#weird parallels

[heretherebedork]

The glasses switch! Where did this come from and why has it now been in two shows two weeks in a row?!

[owl-of-catharsis]

[thebibliomancer]

A couple weeks back or so, I was playing a lot of Splatoon and thinking a lot of Danganronpa so I jokingly mused about an Inkling in a Killing Game. Wouldn’t that be silly? They’d be inking everything, probably with pink ink

Anyway, then the Side Order DLC came out

Wherein there’s a VR world therapy program that takes the form of a relaxing environment for amnesiacs but gets taken over by a rogue AI. Someone gets turned into a robot, which gives them a lot of new, useful functions.

I never would have guessed Splatoon would have it’s own Neo World Program arc.

There are some major differences

Instead of replacing traumatic memories with good ones, the Memverse is meant to help amnesiac octopuses reclaim their memories.

Instead of being designed by the ultimate therapist, programmer, and neurologist, it was made by a pop star in her free time, with the help of some old work friends.

Instead of a big cast of quirky characters there’s four characters stuck in an elevator. Two lesbians, their live-in protagonist, and the world’s coolest girl who is also intensely self-aware about being a third wheel.

Since we’re talking Splatoon, instead of a summer island trip, the relaxing environment is a battle tower.

And instead of Secret Junko, the AI is an enormous but baby octopus.

[mask131]

I came to the realization that I love two culturally-impacting classics, two death-filled tragedies under the sign of the scorching, burning summer sun, two stories of feuding "clans" told through an important division of day and night, and which culminates in the confrontation of a male-female duo representing their respective clans...

Except one story is Romeo & Juliet, while the other is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

[tashthefirst]

David and Georgia on zoom predicting the pandemic a few years before it happened, where they would then go on to make a TV show on zoom and predict the second lockdown almost to the day.

Do they have some power they're not telling us about? Besides sending bisexuals into crisis 😅

[saltair-and-webweaves]

Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

you say you don’t want a boyfriend, but you know that’s not true - Charlotte Green/the voice - Anaïs Nin/the unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath - Sylvia Plath/tolerate it - Taylor Swift/the unabridged journals of sylvia plath - Sylvia Plath/the unexpurgated diary of anaïs nin - Anaïs Nin/ @treebloods/@lovebeing-a-girl/@ sanwtch on instagram/ @onlyanothermundane/@tullispink/I am an observer, but not by choice - @fatimaamerbilal/the prophecy - Taylor Swift/criss cross - Lynne Rae Perkins/Vladimir Mayakovsky in a letter to Lili Brik/what I could never confess without some bravado - Emily Palermo/little weirds - Jenny Slate

requested here

[callipraxia]

(Note: Huh, it seems that @zephrunsimperium has been inspiring me to essay composition longer than I'd realized - just found this in my drafts. Not sure when I wrote it originally, but here it is)

This is a good elaboration on an idea I’ve seen around a few places, and there’s a lot of truth to it. It’s a fairly crucial insight into Stan’s character….

…so naturally, as I wrote my fun adventure AU that was supposed to be strictly about action with minimal depth, the dominant theme became a problem with part of this idea: specifically, what would have happened in the event of failure, of Ford being irretrievable for whatever reason. It’s fair enough to say that Stan in 1982, the Stan who started working on the Portal, really had nothing to lose except his own life…but that wasn’t the case for 2012 Stan. This is even shown in the time-passing montage in A Tale of Two Stans, where we watch Stan rapidly age up from 1982 to the show’s present day in a mirror: at one point, he has a shadowed but visible photograph of himself and Ford as children taped up beside said mirror, presumably as a reminder of purpose, but when the montage ends in the present day, it’s been replaced with a picture of Dipper and Mabel. His family members who, when he cranks up the machine, he *knows* are alive. His family members who ultimately hand him the third journal, making it seem he really couldn’t have done it all himself. His family members who, in the interests of his project in the basement, he’s directly and indirectly endangered that summer. Repeatedly.

I saw something else on tumblr a while back, where someone made a comment along the lines that Stan is pretty much Walter White (of Breaking Bad fame) seen through the looking-glass; they both do seriously dangerous, seriously illegal things and justify them by saying it was all for their families. There’s a degree of similarity between “trust me - everything I’ve worked for, everything I care about, it’s all for this family!” in “Not What He Seems” and the lines “what the hell is wrong with you?! We’re a family!” from “Ozymandias,” and it’s interesting that “NWHS” and “Ozymandias” are both acclaimed as some of the best stuff television has to offer. In the end, Walt and Stan even both perform a last dramatic gesture/series of gestures which results in death/something believed at the time to be similar to death, and they both seem to do so as part of attempts (of a sort, at least) to rectify situations they regret causing. The difference is, we ultimately believe Stan when he says he did it all for his family, whereas Walt himself ends up conceding, “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it…I was alive” in BB’s series finale….

…kind of, if only a very small bit, like how, after saying he initially came up with the idea for the Mystery Shack because he had to pay Ford’s mortgage off somehow, Stan proudly but in passing notes that, “finally, I’d found something I was good at.”

Many, many, many years ago, I read an essay in another fandom (the essay was even older, circa 2003, I think) where a point made was “the mirror reverses what it reflects” but a sub-point was “the mirror also reflects what it reverses.” Stan wanted to rescue Ford because he wanted to make right what he he’d done wrong...but his behavior in Weirdmageddon 3 in particular underlines that it wasn't, unfortunately, totally disinterested behavior. He wanted to do the right thing (as he saw it)…but he also wanted recognition for it. This isn’t to say he’s a terrible person, of course, especially when compared to Walter “remarkably quick to adapt to the amount of homicide that goes with his new profession” White over here: Stan’s ultimately a heroic character. He's just not one we can ever be...completely comfortable with, I think, once we start thinking about it too much, because of how ordinary-human-level his flaws are. He doesn’t quite fit in the molds our brains are used to for a particular type of character. In my opinion, that’s also the genius of the character and the whole show, and why we’re still talking about them both near enough to eleven years after the finale.

I love them both to bits, but if Dipper or Ford had played the central role in the endgame, I think it would have probably weakened the show overall. They are clearly marked out as hero-protagonist types - they’re extraordinary people who regularly fall into extraordinary circumstances. When Ford and Dipper were driven to folly by a need for validation, it involved Bill Cipher, an unfathomably ancient, manipulative abomination against sanity; when Stan was so driven, on the other hand, it involved a snide comment about grammar, resentment about specific behaviors of a specific person, and his need for validation from his own family - issues, in other words, that could drive any of us ordinary folks to do something stupid in a moment of temper when the Line is just Hit. Stan didn’t make his tragic error of turning stubborn during the circle ritual because he wanted the world to acknowledge him as a Great Man, or to change history, or even to promote a Grand Cause. He did it because he had made huge personal sacrifices for specific people and wanted that acknowledged by those people. It’s not hard to imagine that he would have felt the same if he existed in a completely mundane show, one where he’d previously found Ford in a state of nervous collapse/on drugs/whatever and had proceeded to do what he had to do to get him psychiatric help while keeping up the payments on his mortgage - a story, in other words, that one could hear on the likes of Dr. Phil, and a story many of us have seen people go through some variant on at first hand. I would certainly be deeply, deeply tempted if offered an opportunity to know all the secrets of the universe - but on the whole, if I ever cause Great Harm to someone, it's far more likely to be over something far less grandiose. It is, realistically, infinitely more likely to be because I lost my temper at a bad time, when one relatively small slight proved to be the last straw that broke the camel's back and set me to yelling at someone I'd have done better to work with (or similar - perhaps not as immediate, but not doing X tomorrow because Person Y suggested it, one thing leading to another, etc. etc.). A sobering thought, as is the next one: on one hand, Stan - odd variant on the Everyman, in that he definitely has a distinctive personality, that he is - did get a chance to make it right once he realized he'd screwed up...but on the other, the price was high.

It takes a very special kind of strength to spend three decades working on something you can barely comprehend just to bring back someone who didn’t treat you as well as they should.

What kills me is just how uncertain everything would have been. Stan had frighteningly little information to go off of, yet staggeringly unshakable faith. The way he talks to himself while he’s working on it just twists my soul about because he has no idea what’s going to happen when he turns the portal on. He has no idea if Ford is even still alive and I think at this point, the idea of all his work being for nothing would actually destroy him.

Imagine if Ford didn’t come through the portal. The implication that you spent 30 years on something and it didn’t mean anything, that you probably killed the only person who ever believed in you because you’re just That Incompetent and they were all right about you, you were never going to amount to anything because you are the scum of the earth, you are nothing more than a Stan Co. knock off of the real thing and even though you deserve every bad thing that’s happened, it just hurts and the fact that no one cares makes it that much worse.

Ford calls Stan a hero, but I worry that that epithet is too vague to really impact him. Because sure, Stan may have untold trauma from living in the dregs of society, but Ford has blood splattered journals and a rivalry with a demon. That’s what heroes look like. They don’t look like tired old charlatans who run a tourist trap.

But strength - especially the kind of strength it must have required for Stan to even get up every morning - isn’t always flashy or even visible. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is continue to love when the world has given you absolutely no reason to.

[anarcho-occultism]

Kinda crazy this random (and frankly bizarre) movie has a backstory uncannily similar to Undertale, to the point that I thought it might have been a purposeful rip off until I learned it came out the same year.

[obsob]

poems and cats from january!!

[oifaaa]

Can't stop thinking about how different Dukes story would have turned out if him and Tim swapped places and I mean that not in a story sense but if Duke was introduced in the 90s and got full ongoing stories and Tim was introduced in the 2010s and got a couple minis and a book or two were he's just in the ensemble

[pharawee]

Do you believe in parallel worlds?

—THE BOY NEXT WORLD · คนละกาลเวลา · Episode 01

[doesromandoart]

do something

[thenightshadowqueen]

When he hallucinates his dead ex-boyfriend (who he killed) (who’s not actually dead) constantly for years on end, and the hallucination keeps making fun of his failures, but they also have genuine, heartfelt conversations about their fucked-up relationship and how they still love each other

[pippuns]

you ever think about how fucked up it is that shen qingqiu's first mission out of sect was him subduing the skinner, a demon who targeted and replaced people no one would really miss?

very fun how the skinner ended up getting killed and destroyed by someone else who took the place of a person no one really missed

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

Mel and Viktor are both in an Oculorum

The prison the Black Rose have put Mel in is what "Kino" calls an Oculorum, where "According to legend, the ancients built specialized chambers to seal away false prophets." It's unclear whether this place is real and physical, but it certainly seems to be to Mel. It's built like a puzzle box that seems to probe Mel's innate abilities as a mage.

Note that these runes are like yet also unlike Hextech runes with long connected lines and hard angles, like Mel's Art Deco aesthetic, and like the prison itself and its walls.

In Zaun, something was bothering me about Viktor's home - until Jayce blew a hole in the top of the chamber, creating a spiraling tunnel of debris. So now there is a hole in the top of Viktor's chamber with a "tunnel," the same as there's a hole in the top of Mel's Oculorum:

The aesthetic of Viktor's chamber is opposite to Mel's. No squares or hard angles, only circles and fractal-like spirals, curving like Zaun and Viktor's Art Nouveau aesthetic.

But how do we know Viktor's chamber is an Oculorum, specifically? Vi and Jinx give us our biggest hint when they find the wall where their heights were marked as kids:

Which Vi and Caitlyn found in season 1 deep in the undercity, near the Shimmer addicts that Viktor later "cures":

Which was underneath a giant neon Eye of Zaun:

What does the word Oculorum mean?

"ocu" comes from the Latin "oculus," meaning "eye." "Oculorum" means something to the effect of "of the eye." Viktor's chamber stands right by where the Eye of Zaun stood.

Mel is imprisoned while Viktor appears free, but is also in effect trapped. Mel is "the child" the Black Rose was searching for, possibly with magical or even semi-divine heritage. Viktor is a regular man made into a magic user whose religious imagery was not what it appeared to be. Mel and Viktor are both magic users confined to a chamber meant to hold "false prophets."

[crowfromfoggyforest]

um so instead of going to sleep i kinda made something...

Armand x pinterest quotes