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Cake day: June 28th, 2022

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  • Ok first of all an octopus and a squid are in different orders, (octopus all being in octopoda and squid being actually 2 separate orders now (huh TIL) called oegopsida and myopsida) - this is like calling a human a cat (humans are order primates, cats are order carnivora).

    That’s before we even get onto the 14 “legs”. Legs! Seriously Express, could your staff not even look on wikipedia for five minutes? The limbs of cephalopods are called ‘arms’, with the 2 specialized limbs with club ends that squid have being tentacles, none of them have ‘legs’ of any kind, and squid by definition have 10 limbs (yes I know, the vampire squid from hell only has 8 arms, no tentacles but… well they aren’t really squid so they don’t count).

    Such shoddy, shoddy journalism. What’s that? Mind control rays? Perfectly reasonable. Putin told me himself on the joint Wumao-Russiabot conference call last week.






  • I’m something of a breakcore fan myself, I can’t say there aren’t individualists amongst the fans or artists, of course, but it’s like more genres in that regard. (Also depends on what you mean by breakcore I think cause there’s quite the dispute between oldschool breakcore fans - stuff like Venetian Snares, Alec Empire’s “The Destroyer”, etc. - and new music being labelled ‘breakcore’ but which is mostly kinda shitty drum’n’bass with creepy anime cover art).


  • Christian Contemporary - in whatever flavour. I don’t have much fondness for the church as it is and they manage to make something that’s even worse than Christian Rock which, to quote Comrade Hill: “You’re not making Christianity better you’re just making rock and roll worse.”

    Oh… maybe Martial Industrial or Neo-folk. Both of which are fucking teeming with fascists, or “apoliteic” bands. Pretty much everyone you look at in either genre is gonna be quoting Ernst Jünger and Julius Evola, amongst other more obscure fascist or fascist-adjacent ideologues. They have this romantic notion of ‘Europa’, free from the decadence of liberal democracy and multiculturalism - they’re unironic ‘RETVRN’ types.










  • I’ve seen all 10 films many times (no Abrams, your trash doesn’t count) and I really don’t remember an alien supercomputer saying any such thing. Or even being in any of those films. The closest thing would be V’Ger in TMP, which ‘scans’ (and thus kills) the Deltan navigator, Lt. Ilia and recreates her in the form of a computer probe with her memories to interact with the crew. While the crew do hit on the idea of using the probe’s memories of the dead Ilia’s romantic feelings for Captain Decker against her (it?) and that is really horrible in hindsight knowing what we now know about Decker’s actor…

    As for the cold war thing, yeah the Klingons were explicitly meant to be a standin for the USSR, and of course, an American tv show of that era is gonna present a biased perspective, tbh I feel they did a better job than many others would have at presenting even the possibility of peace between the two. Worth mentioning one can extend the cold war metaphor to include others - the Romulans being the PRC (sneaky, authoritarian, collective-minded aliens with yellow skin even! Plus baseless accusations from one character in Balance of Terror that they ‘stole’ Federation technology to make their ships even though they clearly have advanced technology the Federation doesn’t have like the cloaking device and the plasma torpedo). If we accept the Romulans as being the Chinese to the Klingon USSR and Federation as NATO, one could posit the Vulcans as kinda like Taiwan/ROC/KMT? I’m not so sure on that one but the argument could be made.

    I think one has to consider the material circumstances in which the shows were made. TOS was made in the 60s at the height of the cold war, TNG was made in the 80s/90s and reflects prejudices of that era (the showrunner once Gene died, Rick Berman, infamously vetoing ANY LGBT representation at all - going so far as to interfere with DS9’s plans for Garak/Bashir, a show he wasn’t running). I think it’s about as good as one can expect given the environment in which it was made. Especially compared to modern Trek having people living in poverty and drug addiction on Earth of all places, and even having an “Elon Musk high school” or something mentioned in one episode.