Category:Popular Culture

Miranda Priestly and the Clackers: Being Heard and Seen

Almost all of my shoes have heels. Three inches minimum. I had wanted to wear them since I was a little girl. They made you look taller and undeniably more mature. But the best part about them, thought I at age five, was the sound they made.

It’s a sound, I later learned, that some people think ought to be suppressed. In the film The Devil Wears Prada, Andrea complains about her job and mentions a group of women she calls Clackers, because of the sound their stiletto heels make on the marble lobby of her office building. “They worship her”, she says of Miranda Priestly, Andrea’s boss and the editor in chief of Runway, the fashion magazine they both work for.

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Blitzkrieg In My Bed

On Halloween night in Bully, the clock (which usually limits your boyish hi-jinx to 2:00 AM in-game at which point you will pass out where you stand) is disabled, giving you free-roam of the school until you start “Halloween” the mission. If you try to go to bed, as you can any other day after 7:00 PM, you will find that Gary has already taken up residence in it.

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Ring Around the Rebrand

So after I wrote that last post, I got a curious and decided I wanted to compare the Mystique versions of their games to the PlayAround ones. But strangely, even when you download it with Gigolo as per the PlayAround cart pair and no matter where you download it from, Bachelor Party always has Mystique branding. I wanted to know if this was an oversight in production or if everyone just redistributes the one copy of the ROM so I went a-lookin’.

I never found the answer to that particular question, but I did find another interesting theory.
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For Her Pleasure: An Egalitarian Approach to Pornographic Videogames

An acquaintance of mine recently put together a list of games hacked to have playable female characters in response to this article about the erasure of female game developers hacking games to have female heroes in reporting of stories about fathers doing so for their daughters. Obviously playable female characters are a rarity even today, but in thinking about this, I was reminded of a certain company who went out of their way to give women their turn at the controller.

What’s funny about this, though, is this company made nothing but pornographic Atari 2600 games.
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Importing Team Fortress 2 Item Models into Blender

So maybe you, like me, are interested in making an item for Team Fortress 2. And maybe you’re new to modelling so you want to look at TF2 models in, say, Blender (though this will get you far enough if you’re using something else). With the new SteamPipe content distribution system, though, shit’s all hidden and confusing now ’cause they converted all the .gcf files into .vpk’s. Even if you’ve extracted stuff from TF2 before, maybe you’re having a hard time now. All the tutorials for how to do this are outdated and I can’t be the only dumbass who couldn’t figure this out in two minutes, so I am gonna put this here for anyone who needs it.

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Robotic Boogaloo: The Community Divided

So Robotic Boogaloo. The first community-created update. Turned out to be pretty controversial, didn’t it? Half of the “community” are extremely disappointed in the finished product and the other half are giving themselves a hernia trying to defend it. But let’s be real here.

The update was a failure on a lot of fucking levels and just because a lot of people we know and like and admire worked on it doesn’t make that any less true. And protip, guys? Acting like people who are pointing out that updates normally involve a lot more than reskinned hats are being ungrateful to the work that went into this one not will not convince anyone that Robotic Boogaloo is a glowing success either. Because the failings in this update are largely not reflective of the work and effort put in by the contributors. The problems lie in that it ultimately did not produce an acceptable update.
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The Clear Line: The Player and Their Acts

When I was a kid, my parents would complain that I talked about games “as if they were real”. At the time, I didn’t understand why they’d think that. Obviously Super Mario World was not real and I had never, to my knowledge, implied that it was. I think what it is though is that, in talking about one’s experience in a game, you refer to the things you do.

There’s always been this talk about immersion and how gamers can’t tell reality from imagination. That we get submerged in games and, somehow, cannot decipher where the narrative of the game ends and where our own interaction begins. That in playing Super Mario, I am him and he is me.
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The Future is Still Silver and Black: The MSI’s Pioneer Zephyr and the IRM’s No. 9911-A “Silver Pilot” are pen pals, writing to each other from their respective museums about their service lives both pre- and post-preservation.
Low Art Lyseum: DJ, Ray, and Ellie play and critically analyze videogames. 7:00 CST on Thursdays/Fridays. Currently playing Mafia: Definitive Edition.
Engines in Sidings: Thomas the Tank Engine stories. Written with Ray.
We Happy Few Poedit: all the cut content I’ve collected out of the game’s translation file.

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This is going to be a startling question: Are you aware of the youtube ai age verification situation? If yes, could you help me get more awareness for this issue? If no, I would highly suggest looking into it as well for your benefit.The age verification will destroy online privacy and effectively censor the rest of the internet. We may lose the ability to watch videos that an ai determines to be of childish nature, whether it be a commentary of a tv show or a slime review video. The ai will deny you of your access to youtube, unless you present an id like a credit card or a drivers licence to regain access to watching any video. Even if you are an adult, it will not allow you access unless you surrender sensitive info about yourself. Should this spread, internet privacy and safety will be gone, and even a 1984 situation would take place (hoping not). The surrendered data can be exposed to the world, doxxing so many people and allowing scammed and hackers to steal personal info. I do not want to see this ruin anyone's love for anything that may seem childish to a faulty machine designed to somehow replace a parents' responsibility of looking after their own children. It is scheduled to take into effect on August 13th this month.I am afraid that this is what will shatter many fandoms of beloved childhood shows, games, books, and franchises. I just hope that at least the TTTE fandom will help step up against the loss of internet security and privacy. United we stand, together we fall. Let us stand and stand firm against this ruin.Cheers,A worried American who is a thomas fan

So like, there seems to be a wave of bad, privacy-violating legislation going around lately. Gonna be real in that I don’t really know how to fight that kinda thing effectively. Based on the UK one that just passed, kinda seems like the point is actually to stifle communication, since… [more]

for the WIP ask game... The Future Is Still Silver and Black? (original train fiction from you two sounds really interesting!)

So last year, I went up north to visit Ray. Ray lives in Chicago, which just so happens to have the largest railway museum in the United States, the Illinois Railway Museum.

At the IRM, we saw the Nebraska Zephyr, which is a streamlined stainless steel articulated trainset. Each of the… [more]