#he’s inane…

[vanillainwater]

The return of cyberpunk nishiki… now in HD! (And at the club)

Who is the lady? Idk, some random cyberpunk lady I guess. Point is NISHIKI GETS THE LADIES.

But no amount of ladies can fix the fact that from the neck down he’s 90% metal…. And that he’s inane… inane… in the membrane…

But who cares about that when you have DRIP!!!

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[phoenixkaptain]

I love the relationship between Ra’s and Tim in the Red Robin run because it reads fundamentally as an unrequited crush. Between an old man who is so rich he will never spend all his wealth, a man who is considered to be charming in the same way a snake is, a man who is more powerful than the majority of other villains just on the strength of his legacy alone.

And.

A seventeen-year-old boy who has not slept in three days since the last time someone drugged him, has not showered in three weeks unless you count being thrown into a river, has not cleaned his room since he was three and his parents still payed attention to him.

And when I tell you which one has the crush on the other, that’s it, that’s the ultimate punchline, DC may never reach these peaks of comedy ever again.

[chase-prairie]

Shout-out to the guy who took in four women 25-40 years old with a big formal display table that I introduced as "Hello! We are all scientists here at the [institution] who do research on improving lawns with native plants!"

Guy said: "Oh. [long pause] This is not what I thought 'Science at [institution]' would look like."

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SIR? [increasingly manic polite smile]

[rickybaby]

Seeing pre-mclaren Daniel or even Daniel from the early 2021. It truly hits you with how things changed so quickly and so devastatingly.

[graham--folger]

can someone explain to me why im tearing up over the description for trimax vol 10 on amazon calling wolfwood "the protector of our story's hero". like that's six words why am i in shambles

[wyrddogs]

In other news, I have a one-week-old greyhound puppy sleeping inside my sweatshirt. He is warm and soft.

How is your morning going?

[triaelf9]

FYI for folks who want to follow someone for dragon age stuff without the petty drama and discourse, I'm here, this is the account for you XD

If you know me, you know what I mean when I say petty. tldr not all dragon age discourse is petty, but my space will be CHILL

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

Kept thinking about the decline in popularity of Christmas caroling from the 1800s to now and came to the following conclusions:

Would not go caroling in any time period:

Hickey

Gibson

Golding

Wall

Des Voeux

Fairholme

Crispe

Collins (would like to, but is too shy)

Would go caroling in the 1800s but not in a modern AU:

Goodsir

Hartnell Bros

Diggle

Morfin

Weekes

Hoar

Tozer

Dundy

Crozier (coerced into it by Fitzjames)

Jopson (moral support for Crozier)

Would go caroling no matter the time period:

The Franklins

Gore

Magnus

Lane

Fitzjames

MacDonald

Irving

Hodgson

Little (coerced into it by the former two)

(List not meant to be exhaustive. I left out anyone I was undecided on. Additions and edits welcome!)

[lunar-years]

Ok but how did Phoebe contact Jamie to invite him to uncles day? Did she email him? Slide into his dms using her hot moms Twitter account? Accost him in the Richmond parking lot? I need answers

I truly think Jamie has met Phoebe before (because of course he has, he hangs out with Roy all the time. Roy is constantly talking about him to the point where Phoebe has no choice but to assume Roy would want him there with him on the best holiday of the year). And therefore he has at least briefly met Phoebe's mother in past.

So probably, Roy gave Jamie's number to his sister just in case, because I like to think Roy gets paranoid over insane scenarios he's made up in his head and convinced himself could absolutely definitely happen, and Jamie is low-key his emergency contact now, and it spirals from there. Roy's brain at 3:00 a.m. while he’s getting ready to go over to Jamie's house, running non-stop like: "but what if my sister needs to call me about something urgent that's happened to Phoebe but I'm unreachable because my knee gave out while Jamie and I were jogging by the Thames and when I went down my phone flew out of my pocket and shattered along the concrete and when Jamie was helping me up he accidentally kicked it into the water? So then when she can’t reach me my sister tries to call Keeley, but of course Keeley's not up because it's 5:00 a.m. so she also misses this important call...but wait!...who do I always happen to be with who also happens to be attached at the hip to his cell phone and would never ever miss a call?" and that is how he gruffly slides his sister Jamie Tartt's cell phone number written on a slip of paper in his terrible chicken-scratch and tells her to put it in her phone contact list strictly for emergencies.

Roy's sister of course recognizes the power she wields here and abuses it immediately. amen.

[anghraine]

Every time I read it, I'm amused by Elizabeth getting so distracted by Caroline Bingley's uhhh objectively enthralling attempts to flirt with Darcy that she (Elizabeth) stops reading to listen to them. And I do think it's kind of hilarious that the interaction between them absolutely confirms her opinion of not only Caroline but Darcy, even though he's not really doing anything other than getting annoyed at being continually interrupted while trying to write a letter to his sister.

[phoenixkaptain]

Reading the novelization of A New Hope already changed how I saw Luke as a character but Splinter of the Mind’s Eye is going one step further and making me question the very fundamentals thought to be obvious about Luke.

Like, Luke is, for lack of a better term, a nerd. He studied languages and cultures -

“”Yes,” Luke admitted modestly. “I used to study a lot about certain worlds, back on my uncle’s farm on Tatooine. It was my only escape, and educational as well. This,” and he indicated the creature resting a massive long arm on his head and shaking him in a friendly fashion, “is a Yuzzem.””

-he wants to study more languages and cultures-

“Empty doorways beckoned to him and he was tempted, very tempted, to enter one of the ruined structures to find out if its interior was as well preserved as the outside.

This was not, he reminded himself firmly, the time for playful exploration. Their first concern was to find a way out, not to go poking around this ancient metropolis. However wonderful it was.”

Luke wants to know about people. He wants to know about cultures and creatures and he wants to be able to communicate and…

He really just. Is a great Jedi. He jumps between Leia and danger and he befriends the Yuzzem the prison guards thought would kill him and he wants to explore the creepy abandoned ruins of a civilization long past and he uses Anakin’s lightsaber underwater to cut the stem of a lilypad they use as a boat and he comments that the rock formations are almost too beautiful to cut down and he knows how to work Imperial explosives and

He’s a Jedi, man. He’s a Jedi. He’s been a Jedi this whole time, before any of us even knew what that actually meant.

[dinosaurwithablog]

Why is it that in some states, felons can not vote, but a man convicted of 34 felonies can run for president? How is that possible? How is that fair? Who in their right mind would vote for such a person? And how is justice served if a man can escape being imprisoned by running for president and not have to serve his prison sentence until his term of office is over? Especially because he's sooooooo old that he probably won't live long enough to finish his term as president and, therefore, not serve his time in prison. That is not justice. That is insanity. That is just wrong on every level. We can not allow this to happen. It disgraces every American. As Americans, we have to make sure that this felon, Donald Chump, goes to prison as soon as possible by not voting for him. Money and power should not allow a person to flee from justice. Donald Chump is a felon, and that's the nicest thing that I can say about him. Please, use your common sense and your sense of honor and justice and vote BLUE 💙💙💙 Harris 2024 is the only fair choice.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

Magneto enjoying puns/wordplay is still my favorite like. Thing i fear. Like of course you do…..

[nya-defense-club]

The year is 2021. You, Morro Wu, are 14.

You infiltrate nearly every discord server you can get your hands on. You create MULTIPLE alternative accounts. You talk exclusively in nigh indecipherable typing quirks, and every day you push the boundary of what's legible and what's just gibberish. You accuse every single person who so much as mentions your typing quirks ableist and get your other accounts to defend you until the whole server joins. You are gaslighting everyone, you are causing havoc like you have never before seen.

You are the problem.

[graham--folger]

watching monster is like omg hiii

and then there’s this bitch