Empress of Mars: Undisputed @zebratron2084@awoo.space

I just wanna serenade all the locals with "Don't You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds.

@LexYeen@snouts.online Hot Dog Water died for your sins. *nod*

Since it kinda implicitly came up in another thread, I think I'm gonna link to this.

http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges. This is my SINGLE favorite short story of all time and a massive, massive influence on whatever I've done that passes for creative work. It's also only 17 pages FFS. :D

I think over half of my favorite authors owe at least something to this tale.

And he (indirectly) gave my dragon headfriend Enmerkar crash space in the Library of Babel for, like, 200 years. So we feel like we kinda owe the guy some PR.

@frameacloud That is some Jorge Luis Borges-grade taxonomy right there. :D

So, in order to understand this story, you have to know a few basic facts about Enter The Gungeon:

1) There is a character named The Hunter. She is cool lady and doesn't afraid.

2) Hunter has an adorable pet corgiloaf, Junior II, who digs up items for her. I like to call him "Digdug" or "Diggy." Everybody loves Junior II. People who don't love him are wrong and bad.

3) Hunter also has an unlockable B-skin: a wolf kigu. It's awful cute.

4) The latest update added a new character: "The Paradox." It is a random PC skin covered in weird glitchy blue radiation, with a random loadout taken from all PC starting inventories. It is heavily implied that it was born from your PCs fucking around with spacetime too much. It is also intimately connected somehow with the vile Lich who rules the Gungeon.

5) Enter the Gungeon has an unusually rich gameworld, including many subthemes of weird pseudo-elemental effects. One of these subthemes is Love-based weaponry, such as Cupid's Bow and the Shotgun Fulla Love.

6) I am currently playing as a Paradox with the Hunter-B wolf kigu. Since her loadout is randomized, she lacks the "Tennis Ball" item which grants her Junior II as a companion.

And running around on Level 2 without Diggy, the horrifying notion briefly crossed my mind: what if Paradox Hunter is some kind of mirror-universe Lich-Hunter amalgam who... my god... skinned and wore him? ;____;

The thought was too much to bear, and then the real truth finally struck me:

My Paradox B-Skin Hunter _is_ Diggy. More specifically, they're an amalgam of Hunter and Diggy. Fused into a single being, fueled by pure Love magic. They are the perfect gungeoneer... at least until Ocelot the shopkeeper's cat becomes playable.

@Soreth EXACTLY. Films that play like they were made by human Markov chains. :O

"What kind of money, Denny*?"

What kind. Of money. Jesus Christ, this movie is a reverse masterpiece. It's like they filmed the greatest unfilmable book of all times: English As She Is Spoke.

*Danny? Dinny? Donny?

@Leucrotta What's the coyote equivalent of a beak-flap? ;D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cuihrjLNAo

It finally dawned on me, while watching RiffTrax, how to describe part of the appeal of terrible films like The Room.

They're like those "can you spot ten things wrong with this picture" puzzles for adults. Except it's more like 1500 things, and rather than flaws like "the duck has no beak" and "there are two moons" you get "this character totally changed actors for no apparent reason" and "this sport that they are playing has no relation to football or any other earthly recreational activity."

@anthracite I suspect it'll be like that six year old weed we found: it won't cause you any harm, but the potency will be questionable and it'll always smell a tad funny...

@001zlnv Have you ever seen the movie Nightcrawler? (No X-Men connection whatsoever.)

Yeah. It's about a very clever and ambitious sociopath advancing his career. I suspect 100% that the founder of MyLife is a lot like the lead character of Nightcrawler.

P.J. is my new personal hero. She's like a dark reboot of Pam Poovey. (cw: whoo lordy, where do I start, but it did air on broadcast TV...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gPnaWhcEbo

#yogurt

@Xinjinmeng@mastodon.social OUCH! DOUBLE DAMAGE!

#blackmirror #nosedive

Hmm. You know, I'm almost tempted to look up the five folks MyLIfe claimed I know and see if we hit it off. Maybe that site's AI knows something I don't. :>

(Unless one of *you* is secretly Abdesselam Bouzerdoum? The electrical engineering prof from the University of Wollongong? C'mon, fess up! You don't see *me* hiding the fact I won't be born for another 260 years, on another, better planet!)

You know, I've never looked really closely at one of these scammy public records sites before, and I'm almost impressed.

They do a beautiful, theatrical job of frumping up their "report search" pages. in a way I'm sure really impresses their target audience. But the really impressive part is how brazen they are about all those OTHER evil sites who "MAY BE SELLING YOUR INFORMATION," i.e., doing precisely what they're doing.

Did I mention I absolutely hate everything post-capitalism produces?

I ran across my personal profile on mylife, while doing research on unrelated political shenanigans I will deny all knowledge of. O:)

Yeah. Um... every single thing marked in blue is incorrect. I don't recognize a single one of those names, either. And yet, those towns and age are spot-on (sadly), so I know this is my record...

I feel so much better about my privacy now! I don't care if they have all my personal information, as long as too much of it's wrong to be of any use. :D

@zx3 what *is* brain?

This video nails so many of my concerns about the canon-obsession, naive pseudo-realism, and literal-mindedness of modern fandom... I had never thought of it before as something that was being influenced by economics or the structure of the Internet.

This is giving me a lot to think about, both in terms of how I critique fandoms... and how I can ruthlessly exploit these cultural weaknesses in promoting Parallax. I can only HOPE to be so lucky as to discuss Kirt and Noa's bathroom habits at a con panel someday. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QTX2pIRLmE

This Comedy Central short about a fake "alternative medicine" company is the most succinct summary of Why We Can't Have Nice Things I've seen in a while. Funny and scary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTHg-tGvlJ8