#I think 60 is probably a low estimate

[aristoteliancomplacency]

How often do normal persons sneeze and blow the nose?

Rhinitis is defined as an inflammatory disease, but in clinical practice the diagnosis is based on the occurrence of nasal symptoms. As all persons occasionally sneeze and blow the nose, it is necessary to define what is normal. In this study the daily number of sneezes and of nose blowing were recorded in diary-cards over a 14 day period by 80 hospital employees and medical students, who considered themselves not to suffer from rhinitis. The results showed that more than 95% of the normal persons sneezed and blew the nose less than 4 times a day, on average. It is concluded that it is normal to sneeze and blow the nose less than 4 times daily while a higher number can be a sign of rhinitis. It is recommended that counting of sneezes and of nose blowing is used in clinical trials in order to define the study population. Together with an objective measurement of nasal patency this can be useful in defining the effect profile of different types of treatment.

365 * 3 = 1,095.

Therefore not rhinitis?

every time i ask people if they do any new years resolutions its all ooooo i dont like making them bc i fail or ohhhhh no i couldnt keep up wiht that and then when they ask me and i tell them about Pasta Quest (i am eating as many different pasta shapes as possible in the space of a year) or when i did Fruit Adventures (every time i saw a fruit i had never eaten before id get one and eat it and read the wikipedia article about it) theyre like hang on i forgot you can make Fun Ones i want a fun one

[daistea]

i have a very unsubstantiated suspicion that mithrun was young, around 80s, when he got drafted to the canaries

1. we know pattadol is that age and that's legal age, implying that they take anyone who reaches the age of majority - possibly even younger given that pattadol is a middle child and still wondered why she was the one chosen out of the three. she never mentions her younger sister being too young or anything. but I think we can still take 80 as a ballpark estimate

2. going with 80 as an estimate, I think it's interesting that the three guards with canon ages from mithrun's generation of the draft are all so close to being the same age (mithrun, milsiril, flamela). we know elves have a pretty low birth rate and very long lifespans. what's the chance that three from the same draft happened to be the same age, unless they all reached the age requirement around the same time and got sent off? (side note: flamela wasn't drafted, she joined willingly but she seems to be from that generation since she replaced milsiril as vice captain. if her twin sister died very young and she joined as soon as she could, she probably had to wait for age eligibility as well)

3. the pre dungeon shenanigans with mithrun and milsiril? so NOT 30 year old behavior. that is high school mean girl clique bullshit. either they were young when all of that happened or they never grew up properly from the stress of getting sent away young

i don't know if i'm being subconsciously influenced by how the military works where I live, which is that mandatory service starts the year you turn 18 (or 19 depending on what type of school you go to), but in my brain they all join up fairly young

I think for Pattadol at least, it’s implied that her parents sent her instead of her older or younger sister just to get rid of her LOL

If Mithrun joined around 80, then became a dungeon lord around 140-ish, that would mean he’d have been a canary for 60 years. Time moves differently for elves so I mean 60 years in the canaries may only feel like a decade or two to him?? And even then like a decade prob isn’t a large amount of time for elves either.

I want to agree because why wouldn’t the canaries draft Mithrun right as he turned 18? Why would they wait until he was older? He didn’t join willingly. However….

Pattadol’s thing implies that it wasn’t a ‘this noble family’s child is 80 now lol!! Time For War’ but rather a ‘hey send us one of your kids, we don’t care which one’ kinda situation

The manga mentions that he had to join in his brother’s place, and most of the nobility are presented by their families as a show of loyalty. Sooo his parents were all ‘let’s send the bastard child instead lol’

But he also was sent instead because his brother was so frail. It’s a mix of those two factors i believe. Both his parents being dicks and his brother being too weak.

ANYWAY it makes sense for him to be drafted/volunteered right as he turned 80. So it’s completely possible! But it’s also hard for me to imagine him being in the canaries for so long before becoming a dungeon lord…. If he’d been a canary for that long wouldn’t he know what a demon is and the dangers of becoming a dungeon lord? Or was he just too far gone and too arrogant and too overcome with emotion to care at the time?

Idk 🤷‍♀️

Love u patty, queen of coping

[evidence-based-activism]

Hi! Thanks so much for your hard work, I always appreciate the amount of effort you put into your posts and your devotion to promoting the truth above all.

Recently, I was curious about what proportion of men use pornography on a regular basis, so I googled it, and the search results were not useful in the slightest. There were a huge variety of studies cited in various different articles with wildly differing statistics attached to each of them. I don't really know how to effectively parse through all the information available on the subject, so I was wondering if you, as someone with an admirable grasp of statistics, had any light to shed on the question of what proportion of men are regular porn users.

(While writing this, I realized that the answer to this question is probably heavily dependent on which demographics of men are given which surveys, so for my purposes, being a USAmerican, I guess I'd be primarily curious about USAmerican men's habits, but if you had any way to break the data down by region or continent or country, that'd be incredibly interesting too)

Hi, Anon! Thank you!!

There are definitely a wide range of estimates for this, and they vary even more when considering what "frequent" is (at least once a week? more than once a week? at least once a month?). That being said, I think there are still some good estimates:

This article [1] reviewed relatively large (n >= 100) studies published between 2010 and 2017 on non-clinical samples. Both their pooled, weighted, analysis of studies with convenience samples of young adult (~18-39) men from developed and nearly-developed countries* (final sample size > 14,700) and an estimate from a review of large-scale, nationally representative surveys of young adult men from the USA yielded a final estimate of: ~45% of men use pornography at least weekly.

There have also been some more recent studies that help provide a clearer picture.

First, random/probability samples (better for generalization):

This 2021 study [2] on people aged 16 to 84 in Sweden found 33% of men used pornography at least once a week, but this ranged by age group from 66% for men aged 16-24 to 7.4% for men aged 65-84.

This 2021 study [3] on adolescents aged 14 to 17 in six European countries (Greece, Spain, Poland, Romania, the Netherlands, and Iceland) found 40% of male teenagers used pornography at least once a week.

Next, non-random/non-probability samples (issues with generalization, but still useful for investigating specific aspects of a phenomenon):

This 2021 study [4] on more than 15,000 young adults (age not specified) in Arab countries** found 55% of men used pornography at least once a week.

This 2018 study [5] on more than 1,000 adults (>18) in the US found 92% of men used pornography in the last month with an average (across participants) of 68 minutes per a week

This 2017 study [6] on 941 participants (aged 15 to 29) from Victoria, Australia found 84% of men used pornography at least once a week

This 2022 study [7] in that it performed an analysis of "objective website traffic data" in Poland found that pornography use has been increasing over time and as of 2016, 49% of male internet users used pornography in a month. Averaging across all study years, and dividing out by age, the estimates ranged from ~25% for boys aged 7-12 to ~60% for men aged 18-22. (And these are averaging across the period of increase, so the current estimates would likely be higher.)

In summary, frequency of pornography use varies by age and (to a degree) by geographic region (i.e., by degree development and gender equality). All of these also only considered prevalence among men with internet access, which means it is most likely not generalizable to very low income countries.

That being said, given the similarity in estimates between the review, the probability samples, and the convenience samples I think a reasonable rough estimate for the percentage of younger (not senior) men (with internet access) who use pornography at least once a week is ~45%. Just keep in mind that there is definitely significant variation by age, such that older men use much less pornography than younger men.

There are also a lot of studies that look specifically at problematic pornography use, but I didn't include these because (1) they wouldn't be representative of the general population who may or may not be registering their behaviors as an issue and (2) I consider all pornography use problematic.

I hope this gives you the answer you need!

References below the cut:

Miller, Dan J., Raggatt, Peter T.F., and McBain, Kerry (2020) A literature review of studies into the prevalence and frequency of men's pornography use. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 15 (4) pp. 502-529.

Kinda Malki, Christoffer Rahm, Katarina Görts Öberg, Peter Ueda, Frequency of Pornography Use and Sexual Health Outcomes in Sweden: Analysis of a National Probability Survey, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Volume 18, Issue 10, October 2021, Pages 1735–1751, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsxm.2021.08.003

Andrie, E. K., Sakou, I. I., Tzavela, E. C., Richardson, C., & Tsitsika, A. K. (2021). Adolescents’ online pornography exposure and its relationship to sociodemographic and psychopathological correlates: A cross-sectional study in six european countries. Children, 8(10), 925. https://doi.org/10.3390/children8100925

Eljawad, M. A., Se’eda, H., Ghozy, S., El-Qushayri, A. E., Elsherif, A., Elkassar, A. H., ... & Islam, S. M. S. (2021). Pornography use prevalence and associated factors in Arab countries: A multinational cross-sectional study of 15,027 individuals. The journal of sexual medicine, 18(3), 539-548.

Solano, I., Eaton, N. R., & O’Leary, K. D. (2020). Pornography consumption, modality and function in a large internet sample. The Journal of Sex Research.

Lim, M. S., Agius, P. A., Carrotte, E. R., Vella, A. M., & Hellard, M. E. (2017). Young Australians' use of pornography and associations with sexual risk behaviours. Australian and New Zealand journal of public health, 41(4), 438-443.

Lewczuk, K., Wójcik, A., & Gola, M. (2022). Increase in the prevalence of online pornography use: Objective data analysis from the period between 2004 and 2016 in Poland. Archives of sexual behavior, 1-15.

*USA, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Croatia, Poland, Portugal, Indonesia, Korea

**Egypt, Bahrain, Algeria, Yeman, UAE, Tunisia, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Oman, Morocco, Mauritania, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq

[marzipanandminutiae]

i think it’s less that ppl are legit expecting a white christmas in boston every year and more that the probability for one used to be 20 to 30% and it’s now been almost 15 years without one and probability has dropped to 10% and will continue to drop. for someplace like worcester in massachusetts it’s even worse — probability was 67% ish for the boomers and now it’s a little over 30%. only 27 white christmases in boston since 1892 sounds small but when u consider most bostonians had 3 white christmases by their mid-teens on top of all the christmases where there was snow even if it wasn’t one inch and now there are teenagers who haven’t seen even one white christmas… it makes sense why ppl freak out every year it still hasn’t happened.

And that absolutely makes sense, yeah! I have immense climate anxiety too, like I said!

What I was responding to was more the people saying "it's 60 and raining in Boston and it feels like the apocalypse" or "this isn't how it's supposed to be ever; this never used to happen."

I don't know if you saw my longer post, but I went and looked at Boston weather records going back to 1893. Most Decembers from 1893-1903 had multiple days in the upper 50s, with many years getting into the 60s at least once. I didn't track every single year from 1893 to the present, but it seems reasonable to assume that that 10-year period wasn't just a weird fluke. December 1895 actually had more days in the 60s (5) than December 2022 (1).

That's not the full story, of course- December 1895 also had a couple of days in the 20s before that upswing, some with small amounts of snow. You also have things like overnight lows going haywire, and other reminders that climate change is real and it is happening now. I would never, ever attempt to deny that. It's the single biggest problem facing humanity at the moment.

However. There are multiple things to hold in our minds at the same time when thinking about its day-to-day effect on our lives, and one of them is "the effects are seldom as simple as It's Warmer Every Day Now Than It Ever Has Been, And That Will Continue Unilaterally For The Rest Of Our Lives." I'm not trying to deny or negate anything. I'm just trying to make people feel a little less despondent.

(I also just discovered that the metric for a white Christmas here in Boson states that it has to fall before 7 AM, which seems arbitrary and weird. We actually had a white Christmas here in 2017- we got 2.9" of snow -it just fell later in the day. So...it doesn't count for some reason? That's really strange to me. Anyway, the article where I learned this estimates our average yearly "one inch of snow on the ground at 7 AM on Christmas morning" chances nowadays at 19% as of three days ago.)

(I also think this demonstrates what I'm calling Reverse Environmental Amnesia- where, rather than thinking that the effects of climate change have always been normal, you tend to remember past weather in a way that fits the absolute direst interpretation of circumstances. Anyone who was in Boston on Christmas 2017 SHOULD remember the snowstorm...but I've seen multiple locals who don't travel for the holidays agreeing that we've had no Christmas snow at all since 2009.)

[elfdragon12]

So, over a year ago, some anon that was upset that I thought that Megatron's arc in MTMTE/LL was severely lacking in actually taking responsibility and the narrative gave him a real softball by punishing every character that didn't like him/let him off super easy. One message I deleted rather than responded to was about how me calling Megatron racist for hating organics (xenophobic is probably the better word, tbh) was another example of white fans being weird and, actually, Megatron's feelings about organics was justified because they hate Cybertronians.

...

This is either a great example of how bad of a softball MTMTE tossed him or why people need to revisit the source material more often. Or both.

Organics hate Cybertronians because Cybertronians did terrible things to them and Megatron was a serious offender.

"Hundreds of thousands" is a major low-ball estimate. He's killed millions, more probably billions. He listed four different organic races that are all dead because of him. The number is certainly higher than that. I believe the casualty count on Earth was around 700,000.

And that's just Megatron's direct influence. Beyond Megatron, many organics have been Cybertron's victims in one way or another. Usually death. Gorlam Prime is a notable example in how Cybertronian intervention doomed an organic race.

However, the audience does not get to see Megatron's feelings about organics shift nor see the moment where he was hit with the reality that, shock and surprise, organics are people too. "I'd never heard it before. Not properly." is such a wild statement from him because he certainly heard those screams in person. Not to mention the fact that there is no sign that Megatron spent a single thought on organics between the time he's telling Rodimus he'd rather focus on helping mechanical races after Rodimus hid the fact they were helping organics and when Megatron oh so nobly announces he's staying to help save the 60 organics in pods, suddenly having the moral high ground. He never interacts with a single human on "Swearth", but somehow has a breakthrough that humans are people too and "I said fragile, not weak".

There is no build-up, there is no arc. Megatron hates organics until the plot wants him to be The Good Guy™️ and suddenly he's totally enlightened. I think it's cheap and encourages people to forget that Megatron wasn't totally responsible and wise and whatever the whole time.

[recurring-polynya]

Writing/Art Update 11.20.2024

My progress ended up being pretty okay for this past week, even thought it felt like I spent the whole time shitting around, although maybe that's because almost all the progress happened yesterday. Also, when I say "shitting around" some of it was definitely actual shitting around (by which I mean thinking about Renji's bankai), but some of it was deep cleaning my living room so I could have new couches delivered and then the new couches not being delivered, but that is neither here nor there.

Anyway! Writing! I wrote all of Chapter 7/50, which was kinda boring and a drag to write, but it's important for the plot, and came out to just under 1600 words. I'm a little salty that I couldn't have done something better for 🎉Chapter 50🎉 (I've never written a 50-chapter fanfic before!!), but I don't really want to squeeze in an extra, extraneous chapter just to make the numbers line up nice, and I also don't want to delete any of the chapters I've already written, I need those. A bigger problem is that I ended it with one of the characters proclaiming they would come up with a plan and now I have to come up with the plan, and I am not at all confident in my ability to come up with the plan. This happens sometimes in writing, where you semi-commit yourself to the plot going in a certain way, and you know that if it doesn't work, there's going to be a lot to undo. But I gotta commit some kinda way, or the story just isn't going to go anywhere. So maybe this will be it??? If I can come up with the plan, it will work great, I think. It does not need to be a good plan, and it is perhaps better if it's not, but that's what we're doing now, I guess. I want to throw up.

Chapter 8/51 is a much better chapter!! I'd already started it ages ago and I couldn't really finish it because I didn't have a good enough idea of the plot happening around it for the characters to have the conversation they needed to have, but I have that now, so I was able to write it. The reason this update is on Wednesday morning instead of Tuesday is because my word count numbers are really fuzzy when I'm in the middle of a chapter. I did finish it at like 10pm: it is a total of 3558 words, 2,375 of which are new. I may have made the end a little too abrupt, but I can always go back and pad that out. The last few chapters have had Rukia and Renji off doing their own things for a while, and they got to hang out together again in this one. I think it's kinda cute of me that, for the sheer amount of Renruki fanfic I have written, even though I enjoy writing other characters and trying out other dynamics, I just really like writing Rukia and Renji scenes, it's still my favorite thing. Renji is wearing his pink-flowered yukata and making bad tea and Rukia is just relentlessly horny for him, and they would not stay on topic, but it's fine, I'm only doing this for my own enjoyment anyway.

Every time I finish a chapter, I think, oh geez, now I have to come up with another one. I think I know what I'm doing next, and it's mostly talky, but this entire act has just been people talking to each other so I might try to work in a fight scene??? I hate writing fight scenes, that tells you how badly talky this story has gotten.

Anyway: GOAL PROGRESS

This week, +3971 words, which gives me 12,171/20,000 = 60% of my goal, with 6 weeks to go.

I hadn't been reporting word count on the overall act iv rough draft progress, in part because I wasn't sure how much of Ch 51 was going to go and how much was going to stay, but that's resolved now, and the current damage is 8 Chapters/20,871 words. When I got started on it this fall, I estimated that it would end up at somewhere between 12 and 18 chapters, or 30-50k. I think the low end of that was perhaps a bit optimistic on my part, but I might be about halfway through? (which is to say, 18 ch/50k is probably what it's gonna be). Why does 20k seem so small when you've actually written it and so big when it's hanging out in front of you?

I'm gonna try to have a few more productive writing days before I need to go into Full Thanksgiving mode, but I kinda do need to get on that and next weeks numbers may well be trash. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It also seems that I have fallen off the art truck entirely, which I am disappointed in myself for, but also ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[nightshiftpodcast]

Also! About people who are veil touched... is there a limit on the amount of time that someone might be fighting veil sickness? or a specific speed that s-cells might develop? because I have an idea for an oc who has been very Very slowly going through the transformation into a shade (years) and freaking out about it more and more as time goes on

i think i could do some interesting things with that idea (hehe) but if thats not cannon compliant i can definitely re-work that idea

If I've said something about this in canon in the podcast itself, it's escaping me now - but someone asked a similar question in our Patreon Discord about a year ago so here's all the lore we shared then!

"Obviously, not that much is known about Shades in-world (I know everything but that's for later) but veil sickness survival rates depend on the severity of the illness, and how it is contracted.

Many cases of veil sickness occur during the biannual veil lights phenomenon (they occur twice a year around the solstices). The same way you might get a really bad cold in winter and call it 'flu', people can get slightly veil sick after this event and spend a few days in bed. Then, the same way actual flu can be life threatening, veil sickness can be extreme. I'd say probably about 30% of the people who get veil sickness end up fighting for their life. Chances of surviving it are about 50/50, but chances of turning into a Shade from catching it are seemingly completely random, and not all that common. Staying inside at night during the lights is considered a way to stay safer, although it is speculation, not science.

What is known is that there's a far higher chance of becoming a Shade from a random encounter with a Veil rift than there is from catching veil sickness during the annual Veil lights. Rifts open unpredictably and seem to be far more unstable than the biannual event, and extreme sickness and transformation is more like 80% likely to occur, with death being more likely too.

In terms of what transformations happen, there exists something known as 'The Shade Scale', created by an independent researcher called Dr. Melanie Cruz. It is debated but generally considered reliable. Some shades start low on the Scale and get worse over time, slow or fast, to the point of death. Others just land somewhere on the scale and stay there for the rest of their lives. It goes from 1 to 13. On a basic level, 1 is a 'low mutation' and 13 is a 'high mutation', but the scale is not a straight line. Variables on the scale include from 'low chance of transference' (transferring sickness to others) to 'high chance of transference' and 'no further mutation' to 'continuous mutation' and everything in between. The most "dangerous" (take that with a pinch of salt) and detectable shades are all high on the scale. It's estimated that about 60% of Shades score at 6 or higher on mutation. They might slowly become incorporeal, or appear to burn up from the inside like coal on a fire. Seb mentioned a Shade in episode 2 who was fully transluscent - this person would have scored at a 12 or 13. Of those scoring above 9, more than 50% die within a year. Reason for death, mutation or transference is unknown, but those who start with worse mutations more often continue to mutate. Shades who are low on the scale - 5 or below - have what you referred to as 'aesthetic' changes. Despite the difference in mutation, there's no correlation on Shade magic. More mutation does not seem to mean stronger magic. However, there's not enough research nor has enough time passed to really understand where any of them fit permanently on the scale, and the study was only done on a selected number of willing participants, making the results questionable. As there is no real measure of how many Shades exist - especially those who pass as normal people - it isn't known whether the ratios discovered by Dr. Cruz are even close to realistic."

Hope this helps with your OC building!

- Julian

[the-firebird69]

This high level of radiation will be until Tuesday evening and there might be an overlap from the Yucatan the crabs are crowding in now the perimeter line is 35 mi in all around and they have thusly 930 MI they really require a thousand for a medium density group and usually they move when they're medium right now they're crowding in that 35 on each edge is going to turn to 45 overnight and in the morning it will be about 50 that is a pretty good encroachment and they move my rank and size really all the way in and they'll start pushing and it will be kind of to the side of the middle and go push to get out and it's going to start real soon we think that the muck will be it probably 70% out on Friday and is there hardly be there but it's going to be there. Are we feel that Friday smaller armies of crabs will go across it will cause turbulence and moisture and thusly rain it will add to the effect caverns will begin to sizzle it takes half a day for it to get here so Saturday afternoon or evening we will be getting a first breeze from it probably about 20 rad adding to Saturday night which is already above 100 the old skill and Sunday will add 40 rad approaching 200 rad on the old scale I don't know if any of you that can survive that except for our son I really like him to be elsewhere that's very high if it's here you're going to sit here like idiots and we think you do and you get cancer you want him to he would stand about 500 about 7 times a day each time about 30 to 45 minutes and that would be as high as we want them near it but really 500 for a few days solid none of you would survive even Azog and bolge we probably suffer very badly if you in the hospital and be sick. Our son's dad was a different classification and about 10 rungs down if not more.

--right now we are experiencing a lot of people who are shocked at the levels that are going to happen and they decided we could move but really they're not and Uncle Phil is going to die it's already kind of sick but yeah he wants to try and grab teams during the storm and a bunch of people do

Thor Freya

That is way too high I have some questions what will it be in Kissimmee in Tampa and Sarasota thank you

Bg

We have an estimate in Sarasota that number is not going to be good down here Friday they're going to be 90 to 120 up there they'll be 70 to about 110 Saturday we're seeing 100 to 140 up there would be about $90-120 and Sunday about 60 to 90ish and of course these numbers are more like $900 to 1200 that's the new scale. So he says I appreciate it thank you we've got more. Tampa they will be Friday about 60 to 90 Saturday about 52-70 and Sunday about 40 to 70 and there's a reason it's because the wind and it won't carry it as far in the higher altitudes on that day. Kissimmee which is a bit further on Friday will be about 30 to 70 on Saturday 40 to 80 if not more on the low end Sunday 30 to 50 and Monday 10:00 to 40 which are very high it's really 300 to 700 on the new scale all of them are add a zero for the new scale anything above 10 is critical so I'm fulfill might even be up there and he lived there and he might get sick thinking it's high enough because it has been you have to go to Tallahassee even the area the college area is going to be 20 to 50 on Friday etc open Tallahassee it's going to be on Friday 10:00 to 30 or 35 Saturday would be higher 15 to 40 or 45 Sunday about eight to 25 or 30 still high very high much higher than it has been it's like 250 to 300 at the high end on Sunday where is okay Monday should be down to 15 to 25 but that's still 150 and we haven't had a day over 100 yet

Thor Freya

That sounds terrible it sounds like the whole state is going to get it and he says yeah I'll go all the way up to the border of Georgia and North Carolina and Alabama and Mississippi those States will range from 5:00 to about 40 all weekend and coincide with the high numbers.. they say that I'm going to check with our forecasters and see what they say I'm willingville say it's going to be a nightmare.

We do thank you for the information

Bg

Olympus

[yakdeculture]

Umineko (2009 Anime) Review

This adaptation gets a lot of flack for reasons that are mostly fair but also a little silly. Here, let’s have some fun. Umineko is a visual novel that was released in 8 chapters that form two arcs. The anime adaptation only covers the first 4 chapters which make up the first arc, Questions. At the time the anime was created, I’m not looking up how much of it was actually out, but I do know that 100% the 2nd arc, Answers, was not complete yet. Anyways, when it did get finished, Umineko ended up being about 80-120 hours depending on your reading speed, probably closer to 100+. I think part 2 is a little longer but either way. So lets say that part one is anywhere between 40 and 60 hours long. The anime is 26 episodes long, and, lets estimate that every episode contains 20 minutes of actual plot once you take out the op, ed, and next episode preview. That's a little less than 9 hours of runtime. Even if you want to completely bullshit and say every episode is 30 minutes of all gas and no breaks, thats 13 hours. No matter which way you slice it, the total runtime is less than half. Granted, you’re going from a format that is primarily text based to a primarily visual one, so all narration heavy, inner monologue, etc. scenes are either cut completely, drastically reduced, or reformatted to fit spoken dialogue; but even if you account for the fact that you can cut out some amount of time x from the runtime of the vn when reformatting for an anime, there’s just no way to reasonably expect even the best adaptation could condense the entire impact in half the original time! The anime aired in 2009. It’s 15 years old. The reputation this anime has is set in stone, and it is well known that the vn is held in high regard. Therefore, it is virtually impossible to go into this anime without at least some circumstantial evidence that this adaptation has inherent flaws! Unless you were completely unaware of what Umineko was, and stumbled onto the anime by pure happenstance, and watched the entire thing without even once bringing it up to someone else or looking anything about it up, you would necessarily know there are at least some extenuating circumstances when it comes to its quality.

Some people don’t like the artstyle or animation or whatever you might want to say about the general look of the show. I don’t really know what standards were like at the time so I have no real clue if it was low budget or anything but I can see some people thinking it doesn’t look great, especially if you are more used to way more recent things. Personally, I think it looks good enough for pretty much every scene where the actual animation quality and motion are integral to the scene. You can make the same argument about other Studio Deen vn adaptations at the time that they don’t really adapt the particular art styles and instead more or less go with something that is in the spirit of the original style while also being more original. In this case, however, I have no complaints. The visual novel version of Umineko has at least three different sprite artwork styles. Higurashi also has multiple artwork styles. For Higurashi, it is generally accepted that Ryukishi’s original artwork is at the very least most fitting. However, the general sentiment for Umineko is that the Ryukishi sprite’s and the PS3 sprites are more or less on par with each other. To me, the anime’s art style is more or less a combination of the PS3 and original designs, and I think it looks pretty good. Um….honestly, I’m getting bored of writing this review so I’m gonna stop it here I guess. I don’t know if I had more to say, but basically I think while this show gets fair criticism the amount it gets is like crazy people act like this show is completely dogshit and not even worth acknowledging when personally I think it is genuinely a fun watch for people who like Umineko. It would be basically impossible to completely faithfully adapt the entire vn 100% faithfully and accurately without cutting anything out or taking out of shortcuts, so I think something is better than nothing. The particular quality of an adaptation bears no effect on the source material. No one version of a story is a replacement for another, it is simply an additional tale for the readers who love it to experience it in a way they haven’t before!

[liskantope]

It would depend a lot on the context of how someone is using this, of course, but one could for instance make an argument invoking Bayes pulling common-sense-plausible numbers out of your gut to show in an intuitive way that someone else's argument is fallacious when held up to a Bayesian light. For instance, something like "People are pointing out that people in situation X often appear to be Y, they figure maybe 60% of the time, and conclude that if you're Y you're most likely in situation X. But as a prior, we can all agree that the chances of being in situation X are really low, let's say on the order of 1% or something, and when you crunch through a Bayesian computation based on those numbers you get that even a Y person is probably not in situation X." While that wouldn't be watertight, I don't think it would be unreasonable.

I would almost certainly disagree with whoever wrote a paper arguing for the existence of God but more likely with the intuition behind his probability numbers themselves than with his methodology. It reminds me of the Drake equation used to generate intuition for how likely we are to detect extraterrestrial intelligent life: it is useful methodology for thinking about how likely or otherwise this will be depending on a bunch of other variables, along with what all the other variables are and how important each is, provided that we keep in mind that there's a certain uncertainty in the values of the variables themselves. (One can estimate the error in the probability we're trying to compute based on a margin of error in each variable, though; that's part of its usefulness.)

Probably most people here will agree with me on this, but I don't really see the point of using Bayes' rule when you're just pulling the numbers out of your gut? Right? Like obviously if you have actual numbers on something Bayes' rule is useful, but if you're just coming up with the numbers by intuition it feels like guessing with extra steps. Like that one guy who published a paper making a "Bayesian argument" for the existence of god, where he concluded that god exists with probability 2/3 or some shit based on numbers he made up. Anyway I can't remember if I've seen Yudkowsky do this or if it was some other guy, but it's kind of silly I think.

[centrally-unplanned]

Its fucking 2 AM lets keep ranting about this! Genshin isn’t popular the way people think its popular. It is currently one of the most financially successful games ever:

But it doesn’t make 20 quadspillion dollars by being the game with the highest player count - and certainly not by being the game with the highest player count in Japan. It has a ton of players, don’t get me wrong - looking like 60 million monthly users.

That isn’t that much though! 

All the big games clean its clock - and it looks even less pretty in Japan itself:

Mobile games ranked by installs. Do you even know what that second game is, by the way? 

Uma Musume Pretty Derby: Horse Girl Racing & Breeding game, absolutely more popular than Genshin in Japan on mobile (which most people estimate is how Genshin is played in Japan & China, vs PC in the US). Which I am singling out specifically, because beyond just ‘numbers’ you have metrics like intensity of the fanbase, how much do the devotees talk about the game and such. That sets trends more than numbers do, right? And hey look Comiket in Japan just happened, what do you got for me - lets rank number of doujins sold at comiket in the gatcha-style games category:

Type-Moon: 848 

Uma Musume: 728

Hololive: 620 (Vtuber)

Kancolle: 654

Touhou: 596

iDOLM@STER Starlight Stage: 474

Blue Archive: 446

iDOLM@STER Shiny Colors: 232

Genshin Impact: 230

Nijisanji: 194 (Vtuber)

Touken Ranbu: 192

Project Sekai: 172 (Includes Vocaloid)

Arknights: 123

Azurlane: 120

Girls und Panzer: 118

Fuck yeah Girls und Panzer. But anyway 9th place? Pretty good! Very respectable...and fucking wrecked by the HORSE GIRL BREEDING MOBILE GAME Uma Musume

How about some streaming data! Japan only ofc:

So now here its pretty low, but I will grant that its the best ranking anime-style game. Genshin is popular, for sure. But all this taken in, Genshin just aint that big - its a very popular game, probably the most popular “fantasy fluffy anime game”, but its not like, insanely popular, running the show.

The reason you think its popular is two-fold; one is that its a gatcha game, so it is monitizing its player base way above other large games. Not crazily so btw, the average Genshin player has probably spent $70 dollars on the game, the normal price of a game - but still its competing with other “free” games which always have much bigger player bases, its hitting hard in relation. It is, absolutely, one of the most financially successful games ever. And the second reason is its cross-country popularity - its really rare for a game to be huge in China AND Japan AND America. The fact that its a top game in all three countries is a big feat, and it makes you hear about it, it gives it a playerbase scale from the sheer market size.

But if you are Japanese company Nintendo, making a game that is *not* a gatcha game, for a company that is famously pretty parochial about branding their games for the Japanese market uber alles, that is making a *console* game on a console that famously did not sell well in China...why would Genshin stand out to you? Its just one of the games, competing with a totally different model, on a totally different device, and in totally different markets. It is a trend, but it is not driving trends, it is not the trendsetter - certainly not for a Switch game. Engage would have no reason to try to copy it over other game styles.

TL:DR Fire Emblem Engage is taking inspiration from the horse fucker game and if you can’t prove that wrong I don’t want to hear it.

[saphushia]

I love you art!! Do you have any advice for choosing colors that work well together?

thank you! colors mostly just come naturally to me (whether its actually natural or if i've just internalized color theory so strongly that it feels natural i'm not sure lol) so im not very good at actually explaining it. most of it is genuinely just what looks good to you, but looking up some basics of color theory can help a lot to narrow down options so it's easier to pin down what you want.

doing those limited palette challenges (especially when the subject matter doesn't necessarily fit the palette colors) can be good practice and i think at least a small portion of my skill in the area comes from playing those color-sorting phone games like blendoku or i love hue lol. also probably related is the year or so when i was younger where i just refused to use gradients whatsoever for some reason

that aside, here's very bare bones color theory (i wont get into it too deep, there's a billion explanations online that are leagues better than i could explain it) and some tips that might be useful?

|img source|

i tend towards 2-tone palettes when i'm doing full color n they usually end up being complimentary (purple + yellow, green + pink) or close (blue + yellow, green + purple, pink + blue). i like a good strong contrast, which i think is generally what people mean when they say my style pops- having contrast makes the colors seem even brighter and stand-outish.

| left || top || bottom || right |

maybe that ^ helps? the ratios are rough estimates of how much of each pic is each color group. some common advice in general design (it's actually used in a lot of stuff- webpages, interiors, etc) is having 60% main color 30% secondary color and 10% accent color (but like i said, i mostly work in 2 colors so i don't have a great example on hand)

as for finding colors, i'll sometimes search for photography that has the kinda vibe i want- for the kindred spirits pic i literally searched "blue and green spooky toxic photography" and i think i ended up referencing a pic of green lights reflecting off of wet pavement on a dark street.

one big thing that i hardly ever see mentioned but i personally utilize an absolute fuck ton- dulling colors makes them lie. use this to your advantage. say you're using bright green; if you use a gray-blue it can look like purple and will blend with the green instead of contrasting like an actual purple would

| right example |

of course there's lots of situations where you do want the purple (or whatever color) to be a contrast, but this is useful when you don't.

a lot of the time lately i'll color everything in a base monotone (or very slightly varying analogous colors ie teal through indigo) and then make the lighting a contrast (complimentary) color on an 'add' or 'vivid light' or other lighting layer, then sometimes color pick the contrast colors shown in the lighting n use them sparingly to fill in a few of the base colors that didn't fit well being the base color. you can see that in the drowning picture (blue is the base color with pink lighting) and the kindred spirits drawing (gray-blue base colors with green lighting).

one last thing: never be afraid to use filters. almost all of the finished art i post has at least one overlay or gradient map or tonal correction layer ontop of it all. i'm quite partial to a low-opacity gradient map layer set to whatever colors i scrolled thru in my list and liked the vibe of, a black and white gradient map layer with the layer set to brightness (also on low opacity), or messing around with a tone curve or color balance layer. if someone starts shit with you for using filters on your art fucking block them. in general if it looks good it isn't cheating (insert common sense caveat that you aren't stealing other people's art etc etc)

[childotkw]

You come back and announce CS chapter of 10k words? Jordan, I would kiss you right now. I can't wait for it. Also I'd a question for you - do you think that you'll be able to finish it with 60 chapters or do you think that'll change?

Oh god I wish it was only 10k.

I've still got about 6k words to write 😭the Hadrian and Riddle scene alone is probably going to be 4k knowing me - and then there's a Narcissa scene that'll half carry over into the next chapter. CS57 will be twice the length of a normal chapter #rip

I will accept kisses tho, affection is a great motivator 😘

As for the chapter count, it'll likely bump up when I post this next update. 60 was a low estimate on my part. It'll most likely be 63/64 chapters long. It all depends on how the last few story plot points go.

[dufferpuffer]

This is dumb... I've done a dumb thing that's stupid and boring. My rules: + Only people with confirmed death ages. EXCEPTION: I estimate some peoples ages if they have some clues. I will state every estimate I have made. + Personal rule: Parents of teenage kids aren't likely to be over 50. Even though it seems the Wizarding World has kids young - I generously put their age at 50. B^) + Only people who have died in the 1900s. + People are gathered from here, I am not sorry - but I avoided non-book information.

Ok so death ages I gathered: (explanations below, be warned its boring) 5, 14, 16, 17, 17, 17, 18, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 30, 31, 36, 38, 38, 38, 40, 40, 47, 49, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50, 55, 60, 65, 65, 71, 100, 100, 115, 115, 124

That's an average life span of 46.324 for 37 people.

idk how to do the math for this lol I'm just gonna spam numbers in until it seems reasonable. This is BAD MATH and I am a BAD PERSON for it. Forgive me

If we try to balance that out with 37 ages of 200… ...that's an average of 123.162, which is almost there. Balancing with 37 ages of 225 is 135.6621, almost spot on. So I'd say a bit over that, with a bit more variance...?

Conclusion: - I cant conceptualize math - also uh if you take into account all the young deaths then you'd need lots of old deaths to make up for it - Someone please tell me I'm a dipshit and there's a formula - This is how I chose to spend nearly 40 mins damn it

Until that happens: my headcanon theory is that Wizards can live up to like 250 as a maximum age, but most probably only make it to their late 100s. That's why traditional Muggle perception of Wizards is old people - because they get very old, recording their family tree's etc. The low average lifespan of 138 in the 90s is because of war.

Death ages I guessed: Edgar Bones, wife, children - Plural children suggests under 17. (50)x2 and (17)x2. Gideon and Fabian Prewett - Putting them the same age as Molly (31). Quirinus Quirrel is at youngest born 1967 - 25 at death. He is definitely younger than Snape - so to be generous I'll put him at (30) I'm putting Hagrids father at age (50), because father. Tom Riddle Snr - (50), because dad of Tom Riddle. Thomas Riddle and Mary Riddle - by the same rules, (100) because they are parents of Tim Riddle Snr. Barty Crouch Snr - teen son in the late 70s, death in the 90s I put him at (65). Mrs Crouch - death in the 80s I decree she is (55). Bertha Jorkins - must have been at most (40), surely. Dean Thomas' father - Dean was newborn, so I'm putting him at (40), because my 50 rule was for teenagers teehee Pandora Lovegood - died when Luna was 9, almost a teen, (50) Marvolo Gaunt - Merope's mother, putting him at (60) as she died near adulthood. Bathilda Bagshot - she was trying to make friends with Albus and Aberforths mother in 1890 when they moved to Godricks Hollow, so I'm assuming she was at least 17 then - an adult, which would make her born 1873. So she died around (124) Ted Tonks - Father of young adult, so im saying he was (65) I'm putting Lavender Brown here though I don't think we get confirmation? (18)

Known death ages: James and lily potter (21), Merope Riddle (19), Myrtle Warren (14), Cedric Diggory (17), Broderick Bode (49), Sirius Black (36), Montgomery (5), Albus Dumbledore (115) (age from here) , Regulus Black (18), Gellert Grindelwald (115), Dirk Cresswell (37), Peter Pettigrew (38), Vincent Crabbe (18), Fred Weasley (20), Remus Lupin (38), Nymphadora Lupin (25), Colin Creevey (16), Severus Snape (38), Bellatrix Lestrange (47), Tom Riddle (71)

do yall think the 'average wizard lifespan' is '137¾ years' because there's a big gap in ages? or a small one?

Like are people living 70 - 200 or 120 - 150

[chriirahluvr]

Europa: A Shallow Speculation on Theoretical Life

So I am in a mission design class this whole year, a very fun experience! We are honed in on Europa, which has led to me doing so much research specifically on Europa's surface and theorized subsurface ocean and its ability to house life. 

I can make a million information posts about the process of life detection but I just want to make a silly overview of what I think life on Europa would look like if it were to exist! Just some fun speculative biology stuff, maybe with some art to come at a later date if I'm feeling inspired. 

But, for today, I will just be setting some general rules!

All complex life would be aquatic or semi-aquatic at the very least, thanks to the four kilometers of ice separating the ocean from the EXTREMELY irradiated surface. I'm sure some rogue microorganisms could climb their way to the surface thanks to Europa's seismic activity, but the moon's surface is absolutely not suited to house life. 

Europa's ocean is deep. When I say deep, I mean DEEP. It is estimated to be anywhere from 60 to 150 kilometers deep (40-100 miles). For context, Earth's Mariana Trench is just over 11 kilometers deep. That is just shy of 7 miles. I would be tempted to say that skin pigmentation would also be nonexistent, but radiation may lead to pigment being beneficial! I have found no sources about radiation levels within the ocean though, so this is something I am on the fence about. The pressure present at the bottom of the ocean also means that squishy anatomy would be preferred, at least at the ocean's floor! 

Thanks to the 15 kilometer ice crust and a low amount of sunlight, eyes would serve little to no evolutionary purpose, at least for getting around (I will elaborate more later :D ). The primary sense Europa's critters would likely rely on is echolocation, which they would perceive as a "visual" environments kind of analogous to imaging sonar, see above! However, it would likely be much fuzzier of an image. Visual sonar is done through multiple scans over time, which would not be an efficient way to see your environment for an organism just trying to get around. They would just see vague shapes, which get more defined the closer they are. No color perception is allowed either, but it would be the best way to gather spatial information in a pitch black aquatic environment.

If reproduction is not asexual, I believe extreme sexual dimorphism would exist and also that sexual selection would primarily rely on sound. Perhaps some natural predators would learn to replicate the fuzzy appearance and mating call of its preferred prey as a way to lure in easy targets, or perhaps some species would even evolve primitive eyes and bioluminescence as a secondary sexual selection method, and as a way to weed out predators. They would not “see” the light, but rather sense it as a vibration. So, in essence, some animals may “hear”, more like feel, colors. 

Now, about semi-aquatic Europan life!

I can imagine some ice-burrowing species emerging, as a sort of way to escape the chaos of an open ocean. They probably would not live too much higher than a few feet into the ice, however. They would likely have fatty bodies in order to effectively brave the cold, and thus would probably be scavengers or predators. I think the idea of some animals forming ant-like colonies within the ice surface is a fun one! Some predators adapted to traversing these burrows for easy prey would likely emerge from this as well. Unfortunately, a Europan ice ecosystem runs on the assumption that the ice which meets the ocean is the correct texture for animals to feasibly break through with the right evolutionary umph. The speculation is entertaining, though!

A lot of Europan life would probably be similar to fungi or algae on earth. This is because there is no feasible way to photosynthesize, but there are possible energy and mineral sources theorized to exist in the form of hydrothermal vents. Perhaps a colony would grow, with ‘roots' of some kind near a hydrothermal area, and “leaves” spread around to intake resources. Maybe carnivorous flora would exist in this way too! Algae type of organisms would likely just spread around hydrothermally active areas, and “photosynthesize” using the light produced by vents on the seafloor. Lots of small herbivores might feast on this algae, and become a food source for predators. A fun ecosystem!

Again, all of this speculation is just for fun :) It is not SUPER realistic, but as an enjoyer of speculative biology I like allowing my mind to wander while doing all my research for class. Perhaps I might start working on some phylogenetic trees in my free time. I may post some fun Europa science overviews and some of the graphics we are producing for our Huntsville presentation! 

xoxo,

Zofia

[just-a-poor-boy-queen]

Part 33 of Jimercury Kid series

Jim couldn’t understand it. He was completely and utterly baffled.

He had spent the last few weeks watching what he ate, cutting back on higher calorie foods, restricting his sweets, sometimes skipping meals altogether and substituting them for tea or coffee. And yet, as he stood there in his bedroom in front of the mirror, hands struggling with the buttons of his trousers, it all seemed to be for naught.

He could barely fit into any of his clothes. His trousers wouldn’t button, his shirts strained against his chest and even his pyjamas seemed ready to tear at the seams the moment he put them on. He couldn’t understand it; he had tried, he really tried. Yet it seemed he had put on weight rather than lost it.

Freddie had got rid of the scales during his illness, as it depressed him too much to be reminded of how thin and frail he was becoming, so Jim was forced to rely on his own estimation. Given how nothing fit him anymore, it was clear that his current approach to losing weight wasn’t working.

He gave up fighting with the button and pulled the trousers off in frustration, tossing them across the room. He wrapped himself back up in his dressing gown, which seemed to be the only thing that he could breathe in and sat down on the bed in defeat. He couldn’t help but allow his mind to wander to darker thoughts; what if it kept getting worse? What if Freddie looked at him one day and was disgusted by what he saw? Someone as beautiful as Freddie deserved better. He would tell Jim to pack his bags and leave.

He knew he shouldn’t think of such things, but he couldn’t help himself. He had always been made to feel that he wasn’t good enough for Freddie and this only cemented the idea into his head.

And the worst part? His poor mood was making him crave a biscuit.

He groaned and flopped down onto the mattress.

--

‘I’m in big trouble.’

Phoebe couldn’t help but snigger with laughter as Freddie held up one of Jim’s shirts, which was now noticeably smaller than it had been before it went in the wash.

Recently, Freddie had become insistent on being more independent and enlisted Phoebe to show him how to use various items around the house, including the washing machine. In hindsight, Phoebe should have known that this impulsive venture was destined for disaster; of course, Freddie would insist on doing Jim’s washing to surprise him, and then whack the machine up to 60 degrees despite Phoebe’s warnings. And now Jim’s loosest T-shirt was more of a crop top if anything.

Freddie sighed and set the shirt down, folding it pointlessly. ‘On a scale on one to ten, how angry do you think Jim will be?’

‘For shrinking his entire wardrobe?’ Phoebe pretended to consider the question. ‘At least an eleven.’

This clearly wasn’t the right thing to say, as Freddie groaned and faceplanted onto the kitchen table.

‘Cheer up, you old tart.’ Phoebe grinned and gave the singer a nudge. ‘Jim can never stay cross with you for long. Just explain yourself and he’ll forgive you.’

‘I know he’ll forgive me – it’s the half an hour lecture I’m not looking forward to.’ The Persian grumbled and pushed his chair back. ‘Maybe I should take Khaleel up with me. He can’t shout at me if the baby is there.’

‘Using your child as a shield? That’s low even for you.’

‘Give over, Phoebe. You and Joe were happy enough to use Jim as a scapegoat when you were smuggling cats into the house, so don’t you lecture me about morals.’

Five minutes later, Freddie was warily ascending the staircase towards the master bedroom, a packet of custard creams in one hand and Khaleel scampering at his heels. He was mentally preparing himself for the severe scolding he would inevitably receive, but hopefully a few biscuits would sweeten Jim’s mood. Lord knows, the Irishman could use them; he had been eating so little recently, he was practically wasting away into nothing. (1/2)

‘Darling?’ Freddie called out softly as he pushed open the door, scanning the room until he located Jim lying flat out on the bed, staring at the ceiling. ‘Darling, we brought you something.’

‘Don’t come in.’ Jim replied groggily, not even looking up from where he was laying. ‘I’m hideous.’

Freddie chuckled, not picking up the sincerity in Jim’s tone as he stepped into the room, Khaleel immediately making a beeline for the bed. ‘Hey, that’s my line!’

‘We brought biscuits, Daddy.’ Khaleel said excitedly, bouncing onto the bed and sprawling on top of Jim, resting his chin on the man’s chest. ‘I’ve already had three, so Baba says the rest are for you.’

The mere mention of confectionary made Jim groan. ‘Please take them away. I’ll probably put on ten pounds just looking at them.’

‘What do you mean?’ Freddie asked, sitting himself down beside his husband and son. ‘I thought you liked custard creams.’

Jim gave a loud, heavy sigh, lifting a hand to gently pet Khaleel’s hair. ‘I’m fat.’

There was a brief pause as everyone took a moment to process those two words. Then Freddie chuckled loudly, only stopping when he realised Jim was serious.

‘You’re not fat, you silly fool!’ Freddie exclaimed, looking scandalised. ‘If anything, you could stand to eat more. There’s nothing of you these days!’

‘Oh, come on Freddie.’ Jim couldn’t help but snap, though he quickly lowered his voice when he realised that he had startled Khaleel. Their son hated it when they argued, and he quickly pressed a kiss against the little boy’s nose to reassure him. ‘I know for a fact that I’ve put on weight. I don’t fit into any of my clothes anymore. If that’s not proof, I don’t know what is.’

Freddie felt his cheeks begin to burn and he carefully placed the packet of custard creams out of Jim’s reach, in case the Irishman decided to use them as a weapon. ‘Ah…that might be my fault.’

Jim sat up, sitting Khaleel on his lap as he stared at Freddie in confusion. ‘How is it your fault?’

‘Well, I asked Phoebe to show me how to use some of the appliances around the house.’ Replied Freddie, playing with his fingers awkwardly. ‘And I wanted to surprise you by doing your laundry. But I might have turned the temperature up a little too high.’

Jim’s eyes went wide. ‘You shrunk my clothes?!’

‘In my defence, Phoebe is partially at fault for listening to me when I told him I knew what I was doing.’ Freddie dropped his gaze to his lap, peering up at Jim through his eyelashes. ‘I’m really sorry, darling.’

But Jim just started to laugh, though it sounded like he was on the verge of crying as well. ‘Jesus Christ, Freddie. You have no idea how happy I am to hear you say that. I thought I was going to end up needing a forklift to get downstairs.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with your weight.’ Freddie said gently, leaning over and brushing a kiss against the man’s bearded cheek. ‘You’re perfect just the way you are, isn’t he, Kenny?’

‘I love Daddy’s tummy.’ Khaleel replied, giving Jim’s stomach a pat. ‘He’s like a big cuddly teddy bear!’

‘Exactly. He’s our teddy bear.’ Freddie kissed his husband again, rubbing his cheek against the man’s stubble. ‘So…are you cross with me?’

‘Of course I’m cross with you!’ Jim exclaimed, though he was cracking up as he spoke. ‘I have to invest in a whole new wardrobe now, thanks to your terrible laundry skills!’

‘I’ll take you shopping tomorrow, I promise.’ Freddie pouted and thrust the packet of biscuits under Jim’s nose. ‘Now, stop telling me off and eat my peace offering.’ (2/2)

--------------------------------------------------

Awwww haha I loved this!

Firstly, I love how you've explored any body image issues that Jim may have had, and how that tied to his insecurities of not being good enough for Freddie.

And oof, baby Jimbo was adorable.

And the worst part? His poor mood was making him crave a biscuit.

Awwww I love my Irish teddy bear so much😂💙

Also, lmao Freddie being absolute shit at using a washing machine, Phoebe's amusement at his friend's antics, and Freddie eventually blaming Phoebe for putting too much faith into him made me crack up😂😂😂 He's such a character, our Freddie.

(More drabbles by writer anon)

(All the parts of this series can also be found under the tag #freddie and jim and their baby on this blog)