Songs Signifying Nothing

no, actually, i can’t be friends with someone who has opposing political views. this is mostly due to the fact my views are “people deserve rights”

the way i read the iliad at the tender age of 17 to get achilles' grieving scenes which like SURE but 17 year old me should have been reading the táin.

just saw a pigeon doing the puffed up courtship dance thing to another pigeon, and as he was strutting around he suddenly stopped for a split second to do a very brief preen-peck at his own side, then returned to the strutting around. and i surprised myself by instantly losing respect for the male pigeon in that moment, like come on man i appreciate you had an itch or whatever but how is she supposed to feel special when you're getting distracted by bullshit like that? which on reflection i don't endorse, i mean those are pretty harsh dating norms i'm imposing on these pigeons, from a total outsider perspective, for no reason. probably not all girl pigeons are as uptight about that sort of thing as i would apparently be if i was a girl pigeon, maybe she even found it endearing who knows, i don't know her. it's none of my business really. sorry pigeons.

No, actually, i want cables and not bluetooth, i don't want touchscreens, i want buttons and knobs, i want to be able to take the battery out of my phone, i want to charge my phone and plug in head phones at the same time, i want a cd drive in my laptop and not have to buy an external drive, i want a car without a display, i want to turn on the lights with a switch not with my voice, i want to have a paper cinema ticket not a QR code, i want to listen to illegally burned music on a 00s cd player, i want to watch movies that i actually own, i want to read news once a day on paper, i want to aimlessly flick through magazines and not doomscroll on social media, i want to write emails and not talk to chatbots, i want to own stuff without hundreds of digital subscriptions, i want

Reading the dev notes for Mina the Hollower has been a pretty stark reminder to consider the practical reasons for creative decisions. I was all "okay, but what are we really saying by making the protagonist a mouse", and then the devs are like "yeah, the main reason she's a mouse is because GBC-style sprites are tiny and her bigass ears make it easy for the player to tell which direction she's facing".

(To be 100% clear, I'm not saying that there's no symbolism in play there. The initial episode in which Mina breaks Thorne's siege on Lionel's manor is blatantly playing with both Androcles and the Lion and The Lion and the Mouse, which are often conflated in popular culture into a composite tale in which a mouse pulls a thorn from a lion's paw – the characters' names alone make that much obvious! It's just very funny that the decision to make her a mouse came first for completely unrelated reasons.)