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[weatheryear]

Dune

We are finally getting good, true adaptations of Dune.

Other than Zendaya destroying another red head.

But Dune was first published n 1965. With the Big Three, (Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke), Dune is the biggest progenitor of modern Science Fiction. It was so foundational that it would be difficult to list all the intellectual properties based off it, but J. Michael Straczynski explicitly stated that Babylon 5 was an idea to create a long-arc driven space epic, like Dune. Warhammer: 40K stole half of it's premise from Dune. Hayao Miyazaki cited Dune as inspiration for Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, and this was the Manga that turned him into the famed movie director we all admire.

It's roughly equivalent to the Lord of the Rings of Sci-Fi.

[weatheryear]

The Lie of Rosie the Riveter

Considered a cultural icon, and a symbol of Feminism, Rosie the Riveter was actually a propaganda campaign to get women to work in factories during WWII, as the men were off fighting in a war.

The actual model was a musician, and quit within a couple of weeks to marry rich.

The brassière was introduced, as the corset was impractical for factory work. Contrary to popular imagining, wearing a corset normally, as most women did, causes no health effects, other than maybe better posture. What people think of when they think of corsets is Tightlacing. We know about tightlacing because it was scandalous at the time. Before the corset, women wore a Bodice, which is basically a corset with less support. It required less material, and was not fitted, instead the support was provided with lacing.

This is also when women stopped wearing skirts. Because they are impractical - in a factory. Outside of factories, and going on long hikes, skirts and dresses are incredibly practical for everyday life. There's a reason women wore them for centuries, there's a reason ancient cultures wore tunics.

[weatheryear]

DOOM

Most people probably know DOOM from the memes. And of every video game in Human history, DOOM is perhaps the most worthy of this. It is one of THE video games that created the modern video game industry.

I don't mean contemporary video game industry. I mean having recognizable characters and stories in video games.

A step before DOOM was Wolfenstein 3D. Wolfenstein 3D was perhaps the first successful pseudo-3D game. The transition to 3D was not something that was done especially well until the PS3 era, (OoT-excluded), but Wolfenstein made you think it worked.

DOOM was made by the same company. It took everything Wolfenstein did, and ran with it. We didn't have a name for First Person Shooters, so we called them DOOM clones. DOOM was the game you brought to LAN parties. DOOM was a game that every - single gamer played.

Even further, DOOM was deterministic enough that you can learn to play it blindfolded. DOOM is light enough that you can play it by daisy chaining shoes with chips, it's light enough to play in coffee makers. This was helped by the fact DOOM was spread as shareware, (the rough equivalent would be free downloads).

Star Wars: Dark Forces was the first truly 3D game, and it wasn't until Half-Life that the FPS genre was crystallized. Until then, most people just called them DOOM clones.

[weatheryear]

Mario

In the early age of video games, you had to look at the box art if you wanted any clue as to what was actually happening. The problem was how to make a few pixels a recognizable character?

Well, you comically over-exaggerate their traits, of course. And this is why Mario is over the top. Of course, in the end, all he is, is a man wearing a red shirt and overalls, with a monogrammed hat.

Monograms were the sign of chic, and most people only had 2 or 3 sets of clothes. My father was raised with the tradition of dressing up to go to the doctor. He couldn't explain the tradition to me, but it makes a lot more sense when you have 1 set of clothes not covered in shit from hard work.

But we also need to focus on the great lie about Italians, that they are "White". People for most of Human history, didn't hate people because of the colour of their skin, but because of their ethnicity. Most people hated their neighbours, whom they likely warred against, often for centuries if not millennia.

The Italians who settled in the US and Britain were poor, and would often come over as low-skilled workers. They didn't share the same values, culture, or work ethic of the WASPs. And that is what mattered the most for discrimination. Italians were treated incredibly poorly, along with the Irish.

And in fact, a fat Italian plumber from Brooklyn was the least likely person to be the hero. We've had female heroes, in Ellen Ripley, and Wonder Woman. We've had black heroes, as their civil rights march was well publicized, and so people actively worked to help them.

Italians? Yeah, well, the main attitude was fuck them. Until Nintendo decided to make one their hero, and likely the first recognizable video game character, of all time.

Well, what about Princess Peach? Isn't it demeaning for a genuinely sweet woman to need to be rescued?

You say the princess because she's a princess. Yes, she is more valuable than you, (man), because she's a princess. This is an incredibly simple way to set up and emotionally wrought narrative. Because, again, early video games had near zero resources to work with. It's really hard to compare them, as it's 10,000 times weaker than an apple watch.

As for why the man should be the hero and not the woman?

Men have more muscles for their height, higher muscle density, higher bone density, higher volume of oxygen, higher lactic acid tolerance, higher stamina, they run faster, and have arms that are roughly twice as strong. They not only have more testosterone, but are at least twice as sensitive to it. Peach should not be a hero. Unless you go the Super Princess Peach route.

Addendum

A year after Nintendo created Mario, they created Samus Aran. The twist of the first Metroid was that Samus is a Girl. Which every - single - feminist commenting of video games has to ignore. Samus was likely the second recognizable video game character, ever, and remains a fan-favourite to this day.

Doesn't this contradict what I said about Peach?

Well, Samus is genetically engineered, and given super-advanced technology, including power armour. Dread actually animated a jump pack, to explain why she can jump so high.

[weatheryear]

The Internet Was Made BY Porn

In the before time, in the long-long ago, if we wanted to communicate with someone out of ear shot, you had to go to your kitchen, and pick up a handset connected to the wall. This telephonic device allowed you to transfer sounds to distant locations, replacing the earlier telegraph. We even mastered a system that didn't require you to dial it.

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Incidentally, this is where the term "Dial" and "Dial-up" comes from.

The US Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA, which would later add a D for Defence and become DARPA), wanted a communication system that could survive nuclear war.

The idea was you set up an interconnected system of computer networks (spoilers). They had a flexible routing system that would basically search every path to find the shortes, and then send information along this path. If a path was cut, (by nuclear explosion), then a number of other paths will be available.

Well, the academics that designed this thought this was fantastic, and started connected their own computer networks together. The universities started giving locals access to these networks. The original form of e-mail didn't think that anyone would lie about their e-mail, and every network was set to automatically repeat any messages along that needed to get sent. I mean, that was literally how the network worked. Why would someone spoof a system who's primary purpose is complex mathematical calculations?

Eventually something thought that this would be fantastic for civilians. Every civilian could connect to a university, and do complex mathematical calculations!

Civilians entered the field, and started building major trunklines, offering service to wider and wider areas.

Now, the biggest profits can be made with new markets. This is how Telsa and Amazon made so much money. Everyone wanted to be the first to make money on this Internets thing, (that s isn't cute, as the internet is a series of interconnected networkS; the s was later dropped colloquially). Incredible amounts of financing poured into the tech startups. How did they make their money?

And that's what lead to the Dot Com Bubble.

So, it turns out the two main ways to make money on the internet are using it to arrange physical commerce, which is how Amazon made it's money, and to sell discrete amounts of data.

Now, what kind of data are people most willing to spend money on? Sing it with me now!

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Movies? What about movies? It you wanted to spend 2 weeks of this.

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Okay, yeah, you only have the dial-up noise when dialling up, but you still lose use of your telephone. How did you handle someone trying to call you while you were online?

Sadly, the answer is pretty banal. There's a busy signal, and you hope they call back later.

Even loading a site with a dozen pictures would take an hour. And people waited. And people paid for the privilege.

[weatheryear]

Tales of Yesteryear

I realized many of you younglings were not there in the old times, in the long long ago.

So, I (Weatherman) have decided to share my wisdom.