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Homeschooled? Went to a Montessori grade school and then homeschooled during her core Magical Girl career?

Wait a minute. That was Aika's first ever pop quiz? Did she not go to school at all before the events of the piolot?

👁️👁️

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Jem and the Holograms were magical girls of a sort before Sailor Moon busted the genre open.

Do ypu know of other examples of western Magical Girls? I was under the impression it was mainly a Japanese genre.

there’s a few! winx, w.i.t.c.h. and lolirock are some notable examples!! i grew up with winx personally and had the dolls haha

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MSNBC is all over this point. How much longer that will be true with their new President, who can say....

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Mostly in emacs in a login account I've had on a friends Linux box since the 1990s, but I also do some in GDocs (especially if they're going to be pasted into AO3 rather than posted to Usenet, but also sometimes if I'm doing a drabble or other wordcount-is-important thing).

Got called a weirdo irl for the way I write my fics sooo

I am the “writes in document tabs” if anyone’s wondering

[dvandom]

Sounds like someone may have a taxonomy kink.

As someone who is currently in library science school and taking classes on metadata and classification and why and how we categorize the kink taxonomy discussion is FACINATING

Organizational and classification systems are endless fractal nightmares… I love them so much <3

In a better world there would be a specific-ass tag for every specific-ass kink (I love and hate you controlled vocabulary) but also a truly brilliant combined hierarchical and non hierarchical relationship system for organizing and accessing the porn tags. The getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus but horny and not annoying

A man can dream… a man can dream.

i think even the most granular taxonomical system would not save us from the inevitability of semantic drift

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And deleting the program isn't "punishment" for the program, it's "destroying evidence."

Internal IBM document, 1979 (via Fabricio Teixeira)

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So, casting for Gideon Nav?

ILONA MAHER as LUISA MADRIGAL

Dancing With The Stars (33x06)

[dvandom]

Yeah, definitely Early Monkey behavior. By the time of the White Bone Demon encounter, though, the answer was "fuck off to Fruit and Flower Mountain." Yeah, the headband stayed on, but he was Dismissed From Service, and just went home. Got real passive-aggressive about it, too.

If sun wukong managed to get the golden fillet off his head during the journey what would happen in your opinion? Like, would he immediately fuck off back to flower fruit mountain, go on a murderous rampage with his newfound freedom or would there be a touching moment between the group where he choses to stay on the journey (showing his growth as a character and how he choses to better himself without having be forced to do so),

Also how would the rest of the group react? I imagine they’re all probably terrified cause what if he choses to get vengeance for being forced into a journey and punished for things he doesn’t care about ect

I suppose the answer to this does all rely on WHEN that happens... Wukong does eventually become a better person, or.. monkey. But me personally, I do greatly prefer dealing in "early Monkey" hehe.

the kind of Wukong i love is the one that is perfectly happy being very manipulative, lulling Tripitaka into a false sense of security just so he can escape and be free to be as dangerous and crazy as he wants.

The rest of the group? You bet Pigsy and Sandy would see straight through him. The only thing keeping everyone safe at that point is Wukong keeping that headband on. But Tripitaka, bless this poor priest's heart, is still too young and naive- far too trusting.

Far

far

FAR too trusting

But fortunately this may be the only kind of trick Wukong can play once. Tripitaka may be trusting, but stupid? far from it

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For about a third of this country, kept ignorant by their own preference or by structural intent on the part of the oligarchy, the first sign of war will be when they're conscripted...if they're lucky. If unlucky, it will be when the bombs start falling.

So this was a pre-planned (and likely paid for by the Kremlin) show: to invite Zelenskyy, scold him like a kindergartener in front of the press, present him with an unreasonable "deal" - an ultimatum - knowing full well he will refuse it (as anyone in this position would). And then tell the world: "Look, our mighty Orange King could've ended this horrible war in a day, but this poorly-dressed, warmongering, ungrateful twat just doesn't want peace! It's not our fault, we did what we could!"

The show is so cheap, so transparent, yet still effective for so many brainless people.

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If someone has a birth defect that leaves them with just one foot, they don't get crap about how wearing a prosthetic foot isn't the Real You.

If someone has bad vision, no one gives them a hard time about how wearing glasses or contacts is a case of them Not Seeing The World Authentically.

Mind-Body dualism means people assume that mental problems CAN'T be physical problems, and any physical fixes are somehow Fake.

90s movies: Psychopharmacology is as good as a lobotomy. If you take pills to treat your mental illness it will literally murder your imaginary friends and you will become a boring, lotus-eating conformist drone.

Me after taking my meds: drives the scenic route home to see if there are any geese on the pond and does a little dance in line at the grocery store and comes home to throw everything​ in my fridge into a stew pot because I can finally taste food again while singing songs at my birds in which I replace all the instances of "she" with "Cheese" and doing a Dolly Parton impression on the phone to my sister

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Classes

Fighter: Angonoka Tortoise

Barbarian: Alligator Snapping Turtle

Paladin: Ornate Box Turtle

Thief: Pancake Tortoise

Ranger: Eastern Long-Necked Turtle

Bard: Red Eared Slider

Wizard: Galapagos Tortoise

Sorcerer: Mata Mata

Warlock: Spiny Turtle

Cleric: Smooth Softshell Turtle

Edit: Almost forgot

Monk: Russian Tortoise

Druid: Cagle’s Map Turtle

[dvandom]

Bruce-ster's Billions.

Plot armor but it’s Bruce Wayne’s wealth.

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

But by GOD is he trying.

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Thing is, Cinderella was a single story. Journey to the West was an epic. There were 81 adventures of the traveling group, plus the prologue in which Sun Wukong comes into his power and engages in some Havoc in Heaven.

A better equivalent would be the whole Arthurian cycle (which also gave the Knights various superpowers). Except the main existing arc (much cleaned up and altered) would have Arthur training in Purgatory for a year before being brought back to life by the successful Grail Quest, at which point he kicks Mordred's ass (after Mordred transforms into a poisonous serpentman, of course). And then it keeps going, with a combination of bringing in characters cut from the first arc or entirely new ones.

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This whole thread is doomed.

dr who’s on first, doctor strange is on second and doctor house is on third. theres no way theyre getting through a single inning

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Summing the mood up in two bits:

When it's time to go full Magical Girl, she eschews the transformation sequence and just resignedly "pifs" into her outfit.

When it's time to go back to civvies, she joyously goes through the whole ribbons and sparkles transformation sequence.

FEBRUARY 28TH 10AM PST!!!!!!!

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I got my current job in part because of a Skype interview (there was no budget to bring in out of town candidates).

[dvandom]

The Anti-Monitor Anthropic Principle: The Anti-Monitor did not destroy reality because we are here to ask whether he destroyed reality.

do you have any thoughts on that whole “Anti Monitor” thing? Personally I think it’s all bull. I mean I won’t pretend our world isn’t crazy but that whole crisis mess is just way too out there to be real

No one can really say for sure WHAT happened during the various periods called "Crisis Events" because of the manner by which they happen and their after effects but one thing I can tell you for sure, the being calling him or itself the Anti-Monitor IS real and he IS dangerous even if I can't tell you much more about them.

(The Anti Monitor, glimpsed only for a moment in the skies over the world doing battle with all the heroes of the multiverse) From what broad information we do have (mostly supplied by the Green Lantern Corps) the Anti Monitor is a being with a...born distaste for reality and all things within it. A being a pure, malevolent anti-matter who seeks to destroy all reality and then reign over the ruins born in the depths of the void a long time ago as the multiverse was created. He spent untold eons collecting negative energy and was unleashed by some cosmic mistake onto all reality. He waged war on every world, everywhere, unleashing armies of shadow demons that were simply the harbinger of his ultimate weapon. A wave of pure antimatter that would sweep each world clean, one after another, reducing every reality to its component atoms and then annihilating them. Our only salvation is that he was born with a more benevolent counterpart, a being called the Monitor, naturally who had worked in the background in preparation for his great enemy's awakening. He assembled the heroes of every world and sent them out against the Anti Monitor and... ...and well, nobody knows. Like I said the Crisis Events are the ultimate unleashing of multiversal energy. When they occur the timeline and fundamental nature of reality are shifted in such seismic ways that its impossible for any being who exists within reality to catalogue or even remember. People who were alive for any or all of the Crises remember their personal experiences, the things they lived through during these events but the rest is a blur. This actual has a medical name "Multiversal Crisis Syndrome." While people who are present for a Multiversal Crisis will remember the actual events clearly they will exhibit an inability to place a firm chronology on events. They may remember watching a hero they'd never seen before fighting shadow demons, only in the exact same memory to recall that that same hero had lived in their city for years. They might remember driving away from disaster, sheltering in place at home and various smaller events during their period of shelter but not actually be able to place those events in order. One of the best experiments I read about in this field was from STAR Labs, who had a team of test subjects who volunteered to shelter in place at a STAR Labs security facility when a Crisis arose. Their supplies and amenities were directly tracked by the shelter itself and by personal health monitors. Of the four test subjects, one ate enough supplies for a month, one ate enough supplies for 3 days, one had only eaten a single meal and one test subject hadn't eaten anything at all. And none of those time spans matched the chronology recorded by the shelter OR by any of their personal trackers. Even their clothing showed different levels of wear and tear even though each of the subjects entered and exited the shelter at the exact same second of observable reality. What we do know, obviously, is that the Anti Monitor LOST in his bid to destroy the multiverse from the outside in. Obviously. Because you and I are sitting here having this conversation about it.