Donkey Kong 64 turned my sister onto Communism

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Daikloktos

A few years ago my sister and I were reminiscing over a playthrough of Donkey Kong 64, a game I'd spent countless hours of our youth exploring in novel 3D but had been revealed by time as a plodding incoherent scavenger hunt - a position she had always held. I remarked to her "Imagine how bad it'd suck if you lived in the Soviet Union, stood in line three hours in the snow for this game, and this was your only game like it". She replied "I mean, I guess I'd fucking love it in that case. Hahahahah, wow, maybe communism has its advantages" That thought has stuck with me ever since - that a lack of overinundation retains your perspective to appreciate what you have. It's truly vast cosmic irony that a bunch of tree apes developed over millions of years to put in my hands this amusement - not even key to survival and perpetuation - of manipulating flashing lights to inhabit an entirely alien world. Against such a sweep does it matter that I could be fractionally more stimulated by Banjo-Kazooie? Only in that I know it.

Heated Gaming Moment

Refresh me on DK64. Are there bananas in that one?

Daikloktos

It has some deliciously coloured varieties

That first one actually exists in real life; it's even said to have the consistency and taste of vanilla ice cream

Platystemon

The banana defender has logged on.

That photo is 'shopped.

There is a real cultivar called 'Blue Java' that does produce blueish bananas. They can look like this:

They can also look only as blue as this:

Nearly all of the plants sold as 'Blue Java' in the United States are actually an unrelated cultivar because a wholesaler mixed them up and retailers pass on the bad identification. I think that variety, 'Namwah', is the one in the 'shopped photo. It's a fine banana in its own right. Neither of them taste at all like vanilla ice cream to my palate.

'Cavendish' itself may not be on the shelves forever. Up to a quarter of banana growers' expenses go toward controlling the black sigatoka fungus. Organic farmers spend even more money slashing and burning virgin rainforest to create a temporarily sterile environment in which they can grow an Organic® crop. Once the fungus inevitably moves in, they spray shiploads of fungicide everywhere, give up their organic certification on the property, and cut down more rainforest elsewhere to meet the demand for ~organic~ nanners.

Terrorist Fistbump

Where can I get the blue bananas

Venomous

Never mind that, give me the red bananas so I can be truly communist

eSports Chaebol

Eat bananas while you can. We grow them by clones and have aggressively artificially selected them so there's only like a dozen genomes left in the entire banana gene pool

Platystemon

There are over two thousand known varieties.

A university in Belgium hosts a collection of sixteen hundred.

Daikloktos

To continue to be totally out of my depth, exactly how far-off science fiction is genetic companies cracking fungus-resistant bananas? Is that the sort of thing that might conceivably happen in my lifetime?

It's wild how sterile and assembly-line uniform we've crafted this fruit. I guess you can look at the Dachshund for a wilder trip over generational husbandry but there's always something compelling about food mysticism, whether it be the channer obsessed with soybeans as why there's such trans visibility these days or the corporations hoping their new miracle berry goes over as hard as the one three years ago. Plus nobody's ever knocked over a government to keep the weiner dogs flowing.

World War Mammories

I would've got 100% on dk64, except there was a bug where if you didn't collect some banana medals in the final level before exiting the room, they became incorporeal and you could never collect them again. then like a year later I did it all again and was careful to get those medals. essentially I got 101% twice. the residual psychic trauma is a part of why I am so fucked up today. ama

Daikloktos

It's shameful to admit but I got stymied as a kid having to beat the classic arcade game to face K. Rool so I played it twice, extensively, as well. The first time my father ever showed anger towards me was when I screamed at the minigame where you herd the beavers into the hole that it was a cocksucker

Some Guy TT

the transformation of shitty inedible plants into staple crops is by far the greatest achievement of human civilization but none of our history books acknowledge this because if they did theyd have to admit both that some of our greatest improvements in quality of life were invented collectively and selfessly over countless generations centuries before capitalism and even worse that they were invented by non white people

like try to imagine what italian food would be like if some wacky native americans hadnt spent centuries trying to make an edible version of literal poison now reconcile that with the popular image of native americans being savage idiots who just ate whatever random shit they found lying around and were incapable of complex reasoning

Yeowch!!! My Balls!!!

gene-splicing to make something X-resistant is a thing we're doing right now, but the catch is you need to find a compound that
1. fucks up X
2. does not fuck up humans
3. is produced by a bacterium we know how to manipulate
4. and is being spliced into something we know how to manipulate

the list of 1 and 2 is pretty comprehensive at this point, 3 and 4 we're working on

the old fashioned way also works, but it's reeeeeal fuckin' slow

Stairmaster

Grapplejack

Chained Kongs were thought to be POWs of the Great Ape War, unlike Mankey Kong, who is known to be a traitor to the Kong Kause.

really queer Christmas

I got every single collectible and every single thing in that game... except for one golden banana - the banana from lanky rematching the bunny. I spent hours trying to get it and gave up. I never got it and now I wander the world hoping Bernie gets that hen.

Daikloktos

I think that race would be more infamous to this day had it not been overshadowed by this motherfucker a year later

Grapplejack

the rabbit is literally broken, you have to use a glitch to start early or you cannot win (you can also get lucky and have the rabbit get stuck on the enemy in the tunnel).

Platystemon

The idea that companies will develope fungusresistant bananas is fiction, but not for the reason you think.

First let's talk about banana genetics. The joke about bananas is that they haven't had sex for ten thousand years. There is a kernel (that's a pun) of truth to that. Edible cultivars are sterile, almost by definition.

'Gros Michel' could not be bred with 'Cavendish' to get something that's resistant to Panama disease.

However, the forebears of edible bananas were not sterile. We can go to the wild relatives of the domestic banana, breed within each species for fungus resistance, cross two species to get a seedless hybrid, and see how it performs. We're not modifying a known tasty variety to be resistant to fungus; we're pulling a slot machine handle and hoping to get something that tastes good and grows well.

Sexual reproduction is great, but there is another way. Clones can diverge through mutations. This can be accelerated with the atomic gardening that gave us the ruby red grapefruit (no, really), but it happens through the centuries regardless.

At around the time the (western) Roman Empire was a going concern, someone in the area of the African Great Lakes obtained a single banana plant. In the centuries since, bananas have flourished in the region. There are now some two hundred cultivars. The majority are picked green and prepared somewhat like a potato, steamed and mashed. There are at least a dozen cultivars that are specialised for beermaking, the banana equivalent of cider apples. Ugandans eat a quarter tonne of bananas per person per year.

Despite the great culinary diversity displayed by East African highland bananas (EAHB), they remain extremely close genetically. Threats to the West's favourite snack the Cavendish get all the press, but an epidemic in East African highland bananas could be this century's potato famine.

Scientists in Uganda are working on diversifying EAHBs by finding fertile mutants. And Uganda isn't the only nation reliant on bananas. Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, China, India, Indonesia, the United States, France (in Guadeloupe), Brazil, and Honduras also have breeding programmes.

So why did I say that companies weren't going to create fungusresistant bananas?

Simple: these are all national efforts.

Another way forward is genetic modification. This is faster than breeding and produces more consistent results... There is still a way to use modern biotech in a limited way by breeding bananas the old fashioned way, then looking at their genes and seeing how they turned out in important areas. This saves a lot of time over putting seeds in the ground and waiting till they mature.

Ugandans cannot afford to be so precious about their food. They're genetically modifying bananas to be a better source of vitamin A.

There is westernfunded opposition to GMOs, but it's tough to argue against "not going blind".

They are using genetic modification to protect the crop they need to survive.

The great threats to the West's favourite fruit are, in the final sense, ignorance and greed.

Ghost Leviathan

DK Isle is clearly a banana republic though

Dreylad

I really need to do some more research about all the crops government programs have produced, I know in Canada our federal experimental farms have developed a lot of cold-resistant cereal crops. I'm guessing that most of the shit we rely on to sustain ourselves were spun out of government research because capital would never be willing to take on that kind of risk, go figure

T-man

can you use a banana as a buttplug, this is kind of time sensitive so please answer soon

Xaris

anything can be with a little bit of engineering

Platystemon

A banana blossom has a more traditional shape than the fruit.

That may look like a flared base, but the "petals" (actually modified leaves) at the base are too flexible and would fold back readily.

You'd have to leave it attached to the banana bunch for safety.

Drunkboxer

his coconut gun
can fire in spurts

if he shoots you
it's gonna hurt

T-Man

Banana question: I've done some cursory looking into plant factories and other climate-independent growing methods. How can or should we grow bananas locally or in post-climate change hell world?

Platystemon

The good news is that bananas aren't too picky about climate.

As long as it doesn't get too cold, they're O.K.. They're not like some other plants that are overly sensitive to heat or require particular humidity or seasonal variation*. They'll just keep growing.

It's already possible to fruit bananas outdoors in places as strange as San Francisco. With climate change, bananas will grow a little farther north.

Climate destabilisation will of course cause a net loss of productivity, but many other crops will fare worse.

*There's an exception in fe'i bananas. Pacific islanders domesticated an entirely different species of banana than the one that spread everywhere else. Fe'i bananas grow well in the tropical highlands and nowhere else. Colonialism hit them hard and now climate change threatens. The banana belt will be pushed farther up the mountains, possibly disappearing entirely.

T-Man

Follow-up question: can you make exploding bananas like in SS13

Platystemon

We'll be stretching the words "exploding bananas", but yeah.

Gram for gram, dried bananas have three times the energy of TNT.

It is, however, more difficult to quickly release the energy in a banana.

What it would take to make an explosion is grinding dried bananas into a fine powder, suspended that powder in the air, and lighting it.

Such explosions have happened in facilities where flammable powders are present, including sugar, starch, coal, sawdust, and metals.

Thermobaric weapons are a packaged version of the same phenomenon, delivering a flammable powder to the target, dispersing it into the air, and igniting the cloud.

Drunkboxer

he has no style
he has no grace

this kong
has a funny face

Crane Fist

Bananas are bad. Trash tier fruit

T-man

typical tankie opinion ergo wrong

Crane Fist

Bananas are counter-revolutionary, while we attempt to bring humanity to it's noble destiny among the uncorrupted stars the banana-likers are content to squat among the apes, consuming their relics of our brutish forebears

Koishi Komeiji

Yeah! Bananas are nature's turds. Not even a fruit just a giant deformed bean.

Hodgepodge

If you read the thread you might have caught on that bananas are not, in fact, actually something monkies ate in trees. They're the result of humans cultivating nearly inedible plants. They're no more a natural thing than your phone or computer, and the only one content to squat in ignorance is you.

Gareth Gobulcoque

This thread is bananas.

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Thanks to Daikloktos for throwing their blue-banana ignorance onto the fire for this week's ceremonial sacrifice! Join the forums for just $10, and you too can reap the benefits of knowing exactly how wrong you are about everything in excruciating detail!

– Ian "BFM" Helm