#i don't feel very eloquent

[sanctus-corvo]

@photomatt hey. so, you seem pretty defensive and sure that you -aren't- transphobic, and normally i wouldn't think it's really my business to @ you and talk like i know anything about you but. hm. you've made it your business to go into stranger's chats and tell them about how you're not transphobic? so. you know, worth a shot i guess hah.

i'm gonna start by saying something you're not gonna like or believe - but! you are. that's not to say that you're doing it intentionally - i'd wholly believe you're acting on biases on a subconscious level. But, you still are. if you want to change that, you need to be willing to see it - you want to be an ally, and to me that's a huge step. right now, you aren't a great ally - but i think you could be.

I can't speak for everyone here - but for myself, I fucking love this website. it's stupid, and weird, and i love it. i believe you probably do too, if you have a personal account here hah. you're uh! you're tearing it apart. you've allowed your team to disproportionately target and punish trans women while allowing hategroups comparative free-reign over everything. when called on this, you looked and found a post venting comical frustration, and decided to use that to feel justified in your behavior. take a step back - get out of your own head for a minute, yeah? you've made things worse every step of the way, but that doesn't mean you can't make things better, too. no one wants to be "warring with you", so to speak - we want a place on the internet to be silly little weirdos; to express ourselves and be genuine to ourselves. you publicly tore into the community the other day - but that's far from the only instance, and we both know it. i dunno. if you want to fix this, listen to the trans women (and poc) who are giving far more comprehensive lists than i am on what's wrong.

ultimately though, you gotta be willing to admit you were wrong. it hurts, it sucks to feel, but it's gonna do you better in the long run. you're a human - i know that. you fuck it up sometimes - who doesnt? but you gotta move forward in a more productive way than you are right now.

[meta-squash]

I think two of the most important things about Jack Harkness, two things that inform almost everything he does and the choices he makes, are this: that he is a soldier NOT a leader, and that his entire life since childhood has been awash in survivor's guilt (and his whole existence after becoming immortal is an even more extreme version of survivor's guilt).

Jack is not a natural leader. He can think on the fly and he's good at getting people to listen to him, but he's not good at control, or at being objective. He's a natural second in command, he's a soldier. He was brought up to do what other people told him to, and to improvise if he had to (Time Agency, etc). But I really don't think he wants to be the leader of Torchwood. Unfortunately, everything about him means that he has to be. He knows from experience that others having control over him is dangerous, others knowing about his immortality while he's a subordinate to them is dangerous, and he also knows that his own immortality gives him an advantage as a leader. But I don't think he's good at leading. He tries to be. But he's fumbling along, in a time period he's not native to and a planet he's not native to and an unfathomable lifespan, and as charming as he is I think he's often not good with people. He's detached where he should be personal and emotional where he should be detached (or at least more level-headed). He's often too extreme or not harsh enough when it comes to things like discipline or dealing with the problems/traumas/mistakes of his employees or even civilians. He can't handle his employees seeing him uncertain/vulnerable and it makes for huge problems over and over again.

But all of this does make sense because I think in the back of Jack's mind there's always this wheel spinning, these gears turning and turning and calculating the impact and trauma each of his actions or decisions or the events around him are going to have on his own emotions for far longer than normal humans tend to consider. Because the catalyst for any part of the life we see him leading is survivor's guilt. He lost his father and his brother on the same day, joined the military and lost his best friend, joined the Time Agency and lost his memories (and maybe thinks he did something terrible). Then he died, and when Rose brought him back, he was all alone on the satellite with nothing but the corpses of the people who had fought beside him and zero explanation as to why he survived, and he had lost Rose and the Doctor besides. And then all his life on earth since, he has lost coworkers and lovers and civilians he tried and failed to save and probably also aliens he tried and failed to save. And I think by the time he becomes reluctant leader of Torchwood, every action is, whether conscious or subconscious, taken with the intent of minimizing that kind of trauma and the impact of loss.

Except that I think that the survivor's guilt has another layer to it, which is that feeling of needing to sacrifice or absolve himself in some way. No one else is willing to make the difficult decisions, no one else will move forward with the painful and unpleasant actions, even if there's no other way, even though they will someday perish and no longer see the ripples of their actions. But Jack - who cannot die, who must live with the guilt or the pain or the trauma of those actions and decisions for the rest of his very very very long life - is the one who realizes that he must take on those painful responsibilities and must do certain things even though they're terrible, because it ends up being the sacrifice of one over the whole world. And every single time, he's guilty about it, and that makes him want even more to sacrifice his own hurt for the grief and loss of others.

So it's this strange cycle of wanting to protect himself from hurt and from loss and from the survivor's guilt, but being driven by guilt towards painful and/or self-sacrificing actions. Which then makes him fear being seen as vulnerable or uncertain, and he struggles to do things on a smaller scale or in a more level-headed way, because he's not supposed to be leading like this, it's not something that comes naturally, and if he makes emotional connections by being a leader, he'll end up trapped in survivor's guilt yet again each time one of his employees or friends or lovers dies.

It's just a terrible cycle and he's trapped in it for the rest of his existence. Although if he really is the Face Of Boe, then I imagine at some point he eventually finds peace with it all or something, but I think so long as he has a human-form he's stuck with this cycle of leadership and loss and sacrifice and mistakes.

I think it's really important that Jack is not good at his job as a leader. He makes a ton of mistakes, he fucks up so much and his employees or even civilians end up collateral damage, whether physically or just emotionally. He wants to be a good leader, I think, and he's trying, but he's fallible, and he's a stranger in literally every sense, and I think a really big part of his character is that he constantly is forced to live in this bizarre dichotomy where he has to be both very distant and cold and detached, and also very emotional and intense and personal. And any other person would collapse under the stress of repeating that over and over and over again for decades, but he has to figure out how to navigate this weight as an infinite existence that can't ever collapse or let it burn him up and kill him.

[navree]

You keep saying refusing to vote for Biden on moral grounds because of Palestine is ineffective because Trump would be worse, but that really isn't the point. Largely (with the exception of a few extremists and a contingency of people who wouldn't have voted anyways) the philosophy of a movement that has people withhold their vote is to force a significant policy change that wouldn't have changed otherwise. Its a form of protest. I understand from your perspective, election-focused and pragmatic, it is a threat to whoever is running, but if Biden had wanted the votes being withheld he would have capitulated.

Not that this isn't a moot point since he's out, but whatever.

See, this is intensely fucking dumb.

"force a significant policy change" it would not. One, because Biden is the president of the United States, and Israel is not one of those states. Short of sending the CIA to, idk, assassinate Netanyahu in his bed, which most of these people would be against I think because of how much they bitch and moan about US foreign policy at any given opportunity, he cannot actually make an independent foreign power do what he wants and what is electorally convenient for him. Like, I'm very sure Biden would love it if Netanyahu and his partisans stopped acting like fucking freaks for five minutes, if only so that it would stop being a PR nightmare for him. But that's not happening, because he cannot control what Netanyahu does. He could vastly reduce the support the US is providing Israel, and in my view he should, but that's not going to stop what Netanyahu and the Israeli government is doing. Because, I hate to break it to you, but the reason they're carpetbombing Gaza is because they want to be carpetbombing Gaza, and even without US aid they will continue to do it, even it just means with older and less effective weapons. Ultimately, the change that leads to a ceasefire and an end to the war is going to come from the actual parties involved, not Joe Biden.

Two, you've already gotten the significant policy change. Biden has, on multiple occasions now, come out in favor a ceasefire. He has actively been working, along with the Qatari government, to try and broker some kind of peace agreement between Israel and Hamas, but those two keep on fucking it up because they're both run by bloodthirsty psychopaths who don't care one iota about the people they're meant to be governing and only on killing whoever they want. That's been open fact for months now. And it has meant fuckall. The people doing their moral purity about how they'd never vote for Biden were still doing it, just moving the goalposts on what they wanted. First it was ceasefire, then it was 'no ceasefire until [insert impossible demand here] is given', because moving goalposts is what these people do. It's the same mentality as people who saw that Biden was doing COVID stimulus, or cancelling student loans, or reclassifying marijuana, and decided that the issue now was that he wasn't doing enough of it. It's a movement that's been consistently comprised of dogs that caught the car, and are angry that they caught the car because now they can't complain, and they don't want to actually affect meaningful change, they just want to complain because that's easier. And if that's what these people have been doing for his entire presidency, why on Earth would any reasonable person suddenly believe it's different on this one specific issue?

Three, cool you're protesting, then what? Your protest is utterly unserious and completely meaningless if it's not going to have any tangible effects, so what's the next step? You've decided to make your moral purity stance an issue that the vast majority of you learned from infographics on Instagram rather than listening to the voices involved (which is why the red triangle brigade is still a thing on Twitter), so what happens now? No political party is ever going to capitulate entirely to it, because the constituency is just too small (that "uncommitted" gambit was only getting like 10% of the vote wherever it was happening, Biden won over it as a literal write-in candidate in at least one state), so other than the compromise that's already happening, the goalpost movers are gonna withhold their votes because blah blah blah my morals. And their next step is, what? Trump gets elected. And their movement, which has no thought or serious effort put behind it or any actual attempt to provide material aid to the people actually suffering, has helped put a man who is going to be far worse for it in power. The "significant policy change" is going to be that Trump gives Netanyahu whatever he wants and he proceeds to wipe Gaza off the map. The "significant policy change" is that President "Trump Heights" actively makes things worse for the people this protest is supposed to help, as a consequence of that very protest.

It's not about me only being concerned with being "election focused" or some cold hearted bitch. It's about me, as a person who thinks what Israel has been doing since the start is godawful and deeply horrendous, realizing that this entire "protest" is not only asinine but will result in deeply negative consequences and very real harm for the people this protest is purported to be for, and being sickened by that. I live in the real world, and in the real world action speaks far louder than intent. I don't have to acknowledge that the protest wants this or that outcome or what the hypothetical impossible asks that are never going to be answered are, because I understand that they will not matter. What matters is what you get out of your protest, what gains are received, how that protest actually affects change, not the change it gives wishy washy lip service to.

[cacw]

there's a lot

[eikichi-supremacy]

and they were singin', bye-bye Miss American Pie // american oldie i think kuwabara unironically listens to

(low effort lyric edit im queueing here in May cos im probably gonna forget it exists otherwise)

[sun-marie]

Another bg3 thought dump but I've been thinking about this all day. I think a big part of why I love the Boat Scene in Gale's romance (or at least the version I've played), and really Gale's Romance in general, is bc there's so much potential for nuance.

My Tav, Zephyr, isn't particularly faithful to any one god or the gods in general (though she does enjoy studying faerunian theology), and so in theory she's not against opposing and maybe even deposing Mystra. But she knows that many of the "gods" of the modern era were once mortals, and until the cycle can be broken she doesn't want anyone, least of all someone she cares about, to take that risk and lose themself.

When I first got to the Boat Scene, I couldn't help the feeling of dread I got bc I was sure Gale and Zephyr were about to break up. Bc I knew how strongly Gale wanted this and for (mostly) the right reasons, but I also knew Zephyr wasn't going to budge. And I feel like in many games, that would be that; characters disagree, they break up. Even though Zephyr would be against it for Gale's sake, bc she loves who he is, not who he could be.

But the dialogue is so interesting bc it actually lets them argue about it, while also giving the player to stay with him anyway.

"This doesn't have to be the end for us."

"But I could be so much more to you."

Now true source of Gale motivation is revealed. He feels like he's not enough. Which allows Zephyr to reiterate that he is, and they stay together and even grow closer!

It just makes both characters feel very real to me, and I appreciate that they can talk and argue until they get deeper and deeper into why the other one feels this way. It's almost like how couples actually are in real life!

[es-beeohohem]

oh fuck it. i'm gonna use tumblr to blog! what a concept! anyway I'm going to Japan tomorrow! yay! can I afford it? hell no! am I going anyway? hell yeah! wooooo!

I ate 4 slices of pizza for dinner and woke up 3 hours before leaving to the airport with a hungry tummy wtf

my plans are to go to RGG and TWEWY locations and cry about it and some other stuff. the end :)

[pfhwrittes]

p, my love, i think you could talk about the mixing of paint colors up to their rgb specific inputs and i would gladly eat it up <3 your brain is so filled with not only great and wonderful ideas that make me giggle over the moon but the way you write them out is so eloquent !!! please talk about anything and everything that you feel comfy sharing always ilysm mwah <3

.... okay but i could actually do that because i was unfortunately trained on the paint desk in b&q back in the bad old days 😅

but thank you! this is a very nice compliment and i am sending you lots of good vibes back to you anon!

[not-poignant]

(TND au anon) please note my thirst for this is for more temsen content, he is not a vegetable, I want to see that guy in situations!!!!

It's time for you to start writing fanfic anon, and putting that guy in situations! :D

[earanie]

.

[sheydim]

the existential despair of never being the right kind of trans. i don't truly belong Anywhere in this "community" sometimes

[casualnepotism]

It is a strange thing, for a fighter to be so full of words. Having known a fuck ton of them, they’re usually either too quick-witted or too damaged to have any. But I have so many.

Chock full, some would say. I’ve stored them up for years, months, weeks, days. Hours. All the moments it was expected to say them, I missed. All the moments it wasn’t, I seemed to grasp onto and yet- still- they remain. Even when I manage to get them out of me, they’re the wrong ones: excess that built up over time and spilled out before I could fix them into what they were supposed to be. Cataloging the moments where I could have. Should have. Said anything at all and I couldn’t.

When Maelo said he had it, When Wol decided to leave, When Cog tore out her heart, When Clay made his choice, When Nilos first floated joining the board, When Adiane leaned into her godhood, When Cog destroyed the church, When I killed Wol, When Jack killed Dennis, When Jack died, Again, again, again, When Nilos did leave to join the board,

So many times I’ve written speeches in my head to match you all, discarding them back down to where they could live safely. Knowing they could never match what any of you say without even thinking about it. Knowing that none of your goals align to my own, not really. I kept thinking the time would come, the stars would align, the world would sit still long enough for me to explain. Long enough that you would have time to listen and parse my plodding inanities to hear the point that I hide.

Clumsily. Easily visible to anyone listening, I know. I am not skilled in words the way y’all are, so I have to assume you choose not to hear, and I understand. In your shoes, in the end, given the selfishness of what I ask, I would make the same choice.

My words will never match the ones you all spill forth so easily, handing them to the rest of us like they’re grains of sand and not precious gifts to be hoarded and turned, over and over, until they lose definition with love. Not the ones I hand over, not the ones I hide and perfect, and perfect again and again and again.

I supplement instead with what I can give: a hand, a shoulder, a punching bag, a presence, a whetstone, a shield, a pillow. All of my words, folded and compressed, and shaved of their edges until they can be handed away in a bomb that you will never recognize.

Not a bomb, perhaps. You see? Even now, my words cannot compare.

Allow me to rephrase.

We all know what a milkshake is. We could easily describe it. But there is so much more, for us, held inside the word that we could never describe. For me, anyway.

I hope that you have always understood my actions for what they are. A milkshake for the words I was never able to say. I hope you know that I would never you are so I have never I could never if you were to s I hope you know it’s a milkshake for only one word, really, that you can and should interpret in all its forms.

Stay.

[longagoitwastuesday]

I'm loving how, being stagings of the play and not reinterpretations, many productions are able to add some characteristic creative twist to it that adds or enhances something in particular

[alibrandi]

thinking about gender thinking about fatness thinking about stuff and thinking about how easy i have it as a skinny white gnc woman and wondering why it is not easy for other skinny white women and gnc women and why they seem to think the barbie movie is a rallying cry for feminism lol.

[littlekysworld]

“Wh- what are you–? No, no, Midoriya, I’ll be there soon,” Toshinori stammers out. “The sect you’re in is closeby, we’ll get to you shortly–”

“– and make sure to take my hair, too, m-maybe Kacchan can have it– he knows everything already, so it makes– makes things easier…” Izuku is rambling, now, feverishly slurring over his own words. Before Toshinori’s reeling mind can process what in the hell he’s talking about, Izuku bursts into fresh tears. “I hope it’ll still w-work if I’m already gone. If it doesn’t– I’m sorry, All Might, I’m so, so sorry, I didn’t want to waste it–”

The blood drains from his face, from everything in his body to pool down to his toes, and the rest of him is left ice cold.

No. No, no, no.

Toshinori finds himself not simply rushing but sprinting through the nearest crowd of on-lookers, jumping into the passenger seat of the nearest departing officer’s vehicle and slamming the door shut after him.

Izuku is talking about transferring One for All. He's dying. Toshinori is currently listening to Izuku die.  

“And I’m– I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Izuku chokes out. “I’m really, really sorry I w-wasn’t successor you wanted–”

this scene absolutely broke me, so i choose this one for the dvd commentary ask game, if you're still doing them

Izuku insisting All Might to "take a piece of hair" to save OFA while he's dying is something I've seen in many other fics before. I know that this isn't a new idea by any means, but I wanted to include it in my fic, as well, because I 100% believe Izuku would do it. I think he would prioritize salvaging OFA as he sees it as one of the most valuable parts (if not THE most valuable part) of himself. The fact that he fears wasting All Might's greatest gift possibly more than he fears dying speaks volumes of his own estimated worth.

This is obviously horrifying for Toshinori to hear in real time. There's this immense stress of "holy shit there is so much wrong with what he's saying, there's so much I need to correct from our last conversation with eachother- I don't have time to right now, but what if he dies not knowing what he means to me?! What if he dies PERIOD holy SHIT"

[brassandblue]

Having a lot of Thoughts about Arthur’s retirement from the Royal Navy not too long (roughly 10-15 years) after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and how his personality/mental and emotional health did a sharp decline over the next 50 years. Like, imagine, it’s the 1820s, and you feel that politics are beginning to really hamper the thing you’ve put your heart and soul into supporting for the last 100+ years. You start to become disillusioned, recalling how one of your greatest maritime heroes had to fight the Admiralty for appropriate pay for his men and himself; you call how you’ve had to do much the same. 

It occurs to him that he has to really consider his future now, if it isn’t already too late-- he is a distinguished member of society at last, an Admiral, a Duke, and the facade of the elite is one he finally wears naturally after decades of crafting. What good can he do, out there at sea? He feels he needs to be at home, or at least out surveying the colonies, protecting Britain’s (his) interests. He’s had his royals, his government, the Admiralty, echoing the constant refrain of what is expected, what is needed of him. And what is needed is more. More money, more land, more power, more class, more knowledge, more charm, more charisma, more and more, more, more--

He thinks he’s up to the task of becoming That without losing himself and he sold his soul, debased his own principles in the attempt. In abandoning the Navy, despite it being an institution in and of itself, he cast away the virtues that he’d held while in it: Loyalty, consistency, discipline, frugality, moderation, commonality. He dove headlong into trying to meet impossible expectations and decided it was better to turn a blind eye, to enable the subjugation of others, and to profit off blood, than to be considered a failure.