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Season 2 of Grand Blue Dreaming started airing this week, which is great because it only took *checks notes* seven years since season 1. Honestly, until they announced it, I just assumed we wouldn't get a second season.

Episode 1 was really good. Overall, better quality than season 1. The anime seems truer to the manga, both in terms of the art and in terms of getting the comedic timing right. One point of irritation for me with season 1 was that Chisa just did not quite look like she did in the manga, but her face is just like in the manga in season 2!

They are adapting things a bit out of order, probably because Iori's letter to his sister served as a good way to catch people up to speed about the show. Presumably, they will do the Oumi Women's University arc after the little sister arc has concluded. The OWU arc introduces multiple minor characters and minor plot beats that become important later. We even see Busujima in the OP in all her bitchy glory.

Overall, I am really excited to watch more of the show. Some of my issues, like the unimpressive soundtrack and only okayish voice acting, are still there, but if the first episode of the season is anything to judge by, they seem to otherwise understand what makes Grand Blue work and are adapting it to animation accordingly.

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Type of person that annoys me is people who find it arrogant to try to go up against a problem more experienced people have thought about and failed to solve for a long time. Relatedly, people who think it's arrogant to want to rederive things that are known for yourself. It's good to have a healthy suspicion of solutions that seem too easy and an interest in what's out there, but I mean in maths the first thing you should do when approaching a problem is in fact often to ask "why doesn't [thing that's too obvious and easy to possibly be the answer] work?" because trying it and failing will help you understand why the problem is hard, and while it's unfortunately horribly inefficient to rederive everything from first principles yourself, you should have practiced it with at least some things, and truly understanding something means getting to the point where you feel like you could have derived it yourself. In other words, reinventing the wheel may not be a great scientific breakthrough but it will teach you a lot about how wheels work and why we came to use them!

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I have the same issues with LitRPGs. Unfortunately, the very few I do like are comedies, because I don't expect to be immersed by a comedy, so I have no useful recommendations. The Greatest Estate Developer is a very funny litrpg, but I don't think it has a deep message or anything.

I've been thinking of getting into a LitRpg book. But I also really don't want to cause I feel it proliferates a "everything is videojame" attitude. Like stats for DND are there to help us understand limitations and of course it is a game. And even in video games, the stats aren't like "cannon". They are a way to give the player control in some aspects, and help them understand abilities/limitations, for the sake of optimizing gameplay. But reading isn't gameplay. And I want to be immersed. I want the magic to feel like if ____ was true, this is possible. While yes I love hard magic, this doesn't mean that soft magic cannot also achieve this. Most of the time, if we are being honest, soft magic systems aren't totally soft, there are hard aspects, and then soft aspects to encapsulate wonder and whatnot. Think Gandalf vs the one ring. The one ring has obvious and repeatable consequences/benefits. Gandalf, while not breaking immersion, doesn't really have these same rules.

But LitRpg to me, just feels like a breeding ground for unchecked power fantasy, that doesn't have a point other than surface level gratification. My guess (I have really no data for this as I haven't read one) is that the genre is a power scalers wet dream. And one of the main reasons I started reading epic fantasy instead of watching shonen anime, was to avoid power scaling fantasy as much as possible. (I truly detest it, I think it's a breeding ground for fascistic thinking and 'might makes right' philosophy, along with undermining good story telling. For everyone who thinks I'm wrong, how many people will say they hate Legend of Korra because she's weak and would "totally" lose in a fight with Aang, as if that is even a valid line of thinking/questioning.) But again I haven't read one, it's just people seem to always compare them to shonen, and unfortunately that's kinda a staple of the genre.

I want to read one, because I want to see if there's anything interesting there, or if I'm wrong and it could expand my horizons. So please give me a recommendation. I know about Dungeon Crawler Carl, I'll get to that one but I'm really not interested in a comedy book, especially not right now. I want a somewhat hard to read, deeply philosophical/political work that challenges my thinking. To me, those are my favorite books. Something akin to Suneater/Dune, or an R.F. Kuang book, or The Deavabad trilogy. Or even something a little lighter like a cosmere book (I realize that may sound wack). Also I'm not entirely against comedy, big fan of the Locked Tomb series, very funny, still challenging, especially Harrow the Ninth. I'm personally just not interested in "turn your brain off shlock", if I want that, I'll just watch some T.V. or like a marvel movie. If y'all have any ideas let me know, cause I'm too lazy to research this. I would rather go through my TBR of books I know I will likely enjoy or at least think critically about, rather than spend my time digging gold in a proverbial landfill.

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The Urithiru section of RoW is so funny to me. Navani is being introduced to the wonders of particle and quantum physics and trying to see what applications they may have in the “killing god” field, and then cut to Kaladin who’s trying to stave of his depression by playing Among Us with the Fused. (It’s not working)

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romantic relationships blah blah blah okay but what about risking everything for your sibling. what about the unwavering love and care that can only come from a parent to a child. what about someone who just wants their best friend back. ever thought of that.

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Sure I guess Taravangian’s Diagram is kind of impressive, but let’s be honest; Steris could have done the same thing in half the time, and had it perfectly organized without even needing to visit the Nightwatcher.

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my Game Theory™ for space balls 2 is that mel brooks started it now like 40 years after the original and at 99 years old because he is fully aware of and counting on his own mortality halfway through production because it'll be funny. decades-later cash grab sequels where the original cast is visibly too old to be doing this like they used to in their prime has basically come to define the thing that space balls is parodying, and star wars too encountered problems involving a key actor dying in the middle of production because of it. mel brooks will play a pivotal role in space balls 2 as director, producer, and lead actor, and he will die during filming, and either he has specific contingency plans for that or he trusts the people he's working with to handle it but either way he knows it's the funniest possible way to go and now is the perfect time to make Space Balls 2: The Search for More Money

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One guard lies. One guard tells the truth. One guard thinks he's telling the truth but operates from deeply unsound epistemological principles that were inculcated by his elders to steer him to specific predefined conclusions, he's not lying but nothing he says is as actionable as he thinks it is. One guard is honest but he's got that thing where he keeps confusing your left and right with his left and right, and even when it's just him he's always got to stop and think for a second to remember which is which, and long story short he's never once said the correct door on the first try. One guard says whatever the first guard to speak says because he's afraid of being left out. One guard claims the opposite of whoever was first to speak because he's a contrarian. One guard does that fuckass postmodern "what is truth" song and dance because he doesn't actually know which door is the correct one, he lost the briefing packet and for obvious reasons he can't pick a door to check in person. Defeats the whole point if you can come back

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shinovar never gets old. so imagine a fantasy world, right, where 90% of the population are not white, and live in a bizarre rocky land, and the tiny fraction that are are sequestered to Knockoff Medieval Fantasy Europe, except the story is primarily told from the perspective of the 90% of the population who are not white, who exclusively live outside of Knockoff Medieval Fantasy Europe, and whenever the 10% of the population who are white come up, the 90% who are not white describe them like they're fucking gollum

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I think I can finally put into words my amateur approach to literary analysis. My approach is essentially just the scientific/empirical approach for literature. The fundamental axiom of my approach is that any story has a platonic ideal version of it, and that the stories we read are approximations to them, marred by noise. This noise comes in many forms. For translated works or adapted works, something of the original is lost. In the same way, an author is adapting this perfect version of the story into the text they wrote.

Thus, to me a valid interpretation is one that has the best claim at describing the platonic ideal version of the story. An interpretation must be supported by textual evidence. Further, because we are working with a noisy measurement (the text as written by the author), the interpretation must be stable under small perturbations of the text. This is essentially Occam's razor.

I contrast a valid interpretation with a valid headcanon. An interpretation must be supported by the text. For a headcanon to be valid, it is sufficient to be consistent with the text, that is, that its negation is not a valid interpretation. Note that it is possible for two valid headcanons to be contradictory (for example protagonist is left-handed or right-handed in a story than never makes a claim either way), but not for two valid interpretations. This is all captured in modal logic, and is in analogy to provability.

Since the goal is to understand the platonic ideal version, death of the author is not to be adhered to rigidly. The author is a valuable source of information. But just like the text, what they say is a possibly flawed representation of the platonic ideal text, and must be compared with the rest of the text to determine its validity.

What if there is a contradiction within the text or other material (like the author's word of god)? The interpretation that is more stable under small perturbations of the text is to be preferred. If one assertion has a mountain of evidence across several scenes, and the other is one small scene or single comment by the author which can be changed without changing the rest of the story except for resolving the contradiction, the assertion with the mountain of evidence is to be preferred.

When comparing two competing headcanons, obviously the consistent are to be preferred. If both are, they are both valid, but if one has to make the choice, the one that is more likely and simpler is to be preferred. It is for instance much more likely for someone to be right-handed than left-handed. Similarly, very likely assertions need less textual evidence for a valid interpretation than unlikely ones.

Implicit in all this is the assumption that the noise is relatively small, which is basically the assumption that the story is well-written. If the noise is large, the story is badly written and I see little point in interpreting it. At that point, critiquing and dissecting it so see where it went wrong strike me as more fruitful endeavors.

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i think it's really fun when a rly specific trope is super popular in one particular medium but in other ones it's just totally unheard of. it's the time knife. visual novel players are suuuuper used to death games but many others encountered them for the first time in squid games. the other day my mom showed me all excited the summary of a super original novel she found and it was about a girl who got reincarnated as the main character in her favorite fantasy book

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my biggest issue with the httyd live action-and just about any live action reboot is that it seems that the live action adaptations are being made to make the original “better”? like, so many people talk about a live action spiderverse, a live action hercules, a live action PRINCE OF EGYPT (dont piss me OFF.)-like animation is a beautiful work of art, and for some reason putting real people and cgi in it is supposed to be an “upgrade”? im probably being that friend that’s too woke or whatever, but i just think it’s so disrespectful to act like something that takes so much time and effort and energy is immediately considered as lower because it is animated. animation is beautiful, and it is one of the most heartfelt art forms there are, and erasing that for the sake of a cash grab is downright degrading to animation as a medium.

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the gooners

they’re everywhere

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God gives his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers and I'm dodging the draft

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Think some people at the conference I was just at may have been taking notes from this essay, especially the "don't worry about new PhD students in the audience, they're not your problem" parts

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does anyone have any recommendation for introductory physics textbooks (mechanics, electromagnetism etc. at an undergraduate level) that aren't scared of mathematical rigor? I was really enjoying reading the feynman lectures on mechanics but his introduction of vectors was absolutely horrendous and so now I really want to find another physics textbook that isn't scared of vector spaces and epsilon delta limits.

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I wish *do math together* was a more achievable hobby to share with people.