#data fanvideo

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2023-10-09

Somehow bionicle is in this one

Listening: I looked at the date on my oven yesterday and it was 08-10 and I was like hey isn't that Bionicle Day. The answer is no, because it's Americans and Bionicle Day was the tenth of August. Anyway turns out that this year some fans got the original voice of Vakama to do a tribute video? And also Cryoshell dropped a new song.

Cryoshell is one of the funniest bands I know. They had little success until they got contracted in by an ad agency to do music for Bionicle, they did Creeping in My Soul for the Voya Nui arc in 2007 and ended up getting contracted in basically every year after that to whip up some music for Bionicle. They remain to this day extremely closely associated with the Bionicle fandom, like, you know, releasing their latest track on Bionicle day.

They are, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, and with all the love in my heart, the Evanescence we have at home. Bionicle had just saved Lego less than a decade earlier and the media effort around Bionicle was very well designed, which included making the perfect AMV soundtrack for 13 year olds to set their stop motion Bionicle fight scenes to. Of course I don't know anything about using a webcam and extremely dubious stop motion software to produce extensive Bionicle fanvideos. What are you talking about.

I am going to leave it here but there is so much to say about Cryoshell. Seriously just go look it up. Their music is actually very good if you like that particular symphonic metal alt rock style that was so emblematic of the 2000's.

Reading: Ended up on a research dive about small towns, because I now live in a country with a lot of small towns. Attempting to do and find a comparative anatomy of how small towns are administered around the world and what drives their success or failure. There is a lot of stuff from the Trump years when he apparently made some gestures towards the idea that people should just move out of doomed towns.

As always in the USA, housing affects everything, both in that homeownership ties people to their towns and that moving to a new city requires paying often prohibitively expensive rents. There are a lot of conservative blogs taking on this question and doing some dubious interpretations of mostly good data.

I am teasing at the thread of "limits of local government in small towns" which seems to be leading somewhere but it's still not well supported. There's a lot of factors.

Watching: the Loading Ready Run 20th Anniversary Subathon is on until this Friday. Since I was mostly watching during American night I caught primarily their watchalong of old videos, which is cute but not exactly that novel. I do like LRR.

Making: More 3D printing, trying to get the hang of modelling off a photo to make a nozzle adapter for my vacuum cleaner. Also made a little stand for my temperature and humidity sensor so I can see it when I'm sitting down or standing up more easily.

Playing: Beat Breath of the Wild finally. It was so long.

The final fight was kind of anticlimactic, between the assists you get from the divine beasts and all your power-ups I feel like I didn't have to puzzle it out as much as I did for some of the blight Ganon fights. I have kind of accepted that I just don't like the endings of most video games.

I did first go around and do the Champions' Ballad DLC quest because I stumbled into it, it's a nice set of little challenges plus some vignettes of the champions to help characterize them some more. I kind of wish you could walk around the world post-endgame and like, talk to some of the people you've met and see what they have to say. Eh.

Tools and Equipment: I have been storing my butter at room temperature the past few weeks, because it makes it much easier to spread. Modern butter is both very high fat and pasteurized so it won't go off for well over a week even if you just left it out, but the main concern is rancidity, which can happen quite quickly.

My Pro Tip is that you don't have to store the whole damn block. Euro butter is 250g blocks and I cut that into four ~60g cubes that I keep in a sealed plastic container in the cupboard one at a time. Just top it up as you go. I think American sticks are like 100g so you could cut it in half. South African butter usually comes in 500g so you'd have to cut that in like eighths.

#last monday of the week #Youtube #bionicle