#chatter

[tozettastone]

@hatershunter can you. go faster.

northern hemisphere babes we made it to the longest night of the year. we made it. for the next 6 months, every day will give us a little more daylight than the last. let's go. take my hand. climb out of the darkness with me

[ravenekrops]

@infamouslydorky @tf2heritageposts idk who else to tag who's still in the TF2 community but LOOK

COMIC #7

[same-pic-rick-roll]

Big news!

I just adopted a baby.

[bonni]

likeeeee ok exhibit a boobie shirt I stole from dollskill a few years ago (don't ask) it looks kind of cute but maybe I need a push up bra or something bc the one strapless bra I do have is not pushing those thangs up far enough

[same-pic-rick-roll]

All I’ve ever had is an iphone, and I think they’re fine.

But then again I’ve never had a different phone to compare it to. I’ve always wanted to try an android to see how it compares.

I just got my first ever iPhone and my god it is terrible, how did they get so popular this thing is a nightmare

[hyrude]

under my presidency you can rest assured that pants that look normal until you go to try them on and they actually have a bunch of invisible buttons instead of a zipper will be outlawed. and anyone who manufactures them will be shot in the street

[cybertronplannedparenthood]

apparently this is a hot take but i love tf1 orion/op’s boxer nose so much. objectively correct nose for this character

[feraltvman]

Broken Star Puzzles

Powers and MORE explained

Prepare yo'selves for one long ass post, as I ramble off about my silly little AU Puzzles. The full course meal of how he works is now LIVE TEEHEE

⭐ Lets start off with this fun little detail I put in BS!Puzzles design!!!! If you take away his body, then put the pieces closer together you get a mangled broken star shape :D I didn't just pick a random amount of star pieces to be sticking out of his body, it was on purpose to really send home the message that he IS a Broken Star UvU

The rest of The Wishing Star is in his system, mangled and waiting to be used... Is it possible to bring the star together and mend it? Possibly but who knows what that would do to Puzzles? 🤭

👾Build a Minion-

Puzzles first power is to Create Minions that will blindly follow his every order without a second thought. The Wishing Star relies on his Thoughts and Emotions, while a star can read your mind... The deepest desires in your heart when you wish upon it... If you wish for something while your mind is tossed like a salad, unsure of the bigger picture then how is the star supposed to get the bigger picture?

If Puzzles isn't Focused on what he wants. Say hes robbing a bank for petty purposes and hes not totally in it bc in the long run this doesn't do much for his plans, or these guards are pathetic couldn't do shit to him.... He wants a Cool lizard thing to rip them apart and he could get what he imagines or....

A ball of scales with wings. Puzzles may be more edgy and brooding however he is still. Your honor. A silly little guy who cannot stay on task or will ruin his own plans- he could be doing something and suddenly think about how badly he wants Fish Crackers

Star doesn't care that this thought was for Later. He wanted them now and snapped his fingers, you get fish crackers my king.

🕷️Mind Control/⏯️Pause and Mute

The Wishing Star DOES NOT directly affect Puzzles NATURAL abilities in the slightest bit, they are his normal built in functions and the Star doesn't correlate, the only reason he has some of his natural powers is just the convenience that this is a Star in his body. Nothing else.

1 Extra Star he was never supposed to have so his natural abilities are weak and unreliable. Mind Control can only last for a minute if not less than that, he can give someone a simple command to do and use that time to make distance between himself and them in order to summon minions.

Pausing and Muting, can be resisted now. The more someone fights back against the Pause, their body will start to twitch until they can break free on their own accord before Puzzles ability runs out of time.

As for muting, the more insistent the target is to talk their voice will slowly become unmuted.

Puzzles has the tendency to forget that he has limited time so will go into an Evil Villain monologue just to get his ass kicked 2 seconds later- bc he is silly and autistic like that. I wouldnt dream of taking away his quirky behavior uwu

🤕Pain Resistance-

When Puzzles first got the star it was ungodly painful as the giant mass wormed its way into his body, which caused his first wish for Resistance To Pain.... He can still feel damage, and his quirky behavior causes him to flinch anyways even if it won't hurt as much anymore. But he can take a punch from Mario and barely feel a thing now, which isn't the best thing for him as he still wears down just the same as before but now that he can't feel himself wearing down as much, he'll push himself beyond his limits and it will take a lot longer to get him to run away in a fight which could also lead to his capture bc he figured out hes tired way too late and passes out while fleeing.

🎎No Bone Mode-

This ability is a combination of The Wishing Star and The Demonic Goop collaborating in order to keep Puzzles safe from harm since he can't do that himself yet-

The demonic eyes in his arm and in the Puppeteer hand ARE fully functional, seeing more than Puzzles sees but just not sharing that to him bc that would fuck him up even more and they don't need that. Instead it uses what knowledge it has to help Puzzles however it can. Nudging him with impulsive thoughts on top of the fact this man fully does not want to get hit- The Wishing Star fully understands the mission and helps him avoid contact by any means necessary.

Sense Puzzles is resistant to Pain he can't feel any of this as the Puppeteer hand flings him around like a rag doll. Its more or less a very powerful enhancement to his movement and flexibility

♻️Jealousy Meter- (AKA The power of Friendship)

Depending on Puzzles state of mind different emotions and desires have VASTLY different effects on his abilities- Right now he is currently ⭐Hoe Mad⭐

Violently Betrayed by his friend

Left behind by who was supposed to help him

Shown that his vulnerability was nothing but a weakness

Affection is just a TOOL people can use against him

All this goes into the factor of how STRONG his powers while using specifically the Wishing Star are, because his Desire is revenge and to break apart the friend group which ruined his own companionship

Jealousy and Hatred fuel him like a rechargeable battery that was left plugged in.

The more he feels, the stronger he gets. Summoning big creatures straight from hell with full magical capabilities of their own, his own physical strength being enhanced (without changing his appearance. Strong anime twink logic), up til the point he COULD get strong enough to mend the wishing star in his body

This is catastrophic behavior... The more fixed the star is, the stronger Dreams or Nightmares BS!Puzzles can make a reality. Warping the area around him to become different (grasslands to volcano type of shit), gaining better abilities if not negating his need for 5 stars to use his natural abilities.

He has the

potential

To become ungodly dangerous, but he doesn't really think about Mending the broken star in his own system, he rather fears that possibility... He doesn't want to lose it and thinks if he Fixes it, that it will fly out of his body then he will be powerless again. Thus he goes with the status quo. Good Enough 👍

The most he will do with the Star is summon more pieces of it in order to give himself a massive cleaver scythe hand for murdering

TLDR Power Of Friendship:

He could become REALLY fucking dangerous however just uses it to power up his ability to summon things and his own physical strength

[businesstiramisu]

#i listened to a podcast episode about this guy once #don't remember which podcast sorry #it focused mostly on his radio shenanigans and his bid for Kansas governorship #maybe the podcast was Decoder Ring? #or the NPR one that does random weird topics.... is that invisibilia?

Past me, it was Reply All

this dude’s wikipedia entry is the most buckwild nonsense i’ve seen all week

ok, you know you’re in for a good time when this

and this

are the first two things you see, right?

tl;dr, John R. Brinkley was the early 1900s version of quack-doctor-meets-Rush-Limbaugh; his big thing was these goofy surgeries to restore male verility by implanting them with goat testicles.  which is extremely funny except for the part where people died!

normally THAT would be the craziest shit a dude had going on, and yet—

well, okay, first, let’s hear about the dude’s dad:

Brinkley senior’s first marriage was annulled because he was underage.[3] After he reached adulthood, he married four more times, and outlived each of his young wives. 

five marriages!  holy shit.  was the dad poisoning these women or…

anyway, Brinkley himself has a similarly messy love life.  for instance, here’s one way to handle a divorce:

Sally filed for divorce and child support, but after two months of payments, Brinkley kidnapped his daughter and fled with her to Canada. Sally Brinkley, unable to obtain an extradition order from Canada, dismissed her suit for alimony and child support, allowing Brinkley to return to Chicago with the child. 

In Memphis, Brinkley met 21-year-old Minerva Telitha “Minnie” Jones, a friend of Crawford’s and the daughter of a local physician. On August 23, 1913, after a four-day courtship,[14] Brinkley and Jones married at the Peabody Hotel, even though he was still married to Sally Brinkley. Minnie and John Brinkley honeymooned in Kansas City, Denver, Pocatello and Knoxville. Brinkley was arrested in Knoxville and extradited to Greenville where he was put in jail for practicing medicine without a license and for writing bad checks.[13] Brinkley told the sheriff that it was all Crawford’s fault, and gave investigators enough information that they were able to arrest Crawford in Pocatello. The two former partners met again in jail.[13]

imagine your OTP…

in addition to all the goat gland transplants Brinkley was doing, he started concurrently running a radio show, which sounds like such a DELIGHTFULLY mixed bag of material:

Brinkley spoke for hours on end each day on the radio, primarily promoting his goat gland treatments. He variously cajoled, shamed and appealed to men’s (and women’s) egos, and to their desire to be more sexually active. In between Brinkley’s own advertisements, his new station featured a variety of entertainment including military bands, French lessons, astrological forecasts, storytelling and exotica such as native Hawaiian songs, and American roots music including old-time string band, gospel and early country.[32]

life before podcasts…

also, it’s kind of interesting to see an early predecessor of the whole “truth is paywalled but the lies are free” phenomenon here:

Fishbein’s interest in putting Brinkley out of business grew and he wrote more articles featuring stories about people who had grown sick or died after seeing Brinkley. But the [American Medical Association] journal’s readership was mostly restricted to other doctors, while Brinkley’s radio station poured directly into peoples’ homes every day.

eventually, Brinkley’s empire of lies collapses, and good riddance, but also i gotta admire his absolute determination to keep going anyway:

Brinkley reacted to losing his medical and broadcast licenses by launching a bid to become the Governor of Kansas, a political position that would enable him to appoint his own members to the medical board and thus regain his right to practice medicine in the state.

“i would simply become the government,” said he

and he goddamn near succeeded, too, if it weren’t for a rude twist of fate:

Three days before the election, the Kansas attorney general (who had prosecuted Brinkley before the medical board) announced that the rules surrounding write-in candidates had changed, and that the doctor’s name could only be written in one specific way for the vote to count (as J. R. Brinkley). As a write-in candidate, he received more than 180,000 votes (29.5 percent of the vote) and lost to Harry Hines Woodring, later Secretary of War in the cabinet of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[42] An article published at the time in The Des Moines Register estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 ballots were disqualified in this manner. Woodring later admitted that had those votes counted, Brinkley would have won.[43][44]

anyway, he gets so big mad after all this that he moves to the Mexican border, where the Mexican government is VERY eager to help him build the Most Enormous Fuck-You Radio Station In History:

The Mexican government, eager to get even with its northern neighbors for dividing up North America’s radio frequencies without giving any to Mexico, granted Brinkley a 50,000-watt radio license and construction began on XER, his new “border blaster” across the bridge from Del Rio in Villa Acuña, Coahuila (since renamed Ciudad Acuña).[16] As construction got underway, Fishbein and the U.S. State Department desperately searched for a way to shut Brinkley down. […]

Though Brinkley’s American radio license had been revoked, XER’s signal was so strong that it could still be heard in Kansas.[49] In 1932, the Mexican government allowed Brinkley to increase his wattage to 150,000 watts. Several months later, Brinkley was allowed to increase to one million watts, “making XER far and away the most powerful radio station on the planet” that, on a clear night, could be heard as far away as Canada. According to accounts of the time, the signal was so strong that it turned on car headlights, made bedsprings hum, and caused broadcasts to bleed into telephone conversations.[50] Local residents claimed to not need a radio to hear Brinkley’s station; with ranchers claiming that they received it through their metal fences and in their dental appliances.[51]

jfc, USA, maybe you should’ve fuckin been nicer to Mexico is all i’m sayin

anyway he’s big rich for a while but then he dies penniless with a bunch of counts of mail fraud against him, so.  about what you’d expect.

(big thanks to this rando blog post for alerting me to this dude’s existence, lol)

[themetalhiro]

Just stumbled across the Pokémon teams I made with my partner for all 10 of the strawhat pirates. Took like 3 hours and several bottles of wine. maybe I’ll draw them when I have the time?

[enfranchisement]

hello?

[roseslights]

this was just something I drew to send to a friend but thought was funni

[papaya-inspiration]

Here's another angle: What if it was a love story?

People love a star-crossed lovers situation, and they love tales of people finding each other over and over again through different circumstances (heck, what is the trope of reincarnated lovers, if not a variation on this?) So we could take your set up of the same characters hitting the same beats across different worlds and it becomes about love triumphing against all odds. Or if you intertwine the love story with an external conflict (maybe a save-the-word/city/setting plot) where only once can succeed, then it can be about making the sacrifice of love for the good of the many. In every world we find each other. In every world we give each other up to keep the world spinning. I think ultimately to make this work, you'd still need a thing at the end. Maybe not a twist, but a final way of deviating from the expect (which may or may not break the pattern) so that the end state is different from the beginning. Or maybe not! If you're cutting between all the worlds in parallel rather than in series, the tragic ending where they give each other up in ten worlds all in one continuous sequence might be incredibly baller.

The other direction I can think to go with this is to use the parallel beats to draw equivalencies between stories that might not otherwise be obvious, or otherwise makes the reader think. I'm not sure I have a good example off the top of my head, but if one world is about defending an ancient city from a siege of invaders, and the other is an office drama, what does it say if we frame the moment when the city gates fall as parallel to when the boss chews out and fires a coworker and nobody stands up for them? I think there's a lot of that might have a cool potential to use the inter-world parallels to do cool theme work with that (e.g. you could do things like elevate mundane settings and ground fantastical ones, just for starters.)

Pitchposting: The Waves

Here's the logline: a hero flits between universes where everything is different and yet all characters recur. The love interest is the same, whether she's a pirate captain, a cubicle worker, a bard, whatever. The villain is the same, whether he's a rear admiral, a corporate tyrant, or an evil overlord.

Multiverse stories are often about the path not traveled, the way that the world might be different. This would be a story about commonality, everything staying the same.

So there are some number of stories being told here, and the shape of all of them is exactly identical, all hitting the beats at the same time. A death in one means a death in the other, but our protagonist is only in one place at a time, so we see each beat only once and infer the rest. A car chase in one story is a ship chase in another. The climactic battle where soldiers crash against the castle walls becomes a climactic battle where the pirate horde smashes against the walls of a fort, and that turns into a modern cityscape where rioters smash against the walls of a towering skyscraper.

My vision here is that we do grand changes as we move between stories, only to find that everything is equivalent.

So what do you do with this? What's this sort of structure for? What cool stories or scenes does it lend itself to?

My first thought is to break it, naturally. If there are five or six realities that we're cycling through, maybe our protagonist can get just one of them onto a different track, one where fate has something else in store. I don't know how you would do this, there's this neat scene in my head where we go "all is lost -> all is lost -> all is lost -> all is ... wait, what's that?!".

My second thought is that having multiple realities moving in perfect synchronicity with each other allows for a way to really underscore a character, say something about them with thick red marker. The elemental thing that's supposed to define a tragedy is that the bad ending is something that came from within the character, right? Something that they could have stopped, if only they had been a different kind of person. The seeds of their downfall laying within them. So isn't there something nice about seeing that this is invariant? That the worlds are different, circumstances are different, but the choices are the same? You'd have to be incredibly careful with this (and the whole thing, really), because I think in constructing different parallels you might end up with something that the audience doesn't consider parallel. But it could work, layering the emotional beats on top of each other.

My third thought is what I think should have been my first thought: the story is one about mastery, coming to know and understand the rules, "winning" across all realities because of understanding, ideally with some kind of character synthesis along the way. I think this is ... well, difficult, given the rules as I've been talking about them. If there's a "twist", then it should be a twist that happens across all realities simultaneously. If there's something gained or lost, it should always have a parallel. I cannot immediately think of some clever way of breaking this system - something that the reader would understand to be clever or at least worthwhile. (I say reader, but this would be better in a visual medium.) Maybe "breaking it" in a different way is the ideal, pulling the realities into each other, swapping conceits and genres. But this, too, would take a lot of planning to pull off, and you'd need to be careful about these set pieces.

So if I were serious about this (which I'm not, this is pitchposting,) I would start out with our characters, then build some worlds around them, trying for maximum variation in those worlds. The plotting is also pretty vital, particularly the "standard" plot whether you're going to break that or not. I do really like the idea of having a single "mundane" world, a place of office buildings and stakes that are measured in lunch breaks and water cooler conversations. I want the swings to be extreme, but the parallels blindingly obvious when they're put in front of you.

To be clear, I'm not sure that this structure/gimmick could actually work. In a text medium, which is what I primarily work with, I think you'd have to spend too much time on blocking and descriptions and detail whenever you switched realities. Switching scenes can be rough even in the best of circumstances.

But it's an idea that I've had rolling around in my head, and if I can't do something with it, then I hope it can at least spark something in someone else.

[same-pic-rick-roll]

With how popular the haiku bot is, any post it reblogs is bound to gain a lot of notes.

I occaisonially reblog from the haiku bot.

So it occurs to me that, sometimes, I help niche posts break containment.

[bonni]

imagine if it isn't him and we've all just been cyberstalking some random italian guy who's already having the worst day of his life