Jesus holy mother of peasants and pumpkins hail Mary! HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN? March 2022, right when Putin invaded Ukraine. Since then, I’ve shifted gears a lot in my freelance livin’ work. It’s kept me THAT busy, so that is the excuse slip I have for not blogging on my own site for 5 months.
OTOH, I have always said that you should know me by my work, with my domain only functioning as a central hub. Judge me not by my poor stats at penguinpetes.com, but by my freelance work over on a YouTube channel with 3.5K subscribers.
Aw, what’s that, you say? You want to see some of Unca Pete’s video reviews for the $25 billion cannabis industry? Right this way, and be sure to stay tuned for more podcast news following…
Howdy gremlins and goblins! Just a minute while I talk to some old people:
(This domain goes back to 2006, and I still get fanmail from my old material, so I know some old-timers have followed on. You folks know that my longest-continuous blogging gig is 366WeirdMovies. So if you know my review history, you must be on pins and needles wondering which film I selected for the very first video review. (Actually I know you all are wondering, I’m just stalling for the suspense.)
Anyway, for the rest of you: Hey kids I video-reviewed an old horror movie! It’s 1974’s Legacy of Satan, a movie not quite weird enough to be honored on The List, but worth an eyeball that seeks out weirdness. Made in partnership with some colleagues of mine from there, Giles Edwards and Greg Smalley.
But let me back up a bit here while the piano player warms up the lounge for me, because the story of how this project came together is gonna blow the training wheels right off your unicycle…
It’s impossible to avoid now, but for future generations: Squid Game was a TV series on Netflix. It got a viral marketing boost and now all of social media is teeming with foaming-mouthed fanatics insisting that everybody MUST WATCH this show immediately or there will be consequences.
Now I will tell you why, not only am I not watching Squid Game, but you should not watch Squid Game either.
We’ve seen enough class-struggle dystopian sci-fi
The first 10 times I saw a class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie, I thought, “Yeah, great socio-political commentary!” The next 50 class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movies I saw, I thought, huh, neat take, but it’s been done. After that, every class-struggle-based dystopian sci-fi movie gives me the kind of heartburn you get from too much grease and not enough substance.
Let me save you some time and tell you all about every single one of the above movies. This is the entire point:
“Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie”
There are RICH PEOPLE, and they are EVIL for the sake of being EVIL!
There are POOR PEOPLE who suffer because they are POOR!
The RICH stay RICH by exploiting the POOR people and keeping them POOR!
Nobody can seem to do anything effective about it.
You should be MAD about this! MAD MAD MAD!
That’s all this is. A class-struggle sci-fi movie is not inspirational or instructive or educational or witty or original. It is not deep or profound. It’s not even a story. The entire point is to invoke the Krodha rasa and turn the viewer into the Incredible Hulk. Hulk hate rich people now!
Not only that, but we have a whole wing of literature devoted to the exact same effect, called dystopian literature. They include The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World, all of which are at the top of the list of most recommended books for required reading in school. I’ve written this same blog post about why force-feeding students these novels is a crime against intellect.
But we’ll go over it again, this time with movies and TV, because what I am saying really IS an original thought which is currently absent from all of world culture.
You can’t deny that 2021 is shaping up to be a different year from 2020. We have the same ol’ virus, but we threw out everything else we can get our hands on. The smell of revolution is in the air, and it smells like a new generation wrestling the wealth away from the old, and new culture bumping off the old guard. Finally.
At request of my handlers at 123ish.com, I plunged again into the Gamestop stock short raid and modern Bitcoin millionaires, and pointed out that this, at last, is the proverbial sacking of Rome writ in modern times and the movement of wealth from dusty old guys in suits to bright young kids who approach investing the way they do a World of Warcraft raid.
Speaking of Bitcoin, JWZ, one of my old-skool-hacker idols, has lately become the Al Gore of cryptocurrency mining, yelling that we’re heating the Earth with our greed and we’re all doomed, doomed, DOOMED! He has headlines like “Bitcoin mine cargo container literally incinerating planet,” and more on his dunning-krugerrands tag.
Meanwhile I follow Satan on Twitter (don’t ask, it’s a long story), and come to find out Hell has its own cryptocurrency now. Because of course it does.
The new official cryptocurrency of hell is here! Fast, Reliable, and Transaction fee Free currency. LEOX is the future of cryptocurrency!
I think Satan and JWZ should meet, and possibly have a no-holds-barred brawl in the DNA Lounge for the destiny of this planet. Wouldn’t that be exciting, boys and girls?
Want to see what other cultural rat-traps I have been poking my battered nose into lately? Right this way…
Pay no attention to Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space in the banner. We’ll circle back to that eventually. By the way, there is no rule 34 of that show, and I demand to speak to the manager of the Internet.
Over at GeekyDomain, we focus a lot on games, movies, comics, and all that, but I proposed that we’d neglected anime and animation in general. We should make up for that with a whole month just devouring animation. There’s so much in that vein that modern audiences just don’t know exists, especially older stuff they might have caught as a kid and half-remembered now. It’s the cure for the winter blahs, I soapboxed, so everybody went along with that.
That got me on an animated kick. First I commemorated Liquid Television, MTV’s groundbreaking showcase, which was a cheery bazaar of shorts, experimental projects, pilots, and episodes of series that could barely be tracked down otherwise. It was the launch point for Aeon Flux, Psychograms, The Maxx, and later Cartoon Sushi and the eventual launch of Cartoon Network. And then I barely had room to discuss USA Network’s Night Flight, a show with very similar DNA.
There’s no shortage of Gen-X kids who wax nostalgic for Night Flight now, but a lot of viewers couldn’t be bothered to stay up at 3 AM watching every random bit of craziness which tracked onto the screen, so they missed bits like Arise!, the Church of the Subgenius “recruiting” film. Let us pause in reverent amazement: In the early 1990s, before Bob J.R. Dobbs became the Internet’s very first meme, when Robert Anton Wilson yet drew breath, there was a Church of the Subgenius special aired on public television. Where ordinary muggles could see it. How we survived that calamity is anybody’s guess.
And that was just the first step of my month-long adventure…
So you might have noticed that this blog lay dormant from about Thanksgiving 2020 through mid-January 2021. That’s typical; I’m too busy at that time of year working for other people’s sites, and then when the holidays come, I want to hibernate, not blog some more.
But now that I’m back to work and reasonably assured that the nation isn’t going to fall…
… I can toddle back to my standard shtick. Over December, I blabbered about a lot of video games, so there’s much to recap!
The below is a post from November 6th, 2011. NINE YEARS AGO AS OF THIS POSTING. It was posted on my old open source blog and got popular enough to get passed around most of the very news sites I talked about in there. Much water has gone under the bridge since then.
I STILL want Dillo! I just gave up and use Lynx for that function now. I couldn’t get Dillo to even compile on a modern system without maintaining it myself. There are thousands of journalists out there that struggle with this same problem every day; they need to get the facts, and all the facts are behind either paywalls or a million popups and autoplaying videos. I wish we just had a blogger’s equivalent of a Press Pass.
I also no longer run any of the below Linux distros. I’m on the Mint bandwagon now. It’s been the default “works out of the box” Linux distro for a few years, but God knows what I’ll have to resort to if Mint gronks.
Anyway, I’m reposting this NINE YEAR OLD post because people loved it and linked to it. Do not be surprised if it is out of date, because it is an old post. Got that?
I may get around to talking about the rest of gaming news, but it’s going to be hard to get past this first. In my GeekyDomain gig I’m obligated to talk about game trends. Recently when I browse Steam, one game kept shoving itself into my face over and over. Judging from its top-rated position, it seems to be the hottest (oh God stop the puns already!) free casual game lately.
I’ve been tricked into playing a game about seducing demons
So I tried it, beat it even (it takes minutes), and found out what the big deal was. Helltaker is an indie dating sim about assembling a harem of demon girls, after some obligatory puzzle and bullet hell elements. And you, all you depraved people, you wretched goblins made me play that just to see what all the fuss was about.
So now we know why half the fanart base has been taken over by devil girls eating pancakes lately. And honestly, even if I’m not down with this particular scene, I get it, I really do. I even analyze why in that post.
But that doesn’t mean that I quit finding all things concerned with Satanism and Hell to be side-splittingly hilarious. I love how Zdrada has a cross necklace. It’s amazing how well one indie Polish developer managed to capture Western humor so adeptly. That’s vanripper if you want to follow him to see what devilment he gets up to next.
UPDATE: Dr. Fauci just said everything you’re about to read here in a vastly different number of words and more diplomatically, FSM bless his soul. He did that on CNN in an interview, 8/5/2020, but it’s a reiteration of what he says in this article. He remarks that anti-science sentiments are just “for reasons that sometimes are inconceivable and not understandable.”
Likewise, his family continues to get death threats merely to pressure this brave man into shutting up. That’s a point where I can express some solidarity with his situation, having confronted the exact same phenomenon for the exact same reasons when I started blogging.
Now on with the original post…
None of you reading today will have much reason to believe this. Indeed, most of the evidence is washed away from the Internet now. But I was once one of the most hated figures on the web. That was because, in the early 2000s, I was one of the few people advocating for science literacy via computing literacy.
Nobody wanted to listen then. Don’t Make Me Think was a bestseller. Command lines and hacker tools were held up as something holding people back, something to be avoided, in books like The Design of Everyday Things. Nick Bostrum proposed that we might be living in a computer simulation, and the entire Internet instantly agreed that this was ironclad fact, brooking no argument. Ray Kurzweil wrote book after book about how Artificial Intelligence would make computers “wake up” any day now, and the Singularity would be nigh. Matrixism was treated like a real religion by people who could not tell Wachowski brothers’ movies from reality.
I’ve been a busy game blogger lately, but before I get into Linux-specific gaming, I’d like to share my latest crush: Bowsette!
In the grim future of Bowsette there can be only war!
Bowsette is a fan creation I covered in my write-up of the top weirdest moments of the Mario / Donkey Kong franchise. As a Gen Xer, I’m in a unique position to sum up the scope of the historic Donkey Kong and Super Mario franchise. I was there twoscore years ago, a greasy triangle of disgusting pier joint pizza in hand at the Balboa Fun Zone witnessing the dawn of the Donkey Kong original arcade machine. (You can still play that on Linux, if you bootleg the ROM and load up Mame.) I catalog the weirdness from that day through all the magic mushrooms down to modern-day 4chan and its Bowsette abomination.
See, I understand where it comes from. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (2014) for the Game Boy Advance and Wii U had this moment where they decided a female-possessed Bowser would make a fun boss fight, namely Bowletta. Fans instantly repressed the memory until it manifested itself years later on image boards. Every fetish has a childhood trauma behind it.
As wrong as Bowsette is, on the teeth-grinding irritation level of Brony culture, it still feels like it belongs in 2020 pop culture somehow. It was inevitable. Torment the proles enough and even their escapism becomes twisted.
