Finding Out Your Friend Has A New Name/gender Is So Hype. Like Yess Give Us The Patch Notes

An overworked wishing flower

struck with a shitpost idea

It really was a pity the Velika As A Great Being arc wasn't finished, (or even properly started, arguably), because Bionicle never really got to explore its Matoran Universe characters as artificial beings having or acquiring personhood.

Almost every other story about robots, cyborgs or artificial beings plays with or explores what it is to be 'alive' or 'human'. But in the absence of organic sapient beings, it was never really a thing in Bionicle. The Matoran never questioned their status as being alive or being people, and even the Glatorian seemed to readily accept them as people upon first meeting them.

So it would have been fascinating to see them confronted with the possibility that they were not people, just convincing imitations of the real thing, according to Velika.

Guerrilla Girls 1991

810NICLE DAY

It's bionicle day, so here's some of the toa I drew as part of a commisioned set sometime last year. Looking back at when I was making these, I had thought that it was when I was stll refining the biomechanical elements of my style, but I've also found things from that time that were further down the line in detail. I still need to get to Onua and Pohatu, but haven't quite had the time to just sit down and draw a bunch of pieces for a little while - plus I feel nervous about if whether I'd manage to capture them in a comparable amount of detail haha, don't want any of them to stand out in an unusual way

Real talk why does social interaction feel like you’re trying to get a good grade in being a person

I think either abstract or technical would both work, as long as it's actually descriptive.

It has to be short and it shouldn't say anything about the duration. If there are multiple stages, each should get unique text that would let the programmer know which exact for loop/api call/etc it's waiting on.

A good example is how, when you're compiling C++, MSVC lists each source file name so you can tell if one of them is taking a long time. If you're doing a batch build, it says which config it's on.

i hate the convention of computers just not saying what's going on. it'll be like Loading or Wait a bit or whatever and not Here's Why It's Taking So Long. even if i don't understand what it means let me at least be able to look it up online

There exist another dimension called The Empty World. It's very much like ours, in fact it seems to have been identical up until a few weeks ago, but it always seems that way. If you go there today, it was identical in late february, and if you go there this october, it'll have been identical until september.

It's empty, as you might guess. There's no humans, and no animals bigger than a cockroach. The sky is grey, and it slowly rains ash. It's colder than our world by a bit, enough to require a jacket even in summer. The streets are empty, the cars parked neatly in their garages or in lots, but they're all empty and abandoned, their doors locked like they expect their owners to return any minute now.

The newspapers left on stands don't mention any oncoming disaster. We have no idea what the TV or internet would have said: the power is out. The power is very, very out. Not just the grid, but batteries are drained. The cars won't start, the emergency lights are out, and anything with solar panels seems to be getting less energy than you'd expect, even with the perpetually overcast sky.

It's a very silent world, like the calm after a snowstorm. Sounds don't seem to echo as much as they should, nor does sound seem to travel as far. The radio spectrum is empty except for static, there's no one transmitting on any frequency.

There's fewer fires than you'd expect. Even places you'd expect to soon catch fire without human intervention are still standing, undamaged. Campfires can be lit but with difficulty: something is keeping them from burning as they should. Even if you pour kerosene on a campfire it'll barely grow, it's like something sucked the energy out of everything.

All the locked buildings are still locked. Alarms don't sound if you break in (understandable, given the power situation), and of course no one comes to investigate. So The Empty World is your oyster: you can break in wherever you want (provided you can physically do it: some doors are pretty hard to pry open even with tools), take whatever you want, and bring it back here.

Everything resets when you leave. You always enter The Empty World like it's your first time there, like this just happened and you're late to the party... but the party keeps getting rescheduled. You can even take something multiple times if you want.

When you enter The Empty World you get there at the same relative position as you are on this world. If you're in New York, you show up in the empty New York. If you're in Topeka, you show up in empty Topeka. So you have to travel around this world to get to where you want, and you can't just appear in the middle of a bank vault... unless you break into the vault from this world. (So it's great if you work at a bank and want to steal from your employer without repercussions, but not so useful otherwise).

You don't just have to take things, you know. You can take computers and files and books and diaries. You will have to deal with recharging laptops and breaking through any security when you get back, but it's doable.

So, imagine you've just gotten access to The Empty World. What are you going to do with it? What will you take, and where will you go?

The oldest reactionary rhetorical sleight of hand in the book is to identify something widely thought as distasteful, to go "this thing is Morally Wrong" and then not feel the need to explicitly say "that's why people need to be punished for doing it", just leave that as the obvious consequence and, in never Saying it, they never have to explain how guilt or innocence is established or any dialogue around what an appropriate, proportional response to said Taboo Behaviour might be.

Once you start recognizing it as the sleight of hand it is it's impossible to miss.

Ok wait let her speak