#a certified themainspoon classic

[themainspoon]

A quick update for all my fellow r/196 migrants about how things are going back in the motherland. A saga has unfolded:

It began with a basic hornypost, and a comment under said post:

So, the fatal BreadSlice was getting clowned on in the replies, until:

So yeah, the more things change the more they stay the same I guess.

[themainspoon]

Often I think about the r/ambien wife guy, not daily or anything, but still often:

[themainspoon]

A dumb hypothetical that I think about way too often is the "1 of every Pokémon VS a billion lions" one, because to formulate an answer to this question requires answering a bunch of subquestions to work out just how strong/effective a small handful of Pokémon actually would be in this scenario. Because while there are a lot of Pokémon who could fight a bunch of lions and win, a billion lions is in fact quite a lot of lions, to the point where we struggle to fully grasp the number. Even some of the strongest Pokémon who could arguably take down 100's of lions could still barely make a dent in a billion.

But the subquestions I mentioned don't all apply to the strongest Pokémon (a bunch still do though), but instead to a bunch of specific Pokémon who could be extremely effective in this specific scenario. I will now present some examples:

1. Do the Lions have any way of harming Shedinja?

Shedinja may be a posessed cicada shell with a whopping 1 HP, but it also has the ability wonder guard, which means that only attacks that are super effective can hit it. Lions don't use Pokémon moves, this is because they are lions. Shedinja doesn't need to eat or drink either, it just floats ominously. Therefore, unlike the lions it won't eventually die of hunger or thirst. Are the Lions even capeable of hurting it? And to expand upon this, are they capeable of harming any Ghost type Pokémon? If not, easy Pokémon victory.

2: What about Pokémon that are too hot to touch?

Firstly, I'm not talking about the whole "The Pokémon Sapphire Pokédex says Magcargo is hotter than the sun" thing, because we know for a fact that simply isn't true. However, that doesn't change the fact that there are Pokémon that are at least partially made out of lava/magma (does how you describe their biology depend on where they physically are at the time?). Just like us, stuff that hot is something the lions would want to avoid. How could they defeat these Pokémon?

3: "To protect its Trainer, it will expend all its psychic power to create a small black hole."

Ok, to quickly state the obvious: The Pokédex is pretty far from being a reputable peer reviewed journal. But it is also our best source of info on what Pokémon are capeable of, and it repeatedly states that Gardevoir can create "a small black hole". What a "small black hole" means exactly is honestly really unclear. Is it an actual black hole? If it is than Gardevoir could singlehandedly make a huge dent in the number of Lions.

4: Adjusting the Weather Forcast

So, flooding the entire planet would defeat the lions, and so would a permanent drought. These two are both capeable of causing one of those things each. But both really want to do their thing, and really don't want the other to do their thing. Could they come to a peaceful agreement in the face of a common enemy (the lions), or would they continue to fight? Also, would they even have time to complete their weather based win conditions? Kyogre's would work faster, but flooding the entire planet would take quite a lot of time…

5: The big one, what is usually the ultimate argument in favour of the Pokémon. Is Arceus actually God?

If Arceus is God, than instant undeniable dub for Pokémon with 0 questions asked. But, there's an issue with Arceus's divinity that many people aren't aware of. Arceus has claimed that it is God and that it created a bunch of the other legendary Pokémon, and the Pokédex corroborates this. BUT! The truth of this myth relies upon Arceus being the first Pokémon. This is where Arceus comes into question, because we already had a first Pokémon:

Mew, who has been in the series since gen 1, and who is theorised (in universe) to be the common ancestor of all Pokémon. Mew was therefore the first species of Pokémon, from which all other Pokémon are descended. But then how is Arceus also the first Pokémon? The question of whether Arceus is God or just an absurdily powerful Godlike Pokémon depends on whether you adhere to Pokémon creationism or Pokémon evolutionary theory. Basically though, there's a chance that Arceus may not actually be God, which changes things quite substantially.

Some less important questions that still Kinda matter (a little):

Just how hard is Registeel? It's hollow, but made of "a material that is harder than any known metal" (quote from Bulbapedia) could the Lions deal with that?

Yveltal steals the lifeforce of living things around it, Could it slurp up a billion Lions?

How many Lions could Guzzlord eat?

[themainspoon]

I keep seeing polls made for people unfamiliar with a piece of media to ask them to try and identify the thing that does not happen in said media, and I always thought those looked like a lot of fun! So, I decided to make one, and I already knew the perfect franchise for one: The World of Darkness (WoD) TTRPG franchise. The WoD is a franchise containing several different TTRPG’s about playing as monsters, and it has some of the most unhinged lore I have ever come across.

Almost everything above is heavily simplified for the sake of fitting into the poll boxes btw. Also, I promise that this is not a trick. Ten of the Eleven options presented above actually are a part of this franchises seemingly infinite Metaplot. I’ll schedule a reblog containing the answer and some much needed context for everything above.

[themainspoon]

For those who don't have Splatoon 2 Save Data on their Switch or who just haven't noticed, I think this little detail is worth pointing out:

Personally, my theory is that Parallel Cannon bears a resemblance to Agent 4 because the Memverse contains the memories and souls of all the sanitised Octolings and Octarians from Octo Expansion. A lot of those Octo's were likely in the military before they were sanitised, meaning that lots of them probably ended up fighting Agent 4 back in Splat 2's story mode.

We don't know if or how all those memories/souls would be interacting with the Memverse, but from the Palette's we know that souls/memories can take physical form in the Memverse. Therefore, it would make sense if the large number of shared memories involving Agent 4 caused a change in how Parallel Cannon appears.

Agent 3 is likely a much more distant memory for many of the Octo's, if the Octo's from Splatoon 2 ever interacted with Agent 3 in the first place. Maybe Octoling Society has some form of compulsory short term military service program or something, none of the ones who fought Agent 3 were still around because they all finished their tours.

[themainspoon]

We need to make Vampires Bisexual coded again.

At a certain point a whole bunch of authors just dropped all the bi coding, and we desperately need it back.

Us Bisexuals deserve this one fucking thing, please god.

[themainspoon]

Ok I know it's just an April Fools thing, but I REALLY like Booping as an easy brainless method of interaction. Just press button to interact with another person. While we probably shouldn't keep the boop-o-meters, I would like to keep the ability to boop others.

[themainspoon]

I’m slowly beginning to believe that the true central conflict in Werewolf: the Apocalypse isn’t anything presented by the games themselves, but is instead the internal conflict experienced by the storyteller, who has to fight the urge to torpedo their entire chronicle by making the main antagonist some dude that’s a combination of Senator Armstrong and Vince McMahon.

[themainspoon]

There is currently an open petition to the New South Whales Legislative Assembly to amend the law to allow Transgender and Non-binary individuals to Self-ID. Currently NSW is the only state which doesn’t have Self-ID laws in place (Queensland is actively in the process of implementing them, and the bill is currently awaiting “royal assent”), and still requires that individuals undergo Gender-Affirming surgery beforehand. This should not be the case, NSW is actively lagging behind the rest of the nation in regards to Trans Rights. But if this petition gets enough support, there is a chance we could rectify that.

IF YOU DON’T LIVE IN THE STATE OF NEW SOUTH WHALES AUSTRALIA THAN DO NOT SIGN THE PETITION, IT IS FOR NSW RESIDENTS ONLY, AND IF TOO MANY PEOPLE FROM OUTSIDE THE STATE/COUNTRY SIGN IT THAN IT COULD BE INVALIDATED! I understand if this upsets some of you who want to help secure trans rights abroad as well as at home, but please understand that you would not be helping, you would actively be causing problems and standing in the way of progress. If you want to help, please reblog this post so that more people see it, increasing the odds of other NSW residents seeing it and being able to sign it.

Thank you.

[themainspoon]

“Kill yourself” is basic

“I hope your favourite old TTRPG receives a new edition that acts as a soft reboot that is good but flawed. The best elements of the new edition being present in parts of the system that many older fans don’t care about, and the flaws being in areas which those same fans loved and will forever cry bloody murder about. I hope that this new edition brings in many new fans who love the new edition and prefer it over the older editions, being interested in the game for reasons different to the older fans, thus creating an irreparable schism in the community. I hope that fans of the way the game was end up feeling forever bitter and neglected. I hope that the newer fans feel gatekept from the wider community by the unbearable misery and cynicism of the old fans, leading to them becoming hostile towards those older fans. I hope that this leads to the community of this game forever being shredded by pointless edition wars, leading to you becoming trapped in the middle of two toxic communities defined only by their opposition to each-other.” Isn’t going to mean much to many people, but to the right person it is terrifying beyond compression, because it represents something almost inevitable, a story repeated over and over again. It may even represent something they themselves experienced once…

[themainspoon]

Album titled “My Gender” that is a 2 hour long thrash metal concept album recounting the story of a legendary apocalyptic battle at the end of time. A battle fought between the last of the WereBeasts and the evil Machine God, who used and twisted humanities desire to escape the limitations of their flesh against them in order to create an army of mindless cyborg warriors. There’s also a necromancer casting foul and profane magicks, and the Abrahamic God is killed in the crossfire of this conflict.

The album ends with the WereBeasts achieving a pyrrhic victory against the forces of evil that comes at the cost of the extinction of all life, followed by the sound of an implosion, and then a huge explosion trailing off into the noise of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. The implosion being the sound of the entirety of reality collapsing in on itself, and the explosion being the Big Bang. This would be used to show the cyclical nature of time, and that the battle described throughout the album is a Ragnarök like event that always occurs at the end of history before it can start anew, with a new world being born out of the ashes of the old world, the cycle beginning anew.

The final lyric of the album would come after all of this, it would be spoken word with no background noise: “So yeah, to summarise I’m still basically kind of a dude I guess, I just go by both he/him and they/them now, as we just explained.”

[themainspoon]

What have you done to me?

[themainspoon]

Honestly while I agree that CGI is super overused and that we need to start using a lot more practical effects again, I also think CGI suffers from the toupee fallacy.

Essentially, when CGI is actually good and used properly, we don’t notice it. We only really notice CGI when it fucking sucks. And so, since a lot of people only notice shitty CGI, they think that all CGI must be shit and that we should never ever use it for literally anything.

CGI isn’t supposed to be noticed, the best CGI is invisible and/or doesn’t break our immersion so we just don’t think about it. It should not be used to make whole movies, but it should still be used. It’s a tool, when it is used correctly and for the right things it can be perfect for the job.

The problem is not CGI itself, the problem is that a lot of studios are using a hammer as their only tool, and are trying to treat every problem like a nail. The fact that CGI workers are also extremely overworked and underpaid doesn’t help either (we need a CGI union yesterday).

Also, as I said at the beginning: I agree that we need to start using a lot more practical effects again, we can’t (and shouldn’t) use CGI for everything. I’m stating this again because if any of you fucking “so you hate waffles?” me about this I’m gonna cave your skull in with a large rock.

[themainspoon]

I stand in a dark alleyway surrounded by a group of hooligans. I grin, knowing that this fight is already over. I draw my Katana and move so fast that it seems almost as if I am teleporting. This terrifies the ruffians, who stand in shock, waiting for a death that doesn’t come. They glance around in confusion before seeing me, now standing behind them. They watch in shock and horror as I re-sheathe my blade, mere seconds before I explode into finely sliced chunks.

[themainspoon]

If your RPG game has sex scenes it should have skill checks as a part of those sex scenes. Let me fail my roles and do bizarre and comedic shit! Let me bungle my charisma roll and say some deeply strange and unsexy shit, let my character slip and fall mid scene, let my character simply stare at somebodies genitals while slowly formulating a plan of attack, let them bust out their deeply unimpressive “secret technique”, let the get distracted and stop midway through because they need to check something.

I don’t want to watch your perfectly crafted and extremely sensual sex scene, I want to play the game!