Bad At Naming Stuff

I'm tired of blogging on other platforms, so I moved here. Here is a general links page. Here is a page talking about what kind of asks I'm likeliest to answer.

[kintatsujo]

You wanna know why Invid still insists on using Windows 7 and 8

because of Windows 10 being such a clusterfuck by his estimation

Honestly at this point I can’t disagree with him

[kintatsujo]

And to be clear when he needed a replacement laptop last year we literally went hunting specifically for something that was 7 or 8.  

If Windows tries to force consumers to switch to 10 we’ll probably try to find a different option completely.  Which’ll SUCK, but the way that Microsoft runs its business these days is just sliding more and more in a dystopian direction, so.

[ladytemeraire]

My place of employment still uses 7 and despite my frustrations with the intranet and the systems we use, the OS itself makes me want to scream far less than my personal laptop does.

I certainly have to open task manager to kill memory-leeching processes far less frequently, that’s for sure.

[kintatsujo]

The thing about 7 is that it’s the last Windows OS that was actually optimized for a computer without a touchscreen, which is part of the reason Invid prefers it.  Windows 8′s interface certainly works well for a tablet or a ‘droid but there’s not actually any good reason for the start menu to co-opt the entire screen when you’re using a desktop (and yes we know there’s programs to emulate the popup start menu but that’s not the point here and the one we use for our Windows 8 desktop has actually frozen the computer more than once).

It seems to me that there’s something very wrong with insisting on using the same style of interface on two devices with extremely different input styles, but maybe that’s just me.

[ladytemeraire]

It’s definitely not just you - I’m not a tablet person but I definitely got the impression that 8 was intended for tablet and smartphone, not laptop. 10 is… marginally better, but still obnoxious in numerous ways, not the least of which is having freaking popups be a thing again for some inexplicable reason. (Fecking Support Assist, I swear…) And I agree completely, it’d be better if they had different versions of the OS for different devices, but that would make sense and we can’t have that.

Honestly if I could retrofit my laptop to run 7 and still have touchscreen capabilities I’d be a happy camper. I hardly use the touchscreen at all but it’s a nice feature to have on occasion.

[kintatsujo]

That would make sense and we can’t have that:  Pretty much how Microsoft runs itself these days

[invidicon-blog]

For clarity’s sake, I NOPE’d out of getting Windows 10 back when they declared it to have “all the things I loved” about Windows 8 (and 7), which I actually unilaterally hate compared to 7.  (The only things I like about 8 are the things that are still mostly like 7, except for the new way it handles copy/paste operations, which IS legitimately a big improvement, I just wish it wasn’t attached to all this bullshit that asks me to “tap” things on my fucking desktop.)  This was well before 10 came out and turned out to be the worst possible clusterfuck.

Fucking Vista was better than anything that 10 does, and the nicest things people said about it amounted to “pretty, but also very slow and I’m concerned about how it handles security.”

And now that newer versions of 10 will need a pricey upgrade to use old .exe files, AND there’s this weird bullshit with the updates, things are even worse.  I am SO glad there was a fucking cutoff date for upgrading my Windows 8 desktop to 10, having to continue to say no would just be horrifyingly worrying at this point.

[parrot-grass-deactivated2019012]

Marvel: ‘Infinity War is the most ambitious crossover event in history’

Me:

[invidicon-blog]

To be fair, SRW has completely surpassed being a mere crossover event at this point.

[prokopetz]

We’ve argued about elves with big ears, elves with small ears, elves with animal ears, all without any hope of consensus.

I have a new proposal:

[wju2015]

Hey op, do you take constructive criticism?

[prokopetz]

Not since the War.

[smalltall]

So if orcs are “debased elves” does that mean

[ace-and-bees-deactivated2020102]

This post from the start was a bad idea

[prokopetz]

I don’t know about you, but I’m having a great time.

[dykemagik]

in the beginning, Marvel events were spaced by twenty four weeks. then twelve, then six, then every two weeks. the last one, with Ulysses, was a week. in four days we could be seeing a line-wide push every eight hours until they are coming every four minutes. we should witness a double event within seven days

[dykemagik]

[prokopetz]

Arguments about Doctor Doom always seem to break down into “Latveria should be a utopia because comic book superscience” versus “Latveria should be a hellhole because Doctor Doom is a dictatorial asshole”, but I think it’s a lot more interesting from the perspective of Doom’s function as Reed Richard’s nemesis if it’s both.

Like, let Latveria have basic income and universal health care and a robust educational system and such, and let it still be a hellish place to live, because Doom isn’t doing it for you. He doesn’t give a shit about you. He’s doing it because he feels that it’s beneath his dignity for his people to be hungry or sick or uneducated, and he’s got the bullshit superscience to back it up. But he’s not interested in what you actually need; he’ll give you what he thinks you should need, and if the two don’t line up, the problem is you. He’s very keen on fixing problems.

The reason this works for me is because it’s basically the mentality of your average comic book super-scienctist. Yes, even the ostensibly heroic ones. You look at a guy like Reed Richards, of course he wants to save the world - but only on his own terms. He thinks that he and he alone is capable of judging who deserves to benefit from his superscience, and how, and anybody who doesn’t like it can go hang.

In this interpretation, Doctor Doom is that attitude taken to its logical-yet-utterly-dysfunctional conclusion, a stark demonstration that the intellectual paternalism so many stories about comic book superscience try to spin as a virtue is just the dictatorial impulse writ small - and there’s no such thing as a benevolent dictator.

[seliphra]

↖This blog will be screamer free on April Fool’s Day.

[staccatostark-deactivated201811]

remember kids, anxious fuckers like me can’t handle jump scares without having a panic attack!!

[ask-2p-spamano]

//and we promise not to pull any pranks on you guys

[invidicon-blog]

Honestly April Fool’s Day on the internet is for losers and nobody who participates in it is ever as funny as they think, for serious.

[kayinnasaki]

I don’t know what this is from but it’s the gayest start to a fight I’ve ever seen

[invidicon-blog]

@kintatsujo

[70sscifiart]

A Jack Kirby splash page for his 2001: A Space Odyssey series.

[invidicon-blog]

I gotta say, the things I’ve seen from Jack Kirby’s 2001 adaptation looks way more interesting than what I’ve seen from the work itself.

[bogleech]

hey did you know how big an albatross was because I

VERY

fucking

did not

[invidicon-blog]

Well there’s a reason the Rescuers Down Under movie compared the albatross character to a jumbo jet, although it’s hard to tell just how large the character is since he’s never next to a human.

(Though in the first Rescuers I’m pretty sure the albatross was too small because he was sucked into the intake of the weird swamp vehicle’s engine.  ...He was fine, he was a cartoon character.)

[showerthoughtsofficial]

Nowadays lots of movies have to take place in the 80’s or 90’s because the possibility of having a smartphone would ruin the whole plot.

[kintatsujo]

People say this like I don’t constantly forget that I have a tiny computer in my pocket

Like service doesn’t drop

Like you won’t ever randomly run out of data or whatever

Like I don’t lose my phone five times a day

Like you aren’t going to be concerned about someone overhearing you

Like I don’t have to literally nag my kid brother to actually take his to school

Like nobody forgets to charge their phones or forgets their charger

Like a supervillain wouldn’t have a cell phone jammer

There are So MANY different ways to work around smart phones

[invidicon-blog]

Like a smart phone isn’t hella fragile

Like there aren’t people who have trouble using smartphones for various reasons (I’m probably never going to own one because I have trouble with touchscreens, and I don’t even have a disability as the reason why)

(Also as a mild digression on the topic of supervillains with cell phone jammers-don’t tell me that Doctor Doom wouldn’t have a cell phone jammer built into his armor running all the time even for a purpose as petty as keeping ringtones from interrupting his monologues, much less the purpose of tactically interfering with his foes)

[prokopetz]

Everybody talks about “Nintendo Hard” bosses, but let us not forget the many other classic bosses of the NES era:

The boss that you have to hit it 128 times

The boss that makes you sit through a solid minute of invulnerable bullshit, then exposes its weak point for two seconds

The boss with the badass-looking attack that’s actually totally nonthreatening because it doesn’t reach the corners of the room

The boss that rips your face off within seconds the first couple of times you fight it, then you realise that it just has a really obtuse pattern and never get hit again

The boss that doesn’t flash when you hit it, so you can’t tell whether you’re damaging it or not

The boss that performs a frame-perfect jump every time you press the shoot button, and that’s all it does

The boss that was supposed to be hard, but its AI is bugged so that it just spins in circles if you stand on the left side of the room

The boss whose special attack crashes the NES that slipped through QA because none of the playtesters ever got that far

The boss that runs back and forth

[invidicon-blog]

There’s also:

The boss that stunlocks you but can’t actually take any health from you so you have to wait for the timer to run out to start the fight over.

[invidicon-blog]

One thing I really quite like about Dairanger is that its villain group has this distinctly larger scope feel to it.  Aside from the creepy floating globes (mentioned here), which you can see surrounding what is apparently the Gorma palace in the above shot, there are a significant number of other villains who are technically higher in rank than the technical primary villains that I like to call the fashion disaster trio.

Also, it’d be hard to illustrate with screenshots but I kinda love Emperor Gorma XV.

(Screenshots from episode 20 of Gosei Sentai Dairanger, courtesy of ShoutFactoryTV’s streaming service.)

[invidicon-blog]

Oh look, the three loser villains of this series showed up for the first time!

They consist of a lady with a giant telephone on her head, a dude who rides a motorcycle to make up for the fact that he’s very slow-moving, and a dude with a gravestone for a head that contains whatever wacky gadget he needs for a situation (thus actually obsoleting telephone head lady’s ability, though they don’t make anything of that just yet).

Incidentally, they’re such losers they couldn’t even win a fifteen-or-so-on-one soccer match against one of the Dairangers without cheating.

Not my favorite loser villain trio ever but they’re still pretty great.

(Screenshots from episode 15 of Gosei Sentai Dairanger, courtesy of ShoutFactoryTV’s streaming service.)

[invidicon-blog]

Context for this guy possessing a robot:  He wanted to win a fight with a dude, so he kidnapped a bunch of martial artists and athletes and tried to use them to beat the guy (who is an actually superhuman martial artist because Super Sentai, making up for the fact that the guy’s supposed to be sixty-plus years old), and this is what he brought out when all those proved, well, useless.

Bonus fun because the robot’s fists are DaiZyuJin’s (the original MMPR MegaZord’s fists from the previous season.

I have to say, Dairanger really has an amazing mix of serious and wacky story elements-this very episode features hints at some serious plot points that will be important later and also features the Dairangers suddenly ending up in a fight out of their depth with the series’ main recurring villains-and also often makes use of the old-time super sentai tropes in ways that still feel fresh well after the series aired (such as the Dairangers using a finisher attack on the monster of the week that induces a growth explosion, which stuns the guys they got into an out-of-their-depth fight with).

On the flip side, this episode also has that sixty-plus-year-old guy marrying a twenty-year-old, so, uh, well.

(Screenshots from episode 14 of Gosei Sentai Dairanger, courtesy of ShoutFactoryTV’s streaming service.)

[80sanime]

[junipertheory]

holy shit i’ve never seen the whole thing

[bogleech]

It wasn’t the intended message of this but what immediately strikes me is that intersections copied off a city map can make a gorgeous fictional writing system. I am probably going to just do this the next time I need alien runes or something.

[invidicon-blog]

This reminds me of Sandusky, Ohio, whose street plan is literally based on a Masonic symbol of some sort (and thus is the most nightmarish city of its fairly modest size to drive in that I’ve ever visited).

I mean, at least Portland has the excuse of being decent-sized; Sandusky has a low-to-medium five digit population and most of its public businesses are on one street.

[staroidi]

How I Teach Men Not To Talk Over Me: from one feminist to another, when basic respect is lagging and conversations are impossible

I’ve done this to several men, and they catch on rather quickly. You’ll be able to have a conversation right then and there, and it works long term too - they might’ve forgot their manners by the time you talk to them again, but by repeating this, they’ll eventually learn to let you talk without you having to do this at the start of every convo. Source: I have a very stubborn older brother, who eventually learned too.

1. When they interrupt you, stop talking. Don’t try to raise your voice or battle them. Be completely quiet and wait.

2. Ignore everything they’re saying. Do not actually listen - just wait until they shut up. Don’t make a point of anything they say, do not answer to anything they say, do not refer to anything they say here. Literally do not listen a single word. Let them rant as long as they want.

3. When they finally shut up and wait for your reaction, say: ”I wasn’t done talking.”

4. Start over whatever you were saying when they interrupted you. I don’t care if it was a 10-minute explanation of rocket science. Start. Over. Repeat you original thought, but do not add anything related to what they just said while talking over you. That gives them the idea that it’s okay to interrupt you, you’ll still listen and pay attention and they’ll get their point clear without having to listen to yours. (It’s especially funny when you get done and they expect you to keep going talking about whatever they talked over you. The face when it sinks in that you didn’t listen a single word is glorious.)

5. If they interrupt you again, return to step 1. If you find yourself repeating the cycle over 3 times, tell them: ”you’re not letting me speak. Either you listen and wait for your turn, or our conversation ends here.” If they try to make excuses, laugh it off or keep interrupting, end the conversation. Prove them that if they wont let you speak, they’re not worth your time.

Why does this work? First, because sometimes talking over is internalized and men don’t actually notice they’re doing it. Being vocally called out makes them realize it and pay attention to it - especially if it happens more than once. Secondly, by refusing to aknowledge anything they say when they interrupt you, they’ll soon realize they will not get their own point across if they keep doing that. Peoole and especially men have the need to be heard and paid attention to when they talk - when you make it clear that by talking over you, they will not have your attention, they’ll learn to wait until you’re done, because they know that’s when you will be paying attention and actually listening.

Go my darlings. Have some actual conversations where your point of view is just as valid as his. Demand the basic respect of being heard. You can actually have some interesting conversations with men when they’re forced to listen too, when being louder is not going to make them feel like they’re dominating the conversation or winning the argument.