Link Dump 2: October edition
Sharing is caring
I haven’t posted a collection of links for a bit; looks like it was July last year and it’s high time I did it again. To help me remember—or to compensate when I forget—I’ve created a Shares feed (more information on it’s own page) that you can follow to see blog posts I’ve enjoyed. I’m going to try to do more posts like this one that highlight some of the best, though maybe not monthly:
The Good Ending to Pokemon
An AU short story:
They weren’t close friends right away because just because someone apologized doesn’t mean you let them back into your life right away, but they are in the short list of “former champions”. Azure went on to work at and eventually become the director of the Safari Zone and reshape it into something better, so it’s an actual nature preserve as opposed to a legalized hunting ground. Pokémon that are particularly traumatized or not able to fit in to the zones’s habitat needed somewhere to go, and Azure couldn’t think of anyone better than Red.
I’ve been slowing going through the Pokemon games over the last year and I haven’t actually done the first gen yet, but I still found this bit of short fiction really charming. When I do finally play Red or its remake this is definitely going to be how it goes in my head.
cool book: A History Of Webcomics, T Campbell (2006)
I’ve liked webcomics for a long time, and am eternally in a state of trying to get back into them. 2006 though is earlier than me though, and I remember circa 2010 going through archives and stumbling on guest artist weeks by cartoonists that had sadly since given up.
This post is a short exploration of a book by T Campbell, one of the pillars of the scene in that period. The perspective is as wild to me as it is to videodante, so much having changed in the intermediate almost-two-decades. This paragraph particularly stands out to me:
The gamer genres looked like they might choke the life from other forms of webcomics. There was precedent. Comedy newspaper strips had almost completely subsumed the adventure-strip genre, and superhero action stories had utterly dominated American comic-book sales charts for fifty years. Gamer comics popped up all over the 2004 Webcomics List, the early Webcartoonists’ Choice Awards, and a “Most Read List” from Comixpedia.
I’m a sometimes reader of Josh Fruhlinger’s The Comics Curmudgeon and I have to ask: since when were American newspaper comic strips funny? Regardless you can apparently borrow a copy of the book on archive.org though there have been a few disruptions to that service lately.
A Mod-ICED SNOW-posal: The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004)
To me, a child who turned 10 in 2004 and so probably didn’t see this movie until it was on TV, The Day After Tomorrow is a fever dream. I remember the basic premise: global warming has somehow made the US cold instead of hot, but also drowned New York somehow. I did not remember the plot:
Being the son of a top paleoclimatologist, and also at least ten years older than anyone present, Jake Gyllenhaal is uniquely suited to lead humanity through this crisis. It is thanks to him that his schoolmates — who are (I remind you) trapped in a library that has had all its windows shattered, and its heat and electricity cut off, and which has been flooded by a tidal wave, then frozen to solid ice, then buried under a literal mountain of snow, then surrounded by wolves — manage to defeat the giant freeze-ray that instantly reduces temperatures to minus 200 degrees by… lighting a fire in the fireplace.
Of course! Fireplaces! Its greatest weakness! These are the things you don’t learn without a top paleoclimatologist around the house, let me tell you.
This is part of a whole series of posts by Doyle about disaster movies for October, the scary month—they’re very entertaining!
A typology of men who date trans women
8 October, Shel Raphen at The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim.
I debated including this one because it punched me in the gut.
I have written before about how I, unfairly, tried very hard to be a lesbian. Dating men is just quite dire when you’re a trans woman. Other trans women hate you for it, and then you go to men and you find it hard to justify your attraction. Personally, I find men so incredibly attractive and like a lot of stuff about men, but the heterosexual dating scene for trans women is bleak.
This topic is grim and one I do my level best not to dwell on. If you think you are doing any of the behaviours described in this article, please stop it’s not nice even if you think it is. She does end on some vaguely positive advice, but sigh.
Treating trans women well comes down to the same things as treating cis women well. If you don’t think a cis woman would accept or be OK with something, then don’t expect a trans woman to accept it either. Don’t assume that trans women are more sexually free, more casual, more interested in non-traditional relationships, uninterested in being mothers, and so forth. Don’t use us as tools. Treat us like cis women. Hold yourself to the same higher standards you would expect a cis woman to hold you to.
The bar is on the floor. Treat us well, be willing to commit, pursue us straightforwardly romantically the same ways you would a cis woman—and you will be rewarded with the most enamored, loyal, passionate partners.
Microsoft is basically discontinuing Windows. What will happen, then?
Windows 10, the Default Operating System, reaches EOL in a year. As a non-Windows user I am still unreasonably annoyed at this: we were promised that Windows 10 would be the last version and continuously get updates forever and yet that only got us ten years of standard support to Windows 7’s six. I’ve become much less of an “everyone should use Linux!” evangelist after more than a decade of mellowing since I first became a primary user of that OS family, and most people just need An Computer and Windows is what they know—and this is just not acceptable. Windows 11 is full of features nobody wanted and doesn’t run on many perfectly cromulent machines,1 and if there is a Windows 12 on the horizon it’s not going to come and save us. So what is going to happen?
Azhdarchid gives a pretty good rundown of the basic scenarios. As it happens since this post was written Microsoft has caved slightly in that they have graciously extended their Win10 long term support offering to consumers, for a small price and only for year. Regardless I’m in a cynical mood and I think the first scenario is broadly the most likely:
Scenario 1: we all just shrug our shoulders about it
Windows 10’s EOL deadline comes and goes and nobody pays it much mind. Some people upgrade. Windows 11 overall flops commercially due to its unique combination of being bad but also unsupported on large swathes of its alleged user base.
Some small amount of people, mostly computer touchers, migrate away from win10. But most users just carry on as if nothing is happening.
Large numbers of unsupported Win10 installs persist. Several major cyberattacks happen, affecting all kinds of essential services and thousands of individuals, as known exploits become resolutely unpatched by MS. Like all software, win10 gradually rots into something that’s untenable for production use[…]
Read the rest, etc. If people do upgrade I may personally benefit from a glut of discarded machines in the first flush of middle age, because they are the kinds of computers I most love playing with, but that’s not a good reason for what is ultimately going to be a bad outcome as a whole.
so i’ve been playing j2me games
This is a long one but a good one; I love CRD’s videos but I really adore his written stuff.
I resisted getting a smartphone for aaaages,2 but I never put games on them. I don’t know why, partially I didn’t quite know how to get games that would run on the devices I had but I suspect I also had that “well why wouldn’t I play it on the computer” attitude. Plus I was the kid walking into poles while reading books, bad plan.
As such I don’t know whether what I had supported J2ME, but there was a whole ecosystem I missed out on:
i always assumed that J2ME improved the software situation on paper, but i’d never really looked into it, because i assumed all the games were bottom tier garbage, shit out by clock-punching studios and not even reviewed by publishers, who simply wanted titles to stuff their app stores and didn’t care what was actually in them. however, after watching a DNOpls stream a few days ago I became energized to finally investigate this properly.
CRD’s post—and followup posts, and a recent live stream—goes into a lot of detail, and there are now a bunch of games I want to play, ideally on original hardware if I can swing it. Because that’s what always happens, and now you’ll want to do it too!
A salute to the car, the least vital transportation in FFVIII
28 October, Phil at Final Fantasy VIII is the Best.
I’ll play this game eventually too, but in the meantime I enjoy this ridiculously partisan site.
It’s just an ordinary car! It helps you get between a couple cities early in the game that are relatively close to each other. The net outcome when you rent a car is that you skip a handful of battles and maybe 20 seconds of walking. And you don’t even get it permanently. You have to rent it. AND you have to pay for gas!
It is, bluntly, kinda stupid, but I love it. In this elaborately rendered Lumiere-esque science fantasy future, you can’t escape how much it sucks shit to rent a car. Final Fantasy VIII is filled with contrasts, and one of them is your boringly realistic financial situation, in which you get paychecks that you have to spend on gas.
On spooky animals
30 October, Dr Eleanor Janega at Going Medieval.
The end of October is Halloween, as celebrated on every blog and comic on the web.3 Somehow I still haven’t managed to read her book, The Once And Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society but Dr Janega is still one of my favourite history writers and this post about old ghost stories is great:
For example, the very first ghost story (ED: in Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories) involves a labourer who is trying to carry a peck (about 9 liters) of beans home on his horse. The horse meets with an accident and so the man has to continue on by himself. This is when he sees the ghost, ’as it were a horse standing on its hind feet and holding up its fore feet. In alar he forbade the horse in the name of Jesus Christ to do him any harm. Upon this it went with him in the shape of a horse, and in a little while appeared to him in the likeness of a revolving hay-cock [a small pile of hay left to dry] with a light in the middle; to which the man said, “God forbid that you should being evil upon me.”‘
So, yeah. Scary horse, scary hay pile. As you do.
People were scared of very different things, though then again I could probably be persuaded that a horse was out to get me. Still, there’s a good reason for that:
I would argue, then, that part of the reason we don’t see animals as frightening or ghostly is partly because we now see them as companions or as linked to relaxation and pleasure. They therefore don’t occur to us as actors in their own right who can end up being ghostly. Here, Wales and its animal ghosts acts as a counterpoint which proves my rule. Those animal ghosts are haunting countryside, where people are still more closely linked to the animals in question.
I think all of this is important, because there is an unfortunate tendency to act as though society has always been the same, and it’s just that we get better tech. The Byland Abbey ghost stories show us social understandings are always in flux.
Read the whole to learn when goats got associated with the devil, and who was afraid of ‘the sound of ducks washing themselves’.
That will do for excepts, but there are plenty more really interesting things in the Shares feed. I’m going to do my best to keep adding to it so subscribe quick before the rest of the October posts get pushed off the list!
While my old MacBook is a little bit much to ask there is plenty of newer and more powerful stuff that also isn’t going to qualify.↩︎
I never actually had a flip phone for some reason, they were all candybars, but those are included in what CRD is calling a “flip phone” in an era sense rather than as form-factor. You know what he means don’t argue.↩︎
I mean I spent Halloween, both literally in person and metaphorically online, sitting in the lounge with a bag of sweets stashed in the hallway just in case some lost person knocked on the door and needed their disappointment salved with chocolate. I don’t celebrate Halloween, but I enjoy it when other people do.↩︎