#anyway this is a great way to make a statement

[adrift-in-thyme]

for the prompts, maybe smth with Twi and Hyrule? :) *hands you the whump bat*

- hero-of-the-wolf

*takes the whump bat and slaps it against my palm*

Ohoho I’m gonna make good use of this >:)

CW for blood and injury, dehumanization, and torture

———————————————————-

The screams have long ceased and yet Hyrule still hears them. They echo in his ears, screeching louder, faster, than his pounding heart.

Everywhere, it smells of blood.

He has tears on his cheeks that he can’t recall crying. His wrists are torn from the merciless rub of the manacles clamped tight around them. His head aches. There is something warm and sticky on the side of his face. His left leg has an unnatural tilt.

Hyrule lunges forward and thinks nothing of the pain it brings.

“Twilight!”

His voice is so hoarse it is hardly his own. It is so quiet that Twilight doesn’t even twitch at the sound of it. He remains where he is, lying only a short distance away in a pool of darkest crimson.

Someone kicks Hyrule in the side, yanks on the chains that restrain him, and with a cry, he falls backward. This time, when agony explodes through his every part, he feels it like knives in skin and muscle and bone. His vision whites out. When it returns, there is someone leaning over Twilight, fury in his gaze and blood on his fists.

They had left — at least, Hyrule thought they had — stepped out of the room for a moment to converse. And it had been enough, just enough to try and catch his breath, to try and reach for his brother.

Yet, really, it had never been.

“Your friend is a monster,” the man spits, as he looms over the strong boy whom these people have reduced to a crumpled heap of mangled flesh. The way he spews the word with such conviction, it is as though he thinks Hyrule will actually believe him this time. “He is a danger to Hyrule and all who live within it. Don’t cry for him. Stop wasting your paltry breaths attempting to save him.”

“He’s doing you a favor,” comes a sharp voice in Hyrule’s ear. “Everyone will be better off with that thing gone.”

The statement makes his blood boil and breath hitch.

“He’s not!” Another kick sends him into a coughing fit that threatens to burst his lungs. “He-he’s not a thing.”

His vision has decreased to shades of gray and black. His ears ring with a different melody now, grainy and high-pitched. But Hyrule pushes himself up off his side anyway and grits his teeth.

“You are the monsters.”

They begin to laugh. Great booming guffaws that ricochet in his skull and fling themselves off the walls. Hyrule flinches back.

He had expected anger. He had expected a violent outburst of rage like the one that landed him and Twilight here, born of seeing a wolf become a man.

Somehow, this is much, much worse.

“You truly are a fool, boy,” one of them sneers. She wipes imaginary tears of mirth from the corners of her eyes, grins a toothy grin. “He’s enchanted you too, hasn’t he? Is that why you haven’t stopped trying to save him? Or maybe…” She stalks closer. “Maybe, you’re just like him. An unnatural being. A savage beast lurking in human skin. Only, you seem to be better at hiding it.”

A hand grasps his shoulder. Fingernails dig into the space where muscle meets bone.

“Either way, it doesn't matter. You’ll both meet your maker before this day is through.”

Hyrule has a split second to realize the sudden increase of tension in the air, a split second to try and evade. And he spends it staring with dazed anguish at his brother.

Something collides with his skull and sheer agony explodes within it. Like the blink of an eye, the snuffing out of a candle, the world goes black.

….

With the first bits of returning consciousness, he drags himself to Twilight. It is hardly more than a desperate impulse. He can barely think past the pain that worsens with every moment he is awake. But the room seems vacant now, and nothing stands between him and his brother. Nothing but the failing vessel of his own body.

His heart pumps blood dutifully and yet, it leaves him in jagged trails of iron-scented liquid. The taste of stomach acid is pungent on his tongue. The feel of the chains against his flesh, the way every movement sends his head throbbing, makes him want to scream.

Maybe he does. Hyrule isn’t certain of anything anymore.

He drapes himself over his brother’s body, presses his head to his chest just as he had when the blows had poured down like summer rain and he had been helpless to shield Twilight from them.

They had tossed him off, chained him more securely, shouted obscenities for his efforts to rescue a beast.

The land of Hyrule has many demons. So many are a product of Ganondorf’s hatred. But not all of them. Not all.

“Traveler…” Twilight gazes at him. One eye is sealed shut, the other half-lidded and hazy. “‘M sorry.”

Hyrule breathes and it feels as though someone has taken a knife and begun to scrape his insides out. Like one would when preparing a gourd for stew.

“N-not your f-fault.”

Twilight blinks, long and slow. Somewhere deep within where rational thought still resides, Hyrule fears that if that eye closes, it will never reopen.

Get him to safety.

It is the unspoken command that has beat upon his brain since they awoke in this place, that screeched when Twilight screamed, that sang with every burst of agony upon his own flesh. He knows now more than ever that he won’t be able to obey it.

“Not y-yours either.”

Hyrule holds the rancher’s gaze for a moment, too exhausted to accept or deny his kind words. Then, he slumps forward. He fists his hands within Twilight’s matted pelt, thinks of his glorious fur. The fur their attackers had seen as cursed.

“They’ll come…” he whispers and prays that conviction rests within it. “T-they’ll find us.”

Twilight smiles, tremulously.

“Yeah.” It is a breath, a whisper.

Hyrule cannot bring himself to ask for more.

And so they lie there, in blood and gore and darkness, until the world erupts with sound and light. Until familiar voices call their names.

[phynali]

I was in a research talk this week with a researcher who is doing some stuff related to grocery retailers, and he mentioned -- off the record and anecdotally so of course I'm telling all of you here -- that the major grocery chains (Coles and Woolies, as above) have shareholders who saw ridiculous record profits during the lockdowns here, and now they won't let profits fall back down. They need that little bar on the graph to continue to increase, if not as dramatically, rather than allowing the more realistic regression to the mean, the decrease in profits and return to a steady state.

The farmers are on record saying "we're not charging the retailers more than we were a few years ago". The cost of food hasn't increased. The cost of groceries have because the shareholders' greed is endless.

Activists in Tasmania have stuck up more honest promo stickers inside Coles & Woolworths stores, the two dominant supermarket chains in Australia.

[hplonesomeart]

You know I had to do my own rendition of this eventually. It’s just too good to pass up :))

Attached is just the still image version (not gif) and then some behind-the-scenes initial sketch without puzzle pattern. Also the car had a nose for some reason…glad that I went back to the actual reference material to change it because the Puzzlemobile ain’t got one <<

[seventh-district]

again and again i find myself lamenting that audio roleplay isn't taken more seriously by some people. like yeah, they often have a romantic element, and by nature they usually directly involve/address the listener- and i totally get that those things aren't to everyone's taste. no art or entertainment is universally appealing, and that's okay! but.. it still makes me a lil sad that the "cringe" reputation of asmr/audio rp precedes it. there's a whole lot of talent and creativity being poured into these audios by so many people that i feel goes unrecognized and/or disrespected simply due to the medium that the stories are being told through.

[maxlarens]

okay im done talking about lewis and roscoe now, because im really not inclined to get involved in things i don’t know that much about. neither of the anons i’ve answered already were coming from a hateful place and i think all drivers are open to some level of criticism and discussion. there’s nothing wrong with saying those things on tumblr imo

i am however (and this is not directed at any specific anon, it’s just a general comment!!) wary to overly criticise someone like lewis who is the only black driver on a grid dominated by white men, in a sport dominated by white men at all levels. i think there are fair criticisms to level at lewis but i don’t think it helps to call him out on all these little issues that you might ignore for another white driver. i think maybe lewis isn’t doing his best with the resources that he has, but i think he’s trying harder than a lot of other drivers. and that means something.

of course i have general criticisms of activism under capitalism and performative activism. but i dont know if thats helpful here.

[quietwingsinthesky]

another fact about millie: worst hostage in the entire world because she is insufferable about it. the minute she knows you Need her for something, she is going to start pushing what she’s allowed to do and say. girl who thrives with a gun to her head because she knows you need her alive and can’t pull the trigger.

[milkweedman]

I am sorry you've been harrassed by terfs, but the way you are currently trying to weed them out seems a bit misguided. As in, the vast majority of terfs are in fact ok with big hairy CIS men. The so-called men they are actively hating are trans women/transfem people. So by acting like you proclaiming your love to big hairy dudes is the best terf-repellant you seem to be missing the point at best.

i'd love to actually respond to your concerns or whatever the hell it was that you were trying to convey with this ask, but it has almost no basis in reality so i literally cant.

thats the one statement on how effective i think the banners are that has left my queue so far. which is: i hope it works but also have literally 2 other backup plans already in case it does not. i dont know why youre calling that "acting like [me] proclaiming [my] love to big hairy dudes is the best terf-repellant", because thats wildly off target from what i have actually said at any point. everything else youve said is also pretty much either dead wrong or ignorant, so im getting the feeling that you not reading has been a problem for a while.

(ive also not mentioned terfs this entire time--ive been talking about radfems and using the word radfems. they're not the same thing although there's large overlap. so like. thats strike two for zero reading comprehension, buddy. cause you are literally not talking about the group im talking about and youre also inventing whole new sentences that i didnt say.)

[gingersp1ce547]

maybe the key to be able to acknowledge qsmp chara’s deaths AND keep interacting with content is to pretend that the characters died but then

the flow of time started to accelerate and go by so fast that it ended the current universe and created a new one with new versions of these characters that are similar but not quite the same /j

Tumblr user Pommunist first and foremost let me say i love you sm. Our interactions always bring me joy and I’m mentally giving you a big hug or a sick high five or whatever form of affection you would prefer

My part 6 ending headcanon has always been is that enricho pucci never existing meant that the events of parts 1-5 all still happened but when joylene was born jotaro made the conscious decision to avoid making her a “jojo” by naming her Irene instead. Literally the biggest headcanon copium ever so that comparison even if its joking is pretty apt for this situation

I’ll figure something out with time for the ending of things but i do think another part thats making it hard for me is that things aren’t DONE done.

With dsmp theirs no new content thats coming out of that and so all the posts are about the things that already happened.

I worry that if this reboot comes to pass, and especially if its done in a way i dont enjoy its gonna clog up the tag and make it hard for me to find the stuff i do still enjoy.

Though, knowing qsmpblr if i ask really nicely for people to use a tag for it they’ll prob do it

[frumfrumfroo]

Can't believe I never noticed before that most of the dialogue in TFA is... kinda bad? As bad as anything in TROS. The prequels dialogue is bad, but you can tell it's *attempting* poetry. A lot of the dialogue in TFA and TROS is just stating the obvious or trite quips.

It's not a great movie.

[sharingresourcesforpalestine]

you know, I feel like, as little money as I have, I still haven’t put into perspective how much I have that could still be of use. I’m not so poor that I can’t make a difference. I can still buy a meal if I go out. I can buy a trinket. I’m not so poor or struggling with life that I don’t have food in my stomach and a place to sleep. Donating like I have this week has me wanting to do something that I hope many others are already doing. For every cent I would have spent for myself, on groceries, deliveries, gifts, etcetera (beyond the strikes where I am not spending money on anything but Palestinian causes) I will donate equal or greater that amount to Palestine. Because if I have money for me, I should have money for others. This is not me setting myself on fire to keep others warm, I know I would be of no use long term if I destroyed myself by going entirely broke with no way to survive myself. This is considering things beyond medical bills and life expenses that I need to keep going. When I count groceries, it’s things like when I use Instacart bc I can’t go out, because even though I don’t have a means of transportation, delivery is a luxury and if I can afford to pay for that, I can afford to donate. If I buy something non-essential like some snacks or the like, I have to match it with a donation. Because if I can afford to buy that, I can afford to donate. And just due to the nature of being a reminder, every time I get my period I’m going to donate to sanitary products for Palestine, because while pads are an essential product, donating even a little bit towards helping others get even the opportunity to get the same access as I do is an important reminder. There’s $5 donations available for those, and that’s about the cost of an average subscription I would be able to afford— it won’t buy a whole kit, but it will still put money towards that goal. I may not be able to do all the good the world needs, but the world needs all the good that I can do. As much as I can spare, I will donate. I only wish I could do more.

[thiefking]

(ALERT. WARNING. OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THE FOLLOWING POST ARE NOT MEANT TO INSINUATE I THINK THAT PEOPLE WHO USE TONE TAGS ARE BAD OR HAVE BAD INTENTIONS. I AM SIMPLY POINTING OUT SOME OF MY FRUSTRATIONS WITH THEM AND HOW THEY WORK, OR RATHER DO NOT WORK, IN AN EXAGGERATEDLY ANGRY/LOUD MANNER AT A HYPOTHETICAL SITUATION, NOT A SPECIFIC PERSON OR PERSONS OR INCIDENT, AND IT WASN'T EVEN THE MAIN POINT OF THE POST I WAS ORIGINALLY WRITING WHICH WAS JUST ABOUT SOME ANNOYING OVER-COMMENTED STUFF ON MY POST. ALERT. WARNING)

i am still pleased and amazed at the amount of people on my tone indicator parantheticals post who AREN'T being weird and aggro, but i will say. while i got tired of the aggro ones the moment the first one showed up i have also grown tired of the "this is just tumblr tags/congrats you just reinvented tumblr tags" observation. it has been made many times, i can never tell if it's a teasing joke or if they're seriously like "umm dumbass this is the same thing" (because of course they are not paired with any indication of intent, such as a word encased in a pair of parentheses, because for some reason being overfamiliar with strangers on the internet has become very normalized, and they just expect that if they say things to people they have never met that the person they say that to will be able to tell whether they are kidding or trying to insult them, which is highly variable per person) and either way it's like...

i mean. yeah. on tumblr, that is the same thing as what you could use the tags for

but tumblr isn't a messaging app

even its in-built dms do not have tags

if you are using discord if you type a # it would prompt you to pick a channel you are referring to

The Primary Location You Would Use Tone Indicators Is In Conversation With Others And Tumblr Is Technically A Blogging Platform

also a bunch of people are like "ummm or you could just put it in the SENTENCE like a NORMAL PERSON" and first of all shut up. secondly nowhere in the post did i say that i specifically would rather someone use random parantheticals instead of just stating their intent in the actual sentence, i said i would prefer parantheticals over highly abbreviated tone tags. obviously i would prefer people just say properly what they mean, that is literally what i do when i have a genuine question to ask, i don't do "what do you mean (genuine) (sincere question) (confused)" i say "sorry i'm a little confused, what do you mean by xyz?". literally did not fucking say that i think parantheticals would be better than just saying what you actually mean to begin with IN the initial question. however THIRDLY sometimes you just fucking have adhd or the conversation is fast and you don't think to phrase it carefully. and in that situation you might realize after you already sent the message that it's ambiguous what you meant or if you were sincere, so you send like "(JOKE)" or "genuine question" or if you make a reference "(you know like xyz meme/show/game)" immediately afterwards so people know and can respond appropriately. and i would so much rather see people spell the fucking thing out instead of saying /j or /gen or god forbid /ref (WHAT!!! ARE YOU FUCKING REFERENCING!!! YOU CAN'T JUST SAY IT'S A REFERENCE AND LEAVE IT AT THAT THAT DOESN'T HELP!!! WHY IS THAT EVEN A TONE TAG!!! YOU HAVEN'T GIVEN ME ANY CONTEXT FOR IT, THIS IS NOT A TONE TO INDICATE, IT DOESN'T INDICATE ANYTHING, I COULD PROBABLY TELL FROM THE PHRASING TO BEGIN WITH THAT IT WAS SOME KIND OF REFERENCE ANYWAY, YOU HAVE GIVEN ME ZERO INFORMATION AAUUAUAAAAGGGGHHH the fucking autistic person who would not be able to tell that you were making a reference without the tag would probably also not be able to tell what the goddamn joke was supposed to be! i AM that autistic person sometimes!!! you cannot just /ref your way out of that if you are ACTUALLY TRYING to HELP AUTISTIC PEOPLE then make it clear you can be ASKED TO CLARIFY THINGS and then SUCK IT UP AND EXPLAIN THE JOKE EVEN IF IT MAKES IT LESS FUNNY!!! and this is entirely specific to Me who has never once wanted someone to use tone tags even when i do ask for clarification on something, but if you don't want to ruin your joke by explaining it and i already Understood that it was a joke, the /ref and or /j you put on it is actually. equivalent. to explaining the joke and ruining it...... because in this scenario i knew it was a joke already...)

ahem. anyway. i think the people who say "ummm orrr you could just bake it into the sentence :/" do not realize they are the ones being stupid while calling me stupid. because of the fact that they cannot read the post, where i don't say even once that i don't agree with them, because i am talking about something else, which is that if you gave me a choice between tone tags or tone parantheticals i would choose parantheticals

conversely i'm NOT tired of the elcor comparison, even a little bit, even though that one was also made a thousand times. i actually like that one a lot. i never played mass effect or anything i just think that's funny and cool. entire species that has autism... so beautiful ♡

[anarkhebringer]

Getting hit with the Normalcy(tm) switch with FFXIV and not caring about it anymore means all the drama on Twitter has me grabbing popcorn instead of groaning and hoping my game doesn't break after every petty plugin dev dispute

[adjectivenounnumber]

Not a fan of this take tbh. Life is short and consuming popular media for fun is a small part of what people do, you can’t really determine that someone is only ever in engaging w/ fandom content just bc they have a social media profile that they only use to engage w/ fandom content.

Prioritizing media which has deep and compelling characters and prioritizing media w/ a large online fan community to interact with both seem like valid ways of deciding what to watch/read/listen to imo. I also feel like what media gets labeled as too frivolous has more to do w/ cultural/social biases than w/ genuine quality. So “you watch too much media w/ ships” feels like a similarly reactionary criticism as “you read too much romance” was back when women like the Brontë sisters and Austen were writing truly great romance which wouldn’t be recognized as valid/serious art until later.

Given that media w/ fandoms isn’t inherently lesser than media w/o them, and that for-fun free-time media consumption as expressed through a blog is only a tiny facet of a person, I think the concern that people are incomplete/deficient due to fandomification/shipping is unfounded and somewhat reactionary.

fandomification and shipping is fucking up how some of yall consume media and i mean it

[secondbeatsongs]

as a bi person, the bisexual flag brings me infinite joy and always puts a smile on my face, however as a person who has a Passion for Graphic Design, that undersaturated shade of purple infuriates me when it's used digitally

like, on an actual flag - which was its original purpose - it looks great!

those look fine! lovely, even! with the semi-transparent fabric, the way it catches the sunlight, it looks beautiful!

but now look at how it looks digitally

the pink and blue are so vibrant compared to the sad, lonely lavender!

and let's look at this statement from Michael Page, the creator of the bi flag:

(sidenote: he created this flag in 1998, so if his takes on bisexuality is different from yours, it's okay to notice that! a lot has changed since the 90s when it comes to lived experiences and the way we describe them. but, it's also important to respect his thoughts about this and the way he presented them, even if today, we'd probably not say that bi people "blend unnoticeably into both the gay/lesbian and straight communities.")

so in pantone colors, the pink is 226 C, the blue is 286 C, and the purple of the flag is 258 C.

but...here's the deal

Michael talks here about how the key to understanding the symbolism is to know that the purple blends into both the pink and blue. and on a physical flag, I think you can see that!

but digitally, it absolutely does not blend. it clashes badly, and looks oddly separate from the other two colors.

which got me wondering...what purple do you get if you actually blend 226 C and 286 C?

oh! oh, my god.

look at that! look at how nicely it fits between those colors!

look at it next to the original color scheme! look at how much more vibrant the purple is!

and friends. this is just blending through rgb! you get even more purple variations when you use other color spaces!

let's compare all of them:

(top: original, lab. middle: lrgb, lch. bottom: rgb, hsl)

look at all of the different purple options you can get just by combining these two colors!

if you want almost too-vibrant saturation, you can go hsl, if you want something more relaxed that's closer to the original, you can go lab or lrgb. and if you want to split the difference, lch is bright and violet, while rgb is there with its saturated but darker purple.

anyway, I guess I don't really have a point here? this isn't so much an informational post as it is Me Getting Weird About Colors, but I think it is a useful lesson about how colors look very different on screens compared to how they look on objects in real life.

and sometimes, I think it's okay to compensate for that.

out of all of these, this is my favorite bi flag:

it's the one where the colors were blended in lab color space. for me, the lighter, softer purple is close enough to the original bi flag purple, while also feeling like a smoother blend of the blue and pink

but that's just me! and it might not even look the same to you, since every screen is different, because technology is a nightmare!

anyway, thank you for coming with me on this colorful journey! I will now retreat back to inkscape and make pained sounds about inkstitch gradients until something tangible pulls me back into reality

[syrinq]

thinking about the fact that i do like forgotton realms-adjecent (fantasy equivalent of star wars-sized ip) games but then i have to grab a broom and hit anyone appearing out of the shadows who goes "now play dnd (or any ttrpg) with me" extremely violently so they remain in the dark for another 5 million years

[thydungeongal]

"D&D can do anything" and "I don't like dungeon crawls, I enjoy real role-playing" are two statements that often go hand-in-hand and the ironic thing is that the latter statement betrays a very shallow understanding of role-playing while being really snobby. What's even more hilarious is that it's like baby's first RPG elitism, like yeah most people go through a "I like real role-playing" phase but to go through it while putting on airs about the dungeon game while at the same time dismissing dungeon games is real funny.

Anyway, wherever people pick up the idea that dungeon-crawling, the playstyle most supported by D&D, is somehow pedestrian, it very quickly leads to bargaining, like surely if dungeon-crawling is actually bad and for babies then D&D must be capable of so much more, right? Well, truth is, not really, D&D kind of sucks for things besides that.

Where a lot of people go wrong at this point is contending that therefore D&D must be flawed as a role-playing game: like, if it actually kind of sucks for most playstyles besides dungeon-crawling and we've already decided that dungeon-crawling isn't real role-playing, then surely D&D must be bad as a role-playing game?

The issue of course is that most people don't ever interrogate their starting assumption of dungeon-crawls being bad. And truth be told most people who claim to hate dungeon-crawls have never actually played a dungeon-crawl. At most they've played a dungeon-crawl themed linear succession of combat encounters. (I remember this: once when I posted about dungeon-crawls being good, actually, someone responded with a "well I can see the appeal but personally I couldn't enjoy a game that's just back-to-back combat" which is a whole misunderstanding of dungeon-crawls as a genre.)

Anyway so the great thing is that once you re-examine your assumptions about what counts as "real role-playing" and conclude that a dungeon-crawl is as much real role-playing as whatever the fuck Critical Role is doing then you find whole new vectors of being a snooty blowhard and it rules. You can make fun of D&D players in so many new ways,