#anyways we got way off point

[karaspal]

wanna know my favourite detail of jon’s room? the giant hannah montana poster he has on his wall.

do you think he bought it after he figured out he is bisexual as a “best of both worlds” joke or is it a childhood relic? either way, jon kent hannah montana fan, you will always be famous.

[boarloved-art]

Wei Wuxian should be able to get drunk for once. I think he'd either be singing bawdy drinking songs on the roof of the Jingshi or he'd be getting irrevocably lost no matter where he is. He's found in the bushes behind the mountains like a cryptid, and then he's like "I can't believe you all got lost" (extremely slurred) as if he didn't get embarrassed by something Lan Wangji had said and just somehow disappeared when everyone looked back at him

oh ABSOLUTELY im walking with u and nodding and agreeing, i can see him becoming an absolute menace to keep track of at his drunkest.

anyway heres wonderwall The Gang (Wangxian & their fave group of ducklings) in a city known for its STRONG wine and wuxian being like well. ur all grown now, youre technically not juniors anymore. we have to see whos lasting the longest against this stuff!, smash cut to a suspiciously wei ying-less group of the worlds drunkest cultivators being wrangled through the woods by designated driver hanguang-jun, with at least 2 of them clinging to his robes at all times.

[deoidesign]

Random update sorry everything is taking so long. I've paused Patreon and I'm working on various things, but some people have started to express concern for my safety/living status so just letting you know I am alive!

[vaguely-concerned]

every so often, varric will write a black fox story. not anything fancy or for publication or anything, just for fun and because he knows hawke has a soft spot for them. ("an intrepid hero getting into and out of all kinds of trouble and the merry band of misfits following inseparably in his wake? can't imagine why".) some of them are experimental, some of them are straightforward retellings; they're generally pretty short and quick to do, so he allows himself to play around with form and genre and language more than he does in his professional work. stretching over the span of almost twenty years as they do, they contain some of his favourite pieces of his own writing, and some of the most '...was I huffing lyrium fumes or drunk or both for this one, hawke? what the actual hell is this' pieces. hawke keeps every single one of them. varric speculates that this is either because they're just that sentimental, or possibly that it's for future blackmailing purposes. he usually has one ready for their birthday. they have so much blackmail material on him anyway by this point, he figures, what's one more piece of ammunition going to do one way or the other.

varric finishes one of these black fox tales a couple of nights before he brings rook with him to minrathous — the last one. it's about the very last black fox story, the one where the black fox and his friends all disappear together into the depths of arlathan forest, where those in the know say you can find them to this very day, if you know where to look, or if you ever find yourself in trouble and in need of a helping hand. they'll turn up to aid a traveller in need, and disappear back between the shaded trees again once the day is saved, squabbling all the way, seeking treasures and unlikely quests yet unfound and unimagined.

they say on some days, you can hear them as laughter and friendly bickering on the wind from a couple of clearings over. it's not the end, it's just other adventures, some other place. that's the thing about stories. they're funny that way.

(once he wrote a book for his mother on her deathbed and read it to her through the comfortless and drawn-out hours of the troubled nights, and he burned the book the day she died and never spoke of it again.)

after he finishes the manuscript, he sits with it for a long time in the quiet and the candlelight before he wraps it up properly and sends it off back home to kirkwall. he attaches a note -- a story, to the best of all my stories, the one I'd tell forever if I could. take care of each other while I'm gone. first one to arrive saves seats at the bar, right? happy birthday, and send all my lack of love to the merchant's guild, as always. —Varric

he sends that to hawke. just in case. and then he gets up and he goes to find rook — it's time to get going.

[bromcommie]

so I was digging through the Vast Legally Grey Junkyards of the Internet in search of better quality footage from AoU for my edits, specifically the scene with the CA FASCIST grafitti in Sokovia—which I unfortunately didn't find, but what I DID find was a bunch of deleted/expanded scenes that I didn't know/didn't care enough to pay attention to before. Which is fine. Most of it is techno babble and rushed plot setup. However. This stupid-ass ten second clip makes me literally insane. It makes me. Want to kill and maim and chew on the bars of my enclosure. And not in the sense that the contents make me oh-so-emotional, but because the potential of them could. Because what do you mean.

What do you mean those four and a half lines were cut for pacing/time when it's a ten second difference and the rest of the scene is in the film anyway. What do you mean you cut it because it didn't fit the narrative. It's literally couched in two minutes of plot it could've been so easy to slip it in there. A passing reference that would add at least a smidgen of depth to both the (already fucking incomprehensible) plot + politics of the antagonists, and to one of the main fucking characters. Like you were SO close what do you mean you cut every feeble attempt that was made to scratch the surface of Steve's character outside the whole nightmare scene we're supposed to feel so bad about what do you MEAN.

The fact that this minimal exchange—paired with that graffiti scene where Steve is confronted with the actual legacy of Captain America and what he's come to mean to people around the world and then quite physically discards the identity + him still circling back to the mantle at the end of the film anyway because he doesn't know how to do or be anything else, feels like he's too changed for this idea of a normal life that stems from before the war and the ice and doesn't know how to live without carrying that, without being useful in this one specific way—has more meat on its bones in the whole lead up to Civil War and ultimately Endgame than half of this movie's sledgehammer-over-the-head lines about home and family with Barton's kids laughing in the background or whatever like some fucked up C list hallmark movie is downright infuriating to me because like. You clearly thought about it. It passed through your head. You wrote some version of it into the scene. You shot it and edited it and watched it a few times and then you went "nah off it goes to the cutting room floor, we have enough of that. Add those seven and a half seconds to the 20-minute long, entirely CGI Hulk sequence, that we need more of. Surely that will fix the pacing issue".

Side note: this is me not even getting into the fact that, at this point in the franchise, this would have been one of the few lines we'd get of Maria actually saying something or interacting with anyone in a way that is even marginally removed (which this barely is) from simply delivering plot information. This is the only time we kinda get her view on something or even an inkling that she used to be a goddamn intelligence agent. And how that history informs her view of the situation and how it could possibly clash with Steve's own. And that woman is in every fucking movie. (Not to mention the fact that the two of them were just in a movie together, for Christ's sake, and going through something together you could pretty fairly characterize as traumatic and bond-inspiring to boot—and in AoU we can barely tell they even know each other. I mean the bar is so low and they still managed to limbo right under it.)

[welcometogrouchland]

I miss them so bad (Dick and Damian)

[morninkim]

As a show of good faith toward the remaining Decepticons at the beginning of a new, united Cybertron, newly appointed Senators Bumblebee and Soundwave allowed Shatter and Dropkick to enlist into Autobot City's Defense Team.

These two turned out to be... not the best choices.

The city may have fallen to Insurgent Decepticon occupation had it not been for young recruits Hot Rod and Arcee's accidental interception of Shatter's communication with the fugitive Starscream.

To replace the errant Defense Team members, Springer and Blurr were reassigned from Iacon to Autobot City in their stead.

[howtodisappearcompletelyand]

20/10 stars little guy

[thedreadvampy]

sometimes I forget that my experience has been. um. not 'your experiences are not universal' vibes but more like 'your experiences are EXTREMELY atypical'

[thegreatyin]

this nemesis ambition started out a little slow but I am getting closer to finding that bastard who killed my wife, and I’ll not rest a minute now that im far closer to on his trail

sorry got in character for a second

Anyways fun ambition so far very fucked up though

congratulations on joining the murder club anon!!!! depending on who you ask the name refers to either people who have murdered or people who have witnessed murder. usually both. actually extremely often both. it's a swell time you'll feel right at home (don't mind our collective skyglass knife collection in the back)

[quill-of-thoth]

Can't walk much so have a story: how I fell down a mountain and got my 'rescuers' stranded

(It's temporary) (The not walking and the stranding) Backstory: I periodically can't walk because my feet are, to use a technical term, flat ass bitches. I discovered this near the end of my second semester of college by getting a raging case of tendonitis that felt like someone was trying to drill a hole in my foot. Instead of taking another ice pack from the campus nurse, I promptly got a pair of too tall crutches and swung my way to finals with a 104 degree fever, scaring my philosophy professor badly enough that he threw out my final and just wrote in an A. Which is lucky, because. I sat down to analyze The Odyssey and woke up writing about The Tempest.

A doctor, physical therapy, a pair of custom insoles and three months later, I went back to college. With some amount of optimism because hey, I was 19. 19 year olds make full recoveries. Also the reason why I was a failure at gym and my feet hurt a lot had been figured out so I was probably going to get BETTER at, you know, being fully vertical for extended periods of time. Once I worked up to it.

And then for reasons known only to 19 year old me, a person who took a Spanish minor largely because I felt I should use 16 free credits somehow, I signed up for a month long trip to Guatemala during winter break.

Which is how I got to the mountain, but not how I fell down it.

The class was technically an econ course, but Profe. Ed was a closet anticapitalist and every year he dragged about 20 young people to Guatemala to

1) make business majors less insufferable by giving them a "cool" way to pad out econ credits while making them meet the realities of the world and how capitalism doesn't, you know, feed people well, 2) Distribute some American cash directly to the locals, via the purchasing power of said hungry young people who were willing to pay the equivalent of the price of a nice dinner for a single frozen chocolate banana because to us it was like 50 cents

and

3) let his advanced Spanish students do immersion by the sink or swim method. I was a member of group number three. I was in charge of speaking Spanish to guide my group of 4 around. I was also on uh. An amount of painkillers. Enough that it was not recommended that I do any drinking. Nobody warned me about doing any walking up a mountain though because they figured I was smart enough to know that already. Anyway we made it to the first stop and my group was charged with finding the new location of the weavers' collective, with whom our college's chapter of Amnesty International intended to deposit over a thousand quetzales. (So... maybe a hundred USD?) We did not find them on the first day. We were at over 5 thousand feet (and as midwesterners we were used to an elevation whose distance from sea level is a rounding error), we were jet lagged, we were working in a second language, and we didn't know how to find anything without, you know, an address. Also, we thought the directions we did get were to somewhere on the other side of town and my limp had become the fifth member of our party. We pulled out our instructions sheet, hopped back on the Lancha (a boat serving as a bus), took some dramamine because everyone working public transit in Guatemala drives like they're in mario cart, and I told the driver that we were returning via Las Lomas at Tzununa. I felt like I had gotten a second wind.

I remember being a little lightheaded but I thought it was heat exhaustion. Or possibly the moment of second language fluency that feels like either enlightenment or a stroke.

Anyway we were dropped off at Tzununa and pointed up. We walked. Increasingly slowly as I discovered that sometimes instead of being in increasing pain your nerves do an end run around your consciousness to make you EXTREMELY spacey. We saw a parking lot that said "Las Lomas" and went. Past it. Slowly. Until we found a cow and decided we should probably locate a human to ask for directions. At which point we were directed three or four miles up the private driveway we had skipped because we'd been told to follow the calle, a word I only knew as 'road'. The thing is that despite feeling like I was legitimately going to fall apart, and also barf, and probably also faint, I had to keep it together because I was the primary Spanish speaker, damn it. The token guy in our group for machismo safety was like, two classes behind me on a Spanish minor. Also if I didn't have something to do I was gonna hurl. So I cracked a lot of jokes that landed very poorly due to me looking kinda half dead and kept going until we finally reached Las Lomas, the place we were supposed to be over an hour ago. They told us, and I quote, "follow the path through the maize over the ridge and you'll come down right at the edge of town." Which was on our agenda. They also told us "you should be able to make it before dark" which was optimistic even if our group hadn't included me, current winner of the global misery award. They did not tell us that they had their own private dock with ten million stairs. Which was where we were supposed to dock.

I would not have been able to climb them. I was barely able to descend them. But. If we had known they existed we would have known three things: 1) We were now about two hours and five miles late for our original itinerary.

2) The alleged two mile mountain hike across the ridge had not yet begun

3) We could get back on the fucking Lancha from here. So when the hike turned out to be on an 8 inch wide dirt scuff through a field of maize that looked ALL the way down into the extremely sharp and rocky beach we might have thought of getting back on the boat instead of towing my - now violently shivering - top-heavy carcass in a conga line of suffering across the mountain. Hand in incompetent hand we crept like a concussed centipede around the point of the mountain only to see yet another ridge with a huge rock slide crossing the path between us and it. We tried to cross the gravely bit. I promptly slid fifteen feet, ripped the entire butt off my shorts, and kinda passed out for a second. At which point we decided to call Profe. Ed.

This was before international cell phone plans, or even good sim cards, or possibly the existence of cell service anywhere in Lago Atitlan that wasn't populated by American and European expatriates. "Profe Ed we're lost, the trail is washed out, Quill has like broken her ankle or something-"

"Tendonitis! It's actually not the bone -"

"-And the sun is going down and it's like. A million miles back to the lancha. Are there any wild jaguars around here? I hope there aren't jaguars."

"Pretty sure we need to worry more about freezing to death." (When in peril I become a font of extreme helpfulness.)

"GET BACK TO LAS LOMAS YOU HAVE 45 MINUTES TO CATCH THE LAST LANCHA AT 6 PM." The concussed centipede returned the maybe half a mile back up the mountain, at top dragging speed, with one fourth of its underwear on display. I only nearly fell twice. The time was 5:30.

It was decided that two of the team, Token Guy who spoke a bit of Spanish, and French club girl, who were cross country runners, would run and try and delay the lancha while Amnesty International treasurer girl would be my human crutch and keep me from going into shock or something with a water bottle and a bag of chips. The last I saw was of Token Guy literally jumping over a wheelbarrow as they sprinted... down the four mile driveway... to the town of Tzununa.

Whose last lancha was, unbeknownst to us, at 5:45 pm. Because we didn't know about the secret, private dock. And because not a single one of us could estimate distance well enough to realize that we had started by getting off at the wrong stop.

Someone at Las Lomas saw that I was an American in distress and offered their phone. And an English speaking front desk worker because my Spanish had been reduced to me duele las pies, which is less than grammatical, and my English had gotten kinda thin.

All I really remember is the phrase "we have a dock and you can flag the lancha from there" and then. Hundreds of millions of stairs. Uneven. winding. with handlebars added haphazardly to prevent me from just pitching off into the water. You can slide down a handrail on your armpits if you have to but not if it's broken up by a thousand turns. And then we were on the boat and Amnesty went up and down looking for Token Guy and French Club before realizing: they were not on board. We had the cell phone. The time was 6:15 pm and nothing we said could induce the lancha driver to turn around, though he did offer that we could get off in the middle of the lake if we wanted.

We crawled into our hotel at 7 and a new chunk of Profe. Ed's hair spontaneously went white while we tried to explain, in tears, what had happened. At least there (probably) weren't jaguars on the driveway from hell. "I'm going to make some calls" he said, in a voice that was reserved for crises, not the aftermath of dumbassery, and Amnesty dragged me, by way of a bottle of naproxen, to dinner where we sat in silent, guilty, treacherous misery, poking at the fish and wondering exactly how much shit we had just stranded our friends in. Everyone else, who had gotten in hours ago, was talking about the shaman, who was going to come and give us a lecture about how the world was not going to end this year.

No, it was just Amnesty and I who were going to end this year, because if the tendonitis didn't get me, leaving Token Guy and French Club on the side of a foreign mountain was going to do me and Amnesty in. Profe Ed was going to send us back to America, because we were dirty rotten traitors who split the party.

Meanwhile everybody sat playing with the candles until it was very dark. Amnesty and I had procured a blanket and sat under it like two hermit crabs trying to hide in the same guilty shell. Profe. Ed's dinner was attracting mosquitoes.

Until finally in a blaze of flashlights, the Shaman appeared, with French Club and Token Guy carrying like seven bags of his stuff between them.

[hephaestuscrew]

Fisher's death is a different kind of tragedy to the rest of the original Hephaestus crew, because it genuinely was just a horrible accident. And I think accepting that isn't an easy thing for Lovelace.

When almost everyone in your crew is dead, it's the opposite of a consolation to realise that the only other survivor is responsible for those deaths. But once you know you have been betrayed, once you understand that there was someone in your crew who was willing to sacrifice all of you for his own ends, once you've accepted that someone you used to trust killed people you loved, wouldn't it make a kind of sense to believe he was responsible for every awful thing that happened? Wouldn't there almost be a perverse comfort in the righteous anger of believing that Fisher died not because Hui's predictions were wrong, nor because Lovelace's attempts to save him failed, but because Selberg's sabotage doomed him from the start? Wouldn't it tie up the narrative of Lovelace's trauma more neatly if all of it was Selberg's fault, if he was pulling the strings for that first devastating loss? (Cont. below cut)

I imagine that Hui had a sense of guilt and responsibility for Fisher's death. After all, Fisher was only out in that meteor shower because "Hui's projections were way off". Blaming Selberg/Hilbert for Fisher's death would allow Lovelace to posthumously absolve Hui of that guilt. Whereas to accept that Fisher's death was an accident is to accept that it was the result of decisions which held absolutely no malice or willingness to harm.

In Ep38 Happy Endings, after Hilbert reveals that he infected Fisher with Decima first, he has this exchange with Lovelace:

HILBERT But intention was never for anyone to die. Not unless unavoidable.  LOVELACE (realizing) But Fisher did die.  HILBERT Tragic accident. One which even your addled mind has to realize was not my responsibility.

The 'realizing' dialogue tag could be interpreted in a few different ways, but I think this is the moment Lovelace realises that Fisher's death - to echo Minkowski's description of Eiffel being stranded in deep space - "wasn't anyone's fault. It's horrible, and pointless, and it just happened." I think that's a different kind of pain, for Lovelace to realise that - despite the malicious forces around the crew - there was no one to blame for that first tragedy. 

Fisher was the first of Lovelace's crew to die. Lovelace broke her arm trying unsuccessfully to save him. It was the event that turned the first Hephaestus mission from a series of fairly trivial sources of stress, to something ominous that not everyone would come back from. It would be easy to view it as 'the beginning of the end' of the first Hephaestus mission. The period after Fisher's death was "a very difficult time" (as Lovelace describes it herself in Ep35 Need to Know), to the extent that Lovelace developed an "alarming" "dependence on painkillers" (according to Selberg's medical journal).

And there's something particularly heartbreaking to me about the fact that all of that could have happened on a mission without any of the sinister background that the first Hephaestus mission had.

[foxgloveinspace]

People jumping ship cause of the new masks is very ahhhh. Telling. Tbh.

[transldpdl]

Louis de Pointe Du Lac 'In Throes of Increasing Wonder'

[skeletalheartattack]

[cryptvokeeper]

I dare not speak it in the tag because I value my energy but no one has the correct opinions about nosferatu 2024 except for me