#observe the variety

[card-queen]

Favourite Female Characters Poll

Wahoo! Tagged twice here. Once by @dithorba and once by @cool-mint

Rules: make a poll of your favorite female characters (no limits - as many or as little as you want) and see which your followers like the most! 

I've picked 10 because it's a nice round number, but I probably could have easily gone to 50!

Tagging @vellatra @reneethegreatandpowerful @merwetketet @teresashiho and @noisette-tornade

[wizardsix]

I can't remember who said this but there was this one dev who said that when making romanceable characters they have to be attractive in some way (personality, looks, not too morally fucked up etc). and since I read that, the statement hasn't left my mind and I'm very aware now of whenever outside influence and modern discourse get to me or other writers. like just yesterday I found myself rewriting a scene to be more "comfortable" to witness, even though the point was to be emotionally charged and face a difficult topic the character had been actively lying about. but some things can't be glossed over. sometimes it's good when media grabs you by the shoulders and makes you face horrible shit. it's good when media makes you uncomfortable even if it's coming from a ~romanceable companion~. that means it's working. if you remain comfortable forever you learn nothing.

I bring this up bc the veilguard companions are the perfect example and victims of the "romanceable characters need to be attractive" mindset. they don't have ugly sides, they don't fight with each other--and I mean really fight--they don't have controversial opinions or do problematic things. they don't ever question your authority over their lives and why you're the guy in charge. they are nice and perfect and their problems aren't really that serious and can be fixed by simply having a therapy session w rook (bc being possessed or gaining new magic isn't a big deal in a world where previously such events are Very distressing and hard to control). they are further proof that trying too hard to make something attractive has the complete opposite effect if your brain isn't the size of a pebble.

it's overall very frustrating that big game developers continue to be so spineless and I'm not giving anyone a pass for shallow writing, especially from a franchise that is known to have complex characters. none of this is impressive after the first three dragon age games, which were well loved and dissected and debated for years after their release. that isn't to say these games don't have kind characters, having that balance is why I personally like dark fantasy and liked what the dragon age games offered (whenever the writing was good..). it's not dark for the sake of being dark (see grimdark), there's a reason why these things are happening, and in this world no one is completely innocent even if they have good intentions. most people like when their characters aren't always kind or agreeable, bc it's extremely rewarding to finally find that middle ground (of course I have to bring up larian, who made bg3 and proved just how much people appreciate flawed characters, see astarion). conflict is the driving force of a story, no matter what it is. even the most sickeningly sweet cozy slice of life story will have some kind of conflict. it's unavoidable. that's life. taking that away is setting yourself up for failure and all that remains is a boring story full of boring people. no one cares about characters who have their lives together.

(the post is technically over but I wanted to put some final thoughts under the cut bc this got longer than I meant)

I want to go back to the statement real quick... like i do agree, it's true as writers we'll subconsciously (or consciously if you're insecure) try to make our characters appealing, but this is the common trap writers fall into by giving a shit about what others think and want from Their work (which btw I fully believe in writing what you want even if it's "bad" because something with genuine soul will never be as bad as soulless cashgrabs). romanceable characters can and should be as flawed as you'd make any other character, bc trust me there's an audience for everything. even a random npc with two lines will be attractive to someone.

the pressure of an imaginary audience is what pushes writers into a corner and prevents writers from writing and exploring what They want. it's the writer's story first, not the audience's. I think the romanceable companion trap can be easily avoided if writers just 1) grow a bit of a backbone and 2) ask themselves if this is even a necessary or insightful mechanic that will help develop a character further. ask themselves if this character even has the capacity to handle a romantic relationship bc everything else is subjective and it's impossible to appeal to everyone (which apparently this is a controversial take). I won't sit here and pretend that I don't appreciate a good romance, but sometimes all someone really needs is a friend.

obsidian is a good example of self aware devs. they tried to do romance for pillars of eternity 2 bc of fan demand, and it didn't work very well. now for avowed, they didn't explore romance bc they know it's not their strong suit and don't feel it's necessary for this story, instead that time and effort went to developing the characters in other meaningful ways. I have nothing but respect for such a decision bc they know what they want from their story instead of lying and trying to be everything at once. less is more as they say.

[melmac78]

I have more trees, but they’re all over the place so here’s 10.

Trees are from Slaton, Brownfield, Lamesa, San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

I’m happy to explain any tree… just ask.

FTR, the light pole decoration is standard in many towns in West Texas. You can tell how old they are based on lights at night. (Older they are, the more mismatched the lights.)

•••••

Just an fyi - I haven’t forgotten my story.

Work has been very busy and I’m trying to finish up Mom’s coaster tomorrow. (Thankfully no colors so it should cure by the time I need it, but I have another gift for her on top of this one she knows about).

But I’m doing a heck of a lot better than this time last week.

[lucalicatteart]

A few little sketches of some possible school uniforms for mage schools/learning centers for magic/etc. :0c Though because Nanyevimi is so scattered and disconnected, it'd actually vary much more by region (like not everywhere would have a cultural concept of what a suit jacket or neck tie looks like lol), so it's probably unrealistic for so many of them to follow too many traditional Uniform Conventions from cultures in our world, etc. But, still, fun to mess around with designs, and think about which would be most fun to wear/what school you'd go to just based off the clothing lol~

[straycalamities]

i wanna be a horror artist i wanna be a weirdcore artist i wanna be a character artist i wanna do instimate scenes between characters i wanna emulate lisa frank or rainbow brite or the last unicorn i wanna emulate 90s anime i wanna evoke '00s numetal i wanna evoke '10s sadboy music i wanna evoke catchy vocaloid music w disturbing lyrics i wanna be like j-horror i wanna make yaoi i wanna do surrealism i wanna do abstract i wanna do cartoony i wanna do anime/manga i wanna do illustrations i wanna do comics i wanna do animation i wanna stick to askblogs i wanna express every part of me y_y

[flowerbloom-arts]

Some low-effort doodles because I've been thinking about Mymble Jr alot and just how much they watered her down in the 90s series. So I tried 'fixing' some scenes to make her atleast more expressive.

She and the Inspector would've been such a fun relationship if they just let them be themselves like in the comics (and books in Mymble's case), just, I dunno, they made her distinctly boring while they made the Inspector just a little extra silly and I think that's deeply unfair to Mymble. This is especially upsetting when they never shared the same panel in the comics besides 2 of them, and in one Mymble Jr is just standing there while Moomintroll does the talking.

[abyssmita]

Why do so many men like women who have self esteem issues? And somehow their ego gets hurt when a woman is confident in herself? Is it the need to be "protective" or feeling "superior"? Or is it their need of having someone constanty seek their validation, hence projecting themselves onto women?

Wanting to always coddle someone and tell them they're beautiful or they deserve everything, but system malfunctioning after finding someone who is already aware of it, kinda fucked up, don't you think?

[orcelito]

I just think there should be more trans top Vash in the world. And I can Do My Part to bring some about.

[acr3ss-the-cosmos]

The reason my Y.ukong is 6'1" is to compensate for the fact that most of my muses are short (but also because she deserves to be tall asjdhshaj)

[subconsciousmysteries]

a lot of people overtype the 479 tritype because they have never done psychedelics or been in psychedelic culture where the actual 479s reside. its so obvious how many of yall in typology havent lived and that especially includes doing psychedelics which will open your eyes to so much.

[denimbex1986]

'Pre-release expectations were already “stratospheric”, but the unlikely pairing of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” around the world has “helped fuel the biggest collective weekend at the box office since the pandemic”, said Rebecca Rubin in Variety – music to the ears of their respective film studios, Warner Bros. Discovery and Universal, and a potential lifeline for beleaguered cinema chains.

The “Barbenheimer” cultural craze, which began as a meme on the internet, stoked US sales of $82.4m for the biopic about “the father of the atomic bomb”, while Barbie pulled in $162m. Warner Bros. reckons that’s just the start, observing: “This doll will indeed have long long legs.” Shares in AMC Entertainment soared, said Anita Ramaswamy on Reuters Breakingviews as record-breaking sales suggested that the US cinema chain would survive.

On this side of the Atlantic, both Vue and Odeon reported a “booking frenzy”, said Dominic Walsh in The Times. A remarkable 23% of Vue’s customers bought tickets for both movies at the same time. The two films took £30m at the box office in their opening weekend in Britain, making it the most successful weekend for British cinemas since 2019.

With the verdicts now in, here’s what the film critics said about the blockbuster double act…

Barbie review **** “Anthropologists believe there may be tribes living in the farthest reaches of the Amazon” who missed the marketing campaign for Greta Gerwig’s $145m, Mattel-sponsored Barbie movie, but the rest of us had our eyeballs melted by it for weeks, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. So it’s an “unexpected pleasure” to report that it’s not the “blunt-force cash grab many of us feared. In fact, it’s deeply bizarre, conceptually slippery and often roar-out-loud hilarious.”

Margot Robbie is perfectly cast as “Stereotypical Barbie”, a “habitually smiley creature” whose life in Barbieland (a fantasy world in which multiple different Barbies hold sway) is disrupted when she finds herself “haunted by thoughts of sadness, anxiety and death”, said Mark Kermode in The Observer. “Worse still, she develops flat feet and (whisper it!) cellulite – two horsemen of the Barbie apocalypse.” A visit to Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie” (“She was played with too hard”) reveals that a wormhole has opened between Barbieland and the real world. So our heroine must venture there, accompanied by Ken (Ryan Gosling), who learns that the real world is dominated by something called “The Patriarchy”, which, having always been in thrall to Barbie, he rather likes. It all adds up to a “riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable”.

I saw the film with my 20-year-old daughter who loved it, said Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. Me, not so much. “My main criticism, actually, has nothing to do with the subject matter.” Barbie or no Barbie, it’s just not a very good film. It is uneven and disjointed, and “deeply anti-man”. Every male character is “an idiot, a bigot or a sad, rather pathetic loser”, and women’s liberation is framed “not as a movement based on achieving equality between the sexes, but as a cultural revenge vehicle”.

Seeking to both satirise and celebrate Barbie, the film falls into what one critic has called the “reflexivity trap”, said Adrian Horton in The Guardian: the idea that acknowledging a fault absolves you of that fault. So it sends up Mattel, but Mattel will profit very nicely from it. The result is a film that, for all its buoyancy and fun, “feels stuck in a loop of intense self-awareness”.

Oppenheimer review **** “Oppenheimer” is billed “as a biopic of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. “But ‘biopic’ seems too small a word to contain the ambition and scope of Christopher Nolan’s formidable if occasionally unwieldy” film about the so-called “father of the atomic bomb”. Although this “dense and intricate period piece” weaves together “courtroom drama, romantic liaisons, laboratory epiphanies and lecture hall personality cults”, it is perhaps most of all a “monster movie”. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is “an atomic-age Frankenstein, a man captivated by the boundless possibilities of science” who realises too late that his creation has a limitless capacity for destruction. “Murphy’s far-seeing ice-chip eyes have never been put to better use.”

Jumping between several timelines, the film follows “Oppie” from the 1920s and into old age, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. And though its all-star cast is distracting (Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh and others pop up), it builds into a “brilliant” drama about “genius, hubris and error”.

It wasn’t the “instant masterpiece” I was hoping for, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. The script feels “overpolished”; and the “coda that follows the Trinity test explosion and the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a definite slog”. It’s also a shame that female characters are so peripheral, said Radhika Seth in Vogue. Oppenheimer’s wife (Emily Blunt) is a “lipsticked blur”; and we learn virtually nothing about his lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) other than that she’s “emotionally turbulent” and hates flowers. The women are a bit “one-dimensional”, said Christina Newland in The i Paper. There’s also a lot of “clanging” historical name-dropping (“What’s this place called? Los Alamos”, etc.). But the film survives its flaws, which “is testament to the fascinating material and the might of its performances”.'

[melonymint753]

still haunted that Supergiant is making a game with Melinoë, the Goddess of Being Half-Half, and didn't even have the guts to give her a full glowing arm. There were *fan* designs that gave her two-toned skin, but the devs can't even give her full spectral arm, let alone a matched leg? what??

[sincerelyyellingback]

I think your area might just be in a bug deficit. I live in Ohio, and there's been no shortage of bugs here. The types of bugs I see the most pf from one year to the next vary greatly, but that's always been the case. I would say that overall, we still have at least as many total bugs every year as we've ever had in my lifetime.

I think one of the absolute most frustrating things for me personally about the current climate crisis / late stage capitalism hell is that ontop of people just outright denying it and acting like the rising temperatures are normal- there’s been like. A VERY noticeable decline in the amount of insects yearly. As someone who goes out of my way to see bugs, every single year for the past decade there has been a sharp decline in bugs. What used to be fun filled summer months running around, catching grasshoppers and petting caterpillars… there’s nothing. I’ve seen one grasshopper this year. I’ve not seen a single caterpillar! It’s currently the ant nuptial flight season in my area and I’ve seen 0 winged ants. They used to all but infest my home during flight season

I remember as a kid, I used to excitedly find ladybug larvae, and I’d relocate them to plants covered in aphids. But I’ve seen one ladybug in the past 5 years, and 0 larvae. I’ve not even seen any aphids. It’s so tangible, it’s so noticeable to me as someone who considered this my absolute favourite season to do my favourite activity in. And I know if the bugs are dying off, other things that eat those bugs are to.

And the absolute worst part? When I tell people about this, the average reaction is ‘good!’. A lot of people will express joy over there being less bugs in the world. Most will express how they’re glad they’ve been experiencing less mosquitos and I want to just grab by the shoulders and shake them and yell TONS OF BUGS JUST DISAPPEARING SHARPLY OVER THE YEARS IS NOT A GOOD THING !!

Anyways. Fellow entomology nerds, have any of you also noticed a drastic decrease in bugs you’re finding yearly or is my area just in a bug deficit.

[arcticmist0324]

Some random dude just handed me a religious tract. Let’s see how bad it is.

Okay, verdict: not a bad one at all. It has serene imagery and talks about God’s love. No fucked up theology and weird “YOU’LL GO TO HELL FOR BEING TOO LOUD” (yes I got one that said that once, mom threw it out before I got a picture). Lacks creativity though. I’ll give it a 7/10.

[mrbopst]

Good News: A new edition of The Bopst Show, the only music variety podcast that will get you out of this world alive, is now available for free public consumption on Podomatic or wherever you get your podcasts.

Music variety show hosted, mixed and recorded by Chris Bopst featuring words and music by The Beach Girls, Cardinal Rex Jim Lawson, The Turtles, Flux of Pink Indians, LCD Soundsystem, Niney The Observer, Bab L’ Bluz, Chip Young, Ice-T, Risqué, Tabukah X, Wire, Carol Huff, and Arthur Crudup.  The Bopst Show airs Fridays 4 & 10 PM, Saturdays 4 & 10 AM & PM, and Sundays 4 & 10 AM on WRWK 93.9 The Work FM. The Bopst Show airs Monday-Fridays, 4-5 AM & PM, on Slack Radio.

[reasonsforhope]

"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024