Hey man, when you’re done feeding the birds - there are others who are hungry too!
little kids love spooky mascots like bendy and Freddy but I notice they interpret the characters as totally benevolent basically and I think they deserve good quality media that plays into that, a horrifying but objectively heroic protagonist earnestly made for really young audiences. Yeah they got venom but that's still aimed at teens to adult nerds. I guess there's probably no media company right now with the guts to openly market a slavering fanged ghoul as a friendly children's hero but it is literally what they're clamoring for.
I dunno it just feels shiftier how all these newer mascot horror games are only kind of "implicitly" for kids, like they're still made with adult sensibilities and content kids might not be all that prepared to handle yet on the down-low they're hoping to get kids buying merch. Feels off. If you want the baby market then do it unironically and honestly.
There should be like an unironically scary character like you'd expect aesthetically to be the main threat of an adult horror franchise but it just protects kids from harm AND its associated media should be entirely G-rated other than the monster design itself. Make it like a skeleton bat clown with anglerfish teeth or a big black hairy centipede with a bunch of broken baby doll heads but it only hurts mean people and only adults. Or you know there isn't even any violence but it scares away bullies and then it helps the kids find their cat or make a sandcastle or whatever. The writing should not be like it's also for adults. It should be like the level of Bluey or Octonauts, like high quality but intellectually accessible to a three year old. And like the monster lurks anywhere dark like under beds and stuff. Yes there are children who would still be scared of it anyway but there were always children who got scared of big bird or the teletubbies, you know??? I bet other kids would get it and they'd get to feel like the scariest fucker they ever saw is inherently on their side.
“It did not growl. It did not make any sounds. It just tried to get in. Apparently it was scared and tried to shelter itself,” said Ray Zavalas, Quiznos employee.
Look if there's one thing, just one thing, that I wish everyone understood about archiving, it's this:
We can always decide later that we don't need something we archived.
Like, if we archive a website that's full of THE WORST STUFF, like it turns out it's borderline illegal bot-made spam art, we can delete it. Gone.
We can also chose not to curate. You can make a list of the 100 Best Fanfic and just quietly not link to or mention the 20,000 RPFs of bigoted youtubers eating each other. No problem!
We can also make things not publicly available. This happens surprisingly often: like, sometimes there'll be a YouTube channel of alt-right bigotry that gets taken down by YouTube, but someone gives a copy to the internet archive, and they don't make it publicly available. Because it might be useful for researchers, and eventually historians, it's kept. But putting it online for everyone to see? That's just be propaganda for their bigotry. So it's hidden, for now. You can ask to see it, but you need a reason.
And we can say all these things, we can chose to delete it later, we can not curate it, we can hide it from public view... But we only have these options BECAUSE we archived it.
If we didn't archive it, we have no options. It is gone. I'm focusing on the negative here, but think about the positive side:
What if it turns out something we thought was junk turns out to be amazing new art?
What if something we thought of as pointless and not worth curating turns out to be influential?
What if something turns out to be of vital historical importance, the key that is used to solve a great mystery, the Rosetta stone for an era?
All of those things are great... If we archived it when we could.
Because this is an asymmetric problem:
If we archived it and it turns out it's not useful, we can delete.
If we didn't archive it and it turns out it is useful, OOPS!
You can't unlose something that's been lost. It's gone. This is a one way trip, it's already fallen off the cliff. Your only hope is that you're wrong about it being lost, and there is actually still a copy somewhere. If it's truly lost, your only option is to build a time machine.
And this has happened! There are things lost, so many of them that we know of, and many more we don't know of. There are BOOKS OF THE BIBLE referenced in the canon that simply do not exist anymore. Like, Paul says to go read his letter to the Laodiceans, and what did that letter say? We don't know. It's gone.
The most celebrated playwright in the English tradition has plays that are just gone. You want to perform or watch Love's Labours Won? TOO FUCKING BAD.
Want to watch Lon Cheyney's London After Midnight, a mystery-horror silent film from 1927? TOO BAD. The MGM vault burnt down in 1965 and the last known copy went up in smoke.
If something still exists, if it still is kept somewhere, there is always an opportunity to decide if it's worthy of being remembered. It can still be recognized for its merits, for its impact, for its importance, or just what it says about the time and culture and people who made it, and what they believed and thought and did. It can still be a useful part of history, even if we decide it's a horrible thing, a bigoted mess, a terrible piece of art. We have the opportunity to do all that.
If it's lost... We are out of options. All we can do is research it from how it affected other things. There's a lot of great books and plays and films and shows that we only know of because other contemporary sources talked about them so much. We're trying to figure out what it was and what it did, from tracing the shadow it cast on the rest of culture.
This is why archivists get anxious whenever people say "this thing is bad and should not be preserved". Because, yeah, maybe they're right. Maybe we'll look back and decide "yeah, that is worthless and we shouldn't waste the hard drive or warehouse space on it".
But if they're wrong, and we listen to them, and don't archive... We don't get a second chance at this. And archivists have been bitten too many times by talk of "we don't need copies, the original studio has the masters!" (it burnt down), or "this isn't worth preserving, it's just some damn silly fad" (the fad turned out to be the first steps of a cultural revolution), or "this media is degenerate/illegal/immoral" (it turns out those saying that were bigots and history doesn't agree with their assessment).
So we archive what we can. We can always decide later if it doesn't need preserving. And being a responsible archivist often means preserving things but not making them publicly available, or being selective in what you archive (I back up a lot of old computer hard drives. Often they have personal photos and emails and banking information! That doesn't get saved).
But it's not really a good idea to be making quality or moral judgements of what you archive. Because maybe you're right, maybe a decade or two later you'll decide this didn't need to be saved. And you'll have the freedom to make that choice. But if you didn't archive it, and decide a decade later you were wrong... It's just gone now. You failed.
Because at the end of the day I'd rather look at an archive and see it includes 10,000 things I think are worthless trash, than look at an archive of on the "best things" and know that there are some things that simply cannot be included. Maybe they were better, but can't be considered as one of the best... Because they're just gone. No one has read them, no one has been able to read them.
We have a long history of losing things. The least we can do going forward is to try and avoid losing more. And leave it up to history to decide if what we saved was worth it.
My dream is for a future where critics can look at stuff made in the present and go "all of this was shit. Useless, badly made, bigoted, horrible. Don't waste your time on it!"
Because that's infinitely better than the future where all they can do is go "we don't know of this was any good... It was probably important? We just don't know. It's gone. And it's never coming back"
Just learned that the NYPD apparently edited their own fucking Wikipedia page to make themselves look better 😀
ACAB 🐷🖕🥰
you get what you fucking deserve
the Wikipedia user, Majorlagg, deleted all of the (recently added) Corruption and Misconduct section, saying, “The material removed is slanderous and untruthful. It clearly was entered by anti-police groups as propaganda.”
He has since deleted his profile, after getting -4,338 points on his edit.
Wikipedia is by *no* means free of bias or problems, but most of the folks who go through the effort to edit and maintain it are the sorts of nerds with hard-ons for open information and documentation that reach all the way to bloody Jupiter. It really is quite beautiful.
rhamphotheca
The slender mongoose (Galerella sanguinea) is a common species of mongoose found throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. Dozens of subspecies are known, and the fur color varies between subspecies. The slender mongoose tends to live alone or in pairs, and, although it is an opportunistic omnivore, it feeds primarily on insects.
This specimen was photographed at the Prague Zoo in the Czech Republic.
Photograph: Karel Jakubec
(via: Wikipedia)
best thing i ever accepted about people is that most people are just kind of gross like, physically
like most people have gross little bad habits and let the laundry go a little too long and sweat in weird places and are messy eaters and have weird laughs and are a little greasy and asymettrical and have stains and tears and wear on the things they own and its like literally fine and human. we dont need to worry about that stuff and frankly we should kill whoever is responsible for making us think humans are even capable of being perfectly polished made up hygeine machines 24/7. we are little animals we came from the dirt and sometimes you scratch your buttcrack or pick at scabs or what the fuck ever it is literally normal animal behaviour !!! let the soft animal of your body ect ect nd sometimes the soft animal of your body is a little yucky.
This realization hit me super hard when I came to college and hung around real live people for the first time in months. I started going to lunches at church and I suddenly found myself in close proximity to human beings and free-range children while eating food likely spit on by everyone in the room. I loved being around people, so I had to get over it.
The fact that I actually enjoyed being around and observing physical bodies was so weird to me.
I wrote a cringe poem about it:
A snake story, based on an experience I had while I was in Florida.
Okay but honestly with the death of forums and blogs and Yahoo Answers. And the rise of discord. Reddit is the last refuge to get any kind of information about anything whatsoever.
Source: tiktok.com
this pride month im coming out as a furry stoner
Dope
where? *drops to all fours*
fattyatomicmutant-deactivated20
Mimics being treated as/acting like puppies are the best tropes ever we need more pet Mimics
A lot has been said about roguelikes where every playthrough feels basically the same because the procedural map generation fails to produce meaningful variation, so in practice you're just playing a conventional action RPG with bad area design, but I think we also need to start giving roguelikes a hard time for offering the illusion of flexible character design because everything beyond the first biome has only ever been playtested with one specific build. I can't count the number of indie roguelikes I've played where the first biome permits a wealth of options in terms of how to approach it, and then you reach the second biome and immediately get torn to pieces with no meaningful ability to respond because you didn't spec ranged DPS.
Like, yeah, make all the "skill issue" jokes you want, but when you check out what a game's top-level runners are doing to see what "skill" looks like in this context and it turns out that the established meta considers not getting one of three specific drops within the first ten minutes of play to be a reset point, that points to a structural problem.
Wait, which one of them becomes a lizard?
the body is wild because all that shit just kind of grows there in a semirandom way, so it's not even consistent from person to person, but it doesn't get tangled up too badly because it's all held in place by bodymeat like a vascular aspic. which sounds good but it means it's really hard to replace anything, because you're not supposed to. it's just another example of how planned obsolescence encourages waste
transhumanists are just people who believe in the right to repair (our flesh prisons)
Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.
daalseth
This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.
Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.
So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.
That is not good.
In pseudo and acadamic circles this has routinely been called the ‘digital dark age’, I even wrote on the subject a few years ago but can’t find that article right now. [There is even a Wikipedia article on the concept] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age#:~:text=The%20digital%20dark%20age%20is,technologies%20evolve%20and%20data%20decay).
It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.
This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.
There is one thing that’s pretty low impact that most of us could do to help with this. Journal. Seriously. Handwritten journals. It doesn’t matter about what. Anything you could possibly write would be helpful. Your personal day to day experiences are just as valuable as world events. Maybe even more so.
Especially now. Especially if you’re queer or trans and can write without danger of outing yourself to anyone who might put you in danger.
My mate has most of a PhD in Early American Literature, and my best friend and business partner is a historian. Both can tell you how incredibly valuable hand written journals are to historians. They provide a type of insight into what life was actually like for the average person, that you don’t get from formal histories or news articles or accounts of celebrities and leaders.
So if you’re able, please start keeping a journal. I can’t because I can’t hold a pen for that long.
I switched from written to digital journals precisely because I wanted to make sure I can't lose them. I still use paper notebooks for a few things, but I just can't get over the ease and reliability of copying digital notes. It's all .txt files, so it's 100% loseless, pretty much guaranteed to be readable in some capacity as long as computers exist, and takes seconds to back up in 5 different places.
I know it's hard to find a digital storage format that lasts longer than paper (especially if you only touch the paper with gloves) but I'm just unable to consider something the best long term storage format when it's this hard to move and copy.
There's a lot of volatile data on the internet and it sucks, but there's a world of difference between someone's Twitter profile and a hard drive full of universally recognized files that get backed up on three different cloud services. And thanks to European Union, you can now convert the former into the latter.