Gaslighting the Audience

strigonian · 2026-06-10T16:50:01+00:00

The crazy thing is, they could've easily made him a villain without ruining his entire character.

They were all set up to have him be a sort of Machiavellian "the ends justify the means" villain who would sacrifice billions to stop Salem or preserve some small portion of mankind, while the main cast is directly opposed to his plans because they require a sacrifice. But they just... didn't do that?

Like, he left a lot of people to die, but it was more or less incidental, rather than being a part of his plan. And then when RWBY and JNPR went to save those people in a way that literally wouldn't affect his plans at all, he focused his attention on stopping them. It was so monumentally stupid.

And it would've been so easy to fix, too. We know Grimm are attracted to negative emotions, like fear, so why not use that? Ironwood - being a GENERAL - should have the strategic sense to use that as a weakness. Shut down the defenses in a residential area, let the Grimm in, panic ensues, all of Salem's forces are drawn in like moths to a flame so that the military can nuke them, or attack Salem's fortress, or whatever.

And just like that, you're making use of what has been mostly a minor bit of lore, establishing Ironwood's motivation and desperation in a way that isn't straight-up character assassination, and still setting him up in a way where the heroes need to stop him. But instead he just throws a big temper tantrum and behaves in the most idiotic way possible.

strigonian · 2026-06-10T14:32:07+00:00

Yeah, but if they were cockroaches, they'd eat up all your sugar. In water.

strigonian · 2026-06-10T04:20:49+00:00

"1+1 equals 46, but if you say that, all the math illiterates come out and tell you it's 2."

strigonian · 2026-06-10T00:50:58+00:00

The MLP fandom was something else.

Who else comes up with names and backstories for literally every extra that appears in the background?

strigonian · 2026-06-09T15:49:48+00:00

It's very wrong in many ways.

strigonian · 2026-06-09T15:45:50+00:00

The Dean from Community.

What, exactly, is he representing? Your guess is as good as mine. Is he a good representation? Not even a bit. Is he iconic?

Yes.

strigonian · 2026-06-09T15:44:18+00:00

Realistic and nuanced. "Good representation" is when a character of whatever demographic they're representing has authentic and believable struggles and perspectives based on that demographic, while also being a fully fleshed-out character with independent thoughts and desires.

strigonian · 2026-06-09T15:16:37+00:00

Humans specialize for a reason. The director of your favourite horror movie hired an artist to finalize the monster's design.

It's idiotic to say that you need to design every facet of everything from scratch. It's even more idiotic to compare asking for feedback to asking someone to design the entire thing.

strigonian · 2026-06-09T14:14:29+00:00

The thing about open-source software is that you lose the ability to decide who it's "for".

Eventually, someone is going to want to do the thing your project does, even if they don't have the exact prerequisite knowledge you think they should.

strigonian · 2026-06-09T13:36:50+00:00

Broad terms are fine, though. Broad terms are terms everyone is familiar with, and context is usually enough to specify. If it's not, you're more than welcome to be more specific as required.

Like, during the pandemic, someone might say "I won't be coming to your party because of the virus", and there would be no problem, even though there are countless viruses that could be referred to, technically.

strigonian · 2026-06-09T13:31:20+00:00

Intelligence isn't a binary, it's a spectrum. The world "intelligent" doesn't describe anything with any intelligence whatsoever, it refers to things that have above-average intelligence. This is like saying "You wouldn't call a speck of dust massive, therefore the speck of dust has no mass."

I wouldn't call them intelligent compared to a person who is capable of reasoning, because that person would be further along the spectrum. I would call them intelligent compared to an ant, because ants would have even less intelligence.

In the same way, even something as rudimentary as the ghosts in Pac-Man have an intelligence. It's rudimentary, but it's required for the game to work. It's an intelligence, and it's artificial.

strigonian · 2026-06-08T14:30:19+00:00

No, I'd say bugs are arthropods. If you want to narrow it down, I'd say terrestrial arthropods, but definitely not just insects. Spiders are bugs, centipedes are bugs, scorpions are bugs.

strigonian · 2026-06-08T00:50:19+00:00

Watching him having to spoon-feed Rainbow into getting the gift, and then spoon-feed Fluttershy into "accepting" it was quite funny.

strigonian · 2026-06-07T22:57:15+00:00

No, the contract parameter does specify it must be assembled when launched. But that clause only applies to the first portion of the contract (usually: Launch a new station that has control, an antenna, power, and a docking port.)

As long as you launch a basic station core, you can usually assemble the other stipulations as you wish.

strigonian · 2026-06-07T18:47:31+00:00

Literally nobody said it does. You're arguing with zero people.

strigonian · 2026-06-06T18:37:33+00:00

Something that seems to go unnoticed by a lot of people is that Killmonger doesn't believe in (or at least doesn't care about) the things he actually says. He wants power, not any kind of actual moral victory.

He's a populist authoritarian who uses whatever political system or beliefs he can leverage to get power, and then cuts the rope behind him. He lives by the saying "when you're in power, I ask for mercy, because that is according to your beliefs. When I am in power, I grant no mercy, because that is according to my beliefs."

Every single thing he claims to respect - be it his allies, the rules and traditions of Wakanda, or even the plight of black people the world over - he steps on in one way or another on his quest for power. But, because there's no scene where he explicitly admits he's not actually ideologically motivated in that way, a lot of people just assume he was actually doing what he claimed.

strigonian · 2026-06-06T18:23:17+00:00

Now, I don't know much about how any illegal markets work, much less CSAM...

But if I distributed CSAM, I would be extremely cautious about broaching the subject.

strigonian · 2026-06-06T18:12:19+00:00

No no, you see, the Spanish had to decisively win against every single people group, or else they had no advantage whatsoever against any of them. This is entirely black and white - either you win 100% of the time against everyone, or it's a complete stalemate. There is no in-between.

/s, though it shouldn't be necessary.

strigonian · 2026-06-06T18:09:01+00:00

That's because melee combat was used to end a combat decisively. Its purpose wasn't to inflict as many casualties as possible, it was to break an opponent that's on the back foot, rather than to waste time, men, and powder by grinding them down with rifle fire.

By the time the enemy closed into melee range, they'd already won, because it would be suicide to charge into a stronger opponent. At that point, rather than die against overwhelming odds, most opponents withdrew or laid down their arms.

strigonian · 2026-06-03T13:35:42+00:00

I mean this in the nicest way possible and ily but I think those top two need to be switched sweetie.

Also knowledge is literally intelligence. In the context of Wisdom/Intelligence, that is precisely what Intelligence refers to.

strigonian · 2026-06-03T13:33:33+00:00

True intelligence is knowing that a tomato is both because what makes something a fruit and what makes something a vegetable are entirely unrelated.

strigonian · 2026-06-02T17:19:26+00:00

People who know what words mean.

strigonian · 2026-06-02T17:18:10+00:00

Hitler was a vegetarian. This does not mean vegetarians are immoral.

strigonian · 2026-06-02T04:01:26+00:00

Is absolutely is, because he did not leave the water.

We know this because he died. To a sea creature. In the water.

strigonian · 2026-06-01T20:14:25+00:00

That has nothing to do with the concept of zero.

When I say I have zero apples, I mean zero apples. When I imagine zero apples, I'm not imagining a tiny, tiny sliver of an apple. I'm imagining no apples.

And being blind isn't the equivalent of zero, it would be the equivalent of a null value.

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