#initial investment

[lgbtlunaverse]

Horrible thing to say but I think there's a real chance Jiang Yanli was both of her parents' least favorite child and knew it and just kinda. Had to go on with her life knowing that.

[ahalliance]

rapid fire french rayou strikes again (transcript below the cut)

[Video transcript:

[ENG] Etoiles: I— I’m speedrunning it [Mario Party], but it’s like—

[FR] Etoiles: The next person to bust my balls by saying, ‘he’s going to miss the Ascension [French competitive event happening this Saturday 28/10]’ even though my plane is at six PM, you bunch of morons, it’s not because ZeratoR [Ascension event organiser] said once that I’d miss my plane that I will miss my plane, because what you guys don’t understand is that a plane doesn’t get missed if you arrive three hours in advance, and the last time I missed the plane was because my corresponding flight was one hour and a half [late]!

[ENG] Etoiles: I was just saying to my chat that I love them :)

Tina: Awhhh

Foolish: See, once again I have a feeling maybe that wasn’t—

End Video Transcript.]

[eastbluecrewed]

happy one piece anime 25th anniversary and HAPPY ONE YEAR (and a bit) ANNIVERSARY OF ME STARTING ONE PIECE !!!!!!!!!!!

october 2023 feels like a lifetime and also a week ago and i am so so grateful for this stupid little pirate show and all the things it's made me feel over the past year. it is truly absurd the impact a story can have on you. i sure as hell didn't expect this one to, and yet here we are. wild

[mioxly]

these four should be roomies because i said so

for reference pearl is NOT the sane one she's a little shit

[morganbritton132]

Eddie falls asleep during another live-stream but this time it’s inevitable. He starts the stream laying on the couch with a blanket pulled all the way up under his chin.

Steve’s at work, and Eddie’s alone, and he’s tired. He just wants to talk but eventually he nods off.

Steve comes home like an hour later and putters around the room for a bit as he mutters to himself about how middle schoolers can be so mean sometimes. You don’t get a good view of him until he fusses with Eddie so he can lay on the couch with him.

Steve practically manhandles him until they’re both comfortably on the couch and then promptly falls asleep too. They’re holding hands the entire time.

[brittlebutch]

btw Still thinking about the moment where Tula first realizes she's literally, mechanically unable to keep up with / catch Jaysohn when he bolts and runs his full speed. That revelation that she's not fast enough to stop him, or get alongside him, much less get in front of him to protect him if he needed it. The dread terror of it. :(

[spotaus]

Huh... had a banger time with this one, actually 🙏 I don't usually post about them since it feels like a very niche Fandom thing, but I was inspired whilst sketching and had to roll with it <3

[divvy-div-art]

Return

[kayden-i-guess]

Screaming crying throwing up reading Tom's perspective on Alex.

Like how do you, a fourteen year old child, try to help out your best friend who has clearly been through something traumatic, but you don't know what. How do you deal with your friend disappearing for weeks on end and returning with bags under his eyes and scars all over his body. How do you deal with your friend leaving and coming back a little bit more changed each time, a little bit more scarred each time.

like

"When the two of them had finally met again, Tom had been surprised at how much his friend had changed. He had been hurt. Tom had seen some of the scars. But Alex also seemed to have got a lot older. There was something in his eyes that hadn't been there before, as if he had seen things he would never be able to forget." - Scorpia (page 86)

[angelsdean]

me, dean, and everyone else watching: ok sure, sammy

[chiprewington]

Who's the cold caller?

That's Percival Wrenchit! A department-transfer Cold Caller who's working under Chip Revvington as an intern. Ignore the fact ey aren't in any official records. Or that eir intern position seems to be unending. Or that eir last date of work was in Sellbot HQ in 2018. Or that you never see Perry and Percival in the same room.

In all seriousness, Percival is Perry...'s cog disguise. Custom-made with the help of a certain Mr. Fear and Loathing in order to make it look as authentic as possible, to be undetected by even the greatest of toon-sniffing scent detectors. Of course, Mr. FaL's intentions maaaaay have been a little iffy. Being able to keep Perry in C.O.G.S. Inc... maybe get em to be an official hire... and Perry, being how ey were, was stuck with an office job for a while. This... maaaay have led to a few identity crisis's where ey kept forgetting ey're a toon, but this was way back in 2018.

Present-day, this disguise made a come-back... in the form of Mr. Revvington getting a bit too upset over the fact that this strange, silent critter has somehow been getting his brother's blessing for two weeks, yet all ey're doing is just standing like a statue in his office with eir eyes on the floor. Pretty sure ey've sweat bullets to the point the rug's had to be cleaned from something other than cake stains. Regardless, he eventually had enough and figured if Perry was going to be stubborn in visiting him, ey might as well make emself useful. He knows toons take parts in order to build their own disguises, despite the fact they always come out at the very least a little off, to at most straight into uncanny valley for the trained eye. At least this one's got more effort put into it. He doesn't want to see a critter in his office (despite the fact eir first tasks are things such as cleaning the halls, fetching him oil or cogfee, or retrieving certain documents that specifically have information that wouldn't be useful to the resistance. He has absolutely no trust in em at this point and thinks ey could very well be a spy. He's being smart about it.), not to mention the eyebrows that might raise. So shoving em in eir disguise and having em be a department-transfer intern is a good cover-up story.

Get to work, Mx. Wrenchit.

[here-there-were-dragons]

just read the new hatchling skin rules and am having Some Type Of Initial Emotional Reaction and am now writing down said Initial Emotional Reaction uncensored as i currently Strongly Feel A Type Of Way and Require Venting. i cannot word this more politely. i do not have the capability to render this rage into polite borderline corporate-speak for the sake of the damn rules that act like anything short of apologizing for being alive to make up for having even the most constructive understanding friendly criticism or even personal mild non-critical dislike of something like a color or a breed is tantamount to personal targeted hatemail. i cannot wait until i cool into calm bitterness later because if i think about this enough to write about it again i will just go right back to being furious and the fact that everyone ielse who's complaining is focusing entirely on the lolita fashion thing and not on in my opinion the far more significant and offensive part is pissing me off even more. extremely angry unedited ranting ahead

fr having it's own "female presenting nipples" moment right now, not that i'm particularly surprised, they've been a prime example of "conservative protestantism in a lefty-language veneer" for a long while now.

"don't adultify" is such a fucking vague and easily selectively interpreted rule, not to mention insulting for a number of reasons,

but putting that part aside the whole idea of "nothing that suggests that the dragon is an adult in a young body" is. look, i'm not exactly fond of the "adult who looks like an anime schoolgirl" trope myself, but i fail to see how in the absolute FUCK having it be canon in-universe that it is both possible and legal for someone to be forced to stay as a child permanently, is somehow LESS creepy than just saying eternal youth dragons have dwarfism. also, fuck you to anyone with dwarfism apparently i guess?

and "no zombie baby dragons" is just stupid. even fucking minecraft has baby zombies, and microsoft has steadily butchered that game into one of the most t for toddler babymode things on earth this side of cocomelon.

and "no scars on hatchlings" so fuck you to any kids with scars too apparently, even though that's way more common than anyone seems to realize. you hear that, kids? if you're under 18 and have scars your very existence is too obscene for public view. 13+ year olds will be irreparably traumatized if they have to know you exist at all! fuck you disabled kids and fuck you amputee kids and fuck you any kids that have suffered anything ever at all for not appearing as a perfect unspoiled image of conservative christian child-doll innocent purity. flight rising staff says your body and existence is inherently too nsfw to even be acknowledged as existing much less visually seen. everyone knows REAL children don't get damaged at all, and if they do then they're too horrifying and defective at their job of Being A Child Properly to exist in public spaces! how dare ugly things that might make us uncomfortable with their existence by contradicting out ideals about aesthetic moral purity be allowed where good respectable normal people can see them!

i don't say any of these words lightly, and i'm very much not the type to go around calling people whatever-ists and in fact find that kind of thing extremely annoying, useless, reductive, and more or less only ever see it used as a blunt cudgel to shame people into line so they don't question you, and have historically found it especially annoying when people pull out the accusations-of-ism card on fr staff over things that are far more likely just completely understandable (if dubiously competent) issues of certain things simply not occurring to someone on code and design level due to lack of sufficient exposure to the idea, and have always been of the belief of giving them the benefit of doubt (even if often that just means i think they either most likely made an understandable mistake that i would likely also make, or, when i'm feeling less kind, that they're simply not particularly competent rather than actively hostile) so understand how much it means coming from me when i say- flight rising staff, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you, you ableist batch of pricks, so far up your own asses with your performative veneer of vaguely lefty-flavored language that you don't realize how fundamentally extremely conservative all of your actual beliefs underlying them are. for every update you make that i approve of there's another that does twice as much damage as the good update fixed (and i'm starting to wonder if you maybe know what you're doing with that too-always batching the fucked up shit on the tail end of some big thing you know people will be excited about, always hiding these controversial moderation changes under something shiny and new, to the point that now i dread any new good update that genuinely seems a step in the right direction and/or is something we've been wanting for awhile because i'm just constantly expecting the knife hidden behind the footnotes afterwards, the fucking "ban tiktok/gay marriage/strip rights from this population/end net neutrality/whatever/ect" clause stapled onto the end of a bill about something entirely unrelated functionally holding a change people want hostage until they allow the fucked up part through. i've been here most of the site's 10+ years and i've seen this sort of thing happen far, far too often.) and every year the shit that gets pulled on the management and moderation end of things makes me more and more almost glad i've never had an income to spend on this, and the fact that apparently the moderation behind every single other petsite in existence is somehow significantly worse fucking astounds me. the only reason i stay around here is because It's Free Dragon Pictures, because it's literally the only actually good petsite game i've ever played and not gotten sick of within a week or so (and really the only good low-energy game i've ever played in general, which i'm increasingly convinced is in spite of it's management), and because somehow, despite all of this shit, i still genuinely love the game itself, because unfortunately by some accident of creation it seems they apparently stumbled purely by coincidence into making an actually good game idea no one else quite has. and after all the fuckery that gets constantly pulled, i refuse to believe the game being good is anything other than, much like many of the of the incidents i think they're unfairly accused of malice and -ism over, an accident.

Disabled children too obscene to fucking exist. fuck you. good to know half the child population's existence requires a trigger warning to even be allowed to be acknowledged as existing to you. good to know if the heart surgery i had when i was 11 had left any visible external scars i would be considered inherently too obscene to exist to you. good to know if the overhealed and benignly potentially cancerous scar on my back from whatever actually happened when i was a toddler (i don't trust either of my parents to ever be accurate about something like that) was in a more visible spot you would demand i have a trigger warning to post selfies online. good to know if any of the shit that's broken me emotionally left visible physical marks you would think it was good and right for me to be forcibly hidden from good normal people's view and considered too taboo for even the slightest discussion without hiding it with makeup and lies, just so i don't make good, lucky, undamaged, normal people uncomfortable, god fucking forbid. should we hide the gays too, since they also make so many people uncomfy? i imagine it won't be long before disabled adults are too obscene for your polite societytm sensibilities too. i've had the feeling for a long time that amputee and disabled skins were living on borrowed time with your rules, kept technically not explicitly dissalowed where all other forms of injury and ""body horror"" are banned simply out of fear of the backlash it would cause to include them, and well. the doomsday clock on that one just got a little bit closer to midnight, huh?

the only reason i wasn't a (physically, visibly, externally) scarred kid was pure sheer fucking luck. the only reason you weren't a physically scarred kid too is pure sheer fucking luck. the only reason you're not some type of disfigured or ugly or amputated or visibly injured or whatnot is pure sheer fucking luck. you're lucky. nothing more. if having to contend with that fact-the fact of how easily it could have gone a different way and there is nothing they would be able to do about it- makes good normal tm people uncomfortable, then well, get the fuck used to it, other people children very much fucking included don't exist to cater to the aesthetic sensibilities of a lucky perfect few. the only thing that separates you from the damaged ones you find too obscene is a bad day and an unlucky hand. and one day, even if you were lucky enough to escape being damaged when you were young, you and i will both be just like them too.

more festival skin winners slots is good. elemental swords sound fun.

[0ann3]

So someone finished the quest two days ago and hasn't stopped thinking about it-

[surging-eyes-seeing-through]

The stories tell of a dragon who falls to the hands of the spider. It was only thanks to the efforts of the Stag Beetle and the Hedgehog, that justice was served to the fallen dragon. For their efforts, the Stag Beetle decided to stay and rebuild his nation while the Hedgehog returned home. -Scrolls of Time

"What is this, some sort of weird bedtime story? And, I'd rather not be served to any dragons, thanks."

(I don't know what the spider, hedgehog, or stag beetle would be, but a dragon... no, I shouldn't think too hard on it.)

[herotome]

How controversial were the tests to find out if newborns had powers?

Extremely!!!!!