Not Gonna Lie, First Time I Saw This Post I Immediately Thought Of That Scene In Prometheus Where Fifield

I’m not going to say it again: #bertie wooster deserves to win first place.

That modern Captain Planet discussion you guys had at the beginning of the latest @transmediacrity podcast was surprisingly resonant to me, @wyattsalazar. I’ve been chewing on this essay criticizing the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, and it seems like the attitudes and beliefs that the liberal TNG era was built on are now also verboten, and have been replaced by sadder, crueler things.

“Who killed Palpatine?”

What happened? I haven’t been following the show, but I’m vaguely aware they did something with Spock in the latest episode.

Wtf, Strange New Worlds is making me hate Star Trek

Through determination and sheer bloody-mindedness, that’s how! Seriously, though, congrats. :D

Daily Kuvira #100

Holy crap how have I gone 100 gawt damn days of doing this so far?

First Eric and Hannibal mocked him with ominous threats, then he met his real father, then this...man, Questlove had a rough day.

And in another parallel with Disco Elysium, Kathryn Janeway’s psyche is also composed of 24 self-aware archetypes, 18 of which are actively trying to drive her to destruction.

from what i can gather Disco Elysium is about this guy

For you, @coppermarigolds.

pretty sure rian johnson timed this scene to match up perfectly to abba

There’s something deeply distressing to me about how there’s been this steady push over the past twenty years to transform all forms of media from things you can physically buy and use as you see fit into things you essentially rent in perpetuity from publishers and hosting services. It’s like there’s this assumption that we can rent these things forever and never have to worry about the Internet ever going down or one of these digital landlords deciding to take them away from us whenever they want. Movies and PC games are my beat, but I've certainly had to stockpile a number of hard copies over the years due to rights issues or lack of interest keeping them out of the digital marketplace.

On the Existential Fear of Losing Your Online Persona

…

“Digital is about access, it’s about sharing,” Schwartz said. “But once you digitize something, suddenly the object is not human-readable anymore—not readable like a stack of letters in your attic. With digital you have to preserve the letter, and you have to preserve the software, and the machine that can read it.”

That means that as technology evolves, the types of data it can read evolves as well. Think about the floppy discs you almost definitely have in a box somewhere—or DVDs, to pick a more recent example. My current laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive at all. I couldn’t watch my Mona Lisa Smile DVD if I wanted to. So you can see how delicate that media is.

Thinking a lot about this since Apple announced the demise of iTunes. One great thing about iTunes was the convenience of digital while still owning a physical library. I spent a good chunk of the 90s building a music collection. It defined me, which was the things worked then. It’s no coincidence that the transition from aesthetic to moral signal occurred alongside the transition from owning a physical to a virtual library. If the things we own can’t define us, then what does? When I was twelve or thirteen, I would have killed for something like Spotify where all the music I could ever dream of was at my fingertips, but there’s no hunt, no sense of personal value.