#like a fingerprint

[amerasdreams]

EVERY accent is not only valid but cool and beautiful

[montereybayaquarium]

A harbor seal glides through the bay, In waters where the sunbeams play, With whiskered grace and dappled skin, A quiet dance, a gentle spin.

Majestic in its silent glide, Rules the waters, free and wide. A fleeting shadow, sleek and wise, The harbor seal beneath the skies.

Footage from our divers enjoying the magic of the sublime seals right outside in the bay 🌈 🌊

[xzyumi]

heat waves 💥🫠

[sunderwight]

Headcanon/Theory/Concept/Etc Concerning Dragons in the World of Ice and Fire:

The ancient Valyrian blood magic system for taming dragons does increase the general affinity of those of Valyrian descent for dragons. In this case, the general affinity is non-specific. Because Valyria was a slave empire and most menial tasks were handled by members of the lower classes, a lot of dragon handling and care (feeding, cleaning the pits, assisting in training, etc) like what we see the servants of the Dragon Pits in canon doing, would have still been handled by slaves and servants in Valyria itself. If you don't want to be constantly replacing staff all the time, and losing experienced/skilled personnel to random fits of dragon temper, it's best if all if your people have some affinity for dragon handling regardless of rank. So whatever the Valyrian blood mages did, they did it to the whole populace.

But then, how to ensure that only your upper classes are actually taming and riding dragons? After all, you're a slave owning prick who doesn't want your staff stealing dragon eggs to raise in secret and use as part of some violent uprising against you. You'll want some kind of security measure to make that less feasible.

Enter the weird and (in the future) inscrutable "dragon affinity" system. The blood mages find a way to basically encode certain types of dragons so that they will strongly favor specific bloodlines. This system, in turn, is passed among the dragons themselves via their bloodlines. Which basically binds certain lineages of dragons to certain lineages of Valyrian houses. Like say you have Ancient Targaryens living in their Valyrian holdings, and they have Balerion's grandma in their dragon stables. They want to make sure that none of their slaves can steal any of her eggs and eventually become a dragon rider. There's no 100% foolproof method of doing that, since dragons are still somewhat inscrutable. But, you can drastically decrease the odds of success by making Targaryen blood significantly more appealing to Dragon Meemaw and her offspring. As a bonus, this also makes it less likely for the rival dragon riding houses to claim another house's dragons, too.

But there's a bit of a flaw in this system (which is probably the only solution that can be deployed by use of blood-related magics): noble houses tend to intermarry. Obviously, there are a distinct lack of political advantages to marrying commoners, so the Valyrian dragon riding houses would have preferred to marry among themselves and/or powerful foreign rulers. But this means that after a certain point, everyone is related. The magic doesn't care about surnames or paperwork, it cares about blood. So let's say you're Ancient Dragon Lord Targaryen and you marry one of your younger kids off to a different dragon rider house. Their kids are, genetically, still as Targaryen as your direct heir's kids.

So after a while you're still locking out the slaves and servants from being able to tame dragons, but you're not locking out your rival houses. You're losing that perk. Which may not seem all that important at first, but as we witnessed with the Dance, civil wars between dragon riders can get extremely messy, and a lot of it can often come down to posturing about who has the most and/or strongest dragons. So it probably wouldn't take long before various dragon riding houses were wanting to ensure that their dragons were restricted to their actual house, and that their rivals couldn't sneak in and reduce their dragon numbers by claiming dragons from their stock. (You'd think containing the dragons might solve that, but dragons are a bit hard to contain, really.)

Hence, the rise of inbreeding. You try and make sure your house's main lines especially have a higher percentage of "Targaryen" blood, and that none of your rivals have any of it either. The downsides of incest are perhaps mitigated by the same blood mages who have been influencing things from the beginning, perhaps magically tweaking your genetics to reduce the odds of complications, and researching more ways to refine this blood-based system of locking others out of ever accessing your power.

But I imagine that the system required maintaining. There are still going to be times when it's more advantageous to form alliances than to keep your dragons strictly controlled, after all, not to mention limits to how much inbreeding you can do even with magical intervention before shit's getting very Habsburg on you. Not to mention the dragons themselves can be tricky to control, and are less liable to understand the political motivations for not mixing their bloodlines with the perfectly attractive dragons several caves over, who belong to your rivals. Luckily, with Valyrian blood mages still around, you probably just need to pay through the nose to get someone to swing by every few generations and update the blood-based security codes. So to speak. Renew the magic binding your people to your dragons to account for all the drifting genetic nuances. So you don't necessarily need to be wedding siblings to one another every generation.

Except, after the Doom, all those blood mages are gone.

So on the one hand, the Targaryens no longer need to worry about rival dragon riders. Because they're (mostly) all dead. But on the other hand, there's no way to update the bloodline passwords on your dragons now. With each passing generation, you're going to lose some of your advantages for controlling them, unless you're inbreeding at a level that is going to severely limit your ability to make alliances and is going to, you know, completely fuck with your family dynamics for all foreseeable generations. Plus, since you're not a blood mage and this situation is kind of unprecedented, you probably don't really know how long the magic will be able to hold out against the variables of increased genetic diversity over the years. If you "thin" your bloodline too much, how long before you've got basically zero advantages in taming dragons compared to everyone else? Conversely, if the magic is really strong and remains true even through dozens of generations, does that mean you're granting the same advantages to every house you marry your extraneous kids out to over the years? Does a Baratheon have the exact same capacity to tame a dragon as a Targaryen?

So your choices are basically to let it go, to try and retain control over the dragons via culture and influence and knowledge instead of blood purity and incest, or, double down and prioritize power and control above all else and retain whatever you can from the old blood magics by committing to an unhinged level of inbreeding. And then just tell everyone else that it's totally normal for Valyrians and you're an exception to all the usual rules against marrying your siblings, it's a cultural thing, and totally sell that because 1) it's kind of true and 2) anybody with the authority to call you out on exaggerating has just met a mysterious-yet-fiery end via the Doom.

Basically, you consign your descendants to generations of dysfunction and insularity that is guaranteed to alienate them from any of the nearby cultures they might assimilate into, in exchange for increased (but not total!) control over all hypothetical future dragons. Then you destroy a lot of information about dragons so that it can never be stolen, so that no one else can ever learn that taming dragons without your blood is still entirely possible, just harder and more dangerous. (Then you spend the Century of Blood embroiled in a civil war where you kill off most of your dragons, but uh that part wasn't planned, probably.)

Anyway that's why I think the Targaryens are Like That, and why the dragons of the Dance get tamed in the way that they do. Seasmoke likes Addam because he's kin to Laenor, even without the Targaryen blood, there's enough Velaryon blood in the current Targaryens to make him familiar regardless. Sheepstealer and Nettles (should that happen at all like it did in Fire and Blood) just bonded the normal way, without the blood magic advantage. Generations later, Targaryen blood still yields an edge in interacting with Dany's dragons, but it's just that -- an advantage, not a requirement.

[shima-draws]

Sooooo someone came up to our door and left a backpack between our front door and screen door and they also stowed an electric scooter in the bushes? I literally heard them outside and didn’t think anything of it bc I thought it was my roommates grabbing food from DoorDash or smth. But nope! It was some random person leaving suspicious shit in front of my house!!

Anyway we called the cops. Hopefully this doesn’t end up with me getting stabbed in the middle of the night 👍

[anaphoraholic]

a personal headcanon i have about misa is that she plays into the "dumb blonde/bimbo" sort of trope to appear more docile to others while keeping her real agenda hidden. but Also, upon meeting/becoming infatuated with light, i think she plays it up even more because she's realized that he loves explaining basic shit to anyone that will listen... she is in fact a silly goober, but she definitely has a prominent side that is intelligent and calculating

[crstn-art]

elden ring things.. i never shared...i had so much....i drew so much...wtf

[minamill]

Family album

details under the cut

[vacuously-true]

I keep seeing people on my dash who I KNOW have no ill intent reblogging posts that have a veneer of trans-inclusive feminism without realizing it's gender essentialist trans-inclusive radfem shit. As far as I can tell it's a recent resurgence of the ideology, not something that's stayed constant and I'm only now realizing it, although I'm not certain of that.

So like. Here's a reminder that gender essentialism is bad even when it's trans inclusive. Here's a reminder that "society is inherently about men/mascs oppressing women/fems and the agency and responsibility for that societal structure is always and only perpetuated by the men/mascs" is radfem shit even when it's trans inclusive.

Just because someone's gender essentialism isn't biological gender essentialism doesn't mean it isn't gender essentialism. Just because a post is trans inclusive doesn't mean it's discussing gender identity or societal gender dynamics in a healthy way.

Just because a post is free of transphobia or transmisogyny does not mean it is free of sexism or racism or intersexism or ableism or transandrophobia or exorsexism or homophobia or biphobia or any other kind of bigotry. Just because a post is free of transphobia or transmisogyny does not mean you get to shut off your brain and reblog it uncritically, safe in the knowledge that if it's not transphobic it's a Good Take™.

Pay attention to this shit please you're giving me headaches :)

[millidew]

slay the princess + togachako. anything is possible <3

(hey. click for princess shigaraki)

[helpimstuckposting]

I think yall need to cut Celia some slack. I don’t think she’s this huge all-knowing manipulative mystery. She lost her entire identity and life in the TMA universe, was thrown into a new universe by herself, made her own life, had a baby, and then all of a sudden she started being pulled away from the home she made into the world that left her with amnesia after an apocalypse. Yeah, swapping places with someone else probably isn’t the best morally, but the other doppelgänger straight up murdered his counterpart and she told the computer ‘hmmmm no I don’t think so’

She also repeatedly told Sam they should NOT be going to hilltop, she said it was a bad idea and she TOLD him it was dangerous. She was definitely second guessing her first idea, and she DID like him! There was not one single reason for her to date him and sleep with him and introduce him to her son! All she needed to do was say she’d help him, that man was determined to look into all of this no matter what, they could have just done that as ‘friends’ if she didn’t actually care about him

[the-broken-pen]

Honestly the pipeline of “reading the-modern-typewriter snippets at midnight on the floor of my bathroom at age eleven so I wouldn’t get caught” to “being a tumblr writer myself” is a wild one.

[da-janela-lateral]

I've always been curious about esper aura textures. Do they form based on the way psychic energy emerges from its source and weaves itself into an external structure? Do their appearance have a genetic factor just like the very presence of ESP, or its purely a matter of a person's soul? Are there registered patterns in which they can manifest? Do their shapes, colors and movements have a general reason to appear like that, or does it depend on the person? Can the patterns change? Do the patterns interfer in sensorial properties, like perceived temperature, texture or hardness?

Oh that's an anime only thing right.

[fisheito]

let him speak

[tennessoui]

ok this is so self-indulgent that yall are gonna run me off my blog but

au where obi-wan hosts fancy wine&dinner parties, as he’s a renowned chef and retired sommelier (wine expert). the theme of this party is for everyone to bring a bottle of wine and a food that they think will pair well with the tasting notes in their chosen wine, and be prepared to explain their choices to the rest of the dinner-goers.

when anakin (invited by padmé, currently in grad school, easily the youngest and dirtiest person to have ever sat on obi-wan’s nice leather settee) shows up with a bottle of wine that still has the price tag on it ($13 for a “maker’s red mix”) and a bag of flaming hot cheetos, obi-wan knows they’re absolutely going to have hate sex about it

then anakin gets up for his turn to explain his choice and he bullshits so fantastically well, using all the words he just heard these upper class bougie snobs say and using them correctly, that obi-wan is genuinely actually impressed.

oh they’re still going to have hate sex, 100%, but now obi-wan respects the man enough to make him breakfast in the morning

(it’s eggs benedict florentine with house-made hollandaise sauce and freshly baked english muffins obi-wan got up early to bake, and halfway through poaching the final egg he looks over and anakin is leaning against his counter, eating granola by the handful out of the bag as he watches)

[lesbianviolet]

lord of frenzied fail