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2026 March 16: 22:28
Well, THERE'S 42 minutes of my life I'm never getting back. Star Trek TNG 218-"Up the Long Ladder" is a complete waste of time. It's pretty fucking racist against Irish, portraying them as undereducated, unsophisticated backcountry oafs who take up space and disrupt the activities of "civilised" people. I haven't seen such blatant racism from TNG since "Code of Honour" or "A Private Little War" on TOS. I'm going to spoil the ending so you don't have to watch it. Basically, the "civilised" colony needs to absorb the stereotypal Irish colony in order to survive, EXACTLY like what the British did when they invaded Ireland. The Mariposans (British) decided they needed to take advantage of the Briongloidi (Irish) women in order that they can repopulate their colony, thus assimilating the Briongloidi into their civilisation, destroying the (albeit stereotypal) culture that once existed. Unknowingly, they also created aggression against sex-repulsed people, painting sex-revulsion as something terrible that would lead you to make unethical decisions. "Unknowingly", as though sex-repulsed people haven't existed throughout time, but I guess it wasn't as culturally prevalent back in the late 1980s.

The nail in the coffin was that the Enterprise senior staff made the decision to combine the two colonies. So, once again, you have the imperialist mask slip away from the "benevolent" Federation. Picard tells the Mariposan sovereign that he's being a bigot, but like. PLAINLY he values the existence of the technologically-advanced culture more than the agrarian one. The only saving grace to this episode was Barrie Ingham's character acting... but, he seems a little too good at playing an Irish stereotype, so, maybe that doesn't matter as much I thought it did. I mean, after all, Christopher Collins was really good at playing a deceitful, power-hungry guy with a developmental disability in the previous episode. You do what you have to for a paycheque, I understand that. But my particular beef is with the screenwriters (Melinda Snodgrass and Maurice Hurley), the executive producer (Rick Berman and Gene Roddenberry), and the studio executive (Brandon Tartikoff) for allowing it on the air in the first place.

It made Riza (whose family is Irish) so uncomfortable, they had to leave the room. Honestly, I don't blame them at all. Absolutely fuck this episode. If I was still doing episodic videologs, I would definitely give this episode a Sucks rating.

2026 March 12: 07:53
I decided to install all the converted Sims Online content into The Sims 1 yesterday and, idk. I feel like all I did was just hopelessly complicate shit. It takes me 3 days to scroll through all my skins and heads now, and a lot of them don't even look very good. I mean, for a start, whose idea was it to put flayed monstrosities into The Sims Online? I deleted a lot of the shit i was never going to use, but still. I don't know how I ever had such a huge CC collection back on Windows Me, but i did. I had something like 5000 skins and at least 800 objects back then. The difference between back then and now however is that I just installed stuff sight unseen, whereas I was downloading things based on how cool they looked to my 10-13yo brain. The main problem with the Sims Archive Project is that all the CC has been separated from its showcases, so you can't see what you're using until it's actually in the game. Spending an afternoon at your mum's office with a box of diskettes, downloading shit for TS1 from fansites was an experience. The Internet Archive is a public datahoard. I mean dont get me wrong, I'm glad the Sims Archive Project exists, but it isn't set up for anything but batch data retrieval. There's nothing to spark your imagination.

2026 March 9: 17:22
This business with Myrient shutting down and my mad dash to grab as much of the hoard as I can before the time expires is reminding me a lot of what I did with Cohost back in 2024. Except there, I waited until basically the last possible moment to get stuff, so I overlooked a lot in order to get it in under the wire. 'Cos, like, I had from read-only in October 2024 until server shutdown on 31 December to archive it, and I didn't. I waited until December to start my archiving process. With Myrient, its shutdown was announced only 30 days before. It was already the last minute by the time I learnt about it. Riza has offered to let me use their SSD, but these download speeds suck. I'm sorry, I kept meaning to download the rest of the Gamecube ISOs but I just didn't have enough physical storage until like last month. I guess I'll just deal with having a fragmentary GCN datahoard.

2026 March 4: 20:48
for some reason, i've really been missing Sim Town lately. the available streamed game on the internet archive is just some fuckass demo from 1994 that doesnt even fucking work (like, how dumb do you have to be? the EXE is CALLED "STDEMO.EXE". what do you think "DEMO" even means?). riza seems pretty confident they can get it running on dosbox on endeavouros, so technically i could probably do the same on win7. basically you just need to turn dosbox into a win3.1 vm and install sim town on it. i was just having trouble finding a win3.1 iso and i just forgot when firefox killed v115-ESR.

2026 March 4: 20:44
Let's get something in here so I can archive the february microblog, right. not that i wrote much in february but like. it's not february anymore. it has to go someplace else.