Reading

(no subject)

I think I've spent my whole life misunderstanding what people mean when they say "math is universal."

I though it meant, e.g. "any situation where you add two things together can be modeled as 1 + 1 = 2." The equations are universally present. That annoyed me, because sometimes you combine two things together and end up with one thing or three things, depending on the nature of the things.

Now I think it means "if a situation can be accurately modeled as 1 + 1 = 2, your being part of a different culture than me doesn't mean you can accurately model it as 1 + 1 = 3." The equations are universally invariant.

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(no subject)

There’s a thing in Arknights that I really hate. I don’t know the proper word for it, so I’ll just call it “oomph.”

Entelechia is a good example of this. If you have partial vampire heritage, there’s a thing she can do where she “purifies” you to give you the same abilities as someone who only has vampire heritage. If I were writing this, I’d write about gain and loss, non-vampire traits and abilities washed away, the instinct for blood becoming harder to control, a sense of dysphoria from bodily modification . . . Arknights writes this as becoming more powerful and capable, because vampires have more oomph than mixed-race people.

Arknights likes to gesture in the direction of “there’s no such thing as oomph.” In particular, “there’s no such thing as oomph” seems to be the foundation of Kal’tsit’s worldview. Then characters like Nezzsalem have so much oomph that they can only be meaningfully opposed by other characters like the Doctor or Amiya who also have oomph, and I feel cheated.

Before anyone asks, I never read Naruto.

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In response to recent drama

So it’s okay to talk about why you dislike The Rainbow Fish, but it’s childlike to talk about why you dislike Green Eggs and Ham?

I played The Necromancer’s Tale

The magic book deadens your ability to feel happiness from helping others, makes you vomit if you try to go inside a church, and generally screams Bad News on every level.

( Read more... )

(no subject)

Those collaborative roleplaying games with no clear GM seem like a neat solution to “one person does all the work.”

(no subject)

Sometimes I want my arms and legs and head to pop off my torso and fall onto my bed, because it feels like that way I could actually get some sleep.

(no subject)

Hold up. Miley Cyrus is pansexual and nonbinary? I get why the Gaylors wouldn’t care about, say, Lady Gaga, but Cyrus is pretty much the same style and still putting out some good music. Why not obsess over her instead of scrutinizing everything Swift says?

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feo is easily annoyed

(no subject)

I’m reading old webcomics, and I don’t miss the art style that goes “I like watching anime but never took an art class, and I’m never going to do any kind of lighting or depth or be at all realistic about how character’s lips move.”

(no subject)

A realization: The Stupendium is the elevated, semi-dignified form of The Bloodhound Gang. They both have the ability to generate loosely connected rants made of unexpected rhymes, but The Stupendium does stuff like:

Now the ads have got the traffic
And we've grabbed your demographic
So you're packing up your basket
'Cause your dad has gotta have it
He'll be sad if you don’t wrap it with a tag, it'll be tragic
So you're manically grabbing at the shelves amid the panic

And The Bloodhound Gang does stuff like:

Love, the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket
Like the lost catacombs of Egypt, only God knows where we stuck it
Hieroglyphics, let me be Pacific, I wanna be down in your South Seas
But I got this notion that the motion of your ocean
Means small craft advisory

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the dreaded politics

(no subject)

Even if the Israeli government is genocidal, it feels uncomfortable to refer to them as “Nazis.”

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feo is easily annoyed

Still reading Cybersix

The main difference between the comic and the show is that the show wiped off the grime. The city’s less filthy, the people aren’t as ugly (Yashimoto’s horrible overbite actually blends in with the comic characters), Cybersix is relatively less angsty, the villains aren’t as awful, and Fixed Ideas no longer bleed when killed.

Those green vials that just show up in the cartoon when a Fixed Idea dies? In the comic, Cybersix drinks the stuff straight from their necks. Both Lucas and Yashimoto initially think she’s a vampire.

Comic Cybersix is actually more restrained in her violence. Even the Fixed Ideas usually survive.

I thought that weird military march Jose does in the cartoon was supposed to show that he’d had military discipline rigorously ground into him. It’s a Nazi march. Von Reichter is a Nazi. (Really, I should have guessed from the name.)

A lot of these events went straight into the cartoon but got toned down. The bit where Lori thinks Adrian is dating Cybersix? In the comic, she eventually concludes he must be having sex with the panther.

The school is explicitly for troubled teens.

Jose seduces Lori? Giant flaming :rolleyes:

Yashimoto got a gigantic competence boost in the cartoon.

Lori tries to rape Yashimoto at gunpoint? I don’t have a :rolleyes: big enough.

The compilation I’m reading only goes to the end of the Yashimoto arc. I’d just as soon quit here. Ugh.

(no subject)

I’m reading the Cybersix comics, and one thing I think the cartoon improved on is Jose. Neither version of him has any redeeming qualities, but cartoon Jose feels like a product of his father’s abuse, taking whatever action is necessary to conquer the city and make his father proud. He’s the tool that Cybersix was meant to be, the path she’d have gone down if she stayed. Comic Jose is intensely unpleasant in ways that don’t even further his goals, like trying to kill a cat with a baseball bat or tripping an old woman down a staircase.