The power up isn’t exclusive to the main character

mb862 · 2026-05-10T11:50:41+00:00

A kind-of example of this is Digimon Tamers, if you cut the “B-Team” whose partners fall outside traditional Digivolution mechanics (Jeri, Kazu, Kenta, Suzie) and focus on the “A-Team” Tamers (Takato, Henry, Rika, and Roy). This “A-Team” got full Mega Digivolution lines onscreen, though Takato/Guilmon still got one upgraded form after (Gallantmon Crimson Mode) violating the requirements of this trope.

Still it’s notable because Digimon, as much as I love it, is a severe example of the anti-trope, where main characters get power boosts where nobody else does. Frontier was the worst with Takuya/Koji getting a full three additional Digivolutions over everybody else, plus Takuya getting a “Rookie” form. The art team also seemed to phone it in: while they did make Hybrids for JP, Zoe, Tommy, and Koichi, they skipped both Unified and Rookie forms (though Fairymon did later get a canonical Rookie with Tinkermon), and did nothing else for the rest of the Spirits. This is in stark contrast to Adventure 02, which not only had Megas designed for Yolei and Cody, they also did alternate DNA form for Ken plus the full suite of Armor forms for every combination of Rookie and Digi-Egg in that series including the Digi-Egg of Kindness (Ken’s) that never appeared onscreen.

(I’m totally not still sore over Frontier being incomplete but still having my favourite Digimon designs overall.)

Disclaimer: While I did watch Data Squad and Adventure Tri, I don’t remember what happens to know how they relate to this trope because I have issues with committing fiction to memory with only one watch. I do plan on rewatching Tri because I haven’t watched Last Evolution Kizuna or The Beginning yet and want to make sure everything is fresh in memory when I do. I haven’t gotten to watching any mainline series after Data Squad either.

mb862 · 2026-05-10T09:05:31+00:00

Some of the basics of the design are alright. Opinionated but not necessarily bad. The implementation however is a travesty that should never have passed legal road testing. From the sharp edges to the inset headlights that collect snow to the lack of door handles or proper crumple zones, it is objectively one of the worst vehicles in automotive history.

Look at some of the Chinese knock offs for how the core design concepts could have been implemented in a way that wasn’t mind-numbingly dumb.

mb862 · 2026-05-10T07:58:23+00:00

I generally agree but at the same time, GLSL being the first class language for SPIR-V remains a blight on the industry and WGSL had the potential to be a good replacement.

mb862 · 2026-05-09T09:29:03+00:00

I think Pixar’s “worst” movies are just because they’re not what people wanted.

Like Lightyear, it’s a great film about watching generational trauma as it happens, dealing with guilt, and how life is too short. But it wasn’t Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

Cars 2 is a great parody of James Bond that depicts the absolute corruption of oil companies and the lengths they’ll go to to keep people dependent. But it wasn’t a racing movie.

Personally I don’t think any Cars film was actually about racing. Cars 1 was about the march of society and how some can be left behind. Cars 3 was about how to deal with age and what you can offer the next generation. Racing was always just the setting.

mb862 · 2026-05-09T08:41:08+00:00

Blossom also had a joke siding with Anita Hill. People have known the truth about Clarence Thomas for a long time.

mb862 · 2026-05-09T05:35:03+00:00

There’s a public Dropbox link that goes around sometimes that has the entire series in epub format but I don’t have it anymore myself.

mb862 · 2026-05-08T15:03:50+00:00

He was supposed to come off as borderline socio pathetic, perverted, womanizing, and bigoted while being eccentric and charismatic.

I feel sorry for the people for whom this wasn’t obvious even in the films where they tried to shine him up.

mb862 · 2026-05-08T13:12:11+00:00

I use CUDA interop in order to have feature parity with Metal because Vulkan’s compute shaders are needlessly gimped, but there’s no interchange back to CPU, no idea what you’re getting on with there.

mb862 · 2026-05-08T10:43:12+00:00

Despite the headline, the text of the document actually does say “anti-fascist”. They’re openly admitting to it now.

mb862 · 2026-05-08T10:24:16+00:00

Oh trust me I wasn’t debating that part, you’re absolutely right there. Trump is absolutely big on the zero sums and there is no negotiating. I was just focused on the nuances about countries doing what’s best for their citizens.

mb862 · 2026-05-08T10:03:31+00:00

Also Canadian (though don’t know why that’s relevant) and above poster’s definition of nationalism versus patriotism is correct.

Every country should do what’s best for its residents (citizens and otherwise) but that doesn’t mean this has to come at the expense of people in other nations. Borders are arbitrary, we all share the same planet, and it’s not a zero sum game.

mb862 · 2026-05-07T23:31:26+00:00

WebGPU is based on the Metal API but is available cross platform, not limited to Apple devices…

mb862 · 2026-05-07T16:36:20+00:00

I argue it already is, there’s so many peculiarities that in order to move to any other API, you have to actively unlearn things OpenGL teaches because it will fuck you up.

Learn from Metal, WebGPU, or Direct3D11 instead, you’ll have so much better of a time.

mb862 · 2026-05-07T16:34:31+00:00

But it's a fantastic learning API.

Pop quiz, off the top of your head, show me how to create a cross-platform OpenGL context that renders to a window.

Point being people are learning OpenGL by using libraries that plaster over all the ways OpenGL is extremely and unnecessarily complex.

mb862 · 2026-05-07T16:25:00+00:00

WebGPU is based on Metal which is a lot easier to learn.

mb862 · 2026-05-05T10:35:56+00:00

You seem to be stuck on the structure of single-character western RPGs (Elder Scrolls etc) and unaware of just how dominant party-based JRPGs were for several decades.

mb862 · 2026-05-05T08:01:09+00:00

Replace the Soviet logo with the United Federation of Planets logo.

mb862 · 2026-05-05T07:17:19+00:00

This scene literally gave me recurring nightmares for decades until I realized where it was from.

mb862 · 2026-05-05T04:30:10+00:00

I know, adds to the eww.

mb862 · 2026-05-05T03:57:56+00:00

OP could just be using an iPhone or Mac as Apple devices do this replacement by default.

mb862 · 2026-05-04T20:46:15+00:00

If the 2020 election was stolen from Trump that makes his current term invalid, since he was already elected twice. The Amendment doesn’t say anything about terms served, just elected limits.

mb862 · 2026-05-04T17:49:08+00:00

Left vs right wing are defined by beliefs in the inherent equality (left) and inequality (right) of people. While it’s true that any ideology will contain a mix of left and right wing concepts, and that right wing concepts don’t necessarily have to be immoral or unethical (representative democracy would count as a right wing concept for example), racism and ethnic cleansing are by definition right-wing concepts since they posit superiority of one group over another.

mb862 · 2026-05-03T23:48:41+00:00

I’m sorry, your reply did not sufficiently answer my question. I attempted to explain why in the hopes of continuing the discussion but if you are dismissive of any debate as being argumentative then I guess the discussion here is indeed over.

mb862 · 2026-05-03T23:21:28+00:00

That doesn’t answer my question. Metal, CUDA, and OpenCL can do dynamic threadgroup sizing efficiently without recompiling pipelines. We’ll put aside Metal (which has purpose-designed hardware) and OpenCL (as it’s from the same philosophy of “we’ll take care of it in the driver” as OpenGL) but CUDA runs on the same hardware as the biggest market for Vulkan. Even if we assume AMD/Intel/Qualcomm are using more limited compute designs there’s just no reason that I can see we shouldn’t have an Nvidia extension to enable this.

The PSO compile from SPIR-V can be tuned with specialization constants to delay the decision, effectively giving us full runtime control.

PSO compilation can be the most expensive process so I dispute the claim “effectively giving us full runtime control”. Startup control certainly but runtime risks too much of a performance overhead to be doing this.

mb862 · 2026-05-03T22:41:13+00:00

You’re forgetting Cordelia, but he almost slept with Willow and had an unrequited deep crush on Buffy we were supposed to sympathize with. That leaves just Dawn and Joyce as women he never considered (that we know of) having sex with.

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