languray

[languray]

clarification:

While mina is expressionless except for her eyes she's obviously not emotionless. She gets jealous, feels smug, gets frustrated, etc. Where the show is they haven't hit the major points but she is 100% self aware and sentient and is perfectly able to act in her own interests (even if her logic can seem bizarre). The series is very firm that robots aren't human, but they are very much people.

She also is perfectly able to do stuff outside of cooking, she just isn't inherently programmed to.

The 12 episode series "My Wife Has no Emotion" starts out just a quirky "guy marries his ambiguously-sapient robot" but by the end of it his own family is roasting him on Asimovian moral quandaries.

imagine bringing your extravagant food processor (what this robot is actually designed to be) home to your mom and she's completely accepting that she raised an incel technophile BUT she has serious philosophical concerns regarding theoretical degrees of personhood in a rapidly evolving technological landscape

[languray]

this entire series really is a Trojan horse, looks like a romcom but inside the author really wants to do Aasimovian robot fiction. It eventually starts turning way more psychologically complex and kind of fucked up though not in ways you'd probably expect.

The 12 episode series "My Wife Has no Emotion" starts out just a quirky "guy marries his ambiguously-sapient robot" but by the end of it his own family is roasting him on Asimovian moral quandaries.

imagine bringing your extravagant food processor (what this robot is actually designed to be) home to your mom and she's completely accepting that she raised an incel technophile BUT she has serious philosophical concerns regarding theoretical degrees of personhood in a rapidly evolving technological landscape

[languray]

Not if you're Ethiopian! Then he's got a whole book!

The Biblical figure Enoch is my favourite example of an incredibly minor character in canon who nonetheless gets massive amounts of fanfiction. "Oh he's immortal, he's the psychopomp, God imparted His Wisdom unto him, he met aliens, he spoke with angels, he's basically the Hebrew equivalent of Thoth or Hermes Trismegistus"

He is in. Two. Sentences.

[languray]

Mormonism is the only survivor of a whole wave of weird pseudo Christian cults that popped up around the same time, just they had the advantage of wanting people to build giant families, and also fucking off into the desert so nobody tries to kill them for doing weird shit until they were big enough to be unremovable. Also Mormonism is incredibly white and will gladly support anything else if it means they get richer.

Like, Mormonism is awful, and it's also not really a religion anymore in intention. The LDS is trying to expurgate all the weird unique stuff and also no palatable fucked up beliefs because they just wanna be one of those giant protestant megachurches and rake in billions. It's convergent evolution of Rich White Dude Cults.

mormons undoubtedly in the top 5 worst things the united states has ever invented which is really saying something

[languray]

Quattro Bajeena Full Frontal Zuchini Nicchini Slegger Law Jamitov Hymen Paptimus Scirocco Lila Milla Rira Elpeo Ple Mashymre Cello Desert Rommel Fraw Bow Ryu Jose M'Quve Chibodee Crocket Allelujah Haptism Lockon Stratos Anew Returner Heero Yuy Kakricon Cacooler

All real Gundam character names, several of them are the protagonists or main antagonists of entire 40+ episode animes.

Anime is great. Anime will be like “this is my character of ambiguous western descent. Their name is the most incomprehensible combination of made up sounds. And if not that, it is a name that has not appeared on a single birth certificate since 1773.

Code Geass went and said “most of these character hail from Future Sort-of-Britain, including our main character, who will be named Lelouch just like every single British person isn’t.” Then they decided to distract you from this by naming his love interest Shirley, cornering the market of 80+ year old grandmothers clutching their 3 bowls of strawberry sucker candy in delight. Code Geass didn’t even call it a day here they had one more trick up their sleeve and it was to name the third character in the group Rivalz, a name and a character which appeal to exactly no one.

Tiger and Bunny said “What should our western young-20′s heartthrob successful pretty-boy deuteragonist be named? What screams ‘young’ and ‘trendy’ and ‘brilliant’ and ‘sexy’? Barnaby. Barnaby Brooks. This is our Sex Symbol Barnaby.” I bet a bunch of ghosts from the 17th century were stoked about that one. I bet Barnaby walks into gift shops asking if they have any of the travel keychains in his name and he gets laughed out of the store. I bet Barnaby’s parents didn’t die, they just faked their deaths to get away from him seeing as they hated him enough to name him Barnaby.

I haven’t followed Attack on Titan in 7 years but yall have a character named Pieck Finger. That’s it that’s my roast.

[languray]

[languray]

Ah but eastern and western dragons are NOT the same thing! Like, if we're going by the actual cultural depictions and descriptions! In the west very many things got called "dragon" because of various linguistic messes but generally dragons are some sort of large, venomous, reptile. They're big snakes, or lizards possibly with or without wings, often venomous (fire breathing is very rare, and probably came about due to dragon/snake/satan/devil/hell association) and in fact "Dragons" in many medieval bestiaries are very garbled descriptions of large african pythons and similar reptiles. Of course they're also often associated with sin and the devil and so can be a symbol of that (Fafhrd turned into a dragon due to the curse of his greed, Satan takes draconic form at the end of days, etc.) Eastern dragons though are almost universally semi-divine mystical water-beings. They're lords of rain or rivers or seas, they're wise and powerful and shapeshifting and are associated with gods and such. The ecological niche would be bafflingly different! Western dragons are a sort of apex predator that is notably dangerous to be around and can cause nuisances to cities they live near while eastern dragons are localized semi-deities who cause storms and floods and tsunamis if upset.

Honestly if they were real people who live around eastern dragons would be terribly offended and possibly frightened at offending said beings by comparison to something like a venomous bear that steals livestock.

in my mind if dragons were real then western and eastern dragons would be only distantly related species filling the same ecological niche across different continents. but due to visual similarities got called the same thing in English. and it would be one of those things that you hear on trivia game shows and go "oh that's neat" about and then move on with your day, like how tanuki get lumped in with racoons even tho racoons are musteloids and tanuki are canids. do you see my vision.

[languray]

You can still do something like that! Manual curation is the hardest thing to find nowadays and is more valuable than ever. Even if the links are all to twitter or bluesky or webtoon, you can still point to specific bits of those sites and explain WHY people should care! Here's this comic i love, here's why, here's my favorite panel. I can't help much with the terrible ghost of neopets past haunting you but thinking of it as a Things I Love page might help?

I'm slowly in the process of making a Neocities page for Funsies but all the stuff I used to like that I would link to back in the glory days of Custom Neopets Sites are gone :/

[languray]

I used to play Arknights and eventually dropped off because the live service aspects like constant events and FoMo characters and stuff was killing the fun. I'm sad because Arknights has like... One of the coolest settings ever and if it was any other form of game than a live service gacha I'd never shut up about it. Fantasy Cyberpunk about an alien planet inhabited by generically engineered animal people, a medical NGO with a a military branch is trying to stop 5 different apocalypses cause your character is the last living human from the ancient precursor civilization, but also you have amnesia so you don't remember any of the important ancient lore you need to understand what the fuck is going on with all these ancient gods, alien invasions, dimensional portals to hell, and the deadly self replicating magic space rocks that power all civilization. Also your daughter is a bunny girl wizard who's accidentally also the messiah of the native species of the planet, who are demons and treated like garbage and oppressed minorities by the animal people majority.

I do plenty of mobile gaming with little pokey games that provide a hit of dopamine but aren't very complicated. But it's so weird to me that mobile gaming is also expected to be for, like, big serious games too.

Like. Genshin Impact is a mobile game. I have no idea how you could possibly play a Breath of the Wild clone on a 6" screen half-covered by your own fingers and the only controls are thumb-presses directly onto the screen.

Kingdom Hearts started making mobile gacha games that are plot critical and have tons of vital information which seemed like a fantastic jumping off point for a series that was already complicated enough without trying to pull Ariel and Goofy out of a lootbox so I can form the precursors of Organization XIII or whatever.

Did you know there's a third Nier game? Yeah. A whole-ass Nier game. Exclusive to smartphones, which is why you've never played it and probably never will. It is also a gacha game. They're all gacha games.

I understand why companies do this. Gacha makes money. Marvel has like 17 separate gacha games to try and sell you She-Hulk over and over again.

But it's just. It's wild to me, a person who grew up in the era where any successful property would release a fighting game or an action-adventure game or something. Batman Begins had a stealth-based beat-em-up. X-Men Origins: Wolverine had a really cool hack-and-slasher. They weren't always good but an effort was made to make something that looks and plays like a video game.

And now it's just like.

"Oh yeah, I love this anime. They should make a video game for it."

"Oh, well, there's a pachinko machine in Japan and they have a Puzzle Quest gacha game, which is basically a pachinko machine with Bejeweled stapled to it."

"I said a video game."

[languray]

OH if you thought Marvel was bad, check out DC at the same time! Comics in the 90's were in a love affair with what I call the "Mega Event", which looks like Event Comics we all know and love but last for YEARS and take over a characters entire line. In Marvel the two big ones were the X-Men and Spider-Man (particularly the Clone Sage mess) but DC was I think worse with Knightfall and Death of Superman. Famously the Death of Superman arc had 4 different supermen each heading one of the 4 superman books, but these were not separate stories you had to read all of them to understand what's going on, so we got triangle numbers: Every month would have a littel triangle on the cover with the month, year, and a number: The month and and year are self explanatory but the third number is the damned reading order. You'd have January 1996 3, which means you should read 1 and 2 first and 4 and maybe 5 or 6 after. This was part of a plan to make up for dwindling readership via getting everyone to read every book you put out. It didn't work and just alienated mass audiences from comics at the time, never got better either.

I don't know if they still do this but I remember in the 90's, Marvel comics were very interconnected and convoluted to follow especially because a storyline might begin in one title and then span six other titles before it concluded.

An issue of Amazing Spider-Man might have two separate previews of the next issue. One is "Next issue of Amazing Spider-Man, this other story happens" and then the other is "Next issue of Incredible Hulk, the next chapter of this story happens". It was very hard to follow.

But what they also did was make extensive use of asterisks. A character might say, "Didn't Venom get blasted into space?*" and then there'd be a little box that says [He sure did! Amazing Spider-Man #392, True Believers!] so you know what comic to go check out if you want to know more about that.

References to the big interweaving ball of continuity that was the Marvel franchise were super easy to follow-up on because you had these nifty asterisks.

I often feel like the MCU and Star Wars could benefit from figuring out some sort of nifty asterisk system. They both have what has become this complicated interlocking continuity and it would be nice if it was more accessible.

Like. Going to talk for a moment about Andor episode 9 here. You probably already know what I'm talking about, but spoiler barrier anyway.

Episode 9 is a little awkward in that it centers on Mon Mothma's escape from Coruscant and journey to Yavin, but it just. Kinda. Stops. Cassian gets her to a safehouse and then he's done. He's told "Someone else will take it from here," and he buzzes off.

We never see the crucial journey to Yavin.

And the reason we never see that is because it already exists somewhere else.

I know that the reason we only go this far is because the rest of her trip is covered by Star Wars Rebels 03x16 "Secret Cargo". An episode of a CGI cartoon from 2017 that aired on Disney XD and that you can find on Disney+. You probably know that too.

Chronologically, Andor 02x09 "Welcome to the Rebellion" and Rebels 03x16 "Secret Cargo" happen back-to-back.

But what if you didn't know that?

Star Wars gets hit especially hard by lack of an asterisk system due to the fact that it's an interweaving mesh of interquels. They don't write issue 1, issue 2, issue 3, etc. Issue 225 takes place right after Issue 37 but immediately before Issue 191, which means it happens simultaneously to Issue 13.

Remember that time the climactic resolution to Book of Boba Fett revolved around an unaired episode of Clone Wars? Star Wars is just... like that.

And if you know, you know. But if you don't know, there's not really a way to find out except by looking it up on Wookieepedia or something.

I think the MCU would benefit from working out some sort of "See xyz other property" notifier system for their movies and TV shows but more than that, I think Star Wars would benefit greatly from having some way to point to all the other Star Wars properties and go, "This is what I'm referencing."

[languray]

Also a lot of congress are absolutely ironclad elections. Mitch McConnell will never lose an election as long as he runs because the political machine in his state has ensured the election of the current republican candidate, and many house districts are even more locked down and untouchable. If you don't force these ghouls out, they can build mahcines that make them impossible to remove from office until they retire which is why the same dozen ice-blooded monsters has been fucking up american politics for 30 years.

You know, I used to be opposed to Congressional term limits because. Like. Don't we want politicians to be able to build up decades of experience in politicking? Shouldn't we treat it as a marketable skill that can be cultivated and wielded with experience and mastery?

Don't we want politicians like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi who have seen it all and done it all and have a playbook in their back pocket to answer each and every possible move that the opposing side makes? Don't we want that?

...

As I watch the established career politicians of the Democratic Party respond to the Trump Presidency, I find myself no longer agreeing with that sentiment. I think I support term limits now.

What good is a playbook that was written fifty years ago?

[languray]

Ah but those are *costumes*, implying that those properties are media with movies and fanbases within the context of this artwork. The weirdness comes from the fact that in thisgroup of children, tween, and family friendly cartoon characters, there's also two people who commit regular murder. Engineer turns people into man-hamburger, and Pyro will set you on fire then hack you to death with a barbwire covered fireaxe.

Also while all the aliens and magic and secret worlds are one thing, if TF2 is also canon then it means every one of those children learned about Abraham Lincoln and how he invented rocket jumping.

“Dude let’s go to Comic Con this weekend! I got tickets”

Take photos, make friends, meet a celebrity, wander around artist alley or geek out however you like! Just make sure your wallet survives ;)

[languray]

There's some real dissonance seeing Engineer and Pyro TF2 there. I think Tumblr memes make people forget they're both war criminal mercenaries with very large body counts. Like, everyone else is from a family friendly cartoon series and then you've got two people from a game where you regularly turn people into bloody meat chunks.

“Dude let’s go to Comic Con this weekend! I got tickets”

Take photos, make friends, meet a celebrity, wander around artist alley or geek out however you like! Just make sure your wallet survives ;)

[languray]

I'm only saying this for your sake, but objectively, it's not a smart idea to bring politics into normal hobbies. You might lose supporters of your blog just because of your political stance, and that would be terrible since you're so amazing!! It's only a suggestion, but I really reccomend not bringing politics into anything.

[languray]

When I first read this I got confused but then I realized this is the MCU versions, not the comic ones! Because of course in the comics this is a silly interaction. God canonically exists in Marvel comics (As separate from the many many cosmic godlike entities that also exist, and also guys like Thor and Hercules who in the comics are 100% Literal Gods not God Themed Aliens), the cross has supernatural powers against evil. Both of these guys know a dude who has fought Dracula multiple times. Both of these guys have met The Literal Devil, or at least One of Them (Mephisto is the standard marvel Devil figure but there is a Satan who has a kid they've both met too.) They've hung out with Ghost Rider(s) who are either demons from literal hell or angels from literal heaven. Sadly neither really hang out with the FF so it's likely they never heard from Ben the time he died and met God who manifested as literally Jack Kirby. The MCU really doesn't sell how fucking wild the Marvel Universe is.

@oh-tobeafrog thank you for inspiring me with this galaxy brain take on my two favorite marvel heroes :)

original post here

[languray]

This isn't actually correct at all: Greatswords had a perfectly functional battlefield purpose like any weapon that gets used in war. Big two handers fill an important niche of fitting in between small sidearm swords and long polearms in length. This matters cause nothing is more advantageous in melee combat than reach: If you have even a foot of reach over an opponent they aren't really able to contest that. So the general usage would be: You have a couple of guys with big long swords mixed in with your front rank of big polearm guys, and their jobs are to fuck up the enemies polearms by sweeping them out of the way, and then disrupting their formation by stabbing the polearm guys with their big honking swords because once you're past the pointy bit of a polearm it can't stab you anymore.

Weapon Guys have a bad habit of divorcing weapons from their particular historical context (for a Zweihander that is early modern pike block warfare) and calling it bad/useless/weird because it was made for a specific function in a military system that isn't obvious to modern people.

Also you can hold them behind that little flared out hook-y bit with your other hand and stab with it like a spear, the big sweeping stuff is more to knock away big heavy pikes and such.

He also shows some pictures of Odachi but those are completely different in use, context, and purpose. They were big fuckoff swords for armored cavalry to use against other armored cavalry, then transitioned when they lost battlefield effectiveness into being popular votive offerings or court weapons for bodyguards.

“Greatswords aren’t really that great!”

Just because something looks cool, doesn’t mean it’s effective- but it can help!

Patreon - everything else

[languray]

April fools

@themornal and @8edhead are the voices

https://ko-fi.com/paulaperoff My Ko-fi is open if you want to support me so I can make more animations like this.