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[o-wright]

“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“

Meanwhile Ariel with legs;

Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.

Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.

[o-wright]

I've played DCC once and for the funnel we were genre savvy but also understood that it was supposed to whittle down so we were not cautious until we were lower on numbers

i got to run a dcc funnel for the first time in years and 12/16 characters lived. i feel robbed

Holy shit that is a really good survival rate. Were the characters just really cautious or was there a lot of luck on their side? (Also happy to hear you got to run DCC, it looks like so much fun. :D)

[o-wright]

I've actually kept track of this one over the years. While some of the later editions do add some interesting ideas, I think 1st edition is most suited to the "dungeon crawl" niche

Have you played Dungeons & Dragons ?

By Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson

A pretty obscure old fantasy RPG with some pretty unique ideas! You play as adventures (of one of three classes: Fighting-Man, Cleric, Magic-User, but with more classes available via supplements) that go into "dungeons" to defeat "dragons." As your character's "level" goes "up" you can go "down" into deeper "levels" of the "dungeon," and once your character reaches a high enough "level" they get to build a castle!

A rather unique old-school game, the only downside being that it expects you to own two other games: Chainmail for the combat system and Outdoor Survival for wilderness adventures. This hidden gem from the early days is definitely worth a look! There have been as many as five editions of the game, and as far as I am aware the game hasn't changed fundamentally since its first release!

[o-wright]

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Tone deaf as hell + embarrassing to be an adult who writes Hamilton fanfic and writes tumblr responses like it’s still 2010. Get a job

Thank you for this shining specimen of bad faith and projection—I've been looking for a clear example to showcase the intellectual quality of my inbox tonight, and you’ve delivered splendidly. You are, quite literally, the reason I had to clarify I was replying to the most coherent ask I received. This one? Not it.

Let’s address the content—such as it is.

First: I am not obligated to disclose my age online, nor do I find the performative age-checking impulse particularly useful in fandom discourse. That said, it’s deeply ironic that the same people who parrot “cringe culture is dead” and praise safe spaces for expression are the first to sneer at anyone writing fanfiction—especially about Hamilton, which, let’s be honest, you probably haven’t engaged with beyond moralizing TikToks from 2021.

Second: I do, in fact, have a job. Several, actually. One of them pays me to write, one keeps my health insurance intact, and another helps me afford the luxury of spending my free time writing Tumblr responses laced with queer theory and affective analysis to strangers who can’t string together a proper argument without collapsing into moralistic shrieking. In short: I’m winning.

Finally, your comment is a perfect example of the kind of juvenile hostility that substitutes sneering for critique. You aren't engaging with content, you're flailing at vibes. If it’s embarrassing to you that someone writes Hamilton fanfic, I suggest you scroll and move on—like a functional adult. No one’s forcing you to read it. But clearly you are reading, and for that, you’re welcome.

Anyway, thank you for volunteering as a teaching specimen. Your message has been very educational—for everyone but you.

[o-wright]

Molotov Cockatrice

[o-wright]

TIL that Harvard professor Tom Lehrer was asked at the age of 84 by rapper 2 Chainz if he could sample his 60-year old song. Lehrer replied, “I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?”

via ift.tt

[o-wright]

@importantanimalmemes

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Fearing such hits as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” “National Brotherhood Week,” “The Masochism Tango,” “The Element Song,” “Be Prepared,” and “Lobachevsky”

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openin’ the door to the microwave one second early because you don’t need all the hootin’ and hollerin’

[o-wright]

I keep seeing an idea that while it’s OK to ship (or even just like) the characters in Hamilton the musical, it’s deeply dubious to ship (or even just like) the historical Founders because most of them were enslavers or abusers.

Guys. What the fuck do you think Hamilton the musical is?

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a fanfic of the historical characters that made them really cool and elided most of their flaws, in the best traditions of “Founders chic”. He did it really well, and with the best of modern-day real-life intentions. But he didn’t bathe Hamilton, Jefferson et al in the blood of the Lamb and wipe them clean of sin; he just decided to ignore the parts that were uncomfortable - in exactly the same way you criticise less talented writers for doing.

If venerating the Founding Fathers makes you uncomfortable, then good! It should! But don’t pretend that Hamilton the musical is somehow different just because you like it (and I love it).

We all like some problematic things (hi, Ham! Hi, Burr!). We just have to deal with that as best we can.

[o-wright]

cannot stop thinking about the french man who during dinner responded to a person asking "should we be naughty and get desert" by pulling a face and going "naughty? it is chocolate, it is not an, uh, threesome"

[o-wright]

FUN FACT: I own porn I can't watch.

So this is a copy of Adultery for Fun & Profit, a 1971 X-rated film. It won the Grand Prize at the Amsterdam Adult Film Festival, for the year 1970-1971!

BUT it's on Cartrivision.

Cartrivision was an early home videotape format announced in 1970, released in June 1972, and dead by July 1973.

It has some "fun" features, like not selling VCRs for it: you had to buy it build into a new console TV. Which were huge, because it was the 70s.

There's also issue of Red Tapes (of which this is one!)

See, early on the movie industry hated the idea of home movies. They made all their money on movie tickets, right? People watching movies at home, that's gonna seriously cut into their market. This is why they later sued Sony for the introduction of Beta, arguing that it could be used to pirate movies by recording them off TV. (They lost)

So when Cartridge Television started selling Cartrivision in 1972, none of the movie studios really wanted to start selling their films on home tapes, that idea sounded scary. What if someone had a copy of all their favorite films and could watch them forever at home, and never went to the theaters ever again? The movie studios would go out of business!

So along with releasing a bunch of older B&W movies (the only ones they could license), sporting events, and shows from PBS, Cartridge Television came up with a compromise that worked for the movie studios:

Red Tapes.

So, Cartrivision tapes came in two formats: Black Tapes and Red Tapes. Black tapes you'd buy at the store like any other product, but for Red Tapes (which were relatively recent movies), you instead would go to the store and place an order from a catalog. The store would have it delivered by mail, then you'd come back in and get the tape. You'd take it home, watch it, and then return it back to the store. So... Video rental (like Blockbuster!), except they didn't have any stock on hand, and only got the tapes on-demand by mail? Seems annoying.

BUT OH NO: it's far more annoying than that. See... Red Tapes aren't mechanically like Black Tapes.

You can't rewind them.

You can play them and pause or stop them just like any other tape, but the rewind feature on your Cartrivison TV doesn't work.

So once you start watching a film, you can only go forward from that point. You want to rewatch it? Too bad. Go back to the store and pay for it again.

Here's that tape again. Note that it's red: You can only watch this porn film once. Then you have to return it to the store... the stores that haven't been doing this since JULY OF 1973.

But there's another thing you can see on this picture (barely, because this is a blurry picture, thanks Past!Foone): The visible screws in the corners

So here's the thing: The tape labels for Cartrivision hide the screws. A regular tape will look like this:

BUT when Cartrivision failed in July 1973, a bunch of stores sold off their unsold inventory, including watch-once Red Tapes. And people still had some of the players. But what's the point of having a tape you can't rewind? You've basically destroyed the tape now, since it's stuck at the end and can't be rewound!

So people bought some of those Red Tapes (cheaply, I hope) and then took them home and opened them up with a screwdriver, damaging the labels. They figured out how the no-rewinding mechanism worked, and removed it. So basically every Red Tape you will find for sale on ebay has visible screws, because someone modded it in the past.

Anyway, the format has been dead so long that it's doubly-impossible to watch now. The players were only built into big heavy 1970s TVs, which were long ago thrown out. The tapes have gotten old and brittle. If you somehow DID have a player, and it somehow still worked after half a century, the tape will probably shatter as soon as you try to play it.

And the whole format only lasted 13 months, so there wasn't that much inventory sold in the first place, so there wasn't a huge number of these in existence anyway.

But a final fun fact: Someone HAS managed to get video off one of these tapes. And it was so hard that they made an award-winning documentary about it.

See, this was basically the first home video format for recording TV. The quality was terrible but it was better than nothing, and it turns out some fan with a Cartrivision recorded a copy of Game 5 of the 1973 NBA Finals game. ABC and both teams (LA Lakers & NY Knicks) had video copies of that game... and ALL THREE OF THEM LOST IT. But the fan copy survived, in a format no one could play, on a tape that would shatter if you tried to play it.

So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape. They had to dry it out, bake it, freeze it, soak it in alcohol, and rebuild a broken Cartrivision unit, then do a lot of manual fixups on the digital files they'd captured off the tape, but they finally managed to capture the recording of the game.

This was used for the MSG Network, who were doing a special on the 1973 championship, and had no footage of that pivotal game. With DuArt's work, they had something to show.

DuArt then made a documentary about this, called "Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape". It won an Emmy.

The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost. I have been looking for years, and have not found a copy, other than a short excerpt on Vimeo.

So yeah. Cartrivision. I'm slightly obsessed with it, even though I've never actually been able to watch a single second of Cartrivison footage. Tapes occasionally show up on ebay, the odd technical manual or spare part, but players are rare, always broken, and probably would just shred the tapes even if they did somehow work. The tapes are just too old. '

Cartrivision is just... dead and gone. Not yet forgotten, but it took media restoration experts a long time and a lot of work to even get a few minutes of footage off one tape. My chances of ever being able to play my Adultery for Fun & Profit tape are basically negative zero.

EDIT: I've restored this version now that I've figured out Other Methods to dissuade Hacker News. I remain trans and hating you, orange site.

[o-wright]

big shoutout to the gas station near my house which is running a deal on energy drinks and thought the best way to express this on their large LED sign was to make it read BANG MONSTER 2/$5

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I didn’t take many photos this weekend, but you can enjoy this one that made me laugh.

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I would like to share the story of a very understandable but unfortunate mistake i made at work recently

So I'm weeding our ancient and terrible collection of children's books for the first time in possibly ever, and I'm making a decision about a book about migrant workers by Sandra Weiner, called Small Hands, Big Hands. And I'm not 100% sure and I go to just see if there's anything out there about this book's being notable in any way so I do an open web search for

"small hands big hands weiner"

And then I look at my results for a moment

and then at last I somberly add to the end of my search, "BOOK"

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i love words like “acquire” and “acquit” etc… it’s such a treat to see c and q together like that. they’re such an odd couple. it’s like if you were in high school¹ and one day you saw the blonde overachiever valedictorian² hanging out with the weird friendless goth girl with the siouxsie sioux³ hair and you realized they’d been childhood friends all along

¹ stage of education in the united states, commonly portrayed in a romanticized manner in films and tv shows. ² untranslatable; a type of warrior-priest. ³ english singer who was an important figure in the emergence of the gothic rock genre in the late 1970s.