#history meme opinions

[samflir]

What makes a good boot sequence?

A while ago, I had my first truly viral post on Mastodon. It was this:

You might've seen it. It got almost four hundred boosts and reached beyond Mastodon to reddit and even 4chan. I even saw an edit with a spinning frog on the left screen. I knew the post would go down well with tech.lgbt but I never expected it to blow up the way it did.

I tried my best to express succinctly exactly what it is I miss about BIOS motherboards in the age of UEFI in this picture. I think looking at a logo and spinner/loading bar is boring compared to seeing a bunch of status messages scroll up the screen indicating hardware being activated, services being started up and tasks being run. It takes the soul out of a computer when it hides its computeriness.

I think a lot of people misunderstood my post as expressing a practical preference over an aesthetic one, and there was at least a few thinking this was a Linux fanboy post, which it certainly is not. So here's the long version of a meme I made lol.

Stages

I remember using two family desktop computers before moving over a family laptop. One ran Windows XP and the other ran Windows 7. Both were of the BIOS era, which meant that when booting, they displayed some status information in white on black with a blinking cursor before loading the operating system. On the XP machine, I spent longer in this liminal space because it dual-booted. I needed to select Windows XP from a list of Linux distros when booting it.

I've always liked this. Even as a very little kid I had some sense that what I was seeing was a look back into the history of computing. It felt like a look "behind the scenes" of the main GUI-based operating system into something more primitive. This made computers even more interesting than they already were, to me.

Sequences

The way old computers booted was appealing to my love of all kinds of fixed, repeating sequences. I never skip the intros to TV shows and I get annoyed when my local cinema forgets to show the BBFC ratings card immediately before the film, even though doing so is totally pointless and it's kinda strange that they do that in the first place. Can you tell I'm autistic?

Booting the windows 7 computer would involve this sequence of distinct stages: BIOS white text -> Windows 7 logo with "starting windows" below in the wrong aspect ratio -> switch to correct resolution with loading spinner on the screen -> login screen.

Skipping any would feel wrong to me because it's missing a step in one of those fixed sequences I love so much. And every computer that doesn't start with BIOS diagnostic messages is sadly missing that step to my brain, and feels off.

Low-level magic

I am extremely curious about how things work and always have been, so little reminders when using a computer that it has all sorts of complex inner workings and background processes going on are very interesting to me, so I prefer boot sequences that expose the low-level magic going on and build up to the GUI. Starting in the GUI immediately presents it as fundamental, as if it's not just a pile of abstractions on top of one another. It feels deceptive.

There may actually be some educational and practical value in computers booting in verbose mode by default. Kids using computers for the first time get to see that there's a lot more to their computer than the parts they interact with (sparking curiosity!), and if a boot fails, technicians are better able to diagnose the problem over a phone call with a non-technical person.

Absolute boot sequence perfection

There's still one last thing missing from my family computer's boot sequence, and that's a brief flicker of garbage on screen as VRAM is cleared out. Can't have everything I guess. Slo-mo example from The 8-Bit Guy here:

[animanightmate]

Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words can never hurt me leave a literal lasting impression on my brain's wiring, thereby my hormonal and neurochemical secretions, my behaviour, my sense of self, my perceptions, my memories, my capacity for self-care, my relationships, and my environment.

[kaishimo]

Love the silly little ski jump from completely ignoring homosexual history in high school and having a section for gay history in every unit in college

[chucklesandrick]

JFK is canonically a mutant in the X-Men cinematic universe

What are his powers. discuss

[leonardoeatscarrots]

Look at me i remembered to post some of my oc stuff lol

Best way to support me and my art is to like and reblog!

[13personalities]

Guys I’m Lowkey writing an entire hate essay to my history teacher. It has like five paragraphs and I’m rly planning of giving it to him on the last day of school. I am FLAMING this bowling ball of a man.

[mystyrust]

.

[littlebigmouse]

I saw Fight Club for the first time yesterday and to the best of my memory, this was the second time I consciously noticed Edward Norton in a movie (I have a bad memory for actor's names and faces, I may have seen him around but wouldn't know).

The first time was Primal Fear.

This makes Edward Norton the second most specific type cast in hollywood in my book (right after the actress who played cinderella's evil stepsister in like, three different adaptations).

[broke-on-books]

So I just watched Oppenheimer (with my best friend, she's really into physics and wanted to see it with me) and these are my thoughts [with spoilers]

This was a movie that was simultaneously horror-inducing and not horrifying enough in my mind. I cried at about three points during the movie (with the majority of that being for around 10 to 15 minutes straight during the Trinity sequence) for a couple of reasons.

I'm not going to make this a long post so I'll break it down into two short paragraphs of what I liked and disliked about the movie

Like: I actually enjoyed this movie much more than I thought I would? I didn't have super duper high hopes going into it because Oppenheimer isn't really the kind of movie I'd typically watch or enjoy from what I'd seen of the promo beforehand (I was honestly worried I'd bored) but I'd say that mainly wasn't the case. I'd say that the Trinity test sequence was utterly chilling and really technically done so well, I loved that they showed the light so intensely and had it go almost silent for a good few minutes (honestly between 3-5) before shocking the audience with the noise of the blast. I also think the monstrosity of everyone involved was done in a very realistic and human (and therefore terrifying) way. Like the scenes where the people on base at Los Alamos were cheering and celebrating and lifting Oppenheimer up before the American flag after the test were just so deeply chilling and just disturbing to me. I think I whispered 'you motherfucker' under my breath at least 30 times to 10 different characters while watching this movie

Dislike: My main dislike here is really that I couldn't tell how much of the racism present in this movie was actually intentional on the part of Nolan and the writing team. Like I think with many things the answer is likely somewhere in between the two extremes, but this movie is one that for me is really difficult to pin down where I think it stands on that issue. I really wish I was still in my film study class because I'd honestly like to know what my peers and teacher would think about it. Because I feel like the shying away from actually showing the affects of the bomb (not a SINGLE Japanese person is ever heard or seen in this movie) and tests (Native Americans are mentioned twice but their reactions to the Manhattan Project or the repercussions of the tests on the natives and other nearby communities are never/barely addressed) is an effective and powerful way to show the reality of the racism of Oppenheimer and his contemporaries but the way it is presented in the movie makes it almost impossible to distinguish where the line lays behind Oppenheimer's bigotry in text and where the biases of Nolan and Hollywood come into play. And even IF Nolan's exclusion of Japanese, Native, Hispanic, and other perspectives was entirely intentional (to showcase Oppenheimer's biases and story in his own eyes) it STILL raises the question of what stories Hollywood finds worth telling. Like the story of this kind of human monstrosity in the face of curiosity is one that I believe has worth to tell, but is it worth telling at the exclusion of other perspectives of this event and the sheer human suffering it caused? And what does it say about our culture that this is the perspective of the event Hollywood decided to put millions of dollars and thousands of hours behind? These are just some of the questions this movie makes me want to ask.

The previous paragraph was supposed to be about all my dislikes of the movie and instead just covered the majority of what I have to say over the main one, which for me was my central conflict as I watched this movie. However some other more minor gripes are as follows:

1) I didn't like they had like 30 to 45 minutes worth of the senate confirmation/security clearance trial stuff after the Trinity test sequence. I found this part of the movie unpleasant to sit through as I couldn't really find it in myself to care or have any sort of empathy or compassion for Oppenheimer after watching him build test and hand over bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Like I was not remotely interested in his problems after that to be real with you all.

2) didn't appreciate the Florence Pugh sex scenes to be honest. Like I guess I get that they were a part of the story and Oppenheimer's relationship with her character and their affair is important to his story but to be honest. I was 100% perfectly content NOT having to see her boobs and 3 times was definitely a little much for me

3) why were the parts with Robert Downey Jr in black and white they literally happened after the colored parts. Also I just really didn't like these parts of the movie to be honest. They weren't the parts I was there for and to be honest I didn't care too much about what happened to him

4) this isn't fully a dislike but I have complicated thoughts on the prometheus analogy in that I both like it and think it doesn't work for oppenheimer especially in the way they tried to apply it. Idk I won't get into it because I'd like this post to end sooner rather than later and my thoughts aren't the most organized on this matter

5) I was pissed when they did the cut to the scientists and the scientific community as those who would never forgive oppenheimer with the scene with Einstein by the lake. Like THAT'S what he told him? Screw the scientists what about the world!!!!!!! What about humankind!!!!! This was the last scene of the movie and they made up for it the teensiest bit with the "I think I already have [started a chain reaction that will end the world]" but if ANY TIME is when to talk about the world and the future and repercussions on humanity and oppenheimer's legacy to HUMANITY. it was that scene. Literally smh here

Anyways those were some of my thoughts, I'd thought I'd put them out there because I have a lot of lingering things I'd like to discuss and say after seeing this movie, many of which I didn't see talked about on this site after a quick cursory search. Feel free to reply/comment/add your own opinions etc.

[the-hype-dragon]

everyone is guilty of historical revisionism at this point lmao

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i feel like it's also worth adding that these grown ass women with jobs and families risked losing those things and going to jail for the crime of creating, sharing, and engaging with gay fiction. read that again. read it a third time.

a huge factor in the boom of positive, well-written queer representation we've had in the last decade or so is that creators who grew up in and were influenced by fandom have aged into positions to push for it in the professional creative sphere. audiences who grew up in fandom aged into the group where they could contribute money to those projects, now that the door was finally open; audiences who were already in that bracket, and had been desperate for decades for decent queer rep to put support behind, jumped at the chance. people like to brush it off as ~not that deep~ and act like it's ~terminally online~ and ~cringe~ to pretend fandom--let alone shipping specifically--has any kind of meaningful influence. but it has had a powerful, demonstrable positive impact going back more than half a century, and none of that would have been possible if the infrastructure of modern fandom hadn't already been made.

women who put everything on the line--put in money and blood and sweat and tears and fear for their entire goddamn lives--to build our spaces in secret have done a hell of the fuck a lot more for the representation of queer love in fiction than any of you shitheads whining about how fandom is too shipping-focused, how these hags belong in the kitchen should be doing their taxes and raising their children instead of '''invading fandom spaces.''' these women did genuine actual fucking grassroots activism against systemic oppression so you, the assholes in the audience, could sit on your ass and reap the benefits while you actively contribute to the resurgence of that systemic oppression, no less.

do your research, put your money where your mouth is to contribute a tenth of what these women did for society, or shut the fuck up.

I know "60s housewives who invented slash fanfiction" has taken on a life of its own as a phrase, but Kirk/Spock didn't really exist until the 70s and THOSE WOMEN HAD JOBS. They were teachers and librarians and bookkeepers and scientists and they damn well spent their own money going to conventions, printing zines, buying fanart and making fandom happen. Put some respect on their names.

[starlooove]

Uhm not to be a conspiracy theorist but a lot of this black ppl tryna reclaim democracy and the American flags and what it means to be a good ol murcian feels like a set up to manufacture consent for the shit they’re allowing Israel to get away with and the shit they’ll continue to back as tensions rise

[malpractising]

Tag Post :: 1 of ???

[skeletonpandas]

Just kidding. I don't give up on people. I just only let certain ones into my life.

[malpractisingarchive2024]

| Tag Post 1 of ??? |

[jupiterjunebug]

Not giving a shit abt p|_|nk either way makes me the real loser here bc i cannot blacklist the word p|_|nk on tumblr dot com, nobody calls him by the full name, and both sides of the situation r making the tag unreadable. Pwease. I want to see posts of my guys.