Off the prompt "cuddles."

I want to make another booze vid and complete that trilogy. I'm not sure where I'm going with it yet, though, because the sequence has been "we drink to get through the day" (Industrial Strength Tranquilizer), "my drinking has reached problematic levels" (I Drink Alone), so in terms of progression the third vid in the trilogy should be something like "I was on the wagon but I've fallen off again" or possibly "I'll just have one more but I can quit anytime." So I need a song on that theme and a fandom to attach it to. I'm avoiding thinking about the fandom that suggested itself last night by uh related incident below. Also I'm telling myself not to use "I'll just have one beer then I'll be right home" because it's by the Austin Lounge Lizards and I already used them for Industrial Strength Tranquilizer.

(Tony Stark had a conversation with me about my drinking last night, which was deeply disturbing and I think I hurt his feelings when I announced I wanted Steve instead. I mean, let's start with my Steve is already an independent personality in my head and I hadn't realized Tony was and I sort of hope he goes back to minding his own business because jfc. But also, he has an atypical perspective on drinking so I do not know how I feel about the advice he gave me.)(The two pieces of advice were: drinking had not made me feel better, so that was empirically a bad reason to have been drinking; and drinking was not why I felt bad in the first place, so I shouldn't beat myself up about it.)

The other trilogy I'm playing around with is uh, the one I hadn't realized wanted to be a trilogy. And I only have two parts of it bunnied. It's the dystopian trilogy; the final part would be the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel (there is paradise beyond the city walls) vid to "Woodstock." Either the first or second part would be "2000 light years from home," (I'm thinking first, it's the journey from here to the depths intro?) about when space exploration is mind-bending and breaking instead of exciting: like, Solaris, 2001, ha Planet of the Apes would fit on this list, Sunshine *might*, Alien, gosh, even Pitch Black, Event Horizon, Forbidden Planet, maybe Mission to Mars (which, like Solaris, felt very 2001 to me, though it's worth noting Solaris the novel predates 2001, something I didn't realize when watching the 2002 film), possibly parts of Farscape, maybe a smidgeon of the pilots in Dune. I'm still pulling this concept together; it's like, space horror, but a specific corner of space horror that overlaps with some other things? And then I have no idea what the song or theme of the middle vid should be; logically it would be a "when things have gotten as bad as they can possibly get" piece, but I need a specific genre pull that resonates with me a certain way. Even if it looks amorphous to outsiders. I'm sort of considering declaring "Dancer," the Tron/women refusing to be objects vid bunny, to be the middle one, but there's ways it doesn't fit (The Killers are not 60s psychedelic rock; it's not a lowest of low concept, it's a fighting back concept). On the other hand, it's in a angry feminist critique continuum with She Walks, to which the Woodstock vid was originally going to be a the spiritual successor.

Actually, I've just had an idea for the specific genre/trope of the third one (thought process: was contemplating David Bowie's song about 2001, then David Bowie in the Man Who Fell to Earth): the dystopic aspects of society on Earth, paranoia and distrust that when well-meaning aliens end up here, it goes badly for them or people who help them (like, the turn around FLIP from the outgoing journey in 2000 Light Years). Still need a song, but my brain is starting to pile up films: ET, god the whole hazmat suit sequence in ET, Man Who Fell to Earth, District 9, The Day the Earth Stood Still, things like K-Pax and 12 Monkeys and Martian Child might be relevant, Starman (ha, I was trying to figure out why my mother like that one, she's not usually a scifi fan, but Jeff Bridges really), Flight of the Navigator, parts of Close Encounters. I might even start putting in specific interpretations of the Frankenstein mythology, where the "monster" is justified and the villagers have pitchforks (The Island?). No idea what song I would be using for the detained/lab rat/distrust. Well, I know what ~5 years of material I need to be listening to.

Apparently some TV writers need this explanation, and maybe it will magically reach them if I post it here.

A DNA TRIPLE HELIX MAKES NO SENSE.

Right, look, if you are positing a completely alien life form from another planet whose genetic inheritance is not recorded in deoxyribonucleic acid but in some other chemical structure, then sure, run with it, they have triple helices of whatever the hell that chemical is. They also most definitely cannot have babies with humans, do you hear me, really not, but okay, fine, that's a losing battle, whatever, Liam Kincaid.

Let us return to the completely absurd and impossible notion of TRIPLE-STRANDED DNA.

Maybe some basic background on what DNA actually is would help? See, okay, you probably know that there's four bases of DNA that chain together to make the strands, and everyone calls them T, A, C, and G. (They have full names but seriously, even geneticists call them T, A, C, and G, so it's sort of a waste of time or else proof of giant dorkery to know what they are.) What you may not realize is that this is two pairs of complementary bases. T and A bond together, and so do C and G. This means that if on one side of the double helix there is a T base, on the other side there is always an A base. If there is a C base on one side, on the other side there is always a G.

So imagine you have a piece of a strand which says:

TACGCGTAGCCCTTTA

The strand that goes with it to form a double helix HAS to say:

ATGCGCATCGGGAAAT

It cannot say anything else. They have to match. If they don't match, they don't connect. They don't form a double helix.

This is the really key thing I am trying to get at: the two strands of DNA in a double helix do not contain different information. They contain mirror images of the same information. It's like one side is ROT13 of the other side, except there's only four letters in the DNA alphabet, so it's more like ROT2. Why the redundancy? Because the bases have to be reactive enough to chemically copy when the strand is unzipped, but there needs to be some way to put them away and make them stop reacting when it's not time to copy them, and just slapping a mirror version on makes a stable storage form.

Therefore adding a third strand to a DNA helix--in the first place, what the fuck does it hook onto, the complementary bases are already hooked to each other, and in the second place, it wouldn't add new information, because strands just--don't. All the bases in the third strand would have to complement the bases in the first two strands, which means: same goddamn information.

If you are adding genetic material to an existing multi-celled Earth life form as we know them, just splice sequences of regular double helices into existing double helices (aka, either make the strands longer or replace segments of the strands). If it makes you feel really special, add a chromosome or two (be aware: having extra chromosomes is associated with some odd syndromes). Don't add a third strand of DNA to the double helices, it is MEANINGLESS.

If you are imagining a something superspecial and different from existing multi-celled Earth life forms as we know them, and you want, say, more data compressed into less length of strand, or compress more data into the same length of strand (I'm looking at you, Fifth Element), what you would do is add more base pairs. Why? Think binary versus base 10. What's 36 in binary? 100100. Look at how many more digits you need to convey the same concept, because you only have two options to choose from. But if you have ten options, you only need to use two digits, because you're conveying more information per digit. The more base pairs are available to encode information, the more compactly the information can be encoded. This is something I want to see in my scifi, people. The weird alien species with more efficient DNA whose base pairs are TACGEFLM or something. I would even be willing to buy, for the sake of the narrative, the shocking revelation that so-and-so-supposedly-human has a handful of E's and F's, and even some L's and M's in their DNA and so is SECRETLY PART ALIEN.

But not more strands. Just don't. More strands is more copies. More strands is redundancy. More strands is NOT more information. It is not. And when you say it is, in my head I am converting all of your technobabble to "Magic magic, magic magic, magic magic. Sorcery, what ho!"

Glad to get that off my chest.

Is this one of those things where I don't know I'm swimming in water because I was raised by a geneticist?