#Ada twist scientist

[malerfique]

LGBT+ CARTOON  LGBT characters in the excited cartoons they are there

[historyhermann]

Black animation at the crossroads?: Diversity, corporate mandates, backlash, and hope

An image I came up with for this post, noting some Black animations which have aired recently. The top row has characters from: Kizazi Moto, Karma’s World, Supa Team 4, and My Dad the Bounty Hunter. The middle row has Iyanu and Oh My God… Yes!. The bottom row has: The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, Lil Kev, Lyla in the Loop, Iwájú, and Young Love I recently came across a piece in the St. Louis…

[permetutotheworld]

i fucking love ada twist scientist

[banafanax]

I loved reading the Questioneers picture books by Andrea Beaty like "Rosie Revere: Engineer" and "Ada Twist: Scientist." Then they turned it into a Netflix series and I just couldn't stand it. I had the hardest time explaining why until I remembered. It was that damn GrubHub commercial. Everything goes back to that damn commercial.

[raptr-rambles]

Ada Twist: Scientist is at the same level of

I’m learning science concepts and factual knowledge!

And

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD WHY IS EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING SO WHOLESOME AND PERFECT AND I’M GOING TO CRY AT THE SMALLEST BIT OF REPRESENTATION I CAN’T I-

As Dinosaur Train.

Like I MEAN-

Ada, Iggy, Rosie, Benny

Tiny, Buddy, Shiny, Don

The MLM kiss in ATS ALMOST made me cry as hard as the ending from Buddy Wants to Fly

Y’ALL CAN RIP THIS FROM MY COLD DEAD FOSSILISED HANDS

[bunnelbaby]

Here’s a list of children’s shows for girl regressors/girl dreamers to enjoy!

(Disclaimer: Much like my list of recommendations for boy(d)res, anyone is welcome to enjoy these shows regardless of how they identify! This is simply a list of series I sense that girl(d)res would like to check out.)

𐐪𐑂 Gabby’s Dollhouse

𐐪𐑂 Jessica’s Big Little World

𐐪𐑂 Elena of Avalor

𐐪𐑂 Sofia the First

𐐪𐑂 Nella the Princess Knight

𐐪𐑂 Ariel

𐐪𐑂 Molly of Denali

𐐪𐑂 Alma’s Way

𐐪𐑂 Rosie’s Rules

𐐪𐑂 Mia and Me

𐐪𐑂 Rainbow Bubblegem

𐐪𐑂 Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur

𐐪𐑂 Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure

𐐪𐑂 Miraculous Ladybug

𐐪𐑂 Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

𐐪𐑂 Hilda

𐐪𐑂 Jentry Chau Vs. The Underworld

𐐪𐑂 Dee & Friends in Oz

𐐪𐑂 Dew Drop Diaries

𐐪𐑂 Ada Twist, Scientist

𐐪𐑂 Monster High

𐐪𐑂 Rainbow High

𐐪𐑂 Ever After High

𐐪𐑂 Mermaid High

𐐪𐑂 Supernatural Academy

𐐪𐑂 Unicorn Academy

𐐪𐑂 Lalaloopsy

𐐪𐑂 Barbie

𐐪𐑂 Bratz

𐐪𐑂 Enchantimals

𐐪𐑂 Mira, Royal Detective

𐐪𐑂 Alice’s Wonderland Bakery

𐐪𐑂 Kiya & the Kimoja Heroes

𐐪𐑂 Minnie’s Bow-Toons

𐐪𐑂 Butterbean’s Café

𐐪𐑂 Zoobles!

𐐪𐑂 DC Super Hero Girls

𐐪𐑂 Carmen Sandiego

𐐪𐑂 Star Darlings

𐐪𐑂 Princess Starla and the Jewel Riders

𐐪𐑂 Jem and the Holograms

𐐪𐑂 Angel’s Friends

𐐪𐑂 Rainbow Rangers

𐐪𐑂 Charlie and Lola

𐐪𐑂 Sunny Day

𐐪𐑂 Polly Pocket

𐐪𐑂 Puppy in My Pocket: Adventures in Pocketville

𐐪𐑂 Abby Hatcher

𐐪𐑂 Angelina Ballerina

𐐪𐑂 PopPixie

𐐪𐑂 Mermaid Magic

𐐪𐑂 Princess Tutu

𐐪𐑂 Tokyo Mew Mew

𐐪𐑂 Catch! Teenieping

𐐪𐑂 Flowering Heart

𐐪𐑂 Komi Witch Lara

𐐪𐑂 Tea Tea Cherry

𐐪𐑂 Rainbow Ruby

𐐪𐑂 Littlest Pet Shop: A World of Our Own

𐐪𐑂 Whisker Haven: Tales with the Palace Pets

𐐪𐑂 Wild Manes

𐐪𐑂 Ridley Jones

𐐪𐑂 Harvey Street Kids

𐐪𐑂 Luna Petunia

𐐪𐑂 Vida the Vet

𐐪𐑂 Fancy Nancy

𐐪𐑂 Esme & Roy

𐐪𐑂 Doc McStuffins

𐐪𐑂 Pinkalicious & Peteriffic

𐐪𐑂 W.I.T.C.H.

𐐪𐑂 Winx Club

𐐪𐑂 Cardcaptor Sakura

𐐪𐑂 Jewelpet

𐐪𐑂 Ojamajo Doremi

𐐪𐑂 Revolutionary Girl Utena

𐐪𐑂 Precure

𐐪𐑂 Sailor Moon

𐐪𐑂 Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi

𐐪𐑂 Strawberry Shortcake

𐐪𐑂 My Little Pony

𐐪𐑂 Care Bears

𐐪𐑂 Fantasy Patrol

𐐪𐑂 Kindi Kids

𐐪𐑂 Sadie Sparks

𐐪𐑂 Magic Mixies

𐐪𐑂 Chip and Potato

𐐪𐑂 Shopkins

𐐪𐑂 She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

𐐪𐑂 RWBY

𐐪𐑂 Princess Power

𐐪𐑂 Kitti Katz

𐐪𐑂 LEGO Elves: Secrets of Elvendale

𐐪𐑂 LEGO Friends

𐐪𐑂 Shimmer and Shine

𐐪𐑂 Little Charmers

𐐪𐑂 True and the Rainbow Kingdom

(Divider Credit)

[stars-inthe-sky]

Ten people I want to get to know better…

Tagged forever ago by @stpauligirl and @ryeloza!

Last song: "Happiness is a Warm Gun" by the Beatles (maybe we should be monitoring the toddler's playlists more...)

Favourite colour: Blue

Last movie: "Saturday Night," I think? Boyfriend's on a big SNL kick alongside the Lonely Island podcast, and I've been happy to be along for that ride.

Last TV show: SNL 50th, or I finally got around to the (delightful!) recent Doctor Who Christmas special. Or "Ada Twist, Scientist," which my toddler is obsessed with (and at least nominally learning from).

Last book: Hahaha I haven't read an adult book in...probably over a year. I could, it's just that mostly I use the scant not-kid, not-work time I have to do other things (knit), and it's much easier to just read fics on my phone, you know?

Sweet/savoury/spicy: Sweet

Last thing I googled: The website for a graphic designer I work with frequently to make a referral

Current obsession: It's still 9-1-1, but I look forward to shifting (back) into Old Guard mode this summer.

Looking forward to: Remodeling part of the house for the kids' rooms (and therefore no longer having the baby's room exist within the primary bedroom suite)

Tagging: @rcmclachlan, @screamlet, @setmeatopthepyre, @apollabarnes, @iphyslitterator, @dharmaavocado, @alchemistc, @cecilyv, @hachinana87, @werebearbearbar

[justalibrarian]

Children's Books Featuring Women In Science🥼

Rosie Revere, Engineer

Ada Twist, Scientist

The Doctor with an Eye for Eyes: The Story of Dr. Patricia Bath

Who Says Women Can't Be Doctors?: The Story of Elizabeth Blackwell

Just Wild Enough: Mireya Mayor, Primatologist

The Watcher: Jane Goodall's Life with the Chimps

The Tree Lady: The True Story of How One Tree-Loving Woman Changed a City Forever

Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian

Rachel Carson and Her Book That Changed the World

Mama Miti: Wangari Maathai and the Trees of Kenya

The Elephant Scientist

Classified: The Secret Career of Mary Golda Ross, Cherokee Aerospace Engineer

The World is Not a Rectangle: A Portrait of Architect Zaha Hadid

Maya Lin: Artist-Architect of Light and Lines

Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor

Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women

Nothing Stopped Sophie: The Story of Unshakable Mathematician Sophie Germain

Listening to the Stars: Jocelyn Bell Burnell Discovere Pulsars

Hidden Figures: The True Story of Four Black Women and the Space Race

Look Up!: Henrietta Leavitt, Pioneering Woman Astronomer

Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine

Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code

Margaret and the Moon: How Margaret Hamilton Saved the First Lunar Landing

Of Numbers and Stars: The Story of Hypatia

Life in the Ocean: The Story of Oceanographer Sylvia Earle

This list will definitely grow a lot bigger!

Enjoy your reading!

[cosmosrebellion]

I've been thinking of another Blazblue villain for the Symphogear girls to punch and this one is probably the one who deserves the most: Relius Clover.

Relius is a sorcerer and scientist in Blazblue who's responsible for half of the fucked up shit that happened in the series. He is a desensitized monster who views people as tools for his horrible experiments. To give an idea of how much this guy sucks, he turned his wife and his daughter into living puppets who are used for combat, and he constantly traumatizes his son who's looking for a way to bring his sister back.

But the reason I chose Relius is for a kinda of goofy idea. So, you know how in the series they never explain Kirika's back story and also establish that she doesn't remember anything about her family, what if Relius is her father?

With elements like his son Carl desperately looking for a way to give his sister Ada her body back, and Relius wife Ignis showing a lot of moments of autonomy, implying that she's less of a victim and more a co-conspirator despite being turned into a robot, there's a lot of interesting drama to explore with Kirika being conflicted between learning about where she came from, her family's dark history and why no one went looking for her, or keep things as they are to save herself the pain.

Part of what made me want to explore this idea is that Carl straight up looks like Kirika with a different eye color, and I'm pretty sure they're about the same age too. And I know that alongside an evil dad, giving Kirika twin brother (or sister if we take some liberties) might be a twist worthy of a telenovela, but I think there's an interesting story to be told about blood and found family here.

Translating the Clovers into Symphogear is pretty easy too. Replace Relius' sorcery with alchemy and have his puppet creation be a conversion of humans into autoscorers. In Blazblue his objective is to recreate the world as its Ultimate Architect , that can easily be translated into him building some kind of god machine to rewrite history, which creates a pretty interesting theme of someone trying to steal the future the Symphogears fought for.

My main thought with this is doing something big for Kirika's character, but there's also a lot you can do with the FIS trio, I think it be cool for them to take center stage in it. From Shirabe wanting to help Kirika learn more about her past, but also wanting to protect from the pain it might cause, to Maria maybe helping Kirika try to reach Carl given her own baggage with sibling relationships.

I have fun with these.

[outlandish-dreamer]

Do you have any favorite Resident Evil characters?

Oooh yes I do actually!! I love this question <3

First off, I really do like how they handled Ada in the remakes, even if she's not exactly a good person. Maybe it's just her character design, but she's got a special place in my heart.

Helena Harper was way too interesting for them to only have her in one game. Seriously? What the hell Capcom? Anyway, she's great. I love her.

The entire Dimitrescu's family is so cool, but my favorite's definitely Lady D. I know a lot of people like her for uh...certain reasons, but I like her purely for the fact that she's still so sweet in her own twisted way! She's such a mom, and a pretty decent one at that. Giant motherly figure in a video game? Yeah, you know I'm gonna like her.

The entire Winters family is interesting to me, but especially Mia given that she's one of the few characters who isn't a scientist, or a cop. That and how contradictory she is with her family with anyone else is really understandable. As someone who's trying to make up for the things she's done, she feels human in that aspect. Plus, her and Ethan's story is just amazingly well done. So sad, but still great.

Now as for the b o y s:

I love this sad cop man it's not even funny. I mean, he's Leon. What more can I say? The way his PTSD is handeled in the games, his interactions with everyone else, and his backstory are just a few of the things I love about him. One of the only detectives I respect lmao. But yes, he's up there in my favorites, if not the top 3. I love this sad emo boy.

And finally,

The man, the myth, the legend, Luis Serra Nevarro. I..love this man so much. His design is great, his dynamic with Leon is amazing (the bromance of all time, he had more chemistry with him than most anyone else, let me tell ya), and he's just such a likeable character! Even when he's kind of an ass at times. He wants to be a better person and he's just the perfect amount of "I could care less whether you fell of a cliff and died" and "NOT on my watch. NOT. ON. MY. WATCH." He's also genuinely funny, and that's something I hold in a very high regard. So yeah, he's one of my faves.

I really love so many characters in both the original and Evil Dead series, so it's hard for me to pick just one or two favorites. But, these are the ones that have always been, and most like always will be in that category. Thanks for asking me! I had a ton of fun and I love hearing other people talk about this game 〔´∇｀〕

[science-sculpt]

The Nucleosome: DNA's Fancy Packaging and Party Trick!

Imagine cramming two meters of yarn into a pea-sized box. Sounds impossible, right? Well, that's the impressive feat that cells pull off every single day with DNA! They use a clever structure called the nucleosome to pack this massive genetic blueprint into the tiny nucleus.

The journey began in 1974 when Don and Ada Olins, peering through an electron microscope, spotted repeating beads – the first glimpse of nucleosomes. Roger Kornberg, building upon this observation, proposed the now-iconic "subunit theory," envisioning DNA wrapped around histone protein cores. This theory, later solidified by Pierre Oudet's term "nucleosome," laid the groundwork for further exploration. The 1980s witnessed a flurry of activity, with Aaron Klug's group using X-ray crystallography to reveal the left-handed superhelical twist of DNA around the histone octamer. But the true masterpiece arrived in 1997 when the Richmond group, armed with advanced techniques, unveiled the first near-atomic resolution crystal structure of the nucleosome. This intricate map, showcasing the precise interactions between DNA and histones, remains a cornerstone of our understanding.

The Players:

DNA: The star of the show, carrying our genetic code in the form of a double helix.

Histones: Protein spools around which DNA tightly winds. Imagine eight of them forming a core, like a mini-protein drum set.

Linker DNA: Short stretches of DNA connecting the spools, like the spaces between beads on a necklace.

The Steps:

Wrap and Roll: Picture DNA gracefully wrapping around the histone core, like thread around a spool. Each nucleosome holds about 146 base pairs of DNA, making about 1.67 turns.

Connect and Repeat: Linker DNA bridges the gap between nucleosomes, forming a "beads-on-a-string" structure. Think of it as pearls strung between the spools.

Compact and Condense: This repetitive unit folds further, creating intricate 30-nanometer fibers. Imagine these as twisted strands of pearls!

Here's the coolest part: histones aren't static. They can be chemically modified, like adding or removing phosphate groups. These modifications act like tiny flags that tell the cell how tightly to wrap the DNA, essentially throwing a "party" for specific genes by making them more accessible. This fine-tuning allows cells to respond to their environment and express the right genes at the right time. Understanding the nucleosome model is crucial for unraveling the mysteries of gene regulation and diseases like cancer. By studying how modifications affect nucleosome structure and gene access, scientists can develop new therapies to target specific genes and potentially treat diseases at the root cause.

While the nucleosome model is the foundation, the story gets even more intriguing. Different histone types and modifications create variations, influencing chromatin structure and function. Think of it as different music genres influencing the dance moves! Additionally, other proteins interact with the nucleosome, adding another layer of complexity to this fascinating choreography.

The nucleosome model is more than just a neat way to package DNA. It's a testament to the intricate dance between molecules that orchestrates life's processes. By understanding this fundamental structure, we gain deeper insights into cellular function, paving the way for advancements in medicine and beyond.

Remember, this is just the beginning! The world of nucleosomes and chromatin is vast and ever-evolving. So, keep exploring, keep questioning, and keep dancing to the rhythm of DNA!

[dorothydalmati1]

Happy late Thanksgiving, or Black Friday. OAS is coming back, and the remainder of the second season will be released in the 25 days of Christmas. Here’s the schedule:

1. Reynard the Fox and the Jew Animal (yes that exists)

2. Bookworm Bunch

3. 100% Wolf

4. Biker Mice from Mars

5. Glitter Force

6. Max & the Midknights

7. Zombies: The Re-Animated Series

8. Thermae Romae

9. Dash Kappei

10. The Captain and the Kids

11. Flip the Frog

12. The Dogfather

13. Anime Shūkan DX! Mi-Pha-Pu

14. Kindergarten: The Musical

15. Pinky Malinky

16. Beast Boy: Lone Wolf

17. Alice Comedies

18. Dotakon

19. High School USA!

20. Ada Twist, Scientist

21. The Smokey Bear Show

22. My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale

23. Gremlins (Max TV series)

24. Elf Pets

25. The Leprechauns' Christmas Gold

Alright, now didn’t you know I’m apart of Marshall cult?

MARSHALL, MARSHALL, MARSHALL!

First ever dalmatian balloon, wonderful, and remember the time I ate everything?

Credit goes to SuperPac13 for the artwork. Otherwise yeah, see you on December 1st! Gonna post some spamming credit information until then.

[rallamajoop]

Resident Evil 6: When a franchise has an identity crisis

I can’t tell you RE6 is a better game than RE5, but if nothing else, it’s a far more interesting failure.

RE6 is famously the game that tried so hard to appeal to everyone that it wound up appealing to no-one: overlong, overproduced and utterly OTT. RE5 left the franchise at a crossroads: the previous two games were huge successes, but drew criticism for straying from the series’ horror roots. Faced with the choice of doubling down on the new direction or diverting back towards something more survival horror, Capcom attempted to do both, at once, and then some.

The new RE6 would have three different main campaigns (Chris & Piers, Leon & Helena, and Jake & Sherry), all aimed at different markets, plus a fourth which would unlock only after the previous three were completed, which was to be different again. It would have something for everyone! Provided ‘everyone’ wanted a co-op shooter experience with ALL the explosions, or was prepared to play through three different extended co-op experiences just to unlock the one that was kinda more designed to be played solo. Completing that fourth campaign would also be essential to ever finding out what the fuck was going on during those first three. How could that go wrong?

RE6 is, in other words, exactly what happens when a franchise has an identity crisis.

Experienced purely on the level of plot and cutscenes, RE6 remains hard to rate overall because while there are parts of this game I genuinely enjoyed in a way nothing in RE5 could boast, so many other parts of were legitimately uncomfortable to sit through, and in ways owing less to effective horror than to gratuitous, ugly misery porn.

Watch, as these bit characters you barely know die in horrible, gruesome ways in front of people who care about them! Watch! As Helena is finally reunited with the infected sister she committed treason to save, just in time to watch her beloved Deborah transform into a horrific butt-naked-lady monster who will spend the ensuing boss fight posing sexily while her tits show off their jiggle physics! It’s so traumatic for poor Helena, you have no idea!

Watch! As Chris reaches desperately for the outstretched fingers of StarryEyed McNewKid in the final seconds before his body erupts into a monster cocoon! Chris, dude, how long have you been in this business? He’s not falling off a rooftop, Chris! Grabbing his hand is not going to help!

It would all be hilarious if it wasn’t also all so skin-crawlingly unpleasant. There’s something uniquely gross about how these scenes play out, and largely not in the fun way.

With all four campaigns down, the big secret behind devastating bio-terror outbreaks in three different locations around the world turns out to be that some member of the Actual Illuminati gets Big Mad that Ada Wong won’t put out, and converts a loyal scientist (Carla) into an Ada-clone, who promptly sets out to end the world in a fit of clone-angst. There’s a bit more going on in some of the individual campaigns – Illuminati Dude also sets up a plot to kill the US president so he can’t reveal the truth about Raccoon City (whatever that means), then frames Leon and Helena for it. He’s also sent Sherry out to find Wesker’s son, whose blood may be the one cure for their latest alphabet-virus, Sherry little realising who she’s really working for. And the real Ada’s around too – you can tell her apart by how the clone doesn’t wear enough red to be the real deal.

Among the many problems with this game are that Illuminati Dude and clone!Ada are our only real villains, and neither are up to the franchise standard. Ada is just too well-established a character to work as the kind of villain who just wants-to-watch-the-world-burn – you can see the twist coming long, tiring hours before it hits. And Simmons (Illuminati Dude) just does not have any of the personality that makes people remember villains like Wesker or Salazar. There is some impressive creature design in this game – some of the boss monsters are far more memorable than the villains. But by this stage of franchise-transformation, your base level infected-enemy is just a generic guy with a machine gun and maybe an extra couple of eyes up close. It's a military shooter with occasional monsters, expecting you to mow down mooks without stopping for breath.

Speaking of military shooters, Chris has a campaign too, but for the life of me I could not tell you anything in it that matters to anyone else. He runs around a few locations, he fights a lot of monsters, completely fails to stop a missile launch, and loses people in the field. In the wake of RE5, the new game has honed in on the one defining feature of Chris’ character, Man With Lots Of Feelings About Losing People In The Field, and doubled down. Chris loses a lot of people in the field in this game.

The four campaigns in this game are separate enough that I’m going to talk about them that way, so let’s start with Chris.

Chris and Piers

Like the franchise as a whole, Chris is in the midst of his own identity crisis. Is running from place to place, fighting monsters and losing so many people in the field really his whole life now? Yes, Chris. Yes, it is. I don’t know what else to tell you.

As much shade as this game gets for not being proper horror, there’s a case to be made that Chris’ campaign is absolutely a horror story, just one about the specific horrors of toxic masculinity. Aww, Chris, are you having an alcohol-fuelled, amnesic breakdown after traumatically losing your whole team in the field? You think maybe you could use some therapy, some downtime? Well fuck you, Chris, what you need is for the one survivor of your big fuck-up to come yell at you, drag your amnesic ass back to base and give you a whole new team. Then you can go lose them all in the field again, this time down to the very last man, so you can learn how to be a fucking man about it! MEN DON’T GET TO HAVE FEELINGS!!

Chris persists in having feelings nonetheless, mostly rage and denial. By the end game, poor Chris is about half a breakdown away from the point where he could see his whole team smeared into a bloody pulp, and would still have to be dragged away screaming “noooooo we can still save them!!!” The sheer hilarity can only temper the misery so far.

Watch as Chris solemnly retrieves the C4 cartridge that is all that was left of the last (non-playable) survivor of the second team he’s lost this game, which game text will dutifully label as Marco’s C4. Watch the sadness in Chris’ eyes as he slaps it onto a door and blows it open! (That was Marco’s C4, Piers! He loved that C4! He took it everywhere with him! Now it’s as burned and blackened as he is!)

If you’re here for testosterone poisoning, Chris and Piers’ campaign is here for you. Up to this point in the series, one of Chris’ few vaguely-distinguishing features was how many women there were in his life, and how he generally managed not to be weird about that – Jill, Claire, Sheva, even Rebecca. In RE6, Chris is a man’s man in a man’s world, full of men – no lady partners around to slow down this Redfield!

Chris interacts with all of three women in the whole game, and is one of those is him telling a barmaid ‘Listen, sweetheart, you’re here to pour drinks and look pretty’ when she tries to cut him off during his drunken-amnesic opening sequence. Chris spends the rest of the game hunting clone!Ada after she gruesomely murders his first team in front of him. He never gets his final showdown with her. He never finds out she’s a clone. But he sure does get into a big punch-up with Leon when Leon has the gall to suggest they need to bring “Ada” in alive, not in a body bag (the clone herself slips away while they’re still arguing).

Chris does manage to be nicer to Sherry, at least, but his biggest interaction with Jake is similarly testosterone-laden. If you play these campaigns in their intended order, you’ll have the big Wesker-junior-reveal exposed for you in other people’s dialogue long before you’ll ever see Jake find out for himself. Chris decides this means he absolutely has to let Jake know that I Killed Your Father at the first possible opportunity, never mind that the lives of millions could hang on whether he and Jake can get on long enough to get out alive. He and Jake very nearly come to blows over it.

It’s all so ridiculous that even Piers calls him out on it; Chris simply insists that Jake “had a right to know.” Sure, but why now? For which matter, why would Jake suddenly care about the death of the evil, asshole deadbeat he hates so much? Oh, let’s not kid ourselves, it’s all because the writers wanted their big, tense, manly, “I killed your daddy!”-confrontation, and were going to shoehorn it in at any cost.

And yet, for all the bullshit that is Chris’ manly, manly campaign, I can’t completely hate it, because there’s this one bit at the end where Piers injects himself with a virus in a desperate moment, and promptly grows a giant mutant arm that shoots lightning. Like, if you are playing as Piers, you get to wield his mutant lightning arm through the remaining combat scenes.

The game even throws up a bunch of lightning-destructible barriers after the big boss battle just to give you more to do with it. I mean, how can you not love a thing like that? It’s amazing.

More importantly, why the fuck is there not more use of Piers’ horrifying lightning-shooting monster-arm in Chris/Piers fanfic? Do you all not see how 100% DTF Chris would be if he thought it had even a chance of helping convince Piers his monster-arm wasn’t so bad and he didn’t need to nobly stay behind to die? You can’t experience this game and tell me this isn’t the moment Chris has been building up for the whole damn campaign! Am I going to have to write monster-fucker!Chris myself?

Ahem.

Leon and Helena

Leon’s campaign does not start in a bar, comfortably far from the action. It starts in a presidential office, where Leon is already pointing a gun at the zombified PotUS, who is even now eating another victim.

“Don’t make me do this!” Leon begs, demonstrating that Chris has absolutely set the standard for seasoned-pros-still-living-in-absurd-denial that we can expect from everyone in this mad game. Leon, c’mon – wake up and smell the decomposition! Fuck, your boss is so far gone already they can probably smell him from the building next door!

Leon seems to be working presidential security, but he can’t be doing a very good job, considering that not only has the president been zombified on his watch, there’s a woman with a drawn firearm standing next to him in the president’s presence, and (in one of many record-scratch moments) we’re about to find out Leon hasn’t a clue who she is. Other games might have spent some time leading up to this moment, establishing how Leon, Helena and the ex-pres all got into this position. They might even have given us a scene or two to set up Leon’s relationship with said president, a man whose death has apparently been so traumatic that Leon’s forgotten everything he ever knew about zombies (and take note that this isn’t even Ashley’s-dad-the-president, it’s apparently some completely new guy, so even franchise vets are coming in blind). But not RE6! RE6 gives us a few seconds of flashback-montage right before Leon pulls the trigger, and gets right back to its regular schedule of misery porn.

Helena mutters, “It’s all my fault!” but refuses to elaborate in any way until they reach this cathedral on the other side of town (naturally hiding some kind of biotech lab facility) where it will all become clear. It takes a long time to get to the cathedral, however, because there’s a zombie outbreak in progress, and Leon and Helena keep stopping to watch people die.

There’s a man who wants help looking for his daughter! “We don’t have time!” says Helena. “We’ll make time!” says Leon. Well, they sure do make time to watch that newly-zombified daughter eat her father in a horrific scene. Yay! Later, they find a security feed showing a couple of helpless civilians desperately waving “HELP” signs at a security camera, like there’s going to be anyone checking security feeds in the midst of the zombie apocalypse. Leon watches the feed. The civilians persist in waving signs in one of those awkward video-game animation cycles. Leon watches some more. The signs wave some more. Finally, “we should go help them!” says Leon, as zombies show up to eat everyone present. Helena points out it may be a little late. It’s all so hilarible it hurts.

There’s no good reason why Helena can’t explain anything until they get to the cathedral. All she needs to say is that she’s a federal agent whose sister was taken hostage to force her to cooperate with the villains responsible for the president’s death, and who've been making bioweapons in a secret lab under the cathedral. You could question why a major bio-terror outbreak was necessary for one little act of political assassination, but because this is the Resident Evil universe, any evil worth doing is worth doing with zombies.

You could question exactly what Helena was forced to do, but the game isn’t interested in any of that logical plot stuff. You could question exactly why whatever the president was about to reveal about Raccoon City was worth a political assassination, but the game isn’t interested in politics either. We’re going to the cathedral! It’ll all be much easier to explain there! (It won’t be, we’re not here to explain anything.)

It doesn’t really get better from here. Leon’s campaign is, in short, an epic mess. But I can’t completely hate it, because despite all the bullshit material he’s working with, I am kind of into this take on Leon. This is a Leon who’s older, cooler and more sophisticated, and it just gets me something ridiculous. I’ve seen complaints from fans of the original RE4 who weren’t happy he’s more serious and has less goofy one-liners, which is probably fair – Leon still gets some good ones in, but Jake is hoarding most of the real one-liners in this game, and Leon does come across kind of absurdly over-earnest in a lot of early scenes. He's not going to be to everyone's taste.

But frankly, I’ll take this Leon over RE4’s any day. He feels so much closer to the version in the new games I fell for so hard (and not just because he can actually work with women without being weird about it). He also looks amazing in a suit and still has great chemistry with (real) Ada, and good god, they should just run away together already, those combined genetics would produce the coolest babies imaginable, you just try and tell me they wouldn’t!

And, y'know, sue me, but I kinda liked Helena too. I could do without the police-brutality backstory that she gets in documents, but she's a woman who has fucked up big time, who knows it, and is trying to make up for it, and that kind of complicated tends to be what gives me most of my female faves in this franchise.

Jake & Sherry

Much as I enjoyed Leon and Helena though, their campaign at large is still a pretty miserable slog. And having already sat through two long campaigns of indifferent misery porn, I can’t tell you what a breath of fresh air it was it reach Jake and Sherry’s story and realise, oh my god, I’m actually having a good time! They’re actually having some fun together! They have such great chemistry! Jake even has an actual character arc where he looks back on his life with new eyes and real drive to become a better person! Did I accidentally switch to a whole different game?

Jake (aka Wesker Junior) is the kind of character who shouldn’t work: an above-it-all edgelord mercenary asshole who sounds like everything wrong with this game in a nutshell. His reaction to discovering he might be carrying the cure to a zombie plague is to cheerfully put a price on his own blood in the millions. And yet, he’s refreshingly not awful to Sherry, quickly get attached to her and develops a great dynamic, and he’s young enough that he’s out of his depth a lot in the world of bio-terrorism, and not too uptight to admit it.

Finding out his father was none other than Wesker prompts some serious self-reflection, but we’re not going to watch him spend the rest of the game angsting over it, and even through all the horror he mostly seems to be having a good time. Jake’s great.

My only serious complaint about this campaign is that it’d be nice if they’d given Sherry a little more personality beyond being Jake’s no-nonsense handler. I like that she’s grown up from rescued-little-damsel into trusted agent, that she’s competent and comfortable enough with the world of bio-terror that nothing really fazes her (even if the game does get a little patronising about having Jake tackle her out of danger repeatedly), but she’s stuck being the straight-man to Jake’s wilder personality, and that’s just a bit disappointing.

For someone whose parents were neglectful Umbrella scientists responsible for throwing her into a world of horrific childhood trauma, Sherry comes across like she’s never questioned an authority figure in her life since, and that just doesn’t ring true to me. But at least she and Jake get to have friendly interactions with Leon and Helena, because god knows Chris and Piers can't ever be invited to a group cutscene without one of them having to hold the other back.

I can’t say whether I’d have enjoyed Jake’s storyline nearly so much had I not suffered through Chris and Leon’s first, but Jake’s feels like a far more complete story than either of the previous – and there’s a refreshing lack of stopping-to-watch-people-die-horribly. I don’t feel like I’m missing a preceding act’s worth of set-up, and clone!Ada has a smaller role, so the fact Sherry and Jake never find out what her deal is doesn’t feel like it leaves their story critically unfinished.

Which brings us to Ada’s campaign.

Ada

So here’s where we learn that the Ada in the purple dress is a clone created by that one Illuminati Dude she ghosted after he got too clingy. And by ‘we learn’ I mean ‘just the real Ada learns’, because god knows Chris and Leon never find out – and one can only imagine the kind of furious arguments they’re going to have over Ada’s character, motives, and whether she’s even alive or not after the events of the game. Even Ada only finds out her clone exists because the clone insists on trying to best her original, in that classic clone-angst way.

I have such conflicted feelings about Ada’s portrayal in this game. I’d like to be able to enjoy how unflappably cool she is, even when faced with evidence that the Literal Illuminati may be trying to make her the scapegoat for the apocalypse. But the reality is that Ada flaps so little she’s utterly one-note here – like, if you thought the RE4 remake Ada was a little limited in range, RE6 is exactly that, only more so, for much longer. Surely she should at least be annoyed that someone with Chris’ connections thinks she’s directly responsible for major bio-terror outbreaks in multiple countries? A little flap or two would go an awful long way here.

The most memorable part of Ada’s campaign is her final showdown with Carla, her clone – who mutates into a monster so huge and horrific that she basically becomes the whole battle stage, and it’s fantastically creepy and fucked-up (in a way I can actually enjoy, for a change). But most of the rest of Ada’s campaign is her wandering through her scheduled appearances in other characters’ stories, and there’s just not much of interest going on there. Time to fight all those same bosses that keep coming back over and over again!

A lot of what makes RE6 ultimately so unsatisfying is that in the end, thousands or millions of people have died around the world because of what amounts to bullshit illuminati infighting, well beyond the ken of any of the heroes running around the edges doing damage control. Even when Chris finally catches up with the Ada clone, it’s only to see her shot down by mysterious men in a black helicopter who just fly away out of the story again as inexplicably as they entered.

The clone’s not dead, of course – she gets right back up again in time for her boss fight with Ada. There’s no need for the helicopter in this scene at all – letting the Ada clone throw herself off the rooftop without being shot would have served the same narrative purpose. But throwing in an Illuminati drive-by shooting sure does underline how little real agency any of the heroes really have, when the world can be brought to the brink of a bio-terror apocalypse because one rich, white man couldn’t deal with the fact a woman said no to him.

No-one other than Ada even seems interested in the real truth: no-one asks who was flying the helicopter, or ends their campaign with any ‘time to get the rest of those Illuminati bastards’-declaration. Had RE6 been a smash-hit success, I don’t doubt that some kind of get-the-Illuminati plot would have come up in the sequel, but as it stands, Chris and Leon seem unbothered by being mere pawns in the schemes of the unknowably powerful. That’s not much of a happy note to end on.

In the end, the best thing about RE6 is that its reception was so tepid that it led directly to the IP being almost completely reinvented for RE7. And without a trainwreck on the scale of RE6, that might not have happened.

For all the parts of this story I like enough to wish they’d appeared in a better game, it’s hard to call RE6 any kind of success. But it’s at least an interesting failure – a fascinatingly awful trainwreck of an experience – and that’s at least something worth talking about.

[intothestacks]

Adventures in Librarian-ing

I've started reading to the Grade 2s after they finish their lunch and I've got a few regulars who eagerly gather around instead of playing with playdough or drawing instead.

Today's story was Ada Twist, Scientist and they thought it was super cool that she was in Grade 2 like them. :)

[diversityinkidsbooks]

Ada Twist, Scientist By Andrea Beaty

Like her classmates, builder Iggy and inventor Rosie, scientist Ada, a character of colour, has a boundless imagination and has always been hopelessly curious. Why are there pointy things stuck to a rose? Why are there hairs growing inside your nose? When her house fills with a horrific, toe-curling smell, Ada knows it’s up to her to find the source. What would you do with a problem like this? Not afraid of failure, Ada embarks on a fact-finding mission and conducts scientific experiments, all in the name of discovery. But, this time, her experiments lead to even more stink and get her into trouble!   Inspired by real-life makers such as Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie, Ada Twist, Scientist champions girl power and women scientists, and brings welcome diversity to picture books about girls in science. Touching on themes of never giving up and problem-solving, Ada comes to learn that her questions might not always lead to answers, but rather to more questions. She may never find the source of the stink, but with a supportive family and the space to figure it out, she’ll be able to feed her curiosity in the ways a young scientist should.

[autistpride]

Picture books gears towards children:

Wiggles, Stomps, and Squeezes Calm My Jitters Down by Lindsey Parker, Illustrated by Rebecca Burgess

Do You Want to Play? Making Friends with an Autistic Kid by Daniel Share-Strom, Maxine Share, Illustrated by Naghmeh Afshinjah

Sensory Seeking Sebastian by Christia DeShields, Illustrated by Marissa Nelson

Suzi Spins by Emma Dalmayne and Illustrated by her son Raphelle

Benji, the Bad Day, and Me by Sally J Pla et al. Illustrated by Ken Min

Too Sticky! :Sensory Issues with Autism by Jen Malia et al. Illustrated by Joanne Lew-Vriethoff

Come Meet Drayden by Dana Young-Askew, illustrated by Cameron Wilson

My Wandering Dreaming Mind by Merriam Saunders, Illustrated by Tammie Lyon (ND Author)

My Whirling, Twirling Motor by Merriam Saunders, Illustrated by Tammie Lyon (ND Author)

A Friend for Henry by Jenn Bailey, Illustrated by Mika Song

The Little Senses Series by Samantha Cotterill, Illustrated by Samantha Cotterill

A Tiger Called Thomas by Charlotte Zolotow and Diana Cain Bluthenthal

Not Your Typical Dragon by Dan Bar-el, Illustrated by Tim Bowers

The Masterpiece: One Big Canvas by Jay Miletsky, Illustrated by Luis Peres

The Molding of Clay by Jay Miletsky, Illustrated by Luis Peres

Red: A Crayon’s Story by Michael Hall, Illustrated by Michael Hall

Swing by Michael Hall, Illustrated by Michael Hall

Be Who You Are by Todd Parr, Illustrated by Todd Parr

It’s Okay to be Different by Todd Parr, Illustrated by Todd Parr

The Big Umbrella by Amy June Bates and Juniper Bates illustrated by Amy June Bates

Not Quite Narwhal by Jessie Sima, Illustrated by Jessie Sima

Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty, Illustrated by David Roberts

Benny Doesn’t Like to Be Hugged by Zetta Elliott, Illustrated by Purple Wong

Rosalee the Seeker by Nicole Filippone