im gonna put the "bee" in "be right back" *buzzes away*
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Let me begin by saying: fuck Nintendo. Their insistence on ruining the lives of people who do anything they disapprove of with the products they sell, regardless of whether that thing is illegal let alone harmful to them, is despicable. It creates a chilling effect on vital efforts towards digital preservation that extends far beyond their own products, on top of just being a heinous thing to do to fans of their games. The regard in which they consistently hold their back catalog as assets on which they could one day collect rent speaks to a deep-rooted capitalistic mindset among the businessmen who run the company that is in no way outweighed by the positive things written below.
All that said... Welcome Tour evinces an attitude somewhere in the company—somewhere widespread enough to get this game made and translated—that I find deeply admirable. Unlike the obvious touchpoint ASTRO's Playroom, this is a tour of the Switch 2 in the most thorough possible sense. It takes the player not just through the most charismatic features like HD Rumble 2 or the mouse control scheme, it shows off every square centimeter of the system in a very literal sense. Players walk across circuit boards and computer chips and learn about exactly what they do. Every meticulous design decision is laid out for the player to see.
The result is a game that's intimately concerned with the physical and design structure of the device it's describing, and that invites the player to share in that concern. It trusts the player to care about the craftsmanship with which the console was created, and it provides tech demos to guide them towards understanding it by directly demonstrating technical concepts like framerate, HDR, and VRR.
And, yes, this is in service of convincing buyers that the $450 or whatever they laid out for this device was worth it by framing it as a meticulously designed luxury product. But it's also taking a stand and saying that thoughtful, humanistic design is what defines quality. In an era when every corporate product is racing to become the worst version of itself that might still be salable, when overhyped prediction engines that can only produce statistically-average slop are hailed as the future of content, this is a dramatically heterodox position for Nintendo to stake out so stridently. I'm impressed and honestly heartened by it—not enough to look past the company's myriad acts of destruction, but enough to say that I'm very glad that Welcome Tour is the way it is. -
tits out for pride month
detailed image description
spock swings a large bladed implement and cuts a hole across kirk's chest, revealing his tits
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if I were willing to get tattoos based on media properties that I didn't help create, "bearer seek seek lest" would be high on my list
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I've noticed myself becoming more interested in the course of the Roman empire recently. But surely there's no deeper reason for that.
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whenever we get around to doing spelling reform for English, we should go whole hog and ditch the crusty old Latin alphabet for the latest and greatest in orthographic technology. that's right I'm talking about Hangul. it's terse! it's featural! it's visually attractive! vote Hangul 2025
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I learned from Zandra the other night that French basically does not have a graceful way of expressing the equivalent of "fuck <something>". It has plenty of curse words but none of them function as a transitive word roundly condemning something the way "fuck" does in English. It's just one of the strengths of the language—although by contrast, French is evidently better at stringing together a long series of curses.
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posted Queer Movie Matinee 25 May: Jeffrey
This month's film is another lighthearted one that I suspect people may not have heard of. I ran across Jeffrey (1995) last year and I found it to be a charming and offbeat examination of the psychological fallout of AIDS. It's full of gleefully expressionistic directorial choices, and it's got Patrick Stewart playing an old gay interior decorator. It's a lot of fun!
- What: Jeffrey
- When: 11AM on Sunday the 25th of May
- Where: The Beacon in Columbia City, 4405 Rainier Ave S. It's about a 15 minute walk from the Columbia City station, and the 7, 9, and 50 stop right outside the door.
- RSVP: At this link! The theater seats 48, so we shouldn't run out of space, but please RSVP nevertheless!
- Price: If you can send $10 to @nweiz on Venmo to help keep these going, I'd appreciate it, but if you can't afford it please come anyway.
COVID precautions: Please wear a mask (N95 or better) and run an over-the-counter test day-of or the night before. If you can't afford one, Mask Bloc Seattle can probably hook you up. Outsider Comics in Fremont usually sells them at-cost as well. The theater will be selling concessions, but we ask that you eat them outdoors rather than during the film. The theater itself is not a masks-required space at other times, although we will be the first event of the day and I'll ask the person running the show to mask and test as well and I will be bringing a large portable air filter.
Hope to see you there!
So it turns out I fucked up the booking on this, and it's actually going to be at 8PM. Sorry for the confusion and the short notice!
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I had a dream last night where I was once again a day camp counselor, promising the kids that I'd remember them years down the road. When I woke up, I had that kind of temporal vertigo that people gesture at with the phrase "wanna feel old?" It's been around two decades since I was a counselor, and the little kids I was responsible for[1] are all now adults well older than I was at the time. The astonishing difference between the reality of that gulf of time and the immediate present-ness of that era in my memories—amplified by the team—sent me reeling.
I think that disconnect is really what hits us when we "feel old". We lived all those years in between our memories of younger days and the present, and we know them to be full of exactly that many years' worth of events and experiences. But vanishingly little of that time was spent in the context of those memories. I spent only a few sunscreen-scented summers as a counselor, and I wasn't there to see how the camp or the kids kept going without me, nor did I think of them all the time in the years afterwards. So when my sleeping mind guides me back to that time, it feels like now because what really counts isn't how many years passed for me or for the camp, it's how many years I spent there specifically, and that of course never changes.
Contrast with my early memories of dating my wife. We met years after I last answered to my camp name[2], but I find it much easier to intuitively reckon with the distance of those early days with her because I have memories of us together through all the intervening years. To walk back into our first years together would be to cut through the dense thicket of all the times we've spent since then, whereas there's nothing but empty space between now and the day I said goodbye to camp for the last time, and who can judge distance in empty space?
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And yes, I do remember them all—or at least the ones who came back week in and week out. ↩︎
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"Bookworm," named for my habit as a camper of always carrying a book and reading it any moment there was even a brief downtime. Although camp names were typically only used by counselors, I was one of very few campers to go almost exclusively by one even before I aged up into counseling. ↩︎
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All I'm saying is that the first government to start funding grants for working on the fun parts of software instead of betting on machine learning as the be-all end-all is gonna have an incredible leg up on prestige and talent acquisition when it comes to shaping the digital world over the next half century. The USA's place as the center of software gravity isn't just eroding, it's being purposefully gutted by short-sighted fools who think they can save labor costs by farming out a medium that requires both creativity and precision to machines that are fundamentally capable of neither. Jobs are scarce and prestigious, fun jobs are scarcer. A huge orchard of talent is ripe for the picking.
And I don't just mean funding grants for open-source libraries or public-service web infrastructure or things like that (although they should do that too). I mean fully arts grants, blank checks to create experimental digital media, video games, demoscene demos, wacky hardware, video game mods. Fund the stuff that engineers do in their spare time as long as they do it on your soil and make it available in your language. Build goodwill, build local networks of skill and renown, and you'll have a lock on the whole culture as America continues to collapse.