#< not really but eh just in case

[unassumingtherizinosaur]

SNW episode 7: Lower Decks crossover! Cartoon shenanigans, wacky hijinks, set phasers to fun!!! 🤩🪐🖖

SNW episode 8: Now, who wants to see some battlefront trauma and war flashbacks?

SNW episode 9: Get ready for Star Trek's first ever MUSICAL episode! That's right, folks! Singing, dancing, starry-eyed wonder, even some Klingon pop!!! 🎶🌌🎵

SNW episode 10: How about that musical, huh? Haha that was crazy! Anyway back to the Gorn *splatters blood all over every single available surface on set*

[whaliiwatching]

sorry hobie those are hideous

prompt: thrift store

[goldtealeaves]

💚

[elliart7]

Its cool guys, no worries, I broke into Neil Gaiman’s place and found this concept art for season 3, everything’s FINE

[happi-tree]

i am aware episode 38 came out two weeks ago HOWEVER. this interaction has not left my mind since ❤️‍🔥

[stardustedknuckles]

Jesus fuck I thought Sam was gonna do a bit and was absolutely blindsided by the cancer talk. Holy shit. I'm so glad he's okay.

[goldensunset]

*hands you keykid drawing i finally finished after a month*

[batsplat]

I saw the post about assen 2016 and Marc cutting the chicane and was wondering if Marc did that a lot to his competitors like the imitation of mind games. Cause I’ve always thought of Vale as the one who used the mind games more. Did Marc use mind games a lot and was just more subtle?

(assen '16)

if you're interested in reading more about marc marquez mind games, then boy do I have a post for you

anyway, I can't really think of anything that's all that similar to assen 2016 because that's such a specific situation... not every day that you have something as memorable and as easy to visibly imitate and as controversial as cutting the final chicane. of course, if we're talking about imitation, it's pretty hard to avoid mentioning how marc did infamously copy two out of valentino's three most well known career overtakes within half a year of joining the premier class, and was also pretty shameless about the whole thing. but at least there you can say it's all about the race situation marc happened to find himself in - and there will only have been so much premeditation possible with both incidents

more broadly speaking, then, targeted behaviour where he's trying to send a message to one of his competitors during non-race sessions... well, that's fairly common. he loves using non-race sessions to study and stalk and at times deliberately harass his competitors. I'll give a little more details on one specific incident here to demonstrate what I'm talking about. it's related to towing, as it so often is with marc, and I ended up only briefly mentioning it in the post linked above. for context, marc spent a fair bit of time in 2019 trying to mess with the rookie revelation fabio quartararo, sometimes during the races themselves and sometimes outside of them. nothing wrong with hazing your young challengers, right? so one of the more widely discussed incidents took place in sepang 2019 qualifying (tw crash):

big fan of how the article very strongly implies that when marc says the words "honestly speaking", he was not, in fact, honestly speaking. did a single person on this planet believe marc when he said he just happened to end up right behind fabio? who knows, maybe there's someone out there, who knows...

obviously, marc and his team weren't really trying to hide what they were doing, which makes it even funnier that marc just goes for this completely shameless 'oh it was all just a coincidence' routine. and of course, this entire episode ended on a pretty sour note for marc. even though he tried to shrug it off in the moment, this incident did come with consequences for him:

which, yeah. lot's to be said here, lots to be said. but let's return to the actual point of the post, the mind games

in the end marc did do a rather nice salvage job in the race, p11 to p2 - and fabio didn't win the race, which I'm sure was appreciated. here's a nicely in-depth description of the incident that I'm going to liberally steal excerpts from. it's a good bit of extra insight on both the episode itself and what it represented in the broader context of the dynamic between the pair of them

it's part of the established playbook when it comes to dealing with promising young talent: you try to rough them up in the races and you try to rough them up outside of them. you try to make them nervous, maybe you even try to scare them. and so the cycle continues

this is the thing, right, marc really does view all on-track sessions as time to 'work' on his rivals. he's never been focused solely on himself during these sessions - and the towing thing has never just been a matter of practicality for him. 'the race doesn't just happen on sunday' 'great riders, champions, are bullies' 'they don't just want to win, they want to rub the rest of the world's noses in it'... marc has always adopted that philosophy in his racing (and he learnt from the best). he's never been shy in his tactics of intimidation - in his efforts to undermine his rivals' confidence and make them suffer. it's all part of the game

and then, of course, there's the bit of insight we get about how marc was reportedly worried about fabio because of his talent and fearlessness... a rookie who hadn't even won a race yet. and yet marc's "been doing his best to instil fear" into fabio. unfortunately it's not always easy to spook young talent, especially when they're so very brave... it's a tricky line to toe - by marking out your rivals like that, you are also letting them implicitly know you see them as a threat. which if anything can help motivate them and make them more confident. inconvenient

anyway, l'll include some more of the description of the incident, which helps illustrate just how little effort marc was going to in attempting to hide his underhanded behaviour (and how that may have been the whole point):

inherently, right, this 'battle of nerves' is a really important element of the whole towing strategy. it's about your read of the other rider, your analysis of their character, how you think they will play the situation... how much you think they're willing to risk, how much you think they'd be motivated to just fuck you over regardless, how prepared they will be to call your bluff. and in the context of sepang 2019, with that year's title very much sealed up, marc decided that he was prepared to play this game for as long as he had to. marc had won the last five races, fabio was still searching for his first ever win... marc knew young and hungry fabio would blink before he did

which, yeah. less than ideal to engage in mind games in a way that ends up getting you injured. this whole incident does serve as a good illustration of marc's overall approach, but obviously this specific episode wasn't particularly successful or indeed wise from marc's side. all in all, it probably wasn't all that intimidating for fabio when marc crashed behind him

anyway, here's some more bits talking about how marc was perhaps not being 100% honest in his post-qualifying interview:

even though in this specific example marc did admittedly fuck it, a lot of this kind of behaviour isn't bad long-term investment because it's meant to be cumulative, where you're just consistently putting pressure on someone... as it says above, "every ounce of energy spent worrying about you is one which can't be spent on trying to go faster". so you're hoping to distract your opponents, you're hoping that this constant tension will eventually unsettle them - or that you've spent so much time studying and analysing them that you can figure out how to bother them more effectively (*coughs* 2008 *coughs again*). or maybe you just can't help yourself in messing with your opponents and sometimes it is counterproductive because you've shown them how seriously you take them as a rival. maybe sometimes it's a bit of all of those things!

on fabio's reaction:

which is a pretty friendly response, it has to be said! but anyway, of course 'if he wants to follow us we are doing a good job' is probably the most healthy and useful takeaway from the whole thing. that's the thing with bullies, isn't it, you do have to figure out a way to stand up to them. fabio might have been annoyed while marc was picking on him, but he's not picking a fight with marc after the fact. he's just making it clear that he's not been intimidated - and has bagged himself pole in the process while marc started from eleventh place. as fabio says, "it's a little bit part of the game". but it is a game, and it's one that marc has always been more than happy to play

[thesoupisburning]

welcome to the literature club!!!

[photo id under read more bc it did not fit in alt. sob. sorry it's so long there's a lot going on here]

monika from doki doki literature club, a young woman in a school uniform consisting of a light skirt, a darker blazer, and dark tights, is half bent over and looking at the camera with her hands clutched behind her back. she is drawn in sketchy pen on lined paper. her hair is long and in a half up, half down fashion, such that a few strands fall in front of her body, and the rest flows behind her. she is smiling at the camera, and drawn within a frame with stars in the background, the frame itself lined with the phrase "welcome to the literature club" in all caps, at the bottom the phrase repeating over itself and turning into an unreadable mess. her feet fit out of the frame in black shoes. at the corners of the frames are hearts, the bottom left corner filled with the phrase "load me," the top left part of the frame having an extra horizontal line where "club" is repeated both inside the frame and outside it, and the left side designating the subject of the frame as "president monika" in all caps, overlapping with the text "welcome to the literature club." inside the frame, five colored post it notes change what is happening in the picture itself. the pink one covers monika's face (still smiling, now blushing), makes her blazer lighter, and changes the background from asterisks in horizontal lines to hearts in vertical lines. the orange one, in the top right corner, covers a text box that contains "monika's writing tip of the day!" with the phrase "i love you" repeated in caps, breaking out of the textbox's frame, ad infinitum until the post it note ends. the blue one covers part of monika's skirt and legs, showing the pen she is holding behind her back dripping black ink into a pool at the bottom, changing her skirt and hair to be darker, and putting her in light thigh high tights. the green post it note, near the bottom of the frame, only touches part of monika's leg. it depicts the pooling ink from her pen, mostly covered in scribbles, text only faintly readable: "save me." the final post it note, yellow, depicts monika's hand in a different position, grabbing and shaking the wall of her frame. there is no background in this post it, on either side of the frame. her sleeve is black.

IM SO SORRY I DIDNT REALIZE HOW LONG IT WOULD BE I HOPE ITS ALRIGHT

[chibifox2002]

I should get to designing those monsters that Manny was close to while working for Ronnie soon...

[everysongineverykey]

i dunno it kinda bothers me sometimes to see characters who are referred to with they/them pronouns in games described as "ambiguously gendered" or "gender left unclear" or "gender unstated" by fans and stuff like. yeah absolutely they are sometimes that. sometimes the creator had a gender in mind for them while creating them and just didn't think to talk about it in the game. but also, like. sometimes characters can just be nonbinary? and it makes me kinda sad that everyone's first reaction to they/them pronouns in games is "oh, they have a binary gender, it's just up to the player/not stated in-game".

[amarillomlm]

NSFT

I think if I had him straddling my lap with his arms wrapped around me and I could slip my hands up his shirt while kissing his neck as his head rested on my shoulder it would fix all of my life problems. Bonus points if it means I get to hear his cute lil noises in my ear -🐈‍⬛

[stinkypeanutbutter]

me rn making an aiden angst fanfic and I’m literally dying over it I’m making him struggle fr

[turbo-tsundere]

Kokichi kokiching part 2 out of 2, where the violence against carts continues, and the mystery behind his name displaying either as "K okichi" or "Ouma" is finally revealed. All the while the game trolls us about it.

[piningpercussionist]

Felt like trying my hand at a little sketchy thing for the @sp-ghoul-au - obviously I had to do Kim before anyone else...

[papercrane]

i think id be fine with it if the post 96 part of dawntrail was like. patches. like post heavensward. we only got half of american heavensward what gives

then again, the idiots who bitch about 90-95 dawntrail would be even more angrily sexist. but fuck em. make the game for smart people