Three Subjects x 8
Jun. 19th, 2019 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptIn theory, this was supposed to be asking me about subjects I did not know or care much about, but some of them were set so that it was random subjects. So, some amount of commentary on assorted miscellaneous, et cetera.
1) Magic
I have not studied prestidigitation, illusions, or other grand craft of magic, but I can appreciate seeing them, and there were several mathematical magics present in the "Backstage with Blackstone" segments of Square One Television, as well as a few bits in various shows where the building blocks of misdirection were displayed. This is not to say that I can spot a confidence trick from several paces away, but that even when I know it's illusory, I can still appreciate the craft that goes into it.
Oh, you meant some other type of magic? Well, I haven't really studied effects, although I understand the principles behind things like chroma key backgrounds, motion capture, rigging, stunt safety, practical effects, miniatures, and the like. I've successfully rotoscoped light sword effects onto still pictures and can appreciate software that automates the process for each frame. Or automatically removes a background so that another can be substituted. It's enough to sometimes see the rough parts or to appreciate the way that television advertising and sport overlays have essentially made much of our experience of sport an augmented reality compared to seeing it live.
Oh, not that, either? Well, I can't say I've don't a whole lot in spiritual practices that use magic and willworking as a major component. I've read some things, but there are very few components of magic systems that translate to anything outside, whether in aspects of deity, amount of tools or training needed before attempting a work, what consequences, if any, befall those that use their magic for less noble reasons, and so on. And frankly, with any sort of formal magic tradition or such, Smart Kid Syndrome gets in the way and I would have an irrational fear that others will be judging me for my failures, rather than accepting me as someone who's studying.
Not that, either? I haven't played that game in any sort of competitive or casual way since Fifth Edition was the newest Core Set. Which is to say, I don't know much about how it's changed since then, but I'm pretty sure I could pick it back up again if need be.
2) Cliffs
I can appreciate them from a distance, or in photos, but actually being near the edge of a cliff that's anywhere close to high up makes me nervous. Which is to say that I'm more concerned about the terrible things that can happen from heights than being afraid of heights themselves. But that might be more potato / potahto than anything else.
I haven't lived near cliffs in my life, either, so that, yes, is something that I don't really know a whole lot about.
3) Gesture
I mean, there are a lot of gestures that could be referred to here, anywhere from complete sign languages to rude things to show to other people who have offended you or who you want to offend by acknowledging the existence of sex.
Mostly, though, my gestures are points and indicators of place or mood when telling stories or giving directions. I tend more toward using my hands then talking, even if only for emphasis or other not-narrative purposes.
I've learned several gestures specific to officiating and umpiring various things, which helps both as a sport fan and as a person who isn't always in a place where there's a public address system so that the other fans can follow along.
4) Pokemon / Pokémon types
One of each of these from two different people.
18 types, all playing a delicate dance of rock-paper-scissors with each other so as to have a theoretically balanced experience. Over 800 tiny nightmares brought to life and traded around as virtual pets and battle companions. And that's before you get to the dual-types, which carry all the weak points of each of their types. The typing data is usually best represented visually, and the best kinds of Pokémon players can basically juggle that entire chart in their head and recall any necessary intersection in relation to the type of move being deployed and the type of Pokémon it will be deployed on. Being able to recall all the typing for 151 original mons would be impressive, and then for the 800+ now would be phenomenal. Except for the part where it always seems like a certain subset of those Pokémon (usually legendary or mythic) are what gets used in competitive play, and so the problem set of types to remember is much smaller. (It's still an impressive feat of memory and problem-solving skills, which is something that eventually translates out into non-Pokémon settings in a more general form.
Pokémon had been around for 20 years, and shows very little sign of stopping, having adjusted to each new handheld from Nintendo without issues, and also providing console-based arena battles where those who could connect their handhelds could fight their friends in much more fluid animation than they would on their handhelds. It's been popular enough that Pokémon hunting was part of a Google Maps April First prank. And it's also spawned a collectible card game with as much competitiveness as other CCGs, and a similar secondary market.
Oh, and also, the trading aspect, because right from the beginning, Pokémon was always going to be a game where you needed a friend to buy the other version so you could both complete your collections by trading the exclusive monsters in your version for their exclusive monsters. This translated to Pokémon Go, the smartphone game, by having certain Pokémon only appear in specific regions of the world, and so you would need to travel to those regions to finish your collection, or to get lucky and have a friend who had stop by and be willing to trade with you. That hasn't exactly gone over well with players, given that if the target age for Pokémon is teens and younger, they're not exactly going to be globetrotters, and so some of their Pokédex entries will forever remain incomplete. And, well, "Gotta catch 'em all" has been at the heart of the Pokémon games since their inception, so the inability to do that, and the general lack of ability, even with the new friend system where someone can get eggs from other regions of the world, to complete your collection seems like an unwelcome intrusion of our world onto the fantastic world of Pokémon.
I have still only played versions of Pokémon that only consist of the first generation of Pokémon.
5) Lawn care
I mostly mow the lawn and use the weed whippet to make sure things don't get too overgrown. Otherwise, the dandelions are fine, as are many of the other species that are competing with the grass for supremacy.
I also theoretically need to do things like trim back bushes and the like, but the shears I currently have should probably be greased and sharpened significantly.
Morning glory and other ground cover such as that will be chemically destroyed on sight.
I'm sure there's more to learn care in the cases of watering, weeding, mowing, and the like, and if I ever get to the point where I must have that pristine green lawn, I had better be making enough money for someone else to take care of it.
6) Botanical symbolism
I don't know much about flower language or what meanings various bouquets are supposed to have. They're highly culturally variable, as well, so there's no universal code to learn. As I am also generally unhappy with the scents of flowers, assuming they don't trigger a sneezing for, I haven't felt the need to learn any such thing, either. If it becomes important, I can use a search engine or I can call the florist and have them tell me the significance of the flowers that are being bought.
I also don't know much about whether anyone outside of the florist and the search engine knows these sorts of things easily. I know those people exist, but I don't know how many of them there are.
7) Camping
I am not a fan.
Some part of that may have to do with the sleep apnea part that makes sleeping deeply unsatisfying without a machine to help. I didn't know I had it until well into the relationship with my terrible ex. But it ensures that if I ever go camping, I have to be able to run the breathing machine at night, which means electricity and probably reduces the available campsites significantly for me.
Some part of it may have to do with the reality that camping in a recreational vehicle was something that my terrible ex really enjoyed doing, despite the expense involved and that, for me, camping generally meant "still taking care of all the animals, in a much more confined space, and without the benefit of connectivity to be social with people who weren't my terrible ex and her friends, if they were along for the camping." It wasn't like I had plenty of friends along camping with where we could do stuff, so I was mostly cooped up with only my ex and her needs for company, as well as the animals.
I'm guessing it was relaxing for her to go camping, but it was often stressful, sometimes extra stressful, for me. At the very least, it was never more relaxing than the baseline stress in the household.
Earlier experiences were not all that fun, either, being Boy Scout camping trips with people who didn't particularly care about me. So I spent most of my time at the archery range those trips, or otherwise by myself or with the one friend I had in the trip.
So I'm not a fan.
(They haven't been all bad. I went on a camping trip with 2dlife once, and that was okay. But the evidence is mostly against enjoying camping, unless it really would be a break from normal life and there are people who I want to hang out with also going.)
8) Podcasts
I would listen to more of them if it weren't for the problem that they take a fixed amount of time to go through, and I don't have a whole lot of time every day to listen to things. But I do have a smattering of political podcasts, most of the Night Vale Presents Network, and a couple of others, such as This American Life and Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap, that I've been introduced to. I love the medium, I think people who do it are incredibly interesting and they must take a lot of time to do them, but I do not have the time to stay current on all of them, at least not without the likelihood that I'll be overloading housemates with constant audio content.
9) Octopi
TEN-TA-CLLLLLLLLLLLES, TEN-TA-CLES! [beats] TENTACLES!
Tool-using, lock-breaking, smarter than their own good cephalopods.
Also, an octopus still shows up as a regular part of ice hockey, as the original form of the playoff for Lord Stanley's Cup, with six teams, meant eight wins were needed to secure the cup. (Originally, the holder of the Cup agreed to face any team that challenged them for it, before leagues such as the National Hockey League formalized the process of league play and playoff hockey.
Not to be confused with squid, although both of them have the ability to fire off ink as a defense or distraction method against predators. Consult your local marine biologist for more information.
10) Friendship is Magic
The second part of the title for the fourth generation (G4) My Little Pony animated series. Definitely not to be confused with a previous animated series called My Little Pony, which covered earlier generations of characters. There are similar names of the characters, but their designs and personalities are entirely different. (Seanan McGuire has mentioned a preference for the earlier show based on the scale and scope of heroic feeds performed by the main human character and the points.)
Part of what may eventually be called a renaissance of animation, starting in and around Avatar: the Last Airbender (unless you start the rebirth at Batman: The Animated Series and believe there have been no breaks from them to now of good animated shows) where animated television shows once again appealed to a large audience of kids and grownups of all gender identities.
Contains a large cast of characters, even if their body types are similar. Characters are differentiated physically by color, species, accessories, and a unique stamp on the flank called a cutie mark. For the Friendship is Magic universe, the cutie mark is an indicator of the thing a particular pony finds the greatest joy in doing. Pony society seems structured around making sure that any pony can find work (often through small business entrepreneurship) that is in harmony with their cutie mark, and it is a source of significant social stress for young ponies to not have a cutie mark, to the point where a common schoolyard taunt among ponies is "blank flank", calling attention to the lack of a cutie mark.
Created by Lauren Faust, Friendship is Magic is also notable for having an extraordinarily large Periphery Demographic of adult men and men-presenting persons. The "bronies" phenomenon sometimes conflicted visibly with the target demographic of young girls and girl-presenting people in their requests for stories to go on certain directions or characters to do various things to the point where a specific character, voiced by Patton Oswalt, was created as a way of the creators firing back at those ideas and demands. For the most part, though, bronies were responsible for significantly queering the perception of acceptable masculinity and masculine entertainment. (There are male or male-coded characters in Friendship is Magic, but they are a significant minority compared to female and female-coded characters.) By being so clearly outside a convenient box that could explain the show's popularity, like "most bronies are gay or trans*", the phenomenon continued to attract attention, both positive and negative, and a rather large discussion spawned. Many intersectional takes on bronydom that I've read found them lacking in other forms of diversity and criticized then for attempting to control the space of the discussion so that no others could also participate.
Episodes are generally stand-alone, with the exception of season beginnings and endings, although some episodes will reference events that have already happened in a lower-key way. Except for Twilight Sparkle's model after the end of the fourth season. Will run (has run) nine seasons before retiring and the wait begins for what will presumably be a show about the fifth generation. Because there are still toys to sell, in the end.
Generally a fan, excepting when the writers' stable engages in the sitcom practice of "this character, who had already learned this lesson before, forgets it so we can go on an adventure for them to learn or again."
11) Disney
The House of Mouse.
Owner of Marvel, Lucasfilm, Miramax, Touchstone, the Muppets, and many other studios, properties, and ideas. Creator of Mickey Mouse and responsible for most of the terrible copyright laws and their terms of existence, because you will have to pry Mickey Mouse from their cold, dead hands to put him into the public domain so that everyone can use him as they like without having to pay Disney or give them any say in the use of the character.
The unvarnished villains of the parody film Evangelion Re:Death because they want to own everything, and have enough clout to make governments vote to them, instead of having governments break them apart over monopoly concerns.
Everything they do makes them money. Sometimes legitimately. Has an army of lawyers ready to cease and desist anything that isn't so squarely in the pocket of fair use that even they would lose.
Creates feature-film length animated movies that are generally classified as "kids' stuff" when released under the Disney mark. Releases 3D animated movies with Pixar, one of their subsidiary companies. Responsible for what many people envision when they hear the word "Princess", unless they are part of a country that has a royal family and follow their lives fairly closely. (They have a products line branded with their various animated princesses, who are all together but will not look at each other because that would acknowledge the existence of the Princess multiverse. There have been fewer entries to the Princess product cabal since Pixar started also making princess movies, but they will join in eventually, once they stop being cash-vaches in their own right.)
Collaborator on Kingdom Hearts with Square-Enix, where Disney worlds, characters, and movie plotlines advance the Kingdom Hearts story.
Has created several theme parks related to their characters and properties, often wanting you to believe they are "the happiest place on Earth", which might be true if you excluded the grownups who are remarkably aware of the cost of participating in this experience. Supposedly the preferred destination of various sports champions, although that's more memetic and paid endorsement than anything.
Speaking of sports, Disney owns the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and the Entertainment and Sports Network (ESPN), so they have a hand in much of the programming available both over the air and on "basic cable".
Disney, the mark, is aggressively family-friendly. Disney, the company, is not. Touchstone was Disney's house for things above the G rated house (think 10+, 13+, and 17+ classifications, even though they're not "no admittance if you're under that age" classifications, as a parent or guardian can take an underage child into an R-rated movie). Miramax, who has done Kevin Smith (of Jay and Silent Bob fame) and as few others, was also an R-rated division (when they owned it. Miramax is now owned by somebody else.).
Disney owns a lot of things that are the cultural zeigeist now, and has done their fair share of creating those things, too. The problem is, rather than continuing to innovate, they've gotten to the point where they would rather just buy who is innovating and put their money and resources behind it to make even more. It's capitalism at its finest, with all the monopolistic impulses that go along with it.
12) Cheese making
I've never tried it, much like other processes of making dairy things. The basement might be a suitable environment for trying, assuming that Wray you need is a relatively consistent temperature and humidity to make cheese with. But what the actual process is, and any specific organisms that need to be introduced to culture the milk into cheese, that I do not know. And I suspect that having homemade dairy products to further aggravate my sneezes is probably not the best idea.
13) Saturn
Cassini! Which I would be know nearly as much about if it weren't for having someone who has worked on that project and its data as well as otherwise being a really cool woman-presenting person in science and engineering.
So, Saturn's the first planet we observed that has rings that are observable with a low-powered telescope. The planet itself is a gas giant, and the bands in the rings are often due to the orbits of its multiple satellites making sure that the debris that would otherwise be present is swept away and moved. Lots of pictures and measurements and probes sent back from that neighborhood.
Frankly, I wish that we could do more in space research and science by governmental entities getting funded, rather than having people with more money than they know what to do with try to privately research and commercialize space travel and research for their profits. Then again, I'm also one of those weirdos who thinks that those people with more money than they will ever need should be willing to use it to help people desperately in need ask the way through kind of in need, rather than just letting it sit there as a lump accruing interest.
14) Jigsaw puzzles
I haven't gotten into them that much, although they are fun to do. My parents were much bigger in them, and so I picked up some techniques on solving them.
Start with the border pieces, if your puzzle has them, then put together what are obvious features of the puzzle and connect them to the frame where you can. Eventually it progresses to smaller features, like "this piece is entirely composed of grass, so it will eventually slot in here" and so forth.
When there are no more pieces left, you're done!
Some puzzles work in three dimensions, and others impose difficulty by making their puzzle either cut in uniform shapes, use patterns with subtle differences between them, or have a second puzzle on the reverse side that also has to be completed correctly (this feature is often in conjunction with the uniform pieces and/or the subtle variances pattern.)
One of the proudest puzzle completions I did was taking various irregularly-shaped puzzles that formed cubes and finding configurations where two cubes could lose a face but fit together, then three, four, five, and eventually found a way of fitting six cubes of five faces each together so that it made a contiguous 3D shape. It took me quite some time to figure out all out.
15) Jumping rope
I've done some of that when I was younger. Mostly by myself, as I didn't have either the friends group or the body coordination to do some of the more interesting skip rope tricks that were popular (and that helped seed a nascent YouTube with interesting skills videos.
That also brings back the various "Jump Rope for Heart" things that would happen in elementary school, which still continue to this day. I think they were pledge based money raising for worthwhile charity and the promise of a significant amount of physical activity in exchange for the donations.
16) Tables
An HTML component with a reputation for being used as a substitute for the "correct" form of using Cascading Style Sheets to lay out content, especially because CSS increasingly encourages a certain understanding of the DOM to make it work correctly. (And even then, it sometimes gets quirky.)
But tables do have a use, if what's being displayed is tabular data. Semantic page construction just wants us to separate, as much as possible, the purely aesthetic from the meaty content.
Tables also show up when programs wants to store information in a database or file and the information needs to be found by any of its associated attributes. There are a lot of ways to store attributes and relationships between tables and such, and there's an entire study of access and data structures with the idea in mind of making it as quick as possible to retrieve any bit of data in the database.
There are also things with some number of legs and a flat surface on top that we do all sorts of things at, even if they are nominally meant for eating in popular conception. (I say that because other tables generally have a "purpose" in front of them, like a sewing table, a billiards table, and so forth that distinguishes them, but eating tables do not. I'm sure there's a linguistic term for this signifier of the special compared to the default, but I don't know what it is off the top of my head.
17) Fonts
I wasn't old enough to remember it, of course, but I was baptized using the water from one. I would guess by my uncle, the priest, because when you have a priest in the family, they tend to be the ones doing the rites for the family.
For the most part, though, that word seems to be strictly an ecclesiastical one, as I rarely hear anyone referring to various water-containing or dispensing things as fonts. (Some people get described as fonts of things life wisdom and information, and it's that usage that makes me think font and fountain have the same root word, if one isn't the root of another.)
There's also another font that most people in our technological world think of first. Because word processing programs use the word font to refer to the collection of typeface, size, and weight being worked in at any given moment (which is a font, so they're not wrong), it's taken over the meaning of typeface and the two can be used nearly interchangeably at this point.
The biggest distinction I see drawn is between the ones with serifs (little flourishes on the ends of the strokes that make up the letter) and those that are sans-serif. It may have been reading on the usefulness of Comic Sans (it's remarkably good at not causing lexical confusion) where I learned that people with reading disabilities have less difficulty with sans-serif fonts, since there's less extraneous information to be dealt with. So yet another reason for Comic Sans not to be entirely confined to the dustbin.
18) Buoys
A bell rings and a man dies.
They help things stay afloat or at a particular depth so they can do their work of warning or making boundaries, or helping things on the water not have terrible collisions, or emitting sonar pulses. The specifics are things that I can't know about, because I lack clearance, but the engineer in my nuclear family has worked on designing and testing sonobuoys, sometimes in places where you could set up a few nets and play ice hockey on the deck of the ship.
19) Infrared
Spectrum below the visible range for human eyesight. Energy released as heat is often in that spectrum, and can be made visible by false coloration or with tools used to capture that spectrum and then present visible imagery based on that capture.
Astronomy also tends to work with the infrared, as it's often the only spectrum of energy that makes it through the void of space to be picked up on by arrays of telescopes on the ground and in space, even if when it came out it was way higher up the wavelength spectrum.
Humans kind of got short shrift when it comes to the amount of spectrum we can perceive without becoming cyborgs, but at this point in time, if we ever develop that, the amount of information available will be constantly overwhelming, given how much we crowded up all the other parts of the spectrum with our human stuff.
20) Robert's Rules of Order
One of the ur-texts of parliamentary procedure. Despite knowing of it, have not actually read any of it and definitely do not know how they are supposed to work. Since I don't have that many parliamentary bodies that I'm part of (most of them are benevolent dictatorships), I haven't had to learn it, either. This is probably a good thing, because I get entirely flustered when meetings spiral away from control, and I don't think slamming the gavel will help any.
21) Heliotrope
Hello, Sol! You're a very nice star, you know, to have so many things turning toward you. That said, my most common association with the name is that it's the name of the weapon of Raphael, one of the Nine Swords of Ivoire in the game Phantom Brave.
I'm not all that interested in plants and gardening, so I couldn't spot a heliotrope plant without a guide or a more experienced pair of eyes.
22) Echidna
Not native to my part of the planet, and therefore got introduced to the name through the Sonic the Hedgehog series of games, where Knuckles is nominally such a thing, blessed with superior strength and a gliding ability to cover long distances while airborne. Which brings us to the "Sonic and Knuckles" game cart as designed by SEGA, which was intended to be used with other Sonic games so that they could be played as Knuckles, by first inserting Sonic and Knuckles, then inserting the other Sonic game on top of that. Essentially, it followed the same design as the Game Genie accessory, but instead of allowing users to input codes that would change register values so that items, lives, or the ability to jump would be infinite or otherwise, it had the system load specific things into memory from the Sonic and Knuckles cartridge rather than the host cartridge.
Other cartridges were supposed to refuse to load their games, instead displaying a screen that could, with a button combination, be used to play a bonus level of the style of Sonic 3. It was rumored that other cartridges were compatible with the Sonic and Knuckles lock on, most infamously Mortal Kombat could then have Sonic as a character, although that rumor always came with "you can't let Sub-Zero hit Sonic with his freeze attack or the game will glitch and you'll have to reset." A very detailed rumor, certainly. I never owned the console and the requisite cartridges to find out.
As it is, actual echidnas are Oceania creatures, and are monotremes, like the platypus, which they have more in common with genetically than the hedgehogs and anteaters their physical appearance resembles.
23) Pier
Handy for taking a long walk off. Or suggesting that someone else do the same. In theory, the things that boats and other water craft cozy up to so that the humans on board can embark and disembark. Can be large or small, and there are some that have had their buildings transformed from nautical uses to clubs, restaurants, and other establishments that are still referred to as being on the pier (because they are).
Have used them as runways for jumping into lakes as well as their intended purpose. Not nearly as willing to do that when the local water is perpetually ocean-cold. And also, there's a certain distance you want to get away from the pier when you take the leap, to avoid hitting yourself.
Also used for dog jumping competitions, where the idea is to get the longest leap off the pier, instead of going for a high jump.
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1) Magic
I have not studied prestidigitation, illusions, or other grand craft of magic, but I can appreciate seeing them, and there were several mathematical magics present in the "Backstage with Blackstone" segments of Square One Television, as well as a few bits in various shows where the building blocks of misdirection were displayed. This is not to say that I can spot a confidence trick from several paces away, but that even when I know it's illusory, I can still appreciate the craft that goes into it.
Oh, you meant some other type of magic? Well, I haven't really studied effects, although I understand the principles behind things like chroma key backgrounds, motion capture, rigging, stunt safety, practical effects, miniatures, and the like. I've successfully rotoscoped light sword effects onto still pictures and can appreciate software that automates the process for each frame. Or automatically removes a background so that another can be substituted. It's enough to sometimes see the rough parts or to appreciate the way that television advertising and sport overlays have essentially made much of our experience of sport an augmented reality compared to seeing it live.
Oh, not that, either? Well, I can't say I've don't a whole lot in spiritual practices that use magic and willworking as a major component. I've read some things, but there are very few components of magic systems that translate to anything outside, whether in aspects of deity, amount of tools or training needed before attempting a work, what consequences, if any, befall those that use their magic for less noble reasons, and so on. And frankly, with any sort of formal magic tradition or such, Smart Kid Syndrome gets in the way and I would have an irrational fear that others will be judging me for my failures, rather than accepting me as someone who's studying.
Not that, either? I haven't played that game in any sort of competitive or casual way since Fifth Edition was the newest Core Set. Which is to say, I don't know much about how it's changed since then, but I'm pretty sure I could pick it back up again if need be.
2) Cliffs
I can appreciate them from a distance, or in photos, but actually being near the edge of a cliff that's anywhere close to high up makes me nervous. Which is to say that I'm more concerned about the terrible things that can happen from heights than being afraid of heights themselves. But that might be more potato / potahto than anything else.
I haven't lived near cliffs in my life, either, so that, yes, is something that I don't really know a whole lot about.
3) Gesture
I mean, there are a lot of gestures that could be referred to here, anywhere from complete sign languages to rude things to show to other people who have offended you or who you want to offend by acknowledging the existence of sex.
Mostly, though, my gestures are points and indicators of place or mood when telling stories or giving directions. I tend more toward using my hands then talking, even if only for emphasis or other not-narrative purposes.
I've learned several gestures specific to officiating and umpiring various things, which helps both as a sport fan and as a person who isn't always in a place where there's a public address system so that the other fans can follow along.
4) Pokemon / Pokémon types
One of each of these from two different people.
18 types, all playing a delicate dance of rock-paper-scissors with each other so as to have a theoretically balanced experience. Over 800 tiny nightmares brought to life and traded around as virtual pets and battle companions. And that's before you get to the dual-types, which carry all the weak points of each of their types. The typing data is usually best represented visually, and the best kinds of Pokémon players can basically juggle that entire chart in their head and recall any necessary intersection in relation to the type of move being deployed and the type of Pokémon it will be deployed on. Being able to recall all the typing for 151 original mons would be impressive, and then for the 800+ now would be phenomenal. Except for the part where it always seems like a certain subset of those Pokémon (usually legendary or mythic) are what gets used in competitive play, and so the problem set of types to remember is much smaller. (It's still an impressive feat of memory and problem-solving skills, which is something that eventually translates out into non-Pokémon settings in a more general form.
Pokémon had been around for 20 years, and shows very little sign of stopping, having adjusted to each new handheld from Nintendo without issues, and also providing console-based arena battles where those who could connect their handhelds could fight their friends in much more fluid animation than they would on their handhelds. It's been popular enough that Pokémon hunting was part of a Google Maps April First prank. And it's also spawned a collectible card game with as much competitiveness as other CCGs, and a similar secondary market.
Oh, and also, the trading aspect, because right from the beginning, Pokémon was always going to be a game where you needed a friend to buy the other version so you could both complete your collections by trading the exclusive monsters in your version for their exclusive monsters. This translated to Pokémon Go, the smartphone game, by having certain Pokémon only appear in specific regions of the world, and so you would need to travel to those regions to finish your collection, or to get lucky and have a friend who had stop by and be willing to trade with you. That hasn't exactly gone over well with players, given that if the target age for Pokémon is teens and younger, they're not exactly going to be globetrotters, and so some of their Pokédex entries will forever remain incomplete. And, well, "Gotta catch 'em all" has been at the heart of the Pokémon games since their inception, so the inability to do that, and the general lack of ability, even with the new friend system where someone can get eggs from other regions of the world, to complete your collection seems like an unwelcome intrusion of our world onto the fantastic world of Pokémon.
I have still only played versions of Pokémon that only consist of the first generation of Pokémon.
5) Lawn care
I mostly mow the lawn and use the weed whippet to make sure things don't get too overgrown. Otherwise, the dandelions are fine, as are many of the other species that are competing with the grass for supremacy.
I also theoretically need to do things like trim back bushes and the like, but the shears I currently have should probably be greased and sharpened significantly.
Morning glory and other ground cover such as that will be chemically destroyed on sight.
I'm sure there's more to learn care in the cases of watering, weeding, mowing, and the like, and if I ever get to the point where I must have that pristine green lawn, I had better be making enough money for someone else to take care of it.
6) Botanical symbolism
I don't know much about flower language or what meanings various bouquets are supposed to have. They're highly culturally variable, as well, so there's no universal code to learn. As I am also generally unhappy with the scents of flowers, assuming they don't trigger a sneezing for, I haven't felt the need to learn any such thing, either. If it becomes important, I can use a search engine or I can call the florist and have them tell me the significance of the flowers that are being bought.
I also don't know much about whether anyone outside of the florist and the search engine knows these sorts of things easily. I know those people exist, but I don't know how many of them there are.
7) Camping
I am not a fan.
Some part of that may have to do with the sleep apnea part that makes sleeping deeply unsatisfying without a machine to help. I didn't know I had it until well into the relationship with my terrible ex. But it ensures that if I ever go camping, I have to be able to run the breathing machine at night, which means electricity and probably reduces the available campsites significantly for me.
Some part of it may have to do with the reality that camping in a recreational vehicle was something that my terrible ex really enjoyed doing, despite the expense involved and that, for me, camping generally meant "still taking care of all the animals, in a much more confined space, and without the benefit of connectivity to be social with people who weren't my terrible ex and her friends, if they were along for the camping." It wasn't like I had plenty of friends along camping with where we could do stuff, so I was mostly cooped up with only my ex and her needs for company, as well as the animals.
I'm guessing it was relaxing for her to go camping, but it was often stressful, sometimes extra stressful, for me. At the very least, it was never more relaxing than the baseline stress in the household.
Earlier experiences were not all that fun, either, being Boy Scout camping trips with people who didn't particularly care about me. So I spent most of my time at the archery range those trips, or otherwise by myself or with the one friend I had in the trip.
So I'm not a fan.
(They haven't been all bad. I went on a camping trip with 2dlife once, and that was okay. But the evidence is mostly against enjoying camping, unless it really would be a break from normal life and there are people who I want to hang out with also going.)
8) Podcasts
I would listen to more of them if it weren't for the problem that they take a fixed amount of time to go through, and I don't have a whole lot of time every day to listen to things. But I do have a smattering of political podcasts, most of the Night Vale Presents Network, and a couple of others, such as This American Life and Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap, that I've been introduced to. I love the medium, I think people who do it are incredibly interesting and they must take a lot of time to do them, but I do not have the time to stay current on all of them, at least not without the likelihood that I'll be overloading housemates with constant audio content.
9) Octopi
TEN-TA-CLLLLLLLLLLLES, TEN-TA-CLES! [beats] TENTACLES!
Tool-using, lock-breaking, smarter than their own good cephalopods.
Also, an octopus still shows up as a regular part of ice hockey, as the original form of the playoff for Lord Stanley's Cup, with six teams, meant eight wins were needed to secure the cup. (Originally, the holder of the Cup agreed to face any team that challenged them for it, before leagues such as the National Hockey League formalized the process of league play and playoff hockey.
Not to be confused with squid, although both of them have the ability to fire off ink as a defense or distraction method against predators. Consult your local marine biologist for more information.
10) Friendship is Magic
The second part of the title for the fourth generation (G4) My Little Pony animated series. Definitely not to be confused with a previous animated series called My Little Pony, which covered earlier generations of characters. There are similar names of the characters, but their designs and personalities are entirely different. (Seanan McGuire has mentioned a preference for the earlier show based on the scale and scope of heroic feeds performed by the main human character and the points.)
Part of what may eventually be called a renaissance of animation, starting in and around Avatar: the Last Airbender (unless you start the rebirth at Batman: The Animated Series and believe there have been no breaks from them to now of good animated shows) where animated television shows once again appealed to a large audience of kids and grownups of all gender identities.
Contains a large cast of characters, even if their body types are similar. Characters are differentiated physically by color, species, accessories, and a unique stamp on the flank called a cutie mark. For the Friendship is Magic universe, the cutie mark is an indicator of the thing a particular pony finds the greatest joy in doing. Pony society seems structured around making sure that any pony can find work (often through small business entrepreneurship) that is in harmony with their cutie mark, and it is a source of significant social stress for young ponies to not have a cutie mark, to the point where a common schoolyard taunt among ponies is "blank flank", calling attention to the lack of a cutie mark.
Created by Lauren Faust, Friendship is Magic is also notable for having an extraordinarily large Periphery Demographic of adult men and men-presenting persons. The "bronies" phenomenon sometimes conflicted visibly with the target demographic of young girls and girl-presenting people in their requests for stories to go on certain directions or characters to do various things to the point where a specific character, voiced by Patton Oswalt, was created as a way of the creators firing back at those ideas and demands. For the most part, though, bronies were responsible for significantly queering the perception of acceptable masculinity and masculine entertainment. (There are male or male-coded characters in Friendship is Magic, but they are a significant minority compared to female and female-coded characters.) By being so clearly outside a convenient box that could explain the show's popularity, like "most bronies are gay or trans*", the phenomenon continued to attract attention, both positive and negative, and a rather large discussion spawned. Many intersectional takes on bronydom that I've read found them lacking in other forms of diversity and criticized then for attempting to control the space of the discussion so that no others could also participate.
Episodes are generally stand-alone, with the exception of season beginnings and endings, although some episodes will reference events that have already happened in a lower-key way. Except for Twilight Sparkle's model after the end of the fourth season. Will run (has run) nine seasons before retiring and the wait begins for what will presumably be a show about the fifth generation. Because there are still toys to sell, in the end.
Generally a fan, excepting when the writers' stable engages in the sitcom practice of "this character, who had already learned this lesson before, forgets it so we can go on an adventure for them to learn or again."
11) Disney
The House of Mouse.
Owner of Marvel, Lucasfilm, Miramax, Touchstone, the Muppets, and many other studios, properties, and ideas. Creator of Mickey Mouse and responsible for most of the terrible copyright laws and their terms of existence, because you will have to pry Mickey Mouse from their cold, dead hands to put him into the public domain so that everyone can use him as they like without having to pay Disney or give them any say in the use of the character.
The unvarnished villains of the parody film Evangelion Re:Death because they want to own everything, and have enough clout to make governments vote to them, instead of having governments break them apart over monopoly concerns.
Everything they do makes them money. Sometimes legitimately. Has an army of lawyers ready to cease and desist anything that isn't so squarely in the pocket of fair use that even they would lose.
Creates feature-film length animated movies that are generally classified as "kids' stuff" when released under the Disney mark. Releases 3D animated movies with Pixar, one of their subsidiary companies. Responsible for what many people envision when they hear the word "Princess", unless they are part of a country that has a royal family and follow their lives fairly closely. (They have a products line branded with their various animated princesses, who are all together but will not look at each other because that would acknowledge the existence of the Princess multiverse. There have been fewer entries to the Princess product cabal since Pixar started also making princess movies, but they will join in eventually, once they stop being cash-vaches in their own right.)
Collaborator on Kingdom Hearts with Square-Enix, where Disney worlds, characters, and movie plotlines advance the Kingdom Hearts story.
Has created several theme parks related to their characters and properties, often wanting you to believe they are "the happiest place on Earth", which might be true if you excluded the grownups who are remarkably aware of the cost of participating in this experience. Supposedly the preferred destination of various sports champions, although that's more memetic and paid endorsement than anything.
Speaking of sports, Disney owns the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) and the Entertainment and Sports Network (ESPN), so they have a hand in much of the programming available both over the air and on "basic cable".
Disney, the mark, is aggressively family-friendly. Disney, the company, is not. Touchstone was Disney's house for things above the G rated house (think 10+, 13+, and 17+ classifications, even though they're not "no admittance if you're under that age" classifications, as a parent or guardian can take an underage child into an R-rated movie). Miramax, who has done Kevin Smith (of Jay and Silent Bob fame) and as few others, was also an R-rated division (when they owned it. Miramax is now owned by somebody else.).
Disney owns a lot of things that are the cultural zeigeist now, and has done their fair share of creating those things, too. The problem is, rather than continuing to innovate, they've gotten to the point where they would rather just buy who is innovating and put their money and resources behind it to make even more. It's capitalism at its finest, with all the monopolistic impulses that go along with it.
12) Cheese making
I've never tried it, much like other processes of making dairy things. The basement might be a suitable environment for trying, assuming that Wray you need is a relatively consistent temperature and humidity to make cheese with. But what the actual process is, and any specific organisms that need to be introduced to culture the milk into cheese, that I do not know. And I suspect that having homemade dairy products to further aggravate my sneezes is probably not the best idea.
13) Saturn
Cassini! Which I would be know nearly as much about if it weren't for having someone who has worked on that project and its data as well as otherwise being a really cool woman-presenting person in science and engineering.
So, Saturn's the first planet we observed that has rings that are observable with a low-powered telescope. The planet itself is a gas giant, and the bands in the rings are often due to the orbits of its multiple satellites making sure that the debris that would otherwise be present is swept away and moved. Lots of pictures and measurements and probes sent back from that neighborhood.
Frankly, I wish that we could do more in space research and science by governmental entities getting funded, rather than having people with more money than they know what to do with try to privately research and commercialize space travel and research for their profits. Then again, I'm also one of those weirdos who thinks that those people with more money than they will ever need should be willing to use it to help people desperately in need ask the way through kind of in need, rather than just letting it sit there as a lump accruing interest.
14) Jigsaw puzzles
I haven't gotten into them that much, although they are fun to do. My parents were much bigger in them, and so I picked up some techniques on solving them.
Start with the border pieces, if your puzzle has them, then put together what are obvious features of the puzzle and connect them to the frame where you can. Eventually it progresses to smaller features, like "this piece is entirely composed of grass, so it will eventually slot in here" and so forth.
When there are no more pieces left, you're done!
Some puzzles work in three dimensions, and others impose difficulty by making their puzzle either cut in uniform shapes, use patterns with subtle differences between them, or have a second puzzle on the reverse side that also has to be completed correctly (this feature is often in conjunction with the uniform pieces and/or the subtle variances pattern.)
One of the proudest puzzle completions I did was taking various irregularly-shaped puzzles that formed cubes and finding configurations where two cubes could lose a face but fit together, then three, four, five, and eventually found a way of fitting six cubes of five faces each together so that it made a contiguous 3D shape. It took me quite some time to figure out all out.
15) Jumping rope
I've done some of that when I was younger. Mostly by myself, as I didn't have either the friends group or the body coordination to do some of the more interesting skip rope tricks that were popular (and that helped seed a nascent YouTube with interesting skills videos.
That also brings back the various "Jump Rope for Heart" things that would happen in elementary school, which still continue to this day. I think they were pledge based money raising for worthwhile charity and the promise of a significant amount of physical activity in exchange for the donations.
16) Tables
An HTML component with a reputation for being used as a substitute for the "correct" form of using Cascading Style Sheets to lay out content, especially because CSS increasingly encourages a certain understanding of the DOM to make it work correctly. (And even then, it sometimes gets quirky.)
But tables do have a use, if what's being displayed is tabular data. Semantic page construction just wants us to separate, as much as possible, the purely aesthetic from the meaty content.
Tables also show up when programs wants to store information in a database or file and the information needs to be found by any of its associated attributes. There are a lot of ways to store attributes and relationships between tables and such, and there's an entire study of access and data structures with the idea in mind of making it as quick as possible to retrieve any bit of data in the database.
There are also things with some number of legs and a flat surface on top that we do all sorts of things at, even if they are nominally meant for eating in popular conception. (I say that because other tables generally have a "purpose" in front of them, like a sewing table, a billiards table, and so forth that distinguishes them, but eating tables do not. I'm sure there's a linguistic term for this signifier of the special compared to the default, but I don't know what it is off the top of my head.
17) Fonts
I wasn't old enough to remember it, of course, but I was baptized using the water from one. I would guess by my uncle, the priest, because when you have a priest in the family, they tend to be the ones doing the rites for the family.
For the most part, though, that word seems to be strictly an ecclesiastical one, as I rarely hear anyone referring to various water-containing or dispensing things as fonts. (Some people get described as fonts of things life wisdom and information, and it's that usage that makes me think font and fountain have the same root word, if one isn't the root of another.)
There's also another font that most people in our technological world think of first. Because word processing programs use the word font to refer to the collection of typeface, size, and weight being worked in at any given moment (which is a font, so they're not wrong), it's taken over the meaning of typeface and the two can be used nearly interchangeably at this point.
The biggest distinction I see drawn is between the ones with serifs (little flourishes on the ends of the strokes that make up the letter) and those that are sans-serif. It may have been reading on the usefulness of Comic Sans (it's remarkably good at not causing lexical confusion) where I learned that people with reading disabilities have less difficulty with sans-serif fonts, since there's less extraneous information to be dealt with. So yet another reason for Comic Sans not to be entirely confined to the dustbin.
18) Buoys
A bell rings and a man dies.
They help things stay afloat or at a particular depth so they can do their work of warning or making boundaries, or helping things on the water not have terrible collisions, or emitting sonar pulses. The specifics are things that I can't know about, because I lack clearance, but the engineer in my nuclear family has worked on designing and testing sonobuoys, sometimes in places where you could set up a few nets and play ice hockey on the deck of the ship.
19) Infrared
Spectrum below the visible range for human eyesight. Energy released as heat is often in that spectrum, and can be made visible by false coloration or with tools used to capture that spectrum and then present visible imagery based on that capture.
Astronomy also tends to work with the infrared, as it's often the only spectrum of energy that makes it through the void of space to be picked up on by arrays of telescopes on the ground and in space, even if when it came out it was way higher up the wavelength spectrum.
Humans kind of got short shrift when it comes to the amount of spectrum we can perceive without becoming cyborgs, but at this point in time, if we ever develop that, the amount of information available will be constantly overwhelming, given how much we crowded up all the other parts of the spectrum with our human stuff.
20) Robert's Rules of Order
One of the ur-texts of parliamentary procedure. Despite knowing of it, have not actually read any of it and definitely do not know how they are supposed to work. Since I don't have that many parliamentary bodies that I'm part of (most of them are benevolent dictatorships), I haven't had to learn it, either. This is probably a good thing, because I get entirely flustered when meetings spiral away from control, and I don't think slamming the gavel will help any.
21) Heliotrope
Hello, Sol! You're a very nice star, you know, to have so many things turning toward you. That said, my most common association with the name is that it's the name of the weapon of Raphael, one of the Nine Swords of Ivoire in the game Phantom Brave.
I'm not all that interested in plants and gardening, so I couldn't spot a heliotrope plant without a guide or a more experienced pair of eyes.
22) Echidna
Not native to my part of the planet, and therefore got introduced to the name through the Sonic the Hedgehog series of games, where Knuckles is nominally such a thing, blessed with superior strength and a gliding ability to cover long distances while airborne. Which brings us to the "Sonic and Knuckles" game cart as designed by SEGA, which was intended to be used with other Sonic games so that they could be played as Knuckles, by first inserting Sonic and Knuckles, then inserting the other Sonic game on top of that. Essentially, it followed the same design as the Game Genie accessory, but instead of allowing users to input codes that would change register values so that items, lives, or the ability to jump would be infinite or otherwise, it had the system load specific things into memory from the Sonic and Knuckles cartridge rather than the host cartridge.
Other cartridges were supposed to refuse to load their games, instead displaying a screen that could, with a button combination, be used to play a bonus level of the style of Sonic 3. It was rumored that other cartridges were compatible with the Sonic and Knuckles lock on, most infamously Mortal Kombat could then have Sonic as a character, although that rumor always came with "you can't let Sub-Zero hit Sonic with his freeze attack or the game will glitch and you'll have to reset." A very detailed rumor, certainly. I never owned the console and the requisite cartridges to find out.
As it is, actual echidnas are Oceania creatures, and are monotremes, like the platypus, which they have more in common with genetically than the hedgehogs and anteaters their physical appearance resembles.
23) Pier
Handy for taking a long walk off. Or suggesting that someone else do the same. In theory, the things that boats and other water craft cozy up to so that the humans on board can embark and disembark. Can be large or small, and there are some that have had their buildings transformed from nautical uses to clubs, restaurants, and other establishments that are still referred to as being on the pier (because they are).
Have used them as runways for jumping into lakes as well as their intended purpose. Not nearly as willing to do that when the local water is perpetually ocean-cold. And also, there's a certain distance you want to get away from the pier when you take the leap, to avoid hitting yourself.
Also used for dog jumping competitions, where the idea is to get the longest leap off the pier, instead of going for a high jump.
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[Please enjoy this performance of 4'33" while your content is loading...]
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Date: 2019-06-20 11:16 pm (UTC)Do you remember the one with the cliff? I don't think I ever got the starting line (and possibly may be conflating several others into the ending).
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Date: 2019-06-22 09:25 am (UTC)but if you're open to it,
bolding the headers
18) Buoys
would make it much easier for me to read/navigate long entries like this.
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Date: 2019-06-22 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-02 09:00 pm (UTC)still want <user name=fandomgiftbox>es to get
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Date: 2019-07-02 09:01 pm (UTC)Hrm. Seems a forbidden character does successfully mark the end of the thing, but the character sticks around. That's an edit in a comment, but not a good thing overall.
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Date: 2019-07-02 09:03 pm (UTC)but yeah
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Date: 2019-07-02 09:25 pm (UTC)