#compass records

[listening-through-the-lens]

Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley Are Living In A Song

Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley Are Living In A Song

[p4nishers]

thinking about the relationship between mightily oats' "the worthwhile [words] don't burn" and constable dorfl's "the words in the heart cannot be taken"

[his-dark-materials-trilogy]

[qoldenskies]

Oh my fucking god the Raph and Don parallels are so much fucking worse. They sound like each other when they think and speak. Insisting “I love you” against a locked door. The last part of Raph’s chapter feels like the scene where Donnie reminisces on the time after Shredder. His monologue at the beginning literally sounds like Donnie begging for forgiveness from his brother in CL. “I wanna be worth it” you’re both SICK in the head.

HHHHHHhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

leo and donnie may be twinning hard right now but raph and donnie are doing some fuckinnnn!!! PARALLELS!!!!!! CL being so long and having so much to take from for things like this really helps pound in the way that the roles have been reversed after the curse breaks; how they cant do much but work, how they can only love from afar, how they can give and give and give but it wont get through to the person they want to love them the most, how desperate they are for normalcy and simplicity and the donnie they used to have .......

what a terrible way to finally be able to empathize with your emotionally unavailable brother.

that scene where they talk about the stuff they miss is also kind of intended to be a parallel to the family meeting,,,, but donnie's missing from it. they're not saying this to him. because he opened himself up and took their punishment but he wont so easily do the same with their love. haha painful! :D

[brenna]

as an early birthday gift to myself, I pre-ordered the pressure chief vinyl (it arrived yesterday!), and I just wanted to show off how pretty all the cake vinyls are.

[aarcade]

I've spent the last few days watching through Alan Becker's entire youtube channel. you know the experience, everybody knows the experience. the crude but entertaining videos get better and better, quality spikes in ava4, then again in vs minecraft, then oh my GOD ava8.

but the topic of this post is shorts #30, the king. which I was hyped for beyond belief. so it pains me to say that I. kinda hated it. and I can't find anybody talking about this.

spoiler discussion and why I hate fun or whatever under the break

so first thing, why the FUCK didn't I like shorts #30?? it's the best conclusion the story could've possibly had, right? it was cool as hell, the fights went hard, there was emotional depth, maybe you cried at the end (I saved my tears for the wild robot).

it's uh. it's the emotional depth. specifically the way they resolved king Orange and purple.

the backstory for King Orange is fine, sure. it fits him. minecraft ate your son, so you're gonna destroy minecraft. it's not super complex, but he's a villain and he's got aura (pigstep 🔥🔥🔥) so it's fine.

purples's backstory in shorts 29 is an absolutely beautiful setup. his constant seeking of approval, his desensitisation to abuse, how much he clearly enjoys being with the main crew. it's a fantastic inner conflict and his self hatred is really well written. green manages to drag him out of it, reminding him of the people that genuinely enjoy his company.

... so he doesn't need the approval of an abusive father figure anymore, right?

back to shorts 30. king nearly kills purple during the big final fight, sees the parallels between the childlike character he's abusing and the son he lost, and has a change of heart. far too little too late, but it's paying off the setups, so sure. let him have a moment before he gets sucked into the black hole.

it's the aftermath of the black hole that pisses me off. like makes me actually fucking angry. after the storm clears, king shows back up looking all sad, and apologises to the cast. and they (seemingly) forgive him. the child abuser, murderer, slaver, and actual fucking genocider.

this would be fine in earlier avm. it's not that serious, it's a fun animation with good fights where everyone makes friends at the end. hell, it's what happens with the character of Alan himself, and that didn't bother me.

but when you write a complex character arc about abuse, self hatred, inner conflict, you're doing big boy serious writing. you're asking me to engage with the work on a slightly higher level in order to appreciate what you're doing here.

AND THEN YOU HAVE PURPLE DRAMATICALLY HUG KING ORANGE???

whose fucking idea was it to resolve an abused child's arc by having them earn the respect of their second abuser and go off to live with him (assumedly)? purple deserves way better than this. king doesn't deserve this at all. even if we set aside his genocide and enslavement of the minecraft world as being wacky cartoon shit- maybe he didn't realise the mobs were sapient, etc etc etc- even then, he still physically beat purple several times and left him for dead.

why does this character deserve a scrap of sympathy? you wrote your villain too evil and then you tried to shoehorn in a redemption because you were on a friendship is magic kick, I guess.

if you want to write a serious story where emotions have weight, don't forgive and redeem a genocider just because ONE of his sins happened to remind him of something bad that happened to him in the past. and if you want to write a fun light story, maybe have a little less child abuse in there???

I loved these videos up until this point and it breaks my heart to be so angry. but Alan Becker fucking fumbled his most interesting character and had him regress from independence back to parental approval, all in the name of giving the worst fucking guy ever the happy ending he definitely doesn't deserve.

[qwertyshuman]

Alicia from Level 99 Villainess is a tragic figure, at least in the novel versions.

She is supposed to be the protagonist, the wielder of light magic who will defeat the Demon Lord and save the country. She starts off weak, but she should grow over the course of the story, both in terms of power and emotionally to face the challenge at the end.

This is all thrown off by Yumiella appearing at the start of her story.

Yumiella is potentially the most powerful person in the world, and could probably solo the Demon Lord from the beginning. She also looks like a cloud of darkness with glowing eyes to Alicia.

Yumiella also shows up Alicia's harem, giving them inferiority complexes that keep them emotionally stunted and cause them to over-focus on protecting Alicia, which stunts her magical and emotional growth. She doesn't need to learn to stand for herself if she has three strong guys doing it for her. And they don't need to confront their feelings of inferiority if they have sweet, weak Alicia to protect and make them feel strong. Meanwhile Yumiella is still stronger than all of them, a steady reminder of all their inadequacies.

Yumiella tries to help, but her own lack of social skills and empathy lead her to traumatizing Alicia further in her attempt to level grind her. Now Yumiella doesn't only look monstrous, she has also forced Alicia into a dangerous situation and would not let her leave.

So when it's time for the final battle, time to fight the demon lord, Alicia finally takes some agency and attempts to slay the demon who has been tormenting her.

I've been thinking lately about how to make a character who lacks agency interesting, and I think it's by giving a lot of impact to the choices they do make.

[aeolianblues]

do people like. Not realise that it is possible to be critical of two things at once or

[numenrecords]

[mcytegg]

jumper cares for rek and ro so much ☹️☹️☹️

[patheticperipatetic]

I forgot what seeded the thought, but I wanted to know what's the largest a compass could be before physics prevents it from getting bigger. Like, if it got so big and heavy the magnetic field wouldn't be able to exert force on it greater than other forces like gravity.

Turns out, there's no answer. Either that or my search skills are getting worse. There's a 4,000ft compass in the desert somewhere but it's painted on the ground. But that's, you'll need another compass to even make that one. Given enough tectonic shift it'll be wrong some day. The search provided me results to a 9cm compass for children ages 7 and up.

So I asked the /physics reddit and got some vague discussions but no one seemed to have a ready clear response. The only upvoted response is the it has to be smaller than the Earth. Someone mentioned ships used to have big compasses and the largest one I found was a nearly 11" compass from ye Olde days.

Can a functional compass be the size of a bus? A warehouse? A continent? Or would the magnetic field be unable to turn a needle heavier than 50kgs?

Maybe I need to find out how much force the magnetic field can exert on an object free floating in water closed to the environment.

I even had the thought of looking in the Guinness Book website but the only result that they had was oldest compass.

[thesummerstorms]

Sally Jackson vs Bruce Wayne.

Not Batman. Bruce Wayne.

[itspileofgoodthings]

so I found a counselor (yay) and when I went in to fill out the paperwork for it after a very hard day I got very overwhelmed and sad and I started to cry, you know the kind where the tears just well up and spill over without any effort, and a man in the waiting room got up and handed me a box of tissues and it truly went right to the depths of my heart.

[fiapple]

sure there is no such thing as intrinsic value and one day humanity will be lost to time but, like, did you know that it's been found one of the survival tools of early humans was their ability to learn compassion? that, as dr. penny spikins put it, "[they] didn't think in terms of whether others might repay their efforts, they just responded to their feelings about seeing their loved ones suffering." that the care they were able to show each other for no reason other than that they were able to quantifiably advanced the species?

did you know that, quote, "[o]ftentimes, administering care was costly in terms of resources and time to the larger group. Additionally, archaeological evidence shows any individual afflicted with an illness or injury was cared for to some capacity, regardless of their significance within the society, raising questions as to the motives behind 'Neanderthal healthcare'.”?

that, again quote,"[w]hile Neanderthal healthcare practices may have been borne of evolutionary necessity, their tactics evolved out of recognition of the intrinsic value of life more so than a need to preserve their species. By providing care to an ill or injured individual at the expense of the group and administering care without expectation of compensation, Neanderthals exhibit compassion. This emotional motivation drove the species to develop more complex methodologies, and certainly saved the species from early extinction by allowing them to surpass the limitations of their ecosystem."?

it's speculated they would not have even been able to evolve with the earth's climate had they not learned that skill. experts believe it to have begun developing close to 6 million years ago, "when the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees experienced the first awakenings of an empathy for others and motivation to 'help' them, perhaps with a gesture of comfort or moving a branch to allow them to pass."

did you know that "[i]n modern humans starting 120,000 years ago, compassion was extended to strangers, animals, objects and abstract concepts."?

did you know that it's believed that early humans fully experienced love, not just love in the neurochemical sense, not just lust, but genuine emotional love on multiple levels? that it can be evidenced?

dr. penny spikins also said, "[c]ompassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion. It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive. This apparent fragility makes addressing the evidence for the development of compassion in our most ancient ancestors a unique challenge, yet the archaeological record has an important story to tell about the prehistory of compassion."

sure, humans are inherently neutral, and our capacity to be good is just a capacity. but historically it's what's kept us alive.

and you can argue 'till you're blue in the face that it won't matter, and we'll all be just dust in the end. but assigned value isn't less-than, and your fear of responsibility & conscious choice will never make it so.

quantifiably speaking, making the cognizent choice to base your beliefs on what is most compassionate, at what will keep the people around you alive & well, is beneficial to humanity as a species. so as gregory orr wrote, "that's crudely put, but…/if we're not supposed to dance,/why all this music?"

[toymoder]

I think unless you specify that "no" "stop" "wait" mean anything else all of those are withdrawals of consent, even in kink. When in doubt, check in. Not every scene is CNC. I'm really tired of stubborn and inconsiderate people, often doms, who refuse to listen to anything but standard issue safewords and colour systems. I've never accidentally said no when i didn't mean it and i know thats what I'm gunna reflexively say when i need everything to stop. "No isn't the safeword" is coercive at best when CNC has not even been discussed.

[racke7]

It’s so weird to get comments on my HP-fics these days.

Like, I put in a lot of time and effort in those things, and I’m glad that they’re still making people happy.

But also like, why the fuck are you still in the fandom? What morally abhorrent opinions do you have, that you can still engage with HP with a smile on your face?