reactionblogging

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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brin-bellway:

Red Panda reaction-blogging update:

I listened to “Death From Above” and “The Judas Boats” on my traditional Saturday afternoon walk yesterday.

First of all, while I miss the primeverse*, I think I am starting to warm up to this one, or maybe it’s starting to warm up to itself and I’m sensing that. The Red Panda is starting to feel more…himself, in spots, and I’m not sure if that’s a character thing, or if Taylor’s gotten more confident at voice acting in later episodes, or what.

Also…okay, look. For my readers who have not listened to the Red Panda Adventures, and who–like me–are often very sensitive to authors’ politics shining through in their fiction, I want to assure you that it is pretty subtle. There’s no anvils, there’s almost no pressuring even by the standards of someone who can hear SJ dogwhistles a little too well.

That being said, there is nevertheless a clear sense, while listening to the primeverse Red Panda Adventures, that a liberal wrote this. Not enough to be pressury, just enough to be…home-y. I get the feeling that, while I may not know what makes this author tick (I often have trouble with grokking what makes a given liberal tick), I do know what he considers socially acceptable and what he doesn’t, and I can trust him to stay within those bounds as much as he can given the setting, and to provide a sense that the narrative disapproves in those times he can’t.

The pilots don’t feel like a liberal wrote them. They feel like…like an apathetic centrist wrote them. Someone whose birth subculture has not much overt bigotry but a lot of low-level background stuff, who might very well come to the conclusion that this was still horrible if he ever gave it some serious thought, but who never has given it that thought. There’s these little moments in the pilots of…other people might call them “microaggressions”, but I think of them as culture shock. Those little off-balance moments where you realise that your interlocutor’s standards of social acceptability are different from yours, that you can’t predict (can’t trust) what they’re going to do and say as well as you thought you could.

It’s not my place to ask**, but I wonder if maybe Taylor was an apathetic centrist at the time, and moved to liberal-land sometime in the mid-00’s. If he did, it’s fascinating that it shows so clearly. If not, it’s still very interesting that it feels like he did.

Alternatively, maybe it feels apathetic-centrist because it was intended to be played on mainstream radio for a “mainstream” (thus presumed apathetic-centrist) audience, and in podcasts he could be more himself. I think I’m going to have to listen to the Season One Spectacular again, particularly the bits about how the Red Panda came to be.

—

*I was going to switch to some other podcast for my walks for a while once I was done with Red Panda ones, but I think I might have to go straight into a re-listen.

**I don’t really want other people to ask, but it occurred to me that somebody might take it upon themself to ask anyway. If so, please do not link me to him. There’s some stuff in my Red Panda tag that would be very awkward for the author to see.

(Okay, upon reflection I can think of one anvil: the Chinese-laundromat bit in The Crime Cabal. But it was short, and also in a book rather than the main audio series.)

—

Also, @theshadiertwin, I wouldn’t have noticed the hurt/comfort-ness and Red/Baboon/Anna potential on my own, but I think I can see what you mean.

Tags:

#oh look an update #Red Panda Adventures

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Red Panda reaction-blogging update:

I listened to “Death From Above” and “The Judas Boats” on my traditional Saturday afternoon walk yesterday.

First of all, while I miss the primeverse*, I think I am starting to warm up to this one, or maybe it’s starting to warm up to itself and I’m sensing that. The Red Panda is starting to feel more…himself, in spots, and I’m not sure if that’s a character thing, or if Taylor’s gotten more confident at voice acting in later episodes, or what.

Also…okay, look. For my readers who have not listened to the Red Panda Adventures, and who–like me–are often very sensitive to authors’ politics shining through in their fiction, I want to assure you that it is pretty subtle. There’s no anvils, there’s almost no pressuring even by the standards of someone who can hear SJ dogwhistles a little too well.

That being said, there is nevertheless a clear sense, while listening to the primeverse Red Panda Adventures, that a liberal wrote this. Not enough to be pressury, just enough to be…home-y. I get the feeling that, while I may not know what makes this author tick (I often have trouble with grokking what makes a given liberal tick), I do know what he considers socially acceptable and what he doesn’t, and I can trust him to stay within those bounds as much as he can given the setting, and to provide a sense that the narrative disapproves in those times he can’t.

The pilots don’t feel like a liberal wrote them. They feel like…like an apathetic centrist wrote them. Someone whose birth subculture has not much overt bigotry but a lot of low-level background stuff, who might very well come to the conclusion that this was still horrible if he ever gave it some serious thought, but who never has given it that thought. There’s these little moments in the pilots of…other people might call them “microaggressions”, but I think of them as culture shock. Those little off-balance moments where you realise that your interlocutor’s standards of social acceptability are different from yours, that you can’t predict (can’t trust) what they’re going to do and say as well as you thought you could.

It’s not my place to ask**, but I wonder if maybe Taylor was an apathetic centrist at the time, and moved to liberal-land sometime in the mid-00’s. If he did, it’s fascinating that it shows so clearly. If not, it’s still very interesting that it feels like he did.

Alternatively, maybe it feels apathetic-centrist because it was intended to be played on mainstream radio for a “mainstream” (thus presumed apathetic-centrist) audience, and in podcasts he could be more himself. I think I’m going to have to listen to the Season One Spectacular again, particularly the bits about how the Red Panda came to be.

—

*I was going to switch to some other podcast for my walks for a while once I was done with Red Panda ones, but I think I might have to go straight into a re-listen.

**I don’t really want other people to ask, but it occurred to me that somebody might take it upon themself to ask anyway. If so, please do not link me to him. There’s some stuff in my Red Panda tag that would be very awkward for the author to see.

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #Gregg Taylor’s Twitter looks exactly as I would expect a Twitter to look #given only that it was run by the same person who wrote the Red Panda Adventures #mostly tweets about the shows and other fandoms and home life #but with occasional standard liberal fare mixed in #oh look an original post #reactionblogging #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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Interlude 8, Page 2 (Opening Volley)

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{Title link: https://parhelioncomic.com/comic/interlude-8-page-2-opening-volley/ }}

parhelioncomic:

Ahh, Basilisk, it’s been ages since you’ve directly appeared. Welcome back!

Reblogs are greatly appreciated!

Start of chapter | Read from the beginning | Patreon (Read one page into the future)

Why do people use video chats with Basilisk, anyway? Seems like it’s asking for trouble, and “death by videophone software glitch” is not one of the better ways to go.

(Limitations of the webcomic medium?)

Tags:

#Parhelion #reply via reblog #death tw

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~ Brin ~ 5 Comments

I watched the first issue (both parts) of Season 12 of the Red Panda Adventures yesterday! I did say something about maybe doing more reaction-blogging, so:

God, I’d forgotten just how bad I am at stories with pictures, especially stories with pictures and words, and especially especially moving pictures. (It could be worse: they could be moving photographs rather than drawings.)

Pictures are so complicated; even if I can take my time, I usually miss a bunch of stuff*, and it only gets worse if it’s time-limited. It probably doesn’t help that I’m used to Red Panda episodes being purely audio: I suspect it strengthens my tendency to treat videos as basically audioplays, just with minor visual enhancement (getting the broad strokes of the imagery and missing all of the details).

(This is one of the reasons I have a lot of trouble with any webcomic** more complicated than XKCD, the other reason being that even steady webcomics update so slowly that by the time they reach the end of a plot thread, you’ve forgotten what the beginning was. When you combine these two effects, you tend to end up with climactic moments relying on minor details that I haven’t seen in ten months and also didn’t even notice at the time. I’m sure there must be people webcomics work for, but they really do not mesh well with my brain.)

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I did have fun. I just had to strike a compromise between “overwhelmed by quantity of sensory input” and “not getting the full effect of the story”, and I’m a bit out of practice at that.

Maybe I should try watching these episodes multiple times, shifting my focus on rewatches. They’re short enough that it wouldn’t take ages: I could probably even do two watches of an issue consecutively without burnout. (Even without soaking in Everything, watching videos gets mentally taxing after a while. One standard-length TV episode (~45 min) is somewhere around my limit.)

—

*Fun fact: image descriptions have a curb-cut effect. I’m (effectively) not blind, but I often find I understand an image (especially a comic) a lot better after I’ve read an image description, because the description pointed out important bits that I didn’t notice. (I wonder if I should try described video sometime.)

**I haven’t really tried non-web comics.

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #(okay so this was more about my relationship with video-based media in general than about RPA specifically but still) #oh look an original post #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I was researching video conferencing recently for a school assignment #and the supporters praise it for conveying zillions of microexpressions and whatnot #which to me seems like a *downside* #video chats immerse you in so much input that your brain *has* to dump most of it #but you have limited control over which parts get dumped #and your conversational partner doesn’t know what made the cut and what didn’t #ideally you want to prevent people from sending messages you’re not going to receive #so that they *know* you don’t know it #(and if your partner is better at processing large quantities of real-time information than you are) #(they have an advantage over you) #(which they might exploit) #tag rambles #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging

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I saw Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them a couple days ago.

(spoilers behind cut)

Thing I liked: the amount of short-range Apparition in this movie. Characters routinely use teleporting to get past grates, to jump from one building rooftop to the next, to dodge attacks. This is a very Correct use of teleportation and I approve.

Thing I did not like: the amount of Obliviation in this movie. Like, even more than I was expecting. Were we supposed to consider the mass mind-wiping of an entire city a happy ending?

I spent most of the movie worried about whether Newt’s Muggle companion* was going to make it through intact. At the end, the President of Wizarding America is like “You’re going to have to obliviate him, but I’ll give you a chance to say goodbye”, and then she and all her lackeys walk away. Now, to someone who is already thinking about the Eleventh Doctor, this is clearly code for “I’m going to look the other way while you smuggle him to safety”. Except Kowalski then does a 180 on his previously-expressed desire to stay in touch with the wizarding world, says some “I was never supposed to know, this is how things should be” bullshit, and deliberately walks out into the rainstorm of Lethe water. *sigh*

(It didn’t just remind me of Doctor Who, you know, but of a movie I saw when I was a child. Another movie with a setting hidden amongst ordinary New Yorkers, and which was far, far more horrifying than it thought it was.)

(when the monsters came for me, they did not wield claws or teeth or guns, but those little silvery sticks)

*My brain insists on referring to Kowalski as a “companion”, because Newt has the same accent as Matt Smith and once that’s gotten you to start seeing Newt as the Doctor, it turns out to be kind of hard to stop.

Tags:

#in conclusion: #entertaining movie #will make you side-eye your water bottle #amnesia cw #oh look an original post #Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

So for the past two years or so I’ve been slowly working my way through the Red Panda Adventures. Recently I reached episode 100. Towards the end, our heroes are surrounded by a group of hostile sapient zombies (long story). There are too many to take them all out in combat, so the Red Panda uses his mind-control powers to put them to sleep. This being a Christmas special, he begins this process by calming them through evoking the joy and contentment of Christmas.

“You idiot!” I yelled. “You’re begging for an abreaction!”

(I managed not to actually yell this out loud. I was out for a walk, as is my custom when listening to the Red Panda Adventures, and I didn’t want the neighbours to get weirded out.)

For those of you who don’t speak hypnosis jargon, basically an “abreaction” is when a hypnotised person responds to a suggestion in an unexpected manner, generally because they interpreted it in a way the hypnotist didn’t intend, or something about the phrasing reminded them of something and sent their mind off on a different track, stuff like that. It doesn’t necessarily go badly 100% of the time, but–like all forms of miscommunication–it’s usually best avoided when possible, and this one definitely would go badly if it happened.

The trouble is, not everyone associates Christmas with joy and contentment. All it takes is one bitter Jewish kid (*ahem*) or something, one person whose associations with Christmas are negative, and the thing’s going to blow up in his face.

Now, hypnosis as practised in the Red-Panda-verse is very different from the real thing, so in the abstract it’s not inherently a bad thing to have this in-universe expert hypnotist doing things that even I, a person with no training who simply travels in the right circles to overhear hypnotists talking shop with each other, recognise as mistakes. But in this case, the differences between our universe and his make this worse. In the real world, if your induction backfires because it turns out your subject hates Christmas, you just feel kind of awkward and embarrassed and have hopefully learned a valuable lesson about not assuming everyone likes Christmas. But because he’s weaponising his psychic powers, his suggestions have to work, first try, without a hitch, without discussing it with the subject in advance, or he might die. It is, literally, vitally important for him to keep his inductions as generic and universal as possible, and not pull risky, your-mileage-may-vary shit like the spirit of fucking Christmas.

(For the record, he got lucky and it didn’t backfire on anyone. Still a stupid risk.)

To be fair, it’s easier for me to spot this because, as a bitter Jewish kid myself, I didn’t have to put myself in anyone else’s place to see why this was risky. I can tell you right now, anyone tries an induction on me based on the feeling of Christmas (foreignness and resentment and the particular type of loneliness one feels when surrounded by a crowd of happy people whose joy one will never share*), it ain’t gonna go well.

*You know what, Christmas could actually make a decent metaphor for being undead, or vice versa.

Tags:

#oh look an original post #Red Panda Adventures #(I have no idea if that tag is in general use or what) #(I’ve been avoiding looking into the fandom until I’ve caught up with the canon) #(so I don’t know how large or active it is) #rants #sexuality and lack thereof #(sort of) #(I mean I overthink fictional mind control kind of a lot and that’s clearly why) #(and it’s certainly why I was able to yell at him *in hypnotist jargon*) #I stuck the first paragraph in after the fact in order to adapt this post into not needing a jumping-off point #but at some point when somebody’s doing a generalised ask meme #I should totally ask them ”last time you yelled at a fictional character what were you yelling?” #Christmas #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #reactionblogging

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

In hindsight, I probably should have known that an astronomy textbook would be written by star-worshippers.

Dammit, I just want to learn some neat stuff about space and pick up some miscellaneous science credits and not be made to feel broken. Is that really so much to ask?

Tags:

#Brin is touchy about stars #was already a tag #adventures in University Land #oh look an original post

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nevermindbinarity asked: WHYYY (also the way you formatted the link was clever!)

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itsbenedict:

(I’m gonna put this in drafts and post it in a couple days, once the story’s over.)

the answer to “WHYYY” is mainly “there really wasn’t any other plausible outcome”. like, if it didn’t happen this way, it would have happened some other way, because there’s no chance in hell Arc would ever have been able to do what it took to avoid it.

(even though “what it takes to avoid it” is just “not making all these complicated strings of terrible decisions”.)

(spoilers under cut)

Keep reading

(more spoilers)

Yeah, I was wondering at first why the hell anyone would believe O when they claimed to be J, since surely they’ve proven themself to be completely untrustworthy from the staff’s POV. And then I thought, it doesn’t really matter in the end. Arc could never be satisfied with the situation as it stands. They would always be determined to get their memory back, die trying, or–as it happens–both. If they didn’t die to the fungus on iteration O, they’d die to it in a future iteration, or get themself shot when they pissed off one of the people-with-guns one time too many. They really were doomed from the moment they were infected.

Although it’s not really enough to manifest over the few cycles we see, the process does progressively cordon off more of the brain over time

It doesn’t manifest? Was I reading too much into the fact that N can come up with a not just a plan, but a plan for how to hide their real plan, in the few seconds they have between seeing Orchard and having Orchard come after them, but O has quotes like this:

He turned to me. “Sorry- quick question- what’s your name?”

I froze. What did he need my name for?

[chain of reasoning cut for space]

“Hey. Your name. Can you tell me?” Gah! I wasn’t done thinking! I held up a finger for silence.

[more reasoning]

I’d paused too long. The guard was getting suspicious. “I’m just asking. This isn’t a trick or anything, just… what’s your name?”

And this:

Everything was happening too fast. I couldn’t stop and think through every implication of what they were saying- they kept saying things, without giving me time to analyze it! I couldn’t move, I couldn’t make a judgment- had 5 gotten her to say that somehow? Is that what someone who’d had their cover blown would say out loud? No, but- it explained 5’s behavior, it was plausible- but it could be a trick. HOW could it be a trick? What was Helium even saying, oh, she was saying more things now-

I mean, when I saw the bit about brain damage with each reset, I kind of figured the problem was that O thinks more slowly than N does.

*Potentially*, Arc could be cured with a specialized treatment plan and a really high-security facility, where they just lock them in with no human contact and no clues whatsoever, and hope they don’t work it out for themselves over months of time to think and theorize and potentially hit upon the right solution by chance. Maybe stick a lot of books and video games in there to distract them with? 

Is there a reason why keeping a patient continuously unconscious for six months wouldn’t work, or is it just impractical for them to actually do?

(At first I wondered if you could even avoid the need for amnesia by doing that, but I suppose even if it would theoretically work and they had enough supplies, it would be hard to ensure people are always completely unconscious and not dreaming of elephants.)

Tags:

#cordyceps tcftog #reply via reblog #cordyceps spoilers #not sure what happens to a thread with multiple cuts like this #we’ll find out

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

“And if you, gentle reader, have never seen a nervous rocket mechanic, complete with monkey suit, being buzzed by nine thousand demented bats and trying to beat them off with a shovel, there is something missing from your experience.”

Tags:

#out of context quotes robnost style #it is rare that I see something and think ‘…I’m going to blog this.’ #but this was one of those occasions #oh look an original post

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Voiceover on Doctor Who “next time on” preview: Don’t watch this. You can never un-see it.

Me: Okay. *closes eyes*

Tags:

#what kind of fool do you take me for #unlike those poor Zygons I have not had all relevant knowledge erased and I *can* learn from experience #and it has *never* been worthwhile to look at something I had been told to look away from #if you are very lucky looking is neither bad nor good #usually it is some level of psychologically damaging #also next week’s episode’s title is #Sleep No More #I do not like that title #that is a fucking ominous title #fuck you and your horror bullshit #(look) #(I fully believe that ‘Blink’ has a lot of objective merit) #(but I think I’m a worse person for having seen it) #(and I do not want to do that to myself again) #(horror is so utterly not for me) #(causing myself often-permanent psychological damage for fun is not something I can compute) #I *might* read Chakoteya’s transcript when it comes out #but I will try to learn from my past mistakes #and not watch it #Doctor Who #tag rambles #dw spoilers #infohazards #oh look an original post