• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle






  • My parents were separated since before I started forming long-term memories and I was raised by my single mother. We used to visit my dad’s side of the family for a week or so every other Christmas, I lived with him for a couple months as a teenager when my home life got particularly rough due to a profoundly toxic non-parent influence, and during stay that we ignored each other apart from the cliche “divorced parent and kid who don’t actually know each other at all trying to act their respective parts but neither knows how or really wants to or frankly likes the other one but they both know it’s polite to pretend” sorts of interactions (which were quite sparing even as those go). Neither of us has ever attempted to keep in touch with the other over the phone or in writing.

    To be clear, I don’t hold any of that against him even a little bit; that’s all perfectly normal on his end as far as I’m concerned. That’s all just there for context when I tell you that, now that I’m well into my 30s, I recently heard from my older sister who actually tries to stay connected to him that he’s begun boasting about how proud he is for having shaped me into the man I am today. And, like, I’m not even on social media so I’m not a person he’s even capable of keeping tabs on from a distance if he tried. He fully has no idea who I am. He not only doesn’t deserve to take credit, he doesn’t even know what he’s taking credit for. I’m just so automatically an extension of himself by virtue of my DNA that he goes around telling other people that he’s proud of me.

    (A more technically accurate but less entertaining answer to the question is that he’s politically a Libertarian.)



  • I am very aware of the differences in quality but am mostly okay with bad equipment and/or bad settings. The most important thing is to be able to clearly see and hear what’s supposed to be clear and only especially incompetent or especially pretentious media doesn’t get mastered to work well on shoddy displays and/or speakers by those standards.

    The one thing I absolutely cannot tolerate is HDR mode on TVs without enough of a maximum luminance to actually do HDR, so they and up looking way worse than SDR.

    The idea of not caring about binocular quality is truly mystifying. Binoculars’ only job is to make things as easy to see as possible.






  • I have a smart TV and, while I hate that fact with every fiber of my being, I’ve never been through any of the particular bullshit you’re describing. I absolutely can just plug a thing into it and it works when I switch to that input.

    I’m going to go with video game console disk trays. Back on the PS1 and GameCube, you just hit a button to release a lock and then a spring popped the lid open. Now, I’ll admit these newfangled interior conveyor belts we’ve had for checks calendar almost two decades have never actually broken on me, I resent the fact that if they were to break then I’d have no actual ability to get disks in and out of the machine.

    That is, of course, assuming your console has an option for physical media at all, which is a very troubling direction in itself.




  • I was giving the Lee Lemon thing as an example where I agree Kif’s reaction was homophobic, saying it was the only such example I could think of.

    The patrons are responding to the way he’s performing. Zapp is broadly a parody of Captain Kirk and this scene was a reference to William Shatner’s infamous spoken word cover of Rocketman, at least until Zapp fully broke down and started wailing the name of the woman who hates him. The only reason the song is Lola is because that’s a famous song you can easily swap Leela’s name into.

    I swear I remember a Kif reaction, too, by the way.


  • I only remember one instance of Kif being homophobic, when Zapp says Lee Lemon is filling him with “other emotions that are weird and confusing.” Not wanting to constantly see your commanding officer naked isn’t homophobia.

    And his annoyance when Zapp sang a name-swapped version of Lola was about how Zapp is acting toward Leela by doing that rather than the subject matter of the original song. Zapp even replaced the trans subject with a cis one, what could a transphobe even be objecting to?