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Is Moby the Duck a reference to Moby Dick?
If so, am I retarded for taking this long to notice?
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Yes. At first it was just "Moby Duck" when I began using the nickname on my first Ragnarok Online character.
Specifically, the idea came from this episode of Fairly Odd Parents with Tom Sawyer where he changes the "i" in Moby Dick to an "u".
Conclusion: Very yes.
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Gyokuyoutama reacted to this
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I swear you can find Blue's Traveller's "Four" in every single used record store in the world, and it used to be played all the time, but the songs on it have gotten pretty obscure now.
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If I needed to explain to someone what the 00's era internet was like, I would link them to this ZZT World:
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It's so hot! I'm feeling parched in this heat... It's hot, even when I'm not moving at all...
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If you watch this video ten times in a row you can almost believe that old SPUF still exists.
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I recently went out of my way to find the skyward sword saxton hale cutscene edit where he's falling after Link and that channel is like a portal back to 2011 SPUF as well
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General DeGroot changed their profile photo
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Turns out the machine god is real and is keeping my site's welder together.
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I was fiddling around with an old mp3 player of my brother's that he had left at my parents years ago. All the buttons on the outside are busted, but I thought maybe I could get it working. I couldn't get it to play music, but I did get into the file structure and saw names that both resembled my humor far more than his and referenced stuff that he wouldn't have been interested in (like Big O and Aura Battler Dunbine.)
I hooked it up to my computer and apparently I used it as a makeshift external hard drive backup of my first personal computer. In addition to a gig of the first music I downloaded from the internet, there were also about 60 books in .txt format, lots of various school assignments, some old java programs I made, and Hello! style archives of the very first forum I was active on. I only vaguely remember making the decision to transfer this stuff over to the mp3 player, and as far as I remember I never transferred them to any other device before now.
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Now it's pretty much only an external harddrive. Most buttons on the mp3 player are broken, including the play button and most of the navigation buttons. (Notably once you go into a folder the only way to go back is to reboot the whole system.) It has a remote that might work, though the battery in it is almost certainly dead.
On another note I had ignored it for a while since when you boot it up you get random garbage characters so I had assumed the hard drive was fried. Turns out that these are just music files from the Dunbine soundtrack that had Japanese names that the display wasn't set up to show properly.
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Russian coup bros... we're so back
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well now "it's so over" so there's no need to worry about it anymore
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A 1970 Corvette reacted to this
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Pros and cons of becoming known as "that guy who still watches VHS tapes":
Pros: People will randomly give you free VHS tapes.
Cons: People will randomly give you free VHS tapes.
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heist movie where a spam robocaller calls their remote controlled phone bomb at an inopportune time (nobody dies) (hijinks ensue)
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Well Amazon I managed to find the product, despite your search engine and recommendations.
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If June is pride month, which months correspond to the other six deadly sins?
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December = Greed (holiday corporatism)
August = Wrath (hottest month)
July = Envy (Canada Day -> 4th of July)
February = Lust (Valentine's)
October = Gluttony (Halloween candy)
November = Sloth (idk Thanksgiving football)
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Idiot Cube reacted to this
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旅行は良好だった
Understanding this dumbass joke feels like one of the biggest steps I have taken towards fluency.
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arcana force fans eatin' good tonight
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May the 4th be with you.
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May da schwartz be with you!
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Gyokuyoutama reacted to this
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There needs to be some separate term for modern Isekai.
I've previously talked about "Western Isekai" (ex. Narnia, Three Hearts and Three Lions, John Carter, The Dragon and the George, etc.) But even in Japan if you look at classic anime like Dunbine, Escaflowne, Those Who Hunt Elves and so on and you see very little resemblance in terms of plot structure and cliches used when compared to the modern form of the genre.
(Though I'm not even sure if "modern" is the right term here. I haven't seen it, but from what I've heard about the Tanya show it doesn't seem to hit the same notes as other "isekai" shows.)
So there needs to be some new term that refers to specifically this subgenre. This is important because "other world" fiction has a long and rich history, with much of it being very creative. But the modern subgenre allows only the most minor ("gimmick based") innovation.
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Honestly I think you're right on the mark about how they treat the setting. A recent isekai that I think actually does take the world seriously is honzuki no gekkokujou. Not a super serious story and it has a lot of levity in it but it generally takes the world it's set in seriously* which I think gives it a different feel from the more boilerplate isekai shows.
*There's like ONE gag sort of but the thing is that it's both plausible for an alternate universe to have that kind of weird coincidence with the "real" world and also the main character/setting overall rolls with it and doesn't really keep pointing at it and saying "ha ha isn't this so wacky"
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On further reflection, I wonder how much of this is due to genre being a spook.
What I mean is that way back in the 30's or so there wasn't really set "genres" in the way that we think about them today. There were "types" of stories but it was more like "moods": adventure, romance, mystery, wonder, strangeness, etc. If you look at a pulp like "Weird Tales" the stories have a particular "flavor" to them but don't fit particularly well in any modern genre. Some would be called fantasy, some horror, some science fiction, some might be "magical realism," etc. It's not until much later that you get a hard divide between science fiction and fantasy, modulo some people mixing the two and thinking that they are doing something unprecedented.
But even after the initial definition of the genres, they just got more and more specialized. Take fantasy: after Tolkien it got dominated by "high fantasy" or "epic fantasy"; think stuff like Terry Brooks, Raymond E. Feist or the prolific Weiss and Hickman duo. Always lots of discussions of alternate cultures and worlds, the world is always doomed in some way or other, etc. Something like an old Conan story where Conan simply robs some ruins or fights pirates or something no longer fits, even though you'd have to call that "fantasy" if you're going to give it a genre at all.
And of course the same thing happened in anime. In both the east and the west a lot of the driving force was ultimately video games, with usually the pipeline being future author plays RPG tie in game -> future author makes pnp RPG campaign -> author now sells works based on campaign world. (This is also why D&D gets considerably more "video-gamey" with every edition, even in the 1st to 2nd edition transition.) As a result of all of this popular works narrow the field more and more and more. It's not "wonder" stories anymore, they have to be "fantasy" storeis in magical kingdoms. And you have to have a certain type of epic scale to them. And that epic scale has to be realized basically in a Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy way. And it's only after you do all that that writers even think about filling in their own details. So naturally everything becomes the same.
It's not like Japan is forced to do this; Spice and Wolf is a great example of how to write a story in the same broad "genre" that barely follows any of the conventions, but also isn't trying to destroy them (it's just telling a story with a different mood and focus.) But we've hit a critical mass where aspiring authors only see video games, books, and TV shows that are all in this very narrow subgenre, so they have a difficult time even comprehending that they could do something else.
But as much as I hate Isekai, they're still probably in the better situation, since over here it's the same basic problem but with capeshit instead.
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I think you have things a bit backwards; traditionally "western isekai" were known as "portal fantasy" works, if they were referred to as a separate genre at all. Much like "anime" is distinct from "cartoon" only in the language used from a technical sense, so is "isekai" separated from "portal fantasy" or "other world fiction".
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The most insane idea that I know:
"This company bought the rights to the franchise, therefore they determine what is canonical in it."
Seriously, the more you think about this idea, the less sense it makes.
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This isn't in response to any specific development. I am against the idea that rights holders can change canon, period.
Suppose that Sherlock Holmes was not in the public domain, and that the best mystery author in the world bought up the rights and wrote a book which had an amazing mystery and perfectly extended the character arcs of Holmes, Watson, etc. It would still be idiotic to say that this author used his legal rights to add to the Holmes canon.
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There's a lot more to my personality than weeb shit, vtubers and bitching about new technology but for some reason those are the only things that ever seem relevant to post here.
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Female skeletons got it rough, because the default guess is that reanimated skeletons are male cuz they're bald or they're a warrior skellington.
The yugioh solution was just to give their skeleton archetype hair and clothes.
