I sunk hours into NetHack, and I still occasionally dive into the dungeons. I also have a NES emulator on my phone, but it’s just not the same. I’ll play Zelda or Metroid for the nostalgia, but it’s not the same as sitting on the couch with friends.
I feel like I’m going to be responsible for Trump sending ICE to raid the Shady Pines community event planning committee that picks the color schemes for their weekly card games.
The one that sticks out in my mind is the original BioShock. Spoilers if you haven’t played it.
The first thing that happens is a voice over the intercom asks, “Would you kindly pick up that weapon.” And of course you do it, or the game does not progress. The voice is very polite and resonable, helping you navigate this dank maze of horrors. “Would you kindly open that door?” “Would you kindly kill that monster?” The calm manners contrast starkly against the modern horrors you’re experiencing in the game. Of course every request seems like a great idea at the time, and of course the game ends if you fail.
Then halfway into the game, you finally meet the man behind the voice and he explains that you are a mind-controlled slave, conditions to obey any command that begins with “would you kindly…” He’s trying to destroy the tyranny of the system and commands you to kill him, sacrificing himself to free you from the control phrase. The “tutorial” seemed like it was just helpful instructions, but you didn’t really have a choice, did you? The majority of players just followed those instructions without question, never considering whether they were good choices or moral actions. And could you say no? Without the wrench, you can’t survive the first attack. Without opening the door, you remain in the first room forever. Your world is pre-ordained and tightly controlled. How much free will do you have in the game and outside of it? At what point do you stop making decisions and start following orders? And when can you stop again?
Sending drugs in the mail is illegal. The point of this bill is to create pretext for seizing data from servers. When they say “dark” they mean “encrypted” and when they say “illegal” they mean “private.”
Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is still white. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) has always been mixed race black and Puerto Rican. Spider-Man (Miguel O’Hara) will be Mexican-Irish. Spider-Man (Hobie Brown) is black, although he frequently goes by Spider-Punk. Spider-Man (Takuya Yamashir) and Spider-Man (Yu Komori) are Japanese, and have been around since the 70s. They are different people who exist in universes with Peter Parker. There are also universes where Peter Parker is Peni Parker (Japanese), Pavitr Prabhakar (Indian), and then there are all the other Spider girls, Spider demons and Spider monsters, not to mention all the Spider-adjacent clones, offspring, and villains who posed as Spider-Man while Parker was incapacitated (which happened twice).
Miles Morales isn’t race swapped, though. He’s a different character. But I do agree with your larger point that Rowling sucks as a writer and as a person, and that race swaps don’t matter if the characters are well written.
I’ve never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.
Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the “always” moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn’t an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it’s not something that Dumbledore didn’t already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that’s not the point of this rant, and I don’t have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.
But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?
Changing the race of a character isn’t a big deal when the characters are well-written.
Yeah, the entire story follows the major beats of a group of people playing DND. Everything that happens would be familiar to a player. Your party always gets captured and thrown in a prison from where you must escape. Dungeon Masters (the people running the game) will frequently introduce an overpowered “helper” NPC to move the party along in the right direction, but that character won’t engage in the fights. Parties will find several puzzles that the DM has spent hours creating, only for the party to use some magic or tool in a creative way to bypass the entire puzzle.
To someone expecting standard fantasy storytelling, it’s jarring and weird. The anachronistic language, the character decisions that don’t make sense, the magic artifacts that seem to just happen to be exactly what the party needs in the moment, it’s all stuff that would happen around a table in someone’s basement. It helps to think of each character as a regular person you know today playing a game where they make all the decisions for the character. Convenient contrivances or frustrating failures are the DM having fun with the story. Sometimes the dice rolls 20 and you do something miraculous, and sometimes you roll a 1, trip over a pebble and stab yourself in the face.
You don’t have to be a dnd player to enjoy the movie, but you do need to understand the lens through which you’re watching it. Otherwise, the tone and pacing seem really strange.
I think I still have my google voice number.
It’s kind of weird we don’t have the option to create multiple voicemail boxes. How hard would that be?
I’ve been using Etar for years. Can’t complain. Edit to add that it’s an open source calendar app available on F-Droid.
I graduated from college magna cum laud 20 years ago. This is the first time it has come up in any context since I graduated. I took it off my resume 15 years ago to make room for experiences.
Scared because he was high? You shouldn’t drive while high.
Those first 6 notes of 1-2 tho…
I love seeing crossovers. The cool thing about comics is you could have someone show up in another book, and then you’re interested in that character so you go read those books. The movies and shows should be like that, relatively independent but with occasional references and cameos.
Like the way Matt Murdock appeared in She Hulk was enjoyable. As long as you were aware of the Netflix shows, you didn’t need to have watched all the Defenders episodes to understand it. But maybe seeing him in that show made you want to check out the Netflix series.
What I don’t want is like a full introduction every time a special guest character shows up. Like if Hawk Girl makes an appearance in Peacemaker Season 2, we don’t need a “Hi, I’m from the Justice League and I’m an ancient alien wielding Nth Metal, how can I help you?” conversation.
I’m picturing a person panicking and swatting the whole tank off the toilet, breaking the water line and spraying water everywhere.
Turning off the water will stop the tank from refilling. Closing the flapper stops the water in the tank from going into the bowl.
I would imagine most people aren’t fast enough on the draw to think about doing this first step.
If the toilet is actively flushing, water will continue to drain from the tank to the bowl. Closing the flapper stops any additional water from going into the bowl.
Personally, I prefer to make sure the tank only fills enough to fill the bowl, so as long as you don’t double flush, you don’t need to panic and throw the lid off the tank.
Just what my relaxing escapist hobby needed, debt.