#that seems appropriate actually

[ravenpureforever]

On one hand, Young Justice is kind of neglected by the actual superheroes that should be looking out for them in a lot of crucial ways and very much failed by the adults around them

But on the other hand Red Tornado straight up hosts a parent-teacher conference where their respective legal guardians all show up, barring Batman who’s in traffic so Nightwing fills in instead because Robin’s dad does not know he’s a vigilante which is objectively hilarious

[placeholder-mcd]

(Obligatory "I sound like I'm speaking objectively from authority but this is just my opinion and it's okay for you to like media I dislike for whatever reasons you may have")

Okay so like. while "the minecraft move trailer is so bad that it makes minecraft story mode look good in comparison" is both true and funny, can we please not start pretending that story mode is a well-crafted piece of media. as someone who has played through it multiple times (first when it originally came out and I was 12 and thought it was awesome, then later as an interactive Netflix experience with friends for so-bad-it's-good reasons) I feel pretty qualified to say it blows

Like, yes. There are so many things that MCSM got right that the movie apparently got wrong. But, like, they're all extremely common-sense things to get right -- like having the whole thing be animated, and maintaining a visual style that feels consistent with minecraft, and spending time with individual aspects of the minecraft experience that have their own communities (like redstone contraptions). that sense seems a little less common now that the movie trailer exists, but still, these are all bare minimum expectations of a piece of narrative-driven media set in Minecraft.

MCSM still completely fails, however, to have any compelling characters (RIP Reuben you were just as annoying as everyone else) or non-grating dialogue. The universe they depict isn't even well thought out! Like, okay, example:

Right off the bat, they make a big decision about how they're going to handle MCSM: they are not telling a story about people playing Minecraft the video game, but are instead depicting a universe where Minecraft is inhabited by a civilization of NPCs that have identical abilities to a player (aside from like, pausing the game or changing settings or what have you). This, in itself, is not a bad decision, but it puts the writers in a position where they need to conceptualize what is effectively a Minecraft AU. You're not playing survival mode or creative mode, you're playing Story mode. In this AU, humans exist in the minecraft world and have for a long time (centuries, at least?), they've built cities, they have language, etc. Imagine you're Jesse. Imagine you've grown up inside of Minecraft. Everyone is playing on hardcore, there is no respawning, and you live in a world filled with strange and dangerous creatures that seem hell-bent on killing you. Why the Fuck does anyone go out at night. Why isn't literally everyone combat-trained. Why is Jesse acting like he's never seen a Creeper before. Why is Petra the only member of the main party who knows how to craft a pickaxe.

At the build competition, the party is surprised that the reigning building team has a beacon. But nobody takes a second to actually investigate what that means. Did their team intentionally spawn and defeat a Wither? Doesn't that make them more badass and legendary than the order of the stone? Is there a black market for nether stars? (I think Petra is probably the one who gave them the beacon since she also trades Ivan a Wither skull. But like. Why isn't literally anyone else just going and doing what Petra does. Why aren't they impressed)

Ivan having access to a Command Block is also insane. Like, it has potential to be an extremely cool choice -- did Ivan find a way to break the fourth wall? Did he find an exploit in Minecrafts code that allowed him to obtain this? The command block has the power to just generate resources out of thin air. Ivan could actually use it to become a god and give himself creative mode. But okay, we can assume that the command block is just... Different, in the AU. Fine. It's a computing center / power core for the Wither Storm. Sure

But, like. I, even as an 11 year old, knew everything there was to know about minecraft when I played story mode (and, unlike the Movie, MCSM was actually attempting to appeal to the existing fanbase), so watching these characters who have lived for DECADES within the Minecraft universe just. Be helpless and completely clueless as to how the universe works? It makes me hate like all of them. I don't care about Jesse or Gabriel and if I actually had the freedom to perform the basic actions I could perform in Minecraft -- mining, building, and crafting -- I could use my game knowledge to pretty swiftly end the entire conflict at like any point in the story. And I'm not very good at video games. But I would expect a character who's been LIVING IN THE MINECRAFT WORLD TO BE ABLE TO DO THAT. BECAUSE THEY'D BE BETTER AT MINECRAFT THAN ANY OF US.

The whole thing is a contrived and buggy mess that feels like it was written by a Hollywood CEO who watched someone play the game for 30 minutes, looked up some basic information like how to beat the game and whether there's any in-game lore, and then riffed on that until a script outline was finished. The programmers, visual artists, and composers clearly did a ton of work to make MCSM feel like minecraft. And they did a good job -- clearly, a much better job than the Movie is going to do. But that doesn't change the fact that the Story -- the focal element advertised in the title -- completely misses the fucking mark and centers around a group of characters who are largely incompetent and stupid in an unfunny and uninteresting way. MCSM was a shitty cashgrab by telltale games and I am not apologizing to it.

[ban--tam]

that one meme that's going around

[megpricephotography]

Beach Boy! Barney, jumping for joy during a trip to the beach in July of 2012.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

If we assume the animorphs didn't bring up the ellimist after the war, how do you think they explained tobias' whole deal?

I think that a) they don't, and b) there's a ton of misguided speculation as a result.

At least in the first few years after the war becomes public, I assume almost no one would know how morphing works. There's, what, ~5 surviving Animorphs and ~20 ex-controllers who weren't on the Blade ship? And that's it for human morphers on Earth. So if Marco goes "our buddy Tobias got stuck in hawk morph (totally by accident!) but then he later recovered enough to start morphing again", then there's not necessarily anyone to come out of the woodwork and announce that that makes no sense. So maybe most humans think that it's sometimes possible to start morphing again after being nothlited, if they think about it at all.

As Earth's culture continues to change — more andalite tourists, more morphing humans — then I could see people as a whole starting to spot the contradiction. Andalite authorities in particular would probably be pissed off and frustrated by Tobias, because how dare this half-human walking-disgrace-to-Elfangor's-legacy be the one to figure out a morphing trick that none of them ever did. Tobias explaining that he's met their god, that he extorted their god, and that that's why he's a nothlited morpher, probably would only piss them off more. They might even refuse to believe him.

From there, I think that the version of the truth that trickles to most ordinary humans would be something like: "That Tobias guy got stuck in morph but then started morphing again? Yeah, he said he got that from his andalite god. I guess it hasn't happened with anyone else before, so you do you man. We all respect each other's religions, and if that's what he wants to think happened, that's cool with me."

[mortysmith]

Make love not war.

[pixelatedraindrops]

Yuma Month: Day 9: Love

I think that he forgot his love identity too… 💓💦

[agrazza]

the inside of Tavran Gregory's head, everyone.

[susansontag]

you’d have to be so silly to think dumas wasn’t trying to imply eugenie is a lesbian in the count of monte cristo lol. she’s only just properly been introduced where I’m at and she’s basically described in accordance with invert theory. this is how people understood these ‘tendencies’ I’m p sure his audience would have known exactly what he was implying

[non-plutonian-druid]

[ID: a pixel art gif of Five and Delores sitting on rotting lounge chairs by a pool in the apocalypse. Delores, made human by FIve's perspective, is swinging her legs, and Five is reading a book. There are four colors; yellow, hot pink, lime green, and blue. Music notes emerge from a radio. The sky is completely obscured by yellow, shifting clouds. End ID]

sometimes a guy has gotta have a vacation, even in the middle of the apocalypse.

[crumbleclub]

All of the Afton kids have a biting phase, but Michael is the only one who would still bite as an adult.

[valinoar]

the praise rhaenyra gets for being a “feminist queen” or someone who “cares about women unlike *insert character they don’t like*” is so unbelievably ridiculous it makes me laugh. so many team black stans love to paint alicent as a misogynistic demon who hates her daughter and will then use rhaenyra as the antithesis of this as if that woman didn’t deliberately undermine baela and rhaena’s own very much legitimate claims to driftmark to further her own agenda. she passes them off as contenders all for the sake of her sweet illegitimate son, whom she knows genuinely has no claim, and thinks all is well after proposing a lousy betrothal (which she makes BEFORE consulting either girls).

[sag-dab-sar]

I wrote a post trying to figure out why on earth some Pagans & Witches refer to Imbolc (an Irish spring agricultural holiday associated with St Brigid, a potential Christianization of the Goddess Brigid/Bríg) as Candlemas, the completely Christian holiday celebrating The Purification of Mary & Presentation of Jesus at The Temple— which originated in the eastern part of the Roman Empire (which the only "pagan" aspect was it competing with Roman Lupercalia for celebrants).

Many pagan & witch spaces online have a constant disdain for Christianity thus I could not wrap my head around them using such an important point of Jesus' & Mary's life as one of their festivals/'sabbats'.... then, after writing a bunch of stuff, I stumbled onto the answer on Wikipedia's Wheel of The Year page, which has citations for its claims:

Margaret Murray (very early 20th century scholar) in her now discredited witch-cult hypothesis said that the Scottish "witch" Issobell Smyth in 1661 confessed to attending meetings for witches on the cross quarter days included Candlemas. Robert Graves (oh how I loathe you ehem I mean: poet folklorist), mentioned that Candlemas was part of the 8 ancient British agricultural festivals. And Doreen Valiente ("The Mother of Wicca") included Candlemas in her list of Greater Sabbat Fire Festivals, while also listing "Gaelic counterparts," in this case Imbolc.

Sigh.

Early (read: 19th-20th century) paganism and witchcraft, or scholarly work about it, really was just: put every claim regardless of accuracy from any culture in this jar, shake it up real good, see what pops out from the mix, then pretend its historically attested to and traditional despite any and all evidence.

Also whatever Wikipedia writer wrote this, I appreciate your sassiness ... even if it was unintentional:

Due to early Wicca's influence on modern paganism and the syncretic adoption of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic motifs, the most commonly used English festival names for the Wheel of the Year tend to be the Celtic ones introduced by Gardner and the mostly Germanic-derived names introduced by Kelly, regardless whether the celebrations are based on those cultures.

EDIT: To be clear, not all neo/pagans, witches, wiccans, occultists, people-who-use-wheel-of-year are anti-Christian! I'm not trying to say that. But as a worshipper of Mary now, I notice it more and more. Nor am I saying all those people follow Murray/Grave/Valiente blindly but published works and trusted blogs often seem to. This is simply an observation, I've taken notice of, its not the entire communities.

[viperwhispered]

Not a question but let me tell you:

It doesn't matter if someone mixed Jafar and Jamil already, you can still do it yourself as well! After all, the idea might be on the internet already but it hasn't been done by *you* :)

I fully support it

(In reference to my tags on this post)

Well, since I’ve been enabled, enjoy y’all (I'm so sorry):

Jafar-style:

Which - not the worst? I mean would look better if I actually knew what I was doing but.

I found this art of Jafar by MarioOscarGabriele on DeviantArt which very conveniently helped me line up Jafar’s facial hair with Jamil’s face.

And of course I also had to attempt a big bushy beard, and well, the sultan is right there:

...yeah that definitely just looks like a costume beard

I ran out of patience when trying to freehand things but this pencil mustache actually doesn't look as bad as I thought?

Alas, I couldn't find any sort of a braided dwarf beard that I could've slapped on his face, otherwise I totally would've gone for that, too.

[the-busy-ghost]

I have finally emptied the blue bench of all the library books I need to hand back, even though they were terribly photogenic in there, and instead have filled it with all the old children's books I've been keeping around for like fifteen years or more, even though the chances of me ever having children or even passing them on to nieces/nephews/cousins etc is vanishingly small. These are less photogenic but at least it's one way to start clearing the living room of boxes.

Currently strategising how to fit them all in but also wow this is a list of Problematic Children's Authors TM

[organized-chaotic-disaster]

Alright everyone, I've done it

I made a tally of Dan vs. Phil that delves into the truth of ALL OR NOTHING— what kind of difference did it make? Who suggested it more? Who is the true winner of Dan vs. Phil?

What you find may not be what you expect, but I promise you that the truth is there, waiting for you to discover it