vaguerant

Or Windex.

I’m thinking about my eye floaters roughly 200% of the time and I still mistake them for bugs flying past my face at least once a week.

I checked, whoever CONEY is isn’t saying these things, it’s a reaction video making fun of the satanic panic around Pokémon. That’s why in the profile pic he looks like one of those dudes who would make an outrageous reaction face in the thumbnail, because he usually does. No shade, except for the obvious shade.

• Satanism in Pokémon and MTG (original video)
• The Disturbing Agenda Behind Pokémon (CONEY reaction video)

EDIT: I’m watching the OG video (35 damn minutes); favorite pull quote so far:

The danger of Dungeons & Dragons or any kind of role-playing game like this is that it’s played with the mind and–when played with the mind–the mind begins to lose that fine line with what’s real and what’s fantasy. And the more you get into the fantasy world, the more it seems real and all of a sudden now, you don’t know what’s real or what’s not.

Seems like.

EDIT2: Hold up though, is this guy working undercover for Prima Guides or something?

And now, parents, if you’re not up on Pokémon, you need to be. And one of the things you can do is go out and buy the official Pokémon Trading Card Game Player’s Guide. And you can get this at any store that sells any of the Pokémon stuff. I mean anything. You can get it like at Toys ‘R’ Us or any of those places that sell any of the Pokémon.

Sounds like you’ve never had to endure Amateur Services.

Understandable, given the circumstances.

I watched the eight-part miniseries Washington Black (US: Hulu, CA/UK/AU: Disney+). It’s a sort of swashbuckling 1800s steampunk fairytale of a Barbadian boy (the titular George Washington Black) who escapes the life of slavery he was born into using his scientific aptitude and a fantastical airship. I have somewhat mixed feelings about the depiction of life within the show’s universe, but going any further than that strays into spoiler territory. Overall, it was fun to watch. Sterling K. Brown is a major standout in the cast, but everybody is doing good work.

Below I’ll go into a bit more detail about the things I liked less. It’s fairly minor spoilers, mostly about things that don’t happen in the show, but if you don’t want to know anything going in, skip it.

Overall, I’d say it’s what you might expect from a Disney(-ish) fairytale adaptation of darker source material. It just feels a little weird when the elements that were dropped are the harsh realities of 1800s racism and not … little mermaids dying (Hans Christian Anderson spoilers). Again, I had fun watching it, but I feel conflicted about how healthy it is to make historical fiction fun by softening the harder edges. Who knows, maybe it’s OK to have some escapist fiction with PoC protagonists, as a treat?

For people who have seen Nautilus (US/CA: AMC+, UK: Amazon Prime Video, AU: Stan), I’d say that’s a better show, as far as swashbuckling steampunk adventures which try to engage with the racial dynamics of the (fictionalized) eras they represent. But both shows are very enjoyable, quite short and easy to watch. Go watch Nautilus.

It’s all right. I fell off it after one too many comedy “animal accidentally gets killed” scenes for me, which hurt what was otherwise a fun, feel-good sitcom. Tudyk is excellent as always and the supporting cast of small-town weirdos are mostly likeable. It’s not for me but I can understand people loving it.

For those who didn’t follow the link:

But what was the reason for Henry’s condemnation by the University to five and a half centuries of infamy? It was a murder. In 1242 he and a number of other men of the town of Oxford were found guilty of murdering a student of the University. Henry and his accomplices were fined £80 by King Henry III in May 1242 and were made to leave Oxford as a result, forced to stay away (and allowed no closer than Northampton) at least until the King returned from abroad.

Further research is needed to discover the exact details of what happened here but it seems that Henry Symeonis had bought the King’s pardon and his permission to return to Oxford. The King was willing to allow his return if the University agreed to it. But the University refused and chose to ignore the King’s order of 25 March 1264, resuming its hostility to Henry Symeonis. In fact, it felt so strongly about it, that it gave Henry Symeonis the unique honour of being named in its own statutes, making the University’s dislike of him official and perpetual.

There’s even a few that made it big and sometimes bigger than their parent shows.

• All in the Family --> Maude --> Good Times
• Love, American Style --> Happy Days --> Laverne & Shirley / Mork & Mindy
• Jag --> NCIS --> 50 more NCIS spinoffs
• Star Trek --> Star Trek: Voyager --> Star Trek: Prodigy (mostly a Voyager spinoff, but Trek is incestuous)
• Star Trek --> Star Trek: Discovery --> Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Pascal’s family left Chile when he was nine months old, so it would be a lot weirder if he did have a Chilean accent.

If you don’t mind revealing (hi ninjas), how were you playing this on PC? Only, there’s a lot of options these days. There’s the time-tested N64 emulators, but more recently we’ve got two new methods:

The PC port of the source code decompilation:

• https://github.com/HarbourMasters/SpaghettiKart

And the recompilation of the binary:

• https://github.com/sonicdcer/MarioKart64Recomp

For anybody who’s unfamiliar with decomps ports and recomps, they have outwardly similar results but are achieved using very different methods.

Using the old “source code == recipe” analogy, a decompilation is where you purchase a meal and take it back to the lab where a team of scientists painstakingly analyze it to uncover the original recipe that made it, both in terms of ingredients and the cooking method. Once you have that, you can either make an exact copy of the meal or change it to suit your preferences. Dropping the analogy for a minute, you can modify the game any way you like and even go as far as building it for completely different platforms, across as many CPU architectures as you like.

Recompilation is a bit harder to describe using the recipe analogy, because at no point do you actually uncover what the original recipe was. Let’s say you have a fancy Klingon delicacy prepared which is utterly inedible to humans. Unfortunately, you are human. Without knowing how it was made, you feed the dish into the back end of a replicator, which puts it back together in a form which offers the same flavor profile but is edible by humans. In this analogy, the Klingon meal is a game built for the Nintendo 64’s MIPS CPU, while your human anatomy requires food for an x86-64 CPU. However, you can’t feed the output to a Vulcan for the same reason you couldn’t eat the Klingon meal.

As an end-user, the result doesn’t change that much if your goal is just to play Mario Kart 64 on PC. Decompilation is the more labor-intensive process which eventually results in a more flexible “recipe” you can mix around as you like, while recompilation gets you a meal without necessarily helping you understand what went into it or how to make it yourself or change its composition to your preference. Both of these analogies undersell the amount of work that goes into either approach, so I do apologize for making it sound as easy as the sci-fi technology suggests.

There were definitely backlashes to big popular artists of prior decades, like Elvis and the Beatles. Partly it was couched in that “They’re corrupting the youth” conservatism, but also anything that’s popular with tween and teen girls tends to catch a lot of flack regardless of whether or not it’s deserved. Think Twilight or One Direction. I don’t care for either, but they both became out-sized hate figures for weird adult men. There was no shortage of enraged nerd hot takes when that sparkly vampire guy was cast as Batman.

I think Coldplay is kind of on the same page. Which is obviously faint praise, but they have a sort of inoffensively palatable sound which is both the reason they’re so successful and the thing people dislike about them. But it’s probably not worth getting angry about.

That’s a shame, I’ve only heard good things about putting your butt on Grindr.

The for-profit childcare system in Australia is profoundly broken. They’re chronically understaffed and the pay is awful to boot, so there’s tons of burnout and staff turnaround as people move around trying to get hours at different locations, etc. I don’t know that 27 different gigs over a decade is actually that unusual in the sector.

If you’re interested, ABC News Australia did an article on it:

• In Australia’s childcare centres profit comes before safety - ABC News

Fair warning, there are some pretty unpleasant descriptions in the article of things that have been done to kids in the system.

Same here basically, cross-eyed viewing is super easy for me but I have to work for minutes to perform wall-eyed viewing. I was really excited to see a post with cross-eyed stereograms.

Occasionally they take the “investigation bungled by police” angle, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

I AM THE PARK!

I finished up Poker Face (US: Peacock, CA: Citytv+, UK: Sky/Now, AU: Stan) and Murderbot (Apple TV+) this week.

Poker Face is simply the best time I’ve had watching TV in recent memory. It’s currently two seasons in and consistently has me smiling and laughing. It’s not “premium TV” in the way that a Breaking Bad or Severance is; instead, it’s very much a throwback to '70s murder mysteries and especially Columbo. While there is some serialization, it’s mostly episodic in nature. If you like Rian Johnson’s Knives Out trilogy, Columbo, Natasha Lyonne in general, or even the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series, you should have a good time with it.

The basic concept is that Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale is a drifter with the innate ability to detect lies. Broadly she is reading people’s involuntary physiological responses to being deceptive, but as Cale says when asked how her ability works, “I’m not exactly sure, but that’s not really the point.” She travels the country, getting tangled up with a different set of guest stars, one of whom inevitably gets murdered. The structure of Poker Face is such that the week’s guest stars get a ton of screen time, which means they’re able to cast big in every episode. There’s at least a couple of heavy-hitters turning up in every mystery, which often skew toward the comical end of the murder spectrum.

I’m always impressed that they’re consistently able to write murder mysteries for a character who has the X-Men mutant superpower of being a perfect lie detector, which in theory should break the entire genre. The perp-of-the-week doesn’t just walk into a scene and say “I did not commit any murders recently” and set off Cale’s ability. Rather, she catches them in some small innocuous lie that leads her to spiral into figuring out why they would lie about something so outwardly meaningless.

Lyonne is great in it, as are the handful of recurring cast we get besides her, but most of all, getting a star-studded miniature murder-mystery film once a week has just been fantastic. I don’t necessarily want to give the impression that these are Knives Out-quality movies, but I don’t really want to give the impression that they’re not, either. It’s kind of damning the show with faint praise to say that it is relentlessly so much fun while not really offering the kind of deep meditation on human nature that is the hallmark of “premium TV”, but I can’t fault a show where I am consistently having a great time.

No season 3 pick-up yet. I imagine the show is pretty expensive given the names attached, but as far as I know it’s Peacock’s biggest hit by far, so hopefully they see the benefit of having a show people seem to care about.

Murderbot was also pretty fun. It’s a relatively straight retelling of the first book in Martha Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård plays a very autistically-coded security android who is deeply uncomfortable with social interaction and self-soothes with futuristic sci-fi soap opera TV. It’s a pretty different take on the “android learns how to be human” trope, because his behavior is already very human at the outset. For anybody worried, he doesn’t adapt by masking or curing his autism-coded behavior. People do remark on his awkwardness, but it’s mostly just accepted as part of his nature.

My one problem with the show is that to me it felt like one long movie cut into 22-minute episodes. The plot of each episode felt unsatisfying on its own. There just weren’t enough plot elements introduced and resolved in any individual episode to tell a meaningful story within that episode. I don’t have this problem with any other heavily serialized shows, as even then they usually have the standard three-act play structure where some specific event is the focus of the episode. I don’t know what it was about Murderbot, but many of the episodes just felt like they were built to serve only the season-long arc.

Obviously, this comes from the fact that the original book is one book, not 10 episodes of television, and the show basically just splits the book into segments of roughly equal length. Now that the series (which released weekly) is complete, I’m thinking about rewatching from the beginning without having to deal with the arbitrary delay to get the next section of one overall story, because I did enjoy basically everything else about it. Generally, I like the slower pace of weekly episode releases, I just don’t think that format suited this show at all; it should have gone up all at once as a binge show.

Murderbot has been picked up for a second season and I’m 100% going to continue watching. Maybe I’ll wait for the full season to be out before watching, though.

I loved this show! Watched it a month ago or so. Another reference point I’d give is an underwater version of Firefly or Farscape: a rag-tag team of misfits with hearts of gold on the run in a ship that’s not quite qualified for what they’re up against. For more Farscape-ism, it was shot in Australia and the cast are mostly from there and pretending not to be.

The production was kind of a mess: the show was ordered by Disney+ but dropped again before it became available to stream, so where it’s available to watch in any given country is a crapshoot. AMC+ in the US and Canada, Amazon Prime Video in the UK, Stan in Australia. Given the awkward production history, I suspect it will remain a single-season show (hello again, Firefly).

For people who don’t like a series that ends abruptly, I’ll give some very generic “vibe” spoilers: I thought it was a perfectly satisfying ending, especially given the show is a prequel to the original novel, so we know or can find out where the story is going. There are absolutely some plot threads left untied which would be followed up in a hypothetical season 2, but personally I didn’t leave the series frustrated by them.

It’s only a 10-episode show, so it’s a very easy watch. I’d love it if they got the opportunity to make more, but I had a ton of fun either way.

These seem like arbitrary rules. Most random accidents don’t reliably kill people and are also painful. You’re comparing a tiny subset of random accidents to all intentional suicide methods as if they are or should be somehow similar.