trying to get tumblr post embedding working properly, which is to say using the official API to get the semantic building blocks of each post instead of the dog vomit HTML they actually contain, and I've found myself shaving a yak. hopefully someone other than me will find this useful
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When I wasn't in high school, one of the most compelling English class assignments I ever got was to find an ad from a newspaper or magazine and do a close critical reading of it to develop a deeper understanding of the cultural context in which that ad was created, what its specific goals were, and how it aimed to achieve them. It was a blast, and one of the most influential projects for me in developing my critical eye towards the world…
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posted on app.commentbox.io The solution I use: turn on Airplane mode, then try to load the site. Firefox will, of course, be unable to load it, but you can still add a shortcut to the homescreen. Doing it this way means you block the PWA manifest that it's loading that takes away all the reasons you loaded it in a web win the first place.
If that doesn't work, you can also put a rule in uBlock to block it, clear all the caches/cookies, and try again. If you need that rule let me know I will grab it.
holy shit it worked
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in a kosher household you'll often keep around snacks that contain neither meat nor dairy so you can eat them whenever. it's just parve for the course
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posted on theoptics.bearblog.dev twin cities metro communion
y'know when you're in a train car with exactlyone other person
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so apparently you can't add a bookmark of a particular page to your home screen on Android if that page happens to be on a site that supports being a progressive web app. it'll just always take you to the site root
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on The Great American Baking Show:
Sean: I'm really worried about it poofing up a little bit too much when the jam-
Paul Hollywood: Poofing up?
Ellie: Poofing up!
Sean: The correct term. The scientific term.
Ellie: The culinary term. Yeah. "Poof up."
Sean: Yeah, you know, poof it!
Paul Hollywood: Like puffing up?
Sean: Yeah, yeah, but "poof" just has a little bit of, like, *gestures expansively* poof!
Ellie: Poof!
Sean: Puff just sounds a little...
Ellie, dismissively: Puff.
Paul Hollywood: 💭 Am I the only person at this table who realizes this is a slur for gay people? -
Good question! For those unfamiliar, I've had a yearly tradition since 2021 of playing a classic survival horror game each October, because I like themes. I've played Resident Evil (GameCube version), Silent Hill (PlayStation version which I think is the only one), and Resident Evil 2 (2019 remake) so far. This year, as Máxima accurately recalls, I am planning to play Silent Hill 2.
Originally I thought I would obviously be playing the original, since the remake was being made by Bloober Team whose horror output has not seemed particularly great. But with this remake reviewing quite well, I did take some time to consider it as a real possibility. Ultimately, particularly after consulting Christa who has strong opinions about these sorts of things, I decided to stick with the original.
Where I've found my interest in Resident Evil as a series largely orbiting its mechanics and the use of game design to convey a notion of "horror", at least in the first Silent Hill much more of what I found compelling was wrapped up in the story and atmosphere. That's much harder to preserve, let alone elaborate on, in a remake. Even a really good remake made in 2024 will still have 2024-era textures and mocap and movement. If I'm playing a game for its vibe, I think I want the first time I play it to be with the original vibe.
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This is deceptively compelling. At first glance, the ape men, broken english, and doctrine that all animals converge on the perfect (evidently white) human form feels teleological with a distinct flavor of eugenics. But as the film progresses, it builds out a much more nuanced narrative. "Are we not men?" cry the islanders, taught this mantra by Moreau himself. But Moreau does not truly want them to see themselves as fully human. To him they are at their most compelling, and their most useful, as a sub-human who will do his bidding without ever being his equal.
Although Moreau's work isn't precisely secret, he is coy about it, and when he speaks to the mainland about the other inhabitants of his island he refers to them as "the natives". This gives away the allegory: Moreau is a colonizer and the beast-men his colonized subjects. Whatever he has given them has come with a terrible price: not just subservience but subhumanity. When Bela Lugosi's striking Speaker of the Law accuses Moreau of making them "not men but things", I hear it not as a tired admonishment to avoid meddling in the natural order, but as a claim that it is Moreau himself—despite his vaunted laws—who prevented them from becoming fully human.
It's telling that where H. G. Wells's novel is structured around the tendency of beast-men to revert to their bestial instinct, the film pushes this thread far into the background. The climax of the plot is no longer driven by instinctual violence, but by words: the Speaker of the Law confronts Moreau and declares his laws void because they are built on lies and hypocrisy. In their way, the beast-men are more rational than Moreau himself. The film ends by challenging the core dichotomy between "beast" and "man" at its root and suggesting (surprisingly deftly for a film made within Wells's lifetime) that the concept of "sub-humanity" is itself inhuman.
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