i wrote a short taz/homestuck crossover back in 2018, just the IPRE crew running into Earth C, and obviously it’s not up to my current standards but i’m still not sure i’ll ever write a joke funnier than this one
right at the beginning:
and then, lup meeting terezi:
and finally, right at the end, having had a whole year to investigate:
Ok, I Don't Even Go Here re: Homestuck, but this is a QUALITY crossover joke.
loudly going "YOU'RE GOOD YOU'RE GOOD" to myself to ward off the memory of every embarrassing thing i've ever done
fun fact: western shirts' buttons are snaps instead of normal buttons so cowboys can more easily tear each other's clothes off without ruining them in the heat of the moment
Gee, I thought these people were the ones who were like “If you don’t like it, you can just move to a blue state.”
And now they’re mad the guy is doing just that?
You can’t oppress and discriminate against someone then be mad when they take their highly useful skill elsewhere.
His point is basically that he’s going to go where he’s wanted. Guys like Brett realize, as he’s leaving that he’s actually beneficial to the society he’s leaving. If he wasn’t, Bret would be celebrating. This brain drain they’re fretting about is entirely of their own bigoted doing. If they’d thought about retaining great contributors to society instead of culture wars, there’d be no issue.
And the guy still is doing his job, by the way. Saving sick kids.
He just wants to do it in a state that doesn’t hate him and his family.
Even though April had all the clinical signs of schizophrenia, the team believed that the underlying cause was lupus, a complex autoimmune disorder where the immune system turns on its own body, producing many antibodies that attack the skin, joints, kidneys or other organs. But April’s symptoms weren’t typical, and there were no obvious external signs of the disease; the lupus appeared to only be affecting her brain.
The autoimmune disease, it seemed, was a specific biological cause — and potential treatment target — for the neuropsychiatric problems April faced. (Whether her earlier trauma had triggered the disease or was unrelated to her condition wasn’t clear.)
The diagnosis made Markx wonder how many other patients like April had been missed and written off as untreatable.
“We don’t know how many of these people are out there,” Markx said. “But we have one person sitting in front of us, and we have to help her.”
The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus. Every month for six months, April would receive short, but powerful “pulses” of intravenous steroids for five days, plus a single dose of cyclophosphamide, a heavy-duty immunosuppressive drug typically used in chemotherapy and borrowed from the field of oncology. She was also treated with rituximab, a drug initially developed for lymphoma.
The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvementalmost immediately.
As part of a standard cognitive test known as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), she was asked to draw a clock — a common way to assess cognitive impairment. Before the treatment, she tested at the level of a dementia patient, drawing indecipherable scribbles.
But within the first two rounds of treatment, she was able to draw half a clock — as if one half of her brain was coming back online, Markx said.
Following the third round of treatment a month later, the clock looked almost perfect.
Drawing a clock is a common way to assess cognitive impairment. These clocks, drawn by April, show how significantly the treatment regimen was helping her. (Courtesy of Sander Markx) Despite this improvement, her psychosis remained. As a result, some members of the team wanted to transfer April back to Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, Markx said. At the time, Markx had to travel home to the Netherlands, and feared that in his absence, April would be returned to Pilgrim.
On the day Markx was scheduled to fly out, he entered the hospital one last time to check on his patient, who he typically found sitting in the dining room in her catatonic state.
But when Markx walked in, April didn’t seem to be there. Instead, he saw another woman sitting in the room.
“It didn’t look like the person I had known for 20 years and had seen so impaired,” Markx said. “And then I look a little closer, and I’m like, ‘Holy s---. It’s her.’”
It was as if April had awakened after more than 20 years.
TL;DR in case you don't want to read or you're out of free WaPo articles: Article describes two cases of young women who were diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, respectively. Both spent 1-2 decades in inpatient psychiatric hospitals because their conditions were so severe and did not respond to psychiatric treatment, including ECT. This doctor realizes they have lupus that is attacking their brains. He treats the lupus. Both of them improve quickly and drastically. Article wonders how many people with "treatment-resistant schizophrenia" actually have autoimmune diseases targeting their brains... which could be easily identified with a blood test.
Are you particularly surprised by WOTC saying in their newest feedback response video that they're pretty much reverting to the 2014 rule for anything that doesnt get a high positive feedback? How much of that do you think is 'the deadline is looming' and how much is just the result of their design intentions.
I think as long as Hasbro sticks with their "5E is evergreen and must appeal to all D&D fans equally" policy, the game's authors will never be allowed to make a change that doesn't focus-group well ever again.
@kyliafanfiction replied:
Even Hasbro has to know that nothing can appeal to everyone, right? They know not everyone likes every version of RISK™/Monopoly™ etc? I get the joke about business executives being detached but like... are they really not seeing how this can't work?
They're not dumb, they're just thinking like a toy manufacturer.
One of the basic pieces of orthodoxy in toy manufacturing is that you want to segment your target audience in a particular way: specifically, you want to be able to divide your audience up into fully distinct demographic buckets which have no interests in common. That way, you can be confident of exactly who any given piece of marketing is targeting. Without that total market segmentation, you run the risk of competing with yourself for the same audience, which is inefficient.
(As an aside, this is one of the major reasons why children's toys suddenly became so strongly gendered back in the 1980s. The toy manufacturers landed on gender as their primary audience segmentation strategy, and to achieve that, any given toy needs to be only For Girls or only For Boys. Anything with crossover appeal creates a risk that your For Boys marketing will accidentally appeal to girls as well, or vice versa, and now you've got two different arms of your marketing strategy competing with each other for the same audience's attention and dollars.)
With board games, this is basically fine. Most groups don't play a wide variety of games; one group might have Monopoly as their "game night" standard, and another might have RISK, with groups that are equally interested in both being the exception to the rule. Your audience is effectively self-segmenting. Critically, you don't need to own a copy of Monopoly to play RISK, or vice versa.
With Dungeons & Dragons, however, every group needs copies of the core rulebooks (or the equivalent digital/VTT subscription products) in order to play. You can't tidily segment that audience, because no matter what you're trying to sell them, it all flows back into that central pool of "people who buy Player's Handbooks". Half of your audience only being interested in campaign setting A and half of your audience only being interested in campaign setting B would be fine if they were completely separate games, but since it's ultimately all D&D, what you end up with in practice is campaign setting A and campaign setting B competing with each other for the same pool of potential purchasers.
If you're thinking like a toy manufacturer, that just won't do. From your standpoint, there are only two acceptable outcomes: either every D&D group can be treated as potential purchasers of every D&D product, or the outliers can be shaved off into some other audience segment with no crossover marketing appeal to muddy the waters
Presently, Hasbro has opted for the former approach, which is why we're seeing stuff like the Forgotten Realms being canonised as the Dungeons & Dragons setting, with all the other campaigns being watered down and repackaged as tourist destinations which characters from a Forgotten Realms campaign might occasionally visit, or the move away from focused, topical sourcebooks and toward big, messy guides-to-everything which package supplementary material like cable TV bundles in the hope that you'll be willing to buy five things you don't want in order to get one that you do.
(If Hasbro ever opts to try the other tactic, the result would probably be D&D fissioning into multiple completely separate games, each aggressively marketed toward a specific demographic. They'd... probably use something other than gender as their audience segmentation strategy for this purpose? Though I've gotta admit I'd be morbidly curious to see which D&D campaign settings Hasbro's marketing wonks decide are For Girls!)
Which one is closest to Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series, I wonder.
Weirdly enough, probably Dragonlance. It's got pretty-boy ogres, angsty minotaurs, a whole order of knights who ride telepathically bonded dragons and sometimes have forbidden romances with their dragons as campaign-critical plot points, Politics™ – it's basically even more transparently informed by a specific brand of 1980s romantic fantasy than The Forgotten Realms, and knowing Ed Greenwood's creative antecedents, that's saying something!
every video game released as part of a larger series/franchise should have a mandatory waiting period of 5 years between a game release and any sequels or dlc planned afterwards. not to give enough time to make sure the sequel's good and finished, but to drive speedrunners to the state of content-deprived near-insanity where they start doing ridiculous runs like randomizing npc dialogue or cutting every blade of grass
batshit video concepts like this are vital to the youtube gaming ecosystem and they will stop existing entirely if every game franchise puts out something new every 6 months
Making my mom explain the Seattle kraken booktok drama because she writes gay hockey novels for a living interesting to have an insider take
John Gaius' commitment to a certain aesthetic for his space empire is...certainly something...
They are using fountain pens on spaceships. Fountain pens. To the extent that every vaguely intellectual character (other than Abigail Pent, who is repeatedly described as "neat" and "immaculate") is constantly described as having ink stains on their hands and even faces, and the smell of ink is referenced repeatedly.
And when they're not writing with fountain pens, they're using necromantically stabilised blood (this isn't just a Harrow quirk - the Sixth have special spikes on their clipboards for signing documents...).
Amongst the Lyctoral traces Abigail finds in the library at Cannan House are "a warped automatic pen with a thin inner cylinder of ink and a plex casing, rather more antiquated than one with an ink cartridge."
It also seems reasonable to assume that the "clockworks" they wear are analogue watches, as Nona scolds Cam for referring to her beeping digital watch as a "clockwork" on New Rho.
And besides the fountain pens, regency navy uniforms, swords, and general 20th century pulp literature culture, a few more things that characters specifically describe as antique or ancient include:
And fine, these are all within the realms of things people are reasonably allowed to have a personal preference against...
But you know what else the Nine Houses don't have?
VACCINES.
What was the thought process by which Dr Science and Humanitarian Empathy decided to bring back routine childhood illnesses from the 1950s?
Speaking of the 1950s, why - in a society that appears to find permanently magically manipulating the bodies of living people trivial - does the standard of eyecare seem to also be from the early 20th century?
As a glasses wearer, I totally appreciate that there may simply be a social preference for glasses despite the existence of flesh magic. But Abigail Pent swapping between two pairs of glasses would seem to suggest that varifocals went the way of the mumps vaccine...
And our perspective on this is entirely from some of the most privileged people in the Dominicus system.
i mean this fully genuinely and not rhetorically at all - is there any need for vaccines in john's universe if contactable illnesses can be cured with, well, magic? i'm actually really unclear on this, because, on one hand, in nona we learn that john can cure all sorts of things, even some genetic disorders, with necromancy. so, neutering pathogens on a large scale should be do-able within a society rife with necromancers, right? on the other hand, it was plausible to gideon that a flu killed that whole generation of the ninth, so i'm not entirely sure what's going on there and am probably missing something
i actually had a different/perhaps somehow related and more unsettling theory, though, that it's actually not even that vaccines are "not needed," but more that they are intentionally avoided because of whatever it is about necromancers that gives them that characteristic feeble constitution. although even there i feel like i'm Definitely missing something
I would argue there is a very strong need for vaccines. However, it comes secondary to correcting medical issues which arise from life on an uninhabitable planet, and science in the Nine Houses is way worse than we realize.
In HtN, Harrow tells John that her parents gassed "fifty-four infants, eighty-one children, and sixty-five teenagers, and harnessed that thanergy bloom to conceive [her]."
By definition, infants are younger than one year old. Harrow tells us that infants comprised twenty-seven percent of the whole generation, which implies extremely high rates of infant and child mortality.
Excuse my overgeneralized math, but assuming that the Ninth House had relatively consistent birth rates and modern-day child mortality rates, in a population of 200 kids, you would expect an approximate distribution of 11 infants, 133 children, and 56 teenagers.
I might do the actual math later, but the point is that infants are very overrepresented. I wouldn’t be surprised if the overwhelming majority of them died before reaching adulthood.
Studies of various historical cultures and societies have found that approximately half of all children died before reaching the end of puberty. With the disclaimer I haven’t done the full math yet, this is still probably better than the Ninth House’s implied pre-genocide child mortality.
GtN tells us that Ninth House children were extremely sickly. From Gideon’s conversation with Silas Octakiseron:
“This [crèche flu explanation] had made perfect sense to her, always: not only were the children of the Ninth unusually sickly and decrepit anyway—the Ninth House only seemed to truck with the pallid, defective, and upset—but among so much malign decay nobody would have noticed a ventilation problem until it was far too late.”
Even Silas seems to know about this reputation:
Side note: “immunoefficient” isn’t in the dictionary, but it’s sometimes used in medical research to describe effective immune responses (like here and here). Contextually, “immunodeficient” makes more sense; this might be a mistake which wasn’t caught in editing.
Immunodeficiency occurs when the body's immune response is reduced or absent. Several inheritable conditions can cause immunodeficiency, but it’s also acquirable from severe malnutrition, especially where the diet is “grossly deficient” in protein. Considering that the Ninth House lives on snow leeks and nutrient paste, I think that’s an extremely safe assumption.
It also means that vaccines may not have worked well for the Ninth House children even if it were a regular flu:
(Some live/attenuated vaccines are contraindicated for immunocompromised people, too, because they could potentially contract infections if they receive the activated versions of the immunizations.)
In general, there’s a lot of missing background science that the Nine Houses would need to improve their child mortality rates, but I think it’s important to remember that none of the Houses are on habitable planets to begin with. The rich Houses are probably better off food-wise due to imperialism and Cohort prizes, but the Ninth is screwed on that front.
Also, to be cheeky — the first vaccine in the world, the smallpox vaccine, was developed out of the Edward Jenner’s observation that milkmaids who’d contracted cowpox were protected from smallpox. Without a natural world to observe, is it so surprising that the state of science in the Nine Houses is so dismal?
a little more information regarding the maui wildfires:
hotels are still operating. hotels are still operating. they are not the ones offering shelters or housing or food. even bowling alleys are offering shelter, but hotels have the audacity to build on burial sites but not open their doors to local families who have lost everything.
donate to maui united way, the maui food bank, mutual aid, and maui humane society
now that is disability pride month I wanna talk about how tiring it is to be a wheelchair user when you're able to move your legs. every time I used a wheelchair in public there was always someone trying to tell me I'm faking my disability because "they saw my leg move"
people are SO uneducated about disabilities to the point where they believe only those who are paralyzed can use wheelchairs. jesus christ.
[ID: 4 arms holding hands. the arms are labeled "Intersex Rights", "Reproductive Rights", "Trans Rights", and "Disability Rights". The hands are labeled "Bodily Autonomy"
fucked up how colors look different depending on what screen you’re looking at them on. that should be illegal I think
this fucking shit, you know
I spend so much time carefully picking and adjusting the colors in every single drawing I make that I’d probably lose my mind if I didn’t just repeatedly push this out of my memory and pretend it’s not a thing. Why am I reblogging a blank empty post that doesn’t say anything??? Weird
good news! you can’t make sure that everyone will see the correct colors on their own device, but you can make sure your monitor is as accurate as possible for printing and sharing by calibrating it!
there are a bunch of free monitor tests, but here’s an easy one you can use. the passmark and eizo tests are also pretty good, though passmark doesn’t work in your browser. be warned that some tests may cause eye strain.
you can either use the settings built into your monitor itself or use the display color calibration settings in your operating system to adjust the settings until everything looks correct, and then enjoy your accurate colors.
REBLOG TO SAVE A LIFE
Or water fountains, public washrooms, outdoors tables, etc, etc
Notice how removing seating doesnt actually prevent people from sitting it just makes them uncomfortable and makes public spaces more hostile it doesnt actually work at controlling their behavior not till a pig comes along anyways and they'll harass a homeless person/teen whatever they're sitting on.
mxearthling asked me:
hello!! i found your AA “pronoun” and honorifc post in the tag and it was really interesting!! i was wondering if you could expand on blackquill, edgeworth, and klavier in particular when it comes to how they refer to themselves/what others call them? i am INSANELY curious.
This is an interesting Question I got a while back. Now that I’ve replayed some of the games AND am playing Spirit of Justice I feel more up to try and answer it. That said, I am going to go through all Ace Attorney main characters, meaning Defense Lawyers, Detectives, Assistants and Prosecutors, and will give you a profile of how they were written in Japanese, comparing it a little to the original.
This post might be edited when I realize I misremembered something or learn something new.
That said, let’s go!
Currently on this list:
Japanese Name: 成歩堂龍一(Naruhodô Ryûichi)
Japanese Name Meaning: “Naruhodô” is a pun on “Naruhodo”, a Japanese phrase akin to the English phrase “I see(what you mean).” “Ryûichi” means “Dragon”, and the ending of the name indicates that he was the firstborn son of his family. This “Dragon” is presumably what served as the inspiration for naming him “Phoenix” in the English localization.
Refers to himself as: “Boku”, a rather soft-sounding way for men to say “I”, albeit it’s still less formal than “Watashi” would be. This makes me sound younger than a professional who would be using “Watashi”, since older men tend to prefer “Watashi” in their work life. While we’re at “Boku”, contrary to what you may have heard, women *do* use it veeeeeery rarely, albeit women using this in real life are usually seen as eccentric and odd. It’s more common for women to use it in poetic writing, though. In any case, Phoenix’ “Boku” is written in Hiragana, indicating that it sounds especially soft, hinting at his generally mild-mannered personality.
Referred to by the Textboxes as: “Naruhodo”, with a short “o”, openly acknowledging the pun.
Referred to by others as: Maya, Pearl and Mia call him “Naruhodo-kun”, with the short “o”. Trials and Tribulations indicates that Phoenix tried to stop Mia from constantly cutting off the “O” in the end of his name, but she never did, so the punny nickname stuck. Larry and Edgeworth both call him by his last name, “Naruhodô”, without a honorific, which is common among male friends. Apollo and Athena correctly refer to him as “Naruhodô-san” (with the long “O”). Trucy calls him “Papa”, which explains the writing on his beanie. The Judge calls him “Naruhodô-kun”. Blackquil calls him “Naru-no-ji”.
His Speech-style: Somewhat casual, he does sound like a pretty typical, mild-mannered young man, using less polite forms when talking to Maya and more polite forms when talking to certain witnesses or the Judge. He uses the very common, polite “Desu-Masu” forms (which most people in Japan use when they’re talking to anyone other than their closest friends and family) a lot more frequently than a lot of other characters in the series.
Notes: Probably the character who carried over best in the translation. His averageness definitely helped.
