The Hotdog Laserhouse

Kinda felt like you had to, since a lot of magazines were hyping that rivalry up.

In isolation, I never really felt it otherwise, though. They existed as their own things.

I had an NES, my brother got a Genesis. He moved out, I wanted a Genesis, I got a SNES. I was happy with the SNES. I still wanted a Genesis. Two years later, I finally got a Genesis, and I was happy with both.

I would have never even really compared Mario and Sonic for myself unless marketing and advertising put that in my head.

I don’t think she’s popular enough for Sega corporate to buy into it. Like, Blaze is popular, but she’s not Shadow the Hedgehog popular, you know?

At this point probably Sonic Unleashed. The fact it’s kind of an underdog (some people really hate it) kind of fuels a feeling of protectiveness I have over it. It tried, dang it, and it paved the road for a lot of things. I love it and even its rough edges, too. And it has a lot of them.

It’d take a heck of a Sonic game to dethrone this.

I only saw it once and I sort of had the “That’s it?” reaction I sometimes get. It’s easy for me to get unrealistic expectations when something gets really hyped up, and I get let down a lot. I’m pretty sensitive to that kind of stuff, which is part of the reason I sometimes keep my distance from very popular things until the heat on them dies down.

I’m sure it’s a good movie. I’ve actually been feeling the itch to try watching it again.

blazehedgehog:

I don’t think it’s that black and white. I think in certain arenas, media literacy has gotten significantly better! With the internet at our fingertips, sharing and discussing analysis of media is easier and more accessible than ever before.

I mean, at the height of the VHS tape boom, where everybody was making and selling video shows, did we have hours-long video essays deconstructing media? Were zines these tome-length books where multiple people wrote 20+ pages on their favorite movies? Probably not!

More people are having more in-depth conversations about entertainment than ever before! There are whole entire TV talk shows now that air after the show in question to break down and analyze what’s happened that week.

But that’s only for people who want to engage in that kind of depth. On the other side of the coin, we have a society more and more and more obsessed with shorter forms of entertainment. Movies that were considered “timeless classics” are now derided for being too slow, as editing in modern movies gets faster, and faster, and faster, and faster. Services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ are leaning in to the idea that movies and TV are disposable. They aren’t meant to be these monolithic events or pieces of art you proudly display on a shelf, they’re something you watch once and forget about in two weeks.

They are pure, thoroughbred pop culture, but they have fans who are increasingly upset when they aren’t held to the same level as things with real cultural depth and weight to them. That speaks to something for how well these things are hiding just how fluffy they really are, thanks to decades of serialization that makes these movies seem to be more grand in scope than they are individually.

But that’s just the effect of the internet overall. At some point you expect the concept of “mainstream” to evaporate entirely as people stop gathering under big, general population tent-poles and all spread out into their own niches and sub-communities. There’s a little bit of everything for everyone, nowadays. We don’t need titanic, catch-all media when we can have smaller, more frequent, and more focused material, personalized to a specific subset of people.

If you think media literacy is getting worse, that’s just because the bar is raising in other places to make you notice where other people haven’t caught up yet (or don’t care about catching up at all).

But it’s less that they’re getting worse and more that you’re getting better.

I’ve thought about this particular post on and off ever since I wrote it, and I even got a follow-up ask responding to it that I never did anything with:

I’ve seen a greater push over the last year and a half, talking about how Youtube essay culture is making media literacy worse because it’s a bunch of people who don’t understand the rules, roles or boundaries of criticism or analysis.

In other words, you have a lot of ignorant people making outright stupid claims, claims that hurt legitimate academia, because they are being made by people who aren’t very media literate, aren’t asking the right questions, and are coming to the wrong conclusions.

And its spreading like wildfire, in particular because we’re kind of in a golden era of video essays, because Youtube rewards view length more than view count. People are so hungry to make their own video essays they are outright plagiarizing each other.

To make it even more simple: it means dumb people are dragging the general intelligence level of humanity down by putting their stupidity out into the world.

And this topic popped into my head again tonight, and it finally came to a point I think is worth saying: Youtube did not invent this trend. The internet did not invent this trend. Fanzines date back to at least the 1970’s, newsletters have always been a thing, local newspaper opinion columns have always been a thing.

People have always had ways to misinterpret media around them, and spread that misinterpretation around as fact. The internet just made that easier to access. But, like I infer in the original post, it’s easier to access resources to broaden your media literacy and criticism skills in good ways, too. Everything is easier to find, good and bad.

I think it’s fair to say there’s an ebb and flow to things. But Youtube did not invent stupid people, or bad criticism. And our current state of anti-intellectualism did not start and does not end with media literacy woes.

I choose to focus on the positives and live my life to the best of my own ability.

Not entirely. I understand if you wanted Banjo 3, it seems like a slap in the face. But I didn’t really “get into” Banjo-Kazooie until well after I’d played Nuts & Bolts. BK is a great game, and I used it as an outlet for stress while I packed up to move out of Colorado in 2017. I got 101% completion even though I wasn’t really intending to do that.

Nuts & Bolts is a very creative game with an incredible hook that unfortunately has kind of a weird art style and it really runs out of steam in the last third. I never finished Nuts & Bolts because once I got to Terrarium of Terror I found the environment too difficult and confusing to navigate and abandoned ship.

Nuts & Bolts is maybe not a great game, but it has some great parts. And that’s good enough, I think.

Some observations:

1. It’s weird how the moment we crossed the border it instantly turned into a pine forest. Like there were almost no trees in Wyoming and then the instant you hit the “Welcome to Colorado!” sign up in the mountains, it’s pines all over everything, everywhere. Like somebody flipped a switch.
   
2. When I moved to Nevada, I tried to convince myself it wasn’t all that different from the way Colorado looked. That’s a lie. Nevada, Utah and Wyoming are difficult to distinguish from each other. I mean I guess it’s fall so if Wyoming has more grass than the desert states I wouldn’t really know, but outside of the salt flats in Utah it was all mountains and sagebrush… until we got to Colorado. There was a definite, clear mood change in the landscape when we got far enough out of the rockies.
   
3. …and as we rolled through Fort Collins, I got a little misty-eyed. The feeling of missing this place was a little overwhelming. Even, just, looking at shitty little strip malls with bait shops and dispensaries. As we came out of Fort Collins, the road went through a little glen and we were surrounded by falling leaves and grass and farmland everywhere. The feeling it evoked in me is difficult to describe.

I tried to shoot a bunch of video and I took a lot of photos both with my phone and my nice camera so I want to try stitching something together. Unfortunately we didn’t hit a lot of touristy stuff and I was bad at being ready for what little was interesting (the highway we took was almost universally 75-80mph) so I dunno if that’ll actually happen or not. I’m sure I can ramble something together, though.

Mike Pollock as Eggman was pretty bad early on. He had to find his Eggman over time. He was a lot deeper and more growly originally, and he was doing an absolutely awful shrill “OHOHOHO” laugh.

Jason Griffith was really bad at first, too. He was kind of doing a bad impression of Ryan Drummond’s Sonic Adventure voice. By Sonic 06 or maybe Sonic Unleashed, he had it more dialed in.