#You made it a trend and something that's not even relevant any more

[futurewdclandonorris]

If i see one more stupid take how Lando doesn't have a championship mentality and Oscar does and is a better driver and that mclaren should focus on him instead*

[ratatatastic]

I'm new here and the Tkashirt reminded me of a question I have: *Is* Cats social media particularly fun and unhinged? Because I love it but I don't know how unusual it is for the NHL today

i am quite literally the worst person to ask these things considering i dont perceive other teams consciously and i have them all blocked on all socials for my own sanity because i am a hater deep down to my bones so quite honestly-

the best i can do is

[kneworder]

angry at the oscars barbie nominations but in an annoyinger way (i think nominating ryan reynolds makes sense but the best picture and best supporting actress noms are ridiculous)

[mistakenot4892]

Disclaimer that this is a post mostly motivated by frustration at a cultural trend, not at any individual people/posters. Vagueing to avoid it seeming like a callout but I know how Tumblr is so we'll see I guess. Putting it after a read-more because I think it's going to spiral out of control.

Recent discourse around obnoxious Linux shills chiming in on posts about how difficult it can be to pick up computer literacy these days has made me feel old and tired. I get that people just want computers to Work and they don't want to have to put any extra effort into getting it to Do The Thing, that's not unreasonable, I want the same!

(I also want obnoxious Linux shills to not chip in on my posts (unless I am posting because my Linux has exploded and I need help) so I sympathise with that angle too, 'just use Linux' is not the catch-all solution you think it is my friend.)

But I keep seeing this broad sense of learned helplessness around having to learn about what the computer is actually doing without having your hand held by a massive faceless corporation, and I just feel like it isn't a healthy relationship to have with your tech.

The industry is getting worse and worse in their lack of respect to the consumer every quarter. Microsoft is comfortable pivoting their entire business to push AI on every part of their infrastructure and in every service, in part because their customers aren't going anywhere and won't push back in the numbers that might make a difference. Windows 11 has hidden even more functionality behind layers of streamlining and obfuscation and integrated even more spyware and telemetry that won't tell you shit about what it's doing and that you can't turn off without violating the EULA. They're going to keep pursuing this kind of shit in more and more obvious ways because that's all they can do in the quest for endless year on year growth.

Unfortunately, switching to Linux will force you to learn how to use it. That sucks when it's being pushed as an immediate solution to a specific problem you're having! Not going to deny that. FOSS folks need to realise that 'just pivot your entire day to day workflow to a new suite of tools designed by hobby engineers with really specific chips on their shoulders' does not work as a method of evangelism. But if you approach it more like learning to understand and control your tech, I think maybe it could be a bit more palatable? It's more like a set of techniques and strategies than learning a specific workflow. Once you pick up the basic patterns, you can apply them to the novel problems that inevitably crop up. It's still painful, particularly if you're messing around with audio or graphics drivers, but importantly, you are always the one in control. You might not know how to drive, and the engine might be on fire, but you're not locked in a burning Tesla.

Now that I write this it sounds more like a set of coping mechanisms, but to be honest I do not have a healthy relationship with xorg.conf and probably should seek therapy.

It's a bit of a stretch but I almost feel like a bit of friction with tech is necessary to develop a good relationship with it? Growing up on MS-DOS and earlier versions of Windows has given me a healthy suspicion of any time my computer does something without me telling it to, and if I can't then see what it did, something's very off. If I can't get at the setting and properties panel for something, my immediate inclination is to uninstall it and do without.

And like yeah as a final note, I too find it frustrating when Linux decides to shit itself and the latest relevant thread I can find on the matter is from 2006 and every participant has been Raptured since, but at least threads exist. At least they're not Microsoft Community hellscapes where every second response is a sales rep telling them to open a support ticket. At least there's some transparency and openness around how the operating system is made and how it works. At least you have alternatives if one doesn't do the job for you.

This is long and meandering and probably misses the point of the discourse I'm dragging but I felt obligated to make it. Ubuntu Noble Numbat is pretty good and I haven't had any issues with it out of the box (compared to EndeavourOS becoming a hellscape whenever I wanted my computer to make a sound or render a graphic) so I recommend it. Yay FOSS.

[lizardsfromspace]

One aspect of TikTok that's faded, but which was the major driver of panic about it for most of its life, was the TikTok Challenge: the moral panic about dangerous or offensive trends on TikTok that were taking over.

And I do mean moral panic because even basic research turns up that the majority of TikTok Challenge stories were unfounded, or exaggerated.

Many of them straight-up didn't happen. There are trends that never had a challenge attached at all, like Momo, but others were never a thing on TikTok at all. The stories have a similar form to them. For instance, there was once the "shoot up your school challenge" that sparked a huge series of warnings and cries to repeal Section 230 and ban this sick filth...and then, at the very end of those stories, an acknowledgement that there was no source video - that no one had found evidence it existed on TikTok at all.

Let's define a "challenge", because any bad thing that happens on TikTok was branded a "challenge". But in my view, it has to contain, well, a challenge: some element of showing yourself doing it, and then daring others to do it, too. As we'll see, it's actually pretty difficult to find evidence many challenges ever existed

One of the more well-documented is the alleged Benadryl challenge. In mid-2020, a trio of teens overdosed on Benadryl and claimed they got the idea from a TikTok claiming you can get high off taking it. They were treated at the hospital, and TikTok deleted the video in question and blocked the relevant hashtags. But then a couple months later stories about Benadryl overdose deaths started attributing it to the "Benadryl challenge". But...all they were doing was citing the original story as proof the challenge existed. A story that doesn't include a challenge, and where the TikTok video referenced had been deleted and the topic blocked. When a reporter actually investigated, they found no evidence of any challenge videos, and found that, just as TikTok had said, the search itself was blocked. In other words, and this is a trend you see a lot in coverage, the existence of a panic about something on TikTok meant everything sprang from TikTok: because of that story, any teen overdosing on Benadryl *had* to have gotten the idea from a TikTok challenge - TikTok had to be grafted on to every relevant story regardless of relevance, and each new story including it became more evidence it was all down to TikTok. Because teens would never do something irresponsible without an app...would they?

So let's talk about the elephant in the room. Tide pods. The Tide pod challenge was a thing, but it was not a thing to the extent that the media made it into a thing. So how many teens ate Tide pods?

86. Non-stop global media coverage for months over 86 teens doing a stupid stunt. While over 10,000 kids were accidentally exposed to laundry detergent in the year before with hardly any coverage. Discussions over, hey, maybe memes aside it's bad for children to have this dangerous thing look so colorful essentially stopped completely thanks to this panic, during which time stories about children unknowingly eating Tide pods were folded into the panic and attributed to the Tide Pod Challenge. Discussion of actual product safety, discussion of how to prevent harm to over TEN THOUSAND people, had to give way to a moral panic about 86

86 sounds bad, but is a really small number in the scheme of things - and absolutely disproportionate to the media coverage, which lasted for months and endlessly blasted all young people for eating Tide Pods.

There are others. For instance, after Kia failed to include an anti-theft device in their cars, thefts of Kia cars skyrocketed, and some young joyriders posted videos of this on TikTok and other platforms - and posted guides on how to do it yourself. These videos were removed, but somehow "someone posted a guide to steal an easy-to-steal car online" turned into "there's a challenge on TikTok daring you to steal cars" which then turned into attributing all thefts of the car without anti-theft tech in it to TikTok. But in this case, there is a source video, an original video that made stealing Kias look cool.

It was posted on Youtube.

"Slap a Teacher" went viral, and was a complete hoax, as was NyQuil Chicken. Many of the videos in the "Devious Licks" challenge were, as well, hoaxes. These stories go viral enough to spark a well-meaning FDA warning saying hey, don't do this, which is taken as evidence that people were doing it. But in just about every case, it's relatively few people, or the challenge didn't exist. The stories have a familiar form: description of death or incident, statement from concerned parents, interviews with cops and maybe a child psychologist, and then a denial from TikTok. What these stories rarely, if ever, include is any citations of where on TikTok the challenge began, or any independent research into them. Notably, even stories admitting it's a hoax often go on to talk about how we need to control it anyway. When TikTok said a video didn't exist on their platform, it's natural to suspect the social media corporation of lying, but oddly they appear to have been telling the truth most of the time, and were rightly saying content didn't exist or only made up a few videos stopped early on.

(I'm mainly talking about America, but this happened internationally, too. There was, as I understand it, a major panic about the "Charlie Charlie" challenge in Latin America - indeed, it was the panic that brought it to the Anglosphere - but it was, you know. Literally just Ouija boards/Bloody Mary. Meanwhile, the "Blue Whale" challenge started in Russia, off a reporter essentially imagining a game because two teens who died by suicide had images of blue whales on their computers, but there's no evidence of any challenge - but the press, normally reluctant to report on suicides, rushed to give breathless coverage to teen suicides - which, after all, only happen due to the Blue Whale game - likely causing copycats of a game that never existed. Most ridiculously, when a video of a creepy statue of Michael Jackson went viral, Mexican police warned parents about the "Ayuwoki Challenge". Which was...looking at a creepy statue of Michael Jackson online)

But let's address the real elephant in the room. Of the TikTok challenges that really took place to some degree, what are they? Devious Licks was about vandalizing school property. The Tide Pod challenge and its ilk were about eating something stupid. The Milk Crate challenge and its like were about doing dangerous stunts.

And I experienced TikTok challenges like this when I was in high school. I remember this group of kids who egged one of their number on to punch glass, which shredded their hand; I remember people being dared to snort pixie stix dust off the table; I remember people stealing the soap dispensers from the bathroom and the mouse balls out of the mice, because oh wait, it wasn't TikTok challenges, all that happened when I was in 9th grade in 2004

The TikTok challenges that are *real* are just...routine teen misbehavior? Being attributed to an app ruining the kid's minds. Teenagers have been peer pressuring each other into doing stupid things since time immemorial; it didn't start because of phones.

The people who spread these panics did or saw equally dumb things when they were that age. Now that they're older, and parents themselves, it's scary and dangerous. How do you reconcile that? You don't - what you did as a kid was an innocent prank, the same acts happening now are scary and Never Happened When I Was A Kid. So there must be some explanation. In the 80s it was metal music, in the 90s & 00s it was video games, and in the 2020s it was TikTok Challenges. There always has to be some media corrupting the youth into doing what the youth have always done, because "you grew up and became more mature and aware of your own mortality" is not an option you want to dwell on. Meanwhile, actual harmful trends go unnoticed; most of the people who spent a year dunking on teens bc 86 people ate Tide Pods have no idea about how many teen boys have become, essentially, cultists for figures like Andrew Tate or how hard they're being recruited; coverage was lavished on challenges that never existed, but not on true crime obsessives starting a hate campaign claiming a trans woman on TikTok was a serial killer

There are two other factors here. One is a drive to not take the issues facing young people seriously. This has been a long-term function for moral panics - since it's easier to say kids don't face any real problems, they're just being corrupted by outsiders, and we just need to ban video games or "Satanic" music or Slenderman or TikTok challenges to 'fix' it. You had real problems as a teen; but these kids today, they're just whiners. If teens no longer overdose or act out or harm themselves for any reason but Being Told To Online, then there's no need to look any deeper at society

The other is that the defining moral panic since 2020 has been the idea that young people are a barely-literate fascistic mob of unruly hooligans who are acting out More Than Ever, a moral panic that's being used to push legislation that harshly cracks down on the rights of young people and their access to society and their ability to be independent from their parents. But I heard some anecdotes that kids are, like, totally mean now when they never were before so it's probably true, and we should make them their parent's property to stop it

[bonefall]

Do you think the clan cats having less kits per litter/less litters in general (they already have less kits than real cats) would fix the bloated cast issue? Because I look at Ginga and the cast is also bloated and only a few characters have offspring but the author keeps making other dogs join Ohu and refuses to kill the old as fuck dogs

I don't think there's any one particular "solution" for stopping bloat in series that manage large casts through generations like Ginga or WC, it's actually a few things

The #1 MOST important thing I think about bloat, though, is that it's about a ratio of quality to quantity. NOT raw size.

A long while back I made a couple of allegiance lists for certain eras. In spite of my Clans having the same (or even higher!) population as canon, I NEVER struggled with those lists being bloated. If anything, sometimes if a Clan's below 30, they look too small.

(I'm sure you can find those lists if you look, they're probably tagged BB!Allegiance, but they might be a bit out of date)

That's because in BB, there's dozens of HUGE cultural additions to Clan life. In "administration," alone, there's 3 new major divisions of skills (hunting, cooking, construction) ALL with their own "head" of that patrol, plus canon's leader, deputy, and Cleric. Not to mention subtitles like the Educator and maybe a Chaperone/Permaqueen!

So to bring it back to that "Ratio Theory," If our Clan is 30 cats, those 8 major roles immediately give at least a slight amount of character to a little over 25% of our group, with each role being something that the other 75% of cats can desire and compete for.

Canon's measly 3 is 10%, and you can ONLY vy for deputyship if you want any power. There's nothing else to BE ambitious about.

You can make the ratio higher by having hobbies, drama, skills, arts, etc. Basically; characterize background characters! Which should be obvious!! Give them traits that are useful and interesting and show the community being valuable.

It won't feel like "bloat," it has the sense of communities living their lives. Even if they go quiet for a while, when they return (just look at how much people like seeing Sedgecreek or Hallowflight mentioned lmao) it feels like meeting an old friend again.

WAYS TO MAKE BLOAT FEEL WORSE;

Giving too many "opportunities" to old characters.

Think of every relevant role a cat gets as a meal, and the bigger the role the more they've eaten. If you're only giving value to your old fanfavs, you're not doing much for them because they're already full while the rest of your cast starves.

Haphazardly killing off characters.

I actually strongly resent the "trend" where people conflate good storytelling with an author's willingness to suddenly kill characters off. I think it comes from the same place as needing to "outsmart" your audience.

If you kill off a character with VALUE, an unfinished arc, interesting connections, it's just unsatisfying. The Erins have this problem of killing background characters with some established lore or value (like Harelight and Briarlight) while leaving uninteresting background nobodies behind that they never build back up.

Before killing a character, ask yourself what their role in the cast is, and their dynamic with others. Try not to axe them without a plan to fill that "role" and/or comment on their absence. Replace what you take.

EASY REPLACABILITY

This one is HUGE, this is why Ginga is so bad with this. If a bunch of dogs die, 100 random soldiers can replace them from somewhere. That is REALLY bad, because all the random influxes of new characters do not have a chance to replace what was lost.

It also makes death feel cheaper. Oh no! Background dog 7446 got eaten by the newest type of bear. This won't make battles harder to win or cause us to lose any valuable skills though. Also a new dog just walked in from offscreen.

Population Growth outpaces Death Rate

AKA your cast is growing too fast and you're not getting rid of old characters. This is what anon was asking about-- and it CAN help to make births less frequent and litters smaller. Make sure to pair with preventing lots of new, adult characters to casually wander in, too.

ALL of these tips have exceptions and places where they can (and should) be subverted and broken. But these are just things I think about

[david-talks-sw]

An allergy to the Prequels

While I'm putting together a post about the evolution Lucasfilm's transmedia strategies, this part kinda turned into its own thing!

So I'm not sure if anyone else noticed, but, uh... there hasn't been that much Prequel content since the Disney sale, right?

'Couple novels and comics, some episodes... but nothing meaningful.

The more I look into it, the more it feels like a deliberate avoidance to touch on anything Prequel-related - beyond the required quota, that is - to a point where they'd rather tell stories set during periods that are Prequel-adjacent (Dark Times, High Republic) than something set around Episodes I, II and III.

On-screen policy: "pretend they never happened"

I mean, this one's no secret. When The Force Awakens had been announced, with J.J. Abrams at the helm, everyone sighed in relief. "Finally, George Lucas won't keep ruining the franchise."

When Abrams had been announced as the director of Episode VII, I remember this cringey animated video started circulating online, titled "4 Rules To Make Star Wars Great Again" or "Dear JJ Abrams":

“Star Wars isn’t shiny and clean... Star Wars is a western.”

If you ask me, those two things are not mutually exclusive.

'Cause Star Wars has always been both, for many Prequel kids. Both clean and dusty, Coruscant and Tatooine. There was never a disconnect between the Original Trilogy (OT) and the Prequel Trilogy.

Even the documentary The People vs George Lucas shows Prequel-hating fans begrudgingly admit their kids felt all six episodes tied seamlessly.

Abrams, on the other hand, said: "I think [the "Dear JJ" video] was right on." Later on, he also said:

he considered "putting Jar Jar Binks's bones in the desert" on Jakku, somewhere, and

he intentionally made the lightsaber fights "rougher", "primitive" and "more powerful" unlike the fast-paced ones in the Prequels.

Later, we found out he wanted to blow up Coruscant.

It's clear he wasn't a big fan of the Prequels.

But y'know what? Not many fans over 20 were, at the time. And when The Force Awakens came out, most them celebrated it as a wonderful love letter to the OT.

Star Wars is cool again. Mission accomplished 🙌 !

However movies keep coming out, and references to the Prequels - if there are any - are literally just that... references.

Sometimes in the shape of a cameo ("hey look, Genevieve O'Reilly from the Ep. III deleted scenes is playing Mon Mothma again!")

Sometimes in a name (Luke name-dropped "Darth Sidious"!)

But nothing set during the Prequel era, and nothing treating the events that happened in that period as relevant or impactful, beyond subtextual nods.

In fact, the trend of avoiding anything Prequel-related continues as the final film in the Skywalker Saga comes out:

The Rise of Skywalker has a secret Sith society that chants the name "Palpatine" instead of his Sith name "Darth Sidious",

the film pretends the Kaminoans never existed,

and neither TROS nor Trevorrow's Duel of the Fates script even try to bring Hayden Christensen's Anakin Skywalker back on screen. Let that sink in, we're talking about the Chosen One, Skywalker Senior, whose sins caused this whole mess... and his name isn't even uttered once in the final chapter of what Disney dubbed the *Skywalker* Saga (or the entire Sequel trilogy, for that matter).

But hey, The Clone Wars got renewed for one last Season! That's cool right? So many stories had gone unfinished and somehow the animation looks even better than befo--

-- oh. It's not 22 episodes? Only 12?

Four of which had already been shown to us, but hey! We need to set-up the Bad Batch series, so let's shoehorn those episodes in there, and forget Son of Dathomir, Dark Disciple or Crystal Crisis.

*sigh* Better than nothing, I guess.

In other mediums: "just not a priority"

Now this is something that I'll explore more in the transmedia post (and purely my interpretation), but the noticeable change between Lucasfilm's transmedia strategy *post-ROTS* and the one post-Disney sale is that:

Before, the games, comics and novels were the main content. After all, Revenge of the Sith had been released, so that was it, for the movies. Thus, a variety of other content was being cranked out to keep the Star Wars franchise relevant. There were comics set 100 years after Episode 6, comics set 25,000 years prior, games set in the Old Republic era, other stories in the New Republic era, novels galore, a couple of parody films and an animated show, The Clone Wars, which sometimes received its own tie-in comics, novels and games.

After the sale and ever since, most of the transmedia products have had only one goal: promoting the films & streaming shows.

So while in 2015 you won't see an abundance of Prequel content... you'll see an avalanche of OT books and comics come out.

Why? Because the heroes of that era will be in the Sequel Trilogy movies. It provided context to the kids who hadn't seen the OT yet, and reintroduced those films to a new generation of fans, while priming them for the Sequels.

A multimedia marketing strategy that ultimately proved successful.

However, it continued even after The Force Awakens came out.

Don't believe me? Compare how many comics there have been set during the Prequel era vs the OT era.

If they make comics about the Prequels, they're limited runs.

Case in point: before the current Yoda series, the best any Disney Prequel-set comic series ever got was 6 issues.

Note: it's worth pointing out that the frequency of mini-series aren't just a Star Wars-specific thing, it's a comic book industry thing. The readership for comics is dwindling, many people are reading scans online, and so no publisher wants to commit to a story that lasts more than 4-6 issues. My problem is: there absolutely would be readership for a Prequel comic series to warrant an extended run instead of a mini-series.

Let's talk books. There have been give or 64 canon novels published since the Disney sale.

Only 11 of them are set during the Prequel era. And even those stories only came out when the planets were aligned.

Almost half of them were released while being a part of some bigger multimedia push.

Example:

Before the Obi-Wan Kenobi series was being released on Disney Plus, we'd had one novel and like two comic stories about him during the Prequels... released between 2012 and end 2021. That's about three pieces of content in almost ten years.

Clearly a low frequency.

Then, when the series is around the corner, two books and a comic story comes out in the space of months, plus an anthology book with an alt cover with his face on it and a comic with a story of him and Anakin in the first issue, all in 2022.

My takeaway: short of there being a film or series that needs to be promoted, you'll rarely get any Prequel comics or books.

And this is OBI-WAN we're talking about. The character who even the Prequel haters love. Imagine how little attention the other ones get.

Gaming-wise, Battlefront had no Prequel content at all (again, 2015 was the year where OT content was shoved down the consumer's throats to prep them for Episode VII), and Battlefront 2 only released Prequel content a full year later.

All that being said, we did seen some Prequel elements here and there. After all, some actors got to reprise their roles, books and comics came out featuring Prequel characters... but there's a catch.

The stories they appear in are set in-between Episodes III and IV, a time-period known as "the Dark Times" or the "Imperial era".

"Dark Times" being used instead of the Prequel era

It's easy to see the appeal of this era. You keep the same threat from the Original Trilogy - the Empire - but redress it with Prequel elements... while also cherry-picking the best characters of both the OT and the Prequels and giving them a chance to shine again.

The situation is more clear cut, as opposed to the complex one in the Prequels. Bad guys are stormtroopers, good guys are anyone else. And the stories no longer take place in the shiny capital, you're back on the frontier.

But at this point... it feels like a cop-out.

When you consider how much content has been set during the Dark Times, it's nothing to sneeze at. Since the sale, we've had:

2 movies (Solo, Rogue One)

4 series set in that time-period (namely The Bad Batch, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, and Star Wars: Rebels).

2 video-games (Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor).

17 novels (such as Ahsoka, Lords of the Sith, the new Thrawn books, etc)

And just a whole bunch of comic book series & mini-series (like Kanan, Princess Leia, various Vader-centric comics including Darth Vader: Lord of the Sith, many tie-in mini-series promoting Rogue One, Jedi: Fallen Order, Obi-Wan Kenobi, etc).

There's been so much content made for this time-period that it feels like an unwillingness to do the work and create something set something during the Prequel era, let alone something that follows its Jedi.

After all, why make a story set in the Prequels (disliked by vocal fans) when you can just take the characters in that story and put them in an OT setting (which will appease the Prequel-haters)?

Maybe these stories get relegated to the Dark Times because:

there seems to be a perception that anything set in the Prequel era won't sell?

or maybe the current SW writers weren't fond of Episodes I, II and III, and don't find those Jedi characters likable, thinking they're too righteous and dogmatic which makes it hard to craft a story around them.

Or maybe it's because they're under the impression that the Prequel Jedi are bad. Like, canonically, in the narrative. Not just in a "I don't like them" sense, but also in a "the story is all about them becoming corrupted" sense.

Let's expand on that last point.

Retconning the Prequels as the "Fall of the Jedi" era

Somehow the rare stories set during the Prequels that we do get seem to automatically be about how "the Jedi lost their way/failed".

The series Tales of the Jedi is explicit about it...

... and I already explained why it contradicts what George Lucas established here and here.

You also see it in Rebels and the new season of The Clone Wars...

... in comics...

... in games...

It gets to a point where the Prequels era has now been redubbed the "Fall of the Jedi" era by Lucasfilm.

You wanna know what that period was referred to before the Disney sale? The "Rise of the Empire" Era.

Because - and I'll never get tired of saying this cuz it's factual - the Prequels aren't about the fall of the Jedi, they're about the fall of the Republic and Anakin, and rise of the Empire and Vader.

So in addition to being overdone, the "Jedi lost their way" is not even the intended narrative of the Prequels (if one puts any stock in Lucas' words). It's a minor subplot at best, hardly the focus of the films, let alone a whole time period.

But dubbing it "Fall of the Jedi" implies that there's another era in which the Jedi were in their heyday.

Because Star Wars authors are in luck! Yet another alternative has presented itself in the shape of a new transmedia initiative, and it's even better than the "let's set it during the Dark Times" solution:

A new transmedia initiative: The High Republic

You wanna deal with the Jedi before the Empire, but for some reason you wanna avoid dealing with the ones seen in the Prequels?

Look no further. Meet the Jedi of the High Republic.

Noble, adventurous, inspired by the Knights of the Round Table, they're everything the OT kids dreamed about when they heard ol' Ben Kenobi talk about the Knights of the Old Republic.

That's more like it!

Note: the High Republic was created for other reasons and has many more upsides than the ones mentioned above. Namely, a fresh new spot in the timeline that allows for creative freedom and a beautifully-coordinated transmedia storytelling effort where retcons are non-existent. However it does seem evident that not having to deal with the 'unlikable' Prequel Jedi and their "fall" is one of those upsides.

Another perk that the High Republic era offers is more freedom in terms of storytelling compared to the Prequels.

In 2016, Pablo Hidalgo tweeted he still quotes to authors the following excerpt of West End Games' guide for aspiring Star Wars writers, from 1994.

You can't write "this was the best day in Luke Skywalker's life", for example, because another author may want to write a better day than the one you just wrote.

My guess is that a similar approach applies to how all characters from the movies are treated. They're massively iconic. So you can't write a book that drastically changes how Mace or Yoda or Obi-Wan are perceived overall.

The stories need to be self-contained, disregardable if necessary, because you'll have dozens of writers coming up with new stories for those same characters, and you need to leave them some room.

Examples:

Notice how in the book Dooku: Jedi Lost we never see how Dooku turns to the Dark Side and joins the Sith.

Same goes for crossover comic book arcs of the Star Wars issues, like Vader Down or Crimson Reign... the characters don't really change by much in those comics. You could stick to just watching the movies and you wouldn't really miss anything.

But with The High Republic, you indeed can develop these characters as much as you want.

All stories featuring Avar Kriss leave an impact on her, you can nail down who she is perfectly in one book or one comic arc, both being just as meaningful to her character.

The fact that she's not as iconic/famous a character as Mace Windu means that authors can go to town on crafting an interesting and nuanced character arc for her that'll have a beginning, middle and end... something Mace will never really get.

CONCLUSION:

Back in 2015... let's not kid ourselves. The Prequels were unpopular and Disney is a multi-billion dollar corporation. Opting to make as much money as possible is what they do.

It's the same reason they decided not to go with George Lucas' original plans for the Sequels, in 2012.

I mean, imagine you're Disney. You just dropped 4 billion dollars, with a B, on this franchise. Your next Star Wars movie needs to be worth the price tag. Now, you can pick between two options:

Option #1 is uncharted territory and it explores the midi-chlorians (the cursed word…!) and the guy who presented you with this option also openly admits that a big chunk of customers won’t like it, but he wants this to be done because it’s his vision.

Option #2 is very simple: a soft reboot, that plays on nostalgia that the same chunk of customers (aka the 'boomer and Gen-X fans who grew up with the Original Trilogy and now have kids, grandkids and MONEY) will like.

It's a no-brainer. They gave the customers what they wanted.

But time has passed, the fans who were children when the Prequels first came out have grown up, and grew up with characters like Yoda, Mace, Plo Koon, Kit Fisto and other Jedi as their heroes, aside from main characters like Anakin and Obi-Wan and Ahsoka.

Can we maybe expand on them, flesh them out more?

No, let's either ignoring the storytelling potential of these characters or reducing it to them being "righteous, arrogant and dogmatic".

God forbid we get a story showing the Prequel Jedi in a *gasp* more positive light? One where their POV is more understandable, instead of the same old "we brought this on ourselves" storyline.

There's a whole decade between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones... you're telling me there's no space to show us Anakin's training and how he formed bonds with the Jedi we later see in The Clone Wars? I tried my hand at it here:

Interesting or fun Prequel-set ideas from other pro-Jedi fans on Tumblr can be found here, here and here.

And y'know, part of the Star Wars intent is for fans to take the ideas in the movies and come up with their own stories. You're supposed to create headcanons.

What I'm saying is fans of the Prequels are being given less "imagination food" than the rest, and many of us who like the Jedi in particular are forced to rely on headcanons only. "Better than nothing" is no longer an acceptable standard.

There's a range of recognizable Jedi characters that have already been established in films and TCW, can we maybe expand on them, flesh them out more, instead of whole new ones?

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 01/05/2024

super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont

Season 8 No Album Release (Read More) super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont

Ripper Unknown

So. It's been a month now. Has it all settled yet? Have we had the time to let SiIvaGunner's April Fools 2024 event sink in, 30 days later? Speaking personally, I don't believe I have yet. Visions of Gegagedigedagedago, Pomny (digital circus), Boykisser, Brainless Kitty and all of my other favorite memes continue to haunt me to this very day - I see one of the events' rips in my recommended, and in the blink of an eye five hours will have passed. I cannot be anything but amazed at the surgical precision that the SiIva team captured the phenomena of online internet brainrot with during this event, spanning the whole range of severity levels from bad to worse. super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont was certainly not the worst it got - yet it embodies everything the event sought to achieve through it's title alone.

But, right, the event - you'll have noticed right away that everything about the above-linked video's metadata is completely awry from typical SiIvaGunner videos. No attempt at a bait-and-switch, completely different video description, not even a thumbnail of the game used...and what the fuck is the "Buddy Holly Soundfont"???? What's going on here? Well, a lot of these traits may seem familiar to you if you've been on other corners of YouTube in the last few years - like I mentioned briefly back in we are number one but with outdated memes over it, there's been a trend in how non-SiIva audio edits are presented on YouTube as of late. There's an algorithm to appease now, after all - surprises and ambiguity only serve to ward off potential new listeners! After the explosive popularity of some of these, particularly during 2023 with videos like Nirvana's Nevermind but with the SM64 soundfont, they began feeling inescapable - often times sounding pretty low-effort to boot. I don't intend to shame anyone who's made these videos or anyone who enjoys them, of course, but...through how hard they aim to appease the algorithm that be, its difficult not to see these videos as attention-seeking first, and as creative endeavors second.

Which then brings us back to SiIvaGunner. Eight years in, and the channel's way of presenting its videos has remained thoroughly consistent, rain or shine - content in charting its own course. Narratively, this is actually playing to the channel's thematic core, something enforced all the way back in The Reboot story of Season 1, and that continues to be relevant over the years through rips like NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2), and indeed through this very April Fools event. That core is simple: To never conform, to never restrict, to let the channel's team of artist continue doing what they love purely for love's sake, rather than to appease a crowd or a system. Throughout this April Fools day event, then, it was as if we were shown the twisted view on that core, the channel's rippers following the opposite creed - clickbaity titles and thumbnails, no core theme, often even lacking any regard for the tracks being remixed - several times the Wii Shop Channel theme was simply called "The Wii Theme", and of course the very notion of games having "soundfonts" is something that's woefully misinformed to begin with. Opening the entire event with Buddy Holly by Weezer but in the Mario 64 Soundfont set the stage perfectly - after all, what game more overused in "soundfont" edits than Super Mario 64, what album more trendy to playfully make fun of in 2024 than Weezer's Blue album, and what song from said album is more memed than its hit single, Buddy Holly?

Except, of course, this whole thing went one layer deeper. Throughout the four months that the season has been running for thus far, Season 8's running theme above all else has been pure silliness - everything from a Justin Bieber takeover, to an MLG day, to the currently-ongoing SpongeBob day embodies that theme perfectly. And at the helm of it all sits the Joke-Explainer 7000, the current in-universe manager of the channel. Her name doesn't lie: as we saw back in Magolor's Shoppe Fusion Collab she do be Explaining the Jokes, and that was initially assumed to be the bit of this very April Fools bit, the titles like super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont explaining the jokes of the event immediately. But forget not the point of April Fools as a holiday - to deceive. Indeed, though the titles suggest that the team are spending the day just explaining the joke of every rip uploaded, they're in reality just spoiling the supposed "premise". Listen to any one of them yourself, and you'll be given a bait-and-switch surprise which completely transforms the rip of choice. And as the day went on, these surprises only grew stranger and stranger...

SiIvaGunner's April Fools events have an incredible track record, as I've hopefully made clear in Our Sweet Parsley and Your Best Nightmario - but I think I can safely say this year's bit was at least the FUNNIEST one of them all. Every minute of the day felt like slipping deeper into insanity, made all the more clear the moment super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont was uploaded - in a matter of hours, the event had gone from making fun of low-effort soundfont edits that very much DO exist on YouTube, to completely making up an entirely new tier of slop through the very idea of a "Buddy Holly Soundfont". In case it needs to be explained, "soundfonts" are used to refer to video games using sequenced music, wherein individual instruments are played note-by-note through data sent by the game, rather than being streamed from a recording - it is IMPOSSIBLE to derive a "soundfont" from songs like Buddy Holly, played on live instruments and saved as masters back in the 90s. That is the gag that super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont is built on - the "instruments" used to recreate Bob-Omb Battlefield from Super Mario 64 are intentionally low-quality snippets taken from Buddy Holly, used just the same as Super Mario 64's sequenced instruments are used within soundfont edits.

The end result feels like getting splashed with cold water at every part of listening. Rivers' repeating "Whut" voiceline being used as the main melody for the first 40 seconds, for instance, is the kind of obviously "wrong" thing one would never seriously do in this sort of arrangement, yet it only serves to add to the joke here, of just how far we've fallen so deep into the event. The tinny guitar shredding, the low-effort thumbnail edit, the vocals suddenly being added onto the track, the bass being far deeper in the mix than it reasonably should be...it's an experience to behold, and just as you're letting it all sink in, the vocals are suddenly pitch-shifted to the quintessential SiIva meme, Grand Dad himself The Flintstones - its like the rip is poking fun at your misery, as to remind you that this IS indeed still SiIvaGunner, the bit is still going, you are merely along for SiIva's wild ride.

The entire event was RELENTLESSLY funny to see unfold from every angle. Be it experiencing every rip as it was uploaded, or seeing the comments' reactions to the gradual spiral of rot we were being taken on, or most importantly - realizing just how much fun the team must've still had finding ways to subvert expectations at every turn. Season 8 has been an absolute blast so far, and I cannot wait to see where its patented silliness takes us next - even if it'll be hard to surpass the shit we saw on this day, and the absolute state of things that super mario 64 but it's in the buddy holly soundfont represents. Truly one of the SiIvaGunner rips of all time.

[qfitpac]

Imo this is the most likely event for Sunday, and let me explain why. (leaks from the QSMP discord)

First of all, earlier Quackity mentioned being on a plane. Why is this relevant? Well the only way to get to Korea is by plane. However, 14 hours later, he tweeted that he had lied about the plane. Now why would he do this?

This is, of course, because BTS had been testing the mod and realized that Korean wasn't working. For some reason, whoever coded the translate mod had mixed up the language files and replaced Korean with Spanish, specifically Spanish with a Korean accent. (Tbf I don't blame them, the file was named something like QSMP_language_file_v3_finalFINALVERSION_KOR_Korean_Hangul_Accented_Spanish_ESPANOL, and obvi if ur screen is small the last part would get cut off).

Now Quackity is in a predicament. He's very smart, obviously, so he cancelled his plane immediately and actually got a 70% refund even though he was technically canceling within the 24hr window. And then he got in a call with admins. I was actually in this call (they added me on accident) and although I don't speak or understand Spanish I was able to comprehend everything perfectly (they were speaking English).

Basically, they were screwed. BTS themselves had scheduled out time to make a guest appearance on the QSMP, this was huge! MASSIVE!! But the translator wasn't working: what were they going to do? Now naturally my first instinct was oh, well they can speak English, right? But I should've held in my trust of Quackity and the entire admin team, bcuz their creativity and problem solving is as always off the charts.

One of the admins (not going to name anyone for privacy reasons) had been doing a project on their spare time. Eggsonas, of course, have been a trend on and off since the first adoption day. And this admin had been making all sorts of models. It just so happened, by a stroke of luck, that they had made 7 bts eggs!!!!! Everyone was so excited about it, the entire call was shouting for a good minute lol. I actually had to take out my earbuds.

Eggs, of course, cannot speak. This solved the translator problem flawlessly, as the sign and book translators were working as normal. It also gave the BTS members an extra 2 hours to play on the server! (previously their managers had allocated 2 hours for them to find/create minecraft skins, which obviously is now unneeded.) It's a win-win-win.

Now on to analyzing the teasers: firstly, you'll notice the Update accounts tweets. These are, of course, referencing how bts have both touched and eaten ice and ice cream. Also, as true fans will know, bts just recently broke their freezer and had to mop everything up. It's a nice red herring given the previous ice imagery in teasers, and we all know Quackity loves his trickery.

Secondly, the seven outlined in grass. Grass has been a prominent feature in many BTS music videos. Some say it's even a staple of their work. For example, in their 4th music video there is grass on the ground, to represent how growing up has made them more grounded. Nextly, the seven. Obviously there are seven members, but combined with grass this is actually a double hint: BTS was active for seven years between 2013 and 2020 during which they released songs. This is a special number for them because of these events.

Now obviously, I don't have all the answers. My prediction on the discourse, for example, was completely made up. But i hope this gives you all a sense of what to expect come Sunday. (also please don't tell any qsmp admins I'm leaking this info 😭😭😭😭)

[keepmeinmind-01]

wip wednesday 23/10

hi everyone and hope you're having a good week! here are my lines for this week :D

from "all i need", for @wizisbored @stonemaskedtaliesin:

CW: mentions of period-typical racism

Newt had no grand theory, no hypothesis about the roles of creatures or wixen—he only wanted the public to be less afraid and more appreciative, with his academic works simple and illustrative, his books comprehensive and designed for a wider audience.  With every letter, he felt the doubt return. He dared not to ask Theseus, as much as he wanted to, because the Auror Office had been specifically barred from the intel of the Department of Mysteries, and he worried his brother’s head might find some irrecoverable chopping block. In strict confidence, Leta had told him to release a statement, if he so wanted, positioning himself against the magical scientists drawing on the growing trend of Muggle eugenics. Tina had gone a little pale and admitted that she’d never been allowed in any of New York’s resorts, because of her being Jewish.  That, at last, had made him want to release something. The Ministry had posted it for him in a copy of the Prophet; that same week, a Muggle police officer had stopped Theseus and Leta as they’d come out of a riverside restaurant; and new intelligence Albus had given about Grindelwald’s tactical propensities had averted another planned massacre. 

from "never love an anchor 1908 part 4" (which weirdly is part 5, great job me in doing my file names), for @aparticularbandit @oriharaizayadividesintoslytherin @tamsinswriting @lizhly @kallisto-k @enigma-the-mysterious @loyal-house-of-lupin:

CW: referenced infertility

"Well," she said finally, letting the diagnostic spell fade, "it's certainly an unusual curse. Dark magic, without question, but with an interesting temporal component. Were you planning on having children, Mr Scamander?" Theseus's throat tightened. He'd never really thought about it before—or rather, he had carefully avoided thinking about it, the way he avoided thinking about most futures that didn't involve the Ministry. "I suppose that's not relevant now," he said quietly. "Not necessarily. There are treatments we can try. A regimen of specialised potions might be able to counteract the worst effects, though I should warn you they're not pleasant, and success isn't guaranteed." She pulled a piece of parchment from her desk and began writing out instructions in a neat, cramped hand. "Three times daily, with meals. The side effects can be...significant. Nausea, fatigue, occasional magical instability. And even if the treatment is successful, there may be lasting effects we can't predict." Theseus took the prescription, folding it precisely along its creases. His hands didn't shake—he was proud of that—but he could feel the tremors building under his skin, like the precursor to an earthquake. "Thank you," he said, his voice steady. "About the records—" "They'll be sealed, of course. Patient confidentiality." She hesitated. "Though given the nature of the curse, and who cast it..."

from "kmim thesleta flashbacks" for @sourb0i @auburnlaughter @whimsicalmeerkat:

CW a fight in which someone throws a vase

He knew he should stop, knew he was only making things worse, but the words kept coming, propelled by exhaustion and lingering alcohol and the image of that little girl's body that wouldn't leave his mind. "You want to talk about draining? Try walking on eggshells every day, never knowing if you're going to get the woman I fell in love with or someone who looks at me like she's measuring the best place to stick the knife. You bottle everything up, push people away, test them until they break—" The crystal vase sailed past his head before he could finish, missing him by inches. It shattered against the wall in an explosion of glass and early spring daffodils, water running down the wallpaper. Leta stood with her arm still extended, chest heaving, her eyes wild both a mixture of fury and horror. Theseus didn't flinch. If anything, his racing pulse began to slow, settling into an eerily familiar calm. His body remembered old lessons: when things started breaking, it was time to be still. Stay quiet. Don't provoke. Weather the storm. "Are you going to hit me next?" he asked, his voice perfectly neutral. "Go ahead." Instead, she turned and fled the kitchen, leaving him standing amid the glittering shards of broken crystal. Theseus didn't move for a long time. The coffee percolator bubbled and hissed, filling the kitchen with its rich aroma. Water continued to drip down the wall, the daffodils lying broken and scattered across the floor. His mother had given them that vase as a housewarming gift, he remembered distantly. She'd been so pleased to see him settling down, building a proper home with someone. From somewhere upstairs came the sound of drawers being yanked open, things being thrown around. The familiar sounds of packing, of leaving. His feet felt rooted to the floor, even as part of him screamed to go after her, to fix this. But he'd learned that lesson too—sometimes chasing only made them run faster. The morning sunlight caught the broken glass, sending rainbow refractions dancing across the kitchen walls. Beautiful, in its way. Destructive things often were.

and as part of the 2-for-1, from "kmim celebration/sudan" for @sourb0i @auburnlaughter @whimsicalmeerkat:

Rocking back and forth on his heels, he examined the vast range of jars the others had produced and started selecting a few, trying to ignore how discombobulated the sight of his hands reaching out to touch something solid made him feel. Pickled fronds of green cabbage, sesame seeds and grated carrot, bamboo shoots and broccoli stems, and a promising looking pair of jars that contained cucumber and chillies respectively. Leta had loved spicy food; he’d adapted his childhood’s bland palate of basic meals and skipped dinners for her.  This he could do. Cooking had always been a straightforward task for him—following steps, achieving results.  "That large jar is pickled radishes," Newt said. "But the red one next to it is actually preserved specimens of a rather fascinating fungus that grows on the Qilins' preferred grazing grounds. Best not to mix those up." Tina, who had been reaching for the red jar, quickly withdrew her hand. She moved to the sink instead, accidentally knocking the tap and spraying water in several unexpected directions.

[sizzlingpatrolfox]

My theory is that Jm and Jk are making this content together because they are the most succeesful members.

Hybe will never acknowledge Jm’s popularity in any other way, but are going to make him do this content with Jk to make money off of him

That’s it, that’s why is the 2 of them, not V or Rm because jikook got both no 1 on bb etc

Wdym it wasn't Jungkook and Taehyung the it couple, the most successful members whose debut everyone was waiting for and counting on to make history?????

Okay, now that I'm done with the sarcasm...

Aside from the fact that it was something Jimin wanted to do, why did the company suddenly think of it and agreed to it now. (Unless we eventually find out other details about why and how, but I don't know if I'm even going to be here when that happens, so).

Jungkook and Jimin is a pairing that has always worked in many ways, like with the couple of dance units they've had in BTS stages. Or the couple of songs they've sung together, etc.

Apart from that, yes they are the most popular (read popular as in people OUTSIDE OF THE FANDOM have seen them/interacted with their content or music at some point/etc), so all in all I agree that their individual popularity could be a reason.

That's also related to the reach the content has. I've never been one of those people that cry about jikook not being loved; I never cared about that for several reasons that are not relevant right now. One of the reasons that's relevant tho, is that taekook might get the most likes or retweets on their content... but nobody causes conversation the way Jimin does. Whether it's good or bad, Jungkook or Taehyung each on their own, or together, they don't cause conversation. I'm not gloating or anything about Jimin getting hate because I hate it, and I hate when people are like "oh jimin they're hating on you you'll always be famous", but it's a fact that whenever Jimin is involved in something, people will talk about it. I mean, there's a reason his name can't trend in twitter anymore because of the volume of tweets in which he's mentioned every day.

Another thing, probably unpopular, many probably won't get it, and I think that people just don't realize it's happening: Jimin makes Jungkook look good. He makes Jungkook looked loved and worthy of being loved.

Not too long ago I rewatched the hunger games and in the first movie something happens with Katniss and Peeta, I think it was him saying he was in love with her or something. And Haymitch says it was good that Peeta had said that because he'd made Katniss looked desirable. Now, she was perceived as the object of affection of someone.

It's something I've talked about before, how the narrative about Jungkook and the way people perceived him changed when his ships got bigger attention.

This happens to a large scale with all of BTS members, btw. We're just talking specifically about two right now, but the "X member loves Y member, how could you hate them?!" is probably the biggest example of that.

So, there's that too. Jimin's way of treating Jungkook has A LOT of weight on what people think of Jungkook. It might even be a reason of why some pjms can't even stick to one side and are more or less constantly changing their feelings about him.

That's also why I think that if it was solely and exclusively the company calling Jimin up to do this, it was tailored to happen around Jungkook's debut and not before. Because it is good for Jungkook's image.

Finally, Jimin being Jimin. I think many people do a big disservice to Jimin when they talk about why and don't realize how amazing Jimin's personality is. Jikookers especially overlook how awesome, kind, sweet and great he is. They collectively ignore how every single person who's ever met Jimin has made a point to talk about how sweet and kind he is. To most jikookers It's all about how he is with Jungkook when a large part of that is not even about Jungkook, but just how Jimin was raised and how he treats everyone he loves.

Jungkook gets to be a lovely maknae bla bla bla. To jikookers, Jimin's selflessness and beautiful soul only gets talked about in relation to Jungkook.

So another factor of the whole thing is that Jimin's got a GREAT personality. Jin, Hoseok, Jimin, they've always been the one lighting up the mood and making people laugh and taking care of everyone. They're the life of the party, literally. And the company must realize this, too. They're not stupid. They know what works for entertainment and what doesn't. Didn't Jungkook say in that preview that as soon as Jimin arrived it was chaos? Jimin is genuinely so much fun.

It works because Jimin is who he is. It's not even about Taehyung and Jungkook, but it wouldn't work with Yoongi and Jungkook, either. It would be boring simply because they're not Jimin. You can watch any live with Jimin + other member and it's almost always interesting and funny because Jimin makes up for a lot of the mood between two people.

[seeinginthedark]

This is what I believe in my heart and in my soul . My heart and soul have synced in and the communication line between is clear . Same goes for my subconscious, after rigorous shadow self work. As for my mind , I’ve synced in my left and right brain hemispheres. I did this in 2022. So they are balanced and healthy . I am of sane mind . I won’t be gaslighted anymore by anyone , any man , any institution and not even gaslighted by myself .

Here we go, strap in .

If you’ve been reading my blogs , you will know that I’m on a mission. I have a psychosis but, as I keep reiterating, a psychosis means different things depending what culture your from. In Indigenous cultures(who are more closer to the Earth and nature) a psychosis is a ‘spiritual situation’ . In the western medicine world , it’s a mental illness. People get scared during a psychosis and don’t know how to handle it. I handle it. I don’t get scared or paranoid. I don’t have hallucinations or hear voices . I know the difference between a delusion and a sign , a message from the ancestors .

The videos I made in 2022, contain information that I didn’t understand at the time , suddenly now have become relevant. They were warning me of what to watch out for .

We are in a spiritual situation. A war. An attack on our souls . An ongoing oppression. Being drained of our humanity.

To be turned into something un-natural and mechanic. And we won’t allow this happen.

The ancestors that made it to the afterlife (instead of a reincarnation soul trap ) are building alliances with spirits of this Earth, of nature and of the inner Earth. I’m dead serious about this .

A lot of us today are souls of our ancestors who chose to leave the astral afterlife realm to come here in this modern world . They are Mother Earths army. We are at the front line now . The children of today have been absolutely bombarded with screens, technology and toxic social media . In an effort to neutralise us , make us forget who we are and forget what’s important in life . This wave of children , are born already spiritually activated and awake . They have immense spiritual potency and magic-like abilities. They are our salvation now .

A lot of people however , are getting confused thinking they a star seeds or thinking they were meant to be a different gender . These are trends and narratives that have been articulately planted on purpose for the reason to distract and confuse and cause social division . And self identity issues .

Please, if you have one of these special children , who are from magic bloodlines , please take care of them . Nurture them and their abilities. Do not crush their imagination- as it is one of their magical traits . Please limit the amount of screen time they are having. I know it’s hard and we are all busy trying to get by and have to work and have so many things on our plate but please don’t pacify them with iPads and tablets and phones . It inhibits their development. It inhibits their social skills . It socially programs them.

Get them outside in nature as much as possible . Listen to them. Let them have a voice . Let them express themselves creatively. Treasure them . Love them unconditionally. They are here to change the world. I don’t want to see any of these children grow up and be plugged into a permanent virtual reality . With microchips in their brains . With non -organic robotic add ons . Stuck in the simulation. Their souls recycled back into this system when they die . Their souls need to be free, as all of our souls should be .

We can beat this A.I take -over . Together . United . Strong . Keep your vibes high . Self care. Heal from your trauma. Be the powerful spiritual warrior you were born to be . For Earth. For our souls . This is it.

[shinysoroka]

There's a trend I noticed with Westerners who moved to Russia in the 2010, back when things seemed to be getting better. These were white, usually financially stable people, who moved to big cities like Moscow or Saint Petersburg to work high-paying office jobs and would blog about their experiences dealing with cultural differences, navigating the dating scene and of course, busting many ridiculous myths the West has about the country, thanks to, let's face it, a slew of bad James Bond movies.

But with the (accurate) myth busting, often came something else. A lukewarm defense of the country's less savory tendencies that grew more and more staunch as Westerners pushed back in the comments. They would start to argue that the country wasn't homophobic, or at least not the in the way the West understands homophobia. They would claim that the blatant imperialistic attitudes weren't there or were greatly exaggerated. The last thing I can remember was a Spanish blogged based in Moscow stating that a law that had recently passed did not enable domestic violence and the Western media was reporting on it incorrectly. This part was especially infuriating because we wasn't entirely wrong. The Spanish reporting on it was dogshit and inaccurate. That didn't change the fact that the law absolutely made domestic violence more difficult to prosecute and report. If you read the original Russian text, you could tell pretty easily.

The sad part? The people who pushed back were quickly shouted down by both the bloggers and other commenters. What could the complainers possibly know? The blogger lives in the country! He talks to Russians every day! He speaks the language and knows the culture while the complainer probably never left their home town. Of COURSE the blogger is correct, they would reason. The complainers were just showing off their ignorance and blatant anti-Russian bias that obviously, OBVIOUSLY permeates all of Western media. The fact that the blogger was a white person in a wealthy part of the country who was also very receptive to imperialism, racism, queerphobia and a whole bunch of other stuff that their European countries of origin were at least attempting to combat never came up. It wasn't considered relevant, I suppose.

This attitude isn't new. In fact, I have come across many Westerners in love with Russian culture who told me to my face that it was because Russia reminded them of their own countries in the 60s or 70s, before the "woke" nonsense began. Any attempt at pointing out how messed up that sounded was chucked to "cultural differences" and "you just got westernized and you don't understand" or "the West hates Russia" or some combination of all three.

Somewhere along the line, this attitude bled into progressive circles who, out of some misplaced sense of Western guilt, were also incredibly receptive to accusations of cultural insensitivity. All anyone had to to, especially with Americans, was bring up socialized healthcare and that was enough to make wide-eyed, left-leaning young people cast a blind eye to the country's well-known atrocities, so long as it allowed them a safe space to bitch about their own country and imagine there was a paradise intentionally kept from them by evil Western media. And so, propaganda began to trickle in, safely, unnoticed, accumulating in their system like lead.

Western people of color immediately got adopted as tokens, while Russian people of color (or anyone who looked even remotely Georgian) got ignored. The voices of Russian activists still fighting against imperialism, queerphobia and a long list of other issues were also silenced or ignored. Putin's strongman antics became a funny meme online until February 2022 hit and suddenly we all stopped laughing. Now it's 2025, I'm watching wide-eyed idealists download RedNote and I'm getting a weird sense of deja-vu.

[thirdmagic]

many many years ago, around 2014-ish i think it was, there was a tumblr trend of tagging posts of your favorite female character with 'my queen', it was like all the range. and i participated in this trend, bc my favorite girls were in fact queens to me, and i was sure this was the case for many others. but i began to notice certain things about this trend that kinda bothered me and i couldnt quite articulate until someone i followed then made a very well writen rant about it, and i dont remember the exact wording but something that struck me about it was a line that was kind of like "i see you tagging posts about [female character] with 'my queen' and then talking in detail in your tags about [male character] going out to eat waffles', or something to that effect- i dont remember the exact wording but in this hypothetical scenario, the person was describing the tags having a very whimsical and fun scenario full of imagination and affection, and the exact one was very silly but fun. and most of all, a fully detailed scenario, indicating how much the person thinks about this character, without needing to say 'wow i love this character', a level of attention starkly contrasting with the one given to the ostensible-queens who got nothing more than 'wow she is so amazing'. and they were quite angry and spiteful about it and said something to the effect of tagging male characters with 'my kings' in a sarcastic way, kind of to convey that it read to them as more condescending than anything.

it has been ten years, and though the slang and specific fandom trends have since changed, i still remember it, because it still feels relevant, and i still feel the spirit of that post now. we have advanced enough that on a wider scale we understand that its not a good look to hate every woman in a story or treat all fictional women as if they are out to get you and your faves, personally, but we have not quite reached the point where fandoms at large actually seem interested in these stories and characters. right now it manifests in 'mean lesbian backgroung character in your m/m fanfic', or how everything everyone has to say about any girls in a story is to yell 'lesbians!!!!' and move on with no interest or comment or desire to actually do anything with these characters.

like, if fandom is a playground, then male characters are the dolls who get actually played with, while the female characters are the dolls everyone just kinda look at and keep untouched. and while i can't say i prefer it when i was a baby youngling in fandom and all the dolls i liked had really hateful and mysoginstic language slung at them, it's not especially fun either when everyone says they love these dolls but nobody actually wants to play with them, especially if you do, and you have lots of games in mind for those dolls that nobody really wants to participate in, and when they continue to insist that they love these too even though they clearly are neutral at best it really kinda drives you crazy.

[kierancampire]

One thing I dunno if I'm weird about

But I will see people losing their shit about Bob the Builder's latest design, or just any changes to shows they watched when they were young, or things being discontinued. And, yeah, people get super angry about it, but it doesn't bother me?

If anything, I am happy to see shows continue, even if they have to change the art style or aspects of it. This thing I loved when I was younger is still beloved today, that's awesome, also, I haven't watched it since I was a very young child, so why should I care what it looks like now? I'm not gonna be watching it either way. Long as kids now connect with it and enjoy it, that's cool

But even things getting discontinued or slowly dying out, whether that's movies, locations, food, drink, shops, whatever. Like does it suck this thing no longer exists? Sure. But partially a reason it died out was because we all stopped interacting with it, if we still showed care and support for it, it'd still be here. There's no point getting mad that it fazed out when I didn't do enough to keep it relevant

Though another way I relate it to. I do honestly fear death, I fear getting old, what my life will be like when I am older, who will be in it, who will be looking out for me, my health, as at the moment none of it is looking good. But I also fear the aspect of dying in itself. Another thing that scares and saddens me is, I can talk about my great nan, she was in my life, but I can't tell you about her mum or anyone else of that era. It's equally sad and scary to think that everything I've endured, everything I've fought for, everything I've achieved, everything I've conquered, all the suffering I've experienced. Very quickly I will be forgotten, all aspects of my life would have been sold or destroyed, I will be mentioned for the last time, someone will look at something to do with me for the last time. One day I will just slot in as a forgotten statistic for people on this Earth, my individuality will become a vague number not even mentioned or recognised when talking about how many billions of people have lived on this Earth. But even that, one day the sun will die, and if humans can't find a way to exist elsewhere, every piece of life on this planet, everything that has gone on in this planet, will one day be wiped out and it will be like it was never there and none of it ever happened. That does scare me, it does make me struggle with purpose

But that's life. Things end, things die, things fade. Society changes, language changes, attitudes change, culture changes, trends change. There are so many inventors, so many pieces of media, so many beloved practices that were ritualistic and integral to people, so many cherished items, so many past times. There were so many things that were important to people, that no longer exist, no longer continue, and are no longer remembered. And instead we have what we have today, and do what we do today. And why do I deserve to have things I cherished to continue and thrive more than any person throughout history, until the end of time? I don't. We can't keep repeating things and keep things there because it used to exist, thus it always must. Space needs to be made for new things, we need to build on what was there, better ourselves, progress, always get educated, always move forward. We wouldn't be where we are today if we stayed living like it's the 1400's. We won't find ways to continue the life of every species on this planet if we get stuck on Bob the Builder's design

So when I see people get upset about that, I just don't get it, it's life, it shows we still exist. I acknowledge it's sad in a way, then I move on, staying stagnant would be even sadder

[joeysmuttonchops]

8, 9 and 12? You don't have to answer all of them ofc

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

the ntt arent found family, the fab five arent found family, yj is not found family, the justice league ESPECIALLY isnt found family. what you are describing is friends. i swear to god im starting to worry about some of you people. do your friends not help you when you ask? do you think they dont love you? why do people have to be your sibling or your dad to pass a certain point of intimacy?

9. worst part of canon

oh interesting how do we want to read worst. bad quality? bad change of status quo? bad writing trend?

i know something thats all three: Titans Hunt. "now dd" youre asking "isnt that where joey died?" and yes, it is, but titans hunt has way worse crimes than killing my fave

First: it runs for 16 issues, includes two seperate but partially relevant arcs (so you cant skip them), and the pacing is absolutely nightmarish. long stretches with no forward motion but what feels like important set up (but isnt cuz they pull the finale out of their ass). Terrible structurally, but relevent because… 

Second: Titans Hunt is meant to introduce a new titans lineup. but doesnt because its too busy being the Deathstroke Show.  in fact id say this isnt even a titans comic: this is deathstroke -17–-1, which fucks everything up because once Deathstroke #1 comes out and he moves over there and and we try to continue reading Titans, we don't know who half of these people are!

Third: because of the above THIS is the origin of Hero!Slade. titans hunt was a soft reboot for slade wilson. wolfman had always been sympathetic to him, but this was the first time he operated as a hero, which Deathstroke shouldnt have been. it retconned his "relationship" with tara where it had only been downplayed before, it changed his relationship with Jericho which undermines all of their interactions up to this point and completely changes SLADE's character (and therefore onwards into the modern era). if you're wondering how we got from Judas Contract to fanon deathstroke, this comic is ground zero

Fourth: Completely screwed over Vic for the rest of the 90s

12. the unpopular character you like and why more people should like them

ive talked about joey and yara on this blog so id like to take this moment to introduce yall to ANIMA.

anima was created for the bloodlines crossover event but whats important is her solo: Anima 1994. it came out in the same batch as Superboy, Robin, and The Ray and they actually all appear in the Yearbook extras at the end of eachother's comics, which is cute.

Anima 1–6 are some of my favorite issues ever released, period. the second half changes course pretty radically, becoming a bit more of a traditional action comic. it remains It explores teen homelessness, drug addiction, counter-culture, and psuedoscience, gender, and a desperation for independence that you cant have, legally, as a child, and the desire for a people that respect you, and how all of that can be used as a cult recruitment tactic

its also fucking gorgeous. the art is stunning, its vibrant, it excels at expressing emotion, its not afraid to draw women with expressions (MAJOR win). the artstyle shift in issue 4 made my jaw drop the first time i saw it because of the thematic resonance.

anima herself is rude and tries to be confident and desperate and desperate to be kind. her friendship with liv and the rest of boojum is so well written (alright, to varying degrees) and i really do think about it constantly. 

it has flaws, of course, but i really love the anima the the potential she had, and im sorry she never went any further