Category: Nonessential Thoughts

Revisionist History and Revisionist Present, Splash Mountain Edition

Thoughts on an update of a Disney ride, and being on the internet without taking the bait.

Update 08/27/22: If I had done just a few more minutes’ worth of digging, I would’ve seen that the people vocally objecting to the Splash Mountain re-theme all, without fail, quickly revealed themselves to be blatant bigots. The entire thing is obviously a “Comicsgate”/”Gamergate” style campaign, trying to insert alt-right talking points into discussions about pop culture. They’re assholes who are using people’s legitimate nostalgia for a ride and a movie to help amplify their bigotry, and I regret giving them any attention whatsoever.

Splash Mountain remains a problem, and not just for the obvious reasons. Possibly because the re-theming of the ride was delayed by COVID, we’ve gotten to hear an extra two years of people complaining about it.

I already talked about my reaction to the re-theme back when it was announced. Digest version: it makes me sad, because I grew up with Song of the South, I associate it with a family member who passed away, and when I was little, those animated characters were Quintessential Disney to me even more than Mickey Mouse. But the re-theme is going to be better in every possible way: better for Disney, better for Disney’s merchandising division, better for the young kids who’ll have new characters to get attached to, and better for guests who’ll get a fairly significant overhaul for a 30-year-old ride.

But there’s still a lot of revisionist history going on around Splash Mountain and Song of the South. Not just the movie’s absurdly Disney-fied version of a plantation during Reconstruction, but this bizarre idea that objections to the movie and the ride are some recent “woke” invention.

Simply put: Disney was well aware that there were objections to the movie when it was made in 1946, and that there were objections to the movie when the ride was made in 1989. Suggesting that it was a simpler time and they were just unaware of the connotations is an insultingly lousy defense, because it suggests that the people at Disney were either stupid or grossly naive. No, they’ve known at every step that there was going to be push back, they just never had enough incentive to care.

Really, the whole history of the movie and the attraction has been a series of half-measures to work around objectionable material, for the sake of preserving a bunch of charming characters. The movie was re-worked to emphasize that it was set during the Reconstruction and therefore the happy, magical black people weren’t actually enslaved. The ride was re-worked to change the “tar baby” to a beehive and put all the focus on the animated segments. The benefit of hindsight makes it clearer that it would’ve been a lot easier to just pick different source material, instead of juggling a hot potato for decades, trying to surgically remove the most objectionable thing and then leaving the rest for the next group of people to deal with. But to suggest that nobody’s ever had a problem with it until political correctness came along is just laughably false.

Even if you have the most charitable possible impression of Joel Chandler Harris, and believe that he was sincerely trying to bring African-American folklore to both black and white audiences as a reunification effort, it’s still obviously a problem because it’s black culture as filtered through a white man. I personally think it’s reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt — just like with everybody involved with the movie, who I think were at worst insensitive, not malicious — but the whole thing is a problem straight down to its origin.

Ironically, one of the stupidest things I’ve read online also has the barest nugget of a valid argument against a Princess and the Frog re-theme. One of the chuckleheads complaining incessantly on Twitter about “woke Disney” actually said that it was objectionable because it was replacing characters from African-American folklore with a fable written by “two European white men.” Once I stopped laughing at the sheer cluelessness of that, I did feel the barest tinge of regret that we were losing a piece of what is authentically Georgian culture.1A digression about that: since I loved the animated parts of the movie growing up, and just ignored the live action, I had no idea just how much of the movie people find objectionable. I was surprised to hear people call the voices for Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear “racist” since I always just thought they were exaggerated cartoonish versions of how some people in Georgia talk, unaware that the actors were from Amos & Andy and their dialect was dated at best. I have to say I still kind of shrug at that, since I swear that I’ve met several white people who really do talk like Br’er Bear!

So I definitely sympathize with anyone sad to see Splash Mountain go, but I’d also encourage them to get over it, since the re-theming is absolutely a no-brainer of a good idea by every measure2Except for the new name, which I sincerely dislike. It really needed to have “Mountain” in the name, even though there are no mountains in New Orleans as far as I’m aware.. But the actual complaints about the change are so fatuous — even by the standards of people complaining online about Disney parks3I once read a sincere comment from someone complaining about smoking areas, back before they were all removed, and saying that Walt Disney would’ve been disappointed to see so many people smoking in his parks. — that I can’t even believe that they’re being made in good faith.

That’s now true of every complaint about anything “woke” now. It’s so disingenuous and fake and deeply, deeply cynical. Opportunists have realized that they can get immediate attention any time they complain about whatever book, movie, comic book, video game, TV show, or really anything that includes women, LGBT people, non-whites, or non-Christians. Everything gets targeted with a campaign of review bombs and blatantly fake Twitter comments, because they’ve seen over and over again that it’ll generate a ton of reactions.

At this point, it’s just depressing to see people repeatedly taking the bait. Whether by reacting as if the comments are being in good faith, or much more often, just amplifying the stupid comments in order to publicly dunk on them. It’s too tempting to think, “I have the perfect response that will put an end to this kind of backwards thinking once and for all,” or, “I will shine a light on the kind of toxic behavior that permeates the internet, instead of letting their targets suffer privately,” which is exactly the goal behind them: to elevate nonsense and treat it as if it were the subject of reasonable debate.

I don’t know what the actual solution is, but I do know that, for instance, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to the casting of The Sandman (apart from “hey, good choices all around!”) if Neil Gaiman hadn’t publicly responded to complaints about gender-swapping or casting black or non-binary actors. Some of the comments were so obviously phony, written by someone who’d never read the source material, that it’s tough to see what was gained by engaging with them as worthwhile. But if the alternative was for Gaiman to just let all of that garbage float around unaddressed, that’s not great, either.

And the part that’s especially dispiriting is that we’re in at least the fourth or fifth generation of this whole process. You can see how thoroughly it’s infected the conversation around everything. Bullshit, regressive ideas that would’ve been roundly rejected in the days before Web 2.0 are now just taken for granted and expected. This story has a woman superhero, so naturally some people are going to find that objectionable.

Real progress would mean that yes, of course, in 2022 we can see, for instance, a Predator movie with a bad-ass Comanche woman as its lead, that sounds awesome, you’d have to be a fool to object to that. But instead, we get a round of “hey look at this fool who’s objecting to that, let’s all point and laugh.” Even if we’re dismissing them as bullshit, we’re still spending way too much time thinking of bullshit.

What’s even more dispiriting than that is that I’m having a harder and harder time believing any of it is genuine or in good faith, from any direction. We’ve already seen worthless, contemptible piece-of-shit policitians4And that’s me being polite. shamelessly gin up culture wars — putting real people in danger — to advance their own political careers. If those assholes can get so much attention for it, it stands to reason that crass media marketing types are much, much better at it.

For instance: I think that Kate Bush is undeniably a genius, but you could show me detailed transcripts from Netflix headquarters and I still wouldn’t believe that the recent popularity of “Running Up That Hill” was completely organic, and not manufactured by the Stranger Things team doing some extremely effective viral marketing. That’s the innocuous version. What happens when a marketing campaign realizes that people complaining about a black or a Muslim or a female character in a movie or TV series generates a ton of buzz around it?

I know it sounds implausible that people involved in marketing would knowingly do something that makes people’s lives worse, but humor me in this obviously fantastic thought experiment.

It’s entirely possible that I’m being overly optimistic when I assume that people can’t possibly be so genuinely upset about a 30-year-old theme park ride, or a black man or a white woman being cast as the lead in an action movie, or transgender people simply existing. But even if I’m wrong about that, I’m right in thinking that those people don’t deserve to keep having such an outsized part in our conversations.

  • 1
    A digression about that: since I loved the animated parts of the movie growing up, and just ignored the live action, I had no idea just how much of the movie people find objectionable. I was surprised to hear people call the voices for Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear “racist” since I always just thought they were exaggerated cartoonish versions of how some people in Georgia talk, unaware that the actors were from Amos & Andy and their dialect was dated at best. I have to say I still kind of shrug at that, since I swear that I’ve met several white people who really do talk like Br’er Bear!
  • 2
    Except for the new name, which I sincerely dislike. It really needed to have “Mountain” in the name, even though there are no mountains in New Orleans as far as I’m aware.
  • 3
    I once read a sincere comment from someone complaining about smoking areas, back before they were all removed, and saying that Walt Disney would’ve been disappointed to see so many people smoking in his parks.
  • 4
    And that’s me being polite.

The Ineffable Subtleties of “Ow! My Balls”

I get annoyed with a vlogbrother and defend a movie I thought was just okay

Well, I’ve already broken my pledge several times over: not only did I start a new Twitter account, but I’ve gotten to reading it habitually and even actually writing replies to strangers1But deleting them quickly afterwards. Maybe there’s still hope?.

What set me off today was this tweet from Hank Green:

The movie “Idiocracy” is, at minimum, implicitly pro-eugenics.

And I mean, come on, man. It’s tough because I usually like (and occasionally really like) Hank and John Green; and I think they’re generally a force for good on the internet, both for helping make complex topics accessible, and for encouraging kindness, charity, and perpetual learning.

But that’s such a shallow and disappointing take that it seems like it was carefully formulated to irritate me as much as possible. It’s not even that I’m a particularly big fan of Idiocracy — I thought it was fine but not particularly deep or memorable past its core premise. Which, it pains me to have to explain, was satire. It’s as much “pro-eugenics” as A Modest Proposal is “pro-infanticide” and “pro-cannibalism.” And it’s not even that subtle about it.

We shouldn’t have to be explaining satire to grown-ups. And of course, I realize that “No but you see it’s actually satire!” has become the go-to defense whenever anyone says or makes something that makes them look like an asshole. But just because it’s been mis-used so often is no reason to throw out the concept altogether.

Maybe what’s needed is the YouTube IDIOCRACY EXPLAINED! approach, complete with an attention-grabbing thumbnail with big red circles and yellow arrows2I tried my best, but couldn’t figure out how to make the arrows with the latest version of Photoshop before I lost interest in the gag. I guess I shouldn’t have gotten my graphic design degree from Costco.. How about we start with the opening, which sets the tone and makes one thing clear almost immediately: The movie is making fun of everyone.

The “High IQ” couple isn’t being put forward as a role model. They’re self-centered and petty. As the woman explicitly says that they don’t want to have children with “the market” the way it is, they’re shown against a background of increasingly fancier and more expensive homes. (While the children of the “Low IQ” couple lives in chaos and disarray). To spell it out: it’s a criticism of socioeconomics, not genetics. One couple is too focused on accumulating wealth for themselves to be willing to devote any of that wealth to children.3On IMDb, at least, they’re credited as “Yuppie Wife” and “Yuppie Husband,” and if you believe that Mike Judge was pro-Yuppie and was advocating having more of them in society, then I don’t know what to tell you apart from “watch literally anything else that Mike Judge has made.”

And even if you can’t let go of the over-literal extremely-online mindset, and are still convinced that Mike Judge and Etan Cohen were sneaking in a sincere pro-eugenics manifesto and disguising it as a silly comedy, then you could consider the entire rest of the movie. The whole story is about a thoroughly average person who’s forced to make an effort for the first time in his life, because he’s held up as superior to everyone else by a completely arbitrary metric. The movie makes fun of the whole concept of intelligence and wealth as signifiers of actual aptitude. It’s chastising early 2000s society for racing to the bottom, settling for the least amount of effort, and appealing to the lowest common denominator.4And yes, we are all aware that we saw exactly that play out in the late 2010s, everybody can stop saying “it was a documentary!” now.

I hate it when people act like there’s one correct interpretation of any piece of art, but I mean, again: this movie is not that subtle. Which is why it’s so frustratingly ironic to see this movie in particular hit with such a shallow and dismissive analysis, since it’s so stridently criticizing us all for settling for less. It shows what happen if we keep lazily declining to engage with anything of depth, until we’re all buried under trash.

There are a couple of reasons this set me off. First is that I spend too much time online. I’ve seen too many examples of people gradually (and eagerly) descending into idiocracy, since so much of online media favors immediate engagement over thoughtful consideration. Blog posts like this one are an anachronism, and I feel very silly as I’m writing it, because it’s just not cool in 2022 to be devoting so much time to anything so inconsequential.

Instead, they’ve been replaced by explainers: web articles or video essays that aim to take everything from topics in social or natural sciences to the current most-SEO-friendly movie release, pick all of the meat off of them, and encapsulate them into an easily-digestible conclusion. The Green brothers in particular were among the first to popularize the short-and-accessible explainer format, and in a lot of cases, I think they’re great. I appreciate it when someone can take a complex topic and present it so that understanding the basics is easily accessible without scolding me for not already understanding the basics and still acknowledging that there’s much more complexity than can be easily explained.

But while it’s great for sciences and history, it’s just deadly for art and entertainment. The art itself is the explainer.

Which leads to another thing that set me off: I’m wondering how much I’m culpable in all this, since I tend to be such a proponent of accessible media. (By which I mean accessible to interpretation. I’m also a strong believer in accessibility for people with disabilities, but I’m not as vocal a proponent of it as I probably should be). I love writing about the MCU and Star Wars — and invite anyone who claims it’s shallow or juvenile to piss right off — because it’s fun and easy. They’re designed to be widely accessible but still have just enough depth that they don’t end up feeling like empty calories.

So I’m all over it when someone wants to point out easter eggs or bits of lore that I’m not enough of a True Superfan to have recognized, but I can feel the soul seeping out of my body when that turns into “explaining” the show or the movie itself. Especially when it just restates the most obvious interpretation of a work. Usually, this stuff isn’t all that ambiguous, so all you’re doing is restating the obvious in a much less elegant way.5One of the things I like about Nope is that it throws out a bunch of ideas and fits them altogether, leaving the overall theme just ambiguous enough to allow for multiple interpretations. I saw somebody had made an explainer video for the shoe in the Gordy’s Home scenes, which just restated the most obvious things then insisted that everybody else was wrong and that this was the “real” meaning of the scene. Don’t be like that guy.

I guess like everyone else who’s ever entered middle age and seen the culture being increasingly driven by younger people, I can’t escape the anxiety that they’re doing it all wrong and ruining everything. I’m generally for the resurgence in earnestness and rejection of unnecessary irony, but not if it’s at the expense of having everything dumbed down and over-simplified.

I get that there’s a lot more noise than there ever has been, and it’s increasingly hard to have patience for people who won’t just say what they mean. There’s a preponderance of people out there actively lying, obfuscating, and disingenuously arguing about things for malicious intent.6I really wish people would stop trying to engage with anyone complaining about women or marginalized people in media. Whether you’re trying to make a point or just dunk on them, you’re not accomplishing anything because they’re always being made in bad faith. All you’re doing by engaging is helping them make basic kindness and common sense seem like something still subject to differing opinions and debate. In fact, I spent some time wondering if Hank Green were pulling some kind of prank with his tweet, but a) that doesn’t seem like his style, and 2) it doesn’t really do anything with the idea, because there’s no twist apart from restating the satirical premise of the movie and calling it a “hot take.” (If that were indeed the “joke” then… okay I guess?)

But if it means that there’s no obligation to analyze a creative work at any level apart from what it says on the surface, and that there’s no obligation to consider whether your first interpretation might not be the one correct interpretation, then we’re heading towards shallower and shallower art. It starts with people believing that the “Twin Pines Mall” becoming the “Lone Pine Mall” in Back to the Future is some delightfully obscure easter egg that only a select few had picked up on. Continue for a few hundred years, and you get “Ow! My Balls!”7But on the brighter side: fewer thinkpieces and blog posts like this one!

  • 1
    But deleting them quickly afterwards. Maybe there’s still hope?
  • 2
    I tried my best, but couldn’t figure out how to make the arrows with the latest version of Photoshop before I lost interest in the gag. I guess I shouldn’t have gotten my graphic design degree from Costco.
  • 3
    On IMDb, at least, they’re credited as “Yuppie Wife” and “Yuppie Husband,” and if you believe that Mike Judge was pro-Yuppie and was advocating having more of them in society, then I don’t know what to tell you apart from “watch literally anything else that Mike Judge has made.”
  • 4
    And yes, we are all aware that we saw exactly that play out in the late 2010s, everybody can stop saying “it was a documentary!” now.
  • 5
    One of the things I like about Nope is that it throws out a bunch of ideas and fits them altogether, leaving the overall theme just ambiguous enough to allow for multiple interpretations. I saw somebody had made an explainer video for the shoe in the Gordy’s Home scenes, which just restated the most obvious things then insisted that everybody else was wrong and that this was the “real” meaning of the scene. Don’t be like that guy.
  • 6
    I really wish people would stop trying to engage with anyone complaining about women or marginalized people in media. Whether you’re trying to make a point or just dunk on them, you’re not accomplishing anything because they’re always being made in bad faith. All you’re doing by engaging is helping them make basic kindness and common sense seem like something still subject to differing opinions and debate.
  • 7
    But on the brighter side: fewer thinkpieces and blog posts like this one!

Monday Cat

Here’s another experiment learning Nomad Sculpt for iPad. The cliche that cats are grumpy and mean-tempered is lazy and inaccurate. This cat, for instance, loves Mondays. That’s the day he gets to go to his job at the bank, foreclosing on people’s homes.

Dreidelbot

And here’s the Dreidelbot 8000. I made it out of Nomad Sculpt. Partly to make up for posting Santa renders while Hanukkah was still going on, but mostly because I wanted to see if I could make a Nick Park-style robot. Don’t be alarmed by his low battery meter; his fuel tends to last longer than you might expect!

That reminds me: have there ever been any Black Christmas-type horror movies set during Hanukkah? It seems like a natural, what with a murder each day and so on. I can even think of the tag-line for the poster: “With his dreidel he will SLAY.”

Santa, Baby

I’ve been having a ton of fun with Nomad Sculpt on the iPad. I admit I didn’t think much of it until I found videos by Eric Lee on his eric3dee channel. (Start with his video doing Popeye). Not only is it possible to make neat-looking models with it, using the Apple Pencil directly on the model makes it feel a lot more natural than my previous attempts with Blender.

(It also makes it a lot easier to make simple lighting setups and renders than Blender does. I still can’t for the life of me figure out how to make even a basic 3-point light setup in Blender that doesn’t look lousy).

Anyway, here are a few shots of my first project with Nomad. It’s Santa Claus arriving at the home of Zhiyang Z Zyzzenberg, the 4.3 billionth person on his list. (Hope you wanted an Instant Pot, because that’s all that’s left!) I’d thought about doing an actual Santa Baby, but it got weird and unsettling real fast.

Friday Night’s All Right for Looking at all Those Chickens

Just a grab bag of older funny videos this week

Some weeks you don’t have the energy for anything other than looking through old videos. None of these are recent, they’ve all been memed and re-memed and their creators have likely milked every last penny of virality out of them, but they still make me laugh every damn time. I miss Vine. Look at all those chickens!

Friday Night’s All Right For Keeping the Kids Out of the Pool

Friday link post featuring Adult Swim and long-term storage of renewable energy

This week was the 20th anniversary of the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network, and this mini-retrospective by Kyle Anderson on Nerdist.com does a pretty good job of concisely summing up why the combination of cheap TV programming and clever ad bumpers made such a huge impact on nerds of a certain age.

Or multiple certain ages, I guess. I’m having trouble coming to terms with the idea that I was 30 when Adult Swim debuted, because I could’ve sworn I watched it in college. Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to listen to the D-Code Mix of Mambo Gallego by Tito Puente and remember there’s no eating in the pool. What’s that guy eating? Is that pimento?

  • Dianna Cowren on her YouTube channel PhysicsGirl just finished a series about hydrogen fuel cell cars. It was sponsored by Toyota, so it’s definitely spun to be more positive of the potential of fuel cells than you’d tend to see otherwise, but it also does a good job of realistically assessing the downsides of hydrogen, why passenger vehicles may not see wide adoption over battery EVs, and why a combination of fuel cells (faster refueling, longer range) and BEVs (everything else) will be necessary to get wide-scale conversion to electric.
  • The parts of Cowren’s series that I thought were even more interesting were the episode about approaches towards storing renewable energy and different kinds of solar farms beyond the familiar photovoltaics. I was vaguely aware that solar and wind power needed some kind of storage solution to be available on demand, but I’d just assumed that massive batteries were the solution. That video explains some ingenious alternatives, such as using excess energy to pump water to a higher elevation, then using the water falling to power turbines when that energy is needed.
  • Lucas Pope is doing a devblog for his Playdate game Mars After Midnight, and last week’s entry “Working in One Bit” was a neat account of what’s involved in making art for a small one-bit display in 2021.
  • Another interesting project for Playdate that’s in the works: a framework for crank-scrollable comics called Panels, by Cadin Batrack.
  • Those two projects made me realize that I’ve been a little short-sighted about what exactly appeals to me about the Playdate: as somebody who still pines for his Mac Plus, I had been thinking of it as throwing back to a very specific kind of mid-to-late-80s nostalgia for the early Macintosh aesthetic. Instead, I think the actual appeal is broader: it feels like a direct expression of creativity from developer to audience. I got reminded of the wonderful and bizarre Comic Chat IRC client from Microsoft. Frankly, I never saw it actually work as well as its concept promised, but I’m still amazed by the fact that it existed at all. Not just that such an R&D project came out of Microsoft, but that they managed to get Jim Woodring to do the art!

Friday Night’s All Right for Making an Old Witch Smile

Link post in which I recommend some stuff from friends, watch Disney+, and get jealous of a voice actor

  • Nakia is a super-nice and charismatic guy that I’ve been fortunate to hang out with a couple of times, and he’s got a new song and video out called “Dream Big” that you should check out.
  • My friend Graham Annable has a new sketchbook available on his store Gricklemart. While there, consider the Ghost Writer mug, with a spectral entity re-enacting his favorite moment from Raising Arizona.
  • There’s an interesting thread from Angus Johnston on Twitter that gives a convincing counter-argument to a recent story in the New York Times. In short: the environmental impact of a cotton bag is almost certainly not as severe as the article, or the study on which it was based, would have you believe, by several orders of magnitude. The most significant takeaway, I think, is don’t use tote bags made of “organic cotton.” Is that a New York City thing?
  • There are now more episodes of the Behind the Attraction series up on Disney+. The show is a lot more goofy than I’d expected; I like that it’s a counter to the sometimes overly self-serious The Imagineering Story, but it seems light on details and heavy on lionizing individual employees of Imagineering. I have to admit I mostly like it because of Paget Brewster’s narration, although I can’t help but wish she were able to let loose as much as she did on Drunk History.
  • Something on Disney+ that I’m absolutely not conflicted about: The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse. I’ve already gushed about the Paul Rudish-led series of Mickey Mouse shorts, but this new series is even weirder. The most recent short, “Game Night” does great stuff with Mickey & Donald’s relationship, and the one previous, “Once Upon an Apple,” had more laugh-out-loud moments crammed into 8 minutes than I’ve had in months.
  • Speaking of that short, the only two voice actors credited are Tress MacNeille, who’s pretty much universally regarded as one of the greatest voice actors ever, and Chris Diamantopoulos, who just annoys me. His take on Mickey Mouse (and the magic mirror, in that short) has re-invigorated one of the most valuable characters in animation, if not all of fiction, and he does it singing, in different languages, and with accents. It seems like a grievous cosmic injustice that he could be such a good voice actor and also look like that.

Friday Night’s All Right For Not Worrying About It

A random bunch of links including Korean cooking channels

I’ve only recently realized that I’d spent years thinking I liked cooking, but I really don’t. I’m not that good at it, and because I don’t have a good idea of how to correct when something is going wrong or tasting bad, I pretty much have to rely on the recipe working right on the first try. It’s frustrating.

What I think happened was I used to enjoy watching cooking shows on the Food Network so much that it tricked me into thinking I liked cooking. Now, I’m realizing that there’s just something relaxing and entertaining about watching a well-made cooking show. One of my favorites at the moment is Aaron and Claire’s YouTube channel. They’re a couple living in Seoul who focus on easy ways to make Korean and other East Asian food. Honestly, I haven’t yet tried any of the recipes (although I really want to try making Kimchi fried rice), but they’ve got the formula down for making entertaining videos, with all the familiar and funny repetition. Don’t worry about it.

  • I’m late to the party, but I’m also getting to be a fan of J Kenji López-Alt. His main “thing” is bringing ideas from food science to simpler and easier dishes you make for yourself at home. It’s unassuming, practical, and accessible. But I think I’m as impressed by his overall sensibility, right down to his sign-off to “guys, gals, and non-binary pals.”
  • This video by Matt Ferrell is primarily about the work of a French company called Qarnot with a fascinating and ingenious idea: recovering waste heat from data centers and rendering farms and using it to warm buildings or heat water in boiler rooms.
  • Tim Robinson’s sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave has been getting rave reviews and being the subject of memes for a while, but I have to say it doesn’t really do it for me. But this sketch about a driver’s ed class and Eddie Munster ruining a woman’s tables is somehow one of the funniest things I have ever seen.
  • Much-beloved British comedian Sean Lock passed away this week, and there was an outpouring of respect from people who respected him. I really only know him from 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, where his spontaneity seemed genius. Channel 4 put up a tribute video with some of his best moments from Countdown, but I think the better tribute is actually a compilation of Lock’s best moments that they made in 2019. The sequence starting at 0:55, with a NSFW adlib during a wager with Miles Jupp, is one of the funniest moments of the entire series.

Friday Night’s All Right For Carbon Capturing

Friday Link Post inspired by getting pissed at oil companies, again

One of the most frustrating things about the climate crisis is that it’s tough to keep it from feeling simultaneously too abstract and too overwhelming. Even for those of us who take it seriously and are suitably worried about it, it can feel too distant to be able to take significant immediate action.

That’s part of why I like Rollie Williams’s Climate Town videos: they let me stay motivated via pure rage. The latest video recaps the story of an Exxon executive blatantly acknowledging the company’s role in the climate crisis, how they’ve been knowingly lying about their role in public, and how they’ve been lobbying to prevent the government from doing anything to halt it.

I’ve been avoiding Exxon ever since the Exxon Valdez oil spill (that’s how long I hold a grudge!), but I’d started to wonder if it were foolish to act as if my meager boycott were doing anything. Now I say screw ’em all, and if I can help it, I’ll never buy another tank of gas again.

  • Climate Town is also a good source for reminders about bullshit corporate statements pledging to be environmentally responsible, like a recent FedEx campaign.
  • Today, Hank Green posted a video to the vlogbrothers channel giving a high-level explanation of steps governments can take to address the climate crisis, so that laypeople can better understand the terminology.
  • Unrelated to climate change: I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m a big fan of the Monstrum videos by Dr. Emily Zarka for PBS, which have long been excellent takes on cryptids and monsters from folklore. I wish PBS hadn’t lumped it in with a couple of unrelated topics, because they’re so well made they deserve their own channel.
  • The most recent entry in the outstanding 50 Years of Text Games series is about one of Emily Short’s games, which reminded me to check out Short’s blog about Interactive Storytelling. It’s great both for her deep dives and for her link round-ups with a little bit of everything of interest to people interested in narrative games.
  • One particularly interesting post I hadn’t seen before is “Montage, Narrative Deckbuilding, and Other Effects in StoryNexus” from 2017. The application is more esoteric than I’m interested in, but the idea of combining narrative games and deckbuilding games is absolutely genius.

Friday’s All Right for Getting to the Other Side

The Friday link post that asks have I been missing out on the joke my entire life?

A few weeks ago, I read a comic strip about the classic “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke that mentioned that the joke had a double meaning that had gotten lost over the years. The claim is that in addition to being a nonsense joke, it was kind of a double-entendre about “going to the other side” as in going to the afterlife. It was convincing enough that I started to wonder if everybody got both meanings, and I was the only one who’d gone since childhood assuming that it was funny only because it was a non-joke.

(Asking around to some friends and former co-workers online, I learned that none of them had heard of the double meaning, that it seemed an unlikely “retcon,” and as Dave Grossman pointed out: if one of the first appearances of it in print was as far back as 1847, that was before roads had a reputation for being dangerous or getting run over. So it’s very unlikely part of the secret double meaning. But I already spent minutes making the image for this post, dammit).

  • Pre-orders for the Playdate started on Thursday. They went through the initial batch pretty quickly, but orders made now will deliver next year. It’s good to see so much interest around it, since those guys have been working super-hard on this thing forever. (While backing up stuff the other night, I saw a bunch of early art assets for my game, and I was stunned to realize how long I’ve been working on the thing!)
  • As part of opening pre-orders for the Playdate, Panic released a new episode of the Panic podcast, interviewing a lot of people involved with the project, from initial concept to software development.
  • For the record: I’m 100% Team ScarJo. (Actually, I didn’t care all that much until I read Disney’s public statement about the suit, which was hell of gross).
  • Speaking of gross: Activision/Blizzard has been sued by the state of California for a long history of sexual harassment and discrimination. What’s been remarkable to me is how awful Blizzard’s response was — and yet 100% in line with what you’d expect from rich white men in Orange County, CA. NPR, as usual, both-sides it into an innocuous non-response, but the full text is just dripping with indignation and passive-aggressive blaming California liberals. Instead of making even a token attempt to address the allegations. I’m impressed that so many employees were outraged by the response, enough to make a statement and schedule a walk-out for earlier this week. Meanwhile, Activision Blizzard keeps digging their hole deeper and deeper. It would be very satisfyingly ironic if the arrogance of Activision Blizzard’s exec staff is what finally spurs a “Me Too” moment in video game development.

Friday Night’s All Right For Blending and Shading

Friday link post exploring the baffling world of non-photorealistic shaders

Above is a tutorial by Ocean Quigley on how to make a non-photorealistic shader for Blender that looks like an etching or engraving. I was lucky to work indirectly with Ocean on SimCity 4, and he remains one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.

Here, he makes the baffling process of shader creation seem not simple, but at least attainable. I definitely can’t claim to understand every step of the process he outlines, but he does do a great job of walking through step by step and explaining why he’s doing each part.

A simpler but interesting effect is explained by Ian Pitkanen, with this video demonstrating how to add a grainy effect to lighting transitions. It’s a nice, subtle effect that makes 3D objects seem less sterile and more like they’ve been printed on paper.

I’m frequently trying to learn how shaders work (and then getting hopelessly confused and giving up). One of the most useful-seeming resources is The Book of Shaders by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo and Jen Lowe, which encourages you to interact with the examples instead of just passively reading. This is a perfect approach, because it’s a reminder that this isn’t magic, but neither does it require a deep understanding of math. It is presumably possible to understand the basics and then experiment until you get what you want.

The reason I’m interested in shaders at the moment is to see if I can use Blender to make art resources for a possible game for an upcoming black-and-white video game device. This article by Braden Eliason on getting that classic Mac dither effect in Blender seems like it’ll be invaluable for that!