#like that’s a guy. literally just a guy. Not some other ‘weird’ thing. you have damage to your brain

[explodingchantry]

OK I found the source and, genuinely, what the fuck?

Varric is apparently an important character within veilguard but we don't get to express whether the inquisitor left his best friend to die in the fade?

The wardens are a big part of veilguard but we don't get to express what the inquisitor did with the southern wardens?

MORRIGAN is apparently an important character in veilguard and we don't get to express whether 1. We had her have Kieran and 2. If she drank from the well or not?? You know this important decision that was meant to impact the rest of the drinker's life, and was meant even more vital when inquisition revealed Flemerh was Mythal? I literally just replayed that quest and they genuinely make a huge point out of this decision being life altering. But it's not, is it, if both characters who could've drank show up in the next game but the effects of the well aren't present.

"northern thedas is a blank slate" is such a weird take. What happens in ferelden and orlais (and the free marchés if we bring da2 into it too) absolutely matters to the rest of thedas. These things ricochet upwards. You literally choose who leads orlais, one of (if not The) most powerful and influencial nations in all of thedas. You get to choose the fucking DIVINE. Yeah sure that might not matter in Tevinter, but it matters everywhere else?? The rest of northern thedas follows the chantry even if they might not be as horny for it as the south????

And that's only speaking of inquisition choices. I already made a post somewhere about how very few of the decision input on the keep mattered in dai and how filling the keep often felt pretty pointless because of that. But at least the gender of the hof and who they romanced came up, and the leader of ferelden came up however briefly and flawed.

Honestly dragon age was never actually good at bringing up and taking into account old choices. Da2 had a good excuse for it (set in a completely different country whilst the choices the hof made were central to ferelden only, and hawke being just Some Guy who wouldn't get involved in a lot of influencial stuff the hof had a hand in. And even THEN there's plenty of background dialogue about ferelden that does mention it.) Dai does have a lot of nods to a few things; the ruler of ferelden shows up in in hushed whispers, or if you kept Alistair/recruited loghain they show up for here lies the abyss and might even have a discussion with Morrigan with whom they had a CHILD with. If hof romanced leliana she mentions them quite a bit. Morrigan can show up with the full ass child she can have in Dao and that's probably one of the biggest differences the choices you made make. Some other decisions from Dao are referenced; like who rules Orzammar. And as for da2 it's very true that a lot of the decisions made are much harder to reference due to being more interpersonal, so it does make sense to an extent that the decisions are referenced there through simple dialogue (though that dialogue is flawed as hell.) If it doesn't like some of your past choices it'll retcon it, like if you killed leliana in Dao. Or like, for example, just a random example, you got one of the Dao endings where Cullen goes mad, kills mages and runs away. Never mentioned again that one. Weird.

Bioware loves to give you big influencial choices to make you feel important only to turn around the next game and kind of shrug their shoulders as they do the bare minimum with them. And now, don't get me wrong - some of these choices are really hard to integrate. We basically can never go back to Orzammar because its king changes everything. It's too much to take into account and would change what quests and storylines the player experiences.

But then don't fucking write it that way to begin with lol. At least with Dao you can give the benefit of the doubt with things being meant to be part of a single story - but by da2 they knew dragon age was a franchise and inquisition was written and made with the knowledge there would be another game afterwards. They could actually plan things out and figure out if maybe a choice you could make would require too many resources to implement in the next game, and thus just not actually give you the choice in inquisition. Because the divine, for example, makes a HUGE difference. I fully get that it would be extremely difficult to take all three choices into account - reference them but make them not so integral that the story of the game can only happen if one of those was made.

But then don't make us fucking able to choose who the divine is. I'd rather not have as many influencial choices in a game, but have them referenced and have them matter, than... This.

Who you romance. Whether you disbanded the inquisition. And what you think of Solas. Nothing from Dao, nothing from da2, and only this from dai. That's a fucking joke. It's a joke. A spit in the face.

Many of the fans will have replayed the series in anticipation for veilguard, carefully crafted their choices to be their main world state. Especially with the nice little sales you've had during veilguard's promotional period. And now, only now, after they will have done all of that, you spit in their faces and say that none of what they did in the past games mattered. So why should I finish my inquisition replay? Why should I care?

Meanwhile, plenty of events from the books and comics will not only be referenced but be integral for the story. Fuck you for playing the main games, you're stupid for thinking they mattered. Obviously the static stories of our external media is more important. Totally respectful of the fanbase to do that.

[talenlee]

Finding Pokemon That Wear Pants

Pokemon are lil guys. They are in many cases, just lil guys. But there are some Pokemon that exist further on the continuum of ‘a weird lil guy’ than other Pokemon. I’ve said in the past that if you found out your server at a fast food store was a Lucario, your reaction wouldn’t be ‘oh gross there’s an animal back there’ but ‘oh hi there lil guy.’

One of the traits of a lil guy versus an animal, though, is that lil guys do things in human ways – tool use, language, cultural practice, but most importantly of course, is wearing pants. Pants are how you represent a character as having some engagement with a greater society at large, which is pretty weird when you consider the nature of pants being gendered. Yes, it is a way in which we accept the Pokemon as being individuals in society, in that they buy into a gendered form of clothing. Wait, where was I?

Clothes! Clothes clothes clothes, fashion, style, these are important things for the identity of Pokemon. After all, Meowth engages in fashion, you Philistine, and Team Rocket’s Meowth is very high on the Lil Guy O Meter. If we assume a Pokemon needs to wear pants to ascend up into Lil Guy Status, then there’s surely a list of ways to investigate that, thanks to the Bulbapedia page of Costumed Pokemon.

(By this metric, Donald Duck isn’t a lil guy.)

Some Pokemon wear ‘stuff’ as part of their normal look. Particularly, Machoke wears a belt and what looks like booty shorts, which is fun because Machoke and Machamp have no gender dimorphism, which suggests that this beast has enough of a sense of modesty to not want something on their crotch exposed, but for all of the Maches, it’s tits out. Similarly, Mandibuzz has a bone in its … hair? Which is either a really weird thing for it to grow naturally or it’s an expression of some kind of aesthetic. Cubone and Marowak wear a skull, according to their pokedex entries (but the skulls of WHOM, we’re never clear on). And what’s more, there are, no doubt, a lot of Pokemon who wear pants in fanart — and whatever’s going on with Lucario is no doubt going to get edited by enthusiastic artists.

(Considering a regional variant of Lucario that has side pockets turning their thighs-that-look-like-shorts into cargos.)

Here is where we find ourselves with a problem about the assumptions of clothes-ness. The assumption for this sake is that unless we see some indication otherwise that the Pokemon’s component elements can be removed or changed, it doesn’t really ‘count’ as clothes because we can’t, for sure, say that it’s not just part of their body. Both Smeargle and Slowking look like they’re wearing hats but we know one of them it’s explicitly a symbiote and the other, we have no reason to believe it’s not part of its body.

Do we have any place where Pokemon wear clothes that are explicitly and obviously actually clothes, not standardised as part of the Pokemon’s design? Well, there’s a few obvious examples, in the form of the cosplay Pikachus from Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire that lets Pikachu take on the form of things like a Luchador or a Rock Star. Pikachu can wear one of a number of hats, as well, and of course, transition her gender. Which is an odd thing to say, but that is literally what it looks like it’s doing. Continuing away from the Pikachu Privilege space, Pokemon Go brings us the Event Pokemon, which includes Squirtles wearing sunglasses, Pikachus wearing hats (god damnit, there they are again), and honestly pretty cute things like Blisseys in flower crowns, but nobody wearing pants. Jigglypuff, Pichu and Pikachu in Smash Bros don some headgear – caps and bandannas and crowns and bows, those are all accessorising. If we’re looking for signs of a Pokemon wearing pants, so far, all thse avenues leave us stuck looking at only Pikachu, and largely, it’s when Pikachu is doing some kind of a costume.

But hang on, what about skirts? The discerning person’s pant? Well, turns out that a whole range of Pokemon wear skirts in the anime! Serena has a Braxien that wears a skirt, and Dawn’s pokemon don skirts not just once, but thrice – and they’re different skirts!

Skirts, clearly, are more important than pants. After all, Pikachu has worn basically one kind of pants, so far and Buneary has worn an ice dancer skirt, a cheerleader skirt, and a maid skirt, which means that Buneary is three times the man Pikachu can be.

Still, the ever expanding leviathan of Pokemon is relentless and in its growth it eventually picked up a MOBA game, which… exists. Pokemon Unite is a game that allows players to buy skins that put ‘holographic’ clothes on their Pokemon, which I find a particularly novel idea because on the one hand, hey, clothes, on the other hand: why are they holograms. The fact they’re holographic clothes kind of underscores the idea that yeah, okay, sure, we’ll put these things in clothes but they’re not going to be clothes clothes. And they’re honestly, pretty sick! They look cool, and they really ramp up the lil guyness of the Pokemon wearing them!

Mostly though?

They don’t add pants.

Obviously at this point I am down a rabbit hole. I started looking into Pokemon clothes because it was interesting and then that led me to ‘pants’ because I thought that Donald Duck joke upstream was pretty good and that then led me here, and now I’m finding myself wondering just why pants are so rare in these kind of character designs. Across all the Pokemon Unite hologram outfits, I tracked about seventy five that I think count as wearing something like ‘pants’ or a skirt. There are some challenging judgement calls here, though; Blissey, Delphox, Hoopa and Tsareena are all built like their design incorporates a skirt, and their outfits don’t change that skirt design, either putting something above or below that, and I don’t know how to make that judgment call.

There are some truly unhinged choices in these designs, though. Originally this started out as a joke to make a sort of spreadsheet of the kinds of things that you can do with a Pokemon’s design but buckle up because now we’re dealing with something truly crackers. I want you to see these things. I want you, the majority of the people in the world who have not and never will play Pokemon Unite that read this blog, to see the way they decided to implement some of these outfits.

Over 378 costumes, about 73 of them introduce something like pants or a skirt to the Pokemon in question. Of those outfits, there are some truly amazing choices, like Absol asking and answering the question ‘if an Absol wore shorts, it would wear them like this.”

Where Pokemon with ‘skirts’ don’t change them with clothes, amazingly, Lucario and Cinderace, who look like they’re wearing shorts, add on extra elements that integrate those shorts, but also have costumes that change the shorts into other kinds of shorts. Which means that this outfit – well, okay, it’s a hologram we know how the outfit does it, but this outfit is basically painting their legs to fit a different aesthetic. Which I guess makes Cinderace a homestuck?

Special shout out here to Greedent, where taking a shirt and applying it to a pokemon that has otherwise entirely benign design of chest fur, somehow makes that fur look like some truly uncontrolled pubes.

I did also find that there’s a point where Mr Mime in Pokemon Unite can wear one outfit that adds shorts, which is somehow more perverse than not wearing them at all.

Alright, what does this tell us?

Absolutely nothing

But in the process I got to show you this picture of a Slowbro wearing gardening clothes, and the Mamoswine sticking its teeth through its hoodie sleeves made for them.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[loominggaia]

Sorry for the bad picture, it's been a rough day...Got my stitches out today and everything is going well so far! I mean, I look like I got in a knife fight, but...

I just wanted to pop in with some good news:

🎉🎉🎉NO CANCER!🎉🎉🎉

No cancer was detected in my thyroid nodules! However, the thyroid itself was behaving cancerously, so it had to be removed anyway. It would have just kept growing bigger and bigger until it became inoperable and killed me, so no regrets here.

My doctor strongly suspected papillary cancer, but nope, turns out my thyroid was just growing out of control for no reason. She said it's very rare for thyroids to do this without Hashimoto's disease or cancer, and I apparently have neither, so we've concluded that it's just a weird genetic defect. A lot of people in my family have this same defect, including my mom, so I'm not surprised. I'm just so relieved that it wasn't a cancer that could metastasize.

Some other interesting stuff from the report: My thyroid had developed a massive blood supply over the years. It was totally dead, but my body was still fighting to heal it, so it had essentially turned into a softball-sized tumor that was literally sucking the life out of me. The surgery took twice as long because of this. My red blood cells, platelets, and other labs were getting really screwy towards the end there as it worsened. I got my blood drawn again just 5 days after the surgery, and my labs were already back to normal for the first time in years! What a difference!

Also, apparently part of my thyroid was "twisted" and facing the wrong way?? My surgeon just mentioned it because it was bizarre and he'd never seen it before, but yeah...any way you slice it, that thing was totally FUBAR and had to go.

I'm really grateful I was able to get this surgery when I did. Initially the endo doc (who didn't even see me in person) scheduled me for late next year, until I brought my report to the ENT surgeon and he was like "Uh no, this thing is huge and it has to go now". He was able to bump me up in the schedule, and now here we are.

All in all, everything worked out much better than expected. Now I have a long road ahead of me as I get my medication dose figured out, but at least the bloody part is over.

Sorry for the novel, I just want to thank you guys for sticking with me through this and tolerating all the delays. Your kind messages of support helped me get through this harrowing time. Thank you so much for everything. <3

Hopefully there will be no further complications and I'll feel better going forward with that monster out of my neck!

*

Questions/Comments?

Lore Masterpost

Read the Series

[greelin]

like how are you going to sit here and say bisexuality excludes transgender/nonbinary people when there are countless transgender and nonbinary people who identify. as bisexual. Do i just need to explode. am i invisible to you

[deus-ex-mona]

such is the tale of a ✨chronically online hypocrite✨

[kavehater]

“In general I find the idea of being with a man disgusting but I don’t find it disgusting with him”

- spoken by a lesbian

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent game related things .. hrmm...

[no1ryomafan]

I do not bother to check if Getter and Big O ever interacted in SRW because I’m so use to the other mechas I like being in the same game as getter but being so different that they never have any story reasons to have interactions since Getter is only ever allowed to interact with mazinger, OG gundam and any other combiners + it’s all in untranslated hell so I won’t even know wtf was said if there WERE interactions but god damn it I keep rotating a scenario where Roger negotiates to get Ryoma out of jail even though I know for a fact that DIDNT happen despite how many times they used arma and how Z2 actually adapted it fucking correctly for once but it’s just so funny to imagine.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

mordecai is the first funny bitch like spends 90% of his time literally just standing there going "i'm dapressed" to himself while everyone in the vicinity takes potshots and then he's clocking in for the night shift where for the next 9 hours people go "god mordecai would it kill you to act like you're having more fun at the [kills you] factory"

[exopelagic]

okay I severely misjudged spaghetti guy he’s actually just really cool

[zonotrichia-albicollis]

Giant personal vent time

This guy stole somewhere between 3 to 6 MILLION dollars from my grandmother by conning my great aunt into signing over her estate and medical & financial power of attorney to him literally on her death bed

I and my aunt have been working basically a whole second job the last 3 months trying to get together a legal case to go after this guy. And now my grandma wants to drop it. And no one else has standing so what the fuck can we do.

This man has absolutely done this to other ppl before, there is no doubt in my mind. I’ve seen his property records for just what’s publicly available in my county and it’s sketchy as hell. I am never going to get over this but there’s nothing I can do.

Gonna put like a million more thoughts in the tags because I’m losing my fucking mind.

[steakout-05]

ok as an artist i personally find traditional painting to be. really really annoying. like. i do not have the patience for it and i just find it to be really frustrating to set up and actually do and i end up not liking the results. i find that there's little room for mistakes and trying to fix them usually ends up with me making 50 other ones, paints can be so inconsistent and having to rely on availability and certain brands to continue making the paint is really inconvenient, not to mention expensive. spending a bunch of time trying to mix the right shade of paint, only for it to go down a completely different shade of colour and not being able to do anything about it is so frustrating as someone who likes consistency and having things just, y'know, not change colour as soon as it dries. plus, they all use different chemicals and can go off really easily or change textures and i am just not ok with having all my materials having an expiration date like food. lead and graphite pencils just don't do that and they can last for years, they're more reliable. every paint is drastically different and trying to find the right one is not only time consuming but, again, expensive, and i don't even see the point in experimenting when most of my materials end up not even getting used if i don't like using them. plus, i'm just.... really impatient. waiting for paint to dry sucks and is why i much prefer digital or just drawing something because i don't need to wait for anything, it just works. and then when i do want to take my time and work slowly for a better result, it dries too fast. it's kinda hellish trying to balance that time, especially considering how inconsistent paints are.

i like to use guidelines when doing art and i find painting straight onto a canvas to be really tricky because there's a lack of direction for me to actually paint. i'm at a complete loss at what to do when i pick up a brush because i can't map it out first without risking screwing up the paint. there's just so many things to keep track of and so much wet paint to avoid and i just do not have the mind for it. putting colours on a canvas and praying that it works just isn't it for me and requires a discipline that i just don't wanna involve myself with. painting is also just like... really exhausting and kinda painful. i got some pretty bad back issues and my arms tire and get sore easily and quickly when i'm standing in front of a canvas. it's a really physical activity for me and i just don't find something to be very fun to do at all when it's physically hurting me. i know drawing on a canvas has this issue too, which is why i prefer sketchbooks. sitting down and drawing something that doesn't break my entire spine every time i do it is much more preferrable than questioning if i should go to the doctor every time i make a brushstroke, lol

that's not to say that there's nothing i like about painting though! i can paint simple little things, and i like doing that. i like mixing colours with a palette knife and i find it fun and even a little relaxing. i painted some cute little chibi cardboard cutouts of the mario brothers one time and i found that to be really fun and i think i'd like to do that again! but apart from that, i just do not have the patience for it. i love the look of traditional paintings and i find many to be really beautiful, but i could never get into actually doing it myself because i hate the process. i'm content with just sketching and doing digital stuff because that's more fun to me and less stressful of a process to do. it's fun, it allows for more mistakes, it's easier to build up layers of shading and lines, not to mention using building up a figure with guidelines is super helpful with visualising what i want it to look like, and i can just erase something if i don't want it there or want to change something. it just makes sense to me.

tl;dr i dont like painting because it's inconsistent, expensive, time-consuming, directionless, frustrating and it makes my back hurt really bad. i'll just stick to drawing stuff :)

[sunriseovergotham]

kindof funny to imagine my pre-existing ocs being in wbg... fucking dean pryor playing wbg. what a thought. WOULD HIS MOTHER BE HIS PRIZE? OR HIS DAD? oh if it was his dad he wouldnt even need the fourth challenge he'd kill that man on his own. no actually probably someone from his time working for blu....... interesting thought. oh no do NOT give pryor free access to time travel he'd immediately try to monopolize it. and also get fucking rich. oh my god he could fuck over so many people from his past... MAN. dont give the worst guy ever access to time travel its going to go disastrously. MAN.

[ow-old-men]

wouldn't it be so cool if when the pve for ow2 comes out the story and writing of it all is so horrendously bad that it has a reaction effect within the fandom that kickstarts people making their own versions of the game's story and soon there's fan comics that are 20x better than anything bl*zzard could dream of

I know this is somewhat a joke question, and yes- on the face of it, it would be

But in reality, that would not be the reaction to canon content being bad. Spite can only support you for so long - and more importantly, people are already doing just that; creating. If PvE comes out and is horrendously bad, people will be disappointed, they’ll be angry, they’ll post about how they feared this but had dared to hope, I’ll make a very big and funny and time consuming post writing a fake job application to the blizzard writers or some dumb shit like that. And then some of us will leave and some will stick around and make the same shit posts and drawings and what have you not

It’s all already there, you don’t have to punish yourself waiting around for something you don’t want

So sorry for being overly sincere, but if you want fandom to thrive, you shouldn’t sit around and wait for canon to write itself off for good, you should go out and look for the amazing stuff people are already putting out. Hell, you should make your own! Community and enthusiasm and love will always make better stuff than bitterness

[dirt-str1der]

I literally had a dream about reading the worst fan fiction like fucking ever kiryu was just randomly a yandere and nishiki was trying his best to survive also kiryu turned into a dragon (deez nuts) halfway and let nishiki kill him for being a bad boy but he was so upset about having to kill his bro that he just lay in the corpse for a bit and thats when i decided to stop reading and i literally opened tumblr in my dream to complain about how bad it was like the writing went back and forth from being terrible to incredible and i found myself enjoying some parts and despising others. I skipped the first few chapters so i had to tab back out and read the summary like why are they in a beach resort and the summary didnt just tell me nothing but it was also double spaced between each line and very fucking irritating and while reading it i kept thinking this is extremely ooc and boring like they would not fucking say that

[justinefrischmanngf]

it is EMBARRASSING how much i lose my mind when people notice things about me