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Okami Sequel - Project Teaser

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The SAO goddess collection continues to grow

Saw an unopened Sinon going for under $160 - while the QC continues to be garbage it was a nice feeling to get it at a reasonable price... And then I saw it on Nin-Nin for $158 including the tapestry.

I guess the main benefit was the seller I ordered from was already stateside, so I didn't have to wait for customs which was nice. (This is all I can do to comfort myself). That and the included tapestry was the least cool looking one out of the 3.

But yeah this Sinon was rougher than the Asuna I got... The bow hand (that is also attached to the hoodie) is a real mess. I think I will invest in some paints to at least attempt to cover up the missing splotches. But looking from a viewing distance, the sculpt is still hella good and the colors are solid enough.

Now, to find a reasonably price Leafa...

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i recreated the "i'll kill you" scene from gundam wing

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LUCANIS + WINGS OUT Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024)

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dash is dead im teleporting to the past

https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard?max_post_id=606474489540042752

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One of the stranger things about training brand new nurses is explaining how to min max small talk. It feels very weird to coach people on how to chat.

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i’m printing this out and i’m putting it on the mirror so i can confront myself with it

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Do any specific lines/monologues/philosophical concepts from SAO particularly stick with you?

For example, when Kirito explains to Leafa that she considers the game Real because she and others are experiencing it, and experiences are what matter, and so be kind and good even in games(I may be extrapolating more than she did, the concept itself is what stuck with me). I’m pretty sure that became like 60-70% of my life philosophy

the start of alicization

the fact kiri was a child twice

eugeo and that accursed tree, a finite task and therefore much more infinite

it feels less like scifi and more like a dark fairy tale

and then they meet again, but not all 3 of them

and none of the 3 remember the whole picture

the memories are gone, but the metadata remains

and just everything about eugeo being much more a *real* hero than kirito could ever be, and she knows it and is relieved and proud and the facade could *almost* be dropped now that he's there

and then he dies

and i don't think ill ever get over that

ive made posts about it before...

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Wicked is a musical based on a book based on a musical based on a movie based on a book.

THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL FANFICTION

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book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

I was so excited to see a copy of this in real life bc it's something I studied in art history. this is a book that was typeset and printed by hand using wooden blocks but every one of the characters was invented for the sake of the piece and does not correspond to any word in the Chinese language

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Readers, make sure you have all your favourite Ao3 fics downloaded.

Writers, make sure you have copies of all the fics you have posted on Ao3.

I don’t want to be alarming, but things could get really bad really fast. OTW shared this today on Twitter, and I'm a bit worried about it 😅

Ao3 is a non-profit organisation. If they have to start paying taxes, I have no idea what will happen.

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There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom.  A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship.  That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon.  Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they're not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another. People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Don’t tell me about gaps.  Tell me about what’s there instead.

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Having never considered the concept of a highschool retelling of the Odyssey until that one post mentioned them in passing, I'd like to give my own pitch: the Odyssey meets Back to the Future meets whodunnit.

Odysseus is the central figure of the story, of course. He is also one of those high school protagonists who is inexplicably surrounded by half a dozen girls, because emphasizing that aspect of the Odyssey is funny to me. There's Penelope, his actual girlfriend; popular girl Circe; poor little rich girl Calypso; freshman Nausicaa; and Athena, who is older and solidly in bro territory with Odysseus, but still adds to the overall effect of him being surrounded by girls. (Is she a goddess? Idk. Probably she has some other kind of power, like riches or genius or both.)

The cast is rounded out by some of his Odyssey crewmen, maybe a few Iliad Greeks, and Telemachus, a new kid at their school who quickly becomes friends with Odysseus. For about half the story, things focus on slice of life, Odysseus's schemes, and the students' various personal problems. Incidents from the Odyssey are nodded toward, but not directly retold.

Then you get the Back to the Future part with the reveal that Telemachus has traveled back in time twenty years, with the help of future Athena, to solve the extremely cold case of his dad's disappearance by investigating his high school life.

Future Athena was only able to discover that someone from his high school circle was involved; in their time, there were just too many roadblocks set up between her and the truth. And she can't get inside access to those events as her adult self. So it's up to Telemachus to get to know his past parents, investigate their friends, and chase down the clues to discovering where his father's been all his life.

...While hopefully not raising the suspicions of his teenaged, but still infamously clever, parents in the process of this totally straightforward and not at all emotionally taxing mission.

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Please note. The orange one is not included because A. He isn’t a billionaire. And B. Calling him obnoxious is too kind for him.

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🖤💐🩷

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Okay but can anyone articulate the mindset that leads older people to feel like they NEED to know people's gender identity all the time? Like what's going on there