#;; yep. basically this is everything

[identifying-cat-phenotypes]

question!! does a cat's eye color have any impact on what their phenotype would be, or is it a separate thing? if it's separate, do certain phenotypes tend to have certain eye colors (ie black self with green eyes), or is that also totally separate?

It depends. A lot.

For the most part, we don't really know EXACTLY what causes the differences across eyes (well. obviously its pigmentation and refraction. but outside of that? we have basic ideas but nothing too concrete)

We know a lot of cats have similar (yet changing!!!) eye colors due to a common ancestor. However, they aren't really linked to each gene. Well, except for the albinism locus, DBE (including the variations), and white spotting. But it isn't about that right now.

(If you're interested in cats, I suggest reading the linked material. Includes some silly studies about cats. Love them. <3)

In to summerize in short: not really. The slightly longer answer? No, but sometimes? It's dependent on a ton.

signed with invisible ink, mod robin

[songsofbat]

It seems that

an error was made before.

No matter.

Calla Corvid.

You are aware of what has to be done.

Corus Wayne does not deserve to exist.

Calla Corvid does not deserve to exist.

Corus Wayne is not needed.

Calla Corvid is not needed.

There is only one logical conclusion from here.

[faaun]

ok let's catch up quickly

[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?

[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

[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.

[spideysatan]

i thought it was anxiety turns out it was my gut feeling all along

[itsalwaysdark]

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

[hoothootmotherf-ckers]

can people please stop filming the entire fucking world around them for public consumption? and especially random fucking strangers who you did not ask???

I work at a park and man the front desk. and I'm photographed and filmed a lot. I'm talking easily 20+ times per day. most of the times, it's parents filming me swearing in their kids as junior rangers. which. they're intending to film their kids. what they get is me and the back of their kids' heads.

there's this recurring problem that like. people forget we're real people? like yeah you're filming your kid, but you're filming me interacting with your kid. I could count the amount of times someone has asked me permission to do this in the past year on one hand. and sometimes that's after they already start filming.

Like, I'm not an actor. I did not agree to this. You could be a dick and make the argument that I'm a public figure, but I'm not. This is not a persona and my uniform is not a costume. I'm a person trying to do my job and help people and teach them about science and history. And you know what makes it harder to do that? The knowledge that anything I say or do could end up shared with thousands of people. The fact that if I fuck up the wording of this kid's junior ranger pledge, or I sneeze, or make some basic mistake, it's not just a funny or embarrassing moment for me and this one family. It could end up on tiktok.

And okay, those are the people intending to film their own kids and not thinking or caring about the collateral. What's worse is the people who film everything. A few times a week some guy walks into the visitor center, phone already horizontal in front of their face, narrating what they're doing and seeing. They come up to the desk and ask me questions, phone in my face. They take wide establishing shots of the visitor center and every visitor in it. None of us agreed to this! None of these people consented to be in your youtube video! We are not the fucking set dressing of whatever travel instagram story you're making!

I don't know where I'm going with this. This is really only the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes people ask us to repeat what we just did - swear in their kid, or explain a detail, or hand them a fucking map - so they can get a second take, and they're already filming so if we say no we look like the asshole. Sometimes we're asked innocuous things like to point out a landmark, and next week there's a photo of us in the 15,000 member Rangers Pointing at Things facebook group (yep, real thing). One time my entire 45 minute evening program was filmed without my permission and I was informed after the fact. This happens all the time, and I'm giving park ranger examples, but this happens to so many people in service work or public positions every single fucking day.

I guess just, next time you go to film in a public space, take a second. Think about who you're about to film, if they agreed to that, what might happen if a video of them went viral. there's a reason I'm not out as trans at work. And then, maybe. don't. or at least fucking ask.

[djflame]

Damn now I'm sad 😭.

Amity break the silence

What? what made this city so special?, the Justice League wanted to understand

After years of unsuccessful investigation, the Justice League managed to contact the reluctant people of Amity Park, who took themselves as independents, claiming that they did not need heroes since they had defended themselves long before the League existed and the government accepted their political independence in exchange of giving them nothing.

The League did not understand this, why were they forbidden to pass? Why did all their reconnaissance missions fail the second they entered? (Amity is a small town after all, they do recognize each other, this was never going to be helpful) after years of trying to ask the government itself the League was offered a bit of information.

The villagers invited them to see a tradition in the town, something private, just so they could understand a little what was happening. They forbade cameras and information release but they were advised to bring a magician and a curious enough member to the event, of course they were refused to interfere in everything that happened.

The League was surprised by this information but they agreed; when they got to the place Constantine was almost hysterical by the amount of death aura everywhere, the Amity Parker's denied and motioned for him not to say anything. This was directly the veil to the afterlife after all.

In the center of the city, 91-year-old Dash Baxter was smiling, and saying goodbye to his family, the League tensed at this, but the old man only dismissed their concern "It's my time" he whispered affectionately, and smiled at everyone who was reunited "I shouldn't keep him waiting so long."

Slowly and calmly, the old man sat down in one of the armchairs in the old park, right next to a flower-filled but nameless memorial grave, with a smirk he looked at the teenager who had appeared next to him the moment he moved closer to the grave "Did you finally come for my Fenturd?" He questioned mockingly.

The League was shocked at the suddenly emergence of a brilliant teenager, his appearance screaming "other world" but his demeanor calm and humane ; with a sad smile and a hand extended to the old man the boy spoke "We've had our good times Dash, but time always runs out, you're the last of us right?"

"Yeah, it was a good life you know? Even if I had to see Kwan and Pauli holding your hand first" the old man commented looking fondly towards his grandchildren, who were holding back tears "Do you know where I'll go now?"

"Well, I was hoping you'd tell me, but wherever you're going, I know I'll walk you there" the teenager stood up from the bench, taking the old man's hand gently.

"Yeah, I guess so, Kwan and Star are waiting on one side and Pauli on the other?" He questioned sadly, as if he was torn between impossible decisions, which he probably was.

"Yes, Paulina is beyond where I can reach her, will you go with her or will you come with us? Even if you decide to stay, you'll see her again when you fade away, so don't be so quick to decide, ¿eh? I know you're impatient."

"I don't know, it's still a pretty tough call, but before that" he looked at the League and then at the teen, assessing "I need to say, you're a good hero Phantom"

"Uh, that's something you haven't told me in years, back when you were a fan" the boy blushed a bright green, ignoring Dash's mutterings about remaining a devoted fan "Why bring it up now?"

"Because the new heroes need to learn that there are moments where it's not just about saving, but also saying goodbye, their circumstances aren't the same, but even they will have to say goodbye to their cities at some point" he sighed, his exhaustion was easily visible, reflecting in the old age of his face.

"You're being a bit harsh Dash" Phantom chided, though not entirely disagreeing "I was only given the privilege of accompanying you all, I don't think they will get the same treatment"

"Maybe I am, but you could have not done this you know? You always had the choice to run away from Amity, say goodbye, never look back; instead you stayed behind all the years, watching everyone you knew go extinct, how everyone ages while you continue the same until of your acquaintances only I remain, and even with the pain that everything causes you, you took the hand of each one of us, you accompanied us, you met our children, you were part of the lives of our grandchildren, always the first to arrive and the last to finish crying"

"Maybe it was out of selfishness, maybe I wanted to follow them to the other side too, hoping to find a peaceful end."

"Maybe, that doesn't mean that you never left Amity to her fate, even with all the threats to the world everywhere, you stayed here and I think that no one deserves a rest as much as you but you refuse to do so"

"Maybe Amity is all the world I need," Danny shrugged, "and rest would take it off my hands when I'm not ready to let go yet."

"Always the humble" the old man sneered "fine, have it your way"

Very few of the League guests could hear the conversation, but Superman seemed on the verge of tears as they watched as the old man closed his eyes satisfied with his last words, his breathing slowed and his heart stopped beating.

Slowly the teenager bent down to kiss the old man's forehead, keeping their hands together as a feeble spirit rose from the aging man, Phantom took the newly formed shadow's hand and motioned for it to come forward to his side, with an endearing expression in his face.

The last thing the heroes could see were the guiding lights illuminating Amity Park houses where both spirits were passing, until both simply faded from view.

"Oh" for the first time, Constantine seemed to be at a loss for words "That's why you didn't want us here" if anyone had paid attention, they would know how touched he was.

"That was Phantom" the old man's daughter smiled, wiping away the tears that had stubbornly remained in her eyes "Amity's first ghost, the only hero, who accompanies each one of us until the end"

"He lives in Amity?" Constantine questioned, still in shock.

"Yes, you could say, he lives in both Amity's" the woman replied with a small laugh "On the other side of the veil, where all the spirits that once inhabited this place are, and here, protecting us from everything, is a good boy"

"But, he's just a boy" Flash whispered, wanting to deny the existence of anything like ghosts, but Constantine's sad appearance or Zatanna's gaze didn't help his case.

"Don't let his appearance fool you" denied a girl next to the woman "Phantom has existed long before the League, when heroes were dangers and children dreamed of reaching Mars, did you want to know why we stay here? Why did the government agree to leave us alone?" She pointed to the spot where Phantom and the spirit vanished "For him, they put a bounty on his head long ago, so when they begged for help with their strongest threats, he refused."

"Why would they ask him for help?"

"Because he was the first hero, but he preferred to save Amity before the world" pride could be heard in the girl's voice "He made a deal with the government more or less, they leave us alone and in exchange if a universe level threat falls right here, he will take care of it"

"I don't know how helpful a kid would be," Flash muttered, still hesitating, but he was heard.

"Don't underestimate it, your strongest enemies are nothing more than mindless thieves to us" a boy from the crowd crossed his arms "to him, they are like children playing with plastic weapons"

"I understand" Constantine ended the conversation "thank you, for letting us see- all this, it's beautiful; someday do you think he will also take hands with someone from out of town?"

"I don't know, but if you die here after staying with us for a while, well, maybe he'll agree to accompany you too" the old man's daughter spoke again, the woman's eyes were warm, gentle even to him, a damned soul. "He already thinks you are good guys, or the barrier wouldn't have let you in"

"Was there a barrier?" Zatanna was in shock, she hadn't even felt a bit of it, it was impossible.

"Yes, all over the city, but that doesn't matter, are you satisfied with your information?"

"We are, we'll stay away from Amity" Constantine nodded, paying no attention to the protests from the paranoid heroes behind his back or the complaints about having more help on planetary threats.

"Thank you, and Constantine? You're one of the good guys too, remember not to forget that; when the time comes for the veil to part for you, I'm sure the Ghost King will pray for a peaceful end to your soul."

[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

[kosher-salt]

Just saw a post that was basically "Hey off of the internet people usually aren't so crazy antisemitic and most of my day to day interactions as a visible Jew are normal, everything is gonna be ok" and I'm making a new post to not derail, but...

I'm super glad, obviously, that this is the case for many of you. But I do think we should be ringing the alarm bells. Because while you enjoy your grocery trips and post office in relative peace (as you ought to), here is a VERY incomplete list of things I have dealt with in the last 11 months.

-assaulted on my way to class, followed, spit on repeatedly (magen David necklace)

-professor took me outside of class and told me I needed to denounce my Judaism (I mentioned in passing my dad's family in an anthropology class)

-same professor refused to accept my final paper for reasons that did not match up with paper, email full of dogwhistles

-same professor told everyone to attend the protests and "teach those zionists to know their place" she is a Black Latina young professor. Yep.

-another professor straight up refused to accept any assignments that mentioned Jewishness (they were assignments about our families). Gave a student who submitted nothing except a picture of a Palestinian flag full marks. Failed me. I am an all As student, btw. Forced to drop.

-the chair of the anthropology department threw my complaints wabout said professors away without due process. His social media is full of blood libel.

-had to miss my finals as I could not physically get to them due to the protests

-followed and harassed in stores

-synagogue was vandalized multiple times

-called a kike while things were thrown at me

-protestors stood outside of my apartment patio with final solution signs

-new apartment, away from campus: friends of roommates harassed me constantly, to the point I could not use common spaces. Roommates told me that's his right because it's his "political view." He didn't even live there.

-new roommate moved in, less than 48 hours before she attempts to stab me, after learning I eat kosher style. "...kosher? kosher?! FUCK YOU" stab stab, etc. Bitch that was my good knife.

-the other roommates tell me to gtfo of the home I'm renting, keeping my rent ("you people can afford to lose money") and destroy a good portion of my belongings while cursing to me random nonsense about Israel. The police took 25 minutes to get there. We live in the middle of the city.

-fun fact: I had never mentioned my political stance to these people and it's not on my face-out social media (very bare bones profiles)

-been disbelieved by everyone I told this to including the police, my school, the leasing company, and my now ex best friend of 7 years

-cursed at in a store when I asked if there was a kosher section

-told nobody likes Jews because we bring down the vibe and have a victim complex. My knuckles are healing just fine after that, btw, thank you for asking! She is not.

I don't know how to request the 7th off from my school without basically incriminating myself with a threat of violence. There is no world where I just sit there when a classmate says "happy October 7th."

Hope this helps.

[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.