#but here I am

[whetstonefires]

fun! foxhair, huh...and with those ingredients, that's really 'polish' like furniture polish, sort of thing. not the kind of plastic lacquer we usually give that name.

also gonna pick up these tags from @luminarily: #My understanding of martial sects is they become superhuman #They are supposed to cut off any relation with the mortal world #Even if there is an emperor the sects are too powerful too longlived and too detached from mortal power structures to actually be beholden #In any tangible shape or form #Why should they listen to some old and powerless guy?

i mean, that makes sense in some cultivation settings, but mdzs is about as low-fantasy as you can get and still make claims of being xianxia.

these guys mostly kill each other normally, via stabbing with swords. when Lotus Pier falls it's very much a matter of human-on-human violence; the big showstopping techniques showcased are 'ring that turns into a whip' and 'guy who can punch the magic out of you,' and neither of these compare in strategic value with 'having more guys with swords.'

even sword-flying typically features in the narrative as a form of emergency escape rather than an routine means of transit; people walk or take boats mostly. there's horses. i can't recall anyone but occasionally lan wangji even doing the thing where you stand back and send your floating sword ahead to make ranged attacks.

they barely even ever rely on the kind of superhuman qinggong movements that are routine in wuxia stories, where if sects are standing apart from temporal concerns it's generally either because they're renunciant religious orders or secret or both--i think there's more qinggong in cql than in mdzs, just because it looks good and is a bit of a genre staple, and ofc the film lot has the rigs.

very few people can use talismans with any flexibility or in-the-moment usefulness; wei wuxian's trick in the xuanwu cave where he draws a thing in blood and creates a huge plume of fire is an outlier. wen qing is accepted as the foremost doctor of her generation, but no one at any point expects her to be able to create miracle cure pills out of special spiritual ingredients or any of the other stuff Amazing Doctors in less grounded xianxia settings manage all the time, and the idea of a surgical operation on your qi system is on the extreme end of medical techniques.

the advantages of cultivation to your health and strength in this setting decidedly exist, but they're subtle. people get to be superhuman but it's on a scale of 'not dead after a week of no food or water,' not 'can perform inedia indefinitely.'

i mean, those were teenagers, and injured, but they were the strongest teenagers of their generation, which means the bar is pretty low as these things go. the grandparent generation of sect leadership is largely dead, and this is not considered weird enough to require explanation; old people die. wen ruohan is the most powerful cultivator around and also the only one intimated to have a particularly extended lifespan. jin guangshan is notably still young-looking and handsome with adult children, but when he dies in an orgy no one looks for foul play.

surely an immortal could do much better, but this story is provided with exactly one (1) extant known immortal, and not only does she not appear, no one alive has ever met her. baoshan sanren is off on a mountain above petty concerns like politics, but nobody else is on that level.

even the top of the game, like Nie Mingjue and Lan Wangji, don't have the kind of powers or techniques that make you an army-killer. Nie Mingjue's final madness might have killed as much as dozens, but they were fundamentally killed by a man chopping them with a sharp object--when we see him in combat briefly during the war he beheads the enemy general with his saber in a fairly normal 'man killing man with a sword' sort of way. the big scary dark lord waging war on the world dies to a single backstab.

Lan Wangji stood one against 33 once, but those were 33 people who didn't want him dead.

they're just human beings.

furthermore, while mxtx is very vague about scale as a rule, their armies seem to operate more in the single thousands than the tens or even hundreds of thousands that a well-established chinese imperial state could put on the field.

in conclusion, a proper emperor isn't just one man, that's the whole point of him, and a decent imperial army could roll right over this clownshow, especially once they've thinned themselves down with all that internecine strife. they would be so outnumbered, and they do not have the epic powers to counterbalance that.

cultivation gives you combat buffs but they're not all that huge. a good suit of armor might actually protect you better from death.

and if there was an emperor, even if he never did anything, he'd be relevant enough that characters would be both 'keeping the court in mind as a potential political player' and 'trading on the legitimacy of the imperial court to bulk up their own status.' you know people like Sect Leader Yao wouldn't be able to shut up about their first cousin the second-ranked imperial scholar, or whatever.

and when there was conflict about what to do about something like Wei Wuxian or Xue Yang, the existence of a temporal authority would provide a sort of emotional safety valve--even if they never actually did so, people would feel much better for saying 'why don't we just turn this over to an impartial imperial magistrate to decide.'

that's literally the point of at least half the classic features of chinese imperial structure--to make everyone within the territory held by the state conceive of legitimate power in terms of relationship to the imperial center, and see their own ability to rise in social status as necessarily linked with the status of the emperor and the bureaucracy. and thus to create the idea of 'being chinese' and standardize it on a massive scale.

it was (and in many ways still is despite the vast gulf between modern china and traditional court-centric empire) a really effective system. one that the society depicted in mdzs is very much not equipped to resist.

i mean, huge amounts of their aesthetic as 'high status families' are directly lifted from the gentleman-scholar cultural norms developed at the imperial courts of various dynasties. they're already basing their status on the imperial status system. it's just. not operating right now. for some reason.

and the thing is, it has to be like that for the plot to work. the sect leaders have to be where the political buck stops for the political story beats to make sense. cultivation has to have a subtle impact on your physicality for wwx's con to succeed, even with all his misdirection--what would give him away is not being able to use his sword. so he doesn't try to use it, and passes this off as asshole behavior. voila.

and the top of the normal power scale has to be low enough that only Wei Wuxian, with his mobilizing-external-energy method and his freaky spiritual weapons, can operate as a one-man army. no one else can do this. he is unique. that's why he's a big deal. when he went crazy he killed so many more people than nie mingjue was capable of taking with him.

which means that in theory, taking his special amulet is the only available shortcut to having the kind of personal power that high-level cultivators in high fantasy wuxia can throw around, and not have to care what people with armies think.

clearly it isn't that, since wwx does in fact have to care what people with armies think, and probably no one else could use it half as effectively. but that's the lure.

being above such concerns is the aspiration, but i would say it's quite central to the story that it's not something this society is remotely close to actually achieving. the story is kind of directly drilling into the gap between giving above-it-all names like 'wangji' and 'bichen' and the reality of actually living in the cultivation world, which very much will not let people be clean and free of worldly concerns.

and to the extent that the privilege of being at the top of the system allows you to approach close to that ideal when everything's going smoothly...that's kind of dick behavior, huh?

being fixated on the same piece of fiction for several years is great because you wind up drilling down to the most fiddly detail shit like:

qin players need their nails to be a certain minimum length on the right hand, to get the proper pluck effect on the string.

however, there's ofc a maximum length the human fingernail can be before you can't grip things firmly without risk of breaking it and/or stabbing yourself, and lan wangji also wields a sword right-handed.

therefore, an essential part of his personal grooming must be frequent self-manicures to keep his nails on one hand exactly the right length, in good condition, and filed very smooth. the latter both because the qin strings are silk and you don't want to snag and because a nail that isn't filed into a clean curve is more prone to catching and tearing, and if he breaks a nail he can't use his ranged music attacks etc.

(also i think having untidy nails would bug him even if it had no practical consequences, and it's arguably against lan sect rules.)

this was especially important to keep up with during the war, when he had to use both implements frequently, and as well as he possibly could.

so lan wangji on the war front, not necessarily managing to keep up his usual standards of hygiene and personal dress (i think the only detail we ever get about him in that period is Wei Wuxian instructing the kid roleplaying sunshot-era hanguang-jun that he was uncharacteristically covered in blood) still carefully trimming and filing the nails of his right hand, every day.

what sort of nail file do you think he owns. what's a historically accurate nail file going to be made of, huh? what's a luxurious historically accurate nail file going to be made of?

you probably could get a nail-filing texture onto jade but i have a hard time believing anyone would.

[chrollohearttags]

I hate toxic relationship tropes but….i need sneaky link ace worse than oxygen atp

[vaor]

things i wish i had known when i escaped my family household and couldn't ask my parents for help

invest in a good mattress early on. there are many other ends you can save on - sleep is not one of them. this is key to how much energy you'll have throughout the day

you don't need a bedframe but you do need a slatted bed base (even if it's just pallets)

opening a bank account is easy

there's youtube tutorials for everything. how to install your washing machine, how to use tools, fixing stuff around the place. channels like dad, how do i? are a godsend

change energy provider as soon as your old deal runs out. you'll get better offers elsewhere and avoid price gouging

assemble a basic first aid kid at home: painkillers, probiotics, alcohol wipes, bandages, tweezers, antihistamine tablets - anything you might need in a pinch

and an emergency toolkit: flashlight, extra batteries, a utility knife, an adjustable wrench, multi-tool, duct tape

set your fridge to the lowest temperature it can go. the energy consumption is minimal in difference and it'll give you +4/7 days on most foods

off-brand products are almost always the same in quality and taste, if not better, for half the price

coupons will save you a lot of money in the long run

there's no reason to be shy around employees at the bank/laundromat/store; most people will be happy to help

vegetarian diets are generally cheap if you make food from scratch

breakfast is as important as they say

keep track of your budget in a notebook or excel file - e.g. rent, phone and internet bills, food, leisure so you'll have an overlook on your spending over the months

don't gamble

piracy is okay

stealing from big stores and chains is also ethically okay

keep medical bills and pharmacy receipts for tax returns

also, file your tax returns early

take up a hobby that isn't in front of a screen. pottery, music, going for a run every now and then, stuff that'll keep you busy and sane

and most importantly... you're allowed to get the stuff you want. treat yourself to the occasional mundane thing. a good scented candle. a bath bomb. that body lotion that makes you feel like royalty. the good coffee beans.

you're free and you deserve to be happy.

[illumi-nati-png]

Do you think he’s proud of us?

[purplepixel]

Two reallys.

Redrawn panels from IDW #42 but with the rise turtles

I wanted to see what it'd look like. Tweaked the dialogue just a tad so it fits more with the rise characters. Realistically, I'd have to squint really hard to be convinced this exact scenario would happen with the rise turtles. Mainly bc Leo can portal. Draxum can portal. THE FOOT can portal. Donnie would not need to build a portal machine. Ahem anyways. I wanted to mess around with color.

One day I'll actually draw the idw turtles

[tis-i-german-potato]

I need everyone to know that the german word for mullet (the hairstyle) isn't a word at all.

It's the equivalent of calling the mullet "Froshbalo" in english.

Why? Because Vokuhila (the German 'word') is simply "Vorne kurz hinten lang" (Front short back long)

I need everyone to know that.

And I will now start calling a mullet a Froshbalo because honestly that word is banging.

[morebird]

It'll only be a taste, I swear

[emziess]

Isak og Even - fredag 14.10.16 kl 16.40 Skam

[junkart96]

Happy Pride, ig

[heartstringgs]

something something about how when Aaron found Andrew bruised and bloodied in the bedroom, he held onto Andrew like he would disappear if he let go and how when years later, Aaron and Andrew, before going their separate ways after college, held onto each other, an embrace, the culmination of their growth, the realisation of their love, a promise for the future, and how Andrew was the last to let go. How that said everything that he couldn't voice out loud. I'm not disappearing. I'm here. You're here. You don't have to worry. You'll be alright. And so will I. We survived.

[mcytegg]

lately ive been watching old baconwaffle vods from s4 ~ s5 and the difference between old spacewaffles vs current spacewaffles is insane bc bacon has kinda just always crumpled like a wet paper bag when it comes to what planet wants, but he seems so much more...idk. soft? or less callous(?) w planet then he was before.

or well like okay. he was never cruel or insensitive w planet but idk a better word. he was just as bitchy w planet as he was w everyone back then— whereas now he seems a bit more patient and mellowed out in general but he still seems to have a sharp tongue w like everyone Except planet to a pretty noticeable degree.

nowadays he seems to hold this fondness for most things planet does and says in general. like a fondness for planets existence. he doesnt coddle planet in any way but he very openly cares abt him and he gets amused by things planet does i know for a FACT he'd give mapicc, kab, or zam shit for if they did the same thing LOL. like even when hes annoyed or frustrated bc of planet in any way, he never crashes out AT planet like he would most others who push him that far

idk what the point of this was, it was just a thought i had while continuing my other sw yaps and watching the pride month special vod from 2023 specifically bc seeing the difference between older sw vs modern sw is very interesting bc its subtle but also very blatant. if that makes sense LOL

[streetlightgoblin]

COMIN IN HOT WITH SOME FRESH MOVES

[telqqqv]

guys dw he just got too silly

[nxmvzo]

[Team Timekeeper Official Art | 2024-06-14]

THEY'RE SO ADORABLE

BUT I HAVE PRIORITIES

They look so overworked I think they're losing it

You know what time it is

I present to you

Silly Sonetto ft. Silly Vertin

[sebesun]

chaarroonn plz save me plz grumble at me