• 0 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: November 3rd, 2023

help-circle

  • I think it’s absolutely intentional. It feels like it’s written by and targetted towards people who are viscerally repulsed by pedophilia.

    It’s creating a situation that feels like absolute horror, and using that revulsion to help sell the horror. This centuries old mind, trapped in a child’s body, unable to properly experience things like sexually and romance, continually on the outside of everything, treated like a child despite her age and abilities…

    If I remember correctly, she ends up being this extremely bitter murdering monstrosity, out of rage and spite over her existence. Despite her angelic, innocent face, she’s the most evil of the lot. Partly because she doesn’t even have the option of interacting with humans properly, and even most vampires treat her poorly.

    And all because a character had a moment of moral panic, of pity for a poor child. A desire to do the right thing.

    It’s awful. And it’s supposed to be.









  • It’s not a thing to change, though? I guess there’s one aspect that might be addressable.

    I don’t enjoy sports, but I appreciate the skill and training that goes into it. No one could say anything that would make me enjoy watching any sports, but they could help me to appreciate it by better understanding the skills and stuff.

    So if you don’t like Doctor Who - same deal. It’s a matter of taste, that’s fine. If you don’t understand what there is to like about it, that’s all anyone could help you with.

    Me, I only really like the first few sessions of the reboot, with the 9th and 10th Doctor, because I appreciate a little more depth in my stories.

    Doctor Who appeals to so many people and a major reason for it is that it appeals on a number of different levels.

    There’s the escapism, of course. How many Whovians secretly (or not so secretly) wish they could hear the whine of the TARDIS’s engines, see the Doctor, and be whisked away? To adventure, to incredible sights and experiences, to feeling like they matter. That brings me to the next point, but just here for a moment - that escapism is uniquely profound in Doctor Who. A huge number of fans would accept being the Doctor’s companions, even knowing how badly it ends for so many of them. If I didn’t have a kid to take care of, I’d be on that list myself - I’d take a short, full, meaningful life over this bullshit any day. Even if I’m dead in 6 months, for those six months I’d live more than a hundred years the way I am now.

    There’s also the simple, pure joy of following the adventure of someone who’s just straight up a good guy. You can feel safe rooting for him, in your heart - he’s going to try to do what’s right, there’s no mixed feelings about that. It’s like a child’s story that way. And yet, he’s not just fighting cartoonish, childish enemies. Sometimes, yeah, but there’s often nuance, moral complexity, hard choices.

    Like the Pompeii episode where he had to decide whether to actively kill everyone in the town in order to save the world. And they didn’t blow it off, it was a painful choice, he wasn’t saved by a Deus ex machina at the end, he had to do it. He hurt for it - him and his companion Donna, they both strove to do what’s right and made this terrible choice.

    And yet, for all that heaviness that underlies so much of the show (and I swear, the writers love traumatizing the doctor), it still manages to be light-hearted and fun most of the time. Suitable to watch with your family.

    It’s real, and alive, and cheerful, and rich in a way so many shows aren’t. It’s fun and thought provoking.

    Yes, it’s incredibly stupid at times, no joke, and I’m not at all happy with some directions it took after the 10th. I finished Matt Smith’s run and then stopped watching.

    But there’s something beautiful and deeply compelling about it for a great many people. Ah, to be whisked away to adventure and purpose! Wouldn’t that just be brilliant?

    Edit: I can’t seem to figure out how to do spoilers on here…



  • Even if Jellico was right about it being a superior system, he was still being a shit leader.

    You don’t come into a management position and instantly change everything up. You start by learning how things have been going with your staff and setting up a series of changes, with adequate forewarning, for them to adjust to reasonably.

    You sure as hell don’t come into a situation that’s tense with time pressures, emotional pressures, legitimate causes to fear for their lives, etc, and then force a wide array of changes onto your staff.

    Even if the 4-shift thing is unquestionably superior (and let’s assume it is, ignoring the Bajor comments people are making) - it’s still a stupid as fuck thing to do, under the circumstances.

    Especially considering all the other changes and pressures he was adding on, all at the last minute, before a major battle.

    Engine overhaul, protocol changes, shift changes, multi-day extreme overtime, on a staff that’s emotionally distressed right before their lives will be put at severe risk?

    He’s an absolutely terrible captain and a disgrace to Starfleet. His bullshit would have endangered everyone’s lives for no good reason, had he not been damned lucky that the battle never came.


  • We once did something really amazing along these lines. Only once, it was a crap ton of work.

    We were fighting this giant demon wall thing. We made it out of Graham crackers and chocolate decorations, which we attached with melted chocolate as glue, basically. It was super creepy - I made demon eyes, oozing blood stuff, it’s was great.

    As we damaged the wall, we would rip parts of and eat it. It was like a solid 2-3 freaking pounds of chocolate and other assorted things. It was glorious to devour the enemy like that!


  • It’s annoying when monogamous people act like we’re all lying about experiencing compersion.

    Man, do I feel this. Why is it so hard to believe that people can feel differently about things?

    No, I’m not jealous and afraid my wife is going to leave me if she has sex with someone else. She isn’t when I do that, either.

    We’ll eagerly discuss all the juicy details. She loves hearing about my adventures. She’s more shy, so I hear more about who she’d like to be with rather than actual adventures. We both giggle and discuss people we’d totally bang and there really actually isn’t an undercurrent of anxiety about it.

    If I found someone that I started to fall in love with, isn’t that an awesome thing? Love is wonderful! And the sort of person that I could love would be someone that my wife would, at the very least, like. How does this not sound like a wonderful situation to people?

    Monogamy doesn’t make sense to me, though I respect people’s right to feel the way they do. If they feel jealousy, that’s allowed. If they think it’s better to have jealousy, then I’m confused, but whatever.

    It’s just weird that feeling differently gets such negative reactions and accusations of lying.


  • The way I think of it, there is no subtraction, and there is no division. Or square roots.

    There is the singular layer of operations (the adding/subtracting layer which I think of as counting, multiplying/dividing layer which I think of as grouping, etc).

    Everything within that layer is fundamentally the same thing. But we just have multiple ways of saying it.

    Partly because teaching kids negative numbers is harder than subtraction, and thinking of fractions is hard enough without thinking of it as a representative process of relationships via multiplication.

    Again, just how my brain does things. I’m not a mathematician or anything, but I’m pretty decent at regular math.





  • Yes, omg! And the world building idiocy drove me absolutely insane.

    Like, this one part where the were-something (might have been a werewolf?) was like, “only the first born of any pair of weres will also be a were” or something, and the immediate reaction… was to wonder why the were population wasn’t taking over the whole country or whatever. And the were took that seriously, saying the only reason their population wasn’t huge was a large number of stillbirths and such.

    They try to backtrack that a few books later, and deal with the actual consequences of the fact that they literally can’t increase their population without polyamory - clearly someone informed the author of how stupid that was - but still, that initial response was some of the most obviously not-thought-out world building I’ve seen.

    … okay, maybe that’s not true, but some of the worst I’ve ever seen in a book I continued to read, anyway.


  • I used to love physical books, but I just can’t do them anymore. It’s eBooks all the way - on my phone, namely.

    I love to read so much and the ability to have my book on me at all times is irresistible. Going to the bathroom? Waiting at the doctor’s office? A few minutes break at work? Snuggling in bed at night and I don’t want to turn on a light and disturb my partner?

    I’ve tried a few times to read physical books in the last few years, and having gotten addicted to the pleasure of reading whenever the hell I want, I just can’t anymore.

    Audiobooks are great for long car drives, but I rarely do those, so they’re a very occasional treat for me.