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What is a pirate's favorite letter? That the question B,

Some say R and some say I, and some curs say nay, V!

Still others think S, H, or P, and others think may T,

But all be wrong, for know ye this, ye scallywag to be -

A pirate's first and only lover; aye, she be the C.

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And what makes it even wilder is when you realize that literally none of that makes any sense according to the Bible.

Baptism is an outward expression of faith, not a prerequisite for salvation; it doesn’t make you any more or less sinful in and of itself. It’s like the wedding ceremony as opposed to the paperwork.

Jesus was both fully God and fully man (Hebrews 2:14-18); he grew and matured physically just like any other human. Considering it “disrespectful” to represent that accurately in art, or “imperfect” for that to happen, is just... what?

The thing I love about weird babies in Medieval art is, okay, at first you figure it’s probably because these pieces were drawn by cloistered monks who’ve never seen a baby in person, right? But as you become more familiar with the genre, it becomes apparent that no, they’re totally capable of drawing plausible-looking babies – it’s just the baby Jesus in particular who they depict as disturbingly shredded or a tiny middle-aged man or whatever. It’s at this point you realise there’s some Deep Cultural Shit™ in play that you will never fully understand.

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Not to mention that Yoda himself expressed concern at the Jedi’s diminishing connection to the Force. He didn’t realize just how bad the situation had gotten, but his heart was just as much in the right place as ever; it just turned out to be too little, too late. Dooku turned away from the Jedi’s ideals because of the reality of what they’d become, but in doing so he became even more of a monster than the ones he was leaving - we should strive to be like Qui-Gon, who saw the problems and moved to fix them without abandoning the ideals that had slowly been lost, rather than like Dooku, who abandoned those ideals when the reality no longer matched them and proceeded to actively work against the ideals he once claimed to believe in.

Didn’t think I’d find myself agreeing with Count Dooku but here I am.

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Going outside with autism/adhd like *feels all the bushes* *stops to look at a bug* *reads all the signs out loud* *stops to look at a bug* *stops to look at a bug* *feels all the bushes* *stomps on a leaf* *reads all the sign ou

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Don't forget the third state - I am a god who has no idea what they're doing.

The two states of every programmer

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There’s a lot to look forward to in Hollow Knight: Silksong but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that part of what I’m hoping for is the possibility that we’ll finally find out what the fuck was up with Mister Mushroom.

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Spoiler-free Sonic Movie Review

It was really good. Pretty campy, definite intentional B-movie, but done very well. Couple odd blemishes like a couple scenes' scripts getting mysteriously swapped for scripts from Olive Garden commercials, but otherwise no particular complaints. Definitely not at all true to any existing Sonic origin story, but altogether a good reimagining that keeps a lot of the spirit of the various originals. Stay till the mid-credits scene, absolutely worth it. Nothing after the full credits so don't worry about missing anything after the mid-credits scene. Pleasantly surprised to be unironically looking forward to any potential sequels.

Rating: 7/10, would recommend

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Above is my actual most recent, but I'm pretty sure she's actually just a demon pretending to be a cat, so here's another just to be sure.

let’s see the kitties!

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I'm a linguistics student. Words are literally my life right now and hopefully will be for a long time to come. And yet, I am somehow still shocked whenever I manage to pronounce a medical term on the first try. I honestly don't know how you guys manage it.

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So many people in the notes are saying Solo but I'm just.. not seeing it? The spice mines of Kessel were a serious galaxy-wide problem - they were mining out the most dangerous drug in the entire Star Wars universe there. It's basically space crack. Liberating the workforce there, droid or otherwise, was a huge deal. And they played the whole thing pretty damn straight; yes, L3 was a comedic character, but that doesn't mean she can't have serious scenes, and her sacrifice trying to help both the crew and her fellow droids was about as serious as they come. Having some comedic elements in an otherwise serious scene doesn't mean the whole thing was "played for laughs", let alone the idea being "treated as intrinsically laughable" - can someone please explain to me what about that scene got people so riled up, or confirm my suspicions that people really just want to hate that movie at any cost and saw what seemed like a good excuse to bash it?

Gotta say I’m getting real uncomfortable with the whole robot-liberation-as-comedy trope.

A piece of media where robots are basically depicted as people in funny costumes, yet they’re treated as disposable appliances, and everybody – including the ostensibly heroic protagonists – is okay with that? Fine, whatever; children’s media has a lot of unexamined implications.

Explicitly acknowledging from an in-universe perspective that the robots are effectively an enslaved minority, and the good guys are still okay with that? I’m going to be side-eyeing that at least a little.

Including an explicit sub-plot about the robots seeking liberation, but playing it for low comedy and treating the idea as intrinsically laughable even though you literally just openly acknowledged that the robots are enslaved persons? Like… what the fuck are you doing? Who is this meant to appeal to?

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Generally speaking, yes. Any time that the characters acknowledge something outside the realm of the story (for example, the lack of a wall on the side of the set which faces the audience, which is where the term "fourth wall" comes from), they are breaking the fourth wall. This often involves directly addressing the audience, but not necessarily, and many of the best fourth wall breaks come from moments where the audience is largely irrelevant and the wall is broken in a completely unrelated way.

One could say that the so-called "fourth wall" is really just the illusion that the story takes place in a world as real as ours, and that illusion is quite easy to break - all it takes is one simple, knowing glance out past that invisible wall.

“Why do we have to fight, anyway?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

“No, I really want to know.”

”You blew up my whole family!”

“Nope.”

“What?”

“That doesn’t sound like something I would do. I’ve decided it’s not canon.”

“You can’t–”

“Show me where in the story that actually happens. Give me a page number.”

“… well, okay, it’s not explicitly stated that you did it, but it’s clearly intended–“

“There you go. Canon is only and precisely what appears in the published text. Authorial intent can be illuminating, but we’re not bound by it.“

“I… you… you can’t invoke the death of the author from within the narrative!”

“Why not?”

“It’s pretentious as hell, for one.”

“Now that does sound like me.”

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Meanwhile me over here looping Chloe and Parvati's NPs for days without so much as a single support in sight like some sort of off-meta vigilante fighting to undermine the evil Buster empire:

jalter will never let me down

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That depends on the context. Historically yes, warlock is the masculine form of witch, but in modern fantasy, witches are glorified magical chemists and warlocks summon demons (whether as pawns or as sugar daddies also depends on which story you look at).

Wizard is a gender-neutral term. A Witch is not a female wizard. Female wizards are called wizards. A witch is just a druid with no morals.

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Ah, but you forget an important element! The CD-i games are also fully animated, rather than being nearly-static sprites. The hideous, nightmarish quality of the animation accents the terrible voice acting, and the resulting combination is far worse than the voice acting would be on its own. Even if they were voiced exactly as-is, broken English and all, the older mainline Zelda games would not be nearly as hilariously awful, nor as memorable for it, as the CD-i games.

Straight up, the only reason the Phillips CD-i Zelda titles are considered to have exceptionally bad dialogue is because they’re fully voiced. There’s dialogue in the mainline Zelda titles that’d be far more YTP-worthy than anything in Faces of Evil if it were to be spoken by an actual human being, and deep down I think we all know it.

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"Hundreds dead and a whole lotta damage" is the understatement of the century. Alaya's standard operating procedure is to nuke everything in the immediate area of the threat from orbit. If the Counter Guardian that got picked for the job decides they're not about that life, they get casually wiped from existence and replaced by someone less scrupulous. It allegedly gives them "just enough power to eliminate the threat and no more", but from what we've seen in the actual series, it's not exactly a great judge of how much power it will take to do that.

It's worth noting, though, that Alaya isn't the only entity known as the Counter Force. There are actually two - Gaia, or the will of the Earth, and Alaya, or the collective will of humanity. They used to be one and the same, but as humans became more and more independent, the two grew further and further apart; it would be an understatement to say they don't exactly get along anymore. Gaia produces things like Beasts and the True Ancestors to protect the Earth itself, with no regard for the humans it increasingly sees as a threat, while Alaya produces Counter Guardians to ensure the continued existence of humanity, only giving thought to the safety of the planet insomuch as it is necessary for humanity to exist. The problems that Archer has with Alaya come directly from the fact that it only cares about the existence of humanity - it does not give a flying f*ck about humans, just the species as a whole. Hence the "nuke it from orbit" attitude.

In other words, Counter Guardians are mercenaries conscripted into eternal service by "the collective will of humanity to continue existing", in order to nuke threats to humanity off the face of the planet in a never-ending petty slap-fight with "the will of the planet to continue existing".

What a shitty way to spend eternity.

what exactly is the counter force? all i rly know bout it is shirou became apart of it and something about the grand servants

The Counter Force is one of the various sapient forces that make up the world. Also known as Alaya, it exists to ensure human existence is perpetuated. Unfortunately, it is not a believer in precision.

The majority of times it has gotten involved (that we see) inevitably results in hundreds dead and a whole lotta damage. It’s part of why Archer Emiya lost faith in being a hero, the Counter Force requires letting people die for the many.

Hm... kind of sounds like Kiritsugu’s initial beliefs.

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Spiders-Men doesn’t really work either, purely because there’s a character named Spiders-Man who is a spider hivemind that believes he is Peter Parker, and saying Spiders-Men implies multiple of him rather than multiple male (or gender-irrelevant in the archaic sense) Spider-People.

Comics are weird.

The proper plural of “Spider-Man” is:

a. Spider-Mans

b. Spider-Men

c. Spiders-Men

d. Spider-Mani

e. None of the above

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I finally beat the main story of Fate/Grand Order, and it feels great. Time to treat myself to milk and cookies while I silently cry into my glass and wish it were real...