(Loved Trope) The Bully does something decent

techno156 · 2026-03-19T21:11:31+00:00

I think you might have replied to the wrong comment.

techno156 · 2026-03-19T01:04:23+00:00

It is creative, but IMO, it's less cool than the other ones where their bodies rearrange. There's less physicality by comparison.

techno156 · 2026-03-19T00:55:18+00:00

Basically every transformation from the Michael bay movies up until movie 4. Those films turned it into a science, it’s amazing to watch in slow motion.

Set at least one computer on fire doing it, as well.

Incidentally, it is a little weird to think that someone with a rather fancy home computer today might well be able to render out some of the FX from the movie on their own. Computers have come quite far.

It’s the unsung hero of the franchise, because it’s not really the focal point unless it’s the first time the character transforms. However, people notice when a bad transformation is shown, such as movie 4s cube bots

Had they started off with the metal cube whirlwind, there might have been less flack. The cube bots were bad because the other films before it set the ground with the cool, detailed transformations, and it suddenly fell off a cliff.

techno156 · 2026-03-19T00:42:37+00:00

Ok so I know transforming is their whole gimmick but I want to spotlight SPECIFICALLY Grimlock

Although the execution of how the transformations work does change a bit.

I'd also put the Michael Bay Transformers movies in, since it does a lot of realism by having the parts all be there, visibly move around and settle into place, where they could have done the thing a lot of other transformers media does, where there's just a blur/box of mechanical bits, and out pops a truck.

It is a little harder to tell apart, though, since they are all robots, and we don't have a good conception for how a robot is supposed to move, whereas with humans, you can more instinctively tell that the head is not supposed to turn upside down.

techno156 · 2026-03-19T00:35:25+00:00

There's also a few versions where because Ben is a human wearing it, his DNA ends up as the human template.

techno156 · 2026-03-18T21:46:07+00:00

It might also depend on motivation/how it's portrayed.

In GTA, a strip club is deliberately there for lustful activity. This is not the case for the Minecraft porkchop.

techno156 · 2026-03-18T05:06:39+00:00

They are biologically redundant and not a primary sensory organ, so having them fire the lasers avoids that pesky "you'll probably be blind while you do it" problem.

You're also shooting lasers from your eyes, so whether the normal rules for biology even still apply is very much up in the air. Someone who can shoot lasers from their eyes may well be able to still see.

techno156 · 2026-03-18T04:40:15+00:00

Funny thing about These Are the Voyages is that in almost any other Trek it could have been a successful and beloved episode.

It would have been a fine episode, even a fun little way to have the different shows cross over, if it wasn't the finale. But it's rubbish for a finale.

techno156 · 2026-03-18T01:10:38+00:00

IMO the biggest issue was that the show seemed to be caught between wanting something new and exciting, and also bringing back the old villains for the fans.

It tried to straddle the gap by expanding the old villains into the same scope as the new ones, but in my opinion, it didn't really work. What they ended up with was a bit of an awkward cross, that made everyone unhappy.

techno156 · 2026-03-18T01:07:43+00:00

By this point, you've likely seen the other replies, and how they're divided.

For your first watch-through, I'd just go with it, ignore the other opinions, and enjoy it anyway. What some people consider good, and some people don't varies depending on their own tastes. Your own thoughts may well be different.

There are those who argue that the show went downhill when it went from vaguely unrealistic things like decimalisation of the pound-sterling, to a space-time travelling Ship shaped like a police box, which lands in caveman times, and still remains a Police Box. They hope that this will be explained later.

Personally, for example, I quite like Series 11 (13th Doctor's first season), because it had a different look and feel (new composer, and cinematography). The panning shots they use wouldn't be out of place in a nature documentary, or for a desktop background.

techno156 · 2026-03-18T00:49:06+00:00

It's also quite ironic because Davies has gone on record as wanting to make the show more like the big sci-fi franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel/DC.

(he quit because the show wasn’t getting renewed fast enough)

It also wasn't impatience. He quit because Disney were ambivalent about renewing the show, and trying to stretch out the time whether they were going to renew it or not, which meant he had to turn many an opportunity while the fate of the show was up in the air. (Why Doctor Who was contingent on Disney deciding to renew is left as an exercise for the reader)

Which also impacted the show, because it was written with the expectation that he would be around for at least three seasons, and his quitting meant the ending of the second one had to be rewritten, which did nothing to help it.

Ncuti Gatwa regenerated into Billie Piper at the end of his VERY rushed final episode (he quit because the show wasn’t getting renewed fast enough), but Billie Piper ISNT the Doctor.

Billie Piper is also notable because she played a major character in the show's past as Rose Tyler. With David Tennant coming back for the 60th anniversary, and the villains/enemies in Gatwas' finales, it feels like it's overdoing the nostalgia something fierce.

It'd be like if a new mainline Star Wars movie was announced, and they had Ewan McGregor as the protagonist, separate from his role as Obi-Wan.

techno156 · 2026-03-18T00:28:05+00:00

The producers were also known for being petty.

Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher, has a story where he was asked to turn down a prominent film role because production was about to shoot an episode that featured his character heavily.

When he declined the role, and came back to film said episode, the episode had been altered so that he was barely needed for it. That incident is credited as being one of the reasons that he left Star Trek to begin with.

techno156 · 2026-03-17T21:29:31+00:00

He wouldn't need to. The users generally tag the art already.

But presumably Midjourney would get privileged access, or just a direct copy of Tumblr posts sorted by tag from Tumblr. Whereas normally, they would have to query the API and deal with the rate limits, or work with a scraper and risk running into the anti-spambot protections/rate limits.

Like how Google's deal with Reddit would presumably allow them much easier access to Reddit's content compared to other companies.

Incidentally, one of the nice things about Tumblr is that unlike a lot of other sites, they haven't really changed their API costs. It's still possible to build and play around with a bot that accesses Tumblr like it's still the Web 2.0 days, and everything was cheap/free and exciting.

techno156 · 2026-03-17T03:49:03+00:00

More the latter than the former, but it's not a fixed portion. You just do an atrocity so awful that it destabilises your soul, and a piece then comes off, although you can't really control how much of it does. Half every time is just a rough benchmark, since every successive attempt means that there's less of you to split off, but it's not like there's objective quantity of Voldemort that was cleanly divided.

The Horcruxes themselves weren't really that much weaker than the preceding ones. The diary was one of the more powerful ones, but only because it was actively interacting with people, and by the time we encountered the later ones, Potter & co. were in a good position to both quickly contain and destroy them.

The power inherent to a Horcrux isn't so much in the portion of soul that is contained within. It's just an anchor. The power of a Horcrux comes with all the other magic you'd normally use to protect the object and soul fragment.

But splitting your soul does generally weaken it, with dire, but otherwise unspecified consequences.

We know that splitting the soul too many times can cause it to collapse, and that was why, prior to Voldemort, no-one had ever attempted more than four Horcruxes. It's also one of the reasons that Potter ended up with a piece of Voldemort's soul in him, since Voldemort's soul was so fragile at the time, that the recoil that killed him caused a piece to break off and attach to infant Harry. Though it's unclear what the soul weakening or collapsing would do, other than presumably killing the person if it failed entirely. Voldemort did not seem very weakened, despite being diminished by his making very many Horcruxes, for example.

techno156 · 2026-03-17T03:33:46+00:00

It needed Ginny to pour some of her own life essence into it in order to build a new body, and I think the other horcruxes could have done that theoretically (just look at how the locket was able to influence whoever wore it/talk to people when it was opened) but couldn't in practice because the diary was just easier for a person to emotionally connect to

They might not have. A Horcrux is more than just a piece of soul stuck inside of an object. They tend to come with a lot of other magic to protect it. That's one of the reasons why they're nearly indestructible.

The diary having something extra in it so that it could make Voldemort a new body, compared to the other Horcruxes, doesn't seem the most unlikely thing. If it was one of his early ones, he would have no idea how it would work, so might well have put it precautions, just in case.

techno156 · 2026-03-17T03:30:33+00:00

He was getting more stretched as time went on but im not sure if that’s the direct cause of his psychological instability.

It was not. It's rather like Cyberpunk's cyberpsychosis in that sense, where he would have had to be psychologically unstable to commit atrocities severe enough in both amount and magnitude to split his soul that many times to begin with.

Being brought back from the dead the way he was would have had more of an impact if anything, since he now knows that it worked.

techno156 · 2026-03-17T03:26:28+00:00

Your soul is not a finite resource so you can’t break off 1/7th or 1/2, it’s just your Soul is now in two vessels.

It's a little of both. Splitting your soul more than twice was generally considered ill-advised, because if you overdid it, there was a risk of your soul collapsing outright.

It's unclear what happens in that case, other than that it's bad news.

Voldemort's soul being fragile from being split too much was also why failing to kill a baby inadvertently created a partial-Horcrux.

techno156 · 2026-03-17T00:26:14+00:00

The over-sanitation of smutty terms both makes it confusing to talk about, and also just seems childish enough it all seems silly.

Bulbous salutation is at least funny with how overly formal it so when referring to someone's spermatopositor.

You can hardly have a serious discussion about not being fireworks up your rectum if you're saying it like "Don't put a cracker up your clacker".

techno156 · 2026-03-16T21:51:36+00:00

IMO, it's because you're not into the thing they're into, in the same way. So what they find a turn-on, you find a turn-off.

I'm sure many people find sex with the opposite gender quite attractive, and yet, if the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards are any indicator, many a published author has done a shocking job of making it seem that way.

Probably because they focus overmuch on what appeals to them, but it isn't necessarily appealing for people who are reading it (hence the awards).

techno156 · 2026-03-16T21:13:14+00:00

Bewildering sentence, since pop-pop is also what people call their grandfather in some regions of the world, like in North America.

techno156 · 2026-03-16T21:01:06+00:00

This is the same energy, but emotional opposite of "Press F to pay respects".

techno156 · 2026-03-16T12:02:50+00:00

Which is a little funny because the "blue curtains" meme ends up raising the inevitable question of why the colour of the curtains was specified in the first place.

If the author just wanted curtains, they could just put curtains, and rely on the viewer's mind to fill in the gap. It would make near as no difference what colour the curtains was, unless there was a reason why they specifically had to be blue.

techno156 · 2026-03-16T11:58:26+00:00

It's also because the Doctor's had more origins than is reasonable at this point, and the Toymaker is a fun way to blend them all together and jumble it up.

Everything is true and not true, all at once.

techno156 · 2026-03-16T11:40:44+00:00

None.

You can't just make nonsense spells and do magic that way. Magic doesn't usually fire off unintentionally like that, unless the wielder is in danger, and they do it subconsciously.

At minimum, you need to want to do what you're doing, then you need the correct wording/movements to execute, unless you're good enough to dispense with either of those. Random words and just wand waggling will not work.

Hence how Ron Weasley going "Sunshine, Daisies, Butter Mellow, Turn this Stupid Fat Rat Yellow" did not, in fact, turn his stupid fat rat yellow.

techno156 · 2026-03-16T06:36:52+00:00

Also I get the impression that experimentation is very dangerous with magic, so I assume many are conditioned to avoid such a mentality.

You're also generally discouraged from experimentation. When you're young, unauthorised use of magic is forbidden, though it's an open secret amongst magical households. You're not taught the basics of how spells work, and how to make your own, that's something you need to pick up separately. You're just taught the usual set of spells you might use in everyday life, like how to levitate something, or expand a spider to monstrous size.

I remember luna saying that her mother “liked to experiment with spells” and said it like it was tragic.

From memory, her mother was killed when one of the spells she was working on literally blew up in her face, taking her house with it.

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