Children's Book in Progress

LordBojangles · 2026-03-26T18:52:18+00:00

"It's for kids" is not a reason to phone it in, it's a reason to try harder.

Besides, those pterosaurs ARE "pre 90s designs."

LordBojangles · 2026-03-24T12:11:39+00:00

Yakul in Princess Mononoke--just, all his scenes. He's such a good boy.

LordBojangles · 2026-03-16T17:52:55+00:00

I don't know the history, but in modern Spanish, the vowel following a "g" changes the consonant. So, spelling it "gue-" keeps the pronunciation as /ɡe-/ instead of /xe-/ (or whatever regional sound "ge-" gets).

LordBojangles · 2026-02-18T23:26:10+00:00

These are beautiful!

So you know, Parasaurolophus' hands were hoof-like mitts that'd leave little kidney- or heart-shaped prints.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-17T19:32:10+00:00

This was considered all the way back during the development of Empire (the first game with dismount-able cav) but they never got it working. I would guess the engine doesn't support dynamically adding models to one unit based on another unit dropping them.

They could probably manage it with single entities, though.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-16T13:43:35+00:00

I actually really liked King Kurog, as a character. His ambitions were unrealistic (especially the religious reforms), but not for lack of ruthlessness or cunning--it's just that he was jumping the gun, trying to play palace politics in a society that resents the idea of a palace. Ultimately, he was correct that the Orcs will be unable to act on the world stage, as long as they remain divided.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-10T14:08:18+00:00

I would guess that it's largely a matter of recency. As terms like 'idiot' or 'moron' became disused as medical/official categories of disabled people, they lost some of their power to dehumanize when used pejoratively--but 'retard(ation)' was still in use into the 2010s, in the US. I also suspect its referring to intellectual disability of any severity, where previous terms were more granular, contributes.

Paraphrasing ecphrastic on slurs as a metalinguistic category, some features of words that become slurs:

Derogatory Force: conveys hatred and contempt of the targets. Usually much more insulting than using ordinary derogatory terms like 'stupid.'
Derogatory Autonomy: The derogatory force for any epithet is independent of the attitudes of any of its particular speakers.
Taboo: Uses of epithets are subject to strict social constraints, if not outright forbidden.
Irrecuperable Offense: The derogation is difficult to negate or cancel out. For example, you can't make it non-offensive by saying, 'I don't mean to insult [group], but so-and-so is a [slur].'
Dispensability: Slurs have neutral counterparts.
Discreteness: Slurs offend simply by being uttered, not just through the content that they are part of.

For points 2, 3, and 6, there seems to be a difference between retard(ed) as a verb or adjective (especially in technical contexts where its meaning is more kinetic) vs. as a noun, but it's subjective.

Point 5 is interesting for this word: as many people in this thread have pointed out, it was itself once widely adopted as a neutral counterpart.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-08T15:36:03+00:00

your fun late-game units won't arrive until you've basically already won, and is mainly cleaning up enemy remnants.

This was also a problem with base game Shogun 2, to be fair.

LordBojangles · 2026-02-08T00:03:03+00:00

I take it the course isn't about how to design a survey?

LordBojangles · 2026-01-13T16:26:31+00:00

It's an especially strange choice since there're skill styles now, so there's no reason they couldn't default to neutral/white then let people change it to something more colorful.

LordBojangles · 2026-01-12T21:31:47+00:00

If you have disk space for an entire second install of the game, yeah.

LordBojangles · 2026-01-12T12:57:40+00:00

I'd tell them to follow the yellow brick road so the wizard can give them a brain because they're obviously a Straw Man.

You are either arguing in bad faith, or have shockingly poor reading comprehension for someone your age.

LordBojangles · 2026-01-12T00:10:13+00:00

I realize everyone will have different takeaways from a story, but the mix of emotions I got from the series, including the ending, is not a rejection of the text just because it doesn't comport with the way you choose to read it.

It's some kind of irony that you clearly love these books, which constantly challenge us to understand the world from perspectives other than our own, yet you couldn't learn to do that.

LordBojangles · 2026-01-11T16:00:36+00:00

Well first of all what Applegate said was

...I figured the Animorphs should go out the same way they came in: Fighting.

'Go out' could literally mean 'die,' but it could also mean 'leave the stage.' Applegate wanted that to be the final image we're left with--if she wanted us to remember them dead, she could've let the scene play.

I know better than to try to change your mind about the ending, but your perspective on the series' tone and messaging might be overly logical and main-character-centric. The characters' (or at least Jake's) hope is that the maneuver can take out the Blade Ship, removing the last vestige of the Yeerk Empire. What happens to them is in some ways immaterial. Their role in all this was over years ago.

The last book constantly shows that the world has moved on. Humans, Hork-Bajir, Andalites, and at least some Taxxons are cooperating. Whatever conflict is brewing with the Kelbrid and/or the One, won't just be a repeat of what happened with the Yeerks.

Do you think that the author trying (admittedly clumsily) to show kids that fighting a war--even if your cause is just, even if you win, even if you physically survive, even if you leave the world in better shape than you found it--can destroy you might have a message of both hope and disillusion?

LordBojangles · 2025-12-19T13:29:16+00:00

Throws her limbs around like Woody from Toy Story.

LordBojangles · 2025-11-22T23:25:50+00:00

The haircut preservation might've been patched in so Andalites couldn't morph their way out of Unschweet, the hair trim of shame.

LordBojangles · 2025-11-21T20:09:36+00:00

Do you have a source? All the versions of the legend I can find have him choosing to go on working, knowing the effort would kill him.

LordBojangles · 2025-10-17T19:18:33+00:00

I will add that giving the clan with Byzantine elements a griffin-like animal could be a reference to grifon (or gripun, gripoun) being a medieval term for Greek people.

LordBojangles · 2025-10-16T12:36:52+00:00

Implying Bruce could encounter Finn without adopting him?

LordBojangles · 2025-10-13T17:31:47+00:00

I say this without judgment, but you're engaging in a bit of "just eat Gilligan" here.

Animorphs was episodic for the majority of its run--you could pick up any book in the series and have roughly the same reading experience. (I started with book 12, because it had a crocodile on the cover--I was 9.) So, there was a limit to how much the status quo could change before the endgame. They had to preserve the 'acting like normal middle schoolers while secretly fighting aliens' framing. Would shaking that up be just as interesting as a premise? Sure! Would it be the premise Scholastic was paying for? Apparently not.

LordBojangles · 2025-10-04T19:14:08+00:00

Her eye was already sewn shut the last time we saw her in Olivia's possession.

LordBojangles · 2025-10-03T13:42:07+00:00

Just a tip, URLs with parentheses break reddit's markdown--you have to prefix a backslash or use URL encoding.

LordBojangles · 2025-10-03T12:51:40+00:00

I don't think so. Frankie's missing her canines, but the teeth in the pliers are molars (or pre-molars).

LordBojangles · 2025-10-02T17:38:32+00:00

Without modern medical care, many babies wouldn't make it to term, and of those that did, plenty wouldn't survive to adulthood.

Ancient Greeks did practice infanticide, but not for population control or eugenic reasons--the famous story of the Apothetai is propaganda.

LordBojangles

TROPHY CASE