#no i am NOT giving y'all context for this

[cultural-marxism-official]

y'all smoking that same crack the writers were on, if you genuinely feel that veilguard has the same dense, rich cultural atmosphere as any of the previous DA games(i love all of them, 2 is my favorite) you are out of your mind, it couldn't compare in a million years

if even half of your explanations would be apparent in the game, it would still be bad and shallow as a puddle. solas spent 10 years rallying elves to his cause? are they in the room right now? where they at?

rook(just some guy) and his team can fight hypermutated darkspawn the entire game, stand in giant blight pustules raining taint all over them and nobody gets infected? the entire time? nobody gets a single scratch from a single darkspawn the whole game? because that's all it would take, remember? rook, just a mortal person with no supernatural powers, fights two blighted dragons a hundred times their size and wins without a single scratch?

it's not because "they're just that good" nobody is, not even the best wardens are. it's because the writing doesn't take the taint seriously as a threat and the script says you are the main character and that you win

how's that supposed to be in any way believable? how am i supposed to give any poor writing choice the benefit of doubt of a greater context given that? or the fact that minrathous, that's got a magic floating defense citadel, one of the strongest military forces in thedas and chock full of powerful blood mages can't fight off one dragon, without rook....who's...just some person with good fighting skills. who's never faced anything close to a blighted dragon. they're the only one who can save the day? why? why was literally nobody else in all of the tevinter empire doing anything to that dragon?

because the script says so. why does bellara trust us instantly, not because it's good, deep character writing, it's because the script says so, why is rook never in any actual danger from being blighted? because the script says so

a really cool part about dragon age veilguard is the first scene where you meet bellara, especially if you're a shadowdragon mage and you have neve with you

so to set the scene: bellara, the dalish elf who's devoted her life to the conservation, discovery and protection of her people's lost and ancient history, meets two strangers, two tevinter mages, in sacred arlathan. They tell her, hey your gods are back in the world but also they suck and we gotta kill them, and instead of telling them "fuck off you vile enslaving shem, you defile this land with your presence" like most normal dalish, not only does she instantly believe them that her gods are bad for some reason, they're back among the people and need to be stopped, she also happily starts telling them all kinds of secrets and valuable knowledge about ancient elven magic and is even so kind to, without question, take them on a grand tour of this very historically important and sacred ruin in arlathan to find a truly priceless artifact, a one of a kind archive of ancient elven knowledge thought lost forever, because really, what could these unknown tevinter mages possible want with that!

...

are these writers smoking crack?? is that it? theyre smoking crack??

[flibbertygigget]

denis villeneuve get to the sexy ninja nuns challenge

[mobius-m-mobius]

TenSimm + they're really doing this now huh

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

honestly it's been really healing being back to actively contributing things and writing out thoughts on tumblr the last week or so, because while twitter tends to be easier for me to write out Thoughts on without getting overwhelmed, the environment in the twitter fandom circles i'm interested in is not only infested with antis but cliqueish in a way that is caustic to the fucking soul if you try to express a thought that's more than three sentences long--a hundred times over if you're autistic in slightly the wrong way--and it's incredibly reassuring to come back to an environment where the very kindest and most inclusive people toward you are not clearly thinking the r-slur the entire time they interact with you lmao

[cyclorose]

ratt and I 😇

@rattinahatt hey.

[starbuck]

[tea-stained]

more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more secco more ARAKI FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY I NEED MORE INFORMATION ON THIS SCRUNKY ITTY BITTY BIG FUCKED UP THICC LITTLE GUY ARAKI I'M BEGGING CRYING SOBBING I NEED IT I NEED MORE PLEASE. GIVE ME MORE TO WORK WITH HERE I WILL DIE LIKE A PLANT ON A DESERT WITH NO WATER NO NUTRITION GIVE ME MORE SECCO I NEED TO FEED MY HCS I NEED VALIDATION ARAKI GIVE ME VALIDATION

[habitual-creatures]

[crossbackpoke-check]

nosy anon again making a return because i think what my brain did was read that i helped find some kind of writing and then did not fully process what the writing was?? but upon rereading i am very intrigued if you ever get the urge to share i will be all eyes/ears/senses required to enjoy things!!

I GET TO DO WIP WEDNESDAYYYYYY!!! the writing exists mostly in the form of a tag (fantastic! 'verse) and also a thirty-two page doc of snippets and planning, so the sense you will be using most is imagination:

don't think i have ever actually formally written out anything about fantastic! 'verse but! the tl;dr of it is that it's a semi-college au: joel is still a hockey player for the lv phantoms, but morgan is a college student-athlete. it's incredibly relevant to the plot that joel falls in love with morgan in the check-out line of a wegman's, lies a little bit, and ends up going back to get his degree.

most of it is just good fun about college kids growing up, but i think there's a lot of parallels between making your way through a development system where traditional "success" isn't always guaranteed (ahl -> nhl, completion of higher education -> pursuit of a career) because that development system isn't always designed for you to "succeed" or have opportunities. heavy quotation marks around success because part of that struggle is learning what you want in life and how you define success. are your dreams achievable? are they still the same dreams you always used to have? it's infinite branching universes of would you still love me if i was a worm (ahl player forever) (a college dropout) (a college graduate) (older) (realizing the fallibility of your body) (uncertain of the future) (human).

silly little snippet:

[kaurwreck]

also, beloved death note anon(s), y'all are my favorite; I love, love answering questions and hypotheticals about law and governance in fiction. even before law school, I was reading books on how federal law might apply to American comic book superheroes.

[imagination-confusion]

You know what would be funny? Making a hard magic system for these dumb xenophobic cats.

Wouldn't that be silly?

It'd be so silly. The silliest. Absolutely goofiness haha!

[sonicstorybook]

SATBK Origintober 3

In Chretien de Troyes' Perceval (The Story of the Grail), Percival had a very sheltered upbringing in the Waste Forest where (s)he was raised by his/her widowed mother.

Note: Pronouns were he/him but since this is SatBK-themed and Percival uses she/her, changed them to fit.

It was in the season when trees flower, shrubs leaf out, meadows grow green, and birds in their own tongue sing sweetly in the mornings, and everything is aflame with joy, that the daughter of the widow lady of the deep Waste Forest arose. Then effortlessly she placed the saddle upon her hunter [horse] and, taking three javelins [spears], left her mother's manor. She thought that she would go to see some harrowers* in her mother's service, who were harrowing her oats with twelve oxen and six harrows.

*Harrowers are, literally, those who 'harrow.' A harrow is this farm tool that is like a lot of spike/"teeth" on a big heavy frame used to break up and even off plowed ground. While this is a more specialized part of farm work, in this context, we can interpret harrowers to be field hands/farmers. Basically, Percival's mom hired these guys to tend to her land.

[orcelito]

yea Ok i dont think im gonna b able to get the chapter out tonight. probably too tired to edit. but im gonna try to finish writing so that i can Hopefully finish editing so i can post b4 work tomorrow

we'll see! big things happening this chapter

a sneak peak bc i find this moment funny & it is Hilariously out of context:

now, what's vash fucking doing? ur gonna have to find out later lol

[verystressedcollegestudent]

if there's one thing i hate more than slackers in group projects its goddamn hypocrites

[prokopetz]

I'm not gonna claim that most Tumblr polls are anything like rigorously structured, but I've seen a lot of folks rather smugly asserting that having a "not applicable" option that ends up dominating all other responses is evidence that the person who created the poll is incompetent, and y'all: under the specific circumstances in which these polls are constructed and distributed, that outcome is evidence of good poll design, not bad poll design. Yes, even when the "not applicable" responses outnumber all other responses ten to one. There are several reasons for that:

At the time of this posting, Tumblr polls have no "see response" button. The only ways to see a poll's distribution of responses are to wait for the poll to conclude, or to respond yourself – and not only are people on social media typically curious and impatient, many of them also know that there's no way they'll remember to check back later once the poll has concluded, so in practice, their opportunity to see the results is now or never. Adding a little note to the poll insisting that people who aren't part of the targeted demographic should refrain from voting isn't necessarily going to restrain that impulse. Indeed, it may end up encouraging folks who otherwise wouldn't have picked a random result-revealing response to do so, because fuck you, don't tell me what to do.

Many respondents genuinely won't realise they're not part of the targeted demographic until after they've voted. It doesn't matter how much text you add to contextualise the poll, because they'll read the poll first, and if they read the accompanying text at all, it's only after they've responded. Heck, a lot of folks don't even bother to read the question before responding to a poll; they just start going down the options and reflexively click the first one that seems like it might apply to them, then go back and read what was actually being asked (and complain in the notes if it turns out that they misunderstood). Even a well-meaning person can only comply with instructions they've actually read; for those folks, clicking the "not applicable" option is what compliance looks like.

Even folks who do fit your poll's targeted demographic can fall prey to the imp of the perverse. Giving the most accurate response rather than the most entertaining one can be a real struggle for a lot of folks; in scientific analysis of polling data, this is known as the "mischievous responder bias". In an informal setting like Tumblr, it's reasonable to suppose that the mischievous responder effect might be exaggerated compared to polls conducted in more formal contexts, and a well-designed poll is going to take that into account. A humorous "not applicable" option provides an escape by affording folks the freedom to screw around with the knowledge that they're not polluting useful data by doing so; in practice, the "I am a toaster" option is a mischievous response filter.

What this adds up to is that a poll where 90% of the responses hit the "not applicable" button is more likely to have yielded useful data than a poll with a narrow target audience where some unknown percentage of the responses represent folks not reading the instructions, clicking random options to see the results, and/or taking the piss.

[pixelateddragonet]

Eeeeeeeee!