#i'm sorry to be snappy

[empty-movement]

The opening gag where Utena mistakes a planetarium projector for Anthy's brother is one my favorite moments in the show. It's classic 'Ikuhara gave the plot away when no one was listening for it' content. Because of course, it's true. It's true in at least a couple ways, not the least of which being that Akio has been relegated to the *purpose* of a projector. His job is to show the lovely illusions necessary to accept the terms of the present Anthy lives in. Anthy doesn't need to believe he's trying to save her, she can gloss over that. But she needs to believe he's trying to distract her, because that's the least he can be doing to keep surviving in the state he does. It's okay if a constant parade of potential replacements for him continue to march across the pretend sky, as long as it's him that's left with Anthy, safe.

It's kind of like how the media computer in our living room is called Akio, and for the last month the TV it displays to has been an absolute feeding frenzy for my dumpster taste in men. Knives, Sephiroth, Silco, now fucking Astarion, and who Akio disliked so much he fried his own GPU. I replaced it. He took the hint. Akio is only ever as good as his ability to show you what you want. Even if it isn't him. Especially if it isn't him. No one shows up to look at the projector. They are there for the show.

[nerdallwritey]

snippet sunday/WIP wednesday

I was tagged by the wonderful @khywren! Thank you!!!

Here's a snippet from part two of An Evening To Ourselves; expect more banter, but there's also some angst this time around to address a few elephants in the room 👀 (Not in this snippet though. This snippet is goofy because those are my favorite parts <3)

“We had a lot of fun last night, didn’t we?” “Seeing as how I’m always a lot of fun, I don’t understand why you’re posing this question.” You looked down your nose at him.  He hung his head and sighed exasperatedly. “Will you simply allow me to work my charms on you?” You tutted. “Is that what you were trying to do just now?” “Attempting to, yes.” Astarion crossed his arms. “I’m usually irresistible.” You snorted. “Okay,” you said, a small smile appearing on your face. “I’m going to ignore your lack of an answer about your nightmare and will elect to wait until you’re ready to tell me about it yourself.” Astarion pursed his lips. “But go ahead,” you rearranged your legs, wincing mildly as you moved to sit cross legged, “charm me.” A look of worry flashed over Astarion’s face when he saw you wince, but the concern was quickly overtaken by an all too self-satisfied grin. “Feeling it this morning, are we?” You rolled your eyes. “I knew you’d be happy about this.” “Positively delighted, my sweet.” He leaned forward and kissed you gently, bringing a hand up to your cheek. You brought your own hand up to lay against his. He pulled away and appraised your face smugly. “I was completely enamored by your performance last night.” You were about to open your mouth to say something, but Astarion interrupted. “Don’t even think about mentioning that you’re a bard and that of course you’re good at performing, or something like that.” You closed your mouth. You were going to say something like that. Instead you said, “You were pretty good yourself.”

Tagging @maladaptive-menace and anyone else who wants to participate!

I'm still new to the writing side of Tumblr and would love to make new friends to tag :) My asks/messages are always open!!

[murmuringbug]

I'm not on Twitter so dont like quote me or anything but from what I've heard second hand from other people is that theres drama going on about dd posting some art than can be considered suggestive and that breaking bads boundaries. And it's so funny to me XD

First of all that argument is so stupid and I thought we were over that.

And second! Tell me you haven't been on the server without telling me. Y'all can't comment about dd breaking bads boundaries till you see bad have dd beg for him to wear a skirt with your own little block eyes

[rebelscaped]

food truck alley, midday, current time (no specific date) / @anchoragestarters

The remainding few pieces of xiaolongbao he'd ordered had been sat neglected on the bench table long enough that it had started to go cold, the soup having seeped out of one and into the polystyrene tray that held them. Although Kael had never been known for his appetite, it was not because he was not hungry that his lunch had gone ignored but rather that he was much too focused on other things; in particular, inspiration had hit and the most inconvenient moment and he was now stuck scrawling away on a pieces of scrap paper he'd found in his bag. The one he was on right now had been a flyer for something at some point, he hadn't bothered to flip over to check. Songwriting wasn't something with which Kael troubled himself quite as often these days; since he'd joined the band, those duties had fallen into hands besides his own. He harbored no ambitions of going solo but it felt nice to cling to old passions. Besides, the lyrics he penned were often personal and more occasionally, they were too vulnerable to be seen by anybody but Kael. He was fine with this. He might have even considered it a cheaper alternative to therapy. (Or was it more like keeping a diary?)

Of course it came as a shock, then, that a strong gust of wind came in just at that moment and whisked the papers right from under his pen. All Kael could muster as a response was a quiet grunt of surprise. The wind had calmed as quickly as it had picked up, as was the way of Anchorage's unpredictable weather. (He supposed he ought to have been used to that, given how much time he'd spent in London.) Most of the paper had gathered at the legs of another bench. Another occipied bench. Mostly under the bench. "Oh, fuck me sideways," he hissed under his breath, as he pulled himself to his feet and marched over, the gravel crunching noisily under the weight of his heavy New Rocks.

"Ey, if you don't mind moving for a bit, I need under here," said Kael, brusquely. Usually, he'd more polite than this. He wasn't a naturally rude person, but in times as frantic as these, he had a way of forgetting to filter himself. His gaze dropped to the bench table and his eyes widened as he finally noticed that a few sheets had landed squarely in this person's food. (He was so not reimbursing them for this.) Slowly but surely, eye contact was made. "Don't touch that."

[essektheylyss]

new dashboard game just dropped and it's called "is the tired-looking blackhaired knight-coded man who is hiding from the government colin provolone or ballister blackheart"

[unbearable-lightness-of-ink]

so anyway I really did start compiling a kinyarwanda/english dictionary/grammar guide out of all the random resources i've been hoarding on my phone (it doesn't have to be great, it just has to be better than searching multiple different files every time I'm looking for some obscure vocab or grammar detail) and one of these resources is some PDF uploaded to the internet archive and it's... not great. from the writing and contents it's clearly

old (my guess is mid-1900s. I don't remember colonial and post-colonial Rwandan history specifically enough to guess well here, but based on some of the typos, it was done on a typewriter and then scanned with OCR)

intended for missionaries (some examples of actual sentences in the "translate this" exercises include "I praise God because He saved me and He gave me peace and joy" and, I shit u not, "The blind man cannot see the Word of God, but he can hear and he can know the love of Jesus." it's. well for one thing this is basically useless vocabulary for me, and also it's cringe af)

written by someone who was not a linguist (at one point instead of just saying "if T is preceded by an unvoiced consonant, it turns into D" they give you a list of every unvoiced consonant and then recommend that you invent a mnemonic phrase to memorise the list?! why?)

written by someone who was shit with pronunciation (legit so many places where they're like "there's no way to describe how this sounds, you just have to ask someone to make the sound for you" my good bitch the phoneme might not be in english but I could describe it just fine. skill issue.)

but the thing that's really killing me about all this is that every time they try to explain tonal vowels or phonemes that aren't in english, they tell you to "ask an African to say it for you."

an. an what now? an African? babe there are approximately 1.5 billion people in Africa. Africa accounts for about 20% of the land on earth, it's the second-biggest continent, and it has an estimated two thousand living languages spoken throughout the continent.

and kinyarwanda? it has maybe 15-25 million native speakers, depending on which source I trust. it's spoken (almost*) exclusively in rwanda, which is the 9th smallest country in Africa--and that roundup includes islands off the coast of the continent. It has the second densest population in Africa but it still only has like 13 million people in it. and it's a very unique language. its closest relatives do not have the same phonemes that kinyarwanda has, and its closest relatives are also spoken by relatively few people. I don't know enough about kirundi to say much but I do know that it doesn't have the same vowel tones in all instances and it doesn't have some of the same consonant clusters. and the more widely spoken related languages that you're more likely to stumble on someone who knows how to speak? they're even worse for a reference; ask someone who speaks kiswahili to pronounce kinyarwanda for you and they will not pronounce the difference between, say, umuceri (rice) and umucyeri (berry), or the tonal difference between words like umusambi (floor mat) and umusambi (crested crane).

so, like. it's just absolutely sending me, this random white lady who was obviously a colonialist missionary, bothering to make a whole language guide to teach me how to proselytise in kinyarwanda, but along the way she's like "just ask an african--any african--how to say this" lady less than 1% of them are going to know this language but go off i guess

*almost because there's the diaspora of rwandan expats and immigrants in other countries plus the banyamulenge which is a whole aspect of it that has so much fraught history on all sides that I won't even try to say something intelligent about it, it's totally not my place/something i'm educated enough about, but to my knowledge most of them speak dialects that are more or less dissimilar to kinyarwanda; kinyamulenge and kinyabwisha are not the same as kinyarwanda. take it from my munyamulenge coworker who could never pronounce the difference between c and cy

[dracocheesecake]

You know it's kinda dark but I can't get rid of a thoght that terrible things happens in wars and Kai might have been involved in it. Just in theory..

Yeah. He was a warlord, he definitely killed people. So did Oogway. Warlords aren't exactly nice. Plus Kai did call himself "Master of Pain" and "Maker of Widows", amongst other things.

He's a problematic moo moo but he's my problematic moo moo 🥰🥰🥰

[keeps-ache]

gonna keep it shmoovin man

[silentgravesdontexist]

With all due respect, if you give me attitude when all I have is three hours of sleep, a hectic schedule, and manic-depression— I will still do my best to be respectful but have mercy on my patience.

[orphicauroras]

Half of y'all haven't read the books properly and that shows

[mecchantheotaku]

Apparently you do headcannons

Princess?

Sorry, but no. Here's why.

Also, as I previously stated, I won't do too many of these requests because I have had bad experience with people overdoing it before.

I'll probably do one request per Voice and maybe about five general requests for all of them. The general requests will probably be a lot less detailed because there's like eleven of them.

Maybe a Narrator request if anyone does that too, even though that wasn't my intention with accepting requests.

Also, regarding my intentions, the reason I've been focused a lot on the Voices lately is because I've been struggling a lot lately and the Voices have kind of become my comfort characters helping me get through it all.

[chaoticordxr]

@sarcasticsnackpack i have… so many questions. || For Rebekah

" and i have a feeling your curiosity is going to annoy me, which almost always ends with some form of violence. best keep your questions, and quite frankly your opinions, to yourself. "

[indigozeal]

TONAL WHIPLASH OF THE DAY: Some of the most breathtaking floral compositions in recent video games are being produced by, of all titles...well, you see the watermarks.  (A promo game for it, but still.)

[tovaicas]

this actually was made for me specifically

(any pronouns)

[depressed-changeling]

If I sound rude or snappy, I apologize. I also apologize if this is long or repetititve.

In short, yes because of harm reduction. As fucked as we are now, it's nothing compared to what Trump will bring.

The US is essentially the modern British Empire, and we should be held accountable for the war crimes our government has commited not just in Palestine, but the Middle East as a whole and South America (to name a couple, we've devestated far more than that). We should start returning land back to the indingeous people, such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

That won't happen if Trump wins. Him winning the first tine ushered in a whole host of right wing cunts globally, right wing cunts that won't hold Trump accountable and in fact would egg him on. And thanks to the Supreme Court, he would essentially have the powers of a king with no consequences.

Plus Trump has already made it clear that he wants protestros to be shot to be made an example of. That he wanrs elections to end with him. That he wants Israel to "finish the job". In his first term, we were so close to nuclear war breaking out. If he wins again, that would undoubtedly become a reality, starting with Palestine.

I do understand the desire to just burn it all down, but letting Trump win won't usher in the Great Revolution. It's just senseless death and destruction of Palestine, Ukraine, of world stability. It's easy to get swept up with the idea of the Revolution, that once everything bad that could happen does happen, it will all be worth it for the utpoia that follows. But it's an bloody idea that will cost the lives of countless marginalized people.

This attitude is the reason why the Revolution is just a rebranded version of the Rapture that evangelists love to tote. Same principles of once the worst has come, the loyal will be rewarded with paradise, even if that means the many will die for the few to prosper. Especially with the attitude of "why bother to make things better, the sooner the Revolution/Rapture happens, the better."

But let's entertain the idea that the Revolution did occur, how are we going to supply hospitals with vital supplies, vaccines, and medicines when the infrustructure goes down? How are we going to help the elderly or the disabled who can't work and depend on caregivers for food, transportion, etc? How are we going to educate our young? How long will it take to replace the infrustructure and systems our society depends on? How many people will die while we run around like headless chickens trying to figure out a whole new government system from the ground up?

So much depends on what we have in place, pretty much all of which will be torn down by Project 2025/Agenda 47. We don't have a plan on how to take on all of that in the short time we have left of the election, and there will be no chance to plan if he wins again.

We, our family, our friends, we've been lucky to survive the first term of Trump's presidency, but we won't be so lucky thr next term.

You're not wrong in how fucked up our government is, how bad it has gotten. A process that right wing facists have carefully crafted since Nixon. I understand the feeling of hopelessness and that it's too late, but it isn't. Our actions do matter, our choices matter. We have to learn from our mistakes that led to Trump winning, to both the Bush's winning, and not repeat them. We have to take the victories when we can, like succeeding in getting Biden to step down from reelection, getting Harris to not choose Shapiro as VP.

Elections have never been about making a fix-all choice. It's always been maintenance, strategy to choose politicians who will make life for the next generation better than ours was. It's our duty to make the sacrifices our past generations made to not be in vain. And this election especially is about buying time so we get another 4 years to raise hell against our government. Because trust me, we won't be able to against Trump.

It's finally dawning on me that a lot of hard leftists actually do think the US presidency is already a dictatorship.

Like they think that the reason the Biden administration didn't cancel college debt on the grand scale they pictured, is that he just didn't want to. They have no comprehension just how much Republicans were working against him to stop literally anything he could do to make things in this country less dogshit. (BTW, this is why we need to vote blue all the way down the ticket.)

And then they think they can elect some third party rando with no actual allies in the senate or congress or anywhere, and people will just have to do what they say, and won't try to sabotage them even harder because they're even further left. (The aforementioned efforts to sabotage Biden? It would be even worse for an actual leftist president.)

Like no, sorry, the US presidency is not actually a dictatorship.

[smokes-and-bullets]

”You’re only going to make it worse by not resting.”

Stares at her with a narrow gaze, annoyed by her words.

"How about you shut up and I'll rest when I feel like resting?"

Takes a moment before speaking again.

"I don't feel like resting right now.. I will later, sound good?"

He was exhausted but also very high strung and irritated, even if he wanted to rest or sleep he wouldn't be able to.