#also why there are 24 hours

[freepassbound]

He... doesn't?

A: 28*13 = 364, so you still need an extra day every year (and an extra extra every four)

B: The lunar cycle is 29.5 days, not 28 - it'd be out of whack with this calendar in less than one new 13-month year.

C: doing math in 13s is a pain in the ass; 12s are way easier - which is why the Babylonians came up with the duodecimal system (and where, via the Egyptians, the idea of a 12-month calendar originates) in the first place!

[grantwilson]

we are discussing our childhood passions on the dash tonight

[shiraoyagi]

hot take ??

the only reason people say that "mafuyu and tsukasa have nothing in common" when presented with mafukasa parallels is because they equate mafuyu and tsukasa being similar to "tsukasa has depression" because the fandom equates mafuyu's personality to being depressed and nothing else.

it doesn't help that people (primarily younger people in the fandom) who DO believe in mafukasa parallels end up making the mistake of portraying tsukasa as depressed because as of right now he is not (although it's possible he was in past because of his Very Unclear Middle School Backstory but that's irrelevant)

anyways, mafuyu and tsukasa are narrative foils because their core personalities are built off of the concept of wanting to make the people around them— especially their families— happy.

they both developed personalities at a young age based on someone they looked up to. for tsukasa, it was seiichi amami's performance that inspired him to be a star— a hero that could cheer anyone up. for mafuyu, it was her mother taking care of her that inspired her to be a nurse— and you can see the similarities from there.

for mafuyu, her identity would first come into conflict when her mother expressed her want for mafuyu to be a doctor— suddenly, "everyone's" happiness didn't match what she wanted to do, leaving her in a state of disorder and eventual depression.

for tsukasa, his identity was something he nearly forgot in its entirety at the start of the main story— becoming arrogant and fully absorbed in a hero persona, forgetting the kind person he truly is. furthermore, his current character arc seems to be foreshadowing that what "being a star" to him is going to be called into question— maybe it is something more than just being the main character that saves everyone.

their insecurities are incredibly similar.

in mafuyu's first mixed, mafuyu feels insecure towards ichika because unlike ichika, she feels as if her lyrics have no genuine meaning to be expressed to other people— despite them being her very real feelings. this is brought up again in her second mixed as well.

in tsukasa's third focus event, something similar happens. when watching seiichi's performance, he thinks that his acting is "real" and feels inferior towards him, which is ironic because tsukasa has been method acting this whole time. when tsukasa is acting out rio or bartlett or really anyone at this point in the story, it's not just those characters— it's a reflection of his traumas.

just like mafuyu, tsukasa undermines his passions he's poured his feelings into because someone else's work is more genuine in his eyes.

now, then, foils have many similarities and parallels (and i could honestly list a lot more), but how i define them is that they usually have some kind of major branching difference that MAKES them foils.

for mafuyu and tsukasa it's pretty straightforward.

mafuyu's people pleasing behavior comes from external expectations and pressures— her mother's demands.

tsukasa's people pleasing behavior comes internally, from himself— if he can't meet his own standards, if he can't be the perfect big brother or the perfect star, then he is nothing.

and even then, there's some overlap.

tsukasa's behavior was indirectly encouraged by his mother praising him for being a "good big brother" over the phone instead of asking him if he was okay while home alone.

mafuyu's terrified to be herself around other people because she doesn't want to worry or bother them— she doesn't want to be a burden— and projects her mother's expectations onto them, not realizing that they would prefer the real mafuyu if they knew the truth.

and the concept of mafukasa being foils is most perfectly and blatantly portrayed in these two cards.

mafuyu, the marionette, sitting limp on the floor— puppeteered by her mother's demands and donning a mask to hide her true self.

tsukasa, the jester, standing above everything else— puppeteering silenced plushies— his feelings. he's not being completely honest with himself, and he doesn't even realize it.

mafuyu has cut her strings and ripped her mask in half. she has acknowledged her true feelings and expressed them to her mother, even if she had to run away in the end.

tsukasa has not yet cut his.

[korralone]

Caitlyn and Vi are truly one of my favorite sapphic romance stories I’ve ever had to the privilege to watch on screen. I’m constantly 🤪 when I think about the amount of story time that was dedicated to them, and the type of story that was told, as that’s not usually what we get with gay romances.

I keep seeing a lot of people dissatisfied/angry/etc with how their story went and it kinda bums me out so I just wanted to use this post to get my thoughts and feelings out (obviously everyone has their own valid opinions and won’t agree with me)

Cait and Vi not being uwu “healthy” 24/7 and their inherent messiness is WHY I find them so compelling. From the moment they met there were already huge factors against them, both indirectly of their control (class struggle, power imbalance) and directly (personality clashes, communication styles). But they somehow grew to love each other anyway.

Caitlyn not saying “I’m sorry” out loud at any point to Vi by the end of the show, I honestly loved it. Because Caitlyn instead apologized with her actions, and Caitlyn’s actions always seem to speak louder than her words. Her letting go of the vengeance that consumed her for so long for Vi’s sake (which ultimately led to her allowing Vi to break Jinx out) was more meaningful to me than if they had some long blow out argument (and Vi recognizing this immediately and jumping Caitlyn’s bones then and there was just *chefs kiss* to me)

They’ll never be perfect. They’ll always have to work at their relationship. It won’t be pretty, sometimes even unfair. They’ll fight and clash and not always agree, but there’s always this persistent feeling of LOVE anyway, and they’ve decided they’ll put in the work to make their relationship last despite it all. And I think it’s beautiful.

[gloriousmonsters]

listened to most of The Art of War while hanging clothes at my job earlier and I'm going to just distill down the real advice for y'all without the twenty thousand similes and metaphors and such

Wars are expensive have them really fast

Don't kill your soldiers they need food and stuff

But sometimes put your soldiers into inescapable life or death situations because that's how you really get them to be workin' hard instead of hardly workin', y'know

Have more guys than the enemy and be smarter. The best way to win a war is to have every single favorable condition for winning a war. Hope that helps

DO NOT fight in a salt marsh

If your boss gives you a stupid order, don't follow that order

Be 15 min early to the battlefield

Attack the enemy's weak points. But also they might be faking weaknesses so don't attack if they seem weak. But attack their weak points. But also-

For the love of god don't let anyone read omens

[remxedmoon]

fortified by age-old condolences

drawings of the northern lights

god, give us clearer skies

open-eyed, entangled in promises

furthering the questions asked

hands tied behind our backs

bared fangs behind a mask

shaking violently. hey guys. aur. aura mirabelle animatic. can anyone hear me in here. c

ok. i’m not actually making any promises here. i don’t know video editing and also!!!! ive got weird fucked up motivation. the last time i tried to make an animatic was like 4 years ago and i forgot about it after a day. but the Temptations. so for now (indeterminate amount of time) you’re just getting the intro tarot cards. For Now.

also for anyone who’s curious, the cards shown here are the sun reversed, the moon upright, and the stars reversed!! i just kept them the same as they were in the mv. from my Extremely Surface Level understanding, the sun reversed can represent pessimism and ignorance, the moon can represent mystery and self-deception, and the stars reversed can represent a loss of faith! again though, i’m not well versed in tarot card readings in Any Way, please let me know if i’m wrong about anything here!

also for convenience and stuff, here’s the flipped version!! again, no idea if i’m ever going to do more with this idea lol. dddon’t get your hopes up or anything

[whirlwindofcomplications]

TELL ME I'M YOUR NATIONAL ANTHEM.

I. excerpts from a book I'll never write #56, @blossomfully

II. desperation sits heavy on my tongue, @tullipsink

III. brute: poems - emily skaja

IV. "everything all of it," in 'then the war' - carl phillips

V. susan jeffers

VI. radical feminist therapy: working in the context of violence - bonnie burstow

for @gayferrari - everything always comes back to michael

[bettsfic]

okay so i saw The Bikeriders today and i knew i wouldn't be normal about this movie and even though my expectations were impossibly high it exceeded them. i was happy for it to just be a cool movie for the sake of being a cool movie, toxic masculinity ultraviolence whatever, and it was but with Jodie Comer's character narrating about what fucking idiots all these macho biker dudes are. it's like if a woman narrated Fight Club while constantly pointing out how stupid Fight Club is

also, most of it was filmed near where i live and it was so exciting seeing places i recognized! it's been all over the news for weeks

things i loved about it:

protective older woman/loose cannon younger man

lowkey romantic stalking

a relationship suspiciously close to a throuple, by which i mean protective older woman goes to war against possessive older man, re: their mutual intense love for loose cannon younger man. and that's not even subtext that's just text

hot sadboy who doesn’t talk much and is so cool he doesn’t know how cool he is

british people doing midwestern accents

NO PLOT, god bless. just stuff happening and a lot of gay tension building

accurate portrayals of the aftermath of the vietnam war

accurate portrayals of mid-century small-town life

accurate portrayals of men being fucking pathetic

things i did not love about it:

for the love of god please wear a helmet

idk man it's just a whole-ass movie about how vietnam changed the very definition of masculinity, and that awkward era between wwii and vietnam when guys were rebellious for the aesthetic, rebel without a cause shit, twinks in leather jackets manhood. the movie even points that out, like they're so against rules but then they make all these rules for their silly little biker gang because they're bored. and then allll these vets come home from a war nobody wanted and they're actually rebelling, full anti-establishment, and there's just no more honor anymore because everybody's broken. which is all to say, somebody please come into my ask and be insane about this movie with me.

anyway i'm seeing it again tomorrow and i have already started an ot3 fic goodbye

[animatedjen]

Correct. Bode has been my weapon for some time. Quite effective.

[wikitpowers]

james, is that you?

he fs would post this before marrying cordelia :’)

[spiritoast]

miracle mask liveblogs part deux

bonus below the cut of me being utterly devastated

[ethowo-indeed]

etho was once again quite active in the chat of bdubs' latest stream, being the nr1 bdubs fan that he is, and i once again felt the need to compile as many chat messages that i could spot from him, being the ethogirl that i am.

context: etho finding out that bdubs gave away speedy supreme

context: etho being a scar apologist i guess. (in reality doc was flying over bdubs' base with a flying machine, holding a live-shulker. & doc was panicing about bdubs flying too close to the machine/shulker)

context: etho plugging his favourite piece of bdubs merch! go get yourself a pink hoodie that was specifically made for etho <3

context: etho's comeback to bdubs saying he's a horse whisperer, while he also just mentioned the mod he uses to see a horse's speed + that there was a vanilla way to measure the speed of a horse, used by etho, if u were willing to take the time to ride each horse through a million cobwebs.

context: horse rated trash/14 speed by etho xD

context: according to etho, bdubs' height is fake and does not exist. (i don't know how that would work, but etho is never wrong so)

context: bdubs put on the pink hoodie, which was a very exciting moment for etho.

context: bdubs saying that... he was tall where it mattered? in his heart? which resulted in this comeback from etho. (etho is referencing an old vlog bdubs did where he talked about putting lifts in his shoes)

context: bdubs said that part of the reason for the lifts was so that he wouldn't look small next to his wife when she wore high heels. etho did not relent.

context: hermits were telling jokes in the hermitcraft chat and etho wanted to participate.

BONUS:

context: bdubs' mods on their way to "take etho out back" as was requested by bdubs after the height jokes.

[jinikaris]

Hyunjin and Felix’s interactive dance moves in Chk Chk Boom ✩ 2 // ∞ [ Music Core 2024 ]

[watchmakermori]

my biggest TV critique pet peeve is 'the pacing was so bad, they needed more episodes'

I'm seeing it a lot with regards to arcane season 2. say it with me: if the pacing of a story is bad, that's a problem with the writing. not with the runtime.

If you have commissioned a 9-episode show, and you have to squeeze in plotlines and rush through character moments, then you need to take stuff out and rethink your narrative until it works. Poor pacing is usually a symptom of a wider issue rather than a problem in itself. It might be that you've got too many characters, or you haven't sorted out their motivations well enough. When you don't know what to do with characters or you're only including them for the sake of it, it squeezes the story and makes it rushed and unfocused. But crucially, the solution to this problem is often not to extend the story and spend MORE time on those characters. It's to cut them out or rethink their motivation.

I understand the impulse to say 'oh, if we'd only had more time, this plotline would have been much better'. But it's just such a simplistic approach to the problem. Season 2 of Arcane was rushed, yes, but it's problems would not have been fixed by adding more episodes. Season 1 had pretty much the same number of spinning plates (on top of the challenge of introducing us to the characters and world for the first time!), but the story was tighter and the writing was better, so the pacing worked. Season 2's real problem was the disconnect between the different plots and the number of messy, aimless character motivations. More time wouldn't have fixed that

We saw a similar thing with season 4 of stranger things with its ridiculously long episodes. Padding out the runtime did not make the characters or story better! The problem with modern stranger things is that it's got too many characters and most of them have jack shit to do.

It just drives me nuts when people critique runtime as the reason for pacing problems. Runtime is neutral and your job as a writer is to work with what you have. So you've got more ideas and characters than you can reasonably fit into the story? Tough shit! Cut something! Collapse some characters together, or remove them, and ask yourself if you really need that subplot you're so fond of.

Pacing and runtime are not unrelated, but runtime is not a solution to bad pacing. If the writer isn't using 9 episodes well then they probably won't use 18 episodes well either.

[mari-monsta]

It honestly really baffles me when people say adrien is a boring or simple character, I don’t understand where that comes from at all. Because I think the main reason he’s so compelling are his complexities, but in the same vein those complexities I think make him someone very easy to relate to. Like it’s fine if he’s not likable or relatable to everyone but saying he’s not complex is really just ???? To me. Just looking at how DIFFERENTLY he acts around different people and situations is so fascinating to me. Of course everyone takes different personas and highlights different aspects of their personality around different people but adrien is the king of doing it around the same people to the extent of which having his two personalities be the same is laughable to those who know him personally in his everyday life.

But it’s not out of no where, seeing his home life and the kind of person he’s made out to be by his situation it’s not hard at all to understand that he’s a person who is immensely self conscious. He’s constantly gauging others perception of him and whether or not he is “safe”. What’s more fascinating is the entirely different way this comes out in chat noir. Because adriens personality as chat noir is also deliberate to a certain extent but it’s deliberate in the way that that’s how he wants others to see him. He wants to see self assured and larger than life because in his everyday life he feels small and self conscious. The fact that this dichotomy is so easy to follow in his character but creates such a black and white image in his two personalities is so interesting!

Another thing I find completely fascinating about him are his high empathy and how that actually fucks him up more often than not. He’s acutely aware of how other people might be feeling and can easily sympathize. At the same time though he has a hard time understanding certain social cues and situations and seems very out of his element. I don’t think these things conflict at all. Adrien is someone who easily puts himself in other peoples shoes and can imagine and have sympathy for their situation, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to pick up on the social complexities of every interaction every time. Emotions aren’t the same as communication and when it comes to the later adrien works best with simple and straight forward interactions.

In the same vein because of his aforementioned situations he’s also a character who has a lot of repressed anger and frustration that has been building up for a very long time. In his everyday life, he feels powerless, small, and insignificant. He doesn’t have faith that anyone would listen to his thoughts and feelings and actually take them into account, because by all of his experiences no one really has. This creates a defense mechanism where he shuts himself out before he even gets to the point of sharing how he really feels. We see this really easily in his relationship with Nino. He loves Nino DEARLY, but there is something that we have seen in him constantly putting up walls emotionally. He won’t tell him when he doesn’t find something funny, he won’t tell him if he’s unhappy to do something even when it greatly affects his life because he is at his core afraid Nino will not validate those emotions.

As a result, all the frustration he’s built up from feeling powerless in his everyday life we see just. Randomly bursting out of him in inopportune moments as chat noir. It’s not that adrien is such a violent or angry person normally. But he’s so used to repressing and modulating his emotions regularly that when he feels somewhat safe to express any frustration ALL of the anger he feels constantly bubbling under the surface all of the time just suddenly rushes out, like a dam holding back hundreds of gallons of water. This happens repeatedly, and then as soon as he’s realized he’s let himself get out of control he immediately feels immense guilt and he stops the dam up even tighter. This is obviously not a healthy feedback loop but it’s fucking FASCINATING!!!!

A common thing that I feel like I see fans often misinterpret about his character in my own opinion is just how PRIVATE of a person adrien is. Adrien loves sharing his love and appreciation for those around him because he knows how it feels not to know, not to be sure of that affection. But in the same token, Adrien rarely if ever actually shares his real feelings with those he’s close to. He doesn’t like people prying into his life or his feelings and he is very private about most things. We don’t see him talking about what he likes, we don’t see him sharing with his friends his anger or frustration. And in the end Adrien is the one character who has kept his secrets most closely held to his vest. This is all despite being so grandiose and loud mouthed as chat noir. Even as chat noir, adrien rarely is entirely open about things going on in his life.

To me Adrien as a character isn’t interesting or compelling because he is shy or cute or sweet, but because there are a number of different facets to his personality that I can easily see reasons for and understand where his feelings come from. He IS sweet, but not without misplaced anger, not without repression, not without mistakes and messy emotions. Not without pain that we can both easily see the roots of but also have a wide spread variety of consequences from. We see how his formative experiences affect every aspect of his life even in ways he audience wouldn’t necessarily expect, but make complete sense. That’s so fun and interesting to me!!!! Let characters be messy but try their best anyways!!! Let characters hurt each other and try to put the pieces back together one shard at a time. People have complicated emotions that come out in ways we can’t always foresee or help, people make mistakes because of that. But despite everything adrien is a character who cares deeply for those around him and tries to do right by them despite all the rest of it, and despite sometimes not really knowing how.

It’s things like that that keep miraculous being an extremely engaging and compelling story to me. Most of the general things about adriens character are also things that I find interesting about marinettes as well! Of course the intricacies of her character are completely different, but the general hows and whys and complex motivations for her actions while maintaining the best of intentions are what make them both so interesting to me. So this is just a little love letter to adriens character because I wanted to talk about that and why I find him so engaging!