#;; yep. basically this is everything

[ineed-to-sleep]

*me immediately after going through a terrifying and traumatic experience* haha yeah I guess it was rough but I'm fine now like I'm totally chill. It was kinda funny actually if you think about it

[faaun]

ok let's catch up quickly

[stuff-and-such-art]

Young Jack learning his first spell, Mold Earth! He is about to be so fucking grounded. Destroying his father's estate and playing in the dirt 😌, as he should. Requested by Alicen in the dice shame discord!

[goldpilot22]

a collection of doodles I've done lately.

clockwise from top left: me (technically my sona that works in a friend's sona's circus, but it's basically just me with a lil mask), my Pokemon Legends Arceus character, an attempt at capturing Rea's slightly-simplified-imitation-of-a-human uncanny vibes by making them look kinda lowpoly, and "Debbie Deadlight" an original eldritchverse/CoC character who is totally not just Deepcolor from Arknights I swear

[randomnameless]

As someone who loves both Grima and Anankos I don't think Grima took Anankos's backstory at all, Grima's view if anything was stolen from Mewtwo. Lab creation, used in some matter, screw humanity. I would not be shocked if that ended up being the inspiration for the backstory FEH made up (because yeah they made it up but it's a canon property so it's canon backstory now) Mewtwo is one of the most popular Pokemon of all time and you can't deny making a god vs making the world's most powerful Pokemon doesn't have some parallels. And even so while I could see them inspired by Anankos betrayal compared to him nothing about Grima is tragic, he's just bitter. He's fully aware and lucid of everything (despite lacking ancient memories) he's pissed and wants everyone to suffer and it's also fun for him. Nothing much more to him despite how much my fellow Grima fans would like to argue; lab created angry betrayed murder dragon is all there is canonically. But as Grima was once meant to be a Loptous expy before he became FE Mewtwo there is now a lot in Awakening that doesn't make sense due to these retcons.

Anankos though! Oh Anankos is hella tragic following the theme of Fates really. A really good guy. Cared about his people did everything for them, loved them stayed longer than he should have and fell to degeneration. Basically got so old he got dragon dementia nothing like who he used to be due to this disease and since his functions are now failing he's full of rage all the time memories are warped he loses sight of who is around him and more, this rage causes him to go berserk and he's unable to understand why those he loved turned on him then he kills his best friend he keeps spiraling, going mad following and giving into his delusions about being betrayed, I wouldn't be shocked if he made up events that didn't happen in his messed up state of mind. Unlike Grima he is not lucid, it's true he also has a hatred of humanity because he was betrayed and his goal, like Grima is complete world annihilation but his betrayal wasn't a true betrayal either, and technically he betrayed humanity first but unknowingly because he is no longer the same person he was. Anankos is so far gone he's insane. Grima is perfectly sane and still wants complete world annihilation, either because he's angry or because he's just that bored (one of his lines also mentions wanting to start a war because he's bored) because of his betrayal he sees everyone as beneath him mere playthings. Anankos can't see anything he's gone *gone* all that matters is fulfilling his goal.

Sorry for rambling I just really love both of them and feel like calling one a rip off of the other isn't fully correct. Anankos is a crazy deep character (non corrupt Anankos when FEH it'd be a great mythic) and that's why I love him and I love Grima because of how little there is and it's fun to give him more with the little we have, I uh don't like the girl version because she's lets make her sexy and sell to horny men don't we have enough of those!! but the boy version is nifty

Hi!

FEH's canonicity is always going to be questionned, like, I'm the loser who will claim to the world Rhea bakes cookies because her FEH alt bakes them when her Fodlan iteration doesn't bake sweets - but it's all about the thin line, imo, between what in a fanfiction would be called IIC and OC.

Grima claiming that humans only worship him to later turn against him is... backed up by nothing, let it be in FE13 or FE15. Hell, in FE13, his human followers are, uh, sort of brainwashed to come to the dragon's tarble, and end up as his own snacks (he consumes their lifeforce à la Medeus?) - they didn't even had the occasion/chance to ask him something and then backstab him, no, they ended up in his stomach.

(something Loptry doesn't do at all, so what was the point of having this mentionned? "Remember Medeus? Here is the copy of what he did to those 4 ladies!")

In FE15 we got his backstory - where I agree with your mewtwo parallel (even if the franchise had no qualms stomping the "strongest pokemon ever" nonsense which had them release two megas for him - and even then, M-Ray, U-Necrozma and the later legendaries wreck him in half!) which is why they could have used this as a backstory : Grima was rejected by his creator who sought to end him because he "couldn't control him", he was rejected by the dragons (and maybe FEH could canonise the fact that Duma's visit of Thabes happening when Grima was conceived was just not a coincidence!) so in a traditional mindset, if the world hates him, he'll hate the world but with a special hatred for humans (GG Forneus) who "condemned him to live a life of hatred and despair"...

That's where the bitterness angle would come, but where I call this backstory the Anankos expy, it's because Grima's trusted and fellow humans never... turned their blades at him? Unless we're only talking about his Creator Forneus?

FE13's worldbuilding is wonky, but I thought Plegia was a nation where people worshipped him (which led Chrom's dad to war against them!) - so unless Grima suggests the First Exalt (Chrom's descendant) was one of his BFF who turned against them when he tried to do Grima-things which are, in FE13's canon, destroy the world and kill everyone, I really wonder where this "betrayed by humans" angle comes.

As you pointed it out, Anankos's story is more "tragic" because the man had been benevolent, but refused to "move to the astral plane" so he was degenerating, and humans being their human selves turned against him.

And doubly agree, maybe FEH's writers slapped this story on Grima to have someone, who still has some agency and isn't fully consumed by madness (not Anankos then) explain this backstory... FEH most likely didn't came up with Ascended!Heroes already - aka Heroes who are in the best versions of themselves (Idunn becoming a chicken again!) so they couldn't come up with an Anankos who, after being defeated by Corn and somehow surviving, explains his past and stresses the importance of bonds.

Instead, they had to craft something about Grima's backstory because between FE13!Grima wanting to destroy the world and its people in angry red capslocks and FE15!Grima being an eldritch abomination that was rejected by his creator at birth there was a gap they needed to fill and Doylist wise, since Anankos couldn't be released (what would be his lines if he's his insane self? - 2018!FEH couldn't have came up with kid!Soren as a unit lol) it was "okay" to copy part of his background and give to Grima - even if it doesn't make sense at all given FE13 - to explain the behaviour he has in FE13, since the mainline games didn't bother.

But doing so, as you said, retcons FE13.

Rhea baking cookies doesn't retcon FE16 or Nopes because the games (more Nopes than FE16 but that's player pandering for you!) showed/depicted her as someone who cares about people/plays with children when she can, but Grima blaming humans for shunning him when the humans who worship him got what they desired? What is he even talking about? He is the one who devoured his followers in FE13, as they were mindlessly marching to their doom, what/who is the talking about? Forneus? But Forneus never asked him anything, but he tried to get rid of him while he was still in his test tube.

At this point, I realise FEH!Grima is basically, especially as he is retcon to his canon games, a FEH OC lol.

Don't apologise for rambling lol, I always ramble!

I get the appeal of coming up with backstories and writing about characters who have no background, I spent years connecting dots between multiverse about Saias lol and Willy's basically became my OC since canon!Willy is just a name and a statue lol

But yeah, it's a damn shame FEH pretended to care enough about Grima to give them a new background/reasons/plot, but now only sees them as occasions to sell horny alts (Halloween!M!Grima had the same T&A pose than his female counterpart!) even if F!Grima has it the worst (my fwend @crushednugget made a beautiful edit of Rearmed Grima but with Valdar instead!).

But we know what FEH prioritises : horny > plot and relevance, remember Karla and her 3 alts?

[nomaishuttle]

sry its just like rly incredibly annoying how much ppl will like. IDK. yes ik a lot of autistic and adhd ppl who do love music. and sometimes it is bc of their neurodivergence yk. music can be grounding its familiar its reliable and comfortable. i think its fine to say Autistic/ADHD ppl often find comfort in music. but its stupid as fuck to say Therefore enjoying music makes you autistic/adhd.

[mrfoox]

Talking with Fabian and whooooooooo boy that was an conversation and a half...

[sexybabystevie]

this is to ONE PERSON and one person ONLY. if you're confused, it's not you!

[anaalnathrakhs]

ngl i’m having an not great moment over the sheer lack of control i have over anything my body does

[nomairuins]

ill be like I can totally make a lighthearted post mentioning a kink i have and i wont even freak abt it. and then i freak abt it

[okcoolthanks]

Oh dear

pov your dog what huh who said that

[unproduciblesmackdown]

fr incredibly epic subversion move in creep 2 is denying the audience the "understanding" that our perspective is that of Neutral Objective Arbiter. we aren't shown arguments of the protagonist's unfiltered, private thoughts & feelings through visuals or dialogue for us as obstensibly our way to believe she's vulnerable: she is, we understand she understands this, and then we aren't privy to any more "proof" of this by observing whatever attacks or simply emotional duress. we can assess and judge and guess about this person, but the movie doesn't let us believe we're Not, and that instead we're simply "understanding" the conveyed factual information. the killer man uses performance as a way to generate vulnerability, the protagonist young nonwhite woman uses performance to strategically interrupt such efforts from malicious to exploitative to violently so men on like any given tuesday, and the killer man's approach to performance is not truly equipped to react to her adaptation and flexibility; his loss of control turns vulnerability back around on him, whereupon he stumbles and flounders and is knocked off course, while existing in continuous vulnerability even when succeeding at her efforts is, again, any tuesday for the protagonist. putting him in a position of having something to prove just by expressing skepticism abt his threat of eventually killing her. when he tries to leverage Gender to discomfit her by saying she (or, they both) should undress, only to be the one clearly discomfited when instead she simply does so with her nudity a matter of fact (and not really shown, b/c the killer guy's camera pov doesn't just provide some full body shot, he's directing it down, around, at her set, unbothered expression, Showing his own vulnerability in the situation now, unable to deal with her body outside his effort to make its very existence a power play. but isn't being a woman sexual, which is to say, inherently available for consumption by men???). when we get the killer guy's pov as he is looking for the protagonist around the house, increasingly turning it into a threatening sort of hide and seek (kind of creeping around, creepily, even) and we wait for his, and our, expected vision of her being Afraid and Menaced and possibly Attacked, only for her to jumpscare him, and us, knock him on his ass and laugh at him. the killer's like melancholic musings as established in the first film being a situation in which the protagonist plays into the gender of "women provide comfort, emotional support, intimacy!" to extend the relative vulnerability of that and prolong the delay of any violence, how far-fetched....while this narrative of her navigating & kind of heist breaking out of this danger doesn't ask her to like "overcome" or "transcend" that vulnerability like oh hooray she's now Strong enough to win, Too Strong to be thusly vulnerable ever again; nor ever puts forth that she can, or should, ever just turn the situation around completely to win. jumpscaring the guy? still happening in the context of her performing as, at most, "playing along." he's trying to get the advantage over her, she's trying to more so establish / prolong a dynamic of closer to equals to protect herself and interrupt this: despite her inability to take control of the situation / name the game in any lasting way: killer guy is still driven by ego. in the end it's that ego that makes him vulnerable enough for her to again surprise him and us with the final physical fight maneuver to get away, in that last minute and culmination able to drop any performing as her survival strategy, but still able to take advantage of his own performance as means of control and driven by ego

this also compared to horror genre ostensible commentary by way of "subversion" that's just still also misogyny: just Showing women's pain? what else is new. we're asked to recognize it not by understanding it's there as a matter of fact, but by observing and assessing some unfiltered display of it. or the classic of "but if we put a man through the same violence or pain. makes you think huh." or ohh we posited this disabled person as a scary threat but now they're dead b/c they weren't the real threat, makes you think huh? or the classic of "but if we keep the disability as threatening & scary but we also kind of ask the audience to Pity it. makes you think huh." like no, the power dynamic of [the audience (with a clear assumed perspective) is neutral! they must be able to assess and judge The Other onscreen] is there. pity requiring the power difference to Deign to extend it. "well disability is scary but some things are scarier" wow. indulging in [women experiencing violence / harm] as privy observers b/c it doesn't exist if you're not looking right at it, judging it as legitimate for yourself rather than via having to accept the character understands it as legitimate for themself, whether their most unfiltered (in an expectedly externalized way) pain or even simply what was done to them was shown directly to you or not. that women trying to insulate/extricate themselves from harm must also "look" unusually elevated & intense & extreme to be "real," it can't be so matter of fact and even potentially made invisible as for us to be Surprised by the efforts of the protagonist here, and have to wonder what she'll do next, and not be convinced she'll make it out of this forever through taking control and transcending her vulnerability

point is like yeah any character but also any person Making billions should've watched creep 2. the power dynamics not only re: successful Gender relevance in the text but also in the genre of horror, of film itself. the potential violence of looking? that's made constantly relevant. the audience does not get to understand itself as impartial judge. the protagonist doesn't have to earn anything from our assessment: this is a strategic heist, not, again, some kind of commentary on [gender/ed violence, huh?] that presents a Narrative Arc of a woman's who "overcomes" this by becoming "better" (stronger, braver, smarter, etc....). again, with the premise of an egotistical murder man who uses performance and wants to himself be assessed for his own power trip and amusement, the protagonist already prepared to perform in response to such efforts has a survival skill that completely eclipses the ability of murder man, who can only be on the offensive, while not being a mere [just being on the offensive in turn] response which would only become a Power Levels competition. it's not about "winning" at someone else's game that shouldn't exist, it's just about getting through it until there's the opportunity to get away.

and, again, like that we and the protagonist doesn't Need to know if he really means to kill her for real. uneven power and misogyny and the threat of a man and what room there is for her to act in ways that throw off, interrupt, divert, but don't make overt that she's deliberately doing so or threaten in turn? we can understand that this woman is already at all prepared to navigate that; the killer man is not (who, in a true "that is a choice" element of the first movie which is more [whatever] and not required viewing for the vastly superior sequel imo, has implicitly killed mostly to all men before (Choicedly b/c there is given this angle of like, "performing" any affection towards these men. that and the "uh oh! he's Weird!" angle carrying so much more weight like, zzz to the first one. "uh oh! he's a man immediately trying to fuck with this woman!" in the second being much more actually interesting, as well as the performance of / desire/expectation for affection, intimacy from a woman amidst this context of violence like yeah and that's cishet ideals for you!)

anyways yeah lot of media analysis, the pov & not like "negotiating" with the audience to interact w/the understood theme of gendered power dynamics, the audience not getting to think it is granted an objective omniscience, the [this is An Other Person] turned on the protagonist made Relevant, our lack of complete access to her is Relevant, we do not get to expect we are entitled to that full access or forget that we're observing as An Other Person ourselves to instead believe we're a removed, impartial judge who has to be presented with and convinced of every element out here. much more to say but this is like effort #5 & we can't be here all day, gotta throw down a draft at some point, and can't readily rediscover some short essay about it from closer to its actual release. well, it pwns. like i was saying the handling of gender / power going on in there is >>>>>>>> like god knows horror material generally including that which tries to be About it too, but also really just anything in any genre. billions should've watched creep 2 & been different now. imagining s5 where after axe gets peak horribly possessive towards wendy, being outwardly petty towards her over her also shit & boring & Superior artist bf, stalking her about it, sabotaging the relationship about it, secretly taking the portrait of her that he resented her having before....and then we get the repulsive "romantic" scene about wendy going "aw gosh :) you only want me to be [single] so You get access to me!! :))" like and then axe doesn't show up on the helicopter in the end while wendy's like haha i knew :) b/c she rendezvoused with him and killed him. society if only. superhell for real

[katya-goncharov]

i've already taught myself three autumn carols on the piano since i got home a couple days ago, and i'm trying to get the most out of the time it'll take for my parents to get really really annoyed at me playing all the time

[fingertipsmp3]

Just had the weirdest job interview in my life and now I’m eating a big cookie. How is everyone

[foone]

why are printers so hated? it's simple:

computers are good at computering. they are not good at the real world.

the biggest problems in computers, the ones that have had to change the most over the time they've existed, are the parts that deal with the real world. The keyboard, the mouse, the screen. every computer needs these, but they involve interacting with the real world. that's a problem. that's why they get replaced so much.

now, printers: printers have some of the most complex real-world interaction. they need to deposit ink on paper in 2 dimensions, and that results in at least three ways it can go on right from the start. (this is why 3D printers are just 2D printers that can go wrong in another whole dimension)

scanners fall into many of the same problems printers have, but fewer people have scanners, and they're not as cost-optimized. But they are nearly as annoying.

This is also why you can make a printer better by cutting down on the number of moving elements: laser printers are better than inkjets, because they only need to move in one dimension, and their ink is a powder, not a liquid. and the best-behaved printers of all are thermal printers: no ink and the head doesn't move. That's why every receipt printer is a thermal printer, because they need that shit to work all the time so they can sell shit. And thermal is the most reliable way to do that.

But yeah, cost-optimization is also a big part of why printers are such finicky unreliable bastards: you don't want to pay much for them. Who is excited for all the printing they're gonna be doing? basically nobody. But people get forced to have a printer because they gotta print something, for school or work or the government or whatever. So they want the cheapest thing that'll work. They're not shopping on features and functionality and design, they want something that costs barely anything, and can fucking PRINT. anything else is an optional bonus.

And here's the thing: there's a fundamental limit of how much you can optimize an inkjet printer, and we got near to it in like the late 90s. Every printer since then has just been a tad smaller, a tad faster, and added some gimmicks like printing from WIFI or bluetooth instead of needing to plug in a cable.

And that's the worst place to be in, for a computer component. The "I don't care how fancy it is, just give me one that works" zone. This is why you can buy a keyboard for 20$ and a mouse for 10$ and they both work plenty fine for 90% of users. They're objectively shit compared to the ones in the 60-150$ range, but do they work? yep. So that's what people get.

Printers fell into that zone long, long ago, when people stopped getting excited about "desktop publishing". So with printers shoved into the "make them as cheap as possible" zone, they have gotten exponentially shittier. Can you cut costs by 5$ a printer by making them jam more often? good. make them only last a couple years to save a buck or two per unit? absolutely. Can you make the printer cost 10$ less and make that back on the proprietary ink cartridges? oh, they've been doing that since Billy Clinton was in office.

It's the same place floppy disks were in in about 2000. CD-burners were not yet cheap enough, USB flash drives didn't exist yet (but were coming), modems weren't fast enough yet to copy stuff over the internet, superfloppies hadn't taken over like some hoped, and memory cards were too expensive and not everyone had a drive for them. So we still needed floppy disks, but at the same time this was a technology that hadn't changed in nearly 20 years. So people were tired of paying out the nose for them... the only solution? cut corners. I have floppy disks from 1984 that read perfectly, but a shrinkwrapped box of disks from 1999 will have over half the disks failed. They cut corners on the material quality, the QA process, the cleaning cloth inside the disk, everything they could. And the disks were shit as a result.

So, printers are in that particular note of the death-spiral where they've reached the point of "no one likes or cares about this technology, but it's still required so it's gone to shit". That's why they are so annoying, so unreliable, so fucking crap.

So, here's the good news:

You can still buy a better printer, and it will work far better. Laser printers still exist, and LED printers work the same way but even cheaper. They're still more expensive than inkjets (especially if you need color), but if you have to print stuff, they're a godsend. Way more reliable.

This is not a stable equilibrium. Printers cannot limp along in this terrible state forever. You know why I brought up floppy disk there? (besides the fact I'm a giant floppy disk nerd) because floppy disks GOT REPLACED. Have you used one this decade? CD-Rs and USB drives and internet sharing came along and ate the lunch of floppy disks, so much so that it's been over a decade since any more have been made. The same will happen to (inkjet) printers, eventually. This kind of clearly-broken situation cannot hold. It'll push people to go paperless, for companies to build cheaper alternatives to take over from the inkjets, or someone will come up with a new, more reliable printer based on some new technology that's now cheap enough to use in printers. Yeah, it sucks right now, but it can't last.

So, in conclusion: Printers suck, but this is both an innate problem caused by them having to deal with so much fucking Real World, and a local minimum of reliability that we're currently stuck in. Eventually we'll get out of this valley on the graph and printers will bother people a lot less.

Random fun facts about printing of the past and their local minimums:

in the hot metal type era, not only would the whole printing process expose you to lead, the most common method of printing text was the linotype, which could go wrong in a very fun way: if the next for a line wasn't properly justified (filling out the whole row), it could "squirt", and lead would escape through gaps in the type matrix. This would result in molten lead squirting out of the machine, possibly onto the operator. Anecdotally, linotype operators would sometimes recognize each other on the street because of the telltale spots on their forearms where they had white splotches where no hair grew, because they got bad lead burns. This type of printing remained in use until the 80s.

Another fun type of now-retired printers are drum printers, a type of line printer. These work something like a typewriter or dot-matrix printer, except the elements extend across the entire width of the paper. So instead of printing a character at time by smacking it into the paper, the whole line got smacked nearly at once. The problem is that if the paper jammed and the printer continued to try to print, that line of the paper would be repeatedly struck at high speed, creating a lot of heat. This worry created the now-infamous Linux error: "lp0 on fire". This was displayed when the error signals from a parallel printer didn't make sense... and it was a real worry. A high speed printer could definitely set the paper on fire, though this was rare.

So... one thing to be grateful about current shitty inkjet printers: they are very unlikely to burn anything, especially you.

(because before they could do that they'd have to work, at least a little, first, and that's very unlikely)

[ixylle-d-from-the-stars]

Deathworlders everywhere but in Space

This is sitting in my brain because I haven't seen anyone else do this, but take a second to think about this: There are other deathworlders in space, terrifying ones, huge monster orc things. They are massive and nightmarish and impossibly strong. So thats why humans stand out. Thats how we survive. Human's are terrifying because we aren't built for one biome, one climate or even one planet. We aren't necessarily the strongest or fastest or scariest looking, but we're built to survive fucking everything. What if other deathworlder's are almost always only made to survive in one climate? (similar to some of the most deadly predators on earth currently) All the other deathworlders are terrifying, yes, but the second they step off their planet they're weak. Massive aliens of hulking muscle but their planet's gravity is a lot lower than the standard, so they barely meet the average strength bar whenever they go outside their gravity zone. Aliens that have venomous spikes all over their body and look gnarly as shit but their venom has practically no effect on 99% of discovered intergalactic species. Deathworlders whose planet is the nether from minecraft IRl, but they can't survive in any other temperature for any amount of time because their body just can't handle the cold and regulate their temperate (or, vice versa for tundra species). Aquatic species that are kraken-like nightmares, giant sirens and deadly squid-like beings. But they can't leave their home at all, because theres a very specific chemical makeup of their water that isn't currently found within their life-span distance travel. Deathworlders that genuinely can barely survive off planet and are frail compared to even the most docile prey species whenever they have to travel. Their called deathworlders because going to their planet is certain death, but if they leave they'll be meeting death just as quickly. And then along come humans, and everyones like, oh, another deathworlder, nothing to worry abou- wait. These guys dont seem to loose any of their natural strength off planet... and their fast and strong... and- AND THEY CAN SURVIVE IN PRACTICALLY ANY CLIMATE IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE??? HELLO? Oh and of course their predators. Of course most of their planet is completely uninhabitable for most of us. Mhm, yep. thats fair. Totally Basically, deathworlders are a thing, the more common 'terrifying alien monster' type, but their harmless because they can't survive like everyone else. They can't thrive like humans can. It scares the shit out of everyone for a wholeeeeee while, after all, no one ever expected a deathworlder that doesn't die.