#the rules are pretty easy

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

yesterday i started quite possibly the silliest locke i could do (fisherman challenge. i am a fisherman and can only use fish)

[inkskinned]

one of the things about being an educator is that you hear what parents want their kids to be able to do a lot. they want their kid to be an astronaut or a ballerina or a politician. they want them to get off that damn phone. be better about socializing. stop spending so much time indoors. learn to control their own temper. to just "fucking listen", which means to be obedient.

one of the things i learned in my pedagogy classes is that it's almost always easier to roleplay how you want someone to act. it's almost always easier to explain why a rule exists, rather than simply setting the rule and demanding adherence.

i want my kids to be kind. i want them to ask me what book they should read next, and i want to read that book with them so we can discuss it. i want my kid to be able to tell me hey that hurt my feelings without worrying i'll punish them. i want my kid to be proud of small things and come running up to me to tell me about them. i want them to say "nah, i get why this rule exists, but i get to hate it" and know that i don't need them to be grateful-for-the-roof-overhead while washing the dishes. i want them to teach me things. i want them to say - this isn't safe. i'm calling my mom and getting out of this. i want them to hear me apologize when i do fuck up; and i want them to want to come home.

the other day a parent was telling me she didn't understand why her kid "just got so angry." this woman had flown off the handle at me.

my dad - traditional catholic that he is - resents my sentiment of "gentle parenting". he says they'll grow up spoiled, horrible, pretentious. granola, he spits.

i am going to be kind to them. i am going to set the example, i think. and whatever they choose become in the meantime - i'm going to love them for it.

[emperorofthedark]

Cassandra Goth is our poor, unlucky heroine. She has no idea how or why she's ended up trapped within the halls of Whispering Winds Academy, or why her famously missing mother is acting as headmistress, but she is determined to get out with her sanity intact.

[riddlerosehearts]

thinking about floyd and riddle spending their first halloween as a couple together... i think floyd absolutely loves how varied and lively all of the different halloween traditions he's learned about since coming to live on land are, and he wants to try out as many of them as he can each year. so when riddle tells him that his mother always made him stay in his room studying on halloween, and that the only halloween activities he's ever done were those that NRC students were required to participate in, floyd decides that the two of them are just going to have to spend the day doing everything they possibly can. riddle tries to say he's far too busy for such things, but floyd will not let it go and honestly riddle is only half-heartedly protesting anyway because he secretly did always dream of doing the things that other kids got to do on halloween, and maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal to take one day off and spend time with his boyfriend.

so, riddle never got to make jack-o-lanterns? floyd decides to "borrow" about half a dozen of the pumpkins jade and azul had bought for mostro lounge and takes them to riddle's dorm room. riddle is terrible at trying to carve them at first and floyd can't help but laugh at him a little, but since he knows it's not riddle's fault he's never gotten to do this before, he says he'll show him how to do it. unfortunately floyd isn't nearly as good as he thinks he is on account of having lived in the ocean for almost his whole life and now riddle gets to laugh right back at him. they probably both get the hang of it right as they're down to their last two pumpkins.

riddle never got to go trick-or-treating with his childhood friends? floyd texts trey and convinces him to get in touch with chenya as well so that they can all go together. when they approach the first house, in the costumes they had prepared for each of their school's halloween events, riddle starts to get nervous and asks if they aren't all a little too old to be doing this. floyd shoves several huge handfuls of candy from that person's bowl into his and riddle's pumpkin-shaped buckets and tells him it's not like there's any rule that says they can't, and besides, riddle is such a cute little goldfish that he practically looks like a kid in his costume anyway! chenya stifles a laugh while trey has to stop riddle from committing murder that night.

riddle's never gone to a haunted house before? floyd and chenya both think it would be hilarious to make him go to one, so they do. riddle absolutely hates it, but it honestly does make him happy to see everyone else enjoying it--even if floyd and chenya both keep trying to egg him and trey on and get them to go down creepy corridors and check around corners by themselves, and even if floyd keeps running off to different parts of the haunted house and then coming back and hugging or even lifting riddle from behind knowing full well that he'll get freaked out by it.

riddle never got to play the apple bobbing game that's traditional in the queendom of roses? turns out there's a place right by the haunted house where they can go to do it! predictably, floyd is great at it while riddle ends up drenched without getting any apples, but just giving it a try is more fun than riddle expected.

riddle's never gotten to make candy apples before? luckily, trey knows an amazing recipe as well as what combinations of toppings work the best, and he's willing to teach them both! riddle gets very confused at imprecise directions such as being told to use "a few" drops of food coloring on the syrup or to drizzle "a little" white chocolate over it, and keeps asking trey exactly how much he should use. floyd thinks this is adorable. he also thinks it's adorable when riddle tries to scold him for ignoring half of trey's directions and just doing whatever he thinks sounds good.

riddle's never done a horror movie marathon before, or even seen any halloween movies in general? floyd insists that they marathon at least 3 movies together. after the experiences he had at the haunted house, riddle doesn't think he'll enjoy horror movies, but he tries to keep his cool throughout the first one anyway... which does not work out, because he really can't handle jumpscares or excessive gore. during the first movie they watch, floyd (who loves slasher films so much that he laughs and cheers every time the monster gets a kill) is happy to let his goldfishie cuddle up to him and grip onto his arm to keep himself from knocking the popcorn bowl onto the floor, but you know that once it's over riddle is getting teased relentlessly about how scared he was. floyd decides to be nice and put on something tamer for their next two movies, and riddle actually ends up really enjoying coraline and especially beetlejuice.

by the end of the night riddle realizes that they've stayed up way too late at night and a small part of him wants to scold floyd for keeping him up so late, insisting on having him do all of these silly activities and eat all of these terribly unhealthy snacks. another part of him wishes he could scold his mother for keeping him from doing any of these things as a kid, with his friends and the other kids in his hometown, the way you're supposed to do it... and another part of him still is just incredibly happy and grateful to floyd for finally giving him the chance.

[tangledinink]

Do the boys just never take off their cloaking charms? Between showering sports and just childhood shenanigans... how?

Yep! The long and short of it is that Splinter invested in the good shit. (How did he afford the good shit? Donnn't worry about it. Same way he was able to cut a deal with Big Mama...)

The Cloaking Crystals are specifically designed for long-term wear, the bracelets are small and minimal so as to not get in the way of day-to-day, and are enchanted so that they fit snugly and won't fall off by accident-- they have to be deliberately removed with intention. Splinter spent weeks teaching his sons how to wear bracelets without bothering them (even before he got the actual cloaking brooches) and drilling into them how important it was to never ever take them off.

After a while, the brothers just got used to having them on, and really didn't have any reason to ever take them off. I imagine that there was at least one occasion (when they were still young,) where one of the brothers (probably Leo...) started messing with his, but...

Dad didn't even get mad. He yelled a little, sure, and he stopped Leo right away, but... They could tell he wasn't angry. He was scared. They had never seen his face look like that before.

... They kind of decided after that that they really shouldn't ever take the bracelets off. Dad said it kept them safe, and it seemed like he meant it. Now that they're older, they mostly just chalk it up to it being some kind of superstitious thing on their Dad's part, but they remember how important it is to him, and that he told them not to, so... They just haven't.

Not yet, anyway.

[iwaasfairy]

please don’t send me asks about anyone in high school in sexual situations (or younger istfg)

I’m not ever gonna write high schoolers or high school gojo or nothin. thank you

[lord-squiggletits]

One of my least favorite parts of how JRO wrote Optimus is that he wanted so badly to continue his dark and gritty world building making the Autobots problematic, but evidently couldn't reconcile this with Optimus being a Heroic Paragon, so instead he leaned way too hard into "oh Prowl was the one who did this and it was behind Optimus' back" which if anything I think makes Optimus look worse, not better. Because then it's like, okay I know Optimus trusted Prowl a lot as his friend but you CANNOT TELL ME that over the course of 4 million years, Optimus as the leader of the Autobot army who literally would have access to 99.9% of all the records they produce, would never notice or question where some of these odd/inconsistent details were pointing. It just seems really inconsistent with how a real military would actually function, especially regarding Optimus' character, who is incredibly thorough and responsible and wouldn't neglect to keep up with all the details of his army.

Hell, Optimus knows who the Wreckers are and had them on call for tricky operations when he needed them (Stormbringer) so he's literally not at all ignorant of/averse to the use of special wartime units composed of dubious individuals. He's the fucking commander of an entire army, of course he knows that War Is Hell (TM) and no one's hands are clean. That's not even getting into all the stuff he got up to in phase 2/3, I mean everything from the annexation of Earth to OP breaking humans out of prison against Council orders shows that Optimus is no stranger to immoral and/or unlawful means.

It also leads to a lot of annoying fanon where people write Optimus (sometimes unintentionally, sometimes not) as like some sort of ignorant fool who's unaware of the machinations of his own army or has some sort of naiveté of "b-but we can't use bad tactics against the enemy! I would never condone the use of morally gray means in war!" No, IDW Optimus knows perfectly well all of the bullshit he's enacted/condoned for the sake of trying to win the war. Some stuff is definitely out of character for him and was only machinated because of Prowl, but I think this fandom REALLY underestimates Optimus' personal agency/responsibility as the commander of a whole ass army and ESPECIALLY underestimates Optimus' capacity to condone morally gray Bullshit Of War while still being a good person individually as well as, comparatively, the lesser evil compared to Megatron/the Decepticons.

Anyways what I'm saying is JRO may be a good writer but he's really hesitant to make Optimus morally gray and does some asspulls sometimes to justify most of the bad things the Autobots did as "Optimus just didn't know," and since the majority of the IDW1 fandom only reads JRO's stuff they go running with this premise of ignorant/uninformed Optimus when there's evidence elsewhere in canon to show that Optimus is, in fact, very highly aware of the bullshit he's allowed "for the greater good" and the only stuff he was "unaware of" was the stuff he would literally never agree to the ethics of, like bombing innocent neutrals disguised as Decepticons to get them to join the Autobots.

[jokerfic]

@shepards-dead-fish DELIGHTED to talk about this, tyvm

first and foremost, the big dawg himself, Nolanverse Joker

His whole deal can honestly be summed up with:

effectively flipping a code of morality on its head necessitates an intimate understanding of that code of morality first. Ledger's Joker sure does spend an awful lot of his limited screentime preaching nihilism to people, that nothing matters, that saving a busload of puppies and pushing a granny into traffic are both completely morally neutral acts, as is everything else under the sun, because there's nobody up there keeping score.

to me it reads like a crusade. to me, it reads like a smokescreen for rage and disgust. either the Joker isn't human, is instead a figment, a personification of chaos, or he is human, and something happened, something shoved him over the edge, and his actions are a means of punishing a cruel world that he bitterly resents and hates in its totality. you have to understand the concept of cruelty to react to it and lash out like that, though. you have to understand that it's a bad thing-- that bad exists at all. a true nihilist, when confronted with the weight of the world, shrugs-- because what are you going to do? what's the point in trying to change anything when any change is equal to the status quo?-- and moves on with their day. The sheer amount of time and effort the Joker expends on terrorizing Gotham speaks to a belief that Gotham deserves punishment, and punishment as a concept doesn't exist if there's no right or wrong.

confronted with this idea, he would claim that it's just his favorite hobby, his favorite thing to do, and since there's no moral weight attached to the shit he pulls then why not indulge in it? it's important to understand that this is total horse shit. it may well be his favorite hobby, but I think it's his favorite hobby because doing this shit makes him feel superior to everyone, and again, if he was a true believer in what he's peddling, he'd know that there's no true superiority when everything is on totally equal, neutral footing. he's a liar. he's an excellent bad guy because he knows bad exists and is intimately familiar with it. he lives as an inversion of good, tacitly acknowledging that good exists and that he's painfully aware of it.

next up: Jerome Valeska!

Jerome is honestly kind of a doll compared to the others. He's on the simpler side of Jokers when it comes to his motivations and morality, because he sort of of wears his heart on his sleeve (and he never shuts up, so you don't really have to wonder what he's truly thinking). Jerome is doing what he does because he sees it as punishing a world that failed him, and he's open about it. He kicks off his criminal career by murdering his abusive mother, he's unrepentant about it, and from that point on, everything he does is with an attitude of "why should I care if anyone lives or dies if nobody ever did the same for me?"

There's no doubt that, like Ledger's Joker, Jerome really does get a kick out of violence (his family members who've known him since he was a kid repeatedly call him out for being a difficult, bad kid who frequently acted out and scared them-- and it's not as if regular abuse can have that effect on a child, right? he was definitely just "born bad," as his brother Jeremiah puts it. /s). I would argue that he gets a lot more actual joy and fulfillment out of murder and mayhem than any other Joker. He really just likes to kill, terrorize, and destroy! It makes him feel powerful and engaged with the world. It's his main social outlet (he's an extrovert).

He knows it's wrong-- he never tries to argue otherwise, or get out of it by acting like right and wrong don't even exist-- but in Jerome's morality, he's justified in doing it, because the way he was treated was wronger. All he's doing, in his mind, is seeking revenge, and revenge is one of Jerome's biggest motivators. I would argue that the pursuit of it is something he thinks is always morally correct in any case. There's a sense of fairness there, and by extension unfairness. He understands that it's an unfair world, and he thinks it's every person's right to fight for what they believe they're owed, even if that means stepping on other people to get it. "Every man for himself" is Jerome's morality, and given his background, how could it not be? If nobody ever reaches a hand out to you, you never learn to reach out a hand to others.

(By the time he meets people who do reach out their hands to him-- Lee Thompkins, Bruce Wayne-- his point of view is firmly cemented, and instead of opening up to the possibility that the pursuit of goodness might be worthwhile, he laughs at them for being freaks of nature, acting against their own self-interest.)

And finally, Arthur:

Arthur, who of the three is easily the most sympathetic and more of an anti-hero than an outright villain.

Arthur, like Jerome, is also lashing out against a world that has repeatedly hurt him, but in contrast to the other Jokers, whose destruction spreads out over the whole city, he's very deliberate about who he attacks. He goes after people he specifically feels mistreated by. He goes after bullies and thugs and the elites who he blames for the state of Gotham, as well as for his own low personal state. His victims are specifically targeted-- he's not out to just hurt anyone he can get his hands on. He doesn't seem to find any pleasure in the idea of hurting people just to hurt them. He wants to punish bad people (and, at worst, he's neutral about innocents, though I'd say he leans more towards sympathizing with them than not caring about them at all).

That's what I mean when I say his moral code is unusually explicit for a Joker-- it is! Far from being the city's personal tormentor, he's basically hailed as a vigilante and a sort of champion at the end! That's very odd for a Joker. Far from denying they even exist, he very clearly knows the difference between right and wrong, and moreover, he cares about trying to do the right thing (which is why he never even seemed to entertain the idea of killing Gary, even though Gary had just witnessed Arthur committing a serious crime-- Gary hadn't done anything wrong, Gary didn't deserve to be killed). Unlike TDK Joker and Jerome, he doesn't seem to have a natural inclination towards and sense of pleasure in violence-- it seems painful for him, like a last resort, something that takes him over and that he surrenders to rather than something that's always been a temptation in the back of his mind.

But I don't think he thinks of himself as a bad guy. I think he thinks of himself as desperate, maybe broken. I think he cares about being good, I think he's tried to be good-- I think he feels like he's tried everything. But in Arthur's mind, violence is now the only way, the only thing that will make the bad guys sit up and take note. I think that he thinks that the exercise of violence against bad guys is no longer an evil, and I think the distinction matters to him because, again-- he wants to be good. In his view, it's the world that's stopping him from being good, nothing inherent to his own nature.

so yeah. all three of them have a personal sense of morality that informs their lives and decisions, and that they use to justify the things they do. it's super interesting to see where they differ and where they overlap.

[raeloganthesonic06fangirl]

So

Um

How 'bout this Hazbin Hotel show?

Let's just say someone close to me hooked me up with a viewing~

I got one more episode to watch

[vimesbootstheory]

I'm just hanging out in bed rewatching journeyman (shout out to the 6 people who have seen journeyman, banger of a show, STRONG influence on the next lawrusso fic) and I'm so euphoric? It's weird. Like I feel all the good parts of drunk for no reason. The only theory I have is an unusually long endorphin high from today's workout

[getvalentined]

I have Done The Taxes, much later in the year than I usually do because hell world, but they're done and that's what matters.

[snickerdoodlles]

there's a point at which someone's fear of being a dick wraps back around to them just being a dick anyways

[galehowl]

Maybe I should start taking photos of mushrooms I find starting this summer, just for the fun of it, we have quite a few interesting-looking species here if I can even stumble upon them

[giantkillerjack]

Anastasia the Musical sucks so bad. They really said "We're gonna cut the best song from the movie - just axe the absolute banger that is 'In the Dark of the Night' - because we are being SERIOUS and GROWN-UP now. We are A Big Historical Realism Musical Now. This is FOR REAL, okay!? We don't have a SILLY villain like Rasputin! We have Gleb! [Please Just Clap.] We are HISTORICALLY GROUNDED. -- Anyway, here's a musical unironically glorifying the Russian monarchy~~ 💖😌💖😌💖😌💖"

[ctommy-chileno]

My experience in impulse buying game development software has given me great knowledge

[rhysintherain]

For a show about diagnostic medicine, House does shockingly little actual diagnosis.

"Start him on antibiotics." Have you seen a bacteria? No? That's because apparently nobody on your team knows how to grow a culture or run a gram stain.

"It's probably cancer, start him on radiation." Without finding the cancer?? Without knowing what it is so you can decide on a treatment plan??

Very funny that actual diagnosis is too boring for House, so he just throws treatments at people until it almost kills them and demonstrates what the problem isn't.