The Wikipedia birthday graphic!!!!!!!

It's on the desktop version only, I think.

Crank theory of the morning:

On Unwanted Sequels and Reboots

I won't be the first to point out the trend of movies and shows getting unnecessary and unasked for sequels and reboots. It's been widely discussed as a phenomenon, and is usually explained with the simple logic of "studios want safe IPs, most don't want to take serious risks."

That's true, yeah. But there's another layer to unpack there, which is the increased frequency with which they come out. It doesn't take a genius to realize that working with an already popular franchise is going to make more money. It's absurd to think this thought is new, when it's so seemingly obvious. Yet, while sequels and reboots have always existed, they seem unusually prominent now. Why?

Let's consider reboots and sequels as part of a wider genre of media revival, a genre that also includes adaptations. When we include adaptations as part of this tradition, we see that this revival tendency has been prominent for basically all of film history, it's just the things being revived now are no longer books or plays, but just other movies and TV shows.

This, in my mind, is incredibly telling as to why the reboot apocalypse is upon us: it's not that franchise revival is new, but rather that we increasingly live in a world where non-televised media isn't widely consumed. The endless reboots is a factor of our increasingly post-reading society, one in which book adaptations are far less guaranteed to secure an audience.

Good idea: Plastic that dissolves in saltwater

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110174

Researchers at Japan's RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have developed a plant-based plastic that could be a real game-changer for ocean pollution. The material is made primarily from carboxymethyl cellulose, a commercially available wood-pulp derivative that's already FDA-approved and biodegradable.
What makes it special is that it dissolves completely in saltwater within just a few hours, leaving zero microplastics behind, something most so-called "biodegradable" plastics can't actually do.
The team solved an early brittleness problem by adding choline chloride, another FDA-approved food additive, which lets them fine-tune the flexibility, from hard and glass-like all the way to stretchy enough to extend 130% of its original length.
It can even be made into a strong, thin film just 0.07 mm thick. To keep it from falling apart when you don't want it to, a thin surface coating can protect it from unintentional decomposition.
The best part is that all the ingredients are common, inexpensive, and safe, which means this plastic could realistically move from the lab to everyday use.
Given that nature produces about a trillion tons of cellulose annually, the raw material certainly isn't in short supply...

#plastic #pollution #ocean #environment

https://ieji.de/@MinistryOfGoodIdeas/116244167302504366

If you want to tackle systemic oppressions, if you want society to change, you have to participate in building it. You have to act.

My Neocities website is in a place I like now :)

There's a few things I wanna fix and change eventually, but the essence is there