#so if the public demands it

[metaphorical-goblin]

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

It’s weird being a Taylor fan right now because so many outlets are publishing as many stories about Taylor as they can to the point where it feels like there’s a microscope on us and what we talk about. Like we used to be able to talk about theories and trademarks and other silly stuff casually and now those discussions are being spun into headlines and I’m not a fan of it.

[autisticrosewilson]

Jason finding out Willis is wingman bc he shows up and clocks Bruce in the face screaming about one of the MANY awful things he did to Jason (dealers choice) and he referred to Jason as “HIS son”

20 dead 48 injured this is one of very few times Jason doesn't think at all. He throws a smoke bomb at Bruce and then drags Willis back to his apartment.

Jason is trying not to cry so hard he throws up and he's not really succeeding. His dad is here! Willis is alive and he looked for Jason and he brought him back to Gotham, back home, he knows who Jason is and what he does and still loves him, still wanted to protect him.

Willis has practiced this moment a million times but nothing prepares you for being truly face to face with your son, no masks and no fake names. Both of you thought you'd lost the other forever but here you both are. He chokes up and all he can do is tell Jason he's sorry, that he loves him, that he's proud of him.

They talk about everything that's happened, what they've done and who they are now. And neither of them knows what to do because what the fuck.

Jason's dad was a victim of prison experimentation? He's going to kill every single one of them. He's going to shove those fucking syringes so far up all their asses they'll vomit them out.

God, Willis knew it would be bad, but he really couldn't have imagined. His son really died. No fake outs, no smoke or mirrors. Sheila really had sold out their son to a madman, watched him be tortured, and Jason still tried to save her. He's going to spit on her grave but first he's going to make his son some hot chocolate or something Christ. HE CRAWLED OUT OF HIS GRAVE! His son woke up in a box and clawed his way out, half dead and crying for a man Willis has grown to truly hate. He doesn't know what to think about the assassins. Sure he's tangoed with a few in his day but what the fuck he never went on Murder Tour to learn their tricks. Never managed to kill one either, but he supposes Jason has always defied expectations.

Jason is going to be very busy for the next few weeks and Willis is about to take his hate public by giving an interview to the gazette.

[soracities]

Hey! It has been on my mind lately and i just wanna ask..idk if it would make sense but i just noticed that nowadays ppl cant separate the authors and their books (ex. when author wrote a story about cheating and ppl starts bashing the author for romanticizing cheating and even to a point of cancelling the author for not setting a good/healthy example of a relationship) any thoughts about it?

I have many, many thoughts on this, so this may get a little unwieldy but I'll try to corall it together as best I can.

But honestly, I think sometimes being unable to separate the author from the work (which is interesting to me to see because some people are definitely not "separating" anything even though they think they are; they just erase the author entirely as an active agent, isolate the work, and call it "objectivity") has a lot to do with some people being unable to separate the things they read from themselves.

I'm absolutely not saying it's right, but it's an impulse I do understand. If you read a book and love it, if it transforms your life, or defines a particular period of your life, and then you find out that the author has said or done something awful--where does that leave you? Someone awful made something beautiful, something you loved: and now that this point of communion exists between you and someone whose views you'd never agree with, what does that mean for who you are? That this came from the mind of a person capable of something awful and spoke to your mind--does that mean you're like them? Could be like them?

Those are very uncomfortable questions and I think if you have a tendency to look at art or literature this way, you will inevitable fall into the mindset where only "Good" stories can be accepted because there's no distinction between where the story ends and you begin. As I said, I can see where it comes from but I also find it profoundly troubling because i think one of the worst things you can do to literature is approach it with the expectation of moral validation--this idea that everything you consume, everything you like and engage with is some fundamental insight into your very character as opposed to just a means of looking at or questioning something for its own sake is not just narrow-minded but dangerous.

Art isn't obliged to be anything--not moral, not even beautiful. And while I expend very little (and I mean very little) energy engaging with or even looking at internet / twitter discourse for obvious reasons, I do find it interesting that people (online anyway) will make the entire axis of their critique on something hinge on the fact that its bad representation or justifying / romanticizing something less than ideal, proceeding to treat art as some sort of conduit for moral guidance when it absolutely isn't. And they will also hold that this critique comes from a necessarily good and just place (positive representation, and I don't know, maybe in their minds it does) while at the same time setting themselves apart from radical conservatives who do the exact same thing, only they're doing it from the other side.

To make it abundantly clear, I'm absolutely not saying you should tolerate bigots decrying that books about the Holocaust, race, homophobia, or lgbt experiences should be banned--what I am saying, is that people who protest that a book like Maus or Persepolis is going to "corrupt children", and people who think a book exploring the emotional landscape of a deeply flawed character, who just happens to be from a traditionally marginalised group or is written by someone who is, is bad representation and therefore damaging to that community as a whole are arguments that stem from the exact same place: it's a fundamental inability, or outright refusal, to accept the interiority and alterity of other people, and the inherent validity of the experiences that follow. It's the same maniacal, consumptive, belief that there can be one view and one view only: the correct view, which is your view--your thoughts, your feelings.

There is also dangerous element of control in this. Someone with racist views does not want their child to hear anti-racist views because as far as they are concerned, this child is not a being with agency, but a direct extension of them and their legacy. That this child may disagree is a profound rupture and a threat to the cohesion of this person's entire worldview. Nothing exists in and of and for itself here: rather the multiplicity of the world and people's experiences within it are reduced to shadowy agents that are either for us or against us. It's not about protecting children's "innocence" ("think of the children", in these contexts, often just means "think of the status quo"), as much as it is about protecting yourself and the threat to your perceived place in the world.

And in all honestt I think the same holds true for the other side--if you cannot trust yourself to engage with works of art that come from a different standpoint to yours, or whose subject matter you dislike, without believing the mere fact of these works' existence will threaten something within you or society in general (which is hysterical because believe me, society is NOT that flimsy), then that is not an issue with the work itself--it's a personal issue and you need to ask yourself if it would actually be so unthinkable if your belief about something isn't as solid as you think it is, and, crucially, why you have such little faith in your own critical capacity that the only response these works ilicit from you is that no one should be able to engage with them. That's not awareness to me--it's veering very close to sticking your head in the sand, while insisting you actually aren't.

Arbitrarily adding a moral element to something that does not exist as an agent of moral rectitude but rather as an exploration of deeply human impulses, and doing so simply to justify your stance or your discomfort is not only a profoundly inadequate, but also a deeply insidious, way of papering over your insecurities and your own ignorance (i mean this in the literal sense of the word), of creating a false and dishonest certainty where certainty does not exist and then presenting this as a fact that cannot and should not be challenged and those who do are somehow perverse or should have their characters called into question for it. It's reductive and infantilising in so many ways and it also actively absolves you of any responsibility as a reader--it absolves you of taking responsibility for your own interpretation of the work in question, it absolves you of responsibility for your own feelings (and, potentially, your own biases or preconceptions), it absolves you of actual, proper, thought and engagement by laying the blame entirely on a rogue piece of literature (as if prose is something sentient) instead of acknowledging that any instance of reading is a two-way street: instead of asking why do I feel this way? what has this text rubbed up against? the assumption is that the book has imposed these feelings on you, rather than potentially illuminated what was already there.

Which brings me to something else which is that it is also, and I think this is equally dangerous, lending books and stories a mythical, almost supernatural, power that they absolutely do not have. Is story-telling one of the most human, most enduring, most important and life-altering traditions we have? Yes. But a story is also just a story. And to convince yourself that books have a dangerous transformative power above and beyond what they are actually capable of is, again, to completely erase people's agency as readers, writers' agency as writers and makers (the same as any other craft), and subsequently your own. And erasing agency is the very point of censors banning books en masse. It's not an act of stupidity or blind ignorance, but a conscious awareness of the fact that people will disagree with you, and for whatever reason you've decided that you are not going to let them.

Writers and poets are not separate entities to the rest of us: they aren't shamans or prophets, gifted and chosen beings who have some inner, profound, knowledge the rest of us aren't privy to (and should therefore know better or be better in some regard) because moral absolutism just does not exist. Every writer, no matter how affecting their work may be, is still Just Some Guy Who Made a Thing. Writing can be an incredibly intimate act, but it can also just be writing, in the same way that plumbing is plumbing and weeding is just weeding and not necessarily some transcendant cosmic endeavour in and of itself. Authors are no different, when you get down to it, from bakers or electricians; Nobel laureates are just as capable of coming out with distasteful comments about women as your annoying cousin is and the fact that they wrote a genre-defying work does not change that, or vice-versa. We imbue books with so much power and as conduits of the very best and most human traits we can imagine and hope for, but they aren't representations of the best of humanity--they're simply expressions of humanity, which includes the things we don't like.

There are some authors I love who have said and done things I completely disagree with or whose views I find abhorrent--but I'm not expecting that, just because they created something that changed my world, they are above and beyond the ordinarly, the petty, the spiteful, or cruel. That's not condoning what they have said and done in the least: but I trust myself to be able to read these works with awareness and attention, to pick out and examine and attempt to understand the things that I find questionable, to hold on to what has moved me, and to disregard what I just don't vibe with or disagree with. There are writers I've chosen not to engage with, for my own personal reasons: but I'm not going to enforce this onto someone else because I can see what others would love in them, even if what I love is not strong enough to make up for what I can't. Terrance Hayes put perfectly in my view, when he talks about this and being capable of "love without forgiveness". Writing is a profoundly human heritage and those who engage with it aren't separate from that heritage as human because they live in, and are made by, the exact same world as anyone else.

The measure of good writing for me has hardly anything to do with whatever "virtue" it's perceived to have and everything to do with sincerity. As far as I'm concerned, "positive representation" is not about 100% likeable characters who never do anything problematic or who are easily understood. Positive representation is about being afforded the full scope of human feelings, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and not having your humanity, your dignity, your right to exist in the world questioned because all of these can only be seen through the filter of race, or gender, religion, or ethicity and interpreted according to our (profoundly warped) perceptions of those categories and what they should or shouldn't represent. True recognition of someone's humanity does not lie in finding only what is held in common between you (and is therefore "acceptable", with whatever you put into that category), but in accepting everything that is radically different about them and not letting this colour the consideration you give.

Also, and it may sound harsh, but I think people forget that fictional characters are fictional. If I find a particularly fucked up relationship dynamic compelling (as I often do), or if I decide to write and explore that dynamic, that's not me saying two people who threaten to kill each other and constantly hurt each other is my ideal of romance and that this is exactly how I want to be treated: it's me trying to find out what is really happening below the surface when two people behave like this. It's me exploring something that would be traumatizing and deeply damaging in real life, in a safe and fictional setting so I can gain some kind of understanding about our darker and more destructive impulses without being literally destroyed by them, as would happen if all of this were real. But it isn't real. And this isn't a radical or complex thing to comprehend, but it becomes incomprehensible if your sole understanding of literature is that it exists to validate you or entertain you or cater to you, and if all of your interpretations of other people's intentions are laced with a persistent sense of bad faith. Just because you have not forged any identity outside of this fictional narrative doesn't mean it's the same for others.

Ursula K. le Guin made an extremely salient point about children and stories in that children know the stories you tell them--dragons, witches, ghouls, whatever--are not real, but they are true. And that sums it all up. There's a reason children learning to lie is an incredibly important developmental milestone, because it shows that they have achieved an incredibly complex, but vitally important, ability to hold two contradictory statements in their minds and still know which is true and which isn't. If you cannot delve into a work, on the terms it sets, as a fictional piece of literature, recognize its good points and note its bad points, assess what can have a real world impact or reflects a real world impact and what is just creative license, how do you possible expect to recognize when authority and propaganda lies to you? Because one thing propaganda has always utilised is a simplistic, black and white depiction of The Good (Us) and The Bad (Them). This moralistic stance regarding fiction does not make you more progressive or considerate; it simply makes it easier to manipulate your ideas and your feelings about those ideas because your assessments are entirely emotional and surface level and are fuelled by a refusal to engage with something beyond the knee-jerk reaction it causes you to have.

Books are profoundly, and I do mean profoundly, important to me-- and so much of who I am and the way I see things is probably down to the fact that stories have preoccupied me wherever I go. But I also don't see them as vital building blocks for some core facet or a pronouncement of Who I Am. They're not badges of honour or a cover letter I put out into the world for other people to judge and assess me by, and approve of me (and by extension, the things I say or feel). They're vehicles through which I explore and experience whatever it is that I'm most caught by: not a prophylactic, not a mode of virtue signalling, and certainly not a means of signalling a moral stance.

I think at the end of the day so much of this tendency to view books as an extension of yourself (and therefore of an author) is down to the whole notion of "art as a mirror", and I always come back to Fran Lebowitz saying that it "isn't a mirror, it's a door". And while I do think it's important to have that mirror (especially if you're part of a community that never sees itself represented, or represented poorly and offensively) I think some people have moved into the mindset of thinking that, in order for art to be good, it needs to be a mirror, it needs to cater to them and their experiences precisely--either that or that it can only exist as a mirror full stop, a reflection of and for the reader and the writer (which is just incredibly reductive and dismissive of both)--and if art can only exist as a mirror then anything negative that is reflected back at you must be a condemnation, not a call for exploration or an attempt at understanding.

As I said, a mirror is important but to insist on it above all else isn't always a positive thing: there are books I related to deeply because they allowed me to feel so seen (some by authors who looked nothing like me), but I have no interest in surrounding myself with those books all the time either--I know what goes on in my head which is precisely why I don't always want to live there. Being validated by a character who's "just like me" is amazing but I also want--I also need-- to know that lives and minds and events exist outside of the echo-chamber of my own mind. The mirror is comforting, yes, but if you spend too long with it, it also becomes isolating: you need doors because they lead you to ideas and views and characters you could never come up with on your own. A world made up of various Mes reflected back to me is not a world I want to be immersed in because it's a world with very little texture or discovery or room for growth and change. Your sense of self and your sense of other people cannot grow here; it just becomes mangled.

Art has always been about dialogue, always about a me and a you, a speaker and a listener, even when it is happening in the most internal of spaces: to insist that art only ever tells you what you want to hear, that it should only reflect what you know and accept is to undermine the very core of what it seeks to do in the first place, which is establish connection. Art is a lifeline, I'm not saying it isn't. But it's also not an instruction manual for how to behave in the world--it's an exploration of what being in the world looks like at all, and this is different for everyone. And you are treading into some very, very dangerous waters the moment you insist it must be otherwise.

Whatever it means to be in the world, it is anything but straightforward. In this world people cheat, people kill, they manipulate, they lie, they torture and steal--why? Sometimes we know why, but more often we don't--but we take all these questions and write (or read) our way through them hoping that, if we don't find an answer, we can at least find our way to a place where not knowing isn't as unbearable anymore (and sometimes it's not even about that; it's just about telling a story and wanting to make people laugh). It's an endless heritage of seeking with countless variations on the same statements which say over and over again I don't know what to make of this story, even as I tell it to you. So why am I telling it? Do I want to change it? Can I change it? Yes. No. Maybe. I have no certainty in any of this except that I can say it. All I can do is say it.

Writing, and art in general, are one of the very, very, few ways we can try and make sense of the apparently arbitrary chaos and absurdity of our lives--it's one of the only ways left to us by which we can impose some sense of structure or meaning, even if those things exists in the midst of forces that will constantly overwhelm those structures, and us. I write a poem to try and make sense of something (grief, love, a question about octopuses) or to just set down that I've experienced something (grief, love, an answer about octpuses). You write a poem to make sense of, resolve, register, or celebrate something else. They don't have to align. They don't have to agree. We don't even need to like each other much. But in both of these instances something is being said, some fragment of the world as its been perceived or experienced is being shared. They're separate truths that can exist at the same time. Acknowledging this is the only means we have of momentarily bridging the gaps that will always exist between ourselves and others, and it requires a profound amount of grace, consideration and forbearance. Otherwise, why are we bothering at all?

[infiniteglitterfall]

Welp. Just had the most horrifying realization.

What determines whether people want to punch Nazis or not isn’t the fact that they're Nazis.

People only want to punch Nazis when they disagree with them.

[awkward-teabag]

Love (cannot emphasis how much sarcasm there is in that word) that an official Canadian government response to high cellphone rates is to switch carriers.

Switch it to what? We basically have three companies since one was allowed to eat the forth (with the government saying it wasn't anti-competition and the company eating the other pinky promising they wouldn't jack rates up). Even the smaller companies have to rent infrastructure from the Big Three so there's only so much they can do if that rent costs an arm and a leg.

And that's not touching on how many "small companies" are actually just subsidiaries of the Big Three. You may save $5 but you're still with Telus/Rogers/Bell.

Or that the actual small companies tend to have shit coverage because they don't have the infrastructure available to them and are prevented from getting it. Or their traffic is throttled in favour of the Big Three's customers. Or both.

Or that they're extremely regional thus aren't an option for a huge chunk of Canada's population.

We have no true options and the government has shown time and again that they're fine with monopolies, in multiple industries, and don't care when said monopolies jack up prices to make shareholders and the c-suite more money at the expense of everyone else. At most there will be a verbal slap on the wrist and a giftcard for $25 that people have to register for, for a decade and a half of price gouging.

It's not talked a whole lot about outside the country from what I've seen and heard but Canada is a country of monopolies. A handful of companies own nearly everything, every province has a family or two that owns a hell of a lot (Nova Scotia is basically owned by one family at this point), and our government ignores it. Even the branch that is supposed to be against monopolies is fine with mergers and takeovers in most cases.

Because, you know, the company said it totally wouldn't use consumers' lack of options to increase prices.

[spriteofmushrooms]

Can you imagine how annoying it is for Wei Wuxian, strongest cultivator of his time (when using modao and/or guidao), to hear people say that cringe Jiang Cheng killed him?

[intotheelliwoods]

How does it feel to have all 30 of your keychains bought before you even went public with the listing lmao

HORRIBLE ok note to self, order more.

[pocketramblr]

5 headcanons for an AU where All might deflates in front of the crowd after defeating the sludge villain?

OOOOOOH now that's fun

1- it's quiet, for a moment, as everyone stares and tries to process what they just saw. Izuku, who saw the truth already, still is stunned for a second. And then he realizes everyone else sees too, and his feet move before he can think more about it.

2- Izuku needs everyone to stop looking at All Might as the crowd begins to murmur, shaking itself. Izuku knows that Kacchan is very good at being loud and the center of attention. So, 2+2=4, he gives Bakugou a little push into a hero and a civilian and let's that work out.

3- As the explosion begins, Izuku grabs All Might's hand and runs, down between two buildings that still smell like smoke and sewage. Mt Lady grows for crowd control, and sees where they go- but the look in their eyes makes her turn back to the crowd and block a few civilians from following. She pretends everything is normal, and she's an actress. If that really was All Might- and it had to be, she felt that power- he'll be grateful when she contacts his agency later to demand what happened. If it isn't, then she can point out that letting non-heroes follow a villainous impersonator of that power level would have been disastrous.

4- they go a few buildings further when All Might's feet drag and Izuku's burst of motion slows. He pants, and stops at the street. "Go one way, All Might, sir, I'll tell them you went the other way." He can still hear Kacchan shouting above the other voices, and Mt Lady arguing back, but they don't have a lot of time. "Yeah, no." Toshinori says, and drags Izuku instead into a store, heading for the clearance section and hats.

5- the good news is, most people had put their phones down at this point and weren't filming. The TV cameras had turned away to show the people cheering and the blond victim fine. The bad news is that some people still were filming, and the TV crew went back, catching sight of All Might's skinny back fleeing the scene as the crowd erupted. As Toshinori pays for a change of clothes for both him and Izuku, his phone starts to ring. He mutes it as they change and put on the hats. Izuku asks where they are running too, but Toshinori just goes two buildings down to a ramen shop and sits at a table. He points out that no is going to look for All Might at a restaurant a block from the crime scene, much less expect him to be casually eating there in an Endeavor hoodie and a ball cap. He thinks the bright orange FG jacket izuku is now wearing to hide his school uniform clashes horribly with the lilac beanie, but it works to make the few curls escaping to look less green. As they eat, Toshinori tells Izuku about OfA, and makes his offer. Izuku bursts into tears because he just ruined All Might's secret, revealed it to everyone, he doesn't deserve his quirk, and now that it's in the open All Might can pick someone else, the best choice. Toshinori disagrees, because all Izuku did was inspire him to save that other boy, which was more important. Izuku agrees to be his successor, numbers are exchanged, and after eating Toshinori walks him home just in case- but it seems Izuku wasn't identified, probably because Bakugou could only scream "Deku" when shoved, so Izuku gets a quiet night of pure stress to himself while Toshinori heads to ask Tsukauchi for a ride to Might Tower for a very loud and very long night of pure stress and demanding answers.

[peachy-doodles]

for the drawing requests... Larry n Kabu dancing together..... Heehee....

did this as a cool down sketch after those owed art pieces i did... tysm... thinking abt them dancing together is rly funny. short ass kabu can barely reach. they need to put this man in some heels fr.

[coldercreation]

I'm not normally one to do anything more than lurk on social media. But 2 days ago I got properly introduced to omegaverse content after being to intimidated for a while, yesterday I discovered Let Me Try, and now I am tearing through LINK content like a rabid dog.

So uh

Thanks?

I still wanted to ask some questions if thats okay.

What are canon ages of the boys at the time of Close your Eyes and Lock Me In?

Do you have an idea of a time gap between those two stories? They seem to be the main points of reference of the timeline

Hello! Yayy, LINK's caught another one!! You're very welcomee heheh<3

Like all the other specifics for the stories, their ages / locations / accents etc. are a bit vague on purpose. I like to leave the room for everyone’s own imagination based on what they’re familiar with. It makes things a bit fuzzy for the timeline sometimes, but I just prefer having the blurred reality instead of basing it on real places and tracking a firm timeline.

But generally, I eyeball the gap between CYE and LMT to be maybe a couple of years.

The later on in the timeline we get with the newer published parts, I’ve been thinking that Kizzy, as the oldest of the four, are now getting closer to the mid-twenties mark and maybe over. 

The age order is: Isac as the oldest (by two critical weeks🤺), then Kit, Liam’s a year younger, and then Nathan. -> Nat’s age difference to the others & the gap between the stories could technically vary +/- an extra year or so, depending on whatever length of uni you’d want to imagine.

So basically, the canon is vague and they are all twenty-ish something in CYE and LMT xx

[leolingo]

they should invent a college major that doesnt involve doing things

[lensdeer]

working with microsoft products is so fucking miserable I have never felt less in control of what I'm doing

like bro why even bother offering an "embed on your site" option if you're gonna demand user sign-in anyways? why did I have to manually fuck with URL query strings to create a direct download link? IF YOUR EMBED SUCKS SO MUCH WHY WON'T YOU LET ME DO IT MANUALLY WITH <object type=application/pdf data=""> AND THE DDL LINK AAAAAAAAAAA

I guess even if I waste multiple days working on this it's still faster than putting up with GoDaddy's dumbass limitations for uploaded files

[qumiiiquinnquin]

i turn 19 tomorrow

[vaxxildamn]

very happy Matt decided to clarify his stance on the genocide of the Palestinian people rn. Pretty unhappy with the way he worded it, who he centered in his video, and disappointed to see the responses to it on Twitter.

kinda scared to even post about it bc CR fans can get so defensive about their favorite white people that they can often leave little room for criticism or nuance. but man I have thoughts.