#smarter than i think i am

[wreckitremy]

I need yall not on tiktok to see and listen to Mariah

[unnonexistence]

imo a core part of the newmann dynamic is like... you've got these two very very intelligent people who have spent most of their lives being Smartest Guy In The Room. which feels great! but also, it's very hard to form close and trusting relationships when everyone else sees you as Smartest Guy In The Room. and if you maybe don't have great social skills to begin with, you can't figure out how to compensate. and it's hard to build up solid self-esteem when the only thing people value you for is your intelligence, and a lot of them resent you for that, too. so really it is very very lonely.

and then they meet! and neither of them is the smartest guy in the room anymore! and that is both EXHILIRATING (omg! someone who gets me!) and TERRIFYING (the fragile pillar i built my whole self-esteem on is crumbling! help!).

they do NOT know how to cope with this. best they can do is being obsessed with each other.

[mohntilyet]

same anon, do not apologize about taking an excuse to rant because it was a very enjoyable read 👍 especially because i share similar frustration regarding the lack of lore on rivain and even less lore on the lords as a faction. My very first rook was a lord and it was honestly kind of a miserable playthrough roleplaying wise 😭 i think i only got like five faction related dialogue options throughout the ENTIRE game!!! That combined with rook acting like they dont know anything about their own factions or even their own nation was absolutely maddening… anyway whoops sorry for my own little rant

RIGHT.... you do not have to apologise either anon i am right there with you. the map surrounding rivain being so nothing is just insult to injury when 1) like you said, almost no dialogue choices, 2) jack all content because i was running around for 70 hours hoping to find decor related to them/finding none because there IS none/absolutely nothing in the lighthouse being customised as a result and 3) they have decided the only thing you get to say about being a lord is repeating their catchphrase like this shit is scooby doo

the art book also has some pages on the lords that gave me mixed feelings lol spread that i scanned under the cut

i really thought that they would lean into the "mix and match" thing especially because even when i was designing my rook pre release, i was trying to incorporate elements of this! i was looking at duncan's armor to try and patch together something that reflected rivain! but when the game comes out it's just. orientalist. and there's a bull on my crotch. even though the art book discusses this idea of the lords having patchwork armor that they've stolen or put together because they're so diverse. there's a few designs in here that i would have loved to see in the game with the more piratey longcoats and hats, and if they were going to draw inspiration i wish they'd looked more at mauritius and south india (kerala, tamil nadu) instead of . i'm not actually sure what the fuck they were doing here. my first thought when i saw the jewelry and design in game had been indigenous south american? but ofc the longer i looked the more i leaned away from that initial judgement and the more i got confused, and what little we know of rivain is obviously inspired by south asia (asha's maiden name being bahadur, bharv, hari, etc. but there's also mateo?) so i think it is the tried and true method white people looove to do where they mishmash cultures into one place and then get defensive when poc say "we aren't interchangable like that"

visually i think veilguard is so so successful in most cases with that consideration of shape language, colors, etc (though sometimes i think it goes too far. let the crows wear black again) but rivain/the lords is one of the weaker ones because i wish there was something specifically rivaini that tied it all together. like if dragons are found here (presumably. taash has a reputation as a dragon hunter. they would need to hunt dragons in rivain) then maybe scale armor as an identifier. or if rivain is known for pearl farming then it features more in their armor. or if the climate is hotter, so the fabric they wear would be linen and would actually cover more of their skin to avoid sunburn! or if they wear lots of blue, is that because they're a producer of that dye? just worldbuilding things like this completely ignored to make their main thing 'lots of gold and it should be revealing' and be weirdly racist/orientalist in the process.

[icedb1ackcoffee]

to my fellow creatives: never stop making art. art is an act of protest.

[animentality]

'what academics thought of him' get that stick out of your ass, as if writing a bs paper is more valuable than literally 95% of jobs XDD

you know what's really sad?

you don't even know just how much you don't know.

you think that you and I are on even ground and that I just have an inflated sense of self worth and that we are intellectual equals or that we are, in some way, capable of the same logical processing power and deductive reasoning, you just didn't finish school and I did...

but we aren't.

and the saddest part is that you really never will know what it's like to understand things on the same level as I do, nor will you ever attempt to do such a thing.

you're sort of like a newborn puppy trying to contemplate the existence of a mirror.

you're capable of seeing the world around you, but you will not know why or how it works, and everything that happens to you will be outside of your control or comprehension.

and that's tragic.

and I feel sorry for you.

because that must be a terrifying and confusing way to live.

and fear mostly leads to fury and lashing out at anyone you can reach, because you cannot influence anything else, and you just don't understand why.

this is the only way you can assert yourself and make you feel in control, and the worst part is... you don't even know how easily we can see through you.

and you are still, ultimately, powerless.

you're just, you know. also embarrassing yourself.

[scurvyboy]

The way you treated the hater on your pearl and fidd "the cucks" work (which was absolutely splendid btw) made me especially confident in how I treated a recent comment I got on a story I made a few years ago (it's on an app called fortelling but I'm thinking of putting it on ao3 possibly)

The comment on it read something like "I don't appreciate the violence in this story" which is wild because I put a tw for violence at the beginning of the story, so I told the commenter that.

Then they said they didn't appreciate the way I made the characters in the story gay and lowkey suggested that I put a tw for that as well.

Of course I was like hell no. Politely of course. Like you wouldn't put a tw for a straight character, why should I do that for a silly lil gay guy?

Anyway I love your yummy scrumptious art and your utterly silly idgaf energy. Keep being great.

I feel like I sound like one of those "good job, sport" dads, so I'm gonna wrap it up.

i really do hate the state of internet discourse culture these days. if someone says something stupid to me then i'm going to make fun of them, and if they can't take it then they shouldn't have commented in the first place. i say the next time that happens just troll the person and make them look like a bigger idiot than they already are.

[yea-baiyi]

i’m so fucking mad i just realised that the final confrontation between he xuan, shi wudu, and shi qingxuan is perfectly framed like a traditional greek tragedy—it has the three actors, the character between two extremes, the recognition, the reversal, the pity and fear, the catharsis. you can pretty much take the scenes—starting and ending with xie lian performing the soul shifting spell—and directly stage them as a play and they could conform to the Tragic structure. what the fuck man what do i do with this information.

[quaranmine]

On Wednesday before I gave my presentation I confessed to a new employee that I was worried it would be too long and she brightly told me her life hack was to just let AI rewrite things for her. She said I should put in all my talking points and ask ChatGPT to give me a five minute exactly presentation. I was like....how is the most polite possible way (since this is a new colleague I shouldn't get off on the wrong foot with) that I can express that I will Not be taking this advice. Ever. I told her that I didn't think we were allowed to use ChatGPT at this job (we most certainly are not, it is a nightmare for any type of protected information) and also that I prefer to write all of my own work. Despite my best efforts the last part of that was still passive aggressive, lol.

Something about being a writer makes it so that it's almost offensive to me for someone to suggest I use AI to do my work instead? Like, the day I reach the point where I let AI write something for me is the day y'all need to be checking me for brain damage because clearly I'm losing it

[suga-kookiemonster]

me to my white, male, engineer coworker who hasn’t been in the office for a month: oh hey! haven’t seen you in a minute

him: …what?

me, immediately recognizing the problem: i haven’t seen you in a while

him with a puzzled smile: that’s confusing

me, mentally confirming my long-held suspicion that he’s never been around many black people but also deciding it’s too early for me to have to deal with this discussion: it’s just a saying, brad

him: huh 🤔 that’s counterintuitive

[relaxxattack]

i COULD make a post about how the fandoms' lack of respect for moirallegiance led to the really weird popularity of kar♦kan despite kankri explaining beat for beat why that would be incest. but i'm too busy trying to be normal

[fieldsofbone]

i’m turning 28 in june and besties. can i be honest. i have this sense of anxiety and foreboding as i near 30. i love my birthdays and genuinely see aging as a privilege and i think every year that i’m older i feel so much more myself and you couldn’t pay me enough to be 21 again, and i don’t even think that 30 is old! i actually think that, holding the emotional progress i’ve made these past few years constant, i’m going to thrive at 30! i have this idealized image of myself at that age and i am truly looking forward to it! and i do think some of these feelings can be attributed to the fact that my 20s are the first decade of my “adult life” and so i have nothing to compare it to — much in the way that turning 14 felt monumental and terrifying because it signified this arbitrary “transition” — but regardless of all of my cognitive recognitions i cannot seem to shake this feeling.

and i feel so conflicted about it for all the aforementioned reasons, but also because i fundamentally think our anti-aging culture is goofy and ludicrous and pernicious but i am also a member of the dominant culture so even with my beliefs and even as much as i know the anti-aging programming i am inundated with is horseshit meant to make me buy shit, i still feel it! i am still susceptible! and i will be fully honest that some of my fears / anxieties are vain or superficial. like i can admit that some of my thoughts are in the vein of “will i still be considered pretty as i age” which, again! i recognize as probably sounding insane or frivolous to people, but it is in my brain nonetheless. anyway i don’t know the point of sharing this on tumblr instead of journaling it but maybe i’m hoping that someone else understands this and i am not donkey kong king kong crazy

[lifesver]

stop calling my boy stupid <3 he's insecure !

[pvrrhadve]

speaking of the pool scene i'm once again thinking about this conversation between 2 of the densest individuals alive that i stumbled across fnbfhgmfj

[featherymainffins]

"Estrogen could have saved her" but it's "Testosterone could have saved him" and it's me talking about my and @dandelionsheep 's DA:I Inquisitor

[femmefaggot]

top ten games that call a child a bitch 1-4 times

[sunlightmurdock]

me: likes dating older guys bc they know things

older guy: tries to explain something to me bc he assumes I don’t know it

me: >:(((