Your bag has water in it?!?

We're all just goo and fluids, and the pumps and processing systems for those things, draped over a rigid scaffold and contained in a flexible sack.

If I've learned one thing from watching my favourite shows get cancelled year after year, it's that if I made anything people liked, I wouldn't let Netflix near it without a three season guarantee and a harshly punitive kill-fee. They cancel shows before they even run for "poor performance".

You say that, but you know that's not true. We all had a choice, Mastodon is in every way better, and yet the people came here. Feel free to use a social media site with nobody on it. Humourless fuck.

Does anyone think maybe we shouldn’t be using a site made by these particular idiots?

OTOH though, maybe it’s good we know precisely what kind of idiots run this place. Idiots are like spiders. When one bites you, it’s better to know the species.

I don’t think “man, DBZ would be SO MUCH BETTER”, though. I think “wow, if I ever write something with that kind of ‘two opposed schools’ dynamic for a character, I’m going to have to remember to have him combine them when it comes to the crunch.”

The symmetry here is, Gohan sees Piccolo, one-handed, drill through Raditz and Goku, and then NEVER uses the Makankosappo, but it’s a technique of finesse, and precision, not a sledge-hammer. It’s THE tool for the job at the end, and Gohan mixes Piccolo’s training with Goku’s to make something new.

You see his middle and index fingers straighten out of the claw-grip of the Kamehameha, and he says “makanko-hamehameha!”. The beam narrows, a spiral shoots out around it, and it DRILLS THROUGH Cell’s K-wave, dispersing it, and obliterating him with something other than raw power.

Take this example: I think when Gohan beat Cell, he shouldn’t have done it as Goku 2.0, but as the hybrid of Goku and Piccolo he was always portrayed as. One handed Kamehameha works for a bit, but then Gohan uses his brain, uses his training, and his powers of observation…

I’ll often say how things could have been tidied up, or given more symmetry in Dragon Ball Z, but not because I think Toriyama was a hack who couldn’t write, because I, with a different writing sensibility, and the benefit of hindsight, can see how I would do it differently. One day I may.

And I don’t mean “this is MY story about shinigami that are stylistically feudal-Japanese”, but I mean you dissect the characters, and their arcs, and figure out what you liked, what you didn’t, and adapt those into something new. You’d never have Star Wars without a huge range of influences.

Basically, if you like Bleach enough to hate how it went, and you think you can do better, I guess file the serial numbers off, write something similar, see how you go. I don’t mean “Bleach but different”, but take the things that worked, the themes, and build on those. That’s all writing.

Great series. Really excited for the next "big" series you do. Knights of the Old Republic, maybe?

The use of the words "Quick Exit" on the Lifeline page is... Potentially counterproductive.

Honestly, I stand with M'Benga. You know when a physician is juicing up to become a rage fuelled murder-monster, SOMEONE crossed a line to put him there.

And then, yes, there's the point of your article, or a version of the point as I read it, anyway. Any time you're told to go outside your comfort zone, the implication is that you have to meet them in theirs. It's on YOU to always be the one to suffer discomfort for others.

People seem to take for granted that they even know what comfort looks like. For the rest of us, the closest we get to comfort is the cup of tea we drink while trying not to think about the numerous ongoing and incipient crises that we know of, and all the possibility of ones we don't.

Whenever people told me to get out of my comfort zone, they'd get, depending on how fed up I was,

"Oh, you have a comfort zone? That must be nice. I've never found one of those."

or

"My 'comfort zone' was taken away from me by abusive parents at 10, and I haven't known comfort since."

Fake leather in the diary in MacOS X might have looked a bit naff, but you know what it had? Character. Is it so much to ask that user interfaces actually look like something other than a fascist dystopian city?

I'm not saying you can learn to whip up a multitrack video editor overnight, but there's a lot of stuff you can empower yourself to do.

That people are trusting AI to code actual tools that we use every day both scares and sickens me, and I reserve terror-vomit for government bureaucracy.

Genuinely, AI inspired me to learn to program. Entirely because I had put it off for decades, immediately jumped on AI as a tool to NOT have to learn, and then getting incredibly frustrated with the buggy and non-functional output. AI couldn't even make SIMPLE THINGS that I know how to do now.

The beginning of the end was flat design. Bring back the skeuomorphism of the 2000s. I am sick of so much dead space in every UI, and no distinction between buttons and forms. WE HAVE THE PIXELS, NOW! FUCKING USE THEM!

I know if I returned to earth and found it overrun by apes that'd be a huge load off my mind.

I have a smart globe, and bed time is 10% brightness time. That's my "tiny lamp", I guess. It's just enough to read by. Just enough that you feel like you're in a little pocket of cozy dark.

First computer and software you used for writing? (Other than the pen, paper, and your own mind, I mean)

Good thing I’m not American. If my country ever wants me to kill for it, I’ll decide who, and I’ll be starting on my own soil. Whole lot of house to clean in Australia before we go cleaning up the rest of the world, and I’d start with the dickhead who puts a gun in my hands.

I may not go with Ridge, though. I have a Vulkit one I use for my credit cards and ID (and yes, one more Genius Lab Gear card tool), and I like it, aesthetically, with the wood panels. It also has one important feature the Ridge lacks: you can push the cards up from EITHER side.

Eventually, the card sized tools will be fleshed out, duplicating as much as possible from the rest of the kit, and they'll "move out" into a separate "discreet carry" tool kit, for when having a pouch of tools on my belt would be socially not acceptable. Might upgrade to a better wallet, then.

There's definitely an argument to be made for moving up in price to get better value, but those are two sides of the story, and the third is utility. Currently, this metal one serves as an organiser inside the pouch, and it holds two card-sized multitools. Higher cost wasn't justifiabe.

The big disappointment with this clone is, I bought this and a carbon fibre one, thinking it'd look cool as hell to swap the carbon fibre outside plates onto the orange metal wallet, but the screw holes didn't match up. Not even close. I'm sure if I bought Ridge I could do that kind of thing.