i will not shut up about the matrix resurrections for the foreseeable future
wallacepolsom


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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
cherry valley forever
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@blackmelange
i will not shut up about the matrix resurrections for the foreseeable future

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why is all the AI research going into fucking ??? AI image generation and chat bots that only exist to puke out useless sludge instead of, I don't know, better auto captions?? auto captions have so much power to be so helpful to so many people. if auto captions were reliable I could do so much more. I could use captions to understand the barista at the coffee shop, I could use captions to understand people across the room, I could actually watch videos!! this wouldnt erase the need for interpreters and the wider use of sign language but it sure would help fill the gap in the meantime. I can't have an interpreter walk around with me every time I want to go get a bagel but I sure can bring my phone! but nooooo we're pouring all this research into bots that only exist to shit out incorrect search results.
I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff
reblog if you are an ad hating commie
I think that Xena, for all of its ridiculousness and cheesiness, did a better job of conveying the allure of evil than just about any other series I've ever seen. Like it understands that violence, no matter how justifiably it starts out, is addictive, and that hatred poisons you until you can't feel real joy anymore, and it's strange to me that I've never seen it laid out so simply elsewhere.
...so THAT'S what sleeper cell activation feels like. Because yes, YES, LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS, because Xena is such an interesting lightning-in-a-bottle-case study! While I would never discount the work done by the writers, Xena as a show is almost perfectly positioned both historically and structurally to consistently explore that theme.
The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.
That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.
If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.
It's fucking rad and interesting.
99% of all murders committed by women in ancient greek plays are completely justified
Clytemnestra: crack? Is it crack you smoke?

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Who is your favorite Outer Sailor Guardian? 👀
Sailor Uranus
Sailor Neptune
Sailor Pluto
Sailor Saturn
Neo
The Matrix (1999)
little guys in ghibli movies
in the age of repression and purity culture, getting more perverted is the only morally correct course of action
#(thousand-yard sex-disinterested aroace stare) cool opinion. love seeing this same sentiment 10000 times a day on this website
im also aroace. being disinterested in sex and romance is still sexual perversion in the eyes of the state. get more perverted in whichever direction fills you with the most joy!!!!!!
Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears

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3x02 "been there, done that"
You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
I don't have a problem with people listening to music per se, but I do have a problem with the music industry exploiting & mistreating artists.
Personally, I abstain from all music in order to keep my hands clean but really music should just be illegal outright to protect musicians from abuse.
holy shit this person in the notes
Anyone got that comic about making up a strawman to make a point and then turning around and the strawman is standing there
This one?
I was originally planning on holding off sharing this until June, but then decided to hell with that; why wait?
FURTHER RESOURCES:
Intersections: Indigenous and 2SLGBTQQIA+ Identities – this booklet from the Native Women’s Association of Canada is more intended towards 2S folks, but is still a great read for anyone.
Two Spirits, One Voice – This video from Egale is a great, no more comments needed.
A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder – This book by Ma-Nee Chacaby can be a difficult and emotional read, but very much worth it.
Becoming Two-spirit: Gay Identity and Social Acceptance in Indian Country – I have yet to read this book by Brian Joseph Gilley myself, but heard positive things about it.
Please feel free to reblog with more suggestions, if you have them!
It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.
Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!
@lunchm34t replied:
what adventure games softlock you like that?
I'm usually loathe to suggest TV Tropes as a resource, but given that only a person who's entirely unacquainted with the genre would be asking that question, a primer is probably warranted. Check out the Unwinnable By Design article and read the preamble for context on the types of softlocks we're discussing, then hit either the "Sierra" or "Infocom" links (yes, those two publishers each have their own dedicated sections!), pop open the "Cruel" tab, and get ready to read some stuff that makes you mad.
There really is only one correct way to play some of these games huh.
A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it – most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!
(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)
were these like, rented out blockbuster-style and the devs got a cut out of said rent, or
It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud crowd really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.

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Ownership meant a physical copy. Now you own nothing and can't find what you want across multiple streaming platforms.
Bring back headphones that plug in. Bring back expandable memory. Bring back owning media.