#as few words as possible

[krysmcscience]

I have some questions about karaoke night, Alex Hirsch. Very Important Questions. Which I will happily scream at a poor hapless baby triangle who can have no answers for me, and possibly also does not have object permanence yet.

Follow-up that is I guess suggestive, but let's be real here, Bill's a fucking triangle:

Dude slipped right into his birthday suit, lmao

this is so stupid :D

Anyway, I don't care what anyone says, this brilliant individual knows what's up - Bill is absolutely way more of a monsterfucker than Ford could or ever will be, full stop.

[juniemunie]

[Abandoned by the Lightners, his heart became cracked with hatred.]

Hitting a lil' too close to home?

[yeoldenews]

I am now determined to find a way to use "ice cream freezer" as an insult again.

(source: The Troy Messenger, July 13, 1882.)

[tbgkaru-woh]

My DANMEI ALLSTARS scrapbook zine sneak peek! (collection of all my art and comics for Word of Honor- Mo Dao Zu Shi - Scum Villan's Self-Saving System, other danmei cameos. also includes free space for stickers!)

First physical zine preview coming soon before pre-orders open! ♥

[itslilacokay]

ACTUAL CHODARK?!?! WHAT THE FUCK

bonus

[probablygayattorneys]

So, I only started keeping track about a third of the way through Diabolical Box so I'm missing any wisdom from the beginning of that game/Curious Village, but according to Professor Layton and Luke, a true gentleman...

Pays attention to his manners in every setting

Does not pry deeply into other's affairs

Always remembers to treat a lady with kindness and respect

Never takes off his hat

Never forces a lady to say more than she wants to

Always helps a lady in trouble (Get ready, they say this one in like fifty different ways)

Helps those in need

Helps a cat in need

Shouldn't glare at people as if he wants to hit them in the face

Should not go around threatening people with knives

Should not take what does not belong to him

Never, ever makes a lady cry

Admits his mistake rather than trying to cover it up with an unconvincing excuse

Always fights for the truth

Always remains kind when conversing with a lady

Can't walk around with his head bare

If your future self has become obsessed with completing a time machine and has been kidnapping scientists from the past, then stopping your future self is your duty as a true gentleman

Keeps his promises and solves the problem

Always express gratitude for the. hospitality of others

Never plays his ace in the hole until absolutely necessary

Again, if your future self has turned evil, you must meet that challenge and stop him

Keeps his secrets

Has his hobbies

(As an aside, the violin is a very gentlemanly pursuit)

Cannot allow another to follow you into a dangerous situation

Keeps calm and carries on, even under duress

Never rushes a lady

Breaks into a house if he believes a young girl could be in danger

Always keeps his promises

Has good penmanship

Always keeps his word

Rarely resorts to punchlines

Is patient

Shows gratitude to one's teachers

When crafting a solution, always prefers the elegant one

Never refuses a request to help an old friend

Never abandons someone in need

Never neglects those in need

Finds peaceful solutions to potentially violent situations

Isn't suited for rides like a carousel

Never wipes dirty hands on his clothes

Must not jump over fences

Always obeys the highway code

Would never give a false statement to a police officer

Admires a fine collection of gloves

Always remains positive

Does not act arrogantly in the face of tradition

Treats his guests with the utmost hospitality

Always invests in a time piece

Conversely, a lady...

Never keeps a gentleman waiting

Always demonstrates good humor

Solves puzzles

[goldkirk]

I don’t know how to explain any more clearly that it doesn’t MATTER if it seems legitimate to you. You have got to fact check every single headline and post and claim on the left just like you need to do on the right.

The left is NOT immune to misinformation and rushed reporting. And the more emotionally polarizing or shocking the talking points, sound bytes, and headlines are, the worse it is and more frequently it happens.

Learn to verify through multiple independent sources. If you can’t do that, you can’t trust it.

If you have to wait extra hours for the real information to come through vetted channels—NOT just one individual somewhere everyone links to, and not just one single media source either, EVEN if it’s a major news network—thats just how it has to be. What news outside of genuine local disasters near you TRULY needs your outrage and post-sharing in the next hour specifically?

Misinformation works best by not seeming like misinformation and by fitting in with the rest of what you already expect to see. It doesn’t help anyone to not be able to recognize and avoid the stuff.

[ganondoodle]

saw a few posts talking about ganondorf and while i dont want to uh .. risk having to argue with strangers ... i cant shut up entirely (you know me)

(in my opinion that is probably missing alot or just not as well read as a lot of others since i really just say what i feel instead of knowing what im talking about-)

its kinda hard to really talk about him bc hes so .... steeped into tired old stereotypes and harmful tropes with intentionally so little else, if anything, that you almost always end up playing into them if you just take what canon tells you (and alot of people love defending it too :/ )

to what degree is it really his character and what is literally just some things that were decided he does to make it clear hes the one note evil guy, to justify whatever horror is done to him and overshadow/bury what anyone else has done, to not think about maybe he had a point bc look how much bad stuff he does! if you made him fight for the freedom/sovereignity of his own people against an oppressive hyrule he would be in the right- so ACTUALLY he opresses them violently and selfishly even WORSE and then wants to murder everyone tm that dont bow to him bc thats what evil people do! and hyrule is justified in taking them over in turn bc their rule wont opress them :)

its like a game of trying to one up whatever hyrule did with something more bad tm bc otherwise it gets hard to justify killing him over and over

im not saying hes not allowed to be prideful, selfish or violent of whatever, but you gotta know that all of that IS one of those ways that is supposed to make it clear how evil tm the desert guy is; it doesnt matter what hyrule has done bc look! ganondorf is so much worse! and im sure hyrule had their reasons :)

hes never actually allowed to interact with his own people, hes isolated/alienated from them and their culture constantly, hes their king yet he .... violently takes over "free" gerudo villages (what? what for?? what does "free" even mean? they werent following him? their king?? were they .. allied with hyrule, who are good tm, which means they were living in paradise aka "free"? (bc they are good ones tm bc they rejected their evil one in a hundred year man king ruling violently over only women .. *cough*)), yet hes never seen fighting alongside his own people (the most is them .. silently serving him in what, one scene??) and then he drops them the second he has evil MONSTERS to fight for him instead and orders them to kill every living thing or something bc thats obviously evil, he doesnt even care about his own people! how evil! why would he do that? idk, hes the sole, selfish violent evil man opressing his own people, who are all women! that what they do! and WE need to free them from HIM (and they should be thankful to us for it and try to attone for ever having birthed him in the first place) (or he is the reason tm why they suffered/were wiped out and he is literally the sole survivor of his people, bc he doesnt care about ANYONE but himself)

i dont mean he has to be a goody two shoes character (you can be an ass and still do good/be in the right btw) bc more often than not what that actually means is being allied with hyrule bc those are the designated good guys and being on their side makes you automatically good (eugh) but do you rly want to just ... play along with all the propaganda?

imo, aside from being obviously racist, thats also so boring? does selfish, violent evil man king with no people (bc hes not part of them or fighting for them, hes always presented as the worse oppressor) and nothing else to him that only wants to murder bc ... idk evil? sound interesting to you? (to the point that the ONLY time we were shown literally any sort of vunerabillity, end of ww, that theres people trying to argue he was trying to to manipulate you even there?? what for? why? are you trying to reject literally the one glimpse we are allowed into his perspective qoq)

why do alot of people reject the idea so much to consider he actually cared about them, how maybe that prideful and selfish look is just a facade, or even a fabrication? violence that had to be met with violence, not for any sort of selfish reasons, but for his people and was met with a fight he could not win yet kept fighting on, perhaps losing himself more and more in the process, or a lie told so often that it became reality, if someone has nothign left to lose, if all was taken from them, maybe even blamed on them, why not play into what you where made out to be, you cant convince them otherwise anyway its the reason hes never shown to have done a single nice thing, never seen non angry/smug smiling, how he has no one at his side unless he forced them, how he is not allowed to be human even a little bit, never shown being anything but a boring ass trope personified, hes less a character and more a big bundle of racist tropes that fights you at the end (sorry) while looking epic so trying to meaningfully analyze him just by what we are told and shown in canon will always fall kinda flat or end up playing righ into every shitty trope

that is my opinion :I

[bigskydreaming]

Imagine if you were a gay or bi man who tried a certain firefighter show because of all the attention it was getting for one of its mains having a later in life bi awakening.....and between seasons you ventured into its fandom in search of material to tide you over til the next one. And you're greeted by a deluge of posts and fics that are just cheerfully homophobic towards one half of the newly out bi character's canon relationship on the basis of 'well he's not the RIGHT gay guy' and pushing the idea that actually its fine to cheat on him because Reasons and he's sexually predacious based on......behind the scenes implications people have divined like they're reading fucking tea leaves.

But don't get it twisted....this fandom, like all fandoms, really cares about representation!

Sorry not sorry, but we really need to kill this idea that fandoms are welcoming and inviting and inherently progressive when they're frequently insular and reductive as fuck. Every single fandom I've been in has had major trends of people doubling down on their own headcanons and fanon interpretations of the characters and willfully enacting trends aimed at running off people who like the 'wrong' characters (usually characters marginalized along one or multiple axes), like the characters in the 'wrong ways' or other bullshit.

Scott is a Bad Friend fics overtaking Teen Wolf fandom was not incidental, it was a FEATURE of the fandom, because the vast majority of that fandom did not want to share its space with anyone who had the nerve to like its main character. Survivors complaining about or criticizing the prevalance of rape fics in a certain fandom has in my experience always led to a reactionary UPTICK in those fics, with gems like 'this character can, will, must be raped' in the tags making it crystal clear that some of these fics exist because how fucking DARE anyone try and push forth a narrative not agreed upon by Fandom Main.

I could cite examples for so many other fandoms, with the commonalities always being that vast majorities in these fandoms are explicitly reacting defensively to being asked to be more mindful of fandom trends revolving around or exacerbating racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape or abuse apologia, ableism, etc....

With the most prolific fucking rallying cry across countless fandoms being "No the fuck we will NOT be doing that," because lolololol.....

Fandom is an inherently progressive space, didn't you hear?

[miiukkaa]

the little gremlin (me) drew a layout of the subway lair's kitchen

first of all, thanks to everyone who have sent suggestions/questions related to the kitchen in my asks! if i didn't reply back to you, know that i just wanted to hoard your ask and ponder on it and will now answer to you in the following rambles :)

giving you an easy-to-access-link to the subway lair you may or may not have seen.

on the layout, i wrote down in all caps the places where the stairs from the kitchen lead to. the arrows indicate if the stairs lead up or down.

much like in the sewers, the kitchen has lots of tabletops and cabinets that may not fill the space perfectly. some of them are mismatched (the boxes that are outside of the room in the layout are wall cabinets by the way!)

the "OPEN 24 HOURS" neon sign is from the old kitchen.

the rack is for holding both pots and kettles and dry foods probably.

i wasn't too sure if to copy the kitchen island from the sewer kitchen! i just ended up just drawing a simple table basically... the sewer kitchen's island came with a pot rack which i think would be cool to bring back!! (me not drawing the pot rack for the illustration was like 90% me being intimidated by how to draw it, oughh).

fairy lights surround the entire room, yep.

i ended up not adding a dining area to the kitchen for a few reasons:

-the sewers didn't have a dining area within the kitchen... nor anywhere for that matter (at least we didn't get to see one)

-there are seats and tables in the lobby which is a short walk away. methinks that's where they sit down to eat instead.

-it felt too "normal" to add a dining table with proper chairs and everything as the idea itself felt out of place... the way i see it, the family is all about mismatches which can be seen in the backgrounds a lot (and the story itself). so i definitely favor messy and unconventional ways over perfect aesthetics and other norms when it comes to the family :)

[prolibytherium]

I never touched it but I feel like i only ever hear positive things said about song of achilles.. in (rough strokes at least) what makes it dogshit to you?

Okay it's been a while since I actually read it so some of this might not be spot on accurate. Sorry if at any point I say 'the book never does xyz' and it actually does once or twice but I think my underlying criticisms are accurate

-Patroclus is made into like this soft gentle tender quivering little yaoi boy. In the source text, he's shown as compassionate and moved by the suffering of his own men (and apparently having some medical skill, tending to the wounded in the camp), but very much invested n combat and very, very good at it (pages worth of descriptions of the guys he's killing left and right). In this, the arguably more complex character from this 8th century BC text is flattened into Being A Healer, he doesn't want to go to war he just wants to help people, he only goes because Achilles has to but he doesn't want to fight he's a HEALER he's a gentle lover NOT A FIGHTER who just wants to help he just wants to help everyone around him he HEALS while Achilles is a doomed warrior who is so good at fighting and KILLING its a DICHOTOMY GUYS!!!LIKE THE BEAUTIFUL SUN AND MOON DOOMED LOVERS SO SAD patocluse HEALER . (I Think he's specifically characterized as being BAD at fighting but might be misremembering)

-I don't remember much about Achilles' characterization I think it just makes him less of a jackass while not adding anything of interest and levels out into being mad boring.

-Not getting into the literal millenias old debate whether the mythological characters Achilles and Patroclus were being characterized as some type of lover by the original oral sources of the Iliad or its Homeric writers. We will never know. We don't even know what (if any) culturally accepted conventions of male homosexuality existed in bronze age Greece (we know much more about their descendants). But there are some interesting elements of their characterization in this direction, with how unconventional their relationship is WITHIN the text itself- Patroclus is described as cooking for Achilles and his guests (very specifically a woman/wife's job), Achilles chides Patroclus like a father, but there's also scene where Achilles' mourning of him directly echoes a passage of Hector's wife mourning her husband, Patroclus is explicitly stated to Achilles' elder, and is overall treated as his equal or near-equal, closest confidant and most beloved friend (to the point that pederastic classical Greeks would debate over who was erastes (older authority figure lover) and who was eromenos (adolescent 'beloved')- many took it as a given that this text depicted their present-day cultural norms of homosexual behavior but it existed so Outside of these norms that it had to be debated who was who). Their relationship is non-standard both within the text and to the descendants of the civilization that wrote them.

Basically what I'm saying is this book had opportunities to like, explore the unconventionality of the relationship (being presented here as explicitly lovers), explore the dynamics of why Patroclus wants to do 'women's work' (besides being a tenderhearted softboy), the weird dynamics where they take on paternal roles to each other but also roles of wives, how they feel about being this way, and just kind of Doesn't. Which I guess isn't an intrinsic fault (because it omits much of what I just talked about to begin with). it's just like.... Lame. This book takes jsut abandons everything interesting about the source text in favor of flattening it into bland Doomed Yaoi.

-The conflict that sets off the core story of the Iliad is Achilles and Agamemnon fighting over Briseis, an enslaved Trojan woman taken by Achilles as a war-trophy, Achilles spends most of the story moping because he was dishonored by his 'trophy' being taken. Achilles and Patroclus and everyone else are raping their captives, all the women in the story are either captured Trojans (or in the case of the free women within the walls of Troy, soon to be enslaved, and are slave owners themselves). Slavery as an institution and extreme patriarchal conventions are innate to the text and reflective of the context in which it was developed. You cannot avoid it.

But obviously you can't have your soft yaoi boys doing this, so the author has them capturing women to Protect Them from the other men. Their slaves are UNDER THEIR PROTECTION and VERY SAFE (and they might even Like And Befriend Them but I might be misremembering that. Briseis does though). Our heroes have apparently absorbed none of the ideals of the culture they exist in and the author seems to think "they're gay and aren't sexually attracted to their captives" would translate to them being outright benevolent (also as if wartime sexual violence is just about attraction and not part of a wider spectrum of violent acts to dehumanize and brutalize an accepted 'enemy')

In the source text, Briseis mourns Patroclus as being the kindest to her of her captors, who tried to get her a slightly better outcome by getting her married to Achilles (which probably would be the Least Bad of all possible outcomes for a woman in that situation, becoming a legal wife instead of a slave), and wonders what will happen to her now that he's gone. This is a really really sad, horrible, and compelling dynamic which could be fleshed out in very interesting ways but is instead is tossed entirely aside in favor of them being Besties. Like brother and sister.

All of the above pisses me off so much. If you don't want to engage in the icky parts of ancient/bronze age Greece then don't write a retelling of a story taking place in bronze age Greece. I'm not gonna get mad at children's adaptations of Greek myths or silly fun stories loosely based on them for omitting the rape and slavery but it is SO fundamental to the Iliad. If you're not willing to handle it, either fully omit it or better yet set your Iliad inspired yaoi in an invented swords-and-sandals setting where you can have all your heartbreaking tragic doomed lovers plot beats and not have to clumsily write around the women they're brutalizing.

-The author didn't seem to know what to do with Thetis and she made her just like, Achilles bitch mother who spends most of the story trying to separate our Yaoi Boys (iirc her disguising Achilles as a girl and hiding him on Scyros is made to be more about getting him away from Patroclus than trying to save her son from his prophesied doom in the Trojan War) until she sees how much they loooove each other and I think helps Patroclus' spirit get to the afterlife or something in the end?

-This is more of a personal taste gripe but it has that writing style I loathe where the prose feels less like a story and more like an attempt to string together Deep Beautiful Hard Hitting Poetic Lines that will look great as excerpts on booktok (might predate booktok but same vibe). It's all very Pretty and Haunting and Deep but feels devoid of real substance.

I really like The Iliad and The Odyssey in of themselves. They're fascinating historical texts that give a window into how 8th century BC Greeks told their stories, saw their world, interpreted their ancestors, etc. And genuinely I think these texts have 'good' characters, there's a lot of complexity and humanity to it.

WRT the Iliad- all of the main Achaeans are pretty fascinating, the one singular part where Briseis Gets To Talk and laments her situation is great, Achilles fantasizing that all of the Trojans AND the Achaeans die so he and Patroclus alone can have the glory of conquering Troy (wild), Achilles asking to embrace Patroclus' shade and reaching out for him but it's immaterial (and the shade being sucked back underground with a 'squeak' (the squeak kinda gets me it's disturbing and sad)), Hecuba talking about wanting to tear out Achilles' liver and eat it in a (taboo, exceptioally pointed) expression of rage and grief for his mutilation of her son's corpse, just one tiny line where the enslaved women performing ritual wailing for their dead captors are described as using it as an outlet to 'grieve for their own troubles' is heartrending, etc. A lot of grappling with anger and grief and the inevitability of death, a lot of groundwork laid for characters that could be very interesting when expanded upon in the framework of a conventional novel.

And Song Of Achilles really doesn't do much with all that. I know a lot of my gripes here are kind of just "It's different from the Iliad", I would have thought of it as mostly mediocre and forgettable rather than infuriating if it wasn't a retelling (and I DEFINITELY have strong biases here). But I think the ways in which it is different are less just a product of a retelling (of course there's going to be omissions and differences) and more a complete and utter disinterest in vast majority of its own subject matter, to the book's detriment. I think a retelling has a point when it EXPANDS on the source, or provides a NEW ANGLE to the source. This book doesn't Really do either, it just shaves off the complexity of its source material, renders the characters into a really boring archetype of a gay relationship, and gives very little else. Its content boils down to a middling tragic romance that has been inserted into the hollowed out defleshed skeleton of the Iliad.

Bottom line: I definitely would not be as mad about it if I wasn't familiar with the source material but I think it's fair to expect a retelling to Engage with/expand on its source, and I also think it's weak purely on its own merits. This book was set up to disappoint Me specifically.

[radiocity]

The L Word: Lookbook ↳ 1.13, Locked Up

[trekkie-polls]

To be fair you can love someone AND find them annoying. I’m not even sure Q would take it as an insult if he won - more like an acknowledgement of his hard work.

Although more likely there’s someone on this list who you just really don’t like. And if that’s the case please try not to be mean spirited about it. You’re entitled to not like them, that’s your prerogative. Likewise it’s the prerogative of others to disagree.

[cent-scratchnsniff]

Day 50

[zorosdimples]

my dream threesome is with zoro and law

[drenched-in-sunlight]

i like ghostflower (hell I draw fanarts for them) but I’ve decided I like the version of them in my head more and will just stay away from the fandom in general cuz I’ve seen some discussion and they just make me go “what on earth are y’all on” 💀💀💀💀