#it's certain that i'm dying

[asailorsdrunkeneulogy]

whenskiesaregray || It’s Certain That I’m Dying

purchase on bandcamp.

[akai-anna]

I'M FREAKING HYSTERICAL HOW RAN JUST DRAGS HIM AROUND LIKE A RAGDOLL, LIFTING HIM WITHOUT MEANING TO WHICh just further proves 2 things:

shinichi is fckin SMOL AND LIGHT

ran is freaking STRONG

[feroluce]

THANK YOUUUUUUU HOYO

I'm so glad these two weren't just shelved with no acknowledgement of their time together in 2.2, I'm so happy. Dan Heng had zero hesitation about contacting Boothill for this, and the fact that he trusts him enough to rely on his word alone is already dearly beloved to me, but it's also the fact that like. Dan Heng is notoriously antisocial.

Yanqing worries that he's offended him, March 7th used to complain about him not opening up or talking more, he's completely silent in the group chat with Bronya, Sushang develops the world's funniest nickname within like minutes of meeting him.

Even his signature on his text messages. Instead of anything personal or a friendly greeting like most people, Dan Heng's just mentions his job as an archivist.

It's not that he doesn't like people! And it's not that he's trying to be rude or anything! Dan Heng just. Doesn't like chatting.

But that's part of why I think it's really cute that he wanted to ask Boothill something, and immediately pulled out his own phone to do it. In 2.3, we had the huge group chat used to disarm the bomb on the Radiant Feldspar, which included the dango trio and Boothill. So we know all four of these people must have each other's contact info. Dan Heng could have just as easily turned around and asked the Trailblazer or March 7th to text Boothill. But no, even though Dan Heng never likes to talk unless it's absolutely necessary, he decided he wanted to do it himself this time. ♡

[sysig]

Family ♥ (Patreon)

[unlikablefemaleprotagonist]

i don't really want to get too logical about it, but perhaps another "above the table" reason for this battle not being centered around getting redemption for the ratgrinders is because this is a show meant for public consumption and "persuade your enemies to desert their cause and join you" was literally the trick of the final combat for the last intrepid heroes season. maybe there was an implicit understanding among the cast that the same gimmick would be perceived by some as being repetitive

and honestly?? i think the neverafter team had a helluva lot better shot converting the princesses to their side than any of the bad kids had in this battle. key members of the squad (okay, not tim, rip his conversation with rapunzel) made inroads with the princesses through good faith interaction with many of them earlier in the season. elodie and mira were the easiest gets because of elodie's history with gerard and mira's lack of true devotion to the cause, but ylfa had a genuine SHOT with la bete and pinocchio got very close with cinderella (who i think may have come over anyway once her allies were down, if i remember right?)

but there isn't a single ratgrinder they have that kind of relationship with. they've been pretty out-and-out hostile, despite moments such as adaine saving ruben from disintegrate and kristen offering maryanne gifts. maaaaybe you could make an argument for ruben and wanda, but brennan pointed out that once wanda showed up with his enemies and ATTACKED ruben's friends, it was over. oisin seemed like a potential option earlier in the season, but then he pulled the rug out from under adaine and tried to murder the entire student body via nepotism. there was no friendly relationship left to capitalize on after that. and maryanne has been characterized as having such an impenetrable mental wall that it's hard to guess where's she's at, even for the other ratgrinders.

plus, there's the whole basic conceit that the ratgrinders' minds are not completely their own. their agency has been traded away to a nameless god of rage. who's to say any persuasion check could overcome that? honestly, i think if it was a realistic play, brennan would have encouraged the players to try it, like he explicitly did for neverafter, laying out a mechanic for it. maybe we'd know more if kristen hadn't gotten a nat 1 on her buddy insight check, but i think that was the moment that any diplomatic level to this combat went out the window, because the dice dictated that kristen couldn't see buddy in there, and to willfully push ahead with that line of thinking would have been close to meta-gaming. they are playing characters as faithfully as possible, and those characters are stressed-out kids! they don't have the same emotional maturity of a 32-year-old divorced frog prince who really wants to be amicable with his ex-wife

[bumblingbabooshka]

Overhated Female Character x Underused Female Character [Patreon | Commissions]

[fountainpenguin]

I'm fascinated by Early Concept Adult Dale.

He looks EXHAUSTED and like his insides are ROTTING skldjfsdkj.

His tuft... The lack of boots... The hoodie... He looks like he struggles to stay awake on work calls because he's a single dad caring for a newborn and he's plagued by night terrors. Love that for him.

Yeah, this is Dale in his early Single Dad era (to me). I enjoy...

[galadriel-blue]

I think it's so funny how at the beginning of the year I had a pixie cut, and now it's growing out in the height of my LOTR/The Hobbit/The Rings of Power obsession because I can live out my dreams of looking like anyone in the franchise (or at least my own made up character taking place in the show)

I can look like a Hobbit because my hair is curly. I could cosplay a female version Frodo for real. Put little leaves and acorns up in there and I could be Harfoot if I wanted to. I could be an elf too if I so desired.

Imagine TROP Elrond's hair in S2. That's what my hair sort of looks like now, maybe a bit longer. I can wear wigs easily because of my short hair so I am able to cosplay Galadriel (I'm being TROP Galadriel for Halloween!)

Slap a fake beard on me and I'd make a great dwarf!

My sister and I have a running joke that I look like Halbrand on the raft whenever my hair is wet. It's hilarious!

If I grow out my hair a bit longer as I intend to, I will be looking like Aragorn (or at least, maybe his younger sister 😂) I'll have the classic "shoulder length fantasy man hair"

It lined up so perfectly because I cut my hair a month before I even found out about TROP, which is what threw me headfirst into the LOTR fandom. It's so weird how things work out!

[ketunperse]

I need to be put in a proper enclosure or I will become sickly and wither away.

(Proper enclosure: small discord server where 25+ y/o slow and casual artists like me, who are too quiet and timid for bigger servers, share and yap about their silly little ocs and half-baked ideas and hype up each other)

[mariyekos]

Got to Floor 71 of Bloody Palace with Nero tonight. GodDAMN I hate the Fury fights. The triple Fury one is so stressful... I barely survived, but I did, so tomorrow I'll probably keep going to see how far I can get. (I suspended after beating floor 70, so this run's still going.)

Not sure if I'll be able to beat Malphas even if I make it to level 80 (I think she's the level 80 boss and Cerberus is 90?) But we'll see. I'm pretty sure I SDT cheese'd the Triple Fury fight when I did it with Dante, and used it to help avoid Malphas' Super Chicken Rampage too. Man I hate the Malphas' Super Chicken Rampage. I'm so bad at dodging out of it when playing as Nero in Mission 15 anyway. Fighting Cavaliere Angelo with Nero was a lot of fun though. Would do it again!

[fromtheseventhhell]

Robert, Cersei, and Joffrey watching everyone blame Ned and Arya for Lady's death (and barely talk about Mycah cause who cares about an unimportant low-born boy? 🤪)

Arya committed the horrible crime of wanting to defend her friend and Ned physically carried out the act...after her death had already been decided. Right. It's interesting that of the three, Sansa is the one who gets blamed the least despite George saying she held some responsibility.

He was a bit coy in answering our questions but in the end he did indicate that Sansa did have responsibility for Lady's and Ned's deaths.

I'm not saying she should be blamed but if you're pointing fingers and not including her, then it seems more about personal opinion than the story being told. I'm all for her age being a factor in people not blaming her but it just has to be consistent. It can't be that Sansa shouldn't be blamed because of her age AND that Arya can be held responsible despite being younger. And yes, Ned is an adult, but what does that really mean in this situation? He's going against the Queen, a King who refuses to intervene, and a Prince making accusations while surrounded by Lannister guards and traveling South to become the hand of the King...I'm genuinely wondering what he was expected to do? He'd already taken the best course of action by bringing Sansa to tell the truth about what happened. According to George, her lying had an impact on Lady being killed so...why exactly does he get blamed? Why does Arya? This is the moment that tells us the Lannisters aren't to be trusted and the Starks aren't safe in KL, but who cares about the narrative right? It's really one of those situations when you can tell people are only looking at a scene from the perspective of a specific character.

[shadovvheart]

Fellas, does anyone have a clue how to correctly pronounce mercar/laidir/aldwir/ingellvar 🤨

[crystalkitty1220]

Man I wonder where the leader of the fear realm could've gone, it's alMOST LIKE NEVIN HAS AN

[lucadrawss]

MY FUCKIMG GARLIC BREAD

THE ONE THING THAT DIDN'T MAKE ME SICK

GONE BEFORE I HAD A CHANCE TO EAT IT

[victorluvsalice]

After much editing, the third chapter of "Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland" is up! Featuring Alice snatching a certain briefcase for Fat Larry; murdering a certain Russian mafia boss for Venus Dare; and questioning a certain homeless fellow to get more information on those plaguebearers. Plus dealing with everyone's favorite annoying ghoul Patty along the way. This one's a bit of a doozy -- I recommend you pace yourself!

[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