#we've been working on solving this problem literally all day long

[disciplinecottage]

my beloved 1910 singer treadle machine has decided to only make problem stitches. It looks like the upper tension is too tight but even with the tension discs loosened all the way the problem persists. It's been cleaned and rethreaded and everything and she is just not sewing the way she did last week. What is going on 😭

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

@grimharuspex in the comments of that @zoe-oneesama post said it the best; Butterfly should’ve been Emotion and Peacock should’ve been Desire. I know that Zoe has a limit on what canon she changes for her comic which I respect/appreciate given the thought she puts into it (even when canon’s various nonsensical magic rules are especially grating like this) but how do you think things would’ve gone in-show if this was the setup from the get-go? On that note, do you think it’s a good setup for canon in the first place? Why or why not?

This is going to be a rather long lecture on lore and world building and how the peacock fails on every level, so before we get into that, let's start with the positives. I saw a few people pointed out the Desire idea - that being that the peacock's associated Force should have been Desire while the butterfly got Emotions - and I think that they're absolutely right. That one tiny change does fix the surface level issues and make the peacock make sense for its larger role in the narrative.

It would complicate the whole magical slave thing and also mean that you probably have to rework a few of the minor sentimonsters, but generally speaking, it makes way more sense for Desire to birth a fully realized human being. The sentipeople being people while also coming from a single emotion will always be total BS in my eyes.

At the same time, I blame no one for just sticking to canon's lore. Reworking the lore is a serious thing and even I only do it when I'm telling a lore-heavy story. There are plenty of stories where I just stick to canon's nonsense because the lore isn't important.

Now that we've done our positives, let's getting into the negatives! The issue of the day is this: changing the Force from Emotions to Desire doesn't solve the larger problems with the peacock. Problems that we'll now get into. Buckle up, this is gonna be a long one.

Issue 1: Power Diversity

While I would not call myself a superhero expert, I have seen a good deal of superhero and magical girl team shows in my time. Most of you probably have. If you think about the power sets that we see in those shows, then you'll notice that one thing is pretty much always true: every power is unique OR the powers are all closely related in some way. You never do both because the two concepts don't mix. It makes no sense for half of the characters to have totally unique powers while the other half have copies unless there's some sort of special thematic reason for this like siblings sharing a power.

Without that sort of explanation, it just feels weird and it also makes the characters feel redundant. You don't need two speedsters or two supermen! One is enough. Heck, Avatar the Last Airbender takes place in a world where whole civilizations have the same power and they STILL didn't duplicate powers for the core team because they understood that it's important to keep the characters unique.

Miraculous is pretty obviously supposed to be the type of show where the powers don't overlap. Every character gets a unique power that's uniquely suited to them. We even have this confirmed in universe during that confusing scene in the episode Destruction where Orikko - the rooster - tries to explain how his powers work:

Orikko: No, you're mistaken! Time travel is Fluff's power and I can't grant the power that already belongs to another Kwami!

This brings us to the problem with the peacock: it is not a unique power. It's derivative on multiple levels.

Derivation Level One: Akumas

The first and most obvious level is how similar sentimonsters are to akumas. In terms of how they're normally used in the narrative, they're pretty much the exact same power to the point that you literally can't tell which one you're dealing with until someone tells you. The narrative uses them interchangeably with some episodes using an akuma, some using a sentimonster, and some using both.

In fact, I thought that it was really weird that Gabriel didn't switch to maining sentimonsters back in season four. You had akumas breaking their bonds left and right, which is a thing that sentimonsters literally cannot do, making them the obvious fix to this new problem.

To really highlight the whole "indistinguishable power" issue, allow me to highlight some dialogue from Kuro Neko to show that this is very much an in-universe problem:

Cat Walker: You think that's Cat Noir? Ladybug: Of course it's Cat Noir! He must've been akumatized because he regrets having given up his Miraculous!

Ladybug: You'll see once we deakumatize him. (She runs towards Kuro Neko.) Cataclysm his bell, I'm sure that's where the akuma is! Cat Walker: Hang on! (follows her) Ladybug, what if that's a sentimonster? If I use my power on him, he'll lose control and become more dangerous!

Cat Walker: (cringes) What I mean is you're right to doubt, and I agree with you. Until we know for sure whether we're dealing with a sentimonster or someone who's been akumatized, we shouldn't make any brash decisions. (Kuro Neko leaps away.) Let's find out more.

This sort of confusion should be impossible unless it's the result of clever planning by the villain, but that's not what we're dealing with here. Kuro Neko was not about Gabriel tricking the heroes. He sent out a normal sentimonster having no idea that Chat Noir had just quit. And yet Ladybug had no idea that this was a sentimonster. She looked at it and saw an akuma.

Cat Walker also didn't know that it was a sentimonster. He just knew that it wasn't Chat Noir, which was probably the only reason that he thought to question Ladybug and warn her to be cautious. They only realize that it's a sentimonster once they learn that there's a child inside it.

This is canon accidentally telling us that akumas and sentimonster are just straight up indistinguishable unless you see then made or do some experiments to figure out what you're dealing with. That's not a good look if your claiming that each miraculous grants a unique power. It is, however, a great lead in to the second power that the peacock copies: the power of illusions.

Derivation Level Two: Illusions

I said above that it should take careful planning for a sentimonster to be confused with an akuma. While we never see that type of carefully planned setup, we do see sentimonsters used to successfully impersonate humans on several occasions. One example is the episode Optigami which gave us SentiNino and SentiAlec. Seemingly perfect clones of Nino and Alec who did whatever Shadow Moth told them to. We even see a scene where Shadow Moth is telling SentiAlec exactly what to say.

You know who else gives us this type of scene? Rena Furtive in Rocketear:

Ladybug: You said that if Nino could have heard what you were saying, there'd be no misunderstanding? Rena Furtive: Absolutely! Ladybug: How well do you remember what you guys said on the balcony? Rena Furtive: Every. Word. Ladybug: Do you think you could make... a sound illusion? Rena Furtive: Totally.

Is there any doubt in your mind that the peacock can do anything that the fox can do? What's even worse is that the peacock does illusions better than the fox! Fox illusion vanish in a puff of smoke if you touch them. SentiNino was real enough to wield a miraculous because he was a fully corporeal illusion that would have kept on going if he hadn't been snapped away. This brings us to derivation level three: the power of creation.

Derivation Level Three: Creation

The peacock doesn't just outshine the fox, it outshines the ladybug! Lucky charms vanish as soon as Ladybug detransforms. Sentimonsters last forever. The ladybug is only useful in battle as it requires a super villain to cast its cure (which is asinine, but let's not get into that here). The peacock can be used at any time. The ladybug doesn't give you what you want, it just gives you a puzzle to solve. The peacock can fulfill your deepest desires and even create life.

Outside of the extremely specific circumstances that the show gives us - aka an ongoing battle with a super villain - the ladybug is kind of useless. If you want the power of Creation, you're going to use the peacock. This brings us to our second main issue: power balancing.

Issue Two: Power Balancing

The ladybug and the black cat are supposed to be the two most powerful miraculous in existence, but it really doesn't feel like that's true. Sure, if you put them together they rewrite the universe, but that's not part of their individual base power sets. At an individual level, they don't actually feel all that powerful when compared to the butterfly and the peacock. It's more like Marinette and Adrien are smart enough to make their very limited powers work while Gabriel and Nathalie are dancing along easy street and making fools of themselves with every step.

I've mentioned before that I can forgive the butterfly's overpowered nature because this is an episodic show. They want each episode's fight to be unique and interesting and so we have to give them room to have one power set that should be an insta-win card, but isn't because plot.

I can give them that grace once. I cannot give it to them twice.

There is no reason why both the butterfly and the peacock need to feel more powerful than the supposed most powerful miraculous in existence. I've even talked to one person who is rewriting canon with the assumption that the peacock and the butterfly ARE the most powerful ones because they are! Nothing proves this better than the fact that they've both made creations that can copy the powers of the ladybug and the black cat (see: Copycat, Strikeback, Ladybug, Sandboy, Miraculer, and probably a few others that I'm forgetting).

They're also the only miraculous that don't require an active user. You can create a sentimonster or an akuma, then detransform and have a snack while your creation does whatever you need it to do. That's so incredibly broken and such a terrible move in terms of power balancing. Either have all of the powers require active users or, at the very least, have more of a mix of active and passive powers. Why do Mirage, Shelter, and Lucky Charm vanish when their caster's detransform while akumas and amoks stick around? There is no in-universe logic to explain this. It works this way because that's what the writers needed these miraculous to do. A fact that makes it impossible to get invested in the lore of this show.

When designing a complex magic system, you generally don't want "because plot" to be the only answer to why things work they way they do. You want your magic system to feel real and organic to the world. That's how fictional worlds come to life! If Miraculous' magic system was well designed, then you could take it and use it to tell a wildly different story set in the same universe, but you can't. Everything about it is designed around making canon's story work and not around making an immersive world that you can almost believe exists.

There are stories that I wouldn't hold to that standard, but they're mostly short form stories. Anything as big and complex as Miraculous needs to have a solid lore system backing it or else you lose all sense of stakes. A great example of this is the Bunnyx problem where you know that she can show up at any time and reset the timeline even if things are happening in her own past, so why do we need to worry about bad things happening? And how are the ladybug and the black cat the most powerful ones when you have nonsense like time travel and the power to create human-like creatures? Early canon lore was decently solid, but the longer the show goes, the more nonsense the lore gets and that makes me sad because I love good lore.

Some Final Thoughts

You may have noticed that I didn't really talk about the sentikid issue in this post. That's because my dislike of the peacock came long before that fun little twist. While sentiAdrien is yet another great reason to dislike the peacock, it didn't need to be a thing for the peacock to be a terrible idea. Take away the sentikids and you still have an incredibly derivative and lore-breaking power set that never should have made it into the show.

I actually completely redesigned the peacock for my own rewrite which I start plotting back when I was first watching season three, long before sentiAdrein was even on my radar. That's not something that I usually do in my fix it stuff. I usually try to stick close to canon and make more minor tweaks, but the peacock is so fundamentally world breaking that I had no choice but to do a total overhaul. This is already an incredibly long post, so I won't go into that here. I'll save it for another ask that's sitting in my inbox. I'll schedule them to post back to back.

For this post, I'll just end by pointing out that switching the peacock to Desire makes it derivative of and arguably better than the pig, too, since the pig can only tease you with what you want. The peacock actually gives it to you. In fact, I'd say that the peacock may be a better pig even without the switch!

You can also argue that the peacock is better than or at least equal to the rooster and the goat because they're also just variations of the butterfly and the ladybug's power. Like there is legitimatly potential in taking those miraculous and doing an AU where each Kwami's power is an aspect of creation because the powers are so awkwardly intertwined. Probably make the peacock the master and all others spawn from that one or something like that.

Anyway, this is why you can't design powers around characters if you want good lore and a large team! You have to start with the powers and go from there! It's why I edit Nino's character to be more of a protector since that's his supposed True Force! Also because I want him to be more narratively important but that is a rant for another day.

[abadbutsadcollective]

Questioning: Future Life? Kintype? Hearttype? Or Something Else?

Ok, weird new experience for me time. Hoping to get some feedback but also get my experience out there. No one in my system has ever felt this before, so I'm doing what we always do and writing about it. Gonna put this under a cut because it's long, but feel free as ever to read and give input.

Point is: do you ever feel like a character would have you as their kintype?

This character, Hawks from MHA for your information, is very very similar to me. Bird guy with red feathers, his backstory if you twist it lines up eerily well with Hunters (from The Owl House, the guy I'm a fictive of), his general outlook in a lot of ways matches up with me. But I'm not him.

Honestly it's like looking into a funhouse mirror. The reflection is similar to you, but definitely to the left, and if you saw that thing walking down the street you wouldn't call it you. Just something that looks like you. Something that was you, but got changed somehow, even if it still holds the pieces of what you were.

This would be all fine and good, no problems--he's just not something I identify as even though he's similar, right? Simple, problem solved! But the actual problem is... I feel closely intertwined with him to the point where I feel like he should have a me kintype. Instead of a sense of "I have experience of being this man and see myself as him", I feel like he would have experience being me, and that if anything he'd literally have me as a kintype.

Obviously this guy is a fictional character and can't have kintypes unless the source creators wrote it in there. So this isn't even about the source material itself, this is... A distinct feeling. Different to "haha he's like me, he'd probably have me as a kintype" too--it's deeper. It's not a joke or a fandom thing.

I've seen people talk about future lives around--rarely, but I've seen it. Never in-depth aside from "a life you believe you'll have in the future", so we never really learned about what it's like to have an identity that stems from that. I feel like maybe this could be related? It seems to fit the feelings well enough, I'm just not sure how that would work in a logical way. Not that it needs to be flawless in its logic--but I do prefer to have a satisfying explanation for things that concern me.

Hell, is it a parallel life maybe? We've seen more on those. It'd be confusing if Hawks-me in whatever other timeline had a me kintype and I didn't have him as one--though I guess it could work regardless? Maybe? Haven't got anything else pointing toward that explanation yet though--once again it's something I'm not entirely familiar with.

Could it be a hearttype? Never heard them described in this way, though. We've seen "this is like family to me"--not what I experience. I don't know him. We've seen "I should be this"--also not true. I should be me because that's who I am right now, I don't think I "should have" been Hawks. It just doesn't seem to fit, though in a pinch I guess I could describe it as one for a quick explanation?

In the end I could always go with vaguetype and call it a day. But I still don't think that's direct enough of a term--it's not vague, it's a distinct feeling that doesn't have a name. It's unclear on what this is, sure, but only because it doesn't have a name or explanation.

Not that I really need to put a name to it, but this isn't something we've heard of before. I'd like answers, or at least to put this out and maybe have some form of solidarity with someone over it--whether that be now, or a year or two in the future when someone else finds this and goes "wow, just like me!".

I'll keep thinking on it, I just needed to get this all down somewhere.

[shoko-komi]

The Komi Report - Communication 450

Komi is a day early!? This week in Komi Can't Communicate:

Broth is sampled...

...and dreams are dashed upon the stones.

Read It: Mangareader Mangakakalot Viz Media (North America Exclusive) Mangadex (English updates are dead, but there’s the backlog; and Spanish + Portuguese language updates)

I was caught completely by surprise this morning when I woke up and had a notification from the r/komi_san discord server (I exclusively use it for the new chapter notifications. All other notifications are muted and I never go in there because I value my sanity aklsdnlkasndlaksnd).

Now that tensions within the broth crew have been loosened they can get into the favourite pastime of friends everywhere - good-natured bickering.

Nanoda was so timid when she first appeared, so it's really nice to see her coming out of her shell.

I've only eaten good restaurant ramen once - other than that it's been 2 minute stuff - so I don't know what to make of this smelly-ramen vs unsmelly-ramen conflict. Where do you stand?

My girl is flopping so hard at this aksdlkansd.

I might have a hard time explaining this one, but; I love seeing Komi fail. She tried her best to settle the ramen dispute but doesn't know what to do and is sort of useless.

Part of it is I want her to learn that she doesn't need to be problem solver girl all the time, and her friends will like her and want her around even if she isn't "usefull". She's a leader among her peers but it's ridiculous to put everything on her own shoulders, and her peers can solve their own problems such as in the case of the broth. All Komi needs to do to be valuable is be there.

The other part of it is my sadism flaring up.

Really funny that she blames him here. A girl needs her tantrums

Only a brief glimpse of them..... Oda you tease me.....

Also add an entry to the list of left-handed Sukida appearances

My complements to tumblr user fareasterncurlew for this infographic which I think about every day

Classic Najimi gag

Miwa Omojiri my beloved, hello again. Also Tsubo is so me... I would be laughing so hard....

Such heart-breaking news after all their hard work. I love how the camaraderie of the class keeps them in good spirits!!! So many times I've been in a bad situation but I've felt alright because I could laugh about it with good company.

It brings a tear to my eye....

This is really funny but also!! Ogiya comforting Kori is super nice after them being recently at odds. Kori blended into the group so quickly after they figured him out.

The culture festival!!!! AAAAAA I'm excited

We've been shown this beautiful glimpse of what Hiki and the girls are up to. Aaaahh, maid cafes. Literally what would we do without them?

Oda I'm still waiting for a follow up to the Susumi/Hiki yuri...... and I want Yamai/Nakanaka band yuri.... and I want SukiYama yuri.... Oda give me yuri please I'm starved Oda I'm starved to death and dying fatally.......

I hope the culture festival is 50 chapters long and every character is featured and has a super funny joke and there's lots of yuri and wakai dies mysteriously between chapters and is never mentioned again and we find out the details of the Ase/Naruse kiss and Benujit Spopo appears and Tadano is force-femmed permanently and there's happiness, free, for everyone!!!!! And no one is left behind!!!!

Stay safe! I'll see you next week!

[fandomcrazy]

This is all based on a dream I had that woke me up coughing my lungs out (not related to the dream, I've just been sick the past few days)

Hawks quirk (from mha if it wasn’t clear) being Robyn's quirk

Her apartment is in the sky (like actually I'm not even joking, it's just hanging there by pure magic) and right across from the lecture hall she takes notes from with her super vision (part of the quirk ig)

Steve becomes her roommate

Before she meets steve she's known nancy for a while now

Nancy think steve might not know Robyn's a lesbian but Robyn let's her know that "no yeha I told him everything we've been talking about this hot girl that literally everyone in town knows and how her nose is so perfect and how she's so graceful and-"

"Yes Robyn I get the point" Nancy says.

Steve up until this point just thought they were making conversation and was getting to know his potential date. His world view comes crashing down after only hearing Robyn's side of the conversation with Nancy on the phone.

Steve has a mental quirk so it doesn't outwardly show that much except for the little details around his body. Robyn doesn't know what the quirk is (neither do i honestly) and doesn’t remember to ask. Steve appreciates this and is large bonus to having Robyn as his roommate/friend(?).

Most people don't like going to Robyn's apartment because you need to activate your quirk to get there and you need to be synced up with her security feed, which takes a lot of patience and time to do. Steve feels conflicted about hearing this. On one hand it's good because that guarantees almost no one will be able to get to him here but he has to use his quirk everytime he wants to go home.

Now the rest of the Hawkins gang have all been synced up to the security monitor just in case, except for the quirkless and mutation type quirks but they still have a system for that. Almost everyone asks Robyn once in a while if she can just fly them there instead of them activating probably dangerous or embarrassing or not easily accessible quirks. No one else except robyn in the Hawkins gang has a transmutation quirk until Eddie comes along with bat wings on his back at all times. Robyn are the same in that sense, that they can both fly but Eddie can't exactly fly over large bodies of water and he's not as fast as her. No one is as fast as Robyn everyone in the party has agreed.

Robyn knows what she's capable of. She knows she could easily cheat during tests or quizzes at her university without getting caught but she just. Doesn't want to. She wants to prove to herself that she can accomplish something without resorting to taking the easy way out. If she has to bomb 3/4 of tests she takes than so be it as long as she doesn't get thrown put of the university she doesn't care. She'll work double shifts if it means getting to prove that she can do things herself. (This might or might not lead to her slowly neglecting herself and her needs, needing someone to make her understand spreading herself so thin she can barely hold her wings up in the sky is not proving anything to anyone, especially herself(Steve says all this yall, maybe less eloquently but the point gets across)). Maybe this all started from a young age when her parents expected a lot from her, expected her to solve all their problems for them (maybe financial? Idk) and it just made her more convinced to not do anything for themn, but for herself. And although, at the time, this kind of thinking was healthy, it was not sustainable in the long run after separating herself from them in the future.

Oh uhhh heros and villains don't exist, quirks and criminals exist. There is technology created that stuns a persons quirk factor and makes them immobile (paralyzed) temporarily. This technology was used on Steve as a child to make him more "docile".

I like to give as much angst to characters that I think would look hot being pathetic wet dogs-

Robyn and Nancy end up together obvi (if you didn't catch it up there, Nancy was a little jealous of Robyn talking about someone she might be interested in like that that isn't her (that was literally her who Robyn described but whatever)).

Steve and Eddie

And literally anyone else you want to ship I'm a big elmax or elumax supporter and Dustin being steddie's kid basically

Also why the fuck is nobody talking about the sass potential with Dustin and Erica friendship?? They're like copy paste stobyn but with a different font that makes them roast everyone else instead of each other

Anyway don't take any of this too seriously it only took like 30 minutes (that's a lot fo time holy shit 💀😭😭 I'm a slow writer) and no brain power because, again, I just woke up with a coughing fit that probably made me lose a lung. I should probably check on that.

Anyway, BYEEEEE

[valictini]

My take on the whole egg situation (this is all MY OPINION based on what we've been shown for the past 2 months) :

Why did they get some of the eggs back only to end the arc one week afterwards?

I think it's because the admins loved their characters and knew it was going to end soon, so they wanted to be able to play as much as possible before leaving, even if they were not paid.

Why did some of the admins not get this opportunity ?

Either the studio considers them "not their problem anymore" (Pomme and Dapper who left) or they consider them liabilities and at risk of leaking stuff because they publicly supported the ex admins (Empanada, Sunny) All of this is speculation, but my guess as to why Cherry was so upset was not only because she was fired, but she was refused the opportunity to say good bye as Empanada.

Why is the studio icing out their admins instead of straight up firing them?

Because then there are fewer chances for legal retaliation because "they left on their own accords." Never mind that 99% of the admins never intended to sue the studio and only wanted to be treated right, or at least know what was going to happen to their role.

It also shows how little the studio cares about its admins. I believe 100% that they still dont see them as colleagues/employees, but as fans to whom they gave privilege. Privilege that they're not entitled to and thus can remove at any misstep. To me, there is literally no trust there.

Don't get me wrong, there is some truth to this. From what some of the admins said, they did genuinely feel privileged to be part of the project. And that's precisely why some of the more exploited admins stayed, too. They felt lucky to be part of the project and sacrificed themselves in order to meet the studio's unreasonable demands.

But here's the thing, just because you love your job doesn't mean you have to be punished in some way to balance it out. Just because you're passionate doesn't mean you don't deserve basic fucking respect as a human being.

You'd think that after so long, after so much work, the admins would be trusted as colleagues... well, Pomme's example is there to show us that no, they don't care. The second they think you did something wrong, you're just trash to be disposed of, behind closed doors. (I believe to this day we still don't know why Lumi was iced out)

Why did they keep the server running when Quackity said there would be a pause?

Because, as Quackity stated, his #1 priority is keeping the project running. What we didn't realise at the time is that it meant that everything else would be ignored.

Mire importantly, i think they didn't want the more active players to lose interest and so, they simply left it open for them. Never mind all the ccs that missed out on lore and events for the crime of wanting to make sure things were solved before playing again.

What is going to happen at the event of the 24th?

Probably a reset of some sort, seeing how many ccs are ending their character's lore while some still being like "well this character is done but I'm not". Idk if I can bring myself to care though, with how hard the studio is trying to make us forget everything.

They want us to forget that they fired dozens of people via a single discord announcement that didn't even stay up for 24h before the server was closed. They want us to forget that to this day (as far as I know), nothing has been done to contact the exploited ex admins. They want us to forget the fact that Quackity promised to keep running the server only when the problems were solved, and then opened the server back up only two days after. They want us to forget that some of the admins that were still technically in the studio have been and are still being iced out instead of fired. All to save their own asses from a lawsuit that they're honestly INVITING on themselves at this point.

All this to say, thank you, admins. I'm sorry the studio prioritised the project's image above your wellbeing. I'm glad some of you had a positive experience and got the opportunity to leave on a positive note. I'm sorry for the rest who had to go public to even be heard about the abuse you suffered from.

I'm still hoping for a miracle, for some sort of satisfying resolution. I'm still hoping to see my favourite ccs coming back, signaling that stuff have actually been solved. But I won't hold my breath either.

Again, all this is just my opinion. I'm probably wrong on some of the more speculative parts. You might not agree with everything I said. And that's fine. As fans, we will never be given the full truth anyway, so all we can do is speculate.

[agapi-kalyptei]

happylog, week 35/2024

still riding that high from the last pancake party. it's good to feed people and make them meet other new friends

gave away some more Red Gold and I'm left with just two last tubes that are already booked, so nothing goes to waste

i was greedy/naughty though and opened the Erős Pista jar for myself and wow it's so so good. so worth the [bodily function censored]

I actually opened MuseScore and worked on my quartet piece for a few hours, for the first time since like April/May

mental clarity is slowly returning. I might write about it separately but antidepressants+adhd+long covid combo really did make me delusional in the past few years

as the weather's slowly getting colder (NOT you, thursday and friday!! gross.) the migraines are also going away

asked in work if I should work on any other tasks and they said no. so I'm just geeking out about PostgreSQL internals and thinking about to make videos for youtube shorts about it (and a longer one later)

dinner with an old friend in V! can't believe we've met what... 9-10 years ago?

dinner in V! have I mentioned? V? food? great food? In V? the restaurant? that has good food? gosh i love this place. the staff still recognizes me even if I haven't been there much in the past few... yeah. you know

got new sweatpants. they're not as soft and stretchy like the old ones, but that's a good thing because they're 100% cotton and 0% microplastic, hopefully

just tried out the new running shoes. gosh they're instantly comfy, they're easy to put on and off,I can't believe I scored them on literally the first try in the first shop, even the size was just right.

not-so-happylog week 35/2024

skipped Kommi's party on Friday I kinda wanted to go, kinda enjoyed my social anxieties, but ultimately got a migraine which solved the problem for me

skipped ERSO Day on Saturday health was bad, it was a nice sleepy weather I didn't really plan to go, but also felt wrong not to go also felt wrong to not finish the footage I promised, uh, two years ago

ultimately, it's good that I have something firm to measure my level of delusions against. I'll still have to make a formal apology to K2rt, and I still want to finish the footage, but at this point I'm pretty sure the audio from all the chamber concerts is just too garbage to be salvaged for anything other than like 15 second fb/insta stories, and hopefully the main concert is still doable, but most of it is probably copyright-unpublishable because ContentID sucks

I'm still mulling over the encouragement I received during the dinner. To be myself, to create something, without expecting adventurous life or aiming too high or trying to be someone I'm not. To just record or share a piece of my life that's mine, without worrying whether it's better than what others are doing. FOMO is just wasted energy.

[itsclydebitches]

Idk why but Ruby's whole break down is reminding me of the Apathy arc in season 6. Post-Cinder fight with the fate of a kingdom in the balance, post-ally getting stabbed (although Penny did die), something goes totally wrong and so their fight against Salem seems so much harder (Jinn's revelations for s6, for s9, um, many parts of s8 to choose from but I'm going to say Penny's death) so therefore the girl(s) spirals.

And it also reminds me of the Apathy because there are some absolutely stellar concepts here, in isolation I love the judgement of the dead as a moment but.... but it just doesn't quite work because of the larger context around that scene.

Okay, I sorta veered off into a weird direction with this, but comparing the two arcs really helps emphasize (for me anyway) how RWBY keeps escalating without even a gesture towards victory:

Enemies are plotting and planning, but the heroes are equally prepared, including training the next generation and controlling the Fall Maiden powers

Never-mind, Beacon has fallen and the powers are lost

Relics are introduced and now the sub-goal is to keep them safe, but the group also comes to the realization that Salem is immortal

Instead of making headway towards defeating her and/or keeping the Relics permanently out of her reach, two are now lost, a Kingdom has fallen, and the heroes are trapped in the Ever After

Summarized like that it doesn't sound much - maybe even just a season or two of the characters going through expected, necessary conflict - but for RWBY this was seven volumes, the vast majority of its whole run. With Volume 10 not yet greenlit and the vague expectation that it won't last for too many seasons more, I worry about how this is all going to get resolved when we've had this much escalation across this time much with zero work done to inch the heroes towards better prospects. Ruby just committed suicide! The heroes have been at their 'lowest' (from a destroyed school/lost arm to the protagonist fully giving up in the most shocking way possible) for almost the entire show. What are we supposed to do with that? Especially with RWBY's tendency to 'solve' things in a single scene. I can't help but worry that the show as a whole is going to become a version of the Ambrosius conversation. Instead of naturally introducing the Staff, its powers, its limitations, the quirks of its soul, and the building blocks of a creative idea that will eventually save the day, RWBY speed-runs that like whoa, all in a single scene. Here's what the Staff does, the problems you have to circumvent, oh look they figured out how to do that off screen and now they're implementing it! A two Volume conflict (the buildup to this entire trolly problem) is solved in, literally, a single conversation.

Given the expectation (hope?) that the Ever After will be at least a little plot relevant, I'm waiting for the inevitable moment when the show hands Ruby a Get Out of Jail Free card. Like, for example, some handy-dandy device to take back to Remnant (like a leaf) that will deal with Salem (through Ascension), so all they have to do is hop over to Vacuo, spend a Volume engaging in minor fights as they put off the final confrontation, and then magic Salem into being a Good Person through the power of suicide allegory, therefore freeing Remnant from her clutches, lifting Ozpin's curse, ignoring the Gods' involvement in all this, dodging the heroes actually needing to do anything to earn victory, and bringing forth the Happily Ever After for the not-fairy tale.

Okay, obviously we don't know if any of that is going to happen, but I'm afraid that something like it will, largely because yeah, we're getting these repeated cycles of Awful Things Happening, each worse than the one from before. The show, given that it's already in season nine, can only continue doing that for so long before the writers go, "Shit, we're ending. Quick! Hand the heroes a simple solution to wrap it all up."

[kernelbastard]

putting these Slugpup Hungry Games hcs here bc I don't feel like making a new sideblog right now

me and my friend have been obsessed with it the past few days so here's some stuff we came up with. note: the pronouns are not literal, Slugcats don't speak English (slugsign W), they're just how we refer to them (also I have separate headcanons for how Slugcat gender and social roles work but I don't know if any of the Hungry kids ever learned any of that stuff so it's not super relevant)

... also we don't know GladosCat's real Iterator name so we've just been calling her Ambition or Wire Mother interchangeably

anyway. these are for you @peculiurperennial

General

The pups are listed in order of age. Therefore, Bingus is the eldest, while Onion, despite being larger than the others, is the baby of the group.

How much a Slugcat remembers past cycles is determined by age and species, and increases as their brains develop. However, there are exceptions to this pattern, like Fleece.

They were not born of the same litter, although it is possible that they were all raised in the same tribe; either way, none of them (except Onion) remember who they were before being captured, and in the end, it doesn't change that they are siblings now.

They cannot directly speak to each other, nor do they know Slugsign, so their means of communication are very limited. Still, they definitely understand each other better than other pups would, simply because they're so familiar and have had to learn to cooperate in dangerous situations. Bingus and Fleece are the most in-tune with each other's thoughts.

Onion already had a bit of the Rotund gene in her ancestry before modification, which is why she's so much bigger; Rotund Slugcats are very close to standard Terrestrials, and are not considered a separate species by Terrestrial society. That being said, all Slugcats - excluding Purposed Organisms - have enough genetic similarity to produce healthy pups with Terrestrials, so it's not impossible for Bingus and Fleece to also have Carnivore and Aquatic ancestors, just... Unlikely, especially in Fleece's case, as Aquatics are not native to this region.

Subject A-23334, Carnivore type - Bingus

They/Them, "the Prodigy"

Second-clearest memory of past tests and cycles.

The smartest and strongest of the siblings, at least in most ways relevant to testing.

Does not enjoy violence, preferring to solve problems as puzzles rather than fights, but will do what is necessary to help their siblings get through the tests. They're not afraid to take a hit if it means the others are spared.

Considers themself a sort of leader, whether or not this is acknowledged by the others, but it's not a source of pride or self-importance; it is instead a great responsibility, a burden, that feels so heavy it nearly crushes them. They know they are Wire Mother's favorite, and they'll do everything in their power to keep her focused on them rather than the other pups, even if that means they will be left out of escape plans. This facility creates Purposed Organisms, and, under the Iterator's watchful eye, Bingus has lost every part of themself that is not part of this sense of purpose.

Subject B-6587, Aquatic type - Fleece

They/Them, "the Opportunist"

Can remember past testing cycles almost perfectly, but has gaps in their memory.

The quickest and most practical of the siblings, avoiding unnecessary risk whenever possible.

Often acts cold or distant, as if they don't care as much about the others, but really, they keep that emotional distance as a means of protecting themself. They are afraid that if they break down and Wire Mother finds out, she'll do something to "fix" their memory.

Feels deeply isolated from their siblings, except for Bingus, as they both know more than they should. Even then, though, they don't have a clear method of talking about it, and Wire Mother doesn't give them much privacy, anyway, so Fleece can never drop the act for long. Over time, this loneliness has grown into resentment, though they won't let it show to anyone but Bingus, as the misplaced "source" of this anger.

Subject C-6287, Terrestrial type - Jib

He/Him, "the Paragon"

Doesn't remember much, but has held onto enough information to know how bleak the situation is, and retains more of the emotions from past cycles than actual facts.

The kindest and bravest of the siblings, but unfortunately, naïvete has no place in the testing chamber except as a bloody example of failure.

... Isn't actually anywhere near as naïve as Wire Mother thinks he is. He knows he's not the strongest or the fastest, and he's very easy to kill. But he does have one thing the others don't: pure stubbornness. Anyone here seen Everything Everywhere All At Once? He's like Waymond. You know what I'm talking about. "When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naïve. It's strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything." If these kids do get to escape down the line, I hope it's Jib who leads them through it.

This bit isn't as serious, but he reminds me of a shonen protagonist. That's all

Subject D-42346, Rotund type - Onion

She/Her, "the Avenger"

Has little to no memory of past cycles, but does remember her life before capture.

I don't have nearly as much to say about this one, mainly because I'm still trying to figure her out. But I do think it'd be cool if, while Jib represents the things Wire Mother can't control or beat out of him, Onion is more... Well, technically a great success, but maybe too great. She's hard to kill. Eventually, her creator is going to regret that.

kind of ran out of steam at the end there but I'll follow this up in a little while with more details (in the form of Discord screenshots)

[morganoperandi]

I haven't updated much about this, but I have to vent.

I'm dealing with long covid. I got covid and RSV back in January 2022 and the reality is that I never fully recovered and, at this point, nobody knows if I ever will. My brain doesn't work the way it used to. I get into a brain fog, forget what I was doing, lose words, and get severe headaches anytime I've got a heavy mental workload. I also developed a stutter, that I was able to help mitigate with the help of a speech therapist.

I'm also suffering from extreme fatigue. I never feel rested and every day I physically go in to work, it puts me out of commission for the next two - three days. I've started bringing a cane with me for any longer walks, because I need it for the stability.

Covid and long covid are new. There's little significant research out there so, even if you have a supportive healthcare team (which I, fortunately, do), there's no definitive answers. Will a specific treatment work? How long will these symptoms last? Will these symptoms get worse? Literally nobody knows.

I was out of work for three months on medical leave, from November to February. I returned, not because I was actually feeling better, but because I ran out of vacation and sick time (thankfully, I had a lot built up because I rarely used any before this). My entire job, not to mention much of how I identify myself, is based around problem solving and communication and those are the two areas I'm struggling with the most right now. Even writing this post has been a struggle.

I now have over a $1000 in medical bills and many more appointments coming. Our landlord is planning to raise our rent when our lease is up in a few months, so we've got to start packing and figuring out where we're going to move, but I don't have to physical or mental capability to do all the things I need to do for that.

I feel broken. I feel like I'm falling apart. I just want to be normal again.

[basedkikuenjoyer]

Any Title Would Sound Like a Prince Song

Nami...thank you for incidentally making my favorite little gag moment in the arc so on point for today. I'll admit I have incorporated the fearsome Future Kick into my repertoire and use it on my boyfriend. A flower made of jewels would really solve my entire conundrum here. Bonney & Kiku. It didn't take me long to point out how well Jewelry Bonney could pick up the thread Kiku weaves through Wano. I literally did when she popped out of the water bubble.

Now that she's been properly utilized, it's time to evaluate. Yesterday's chapter review touched on this. Unlike the mirror opposite dynamic with Yamato, Bonney just tracks more and more with Kiku's odd role in this story. But there's still a couple of nagging questions. Let's take a day to take stock:

So first of all it's worth a refresher. We were already looking at the fact Kiku has a lot of untapped potential and the right background for a Quartermaster before Wano ended. Which it did, but not without playing heavily into the core aspects of how that would work and leaving Kiku conspicuously open-ended. Egghead didn't take long to set up a couple of things that could still leave that door open, and through that lens her story could be seen as being "kept warm" by elements consistently floating around. A theory at least somewhat bolstered by the Academy spinoff blatantly setting up the same shell game with Kiku & Yamato. A type of twist that works well with the classy, unassuming lady.

Enter Bonney. I had reservations but always thought she fit the bill for someone who could sensibly take that torch. Problem was, she was on the backburner for much of Egghead. An arc now about as long as Punk Hazard. Now that she's back in the limelight she actually is getting the right kind of build for that same role. Not to mention Ginny fitting it to a T. Like I said yesterday, it works for Kiku as the imposing but sweet big sister. A wifey vibe almost. Bonney is more the sharp-tongued, bossy little sister. These both just...work on this fundamental character design level. It's that idea you need to fit a role on the crew but also in an anime ensemble. Both have some "special" markers and both are fairly popular faces with solid stories already. Stories that have good prior hooks to justify a late addition.

Tale of Two Hannya, point with Kiku & Yamato is that Wano is almost a kind of jidaigeki double feature. When a core theme seems to be what we want to do vs. what we feel like we have to do...you gotta wonder about our author doing the same thing. The two split Luffy's story, mirror opposites, why would you ever focus on flashy but flawed here for half the arc over humble with hidden depths always at the edge of the limelight? Now...we're moving on to a sci-fi B movie with something different for Bonney. She's the same thing. Could fill the same role. Can't fault her for being a hothead here because it's not unlike Kanjuro and we've seen Bonney be the level head.

If you ask me, what will be the most telling is what happens when we get back. Are we jumping into the same scene? Bonney could collect herself and show a superhuman amount of composure made all the more compelling by knowing how young she is. Last arc the Supernova buddies took down Big Mom. Bonney could believably show out, girl threw a nasty kick at Luffy and tanked one from the Frontier Dome. If Egghead pulls it again and does something weird with our return to the main story? Then you gotta go back to asking who threads the needle on these vignettes we've jumped through.

[weaselle]

and the really frustrating part is that we spent like hundreds of thousands of years science-ing the shit out of this problem until we finally solved it and now in the last like, two generations we've backed all the way off our best solution to this for no good reason.

see, you start with a group like gorillas and everybody has to get and prepare their own food and they spend a good chunk of their day each day doing that, but not so much that it's onerous and they have almost nothing else to do anyway.

but say you want to store food for when there's no food. And say you want to eat more kinds of food, and say you need your brain to start running a huge protein and sugar deficit so you can think real bigly. Now preparing your food doesn't mean bruising some leaves in your fist or chewing the husk off a fruit or breaking open a nut, now preparing your food means processing it, which is labor. And cooking it. Which is labor. And you low-key have to invent tools to prepare and eat it. Tools like sharp scraping stones and mortars and pestles and bowls and spoons and things.

This is getting to be a lot more work. You're getting a lot better access to nutrients and body fuel, but you need a lot more labor to find and prepare the food, and you need specialists to make the tools -- which means you have less people (or at least you have less total individual work hours within the group) available to do that extra labor.

That situation put a hard cap on group size (and therefore cooperative potential) for a long long time -- tribes of people who operate under the hunter-gatherer protocol (an oldie but goodie, plenty of great stuff to say about this format of peopling) often max out their group size around 50 individuals because if you all split up and go different directions, and hunt and gather at a steady walking pace for half the day, and then turn around and come back together along slightly different routes, the total area of land you covered as a group has the resources to support about fifty people usually.

Like that's how much land a group of people can cover in a day, and that amount of land is enough space to grow fifty people's worth of fruit and rabbits and stuff. Maybe only 30 ish people's worth in the badlands, or 65 people's worth of stuff if you're in a particularly lush area, or maybe you exploit something local or innovative that lets you double that number or whatever, but on average it's about 50 people.

but then, big new tech! Agriculture! Not just plants, but animals for labor and meat too. Now fewer people on a smaller area of land (about 6 acres, which is only about 1/10th of a square mile) can feed maybe a thousand people.

But if you want college professors and heart surgeons and video game designers and dentists and rock guitarists and the hundreds different specialist jobs it takes to build a single car, well, you're going to have to get a lot better than 20 people on 6 acres feeding a thousand people. You're gonna need like 5 people on 5 acres feeding 10 thousand people if you can figure out how.

and out of the total amount of human time and effort that has taken place on this planet, a huge amount of that human time and effort has been spent on trying to improve that ratio. More food provided by less people

This, incidentally, is why "industrialized food is all automatically evil" is not a realistic take, because first of all, it prevents famines and saves lives, and second of all, it's literally what allows us to have heart surgeons and video game programers.

The industrialization of our food production is something we've been working on our whole existence on this planet. The brilliant cultivation of corn by central and south american natives is all part of that process, and we still need to be working on it. We just have to make sure it's being done for the good of humanity and the planet, and not for the profit of some giant corporation or the power of some corrupt national government.

Anyway, back to the point, part of that process is the individual preparation of food as a meal. See, a gorilla eating a meal of leaves just picks and eats the leaves, but a human eating a meal that utilizes food processing to take advantage of a food source like cassava tuber, has to dig it up and grate it into a paste and squeeze aaaaaall the poisons out of it, and dry it and bake it and probably some other stuff i don't know that whole recipe, but it's a labor intensive process, and if you do it wrong you eat cyanide.

food prep is important. It takes labor, and tools that need to be cleaned and cared for, which is more labor...

This is part of why bread is a big deal. Like, the Roman army used to actually be paid in bread as a salary. And of course we've all heard about the street vender food carts in ancient Pompeii. But in-home preparation is a very real requirement on the front end of our food development as a species.

and the solution is simple. The beautiful thing is, it takes an almost identical amount of time and effort to cook a meal for two as it does to cook a meal for one. So it's easy to do the same thing to our food practices on the front end as we did on the back end. You have a small number of people making the food for a large number of people.

So if you live in a big family group, maybe 10 to 20 parents and siblings and aunts and cousins, then you can have like 3 to five of those people doing a real, but reasonable, amount of labor to feed everybody, who presumably has other specialist jobs that benefit the family group.

But somehow, modern western (can i just say white? I mostly am white, i feel like i can just say white, though of course there's an unfortunate combination of colonization and an evil empire version of keeping-up-with-the-joneses that's spreading the worst of the west around the globe) ANYway, this culture has taken that "fewer people providing for the group" thing, that super effective social unit, and twisted it into a single person doing everything for themselves (which is ridiculous and an illusion, a single person doesn't exist entirely on their own efforts in the modern world any more than a single person survives long living alone in the ancient wilds)

And then the most you are supposed to upgrade is to one pair of adults who have to do ALL the specialist jobs for their "group" between them, raising the kids and cooking the food and managing the money and securing the housing and everything that would normally be done by a larger group.

Anyway, it should be at least two people cooking for at least five adults, but more like 5 people cooking for 20 adults imo, we done fucked the whole system up

[stripedtabbycat]

i've been watching hana hyperfixates' gravity falls videos after they were in the latest mystery shack lookback episode on the book of bill and greatly enjoying myself. much better than watching anything that might have been on tv today

their gravity falls timeline video really resonated with me as someone who also likes to engage with fiction that way (constructing elaborate conspiracy board level arrangements of canon to figure out where and when the hell everything is happening is in fact fun! if somewhat madness-inducing). my own thoughts on some of the matters raised there include:

personally i do prefer the idea that shermie pines is the oldest brother and has a significant enough age gap with the stans that he wasn't really around while they were growing up, and that the infamous baby seen in that one shot of "a tale of two stans" is his kid. if that is dipper and mabel's father it would make sense timeline-wise for him to be about 30-31 when they were born too, and regardless of what any of the creators say this is perfectly possible solely working with what the text gives us. BUT i also appreciate the effort involved in figuring out a way for the baby to be the very young grandfather of 12-year-old grandkids in the present day. alex hirsch you had no idea what you were unleashing with that one shot of the stans' mom holding a baby.

in fact i'm impressed by how much you can work out just from the stans' childhood years being nebulously defined as "the 60s". i like being able to set concrete dates working around what we've been given

characters do seem to forget dates a lot here. almost as if someone has some kind of device that can erase specific memories from your brain... (in all seriousness i was genuinely thinking okay so what if at some point fiddleford started regretting creating the memory gun and wiped his own memory of making it, but then found the plans later or even came up with the idea again entirely on his own, thus explaining why the journal has him creating it after the gremloblin incident while the show implies it was after the first portal incident. it's possible, and also shows the dangers of trying to solve problems with memory wipes. i didn't even think of the eurhythmics being the key to it all)

insane that the fiddleford mcgucket character tag literally only had 2 fics in it on ao3 before "society of the blind eye" aired. this is what i've been saying about prequels and backstory stuff - the impact a good one can have is incredible

i also fully believe that on the page of the journal after ford's realization of bill's betrayal where he writes complementarily about bill before crossing it out and writing CAN'T BE TRUSTED and DO NOT SUMMON AT ALL COSTS, the crossed-out parts were in fact written by bill temporarily possessing ford to fuck with him some more. i'm generally impressed with how the published journal works around the few full pages of it we see in the show and this is a good explanation for that. also might explain ford writing ICE ICE BABY in code long before the song came out...

(how the revelations in the book of bill about the lost journal pages play into all this is very interesting and might throw some of this timeline stuff off a bit, but that's a topic for another post)

i've been generally assuming the main events of the show take place in 2012 with 1982 being the year ford was lost to the portal, so this is the first time i've seriously considered that could be off by a year. it certainly does make a lot of the 1980s era of the timeline fit more comfortably, and if the twins are turning 13 in 2013 that means they were born the same year as me! yayyy

i am also now subscribing to the headcanon that the party in "double dipper" was a secret birthday party stan was throwing for himself and his missing brother, whose birthday he hadn't celebrated together with for a very long time. :( also tracks that he'd be keeping that kind of information about himself a secret

speaking of birthdays, i was going to try and figure out a solution to the problem of soos' birthday being different in the journal than what was shown in the episode about it, and was thinking that if he dislikes it enough he might go so far as to find a way to have a different one printed on his id cards, which stan could have helped out with (after his plans to get it removed from the calendar didn't work out) since he's got some experience with fake ids. but in the episode that card is how dipper and mabel find out it's his birthday in the first place so i guess i have no explanation for this. maybe it's another time anomaly?

[allthemusic]

Week ending: 5th February

Well, my reactions to these two songs are just about diametrically opposite. They're both well-made things, but... well, you'll see.

Problems - The Everly Brothers (peaked at Number 6)

It's certainly a very Everly Brothers song. We've got a vaguely Bo Diddley beat-adjacent guitar riff, some thumpy drumming and some tight harmonies, all accdentuating lyrics that are deliberately teenaged, portraying the sort of real-life situations that teenage listeners would have related to.

Problem is, the teenage angst here just doesn't work for me, and the Everlys come off as particularly whiny and annoying. The whole's song's about how Don (or Phil?) has problems, problems, problems all day long. Which is already quite dramatic, and that's before we get to the line that literally has Phil (or Don?) singing woe is me, I should have stayed in bed. Which, okay, I get it, is a very teenage feeling to have. But it does create a sort of sense of exaggeration, or of almost comedic angstiness, especially when we also get an explanation of our singer's main issues, namely that my baby don't like anything I do / My teacher seems to feel the same way too. Plus, there's a car riding on his grades, which makes it even worse: Can't get the car, my marks ain't been so good. They're all realistic concerns a 1950s teenager might have, but it still feels kind of like a performance of adolescent angst, and as such, it just kind of annoys me.

Still, alone, this wouldn't bug me. No, it's the last verse that does that, as our narrator sings: Problems, problems, problems / They're all on account of my lovin' you like I do / Problems, problems, problems / They won't be solved until I'm sure of you / You can solve my problems with a love that's true. So, let's see. We've blamed all of Phil's (Don's?) problems on his crush - which is not a winning romantic move, and is also kind of inaccurate, if his grades are part of the problem, one has to assume? And then, to compound matters, Don (Phil?) is going for this weird, pressurising move where he seems to be trying to guilt his crush into solving all his problems. Gross, and unlikely to succeed. You will not win your crush over by being performatively pathetic, dude. Not gonna happen!

Anyway, musically I also find the song kind of repetitive. And it's so Everlys. Everlys by numbers. Not a fan.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - The Platters (1)

What a contrast between the Everlys high school whine-fest and this track! We've gone from a track bemoaning all of Phil's (or Don's?) relatively trivial problems, to a much more mature track that's all about getting hurt, and the philosophical outlook you need to move past it.

It starts slow and syrupy, with these rather old-school violins setting us up for what will develop into a slow, lush sort of track, pushed along by this steady brushed drum beat, never really hurrying, with a vocalist who by turns soars into the stratosphere and then hangs back, but doesn't hesitate to really wail on the ohhhh interjections. And periodically, these really pretty orchestral bits, like the harp that crops up periodically.

What really makes the song is the lyrics, though, and the story they tell, rather poetically. Our singer was in love, and told everyone about it, when they asked: I of course replied, "Something inside cannot be denied". The people talking to him scoff at this, reminding him that all who love are blind, and that when your heart's on fire / You must realize / Smoke gets in your eyes. It's a metaphor apparently based on a Russian proverb, and it captures this idea that love can make you almost delusional, or at least hide certain truths from you. And our singer replies by laughing them off. So far so good.

But then things take a twist as we learn that today, my love has flown away. And suddenly the scenario flips round, as laughing friends deride / Tears I cannot hide. Our singer responds to this completely unwarranted mockery with a restraint I wouldn't have shown, smiling and flipping their advice round, singing about how when a lovely flame dies / Smoke gets in your eyes. The metaphor's become one less about how smoke blinds you, and more about smoke making you cry. And yet there's the subtlety of it still being a "lovely" flame - our narrator is hurting now, but appreciates the relationship for what it was, accepting the tears of a break-up as an inevitable sign that what he had was good. There's a sort of philosophical acceptance to it all. Things haven't gone well, romantically, but the singer, faced with this, simply accepts that it's over, and despite his friends being seemingly the literal worst, he manages to accept it graciously and rather stoically. Take note, Everlys!

Musically, there's a real musical theatre vibe to this one, though the Platters have done it up with some rather doo-wop backing vocals at points. It's the vaguely classical-sounding melodrama of it, the big soaring ballad lines, the occasional change of key, the dramatic changes in the backing instrumentation as the mood of the whole thing turns on a dime. And so I was hardly shocked to learn that the tune was originally composed way back in 1927 for the musical Show Boat, but was only given lyrics in 1933 as part of a completely different musical called Roberta, which sounds much dafter than this song would suggest, all about a football player who travels to Paris as part of a dance band, gets stranded without money and ends up working for his aunt in a dress shop, where he falls in love with a shop assistant, and also gets involved with a Russian princess? Like I said, daft.

Still, quality will out, and as such, the song became a bit of a 1930s standard, and seems to have been covered by just about everybody, including a saxophonist called Zoot Sims, who I'm only mentioning because of his excellent name. Other notables who covered this one include Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Jo Stafford, Eartha Kitt, Dinah Washington - and the list goes on!

No competition this week. I generally see the appeal of teenaged songs for teenagers, but I'm just not in the mood for it, today. Call it a demographic issue, but I'm much more inclined towards the Platters twisty metaphors and soulful balladeering, at least for today.

Favourite song of the bunch: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

[perpetual-fool]

-

This is probably stupid and I'm probably wrong, but it's bothering me.

There was an incident. We've had ants in the kitchen pantry, so we have those little tubs of ant poison sitting on the back of the shelves. A while back I noticed they were shoving food packages all the way to the back, so they were coming into contact with the open containers of poison. None of the poison seemed to have gotten out, but that leaves too small a safety margin for my preferences. I brought it up, they agreed it was a problem, and we now have bins to put the food in, ensuring the food will not be touching the poison. Then today, I see that someone has deliberately put a bag of nuts behind the bins and in the poison zone. Unlike before, it had pushed the poison container on its side, the poison had pooled up in its container and was almost leaking out. So it's now a very serious problem. I brought it up, they admit to doing it. Why? They just forgot the poison was there, they claimed. Sure, I can believe that they just forget about things when they're not paying attention to them anymore. So I clarify, "oh, so it's like [other problem]?" And they say "oh, I just needed to be aware of it", "What do you mean 'just'?", "I just wasn't aware of it", "What do you mean 'just'? you literally just told me you are not mentally capable of this." And then I realize this is an attack, and disengage.

That's one of the contradictions I was mentioning earlier, I only know they're wrong because they're disagreeing with themselves. Have a lot of feelings about it, mostly insecure about my life. Like, I'm a dependent, and the people I depend on take nearly every opportunity to destroy me as a person. What's going to happen if they realize it's not working?

Though I think the fact that it feels like a crisis every time it comes up means I don't have the right idea about what's happening. It should at least feel routine, like "ugh, this again". I did have an inverse experience with Cat when she cooperated with the 'explain, give example, rephrase' thing. So extrapolating from that, am I just getting hit with alienation? anti-belonging? And there's not really anything about it I can solve since it's just a raw feeling. If that's true, maybe I could manage it better. I guess I keep getting set up for betrayal by reasonable sounding things, like 'yes, having poison touching the food would be a problem'. Knowing that's what happening, maybe I can be sure to keep my expectations low if someone isn't talking like they're writing code. And maybe get back to making my own language so I can synthesize my own belonging with my imaginary friend.

I seem to be circling issues again. I feel a bit bad about theoretically wasting someone's time with this. But I make these pretty easy to ignore, so I shouldn't. And it just means I haven't figured things out yet.

Tangent, it feels like 'resting' is taking an unreasonably long time. Three days and the ideas still aren't coming? No one has that kind of stamina. If what I really need to recharge is 'belonging' then fair enough, but I'm wondering if the random videos I've been watching have a result akin to junk food. Like, if I'm hungry and I eat a donut, I will actually be more hungry afterwards. I'm thinking maybe my idle activities are returning little to no mental energy. So maybe I should commit to something more involved, like finally playing Outer Wilds or Tunic. I did have a good week or so after trying Lunacid, I think. Hypothetically I should be working on a project of my own, but that's the chicken to the egg of not believing I'm wrong for wanting things. But maybe someday I'll figure out how to design an RPG that somehow replaces combat with sex. Or figure out meaningful time travel, or how to capture that sense of mystery, or simply identify what exactly I find engaging.

Anyway, thanks for theoretically listening. That may or may not be helping somewhat.

[taiblogcomics]

Nice Day for a Red Wedding

Hey there, clown corps. Headin' towards that finale now, huh? Genuinely, I don't think there's much chance of guessing where this is going, so let's just read on, shall we~?

Here's the cover:

Boy, speaking of heading for the finale… Or should I say, beheading~? Anyway, this must be the oft-rumoured princess we've been hearing so much about, eh? Nice to see her! So, what's the '80s or possibly '90s cartoon property we're fusing and lampooning today? Ah yes, that Saturday morning staple, Game of Thrones. Yeah, sure, we all grew up on that, didn't we? I guess they had this "Throne of Games" visual and wanted to lean into it. Like, there were definitely a lot of '80s and '90s cartoons about medieval kingdoms to draw from, we didn't have to go here~

We open with a cool map of the kingdom of Dimension Ecch, and I really appreciate it. Like, it's not informative for the story, I just like a cool map. Anyway, we also get some exposition. Long ago, the land was ruled by an Overlord, until the Adversary struck him down and cursed the lands to become… G-rated. And yes, they mean exactly what you think they mean. This is what all that jazz with the jokes regarding Slapstick's lack of equipment has been building up to. His dickishness has doomed an entire dimension to dicklessness~

Gotta say, I appreciate the detail in the art here. The same way that Slapstick and the other toons stood out as cartoonier than the realistic backgrounds in the previous issues, now he blends in perfectly and it's the ARMOR agents who stands out, looking realistic against the dimension's toony world. Really great work by the artist. So anyway, long story short, Slapstick is kind of annoyed no one recognises him. All that exposition didn't mention how he's really the champion and not Mike. After all, he destroyed the Overlord, where's his recognition?

So of course, overhearing him take credit clues the crowd of toons around them that he's responsible for de-organing the lot of 'em, and decide to burn him at the stake. Thankfully, his competent party members also are here to rescue him. When pressed, Slapstick tearfully admits his "condition" to Teresa, distraught that she should find him so unendowed, especially when she's starting to develop feelings for him. To be clear, the only feeling she has towards him is annoyance. Something the reader is also probably feeling by now, so let's speed this along~

Thankfully, the princess enters at this point, attended by a squad of magical girl soldiers. The princess is appalled to have heard all the talk about their privates, and fears they might be slipping into the old ways of no-no words and crude behaviour. And then, I swear to God, she breaks into a musical number. An honest-to-god Disney-esque musical number about how she solved the reproduction problem. It lasts three pages and has choreography. This comic is amazing. Slapstick is as impressed as I am, just to show you how good it is~

Anyway, the gist of her song is that everyone was despondant after their lack of genitals also seized the means of their reproduction. So she set up a system where literal storks bring everyone babies without having to go through all the, shall we say, messy parts. Slapstick wonders if maybe they took the fun out of it, but he's impressed she solved the problem regardless. It doesn't matter anyway, since now that Mike the Champion is here, he can fulfill the prophecy and restore everyone shnoodles. (I'm running out of euphamisms at this point!)

Trouble is, Mike's not here. He's still kidnapped by Skratch, the evil terrorist cat organisation. They've also teamed up with Sorceror Supreme and eternal enemy of the Taurs, the wizard Gorgonzola. You can see that Mike's makeshift costume was actually pretty spot-on. Gorgonzola is trying to get Mike to spill the beans on the prophecy and stop playing dumb. Trouble is, he's not playing. He genuinely has no idea what's going on or how to fix what's ailing them. And before Gorgonzola can interrogate further, the War DOGS start attacking their base.

While the War DOGS distract the cats, Slapstick and the ARMOR agents burst in to fight Gorgonzola. Slapstick's brought the two weapons he's proven are super useful against toon-kind: Bro-Man's sword and Quasimodo's arm cannon. So Gorgonzola simply waves his wand and makes them disappear in a puff of pink smoke. I guess magic trumps technology in this case. While the wizard continues to block shots from the agents' laser guns, Slapstick slips around and hits the man in the small of his back with his mallet. No magic spell to protect against plain ol' blunt force trauma!

He drops his wand in the process, which Taurette retrieves but cannot use. No weapon left, Gorgonzola turns to the real magic of this story: '80s cartoon parodies. As Slapstick goes to untie Mike from the big metal chair he was being held on, the chair unfolds and becomes a Transformers parody named Lay-Zee-Boyee, greatest of the Chairbots! Look, I know the Rock Lords were a thing. They didn't catch on, and I don't think Chairbots would either. Though you might get some enjoyment of having other Chairbots sit on each other.

Agent Teresa leaps up onto Lay-Zee-Boyee--who, incidentally, speaks in "robot" versions of urban slang (e.g. "Motherboard said knock you out")--and begins rewiring him to control his transformations. Keep in mind Mike is still tied to this robot as well. It's not important, but it will help add to the bizarreness of whatever you're visualising. She manages to get him to turn into a missile shape, and Slapstick uses his mallet to whack the missile, rocketing it straight into Gorgonzola, pinning him to the wall. If it wasn't an '80s cartoon, it'd probably be gruesome!

Rex also enters, having defeated the Skratch Commander offscreen. With the villains all mopped up, they return to the princess, now with Champion Mike in tow. Hey, are you expecting a twist? Because here it is! Gasp, the princess is evil! She's even doing a dark reprise of her song! Toons are immortal, but they can be broken down and melted. That's her baby-making business. To demonstrate, she melts down Gorgonzola and turns him into a baby, literally recasting him in a mold. Business is booming, so why should she let a couple of outworlders get in her way? To that end, she condemns both Champion and Adversary to a death battle in the arena to close the issue.

This issue is mostly a fight scene (and I have a feeling the finale will be too), but it is very silly, so I don't mind that as much as usual. Like, at least this fight scene is enjoyable to read, compared to half the ones in Suicide Squad. There's honestly still a lot going on here, so we'll see how they wrap it up in 22 minutes--I mean, pages--next issue~