Pastelbat @pastelbat@awoo.space

the endorsement or denial ability of an entity to self-analyse and deem its self analysis accurate, is at the root of a whole lot of ideas

https://store.steampowered.com/app/201270/Total_War_SHOGUN_2/

Total War: Shogun 2 is free (to keep) atm, also very good

If you can list a few villain-names in pop-culture fantasy works off the top of your head, then chances are good you can just copypaste that if you ever need to recite a list of unpopular Roman Emperors

Like, we're symbiotically entangled with dozens of other creatures and, like many other species, adapt and change our local ecosystem according to our needs, and use tools creatively and in response to our situations

There's a fundamentally Romantic idea of 'man in nature' as some achievable ideal-state lying at the base of all this which I'm sure Rousseau would go wild for (pun intended)

The idea of a "natural human lifespan" relies on separating "natural tool-use" from "unnatural tool-use"

If food replicated from data to a molecularly indistinguishable copy tastes worse than the original dish

..Do humans taste worse after going through transporters?

I liked the show up until the last few episodes

It seemed like it might genuinely embrace "synthetic life is different from organic life! And that's fine, actually? Diversity of life and experience is.. Good?"

But then they end the series on a note of "It's good only if they're like organic life! In that it's innate that life will always die and that's beautiful. Anything else is a meaningless unlife full of spoopy tentacles."

(Hydras are, presumably, evil tentacle synths on a deep-cover mission to Earth)

So: a big dramatic journey that hits a lot of high notes, then crashlands straight into Caveman Science Fiction in the final act

(http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjB3c4woT20

Smog - Bathysphere

(using #batplaylist so people can filter if becomes a regular thing)

https://soundcloud.com/fallofromepodcast

Relistening to a really good podcast on late Roman history

Patrick Wyman's really knowledgeable on the topic, and explicitly doesn't just homogenise the ethnic/political groups involved in that period ("the romans", "the barbarians", "the goths", etc).

It also goes into what life would be like for people on the ground in various places, times and cultures, not just a sweeping overview the wider political phenomena.

Is good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUPA0C60YDE

Morcheeba - Enjoy The Ride

(video CW: vomiting)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__p2IpVAEQU

Handsome Boy Modeling School - Sunshine

Hack up the identities that are handed down to you with gleeful abandon
melt down their core ideas
discard what you will
cast the parts you wish to keep in new forms
stitch in other parts
construct new parts entirely
vandalise yourself

You were never theirs to define in the first place.

I think about these panels a lot

[Wicked + Divine spoiler warning]

Going through my photos and

Gosh I haven't thought about my RPG combat system in a while

That was/is rad

The sunset yesterday was pretty spectacular

When I spend the whole day drained and lethargic and unable to function

Then get a pretty consistent high-energy period each night

..Which I then medicate myself to suppress and sleep poorly through

It makes me wonder if sleeping semi-normative hours is really worth the effort of purposely sabotaging so much of my functionality/energy/creativity

De Sade: Main is inherently and violently horny

Mirbeau: Main has lost touch with true horny, it is violent only in boring ways instead

Foucault: Attempts to define NSFW are horny on main about main by main

LRT:

One is the robot that longs to be human, the other is the robot that wants to destroy all humans

holy heck, Hellboy 2 had a lot more physical VFX and costuming work in the creatures than I realised (I assumed CG was pulling more of the weight)

This is a really great article: https://monsterlegacy.net/2018/06/28/hellboy-2-mister-wink/#more-11324