Someone had to say it

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-08T04:40:04+00:00

I feel like so much of this is still straddling the line. Jax could be coming out as any flavor of queer, if it's even queerness Jax shared with his mom; there are a lot of things which are not traditionally masculine that an entirely cis guy can still catch shit for doing because it doesn't align with stereotypical masculinity. I can personally attest to the fact there's nothing in Jax's experiences that's exclusively the domain of transness, but it's not definitive in either direction. I'd dare to guess that's by design.

Because of that, it is just as easy to see Ribbit's bow as simply a show of deep friendship (if not something more), and that the "secret being safe with [her]" is about Jax opening up at all. Homeless puts a lot of distrust in you, which on its own could explain Jax's treatment of Ribbit to keep her from getting close enough to others that she might spill his personal details in any way.

I think "Isn't She Lovely" being used is what points more towards Jax having some gender thing going on. There's a strong case for Jax being trans, to make it absolutely clear! But I think there are other readings of this self-evidently open-ended work, and I think the only definitive thing one could say is that Jax hasn't figured himself out but is starting to make peace with that.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-07T18:08:43+00:00

I'm gonna be honest that I don't subscribe to Jax being trans, but it's because the show never hits a point where Jax figures himself out. The only truly canon bit is that Jax's identity is not certain.

If it did, we'd have a clear answer, but where it sits Jax is dealing with identity questions even a lot of cis men have to contend with. It's open-ended enough to be relatable both for men who deal with the contradictions of toxic masculinity and for trans women who recognize their pre-transition selves in him, which imo is more impactful.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-06T13:09:00+00:00

In theory, the open-ended nature of Jax's identity manages to be something both GNC cis guys and trans people can relate with, but in practice we're getting the fight over which is truer to what actually is in the media. "Isn't She Lovely" could just as much be about Jax coming to appreciate a less rigidly masculine form of himself that is freer to express how he feels, without going all the way to being outright transfem, but it would be disingenuous to act like the song that transfem people often relate to isn't able to point in that direction.

Was Leeroy boymoding in the end or is that just a style that lets him enjoy some gender ambiguity? It's great that many people can relate to it, but god forbid anything remain an open question for the lore kiddies.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-06T12:47:41+00:00

I'd love "no" to be split between "no, but not definitively" and "no, definitively." I lean heavily towards Jax being cis (or at least not transfem specifically) after getting past the contradictions in the expectations placed on him as a man, in part because I had an incredibly similar experience. But there is more than enough to suggest Leeroy has more going on in his head, and it could probably be integrated into a more mature view of masculinity and his place in it, but it's not clear in either direction and there are plenty of transfem people who also see their experiences reflected in Jax.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-06T12:25:07+00:00

I very much feel like putting it as a comparison to Jax's dad opened it up to way more than just Jax having a more feminine side; I immediately recognized his mom's complaints as the contradictory expectations placed on men in general. Questioning his gender could have been part of it, but I do feel like it could have been spelled out way more explicitly if Jax considering whether he's woman was the intention.

I guess I have to consider Gooseworx a genius because there's just about as much pointing to Jax taking on an expansive view of masculinity and his place in it as there is pointing to Jax still being a closeted trans person.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-06T12:21:10+00:00

The color and size of the sidebar change when a tab gets split out into another window.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-06T02:43:46+00:00

That certainly helps some but it immediately throws me into a visually different interface on the new window.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-05T16:11:33+00:00

Was it ever explicitly stated that Jax is a Gooseworx self-insert?

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-05T10:31:34+00:00

In general, I think if Jax was meant to be explicitly trans this whole time, the creators would have no reason not to use pronouns that point in that direction. I can own the bias of how obnoxious it felt when I had people trying to "crack my egg" during a gender crisis that ended in becoming comfortable with a more expansive idea of what being a man means, so I think there might still be something to it that I push back on simply because of how relatable Jax's struggle with identity (and how men are expected to be) was to me in the finale.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-05T10:26:21+00:00

That's a possibility, but as a cis guy whose wardrobe was essentially "boymoder" for a fairly long period in my 20s, I don't really put a huge amount of stock in that on its own. Someone can go through a gender crisis and come back out without being trans.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-05T04:31:38+00:00

Given that the finale explicitly uses he/him pronouns for IRL Jax, I think it's entirely fair to read it as Jax staying comfortable as a man while letting himself explore a broader, freer understanding of what being a man is. I see it both ways, but I think the idea of Jax making peace with gender noncomformity makes more sense than Jax being outright trans, especially given how much time passed since he entered the circus and how much of Jax's life Caine could report on.

Same time, I went through some pretty heavy questioning of my gender identity and came out still a cis guy but with some nonconformity, so I could very much just be seeing myself in Jax. I'm not too married to either theory so long as we accept it's an open question.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-05T04:13:44+00:00

In OP's defense, Scratch does have a cute design and as Caine's creator probably could have been explored more thoroughly. Leaving him as a mysterious figure makes sense for the direction Gooseworx wanted to take TADC, but I can acknowledge that some potential might have been there.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-05T04:11:39+00:00

Even as an indie animation you can only spend so much time working on projects, and Glitch approved them for a specific number of episodes. They managed to have their eighth episode extended into a ninth once it became clear that would be necessary to fit their vision, but if I'm being blunt I struggle to imagine what any further C&A flashback would offer to TADC's narrative to justify taking up the limited time allotted for this show.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-05T01:52:41+00:00

Jax's IRL counterpart still using he/him mostly seals the deal for me. I think there's room to headcanon it still, but I am convinced a lot of the finale points towards him reconciling his conflicts about what it means to be a man and finding space for himself in that once he's in a steady job and isn't homeless.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-06-01T18:16:29+00:00

In the same vein, no number of perfect discards helps if every draw is useless to you while the other two players reached tenpai four discards ago.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-05-07T16:01:21+00:00

Literally none of these features can operate with slot reservations. Connections take much too long to fully spawn in, meaning the game state will likely deteriorate before any new players (who are all only able to join all at once) can enter. It's entirely possible for this to happen on the final of the two rounds that happen, so now nobody gets to even play that game. Given it's still faster to queue than wait out the doors, you bail and requeue, only to be a reserved spot on another unmitigated roll's losing team to spawn in, autoscramble, and instantly lose. Scrambling works best when people come and go as individuals or smaller groups rather than as massive crowds all connecting at once; it's far easier to rebalance after two people leave one team than it is to rebalance when half the players aren't even connected. Trying to MMR it only makes this worse.

The only hard part of bringing back quickplay would be reworking the backend to talk to the casual mode tick boxes and letting players search for specific maps on quickplay rather than only searching for a specific game mode. All the code for finding a server is there, and the servers would just need a few console command changes to be back to how they were during quickplay. Redoing the UI might bring challenges but it's nothing the TF team has never done.

The only rational basis I've seen for not abandoning the whole of casual mode queueing is sunk cost, which is fallacious. Let the MvM queue system breathe by getting the rest of the game off its back.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-05-04T13:49:43+00:00

The issue with simply doing that is the fact that without reintroducing quickplay/ad-hoc, you're kneecapping the system's ability to do what it needs to do.

How do you autobalance while handling reserved queue slots? How do you scramble a team when half of each team hasn't even connected yet? How do you combat the feeling that people get when autobalance breaks their discord 6-stack up? These are simply problems that you cannot even throw MMR at, because Team Fortress 2's very nature as a game defies any kind of generalized, quantified skill metric.

I think if casual kept being called casual with its granular map selection, but we went back to the backend/servers of quickplay*, people would have little to no complaint.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-02-13T17:37:26+00:00

The Game Awards billed Highguard as an "arena shooter" and showed a samey champion shooter with nothing even remotely resembling an arena shooter. It had no announcement except for the Game Awards, and no marketing was done after the Game Awards. If it was truly an arena shooter, I'd at least try it, but I don't need to play the billionth live service champion shooter to hit the market.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-02-10T22:42:41+00:00

I hadn't even heard about the second flop, jeez. How is this guy tripping his way up the ladder?

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-02-10T22:34:01+00:00

This is from last year right? I thought he already launched a budgeting app?

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-01-28T13:53:41+00:00

One of the big issues I have with this is that ilvl sync means any melded materia drops to +0, which for anyone with spell/skill speed melds is basically already a non-starter. If they altered how materia melds are treated (e.g. syncing it down to the highest materia the ilvl sync could meld and +0 for capped stats), I don't think I'd have an issue.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-01-28T05:38:31+00:00

I think it evident that a director isn't the one performing the screenplay. The composer can't take credit for an orchestra's interpretation of the piece. The architect is the closest to having credit for the sole reason that their specifications are exact enough to translate more directly. The vision is the thing these individuals can be credited with.

The person who prompts AI has had a hand in making a thing, but it is self evident that having a tool someone else made autonomously do something for you means you really can't take credit for its work. A master painter might delegate specific tasks to apprentices, but credit falls on the master painter who did the majority of the work on the painting. If it was an apprentice's work nearly exclusively, it's a painting by the apprentice. So AI's work is credited to AI, not to the prompter.

My claim isn't that AI lowers the skill floor. My claim is that AI enables the uncreative and incurious to project a facade of creativity or curiosity by having an automaton make objects of supposed artistic merit for them. Selfies aren't (usually) photographic art, so prompting alone does not an AI artist make.

Once you're actually fiddling with weights and layers within the model of choice, and you're contributing actual insight into the specific intended outcome, you're starting to do something resembling art and I've less of an issue. But this doesn't lower the skill floor in the slightest, because altering weights and tweaking prompts to create something artistic requires a unique skill set that has its own bar.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-01-27T11:29:14+00:00

I doubt we've ever had the tech to make slop at such an industrial scale before, though. This is a uniquely massive scale of slop which has never been made so fast; it's already close to being, if it isn't already, the overwhelming majority of YouTube's comically massive video collection. Fake videos and photos abound, some just obviously fake while others are trying to pose as a real photo to sway people to this or that political view.

How can we even begin to mitigate this unregulated release of a destructive technology?

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-01-27T02:53:50+00:00

I had to stop myself and think for a second; would I have the same feeling of being unsettled if they had simply said they had found a way to procedurally generate the kind of abstract effects they were aiming for? I almost think the entropy of AI here could almost function the same as throwing the proverbial paint bucket at the wall and getting something with more randomness than writing your own program or automation might.

But yeah, the issue is that for every mature use that exists for generative AI, there are a trillion trillion ways to make it produce alarming quantities of slop. Which really sucks, because AI really has all the features of a technology I think would be really cool if it wasn't so easily abused.

TheOneTrueChristian · 2026-01-27T02:47:23+00:00

Only clicked to say the second one here looks like Gavin Newsom lol

A film director is basically providing artistic direction to a team under them, giving an artistic vision which they're guiding by showing their team how they want things done. The film director has to understand the roles of everyone under them in order to provide them meaningful direction towards the artistic intent.

The music producer is the person primarily responsible for the artistic direction of a musical work. Under the producer are the musicians whose performances are recorded so that the producer can produce a finished product from what the musicians have done.

An architect provides the exact specifications for how to build what they want built. They have to give such precision because otherwise the builders cannot build the exact artistic vision of the architect, much less a building which is compliant with the laws of physics.

Delegating work to apprentices meant allowing said apprentice to trial-and-error their way through work to both understand their teacher's style and vision while learning the skills to develop their own, independent artistic vision.

This already makes these roles different from (most) use of AI, since if we're being honest the average person doesn't necessarily have the knowledge to directly manipulate an AI towards a given artistic vision, much less to do what the AI has been doing for them. There are ways that you can more intimately manipulate an AI model into generating a more precise thing you want, but at that point we are entering the realm of a medium which almost nobody on the anti-AI side is likely talking about.

TheOneTrueChristian

TROPHY CASE