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We have GOT to stop pathologizing the joy out of life.

Saw someone claim that if you read a lot as a child, you were disassociating. No, you were reading. Because reading is fun.

"I have a problem with maladaptive daydreaming." It's only maladaptive if it negatively impacts your ability to function in the real world. Laughing at a joke you made in your head isn't doing that.

"You seem to do a lot if creative projects. What are you escaping?" I'm escaping this conversation.

Like what is the end goal? Because so far, all this has done has made it harder to enjoy my hobbies because you're turning a mindless process into something I gotta think about.

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My douchey coworker started a story by being like, “You know Mr. Beast?”

And honest to god, I don’t, but I suspect if this coworker likes him then I wouldn’t care for him. I had the unparalleled pleasure of going, “The moldy cheese guy?”

That was the only thing I knew associated with the name.

Fully derailed him. He was absolutely baffled and stopped to google the moldy cheese scandal. So thank you tumblr, for sharing about the moldy cheese so I didn’t have to listen to that anecdote.

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Richard Siken… Richard Fucking Siken. You asked RICHARD SIKEN if his poems were inspired by BUDDIE. Gay men do not exist in people’s heads except as props huh?

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pro insider tips for black friday from a retail worker

stay home

stay home

stay home

stay home

stay home

stay home

stay home

dont even think about going to a store

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"we need less sanitized queer stories" yall keep saying fucking she-ra romanticizes abuse. you couldnt possibly handle less sanitized queer stories

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Maddie being introduced as this literal ray of sunshine and then being the first to beat along to Piltovers turn to martial law. Her interactions with Vi mystifying her as “one of the good ones.” One of the good Zaunites. She was always discriminatory toward Zaunites, they just didn’t make it overt at her introduction. The turn to fascism and discrimination can start with anyone. Including a literal ray of sunshine.

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the most fun a girl can have is finding parallels, noticing patterns, making connections, contemplating

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Do you block people in the same fandom as you just because you don't like their takes?

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and please feel free to tell me why in the replies/tags !!!!

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davrin didn't know what a wisp was two weeks ago and emmrich hasnt seen a live animal in 5 years but that doesn't stop either of them from being unflinchingly up in each other's business.

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🎶workin' 9 to 5, yeah they're dead but it's my living🎶

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Yes I do say “I’m not on TikTok” with an air of arrogance intended to assert dominance

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so about the choice in act 3. I feel like the writers wanted to do the suicide mission from me2 AND the companion choice from me1. which clashes at its core because the whole point of the me2 mission was that if you did all the companion quests and worked for it, you could keep everyone alive. and I get wanting the shock of having one of the companions die no matter what, but at this point in the game after the obvious set up, it just feels like one of those haHA surprise! moments

then there's the fact that it's between davrin and harding. the black man and the fan favourite from dai. like it feels so stacked against davrin at that point.

I picked davrin first, and then I went back and picked harding, thinking maybe that was the right choice to keep her alive. and here's where the whole choice gets even worse for me, because harding, instead of using her stone magic, the actual thing that would give her an advantage against ghilan'nain, she climbs up to the exact same spot as davrin, and uses her bow. she tries to use arrows against a giant multi-limbed blight enhanced being. it's stupid! of course she dies!

I had expected that if you picked harding, she would use her stone magic, which would distract ghilan'nain because of the history with the titans, giving lucanis enough time to act. it would have worked really well as a continuation of her character arc, and it would tie into her personal quest in a way that would make it clear that the effort we put into doing that was what makes the difference.

but by not doing that and having her die no matter what, it instead feels like it doesn't make sense. davrin, at least, is just a man with a sword. his death here makes sense because he's against impossible odds.

which brings it back to feeling really bad that the choice was between him and harding. because for this sacrifice / loss to make sense, it feels it should be davrin. for this narrative beat to make sense, it should be davrin dying.

it feels like the writers are saying: the correct choice here is davrin. he's the only companion who should die no matter what. to signpost this at the moment you make this choice, we will have the other choice be the fan favourite from dai. because no one will want to risk her potentially dying.

it feels bad. it feels racist. davrin deserved better.

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da2 isn't the best dragon age game *because* it's openly a tragedy, but being a tragedy forces a level of narrative coherence that the other games in the series don't have, and *that's* what makes it a better game.

okay, so. dragon age 2 runs on nested foreshadowing and a limited set of themes that almost every character and plot beat fall into: love is not enough, wealth is not enough, power is not enough, good intent is not enough. the problems you run into are structural, rather than individual, and your ability to resolve them as one person is strictly limited. the arishok is a central figure for this, because he prefigures every other tragedy and makes the game's thesis statement as clear as possible. he doesn't want to be in kirkwall, but he is compelled to remain until he gets back what was stolen. he doesn't want to lead a coup attempt, but he is compelled by qunari codes of justice to act. he does not want to die and fail his duty, but but he is compelled to by the other two impossible demands. every tragedy in kirkwall is the result of too many people with wildly different definitions of justice crammed into one place specifically designed to maximize human misery and suffering, and so you get a wonderfully nested narrative onion where each quest reinforces that idea, where there are no good options, just positions you can take — even the affinity system plays into that, where constantly gassing up your friends or constantly pushing them to change are equally correct ways to go, but ones that won't ultimately make a huge difference in their lives or characters, because no matter how much they like you, they're not under your control.

this coherence is even justified by the framing device. of *course* the moral of the game is "insisting on a dogmatic, narrow idea of justice destroys individuals and societies," it's a yarn being spun by varric the con artist to a chantry cop!

neither origins or inquisition play with that sort of narrative complexity. origins is a jaundiced hero's quest, certainly, but it's still basically a hero's quest; inquisition has a number of characters who question what you're doing and why, but the multitude of voices pulls the game in too many potential directions. DA2 was so constrained in its production that it pulled on decidedly ancient theatrical traditions, and it worked so, so well

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I don't know if there's a sufficient explanation hidden somewhere in the game or if all of this is just one big retcon, but for me the reason why Veilguard Crows seem different from what Zevran described is one part just different Houses handling their recruitment and training differently, and one part the Crow characters just acting normal despite the horrible shit that happened to them because they either don't know any better, have come from a worse background (cough Mien cough) or just re-contextualize it in their heads as necessary. Like that one friend who starts fondly reminiscing about something that happened to them in their childhood only for the other person to sit there thinking 'this is extremely traumatizing'.

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While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.

Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Onion, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.

(EDIT: Fixed a sentence incorrectly suggesting that Clickhole is still affiliated with the Onion – it totally slipped my mind that they'd sold it back in 2020.)