#the choice of word is more for Us i feel

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I've been doing a lot of reflection as of late, especially after this past class.

This past class was about the Torah and Tanakh in general, and the way the rabbi talked about the commandments (specifically the ten commandments) has made me really reflect on how I interpret them, specifically the fifth commandment, or honoring your mother and father.

This is a commandment I have wrestled with for a long time - in fact, it brought me away from g-d at multiple times. I was severely abused when I was incredibly young by my mother, and I used to feel insulted at the implication that I were to honor her while she got to live a better life. It was hypocritical, in my eyes.

But this rabbi surmised that this particular commandment was because parenthood is an act of creation, something that is like the g-d from which we come from. My realization is this: I don't think we're necessarily meant to take even these commandments literally.

I this particular commandment is more of a call to honor creation - creation is a gift, and like any gift, many people simply will not like it and will discard it. The person who abused me created me, but she did not honor creation. She didn't honor me, but I can still honor it.

I have started to honor creation much more. I'm too young, too unstable, not mature enough to be a father (though I fantasize about it), but I create all the time. I create relationships, I create with my hands through crochet. I create memories, I create my world. And I can honor who I am and where I came from that made me who I am. I've been learning one of the mother tongues of my family (Italian, since part of my family originates there) and it was judaism that inspired me to do this.

I don't think g-d wants me to honor my abuser. I think He wants me to remember the Holy action of creation. When I am a father, that act of creation will be Holy, and indeed, I am already joyful about the thought.

I have seen many people struggle with this particular commandment, but I think this perspective helps me personally. I don't think I ever have to forgive my abusers (plural), and I don't think I am commanded to simply because they happened to be family. I am commanded to recognize the holy, to elevate the mundane. In doing so, I will remember g-d. Through creation, I honor g-d and everything he has done for us, for me, and for our collective people.

[goldkirk]

I don’t know how to explain any more clearly that it doesn’t MATTER if it seems legitimate to you. You have got to fact check every single headline and post and claim on the left just like you need to do on the right.

The left is NOT immune to misinformation and rushed reporting. And the more emotionally polarizing or shocking the talking points, sound bytes, and headlines are, the worse it is and more frequently it happens.

Learn to verify through multiple independent sources. If you can’t do that, you can’t trust it.

If you have to wait extra hours for the real information to come through vetted channels—NOT just one individual somewhere everyone links to, and not just one single media source either, EVEN if it’s a major news network—thats just how it has to be. What news outside of genuine local disasters near you TRULY needs your outrage and post-sharing in the next hour specifically?

Misinformation works best by not seeming like misinformation and by fitting in with the rest of what you already expect to see. It doesn’t help anyone to not be able to recognize and avoid the stuff.

[evilkitten3]

one pet peeve of mine in founders-era fanfics is when madara's whole,,,, everything is solved by izuna just being there

like maybe this is just me, but i don't think izuna surviving or even coming around to the idea of a truce with the senju would've been enough to keep madara from the path he ended up on.

izuna wasn't the reason he left - he was definitely part of madara's issues, but he wasn't the why. even if izuna had stuck around, and even if that had been enough to keep the uchiha clan from losing their faith in madara, i think he would've still come to realize konoha wasn't what he'd hoped it would be.

best case scenario, i think izuna's survival might've caused madara to stick around a bit longer, but i don't think it would've lasted. honestly, even then, that might've just made the inevitable break-up between madara and hashirama even more agonizing (particularly for izuna)

it's a fun idea to play around with for sure, but frankly i don't think canon!madara could've ever been 'saved' from that path. certainly not if the hidden village system ended up getting set up in the same way.

[quietwingsinthesky]

how much of your writing is ai generated

ngl anon kind of fucking rude to come here and accuse me of that. i don’t make fic just to rack up some arbitrary numbers, be that wordcount or idk, kudos. i make fic because i fucking care about what i’m writing about. if i didn’t, i wouldn’t write it, i certainly wouldn’t post it. AI fic is a plague on fandom for plagiarism reasons, obviously, but also because why should anyone give a shit about your writing if you didn’t? I don’t care if one day we have AI that makes stuff identical in quality to what people can, or better, even, because the words on the page aren’t the point, it’s always about the reason behind putting them down.

So, to answer your question, none of it. And it never will be. I’d rather never write again than stoop to that. And I certainly think less of anyone who does it themselves.

[tokutaiseichan]

Zenji is such a fun, unpredictable guy in the way that every character cue used on him screams "Traditional! Japanese!!" but then he opens his mouth and it's just a barrage English loanwords one after another. 😂

he actually sounds far more elegant (befitting of the whole Dramatic Poet trope) in the English loc, imo. 😅

[jenna-louise-jamie]

thinking about yassen gregorovich instead of sleeping (because i love him) and how he is a catalyst. yassen stabbs ash -> ash kills john rider -> ian rider raises alex -> yassen kills ian rider -> mi6 blackmails alex into becoming a teenage spy.

i have so many thoughts that i can't properly articulate. obviously this is a simplified chain of events, but yassen and his choices set off a chain reaction of the world's most unfortunate dominos. especially when you read russian roulette. to be clear im not necessarily trying to blame him for everything because that feels very mean. he was also just a 14 year old kid when everything in his life went wrong, just like alex. only difference being yassen literally had no one.

i think i should write an essay about this because i haven't even gotten into my thoughts about what yassen and alex's dynamic would look like past eagle strike. i would imagine it'd be similar to ellie and joel from the last of us part 2.

where obviously yassen loves alex and alex on some level cares for yassen back but struggles to reconcile that with the fact that yassen is responsible for his uncle's death. a very unforgivable act. it would be so messy and complicated and angsty, because on one hand here is an adult who truly cares about him and has a connection with him through his father. yassen could tell alex about john, and trust that yassen truly wants whats best for him. but he killed ian, and he cannot take that back.

while alex reels from those feelings, yassen is also trying to reconcile his love of alex with the knowledge that he on some level is responsible for the suffering alex endured at the hands of mi6. and possibly even the fact that alex's godfather is the one who killed john and helen.

[vynegar]

"Albie" (main story 11-21)

At the end of Episode 11 (Part 1), we find out that "Albie" is simply a name that Vyn made up on the spot when Rosa asked. He may have been inspired by his own birth name, Vilhelm Richard Albert de Haspran.

In Chinese, Vyn choose the name "阿明". "阿" is a prefix used to form nicknames, "明" can be a name but also means "bright, clear". In Vyn's Romantic Rail Getaway card "Food for Thought", he tells us the meaning of his name:

You can see the character 明 appear in the word 明亮 ("bright"), although 明 is such a common character that I wouldn't say that this Chinese text alone is enough is sufficient evidence to show the connection between the two names. It's the way that the "Albie" and "阿明" happen to coincide in the name "Albert", which made me take note of Vyn's "careless" choice in name.

If the Chinese name was intended to subtly reference "Albert", I can certainly imagine imagine this as one way to preserve that reference through translation, even if it becomes more obvious. We do have an example of the translation preserving plot-relevant wordplay in a name: Lowe Leare ("Lowly"), originally 萧仁 ("小人", both pronounced "xiao ren" but with different tones). However, there's also an incident of a plot-relevant name being missed through translation, though it was in an event (not the main story) that probably foreshadowed a distant plot point and had infamously bad translation issues.

Anyway, it remains possible that "Albie" is a coincidence. However, after Vyn and Rosa wrap up their conversation about Albie's name, the narration makes a comment on the importance of that moment:

It isn't until the whole case is settled that you are surprised to realize something... You had briefly touched on the key to cracking the case at this very moment.

...which at least gives me enough confidence to not feel silly writing up a whole post about it. We've only seen part of this case, and there's a lot of mystery still surrounding Vyn's behavior so I don't have any definitive hypotheses on why Vyn might have chosen his own name for Albie. Is there something that made Vyn seen himself in Albie? Did the delinquent's attitude remind Vyn of the cruel, stratified world that he was born in? Is he reminded of how people who have imperfections will be tossed aside and abandoned? I guess we'll see when part 2 of this episode is released.

[bittersweetresilience]

it feels cosmically unfair that i think about writing all the time want to write all the time and sit down to write all the time and i come up with two sentences at best. there should be some reward system i think

[shirks-all-responsibilities]

"...one of the things I kept saying to him was because you're so naturally tough and gruff and masculine and Joel, the more you can show me a scared, sad, frightened kid inside of you, the more I will connect with you and feel everything else." Craig Mazin on directing Pedro Pascal early on in The Last of Us (from the official podcast for Episode 1).

Joel's microexpressions that float across his face in this moment—when he sees a girl in Jackson that looks so much like his long-deceased daughter—absolutely broke my heart. I was immediately transported to this moment I giffed of Pedro's raw performance as Ricky Hauk in Touched by an Angel? Joel's repressed "inner child" and emotions that have been buried under all the unresolved trauma and sheer horror of the reality he now lives in, how it's this expression that he accesses in this moment of the most poignant, overwhelming grief? How it's so muted, so subtle, all these many years later, in such a broken man? My heart?

The way that grief never truly leaves you? Something about the echoes and contrasts between the two performances hits me in the feels? Seeing echoes of sweet larval-stage bby Pedro in 50-something Joel is so fkn sad? 🥺

And then, look at how his expression shifts in each scene...his eyebrows morph back down to that furrowed baseline, back to his hardened shell? It's incredibly subtle in his younger self, obvious in his older self, and heartrending in each.

[alchemiclee]

i know this has been said 473773474833 times by the kavetham/haikaveh shippers and probably even nonshippers, but i'll say it again. I finally finished the genshin summer event and did the little after quest in sumeru and.....every time kaveh is sneaking around trying not to be noticed coming out of alhaithams house it's just such a gay vibe. he's basically screaming "I can't be caught being gay in a homophobic society!" even if that's not what the game writers are *actually* saying. that's just how it comes off and they can't make it come off any other way. with hoyo's gay history, it makes me wonder if it's on purpose and all a cover-up to have a technically different reason for it so they can get away with it lmao but we will never know.

[iknowwhereyousleepatnight]

u ever do something and get really really into it and ur like wow maybe this is a sign that im not being enriched enough in this area of my life

[waywardsalt]

a rlly tiny thing ive never really seen brought up is that among linebeck’s little comedically-inclined misspeaks, which are mostly little bits surrounding his greed and him initially talking more about his goal being treasure and then covering it up by appealing more to link’s goals, there is the instance of him misspeaking once you get the northwestern sea chart, where before he corrects and instead says they should go ‘save’ the next spirit, he first says ‘snare’ instead

[btbonescanon]

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[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

Talia saying Jason with 24 hours and a survival kit, fresh from the pit, couldn't be tracked by Ra's is interesting

And oopsies I liveblogged all of lost days in the tags of this post

[asdpawprint]

Today in therapy, we developed a metaphor comparing me to a traumatized horse that goes into fight or flight over the slightest touch on the lead rope. And work is an average horse trainer interacting with me.

A great trainer would take many steps back, let the horse loose in a pen and just sit with it for as long as it takes to develop a sense of safety and trust. After that, they would slowly build back up to wearing a halter and lead rope, and counter condition the lead rope so leading becomes a safe and comfortable feeling. That's the magic wand scenario (unrealistic wishes for how life could be better): taking a long term break from work to develop a sense of safety in everyday life and accumulate enough maturity/capacity to cope with raising the expectations again years later.

But we're talking average traditional horse trainer, who expects this horse to do its job asap, but also wants minimal stress reactions while doing so. What can be improved without taking steps back?

If you stay just where you're at, slight touch on the lead to create movement, for long enough, then eventually the panicked leap forward will shut down into a tense walk. But the emotions are still the same, and the problem will be explosive again when the bar rises.

What's the in between? How can we improve the emotions without taking steps back? How can I develop feelings of safety while still doing my job?

[hella1975]

hiii i'm really sorry this is kind of a Lot but um. is it bad to leave a toxic friendship by absolutely verbally destroying the other party? because like. i think i may have broken the geneva convention with some of the things i've just said to this girl. but she started it! she called me a stone cold bitch so i said she only dates narcissistic sex offenders i feel like i may have overstepped. but it is true she is currently dating someone accused of assualt so. we both leave for uni soon so i won't see her again but like i just feel BAD and NOT GOOD about being so mean even tho she cheated on my closest friend. i also said she was a pathological cheater which IS very true but i feel may have warped her perspective somewhat. is it just a rite of passage to have that one friendship that implodes spectacularly or am i doing this wrong

'she started it! she called me a stone cold bitch so i said she only dates narcissistic sex offenders'