Day 7: Leaderboard Well I Am Not Sure What To Share Today But I Think A Romantic Photoset About SylPeeps

february 3rd

I don't know if this is common knowledge, but all of team Mustang's codenames are borrowed from girls working at Madame Christmas' bar.

This is Vanessa, the girl whose name was assigned to Falman.

That means there's an actual Elizabeth — with whom Roy would talk to over the phone, and go on "dates" with — who is not Riza. That's exactly what makes the codenames effective. At any point Roy can just go on that fishing trip with the real Elizabeth to throw off anyone suspicious.

Also, all the selected girls' names share one or more of the Japanese syllables (kana character) with the person they have been assigned to:

Name (Japanese spelling)

Riza (ri-za) = Elizabeth (e-ri-za-be-su)

Jean (jya-n) = Jacqueline (jya-ku-ri-i-n)

Breda (bu-re-da) = Braidykins (bu-re-i-di-ki-n-su)

Vato (va-to) = Vanessa (va-ne-s-sa)

Kain (ke-i-n) = Kate (ke-i-to)

Poor Breda is the only one whose codename is related to his last name instead of his first name.

Bullyin their son: holiday edition

Is spider silk being as strong as steel another lie from childhood? Bc you're able to break it pretty easily on accident. Genuinely asking.

spider silk IS actually significantly stronger pound-for-pound than the same amount of steel, but only in one direction! and coincidentally, it's the same exact direction that got a bunch of people killed in a submersible last month.

see, when people talk about the "strength" of spider silk versus steel, they're specifically talking about tensile strength:

which is specifically the measure of the strength of a material when two forces are pulling at it from the ends, like when a steel cable is holding up a bridge support, or crane cargo:

or like when a strand of silk is supporting the entire spider.

that's tensile strength, baby!

but there's another type of strength that's very important to take into consideration when you're actually building things like bridges and submersibles, and spider silk and similar materials like carbon fiber are absolutely garbage at it! and that's compressive strength.

this is basically the inverse of tensile strength, where instead of being yanked at from both ends, the forces are crushing inwards at the material from both directions instead.

you can expect to see these kinds of forces involved in road surfaces, vehicle engines, and again, submersibles.

now steel and its more competent cousin titanium are fucking GREAT at compressive strength! the harder the outside forces are compressing them, the stronger the metals get.

NOT TODAY, FUCKERS

but strand-based materials like spider silk and, again, carbon fiber, are fucking garbage at this. they can take a certain amount of pressure, but each round with compressive forces snaps some of the strands that makes up the material! and those don't grow back, so basically you're just gradually reducing your poor overstressed carbon-fiber hull into a completely useless shell of shattered thread fragments over time as the strands of fiber that actually give it strength die off one by one.

and eventually, something's gotta give! and then people die about it.

this is why, even though spider silk IS stronger than steel in one specific way, we're never going to stop using steel in industrial applications and switch over to spider silk or carbon fiber full time. these materials all have their areas of use, and steel just covers a wider base of applications.

and don't even get me started on shear strength. we'll be here all damn day.

The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

dir. Sergei Parajanov

some doodles i did

30 Minute Speedpaints (6 of 9) - Diana Franco

*rotating him in my mind*

Ref images from the manga below. Just cause i like havin that kinda thing:

lil wander today

Peepers: my darling precious evil frustrated ambitious little eyeball man

Post S1 analysis

Also it would be nice if you’d read the thing. I like the thing.

A good while ago I wrote how much I liked Peepers willing to put his foot down, when he’s not afraid of Hater, when he’s done with his boss and it shows. And some of you told me “Oh man, you’re going to like Peepers in S2!” And I was like “Ok, fine, we’ll see.”

“The Greater Hater” started with Peepers clearly annoyed with Hater, not caring if he get blasted or not. Okay, good. Then he’s clearly in awe of Dominator’s ship and I go “oooooooh I suspected he’d leave Hater in S2 looks like I was right!” Then he goes off on Hater again and as we all know frustrated Peepers is the best Peepers. So here I was, thinking that Dom was going to be Peepers’ new boss, happy about Commander letting his frustrations out, maybe he’d get some character arc thanks to the switch? …But at the same time I enjoyed that dynamic between Peepers and Hater and I was also kind of sad it was going to end right when it started to get really good? The episode continued; Dominator managed to trap Wander and Sylvia, enrage Hater and fight him back with ease, while Peepers gets a good look at bot factory. “This is it,” I thought. “He’s going to leave Hater for the new guy for galactic domination.”

And then Peepers saved everyone by wrecking the console and, though I didn’t really know it at the time, became my favorite character.

Peepers got A LOT of character development this season. And, strangely, his character arc wasn’t even that big or prominent. He wasn’t the one who was supposed to face Dominator in one way or another (though he tried, oh boy he tried and ended up with disastrous results). He was a guy who wanted to have universe at his feet, knew he lacked the abilites to do so and had to rely on someone powerful. But now with Hater being distracted by Wander all the time he had to work even more and even harder to fullfil his ambitions.

Aside from the very first episode it didn’t start with much. In “The Big Day” he tried hard to get Hater out of Wander-frenzy, and failed miserably not noticing the whole skullship planned a wedding destruction ceremony. He broke down in tears and that was that. In “The Breakfast” he just served the titular meal multiple times only to get roped into cleaning the mess Hater left in his morning tantrum.

But then “The Axe” happened. Peepers is fired by his boss, keeps on hoping Hater would rethink the matter, but it seems like skeleton man gets on his own just fine. Peepers suffers through his inner “Grop I’m so sad about life and stuff” song (and I still didn’t got to hear Tom Kenny’s version, come on, when is it going to be released?) gets into taxi and… tries to find a new job in newspaper? What the heck, there are so many villains around, why can’t he just work for one of them? It’s because he truly believed Hater is the greatest, the most powerful villain in the galaxy. And that they could be great again working together if Hater would just let him. And, well, eventually he does, almost to the point of begging. They get back together, Peepers gets a statue, and everything is right in the world.

We also got to see his room in that episode. It’s small, it has a bed, a toilet, a locker and a giant Hater poster. That’s it. And then he can fit all his belongings in cardboard box (along with a plant that I’m sure he stole from the cafeteria to have something to put into box). It just shows how much time and effort he put into his work. No wonder he was depressed about the prospect of losing it all.

“The It”. Oh my grop I absolutely adore this episode. Aside from being hilarious it was great Peepers episode. Commander is fed up with Hater’s shenanigans and decides to work with what he can. Hater causes a chaos with the game of tag (and also wants to tag Peepers himself, and, well, we can’t have that… cause… reasons… nobody would like to be it anway…) – time to freeze him in coldbrrnte! Nobody wants to be it? Time to use it against other villains! And we get this nifty montage of evil, ambitious Peepers. “A true villain turns weakness into a strength!” Thanks, Peepers, that was subtle. While writers just can’t keep Commander happy for too long and episode ends up with him crying, at this point Peepers understands that while he needs Hater for the empire to work, he ensures watchdogs are working with him anytime skeleton man gets distracted by Wander.

…Though then again does he actually need Hater that much?

Enter “The Cool Guy”. Peepers and Hater’s relationship is actually pretty decent at this point. They seem to have an actual fun playing with toys strategic figurines and planning an invasion at the same time, but Emperor Awesome’s arrival puts a wrench into the whole thing. On Peepers side he worries that his boss won’t get to the invasion on time but eventually gets fed up with waiting – it’s invasion time! Commander goes on how he knows very well what Hater truly wants, mocking his dreams of being popular and tries to lead the invasion on his own. While putting his eye-face on the flags. Though he definitely used Hater’s popularity as a villain to do this.

When he goes off to the aliens about bowing down to their new master and ruler he gets interrupted. And no one, no one will ever convince that he wasn’t talking about himself. He wanted to conquer in his name for once, just to try, maybe he had capabilites, maybe he was enough, maybe he didn’t need Hater after all? But Awesome makes fun of him, of his cuteness, his height, and him being a nerd. And Peepers, despite the initial failure, responds in truly great manner, making fun of him instead, pointing out what pathetic person he is. However he does that without mentioning the jab at his height. It’s clearly a thing he doesn’t want to talk about.

There’s not much to talk about when it comes to “The Rager” and “The Good Bad Guy”. Peepers continues on being Peepers to who Hater actually listens to, but also gets smacked around by his boss (more about that in relationships analysis). He’s just kind of there. Getting punched by Sylvia who wasn’t even there.

Oh yeah, time to mention his relationship with Syl, huh. Since their moment in “The Battle Royale” they started to get along, somewhat. It’s continued in “The Show Stopper”, “My Fair Hatey” and “The End of the Galaxy”. They found a similriaties in each other, common goals, and at some point even had fun together. Their frenemy thing going on is important to both of them, but especially Peepers, who, so far, didn’t have anyone who he saw on a same level as him.

Before “The Battle Royale” Commander managed to get his boss to the #2 spot on the leaderboard, learned to work with childish Hater and the only real obstacle was Dominator on the first place, destroying planets left and right. After this episode Dom rmeained as obstacle, but in an entirly different way: previously Hater was willing to fight the guy back. But since he developed a crush on her things started to be… complicated.

Peepers, after the fluke of attack in “The New Toy”, where Hater sabotaged every attempt at fighting Dom back using the frostonium, is done. He just wants to get rid of Dominator, wants his boss back on track; he doesn’t even dream of getting S1 Hater, he just wants the things to be what the status quo from the S2 first arc back, when childish, distracted Hater was a person he could work with.

So when Commander gets Hat into his hands he snaps. “The universe will be mine!” He’s entirely willing to leave Hater and conquer the universe – yes, he said universe, not galaxy – by himself. Dude’s definitely ambitious. Of course after everything blows up and Wander gets his Hat back things get back to normal. Well, relatively normal. As normal as WoY with Hater having a crush on a bigger villain can get, I guess. But it was there, Peepers and his ambitions resurfaced yet again.

By the time “My Fair Hatey” rolls Commander decides to take matter into his hands. I feel like fighting Dominator was pretty personal for him at this point; she was the person who messed up his plans, who made Hater into total fool. He explains his plan to Sylvia in a glorious singing manner, roping her into bringing frostonium onboard Dom’s ship and… well, he successed. Sort of. It’s unclear what has actually happened, but Dom gets ice powers thanks to that and the galaxy is even more doomed. But nobody can accuse the little guy for lack of trying.

In “The Bad Neighbors” Peepers clearly feels guilty and tries to reach to Hater for help. He doesn’t sleep, overworking himself even more than normally, and comes up with nothing. There is a bright spot at the end of a tunnel though – his confidence is back by the end of episode and everyone is free from sitcom shenanigans.

When I finished the series my Screener asked me which arc from S2 was my favorite and which one I liked the least. Without thinking I responded that I the third arc was definitely my least favorite. Before I could mull over my response she said: “oh yeah, it didn’t have enough Peepers in it, right.”

Yeah, Commander kind of disappeared in a last act and took backseat to Wander and Sylvia trying to find ways to beat Dominator. He finally got to appear in “The Robomechabotatron”, where he pretty much laid out his opinion about Hater to Wander (which also meant some Peepers&Wander interactions, yay!) And while I love “The End of the Galaxy” he didn’t do much there. At the beginning he lost all hope, though was later shown to be looking for Hater, probably trying to plan what to do next, if that galaxy was lost. He was extremely happy about getting his compentent boss back, saved Sylvia’s life, got a serious case of heart eyes and it ultimately got back to chasing Wander across the galaxy.

So, Peepers. Ambitious, evil, workaholic Peepers. I love this guy.

While it’s obvious he’s evil, more evil than Hater, I was thinking: how evil is he? Can we assume he’s as evil or even more evil than Dom? (Or Screwball, but let’s stick to evil guys who know they’re evil kay.) People seem not to think so, if only because he exclaimed: “Man, that’s evil!” upon learning her plan of destroying the whole galaxy. First of all he’s fine with destroying few planets. He was planning a tour to do it back in “The Big Day” for flarp’s sake! It’s not about all the people who would lose their homes and lifes in that, no. It’s about his lack of comprehension about this plan. See, Peepers is ambitious, he wants to conquer, he wants to rule, even if it has to be in someone else’s name (though we all know he would gladly do it alone if he could). Sure when he sees her plan on a giant screen he’s shocked, but then…

…he has this look. It’s not ‘it’s so evil why would she do that to these people’ look, it’s: ‘what the flarp, why would anyone do that, what are the benefits, is that her plan, is that why she destroyed everything on her path, better stop her quickly or I won’t have anything to conquer.’ He wants to save the galaxy only to conquer it, he says it himself later in musical episode, and Hater remembers it in the finale, causing the heart eyes. So, yeah, personally I don’t think Peepers is less evil than Dominator, he’s just more cautious, needs to work with others, and doesn’t see sense in destroying everything; what is there left to rule after all?

So what would happen to Commander in S3? A lot of things, I imagine, I wrote the whole post about my suspcions regarding his future. Also there’s a matter of his and watchdogs’ home planet, that aaparently was destroyed by Dom. We would learn about his background, maybe finally get his first name. More interactions with Hater and Sylvia. Please, please, more interactions with Wander and Dominator. And…

…I'm… just gonna go cry in the corner, okay?

TL;DR: I love this character so much. He’s ambitious, evil, and was supposed to get an arc in S3. Still got a lots of development in S2 and what we got was glorious.