A sufficiently desperate amalgamated waffle sorter

I wonder... if I were to change the past so that I started watching My Little Pony now, with no prior knowledge thereof... would I see Pinkie differently?

As it stands, she's essentially the founding member (though not the first, chronologically, even in my experience) of a brain-category that has some relation to the "manic pixie dream girl" trope, but, well... the four foremost members of that category are Ty Lee of A:TLA, Pinkie Pie, Nora Valkyrie of RWBY, and Tess Fontana of Eureka. And the latter two are my current favorite members of their respective casts, whereas Pinkie is pretty near the bottom.

Don't get me wrong, I realize there are substantial differences between the four. And I don't see any way I could prefer Pinkie to Twilight, let alone Fluttershy. But it seems rather odd for the same brain-category of this type to contain both extremes.

I wonder how many people can legitimately say that the voices in their heads keep them sane?

It's odd to say, I know. But if one's definition of sanity includes understanding and being able to deal with other people, I'd say it's accurate enough for me.

Way back when I started at Milliways, I believed I played Felix basically as myself. This was not entirely true - I played him as somewhere between myself and his canonical self, with a few aspects from neither. Vestiges of this remain to this day. But it sort of set the stage for playing him as he actually is, and even more, hearing him. The Felix who lives in my head today may not be precisely the canonical Felix. But he specifically isn't me. He has different goals, motivations, and responses than I do. And because he isn't me, but I have access to his personality, I have that much more understanding of persons-other-than-me. It's no longer exactly trial and error - or it is, but without external consequences.

And the other voices I've picked up along the way - Kain, and Rose, and Fluttershy, and Applejack, and to a lesser degree Spock and Karis, and even the alternate Felixes - all help. They're at different degrees of not-me, but more importantly, they're in different directions. Even if Rose were more like me, she wouldn't necessarily be more like Kain. Spock isn't on the same line as Fluttershy, no matter what their respective 'distances'. And so on. Which means that I have more places I can look to figure out what people expect, and how they will react to whatever I do.

I still don't expect to ever be "normal", but because of headvoices I think I can fake it better than I used to.

I have now seen Tangled.

It was fun. Not up to the Second Pixar Threshold - also known as "let's see that again!", which has only been reached by WALL*E and Toy Story 3 - but still fun.

I absolutely love being able to feel the shape of music. It's nothing huge, but I can usually tell when there's going to be a change in whatever music I'm hearing, and often what sort of change. For instance, there's a song in Tangled called "I See the Light" (Probably vaguely spoilery, but not if you are up on your Disney tropes.) Having never heard it before, beyond my brother singing snippets of it in the shower, I was able to "cue" the start of the singing. This isn't the only time this has happened - at the ending climax part of Stardust, the first time I saw it, I cued changes in the camera angle based entirely on the shape of the music. Every time I hear "When You Believe", from Prince of Egypt, I raise my right hand at a particular point. Every time.

Incidentally, I am informed that the Flower song is called "Healing Incantation". This produces interesting resonances in my brain - I tend to associate that phrase with the following:

( J'den encour. )

Context, says Brain, is a wonderful thing.

We know that the people behind Avatar (TLA) are Miyazaki fans; see, for instance, Appa and several of the spirits. Who's to say it's not recursive and retroactive?

I submit, therefore, that Princess Nausicaä is, in fact, another world's Aang. She's a bit more awesome and more in-tune with nature, and of course female, but she's got her glider that she can ride like the wind itself, and she's single-handedly responsible for the improved status quo at the end.

I've got a little list;
I've got a little list!
( Of the many many Sylars that the audience is shown. )

Any disagreements? Better names to offer? Others that should go on the list?

Also, ( Read more... )

Sometimes I wonder if Brain thinks I've forgotten he exists. Consider, for instance, this morning:

I noticed that tonight's episode of Heroes was "Cold Snap". Immediately Brain submitted a composite meta-image composed of Tracy Strauss, that hammer-thing from Soon I Will Be Invincible, 28 Days Later (I think. I've never watched it, and I may be mixing up titles again.*), and Wintersmith.

*The website TV Tropes is a wonderful source of such trope data. Unfortunately, it should adopt "Betcha Can't Have Just One" as its slogan. Having made a conscious effort to keep down the number of pages I have open, I currently have 14 TV Tropes tabs simultaneously, plus at least one separate page that's there as a direct result.

(Is there no "puzzled" mood option? "Confused" isn't quite right.)