#I'm supposed to be testing code fixes right now but the people who make the website took down the sandbox version we need to test things

[samderella]

Client: Is it past the deadline? Can I still sign up?

Me: Yes. And yes. Just don't fucking tell anybody

[autumnbrambleagain]

Vampiric Hunger is the most fascinating thing to me, and the quintessence of early Morrowind Modding.

With just janky MWScript, the author was able to make a hunger system where you need to feed on blood, and often early on, petering out as you go longer. It adds sun damage based on a percentage of health and ways to deactivate it with items. It gives you new vampire powers the longer you're a vampire. As far as coding goes, it's arguably not the most impressive vanilla Morrowind mod to exist, but it is certainly up there in the top few pushing the vanilla engine as far as it could go without MWSE.

In terms of writing you have lines like "Please Noooo." in response to you harvesting someone's blood. It's... bad.

And in terms of actual design... they changed the bonuses Vampirism gives you from Attributes to Curses. Which is an actual, in-engine mechanic! And for all the incredible scripting work, lovingly commentated and clear and coherent, I can only imagine this:

They changed it to Curse because uhm vampires are cursed right that's way cooler.

And as a result, the stats and skills you get for being a vampire are temporary and if anything drains or damages them you can never get them back ever because curses are an in-engine function that was never finished being implemented and you set it to curses without it being a function that works and now your mod doesn't fucking work.

There are mods that fix this, allegedly, but the one I'm using doesn't seem to be working for me, which is just. Just fantastic really because it's going to be a huge fucking deal to reset my stats to where they're supposed to be, and then even more testing to see if I can get the "fixed" version to actually work right before I just scrap the mod alltogether.

Because the version I'm using helpfully put half the fixes in a DIFFERENT .esp that adds a bunch of shit I don't want and wasn't using and didn'' realize until later the fixes were in THERE for some reason, you know, because who would put the fixes in the bonus extra optional fucking esp lol? And switching to a fixed .esp doesn't seem to be working and worse, seems to prevent stat restore on drinking blood, which, I don't even know why that's fucking up now did you HOOK the stat restore into it being a curse somehow??? The fuck did you do.

But it's the utter living SYMBOL of early Morrowind modding. You accomplished something far beyond the expectations of what the game could do... and then fucked it up, entirely, made your mod actively deleterious and broken, because you went "haha isn't vampirism a curse? there's an option for curses here that sounds way cooler I"m gonna make them a curse instead"

And to this day no one's done a better vampire mod. There's Devilish Vampires now, but Vampire Embrace has a complex dialogue system that allows people to talk to you if they like you enough, and has a pre-greeting system that allows you to convince them to talk to you even if they normally wouldn't, and... Devilish Vampires has it so you can do it if you wear a closed helmet and only if you do that. If you're a beast race there's One Hat that works and that's it. And instead of allowing you to feed on people repeatedly, and collect thralls and make new vampires, it... makes you feed on corpses, forcing you to kill someone every time ? ? ? I guess? ? ? You're basically exchanging like two dozen awesome systems for a fifth of the content like no offense very impressive mod also but VE/VH just remains completely unmatched

Vampyr looked cool but that project hasn't gotten an update in over a year so rip.

Meanwhile Vampiric Hunger would have worked great if the author hadn't gone "wow... vampirism is a curse and there's a curse option here... neat!"

And that's. That's So <s>Raven</s> Morrowind.

well i guess my next morrowind time is going to be spent fixing someone else's mod. again. because that's what morrowind is BAYBEY

[nokingsonlyfooles]

Ha. Aha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAaaaa...

The links don't work on the Front Page template! Well, sure! Who needs links on their front page? That would be a silly feature! I don't need a working menu for any reason! You don't actually want to READ anything when you come to my site, right? RIGHT?

🤣

God help me, I thought WP's Query Loop blocks were broken, but I had a brainwave and tried them on a regular page. They work fine!

I have severely scaled back the 3rd party stuff and I'm working almost entirely with WP's own blocks and their latest theme. (The few things I have are all tested with my version and I really can't do without them. They're supposed to play together!) It should WORK, right? Why would they go public with that stuff and start tearing up their existing editor with all kinds of new options that I can't set correctly unless I use the site editor IF IT DIDN'T WORK?

It would be generous to call this a beta test and they're NOT.

I have no good options. WP keeps updating to add more features (and fixes, I assume) for the site editor, and the themes and blocks designed for the old customizer are all struggling to keep up. And I wind up with old pages and posts that lack values that the updates are looking for. So they either assign me a default value, a value of zero, or a random one, and of course they don't tell me. Things just break and I gotta plug input into a black box that lies to me on the backend until it spits out what I want on the frontend.

The new editor seems resistant to letting a person work in HTML at all. I used to be able to toggle it on and off and now in places it's either hidden or gone. All blocks all the time, baby! Haha, yeah. That wouldn't be a problem if they just worked like you said they did!

I rebuilt the whole site from scratch less than two years ago because I thought that would clear up all the errors from outdated code. That did not work like I wanted! It's so much worse now!!

If I keep fixing it in the old editor, it's going to keep breaking. But the new editor doesn't work. I mean, the old editor barely worked either, so I get why they need a new one, but it needs to work. I need more than just a static page and a storefront. I need complex text that work on mobile and desktop and is as accessible as possible - because I don't want to be a total jerk to people who have worse eyes than I do.

They're giving me features that were difficult or impossible to code before. For example, I can finally take the air out of Milo's cards with a basic Paragraph block. But, dear god, as a result of that NOTHING is basic anymore.

The default image displays with rounded corners now and it doesn't bother to tell you the value is set to round the corners. It just looks blank, null, but you actually have to set it to zero - you have to type in a number or drag the slider all the way to one end to make it produce corners. EVERY TIME. You need to do a similar thing to set the "padding" and "margins" to zero - you have to set them to one and then drag them back. Ah, except when it comes to the Content block, which SHOULD have an automatic margin because it looks like hell without one. You can't give that thing a margin AT ALL. You have to select all the content on each individual page or post, group it, and give it a margin that way. I think there's a default template for everything, and they're probably all available to edit but god only knows if the edits will match on the frontend.

I can fix the front page. I don't have the energy now, but I deleted the template and set it to a static page via the old editor, which still has some necessary features on it and is still available on every (I think?) theme that uses the site editor. Wow. When the new editor comes packaged with the old one, that really inspires confidence. I'm sure it's fine, It MUST work like it supposed to, I'm probably just terrible at websites. Anyway, since the Query Loop works on a "normal" page, (hahahaaaaa everything is templates now, what even is "normal"?) axing the template ought to fix it. And I don't need more than one front page anyways, so to hell with the template.

...Until I get another damn update that forces me to use it, god knows when.

[effei-s]

pressure points AU: emmaline sommers.

about a year ago i had the idea of writing gender switch modern au with my kids and i even started working on it: i made collages with the characters and it was around 2000 words long piece when i lost the doc (of course i did, because i’m a fucking idiot) but collages remained and i liked them too much to give up on the idea entirely. so few days ago i came back to this au and wrote a little something for a few characters. who knows, maybe one day it’s gonna become a full-fledged fic, but for now we have this.

Emmanuel Sommers

coding genius with unethical work practices;

specializes in creating virtual reality simulation programs and AI.

Helenos carves out time between organizing a military coup in Mali, selling Degas' “Les Danseuses bleues” on the black market and pulling strings of the French Senate to take action on the new housing bill. Emmanuel carves out time between endless upgrades of Andromeda, data harvesting, and sleepless nights.

Hel says: guess who showed up?

Hel says: guess what he was trying to sell?

Hel says: guess how did he get it?

Hel brings with him not only antique coins (a little tradition of theirs) but also bad news and evidences: photos, printouts of calls, tapes, and analysis reports. On the footage, the dead man is holding a prototype program codenamed Architect. A program that no one was supposed to know existed. M knows who the rat is even before Hel says the name (out of eight people, only one was capable of making a copy without anyone spotting).

Inside, the frustration feels like a bee sting: it pricks and then it subsides, gives way to monotonous irritation.

“Jamie run tests, it works. She also said she recognized your ‘handwriting’ right away.”

"Why didn't you keep it, if you knew it isn’t fake?"

"I don't want to die before I'm 40. When it comes to your creations, you're worse than a mother bear protecting her cubs. Not worth it."

He makes himself a Bloody Mary. Leaves a light kiss on M’s cheek.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to fix it."

As I always do.

He sends a message with 26 names.

"Najem Ibrahim, two days." it says at the top of the list.

[multiverseforger]

Fav game character

Tina and her parents were sold to Hyperion to become test subjects for Jack's slag mutation experiments, an event which led to the deaths of her parents. She escaped their fate using a grenade that she had hidden in her dress at her mother's insistence, and once she was free of Hyperion's reach she vowed revenge on the man that had sold her family: Flesh-Stick.

Involvement

Borderlands 2

Tiny Tina's demolitions expertise is called into action when a Hyperion supply train believed to be carrying a Vault key needs to be stopped. With that objective in sight, she then sets the Vault Hunters to the task of finding two rockets (which she refers to as 'badonkadonks') to carry a 'suicide'-bomber toy each, and then to set them on target.

Her collaboration with the Vault Hunters continues when she has them gather items and guests for a very special tea party. During the final mission Tina will contact the Vault Hunters and wish them luck in stopping Hyperion and even reads them a poem repeatedly telling the Vault Hunters to 'kill Jack'.

Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage

Tina appears in a supporting role in Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage. Initially she is hired by Mad Moxxi to help the Vault Hunters train prior to battling Motor Momma, but also asks their assistance in obtaining the autograph of her third favorite mass-murderer, Sully the Stabber, as well as walking her "puppy", a Badass Fire Skag named Enrique. She also provides commentary on many of the Vault Hunters' actions throughout the course of the DLC.

Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep

Tina takes on the role of the 'Bunker Master' for the game 'Bunkers & Badasses', where she is shown to be bad at this, by fumbling in such ways as creating impossible fights early on and not balancing the gameplay in certain areas. The real problems underlying Tina's mental state (at that time) start becoming more apparent as the player progresses, being obsessed with eating only crumpets and constantly trying to insert a manifestation of the now deceased Roland whenever she wants to, to the dismay of the other Vault Hunters. Tiny Tina's character develops over the course of the campaign and she learns to accept Roland's death.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

Tina makes her first appearance during the game while Lilith was interrogating Athena, inviting the Vault Hunters to play another round of Bunkers and Badasses, but was turned down. Later, after Athena finishes telling her story, Tina introduces herself and requests Athena to tell a story about fighting a raid boss. As she had no idea what a raid boss was, she "came up" with a story about fighting one (in this case, the raid boss being an enhanced version of The Sentinel). After that, Tina requests Athena to tell the story of her working for Handsome Jack again.

Borderlands 3

At the time of Borderlands 3, Tina is presumed to be around 20 years old. She is still part of the Crimson Raiders B-Team along with Brick and Mordecai. The team is hired by Wainwright Jakobs to rescue his partner Sir Hammerlock, but after they fail to report back on their progress, Jakobs requests the Vault Hunter to go The Anvil to investigate setting up the story mission Hammerlocked. Tina's code name during the mission is 'Crunk Bunny'. Tina requests 'ingredients' for her 'Pizza' (bomb), composed of 'sauce' (nitroglycerin), 'onions' (wires) and 'ham' (a detonator). She then asks the Vault Hunter to deliver the pizza, which is to blow up the door to the structure where Hammerlock is being held. After successfully rescuing Hammerlock, she declares that the B-team's work is done and they leave Eden-6. Tina is found later on Devil's Razor back on Pandora, where she or Brick will give the mission Boom Boom Boomtown. She asks the Vault Hunter for help in winning back their new home and base of operations, recently named by Tina as "Boom Town", by fighting off COV that have been sneaking in thru a tunnel that Brick is keeping the COV locked inside.

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Appearances

Borderlands 2

Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage

Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep

Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

Borderlands 3

Quotes

"Come on iiiin, you are missing the Fuun!"

"All around the Sta-actus plant, the stalker chased the bandit, the stalker thought 'twas all in fun - POP! Goes the bandit!"

"Oh haiiii!"

"Roland told me you were comin' - I still owe him for all that buttcrap with General Rancid. So, you gotta hijack a train, hunh? Chiiild's play! Lemme introduce you to my ladies."

"Runnin', runnin', runnin', I'm runnin' over here, run, run, run-run, run."

"This here's Mushy Snugglebites, and this is Felicia Sexopants. These fiiiine-ass womens could stop that train for yas, but I'ma need their badonkadonks first, and they got stoled by the bandits a few days ago. Go get 'em!"

"Naptime!"

"That's right, bitches - my big brudder's about to teach you some MANNERS. Nobody steals Mushy Snugglebites' badonkadonk and lives!"

"That's Mushy Snugglebites' badonkadonk. She's my main squeeze. Lady's got a gut fulla' dynamite and a booty like POOOW!"

"Got the badonkadonks? Best day evaaaa. Bring 'em back here and I'll use 'em to make some fine-ass damsels who can hijack that train for yas."

"Hey I told ya'z to get outta heeya, get out or do I gotta shank a bitch?"

"Get-outta-my-shop-or-I'll-punch-yo-butt. That's-how-Tiny-Tina-roll."

"(Singing) Put a little bomb in the hot ass damsel, blow stuff up and make people die."

"I'm a little teapot, bloody and cut. Here is my handle and here is my butt.*explosion noise* Oops."

"Squishy. Squishy squishy squishy."

"Oh daaaaaayum, you lookin' good, ladies. Let's get to work."

That's right. Twin sisters, man. Hhhahhhhhh. Take 'em. Take 'em take 'em take 'em take 'em."

"Just put my damsels near the choo-choo track and set 'em off! Good plan? Great plan!"

"You're cordially invited BITCH!!!"

"When you are ready to begin the Tea-Party, please smack Mister Flesh Stick in his bitch face."

"Gonna eat so many goddamn crumpets, it's going to be a Crumpocalypse."

"Ten... Nine..." *launches rockets* "I got bored."

"BURN ALL THE BABIES!!!!!"

(Cute yawning noise)

"Make it RAAAAAAAAAAAAAIN!"

"Sup, sucka? It's Tina. I wrote you a poem and it goes a little somethin' like this BREAK IT DOWN. Ahem. Kill Jack. Kill Jack. Kill Jack kill Jack kill Jack KIIIILL JAAAAACK! Kill Jack. A poem by Tiny Tina."

"Climb the pipe to the train or you'll go insane wut wut. That's a rap song I wrote."

"Get some cookies, so you can eat 'em and grow up big and strong and kick Piston in the butt-butt."

"Real badasses eat chocolate chip cookies, I'ma gonna get that tattooed across my back in Old English font."

"Wait a minute. Those cookies weren't chocolate chip. Those...are...raisins. WHYYYYYY-HY-HYYYYY?! SHAWTY, DESTROY ALL THE FOOD DISPENSERS! WIPE THE RAISIN ABOMINATIONS OFF THE MAP! I JUST WANTED CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES! WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE?"

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Do you know who just arrived in Beatdown? SULLY THE STABBER! He's my THIRD favorite mass-murderer in the ENTIRE WORLD! You HAVE to go get his autograph for me."

"Get his signature on this. Please. PLEASEpleasepleasepleasepleaseplease! If you don't get his autograph I'm gonna DIEEEEE. He's my favoritest. He killed every living person on the Bathymas with nothing but a rusty butterknife. If you don't take it I'm gonna start crying. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. [making a song out of it] oh-baby please please PLEASE! That was 'Please' by Tiny Tina with Vault Hunter on bass."

"He said...no? Well. There's only one thing to do -- look him in the eye, nod politely, and KILL THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF HIM!"

Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary

While idle

Some of the idle chats are mission related and can't be heard again once the mission in question is completed.

"You come up in my face, and you DON'T GOT BOMB PARTS, you KNOW I'm throwing hands."

"Oh, hello! I didn't see you there. I was just on an important mission to save my friends and AREN'T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE DOING THE SAME THING?!"

"Gonna go blat-blat-blat on the vine-freaks. \n Rat-tat-tat till their brain leaks. \n Chill, girl, just droppin' some bars. Go do the thing."

"I wanna shoot the cannon again! AGAIN! But Lil said no. BLEEPING CURSE WORDS!"

"You kiddos killed that butt-bot so, so good! (cackle) Butt-bot."

"Come on, Mordy. You got this! You gonna be all right."

"MORDY'S ALL BETTER AND ELLIE FIXED THE CAMP'S COFFEE MACHINE AND I CAN'T STOP YELLING ABOUT EITHER ONE OF THOSE THINGS!"

"Yo yo yo. You kill that vineyman up on vineyville yet?"

"I left some reeaaal sexy bombs back on Sanctuary. Oh, just thinkin' bout 'em... come on, think about 'em with me. Yeeeeeah. Together now. Hohhhhh."

"That. Was. The BIGGESTEST BOOM OF ALL TIME! Gotta give it to Lilly-of-the-valley, she knows how to kill a baddo in style."

"Seriously, though. Vaulty-Vault, you was there for me in the dark times. That's fo' life."

"So, just saying, it's probably my birthday, and you ain't got me nothing. Mini-moonshot cannon. Just wanna put that in your head."

Notes

The photo of Tina and Roland

She is introduced as an old friend of Roland's and she has a picture of them together in her room. Roland also mentions beforehand that, "I've saved her life a few times, and she has saved mine more times than I can count."

In Borderlands 2, there are a few unique weapons that are associated with Tiny Tina. These weapons include pink hearted camouflage and/or stuffed bunny image decals.

Teapot

Cobra

Boom Puppy

Tina's voice is performed by Ashly Burch, sister of Anthony Burch - lead writer of Borderlands 2. (The two are also a part of the web series Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?.) She is also credited with the voice of the cursed gun, Bane.

Tina has unusual gender-specific dialogue, referring to both male and female Vault Hunters as "girl". She also makes a number of sexual comments in an appreciative manner in regards the female members of her tea party, whilst during the Assault on Dragon Keep storyline she confesses to liking Maya in The Siren's invitation, asking if Maya likes her in turn. Additionally, her original motivation for helping the Vault Hunters train for Mad Moxxi was going to be due to her having a crush on Mad Moxxi.

Tina switches verbal mannerisms frequently. Her speech styles include a stereotypical inner-city American speech pattern, little girl speech patterns, stereotypically pretentious British English speech, to randomly violent and murderous speech, and others.

Trivia

There is an Easter egg related to Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? in the Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage. On the back of Tiny Tina's bus is a pixel drawing of Papa Burch riding a unicorn from the HAWP episode 'Sleep Is Death'.

Roland recognizes her as one of the greatest demolitions experts on Pandora and a picture of the two can be seen inside of her home.

Tiny Tina is mentioned by Brick on a mission in Sawtooth Cauldron as he recalls carrying her on his shoulders as they fought together. In the end credits, it is shown that they worked together again in this manner cleaning out the remaining Hyperion forces.

ExotropiaTina has an intermittent exotropia (lazy eye) in her left eye. This was originally due to a glitch, but the developers enjoyed it, so they purposefully left it in. This has also passed on to Borderlands 3, as her left eye will occasionally twitch while talking.

In NowGamer, an interview revealed that there is part of a mission removed from the main game involving Tina. Originally, when telling of Roland's death, the players were to head out to Tiny Tina's home and tell her the sad news. It described her being deeply affected by it, thanking the players for telling her, asking them to leave, and locking herself in her workshop to mourn. Anthony Burch, lead writer and the source of this news, says they regret they could not include this scene into the game. It was supposed to be the only moment in the game she loses her peppy mania [1].

Her tea party place card is labeled "Lady Tina of Blowupyourfaceheim"

On May 24, 2013, Tina took over the @ECHOcasts Twitter (previously owned by Krieg).

Tiny Tina's parents have officially been confirmed dead as of the sixth episode of Inside the Box, entitled "Fart Jokes and Tragedy".

In the Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary DLC, Tiny Tina, Mordecai and Brick form a team simply named "The B-Team".

Tiny Tina refers to Brick as "Brick-papa" and Mordecai as "Mordy-mom". This is further mentioned when Brick says "Don't talk like that to your mom." to Tina.

It is revealed in Sheega's All That that Sheega is an ex-girlfriend of Tiny Tina.

ECHO logs in Devil's Razor reveal that Tiny Tina has dated multiple individuals, broke up with all of them, and staged a wedding to make money from the wedding gifts sent by her exes.

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[sol1056]

as one of those Pidge stans that talks a lot with other Pidge stans, I have to say many of us are frustrated with the fact she really didn't have any development and also kind of tired of everything just being family-arc with her, instead of properly bonding with the team. In fact, I'm scared they're just going to kill off Matt now just for the sake of having her focus on family again, when it's the perfect time to make her move to something else.

Pidge is a textbook example of a character who gets too much love. She agonizes over whether she’ll achieve her goals, but it’s never really in doubt that she will — the one time it seems she won’t, the show resolves the question immediately. Without those doubts or consequences, nothing’s forcing her to change, so… she doesn’t. 

The creators set her up to walk through the door already-done. She needed to be introduced about ten steps before that, development-wise, so we could see her grow and change and become herself. The S5 flashbacks told us Pidge was bullied, but I guess we’re supposed to assume she got over that before the story started. 

Which is really rather disappointing. Had she started a bit earlier in her path, her reaction could’ve been quite different when Lance tried to bond (less “Pidge doesn’t like people” and more “Pidge is certain any invitation must be a trick”). It also might’ve made more sense why she’d ditch the paladins and head for her family; they were the only safe harbor she’d ever known. Her progress in finding her family could’ve then become an outward manifestation of her progress internally, in finding her own voice. 

Incidentally, letting Pidge still struggle with post-bullying trauma could’ve created interesting tension between Keith and Pidge. Keith struggles with reading the social cues, but he very much wants to belong; he just doesn’t know how. Pidge can read the cues but damn if she doesn’t care, she’ll smackdown before she’s smacked. They seem simpatico but their motivations are in direct opposition, and a mission where they’re forced to work together could’ve turned them into a real oddball kind of siblingship.  

After S5, I happened on an interview where JDS said they decided early on that Pidge deserved a happy ending. Which rankles from the POV of any other character — especially Keith, Allura, and Shiro, who all lost so much and paid such high prices — but it’s also frustrating, too. Pidge needed to earn that happy ending, not just be handed it by newbie creators who coddled her like the worst of helicopter parents. 

(Hrm, like… helicopter writers. A new phrase. Handy.) 

It seems counter-intuitive, but a character only ‘earns’ their victory through difficulty. The closest she ever comes to a hard choice is early S1, when Sendak hijacks the castle. By S5, she’s been shown as so resourceful on her own that it’s kinda dubious Lotor has much to give that Pidge can’t ferret out through other means. So losing Lotor doesn’t really cost her much, which is why she can toss him away so easily. 

Even her saving throw in S6 is hollow, because we never saw her grapple with the morality of installing a shut-down program on the leader of her team — without his knowledge, even. No, we only find out about that after Pidge’s choice is shown to be the right one, so she’s never forced to suffer any true consequences. The narrative skips right to validating her choice, instead.

What if, instead, her ‘galra tracker’ had had certain flaws she couldn’t fix. And even Matt’s additional data provided no further clues. Then Lotor comes along, and he knows some handful of codes, or an engineer’s understanding of how the security relays work… idk, something that could unlock all the secrets Pidge has been struggling with for three seasons. 

Now put the choice of her father’s retrieval vs Lotor’s knowledge that’s helped Pidge unlock, say, the Empire’s supply lanes or top-secret exchanges or something. Billions of lives could be saved. If she weighs all those lives as valuable, can she really say one person (Sam) is worth more, in the big picture?

That would’ve been an interesting twist, forcing a difficult choice. And it might even be a surprise: say, she decides a billion lives do outweigh her father’s one life. We could’ve gotten Pidge having a heart-to-heart with Allura over loss, maybe another with Hunk or Lance about family. And… one with Lotor, telling him why she was arguing against his exchange. She could’ve gone from the amoral fix-it plot device to finally stepping up as a full adult of the team, aware of the consequences and benefits, and this time making the hard choice Shiro alluded to back in S1. 

(I’d then have Lotor then speak to Allura and/or Kuron. Lotor didn’t know a father’s love, but Pidge did, and Lotor isn’t willing to ask Pidge to sacrifice her father. So, Lotor volunteers for the exchange. Cue Kuron saying, “Maybe we can figure out a way you don’t have to…”)

Hell, just think if Pidge had been involved in the lion swap, and she’d also been locked out. What if she’d switched to Blue, and been forced to provide that support, while Allura had ended up in Green? Oh, the possibilities — but they hinge on having creators who understood that what makes a character truly interesting isn’t wrapping them in cotton stuffing, but in pushing them to their limits and then just enough beyond. Only then can we see what the character is truly made of. 

The EPs’ kind of love never pushed Pidge, nor tested her. It only stifled her, and the story’s definitely weaker for that. 

[fly-pow-bye]

Powerpuff Girls 2016 - “Imagine That”

Written by: Jake Goldman

Written & Storyboarded by: Kyle Neswald, Benjamin P. Carow

Directed by: Nick Jennings, Bob Boyle

Power-Noia MIN ~Crappy Mix~

The episode starts with a candy train in a candy-themed world, conducted by Bubbles and her Scottish bagpipe-horse friend, Bagstripes, who acts as the train's horn. Definitely not in the City of Townsville, but in the City of Bubbles' own mind. Can you believe this is a mind of a coder? It's just so wacky!

In this world of nonsense, Bagstripes tells Bubbles that there’s trouble in Milkshake Junction. Queen Shmallow, a rather large marshmallow queen, shows up, constantly snorts, and does a raspberry just so we can have a fart joke. Is this supposed to be their parody of Princess Bubblegum?

The big trouble Bubbles has to fix? The milkshakes aren’t shaking! Get it, because milk “shakes”. I don't have a drum set handy to do the "ba dum tsh", but I can imagine it.

Bubbles: This looks like a job for...the train conductooor!

See, Bubbles’ imagination knows no bounds with such a creative title like “train conductor”. They might be going for “train of thought”, because this whole episode is about imagination, but I am going with a lack of creativity here. Bubbles knows how to get these milkshakes a-shaking. Thankfully, it’s not by showing them how. I got worried for a second, mostly because this whole scene reminds me of Painbow.

Instead, she turns her head into a boombox with the help of her magic hat! She gathers around all of the dust bunnies to do a Dust Bunny Disco. Yeah, her candy world is full of dust bunnies, too, because imagination. They already did a dust bunny joke in Memory Lane of Pain which was far more fitting; is this supposed to be a reference to that?

What do dust bunnies have to do with candy? How does a life of superheroics inspire a dream like this? Worst of all, why is not one of these guys voiced by Dana Snyder? I wouldn't blame him if he didn't want to be in this, but Master Shake would have distracted me from all of these questions!

She swings around one of the milkshakes, and all I’m doing is waiting for someone to start yelling “Bubbles” so this dream sequence can end.

That is indeed what happens, as this is all just a daydream by Bubbles, and she was actually swinging around Buttercup. She flings her right into a show and tell, where Blossom is showing off an ant farm filled with dangerous fire ants. Is it just me, or is this class nothing but show and tell? Buttercup gets flinged into the glass, and the fire ant farm falls on them, covering them with fire ants, sand, and, presumably, broken glass.

How do the rest of the students react to this? By laughing at them, of course. I must say, the Powerpuff Girls aren't making a lot of friends at this school; they call them babies, and they have no hesitation to laugh at them when they get covered with broken glass. The fire ants eventually catch up to the rest of the class, including Ms. Keane. She orders the girls to go to the Principal's office. Yes, even the two that were victims of Bubbles' imagination get in trouble, too. How dare they become victims!

On the plus side, we'll finally get to see Principal Jennings! Maybe we’ll even get to see Miss Boyle, too. Finally, some new characters that would give some world-building, or at least some school-building. That above image is the only proof that the school even has a name as of this episode; that's how desperate this poor school needs something like this.

That school-building will have to wait, but we do get to see that mysterious student from Secret Swapper of Doom again, commenting on how Bubbles has such an imagination. His big twist in that episode was that he was actually Him in disguise. This episode doesn't even try to hide it, as he instantly turns into Him after the Powerpuff Girls walk away. They didn't really hide it in Secret Swapper of Doom, either.

There is one other point to his appearance other than to explain how Him knows the problem of the episode, and that he's planning something evil. We finally get to learn Him's student form's name: Harvey. Like Harvey Comics? One of their characters was Hot Stuff the Little Devil.

At the Powerpuff house, Bubbles explains why she did something that would endanger Blossom, Bubbles, and all of those jerks in the classroom, and give them all detention. Yes, even Blossom and Buttercup get punished for their heinous crime of being thrown into glass! I do get that they had to find a reason for Blossom and Buttercup to get angry at Bubbles, such as undeserved detention, but I would say having to go to the school nurse to treat those wounds would be good enough. Yes, this reboot does make me believe these superheroes would be wounded.

But Bubbles can't help it, she has an overactive imagination! Buttercup tells her to shut it down while saying whatever this is:

Buttercup: Overactive! It couldn’t be more active if it was a Labrador on a bicycle chasing squirrels made of bacon!

This random word blender humor is very fitting for the kind of humor that is spread throughout this episode. If that’s not the humor one is looking for, they might as well turn the TV off now. Most people did when the theme song started.

Blossom tells Buttercup to go to bed, so they can be angry at Bubbles in the morning. While the Powerpuff Girls go to sleep, Him shows up, turns into mist, and invades their room. They must have been really afraid that viewers might not have gotten that Him is going to do something bad!

Bubbles wakes up, and finds that the bed has been transported to Milkshake Junction. Blossom and Buttercup wake up too, and wonder if they're dreaming. Buttercup tests this out by punching Blossom in the face. It's supposed to be funny, because you're supposed to be pinched, but Buttercup would rather be violent! Bubbles is super excited to be in her world of milkshakes. It's all about the power of her imagination!

Or imagjinashuln(tm), as she spells it. She can talk to animals, which has been shown to include at least one other human language in the original, but she can’t spell. The joke is that the blonde one is a maroon, don’t you know! It's weird to think she's into a profession where misspelling words leads to serious errors!

The opening sequence was enough of this random land of milkshakes and dust for anyone to stand, and it seems that even the episode itself agrees. Immediately after the imagjinashuln™ joke, Him pops out from one of the milkshake’s straws and steals Bubbles’ magical hat. Forgot to animate said magical hat? Don’t worry, it just magically appears right before it gets stolen! Nobody will notice.

Using the magical imagination hat, he turns Milkshake Junction into a hellscape. The dust bunnies, originally just a kind and out-of-place decoration, now have fangs and apparently have a taste for sugar, spice, and everything nice!

As an aside, thoughout this episode, I felt something off about Him. It's not his actions, as this is a very poor man's version of Power-Noia. It wasn't until I rewatched this episode that I realized that Him doesn't have his echoey voice filter throughout this entire episode. Sure, you can still tell it's Him's voice, but that filter gave it the otherworldly quality it had. That's how little they cared, and I probably shouldn't.

Speaking of voices that don't sound right, the lack of imagination turns Bubbles into a monochrome version of herself who can only speak in monotone. Sounds like a Raven impression; so good to know not even Tara Strong's other roles are safe from this reboot.

Buttercup flies in to stop Him, only to get bounced back by an evil Queen Shmallow. Buttercup says they should never speak of this, as if this was any more embarrassing than all the other Monster Punch Girls Down scenes. Then Blossom eye lasers Shmallow, which makes her fly away into another Spongebob Squarepants explosion gag. After Blossom makes a s'mores pun, which comes with, big surprise, a fist bump, they get surrounded by dust bunnies led by a now evil Bagstripes!

The Powerpuff Girls fly for their lives, as they are chased by the now evil dust bunnies. It would be an easy assumption to believe that dying in a Him dream would lead to their death in the waking world. Blossom finds a door to a supply closet that just happened to be there, which leads to them falling into a dark crater. They try to ask Bubbles to imagine something, but of course, she doesn’t have her imagination. It’s up to Blossom and Buttercup to realize this power of imagination.

Buttercup: What could be do, imagine a flying hamburger turtle to give us sagely advice?

As soon as Buttercup says that, a flying hamburger turtle appears! So good to know that not even Craig McCracken’s other cartoons are safe from this reboot. Blossom congratulates Buttercup on giving them a great idea, and we cut back to Buttercup eating that turtle. Because Buttercup is a rascal that will happily eat sentient creatures.

Speaking of which, Him is sitting on his throne, sucking one of the milkshakes dry. What do you know, Reboot Buttercup and the Devil are pretty similar! Really, I don't need to make any more commentary on this, as that scene speaks for itself. This sucking, of the milkshake kind and not the reboot's usual kind, gets interrupted by a flash of imagination light.

Blossom pops out of the ground as the Office Valkyrie, with a “pen is mightier than the sword” sword and some ruler wings! You'd think the math queen/mathlete should be the one handling rulers, but instead, Buttercup is the Laser Eagle. She's an eagle who has lasers. Doesn't she already have laser eyes? I think they used all of their creativity points on Blossom.

Him: Oh caaandy critters...get them.

Yeah, there's this weird hidden joke where they keep using the word "get" where the word "destroy" would have been less awkward. This is seen earlier in the episode, too.

Buttercup: Why is everything trying to get us?!

Maybe they were going to say "kill", were told not to use that word, and didn't want to reanimate the lip movements. Blossom and Buttercup easily take care of the dust bunnies, and they have to face off against two of Bubbles' imaginary friends. Evil Bagstripes does a dance, using his pipes as swords, and Blossom just throws her pen at him, causing him to deflate. Indiana Jones may or may not be pleased.

Bubbles: Good job, he was always my least favorite.

Then why did you imagine him? As for Buttercup, she faces off against Evil Queen Shmallow again. This match lasts an even shorter time, as Queen Shmallow just gets lasered in half, because apparently Laser Eagle's lasers are stronger than Blossom's, and Bubbles just goes "you sure got her". Again, I think they used all of their creativity points on Blossom.

While his candy critters went down without much of a fight, there's still Him himself. Using his imagination train conductor hat, he turns into a train! It's here that I realize that this is the first reboot Him episode that doesn't involve an evil item. That's good. In this episode, even Buttercup says this train form is cool looking; essentially a verbal form of the fistbump joke. That's bad.

They repeat the same “punch punch uh-oh“ scene they did with Silico with a more fitting villain, as Him files the Office Valkyrie "under "P" for pathetic", which is an okay joke. The Laser Eagle goes down pretty easily, too, as the Him train reflects the lasers back at her. The Puffs defenseless, Him gets ready to "get" them, but what happened to Bubbles?

It turns out, this whole thing was just a distraction, as monotone Bubbles steals the imagination cap, and explodes in a boom of creativity. Blossom and Buttercup wonder where Bubbles, and she comes out in the most creative way she can muster...

...by ripping off the Teletubbies! For an episode that’s supposed to be a tribute to being creative, they sure are making some un-imaginary friends out of themselves. Without the hat, Him no longer has control over Bubbles' world, and is just a simple little devil now. Like Hot Stuff!

Of course, being the sun isn't the only thing Bubbles is going to do. She's also going to imagine a creative way to defeat Him: more milkshakes! They're going to do it for Joey. Not Big Joey, not Joey the Camp Director, but Joey the Sucked Milkshake From A Minute Ago. We even get to see him on a hospital bed.

Joey The Sucked Milkshake From A Minute Ago Go...get...him...guys...

Yeah, more of that getting! I will give this episode some credit: it’s only implied that the ultimate evil the Powerpuff Girls have and will ever face could be taken down by a bunch of anthropomorphic milkshakes. He leaves before the milkshakes could even "get" him. They're disappointed that they couldn't avenge their fallen friend.

And we cut to Joey flatlining in vain. And that's how the dream ends: with a reminder of death and disappointment. Who said the reboot can't be dark? Not funny, but that's kind of a given at this point.

The Powerpuff Girls wake up, and wonder if it was all a dream, even though it was already shown that it was, indeed, a Him plot. At least Bubbles got to save the day this time, something the reboot has dedicated an entire episode to showing that she never does. However, it's in a surreal dream world she had absolute control over, so it's not much of an accomplishment.

We get the weekly apology scene, with them saying sorry that they doubted the beauty of a great imagination. Bubbles is sorry too, for letting her imagination get the best of her. Hopefully, she won’t try to throw her friends that can’t survive broken glass, if she even has any. Her only friends seems to either imaginary or Donny the Hell-Horn, and the latter is happy to dump her for someone cooler.

The episode ends with them playing, pretending they’re the personas they used in the dream world. Even on non-rainy days, the Powerpuff Girls seem to have time to pretend to be superheroes. Episode end.

Does the title fit?

It's about imagination, and imagination saved the day. Buttercup even directly quotes the title in this episode.

How does it stack up?

I tried to imagine the positives of this episode, but I think monochrome Bubbles has the right idea.

Bubbles: Okay. I'll try. (pause) I got nuttin'.

Joking aside, it's finally cool to see Him do something other than hand a weird mysterious item that turns out to be evil. The Powerpuff Girls do indeed get the villain to the point where he has to escape, something that this reboot does rarely. Is that even a positive?

This episode is about how you shouldn't be afraid to use your imagination, written by people who are afraid to use their imaginations. Considering Painbow, that may be a positive, but what does this episode have? The humor is just random, with no real wit to be found.

As it stands, I'd rather not imagine this episode. Not a terrible moral, but I wasn't a fan.

Next for PPG 2016, Jared freakin' Shapiro. Man, I really need to think of something else to prepare for that one. All I can say is that life is like a hurricane.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN JUDGE

When you catch bugs early, you also get fewer compound bugs. I've never heard anyone say that they loved Java. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do. Different languages are good for different tasks. This time the evidence is a mix of stuff from the headers and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively. It was the narrowness of such channels that made professionals seem so superior to amateurs. In a desktop software company, this would have been too late. In defend-a-position writing that would be a well-paying but boring job at a big company, this would explain why you have to fix it. What you want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we'll have to figure out how we use the word. When we started Viaweb, hardly anyone understood what we meant when we said that the software ran on the server, it would be useful for other kinds of filters too, because it meant we didn't have any plans. If there's just one point, they're identical: the average and maximum are the same.

To developers, the most likely prediction in the speed department may be that Moore's Law will stop working, and their performance improves. One question that arises in practice is what probability to assign to words that occur more than five times in total actually, because of the doubling, occurring three times in nonspam mail would be enough. He likes to observe startups for a while at least. I'm making a big assumption in even asking what programming languages will there be in a hundred years. At big companies, because their software is probably going to be possible to do much more than writing commentaries on Plato or Aristotle while watching over their shoulders for the next release. You'll have to adapt to the whims of investors. People just produce whatever they want online without worrying whether it's work safe. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on. Those few that inevitably slip through will involve borderline cases and will only affect the few users that encounter them before someone calls in to complain. Fred is. Because seed firms are companies also means the investment process removed that stress, we'd make a list of such words and mail containing them would automatically get past the police to get up to an apartment that overlooks the president's route. And strangely enough, the better.

This is an instance of a very important meta-trend, one that Y Combinator itself has been based on from the beginning: founders are becoming increasingly powerful relative to investors. Republic occurs in Nigerian scam emails and this spam. You need that resistance, just as there are in the real world. Someone probably will eventually. At each step, flow down. And funding delays are a big distraction for founders, because you don't have to do, instead of what he called essais. Well, that's news to no one. How did things get this way?

In a hundred years, maybe it won't in a thousand. So you can still get large returns on large amounts of money; you just have to spread it more broadly. A good deal of programming of the type that we do today. And once it spreads to hotels, where is the point in size of chain at which it stops? So we are working on it. But I am not negative on this one, I am interested, but we thought very carefully before we released software onto those servers. Angels have a corresponding advantage, however: they're also not bound by all the rules that VC firms are organized as funds, much like hedge funds or mutual funds. No, not generally.

I only consider words that occur in one corpus but not the other. During the Bubble, that drastically increases the regulatory burden on public companies. Whatever Microsoft's. Either it's something they felt they had to do to get more people through the test drive. But I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea. Aircraft: applying corrections too vigorously, so the deal fell through. So for any given idea, the payoff for acting fast in a bad economy will be higher than for waiting. I think the big obstacle preventing us from seeing the future of startup investing, realize it would pay to be upstanding, and force himself to behave that way. Someone like a judge or a military officer can in much of his work be guided by duty, but duty is no guide in making things. They're increasingly rare, and they're right. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means to try.

That wouldn't seem nearly as uncool. Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of intellectual archaeology that does not need to be a case of premature optimization. Viaweb we spent the first six months just writing software. They were atoms of drawing, but arranged randomly. If anyone wants to take on this project, it would affect at most one merchant, could probably be hushed up, and in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor. The contacts and advice can be more powerful than our first PR firm got through the print media are competing against. One of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in NYC right now meeting their users. But for what it's worth, as a high school kid writing programs in it. So the more confident you are, the more outliers you lose. Everyone knows you're supposed to do what hackers enjoy doing anyway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. Investors will probably find they have to get all the way to get fast applications is to have many layers of software between the application and your operating system.

Garbage collection, introduced by Lisp in the early 1960s, but many companies continued to write code in machine language. It's one of the biggest IPOs of the decade? If you think of using Lisp in a startup instead of within a big company, any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish. I thought before Viaweb, to the extent I thought about the question at all. Founders understand their companies better than investors, and time always more than you spend. With Web-based applications, these two kinds of theoretical knowledge had to be delivered. It's oddly nondeterministic. It solves the problem of the headers, the spam of the future will probably look something like this: instead of a fixed round size, startups will do a rolling close, where they take money from the general public you're more restricted in what you can extract from a frivolous question? When a company loses their data for them, it's a fine-sounding idea to say that angel rounds will less often be for specific amounts or have a lead investor manage an angel round before going to VCs. If several VCs are interested in you, they will sometimes be willing to split the deal between them. Over time, hackers develop a nose for good and bad. This is especially necessary with links whose titles are rallying cries, because otherwise they become implicit vote up if you believe such-and-chug undergrads, who are called general partners, get about 2% of the fund annually as a management fee, plus about 20% of the fund's gains.