#but you make a legitimate theory op

[mzminola]

This is not a perfect analogy but I am making it anyway to try to convey what being online has been like for me lately.

Seeing people say "Oh, Jews are fine, I just hate zionists!" is like seeing "Oh, women are fine, I just hate feminists!"

Zionism and feminism are both very broad socio-political movements that have changed focus over time, that ostensibly have some very basic core tenets but you really need to ask the specific person you're talking to how they personally define it to be sure.

Both have been subject to legitimate criticism, and hostile reactionary bullshit. Had waves, sub-movements, splinters, people with damn near opposite views sharing the term and people with seemingly identical views rejecting it.

You can give working, broad definitions like these:

Feminism is the belief that all people should be treated equally regardless of gender, with a focus on women's rights due to systemic oppression.

Zionism is the belief that all peoples have the right to self determination and safety, with a focus on Jewish people finding it in Israel.

You can also give different definitions! Many people give different definitions! Many people also hold these beliefs but use different names for them for various reasons.

There are self-described zionists who are jingoistic, racist, etc, and who attribute those attitudes to their zionism. Just as there are feminists who are misandrist, bio-essentialist, transphobic, homophobic, and so on, who attribute those attitudes to their feminism.

There are also incredibly selfless, compassionate activists working for positive change in the world who consider themselves zionists and feminists.

It has been very jarring to see people, who I respect, uncritically reblogging posts or headlines that use "zionists" as a stand in for "bad people", just as jarring as it would be to see them sharing things that use "feminists" that way. Especially when those posts contain easily debunked conspiracy theories that I know you'd have seen right through if the OP said "Jews" but because they said "zionists" you swallowed it whole.

I am not asking anyone to stop sharing important information, petitions, news articles, resources, and so on. I am asking you to slow down and stop spreading inflammatory language that paints a broad socio-political movement for Jewish self-determination as inherently bad. The same way I would ask you not to spread inflammatory language that paints gender equality & women's liberation as inherently bad.

If the information is important, please look for other, more neutrally worded posts. Or verify the links yourself and make a fresh post! There is no situation online in which the only way to share information must be to spread such language.

[pseudowho]

it’s the anon with the weird boyfriend-best friend situation again :,) thanks for your advice last time haitch! so here’s a little update: after i read your advice i talked to one of my friends about the situation too and she essentially told me the same things you did. so after thinking it all over i decided to talk to my boyfriend last night and it did NOT go well. it wasn’t even fully a break up conversation exactly? i honestly just wanted to just talk to him, get things off my chest and hear what he had to say. so i explained the situation from my side and that i thought him and his best friend might need to work things out a little bit. i didn’t accuse him of anything and i wasn’t really… confrontational? because i really don’t think that there’s actually anything going on between them, i don’t think he would ever actually cheat. but he got super mad at me. like really really mad, i’ve never seen him like that before. and he said that i was trying to ruin their relationship and that everyone does that to them. and i kept trying to explain that that was the last thing i wanted and that i wasn’t expecting him to choose between me or her, just that he maybe had somethings to work out but he just wouldn’t listen. he just kept yelling, he’s literally never done that before. i ended up just leaving and i haven’t talked to him since. he’s blown up my phone with apologies and he seems really upset and sorry so i feel bad for him now but i was so caught off guard by how angry and defensive he got when we talked

CONTEXT: OP initially sent an Ask expressing disappointment that her boyfriend didn't allow her to borrow his clothes. On further Asks, it became apparent that the OP's boyfriend doesn't like her, his girlfriend, to borrow his clothes, because he lets his female lifelong best friend borrow them. On further analysis, it became apparent that the relationship between the boyfriend and the best-friend had more highly intimate elements-- routinely sharing beds, always spending birthdays and holidays just the two of them, and significant levels of physical affection. The OP theories that this stemmed from shared trauma between the two establishing an unusually intimate relationship...but the OP has been increasingly uncomfortable with how this intimacy does not extend to her.

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

Sorry, but shouting, rageful anger followed by pitiful apologies, does not a discussion make.

A lot of young men are raised to be distinctly uncomfortable discussing vulnerable emotions. Instead, the visceral response becomes anger, and the emotions at the core remain unmanaged. It sounds like he was probably doing this, for lack of any better communication ability. You touched a soft spot for him, but it doesn't make what you had to say any less relevant.

You raised legitimate concern, and his first response was anger and accusation. That's not functional. This likely wouldn't be the only thing he would react like that too, either.

Ultimately, it benefits him very much for you to be too afraid to bring this up again, and for it to be left alone. There is an element of his reliance on you feeling bad for him, whether he is doing it on purpose or not.

Personally, I would find that if you raised it again, and told him it really needed to be discussed, and he still refused to/flipped out/wouldn't address it with you, you should be considering your long-term future.

Both because of the best friend he has a disruptive semi-romantic intimate relationship with that he refuses to address the core of, and because if this is the way he responds when needing to discuss emotionally heavy/vulnerable things, that's not something you particularly need in a future partner.

You can feel bad for him, and still defend your right to transparency. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Love,

-- Haitch xxx

[many-but-one]

“hey you’re using the language of antisemetic conspiracy theorists and this promotes current antisemitism in conspiracies like qanon because it legitimizes those conspiracies and their bigotry” “don’t police survivors’ language!!!!!”

Yeah, I wondered if me answering that ask was going to gain me more anons.

For starters, you cherry-picked one thing we said and ignored everything else. We stated that if it’s an issue of antisemitism alone, then it would be better to educate people about the new acronym and encourage them to use it instead of angrily saying survivors shouldn’t use an acronym that describes their experiences, not to mention saying people shouldn’t use it at all because it can bring them harm, which I suppose could be true. Though the only harm I’ve ever gotten for using the RAMCOA label is fake claimers trying to say RAMCOA doesn’t even exist, not people zeroing in on me being (now formerly) programmed and trying to exploit that.

My main point was that the OP of the post sounded like (and we may be wrong or misconstruing what they said, and if we did, I apologize) they were acknowledging the trafficking and ritual abuse part of the RAMCOA acronym, but ignoring the MC part/alluding that MC as a whole is the conspiratorial part. That was what we take most issue with. If Jewish systems don’t want RAMCOA/OEA survivors to use the RAMCOA acronym because of the antisemitic roots, then I agree that it would be wise to phase it out of the community’s vocab.

However, MC is not just an antisemitic conspiracy theory, it is something that actually happens to people. Just not in the way said conspiracy theorists try to claim. I’ve known people whose MC happened at their local church, their local daycares, their families, trafficking rings, and various political or religious cults. Not Illuminati bullshit—because yes, that is an antisemitic conspiracy theory. I can see how using the acronym RAMCOA would firstly make people think of the Illuminati/antisemitic conspiracy part of the history of the phrase, and by using a different acronym it can hopefully divorce the Illuminati conspiracy from MC, and therefore be more accommodating and respectful to Jewish systems, though I do think that no matter what acronym we use, people who think MC is “just a conspiracy” are going to conflate it with Illuminati stuff regardless because the history of MC is unfortunately tied to Illuminati conspiracy theorists. It’s unlikely we will ever truly be able to escape that part of the history of MC, which is extremely unfortunate.

The best we can hope for is continuing to educate people on what MC really is (as in, not an Illuminati conspiracy) and encouraging people to use proper language that is respectful. I apologize if it came across only as us not being understanding of Jewish systems’ experiences with antisemitism. We were mainly noticing OP alluding to MC as a whole being a conspiracy, and I realize we were also defensive about others policing what others are allowed to use to describe their experiences, which has happened with the whole “HC-DID shouldn’t be used” debacle that happens on a semi-frequent occasion. The difference that I’m seeing now is that HC-DID is a community term and RAMCOA has negative implications, and I apologize for that.

I know some folks in the community have been talking about trying to figure out a new acronym that isn’t tied to Illuminati conspiracy but is more specific than OEA, though I haven’t had the time to think about it much myself.

[steve-brules-rules]

Guys

What if all the Old One spells you get in Lemuria are stories The Old One made up about himself

I like to imagine The Old One went into hiding among the pirates between the Lemuria debacle and Karamelle. Which is my theory about why he shows up in all the exposition dump puppet shows in P101.

On top of being obviously manipulative, I imagine he was really egocentric (cuz you’d kinda have to be to create a world and then think you can grow the perfect hero out of a test tube or whatever). And he likely loved having those lemurs basically worship him as a god.

There are a lot of allusions to The Old Ones in P101 on top of imagery of The Old One, all usually just verbally mentioned in passing. In meta, it’s just an HP Lovecraft reference. But either there’s a Lovecraft world out there in the spiral somewhere with a whole civilization of Cthulhus like The Old One who are legitimately op and dangerous and godlike, orrrrr, the more entertaining option imo: The Old One found that pirates are easy to manipulate because their worldview is so much smaller without magic, and he made up a bunch of legends to make himself seem more powerful/important than he actually is. Maybe he did it to make pirates stop harassing him, or maybe he wanted the pirates to worship him like the lemurs. Probably both :-)

So, all of that to say, I’ve spent a long time wondering why these spells show so many disparate versions of The Old One, from He-Man to Tarzan. And I like to think it’s because he injected legends of himself into his mini civilizations on Lemuria for some sense of self importance or control or something

[lnkedmyheart]

Calling the whole "Chuuya was never a vampire" thing skk fanservice is crazy to me cause like bitch, who do you think would have been going rabid about Chuuya actually being a vampire and Dazai having to break him out of vampirism? If Chuuya actually did kill Dazai and then bit him homoerotically or if Chuuya actually came back to his senses at Dazai's words?

The only reason you are this angered and this obsessed with calling a very normal non shippy skk plan fanservice is because it turns out skk shippers and normal sane people were right when they theorized that a) the intruder was Chuuya, b) Chuuya was too op to be a vampire, c) Chuuya was NOT a vampire in the drowning scene, d) Chuuya, being a gravity manipulator could save Dazai from a falling elevator, e) Chuuya having left the control room while Fyodor was gloating with Sigma was sus, f) Chuuya could control bullets and stop it from hitting Dazai and the two of them were faking it.

"It's too predictable". Some things are just basic fucking logic bruh.

Like I'm sorry bro. This isn't even all that shippy and in no way does it undermine their bond. If any of those ultra dramatic Chuuya was actually a vampire theories had been canon ya'll would still have angrily called it skk fanservice. Because I swear every single step of the way ya'll were legitimately attacking and mocking the intelligence of the shippers and Chuuya stans for their theories, insisting they kept making everything about their ship when it was literally an arc focussing on their bond as partners. Everyone wanted someone completely random to save Dazai because Lord forbid Chuuya do anything in the main manga because how dare Chuuya fans get any canon content whatsoever.

[magical-regical]

I fought bird mephisto today and hoo boy that was way harder than Patriot since it's a test of how fast/well you can heal your operators instead of a straight dps check. Barely got by with the skin of my teeth, god bless Purestream, I don't know when chapter 8 came out but I can't imagine clearing this with year 1 operators, maybe Saria's healing is enough to sustain (and the other medics) and then SA and Eyja sweeps? I have neither Saria nor SA so I won't be testing that theory anytime soon.

But you know, while I was finding my strategy, I kept thinking, "Gee you know who would make this stage much easier, some might say trivial even? Fucking EYJA ALTER."

I'M AT 120 PULLS AND I'VE ONLY PULLED 2 6-STARS AND NONE OF THEM WERE THE OPS WHO SUPPOSEDLY HAVE A RATE UP. FUCK.

Also can I just say the red stages on chapter 8 were fun. R8-8 and R8-11 are legitimately the first stages where I had to retreat and redeploy most of my operators in a stage instead of just fast redeploys and Surtr. I had my IS brain on for those stages lol.

[positivelybeastly]

Assuming nobody in the marvel universe knows the extent of Hank's actions outside x-force and the quiet council, what do you think will happen if word got of what he did?

This is kind of a funny one, really.

So, as things stand, and to clarify your point, the only people who realistically know the extent of X-Force Beast's actions are the Quiet Council (Cypher, Xavier, Magneto, Apocalypse, Sebastian Shaw, Storm, Nightcrawler, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Mystique, Kate Pryde, Exodus and Mr. Sinister, with later additions being Hope Summers, Colossus, Destiny, and Selene) and those on X-Force (Wolverine, Omega Red, Laura Wolverine, Sage, Domino, Deadpool, Kid Omega).

We also have to imagine that they probably told other people, i.e. Jean probably told Cyclops, but that's basically up to the writers deciding if they want to ever make this whole mess part of a joined up story rather than one long Percyverse tale.

So, what happens if words gets out? Uhh, honestly, it's up to the writer, but logically speaking, not a lot.

Beast can basically just bounce and leave the X-Men behind forever, and no-one's really gonna say anything, mostly because to incriminate him is to incriminate themselves. Rule one of black ops is that you don't leave evidence, so even if they know, they have to either be a witness - and admit that they let it happen - or present evidence which we have no real reason to believe exists. I imagine the space prison probably got vaporised because Krakoa did not want that to ever get out. Terra Verde had nothing linking him to it. I imagine telepathic knowledge isn't admissible in court.

Like, imagine if Jean wants to try and get Hank prosecuted. How does she know? Well, when she found out he'd killed a small country, she held him up in the air and said mean things to him for a bit, then walked away from the situation in a cloud of moral superiority. She later then proceeded to hold civil conversations with him, touch his arm in a quasi-affectionate manner, and plead with him to see good again.

The panel cuts it off, but the art shows her touching Hank's arm.

Fairly certain that man has a kill count in the hundreds of thousands, Jeannie, you sure you want to go with this tack?

Especially in the wake of a shit ton of in-universe Orchis propaganda that's been demonising mutants non-stop, if it were to come out to the public now, people would probably just dismiss it as a complete fabrication, tbh. Hank is one of the few mutants with a legitimately good reputation, so he'd survive it.

He would probably have to deal with some questions from the Avengers, though, especially if he wanted to work with them again or the allegations came from a reputable source, like an X-Man of good name like Storm or Wolverine.

But again. They were both perfectly fine with the Terra Verde genocide. They were both completely fine with the space prison, and a ton of other fucked up shit that Beast did. The point at which it became a problem that needed to be solved is when it affected one of them (the Wolverine mind control saga). That does not reflect well on them, so frankly, I don't think any of them are likely to be selfless enough to point the finger at Hank.

If a writer really wanted to push this to the extreme end of the scale, Hank would probably end up at the Hague International Court of Justice for genocide and a litany of other crimes, and be looking at life imprisonment or the death penalty, depending on what the Marvel universe's version of the Hague doles out. But again, it'd be a shaky court case with a severe lack of witnesses or evidence. It'd basically just be a lot of X-Men pointing at Hank and saying, hey, that guy did fucked up shit that I was fine with him doing until it affected me.

The funny thing is, that X-Force Beast kind of won. Like, I imagine he's going to get gutted by Wolverine at the end of X-Force, that's not really something I doubt, but if the prevailing theory that a younger, more heroic Hank is going to take his place comes true, then he basically just got to do it all with fairly minor repercussions in the grand scheme of things.

Oh no, he's 20 years younger, in the prime of his life, and no longer shackled to the X-Men! Oh no! How awful! How much of a punishment can you logically mete out to a war criminal who doesn't even remember doing what he did, for whom there's no evidence of his actions? You can't really punish young clone Hank for what X-Force Beast did, that's not really justice.

There's been some speculation that X-Force Beast left behind his Avengers era back-up out of romance or love, out of guilt and nostalgia, out of a subtle feeling that he is in the wrong and the only way to fix himself is to go all the way back. And I tend to agree! That's not a bad character beat! It makes sense!

But a part of me is waiting for the reveal that he chose to leave that back-up because there's no way that baby Hank, whose memories end with the Avengers, can be brought to justice for his older self's crimes. We already did this with Cyclops back during the All-New X-Men days. X-Force outplayed them all, and got to do essentially what he wanted.

I don't know if Ben Percy has realised this, because frankly I don't believe he thinks that deeply on what he writes on X-Force, but if things shake out the way his foreshadowing indicates, his villain won.

Maybe that's his final bit of commentary on the CIA? Iunno. I couldn't give less of a fuck about the half-baked crap he's shovelling while he writes a tired Wolverine vs. Sabretooth retread. In-universe, it just means every other writer has a baked in excuse to ignore the bumblefuck bullshit he's been peddling for 5 years.

The only real consequence of all of this is that Beast basically can't interact with the X-Men again unless they retcon that it was all a mind control slug or some bullshit, and . . . like, I like a lot of his relationships with the other X-Men, but they have not been conducting themselves well or been particularly good friends to Hank for close to 20 years now, so I'm fine with that, honestly. Hank's lucky in that he's a versatile character with enough relationships and friendships outside of the X-Men that he could exist for another 60 years, not talk to another X-Man, and still be swimming in stories.

[onecornerface]

Against Against "AI Art is Art-Theft"

In response to this Facebook post defending AI art against the charge of art-theft--

I’ve occasionally complained that anti-AI-art critics tend to promote sloppy arguments which overstate their case. But now I’m gonna defend the anti-AI crowd—they do raise legitimate concerns, and the OP here is being unfair. The OP singles out two bad anti-AI-art arguments while failing to even acknowledge the existence of better arguments. It fails to refute nuanced versions of the accusation that AI steals art.

My real contention is basically the same as it’s been for a while: The arguments on both sides of this controversy don’t seem well-developed enough yet to justify many confident conclusions, and this goes for the pro-AI side as much as the anti-AI side. The information in the OP is a good overview of some technical details to keep in mind, correcting some common errors on the part of anti-AI-art critics. But the scope of this defense is pretty limited, and doesn’t apply to more nuanced criticisms which have already been made.

Yes, it's true that AI art doesn’t engage in copying-and-pasting images, nor even pieces of images. So it is not equivalent to some more traditional kinds of art-theft. Many anti-AI critics are sloppy and get the facts wrong about how the technology works, and this is bad. But this doesn’t disprove more nuanced lines of criticism.

I haven't checked much discourse on this recently, so I don’t know how many anti-AI critics still make the incorrect accusation of copying-and-pasting. This may still be a common false accusation, or the anti-AI critics may have mostly stopped making it, I don’t know. In any case, some anti-AI critics now make art-theft arguments based on *accurate* descriptions of the technology.

The OP is wrong to treat art-theft as basically equivalent to simple copying-and-pasting, so as to imply that “no copying-and-pasting” guarantees “no art-theft.” The OP does not address the possibility that AI art could be a different kind of art-theft—one which is morally akin to old-style art-theft, but which uses new techniques. There is no comprehensive consensus theory of art-theft, or of related concepts such as plagiarism. There are many forms and variants of plagiarism, and it is entirely plausible that new technologies can enable new forms of wrongdoing which are similar in spirit despite being technically distinct.

There are many forms of wrongdoing which are such that new technologies have facilitated the creation of new subtypes of these actions, in such a way as to NOT meet traditional criteria. New technologies, such as social media, have sometimes expanded the variety of ways in which people can commit crimes or wrongs such as fraud, harassment, and stalking. Sometimes this may be a reason to expand or revise the criteria or standards for these actions—so as to count relevantly-similar technology-enabled versions of these actions, which may not have met earlier criteria.

This does not show that AI art is art-theft. But it would not be surprising if new technologies, such as AI art, may enable new *versions* of old forms of wrongdoing in ways that do not meet all the traditional criteria. In light of this longstanding pattern, the fact that AI art doesn’t involve copying-and-pasting (part of traditional forms of art theft) is consistent with the possibility that it may still commit art-theft in some new way enabled by new technology.

To be clear, I think the burden of proof is on the anti-AI-art critic. It is up to the critic to provide a more plausible account of art-theft and to argue that AI art meets the proposed standard. This may be a harder task than some critics assume. For instance, most forms of art-theft seem to involve stealing particular artworks from particular artists. By contrast, if AI art is art-theft, then it is apparently an unusual sort—one which involves stealing (something like) abstract elements from many artists in a widely dispersed manner. I think more anti-AI-art critics should acknowledge if they are appealing to a revisionary ethical theory or principle, and that a reasonable person may be non-culpably skeptical of the revisionary view.

However, contrary to what OP seems to assume, some critics have attempted to do this. For instance, Trystan S. Goetze’s paper “AI Art is Theft” (2024) develops an argument that, well, AI art is theft—in a manner clearly grounded in a careful and accurate account of how the technology works.

[standbowed]

@maqias said: For the meta asks!! What changes do you think would be made between your muse as they exist in your head vs how they would be treated as part of canon? And, what headcanons/theories do you believe fandom would invent about your character?

meta asks - if your oc was canon // accepting.

Dialogue and scenes would get cut down significantly (to be expected when you're going from the focus character of an rp blog to a side character in the source work). Also, let's be real: if Hachi and her stand were canonically in Diamond is Unbreakable, Driver 8's abilities would get a way smarter explanation-via-character-dialogue from a character watching it work. Araki is far more comfortable using specific science/terminology as a basis to explain why and how a particular stand works. Tragically I am not science-smart and the best I can do is say "uhhhh Take A Break tickets are debuffs that make you move slower and with less force and Reach Your Destination tickets make you move a little faster and with more force". Araki is built different for having characters explain the principles of physics or whatever involved in a stand's ability, but I'm simply not that kind of girl.

I'd think her characterization mainly gets explored via a series of vaguely meme-able panels of her making nervous or shocked faces in reaction to things, alongside exposition of her people-pleasing and feelings of inferiority/envy via Heaven's Door analysis, but the rest is left to be filled in by fandom interpretation. If she started off as more of an antagonist there would probably be more to work with, alas. But maybe there are a handful of people who like to theorize on what would happen in certain arcs if Hachi/Driver 8 were present instead of just mentioned. I just think it would be funny if people did powerscaling threads on Hachi vs X Character. Could Driver 8 beat Highway Star? Let's discuss (a dozen qrts going "wait, WHO💀💀")

I think she'd be one of many characters who doesn't get a canon birthday during the part's run, so there's some disagreement in the fandom of when to celebrate (people favour August as it's the 8th month, then years later Araki for no particular reason releases some information that gives her a confirmed date of birth which is, well, not that). I think occasionally fans mix up and/or choose to think other, legitimately background characters in DiU with short brownish hair are also Hachi sightings (using Araki's tendency to tweak character designs after introduction as reasoning), so there could be headcanons that spring from these one-off panels (Doesn't that girl with the racket we only see from behind look like Hachi? Tennis club member confirmed? No wait, Hachi works part-time at the Owson's after school, doesn't she? That employee that shows up in the background of a scene has similar eyebrows, though her hair is longer. Maybe the animators didn't know that was supposed to be Hachi?). I also think people headcanoning Hachi as having a crush on whichever character in her age range is the op's personal blorbo is deeply funny. Like they are using the 1-2 panels at their disposal of Hachi looking at any given character as evidence--but the real ones are posting that "It doesn't have to be like this. Hachi has 2 hands" to a raucous 8 note reception.

Closing things out here: not a headcanon but I think it would be funny if a small subset of fandom enjoyed wildly exaggerating canon!Hachi/Driver 8's plot importance/popularity in fandom for jokes. Example:

[aquadestinyswriting]

Hey! From the horror asks, for a mage that's not Sel (you have other chars to develop too 😛️):

🕰 - what would your character do if they were stuck in a time loop?

🪞 - what would your character do if faced with an evil doppelganger? would they run away, fight? is the doppelganger a reflection of their inner fears?

Thanks for the asks, hen <3. Ah, boo! Luckily, I now have a spreadsheet to actually randomise characters and the 1d4 I had to roll for the rest of the wizards I have so far picked Dwena. Answers are under the cut to save peoples' dashes

🕰 - what would your character do if they were stuck in a time loop?

To be fair to this question, the answer would be fairly similar across most of the Wizard's Tower staff. However; Dwena, in specific, would spend a bit of time working out what the heck kind of magic is keeping her trapped in this loop and if it can be mitigated by her (admittedly op) planeshifter powers. If the timeloop cannot be negated by simply hopping over to another plane for a bit, then she'll likely assume that the timeloop has been put in place by divine means and is probably a prank by Glittergold. If the latter is indeed the case, then Dwena will spend her time in the loop testing out various theories and scientific studies trying to work out what it is that Glittergold wants her to do so He can stop it please thankyouverymuch.

However, if the loop has not been caused by Glittergold, Dwena will leave a distress message after a couple of hundred cycles of this nonsense (depending on how long the loop covers in itself) asking the rest of the tower and Felix to help her find a way to negate it. Given that magic can do weird and funky things that not even the most learned wizards can explain, I'm pretty certain most everyone in the Tower will leap at the opportunity; mostly because Dwena is the head of magical security, so her being stuck in a loop is actually a major security concern. Whatever ends up happening, I'm pretty sure Dwena will have a very extensive set of notes in her head that she can make an academic paper of some sort out of. Then make contingencies to prevent a similar thing from happening again.

What would your character do if faced with an evil doppelganger? would they run away, fight? is the doppelganger a reflection of their inner fears?

An evil doppleganger of Dwena is actually a legitimately terrifying concept. Like most of the staff that head up the wizard's tower, Dwena is an insanely powerful wizard who, on top of having the capability to blow up a good 20-30 mile radius around her, can shift to other planes with just a thought and has the capability to create new ones with not much more effort. Dwena is a good person, and knows how dangerous these abilities are. Now imagine she had a villain arc instead and became a member of the Big Bad Evil Wizard Guy Group (we should probably come up with an alternative name for said group at some point).

Now, the doppleganger is very likely a reflection of the fear Dwena has regarding her abilities. She's acutely aware that, used irresponsibly, that power can completely shatter reality altogether and the only thing that can fix things if that happens is basically a Divine Intervention, and maybe not even that. Given all that, Dwena will try to lure the doppleganger away to a dead plane and try her best to contain the fight to that plane only.

What Dwena does to defeat her doppleganger depends on why it's even a thing to begin with and what it does. If it's a magical thing created from her own deepest fears, then confronting and talking to it will probably work just fine. If it's a creation of something else that's looking to destroy her, then she figures out who created it and goes off to kill them before the doppleganger can do too much damage and will ask her friends to try and mitigate what damage is done. If the doppleganger was created to just destroy everything, Dwena will have her hands full just trying to contain the damage and will rely on her friends and a bunch of adventurers dealing with the creator.

Either way, Toreguarde is probably fucked in some capacity. Which, honestly, is nothing new.

[kradogsrats]

1/2 I have a conspiracy theory that Viren cares so much about Harrow, Amaya, and Sarai that he just hangs back and lets them do most of the action so they don’t realize he makes them completely irrelevant. Either that or he just wants to hide the fact that he’s totally OP, Palpatine-style.

Yeah, I mean… there are ways to balance magic in a setting like this, and it seems like they just… don’t.

I actually have a lot of intricate headcanon to explain the general decline in dark magic since the mage wars, plus its danger and personal cost corruption-wise, and even lasting or permanent enchantment effects like Claudia’s snake bracelets, but so far the actual canon is pretty much like “dark magic requires a reagent and incantation, except when it doesn’t, and it causes corruption, except when it doesn’t, and it can do anything the plot demands, but no one uses it for anything else” lmao

And then meanwhile they ignore any weakness primal magic is meant to have if it serves the plot, like thank god they gave Callum Ibis’s staff because I was going to lose my ENTIRE GODDAMN MIND if he was able to do SKY magic while fucking UNDERGROUND. Also the bullshit about Rayla “not feeling connected to the Moon” underground like GIRL YOU ARE NOT A MAGE. A moon opal is literally FREE SPELLCASTING, you do not NEED to feel “moonier” for this! She could be literally ON THE MOON and would not be able to cast that spell without an outside source.

That being said in outlining this fic I am literally like “okay, ratchet back, we gotta let Harrow and Sarai do some shit too” so… yeah.

It’s funny because I’m also like… a chunk into season 2 of ATLA and they actually??? do a really good job of keeping non-bender characters relevant???? Like ngl back in the day I thought “Sokka is the team strategist” was a fanon thing or a way they tried to develop him late in the series, but no, he’s actually legitimately like that as far back as the first season.

[cowboylikedean]

why are you so against walkable cities?

I'm not. What I'm against is this idea that cities that aren't walkable need to be changed and made to be walkable. I’m also wary of the various definitions of “walkable.” Walkable cities are all fine and good, but when the discussion around them turns into a call to action, you gotta look at what that action actually is and what the actual real consequences of that action are. This is a very long post and I both apologize and don’t apologize. It’s very important to be aware of specifically what you’re asking for in logistics of demanding change. This is why.

It wasn’t as clear to me how harmful this rhetoric was, like how it politically connected to real harm, until a conversation I had with a local politician. A man running for city council called me to ask for my vote because I’m a reliable municipal voter. We were having a relatively good and productive conversation about issues going on in our city. I asked him how he felt about the person who was currently serving as my district’s representative. This is someone I voted for multiple times, and at the time of this conversation he was the only person on the city council I felt had the residents of my city’s interests at heart. The candidate I was speaking with said he had disagreed with many of our current rep’s votes and positions. This was jarring to me because I was familiar with my current rep’s voting records and there was basically nothing I disagreed with. So I asked for clarification. The candidate said our rep had made several votes against making our city (and district) “walkable” and creating “walkable opportunities.” I asked and pressed in exactly what specific things were proposed that our rep had voted against that was against making our city more walkable. I knew this representative to be very pro-public transportation and his plans for increasing public transportation was always respectful of existing life in and around affected areas. I knew him to be very pro-sidewalk, bike lane, and greenway. In pressing, I uncovered the specific votes this candidate was talking about were against development, not against walkable changes. My representative voted against government funding for the development of a mixed use building not far from me that would bring new stores and luxury apartments to the area. He also voted against re-zoning a residential zone for a 10 story mixed use building. He also voted against re-zoning a residential zone beside an elementary school for a shopping center with a single apartment building in the middle (literally surrounded by stores). None of these were votes against making our city (or district) walkable. They were votes against government sponsored overdevelopment and inappropriate development that would bring harm to the surrounding community.

After that conversation, I started listening to and paying more attention to the rhetoric and calls to action. Some of them are great in both theory and practice! There is never more harm by adding sidewalks, bike lanes, foot bridges, foot and bike paths, greenways, alternate pathways that aren’t roads where cars are. Some of them are great in theory but get difficult and potentially harmful in practice. New buildings and mixed use zoning, for example, can be helpful and also very harmful. Some of them are nearly always bad. It is pretty much almost always harmful to tear down an existing structure to build a new one.

The problem is the VAAASSSTTTTTTTTT majority of internet calls to action on this front involve new buildings and mixed use zoning. And often that derails legitimate points to that first type of suggestion. The post I reblogged a while ago (which the ask was a response to), for instance. The OP was LITERALLY talking about needing more sidewalks and bike lanes specifically in disenfranchised areas of unwalkable cities. This is a documented and studied way in which city planning in the United States is racist. Like we learned about specifically the intentional lack of sidewalks in black neighborhoods in my race inequality class in college. Very important disparity in public safety that is both easy to fix and the fix harms no one. The first response in the thread is a European (we’ll get to why that’s important in a second) that starts out about sidewalks and very quickly becomes about mixed use zoning.

In my reblog of that post, I pointed out how people currently live in the cities people are talking about when they discuss unwalkable cities. My purpose was drawing attention to the fact that you can’t discuss proposed changes to a space without considering the potential consequences for people who are already inhabiting that space. If people are currently living in a space, and an outside force observing this, thinks of ways in which their space is better, and then proposes (or enforces) changes on that space without considering the people who are currently there... it’s bad. We know this to be bad because its most extreme and harmful application is colonialism. So then a European (an outside force) thinking of how their space is better and then proposing changes without considering people who currently live there......... is not great! In fact it’s bad!

That European’s discussion of the importance of mixed use zoning was emotional. That person expressed a sadness for Americans without mixed use zoning while they specifically reminisced about their teenage years and existing in public for free. They said most of their free time was spent wandering around, picking up snacks at corner stores, and hanging out at local parks. The thing I’m trying to draw attention to is that this is not different. Yes, as a teenager I spent more of my time in cars vs walking, but I also spent my time at local stores and I spent my time in parks. I also spent a great deal of time in malls and shopping centers... You don’t have to buy anything to be there! That said, I did also spend a lot of time walking in public! I walked from my house to the parks around me. I walked from my house to my friends houses (we do have friends who live close sometimes!!). I walked to the greenway and through the greenway. I walked around my neighborhood. There is nothing stopping American teenagers from walking!!!

UNLESS!!!!!! Unless they live in those disenfranchised areas that were planned specifically to not have sidewalks, greenways, and bike paths! Mixed use zoning isn’t what makes walking accessible! Safe places to walk are what makes walking accessible! So that means those votes against mixed use zoning my city council representative did were not votes against making our city more walkable, they were votes against mixed use zoining. 

So then that leads to the question of why mixed use zoning is a part of this conversation. Why are we discussing mixed use buildings and zoning if they’re not actually what makes a city walkable. And honestly, there are many reasons for this... As I’ve already pointed out, Europeans talking at length about how “sad” it is American have less mixed use zoning is a big part of it. But I want to focus on a scarier part of it and that’s that there is a lot of money in mixed use zoning! We’re all familiar with the phrase “you are not immune to propaganda” but now would be a great time to sit down and try to internalize it.

In a place where there is not currently an abundance of mixed use zoning, creating mixed use zones always requires new building. If you life in a place not plagued by over-development, I envy you. But let me tell you, from my perspective in a city that is plagued by over-development, you should be wary of this. What’s going on in my hometown of Raleigh, NC is very akin to what happened in Seattle and I know a lot of other places have similar shit. Basically, as a city gets bigger, more businesses move there, and that brings more people, and it generally brings higher income people and businesses too. That means that city governments have financial incentives to do things that bring more attention to their cities and make them look like shiny great places for businesses to move to. The goal is to make your city have the appearance that it is luxury and pretty while keeping costs lower than bigger more established cities. Companies are given tax breaks and special deals to move into an area too. All of this... requires new buildings. Therefore, cities have financial incentives to have good relationships with developers to build new buildings and bring in new businesses............. And SO! they pay the developers in tax breaks!!! That means that your tax dollars pay for these new buildings. It also means that as they go up, and they do what they’re supposed to do, more people and business come and the median income of a city shoots up without wages moving at all. When that happens, people who have lived there their whole lives get priced out. It’s called gentrification and it is a huge problem. And take it from me, it is not a fun problem to have.

Gentrification as I have described primarily hurts low income communities and communities of color. Part of this is because that’s where land is cheaper. In order to build a building, you have to have the land for it. So those neighborhoods get bought up and gentrified first. So in addition to a city becoming richer without increasing wages, it also becomes whiter and therefore more hostile to people of color. This is also a social problem created by the push for more mixed used buildings and zoning. And remember, its these areas that are not walkable to begin with. The racist city planning that keeps sidewalks, greenways, and bike paths from neighborhoods of color gets used as a defense for why its needed to gentrify these areas. These are the most unwalkable parts of the city so if we equate making a city “walkable” with “mixed use zones,” then fixing the problem that these areas are unwalkable (which again, is by design) requires adding more buildings, which makes them whiter.

It’s not just about new buildings though, it’s also about old buildings. As I said earlier in this post, the worst most harmful call to action is tearing down existing structures to build new ones. This is where the logic and logistics come to play here. So you have a space and it’s already developed. That means the vast majority of the land is already owned. You have to build new buildings to make a residential space mixed used..... so where are you going to put those new buildings? In those neighborhoods of color, what happens more often than not is that the residents get bought out by the developers and the city. What also happens is that cities will raise taxes and existing residents lose their houses that way. At any rate, what ends up happening is that developers tear down houses that have been lived in for decades so they can build a new mixed use apartment complex.

Property taxes is an important part of this equation. Property taxes is determined by the value of the property and the value of the property surrounding it. As new buildings, new businesses, and more expensive buildings go up in an area, so do property taxes. The location becomes more high demand, and therefore expensive, and the average value of the buildings goes up because there are new expensive buildings there were not before. The result is more gentrification.

All that aside though, lets get back to the logistics of where are these new structures going to go. Let’s look at a map! Excuse the terrible markup job, I didn’t feel like getting a mouse to do a nicer job so my shaky trackpad is what we’ve got lol

The circled neighborhood is a neighborhood I used to live in (I no longer live there internet safety and all). All three of those businesses are home businesses. This neighborhood has 99 houses in it and no extra space. The green line along the creek is a greenway. There are neighborhoods on either side and houses all up and down the larger road across the street. Within a 5 minute drive, there are two Food Lions, a Harris Teeter, and an Aldi. The closest one of those is the Harris Teeter which is a 22 minute walk. Where would you put the store? Would you tear down a house? What would you do about the people who live in that house? Even if we’re talking corner store rather than full grocery store, you still need space. So where is it going to go? The only land without a building on it is the greenway. That’s antithetical to what we’re doing here, but it’s “destroy the greenway” or “destroy a house” and which one are you going to choose?

You can’t just Houdini land out of your butthole because you want to build a mixed use city on top of an existing suburban city. So any actual meaningful calls to action, or even discourse and discussion, has to have a plan... Or at the very least, acknowledge this. You can’t take something that is one way and make it another way without a plan of how to get there.

And with that said, there are the questions of “Do all cities need to be walkable? Or can some be suburban? Why are there cities suburban if walkable cities are the obvious better choice?”

This is an unpopular opinion, and feel free to hate me or call me out, but I think there’s a lot of narrow minded thinking going on here. The truth is, some people choose single-family suburban neighborhoods for a reason. It’s about having your own outdoor space. It’s also about not sharing walls. If you don’t have to share walls with a neighbor, why would you want to? Here’s the thing Europeans and people in bigger, more dense cities don’t want to think about: If you have the space to spread out, why not? 

The argument that comes up here is almost always in three veins: 1) cars, 2) teenagers, 3) yards. 

So let’s tackle those one-by-one. Yards in the sanitized Green-Grass-Cut-Short-HOA-Passible-Suburban-Nightmare variety are not the only one variety of suburban yards. Some people have yards that look like this: 

The enemy of biodiverse suburban spaces isn’t the single family homes or the distance between houses and the nearest store. It’s HOA’s. HOA’s have rules to require everything to look the same and be easy and digestible. And guess what? These rules are about property values! The same motivation to keep property values high that city governments and developers have is what motivates abusive HOA guidelines. These organizations are almost always headed by someone who wants to keep the neighborhood free of “undesirables” (that would be people of color) and who wants to keep their property value high. While HOA’s will fight against their neighborhood becoming mixed use, having a mixed use neighborhood or building next door is desirable. HOA’s love gentrification! These organizations, just like the abusive city planning and development we’ve discussed in this post, are about making the space appear nice, polished, inoffensive, and digestible. In fact, the worst, most restrictive HOA’s are managed by the company that developed the neighborhood. Most of these neighborhoods with developer HOAs, are sold with the continuation of the HOA in the contract. Developers build those cookie cutter suburban neighborhoods knowing this will give them political leverage down the line for decades. The push for more diverse outdoor spaces in the US will not be solved by an increase in mixed use development. This will actually decrease the amount of outdoor space. Those neighborhoods already have parks and yards.. Imagine the potential biodiversity of a small suburban neighborhood vs an apartment complex. The goal is to make those existing outdoor spaces healthier. Not to tear them up and build on top, right? The answer to this problem is not solved by development, it’s solved by eliminating HOA’s, or at the least, restricting their power.

So then teenagers.. As we’ve already discussed, teenagers in the United States do not have these sad disconnected lives that gets spun in online conversation. I see a lot people talking about American teenagers spending so much time online because they cannot go out with their friends, but kids all over the world spend a lot of time online. This, too, however… Is caused or worsened by gentrification. The Suburban Safety Panic that a lot of people cite is not about cars… It’s about the local news cycle, a general fear of “crime,” and white supremacy. All three have a lot of money in gentrification. As a community gentrifies, the police have financial incentives and public and political support to be even worse to people of color. This increases the general fear of “crime.” The local news cycle is dependent on this, so they then become financially invested in gentrification. If the people feeding you the news about the “crimes” and the development and political conversations of your space are financially motivated to encourage gentrification, then what will happen is an increased public fear of a general sense of “crime,” and a public support for efforts that will “decrease” it, which the news tells you is gentrification……. Do you see where we’re going here? White supremacy created the police and the definition of “crime” in the US and the goal is the eradication of people of color, which is much easier when they do not have homes because being without a home is defined as a “crime,” and so in addition to gentrification pushing people of color out of their homes and making the communities more white, it also naturally increases crime, which increases public panic, which increases the push for gentrification. It’s a very tight feedback loop. This feedback loop is what leads to suburban parents having stricter rules on their kids’ time outside of the home. Because they don’t want their kids caught up in dangerous crime. As previously discussed in this post, nothing but racist city planning stops American teenagers from walking. Plenty still do, there are still parks and stores and other places to walk. It just has to be safe to do so, and it is only safe to do so for the richest and the whitest neighborhoods. Teenagers being forced to spend time inside and being unable to exist for free in public is not about the city having mixed use zones, it’s about pathways to walk and gentrification creating public panic (and also loitering laws, which are - again - designed to criminalize existing while not white soooooo). 

So that leaves cars. Now I hate to be the bearer of bad news… but sometimes... cars are just more convenient. I know i KNOW I know, it really sucks but it's true. We, as a world, need to decrease our reliance on oil to survive. Pretending cars aren't convenient is not going to be very effective because it involves denying reality. I think about this in the same way I think about the way the pirating community talks about streaming and how ineffective that has been. We all hate our streaming services, yet we haven't left for piracy en mass because there is convenience to streaming that pro-piracy conversations actively deny. The same is true for cars. Not having to plan your trip across town because you can just jump in the car is easier than planning your trip across town. Having a car makes grocery shopping easier, because you can buy more stuff without having to walk with it at all. Driving increases your time in private, even while in transit because your car is your private space. You get to play the music loud or talk on the phone and say whatever you want. You get to eat and throw your trash on the floor. It's your space.

Denying the comfort and convenience of cars in favor of this fictional myth where the only reason people in suburban spaces use cars is because they can't walk is going to accomplish nothing because it's false. I mention this because I see this conversation take this line a lot and it's so unhelpful.

Now we're at public transportation. Reliable, safe, close and fast public transportation is what needs to be increased in order to decrease reliance on cars. This is the line the "walkable city" discourse states. Sure, that's true. It's also not cheap, nor is it easy to plan for, nor will it equally serve everyone. For all the reasons already spelled out here, your plan for expanding public transportation to an area has to take into account the people who already live there. It's not as simple as "build a commuter rail system" because you run into things like the space from my former neighborhood we did above. Noise, traffic, lights... All of that is important to keep in mind.

When discussing decreasing reliance on cars, you don't really have to decrease suburban spaces to do that. Park and ride should be a part of this conversation and should be encouraged more than it is. Some people who live in suburban areas driving to a park and ride depot and then taking the train, bus, subway, what-have-you to their downtown destination does decrease reliance on cars. I bring this up here because it's expensive to build some of this stuff like subways and commuter rails. It's difficult to plan a bus route to a suburban area, because the needs of that area are not always clear like they are urban zones. This means more community outreach and meetings. However, cities have incentive to decrease these things. For all of the reasons stated above, cities do not give a flying fuck of a shit if their current residents are happy or well served. They care about money. In the areas that need this transportation the most, the poor areas where suburban reliance on cars is unaffordable, cities know they're not effectively serving these residents. We've already discussed that this is built into the city planning.

Cities increase public transportation access not when citizens need it, but when businesses do. Thus, this conversation becomes another way to spread propaganda about why gentrification is good, needed, and necessary to the wellbeing of a city, which we have already discussed it isn't.

My dad's neighborhood is walkable. His closest grocery store is a 5 minute walk, within a 5 minute walk, he has bus stops for 4 different bus routes. He and his neighbors use the busses semi frequently and often walk to the store and back. There are multiple parks in the neighborhood. There are bike paths on the major streets that people use frequently. The city is still using the expansion of public transportation to increase the walkability of the city to increase gentrification in the neighborhood. Specifically, they've proposed commuter rail (for which they are buying up and tearing down poorer houses and neighborhoods) and increasing taxes to pay for it. They are taking the most walkable but diverse neighborhoods and increasing taxes, which drives the poor and people of color away, buying those houses, and building a commuter rail no one wanted.

This is all about one thing: money.

The walkable city discourse online buys into and eats up this propaganda like it's legitimately good food... But it's just propaganda. I really cannot stand it and I wish y'all would use your brains. This propaganda is what leads to the fact the U.S. is building more apartments than it has in 50 years and almost none of them are affordable.

This is not as simple as we need to make our cities more walkable. I will remind you New York is a walkable city. It's also a crapshoot of problems and one of the most unaffordable and inaccessible in the nation.

[hellsdaydreamwastaken]

Screenshotting instead of RBing because I don't wanna get into drama when I'm still so new to this site but holy shit I think this might legitimately be THE WORST "Communist reading list" I have EVER SEEN.

1. Only three books (or four if you count the belated addition of the Manifesto) is absurdly tiny. If people are "scared off" by a list of 10 books that is absolutely a skill issue.

2. Likewise, if you find Principles of Communism, one of the absolute simplest serious works of political theory ever written, to be "a bit difficult", you are just an idiot. Like, you are stupid. You're legitimately just very unintelligent if you find that a complicated read. There's no nice way of saying it. You're not a smart person.

3. On Authority is a great little text, but a terrible "introduction" to ANYTHING. It is beyond absurd to suggest reading that before the Manifesto. Laughable even. It's a rather niche tract! It's never meant as a general introduction! It's a good text and all, it's true and everything, but... it's really not even required reading at all these days, let alone an introduction! Really this just reeks of "read this to win Internet arguments with anarchists!", which should go without saying is the worst reason to read anything. I'm not an Anarchist, I do think that text is good, but it's not really THAT important. Let alone a good introduction. Unbelievably terrible suggestion.

4. Recommending Mao BEFORE Marx is so fucking brain-dead I am tempted to think this is a joke post, except that I know Leftists can actually be this fucking dense. Even so, actually claiming it as the most important and saying that "if you only read one make it this".... I am floored. Maoists are truly some of the absolutely most bumblingly brainless Leftists out there.

5. Oh yeah and then they tack on the Manifesto at the last minute. For fuck's sake you should be LEADING with that! And if you think it's too "obtuse"... just give up honestly. If the Manifesto is too hard for you how will you ever get through Capital without straight-up dying of brain overload?

This post is very angry and mean which is why I didn't make it a reply to OP, because I don't wanna just start a fight, but seriously this is some TERRIBLE advice. Never follow this.

[hydilumii]

Yeah this is made particularly clear in these few pages in the Book of Bill, at least in my opinion.

Like, the first page is a horrifying account of genuine psychological torture, and Bill refers to this, and Ford's genuine betrayal and anger, as "keeping things spicy." We know Bill has a delusional view of pain and torment and sees it as a joke-- we see it in Sock Opera, most of Weirdmaggedon, and especially here. "Those were just practical jokes!" he says, and we pan over to Ford and he's holding a crossbow to his brother's face and demanding, "Did you come to steal my eyes??"

I think the Book of Bill adds so much depth to the relationship between Ford and Bill, because we've seen Ford's take on the relationship in the show and Journal 3, but never Bill's. And once we get Bill's, we get pages upon pages (and missing pages of the Journal that may have been forged by Bill-- check out the theories if you want but I won't get into it now) of HIS account. Bill doesn't understand human emotion or human love, and conflates the latter with fear. The pages on love reinforce this, wherein Bill claims FEAR and LOVE are the same emotion. (Probably since they both make the human heart race or something.)

Anyway, my point here is that Billford was never supposed to be a healthy relationship, and the Billford content that understands this is really cool. Exploring a complicated relationship such as this takes a lot of maturity and care, imo? Bill DID put the Pines family through horrible trauma, ESPECIALLY Ford. Ignoring that removes an important layer from the interesting narrative that Alex Hirsch meant to convey. Bill is TRYING to tell us that "he's just a li'l guy!" He's woobifying himself. Because little guys who are silly gooses don't have to face consequences for their actions. Bill is legitimately delusional and an incredibly unreliable narrator, I fear. Maybe some people can't handle that yet...?

Anyway, I doubt I need to say that engaging in something in fiction isn't synonymous with endorsing it IRL, since I feel like we all know that on this website. I really love seeing Billford content that digs into everything we've been shown in various Gravity Falls media. And I also like some of the silly stuff. It's good to have a balance, but I agree with OP. Complex characters deserve to be treated with care!

Ngl ever since the GF fandom came back, it is severely annoying seeing Stanford Pines’s character being reduced down to wanting to fuck a triangle instead of the complex character he is and why he was drawn to Bill in the first place. I also don’t like how people are starting to woobify Bill due to his backstory and paint him out to be this silly goose ex of Ford’s when in reality he’s still a demonic monster who never cared about him and wanted nothing but to control him.

Like y’all DO realize that just because Alex Hirsch likes making silly undertone jokes about Ford and Bill having a “breakup”, doesn’t erase all the horrible stuff Bill put Ford and the Pines family through…..right??? Cause good fucking GOD the fighting and discourse that’s happening on twitter rn regarding this. You can’t even call Bill and Ford’s dynamic toxic without getting attacked or made fun of, it’s ridiculous. And this ALWAYS happens with mlm pairings in media, or characters fandoms deem as gay. Because fans start to see the fanon version of the characters they’ve made up in their heads as canon, and then proceed to woobify said male characters.

And let me be clear, if you ship BillFord…that’s okay with me, I don’t care. But if you paint their relationship out to be lighthearted and silly, to the point where you’re attacking others for calling it toxic….you’re delusional because did we watch the same show, read the same books, and look at the same website?

[veryflirtytransportalate]

"You know, for someone who just woke up from a 200-year nap, you're pretty easy on the eyes." - Sizzel, on the topic of... Sizzel

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Taking another off day, since I'm busy as hell, so here's some additional shots from my bunny shoot.

My attempt to steal power from the Mayor of Diamond City isn't going well. No one responded to my attempts to generate an impromptu emergency election that would allow me to oust the mayor through semi-legitimate means, so I followed up with an op-ed calling gently for rebellion. I published both of these things in the paper, and came to an awful realization.

Mayor McDonough is the only one who reads Piper's paper.

I walked around and the only article anyone talks about is the one the Mayor got up on stage and explained. I don't even think anyone read it, I think they just know what it's about from hearsay. Can they read? I mean funk, seriously no one gives a damn that I'm calling for insurrection against Diamond City authority?! I'm pretty open about how they'd be getting on the ground floor of an incredible business opportunity! No wonder everyone ignores Piper, all she talks about is reading and writing to a community of... of... what... what do any of these citizens do? Anyone but the merchants got a hobby?

New theory: literally everyone in Diamond City is a synth.

(Thoughts on the new Fallout show below the cut. I haven't seen it and also hate the plot of modern Fallouts so, uh... let's just call it high in sodium, you get me?)

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Hello! I am actually very busy.

Happy show day. I guess they moved it from a day early to two days early? I thought it was coming out in December?

I'm... trying to get excited about the show. I want to be excited about the show.

I'm...

I'm not excited about the show.

I want to care... the show is going to be well made. Amazon money? Westworld guy? Sure. Whatever. I can picture it. Great lighting. The post-processing, well blended. Sound will do that thing where it gets loud and then suddenly cuts off. Dramatic. Vault-Tec. Ghouls. Vertibirds. Power armor. Hair. Make up. Last looks. Camera. Rolling. Action. Cut.

My favorite part of what Fallout used to be was that it was a strange blend of isometric RPG with the Star-Trek approach to episodic speculative fiction, approaching real world problems through the lens of a very non-real world, and trying out approaches to complex issues of governance through that frame in a collaborative form of fiction where your actions defined your character and the world around them.

It was not to see a beautiful actor in heavy make-up with perfect hair pretend to be in a gun fight. If I wanted to see a beautiful actor in heavy make-up with perfect hair pretend to be in a gun fight, I'd just watch John Wick. Or a Star War. Or a Marvel.

I hate marketability. I hate the way in which everything has to appeal to a consumer base that has had their options for entertainment sliced away until only the Disney remains. Amazon is just nerd Disney, these days, too. I hate money. Can't wait to see Fallout cross-promoted Capital One Credit Card commercials.

But more than anything else... the writing in Fallout 4 was so bad, so without understanding of using dialogue to represent character to facilitate plot, that the entire world lost a layer of joy. We're never going to have an intelligent Deathclaw ever again: I believe, based on the general writing quality that was permitted in Fallout 4, that if they made a sentient Deathclaw it would be some big twist that it's leading a raider gang, being answered to by between one and five henchmen. Never will we have communities that look like raiders but are actually engaging with the world around them with long term objectives and goals - the way the word "raider" is used is fucked, it applies a moral justification to seeing someone and blamoing them because they had the wrong name tag on. If you met some people that you had a moral justification to un-do, it was because they began a fight with you. Misdoings were just as dire, and writing hinted at additional atrocities than we saw in the explorable maps, but you discover these things by interacting with the sprites, both in a conversation mini-game and in the primary simulational RPG layer. Sorry, but hey, get a cool raider-y FO76 skin, it's only $15. A part of me doesn't wanna see a show celebrating that.

On the other hand... it's gonna be Amazon money well constructed, and, what else am I doing with my time, I guess?

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[ultimateplaylistmaker]

OP I love you luck analysis (especially since I'm trying to write a luck fic so the background of how it works in universe is now like holy script for me) and I'd like to add in how I've always thought Nagitos luck also refused to kill him. I've always described it as "good luck for him, bad luck for everyone around him" as it seems his luck targets those he's close to first before finally turns on him the "equal the scales" something he comments on in the game.

However! What I wanted to mention was my personal theory that the only reason Nagitos plan in the fifth trial worked is specifically BECAUSE he was dying in a game so his luck allowed it. Like the guy lived for years despite a 6 month prognosis? And then when he actually dies its the one time it doesn't matter bc they were in a game? Sus, lol

Yeah I think I specifically worded it as 'seems willing to kill him' which makes it more iffier on if it will actually go through with it, but it certainly makes komaeda THINK hes legitimately going to die from it, which Makoto's luck rarely ever allows.

I'm glad you liked the analysis though, luck is a FASCINATING talent in this universe