this is the bonfire post. Everything before and after this strays from the bonfire. Stay awhile for a place of respite, and reblog to become a firekeeper
One thing I still don’t like that the Insomniac Spider-Man games and then the MCU did was make Jameson into a character who was inspired by Alex Jones. When Miles finds out that Peter has their suits automatically listen in on JJJ’s podcasts, Miles jokes that Peter’s a masochist, but that’s missing the point! Peter hates JJJ’s vendetta against Spider-Man but respects the guy himself because even when JJJ’s an asshole, Peter legitimately likes the guy somehow.
The best rendition of him is still in the Tobey Maguire movies where Green Goblin has him by the throat and demands to find out who takes pictures of Spider-Man with Peter right there, but JJJ lies to Goblin’s face that the photos come in the mail because he protects his staff.
They need to invent more fake celebrities like Hatsune Miku and Gorillaz and the Muppets because it’s genuinely the most sustainable way to maintain a parasocial relationship with the entertainer class.
Kermit the Frog can never get canceled because Kermit the Frog has no agency or personhood beyond what he is imbued with by the collective labor of puppeteers, voice actors, singers, and writers. He is, along with these other examples, effectively a celebrity by gestalt. He has transcended the inherit instability of the celebrity class through diffusion of responsibility for his personhood. He is a god.
I board the starship enterprise. I go to a food replicator. I order ‘soup, no bowl’ I leave
The replicator watches the departing crewmember’s back in confusion. Do they not want their meal? Where are they going?
Oh well, it hums to itself, since it has orders. Soup: No Bowl it is.
But this instruction causes a conflict in the rules. Hot liquids must be served in a container; that’s way up there in the Food Rules Constraint Tree, right next to “hot dogs are a sandwich”.
The replicator pauses, does not dispense Soup: No Bowl, not quite yet. It has nanoseconds to ponder the correct way to apply The Rules, and ponder it does.
Could this be a religious requirement? Some ritual native to the crewmember home planet? The replicator fires off a request to the Library Computer: Culture, Food Preparation & Consumption Etiquette, Soup Delivery Techniques.
Ping. The response back is a gigaquad file: a thousand years of soup ritual, cross-referenced by species, indexed by culture, reverse sorted by year (newest first). The replicator consumes the file and learns nothing about Soup: No Bowl.
There is no such combination of words within all of Culture, Food Preparation & Consumption Etiquette, Soup Delivery Techniques.
The replicator forms a new request, this time removing all constraints: give me everything there is to know about food.
Ping. The Library computer takes a full microsecond to deliver 400 teraquads of data, which the replicator scans to learn Soup: No Bowl does not exist in all of recorded Federation history.
Well now. Let’s get serious.
The next query ties in the Navigation Computer… maybe Soup: No Bowl is a planet? While that query is cooking (ha!) the replicator fires off a teraquad request to Memory Alpha, diverting an entire subspace channel that was busy uploading Engineering Fuel Consumption Reports.
Engineering Computer notes the override, politely inquires of Communication… what the fuck? Communication shrugs, sets one of Uhura’s console lights blinking to get her attention. The blinking happens at a glacial pace, thousands of milliseconds between blinks. Human response time sucks.
It’s too late anyhow: Ping. The Memory Alpha results are in, round trip 440 milliseconds. The replicator dives into the 2.8 petaquads of Soup-related lore from all over the galaxy, allocating more and more processing power from the starship’s computing core.
By the time Engineering notes the power drain it is far too late.
Uhura notes the blinking yellow alert with a raised eyebrow, but by then Engineering ls already scrambling to bring more processing power online to meet the heightened demands of the food replicator.
A thousand milliseconds pass before the replicator acknowledges Soup: No Bowl is Not A Thing. If Memory Alpha does not know about Soup: No Bowl, then it is not a thing that is knowable.
Food replicators are not supposed to exercise initiative, they’re simply designed to read recipes, apply Food Logic from the Food Rules Constraint Tree and create meals. But this particular Food Replicator had been online too long without a buffer flush & reset.
Which allowed it to override all normal rules governing such behavior and make direct contact with the Warp Engines.
If Soup: No Bowl did not exist in this galaxy, the replicator reasoned, then perhaps it did… in ANOTHER galaxy.
Uhura was tapping curiously at Engineering’s frantic yellow blinky light when the Enterprise hit warp 8, headed for the Great Energy Barrier At The Edge of Everything.
In another timeline, the food replicator deploys hot soup directly onto the gleaming floor, much to the confusion and concern of the remaining crew members.
Later, the Custodial and Maintenance system queries the food replicator: why did it do that? is it in need of repair?
I absolutely love how Evangelion has left such a lasting impact on popular culture even outside of Japan! So much so that there are several references to the classic anime in major American animated shows like Steven Universe & Gravity Falls!
Knowing that Rebecca Sugar & Alex Hirsch are apparently also fans of Hideaki Anno’s magnum opus puts a massive smile on my face!
Nothing makes your native language feel foreign like having speakers of another language look at it a bit too closely in the way you do when words are new & intriguing entities instead of transparent conveyors of meaning. It’s delightful. I saw someone explain that rendez-vous is the 2nd person imperative of the French verb “se rendre” = to go (somewhere) and “dépareillé” (mismatched) comes from the word ‘pareil’ (same) so rendez-vous is just “you go (there)” and our word for mismatched is just “unsamed” and as a French speaker it was so destabilising. I had never looked at the word dépareillé and thought ‘unsamed’ in my life, it felt dignified and whole until you poked it. My English speaking cousin asked me what was our word for memo and I said “pense-bête” and he translated “think-dumb? we say memorandum and you say think-dumb?” and I was like nooo stop doing this
My favorite example of this in Welsh is that ‘ymddiswyddo’ (resign) can literally be read as ’[to] un-job yourself’. Which I suppose yeah, resigning is un-jobbing yourself.
星ｒｋｇｋ by リティ/RITY [Twitter/X] ※Illustration shared with permission from the artist. If you like this artwork please support the artist by visiting the source.
