erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
3d ago
erwgv3g34
3d ago
The mainstream. It's @covfefeAnon's catchphrase.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Which is exactly what happened during the Hundred Flowers Campaign.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
(found a free link here, not sure how many times it can be shared before the paywall goes back up)
erwgv3g34
3d ago
If you have never been oneshotted, you're not looking hard enough for infohazards.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
From AntiDem's Ask.FM:
I fell in love with the first of these - let’s call her L - when I was 22 and she was 16 (spare me your comments). It started out online (yes, that was possible even in the mid-90s) and progressed to a real, in-person, face-to-face relationship through means of all the impossible romantic daring that was at my disposal back then. When I went to Japan for my year living there, I engineered a way to bring her along with me. For that one year, we lived a peaceful, idyllic life in a small village in the mountains, in a tiny (but it was all we needed) place with a rice field stretching up to our wall one way and a corn field the other. I’d never lived in the country before (and haven’t since), but the pace of life grew on me. We had no internet service (the only year in the last two decades I’ve lived without it). We’d get woken up in the morning by the neighbor’s rooster. In the evenings, she’d make dinner, then we’d sit on the couch and watch whatever anime was playing on TV that night, struggling to understand as much as we could. On weekends we’d go into Tokyo for the day, or visit friends, or just walk around the lake hand in hand. We only stayed a year, though we could have stayed longer. I had other plans, none of which seem real important now. That was emblematic of what went wrong. I was young and smart (though nowhere near as smart as I thought I was) and overbearing and bossy and most of all arrogant - so terribly arrogant. I wanted to do the right thing; I wanted to treat her the way that I now know I should have. But my own parents had divorced, and my family had shattered… I had no guide to doing it right, so I did it all wrong. Not that that’s any excuse. When we came back, we ended up in New England, a time I liked almost as much as Japan. I don’t think she liked it that much - she loved Japan, and had wanted to stay - though she put on a brave face for a while. Things started getting bad a little bit at a time. A lot of stuff had built up - a lot of it my fault, and a lot of it hers. Things came to a head in the spring, and just like that she was gone.
Somewhere there’s a parallel universe where there’s a version of me who made better decisions, and he’s married to L, still living in that tiny place in the mountains of Japan between a rice field and a corn field. I know this because I know that’s the way things should have gone. It’s just that in this universe, they didn’t.
And knowing, with the cold certainty that it was a terrible idea, that I'd regret it, I fired up ChatGPT. Google Photos had already surfaced a digital snapshot of us, frozen in time, smiling at a camera that didn’t capture the tremors beneath. I fed it the prompt: "Show us as a family. With children." (The specifics obfuscated to hopefully get past ChatGPT's filter, and also because I don't want to spread a bad idea. You can look that up if you really care)
I didn't even finish reading your post, I just rushed off and tried it after this paragraph. The first attempt was quite bad, but that was because I tried only feeding Chat GPT a single image of each, having overestimated its abilities. I tried it again with five images of each, selected for quality and variety like a LoRA, and got a much better result. I didn't even have to mess around with the prompt; a simple "Show these two together, as a family, with two children." did the trick.
It is quite striking. But I already cry about this every once in a while; an extra image doesn't really add anything different.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
The Newbery Medal and the similar Carnegie Medal provide lists of children's books decades long which have been critically acclaimed for their quality. As long as your friend stays away from anything after 2010, the titles should be non-woke.
In particular, the early Newbery Medal winners and runner ups (called Newbery Honors) are entering the American public domain. Thirty-one of them are currently there, and another nine will join them on January 1st, 2026. So if your friend is willing to give his niece an e-ink reader, he can just download several of them for free from Project Gutenberg.
Alternatively, he could try a long running series such Animorphs, Goosebumps, or Encyclopedia Brown.
Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up.
What? Reddit was founded in 2005, and didn't ban its first subreddit until 2011 (r/jailbait, rest in power).
erwgv3g34
9d ago
This only works until AI decides to turn the whole planet into computronium. Which will take, what, a couple of years, tops? The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight; we need to shut it all down.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood : Closer to 8 than it is to 7
A show that frustrated me. Too tropey, too many characters being retarded. I find it hard to articulate my dissatisfaction in a satisfactory way.
FMAB represents everything that's simultaneously right and wrong with shounen storytelling. The worldbuilding is genuinely excellent: alchemy as magic system with consistent rules and costs, political intrigue that feels like actual statecraft, character motivations that make sense within their contexts.
But the show consistently undermines itself with genre conventions that feel obligatory rather than organic. The power of friendship speeches, the reluctance to actually kill major characters, the way complex moral situations get resolved through superior firepower, it all feels like the show is checking boxes rather than exploring the implications of its own premise.
You should really try the original Fullmetal Alchemist.
First of all, if you only watched Brotherhood, you completely missed the setup, because Brotherhood speeds through the early episodes on the assumption that you have watched the 2003 version. Second, it is a much darker, cerebral, and emotional story. It's not filled with fights and comedy and friendship speeches the way Brotherhood is. 2003 avoids the standard battle shonen cliches in favor of telling a more dramatic and philosophical story using the exact same setting and characters.
It's like Fullmetal Alchemist for grownups.
My own recommendations:
Erased (AKA The Town Without Me) is one of the most beautiful stories I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. It's also only one cour long.
The Promised Neverland. The first season is incredible, and ends at a very natural stopping point, but definitely leaves room to continue the story. The second season is legendary for how bad it was, and most fans pretend that it doesn't exist. It works really well if you choose to treat it is as a single-cour anime. I wrote a longer review on /r/rational.
The exact same thing that happened with Fate.
It turns out that people give you their money if you keep re-imagining the Pacific War in space with giant robots, so when Philip J. Otaku says "Shut up and take my money!", the market responds by supplying as much Gundam as can be sold.
Gundam has a bunch of alternate continuities called "timelines", each of which is canonically independent of the others even though they tend to reuse the same story elements (giant robots, space colonies, a masked antagonist, etc.); think Final Fantasy or Fire Emblem.
The first timeline has the best OVAs (War in the Pocket, Stardust Memory, and The 08th MS Team) but the problem is that the original show which establishes the timeline is a fucking mess. Mobile Suit Gundam has shitty animation, padding, stupid gimmicks designed to sell toys, etc. It's not really worth watching.
I'd recommend starting with Gundam SEED instead, which is basically a modern remake of Mobile Suit Gundam with much better production values, and is a genuinely decent show. Just make sure you watch the original version instead of the HD remaster, and for the love of God avoid the sequel Gundam SEED Destiny.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
Go ahead and finish episode 3; it has a real bite to it.
The three episode rule was largely established in response to Madoka.
Light novels are mostly regular books that have occasional anime-style illustrations in them, maybe ten per volume. They are written at a lower level of language complexity and are aimed at younger audiences; basically the Japanese equivalent of YA novels.
Example 1, from "An Introduction to Light Novels".
Example 2, from "What Are Light Novels? How To Write Light Novels?".
Durarara was originally a light novel, and was adapted into both a manga and an anime. This is completely normal in the incestous media ecosystem of Japan; The Saga of Tanya the Evil is another good example.
In general, the lower the production cost, the more titles there are. So these days there are tons of web novels, the most popular of which get rewritten into light novels, the most successful of which get adapted to manga, and only the very best get adapted to anime.
One notable feature of modern anime is that it often serves as essentially an advertisement for the manga or light novels rather than as an end in itself, so you get one or two cours and then nothing, because there is no point in promoting a print series that has already ended. C'est la vie.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
From Ghastly's Ghastly Comic (NSFW):
In Canada winter is the line that separates the real attention whores from the posers!
The period between the post-WW2 cleanup and the oil crisis was a period when the core western countries -felt_ prosperous (even though normal-ass economic growth means that we are a lot richer than that now), so vibes-based economics associates the aesthetic of that period with material prosperity.
Food, clothes, electronics, and basically anything else you can buy at a Walmart all gotten much cheaper, but we are still poorer than we were back then.
Housing, credentialed education, and healthcare have all gotten way more expensive, to the point that they consume all the savings you get from the store and then some. It doesn't matter how productive your economy is if zoning makes it illegal to create apartment buildings or if the medical cartel keeps the amount of doctors artificially scarce; it just means your landlord raises the rent every year until you are living paycheck to paycheck and you are always one serious medical problem away from bankruptcy, all after you start your life four years later than normal and five figures in debt because the government decided that it was racist not to graduate everyone from high school or to use IQ tests for hiring.
But the real problem is hoeflation. Women are now provided for by the state, meaning that their BATNA to marriage has gotten way higher. In the old days, just working full time at any job was enough to make you a marriage prospect. Now women expect you to have a career, and ideally to make six figures. Especially if they have gone through the credentialed education ringer themselves; once a woman has a degree, she thinks herself too good for a man without one. And, of course, that also means she comes with her own debt, which she expects you to pay, because she will stop working full time as soon as she gets married, having gotten her feminist merit badge.
In real terms, 1950s man was much wealthier than man today.
erwgv3g34
10d ago
This is like replying to a negative review of Harry Potter with "this is why I have no interest in literature".
erwgv3g34
10d ago
Different boards have completely different cultures. /b/ is not /pol/ is not /k/ is not /r9k/.
erwgv3g34
10d ago
The hell is this, the Terrible Take Tuesday thread? Cowboy Bebop and GitS are not just good, they are excellent.
Seconded.
The plot in Cowboy Bebop isn't that special (though that isn't what it's about), but overall both are great series.
The overarching plot of Cowboy Bebop is mediocre. The individual mini-plots that make up each episode are great.
erwgv3g34
11d ago
I was not prepared for their Wikipedia photo.
If she was born in 1951, she must have been 57 or 58 at the time of the photo. She aged incredibly well.
/u/TrannyPornO has an article about getting cheap Ozempic from the gray market.
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