bros

Colossal Biosciences is planning to bring back the giant moa, a 3m (10 foot) tall flightless bird that went extinct around 600 years ago, shortly after humans arrived in New Zealand. Peter Jackson is one of the major investors. Considering the difficulties the Australians had when dealing with emus, which are only 2/3 the size of the great moa, they really need to consider that there was probably very good reason that the early New Zealanders wiped them out.

I love YouTube Music — it's a great streaming system and gives me access to music that I could only have dreamed of when I was younger. But there's one thing about it — a small thing really, but still big enough that it bothers me: When you have a playlist, it should be a trivial thing for the software to add up the running times of all the songs in the playlist and give you a runtime for the playlist, and this works for shorter playlists, but once a playlist reaches 5 hours or more in length, the program gets lazy and anything over 5 hours is either "5+ hours" or "5 hours [XX] minutes," where [XX] isn't the actual number of minutes past 5 hours, instead the point after 5 hours where the software got lazy and decided to stop adding. Not a deal killer, not even that big of a deal, really, but it's annoying.

Two days ago, Twice and Blackpink both had comebacks on the same day: Twice's "This is for" and Blackpink's "뛰어(JUMP)" (links go to the videos, so as not to spam your feed with two embedded videos).

Blackpink's song is a 1-song single, per YG's strategy of keeping Blinks starved for new music from Blackpink, while Twice's song is part of a 14-song album, keeping with JYP's strategy of giving Once as much music as they could possibly want from Twice. I prefer the JYP strategy — at first I was a bigger fan of Blackpink than of Twice, but eventually I got tired of waiting for new songs from Blackpink.

Two interesting things I noticed:

• Twice Jeongyeon has had difficulty meeting the ridiculous weight standards imposed on K-pop idols (i.e. still not fat by any measure), so in recent comebacks Twice's stylists have started dressing everyone but Jeongyeon in midriff-baring tops. I don't know if this was done at the company's request or at Jeongyeon's, but they did it again this time.
• Blackpink's song actually includes the English lyric "Are you not entertained?"

I've got an idea about the plotting one of my fics, but I'm not sure if the idea I've got right now is the right thing. So. . . if any of you have read my fic "Turning of the Year" — or if you feel like reading it right now — and you'd like to give your input on the future course of the story (at the risk of possibly getting spoiled), send me a message.