First Eric And Hannibal Mocked Him With Ominous Threats, Then He Met His Real Father, Then This...man,

I’m a big boring nerd who likes uniforms, so I was always Templar. 'Course I do have a soft spot for both the Kingdom (mummy gangsters!) and the former Red Hand (communist magic!).

Time for the hard question: Templar, Lumie, or Dragon?

Illuminati, real meme hours.

“Congratulations son, you’ve reinvented Romulans.” (Actually I imagine most Romulans would find these guys incredibly tedious to be around.)

“Order.

Kuvira is driven by a fierce desire to protect and guide the citizens of the Earth Kingdom and persistent on achieving national unity through the use of military force. She displays mastery in the use of metalbending, and also demonstrates considerable physical strength.” Art by KDEJ.

Well I guess it’s time to chip off the rust and draw some Kuvira again jesus.

If your ever feeling embarrassed or frustrated with your voice just remember S.H.O.D.A.N from System Shock got to remake herself in her ideal of beauty and decided to have a stutter and inconsistent tone.

My only knowledge of Promising Young Woman comes from Barbara McClay’s review of the movie on her personal Medium, and she makes the point that despite being billed as a throwback to rape-revenge flicks like Ms. 45, it’s far more reminiscent of something like Taxi Driver. There’s all this weird stuff about Cassie’s behavior that suggests that her quest is borne of the same sort of individual psychopathology that animated someone like Travis Bickle, but the movie isn’t willing to dig too deep into her or let her detonate the way Bickle did.

I’m still wrestling with what I think about Promising Young Woman, but it is weird in retrospect that the perpetrators she did the serious psych-outs on were the female bystanders as opposed to the male bar rapists. (This is an argument for more psych-outs, not less, to be clear.)

I wonder where this one came from. I want to say from the Allied front in Murmansk/Arkhangelsk, but given logistics I imagine it was probably shipped in through the Black Sea to aid Denikin’s armies and got captured and shipped to Moscow later. Reminds me of a story I read in a book on the RCW where the Whites in the south lost something like 3 tanks because they weren’t secured properly at the docks and just slid into the sea.

Captured British tank Mk IV, in the service of the red Army, during the parade on red square.1920.

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.

Most of what you've written jibes with my experience with B:I. All the Bioshock games had convoluted development histories, but B:I feels like there was never a clear idea as to what the game should ultimately be. (As an example, all those Vox weapons you find late in the game are the only surviving trace of a multiplayer mode the game was supposed to have.) Apparently it got so bad that after four and a half years in development, the publisher had to send in a producer to hammer the game into a playable form in six months to meet the final ship date. As for BaS...I only played the first one, and it felt weird, like a jerry-rigged version of B1′s combat manhandled into B:I’s mechanics, with a heavy emphasis on survival and stealth. As for plot, it does retcon a fair amount of detail from B1 while trying to pretend B2 never happened, and none of the changes are really for the better. I never played BaS2, which was even heavier on stealth, but what I’ve heard makes it sound like a scorched-earth epilogue to Infinite (and a fix-it fic for Daisy Fitzroy that just makes things worse).

Well, I just finished Bioshock Infinite. Some probably not very well-formed thoughts, plenty of spoilers, and a question for those who’ve played it, under the cut…

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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

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“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.