Madiha, The Truth Is...you Never Stopped Watching Betterman. You’ve Been Watching Betterman This Whole

Forgive my bluntness, but isn’t the Myers-Briggs system based off of a deeply simplified interpretation of Jungian psychology that mental health professionals (Jungian psychologists or otherwise) consider littler better than a horoscope? Are companies actually using the test as a way to judge candidates? (Mind you, we could probably say the same things about IQ tests.)

Study Myers-Briggs and learn to fake out the test to thinking you’re an “SP” or “SJ”, preferably extroverted type, depending upon the job that’s giving you a personality test. I suspect that lots of non-professional jobs and non-tech jobs are specifically weeding out people who would map to Myers Briggs NT or NF types, and using iNtuitive Thinker traits as a proxy for autism. Make sure you can fake the test out to your cisnormative personality type expected of your gender; that will be T if male and F if female. I highly suspect that iNtuitive (Thinker or Feeler, but especially Thinker in any retail setting) personality traits are being mapped to unemployable neurodivergence by employment related personality tests.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. :|

@nesterov81 depending on your point of view, for Hitoe things either improve, or enter fate worse than death territory, in these episodes of the show

get hype for the podcast

That modern Captain Planet discussion you guys had at the beginning of the latest @transmediacrity podcast was surprisingly resonant to me, @wyattsalazar. I’ve been chewing on this essay criticizing the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, and it seems like the attitudes and beliefs that the liberal TNG era was built on are now also verboten, and have been replaced by sadder, crueler things.

There's another Worm connection in No Man's Land with Poison Ivy. As the rest of Batman's rogues' gallery carve up Gotham, she ends staking out a derelict city park and caring for a bunch of kids who were orphaned or otherwise abandoned after the earthquake. Rather than rousting her out, Batman agrees to leave her alone for the time being, provided she uses her powers to generate produce for the rest of the surviving citizens to eat. While Ivy was less than pleased about having to go along with this, she still held up her end of the deal.

In his own discussion of Ivy's history on Twitter, Exalted_Speed has argued that No Man's Land is really where the interpretation of Ivy as an antihero (ahem) took root. The connection with Worm is obvious; however, Taylor's tenure as urban warlord feels like a more refined version of that concept. As noted in the thread, the attempts to turn Poison Ivy into an antihero often stumble on both the sheer amount of carnage she's caused over the years and on with her original characterization of "vicious plant-themed Catwoman" which is still a major element in her modern portrayals. By contrast, it's much easier to offer apologetics of Taylor's conduct on the Boardwalk, since she was explicitly written to fit the role that Pamela Isely was awkwardly retrofitted to play.

Got a Worm meta question for you. I'm starting on the early parts of Taylor's warlord era - I'm about to leap into Arc 13 - and the general concept of a ravaged American city being divided up by various supervillain groups is reminding me a lot of that Batman story arc No Man's Land from the late 1990s. Unfortunately my comics knowledge is rudimentary at best, and I haven't been able to any discussion comparing the two stories, so I was wondering if I could pick your brain on the subject. Was it just convergent evolution, or was Wildbow engaging with the Batman story in some way?

I myself have only read about half of No Man's Land- and several years ago to boot- so I've got limited ability to do a direct compare and contrast. No Man's Land is absolutely the sort of status-quo-shattering, history-book-making upset that, within Marvel and DC, nonetheless always inexplicably heals and loses salience until you can barely tell that it's still in continuity. Worm is heavily informed by Wildbow's irritation with that sort of thing, so I think it's totally reasonable to view the warlord era through the lens of "What if No Mans Land had no editorial escape hatch." Alternatively, I think it kind of makes sense to view it through the lens that it's working backwards from the premise of No Man's Land- In what kind of setting would it be plausible for the Federal Government to write off a sufficiently-damaged American City? In what context would the legal infrastructure have been established for that, in what context would that even fall within the Overton Window? What muddies my opinion on this is that the general concept of a ravaged, atmospherically-apocalyptic American city torn up by superpowered gang warfare is something that's kind of just been in the water in superhero comics since the mid-eighties at least, and it was a relatively common thing to see during the Dark Age- they were choice prey for all those overpouched musclemen with their poorly rendered firearms. I'd be surprised if Wildbow wasn't at least aware of No Man's Land, but it's definitely not the only cape book from the late 90s or early oughts where you could pick up that idea from. Ultimately this leaves me unsure if No Man's Land is the specific referent or if it's just part-and-parcel with trying to do an involved, thoughtful take on what cape comics were like at the time.

Welp, I did it.

I finished playing Silent Hill 2 for the first time. Even though I’ve seen tons of LPs over the years, the game still hits like a Mack truck.

The X-Files is interesting in this context, since even though Mulder and Scully are our heroes and we love them, they are still FBI agents, actual official representatives of the greater American monoculture who are tasked with going to the backwaters and forgotten places and dealing with the strange and deviant for the good of the whole. To their credit, the people writing The X-Files recognized this, and there’s plenty of episodes where they depict their monsters-of-the-week with some sympathy, or handle Mulder and Scully’s incursions with a note of ambivalence.

Old tv shows where the hero visits the 'town of the week' and identifies then solves a unique problem before moving on are so weird to watch now. "Route 66" to "Touched by an Angel" and etc. Any town in North America that still actually has a unique local culture wouldn't be receptive to an outsider pushing their nose into the local affairs.

Who even still thinks of turning to a pack of kind-hearted outlaws when the bank comes to foreclose on their orphanage?

I’m just reblogging this to tag on a recommendation for Gemma Files’ novel Experimental Film, a horror story about Lady Midday and the forgotten world of hobbyist silent filmmakers at the dawn of the 20th century. (Plenty of female characters to boot as well!)

The ray of blazing, scorching, devouring sunshine.

So instead of making the story about the political maneuvering in the former EK they’re going all-in on the mind-control plotline? Sigh... At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Bryke don’t know how to write political stories. Every time they introduce a political topic like relations between benders and non-benders in Republic City or discord between the two Water Tribes, they always end up walking it back, changing the subject, or having the issue hinge on some piece of magic or technology rather than on the thoughts and actions of the characters. There’s no shame in not having the knack for writing politics, but when you keep trying to do it despite making a hash of it every time, you really need to step back and reconsider a few things. Heck, Faith Erin Hicks is handling the divisions in proto-Republic City in the AtLA comics far better than Bryke ever did. On a more speculative note, a part of me wonders if DiMartino is actually going to go so far as to walk back the end of B4 and Kuvira ruler of the Earth Kingdom again. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing. (Also, is it just me, or Asami just become a damsel in distress for Korra to save ever since their relationship began?)

It’s Korra and Kuvira vs Mako, Bolin, and Asami in The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part 3!

We now have the cover and description and they come with a major bombshell: Part Two is still months out and Part Three even further after that, but Mako, Bolin, and Asami become brainwashed and turned against Korra, along with others across the Earth Kingdom, .

This could be the result of the scientific experiments using spirit energy the Earth Empire remnant was conducting.

This is actually kind of exciting because we’ve never seen Team Avatar battle each other before and that’s now a possibility. Of course, Korra should realistically have a much higher base power level, but who knows what the spirit energy experiments have up their sleeve…

Here’s the full description:

“Kuvira’s true nature is revealed, and the Earth Kingdom will feel the consequences!

Thanks to Commander Guan and Doctor Sheng’s brainwashing technology, all hope for a fair election in the Earth Kingdom is lost. Korra works with Toph, Su, and Kuvira to plan a means to rescue not just the brainwashed Mako, Bolin, and Asami, but everyone else caught up in Guan’s plan! With the Earth Empire potentially on the rise again, Kuvira pulls another trick from her sleeve … but whose side is she truly on?”

You can see the cover and description for Part Two here. It comes out November 12th.

Part Three arrives on February 25th, 2020.

source

Where did this picture come from? It can’t be a player’s ship, since the game’s naming system won’t let you name a ship Enterprise, Defiant, or Voyager or use their registry numbers.

Enterprise B