#oh how valuable!

[therealbrigeedarocks]

i don’t know if my ask made it in before the box was turned off so here have a cute lil hedgehog guy until you can draw lil hedgehog guys of your own @littleguysdaily​

p.s. if you remember neko atsume then you’ll like hananezumi where you grow flowers on cute lil hedgehog guys like blueberry

haha joke's on you i fixed it before anyone could see it PERFECT

Today is lining up to be a real rotten one.

Now would be a great day to comment on and/or reblog your favorite little guy(s) so I have some funny messages to look forward to at the end of The Shift.

Thank you for your cooperation,

Managment

[bilaudad]

wing stuff!

experimenting with a more cartoon style, idk what i'm doing loll

tagging: @goodomensafterdark <3

[hers-underwraps]

Why Dashi is my favourite character 🩷

This is something I've been wanting to talk about for awhile. I've been putting it off because I typically like to keep my posts lighthearted and fun. Also, this is kinda a personal thing for me lol. However I just think it's important to get it out there.

————————————————————————

Feelings around Dashi in the Octonauts community are so mixed, some people enjoy her whilst other have a pure hatred for Dashi. Unfortunately, there is a large majority that holds that hatred in their hear or people that like her but only for her aesthetic. Hence this is why I wanted to get my thought of why I valued her out there as someone who values her deeply for her character.

Dashi has always been someone I've idolised. As a young girl, she was the epitome of a woman. She was able to exist as someone confident in what her passion was, someone who actively engaged in fields such as coding and engineering, she could lead her crew and be a daredevil. She was also able to be confident in her femininity, she could love pink, and she could love photography and her music. She's an older sister (and a really good one at that), she can be a little silly and she could hold quality/unique relationships with other members of the team. She was also able to accomplish all of this authentically. She wasn't considered a rare exception in the show, this was just considered the norm and it was honestly something I envy so much.

This was something that I took away from the main series of the Octonauts.

That's what she meant to me from the limited screen time that she got. I remember watching the damselfish episode and thinking omg this is the coolest thing ever. Or that episode where they made the tiny camera of the worm and glued it back together. The manta-ray episode where she was so determined to achieve her goal. She held quality relationships with several members. Seriously one of my favourite Dashi moments with the others was her running off with kwazii in the Siphonophore episode. She was always a central member in leading the team and was confident in her leadership/decisions. A few I remember off the top of my head were the episode where they needed a new bubble generator, that one episode where half the crew got beached and she and kwazii were working to get them back or the surfing snail episode. Also I know this isn't from the OG series but I really like her in the ring of fire and San Actun specials (I refuse to watch the Great Barrier Reef special so idk what was happening there)

This was how I interpreted her character before I found out there was a spin-off series that put her in a central role, which honestly was awesome to me because it just affirmed my interpretation of Dashi. It affirmed that my way of interpreting her was not just in my head. Everything she meant to me was real.

This is what made it more heartbreaking for me when I found out that there were so many people who hated her role in both the original and spinoff series. These people thought her role was forced, that her character choices were off and that she was just another mary-sue.

I think a lot of people fail to see one of the main reasons as to why Dashi is an important character to the people that do value her.

This stems from how important representation is for young people. The original series was released back in 2010. Looking at this era contextually, sexism in everyday life was still a massive problem. Stereotypical traditional roles were heavily enforced in media and everyday life. Basic rights for women were largely failing to be met. Even though things have improved a little bit since then, sexism is still a massive issue that affects every woman. So you can imagine how much it meant to the young girls watching this show to see an autonomous and feminine character being able to achieve so much.

Even though she was a side character in the main series, she was who you looked at, I mean how could you not? Just looking at her aesthetically she is quite literally the only one with a stereotypical "feminine" colour palette. She was the only girl on the crew that presented in a traditionally feminine way.

Then you're probably thinking but what about tweak? Well yes, she was absolutely a groundbreaking character too. However, she is presented in such a masculine way that I don't always feel like she has the same impact that Dashi does. She was original going to be a man and she is aired as a man in other translations of The Octonauts (the Russian one off the top of my head). She is as typically "feminine" as Dashi, she honestly lacks any of those qualities. NOTE: (NO HATE TO TWEAK OR GIRLS WHO ARE LIKE HER, I LOVE TWEAK AND MASC GIRLIES)

This is important to me because when I was younger I believed that in order to have a passion in fields that were considered more "masculine" such as science or mathematics you had to reject femininity. That stereotype was so heavily pushed on me and it was genuinely so damaging. I felt that I had to reject everything feminine and I did. I remember getting reprimanded and told "I'm barely even a woman" for my interests. I always felt that I had to sacrifice a part of myself and it was genuinely such a depressing way to be. Sometimes its so bad that I just has breakdowns because I feel I don't belong and I always have that impending feeling of doom that I ever will. I always feel so isolated because I genuinely found it so hard to find other women who shared that interest. On the rare chance I did find someone, they were cases similar to Tweak, girls that had rejected and demonised all feminity to the point where they were basically considered dudes.

This is still something I struggle with so much today. Yes, a girl can enter into a STEM field without being burnt at the stake but there's still so very few. I'm sitting in physics and mathematics classes where I'm effectively the only girl there. Female scientists are never talked about and I'm by other teachers as a rare exception. I still struggle to feel as if I can exist as both feminine and as someone who can be passionate about STEM. Being feminine is so demonised and intimidating in those fields due to the sheer lack of representation, you feel as if it's necessary to conform to a more masculine demeanour. On the flip side, having a genuine passion for STEM is so freaky in the eyes of other girls. If I try and talk about something remotely related to that, I feel as if they're about to hurl tomatoes at me so I never talk about it. It feels like I can never exist authentically and fully as myself, some days I feel like I lose myself, like I don't belong. I value being feminine I really do. I've always been passionate about feminism, I love the colour pink, pretty things and I like presenting that way. But I also love STEM I'm so passionate about it. I just wish there was a way that I could exist as both.

This is why I idolise Dashi so much. She is what I want to be. She's confident in her femininity and confident in her career. She doesn't; need to sacrifice this to achieve her goals. She can exist in a male-dominated crew (which is a realistic scenario for an irl workplace in those fields) without changing that about her. She isn't treated as a rare exception but just valued a normal part of the team.

She is a Stargirl to so many young girls. She exists as an autonomous and bright character, she isn't entirely defined by just her career or gender but she actively represents both. She's realistic, she's flawed, and she grows so much throughout the series and I think her growth is then appreciated in the spin-off. In a world that's lacking authentic representation in both media and so many male-dominated fields, it's so important to realise the innate value of these characters.

So that's why Dashi is my favourite character. She means the world to me.

She always has and always will 🩷

[astranauticus]

i don't have the screenshots on hand because this is just a thought i needed to let out after being woken up by my buildings fire alarm at 7am (i am in shambles, thanks for asking) but back at the start of canto 7 i was trying to figure out what in the Fuck hong lu meant by don quixote being 'the most lucid' of the sinners and eventually my read was that she's the one who's most clear on what she wants because hong lu brought up how her eyes are sparkling and the two times dante notes someone's eyes sparkling in that episode (?) were when don talks about saving all the people in la manchaland and when charon says she wants to eat candy at an amusement park, and also this would very nicely mirror the bit in the final sancho fight when dante ruminates about how so far they've been trying to help the sinners out of their issues by figuring out what they want and then promising it to them but with sancho she doesn't want anything because everything she's wanted as don quixote was part of that dream that she's now woken up from (especially with dulcinae talking at length about the difference between sancho and don's eyes)

but like..... there's one other thing about eyes that dante notices in that early episode

so i'm wondering if this is an idea that's gonna come back in canto 8, that dante's old tricks aren't going to work here either because hong lu just doesn't really want anything for himself when he's been living his whole life surrendering (hah) himself to being used by other people for their own goals

[quixlebug]

I think my favorite part about comic #7 is all those kids? You just know they're getting so many weapons for Smissmas

[fudan-no-nijiiro]

So I finished all the song quests for the latest event, and so now I'm just playing SONG LETTER on repeat (now that I'm at home on wifi and can watch the video without the lag killing me instantly). As you do.

And I absently started thinking about QUARTET NIGHT ships—y'know, also as you do. In this case, specifically the ships that you (or I, at least) don't usually see.

And now I want a serious, slowburn Reiji/Camus fic to exist so bad dammit.

[fishparasite]

so many thoughts about 47 always but whenever i start to write a post there's just too much to write about

[pinoruno]

😁

[szilverer]

oh haha well a little tomfoolery. we could use the moonpearls when they eventually need to bribe the crew at zee--

[marurumai]

i put my favs together and tried to decipher what they all have in common. its been weeks and i cant see anything.

we could have pink characters but aoi, ena, chu² and ctommy dont fit... loud characters? but aya isnt really loud so i dont think so. high schoolers? theres no school for aoi nor tommy. lesbians? i literally dont know. what is it. what.

[spotaus]

Fun Fact: When I don't know how to write a character in their natural habitat, I will first drop them into either a Medieval or Mafia au. Then, miraculously, I know how to wrote for them.

[mayordeas-clone]

saw a take that peeved me in the vocaloid feed on bluesky but i don’t wanna be confrontational there + my thoughts are too powerful for a 300 character per post thread so im making it tumblr’s problem

due to my intense vsynth brainworms this is going to sound incredibly pedantic and annoying which is why i am posting it here okay here we go

the post was sort of a ‘callout’ of a creator who uses synthv for covers of fnf songs or whatever. the general body was like “they write their own lyrics but they make the vocals using ai with a program called synthesizer v” (the implication being, “this person is an ai-using fraud, don’t support them”)

if ur in the community or like have a little bit of an idea of how ai is associated with synthv specifically this is a nonsense uninformed take (the ‘ai’ training is used for autotuning/cross language synthesis/some other shit idk but the point is it’s not the type of ai that like, writes the melody/lyrics for you and is voiced from random samples from unknowing providers but i’ll get back to this later)

ai is mentioned on synthv’s website (also vocaloid’s much to the detriment of news articles that report on hatsune miku) so it’s a common misunderstanding, whatever. it would be nice if people actually looked into the ways ai works in vsynth at least a little bit but in an age where artists are on the defense against the ai boogeyman i guess i sorta understand the knee jerk reaction to assume the ai in vsynth software like synthv is the Bad kind. annoying, but nothing new.

but i think what made this post rotate in my mind to the point of crystallizing into unnecessary rage is an add-on that was like “i just prefer my music to be sung by real people!” followed by “by the way, vocaloid isn’t ai, so no you’re not bad if you like hatsune miku music”

ohhh man this actually did piss me off a little cuz wow way to really shout to the heavens that you have no damn clue what you’re talking about

firstly, i COMPLETELYYYY understand that the premise and general sound of vocal synth music is not for everyone. the computerized words, the unrealism, or even the fact that it’s not an actual person singing, like whatever that’s fine i get it. but like you can’t go around and be like “by the way vocaloid [aka hatsune miku] is chill don’t worryyyy” bc that line of thinking from my understanding doesn’t really make sense? miku isn’t a real person either 😭😭 her latest release even uses ai! (at least i think it does cuz vocaloid 6 has ai support but idk i guess that doesn’t matter) does she just get a free pass cuz she’s an internet darling?

miku is a piece of software where you write the midi for her vocals and input the lyrics so a slurry of samples recorded by saki fujita can be played back in an in-character singing voice. synthv is a piece of software with similar character voice databases where you do the same thing, write a midi and input lyrics so a database’s voice samples put it all together to sing back. the inclusion of ai in this process is to streamline the workflow for the user to automatically work out the pitch transitions between notes to save on time manually tuning, creating a more realistic playback. this ai, perhaps merely the inclusion of these two letters in the proximity of synthv’s marketing, is what makes synthv both Significantly Different and Inferior to miku.

the lack of ai with vocaloid (as far as op knew, cuz need i remind you vocaloid as of its 6th installment uses similar ai to synthv lol) making it Better than synthv sent the implication, TO ME, that op thinks that the ai used in synthv is the type that like, takes samples from other people without their permission to create the voices (then leading to the “i just want my songs sung by REAL people” aka not sung by dubiously gathered samples). i recognize this means of creating ai voices to impersonate other people and make them say things they should not without their knowledge or permission is CERTAINLY bad but like that’s not how any of this works if we’re talking synthv (you could argue this applies to those utau banks that make voicebanks for like sonic the hedgehog and shit but those usually sound like ass and are about as convincing as a sentence mixed youtube poop). maybe that’s not what they meant (i don’t wanna dig up the post cuz i don’t wanna be bothered and it’s probably gonna piss me off to the point of starting something which i don’t want) but based on my understanding of their point this is like. wholly untrue. in fact synthv voicebanks (particularly those from eclipsed sounds whose terms of service are free to read on their website) have special terms specifically designed to protect the voice providers of their databases BECAUSE of the extra realism in their voices (terms such as, “you can’t credit any voice work done with Solaria to Emma Rowley [her voice provider] or anyone else besides the software itself” in the case Solaria is used to say something objectionable and cast it on Rowley, that would be a breach of the terms and might even get your license revoked). shit like that is likely what people who are afraid of ai voices expect to happen but there were contracts signed to protect and inform the voice providers of what their vocal likeness is being used for + compensation paid to them for their work providing vocal samples SPECIFICALLY for this product. and ofc miku is the same. ITS THE SAME. BUT MIKU IS A FUNNY INTERNET MEME SO SHES FINE. GRRRRR!!!!!!

[aturinfortheworse]

I CANNOT remember which of my mutuals (probably mutual?) posts gay shit about COD but please know you did me an invaluable service today, because I spent the whole day today with a student I don't know that we'll and early on it came up that she likes COD, and she said she only likes it "for the men," and I had the great fortune to be able to say "Oh yeah!! I've seen The Men and I GET IT. There's like a Scottish one, right?"

Best friends for the rest of the day.

[atlantis-just-drowned]

"You were so right to distance yourself from that group of people !"

Thanks for the ego boost. I did it with the help of my coping mechanisms, my trauma responses and the ability to over-analyse everything until it makes sense.

Now, spill the tea. What happened, in great details.

[kaweeella]

I have a very important question

[marginal-notes]

Tobirama, are you proud of this insanity I’m indulging in for you.