@astralikacastle / astralikacastle.tumblr.com
we need to start killing people
TRANS IS BEAUTIFUL
BTW If youd like prints of this I have em available here! ;w;
“So basically my couch has electricity and I use it to charge my battery powered doorbell”
“Okay that makes sense”
Now explain it to a Japanese samurai from the year 1218
"do you know how waterwheels grind up grain in a water mill using the force of running water? We found a way to create a huge source of force that runs all the time and can transfer its force over long distance. I can tell you in more detail, but that's the basics. Now that is a chime that has a mechanism that one can press instead of having to open the door to let you know that you are waiting to be let in. It requires the transferred force to make the mechanism work and that wire is how we transfer the force to the chime."
Convenience! And not always the good kind.
Everyone has phones that need charging, how about integrating the port you plug your charging cable into in the seat you're probably hanging out in? Now you don't gotta make sure you're sitting close enough to the outlet, just that the couch is plugged in like a power strip.
Instead of having to tear down your wall (or, y'know, hire an electrician) to build in a doorbell, what if you could just buy a new doorbell that also can be hooked up to other devices? Well it's still gonna need charging if youre giving up it being hooked into the core electrical system. And if you want to camera your front door... Yikes, but also just get a real security system.
If we lived in an imagined idyllic age of days gone by, Sony would be running TV ads featuring a guy with frosted tips in a sports car saying shit like "switch 2? Try switching 2 Playstation instead" and he'd drive off and you see his car is full of beautiful women and twinks (it's woke) but they'd never do that these days
"oh why are the boys there why is it woke" I'm projecting cherry-picked pieces of modernity I personally find palatable onto my imagined idyllic past that's what makes it imagined and idyllic dipshit
In a better world Satoshi Kon would get the level of praise Miyazaki gets but unfortunately Kon's works don't appeal to the "young witch in the alps solving the mystery of her neighbor's missing cat" crowd so we're fucked I guess
Genuinely I wish film circles discussed his work more and treated his death as the tragedy that it is. Losing him at age 46 was an enormous loss.
tokyo gofathers my beloved....
Whenever someone complains about the $80 USD sticker price on new games, some folks like to bring up the fact that many Super Nintendo cartridges were retailing for the same price way back in the 90s.
The subtext of these observations is usually that AAA game prices have been effectively static for thirty years, so really, once you take inflation into account, AAA games are cheaper than ever.
A more pointed observation would be that, in spite of those thirty years of inflation, that $80 price tag has managed to become less affordable to the average gamer in 2025 than it was in 1995, which is an indictment that reaches much further than the AAA gaming industry.
in the vein of "he would not fucking say that": they would not be that well-hung
like, you expect me to believe they're packing a footlong schlong? they would be four and a half inches on a good day. deeply immersion-breaking
All porn is Hyper fetish if you try hard and believe in yourself
Sorry i didn't post about this earlier but maybe this lines up with the general audience's schedules anyway lol I MADE A GAME!!! IT'S DREAMS OF AETHER!! IT'S REAL YOU CAN PLAY IT It's $3 normally but it's FREE to celebrate April Fool's Day!
Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now
He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.
For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.
Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.
He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor
Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going
LMAO DEVASTATING
How do you fail Bronze as Torbjorn? A pigeon could beat Bronze as Torbjorn
You can get fucking POTG as Torbjorn while you're literally dead how is he THIS bad
I for SOME FUCKING REASON cannot open the reblogs on this to find the original chain I'd responded to. #FunctionalWebsite.
But...
I think the trick here is simple.
Cuz some people have pointed out that there's an *easy* logical flow here, but like. There's a step that's crucial.
People didn't have access to mobile phones in the 70s. Or, well, that's not quite true... Wikipedia diving for me.
The first handheld cellular phone was demonstrated in 1973. And weighed 2 kilos. The first commercial cellular network analog was in japan in '78, followed by launches in '81 in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Prior to this, there was Radio Telephones, but these were primarily mounted in cars and trucks, and briefcase portable models were... Well they were *briefcases*.
The cultural phenomenon is that nowadays not only does literally everyone have their own personal phone, but that it also connects to... Well.
Remember that ARPANET was '69. The 70s was also the decade where the internet was first being *born*. The Internet Protocol Suite wasn't standardized until 82.
So we have these devices that connect to a global network of information, shopping, socialization, movies, games, music... All of us, now, individually. Which is a combination of the idea of the telephone and... Ah,
"Home Computer" was the way people called them in the late 70s, early 80s. And the way *we* think of them in the modern day is also deeply influenced by the idea of the graphical user interface, something that makes computers more visually designed rather than purely text-based as an operating system. And the first commercially-available computer with a GUI was... '79.
And of course, they still use electricity. We've moved past... Well, hold on. Were they still using batteries in the 70s? Hell, even if the technology for Rechargeable, Built-In Batteries was a thing that far back, USB cords weren't designed until '96, which is how nearly anything is recharged these days.
So for the convenience of people who have palm-sized computers in their pockets, so they can readily connect to a global network of information that's like radio but even fancier, we've designed some expensive couches to have built-in ports for the relatively standardized cables we use to charge them.
then we can land on "and also the doorbell is equally portable and uses the same rechargeable technology (and possibly the same connection to global networking), so it's easier to manage if e.g. your original doorbell breaks down." Which is the part that I think people have kinda glibly said is the easy part to explain. And even oversimplify.
The choice of the 70s feels really potent here, because someone in the 70s could have exactly enough context to be completely boggled with not only How, but Why we ended up here. Like. The further you jump back the easier it is to sort of... I'm gonna say "magicalize" a lot of modern tech. Which, to be fair, a lot of modern tech feels like fuckin' magic. We connect to a network that we've formed in the very air around us, powered through harnessing of the energy found in lightning, and it lets us communicate all sorts of things to each other from anywhere in the world at speeds only tales of magicians being able to teleport could hope to achieve. Not even your fastest athletic heroes could outrun it.
But the 70s lands right when a lot of foundations on this tech were just being born. ARPANET was only a few years old, "WiFi" isn't until '97. Microprocessors were just being born and now they're so ubiquitous they're in fuckin' *doorbells*. That thanks to that ubiquity, the need to recharge it is also so supplied for you might have a couch with a convenient port for it!
It's wild! I love it!
My problem with all those memes hating on electroswing is that many of them implicitly identify "contaminating" swing with EDM influences as the genre's central problem, when the real problem is that most self-labelled electroswing artists clearly know fuck all about swing.
Like, there's no intrinsic problem with the idea of swing-style EDM. That's a perfectly cromulent notion. The trouble is that in order to properly make it, you first have to actually know what swing is.
I mean. Would it be more accurate to call it Electro Vintage?
I'm curious how much of people who *like* Electroswing feel a connection to the specifics of swing or just call it that due to how much of Electroswing tends to gesture to, like. An aesthetic of vaguely "vintage", nebulously "nineteen-twenties", and roughly "radio", sorta melded into the EDM.
... I say, using this as an excuse to do something I haven't done in a while: listen to a genre I like. (And self-reflect in the process!)
