#not really but don't tell the class

[lurkingshan]

A quick summary of how the class disparity themes in Peaceful Property ultimately landed in the finale:

We got confirmation that Grandpa was a great guy who built a giant real estate empire purely through grit and hard work and never did anything wrong in his life

Any harm that came to people and communities because of the company was indeed the result of Home’s uniquely evil aunt and uncle who acted without his or his grandpa’s knowledge

The plot culminated in a poor character once again sacrificing himself to save the rich kid

As expected, Peach gave up his dream job to stay for Home even though there was no logical reason they couldn’t do their project in Chiang Mai (he has never been able to hear the ghosts so that attempt to say it was because of dialects was extra sloppy)

Instead of actually training properly as a chef again like Peach wanted, he had a chefs table he has in no way earned handed to him by his rich friend, ultimately ending the show with a message that capitalism is benevolent and is what made their happy ending possible

Speaking of, the only happy ending Kan and Suradech got was the honor of continuing to be Home’s employees. That Home did not even do anything for Kan’s community after everything she suffered is definitely one of the biggest WTFs in this show.

And on that note--Home got a huge inheritance and appears to have used zero of it to address the harm his family did

The only thing I have to say about it at this point is:

[black-and-yellow]

How much would it cost to see post lov Loudspeaker with all of his scars? I have shiny rocks and seashells

Doesn't take much to convince me to draw Loudspeaker. But give me your coolest rock.

[khattikeri]

i think the whole "jin guangyao cares more for his male best friend's life than for those of his own wife and son" thing, beyond being fun xiyao fuel, has a lot of interesting implications in the way jin guangyao latches onto lan xichen as an ideal to aspire to.

ultimately jin guangyao liked lan xichen's status and power more than he cared for qin su, a woman who sincerely loved him and fought her parents to be with him even when he had no real status or backing, and jin rusong*, who couldn't have been more than four when he was murdered for politics' sake.

[thejadearia]

Speaking of Shimazaki, I learned a lot about myself this week making these terrible memes so I could drop them in the discord chat as I made my friends watch MP100. What I learned was, I have a terrible sense of humor (actually I already knew that, I just didn't realize it was this bad) and that the only thing I enjoy more than watching Shimazaki kick ass, is Shimazaki getting his ass kicked. (I'll have more of these for next week when we get to Serizawa's stuff! Sorry!)

[uncanny-tranny]

I know this is a very unoriginal observation (much like any other), but I'm finally reading The Great Gatsby, and even I wouldn't describe men the way Nick does.

[novella-november]

Is this fanfic friendly? I feel like an outlier.

I guess this is my sign it's time to throw together a FAQ post to link to lol.

Yes, every event for this blog is fanfic friendly :D

Though as I mentioned on my Ominous October post, for events that include multiple short stories, I encourage everyone to flex their creativity and take one of their planned short story fanfics, and at least *attempt* to turn one of them into something entirely original; rebuilding a character and story from the ground up to stand on its own two legs is no easy feat, and that is what makes it so fun!

It really gets your creative gears turning, to make an "au of an existing material" to be something entirely original, and you can be pleasantly surprised about the things you come up with!

As a few people say, its not just a matter of "filing the serial numbers off" -- you have to add in just as much *or more* as what you take out when you are turning a fanfiction into something that is original and completely divorced from its original source material / inspiration, and that is a hard, but very rewarding challenge!

Obviously, this is not a requirement (there's no hard requirements for any of the challenges, other than no cheating, including no using AI),

but if you would like an extra challenge for the short story events and you're planning on doing entirely fan-fiction, I highly recommend trying it out at least once, and seeing where it leads you--

you may find yourself pleasantly surprised by what you find down that rabbit hole!

[ravencromwell]

The poem evokes human greatness and human vulnerability. People are “godlike” in their courage and skill, but even the greatest mortals fall and clutch the dust between their bloody fingers. The beautiful word minunthadios , “short-lived,” is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us. We die too soon, and there is no adequate recompense for the terrible, inevitable loss of life. Yet through poetry, the words, actions, and feelings of some long-ago brief lives may be remembered even three thousand years later.

--Emily Wilson's introduction to the Iliad

[nereb-and-dungalef]

I keep drinking coffee thinking it's gonna make me Productive and then instead of doing the work I actually have to do I just compulsively make spreadsheets :(

[novelconcepts]

the truly problematic thing about having insanely vivid dreams just about every night--and i mean the kind of vivid where you remember details days or even weeks later, like it's just another normal-ass memory--is that you wind up losing track on an emotional level of what's real. like. i know that was a dream. obviously it was a dream. but some part of my brain misses it like it really happened. i am painfully, achingly nostalgic for people i've never met, places i've never been, shit that literally could not ever happen--but i feel as though i remember. which is just the most unhinged thing, right? like, i remember going on a run that took me over a fence into Disneyland, and i remember having to take a shortcut through a Chinese restaurant, but it was fine, because Erika Ishii was there, and they'd done this before, so no worries. right? no! obviously not! why do i remember this with such visceral clarity three weeks later?

oh, what's your favorite episode of this TV show? the one i dreamt. yeah, don't worry about it, it didn't make coherent sense, but it was in the feelings, right? my ship had the best fucking scene. no, of course i can't explain it to you, that's madness. it involved a rocking chair. don't worry about it. it's fine. it's super important i don't accidentally reference this in a fic someday, though.

this shit is deranged, dude. missing people who are quite literally my own brain's invention with an actor's face. missing places that are a meld of a movie i saw once, my childhood bedroom, the second floor of my high school, and inter-dimensional space. like. no! no, this shouldn't be a thing! is, though. the clarity of it. just fucking bananas. this has been happening to me my whole goddamn life.

[skeletoninthemelonland]

cw // possible eyestrain

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Sound Sensitivity

[essektheylyss]

Okay I did get distracted by a grade being posted and I am about to be both a nerd and a millennial but god ngl I do hate classes where you get full points on all your assignments but don't actually get any actual feedback on them. What is the point. If it's a class where everyone gets passing grades for making the effort but you get actual feedback and comments, that's great! But I would genuinely rather get points docked and get extensive comments on what I did well and what needed improvement and why than this.

[theguardianace]

man. it hasn't even been a full half day of this event being out and im already drafting a fic for it. what an absolute RIDE thsi has been.

[chemblrish]

My thesis supervisor has a reputation of being very strict and demanding - which he definitely is at first, but he softens a little when he sees someone's serious about uni and that means most students don't get to witness that, so it's always fun telling somebody who my TS is and then watching this absolutely horrified expression on their face lol

[vv-ispy]

on one hand I totally understand tropes are popular but on the other hand I think Amos is a lot more compelling as a middle aged woman trying to figure out her life after a loveless relationship than a mother figure ya know

[batsplat]

casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that

oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...

yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?

anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:

like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual

uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think

[steakout-05]

something that had always been really frustrating for me when i was still in math classes in school was trying to watch the teacher actually work the problem out on the board and still not understanding wtf was happening. for some context, i heavily suspect that i have some form of dyscalculia because math and numbers literally do not compute properly in my brain. it'd be too long to explain the full extent of my possible dyscalculia here but math literally does the mental equivalent of maxing out the CPU power and memory of a computer to the point where it freezes and lags to my brain.

math class was always stressful for me because no matter what i did and how much progress i made, there was always a lack of understanding i had when it came to trying to work any math problem out long term and remembering anything. it felt like there was always something i was missing, so when the time came for the teacher to explain and go through a math problem step-by-step on the whiteboard, i made sure i paid as much attention to it as humanly possible as child-to-teenager me could muster and even then i still did not understand how the fuck they solved it, all because of one thing: the teacher pulling a random number completely out of their ass that happened to be the key to solving the problem.

like. i don't think i can illustrate how frustrating and isolating this was to experience with words alone. here i was, paying as much attention as i physically could, trying my damned hardest to memorise each individual step and calculation in order to understand how to get from point A to point B. everything made perfect sense up until the teacher suddenly stops for a second and writes a seemingly completely unrelated number there with no context as to why it's there in the first place, and then, in that singular moment, everything immediately comes crumbling down and i'm left completely confused. and somehow, everyone else around me perfectly understands it except me. like. imagine sitting there, giving the teacher all the attention you possibly could, literally watching and studying their hand movements just to understand every single step, only to be even more confused than your classmates, who you're pretty sure were half-asleep during the explanation, who also say they understand how the teacher came to that conclusion. what. the actual fuck.

when i try to explain how infinitely confusing and irritating this was for me, i'm reminded of a quote from that video Patricia Taxxon made about DHMIS: "The rug is pulled again ... There was never any hope of following the thread, understanding is impossible.". even when i was literally trying my best to possibly follow anything that was happening, the rug still gets pulled out from under my feet and i'm sent all the way back to square one of not understanding a single thing and being confused again. all because the teacher didn't explicitly explain how they got that random number that was apparently singlehandedly necessary for solving the equation and where they got it from, apart from that place being from literally fucking nowhere.

it's really no wonder that i eventually stopped giving a shit about paying attention in math class, because even when i was, it was still daunting and incomprehensible as always. why bother trying anymore when trying still gets you nowhere? trying to ask the teacher where they got that number from was an impossible to understand task as well, as their either snapped back with a "well you should have been paying attention" (even though i WAS but whatever) or they do explain that they added the first two numbers from the equation together or something, but now i'm wondering why they didn't just explain that in the first place like they did with everything else instead of seemingly just assuming everyone would know to do that.

by the way, if i had to give an estimate, my math ability is probably still at like. a 5th grader's level at best. so uh. yeah it's not good. still, it is kinda funny to me though, not only because i do find a bit of humour in the situation, but also because some people are often so quick to judge someone's intelligence purely based on their mathematical abilities alone. like. the idea of someone calling me dumb for still needing to do addition with my fingers despite the fact that my reading and language levels are considered above average is really funny to me lmaooo