Ironhold

To clarify the MAGA incident - https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Diaclone All of the 1984 and 1985 toys, and a number of the 1986 toys, were either recycled from other toy lines or were originally intended to be used in other toy lines. Most of these came from Diaclone, a line produced by Hasbro's longtime Japanese partner Takara. The premise of Diaclone was that in order to fight off an alien invasion humanity created war machines that disguised themselves as everyday vehicles. Due to how loose the IP laws were in Japan at the time, four of these toys were quite literally unlicensed knock-offs of real life race cars. As IP laws in the United States were still fairly loose regarding toy production, Hasbro chose to make only token modifications to the liveries of the four toys before releasing them in the United States. One of these cars was a knock-off of the Martini Racing #4 Porsche 935 Turbo, who would become the 1984 character Jazz: https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Jazz_(G1)/toys#The_Transformers . The English-language dub of the 1980s cartoon would feature industry legend Scatman Carothers as his voice actor, which helped him stand out as a character. This, along with some clever writing in both the cartoon and Marvel US comics, made him a fan favorite. However, by 1986 it became apparent that not changing the livery was a bad idea. Fans who purchased a Jazz figure through a mail-in promotion from breakfast cereal brand Cookie Crisp discovered that the altered references to Martini Racing had been removed entirely and a few other token alterations had been made. Most subsequent releases of the character, be it a re-release of the original toy or a new figure entirely, have experimented with different designs in order to distance him from his origin as an unlicensed knock-off. This includes the 1993 "Generation Two" release (where his racing deco has been entirely replaced with music notes and he's now the #1 car) and the circa 2004 Binaltech / Alternators release (where he's entirely monochrome with no livery at all). It was no surprise, then, that the 2017 figure likewise courted the concept of the original deco without actually copying anything that could be truly lawsuit-worthy. However, fans who bought the first wave of product noted that the person who designed the deco hid "MAGA" in the deco, using a fictional text-replacement language created for the franchise to make it not readily apparent. For obvious reasons, most of the fandom was quite upset, believing that politics of this nature had no place in a toy line. As such, when Hasbro apologized and issued a statement claiming that the designer had been fired and the bit would be removed for subsequent releases of the figure, a large chunk of the fandom accepted that as fair consequences. However, the "woke" part of the fandom was still out for blood. In their eyes, Jazz was "black" because he was voiced by Scatman Carothers in the 1980s, and so they quite literally saw the MAGA bit as a hate crime. Yes, you read that. Things got quite ugly at that point, with several then-popular fan forums being ripped apart. It seemed like things started healing, but then in 2020 Hasbro announced that they would be doing yet another new version of the figure. Jenevieve Frank, who IDW regarded as an "expert" on the Arcee character, saw that this incarnation of Jazz would be the #14 vehicle instead of the #4 vehicle and lost her mind on Twitter, accusing Hasbro of once again using Jazz to promote "white supremacy" because she saw his being the #14 as a reference to a popular saying among some white supremacist groups. ...Only for Hasbro to explain that the original Diaclone version of Jazz was entry #14 in the official Diaclone product catalog, and since they could no longer have him be the #4 vehicle due to the aforementioned IP issues, he would now be the #14 vehicle. Yes, this is how headache-inducing the franchise has become.

My stance on pronouns is this: I have such a history of head trauma that I'm lucky to even remember names when I meet people the first time. Pronouns represent double the information I have to try and recall, making it more likely I'm going to botch something. If you're patient with me, I'll try to be patient with you.

Blame IDW Publishing. https://tfwiki.net/wiki/IDW Not long after IDW got the license to produce Transformers comic books, one of their writers (I want to say industry legend Simon Furman, who has worked on the franchise off and on since the 1980s) declared that there would be no female Transformers. It would be an all-"male" cast of characters, with the robots being masculine but functionally genderless. Well, the writer underestimated the lasting popularity of Arcee, a female character first introduced in 1986. IDW found themselves in a position to where they needed to introduce Arcee into the comics, but didn't want to contradict their writer. So they decided that Arcee would be a male character who was forcibly transitioned into being female by a mad scientist. Yes, you just read that. This decision polarized the fandom, with even many LGBT individuals calling IDW out for making her being transgender into such a horrific plot point. However, IDW as it turned out leans hardcore "progressive", and there were enough so-called "progressives" in the fandom who cheered them on that IDW felt vindicated. This led to them inserting gender politics and LGBT themes into the comic as a whole, with multiple writing teams essentially being under mandate to make the franchise "woke". This culminated in the infamous issue "The Price Of You", where the character Blast-Off was promised that if he agreed to spy for someone that someone would brainwash Blast-Off's gay crush into loving them back. The fandom was coming apart at the seams due to real-world politics and other drama, and an unnamed individual inserting "MAGA" into the decor of a 2017 Transformers action figure using the fictional Cybertronix language from the franchise didn't help matters any. This issue essentially dropped a daisy cutter right into that fissure, making it permanent. IDW persisted, however, even working LGBT themes into G. I. Joe, My Little Pony, and other licensed franchises. Not even Hasbro hauling IDW out behind the woodshed after the controversies involving writer Aubrey Sitterson (who was leading the charge on making the Joe franchise more "woke") was enough to dissuade them. Whereas Hasbro was once a bastion of family-accessible franchises and entertainment, the monster that IDW unleashed has fused with the monster that is ESG scores and is now forcing Hasbro to stay their hand when writers and directors insist on bringing woke into their properties. Dungeons & Dragons is all but dead as a franchise because of it, the live-action Snake-Eyes movie that was meant to restart interest in the Joe franchise flopped because of it, and now it's infesting Transformers.

There's a ready supply of anecdotal stories in which children as young as elementary school were told that to enjoy things typically associated with the opposite gender was to be transgender. This is usually the result of left-leaning teachers or school counselors taking it upon themselves to diagnose children and begin transitioning them.

Funny you should mention tomboys, as this (admittedly risqué) comic series just got an anime adaptation earlier in the year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomo-chan_Is_a_Girl! (still need to watch it, but have read summaries & reviews). A tomboy has fallen in love with the guy she's known since childhood, but is blindsided when he assumes her confession of love is her reaffirming that she still wants to be friends. She polls a group of female classmates as to what could have happened, not realizing that one of the other girls doesn't have her best interests at heart. The other girl is jealous that the tomboy outperforms her both physically and academically, and so deliberately tries to throw the tomboy off by arguing that the guy doesn't see her as a girl and so she needs to be more effeminate. In reality, the guy is - like a lot of teenagers - dealing with some mental health issues. He *knows* that the tomboy is in love with him, but his response was calculated to keep her at arm's length because as much as he loves her he knew that until he got himself sorted he couldn't be the boyfriend she needed him to be. Fortunately, both of their parents finally connect the dots and realize that something's wrong, and eventually coax him into opening up. When the tomboy learns that he's not well, she explains that she loves him anyway and that she's willing to stand by him for however long it takes.

Mulvaney is what happens when a company loses sight of who its core audience is. For decades Budweiser positioned itself as the beer of choice for blue-collar Americans from what the coastal elites typically regard as "Fly-Over Country". In came a new VP who quite literally declared Bud Light's customers to be nothing more than "frat boys" (yes, her words were leaked) and hired a third-party advertising company to turn that around. They went with someone who even the LGBT community is split on, and things fell apart from there. Essentially Bud Light is now a dead brand. AB would do well to withdraw it from the market and leave it idle for a decade so that people can forget what happened.

I've been trying to track it down, but apparently a 2021 study from up in Canada revealed that something like 88% of a group of minors who had sought gender-affirming care no longer considered themselves to be transgender by 20. Of that 88%, something like 63% said that the initial reason they had pursued care was because they were struggling with homosexual urges and initially believed that by transitioning they would be heterosexual again, only to ultimately accept their being homosexual.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/18/disney-worlds-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-to-shutter.html Considering that we're still at the tail end of a recession and they were charging $6K a night, it's not really any surprise.

Each person here has their own story to tell, and their own basket of life experiences. For example, I myself have, for all intents and purposes, been trained in psychological warfare. I'm talking the "how to melt brains for fun and profit" kind of psych warfare, where you get inside someone's head, figure out what makes them tick, and use it against them until they either do what you want them to do while still thinking it's their own idea or shatter as human beings. There are things I am going to burn for, and I have accepted that fact. I also briefly studied criminal justice, including looking at several infamous killers. Throw in my 7+ years of Spanish, and in an alternate reality I could be out running with the spooky boys right now. I don't live in a world of warm fluffy ideals. I live in a world where people will *literally* grind your face into the pavement just for giggles. I look at how systems are vulnerable, what can make those systems finally break, how those systems can be fixed once broken, and how they can be shielded to prevent them from breaking again. A big part of what I do now as a newspaper writer is warn the public about these things, including how folks like me know how to game them.

We're not *that* far removed from the Johnny Depp trial. I actually know That Umbrella Guy from Twitter, and we've interacted in the past. Nearly a year on and Heard's sycophants are trying to have his reputation and personal life destroyed for daring to cover the trial and showing off the fact that Heard abused Depp and got the media to believe she was the victim when he pushed back.

I remember the damage totals being more intense.

I'm guessing it was basically "this is what the standard dice sizes are, so..."

In the older version of the game? Depending upon what character class (wizard, fighter, thief, ranger, et cetra) your character is, you can potentially have a mere 4 - 12 hit points when you first start out. Housecats? 1 bite for d6 damage and 4 claw attacks for d4 damage each, meaning a housecat could hypothetically deliver 22 hit points' worth of damage in a single attack, 44 if it manages a "critical hit" with each of them. So your average housecat could bring down your average rookie barbarian warrior. Yeah, in the early editions of the game it was very, very easy for your characters to die.

Nope. Getting caught up after Free Comic Book Day. Spent the morning picking up some comics for my nieces and nephews, making purchases as well so I'm not just raiding everyone.

I'm on a Mythbusters fan site. Back when the show was still more active, we were forever talking about movies and dodgy physics in them. Sadly, it's just four or five of us left now.

Today was an annual event in the United States known as "Free Comic Book Day", when comic shops all over the nation offer a select assortment of comic books for free as a loss leader to get people to shop. This year's batch included a few YA-friendly titles (Smurfs, Dog Man, Disney, and so forth) that my mom and I decided to stock up on for some younger nieces and nephews I have who are having difficulty getting interested in reading. I did throw down a fair bit of money at both of the stores I went to, and convinced my mom to do the same so that we'd count as separate customers & so could get more books (both stores had a per-customer limit).

It's been inconsistent throughout the duration of the franchise. In the original issues of the series, it was explained that Krypton's gravity was so much heavier than Earth's that in time all Kryptonians evolved to deal with the gravity. As a result, Superman has to actually hold himself back at times because he's so strong he can leap tall buildings or outrun a steam engine. More recent incarnations have it that solar radiation produced by Earth's yellow sun empower Kryptonians with all sorts of advanced abilities.

I've had cats since 1990.

Cats are one of nature's murder machines, right up there with dingoes, dolphins, and mantis shrimp. That is to say, they look cute and innocent until you have to start hiding bodies. Yes, Fluffy can and will go for the throat if so motivated, and that includes humans. This is why you don't get between a mama and her babies, or an adult cat of either gender and someone they've claimed as their own. It's actually a running gag among older tabletop role-playing gamers that in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons your average housecat could kill your average first-level player, a fitting testament to their destructive capability in real life.

I have so much damage to my sinuses from injury, illness, and medical malpractice that it's affected my sense of taste and smell. I don't mind drinking shelf-stable or powdered milk.

MBA time. Budweiser has spent *decades* and untold sums of money trying to court blue-collar workers from all over the United States, including the portions that most coastal elites dismiss as "Fly-Over Country". It's been positioned as the beer of the common person for some time. Cue some utterly incompetent marketing VP declaring that Bud Light is the sole province of "frat boys" and that it's her job to completely re-brand everything. I put that word in quotes because her little rant got leaked. This *alone* was enough to alienate and even offend much of the company's traditional customer base. Pride-themed cans? Guess what: Bud's traditional core audience isn't exactly too big on the LGBT movement, with the "T" part of it gathering particular controversy of late due to a number of issues and incidents. Going with Dylan Mulvaney? Dylan is so controversial that even many people who do identify as being transgender want nothing to do with them. There's a growing perception that Dylan is not in fact transgender and is merely claiming to be so for publicity. As a result, said VP destroyed the company's image with its core audience while also ensuring that many of the people they were trying to reach out to weren't interested. Oh, and photos have since surfaced showing the VP attending a *lot* of frat parties, suggesting that her own life experiences may have colored her perception.

For me it's been the opposite. When I was a teenager, stake leadership kept sounding the drumbeat of "All men must go on missions, and all women must consider any man who doesn't to be ineligible for marriage." The evening sessions were historically used for hammering the point home (as were many fifth Sundays), and because I didn't go on a mission due to the then-current family situation (my help was needed in caring for an elderly relative) it got to where I came to loathe stake conference. It didn't help that my dad would light me up if I didn't go or if I walked out because I couldn't take it anymore and needed space.

Yesterday was stake conference. I was also pet-sitting for someone who was out of town for a family emergency, and so due to a series of issues with that I arrive quite late; it started at 10 AM and I was in at about 11:15. First talk I do catch is one about how we shouldn't actually be contending with people or getting into debates or anything else like that and should just walk away as needed. As I've noted earlier, when I first got online in 2000, if you were a member of the church then conflict was inescapable; if you self-identified you'd get jumped by people eager to test out whatever anti-Mormon material they'd been spoon-fed, and members of the church were so rare online you generally had no back-up. So there I am in the back of the chapel like so, thinking about how between my being on the spectrum, the drama I was dealing with IRL, and constantly having to fight off cyber-bullies I functionally became a living weapon. Ever have a stake conference talk that just really, really rubbed you the wrong way?

When the "Hogwarts Adventure" video game came out a bit back, a number of more militant transgender rights activists declared that to support the game in any fashion was to literally support "trans genocide" because it was putting money in J. K. Rowling's pocket. As a consequence, anyone who talked about the game on social media found themselves subjected to cyber-bullying from individuals who presumed "plays game = hates people who are transgender". Matters came to a head with a popular virtual idol known as Pikamee. Pikamee had considered playing the game as part of an upcoming charity live-stream, and so a literal horde of these militant activists swarmed the chat of a stream she was doing and began engaging in extreme cyber-bullying. Thing is, the actress who played Pikamee had grown up being bullied for being mixed-race, and the incident caused her to have traumatic flashbacks which were so extreme she tendered her resignation to her talent agency. Around this same time, another virtual idol, Silvervale, was also being subjected to extreme cyber-bullying during her live streams, to the point that the actress actually broke down crying on camera. Large swaths of the internet - including individuals who themselves identified as transgender - mobilized in response to what took place and began pushing back against the militant activists. As I had to explain to someone a day or so back, not only are a lot of people less likely to listen to *any* transgender rights activist now because of what happened, it's become easier to paint any transgender rights activist who even vaguely engages in exaggeration as being "militant" and dismissing them accordingly, like what's going on in Montana. Yes, a number of transgender individuals are now declaring that these activists don't speak for them.

*All* cats are murder machines. Even your average house cat can do considerable damage when so motivated. That kitty on your lap is a cuddly little ball of murder.