downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because

followed by

is such a funny sequence

i find most people who haven't seen it in person don't know that cairo is RIGHT THERE

I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they're literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd

No, y'all don't even understand.

There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.

That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get "lost in the desert near the pyramids", because it's like... just turn around my dudes you're only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop

Yall don't know how much I adore all of this

This is terrible but today when I was playing volleyball outside with some friends one of their children (18 months) was sort of ambling around on his stumpy little toddler legs and so we were all trying to be careful and like not spike the ball onto the baby but then he wandered over to his father, who picked him up bc dad reflexes, and then the ball got passed over to the dad and he sort of had a no thoughts moment and instinctively used his child to smack the volleyball over to the next person. Like he just swung the kid and used his legs like a baseball bat. I'm never going to forget his face of premature regret mid baby-manuever right when he realized what he was doing AND the instant he realized his wife saw it happen. Anyway the baby was fine he didn't make contact with the ball all that hard and he was just mad his dad wouldn't use him as a club again but I had to sit down because I laughed so hard I cried.

now that I am thinking of it the “strong female character” discourse perpetual motion machine has honestly done terrible damage to how people write female characters, especially in YA books, because it encouraged people to write individual characters in terms of things that were generally wanted or needed among female characters.

so reader A wants women who are independent, so I’ll make my protagonist independent. reader B wants women who are strong, so she’s also strong. Reader C wants women who are feminine, so she’s feminine, but reader D wants women who are not traditionally feminine, so she isn’t too feminine, and reader E wants women who don’t need a man, so we’re going to avoid focusing on romance, but reader F wants women who are sexually independent, so we’re still going to have her be sexually active and explicitly not give a shit about her virginity, and it keeps going and keeps going.

and what you end up with is a bunch of characters that exhibit a limited range of qualities because few people want to write women that strongly contradict *any* of the things people want from female characters, because we’ve been reading it like every single female character has to individually model what a Good Female Character should be like, and the majority of YA protagonists are vaguely the same level of feminine, independent, vulnerable, skilled, clever, and sexual, and it’s actually suffocating

There used to be this concept going around called the “Galbrush Paradox.” To find the original text...

It’s a little angry, haha. But the point is there. Basically: There is a perception that with female characters, a woman must be representative of women as an entire demographic. There is no such perception with that in male characters. And this is bad; out of well-meaning concern for women as a demographic, it stifles what kind of female characters can be created, and that in turn sort of pushes female characters further into specific niches

Okay this is the best thing I've read all day thank you for showing me.

Is it... true though? Are there no pathetic female mains?

I'll be clear that I certainly cannot think of any myself right now, but I don't play that many video games any more.

i connected to The Locked Tomb fandom on Tumblr recently, and they are RABID about flawed female characters. My notes are filled with people exulting about how Gideon Nav is "lesbian himbo Johnny Bravo with a sword," and other broke lesbian necromancers and such.

Much of that comes from having a lot of female characters so that one need not represent everything. (At least) one of the books reaches a point where there are no men known to be alive on the planet, so we have a predominantly female cast whittled down to an entirely female cast. This gets the books known as "that lesbian necromancer series," which is a big selling point with some target audiences and pigeon-holing with others.

Being on Tumblr, you hear the same dynamic more with other demographics. If you have one gay character, anything you say about him is a statement on all gays; if you have many gay characters, you have a "gay show" outside the mainstream (and also therefore Making A Statement About Gays with the show).

No one has a cast big enough to give multiple representation to every demographic, so every work of media will have this issue on any front where folks care to make it an issue. You can accuse any media of exclusion, tokenism, or pigeon-holing of multiple demographics. Which is potentially freeing, when you realize it is actually impossible to win with people who are looking for reasons to hate you.

Back to video games specifically, villains providing representation is a particularly frought area given the commonness of combat as a central mechanic. You don't want to have players feeling bad about hitting a girl. You don't want to have players too enthusiastic about hitting a girl. Insert other demographics here.

(This is what gives us Poison from Final Fight, another entire post on her own.)

One antidote there is to have a female game lead, because it is OK for girls to fight girls, which returns us to the original question.

So a kindly person over at Twitter posted the link to this for me yesterday evening. It's a scene from Privateer 2: The Darkening, in which Clive Owen (as a guy who has awakened without his memory in a dystopic spacefaring future) meets up with a priest of a religion essentially based on, not to put too fine a point on it, the worship of beer and its patron deity. (They call their priests "Uncle" the way Catholics call theirs "Father": this is "Uncle Kashumai.")

When I wrote this part I had no idea the producers were going to cast Clive Owen and BRIAN FUCKING BLESSED in the roles. At the time, I thought to myself in one of the writerly forms of esprit d'escalier, "If I'd known they were casting him I'd have written that part much bigger!"

As I'm now reminded... I really needn't have worried, because the drape-chewing here achieves levels only rarely seen before in human history. This is the exact and diametrical opposite of the concept of "phoning it in." Dear gods. Nobody could possibly have paid him what this performance is worth. Yet out it came anyway. :)

...It's easy to forget now (or to remember only with difficulty) how hard the work associated with this screenplay was. Or how long it took. (I was working in a hotel in Slough, near the Electronic Arts UK offices, for six weeks while writing it—the longest I'd ever been away from Peter since we were married. It was... a strain.) What remains to me now of that experience is a binder containing the screenplay for Privateer 2, the single longest script work I've ever done—300 pages and change—the game itself, and moments like this.

...All worth it. What a trip. :)

What's this in?

Deeply embarrassing non-effort from the anti EAs. Disgraceful really.

The quotes in the review sound like the villains in an Ayn Rand novel.

The protagonist would have a childhood friend who is portrayed as good-hearted but misguided, a pragmatic moderate who scolds the protagonist for being hard-headed. "You've got to take care of people, Protagonist!" "People have got to take care of themselves, Childhood Friend." This would be a background story thread while the main cast is having rough sex and infodumping about trains and heavy industry.

740 pages into the novel, as the Effective Altruist Childhood Friend's plans are coming together to eradicate parasite infections in rural Africa, this book would come out, showing Childhood Friend the pointlessness of altruism as his erstwhile allies turn against him exactly because he was being effective instead of purely emotive. "Moderating your reason with altruism is like moderating your food with poison, Childhood Friend." "But these condemnations don't really mean anything. There isn't even an argument." "I've told you those kinds of people are just dead weight, and now you've tied yourself to them. I can't save you if you won't cast away the anchor of altruism and embrace ethical egoism."

And then everything would collapse like a house of cards while the protagonist rides off into the sunset on a train, giving a 40-page speech on the unknown ideal of capitalism.

clear -> clarify

near -> narify

spear ->

nuclear -> nuclarify

It's weird that the west got the idea that "sushi = raw fish". Like, it could have raw fish. Or it could have cooked fish. Or it could have no fish at all. The most popular sushi in Japan is literally cucumber. The term "sushi" literally refers to the rice.

The English word "sushi" means something different than the Japanese word "sushi." Descriptive linguistics wins again.

What's extra weird about the English word "sushi" is that the most popular American sushi (California roll) also does not have raw fish.

fun with the safety sign generator

I love when our girls get to Canaan house and one of the first interactions they have with non ninth human beings is Dulcinea commenting on how charming and novel it is to meet a ninth house nun, and then Harrow leads them in the Ninth version of the prayer and everyone stares at her like she has twelve heads, and Gideon is treated like the avatar of death itself swooping through the corridors

And we, as the reader, had just been going along with the bone motif the whole time. This is a book about necromancers, sure, skeletons working the fields, skull paint, bone prayer beads. That tracks.

And then they get out in the real world and it turns out the Ninth are just fucking weirdos being treated like a 12th century nun just walked onto the set of a modern reality show set because that's exactly what fucking happened.

hate how most of my problems are abstract or systematic i wanna fight more of them with a sword

Perdition’s definitely on my shortlist for funniest worm characters:

He has a power that is a huge terrifying force multiplier in team vs team fights, and utterly ineffectual when used on its own... so naturally he sucks at everything all the time because he's physically incapable of teamwork.

When the Simurgh looked through every possible universe for the most toxic people to summon the Bet using her temporary interdimensional tinker powers, she immediately locked on to this dude.

I really like this insight because of the ongoing observation that powers in Worm run on the irony of giving you exactly the wrong thing to solve your problem, usually either the super-powered version of your problem or something that sounds like the solution but in practice makes it worse.

Familial neglect? Invisibility! Bullied and abandoned by friends? Millions of tiny friends under your control! Eating disorder? We can make an S-class threat of that! Incapable of teamwork? Support power!