My Apartment Manager is not a Planning Thread, #14

[robkelk]

New MetaBallStudios video -- Mecha seen from first person (and demolishing some NJ waterfront while they're at it):

Oh, look - a Patlabor, at roughly 1:50-2:00. Commenting about that here because Si!Rob asked Washuu-chan what it would take to get "a Patlabor-sized mech" to give to Saten-san for Christmas.

[robkelk]

Eventually, we're going to get past the retcon stuff and into new material... including the obligatory beach episode.

Looking forward to that point, and gathering up a few loose comments, I've created a wiki page for another residence.

Bankrupt and abandoned since 2001 when Funtom Property Management bought the complex, the Kaluakoi Hotel has become a place where displacees can relax without needing to worry about blowing their cover -- whatever cover they might be maintaining.

It has its own displacees, who have moved from both their home reality and their home island of Kauai. But Molokai isn't that different from Kauai, although the resort is so remote (Kaluakoi is 20 miles from the closest town) that most tourists never go near the place.

Be warned: the only reason why the resort is inhabitable at all in early 2017 is because of the alien technology used to get the main building and a few outbuildings back into shape, and to provide amenities to the guests. If you aren't used to working with somebody like Washuu-chan, don't touch anything that you don't understand. But if you are accustomed to the weirdness involved with being or working with displacees, this is the perfect place for an Obligatory Beach Episode.

The complex manager is TO BE DETERMINED. They were hired by Funtom from the local population for their knowledge of local conditions and building reconstruction and maintenance.

(displacee list and local map snipped)

Local Opponents:

• Occasional dedicated investigative reporters (such as Minkao Jinguuji or Carl Kolchak) looking for a story so they can write off their trip as a business expense
  

Which means the resort needs a manager. I've already picked an advisory board member from among the displacees.

The resort also needs a tutelary. I'm reluctant to pick one from Hawaiian religion because some people still practice it... so there's that whole "cultural appropriation" issue there. Besides, there aren't a lot of "deities of going on vacation" out there.

So far, the hotel complex has one person staffing the hotel's front desk and the convenience store... so the folks from RWBY will feel right at home. Except that the person isn't a crotchety old man who just grunts, she's an attractive young woman who's too busy to make small talk.

EDIT: Oh, and there's something in a footnote in the list of displacees that I want opinions on before I make it official.

[Bob Schroeck]

<blink> Didn't we already allow for that? I could have sworn that we'd already established that he'd be arranging the transfer of displacee agents to his group.

[robkelk]

It does expand his area of responsibility somewhat. Previously, he only had to worry about assigning agents to investigate terrestrial threats.

[Dartz]

I do like Pele as a tutelary. Though in less obvious form.

Thermal hot water. Or Einstein fridges for cooling. The Volcano is your friend. Do not fuck with the Volcano and do not steal anything from The Resort or misfortune awaits.

[Inquisitive Raven]

I do like Pele as a tutelary. Though in less obvious form.

Thermal hot water. Or Einstein fridges for cooling. The Volcano is your friend. Do not fuck with the Volcano and do not steal anything from The Resort or misfortune awaits.

That would require her to make peace with her sister, the ocean, who chased her from island to island. Now, I need to look up the story, so I can find the sister's name. Mind you, the sister is also a potential tutelary.

[Vulpis]

I do like Pele as a tutelary. Though in less obvious form.

Thermal hot water. Or Einstein fridges for cooling. The Volcano is your friend. Do not fuck with the Volcano and do not steal anything from The Resort or misfortune awaits.

That would require her to make peace with her sister, the ocean, who chased her from island to island. Now, I need to look up the story, so I can find the sister's name. Mind you, the sister is also a potential tutelary.

Just add a visit from Usagi, possibly with prompting from Michiru?

[Dartz]

Then again - I also think the God-Emperor of Mankind would be an aumsing tutelary for *somewhere*

[Bob Schroeck]

I do like Pele as a tutelary. Though in less obvious form.

Thermal hot water. Or Einstein fridges for cooling. The Volcano is your friend. Do not fuck with the Volcano and do not steal anything from The Resort or misfortune awaits.

That would require her to make peace with her sister, the ocean, who chased her from island to island. Now, I need to look up the story, so I can find the sister's name. Mind you, the sister is also a potential tutelary.

Why not Maui, or Te Fiti, as depicted in Moana?

[Labster]

To quickly follow up on our call:

I wasn't able to find much on Josh's final name in Japanese, and in some cases it might be Horai instead of Jurai or something?  I can't imagine a reporter mixing that up though.  I tried reading Japanese wikipedia as well and it doesn't help much, all I have is romaji sources.  The whole tomb theory seems fringe enough as to not intentionally be an influence on Tenchi Muyo.

Now I did look up the kanji for the Jurai family in TM though, which is spelled 樹雷.  The first one is a more complicated version of 木, meaning tree or trees.  The next one is 雷, thunder/lightning.  (Both are the Chinese readings; in the Japanese readings it would be ki-kaminari.)  I'm pretty sure that this is a plot related name, given the energy beams coming from the trees.

Which is not to say that there aren't tree metaphors we can use if we want to make the connection.

... yeah, I know much more about Christian mythology than Hawaiian mythology.

[robkelk]

Finally came up with a Halloween costume for Sora Hasegawa.

Requirements:

• Female
  
• Wears glasses
  
• Helps the others, doesn't take the spotlight herself... but her skills are still essential for the team's success
  
• Attractive, but not the prettiest person in the group
  

Edna "no capes!" Mode fills all of those requirements... and shows that two characters can have a lot of tropes in common and be completely different.

[robkelk]

I do like Pele as a tutelary. Though in less obvious form.

Thermal hot water. Or Einstein fridges for cooling. The Volcano is your friend. Do not fuck with the Volcano and do not steal anything from The Resort or misfortune awaits.

That would require her to make peace with her sister, the ocean, who chased her from island to island. Now, I need to look up the story, so I can find the sister's name. Mind you, the sister is also a potential tutelary.

Why not Maui, or Te Fiti, as depicted in Moana?

Maui is the ocean itself, if I understand the Polynesian beliefs correctly.

It looks like Te Fiti was made up out of whole cloth for the movie. I think we can use her.

[Bob Schroeck]

No, Maui is a culture hero/trickster figure. Technically a demigod, but according to Wikipedia he wasn't actively worshipped. He's not the ocean.

[robkelk]

Now you tell me

Anyway. Let's see whether this works -- as of two minutes before I posted this, everybody should be able to read Te Fiti's character page.

[Labster]

Unfortunately I still cannot login to the new wiki URL, having spent an hour trying different things. I can use all of the other wikis, just not ours. So I may not be able to contribute for quite a while.

[robkelk]

Consider it a chance to test the blacklist - can you get at anything that you shouldn't be able to?

[Bob Schroeck]

Was just looking at the NE US/E Canada map and had a silly idea.

Phineas and Ferb in the Tri-State Area found at the point where Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky meet.

EDIT: And yes, I know their Tri-State Area is highly mobile. Having it stationary should be an entertaining novelty.

[Inquisitive Raven]

No, Maui is a culture hero/trickster figure.  Technically a demigod, but according to Wikipedia he wasn't actively worshipped.  He's not the ocean.

You may recall that I referred to the ocean as Pele's sister earlier. Whatever else Maui may be, he's nobody's sister. I did manage to track down the sister's name btw. It's usually rendered as Namaka although that's a shortened version. Then again, Pele is apparently not the full name of the volcano goddess either. It's the name everyone knows though.

[Labster]

Consider it a chance to test the blacklist - can you get at anything that you shouldn't be able to?

Yeah, I could, fixed in mw-config #5482.

I can also log in now, thanks to running some maintenance scripts.

I continue to know almost nothing about Hawaiian mythology.

[Labster]

I just thought I should mention it, since it doesn't happen that often: Happy Birthday to Touya Kinomoto and Anthy Himemiya!  Hopefully we'll get some nice fan-art today

[robkelk]

I just thought I should mention it, since it doesn't happen that often: Happy Birthday to Touya Kinomoto and Anthy Himemiya!  Hopefully we'll get some nice fan-art today

Nothing yet, at least not on Danbooru. (tag "Birthday")

[robkelk]

Has anyone else seen Our Home's Fox Deity.? (The period is part of the title.) If you haven't, go find a copy. I'm thinking of adding the show to Refuge -- maybe as the first displacee group in the often-hypothesized Saskatoon residence -- but I want to clear it with the other writers first because of a few of the characters.

The show's premise, for folks who haven't seen it: The younger brother of a clan head has strong mystical potential, but no skills, so the older brother decides to allow a tenko (think "kitsune on the way to becoming a kami") to protect him. The tenko and the clan's guardian (who dresses like a miko) move to the big city in order to do this, and slice-of-life/comedy/action ensues.

The characters that I'm worried about include... some major spoilers, so into a spoiler block they go:

Spoiler

• Kuugen, the aforementioned tenko, and Kuugen's sibling Gyokuyou. They're each one step away from becoming kami, and have been for a few centuries. Kuugen is capable of going toe-to-toe with Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, and it's a fair fight. While there are a few things that Kuugen can't do, (s)he pretty much has New Powers as the Plot Demands, and Gyokuyou is slightly more powerful than Kuugen. (They're also both genderfluid to the point that each has both male and female seiyuu, but that's neither here nor there.)
  
• There's a convenience store just beside the local shrine, owned and operated by the kami enshrined at that shrine. "Hey, great, we have a ready-made tutelary"... except that said kami is Ebisu of the Seven Lucky Gods.
  
• My favourite character from the show, Myubo, who I sometimes call "puppet girl" because she wears puppets on her hands... except that the puppets she wears are her familiars. She's... not a kami, but not a mortal, either.
  
• Two characters who drive their respective story arcs: a very powerful oni, and a very powerful werewolf.
  

Are they too powerful for Refuge?

[Labster]

One of the weird things about stories is that you some times learn something that makes you interpret the story in a different light.  Like in The Big O, the word "Megadeus" sounds a little weird.  But apparently Megadux was a real title given in the late Roman Empire.  Probably not related, but just an interesting thread to pull at.

Then I found this, while tracking the Russian war of aggression: a post about a drunk Russian guy who threw his grenade launcher at the ground, and the RPG detonated .. this post a meme about the Ukrainian drone video of the event.  But I'm going, why are people talking about a squirrel?  It turns out "catch a squirrel" in Slavic languages like Russian is a euphemism for being so drunk you can't stand.  (Just like Inuit words for snow, right?)

But then I think back to Rocky and Bullwinkle, and how our Pottsylvanian friends are always trying to catch a squirrel.  That pun has been right there, the whole time, literally my entire life, and I never had the linguistic background to get it.  Was it intentional by the writers?  I wouldn't put it past them.  But it's definitely usable for us when our other characters go to Frostbite Falls.

Also, war is hell, and I'm sorry that this guy had to die so that I could learn a pun.  But he should have thought of that before... well, a whole series of bad choices.

[Bob Schroeck]

So I was following a link about Minkao's birthday and came upon this:

"So wait. Now we have someone from a fictional work that was in a fictional work? How frakin' meta are we gonna get here!?"

"Let's Gekigang-In!"

I'd just like to point out that we've now got the "beach story" version of the characters from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in the setting, so that makes two such works so far...

[Labster]

You know, years later, I have finally come up with a good in-universe reason why LA would have the first grimm attack. Obviously it's because LA has one of the highest concentration of fairy tale characters, with a Snow White, a Crimson Rose (Red), a curious girl named Alice, and of course a few water fairies.