#which is so on brand of me tbh

[unclefathersantateddy]

someone manifest/pray/affirm/etc (whatever your ideology practice is) that I do some Got Dan drawing towards Geneuary (please + thank)

[akkivee]

AND THEIR SAUCE????????

[harrietvane]

Well this is embarrassing. For everyone.

[ct-multifandom]

I don’t usually make posts like this, but I’ve been seeing a lot of anti-intellectual junk lately, and I really think we need to put the word “pretentious” up on a shelf until people learn what it actually means.

It doesn’t describe someone who likes artsy-fartsy deep meaning media. People who are pretentious are fake. They’re posers trying to be sophisticated and unique, not like other girls. They pretend to only like stuff they think will make them sound cool when they talk about it. They want to act like they know something you don’t, and they want attention for it.

By definition, if you genuinely enjoy something, you can’t be pretentious. If it resonates with you, and you analyze it, and you don’t care what people think, that’s the polar opposite, actually. If you love obscure experimental prog music, if you watch underground high concept indie films through English teacher eyes, if you spend hours in a modern art museum reading each piece as a vessel for storytelling, if your backpack’s full of poetry books that inspire you, if you play underrated games that were someone’s passion project, if you have an interest in studying the classics or the masters, you are not pretentious.

Of course, some people just don’t like some stuff, and that’s fine, but that’s not what this is about. Don’t let anti-intellectuals shame you for enjoying things just because your interests are inaccessible to them, because they refuse to be brave and put effort into critical thinking. You’re not stuck up for refusing to overlook the craft of artists.

[fruitless-vain]

On the topic of refrigerators the fact that nearly every single option has a drawer bottom freezer by default is the worst

The people there were like “oh you’ll want it down there because it’s less frequently used! So putting the freezer at the bottom brings the perishable items up to eye level to reduce food waste!”

Sure, I get it I suppose.

But *I* use the freezer just as much as my fridge and need to get in to it often for my dogs’ food. And *I* on a daily basis experience piercing pain to my cranium for bending my head over below heart level.

I can easily put fridge items I need to use on the higher shelves to avoid that problem with the prior design of the freezer being on top. Putting the freezer below makes all freezer access painful for me.

I ended up finding one that has pressure locking drawers in the bottom freezer so when you pull it out there’s a really shallow drawer that will keep the items I need as high as possible in the freezer provided there’s some weight in that drawer. But like damn the overall design is so flawed for anyone not completely able bodied

[francy-sketches]

lmao I found a relic of my old joanna design with emo hair (that's how her grandkids got it) but it only exists in cat form

[poorlittleyaoyao]

Okay! Trying this again now that it's not midnight, because I'm still on my bullshit but have more words now. What I do not have is my copies of the first two novel volumes, since I am traveling, so I can't do direct quotes.

We know that, at some point, JGY and XY became cultivators. IIRC, it is stated in Volume 1 that becoming a cultivator without a golden core is possible but it's unorthodox and unlikely--even moreso given that a golden core in MDZS/CQL is akin to an organ that can be permanently destroyed/remove rather than an energy reserve from your qi being super swole. Demonic cultivation is appealing in part because it operates under a different set of parameters, and (though the world at large doesn't know this) WWX invents it in large part to compensate for the loss of his core.

We can also safely assume that the means to do this aren't accessible to everyone. We see peddlers hawking dubious cultivation materials. JGY tells his sworn brothers about the fraudulent pamphlets his mother purchased for him as a child and laments that she and people like her have no way of knowing that they're useless. (Since this statement goes unchallenged by LXC, NMJ, or WWX's narration, I think we can take this particular JGY assertion at face value.) In Yi City, WWX explains the "folk wisdom" practiced by regular people, ranging from the effective (the rice congee to absorb poison, the mortuary's high threshold to keep corpses from hopping away) to the superstitious (the paper effigies and joss money), and WWX reminds the juniors that these people don't have cultivation knowledge of their own. All of this suggests that there is no freely-accessible bank of cultivation knowledge, demonic or otherwise. There are no old-timey YouTube tutorials, and there is no indication that a person can roll up to a sect like it's nbd in this particular universe for formal education.

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO MY ORIGINAL POINT, which is: how did JGY and XY become cultivators in the first place?

JGY has acquired some level of cultivation by the time he's working with the Nie, albeit with a shaky foundation that both he and Narrator WWX identify as a deficit he'll need to compensate for with breadth over depth. How did he develop his power without formal training or reliable study materials? Teenage XY has somehow become capable enough for the Jin clan to see him as an asset, despite the fact that he is a feral street urchin who can't even read as a child, and demonic cultivation is a brand-new technology, as it were. Where, when, and how did he teach himself? What skills did he demonstrate that caught JGY's interest?

Since this story is not about JGY and XY's professional journeys, the text doesn't have an explanation. (Or, if it does, this website and also the wiki have been slipping, because "how the hell does JGY even have a core?" has vexed me since 2021.) There isn't a definitive answer here! What I am curious about--because I cannot possibly be the only one who wonders about worldbuilding ramifications and what offscreen events brought these characters to where they are, and I think it is fair to wonder about the mechanics of things that a text itself brings up--is people's personal headcanons.

So! Canon-compliant Xue Yang and/or Jin Guangyao enjoyers! Tell me how you personally explain their whole deal! Bonus points for telling me how it changes for CQL, bc both of them are coming from very different places there, and an MDZS-compliant explanation won't work for CQL and vice versa. Bonus BONUS points if you have fic exploring it that you can link.

[laurelwinchester]

went into the dean winchester tag for the first time in months and in general it seems just as terrible and unhealthy in there as always. except... is it just me or are the new w*ncest stans even weirder than the old w*ncest stans?

[inloveanddepth]

love these guys

[johanthefriskiestofbits]

oooooo please tell me (who knows nothing on the subject) about orv swap au

hehehe. hehehehehehe. hehehehehehehhehehehhheheheh <- guy who is so normal

the premise of orv swap au (name has yet to be finalized) is this: what if kdj and yjh swapped narrative positions (reader <-> character) but very little else? what if a video game player enters a time loop to save his favorite character from dying over and over again and also to end the apocalypse?

admittedly it's not super fleshed out yet (a lot of the changes this premise would introduce are still not hammered out yet) but here are some points under the cut (novel spoilers ahead!)

orv swap au starts with pro gamer yjh who feels :/ abt his job, but hey, it pays the bills. despite (or maybe because of) his relative popularity as a pro gamer and networking with the agency/sponsors/people to impress, he's kind of isolated in a way that's detrimental, a facade of someone he's not whenever he's on camera

something to play around with is the idea of agency? maybe this yjh doesn't feel like he has any and has his hands tied between the lifestyle and being under public scrutiny and not having enough of a support system to leave everything behind. maybe he doesn't know what else he would even do. maybe he's aimless and drifting with nothing to hold on to.

his favorite video game is what i've been thinking of as World's Hardest To Play Indie Game (not based on difficulty but just on the experience of consuming it) a boring, exposition heavy, player-hostile, poorly designed, slightly buggy mess of a barely-playable game: twsa, a game that was not finished upon release and experiences with sporadic updates every now and then.

the ending tree to this game is so convoluted its insane. also theres no save states so if you die (very likely) u restart babeyyy.

twsa (video game) does have multiple endings, all of which happen when kdj, your main character, dies. some are farther into the apocolypse than others, some paths require meta knowledge of future events or character actions or items or whatever. the "true ending" is either analogous to the original 1863: kdj makes it to the end at the cost of everyone he loves, or hsy's modified 1863: kdj makes himself enemy of the scenario to secure a way out for the kimcom remnants.

there's branches on the choices tree where everyone dies and everything sucks and is bad forever and theres choices to make where kdj gets to make a family and they don't really get to settle down but they can get pretty close to it among the ruins of the apocalypse. through all his testing, yjh finds that these endings are nice but peter out - to get to the end of the apocalypse yjh has to claw his way there inch by painful inch, through betrayal and sacrifice, and he still cant fully get past it

i originally wanted to finagle a yoohankim 3 way swap but i couldn't figure it out. swap aus are a lot easier to work with when they're even numbers, at least to me, so this au features a ysa who is a video game company employee by day and by night she really has become god this time (and also a terrible indie dev). and this is how jungdoksang can still win !!!!

also yjh's coworker from Real Life hsy :) i haven't decided if she's like an employee for the same agency, or if she's someone else in the gaming circles that yjh interacts with sometimes (in my heart theyre in like some sort of discord server together), or something like that but she's around. whatever she does she is twitter cancelled for something. to me.

the only other character swaps are lsk and yma. yma is yjh's estranged sister (in broad strokes there's a vague bad parent situation going on here) (they used to be close until they drifted apart and slowly started hating each other [there is an abyss between them that neither of them can bridge]) (he feels that she betrayed him and threw him under the bus so he left [maybe he gets kicked out]) (she feels that he abandoned her to whatever situation they have going on [he didn't even try to take her with him]) and he has to find her when the apocalypse starts. yjh older sibling to yma gives us a whole different little dynamic to explore from kdj ysk (there's different levels of responsibility and guilt and blame when you're talking siblings that are soooooo interesting to me. sorry that i see any set of siblings and immediately try to figure out how to make them worse)

lsk is kdj's mom who appeared into existence at some point with kdj and they were both just adults. that's weird isn't it. oh well. i guess she can become a transcendent later too for funsies

everyone else stays in the same configuration of Real Person vs Character to me this is a very important aspect

this point has no precedent with the swap, nothing particular that would change to cause this, but it would be so funny if lgy was a little gamer boy who is an avid yjh hater. hates that guy. shows up to competitions to boo him. tunes into yjh's silent no-mic speedrunning streams to mald in chat but yjh +mods don't ban him bc its kinda funny.

anyways the apocalypse starts when yjh and his coworker/fellow gamer hsy are on a train to twitchcon and lgy is also there (also headed to twitchcon) and he brings bugs because he likes them but also to sabotage yjh specifically. its just funny if this happened. you understand

instead of having reader-related skills and abilities, yjh's skills are video game player based! he gets flavor text insight on people, location, and items, things like that. notably, he has the ability to reset, to bring himself back to the beginning of the apocalypse

orv swap proper follows yjh as the Player of the Game (Consumer of the Narrative) who lives hundred of lifetimes in this ruined-world-become-reality "replaying" [read: time looping through] the game to reshape it to save his fave character from self implosion (kdj with no dissociation is very prone to dying. all the time.). to revisit the idea of playing with yjh and the idea of agency, of creation, the only way to get past the apocalypse is to go off the beaten path, to choose options that weren't even there in the game. when in space, at his darkest point, yjh becomes a writer. in this story, at his darkest point, he has to become a creator too

please do not ask me how the epilogues go i dont know how the epilogues go (i don't want to throw yjh back into a train for milennia after he Just went through a thousand resets so i'm sending kdj for that but i havent fully planned how or why)

anyways, hope that helps!!! :)

[dahldahlbills]

starting to realize podcast writing might be so difficult for me bc I don’t like episodic writing.. I miss my big storylines and slowly building up to something

[featureenvyproductions]

Going to forever keep advertising my shit with tropes because do I have to? No. Am I too "stupid" to do it another way? No, not really. And as you've all seen, I also am perfectly capable of writing real blurbs and do write real blurbs. But I think it's fun to make the pic with the tropes anyway and have that around too. And also it keeps the pretentious people away. The sort who don't understand reading is not always for taking a "discomfort" vitamin because they A) are privileged enough to not have discomfort every day of their life to need to escape from or B) are fresh out of college and haven't discovered the joys of/have been shamed OUT of reading as a fun low pressure thing they can do to escape when they're fucking tired (and they think this sort of thing is new with fanfic and not more or less how "trash" lit like romance novels are marketed), as opposed to reading as some sort of Moral Duty To Be Deep that was instilled in them by a middle aged straight white English professor who thinks one can fulfill this by writing 10 pages about books where people scream at each other, have affairs with young women, or Make Up A Guy to warn people about things that Could Happen (that *cough* already happen to marginalized people *cough*) Anyway it's my version of a scarecrow. Firing shots to keep the rent low. Come take a seat next to me in the dumpster my fellow raccoons.

[josecariohca]

.

[monkeebratz]

My mha thoughts are getting a little out of hand, and repetitive. Bc they're all:

one shot #1: I give a villain a child!

one shot #2: I give another villain ANOTHER child!

one shot #3: I give a HERO a child for a change!

not necessarily a one shot but certainly an idea: We age up the child from #1 and age down the child from #2 and shove them at the og timeline to have rooftop trio 2.0! The kids are having a great time but the adults are losing their shit!

[niuxita21]

If these two aren't meant to be in love with each other, someone on the directing team fucked up REAL bad lmao

[essektheylyss]

Am I going to watch Succession for, primarily, fic research. Am I really going to do that. (The answer is yes.)