#pattern recognizer

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according to some lore (most notably the name of the jail Sam Flynn goes to in Legacy) the Tron movies are set in "Center City."

this is a fictional place. but i have seen some people assume it was in Pennsylvania, because if you look up "Center City" most of the places you'll find are in Pennsylvania

which is simply because "center city" is Pennsylvanian for "downtown." (Pennsylvania has a whole lot of interesting linguistic/dialect things going on.) (ask Yinzler.)

anyway though.

Pennsylvania is not the only place that has Center Cities.

personally I've always headcanoned that the one in Tron is a fictional suburb of Los Angeles

that fits with the mentions of Los Angeles in the Betrayal comic. and it is plausible enough. Los Angeles is bigger than some entire nations. Los Angeles has so many damn suburbs that, for all anyone knows without looking it up, there totally could be one called Center City. And most importantly, the Tron movies absolutely do not LOOK as if they're set ANYPLACE else besides Los Angeles

But

if we were to imagine that they are set somewhere else

that opens up some truly hilarious possibilities 

while I lived in Los Angeles, my roommates loved to watch "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia." and, according to them, the funniest ongoing joke in "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" is the obvious but never-addressed fact that it is not actually sunny in Philadelphia at all

and that the show is very very obviously filmed in Los Angeles, not even slightly trying to look like Philadelphia or anywhere else in Pennsylvania or anywhere else outside Los Angeles

...And I think it would be uproariously funny to imagine the same thing is going on with Tron.

Headcanon that Tron is canonically in Pennsylvania, hence the Center City

it's just... not real-life Pennsylvania.

It's the same Los-Angeles-coded, alternate-universe Pennsylvania that "Always Sunny" is set in.

...Crossover time.

See, for me having a very active pattern recognition subroutine means having

1. an extensive mental library of lots and lots of random scraps of information I've somehow picked up from all sorts of fields.... often without context or real-life connections archived in my memory

2. A search function that VERY actively scans the mental archives, finds different pieces of information, and improvises connections between them.

(which are SOMETIMES useful. SOMETIMES.)

Which is why I portray this little bastard as half Tron 1982 Recognizer, and half the logo of the Internet Archive

(ah who am I kidding. It picked out the symbols itself. Typical Pattern Recognizer behavior)

And an example of a typical interaction:

- you should wear grease stained work clothes after labor day to show you are an actual laborer

- labor day is the start of the cold snowy season, which means the actual world is gonna start wearing white soon, you shouldn't try and upstage her. (Also you'd be camouflaged in the snow and that makes you look dishonest and sneaky)

- september is among the most common human birth months, therefore labor day is a day for going into labor. If you've gone into labor that means you've been pregnant which means you aren't a virgin which means you don't get to wear white

for example

one common set of meds is Colonoscopy Preparation

which, as one might guess are just an extreme bunch of laxatives for cleaning out the colon

there are plenty of jokes to be made about this

one is, of course, that these products include Polyethythene Glycol, which is abbreviated PEG, and you can imagine where my mind goes with that

but unfortunately

my mind is getting even more creative with the Magnesium Citrate part of the regimen

does my mind stick to a simple little joke like "lol Topcare? More like bottomcare, am i right"

no

no it does not

my mind prefers, for its own ghastly reasons, to go full Weird Al on Repo the Genetic Opera

and so for the entire slow hour of the early morning THIS has been stuck in my damn head

---

Citrate comes in a little glass bottle 

little glass bottle?

little glass bottle 

and the little glass bottle pours somewhere inside your anatomy 

and your gut goes off in sharts 

then youre ready for

colonoscopy