Maria Writes Things

The girls all gather together and the protagonist comes forward and delivers the news: Spending all this time with all these amazing women has helped her to realize she's trans. Everyone cheers and welcomes their new sister.

I also understand that “middle-aged yaoi” isn’t as fun to say as “old man yaoi”, even when it’s more technically accurate.

Like. Thinking about a recent death in Daredevil: Born Again and the fridging discourse that emerged from it, I find myself thinking back to Amazing Spider-Man 2.

And Avengers: Endgame.

And. Like.

Since the 2010s I feel like sometimes creatives will now do this thing where they bump off a female character so all the men can be sad and react to her death.

But they try to couch it in reassurances. Gwen and Natasha falling to their deaths shouting at the screen, "It's not a fridging! I chose to die! It's all my fault! I wanted it like this! I CHOSE TO DIIIIIIE!!!"

And then a proud creative pointing at it going, "See? See? It's not a fridging! I'm a good creative who knows not to fridge women."

And. Like.

No.

The problem wasn't that the female character didn't have enough agency in it.

The problem is that you keep killing all your women in nearly identical ways so that your men can have nearly identical feelings to feel.

That being said, I do agree that later writing handles Natasha a bit strangely and I don't think Hawkeye's death wouldn't have affected the narrative as much. Natasha would still be affected (mirroring Hawkeye) and such, but characters tend to dwell on her death a lot without really... doing anything with it.

In 40K everything is done with D6s so players just have tons of those dice and roll every attack at once. Since all rolls have to meet the same threshold, rolling many attacks is actually pretty fast (one guy was doing 20 attacks at once at it was practically as fast as my 2d6 attacks).

Once their bizarre trolley construct is complete, however, the monster becomes more hostile and roams the dungeon level in search of test subjects. They make intelligent creatures choose to save one of their friends or five strangers… and depending on the results, the sphinx will either set the test subject free or place them on the tracks in the next round of trials.

My car's cabin is about 2 metres wide and 1 metre tall. (I have a pretty small car) At mid-height the cabin is probably something like 4.5 metres long, if we include the trunk. Since the shape of the windshield is basically triangular, the cabin looks like a trapeze from the side.

The volume is thus Area (Sideview) × Width, meaning 4.5m × 1m × 2m = 9m³.

The human body is less dense than water (because it floats), but humans can also dive so it can't be thaat different. Water has a density of 1 kg/l so let's say 0.9kg/l = 900kg/m³.

9m³ × 900kg/m³ = 81000kg so we can fit 81 tons of human bodies into our car if we don't leave any air.

Humans are about 80 kilos, so realistically I'll probably be able to fit 1000 human bodies into my car with great effort if I already removed all the furnishings. If I want to leave them in one piece the number will probably be somewhere around the hundreds, but definitely not more than a thousand.

Is this an accurate result? No! But I didn't have to do any real work to get to it and (apart from the geometry formulae) all these facts are stuff you'll pick up just by living in the world.

Fermi estimations are really useful!

The star will enter a phase of extreme unrest, firing out hugely destructive waves of power, with the potential to end civilisations

Years go by, and nothing happens

Turns out that even extremly powerful solar storms don't effect much for non-electricity dependant people

Just some impressive auroras

1) a new feast day to be declared on the first day of the auroras

2) the visionary is deemed a prophet and becomes the nexus of a new religion

3) the king of the nation declares himself the rightful ruler of the entire world, which either leads to his kingdom's downfall or a prosperous (though ephemeral) future as a great empire

Not yet. It's on the backburner of things I need to check out after season four kinda caused it to dip from being a Must-See for me.

I was really into the show when we were up against a Lovecraftian nightmare spider from beyond reality that we accidentally opened a gateway to because the government can't stop fucking with things it shouldn't.

But then season four went, "No, actually, the bad guy is a psychic serial killer who kills people because he's crazy and evil. He made up the Lovecraftian nightmare spider. There was never actually a Lovecraftian nightmare spider. It was just an extension of the psychic serial killer all along."

And I was like. Oh. Well. That's. Way less interesting, thanks.

Psychic serial killer can be interesting, to be sure. A lot of people like Freddy Krueger. But I wasn't here for Freddy Krueger. I was here for Cthulhu. I was here for the cosmic horror from beyond reality, and it got dropped for Eleven's archrival who has her equal and opposite superpowers.

So I dipped.

I think Lovecraft-esque plot elements are often overlooked in favour of more relatable villains. I find this very annoying.

“What ancient crypt is this?”

"I'm opening a magic library", a romantasy anime where our plucky female protagonist... opens a magic library, probably together with a male childhood friend / love interest, featuring some more potential love interests as patrons/visitors. Every episode has a new piece of knowledge the customer is searching for & they'll probably go on adventures to find it.

Maybe the books have a will of their own and that's what's dangerous?