#what does the key open

[madou-dilou]

[egophiliac]

buckle up lads we're going BACK INTO THE BOOK

[discjude]

Yeah this is about right (as always my thoughts are in the tags so there's actually kei content there lmao)

[stoneheart-paramour]

alright, small things done... tomorrow i have another appointment so guess i'll see how that goes and if it will interfere with my writing

[queer-crusader]

In praise of Dead Man's Chest,

a rather forgettable follow-up of Curse of the Black Pearl, i wanted to quickly list the moments where the vibes are truly off the charts:

when Bill Turner comes to tell Jack his time is up and gives him the black spot

visiting Tia Dalma. Her telling of the origin story of Davy Jones' heart, the fact that she has the same music box on her table in a brief shot, Barbossa's boots (still dead? resting?) on a bed in a different room as monkey Jack investigates. (Hell, when her cabin comes into view we hear the same tune we heard when Barbossa died!!) "Him heart." "A touch... of destiny" ma'am i fucking love you

Will being sent to search the Flying Dutchman but he's only sent to a wreckage that has fallen victim to the kraken. One crew member still desperately trying to hoist a sail, Will barely able to snap him out of it. Bodies everywhere. Lashing rain. A body dropped from great height, its face torn off by the kraken's suckers, just a membrane of skin that is still pulsing as the man desperately tries to breathe beneath it. I feel like this is Will's "you'd best start believing in ghost stories, Turner. You're in one!" moment

And then the Dutchman rises from the depths and its crew literally comes out of the woodwork!! Will dousing his sword in oil and smashing a lamp to fight with a flaming blade and see what he's up against!!

"Do you fear death? Do you fear that dark abyss?" (still thrilled i put this line on a pair of booty shorts in my black sails crack fic but thats an unrelated sidenote, this line just FUCKS) "All your deeds laid bare. All your sins punished. I can offer you an escape." BILL NIGHY DOES NOT PLAY ENOUGH VILLAINS

"Life is cruel. Why should the afterlife be any different?"

Jack looking at the scene unfolding through his looking glass. Jones looking right back at him. Jack putting the glass down and Jones being RIGHT THERE. VIBES OFF THE CHARTS

"You can't talk your way out of this one, Jack" yet HERE HE IS BARGAINING THE WORTH OF HIS SOUL. And he tells Will, who is taken as down payment, is in love, betrothed even. And the impact that has on Jones. Not to mention how the key theme of Davy Jones, a man whose story is centered around love and heartbreak, starts playing for the first time. Fuck

Recruiting new men (sorry, cannon fodder to give to Jones) and Gibbs asking a potential crew member (Norringtonnn) what his story is. "My story... It's exactly your story, just one chapter behind." FUCK THATS SUCH A GOOD SUMMARY OF NORRINGTON'S CURRENT STATE

THE ORGAN VERSION OF DAVY JONES' THEME. The way the giant coral tubes coming out of it remind me of the arteries and veins of a heart. The way Jones still cries while playing it - cutting out his heart clearly didn't have the full intended effect, despite his cruelty that followed. (Here's the coolest fucking IRL version of that theme btw. You'll realise exactly where the phrase "pulling out all the stops" comes from)

Wyvern, a man so long for his debt on the Dutchman he's becoming one with the wood. That fucks

LIAR'S DICE. There's an extended version of the scene and here is an analysis of why the long version fucks actually and how it's a masterclass on writing plot and character development subtly

"Let no joyful voice be heard! Let no man look up at the sky with hope! And let this day be cursed by we who ready to wake... the Kraken."

And then when you see the true scale of it. The way it snaps a ship in half and pulls it beneath the wave. That kinda fucks

"The boy's not here. He must have been claimed by the sea. "I am the sea." Mr Jones i think that's a point of contention the root of which caused your relationship problems and everything that followed

Leaning into the chest and hearing an actual heartbeat

Jack abandoning the Pearl during the Kraken attack, then checking his compass and for the first time it works, telling him what he wants most. We don't see what it points to, but based off what he tells Elizabeth in the first film, my guess is the Pearl, which in his mind represents freedom

The absolutely HAUNTING memorial of Jack at Tia Dalma's cabin, underscored with the sound of Will's knife hitting the table over and over. The deep despair. Tia Dalma saying she knows how Will hoped to use the Pearl to chase down Davy Jones and save his father. The way she jumps on the slightest glint of them being willing to try and repair what has happened. She wants Will to go after Jones. Because after all, she's taken steps to help the crew for the inevitable moment Jack would lose and needed saving:

BARBOSSA'S BACK BABEYYYY AND LOOKING MORE ALIVE AND THRIVING THAN EVER

Special shoutout to the three-way fight in the chapel and on the waterwheel, it's silly and a little slapstick-y but it DOES have some cool choreography and really cool moments! Clearly an attempt to recreate the fight in the workshop from the first film, and while it doesn't succeed in the same way (not quite to the rhythm of the music like in the first film, little to no character development revealed like we saw in film 1), but the scenery is vibrant, the choreography is good, the ever-changing alliances fun and the scene IS memorable!!

[makshu]

What if the key that Yashiro took from Amane in the past is the key to a diary? It was a key with a keychain, so I imagine Amane used the key a lot, and I don't think it's his house key (since the door to the Red House was unlocked), and I don't know what it could be. Maybe it was a diary, I don't know, at this point we'll think of any nonsense lol

[disorganised-bagel]

been playing way too much slime rancher recently, and am now getting The Urges to make some kind of rtc slime rancher au

[poisonouspastels]

@beegswaz genuinely i think my favorite tags on any of my work ever. i fucking love when people talk abt my characters like this

[magnusmodig]

||. thor misunderstanding earthen housing norms in the modern day is SO funny to me to think about. He's doing his best, but between being from another planet with far more advanced technology (and much more "archaic" culture customs) on top of also being a PRINCE, I would imagine some normal practices and understandings of things simply don't click with him more than others.... Not because he's not smart. Thor is incredibly intelligent. ONLY because of the huge culture divide. But... that said: the concept of having neighbors who own their own land right next to yours, but the plots of land are TINY ??? absolutely crazy to him. Why aren't the plots of land BIGGER? why don't more people utilize it to farm crops???

Also don't get him STARTED on the idea - or nature of - apartments.

[astral-cataclysm]

i spilled water on my mechanical keyboard last night what do i do

[fluffypotatey]

Did merlin turned darker and more morally corrupt as the seasons progressed? (This isn't part of the game, I haven't watched the whole show but my mom does so I know a bit, and sometimes it really seems merlin is the #1 enemy of magic as long as Arthur is safe and happy)

yea and no????

like he does get more apathetic with killing people (as in, he isn’t as conflicted about it because his end goal is keeping Arthur alive) and he does have a hand in sabotaging events that could have helped with magic being seen as good (however, it’s not his intention). a lot of the time he feels that he doesn’t have a choice because if he were to choose between magic and Arthur, Merlin will choose Arthur

he did it in 2x08 (I may disagree with the writers’ choice here but the point still stands), he did in 4x02 choosing to sacrifice himself in Arthur’s place, and he did it in 5x05 choosing Arthur’s life again despite knowing that risked Mordred’s own life and the future of magic in Camelot

I wouldn’t call him corrupt and darker in a villainess sense but rather corrupt and darker in a sense where he has spent 10 years being told Arthur was destined to bring the Golden Age of Magic and he was meant to protect him, but then he got too attached to Arthur and no longer cared for the goal everyone set for him. He had a new goal by s4 which was keep Arthur alive despite everything

[knifegremliin]

my laptop is such a trooper btw (he has so many cracks on him)

[bluebellhairpin]

Favourite writer opened up writing commissions. I am. So tempted.

[zenyuumi]

I hate it here

[gingersnapwolves]

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

[jonnywaistcoat]

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"