Jamie Wahls — Reviews

Space King 5: Annoyances

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What was wrong with Space King 5

(I do actually empathize with how hard it is to make art on a timetable for an audience)

New character design was great, the giant mecha were great, the boars were great, the toybox boy drop was laugh out loud.

The B plot of Ball Fondler Chestnut was pretty milquetoast. Chestnut getting groomed was a legit funny concept, but, like, how does this process make the priest cum? Does this actually do anything for the globules? Why were the dozen lesser priests there, and why didn’t they help for either the ball fondling or defending the globules against quite-serious risk of aliens absconding with them?

The moral lesson of the episode was…share with your friends? Okay man

I liked the characterization spot of Bryce, it makes him one iota more relatable

I’m sorry you identify as Bryce or whatever man, we still are not seeing what is good about him

Letter to Big Mouth

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many parts were embarrassing or cringe. Some parts were too woke, as y’all were moved by tides of moral fashion. Many parts were over the top, and sometimes bad.

Also there was a thread of coming to accept and forgive yourself. It was raw in its commitment to telling the whole, abjectly humiliating truth. And loving yourself anyway.

Thank you. It healed me a little. I would be proud to have made it.

Darling in the Franxx Betrayed Me

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just feel so personally betrayed by Darling in the Franxx.

( Alternative title: “You played yourself.” )

I know this is kinda my fault for getting excited about my headcanon before the show demonstrated it wouldn’t shit the bed I was in, but good christ it was ticking so many of my boxes and then fucked up so hard. I feel about DitF the way you feel about a regrettable ex.

(“I see how I ignored the warning signs, but I just wanted it to work out so badly…”)

Lemme introduce you to the show I thought I was watching:

The year is 2180. A century ago, humans discovered the wreckage of an old, old civilization beneath the earth’s crust. It had advanced technology, powered by a novel power source—which we can just call “magic”. It seems that, in defiance of all heretofore understood physics and common sense, there’s just…magic, right there, deep in the earth, this neat glowing orange gel that can be harvested and used for fuel.

(Not burned like fuel, exactly, but sequestered, because it constantly emits energy. Kind of like plutonium.)

So they immediately start grabbing tech and bootstrapping their civilization with all this shit they don’t really know how to use. They start retrofitting all of their existing tech to use magic, because oh man this fuel is so, so much better than every other power source and all other sources are obsoleted at once.

They discover another weird property of magic; holy shit, an infusion of it into a human will make them immortal?! (And asexual and infertile, but whatever, acceptable price to pay for immortality.)

This becomes the new default. The overwhelming majority of the population becomes immortal. It does…odd things to human motivation and cognition, seeming to sap it. Unclear whether that’s a byproduct, or just because magic immortality seems to stop the biological clock at age 60.

A hundred years go by. Since the immortals are the dominant cultural force, their preferences wax ascendant. Having children is now seen as a weird and gross thing to do. Sex is considered unsanitary and pointless. Directly magically stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain is seen as a Reasonable And Fun thing to spend most your time doing.

Harvesting magic from the Earth at no point stops…

Whoops! It turns out that extracting magic from the Earth leads to widespread desertification; all life was apparently sustained partially by magic. Guess we need to put all the humans in biodome cities.

Double whoops! It appears some kind of…ancient primordial guardians of the earth(?!) are emerging from the depths to seek out the magic and claim it back. These look like giant angry blue robot dinosaurs, and they wreck house.

They immediately destroy most cities and human settlements.

Now, at this point, the earth is an uninhabitable wasteland. All surviving humans live in giant roaming cities—literally roaming, they have giant legs—and each of these Arcadias is completely dependent on magic. They can’t give any back without sacrificing human lives—because recall that in addition to powering the Walker City, the magic is also inside humans, sustaining their immortality.

Now (and bear with me as I drop some admittedly frown-inducing mecha-anime tropes) humans discover that conventional weapons do nothing against these robot dinosaurs. What’s more, even magic-assisted weaponry does very little. Why, the only thing that could stand against them, is…

Enter Doctor Franxx.

He’s sifting through the old magitech collected from the ruins of that advanced civilization, and he finds these ancient weapons. They’re not guns; they’re, well…battle mechs.

Each battle mech is piloted by two people at a time. Or, strictly speaking, it doesn’t have to be, it’s just that you usually will want to have two pilots. And they should be, um, a boy-girl pair. Because the mechs are powered by, um…sexual energies.

Doctor Franxx says, sorry, what the fuck?

He’s thinking, what even is going on with this…planet? Magic makes you asexual, removal of magic kills all life by stopping sexual reproduction, these mechs are powered by sexual impulses…

I’m getting a lot of strong signals here and they’re only sort of consistent. Did we just, uh, fuck up the chi of the planet real real bad, or what? What was this ancient civilization even DOING to end up with mecha that are LITERALLY POWERED BY SEX.

He pauses, and then another revelation hits him.

He considered, with a pinwheeling terror-feel of humanity surviving by gross luck: Would anyone but me have even realized how these work?

Because quick note about Doc Franxx: this crotchety weirdo is from one of the very small sects of humans who still reproduce the normal way—fucking. He doesn’t have immortality, and has extended his lifespan via minimal use of magic and by becoming a cool cyborg.

He thinks, is there some kind of guiding hand bailing out humanity, here?

But he doesn’t have much time to think about that Season Two revelation because holy shit there are robot dinosaurs up Humanity’s collective ass right now and the lusty gonads we’d need to save the species are currently shriveled with immortality.

So he calls up the ruling council of Humanity, and says:

“Guys, I have a weird, weird request, but…I need you to genetically engineer me a soldier caste of humans who are…perpetually horny teenagers. And I need them to pilot these ancient sex-battle mecha to fight off the dinosaurs.”

Humanity, who is pretty short on options at this point, says,

“Deal.”

And this is how we end up in the Darling in the Franxx world.

With scientists researching the genegineering of a literal succubus.

With the impotence metaphors when you can’t get your mech up.

With the most elite soldiers being a depraved bisexual corps.

With squadmates desperately trying to do relationship counseling for each other mid-battle, so they can find that spark again.

Upstream Color: So Was He the Bad Guy, or What?

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Upstream Color: What Even

What factually happened in this movie

We see some kids drinking worm water and then synchronizing their body movements, which suggests that the worm water does something psychic

The lady is rendered suggestible via worm mugging and then the Thief takes all her money. I’m sure this is top-shelf hypnokink content for somebody

He can’t let her sleep, because sleeping will trigger the next phase of the worm’s life cycle?

He leaves, she sleeps, she can feel the worm growing enormous inside of her

Then either coincidentally or in his daily sweep for people who’ve been worm infected, the scientist finds her and saves her life by pulling out a real real long worm. He puts it into a pig for unclear reasons.

Her life is ~ruined.

The scientist (has psychic powers?) and remotely monitors his worm-saved people through their still-wormed pigs (who seem to be doing fine? Did he actually need to remove the worm to save her life?)

I found this part quite cool. I figured we were now gearing up for an Avengers Coming Together bit in which the scientist unites all of these worm victims and they hunt down the thief, and/or fight the sinister international cabal that rules the world with worm powers, or…something.

Then that doesn’t happen; we see some relationship tumult, and the walden pond revelations are kind of overexplained and unnecessary. Lady and new bf track down the scientist and kill him, for unclear reasons after he saved her life.

…does having a worm grant you psychic powers, and did the removal of the worm actually amputate this process? Perhaps this is what we were seeing with the synchronized children in the beginning. Perhaps this is how the scientist is remotely monitoring people. Is the scientist using his Worm Summons to psychically castrate people?

But it sure did seem like the lady was suffering for having a worm in her; the sense I got in that scene was definitely “he’s being caring and compassionate about this and saving her life”. We see him expressing affection to animals and to her. I don’t think the movie is trying to tell us he’s dr. lobotomy.

Welp, I don’t know what that story was communicating. Vague inspiration for a dnd game about people who get psychic powers as a byproduct of a psychic mugging. I would have liked to see the scientist be a more clearly nice guy, or more clearly a bad guy; I feel this movie didn’t come across as a story exactly but more a recounting of things that happened.

The Main Plot of The Erogamer

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Erogamer: The main plot

No, not the girl with the magically-stretchy orifices, the main plot. As in, what the fuck happened to the Earth?

1. The Multiuniversal Setting

Ok, so there’s like a trillion universes. And that is an understatement, but bear with me here. A trillion universes, and many of them have wildly different rules of physics, and some of them don’t run on math at all.

There’s like a trillion universes, and in one of them—which we can refer to as “ours”—the probabilistic (yet deterministic) odds of humanity not exterminating itself dropped from 0.0001% to Just Zero.

At which point…

2. The Teeming Gods

Ok so there’s like a trillion gods. (And that’s also an understatement, but, sigh. Our language isn’t great at communicating infinity and fractional-infinity in ways other than math.)

A “god” in this parlance is any of,

A magical being from a different-physics universe which controls some universes
A superintelligent AI which controls some universes,
Literal Olympian Gods which control some universes
Entities which can engage in trade with the previous,
Etc,
Etc.

These entities trade with one another, in complex and surely-too-complicated-for-mortal-ken-to-understand ways, one of which can be read about here and also here. (I’m also not claiming this is the way, and certainly not the only way for these entities to exchange things with one another, just that it’s a way which beings in even genuinely disjoint universes could trade.)

3. Our story

Once “our universe” demonstrably lost the chance of a good future, it was kinda…foreclosed. It was no longer subject to the non-intervention protections that keep these multiuniversal gods from meddling in the affairs of developing universes, and it sorta…went up for auction.

My current speculation is that a human in the universe is randomly selected as its keeper (recall, the “Princess of the Shattered Earths”) and then, depending on the personality and preferences of that human, the gods trade amongst themselves for who buys the universe.

There are many, many gods, and many of them are very strange—but all of these gods engage in trade with one another.

(“Other forces of reality hate anything that ate innocent plants, but they do not have things all their own way.”)

One of these gods, to pick a single point of possibility out of the (sorry) yet again infinitely vast possibility space of all gods—one of those gods is The Erogame.

It is very interested in sex, and also romance, but specifically it is interested in Erogames, couldn’t you tell by the name? And given that our heroine, the sad, virginal, erogaming Cinderella Sheen is the Princess of this Earth, the Erogame makes the purchase (outbidding the fat-shaming god, who loves fat-shaming and was also eyeing this U.)

And now the Erogame is replacing physics and probability with its own friendly, erotic versions of those things.

It also seems like a hair god gets involved at some point, whose values are pretty straightforward.

(“Happy? Sure, whatever. But she will need cooler hair.”)

And it seems like the glitch text is coming from a third god of—I guess I’d call it kindness and hope, or Eudaimonia—which universally occurs whenever something has pushed Cindy beyond a certain threshold of horror/despair/grim-compromise-with-Reality-Classic, and she needs to feel the gentle hand of a benevolent deity.

But Charles Adan may exert a tiny portion of influence over the course of humanity’s epilogue.

He could use that portion of influence to grant himself abilities on par with anything he has seen Cinderella Sheen do. He could set aside some lesser Shadow for himself to rule, as in the books of Amber that he read as a child, or he could travel across stories to join with more of his fellow refugees first. Most lost souls of Earth choose something along those lines, if they are given a chance. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is a perfectly sensible thing to do after the world ends and it is rare to have better choices.

For Charles Adan there is another option.

Across the Cosmic All there are some number of people in situations like Cinderella’s, with powers that can try to summon to them someone like a Charles Adan. For he is very much the type of boyfriend you would try to summon, if you were a girl like her.

And if someone like Charles Adan agrees to answer that summons, that child of Earth is more likely to stay sane, stable, anchored, and not lose what’s left of her humanity.

If people like Charles Adan are willing to forgo being kings themselves and abide within the sovereignties of their princesses, many more people like the Cinderellas Sheen will be able to summon one of the Charleses Adan. The numerical factor in the exchange rate is significant, for reasons he is not now given to understand. It is not a thing that he alone must do, for there are others like him if he refuses, but the duty will come to someone.

Starfighter: Eclipse — I Wish This Were Good

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Starfighter: Eclipse — I wish this were better

It’s quite the writing challenge that the player is a Pilot rather than a Navigator, because Pilots, in-universe, are dumb as hell.

And the reason so many boys’ love games are from the POV of the shrinking violet, bottom, omega-male, is because these games are made for women.

(the comic definitely was)

with Abel as the viewpoint character and Cain as a totemic representation of dangerous male dominance

…i am displeased with the way it rubs their cameos in your face right off the bat, too

yes, we know this is an extension of an existing franchise, that’s the only reason we’re playing it.

it is very strange that there are some women in this too

like i was fine with just sort of forgetting women existed for the purpose of this gay man fuck game

but it’s much weirder if women exist and they 100% work in the maintenance department

the problem is that their budget and effort-allocation is…bonkers?

Music: D+ (but somehow they spent thousands on it?)

SFX: C+ (perfectly serviceable)

Writing: D (but somehow they spent thousands on it?)

Teaser Video: C (but why do you even need this?? You probably paid a thousand for this too, christ)

Sprites: D+ to B-? (Beautifully drawn, but there’s so few sprites per character that it makes it pretty goddamn hard to have a conversation. Notice how at no point do you have a back-and-forth longer than eight lines with anyone? That’s because they have too few moods and they’ll just look like cardboard cutouts if you hold the shot.)

Splashes: S-tier. More gorgeous splash pages in this 60 minute game than I’ve seen in some sixty-hour games.

Backgrounds: A-. Very nice bespoke work here.

if this were a project produced for $30k in eight months, I’d say it warrants a C+ and I might pledge to them to see what they produce in the future

but this was a project produced for $140,000, on a longer timeline, and they already had a game demo, so they already had the game engine running

Interspecies Reviewers: A Begrudging Respect

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Interspecies Reviewers: Confusingly Good Along A Lot Of Dimensions

Look, for a porn comic, this worldbuilding is fantastic.

I have a soft spot for the gimmick. Not the gimmick where a triad of Dnd-Style Fantasy Characters have decided to have sex with ladies of every species—but rather, the metagimmick: the showrunners committing themselves 250% to a dubiously good, spit-take of a premise, and then playing it entirely straight.

This show isn’t just porn. There’s a ton of porn in it, more than I’ve seen in some pornos, but there’s also bewilderingly consistent and well-communicated character moments and, and, can I just talk about the worldbuilding for a second?

This is paying a heartening amount of attention to different species’ sexual preferences and proclivities. Elves think extremely mature humans are a prize catch, because they have hella sex skills and their mana has had time to ripen. Humans think five hundred year old elf women are attractive, because they still look like flawless twenty-something year olds. Most species consider humans to be deviant and weird for this reason.

And they included the detail where hyenas all have weird dicks! They’re paying the appropriate amount of attention to fantasy-race genitalia!

Something about this is working for me, despite my wishes.

Obviously the premise is really skeevy. Obviously the episode in which everyone drinks potions of turning female and then talk about tricking dudes into having sex with them…well, I can see why Funimation would want to drop them like a hot potato, which is also covered in poison.

But all the dudes walk away with more empathy for ladies, afterwards! They develop a little as characters! And they all have different preferences, communicated well!

And, just listen to the opening theme! I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything so relentlessly happy in my life!

(I recommend you listen on 1.2x)

Goddammit

8/10

Shimoneta Wasn't Good, Exactly

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Okay let’s talk about Shimoneta

In a really quite dystopian future, Japan has embraced staunch anti-profanity laws to the point that all citizens are wearing recording devices constantly, ensuring they don’t swear or discuss sex. A group of concerned students decide to take sexual education of the populous into their own hands, so they become…erotic terrorists.

Shimoneta isn’t…good, but…

(Or, strictly speaking, even defensible; the plot is pretty silly, and characters Flanderize on the scale of episodes rather than days, but…)

It’s got a couple things that are going right for it. It really leans into the trope of Refuge in Audacity, such that every time you think it might flinch away from making a dirty joke, it makes it, and then immediately afterwards makes a filthy joke, just in case you thought it was done.

I am thirty goddamned years old. I have seen so, so, so many animes. But this sweet little weirdo of a show still makes me snort in aghast delight. It has a really good heart; every single character is kind, and crazy, and trying to do what’s right as best they see it.

Yes, the show is crass. Yes, a genderbent version of it would be, uh, deeply uncomfortable. But it sure seems like the writers sincerely believe in the message here, of embracing sexuality and living without shame. (Point in fact, one of the post-credits scenes was a live-action demonstration of how to make your own fleshlight.)

Watch the first five episodes, then stop. You’ve had the Shimoneta experience.

Hello World: An Anime Plot Summary

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Plot points of Hello World (the anime)

-Our story begins right as the Japan Cultural Backup drones finish scanning all of Japan at absolute resolution. This is not a coincidence.

-Here’s some random high schooler in Japan, he has a crush on a school idol and he reads books. He is our protagonist.

-Then, an older version of him from ten years in the future shows up.

Future: Hey fucko, so, you’re actually in a simulation of Japan. The drones scanned everything at high enough resolution that we can now plug it in a physics model and run it deterministically forwards.

Future: In the Outside World, it’s ten years later, and I have worked tirelessly to get this opportunity—to work at the Simulation Center.

Future: And I’m not supposed to be doing this at all, btw, but I’ve booted up this simulation so that we can save the brainstate of the girl we love, because she’s braindead in the real world.

Young: What?? Something bad is going to happen to [Idol]??

Future: Who? Oh, no, a different girl. Lol, I forgot I cared about [Idol]. Even though it was basically the only characterization that you have.

Young: Oh.

Future: Anyway there’s gonna be a lightning strike at the festival on Date, and I need you to keep her away from that. Here’s my suite of ultra-cool Hacking Tools that, from the inside of a simulated reality, are pretty much just superpowers.

(gives him a MAGIC HAND with which he can summon matter into existence, limited by his creativity and his desire not to break masquerade and deviate the entire simulation.)

(Editor’s Note: …note that obviously everything is already FUBAR because of the speed-of-light propagation of minor changes; remember Dizziness of Freedom.)

Future: Oh, also, you should go meet her and fall in love so that our relationship actually happens—here’s my journal from those periods. Don’t fuck it up, ok?

Young: Wait—

Future: Gotta go before the COHERENCE COPS get me! (disappears)

Young: …what

Young: are coherence cops real

The Coherence Cops are real. They are invisible to everyone except for the protagonist, but are subtly changing things to return the system to its predetermined state. They appear as a bunch of fox-headed men in suits, which seems pretty baroque for a checksum, but what the fuck do I know.

A romantic comedy montage ensues, in which our protagonist does a milquetoast job wooing a girl that he knows conclusively he will be able to woo, even while he holds a literal walkthrough for their romance. This is a creepy and weird power asymmetry, but she doesn’t really have characterization or lines either, so I suspect that her experience was not a significant concern for the author.

Eventually they fall in love, if you can call it that, and our hero is prepared for the big night. Also, now he can summon all kinds of cool stuff out of his MAGIC HAND, like gold and swords and motorcycles, and what the fuck else would you even need in a shonen anime.

They meet up in the aquarium, or something.

Young: [Girl]! Don’t go to the festival tonight!

Girl: Okay.

Young: …kinda thought this would be harder, huh

Then arrives FUTURE Young.

Future Young: Awesome, you did it!

Young: We did it, superbuddy!

Future Young: Yyyyyyeah. Anyway I’ll be taking her now. Thanks!

Young: Uh

Girl: ???

Future Young: Yoink!

And then he yoinks his teenage girlfriend’s brainstate out of the simulation and leaves his past self to die. The Coherence Cops flag this simulation as hopelessly decoherent, and queue it for deletion.

Big letters appear in the sky: DECOHERENT SIMULATION. TIME UNTIL DELETION 7:59:59…7:59:58…

Young: …what the hell, man

In the Outside World, Future Self is in a hospital room, plugging the old brainstate into GIRL’s comatose body. She wakes up.

Future Self: It was all worth it. For you…

Future Self: The last thing you remember is probably being struck by lightning at the cultural festival…?

Girl: No, the last thing I remember is you showing up and wrenching me out of reality. Where is Young?

Future Self: …huh, ok, I didn’t think this through.

Big letters appear in the sky: DECOHERENT SIMULATION. TIME UNTIL DELETION 7:59:59…7:59:58…

Future Self: ……….what, no, what, god, why

Girl: We’re in another level of simulation!

Future Self: aaaaaaaaaa

Then our Young protagonist (who was in the aquarium in World-2) uses his suite of HACKING TOOLS to jump up to World-1 (in the hospital room). He is pissed.

Young: Hey dick, remember how you abducted Girl and left me to die

Future Self: Hey be cool man, I’m you from the future

Young: Well then I turn into an asshole

Future Self: But we did it for love!

And then they get chased on their motorcycle by a monstrous horde of Coherence Kitsune.

At some point, Future Self heroically redeems himself, saying “I’ll hold them off”, and the other two kids go on ahead without him. He probably dies, or something.

Then, they use their suite of Sweet Hacking Tools (presumably a powerglove and a black hoodie) to jump into World-0. Girl disappears…

…to be replaced by her adult self, who is a doctor! Because this entire movie was just Future Her going through a convoluted process to rescue his brainstate!

And they’re on the moon!!

3/10, it had two cool ideas but it also had contrived Hollywood execution. Skip.

Deca-Dence: Could've Been Good

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Deca-Dence: Really needed an editorial round

Deca-dence is a regrettably-named, generic-ass post-apocalypse story about a mostly-extinct humanity trawling about a ravaged desert earth in their colossal mobile fortress.

There are only about a thousand humans left,

They’re attacked daily by subterranean monsters

And defended by sorta-magic-warriors

Our protagonist wants to be a warrior pretty bad, but can’t because she has a prosthetic arm

I sure wonder if she’ll somehow end up becoming a warrior by the end of the show.

But the twist is that the entire thing is a competitive MMO for higher-planar beings

Control chips are installed in every human at birth

The monsters are made in a factory and released at specific times for “events”

The Highdwellers remotely pilot humans for their entertainment

Human law enforcement is directly controlled by the Highdwellers to ensure that everyone keeps the giant fortress in working order

And despite that cool twist it’s still kinda lame

Really just…needed an editor.

If you’re going to have a generic-ass anime setting be your setting (as a deliberate design choice because the real setting is a larger universe which contains that setting) then you ought to reveal that in episode one

I abandoned this anime because its first episode was so generic, and I only came back for a second look upon reading the wikipedia

And even so, there’s just a bunch of design choices that are…regrettable.

The mega-trawler, which contains the entire bastion of humanity, sometimes fires up its reactor core in order to rocket-launch a giant fist and sock the monster in the face.

The Highdwellers, when they’re in their natural, digital universe, recharge themselves with some kind of green fuel rods. There’s a very dramatic moment in which our secondary protagonist, an assassin working for the Game Corp, has decided to commit suicide by starvation, by not eating fuel rods. However, upon interacting with our primary protagonist, he decides he wants to live again, so he shoves a fuel rod in his ass and charges up.

Why did someone decide that these creatures would have little butthole charging ports
And why did someone greenlight this dramatic Not Suicide moment being so highly anal

The mascot character is an ugly mutant dog—but it’s not so hideous that it’s a thing, y’know? Made In Abyss had a really grotesque character that kinda hurt to look at, but that was the point. This is just a…kinda blobby dog. (Pictured above, for reference.)

Control, the Game: A Review

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Control, the Game: Starts strong, heavy-handed, meh.

Control: 7/10, SCP foundation by way of Hollywood. Good work with the credits fakeout, good work with neat non-Euclidean geometry; too much reliance on stock supernatural tropes such as the Astral plane, and that evil chant shoulda been more coherently sinister instead of lolrandom

(Great work with the material supplements; I read and enjoyed most of them)

I see what the intent was with the protagonist’s journey of “I don’t want this position” transitioning into “this is my fight”, but we didn’t have a good sense of characterization for why that’s narratively significant. Similarly, it being revealed that Trench was how the Hiss got in was not a particularly revelatory moment; I didn’t really care.

The buildup from villain Dylan towards “go and see the candidate program, see what this foundation really does” was exciting, but, yall chickened out and didn’t have a wing of tortured children. Pussies.

I would have liked it if someone less…high school theater had written the dialogue; I get that you want to show these characters’ motivations, but consider showing them, rather than having people declaim them

Polaris was, in general, a pretty neat thing—but I had misunderstood and thought that Polaris was me, and that the commands this lady were receiving were my controller input. I was prepared for a level of mindfuck that wasn’t present, and I have no one to blame but myself

7/10, the people involved didn’t trust the audience to get the high concept horror stuff

Also the puzzles weren’t very good

Beastars: What Even?

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

(Contains spoilers)

Ok so imagine Zootopia.

This is like Zootopia, in that the show is furry as hell and focuses on the difficulties inherent in trying to organize a society in which some persons are just way, way more powerful than others, and in fact want to eat the weak,

Except it’s also a high school anime? And it’s also Twilight, with the forbidden romance between a confused girl and a tenuously-in-control-of-himself superpowered guy who is having genuine difficulty determining whether he wants to fuck or kill her.

I feel like this is two or three different shows, tbh: the opening scene makes it out like it’s going to be a murder mystery, but it turns out that scene was just a setting detail—sometimes, one of the students goes berserk and eats another student, and that’s just kind of a thing that happens, and no one likes it but everyone mostly forgets about it.

(I sincerely can’t tell whether this show is pretty smart or pretty sloppy.)

The characterization is really quite good—no one is a villain, exactly, even the assholes; people rationally pursue their self-interest, even when their self-interest is ridiculous or they themselves aren’t very smart.

The worldbuilding is pretty good, despite the inherent uphill-climb of trying to create a society which contains a hundred different anthropomorphic animals. It has nice, realistic feeling details, like a black market trade in meat and a lot of self-hating carnivores and a really grisly, uncomfortable scene where an old antelope offers to let some predator species eat off his fingers for money.

It jumps between anime tropes and shocking brutality really fast, though?

Around episode 9 it takes a sharp left and goes from PG to hard R, because apparently the lion mob has a whole kidnap-and-devour racket going on, and the city mostly pretends this doesn’t happen for the sake of minimizing tension between predator/prey species. And it’s a weirdly sexual thing.

And apparently there are places where they raise animals without language so that they’re, y’know, animals, and you can buy those animals and eat them?

And there are guns in this world, but very few of the prey species carry guns?

Man, I don’t know how much this show is a decent portrayal of different species’ psychologies—which also seems subtly possible—vs just sloppiness.

Its portrayal of high school bullshit that makes character sense, and is reasonable for the people doing it is, like 10/10, on par with Big Mouth. The worldbuilding is…I think it’s good??

The way it jumps between high school drama anime plots and…mob violence thrillers is…not great, but I guess they were trying to communicate something about the world. Or they changed authors halfway through.

Probably worth watching, 6/10, but be prepared to be uncomfortable.

Time Warped: A Book Report

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Time Warped; a Book Report

This is a book about the human perception of time. It was a little too pop sci for me, but it has some cool notes.

People with a fever or otherwise high temperatures appear to perceive time as being dilated; they estimate a minute has elapsed when it has in fact been 35 seconds.
That cool “bullet time” effect that people anecdotally get when experiencing terror? It doesn’t seem to actually speed up human perception.

The experiment (by my neuroscience-crush David Eagleman) is thus:
1. Attach many digital clocks to the side of a building. They are displaying numbers, but the numbers are changing faster than humans can read.
2. Sparta-kick your volunteer backwards off the roof of the building. Ask them, afterwards, whether they could read the clocks.
3. They couldn’t.
(They tried this experiment on a rollercoaster too, but the participants weren’t scared enough. And, obviously, David Eagleman did this himself.)
An experiment where you have someone listen to very rapid tones, and people tell you whether it was two or one tone that you heard; people are better at differentiating sounds than they are lights. The human ear-precision threshold is something outrageous like 1/500ths of a second, but the visual differentiation is more than an order of magnitude worse. (I assume that experimenters controlled for potential cofounders like echoes and reflections, but I haven’t read the study.)
Hummingbirds have a weirdly precise internal clock that is, by default, tuned to tracking 20 minutes. (This is the nectar-reload time on many flowers). It’s not hard-coded, though; if you put hummingbirds in a garden of 10-minute-flowers, they learn to track that very accurately as well.
A person in a vegetative state can still learn classical conditioning so long as they have an intact cerebellum.

You have a machine which puffs a little puff of air into a person’s eye. This causes people to blink. You play a tone 600ms before puffing the air into their eye.

The person learns to blink at precisely the correct time to avoid this—even if they aren’t, like, otherwise conscious.

A person with cerebellar damage does not learn this.

The discoverer of this finding wants to use it for diagnosing which persistent vegetative states are recoverable.
Ten percent of people can just feel their heartbeat all the time (including myself)
Dopamine seems to be involved in time perception; people on anti-dopa drugs underestimate how much time has passed, while people on dopamine agonists (e.g. meth) overestimate it.

I have some concerns about research methodology, given that haloperidol probably just makes you have low-brain-activity in general, and cocaine makes you feel great.
“A moment” is pretty universally considered to be 2-3 seconds. Handshakes need to last almost precisely 3 seconds or people feel weird.

The Sack Lunch Bunch

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was looking for the surreality of Sack Lunch Bunch to cohere into a larger narrative—an overlay of some alien dimension, burgeoning psychic powers, or a sealed cthulu—and when it became clear it was not doing that, my curiosity was slaked.

Weird-for-the-sake-of-weird is a very mild, more intellectual presentation of Omg-So-Random

The show is not bad by any stretch of the word, but it is clearly not for me

5/10

Media Recommendations 2019

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A list which is to fill you with delight, like a menu. It is definitely not a todo-list to feel guilty about.

Erased

This is an anime series about an adult who hates his life and realizes that he ruined his chances of happiness by doing his childhood wrong. But don’t worry, there’s time travel! He ghost-possesses his child self, and then he and his friends intervene to stop some seriously dark shit happening in his small-town.

My anime pick of 2017.

Made in Abyss

This is an anime series about kids who notice that adults are useless (at best) and decide they need to spelunk I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Hell all by themselves. Well-written, legitimately distressing peril ensues.

My anime pick of 2018.

Worth the Candle

A story about a kind-of-milquetoast teenager being transported into a fantasy world that bears an uncanny resemblance to the dungeons and dragons games that he’s been running. Perhaps it is only I who connects so hard with this, but holy shit I connect with this really hard. Incredible worldbuilding, excellent plot. Protagonist gets better. (Written by Alexander Wales, if that sweetens the pot for ya.)

This is my fiction pick for 2019.

Erogamer

This is HPMOR but it’s about sex and being unattractive but having hope for the future. Mildly life-changing in the way that HPMOR was.

This is my fiction pick of 2018 (and note that 2018 was a bitterly contested year for fiction.)

Practical Guide to Evil

Worm, but fantasy. Huge, sprawling webfic with adequately intelligent characters. This is a universe in which narrative tropes apply as probabilistic laws, and everyone is aware of that and working to exploit them.

Feels pretty Young Adult in the first book, but it gets better. Gets worse again later, too; YMMV.

The Dark Wizard of Donkerk

If you like alexanderwales, you’ll like this. He wrote a big book! It has all of the excellent worldbuilding and well-reasoned magic systems we have come to expect from notorious A.W.

Shadows of the Limelight

Another Alexander Wales fic. A world where everyone has a superpower, and the strength of that superpower intensifies depending on how famous or infamous you are.

People pursue incentives rationally.

The first two Madoka Magica movies (4 hours in total)

These two movies, “Madoka Magica Puella Magi: Beginnings” and “MMPM: Eternal” are the supercut of the Madoka Magica anime. This is about a group of high school girls who make a contract with an alien entity, empowering them to fight evil. It is common to say “wtf is going on” for the first two hours.

These two movies are, together, my favorite christmas movie.

The Northern Caves

“An online fanforum tries to understand a fiction writer’s incomprehensible last book.” Death and cosmic horror ensue.

Bears the classic Nostalgiabrist stamp of slow, brooding prose and being a little up its own ass, but this one worked for me.

Homestuck

Ah, Homestuck. A story/forum game about a group of 13-year-old friends who accidentally annihilate the universe.

It gets tolerable around page 50, and enjoyable around page…500? 1,000? There’s 10,000 pages, though, plus twenty plus hours of movie, plus 200,000 words in the books, plus 100 plus hours of music, plus twenty hours of gameplay, plus ten years of convention culture. It is a sprawling juggernaut sincerely without compare.

Promised Neverland

Literally the darkest setting I’ve ever encountered, uh, bar none? You will watch this, and think “yeah, I know something bad is coming”, but it was executed really really well and something very bad is coming. Very intelligent, rational characters doing lethal-stakes counterintelligence games against one another.

My anime pick of 2019.

The Samurai Jack Reboot (Season 5)

This was some engaging-ass storytelling. Genndy Tartakovsky is really, really good at making tense, compelling scenes with no dialogue.

It’s not necessary that you’ve ever watched Samurai Jack before, and indeed it’s perhaps better than you not.

Mind Control University

A rational, intelligent, Lawful Good protagonist with a life-defining fetish for mind control is invited to a multiuniversal battle royale. Incredible worldbuilding ensues, with very intelligent characters being clever and ruthless at one another.

This is great. (This is also very horny.) I want to play the videogame of this.

Cordyceps: Too Clever For Their Own Good

“Someone wakes up in a mysterious facility with no memory of how they got there. This turns out to be the ideal state of affairs, and is swiftly ruined.”

…and then it actually delivers on that tagline, which I found delightful from a craft perspective.

Kokkoku: Moment by Moment

Basically a rationalfic anime about a family who has a magic ability to stop time for everyone but them.

It defies common anime tropes about “the villain has to be evil, and also needs to lose composure and start maniacally laughing sometimes”. Characters make intelligent choices sometimes, even.

Primal

Ugh, maybe I’m just a slut for Genndy Tartovsky’s stuff, but Holy shit, after every episode of Primal I have to sit down and just process for like fifteen minutes

The show has no dialogue; the show is not especially subtle. The show hits hard, every episode, evoking the blunt terror of a deeply unpredictable world.

A Daring Synthesis

Imagine a Worm crackfic, with the standard crackfic protagonist; an absurdly overpowered memelord spouting off disaffected one-liners.

But now imagine that only the protagonist is like this, and everything else in the world is not a crackfic, and they are in fact weirded out and cringing at the behavior of this clown.

And then imagine that the collision of the OP Coolguy Protagonist with the real world is very bloody and disquieting as Reality Ensues, and this collision gives him PTSD and teachable moments, and he starts to apprehend what a regrettable bozo he is…

This story is somehow, despite all odds, the Actual Best worm fanfic. I think this is the funniest story I’ve ever read, in terms of comedy-per-word, beating out Pratchett, Harry Potter and the Natural 20 and the FimFiction Hard Reset.

(Stop reading at the end of Book One, though. I mean it.)

Also worth your time

Harry Potter and the Natural 20
Hard Reset (FIMFiction)
The All Guardsmen Party

Worm fanfic:

Camera Shy
Weaver Nine
Cenotaph (of course)

Humpermonkey’s Ghost Stories

Sure, you know about Military Sci-fi. But do you know about Military horror?