wiseabsol

[wiseabsol]

suck, and i cannot stress this enough, my cock to the fucking base

[wiseabsol]

everyone is always acting like there is some crisis of human interaction with one another because everyone is overly sensitive to how strangers approach them and like. no actually its because nobody has any fucking manners. social etiquette has legitimately vanished. it makes interacting with strangers miserable because people don’t know how to fucking behave in public.

like it is rude to stare. it is rude to point. it is rude to have a loud phone conversation in a quiet place. it’s rude to listen to music or videos or whatever on your device with no headphones on a loud volume, or at any volume in an enclosed or quiet space. these are rude things to do. like i’m sorry while some etiquette is silly, an acceptable level of decorum is necessary to make existing in public bearable for everybody…….it is LITERALLY common courtesy

[wiseabsol]

[wiseabsol]

I got an ad for that weird 'Mufasa origin story that doesn't even make sense if you think about the plot for more than three seconds' movie and I got so mad.

Not because of the fact that it exists, I've gotten used to modern Disney's M.O. being bastardizing their legacy.

No, it was because the ad had a picture of the lion cubs who are supposed to be young!Mufasa and young!Scar and I was just sitting there like 'Literally which of these lions is supposed to be who?!' Because they're both the same awkward, hyper-realistic lion cub model, just one has lower color saturation.

[wiseabsol]

Wallkett-Maheen-Tahallik

After a dust bath.

Location: Eastern, Gold Peaks Territory, Andalite Home World.

[wiseabsol]

HER BEST AND ONLY FRIEND HAS JUST DIED

— Ariana Grande, on Glinda the Good

[wiseabsol]

People act like the characters we've met from the Citadel must be suspect. Must secretly be evil and untrustworthy.

And like has media generally rewarded that instinct? Yeah. Do I think that's what's happening here? Probably not?

Because I think it's worse. I think that many of the Citadel folks were have met are nice. Good to their families. Not jerks. Not mustache twirling monsters. Just people.

People that are inside an imperial machine where they don't have to generally count the cost or consequences of what they do.

And where's the line between just living your life and complicity? Suvi and that scared farmer girl who believes the enemy EATS people. Suvi and Silver view themselves as defending the homes of their people and freeing them from the enemy. Is that evil? Are they evil only in the aggregate? If you have to zoom out that far how could you know? And if you know, what do you have the power to change?

I live in an Empire. In systems of racism and murder at the foundation. I have had to do a lot of work to learn that and decide what to do with that. There's things that are out of my scope of control. There's things that are within my scope of control. It's hard to know the difference.

I wrestle with it constantly.

I don't think the story WBN is telling, a story that explicitly harkens to Ghibli as a strong influence, keeping in mind the strong moral stance taken by Ghibli films, is likely to make it super easy for us or the characters to draw the kind of lines that are comfortable.

Silver might break Sky's heart in a conflict between their loyalty to the Citadel versus their fidelity to one another, sure. But also, maybe not. I mean we also don't know who will get swept up in Quest fever next. We don't know if there will come a breaking point for multiple folks or if a breaking point will ever come for any of them.

Suvi's parents did their sneaky shit together. So we know that it's happened. And sure, it could be the trio on their own versus the world. But it could also be thousands of thousands of people all singing the Rain Road in defiance.

[wiseabsol]

I’m just going to leave this here

[wiseabsol]

[wiseabsol]

Please don’t pirate books at least while the author is alive. I’ll make an exception for actual billionaires and wildly expensive textbooks you cannot afford yet need to complete your studies. I can’t make an exception for assholes, because we’re all considered assholes by someone.  I don’t know how many people realise how many writers who created successful, beloved stories and characters still die poor while other people get rich off the same work. I don’t think people realise that in the UK the current average yearly earnings for an author has nosedived over the last fifteen years to £10,500. That obviously is forcing people to quit writing. It increasingly means writing is a job for people who’ve inherited money or have wealthy spouses who can support them. I don’t know if people realise that in general, writers are poor and getting poorer. I’m sorry, but if you think widespread sense of entitlement to free books has nothing to do with that … you’re just wrong. 

I say I don’t think people realise - the truth is I hope they don’t, because the alternative is that they don’t care. That’s certainly the impression I’ve got from Twitter, where a truly horrifying number of people are arguing that copyright on  all books should expire after thirty years, and you should be able to acquire books for  free after that. This … would not just mean that everyone gets free books. It would mean if you write a book at 30, not only do you lose any royalties from it at 60, but Disney can take it, make a franchise out of it, Scrooge McDuck it up in a pool of money while you starve because writers don’t get workplace pensions.

Some threads on the unintended (?) consequences of this. I can’t go over it all again. John Brownlow NK Jemisin Michael Marshall Smith Me Marina Lostetter Kari Dru and others William Gibson and others

There are plenty of others. It’s not that this actual idea will actually happen, but I do think it reinforces the idea that it’s not only okay, but sometimes actually virtuous to search for ways to enjoy writers’ work without paying for it. Like it’s somehow a step towards a better world. Not just at the reader end, to be fair, at the employer end too. And I do see a lot of people here too who are all about supporting workers unless the workers are writers in which case fuck’em. 

Like. If you want to radically change society in such a way that mass-media conglomerates don’t exist and so can’t exploit us and we’re supported to make art in some other way than fine. But can you start the revolution with actual rich people please, not ask us to live right now, in the society we’ve got, without the money we need to survive it. Finally, a plea: I really, really, do not want to debate this. This whole thing genuinely makes me feel tense and shaky and sick. If you’ve got to disagree - unfollow me, block me, vagueblog somewhere I can’t see it. The Twitter version of this already has me feeling like I’ve been kicked in the gut. I didn’t want to write this post. I just felt I wasn’t going to have any peace until I did.

[wiseabsol]

Digging through my WIP folder and I found notes for a story idea I had about a dragon adopting a human.

Not on accident, mind you, the dragon doesn’t just stumble across a human infant and adopts it. The dragon decides it wants to adopt a human.

The dragon explains this to its lich friend: “I want someone to take care of me in my old age! A human would be great! Imagine how easily it could talk the other humans into leaving me alone! And– and it might decide to grow up and become a goldsmith, right? Some humans become goldsmiths. My human might decide to go into goldsmithing too!”

“I think you’re overestimating the percentage of humans who become goldsmiths,” replies the lich friend, who is not terribly discouraging of the idea, but also not particularly invested in it at this point. It seems like a plan with a lot of potential points of failure.

The dragon is undeterred, mostly because it has a whole hoard of gold coins and goblets and jewelry and trinkets that seem to indicate to it that there must, in fact, be a great number of humans who know goldsmithing to have produced all that.

Anyway, the dragon decides to shapeshift into a humanoid form, go into a city, and adopt a human child. It needs the lich’s help, because it doesn’t know anything about human fashion. The lich’s knowledge on the subject is a few centuries outdated, but they attack a few fancy carriage on the road and reverse-engineer an outfit from what the humans inside them were wearing. (Those humans were nobles, it’s fine, it’s a victimless crime)

The lich fusses a lot with the humanoid appearance of the dragon until everything looks just so.

(“Am I actually doing it wrong, or are you just making me shapeshift into something you find more attractive?” the dragon asks.

“If you want me to pose as your husband, this is the price to pay,” the lich replies.)

They go into the city, anyway, and they find an orphanage on the shady side of town, where the tired, overworked and underpaid matron clearly sees there’s something not right about these two, but not in any obvious way she can put her finger on. She’s just happy to have one less mouth to feed.

Anyway, child get! 

She comes along quietly, and doesn’t even comment when she’s taken to a dragon lair.

The dragon is ecstatic with its new acquisition.

(“Does it know any commands?” the dragon wonders. “Sit! Stay! Roll over?”

“You may be thinking of dogs,” the lich points out. “Children do not perform tricks.”

They both looked at the human child, trying to figure out how to approach her.

“So, what scam are you running here?” the little girl asked suddenly, startling both the dragon and the lich.

“I was wrong,” the lich says, “they’ve definitely been teaching children new tricks since I was alive.”)

[wiseabsol]

Look what I found in my files

[wiseabsol]

“Do I have any right to be as proud as I am?” [X]

[wiseabsol]

Also Ame you literally did scoff over the loyalty answer wtf.

[wiseabsol]

I feel like Ame and Suvi really demonstrate the difference between niceness and kindness, and sympathy and empathy, respectively.

[wiseabsol]

Truly crazy to watch people pop off on Silver and Sworn for having Suvi’s back and letting Ame know that despite her intentions, her actions were out of place and unhelpful.

Silver and Sworn, the ones that were *actually* by her side when she was on her way to the horses to make sure no one starved, because Eursulon outright refused to help (and spoke of not wanting to be there at all) and Ame was bopping from fraught conversation to fraught conversation.

Silver, the one who understood that what Suvi actually needed when they were finally alone was to put down the devastating burden of trying to keep three dozen people alive behind enemy lines for a night and rest.

Sworn, the one that volunteered to handle the horse problem since he saw how much it gutted her to resort to it.

Feel however you want to feel about their phrasing or tone, but neither was wrong for taking Ame to the side and speaking with her on points Suvi’s also made to her in the past. It is neither empathetic nor community-serving to repeatedly refuse to adapt to a different culture’s way of doing things.

Truth is, Sworn and Silver are the ones being a good friend to Suvi right now, and if you can’t see that it’s because your Citadel-blinders make you instantly dismissive of anything Suvi wants or needs that diverges from Ame and Eursulon’s preferences. And that sucks to see. Again.

[wiseabsol]

"lying is wrong" what evangelical nonsense is this???