#the ridiculousness is the point i guess

[scentedluminarysoul]

oh my fucking GAWD

Right-wingers in Germany are complaining about the government putting out advice on how to deal with the heat (like stay hydrated and stuff)

They're LIVID

Claiming the government forces them to do shit, telling them how to live their lives

Like. Just fucking DIE THEN

At least the memes are funny. Germans are posting all kinds of casual hints and advice and acting like the bigots. It's so funny.

This shit started so long ago, too. Like, a German politician, the head of the CDU (Merkel's party) was complaining about coke bottle caps staying attached to the bottle. Some of his supporters were literally saying it's Nazi stuff. Before that, they were complaining about a sign on a paper towel dispenser, asking them to please throw away used towels into the waste bin. Yes, really.

I can't. Just. Get me out of this fucking shithole country.

[corsairspade]

Halenthir scenario where they get married for tax benefits (in a platonic good friends sort of way) and fall in love long distance via sending each other letters with ideas on how to best leverage their marriage for tax evasion.

[otaku553]

Something funny for your spy x family ASL au

Luffy took ONE look at loid and internally went 'oh sweet. He's a spy like sabo' and never brings it up while anya just stares at him horrified and like with ace and sabo, he just never brings it up.

This also happens with yor and anya makes a funny noise

(As i am typing this my dog has the zoomies and is running around like a maniac)

HAHA YEAH THIS WOULD DEFINITELY HAPPEN

I think loid’s a good enough actor that luffy wouldn’t figure it out immeditely from like just a few seconds of meeting him but give him a minute or a few and he’ll figure it out on vibes alone

[foxx-queen]

i keep thinking about the datamined conversation between halsin and minthara and what gets me about it is that if you side with halsin and turn minthara away, thats objectively the bad choice.

like at this point, you've rescued minthara from moonrise. you know now that she was being controlled to act against her will. you've gone to the trouble of rescuing her from her tormentors, and you've experienced what it felt like as they tried to destroy her mind. you know what will happen to her if you turn her away. and if you do, you're willingly condemning her to that fate. you've essentially allowed her to experience freedom, to regain her sense of self, only to tear that away from her again.

whereas if you side with minthara, and halsin leaves, that's the only consequence he experiences. that he's not a companion anymore. at this point, we've saved the grove, we've saved him, and we've lifted the shadow curse. we've helped him achieve what hes been hoping to do for over a century. leaving your party won't see him lose his free will. he can return to the grove and live his life.

the choice is essentially either condemn someone to a fate worse than death, knowing exactly what that entails vs not letting someone travel with you anymore. its pretty clear cut to me.

its just interesting to me that they've switched the morality of it around given that minthara is considered the 'evil' companion by so many.

[toytulini]

who is in charge of all the stupid arbitrary changes to every fucking app and website for no fucking reason have you never heard of "if it aint broke, dont fix it"?

i swear to god every app website service etc is just slamming the randomizer button on features every week and hoping it unlocks a market changing innovation instead of like. waiting to make sure the change is actually innovative before forcing it upon everyone

[fromtheseventhhell]

I ignore about 95% of the conversations surrounding Arya having killed people because, outside of Arya stans, people refuse to include the context of the very violent circumstances she experiences + her trauma which influences her actions. She wasn't destined to be a killer and her being forced on the run, having to survive during a war (at times on her own), having to witness countless people being tortured and murdered, being enslaved as a prisoner of war, having to witness the deaths of her family, etc. are all hugely important factors. Not to mention the times when her life is literally on the line and she has to make tough decisions to ensure her survival. The only time her trauma is acknowledged is when people are using it to prove she's "too far gone", otherwise it's essays on how she hasn't suffered that much. It's so boring how people ignore well-developed characters just to reduce them to one or two aspects of their story. And this treatment is only for certain characters; let someone mention Sansa being part of the plot to poison Sweetrobin and all of a sudden, people can understand being forced to make questionable decisions under difficult circumstances.

[emkini]

Y'know what screw it I haven't seen Oppenheimer but I've seen plenty of jokes and I have two thoughts about this quote from a rhetorical and linguistics perspective:

"Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds."

"I am become" is the archaic form of "I have become", a.k.a the present perfect tense. It is not grammatically incorrect- just old as balls. As far as I know (and feel free to correct me), this quote is Oppenheimer's own translation from the Bhagavad Gita and therefore one he would have put a great deal of thought into. You can see similar phrases in Jane Austen novels and Shakespeare scripts, as well as in the King James bible. "I am become" is absolutely not on the level of "I haz cheeseburger" and I am getting REAL TIRED of seeing the two compared.

The nuance of "I am become death" is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from alternate phrases such as "I have become death" or "I am becoming death." "I am become" gives a sense of finality without being in the past tense; a sense of continuity without being imperfect. Using this archaic form of the present perfect is a rhetorical choice, and a very intelligent one at that- in other words, it sounds fucking cool and there's a reason all of us remember it to this day.

In summary: "lololol famous Oppenheimer quote has bad grammar" is a VERY SIMILAR sentiment to "Maybe the curtains are just blue" and some of y'all need to do 5 seconds of research before saying things on the internet because that's about how long it took for me to confirm my thoughts on this.

[sysig]

Finally made a Parapluesch OC, introducing Mama Oz ♥ (Patreon)

[beneathsilverstars]

NOOOO I JUST FOUND OUT THAT ID5 ASSIGNED EVERYONE ACTUAL FAVORITE COLORS....... my colors for coffeeshop au are all wrooong

[thereareeyesinsidethetrees]

do you think ford would like aye-ayes

cause like. they're weird as fuck but i feel like they'd be more weird to him in the sense that a hawktopus is weird than anything else

[racke7]

Sooo... I got bored and started trying to make crossovers happen again.

And basically, I've realized how very close BNHA and Worm are to each other, as far as settings are concerned.

Like, there are underlying differences in the world-building, but:

Powers appeared from an unknown source

Heroes and Villains are a thing

Powers are very unique, but tend to be "thematic" in families

In my opinion, the biggest differences between the settings are:

BNHA takes place in Japan, Worm in the USA

Scion is a well-known "all the powers"-cape, AFO is an unknown "all the powers"-cape

Worm has Endbringers

And... that's pretty much it.

Which lead me to think about "BNHA with Endbringers" and... it sure does fuck with the setting a LOT.

[mappinglasirena]

The Stairs Under the Bridge

If you've been following my blog for a while, you know that one of the many mysteries/points of discussion that come up repeatedly is: what is happening in the space under La Sirena's bridge? There's a door leading there from the mess hall and we see Picard walk through it in S01E06, "The Impossible Box", but we never find out what that space is being used as.

(At least, we don't know what its in-universe use is. We know from set plans that in the studio, the space apparently held the playback setup.)

We got a glimpse of a cross-section of the ship in the Blu-ray set tour, which has some impossible geometry happening under the bridge...

(That is not a proper floor and something is definitely clipping through it!)

... and if you remember my post from a while back, I speculated that the most likely explanation is that the model has an extendable ladder there, that would allow people to board/leave the ship by a means other than the loading ramp. This would fit with the early idea of the season 1 writers to have Picard board La Sirena in a space port, rather than beam him on board while she's in orbit.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, we got confirmation that this is indeed what the production team originally intended.

Dave Blass, the production designer for PIC Seasons 2 and 3, tweetet some images showcasing a cross-section of the Sirena set/model:

As you can imagine, this gave me enormous joy (and a not too small amount of glee)! I have long insisted that the panorama windows, i.e. the exit the Motley Crew use to get off the ship once she crash-lands on Coppelius, don't really work as a proper access point to the ship. There is a three foot drop right inside the window the crew needs to bridge, no proper hatch, no ladders, etc. The only reason it makes for such a convenient exit is that Sirena is buried in a few metres of dirt, bringing the window level with the ground.

And indeed, La Sirena has, or at least was originally intended to have, a proper access to the front of the ship, one with a ladder and hatch and everything! And it's located in the mysterious space under the bridge!

But, me being me, this schematic also immediately raised a question: Isn't that ladder a bit too short?

If you remember this post, it seems like one of the changes made during Sirena's design process was that the wings were dropped quite a significant amount. Where the early concept art has the ship sitting fairly low to the ground, she is raised much higher when she reaches her final form.

Essentially, we went from a configuration that might have looked something like the version on the top to the actual model on the bottom:

This change increased the ship's clearance significantly.

For the non-imperial-measuring among us, the height of the ladder given in the schematic shared by Blass, 14' 10 1/2", translates to about 4.8m. However, when you line up the orthogonal view of the ship with the cross section, the length of the ladder is not really enough to reach the ground once the ship has landed.

(The green line indicates the bottom of the stairs.)

There is some speculation that maybe Sirena can fold up her nacelles for landing, and that might be true. There are rooms extending into the wings that would end up at an odd angle, but I suppose with artificial gravity, anything is possible -- if somewhat unlikely.

Still, if we presume Sirena's wings are rigid in general, the distance from the tarmac to the belly of the ship (here: the stage floor in the schematic) is a bit larger than 4.8m.

I wanted to adapt the ladder accordingly, but getting good measurements by converting between feet, pixels, and metres is a bit of a hassle. So instead, I simply used the measurements already on the schematic and extended the ladder so that the ship's clearance would be 5.5m or around 18ft.

This brings the total length of the ladder to about 21ft or 6.5m, and overlaid on the orthogonal ship view, it looks like this:

(The green line once again indicates the bottom of the stairs.)

As you can see, this length requires for the outer engines to fold up a little bit and would have the lowest point of the nacelles basically sitting on the ground. I personally think that would make a lot of sense, and in season 2 we did see that the outer engine pods are on hinges and can definitely fold down.

(It's subtle, but they do move back into their resting position towards the end of the gif.)

It was never confirmed that the engings can fold farther up as well, but looking at how they're attached, I think it makes sense that they could.

Now, in the adjusted S1 concept art of Sirena at the space port, the outer engines are in their normal positions and the wings are actually fully off the ground, with the ship resting on extended landing gear:

So, my extended ladder is the absolute minimum length needed to account for the dropped wings. In all likelihood the ladder would have to be even longer than that, because the clearance would be over 5.5m.

One thing that playing around with all of these views and measurements made me realize, though, is that La Sirena is quite a bit larger than I usually picture her. I have this realization about once every two or three months, so to make it easier to internalize, I asked the wonderful @regionalpancake to assist me.

Google helpfully suggests that 5.5m / 18ft is about half the size of a telephone pole or of three Michael Jordan's standing on each other's shoulders. It is also the size of...

... one average adult giraffe. (This is more or less helpful, depending on when you last went to the zoo, but I really enjoyed that as a visual aide.)

And because Regionalpancake is a good sport (and extremely proficient at adding animals to La Sirena), she also gave me this second edit:

(She also helpfully removed the spacedock workers who were a little to tall in comparison to Sirena. Hopefully, the friendly Averagely-Sized Adult Giraffe will make the ship's real dimensions slightly easier to gauge.)

So, now we have an idea of what might lurk beneath La Sirena's bridge!

I imagine in-universe, there is more stuff stashed under there than just the stairs, though. Perhaps the space gives easier access to the phaser banks in the nose of the ship, or to some other flight control or power distribution machinery. And there's still the question of why Picard, after a very emotionally draining conversation, chooses to head into this space rather than going straight upstairs to his cabin or to his study on the holodeck. (Yes, I know the Doylist answer is because it was the more dramatically satisfying blocking/staging choice, but on this blog, we like to dig for Watsonian explanations, too!)

My personal guess is still that there's some communal washroom down there, because those have to be somewhere on the ship, and that space would actually make sense, being in such close proximity to the bridge and mess hall.

But, since we never saw any of it on screen (and won't ever see La Sirena on screen again), I guess the space under the bridge will always remain a canonical mystery -- and thus available for any interpretation your writing /mapping/ headcanon might require ;)

[sev-on-kamino]

The Clones as random thoughts I’ve had while working on WIPs:

Echo: is this actually reasonable or is it just reasonable to Fives?

Fox: I’m sure with enough Red Bull, I could make this and 50 other things happen.

Wolffe: they haven’t tried intimidation yet!

Crosshair: Maybe the violent approach is reasonable this time???

Tech: That wouldn’t make sense to anyone, so why is it here?

Thorn: Oooh this is hilarious, and I’m about to make it Fox’s problem

Fives: well, he fucked his way into this, so maybe he can fuck his way out

Hound: I think he needs a tooka. Yeah, that’ll make this way less sad.

Wrecker: Is it over the top to have an explosion in the first chapter? Nah, they’ll understand.

Dogma: That’s grammatically incorrect and tactically unsound.

Jesse: This is unforgivably horny…sweet!

not subjecting my taglist to my tomfoolery, but feel free to let me know if the goofy festivities are to your liking, and you want to be tagged in this type of clownery as well 🤣🤣🤣

[moonchild-in-blue]

Getting into Sleep Token is all fun and games (and pain. so much pain) until you try to listen to one of your favs albums, but your brain just goes-

WHEN YOU SIT THERE, ACTING LIKE YOU KNOW ME, ACTING LIKE YOU-

Like. Vessel please. Can't you give me a rest for just five whole minutes?

[teabutmakeitazure]

told my mom I don't feel like her daughter or blood because of the way she treats my cousin and she told me I'm being ridiculous and petty

[vinkumakkara]

when it comes to srr's writing the juxtaposition is the whole point, I Get It. it's a story about your typical group of twenty-something best buddies just trying to balance their everyday lives and oh man work is just a pain in the ass isn't it - their "work" just happens to consist of violence and pillaging and murder. it sure is wacky. but by trivializing what the characters do to such an extent, turning it into a mere inconvenience and everyday drudgery, it makes the player question what the point of it all is as well and the end result is the most tonally dissonant game in the series. and when i say "characters" it isn't even all that consistent, like it's mainly the Mogul who consistently stays "in character" while their friends alternate between being really into the chaos or being shocked by it. it's inconsistent even within the dynamics between the main characters, and when you look at the rest of the world... i don't get it. i can't say Santo Ileso (the city and its people) is exactly understated, it's pleasantly exaggerated and cartoonish, but it's that "pleasant" part that bothers me. it's cartoonish in a sense that would maybe appeal to that more sitcom aligned audience the game apparently covets - nothing too edgy, nothing too controversial, people just casually commit mass murder on a daily basis there, it's just a regular job haha. it's as quirky as it is tonally confusing

like did the question "what if Saints Row was a sitcom" really need to be answered? i see people defend these choices on occasion by calling it "evolution", like fans like me just need to get on with the times, but srr isn't improving on what came before all that much it's just different. completely changing stuff for the sake of it - or more like for the sake of imagined bigger profits - isn't "evolution", it's just like a whole unrelated thing now while still being called the same name from almost 20 years ago. completely removed from its original context while still vying for the wallets of those very same fans who've been let down so many times now. people who defend it in this way are basically saying that artistic integrity is completely worthless, the only value at least these games have is maximizing mass consumption by any means necessary. these games are Products and nothing more and you're a dumbass if you think otherwise. now that's just games in general to be fair but with this series in particular i genuinely think the whole "gta clone" thing is a major part of this perception, like how could you ever value the artistic integrity of this series if you never thought it had or even could have any? anyways idk how i got here i was thinking about that stupid 00s internet humor esque waffle thing Kevin's got going and how that relates to the game being marketed towards "millenials" while people insist it's totally for gen Z audiences instead and i lost the plot completely