I feel deeply ambivalent about a lot of art / tech things in games because I really respect the care and craftsmanship that goes into them but also find them to be totally ignoble pursuits where every...

tumblr employee justin/jstn set up a vt220 serial terminal to act as a remote terminal for his mac pro

Chihaya is an anomaly among the other girls—she’s a reluctant idol. She dances but hates practicing. She grows frustrated when prompted to change into a different outfit. She half-heartedly grins in the presence of her shadowy, omnipresent Producer, afraid to disappoint you at every turn. She’s asocial, and hardly hangs out with her peers or finds enjoyment in other hobbies (outside of listening to classical music). Instead, she focuses on singing, her only passion in the realm of her broadly defined career as an idol. In an earnest declaration, Chihaya believes that if she could no longer sing, she’d rather die. Singing keeps Chihaya alive. This is because Chihaya suffers from chronic depression, onset by witnessing the death of her younger brother as a child and her parents’ subsequent divorce. While Idolm@ster never takes the step to explicitly label Chihaya’s suffering as chronic depression, it doesn’t need to. The signs are all there. This is Idolm@ster using Chihaya’s personal struggle with depression as an astoundingly accurate in-game function. Despite the existence of the Chihaya Spiral, it’s important to note that Chihaya isn’t perpetually in despair. When she succeeds, she still inches forward, her tension meter snails its way upward. She has her good days, just as she has her bad days. Chihaya is not solely her depression.

it’s interesting how many op-eds were written about how children born in the late 90s-onward were digital natives that would go on to become extremely versatile in tech when the reality is that tech becoming more consumer oriented nipped the incentive for a lot of kids to explore beyond the services offered to them. not knowing how to torrent things is only the tip of the iceberg and tech illiteracy is only going to continue to climb as the cultural shift from computers to phones becomes more pronounced in coming years. I used to joke that people in the late aughts saw laptops as like, $700 facebook machines but the modern comparison is that people see laptops as $1200 subscription service for media they don’t own machines.

Harry Potter pretends to be an aracial story about found family, but if that were true, why are Harry’s distant ancestors important to who he is today even in the seventh book? Why does Harry have to live with his cousin and aunt and uncle? Because magic inherently prefers blood ties. Whilst Rowling was writing a story that seemed to say, “your heritage is not that important and doesn’t make you better than others” she was still writing a story about a boy who got all of his money through his bloodline, who was protected by living with his bloodline, no matter how evil, who was uniquely able to stop Voldemort because his bloodline passed down the invisibility cloak for generations and generations. Any step Harry takes he is compared to his perfect parents who were exactly like him — he looks just like his father, but he has his mother’s eyes, you know! — consider WHY a woman who is racist might’ve written a story like this. A story that on its surface, condemns a blood caste, but still in every step it takes, validates the idea that blood is thicker than water, and your geneological origin is what makes you special.