#yes excellent

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Boldly stolen from twitter

[misc-obeyme]

secret 3rd option (dinosaur brains)

Ahhh so rather than snake or birds, queztalcoatl brains are dinosaur brains!??

You know what, that's far more interesting, headcanon accepted.

I wonder if there are still dinosaurs in the Devildom? I mean if they're still eating their brains then there must be, right? They never got taken out by the meteor that hit earth 'cause they were in an entirely different realm!

There's a whole section of the Devildom where no demons live and only the dinosaurs roam. Brave souls venture out into that area to hunt the dinosaurs just for their brains.

But dinosaur brains was too boring, so they decided to call them queztalcoatl brains instead. It's all a marketing ploy lol.

[transformativeworks]

Everyone in the tags

AO3 Celebrates 14 Million Fanworks

AO3 now hosts more than 14 Million fanworks! If you want to find out how we celebrate our fannish community, read more at https://otw-news.org/ymr8b4cu

[abigailspinach]

A Drop of Corruption: An Ana and Din Mystery (Shadow of the Leviathan Book 2) Kindle Edition

by Robert Jackson Bennett 

Book 2 of 2: Shadow of the Leviathan

The eccentric detective Ana Dolabra matches wits with a seemingly omniscient adversary in this brilliant fantasy-mystery from the author of The Tainted Cup. In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, a Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—vanishing from a room within a heavily guarded tower, its door and windows locked from the inside. To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial detective, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol. Ana soon discovers that they are investigating not a disappearance but a murder—and one of surpassing cunning, carried out by an opponent who can pass through warded doors like a ghost. Worse still, the killer may be targeting the high-security compound known as the Shroud, where the Empire harvests fallen titans for the volatile magic found in their blood. Should it fall, the Empire itself will grind to a halt, robbed of the magic that allows its wheels of power to turn. Din has seen his superior solve impossible cases before. But as the death toll grows and their quarry predicts each of Ana’s moves with uncanny foresight, he fears that she has at last met an enemy she can’t defeat.

[weepynymph]

Do not write fanfiction. One second you're normal and the next you're downloading a calendar from 2004 and tearing your hair out over what specific date every event in your fic happens

[bookgeekgrrl]

#you know i used to hate this trope less than i do now#but living through multiple times when it became obvious that lots of people BELIEVE THIS IN REAL LIFE#that it is somehow morally superior to NOT choose and thereby let something awful happen to everyone#rather than choose a less than perfect option and thus save at least SOME people#has really made me re-evaluate whether this is something i want to see rewarded in fiction#like i think a lot of people saw this in children's shows and then internalized it as The Truth In The Real World#rather than wish fulfillment that we're supposed to put on our critical thinking cap for the difference between fiction and reality#and as a result they don't realize that the Do Nothing Option is in fact an active choice and not a neutral option#and that when a magical third Save Everyone option doesn't appear then well they played no role in the Everyone Suffers outcome#so i'm just. not interested really in media that does this without making the characters fucking WORK for their third option#no deus ex. if you refuse to choose then you have to EARN that magical everyone lives outcome (@thesporkidentity)

Hate Hate Hate stories that reward characters for refusing to do triage. 'I refuse to choose only one to survive even if it means both die' [plot contrives for this to be the only way both survive] is so weak. Making difficult decisions with no good outcome is not a moral failing

[library-of-the-starless-sea]

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN \o/

review critique will be incoming at such a time as i have energy to write it

[lowpolyanimals]

Pigeon from XCOM 2

[benkaben]

Me when I'm an all evil infinitely powerful being

[aniseandspearmint]

California poppies

one of my favorite oranges

Just had a vivid memory return to me of a long time ago one of my mom's friends after hearing I was autistic recommended a book to me with an autistic main character (I never finished it, I just didn't like it. I don't even remember the title)

And the main character, he hated the color orange. Which is fine, I don't even particularly like the color orange most of the time, there are certain bright shades of it that cause my skin to crawl, I get it. He says it's all shades of orange, still fine, people can have preferences. And then he says the reason he doesn't like it is that "it's a color that doesn't occur in nature."

Blatantly untrue! What about tiger lillies? What about sunsets? Tigers? Monarch butterflies? Orange tulips? Those annoying Asian lady beetles? Fuckin' oranges?

It's fine if you don't like orange but it's certainly not an unnatural color!

Everytime I remember this I try to think of another orange thing in nature. I am now an orange appreciator out of spite for that book.

[abigailspinach]

“He had so much reach on me—ridiculous, decadent amounts of reach, between that enormous black sword and his greater height—and he knew how to use it. As I came rushing in low and fast, he took a leisurely step back, then another, flicking lightning-fast cuts at my hands, my face, my shoulder. I barely parried most of them, taking a light kiss of a cut along my cheekbone and a slightly deeper one on the outside of my arm. He didn’t let me close, maintaining his distance with those liquid backward paces and the indisputable argument of his steel. He kept me right in the worst possible place to be: the small and terrible zone where I was within his reach and he was outside mine, so he could strike at me at will but no amount of skill or effort would let me hit him. It was an absolutely disastrous opening for a swordfight; the advantage was entirely his, and it was all I could do not to get cut to ribbons. But I didn’t care about hitting him. I cared about moving him toward that door. And the distance between him and the exit was vanishing with every taunting backward step he took. He started to circle, sliding to the side, and I couldn’t allow that. Time to change tactics.”

— The Last Hour Between Worlds (The Echo Archives Book 1) by Melissa Caruso

[bluerosefox]

Her Astrophel and Sterling

hmmm

Hmmmmmmmm

You know what.

You know those AU's where the Batfam finds or learns about either hidden or thought to be dead Al Ghul Danny! with a deaged/daughter Dani (Ellie) (I should know, I created a few of those storylines) but what if, now hear me out, what if instead of them finding Danny first its Talia.

Do I want Talia discovering her thought to be dead son to be alive? Yes. Do I want her to find him while investigating Amity Park when the League gets reports of 'Lazarus creatures/water'? Yes.

DO I WANT HER TO KNOCK ON THE FENTON'S DOOR, fully ready to pretend/honey talk her way into the house to uncover what the Fenton's know, ONLY TO MEET A LITTLE ELLIE?!

YES.

Ellie whose eyes and hair look like a copy of her Beloved but she can see bits and pieces of herself as well. Talia knows the child in front of her was not fully her's though but everything makes sense when she hears a voice, a voice she hasn't heard in ages but as a mother just knows, speak out.

"Ellie! I thought I said do not answer the door my Sterling."

"But Daddy, yous was busy fighting the hotdoggys!"

Talia's eyes widen when she finally catches sight of familiar black hair and blue eyes.

and she could only lightly whisper a old nickname she hasn't dared uttered in ages, a name she secretly gave her son due to his love of the stars "Astrophel..."

[vamp-bites]

My Vashwood trans headcanons in diagram form

[delta-lethonomia]

There's a reddit thread on the BG3 sub where the user u/InklingRain posted a spreadsheet they made with all the companion approvals. Super useful in general both for playing the game and for fic, so I thought I'd post it on tumblr and play around a little!

There's a top row with the average approval by companion, but I didn't find that very useful, so I changed it to the count of approvals (i.e. count of approvals & disapproval total, how often a companion had a reaction to something). We all know Astarion gives a lot of disapprovals here and there, but they're only -1 at a time, so no big deal, right?

No. Minsc has the least at only 45 reactions, Halsin at 95, Minthara at 145, and of the main companions, Gale is pretty average at 198, Lae'zel at 224, and Shadowheart, rather opinionated at 258...

but that's nothing compared to Astarion's 406. That's almost 150 more than the next person!!! That's more than Minthara and Shadowheart combined! Babygirl really woke up one day and decided to get in a snit over everything that happens 😂

(Longer post about count of positive and negative opinions, sum of approvals and disapprovals, and some major outliers below. Picture with values at the very end.)

But that's a bit disingenuous. If we look at the ratio of positive to negative opinions (not taking value into account), Astarion's pretty average at 30% (negative count over sum count, so let's call that negativity). This is similar to Gale (31%), Karlach (30%), and Lae'zel (32%). In theory, getting Astarion's approval or disapproval is just as easy as any of theirs, with a 20% bias towards positive approvals. Later companions are weighted heavily towards the lower end of the spectrum, with Jaheira at 13% negativity and Minsc at 9%. As you only get them very late, it's pretty clear that the game gives you a lot of opportunities to get their approvals and thus open up more of their quests and dialogue.

However. We have an outlier. Wyll Ravenguard, clocking in at an indecent 38% negativity! Which really just goes to show, while Astarion is the most opinionated, Wyll has the most disapprovals, making him the judgiest companion of all 🤣

However, this really wouldn't be a good post if we didn't look at the value of approvals. Karlach, for instance, has the strongest disapproval value of -100 (given if you sleep with her and then call it a mistake). Ouch. This is clearly at outlier and doesn't say much about Karlach's changeability of opinion in general. If we look at the sum of positive and negative opinions, this is a very heavy swing, making up 100 points of her total 191 disapproval points possible to her 281 approvals total. Another outlier is Minsc, who currently possesses a 43% disapproval percentage (a heavy -50 disapproval given if you sacrifice him to Sarevok. Jaheira, by contrast, apparently doesn't give a damn, or her value might simply not be included in the dateset.)

Removing outliers is really a matter of opinion here, so I'll only remove the most extreme swings, such as the above mentioned disapprovals.

The otherwise strongest swings are Astarion (-15 for telling him it was a mistake preventing him from drinking Araj's blood, or saying you only wanted to sleep with him, not deal with his trauma) and Wyll (+20 for siding with Karlach during his confrontation with her, which really shows he didn't really want to kill her and is very grateful you stopped him). Halsin gives +40 for reuniting Oliver with Thaniel, which...lifting the shadow curse is sort of his life's mission, and a bit of a unique case, so while it makes sense, I think it's such a unique event that can't be topped by anything else and will remove it. Jaheira give +20 for extending the Emperor's protection to Minsc, and, for funsies, Minthara's heaviest disapproval is -5 for donating to Lolth at the Stormshore Tabernacle. (lol)

I only chose to remove the aforementioned Karlach, Minsc, and Halsin values, as they're all very large swings and rather character-defining or personal to the individuals mentioned, so I don't think it says much about them in a more general day-to-day sense.

Now, using the sums of our negative and positive values, Gale is our most Negative Nancy, clocking in at 37%, which goes to show that while he's pretty average for the amount of things he cares about, when he disapproves, it's a strong one. Next up is Astarion at 35%, and Wyll at 34%. Lowest are Jaheira and Minsc at 7% and 4% respectively, which makes an intuitive sort of sense: Jaheira is old and just over being upset by the players poor choices, and Minsc is an insanely positive person overall. The next most positive companion is Halsin at 13%, which also matches with his vibe pretty well, followed by Minthara at 17%, Karlach at 24%, Lae'zel at 26%, and Shadowheart at 28%.

Tl;dr: Astarion has many, many opinions, but Wyll is the most judgemental (most disapprovals compared to approvals possible). However, when it comes to the strength of those disapprovals, Gale reigns supreme, followed by Astarion.

If don't break Karlach's heart, help Halsin achieve his life's ambition, or sacrifice Minsc, then they're pretty positive overall. Later companions are heavily weighted to approve of your actions, and Minthara is comparatively judgemental, but overall far more easy to gain approval than disapproval from.

If you take the average of all these values and include the later companions to look at as a personality "baseline" of how judgy and how strong those disapprovals may be, then...the Act 1 companions are all dramatic af, which really should come to no ones' surprise, while Karlach is the most willing to give the benefit of the doubt imo.

[hamletthedane]

Love that Oppenheimer is a deeply disturbing horror movie about a man forced to accept that he is, in a person, the representative manifestation of mankind’s evil in committing one of the greatest horrors of human history - LITERALLY acting as the modern Prometheus, tormented by his sins for the remainder of time. Knowing that he will never be pitied and his actions will forever be utterly unforgivable because the blood of genocide and the potential of total human annihilation will eternally drip from his hands.

But also the simultaneous indictment by the film that to blame a single person for the Manhattan Project is to refuse to accept your own capacity for great evil if the ends ever seem to justify the means, and the culpability of every member of a species that lets itself create something so unspeakably terrible.

Hate that twitter’s take on such a nuanced and brilliantly handled examination of those issues is “movie bad because protagonist not evil enough.”

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

Oh, get fucked all the TERFs who come into my ask on anon and talk shit.

Oh, get ENTIRELY FUCKED.

Oh shit, worm? Like. Rip to people who don’t want to make an account for whatever reason but this is fucking great. Izzy Hater Anon eat your heart out.