Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂

>Number One<

You Can’t Use It if You Lose It

Conservation is an interesting topic in general but also one I’ve been thinking more about lately because I wonder what the legacy of this period in time will be. One of the things that does strike me is that a lot of things I liked as a child are still accessible in some manner shape or form, which is honestly pretty unique. The internet has been a double edged sword in preservation between the Internet Archive and other projects a huge amount of the internet has been saved but plenty has been lost. When people try to put in context the time that I lived though a lot of context and understand (especially tweets and other walled social media) will all have been lost so that video games are part of that loss isn’t all the surprising to me. The article mostly talks about games pre-download but even fairly modern games are now facing new problems where they no longer exist as physical media or they can only be accessed in conjunction with non existent software or servers. This is only made worse by media companies hoarding licenses and refusing preservation (without engaging in it themselves). I know video games aren’t the top of the list for important human artifacts in most peoples eyes but this type of copyright issue can easily extend into other fields.

>Number Two<

Come On Barbie, Let’s Go Discourse

I know you’re bored of the Barbie discourse but this isn’t so much a piece about the actual movie (it was written before it hit) but instead an actual piece about the original Barbie discourse and specifically about Barbie and her role in feminism as examined through the 1994 Simpson’s episode about the 1992 talking Barbie doll and Barbie’s role in femininity, womanhood, and consumerism:

The fight for a Better Barbie was born out of genuine concern for girls’ body image and self worth, but it also serves an unintentional purpose as free market research for Mattel.

>Number Three<

And Lord Knows You’re Tired

So much ink gets spilled about how China is or isn’t influencing American media, especially the American movie industry and that’s why I kind of love Accented Cinema‘s video about how his friends in China react to Fast and Furious and why it might be so popular there. The truth is that for most people around the world, the reasons to like these big blockbuster movies is the same as anywhere else: they’re tired and for a few minutes you can watch something that doesn’t ask anything of you. Movies like Fast and Furious aren’t even legible to American audiences as something that needs to be picked through and puzzled out or thought about after you leave the theater and the appeal of that seems to universal in a world filled with noise that asks us to work every moment we’re awake. Sorry that’s really depressing but also, maybe it’s true.

>Number Four<

Women Are Killing It (In Horror)

I find this piece to be in more conversation with some of the “give Ryan Gosling an Oscar” conversations I’ve had in the past couple weeks than anything else. Personally, as a woman, I have always enjoyed horror because in horror roles women get to act within a generally wider range of emotions often being able to explore more roles than in any other genre. Women can be gruesome, cruel, odd, and downright uncanny in a way that genres that have to hue closer to reality cannot and it is very sad that we don’t recognize these performances for their craft.

>Number Five<

You Do Not Want This

I’m tired of explaining that you don’t want COVID because every infection is a not-small chance at having possibly life-long complications. That having a chronic illness is terrible. That living a life with fatigue, brain fog, constant pain, or other symptoms is not just annoying or bothersome but will destroy your life. And I know you’re happy ignoring the 1000s of article from people who have Long COVID or this one about chronic fatigue but I don’t care because it’s still important and you do not want a chronic illness if you can do your best to prevent it.

That’s all for this month and hopefully I’ll see you back again next month with some more exciting and cool things!