Mastodawn

Arcadiagt5 Mar 5

@ami_angelwings no specific examples but in general gatekeeping is HORRIBLY tedious and generally nasty. “You’re not a real fan unless you’ve seen X” is just bullshit and I want no part of it.

At the other end, good natured speculation about aspects not fully explained where the participants are doing so in good humour and the knowledge that they can’t ever know for certain.

alxdre301 💤Mar 5

@arcadiagt5 @ami_angelwings it's always fucking this 😞

neatchee Mar 5

@ami_angelwings tedious? Star Wars vs Star Trek in-universe combat comparisons e.g. Millennium Falcon vs USS Enterprise

Best? Whether Lois could ever carry Superman's baby to term

Steveg58 Mar 5

@neatchee @ami_angelwings
Do people still remember "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" by Larry Niven?

Arcadiagt5 Mar 5

@Steveg58 @neatchee @ami_angelwings I do, and I still think it’s funny. :)

neatchee Mar 5

@arcadiagt5 @Steveg58 @ami_angelwings I was thinking about this scene from Mallrats: https://youtu.be/wqwUdp5-2D8?t=35s

Also the cookie stand is not part of the food court

Mallrats (3/9) Movie CLIP - Superman's Baby (1995) HD

YouTube

Steveg58 Mar 5

@neatchee @arcadiagt5 @ami_angelwings
Okay, I had never seen that. 😎

Arcadiagt5 Mar 5

@Steveg58 @neatchee @ami_angelwings New to me too! It’s our lucky 10000 day today apparently… https://xkcd.com/1053/ #XKCD

Ten Thousand

xkcd

Rosy Mar 5

@ami_angelwings lots of websites give a specific birthday to my favorite character but there is no official source for this birthday and it contradicts her official zodiac sign. not a back and forth argument exactly but I did send a long explanation with sources to an anime site explaining why they should remove the random birthday but they never did. it frustrates me

Andrew Mar 5

@ami_angelwings an argument over what aircraft was the first SST

(It’s the DC-8)

@ami_angelwings For me probably the most tedious would be Apple. They've spent an enormous focus since almost the beginning on marketing and it has worked.

People will fight and die for them. They release a thing that is just the same basic function something else already does, apply limits to it, charge 3x as much for it, and then slap on a flashy exterior and people sleep in tents for a week in freezing temperatures to be the first in line to buy it.

People wax on constant nostalgia for various things that just weren't as good. They put Apple on a pedestal so high you can barely see it anymore and fight tooth and nail against anyone suggesting maybe the corporate garden isn't all beds of roses.

I suggest alternatives and get ripped into.

@ami_angelwings As a side note, this applies to a lot of fanboyism in a lot of things and tech is definitely high up the ladder in that regard. For example, nVidia fanboys insisting AMD is the worst thing ever made when, ultimately in a game, they're almost the exact same thing, just one sometimes is faster than the other in a particular generation. (nVidia pulled ahead for now, but at the cost of ridiculous price tags, high power usage, and just generally being unfriendly towards consumers, so... I really don't get the fanboyism. But then AMD has had their negative moments too... No one is perfect. That's the nature of tech! No one belongs on a pedestal.)

@ami_angelwings I'm having troubles remembering a specific example of my favorite fandom/arguments, but one thing I truly love is getting into deep speculation about things.

Take, for example, the game Stray. There's... a lot of background to that game that isn't immediately obvious. I have a very specific theory about what happened to all the humans (I don't know if it counts as a spoiler or not, so I won't say it in this post) and how things got the way they are. Plus there's some easily missable stuff like exactly how the Zurks came about. If all you do is the minimum quest-wise and then spend the rest of the time knocking flower pots down you'll totally miss stuff like that. And it makes for some really fun discussions.

This one isn't my favorite though. Just one of many.

@ami_angelwings I think the main thing I like to speculate about is what happened to the humans. Of course, the fact is the Zurk ultimately killed everyone (presumably while still just a really prevalent bacteria. You could pretty much just blowtorch them out at the end there.)

But consider our little "AI" assistant who was so obviously once a human.

Suppose actually that's what all the robots actually are and how they got that way. Suppose that's why they all have weird human habits that the game sort of lets us believe they merely developed from observation. There was obviously a transfer process to get consciousness into the helper we see from the beginning and it was obviously incomplete.

You see strange machines around here and there too...

@ami_angelwings As a supporting point to my theory, when you get to the sealed off area, all the companion bots inside are as generic and unthinking as could ever be imagined. They had been running all that time doing absolutely nothing but repeating the same tasks over and over robotically. They have absolutely no personality whatsoever and never once thought to paint or play board games or anything else. Just clean.

When trying to transfer people, they wouldn't have been able to reach that area to transfer anyone into them. Thus they remained forever just as they originally were. The secret of the robots developing personalities was not simply time alone.

Thus every robot we see up until that point is actually a transferred human who forgot

PixelJones Mar 5

@ami_angelwings
A cinemaphile/cinematography YouTuber I greatly respect (a true expert on film) argued that High-Frame-Rate movies are a gimmicky abomination that will NEVER create watchable films. I briefly and gently suggested that he could be right but the same was said before about every technological advancement in film (sound, color, 3D, IMAX, digital projection, etc.) He came back at me with paragraphs and paragraphs of criticism questioning my utter lack of knowledge, whether I'd seen any good films at all and generally doubting I had any good sense or taste. Once a few of his fans piled on with insults, nothing I said with good humor, humility and a respectful tone could diminish the collective hate coming my way. I thought we'd at least get to a agree-to-disagree resolution but I was left with no choice but to exit the discussion in shame.

Egret Mar 5

@PixelJones @ami_angelwings The shame was rightly theirs.

CT Mar 5

@PixelJones @ami_angelwings I’m remembering that the guy who always disagreed with me was a “film school guy”. Even if the topic isn’t movies, maybe it’s just their personalities? 😝

To be fair, I would always crush him in every argument. But he WOULD tell me I’m an idiot squared at every opportunity, and flex whatever minimal connection his degree had to anything.

PixelJones Mar 5

@ami_angelwings
Some of the most interesting arguments keep popping up around the question whether you can continue to love a body of work (Harry Potter, the Ender's Game Saga, Dilbert, Neil Gaman, etc) even when confronted with the hostile homophobia, transphobia, regressive political views and sexual abuse of their creator. I've been surprised a few times that people are willing mostly to engage this question with some nuance and empathy. True fans can understand you having to reject the work you love because of its author and also accept someone who clings dearly to the meaning that a beloved work holds for them while ignoring the abject flaws of its author.

PixelJones Mar 5

@ami_angelwings
My personal opinion is that the work stands apart and has a life of its own beyond the author ... unless revelations about the author expose darker meanings and intentions buried in the work. Sometimes ideas or scenes you thought were accidents or ironic or pointed humor turn out to be true insights into the author's inner demons. So, those works can't help but get retroactively poisoned by what you know too late.

@PixelJones I'm very much with you on the Death of the Author, a work of art stands outside of the artist and one does not influence the other afterwards

but there's an additional layer of nuance that capitalism adds, where the *purchase* of an artwork *does* involve the artist, as they profit from the sale. How much that bothers a person is obviously an individual thing, but it's an important part of the conversation IMO.

Robert Hutchinson Mar 5

@ami_angelwings Most tedious might have been that a certain VN/anime character was transgender.

Had to deal with everything from "Japan has femboys, not trans women" to "it's not what the author wrote" (it's probably not what they MEANT to write but they absolutely fuckin' wrote it) to the actual guy who translated it into English saying "nah, he's a man". That last part was when I noped out.

Rosy Mar 5

@ertchin I've seen this happen over and over again in different fandoms. It makes me cringe.

Robert Hutchinson Mar 5

@ami_angelwings Most interesting, hmm. I'll go with the broad question of "what the hell is happening in Deltarune?", because I've found a couple of places that are willing to discuss any and all theories but also willing to acknowledge that many of the theories are Not It.

It's actually helped me (I think) be a little less tedious in my own insistence on certain arguments.

zhinxy Mar 5

@ami_angelwings "why doesn't Batman kill the Joker/buy crime" is most tedious, most interesting, otoh?... Hmmm 🤔

Every Other Dracula Mar 5

@zhinxy @ami_angelwings I still maintain that a better question is, why doesn't Harley Quinn kill the Joker?

Phantom Kitty Mar 6

@zhinxy @ami_angelwings Given how often that Joker escapes, I am surprised that Batman has not asked Superman to send Joker to the Phantom Zone. It stays within Batman's no killing rule and puts the Joker some place where he can't escape.

zhinxy 3d ago

@phantomkitty @ami_angelwings this happens in the Lego Batmsn Movie! But Superman is pretty strict about not using the zone for Earth threats in mainstream stuff!

@ami_angelwings the most tedious one for me recently was Helldivers 2 fans trying to paint Super Earth as being "good", just because everyone else is also bad. They're strapping nuked to teens and telling them to run at the enemy, they're not "good" by any means.

@ami_angelwings one of the more interesting (but completely unimportant at the end of the day) discussions I've never had was about what constitutes a "piece of music".
Is every recording of Moonlight Sonata a new piece of music? Is the original manuscript the piece? Are reproductions of the score the same piece of music? What if they misprint a note? If someone transcribes it by ear and they hear different rhythms than Beethoven intended, have they made a new piece?

@ami_angelwings If a player makes stylistic decisions, have they altered the piece? Is it a new piece?

It seemed a lot of people considered a musical to be a piece, but no one could agree on what that piece was. Is it the original score, the first performance, the first recording, or even the first filming? Was every performance of it a performance of the same piece, or were they different?

@ami_angelwings Does the order of the songs in a show matter? Because Love Never Dies changed song order several times, and the filmed production has a different order to the album. Heck the show had substantial rewrites, is it still the same show?

It's very Ship of Theseus, but with extra layers because the Ship is a physical object, while a piece of music is... so many different conceptual objects and also several physical ones, all stacked on top of each other.

BogusMeatFactory Mar 5

@ami_angelwings the most tedious argument is "What is retro?" Its just everyone being old men shouting at clouds refusing to accept the subjectivity of the argument.

CT Mar 5

@ami_angelwings There was a guy who simply felt the need to disagree with me, no matter what. To the point where when I was complaining about battle shounen (a common enough occurrence for me) he had said something to the degree of “if you ignore the few hundred filler episodes, Naruto has a pretty tight narrative.”

Like…. My dude…😝

Jeffrey Mar 5

@ami_angelwings
Back in 88 everyone was up in arms about Michael Keaton being cast as Batman. So much hate and all of us, me included, where so wrong. I admit I was loud wrong and that Keaton is my Batman.

I get to be around college students. They are upset that the end of The Boys is close and are curious about the comic. The looks I got as the "old man" shocked them with the differences between the show and the comic. That was the best.

Chip Mar 5

@ami_angelwings “What is pixel art?”

I actually refined my definition quite a bit based on the discussions, but it just never stops coming up. You can argue it forever.

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽Mar 5

@ami_angelwings Most tedious: The Star Trek transporter argument. Almost 60 years, and it's still: You either believe in Ship of Theseus & don't believe in magic souls; or you're scared of transporters. It will never be resolved past that, and some people are literally insane over it.

Most interesting varies, I like a lot of deep dives into single-auteur books & shows; whether that's Heinlein, or Serial Experiments Lain, or whatever. Franchises have no depth.
#fandom #anime #startrek

@mdhughes @ami_angelwings

Lockely

Mar 5

It does not help that Trek muddies the waters as much as it does over the entire series lifetime.

Somehow, both Second Chances (TNG 6x24) and Realm of Fear (TNG 6x02) are both canon and entirely contradictory as to how the transporter works. You can't be both entirely conscious through the transport process and basically whole, AND be capable of duplicating into two people.

Ami Angelwings Mar 5

@lockelyfox @mdhughes yeah they get weird about the transporter buffer

According to the TNG technical manual (which I own), they take you apart molecule by molecule and that gets put in the buffer and then they physically send those molecules to wherever you beam to so they're not killing you and sending data of yourself and reconstructing you from that data

@ami_angelwings @mdhughes

Lockely

Mar 5

Oh I know, I'm Team Transporter Isn't A Murder Machine, but fuuuuuuck the writers make it hard sometimes.

Like, I quote Realm of Fear all the time because Barclay is conscious through the entire process *and* is able to pull people stuck in the phased state out of it before they go into the buffer.

Combine that with The Next Phase (TNG 5x24) and it feels to me regardless of what the tech manual says, its more likely that your matter gets phased and compressed before being *shifted* to wherever you're being sent and then uncompressed and unphased.

I love Trek but the transporters are basically magic.

Cap'n Briney 📚🏞️🌌Mar 6

@lockelyfox @mdhughes @ami_angelwings my head-canon is that you maintain consciousness so long as the matter stream remains coherent, so for most normal transporter use. It's when something out of the ordinary happens that you get stored in the buffer

Peter Cohen Mar 5

@ami_angelwings I have to think on the second question, but hands down for the first: "Star Trek is too woke."

FoolishOwl Mar 5

@ami_angelwings I don't know if it counts as tedious, exactly, but in the 90s, on the Traveller Mailing List (for the TTRPG), someone suggested that the civil war called the Rebellion could be quickly ended if someone put reactionless thrusters on an asteroid and accelerated it to a large fraction of light speed before it collided with Capitol, killing Emperor Lucan and billions of other people. Arguments about physics and ethics raged. I took a break from the email list for over a year; when I came back, they'd recently made it a rule you weren't allowed to talk about the asteroid anymore.

The most interesting was on the Elder Scrolls fan forum, when Michael Kirkbride talked about a step beyond CHIM: "No one has achieved Amaranth yet. Except for the one being or idea that no one has found yet, which is still just sitting there." This led to several months of intense discussion of pretty much the whole of Elder Scrolls, trying to figure out what he meant.