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In the near future, 85% of all jobs have been automated, and everyone's basic needs are met for free. You work for a secret organization that creates fake busywork jobs for the majority who aren't qualified for the few real jobs left, but need perceived meaningful labor to stay sane.

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if I had a wrestling persona they would be part demon part pharmacist and their name would be DVS (like CVS but pronounced Devious) and their catchphrase would be Welcome To The Harmacy

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tumblr stop trying to get me to look at my for you page challenge

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In C1, nobody except Pike really gets Vax's faith in the Matron. Percy doesn't get it, but Percy knows that that's the kind of person he is. Scanlan and Grog don't really pay much mind to it.

But Vex and Keyleth really don't get it. And towards the end, they both actively resent it. Why does Vax want to obey the Matron like this? They could've brought him back without this deal, if he had been willing. But that would be against Her will, so he had to take this deal that left them in this awful emotional limbo for 3 days instead. Watching him, knowing that completing their mission would mean his death. Wasn't that worse?

They just don't get faith like this. And Vax never really explains. Even when he comes back from the Malleus Key, the best he can say is "I mourn for our life together...[but] I would not see her go." They just reluctantly - bitterly - accept it.

I think a lot of people in C3 discourse are the same: they don't get why anyone on Exandria believes in the gods or wants them around.

This kind of faith is really hard to explain, especially when the system of religion and gods is so different from our real world systems of religion and divinity. Why do Caduceus and Fjord believe in the Wildmother? How does that manifest in their everyday? Why does Deanna follow the Dawnfather? Is faith even a component of worship or clericalism in Exandria? FCG followed the Changebringer, but had clerical gifts before that. But his faith was important to him, without the magical gifts.

I guess the ultimate question is: is that faith worth caring about? Is the faith and worship of the Exandrians who believe in/follow a god something important enough to be weighed against things like "do the gods deserve the position they have", "the feasibility of keeping Predathos locked away", "what the gods themselves want", "what was possible in the moment"?

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Spy x family is very very good because there's a bit where a far right terrorist group says that they want to start a war and a main character responds by saying to them "have any of you ever killed anyone before? Have you ever been killed before? Have you ever had a limb torn off by an artillery shell? Have you ever heard the sound of bones shattering? Have you ever smelled the reek of rotting flesh? Have you ever found the crushed bodies of your parents and siblings in a pile of rubble that used to be your home? Have you ever discovered a blown-off piece of your lover stuck to a wall? Have you ever been so hungry that you tried to eat tree bark? Or stewed a pot of human flesh? Have you ever convinced yourself that your enemy was subhuman so you could...slaughter them like animals? Have you ever been so haunted by shame and regret afterwards that you cried until you vomited? Have you ever had friends who did the same, and then took their own lives? Did you learn nothing about war at your university?!"

and that's the same volume where they adopt a dog that can see into the future

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And if I say that Jason can't perceive himself as a proper adult after all these missing years that he spent being dead, and then catatonic, but at the same time, he was never taught how to be a kid, either. All he did was surviving as a child on the streets or taking care of Catherine, an act that made him taste responsibility and the harsh reality of the world from the very beginning of his conscious life. The closest "childhood" he got to experience was a few years as Bruce's son, and yet, it wasn't enough - he never got to feel fully safe and secure, he was never fully assured that he was a kid, who could do anything he wanted (case in point, him, thinking that Bruce disowned him after benching, and his desperate urge to find another parent since he was left alone, betrayed and pained).

So, yeah, Jason mourns the past, but most of the time he grieves the things he never got.

It is not about not being able to return to his childhood innocence. It is about having nothing to return to.

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Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

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My elderly father started talking about how frustrating he finds “the pronouns thing” and I was like. Oh no. He had such a good stand on this, he’s been they/them-ing his cishet siblings for god’s sake! Is he regressing?? And he was talking about how difficult it is to remember, and how onerous it feels to expect strangers to keep track of it, and I’m like oh no oh no.

Then he says, “I mean, the problem isn’t the gender thing. The problem is four words: she, her, he, and him. We got rid of stewardess and turned it into flight attendant. It doesn’t matter if the flight attendant is a man or woman, so we got rid of it. We just need to get rid of those. I don’t need to know.”

“You don’t need to know… people’s gender?”

“No. I don’t care, I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to remember it.”

So we can relax. It’s just a continuation of his crusade to they/them the world. He doesn’t want to remember anyone’s gender. He’s abolishing the genders.

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Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.

I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.

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It’s International Fanworks Day 2025!

IFD 2025 is here! Join us for 30 hours of fandom-related games, or hang out in our Discord chatroom and talk to fellow fans. Find out more at https://otw-news.org/579x8fdf

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listened to most of The Art of War while hanging clothes at my job earlier and I'm going to just distill down the real advice for y'all without the twenty thousand similes and metaphors and such

Wars are expensive have them really fast

Don't kill your soldiers they need food and stuff

But sometimes put your soldiers into inescapable life or death situations because that's how you really get them to be workin' hard instead of hardly workin', y'know

Have more guys than the enemy and be smarter. The best way to win a war is to have every single favorable condition for winning a war. Hope that helps

DO NOT fight in a salt marsh

If your boss gives you a stupid order, don't follow that order

Be 15 min early to the battlefield

Attack the enemy's weak points. But also they might be faking weaknesses so don't attack if they seem weak. But attack their weak points. But also-

For the love of god don't let anyone read omens

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Yes Yes Ruri I love Ruri sm Im her biggest fan you guys wouldn't understand

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happy holidays, Lexie!! @2129888 i was watching your iNCREDIBLE amv and it got me thinking about how many times they seem to unconsciously protect and defend each other, or cover for one another, even really early on. and then over time it becomes more and more deliberate as they build trust in each other and i just have a lot of Feelings ™ about it

thank you for running the event again this year @oofurixmas!

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Right by his side, asleep, heal and grow in this unforgettable refuge of Gotham, here together... where they belong.

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Day 1: Pets (old,new)

For Damian week 2024 on Twitter(X)

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Day1

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as much as i love corruption arcs, there's just something so sexy about a character that can't be corrupted, to the point that he un-corrupts you instead