#but we're generally doing good.

[iniziare]

/works on tags /works on new header and icon that'll be Jingliu /works on not dying over Jing Yuan /works on not looking at the source of anything because I die MORE

[speedofsoundsketches]

STOOOOOPPPPP

[unproduciblesmackdown]

always enjoyed the Chess Set In The Foreground perspective framing used here

now also noting like, huh, a chess set in a general store just visited by marigold competitors who killed one of their guys and are now on the way back from their rendezvous point w/suppliers

[sskk-manifesto]

Bungou Stray Dogs: Dead Apple and how “ability users” (opposite to “normal people”) learning to accept themselves through the acceptance of their own abilities is a queer metaphor of acceptance of own's sexual orientation and gender: an essay by me

[lunarharp]

if i just told you i love you would this world change

[sysig]

my 2nd request !! The skeleton brothers wearing matching pajamas :D

Day 13 - The Friendship Brothers

[rubberbandgirlme]

back on stage in my big clown leander shoes, a promised post. here's what i talked about previously: part i, part ii, part iii

let's go back to the last two points in part i (starting with 'now hear me out'): i replayed the whole scene and turns out i was wrong. here's why: 1) never write any theories at 5 am 2) never take things out of the context. sorry for misleading you, lemme make some amends:

if you choose the 'keep touching him' option, leander will notice how desperate and touchstarved mc is (he's constantly pausing before speaking: afraid of hurting anyone with his words or skillfully manipulating? i know it's the latter, but what if it's both? 👁), keeps eliciting information and, when his suspicions are confirmed, he puts his trusted weapon to use: flirting (empty flattery, as vere said). we all know he's lying and he's not infatuated with mc at all (his pulse was steady). BUT!!

power?? is that some kind of doublespeak because leander doesn't want to mention the curse and ruin the moment OR is it a slip, and the curse is not a curse but something that mc just cannot control (yet?)? 🤔

for now the 'level-headed' line in the context seems to be used just for building mc's trust, not for hinting that controlling the curse is difficult; same with "we match" ��� to stress that everything is okay, and leander's completely reliable, because hey! he and mc are alike! (i am squinting suspiciously here though, i still have a hunch he means so much more) however, that's yet to be seen how much truth leander actually reveals in his speech.

the question is: why does leander need mc to trust him with their life? he can control the curse, can he teach mc how to do that? or does he want to use them however he likes, feeding them lies and using mc's "curse" (or even mc) as a weapon? much to think about.jpg

[xxplastic-cubexx]

sequel to this ramble cause the way james talks bout the reduced cherik scenes throughout the xmen films in this video is making me want to kill people. 'we'll always have paris darling' what if we all blew up.

[alelelesimz]

you guys do realize that AI has been a thing for a long time as an algorithm tool that is used in things other than generative AI, right? many games have been using that type of tech for a long time, but the term "artificial intelligence" just got popular recently

[maeamian]

Becoming deeply radicalized against the idea of crewed Mars missions, y'know how the Rovers keep sending back better and better data what if instead of that we made an even bigger one and devoted nearly 90% of its capacity to holding a guy in a bubble on top of it instead of sending back useful data, but wait! They'll eliminate like a half hour of latency and also almost certainly contaminate the landing site and possibly the entire planet, so it's not all downside.

[aroaceleovaldez]

my current theory is that PJO TV is gonna go the exact same route as the movies:

Movie/Season 1 - The writing is meh and is criticized alongside the heavy deviations from the original series. Some people are staunch believers that it is too harshly criticized for being a derivative series, and they're probably right to some degree. As a stand-alone media it's somewhat confusing without original context and generally received as Medium-At-Best, but not the worst thing ever.

Movie/Season 2 - The writers respond to criticism by making changes recommended by feedback to the first [season/movie]. These changes to be closer to the books are generally regarded favorably. The second [movie/season] is regarded with little fanfare. They solve too much way too early on and essentially kill any chance for them to continue the series, but set up a continuation anyways by introducing Thalia. They announce plans for the third [movie/season] and everyone is confused.

Movie/Season 3 - Is announced but never comes to fruition and everyone is kind of relieved by that. Also I personally hope Disney+ will be dead by this point. Maybe Netflix will pick it up to go with the TKC movies. I dunno.

[cementcornfield]

Ugh I can’t stand how chiefs fans are making fun of jamarr and calling him a diva (among other names) when Travis literally screamed in his coach’s face during the Super Bowl and has been ejected from a game before for disrespecting the ref.

tbh i don't mind chiefs fans shit talking ja'marr, they have every reason to hate him. he's embarrassed their team plenty and has done more than his share of shit talking. let them have their fun (although i agree it's def hypocritical after that travis moment that i guess no one ever wants to talk about!)

what upsets me SO much though is seeing our own fans turn on him. calling him selfish for the hold-in, blaming him for the contract debacle, saying he's overrated, saying we should trade him and keep tee (when they were all saying the exact opposite when tee requested a trade TWICE a few months ago 🙄). and i do understand that ja'marr was in the wrong for this penalty, but getting ridiculous penalties against the chiefs is kind of just what he does! like it cannot be emphasized enough how much that man hates the chiefs lmao.

ja'marr has been STRUGGLING these past few months and it's obvious how much of a toll this has taken on him. i'm not at all surprised things boiled over to a tipping point when he thought he was tackled in a particularly dangerous way (whether he was right or wrong, he DID believe it). right now he's taking a huge risk being out on the field at all without any real guarantees for the future. that shit is scary, it's scary betting on yourself even when you do believe in yourself 100%. people play better when they feel secure, when they feel valued, and the front office did everything they could this offseason to make him feel the opposite.

i'm really hoping he can have a big game this monday. supposedly the commanders defense is Not Good, so that should help us! (i just hope it isn't a trap game for us. but the fact that we're 0-2 i think will make the guys take it seriously.) winning helps cure all ails for competitors like ja'marr, and i believe we've got a lot of that ahead of us!

[antianakin]

There is exactly one criticism that I agree with my, very anti-Jedi, cousin on and that's the Jedi were TERRIBLE Generals. Generals may TRY to make sure their men mostly come back. But useless sacrifices are not only acceptable, but expected, the men are mostly expandable in war. The Jedi did not consider sacrifices like that acceptable or expected. Sure it did happen. It was WAR. But they tried their best to make sure it DIDN'T. The Jedi were terrible Generals. But they were the teachers and Leaders the CLONES NEEDED.

I'm not sure I'd ENTIRELY agree with that. I think I'd be willing to agree that the Jedi were perhaps less CONVENTIONAL Generals, and they definitely do seem to at least TRY to place the lives of their men above just tossing them away for an easy victory, but you can just as easily claim that keeping the men alive to keep fighting is a good strategy in and of itself.

The biggest piece of evidence I'd point to that the Jedi were actually perfectly good Generals is the Citadel arc and Tarkin's criticisms. The one real criticism he makes of the Jedi as military leaders is that they're occasionally too soft and will abandon a mission if it looks impossible to win without near total casualties (on either side). But he's generally fairly positive about the Jedi and if they were truly awful at their jobs, I don't think TARKIN of all people would hold back on saying so, even to the Jedi's faces.

And we DO see the Jedi willing to make sacrifices and accepting that this is a necessary part of war. The Citadel arc is, again, a perfectly good example of this. Obi-Wan and Anakin go in with like 3-4 men each I think and they come back with a grand total of 3 (Rex, Cody, and Fives). A LOT of clones die on this mission that they all KNEW was basically a suicide mission because the Jedi themselves decided that getting the information about the hyperspace lanes was vital enough to the war that it was worth losing multiple lives over (including their own).

So it's not that the Jedi don't understand that sacrifices are necessary in war or even that they avoid it entirely, they just avoid what they see as UNNECESSARY sacrifice for what might amount to a fairly minor victory. Keeping more of their men alive might, in the long run, be a better strategic choice than losing all of them on one campaign, especially if it's over like one uninhabited moon or something like that. There's nothing to say that the losses the Jedi deem acceptable are things that would've changed the entire tide of the war had they chosen to push forward instead.

The other good evidence that the Jedi acting this way would've been the WORSE choice is the Umbara arc. We are told and then see that Krell IS the kind of General who is willing to lose a lot of clones in order to gain victories in battle, and the clones do recognize that he has a lot of victories under his belt. But never once do they discuss whether those victories really MEANT anything or had a large impact on the war effort. It certainly never seems that the Republic is majorly pushing back the Separatists because of Krell's victories, nobody ever mentions that Krell gained them a major advantage with those victories or took out anyone of any consequence on the Separatist side with his strategies. And by the time he gets to Umbara, he's explicitly using this strategy to WEAKEN the Republic side and cause a loss. Several of his strategies WOULD'VE meant the Republic lost on Umbara and it's only the clones utilizing different strategies that put fewer of them at risk that they actually end up continuing to HAVE victories at all.

I'll also point out that the Jedi continuously getting their men killed en masse would've bankrupted the Republic a LOT earlier because they'd have to be paying for more clones a LOT more often than they did in canon and I can't imagine anyone would've considered that a particularly sound strategy and at some point I'm sure the Senate would've felt obligated to put a stop to it anyway and insisted on strategies that kept more clones alive for longer. So I'm not sure it's fair to claim the Jedi were utilizing BAD strategy by not just exclusively using tactics that meant most of their men were killed for every single victory.

So the ONLY criticism we EVER see of the Jedi's ability as military leaders is Tarkin claiming they're "too soft" and Tarkin is the kind of person who would likely say that until the Jedi started carpet bombing entire Separatist planets. Would it give them a victory? Yeah, sure, maybe, but that's the exact same strategy the Separatists are using and look how well that works out for THEM. Everything else we ever see seems to showcase that the Jedi are in fact perfectly good Generals, not just in that they're kind to the clones and are unwilling to carpet bomb Separatist planets, but also because they're just... good at this. They CAN be strategic, they CAN run wars if they want to. And I think that's the whole point of the Jedi in some ways is that yes, they CAN make war when they need to, they just actively choose NOT TO every time they can. THIS is why Qui-Gon tells Padme that he and Obi-Wan are there to protect her but that they can't win this war for her and they end up going off to fight off a Sith while Padme has to actually win the war with her own people and the Gungans instead. The Jedi don't WANT to be in the position of doing nothing but fighting, but they're absolutely capable of this kind of work.

That's the tragedy of the war in some ways, the Jedi ARE good at this no matter how much they wish they weren't sometimes. But being good at it means they can actually protect the Republic, their own men, and even the Separatist civilians better, so they're not going to just sit there and do things that will screw over a bunch of people. Yes, they're going to fight the war in such a way that they reduce casualties as much as possible, but reducing casualties also requires doing enough to not LOSE the damn war, too. It's a delicate balance they're trying to hold on to and I'd argue they manage it better than anybody else would've ever done in their position.

[cogentranting]

The Hunger Games succeeds (and more so achieves sort of mythic effect) because it approaches dystopia through the timeless-- it (and Ballad) brings these universal ideas to a very personal lens and asks questions like "how do we begin to excuse evil in our lives" or "how do you hold on to goodness in the midst of oppression". And because it is so invested in the transcendent it lends itself to very powerful symbols, which give it that mythic feel.

Orwell's books (Animal Farm and 1984) both succeed through a very different approach to dystopia (Animal Farm isn't really a dystopia in the traditional sense but it has a lot of the elements). Orwell succeeds through real perceptive insight into the inner mechanisms of the subjects of his critiques. Orwell has vision that can cut deep into the way that things like propaganda or 'controlling the narrative' work and then, having dissected them, hold those tactics up for all to see.

And I think a lot of dystopias fall short because they get tangled up in the Idea of their story. The "what if" they've created. Either focused too much on the Issue-- too narrowly to be universal, too broadly to be revealing-- or too disconnected from anything genuine. And because they get stuck at that particular point they don't have much more to offer than "wouldn't this be bad?" And if you get a pretty good writer they can make that feel insightful but really it doesn't have much more to offer than whatever absurd YA book comes to mind first when you hear "bad dystopian novel".

[empyreansentinel]

if angel was raised on pandora it means that she and jack lived as residential settlers during dahls occupation. grogmouth likely worked for the flynts who, being a high status family at the time, in turn worked for dahl. baron flynt was the warden of thor, a dahl mining rig that doubled as a prison. the companys sole interest in pandora to begin with was to extract eridium and find alien relics, so a siren would be a priceless bargaining chip for their efforts. all of this to say its very possible that the flynts were the ones who sent out the order for angel to be kidnapped.

[hellenhighwater]

Wait is that actually your ex-boyfriend's hand? What happened to him?

He works with real live dinosaurs so....

Nah, he and are are super good friends--we were before we dated, and remained so after, because the breakup was extremely amicable, and he's one of those people who's a terribly good gift-giver. Most years we still exchange gifts sometime between our respective birthdays and christmas, and he sent me that hand (it's a replica) as a gift one year. I made him the archaeopteryx fossil bowl this year.

Just because this is the OG bone-stealing witch website, I will clearly state that the only real human bones I possess are my own. My animal bones are all either scavenged myself or gifted to me by the people that scavenged them. (I have a sort of energy that consistently makes people go "I saw this dead thing and thought of you!")

I don't have a problem with owning human remains that are ethically sourced, but the reality is that unless you can very precisely trace the origin of human remains to the specific person who clearly and unequivocally stated in life that they're cool with someone keeping and displaying their now-unused crunchy bits, it's...probably not ethical. So if someone has some of their own bones that they're done using that they want to send my way: cool, let's talk, ideally before it's necessary to have the conversation by seance. Otherwise, I will continue to be perfectly happy with my replica remains.

I'd like to will my crunchy bits to someone who will make dramatic monologues to my noggin, but hopefully that's not an issue I'll need to deal with for a while yet.