#*cough* amazon

[sophieseals]

Also I may be treading covered ground but firecracker is AMAZING pick me representation. Those drugs ARE killing her she has an enlarged heart and it will pop supe or not. She’s done all that to win the affection of a perfect representation of conservative governed patriarchy personified in homelander and he even after ALL THAT still hates her. Even when you fit every conformity, beauty standard, blame all the other women for men’s bad actions those men STILL DONT WANT YOU. And it is metaphorically and literally KILLING HER.

[merilles]

Ladies of the Ring 💍✨

[kayvsworld]

bucky (616) and bonky (mcu) have such different energies so far....like i would trust bucky to run a group project despite his potentially unwise methods i feel that he would be efficient and methodical i do NOT trust bonky. bonky should not be in charge of anything do not ask him for anything he longs to do housework in louisiana

[h-a-unted]

Reacher in S2E7: The Man Goes Through

[kideternity]

There’s something really fascinating about the fact that one of the major themes that keeps appearing in Amazon is that of like, xenophobia? Like xenophobia against Amazon? Amazon is often persecuted and mistreated by the people he's trying to protect just because he looks and acts “strange”. He was attacked by a group of men who tried to kill him because they thought of him to be a murderer, he was later arrested by the police and then hounded by paparazzi for being “weird” or “suspicious”, A scientist learns of him and gets the idea he should literally study amazon- treat him as a specimen to be dissected then as a real person- he’s later harassed and literally restrained by another mob of people all because some random lady thought him simply playing with her son was something Nefarious / lead to something nefarious. Even Ritsuko, one of the major supporting characters, has a major part of her character be about overcoming her negative assumptions and thoughts about Amazon (There’s one episode, though i'm unsure if the subs cross over to all versions, where she literally tells him to Leave Japan and go back to the Amazon Jungle because he’s the reason all of the trouble came to Japan in the first place. Sounds awfully familiar to certain talking points, doesn’t it)

All of this occurs simply because Amazon does not fit into the ideal of the average Japanese citizen. He wears little clothing, he acts very erratically and energetically, and most imperatively of all he has a language barrier in that he can't communicate like speak Japanese fluently. Amazon is not in anyway a bad or dangerous person, but due to the culture/environment he was raised in and how that differs to what people expect as the norm, he’s more likely to be perceived as a threat.

I can not confidently say this was intentionally built into the show, but considering the innately political nature of Kamen Rider, at least Showa era Rider, I would be inclined to believe it’s more likely than not that Amazon's persecution by others is meant to at least tie in some way to a commentary about the deeply harmful nature of xenophobia. It makes Amazon's feelings, as well as his choice to still choose to care for others and to help them, a lot more impactful + heart wrenching for me personally. He’s literally just trying his best and so many people hate him. Cut the guy some fucking slack.

[snobgoblin]

HEHEHEHEH I was curious to see how much his outfit would be, you know, assuming he didn't steal it or find it in the trash (which he probably did) SO all of these items, NEW, would be this much! I tried to find reasonable prices, while also avoiding temu and shien and similar sites (which was way harder than you'd think damn, especially for the shoes) anyway I used Craig McCracken's list of the components of Aces outfit for this

so that makes $153.47, which is $63.52 in 90s money (I don't know how much exactly each of these would have cost, I just adjusted for inflation)

interestingly, the boots, pants, and shirt were all listed as women's clothes

also- I debated adding the gel to this but calling it part of the outfit was a stretch, and I was already stretching with the shades... also I couldn't find an exact match for the vest unfort

[monsterintheballroom]

"Dead Hot" ep2 Penelope Wilton & Bilal Hasna

[amethystsoda]

there’s so many good ones, I’m in tears bc I’m laughing so hard

[phoenixtakaramono]

29 - Truce or TNotG 50

Re: Questions for Fic Writers

Ty, anon, for the Ask! I’m gonna give a huge Spoiler Warning for Truce chs 3-4 (and TNotG ch1) which have not been posted to AO3 yet, so read at your own risk.

29) What songs would be (or are) on a playlist for [insert fic]? Explain your choices if you want!

…Oh goodness, last I checked there were 89+ songs I have for TNotG’s playlist, haha. They’re pretty self-explanatory, in my opinion, but I ordered the songs all by the first world we start in + the six arcs + return to Billy’s world. I’ll link the playlist at the bottom end Author’s Note when The Name of the Game ch1 is ready to be published to AO3 in September 2023, but you can also listen to it here:

As for Truce (which you can read ch1-2 here), there are 47 songs…ahhhhh, essentially for both fics, I listen to these songs I like to help set the vibe, mood, and atmosphere for me while I write. It’s like my background music/ white noise. For me, it’s usually the lyrics which tie into the story, usually highlighting a character motivation, their vibe, or just setting the scene. I can highlight a couple songs:

Crazy - Jake Daniels - It really set the vibe for me to get into Homelander’s headspace whilst writing the prologue, because everything in this chapter is from Homelander’s POV. The atmosphere, the lyrics, and the coincidental bloody superhero album art? I thought it was perfect.✨

Wolf - Zack Merci X Arcana - For ch2 (part I), this song encompasses Billy’s overall goal and manipulation of everyone (the Boys, Homelander, and Vought). It’s pretty much the theme song of this chapter.

(Keeping in mind: 🔴 Billy’s POV, 🔵 Homelander’s POV)

Lyrics:

Got you in the palm of my hand

Sowing distrust over this land

I can make it hurt till you understand […]

I was such a fool

Under your command […]

See the truth is I had change of heart

And all that I know is

I will be tearing you all apart […]

I’ll get in your head like a nightmare

And if I was you, I would be scared

Bet you never saw this coming

Don’t you know that I am a wolf in sheep’s clothing

Power - Isak Danielson - If Truce could have an opening number like how every show does, this is pretty much the theme song for Truce overall. It also sets the vibe for ch3 (part II) when Billy and Homelander finally get frisky on the kitchen island countertop, and kinda for ch4 as well. Although the entirety of the chapter will be in Billy’s POV, I want you to know as everything is happening, especially if you listen to this song when you read ch3, these lyrics represent the desperation of the ideal that Homelander sees in Billy. He’s ready for that unconditional love, for that perfect soulmate partner who gets him 100% and is just as obsessed with him as he is; in a dramatic turn of events, he’s now essentially pinning all his last hopes for a human connection onto Billy. (Notice ch1’s line: “keep me sane. Keep me grounded. You are the one person preventing me from razing this earth to the f*cking ground” before it shifts into the fear that Ryan, his flesh and blood, will end up disappointing him ➡️ pivoting to the line of how “the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Failure, after failure, after failure […] Maybe what needed to be done was to reevaluate his life. Acquire a different perspective on things, a new outlook.” ➡️ The SHEER POETIC IRONY now that he’s shifted that target in his brain to Billy after what’d happened in ch1. It’s a disaster waiting to happen but we’ll only allude to the disastrous future potential at most because Truce is 4 chapters only and not 12 chapters so we’ll end on a Happy Ending for this PWP fourshot. For me, it’s a song that shows that it’s not always a women that can get stuck in a toxic codependent relationship and that men can also be stuck in the same shoes. And if that ain’t the situation with Homelander and Billy in Truce?

(Keeping in mind: 🔴 Billy’s POV, 🔵 Homelander’s POV)

Lyrics:

I still look at you with eyes that want you

when you move, you make my oceans move too

if I hear my name, I will run your way […]

it’s my desire that you feed, you know just what I need

you got power, you got power

you got power over me

I give my all now, can't you see, why won't you set me free?

you got power, you got power

you got power over me

I was lost until I found me in you

I saw a side of me that I was scared to

but now I hear my name and I’m running your way

All I feel as I get closer to you

is the Desire to move like you do

so now I hear my name and I’m running your way

I am ready now […]

I give my all now, can't you see, why won't you set me free? […]

You’re the one that seduced me, lured me in with your beauty, now I know that you used me

All you did was confuse me, you're no longer what I need, touch me slow, feel my heart bleed

(Also this song^ is the bee’s knees. I never skip this song in my iTunes playlist when it comes up and always belt it out when I’m alone. This song is very, very, very underrated. I highly rec you give it a listen.)

Rob a Bank - Confetti - “Who's to say that I can't break into your house / While you're working / I'm just lurking through your bedroom like a mouse / Gettin' naked on your sofa wearing just your penny loafers / Take some pictures leave 'em by your dirty dishes” ⬅️ What can I say? This screams Homelander to me and I laugh at the imagery of him breaking in, trying out Billy’s shiny new polished penny loafers whilst getting naked on his sofa and taking dirty pictures of himself to leave by the dirty dishes for Billy to find. It’s like a tomcat in heat scent-marking his territory. This song does help me imagine the dynamic when we get to the NS*W parts.

Religion - Isak Danielson / Dancing in the Sky - Kristen Cruz One of these songs will represent the penultimate ch4 which’ll entirely be written in HL’s POV; Religion mostly represents Homelander’s POV (which is really just him desperately trying to deceive himself if we look at it meta-ly, but shhh, he himself is not that self-aware in ch4) whereas Dancing in the Sky represents Billy’s side of things as we end the final scene in the story with Billy given approval to take Ryan to visit Becca’s grave to pay respects and for one last emotional send-off—whilst HL (who Billy doesn’t want to see him anywhere near this day) secretly watches the private moment from far away like a lurker outsider. It’s supposed to be a bittersweet emotional touching moment to tug at the readers’ heartstrings—which gets twisted because this is HL’s POV so it becomes tampered with his desperate obsessiveness and possessiveness of Billy being his and HL’s jealousy of Becca that he won’t admit to but, as an audience, we can tell he’s supeeeeer jealous (like, thanks for giving birth to my son—but you’re dead buried six-feet under, and your husband will be my husband now so good f*cking riddance; I will be the winner; he will come to forget you and love me only). It’s a very fatalistic self-fulfilling prophecy. I REMIND YOU, we will still have a Happy Ending for the Billy/ Homelander ship in Truce (hell, HL will even get to fondle Billy’s old wedding ring and think about having his own wedding ring on Billy’s wedding finger) but we’re gonna get a couple parting ouchies as a souvenir at the end a là Becca’s resting place visit.

Religion Lyrics (HL @ Billy):

Can we say goodbye to, to the lies you told

You know I’m wiser, I’ve been here before

I believed your stories, at least the blind in me

You gave my eyes what they wanted to see

I’ve lost my reality

I’ve lost everything in me […]

You act like a God and you’re trying too hard but I need it

I was once a believer

Now I’m back to believing

I’m trying to be smart with a stake through the heart but I feel it

Turning into addiction

Praying in your religion […]

Future doesn’t matter

I'd give it up for you

Even though I know that you’d never do

You know your power and I know it too

I’ll end up in fire, burning with you

Dancing in the Sky Lyrics (Billy @ Becca):

Tell me, what does it look like in heaven?

Is it peaceful? Is it free like they say?

Does the sun shine bright forever?

Have your fears and your pain gone away?

'Cause here on Earth it feels like everything

Good is missing since you left

And here on Earth, everything's different

There's an emptiness […]

I hope you're dancing in the sky

And I hope you're singing in the angel's choir

And I hope the angels know what they have

I'll bet it's so nice up in Heaven since you arrived

So tell me, what do you do up in Heaven?

Are your days filled with love and light?

Is there music? Is there art and adventure?

Tell me are you happy? Are you more alive?

50) Answer any question of your choice, or talk about anything you want to talk about!

HMMMM. Since the ball is in my court, I’ll answer 49) What are you currently working on? Share a few lines if you’re up for it! I tweeted a screenshot of TNotG ch1 - scene II yesterday night but I can give y’all a longer preview of a couple lines from my new QT:

Look forward to The Name of the Game being posted to AO3 on September 2023! Presently exposition scenes I-II (which total 38 pages, with scene I essentially being a speedrun to catch readers who are unfamiliar with these characters and the fandom up to speed whereas scene II is laying out all the story foreshadowings and as many Chekov Guns as I can reasonably shove in for now) are completely done and edited; I’m now trying to get to the finish line of scene III which is the more…exciting part of the three scenes (where dragon!Billy, our transmigrated black-bellied scumbag ML, meets knight!Homelander, our black-bellied scumbag shou, for the first time) before I can give an advanced notice on my socials of the week it’ll probably be posted. ✌️

[wildegeist-old]

Why is it so hard to find fragrance-free soap and body wash near where I live do you idiots know how badly I react to fragrances and perfumes oh my god please make unscented stuff more widely available this is so frustrating soap and body wash don't even NEED to be scented why is everyone so obsessed with sense-assaulting perfumes that obliterate people's sinuses it actually causes fucking breathing irritation for me

[ultramantr1gger]

ultraman blazar.......ultraman blazar july 8th I FUCKING NEED TO WATCH THIS

[vpgoldenrod]

Its far too late at night for me to be cackling as loudly as I just did.

Neil-verse goes brrrr

[suicidalgamergirl]

Stuff I got. Hadn’t eaten much because I have a headache and bad cough.

Found another Astarion plush. My costume fits me.

Picked up MTG cards off eBay. Waiting for 2 games and a plush.

-V

[leadmeastraylittlefairy]

.

[ms-demeanor]

any thoughts on the new post that staff went scorched earth on which is now making the rounds abt tumblr live? it basically screenshots all the tos and claims if you've ever opened the app (or in some rbs, unsnoozed live) tumblr has gotten your data. on the one hand i feel like this is fearmongering, but on the other its true that MOST sites have your data as is so its pretty standard. you seem pretty knowledgeable abt data gathering so i was wondering abt your take

This is going to be pretty unkind but watching tumblr users interact with staff and live is a great primer on how conspiracy theories happen.

Nobody on this fucking website knows how to read a ToS, nobody on this website knows how anything fucking works (sorry, this is not a dig at you but how would tumblr "get" your data from you clicking or unclicking live; the only data that tumblr has on you is the data that you have put on tumblr what data do people think that clicking the "new" button is scooping up that is anything beyond interactions or posts or IP addresses which are the things that tumblr already has information about like you do not introduce new information into the tumblr ecosystem by clicking a button you haven't installed anything you haven't changed permissions on your browser if everyone is so goddamned scared about live stealing their data i strongly recommend they stop using anything but public internet through an anonymizer and making sure location data is shut off on all of their devices and anyone who is flipping their shit about the type of data that live is collecting but who is using chrome on any device needs to chill the fuck out about live and flip the fuck out about google)

this is like that post about twitter's content policy that circulated the other day or that post about deviantart's content policy that circulated ten fucking years ago nobody knows how to read legal documents and nobody knows how to read technical documentation and this comes together into unholy matrimony on the no reading comprehension at all moral panic website

live never violated the GDPR it was just rolled out in the US first but the entire userbase decided that because it hadn't been rolled out simultaneously in the EU and the US that it was SO UNSPEAKABLY PRIVACY VIOLATEY THAT THE EU HAD BANNED IT FOR ITS CRIMES with, like, nothing whatsoever backing that up because, again, even at its most intrusive Live collects about as much data as Twitter or Yelp, both of which are *capable* of meeting GDPR standards with that level of data collection (even if musk sometimes makes decisions that violate GDPR).

Live is significantly less intrusive than any facebook product, than Amazon, and than any Google product. If you use youtube logged in, don't worry about live, the horse is out of the barn and tumblr is the least of your worries *regardless* of live. If you regularly use Google as a search engine please god learn how to evaluate and compare risks across platforms because Live is like a coughing baby compared to about a dozen things that most highly online people interact with every single day.

If you don't want to use live don't use live. Clicking the button doesn't magically transfer your secret FBI file to tumblr and even agreeing to the ToS doesn't share anything that tumblr doesn't already have if you don't continue to interact - if you don't interact with live after agreeing to the ToS it's not collecting any data except your non-interaction.

For everyone who is losing it over Live just turn off your goddamned location on your fucking cellphone and turn off your location on your goddamned computers and that's it, you're good, you're fine, relax. If your response to "turn off your location" is "but I need it for _____" then don't worry about Live, whatever "_____" is was already collecting and selling your data.

Do you use an activity tracker? Congrats, you have much, much bigger privacy issues to worry about than tumblr live.

Okay but also I yelled about that post and the very many ways in which it was incorrect in January.

And I happened to take an archive of the page at that time because I'm a paranoid motherfucker.

And if you want my guess as to why staff went "scorched earth" on that post it's probably because if you scroll down to the bottom of the page on the archive, OP calls on everyone looking at the post to send a kind fuck you to the CEO then tagged his tumblr.

If you look at the other posts that went scorched earth in relation to tumblr staff they were also posts that very pointedly directed a lot of ire at a single staff member.

I don't think that any individual tumblr staff members are above criticism and I don't think that staff as a whole is above criticism but part of learning to read a ToS is understanding that someone can be shitty and vague and use TERF talking points and skirt the line and be technically okay under the ToS while someone can have a legitimate gripe about another user being horrible and manage to violate the ToS by accidentally spinning up a harassment campaign or suicide baiting someone.

Shitty people like nazis and terfs thrive on being edge cases. They are very good at finding a boundary and standing juuuuuuuuust on this side of it and going "la la la I'm not violating the ToS, you can't stop me!" and that blows and it leads to a lot of people encountering a lot of shitty stuff on a lot of websites but personally I'm pretty glad that there's a lot of gray area because when you cut out gray area that's when you see things like It's Going Down getting banned as extremist content alongside white supremacists. Please continue to report nazis and terfs, and when possible go deep into their pages to report because a pattern of behavior is more likely to get recognized as hate speech than a single post that gets reported a hundred times. Please block as many people who it's harmful for you to interact with as possible because it's clear that staff is not going to do the kind of work protecting users that users would like staff to do.

However I just can't get angry on behalf of a blogger who got nuked for saying "Hey everyone who hates this feature that we all hate please go tell the CEO to fuck himself at this URL specifically" - that is an extremely clear violation of the ToS because it is absolutely targeted harassment.

So now tumblr-the-userbase is going off on its merry conspiracy way skipping through fields and lacking reading comprehension and saying "users are getting banned for reporting the crimes of tumblr live and its gdpr violations" and ignoring the fact that the post was nuked because the last line was saying "hey everyone, let's all individually tell the CEO to fuck off in messages sent directly to him that are certainly not going to include any threats, exaggerations, gore, etc. etc. etc."

If I were to make a post that had 50k notes and the last line was "and while you're at it, please send tumblr-user-ms-demeanor a personalized message telling them why they're a terrible person so they know what we think of them" it would absolutely be reasonable to say that was harassing that user. And that post did it with the CEO. Who is not above criticism (and I have my criticisms! I don't think he really gets tumblr and that's a problem!), but jesus fucking christ don't tag the goddamned CEO or any other staff member in a call to action asking users to send them messages saying "fuck off" this is literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen a tumblr conspiracy theory coalesce around.

Anyway thank you for giving me a place to vent i've been getting more and more pissed about this for three days. Everyone feel free to kindly tell tumblr user ms demeanor to fuck off.

[viiioca]

i know that solution 9 representing imperialism is The Point but it really is something to get hit with a weepy "the war was so hard on us, we needed unobtanium just to survive complete climate collapse and everyone burned each other down for it" after a tour through the Mall of America and seeing that the unobtanium that the world burned itself down for in a desperate bid for survival is being used to produce self-heating coffee cups and disneyland retirement village for dead grandma. they have an amazon warehouse full of souls they keep in kcup pods that they hand out in a state-sponsored work program.

"i guess we just have to respect their cultural differences 🙂" girl they figured out how to burn a soul up like the Go Faster button in fast & furious movies. one of the 17 year olds they have fighting in the thunderdome just huffed your mom's soul like a whippet on pay-per-view and he's going to do that 9 times a week until he gets victorian coughing baby disease and dies. you don't have to be ok with that. this place sucks