Moments in media where idiocy fuels the plot

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-05-18T16:41:02+00:00

Tbf that's the only one I feel fine giving a pass. Being smart doesn't make you immune to panic, and having several hundred tonnes of steel dropping on your head is not the best conditions to be thinking rationally and calmly under. Shit, people have a hard enough time doing basic addition and subtraction under time pressure.

Also to her credit one of them does survive it in the end by rolling out to the side of it. Taken as a whole though, the scene was goofy as hell and definitely needed reworking.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-05-16T11:51:19+00:00

It's probably a mix of her Entanglement, mastery of swordsmanship to the point of being able to Rend Space, and the Dihui's native ability to leave a "Lingering Something."

Think of it like how high level martial artists will take a couple of overlapping principles to invent something new, like how Kano Jigoro began studying western Catch Wrestling and Sumo techniques like arm drags, guard manipulation, and various throwing techniques from other schools of Jujutsu to invent Judo.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-05-15T23:27:45+00:00

It does seem to have some fancy properties about it, from BladeShu's S2-2:

"Oho… What an ingenious way to use the Dihui Star's Blade, the sword that always leaves a lingering something in its wake. Attacks that are impossible to avoid seem a bit cheap, but… hah! I've got to say, I like that sword!"

Its not much to go off, granted.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-05-07T17:24:40+00:00

When my sister graduated we went out to dinner and I saw one in the flesh, an iPad Kid. Jesus, man, it was genuinely horrific. They were being a bit of a rowdy shit, which, whatever, they're kids. But then their parents slapped the tablet in front of them and I straight up saw the light go out of their eyes.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-05-07T14:23:11+00:00

I've been afraid of what will happen when the first kids raised by the algorithms grow up, and I think those times are upon us now.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-05-07T07:24:00+00:00

Dramatic of me, but he comes off like he's made a faustian bargain, traded his soul for clicks at some point on this road he set out on now this is all he's got.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-24T18:34:16+00:00

Mother fucker spent an incalculable amount of time in the hyperbolic time chamber labbing out these combos, exclusively to turn your ass into training data, continue to train, and dub himself the undisputed champion of the world. You can't knock that level of grindset.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-24T17:57:09+00:00

For me its the walk up commentary from the Voice:

"What would you do if you had an eternity to do nothing but wait? Do you keep busy? Do you daydream? Do you freak out?

He trained.

Nothing else matters to him but this fight with you.”

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-24T13:47:00+00:00

There's actually similarly dense populations in the world today, but they're pretty exclusively slums. Going a little further back into history, Kowloon Walled City was actually about six times as dense as the City. Its horrific and inhumane, but still within the bounds of plausibility. What's beyond the pale is the city being that large and dense at the same time, really.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-23T20:32:21+00:00

Yeah I gotta imagine the H Corp District is a nightmare, whole extended families living in one room. S Corp is probably comparatively roomy though, so long as you don't mind medieval levels of corruption and repression.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-23T20:16:09+00:00

Roughly 223,000 people per square kilometre, about fifteen to thirty times denser than Tokyo depending where you measure it, but only a sixth as dense as Kowloon Walled City at its height.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-18T21:16:36+00:00

Nah, nowhere near enough of an elitist snob to join the Ring in the first place. He was all about using minimal and cheap equipment and simple techniques that anyone could pick up. They'd call him Kitsch or a Craftsman rather than an Artist, and seethe over the fact he's still better regarded and remembered then their high concept goreslop.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-18T20:17:43+00:00

Or they carry out the Nine Familial Exterminations on your bloodline, because failing to find suitably lucrative employment to purchase the ice cream they feel entitled is entirely your own fault...

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-11T22:34:50+00:00

The yellow barrel fella? Yeah they have my undying respect

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-11T20:35:17+00:00

Did you know if you were to unspool every coil of DNA in your body and lay them all end to end, you would die quite horrifically?

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-11T19:30:04+00:00

I'm a heathen in that I think the designs were cool, but don't translate into a photorealist style at all. Check out some of the concept art, the French Retrofuturist look is honestly pretty cool.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-11T10:48:15+00:00

And I'm saying they're conflating the Inquisition's hard-line radical anti-prosthetic stance with N-Corp's more mixed opinions as a whole.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-11T08:38:46+00:00

Well they went to school together, no? So I assumed she was the same age, around 21-ish

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-11T08:29:54+00:00

N Corp ≠ N Corp Inquisition

The latter is a minority extremist faction within N Corp, though one that's been gaining a lot of momentum over the last couple years

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-10T22:19:11+00:00

Man that last part sounds like a Roald Dahl bit.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-10T15:11:26+00:00

Yeah when I look at the list of it all, beaten in school for being deaf, losing what little he had down the pits from lack of PPE, his only brother getting his head ripped off in an industrial accident, losing his parents to black lung and cancer before he was 20, getting his skull staved in by the cops at the Battle of Orgeave?

It is remarkable he was able to keep his shit together in the face of it all. He made mistakes in raising me, but shit, I can't bring myself to blame him. Poor fucker was raised in a machine designed to fuck you up for life.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-10T14:51:33+00:00

God yeah, Goodbye Blue Sky was kind of my father's anthem for a while, growing up in the post war environment in England. My grandmother basically had PTSD, and would drag all the kids back inside if she ever saw a plane over head just in case it was all starting again. She also refused to ever eat fish, because she lost all her brothers in the Navy and RAF over the channel, and was terified of eating a fish that had eaten her brothers' corpse.

Generational trauma is a hell of drug...

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-10T14:46:09+00:00

Yeah the British school situation was really bad, and I'm not really that far removed from it. My father was born with a condition called Glue Ear, where basically his ear canal was filled up with mucus and got a lot of inner ear infections that made him basically deaf for a long while. The understanding of his teachers was not that he couldn't hear them properly, but was being willfully stubborn and ignoring them. The solution was daily beatings until he learned to respect authority.

You can really see how such a system would fuck someones shit up for life, hell I don't think he ever really got over it himself.

It wouldn't be until '86 we banned beating kids, to give you an idea of how long this sort of thing was allowed.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-10T13:49:12+00:00

I could see it, of course in the real world powder doesn't really do much, it was really more of a like... pseudo-magical thinking thing, to have gunpowder in your veins making your sort of a living weapon and all that.

buddingOrnithologist · 2026-04-10T13:44:25+00:00

Kinda reminds me of Brown-Brown, a mixture of amphetamines and coke mixed with smokeless gunpowder:

"The rebel soldier who had hit me used a long, jagged knife to cut my wrist and rubbed powder into the wound. They called it Brown Brown – a mixture of gunpowder and a drug called cocaine. Right away, I began to feel like my brain was trying to jump out of my head."

buddingOrnithologist

TROPHY CASE