Neverending 80’s story

Holy shit, was this the music video for the theme song of The Neverending Story?

The only thing missing is Bastian riding Falcor in the foreground. This video needs a goddamn albino luck dragon, by damn!

Ode to Oblivion

The story behind the Oblivion mod Terry Pratchett worked on

The only Pratchett books I’ve read are The Long Earth books he collaborated on, but I found this article interesting anyway. The mod in question is for a custom companion you can get for Oblivion. The part where you can get her to lead you if you’re lost, or have her pick a destination for you at random, actually sounds like it would have been neat to have in the base game. Anyway, it’s not every mod that has dialogue written by a bestselling fantasy author.

Not the Renaissance

I just discovered the Reddit community r/AccidentalRenaissance and boy, this is some top shelf stuff. People post modern pics that resemble Renaissance paintings in composition and whatnot. I suggest filtering for the top-rated posts, as some people’s definition of a Renaissance painting is along the lines of “neat picture from a basketball game”.

My favourite of the recent posts is of a British soldier at a wedding checking his cellphone:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

Just here to post an interesting little interview I found with Kim Stanley Robinson (author of one of my favourite science fiction books, The Years of Rice and Salt. I especially liked his observation on the cultural construction of beauty:

SP: I wonder if we would develop a different sense of beauty if we went out into the Solar System. When we think of natural beauty, we tend to think of gorgeous landscapes like mountains or deserts. But out in the Solar System, on another planet or a moon, would our experience of awe and wonder be different?

KSR: You can go back to the 18th century when mountains were not regarded as beautiful. Edmund Burke and the other philosophers talked about the sublime. So the beautiful has to do with shapeliness and symmetry and with the human face and figure. Through the Middle Ages, mountains were seen as horrible wastelands where God had forgotten what to do. Then in the Romantic period, they became sublime, where you have not quite beauty but a combination of beauty and terror. Your senses are telling you, “This is dangerous,” and your rational mind is saying, “No, I’m on a ledge, but I’ve got a railing. It looks dangerous, but it’s not.” You get this thrilling sensation that is not beauty but is the sublime. The Solar System is a very sublime place.

It’s December again

The holidays are upon us, which means it’s time once again to shit on Love Actually. Here is an interesting essay about hating the movie for its arrogant Englishness which links Love Actually to Brexit and manages not to break the shoehorn it was using:

Love Actually is objectively a very bad movie, but that explains nothing. The world is full of bad movies. Besides, I don’t believe in hating movies, no matter how bad. Honest critics can find a movie stupid or dishonest or boring or shoddily made or politically dubious. But hatred? That’s just a sign of something missing in yourself. If you hate Marvel movies, you’re probably just not in the target demographic. If you mock Tyler Perry movies, you’re really just mocking the people those movies are made for . . .

My revulsion for Love Actually nonetheless comes principally from its Englishness. I don’t believe in hating movies and I don’t believe in hating peoples either, but Love Actually forces the question. “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think of the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport.” The opening line tells you everything you need to know about the real subject of this film. Love Actually takes two of the most beautiful phenomena on Earth — love and Christmas — and replaces them with Englishness. Love Actually predicted the Brexit era, in a way, since both are the result of the ingrained English sense of their superiority and the final proof that their sense of superiority is an antiquated fantasy. George Orwell identified the basic assumption of English conservatism back in 1939: “Nothing ever changes and foreigners are funny.” That’s the operating principle of both Brexit and Love Actually. The dominant aesthetic is entitled insularity.

Basically it argues that Love Actually is English provincialism at its worst and that watching the movie is essentially like watching England savagely wanking over a photo of itself.

Sonic the, uh, fighter of Communism?

I’ve mentioned @fanfiction_txt before, which is a Twitter account that tweets quotes from actual fanfictions and reviews. I always look forward to a new tweet and most of the time it’s something hilarious. It’s great to see what fresh lunacy is out there after a long day at work.

This tweet is only okay for me, mostly because I’m not super into Sonic the Hedgehog and don’t really care about the characters from the games. But the fic the quote came from, on the other hand . . .

Sonic the Hedgehog: Make America Great Again

By: AmericaverseWarlord

Actions speak louder than words… and the barrel of a gun speaks loudest of all! Sonic the Hedgehog, a fearsome warrior who trusts only his instincts and his shotgun, fights alone after Americageddon to protect his star-spangled country. Will he be able to save America from the diabolical clutches of Communism, or will his quest for revenge ultimately destroy him?

Rated: Fiction T – English – Poetry/Angst – [Shadow, Sonic] [Bride of the Conquering Storm, Metal Madness/Metal Overlord] – Chapters: 42 – Words: 125,183 – Reviews: 47 – Favs: 40 – Follows: 32 – Updated: Nov 23 – Published: Aug 29, 2016 – id: 12125232

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN FINALE – THE SIEGE OF STALINGRAD III
Part 2 – God Is Calling Me Back Home

After a long, grueling battle with his greatest enemy, Sonic has finally succumbed to the might of Communism. However, he was able to deal them a crushing blow before his death. Will Donald Trump’s Space Force be able to finish what he started?

42 chapters of this horseshit? C’est magnifique!

SimCity loves Robert Moses

Professional city planners nitpick SimCity‘s realism:

Sim City: An Interview with Stone Librande Read the comments and you’ll see a bunch of urban planning nerds bitching about the game’s unrealistic simulation of traffic and parking.

how sim city greenwashes parking For more on the parking lot apocalypse that Sim City hides from its players.

Did Sim City Make Us Stupid? And some complaining about the zoning laws of the game (no mixed residential and commercial?).

I’ve gotten interested in urban planning lately so I recognize all of the criticisms, especially with how Sim City and The Sims considers the American model of suburbs and the car-centric commute to be the standard form of the city.  I suppose I won’t be able to build my dream city of walkable streets, cars banned from downtown, bike lanes everywhere, commercial and residential areas mixed together to allow people to work close to home, residential buildings being mostly mid-rise apartments and interspersed with parks and cultural attractions like museums, and public transit out the wazoo with buses and streetcars and commuter rail and subways all over the place.

As you may have guessed, I voted for Jennifer Keesmat as Toronto mayor.

I dunno, maybe Cities: Skylines is where it’s at.

PS

Check out this competitive SimCity 6 game where urban planners tried to fuck over each other’s neighbouring cities.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Sheesh, when it’s laid out like this then the parallels are just ridiculous:

– living five adults to a two room apartment

– being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you

– ‘totally not illegal taxi’ taxis by private citizens moonlighting to make ends meet

– everything slaved to the needs of the military-industrial complex

– mandatory workplace political education

– productivity largely falsified to satisfy appearance of sponsoring elites

– deviation from mainstream narrative carries heavy social and political consequences

– networked computers exist but they’re really bad

– Henry Kissinger visits sometimes for some reason

– elite power struggles result in massive collateral damage, sometimes purges

– failures are bizarrely upheld as triumphs

– otherwise extremely intelligent people just turning the crank because it’s the only way to get ahead

– the plight of the working class is discussed mainly by people who do no work

– the United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default

– the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless

– the economy is centrally planned, using opaque algorithms not fully understood by their users