So Girls Band Cry basically did the literal exact same ending that Jellyfish tried to do, except it actually involved all the cast instead of just being one of them getting to have a small personal win while the rest sit around watching from the sidelines like , and was also paced for that to actually work as the climax.

The first seven episodes of Jellyfish were better, hands down, but the last five were like an entirely different show (in fact, I'd say the tail end of Jellyfish was literally just the tail end of Girls Band Cry but worse because it didn't fit the characters or story trajectory at all and also wasn't executed well), with the one exception of episode 11 and how it dealt with Watase's gender. In contrast, the first half of Girls Band Cry wasn't great: the characters were abrasive and annoying and all the narrative drama was just Nina or Momoka getting mad and then storming off because of it, over and over, but it admittedly did manage to turn it around in the last five or so episodes and give it all some semblance of a coherent story arc.

Also tell me I'm not the only person who didn't realize until episode 10 that Tomo and Rupa were a couple? They never say anything about it that I caught, but it's pretty clear in retrospect that the two women who live together, spend every waking moment together, and who have a categorically different sort of relationship than they do with anyone else are together, at least after seeing these scenes from ep10 and ep11:

Unfortunately the Nina/Momoka pairing people were meming over never happened, though it's not particularly surprising since they just didn't have any particular chemistry past the first episode or so. In fact, looping back to the "Jellyfish turned into a worse version of GBC in the end" point, the heel-face turn Jellyfish did with Mahiru and Kano basically turned them into Nina and Momoka: friends, but held at arms length.

The last point to mention is the art: third act narrative problems aside, Jellyfish was a stylish and gorgeously animated show with vibrant static-but-lively backgrounds; Girls Band Cry had a fair bit of style to it and was probably the least bad looking CGI anime I've ever seen, but the CGI still just looks bad most of the time and the added motion from animated background action dilutes the shot and distracts from the actual focus of any given scene. I've come to strongly believe in the value of a static background as an economy of motion and focus thing, and a crowd of janky moving repeated-model extras wiggling in the background absolutely brings down the scene in a way that a static panel of out-of-focus background characters doesn't - so it should be no surprise that the best looking shots in GBC are the ones without a ton of background action or jarring movement that the CGI exacerbates.

So I get that it's not like in Cities: Skylines where it's used for pathfinding by people traveling around and instead is like "people go stand at the sad and unfulfilled person station in the hopes that a carriage will arrive to take them somewhere they need to go," but what happens then? They have an "I would like to go do a job at the job factory" travel goal and an "I would like to go shopping" travel goal, but do they also have an "I would like to go home" goal or do they just teleport back home after doing a task?

Do I need to coordinate them returning home or just being delivered to places they want to work and shop?

Edit: for that matter, how does refueling work for trains and busses? Do they just autonomously seek out fuel stops when they need to, or do I need to micromanage that somehow? Scratch that, I just watched a bus go to a gas station unprompted, through I'm still unclear on whether trains will find a fueling station or if they need to be routed through one.

The animation and color palettes are gorgeous, the soundtrack is great, and the story is both cute and poignant, revolving around an amateur artist, disgraced former idol, said former idol's fangirl/stalker, and a failing vtuber starting a band but focusing mainly on their personal alienation and anxieties instead of the music/performance side of that. The four main characters are all pretty unambiguously queer too.

Cons: might be yuri bait, and the rare fanservice shots are weird and tonally out of place with the rest of the story. There's also five episodes left in the season so there's plenty of time left for it to milkshake duck and retroactively ruin the first half.

Still a shame the anime never got picked up for another season.

Like as far as writing quality in general, art, characters, etc it's all quite good, but the whole "dungeon ecology" stuff being retconned away with "actually it's all eldritch horror wish magic so all that monster ecology stuff is fake bullshit that doesn't matter" kind of sucked as a core plot point, as was downgrading the dungeon lord from "scary ancient mage who knew how to make such a big and complex dungeon" to "just some dumbass who didn't understand the most basic things, and it was all just eldritch horror wish magic doing the heavy lifting." Making a core point of the wish magic "greed and cruelty are harmless and normal, but wanting to improve the material conditions of others? That's a serious moral hazard that feeds a world eating demon!" is some peak liberal bullshit, too.

Also I hate the narrative device of "this arc has reached it's climax and finished and we've wound it all down now, time to move on to the next-PSYCH lmao I take it back it's not done I'm undoing it now it's still on we're still doing the thing that just finished lol" because it's lazy and ruins tension and pacing compared to just finding some better way to segue into a new arc. Especially since it doesn't even really do much of anything with the retcon, and it was practically just an excuse to get rid of the timer they had and replace it with a different one they didn't know about.

Apart from those things it was all good enough, though.

Like the way its structured to start with is the extremely tight view that drives home that all these other characters have their own lives and existence but you only ever the few bits when Frieren's around and then they're gone, while the pacing keeps up this constant feeling of time slipping inexorably away and being lost forever. It hits hard and is structured perfectly for those themes.

Then it hits a point where the story shatters into a bunch of separate threads and grinds to a complete halt in the way that stories that split into a bunch of threads inevitably do. It loses the tight focus and the feeling of "yes, these characters have their own existence but you only interact that during the moments you're actually there" sort of thing in favor of just showing you a blow by blow of everything that's going on with them, and instead of time slipping away no matter how hard you hold onto it it instead stands completely still.

It stops being unique and impactful and starts being "that annoying thing from BNHA where they spend like half an entire season going into excruciating detail about some little training exercise with mild competitive elements that every single member of a huge cast is participating in" instead.

I know you have to soak them overnight to rehydrate them and leach out poisonous shit, but is there more to it than that? Can this go along with seasoning them or does the water need to be as clean as possible to make them safe to eat?

Here's one begging the mods to curtail all the AI generated slop in the AI slop generation sub.

Another post asking how to filter out all the low effort memes, and another providing a link to hide them.

The meme in question is also some vaguely racist riff on the weird facebook spam pictures, focused on an african child making things out of garbage.

It's just really funny the bitter fighting that's happening between "don't ruin this useful informational sub with the literal fruits of its efforts" people and the "lol lmao slop machine go brrrr" trolls.

They're holes in the water you throw money into.

Like I don't even have any ethical qualms about it, I just have crippling social anxiety that stops me from doing the sort of networking and bullshitting a crypto scam requires.

I've spent weeks searching for an answer and trying different fixes, but at best I've reduced the frequency of it happening and even that I'm dubious of, since it seems so random.

• journalctl has absolutely nothing at all from when it happens, except one time where it managed to log that the kernel lost contact with the GPU in the seconds before the system went down - after undervolting and underclocking the GPU that message hasn't happened since.

• there's no crash log from it either.

• memtest declared there were no problems with the RAM.

• I've been watching sysinfo and corectrl like a hawk and CPU, RAM, and VRAM usage is all well within normal levels when it happens, temperatures are low across the board.

• the same system has been 100% stable and completely fine running under heavier load for hours at a time in windows.

• I've followed AMD's instructions for making sure the GPU drivers are what they should be for this, and the kernel is a version that's supposed to be correct and stable for those drivers as well.

• specific compatibility settings that other people found to fix literally this exact problem may have, at most, reduced the frequency of the crashes but again, they're so erratic it's almost impossible to determine cause and effect here.

• I've tried disabling the integrated graphics both in the BIOS and through settings, because that can apparently cause instability, but that hasn't helped.

I don't know what else to look at or try at this point.

So by now we probably all know about the concept of diegetic essentialism (tl;dr: treating a piece of media as if it were a whole and complete thing that exists in and of itself within itself when analyzing it, instead of only what the author actually shows), and we can see that it's both a real phenomenon that both fandoms and critics do a lot to the point that it's something that needs some level of criticism.

Now, as the essay itself says, diegetic essentialism is a part of how media is consumed and parsed, and I could describe it as a sort of object-permanence for fantasy where you have to assume and work with the fact that a story isn't and can't go over every bit of progression in detail and so you have to assume that things are happening in the background, the character is still there if the camera pans off them or they aren't mentioned by name for a paragraph or a page, etc. So its point is more that it should only be a part of the actual act of consuming media, and you shouldn't do that "remembering that stuff off screen is there and stuff is happening offscreen" thing when analyzing a work to try to divine exactly what "really" happened offscreen in the fictional story.

With the release of Starfield, it became apparent that this is an incomplete perspective. For anyone who is not familiar with that, Starfield presented a high-tech, "utopian" society of space-car-brained fascists of several flavors, none of whom know what a phone is, and where despite having functionally limitless resources everywhere you look 90% of the population are either unpersoned homeless people you're legally allowed to hunt for sport, or the footsoldiers of one petty warlord or another. The official, explicit author explanation of the setting is that it's cool and good, and that it's a hopeful and aspirational future. The horror is all whitewashed and toned down, and internal criticism of the nightmare dystopia it's created is extremely weak and soft.

Naturally, the fanboys do diegetic essentialism to imagine how it actually does work and is as nice as it claims to be, handwaving over all the fascism and slavery to unironically do the liberal thing that Vonnegut mocked in Player Piano about how even the poorest members of society have fancy consumer goods that make their lives better than those of kings (which in Starfield's case they're inventing from whole cloth, since there aren't fancy consumer goods and no one even has a phone). Now we could just say "this is vapid and horrible on its face" and leave it at that, but that makes for a weak criticism and forgoes a chance to pick apart the brainworms that went into its creation.

It is for that exact purpose that I synthesized Diegetic Materialism as the answer. Because sometimes one does have to engage in diegetic essentialism to analyze a work, but this should remain grounded in material analysis. That is, if one is treating a work as real inside itself one's focus should be on how its internal cause and effect flows, what the material underpinning of some facet of it is and has to be. Effectively applying worldbuilding and character building criticism to better understand both the author and the work itself - characters should have motivations and backgrounds, setting elements should have causes and histories, and in the absence of these what one can reasonable infer should make sense or at least not betray the author's brainworms.

For example, the UC in Starfield: it's literally just Heinlein's Starship Trooper fascists, uprooted and set down in a context where they make absolutely no fucking sense. It's a highly militarized, elitist society ruled by a military junta and massive corporations, which locks personhood and rights like "owning property" behind military or civil service (and in a step beyond even Heinlein, there isn't even voting for citizens, the state is simply a self-enclosed military and bureaucratic hierarchy). Despite this, there's neither a reason for any of it nor dissent, nor do they do any of the things that would be required to sustain that system. They're a clean, happy, cosmopolitan society that preaches tolerance and peace and has social welfare programs, while the non-citizen class either lives in rental units in peaceful slums out of sight and there's no need for brutal enforcement or peacekeeping, or they're outcasts you can legally hunt for sport and no one thinks there's anything weird about this.

It's nonsense, and it gets more nonsensical the more you look at it because there's no cause and effect: why are the happy, tolerant, very concerned about social welfare people locking personhood behind military service? Why is there no dissent to any of this? Where is the conflict between the corporations and social welfare programs? Where is all the violence and immiseration that this society would require to sustain its militant and corporate hierarchy? Its diegesis makes absolutely no material sense whatsoever. Hence why it was the inspiration for "diegetic materialism."

Tl;dr:

Thesis: being a dumb nerd who does diegetic essentialism to divine unwritten details about a work.

Antithesis: saying that's bad and you should stop.

Synthesis: employing diegetic essentialism as a tool to let you apply materialist analysis in criticism of a work.