Leasspell Dæl

I've gone. Not one for goodbyes, I thought it best to slip out quietly. Love to you all, Giles.

She didn't say IT...😳

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we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

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Question 1/3

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big dog aura VS small dog energy

 - every man in the world is crazy about you, from the dashing naval officer who asks for your hand in marriage to the handsome young blacksmith’s apprentice who you met as a child and feel a strong bond with to the devilish pirate lord who saves your life and flirts with you shamelessly and you make out with him once but it’s for a good cause

 - you have two weddings, one where you femme it up and then it turns all emo when it rains on your wedding day and the groom is dragged off in chains by another guy who secretly has the hots for you and then you have a second wedding where you dress as a man because you’re the pirate king now and you exchange custom vows and witty banter during a sword fight with zombies

- a random pirate you knew for half an hour names you his heir and now you command one of the biggest and most important fleets in the sea

- not only that but you became the Queen of all pirates who now obey you and are at your command. You use your powers to destroy the fleet of the East India Company

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.

a continuation of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

"General Gran is dead?" Roy asks incredulously.

Maes doesn't repeat himself, just takes another long swallow of Roy's whiskey.

He's been opposing them from the beginning and was a bastard on top of it, so it's not exactly like it's a huge loss, but, "Who killed him?"

It's not like people end up in that many pieces on accident.

"No witnesses," Maes says.

He blanches. "How many casualties?"

"None."

"The man's house was practically leveled!" he snaps. "You're seriously telling me that happened with no one noticing and no one else killed?"

Maes doesn't answer him again. He just keeps drinking.

The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.

That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.

If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.

Zoro was the one who thanked Usopp right after the latter freed them from the wax:

He was also the one who carried Usopp after the fight was over:

And the one who made a toast to Usopp, who he called " The hero of Little Garden"

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