i think if you showed minecraft or fortnite to a little medieval peasant boy he would probably start writing parodies of church hymns. it’s human nature
there seems to be a fundamental disagreement between microwave oven manufacturers and the producers of microwave meals over whether the customer should know the wattage of their microwave or if such details should be abstracted away from them
the microwave rice demands 800 watts of power for 2 minutes, but all the microwave can offer me three settings: one low, one high, and one somewhere in the middle. I turn it to the one in the middle as I happen to know 800W is the average power of most microwaves. the light comes on and the bag of rice starts slowly turning, but rather than hearing the usual rumble of the microwave, I instead start hearing short snippets of conversation - words snatched from the ether. the lights flicker and a chill runs up my spine. the voices remind me of those "spirit boxes" ghost hunters use. I double check the setting on the microwave. "ah," I say, remembering that I had set it to medium,
"Mario Mario" is an anachronism. He and his brother were only ever referred to by mononyms in their lifetime, like most residents of the Mushroom Kingdom at the time - multi-part names were typically reserved for members of the Toadstool dynasty, and even these were more like titles or Roman cognomina than what we would call a surname today. His putative ennoblement as founder of the "House of Mario" came centuries later as the collapsing feudal order sought additional sources of legitimacy
#mushroom kingdom folklore says that he sleeps beneath a warp pipe to arise in the time of the kingdom's greatest need #he's definitely shown up a few times but it's hard to tell if he has risen from the dead or is just in the middle of some time travel shit #historians hate him.
While the historical evidence for Mario having a younger brother is quite concrete, the name of said brother is less certain. "Luigi" is generally held to originate with a separate figure from a series of chthonic myths, who originally served as a sort of psychopomp charged with capturing spirits that escaped the underworld. The strongest case for a contemporary figure named Luigi comes from the Waffle Kingdom sagas; however, this Luigi's brother is a gladiator named Gonzales.
now I know that there's no way for me to respond to this without a bunch of fans of the modern adaptations ruining my inbox for the next week, but there's no evidence of Waluigi - or indeed Luigi - in any of the contemporary versions of the Mario-Wario sagas. The name "Wario" itself is a later invention, held to be a pun on warui that likely emerged after the adoption of Japanese scripts in the Koopa States.
The conflict between Mario and his "boyhood rival" was one over political influence on his home island and Mario's long absences - in particular his trip to Sarasaland. While later Sarasan sources would heavily reference Mario's brother, he is absent from both the preceding narrative and the unrest in Mario's homeland. The historical consensus is that the Sarasaland journey was one of Mario's earliest wanderings, with his brother attempting to manage affairs in his absence and proving unfit. The invention of a separate "Wario" character and its development into an explicit coup d'etat were later poetic creations, as is distancing of the "Wario" figure from the later depictions of Mario's brother as the more cowardly and reserved "Luigi".
(As an aside: "Mario Land" is a mistranslation. The original Mushroomer and Sarasan chronicles are better translated as "the land of Mario", without connotations of ownership. The modern scholastic consensus is that it refers to Yoshi's Island, where Mario and his brother spent their youth and later established a small manor, not, as commonly depicted, a "Mario Castle". The emphasis on Mario as king of "Mario Land" was a mostly successful political maneuver by the Yoshis to retain coequal status with the Mushroom Kingdom heartlands in the face of 18th-century expansionist pan-Mushroomism.)
The later emergence of "Waluigi" is an ironic recombination of two figures from the same historical source, and may have originated as a farce parodying the Mario stories. (The name "Waluigi" is also conflated with the early Norman figure Varr Yngwi, who is generally credited with the invention of tennis.)
Character has a PhD: they’re really smart and knowledgable about their field!
Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.
Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both
Character has 4+ PhDs: if they aren’t an undercover vampire or something then no they don’t lol
Alternatively: this character is some kind of rock star celebrity in their field and has a bunch of honorary degrees from several different institutions, and also this story takes place before most universities adopted a separate postnominal for honorary doctorates specifically to avoid this sort of confusion.
[Image Description: A drawing of the Discworld, depicting the four elephants stacked on top of one another rather than in a circle. End Image Description.]
playing a game where i put my entire music library on shuffle and see how long it takes to name 25 songs correctly. if you guess and fuck up you just skip to the next one but if you can't even guess you get a 3 second penalty. my current best time is 7:01 bc i keep getting songs with fucked up long intros and i encourage you to try to beat me
yours is definitely worse than mine lol. the issue i'm having is a lot of mine aren't in english so i don't actually know the titles because i can't read cyrillic or japanese lol. there is also a significant amount of library music and film scores, and getting 4 or 5 of those is a death sentence for the run
Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.
Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.
Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.
"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you
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i think this captures the defining pathology of the collective social media psyche right now. we are in the thrall of people who are wantonly cruel but who also demand to be coddled at all times in every way
a character being a perpetrator does not negate their victimhood and neither does their victimhood negate being a perpetrator. u can accept and reckon w both dimensions in ur analysis
the replacement of websites with apps sounds so backwards when you actually describe it. like hmm you have to download an entire program onto your device each time you want access to a portal, where it takes up storage indefinitely. somebody should invent an app where you can "browse" any portal just by typing in its address... 🥴
snowghoul
kianamaiart
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
gracieabrams
