||: Tweet tweet motherfucker. :||

comic that appeared to me as I was waking up from a dream

what do you mean theres already pokemon that spell the alphabet

ditto version

The rise of overly dark Magical Girl shows, which contain suffering for no other purpose than to display said suffering, largely stems from a complete misunderstanding of what Madoka was, and what made it great.

Madoka spends two and a half episodes setting up a happy, cheerful, Magical Girl show, and then spends eight and a half episodes rejecting that premise, showing that hope only leads to despair, that a wish will lead to a curse, that things cannot fundamentally improve, and that trying to make things better will only bring suffering upon yourself and others. This is what derivative "tragical girl" shows were about; the suffering of young women for its own sake, as if that was the point of Madoka, as if the suffering was the entire point.

The last episode, however, has Madoka herself rejecting the show's entire premise. She's told hope leads to despair, and exclaims "If someone says it's wrong to have hope, I will tell them they're wrong every single time.". She's told that the very foundation of the universe leads to suffering being inherent, constant, and that the only thing one can do is to endure said suffering as long as one can bear, before falling to despair and inflicting the suffering one has experienced unto others; she's told that any wish will become a curse, yet ends the show saying "All those Magical Girls who held onto their hopes and fought against witches, I don't want to see them cry—I want them to stay smiling until the end. If any rule or law stands in my way, I will destroy it. I will rewrite it. That is my wish, that is my prayer.""

Walpurgisnacht had been set up as the most terrible witch to ever exist up until that point, and the viewer had been led to believe they'd fight to the death against it, and inevitably lose—as a Magical Girl seemingly always does in the Madoka universe. Madoka does not fight her, Madoka shows compassion, simply stating "It's okay. It's okay now, you don't have to hate anyone anymore, you don't have to curse anyone anymore. I'll go back, before you took that form, and shoulder that burden for you". There was no fight, and Madoka simply took on her despair, as she took on everyone else's, allowing them to once again have hope.

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:

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.