#the possibilities are sooooooo

[not-your-bro]

despite cdpr doing nothing with it, i think i'll be forever fascinated by the potential of regis relapsing after his regeneration, due in part to the blood he drank at stygga. regis' whole disposition changes after he drinks, to the extent that he needs only say one sentence for geralt to look at him like bro are you good. yet when they reunite post-regeneration (and specifically discuss regis' addiction!!!!) it isn't brought up at all. and regis is apparently fine enough that he can put himself through extreme temptation at tesham mutna and still walk away with his sobriety intact.

but like, c'mon!! if the last thing you did before getting fireball blasted into the void was taste the most delicous thing imaginable - the thing you're wired to crave but have deprived yourself of for so long - wouldn't you come back wanting nothing more than to taste it again? cdpr? cdpr open up i just want to talk

[dykedvonte]

You ever just see a Mouthwashing take that makes you want to bang your head into a wall? I literally just saw someone claim Curly couldn't have been emotionally abused by Jimmy before the crash because he was in a higher position of power than Jimmy.

-Shrimp Anon

The mouthwashing fandom has shown me that people genuinely do believe that certain types of abuse are not as detrimental as other types especially when they deem those immune/resistant, ergo, believing one is objectively worse no matter how it affects the person nor the intersections of power, history and dynamics at play.

Get ready cause this is a yap session:

Cause like it's heavily implied that Curly and Jimmy's friendship was toxic and abusive, pointedly in the direction of how Jimmy uses Curly's belief/comfort in him. Curly wasn't forced to enable Jimmy but he was emotional and mentally on edge around him in almost every scene in some way. Mental and emotional abuse are not contingent on what positions you have at work. Yeah, he's Jimmy's boss but he was Jimmy's friend first and it's like getting into Psych discussion to talk about how social power tends to overshadow any perceived organizational power in the human mind. People are concerned about their jobs ofc but they tend to hang onto and put more value/investment into their personal relationships, hence why there tends to be laws and restrictions around mixing the two.

I always see the sentiments that "Curly is a grown ass man", "Curly is bigger than Jimmy", "Curly is Jimmy's boss", "He just needed a backbone" as criticisms of Curly and while I do agree that on the surface level all of these to be true and viable ways Curly could've taken more control of the situation, I often look at the parallels of Anya and Curly as victims of Jimmy pre/post crash.

The way Jimmy talks to Anya post crash is how he talked to Curly in the pre-crash segments. It's hard to pin-point mainly because we know he hates and wants nothing to do with Anya compared to his contrary but similarly handled obsessions with Curly. It's a weird sort of "honey-moon" effect of abuse Jimmy does in terms of emotional and mental victimization. He is always horrid to Anya, always talking down or questioning her abilities and thoughts in a situation, this of course includes the harassment and assault. However, he has a moment of attempted gentleness/conditioning when he question her about the mouthwash when she's contemplating drinking it at the table. The key difference is he has no personal investment in Jimmy outside wanting nothing to do with him, meaning there is no sort of romanticized version of him that he can condition her off of. He knows this, hence, why he always reverts to trying to make her to scared to oppose him.

This sort of give and take of "kindness" doesn't work on her because she knows he is just doing it to take more from her than whatever he could possibly give but it reflects even the "softer" scenes between him and Curly where he always rewords or rephrases Curly's sentiments and concerns to sound more shallow. He is feigning a deeper understanding by reworking Curly's emotions into something bad and needing to be hidden. Everything is laced with envy and resentment, an outburst just around the corner, I mean he even slams the table in the birthday party scene, a tactic in emotional manipulation to set the victim on edge and cloud their ability to respond. Even if Curly knows Jimmy won't get physical in that moment, the physical actions is intended to make him back down in the confrontation in case it does. This is something that is just not person specific. It ingrains itself into how you interact with the world and life and it shows in major and minor ways with Curly.

Post-crash, the abusive nature is more in tandem to the physical victimization Anya went through and the stripping of voice and autonomy we see take place. Like the parasite in HFIM, Jimmy speaks for Curly most of the time and puts words in his mouth, similarly to how he takes Anya's plans as his own. He very commonly, with the both of them mind you, supplements the worst aspects of himself into them; pettiness, selfishness, lack of understanding... And tries to cover himself with their best qualities; kindness, planning, initiative, etc...

These parallel are just to say that positional power has little to do with if a person can be abused and how it can even be flipped to further the abuse. There is no doubt that Curly could've picked up on Jimmy's envy of his position hence another reason he never confronted him as a Captain but as a friend as doing so would immediately put Jimmy in a space to be confrontational/combative.

I think the disdain some people have when they talk about the heavily implied if not implicitly stated emotional/mental abuse Curly experienced being Jimmy's friend is when treating it as an excuse to why he didn't do more. I can understand that completely because it is not an excuse to why he didn't do more but is a very real reason people in his position in these scenarios can experience whether in the context of a work or social environment. However, I also think the way people talk about it really does demonstrate a bigger problem when talking about abuse when somehow who is/was abused is either part of the issue or enabled it.

Harkening back to the sentiments about Curly's inaction regarding Jimmy, I think the exact phrases I used/have seen show how there is an inherent belief that it is easier to overpower the effects of emotional/mental abuse that go in tandem with the perception of Curly as someone who should be able to. There is not an age you suddenly stop being susceptible to abuse nor a set point or low where you realize how it has affected you. You don't suddenly know to stand up or put a face on to face your abuser nor admit that you inadvertently enabled them to subjugate someone else to the same treatment. Maybe it's my psych brain but their is this growing belief that direct action is somehow easy or always the best method with the game shows you instances where it is not always the case. In real life that rings true too. He should have done more, but it's not impossible to see why he struggled to find a way or didn't even if it makes us mad.

It's not easy to suddenly gain a "back-bone". You don't immediately want to resort to aggression, especially if it mirrors the type you were a victim to. You don't want to believe you allowed yourself to be treated this bad, let it get that bad or allowed something bad to happen to someone else. It is easy to be in denial, to retreat to your thoughts or make excuses to avoid the painful truth. It's frustrating but in a way we know is relatable. It why we both hate and love Curly for it. We know we'd be better, we think we'd be better, we like to think we wouldn't falter in the same ways but it's always easier to say that from the outside looking in. It's easy to see what he was doing wrong because we are seeing it, not him, but the game really does make you picture what you would do if this was your raw reality and it's why this debate about Curly seems so never ending/contradictory. We can all say what we'd do but bottom line is that's much different when you're in the moment with all the emotions and human feelings attached.

I personally think Mouthwashing tackles the themes of rape culture, enabling, toxic masculinity, types of abuse and patriarchy in ways that are meant to deconstruct the typical straightforward views we mostly have of these concepts and how little subtilities of them are just as, if not more, detrimental than the overt/obvious parts. The game deals with the idea of little details and bigger picture in a way to show that sometimes the bigger picture is not the issue but the little details that make it up. It's why I have a personal dislike of depictions of Jimmy as the typical horrible person who would of course do something like this because the game is about noticing the little warning signs, the foreshadowing and foresight.

It's why I dislike the typical discussion of "bro code" and "boys will be boys" for the game because the game makes a point to avoid the standard depictions of such. It is about the type of men who still enable despite not condoning, agreeing or even perpetuating harmful beliefs because they can't see the little details or the ways it seeps into their everyday. The severity is not obvious to them as it was not obvious to Curly, Swansea or even Daisuke the way it was to a woman like Anya. There are little details about Jimmy that should ring alarms but if you are too naive like Daisuke, too distant like Swansea or too conditioned like Curly, they are just off markers.

There is 100% more constructive/concise ways to say "Curly was a victim of Jimmy's abuse on an emotional and mental aspect that clouded his judgements and perceptions in the scenario" while also critiquing on the side of "Curly still had a responsibility to protect Anya as a crew mate and Captain that he failed to do due to biases and stigma's he failed to surpass" without the weird condemnation people give him about should've knowing better than to let himself be manipulated by a person he considered a close, if not family/best-friend and had his own reasons to trust initially. Also stop being weird about victims of abuse in general with this fandom, like sorry not everyone has a like social epiphany the moment someone's nasty to them. People are treating it like you immediately know when you are in a toxic relationship immediately or comprehend when a person is actively dangerous and either it's your fault for not knowing how to leave/cut them off or you deserve it. Like the hypocrisy of people believing how certain fans treat the story reflect their irl views but not their own is crazy.

End statement is: I honestly don't even know man, I've been writing this too long and just like no man on that ship was perfect or really helped Anya when it mattered and I feel like pitting them against each other in discussion on who did the least or most or how it was justified sucks cause in the end Anya always did the most and best thing for herself.

[fisheito]

omg where'd you get your top it looks like it would fall apart after one cycle in the wash

[skitskatdacat63]

2023 Qatar Grand Prix - Sprint - Oscar Piastri

[francesderwent]

Percy walking into the mouth of hell and starting to despair—no matter what we do how could we ever win the monsters will always come back even if we defeat them again and again if we die destroying them they will just return for our children to fight—and then going “omg children! I’m gonna have kids with Annabeth! wow hope is real and infinitely more powerful and reborn a thousand times more than any evil lmao monsters get rekt”

[mariatesstruther]

okay but a version of events in which tommy takes ellie to the fireflies, but NEITHER of them come back. and maria joel have to work together to get them back

[irhabiya]

liberal zionists, "pro-palestine" zionists (???? do you people know what an oxymoron is) and every other type of zionist are all zionists at the end of the day. they are fascists and genocidal freaks at heart no matter how much they love to larp as progressives

[lover-of-skellies]

Alright, this concludes round 1 of Sans Fight Night. I’ll set up polls for the next round shortly!

[ratatatastic]

"chucky did one with the cardinals not too long ago did you reach out to him any advice?" "i didnt... yeah just going for it we'll see what happens 😃!" (proceeds to be consumed by the spirit that haunts loan depot and airmails the ball)

"Have you thrown a first pitch before? And just your nervous level for tonight?" "I have never thrown a first pitch... a little bit of nerves! You always wanna throw a strike but I think I'll be alright!" "Did you play baseball growing up at all?" "Just a little bit, just when I was younger. And then started to kind-of get into hockey a little bit more and—so just when I was, you know, up until I was 7 or 8, I think?"

Fox Sports 940 | 9.6.24

wonderful form this man did not want to get chirped for not reaching the plate he put his whole arm into that 😭😭😭😭

philedelphia phillies @ miami marlins | 9.6.24 (x)(x)(x)

also just to note that erods wearing a 10th ani florida marlins hat as he dons the black alts which goes so hard man knows BALL

[itspileofgoodthings]

I mean I’m obsessed with crash landing on you because it’s like if a hallmark movie was good and that is fascinating to my brain and healing to my heart.

[0rph1x]

look at them look at them look at them look at them look at th

[activatebutterflyshield]

Something something the album Coyote Stories by The Crane Wives is about the current objectively horrid state of the world and also a call to action on changing that.

Okay. Starting with “Keep You Safe”. Here, the singer starts out as a young adventuring child who is afraid of joining their friends in slightly dangerous games. They never joined in, too afraid to face the consequences. As they grow up, they get more and more scared of the world as they see more and more slightly dangerous things happening around them. The refrain is a mantra that “Time is not your friend / Time is not your remedy / No amount of waiting will make you, make you brave / No amount of fear will keep you / No amount of fear will keep you safe”. The singer in this song is symbolic of the current state of the world, with so many people afraid of what is to come. The fears keep on piling up, from climate change to war to so many other things, and the people stay afraid, but they never grow any safer by being afraid. Time can and will march on, and, as the song says, “Come what may”.

Going on to “The Moon Will Sing”. The singer speaks of an unfulfilling relationship, with someone or something that keeps on leading them on but never fulfilling their promises. They mindlessly follow the something, and quietly ignored their neglected heart for a time. The chorus is “The moon will sing a song for me / I loved you like the sun / Bore the shadows that you made / With no light of my own”, in which the singer is lamenting their neglected state, but is also speaking of it in the past tense. They’ve moved on now, and are recalling the unhappy past. The singer in this case still represents the state of the world, but of a slightly altered state. They used to be in a bad place, but they’ve changed for the better, reflecting how the world has started to shift for the better. We’ve caught sight of our sorry state and are trying to remedy that.

Next is “Allies or Enemies”. This one is blunt and very personal. The singer immediately references “wildfires and weeds”, as well as an “awful damn disease”, all of which are rather familiar to 21st century Homo sapiens as omnipresent news headlines in the backgrounds and foregrounds of our lives. We are intertwined with these tragedies just as the singer is intertwined with the subject of their song, to the point that neither can conceive of a world without the tragedy or the subject. Anything and everything may or may not happen, as “All is fair in love and war”, but if this dynamic keeps up, it will be “the death of me”.

“Unraveling” is mostly a heaping pile of metaphors and symbolism. The singer is lamenting their lost loves, people who seemed to care for them before disappearing without a word. Though these men were kind and seemed to help, each and every one would eventually disappear and leave the singer worse for wear. Perhaps the best line to be applied to the world’s current state is the one about the carpenter: “Sanded my rough edges, crafted new and lovely things / But now my love is gone / And I can’t help the fracturing”. The carpenter represents the groups and people who have shepherded the world into its current state, keeping the population complacent by plying them with pretty little gifts and things to distract them while profiting all they can. But as soon as the carpenter has gotten what they wanted, they leave the world to its own devices to deal with the consequences of their profiteering. These profiteers are partially the ones at fault for the current state of the world.

“Hard Sell” does, in fact, hit hard. The singer is clearly going through something rough, holding themself together through sheer will to live. They’re trying so hard to get better, but it’s so hard to improve that it seems that they’re “working with barbed wire and moth wings”. To go on a tangent, the decision to specifically say “moth wings” and not bird or fly wings evokes (in my biology-addled brain) the image of salt and pepper moths. These are moths that rapidly evolved to have darker coloration thanks to the sooty, polluted conditions of the Industrial Revolution. The singer is using the only things they have: a metal material designed to harm and keep out and the wings of an animal greatly impacted by human-spurred climate change, and they’re lamenting that it seems that everyone might be going through the same thing. And its true; we’re all facing the same consequences of the state of the world in one form or another, and the only difference is how we present ourselves to the rest of the victims out there. We’re all affected, and we all need to “stop pretending now” and get something done.

Finally made it to “Rockslide”, the song that got me down this track in the first place. It has a runaway rhythm with a singer that speaks of feeling the “wild weather” that’s “got the mountain shaking weak”, and of the “quaking” of “rocks … a’tumblin while the people are asleep”. That wild weather is all the rapid and negative changes rocking the world, or the mountain. And the rocks are the consequences crashing towards the people so ignorant they might as well be asleep. Though the singer prays that they might keep their soul and that “you”, whom they’re singing to, wants to settle down, they also acknowledge that they must run or “the devil we will meet”. The people of the world must run, or make changes, else they’ll face the horrible consequences, or the devil. The devil, or “monster”, is coming and does not care what it hits.

On to “Metaphor”. Oh boy, “Metaphor”. The singer here is someone broken, jaded, the sort of person who’s been hurt ten too many times. They are a liar, a scavenger, a (metaphorical) killer. “You can’t trust a single thing I say”, they sing, because they’ve been lied to and forced to survive in the corners and the margins of the world. They are loud, they are hurt, and by goodness do they not want to go through that again. I really shouldn’t have to say why this is all to real to so many people in this world. They’re the ugly, hard to look at truth of the world, the headline you’re afraid to finish reading, the words just a little too raw to be fake. “I’ve gotten good at making up metaphors”, they sing, because that truth is too hard to bear without at least a little bit of sugarcoating.

Now comes “The Hand That Feeds”. Do I really need to explain this one? “I’ve seen good men spoiled / Chained to their jobs like hounds / They work and sleep, and work again / In the darkest nights they howl”. The people of the world, those who by all measures should not suffer, are chained and bound, deprived of freedom beyond their desperate laments. This is the fate the singer’s father wants his child to avoid, the snare he wishes them to see and remain free of. They sing of how “He taught me that the hand that feeds / Deserves to be bitten when it beats”. No matter how good it looks, you should never take the deal. Never shake the hand of the devil, despite his honeyed words, and remain your own self. That hand only wants to drag you down deeper.

Next is “Little Soldiers”. Okay when I started writing this thing I had just finished All Quiet on the Western Front and so I had a lot of sad war metaphors about this one, but it’s been a while and most of them have vacated my brain in the meantime, so… here goes. “On the broken backs of all the words we spared” they sing, “Like little soldiers in the trenches / It was a march we made towards ruin and despair / but we held hands all the while”. The singer here is recovering from a horrible loss, of the ending of a relationship they thought was good and healthy, but in reality was false to both parties. Both the singer and their former partner are representative of the common suffering of the common people, of their past struggles and strife, and how, in the end, they banded together to fight for each other. The refrain reflects this bittersweet dynamic, switching between “I swear that I loved you” and “I swear that you loved me”. The common love was the only good thing in the lives of the partners, and is all they can look back to in the end.

Following is “Sleeping Giants”, with a return to a feel similar to that of “Rockslide”, as forces beyond mortal comprehension threaten to wake. “I feel the mountains / Shifting under me / The sleeping giants are finally waking”. The singer is hyper aware that they are in danger, and said danger is something so alien, so powerful, and as unexpected as the land itself was shifting beneath their feet. Their pulse is racing, they are in fight-or-flight as all those prophecies from the previous songs in the album begin to come true. “The moon is humming / Lovely melodies / The forest echos, the trees are crowing / Hungry, hungry harmonies”. Natural keystones as far separated as the trees on the Earth and the moon in the sky are calling out in tandem, something is wrong. Something is terribly, horribly wrong.

A rather abrupt tone shift as “Of Everlong” follows. It’s a very short song, barely more than a minute, and its poetry is perhaps the strongest. I’ll just write the whole thing here.

“Out of the ocean / Over the harbor / Lay no sons and / Lay no daughters / Among the mountains of everlong / Twas there I wrote me / A sad, sad song / And if my lover / Will not hear it / Take my voice and / Take my spirit / Leave me weakened / And dig my hole / Only my lover not I can keep my soul / Only my lover not I can keep my soul”.

The singer, a lover much like the one mentioned in “Little Soldiers”, is singing a lament that they are alone, here in the mountains of everlong, beyond all reach of other people. Here they sing of what they have lost, or perhaps never had, a tune that can only echo about those mountains and never reach beyond the ocean. They declare that they’d rather die than never see their beloved again, consigning themself to eternal loneliness rather than risk breaking their heart all over again. Theirs is a song of what was and what will never be, of a world of memories that was long taken by the mists and will never emerge from the horizon with the breaking dawn.

It stays melancholy with “Never Love an Anchor”, with a rocking rhythm like a ship in a calm sea, and a singer who laments that they were never enough for their beloved. They were unable to care for their child, their spark of light impossibly kindled in a life made of sorrow, and feel that it is all their fault. “And I tried to do the best that I could / But try as I might I couldn’t bring myself to hold you”, they cry, a gentle, quiet admittance of defeat. They knew that they could never be enough, and so gave a chance to their beloved in exchange for defying their own selfish desires. This singer acted for the good of the many rather than the good of the few, giving what hope they did have to the little one so that they may rise just a bit higher. “On some level, I think I always understood / That a ship could never really love an anchor”, they sing, an admittance of their own failings, and a declaration that their beloved will be better, will have some brighter future, some breaking dawn at the horizon to look forward to.

The final song of the album is “New Discovery”. It’s a final declaration of the singer’s hope for a brighter future, of some true and real goal that they might strive for. It may not be real, it may be a mirage, but by goodness will they bite and claw and fight for it. “I want to believe / There’s something left for me / A new discovery”. It’s a hope, a faraway paradise, an impossible pipe dream, but it’s something. And to a person at the very end of their rope, to those who might sing of their trials and tribulations and torments and tragedies, something can be everything. It doesn’t need to be grand, or golden, or even great. It just needs to be better. And that is something everyone should be able to get behind.

Hope is famously that thing with feathers, the creature at the bottom of Pandora’s box, the last feeling humanity will ever have. It will drive us on through the deep, dark night, be our guiding lantern in the shadow of the dragon, and when we see the light of the sun shatter over the eastern horizon, we’ll think, yes. One more day. One more day to live and to learn, one more chance at making things better. There will always be nights; times of death and destruction will come again and again for the foreseeable future. But the night is always followed by the day, by hope and a new chance to take another step towards a better future.

Never stop fighting to see that next dawn, to once again behold the sun declaring that a new day has risen.

Never stop working to make things better.

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

Sorry if someone's already made this poll I am just DYING to know if anyone else finds it hard to believe, as the show seems to expect us to do, that he entirely failed to notice both these things.

Speaking for myself, I can accept the possibility that Julian was clever enough to hide his enhancements from even a trained spy, especially given his decades of practice at it. But personally I just cannot believe Garak didn't at least suspect something was off when Julian got replaced.

[francesderwent]

anybody who’s trying to make a career out of spreading the Gospel without the prolonged, committed, relationship-building aspect that you’d have as a teacher or a pastor…I’m biting you

[bylertruther]

not to inflict psychic damage on the person reading this but in the halloween episode.... will was really Calling Out for mike fr. he was Screamin like his voice got scratchy he was um. he was so scared :( and he wanted mike :( and um. well. the thing about that is that it makes me want to [REDACTED]

[krogans-give-the-best-cuddles]

Reading Asunder and I think I hate this more than the first two. The first two were often poorly done in a technical sense, and often had a lot of sexism. But Asunder is the "video game developers idea of gray morality" problem fucking distilled. The sexism is still here, and most of the technical issues are fixed (though certainly not fucking all) but like

Every two damn minutes it's: the noble and pure and pretty Evangeline (ignore the fact that like a kid starved to death under her charge and she is actually a threat and jailer to everyone around her just bc they were born different) who is so noble bc she.... believes the beliefs of the organization doing all the bad stuff. But she believes it really genuinely, that she's helping, even when working w the bad organization. And she's pretty, we'll mention that again.

Versus Adrian who's described as pretty never and often described as mousy and irritating. And she wants all the mages to be free but she's like soooo angry and loud and mean. Did you hear how she's too angry? She's soooooo angry, the redheaded fire Mage. So angry. And she's super judgemental. No one's as judgemental as her, even Wynne (a character who's greatest and most consistent flaw is being judgemental) will call her out as being too judgemental. And of course like, maybe she has some points about Mage freedom if she just wasn't so angry about it and obsessed with it. And she's not pretty.

And of course. Both. Are in a love triangle with our main male POV character. In fact he at one point dated Adrian, although it's impossible to tell why, bc he only ever thinks of her in the worst ways possible, so like. What did he like about her? What does he even like about Evangeline other than that he thinks she's hot? No one knows.

Something about it being written slightly more competently makes me like it even less