In the Book Version I Died Already

ceiling cat

monorail cat

long cat

the OG can i haz cheezburger cat

the lesser known graphix cat

invisible bike cat

my planet needs me cat

cat with the gat

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

They want to build this in the zoo parking lot and act like its no big deal

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

And at some point it was just a lot to keep track of and frustrating that so much was out of continuity. For example, recall that Ion Storm and Nova Storm were suddenly named in 2015 after decades of fans (like me) making up names for them.

And I tried switching to writing for IDW 2005 continuity, but the Combiner Wars portion such as it was went way different than I thought and another fic went way out of continuity.

So, that's why I write "Continuity Soup" now. I can just be like, "Nope, not this version, mine is different, and I was clear about that."

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

They don't have to be a "Big Bad", just the most fun sounding antagonist to either be an adversary to both these characters or to attempt to come between them.

These are all soup versions of these characters.

I don't think I can "character assassinate" Flame, because his history across continuties is to be character assassinated.

Bombshell who in G1 cartoon has some antagonism with Mirage and was alongside Skywarp in being reformatted by Unicron gets no votes.

But, Swindle and Onslaught, two Combaticons, are leading contenders according to poll.

I think, when I finally get chapter 6 of Back on Track posted (working on it, promise) it will be clear why both Swindle and Onslaught were even on this menu. (Swindle already was serving as a sort of rival in Mirage's POV fics and was more a questionable ally in Skywarp's POV.)

Then it looks like Thunder Clash and Tyrest got some support. I believe I can get around to Tyrest sooner and need to think about where Thunder Clash fits.

Then there was a little interest in Mini-Con Thunderclash (who in the whole vague Unicron Trilogy continuity is canonically both Skywarp's partner and antagonist), in Flame, and in some bot from the Senate being antagonizing.

In this soupy continuity, Flame briefly appeared as the cleric from Our Lady of Tarn shrine to Solus who made assumptions about the gender of young "Damus" who went on to be the page of the gladiator Megatronus of Tarn, *also* called Megatronus of Tarn.

I'm still not sure who all the surviving Senators are post Age of Wrath, but there's time to think about that. I need to get Skywarp's Ascent out of Unitrex and through Tyrest, Tetrahex, and Rodion before they end up in Iacon.