#so they needed their own spotlight

[romanceddawn]

The Trouble With Patience by deevotee | Rating: T

Seto would like to be able to open himself up to more intimacy in his relationship with Yugi. However, the first step is actually being comfortable with the small things.

Tags: No Archive Warnings Apply, Kaiba Seto/Mutou Yuugi, Kaiba Seto, Mutou Yuugi, Insecurity, trouble with intimacy, Just Kaiba Things™, Fluff, Established Relationship, Post-Canon

[vaggieslefteye]

HUSK, Hotel Bartender & Concierge | 1x04 - Masquerade

"Oh, I FORGOT — you're the wise-old bartender who's seen it all! Get the fuck over yourself and pour me a real drink."

[royalarchivist]

Jaiden: Cucurucho, you have a lot of power, right?

Cucurucho: ...I don't know. Maybe.

Roier: Ah... Yes, you know, don't act like a dumbass, you have it. You have it, man. Eh?

Jaiden: Is there a way for us to protect all the Eggs? Do you know? I don't want anything to happen to the Eggs that happened to Bobby.

Cucurucho: Ha ha ha

Roier: WHAT? [Smacks Cucurucho]

Jaiden: [Bops him] Headpats.

Cucurucho: Maybe.

Jaiden: [Continues to bop him] Headpats. C'mon, I can get it out of you! Headpats! Chin scratches! Belly rubs!

Roier: [Joins Jaiden in bopping Cucurucho, chuckling and laughs]

Jaiden: Yeah? He's comin' around!

[Jaiden and Roier both laugh]

[carnelianwings]

Something I find really funny is how for all the rumors that Seed’s staff/writers don’t like Cagalli, Orb under her leadership just keeps ending up in a better (political) position with each addition - Seed Destiny ends with Logos wiped out, Blue Cosmos severely hampered, and the entire Seiran family wiped out, including Yuna. This leaves Cagalli with almost no political opposition in Orb (since the second Battle of Orb would’ve flushed out a majority of the Blue Cosmos/Logos sympathizers within the government/military), along with giving her a boost in popular and military support thanks to her actions and field leadership during the battle.

(Cutting for me just rambling on a bit about the in-universe politics after Seed Freedom)

You can tell with how much she’s managed to get done in the years between Seed Destiny and Seed Freedom - in that short year and a half to two years, she was able to propose and found COMPASS, secret away and upgrade the Impulse, Destiny, Strike Freedom, and Infinite Justice, arrange for ties between Orb and Terminal to investigate/exchange intel (Athrun and Meyrin), and put into place all the evacuation/defensive protocols in case of another attack on Orb (as seen vs Foundation and Requiem, even if she needed Kira to pull an “I lived, bitch” to Aura 😅).

And it doesn’t end there - thanks to Foundation, Cagalli arguably has an easier time internationally now, because the Eurasian Federation leadership also got hit and the Eurasian Federation, while not necessarily Blue Cosmos sympathizers like the Atlantic Federation, was very staunchly anti-PLANT, which I think would’ve caused some problems for Cagalli, especially post Seed Destiny with Lacus joining her for that broadcast.

I actually think Orb probably has fairly decent diplomatic relations with PLANT (I think Chairman Lament mostly cut off that call after everything went south in Eldore because of the whole nuke situation), especially since Lacus is COMPASS’s inaugural president, plus the time both Dearka and Waltfeld (I’m not sure if he’s in Orb or PLANT as of Seed Freedom since his silent cameo has him helping to stop the coup in PLANT in Seed Freedom) spent there. And we have a very prominent all-Coordinator team with the Yamato Team - truth be told I actually wonder how much the Earth Alliance invested into COMPASS because everything we see on screen is either contributed by Orb (Archangel, Murrue and crew, Kira, Mu, and the Murasame Kais), PLANT/ZAFT (Millenium, Konoe and crew, Heinlein, Shinn, Lunamaria, Agnes, Gelgoog, and Gyan), or arguably both (namely, Rising Freedom and Immortal Justice). Unless I missed a minor crew member along the way. Which is possible.

Also pure speculation on my part on this - but the fact Seed Freedom has Athrun going into intelligence with Terminal (which we first see as having a presence in the PLANTS) from the Orb side and Yzak and Dearka going into intelligence from the PLANT side can’t be a coincidence. I want to think the three of them decided on it together because being in intelligence/covert ops gives them the chance to work together without having to force anyone to change their current loyalties - I don’t think Athrun can be truly loyal to anyone except Cagalli after Seed Destiny, and Yzak was always loyal to PLANT, and if Dearka hadn’t been captured and made to realize how extreme PLANT had become under Patrick Zala he wouldn’t have switched sides to Orb/Three Ships Alliance during Seed either. Which also indirectly feeds into Orb and PLANT having better political relations than Orb and Earth Alliance.

Which brings me to my final point - I would be very surprised if Orb isn’t the primary target for the antagonists in a Seed Freedom sequel. At this point Orb’s capable of doing too much with the limited resources it has as a small nation with too much military strength at its command. And there is room for a sequel (setting-wise) because while Earth Alliance took another major hit with during the Foundation Conflict, the ideologies that led to the First and Second Earth Alliance-PLANT wars still exist - even if Blue Cosmos lost another leader, even if the believers of Coordinator Supremacy lost another leader (in Jagannath) those ideologies still fundamentally exist. All the Foundation Conflict did was serve to take down the military leadership of those ideologies - even if the public on both sides see those views negatively it doesn’t make them go away.

[thepromisedbride]

i don’t talk about bridgerton on here but just to clarify. i will not be having ANY eloise hate on this account. i will bite.

[tvok]

God made yuya and yusaku not exist in the same universe because he knew they would be unstoppable as canon best friends

[lloydfrontera]

literally me right now you don't understand

i wish the webcomic had shown just a little bit more of what happened in the two months between serazade asking for julian's hand and the wedding because it is so heartwarming <3

right after serazade asked to marry julian, they had a family meeting in the middle of the night (including lloyd who was barely awake for it) where the count asked both julian and serazade separately if they were both sincere in their respective declarations of love.

and when they both said they were the count was immediately supportive of them, even taking on the task of asking for the permission of both the queen and the sultan for the marriage.

like. this is a man who by his own words was often to soft hearted and indecisive to be a good lord. and yet when it came to his son's happiness he didn't doubt for one second to take action and wrote to two monarchs to get the permission they needed. he could've easily let lloyd take the lead, reasoning that he already had a connection with both of them, but he didn't!! he stepped forward and did his duty as father without any hesitation or doubts!!

i just,,, really love arcos you guys <3

[carmenized-onions]

i can very well imagine Fak getting insecure over tony's handyman takeover LOL, like he'll tell carm about some issue happening and carmy will be like "oh yeah, i'll tell tony about it" and fak just follows carmy like. What do you mean tony im right here im the handyman... all in good spirits ofc, and sugar just there telling him "don't worry sweetie we'll find something for you to fix"

God you've ruined me, I'd so dedicated myself to the idea of only following Tony and sprinkling in bits of Carmen's thoughts and NOW I'm COMPLETELY RUINED WITH WANTING THIS!!!

(in a good way, i jest hehe, this was such a delight to read, just kickin' my feet like 'YEAH!! YEAH THEY WOULD!!')

The Fak and Tony dynamic hasn't been touched on too much just yet but it really is so fucking funny, please do know that in the background, this is absolutely what is happening lmao. Fak will have his moment I swear HA-- We will give him a squeaky hammer to help <3

Everyone write fanfiction about my fanfiction fr, it's too fun to write for Tony, I promise you'd love it.

[a-high-femme]

..

[qwortywarrior]

“Burn.”

[cornsobsessions]

why does every woman in stem have to be asked about being a woman in stem all the god damn time !!!! just let me live a little gahhh

[darktyrannomon]

Grimmelfeld’s Death

The howl and rush of the blast echoes in your ears, so loud that you feel that you may lose all your senses at once. The dragon, as large as a small hamlet, shields the best of it from you, his hulking shadow the only protection from true annihilation. You can hear his pain reverberating in the forest that is shaking all around you, with the trees being forcefully ripped from their roots and turned to ash, creatures screaming as they too splinter into dust. Anything and anyone who was lucky enough to be close to you has rushed to the shelter of the elderwyrm, his kindness protecting predator and prey under one ailing body. The wolf and deer, the fox and rabbit, humanoid creatures that some of you have never seen before all huddle against his body, forming an island of green against a sea of grey ash and golden flame. Those who weren’t flash fried by the blast staggered into the circle with shrapnel tearing their bodies apart, legs crushed by falling trees or splintered with rocks and metal from the war machine. 

Your eyes slowly open to the hellscape, first only noticing the trembling creatures and persons able to seek this only shelter in the explosion, then noticing the wounded, of which there are many. The stench of blood and fear hit you through the tang of sulphur, the cries of the wounded feeling like they are forever away as the blast threatened to deafen you, the ringing in your ears drowning out thought, reason, and rationality. You think you can hear shouting, howling, crying, but sound is so drowned out it you fear it could be your imaginations. 

Roll con saves, roll charisma saves

Successful saves see Janus, at a crossroads, two doors in the distance.

You see what looks to be a man, clear as a picture in the middle of the smoke and dust, two horns connect behind him and seem to connect to something on the other side. He is wearing a sharp business suit and gestures to you to a door behind him. He turns, and another face, on the back of his head, also with a second set of arms, gestures to a second door. “It is not often we get to witness a choice that shapes the world.” they say, overlapping each other in eerie harmony. You blink and they are gone, but the doors in your minds remain out of your peripheral wherever you cast your gaze. 

Everyone except odette and zach make a perception check

You see the Magpie King, standing vigil next to the huge body of Grimmelfeld, who with laboured breaths seems to be trying to speak. He does not notice the Magpie King, but perhaps that is the point. In a solemn, pained gesture, the Magpie King summons a weapon, a glaive, died with obsidian and mercury. The head of the glaive elongates to a scythe which glows a soft gold and it becomes clear to you, those that have died and have seen the Raven Queen herself, that Grimmelfeld has moments left to live. Unable to speak, a voice reverberates in your heads.

“I am dying. In my final moments I can provide for you a gift, a gift of which you have asked of me already, but I only have the strength to do one or the other. I can give my soul to you to anchor one of your weapons of fate, knowing I can never return to my body, as it will be not fit for me to go back unless I turn into a dracolich or similar. Or, I can heal your friend. I can cast wish for Mina. I will be nothing more than ash on a skeleton soon, you must choose quickly.”

Looking at his body reveals that scale, skin, and muscle are starting to pull away, disintegrating off of the skeleton in a slow, beautiful manner as though flames were drawn by a spider web. Radiant energy slowly consuming the flesh until only bones remain. You must make a decision and quickly. Harness the soul of the dying dragon to save the world, or heal your friend of a dreadful curse?

[pancoleon]

A rule of thumb for central London: if someone owns their home it's probably worth over £1 million. A huge amount of London is still old buildings from the 19th & early 20th century sitting on absurdly inflated land values.

On a similar note, if you're seeing an article reporting on the value of someone's London home and it's from 1) the Telegraph, 2) the Daily Mail, or 3) the Sun chances are it's being mentioned to undermine what people are doing because "you say all this and yet you're a millionaire!" and the like. They're all firmly right wing papers and wouldn't care about this if they didn't consider their target 'left wing'. In this case, the original story seems to be from The Sun, a Rupert Murdoch owned rag. For American readers, he also owns Fox News if you want an idea of how genuine it might be wrt homelessness or someone owning property.

Another example of this the UK had was the leader of the left wing Labour Party living in a house worth £1 million. He had been the MP for a London constituency since 1983 and bought his house within the constituency long before house prices in the area rose dramatically. This didn't stop newspapers try and convince their readers that he was disingenuous when talking about fighting poverty because 'he lives in a million pound home!" and the like. For reference, here's his house:

Okay, more specifically his house is the one with all the plants outside. Basically a mansion I'm sure we agree.

Please don’t pay for his music.

[dailymanners]

Tips and ideas for how to respond when someone is being rude to you

For personal reasons I won't get into, I have a history of just freezing when some is rude / hostile / aggressive / condescending / patronizing / etc. It's obviously not something I'm happy about at all, most people who freeze or fawn aren't happy about it and would change it if they could.

One day I confided in my co-worker, a middle aged woman in her 50's, that this is something I struggle with. Considering how confident and assertive she always struck me as, I was shocked when she told me this is also something she's struggled with.

The advice she gave me is to just memorize and practice a few broad statements or reactions that you can pull out of your pocket so to speak when someone is being rude or disrespectful to you. It's not easy if you're someone who's been conditioned to freeze or fawn, but practice helps. Practice saying these things when you're alone. Put up a sticky note next to your bed or on your bathroom mirror with these phrases and practice them when you see them. Practice saying these with a partner or trusted friend, role-play scenarios where you might need to use these phrases.

Here's a few phrases that have worked for me. The nice thing about them is that they tend to shut down the situation rather than escalating, while still letting the aggressor know that you don't find their behavior acceptable.

"Are you okay?"

This works well in professional settings, because it's not like your work place's residential bully can run to HR about you asking if they're okay (but they might if you try to retaliate and give them a taste of their own medicine). However, it still effectively sends the message "I think there's something wrong with your behavior and don't accept it". It's also not likely the response they're expecting, so it'll likely throw them off and prevent further verbal aggression.

"Could you repeat that for me? I didn't catch what you said."

This one is most effective for people you believe to actually have a conscious and might regret what they said if they actually thought about it a little more. I find that often when I do this one, when people repeat the rude/snippy/patronizing/etc thing they either shamefully stumble over their words and show some remorse, or they change altogether what they say. In the off chance they don't regret what they said and end up repeating exactly what they said, this at least buys you some time to think of a better reaction since you're no longer caught off guard by a sudden rude and snippy remark.

"Can you explain what you mean by that?"

Similar logic to the last one. Often when people are being rude/snippy/patronizing/etc they're caught up in their own emotions in that moment and didn't think it through. This is a polite and civil way of putting their rude behavior in the spotlight and making them reconsider what they said. The other advantage to this one is that in case you did misread their intentions and they meant no harm by what they said or did, this gives them an opportunity to clarify that, instead of you just feeling bad over a statement or actions they actually had no ill intentions with.

If anyone has any further examples of reactions / responses / statements that have worked for them, I'd love to hear about them. I'm new to studying the art of how to civilly yet effectively shut down bad behavior from others, so I'm always open to hearing more suggestions.

[feyburner]

I ??? woke up at 3am with this scene fully written in my mind palace and quickly jotted it down in the Notes app

*

Clark’s shaking his head before he realizes he’s doing it, and feels a twinge of embarrassment at his own bad manners when Bruce stops mid-word to look at him, brows raised.

“No?” he says.

“No,” Clark says, again without thinking, and again with the reflexive urge to apologize. Somewhere his mother is tutting without knowing why. But he doesn’t apologize, because he’s already saying, “No, it can’t—it can’t be that.”

“Okay,” Bruce says slowly. “Can you elaborate?”

He is, honestly, having trouble taking his eyes off the screen. The mockup design of his new suit is there, dark and sleek, ridged like tactical gear. The blue is like the last shade of evening before you can’t call it evening anymore, the color of nine PM in Kansas in July, so exact there’s a strong chance Bruce color-picked it from a photo. The yellow accents are the cool fluorescent yellow-green of lightning bugs. The red is dark as arterial blood. Every aspect of the suit has been updated—the colors deeper, the angles sharper, the S extending to the corners of its frame—but Bruce has done it without changing the fundamentals. It’s immediately recognizable as the Superman suit, just… well, a little cooler, maybe. A little more of the times. Even the tailoring is modernized. The neckline. The shape of the boots. Where the belt hits at the waist. Clark can tell just by looking that Bruce has not only spent a lot of time on this in general, he’s spent a lot of time designing it specifically with Clark in mind, Clark’s needs and preferences and the small discomforts of his current suit, things he might have mentioned offhand after a mission but never with the assumption that Bruce was listening or filing it away. No doubt the next slides of this presentation will detail all the hidden features of the new suit, and they’ll all be incredibly thoughtful if not slightly overkill, and Bruce will pretend his sole motive here was practicality and risk reduction and respond to any thanks with a curt nod.

And Clark wants to thank him. He will. It’s just.

“It can’t be… cool,” he says, inane. Bruce is watching him with that steady look that used to feel clinical, piercing, and now mostly reads as attentive. “It can’t be—like yours. Tactical, military-grade.”

“Lightyears beyond, actually.”

“It has to—Ma said once, a kid should be able to draw it with crayons. You know? I can’t look like a weapon. I have to—I want to look like a friend.”

He can feel himself flushing. It’s rare that he speaks like this, and rarer still that he does so while being stared at intently. Bruce may think of himself as the darkness, but his gaze is a spotlight: unwavering and revealing and more a little sweat-inducing, for one reason or another.

“Sometimes, when I show up, people laugh,” Clark says. “If it’s somewhere out of the way, where they haven’t seen me before. I show up and I look like a festival performer. It’ll be the worst day of their lives, and they’ve got no reason to trust my face, but when they see what I’m wearing—it goes from ‘Who are you?’ to ‘Who is this guy?’ And that’s a good thing.”

“Hard to be afraid of a man dressed in primary colors,” Bruce says, almost to himself.

“Exactly.”

“I see. Thank you,” he says, “for explaining.”

Clark tries not to show how surprised he is to hear that. Judging by the crook of Bruce’s mouth, his success is negligible. “Of course. Sorry I didn’t—I mean, thank you, obviously, for going to such trouble. I didn’t mean to come in here and—I really do appreciate it, I can tell you put a lot of work in—”

Bruce’s eyes cut away. “No. No need. I didn’t ask, before I…. It was only a first draft. If you’re amenable, I’ll incorporate your feedback into the second one.”

“Oh! Yeah. Yes, of course, but you really don’t have to—”

“If you have any further notes, I would like to hear them.”

There’s something determined in the lines of his face. Clark has the sense that this moment is important, that it’s a turning point, even if he’s not sure why. It feels like striking out into a sea of ice, a blank white expanse under which something precious and vital is hidden, has been hidden all along, just waiting for him to find it. To want to.

“Sure,” he says. He looks back at the suit and swallows, and knows Bruce will see the flicker of his throat and take some meaning from it, and wishes he knew what the meaning was. Or maybe Bruce won’t notice or read into it at all. Maybe Clark needs to calm down, in fact. “Um. I don’t want to assume, but does it… do things?”

“It does things,” Bruce confirms, after the barest pause. “Let me show you the next slide.”

[rumplestiltrin]

truly ill never understand the hamfisted forcing of peters very well known "rejected main love interest" to become Miles' One True Wuv. insulting for both honestly

and to see confirmed that miles is also functionally, in previous concepts at least! is spdrgwns replacement for peter

well maybe theyre just objectively a bad pairing☆