#i am one with the tinfoil

[jamiebluewind]

Was looking at some art and just had a thought after seeing a freshman year piece (linked below): The Rat Grinders were originally The High 5 Heros right? That changed to Rat Grinders after Lucy died. The 5 stood out to me, so I went to the wiki to double check and... yeah. Their original name had 5, not five spelled out. It sounds like a cute little name for a new adventuring party, but the thing is... there were 6 party members: Kipperlily, Ruben, Mary Ann, Oisin, Ivy, and Lucy. That made my mind go to theorizing.

What if someone wasn't always a part of their group (either literally or figuratively)?

If it was figurative, we got a situation where it's 5 party members and the extra one that was required by school rules (and that name never changed until after one of them died which is even more sad).

If it's literal, there were originally 5 party members, they chose their name based on being a 5 party member party, and somehow they eventually got a 6th member. It's not unreasonable to assume with the kidnappings and life stuff and five billion other factors that the freshman class wouldn't always be perfectly divisible by 6. That would leave one party short the first day (or with an extra person or two). There's a lot of ways to get a group of 5 to 6 if you really think about it (some of which might have been easier with Kalvaxus being in charge and/or Arthur Aguefort dead).

1. The party did part or all of freshman year as an odd group and a 6th is brought in later. In the meantime, they might have partnered with another group or got a hireling for party activities that required 6 students.

2. The school brought in a transfer or offered a spot to the best candidate/s that was still interested

3. Someone slipped in after the party formed using magic, devil's honey, or some other means/mechanic (it wouldn't even need to be at the start of the year)

4. There is an inconsistency due to the time quangle (and someone is exploiting that)

What could it mean? Who knows!? But my goodness isn't it interesting to think about?

PS: Thank you to @idonthaveanyurlideas for being the catalyst to my mad mad ravings tonight ^_^

[bestagons]

I have developed an absolutely bonkers conspiracy theory that when they moved out of the first London apartment, Phil moved somewhere else and then eventually the next year moved back in with Dan.

[daemon-in-my-head]

Genuinely confused as to why people follow me. Why? Has someone threatened you to do it? Lemme know and I'll hit em. I'm not contributing anything to society over here. I'm literally just talking shit about 2-3 men I made up and occasionally the drow woman and her ex.

My version of Gortash or Durgetash is straight up just pain. A lot of pain. And even more pain. I'm not even horny posting as evidently displayed by that one fic of mine that literally just blueballs people repeatedly.

I haven't written anything good in over a month (sorry bout that btw) and the art I do post is occasionally and not that good to warrant anything.

The asks? But they're new (fyi new version tmr, got nearly all questions transferred now and split it into ten parts, albeit they are anything but balanced)

I'm confused and genuinely idk what people expect of me. I also don't remember if I've asked b4 cuz atp I have over 250 drafts. I'm scared of opening that tab so I just keep creating new ones. Help lol

[heylittleriotact]

Not me clocking Solas chanting the lyrics from I Am The One in episode one of Vows & Vengeance 👀

[the-gene-mile]

thinking about how we see nat's limo in the promo images for 1403 but no nat

[icicleteeth]

I am hitting that hopium SO hard since 6.5 live letter showed some pieces from the last furnishing contest are already being put in the game.... That maybe they didn't show it all yet, and maybe, just maybe, they will implement more of them and we won't have to wait 4 or 5 years to see it...

[mothric]

literally every week for the past month a different friend has gotten into a relationship which makes four in a row and while I am happy for all of them what the Fuck is in the air

[poltergeist-coffee]

currently revamping my qcellbit design so i was looking up pictures of cellbit for ref and hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh /pos

i’m so normal about him i’m so normal i’m very normal i’m normla

[chloefraazers]

Wait wait that nil scene was “specially” motion captured? I mean I know all the cutscenes are mo-capped to some extent but “specially” caught my eye, have I missed something? 👀

by “specially” i mean that it in particular was mocapped rather than being animated like other minor cutscenes.

@kittleskittle is far more knowledgeable in this but i’ll try

the big giveaway is the minute details in facial expressions and gestures. aloy and nil are both making movements and expressions well above the quality of a standard cutscene (outside of main plot). compare to cutscenes with avad, with petra, even the kulrut with regalla and the shot of hekarro and kotallo reacting to the rockbreaker. was it a specially animated expression? yes. was it mocapped? i don’t think so, because the quality wasn’t as high as other scenes.

and this isn’t to say this was the only non-main plot point that got its own motion capture, but it interesting that this extremely missable five-minute chat has it.

compare also to quests like drakka’s. i don’t think those received mocap because they just aren’t quite as fluid, organic, and their drops and resting expressions are very quick and flat. they’re well-done, but they are undeniably not at the same calibre as the nil scene.

you can even compare it to other nil scenes if you win subsequent races. yeah, it’s hilarious that he’s blatantly staring at her chest, but he’s definitely doing that because those scenes were not motion captured. nil is still smiling when he talks, but his face drops much faster after his dialogue to the standard flat npc face and his gestures just aren’t as organic.

[octoooo]

Can we ban small spherical foods

[ikmenios]

told one of my housemates about this paranoid delusion I've been having about like people watching the house monitoring us etc whatever and he put a pair of binoculars by the window and started closing the blinds and mentioning whenever people lingered on the road outside. and idk if he's enabling or just with me on it

[lovelandfrogmansupporter]

Y’all I really thought it was a stretch when I heard the theory after season one aired that Alice wasn’t real and Armand planted those memories in Daniel’s head but consider my head officially tinfoil hat covered- Armand erased years of memories in Daniel’s head of his relationship with Armand and he had to replace it with something. “You feel freer to hold her hand in Paris. Why is that?” Yeah exactly. Why is that? Why would it make a difference that they’re in Paris? Unless it wasn’t a memory of his relationship with a woman, it was a memory of 1970’s Daniel feeling more comfortable holding hands with a man in France than in the U.S. “She said no when Daniel proposed” evoking the same grief in Daniel’s expression brought on by Armand refusing to turn him into a vampire and living a life together I am telling you right now that motherfucker, that motherfucker back there is not real that woman is not real

[wenellyb]

Some people: "Bucktommy shippers are weirdos"

Me, proving their point:

Would you guys mind putting on some tinfoil hats with me for a minute?

So during the dinner scene, Buck and Tommy are coming from the kitchen with their plates, and we see a pot on the stove.

Why am I talking about this?

Because the handle of pot it turned to the left.

But Buck is right-handed

Do you know who is left-handed?

Tommy!

So what does it mean?

It means Tommy is probably the one who cooked dinner.

If I take the headcanon even further, Tommy knew Buck had an exhausting day and went to Buck's appartment first and had dinner ready for him when he got home.

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

so part of me wants to blame this entirely on wbd, right? bloys said he was cool with the show getting shopped around, so assuming he was telling the truth (not that im abt to start blindly trusting anything a CEO says lol), that means it’s not an hbo problem. and we already know wbd has an awful track record with refusing to sell their properties—altho unlike coyote v acme, s3 of ofmd isn’t a completed work and therefore there isn’t the same tax writeoff incentive to bury the thing. i just can’t see any reason to hold on to ofmd except for worrying about image, bc it would be embarrassing if they let this show go with such a devoted fanbase and recognizable celebrities and it went somewhere else and did really well (which it would undoubtedly do really well, we’ve long since proven that). it feels kinda tinfoil hat of me to making assumptions abt what’s going on in wbd behind the scenes, but i also feel like there are hints that i’m onto something w my suspicions: suddenly cracking down on fan merch on etsy doesn’t seem like something a studio looking to sell their property would bother with, and we know someone was paying to track the viewing stats on ofmd’s bbc airing, which isn’t finished yet, so i’d expect whoever is monitoring that to not make a decision abt buying ofmd until the s2 finale dropped.

but also i think part of me just wants there to be a clear villain in the situation. it’s kinda comforting to have a face to blame, a clear target to shake my fist at. but the truth is that the entire streaming industry is in the shitter. streaming is not pulling in the kind of profit that investors were promised, and we’re seeing the bubble that was propped up w investor money finally start to pop. studios aren’t leaving much room in their budgets for acquiring new properties, and they’re whittling down what they already have. especially w the strikes last year, they’re all penny pinching like hell. and that’s much a much harder thing to rage against than just one studio or one CEO being shitty. that’s disheartening in a way that’s much bigger and more frightening than if there was just one guy to blame.

my guess is that the truth of the situation is probably somewhere in the middle. wbd is following the same shitty pattern they’ve been following since the merger, and it’s just a hard time for anyone trying to get their story picked up by any studio. ofmd is just one of many shows that are unlucky enough to exist at this very unstable time for the tv/streaming industry.

when i think abt it that way, tho, i’m struck by how lucky we are that ofmd even got to exist at all. if the wbd merger had happened a year earlier, or if djenks and tw tried to pitch this show a year later, there’s no way this show would’ve been made. s1 was given the runtime and the creative freedom needed to tell the story the way the showrunners wanted to, and the final product benefited from it so much that it became a huge hit from sheer gay word of mouth. and for all the imperfections with s2—the shorter episode order, the hard 30 minute per episode limit, the last-minute script changes, the finale a butchered mess of the intended creative vision—the team behind ofmd managed to tell a beautiful story despite the uphill battle they undoubtedly were up against. they ended the season with the main characters in a happy place. ed and stede are together, and our last shot of ed isn’t of him sobbing uncontrollably (like i rlly can’t stress enough how much i would have never been able to acknowledge the existence of this show again if s1 was all we got)

like. y’all. we were this close to a world where ofmd never got to exist. for me, at least, the pain of an undue cancellation is worth getting to have this story at all. so rather than taking my comfort in the form of righteous anger at david zaslav or at wbd or at the entire streaming industry as a whole, i’m trying to focus on how lucky i am to get to have the show in the first place.

bc really, even as i’m reeling in grief to know this is the end of the road for ofmd, a part of me still can’t quite wrap my head around that this show is real. a queer romcom about middle-aged men, a rejection of washboard abs and facetuned beauty standards, a masterful deconstruction and criticism of toxic masculinity, well-written female characters who get to shine despite being in a show that is primarily about manhood and masculinity, diverse characters whose stories never center around oppression and bigotry, a casually nonbinary character, violent revenge fantasies against oppressors that are cathartic but at the same time are not what brings the characters healing and joy, a queer found family, a strong theme of anti colonialism throughout the entire show. a diverse writers room that got to use their perspectives and experiences to inform the story. the fact that above all else, this show is about the love story between ed and stede, which means the character arcs, the thoughts, the feelings, the motivations, the backstories, and everything else that make up the characters of ed and stede are given the most focus and the most care.

bc there rlly aren’t a lot of shows where a character like stede—a flamboyant and overtly gay middle-aged man who abandoned his family to live his life authentically—gets to be the main character of a romcom, gets to be the hero who the show is rooting for.

and god, there definitely aren’t a lot of shows where a character like ed—a queer indigenous man who is famous, successful, hyper-competent, who feels trapped by rigid standards of toxic hypermasculinity, who yearns for softness and gentleness and genuine interpersonal connection and vulnerability, whose mental health struggles and suicidal intentions are given such a huge degree of attention and delicate care in their depiction, who messes up and hurts people when he’s in pain but who the show is still endlessly sympathetic towards—gets to exist at all, much less as the romantic lead and the second protagonist of the show.

so fuck the studios, fuck capitalism, fuck everything that brought the show to an end before the story was told all the way through. because the forces that are keeping s3 from being made are the same forces that would’ve seen the entire show canceled before it even began. s3 is canceled, and s2 suffered from studio meddling, but we still won. we got to have this show. we got to have these characters. there’s been so much working against this show from the very beginning but here we are, two years later, lives changed bc despite all odds, ofmd exists. they can’t take that away from us. they can’t make us stop talking abt or stop caring abt this show. i’m gonna be a fan of this show til the day i die, and the studios hate that. they hate that we care about things that don’t fit into their business strategy, they hate that not everyone will blindly consume endless IP reboots and spin-offs and cheap reality tv.

anyway i dont rlly have a neat way to end this post. sorta just rambling abt my feelings. idk, i know this sucks but im not rlly feeling like wallowing in it. i think my gratitude for the show is outweighing my grief and anger, at least for right now. most important thing tho is im not going anywhere. and my love for this show is certainly not fucking going anywhere.

[genericpuff]

I've been seeing you say/speculate Rachel Smythe has been cut loose from webtoon, could you elaborate what you mean by that?

It's only a tinfoil hat theory that people should take with MOUNTAINS of salt (seriously, I'm more likely to believe that Rachel really is just done with LO), but there's a general suspicion that LO wasn't meant to end here and that Webtoons decided to cut the cord. I've made a post about it before but some new stuff has surfaced since then.

1.) The announcement the series was ending was made quietly at NYCC and not shared to either Webtoons' socials or Rachel's socials.

The only way fans initially knew about the series ending was through a screencap from the Discord where someone else who had been attending NYCC passed on the info from a Q&A that LO would be entering its final arc.

For a good while the only other way to know the series was ending was through the Discord, a Cosmopolitan article, and my own post.

Though it sounds odd for a series to get cancelled halfway through its third season, it's not uncommon for Webtoons to suddenly axe series while they're on their midseason hiatuses, it's happened before. So there's a general suspicion that Rachel may have found out during NYCC that LO would only be given one more arc.

2.) The actual finale announcement was made in a text post on Instagram that suddenly announced it would be ending on May 11th, despite the fact that there was still lots to wrap up in the story.

What this implies is that Rachel was given one more arc, with no concrete end date... until Webtoons told her to wrap it up in a limited number of episodes, hence why despite us knowing it was in its final arc, the end date still felt too soon. This is also supported by the fact that her initial announcement was vaguely "early/mid 2024" - she couldn't give a more accurate end date because she didn't plan for the actual ending.

3.) Things that Rachel has said implies that she was either hoping for the final arc to go on longer, or that she didn't think LO was going to be ending now.

(that "nothing is set in stone" quote further supports the theory that she may have been hoping to get renewed in spite of the lukewarm ending announcement - that the only reason the announcement was so quiet was because WT hadn't fully committed to it yet and wanted to see how the series would do upon its return; now that they see it falling behind to other series, it might mean WT became more sure in their decision to cut it and gave her an actual deadline to wrap it up by.)

4.) Webtoons has stopped promoting Lore Olympus despite it ending.

Any promotional spots that it has gotten have been stuffed into the dead zone of the banner reels (seriously, anything past the 3rd spot is practically useless because it takes actual committed scrolling to get there vs. the first 1-3 banner spots which can be seen as soon as you open the app/site) and the banner art itself does not in any way advertise the series being in its final arc. These banners also only seem to be appearing for a day at most, compared to the days upwards of weeks they used to get.

Webtoons also hasn't been doing any sort of promoting on their socials for it. Considering The Mafia Nanny has been consistently beating out LO in the top rankings for weeks now, and that LO's rating and view count is still dropping, it appears that Webtoons has finally given up on shoving it down people's throats and put their focus elsewhere.

Again, this is all tinfoil hat speculation, so take it with massive doses of salt. Considering this is Webtoons, I wouldn't be surprised if they finally decided to put LO out of its misery, but this is also Rachel and I wouldn't blame her in the slightest if she finally wanted to be done with it after the past two years of people clowning on it. And I say that knowing I, myself, am a clown LOL

Either way, I feel like either outcome is plausible in its own ways, but whatever is the true reason, it doesn't change the fact that LO is ending and has 3 episodes left to wrap itself up. And whatever comes after will likely involve the launch of Inklore which was estimated for the spring.

[whore-ibly-hot]

OMG SPEAKING OF MARRIAGE honeymoon with Joey or like anyone really what would Fritz honeymoon be like? Like I'd assume they didn't get one cause man's busy

Honey-mooning with Joey would be fairly simple, he'd take you to the inn or motel of one of the slightly larger nearby farming towns, and treat you to all the southern comfort food and hospitality you could want. He'd get you a nice breakfast, and flowers, but in the evening he'd make it very clear that he wants to begin the process of knocking you up. He will back off if you tell him to, but he'll make his intentions known. He just wants you knocked up as quickly as possible, and as much as he wants to enjoy the honeymoon he mostly just wants you back in the farm, acclimating to life with his family and getting settled in. It'll feel all that more real that your truly his once he can wake up in his own bed, with you their everyday.

"I hope you liked dinner, I've never been to that restaurants before, but my chicken was great. Um, darlin'? I know your probably stuffed, but are you too stuffed to work up the energy to go for a roll in the hay with your new husband?"

Fritz wouldn't be able to spend anytime honey mooning with his bride, and as a traditionalist this upsets him. Instead, he'll settle for a very extravagant one night wedding and ceremony away from the small town he's stationed at. He wants to give his bride the luxury you've never been accustomed too. You'll meet all his fellow military officials, and be shown off like one of Fritz medals. That night, he doesn't let you do anything during the consumption of the marriage. He wants to worship you, not the other way around. He will insist on some sort of white lingerie being sent in, as he wants you looking like a bride when he takes you, but he doesn't want to ruin your dress or suit. He asks beforehand if he'll be able to start trying for a baby that evening.

"Being a woman is not enough for a slimy cadet or confident rookie to simply respect you my poor dear, and I am sorry for their behavior. Being an officers bride should help, but we get new soldiers so often on the front lines, they may not know."

"What are you saying?"

"I think it'll be a little more obvious your an officers wife if you're walking around with a little bump next time we go to town. All for your safety, of course."

BONUS!!!: Mattias doesn't have the money for a big wedding or an extravagant honeymoon, but while he may not have the money, he has the spirit to party, and he knows others who do. The entire wedding reception is held as a block party at his mother's home in old Harlem, and the guests are a mix of neighbors and family. Mattias loves his family, and his perfect way to solidify a marriage is to blend you in with them. His biggest regret about the wedding is his father wasn't there to see him get married, so it's also nice for him to be around his Mami at a time like this. He loves how the two of you get along, and the two of them share stories of Mattias's papa, from when he was alive.

Mattias cannot handle it when his sees you playing with his young primos and primas, and the other neighborhood kids. Dancing with them and helping them reach the tinfoil trays to get food onto their plates. This results in him returning back to your apartment and immediately begging to dick you down, and give you a baby.

"Cmon, pretty girl!" He's kissing up on your neck, pulling you out of your reception outfit. "Gotta have you, mi esposa guapa, give you some kids. I've been shaking with nerves and energy all day, and I can't exactly fight it off at a block party. So please-"

"Let's make some hijos..."