#surprise I live

[pangur-and-grim]

every time I say “starting nooooow I won’t have any major expenses” something HAPPENS! there’s raw sewage backing up from my drains, and apparently the plumbers will need to break the floor and the wall to get to the pipes and fix it.

if the cat stuff hadn’t wiped out my bank account, this would be annoying but manageable. as it is…..I’m going to try to get everything up in the store for Friday.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

woke up and someone spilled vanilla extract all over my dash, so as punishment you strange little beasties are getting all the VANILLA FACTS i know:

vanilla is the 2nd most expensive spice in the world (2nd to saffron)

which is why more than 99% of what we call "vanilla extract" is actually vanillin (vanilla's dominant flavor compound) and is not extracted from real vanilla.

luckily, even professionals struggle to tell the difference when it comes to things like baked goods. but there is a distinct difference in non-heat treated products like vanilla ice cream. real vanilla has a more complex, individualized flavor profile.

why is vanilla so expensive? because it is a ridiculously delicate & demanding crop. complete primadonna.

vanilla beans come from vanilla orchids. these crazy flowers bloom for A SINGLE DAY and have to be HAND-POLLINATED in a process that is exhausting, delicate, and requires specialist knowledge passed down over generations.

then, if you're lucky, you get vanilla beans.

which then require months of further specialized treatment.

the entire process takes about a year and can go wrong at any stage

vanilla has been cultivated for over 800 years (possibly much longer). the first known cultivators are the Totonac, an indigenous people of Mexico.

the Aztecs used it as a sweetener to balance out the bitter taste of cocoa. it was popular in a drink called xocolatl--the precursor to modern hot chocolate!

it is only pollinated by a very specific orchid bee!!!

which is why no fruit could be grown outside of Mexico until the 1800s

Edmond Albius, born into slavery, invented the pollination method we still use today--launching a global industry when he was just 12 years old.

today, the majority of the world's vanilla is grown in Madagascar

if you want real vanilla, read the labels carefully--it's harder to find than you think!

in conclusion, those tiny black specks you see in fancy vanilla ice cream? those are vanilla bean seeds! itty bitty orchid seeds!!! they are delicious and also a PRISSY BITCH!

(src)

[wildflowercryptid]

underappreciated marcille bit : her being a gay lil hater and glaring at toshiro whenever he gets flustered over falin

[chloesimaginationthings]

Have you made anything about how game Michael has a British accent and movie Mike doesn't?

YES I HAVE.. (here’s the og post)

[rrandomtthings]

Hi yes can we talk ab the Chouchou cameo for a sec ☹️❤️

[haunted-desert]

LINKIN PARK: Numb Live in Texas (2003)

[hayden-christensen]

God rest my soul I miss who I used to be The tomb won't close Stained glass windows in my mind I regret you all the time

[corvidcall]

"heres how mike schmidt could actually be an afton-"

"heres how mike schmidt could actually be an emily-"

[somewhereincairparavel]

whenever there are jason slander reels on instagram and basically 99.9% of the comments are defending him and saying 'you aren't cool for hating on him for absolutely nothing' and 'its not 2013 anymore, all of us have matured now, and we realize how overrated jason slander is' angels gain their wings :)

[bbygirl-aemond]

it makes me so insane that rhaenyra is doing to jace exactly what viserys did to her. while obviously rhaenyra cannot acknowledge her children's parentage publicly, this episode makes it clear that she has refused to acknowledge it to said children, even in private, ever. even though said children have been forced to live through stares and bullying and derision their entire lives because of it. and she continues to do things that undermine jace's claim, such that he is set up to face a potential civil war of his own when he tries to ascend to the throne. she is content to leave the consequences of her actions in having bastards for jace to deal with once she is dead, just as viserys was content to leave the consequences of his actions in making rhaenyra heir for rhaenyra to deal with once he was dead.

[quicksilversnails]

Took some notes from the Wild Life retrospective episode of the Imp & Skizz podcast featuring Grian because I thought the behind the scenes info was really interesting!

(3:15) The wild cards were all kept totally secret from the players (apart from Grian), with the exception of the superpowers and finale (as they required the players to set keybinds)

(3:45) The players were given files containing the required mods each week, which were named things like "creeper rain" to throw them off

(4:12) Wild cards were a combination of data packs and mods

(4:38) Grian told them not to read the folder name to avoid spoilers (which is kind of impossible), so everyone fully believed there would be creeper rain lol. Grian was saying it in jest but everyone took it seriously and were apologetic about having seen it, to which Grian told them not to worry

(6:58) Grian originally contacted a data pack dev called Brace for help with programming the wild cards. Some, like the shrinking/growing could be achieved with minecraft attributes, but the snails were too janky and unusable. Grian still liked the idea though, so he reached out to mod developers Henkelmax and Breadloaf, who designed the pathfinding/behaviour from scratch

(8:49) They had a debugging mode used to test the pathfinding of the snails, shown in the podcast and in Grian's credits

(10:09) Grian wants most of the credit to go to the development team and artists, as he was mostly in charge of ideas & organization!

(10:39) Grian's only regret with the snails was that they were too fast in session 3, leading to unexpectedly many deaths. They were apparently not so difficult to get away from during testing, but perhaps the testers were more used to them than the players were

(11:44) Grian: "We did develop to the lowest common denominator" ie. prioritizing how players would struggle over how worrying about if players would do too well

(12:56) Oli's voice for the snails was iconic. It cost Impulse a life because he intentionally stayed closer to it to hear the voice lol

(13:42) Danny was in charge of the snail models and animations

(14:11) During testing, the snails just sounded like Oli, which made it feel weird. They pitched up his voice so that it'd be less immediately recognizable

(15:18) The snails' jumping attack was meant to be clearly telegraphed: they would stop, wiggle, make a "ooeee" sound before jumping. Many players had their friendly creatures volume turned very low/off (as cows and other mobs are loud), which made this attack much less obvious for them

(16:57) The growing/shrinking had the least testing done for it, as it was the simplest conceptually and to program. This meant that the falling off of blocks due to the shrinking hitboxes wasn't anticipated

(17:55) Before the 1st session, Grian told them that he didn't think anyone would die to the wild card. Pearl's death made Grian pretty nervous, as he didn't want everyone dying too early in the season

(19:29) 6 lives were given, knowing that many of the death to the wild cards were unexpected/unfair. The intent was for ~3 lives to be allocated for wild cards, and ~3 for PvP.

(21:13) The developers were all fans of the Life Series!

(22:43) The shrinking/growing was intentionally pretty simple to ease players/viewers into the concept and build up toward more dramatic wild cards like the snails

(25:38) In the hunger episode, Grian didn't know which foods would be good

(25:58) Grian thinks that "it's unfair that Grian already knows everything" is valid criticism, but that it's important for him to be involved with the ideas. Having someone else do that is like having someone else record his videos: Life Series is his brainchild

(26:35) Well before the season began, while they were still developing the concept, Grian asked the other players for wild card ideas that would meet a few criteria. All of them ended up being unused for one reason or another. Impulse thinks his ideas were very "inside the box" because he was viewing things through what was possible in vanilla Minecraft. His idea was to have a scavenger hunt where the players would search to find a relic. The first person to find it would get a buff. Skizz's idea was for every player to turn into a random passive mob for every given interval of time. They would have to find every other player of the same mob type as them or else the whole group loses a life.

(29:44) The food qualities were weighted by the rarity of the item, so very common blocks like dirt and cobblestone would never give anything good. The other items were randomly selected

(30:23) Regular blocks/items cannot be made edible normally, so they had to circumvent that and custom code a fix for items not stacking correctly

(32:41) While a lot of players do want to win, the main priority is creating entertainment, which prioritizes playing recklessly

(33:20) The food wild card wasn't included in the finale because it would've felt like "too much". There was a higher risk of technical issues since it changed the data values of items, and Grian didn't want someone's last death to be because they ate their sword. In his mind, it was a good and fun wild card, but didn't need to be repeated in the finale. Impulse points out that they all would have collected more rare items by that point, removing the incentive to search for blocks to eat

(33:46) The wild cards in the finale were nerfed from their original sessions. The shrinking/growing had a smaller height range, the snails moved slower, etc.

(36:21) The personalized snail skins were a late addition by Danny, who made 18 skins very quickly

(36:49) Grian did not anticipate the snails becoming as popular with fans as they were. After the session released, they had the idea to release the snail merchandise, which directly funded the rest of the season

(39:20) Grian spent what "felt like every day" testing with the developers. They'd record the sessions on Tuesdays, meet up with the dev team, talk about what need to be done, testing, bugs, etc, edit and upload on Saturday, and would get a few days grace before starting again

(40:01) After the snail session, Grian was worried that the season would be very short due to all the deaths. They were considering toning down the later wild cards but ultimately didn't change them too much

(40:36) The time wild card was carefully balanced. If it had gone even a little faster, many players likely would have died because they wouldn't have time to react to threats like baby zombies or creepers.

(40:57) While sessions normally run for a variable amount of time, session 4 was hardcoded at 2 hours. Grian ended the session ~10 minutes early, just after they hit max speed, because he felt like things were getting dicey

(42:46) When the wild card first activates, it looks a lot like the server had frozen or crashed. Grian told the players before the session started that it would look like the game was broken, but that it isn't broken. Skizz tabbed out anyway and missed the beginning 😔

(43:30) Having the rain start just as the wild card began was a good visual indicator of time slowing down. This was a suggestion from the dev team (probably Brace)

(44:41) Impulse and Grian "cheesed" the end of the session by going branch mining. Grian wanted players to take advantage of the wild cards (eg. mining quickly, helping to kill someone), and not have them just be an annoyance.

(45:30) Keeping the client and server-side time stay in sync was challenging. The sky's motion was changed to be smoother on client-side. The players were also not as fast as the server (around 2x faster), the server was going faster than that, and the time of day was even faster

(46:56) The sounds were pitched up/down based on the speed to add to the effect

(27:46) In testing, if the players were made 7x faster, it would be basically unplayable, which was why it was capped at 2x speed. This made mobs very dangerous, as they were now faster than players and could catch up to you and kill you easily

(49:01) On several occasions, they had to extend the fuse duration of creepers to make them more fair. In the time session, their speed was only increased by ~10%

(49:39) Usually, Grian was the one to test the wild cards and notice when things like creeper speed would be an issue, since he was the one with experience making videos

(50:50) A challenge with balancing wild cards is accounting for the playstyles of so many players: reckless players like Scar and Skizz, "kind and gentle" players like Bigb who would stay off to the sides, and "the sweat squad" (Scott, Impulse) who play very cautiously

(52:48) Trivia Bot was the only wild card that was not planned in advance. Grian was struggling to come up with a wild card for that episode, and wanted to have a wild card available that could give people lives in case many people died to early wild cards without it feeling cheap.

(53:33) Trivia seemed a little boring on its face, so presentation was essential

(54:34) This one made Grian the most stressed due to all the moving parts involved in making it (coding and pathfinding mostly by Henkelmax, visuals by Hoffen, audio/music, questions)

(55:08) Trivia Bot's design was based on Grumbot and Mettaton from Undertale. Hoffen drew concept art shown in the video

(58:32) They show Trivia Bot's custom animation for becoming a snail and it's really cool

(59:12) The music was the most stressful part of the project. Grian spent 2-3 days looking through Epidemic Sounds for a Trivia Bot theme song and couldn't find anything good. He commissioned Zera @hopepetal for a theme song, which is played in the podcast. However, Grian realized he needed a full audio package, so he commissioned Oli late in development, who created the final soundtrack and many audio variations

(1:01:38) Grian wants to send appreciation for everyone who worked on the project, even if their work ultimately went unused

(1:02:58) Skizz was happy to give back however he could by staying on standby in the final episode as a zombie, as the players were able to "reap all the benefits" of the hard work of the development team

(1:05:21) Grian didn't know any of the trivia questions beforehand, which were done by fans of the series. The goal was for ~50% of the questions to be answered correctly, which was approximately met

(1:07:11) Players couldn't get questions about themselves because it would be too easy. This would encourage players to leave their bot, allowing other players to mess with them

(1:07:57) Grian felt a little left out from the discovery element of the wild cards, and decided to mess with Scar by hiding his bot. He wasn't expecting Scar to die from it, and could tell that he was genuinely a little upset by it. Grian felt bad about it, which led to a genuine in-game alliance between them

(1:12:32) Grian was very close to letting Trivia Bot give lives as rewards, but decided it would feel too cheap

(1:14:38) Mob swap was slightly toned down, with more camels and sniffers spawning

(1:15:07) Evokers didn't drop totems anymore. Instead, there was a minuscule chance a warden or wither would spawn, which would drop a totem if killed. Grian was a little disappointed that the warden got cheesed in the end

(1:17:45) Having the mobs start passive and turn hostile was mostly for the presentation, building anticipation, and so players could predict where mobs would spawn and react accordingly, making things feel less unfair

(1:20:32) There was no superpower made for Skizz (or Mumbo presumably)

(1:20:38) The superpowers were another late addition. There was a large design doc where Grian created all the powers, which were handed over to Henkelmax and completed over 4 days

(1:21:42) Grian avoided superpowers involving strength, that could cause someone to die easily. Most of the powers were social or movement-based, which couldn't be used for offence as easily

(1:22:25) Some powers were randomly assigned, others weren't. Impulse's was random. Cleo's, Bigb's, Lizzie's, Grian's were assigned.

(1:24:25) Grian gave himself the mimic because it could easily backfire (like in Grian's fall damage death), and because it would've been confusing for a player who wasn't aware of the other powers. They likely would've spent the episode just figuring out how everything worked and not actually using the power to its best ability

Lots of discussion about the superpowers and how they interacted in the episode itself, go watch if you're interested :)

(1:33:38) Talk on how the series "standard" rules evolved since 3rd Life. There was no keep inventory, and no restrictions on enchanting levels or potions, which created slow or unbalanced fights

(1:36:23) 3rd Life was designed to be an experimental series, which made Grian eager to improve it. For example, some people just weren't dying in 3L, leading to the boogeyman in LL, and so on

(1:37:17) The goal with the seasons isn't to one-up the previous one, but to create a different experience every time, which keeps things engaging for the creators

(1:38:31) At the end of each session, Grian would ask the group if they had fun and how they felt about the wild cards. According the Skizz, the answer was "a resounding yes"

(1:39:08) Grian had moments throughout the season where he personally felt like things didn't go well for him, and was anxious for the rest of the group's episodes. Things worked out while editing the raw footage, though. His issues were never with the wild cards themselves, but his own actions (traps not working, spending too long branch mining), but would always find funny moments in his footage

(1:43:41) Everyone in the Life Series cast genuinely likes and genuinely respects everybody else in the group. This allows them to make the show and get mad at each other, because they know it's all just in-character

(1:44:50) It'd be hard to top Wild Life in spectacle, and Grian doesn't want to start an arms race with himself. The next season could potentially be closer to 3rd Life, but Grian's not sure yet. For Grian, Wild Life was the most enjoyable

(1:45:20) Grian: "As long as people keep enjoying [the Life Series] then I'd love to keep doing it"

(1:49:35) With the finale, Grian knew how the wild cards played out the previous sessions and was able to adjust them

(1:49:56) Grian's goal was to create safe chaos where everyone knew what was happening and wouldn't die to them, which didn't go entirely to plan. The snails were 60% of their original speed and people still died

(1:51:03) Grian made a precise timeline of when each wild card would start/stop, it wasn't randomized.

(1:54:16) All the superpowers were randomized, with Bdubs' power being removed from circulation because it didn't have much use in a finale setting

(1:56:10) It was important for Grian that in the final moments, the wild cards were removed, so there were no interruptions. The timing worked out well because there were a few people left and it ended within ~10 minutes (this implies that the change wasn't based on # of players alive, as people had speculated based on Gem's death)

(1:58:48) The players all randomly switched to zombie skins throughout the session to mess with people on NameMC. Well-played :)

[mobius-m-mobius]

TOM HIDDLESTON and OWEN WILSON in the LOKI S2 BLOOPER REEL

[gellavonhamster]

One Piece Live Action + Tumblr text posts, 1/?

[buttercupshands]

So.

Act 5, huh?

Oh, and that.

"You can start breakdown now."

Finished the game couple of days ago and had some thoughts I needed to process a little. Like. Yes.

So anyway I actually didn't plan this and just wanted to redraw some sprites to just make sure I understand how to draw Siffrin correctly (still working on that!)

What did I learn from this? How fun it it to draw on a canvas that literally doesn't let you draw with colors without some layer cheating when necessary. Never tried it.

The beans. Sleeping beans.

Basically what happens when you want to sleep AND draw. Draw characters sleeping on your behalf.

Doesn't help, but at least it's cute.

I have no idea what was going on in my mind as I drew this. Feels like a fever dream of 'I want to sleep' at 4 am and 'Hm...' of thinking random things

Also that phone craft sign. Still too funny to imagine. I had to.

[syn0vial]

yes, yes, boba fett finds it strange and uncomfortable when people can see his face and this is one of the major reasons he almost never removes his helmet (in the expanded universe anyway), but another factor that i think isn't explored nearly enough is just how much his helmet shapes how he sees the world. it grants him 360° vision, lets him interface with his weapon systems and slave I, and automatically dampens loud noises and dims bright lights. imagine going through the vast majority of your life seeing the world through that lens and then suddenly taking it away. removing his helmet for any significant length of time likely isn't just uncomfortable for him but downright disorienting.

[idontmindifuforgetme]

megan thee stallion is the perfect example of unbothered energy. nicki has repeatedly vagueposted about her, gone on unhinged rants about her, gone so far as to mention her dead mother (such a classless low blow), threatened her on live, and has now released the tackiest diss track in history. and what has megan done? literally nothing. she straight up ignored her, aside from that one ig story where she posted herself laughing (which was perfect btw). she is the epitome of “i will not dignify that w a response.” i love it.