#i got some kind of prizes for it

[protoindoeuropean]

Knjigobube (from knjiga ‘a book’ + buba ‘a pupa’; I’d translate it as “bookbuds”) was [RIP Epta] a children’s book reading program where after reading a book, you would create some art on a page spread inside the provided drawing book, based on what you’ve read of course. Parents and children were supposed to create it together. (The drawing book itself contained suggestions: what to draw, which techniques to use and what kind of materials, which part the parent should do and which part the child etc.)

Anyway, these are some of mine 😌

[beatcroc]

there's no way the bathroom at peppino's pizza is actually that big but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . hey ummm anyway.... i care them...... anyway there's a lil ramble on my take on fake pep's like psyche or whatever in tags on the og post if ur into that kinda thing :y

hey! it's a series! fake peppino world tour: [noise] [noisette] [peppino]<- u are here [gustavo] [gerome] [noisette again]

[s-aint-elmo]

there was a post about daiba nana as a body snatcher horror from junna’s pov and it has me in a fucking chokehold.

imagine being roommates with somebody you haven't gotten to know yet, and it's a little awkward but you're both polite and she seems like a nice girl. she's kind and open and warm, ready with a helping hand or a listening ear, beloved quickly by your classmates in a way you never quite managed to convince people to love you. you could be friends with her, given time. you think she might want to be friends with you, too. 

you go to sleep as hoshimi-san and wake as hoshimi-san and walk to school as hoshimi-san, but, without warning, you cross the threshold of the classroom and suddenly you're junna-chan. 

suddenly, the friendly interest in daiba-san's eyes has deepened with an intensity that unnerves you, even when it manifests in entirely benign ways—an uncanny familiarity with your schedule, a fond glimmer for your quotations, an offering of your favourite snack food with a side of dishonesty in the way she claims it was a lucky guess. 

you feel seen. the way prey does when a predator reveals itself upwind. exposed and unprotected. 

but daiba-san is easy to like, easy to love, easy to forgive. you forget your unease in the face of her sincerity. she takes care of everybody as though it were her sole purpose on this earth, so you take care of her. 

when daiba-san becomes nana and you become junna-chan, willingly this time, you wonder if you imagined the anticipatory gleam in her eyes when you served her your first name, as though it were a favourite dish she'd long been craving.

[rainofthetwilight]

YEAH YEAH WON A PRIZE AT SCHOOL TODAY LETS GOOOOOOO

[water-weaving]

looking at my Life's Work, Essential And Irreplaceable, and wondering why the hell something like 30% of my poems are about. laundry. dude WHAT

[thegreatyin]

i must admit. it is now Very Funny seeing the relickers show up in caeru's deck. literally the most awkward door to door salesmanship ever

[iceeericeee]

I wonder how many tags i can add on to this

[trainerxabi]

Miette and Georgia's daughter Faye, and Will and Morty's son Kasuka/Douglas

check my commissions!

[adamantine-ribbon]

imagine being such a dick Nintendo has to put out a statement about you

[joemerl]

It's no longer Halloween where I live, but anyway: Dictionary.com (of all places) had a contest guest-judged by my childhood hero, R.L. Stine. It was to write the first 50 words of a story involving a haunted house.

Sadly, neither of my entries won, but I thought I'd post them here just for fun.

Entry #1:

"Those who enter Strongmore Manor will haunt its halls forever."

I can vouch for that. I sneaked in for a dare in 1986, becoming the lucky thirteenth victim of Gregor Strongmore's curse.

I watch as another group of kids creep through the door. As if this place wasn't crowded enough.

Entry #2:

Steven could tolerate his roommates at first. The piercing screams, slamming doors and visions of hanged bodies were a small price to pay for buying a Victorian mansion so cheaply.

Then they took his cookies.

The cookies CLEARLY labeled with HIS name.

"That's it!" he screamed. "I'm calling an exorcist!"

[astros-turf]

If those you leave behind truly love you, your trinkets and trash will be their most prized possessions. And even if it's not treasures for them, or you leave behind a mess, it's not wrong to surround yourself with trinkets that make you happy during your life, because you deserve happiness just as much as anyone else. So long as your environment is a healthy and happy one for you that makes you feel comforted? That's all that matters.

i want ten million trinkets but i also want my death to not be a burden for those I leave behind

[medicinemane]

Need to learn to sharpen knives or I'll never be able to take care of myself

Like I know the steps, but somehow I just do them wrong, and even following in person instructions from people who know what they're doing... never managed it

(You ever notice how often even really competent people seem to wind up randomly incompetent for no reason, like my uncle who fucking hunts and has used knifes pretty much all his life and gave me a sharpening stone... suddenly seemingly not knowing how to sharpen knives and like... I don't get how he just... suddenly seemed confused and like he didn't know it despite the fact I know he knows how to do it... and it's not like I think he was trying to pull something over on me... anyway...)

Like, if I can't sharpen knives I can't cook, cause I need a sharp knife to feel safe cooking. I'm not spending a ton of money when what I need is a life long skill, not another knife... all my knives would be good, they just need to be sharp

So I don't know... another skill I really need to pick up by May

[lizardsfromspace]

I do have to impress on anyone who wasn't around for it how batshit the reality boom of the 2000s could be. Especially on Fox.

Here are some 100% real 2000s reality shows:

Who's Your Daddy? A woman has to guess which of eight men is her biological father. One of them really is, and if she guesses right she wins $100,000. If one of the seven fake dads convinces her to guess them, he wins $100,000.

Black. White. A white family learns about racism by living a month in blackface, while a black family spends a month in whiteface. The black family was a real family, but the white family was just some actors hired to put on blackface to prove racism exists

Without Prejudice? Five strangers decide which of five strangers gets a cash prize based off clips and their answers to political questions. Cancelled when one of the choosers openly said he'd eliminate all black contestants

Welcome to the Neighborhood. Three conservative white families in a Austin subdivision decide which diverse family gets to move in. Unaired due to being literal housing discrimination

Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay. Two straight men try to pass themselves off as gay and whoever seems more gay gets $50,000. Unaired due to. Due to. Due to

Playing It Straight. A woman tries to find love among fourteen men, half of whom are straight and half of whom are gay, and she must eliminate two men she believes are gay each week. If she ended up picking a straight man in the end, they'd split a million dollars; if she picked a gay man, he'd win a million dollars

Boy Meets Boy. This was Playing It Straight but starring a gay man and he had to eliminate straight people

Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? He wasn't a multimillionaire. He didn't even have a million dollars in liquid assets. He had a battery conviction Fox claims they didn't see. Because it was the 2000s, somehow this ended up with the woman he won being widely vilified and turned into a national punchline. How dare she complain about a massive corporation tricking her into marrying a lying abuser, good thing Matt Lauer's there to take her down a peg

The Swan. A "ugly" woman is given plastic surgery and wins a prize if she's the hottest at the end of the season. If she's not hot enough by the show's standards she's eliminated and called ugly on national TV

The Biggest Loser. Overweight people engage in competitive crash weight loss that often led to awful health complications. Studies showed basically everyone on the show regained any weight they lost once it was over and they didn't have abusive trainers demanding they take huge health risks to win a competitive weight loss competition. Like the others, this one was cancel-oh, it was a massive hit that ran for 18 seasons? Yikes!

Wife Swap and Trading Spouses. These were the same show and had a wife from one family go to another family that was different politically, racially, culturally, religiously etc. Most famous for the God Warrior

At the time people focused on the likes of Fear Factor but looking back it's wild how many of the worst shows toyed with politics. So many of these shows have a premise that's like "what if we exposed these conservatives to these people they hate?" or hyping themselves up as Important Experiments. Then they'd freak out when they got the kind of viral bigoted freakout they were trying to construct the whole time.

There were also a bunch of horrible reality shows, thankfully this time mostly unpopular, in the 2010s that based themselves around economic themes as a response to the market crash, but that's a story for another time

[serafaina]

OK. OKAY. YOU GUYS.

I am LOVING the fucking chocolate guy’s netflix show! It’s FANTASTIC! Anf hold on to your fucking boots y’all cause it’s actually not what I was expecting at all!

Do you miss the gentleness of the Great British Bake-Off? THIS SHOW IS SO KIND AND GENTLE! For fuck’s sake, NO ONE GETS KICKED OFF! No. No, Listen to this! When they lose the first challenge (a pastry one), the punishment is... They get private lessons with Amaury to help improve what brought their scores down instead of competing in the second chocolate challenge. 

When the one black lady contestant messed up the first challenge I was super bummed and like, OF COURSE. But NO. She got lessons! She struggled! she worked hard! and she won a later challenge! GROWTH MY DUDES! They are there TO LEARN and GROW and Maybe Win a Big Prize!

They ALL get to stay and keep doing their best! and at the end the one who did the best overall is the one who gets the money prize!

Look at this lovely line up! they make COOL LOOKING FANCY THINGS! Amaury tells us how he does some of the fancy things he does! They OFFER TO HELP EACH OTHER WHEN THEY FINISH EARLY AND GET PROPS FOR THAT! (not taunted for not using their own time better). The set up even kinda makes the one who is like, I’m in it to win it, is the villain and doing bad. The rest who are like, I’m here to learn and grow and maybe make friends! AUGH YOU GUYS!

Amaury is soft spoken and kind, and has a pretty voice and a pretty smile and that’s nice to watch too. The chefs are talented and artistic and they actually give the THE TIME to make nice things! It’s not “Wham out some half-assed garbage in 2 hours so we can shotgun the production and laugh at your garbage” like most cooking shows nowadays. NO! 14 hour challenges! They’re still hard, but they get to actually make cool stuff! fancy stuff! Stuff I want to look at and cheer for them!

The episodes average 38 min and aren’t a huge time commitment, the first episode being the longest one, and there are only 8 total so it’s not like you have to really get in for the long haul. \

WATCH IT! Pump it! we need more cooking shows like this and less that are sad and mean!

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Terry Pratchett about fantasy ❤

Terry Pratchett interview in The Onion, 1995 (x)

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Terry: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

Terry: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

Terry: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.

Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

[fuckyeahisawthat]

Controversial opinion among Dune book fans maybe, but I loved the changes they made to Chani's character. Making her a fedaykin who is already an experienced fighter before Paul arrives was a brilliant choice. Dune Part Two is a war movie, and this puts her at the center of the action, side by side with Paul, and gives her a much more active role than she has in the book.

We got a hint of where things were going in the beginning of Dune Part One. The first thing we ever know about movie Chani is that she's a fighter. She serves as a voice for the Fremen, telling us the story of their struggle from her point of view. I wrote here about the difference this change makes compared to other adaptations of Dune, what a perspective shift it is to have the world of Arrakis introduced not by an outsider, describing it as a dangerous but valuable colonial prize, but by one of its native inhabitants, who tells us before all else that it's beautiful, her home that she's fighting to liberate. I am so, so glad that the second movie followed up on this characterization.

I never found Chani and Paul's love story in the book particularly convincing, because why would this woman, who already has a prominent and respected place in Fremen society, even give the time of day to her deposed would-be colonizer, let alone fall in love and have children with him? Without a compelling reason for Chani to love Paul, she ends up feeling like a prize to be won, and "indigenous culture personified as a woman to be wooed (or conquered) by the colonizing man" is a trope we've seen and don't need to repeat.

But as soon as you tell me it's a barricade romance I get it. Cool cool cool, I know exactly what this relationship is now and it makes sense. Movie Chani doesn't respect or even particularly like Paul when she first meets him, and she doesn't think he's the fulfillment of any prophecy. She comes to respect him, and eventually love him, through his actions. He's brave--sometimes recklessly so. He fights well. He's willing to stick his neck out on the front lines with the other Fremen fighters. He can (after a little help) hack surviving in the harsh desert environment. He's not too proud to learn from others. He seems to genuinely want to be her equal in a common political struggle. All these qualities make sense as things she values.

Fighting side by side as equals is just about the only way I can see movie Chani falling for Paul. And it fits perfectly with the film's pattern of reversals that Paul's capacity for violence would initially be one of the things Chani likes about him, only for her to be repelled later when she sees what he becomes.

And as for Paul, well, he's had people deferring to him his entire life. Someone who doesn't take any shit from him is probably refreshing. He seems to like people (Duncan, Gurney) who challenge him and engage in a little friendly teasing--and aren't afraid to go a few rounds in the sparring ring.

It's easy to speedrun a romance when you're spending all your time together in mortal danger fighting for a shared political cause. Especially if you then start winning in a war your people have been fighting for decades. Are you kidding me? That is the perfect environment for intense battle camaraderie to turn into romantic love, and lust.

It makes sense that this version of Chani never believes Paul is any kind of messiah. Of course a character like movie Chani wouldn't believe in or trust some outside savior to liberate them. She's been working to liberate her own people for years. The more Paul invokes the messianic myth, the more he starts sounding once again like someone who plans to rule over them, and the more uncomfortable Chani becomes. In this way she becomes a foil to Jessica, the two of them representing the choices Paul is pulled between. It's a great way of externalizing the political and philosophical debates that often happen within characters' heads in the book.

And of course this version of Chani would leave Paul at the end of the film. It's not just the personal, emotional betrayal--although that stings. What common cause does she have with someone who just declared himself emperor and is sending her own people off in a war of conquest against others? Given the important role she plays in Dune Messiah, I am super curious to see how they get her back into the story, but girl was so valid for being willing to just gtfo. Given that she has the last shot of the whole movie, I'm sure she'll be back somehow, and I can't wait to see what they do with her character in any future installments.