well, well, well, what do we have here?

I'm gonna run y'all through a brief list of plotpoints and I am not making up a single one of these. And I want to preface this by saying each of these plotpoints are all just from ONE SEASON of this show

The Penguin gets electro-shocked into being a good person, Alex DeLarge from Clockwork Orange style and during this time he meets his long lost dad. His dad loves the fact his son is a "Dashing gangland kingpin" and is all set to leave him the entire family fortune which pisses off his dads gold-digging wife and awful children. So his step sister tries to fuck him to get him to keep them in the will. When this doesn't work his step-brother offers to try and fuck him next. The step-mother, not willing to follow in the footsteps of Corey Chase, comes to the conclusion that re-enacting the plot of a Families Tied porn scene ISN'T going to work and so she instead poisons her husband to death and she and her kids make Oswald their live in cook. When he finds out he MURDERS HIS STEP SIBLINGS, COOKS THEM AND FEEDS THEM TO HIS STEP-MOTHER

Michelle Gomez shows up for two episodes as an assasin talent scout that operates out of a crime lord lesbian bar and she sends a face eating cannibal to try and kill Jim Gordon

Jim Gordon's ex wife becomes a supervillain who ends up in a bisexual polyamorous relationship with a BDSM assasin and her brother (God there's so much incest and cannibalism in this show it's like an episode of Game of Thrones...or a gathering of the RNC), a supervillain with an ancient grudge against the Wayne Family who wants to use a string of false flag supervillain terror attacks to get himself elected mayor. Jim Gordon LITERALLY HELPS A CRIME LORD MURDER HIM. However, the batshit insane mad scientist who is the head of Arkham Asylum resurrects him as a nigh-unkillable zombie assasin that's been brainwashed to believe he's a Holy Warrior of the Order of Azrael, a Knight Templar cult. This leads to him going on a killing spree as said unkillable zombie soldier. He dies for the second time when the Penguin shows up on the lawn of Wayne Manor out of nowhere with a rocket launcher, blows him up and then just peaces out

The show basically deciding sometime halfway through season two that it didn't want to be a crime drama about Jim Gordon but would instead like to be a black comedy about Gotham's villains was honestly such a good call <3

the more it just embraced being fuckin insane the better it got :D

And yeah, the show deciding to make Penguin and Riddler a Toxic Yaoi supervillain couple was CHEFS KISS <3

There WAS an Alfred series that was indeed him working to bring down a fascist dystopian government in Britain that seemed like it was heavily "inspired" by V for Vendetta

(Count Olaf voice) Inspired is a BIG BIG word that means "please don't sue us Alan Moore"

And yeah it was indeed set in the same universe as Gotham

Genuine plot point in this show: Riddler falls for a woman who looks like his Sexy Dead Girlfriend and Penguin has her killed because he's jealous which sparks a supervillain feud between the two. At one point when he thinks Penguin is dead the Riddler gets high as balls so he can hallucinate Penguin because he misses him. At another point Penguin has the Riddler FROZEN IN ICE so he can gayze at him like a weird frozen trophy

happy belated birthday blue rat

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was: