Time travel is the worst

 I liked the Umbrella Academy Season 1.  It had characters I enjoyed watching, a great aesthetic, and a bunch of neat world building that I wanted to see more of.  It wasn't perfect, but I had a great time with it.

Unfortunately UA ended up being a lot like The Matrix.  It had all these cool ideas that didn't quite fit together, but it didn't have enough time for you to sort out exactly how they didn't fit.  There was still tons of room to imagine that the writers had all of it figured out, and that later on you would see the story come together beautifully.  Then the next chapter came out, and everyone realized that they had been just making shit up the whole time and when they actually tried to put it all together it looked like a junkheap instead of a carefully crafted narrative.

A substantial part of the problem was that UA was determined to have a bunch of time travel.  You *can* do time travel well (see Terminator 2), but the way to do it well is to simply have it happen off screen.  Time travel happened, sure, but now the characters just have to cope with the situation they are in.  Shows where the characters can time travel and change the past all end up being a disaster.  UA had the time travel pretty much off screen for the first season, which was fine, but in the second season they elected to have lots of time travel in the plot, and that blew everything to bits.

You can't just have a character who can go back in time and fix anything that goes wrong.  It makes all the decisions everyone makes totally silly.  Heck, the revelation that he can do this retroactively trashes the first season of the show, since now we know that he could have solved all the problems any time he wanted, and he just didn't because the writers told him not to.

Having everything go terribly and then fixing it by 'turns out the character can go back in time and change anything he wants!' feels like they were trying to go for a big emotional scene but lacked any sense of creativity or long term thinking and came up with the most silly, hackneyed, destructive idea they could and ran with it.  It isn't easy to write characters into dire situations and then have them get out of those situations in a believable but surprising way, but if you can't write that, then find someone who can.  Just throwing up your hands in despair, employing a Deus Ex Machina, and giving up on any world consistency or dramatic tension going forward is pathetic.

It is easy to see where this heads.  In future the character simply forgets to use his 'fix anything with time travel' ability, and they write stories as if this major plot point never happened.  I know that in superhero stories characters forgetting to use their powers is common.  That doesn't make it good.  It isn't just with nonsense time travel either - characters in UA consistently have abilities they forget about, or don't bother using, for no reason.  They have a hugely important conversation in the show where all the main characters desperately need a villain to tell them something.  One of those characters can mind control people, and does so regularly.  All she has to do is say "I heard a rumour that you answered all of our questions" and the villain would spill any secret they desired.  Since they were desperately trying to prevent Armageddon at that point, it would be entirely justified!  But she forgets, because that way the plot can happen.

It sucks, because I like the people in the show.  I like the weird retro/futuristic blend of the tech.  I like that they blend in stories about people of colour and queer people and make those struggles part of the narrative.  

But the plot is a travesty, and the worldbuilding is an inconsistent mess.  Whenever the characters need to be in a place for the plot, they go all robot 'beep boop I am going over here now' even if it makes no sense whatsoever.  What a waste of a bunch of good character building.

So many superhero shows fall into the trap of gifting characters amazing powers to solve problems and then completely forget that this changes the world and they will actually have to account for those marvellous new powers at other times.  Unfortunately Umbrella Academy does this, and to an extent that I just can't care about it anymore.

I look scary now

 I have been gradually increasing my shagginess over many months.  My hair on my head was never going to look good, but I had some hopes that my beard would eventually be attractive.  That did not occur, and I am now quite sure that lots of hair is just a terrible look for me.

Yesterday, I finally decided I had to do something about it.  This is phase 1.  For years I had thought that maybe my hair was thinning on top, but I wasn't sure.  After letting it grow out though, that thinning is undeniable.  My dad now has more hair than me.

Phase 2 is me without the hair.  I saw a picture online of an older guy with buzzed hair and a huge beard and it looked fantastic, so I was wondering if I could successfully rock that look.  It turns out I cannot, and everyone who saw it was horrified.

It just doesn't do the thing I was hoping it would do.  Onto phase 3, which is just the same but with a less scraggly beard that has been trimmed down quite a bit.  People viewing my makeover were much happier with this look than the last - nobody likes the big beard on me.

This one is okay, but it just isn't great.  When the beard is shorter it doesn't fill in the way I want.  Also, a shorter beard isn't nearly as much fun to fiddle with, and it still requires maintenance.  Half of the draw of a beard is not having to maintain anything!  Time to take even more off.  Phase 4!

Back to my old look, the one I have been rocking for years and years now.

This is my best look.  I guess that is good to know, since I have had a goatee for about 25 years now, with a couple of six months beard growing stints that didn't work out.  I know this is just the way I should be, but every so often I have to test it out to be sure.

Now I need to endure a few days of Wendy and Pinkie Pie looking at me like I am an alien and walking around me staring whenever we pass one another.  They don't react well to extreme changes in my appearance.

Feel free to chime in about what look you like best, though it doesn't seem like I will be taking your suggestions unless they happen to fit the buzzed look at the bottom.

Yelling at people

I have been hunting for an online home in World of Warcraft.  Finding the right guild to settle into is not an easy affair because there are so many things that can make a guild a bad fit for me.  You need to make sure the people in the guild are playing for the right amount of time, at the right time.  You also gotta find folks that are doing the sort of playing you are doing, at the right level.  Matching all the basic logistical bits is tricky.

But those aren't the only sort of considerations.  I had been in a guild for six weeks or so with everything seeming quite reasonable and then it went from fine to disaster in a tiny span of time.  One raid night one of the raiders starting telling risque jokes, which generally I am fine with, and then graduated to telling jokes bashing gay people and people with disabilities.  I got pissed and told him to stop.  

I don't have any sort of authority in the guild.  Other people can ignore me unless management is willing to step in, and management seemed to have nothing to say on the matter.  Still, apparently my grumpiness was intimidation enough, and the jokes stopped.  Temporarily.

The next raid he started up again, and after the raid I wrote a post talking about how much I cannot and will not tolerate such things.  Both on a political / philosophical level, and also on a deeply personal level.  Even if I would be fine with gay bashing jokes generally (I am categorically NOT fine with it) there is no way I could tolerate it because of the people close to me.

The guild management made it clear to me that they were going to make gay bashing comments now and again, and I could either be cool with it or leave.  They also made it clear that I was making people uncomfortable by calling this sort of thing out, and they weren't happy about it.

You see, they play WOW to relax, and they don't want to feel judged while playing.  They want to be a fun, no politics, no drama sort of guild.  That means gay bashing has to be tolerated, because after all, it is crucial that the guild be a easy, welcoming place for straight people who want to be bigots.

They also chastised me for thinking only of myself, and not taking anyone else's feelings into account.

It made me sick to my stomach.  Obviously that attitude is wretched, and I am well rid of them.  However, I hate having to find a new place to hang out, and I hate not knowing if I am getting into a nest of vipers when I am doing it.  Guilds all claim to be fun, easy going places.  Nobody advertises "We are a bunch of bigots, come take a dump on minorities here."  Nor do they say "This is a place where we do not tolerate bigotry."  They just talk about raid times and what bosses they have killed.

In both board games and computer games I keep seeing this idea floated that gamer communities are the most accepting communities.  It is so obviously nonsense.  They *are* the most accepting places of being a gamer, that is for sure.  Accepting of other things though?  Not so much.