#and more conflicted the second time

[waitineedaname]

I love that the best emotional acting when it comes to facial expressions comes from Lan Wangji (microexpressions) and Jiang Cheng (macroexpressions). Lan Wangji doesn't emote much but when you're keyed in, the tiny little changes in his facial expression are Devastating. Meanwhile Jiang Cheng is feeling Every Emotion, All The Time, and you are going to see it on every inch of his face. He'll go through twenty different expressions in the same amount of seconds and that face journey will be but a brief glimpse into the awful emotional rollercoaster that is Jiang Cheng's life

[void-dude]

I have terrible news- I might want to rework the original plot of my Shapes and Pines AU 😭 y'all keep giving me such cute ideas that I might want to go back to my ORIGINAL draft! I don't know man I'm so conflicted nooooo dammit!!! As of right now I still got free game to choose but aaarghhh I gotta decide

[hazellvsq]

obviously things about the feud between frank and leo could have been executed better but one thing i do actually like about it is that both of them, in their intro books, reference being bullied in the past, and both of them have low self esteem and are seen as outcasts by others. which means that when they fight with each other, neither of them ever really sees himself as doing anything wrong because they’re both used to being on the receiving end of bullying and don’t really comprehend that they’re engaging in it themselves. more under the cut

annabeth and hazel have to explain to frank and leo respectively that the other is intimidated by them, and neither of them can really internalize that until late in the book. and leo can also justify his actions by being intimidated by frank, but he’s also intimidated by percy and annabeth, to the extent that he makes significantly less jokes at their expense, so intimidation is not actually what's motivating his antagonism. he enjoys being able to get a rise out of frank and looking smarter than him, and clearly knows that its different than teasing the people he’s actually friends with. likewise frank has no issue aiming for the jugular once he feels threatened and doesn’t seem to feel even slightly guilty about being mean to leo. and their own insecurities give them insight into the other's insecurities, which they then proceed to use against the other, (“am i worth two franks or three franks” from the guy who blew up new rome, “you care more about your ship than your friends” from the guy very obviously not considering leo to be his friend), all without admitting, to themselves or anyone else, that they’re jealous of the other. they're both projecting heavily, they both very much match each other's energy, and they have the entire ship cringing every time the two of them interact.

and i like that! it’s even one of the reasons that i ship them together, because it gives both their interactions an edge that neither of them have with other characters. they both have massive chips on their shoulders that are somewhat justified by their pasts, but it also can turn them into assholes. i like that the conflict between them revealed deeply buried mean streaks in two typically friendly characters. i think it reflects a certain type of teenage bullying where the mindset isn't "i'm going to antagonize this person i don't like," its "this person makes me feel bad and i'm reacting to it." its realistic! frank and leo show each other’s character flaws and blind spots, and the end result of it is genuine character development and growth for both once they actually try to get to know each other. and they get to a point of resolution without completely changing their personalities or erasing their flaws. its them finding genuine understanding without sandpapering away what makes their character's interesting.

[wojtekaneko]

Season 4 was so good! Really nice change of pace after s3. And it made me love these characters even more!! ^^ also ep 160 killed me and ripped me apart but hey here's some fun drawings!

[fujii-draws]

OKAY! Chatot rant in tags below! Read at your own discretion.

[slurpyboii]

A little bit of this chapter was actually p good but the rest was literally nothing. Like. What are we doing. What do you mean one more chapter left.

Spoilers in tags

[blueskittlesart]

i am an athena cykes defender forever and ever until the day i die but god. somewhere out there there is a universe where apollo justice got actual follow through and it kills me that i am not living in it

[wonder-worker]

"The division between the two families [the Woodvilles and the Nevilles] and their allies can be seen in the royal charters that they witnessed. Warwick, Rivers and Archbishop Neville of York, while serving as chancellor and afterwards, were fairly constant witnesses to royal charters and consequently often appeared together. This was not, however, the case for other family members and friends. From 1466 to 1469, if Scales or Woodville associates like Sir John Fogge, John Lord Audley or Humphrey Lord Stafford of Southwick witnessed royal charters, then members of the Neville group, such as John Neville, earl of Northumberland, or John Lord Wenlock would not, and vice versa. Discounting the ubiquitous Warwick, Rivers and Archbishop Neville, of the twenty-four charters issued between February 1466 and June 1469, twelve were witnessed by men associated with the Woodvilles, eight by men associated with the Nevilles and two were witnessed by no member of either group beyond the two earls at their heads and the archbishop; only two charters, both from 1466, featured associates of both families.

Such striking segregation of witnesses suggests that something more than simple convenience or availability was at play. [...] The evidence of these witness lists does show the extent of the split between the two groups from early in Edward's [first] reign and of the need for political society to work with that cleavage in the heart of the Yorkist regime."

— Theron Westervelt, "Royal charter witness lists and the politics of the reign of Edward IV"

*This is specifically applicable for Edward IV's first reign; in contrast, the charters in his second reign displayed a great deal of aristocratic and domestic unity and cohesion.

[spittingspite]

It's always "character who will do anything to protect their loved one, even commit horrific acts of violence, learn kindness and mercy at the request of their loved one" and never "merciful character who hates violence and fighting makes an exception because they love someone so much they will disregard their own morals and values to commit horrific acts of violence if that's what it takes to keep their loved one safe"

[completeoveranalysis]

[3]

We resume in the Time Stop!

Visually I quite like how they’re differentiating this here - it’s harder to show that time is stopped in a still medium, because we view things as if time has already stopped. The pictures don’t move. But CLAMP have added a grey filter to the moments where time is frozen, and left the unfrozen parts looking brighter by comparison. It works really well! You can even see Evil Wolverine’s pretentious throne that looks like little wings because he just can’t stop himself. He cannot resist being extra for no reason. The man does not know the meaning of moderation. 

And VERY fun framing with Lava Lamp and Evil Wolverine visually divided by THE MOMENT where he didn’t grab Sakura’s hand, also cast over in grey. Evil Wolverine looking Peak Villain as possible, while Lava Lamp’s eyes are wide open in realisation. I’m not sure if it’s because of Who is talking to him, or the Pure Temptation of an offer that WOULD FIX EVERYTHING. He COULD do it. If he took this man’s offer he COULD SAVE SAKURA, which he has devoted literally half his life to already.

[coquelicoq]

Ce n'est pas de John Jackson qu'il faut attendre grand intérêt pour Diderot, Stendhal ou même Flaubert, mais ce courant qui ne sait guère la poésie n'est pas en France aussi vaste qu'on pourrait croire, il y a souvent chez nos prosateurs, aussitôt en cela les plus musiciens, les plus grands, le besoin de réparer dans leurs propres œuvres les dégâts que la prosodie dite classique du vers régulier et de la rime à outrance a causés dans la sensibilité poétique, et de Rousseau à Proust en passant par Chateaubriand ou Nerval l'étude de quelques-uns de ces poètes de la prose est aussi la voie qu'a suivie John Jackson dans nombre de ses essais, voie proche d'une autre où il rencontre Hölderlin ou d'autres aspects du romantisme allemand.

if i may just whimper pathetically for a second. first of all this one sentence, which could very easily be made into three sentences, is 128 words long. secondly there's a comma splice (which is allowed in formal written french but definitely makes things harder to parse). thirdly it took me like ten minutes to figure out that the subject of "a causés" is "la prosodie" because i missed the "de" before "la rime" and so thought the subject of "a causés" was the plural "la prosodie et la rime", which is not the writer's fault except insofar as it is easier to miss a word when there are 128 of them. fourthly that "et de Rousseau à Proust" is really rude because, coming after a comma instead of in a new sentence, the "de" feels like it should be referring back to the last de in the main clause, which was "le besoin de", but that doesn't make any fucking sense, and you have to wait several more words to find "l'étude", which isn't even set off by a comma. fifthly the "sentences" (not pictured) directly before and after this one are not actually sentences as none of them contain a main verb, something also allowed in written french but imo really rude to do in excess. this guy is like "a sentence is EITHER five sentences in a trenchcoat OR a lone noun phrase (with subordinate clauses of course)." dude can we not just split the difference. i'm suffering here.

sixthly even after eventually managing to parse the syntax i still had no idea what he was saying because i confused réparer with repérer. that's one's definitely on me though.

[mint-stone]

ngl the season finale was a bit dissappointing :/

[mintharan]

ooh the fight with emmrich before the last stand where either one or both he and Rook can die is so so good. agh way to up the stakes even more

[your-pal-nebula]

"Cringe culture is dead!!!" They say, and then proceed to be absolutely insane about Hazbin Hotel fans

[giantkillerjack]

Anastasia the Musical sucks so bad. They really said "We're gonna cut the best song from the movie - just axe the absolute banger that is 'In the Dark of the Night' - because we are being SERIOUS and GROWN-UP now. We are A Big Historical Realism Musical Now. This is FOR REAL, okay!? We don't have a SILLY villain like Rasputin! We have Gleb! [Please Just Clap.] We are HISTORICALLY GROUNDED. -- Anyway, here's a musical unironically glorifying the Russian monarchy~~ 💖😌💖😌💖😌💖"

[visual-calc]

Say, does quantum physics correlate with time traveling journey? Time traveling machine quite tempting to be made..

VISUAL CALCULUS [Heroic: Success] — Quantum physics actually has very little to do with our understanding of time, or the possibility of time travel. Most of the relevant theory falls under the theory of relativity, with a little bit of thermodynamics sprinkled in.

At its most basic level, relativity states that our reality exists in four dimensions: the three spatial dimensions we usually think of, and time, which is why we sometimes refer to it as "spacetime". Time is connected to the other three dimensions in a special way: the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. Similarly, the closer you are to very massive object, such as a black hole or Elysium's core, the slower time passes for you.

This means that it is almost trivially easy to travel forward in time— just steal an aerostatic and fly very, very fast, or take a vacation at the bottom of the ocean. Either of these will cause you to experience less time than a friend who stays stationary or at sea level, so upon your return you will have effectively traveled to the future— by a few billionths of a second. A difference in elevation of a few thousand feet is not enough to create a significant difference in time, nor are there any means of transportation able to reach the necessary speeds to make this a practical means of time travel. But traveling forward is at least theoretically possible.

However, based on your prior interaction with Savoir Faire and Interfacing, I suspect that you are interested in traveling backwards, and I am afraid I need to be the bearer of bad news: it is simply impossible. The arrow of time only points forward. This is a law higher than you, or me, or Authority, or any of us. There is nothing we can do to reverse it, in any normal reality.

Physically, this is intrinsically linked to the idea of entropy, a measure of disorder. Entropy can never decrease— any process that is possible can only increase disorder, never decrease it. Reversing the flow of time and traveling backwards through it would allow you to increase order. For example, if you broke a glass, then traveled back to a time where the glass was whole again, you would be returning it to its ordered state, making backwards time travel impossible just from a physics standpoint. That doesn't even scratch the surface of the possible paradoxes of causality such travel would cause.

However. Not all of Elysium is part of our normal sense of reality. Entropy and entroponetic share the same root, after all— the Pale is entropy incarnate, disorder made manifest. Deep enough in the Pale, this disorder is great enough that our usual notions of time and space have no meaning. Reality ceases to have dimensions at all and the laws of physics break down.

The only way we can travel through the Pale at all is using Pale latitude compressors— devices that allow us to force the Pale into having dimensions again, taking on the shape of our familiar four-dimensional spacetime. No one has ever tried forcing the pale into being anything else. It's easy to see why— for transport of human beings, you want to make sure that they stay cocooned in a reality they can safely exist in. But, I do confess to having wondered whether it might be possible to use a Pale latitude compressor to impose a different type of reality on the Pale. If we're imposing dimensions anyway, perhaps it's possible to pick how they relate to each other such that traveling backwards in time is possible?

Please do note that I do not recommend that you try this, Turtle. Harry's brief encounter with the latitude compressor in Martinaise has more than convinced me that they are not to be trifled with. Additionally, there's no telling whether a set of dimensions that would allow time travel would also allow you to exist, or whether such a set would even exist at all. Most of us have come to like you quite a lot— I would hate to see you perish as a result of an entroponetic accident because you tried to time travel.