#this series has so many good lines

[anonymous-ace72]

Some of my favorite ToA quotes

I was a dramatic god.

 I thought my last statement was a great line. I expected gasps, perhaps some organ music in the background. Maybe the lights would go out just before I could say more. Moments later, I would be found dead with a knife in my back. That would be exciting! Wait. I’m mortal. Murder would kill me. Nevermind.

Hidden Oracle, p.201

--

“If you pull out a brochure, I will make you eat it.”

Hidden Oracle, p. 235

--

VERILY, THOU ART DENSER THAN A COMBAT OSTRICH CUBE. 

Dark Prophecy, 125.

--

What was proper? Commodus intended to live forever. He would drive away the darkness with the roar of the crowds and the glitter of spectacle.

But he generated no light. 

Not like the Waystation. Marcus Aurelius would have approved of this place. Emmie and Josephine lived properly with what time they had left, creating light for everyone who came here. No wonder Commodus hated them. No wonder he was so bent on destroying this threat to his power. 

Dark Prophecy, p.370

--

Leave it to McCaffery to be tactless about love to a child of Aphrodite, while simultaneously starting a fire in front of a satyr.

Burning Maze, p.122

--

I remembered how disgusted Poseidon had been, watching Caligula tootle around the Bay of Baiae, though I think Poseidon was just jealous his palace didn’t have rotating statues.

Burning Maze, p.221

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I had never been a fan of felines. They were self-centered, smug, and thought they ruled the world. In other words… All right, I’ll say it. I didn’t like the competition.

Tyrant’s Tomb, p.76

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Nothing is quite so disconcerting as having science explained to you by a supernatural creature.

Tyrants Tomb, p.116

--

I could imagine a younger Meg exploring these tunnels, doing cartwheels in the muck, and growing mushrooms in forgotten locations.

Tower of Nero, p.28

--

NERO IS NOT WORTH A FIG, HE SEES NOT MY BRILLIANCE.

Tower of Nero, p.247

[ammoniteflesh]

I finally got around to ep1 of Vows & Vengeance. DA spin-offs sure do continue to have, uh, variable quality.

(I'm trying to find a nice way to say 'the writing was hilariously bad' and failing lol)

[deus-ex-mona]

such is the tale of a ✨chronically online hypocrite✨

[slymanner]

Giving this scene the spotlight again cause it's one of my fav jokes in the mini series but also my adventure time brain is full and i wanted to give this scene some cool text :D

[fictionadventurer]

Good news! The channel that plays only old History Channel documentaries had a day entirely devoted to American presidents, so I have a lot more president facts to share with you!

(Important note that I have fact-checked nothing. I am only spouting off trivia the way I would if you were here for me to info-dump at).

Andrew Jackson's wife died soon after he was elected president, and he believed her death was caused by the vicious attacks against her during the election. Because he apparently lived his life as though he were a Shakespeare character, he said something along the lines of, "On the grave of this saint, I forgive all my political and personal enemies, but as for those who slandered her, they must look to God for mercy."

When William Jennings Bryan ran against William McKinley in 1896, he went on an epic nationwide whistle-stop campaign. Though he never drank alcohol, he reeked of liquor throughout his tour--because he was using gin as a deodorant! Instead of stopping to bathe, he would wipe himself down with gin to mask his body odor.

After Harry Truman, it became the practice for both presidential nominees to get security briefings months before the election, so when they came into office they'd be up-to-date on world events--with the understanding that all this info was strictly confidential. When Richard Nixon heard that LBJ's administration was putting together peace talks to end the Vietnam War, he went to the South Vietnamese and told them to refuse to go to the table, because if they waited until he was in office, they'd get a better deal. LBJ found out and told the head of the Republican Party to tell Nixon to stop it, because this was treason. Nixon called LBJ back and said this story was untrue and he had nothing to do with any such actions. LBJ knew he was lying, but only because he'd been secretly recording sessions with the South Vietnamese, so he couldn't do anything without exposing his own actions. Because of this, South Vietnam never came to the bargaining table, and the war dragged on more than five years longer.

When Ronald Reagan was shot by an assassin, Soviet submarine activity increased near US shores, and people thought this might be part of a Soviet attack. George Bush, the vice president, was (I think) in Texas at the time, and immediately started flying back to Washington, but his plane didn't have a secure phone line, so he couldn't be in charge of the country, and people weren't sure who was next in line. Both the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense believed that they should be in charge. The press also wanted to know who was in charge, but the press secretary was doing a terrible job at the press briefing, essentially saying that they didn't know who was in command. The Secretary of State then sprinted into the briefing room, took the microphone, and assured everyone that there was a clear chain of command, and he was in charge. The only problem was that he was wrong--he'd completely forgotten that both the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate ranked ahead of him.

At the time this documentary was made (2016), Dick Cheney held the record for the shortest presidency. The president is allowed to temporarily hand over power to the vice president if he's going to be incapacitated. George W. Bush made use of this rule twice when he was going in for colonoscopies, so Dick Cheney served as president for a total of four hours.

[welcometogrouchland]

I support the "Batman was unfairly biased to Stephanie for XYZ reasons" crowd so strongly bc DC claims that Bruce is a master planner who is able to understand anyone's psychology but he didn't realize that literally every single one of Steph's problems as a teenager would've been solved by her joining a shitty punk band. If he couldn't figure that much out then he didn't understand her for a minute

[dutybcrne]

Sometimes I like to admire Kae's new skin and think of aaaall the little gaps where someone could press quick little kisses against

[britneyshakespeare]

throughout the series of drake and josh it pretty consistently implies that josh nichols is a christian (josh peck is jewish) and in the finale of the series helen (played by yvette nicole brown, not jewish[?]) is portrayed as a practicing jew

[cospinol]

TODAY’S EPISODE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Koku you amethyst time!!!!!!!! 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰 And it’s apparently the moment that the show’s staff have been waiting for just as eagerly as I have because it’s the best looking episode not just of this season but maybe… of the entire series since its inception…????!! I genuinely can’t think of another one that has Multiple dedicated cuts of detailed action in a row like the sequence from kyou kai snapping on the mountain road to the encounter between shin and kyou kai + rai do and koku’ou at kan ki’s camp, and certainly not one anywhere near as good looking, it’s such a treat…!!!!!!!

[quick aside, before I forget I want to add that rai do is addressing shin as ‘obocchan’ in the last cap above :DDD truly the gift that keeps on giving]

And anyways that’s without even touching on how good this sequence would be regardless of looks because it’s still Amethyst Plot time 🥰❤️💞❣️💓💍💘 Bi hei giving in to peer pressure in just the kind of moment of weakness that you can’t actually detest him for (of course you would want to believe him when he tells you it wasn’t a civilian village..), kyou kai absolutely fucking snapping, the cool head ten maintains between trying to hold shin back and immediately pivoting the hi shin unit to a defensive formation for the real possibility that shin and kyou kai actually start pvp against the kan ki army , and of course shin and kan ki putting their cards on the table :)))))

^ my favourite panel of him ever now animated!!!!!!! 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰 and my favourite moment in the exchange between them, shin’s is still yet to come (I think all his talk in this week’s episode about kan ki not being equipped to handle sei’s dream of unification *is* sweet and sincere but it’s also dumb and that’s why kan ki is able to refute him so easily; the point that really matters and where his moral stance becomes unassailable, for me, is in the fact that it’s all for hyou’s sake. there’s no counter-argument about what you may or may not be turning a blind eye to there, it’s the mandate made absolute and incorruptible instead…) but this is maybe my favourite line of kan ki’s ever… he’s just following through on the promise he made you; these are the rules you agreed to play by! 🥰🥰🥰 i don’t even need to go into the premium emycore aspect of ever part of this sequence lol, the indulgence of it all…

also I was pleasantly surprised to see that they preserved just about all all of the gore from the scenes covered in this week’s scenes; there are some minor changes (the zhao soldiers kan ki is having the saki clan interrogate early in the episode are shown a little less mutilated than they are in the manga, and there’s no nudity) but they really are minor which bodes pretty well for the saki clan artworks coming up soon :~) I think there’s a chance we might not see that scene until the week after next since next episode’s primary focus will of course be Bi Hei And The Hi Shin Unit as per the ep title, but i’m so curious to see what they do with it since the anime has *always* omitted saki and saki-adjacent activities in the past. but I won’t get ahead of myself when we still have all of bi hei’s crisis to savour first :D

also, in shin’s speech telling kan ki off, we got a little additional visual of ran dou from sanyou campaign! always on the lookout for scenes from s1-2 appearing in flashback in the current art style <3

and i really had forgotten what he looked like lol even though this is another scene I absolutely adore for similar reasons to the one in the camp in this episode - though there’s no mou ten around to step in and defend shin this time, of course… :)

[goldensunset]

oh i am SPOOKED

[keykidpilipili]

You know with Shadow’s characterization going in a good direction in prime, I want to hope for great team dark moments.

[lonesomedotmp3]

"more like FUCKINGham palace" sarah marshall you are my favourite person in the whole world

[cheswirls]

i finally watched the hq!! movie

it was a lot of fun :)

[hecksupremechips]

The way akishinji and ashbella both have dramatic coma scenes and dramatic shot through the heart scenes like we’ve gotta stop meeting like this 😩

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

[deanncastiel]

omg y'all ever quit a book bc it's so aggressively heterosexual 😩😩😩