#this one really grinds my gears actually

[veliseraptor]

sometimes I think people think "narrative parallels" means "exactly the same" and like...that's not the point, actually, the point with narrative parallels is that they're variations on a theme that are meant to illuminate something about each variation. a narrative parallel that is just a precise reiteration of another thing isn't saying anything. it's just redundant.

[transmasccofee]

Ppl sometimes say that “oh theres no way the author intended for saiki to be trans” to discredit canon, which is funny bc it implies that Asou is an idiot who has no clue that Explicitly Writing Saiki As Afab And Making Him Say He Was Born A Girl would make him trans, meanwhile in reality there are at least two other canon trans characters

Even worse is when they say “stop projecting western concepts like transgenderism onto this manga, you’re whitewashing it!” meanwhile in reality there are at least two other canon trans cha

[banditblvd]

limnu.com was special I think

[thatswhatsushesaid]

one of our neighbours in our condo tower has accidentally paired their phone or whatever to our galaxy lamp, which has a mostly useless speaker built into it. because it is mostly useless, we never use it, meaning it is never paired to anything.

anyway now i can't use my damn galaxy lamp because every time i turn the fucking thing on, some canadian conservative talk radio show comes rattling through these shitty speakers, and there is nothing like conservative talk radio to harsh one's buzz.

[m3llowm1sh]

(BRAWL TALK SPOILERS)

I REALLY DONT LIKE THIS SKIN…. IM SORRY COLETTE FANS………….

[sunflowerdigs]

People being touchy about Roman potentially fucking Mencken are just...I don't get it. Because literally everyone around Roman except Shiv is aiding and abetting him in becoming president. And Matsson - Matsson is a technocrat who talks about his workers like they're slaves. He and Roman were never going to be your cutesy little harmless OTP, laying people off on their anniversary for fun. Like...you're falling for the window dressing. There is no "the fascist" on Succession because everyone seems to think they benefit from what Mencken is bringing to the table as the potential leader of the United States. And even Shiv didn't really care whether or not they kept Ravenhead. Oh, he puts Shiv and Tom off their lunch, but Tom is happy to keep the nazi on board as long as he brings in ratings and keeps Tom in power.

But, like...keep clinging to that false sense of morality about the terrible rich people show, I guess? This is where it was always going. These people have worn their funny little masks for long enough - s4 is the big reveal. Mencken or no Mencken, the mentally of the billionaire elite always leans towards fascism because fascism is the only way that they can maintain complete control of the populace and hold onto their own wealth.

[exhaustedwerewolf]

hr guy was screaming crying throwing up when I told him I wouldn’t be at the evening part of the xmas social because the date changed and I have a life outside of work and now he sends round the details for the unavoidable lunch part and despite me giving him my dietary requirements well in advance on his request there is simply nothing I can eat. like even ditching the vegetarianism I am allergic to everything on this menu.

[chaosartisan]

You all are so pro mental illness until they forget to take their medication.

You all are so pro mental illness until they start having delusions.

You all are so pro mental illness until they develop brain fog.

You all are so pro mental illness until they start forgetting important dates.

You all are so pro mental illness until they identify neuro divergent traits that you have.

You all are so pro mental illness until they start expressing their struggles.

You all are so pro mental illness until someone can't afford to go to therapy.

You all are so pro mental illness until someone can't afford their medication.

You all are so pro mental illness until it's something that comes attached with a physical health condition or deformity.

You all are so pro mental illness until it comes to advocating for better systems.

You all are so pro mental illness until your loved one becomes mentally ill.

You all are so pro mental illness until they need your help.

You all are so pro mental illness until it comes to doing anything other than saying "I'm pro mental illness."

yall are pro mental illness until they hallucinate

yall are pro mental illness until they dissociate

yall are pro mental illness until they self-isolate

yall are pro mental illness until they're paranoid

yall are pro mental illness until they split

yall are pro mental illness until it's too Scary for your comparatively neurotypical brain to handle

[arolesbianism]

Oh also further update on my experiences with the new oni dlc. Bionic dupes struggle in early game ceres a bit I think (their poor poor gears)

[invertedspoon]

i fucking hate promises teachers make if the class as a WHOLE turns in THEIR OWN WORK. cough cough. a certain english teacher who is promising us if everyone turns in 4 separate assignments we've done over the last 4 weeks then we won't get an extra assignment to do. cough.

[detectivesoup]

when I'm in my apartment or with my parents (northern united states)? socks, sure.

when I'm staying in central mexico with my extended family? shoes. we all wear shoes. they go on first thing in the morning. do you want to test the range and depth of a scorpion's stinger? no? then you wear shoes. smh.

how do the people walk around their house

barefoot

socks

sandals / chanclas / flip flops

shoes (wtf is wrong with you)

[nebucat]

elise critics annoy the fuck out of me tbh

[idiopathicsmile]

you know what really grinds my gears?

okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.

by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd's wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)

lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.

lady doyle attempted to channel houdini's late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to "harry." houdini's mom was jewish and didn't talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn't. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.

then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn't lie about it. so he essentially said, like, "yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can't." and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.

and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren't even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini's youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.

houdini's best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.

(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, "ghost racket crusade" of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf's book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)

but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don't have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called "houdini and doyle" which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini's whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)

i am just steamed about this. steamed.

[warblingandwriting]

I do feel bad for some of the Youtubers because there are a few that are clearly documentarians, like they’re doing extensive research into a topic, contacting people, conducting interviews, genuinely making informative art that is really good, and that can genuinely stand up with ‘legitimate’ documentaries a lot of the time. And those poor guys get blasted because there are also a derth of low-grade tabloid-y channels that make four hour long smear pieces on some random internet personality whose crime was... having friend drama or maybe being kind of an annoying person, and then they call those documentaries even though all the ‘research’ they did was reading a forum page that said bad things about the person and hatewatching/reading their videos/posts.

[thebibliosphere]

I was thinking about this a lot yesterday, but one of the things I really struggle with post almost dying in 2019, was how almost every medical provider focused on the effects of the trauma and not the actual physical fallout.

Like, yes. It was immensely traumatic and trauma profoundly affects the brain, but with hindsight (and by hindsight I mean I’ve been grinding my gears over this for the last four years) I can’t help but feel the ball got lobbed over the “mental health” fence a little too quickly.

I had fucking hypoxia, for God’s sake.

Why was no one more concerned that I can’t remember things or that my skill level as a writer and editor dropped substantially in the aftermath. (I’ve gradually regained most of it, but there are still things I have to pause and look up that were once second nature to me. I hate it. It’s traumatic every time it happens because there’s just a blank hole where Knowledge used to be and God dammit I worked hard for that and now it’s tumbleweed.)

And I know the answer is Covid. I know the world shut down just as I started getting answers and I’m one of the lucky ones because I’m still here. But fuck me. I don’t know how they expected me to CBT and mindfulness my way out of that one.

[sharkylass]

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

(It's not belated what are you talking about-) With the spooky day I bring...

---------------------------------------

--------------------------------------- There's A LOT OF ART under the cut, however it's A LOT OF SPOILERS.

ESPECIALLY FOR THE ACT 6 ENCOUNTER/TWO HATS, EVERYTHING IN THIS POST IS DEPENDANT ON THE FACT YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT ENCOUNTER.

(The dandelions are frozen in time) (...) (You envy them, but you think that's sacrilege, so you move on.)

The gif takes forever to load, please bare with me-

ALRIGHT, LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO ROBORO.

Roboro (it/they/he) is cold and calculative. It spent so long trying to get out of the loops, that a lot of their tact and bubbliness gave way to their cynicism and bluntness.

They exhibit more of their younger traits. Extreme smarts and avoidance. However, they still carries themselves tall, and aren't afraid to speak their mind. Most of the time, they simply choose not to.

The decision to make him cold and distant, rather then manic and erratic, actually came from Loop themselves. Loop is very actively trying to be the opposite of Siffrin. They act chatty and cruel because that's how far they've been driven, that's how they choose to hide themselves now.

Roboro is the same, in the sense that it's supposed to appear the very opposite of Isabeau.

"Why is it a Dandelion?"

From what I've seen, most people lean on the space idea for the guides, and I find that super neat-

But as an exercise (before this AU was even an IDEA in my mind-) I tried to design Mira, Odile and Isa as guides.

I tried the space theme, and felt really limited with it.

So instead I decided to design them based of ways to wish

Mira was a fire (candle)

Odile was a coin (throwing a coin in a fountain/well)

And Isabeau WAS in fact a dandelion (blowing on a dandelion)

And I guess that idea just stuck around in my brain until I got to making this au.

Their Dynamic With Isa

The two's dynamic isn't too dissimilar to Sif and Loop. Isa still tries to be his loud positive headstrong self, and Roboro sees past the bullshit, and grinds Isa's gears

(Fun fact for that second one: Roboro knew Isa wanted to be called "good boy" cause it probably would have wanted to hear it too-) As time goes on, the two learn to get along if only a little. Isa starts to appreciate the bluntness of Roboro, together with the helpful tips. Roboro meanwhile, seeing Isa's descent starts to feel a spark of empathy for the guy (which sucks for ACT 5 whoops.)

Silver Coin Equivalent

The equivalent is called "Lucky Pencil". Isa is a pretty superstitious guy, despite knowing better logically. So I thought he'd totally be the type to carry around a lucky charm of sorts!

(You recall.) (Before you lost yourself to time, you tried to become a defender.) (You got so tired of being the lone kid, the one people would not see, or think about.) (You were smart, but you were invisible.) (Sure, you were quiet, but you had good grades! You were getting by!) (Even your own family didn't think much of your solitude.) (And yet, you were so scared to open your mouth, to even answer questions you knew the answers to-) (It was hard. Suffocating even.) (When teachers started giving you good grades without you even having to try-) (Something had to change. You had to change.) (And you did! You became stronger, resilient, reliable. Became the very antithesis of what you used to be.) (Left everything you were behind.) (But it was worth it! You could finally!!! Talk!!! You could bring smiles to people's faces! They'd smile when you entered a room! And each time you felt pride. Pride in who you were.) (You tried talking with your family more, being more open, loud-) (They still didn't see you.) (Smart kids turned away, uble to face you, see their fears embodied. Fears that if they wanted to belong, they had to leave their brains for brawn.) (It was better. You were happier. But you still didn't belong, either.) (In hallways filled with people, you were still just there.) (…) (You tried really hard for you Defender exam. You exercised to near faints. Only really ate and slept cause you knew it would make you stronger.) (Buried your nose in reading and studying to avoid thoughts of doubt. And when they'd reach you anyways, you'd go for a run.) (You know it wasn't the best for you. You're supposed to be stupid, not unwise. "Just until I pass" you told yourself.) (… You were exhausted on your exam day. As your nerves heightened, so did your "coping". You were ready!!! You just, needed a little help.) (So you opened your drawer, filled with old papers and textbooks and notes. You don't like looking in there too much, but you took what you needed.) (A beaten up pencil. Your little lucky charm!!! Sure, you always knew the answers, but it was easier if you believed this pencil was helping you, guiding you.) (It was silly to think it would help, but you weren't taking chances.) (…) (Even after all that time, you couldn't leave that part of yourself behind.) (You still can't.) (You're the only one that can't.)

ACT 6 FIGHT

The ACT 6 encounter would... go about as well as you'd expect. Not only did a version of you win- it's the version of you that pretends to be a meat head, the one that's preoccupied with being nice rather then thinking ahead. How did he get to win when you, you who's changed, you who's given everything you had, everything you wanted to simply get out?

Why does he get to win? Why does this loud mouth, emotional, explosive guy get to win? He's learned nothing!---

I have more stuff to draw for this encounter, including the "I'm sorry/ thank you" pictures. I leave this one off with the knowledge that Isa used to tug on his hair as a stress stim. Guess is stuck around huh.

______________________

Post Loops Roboro

Roboro, once again, Changes! This time to resemble a yellow dandelion, rather then a white one. The family is long gone by the time Roboro wakes up again, and first thing's first- It has to find clothes. It doesn't like the weird looks people give him.

So, he goes to the House, braves the looks and gasps and confusion. It's trauma be damned, it's gonna talk to that Head Housemaiden finally.

He meets up with Euphrasie, and she quickly catches on what must be going on.

She's readily willing to give Roboro one of her old dresses-

Problem being- 1. They are too big on it (he may be Tall, but not EUPHIE level tall-) and 2. It wouldn't be the most comfortable wearing a dress around.

So, they figure they should make some adjustments. Euphrasie is willing to make the adjustments, it would only take her a day or two.

However, Roboro kind of... wants to try to do it themselves. There's no rush, it has nowhere to be. Maybe... maybe learning to re-engage with an old hobby could be good for it...?

Euphie excitedly lets it stay at the House, figure out what it wants to do- to take it's time changing!

Obviously, Roboro has trauma from the House. The walls, the cramped space- it terrifies them. But they also don't want to stay at anyone's home in Dormont, the awkwardness would kill him, if feeling like a nuisance doesn't do it first.

So. Roboro stays at the rooftop.

Roboro does some sewing on a new outfit, at the top of the House. At the very end of everything.

It's a bittersweet reminder that it's over, so it's as good as it could get while staying at Dormont.

I have a whole comic about this in particular, but this is already a massive infodump so I'm gonna stop it there for now-

Roboro travels around a while. It and Isa agreed to meet up eventually, but there was no rush to it.

He went around a while, re-familiarized itself with life, with people, with hobbies, with existing-

Probably made some friendships along the way. Those are probably the people who pushed it into reconnecting with the family.

I'm not gonna go into detail about everyone's dynamics and stuff, this is too long, and I'm still writing that stuff anyway.

I can however leave you with this:

(I might change how Post Loops Isa looks in the future, I haven't quite figured it out yet)

______________________

PHEW

THAT WAS A LOT

IT'S NOT EVEN EVERYTHING I HAVE, I HAVE SO MUCH STUFF AUGH,,,

Anyways, I just wanted to thank you all for the support on the first post, I didn't expect it at ALL Just know I appreciate it :]