#i think its an interesting concept though

[raichukfm]

It's a fascinating question and the answer doesn't speak to it at all. We're talking about swapping perceptions, you know, the hypothetical thing that could answer those "What if my blue is your red?" ponderings. Were that the case and you were to swap, you would start seeing everything red as blue and vice versa, but you would be able to tell this. That's a controversial point, but we aren't proposing a full qualia inversion here; your internal concepts of red and blue haven't changed, just the way that your brain maps sensory stimuli to your qualia has. You can imagine red, and it's red as you have always imagined it, you just look at a red delicious apple and you see it as blue. (Actually a fascinating question whether people would agree with this assessment, and has me wondering about people with aphantasia specifically about if they think their 'red as they have always imagined it' can be separated from the way things with that color look to them. I'm getting off track.)

But this swap is different. Semiotics refers to the meanings that things have; for instance, the way you are looking at these squiggles or hearing these sound waves and taking them as a message. I am intending a meaning now as I type these words out, and you are taking away a meaning as you perceive them, and though it won't quite be the same meaning it is related. There's a question of where exactly the meaning you perceive is; is it in the message itself? Is it just contained in the context around it? Was it put there by me? Is it only there when you read or hear it?

And now specifically we're talking about abstract objects, things which aren't concrete; for instance, words as words, not images or sounds but the thing that those patterns invoke. Things where it is already an interesting philosophical question about how exactly it is that they exist. (For those with the bent to ponder it and not just go 'Uh, they just do, duh' because yeah that's fair.) And that's just one example of an abstract object. It's not all messages. There are numbers. There are complex mathematical objects, like groups and rings and fields. Are things like "peace" abstract objects?

If we do this swap of perceptions, so you perceive the meaning of an abstract thing to be the meaning that I perceive... What are you perceiving, exactly? Is it the thing anymore? Is this even truly a swap of perceptions or is it rather a swap of thoughts? If you took one piece of my mental model of the world and swapped it out with one of yours, how would it fit in? Would it fit in at all? It's fascinating.

The world isn't shrouded in darkness. There's not some blinding fog that has settled over everything. You can observe the world, make sense of parts of it, peer into its mysteries and try to think of answers. Yeah, it's confusing and a lot of pieces of it are out of reach but that's just because the world is so fucking big and complicated and so many parts we simply lack the faculties to possess. This question is that lovely kind of philosophical pondering that is fundamentally unresolvable and by all rights has no practical purpose... But we can still talk about it, and in talking about it, we can share ideas and work through how it is we think of things. If nothing else, we can enjoy ourselves. And that's as practical a purpose as anything else.

Don't see something you can't think of how to answer and decide that it cannot be answered and that now is a time to shrink away to safe thoughts that can be trusted. Ponder whatever bullshit that strikes your fancy, and try to think about what the answers would be. Even if you can fundamentally never find out if you're right or wrong, the thinking itself is a worthwhile exercise. Encourage other people to do it too, though don't try to force it; different people have their own sorts of funtime questioning. I've got things like this, some people have how much prep time Batman would need to defeat Shrek in a fight.

equally confounded and obsessed by this quora question and response that i just stumbled onto

[lesbiangiratina]

The nitpicker arrives. I dislike it when people say testament has “transcended gender”, its absurdly common for something that hasnt been said officially. First off i assume people are mixing up daisuke’s quote about them “transcending humanity”. He essentially says testament is sexually androgynous due to not being human, being something above humanity, which really is not an uncommon idea. Their early coding revolved around the conflation of sex and gender, saying something was going on with them while still considering them to be a man. What i think was less typical though is daisuke’s obvious very genuine interest in depicting testament androgynously in general, and well that intention was fully realized with making them explicitly agender in strive. And really, while its VERY interesting history, that previous statement shouldnt be applied to testament as of strive. Riku ozawa said outright that the team wanted to change how they handled testament’s gender, seemingly referencing the phrasing of that daisuke quote and proposing something new in its place. Developer backyard vol 10 says testament lives “without the concept of gender”, phrasing that has a lot less implied Otherness and lack of agency than “transcending humanity”, especially with referring to gender as a concept. Admittedly this is still attached to them being a gear, possibly still with implications about their body, but its pretty clear that the japanese fandom’s idea of testament’s body being related to their androgyny has changed with these statements and i’ll trust them on that. It was never about identity before strive, i think a lot of people dont really get that. Theres a reason for the shift in phrasing alongside the shift in their portrayal.

Just wanted to ramble about this. Ummm my bad. I love that daisuke quote, i’ve tried to do as much as i can to research it, to find more information and proof of its existence (DID YOU KNOW. Theres currently no actual archival of it’s origin. It was allegedly in a mail-only arcsys fanclub newsletter, probably from the first 4 volumes in 1998/99. We only have volume 15 currently. But it’s existence is fortunately kind of undeniable at this point. I wont ramble further.), but it drives me crazy seeing people both misquote it and incorrectly apply it to strive testament. Okay

[gabirox]

some thoughts on vlad between seasons 2 and 3

i have many, many conflicting headcanons about what exactly happened in the gap between s2 and s3 and how the entire family was at that point in time but one concept i think is interesting is the idea that vlad was drinking blood in that time.

obviously its well established that vlad refuses to drink blood and believes its wrong. in s3e1 we see him say this from the offset, however we also see him really struggle with being in a room full of breathers. most of this can be easily brushed off with the writer's trying to display that drinking blood isn't who vlad is, even though its what his nature calls for. this is pretty boring however and therefore i am choosing to project headcanons onto it <3

after wearing the crown of power at the end of s2, vlad collapses leading to the iconic scene of ingrid saying she neither knows nor cares if vlad is alive or not. this is where the blank spot begins. we know that the batteries on the uv cage ran out so the count could escape with renfield and vlad, however we don't know what state vlad was in at this point of time but we can assume it was bad.

working on the basis that the crown of power at least partially transformed him (e.g. gave him his fangs and boosted his powers, i then believe that he never went to the blood mirror on his sixteenth birthday as everyone believed he had already transformed, which then allowed for the events in s3e7/8, but thats another post) i think its an interesting idea that the count - unsure what exactly to do with this extremely ill vampire child - gave vlad blood whilst unconcious in an attempt to heal him. when vlad eventually came around he would deny this as treatment, but i'd like to believe that it is what made him better. to go along with this i think it provides an interesting dynamic that vlad is unaware that he was being fed blood whilst in this weakened state, with the count never having the heart to tell him that he had been drinking copious amounts of blood. its for this reason that we see vlad then struggle so much to be around breathers, as he went cold turkey on blood after he woke up properly. it shares some parallels with how much he struggled after biting erin - although it wasn't entirely the same.

TLDR: vlad had a blood addiction he never even realised he had because it was used to save him when he was ill

[ganondoodle]

you know im unable to shut up when i have any opinion on zelda (though i try and have thus far succeeded at not commenting on any other concept from the darn book)- i find most totk ganondorf concept art worse than what we got to insulting even (of those i have seen) ..... this one though

much more the one in the background than the one up front, still at least he has the collar and the weapon we saw in the first trailer of things that never happen in the end (like so much else)

[fatedroses]

I draw a sketch to simply offer my own personal little headcanon and theory that Zenos was the only other descendant Emet got close to (knowing him probably unintentionally) besides Lucius.

Obviously we never see them interact directly, but several little worldbuilding tidbits do make me ponder about certain things, like the possibility lorewise that it could've been Emet that named Zenos, and the fact that they share certain habits and potentially interests.

[sonknuxadow]

something so beautiful about how shadow with huge demon wings is probably something that would have been widely made fun of a few years ago but the general consensus on it now is that its the coolest thing to ever happen . peace and love on the black comet

[unityrain24]

ok but i'm like in love with the concept of the chitauri scepter acting like a drug. and you suffer withdrawals when you are severed from its influence

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Babel-17

sci-fi set in a future in an intergalactic war facing unknown beings only known as ‘invaders’

when a new code from the enemy is discovered, a poet/linguist/cryptographer is asked to try crack it - but quickly realises it’s a language

she assembles a crew to travel to the war yards to study the language, and discovers that learning it changes the way people think and interact with others

explores linguistic relativity

queer and polyamorous characters

[doctorwhoisadhd]

hmm thinking about the idea of love songs. i think the idea of what a love song is that we have in our culture is inherently a little bit flawed because we have the idea that any song written about romantic feelings is a love song and im thinking thats not exactly true because there is a difference between "romance" and "love". what i'm saying is not that love is a broader category and applies to things that are not romantic in nature. this is in fact true, but it's not what makes the important distinction here. the true distinction between "romance" and "love" is that romance is a societally defined type of interest in another person, whereas love is, essentially, a promise that you make when you build a relationship.

as such, what i call "love" here might be better defined as "care", as that implies more time and effort, but that's a different suitcase to unpack and largely unimportant to my point here, which is more about the societal conventions of what we call love songs. the point is, relationships can be built with other people, yes, but also animals, places, organizations, ideas, so on and so on, whereas romance requires another person, hence the difference between the ideas of "romance" and "love".

with that in mind, there are two types of songs we in western, english speaking, society call "love songs":

1) songs that are about a person's romantic interest in someone that is either definitively known to be unrequited (existing monogamous relationship, sexuality that doesn't align, etc) or simply not requited (aka romantic interest being unknown); and

2) songs about an existing relationship (keeping in mind my points about relationships not just being with people, but also places, things, etcetera) as is.

(some examples of the latter category: mountaintop by relient k, which defines the relationship in question as non-romantic; or i miss my mum by cavetown, which is - as the title implies - a song about the singer missing their mother.)

now, the thing that makes distinguishing these two difficult is the fact that songs about an existing relationship CAN be about wanting certain aspects of that relationship to change. in these cases, determining that a song is one or the other will hinge either on a) authorial intent or b) whether the song is more about what the singer wants (thereby implying #1) or the lack thereof in that relationship (which would imply #2).

to get back to the subject at hand: the term "love song", as we think of it, is an umbrella term that include both of these two categories, and i think that perhaps it is reductive to do so. with that in mind, i think perhaps it would be more appropriate for "love song" to mean only the latter, whereas the former is a category of its own. WHICH is not to say that the two can't overlap — just that if a song is about a person with whom the singer has no relationship, it cannot be considered a love song due to the fact that it is a song about infatuation, not love.

(another interesting wrinkle this provides is the fact that a song might start out in the first category and, as the writer develops a relationship with a person, might move into the second category as they write more.)

[karda]

oooooo

Did you like a quiet place day one? Sam was my favorite

i actually cant watch horror movies because of the illness™ i just like men

[glindyupland]

I just think it’s silly that so many people complain about Villain Amaya as “wasted potential” and that “we were robbed” like-

My pals, post canon fan fiction is right there. The desire to free her husband is right there. Either by touching an evil book while being too eager to remember the obsidian oil, or being possessed by contact (ie what she believes is true loves kiss) when trying to reason with him in the dungeon.

We don’t need a rewrite, we can have a continuation. Both can be true. Amaya is a complex character, she can handle it.

[starboy-squeakers]

Again not a dungeon meshi reader/watcher but every time I hear about that laois guy I get reminded of how my system had/has a hyperfixation on dragons so intense that we got that big fancy dragonology book and we treated it like the damn dragon Bible for like years

Now, obviously, we understand that there's different interpretations on mythical creatures, and no one interpretation on a dragon is necessarily gospel, but that multiple interpretations on the classic tale of beasts of scale and fire are completely valid and to be expected!

however if you call an Eastern dragon a coatl I'm going to come to your house and slaughter your family

[dayurno]

are you going to read tsc when it comes out? and, if not: would you like your acolytes to give you the important kevin day updates or would you rather not?

oh my acolytes huh! well i don’t know :) it’s so nice of you to ask and i’m very touched actually…. nice to me 🥹…. i guess any (good) kevin updates would be nice and probably sway the balance on whether i read it or not, but at first glance i probably won’t read it unless it sparks my curiosity once it’s out and the story starts making its rounds around my circles :) i’m plenty interested in the period where jean stays with the foxes but i don’t much care for the trojans nor the proposed storyline*, though even a picky reader like yours truly can be convinced into buying a story if kevin day’s in it

*by this i don’t mean that i Dislike the process of jean healing but it’s just overall not my favorite theme and, to be frank, i don’t have much interest in reading about a normal well-adjusted team either. from my view tsc is aftg without my favorite parts (namely kevin day as a main character, the foxes’ messy dynamic, problematic and controversial side characters, neil’s narration, The Mafia, andrew in general) and while i am always and forever a ride or die for jean moreau, and i am glad he’s going to get better and be happy, a lot of my feelings for him don’t really stem from the idea that there is a softness underneath all the grit but actually and sincerely the fact that he is crazy. i Love jean because he’s horrible and scared and cruel and i don’t know if i’ll care much for him once he’s out of that state :) i meant it when i said a few months ago that i would’ve been more onboard with a story about the ravens (no matter how gruesome) or even a glimpse of jean’s pov in the nest, though of course nora sakavic should probably choose to be happy every once in a while so i wouldn’t ask her to write that

so tl;dr: you can send me good and relevant kevin updates if you want to and if they’re interesting enough i might read tsc in the future

[sonknuxadow]

I greatly enjoyed my time with Sonic Prime, but I will admit that the ending confused me

i thought the ending worked fine but it was a bit underwhelming compared to some of the theories i saw. and i also wasnt really expecting for it to be possible to restore green hill without wiping the shatterverse from existence because that just. didnt feel possible based on what we knew about how this stuff supposedly works . What ever its just baby cartoons doesnt matter

and ive also seen people thinking the ending was meant to be a cliffhanger setting up for a potential continuation but i dont think that personally. to me its obviously just meant as Ohh sonics life never slows down so theyre immediately jumping into another adventure The End. or whatever

[ourstochoose9]

Earlier tonight I had a dnd session where my character (a warforged wizard with major amnesia) had her first emotion-induced flashback, gaining back a few scraps of memory (some that even I the player didn't know about).

I wasn't originally gonna post about it, because it's a dnd campaign and no one else knows about it but the dm and the other four players (none of whom are on tumblr afaik). But then I thought "hey, the session ended immediately after that flashback, I'll write a bit about how my character is handling it!"

It ended up being longer than my last actual fanfic. And I spent an hour and a half on it max.

Soooooo if anyone wants that lmk I guess.