#rooting for that independence

[jesncin]

Chindo Tim and Malay Bernard gaming and saying region specific cusses :p this prompt is for DC Gotcha for Gaza! I never really drew these two before but Southeast Asian Batfam was too good to pass up.

Got a DC art/fic request in mind? You've got until the 18th to submit! Look over the DC4Gaza carrd to learn how ;)

[nicorobinphd]

stg, being an enjoyer of jane twdg is like being forced into an expert-level course on the way misogyny manifests in video game spaces.

god forbid a woman be complex or difficult or provably mischaracterized (see tags) at the end of her arc to service the culmination of a man’s storyline.

[saltedsnailstudio]

In The Garden

Jasper Alexander

linocut print on lokta paper

[rutadales]

honestly favorite character type in dsmp is "immortal but did something fucked up to get here". cdream, sam, foolish. the "came back wrong" trio. the "should have killed me when you had the chance" triplets. the "immortality should be a diagnosable disorder in the DSM 5" gang

[woodsling]

I'm having midnight Halsin thoughts. This kind of turned into a ramble about the way Halsin leaves at the end of the game.

Honestly I don't feel like it's wildly out of left field for Halsin to leave as soon as Baldur's Gate is saved. The entire time you're in the city, he's extremely vocal about how much he hates it there.

For someone who's confident in himself and assertive about his freedoms, the fact that he even accompanies the player to the city at all I think is a testament to just how much it meant to him to have the player's help lifting the shadow curse.

I mean he finally sees an old enemy overthrown, regains his oldest and best friend, and sees the shadow curse lifted from what's implied to be the place he spent his early childhood... And then has to immediately leave to help the player. Like, immediately. He doesn't even have time to breathe it in. I don't think he would have done it if he wasn't so immensely grateful and honor-bound to help. On

And then he has to go somewhere terrible! A very dense city full of rot, and abuse, and backstabbing, and murder, and homelessness, and hunger... And and and. It's like his own personal hell. But I feel like even though he's quite expressive with his feelings about the city, he's never bitter or resentful toward the player for making him be there. He takes ownership of his promise to help and he's true to that.

But is it surprising that he wants to get the hell out as soon as his promise is fulfilled? He misses his home! He misses his best friend! He sees an opportunity to help people AND live the life he wants! Idk like I get that it might seem kind of sudden but to me, the writing was on the wall. This is like a continuation of something we see when he finally confesses his feelings to the player. Halsin likes to chew on things and sort out what he wants before he expresses it out loud, but when he's ready to express it out loud he KNOWS what he wants and he's ready to act on it immediately.

And honestly I'm not super surprised that he doesn't expect the player to follow him right away. It's reasonable to think that a Baldurian Tav would want to stay in the city they JUST saved, similarly to how he wished he could've stayed in the land he just saved. (Reithwin, right? For some reason I'm not sure but I'm not googling it rn). And even if he thought Tav might follow him, they lived in the city before the tadpole... They should theoretically have affairs to get in order before they can just up and take off with him.

Idk. I saw some crit posting recently where someone said something about how Halsin was only into the player for some sex and then of course he left after, and it really rubbed me the wrong way. Obviously he's into sex but I don't see him leaving as an indication that he's not also really emotionally into the player too.

Just because you're in love with someone doesn't mean that you should compromise your happiness and put yourself in a terrible position... He would be completely miserable if he stayed with Tav in the city. And perhaps he could've stayed a day or two longer? But with the refugees getting ready to head out (back to the place he most wants to be!) it makes sense to me that he would feel called to go with them.

He's already duty-bound enough, let him choose his own happiness for once! I wonder too if that's part of the reason he doesn't outright ask the player to come with him. Like he already feels like he's being selfish in taking what he wants and doesn't want to be greedy and ask for more.

Anyway. This got long. I guess my point is... Independent relationships can still be deeply loving. Halsin can care deeply about the player and still choose to prioritize his own happiness. And I should start blocking crit posts lmao

[batsplat]

bat splat thank youuu for saying the pecco jorge rivalry is just for pecco as opposed to having the specter of Vale hanging over it. I want to ask tho, I have been seeing people say the only reason pecco wins the race is because he copies jorge's setup throughout friday/saturday/Sprint. Wanted your opinion on this because I have also heard that Pecco gives decent engineering input and builds his race slowly over the weekend. Was just confused about how much data sharing can actually help, and how much does it help with the ducati specifically!! Have a nice day, love your posts

have a good day too, anon!! and I will gladly spread the pecco narrative independence agenda!! it's something I really do like about the rivalry - expanded a bit in the comments under this, but it's neat to have something that really is Just Pecco's. from inception it's very much his own rivalry, his own narrative... idk, this sport is too reliant on valentino to provide any kind of narrative tension, and it's just sort of refreshing to see this multi-year narrative play out that has fuck all to do with that guy. enough

on the set-up copying, obviously that is bullshit. I mean, to be clear, I'm sure pecco absolutely copies the set-ups of other ducati riders, but that's very much a mutual process - it's something that benefits all the ducati riders, and they've all openly spoken about this. it's very helpful to be able to see the data from seven other riders!! that's a big part of why ducati has been so bloody good!! the main difference is that jorge tends to be faster from the start of the weekend, whereas pecco tends to take time to reach his level. which I suppose makes some people draw the conclusion that pecco is only fast once he's copied someone's set-up. again, this isn't the case - it is just a difference in approaches. points come... well, unfortunately, not just on sunday anymore, but they certainly do not come on a friday. pecco knows this, which is also why sometimes he's not even trying to top an fp1 session - this year there have been quite a few instances of jorge but not pecco throwing on a fresh set of tyres towards the end of fp1 and setting a particularly impressive lap time. there's also nothing wrong with THAT approach, jorge is playing to his strengths, but at a certain point we're just talking different run plans

(there is also a very obvious logical fallacy with this line of reasoning. if you are copying someone's set-up, then by definition you have the same set-up as them. and if you beat someone with the same set-up, then it stands to reason that you were riding better than them. sure, you can argue the success is less earned because your team... idk, just lazed around all weekend, but at the end of the day surely you still cannot be a bad rider if you are getting more out of another rider's set-up than they themselves are able to manage)

and yeah, pecco is known for giving good feedback! just being a good learner in general. here, actually, a little throwback from start of 2019 where pecco's crew chief gabarrini (who also ofc has worked with casey, lorenzo and briefly with marc) compared pecco and marc:

"A driver - all of them do this - starts at a certain level and ends the day at a higher level. What makes the difference is starting again where you were. Few have this quality: it often happens that a driver sets good times - without knowing why, without being aware of how he got there. The 'good' ones, on the other hand, have this characteristic: they achieve a result and know why they did it," explained the chief technician. Gabarrini even goes so far as to compare the MotoGP rookie with the current world champion: "I saw this quality in Márquez: I was with him when he made his debut in the MotoGP World Championship. His ability to not forget what he had learned impressed me. Once he had understood an aspect of the riding style, the set-up or any other thing to be faster, he had it in him forever. Pecco also has this quality." "In Valencia we started with a base similar to the one Lorenzo used: on paper it suited Bagnaia, based on what you could understand when you saw him riding a Moto2 bike. From then on, the normal changes to the set-up were made so that he could ride the bike as he liked. In the meantime, Pecco has worked enormously to adapt his style to the Ducati."

and there you have it - pecco's good at progressively getting better at stuff, including over the course of the weekend. as for the set-up copying thing, partly it's just typical competitive paranoia (even though it feels like the fans are currently doing it more than the riders). back in the day, valentino and jorge used to have the world's dumbest arguments about this every other week. led to one of my all time fave messy jb moments:

god I miss that guy so badly. they don't do ride-or-die like that anymore

the point is that both sides were engaging in pretty silly mudslinging, just kind of for the vibes of it. valentino/jb trying to get under jorge's skin and jorge a bit more earnestly aggrieved. as ever, if you want to read more about how that particular era of jorge/valentino unfolded, see here. this is just to say, this kind of faffing about is a tale as old as time and it's always a bit silly... you had jorge say that it was impossible for them anyway to copy each other's data in the very same answer as he accused valentino of copying his set-up. like, I'm sorry, I am not going to take this seriously. a lot of sports is about having dumb arguments

and yeah, again, pecco does gradually build up his level over the weekend. more of a valentino than a casey, it's fair to say. and that'll hurt him in the sprint format - which I talked about a bit recently while going through casey's latest interview about how sprints are satan's providence:

so yeah, casey thinks that if anything there isn't enough time to work on set-up, and mat oxley thinks it's rubbish to say pecco relies on sprint data to be better on sunday. (as I said in that post, I do find it fun if unsurprising that casey is so virulently anti-sprints, because you'd think a lot of aspects of the format - including less time for everyone for working on set-ups - really would have suited him. keeping it real.) so on the whole... y'know. maybe he just gets better over the course of the weekend. it's been known to happen. there's actually some pretty significant ways in which the current version of the sport isn't all that pecco-friendly, from the shitty michelin front tyre we're keeping for another year to the sprint format we appear to be stuck with. it's just that he also happens to be on the best bike - and the fact that he's winning a lot but simultaneously isn't highly rated by fans makes people want to believe that the current series is 100% ideal for him

a lot of fans are loathe to admit pecco might actually be a good rider so they'll find basically everything to justify that prior. including getting into increasingly conspiratorial territory. but my actual take is this - if pecco has been gaming the system so expertly that he is somehow the only guy able to take full advantage of everyone else's data, so shrewd and cunning that he can spread magic dust on his bike so that he suddenly leaps ahead of jorge, such a dastardly operator that he can steal the set-up that poor jorge perfected on friday morning to fix his bike five minutes before the sunday race, then... good. I support it. I hope he's cheating. the more unearned the success is, the better in my books. long live corporate espionage and foul play

[raayllum]

having a moment (and this might be my autism speaking) of remembering that when characters (or even irl people) are analyzed / analyzing themselves, some people just look at the behavioural patterns and not where they stem from in the character's psyche and go "my job is done" when the job is half finished cause to me that shit has always been synonymous and i cannot imagine fathoming meta writing from any other standpoint

[y-rhywbeth2]

The VtM part of my brain thinking about BG3 again even though brain activity should have more important things to do rn: 'Cazador's set up and most of his childer scream 'Tremere,' but Astarion himself wouldn't be great at existing within the Pyramid.

'...Hey, what if Astarion's Ravnos, his siring was revenge/educational and Cazador's the adoptive sire.'

The clan has CtD ties; elf. Arcane Trickster -> Chimestry. The clan curse/ban could be any number of his vices (being cruel and spiteful for the sake of it springs to mind), but I think it'd probably manifest as a fundamental inability to obey hierarchy and orders (which is not the same thing as the Brujah temper and clan cultural inclination towards rebellion). Like a lot of people I tend to try to awkwardly avoid the racist shit built into the origins of the clan, but moon elves are not sedentary peoples so there's a really fucked up aspect to this in there if you start converting to the real world shit and bringing it into play.

(I am always on my WoD bullshit, I should probably tag it for filtering...)

[thousand-winters]

It has always bothered me, but after watching Arcane I keep thinking more and more about how much the framing of the narrative in Fire Emblem Fates bothers me.

Because the thing is we have very similar situations: Hoshido and Piltover as the privileged parts of these societies, with Nohr and Zaun struggling to get by. But where this unbalance is very clear in Arcane, it's framed SO differently in Fates.

Nohr is in the wrong for doing whatever they can to survive, despite the fact (iirc) they did ask Hoshido for help because they get no damn sunlight in Nohr because of the light and dark dragons or whatever and there's only so much cattle and crops you can get like that. People are dying everyday over there and Hoshido doesn't give a damn, but Nohr is in the wrong for being desperate enough to try and get territory on their side of the continent because they need to feed themselves.

It's insane. The retainers of the royal siblings in Hoshido are all children of nobles. The retainers of the royal siblings in Nohr are all like "oh, this was an assassin trying to kill me to get money to survive so I ended up taking her in", "this boy was trying to rob us to be able to eat and he was going to get executed so I took him under my wing", "I saved her from a gladiator wing and took her under my care", like ???. The difference in conditions is just insane.

Even the royal siblings aren't escaping this because despite being the ones who get the best standing, they had to murder a whole lot of their half siblings because of the sheer amount of women who became Garon's concubines in order to try and ensure themselves and their children a better life. And then they had to kill each other in order to have a chance. THEY WERE CHILDREN. THEY HAD TO KILL THEIR HALF SIBLINGS AS CHILDREN.

Meanwhile in Hoshido the biggest problems the siblings had was that they were insecure or shy or whatever.

And you're expected to go "you're right, Nohr is evil, Hoshido is good". Like... I don't even know, man. What were the writers on, it's insane. And the amount of stuff about Nohr that got censored in localization because it was too heavy due to how dark it got is also like... jesus fucking christ, these people were living in misery and you want to blame them for trying to get themselves a better life since Hoshido won't help? Be for real...

Fates, you would be so good if you were good 😞

[theadhdgoblin]

[soulmvtes]

and what if i say you blank street matcha people are fake matcha lovers? what then?

[hawkp]

X user @moniquemcgee this is a very demure, very mindful take

[dailyanarchistposts]

To

THE EDITOR MODERN REVIEW

You have in the December (1929) issue of your esteemed magazine, written a note under the caption “Long Live Revolution” and have pointed out the meaninglessness of this phrase. It would be impertinent on our part to try to refute or contradict the statement of such an old, experienced and renowned journalist as your noble self, for whom every enlightened Indian has profound admiration. Still we feel it our duty to explain what we desire to convey by the said phrase, as in a way it fell to our lot to give these “cries” a publicity in this country at this stage.

We are not the originators of this cry. The same cry had been used in Russain revolutionary movement. Upton Sinclair, the well known socialist writer, has, in his recent novels Boston and Oil, used this cry through some of the anarchist revolutionary characters. The phrase never means that the sanguinary strife should ever continue, or that nothing should ever be stationary even for a short while. By long usage this cry achieves a significicance which may not be quite justifiable from the grammatical or the etymological point of view, but nevertheless we cannot abstract from that the association of ideas connected with that. All such shouts denote a general sense which is partly acquired and partly inherent in them. For instance, when we shout “Long Live Jatin Das”, we cannot and do not mean thereby that Das should Physically be alive. What we mean by that shout is that the noble ideal of his life, the indomitable spirit which enabled that great martyr to bear such untold suffering and to make the extreme sacrifice for that we may show the same unfailing courage in persuance of our ideal. It is that spirit that we allude to.

Simiarly, one should not interpret the word “Revolution” in its literal sense. Various meanings and significances are attributed to this word, according to the interests of those who use or misuse it. For the established agencies of exploitation it conjures up a feeling of blood stained horror. To the revolutionaries it is a sacred phrase. We tried to clear in our statement before the Session Judge, Delhi, in our trial in the Assembly Bomb Case, what we mean by the word “Revolution”

We stated therein that Revolution did not necessarily involve sanguinary strife. It was not a cult of bomb and pistol. They may sometimes be mere means for its achievement. No doubt they play a prominent part in some movements, but they do not — for that very reason -become one and the same thing. A rebellion is not a revolution. It may ultimately lead to that end.

The sense in which the word Revolution is used in that phrase, is the spirit, the longing for a change for the better. The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit. Otherwise degeneration gains the upper hand and the whole humanity is led stray by the reactionary forces. Such a state of affiars leads to stagnation and paralysis in human progress. The spirit of Revolution should always permeate the soul of humanity, so that the reactionary forces may not accumulate (strength) to check its eternal onward march. Old order should change, always and ever, yielding place to new, so that one “good” order may not corrupt the world. It is in this sense that we raise the shout “Long Live Revolution”

Yours sincerely

(Sd/-.)

Bhagat Singh

B. K. Dutt

[bumblingbabooshka]

Rare Chakotay-Janeway-Tuvok moment: These three have got to get together and see a ball game or something.

[susanaesono]

M'bolani loading... 💫

[franollie]

philadelphia has to win the super bowl. otherwise the world ends i think