NativeJovian

Ultimately it feels like Gwitch doesn't care about anything except the fate of its main characters, which is absolutely wild when it has this whole world set up with huge issues of inequality and cyberpunk style corporations-as-states but ultimately just goes "oh yay the girls got a happy ending :)"

Yeah, I guess I don't disagree with any of that, I just feel like Gwitch ends up as less than the sum of its parts. Characters like Chuchu are cool, but then the show doesn't DO anything with them. There's stuff like the whole Earth Gundams plot thread, which in the end serves to... make Elan sad?

No shade on anyone who's just here for the lesbians, but I feel like you can have lesbians and also be good at other things, and Gwitch just doesn't tick any boxes for me.

I didn't even think that the core SuMio relationship was done very well tbh, but I'm ace as fuck so I'll call that a me thing.

Gwitch was very much Not For Me (neither was Utena, for that matter) but what I struggle with is who WAS it for?

Like, the politics/worldbuilding is half-baked, the core "what's the deal with Aerial" mystery isn't very mysterious, the action is pretty samey. Is it literally just the lesbians??

Gate agent just made the following announcement for my flight delayed by 40 minutes: "Once again passengers in the gate area I apologize for the inconvenience, I apologize for the delay, I... ...sorry, I forgot what I was saying. Let's just board first class."

Girl I feel you.

I finished rereading that one recently! It's definitely a good time. It amuses me how similar the protagonist is to Mark Watney from The Martian. Mildly disappointing that they didn't just bring Matt Damon back again to star in Project Hail Mary, but I can see Ryan Gosling killing it too.

The Jupiter Hammerheads being mentioned during the World Series broadcast was not on my bingo card for the evening, but here we are.

I've actually been to all of these, though Honolulu just barely. I had a layover there on a flight home from Maui -- but I did leave the airport to grab a quick drink with a friend, or else I wouldn't count it.

imo Challia ends up being the most interesting character in the show over small touches like this. He's not a scheming mastermind or a charismatic leader, he's just this weird guy doing his own thing and who is also an unflappable Newtype badass. The man contains multitudes and it's fun to watch.

The biggest two instances are Hush and Julietta. Hush starts out very prominent but then just kinda fades into the background. Julietta's initial appearance feels like a completely different person, cavorting around and eating a butterfly, when after that she's a no-nonsense stick in the mud.

I feel like there's a lot more reshuffling within S2 than there is between S1 and S2, but that still seems likely to be a result of them not being completely sure they'd get a S2 in the first place. Less time to edit S2 as a complete unit if you don't get the greenlight for it immediately.

Machu's attitude here feels like a failure of imagination on the part of the writers. To us on Earth, living in an air-conditioned tin can in orbit is weird and artificial. But for Machu, it should be mundane. It's how she and billions of other people have lived their whole lives!

Oh yeah, her romanticizing Earth makes perfect sense -- because to her, it's exotic and exciting! But couching it in terms of colony life being "fake" feels like... I dunno, saying that living in houses is weird. Houses aren't "natural", sure, but they're very NORMAL. Same with gravity in colonies.

I get that it's a metaphor for her teen angst, but Machu's thing with colony life not being "real" always rang hollow to me. She was born and raised in a space colony. So were her parents, probably. It's the only thing she's ever known!

None of it should be weird to her. It's just her life!

I believe this is supposed to be Lalah. As in Lalah Prime, the Rose of Sharon. How exactly she's using Newtype powers to send text messages while also being frozen in trans-dimensional stasis is left as an exercise to the viewer.

I'd kinda like to see aliens purely as a catalyst for human conflict.

Like humanity gets a signal saying "we are on our way to your solar system, we will arrive in 80 years" and then humanity spends 50 of the next 80 years fighting each other over what to do about it.

But the fact that he doesn't care about ANYTHING else is what makes him a bad person! He defends Gjallarhorn's systemically evil status quo almost incidentally, just because it's good for his friends.

In an AU where he grew up on Mars, he could easily be one of Tekkadan's biggest supporters.

Gaelio is fascinating because he's objectively a shit person, but he's also fanatically loyal to the people he cares about, which is basically always a heroic trait. He literally doesn't care about what Gjallarhorn or Tekkadan are fighting for, he just hates the people that hurt his friends.

This is great wisdom.

wait did I just accidentally reinvent WfM's setting from first principles, with the weird corporate politics and power plays that includes literal backstabbing

Presumably you knew this could happen at any time, so you made preparations and you're in a position to stay afloat.

But what happened to him? Did he back the wrong horse? Get killed in the fighting? Or does he just no longer need you as a front? How would you ever find out? Do you even want to?

This is obviously sketchy, but you can't afford to say no, right? Do you try to figure out what this guy's deal is, or do you just keep you head down and take his money?

And then after all that Gjallarhorn infighting, he just vanishes and you never hear from him again. How do you deal with THAT?

God, this is such fanfic fodder. Imagine someone from the Montag Company fighting to make it a worker-friendly operation, getting blacklisted by Gjallarhorn and facing ruin, then having this absolute lunatic in a mask swoop in, give you All The Money, and tell you to keep doing what you're doing.

A shot of the ironic foundation in Lake Eola in downtown Orlando with a bandstand painted rainbow for Pride in the background.

A shot of an inflatable monument in pink, blue and white with the letters TRANS PRIDE at the bottom, set up with Lake Eola as the backdrop.

Walked to the Come Out With Pride event at Lake Eola afterwards (with what felt like half the No Kings crowd, chanting and cheering the whole way). Didn't have time to stick around for the parade or anything, but had fun checking it out.

A shot of Orlando City Hall from across the street, on the opposite corner. The sidewalk is already filled end to end with protestors, 15 minutes before the official start time for the event.

A shot of the protesting crowd, people standing shoulder to shoulder under the trees in the plaza in front of Orlando City Hall, with various protest signs on display.

A wide shot of the protesting crowd, showing easily hundreds of people.

Another wide shot of the crowd, taken from the same spot and at the same time as the previous photo, showing hundreds more people.

Went to the #NoKings protest at Orlando City Hall this morning. My first time going, but it was a good time. Tons of people!

If I'm lucky it'll run on the shitty disposable laptop I bring on work trips for when I need a computer with no IT restrictions (which neither my actual work laptop nor most customer-provided PCs are). Then I can play it on the road and maybe I'll actually finish it in a reasonable amount of time.

It also has not just one, but several nonbinary characters, so love to see that -- one of which is the stand-in for the player character of the VN it's based on. It's available on Steam and has 93% positive reviews, so seems worth checking out. It's even on sale right now, so I grabbed it myself.

Watched ep 1 of Gnosia today. It's about weirdos from the enlightened spacefuture playing Werewolf/Mafia to catch the person on their ship who is secretly The Thing.

Not the most original premise, but the character work is solid and it's shockingly well animated, so I'm looking forward to more.

Dozens of things you can do to clean up a fresh install of Windows 11 24H2 and Edge If you start using Windows 11 this year, you’ll want to know how to clean it up.

This is from the beginning of the year so it's slightly out of date, but it's still a very useful resource for finding where exactly you can turn off some of the more annoying nonsense. No, Windows, I don't want anything to do with a Microsoft account, stop asking.

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

Finally bit the bullet and updated my PC to Windows 11. Been using it at work for a while so not much of an adjustment. I don't hate it or anything, just no particular reason to update until now.

Fairly painless, except a bunch of settings that need to be changed because the default is annoying.