In the acceptance phase of the Five Stages of Realizing I Need To Scale Up My Con Presence.
The last time I felt this way was when I had to accept I was finished with packing up boxes of books and shipping them UPS/as carry-on; it was time for pallets and teamsters. And that worked out okay, so.
If your game/book/comic/movie set in the 1990s does not feature those goddamn T-shirts that had collar-to-hem pictures of like, Looney Tunes characters, except in baggy jeans and ball jerseys and Air Jordans and whatever?
It is fake. You are fake.
This is a thing I basically never see in mainstream media set in the 90s, because nobody feels like being sued. But it was a thing. It was everywhere. It was absolutely inescapable.
I cannot stress enough that this was considered extremely cool and desirable
All my pals (and listeners to the @dirtyoldladies podcast) know I have a super-duper hate-on for time travel in fiction.
When asked why, I usually say something like "OK, so I sprint out of the time machine, run to my childhood home, and kill my 5-year-old self. SOLVE FOR THAT."
Friend: "...But you didn't."
Me: "No, I did. I did it. Explain that."
F: "You wouldn't be here if you did!"
Me: "No, I'm doing it. I'm dedicating my life to it. I will not stop until I do."
And so and and so on, ad nauseam.
Little did I realize:
- There was actually a movie where that's basically the plot
- It's exactly as full-of-holes as I'd expect, and
- YMS did a WAY better job explaining all the crap I hate about time travel in film than I ever could.
Th Egyptians who built the pyramids were proud to be part of the project. They gave their work gangs charismatic nicknames (like "Drunkards of Menkaure") and wrote secret graffiti on the blocks they put in place. They brought their families with them during building season.
And this isn't theoretical. It's factual. People died on-site during construction, and there are graveyards for the workers and their families within sight of the Great Pyramids. Tomb robbers ignored them, and so a lot have been found intact.
I grew up in the US state of Maryland, which (for folks who don't know) features a good chunk of the Chesapeake Bay. It's a big part of Maryland identity.
It's weird to be reading about all the islands sinking into it due to climate change.
Not in the future. Right now.
(No, it's not ELUSIVELY due to climate change, but climate change isn't helping.)
Holland Island, for example. it used to look like this.
And then it started sinking, and was abandoned.
Some residents actually disassembled their houses and took them with them to the mainland, but at least one household didn't.
It's been a tourist attraction for years. or WAS, anyway. It finally fell into the sea, semi-recently.