#poor planning

My first exposure to TMNT was the 2003 series, which aired on TV. Due to my inability to navigate cable, I only saw sporadic clips and action scenes, but what I saw really interesting me.

My second exposure was the 2012 series. This was the first TMNT show where I watched the pilot and decided to watch the series in order.

It was a decent show, but after a rewatch, there were some things that bothered me, like:

April O’Neil (she was poorly written as I'll touch on down below)

Donnie x April x Casey love triangle

Mikey and Donnie not getting serious focus/growth compared to their brothers

Karai's character arc (or lack thereof)

The poorly written humor that feels a bit juvenile at times

The shipping in general (RaMona is the only good one)

The animation in certain places (Donnie retracting his limbs into his shell seems wrong, and the human mouth animations feel a bit putty-like)

Now, I can forgive animation and poor humor (it was the 2010s), but I cannot forgive poor writing.

It's not something that you would notice as a kid, but it becomes more apparent as you keep watching (and especially during a rewatch) that this show was not written cohesively.

The best analogy I can make about the viewer’s experience is this: Twelve people were baking a cake, and at first, everything seemed fine. They knew which ingredients to use, how much of each ingredient, and how to incorporate them into the mixing bowl.

But as time went on, there were arguments, and each baker tried to throw their chosen ingredients in the mixing bowl to overpower the others’. Then, they got notified that the bakery was about to open, so they baked the batter and sold the cake.

And it’s a good cake, many people love it on their first try, but as you keep eating, you bite down on bits and pieces that don’t taste right. You spit them out and examine them. You first throw them away and continue eating, but you keep finding them.

This is most obvious with April O'Neil. It feels like for every three minutes of April per episode, she was being bounced around between five separate writers.

Is she into Donnie or Casey? Is she creeped out by them and just wants to be alone? Is she a whiny brat who endangers the group with her inability to read bad situations or is she a competent fighter with good control over her powers? Is she focused on saving her dad or trying to live a normal life? Does she have good control over her powers or is she flying blind? Is she part of the family or just the resident human acquaintance that eats their food and takes up their living space?

I can't even give you a clear "I love/hate 2012!April" because I know nothing about her except "She was poorly written", and that's not something I can blame a fictional character for. That is the fault of the creator/writer.

Things are coming along nicely by my estimation. Not as neat as most people’s garden but I like the irregularities. I let certainly too many volunteers have their way and I’m too weak willed to thin aggressively enough.

I didn’t realize that peas don’t like alliums. Next year I’ll make sure to place them away from the leeks. And of course I hardly used any leeks this year before they started developing blossom heads. But I really don’t mind because the bees go absolutely nuts for them.

As you can see the potato volunteers mostly get their way. I was going to plant a full row of brussel sprouts here but by the time the starts were ready I had already forsaken the space to the potato bullies.

This took way longer than needed, I just kept half-heartedly pecking at this assignment.

One up: Sometimes just saying screw it I’m done is the accomplishment.

One improve: did a really poor job of color planning and mixing. Never had enough color mixed, never got into the grove of painting. This lesson was forced.

There are idiotic conspiracy theories being circulated about the Astroworld disaster in Houston. They are pure bullshit.

No, there is not any evidence that somebody was running around injecting people with a syringe.

[T]he needle-prick story should never have been reported as news. In addition to a lack of evidence—there was no toxicology report verifying the claim—it just doesn’t make basic sense. I’ve been a journalist on the drug beat for several years, and I’ve never talked to a drug user who’s eager to give their drugs away for free to people who don’t want it. It also takes time and concentration to dilute drugs and load them in a syringe, a task that could be quite difficult to do in a dark and crowded space like Astroworld. Then, there’s the matter of actually injecting a moving target square in the neck, unless maybe the assailant is Showtime’s Dexter. In reality, it’s incredibly difficult to inject someone in the neck, especially “stealthily,” said Dr. Ryan Marino, who specializes in addiction and overdose.

And the Satanic influence story sounds like a Christian fundamentalist fever dream which recurs whenever some music crops up which far right religious fanatics really don’t like.

It’s understandable to reach for a clear cause and source of blame in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy; on TikTok, conspiracy theorists suggested that the concert was some kind of satanic ritual led by Scott. 

Blaming problems on people who are allegedly in thrall to Satan is part of the playbook of loony Christian fanatics.

In fact, nine people were killed because of poor planning, poor security, and poor crowd control.

Live Nation, the organizer, and Travis Scott both look irresponsible. The performance continued over half an hour after officials declared a mass casualty event.

That itself is so wrong. But what is worse is that there were simply too many people crowded together in too small a space without proper crowd management.

Crowd crush, otherwise known as “crowd surge,” is a horrifying phenomenon that occurs when people are jammed so tight together that they can’t breathe, leading to injury and possible death by compressive asphyxia. In crowd crush, people don’t need to be in an altered state of mind to trample other people to death (not that drugs cause one to do that, anyway). It’s happened before: A gruesome case of crowd crush at Hillsborough stadium in 1989 killed 97 people. “Crowd crush is not a very intuitive thing,” said Claire Zagorski, a paramedic and addiction researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “When I started paramedic school, I didn’t understand how trampling was deadly. But it’s completely plausible that young, perfectly healthy people could die from it.”

Crowd crush is nothing new, nobody can say this was totally unforeseen. It is a phenomenon which has been well known for at least 2,200 years.

At the Battle of Cannae (216 BC), the Carthaginian general Hannibal encircled most of a Roman army and kept advancing until the Romans were so compressed that many were asphyxiated. (Though ironically, many of those encircled Romans tried to commit suicide by asphyxiation.)

Just to illustrate: A scene from S06E09 of Game of Thrones was directly inspired by Cannae.

If Sansa and Littlefinger hadn't come to the rescue, Jon Snow and his allies would have ended up like those Romans at Cannae.

Astroworld was clearly a preventable tragedy. Profit was placed above safety. 

Simon:  Haha--We've captured the big human!  Now, what are we gonna do with him?