#hacker files

[sebeth]

DC's Lesser Known Series

[orange-s-mario]

also all of these 80s comics have ads

now I want to read the weird and hacker files

among others

[toomanywatchers]

people: skipping the sponsored ads in mystery files’ episodes

the intellectuals: trying to pinpoint the professor morris ashley lore

[notwhelmedyet]

bg3 dialogue - wyll moments i'm saving for reference

(a classic Witcher moment, nice confirmation that monster hunting has set him against people as well as creatures)

(shadowheart, I don't think that's how it works. i don't think that's how anything works)

(just out here volunteering to nanny for werewolf babies. fascinating man. i think you flunked monster hunter school, wyll)

(baby wyll was scared of ghosts 😭 )

(OH. so that's where the "shadowheart & wyll: monster erotica fans" headcanon comes from)

[brekitten]

The Therapist

There's a new therapist at school.

Normally this wouldn't really bother Peter at all, since he's never gone to see a shrink in his life and doesn't ever plan on it, but there's something... off about this woman.

She seems unassuming enough at first glance. Red hair, green eyes, bright red lipstick. But there is something in her eyes, something that Peter can only describe as a predator looking at its next prey, when she looks around the school at all of the teenagers milling about. Heck, even the way she walks makes her seem as if she is a predator stalking her prey.

It could always be some kind of power move, Peter reasons. He's met people like that before, who try to intimidate everyone around them into thinking that they are superior, that they are the apex predator and anyone who dares to cross them would pay for it dearly.

But his Spidey Sense went crazy around her.

He tries to brush it off as paranoia. He'd pulled an all-nighter last night in the lab with Tony because neither of them had been able to sleep, and he hadn't been sleeping well even before that. (Funny, how it had all started the night after he first bumped into the new therapist in the halls.) So his Spidey Sense is probably out of wack because he's tired. Simple as that.

But it seems like everyone in the school is depressed. Even Ned, who can't even muster up the energy and enthusiasm to talk about Legos or Star Wars or even the weather. It worries Peter.

Because it all started when that therapist came to the school.

He can't ignore it forever, he knows that. There is only so long his Spidey Sense can tell him that she is danger danger danger before he finally listens. He has to do something to help everyone.

So he researches.

And he falls into the rabbit hole of ghosts and ectoplasm and secret government organizations and the little, unassuming town of Amity Park, Illinois.

He doesn't sleep that night.

When he comes to school the next morning, Dr. Penelope Spectra looks him dead in the eyes, and smiles.

[lifewithaview]

Gillian Anderson and Kristin Lehman in The X-Files (1993) Kill Switch

S5E11

Mulder and Scully's investigation into a mass shooting in a coffee shop leads them to believe that the targets were not the low level drug dealers and wholesalers who were killed but rather Donald Geldman who had been sitting at a table working on his laptop computer. The Lone Gunmen tell Mulder and Scully that Geldman was one of the original computer geniuses who disappeared years before. His laptop leads the agents to a hacker, Esther Nairn, who goes by the name Invisigoth. She tells them of a vast government conspiracy involving artificial intelligence that allows them to see everything and take action against all enemies.

*Gillian Anderson's fight scene with the nurses is one of the actress' favorite scenes in the series.

[all-rock-and-roll-is-homosexual]

>SYSTEM ERROR: a spotify playlist

>System Error is the soundtrack to a fictional 90s Hacker film

(although I cheated with the Curve track as it's from the early 00s)

Dissolved Girl - Massive Attack

Faith Healer - Recoil

The Day The World Went Away - Nine Inch Nails

Chainmail - Curve

Tesko Suicide - Sneaker Pimps

Charlie Big Potato - Skunk Anansie

Battle Flag - Lo Fidelity Allstars

Crazier - Gary Numan

Crackhead - Suede

Breathe - The Prodigy

Block Rockin' Beats - the Chemical Brothers

The Devil Does Drugs - My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

Lecher Bitch - Genitorturers

Juke Joint Jezebel - KMFDM

Sins Of The Flesh - Sister Machine Gun

Installation No. 1 - Einstürzende Neubauten

Wake Up, Time to Die - Pop Will Eat Itself

[sspacegodd]

[au-mashup-party]

If Hacker cries…you know something bad is going to occur..

Hacker (now owned) and everyone else by me

Blithe by me and @nova2cosmos

[team-hot-wheels-imaginators]

There are two members of Team Hot Wheels who share a love for gaming.

In fact, it is that love for gaming that has allowed the two to start getting along, as before this discovery, the two kids weren't exactly eager to start talking with one another one-on-one.

Recently thought, they've started making arrangements to hang out and play their favorite games together on their own time.

You probably wouldn't be able to guess who on the first try...

Yep, it's them.

[arolesbianism]

So I may or may not have spent a good chunk of my day trying to learn how to look into onis code and while I may not have yet succeeded I will likely keep fucking around with shit tomorrow and if I manage to succeed it'll spell great doom for my sanity as oni becomes the interest I've officially poured the most effort into analyzing

[weareatwar]

The Hacker's War's

[skylinx2o]

I was about to buy some games, since there's a spring sale, but then I remembered that around a year ago I promised myself to never buy a game if I can get it for free, and so I didn't. We don't buy games here, we pirate them like real men (or wait till it's free, because free is a fair price).

[leakinglungs]

rip to my 2015 webcam u will be missed </3

[popculturegenealogy]

Family history, records, and Carmen's journey of self-discovery

From the last episode of season 2 of Carmen Sandiego.

This post, a bit like the bast one, which focused on Futurama, looks at the second season of the new animated show, Carmen Sandiego. [1] As a warning, for those that have not watched the episodes of the new season, or perhaps even the first season, this post discusses spoilers from the show itself, just to give you a heads up. The show is set, clearly, in our existing world, not in some magical world. Without further ado, let's dive in and discuss the interwoven threads of records and family history.

Reprinted from my Genealogy in Popular Culture WordPress blog. Originally published on July 28, 2020.

In the show's first season, we were introduced to Carmen Sandiego, the code-name of a 20-some Latina woman, an international master thief who stole from thieves, especially in that season's first two episodes. Despite the fact that we as the audience knew that she had previously been a part of V.I.L.E. (Villains International League of Evil), her background was relatively obscure. She had been born in Argentina presumably and only had a set of "matryoshka dolls" as her possessions, with the story that she was found by the roadside near Buenos Aires. Perhaps purposely, what is revealed about her past is piecemeal, contrasting from shows like Futurama where family trees, although non-traditional, end up being somewhat central. Carmen, who also goes by the names of "Red," "Black Sheep," "The Lady in Red," "Fedora the Explorer," "The World's Greatest Thief," "The Miss of Misdemeanor," "La Femme Rouge," and "The Crimson Shadow," among others, has no memory of her parents and grew up on V.I.L.E. Island, which is somewhere in the Canary Islands.

While her narrative in this show differs from those in previous iterations, you may think that perhaps she had Russian ancestry. As it turns out, some Russian Argentines immigrated in a sizable number from 1901-1920 if my translation (via Google Translate) of this publication is right. There were also specific colonies of Russian-German immigrants who settled in Argentina starting in the 1890s in agricultural areas. There's also 10,000 inhabitants in Choele Choel, including Russian Orthodox immigrants, sometimes called the "White Russians," who came from Russia itself. Others have noted that there were five immigration waves from Russia to Argentina since the end of the 19th century. Presently, hundreds of thousands with some people of Russian descent living in Argentina. On the other hand, the dolls themselves are deceiving as they may not indicate ancestry at all!

The latter brings us to the most recent season. Like the first season, there isn't much focus on her family roots at first. Carmen is at a bit a dead end. Shadowsan, who rescued her from Argentina, whom has Japanese heritage, says he doesn't know much about the mission, with little he can tell her. She accepts this for the time being and makes an interesting remark at the end of the third episode of the season, "The Daisho Caper":

Of course, discovering herself and her identity are important themes of the season. Even stronger is the continual use of records. Carmen's hacker friend, "Player," breaks into V.I.L.E. hard drives from his home computer to figure out what capers the evil organization is plotting and how Carmen can stop them. Apart from that, in the last episode of the season, "The Deep Water Caper," which ends the show not only on a cliffhanger but with a big bang, Carmen specifically references records and finding out the truth about her family. This is NOT the way to manage your records, people, seriously. Blowing up your headquarters and having it sink into the water is not a way to erase records. I mean, they didn't even do a good job, because she still found the files.

And because of that, this episode is perhaps my favorite of the whole season. Unfortunately, we don't see the server room since the V.I.L.E. faculty literally destroyed the whole academy, but she swims through the water and retrieves the necessary records. From this, she is able to learn more about her past and finds the case files. It shows that her nemesis, Coach Brunt was right when she taunted Carmen in the previous episode about Shadowsan: he was on a mission to Argentina to kill a man named "Dexter Wolff," obviously a code name. But other than the fact that Wolff was V.I.L.E. faculty, it doesn't say much more. She then decides to confront Shadowsan, presumably in their new headquarters in San Diego at the former "Carmen Outer Wear" company building. Telling him that she won't let him escape, he says he is not going to run and will tell her everything. So much for following Carmen's instructions when she, during the "Daisho Caper" (and in some of the prior episodes) to have no more secrets. He claims he didn't tell her the truth for his own protection.

The fact that Shadowsan, the creator of the record Carmen found, did NOT tell the full truth in the record itself, relates to a lot of archival themes. For instance, you could say that Shadowsan's report is a primary source, but since he left out certain content is almost an archival silence or "gaps or missing pieces in the historical record" to quote from the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy. As such, he is engaging in a form of bias, as he is engaging in a "prejudice in favor of one thing or person over another," specifically in favor of Carmen. Furthermore, records themselves can "easily become lost, distorted, or orphaned" as archivist Samantha Thompson points out. There have often been distortions and omissions in records, like those in Early Modern Europe, records left by the so-called "Founding Fathers" of the U.S., or within family archives, meaning that in this sense, Shadowsan's action not unique. Due to the omissions from the report, Carmen was right to challenge its accuracy, as the latter means, in an archival context, "the degree to which data, information, documents or records are precise, correct, truthful, free of error or distortion, or pertinent to the matter." It actually reminds me of those 1990s Hollywood films I reviewed a while back which often had themes about records erasure.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Shadowsan says he went to Argentina to track down Wolff and followed him to a villa outside Buenos Aires where he found Carmen, complicating his plan to kill him. As he was about to carry out his dirty deed, another group of law enforcement, presumably INTERPOL (explaining how she can connect with Devineaux and Julia so easily) approached, ready to take him down. As he tried to escape, a young Black female agent named Tamara Fraser shot him down (maybe she thought he was pulling out a gun?). She later used this leverage to form a special investigative unit, A.C.M.E., implied to be part of INTERPOL. This means that the 'Chief' killed her father. No wonder she feels no compunction in hacking A.C.M.E., tricking the Chief by giving her a phony V.I.L.E. hard drive. Within, Player finds the file which gives the real name of the Chief (Tamara Fraser) and shows her taking responsibility for the act. Interestingly, the presence of Shadowsan and Carmen there is not recorded, so A.C.M.E. has no idea she is the son of a person their Chief killed! The episode goes on for Carmen to unearth the casket of the person who owned the house, a woman "Vera Cruz," which turns out to be a decoy, allowing her to vanish "without a trace." As such, Carmen doesn't know the name of her mother, although she holds out hope, as the episode closes, that she is out there and she will find her someday, saying: "everyone leaves a trace. Somewhere out there I have a mother who may or may not know I am alive" with Shadowsan with her until the "end of the line," declaring "then let's find her." On a related note, as viewers, we learn, through deduction, from the fake coffin that the coffin was planted in 1999, and this show having been set in the present day, that Carmen is at least 20 years old, if not older.

In the meantime, A.C.M.E., due to the hack, re-activates pompous fool and chauvinist Chase Devineaux. Of course, they had been trying to track Carmen and catch her in order to learn more about V.I.L.E., but it had been pushed by Julia, the former partner of Chase at INTERPOL, that they try to recruit Carmen. All goes well except in the process Carmen is hurt badly after escaping A.C.M.E.'s clutches in the Stockholm Caper episode. After learning this horrible truth about the Chief, it seems abundantly clear Carmen isn't going to trust them again. Why would you trust a person who killed your own father? So, I expect some sort of showdown between Carmen and A.C.M.E. or just Carmen and the Chief in the next season, if I may make a prediction.

With all being said, what can we say about the show and its themes of records and family history? Clearly, this season was much stronger in the latter theme, as the former has been a staple throughout the show itself, along with a continued focus on the use of records to halt the actions of evildoers. There is also a strong emphasis on discovering who you are, which is also present in shows like Steven Universe and Revolutionary Girl Utena, both of which I have reviewed on this blog in one way or another. It also makes me think of the 1990s show, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? where some parts of her family life are revealed at the end of the show's run. While I hold out hope that Carmen will go to a library or archives in the future, even if she does not, the show still has staying power and shows that you should pursue a focus on your family roots. That seems evident in the upcoming season.

© 2020-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] When I originally posted this in October 2019, it fulfilled a promise I made back in June to write about the show. I also talked about it back when I had my DNAChat, you know the Twitter discussion I did back in late June. If you need a refresher, I recommend you check out "Last two days of #DNAChat," "DNAChat Questions," "#DNAChat Day 5," "#DNAChat Day 4," "#DNAChat Day 3," "#DNAChat Day 2," "#DNAChat Day 1," and "Tweets introducing #DNAChat." As I pondered what to do next, although I'm not completely convinced I want to do a chat on Carmen Sandiego, DNA, "Resistance Genealogy," racial justice, or archives/libraries topics, although I may change my mind in the future. During the chat, I even asked a question on one of the days, although getting her age wrong, saying that Carmen knows little about her past, and asked participants if DNA test would help her and what they would recommend she do.