#whos jeff bezos? literally no one.

[starboymp3]

my twinʼs so clueless about some stuff i wanna be her so bad. like

me: hehe have you read this good omens post thatʼs like “you go to your friends place but jeff bezos is there”

twinie: whoʼs jeff bezos? :)

me: omg you know! amazonʼs ceo, the dude who went to space...

her: i have no idea

me: you know, bo burnham wrote that song of him, “ceo, entrepreneur, born in 1964, jeffrey, jeffrey bezos..”

her: who??

me: bo burnham? the comedian?

her: ??? never heard of him

me: dude, he had that album a few years ago, you knoww, “get your fucking hands up, get on out of your seats...”

her: i dont know this song. what was his name again?

me: bo burnham.

her: i dont know him

girl youre so valid. hell yeah

[littlefoxwithbighat]

Most music software contains a cool feature where when you press "play" on a track, the music plays! 😮🤗🎵🎼!!! Therefore, I think it's so brave! 😍🥰 and cool 🤪😎💪 that Amazon music's app... doesn't fucking do that!! 😁😁😉 Not even a fucking little!! 😘☺️☺️ If you do get it to play by some fucking miracle of rubbing sticks together against your phone,🪵🤳 praying in ancient Greek 🙏🛐😇 and a Great White Thunderstorm has appeared on Northern Saturn 😝🪐 prepare to wait over 10 motheFUCKING MINUTES FOR THE DAMN THING TO LOAD SO LONG YOU WILL HAVE PROBABLY FINISHED ANY COMMUTES YOU WANTED YOUR GODDAMN MUSIC FOR and then get the SHIT scared out of you bY THE LOUDEST FUCKING NOTE you've heard in your life ERRUPTING from your phone after 10 minutes of dead silence 🤫😜🎉 because that's right we've also been lagging your whole phone in the meantime 🤣🤗😘. And the interface (which doesn't work still!😊) popping up randomly near constantly on your screen 😇😍 despite you not asking it to do that! People have been giving this app funny feedback like "I WISH IT FUNCTIONED AS A MUSIC APP ITS ONE JOB" and "PLEASE FUCKING PLEASE JEFF BEZOS MY WIFE IS DYING." Amazon music. 💕💛💘💋. IF YOU LIVE IN BALTIMORE FUCK YOUUUU

[honoviadakai]

Badly summarizing Hazbin Hotel songs: season 1

Happy Day In Hell:

Local nepo baby is very optimistic for someone who was born and raised in hell but damn it if you don’t find it a little endearing.

Hell Is Forever:

Your gut feeling about the pastor’s son was correct and he is indeed an annoying prick who likes to act God’s always got his back.

Stayed Gone:

Demon Jeff Bezos finds out his Ex is in town, isn’t happy about it and tries to slander the man only for his ex to immediately clap back and serve everyone some piping hot tea.

It Starts With Sorry:

Some of ya’ll are way too forgiving and it really shows…you’re lucky you dorks are adorable.

Respectless:

A 4’11 Millennial bitch serves absolute ✨CUNT✨ at a meeting she didn’t want to attend, local MILF is not amused.

Whatever It Takes:

A MILF and a lesbian sing about how they’d willingly die for the ones they love. It’s sweet but deeply concerning.

Poison:

Local twink took “conceal, don’t feel” way too seriously and now you’ll never be ok again. Have fun in therapy.

Loser Baby:

A DILF and a twink sing about how they’re the biggest losers in hell and it’s the sweetest fucking thing you’ll ever see in your god damn life.

Hell’s Greatest Dad:

2 grown ass men fight for custody over a grown ass woman.

More Than Anything:

The literal king of hell loves his child more than your father will ever love you and you just gotta live with that.

Welcome To Heaven:

The polite Christians are trying to convert you, but they’re really good at show tunes so I ain’t even mad.

You Didn’t Know:

Vindication for everyone who’s the black sheep of their family and now have religious trauma.

Out For Love:

Local MILF hypes up her newly adopted lesbian daughter by telling her love is the ultimate murder weapon.

Ready For This:

Local nepo baby discovers that the fastest way to get cannibals to fight for you is through show tunes and the promise of flesh.

More Than Anything (Reprise):

No, the two leading females are not “just really close friends.” You were told well before this moment.

Finale:

While the main cast is having a Bob the builder moment, 3 local bastards are promising to fuck shit up next season and the person you least expected is having a mental breakdown in the break room.

[shelleysmary]

gotta laugh at everyone who has ever said that "~unLiKE tHe pEtEr jACkSoN fILmS~ the trop people don't care about tolkien, don't care about middle-earth, it's a soulless adaptation for the money just because amazon is behind it" because (and i say this while also saying fuck amazon, fuck jeff bezos. it goes without saying - two things can be true at the same time, i can't believe it bears repeating)

how do you think films and television get made?? hate to break it to you, but it's all for the money. new line cinema didn't say "we love tolkien, pj, let's do this for free!" they were literally looking for a franchise hit when they decided to take the films over from miramax - which is exactly what every studio and their mom is trying to do now!!! it's movie business, baby! to say the people behind trop - the actors, the casting directors, the production designers, the vfx artists, the art directors, the armorers, the costume designers, the set decorators, the makeup artists, the ADs, the carpenters, painters, prop-makers, steelworkers, laborers, animal handlers, sound editors, miniature builders, stuntpeople, craftspeople, movement and dialect coaches, trainers, lighting techs, jewelers, etc. - don't care about the story they're telling???? is a wild reach. obviously they work for the showrunners who work for amazon who care the most about making a profit, but so did peter jackson and new line!! wanting your project to be financially and critically successful is not an inherently evil thing, come on guys, are you still buying into the starving artist fallacy 😭

there are tons of little nods to the silmarillion and other parts of the legendarium in the rings of power. yes, there are also changes and goofs, but lotr and the hobbit film trilogies also had their fair share of changes and goofs. i just think that "these people didn't read the books/this is just a money grab/pj & co. cared about the source material while these losers clearly don't" are tired arguments used to justify subjective opinions, not to mention the way it reeks of revisionist history considering the way tolkien purists initially took great issue with deviations made in lotr and especially the hobbit.

it's almost like...the most hated tolkien adaptation is ever the current one.

[raraeavesmoriendi]

Okay but watcher originally wasn’t going to leave the old videos up. Like that is something that they backtracked on and are trying to gaslight people about. They did an interview with Variety where they told them that they were going to slowly remove their content from YouTube.

I’m trying to figure out if you’re footstamping at me or what, but babe it’s not worth it.

they’re going to do with their videos what they deem they need to bc they’re not actually our weird friends and we don’t know them like that, they’re guys who make video series who are trying to figure out how to keep a studio afloat in a landscape currently dominated by media conglomerates owned by people like jeff bezos. that is the cut and dry of it. yeah, they probably changed their minds and reversed their earlier decision, but if anything the way people are frothing at the mouth about losing their ~comfort content~ (which. yikes don’t get me started), one would think that would be a relief.

look, I had a whole essay here but I have shit to do so, short version: watcher could have strategized and rolled this whole thing out differently, and who knows, maybe more things will change. maybe they’ll change their content output schedule for their own channel. maybe they’ll add shows or cut , or re-scale for international viewer accommodation. I’d hate to be their PR person right now. but it is what it is. if you can’t pay them, don’t. do not subscribe. literally no one is forcing you. if you wanna see their stuff that badly, find someone who can and password share. they literally said it was fine.

cards on the table, I don’t even know if I’ll be getting a sub until October, or at all, bc I’m a grad student and I have bills. but I’m not about to sit here and act betrayed and hope they fail a. because I’m an adult who understands that no matter the size of the staff, providing employee benefits and insurance costs money, as does making any kind of for-fun content in our current hellscape, and b. it’s kind of shitty to watch people turn around and act like a media company is their friends personally stabbing them in the back and betraying some grand marxist ethos when it’s literally just people who don’t have things like mousecorp and netflix behind them trying to make their shit on their own terms. I’m not going to sit here and pretend they’re some rich greedy corpos trying to wring money out of us poor broke smol beans out of malice when they’re not even in the same ballpark. they’re allowed to ask to be paid for their time and their labor. if people can’t pay them, then they can’t pay them, end of. some things we just have to go without and that’s just how it shakes out; there are worse and more critical things I could be missing out on that I will be paying that money for instead.

but I’m not about to insist their stuff be free forever because ~I want it~. because that’s not what it comes down to, in the system that we currently operate and exist under. I’m not entitled to their shit like that and frankly no one is.

watching people openly hope they crash and burn bc it won’t be free anymore just makes me chalk it up to one more shitty example of how consumer culture has just made people not think about how stuff is made as long as they can get that instant gratification, but like. water is wet, news at 11.

[insanitysilver]

So you have this author.

He has a bunch of projects, sure. Starts his own indie publisher in spring 2017 to start getting them out there. Cool. Good hustle. The problem? One of his projects is the start of a seven-book LOTR fan fiction sequel series.

Fall 2017 - He writes the Tolkien estate asking for rights to publish it. His letters go unanswered. (The Tolkien estate is notoriously litigious and close-fisted with rights.) Undeterred, he keeps plugging along.

April 22, 2019 - He interviews his first beta reader on his indie pub's social media to drum up excitement.

Nov 7, 2019 - He gets a lawyer to ask the Estate for the rights more formally. They say no.

Nov 13, 2019 - The Tolkien estate and Amazon close their $250 mil rights deal on Amazon's upcoming LOTR prequel tv series.

Dec 24, 2019 - Author shows up at Tolkien's grandson's house on christmas eve, and "delivered [his 180k-word manuscript] in-person", including a letter with this line:

"I truly cannot imagine, anyone else alive in the world who is capable of taking the foundation your grandfather wrote and expanding upon it as beautifully and imaginatively as I have." That's a pretty big swing buddy!

Tolkien's grandson mails the manuscript back.

So, he publishes his book anyways.

Sept. 1, 2022 - His book hits the major digital storefronts Sept. 1, 2022. Amazon's LOTR prequel tv series? Also releases Sept. 1, 2022.

He sees some similarities. So what does he do?

April 14, 2023 - He sues the Tolkien estate, the Tolkien trust, Tolkien's grandson, Amazon, and Jeff Bezos himself for $250 million.

June 1, 2023 - The Tolkien trust sues him for copyright infringement right back.

Aug 25, 2023 - Having failed to prove the similarities between the tv show and his book, he loses the first case. (The proposed similarities seem tenuous to me too, but judge for yourself.) He can't sell Tolkien fic ever again. And he has to destroy all the physical copies of his book. And he has to pay their attorney fees. About $134,000.

Dec 14, 2023 - Also failing to prove his work was transformative enough, he loses the second case.

Now, I'm not going to shill for Amazon. US copyright extends 70 years past the death of the creator. That seems to serve corporate interests more than then public imo. If it were up to me, it'd be death + 30 & LOTR would've been public domain in 2003. Author guy could've followed his bliss, and clowning on him now really only serves Amazon's agenda.

But! The lesson here is: while the laws are what they are, if you're going to write fanfiction... literally do anything else but that.

Sources: 'The Tolkien Estate & Amazon Win ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Lawsuits' by Max Goldbart for Deadline.com Opening Complaint, Author v. Bezos Opening Complaint, Author v. Bezos, Attachment #2 Tolkien Trust v. Author, Judgement

[mariacallous]

One phrase encapsulates the methodology of nonfiction master Robert Caro: Turn Every Page. The phrase is so associated with Caro that it’s the name of the recent documentary about him and of an exhibit of his archives at the New York Historical Society. To Caro it is imperative to put eyes on every line of every document relating to his subject, no matter how mind-numbing or inconvenient. He has learned that something that seems trivial can unlock a whole new understanding of an event, provide a path to an unknown source, or unravel a mystery of who was responsible for a crisis or an accomplishment. Over his career he has pored over literally millions of pages of documents: reports, transcripts, articles, legal briefs, letters (45 million in the LBJ Presidential Library alone!). Some seemed deadly dull, repetitive, or irrelevant. No matter—he’d plow through, paying full attention. Caro’s relentless page-turning has made his work iconic.

In the age of AI, however, there’s a new motto: There’s no need to turn pages at all! Not even the transcripts of your interviews. Oh, and you don’t have to pay attention at meetings, or even attend them. Nor do you need to read your mail or your colleagues’ memos. Just feed the raw material into a large language model and in an instant you’ll have a summary to scan. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude as our wingmen, summary reading is what now qualifies as preparedness.

LLMs love to summarize, or at least that’s what their creators set them about doing. Google now “auto-summarizes” your documents so you can “quickly parse the information that matters and prioritize where to focus.” AI will even summarize unread conversations in Google Chat! With Microsoft Copilot, if you so much as hover your cursor over an Excel spreadsheet, PDF, Word doc, or PowerPoint presentation, you’ll get it boiled down. That’s right—even the condensed bullet points of a slide deck can be cut down to the … more essential stuff? Meta also now summarizes the comments on popular posts. Zoom summarizes meetings and churns out a cheat sheet in real time. Transcription services like Otter now put summaries front and center, and the transcription itself in another tab.

Why the orgy of summarizing? At a time when we’re only beginning to figure out how to get value from LLMs, summaries are one of the most straightforward and immediately useful features available. Of course, they can contain errors or miss important points. Noted. The more serious risk is that relying too much on summaries will make us dumber.

Summaries, after all, are sketchy maps and not the territory itself. I’m reminded of the Woody Allen joke where he zipped through War and Peace in 20 minutes and concluded, “It’s about Russia.” I’m not saying that AI summaries are that vague. In fact, the reason they’re dangerous is that they’re good enough. They allow you to fake it, to proceed with some understanding of the subject. Just not a deep one.

As an example, let’s take AI-generated summaries of voice recordings, like what Otter does. As a journalist, I know that you lose something when you don’t do your own transcriptions. It’s incredibly time-consuming. But in the process you really know what your subject is saying, and not saying. You almost always find something you missed. A very close reading of a transcript might allow you to recover some of that. Having everything summarized, though, tempts you to look at only the passages of immediate interest—at the expense of unearthing treasures buried in the text.

Successful leaders have known all along the danger of such shortcuts. That’s why Jeff Bezos, when he was CEO of Amazon, banned PowerPoint from his meetings. He famously demanded that his underlings produce a meticulous memo that came to be known as a “6-pager.” Writing the 6-pager forced managers to think hard about what they were proposing, with every word critical to executing, or dooming, their pitch. The first part of a Bezos meeting is conducted in silence as everyone turns all 6 pages of the document. No summarizing allowed!

To be fair, I can entertain a counterargument to my discomfort with summaries. With no effort whatsoever, an LLM does read every page. So if you want to go beyond the summary, and you give it the proper prompts, an LLM can quickly locate the most obscure facts. Maybe one day these models will be sufficiently skilled to actually identify and surface those gems, customized to what you’re looking for. If that happens, though, we’d be even more reliant on them, and our own abilities might atrophy.

Long-term, summary mania might lead to an erosion of writing itself. If you know that no one will be reading the actual text of your emails, your documents, or your reports, why bother to take the time to dig up details that make compelling reading, or craft the prose to show your wit? You may as well outsource your writing to AI, which doesn’t mind at all if you ask it to churn out 100-page reports. No one will complain, because they’ll be using their own AI to condense the report to a bunch of bullet points. If all that happens, the collective work product of a civilization will have the quality of a third-generation Xerox.

As for Robert Caro, he’s years past his deadline on the fifth volume of his epic LBJ saga. If LLMs had been around when he began telling the president’s story almost 50 years ago—and he had actually used them and not turned so many pages—the whole cycle probably would have been long completed. But not nearly as great.

[spacelazarwolf]

I’m kinda confused, are you saying we can’t refer to the elite/1% as the…. Elite or 1%. Because like…. Leftism by nature being against the ultra rich that exploit middle and worker class workers to get an incredible amount of wealth and refuse to literally do anything good with it, not just ppl who happen to have money but like. The Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks of the world. What are we meant to call them? Are we supposed to believe that wealthy people don’t have incredible amounts of power in this system and routinely buy off politicians (especially in America) and get special treatment by law enforcement? Is it because all of them are Jewish? No. Most of them aren’t even Jewish and the ones who are are simply circumstantial. It’s because they’re fucking horrible people who hoard wealth and the government is corrupt.

ah i see my post is making the goyish leftist rounds again.

this is always how it goes—

me: can y’all stop using rhetoric that specifically originated in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

y’all: UMMMMM ARE U SAYING WE CANT CRITICIZE THE ULTRA RICH?????????????

[bioshook-wynand]

Since my friend and I are playing Bioshock 1, i wanted to share some of the things that have happened so far:

- We sat and watched the plane fully sink

- "OUGH?!" < her reaction to the giant Ryan statue

- Right off the bat she didn't trust Atlas and said his wife and child aren't real

- Every security bot is named Jeff

- The wrench is also Jeff(rey Bezos)

- We spent 30 minutes trying to get to Steinman because I forgot I has to throw the bombs at the debris blocking the entrance

- We went through 4 nitro splicers before I realized something wasn't right. I do this everytime. I literally replayed Bioshock like 2 weeks ago and forgot how to do that

- I've died more times in this playthrough than I ever have in Bioshock 1

- Keeps asking me if Atlas is evil, I keep telling her no and that he's my babygirl

- I've been spoon feeding her Atlas propaganda so hopefully she'll trust him by the end

- LOVES the little sisters, terrified of big daddys. She screamed the first time we had to fight one

- I tried to get the first bouncer stuck behind the register in the Medical Bay, but absolutely shredded him before I could

- The women were too stunned to speak

- We sat under the floor of the McCracken Crab trying to kill a Rosie. I died.

- I also hid under the floor of the Fisheries and smacked Splicers that walked overhead

- I got killed by a (different) Rosie like 5 times before I finally killed her

- Also ran from the third Rosie repeatedly before I finally killed him

- She chose target dummy for our first real plasmid

- I've only ever used it when losing control of the plasmids. So I've only used it once-

- Me: God I hate Andrew Ryan

Her: Bash his brains in

Me: *Hephaestus flashbacks* Oh I'm gonna

- Spider splicer: *angry screeching*

Me: New wife for you

Her: Great, thanks

- Hates it everytime I say "Snappies"

- I spent way too long looking for the final spider splicer before realizing I could take a picture of a dead one

- She did trust Peach Wilkins though (Somehow??)

- "I've got a really bad feeling about this" intensifies

- Yelled "THIS IS YOUR MAN⁉️" When Atlas walked out and almost missed Ryan's speech and the splicers bc of it

- Predicted the sub would blow up, but was shocked when it actually did

- I think she begrudgingly trusts Atlas now, his acting is peak

- I also went on a 2 minute rant about him and she made fun or me the entire time

- *finds a crawlspace full of Atlas posters*

Me: Oh my god, this is where I live!!

Her: NO

Me: With my Atlas posters and my.. Pistol bullets??

Her: N O !!

- #1 Langford stan (she's in love with her)

- Got jumpscared by the Houdini splicer that appears behind you (We both screamed)

- I was laughing bc his shadow was looming over us, then slowly turned around and we had a staring contest before I finally shot him in the face

- I've literally never seen him just sit there before?? He always disappeared as soon as I turned around. Wild

- She compared Langford writing the code on the window to 11307 from Danganronpa (iykyk)

- Cue disappointed sighing (Not really, I laughed really hard)

- This entire playthrough has just been me aggressively hitting on Atlas and her reevaluating our friendship

- Not even the posters are safe

- "Who is Atlas?"

Me: My husband

Her: UGH

- Saying "This is for me!!" every time I see an Atlas poster

- She is genuinely considering killing me

- Made me harvest a little sister to see what would happen 😔 We reloaded tho it's okay

- I've found so many secrets in this playthrough, including a vent that goes to a meat locker in the Farmers Market

- It felt like I was getting chased by everyone in Rapture while trying to make the Lazarus Vector

- I also (somehow) shot the big daddy in Langford's office while fighting splicers

- That was terrifying

- *Enters Fort Frolic* Me: It's about to get real silly

- I've been hyping up Cohen this entire time because I knew she would like him

- Unfortunately, she does

- She gagged at the "expectant mama" line

- Got jumpscared AGAIN by the splicer in the basement of Sinclair Spirits

- "SINCLAIR WHAT THE FUCK"

- I can never find the record store when I play Bioshock, this time was no different

- I gave up and went after Hector instead

- When we met Silas Cobb she yelled "KITTENS??"

- She agrees Silas is a discord mod

- We spent like 2 minutes straight trying to catch Hector and Silas

- I also got jumped by a bunch of splicers every time I tried to kill a bouncer

- She lost it at Cohen walking down the stairs

- "HIS GAY ASS WALK"

- I smacked Cohen after his speech and immediately ran

That's all so far, but we'll hopefully play some more this week!

[fuckyoudads]

DADS DO NOT READ MY BLOG I SWEAR TO ALL THINGS UNHOLY I WILL CRUCIFY YOU BOTH

Survivor of that one submarine cthulhu incident

Calliope you're a real one xoxo

WIZARDS FUCK OFF

DNI: Steven (you know what you did), Dads (this is MY BLOG), vampire haters (I'm literally half vampire), wizards, Jeff Bezos, Marine Biologists, Transphobia, dream apologists, people who say d*rk m*gic, divorce lawyers,

[[ 'Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here' is a small one-act play currently in production, taking inspiration from Dante's Inferno. All blogs regularly interacted with are also characters from this play, all blogs put together by the cast for silly reasons. ]]

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Doctor Who, but Chronologically 31

Fun fact! The timelines have intersected, almost - if we were watching this show in the normal order, this episode is actually only one out from where we would be. It's 1930! And we all know what that means - it's time for some terrible stereotypical New York accents as we watch Daleks in Manhattan.

Martha's back! Very exciting, Martha put herself into God Tier in the companion rankings with her last episode, and frankly she is very solid in this one as well. She and Tennant arrive in New York, discover it's 1930, and immediately launch themselves into the mystery of working class people going missing during the Great Depression as they live in a Central Park slum in sight of the Empire State Building being built, a tale that is so richly anti-capitalist the only thing they don't do is turn to the camera to break the fourth wall and say "The real monster here, children, is capitalism."

(Also, side note, if you watch in this order, you do feel the devastation of the First World War).

Plot-wise, this is a two-parter! Our second one that is actually intentional. In fact, the plot is fairly basic and simple, meaning the emotional stories and anti-capitalist morals can take centre stage, which is nice - homeless people are vanishing from the slum. They are being turned into pig slaves, by which I mean, humans in fetching brown boiler suits with pig heads who squeal a lot. This is being done by a sort of wannabe mobster who wears stylish spats in the Empire State Building, who insists his workers risk their lives to attach Dalek bumps to the top - because, as the title made clear and the episode wisely chose not to hide from us, the real bosses behind it all are Jeff Bezos inhuman monstrous perversions with no morals or emotions other than hate or racial purity aka Daleks.

Which is exciting! Because you see, while we have SEEN Daleks before, next to the big cube in the second episode, and we got that brief cameo from Rusty... this is actually the first time we get to meet them properly! First Dalek episode, to show us why they're scary!

Except it turns out there are only four of them and they're a cult.

Also the Doctor is proper freaked out by them. We get SO MANY PLOT THREADS HERE

"How are they still alive?" he asks the showgirl who has followed him into a sewer (she is played by Her From Spooks). "How do they always live, while I lose everything?"

Later, Martha, having been kidnapped for experimentation by Daleks and literally shaking with fear, steps up to the Daleks and stares them down.

"I demand to know what's going on," she proclaims (god she's so fucking cool.) "Report."

"Our planet and species were lost in a war," a Dalek says (HOW MANY FUCKING WARS -) "We're the Cult of Skaro. Dalek Sec is hybridising with a human so we can evolve to live outside the shell."

(The other Daleks do not approve. Racial purists. I foresee a mutiny.)

And the merge is complete! The final cliffhanger is that the wannabe mobster now has a single eye and a beard made of penises.

Far be it from me to agree with Daleks, but I also think that's a bad design, actually.

Anyway, other little stories in this episode include Rick Griffin from Holby City playing a man called Solomon, the sort of leader of the slum, who in his first scene resolves a conflict by splitting a loaf of bread in half I-see-what-they-did-there; Her From Spooks playing a showgirl whose boyfriend gets turned into an incomplete pig slave, so he just has the snout and that's it (on being reunited she is very good about it, good for her); and ACTUAL LITERAL SPIDER-MAN IS HERE. That is. Andrew Garfield. Like, THE Andrew Garfield. His name is Frank and he's from Tennessee and he is also about to be experimented on with Martha. And he's played by Andrew Garfield.

The Doctor jokes at one point that he'll let Frank kiss him if he wants, and all I can think about is Andrew "I want to play bisexual Peter Parker" Garfield's eyes lighting up at the line.

But, a nice moment for us watching: the showgirl bonds with Martha (of course) and offers to let her watch the show from the wings.

"Have you ever been on stage?" she asks

"Oh, yeah, a bit," Martha says. "Shakespeare."

WE UNDERSTAND THAT REFERENCE!!!!!

Anyway! New plot threads again!

“She” (an unknown person) is returning (perhaps River returned as Missy. Maybe Me? Maybe Clara???!)

There is something on Donna’s back

An entire planet, Pyrovilia, just… disappeared, somehow. (Maybe because the TARDIS is exploding??? Saturnine was also lost, and that WAS because of the TARDIS exploding. The lion man’s planet was also lost but he was a bit of a knob about it if I’m honest.)

Amy is maybe dead (she’s not)

The Doctor has been cubed (he’s out, but how?)

River is possibly blown up  (unless she’s Missy)

The TARDIS has blown up  (It’s fine now. Except it’s sort of melting now because it’s corrupted, but it’s fine again)

The universe appears to have ended  (the universe is back again)

The Doctor has employed(?) Nardole

(And Nardole was “reassembled???” Nardole had glass nipples and invisible hair?? WHAT THE FUCK IS HE)

There’s a vault in the TARDIS and it contains Missy but we don’t know why (sometimes she knocks for the bants)

What has happened to all these companions and where are the new ones coming from?

There’s an immortal Viking girl now. Her name is Me and she’s now looking after the people the Doctor abandons

What’s With The Silence?

Why was Rory entirely unconcerned by the entire world suddenly going silent when that is Not Normal and should have been, at the very least, extremely disconcerting?

What did the Doctor do to Queen Lizzie One?

Who is Captain Jack Harkness? (Is he the one who gave the companions a warning about the lone cyberman?)

Why is Amy seeing a one-eyed woman in a vanishing window?

What’s with the Doctor’s future involving getting shot by an astronaut?

Is Amy pregnant and why is it inconclusive?

Who is Sarah-Jane Smith?

How is the Doctor Bill’s teacher and why/where does he have an office?

What is going on with the Cyber War and the Cyberium???

Who did the Doctor lose to Cyber Conversion?

What happened with the Other Cyber War?

What happened with the Third War that deleted the void?

Why does Rose seem particularly important?

What’s with the Weeping Angel statues, and why can’t you blink at them?

What order do these Doctors go in? (Eccleston, Tennant, uncertain, Smith, Capaldi, Whittaker)

Which companion just… forgot the Doctor, and how?

Yaz and Vinder are about to die as Mori/Mwri/Muuri

There is a Lupari shield around Earth.

What’s a Time War?

What’s the Rift?

What’s Bad Wolf?

What happened with Amy’s pregnancy?

In which war did the Doctor become a war criminal, and how?

Who is the Master?

Why has Amy forgotten Rory?

Is Rory plastic or not?

Why is the Doctor sulking on a cloud?

How exactly does the Doctor have a cloud?

What exactly happened with Strax to, uh, tame him?

Which friend killed Strax?

Which friend brought Strax back?

Where did this lesbian lizard and human couple come from?

What happened with Clara as Souffle Girl and the Daleks?

How does Clara actually join?

Why so many Claras?

Why is Missy apparently in robo-heaven?

Why is probably!Missy pushing Clara and the Doctor together?

What is Trensilor and what happened there?

Who is Handles?

The Doctor is about to be dissolved by a beautiful geode man

The universe is being crushed by the Flux

Will the Doctor open the fobwatch?

Sontarans are invading Earth again

Who is Kate?

Who is Osgood? Another name of Clara’s again?

The fuck is the deal with the Grand Serpent

Does Martha get to go to an ice cream planet with 12-fingered massage aliens?

How did the Doctor forget Clara?

Who is Bill’s puddle girlfriend Heather?

How did Nardole die?

When does Bill get Cyberman-ed and die?

When does the Doctor shrink and enter a Dalek called Rusty?

Whittaker is falling to her death rn

Was that ring relevant?

Does anyone know the Doctor’s name?

When did Yaz talk to Dan about fancying the Doctor?

When did Dan talk to the Doctor about fancying Yaz?

Who was the Doctor’s wife?

What's happening with the bees?

What happened with Donna's ex and a giant spider?

What war wiped out the Daleks, and is it one of the ones already mentioned?

What did the Doctor mean when he said "The (Daleks) always live, while I lose everything?"

[altocat]

honestly, i don’t think people give president shinra enough credit. hojo’s an easy target because he’s the ugly, cartoonishly evil mad scientist, but president shinra is the one funding hojo’s cruelty. he’s the one running an evil megacorporation that’s destroying the entire planet and brutally putting down all opposition. in terms of scale, president shinra is the most evil person in the ffvii universe, imo. he’s their elon musk or jeff bezos.

President Shinra is an EVIL motherfucker. I don't buy any of what that recent Square Q&A said where he used to be a goodhearted entrepreneur guy who slowly went down the wrong path. I totally believe in duality and moral complexity, both in fiction and in real life, but there's a difference between corruption and dropping a literal concrete plate on top of millions of innocent civilians. The guy was probably always a little messed up. Shinra as a company is just the means of him expressing it.

[darkwingphoenix]

@loominggaia AU OC Trivia

Some small trivia n stuff for Amber, Justinia and their family!

Clarity was born as a test run done by Bozzag to attempt to breed "Designer Sirene" to be purchased by rich people as essentially the equivalent of someone like Andrew Tate or Jeff Bezos getting a shark or something

She was specifically bred to be leucistic, making her extremely pasty compared to her relatively tanned father Jet (it just so happened he and Justinia had the right genes for a good chance at a leucistic sirene), who's pale but on a Cyana/Skylie level, and a totally different world to her much darker-skinned mother and sister Amber

Clarity has fairly bed eyesight as a result of her leucism (The sirene leucism genes are super close to the ones for average eyesight, and leucism makes them have worse vision in my headcanon), and often wears glasses or contacts. Due to how water destroys books, she has reading glasses for reading and sirene-safe contact lenses for underwater stuff

Justinia and Jet are also carriers for vitiligo and have a good chance for having kids with it (Which they just rolled super high on as 3 of their kids have vitiligo and the other's leucistic)

Maia was gifted Clarity by Rodrig and Cerulea as a 3rd birthday present, but Cobalt and Sai had zero input on it

Pissed off they'd separate a child from their mother so casually, Cobalt went off to hunt down Justinia and buy her too, winding up making a deal with Bozzag to have her come back in in about 4-8 years and he can have her 75% off and he can buy her stud male after her next breeding with the same discount

Her next breeding it with Jet, so he buys him as part of the deal

Saheli is born blind as, again, I headcanon the sirene vitiligo/leucism genes are super close to the vision genes, and it's an entire thing amongst sirene where many albino, leucistic and vitiligo sirene have worsened vision, if not congenitally blind like Saheli

These genes are also heavily sex-based and trend for females to have a higher chance for lowered vision or blindness, so while Mako has average vision for a sirene Amber actually has relatively poor vision (As bad as Clarity's) that she wasn't tested for until she was struggling in school aged 7

Both Justinia and Jet's families have a history of albinism, leucism, and vitiligo, with poor vision super common as a result. Both of them lucked out by not having any of the pigmentation genes and no vision problems, but they had no luck with their kids, and only one has good vision, with two being heavily visually impaired (Amber and Clarity) and the fourth is completely blind (Saheli)

Amber is also colorblind, specifically tritanopia (The right images are what she sees):

Amber actually had a terrible time at school initially as she had no clue she was color blind and near-sighted until her teachers advised Cyana and Angeline to get her eyes checked

Dr. Asha checked her vision via telepathy (Prolly a common occurrence when telepathy canonically allows someone to literally look through someone's eyes) and confirmed she was heavily visually impaired and tritanopic

A few weeks later, Amber got accommodations for her shitty vision at her school, which was being funded by Jelani himself (As he knew it'd be an issue and just decided that if he was gonna help one kid unrelated to him, he'd be helping all the disabled kids in Uekoro too while he's at it)

Clarity's vision is not color blind in anyway, but this is traded for near blindness (As in Cinnamon level, just sans hearing problems too), while Amber can see shapes and stuff but it's 95% blue and red, while for Clarity she can only see something in detail beyond color and shape within like a foot of her face

Clarity develops a love language where she favors being super close to her partner as she can see their face in detail, which usually doesn't happen and so she likes it

Amber has zero color coordination for her clothes due to her tritanopia, and as she develops skill in illusions, all of her illusions are tinted how she sees them: More blue and red, making them easy as hell to spot for someone without tritanopia, but she fights this hard, managing to make super convincing illusions, if still a tad blueish or reddish

Clarity, Amber, and Saheli all take up telepathy at Justinia's recommendation to counter their vision, or rather lack of a lot of it (Or all of it for Saheli)

Jet and Justinia aren't related in the slightest, with their last ancestors being some sirene in Chadrak, their genes were just perfect to fuck up their kids' vision for no reason

[hawkfawun]

choose violence: 3, 19, 24, 25

This one is so salty. I'm sorry. I don't know how to make it less salty.

3. Screenshot or description of the worst take you’ve seen on tumblr

bad take. SPEEDRUN!!!! (mostly) Griffith addition.

1- "Gennon is the victim and not Griffith in their encounter. Griffith is cruel for killing him." I get that you don't like Griffith, that's fine. You are saying the pedophile who took advantage of him when he was 12-14 is in the right though?? Also when he killed him the guy was actively trying to kidnap him to be a sex slave.

2- It is "disrespectful to Miura" to ship griffguts. Miura has expressed interest in queer themes and basically said Griffith is gay before. I don't think the man was a pearl clutcher.

3- "Guts should have just killed Griffith when he was disabled." Guts would NOT have done that.

4- Age gap discourse. All the main adult characters are supposed to be roughly the same age. I have no interest in debating if adults fighting the horrors are allowed to have 3 year age gaps lol.

5. "Griffith is Jeff Bezos" ?? Ah yes free education and housing. What Jeff is commonly known for. Not that I love calling him a communist either. I could write a lot on this but. Eh.

19. You’re mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like...

WELL. I am pretty damn shameless on here. A lot of people don't like my ships and thats fine. Best to block me though.

I'm not mad exactly but I do think it is surprising I ship Judau/Casca a bit! Normally dislike that kind of ship but I think there's a lot of room for it to be done in a compelling way. The way his insecurities play out is super realistic and interesting to me. I do think he seriously puts Casca above himself and loves her for who she is not who he wants her to be. Also, I just want nice things for them both. ^^

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse?

Casca. Literally anything about Casca. You can be like "Wouldn't it be fun to draw an apostle casca" and people will act like you committed a real actual murder. Never mind if you have some criticism of the eclipse rape or Elaine.

I STILL get asks. btw- if you make sock puppets to harass people for being "too sensitive about rape" that makes you look like a creep fullstop.

Also anything with Griffith but that's a given.

25. Common fandom complaint you are sick of hearing.

Hmmm... anytime anyone has an even mild critique of berserk everyone complains you are literally "spitting on a dead man's grave." It is rare fans complain about the manga itself.

Also rare they complain about Miura. Berserk fans would rather send death threats to fans posting interviews than believe their made-up image of him is wrong.

for the record, I obviously love berserk and think very highly of Miura in a lot of ways. I get why people are defensive of it but phew. Berserk fandom is a little too defensive!

thanks for the questions!

Choosing violence ask meme

[bitletsanddrabbles]

PSA

One of the truest things I ever read was from a webcomic called Head Trip. I don't remember it exactly, but it went something like this:

"It doesn't matter how right you are, if you're just going to be a giant, annoying douche bag about it, then you're a giant, annoying douche bag. Shut up. You're just making your side look bad."

And I really feel that's an important message, because seriously, if I had a penny for every time something's gone across my dashboard that is supposedly supporting something I support, but is so nasty, toxic, and bullying that it makes me want to stop supporting that thing - even if that thing is technically my own rights - I would make Jeff Bezos look like a pauper.

For those outside of the U.S., a penny is worth $.01 and costs $.05 to make. It is coinage we literally lose money producing.

So maybe think about that before you attempt to increase tolerance and fighting prejudice by reblogging a post that's name calling, damnation by association, calling for violence against people with different world views than you, or other forms of straight up bullying, because I can't think of a single famous civil rights leader who made progress by being a douche bag and ragging on the opposition.

[rhywhitefang]

What power do i have by virtue of being female aside from MRA type “men open doors for you” stuff.

I'm confused. I literally never said that women inherently have power in society by virtue of being "female". Men are the ones who hold power in patriarchy.

Now if you're talking about being cis, you do hold power over trans people, because you are able to wield transphobia against them.

Is that what you mean? If so, please listen to accounts of trans people and the very real violence and discrimination they face.

And then there's other kinds of power you could have that dont have much to do with your gender. For example, if you live in a Western country, you hold some amount of power over people in the global south. If you have a safe place to sleep at night, you hold power over unhoused people. If you're white, you hold power over non-white people.

Power and oppression are two sides of the same coin. They create each other and cannot exist without each other. Most people have some amount of power and also face some amount of oppression. There are almost no people who hold *only* power and face zero oppression (maybe Jeff Bezos?), and likewise there are almost no people who hold zero power and face only oppression.

We need to able to recognize and take responsibility for the power we have in order to dismantle it and fight back against oppression.