You Know She Had To Do It To ‘em (by “them” I Mean “the Teplans,” And By “it” I Of Course

I may not understand any of what’s going on in the show, and I may still believe that Algernon is a kind of furniture polish, but hearing you guys talk about Betterman always brightens my day.

I feel not good but I did manage to record Anime Club with @plumerium 

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.

This is why Bryke didn’t want to introduce guns in The Legend of Korra.

The perfect match. @lazarus-cell

So it would seem that the only place we could go after season 1 was “to hell.” I am frightened, yet wait for the podcast with bated breath. (At this point, I’m half expecting that Hitoe has developed a wicked morphine habit to overcome her curse and have friends again.)

spread wixoss went from 0 to kakegurui level demon lesbian horny in no time

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.

She’s trying her best. :3

I've good a good Kuvira sketch idea for you: little Kuv, age 10, in a homemade Avatar Kyoshi costume (think store-bought or low-rent Halloween) and messy makeup, taking her role VERY seriously.

Daily Kuvira #136

Someone help this poor child.

Tullio Crali’s Nose Dive On The City, 1939 (via here)

I still haven’t played the Mass Effect games yet, but these sound like the sort of things the Enterprise-D comes across in the middle of a normal planetary survey or supply run that turns into some delightful adventure about missing time, lizard aliens, and good old-fashioned space madness.

Mass Effect one is like, oddly surreal and full of little mysteries. Like you go on any planet with the mako, and you come across all sorts of stuff. Like debris from space ships, abandoned tents and rovers, and even dead bodies in the middle of nowhere??? Or a random beacon with the dog tags to some captain. Let’s not forget the mummified Salarian on some lifeless planet out in the middle of nothing remarkable space.

There’s a gas giant in a system in like Hades Gamma or Gemini Sigma or something with a moon notable for having the abandoned ship of a Turian general that served in the Krogan rebellions. All it says is that he was nowhere to be found, only a deliberately depowered ship was found. Like???? Or the gas giant with mysterious machines beneath the clouds that no one knows the origin or purpose behind.

Therum has a town of 13,000 on it for the mining, but we never see it?? The planet that’s 90% ocean also has a settlement and we don’t see that one either! In any of the games we never get to visit Elysium, even though it’s mentioned several times.

Another planet has some weird history and prothean ruins or something else super mysterious on it, and Earth universities want to study it but it’s stuck behind what could be decades worth or arguing with the council about it.

How did the Thresher Maws get scattered to so many random planets, and what they eat there??

And then there’s random outposts on these empty planets but we don’t know what they were researching?? The one planet where the mine is filled with husks, but we are never given any reason as to how they turned into husks in the mine. Or the occasional empty freighter ship orbiting a star that has some bizarre reason for it being abandoned and forgotten.

How did the pirates or scavengers get on these planets and appear in hideouts or trying to salvage some debris, but there’s no ship around? Did they get dropped off and someone was coming back to pick them up or what?? Where are the big pirate gangs based at? Some place akin to Omega or Illium or just a base on some empty planet?

Some of this confusion with logic, but most of these are like, so mysterious and I want to know all the answers.

For a little field test of scenario B, please enjoy this rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”, arranged by The Section Quartet and sung by Rebekah Del Rio, from the weird Bush-era cult movie Southland Tales.

Would it seem stranger to you if, for a ritualized performance of the national anthem, with no warning they played

A) the same tune as always with plausibly anthemy lyrics you’ve never heard before

or

B) the same lyrics set to a totally different musical composition?

Willem seems so disappointed in this fact...