#stand up specials

[lserver362reviews]

WOW. This was triumphant! Safdie's direction added an anti-comedy twist that I found extremely compelling. Sandler's jokes and songs vary from laugh out to loud to completely cringe-worthy, but it all worked for me! Even the raunch and moments that veer close to the more typical annoyances of married life from someone his age. You can tell he's got so much love for his people, his family, and his work, and that makes all the difference. I found the ending ode to Comedy to make this a companion special to 100% Fresh but in a way that was still totally fresh. (Someone, who shall not be named here, should've just had a career as an Elvis impersonator).

[martyrbat]

batman: odyssey (2011) #6

remember only one of them actually went to med school and got their degree and it is NOT the man dressed as a giant bat !!!

[brightgoat]

[ green child AU .5 ]

jolyne runs off with stone free and pucci bullies whitesnake part 1

part 2

[oxavierart]

🎉⭐🎉

[rotisseries]

because amenogozen is a 4 dimensional being, and cannot be killed solely by attacking it in the 3d space, the combination of atsushi's claws, which can "deny even amenogozen's dimensional detachment" and akutagawa's rashomon spatial distortion, is the only thing viable for killing amenogozen. which is why months ago when everyone on social media was saying that sskk was cooked and that they needed skk back as soon as possible I wanted to (remembers that threatening a person's life over animanga fandom is embarrassingly immature) send them a strongly worded email

[int3r3st1ng]

Percy: I think I accidentally joined a cult Later Percy: Update, I am now the leader of said cult

[unfinishedslurs]

The boy stops in his tracks. “I know you,” he says, tilting his head curiously. He’s not tall, but he’s regal nonetheless, dressed all in white. Something about him makes Leia’s hair stand on end, and although she hides it she feels a stirring in her own chest. I know you like I know my own soul, she thinks wildly, and wonders where it came from. Has she gone insane?

“That’s nice,” she says, and shoots him anyway.

He deflects it in a flash of light, a glowing blue laser sword appearing in his hand like magic. She’s only seen one of those before, and it’s Vader’s. If this boy is anything like Vader, she realizes, she’s in deep shit.

She’s smart enough to know when she’s outmatched. Leia makes the tactical decision to run for her life.

Later, as she’s getting the hell out of there, she wonders why he didn’t try to stop her.

She remembers being young and tugging on her mothers skirts, demanding to know why their guest was so sad. “Does he not like it here?” She’d asked, and then, trembling, because Kenobi always seemed saddest around her. “Is it…because of me?”

“Oh, Leia,” her mother sighed, lifting her into her arms. “It’s not that, I promise.”

“Then what is it?”

“Master Kenobi lost a child under his care, years ago.” Breha’s eyes grew deeper, darker. “It was not his fault, but he blames himself. You remind him of that child, that’s all.”

Leia had quieted at that, contemplative.

The next time she’d seen Master Kenobi, she had given him a hug. He didn’t seem to know what to do with that, so she resolved to give him more of them. “He’s lonely,” she’d told her mother. “No one should be lonely.”

Looking at Obi-Wan Kenobi now, the memory seemed so far away. He’d aged thirty years in the ten it had been.

He looks, Leia thinks with a small twinge of regret, very lonely.

“Leia,” he greets. “It’s been a long time.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Leia sees a glint of white.

Kenobi freezes in his tracks. “Luke?” He whispers, and through the distance Leia can hear it as if he’d been speaking directly into her ear.

Master Kenobi lost a child under his care, her mother whispers in her head. He blames himself.

In an instant, Leia understands everything.

Kenobi is still staring at the boy he’d lost so long ago when Vader cuts him down.

Later, as she’s pacing around on the Falcon to Han muttering darkly about Princesses and supernatural abilities, she rememberers the way the boy collapsed, as if all his strings had been cut. Vader was too occupied with him to even look at her as she shot at him desperately.

Luke. She hates him more than she hates herself.

“They know where you are,” he hisses frantically. “They’re coming for you. You have to run.”

“Wait!” Leia quickly pulls up their sonar. Nothing yet, but it would explain the distant queasiness she’d felt since they’d landed. She tended to trust her gut. “How do you know? How much time do we have?”

“Not important, and not enough,” he says. “I have to go, and so do you. You need to leave yesterday.”

“How do I know I can trust you? I don’t even know who you are.”

He pauses. “Call me Skywalker.”

“That’s not an answer, Skywalker.”

“Yes it is.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but there are faint voices on the other end, drawing nearer.

“Shit,” Skywalker mutters. “I have to go. I’ll be in contact, okay? Don’t ever tell me where you are, or where you’re heading. Vader and Palpatine aren’t shy about reading minds. Just leave as soon as you can, and figure out the rest.”

“But—“

It’s too late. The comm has disconnected.

She stares down at it, disbelieving. How would the Empire know they’re here? Why should she trust a stranger who somehow got her personal comm code?

Gut feeling or not, on paper this was a perfect location. Supplied, armored, and most importantly, extremely well hidden. There was no real reason to think it would possibly be found out.

It’s probably a trap. Almost definitely a trap.

Han sticks his head in the door, a sour look on his face. “Hey Princess, can you tell these idiots—“

She makes a decision then and there.

“We’re leaving.”

“What?”

“We’re evacuating, effective immediately.” She pushes past him, and he follows so close he’s nearly stepping on her heel.

“Why? I think it’s pretty cozy here. Actual sunlight doesn’t hurt, either.”

“Apparently too cozy.” She grabs the first person she sees, a pilot who stares at her with wide eyes. “Emergency evacuation. Spread the word to pack everything you can and leave, I’ll let you know where we’re headed when we’re in orbit.”

He salutes and scurries off.

“Woah, hey now.” Han snatches at her elbow until she turns around to face him. “What’s going on?”

“There’s a new informant. He told me the Empire knows we’re here. They’re coming for us.”

“And you trust this person because…”

“I don’t have a choice,” she snaps. Someone runs past them, holding three packs filled to the brim with rations. “It’s either he’s lying and we’re not in danger, or he’s telling the truth and we’re going to die if we don’t listen. It’s not exactly hard math.”

It could be a trap of course, but he hadn’t suggested any sort of direction or destination to follow, and Leia wasn’t inclined to share. Especially not after his tidbit about Vader and Palpatine reading minds.

He squints at her. “That’s not it.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe you,” he insists. He’s so infuriating. Leia doesn’t know why she hasn’t kicked him out yet.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do, and you’re either gonna tell me why, or find a different transport when we head out of here.”

“Who said I was riding on your hunk of junk?” She demands. She actually was planning on going with them, since the Falcon has more than enough room for all the supplies that can’t fit in the other ships and none of the trustworthiness of the other pilots, but Han doesn’t need to know that.

“Well?”

Damn him. Damn him for knowing how to read her. She doesn’t know when she let that happen.

“I feel it,” she admits, defeated. “Something tells me he’s trustworthy. We’ll wait and see if it’s right.”

He studies her. She holds her head high, but inside she’s jittery at the scrutiny. They don’t have time for this.

“Yeah, all right,” Han finally says.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” He rolls his eyes, like she’s not acting absolutely insane by putting all her trust in a random man she’s never even met. “Now come on, Princess, weren’t you the one who said we had to hurry?”

What is it about this man that makes it impossible to tell whether she wants to punch him or drag him into the nearest supply closet? They don’t have time to find out.

“So there’s good news and bad news.”

“Bad news first,” she demands.

“They know there’s a mole.”

“Shit.” Of course they know, how could they not? She should have been more careful, less obvious about the correlation of their movements with the Empire’s plans. “The good news?”

“They’ve tasked me with hunting down this ‘pathetic rebel spy,’” Skywalker says, humor in his voice. “That should buy me some time.”

Leia can’t quite stop the snort she lets out. “Seriously?”

“Yep. You’re speaking to a professional mole-hunter, here.”

“Well congratulations on the promotion, Skywalker.”

“Thank you,” he says grandly. Then, quieter, “It won’t last, Princess. They’ll find out eventually.”

“I know. Just hang in there, it will be over soon.”

“Will it?” He asks, suddenly sounding very young. She realizes that she has no idea how old he is. She doesn’t know anything about the man who has saved them more times than she cared to admit, and the idea rattles her until they sign off.

Later, she looks up the name Skywalker in their archives. There are a few results, but only one sticks out.

Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight and hero of the Clone Wars. Killed at the hands of Darth Vader. There are gossip articles too, speculations on his relationship with the pregnant Senator Padmé Amidala, who died around the same time Skywalker did. The baby, it seems, died with her.

Unless he didn’t.

It’s ridiculous. It’s impossible. The idea is so ludicrous that Leia almost rejects it entirely.

But it makes sense. By the Maker, it makes sense.

The child of Anakin Skywalker, it seems, would be a powerful Force user indeed. Powerful enough for Kenobi to take the baby and run. Powerful enough for the Emperor to want him for his own gain. Powerful enough to send Vader after Kenobi and take the boy himself.

Maybe even powerful enough to shield his mind from Vader and Palpatine’s intrusions.

Powerful enough to hide the fact that he’s a spy.

Leia sinks into her chair, covering her face as she laughs.

Maybe Luke isn’t so bad after all.

“No, no, no,” she mutters, digging through the smoking wreckage of the TIE fighter. “Don’t be dead, please don’t be dead.”

“Princess…” Han lays a hand on her shoulder that she immediately shrugs off.

“No, he’s not dead. He’s not. Luke!”

A faint cough answers her, and she’s so relieved to hear it she could cry. Behind her, Han starts bellowing for a medic and, “Some damn help here, do you expect us to move all this ourselves?”

“Luke, it’s me,” she sobs. “It’s Leia. You’re at the Rebel Base. You’re safe.”

More coughing, and there’s a worrying rasp to his voice when he says, “You know…my name?”

“I figured it out.”

“Smart.” This time, the coughing is so bad Leia and Han both wince.

“Shit, kid,” Han says, moving another piece of rubble. “Don’t talk. We’re gonna get you out of here, all right?”

“Stand back,” Luke chokes out.

“What?”

“Stand back. Please.”

Han protests, but something in Leia knows they should listen to him. She drags him back, and motions everyone else to fall back with them. They do, albeit reluctantly.

“Clear,” she calls, hoping Luke can hear her.

The TIE explodes.

“Fuck!” Han goes back in, Leia on his heels with the terrifying feeling that she’d just allowed Luke to die, before they both stop in their tracks. Around them, the broken pieces of the TIE are floating.

And curled up in the middle is a man dressed all in white.

“Luke!” She pushes past Han to start dragging him out, and after another moment of staring around them, he helps her.

As soon as they get clear, the pieces fall to the ground with a clatter. Luke falls limp with them.

Han is still looking at the TIE. “Can you do that?” He asks quietly.

Leia pauses her examination of the unconscious man in front of her to glare at him. “Is that what you’re most concerned with right now? Really?”

“Excuse me for asking, Princess!”

“It’s white,” Luke grumbles, pulling at his hospital gown bitterly. “I hate wearing white.”

“Should I be offended?”

He rolls his eyes. “Don’t even. You look great and you know it. I just feel like I never left.”

“Well,” she says gingerly. “I guess it’s a good thing you got sick of it. If we went around in matching outfits all the time, people might think we’re twins.”

He snorts. “Yeah, right.”

[invisibleicewands]

Michael McIntyres 25th Year Stand-Up Special - 14/11/2024

(How the night ended:)

[baejax-the-great]

My brother died very suddenly yesterday.

He was the kind of person who always had dozens and dozens of friends everywhere he went because he was easy to talk to and funny and treated people with respect, and his friends ranged in class, race, age, social ability, introversion and extroversion--no matter who you were, he could and would befriend you.

He would scold me for not asking him for help when I needed it, and he would mean it. He taught me to tip well. He loved helping people. He played practical jokes on the new kids at work, including getting one guy to "chop flour" because the flour they had in the kitchen was "too coarse."

He introduced me to some of the best food I've ever eaten in my life. He would always help with a recipe that wasn't working. He would tell me what to buy my foodie friends for their birthdays, and he never got it wrong. He loved meat and whiskey but also wine and fruit and he got me to eat beets even because he knew how to make anything good.

Mostly, he thought that people were all deserving of respect and decency. He was outspoken on this. For all that his friends ranged across demographics, he didn't tolerate anyone being hateful around him. But even then, he was nice about it. He would try to get people to come around to his side. He saw the good in people.

And he was happy. He had finally quit chewing tobacco and managed to stay off it for three years. He had a girlfriend he really liked. The pandemic had put him out of work for over a year, but he was back at his job and doing well and he liked it. He was good at it. And it's complete bullshit that he's gone.

[vaguely-concerned]

merrill dragon age really reverse engineered an eluvian from first principles in a cave with a box of scraps and one single blighted shard. and STILL she gets no respect for it from anyone but potentially hawke, at least in a confused yet well-meaning 'are ya winning son' sort of way on the friendship path. dark days for women in STEM

(really though it seems the equivalent of a person in the middle ages putting together a nokia phone from rocks and sticks (and one coaching session from a spirit, fair enough) and then just not being able to figure out how to turn it on even though it is fully functioning. magically at least merrill is inarguably a genius. the tony stark of kirkwall. well not really that comparison falls apart pretty quickly but you see what I'm saying here lmao)

[aroaceleovaldez]

Mark Oshiro confuses me a little bit not going to lie. In the press tour for the first book all they ever talked about was how Nico is their son and Will is fine I guess. Then they said like 2 weeks before TSATS came out that they didn't understand Will's character at all and it's one of the main reasons why Will has so little POV.

Possibly unpopular opinion but I don't think it's a good, encouraging sign when the writer admits to not really caring about the deuteragonist or not even having a sense of how to write them...

Yeah, no. If you have no interest in 1/2 of the POV characters of your book, you REALLY shouldn't be writing it (or at least, not have that be a main character). Especially when the main way TSATS could have been improved is if it was primarily Will-centric instead of Nico-centric. Will basically had next to no established character prior to TSATS! He was practically a blank slate! But all the new stuff we got for Will in TSATS was so clearly disinterested and had no regard for his previously established traits (or the established timeline/canon). Which is annoying because fleshing out Will would have been the PERFECT opportunity to actually incorporate a lot of the topics that Mark Oshiro specializes in as a sensitivity reader, which was the ENTIRE REASON THEY WERE BROUGHT ON AS A CO-AUTHOR!!!!

As TSATS stands, there is no reason for Mark Oshiro specifically to have been the co-author instead of someone else. It's so clearly just a PR move from RR following the huge backlash Rick received due to his response to criticism on how he wrote Piper and Samirah (and Reyna and etc etc). This was immediately following Rick saying he wasn't going to write what would become TSATS because "it [wasn't his] place to." Most of the topics that Mark Oshiro specializes in either weren't relevant at all to TSATS or written very poorly (to downright offensively) in TSATS, so either Mark Oshiro wasn't doing their job or was not able to do their job for some reason, but either way it basically makes the theoretical justification for Mark Oshiro being the co-author/sensitivity reader irrelevant.

With Will, it was HUGE fanon back in the day for him to be trans. Trans!Will and photokinesis!Will were basically the two biggest headcanons for him (both largely popularized by Cherryandsisters). We know Rick is aware of this old fanon because he canonized photokinesis!Will. If we had gotten trans!Will, that would have been great! And then made sense why we specifically got a trans co-author! (Instead, if anything, TSATS canonized Will being cis.) If we had gotten Will being latino, that would have been amazing!!!! And also then made sense as to why they chose Mark Oshiro for the job as a latinx author/sensitivity-reader, versus potentially choosing an Italian co-author since Nico being Italian/Venetian was emphasized so much in the book (and done poorly! Yknow what they could have done to fix that? GOTTEN A SENSITIVITY READER FOR IT)! Based on the themes and focuses actually present in the book, it would have been most logical to get a queer, neurodivergent, Italian co-author or sensitivity reader who specializes in those three topics at least. But we didn't! So why was Mark Oshiro chosen instead when they only specialize in one of those topics? PR reasons. It's blatantly entirely PR reasons and no actual thought or care was put into this book (or, likely, TSATS 2 either).

It doesn't help that we're also actively being told that the published version of TSATS was a rough draft. Or that their editor blatantly isn't doing her job. Or that "The Sun And The Star" was the working title that they just kept cause they didn't bother to make an actual title. And that the final version is full of explicitly last-minute scenes that weren't checked over at all (the final Bianca scene, for one). Or the ACTIVELY ADMITTING TO SOURCING IDEAS AND INFORMATION FROM FANS! That last one is kind of important because at this level of publishing that is a HUGE no-no for legal reasons. You can get into a lot of trouble for that and there is a reason why it is Ye Olde Fandom Law to never try to pitch your ideas or headcanons to the source creator(s) and keep fandom separate from the creators. There is a REASON why Rick Riordan is so distant from the community these days and it's for PROTECTION AGAINST LEGAL REPERCUSSION. Mark Oshiro being the exact opposite while also ACTIVELY ACKNOWLEDGING sourcing concepts from fans does not bode well! It has to do with copyright stuff.

It's just. So. Sighhhhhhhh >->o <- me lying on the floor about all of this. It's sad being able to see the glimmer of what could have been at the very least a decent book underneath all this. If anyone involved in the process had actually cared just the tiniest amount.

[zehl0w]

Very messy scribble of a comic because they were on my mind (I doubt I’ll ever clean it up so I’m just posting it now so it doesn’t rot in my procreate files LOL)

[talesfromthecrypts]

Everyone who does fan casts seems to only know 20 actors total. People with an actually interesting and more wide ranged actor knowledge just don't seem to fan cast.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

idk the consensus on the last stand but old man charles and erik rolling up to lil ol young jean gray's home and sitting down with her like two old men about to adopt their daughter .. it makes my brain happy at the very least

[zhouxiangs]

Thank you for inviting me. Let me do something for you, Mr. Ming.

MY STAND-IN (2024) | Episode 5

[legendary-defender-of-fandoms]

Stupid Little Details I Forgot I Loved About Wreck-it Ralph

Ralph’s teal undershirt. I don’t know who came up with it, or if it was meant to just symbolize his similarities to Vanellope (outcast, looking for some appreciation, in desperate need of hugs & a decent bed) and Felix (good guy, really sweet when you give him a chance, more of a lover than a fighter) or just to give his design a little something to make it all pop, but by God it was the perfect decision!

Felix is a video game character who absolutely hates conflict. He’ll do anything to avoid direct confrontation, and even his gameplay is about mitigating the damage Ralph causes. Which makes his interactions with Calhoun & his outburst in the Fungeon all the more satisfying, as he stands up for himself & refuses to dance around the issues at hand.

The subtle nods to Ralph & Felix’s canon & meta origins as knockoffs of Donkey Kong & Mario respectively. Ralph went through a LOT of changes in early development, but you can see hints of his relation to Donkey Kong in his expressions as he smashes the jawbreaker & when he pounds his chest with excitement as Vanellope taps into her racing skills for the first time.

Calhoun’s hair serving as a metaphor for her emotional state. There were early plans to give her camouflage powers and have her disappear into the background when she got more distressed, but the crew thought it would be a bit too distracting & decided to use her bangs to represent her emotions instead. A wise decision, especially when her hair subtly comes over her eyes during the wedding flashback as she guns down the Cy Bug that ate (and started transforming into) her husband.