#also ; i mean...yes; it was principled?

[shalom-iamcominghome]

People findinging out that antisemitism does, in fact, victimize people

[chamerionwrites]

“Democrats have to stop pandering to the left” would be a hysterically funny postmortem election take if it weren’t so old and predictable and tiring. Pandering where. Show me the policies. Remember when Biden slightly airbrushed Trump-era immigration law, and Fox News went right on characterizing him as an unhinged open borders commie regardless? Remember when Harris literally campaigned with Liz Cheney?

[insteading]

So I've only watched 2.1, 2.2., and 2.3 once each so far, but I can already tell the music choices are going to wreck me this season. I figure lots of people will have things to say about the use of Kate Bush in 2.3, so I want to focus on the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony #7 in 2.2, "Red Flags."

First, this movement has been a banger since it existed: at its first performance, the audience demanded that the second movement be repeated after the symphony concluded. It's a funeral march, and per the notes accompanying the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie of Bremen's gorgeous recording, it was likely heard as responding to collective grief:

The premiere performance of Beethoven's Seventh was at a benefit concert in Vienna in December 1813 for wounded soldiers and their families. It came only two months after the Battle of Nations near Leipzig. The German name is "Völkerschlacht" (Slaughter of the Peoples), one of the most catastrophic wartime events in human history. It also marked the liberation from Napoleon's forces. The sad, beautiful quality of this piece makes it very different from the other three movements of Beethoven's Seventh. Endlessly mournful – but also uplifting, it is still played at funerals today.

For those of us who were in music school at a certain point in history, it is also the soundtrack for characters experiencing suicidal ideation, courtesy of the 1994 film Immortal Beloved.

Its use underpinning the conversation between Ed and Izzy is self-explanatory: Ed's way of expressing self-loathing is to goad the people around him to hurt him. He feels a kind of ambivalence toward his own life that we saw last in OFMD's pilot, where Stede cannot firmly answer Oluwande's question, "Do you want to live?!"

But we hear the first notes of Beethoven before that scene ever begins.

That the music begins here, rather than when Ed enters the hold to press Izzy into killing him, highlights as much as anything we've seen so far how traumatized Lucius is: not just by being pushed overboard, but by all the trafficking and abuse he experienced before encountering his former crewmates, which he barely starts to detail in this episode. "If I start, I don't know what's going to come out." The stories Lucius shares may have an over-the-top quality, but they're scored like tragedy.

[magpie-trove]

Today on Pop Culture Addressed By Ancient Theologians: Does Free Guy synthesize the tension between will and intellect as the vehicles of ultimate human bliss as seen in Thomistic medieval theology?

[heteromerous-rhyming]

also the disney promotion just left a bad taste in my mouth. let's be so honest, annabeth's reaction to disney world (esp bc in the show she canonically has not watched a single movie apparently) would probably be confusion and disgust. she strikes me as the type of person to dislike large crowds and none of the attractions would make proper sense to her. disney world is also so heavily commercial and she's lived half her like in camp half-blood, which is a place pretty much untouched by capitalism.

they're not going to do this of course but. if they do mention disney world next season, the only way (imo) they could do it in character is to have annabeth vent about the park. like go, yeah my dad thought i'd love it but he clearly doesn't know my interests. we decided to go home early and ended up talking about architecture during post-wwii reconstruction.

[deus-ex-mona]

i miss her…

[salmondot]

I know I'm taking a swing at the hornet's nest with this one - but Astarion fans need to shut up, tbh. You're annoying little blorbo isn't that special, he's got the same shit going on as everyone else. "b-b-but, he was abused by Cazador for 200 years and he was turned as a little baby :("

yeah? Shadowheart was kidnapped as a child and physically abused. Lae'zel was literally born into her abuse. Karlach and Gale are physically bound to their abusers. We literally watch Wyll be disfigured by his evil and extremely powerful master.

This is an ice-cold take, I know - but like, could we not condense the obnoxious simping to the most tropey character, please?

[thatscarletflycatcher]

I'm trying to articulate a thought: while a moral reading of a text is necessary and I'd say unavoidable, a judgement of a text cannot begin and end in its value as a didactic piece for teaching morality to the reader (or reinforcing their sense of moral selves).

This doesn't mean people should read books that make apology of things the person finds morally or psychologically repulsive, just because there's some artistic value in them anyways.

But I have seen people for whom reading (and engaging with media in general) becomes a moral race in which their enjoyment of literature must be thoroughly justified by the -often only superficially ascertained- moral value of the themes and lessons of the text, and for whom the things they read are a letter of presentation of the moral principles they spouse.

In other words, instead of the moral principles of the person delineating the framework through which they approach the text, it is a checklist of things the text must explicitly contain in order to be seen as having any worth at all.

Which is a rather sad and superficial way to engage with things.

[confinesofmy]

for the first time in a long time, i threw together something to eat and it was actively bad. not because of parosmia or any other external thing, it just genuinely wasn't good. i barely finished it and was really glad it was one serving. #humbled

[starryoak]

Me: I am a totally reasonable person capable of accepting that some people won’t enjoy my favorite media and not freak out over that.

Someone: (expresses even a mildly negative opinion about Psychonauts)

Me: I am no longer reasonable, I am ready to murder.

[the-silver-stone]

watched the book of eli last night. yep this one is going on my fave apunkalypse aesthetic movies list. danngngngn. ghngnhghghghhhh

[steampunk-raven]

procreate dreams is an incredible animation app but also absolutely terrible because it has no fucking selection tool

[lesbianlenas]

was cleaning my room w my mom bc everything got dusty from my humidifier and she was cleaning my funko pops and was like “you know it’s weird how you have so many more women than men” and i was like how is that weird. and then she said “it’s almost like you don’t like men” 😭😭 she’s really going for it at this point huh next she’s going to just be like you’re gay aren’t you youre gay admit it and i also won’t respond to that 💞

[cursed-rat-of-homosexuality]

Me watching two characters that are absolutely Not Fucking™:

[sad--tree]

keep saying i don't want 2 work another retail xmas but canNOT 4 the life of me make myself finish my goddamn fucking job applications !!!!!! death & dying & despair etc. etc.

[volixia669]

I think I finally figured out what irritated me about that gameplay trailer for BOTW Tears of the Kingdom.

I mean, aside from the voice over. Something about the voice irked me, making it impossible to watch.

But like. The biggest question for a lot of people is will Tears of the Kingdom at the very least provide a way to repair your weapon?

And unless the site I looked at missed something, it seems the answer is “now you can STACK your incredibly flimsy weapons”.

Which.

No.

I want to be interested in Breath of the Wild and its sequel. But because of how my brain works, the weapons breaking with no way to fix them is a dealbreaker. I’m cool with weapon durability as long as you can fucking fix them.

It’s not like its a new mechanic, as it’s been used in dungeon crawlers for ages.

But there needs to be a way to, y’know, fix the weapon.

If you can’t, well my default is to save up a bunch of the easy to find weapons, and try not to get attached to the big fancy ones.

Yes, I get attached to digital weapons, I’m human and I have adhd.

Like, if the fuse ability can be used to fix weapons, then cool! I’m on board. But if it’s just for making ridiculous shit, well, that’ll be fun for some. But right now I’m not in the headspace for it.

So yeah, today’s gameplay trailer sucked for me because it didn’t answer the one question I had, so the matter of “can I get emotionally invested in this” is still marked unresolved.