#i know this is weird but i'm CURIOUS

[eddiediaaz]

help me figure out my personal/profesionnal life (jk i'm just feeling messy and curious because i seriously don't know what to fucking do)

for context: i've been working successfully in the vfx industry since 2016. unfortunately, following the (much needed) hollywood strikes last summer, the industry was shaken. then, as the vfx industry was slowly starting to get up from the 2023 strikes, my government (quebec, canada), decided to cut much needed tax credits/funding for the industry. this decision was announced only a month ago (june 2024), which means the industry will not get better and will actually mostly die out, because it relied a lot on this funding to support the artists' salaries. it's estimated that only 20% of jobs will remain in the province where i live by 2025 (i myself have been unemployed for 6 months now). i am not a senior artist, so i would struggle finding a job with so little openings and multiple artists fighting for the same opportunities. i like working in the industry, the money is good enough for me and the projects can be interesting. but it's also a lot of overtime work sometimes, and it's quite a volatile industry since it's not regulated/unionized.

even more context: i'm 31, i have no money, no savings, a few k's of credit/film school debt left to pay, and that kind of "specialized" work i did for 7 years (vfx compositing) is a bit too niche to be applied to another job, to be honest. the two main options are to follow the industry somewhere else in canada (like vancouver or toronto, which are both a lot more expensive than my current city), or even london and especially australia; or start over with a new career. moving sounds fun and quite daunting, but i also don't have much money, no family outside of my province, and i have 3 cats to think about. there's also the possibility to keep working in the film industry but to do something else. which would also require to restart from the almost bottom. i also have no clue what kind of job/career i wanna do if not vfx, but i'm trying to stay open minded about it. what would you do?

[spocks-kaathyra]

thoughts about the Cardassian writing system

I've thinking about the Cardassian script as shown on screen and in beta canon and such and like. Is it just me or would it be very difficult to write by hand?? Like.

I traced some of this image for a recent drawing I did and like. The varying line thicknesses?? The little rectangular holes?? It's not at all intuitive to write by hand. Even if you imagine, like, a different writing implement—I suppose a chisel-tip pen would work better—it still seems like it wasn't meant to be handwritten. Which has a few possible explanations.

Like, maybe it's just a fancy font for computers, and handwritten text looks a little different. Times New Roman isn't very easily written by hand either, right? Maybe the line thickness differences are just decorative, and it's totally possible to convey the same orthographic information with the two line thicknesses of a chisel-tip pen, or with no variation in line thickness at all.

A more interesting explanation, though, and the one I thought of first, is that this writing system was never designed to be handwritten. This is a writing system developed in Cardassia's digital age. Maybe the original Cardassian script didn’t digitize well, so they invented a new one specifically for digital use? Like, when they invented coding, they realized that their writing system didn’t work very well for that purpose. I know next to nothing about coding, but I cannot imagine doing it using Chinese characters. So maybe they came up with a new writing system that worked well for that purpose, and when computer use became widespread, they stuck with it. 

Or maybe the script was invented for political reasons! Maybe Cardassia was already fairly technologically advanced when the Cardassian Union was formed, and, to reinforce a cohesive national identity, they developed a new standardized national writing system. Like, y'know, the First Emperor of Qin standardizing hanzi when he unified China, or that Korean king inventing hangul. Except that at this point in Cardassian history, all official records were digital and typing was a lot more common than handwriting, so the new script was designed to be typed and not written. Of course, this reform would be slower to reach the more rural parts of Cardassia, and even in a technologically advanced society, there are people who don't have access to that technology. But I imagine the government would be big on infrastructure and education, and would make sure all good Cardassian citizens become literate. And old regional scripts would stop being taught in schools and be phased out of digital use and all the kids would grow up learning the digital script.

Which is good for the totalitarian government! Imagine you can only write digitally. On computers. That the government can monitor. If you, like, write a physical letter and send it to someone, then it's possible for the contents to stay totally private. But if you send an email, it can be very easily intercepted. Especially if the government is controlling which computers can be manufactured and sold, and what software is in widespread use, etc. 

AND. Historical documents are now only readable for scholars. Remember that Korean king that invented hangul? Before him, Korea used to use Chinese characters too. And don't get me wrong, hangul is a genius writing system! It fits the Korean language so much better than Chinese characters did! It increased literacy at incredible rates! But by switching writing systems, they broke that historical link. The average literate Chinese person can read texts that are thousands of years old. The average literate Korean person can't. They'd have to specifically study that field, learn a whole new writing system. So with the new generation of Cardassian youths unable to read historical texts, it's much easier for the government to revise history. The primary source documents are in a script that most people can't read. You just trust the translation they teach you in school. In ASIT it's literally a crucial plot point that the Cardassian government revised history! Wouldn't it make it soooo much easier for them if only very few people can actually read the historical accounts of what happened.

I guess I am thinking of this like Chinese characters. Like, all the different Chinese "dialects" being written with hanzi, even though otherwise they could barely be considered the same language. And even non-Sinitic languages that historically adopted hanzi, like Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese. Which worked because hanzi is a logography—it encodes meaning, not sound, so the same word in different languages can be written the same. It didn’t work well! Nowadays, Japanese has made significant modifications and Korean has invented a new writing system entirely and Vietnamese has adapted a different foreign writing system, because while hanzi could write their languages, it didn’t do a very good job at it. But the Cardassian government probably cares more about assimilation and national unity than making things easier for speakers of minority languages. So, Cardassia used to have different cultures with different languages, like the Hebitians, and maybe instead of the Union forcing everyone to start speaking the same language, they just made everyone use the same writing system. Though that does seem less likely than them enforcing a standard language like the Federation does. Maybe they enforce a standard language, and invent the new writing system to increase literacy for people who are newly learning it.

And I can imagine it being a kind of purely digital language for some people? Like if you’re living on a colonized planet lightyears away from Cardassia Prime and you never have to speak Cardassian, but your computer’s interface is in Cardassian and if you go online then everyone there uses Cardassian. Like people irl who participate in the anglophone internet but don’t really use English in person because they don’t live in an anglophone country. Except if English were a logographic writing system that you could use to write your own language. And you can’t handwrite it, if for whatever reason you wanted to. Almost a similar idea to a liturgical language? Like, it’s only used in specific contexts and not really in daily life. In daily life you’d still speak your own language, and maybe even handwrite it when needed. I think old writing systems would survive even closer to the imperial core (does it make sense to call it that?), though the government would discourage it. I imagine there’d be a revival movement after the Fire, not only because of the cultural shift away from the old totalitarian Cardassia, but because people realize the importance of having a written communication system that doesn’t rely on everyone having a padd and electricity and wifi.

[mikimeiko]

The Expanse | Season 4 (2019), Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby

[brucewaynehater101]

Hey.... White Ghost's wording here is very particular.

He doesn't just say: "You did not go into the Pit."

What he does claim is that Tim wasn't resurrected and that the Pit wasn't used to heal Tim.

Not that it wasn't used at all on Tim.

I see now why some hc that a little bit of Pit Waters was used on Tim

[dailyloopdeloop]

can we get loop slugcat from rainworld

DAY 61: i am not familiar with these beasts. but their shape amuses me tremendously

[homielander]

the most interesting character detail about maeve through which i have extrapolated at least half my understanding of her is that she prefers to be called maeve. i frequently see "maggie" pop up in meta and fic as her chosen name, but quite literally nobody calls her that, including (and most significantly) elena. elena is maeve's tether to her humanity and her refuge away from vought, yet even elena only ever refers to her as maeve. (and in season 2, we learn that maeve started dating elena before she joined the seven -- before queen maeve's popularity would have become so inescapable that she would feel compelled to introduce herself by that name.) it's especially notable that in her final scene, maeve refers to starlight as annie for only the second time, but she is still called maeve by both annie and elena.

here's what we know about maeve's life as maggie: she had a rocky relationship with her father whom she doesn't seem to speak to anymore, she's from a "cousin-fucker hick town" as described by homelander -- i can't imagine this place being terribly lgbt-friendly, and she generally lacks connection with anyone she would have known before becoming queen maeve. she doesn't have fond memories of this time of her life, and perhaps that extends to all associations with it, including the name maggie.

i tend to think that becoming queen maeve was, in many ways, self-actualizing for her. the act that garners her national attention and earns her a ticket to vought is a heroic one -- she breaks every single bone in her right arm to save a school bus from falling off a bridge. and i know madelyn says she is responsible for the mythos of queen maeve, but this character was still aspirational, and likely someone maeve wanted to live up to. in any case, this new identity gave her a purpose and tools to achieve it: she wanted to help people! by her own admission, maeve enters vought bright-eyed and hopeful, not far off from annie. (maeve is also one of the only supes in the seven not to know about compound v -- she doesn't strike me as religious but believing she's among the very few born with powers would have strengthened her internal drive to be a hero.)

it's for the same reason that i think maeve actually... liked having powers? of course she says otherwise in her last season, but season 3 maeve is cynical and weary from about two decades of dealing with vought and homelander's abuse. they've used her first as the token woman and then the token gay person of the seven. after growing largely passive to the brutality of the job, the flight 37 incident forces her to confront all of the violence she's witnessed and tolerated. she's given pieces of herself away and she loathes the husk of herself that's left. i don't find it surprising that she would want to relinquish every single connection to vought, including her powers.

assuring herself that she will be better off without her powers comes with an added benefit: she gets to distinguish herself from homelander, who would be lost without his powers. and i think she is eager to make this distinction in her mind because there are some uncomfortable similarities between their initiations into vought. the mantle of homelander allows him to exert agency for the first time in his life, just as the mantle of queen maeve endows her with purpose for the first time in hers. (crucially, none of his current circle call him john, either.) they both enjoy being the most powerful superheroes in the world, the unending public adoration, and (in my interpretation) each other. they're also both overwhelmingly lonely and they know it -- homelander teases her multiple times about how she has no friends with a bit more bite in every passing season, while maeve is keenly aware of his isolation and exploits his yearning for love pretty effectively.

maeve steadily grows disillusioned with her position at vought because she still has a moral code, suppressed though it may be. even so, she nearly relents to homelander's vision: that they will be lonely at the top but lonely together. she's pulled out of her miserable state of inaction by annie and elena. annie reminds her of what a hero should be (what she was, once); elena offers her a way out of vought, serving as maeve's light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.

she escapes that tower as maeve, not maggie. she rejects homelander's god complex which engenders his cruelty towards regular people and 'lesser' supes -- no one will call her queen maeve ever again, at least -- but it is still important to her to be a hero, and for better or for worse, she found that as maeve. i feel like she'd struggle to exist without her powers (possibly the self-awareness hasn't settled in yet) for all the reasons mentioned above. i like to think that eventually, she'll circle around to helping people and resisting vought however possible -- albeit on a smaller, more covert scale so she can continue living a peaceful life with elena.

[pablohunie1993]

I know I poke fun at the john constantine pink triangle incident but jokes aside i'm genuinely curious what other people think about it. imo it's a great blaring example of how incapable dc is at writing john's bisexuality into a story that doesn't surround corporate pride or getting together with a man.

I tried talking about it once on tiktok (idk what i was thinking either) and a few people defended it saying things like "how else would you explain a blond hair blue eyed man being sent to a ww2 ghetto?"

didn't the joker send him there? was that not reason enough? 'the joker' was kidnapping girls and ordering soldiers around, we can't suspend our belief that she had the power to send a british soldier caught undercover as a nazi away? the pink triangle and 'bunny that doesn't breed' comment was necessary to the plot?

[bloodcoveredbutch]

hello danger days fandom. tell me why everyone hates val velocity

[logansgaar]

it's kind of astounding from a historical stand point that some of the healthiest, anti-toxic masculinity perspectives on male emotion in the MCU come from two guys from the goddamn 1940s, when "real men don't cry or show affection" had really become a deeply ingrained belief

[yuri-the-boxfox]

tw: mentions of hypersexuality

So, I saw someone headcannon a character as hypersexual, I will not say which character as it isn't important to what I'm talking about, something about it seemed kind of wrong to me which is why I'm talking about this

I am not hypersexual so I don't know if this is wrong or offensive to do or not but something about it felt a bit wrong still,

To anyone who is hypersexual or knows more about hypersexuality than me, is it wrong or offensive to headcanon a character to be hypersexual.

I have no say in this as I know basically nothing about hypersexuality and I am not hypersexual myself, I'm just looking for opinions

[neosatsuma]

if so, feel free to say in the tags what those names were!! 👀

[existencebringsonlypain]

this is intended to be, like, if a stranger on the street you were having a conversation with called you love.

think of any random person. I know this is dependent on context, but I don't want everyone to be hitting "else" just because if they're really nice they'd be okay with it. If any typical person you were chatting with called you "love", how would you react?

[hanzajesthanza]

~a vampire at dawn~

excuse the quick sketch, for this post is less about the art and more about the idea behind it... i have this headcanon from when geralt's company was trekking with the beekeepers through the wilderness:

although they were initially very grateful to have three meals a day prepared for them, they quickly got sick of having honeyed porridge served for all three of them. "Everything was sticky from the honey, even the young women." milva began to get nauseous at mealtimes, and cahir, usually ravenous at mealtimes as befits a strapping young lad such as he, even turned down a few bowls.

regis, however, was quite happy with it.

because, as is mentioned later in the book, about saovine traditions: "The spirits of the dead (...) should be given honey and groats, all sprinkled with vodka…" i imagine some confusing night where he went into a villager's hut to drink blood, but, it was around saovine, so they were even expecting someone like him to arrive and to even be looking for such a thing. prepared for such a situation, they handed him some kasza with honey. he didn't really know what to do with it, but they instructed him on how to eat... it was surprisingly pretty good, so he started pulling this on all the other villages, like hey i;m "undead" (whatever that means) do you have any "porridge" with "honey." yeah also put a little vodka on it while you're at it.

so honeyed groats turned out to be the first human food he ate, and over time, became like a comfort food to him. now he has it without the vodka though

[xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx]

I like doing these polls, I wanna see what patterns emerge

[croh3]

the hardest part of liking the penumbra podcast is being the second citadel fan first and juno steel fan second