FJ Thomas @fjthom@mastodon.social

YT analytics for the past month are... interesting. 😝

I made another Dicey Dungeons video, for the final public build (v0.9). I felt bad that it took me a week to get around to it (because I was watching SGDQ practically nonstop), so I may have gone a little overboard by doing complete runs with all four classes. 😝

https://youtu.be/EeNEHtZnrk0

I watched the video. While there are some things I don't like about the tone and approach (you know, typical YouTuber shit), he makes a good case for Atari's current owners being shady fucks: https://youtu.be/z0qyUhb3VXI

The Tempest 4000 "demonstration" is the best part. They used footage of a Windows build (the VCS supposedly runs Linux), and Llamasoft apparently had no idea the game was being ported to the VCS in the first place.

Judging by my YouTube recommendations, people are still highly skeptical about the Atari VCS. 😝

Techmoan did a video on the MQA CDs released by Universal in Japan earlier this month, and the comments are full of people arguing over whether MQA is "snake oil". The short version: it's apparently a highly compressed, lossy format despite being "high-res", and on these discs uses up 3 of the 16 bits normally used by CD audio, resulting in the CD audio layer sounding worse than it normally would. 😐

I just watched the SGDQ speedrun, and since I doubt I'll have a Switch anytime soon I didn't mind seeing the ending. And what an ending! Basically, Peach gets fed up with both Bowser and Mario and tries to leave them behind on the moon... but it's heavily implied Mario manages to make it onto the ship via some spectacular jumps, and so will continue to be an unwanted thorn in Peach's side for years to come. Never thought I'd see that in a Nintendo game.

Axl Rose: making heroin addiction boring since 1987.

I'm listening to the "Super Deluxe Edition" reissue of Guns N' Roses' "Appetite for Destruction", and it's wild just how tame this record sounds in 2018. It's Led Zeppelin 2.0. It's as meek and mild as mainstream "hard rock" gets. It's a million light-years removed from metal. And it's bizarre to think it once caused a minor moral panic.

Is there any clearer sign that we're living in horrible times that people don't even feel safe to mention the names of people or websites that aren't actually connected to official avenues of power, for fear of the consequences?

For fuck's sake, I just saw a published writer refer to Colin Moriarty as "gamer snake man", and people continue to treat KF like they're fucking Voldemort. What kind of a fucking world is this?

Seriously, I expected way more complaints when I called Elvis Costello a misogynistic piece of shit last night.

Then again, maybe everyone who saw that tweet was too young to even know who the fuck he is. 😝

It's wild how I can go on lengthy drunken rants on the birdsite about fascists and harassers and no one even notices, but use a hashtag while commenting that a speedrunner has an annoying laugh and people immediately show up to complain.

Social media is fucking weird. 😐

Not quite done yet: here's another classic Kirsty MacColl/Johnny Marr collaboration.
https://youtu.be/wsD6E3moZUc

Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up with one of Kirsty's greatest songs, "Can't Stop Killing You"- co-written with Johnny Marr, and possibly the most honest portrayal of domestic violence and abuse in pop music history: https://youtu.be/QnbiW3lp7TQ

Oh yeah, there's also the huge difference between Aimee Mann's version of "The Other End of the Telescope" and Costello's recording of the song on All This Useless Beauty, where he rewrote the last verse to make it the self-pitying lament of a "cultured" white guy (seriously, that line about "a bamboo needle on a shellac of Chopin" is just too fucking on the nose) who can't understand why a woman wouldn't want to fuck him.

Mann's own songs are also better than Costello's.

I used to be a huge fan of Costello. Why do I hate him now? Well, mostly this song: https://youtu.be/nAi7dJla6To

Well, there's also his weird 90's/00's attempt to prove he wasn't just a mere rock singer, which led to similar elitist garbage from other similarly inclined old white guys, but the skeezy predatory mental-health-ableist trash in that song's lyrics sums up Costello's loathsomeness better than anything else.

But here we are in 2018, and Kirsty's long gone, Danielle Dax has given up music entirely in favor of painting, and the vast majority of their contemporaries are either semi-retired (Suzanne Vega) or rely on a niche audience to support their music (Jane Siberry).

But people still treat misogynistic pieces of shit like Elvis Costello as fucking geniuses. 😫

Maybe I'm a little too angry here. I just feel Kirsty doesn't get the credit she deserves, considering she was a better songwriter than any of her male contemporaries. And she made their songs so much better- just compare her version of "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby" to The Smiths' original.