#proofs that i'm actually good at this

[ozonecologne]

.

[sleeplesscenarios]

kim dokja: why are people not improving that much when they're with me? :/

also kim dokja: it's alright, friends, i have a plan for everything, you don't need to worry or even think about anything, i have matched every detail of my plan to your current skill level and possible potential, all you have to do is trust and follow me ^^

[crispycreambacon]

Debating if I should release the Ryan/Professor "marriage that goes south after a car crash" AU fic that my friend wrote for her English exam and got a 24/25 on

No additional context like last poll. Just follow your heart.

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s4 episode 7 thoughts

my very first thoughts: a CANCER MAN episode??? are we gonna get some backstory?? some CSM lore?!?!? 

part of me is deeply curious, but part of me also wants agent time, so… hmm! i’m intrigued. my curiosity? it’s been piqued.

and the lone gunmen have been mentioned!!

author's note: woah... i was expecting a lot of things, but cancer man being a flop author was not one of them. it's kinda sad, but mostly just pathetic.

judgement aside, i actually really liked this episode. there are things i would change, but i thought it was super intriguing to see certain parts of what is hidden beyond the curtain, but never enough to fully satisfy you, which i do love about this show (even if it is occasionally infuriating). the multi-part structure was also an interesting and unique choice that worked well, but i do have some... questions on writing/character motives and if they were well-received. but you'll see what i mean in a bit.

a lot happened in this episode, which i shall begin to recount below!

OH! we open with a shakespeare quote!!! “for nothing can seem foul to those that win” oooookay i suppose that is relevant to our ciggy man. damn. couldn’t be me. a lot of things are foul to me. such as killing melissa. 

we see a rat! a rat! cute little critter. oh. cancer man arrives, and is less cute. he's looking at some broken windows… damn, why is s4 so dark? i keep having to turn my brightness up. it's annoying!!

his lighter says “trust no one” omg… he’s so weird. just an overall strange fellow. seriously, who gets a custom lighter that says that? way to draw attention to yourself while trying to Not Do That.

so he’s opening a suitcase…. WHAT!! he is somehow listening to a bunch of conversations, including the “not everything is a dark labyrinth of conspiracy” one, which means he must have had bugs in all of the rooms where mulder and scully chat!!! who has time to sort through all of that audio content to find the juicy stuff?? probably his freak interns that i KNOW he keeps scattering about

okay, so he’s listening to a conversation now between the lone gunmen and mulder. frohike is freaked tf out, but mulder says no one would kill him because “you’re just a little puppy dog”. aww. that's a cute thing to say.

GAG!! the lone gunmen put on a special audio filter to hide their conversation, and CSM just pressed a button to totally ignore it, and turns to the camera with a smirk. EW! EW! creepy man. ugh, i can’t believe i paused and had to look at that awful creepy smirk for more than a few milliseconds.

oh my goodness, scully is also here during this conversation between the lone gunmen and mulder that we are listening to via CSM's technologically aided eavesdropping. frohike is saying he found stuff about cancer man, while cancer man loads what looks like a SNIPER RIFLE, and aims it out the window??? “what did you find?” “possibly everything”

GASP! i’m hooked. i DO want to know possibly everything. 

(watching the intro and that scene where they burst in with the gun always gets me, but today it’s making me ache in my chest because of how beautiful they are. so feel free to psychoanalyze that)

frohike is describing trotsky’s assassination. this is an area of history i am weak in, so i am seated for my lesson. it is actually entirely unrelated to the plot at hand, and is just some frohike nerd lore, but that's cool, i like a dude who knows these things.

frohike says “he” (presumably CSM) appears on august 20th, 1940, in louisiana. and his father was a communist activist, executed for espionage before his son would walk!!! and his mother died of lung cancer before he could talk!

damn. tragic backstory for this fellow. he pretty much said "i know cigarettes killed my mom but i'm different"

he was sent to various orphanages where he spent his time reading and not making friends. then he went off the grid until a year and a half after the Bay Of Pigs. weird way of measuring time- before and after the Bay of Pigs

OH! we get more text… “part 1: things really did go well in Dealey Plaza” hmmm....

some army men are jogging, while another dude reads the manchurian candidate, saying he would rather read the worst novel ever written than the best movie ever made. he must not know about the novels that are out there… i assume this is cig man?

OH MY GOD! he’s talking to MR. MULDER! wait, wait that means….

! MULDER LORE REVEAL ! his first word was JFK

that is... actually really adorable. and will make his toddler stage difficult as he has to break certain news to baby mulder.

why do i get the feeling, from the shaky way CSM just set the photo of mr. mulder’s wife and child down, that he is fighting suppressed romantic feelings for his buddy like the cold war depends on it? hmm....

these fancy looking men want to talk to the guy i assume is cancer man. they ask if he was involved in any of the big events from the early 1960’s, which he denies. you know, assassinations and whatnot.

oh! when they ask if his father was executed as a spy, he says his only regret is that “i was too young to throw the switch myself” which is kind of a crazy thing to say. "yes i never knew my dad but i wish it was me that killed him" is a wild hill to die on. but i guess this is what the 60's did to people.

OH! he also denies a cigarette when offered, saying he never touches them. well. some things went down between then and now, i assume. and hopefully, we shall gain a glimpse into what changed.

this general dude is yapping about extraordinary men and i assume he is referring to himself. and his father. and young CSM, too, can be an extraordinary man! 

“communism is without a doubt the most heinous personification of evil mankind has ever confronted” <- said by a guy who likely fought the nazis, this is an absolutely crazy line... but again, i guess that shows how deep everyone was into the propaganda

they are offering baby CSM a very important job… so important, his army service will be erased… he needs to assassinate an american civilian, former naval pt-boat commander…

OH MY GOD, DID HE KILL JFK???

this is wild. how many different characters across various medias have been responsible for killing JFK? does anyone have a spreadsheet? if not, DM me and let’s make one 

so what is the reason in universe for why JFK had to kick the bucket….

because of the bay of pigs failure??

i get it was bad, but i didn’t think it was THAT bad. that makes no sense though timeline wise… they said bay of pigs was “last week”, but that was 1961, and obviously he didn’t get shot until 1963. so are we expected to believe that they waited 2 years to kill him? 2 years in which a lot of stuff happened? or is this some sort of factual oversight i’m supposed to ignore. or am i misunderstanding the episode structure. did i mishear/read a line?

(digs my claws in) you guys i cannot ignore a JFK anachronism i’m sorry

and now we're off to texas to witness the inevitable. this dude playing lee harvey oswald is lowkey cute, a thing i never thought i would have typed more than a few minutes ago. CSM yells at him about how smoking is BAD!

baby cancer man is talking to lee harvey oswald (another wild sentence), telling him he’ll see the president today. he calls baby cig man “mr. hunt” which i assume is a fake name… and he lies and says he loves the movies!! how simply do the falsehoods slip from his tongue!

ooooookay i see what is going on here. “mr. hunt” is a member of a cuban loyalty group telling lee harvey oswald to hide some weapons. a fall guy is being carefully crafted.

and lee gives him his cigarettes… the same cigarettes baby cig man scolded him for smoking…. omg…. foreshadowing

you know, in all my years studying history, i have never imagined what the inside of the book depository building looked like. and OMG! in googling to try and see if this was an accurate representation, i learned that dealey plaza is where he was shot! so i guess i’m good with JFK lore, but bad at geography. but that answers what the whole opening quote was about.

baby cig man is getting in a sewer to do some crime… very eugene tooms of him. he's getting his gun out in the sewer for a sneak attack…. while lee gets a root beer… and it seems umbrella man was giving a signal on when to shoot! fascinating.

(jackie’s outfit that day looked less fuzzy irl than it appears in this episode, so please take note of that wardrobe people)

nah, this is gonna make me feel bad for a FAKE lee harvey oswald…

and while JFK was dying, baby cig man stayed in that sewer the whole time… wow. i feel like someone should have taken a peek.

soooo realizing he is a patsy, lee shoots a cop. which is actually just far more incriminating than had he done anything else. then he goes to the movies. where the cops find him. and baby cig man was watching all of this…. he pulls out a cigarette and starts smoking. OMG was that his first?? to cope with the Guilt?? damn.

it’s a bit of a ludicrous story that makes me giggle when i consider the real-world implications, but i will take it for what it is.

but back to modern cig man, listening to all of this being explained. he says nothing, seeming to confirm the accuracy of what is being said.

“part 2: just down the road from graceland”

no, don’t tell me he killed ELVIS, too?!?!?

wait, i read that wrong. “just down the road aways from graceland” okay, not sure if that clears anything up. but we hear the voice of martin luther king jr.

no… don’t tell me he killed HIM, too…..

notably, this whole part is in black and white. cigarette man is tap tapping on his typewriter. he’s writing a book! “take a chance: a jack colquitt adventure” <- sounds boring 

he’s listening to MLK talk about Marxist revolutions… is baby cig man a closet commie? no, for it appears he is deeply upset by these words!

he’s still in black and white, at a meeting about MLK, talking about how some claim he wishes to wage war against white america. baby cig man says “wouldn’t you?”, and i begin to wonder if he is based, but these hopes are quickly dampened as he explains that MLK's existence and activism are no longer civil rights issues… because he said something about communism. bro. what. is this how people actually felt…?

(you read about the paranoia and the terror of the red scare, but seeing an attempt at putting it in context still makes you think damn, times were weird)

this council is now talking about how they can best discredit MLK, and we see a guy who is blamed for the “there is but one way out for you” letter, which baby cig man says is stupid. oh, he blamed the director of the FBI for that. damn!

cigarette man says we need another patsy, and to make it a white man, so “it” (referring to king’s assassination) looks racially motivated. and oh! he says he’ll do it himself.

“i have too much respect for the man” <- so you’re gonna be the one that kills him? bro… what. we don't usually kill the people we look up to where i come from.

so. cig man lights up as he stands outside a building where MLK speaks. 

AND HE PULLS OUT THE PHOTO OF BABY MULDER AND HIS MOM???? WHAT THE FUCK

(is this like a “he’s grieving because his work demands that he never has a family” kind of thing or a “he’s longing for the embrace of mr. mulder” kinda thing….? does he love mrs. mulder….? what is this….)

cancer man gives the dude he’s framing a couple hundred dollars. and then gets in the bushes behind where dr. king is staying. i'm still processing the photo reveal.

and bam.

wow, i feel that this is… weird. idk, the whole “this character killed JFK” thing has been going on for so long that it doesn’t really feel that shocking, but dr. king’s death is a tragedy in a different way, and i’m not sure that using it in fiction is like, super appropriate? um.

while i am unsure if i feel that using a civil rights leader's assassination in your alien story is something we should brush past, i do understand what the writers are attempting to do here, which is show how dedicated to the anti-communist cause cig man is, and how he'll stop at nothing to do what he deems needed, no matter how ugly or horrific. i recognize what they are trying to tell me.

LMAOOOO WAIT. place my moral pondering aside for a brief second. if you pause, you can read the rejection letter baby cig man gets for his book. “my advice? burn it!” <- DAMN that book must have been god awful 😭

oh god. now the TV is mentioning RFK… don’t tell me cig man did that, too…

(author's note: thankfully, he was not involved with the killing of this kennedy brother; no clear statement on whether or not he was responsible for ted's whole thing)

AND WHY was cig man putting that photo of mrs. and baby mulder in his drawer…?!?!

cig man seems to be almost crying while quoting aeschylus along with RFK on the tv, as he speaks about the grief of losing both his brother and MLK…. damn. am i supposed to feel bad for CSM? because i don’t. 

back to modern cancer man. we now enter “part 3, the most wonderful time of the year”.

jump to 1991. he has saddam hussein on the phone?? and tells him to call back. and some other dude is working on the oscar noms LMAO wait... i lowkey love the idea that the government controls those... need to think what that would imply for every single winner ever

AND he rigs the superbowl so the bills don’t win LMAO what is his beef with buffalo?! AND he rigged the olympic hockey game in ‘80?

we’re getting the impression he kinda controls everything. message received loud and clear.

OH! now they’re talking about mulder… “that ‘spooky’ kid”, is how they refer to him. and CSM says that mulder is his to keep an eye on. i'm sure that's part of his decades long plot, to keep mulder under his watchful eye and use him as a pawn in his schemes. also, gorbachev has just resigned. no more enemies to fight.

and CSM gives his men some presents for christmas. how thoughtful…..? 

his men invite him to come with them to virginia for a family get together. damn, they like this guy? it seems they honestly do!

he got them all ties…. very strange fellow he is.

okay, so he lied and said he had to go see family to escape the gathering. and then ominously walks outside mulder’s office door. dun dun DUN!

he has some mail… and opens it to see something that displeases him. THEN HE STARTS WRITING AGAIN!! it seems like auto fiction, when you write about yourself but pretend it’s happening to a character. damn. crazy coping mechanism. good to know that he is kinda a loser all around. 

so, some days he longs for a second chance. okay, yeah, we all do cancer man, and most of us didn’t kill JFK.

the phone rings. it’s DEEP THROAT! my old friend!! were they tight?!

it seems that on christmas eve of 1991 was when a weird alien spaceship arrived to earth. and the occupant is in “critical condition”. also, deep throat mentions the UFO he had claimed to see before in vietnam, so we know he wasn’t lying entirely about that.

they have this fleshy pink alien hooked up to life support, which has me wondering how alien life support works, and also how many types of aliens we are dealing with in this universe. but i’ve mentioned that before. still! worth mentioning again!

lore reveal that is unsettling... DEEP THROAT’S NAME IS RONALD???? 

idk, i was expecting something like abernathy or shackleton or cromswell!

deep throat gives cigarette man the gun to handle the alien situation- but CSM protests, saying that a “living EBE” could advance bill mulder’s project by decades!!! MR. MULDER MENTIONED?!? he'd be willing to break protocol to help his buddy out?!?

but no, deep throat recites the rules from the security council resolution, which makes him remember what they came here to do.

can you just… shoot an alien??? to kill it? well. you can shoot some of them to kill them, but not the kind that need the special neck stabbing device. okay, keeping track of all this, just seems like maybe all aliens would need something a bit cooler to vanquish them.

they’re fighting over killing an alien…. cig man doesn’t want to do it, so he tosses a coin. so he makes deep throat do it?!?! deep throat says that this is their new enemy. honestly, the sad little alien does not look like he can hurt you, but okay.

(i mean, do they really need the gun? he’s an alien on life support, just pull the plug)

oh…. cig man rips the bandage off his neck as deep throat climbs into some gear to… gas the alien? now what is the significance of this bandage that has been on his neck but ONLY for part three of the story?

that alien is creepy. deep throat really does shoot the damn thing. and cig man lights up while this goes down. is every cigarette one dude he killed….? damn. that’s like 5 packs a day….

“part 4: the x-files”

OOOO, info on scully being brought in!!!

OMG!!! we see parts of her thesis.

did we know she went to the university of maryland? well, i didnt, so that counts as a…

! SCULLY LORE REVEAL ! she graduated from the university of maryland in 1986!

(looking back, i realize this was all flashback stuff from the pilot. but i didn't KNOW at the time that this show would do such things to me, so i wasn't taking detailed notes! wow! how much has changed)

but it’s cancer man reading her thesis. stay away from her!

okay, now we’re back to one of the earliest times we ever saw scully, in her pilot episode fit. and was cig man actually there in the pilot? i think he was, right?

aww, we get to relive the “FBI’s most unwanted” moment through cancer man’s listening. it’s creepy, but still a heartwarming time.

back to the modern day- frohike is talking about how cancer man is “the most dangerous man alive”, because he believes these actions are all that life allows him, and he can never escape himself. damn. that’s deep.

and then back to the 1991 christmas eve scene… an editor loved CSM's book! he used the pen name “raul bloodworth”… have we heard that before? well, i’ll keep an eye out on various shelves. so he calls the number they gave him… he is desperate for validation… and he’s going on about how he wants the cover to look. there’s a cutting comment about “working with young authors”, and the publisher says he’ll have to “relinquish some control”. and cancer man is SO excited.

oh my gosh… wait, why am i lowkey emotional now? but that emotion is very specifically second hand embarrassment.

so he’s typing his RESIGNATION LETTER?? for the day the story gets published. for some reason he thinks that getting one story published = a life of steady income. HAH! if only.

he even takes a wistful look at his cigarettes and crushes them in his hand!!! wow, a time to begin again.

lmao i see a reference to darin morgan in the background magazines… do not think you are slick, props team!

CSM’s going to go pick up his story from a newspaper… and his story was published in a porno… and they changed his ending… 

this is NOT a good thing omg

and the newspaper salesman says that the magazine is garbage…

we just watched his dreams die in real time. and with the magazine, he buys another pack of cigarettes. damn. no chance for a new life, i guess. 

CSM’s now monologing about how life is like a box of chocolates (disappointing), and this is an interesting juxtaposition, because he is next to a man who is digging through garbage while he says all this, so clearly his material status could be a lot worse but it’s probably a mental prison, being rich and important and also sad.

Frohike clarifies that this CSM theory is based on a story he read, but he’s going to check with some hackers. as frohike walks out the door, cancer man mumbles that he can kill him whenever he pleases, but chooses not to do so today. 

woah… very different, but i actually really liked this episode!

i liked getting a peek into the mystical lore surrounding CSM, but also it wasn’t THAT much of a peek, you know? we know a few of the things he did, and that he did them in the name of fighting communism. i guess when he thought that communism was “defeated” they switched to aliens, but also aliens had to be there the whole time, because they did make the agreement about it after ww2. so he’s been up to a lot of stuff.

do i feel a little bad that he can’t get his writing published? yeah, but like i said in a “it’s cringey” kinda way, which i think was the intention. it’s funny that he has amassed all this power but is still a flop. 

like i said, i feel weird about the whole MLK thing. i think the coloring going black and white was to illustrate CSM's black and white thinking, about how you are either right or wrong, and to be wrong requires punishment, no matter what anyone else says on the matter. that was interesting.

hmm, i'm pondering. what will happen next to our smoky- well, i was going to say "our smoky friend", but we are not friends at all, are we? where will our tobacco-filled creep lead us?

i liked this one! it was really different from the traditional episode structure, so it felt special and nice. i liked getting an idea of his line of work and how he got involved with it and why, even if the killing post-Bay of Pigs thing was weird, but i GUESS it did bring the soviets and cuba closer together, so i GUESS if you thought anything that advanced communism had to be avenged, you would think that is a logical conclusion.

hmm, i can't afford to try and figure out who actually did it IRL! too much on my plate. it's an interesting theory... i shall have to give it a long contemplation.

[xbraveheartx]

So I know the quality sucks and we don't get any better quality to compare, but I just wanted to point out that, yes. Baby Carlo has freckles. Very few of them. But you can see the ones he had since he was a wee young lad standing out in his painting.

Go ahead and go into the game and stand in front of the portrait. Compare their faces. I'll wait c:

Here's a full/clean version of his portrait if you want to stare at it

So anyways like I was saying before--

[sysig]

Getting up to trouble is his speciality (Patreon)

[carcharadroid]

This is the last thing I'm probably gonna say on Palworld for a while but look

listen.

I'm just begging people to give this thread a look and stop being in denial.

Drawing inspiration from the same concept is one thing, but more-or-less tracing a model and barely tweaking it is a whole other kettle. I'm not going to bat for Nintendo here, because at the end of the day no matter what happens I doubt Palworld will put a dent in Pokemon's profits.

I just want people to stop harping on the fucking sheep and sending death threats to the devs. Make your case but for fuck's sake make it well and don't threaten to kill someone over it. The fuck is wrong with y'all??

[quatregats]

Girl help they're submitting more induction proofs

[crow-talks-hockey]

wow. well. my interest in the rempe-mania has absolutely plummeted. i was like "oh kinda cool" for round about the first two days and then... then i realized he's just going to be, and really already is, another dirty ass player and the Model R^nger if you know what i mean. the first couple fights were kind of cool and all but holy fucking shit if this is exactly the player we do NOT need coming up in the league. i'm all for bringing some of the rough-and-tough (BUT CLEAN) stuff back to hockey but when it's this? when it's coming into the league and basically making your goal hurting players? and getting away with it? it's bullshit. too many players have lost their primes or their ENTIRE FUCKING CAREER to injury especially related to head injuries, which is what rempe is doing. and he fucking knows it. it makes my stomach sick. and probably the worst part about this is the dops will do nothing. just like how they do nothing with wilson or trouba or perry or kane or any of the other repeat offenders. now, you could say rempe isn't a repeat offender yet but come on. if this continues it's going to happen. but it wont matter because the nhl doesn't care. they don't care. it's disgusting.

[icewindandboringhorror]

Hrmm... Revising my game and I feel like there's still sooo much writing left to do, for something that probably won't even amount to much, so.. I do want to narrow my focus more (especially given my health problems seeming to get worse/less energy the past few years), but I'm not sure how would be best to...

I currently have 5 characters as the Main ones with full planned questlines and such, with each character having 6 quests you can do for them. But I haven't really started the writing for the 5th main character. So then I was thinking, if I were going to write 6 full quests worth of content anyway... is it better to allocate that time on just doing a Complete 6 Quests for ONE single character, OR would it be better to do something like.. choose THREE side characters and do 2 quests for each of them? So that people have a wider variety to interact with and sort of sample around (of course with the idea that, once the first version of the game is released, IF people actually care about it enough to make it worth the effort, I would then add additional content to complete those 3 characters stories as well)

-

SO... If you were playing an interactive fiction sort of game centered around talking to & doing quests for a cast of characters (like there's no larger plot, more it's just about interacting with people, every character kind of has a self contained story, the focus is just learning about them and the world and exploring the area) --- Which would you rather have?

(and of course it would be stated up front which characters have only partial questlines, so people don't expect them to have full quests like the others and then get disappointed, or etc. etc.)

Basically, is it better to just focus in specifically on having one fully complete questline? Or for there to be a few stories that are not complete yet, but have more initial options available?

[keelanrosa]

terfs when a study shows literally anything positive about trans people/transitioning: 'hm i think this requires some fact-checking. Were those researchers REALLY unbiased? Because if they were biased this doesn't count and if they weren't knowingly biased they probably were unconsciously biased, woke media affects so much these days. Have there been any other studies on this? Because if there haven't been this could be an outlier and if there have been and they all agree that's a bit odd, why aren't there any outliers, and if there have been and any disagree we really won't know the truth until we very thoroughly analyze them all, will we? Were there enough subjects for a good sample size? Did every single subject involved stay involved through the whole study because if they didn't we should be sure nothing shady was going on resulting in people dropping out. Are we 110% sure all the subjects were fully honest and at no point were embarrassed or afraid to admit they didn't love transitioning to the people in charge of their transition? Are we 110% sure none of the subjects were manipulated into thinking they were happy with their transition? In fact we should double-check what they think with their parents, because if the subjects and their parents disagree it's probably because they've been manipulated but their cis parents have not and are very unbiased. How many autistic subjects were there because if there weren't enough then this doesn't really study the overlap between autistic and trans and if there were too many then we just don't know enough about what causes that overlap to be sure this study really explains being trans and isn't just about being autistic. How many AFAB subjects were there because if there weren't enough this is just another example of prioritizing AMAB people and ignoring the different struggles of girls and women and if there were too many how do we know sexism didn't affect the results. Was the study double-blinded? We all know double-blinded is the most reliable so if this one wasn't that's a point against it even if the thesis literally physically could not be double-blinded. Look i'm not being transphobic, i want what's best for trans people! Really! But as a person who is not trans and therefore objective in a way they cannot possibly be, i just think we should only take into account Good Science here. You want to be following science and not being manipulated or experimented upon by something unscientific, right?'

terfs when they see a study of 45 subjects so old it predates modern criteria for gender dysphoria and basically uses 'idk her parents think she's too butch', run by a guy who practiced conversion therapy, 'confirmed' by a guy who treated the significant portion of subjects who didn't follow up as all desisting, definitely in the category of 'physically cannot double-blind this', completely contradicted by multiple other studies done on actual transgender subjects, but can be kinda cited as evidence against transitioning if you ignore everything else about it: 'oOOH SEE THIS IS WHAT WE'RE TALKIN BOUT. SCIENCE. Just good ol' unbiased thorough analysis. I see absolutely no reason to dig any deeper on this and if you think it's wrong you're the one being unscientific. It's really a shame you've been so thoroughly brainwashed by the trans agenda and can't even accept science when you see it. Maybe now that someone has finally uncovered this long-lost study from 1985, we can make some actual progress on the whole trans problem.'

[unfriendlyamazon]

inzoi dropped their character creator demo i'm very fascinated

[feynavaley]

I keep seeing people claiming things that straight-up contradict canon about America and Canada's dynamic, so I'm going to clarify a couple of points.

What's canon: Canada makes America cry after insulting him at length during an argument. Once. (The other time, we don't get to see America's reaction, even though we can certainly surmise he doesn't take it well.)

What's NOT canon: Canada constantly bullies (or even abuses!) America, treats him horribly and believes to be above him.

As I have already stressed, Canada makes America cry at most two times in canon.

Now, this obviously isn't okay and I'm not claiming Canada's actions were right. However, people just love to dismiss the context. First of all, this isn't Canada just insulting America out of nowhere without a justification, they're in the middle of arguments. Not to mention, both times, America is the one who starts insulting Canada. (This is another thing people conveniently never mention.) Then, Canada answers and, with the spirits running so high, he definitely goes too far. Even so, there is a context that, without justifying it, does explain why he lashed out so.

Moreover, Canada insulting America definitely isn't their everyday dynamic. They're depicted at ease around each other numerous times, doing activities and spending time together. All instances in which both of them are nice and friendly, clearly enjoying what they're doing. To make this even clearer, in most of their interactions, Canada shows no hostility towards America and is, instead, very kind to him.

Lastly, regarding the assumption that Canada feels superior to America... that one is explicitly denied in canon. Canada does have some issues with America's behaviour, this much is true. However, he believes himself to be overall inferior to America, not superior. He explicitly says so.

With all this, I'm not trying to claim that Canada is perfect or that he never does anything wrong. Just like every person, he has his limits and flaws and even though he's generally nice and accommodating, he can reach the breaking point when put under a lot of stress and then, make mistakes. But not being perfect all the time doesn't make him a bad person either. Not when that faulty behaviour is so different from his normal one.

[queenlucythevaliant]

Some off-the-cuff thoughts on overspiritualizing patterns in science

I remember watching a talk in middle school youth group about laminin, the "molecule that holds your whole body together" which was supposedly shaped like a cross. The suggestion, basically, was that the cross's image was integral to our molecular makeup and that this was part of God's design in a very Significant way. I was a burgeoning STEM girl, so I taped a diagram of a laminin up next to my bed for a while.

(As I would later find out, the whole laminin thing had/has some reach among Christians. There are T-shirts and everything)

Fast forever to spring of my freshman year as a microbiology student. I take my first course in cell bio, and I learn that laminins are actually one of many families of ECM glycoproteins. They aren't really any more significant in "holding the body together" than collagens, elastins, or fibronectins. They're very important, yes, but ultimately just one type of adhesive protein among many. And! They also do a bunch of other stuff that's way cooler than just. Adhesive.

While some laminins do bear resemblance to a cross when diagramed, it's really only because they have three subchains. Some are t-shaped, but others are y-shaped, and those don't look anything like a cross. Also, when they're in situ rather than in a nice, neat diagram, they tend to be all floppy and then they look even less cross-like.

Source

And when I learned about this I was oddly relieved. It felt like I was right about something that I couldn't even put into words, and that somehow the field of what I could call glorious had grown wider.

Christians are called to see and marvel at the presence of God in creation. I love doing that! I see God left and right through my scientific studies. Yet I also know that the human brain is pattern-seeking and that we are prone to pareidolia. I honestly don't know that there's a substantive difference between seeing the cross in some laminins and seeing Jesus on a piece of toast. It's all just seeing patterns that arise from something else (in the case of laminins, being able to bind three different molecules at once) and attributing spiritual significance. God is sovereign and maybe in the grand scope of his vision for creation it means something, but in terms of seeing God's hand in science I just find it so... small?

You could spin so many four-chain or four-domain proteins or goodness knows how many other molecules into images of the cross if you pick the right diagram. You could take every pattern of three in nature (and there are many!) as an image of the Trinity. If you really, really wanted to, you could take every six in organic chemistry as a sign of the beast, which would be hilarious in its misguidedness. It just becomes so literalistic and dull so very fast.

Look! Wouldn't you rather talk about the fact that laminins begin to appear along the edge of a developing lung at just ten weeks of human embryonic development, suggesting that they play a role in alveolar morphogenesis? That they're present in the neural stem-cell niche, which makes them an attractive candidate for helping to treat degenerative neurological conditions? I want to go back to whoever gave that talk that I watched in youth group and shake him and say, "God did that, and you're still hung up on the fact that laminins have three subchains?"

[pa-pa-plasma]

fucking hate fighting with people's who's main strategy is straight up lying & screaming & crying until you give up trying to even attempt communicating. just coming up with the most batshit, insane lies they can think of to slander you & they literally just don't fucking stop, like persistence predator shit except they're just doing it to avoid having to take responsibility. what the fuck is going on in that kind of person's brain

[sysig]

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