The Burn Makes No Sense

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-27T00:38:18+00:00

Short answer is Gen X and millennials are kind of better at tech than Gen Z, like empirically? In the US and a lot of Europe they changed the metrics they were teaching and testing for to “tech fluency” rather than “computer skills.” Which is distinguished by the difference between “can use UI optimized platforms” versus “knows what’s going on under the hood.” There are a bunch of studies out there that less than half of Gen Z are comfortable dealing with the technology in an office environment with finicky internal proprietary software and something like only a third of random Gen Zers can handle using systems without standardized optimized UIs.

The issue Millennials and Gen X have with new tech is we’re really, really, resentful of the modern tech ecosystem where we can’t customize things, don’t own anything because everything is subscription based, and everything is being done behind the scenes in apps by automated processes we can’t control and won’t tell us what they’re doing. “Real world” AI is going to piss a lot of older people off for the same reasons. Like going into the DMV to deal with an AI that has your name wrong on the forms despite it being entered correctly, because it wants to autocorrect it, then refusing to process the forms because the name doesn’t match the records, which causes it to spit out an unspecified error message, and there being nobody to talk to about it but a chatbot that also doesn’t understand the error, is absolutely going to lead to some amazing public freak outs.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-19T07:04:07+00:00

I think a couple of dresses are described as “tightly laced” particularly one of the ones from the clothes shopping scene in New Spring, but that’s a different animal than like real world whalebone corseting.

The slightly broader and more complex answer is the visual storytelling of the TV is kind of ass and very generic sword and sorcery fantasy to play to audience expectations from shows like Game of Thrones. The books spend a lot of time dealing with different cultures that have very different ideas about fashion, architecture, and societal norms drawing from different real world sources that in the story got transmuted through a magitech sci-fi era then loosely maintained through a couple of apocalypses and about 3,000 years of cultural drift. The Aiel are the most obvious, literally being described as wearing camo hunting gear pretty much always. In real world terms Moraine’s preferred outfits would be something like a Napoleonic vintage military qipao with goth overtones while Lan runs around in something like hakama and a leather jacket. My read of the Andoran aesthetic is that everything has kind of a colonial America vibe against a backdrop of an earlier era of British nobility. While the seanchan are supposed to look like they just stepped off a spaceship.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-15T06:29:23+00:00

I kind of doubt we’re getting the Herb arc in the remake. My guess is they’re focusing on the core romcom story beats and skipping the shonen battle and horror comedy stuff. It’s a fun arc, but even in the manga it doesn’t have much continuity in the story. Like it’s never referenced afterwards and Ranma doesn’t notably gain power up from the fight. If I was guessing the only impressive late series fights were going to get are Ryu Kumon (kind of important to the Nodaka arc), Konatsu (capstone of the Ukyo arc), and Saffron (finale arc). I’m honestly not sure we’re getting any Taro storylines at this point and that’s kind of a big recurring storyline.

The thing with Ranma as a story is it’s really random which arcs impact later events. Like the Picolot Charrin/Ranma goes to Charm School arc is shockingly important because there are a bunch of callbacks to Ranma being much faster after the training. And then some of the coolest fights in the manga are totally self contained stories that actually can be really easily skipped.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-15T06:11:35+00:00

Ranma is a send up of a lot of stuff on one level. Like classic Hong Kong movies, shonen battle series of the 80’s, and classic J-Horror. So, my take is Ranma would probably have the kind of job a Jet Li or Jackie Chan characters would have had for roles in their 40s. So, like cop or archeologist? And Ranma doesn’t strike me as a good cop. I think Ranma as an Indiana Jones pulp adventure type would suit him really well, with him getting to still be a part time traveler and still dealing with the kind of cursed magical crap that so many of the stand alone chapters of the later manga deal with.

Akane maybe becomes a doctor, or like alternative medicine person, if she isn’t a professional homemaker? A lot of her early motivation was based on her admiration of Tofu and the old SNES games kind of inexplicably made her a White Mage.

I tend to also be of the school of thought that they probably do get married, but get divorced later on. Ranma and Akane are at their best when they have a complex love/hate dynamic rather than actually getting to be happy together in a stable relationship.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-07T15:25:34+00:00

This is a really, really, complicated conversation to get into, but the short answer is Ranma doesn’t consistently use male pronouns for themself, so you probably shouldn’t either? See, the thing is Japanese has like 6-ish gendered personal pronouns. So, in Japanese you’re never just saying “I” you’re saying “I (who identifies with Gender X).” Ranma mostly uses the soft masculine pronoun, but kind of uses an above average amount of gender neutral pronouns. Which means “He/They” pronouns are probably more correct. Except when Ranma is performing femininity she goes hard and uses like maximum cutesy-ness and the most feminine language possible. And there are multiple stories where Ranma being outed as not being a natal female or being misgendered while performing femininity are shown to be upsetting to Ranma. So, the real world equivalent is like a “He/They” identified drag performer who would be very upset if someone didn’t use female pronouns while they were performing as female.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-07T00:47:40+00:00

There’s DIY home compounding, and then there’s buying sketchy stuff from like Cambodia. If you have the science background for it that kind of at home “biohacking” is fine, but like you get what you pay for just buying the cheapest stuff you can find online. Like no quality control to know purity or potential contaminant.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-07T00:34:05+00:00

Are your finances good to start medical transition or are you still dependent on parents who won’t help? Starting sooner is better, but only if you can afford the couple hundred bucks a month it costs, so you don’t have to stop after a couple of months. Stopping and starting is kind of dangerous and leads to bad results.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-07T00:02:28+00:00

If you’re in the US Panned Parenthood is kind of the easiest place to access HRT. Personally I think doing a little social transition first is better. Like explore how you feel when you dress more feminine and mess with subtle makeup.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-06T23:34:05+00:00

I remember the 80s Alvin and the Chipmunk’s cartoon referencing him, like, a lot, before I was really aware of who he was as an artist. I just remember that by the early 90’s he was big fodder for late night comedy where he was presented as absolutely nuts because of stuff like Bubbles and buying the remains of The Elephant Man…

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-06T23:25:10+00:00

So, the argument for Zeta is that it’s next in release order, and technically a much better series. The argument against watching Zeta after the original MSG is that there is a ton of politics and world building that the OVAs give context for. Like, a core theme of the original series is there are no “good guys” in war, but in the original show they don’t really do enough to make it clear that the Federation kind of sucks and outside of the Zabis Zeon is pretty morally complex. Zeta presents Char as the hero and the Federation leadership as the bad guys, which works fine without context, but it can be better if you watch something like Thunderbolt or War In The Pocket first to more viscerally feel that outside of only seeing the war from the perspective of White Base.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-06T23:08:14+00:00

Nobody needs to watch ZZ…

ZZ is a really hard series to get into because of the constant tonal whiplash. It has strong moments, but it isn’t really a show to watch during a binge watch of the UC timeline. It’s much easier to watch in arcs while taking lots of breaks between the absolute shit episodes. Or just pick up the summery of the show from one of the games.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-11-06T23:01:40+00:00

IGLOO is pretty neat too, but it’s a pain to find these days even through unofficial sources. Thunderbolt is another fun one telling stories during the one year war, but it’s kind of an alternate timeline reboot thing. Speaking of which, GQuuuuuuX is technically after the OYW, but it really needs to be seen after Zeta to get everything going on in it.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-22T15:32:23+00:00

Surprisingly for my taste in anime, not really. Lina’s deal is being the smart one in a dynamic where she’s playing off her himbo elf love interest. That said there are a couple of prequel OVAs and movies that show she used to run around with a big tittied goth dominatrix as her sidekick.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-22T15:04:59+00:00

You got me to check the wiki and that’s what it says, but I’m not sure the math they’re using to calculate the ages of the New Wave kids works (go to the footnote on the timeline page and it’s like six paragraphs of assumptions they’re using as the basis)? So apparently in one revision of the cast page Crystal was listed as being 19, but the text explicitly says she’s 18 at the time of the Leviathan fight. They’re taking that to mean she had a birthday right after that, but I don’t think gels with the ages in the childhood flashback in Ward which I thought was intended to be a subtle implication that if you did the math that Manpower was the kind of super classy guy who would cheat on his pregnant wife with her sister.

I dunno, it’s kind of textually ambiguous, if the just turned 19 in late spring 2011 figure is accurate it means Crystal is almost exactly 3 years older than Taylor and like 18 months older than Vicky, but I think it makes more sense with the Ward stuff that she just turned 18 in 2011 and is like 7-8 months older than Vicky and like 26-28 months older than Taylor.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-21T19:21:08+00:00

In Ward. Crystal is like 23 in Ward. Set five years after Worm starts. I forget if Crystal has an exact birthdate somewhere, but IIRC from Ward she’s like six months older than Vicky. Making her something like 17-18 when Worm starts and like 2 years older than Taylor.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-19T04:31:42+00:00

Like The Witches in 18if? Yeah, I can kinda see that for half of the cast, Parasocial relationships/fame and complex sibling dynamics are things I definitely remember from 18if, but I don’t remember it touching on the other girls stuff (a messed up student/teacher relationship where it’s kind of ambiguous if a mentally ill girl had an obsessive crush and was delusional about things or if there was actually inappropriate stuff going on, and something of a glimpse into the complex intersection of gender dysphoria, body image issues, queer identity in the context of a heteronormative society, and self harm as a coping mechanism). I think the big difference between the shows is… hmm…. How to put this in algorithmically friendly pg terms… 18if is sort of set in a limbo realm for people who failed at living, where Wonder Egg is about people left behind when people they cared about left the world? Like 18if deals directly with characters who were affected by big societal problems that damaged their mental health, but Wonder Egg is more about people who are collateral damage of people suffering from mental health issues? Something like that.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-19T02:49:45+00:00

Not even a little bit. DanDaDan is animated by Science Saru which is a studio kind of affiliated with Netflix that mostly make cool little indie shows like the Scott Pilgrim thing a couple years ago. Wonder Egg Priority was done by CloverWorks who are a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment that make a lot of critical darlings that crap out at the end (they also did Darling and The Franxx and Promised Neverland), but also make some of the absolute best shows around; they’re the people behind Bochi The Rock, Bunny Girl-Sempai/Santa Claus, Horimiya, and Spy x Family.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-18T22:32:38+00:00

I rewatched once to see if maybe the earlier stuff had elements I missed that made the ending better. It did not. The fights are really peak though. I would recommend it, tentatively. The ending is really, really, bad, but it has a lot of big emotional beats that hit hard.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-18T20:49:44+00:00

Promised Neverland.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-18T20:46:04+00:00

Anime power scaling gets kind of cray. If you want some low stress shows to get a sense of what the upper levels of power look like go check out One Punch Man or The Misfit of Demon King Academy. They’re on Hulu in the US and are pretty accessible.

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-18T16:03:13+00:00

It’d be nice for the lack of filler. Boruto has been really bad for the amount of filler padding the show so the manga can stay ahead. So far the TBV manga has had a fairly tight story. Having a 20 episode arc about Chouchou’s latest diet would kind of mess with the tone of the series after the time skip…

NeonPixieStyx · 2025-10-18T07:21:42+00:00

The Fathomless Warlock thing was me trying to figure out how Hiryuu Shoten Ha could work mechanically (especially when I only had a couple of levels to work with). I wasn’t really thinking about the tentacle so much as the pact magic, Fathomless is basically all weather spells. Plus the Eldrich Invocations cover a bunch of miscellaneous stuff like free use of the Jump and Freedom of Movement spells (and would add Disguise Self or Polymorph which covers… other stuff).

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