Carl Muckenhoupt @CarlMuckenhoupt@mastodon.social

I just had a fairly surreal experience: I found out that there was an official Disney princess named Maariyah that I had never heard of? From a recent-ish Pixar film THAT I HAD NEVER HEARD OF?

It turns out to be all an Internet hoax, but a remarkably well-supported one. It's a *lot* easier to find pages that are part of the hoax than pages stating that it's a hoax.

The very first hit for "disney princess" on duckduckgo image search includes her. (Not the case on Google, though.)

Happy full year!

Young enough to recognize popular media's use of memes from the internet, old enough to find it bothersome

OK so hear me out: In Blade Runner 2049, we learn that replicants can have artificial memories implanted in them, right? What if that's all the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and the C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate were? Roy puts so much significance on how his memories and experiences will die with him but for all we know maybe they're still in a vault somewhere

Nike for Dogs ad: "There's nothing like the rush you get from chasing a thrown object. Nothing."

A sophistic argument about border crossing:
National laws only apply within a nation's borders. But once a person is within a nation's borders, they are no longer crossing the border. Therefore illegal border crossing is a logical impossibility.

Idea: One of the downsides of month-long observances is that there's only twelve months, right? So in the USA June is both LGBT Pride Month and PTSD Awareness Month, because there aren't enough months to go around and they have to double up like that.

What if we just offset some of these observances? So like PTSD Awareness Month could be June 15 through July 15 or something.

The great thing is that the overlaps could contextualize the things in different ways.

Is there an Undertale AU based around muppets? Ernie and Bert as Sans and Papyrus, Bunsen Honeydew as Alphys, King Sweetums, that sort of thing?

There must be, right? There's Undertale AUs on every imaginable theme. I can't be the first person to think of this one.

Proposed alternate ending:

Thanos snaps his fingers. Half the life in the universe becomes ash -- including Thanos, who clearly didn't think this through all the way.

Cap or someone picks up the glove and rewinds time, restoring everyone to life -- again including Thanos, who immediately grabs the glove away from him, snaps his fingers, dies again.

A long pause. "Maybe if we took one of the other stones out..." The avengers continue to argue about what to do as the credits roll.

So wait, hear me out:
Power stone: infinite strength
Mind stone: infinite intelligence
Soul stone: infinite wisdom
Space stone: Lets you move anywhere instantly? Infinite dexterity
Reality stone: Creating completely convincing illusions? Infinite charisma
That leaves infinite constitution for the time stone, which is a bit of a stretch, but the time stone's main use is do-overs, and that's kind of like tenacity I guess.

I mean, the obvious argument against allowing inheritance of data values from prototype objects is basically "If you do it that way, you can dynamically change values in all the instances by changing them in the prototype", and my gut reaction to that is "Yes, and THAT IS AWESOME"

A thing I just read: "A class body can only contain methods, but not data properties. Prototypes having data properties is generally considered an anti-pattern, so this just enforces a best practice."

I'm like "Say what? I mean, I guess they have a point, but inheriting default values from prototypes is simple and I understood it and giving each instance its own copy of the same values just feels kinda weird."

This must be how people felt about unstructured goto back in 1968.

Columnar basalt!
Columnar basalt!
Columnar
Columnar
Columnar basalt!

I had this notion that Casey at the Bat could be sung to Mack the Knife, and probably should be for maximum pathos:

But, there IS nooo
Joy in MUDvillle,
Mighty CAseeey
Has... struck out......

But on further inspection, I find that this only works for a few lines. ("There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place" being another.) Casey's meter is a lot less regular than I had ever realized, most lines leaving out the initial stressed syllable which is indispensable for Mack.

I have a little fantasy of a manga character who's a bicycle messenger in a dystopian/post-apocalyptic future.

Friendly and helpful, he's a specialist on the hero team, performing amazing feats with a unique hi-tech bike that folds up so he can carry it on his back when he's not riding it.

Inevitably, at some point late in the story, the bike would get destroyed. "It feels so strange to not be touching it. My role on this team was defined by that bike. Without it, who am I?"

A weirdly meloncholy reflection:

I remember my first CD rack. It was a boxy little thing that held maybe 12 discs, designed to sit on a desk. Over time, I supplemented it with a second, then a larger one that sat on the floor, then a bookcase-sized one, then a bigger one.

It seemed like this was going to be a perpetual occurrence: running out of space and upgrading. But now? I have every reason to believe my current storage capacity will be enough to last me the rest of my life.

It's been said that the appeal of spy films is the fantasy of being underestimated. If everyone around you thinks you're a nobody, it's thrilling to imagine that this is only because you have them all fooled.

Black Panther is like that, but with an entire country.

I think my favorite thing in the Black Panther movie is realizing, long afterward, that the voices in the opening narration were young Killmonger and his father.

It reminded me of Undertale.

A political fantasy:
1. In an effort to end "anchor babies" that produce "chain migration", Congress ends birthright citizenship in the USA.
2. Too late, they realize that nearly all US citizens are birthright citizens.
3. The people who made this happen are powerless to undo it, because the only people who can vote or hold office now are naturalized immigrants.

According to some stats I googled up, in America there are 14.8 million adults with depression, and 15.1 million with alcoholism. And yet I see a LOT more people online talking, and making art, about living with depression than about living with alcoholism.

The more I think about this, the less I understand it.