since people have been asking why I’m not really posting these days: I have more followers now than there are people who live in my town, most of whom very clearly followed me because of (or at least right after) some posts that I dislike and regret, so I’m Really Entirely Uncomfortable With All Of That.
every day im haunted by the fact that despite the fact that pokemon is by some metrics the largest media franchise of all time, not one single solitary human being has uploaded an hd version of Pokémon 2000: The Power Of One (Music From And Inspired By The Motion Picture) to the internet and therefore I can’t listen to Weird Al Yankovic’s masterpiece “Polkamon” in the quality it deserves
BTW, just to make sure everyone knows, this isn’t just some internet rando commenting on her observations on the internet.
They are an Assistant Professor of Media Industries at New York University and literally just finished writing The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, a book on the history of the computer industry in the 70s.
This tweet isn’t just an observation, it’s the result of years of research and study. And it’s absolutely true.
The thing with the writers strike and actors strike is that. You ALL have to start realizing that the cool creative jobs they paint as “glamorous” in the media are actually ALL struggling in a big way, and basically everyone below “Huge Household Name” is actually often having to spend THEIR OWN DAY JOB MONEY to keep trying and trying to “break into” that household name status.
Like, im a cartoonist. Just starting out, but already fairly successful! My comics are sold in a handful of states, i sell out of my works, and i even have been featured as a finalist in a couple awards shows AND have pieces bought by a cartooning museum. I still barely make a couple hundred per month off it IF IM LUCKY, and spend almost as much trying to print more. Oh yes, i have to print my own comics! And working for a big comic company, they generally require you to bring some level of your own equipment. Heck, even if you make it “big” as a cartoonist…you wanna know how much you get paid if your comic that you spent months of back-breaking labor on is adapted into a marvel movie? A one-time check for $5000. Out of the BILLIONS those movies make, in perpetuity for eternity, you are given $5k. Pre-tax. Pre-agent. Pre-lawyer. (Yes we have agents and lawyers too, quite often). There’s hardly any cartoonists who can afford to quit their day jobs, and even those who do are never living above the lower middle class range.
Now obviously cartooning is not the same as acting or writing, but my point is that we NEED yall to stop thinking just because you see our work as cool that we are living some dream life!!! Basically the only people who are living these dream lives you think of are CEOs of major companies and the occasional celebrity. The rest of us are just out here, struggling to survive just like you, we just happen to have a side hustle which is Kinda Cool.
All the arts. Writing, music, movies, dance, theater, design, all of them are important. We assume people with “real talent” will be able to make a living at them but even the super talented people can’t, and a lot of people who might be super talented never get to try because they have to do something else to keep a roof over their heads.
this is completely true. when i went to school to learn animation, the teachers there (who all worked at the now-shuttered fox animation studios) basically said don’t expect to get paid a lot. you’ll be the cool parent with the cool job, but you’ll never be Really Rich, and that sure is the gd case, ain’t it.
“I love endless corridors, I love doors that lead where they shouldn’t and stairways to nowhere, I love rooms whose dimensions don’t add up and angles that don’t make sense” bro, that’s not cosmic horror, it’s just Brutalism.
it really isnt fair to Endless Ocean Blue World to never grace the light of day again. Endless Ocean could do so much on these consoles. I miss them. Where else would I have a video game about being a diver where the plot included dracula vampires, sort-of-atlantis, forgotten amazonian submerged jungle ruins, aliens, and dragons
someone else knows this game?! I was just thinking yesterday how much I missed this game. Though. I must confess I don’t recall the vampires or aliens.
You salvage up UFO parts and the Valka Castle portion is extremely heavily implied to be Vlad Dracula’s castle and the spooky black manta ray you find in the throne room after you escape the megalodon god of death is named Phantom
I know I usually talk about crocs, but this is too good not to share. A new giant basilosaurid whale with weird anatomy from the Eocene of Peru. Perucetus colossus is a peculiar animal. It’s bones were incredibly thick and incredibly dense, very much unlike those of modern whales and even more extreme than even those of the thicker basilosaurids (aptly named Pachycetinae i.e. thick whales). These adaptations have been compared to modern manatees and dugongs. Know the weight range is highly dependent on what you base the math on. Using manatees as a proxy, you get a weight of “only” 85 tons….using extreme values for whales a whopping 340 tons. Mean values for whales a still really big 180 tons. This could indicate that Perucetus rivaled the Blue Whale as the worlds heaviest animal ever.
The ecology is poorly understood tho. We know basilosaurids preferred coastal waters, and with all the similarities to manatees it is reasonable to assume that Perucetus was a shallow water animal itself. It also likely wasn’t the fastest swimmer. And the lack of a skull basically means we can’t say much on its diet. We can wager a guess and say it wasn’t a predator because, you know….it also likely wasn’t a grazer. Cool as it would be, we don’t really have herbivorous whales like that so its incredibly unlikely. The two more likely suggestions are that it lived on small animals burried in the ocean floor, sorta like a grey whale. Or that it was a scavenger like a sleeper shark (tho I find that suggestion far less likely, giving me scavenging T.rex vibes ngl). But again, once we get a skull we can talk about this better.
Sidenote I do find the name a little underwhelming. It’s a bizarre animal and the best we could come up with is “Colossal whale from Peru”. I’m also not a mammal person, but from what I’m being told the silhouette is a little exaggerated and it wasn’t necessarily that thick in life.
