#Like there's several examples I can think of

[lodane]

Tubi Testimony (pirate POV, tubi-n-chill x reader)

Context? i came to the site for gothic soap opera Dark Shadows on ABC in the late 1960s. if you're gonna do the same... look for "Dark Shadows: the Beginning" because that's the real 1966 start of the series (before Barnabas shows).

Ads... Like, ANY?

first things first... i assume tubi has ads but i use ublock-origin (win10, firefox/opera) and haven't seen any... at all... ever.

. n . o . t . h . i . n . g .

Account?

in my browser, you don't have to have an account. I REPEAT: NO SIGN-UP OR SIGN-IN REQUIRED. can't speak for the phone app, haven't used it 🤷‍♀️

Watch Party

i'm not sure if they're one of the services that black out the screen when you stream to friends on discord/etc. (tbh i don't think they do this? but...) if so they're one i've worked around by disabling hardware acceleration in the browser's settings. 🤷‍♀️ like candy from a babbyform.

Subtitles [CC]

the captions aren't perfect but they're a straight up SRT file 👀 you can rip with anything (including, just, like... the ublock logger showing you the direct URL). i don't know where they came from, and they don't seem *entirely* automagically generated... so, i can't tell if they're pulled from some (phoned-in) DVD, they're paying someone to caption, scraping some (really half-assed) fan subs...or some combo?

this is important to me since i'm going to be fixin' up my OWN fan subs for this show and it's great when someone saves you some legwork. i use downsub dot com (which is SHOCKINGLY not a k*nk site) to scrape the captions when i'm being lazy.

The Video Itself

the videos themselves are quite easily obtained, too... but... i'll tell ya... i never bothered ripping the show, and i stopped downloading it from elsewhere atm, because i legit enjoy just watching it on tubi... the vibes are good, the ux/ui are good, and they basically have the same files as i can find elsewhere (admittedly scuffed, for the example of Dark Shadows) on any archive or torrent for a show...

i can side-by-side a rip to a file and see there's basically no difference... so i don't think they attempt any reformatting/editing/etc. of the media they, uh, obtain... from... somewhere?

🤔

actually... i have a test for this... brb...

(pulls up Buffy's 'Once More with Feeling' on Tubi)

so, since it's shockingly different on various platforms and editions, it's a great little litmus test.

VISUAL DIFFERENCES? placing the file and tubi side-by-side, playing the exact same spot... yeah, i guess... there's a little bitsy change in color/contrast/fuzz (very likely just throwing a few less pixels on the screen) that's probably just some lossy compression they do to make it easier to house/stream all these files…

BUT WHICH VERSION IS IT? for Buffy's s06e07, OMWF, they have the 00:50:45 runtime version, which afaik is "the good* version" with all the original visuals intact. i'm sure someone is a bigger Buffy scholar than me, but i think this the "DVD version" (not an old DVR/TV rip, like i subsisted on for years, not the terrible blu-ray wherein they cut several minutes).

the captions are LITERALLY identical from the "Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 1 to 7 Mp4 1080p" torrent (which, again, are likely originally from the DVDs).

tangent: the entire scene before and after "I Have a Theory" is an amazing case study in why those Blu-Rays were strangely good 5% of the time but absolutely still ruined the show. why? well, tbh there are a couple edits this episode could use… changes that were made for the better in the blu-ray version, like... i guess i can understand taking out the donut/cruller Magnolia PUA joke, since it's very dated? along with Anya dropping the m-slur… we could lose that, for sure [which, i just checked, is in the tubi version, so it's def not blu-ray]. too bad the blu-ray also kills the pterodactyl joke??? they cut out the shared visual framing device of the shoppe's door/bell when buffy/dawn enter for one but leave the other? it feels like the level of brainpower that went into that Hitchhiker's Guide movie when they ruined the joke about "beware the jaguar" and all that in the first 10 minutes?

conclusion...

go watch Dark Shadows: The Beginning or Buffy the Vampire Slayer on tubi tv ig? do a fan sub for the first 365 episodes of an ancient soap opera in a desperate effort to get ppl to watch it?

fuck man idk...

💋

Tubi is the best streaming service because it captures the feeling of a video store, but not a corporate video store like Blockbuster, or even a good indie store, but a rundown video rental place under a overpass weeks away from closing down. You'll find, like, 2001: A Space Odyssey next to a unwatchable copy of a 70s exploitation film and a micro-low-budget indie and a movie called STRIPPER VAMPIRE MASSACRE III but you can find no evidence of STRIPPER VAMPIRE MASSACRE one or two existing.

This is a real, commercial streaming service and they've uploaded films with the DVD menu visible for the first few seconds bc it's a recording of a DVD copy. What a titan in the landscape of streaming

[dimplyowl]

One thing that’s really fun about fanfic within a fandom is that you can see familiar phrases cropping up and getting spread around that fandom. Like, there are three big ones I can think of off the cuff with ofmd:

1. When describing something with more of a vibe than a full physical description, authors will write something like “Stede was all golden curls and pink cheeks and freckles.” It almost gives a feeling of overwhelm and fascination and interest from the speaker’s pov, honing in on several qualities that speak to them, make them really feel something.

2. “He had to [blank] him about it.” Generally the verb here is kiss or fuck or something similar. It’s used to describe an urge that comes up as a result of someone/something else. You could say for example “Ed bringing him flowers was so sweet Stede had to kiss him about it.”

3. “And if…then no one else had to know” or “And if…then that was [blank’s] concern/business and no one else’s.” Used generally when a character is falling in love or pining for the other and doing something that would be incriminating or embarrassing were someone else to find out. For example you might say “And if Ed spent his entire drive home thinking about the way Stede’s thigh had felt pressed up against his, then no one else had to know.”

Anyway, I just think it’s sweet that we see words or phrases in other people’s works that we like so much that they sort of become characteristics of fics from certain fandoms or even certain ships. There are probably a bunch more, feel free to add on if you think of any!

[certifiedsexed]

What even is the term sanitary though. Like if it's about "if it gets in you you'll have an infection" STI's are certainly unsanitary and that doesn't say anything about the person's moral character or something. If it isn't, what is even the point of the term.

— signed, a severely disabled, and very tired, guy

Well, sanitary has more than one definition, like a lot of words. It actually has quite a few definitions, all revolving around "cleanliness".

For example, it can mean "kept clean of dirt and waste", but it can also mean "free of dirt and germs that carry infection and disease". By some definitions, STIs can be unsanitary and by other definitions, they're not.

So automatically pinning someone with an STI/D as unsanitary [to have sex unprotected with] isn't a great idea just based on the basic fact that "kept clean of dirt and waste" is the more common use of sanitary.

But it's also not a great idea when terms like that have repeatedly been used to moralize having an STI/D and you're not clarifying specifically what definition you're using.

It doesn't automatically say anything about someone's character, that's true! I am not trying to say that fitting the definition of "unsanitary" is an automatic bad thing at all. As someone who's also disabled, I very much understand where you're coming from on that.

But making sweeping statements like "having sex with someone with an STI/D without protection is automatically unsanitary" is demoralizing and inaccurate.

You can have an STD, have sex, and there be an almost nonexistent possibility of someone catching it, it just depends on the STD and how you're managing it and how you're having sex.

I wasn't pointing any of that out to try and redefine the term "sanitary" or something. I was pointing it out both for accuracy and because by the common definition of the term, that was edging into language that could easily be construed as bigoted.

[Also, as I mentioned, you are almost never safe from infection/disease during sex. By that definition, all sex is unsanitary, so to pick people with STI/Ds out specifically is shit.]

Maybe that's just me being picky but given I'm a sex ed scholar, I think it's fair to be a little hyper-specific sometimes on language.

Hope this makes sense. If not, feel free to let me know or ask for clarification. <3

[centrally-unplanned]

Do you know anything about Arthur C Clarke's reception in Japan and in Japanese pop culture? I just finished reading Childhood's End because I've seen it referenced in Xenogears, Gurren Lagann and Planet With, which isn't objectively a lot but more than the zero times I've seen it in American pop Scifi. Makes me curious how big he was over there.

Oh yeah, he was quite big in Japan! Essentially "all" the classic Sci Fi was, and Clarke was one of the biggest. Childhood's End specifically was one of Yukio Mishima's favourite books, for example. All of his works were pretty widely translated soon after release (Childhood's End was definitely available in Japan in the 1960's, that I know), and were very popular with both the SF crowd and the literary scene. In general, he was the right blend of "hard" sci fi with fantastical/spiritual elements that was very much in vogue at the time. And in the early history of Japan's animage community, those were all mushed together as one scene, only moving to more separate tracks in the 1980's. I remember in one of the essays I translated over the years, literary critic Nozomi Omori (in 1997) makes one of those "classic works like" comments and Clarke/Childhood's End is his go-to to illustrate the point. I think you can argue it is in the top 5 most famous works in this era.

A bunch of the specific references you are seeing are the unique lineage of some ~80's anime works like Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked. Yoshiyuki Tomino (gundam creator), who directed the film, was a big Clarke fan, 2001 most specifically I think, and the film has several direct nods to him. There are other works that draw from this well, Ideon is just the biggest, and the one that was the most direct inspiration for Evangelion as Anno was a big fan. From there you can see the references go out - Gurran Laagan is a Gainax work, Planet With's creator Satoshi Mizukami was a huge Gainax fan (particularly FLCL, shout out!), etc - as you get later the references become second-order like that, less people reading the classics but the ideas are in the water. Though I don't want to overstate that direct link - Xenogears lead creator Tetsuya Takahashi is just a direct fan of Clarke as well, and explicitly pulled from such works for the project (you can see a bunch in works by Square in the 90's)

Though a personal note, you will if you google around find people saying Evangelion was "referencing" Childhood's End with Instrumentality? Best I know that isn't true, instrumentality itself as a word is a nod to Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith, and Anno is on record saying it is a shallow reference, he just thought the word sounded cool. Anno was not a classic SF fan, he is one of those "second order" guys where he is picking up the stuff movies like Ideon are putting out, but isn't interested in their classic origins.

[artbymesa]

I was just gonna put this in the tags, but maybe this will help someone else to share my story if anyone else feels less alone. And it got long. I was a valedictorian in highschool. I would not recommend it.

Take it from me-- Do well in school, absolutely. Please try to do well in school. Please. But Do Not let it destroy your mental health the way I let it. I had a very unhealthy relationship with it and tied it to my self worth.

(Story time under read more if it helps anyone)

Oversharing time-- it was my priority in highschool. It was a goal I set for myself to prove I could do it, and if I didn't, I think I saw myself as a failure. This was mostly self imposed, and theres probably a psychological explanation for this I wont get into for the sake of length. But I thought if I could at least do this, I had something on paper that I could point to for myself in a sort of external self validation or worth. "I dont know what metric to gauge myself on, but at least I accomplished this". Call it a method of self soothing, I suppose.

It led to almost daily panic attacks that I could not publically control. The whole nine yards, too. It was exhausting and physically draining. If I were honest with me-- I isolated myself. More human contact, more going out with friends, more of me being the one to make the point of reaching out to other people would have made a world of a healthier difference. My focus might not have been so singular and borderline obsessive because it was the only thing i held onto. It put me in a horrible place mentally, and it has severely affected my adult life. I am still trying to unlearn the "if I mess up learning how to do this on the first try, i am a failure" when its like....just learning how to pipe icing on cupcakes or something. I tied my worth to my ability to learn, and that can become extremely unhealthy in a hurry. Especially when I already had mental health issues that were at odds with learning quickly-- like panic attacks that come on fast and wipe my memory and ability to think clearly. Its like I chose the hardest thing for my brain to do, and that was the metric I weighed my self worth on.

What I told myself at the time was some variation of "if I do this, i'll have the best chance at financial support or a full ride for college." That doing this means I will become self sufficient.

That's not how it works, and thats not how it worked.

I got a $1k grant, which was nice, but nowhere near the full ride or anything close to the "heavens of opportunity rain down upon me" sort of thing I had hoped for in my head.

Valedictorians make for good metrics for the school. Attendance records make for good records for the school. Not in any way saying kids SHOULDN'T try to do well in school (please for the love of god, we need every scrap of education we can get in this country), but please find a healthy medium too.

Doing well enough in school and not letting it destroy your mental health do not have to be mutually exclusive. A 3.5 is probably good enough. That was the cut off for one of my bigger transfer scholarships later down the road, transfering from one college to another. Nowhere did I have to continue maintaining a 4.0.

Besides. I didnt get a 4.0 by retaining functional information. I got it by gaming the system of how testing worked.

The example I use is a very dry history class in college I had. Our final exam was the culmination of all of our final tests. Same questions, same answers. I did not remember the content. I did not learn anything. What I did? I remembered the first three words of the question and the first three words of the answer, and remembered them by association. And then I forgot it all within the hour.

In the meantime, foster your friendships. Good friendships. This can create business connections in the future. Kindness and community will get the majority of people further in life than being any kind of top of your class, I promise you.

But most of all, be kind to yourself and treat yourself gently.

are you or have you ever been a straight-A student?

[sickfictropes]

You know that trope where everyone except the person who has portal powers feels violently ill after going through a portal? A prime example of this is Wakfu (Netflix)

I feel like this needs to be explored. I want to see it happening for longer and I want to see more side effects!!

Teammate barely being able to walk after teleportation!! And being too nauseous to eat or drink!!! and not being able to use their own powers because their body is too wired!!!!

Teleporter panting from exertion after using their powers to transport several other characters but pulling themself together to take care of them!! Feeling guilty even though it was their only choice!!!

and who said Teleporter HAD to be immune to their own power? give them some spotlight too. maybe they can go through portals on a regular basis but do it too much or too fast and it's just as bad for them

what do you think

i've never actually seen this trope before but i like it a lot for reasons not at all related to the fact that i have an OC universe of space scientists who frequently teleport on and off the ship,,,,, 👀

but the teleporter being a person is cool too!! them feeling horrible about having to put the team through that but knowing that they had no other choice omg

[oifaaa]

When I was younger I used to get so pissed off by high-school aus specifically bc no matter where the original story takes place the au would always be set in an American high-school and American High schools confuse the hell out of me

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I mean... while I don't think you're wrong about how the goal of mechanics like reaction rolls or morale rolls probably is more "let's introduce more randomness" than "let's treat our enemies as living creatures rather than punching bags for the PCs to kill", but I think saying that the difference in the playstyles encouraged by the mechanical design of old-school D&D vs modern D&D is a matter of simply how structured the game is ends up being extremely dismissive of the ways in which the design of old-school D&D does organically disincentivize combat as the default encounter disposition on the player side (regardless of if that was the design goal or not) by making combat an extremely suboptimal default way to respond to encounters.

As you say, the flavor text of various monsters in modern D&D is a clear indication that combat should not be the default assumption, unless the players choose to ignore it. But the thing is. In modern D&D you *can afford* to ignore it in a way that you really can't in earlier editions of the game.

I'm gonna be using the 1981 edition of Basic D&D (a.k.a. B/X edition) as my example here because it's the edition I'm most familiar with, but pretty much all of this is applicable to all TSR editions of the game (except maybe 2e)

In all editions of D&D, HP is a resource, and turning an encounter into a fight is synonymous with consuming it. However, in editions like B/X, this resource is scarce and hard to recover. At early levels, even the beefiest classes in the game are never more than one or two solid hits away from 0 HP (my last B/X character was a fighter who started with 4 max HP at level 1. FOUR.), and once you reach 0 you're DEAD dead, no negative HP like in 3.x or death saves like in 5e. Magical healing is scarce (clerics can't even cast ANY spells until level 2. At which point they gain the ability to cast ONE spell per day), and without magical healing you naturally heal at a rate of 1hp PER DAY of rest.

By contrast, in something like 5e (or, to a lesser degree, even 3.x), where your characters have larger HP pools, there are several guardrails to prevent you from dying once you reach 0hp, your cleric is a much more plentiful source of magical healing, and even without access to magical healing you can use short rests to recover a substantial chunk of hp after a fight, HP is a resource that is much easier to justify spending. It's plentiful, easy to recover, and even running out of it is less of a big deal.

My point here being that, when you're playing an edition of the game where every time a fight happens there is a not insignificant chance that someone might end up dead within the first round of combat (and even if everyone does survive, the fight will likely leave the party in a state that might take several in-game days to fully recover from), you kinda can't afford to ignore any opportunity to NOT turn an encounter into a fight.

Like sure, in an edition like 3.x talking down the goblins instead of fighting by opening trade negotiations is a cool thing that MIGHT happen if the DM crafted the encounter that way and the players are so inclined. But in B/X talking down the goblins instead of fighting by opening trade negotiations is something you want to be doing as often as possible unless you want a TPK every couple sessions.

Like... I think there's something to be argued about how much these games are ACTUALLY played that way, but if we're looking purely at the gameplay style incentivized by the game design itself, I think it's plainly wrong to say that there's not a palpable difference in the degree to which combat is mechanically incentivized in post-3e D&D vs older editions.

So there is a pretty clear shift in playstyle between TSR D&D and WotC D&D: for better and for worse, D&D 3e introduced the idea of encounter balance, de-emphasized mechanics that had previously encouraged the GM to think of the monsters as real living creatures (reaction rolls, morale, etc.), and it had the effect of making D&D a much more combat-focused game. D&D has always been a game that's opinionated about combat, it's basically the most expressive and detailed form of play regardless of edition, but combat in the TSR editions was not exactly zoomed in and tactical. The WotC editions purposefully made combat zoomed in, granular, and tactical.

And this has had an effect on playstyle: since combat is now the main form of player expression what players actually want is for their characters to get into combat. Because combat is the most fun part of the game. But the game has also changed from the largely amoral dungeon-crawling game into a game of fantasy heroics (even though a lot of the trappings of the amoral dungeon-crawling still remain, which contributes to the dissonance), so you can't just have the player characters going into combat for the sake of it. That would frame the player characters as kind of Fucked Up, and we can't have that in our supposedly heroic fantasy.

What you end up with is a variety of contrivances like "they're bandits," "they're cultists," or, my all-time favorite, "they attacked first" to make the action seem morally justifiable, even though gameplay is still motivated by a desire to fight. The monsters fight to the death and, importantly, can often not be reasoned and negotiated with, partly because combat is supposed to be the fun, engaging part everyone is here to do, but also because if they actually acted like reasonable people it could cause dissonance with the whole "the player characters are the goodest heroes."

As my friend @tenleaguesbeneath once called it: what is actually going on is that the player characters are hunting people and monsters who have been programmed to fight to the death and never negotiate for sport, while justifying it as self-defence.

It's a simple power fantasy, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Sometimes you want to play a morally uncomplicated game about killing guys with cool magic swords. But I think it's also fun to think about what the specific types of monsters players end up fighting reveals about Society the invisible, unexamined ideology lying under the surface that the designers of even modern D&D have failed to examine. And to me it often reads like a frontier justice fantasy. None of that is to detract from anyone's joy of the game, and for me it's just fun to think about and post about this stuff while Still Enjoying the Game, but if someone expressing that opinion makes you feel uncomfortable, why? That's pretty silly imo.

[firestorm09890]

Penny stardewvalley makes me so sad because she's SO sensitive to, like, basically everything you tell her (telling her that you can't stand children while two children are nearby is a pretty lousy move but -1500 friendship?? being a jerk to other characters' faces typically loses you about 50 points, and if you choose the option labeled "creepy" and ask Leah for a kiss in her 2 heart event she physically hits you and kicks you out of her house but that's only -100 friendship…) and so if you want to befriend her it's a whole lot of lying and tiptoeing around her feelings (2 hearts: George was right but saying that makes her feel bad. 6 hearts: her food sucks but even if you try to be polite about it she feels like a failure; only a bald-faced lie pleases her. 8 hearts: saying you don't want to be tied down with a family loses you a little bit of friendship and she's only happy if you say you want kids) and I can't help but think she's a product of her environment. She lives in a trailer with only her mother, who gets drunk every night and has something of a temper. Penny's like a skittish rescue animal who won’t even come out from hiding under something unless you leave her lots of treats

[fierceawakening]

So my dash is doing a thing talking about how there are all kinds of studies showing weight loss is unsuccessful but not actually linking them

Is there actually something more recent than that one study from the 1950s saying 90some% of diets fail? I’ve gone looking for something more recent in the past and not found it.

Also iirc that 1950s study really didn’t define a diet clearly and carefully, though I’m not looking at the criticisms of it this second.

A lot of people use “diet” in different ways. Some people mean “any intended change in habits, such as smaller portions of desserts,” and some people mean “things called ‘diets,’ which prescribe specific patterns of eating, usually involving limiting, excising, or focusing on particular foods.”

Those seem different to me, though I’m open to examining something post 1960 that gives evidence they should be considered statistically identical and would gladly eat crow if it was unambiguous that these are the same.

[vintagerobin]

While that's true for most male superhero mantles, I don't think it holds as true for mantles using the word "girl". Originally, Barbara was an adult when she began as Batgirl, and while she's been de-aged several times, she's always remained Batgirl well into her adulthood, only changing names after her back injury. Another example I can think of off the top of my head is Kara, who has kept the Supergirl name past her mid twenties before too.

I don't think it's bad writing necessarily, just a combination of "girl" having come to be a more nebulous term and those characters being very iconic in those roles. I mean, Barbara isn't even the original Batgirl. She definitely could have taken "Batwoman" at some point in her long history, but she really defined the role of "Batgirl", taking that name from meaning just a sidekick love interest to meaning an independent character with her own motivations and goals. She made "Batgirl" far more recignizable than "Batwoman". The name has so much more weight than your typical sidekick mantle because of that.

Back to Cass - I get wanting her to be Batman, I also think that'd be cool, but imo there's nothing embarrassing or childish about her being Batgirl. The name also means a lot to her personally, being a connection to two of the most important people in her life. Personally, I prefer it to her using a Bat-related name with no direct tie to Babs like "Black Bat".

I hate the fact we are at a point Cass HAS to be Batgirl to re-establish importance to her character after years of being neglected but she is like 23 at this point but can't take the mantle of batman.

[thefleshyougoveggie]

this hole i saw on my walk in the woods is sooo the buried coded

[hearts401]

We need to start treating bad writing like bad art and im not kidding

[wellzofyouth]

That one post of my mine predictably aged like fine wine. Never let somebody on comic twitter in the writer's room😭😭😭 Like imagine a 1 to 1 adaptation of literally any event?? -1b at the box office. "Who are these people???"

[chiveoil]

for me what works best is knowing that i can’t form habits in a way that is automatic, like i can’t just do things in the same way every day without thinking about it, i think that is a pretty big feature of adhd and i’d be setting myself up for failure and feeling bad about myself if i saw that as the goal. but what i can do is check off things i want to do daily on a list.

for a while i’ve using a notebook/bullet journal type system for this, writing myself lists and checking items off as i go every day. i have 15 things on this list, but the only actual ‘habit’ i have really managed to form is ‘open my bullet journal throughout the day’, which i achieve by keeping it within arms reach pretty much at all times. when i tick one thing off the list, i look at the next thing, and i’m reminded to do it as well.

the actual things i put on the list are things i have learned over the course of several years that i need to do daily in order to stay generally okay (like: talk to someone i love, go for walks, eat regular meals) so it helps that these things are very important, if a lot of them were aspirational or unrealistic in some way then i doubt i would be bothering to track them once the initial burst of motivation wore off, but i have been doing this pretty consistently for years. for new habits that are stretches that i want to introduce, i add them to my list one at a time, or i add them to a similar list of things that i want to try do weekly or monthly. starting slow and keeping it within this framework is the only way to do it for me.

the pen and paper system i’ve been using for a little over a year, i used to use habitica for a few years before that. there are a few habit building apps that work like this and habitica is a really good option imo. it’s very geared to adhd in various ways and works very well without the paid features, it’s also available on desktop. potential downside that the fun rpg element of the app can be a bit confusing to get to grips with at first.

another thing that is important for me to know as a person with adhd is that no one ‘system’ of keeping track of my daily tasks will work forever, and i will have to be adaptable when it stops working. right now my notebook/bullet journal system works for me, in future i will have to try something else, but the basic system of ‘daily repeating to do list of things i absolutely do have to try to do every day or there will be really negative consequences for my life’ is how i do it and that will be the same whatever framework i put it in. example of another way to do this could be: a big whiteboard with the days of the week and you give yourself ticks or gold stars, put out somewhere you will see it and be reminded of the list.

tldr basically with adhd you need constant reminders and the way i do that is Daily Recurring To Do Lists.

Does any fellow adhder have any tips on how to form habits in adulthood? I’ve been trying to look online and everything that seems promising leads to a subscription to learn more

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

Shocking news: being "high maintenance" aka going out of your way and spending time and energy on doing many little things to have your life the way you like it ... actually improves your quality of life