David J Prokopetz

Kamen Rider franchise:

So it turns out that fated rivals ARE a thing, but due to a bureaucratic error it was never specified that nemesis pairs have to be the same species; consequently, for most living humans, their fated rival is some kind of bug.

Crucially, if you consistently kill them both off at the end of each episode, the tension is gone because it's predictable. Maybe you do a two-parter. Maybe have a stretch where one of them survives for 3–4 episodes, but goes through multiple partners. Maybe they both eat it in the first 10 minutes!

"X-Files" style paranormal investigative procedural which preserves high stakes over the length of its run by keeping the same supporting cast from episode to episode, but the sexy lead duo can die at any time. Many pairs last only a single episode, especially the gratuitous celebrity guest stars.

You think you've got it rough? I once checked the AO3 profile of an unfinished fic I'd been recced, and discovered the author'd abandoned it to write a long-form Harry Potter fic, abandoned that for ANOTHER long-form HP fic, then abandoned the second HP fic to write about Sasuke fucking Spider-Man.

It was like she had no friction at all – she just skated across my torso and tumbled off the far side of my office chair like an ice cube on a hot skillet.

I'm wearing what was advertised as a "highly breathable" dress shirt today, which texture-wise is basically a button-down made of parachute fabric, and apparently I failed to reckon with how this would interact with my cat's habit of hurling herself bodily at my lap to flop against my tummy.

I once saw a dude post a generative image as original work and one of the characters was wearing a T-shirt with the prompt printed on it.

One of my favourite species of generative AI fuckups is when someone claims that an image is their own original work, but there's a sign or a poster or a whiteboard or what-have-you in the background and you can literally see the prompt they used written on it.

Carefully explaining to my elite catgirl infantry for the fifteenth time that polearm unit tactics only work if everyone in the unit is wielding the SAME polearm. One of them showed up with a Bohemian ear-spoon. Where did she even get that.

Spends several years queerbaiting my TV show's audience, strongly hints that Everything Will Be Resolved in the series finale, then does a five-years-later epilogue in the last five minutes revealing that two characters who have literally never interacted got together off screen.

Killing my chief minion each time they fail me because I'm evil, reviving them afterward because qualified help is hard to find, and completely failing to realise the only reason they haven't betrayed me over being treated in this way is because they're kind of into it because I'm dumb as hell.

You'd think I'd have advice for the current North American cold snap, living where I do, but in practice I know fuck-all about best practices because this happens every year here and all the houses are built to handle it. It's going down to -42C this weekend and my only plan is "don't go outside".

Group of characters where each claims to be the last survivor of the same extinct extraterrestrial civilisation, insisting the others technically don't count; one's a robot created by the culture in question, one was raised in the culture but isn't the same species, one's a straight up ghost, etc.

I think English orthography would be categorically improved by the adoption of extended whitespace. Right now we're stuck with ellipses to serve that function if we're doing things "properly", and "hell... yes" simply does not communicate the same thing as "hell yes".

"Ending explained" video for "Moby-Dick" that initially appears to be addressing the luciferan symbolism surrounding Ahab, but by the two-thirds mark it's clear it's circling in on an argument that Ishmael's improbable survival of the penultimate chapter proves he was secretly working for the whale.

"MIO: Memories in Orbit" dropped the same fucking day I finally got around to 100% clearing "Ender Magnolia". It's like the universe is conspiring to kill me exclusively through the medium of elegiac post-apoc metroidvanias about short girls making friends with robots.

I'm incapable of reliably committing the names of the Great Lakes to memory because my brain absolutely rejects the fact that there's a Lake Superior but no corresponding Lake Inferior.

The adjustments become more narrowly targeted as it gathers data over the course of play; the EX stage bosses have pre-recorded taunts for kinks you've never even heard of.

Masocore shooter that syncs via Bluetooth with one of those biorhythm monitoring apps and measures the player's autonomic responses to various audiovisual cues in order to increase its difficulty by dynamically adjusting its presentation to target whatever the player finds most distractingly horny.

We can’t simply rely on naturally occurring davids bowie, conditions have to be just right for that to occur.

Ultimately we've got to reckon with the fact that much of the OSR movement is merely reacting to indie TTRPGs' tendency to lose sight of why many folks take up the hobby: for a safe and budget-friendly way to satisfy the natural human impulse to put one's friends in some kind of fucked up labyrinth.

Taking a principled stand against past participles.

It's fun when androids with penises are described as "fully functional" because there are so many unexamined assumptions in play. Some day I'm going to write a story where a bepenised android is described as "fully functional", then 20 chapters later disaster is averted by the fact that it can piss.

I don't even have the excuse of being a kid – I was 22, and absolutely should have known better. Sometimes computer literacy merely enables exciting new ways to fuck everything up, is what I mean to say.

I keep records and backups pretty rigorously, which is why whenever I'm doing an archive crawl and hit a conspicuous lacuna of several days in the last week of January 2006 I immediately know that was the time I tried to modify my primary hard drive's master file table by hand.

"Illimitable" doesn't mean "unlimited"; it means "unable to be limited". That's part of the problem – topics where the first one applies come up fairly frequently, but the second one, not so much!

[...] they were prompting for images with the dicks already pixelated, then separately feeding in the same prompt without specifying that the dick should be pixelated, and whatever AI they were using couldn't reliably reproduce the same image twice.

I think the dumbest way I ever saw someone get caught using undisclosed generative AI was a guy who posted censored art with uncensored versions on their Patreon, but the latter had subtly different composition, and it turned out they weren't generating the images, then censoring the dicks – [...]

The problem with being a fan of classic literature is that you end up knowing so many fantastic words that basically never come up in everyday conversation. Do you have any idea how rare it is to get the chance to drop an "illimitable"?