#interesting stuff to think about!

[northern-passage]

Hello! I was curious... Do the coins in TNP have designs, or are they completely smooth? :0

they do! the gold Adranian coins (which is what Clementine has) have the symbol of the king/king's house which is the swooping hawk that we'll see Duncan wearing later. that's basically the royal sigil of Adrania, and we'll see wardens, soldiers, and other high-ranking politicians or wealthy Adranian families wearing it throughout the game.

silver coins have a merchant ship on them, and bronze coins have the moon on one side, and the sun on the other side (to represent the Wolfmother's children, but to avoid directly printing the image of a god on money). Gael is different in that their gold coin actually has a whale on it, since whaling and fishing is their main source of income (versus Adrania, which in the south has decent farming and functions as a massive trade hub between/with Gael and Yulan). their silver coins have a wolf on one side, sun and moon on the other (same reason as Adranian's have it on their bronze) and then Gaelish bronze coins just have a silhouette of the southern mountain range and sea stacks.

Gael also has whale bone coins and Yulan has shell coins, but those don't get traded with Adrania. only the metal coins, and that's just because gold is gold; it doesn't change much of the value, it's only aesthetics, and the flow of coins between Gael, Adrania, and Yulan (Adrania's main international trade partner) is vital for all three countries.

[tizzymcwizzy]

this is a poster i made for my call to action assignment in humanities! it's a bunch of basic and easy stretches for people who sit and work at a desk all day (me)

the idea is that you'd put the poster up above ur desk and do the stretches every 30 minutes or so,, the whole routine won't take more than about 6 minutes to complete and when done regularly it can prevent wrist, shoulder, neck and back pain! :)

all these stretches can be done while sitting (although i HIGHLY recommend you stand up and move around while taking a break from working)

you can get a free digital copy of this poster here on my gumroad!

and you can order a print/poster here from my inprnt!

[ciderjacks]

She’s the most like me

[wardingshout]

Zelda goes mushroom girl

[divorceblogger]

this show rules sorry

[turtleblogatlast]

One of my favorite headcanons is that Leo grew up watching telenovelas with Splinter.

It just works so well - his bits of Spanish that he spouts randomly, his showy way of apologizing, and, of course, his love for dramatic betrayals all point to this being a very real possibility.

Plus, it’s very cute to imagine a tiny Leo at his father’s side as they both gasp in shock when the show’s eighth plot twist in just as many episodes happens.

[taffywabbit]

so like. at what point are we going to stop listening to game companies saying "the game was poorly received and didn't meet our sales targets, and that's why we're removing it from storefronts and taking down all the servers mere months or even weeks after release" for titles that had a long expensive development, were barely marketed, and nobody knew they'd even released until after they heard they were getting shut down and couldn't be played/purchased anymore?

I feel like the prevailing takeaway for anyone who doesn't just conclude "yeah, game was pretty mid, makes sense to me" has usually been "this company just has unreasonably impossible sales expectations and treats every project like a failure if it doesn't print a trillion dollars". but these ARE allegedly experienced business execs who aren't complete idiots, and after this most recent debacle with Concord I'm starting to wonder if a bunch of these "games getting wiped out of existence when they underperform instead of just being allowed to persist as they are and maybe improve with time" cases in recent years might be more of a Warner-Discovery type situation, like nuking an entire animated series or film that was worked on for years and preventing it from being sold because it has to be officially unprofitable for the company to use it as a tax write-off. I look at a game that was worked on for 8 years and only made available for 2 weeks, and it's hard not to see the parallels.

great work, AAA games industry, really normal and sustainable stuff you're doing over there as usual

[get-grubered]

hey so just to be clear:

special interest ≠ thing you really like

special interest ≠ hyperfixation

special interest = thing pretty much your whole life revolves around, you get anxious if you don't interact with it enough, how you see the world

[tofixtheshadows]

So I've been thinking lately about how Mithrun is Kabru's dark mirror (more on that another time- it needs its own post), and I thought it interesting that one of their parallels is that they were both cared for by Milsiril, but in opposite directions. She took Kabru in as her foster after he was orphaned and tried to convince him not to become an adventurer. On the flip side, she helped rehabilitate Mithrun specifically so that he could rejoin the Canaries.

And I kept wondering: why?

For Kabru, obviously she loves him a whole lot- despite any other shortcomings in their relationship, I do believe that.

So I get why she tries to convince him not to go dungeoning, and, failing that, at least prepares him as thoroughly as she can.

But why help Mithrun? She used to hate Mithrun, but after realizing what a secretly twisted person he was, she actually thought of him more positively (oh, Milsiril). So it wasn't as if she held the kind of grudge that might motivate her to make his already-depleted life even more miserable by sending him back to the dungeons. And it wasn't that she felt bad for him either, since she didn't visit Mithrun for the first ~20 years of his recovery.

The Adventurer's Bible says that Utaya was the impetus for Mithrun returning to the Canaries, but Milsiril is the one who made the trip to see him and tell him about it.

Why would Milsiril work so hard to get her old coworker back into fighting fit? Why encourage him to return to such a dangerous lifestyle, when she was the one who chose not to mercy-kill him?

That last panel is such a crazy thing to hint at and then never elaborate on. Without it we could have just thought that Milsiril wanted the Canaries' work to continue without her, even if it seemed out of character. I think some people even assume she's just a natural caretaker as a foster mom and handwave it to include nursing Mithrun too. What could Milsiril's suspicious motives be? What does she gain from Mithrun joining the Canaries that isn't an altruistic desire to see dungeons safely sealed? Feeling a sense of responsibility for the work she left behind isn't an ulterior motive.

My theory is: Milsiril, knowing that Mithrun was empty save for the burning desire to face the demon again, wound him up like a clockwork doll and pointed him back at the dungeons.

Hoping that he'd eliminate the biggest threat to Kabru's life, before it was too late for him.

Milsiril the puppetmaster.

[grimalditeuthis]

i love when a podcast has a woman that is awesome

[itslilacokay]

oh would you look at that

part 1!

[catmask]

it is insane how normal i am medicated like. you mean this was an option the whole time. what

[factual-fantasy]

I don't think I have the drive to commit to completing an entire webcomic.. and since my health is where it is, trying to develop the story is tedious and draining..

Though that isn't stopping me from thinking a whole lot about it.. thinking of ways I can make the story building process easier. Thinking of character designs and relationships..

And it's not stopping me from making memes about the story I've built thus far XD

[botanyshitposts]

ok INCREDIBLY old content originally meant for this blog but in 2018 when i was just a wee lad with a little spinner propeller hat and big rainbow lollipop i went to a carnivorous plant convention in california and met a bunch of people who breed/collect/study these guys. one person was this collector who was slowly working on leaving the hobby or at least no longer growing plants, and he had a bunch of carnivorous plant related files he was charging like 50 cents for or something, and so i came into possession of these, which are examples of the kind of paperwork you have to have done to legally ship/trade endangered species of both plants and animals. functionally very boring paperwork, but something i found like, incredibly fascinating. i blacked out the personal id of the person and then immediately forgot to ever upload them, lmao.

these plants were bred and raised in a greenhouse and sold abroad, not taken from the wild, but because the species are endangered and often protected in their native countries (most of these are nepenthes, asian pitcher plants, a huge family spread throughout oceania and southeast asia), there's a lot more documentation that needs to be done regardless of their origin, both on the end of the seller and on the end of the buyer.

the rabbit hole on carnivorous plant trade is deep and kind of wild. there's plenty of common, non-threatened, greenhouse-grown pitcher plants on the market that people buy all the time, even non-collectors, but there's a whole debate to be had on if it's morally okay to be collecting the more endangered/rare of these plants in the first place. the big argument for breeding is that breeding them in captivity means there's more supply that's not poached from the wild, meaning poachers have less of an incentive to take the risk of taking adult plants from their habitats; from what i've heard, sometimes countries will issue permits for breeders to collect some wild seeds just to create a non-wild breeding pool to drive down the price. predictably, however, you also get people who are very much willing to pay a lot of money to get as rare of a plant as possible.

anyone familiar with the allure valuable plants have had over people throughout history can imagine the rest, but here's an article about a guy who started buying poached plants to enrich his private nepenthes collection, who then got busted by a fish and wildlife service agent embedded in his carvirorous plant circle. the plants this guy was buying were being sold to him without any CITES paperwork or declarations like the ones above; it was literally just a guy in indonesia taking rare plants from the woods around where he lived, selling them over facebook marketplace and ebay, and mailing them overseas as an undeclared 'gift' to get around customs. frighteningly small steps to take on all sides, to be honest.

(also, fun fact: another example of carnivorous plants that get poached are wild venus fly traps, which are only native to north and south carolina in the US. from what i understand it's a mix of people who genuinely did not know it's a native species and people who really are just going out into the woods and digging up plants to sell online. sometimes poaching is closer to home than you'd think!)

anyway. wild and interesting times in the land of plants recovered from a hard drive lmao

[fluentisonus]

(typing this as I walk to work so this is not articulate but) thinking a lot abt how les mis w javert sort of. hm. questions? problematizes? the Idea of dogs & the domestication of dogs (metaphorically ofc) like it sort of looks past the 'man's best friend' angle entirely & makes you think things like. kind of fucked up of humans [the social order] to domesticate the wolf [person outside of society for whatever reason] expressly to turn against & cause harm to other wolves in order to keep them out [away from respectable society] & keep themselves safe but never truly consider it an equal [it'll always just be a dog]. kind of fucked up that the dog finds enjoyment & life's purpose in this

[noodles-and-tea]

What are people even saying fiddleford did?? 😭 like what did he ever do wrong I can’t think of a single thing. maybe it’s bc I didn’t read the book yet

I think what is primarily being discussed in his case is a) he left his wife and b) he started a cult to erase people’s memories, generally nonconsentually.

Now we don’t actually know all that much about fiddlefords relationship with his wife, there are things that suggest he maybe wasn’t prioritising his family when he was with Ford (I.e. the Christmas presents) but I think it’s unfair to write off someone’s headcanon or theory as “wrong” when there’s no definite answer.

The cult is probably definitely a bad.

BUT! What’s so revolutionary about Gravity Falls is that it has well written characters that are complex and with flaws. I think just about every main character does something bad or selfish at one point or another but it’s also always perfectly justifiable to the character too. There is always personal reason for their actions so nothing is technically black and white “bad”.

I’m not pointing fingers but I reckon some people who maybe aren’t so familiar with fandom spaces or consuming media in a more critical way seem to have a sort of mindset which means that in order for you to like a character they have to be entirely good (or bad - but if they’re bad you have to admit they’re bad and that’s why you like them). And of course people could also take the personal justification and turn it into actual justification.

A lot of the conflict in the show is morally ambiguous and the characters motives are generally easy to understand and even empathise with. Most people that genuinely enjoy the characters - or at least, speaking for myself - don’t excuse their flaws but enjoy the complexities of them!

All that to say, Fiddleford is literally me you guys <3