englishlaboratory

[englishlaboratory]

[englishlaboratory]

And here we find a rare instance of a Humans Are Space Orcs post from Tiktok that isn't an AI voice reading a reddit post over a minecraft video.

[englishlaboratory]

Happy 9th anniversary Undertale

Read the poem and couldnt not do a little something about it !

[englishlaboratory]

[englishlaboratory]

I'm glad that people are still having fun on tumblr even after we found out about the frightening ghoul that reblogs posts but doesn't say anything

[englishlaboratory]

[englishlaboratory]

I just love the posts people put up for the mutuals. It’s totally like—‘oop, time to refill the tumblr bird feeder! I wonder what will be attracted today? Oh look! A red crested naval mutual. Oh yes, I wondered if the Star Wars warbler would show up. A bit early to see the stabby beaked Caesar but they’re keen aren’t they?’

[englishlaboratory]

chosen one not as in the one the prophecy foretold but as in lamb to the slaughter. as in the only person both brave and foolish enough to do it. chosen one as in sculpted, molded to be the perfect sacrifice to something expertly, divinely crafted to annihilate you wholly and surely. chosen one as in taken away. chosen one as in death sentence. chosen one as in goodbye

[englishlaboratory]

"you are a tar pit" changed me. like sometimes people are inescapably and self-feedingly miserable and angry and bad-faith and i never really had the language to call that out or talk about it before that one post. so thank you to the original tar pit for changing my world, wherever y. hey wait it shoupdnt be spelled like that. there should be two e's

[englishlaboratory]

[englishlaboratory]

Still can't get over the fact that Toby Fox dreamed up a game ending, but he decided he wanted to make something a little less ambitious first, so instead he made the most influential indie game of all time

[englishlaboratory]

still mad about smart TVs. that shit should be in a separate box like you can literally buy one of them androidtv boxes for £30. it doesn't need its own ip address it doesn't need its own app store it doesn't need to replicate the functionality every device plugged into it already has

[englishlaboratory]

Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here

[englishlaboratory]

If the gore in a gore/body horror movie is mainly cg then what’s even the point

[englishlaboratory]

So the airbase has a commander whose name is Sergeant. His rank is Lieutenant Colonel and his office is, of course, private.

[englishlaboratory]

something I’ve seen in various fandoms now is young artists will draw flip phones with cracked screens. But in my experience, I have never met someone whose flip phone had a screen crack. Those screens were more like something on a calculator or a nintendo ds than like a smartphone. I was a klutz, and my first phone broke because the front half and back half came apart. Like you’d mayyyyybe see it on some of the later flip phones that only had large screens on the front because smartphones had already made them popular, but it was still way more rare.

If you wanna give a character a flip phone and show they’re clumsy, they’re more likely to have the paint scratched like hell or parts of the plastic chipped off. No more phone charms because the plastic loop broke. If the screen is broken, it would sooner not turn on anymore before the screen would have a crack in it.

[englishlaboratory]

Where Star Wars went wrong

Quoting Jason Pargin, who articulates it better than I could:

"In any kind of a sane world, The Mandalorian should have run for 150 episodes at least. They had a formula here that could have worked forever.

"It's a formula that has always worked: a heroic stranger wanders into a strange new land and meets a bunch of colorful characters, usually under the thumb of a powerful threat. The threat is usually in the form of a villain who's played by a famous actor just chewing the scenery. He uses hits wits and his courage to get out of it and then he moves on.

"Have Gun, Will Travel" ran for 225 episodes from 1957-1963. It's where Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame got his start.

"The sci-fi space adventures we had years and years ago used to run forever. Star Trek TNG had about 180 episodes, Deep Space 9 had about the same number, even Voyager -- the show that we think of as being a "lesser series" -- had 172 episodes. And here's the thing: most of those episodes were really good!

"But because of the way the business works now, and because of 'corporate synergy,' by season 2 of the Mandalorian, they were brainstorming "how do we get this back to Luke Skywalker and the Death Star?"

"By season 3, fans were lost, because some huge plot events had occurred in a completely different series, because they needed it to connect to their Boba Fett show. And now, the Mandalorian is dead. They're gonna wrap up the story in a movie, and that's it.

And the crazy part is, this was always the perfect format for Star Wars: it always should have been a short form serial! That's what George Lucas was ripping off when he made the film back in 1977: serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

These were little 12-minute long episodes that played as one continuing story, but each one was its own little lighthearted adventure that usually ended on some kind of a cliffhanger.

"This is why so many of the most hardcore Star Wars fans who are old like me only like two of the movies, because by the third film they were already just repeating beats: they were attacking yet another Death Star.

They ran out of ideas so fast, because this is not the ideal format for this universe. The Mando and Baby Yoda Show is the ideal format! This should have run for the next 20 years! They even set it up so that the star wouldn't even need to be on set for most of it, because he wears a helmet!

"I think some fans object to this, because they think of it as making Star Wars smaller, that you're reducing it to 'just a TV show.' But it's the exact opposite: it lets you expand the universe, because you're forced to to keep coming up with new places for him to go, and new people for him to meet, new villains for him to face -- you're not forced to just keep coming back to the Death Star again and again, and the Sith, and the Jedi.

In Episode VII: The Force Awakens, the Starkiller Base destroys five planets. That's mathematically five times more tragic than the destruction of Alderaan.

"And if you want evidence, just look at Star Trek! It's the show that expanded the universe. The Star Trek films were just action movies that are very forgettable. But I guess the world has changed, because they don't even do Star Trek that way anymore.

Picard ended its run after 30 episodes. Discovery concluded after 65. Hopefully, Strange New Worlds marks a return to form for the franchise.

"I don't get it, because it seems like a version of this show that runs until the year 2040 would have just printed money. The merchandise sales alone would have covered the production costs. Instead, it's 24 episodes and a movie that I think everyone has already stopped caring about."