#greater lesson

[wordsoftheheartandsoul]

On the other side of offense, forgiveness, and moving forward - I pray you find yourself grateful. I pray you see the greater lesson in all you endured and make peace with the fact that you and everyone who crossed your path had to be exactly who they were for you to be who you are now.

Morgan Richard Olivier - One Still Whisper

[ducktracy]

fun cool animal fact: pigs have poor eyesight

even more fun, cooler animal fact: overzealous, (hopefully) unintentionally insensitive ducks will make fun of begrudging bespectacled pigs for their poor eyesight

even MORE fun, coolerer animal fact: ducks have very GOOD eyesight, so the fact that this seemingly does not apply to said overzealous, unintentionally insensitive duck means that he has extremely meager room to talk

and also Porky is colorblind. poor guy can’t catch a break

[mindofserenity]

يجب على المرء أن يكون دائمًا على دراية بكل خطوة يتخذونها في رحلة الحياة هذه

One must always be soulfully aware for every step they take in this journey we call, life.

— mindofserenity

[waterlinkedgirl]

Musical Touken Ranbu: Michinooku ~ Hitotsu Hachisu (Michinooku ~ A Single Lotus)

Here we go! Only a few days after the archive release and toumyu's ninth anniversary (congratulations!)

Michioku, or Michihasu, is a myu I have many conflicting feelings about, both positive and negative. However, I do believe that with the right amount of care in the next Mika-related story myu, the negative can still be cleared. Plus, I'm glad about a lot of things being re-established. The writer does need to step up her game a little on the plot-writing side of things, as well as the understanding-and-respecting-past-myu side of things, but as long as she does, this can still be given a proper place within what was already established.

Keep in mind that these are only the subtitle files, timed and tled to the DMM senshuuraku and the bluray respectively. The archive version will have a talk at the start, so the starting times of the subs will have to be delayed accordingly.

You can find the subtitles and my TL notes document here!

[noctude]

me at work today Thoroughly painting over scuffs in the wall: i’m going to get a good grade in painting this wall etc

supervisor: you don’t have to be so nitpicky about it

me: oh there are mistakes to be made in this world i never thought possible

[lenaellsi]

Thinking about Aziraphale taking away Nina's pain and anger and agency at the ball so that she can be the star of his Perfect Regency Romance and then twelve hours later offering to change her narrative mirror into a watered-down, idealized version of himself so that their relationship will be less complicated

[throwawayasoiafaccount]

I love that one of the roles fire plays in this series is to represent how all consuming desire can be, and how it’s framed as something that can be world ending when uncontrolled.

So naming unnatural, untamable green fire ‘wildfire’ is therefore a stroke of genius. It’s the representation of how we humans manufacture our own doom in the pursuit power, of how uncontrolled desire will eventually blow up in our faces.

And the fact that barrels and barrels of it sit fermenting under Kings Landing, Westeros’s breeding ground of maniac desire, and the capital the ambitious and corrupt flock to for what it promises? It’s perfection!

[wayti-blog]

Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.

-Zhuangzi

[willowcrowned]

“Making anyone over the age of 8 watch tcw should be forbidden” okay, but why?

because it’s bad in the way only bad kids shows can be. and then it’s also bad in fifteen other ways

[4belphie]

not to be dramatic but the idea that diavolo sending mc back in time around lesson 16 was okay bc diavolo knew that mc wouldn’t die/would be brought back is…..questionable and actually makes diavolo look worse in a way?

like….i think because the game doesn’t go into the trauma of lesson 16 at all, ppl think that mc is brought back and everything is fine and dandy, but, realistically, it wouldn’t be. at all. mc still DIED. in a violent, bloody way. they were choked out. they could likely feel the life being literally choked out of them. they probably fought against belphie and struggled against him as much as they could, but it was useless.

do u genuinely think that something like that wouldn’t cause trauma? nightmares, terror, ptsd? not just for mc either. the brothers would be left reeling from all of that. how tf would u trust your brother again or be able to look him in the eye while knowing exactly what he did to someone who couldn’t defend themself, someone you’ve grown to care abt quite a lot?

diavolo knowing that mc would die in such a brutal way and not caring makes him look worse than he does in a scenario where he simply did not know that would happen.

you can choose which scenario you see as canon, but you cannot pretend like diavolo knowing everything makes him innocent of failing to protect mc.

(and, like, diavolo doesn’t HAVE to be innocent. he is a grown demon. he, at this point in canon, doesn’t have a strong bond with mc. he cares abt their wellbeing bc of what they do for him and their role in his plan, not bc he truly cares for them. he can be morally ambiguous.)

[the-priestess-of-dawn]

I went looking and couldn't find any record of me ever actually posting this on tumblr, oops, but a couple years back I wrote this thread on twitter about how Emmeryn's sacrifice absolutely is not supposed to teach Chrom (or Robin, for that matter) that "sacrifice is necessary" or anything like that and mmmm for reasons I am getting Upset about it again so asdfghjkl I'll actually share the Rant with my tumblr followers this time.

[doomduck]

Okay children *squishes your collective faces between my hands*

Say after me " we will not call an event less cursed until AFTER the free skate"

*lets go*

Now don't do it again.

[ducktracy]

"posting this because i NEEEEEED this on my blog" is probably going to be the caption for 95% of the Shin-chan stuff i post BUT IT IS NO LESS TRUE BECAUSE OF IT. Masaaki Yuasa is quickly becoming one of my favorite animators and i want to have easy access to ogle at his work at any time. and i hope for you to do the same! so here's his animation for Ending 3 of the show from 1993

[argcicle]

hey i’ve been in this fandom for three days and haven’t noticed any hcs for this, but I think Schlatt commonly tells stories/lessons to Grizzly like the Book of Job in the living blocks video

[hephaestuscrew]

Assorted Thoughts about the Greater Boston Season 4 finale

I'd assumed that Leon would 'move on' at the end of Season 5, the end of the podcast as a whole. But now we're going to have a whole season of the podcast without him. It's strange to imagine. There's never been a Greater Boston podcast without Leon Stamatis. There's never been a city of Red Line without Leon Stamatis. We began Season 1 confronting the gap that Leon left behind. We learned that he wasn't quite as gone as we might have thought, but there was still the loss, the grief, the consequences of his death. In an interesting narrative symmetry, at the beginning of Season 5 we'll have to confront him being more fully, completely gone. But I think we'll continue to see the ways in which his life and afterlife have rippled outwards.

~~

Immediately after Nica said Leon had brought people together "like a family", Louisa exclaimed that she needed to call Michael. I can't help wondering if it was Nica's comment that triggered that thought for Louisa. I'm emotional about Michael being family for Leon, Michael being family for Louisa, Michael being someone who was brought into Louisa's life by Leon…

~~

There were two moments of Nica and Dimitri sitting with Gemma in the middle of them holding the crystal ball. First, in the back of Lucia's car, when Nica reached out to touch the ball and Dimitri took her hand instead. Second, on the Ferris wheel as they prepared to say goodbye to Leon. Leon was in the middle between his two siblings - he is what divides them and he is what unites them. They held hands over him, finding awkward togetherness in the presence of their loss, stopping each from succumbing to that loss. Leon was in the middle between his two siblings, but he also wasn't; it was Gemma occupying that space for him.

On a related note, I can't help but wonder whether the Stamatis siblings had habitual positions when they'd sit in the back of a car together as children. I think that's a fairly common sibling thing, and it seems likely that it would appeal to the order-loving Leon. I can't decide if it makes me more emotional to imagine that they usually sat with Leon in the middle like that, or to imagine how they sat on that ferris wheel wasn't their typical childhood order.

~~

The lack of narration and the high number of monologues from a range of characters this episode meant that sometimes I wasn't initially sure whether a scene was an interview snippet from a real person or a monologue from a character. I think there's something significant in that blurring of reality and fiction, in real stories of loss mixed with the fictional. Those interviewees are a part of this story, or this story is a part of our world too.

~~

I loved Michael's mantra being spoken by the group, with each person taking one word. For Michael, that sequence of numbers was a way of asserting his own agency in spite of circumstances and his ideas about his nature. It was a way of saying 'my choices matter, even if I can't change the outcome'. And this moment showed how that idea can be upheld within through community and togetherness.

Michael spoke the word "Eight". And perhaps he wanted other people to take over, trusting that the people around him would complete his mantra, believing that they'd understand what he needed in that moment. Or perhaps he was intending to speak the mantra by himself until Louisa interrupted to support him. Either way there's a uniquely powerful kind of choice made against an indifferent world - the choice for people to stand against that world together. It's a contrast with Michael's often self-isolating tendencies for that mantra to become a shared thing.

[thisbibliomaniac]

I got my first mp3 player when I was 13. I still have it. It came with 100 free downloads from a site that probably doesn't exist anymore. I downloaded 100 songs, and listened to them nonstop for two weeks. On day 15, every one of those songs "expired", and were no longer playable. That experience has been in the back of my mind ever since, and that's why I have refused to pay for anything digital (with a couple of notable exceptions), and every bit of media I purchase is a physical disc.