[Or: “Captain Jean-Loop Picard”]

Someone edited a loop of the ambient background sound of the Enterprise-D engines idling. A 24-hour long loop.

Might be good white noise for sleeping.

Teens react to 90s internet –

I’m kinda fond of the 90s internet. Most likely some misplaced nostalgia, I’m sure, but it could also be that Night Sky Radio started streaming online in 1995.* This brings back memories of what the station was like back in those days. Have a look for yourself at the 90s version of Night Sky Radio.

I really miss Geocities. Specifically, the way it was before Yahoo bought it. It had a great theme and actually kinda felt like travelling through different neighborhoods.

* After a, well, let’s call it a spirited discussion with the FCC regarding regular broadcast transmissions. The staff attorneys tell me I can’t say anything further on it.

Bugs calls a square-dance tune… [and] redefines the courtship ritual of the dance — a means of channeling and controlling sexual energy — into a fiercely homoerotic ballet.

A Slate article claiming that “Looney Tunes” cartoons were far more brutal than we remember them. James Lileks at National Review concedes the issue, upon the condition that “you’ve had your sense of humor surgically removed, and replaced with an oversized gland that produces chemicals responsible for compulsive frowning.”

What Slate completely missed, and Lileks zeroes in on, is that apparently progressives ran rampant at Warner Brothers studios.  Lileks continues, pointing out that the same episode, “Duck! Rabbit, Duck!”

…contains messages that should hearten the heart of a Slate writer, for it contains a very modern message about identity. As you may recall, the plot concerns Fudd’s confusion over which season it is: Wabbit, or Duck? The signage is confusing. Daffy self-identifies as a duck, and this being the ’40s, he is locked in a fixed identity, a product of a culture that says if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it is a duck. But as we now know, “species” is as fluid as any other form of identity.

And that’s something Bugs reveals in a very subversive sequence. Daffy uses colloquial expressions to describe his mood, noting that he feels like a goat. Whereupon Bugs produces a sign that says it is Goat Season. Fudd unloads accordingly. It may look like violence. But it’s really acceptance. If Daffy says he is a goat then he is a goat. He may suffer the consequences, but Fudd has affirmed his statement of identity. Over the course of the cartoon Daffy identifies with various species, and in each instance Bugs has an appropriate placard to nudge Fudd toward accepting the fluid spectrum on which Daffy may choose to locate himself.

Half a century before Facebook’s 57 genders, Warner Brothers was laying the groundwork.

Read the entire piece, and wonder, “How many times did Bugs do himself up in drag again…?”

Speaking of groundwork…. WB cartoons clearly revealed their pseudo-intellectual worldview and love of scientific sounding formulas over empirical reality throughout the “Foghorn Leghorn” cartoons, where the title character was often shown up by the runty, bespectacled Egghead Jr. –