#anyway someone talk to me about this i want to go more insane about it

[tungle-scant-sequels]

rewatching mandalorian with @ravioliofthesea and i wrote an actual essay-sized bulleted list (with his contributions) about how That One Scene in s2ep7 makes me bonkers in discord messages. i am importing it here. spoilers for aforementioned episode below

mando is in a position of extreme vulnerability. the only people with him are a shitty criminal that tried to put him in prison once, and a fuckingf imperial warlord. the criminal is helping out here

because of point 1, mando's body movement is limited. he's not used to emoting this much, so he holds his body stiff and rigid. he looks down at the table and barely moves his face, only glancing at people frmo the corner of his eye. when he's approached by that one guy he is frozen. this is a contrast to his usual helmet body language, where he cant really make small, subtle movements in his armor. his helmet keeps him from having peripheral vision, so he can't really corner glance people either. the discomfort in this scene is so visceral god

when first approached by the guy he stares straight at him like a deer in headlights. the dude is frozen

also the fucking harsh light?? in his face?? the light is coming from the window, lighting the side of his face that the warlord is looking. it's like he's in a fucking spotlight, which is how he probably feels right now. the side that mayfeld is on is in shadow (mando feels slightly safer with him)

mayfeld is very respectful of mando. a lot of this is subtle body language, but when mando gets confronted by the warlord guy he awkwardly and very bluntly pulls in to save him. also after shooting the guy mayfeld immediately hands him the helmet and looks away when he puts it on, then assures him that itll be private. he also avoids making eye contact with him

(from @ravioliofthesea) the helmet is mando's sense of security. it's how he's able to stay calm, but this is unusual state of complete vulnerability. mando looks to the table, then to mayfeld for security after the warlord says something especially shitty, and immediately looks him full in the face after mayfeld shoots him and it's clear they're in danger. this is where mayfeld responds by handing him his helmet after mando glances at him mayfeld immediately looks down to avoid eye contact

mayfeld is probably the best character to talk to the empire guy. he doesn't really care about personal honor, he is extremely survival oriented. the empire guy tried to appeal to him with morals and personal honor and greater good bullshit. if it was mando or anyone else, they would have questioned him or tried to debate him. mayfeld recognizes most of all that being a war hero doesn't fucking help anyone if they're dead. he also recognizes that the civilians they fought in his war were also trying to fight for their own survival

the transition from cold to hot anger in this scene is VERY. very good. mayfeld is able to contain it for most of the scene but the scene slowly gets tenser and tenser. you can tell he is ABSOLUTELY seething mad and it is SO satisfying to tell him that what's dead is dead. then he shoots him and then everyone else. one can guess that he's in a state of extreme anger (dead cohort) and panic (in danger). it's Go Man Go

combination of the past two points: it's such a mayfeld thing to do to just fucking shoot him. the guy cant be debated with he's off his rocker and also a military official🤢

he also deserved to be the one initiating the fight. fuck that guy

yeah the message here (fuckign. shoot the guy) is pretty blunt. i love it

this is also probably where he got his nihilism in the first place. did he have ideals? who fucking cares anymore man his entire cohort fucking died

the thing about what mayfeld said about still rules broken in harsh circumstances turned out to be true lol. as said above this is coming frmo a pretty survival-oriented person in the first place

in short the acting in this scene is VERY good and also military leaders who are Like that have it on sight

[shrublee]

reminder to all frubbo fans who have also been making theories about creation lore

The movie Wall-E is about robots falling in love ROBOTS WITH AN S

[phoenixfiiire]

Tentatively maybe returning tomorrow, maybe... friday? Depends on vibes and what me and Sera are doing.

There is going to be a rule change for my own comfort. This sounds ominous and for all I know it is but I don't have the energy to really write it out eloquently so I'm just going to ramble in tags for now.

[loosingmoreletters]

slams hand down do it you know you want to do it,,, sugar daddy au and now its just awkward as fuck but they get to Deal with It. bonus points for people laughing at them in the background. i am your inner demon whispering that this is a good idea and you should absolutely write it (no pressure ofc!!! take your time and its fine if you want to!!!)

for ship names. yeah very sad. i havent settled on like. a combination of their names that sound appealing to me so im just. sitting there awkwardly in Yun Taeheon x Shin Junseo. simple but it works. ill bonk my brain for ideas later,, i have cut down on thigns i need to hand in tomorrow im procrastinating because the thing i need to do is so horribly boring

maybe the korean side of the fandom has something going on but that would require me to go on twitter and figure out what korean words to put in the search box and I'm already failing at "go on twitter".

sdkhldfkhg the inner demons are winning. now I'm kinda contemplating how this would even start, which made me realize we know fuck all about Shin Junseo's past??? We only knew that apparently he had a shitty job before he awakened and didn't have any friends and seemingly also has no family.

So like? Local man signs up on an app bc honestly at this point being a sugar baby would not be worse than another horrible shift at whatever minimum wage job he has to pay the bills?

And cool, he hits it off with Yun Taeheon, something something business man. It's a lot less hollywood-pretty-woman than he expected, more nice dinners with genuinely entertaining discussions, and sure getting laid is nice too, and then, well, the world goes to shit for a hot second and well, the contract written before runs out, isn't renewed and Shin Junseo has a moment between picking up a shitty job again and awakening where he comfortably lives on his savings while his,,, ex? well, no, ex would be implying they dated. boss is also not quite the term, his previous situationship, made himself a guild master.

whatever.

and then the world goes even more to shit and he drags corpses and the memories of a world annihilated out of a dungeon. He makes his plan, keeps his head down and then fucking Yun Taeheon is standing in front of him again.

[mint-mumbles]

Gonna use this image any time someone says something low key sexist about Sable (ie "she's showing too much skin" regarding a fucking bathing suit 😭🤦)

I don't hear you complaining about Spirit 😭

[strangerhands]

if any of you ever notice me liking, un-liking, and re-liking your posts, (sometimes multiple times a day. sometimes multiple days apart.) please (try to) ignore me. i am sorry. i am insane. thank you. have a good day

[bibleofficial]

ok so man that i hooked up w like 2 weeks ago that i wanted to see for like dates: cancelled. i’m bored of him 😭😭😭

[mel-loly]

-Now the circus really catches fire.. World War III is about to arrive in Brazil.

[livvyofthelake]

well basically like raise your hand if you’ve ever been blocked by a close mutual you though you were actually friends with and not just fandom-mates because you expressed an emotion they didn’t like because apparently they only want to interact with people who watch the same media as them and when you didn’t anymore they stopped talking to you and the media you DID have in common they gave up on once they found something more popular and seeing as that thing happened to be your favorite thing you graciously let them have because you believed you were friends and they would treat it with care and love but they didn’t and it made you feel like they didn’t respect you or like you or think of you as a person but rather as a faceless entity who sometimes could make Posts about tv shows you have in common. despite the fact they know what your face looks like because they’ve seen it because you’ve gotten together on zoom and watched movies together like friends do but that doesn’t mean anything i guess if you try to delicately have a conversation about how you feel because they just immediately dismiss you and start talking to you like you’re coworkers in a polite email chain because you said you didn’t like their tv show. which was a fact they already knew but didn’t take seriously because they were apparently never viewing you as a person! or has that only happened to me.

[averlym]

a word to the wise sometimes the only true rest is looking beyond what you thought was success

so true! adamandi is full of wise advice such as this, including: "and you'll never feel better if you - fucking die- you stupid ass!"

[everydayarsonist]

so I saw some of the backlash to matpat’s murder drones theory so I decided to check back on his channel and.

what. bro what are you doing. what are you doing????? huh?????? I don’t- I can’t even- what?????

[agayconcept]

.

[serenuum]

having SO many mike warren thoughts i want to share but THEYRE ALL IN MY NATIVE LANGUAGE AND ITS TOO ENERGY CONSUMING TO ACTUALLY TRANSLATE ANY OF THEm like what the FCUKK

anyway its once again going insane over special agent mike warren hours happy going insane over special agent mike warren hours to everyone who celebrates < 3333

[monty-glasses-roxy]

And before anyone ever starts to worry I'll see them in my notes and get annoyed or anything, that's literally impossible. I love seeing people's tags on my posts and spam likers going through everything. Especially on older posts like the Monopoly and Uno ones I just reblogged! It reminds me of what I've done and sometimes I'll look at the post again and reread it. It's real nice doing that sometimes and other times it springboards me into a new train of thought based on that and how I can fit those little scenarios into new ones.

So yeah, don't ever worry about being in my notes. I genuinely love to see people in there!

[snekdood]

idc if ppl think im problematic i just want it to be for the actual real reasons i am

[inbabylontheywept]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.