A Criticism I See Of Sao Is Often Along The Lines Of Whats The Message? That Video Games Are Better Than

a criticism I see of sao is often along the lines of “what’s the message? that video games are better than real life? that being trapped in the game was Good, Actually? that doesn’t apply to real life at all. that’s a useless thought experiment akin to contemplating the ethics of fucking your clone.”

the way the aincrad arc was about how you have to find love and happiness in the here & now, no matter how bleak things are. because when fighting for a cause, it’s so easy to deny yourself joy until that far-off dream is achieved; you tell yourself you’ll rest after you’ve saved enough money for early retirement. or when capitalism is over and homelessness eradicated. or when you’ve finally reached peak physical form. or when the war is over.

but so many people die before that happens. or they live to see it but shortly succumb to trauma or just the ravages of time. all those years spent fighting for your cause, but now you’ve won you’re an adult and you never had a chance to have any semblance of a childhood. or now you’ve grown so accustomed to misery, you don’t know how to treat happiness- so accustomed to pressure and hatred, you’re cruel and harsh to the people around you.

in sao, life went on, in its strange way. people went fishing. they got married. they cooked and ate for pleasure. they did quests and events for fun. people sarcastically say “they’re trapped in a death game and all they can think about is buying a cottage and fucking?” as if there wasn’t a very direct reasoning for this in the plot. them experiencing a sort of burnout, as well as distrust in the system as it was. them realising their own mortality, that they could be killed any day now; that it’s better to die in love than to die miserable.

Ok minor detail but ...

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations. 

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

The detail in these shows is amazing. 

I like the headcanon that Jeremie actually had a lot of battles during the fight with XANA...except most of them were really mundane, incomprehensible to anyone else, and against the supercomputer itself.

I mean, the whole thing was built by one guy, who probably made his own programming language for it, in 1994, while actively in the process of going insane. It was a marvel! A masterpiece of technology far beyond its time! And its codebase was probably spaghetti on top of spaghetti on top of a dumpster fire. Hence Jeremie having a love-hate relationship with first the computer and then Franz Hopper himself, constantly oscillating between "wow! how did you do this?!" and "oh god, how did you do this?"

The scanners and RTTP work nigh-perfectly because they were thoroughly tested, and Lyoko itself mostly runs very well, but also there's a pebble in the forest sector that cannot be removed or all the textures turn into checkerboard for no discernible reason, everyone's models have loaded in missing any kind of physics at least once, all of the shaders broke at some indeterminate point right after Aelita was first materialized and he still has no idea how that happened, why can't he spawn anything less than three meters above the ground without it ending up IN the ground, yes those are two rocks inside of each other stop giggling, what do you MEAN THERE'S A MEMORY LEAK, WHERE IS THERE A MEMORY LEAK, WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME SOMEBODY CLEARED THE TEMP FILES ON THIS THING, WHERE EVEN ARE THE TEMP FILES THIS SYSTEM MAKES NO SENSE--

He keeps having to ask weird programming questions on internet forums and laments that he has to know an equal amount about 3D physics rendering engines and QUANTUM PROBABILITY MATHEMATICS to make the thing work. Plus he tries to do some things remotely, but his laptop can't run half the supercomputer's programs, and the other half he's remote editing over terrible 2006 school-wide wi-fi that craps itself every time some 10th grade bozo down the hall tries to pirate anime.

This is literally the most bomb-ass D&D story I’ve ever read in my life oh my god.

Replacing physical buttons and controls with touchscreens also means removing accessibility features. Physical buttons can be textured or have Braille and can be located by touch and don't need to be pressed with a bare finger. Touchscreens usually require precise taps and hand-eye coordination for the same task.

Many point-of-sale machines now are essentially just a smartphone with a card reader attached and the interface. The control layout can change at a moment's notice and there are no physical boundaries between buttons. With a keypad-style machine, the buttons are always in the same place and can be located by touch, especially since the middle button has a raised ridge on it.

Buttons can also be located by touch without activating them, which enables a "locate then press" style of interaction which is not possible on touchscreens, where even light touches will register as presses and the buttons must be located visually rather than by touch.

When elevator or door controls are replaced by touch screens, will existing accessibility features be preserved, or will some people no longer be able to use those controls?

Who is allowed to control the physical world, and who is making that decision?