It’s been about 28 months since I left here, and I’ve learned a lot of stuff about "social media” and what I want to use the Web “for”.
On the “good news” side, I’ve been creating my own microblogging program called bopwiki. (AKA “bop”)
(It generates simple webpages in a ‘threaded’ format similar to mastodon or twitter, but is supposed to be an experiment in evolving their ‘microblog thread’ medium into a new medium that I hope is better for some uses, such as “informational” twitter threads you’re supposed to bookmark but are hard to even read in the twitter interface.)
On the “bad news” side, I don’t think I like “social media” in the form offered to us by corporations and don’t think I want to come back to any of it.
I think the fediverse is the bare minimum to make “social media” even worth using, and would rather be on the fediverse and/or experiment with bop.
(note that bop isn’t really supposed to be the ‘ultimate’ blogging tool to squash mastodon or anything; the way I use it, it basically replaces the Other blog I used to run off to the side of my tumblr(s) by running wordpress on my own server.)
Accordingly, I may be periodically “coming back” to finally dismantle these blogs and move everything I really find worth keeping to a bop blog or two (which will probably become public again). I feel like doing a proper “spring cleaning” of my posts and putting them into a more portable format is the best way to make sure I don’t lose them 10 years from now, if you imagine tumblr totally closing or something.
if you want to reach me,
message me on mastodon, or use another ‘non-social-media’ method if I happen to have given you one. I’m currently focusing on either trying to build local in-person connections or networks of people who actually want to create parallel structures that provide an alternative to corporate services.
a little metroid comic i made. gigideegee made an incredible metroid comic on twitter and it lit a fire in me to make my own so i did. the little doodle in zero mission always gets me. i like how we always get hints as to how good a person samus is and this is one of my faves.
ultraman hero designs really weird me out because they’re so featureless and yet oddly specific that I feel like in just a slightly different world we could be reading accounts of people coming back from general anaesthesia or driving their car along a road and seeing things out of the corner of their eye that aren’t little grey men or men in black with red lipstick but instead look exactly like this and i dunno like i know they're well intentioned and want to protect their planet but i don’t think i trust these people
going back and looking at stuff related to old japanese super/kaiju shows when you’re only familiar with megaman is strange because it’s like a big weird scavenger hunt you unwittingly stumbled into with no key anywhere where a bunch of design inspirations were silently and casually scattered across space and time by a mysterious group of pranksters purely to fuck with your personal perception of reality and every few minutes you’re like “wow, I found another one”
(that a bunch of fans had to reconstruct from 2 minute youtube clips of just a small fraction of the episodes when the original decades-long series was lost)
hey guys remember that part in ep 28 where like, everyone got a coffee break and everything was totally fine and everyone is great. good times! [hot shit button ref]
ok but like still
if dr light build mega man x some time after the events of mega man 10 why did he like
basically model it after who he considers to be his wonderful son and call it his greatest creation. bc thats basically like. replacing rock imo.
like assuming rock was still alive when x went into development why would dr light start to conceptualize a “new and improved” version of his son what happened to rock and roll and blues and like everyone else
When thinking about what decisions light makes I think you have to consider that out of all the ~88 boss robots (so a big portion of all the central ‘characters’ there are), an outrageous 82% of them were made by wily
(this will be long but bear with me to the end)
so basically you have light just hanging out doing a few good things and making a handful of smaller machines and abilities, a handful of robots,
while over in the corner there’s a giant factory operation cranking out an almost unimaginable number of boss robots, hazards, extra security robots like the copy rushes, penguins, sauropod, mecha dragon, et al., and almost certainly a gigantic piracy network of just robots stealing raw materials and bringing them back to make all these robots and fortresses and traps and everything
I always thought wily was just really stupid until now and unable to accomplish much, but now I really think about it, if the games were really trying to be coherent they’d give a little nod to the sheer volume of everything he’s able to produce and innovate in a short amount of time... or period.
At a certain point of him continuously building things and improving manufacturing technology I’d start to wonder if there were actually a measurable number of percentage points of the world GDP just going into items invented, built, or stolen by this one guy.
Meanwhile, it’s weird to think that if - as megaman 9/10 suggests - light is ‘freeing’/‘rehoming’ all the boss robots so they get a chance to be “good”, in a way it’s almost like half of what he provides to people as a supposed innovator in robotics is just nabbing all wily’s robots and then taking credit for them (which is ironic when supposedly the whole reason wily doesn’t like him and does evil things was something like ‘light took credit for some of the basic technologies for all the robots when wily was actually the inventor’?)
So I can only imagine if you’re light you’re just sitting there thinking,
hmm. this guy has had a massive impact on the world, not all of it even negative. if he wasn’t constantly committing crimes, people would almost like him better than me. I wish I had that much initiative. Maybe I’ll build an incredibly advanced thing he could never provide so people see how much he doesn’t have their best interests at heart and only makes these “innovations” for selfish purposes.
And from that angle you could in a way see the x series as light’s series while the classic series is wily’s series. It could be - maybe - that light’s dream was to see the robots fully self-actualise and fulfill their dreams while wily would’ve been content to crank out batch after batch of simple servants busy stealing massive quantities of metals and glass and stone and energy sources
It’s still a great question why, personally, he’d decide his super awesome new model of robot to bring massive positive change......... should just be called rockman/megaman again and look almost the same.
And I think that answer greatly depends on your interpretation of the classic robots’ level of technology.
Maybe he wasn’t hopeful rock would be able to have the same kind of intelligence as X, concerned even if upgrading became possible it might take a long time to get to that point, and it would be better for the time being to just start again with more modern technology and be sure it’s working first.
(I always for some reason think of the classic megaman robots as being like old space probes that are doing phenomenal things on horrifically outdated hardware for what they’re supposed to be doing... highly functional, but by the time the X era is starting, possibly as hard to directly update as a memory bank made out of manually sewn nickel threads.)
Then we also have the idea of light making X as a tribute in case rock breaks down and can’t be located, which is a little dumb, but does have some potential.
There's a possibility he actually felt really bad about not being able to be there for rock ‘past his unsupported date‘ and considered it one of his biggest failures ever, and that added to the reasons he had to make X absolutely amazing.
(I actually don’t like these kind of interpretations where light knew all the robots would break, not least because everything surrounding classic megaman is always like ‘no no the robots can be rebuilt as long as you have their mind circuit board.’ ‘no no no no the robots do not get thrown away and destroyed they’re fine. see look people need them and get worried when something is wrong with them’
another reason: ‘x is an upgrade, rock doesn’t matter’ breaks down so easily when there's almost nobody better suited to go weird places and retrieve broken allies than x.
especially if, as a competent computer programmer like me would think to do, the classic robots’ programs have all been dumped and backed up somewhere. if it were me I would make like 100+ copies of rock’s program - especially if it’s laughably small vs a reploid one, then just make a ridiculous number - and scatter them all over, hopefully in a way that's impossible to unlock if you aren’t x. ‘comparing many copies’ is basically the method used to reconstruct DNA/RNA genomes even though among all the cells in your body much less other individuals you’ll find a ton of mutations and omissions and broken strands etc, so I would have a lot of confidence in it)
Or maybe, the really weird possibility: light was perfectly ready for the proliferation of different people called mega man at some later date when technology spread out to the masses more and others showed up wanting to join his effort
(as you’d think a proper response to “wow light never invents anything he always just spends his time fighting wily” would be “hey light team, we love you and we want to help so you can spend more time inventing stuff”).
Maybe he had some remote thought there would just kind of be a whole team of megamans one day, so it’s not a bad thing to start now. (Which is such an interesting image when classic megaman and x both draw such heavy vibes and design cues from tokusatsu shows - ‘wow, we’re real power rangers now’)
It’s a little weird that although megaman protagonists generally feel more connected in this way than in, for instance, final fantasy, as far as I know most spinoff megaman continuities are all expressly like ‘no they are not actually part of a single team megaman, this is a new world’. Except for.... ZX, is it? that has the “megaman model ABC” convention where all the bosses are called megaman and a letter. I have not looked at that game closely
The most interesting thing I think everybody has to know, though, is that there was a megaman X game....... with an unused concept art for rock
Which says to me there is basically no reason at all he doesn’t exist in X other than ‘wait, he’s too important for a weird cameo, we need to think this through better‘
dr wily is a fool if quint had succeeded in destroying mega man quint wouldnt even exist and therefore wouldnt have destroyed megaman dr wily you could have created a terrible paradox you damn fool learn to think
better yet, if that neatly resolves and you just take megaman out of the future there would still be a protoman and ~50-100 other robots (!). so it’s not like light would even give up
maybe blues would just step up and do more, even as he has a weird reputation of ‘not being the hero’
but i think the most likely effect would be x getting made AND freed earlier which would basically disrupt everything and leave wily like ‘what the hell is all this’ because he didn’t get a chance to snoop on the process of it and make zero
you forget that blues (protoman) actually DOES have a grown-ass man voice in basically every japanese megaman thing with voices
and he's supposed to be a test of the technology used for rock (megaman)...
so if you think about it logically................ there might be a nonzero chance rock was also originally meant to sound like that. perhaps until light had to actually hear it?
blues: hello father. i am an ordinary nonthreatening 10 year old
dr. light: i have made a mistake.
what really gets me about cladograms is how MANY groups of extinct pseudosuchians there are
if they’re really dead set on not wanting the jurassic park monsters to look like dinosaurs like why didn’t they just make it 200 different weird walking crocodiles park
