#which is arguably dumber

[nnobodoodles]

Huh.

So I randomly remembered Croc is pretty much Italian.

[uas-852]

free

[thearcaneuniversity]

People haven’t gotten dumber this season - the rules have simply changed.

In both seasons 1 and 2, we witness people with intricate motivations and nuanced reactions, shaped by their unique backgrounds. Often, these choices stem from deeply personal places, perspectives that the audience isn’t always privy to.

In season 1, the stakes were absolute: you either played to win everything or walked away with nothing. Except for the brief opportunity to exit after the first game, there was no turning back.

In season 2, however, the dynamic shifts. After each game, players are given a choice - leave with a portion of the winnings divided among the survivors or continue. This open-ended structure fundamentally changes how participants approach the games.

It’s no surprise that such contrasting scenarios would alter people’s outlook and behavior.

In-ho understands this better than anyone. He’s seen it unfold year after year, and his perspective is clear: put people in extreme situations, and their most primal, ruthless selves emerge. This is the lesson he tries to impart to Gi-hun. From In-ho’s experience, people don’t change. Most believe they’re the exception - that they’ll survive while someone else falls. This mindset, while self-serving, is often what carries them through life-or-death situations.

Gi-hun, however, tries to challenge this narrative. He clings to the belief in humanity’s inherent goodness and strives to inspire change in others - a noble but arguably naive endeavor given the circumstances. His core argument holds weight, though: who created the games in the first place? Why do they exist at all?

For In-ho, the why doesn’t matter. The games exist, and that’s the end of it. Gi-hun refuses to accept this fatalistic view and seeks to confront the system itself.

However, this is why Gi-hun is set up to fail now. His naivety, while not inherently wrong, doesn’t account for In-ho’s perspective. He won’t succeed with his current approach because the cancer must be eradicated at its source - a mission he initially seemed prepared for, as we saw in his converation with Jun-ho: killing the Frontman won’t make a difference - it’s the benefactors who must be eliminated.

Yet plans shifted, and he found himself drawn back into the games, forced to play by their rules once more. It’s a fascinating dynamic - one in which In-ho currently holds the upper hand.

[bad-system]

did someone say 'haunted by the narrative' henry?

"in the end, you'll see i was right! the stronger dog fucks the bitches...!"

been thinking about the desperation with which istvan imparts these last words on henry. the more i think about it now, the more it's starting to sound like a warning more than anything else (before it's too late?). i know there have been dumber and less meaningful final words, but this one struck me because of its urgency. why waste your final, impaled breath on a vulgar catchphrase on an enemy you barely even knew?

could it have been foreshadowing rather than a struggle to establish his own high ground in his last moments?

i say all of this because istvan didn't nearly have the obsession with henry like henry did with him (or at all, actually). even to the point of admitting to erik that he had almost felt bad for henry, with no audience to perform for (except erik, arguably his most genuine audience).

and i think about henry being introspective about it. the words come back at the worst times. in the middle of a fight. after a kill. when the blood’s still warm and no one’s looking.

the stronger dog fucks the bitches. maybe that’s just how things are. maybe istvan said it out loud because everyone else is too scared to. it sounds awful because it is. but that doesn’t make it false. henry’s seen it—lords, knights, thieves, merchants. he's been it, in the moment it mattered most, with istvan. the ones who win are the ones who take. the ones who don’t flinch.

but he clings to the idea that he’s not doomed to become that. he holds onto his father’s voice instead. to the quiet decency in the things they made. he might not always know what’s right, but he knows what wrong feels like.

he wants to rise above it. wants to think he’s more than teeth and muscle and will. but there’s blood on his hands either way. and he’s starting to think istvan knew that better than most.

you could also argue that, if it was indeed a warning, istvan warned henry because he saw himself in him. he said this multiple times, "you're just like me", and with this warning, prophecy, it's becoming clearer why he kept saying that. istvan likely knew that it's a slippery slope and malevolent as he was, he was at least aware of it. that "i almost felt sorry for radzig's bastard" and the warning could very well have been a sincere, if crude, way of istvan saying; you don’t come back from this.

which makes sense! because henry's narrative up until his and markvart's death had been driven by revenge. istvan recognized this, henry like a dog with a bone (sword) in the face of everything. because if henry wants to be the dog that bites back—wants revenge, wants to protect—then he needs to embrace the animal.

WH masterfully created a villain who seems shallow—easy to hate, easy to dismiss—but it’s almost like we’re seeing him through henry’s tinted lens. henry never looks past the hatred, so we don’t either.

and then istvan shows up in a dream, just once. just enough to remind us he’s still in there, rotting quietly in the back of henry’s mind. but i don’t believe for a second that’s the last we’ll see of him. the emotional weight of that revenge, everything that led to it, was too heavy to just dissolve in the glow of a new adventure. it doesn't disappear because henry found a new sword or a new cause. i need henry to sit with it. to stew. to wrestle with it. conse your fucking quences, henry!

[rosemaryentombed]

i wanna take a moment to dig into solomon lane’s level of villainy in fallout cuz it’s like. yeah. he really did set that shit up for his OWN entertainment. he probably wouldn’t have made it out alive, fine, because so long as ETHAN can watch everyone else die, lane can die happy. cuz that’s all he wants! he wants his nemesis to suffer and is ok dying in the process bc he understands that a) he’s aged out of his anarchist days, and b) is probably too damn depressed to be of any use to his acolytes who are bigger, stronger, faster, and arguably dumber. lane knew it was time to throw in the towel and did just that.

but he did it AFTER he hunted down julia. which is so fascinating bc julia had nothing to do with rogue nation’s clownery. she wasn’t an obstacle. she was a goddamn ghost!

which just means once lane was locked up, he went out of his WAY to dig up ethan’s past. he found julia and made her one of his primary fixations on how to make ethan truly suffer, despite them having been divorced nearly ten years and her remarried to someone new. ethan’s recurring dreams truly were the prophecy of prophecies 😭

but whether or not ethan and julia are divorced doesn’t matter to lane. what matters to lane is that once upon a time, ethan hunt was happy. he had a wife who made him happy. he had a wife he had to let go to save the world. lane couldn’t even guarantee if ethan cares about her like that anymore. that shit with walker in the elevator was a gamble. but it worked! it worked bc ethan still loves julia!!!

and lane, in all his insanity, figured out that if you wanna really kill a man, you don’t have to touch a single hair on his head. you just have to kill his wife in front of him and let nature take its course aka suicide. that’s why no one in lane’s tribe let slip that julia was IN kashmir. damn motherfuckers were planning for ethan to witness her death in realtime 💀

[skaruresonic]

https://www.tumblr.com/skaruresonic/770516871305953280/your-chat-with-wood-reminded-me-this-is-something?source=share

>Unlike the Gary-Stu folks usually try to portray him as, Sonic has never been completely infallible

More reasons why that one comic and the fandom are completely wrong.

I know we're all sick of talking about idw but it really can't be stressed enough how monotonous, uncreative, and redundant the comic is.

The comic tries to prove that Sonic isn't invincible and has just been cruising through life via favoritism and cheat codes. But that's just not true and never has been.

Sonic has been knocked around, humiliated, and proven wrong about things, in the games AND media outside of them. There isn't a single official version of Sonic who's portrayed as all powerful and always correct.

It's even dumber in the context of the idw comic because idw sonic is arguably the most pathetic version of the character. Idw sonic gets harmed or embarrassed every couple of seconds. He even needed to be saved from a low power motobug at one point. But the comic stills presents Sonic getting hurt by someone as a rare anomaly despite how common it is.

And the whole thing about Sonic being wrong sometimes and having people learn to argue with him makes even less sense. Characters disagree and argue with Sonic in the games and the idw comic. Just because the comic version of Sonic is too much of an asshole to listen doesn't change the fact that the other characters indeed have their own opinions and are able to disagree with him.

The most annoying aspect of the idw comic is that it keeps trying to prove things that everyone already knows. It's even worse because the comic does this crap through atrocious writing.

Yeah. Sometimes it even manages to bleed over into discussions where folks are trying to argue for the merits of Games!Sonic's character, but perhaps might not word it well.

"Sonic never doubts himself" isn't a completely wrong sentiment in spirit, but it is somewhat erroneous given that he does experience moments of doubt on occasion. He just doesn't let doubt get the better of him.

The thing with IDW, which has been discussed at length, is that the narrative appears to agree with Sonic while also giving him grief for his principles, making it difficult to determine the bottom line the book is trying to convey. It keeps giving him easy strawmen to refute in order to prove his position as the correct one while also using his ideology as a source of manufactured drama.

---

And the whole thing about Sonic being wrong sometimes and having people learn to argue with him makes even less sense. Characters disagree and argue with Sonic in the games and the idw comic. Just because the comic version of Sonic is too much of an asshole to listen doesn't change the fact that the other characters indeed have their own opinions and are able to disagree with him.

Games!Sonic's whole thing about "it doesn't matter who is wrong and who is right" doesn't apply here because there actually is a "correct" interpretation we're supposed to take away from the book. Which is ironic, when you consider IDW!Sonic's supposed to be one in the same with Games!Sonic.

Issue 23 is a good example of the comic's wishy-washy treatment; Sonic admits Eggman makes him suffer for his belief that everyone has a little good in them deep down, but then also yells that he's going to lock Eggman up forever.

...So like, is Sonic's contradictory nature supposed to be a feature or an intentional flaw of the writing? And why is it that Games!Sonic's confidence makes him less compelling by comparison?

...All this hot air just to say "I find Games!Sonic boring because he isn't #relatable."

[mastermatoyas]

Decided to start playing Tokimemo Girls Side! (the DS version of the first game)

Turns out I am dogshit at it, as you can see from these screenshots:

I've spent the past six months trying to hang out with Hazuki, and he just barely likes me more than Morimura, who I have literally spoken to twice.

Homeroom teacher hates me (I think because I won't go on his weekend field trips) but isn't completely not attracted to me, which is arguably the worst position to be in.

But I know if nobody else has got me, Arisawa's got me. Absolute OG. Queen. Goddess.

I want to hang out with Fujii more because she's awesome, but hanging out with her actively makes me dumber and I already did super badly on the first set of exams.

Anyway this game kicks ass. There's really something about the strategy aspect of old-school dating sims that scratches the brain just right. I'm specifically going for Hazuki's route because I know it's the hardest, and I figure if I can get his ending, everything after that will feel really easy by comparison.

"Why not go for a more natural difficulty curve and work your way up to that?" because I'm trying to replicate the feeling I had playing Princess Maker 2, where the first couple of years were hell and then my twelve year old daughter made a kazillion dollars killing monsters in the woods and never had to worry about anything again. There's something really appealing to me about a life sim with a difficulty curve that feels impenetrable right up until the point where you completely break it in half, and I'm chasing that high.

Anyway, check my stats. No idea why I have so much charm. I think I got all that from cheerleading club.

I started out with 50 intelligence and style, and I've barely gotten any more intelligent, and have actively lost a bit of style. All of my other parameters are way up from where I started, though, so I'll take that w.

[thesinglesock]

I've seen several posts going around insisting that "IQ literally doesn't matter". And while I agree with the point they're trying to make: that having a higher or lower IQ than average doesn't make you any more or less of a person, I feel the need to throw my own 2 cents out there. Because having an IQ that is either above or below the average (which is around 100) technically does count as being neurodivergent, and will affect your life in a way that very much "does matter". I'm not saying it's inherently a disability, only that it does affect various parts of your life. Like: my brother has an IQ that is well above average. But since the education system is designed for people within the range of the average, he's struggled to pass nearly every class he's taken. I'm closer to average, so I've had a much easier time than him in school. According to our IQ scores, I'm "dumber" than him, but because of that, I'm better off academically. I don't have any personal experience with how the school system works if your IQ score is below average, but I imagine it works similarly. You might be able to get a passing grade if you're lucky enough to have someone who can help you memorize the "correct" test answers, but the system isn't logical to you, because it wasn't made for you.

That being said, school arguably "doesn't matter", so it doesn't really support my point. You can have a perfectly good and comfortable life even though you dropped out before you could get an education. But having above or below average intelligence can also easily make you a social outcast. The further up or down on the scale you are, the smaller the pool of potential friends gets. I edited this graph to illustrate my point:

Not saying you can't be friends with people who thinks differently than you, it's just that it's kind of hard to make a healthy amount of deep connections with people if most folks don't really "get" you.

[averyangrytissuebox]

The issues with Vecna: Eye of Ruin are foundational because they got Vecna himself wrong

If you either didn't know about this book or only vaguely looked at it because it is part of the content run that Wotc is pumping out before dnd 6e comes out soon, I can't blame you. A brief scan of *shudders* reddit shows that the it wasn't very well recieved by the die hard fans of r/dndnext and I've seen very little buzz about it in the general dnd zeitgheist. While I have lots to say about why this is probably due to lack of trust in Wotc after the OGL, official adventures being underwhelming and the community being fractured as all fuck, but I want to focus on one very specific thing to show what is wrong with the adventure: Vecna's statblock himself.

Here it is. If you downloaded the Vecna dossier a couple of years back, this will look very familiar and it isn't abundantly obvious where this goes wrong so I want to break it down.

The first is a flavour fail. Vecna in the lore is the archlich supreme, formerly a king and lich who ascended to godhood. Once considered one of the strongest liches to dwell in the Greyhawks setting, he has grown to be a scourge of the whole multiverse. An unmatched sorcerer and epic BBEG worthy foe (just ask Matt Mercer). Iconic to his appearance are four things: His eye and hand which were all that is left after he was betrayed by Kas, his right hand man. Just as synonymous to his appearance is the sword of Kas itself, the only blade capable of permanently destroying the hand and eye. Finally, Vecna created the most profane tome of them all, the book of Vile Darkness.

With all that established, there are some immediate flavour issues with this. Firstly, Vecna is not particularly intelligent as far as high level villains go. At 22, he is dumber than Auril (24), Zariel (26), Acererak (27), the demon lords and Manshoon (23), the guy who is well known for being paranoid enough that he created clones that turned on him. Notable wise guy. He isn't even the most intelligent character in his own book because Kas and Tasha are intelligence 23. Truly a bizarre decision for one of the greatest liches of all time.

Secondly, he isn't actually that good of a spellcaster. He is an innate caster and not a wizard for ease of use I assume but as far as spellcasters concern, he is lacking a lot of fire power that a CR 26 god should have. He doesn't have any 9th level spells, making him an inferior wizard to both Acererak and the humble CR 12 archmage. He doesn't have counterspell, instead having a non spell version (But I will come back to this later) and he doesn't have shield. He is not so sturdy that he shouldn't have it and there is no in lore reason why he doesn't have basic spell casting.

Finally, there is no mention of his eye or hand in the campaign itself. The blade of Kas gets an honorary "However, if the characters wish to find it and use it against the warlord, you might place the artifact somewhere in this adventure for them to find" in the introduction and can be acquired at the very end on an extremely high roll. The book of Vile Darkness is buried in his chest which is very cool though, I will admit.

The second and arguably bigger issue with the statblock is that it is bad to fight and lies to the DM because it is the wrong CR. Actual CR is calculated by averaging defensive CR (which is effective hit points and armour class) and offensive CR (damage dealt per round). So lets fact check those CRs to confirm the maths. [A quick side note before we continue, the closest approximation of Flight of the Damned is a dragon's breath weapon which assumes it hits two targets for offensive CR].

Offensive CR = 2(7+9+9) [From two attacks with afterthought] + 96 [Rotten Fate] + 10 + 10 + 10 [For all three reactions] + 10 [Vile teleport used offensively] = 186 dpr.

A very impressive but decidedly not CR 26. In fact, his offensive CR is only 23. Vecna's attack bonuses are higher than average which can increase CR by 1 but not that much. Also he never wants to cast a spell unless he has to because it is a massive damage loss on Vecna

Calculating Defensive CR is trickier. Effective health is calculated by taking his actual health 272 and multiplying it by 1.25 because he has immunities to poison and non magical bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage. Then we add 30 to that total for each legendary resistence. (272 x 1.25) + 150 = 490 which is CR 22. Averaging both of them gives you 22.5

The issue with this is twofold: It means the DM doesn't actually know how strong Vecna is and if they take it at face value, they might nerf them or pull punches when they shouldn't making the fight feel cheap. The second and much bigger one is that Vecna's defensive tools allow him to dispatch a party of spellcasters with ease because of 5 legendary resistance, impressive saves and dread counterspell which cannot be countered but he gets easily overwhelmed by any martial. This is further compounded by the fact that players win the encounter by reducing him to 50hp or less so two fairly optimised martials (e.g. took the relevant combat feat and have maxed out their main stat) can kill him on the first turn, ignoring magical weapons which this adventure has a lot of. This makes the fight swingy and not fun because the martials get to party like there is no tomorrow but if you are a full caster, you do not get to participate.

Overall, the stat block is a failure of flavour and balance, feeling like it was thrown together after the fact because they needed Vecna here. Ultimately, Vecna: Eye of Ruin is less about Vecna and more about going through the most iconic places in d&d's history to get the rod of seven parts, which is perfectly fine but then why put Vecna on the cover when he isn't even the main villain. It feels like they shoved Vecna into this book because recognisability from stranger things and Vox Machina rather than him being an integral part of the adventure and that is reflected in the stat block.

I have a lot more to say about d&d balance, official adventure design and homebrew fixes including how to make a Vecna that doesn't suck but this post is long enough as is so maybe another time

[akimojo]

I've always wanted to ship Fang and Vanille. Their bond is intimate and unbreakable, and their moments are arguably some of the most touching in the games. Unfortunately, I find myself unable to due to the way the first game in the trilogy portrays their characters, particularly Vanille. It's hard for me to ship her with Fang when the characters often treat her as a "kid", and even refer to her as such. I don't know, maybe it's just me but I got the impression that she's frequently infantilized by the people around her, which is something that bothers me when it comes to shipping her with someone like Fang, who is considered one of the "adults" of the group. Obviously, despite that, they are both consenting adults and a romantic relationship is totally possible! I just personally found their dynamic to be more platonic in the first game because of how everyone treated Vanille, and that kinda got solidified for me when Fang herself also called her a "kid" (I played the English version, so I don't know if the dialogue is different in Japanese). That said, I DEFINITELY sense some gay vibes between them in Lightning Returns! It's undeniable. I just wish the og game hadn't made me see their bond as the sisterly type :/

Oh yeah I can see that, especially since the devs were pretty adamant that they had a sisterly bond (even though I personally refuse to believe in that lmao)

The way I see it, the others in the group referred to vanille as a kid because 1. she IS a teenager (19, and the person who called her a kid the most was sazh, who is 40) and 2. when she was masking her depression she overcompensated so much that her skipping around and giggling after something as dark as the purge made her seem a lot younger and dumber than she actually was. Fang knows her on a much deeper level than that, so I don't think she would actually see her as a child. Plus, they're only 2 years apart

I'm assuming the scene you're taking about is the one after fighting hecatoncheir? I personally don't take the wording there literally since fang was comforting vanille while she was straight up sobbing like a kid would ajdhsjgn and I'm not a native english speaker so I could be wrong about this, but "poor kid" sounds more like a phrase people say in general and not something that should be taken as "you're a child to me" but again, I'm not sure

To me it just seemed like a way for fang to insinuate that vanille is a victim too and she's still young so she has every right to make mistakes

I can definitely understand if people view their relationship as platonic tho, especially in the first game since not everyone has revisited it with the lightning returns shipping goggles that have been permanently glued to my eyes

[amazingdudesblog]

Dreamworks, What is Happening?

Now DreamWorks hasn't always had the best track record, let's just be honest. But recently, it's been telling that they and Universal have been in a slump in terms of their decisions, no matter what type of those decisions are. You all already know how Ruby Gillman left a bad taste in my mouth, considering the writing could have been a straight shot into something emotionally investing, with Chelsea being redeemed and finding a family in the Gillman’s after being alone for so long. But they didn't do that because we just had to have an irredeemable villain, because it worked with Jack Horner, why not do the same trick and dance with Chelsea/Nerissa? The unfortunate truth is that this just left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. Now, while some did not mind this, let's just be honest and say it would have been best if they went with the more emotionally investing ending to the movie. But that's only part of the problem when you have the fact the marketing (which wasn't much at all either) spoiled the twist. Now I knew going into this movie Chelsea was gonna end up a villain, no surprise there, but the thing that made this movie crash and burn for me was the fact that this spoiled twist did not lead to anything much more. Sure you spoiled the twist either way, but with Chelsea being redeemed, you would at least have a very emotionally driven ending, and a positive message that's anti-war, anti-prejudice, and shows the value in one young woman showing compassion to another in hard times, and making her see that things don't have to be the way they are if they truly made an effort to change things by sticking together. I mean hell, my rewrite ends with them becoming practically sisters. But no, there is no touching ending where the girl who was alone with her revenge driven mother for most of her life, before that mother died trying to get a weapon to wage war again, finally got a friend in another girl who, even as she was trying to kill her, knew on the inside she was still just a child who's been through a lot and wasn't going to let her become a monster because of the conflict between their people. There was no ending where the grandma who thought of another species as monsters finally sees how wrong she's been and wants to make things right. No. It ends with an even dumber twist where the girl is actually the mother, and she's put in a cage and mermaids are actually just evil creatures. Big victory for nuanced writing, eh? And to make matters worse, universal decided it would be best to put this movie out during the time when spider-verse, elemental, transformers, Indiana Jones, and the flash were all also playing in theaters. You know what would have been a smart time to release the movie? September 1, no kids movies were releasing in theaters at that point (seriously go check) so maybe while ruby wasn't the pinnacle of writing, it at least would not have been stacked against spider-verse and elemental especially, thus you'd have a fun movie for the family and maybe it could have at least made its budget back. But no, release it around the two other animated movies that are obv gonna be more beloved by audiences bc they have arguably more stellar writing, and are obv gonna be suggested to more audiences bc they stuck with the viewers in a positive way, meanwhile the only way ruby stuck with viewers in a negative way with people thinking “well that was lame, I would have liked for Chelsea to be redeemed and become genuine friends with ruby, would have made a sweet and sincere ending.” Now this obv isn't the case for everyone, but come on, most of the audience would've probably left the movie on a more chipper note if this happened instead. So, take marketing that spoils the movie and isn't very prominent either way, writing that's about as bland as you can imagine, and a release date that can be described as stuck between a rock and a hard place, you have a box office flop that made not even 50 mil throughout it's entire run. Part 2 of this post coming soon, where I will talk about Orion and the dark and megamind

[hippotime]

If you're 18 in college now, you arguably lost your foundational years of secondary education, the years when (if you're lucky) you start learning how to process and assess complex information. How to know if you've got the answer right or not. How to find what you need in the library, is it useful or not?

You might then leap on a tool like chatGPT, because you don't know how to discern between what it offers and the skills which you missed out on.

It makes me wonder whether the early years of the pandemic have indeed made everyone dumber, as Romesh Ranganathan predicted in 2020.

I just started grad school this fall after a few years away from school and man I did not realize how dire the AI/LLM situation is in universities now. In the past few weeks:

I chatted with a classmate about how it was going to be a tight timeline on a project for a programming class. He responded "Yeah, at least if we run short on time, we can just ask chatGPT to finish it for us"

One of my professors pulled up chatGPT on the screen to show us how it can sometimes do our homework problems for us and showed how she thanks it after asking it questions "in case it takes over some day."

I asked one of my TAs in a math class to explain how a piece of code he had written worked in an assignment. He looked at it for about 15 seconds then went "I don't know, ask chatGPT"

A student in my math group insisted he was right on an answer to a problem. When I asked where he got that info, he sent me a screenshot of Google gemini giving just blatantly wrong info. He still insisted he was right when I pointed this out and refused to click into any of the actual web pages.

A different student in my math class told me he pays $20 per month for the "computational" version of chatGPT, which he uses for all of his classes and PhD research. The computational version is worth it, he says, because it is wrong "less often". He uses chatGPT for all his homework and can't figure out why he's struggling on exams.

There's a lot more, but it's really making me feel crazy. Even if it was right 100% of the time, why are you paying thousands of dollars to go to school and learn if you're just going to plug everything into a computer whenever you're asked to think??

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT KATE SAW IN USA

At best you may have to save many times its own length to be justified. Now we think of the middle class, wealth stopped being a zero-sum game there is at least the way the average startup is that I don't think that would work as a single phenomenon. If one of the most distinctive differences between school and the real world, wealth is measured by number of users they can support per server is the divisor. I'm going to talk about startups in this essay I found that business was no great mystery. These are separate questions. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right slang to use. These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure.

In the startup world, they're usually the x of y or the x y. Hell if I know. But people will pay for programming languages? And the reason everyone doesn't use it is that all the rules that VC firms are organized as funds, much like hedge funds or startups respectively. But I think this principle would also apply to the other. One of the most important factor in a language's long term survival. Any given person is dumber as a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you can love work, you're in startup territory. There is no longer necessary.

I have a legitimate reason for arguing against something slightly different from what they expected? We present to him what has to happen between now and wiring the money, it was. Find one and launch it clearly but apparently casually in your talk, preferably near the beginning. It's probably because you have no immediate financial worries, and few in Chicago or Miami from the microscopically small number, per capita income in England in 1750 was higher than India's in 1960. When one candidate beats another they look for political explanations. I realize that seems a bit of a problem so far. Initially it was supposed to look. Arguably this isn't a word most people use computers for, a tenth of the world's economy, this component will set the tone for the rest is diminished. Ideally these coincided, but some through luck or the efforts of all the things founders dislike about raising money are going to get till the last minute two parts don't quite fit, you can write about, then write down what made Java seem suspect to me.

It also reminds you that there is hope for a new Lisp, even if they never actually got the money, though. If you start to become more stratified. Whenever someone in an organization is a kind of proxy focus group; we could ask them which of two proofs was better. One would be to make money is by not hiring people. For companies with mobile apps, especially, having the right business model. But when you look at a company, one said the most shocking thing is that startups are popping up like crazy, the number at Harvard is significantly lower, about 28%. We told him we'd fund him if he did something else.

Thanks to Geoff Ralston, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, Sam Altman, Kenneth King, Fred Wilson, and Trevor Blackwell for putting up with me.

[khaleesimaka]

Like I would have preferred to see more of Arya connecting with her humanity and being torn and there being a build up to what Sandor tells her in King’s Landing. That scene kinda came out of the blue and if you aren’t paying attention to Arya’s character arc, you wouldn’t know where it’s coming from

[anhttydbookfan]

#Like tbh a lot of the conflict in the second film wouldn't have existed re: hiccup's desire to change drago's mind if it were book hiccup#Because if escaping doesn't work then Book Hiccup can has and will kill people who are trying to kill him#Most of the time accidentally but still#<prev tags#to be fair. the tribes of the archipelago would've rallied behind book hiccup almost immediately (if this is after the last book)#idk how the timelines really match up since movie hiccup at his youngest is older than book hiccup at his oldest (excluding the epilogues of#course lol)#but if it wasn't after book 12 then lets not forget book hiccup has arguably done much dumber shit for less noble causes#like stealing a library book bc toothless ate the original (iirc. its been a year or so)#the plot would probably be more like hiccup having to convince stoic that drago is coming to steal the dragons#and stoic would be like 'preposterous (which is a large word for him). how could they possibly steal a dragon?! theyre all huge! the only#thing we would have to worry about is that runt of yours. keep him close and we'll be fine. now i need to go argue with baggybum' or some#thing like that. then then drago would get to the archipelago and the vikings would all (reluctantly) go 'SHIT. HICCUP WAS RIGHT. (AGAIN.)'#and ask him for advice#meanwhile camicazi and the bog burglars have pick pocketed the HELL out of drago's ships.#'i stole his belt! WHILE he was WEARING it!' camicazi would brag (this is a major plot point later)#eventually shit happens and hiccup and drago are sword fighting or something and toothless bites at his pants and tugs and they fall off#completely (told you it would be important) and drago is defeated and laughed off the archipelago and all the dragons go home#(after hiccup has to convince stoic that no. they dont need the exotic roman dragon. it needs to go home father. yes right now father.#your other two hunting dragons would maim it. say goodbye to the dragon father. goodbye dragons.#and then theyd join furious and end up protecting hiccup or something#idk im not good at endings but take this anyways

Hey @paleasamoon this is by far the greatest adaptation of the 2nd httyd film to fit the vibe and tone of pre-book-9 httyd that i have ever seen. Excellent job

Okay so I just found out about some plot points of httyd books and all I have to say is that I am shooketh and they sound nothing like the movies and wtf do you mean (spoilers) Snotlout dies and Hiccup kills a bunch of dragons and Toothless is a dragon GOD????? HUH???? HOW DID THEY GET THE MOVIES FROM THAT????? SHOULD I READ THEM??? BUT SNOTLOUT DIES???? HUH?????

[catgirl-catboy]

Which Danganronpa do you think got dealt the worst by Localization?

I'd be lying if I didn't say Gonta. (though Angie's god changing from being a generic god, making her a mockery of religious folk, to Atua, a very specific god that real people actually worship, has some fucked up, arguably kinda racist implications.)

A small CW for discussing the R slur in this analysis/rant. I don't write it out, but I understand 100% if you don't want to read it.

Speaking in the third person is considered a cute quirk in Japan. When a Japanese author has a character speak in third person, they are usually trying to make the character appear cute and harmless, which absolutely fits Gonta.

However, most American (or culturally American) authors reserve that kind of third person talk is reserved either for cavemen, or neurodivergent characters, with the implication that the character in question is too dumb to have a proper grasp of English. (Abelism much?)

This fits everyone else's perception of Gonta, but not who he actually is as a character.

One of the main points of Ch4 is that the class (even characters Kodaka wants you to like, such as Kaito and Himiko) was wrong to treat Gonta like he was stupid, and that Kokichi, who you aren't meant to like (as a person. As an antagonist he does a decent job) at this point, was in the right. With the big twist of Ch6 coming up, in addition to the Ch5 reveal that people like Kaito and Kokichi can work together to a common goal, it's important to point out that your cast isn't as perfect or infallible as they appear.

Which is why it does such a disservice to have Gonta continue to speak in the third person in the English version.

Gonta isn't the first character to speak in the third person in Danganronpa, Ibuki does it too! But it doesn't affect Ibuki's characterization in the same way, since Ibuki's character isn't about wrongly being underestimated. If Ibuki comes across as slightly dumber, it isn't a disservice to the themes of the story.

Also, Ibuki's backstory doesn't evoke Cavemen in the western player's mind.

Some other changes around Gonta were made, notably that Miu does not actually say the R slur to him. The word is a step up from 'baka' in rudeness, so "moron" or "fucking idiot" would be closer to the original tone. Miu calls many people idiots, with Kaito and Kaede being the first to mind. Only Gonta gets the ableist slur treatment -_- (Which makes the fact that it was put in there even more heartbreaking for me.)

Even if you aren't meant to agree with Miu, this can subtly color your perceptions of Gonta. Also, Miu gets a lot of hate for this, which doesn't seem fair to me. Stan Miu.

The most infuriating thing about this is, there's another v3 character that speaks in the third person in Japanese. My queen, Tenko Chabashira. They changed how she referred to herself for the western audiences, when arguably keeping it the same would not have done her that much of a disservice to her character. (She's a comic relief character who says dumb shit. Having her seem a bit less cute and a bit more stupid to western audiences wouldn't affect her plotline that much. Some people would maybe get irrationally angry and say she's a strawman (or strawwoman! sorry Tenko.) for feminists, but Kiibo is right there.)

So the argument that the translators would have to put a lot of work in doesn't hold.

In order to adapt Gonta more accurately and have him seem cute like Kodaka intended, I propose that he has emoticons at the end of his sentences sometimes. (I am shot by a sniper rifle for this idea!)

Heres his canon first line (not counting pregame because fuck that)

"Oh! Sorry for scaring! Gonta scary-looking. Most people not wanna talk to Gonta when meeting for first time. So, like gentleman, Gonta say thank you! Thank you for talking to Gonta!"

and here's it with how I'd alter it.

"Oh! Sorry for scaring! I'm scary-looking. Most people not wanna talk to me when meeting for first time. :( So, like gentleman, I say thank you! Thank you for talking to Me! :)"

Like, he comes across different, huh? Even to my eye, it reads more like he's struggling with the language in the second one, while the first one not so much.

Kaito and the Saiouma ship actually benefit from the localization, but that is another topic for another day.