/run/media/silveradept: Random Thoughts in Various Spaces

Just a couple of stray thoughts that probably deserve nothing more than a stray thought, but they keep coming back to me:

• Things in RWBY are always named thematically. Sometimes it's easy to spot, sometimes not so easy. I'm a bit annoyed that it took me six seasons to notice this, but here it is. Signal Academy is where Ruby trained before going to the regional academy, Beacon. Signal -> Beacon. Pyrrha is initially from Sanctum Academy, and finally, it's been noted that Sanctum is in the same region as Haven Academy, where Season 5 was mostly spent. So, Signal -> Beacon. Sanctum -> Haven. The schools all have related names, and it looks like the regional school is one power of z more than the feeder academies around it. Atlas is an outlier, but it's also the name as a thing that encompasses the whole world, so it fits. We haven't yet seen any of the feeder schools for Shade, though, so it's to be seen whether it will also follow the pattern. Perhaps one of its feeder schools is Oasis?


• For as many times as Chat Noir has been temporarily converted to the side of an akuma, why doesn't Hawk Moth/Papillon just grab his Miraculous while he's on their side and then go after Ladybug after it's secured? Seems like it would be something that's really beneficial to him and it would deny Ladybug a critical ally in the next fight. More often than not, though, we seem to be showing Chat Noir joining the rush to try and incapacitate Ladybug, which rarely ends well for him or the akuma. It's just a show, it's just a show, but it's starting to bother me that for as much as Hawk Moth is supposed to be a big villain, he's...forgotten to read the Evil Overlord List more than a few times so far. But I'm not fully caught up to where everyone else is yet, so there's a possibility that he's going to get his act in gear.


• He's also incredibly terrible with children in general.


• The pronunciation of Rena Rouge in the U.S. version of Miraculous Ladybug makes me frown slightly, because the close front unrounded vowel sound, ("long-e") doesn't seem like a good fit in either English or French for that spelling. I'd expect "Reena" to be the spelling so as to get the right pronounciation consistently. Also, if "Rena" is supposed to be related to "Renard", the substitute name for a fox (used to avoid invoking bad luck on oneself...I linked some time ago to a thing about that very sort of substitution somewhere, but I'm not digging it up right now), as an page on Rena Rouge's civilian identity suggests, then the U.S. pronunciation is extremely unhelpful at making that connection. (Personally, I read "Rena" more like "Raina", but now that I've done a cursory amount of research, I could train myself to say it more like the "Renard" at the link.)


• If your game only has Facebook as a way of making sure your data gets saved if you ever have to cross devices or you have a backup fail spectacularly on you, your game is terrible, even if it is part of a mythos that I'm otherwise very interested in.

Another one before the end of a month! (January 02019)

Hello, everyone! Let's see if we can't get this rolling with this: A memory of Ursula LeGuin, before everyone knew her, and how she handled the earnest and the pretenders.

Constructing a language with feminist principles in mind, and writing stories around them to put them to use. Additionally, the digitization of the papers of pioneers of LGBTQ literature.

It's Hugo Nominations time! So forestofglory has some resources for you.

The hiring of an intimacy coordinator to help keep track of comfort and movement and boundaries during televised sex scenes has made fioming them much better for the actors and the crew involved all around. If for no other reason than to have someone other than the actors thinking about their comforts and advocating for them so the finished product is something they can all agree on as a good thing.

( And there's more! )

Last for tonight, mouse potato, a phrase defining a person that sits in front of a computer for extended periods of time. (via tozka, who also pointed out the Distributed Proofreaders.) Which comes with a handy tutorial on how to use VLC (a great program for playing files of any sort) to automatically generate screenshots of any video file you might be playing in VLC and want to get screenshots of, courtesy of timetobegin

And a tally of what was removed from places where objects generally should not go.