#and IMPROVE SOCIETY

[deadpoets]

- Nathaniel Handal, from “Love Letter,” Poetry (March 2021) [x, old version]

[they-call-me-hippie]

"Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil"

Hanna Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

[starry-bi-sky]

more clone^2 memes because i think they're funny

[starrysharks]

winter assassin outfit

[asteropescrolls]

"born to live"

darling, you were never born to die...you were born to live. you were born to feel the air splurge through your lungs, to feel the sunlight warming your back, to hear the birds sing early in the morning. may these little joys coat your existence akin to a warm blanket. may they keep your heart beating. never lose the childlike wonder locked in your core, too beautiful a thing it is to let go of.

[captainkirkk]

Social media fics are fun, but future historical accounts and opinions about our characters (especially if our main characters are kings or important societal figures) about how influential and much-loved said characters become?? That shit makes me go feral every time

[ofswordsandpens]

the chalice of the gods becomes objectively funnier if you head canon that percy and annabeth only stay at New Rome for a single semester before realizing its batshit insane there and running for the hills

[3liza]

"uwu be nice to men they're so sad" does anyone remember the centuries and millennia when it was illegal to not be nice to men like institutionally, punishable by death, and they did not respond with better politics or behavior or less violent crime or fewer family annihilations, rapes, infanticides, regular normal homicides, serial killing, child molestation, etc. does anyone remember that. i think it was written down somewhere if you don't remember.

[screebyy]

Part 2: local empath tries and fails to parse his own feelings apart from the feelings of the dead little freak living inside his brain

Next part is either gonna be either a really big one or split into several little parts idk yet but i would like to finish this at least through the next Scene™️

Prev || Next

ID below cut

Panel 1: Crow is sitting on a branch high up in a dead tree, on a hill above the Harbinger’s Seclude temple in the Dreaming City. Crow is relaxing along the branch, with one leg stretched out and one propped up so he can rest his hand on his knee. He is leaning back against the trunk of the tree as he looks to his right, down at the temple and away from the viewer. He is holding a flaming hunter throwing knife in his hand, flicking it back and forth. Glint is floating next to him. Glint: “Do you want to see him again?” Crow: “I don’t think he wants to see me.” Glint: “That’s not what I asked!”

Panel 2: Crow twirls the knife in his hand, scowling as he looks down at it. The knife is made of solar flame, and leaves trails of fire behind it as he twirls it. Crow looks like he is reluctantly considering Glint’s question.

Panel 3: Crow turns back towards the temple, grabbing the knife and pulling his knees into his chest. Crow: “I just want him to be alright.”

Panel 4: Crow hugs his knees into his chest. His face is not visible. Crow: “And… it seems like knowing me doesn’t help with that.”

Panel 5: Crow has his arms crossed over his knees, and is resting his face on his forearm. With his other hand, he continues to fidget with the solar knife, twirling it between his fingers. He is looking at the knife, but his expression is distant. Crow: “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Panel 6: In a memory, Uldren and Jolyon are in bed, late at night. Jolyon seems to be sleeping peacefully, and is embracing Uldren from behind with his face pressed against the back of Uldren’s head. One arm is draped over Uldren’s waist, while the other is resting under Uldren’s cheek, with his hand palm-up on the mattress in front of Uldren’s face.Uldren is awake. He is clutching the blanket around his waist with one hand. His other hand is clutching desperately at Jolyon’s hand on the mattress in front of him, with his fingers threaded between Jolyon’s at an awkward, stiff angle. He is staring at their clasped hands, looking distraught and almost angry. He is crying. Crow (from present day): “I always knew I was bad for him. Even before the garden, when things were… Mostly good. I knew I’d never be what he wanted. What he deserved…”

Panel 7: In present day, Crow continues to twirl the knife, but has turned his face further into the crook of his elbow, staring vacantly into the distance. Crow: “I was just too selfish to let him go.” Panel 8: Close up of Glint staring down at Crow passively. Glint: “It sounds like that’s how Uldren felt. What about you?”

Panel 8: Close up of Crow’s hand holding the knife. He has stopped it mid-spin, catching it between his fingers. Crow: “...”

Panel 9: Close up of Crow’s hand. He dissolves the knife into a fizzling burst of flame as he closes his hand into a fist. Crow: “Right.”

Panel 10: Wide shot from behind Crow. Crow turns his body fully towards the temple, still resting his left hand on his knee. Glint is floating in front of him, looking at his face. Crow: “I don’t want to make the same mistake. So… if he asks, I’ll be there. But after everything Uldren did, the way things ended…”

Panel 11: Crow turns his head away from Glint, leaning on his right hand stiffly. Crow: “I don’t think I’ll hear from him again.”

Panel 12: Glint floats in front of Crow again. Crow is looking down and away from the camera. Glint: “... And you’re okay with that?”

Panel 13: Crow starts to turn back towards Glint, looking torn. Crow: “... I-” He is interrupted by a dinging sound coming from his pocket.

Panel 14: Crow pulls his phone from his pocket, looking at the screen curiously. The phone dings again, and the screen shows that there are two new notifications.

Panel 15: Crow pulls the phone very close to his face, clutching it tightly with both hands. He is staring at the phone with comically wide eyes, looking alarmed and is blushing lightly. The phone shows two messages from an external sender [EXT]. Crow: “A-” Phone: “Are you still in the reef?” Phone: “It’s Jolyon”

Panel 16: Wide shot of Crow squatting like a gremlin on the branch, holding the phone with both hands directly in front of his face as he types on it quickly. He is blushing, and looks extremely focused. Glint is spinning excitedly above him. Crow’s response is visible coming from the phone. Phone (Crow’s response): “yes leaving tomorrow” Glint: “He’s messaging you!! Do you think he wants to see you??” Crow: “I don’t know shush” Crow: “He’s typing…”

Panel 17: Close up of the phone screen, where 3 messages from Jolyon are visible: [EXT]: Can we talk? [EXT]: Meet me here? [EXT]: (a UI element reads NAV DATA SHARED, showing a nav point over cartographical lines)

Panel 18: Close up of Crow’s face, looking down at the phone. He look surprised.

Panel 19: Text shows Crow’s response: “on my way.”

[cringefail-clown]

how does Beforan Karkat react to Kankri's pretty much idolizing of him?

hes absolutely baffled (he secretly loves the attention) ((sollux wont stop making fun of it))

[cozylittleartblog]

the only tradition i'm interested in embracing is the good ol' french tradition of Chopping People's Heads Off

oh the irony of it all, this is available as a 5 x 7 print in my etsy! (& my redbubble + teepublic)

[bobbimorses]

what do you think of matt fraction's hawkeye run? obviously its very highly regarded but i have seen criticisms on how he portrayed clint's character and that some people also had issues with it because all the mcu fans used it as substitue characterisation after avengers 2012 left them with not much and "became insufferable about it." also that other good hawkeye comics were ignored in favour of it.

well idk if i would characterize "became insufferable about it" with regards to reading a comic as it is released bc comics have so much trouble succeeding. but i think what you're getting at with pointing to 2012 is a sort of revisionism that's occurred. and it has! i think many have forgotten, and many more are now unaware (bc time disgustingly marches on for all of us) that the avengers movie, in fact, came out before hawkeye v4 (the fraction & aja run we're discussing) even began.

i would like to gently grab you all by the shoulders when i say this--bc i realize we've reached a point where some of you were literal kindergarteners when this movie came out and don't have the cultural consciousness to know not only was hawkeye not (never!) a household name, but neither were "the avengers" for the most part--but whenever you say "i can't BELIEVE the mcu didn't include/start with [storyline from hawkeye v4. page from hawkeye v4. panel from hawkeye v4. dialogue/"catchphrase" from hawkeye v4. relationship from hawkeye v4. retconned backstory/fluency from hawkeye v4 ]" regarding clint, know that that literally did not exist at the time.

mcu clint showed up wearing all black in 2011. mcu clint in the movie "the avengers" wasn't even wearing purple. mcu clint was actually not even that clinton francis barton. the mcu started off as the ultimates. "i can't believe the mcu didn't make clint like clint barton in this page from 2015." mcu made clint like clint barton from an entirely different line of comics, the ultimates, with an entirely different clint barton, bc the 2010s had just started crawling out of the Grit and Realism and We're All Wearing Black Leather of superhero movies from the 2000s. and practically none of those were comic-accurate. the mcu still isn't by god but a current mcu movie can resemble a specific storyline and have a recognizable costume whereas a lot of superhero movies in the 2000s (not you spider-man and hulk costumes) were like "here is the character, bulleteater foxtrot. he is based on the celebrated indie comic where someone shoots at a lonely boy making friends with a fox in the forest and, after a bullet grazes his face and kills the fox, he avenges his friend by championing the survival of forest critters over encroaching aggressive habitat destruction. in this movie, some hitman in the mob that eats shrapnel-os for breakfast every day gets intel from a woman named foxy and 35% of the scenes are in a seedy club with gratuitous dancing. nobody has the same name as a single character in the series. 80% of our viewers will not know this was based on a comic when it airs at 10pm on showtime. godspeed."

digressing psa over. that wasn't your question at all but we went through that journey just now together.

ANYWAYS i see what you're saying about "substitute characterization." when clint had so little non-mind controlled scenes and characterization available from the mcu at all, you can understand people pulling from the comics for their characterization. as they should! comic book movies have characters from comic books! whooo, comics! it's fair that people were reading the currently releasing comic to supplement their fanworks of this character with a lacking portrayal. and bc of the popularity and acclaim of the series, well that just made it easier. but these elements combined meant past portrayals of clint were kind of overshadowed, bc people were unfamiliar with the clint barton of the past 50 years. why? bc clint barton wasn't a household name! hey, it all ties back! that digression wasn't a digression after all!

well as you all know, the avengers made a billion dollars. people did not know clint barton, but now people do. only they don't know clint barton, they know the name, clint barton. oh cruel household name irony, our journey is not over. and the people reading hawkeye v4, perhaps even their very first foray into comics (or still unsure of how to access comics so they see piecemeal panels of it second-hand), now that they're curious about all this? well they're like "hey, wait a second...where was this clint barton?" so now you can have vocal contingents of fans of popular and acclaimed comic hawkeye v4, like "yo, that's not clint barton!" people would like comics portrayed accurately in movies that are purported to be comic books based. god knows that would be wild. but using hawkeye v4 as all examples means our purple-masked friend is, well, purple-maskless. but them's the breaks.

now back to your actual question. i've actually typed way too much explaining this weird set of circumstances about mcu vs 2012 bc i think it helps explore the second part of your...statement? but as to your actual question, which i think would be more comics-centric than criticisms with mcu fans, i've touched on that a few times before. not to link to other questions to answer your question, but yeah. it's a great comic. there's a reason it did so well. it just so happens that that may have led to historical portrayals of clint being eclipsed with subsequent writers trying to replicate its success haphazardly. no reason for us all to do the same. we love reading the source material don't we folks. for more unnecessarily long tangents about clint barton, feel free to peruse my meta tag. we are all lovers of a certain clint barton on this here planet earth

[gunstellations]

double trouble

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[cookiecrumbconundrum]

even a day is a very long time // on resilience & saving your younger self

@/inanotheruniverse | dana's hands and, long island, new york | lilith kerr | @/tapewormart | sue zhao | robert de flers | "problem area", melissa broder | dead poets society, peter weir | creature, michael dumanis | e.t, steven spielberg

[ichabodjane]

Yeah, the US higher ed system is quite differently structured than the European system! (Not sure about the Canadian universities tbh.)

Most bachelor degrees in the US require a certain amount of general education classes that everyone needs to take before you go into specialized classes for your degree. That's why you don't *have* to choose a degree program for the first couple of years if you don't want to and why people can switch majors without needing to completely start over (sometimes).

The general education usually includes life sciences, fine arts, English composition/literature, foreign language, maybe some kind of tech, and physical education (anything from jogging to billiards lol. I did yoga and tai chi for mine. The Ivy League private schools make you do a swimming test to graduate.) The point is to create a well-rounded education, which is what "liberal arts" is supposed to mean.

There's two main ways to get gen Ed credits before you go to a 4 year school/bachelor's programs. High school students can take Advanced Placement (AP) classes, which end with exams created by the College Board (the same company that runs the SAT/ACT general exams that you also usually need to apply to uni). Most unis accept a certain score on an AP test as credit towards one of their general education classes. So for example, I entered uni already having credits for English lit and comp, math (stats), French, history, prolly some other stuff I can't remember. Ofc this is assuming your high school is affluent enough to have AP classes at all and that you can afford the exam fee but it's still cheaper than university tuition.

The other way to get early credits is taking community college classes. Most community colleges have transfer programs set up with nearby unis. So people either take some classes then transfer to a 4 year degree OR they complete an associate's degree and roll that into the final 2 years of a bachelor's and then they have both degrees at the end. A lot of community college general ed courses are also open to high school students if their high school doesn't offer sufficiently advanced classes.

And because its the US, all of this varies based on how your state university system does things. Private universities generally follow this setup but not all.

An associate's degree generally comes from completing a 2 or 3 year program at a community college. In the US, community colleges are smaller state-owned schools that are less expensive than universities. They offer lower level university classes or programs in things like business management, nursing, or general studies. Often people save money by doing their general studies classes at community college then transferring to a 4 year university to finish a bachelor's degree (sometimes you can get an assoc. And bachelor's in the same area). But associate's degrees can also qualify you for a lot of jobs on their own. (Community colleges also usually have a lot of non-degree classes in things like foreign languages, first aid, or honestly whatever someone wants to teach, which are open to anyone.)

Oooh thank you for explaining! I've always had trouble categorizing college from what I've seen in US American media. So you can kinda choose whether going to college as a gen ed continuation, or the opposite to get specialized? Are there any Bachelor's programms you need Associate's degrees for?

I'm fairly sure something similar used to exist in Belgium for specific fields, but they were homogenized in the ECTS system introduced by the Bologna process (essentially making it easier to change fields without losing your credit, and making international recognition of diploma's possible). Now theoretically there are distinctions between institutions for more practical education (no options for Master's degrees in most cases but this is changin) versus more theoretical/academic studies. If you take a practical Bachelor's degree, it might be that you need extra credit to take a Master's.