A Lost Memory Uncovered

On the 25th day of last month I discovered - quite by accident - the identity of an old animated TV show that for me was clouded in mystery for many years, one that left me with memories I had yearned to understand.

A long time ago, I gained an incomplete knowledge about this obscure TV show as I saw some amount of moments on it, while being just a kid. Naturally, the starting life amnesia set in hard, and I never registered the name of this thing in all of my life until 2024.

Everything I Knew - Or Thought I Knew - About The Show Back Then

Let's refer to the show as Rabbit T. In Rabbit T, the one character I remembered was an anthro rabbit character - with no known name - in white fur who wore a cyan or teal outfit that I basically remember but can't find in an image search and, if I can be trusted to redraw it properly, appeared to me to look kind of like this:

 

It seemed a little appealing in my memory. The outfit's not "cool", but it did have a strong aesthetic. One that I know I have absolutely failed at drawing the way it deserves to be shown. Naturally I could have also told somebody with questions that there were other protagonists alongside this rabbit. But I didn't remember their species or seeing how they looked. The memories were extremely incomplete. After that, you probably understand why finding this show again took so long.

I also knew that the setting was some kind of old time Victorian England - as best as I can guess with my very limited knowledge of what "Victorian" really was, and that there were villains - though like with every other character I didn't have any recollection of what their appearances were like - and something to do with a chase with the villains and the protagonists running away from them, and the rabbit at some point having a joyous face, maybe because he was so full on cleverly winning a victory over his pursuers when he got away, or because that was just the sort of person he was.

So why did I want to find the show so much again? Well, I think just about any average memory of unknown origin makes the brain that owns it demand an answer. That's one reason. However, there was one final thing I retained from back then - the freaking end credits screen.

It's common for me to feel swayed by pretty music that uses bells, and this is what the ending theme for Rabbit T allegedly had. It also had a still shot of the Victorian England city from above while the credit text cycled through. Text just disappeared and was replaced by other text that appeared. In other words, basically no moving parts.
I think I somehow ruined this for myself, but the problem with the credits is that at this point I don't know if a steam train in the still frame existed in my original memories or not. So let's throw a quantum steam train in there, and sort of pretend like maybe I was swayed by the train while watching the end credits as well but also maybe I didn't know it was there at all.

It's not like I actually liked Rabbit T in any meaningful way. Remember, I could barely recall anything about it. If I found the show again, I probably would still not bother to watch a full episode. But aside from the element of wanting to solve a long-held confounding mystery, it for some reason also had a kind of magical allure to me.

Probably because of the bells.

The First Serious Attempt To Find Rabbit T

In the 11th of June in 2021, I guess I thought about the show pretty hard again, because I reached a point where I really, really tried to find the identity of Rabbit T. Sometimes I'll know about something from my past that's really mysterious like this for a long time but then one day actually give it my attention for the first time since losing touch. Rabbit T came up at some point after several years of inactivity, as I said, where I somehow was not considering that I might actually want to try to find it. These don't always have to happen on the same day I actually go searching.

In that day of 2021 June I went searching all over the place online for everything I associated with the mysterious memory of Rabbit T - which wasn't a large collection - and trawled Wikipedia through a page that was called "List of fictional rabbits and hares". Which, I remind you, did not work. It wasn't 2024 yet. And that page does include anthropomorphic ones.

Strained and defeated, I finished the entire Wikipedia list and several web searches like "anthro rabbit in a green hat" and so forth without anything remotely like what I wanted appearing, and gave up. It must have been very obscure. The show was not going to be found.

An Amazing Encounter of Straight-Up Chance

In some places, you can find "complete" lists of television series cartoons that were made. One day, I was having a rough time that called for a specific kind of cartoon series to watch that I wasn't going to find on the main beaten path where all the usual shows I know about and watch are seen.

I scrolled down one of my frequent alphabetical list haunts, and the recognizable for reasons of no relation to anything name "Saban's" caught my eye.

 
This would be the day, August the 25th in 2024, that I discovered that the name of the cartoon I had unanswered questions about was called Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist. But I didn't know this, or that it was the show containing who this post calls Rabbit T, yet. In fact there was a moment where I didn't even suspect it. I clicked the thing out of curiosity.

I saw the image and was amazed. I didn't know the show I sought had anything to do with Oliver Twist, I don't know much about Oliver Twist, and a mere moment ago I was not expecting to suddenly discover the origin of something that was so deep-in puzzling to my life this day. Again, it's not like I liked the show, but I wanted to know what place I was getting unidentified mental fragments from, even if it didn't have some feeling of allure. It always did have a feeling of allure in the past. It still had some major draw during the next few moments of that reformative day, and I begun to check it out.

What I Know About the Show Now

Somehow, Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist felt a little disappointing, now that I understood what it was for a tangible, real thing at last. I wasn't so absorbed as in another time I may have imagined. I was still excited in the minutes that followed of checking random points in episodes - but not any wiki pages according to my browser, for some reason - but not very absorbed. I didn't take the time to watch a full episode either. It's not really for me. I am just kind of glad I have some critical information now.

The disappointing value of seeing the show in 2024 probably comes from a lack of powerful, exact recognition of things in the show. I couldn't say "seeing this scene took me way back" or "Oh, I remember this guy!" I think a lot of good-feeling memory exploration when you find something from your life during a period a long time ago is good because you see what's in it and you are amazed with how suddenly, overpoweringly familiar it is. I would have liked to have that feeling with Rabbit T but this year I simply did not. Because it was just too different, and I had to accept that the show my brain pictured just did not actually precisely exist.

The first revision I had to concede was the design of the white rabbit. We have a name now, he is called Artful Dodger. He's the one on the left. Yeah I don't recognize the other two upright animal characters even while seeing them now, too. As you can see he actually wears a completely different outfit than the one I drew for this post up there - making the real design wrong in my memory's terms. It's sort of a "shouldn't gripe" change when I think about it, as that suit from my discredited memory wasn't exactly at the cutting edge of looking-super-cool fashion. Not compared to a dark suit and buttoned shirt for his upper body and a top hat, either. He was very different though. His face was coloured wrong, with most of his fur being grey, and it's a bit insulting that the real Artful Dodger cartoon rabbit anthro looks fucking nothing like the Rabbit T namesake of my memories. The most important and only previously-seen character in this quest, unrecognizable.

That's what a lot of things about this show now that I was seeing the real thing are. Unrecognizable. Seeing that, the question might arise of "how am I so sure I found the right show?"

It's quite simple, really. I don't feel very drawn to that conclusion out of feeling - again, it didn't hit me with familiarity the same way memory jackpots usually do - but through logic it's impossible to deny. Because it would take some ridiculous coincidence, so freaking contrived, some serious screwing around for there to be a second show out there that's that similar to Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist and is a more exact match with what I remember. I just don't think our plane of existence would do that, even after some of the stupid things it's done before. There would have to be some ridiculous level of screwing around with unnecessary show production and fictional material management to mislead me that hard. A key word here could be "specific". I simply have no reason not to conclude that my memories have a far range of possibility for being inaccurate and that the reason it's different in 2024 is simply that. My past has to just be adorned with memories that are wrong. As a side note, I don't know how much sway missing episodes could have had in all of this.

There's also much more solid proof that I have the right show in the recognizable nature of the ending screen.

The ending music in the credits was quite a thing of recognition, but past the first run of bells, there wasn't much memory of the show from my childhood left to recognize. The second and only other revision that comes to mind after all this time is that the music in my brain - beautiful though it was - used more bells and had the wrong melody. I swoon over good use of music bells, and before recent weeks the vision of this ending screen and its music was such a feeling...

I know there's some ensemble of villainous characters, and humans are in the show, but it's still vague. Again, I do not care enough to actually watch an episode of the show to find out more. I'm simply glad I no longer have to wonder what went on in my life to create such an odd place.

I also now have a strong indication that Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist was not just based on Oliver Twist, but is actually quite different to the original Oliver Twist, with lots of elements and writing being changed to create a different version of the idea. It'd have to be too if it has "Adventures of" in its freaking title.

As of the day of this writing, I know that the show actually has a large portion of lost media. Episodes 1-29 can be quite easily found, but the show apparently is supposed to have a total of 52 episodes. The information is so lost, probably all we have of the last 23 episodes anywhere is their titles. Entire boxes of episode descriptions, empty and collapsed into a line. We don't even know when the entire list of all episodes - even with the ones that aren't lost - appeared on people's cathode ray tubes. The "Air Date" column of the episode list on Wikipedia says TBA for all of them.

Also, did you know that the list of fictional rabbits and hares on Wikipedia from the 2021 part earlier still doesn't list Artful Dodger from Saban's Oliver Twist cartoon? Yet the list of episodes in the boxes of the SAOOT article containing some amount of not-lost data have episode plot summaries that are quite lengthy. Actually I think the fictional rabbits list may be quite under-detailed against what I expect the great swathe of fiction in the world to contain for rabbit characters.

Finally, an interesting point I have now gained in my knowledge of the show is when it apparently aired. Saban's Adventures of Oliver Twist broadcasts went from February 1996 to February 1997. Even though I live in New Zealand and therefore at a young age likely got different shows than English-speakers of this planet's west half at different times, I was born in 1995. 1995, readers.

That's a revelation. When I gained my witnessing moment of this show, how fucking young was I? It's like no wonder my memories of the show got this broken up.

If I Could Win Like This Again

Those of you who have been with this blog since 2022, when it basically began, will remember another mystery that I wanted dearly to solve, as described in the first Figment Area post. The huge destructive red and black being, Wawoo.

I hope I didn't let such readers down by showing them a title that says "A Lost Memory Uncovered" and get their hopes up for a spooky Wakawuwu revelation, only to ease them into a story about a mystery that - compared to the sheer cool creepiness of Wawoo's origin - is practically worthless. Even though Wawoo and the cartoon from this post were both seen in "real cartoons" that contain lost media, I still don't know who Wawoo is, and I don't think I ever will.

But there are other mysteries of old unexplained memories in my life. I'd like to have this kind of victory again. To find the explanation for more of the weird unknown occurrences of my early life. Similar searches and successful answers have happened before, but the successes that come to mind right now have not much wow-factor compared to many of my expectations.

If I could win like this again, could one of the victories feel as incredible as I always imagined? Will all of them die down as a flame in damp branches would like Rabbit T, or will I one day truly have a powerful and lasting moment of amazing recollection? Are there any future answers to my remaining mysteries at all?

I'd like to see the cartoon that created the Wakawuwu mystery again some day, but a good place to start would be the aisles of shelves decorated with pretty dark and light canisters of carbonated liquid flowing upward around central towers of crystal.

(Playing Card Game Rules) How to play Castle Walls

In this post, I will detail how Castle Walls, a playing card game invented by myself, is meant to be played. The idea for this game has been lying around unattended for years, and during and before that time the game's rules have been cemented and uncemented and cemented again. This was done mostly by actually playing the game with friends and family. The rules are about to be set in stone.

The Game

Castle Walls is a card game - similar to certain anime card games, which you've probably played before - where you battle with your opponent to make them run out of Life Cards, at which point you've won.

The game is kind of basic, and relies on luck, but also gets quite nuanced and advanced, starting to be about reading your opponent more than mere luckiness. Even card-counting has a bit of a strategy to it in this game. If you can count cards, don't be afraid to do it in Castle Walls, especially if it's being played competitively.

At the time of this writing, Castle Walls is only designed to be played between 2 players, 1 VS 1.

How to Set Up Castle Walls

To play Castle Walls, you will need a standard deck of playing cards. The ones that have four suits and a bunch of numbers. You know what playing cards are, I will spare you the explanation. That makes this game cost only about $6 to play.

All playing cards - other than weird spares that aren't even a part of playing cards - will be used. All 54 of them. You do not remove either one of The Jokers. The Joker is actually part of a major situational strategic play, which can potentially happen during a playthrough.

Dealing the Cards

This may sound like Captain Obvious, but you need to shuffle the deck first. Believe me, not every game I ever make is necessarily going to do shuffling at the start. Hindbodes will find a way.

There are two places per player where cards go when the dealer is dealing. One is the player's stack of Life Cards, and the other is the player's hand.

First, the dealer puts one card face down in the opponent's life card pile. Then, the dealer does the same for their own life card pile. This repeats until both piles have exactly 6 cards each. Nobody is meant to see which cards they are while the dealing is done. The Life Cards are to be placed in neat stacks.

One of the most important points about the life card pile - and something that everybody eventually notices - is that it effectively removes cards from the playthrough, selecting which cards you don't play with randomly and secretly. In this effect, you don't know how many Jokers are in the game of Castle Walls that you're playing until well into the game. Unless you luckily draw both of them on turn one. Such draws are rare, but they can happen. All face-down life cards remain a secret to both players until they are taken off the stack by combat.

Second, the hands are dealt. Pretty simple, really. The first card goes to the hand of the person who is not the dealer. Like the previous stage, each player gets one card for their hand in turns. So the other player gets one card, then the dealer gets one card, then the cycle repeats. Once both players have three cards for their hand, the rest of the deck is placed face down to the middle-left or middle-right of the playing field, and the game is nearly ready.

When The Game is About to Start

Before the game begins, the players must decide who has their turn first. This can be done with either a round of Paper Scissors Rock, a coin flip, or simply what both players agree on. Then, the game begins.

The Hierarchy of Cards

The level of a card in Castle Walls is very important. Put basically, from highest to lowest, the cards in a list of power levels are:

• Ace
• King
• Queen
• Jack
• 10
• 9
• 8
• 7
• 6
• 5
• 4
• 3
• 2

The Anatomy of The Game's First Turn

Castle Walls is about using cards on the field to "attack" your opponent's field cards, and ultimately your opponent's Life Cards. However, on the first turn of Castle Walls, you can not attack.

Other than the inability to attack, the first turn is very much identical to all other turns. So I will go over the anatomy of all following turns now.

The Anatomy of The Game's Second and All Following Turns

Every turn of Castle Walls, you must draw one card from the deck in the middle, exactly at the start of your turn. If the deck has run out, simply flip the entire graveyard and use that as the new deck. You do not shuffle the deck when you do this. Meta strategies - based on card counting - could certainly emerge from this mechanic. As the creator, I welcome that.

After you draw a card, you may choose to play a card face-up, or face-down. If you already have a card face down, you can place one face-up card on top of it, maximum. There are three places on the field, side-by-side, where you are allowed to place a card. You may not go any further than the three slot limit, meaning at the absolute most your field card count is a total of six (three cards face-down, and one face-up card sitting on top of each face-down card), and having six cards on the field this way is extremely unlikely during regular play.

You are not required to play anything or attack on your turn, you are only required to draw a card and discard any excess cards as ruled by the End Phase.

You are not allowed to place The Joker on the field like the other cards. The Joker is a rare card that has special innate abilities in this game. The nature of that play will be covered later in this article.

On your turn, after you draw a card, you are in what is called the Main Phase. You can only enter the Main Phase once per turn, and only after the instant that you've drawn your card.

In the Main Phase, there are things you can do, and things you can't do.

Things you can do in the Main Phase:

• Play one face-up card OR play one face-down card.
• Use the special straight discard (will be detailed later).
• Use The Joker, if appropriate (will be detailed later).
• Flip one or more of your face-down cards face-up, if there is no card above it. A face-down card can't be flipped if it was put face-down during this same turn.
  

During the Main Phase, you can not attack with a card.

When you want to attack with a card, you may enter the Battle Phase.

In the Battle Phase, you can attack with as many of your face-up cards as you choose, but each of them can only attack once per turn. Once you are in the Battle Phase, you can not return to the Main Phase until you've drawn a card on your next turn. Naturally, face-down cards are not able to attack. Any face-down cards you want to attack with must be flipped face-up first, during the Main Phase. This means you can not flip a card face-up right after attacking.

When your turn is ending, and you've already had your Draw Phase, Main Phase and/or Battle Phase, you observe an End Phase. The only purpose of the End Phase is to siphon off any excess cards that the turn player has. If you have more than six cards in your hand during the End Phase, all you have to do during the End Phase is remove cards from your hand and put them in the graveyard until you have exactly six cards in your hand.

 

Attacking Basics

When you attack with a card, you "nudge" it in the direction of your opponent if the opponent has no cards on the field, or pick it up and point it at the targeted card on the field they do have.

An attack can resolve in many different ways. In this section, we will be focusing on attacks to opposing Life Cards and on what happens when a card attacks another face-up card. All cards that attack are, naturally, face-up. The game would be impossible to balance well otherwise. However, cards that receive an attack may or may not be face down. Face-down cards act as Walls or Traps. See the respective sections for more info on them.

If you attack when your opponent has no cards on the field, it will make your opponent's number of Life Cards decrease by 1. Multiple attacks (logical maximum of 3) can do this in a turn, as long as there are enough offending and unspent cards with which to launch said attacks. For example, if your opponent has no cards on the field when your turn starts and you have three cards on the field at the end of the Main Phase, you have the ability to attack your opponent's Life Cards up to three times.

When a life card is attacked, it is removed from the original pile and placed face-up on a newer, face-up pile. This shows how close your opponent is to losing, and it additionally and importantly reveals which cards were removed from play when the game started. As the game goes on, it gradually becomes more and more clear what sort of cards were absent. Sometimes you will find one or both of the Jokers in the Life Card piles before the game is over.

However, if the opponent has cards on the field, the attack becomes more complex in nature, and has more rules to adhere to. For this section, it will only be face-up cards in a battle that I cover.

One: if a card attacks a face-up card of equal or lower power value, the attacked card is destroyed, and sent to a face-up pile called The Graveyard. The Graveyard is located beside the main deck.

Two: A card can not attack a face-up card that has a higher power value on it.

Attacking Walls

When you attack a face-down card, you don't typically know what will happen. It could be this, or it could be a Trap.

A Wall happens when your card attacks a face-down card (which is then flipped face-up), and the flipped card happens to be of a power equal to or greater than that of the card that attacked it.

When a card on the field attacks a wall, neither card is sent to the graveyard. The turn of whoever attacked will automatically end.

An Ace is the most powerful attacker in the game, and the only thing that can wall an Ace in Castle Walls is another, face-down Ace. This can lead to some scary aggressive strategies. A face-down ace that gets attacked can ultimately, on the next turn, strike back at anything that hits it. If you attack a face-down Ace with your own Ace, you can expect to lose your Ace next turn.

Cards of the power 2 are special because no matter what they attack, if it's face-down it will wall the attacking player. This ends the turn of whoever attacked using the power 2 card, but this play can directly lead to a strategic advantage.

Attacking Traps

When you attack a face-down card, you don't typically know what will happen. It could be this, or it could be a Wall.

A Trap happens when your card attacks a face-down card (which is then flipped face-up), and the flipped card happens to be of a power lower than that of the card that attacked it.

When a trap is flipped, the suit of the card determines where your turn goes next in a fork in the road. The difference here is whether your card attacked a red suit (Diamonds or Hearts) or a black suit (Clubs or Spades). Traps intend to destroy one card on the opposing side of the field, once attacked by that opposing side.

If a trap is activated and it is a red suit, it will immediately and automatically go to the graveyard, while the card that attacked it goes to the graveyard immediately after it.

If a Trap is activated and it is a black suit, the owner of the trap must choose one opposing card on the field that is not the attacker, if there is one, and send that to the graveyard right after sending the Trap to the graveyard.

Special Technique #1: Discarding a Four Straight

During your Main Phase, if you have a consecutive straight in your hand of four cards, you can send all of them to the graveyard to target and destroy one card on your opponent's side of the field, unless it is one of those face-down cards that has a face-up card above it. Any one face-up card can still be sent to the graveyard by this technique. When your straight goes to the graveyard, your straight goes first - before the card it's targeting, in order from highest to lowest power.

Special Technique #2: Discarding The Joker

During your Main Phase, if you have more Life Cards removed from your life card pile than your opponent does, you can discard one Joker from your hand to the graveyard. After this, you must take every single one of your opponent's field cards and add them to your own hand. Then your turn continues as normal.

Final Thoughts

That is pretty much the entirety of the rules for Castle Walls. It is a simple game compared to say, 500 or what-have-you, but it can take a while to explain and has as-of-yet uncharted potential depths. I took a lot of inspiration from a trading card game, but I also did everything I could to make it something of my own creation. No plagiarism is to be found here, unless of course somebody tries to plagiarize me again. Lots of people like to plagiarize me, it's a historic feature of being Hindbodes.

(Hallways) Cockroach Communication Antennae

Late in the cycle of light, standing opposed to gravity on the wall, a cockroach unit named Lepia twiddles the antennae. They are equipped to receive broadcasts. Lepia stands, scanning, listening, hoping. Lepia waits for the signals.

It's out there. The truth is out there. The world will understand what happened, and this cockroach will be the hero they sorely needed. One day they will be surprised that Lepia did what always needed to be done, finally.

Lepia will find it. Until then, it's wait, wait, wait...

Things You Can't Say At An Airport

Airports are impossible to separate from the style that civilization as we know it is presented by. Or at least, they are for the time being. With the struggles that society currently faces, who knows how much longer we can afford to run international planes? But everybody alive today either knows what an airport is, or has been isolated from universal knowledge somehow.

But did you know that there are a lot of real, common phrases that you do not have the freedom to say in an airport? Join Figment Area as we go through this list of Things You Can't Say At An Airport.

 

This Movie Is Going To Bomb

Imagine this: you're in an airport waiting for your friend to arrive back home, you're on your phone, and you're watching the trailer for the upcoming live-action adaptation of Frogger (1981). It's directed by somebody nobody's heard of, the plot focuses on the titular frog setting up a beauty cosmetics company, and the script resembles the one from Spy Kids. Then suddenly you turn to your idiot friend who's genuinely convinced that this movie is fundamentally a good idea, and you say to him "Mate, this movie is going to bomb."

Believe it or not, this moment can get you into a lot of trouble! Airport security will be asking you a lot of questions and otherwise bearing down on you at this point, and it's not a good way to go.

If you find yourself in this situation, try using phrases like these instead:

- This movie is going to squash!

- This movie looks like a dumper down!

- This movie eh? No way, hosé!

- I think the trailer says it's going to be a failer!

 

 

That's A Real Bombshell

 

Sometimes when you're at an airport, a family member says something to you that's truly serious. But if this ever happens to you, you must be careful to not make this one mistake. Hundreds of people a year are detained by security guards for saying "That's a real bombshell" after their mother in-law says that her Flemish Giant rabbits died.

 

Be aware of yourself and your surroundings when your exo-family says something about Flemish Giant rabbits dying, or you will run serious risk of airport guards acting on the thought that there is a REAL BOMBSHELL in your bag. Airport guards are extremely hostile in the face of Unexploded Bombs coming into their domain, so be careful when the rabbits are deadful.

I'm going to inject all of your fucking babies with needles full of nitroglycerine and use my explosives to blow this whole place to smitheroons.

 

(I hope my friend Miss T doesn't read this one. It would not be pleasant for her.) Imagine it. You're at an airport, and you have a lot of hypodermic needles full of liquid nitroglycerine, and you've just generally had a really bad day. 1 in 17.5 people report that they or somebody they know has been in such a situation and not gone very well with handling it, proceeding to threaten the other airport customers with an accidental outburst or twenty-five. If you find yourself in such a situation, with any amount of nitroglycerine needles, try to imagine that the airport is inside a cube. This might help to save your life.

People Keep Zero-Bombing My Posts

 

In the modern days of the web, digital built-in button features to criticize content are at an all-time low. But surprisingly, in some places it is still possible to be critical of media that comes out without being forced to leave a comment. Oh no! We can't have accountability for poorly-done shovelware going on!

At this point, there are still some places where you can post a piece of entertainment online, and have it be rated zero stars, which is known in some places as "Zero-Bombing".

If you are online in such a place and happen to suddenly realize that there is a colossal infrastructure of airport walls and people around you, be wary of what you might say when your media is judged by the click of buttons. This can get airport security to accuse you of carrying entire weaponized historic World War planes on your person!

Some day the right to criticize posts will be helpfully removed, and people will be able to post any legal content with absolutely zero quality safeguards for putting it under scrutiny, leaving the average Joe at an airport to enjoy a much safer time.

I'm going to cut the person who runs this airport open.

 

About 60% of people believe that the phrase above is very justified, and that we should be allowed to say it in airports. However, in this world, it is not yet a safe place to do so when you're in an airport.

 

 

 

Fuck you all! It's time for the cleansing fire of all wretched civilization!

 

Don't say that at an airport.

 

 

 

Bombs Away!

 

Don't say that at an airport. I don't care how big the swimming pool is.

 

 

I LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE ME, I REALLY LOVE YOU SO LET'S DIE TOGETHER. I LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE ME, LET'S JUMP ON A PLANE FUCKIN' [censored]!

 

To end on and wrap this article up in a neat little bow, we have our final point in the list. The phrase that this article refers to is the phrase that is above our paragraph here.

It is a profound and cerebral smash hit 2019 song by three friends in a room in a humble town of Australia one night, a state in a country where plane disasters are historically a serious issue. Putting their brains together, they made a song that would change the entire world.

As beautiful as it may seem to reference and honour this song in an airport by singing it out loud, that is not something that you want to do. There are other spaces where it can be better discussed with more safety and care, and less intrusions from airport guards.

 

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Thank you for reading this important announcement from the Figment Area public service.

(Complaints) Go Live in a Dried Up and Disgusting Boot, Wordpress - I Am Done With Your Pathetic Ways

Those of you who paradoxically were early enough in Figment Area's run to see my blog on Wordpress - or just those of you who looked deeper in the archive - are probably wondering why I moved from Wordpress to Blogspot after only two posts.

Yeah I could tell you. Oh, you want to know? You'd like to know why? Great! I'll tell you!

Well, you see, basically it's... well yeah, Wordpress is a fucking piece of cow shit! There you go buddy. I didn't talk like this in the title only because I've never been quite certain about the safeness of swearing in your Internet creation titles. Believe me, I wanted to make a title that was harder on the place.

I'll go into more detail, but first, a bit of backstory would help us out, here.

In 2011, whenabouts, I was using Blogspot. It was my only choice and only choice I even considered, and then I stopped using it because I wasn't into what my old blog was doing, as a series of writing pieces, just in terms of what the content could be. It was called The Alternate and Crappier Science, and it was fundamentally a bit hamstrung by its own core concept, which I guess is sort of why I gave up on it.

 

That's fine. The problem was, later on I somehow got into my head the idea that Blogspot was bugged out, not well designed, and able to screw me over. Formatting automatically getting tangled and confusing because of What-You-See-Is-Blah-Blah editing was certainly an issue at one point, even if just in my head. But I honestly think it would be too hard for me to explain to you what the origin of that assumption was, and that I'd only be giving theories. Theories that are too hard for me to articulate.

So in the 2020's, or The Dire 20's as I like to call it, when I got to the point of wanting to make Figment Area, I changed my current writing home to Wordpress, as I'd spent years anticipating.

Oh boy, was I tragically fucking wrong in doing that.

I thought Blogspot would glitch out, be hard to format, and make writing hard. Choosing Wordpress was ridiculously ironic, because that's exactly what Blogspot seems to hardly be doing at all right now, and what Wordpress did to me instead.

Writing the Tom and Jerry post on Wordpress was a fucking nightmare. I don't remember how hard the Wawoo one was, but the Tom and Jerry one definitely must have been a fucked up experience. Instead of going over that, I'll try to describe what happens when you - as a hypothetical thought experiment subject - try to write a blog post on Wordpress, and you try to make it designed your way.

After finding the new post button in a long, gross, annoyingly-animated sidebar with buttons hidden inside buttons, you get a fucking piece of shit interface where the amazing present-day team has thrown out those archaic, old fashioned boxes that "indicate where stuff's boundaries are and where you're supposed to click" and give us this new, modern, slick piece of shit that I'll redraw for you here.



Now, just in case you have some concerns about me, and how I decided to draw all that because I don't know how to take a screenshot, you should know that this thought is not true. I deliberately opted for drawing the picture instead of just copying a screenshot over because I thought it was a good idea. I'm not Wordpress, I'm actually pretty smart.

So that right there is a pretty big red flag. A red flag I don't know how I ignored when I was starting out with it. Not only are the boundaries you can use to have a frame of reference imaginary and the graphic design obviously full of itself, but apparently the text writing interface is made of "block oriented writing". That's the name I've given it.

You have to make a new block when you want to add content to the writing. Every time. Whether it's a paragraph, an image, or "a quote". Can I explain to you what this means? No. Is it fucking annoying to use by design and breaking all the time, possibly not by design? Hell yes it is.

And I still hadn't quite yet realized how bad of a place I was in.

Wordpress' interface here is one of those annoying editors where the actual formatting buttons - like, if you want some of your text to be bigger, italicized, bold, aligned to the right, etc. - are not constantly visible. They are hidden until you're writing something and have... highlighted it or something. It was irrelevant and a waste of time on Tumblr, and it's like that on Wordpress. And it's way worse on Wordpress. Thank you, Blogger, for not being this way, which is a grace I thankfully experience the very minutes I write this angry open hate letter. Seeing those buttons stay up there at the top of my post editor feels like a blessing.

It's going to get worse, if you're not convinced. This post will go further and show more horrendous problems. Earlier on in this post's development, I followed that previous sentence with "That are more horrendous." I no longer, in 2023 (this post took ages to be finished and published) believe that is the case. The post editor is the worst part of Wordpress, though yes there are other issues with using the website that haven't been reached by the expected line of reading yet.

 

I will still be talking about the post editor for a while, but it goes beyond that. I pity your soul if you thought I was going to rip into the editor for posts and that was it. The crap virus on Wordpress runs very deep, from how your website's appearance unexpectedly and uncontrollably turns out all the way down to navigating the dashboard menus.

 

Back to the awful block oriented writing, let's assume for a minute that you want to have more of a theme going on with the formatting of your writing. Maybe you want to make it the right size because it doesn't start off at the right size. Now let's imagine this crazy idea that you want the sizes to be the same as each other, or as a critic would call it, consistent. Good fucking luck, buddy. Block oriented writing is a bitch when you can't rely on the other mechanics to let you control everything at once, or even decide on the default for what formatting you get every time you make a new block. And these blocks? To the reader they're just paragraphs. Paragraphs as in "<p>" and "</p>" if you know about markdown. You can't make a line break without risking making a new one. Paragraphs that can't be moved around or merged back together easily. Paragraphs that have a rigid border that makes itself both unnecessarily important and hardly visible and difficult to find.

 

It's absolute bullshit.

 

I'm sick of talking about the editor now, so let's move on to what's outside the editor.

One of the most audacious examples of bullshit about Wordpress is what happens when you're trying to get an archive system that links to all of your older and newer posts in a convenient and logical way working. Wordpress has "Next" and Previous" buttons at the bottom of its posts - obviously meaning they only let you skip ahead or backward by one unit at a time, and apparently they think this is enough. Let's have a look at the archive that I manually - yes, manually - put together on the Wordpress version of this blog.

I'm going to break down why this thing is so fucked up over the course of two or three paragraphs. First, the more noticeable thing to a casual reader is probably the big rectangle next to "EARLIEST", unnecessarily low-reaching and asymmetrical with its counterpart on the right, beside "LATEST". I couldn't do anything about that, even though this is a technical custom extra page, not a main section regular old blog post. It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure that's a compromise I did by sacrificing a vertical line character that is found on nearly any normal keyboard, which the site then automatically enlarged because it's trying to do that thing that happens at the start of some books, not an actual HTML rectangle div. Wow, so fancy! I looked up the name of this keyboard  character for the first time in my life while writing this very paragraph, and according to Wikipedia it's only been uncreatively named "vertical bar" this whole time. I dislike that and know a lot of stuff about programming, so let's just call this one "Char124". If not for the fact that I was forced to sacrifice a Char124 to the fanciness goblin, this manually-maintained nightmare page might actually look good.

Now, about those Earliest/Latest buttons... I typed out those words and hyperlinked them manually. The dates next to the post titles are filled in manually. The post titles are typed and hyperlinked manually. If I kept using Wordpress today, and had more and more posts coming out on it, I would have to be going back to this page and manually updating the list once and the hyperlinks twice every time a new post came out. I don't imagine that the editor on this would be particularly co-operative either.

For some reason, right now I have a manual index of articles on the Blogspot version of this site too, but it looks better, isn't necessarily required, as there's already an automatic post list on every post page, and at least it'll actually edit properly if I keep it around.

This is a minor point in my mind at this stage, probably just because I've forgotten just how far this thing went, but the wideness and emptiness of a standard Wordpress page is uncomfortable. There's just kind of a distressing and anxious broadness to everything that makes me feel lost. I got a bit paranoid and checked, but nope - the site design on my Blogger one isn't as bad as that. It's always been nicer to look at and doesn't feel like walking on a plank high above a perilous pit void while wind is blowing at you, even if maybe the Blogspot version I made still looks a little weird.

As well as all that, it's too hard to find CSS options and other options when designing your site, according to older records. I don't want to try testing it again now. I don't remember what going through these hoops was like, but I trust my past self on this one, who started writing the Wordpress hate into a Blogspot post during a time that may now be about two years ago. That's the other point, it's been really long, I want to wrap this up now and not suffer Wordpress experiences much longer.

Finally, getting posted previews for your Wordpress links when you post one in something like MeWe or Discord to play nice is way too hard. The first times I checked, it just brought out these white rectangles of nothing, with support giving no real solution to people after I looked it up, I am damn sure of it. Well, it was like that at the time - I just tested it on Jan 7 2023 now, with no obvious error still showing - which I guess was a bug they fixed, but Wordpress had its chance even way more months before I was having problems with that, so it's way too late for redemption now. I don't want this company trying to make me feel crazy just because I remember something that doesn't happen now, either.

So that's Wordpress, a shitty blogging website that I hope I never use again. What messes with me most about this whole thing is that other people actually use Wordpress somehow. People can write on Wordpress and say "Yeah, this works! I'll keep using this for my blog!" In fact, two of the people in this situation are people I know, people from my family.

But I don't envy these people. I'm just a bit disgusted with them. As in nausea, not something like actually believing in someone being reprehensible. Now, I would be disgusted in that sense if certain people tried to actually convert me.

 

With the people I know who use Wordpress, or anybody really, I don't know what they did to tolerate Wordpress, but I don't want to try to tolerate it ever, and I get the feeling that potentially I'll be hearing things like "Oh, you can fix that" or "there's a way to turn that off". No. Just no. I don't care. It would have taken me months to figure those things out on my own. I severely doubt the intentions and lasting quality of a service that hides the good answers so well and would make me go through heaps of hoops just to get a good experience because terrible decisions are the default experience. I don't give a fuck. I don't give a fuck if Wordpress bans me, either, that's like being banned from using a horrible public toilet complex that you don't need and absolutely hate. Naturally, this makes it blatantly obvious that I won't be taking kindly to suggestions that I can pay for a better version of Wordpress, either. At this point, even if Wordpress gets improved massively one day and all my problems with it have technically been fixed, I will not forgive it. It put me through too much.

 

Use your shit website if you want, but don't try to convince me to come sauntering back in to that hellhole. I won't try to sell you on switching to Blogspot, but for everybody's sake and the nature of supporting the best competitor in a competitive market where it's easy for a bad place to become the next Tyrannitar, I hope you would use Blogspot in the extreme hypothetical case that Wordpress is your best other option. Otherwise, I don't really feel fond of the idea of saying "This place sucks, but I can recommend this other place that blah-!" Who knows how well that would age, or if I'd be the one being annoying? It's easy to imagine such a recommendation being annoying. For the time being, Blogspot is a decent place for me to call my current vein of written content's home. In this new age where it's all Figment Area and no TAACS, so far it's given me minor trouble at worst.

 

All I can say is, don't use Wordpress. I don't want people to suffer through it or support it. Wordpress is a garbage titan that does evil and gets more reward than it deserves, on par with Facebook, Quora, and YouTube. Wordpress, you can suck on an expired eggplant.

(Fiction Repair Concept) How to Make Tom and Jerry’s Mouse Sympathetic, Rather Than Repugnant

There's often a range of noticeable disconnects in the mind of an old-school antics-based short cartoon viewer, when the cartoon in question is a short about an animal chasing another animal for food or another hostile reason. We want intelligent beings to be treated humanely and get to keep their lives, but we understand that carnivorous animals require deaths of unintelligent – or perhaps intelligent – other animals to keep living, themselves.

 

As human beings in the Anthropocene era of Earth, we frown at meaningless killing of other sentient beings, and want everybody of our kind to be safe. We have to eat, though, so it’s fortunate that we can look at some killing of some animals and deem it fine, even though we technically could all choose to be vegetarian and still survive. That is fine if it is “humane killing” – as strange a concept as it sounds when you see it written – because the animals we eat typically don’t have intelligence to necessitate them having the same rights as humans.

Sure, they don’t need those rights because they are not like us, indeed. But cartoon animals that walk on two legs and have the brains to form complex plans are human enough that they should have rights similar to our human rights if we ever somehow encounter them in real life. That’s why I don’t think we should kill aliens who make contact with us unless they come as enemies to our race.

There are problems with humans eating meat, especially seeing as we are not obligate carnivores, but imagine if we were without any choice in the matter of eating meat, and we were like Tom from Tom and Jerry, and there were a race of things we had to eat to survive that were just as intelligent as us. What would a Tom race or a Jerry race have over the other one that gives them more right to exist than the other, other than the practical application of Jerries being able to survive on their own if all Toms were wiped out, and not vice versa? Once you comprehend this predicament – which you probably did already, long before I showed up – it’s easy to see the ethical dilemma behind the Wil-E-Coyote VS Roadrunner shorts or a similar property, and you might even feel apathetic towards what you’re watching. Because we apparently prefer watching survival over watching carnage, these cartoons will give the upper hand to the prey, and make the predator suffer terribly in almost every episode, when usually the predator’s motive is their own kind of survival.

The neat thing about Tom and Jerry that I am going to reveal today is that it actually gets pretty close to justifying an expectation of sympathy toward Jerry from the audience, and my extremely simple plan to take it all the way. I’ll let you stop wondering right now.

 

 

Jerry is a wild mouse, invading the home of Tom’s owners, with Tom certainly being a domestic cat. You could even say that Tom is trying to be helpful, by taking care of a pest that’s surely undesirable in his household. To fix it all, make Jerry a cute pet mouse who keeps escaping from his cage and getting into trouble. That way, audiences will almost certainly have as much reason to root for Jerry as for Tom, or more. Bam, that’s done.

That is what I had typed out in the draft for this post, months earlier than now. Great, now it’s broken! I’m sure past me had a plan for all that, but I came back to writing this article evidently too late, and now the whole thing has fallen apart. I have no idea what I was building up to with the first part of this article anymore.

I feel like we basically got across the information we needed to though, right? Jerry’s not sympathetic enough and he would be if he was an owner’s beloved pet instead of a pesty wild animal showing up uninvited in somebody’s house, when Tom actually is somebody’s pet. The introductory “philosophical” part of this post that my past self left here was a pretty neat read. I’m really sorry, folks! That’s gonna have to be all. Watch this blog for a near-future article that might come out! And I’ve had a lot of trouble with it so far, so hopefully WordPress’ post editor will be gracious enough to co-operate…

Yes, I do realize that Tom and Jerry was not Warner Brothers or Looney Tunes. It’s already quite clear that things aren’t working right now.

[ THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY ONLINE AT THE TIME OF 2021-05-25 ON WORDPRESS, A WEBSITE WHICH I'VE ABANDONED NOW BECAUSE IT SUCKS - THIS IS THE LAST SUCH ONE TO RELOCATE BEFORE THE COMPLETION OF THE MUCH-NEEDED MIGRATION FROM THE DOOMED ORIGINAL FIGMENT AREA WEBSITE ]

I Would Love to Know Who Wawoo Is

Welcome to Figment Area. First I'd like to say that this is the first post to be published on this blog after a long time of the website being online but empty because of delays and distractions, and second I'd like to say that if you were here during that period of time by some ridiculously low-probability numbers being rolled, thank you for being here now. With a first post of any kind when I'm going into new territory, things can be a bit of a struggle because of the rules I impose on myself when this happens. Today I came up with even more rules, and then a crazy post that doesn't break any of them.

I’m going to tell you about one of the ancient mysteries of my life, one that’s been haunting and vexing me since I was very young, and is still unsolved. In 2019 I started telling far more of my friends about this than I used to, even though the mystery started in a year much closer to 2001. The mystery was the identity and origin of a giant mythological creature that can devastate villages, and probably cities. I must say, this thing doesn’t really make me feel afraid when I think about it, but the nature of the creature from a fictional standpoint is pretty terrifying, and it’s unnerving that it’s a mystery that’s been following me in the ways it does for so long.

My earliest memory of this so-called creature was of a coloured cartoon I was witnessing – which at this point could have been a broadcast on TV or a short dream, I do not know – in which it towers with its black and red stripes above a pre-colonial Maori settlement near the sea, likely in New Zealand, laying waste to the indigenous buildings around it. I believe some cartoony Maori folk came ashore on a traditional waka and noticed this monster, discussing quite direly what plans they should put into action.

Now, if you live in New Zealand like me and know about the culture, you will probably be very quick to say “Oh! It’s a Taniwha! Problem solved!” Instead of asking you to take an exercise in thinking critically, I will skip ahead and just outright explain why this simply does not bring us any closer to solving the mystery.

Taniwha are a vague idea, and do not look the same as the beast I’m describing in an web-based “Taniwha” image search even after thousands of pixels worth of scrolling down, even though the specific design of what a Taniwha looks like changes from image result to image result. I’ve always seen Taniwha as an aquatic sort of beast, with fish-like features, and they’ve always been viewed as a pretty terrifying monster, I think, but no amount of people comparing them to what’s been haunting me has ever made a difference.

The earliest memory was good enough to give me a strong description of the creature. It was like a humanoid giant with harsh red and black stripes all over, with a round but tall tiki face for a face – which was also striped the same way. The face had intimidatingly wide eyes that were probably all whiteness and pupils, without irises, and the expression was that of a violent scowl. Its arms and legs were like that of a human, only much more cylindrical, and I don’t remember what sort of hands or feet it had.

The memory didn’t go on much longer, and I never saw how the creature was taken down or how the arc was resolved. It was in fact extremely short. This is one of the reasons I think it’s likely that it was a dream, not an actual episode of something I saw on TV. I have no adjacent situational memories telling me I was in a room with other stuff happening to link it to a real situation, and the viewport of the memory was just like my other dreams about cartoons and videogames – there is no screen in front of you bordered by a monitor sitting in front of you in your reality: the screen IS the reality. This aspect of my dreams is probably one of the reasons why it was so damn scary when I was having that Monsters Inc: Scare Island dream and my player character Sullivan got hit by a car in a dead-end of an alleyway.

The other primary memory is one that clearly scared me more, as I can still remember the kind of fear I felt, though I was not in any real danger. This one was almost certainly real life, and it wasn’t a memory of watching a TV cartoon.

I was at a house owned by somebody who I think was a friend of my mother’s, and I was probably younger than five years. I was in some wooden room after probably toddling off away from the rest of the human beings, the ones who were actually adults, and then I looked up at the wall.

Oh god, this part was fucked up. There was some kind of large, black and yellow mask hanging on the wall, with a face that looked almost exactly like a live-action version of the face of you know what. This thing fucking scared me, and at some times – such as a few dozen seconds ago as I continued to write this thing – I can viscerally remember a trace of the feeling I felt. This shit was fucking scary when it happened, and I guess I walked off and tried to get mum to console me about it or something. Then the memory ended. Looking back, I think the face came from some kind of tribal mask-hybrid-shield thing, and was part of a collection.

Asking for my mother’s help with identifying which of her friends’ houses this happened at in a more modern conversation reveals that nobody I know has the ability to track this mask down again. Not willing to let me make a fool of myself, I searched the Internet for a picture of this thing, and did not find anything.

So, lots of time passed and I turned 23. I was finally waking up to the fact that I could consciously search for the solution to this thing. Who was it, what was its species called, where do I go to see the images of it that I remember? To this day, I don’t know. But telling people the story about it and hoping they would know something has brought me closer.

The start of me telling the story and hoping somebody would know something seemingly happened in 2019 during the time I was living with my oldest brother in Australia, and so did my next hint, though it was dubious. I had a dream about some casual friendly scenario with cartoonish Maori characters and some kind of “tiki restaurant”, and this concept we call a dream, this active authority on all things mysteriously weird and weirdly mysterious, was kind enough to bless me with its mystical interpretation, giving me two words that I could finally use to name the beast, and the beast’s species:
Wawoo – The Specimen
Wakawuwu – The Species

From that day forward, even though the dream didn’t empirically prove anything, I started using these words to describe it all. Then, I could finally articulately ask myself… Who was Wawoo?

More time passed, and I was living in New Zealand again. I still didn’t know what the cartoon I remembered was, but I was soon to find out. When talking to a certain cool woman who I used to visit, I finally found out that somebody knew about a cartoon that looked the way the cartoon in my first Wawoo memory did. Enter Tamatoa the Brave Warrior.

This bloody thing and its characters basically looked just like the first memory of Wawoo did, even though I noted a brightness of colours that I didn’t quite remember being part of it. This friend of mine told me that it was basically a lost work, and that some people she knew really wanted to watch more episodes of it as there were only three obtainable episodes left. I’ve always been no good at finding episodes of TV shows that were lost to time, but I cheekily emailed a YouTube video essayist called Saberspark some info about Tamatoa the Brave Warrior, thinking that if it’s as interesting to him as the other weird cartoons he frequently gives a review, I might have an easy shot at getting somebody to find more episodes for me, or at least finding out some things I didn’t know about the show. It was a very cheeky move.

Within the week, I watched all three available episodes of Tamatoa the Brave Warrior. It was a simple, child-friendly, not top-tier collection of TV episodes, with durations of about 10 minutes. I’m glad it was more than just clips, though, as full episodes would just about be the only right way to experience it. It’s just a cutesy show about pre-colonial Maori people living in New Zealand, enjoying life. Nothing scary so far.

One of the three remaining Tamatoa the Brave Warrior episodes had a pointedly interesting name. It was called The Taniwha. Naturally I had to watch this one as well, and for some reason I feel like it’s the one I watched last.

That is the Taniwha from the episode, being looked at by a Maori kid and a talking Tuatara. Sorry buddy, but you are not Wawoo, even if your face is really scowly and red. There’s no striping, no black, no mass destruction or strong villainy in the episode, and even the height is too lowballed to match. I think we’ve got a game of comparing an oven to a volcano here.

So that was it. The most recent piece of progress toward figuring out who Wawoo is and where to go to see his feature again was a 2019 hint about a cartoon show with 3 available episodes, and I’ve come no closer since then. Seeing a Taniwha that tries and fails to be Wawoo was disappointing, but I’m very grateful for the fact that I now know what the show Tamatoa the Brave Warrior is, as this has been a massive step forward in figuring this thing out. It gives me an extra bit of closure that I didn’t have before.

Maybe I will find out what the memory was some day, and I’m hoping for it. Maybe more episodes will be discovered and posted to the website NZ On Screen, and I’ll see the episode with the terrifying rampaging beast in it. At least, that’s possible if the scene wasn’t just a memory of me sleeping and dreaming…

 

 

 

[ THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY ONLINE AT THE TIME OF 2021-01-11 ON THE ORIGINAL FIGMENT AREA WEBSITE, WHERE IT WAS ALSO THE FIRST POST ]