#salty post is salty

[buckybarnesss]

ah yes the refrain of "derek and stiles don't like each other and only tolerate each other for scott"

what? derek and stiles like each other more than scott ever likes derek before season 3 and than some.

scott is down right shitty to derek multiple times mostly based off first impressions and his issues with male authority figures. he didn't move beyond that until season 3 at the earliest and even then it's more of an ally-ship than being friends.

stiles and derek have their own relationship outside of scott.

derek pretty explicitly trusts stiles, indulges him more than once in a way we don't see him do with others and spends all of 3B trying not only to find stiles but protect him from being killed despite evidence that stiles is doing horrible things.

stiles returns for derek over and over and over. he even compromises his fbi career to save derek. he totally wasn't concerned when derek's name was the password for one of the deadpool lists and he doesn't totally have like six reactions shots dedicated to him watching and hesitating as derek is dying in smoke and mirrors not at all. 🙄

this doesn't even scratch the surface.

but they don't like each other and it's all for scott and us sterek fans are just creating fanon out of nothing.

[infiniteorangethethird]

sure "romantic" isn't the only type of love but also "love" isn't the only type of positive feeling. So maybe stop insisting everyone needs love to be happy and accept that loveless ppl exist? Pretty please?

[sparrowlucero]

what's the flight rising art direction post?? I used to play that game

for everyone who doesn't know flight rising is a virtual pet site ala neopets, but with dragons. On its forums I made a thread pointing out that the dragon designs were becoming relatively more "same face" over time, with similar face shapes and often with a similar "noodly" anatomy my point being that they were both losing some of the charm of a lot of the animals they were based on (with bug, bird, and eel inspired dragons all looking somewhat similar and mammalian), and even more pertinently, not allowing for a wide variety of body types for user characters in the game - with most of the gameplay being a dressup/character creator, you see why having very few buff, chubby, stocky, etc character designs is a pretty big downside. These are the dragons released in the first half of the website's history, with the shapes outlined:

(these pairs are the same species but have somewhat different body shapes, so they were both outlined) And these are the dragons released recently. The stockier guy on the bottom left is the very oldest of these:

I also pointed out several of these designs have very similar faces, relative to the facial variety you could have with dragon designs (other two recent guys are outlined above):

In comparison, here's some of the head shapes from earlier dragon designs:

and yeah I think you can see what I mean about the shape language getting a bit more homogeneous. I expressed that I felt like the art team may have observed the popularity of the thinner, doglike dragons in comparison to the chubby reptilian ones and decided to err towards the former.

I also drew some dragons to better get across my point about shape language when people suggested I was failing to account for the fact that the "sameface" dragons weren't entirely identical:

(obviously I'm exaggerating shapes for clarity of point; clarifying here as some people believed I was knocking the art style and wanted it to be more cartoonish...) I also pointed out that you could easily draw very identifiable fanart of two breeds which people were saying looked different:

(someone told me these didn't read as fanart of either dragon. you be the judge, I guess) I did get a lot of very nice comments, both in agreement and disagreement, but also some comments that I was being disingenuous, arrogant, or (much more dishearteningly) suggesting that fat designs are simply too unappealing and that the artists can't waste their time on it because the website is a business.

yesterday they released a sneak peak at their newest dragons, which people believe are cetacean inspired. I tuned in as the initial preview (which only featured an arm) made it look pretty stocky:

but, shocker:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[hinamie]

congrats on your recovery n all yuuji but unfortunately for you I thought the scars were cool >:/

[sexy-sapphic-sorcerer]

BBC Merlin & Text Posts (16/?)

[tea-earl-grey]

can 2024 please be the year where we stop acting like Jadzia's bisexuality was subtextual and that her queerness should be treated with the same validity as other common headcanons. i love queer headcanons! i love thinking about gay subtext (intentional or unintentional)! but i cannot possibly understand how kissing a woman, professing your love to her, and risking your future to spend your lives together is somehow subtext. (well i can understand because 1) fandom doesn't like to focus on queer women nearly as much as queer men and 2) seeing queer women who later marry men as somehow not "actually queer" is just. classic biphobia.)

[salcreus]

Bwah

[factual-fantasy]

Just a heads up to new artists who might not know this: tracing people's artwork and posting it as your own is not okay. With or without credit, its stolen if you don't have permission.

This is why I continue to stay out of the Octonauts fandom and now probably will not return. Even months after leaving the fandom I'm still getting new art tracers and thieves.

If you absolutely have to trace and post it, just ask the artist first. If they say no then don't trace their artwork.

[kaxtwenty]

I feel like a solid 75% of discourse around the Jedi wouldn’t exist if people just factored in that they’re monks.

It feels like half of y’all don’t consider that maybe being a Jedi really is just incompatible with a lot of things that are a normal part of other people’s lives… Because they are monks.

We had a whole trilogy showing how Anakin wanting to have his cake and eat it too led to disaster and people really came out thinking, “the Jedi should’ve just let Anakin be married,” not, “Anakin was a selfish moron who ruined literally everyone’s lives because he couldn’t accept that he had to make a choice.”

[cheekylittlepupp]

Somewhere where we can lose ourselves and forget all this madness..

[bereft-of-frogs]

I just wish that more people recognized that not all fiction is allegorical, and you don't have to constantly be grasping at real world parallels to figure out what the 'correct' moral interpretation of fiction is, you can just sit with the story

[pestiforousalt]

Wip of a Longan Dragon Cookie design. Less of an.. idealized version, and more of a detailed character look that isn't the CookieRun art style. With a couple headcanons. I guess Gijinka might be the term to call it?

Anywho,

I did want to slightly change their robes though, because given their seemingly never-ending age, I have some inspiration from Roman and Greek cloths and how they would fold these huge fabrics into togas. The original design is very reminiscent of it to me. It's all still a work in progress, though.

[pepperf]

I'm a little puzzled by a few takes I've seen along the lines of, Lila was such a great wife and mother and Diego took her for granted! Because I don't think the show gave us that at all, and I think it relied heavily and lazily on societal norms to get the audience to make that leap. It also ignored previous characterisation, which is why I plan to disregard the season as a whole - because if the characters had been like this from the start, I wouldn't have fallen in love with them.

So, what I mean is: the whole time we see her as a parent, Lila is basically phoning it in. She seems to view her kids as one monolithic, sticky entity sent purely to ruin her day (distinct shades of the Handler there). They're just a list of chores - diapers, dentist, ballet, cake, piñata... And I'm not underestimating how much parenting really is a list of chores to be done - but that's all we see, no love, no fun. She's eager to get away from them, and she's only - finally - desperate to be with them when it's convenient for the plot, at which point we're supposed to buy the idea that her kids are her sole focus (not the relationship that they spent the past two seasons building up). And even then, the focus is not on the reunion with the kids, it's on all the awkwardness of the surprise love triangle. Hell, one of the kids doesn't even get a name.

Their intent might have been to have Lila be the better parent, but like much of this season, it's all tell and no show. We're working off a couple of brief conversations from the points of view of two frustrated, tired, biased individuals who are already at odds with one another, plus the evidence of what they actually do. They show that they’re not communicating well, but they don’t show how that happened, how long this has been growing, if one of them really is more at fault. All we know is that he complains a lot, and she’s sneaking out at night to play secret agent. They tell us that she loves her children (eventually, after seven years apart), but they show her being annoyed and/or bored in every normal, non-apocalyptic interaction. They have her (and Five) tell us that Diego is a bad husband, but they show Lila sniping at his weight, his way of running a birthday party, rolling her eyes at his efforts to impress her and regain her attention - and they show him dadding at everyone (he will turn this van around, so help him), the comfortable love and affection between him and his kids, the Punjabi he learned to speak fluently to his in-laws, him looking for ways to fix his marriage...

Take the bracelet thing, for example. "You hate bracelets," says Diego. "I gave you one for Valentines and you traded it for a Dyson vacuum." I think what we're supposed to take from that is a) Lila stopped wearing the wooden bracelet (uh oh, signs the honeymoon period has worn off!), b) Diego gives thoughtless, stereotypical gifts, and c) he doesn't understand what she really wants.

But an alternative reading is this: a) Lila stopped wearing the wooden bracelet (could not be a clearer or more loaded 'fuck you' to Diego), b) Diego tried to find another way to win her affection (on his pay as a delivery driver, with a wife and three kids to support, he managed to buy a bracelet that was expensive enough to trade for a Dyson?), and c) she rejected that gift as well, without any deeper explanation than 'I hate bracelets'. She's shut down all communication between them and is not telling him what's wrong. She has shut him out so comprehensively that she's got a whole undercover life - for which she apparently has the time and energy! - and yet we're supposed to think that oh it's all on Diego. Why? Lila is not a shy and retiring flower, and she and Diego have been shown before to have some very sincere heart-to-hearts about their relationship. Something changed, okay, fine - but why would we assume it was Diego that caused that?

I think our expectations about What Women Are Like are doing a LOT of the heavy lifting in how the show wants Lila to be perceived. She's a woman, and therefore she's automatically a good wife and mother - that she's emotionally intelligent, the organiser, she'll love her children and would do anything for them, she'll tried the hardest to make her marriage work, just...because boobies, I guess. This is not how you write good parents, or good female characters, TUA! A truly astonishing amount of people actually ARE women, and they know that it doesn't automatically confer any kind of maternal or wifely abilities! These things have to be worked on!

(In real life, women are often socialised to be better at these things, this is sadly true. But an awful lot of us do not have an innate talent for it, and there's no shame in that. And, more relevantly to this post, this is not real life, and Lila is not your average person. She's not normal, and I love that about her. She was raised to be a weapon. Do we really think the Handler installed the 'homemaker' module? Lila herself said that she was scared that she wouldn't know how to be a mother, because she had no good example to base it on.)

I also think the show assumes that, when you get married and have kids, you're automatically granted a house in the suburbs, a bunch of in-laws, and enough money from just the husband's job to get by. And I think that is an incredibly privileged and blinkered assumption. Frankly, unless her parents are financing them, they should be struggling a lot more. None of that is explained, and for me it was a real gap, because these are the arguments that Lila and Diego should be having. Lila caring for the kids versus getting a job. Living with family versus striking out on their own. Diego sticking at a job that makes him miserable and difficult to live with, or taking the huge financial risk of trying to find something better. These are the real life issues they should be facing.

Listen, I think the characterisation of Lila as a parent and spouse in this season is horseshit. I think she would be so much better than they showed - of course she's going to have some low times, she's going to struggle with her own upbringing, but I think she would try her damndest to get it right, and I don't think she'd be defeated so easily. But if we're dealing with what canon actually shows us, she's, uh, kind of mediocre as a mother, and really not that great as a partner.

And yes, I'm sure Diego is no angel, either, he's obviously wrapped up in his problems, and he's probably not much fun to be around when he's fixating on, uh, *checks notes* wanting a more fulfilling job (the fiend). But honestly, he's not that far removed from the Diego we've seen all along, the one she fell in love with. It takes one conversation for him to realise how incredibly fortunate he is, and to convince him to try to work harder on his relationship and stop focusing on the unobtainable. The idea that he's the only one who is failing at this whole gig - the chief culprit in the failure of their marriage, the only one who needs to make an effort to fix things - is bizarre. And it's pretty obvious why they've done it: to justify her thing with Five later and make it all seem more palatable. But there's no real substance behind it.

tl;dr: this season was badly-written, takes some incredibly antiquated attitudes towards the role of women that are inconsistent with the characters they themselves established, and some incredibly classist attitudes towards manual labour, and just hopes that you'll either take it at face value or read the fuck into it, to better sell you a shitty romance that added nothing to the plot.

[jewish-sideblog]

“Antizionist Passover” literally the Haggadah calls you a wicked child if you distance yourself from our people’s struggle for statehood in the Levant. The singular and explicit point of the Maggid is to put yourself in the shoes of our ancestors, yearning to live free by our own laws in our own nation. Some of you need to renew your PJ Library subscriptions and go back over the essentials

[traumasurvivors]

Here’s a reminder that even if your parents had their own trauma, it doesn’t mean it was okay for them to treat you the way they did.

It’s valid if you’ve forgiven them or whatever else, just please don’t invalidate your own feelings because they were also hurting.

[saltwater-sloth]

[BAAU belongs to @cuppajj]

"One of the many Lambs who plant saint orchids across Earthbread, Jelly Coral Cookie is a humble gardener who cultivates all sorts of vegetation and fungi for the cult. She only cares about two things: the ideology of the Lambs and her plants. 

Some say that she only joined the Lambs of Penance because of her fascination with the Saint Orchids… Nevertheless, she serves Penance loyally, and happily tends to the orchids while joyously awaiting the day of her purification.

Please tread carefully though; the coral in her dough is not that of the Sea but of mycelium, and she grows many things besides orchids. You won’t realize just how many different types of plants and fungi can leave a Cookie temporarily immobilized until you meet Jelly Coral Cookie. . ."

Extra Notes:

Specifically based on Sebacina sparassoidea (white coral jelly fungus).

However, she is broadly based on orchid mycorrhiza, which is typically a symbiotic relationship between orchids and fungi wherein the fungi help the orchid get nutrients. Although sometimes this relationship can be parasitic.

She has helped many Cookievorous Plants thrive since they were but mere seedlings, and in return for her generosity they are immensely loyal and protective of her. Despite this, she largely leaves them to their own devices, simply requesting that they protect the saint orchids in their territories from being destroyed, and to not harm any Lambs.

That said, there are 3 of these cookie-eaters who are never far from her. They usually help guide her when she’s in unfamiliar terrain and make sure no one interferes with her gardening.

She is a Penitent Acolyte, but she generally avoids wearing the official robes since she doesn’t want to get them dirty from gardening. However, she will wear them if asked to, though she can’t fit her hair into the hood unless she cuts it…

While she is clean in her reference art, Jelly Coral usually has a few dirt stains on her.

Has the WORST labeling system for her herbs—or at least that’s what everyone keeps telling her when they see the monstrosity, but she can find everything just fine.

Personality-wise she’s a bit socially awkward, but very passionate about gardening and keeping her fellow lambs safe (until they can be purified, that is).

Finally got around to posting this lil' weirdo. I like to call her my discount Poison Ivy /pos.

Anyway Cuppajj's AU is fire, check it out.