#the nerd rants

[thenerdrant]

I think the fact that I am aroace and Im a punk and I do ballet is just another testament to how my life is truly a sitcom

[parrish-the-thot]

A continuation of this post I made

I imagine Steve genuinely doesn’t think about Eddie, like at all. Besides the occasional “what is he yelling about in that table” or “ Munson actually showed up to class” or once in sophomore year he thinks “how much does Munson charge for an ounce of weed? Would he take a $50 for an ounce” which causes Eddie to wait around all day at the picnic table wishing for some shmuck to offer $50 for just an ounce, but no one shows up (Steve had to go pick up Dustin after school and didn’t want him to find weed the weed when he inevitably starts going through Steve’s car)

The lack of soulmate thoughts really irks Eddie, because he knows his soulmate is in Hawkins, but he never thinks about Eddie, like at all??? Positively or negatively?? Eddie jumps on more tables, he blares loud music from his van, he is in a band, he is the drug dealer for all the teens in Hawkins and all his soulmate thinks is “why the fuck did Munson double park his van, I’m going to be late looking for a parking spot now” it absolutely drives him crazy.

He eventually figures out his soulmate must be a jock of some kind because one day he hears “what is Munson doing under the bleachers?” when some sports team is let out of playing with balls practice. He is briefly heartbroken his soulmate isn’t a nerd like him, but then spends the night thinking about how a certain fluffy haired jock could play with his balls anytime.

Steve isn’t not thinking about Eddie on purpose, but they just don’t run in the same circles, so he doesn’t really think about him too much, just in a genuine, “I don’t know them, don’t interact with them, so I don’t really think about them” sort of way. Especially after befriending the kids, Steve’s focus goes to keeping them safe and being a babysitter instead of finding his soulmate.

Steve’s experience with his soulmates thoughts is completely different. Starting in middle school he heard his soulmate think he was cute which he thought was nice. As he got older his soulmate would still think he was cute, but also handsome or pretty which, he doesn’t know any girls who call their boyfriends pretty but ya know, he can roll with that. He thinks he will have to roll with a lot of stuff, since hai soulmate seems to into a…a lot of interesting things, to say the least. Steve has dated a lot of girls but none of them seemed to want to rub their face in his chest hair like his soulmate did, who also wonder is Steve was that hairy everywhere which- he was but he didn’t think a girl would want to know about that.

He would be in the middle of a basket ball game and he hit with a 15 minute monologue about how wonderful his ass looked in “thise little green shirts that ride up his ass in the best way” and how his soulmate “wanted to be those shorts” causing Steve to miss three different shots. Also with all this wildly kinky stuff and even general sex things Steve has never heard of or thought about he figures he should become more knowledgeable to better be prepared for his soulmate.

One day when Steve is cleaning up a drink he spilled in the cafeteria and heard “god Harrington looks good on his knees, bet he would look even better with my cock in his mouth” figures chances are his soulmate isn’t a girl at all.

With not much else to loose and a new door opened up to him, Steve starts spending time thinking equally horny thinvs about different guys he sees in class, just to see if they will react to what he is thinking. This is how he figures out Eddie is his soulmate.

Steve notices eddies table is getting a little rowdy, as is always does before Eddie gets up on someone’s table and he rants about jocks and preppy girls while stepping on people’s lunches, Steve thinks “what if comes over here, spits in my stretched out hole, and fucks me right next to Heathers Halloways tuna sandwich��

Eddie, whose soulmate didn’t even think about Eddie that one time his car got spray painted a fit was all the school talked about for a week, was NOT expecting that at 12:30 on a Tuesday and promptly trips on a chair and slams face first into the lunch table, breaking his nose.

Eddies friends rush him to the nurse and Steve is torn between this being a sign Eddie is soulmate or Eddie just clumsy, Steve has seen him walk into a door twice, so he don’t 100% sure. Steve decided to test this anytime he has a clear viewpoint of Eddie and starts thinking the most horny, kinky things possibly about Eddie to see if Eddie reacts proves he is Steve’s soulmate (also revenge because Steve had to go through years of Eddie horny pondering interrupting Steve during important tasks games or tests so Steve figures he should pay that forward during eddies dungeons and dorks games)

[biteable-pink-pixie]

You're such a nerd. Wanna fuck nasty?

[tanis-zed]

Sudden brain blast over morning coffee:

John Gaius, necrolord whatever, cringiest man alive, refuses to let the earth die. And not just in the literal sense of locking the earth’s soul in a barbie on ice, in subtler ways too.

The most obvious is the memes, John constantly references memes that are dated even to us, but are in universe from a culture that died ten thousand years ago!

Slightly more subtle is the years. Why does everyone in the Houses measure in earth years? It’s been ten THOUSAND years since anyone lived on the earth! But John keeps them as a unit of measurement.

Even more subtle is the language. In sci-fi and fantasy we’re all used to the idea of the translation for the reader, people don’t speak english in lord of the rings, or dune, but the dialogue is in english for us, the readers. Not in The Locked Tomb. In this series, they ARE speaking english. Modern, bog standard english, to the point where two people born thousands of years apart speak similar enough dialects that one can pose as the other (dulcie/cytheria).

Now, this could possibly fall under that standard sci-fi trope, EXCEPT!!!! In Nona The Ninth, we see the non-house humans! And they speak dozens of languages, like you’d expect after TEN THOUSAND YEARS of linguistic drift!

John is trying SO HARD to keep the earth alive that he’s forced a language to stagnate for, say it with me now, Ten Thousand Years, to the point where even completely new things with no equivalent in our world don’t even have new words, just repurposed old ones (flimsy, sonic).

John Gaius, the first necromancer, could resurrect the planet itself, and millions of people, but he couldn’t resurrect the culture. So, John, cryogenics researcher, tried to put the culture on ice, to keep it as close to the one he remembers as possible. And he still failed.

[m-3-rcil-3-ss]

I hate when people write my whiney pathetic men as doms

[bennetsbonnet]

I know I turned this scene into a joke about how gorgeous Colin Firth is... but the pineapple that lurks in the background of the Netherfield ball when Mr Collins is yapping to Mr Darcy is such a subtle detail that I really appreciate!

The wealthy at this time in Britain were a little bit obsessed with pineapples. Depictions of them featured as decoration in country homes, in political cartoons, paintings and crockery (warning: Margaret Thatcher jumpscare🥴 but you can read more about that here and here).

But to have an actual pineapple on display during a large social gathering such as a ball? That was really showing off.

Especially when you consider it cost £150 (or approx. £28,000 today) to buy the initial plant, build a hothouse to grow them in and run it... with no guarantees they'd grow given the climate was not exactly suited for growing pineapples! It was a huge risk.

All this meant that pineapples were so scarce that they became incredibly sought after. Naturally, rich people did silly rich people things to acquire them and show them off... perhaps they were the NFTs of their day?

A single pineapple was valued at £60 (approx. £11,000 today). Given the cost and effort of acquiring one, you'd think people would be keen to tuck in and sample this exotic fruit? Nope. Pineapples were not eaten! Of course not! They were displayed on plates surrounded by other less prestigious fruit during dinner parties and other social occasions, usually until they rotted. They could be rented for special occasions too. Such was their value that naturally they became the target of thieves and some pineapples even had their own security guards!

In the end, colonialism (because all British history eventually returns to that) meant that pineapples could be imported cheaply and their status was devalued when the working classes could afford to buy them.

But next time you watch Pride and Prejudice (1995), pay attention the scenes in the dining room at the Netherfield ball and look out for the pineapple... which is the second prickliest thing in shot (behind Mr Darcy). 🍍

Also... just to throw in a little etymological rant... as a treat: I know most of the rest of the world calls them ananas... but in English (and other languages) all fruit used to be called an apple of some sort. We just never got around to changing pineapple.

The humble potato has some peculiar names in other languages... looking at you, French and Dutch with your pommes de terre (apples of the earth) and aardappels (earth apples)... and then there is also the Italian for tomato... pomodoro... (golden apple) when most the rest of the world call them some version of the Nahuatl 'tomatl'.

Languages are just funny like that and that's why I find them fascinating!

[deckond]

irrelevant detail: the gun clay is holding in this frame is actually a colt acr, a submission to the us military as an improvement for the m16 rifle, which never passed.

the gun has never been used by the us military nor by any civilians as far as i know of. it is extremely rare to get your hands on a military weapon like this, especially if it never made it through.

and he didnt have just one, no he had THREE of them (including the one he was holding). probably the only explanation of how he got his hands on it is if he was involved in the gun manufacturing, military testing or probably some illegal shit.

there’s like already a bunch of questionable items in clay’s arsenal but this is what caught my attention LOL.

[vir-dirthera]

Thinking about how the elves have zero political representation in Thedas at the beginning at the Dragon Age series and the situation doesn't change at the end of Veilguard. Like they want you to forget that every political and religious power on the surface of mainland Thedas is run by humans.

Thinking about how Warden Mahariel asked for a boon from the rulers of Ferelden, for the Dalish to be given sovereign lands and was denied.

Thinking about Warden Tabris asking for Shianni to become the first elven noble, and how she was murdered in the epilogue slides.

Thinking about how Lavellan is the only elf who is a public political figure.

Thinking about how Briala can attempt to empower the elves from the most precarious situation where she has to joint rule with Celene and/or Gaspard of all people.

Thinking about how making Leliana divine was the most tangibly good thing you could do for the situation of the elves.

Thinking about the viddathari, elves who join the Qun so that they can be treated with some form of dignity.

You can have a world state where you do literally everything possible to help the elves and it's just a drop in the ocean. So of course elves are vanishing from society en masse to join Solas' cause because it appears to them as the only option they have to change the social order. Even if Solas is just using his followers for his own personal crusade, with everything we know about Thedas it's just a no brainer.

But no, we don't need any of that because now we have the Veil Jumpers, a loose coalition of elves and non-elves that is comprised of citizen archeologists who excel at getting lost in the woods and blowing themselves up.

[acquired-elfroot]

The annoying thing is that reducing Solas to a dislikable two dimensional caricature in Veilguard didn't even come close to fixing the problem they set out to fix in doing so, and it was never going to.

I can’t pull up the exact quote, but I believe one of the writing team said something along the lines that they needed to make Solas less sympathetic because at the end of Trespasser too many people agreed with him and wanted to end the world. Which is why they chose to have him kill Varric, among other things. 

While I will say that I agree with the choice to have him kill Varric(I like the idea of him making Rook hallucinate him too, that could have been sweet if it had been well executed rather than a bland set up for a M. Night Shyamalan level twist) to raise the stakes and set Solas up as a serious antagonist for a new audience, or an audience that hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to him - but there is no way it could have ever suddenly made his goal to tear down the veil unsympathetic for those who found it to be so.

The writers seem to have been under the impression that members of the audience sympathised with Solas’ plan to tear down the veil not on its own merits, but for the draw of his sparkling personality alone. Not for well established lore related reasons, or for extra-narrative reasons rooted in a desire for emotional catharsis and narrative satisfaction (which a fictional body count has even less bearing on besides) but because he’s a sad pretty elf boi and we want to kiss it all better.

I’m going to be real with you, if they had surgically transplanted Ogrehn’s personality onto Solas and had him stone cold murder every other beloved character in the series, I would still want the  Veil to come down, or at the very least a better solution than leaving it just as it is. How likeable he is or isn’t has fuck all to do with it? 

Making Solas more dislikable does nothing to change the effect the Veil has on spirits and mages, it does nothing to address the question of the value of mortal lives weighted against immortal ones. It does not change the narrative role of a trickster in bringing enlivening chaos and upheaval to a stagnating world, in this case one that’s been forced to stagnate in service of the illusion of player choice; nor does it quiet our desire to see the rotten roots of Thedas’ corrupt institutions torn up and put to the torch ect. ect.

Most annoyingly, attempting to use Varric's death to accomplish this betrays the writer's assumption that players that did sympathise with Solas’ goals did so out of a naive misapprehension that he’s some sweet uwu softboy that could never do anything truly ruthless or cruel in order to accomplish his goals, and that once we had been disabused of that belief we would clutch our pearls in horror(you mean he’s willing to kill people? In a video game series with protagonists that each have kill counts numbering in the thousands? Quick, summon my fainting couch!) and tidily dismiss the notion that he might have ever had any worthwhile motivations at all. 

Look all you silly little girlies that want to kiss the fictional man, I feel like you don’t understand that he’s the *bad guy* here, glad we’ve cleared that up for you sweetheart. And isn’t he just sooo condescending?

It does not seem to have occurred to the writers that, to his fans, his stone cold ruthlessness is both one of the most well understood and deeply compelling features of the character.

I would happily give that writer a pass on a wicked case of foot in mouth, but the way Anaris & Cyran are written seems to very much enforce their the stance that an overabundance of sympathy for Solas as a person, as well as a desire to see him vindicated are the primary reasons any of the audience would ever agree with his goals. 

So to fix this issue, it stands to reason that the writers needed to de-emphasise everything that humanised(for lack of a better term) Solas and made him sympathetic as a person. Because apparently the problem is that their attempts to do so in the previous game worked a little too well on some people, right? 

As @mythalism pointed out, we cannot see him comfort his friends through their panic or grief or their crisis of faith, or have hushed philosophical conversations with them. We cannot see him flirt awkwardly, or try to pretend he didn’t just set his own coattails on fire.

We never see the god of liberation free so much as a wisp bound to a teaspoon.

And all of those compelling character motivations you thought he had about free will and self determination? Don’t worry kitten, we’ve sanitised all of the conflicts those might be applicable to right out of the setting anyway. Yay <3

At the same time, it feels like they’re too scared to upset the very same audience that they imagine has this woobified rose tinted view of the character, lest they scare them away. They’re too afraid of the audience to let him be truly unwaveringly ruthless, prejudiced, bitchy, vindictive, and even genuinely sadistic towards his enemies, because that might upset our fragile sensibilities too much! 

He can’t ever say anything mean to Rook - that might hurt our feelings!

He doesn’t really do anything bad, and if he does he doesn’t really mean it. He committed war crimes, but only because Mythal asked him nicely. He killed Varric, but it was an accident. He makes Rook hallucinate Varric, but he doesn’t use that to manipulate them; Varric just hangs out and vibes. He uses blood magic on you, but he doesn’t do any of the truly fucked up violating things that we know full well blood magic is capable of. He misleads you when he says “the Veil will not fall by my hand”, but it’s so transparent that it’s laughable. He’s never allowed the conviction to really follow through on any of his misdeeds, while still he’s bizarrely framed as outright villainous for them. 

So what we’re left with is a character divested of most of his admirable qualities, but with most of the rough edges filed off as well. Toothless. Boring.

It feels so much like they’re talking down to their audience? Like they don’t trust us to see a character with BOTH vices and virtues in spades come to our own conclusions about them? 

So we get this bland mealy-mouthed version of the character that we apparently need watered down further with ‘our team’s’ insipid commentary, much of which is blatantly based on bad takes people were spewing online almost a decade ago, and many of which have no bearing whatsoever on the actual story we’re being told because ohh my godd apparently we need to have our hands held while we’re walked though every opinion the audience might theoretically  have about the character and gently reassured by proxy that it’s a hashtag #valid opinion and why does this game insist on speaking to us like we’re morons??

For all that they incessantly bring up how condescending Solas is, I’m not sure if I've ever felt more spoken down to by a story I had been so invested in.

So Solas is boring now and I still l wanna tear down the veil lol

[ender-of-the-sender]

I love joey because how the hell does he look like his own younger brother

When I look at Pete, I dont see just see Joey, I see Ted

[mahalkitamully]

having a cute theme is so fun because imagine scrolling through my blogs seeing pink and lace and bows and then you see a little blurb on how I think nerd armin would be so perverted but too embarrassed to act upon his needs so he'd just sniffled and stammer while begging you to touch him and to stop grinding on him and shit

like imagine him stuttering while holding your hips tightly, jutting up to feel friction to sooth himself but to no avail

pink bow white lace banner here

anyways new theme,, ayane yano :3

[thenerdrant]

Today I re-listened to the first episode of TMAGP and the part surrounding the reddit thread about the magnus archives caught my eye (pun intended)

I dont think the archivst creature is John. I think the reddit user RedCanary was turned into the archivist that we see later in the season

[siriuslysatorusimping]

I’ve seen so many posts about nerd Gojo lately and how shy and reserved he would be and it irritates me that people are completely ignoring the fact that CANON GOJO IS LITERALLY ALREADY A NERD. ‘NERD GOJO’ IS JUST GOJO. ARROGANT, BLUNT, A BIT OF AN ASS, BUT CARING, AND ATTENTIVE, AND OBLIVIOUS BECAUSE HE’S ALSO SO DAMN AUTISTIC THAT IT HURTS.

CANON GOJO IS AN AUTISTIC/NEURODIVERGENT NERD AND I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

[biteable-pink-pixie]

Nerds can fucking GET IT. And by 'it' I mean this pussy. ♡

[munsondjarin]

you absolutely love hearing eddie nerd out. when he apologized for ranting once, you admit that not only do you think it’s really cute, but it’s a bit of a turn on. he never lets that fact go. you’re making out on his bed and he starts trailing kisses up your jaw. nearing your ear, he leans in to whisper “wanna hear about the different types of orcs?” you whip your head at him in confusion before he continues whispering in your ear, deepening his voice. “there’s uruk-hai, actually uruk means orc in black speech..” you fight back a laugh and he pulls away just enough for you to see the smirk on the corner of his lips. days later when he picks you up for a date and sees your outfit, he immediately goes “have i ever told you about the fall of gondolin?” as he wiggles his eyebrows. it becomes a common occurrence, hot whispers about elven politics and defeating dnd monsters in hopes to hear you giggle and feel your smile against his lips.

[chronicprocatonator]

Oohhhh Golden is Rumi's "I Want song", it's a manifestation of how Rumi is subconsciously ashamed of herself and how desperate she is to live openly. Even in a song that sounds triumphant and bold and loud it wreaks of anxiety and self hate, she not talking about a beautiful present, shes talking about a future in which she erases a part of herself that she was literally born with. She doesn't want to lie anymore. She doesn't want to be scared of what would happen if her friends knew. She even gives a false version of what she's truly insecure about. God this moive is so damn good.