Like ultimately he's trying to argue there's actual truth in our poetic, animalistic relation to the world, and that the reduction of our relation to the world to taxonomic categories misses something important about what it means to be true.

Nah, he's bungling reciting an evopsych theory trying to validate eurocentric "all art about anything serpentine with a non-snake face is a dragon" bad anthropology. The whole "dragon means ur-scary thing and represents instinctual imprints of features of the most scary things of our distant ancestors' lives" theory relies on "dragon" even being any sort of consistent archetype, which it's not. European dragons might be villainous, predatory serpents aesthetically inspired by actual european/mediterranean animals or art/descriptions of said animals that their creators would have seen or at least heard about, but the things european explorers labeled as "dragons" from other cultures are not only radically different in aesthetics and sort of meta or narrative role (eg Chinese "dragons" being lucky, good things associated with divinity), but are also aesthetically inspired by local animals the creators of the art and stories would have seen and known.

The whole thing is actually very silly and chauvinist. It would be like some otaku weirdo trying to use old Egyptian god artwork as evidence that "catgirl waifu" is an innate archetype.

It's even funnier if you know the broader context of the argument he's drawing on and just sort of bungling because he probably read an article about it in some magazine once and is riffing off his drug and coma addled memory: it's basically this weird evopsych nonsense about "every culture independently invented dragons because they're a sort of primal imprint of sources of danger" that's basically trying to "explain" something that's actually the result of dumbshit 19th century eurocentric anthropologists calling any sort of mythical creature that had representations that were anything even remotely like european dragon art "dragons."

Like it's taking a premise that's not even true to begin with, and then coming up with a dumbshit mystic explanation that makes it real instead of just chauvinist dipshittery, and then he's also just completely bungling retelling this quack theory and presenting his own fractured understanding of someone else's absolute nonsense as some sort of profound truth.

I think this was one of the earlier ones, somewhere in between the moon sheriff arc and the one where they travel across the post apocalyptic wasteland that was the US I think? Pretty sure it's before any part of the big apocalypse war arcs that start with the space voyage arc.

Judge Dredd is a weird and silly setting and it's very easy to see how it got mashed together with Dune and legally-distinct-from-LotR Warhammer to make Warhammer 40K.

Judge Dredd has "isocubes", though what that actually is varies by artist. I distinctly remember one panel (from the funniest comic: the one where he arrests himself and all his friends for a petty noise violation on Christmas, sentencing them and himself to a weekend in the isocubes) showing a stack of them and they're like, clear glass boxes with a chair in them.

IIRC it was real, but it wasn't as big or widespread a thing as the common retelling of it suggests. There was a speculative bubble that led to merchants making promises to buy however many bulbs from some farmers to get them to plant and grow them as a cash crop, and then they broke those agreements when the bubble popped leaving the farmers unpaid for their work. It didn't crash the economy or lead to famines or the like, it just led to some people skipping town, IIRC some court cases as farmers tried to get compensation for having been screwed over, and some farmers struggling more than they would have otherwise. It's biggest effect was a breakdown of trust since the idea that contracts could just be ignored like that was unthinkable and offensive and made people much more wary to work for a promise of money instead of money up front.

In other words, throwing money at some chud lackies to make shitty mobile games with AI generated assets that will "somehow" end up with budgets in the millions and take a year for the same result as $3000 dollars of work over a week.

Honestly kind of jealous of the grift, because whoever gets handed the project is just gonna be stealing money hand over fist with no oversight or expectations as long as they massage his ego and talk themselves up enough.

The final season of the anime is centered around helping a trans girl get away from her terrible family so it's not all lost.

The girl with the wish magic powers? Somehow I either missed that she was trans or forgot about it, though my memory of that season is pretty hazy because I both had sort of mentally checked out after slogging through the chimera ants arc in a couple of days and because I switched from the dub to the sub partway through because the dub was something like five or six episodes behind at the time.

Hunter x Hunter definitely isn't generic.

I'm comparing it against the peaks of the genre, like JoJo and Kill la Kill where every fight is basically calvinball but they make it compelling anyways. I get the feeling HxH was genre-defining when it was written, but it just feels kind of standard now.

The worldbuilding of HxH actually is the weakest part for me

I was including stuff like Nen and the weirdness of the Hunter Association as worldbuilding. All the mechanical bits of how the world works, the factional landscape, whatever story is implied to be going on when the camera isn't looking, I'd put all that under the umbrella of worldbuilding.

What other problematic aspects does the series have? I'm interested to know.

You pointed one out yourself: the way the second half of the chimera ants arc took place in a racist caricature of the DPRK. I'd add onto that the way the first half of the same arc took place in a racist caricature of Latin American revolutionary states/movements that it portrayed as being some sort of anprim narco cartels who only tolerated technology when it had to do with selling drugs.

There's also some generic transphobic gags in the first season during the prison part of the hunter exam arc. Gon at one point casually mentioning having been hired as an escort/prostitute by female sailors was weird and felt like a pointless and creepy random throwaway line to put in. That's all that stands out in my memory, but it has been a long time since I saw it so there could be other things that I missed or that I've forgotten.

Is that the one with the dude perving on little boys?

It's not explicit, but yes the sort-of queer-coded serial killing clown villain who's really obsessed with Gon in a way that vacillates between "frenemy wants the target of his obsession to reach his full power level out of platonic interest in power levels" and "licking his lips while he threatens to murder the child he is obsessed with" really sucks as, like, a narrative decision the author made.

It's not the only problematic thing about the series either, it's just the most egregious and persistent part. It's really not worth looking past either, tbh. The best the series gets is just like generic shonen fight arc slop interspersed with generic shonen training arc slop in a setting with some interesting worldbuilding. I think the series is kind of historically important in the same way DBZ or Sailor Moon is, but tbh the things it does well JoJo does better and in more interesting ways, and for the anime at least the HxH pacing is terrible to the point that it becomes an agonizing slog to get through.

I've only seen the (second?) anime, and that had its highlights but serious pacing problems throughout, especially in the chimera ants arc. The generic shonen tournament arcs were fine, if drawn out, but the chimera ants arc felt like a whole lot of jumping back and forth between way too many ongoing individual stories most of which were usually treading water waiting for something else to happen or other parts of the plot to progress - the whole arc could have reasonable been like 12 episodes long with some montages and it wouldn't have lost much of anything.

not like any of the exos which feel a lot more adjacent to transness

Micah-10 is trans and IIRC has a trans voice actress.

Her interactions with Cayde in the campaign post-game was like, the only decent writing of the expansion. Some of the only decent writing of the past several years, tbh. D2's writing has really gotten marvelized and bland since they started fleshing out all the big mysterious figures and places and it turns out they all suck and are boring and the big overarching meta-plot was dumb with a villain that was just like "edgy teen discovers existential philosophy and has mind blown" in motive and background.

It's been almost a decade since the last time I moved, and I still have nightmares about it sometimes.

Older democrats wouldn't have respected German laws because they only acknowledged American laws and the American civic cult as legitimate. They were true, militant believers in America's brand of liberal proto-fascism and didn't tolerate foreign brands of fascism. Until those brands had been safely acquired as subsidiaries of the American empire, that is. Then the foreign fascists became special good boys who deserved lots of money and guns to do violence for American hegemony.

The BC Rich warlock

Everyone's always ragging on those as being particularly ugly guitars, but I think at worst they just look a little silly. All the really pointy guitars are just sort of a "yeah, I get you're going for one particular aesthetic and it's kind of corny, but as long as you get the balance of the shape right and keep some clean lines to it it's fine," to me.

That's making me think of the bespoke johnny silverhand guitars I've seen luthiers make as display pieces a few times, except those of course have the body cutout in the wrong place and the tuners placed so the strings have to make a sharp turn at the bridge, making the low strings too long and making the guitar impossible to get good intonation with. You want to see a really cursed looking guitar, look those up.

Most don't bother me, it's just that particular shape. I don't like the headstock, or how the upper part of the body softly curves in to meet the neck at around a right angle like an acoustic, or the sort of boxier acoustic-like body in general. Like the only guitars that I think look worse are weird novelty builds like the machine gun kelly chunky razorblade or an absurd anime waifu cutout that I saw posted as a particularly cursed guitar shape once. I guess there are some variations on the general strat shape that just look off too, like when they're sort of stretched and warped a little so they get more lopsided and just look blobby.

Damn, you mean I've been thinking the wrong name whenever I see a les paul? Looking at it, I don't really like the telecaster shape either, but it's not nearly as bad. I really can't stand electrics that have the acoustic-style headstocks where the tuners are on both sides - I don't know why but it just looks wrong.

Least reactionary telecaster.

I don't know why I have that association but telecaster shaped guitars just look fashy to me, even before you deck them out with fascist symbols like that one.

A dingo that not only will eat your baby opportunistically, but in fact is purpose built to do exactly that as its primary function.

Let's see... that's about $9 per person per day, which is still excessive especially if that's supposed to just be groceries and doesn't include buying prepared food somewhere which would easily double it if it's a daily thing, but it's also less than I was expecting.

I mean I live on $1-2 worth of food a day on average, living mostly on beans, rice, ramen, tofu, potatoes, and the occasional egg, but I had the impression that the typical American diet was, like, full of overpriced junk food that's high calorie but also comparatively more expensive per calorie than food cooked from raw ingredients.