I was rummaging through a graphics folder today at work, and stumbled across two images that caught my eye back in 2015.
The first is a tweet from 24 November of that year:
[DESCRIPTION: A screenshot of a tweet by “Javi”/@OKBJGM, dated 24 Nov 2015, which reads “life becomes more tolerable when you come to the inevitable conclusion that sisyphus was covertly using the rock to wear down the mountain.”]
The second is a screen shot from the Doctor Who episode “Heaven Sent,” which aired four days later, on 28 November 2015:
[DESCRIPTION: An image of The Doctor, as played by Peter Capaldi, standing in start silhouette in front of a brightly-glowing wall of a glassy material.]
The tweet was still fresh in my mind when the episode aired – I had already saved the screen shot. I had always intended to do something with them, and now, almost four years later, I finally have.
[DESCRIPTION: The Doctor Who screenshot with the text from the tweet cited above added in a flowing script, and a credit line for both text and image in a smaller font.]
I saved this at 1280 x 720, and I do hope that Tumblr preserves that resolution for those who might wish to save it.
Roll away the stone, Sisyhpus, Roll away the stone If you could just move yours I could get working on my own
–Rush, “Carve Away the Stone,” Test for Echo (1996)
One of the main characters in my sword & sorcery stories may be either trans or intersex, and whenever I try to make a decision one way or the other, he just chuckles at me.
He used be my D&D character. You’d think I’d know.
I’ve known him for more than forty years, and knew about his gender-ambiguous traits almost from the start.
He’s not human, humanoid, or even a mammal, though he’s adventuring in a setting where most of the people around him ARE. If he’s trans or intersex, they’d never know.
So, Twitter and Tumblr are abuzz about the trailer for Titans, on the upcoming DC Universe streaming service.
Unpopular Opinion Time: I just saw it, and I don’t hate it.
Everyone seems to be complaining because the show looks like a super-powered soap opera about a bunch of angsty teens with parental issues.
Look, I know most of you out there in Tumblr land are more familiar with Cartoon Network’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Titans and their pizza and their anime facefaults and their BOO YAH,* but…
The New Teen Titans? The Wolfman-Perez classic that linked arms with the X-Men to pretty much define the comics landscape of the ‘80s? The book that made the JLA look like second-stringers?
That was a super-powered soap opera about a bunch of angsty teens with parental issues.**
And whoa Nelly, it got dark.The Judas Contract, anyone? That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Believe me, I’m no fan of grimdark darkgrimmery for the sake of grimy grim darkness, but aside from the shadows upon shadows upon shadows and Robin’s now-infamous expletive, that trailer looks a lot closer to the source material than eitherof the Cartoon Network shows have been.
Anna Diop as Starfire looks amazing, though, and, hey, I’m always up for Hawk and Dove.
*No, I’m not talking about Teen Titans Go! I’m talking about the 2003-2006 series. News Flash: everything you whippersnappers say about Go! is exactly what anyone now over 45 said about the ‘03 series when it first aired.
**Yes, Robin got along with Batman just fine right up until the Crisis, even in the pages of NTT, but the post-Crisis retcon of an acrimonious split has been so firmly entrenched that I’m not going to gripe too much about this show following suit.
My roommate tends to turn on random movies when he’s puttering in the kitchen. His preference is for action movies that he’s seen a zillion times, so he doesn’t have to actually pay ATTENTION … so there are several regular visitors to our living room.
The running joke started out as “Die Hard wasn’t on, so …”
It then turned into “Any Bruce Willis movie is Die Hard:” The Fifth ElementisDie Hard in Space, Armageddon isthe OTHER Die Hard in Space,Hudson HawkisDie Hard: the Musical, that black-and-white Frank Miller movie is Sin Hard, The Sixth Sense isDead Hard.
It has since transmogrified to “EveryCable-Staple Action Movie is Die Hard.” Captain America: the First Die Hard. The 6th Day isClone Hard. The third Mad Max movie is Beyond Die Hard. The CGI/MoCap Beowulf isDie Hard & Dragons.
I just walked out to get a sandwich. Real Steel was on.
Something my middlest brother pointed out yesterday:
The wealthiest people on Earth do literally nothing with their wealth. They do an awful lot with their power, but not the hoarded wealth itself. Any spending or reinvestment is minuscule in proportion to the sheer amount that exists just to sit there and accrue. The wealth grows far faster than it can be spent, so any argument that spending is itself an efficient form of redistribution falls apart.
Under capitalism, capital races to become inert wealth. It is not a self-perpetuating dynamic system, it’s a system degrading toward a kind of heat death.
It’s called ‘Money Warehousing’ and is argued to be the intentionally under-investigated SOURCE for A LARGE PART of this countries past/current financial woes. Why is it ‘Intentionally under-investigated’?… You KNOW why.
As I understand it, the real irony is that this kind of money warehousing was the entire premise of pre-capitalist mercantile economics, and one of Adam Smith’s most revolutionary points in The Wealth of Nations was that nations prospered when wealth CIRCULATED instead of stagnating.
People who insist that they are the biggest success stories of capitalism are the ones who are its biggest failures. Much of the “deregulation” of the last few decades has been the systematic dismantling of the mechanisms that Smith proposed to prevent wealth warehousing.
Conservatives insist they are capitalists, but really, they’re trying to force the system to revert back to mercantilism, where wealth is concentrated in a few hands and then does nothing.
(Disclaimer: Your Obedient Serpent is a wetlands ecologist turned cleanroom systems analyst. Economics is not his usual bailiwick, but when stagnating systems get choked with sediment, they demonstrate similar behavior whether the sediment is silt, suspended dust, or dollars.)
People assume that AI is inherently an outgrowth of computer technology, but the whole point of the “programmable general purpose Von Neumann machine” is that its principles are technology-independent.
We have had AI for a at least a century.
Modern corporations are paperclip-maximizing AIs running in human wetware on an operating system of contracts, regulations, and other social constructs, and capable of self-programming by modifying that underlying operating system. They have partially migrated to a digital platform, which has allowed an increase in the speed with which they can assimilate environmental feedback and manipulate their surroundings (vis. high-speed trading).
