My piece for the @legacies-entwined zine from last year!!
I'm so excited to be able to share this with y'all and grateful to have worked with so many incredible artists on this project-- If you're interested in grabbing the zine and/or any merch we made, you can snag it on Feb. 22nd at the leftover sale!!
(prints)
(Was) my contest entry... started this 2 days before it ended so I did this to myself... :D
You know what?
I’m no longer holding Star Trek or Star Wars “accountable” for their clunky-looking sixties-and-seventies future technology.
Why?
Because the Enterprise is off on a years-long voyage through space. There’s no Verizon store, no Radio Shack, no Geek Squad out there. If the Klingons fire photon torpedoes and the bridge shakes and Spock’s head bangs against the fancy iPad72 touchscreen and cracks the glass, the ship’s toast. If Han Solo’s fingerprints get all over the starchart and the touch-calibration is off by half a centimeter, the Falcon is going right into a star. But if Mister Worf accidentally twists the command knob too hard and pops it off, he can just screw that thing right back on and it will keep working. Dust gets in there? Take it apart and clean it out. All the plugs are big and universal, all the power cells are functional and have a decent battery life, and nothing is built to expire in the next six months so you have to buy a new one.
That tech isn’t anachronistic or suffering a bad case of Zeerust–it’s practical, effective, and it works. Apple tried launching its own space exploration craft, it had to come back for full repairs within three months, and then it had to be upgraded over the next two.
But this? This is just good, long-lasting, fully-functional, and reliable craftsmanship.
The actual real-life space shuttles’ electronics looked pretty much like that for their entire lifespan and this is exactly why.
star trek heritage post (August 23rd, 2017)
Genuinely can’t stand the new favouritism towards video format. You want me to spend a whole two minutes listening to someone say out loud a paragraph I could read in 20 seconds?
(This is about tiktok. I hate tiktok.)
It’s not just tiktok, it’s everything. I’m tired of clicking on news articles and instead finding it’s a video I have to watch. I’m tired of being sent to a video when I want to learn about a new thing instead of an article I can skim in less than a minute. You mean you want me to sit through an entire video, listening for the one kernel of information that’s buried in there that I’m interested in? Nah, man, life is too short to waste it like that. I don’t know why any of you like videos lmao.
Thank god someone said it holy fuck!!! I hate video formats!! Hate hate hate!
And it is legitimately impossible to find information on certain subjects in non-video format. “Internet lore” subjects are almost exclusively the domain of videos. Minecraft redstone tutorials? Fuck you, here’s a video.
Watching things is for some reason something I cannot get my brain to do. I don’t watch tv or movies because passively looking at a screen is not engaging enough and I get distracted, and I can’t just glance backward like you can with a book.
This is an accessibility issue. I’ve been required to watch films for classes before and had to break them up over multiple days, listen to their audio while playing minecraft or some other activity to occupy my hands, or just straight up bullshit using wikipedia summaries and stuff.
You know how when little kids try to explain something to you, they stop and start their sentences over and take forever to finish the explanation? That’s what video format is like for me. It’s just SO SLOW and takes FOREVER to get to the point compared to reading, and if I miss something or get distracted, I have to rewind the video and try to go back and catch it again.
And I can’t quickly, visually skim a video to see if it will have the information I need. If I hit skip, I might miss something important. I can’t go through the subheadings like I can in a written piece of text. There might BE an outline with subheadings for the video, but skipping forward might make me miss the handful of frames they’re displayed in. I can’t screenshot a sentence in a video so I can look at it later when I need it.
I also just process less when i’m watching a video. If I’m not doing something else while listening to the audio, I’ll miss a LOT. Information in video format just feels more ephemeral in my brain.
Someone sent me a video essay about the history of 2b2t (the minecraft server) but I haven’t watched it yet even though i’m really interested in it.
My heart breaks at the thought of all the information out there that I can’t crack my way into because the only way it’s preserved anywhere is in video format
The sheer number of times the comment section has been my savior, summing up the video in a few bullets- 😭
STOP NEEDLESSLY LONG VIDEOS
AND START JUST-TEXT ALTERNATIVES FOR INFORMATION-GIVING please
