#I’m very passionate about stuff like this

[lukeynewtssimp]

When Nic is out and about with her bf all I see from Lukolas is pure hate and disdain for them both. It’s only now that the man brought out his gf that suddenly everyone is okay with it. Does that seem like equal treatment to you? Where was your defense before this?

You’re happy and proud of him for finally claiming her but where is the happiness for Nic? I’m still talking about Lukolas in general.

Do you not see the people saying he’s finally with someone well matched with him? And when people said the same hateful things after premiere night because of that stunt where was the support for Nic? You think his choices didn’t affect her, whether it was intentional or not?

This side of the fandom is extremely male-centered and you just don’t want to admit it. I am still very much hoping to be proved wrong in the future.

Wow okay there is a lot to unpack here.

Let me start by saying that my blog is very new. I only started posting like a month or so ago so excuse me for my lack of defence back when Nic apparently “needed” it.

Neither of them “need” anybody to defend them lol. We don’t get brownie points for proving we are their number one fan. They literally have no fucking clue who I am and don’t care to find out either. I just use my platform to express my love for the people I am a fan of and the things I am passionate about and to express my frustration at things and behaviours that annoy me. That’s the point of having a personal blog.

idk how to make it any clearer. Like it’s literally in my username, yea I am a fan of Nicola too but I’m a bigger fan of Luke. We all have our faves so I don’t get why you’re so angry that Luke is mine.

Yes I see the very small number of people making comments like that about Antonia looking good next to Luke or whatever. I choose to ignore it because I have seen a very small number of these comments and me talking about it would only amplify these pathetic people’s voices. I obviously do not agree with this take. It is rooted in fatphobia and those people can say whatever they want but they do not speak for Luke or Nic.

Nic is not some self conscious young girl waiting for a man to notice how beautiful she is. The fact that you think Luke’s decisions about who he’s dating affected her, then you’re the problem. You’re the one painting Nicola as this desperate girl crying for attention. Nic is a confident and very sexy woman and she fucking owns it and knows it. She literally ruled 2024 and has gained so much popularity last year as she deserves. And you know what? Luke knows it too and that man, unlike what you and other people think, is not and was never ashamed to show that he’s attracted to her and finds her beautiful and sexy and smart and talented. He’s not the most talkative when it comes to that stuff, that man literally blushes at everything. But his actions speak louder than his words. Just because he is dating a woman who doesn’t look like Nic does not mean he does not find Nic attractive and it also does not mean he rejected Nic by doing so.

As @jenhack beautifully put in the comments: Nic is not bothered! She is busy talking to other SAG nominees and being lauded by her peers. She does not need to, or have to be defined by any man she is connected with.

Crazy Lukolas do not only hate on Jake and Nic but they also hate on Luke and Antonia. Have you seen all the nasty stuff they have called this poor girl?

Sorry this has been very long but I just need everybody to stop projecting their hurt feelings and traumas on Nicola and Luke PLEASE!

PS: the “you” is not just aimed at you specifically anon, but everybody who agrees with that discourse of Luke hurting Nic by dating another woman and taking her to the premieres that I am tired of hearing about. And let’s not forget Nic took Jake to that premiere too…

[bonewaryreblogs]

Giovanni Zatara and Zatanna Zatara

Coming from a long line of stage magicians who immigrated from Italy to America when his father, Luigi Zatara, was a child, Giovanni Zatara decided early to continue the family legacy. He was drafted into World War II as a young man but continued to practice stage magic when he could, often using it to entertain his comrades during rare moments of rest. While overseas, he met the Phantom Stranger, who told Giovanni he had the potential to use “real” magic, not just sleight-of-hand stage magic, and gave him a notebook written by Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni’s ancestor. He tried to decipher the notebook but didn’t succeed until he got home and could actually focus on it, rather than using it to distract himself from the horrors of war. He spent the next decade learning all he could about real magic, falling in love with a natural magic user named Sindella, learning about the magic community though her, joining the Justice Society of America under the name “Merlin the Magician” along with his mentor Sargon the Sorcerer (John Sargent), and eventually fathering Zatanna with Sindella around 1950. Shortly after Zatanna’s birth, Sindella “died” in a car accident, leaving Giovanni to balance raising Zatanna as a single dad, being a superhero, and continuing his day job as a stage magician.

(I know he canonically never uses a superhero name, instead using his public stage name while being a superhero, but this bugs the ever loving CRAP out of me so I’m changing it. In my story, Giovanni didn’t want people to think he was “cheating” in his profession by using real magic on stage, or risk making non-magic people think they can do superhuman feats via stage magic illusions. He really wanted to keep the two separate.)

He may or may not have been cursed by the Evil Allura before he was found and saved by Zatanna and the Good Allura. Either way, this was all before the Justice League debuted, which he considered joining but ultimately decided he’s too old for this, retired from the JSA (and heroing in general), and opened a magic shop (stage magic, not real magic, though he does consult for real magic stuff on the side).

Born around 1950, around the same time Clark Kent was adopted, Zatanna Zatara was naturally gifted in magic and very passionate about learning everything to do with magic and the occult. Her father, Giovanni Zatara, kept his superhero identity a secret from her until her teens when she expressed interest in becoming a superhero. Zatanna had asked to learn more “practical” spells, like those a superhero might use, and the two danced around Giovanni’s superhero status and Zatanna’s budding desire to become a superhero before they ultimately came clean to each other, bringing them even closer as father and daughter. While he was proud of her choice, he could admit that the thought of his daughter being a superhero made him nervous. He was all too aware of how difficult and dangerous the life of a superhero was and didn't necessarily want that for his daughter, but more than that, if she was to become a superhero, he wanted it to be because she wanted to, not because she wanted his approval or felt obligated to follow in his footsteps or, heaven forbid, trying to impress a potential partner! Those were nice bonuses, sure, but he wanted to make sure the desire came from within Zatanna, not from an outside source.

Giovanni trained Zatanna for a few years and she was just starting to make a name for herself as “Zorina” when Giovanni went missing, prompting Zatanna to search for him and becoming a superhero in a trial-by-fire kind of way. He is eventually found and decides to take a step back from heroing, retiring from the JSA (slightly miffed that they didn’t help Zatanna more in finding him) and acting as Zatanna’s “sidekick”/background mentor as they work independently for a while, slowly falling back into a more consulting role rather than being out in the field himself. At some point, both of their identities had been revealed to the public but they decided to roll with it, incorporating real magic into their shows as a wow factor display and only keeping “superhero names” as a symbolic gesture to the superhero community.  

By the time the Justice League debuts in 1994, Giovanni is in his 70s and really feeling his age, despite his magic keeping him young for longer than the average human. Zatanna, in her 40s, still feels like she’s in her prime and appears to be in her mid-20s; due to her mother’s magic lineage, Zatanna inherited “decelerated aging” and a long lifespan similar to Atlanteans. Zatanna happily joins the League as the Mistress of Magic and while Giovanni himself doesn't join, he agrees to consult in all matters magical and even help teach younger magic users to respect the craft. Zatanna looks maybe 30 by the time Danny is introduced to her, even though she’s in her 50s.

Sindella didn’t actually die, she was abducted by “her people”, who are a clan of magically inclined humans that call themselves “homo magi” rather than “homo sapiens”. They live in the mountains of Turkey and are similar to Atlanteans, though without their particular bias towards water-based abilities. They may also be mildly related to Themyscira, as the Amazon's language is described as a mix of classical Greek and Turkish.

I picked the name Merlin the Magician for Giovanni Zatara’s superhero name because there was a similar magic superhero by that name created shortly before Zatara debuted in DC Comics, and while this Merlin was originally made for Quality Comics, he does have ties to DC Comics and is apparently affiliated with the All-Star Squadron, which is very much a DC team. Both Merlin and Zatara were based on Mandrake the Magician, generally agreed to be the first comic book superhero as we would recognize them today, and (aside from a green cloak said to belong to King Arthur’s Merlin) both had the classic “stage magician” look with a tux/suit, mustache, and cape/capelet. Zatanna’s titles, Zorina and the Mistress of Magic, were much easier to pick, as she had apparently used them before according to the DC Wiki.

[p-cap-press]

THE TELEGRAPH

Peter Capaldi interview: ‘The default Doctor Who now is a kind of cosmic imp’

INTERVIEW

The actor talks about playing the Time Lord, never doing Shakespeare and releasing his debut album at the age of 63

Neil McCormick

12 November 2021 5:00am GMT

Before Peter Capaldi was an actor; long before he became celebrated as fierce civil servant Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It or a daunting and strange Doctor in Doctor Who, he played guitar and sang in obscure Scottish punk band B-----ds from Hell. Now, at 63, Capaldi is finally about to release his debut album. “I’m not setting out to make a career change or chase my cousin Lewis up the charts,” he insists. “I’m an enthusiastic amateur having a go.”

St Christopher is a strange and beguiling piece of work, a complex slice of baroque pop-rock and ornate singer-songwriting, its widescreen productions decorated with poetic lyrics delivered with downbeat theatrical flair. “It’s largely the same stuff that was floating round my head post art school, Glasgow, circa 1979, set in neon and rain. Except I’m 40 years older.”

Sitting in a north London café, Capaldi stirs an “extra hot” latte. He’s wearing a sleek black coat over a white T-shirt, his face lean, eyes sparkling, mouth playing with a perpetual half-smile. He draws movie-star attention but blanks it out as he discusses his passion project.

“There’s a tyranny of logic about acting. Your job is to tell the story through the medium of your part as effectively as possible. But it’s somebody else’s story. I enjoy the freedom of music, you can respond to a sound or a tone or a chord and try to construct something that goes with that or against it.” Capaldi’s lyrics playfully grapple with grand themes, from the interconnectedness of everything on Atlanta Vacant Lot to the ephemeral illusions of deluded youth, on the slyly mocking Beautiful and Weird.

As a working-class child (his parents ran an ice-cream business) growing up in Glasgow in the 1960s, Capaldi was drawn to acting but didn’t feel equipped. “You go to an audition and they ask ‘what’s your Shakespearean piece?’ I’d never seen a Shakespeare play. So you’re hopeless, because there’s no uncle in the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company], you’re not part of that world, you have nothing except a desire to have a go. So I did apply to drama school but I didn’t get in.”

A teacher encouraged him to apply to Glasgow Art School, where “music swept me away”. The B-----ds turned into the Dreamboys, with future comedian Craig Ferguson on drums. “As we were slightly pretentious art school kids, we were trying to evoke a kind of Dr Caligari dreamscape, but we just sounded like a junior branch of the Chippendales male strippers.” They soldiered on in obscurity for years. Then, while touring as support to Scottish new-wave pop band Altered Images, Capaldi was spotted by director Bill Forsyth. At 24, he found himself making his film debut opposite Burt Lancaster in Local Hero. “He [Lancaster] was fabulous. He said: ‘Kid, your instincts are terrific! Terrific! But I can’t understand a f---ing word you’re saying.’”

Capaldi with Burt Lancaster in Local Hero (1983) Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Capaldi had a long career as, effectively, an interesting supporting actor. “You look back and go ‘Well, that was a good choice, that was a bad choice’, but really there were no choices. I had a baby and a wife and a mortgage. You’ve got to do whatever comes up.” He won an Oscar in 1995 as writer and director of the short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, but subsequent projects collapsed. “It’s a tough business. I had a very bleak period where whatever initial success I’d had had long failed. There was no work, no money coming in, Oscars had come and gone, Local Hero had come and gone, youth had come and gone. And I didn’t know how to get it back on track.”  Then, out of the blue, fellow Glaswegian Armando Iannucci asked him to be in his new sitcom, The Thick of It. “The big lesson I learnt was that you can’t control it, so stop angsting over it. But that’s easy to say now. It wasn’t easy stalking about with no money for a cup of coffee.”

It wasn’t until he was in his fifties and cast as the 12th Doctor that he achieved household-name fame. “My job was to go into work in the morning and battle Daleks. It was fabulous. You get to inhabit the skin of this charismatic, magical creature. Kids look at you and you can see their jaws drop. That’s an extraordinary position to be in.”

Yet he admits to finding the pressure of being recognised on the street quite daunting. “You have to always be positive and good-hearted. My default position is probably a bit more melancholic and reflective, but nobody wants to hear about that stuff when you’re the Doctor. I wanted to be a more distant and alien Doctor. Because that’s how I remember [first Doctor] William Hartnell, being a kid in Glasgow on dark winter nights when this strange figure with the white hair and slightly irate voice could open this portal to a magical world. The default now is a kind of cosmic imp. Which is great. But I wanted to touch the dark winter nights. I’m not sure whether the brand supports that any more, but that’s what I was interested in.”

The reign of his successor Jodie Whittaker ends next year, but Capaldi expresses no opinions on who should follow. “One of the great things about doing Doctor Who is it kind of cures you, in the nicest possible way. So I think they’re all great and I wish everybody well, but I’m done,” he laughs almost gleefully.

Capaldi as the 12th incarnation of Doctor Who Credit: BBC

The revival of his long-dormant musical career is the tale of two doctors, when Doctor Who met Dr Robert (AKA songwriter and producer Robert Howard, frontman of vintage art rockers the Blow Monkeys). The two would play guitar together at parties, and Capaldi became a fascinated observer of Dr Robert’s studio work.  Meanwhile, Capaldi’s young second cousin, Lewis Capaldi, was rising to fame as the UK’s favourite singer-songwriter. “Lewis is a proper musician, a really gifted songwriter. He’s been doing that since he was like, 11 or something. I’m very proud of him, even if I don’t really know him.”

Capaldi, who will soon be seen in the Terence Davies film Benediction, about Siegfried Sassoon, jokingly admits he still doesn’t have “a Shakespeare piece” for auditions. “Shakespearean companies have never troubled me with their interest. I know in my heart of hearts, I can act it. But once you get into a production, you are going to be up against people who have been practising the iambic pentameter for the last 30 years.” He shakes his head. “Ach, I could do it! But, you know, it’s such a palaver, they last so long, they’re always like three-and-a half hours long. I’m not bothered.”

His advice for young actors is simple. “Number one, and most important of all, learn your lines. Because if you learn your lines, you have the freedom to tell the story using everything God’s given you. Number two, hang on in there. Because the stars align, sometimes. Look at me. Sometimes you get lucky.”

Peter Capaldi’s St Christopher is out next Friday on Monks Road Records

[callipraxia]

Note: haven’t tasted any of these yet (though I did say “the heck with good sense” and order some samples; check back in about a week for proper reviews) and am just musing about what some of the components are and how they link to GF characters, at least in my mind. That established, here are Some Preliminary Notes, Just Based On General Knowledge Of Tea:

Mabel: I have no idea what a mix of spearmint, strawberry, and watermelon would taste like (I really like spearmint, but dislike strawberry and am indifferent to watermelon), but somehow, yep, I still feel comfortable saying this one just sounds right.

The Author: If that Assam is a good Assam, then I want this. I will note that I have drunk roasted mate before, but don’t know what it tastes like exactly; Stash used to have this salted caramel mate/black tea mix that was my daily favorite for my lidded work mug, back when we worked in an office. It’s also caffeinated, though I’m not sure that matters as much when it is blended with a black tea and particularly with Assam. Strong stuff, usually, Assam; I drink it a lot in the springtime because it’s one of the few substances that really helps with my awful spring allergies.

Dipper: I…don’t know that I’ve had passionfruit tea before, actually. The ‘passion’ bit certainly fits Dipper’s personality, anyway. Lemongrass is very nice. Sour apple is less my style, I like apples that are very firm and very sweet, but this also suits Dipper’s personality just on name alone, bless him.

Stan: On one hand, Lapsang Souchong is the famous “smoked” tea, and people who dislike it have been known to describe it as like walking into a casino with a mouth full of water. Personally, as someone who likes LS, I don’t think it’s much like that at all - but then, I grew up eating a lot of smoked meat (my father liked mixing in hickory with the charcoal for the fire in his grill), I still like a bite of smoked cheese, and my infernal sinus sensitivity has it where I can immediately differentiate wood smoke versus cigarette smoke (and occasionally, between brands of cigarette - I curse the day my grandmother switched from Salem Lights to Marlboros) vs cigar smoke. I set foot in the lobby of a casino precisely once in my life, then had to flee because of the overwhelming stink of cigarette smoke was making me sick even from a room’s width away….

Oh, wait, we weren’t here for my personal anecdotes and oddly specific knowledge bases, were we? I get sentimental sometimes, which ironically fits Stan as well as an association with a casino does, if that’s how you experience Lapsang. There are a lot of different experiences you can have with Lapsang, from smooth to very ‘prickly’ feeling, sour or sweet, the base can taste woody (which isn’t a bad thing in tea) or overpoweringly naturally fruity, in a dark forest fruits kind of way…complicated stuff, so also appropriate for Stan in that way. Caramel is a lovely sweet flavor, close enough to toffee that Lapsang and caramel could bring to mind both bacon and toffee, two of Stan’s favorite food items. It occurs to me that peanut isn’t really a note I’ve seen in tea…possibly adding a bit of some other nut might give a little nod in that direction, along with moving the caramel more toward toffee? I’d love to tinker with blending myself to see what I could end up with. Which I may actually be able to do - this looks like Adagio Teas, who at least used to have the ‘make your own blend’ option. I never tried it myself - or, in fact, any Adagio teas - but wow, this brings back memories, I can’t even recall when I last thought of Adagio, and had in fact had the vague impression that they weren’t open anymore, though good for them if they are.

I don’t know what a mambo is outside of a song about “mambo Italiano” that everybody sang like three lines of all the time when I was in elementary school (despite none of us speaking a word of Italian, unless you count ‘macaroni,’ and probably none of us even being able to find Italy on a map), but I suspect it’s here to prevent us from ending up with too darkly elegant of a cup - the base blend might hit multiple things Stan likes, but comes off a little more dark academia than any flavor of chaotic or animated. “Mambo” also may be Spanish, which would be a nice nod to Stan’s adventures in central and South America. Other ways one might accomplish that could be a touch of mate, or, if one really must, some coffee-flavor.

Ford: If I were to assign Ford a Lapsang souchong, it would be one of those raw-dark-fruits one I mentioned in Stan’s bit, ones where the smoke plays only a minor role. I think Ford would really like to be something like, say, Smoky Earl Grey from Fortnum’s, but I spent the past two years of my life writing a monograph on the subject of how this is a veneer, not his actual personality - there aren’t really any Fortnum’s people in Gravity Falls except perhaps Pacifica, and I think of her as more of one of those very…frilly-feeling French teas. But we’re discussing Ford…really, really good pu’erh can give you a sort of brain-sparkly feeling I can see working for Ford. Inadequate memory of what hazelberry tastes like to comment on that. Assam -

Assam, really, is plenty complicated on its own. Indian teas are especially characterized by whether they are first flush (the first round of leaves harvested) or second flush (the ones that grow in later). A nice Assam can have a lovely honey note, though the word most people use for Assams is “malty.” I don’t know what malt tastes like, though, so I don’t know about that. I can say that I can usually tell if I’m going to love or hate a given Assam at practically first sip, which, along with how Lapsang is very much a matter of taste, does reflect on how divisive the character is said to be in corners of the Internet that aren’t mine.

Stan W/O Lapsang: can’t see the description in the image, can’t comment on that one.

Bill Cipher: I can’t really imagine these tastes together, but I automatically want to revolt at lavender being included - I like lavender, you see. If I was going to make a Bill tea myself, I’d get a really lousy pu’erh - I vividly remember one I had one time that tasted like fish fried in over-used grease and which made me sick to my stomach if I drank too much of it even if I somehow drowned out the fish with enough of Harney’s Vanilla Black - and then throw all the tropical fruits in it, and then throw a red berry mix into it (I don’t like red berry blends, unless you count teas with cranberry flavor in, which your standard Four Red Fruits type of tea doesn’t usually have). This would probably taste bizarre, foul, and utterly confused, but it would be in character. Though really, if I was going to sum up Bill as a liquid, I’d probably go with a cocktail of antifreeze and bleach.

The Mystery Shack: I can’t remember off the top of my head if Pu’erh Dante is flavored or not, or if there’s anything extra to account for the ‘moonlight’ aspect of Earl Grey Moonlight, so I really can’t say much here, except that pu’erh and key lime could capture something of the sense of the place - bright and summery colliding with all this tangled mess of messy adult lives just beneath the surface. Can’t really imagine what that would actually taste like, though.

Mabel (Alt W/O Strawberry): “berry blast” is too vague for me to say anything without knowing what the berries in question are. I probably wouldn’t like it (see comments on Four Red Fruits blends), but it does match the idea of Mabel.

Ford W/O Lapsang: Fun fact: the tea typically called gunpowder green isn’t actually smoky at all. It’s named that because of the unique shape of its preparation, which make the leaves into little pellets that apparently resemble stuff you put into really old-fashioned guns. The best gunpowder I ever had tasted strongly of honey; the worst was a bitter mess that I couldn’t dump enough honey into to salvage it. Which is also kinda Ford-appropriate, in a way….

This tea’s primary interest lies in how it’s a blend of three out of the four/five most common tea ���categories’ - no oolong or white tea, but green tea, black tea, and pu’erh? That’s an interesting combination. I’ve seen green and black blends before (Murchie’s of Canada particularly has a thing about mixing a little green tea into their black teas; results vary for me), though since you don’t make black and green tea at the same temperature, I must admit the idea has always kind of confused me. Never seen one with pu’erh in it before, though, so points for originality if nothing else.

@sovonight has Gravity Falls inspired tea!

Complete with their beautiful artwork on the packaging.

Get the tea here!

[karmathehalflander]

obviously the official Boyf Reinds ship song is Video Games by The Young Professionals but please consider these

. You Always Make Me Smile by Kyle Andrews (makes me think of them for some reason? Idk I just feel it? I think I saw an edit or something years ago)

. Loser by Julian Moon (fits in every single way omg, amazing, literally made for them)

. Vintage by High Dive Heart (perfect vibes, lyrics are immaculate)

. Nintendo by Todd Carey (it’s cute, I think it fits them well)

[sokkas-therapist]

Ok so I decided I am going to post that “atla live action hot take” I mentioned

Click below the cut if you’re interested in hearing my take on the whole “taking away sokka’s sexism” thing

1) nobody is glorifying sokka’s sexism by saying it should be kept in the show. It’s quite literally the opposite. The original series did a great job using his sexism as a lesson; any time sokka made a sexist remark in the first 4 episodes it was made abundantly clear that he was wrong, and as soon as Sokka was proven wrong he admitted that he was misguided, apologized, quite literally bowed down on his knees to ask for forgiveness, and even asked to learn from the kiyoshi warriors, and excepted wearing their traditional uniforms, further surrendering his flawed perspective of societal gender roles. A wonderfully executed example of writers using their characters to teach viewers a lesson: which was, in this case, that sexism is wrong. Sokka’s sexism was not left unresolved, so why take away a valuable lesson in the show??

2) if you take away a character’s flaws…then they don’t have development. A character can’t learn and grow from their mistakes if they never make mistakes.

If a charecter starts off perfect and unflawed then they are surface level and lack depth or the ability for an arc.

And no, this is not saying that Sokka didn’t have many other admirable qualities like his intelligence and adaptability etc.. He 100% had those qualities. But one of the coolest things about the original atla series was their ability to flesh out side charecters and give them depth. A charecter who is simply smart then becomes smarter, or adaptable then becomes even more adaptable, lacks depth and internal conflict.

Sokka’s sexism was the starting point for his internal conflict. Sokka wasn’t just sexist to be sexist, or because the entire southern water tribe was misogynistic (and we know for a fact they weren’t, because if they were misogynistic, then Katara wouldn’t have been shocked when the North denied her waterbending training). He was misogynistic because being seen/accepted as a “man” and a strong warrior was all Sokka wanted after his father left him behind. In reality, we know his father was only trying to protect his son from the horrors of war. But to a young and impressionable child, Sokka internalized this as him not being “man” enough, so he dedicated himself to becoming the person he thought would make his father proud. He was always reaching for this unattainable standard he set for himself, which lead to him having a skewed and toxic view of masculinity that he took out on the women around him. He associated being a worthy warrior with being a traditionally masculine man, and leaned way too far into fulfilling the gender roles men and women are told to play in society in hopes of gaining his father’s approval. We see him do this by suppressing his feelings of inferiority as a nonbender, along with all the aspects of himself that he thought could be seen as “weak” or “feminine” (ex: his love for shopping and poetry and art that we see develop up until the literal end of the series).

So clearly, the vast majority of sokka’s charecter development that deals with internal conflict stems from the toxic view of masculinity and gender roles that he adopted after being left behind by his father, which caused him to outwardly lash out toward katara and Suki with misogynist comments. So taking away the sexism we see in the first few episodes eliminates important context that makes sokka’s character development throughout the entire series significant, not just an “iffy unnecessarily bigoted message”, because it was quite literally used to show that sexism was wrong.

I wasn’t going to say anything about this at first but seeing so many people display a fundamental lack of understanding for the premise of character development and the usage of charecter flaws to promote positive messages in media set me off. Just…WTF????

(Also I know I wrote a summarized version of this in the tags for another post but I wanted to expand upon it more and make this a separate post)

[floweyseviltwin]

helloo. your palettes rule do you maybe have any tips on how you choose your colors :^) no pressure

Ah!!! Thank you!!!

my main tips are to keep values in mind, to not be afraid to saturate the HELL out of your colors, and to use the tools you’re given in digital programs!!!

elaboration & extra tips vvvv

Values- every hue has an inherent value, blue is the darkest, yellow is the lightest, so a saturation or hue change does mean a value change! Whenever i’m working on something more serious, i add a layer with a solid gray on “color“ mode to check my values throughout me making it. (do this as often as you flip your canvas, which you should also be doing fairly often) Values are super iimportant to the composition of your piece, so zoom out really far and see if your piece is still readable off of values!

Saturation- SATURATE YOUR COLORS. every time i color things, i start with a very (halfway to the full saturation or more) saturated color blocked in- often a color i want my character to be tinted- and start from that main color whenever i choose a new one. Though I like to use INCREDIBLY EYE-BLEEDINGLY saturated colors, greys have their place too!!! especially in more soft pieces. I never use fully desaturated greys, whites, or blacks. Again, i keep in mind the inherent value of colors, and use that to keep even my white tones saturated. (often i use a decently saturated cyan or yellow instead of white, and blues, purples, and dark reds instead of black) i also never touch the sides of the color picker when choosing my colors by hand, because it looks nicer.

Tools- this one’s for digital art specifically. Digital programs come with SO MANY useful tools that can improve your pieces so much, it’s silly to overlook them! USE filters, USE curves, USE layer modes!!!!! They’re there for a reason, and they can totally help if you’re too timid to saturate or darken your colors too much.

Other random tip i thought of while writing this that really opened my eyes recently. Try Starting by blocking in your LIGHTEST color, if you change it to be a wildly different hue than your character, then you can use that “white“ hue as reference for the rest of your colors. boom, LIGHTING!!!

^a doodle that came to mind using this. i started wanting the whitest color, their skin, to be this purple hue. so the color of their sweater, normally green, ended up a desaturated Orange because that’s how far it needed to go to appear green!!! Its really good to practice doing colors like this, it gets your artist brain flowin~

i freakin LOVE color theory, i’ve absorbed a lot of my color knowledge from learning from other artists. I reccomend the youtube channel Lighting Mentor for some really good tutorials on color and lighting. That’s one of my favorites, but there is literally a million channels and videos out there for you to learn from! If you type just “color theory“ into the youtube search bar you’ll find so many amazing videos by amazing artists. Don’t shy away from learning more about art!!!!! Embrace it!!!!!!!!!!!!! And GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN!!!!!!!!!! x^)♡︎♡︎♡︎♡︎

[idontmindifuforgetme]

I’ve always loved medicine bc it’s the perfect intersection of science and humanity—the two things I value above all else in this world. Truly adored it since I was in the cradle. But now I’m thinking about how so much of my journey to neurosurgery will have to involve KILLING my feelings essentially bc how do you survive otherwise

[itspileofgoodthings]

Well, I actually have the most mundane of questions, but it’s been so long since I’ve been in an English class that I feel like I’ve completely forgotten (and I’m curious how you do it): how do you go about reading a book as a class? Do you assign them the chapters to read at home and most of them actually do it? Or do you give them class time to read? Do you have the kids who try to spoil the rest of the book for the class? Basically, how does one teach a book in the year 2024?  😀

And do you have your students annotate inside their books? (I know the English teachers in my school require the students to do that, and I get why, but I inwardly shudder every time I see a student marking up a page.) 

Haha I love this question because I too am always asking myself how DOES one teach a book in 2024?

It’s sort of a combination. I absolutely assign reading every night (almost) unless it’s Shakespeare or any play in which case we read it all in class. But for a novel there’s a couple chapters a night. I read aloud to them a lot too. Sometjmes I make them read aloud to the whole class, rotating kids who read. Sometimes I assign a chapter to be read in class silently with questions or quotes due at the end of the reading. Sometimes I put them in groups and make them read aloud to each other. There’s no one way that works for sure and of course ultimately I have no control over how much they read and I’m not naive enough to think that most of the reading assigned for homework doesn’t get skipped most of the time buuuuuut.

My bottom line is that I believe it’s my job to get excited about the actual text itself (easier for me in some cases than others but overall pretty easy because it does fill me with excitement) and then commit to taking them on the journey of the story with me. And my goal—that I’m sure I often don’t reach—is to make that experience so much more fun if you have actually read. And the way that I teach is pretty text heavy which is why I always make sure I’ve read the chapters for the day and am not just relying on my memory because the way I do it is just sort of absorbing it all up like a vacuum-cleaner, schwooooop, and then either pulling stuff out of the reading to look at directly or directing them to do the same thing. So the big thing that I have going for me, if any, is buy-in. Is getting kids excited about actually reading the actual text. I also speak often and passionately about the evils of sparknotes etc. not because they help kids get better grades or whatever but because they present you with the husk and shell of a story, stripped of all that makes it interesting, and that by reading that alone they’re reading something so dry and dull and are not achieving what I always want them to achieve —which is, have an Experience with the Literature.

Again, it never works perfectly by any stretch and there are so many ways I want to explore in my quest to get better at it but overall I think, at my very best, I can create this wave of energy and excitement in the story itself which is the most organic and ultimately most helpful way to get them to want to read.

Also no haha. I don’t let them annotate! Though occasionally kids DO of course. But sometimes they bring in their own copies in order to do that. The spoilers absolutely happen and are annoying but I sort of get by it by moving on very quickly and/or talking about how it’s often not the ending but how you get there that makes it interesting. Because that’s just true!

[deepseawave]

obsessed w the tags on ur last reblog

Omgg, thank you haha, it was a quality post so I just had to appreciate it in full force 😂❤️

Can‘t believe someone would actually enjoy my yapping :,D

[heartbreakfeelsogood]

sorry to be a bitch but some of you say you love mania and still treat it badly. you say you love it but still think it’s lesser than other fob albums. you might think you’re hiding it but i can tell

[collectivecloseness]

Not to be one of those "I can fix him" type person but I honestly think that if kurt had gotten a significant other (or a friend) the whole spree thing wouldn't have happened because I think that the killing was not only about the views but also because he was lonely and didn't have anyone that cared about him

I’m going to be upfront about this now, but my answer is coming from a place of actual character analysis, rather than a ficcy answer, because it’s my honest opinion.

If you’d seriously befriended or gotten into a relationship with Kurt two, maybe a year, earlier, yes, you could have changed things. If it’d been some months earlier, no.

We see London being nothing but nice to Kurt. Giving him physical affection, flirting with him, being genuinely nice. I believe the writers put her there as a show of this. Hey, to anyone who might be attracted to Kurt at this point in the film, or feel bad for him, thinks he would only kill those who are bad, or thinks I can fix him, this character, half way through the film, is to show that no, you couldn’t. Someone nice and trying to connect with Kurt, treating him not like a loser, touching him, genuinely treating him like a human, or even like a potential love interest, is not an exception. It’s to really expand on Kurt’s character.

You saw him killing a white supremacist asshole first. Then some woman who you never really get to know, they imply her to be rude, but actually she doesn’t really do much wrong. If we’d known her character, we wouldn’t think she deserved to die, but she doesn’t get as much direction on her specifically, and we’re close to Kurt, so we don’t care. Then another asshole that he kills, and in a funny way, after defending a woman’s honour beforehand, and with Bobby, another asshole, goading Kurt, you want him to succeed with a triple KO, show that hey he is seriously doing all this, and people should be watching, because he’s actually doing something incredible. Bad, but incredible.

And then he brutally murders London, with a massive smile on his face, and he clearly planned it all and had nooo qualms about it. Not a single one. Kurt did not care. His character starts to change then. You could feel bad for London, maybe you don’t. But she dies, even though she did nothing wrong, and actually treated Kurt decently.

Then he goes on to murder a kid he used to babysit, someone he looked after for years as a child, and you start to think that’s a bit fucked up of him. But still, Bobby has been an asshole the entire time, and Kurt is our protag we’ve been with, and still like, and want to keep watching. Obviously the scene of him showering blood off while manically giggling about 100 viewers, which isn’t even a lot, is showing how mad he is, but also it’s a great scene, you’re enjoying watching his madness. And then after the whole thing with DJ Uno it’s him saying fuck the homemless, murdering an innocent driver (albeit offscreen), then insinuating SA with Jessie, and realising he murdered his mum, watching him murder his dad as well, and trying to kill Jessie too.

I mean, this is even coming from a slightly ficcy POV, but I genuinely think some of the only ways you’d survive, is A) be like Jessie apart from the show that night. Slightly famous, and with a bigger asshole in the car, someone Kurt not only would defend you against to show his fans but because he genuinely feels the need/want to with zero hesitation as a person, and the getting out when you can. Sure Kurt’s a bit obsessive, but if you’re doing something boring that night, and hopefully didn’t make too much of an impression, hopefully your content was enough for him to keep going with his plan and it’s too hard to track your address. That, or B), have seen Kurt’s socials before...

Especially if it’s slightly early on, but not his first victim. If you were like you look familiar he’d happily go on his Kurtsworld96 tangent, and say you’d been recommended that video of him and his dogs, with 12 views, and you watched it yesterday, because dogs. You even left a nice comment, again, because dogs, Kurt goes crazy. An actual fan meeting him in the wild? He wants to talk to you so badly. Wants you in the front, so he can see that his video is in your YouTube history. So he can see your reactions as he talks to you! He saw your comment, obviously, and it made him go wild. Because he barely gets any comments ever, and only like 5 times where they’ve actually been nice. You talk to him about his video, and he’s just going “Yes!” Everytime you mention a detail and he’s talking more about the bts of it and you’re interested. You follow his YouTube there and then and he’s so full of glee and warmth.

He’ll ask - to his cameras though - if his kurtie wants a selfie, and you take one with him, peace sings of course, he even adorns you with free swag from the back, a Kurtsworld96 cap. He doesn’t want to kill you because he thinks it’ll send a bad message to his fans. He still only has a couple of people watching, so he wants them to know he’s safe, and they can be his fan, or even come up to him today and say hi! His fans can get a spree ride today and meet him! So he won’t let you drink the water. He’ll let you go home.

But even that’s partly just so people don’t not want to become his fan, if he only has like nine subscribers and he’s still offing one of them. If it had been later in #thelesson, where he had more people watching, not only is he more swayed by them, but he’s less just genuinely giddy and in awe of you, but trying to put on a show, and feeling powerful enough to try and beat his score. Maybe he won’t kill you, maybe. Maybe he’ll just take you to his home instead. Maybe you can find out what the ‘marry’ option actually means. But again, even that’s a slight more ficcy answer. And I already had this as an idea for a fic plan hahaha.

Kurt is too far gone prior to the film. He is delusional, creating a complex, and all he wants is his moment in the spotlight, and eternal infamy. Even being remembered as a bad guy, and being made fun of by his ‘fans’ the entire time he is doing it.

Spree killers don’t go into their sprees thinking they’re coming out of them alive. It’s different than serial killing. Almost every single spree kill ends in the murderer being killed by police, or them killing themselves. Very rarely do they live, and if they do, it was almost definitely not in their plan to. Kurt knows he’ll probably die, he’s definitely going to get caught anyway, I mean he’s literally broadcasting all his crimes, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to get the record, for more infamy, and go as far as he can, make things as extreme as possible, for more chance of clout.

He has a shitty home life, even though he liked being social he wasn’t very good at it, he substitutes followers, numbers, for actual human connection. I don’t know if you’ve seen his Tiktok about how his customers are one step away from being a fan, a fan is a friend to him, and his friends are family. It sounds like he’s going on a bit of a rant, like someone/something reminded him of his loneliness, and he’s trying to prove it. That numbers, or good interactions with customers (we know he loves his high five star spree ratings), mean he is popular and liked and basically has friends. He needs friends to be his family, because his actual parents don’t give him the emotional support he needs. Maybe his dad tried a little, but he’s screwed things up a few too many times for Kurt to trust him enough to let him back in, or be someone for him, even if his dad did try.

Kurt is 100% lonely, and it seems he had a lonely childhood as well, from inferences, references, and even his draw my life vid, etc. If he’d had someone, a close friend, a partner, a good therapist, if he’d had someone with him maybe a year or two prior. If he’d started to obsess more over that connection with someone versus numbers, started to see a real relationship with one real and there person as more valuable then those numbers (when his viewers aren’t even nice to him but he doesn’t care because it’s still attention), it may have been different.

Obviously you don’t want Kurt to be too obsessive or dependent, especially if he feels like you’re the one person he has. But if you were there to show him healthy love (platonic or romantic), walk him through healthy boundaries that he trusts you enough to stick by, get him in therapy where he can realise that he didn’t not get hugged enough as a child and swapping human connection for clout is a toxic and not worthy opponent of real life human love. If he’d gotten that in a time before, you may have been able to pull him out before it was too late.

But Kurt hits his 23rd birthday, on April Fool’s day, and goes on his spree killing shortly after. He planned a bit before that most likely, but his birthday (I just inferred from his driving license and when the events of the film take place) was probably a catalyst, and a last straw for him to be like ‘see? Things didn’t get any better. Now I’m seriously going to do my preparations now for #TheLesson, because I’m 23 and have nothing left to live for anyway’. Especially in a society where 23 can be seen as old, especially when it comes to being an online content creator. He’s still stuck with lousy parents, doesn’t have a fancy job to at least brag about, even if he likes spreeing it still might get him snide comments off of people or his mum or something, his dj/influencer career is still going nowhere, so he might as well go out with a bang.

He’s been trying to be an influencer for ten years by the point of the film, and has watched someone he watched grow up become famous and loved and worshipped, while, even with hanging onto the coattails of Bobby to get some exposure, since he obviously will have been in some of his posts over his career, he still rarely reaches double digits. And that’s numbers alone, not likes, or comments, or dono’s, or anything even slightly personal. Not just an anonymous number behind a screen. Kurt won’t want to give up now.

And the more he’s tried and craved this attention, especially while growing up where he’ll have less adults sticking up for him or being nice or promising he’s worth something, can be something, less kids in his class who he can see everyday or have to be nice or work with him on projects, less hope from others around him that’s he’s young and can do amazing things and can be better than his parents or can get out and do something. Kurts lost more, and held onto that need for clout/attention as his only source of escape and love as times gone on. He’s romanticised the life of fame so badly. He’s obsessed over it. He’s had to numb himself more and more to the world. Nothing else matters but at least an extra number means he’s making progress, he’s doing something, he can show people. That’s one thing to at least be happy about, in his day. Everything else sucks, but if he keeps holding onto that one thing, puts all his eggs in one basket, he’ll eventually win... one way or another.

Numb the emotions. Displace that need for human love to attention from anyone and anywhere he can get it, he’s so starved, any flicker of a possibility of attention he will cling onto and fight for tooth and nail, even if they’re shaking him off and yelling at him for being a fucking freak at the same time. Kurts always been a loser, but he just doesn’t want to lose completely. He needs at least some vindication, if he gets lots of viewers, at least he’s going out with attention in one way or another.

I can’t remember the name of the psychological study, but it showed that children who didn’t have secure attachments at an extremely young age, getting worse as they got older, would suffer from disorganised attachment behaviour and indiscriminately friendly behaviour. Being super attached and overly friendly to any adult they come into contact with because they haven’t experienced that secure love they innately need. No matter if a person could be dangerous, or bad for you, or you know nothing about them, you cling to them because there’s a chance they’ll give you anything, and any attention/affection from a person you would desperately grab onto, and need it back as soon as they pulled away. I feel like Kurt would be a bit like that with people. His parents weren’t great with him, they were neglectful. He was probably seen as weird as child and didn’t have many friends in his own age group too.

If you’re even halfway nice to Kurt when he meets you, he may cling to you desperately, and use any tactics, despair, manipulation, overeagerness, anything to get you to stay. But when he substitutes no actual human connection in his life for numbers on the screen, all that gets even more scrambled. Kurts pretty fucked up, but learning you could have fame and fans instead of friends and family, watching Bobby get millions and worshipped, he sees that as even greater than just like one friend (even though he sees all his fans as friends because he severely needs friends (who are an equivalent of family to him) so so badly), because if no one is truly loving him, he can at least have hundreds, thousands, millions giving him attention. Because surely that’s got to be massive.

So while Kurt substitutes numbers online for actual affection, attention, and connection, he has been too far gone for a while. He’s changed as a person, quicker and quicker in the last year or two especially. Become less empathetic, even though he still craves love just as much, if not more. Although he might not realise it in the most coherently thought out sense, like instead of I want to settle down with someone and have steady work friends, it could devolve into I want someone to hold me, and never ever leave my side, and show haters I’m not a virgin, and have a bunch of fans who worship me, and have someone there for me, someone to collab with too, while I gain more and more loyal kurties. Even though Kurt is still emotional, his emotions are more displaced and rabid, turn more dysfunctional and toxic, letting himself spiral in unhealthy coping mechanisms because it’s easier, and then he can focus solely on his influencer career more.

Kurt Kunkle will have changed a lot as person in the year prior to #TheLesson. A simple close friend/partner and therapy sessions might not be enough to make him see what he already has right in front of him. Make him give up trying to be an influencer, delete his cringy content, and get on having a different, but nice life, with someone else, and maybe others as he goes along.

No. He cannot give up on his dream. Anyone who tells him to is just a hater. They don’t believe in him. They don’t realise how important he is, and how important he is to his fans. They think he is a loser. They just want him to change. Maybe after they’ve changed him, they’ll realise he’s still not good enough, since they clearly think it anyways because they keep trying to change him, and they’ll leave, and he’ll be back to square one, and completely alone now. He’s not going to give up on his dream, by that point, he needs it. And he will not listen to reason that he doesn’t.

Being famous has seemed like a closer more achievable goal, and the one thing he actually needs, he’d probably dump his friend/partner if they put their foot down and said it was them or Kurtsworld96. He doesn’t need anyone, by this point, everyone’s let him down. But he’s made such a grandiose thing of his channel, that he can be this good and big, that he’s too far gone. But if he loses you, and still doesn’t get that, things only get worse for him, and he only gets darker, and more needy for that fame.

The delusions of grandeur get deeper, and his god complex for his ‘fans’, for him being the one to take life so easily, gets worse. And he really doesn’t care that much.

While I do think Kurt needed all that love, the affection, attention, connection, everything, especially since he was severely starved of it as a child, if you hadn’t gotten to him about a year or so earlier, Kurt would’ve been too far gone. He would’ve changed. Wouldn’t have wanted to turn back. Your only hope of getting out alive, is your own escape attempts, or him being so obsessively and toxically attached to you, he can’t let go, even though that seriously means no matter what...

[fappellmoan]

um yall… sam’s roommate pulled up to coffee like. um. dressed like this. btw. and their hair is just like. a better fluffier mullet. is this surprising

[s1lly-gh02tz]

hihi pooks!!

day whatever-the-fuck-it-is of asking you to make a stock shuffle of spamton :)))

Dawg that idea is absolutely amazing. HOWEVER… I have another like animation idea I’d like to focus on right now. It’s an original project kinda thing. If that fails (aka I give up) I’ll try to do that 😎

[akkivee]

Blocking out kiruma facts LOL aint that the truth

The only reason I find out the other charas hes voiced now is when circles tell me about a character with a controversial jp va and I ask who and 50% it’s always him

eng fandoms that he’s touched coming out in droves to clown on him every time he’s relevant for whatever reason is so funny to me lmao

it’d be nice if hypmic was the only place i had to put up with him but he’s in slam dunk and some music anime i was watching last anime season it’s so tragic 😭😭😭

[bioswear]

I’ll say it once: I think Israel needs to fuck off, Palestine should be free, America needs to stop sticking its dick where it doesn’t belong