People say that old games dont look as good as they remember
Its because they legitimately dont.
The “fuzz” from CRT monitors was something that was definitely accounted for and taken advantage of back in the day when it came to video games! While this effect is noticeable in 3D games, it’s MUCH more visible when it comes to 2D sprites:
Just look how much more depth these simple sprites of Princess Peach and Bowser from Super Mario RPG seem to have when seen through the “dots” of a CRT TV screen!
I somehow did not know this!?!?!?
One of the clearest examples of this is using the effect for transparent waterfalls in the MegaDrive Sonic games
My absolutely favourite example of this is with Dracula’s eyes in Castlevania
The art history version of “you’d look prettier if you smiled more”
you know what? fuck this *un-smiles your painting*
The reminds me of how you can tell “photos” of people generated by the various machine learning apps are fake because they make EVERYONE have huge American smiles, even cultures that 100% do not smile like that.
Cover art for the book “Nor Crystal Tears” by Alan Dean Foster.
Book is about first contact between humanity and an alien species, all from the point of view of the aliens, the mantid-like Thranx. Sort of a prequel to the Humanx Commonwealth series where years later Humans and Thranx have so intermingled culturally, economically, and socially to become an “Almagamated” people.
I had what turned out to be a dangerous walking pneumonia, for a week, but the manager at Burger King wouldn’t let me off. My breathing was very loud and ragged. I was coughing on and breathing on the food.
I wasn’t allowed to leave. I was told if i called out, I was fired.
So Im shuffling around wheezing loudly swaying with my high fever as I work drive thru by myself, and a paramedic walked in to order dinner.
He goes ballistic, My friends. He demands to see the Manager. he chews him out at the top of his lungs so the whole restaurant can here. Guys working the back came up to watch. Customers staring and thinking hard about the infectious food they were eating. Dude losing his shit about how infectious I was and all the people management had been endangering for days judging from my breathing and I needed to be home on antibiotics RIGHT NOW and the health Department was going to hear about this.
I went home. i got the week off. Didn’t even need a doctor’s note.
Getting friends management doesn’t know to do this WOULD WORK.
Same manager not letting me take my influenza home a year later despite repeated vomiting? Threw up in front of customers. Customers demanded money back and started threatening the manager with lawsuits.
I got to go home and got time off until I stopped vomitting.
GO AHEAD and THROW UP in front of Customers. THEY will Complain.
Don’t be shy.
They are supposed to let you stay home when you are sick. Stop protecting management. (Hiding how sick you are protects management). They are abusing you. Let them reap what they sow.
Y'all ever get so excited about a scientific paper you’re reading that you get chills???
So I thought to myself
Huh, a lot of our invasive species come from China and Japan
And then I thought, huh, I should look up what Kudzu is like in its natural habitat
And I found this article by a team of scientists investigating the history of Kudzu in China
And ohhhhh my goddddd. I’m vibrating with excitement over how cool this is.
The first bombshell that turned my brain inside out:
KUDZU IS NOT WILD. IT IS SEMI-DOMESTICATED.
In China, Kudzu has been a fundamentally important plant for food and textiles throughout history. We have Kudzu cloth that is 6,000 years old!
THIS PLANT CLOTHED AND FED ONE OF THE MOST POPULOUS AND MOST ENDURING HUMAN CULTURES ON EARTH
and in turn
HUMANS SHAPED AND SELECTED FOR ITS TRAITS
*AND*
in its natural range, humans are the main “predator” of kudzu
“Harvest by humans appears to be the major control mechanism in its native areas.”
Kudzu is like that because it co-evolved with humans.
WHAT
YALL
This means
That Kudzu is so highly invasive because—just like most plants evolved to be grazed by herbivores and/or eaten by caterpillars, keeping them in balance with everything else—Kudzu basically evolved to be harvested by humans
The other half of the ecological partnership that keeps Kudzu in balance with everything else isn’t a caterpillar or a hoofed beast. It’s us.
I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.
I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”
And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”
“Do you now.”
“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”
“Oh, and why’s that?”
“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”
“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”
Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.
I think this is very accurate. One time a tree fell on me in the forest and while it would have made more sense to simply jump to the side and avoid it my idiot brain went through the fight-or-flight options and apparently chose fight, so I reached out my hand and caught the tree, then dropped it on the ground beside me. Ended up fracturing my wrist and wondering why the fuck my brain thought that was the best option for survival. I don’t think people are good at really weighing the optimal choices in moments of crisis.
Bruce: “New Justice League policy. I am willing to pay for whatever damages you guys do in the name of justice and saving lives, but you have to write up a report detailing how the damage occured, including your thought process. Every once in a while, I will complie them into a presentation that we will go through as a whole to determine how you could have mitigated the collateral damage.”
Clark: “This is going to be a ‘name and shame’ type of thing, isn’t it?”
Bruce, lying through his teeth: “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. This is to improve ourselves.”
The ones who admit “I don’t know what happened here” get a pass on shaming but they still get the alternative suggestions list
And on nights when he really needs a break, Bruce pulls those presentations out, watches the video, and laughs his tits off.
Forget the edgy “batman contingency: here’s how I’d kill all my friends” that’s all over YouTube Shorts, THIS is the series I want to see!
