Roundup

Critical Role

Watched the first half of the latest episode. I unexpectedly got some fodder for the fic I'm currently writing, which was nice.

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Homestuck Epilogues

Since I started read the comic last year because I was home sick with a sore throat, I decided missing the first day of work due to yet another sore throat meant that the only appropriate reaction was similar. Ooof, what a ride. I understand why they were controversial in fandom, but there were lots of character bits I found fascinating.

...Gamzee continues to distress me, however, and I don't think that'll ever change.

( spoilers spoilers spoilers )

Is there going to be more Epilogues? Is the mysterious Homestuck 2 I've heard about the more Epilogues? I will find that out later, I still have various parts of Homestuck canon to peruse.

Fandom Work Recs

Quiz: What Character From "The Penumbra Podcast" Are You? - I got Juno, which feels like a bit of a roast

Art: Honk - If nothing else, this continued Hugos-AO3 wank has given us so much great art/fic.

Linkspam

Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain By Jamil Jan Kochai, and the accompanying interview

Your father is a dark, sturdy man, and so unlike you that, as a child, you were sure that one day Hagrid would come to your door and inform you of your status as a Mudblood, and then your true life—the life without the weight of your father’s history, pain, guilt, hopelessness, helplessness, judgment, and shame—would begin.

The Asian-American Canon Breakers

Part of the reason “The Woman Warrior” was so palatable to mainstream readers was that it could be read as a story of the traumas associated with immigrant assimilation. Perhaps these wounds might even compel a young woman to retreat into folktales, to rewrite odes of the distant past. Family bonds, the psychology of immigrant households, estrangement from the mother tongue: these became the defining themes of Asian-American literature, in part because they were market-tested.

Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes

From the mid-1920s, when Hugo Gernsback coined the term “science fiction,” several fallacies became associated with the increasingly vigorous commercial genre and never entirely went away. The first was the “Taught Me Science Fallacy,” which goes something like this: Isaac Asimov writes about science and particle physics, so if I read the Foundation trilogy, I might learn what a neutrino is.

Can monoculture survive the algorithm?

Instead of worrying about the loss of monoculture, I’m more concerned that there isn’t enough room for products or projects (or even places) that are not memes, that aren’t pre-optimized for sharing or scaling. In the end I fall more on Scorsese’s side of the argument, though I wouldn’t wish for any more Scorsese: The non-homogenized alternatives to the mainstream become harder and harder to find. As we grow more accustomed to the algorithmic monoculture, allowing it to occupy our senses, we might lose our understanding of, or our taste for, anything else.

That last article was interesting because firstly, that chart's an interesting way to consider media, and secondly, I'm curious to what extent most people eat up whatever the algorithm spits out. (The companies involved have actual data on that, I bet.) I know they exist, because Spotify and Youtube is built on that, but I find that system mostly unrelatable. It happens briefly sometimes with Spotify/Youtube if the specific song/playlist I've picked finishes before I notice, but I've never clicked on something on Netflix just cause, y'know? Most of my media consumption is running off other people's recommendations/interests, and that seems harder to measure.