#why does all of moebius look 40

[cherry-peach-777]

All the middle schoolers in Tokyo revengers

[goro-pancake-akechi]

Let's analyze this image here.

As expected, Noah got the Shulk treatment and Eunie got the Sharla treatment. Everyone else isn't all too revealing, and honestly th-

WAIT

WHAT THE SCALLOP?! IS THAT A CORE CRYSTAL?!

I thought he was just a human using some weird technology!

Well, there's a few explanations. As I get further into them, I will delve deeper and deeper into late-game and end-game spoilers. Heed my warning.

The most obvious explanation is that he's a Blade. The weapon makes enough sense for a rare blade, and I see no real evidence otherwise.

We can rule out Flesh Eater. Flesh Eater Core Crystals are always a weird mix of the original color and a red/pink, except for Jin, whose Core Crystal is fully red due to being a complete Flesh Eater or something. Taion's seems to be a pure blue-green.

Perhaps a Blade Eater? That would also make some sense. We can't see any of the weird lines or anywhere that the Core Crystal was cut though, so unless Blade Eater technology significantly improved since Xenoblade 2, it wouldn't really work.

There is another very important detail though:

It's made clear that Agnians are naturally stronger than Kevesi. This is why all Kevesi soldiers use one or more Power Frames, to increase their strength to a point equivalent to that of your average Blade.

But does that really make sense?

I say no, for the following reason:

The average Xenoblade 2 human is no stronger than the average Homs.

For a few examples, take Teach, Miyabi, and Juniper, none of whom exactly seem to be Blades. Now, Teach is Indoline, so we can rule him out as being a Blade Eater, since that's their whole thing. Miyabi looks like a human, and her Core Crystal is weirdly shaped and a bit high on her chest, but that isn't enough evidence to say that she isn't a Blade.

But there is NO defense here for Juniper. Her Core Crystal is on her SHOULDER. And not only that, but she's GORMOTTI. There is no explanation here other than her being a Blade Eater, but that still doesn't make sense because she doesn't have any of the Blade Eater technology around the Core Crystal, and there isn't a cut!

But that's not all. Think about this:

If the average Human, Gormotti, and Indoline is around as strong as a Homs - way weaker than a Blade or anything associated with Blades - then how is the average Agnian soldier more powerful than any Kevesi soldier who doesn't have a Power Frame?

For the entire Agnian army to be made up exclusively of Blades and Flesh Eaters is as impossible as reaching the Military District in under 40 seconds.

Consider this:

Everyone in the Xenoblade 1 and 2 worlds - whether they're Homs, Machina, Human, Blade, Nopon, anything - seems to have their mind, soul, and genetic information stored within a Core Crystal inside of Origin. This could well enough explain how everyone in Keves and Agnus can use a Blade.

But it also leads into another, morebdefinitive explanation:

Every Human, Indoline, and Gormotti in Agnus has their Core Crystal awakened in some specific way within the Growth Modules in a process similar to becoming a Blade Eater. They do not become a Blade, but they are able to awaken a unique Blade weapon or Blade-like weapon, which is why Agnian classes have much more unique weapons than Kevesi ones.

Why is this done? One reason is probably to equalize power across Agnian soldiers. It just makes sense for every random soldier to be of around the same strength. The other reason is to make it more fun for Moebius. Agnus now has a unique power that only they can use, but they all have a Core Crystal, which can be a weak point. Kevesi soldiers have Power Frames which only they can use, which have their own various weaknesses. Basically, it makes it more fun for Moebius to hunt them down OR watch them fight each other if killing soldiers of different nations works in different ways.

So yeah. That's my explanation for swimsuit Taion.

Oh, and also Lanz has a funny outfit from what we can see of it.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Stargate SG1 season eight full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

31.57% (six of nineteen).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

20.02%. For a second there, I thought they wouldn’t even make the 20% this time. So close.

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Zero. Shock, horror. The highest percentage they got was a 28.57 (for ‘It’s Good to be King’, and they only had two named female characters even then), so they didn’t even manage to crack 30% for the entire season. What an odious achievement. 

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Seven of them, and as noted above, even the episodes that weren’t under 20% weren’t far over it. At least they only had one episode under 10% this time. Ain’t that damning with faint praise?

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-three. Four who appeared in more than one episode, one who appeared in at least half the episodes, and ZERO who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Eighty-one. Twenty-four who appeared in more than one episode, Four who appeared in at least half the episodes, and two who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

As has become their habit, they had just a little solitary glimmer of goodness (thanks C Judge), cancelled out by their standard fallback on treating women like sexy lamps who exist for male amusement. While they were less egregious with their sins this time around than they have been in the past, they also did little work to balance it out with anything positive (average rating of 3).

General Season Quality:

Not bad - there are no truly awful episodes in there - but mostly not great either; there are a few well-earned developments and strong culminations to long-term plots, but there are also quite a few very safe, unremarkable episodes, and the alteration to their team dynamics leads to some flat storytelling. Altogether, it is solid viewing, but they’ve certainly had better, more imaginative, more exciting seasons.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Don’t let the ‘four recurring female characters’ thing fool you: one of them is Carter, one of them is RepliCarter, and one of them is the Alternate Carter from the two-part finale. It’s basically just a whole lot of Amanda Tapping, plus two (2) appearances by the female Trust operative Brooks (and you could be forgiven if you missed the fact that she even got a name, because she wasn’t exactly prominent). This is their worst female:male ratio yet (and they had already set the bar SO LOW), plus their worst Bechdel score so far. I know we’ve got two season left to go still, but I’m gonna guess this will be their worst statistics for the series. Eight seasons in, by which point they really, really should know better. Very heavy sigh.

And it was a pretty weird season; not weird as in ‘bold and different’ so much as ‘everything feels just a little off’. A big part of that is the reduced availability/use of O’Neill, whom I noted as having really too big a personality to be comfortably shuffled off to a minor presence in the majority of the season, and even in those episodes where he is more extensively present, he feels awkward and out-of-place as leader of the base; episodes where he takes on a more action-oriented role are much more comfortable in their familiarity, and most of the better episodes of the season boast that factor in common. They had episodes in past seasons, now and then, where O’Neill had a smaller role (and a few in which he was entirely absent), but those episodes didn’t tend to suffer for it; the cumulative effect of his under-use in season eight builds up fast, and it’s hard not to feel it. You gotta go big or go home with Richard Dean Anderson. There’s just not much space in between.

The other thing that has the season feeling weird is the fact that they played it so damn safe; especially odd since they also wrapped up their long-term plot lines in the process and essentially packaged this like a farewell season. It’s obvious that they felt the show was winding down and that they were expecting this to be the final season (while the show does continue for two seasons longer, nine and ten are distinctly different outings to the rest of the series), and as such it seems very strange of them to not take advantage of the opportunity to have some reckless fun with their show before it ended. They resurrect the Replicators as villains for what is essentially a three-episode arc; they resurrect Anubis as well, though as usual he has little impact beyond making grandiose threats that never play out as meaningful action. There’s not really a single inventive or unusual episode in the bunch - even the two-part time-jumping alternate-reality finale doesn’t do anything particularly notable with its premise - and those episodes which have the most potential for intrigue are often the least-cooked of the season. There’s a lack of real stakes or jeopardy in pretty much any plot other than the ‘Reckoning’ two-parter, and there are some muddling, awkward personal-life narratives which sometimes work ok in a nice understated fashion, but also sometimes come across awfully forced and grotesquely constructed/motivated (why won’t Daniel just stay dead and spare us the trouble of his presence, huh? Also, never having to mention Pete ever again cannot come soon enough). 

And then there’s this: despite making a weird not-deal out of Carter being approved as the new leader of SG1 near the beginning of the season, we get to see her actually leading the team approximately...never. When she is evaluated as the new leader in ‘Zero Hour’, SG1′s adventure happens off-screen while the episode focuses on O’Neill juggling his new duties back home. Technically, Carter is in charge when the team shows up in ‘Icon’, but the episode starts in media res with Daniel already stuck on the planet without the rest of the team, and the flashbacks (where Carter is in charge) catch us up to that point almost immediately. The team arrives on Maybourne’s planet in ‘It’s Good To Be King’, but it doesn’t take long before O’Neill is called in to help out and thus takes on his old authority over the team, and for the mission in ‘Moebius part one’, O’Neill is there from the beginning. All the rest of the episodes in the season either take place on Earth, and/or they don’t involve the team working together or in a setting that necessitates someone ‘leading’. For that matter, even in the few brief scenes across the season wherein Carter is ‘leading’, she almost never gets to act with that authority the way that O’Neill did when he ran the team; it’s very easy to forget that Carter is technically in charge when she’s not being presented any opportunities to give even basic orders. In addition to robbing Carter of her deserved status over the course of the season, the lack of proper team episodes works to the detriment of the group dynamic, reinforcing the idea of the show coming to a bittersweet end by having SG1 just not feel like SG1 anymore, not just because O’Neill is gone, but because we aren’t getting the chance to see how the remaining team members are adapting without him. It’s a sad weird way to close out this chapter of the series, and it’s hard not to wonder if they would have been so awkward about it if they had a man as leader of SG1 instead. I mean, just look at season nine...

[j-k-notrowling]

Untitled

Hi there! Spoilers up front: this is a gratuitously long-winded “thank you,” not an Ask (also I’m 31 and don’t know how to Social Media so apologies if this is the wrong page/tab/link/widget).

--(oh actually it’s a blog post now because of course I can’t send an “Ask” this stupidly long see? wasn’t kidding about that Social Media thing...)--

I started writing my first book in the Fall of 2016. Before that I’d only written songs. One day I got an idea which didn’t fit within the usual rhymes or rhythms. I tried and tried, but kept on hitting a wall. In addition, I was fed up with the whole “business” of music—the fragile egos, the politics of being in a band, all that. One morning I sat down at my HP desktop computer (again...31) and opened up a blank Word document. I stared at it with murderous intent for a long time, but nothing happened. So I grabbed the nearest book off the shelf (Crash by J.G. Ballard), opened it, and began to type out the first paragraph, copying the sentences line by line. I wanted to see what it felt like — my clumsy fingers pecking at the keyboard, observing how the words fell into place with a musical cadence and tempo almost prophetic, as though the ink were destined to dry in this exact form upon the page, the machinery of its tumultuous birth and impeccable design skillfully concealed. I paused and looked out the window. There was a squirrel on the deck, I remember. And then I saw it. Not outside but inside my own head, behind my eyelids. The song, the one I’d been struggling to write, I saw that it could be a story. I saw it had a clear beginning, middle, and end. I saw a world of characters opening doors to other worlds, other stories, other characters. This was life-changing shit. Suddenly I was a little boy at my first baseball game, drinking my first ice-cold Coke, surrounded by old men chain-smoking Marlboro Reds and muttering dirty words I’d never heard before about the [EXPLETIVES DELETED] on the opposing team. I’d discovered a fire fueled by the psychic anarchy of its own discovery, a Moebius-strip of dramatic invention, a repository for all the pop-cultural turds floating around inside the cracked porcelain toilet bowl of my skull. I wrote prose every night after work. I never thought about what I was doing. I never once stopped to check word counts or page counts. I never thought about sticking to an outline, making sure my story adhered to a specific plot structure, none of that. I wrote like a man in love. Delirious, overheated teenage love. Wear-my-ill-fitting-letterman’s-jacket love (is this also A Thing™️ in Canada?). Stupid stupid stupid love, naive and hormonal and precious and retrospectively mortifying. I’d turn off the world, turn on the music, sit back and watch the words sashay straight into my lap. It took 2-3 months before the ruthless scourge known as Self Doubt farted in my private elevator. Am I doing this right? How many words are in a book, anyway? How many pages? How long is this going to take? Is this an effective way to impress women and/or get laid? Am I writing a novel or a novella? The fuck is “flash fiction”? Are you allowed to write actual books in Microsoft Word? Does it matter that my free trial version of Microsoft Word expires in 30 days? They’re bluffing, right? And so on. I compared my own writing with that of authors I admired; subsequently, I couldn’t get out of bed for a week. I watched 40+ hours of “Kitchen Nightmares” reruns (it’s. the. same. fucking. formula. every. single. episode.) and nursed my shame with bowl after bowl of strawberry ice cream. To think — I’d TOLD people about this fool’s errand, and sooner or later I’d have to show them precisely how awful a writer I was... I turned to the Internet for advice. At first, it seemed like a godsend. There was such a litany of knowledge, so many pro-tips and life hacks and proven formulas for success. This was how I stumbled across your channel. I found other channels which offered more straightforward “DO IT LIKE THIS YOU FUCKING IDIOT” instructions, but I still enjoyed yours the most. I lol-ed at your jokes. I remember a few videos where you spoke highly about All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which remains among the most achingly beautiful books I’ve ever read. Also you’re Canadian, and you guys just generally Human better than we (Americans) Human. ...and here my troubles began. See, the more I tried to adhere to word count goals, the more I tried to properly organize the scenes on my Scrivener™️ virtual cork board, the less I enjoyed the actual process of writing. So I tried other things, based upon other writers’ suggestions: cut the adverbs, write in the morning, write at night, write during your lunch break, write an outline, stick to the outline, write x amount of pages per day, write x number of hours per day, spend x amount of hours drafting and x amount of hours editing, etc. But nothing I tried made me feel confident in my writing. I started actively hating it, to be honest. I dreaded the cursor and the infinite white void. Then I would watch more writing videos and feel guilty about my lack of ambition, my inability to accomplish simple tasks. It’s only a few thousand words, dude — just get in there and do it. Eventually I would. I’d grumble and feel miserable and stay locked in my little writing dungeon all night, ignoring my friends’ texts and phone calls, and the next day I’d hate everything I wrote, trash it, and start over. Then, when I had no more writing left to hate, I started hating myself. The words in my head turned malignant, putrefied into spongy, black tumors. I’d spend all day at work consumed by thoughts and ideas and goals! goals! goals! for my book, then I’d come home and stare at a blinking cursor and wonder why I was such a worthless failure. I couldn’t write the way these other writers did, no matter what I tried. But I still wanted to write. Needed to, in that yearning, terrible way I suspect you understand. I don’t know why The Internet subconsciously invites us to flay ourselves before total strangers, but it does. So I will. Shit got Dark™️, Shaelin. I gained 50 pounds, started living like a hoarder, stopped hanging out with my friends, stopped leaving the house altogether. I kept the curtains closed so my neighbors wouldn’t see the piles of empty take-out boxes stacked up on the kitchen table. I traded the pleasures and contradictions and beguiling enigmas of women for the 24-hour neon distraction of cheap porno. My cat Maggie, basically the only friend I had during this time, got cancer. I watched her suffer and waste away because I couldn’t bear the thought of putting her to sleep and coming home alone to an empty, filthy house. Eventually she died and I hated myself even more for not being able to save her. I wore the same pair of pants for six months. I’d go to work and sit at my desk all day and do absolutely nothing (I was the accounting manager at a small company, technically my own “boss,” so I got away with this for a shocking, frankly heroic amount of time). Then I simply stopped going to work. And I kept torturing myself with those stupid goals and word counts, never happy with the end result, resigned to feel like a failure every day. I remember watching your “Spill the Tea” video back when it was initially posted. Watching it now is eerie, because you describe exactly what I was going through, what I was feeling. Like, to the “T” (see what I did there? #WordPlay #LitPuns101). I’d never experienced anxiety/depression before, so I didn’t really understand what was happening to me. Not that it mattered, because by that point the damage was done. I couldn’t recognize and isolate the real problem. I’d given up. Even though you said a lot of things in that video I desperately, desperately needed to hear, I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to listen to you, because you were one of Them™️. Your eyes were bright and your voice sounded friendly and encouraging, but your name wasn’t McCarthy or Pynchon or DeLillo or Nabokov. You were just a kid. What could you possibly know that I didn’t? In January of this year I called a local psychiatric hospital and told them I was planning to kill myself. I never harbored any true intentions of doing that, but I figured they’d offer me a nice three-week vacation in a padded cell. Considering the circumstances, it honestly seemed like a relief. I ended up quitting my job, selling my house, and moving back in with my parents 300 miles away. I started seeing a therapist once a week (still do, for the record). So far I’ve lost 30 pounds of the 50 pound surplus I acquired. I kept watching your videos, even though I was no longer in the market for writing advice (#JustHereForTheSnark). You kept me lol-ing through some bad days and weeks and months. I’d listen to you talk about problems with the writing community and nod my head like an old woman in church (#ShaelinSermons™️ #SheTeachesANDShePreaches), but I still hadn’t made the connection with my own issues. I swore off writing completely, went back to playing music. Cover songs in coffee shops and family restaurants. It was fun for awhile. I genuinely felt happier. But my story was still an old pebble poking around in my shoe...calling out, issuing playground taunts, drawing hairy cartoon dicks on my forehead while I slept. About a month ago I stared down another blank page, my first since experiencing that fun-sized nervous breakdown earlier this year. I closed my eyes and heard your voice in my head. “You can do whatever you want.” I had no goals, no arbitrary quotas to meet. I wrote a few lines, stopped, fixed a couple things I wasn’t satisfied with, and then went on with my day. I thought about what I’d written, sure, but I didn’t worry or spend the whole day stressing out. The next morning I read over what I’d done, and I didn’t hate it. I thought it was actually pretty good, funny and off-kilter and a little/lotta fucked up. So I sat down and wrote some more. Took some things out, re-worded stuff, dressed up the bones in silver and pearls. Addition and subtraction. Before I knew it, I’d finished a whole page. Then another. And then the hair on the back of my neck stood up, because I remembered: This is how it felt at the beginning. Back when I was young and love-struck and writing only to catch those moments of pure levitation, that devilish tickle, that rush of blood propelled by my own wild heart. It’s been a rough road, but I finally found what I’d lost. I figured out how to write again and enjoy it. And ultimately, the best writing advice I received didn’t come from McCarthy or Pynchon or DeLillo or Nabokov. It came from a young woman in another country with a camera and a nose ring and a big tapestry and bigger dreams which run parallel to my own. So thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your busy life and braving the Steaming Pile™️ that is The Internet to offer words of empathy and encouragement to complete strangers. Thank you for the wisdom you share. Thank you for being who you are. Know that tonight the stars shine brighter as a result. They do for me, at least. (Also I’m sincerely sorry about the absurd length of this “Ask” wherein no actual questions were posed and nothing substantial was communicated beyond a simple yet torturously delayed “thank you” kthxbye #longlivethenewtapestry 

—Justin)