#Which had also not been given to him

[autumngracy]

Unrelated, but I misread this as "got a package from my dead grandpa today" and was reminded of a few years ago when I (29ish at the time) found a letter written to me by my paternal grandfather, who had died when I was 5, and whom I saw only a few times, leaving me with a single foggy memory of sitting on his lap.

He had written it to child me, and my parents never gave it to me, possibly because I was around 3 and too young to read at the time, and they meant to give it to me later and forgot.

In the letter, (it was actually a cute little greeting card) he wrote how much he enjoyed having a granddaughter and how happy he was to spend time with me.

I opened the sealed envelope and read that letter 25 years after he'd died. I didn't get to attend his funeral. I can't remember his face.

But I know that he loved me.

HES LEARNING

[icantalk710]

Looong day of catching up on emails and work to set myself up to be (mostly) on vacation as of xmas 😩☕😵‍💫

[bumblingbabooshka]

When the only person who might understand what happened- understand. Not sympathize or empathize or comfort you but understand what happened, isn't there anymore. Or: 'A Man Made Me Do Something I Didn't Want To', for when you can't talk about it or look it in the eye [Patreon | Commissions]

[youandthemountains]

it probably is insane how much I wish I could express the thing about spones. the vibes about spones. Like there's the joking fun fandom vibes and I love them, I love to play with them, of course of course. but the THING. the CORE to me. i wish i could capture it and share it.

[vaguely-concerned]

I'm fairly sure I'm less than half way through act 1, and already so much of my mental health hinges on getting to have lucanis' soft weirdly low-key voice in my ears saying absolutely insane shit and delightedly whispering 'buddy baby what'

(he genuinely does see deicide as just another part of his 9 to 5 and while not humourless in general does not understand why anyone might find this idea odd or humorous, is the best way I think I can describe his vibe. have you ever seen a man so beautiful and so autistic and also he murders people mostly politely and then goes back home and makes everyone a nutritious family dinner afterwards. add in some acute sleep deprivation and that's it that's the whole guy)

[gogandmagog]

The Blythes are Quoted by L.M. Montgomery

[statementlou]

hello :) could you maybe explain a little bit how dan wootton blackmailed louis?

ugh sorry for taking a while to get to this. The problem is I feel like the only two ways to answer this are by spending a week and a half of full time labor sifting through old posts and evidence to get every detail right and lay out an airtight case, or to halfass something very serious, and so I felt a little stuck. So since I can't seem to find a good halfway point, apologies but here is the half assed version, if you want to get into it more I invite you to do your own deep dive or talk to other people, but here's how I remember things. Louis has almost never on video explicitly said things about Larry not being real and/or anything negative about fans and their theories (mostly the opposite), up until the last couple years when he obviously decided to make a major change he didn't talk about Freddie much at all let alone saying he was his kid, honestly not that much about Eleanor even; except for in two major interviews with Dan Wootton, each of which lined up with a serious traumatic Tomlinson family event that they managed to keep out of the tabloids until the very end (Jay's illness and Fizzy's struggles with substance abuse). After the fact of those events a lot of small things that didn't make sense at the time came together to look very much like Louis traded those interviews (and those answers) for having his family's private matters kept private. Story trading of this kind is a publicly known real thing that happens, and there were various clues that suggested he was being leaned on about those stories to lend legitimacy to the idea that it was something that happened in these cases. Given what we know about Dan Wootton and how he operates even before the recent flood of information and even more now, I think it's more than likely that he has been holding the threat of outing Louis (as he has done to many other public figures) over his head for over a decade, and has used his family's tragic struggles to get Louis to dance like a fucking puppet for him and I will REJOICE at his downfall when it comes whether it is now or 20 years from now... because someday it will, he has made too many enemies to stay above it forever

[dykedvonte]

I think the most baffling thing about the Tulpar as a vessel to me is the fact that the ship really did only have a one way communication system.

I know it was cheap but even the most basic of vessels regarding major transport would have some way, shape or form for outside communication. Not only that but there was absolutely no form of innate emergency signal to show they may have been offline or in trouble despite clearly having a system to dock credits if they went off course. It's another factor that really shows that bad situations are made to get worse by design. One person who is required to relay all information to the crew and make all the choices without feedback. No way to update or call for help in case of a dire situation. No way to inform of inner personal conflicts and acquire procedures accordingly.

It really is like they are all in some sort of fucked up solitary confinement. They have their own world with strict roles that are meaningless in the end, as long as the cargo makes it, it doesn't matter what happens on that ship to the company. They don't want to hear anything and will come to conclusions on what happened based on how much pay they can withhold from the workers. Even what they do send is short, sterile and corporate to the extent it was likely written and sent out with a command by some random unmanned computer in an office.

There's something to be said about how unfair it is to force absolute power and control onto one person when you as an entity could do so much more to offload it but I've said it many times before so I won't again.

[pass3ra]

cressida's storyline was genuinely shameful tbhhh it's like they started rewriting it in the first half of the season then completely forgot about the changes they'd made to make it fit the book plot and it just ends up making everyone else look bad😐 every character in the second half got a "penelope did nothing wrong" lobotomy so we ended up with eloise completely ignoring cressida being sold off to an horrible man (when she made every effort to support her in the first half of the season) and for some reason resenting her for pretending to be lady whistledown? Then they somehow frame her ignoring colin's offensively bad pleas as it being her turning away from redemption when all she's trying to do is escape being trapped in the country with her likely abusive aunt... and it ends with her meeting her horrible fate and it still being framed as tragic only to immediately juxtapose it with the bridgerton family winning the idgaf war while gleefully seeing off francesca and her future dead husband. The bridgertons were the villains of the season frfr

[peanutbutterandbananasandwichs]

God not to engage in the most stupid discourse of all time (you did it Dean girls you invented something dumber than spagettioes discourse!). But. "Sam abandoned two dogs". I'm sorry do we really think Sam had ANY choice in the matter as to whether he brought Bones back with him when John found him after he ran away in Flagstaff??? Like seriously?! Do you think this CHILD made a conscious decision to "abandon" his doggy companion or do you think MAYBE just maybe John Winchester told him to leave the dog behind and Sam was probably pretty distraught over it actually??!

[fandom-geek]

albrecht entrati has the most arse-backwards methods of harm reduction i swear to god

...anyway. as ppl may have guessed, i wrote this post before i did the new year's eve do-over. i'm still deeply suspicious of how he knows about the operator and the drifter both existing in the same timeline or why albrecht is interested in tau, but hey, he can't eat all the blame for that - yonta admits to disabling the reliquary drive's safeties before the jump [1]. the zariman wasn't meant to reach tau in one massive jump.

but first! the kalymos sequence. "protect the vessels. repair. rebuild." the thing that leads albrecht to declaring it complete? the drifter befriending and growing close to the hex, and using that trust to save their lives.

i have questions about whether albrecht was in duviri at the same time as the drifter and knowingly left them behind, or if duviri's void nature means it always existed once the drifter created it and albrecht arrived before them. but either way, the "repair" and "rebuild" of the kalymos sequence seems to mean... fixing the drifter's isolation and rebuilding their support network? absolutely insane, i love it.

like he theoretically could've gone about it a ton of different ways, but instead forced the drifter's hand by telling them to let a city blow up and then shooting them and amir for good measure.

this man is literally the most normal orokin we know of.

and what does this mean for my thoughts on his involvement with the zariman? well, he realises in his trip to duviri that euleria created the tales to teach children how to protect themselves from the void, and the tales went on to be a foundational part of the entrati's involvement in the zariman.

you've also got the lanthorns (aka lanterns), which map voidspace onto realspace. this is presumably to make navigating the void safer. there's the exolizers, which are decorated with entrati obols, which reduce void contamination and prevent void cascades. and then there is, as melica frequently reminds us, albrecht's own archives which were used to form the curriculum. you've got the safeties on the reliquary drive - a drive which is still actually free of void corruption, even as it creeps as close as it can get.

albrecht was an outsider in orokin society. he'd been humiliated for who knows how long during his failed void experiments. drusus thought him a madman "fit for the asylum". parvos granum boasted of stealing from him without consequence in a society obsessed with ensuring the orokin were treated appropriately. once he learned of the zariman, would albrecht have had the power to stop it, even knowing what danger they faced?

then there's his line about "the unholy zariman parade". that could be a man who regrets his involvement and what his "all for the greater good" methodology did to those onboard (especially when you consider the zariman wasn't meant to do the trip in a single jump). or it could be a man who knew that zariman was fucked and worked with his daughter to do everything they could to save those onboard from the void?

and he still failed them, to the point that a child had to make a deal with the thing that he unleashed to escape and one version of them got trapped in the "execution circus" for centuries. that another child consigned themselves to oblivion to protect the origin system against that monster. that countless more were forced to become comatose child soldiers, who eventually turned on their abusers and murdered them all. no wonder he talks about repentance and absolution, huh?

[1] i footnoted this entirely because yonta is insane and i love her. [Angel rank] Yonta: "I'd figured it out! How the Zariman could jump all the way to Tau in one big bold leap, disabling the safeties in sequence. If I had it to do again, we could make it."

[lunarharp]

"Found out" set in kind of a made-up chapter where the girls are in trouble, or something.

[safety-pin-punk]

yall Im so fucking tired. This month has been exhausting. I promise Im alive, just barely functional atm.

[aliusfrater]

similar cinematographic choices to portray the same imagery with insanely different circumstantial contexts

[edwinisms]

I know how it sounds at first, but I really gotta feel bad for the boys that sacrificed edwin; I mean even the term “sacrificed edwin” paints them in a more sinister light than they really deserve– considering that wasn’t really, actually their intention.

they were bullies, they were homophobic (and/or were self loathing gay boys themselves taking it out on edwin, or were equally likely peer pressured into acting a certain way), they planned something stupid and mean to do to an innocent, anxious boy with the goal of scaring the shit out of him, all because he was effeminate and an easy target. but they didn’t know or expect any of the ritual stuff to be real. they were all laughing and joking during the ritual because it was just that to them– a joke. a cruel joke, but a joke.

teenagers can be mean and stupid and they usually regret it as adults and grow out of it / grow from it. they were stifled the chance to grow out of it, at least while alive. none of those boys deserved to be instakilled and sent to hell; they’re really not that much less deserving than edwin himself. they were all just kids, after all.

[gerrydelano]

it's been like 10 hours and i am still thinking about gerry child experimentation canon. fuck my entire life