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This is just awful

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an underrated part of the Flash Game era was the sheer amount of copyright infringement going on. you could straight up have mario murder koopas with a shotgun and nobody would stop you. nowadays if you make a fangame perfectly in compliance with their brand standards Nintendo will send a deep web hitman after you

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genuinely something so delightful about getting obsessed with your own characters. what do you MEAN I can turn my headcanons for my characters into Official Real Lore. that's so fucking cool are you serious

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Slow Horses S01E05 "Fiasco"

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portraits of utility poles

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aragorn is in hell <3

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Some five thousand years ago, a 27-foot high granite standing stone was erected by the Neolithic people of future Dartmoor. In the 12th century, a monastery was built on the spot, incorporating the stone into its foundations. The monastery became a manor house in the 14th century, then an inn in the 15th, which it remains to this day as The Oxenham Arms.

The standing stone remains in its place, unceremoniously part of the sitting room wall next to the radiator.

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what are your ideas about jess and dot?

thanks for asking! i’m about to say so many words at you

here is something that gets lost in the retelling: polkadot patterson and jessica telephone were not always legends. we don’t have exact statistics about their performance in s1, because we weren’t keeping track of that kind of thing then, but we do have the election results. dot and jess were both randomly chosen by two max-out blessings (two remarkably simple blessings, might i add - future blessings have fun names but these were just called “max out hitting” and max out pitching”) and then immediately chosen again by two team-swap blessings.

so imagine dot and jess, two completely random players on two completely random teams that won these blessings by completely random chance... who are suddenly the best at what they do. that’s not an exaggeration; in s1, people weren’t just randomly five stars. these two people, these two perfectly average players, got the blessings that made them powerful, and then immediately got uprooted from their teams and moved to new ones.

maybe this is me just editorializing, but here is a question for you: imagine you have just been blessed with divine power. imagine you have been thrown into an entirely new home at the whims of people who claim to love you. and then imagine there is exactly one other person in the world who has just experienced the same thing. do you call that person? i would call that person. this is where the story begins.

i don’t think dot and jess are Friends friends. they’re not “call each other at 2am” friends and they’re not even really “i’d pick you up from the airport” friends. but in the beginning, before there were blessings like we know them today, before there was some kind of common physical change, they are the only two who were rewritten. they are the only ones who understand.

i think they talk, sure - i think maybe they meet up the day after election day and talk about how things are going. i think they’re friendly. i think they enjoy playing against one another, when the circumstances permit. but this isn’t a story about friendship. this is a story about being famous.

dot and jess both handle being chosen by the fans in different ways. jess leans into it, hard. jessica telephone, killer for the pies - she loves it, and they love her. she’s massively adored and she plays that up, leans into the celebrity. dot doesn’t do that in the same way. i think jess sees the blessing as something to grow into and dot sees it as something to live up to, an impossible standard, a bar that they’ll never meet but have to keep trying.

but it’s actually jessica who becomes disillusioned with blaseball first, for a very simple reason: blaseball takes something from her first. it takes sebastian and replaces him with a copy that’s not quite right. she’s seen teammates burn, seen them choke on peanuts, but this is the first time it was her life, her personal life that got changed. this is the first thing it’s done that she cannot forgive.

seasons go on. dot keeps pitching, aiming for perfection; jessica keeps playing, even if her smiles for the fans are a little more plastic now. if you’d like to expand the narrative, nagomi mcdaniel enters the conversation about now: she gets a boost from a peanut and another from a blessing. she goes from one of the best natural batters to the best batter, period. there’s a new legend, someone else to go out for drinks with after elections end.

and then the idol board appears.

in season six, jessica and nagomi both get shelled. (dot is alone for elections, one constant touchstone for half a decade gone.) in season seven, jessica gets out, but dot is shelled. (jessica alone; she can handle it.)

but it’s season eight that matters, because season eight is when the fans put jessica back. season eight is when the fans are so interested in their idol payouts that they don’t care what they’re doing to her. season eight is when she is superallergic and people wonder what that’s going to do to her in the shell. as if it’s abstract. as if it’s something they can randomly wonder about.

at the end of season nine, the fans also decide to play a game with polkadot’s life. something will happen to the shelled player at the top of the idol board, and we don’t know what, but the fans want to find out. so the fans idolize dot, and it turns out to free them. it could’ve killed them; it didn’t. within a handful of days nagomi mcdaniel is also unshelled, random chance at work again. things are looking up. there is something approaching hope.

this is what i want you to understand about the shelled one’s pods, about the idol board, about everything. the fans gambled with polkadot’s life and won. the fans gambled with jessica’s life and lost.

i originally had this idea over grand siesta, so i’m going to end it there: jessica has fallen from the sky down into kansas city, and dot is back in canada. it’s that first and last thing that interest me: did you know polkadot was on the breath mints, back in season one? did you know that only seven original breath mints players were left on the team over the grand siesta, that two of them are alternates?

everything changes. blaseball is not kind, even to its stars.

polkadot begins in kansas city, with a regular season and then a blessing and a series of increasingly irregular seasons. jessica ends in kansas city, after losing her brother three times in two ways, after being chosen and then not even getting to remain the best player. polkadot was chosen by the fans to be saved, and jessica was chosen to be doomed. polkadot is here because they want to see her, and jessica never wants to see them again - even if it’s not their fault that the fans rescued them, it’s hard not to be bitter about being the one left behind.

everything changes, but it’s still the two of them. even with jessica newly jaded, even with polkadot squiddish, even with reality overwriting itself time and again - it’s the two of them, parallel paths tangling together. it always has been.

this is what blaseball does: it gives you one person, only one, who understands unconditionally, and then it makes that friendship fraught, hard, impossible. and this is what people do: they maintain that friendship anyways.

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As if there weren’t enough ways to post to Tumblr, look what Marco got working.

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"Dunk"

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a lot of stories treat romance like it makes the relationship between two characters self explanatory and to be honest it doesn’t

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Did anyone ever like attempt to document and compile the variations of Barney the dinosaur murder ballads across the elementary school system in the early 2000s. Like legit it has always fascinated me as a phenomena and I would love to know if there were like traceable regional variations or what.

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Surprisingly, they actually acknowledged the reason for the age-dependent transition gender gap! (with sources)

❝Why is this happening? Trans misogyny is a unique type of discrimination trans girls and women face. It combines transphobia, the hatred for and discrimination against trans people, with misogyny, the prejudice and contempt towards women. The impact of trans misogyny is far-reaching. During adolescence, trans girls experience higher rates of bullying and victimisation than trans boys and cisgender peers. During adulthood, trans women remain at high risk of abuse and violence. They are also more likely to encounter housing discrimination, homelessness, unemployment and poverty than the general population. Faced with such daunting prospects, it seems much harder for trans girls to reveal their gender identity as adolescents at an already uncertain time of their lives.❞

(yes, the language and such is slightly off, the authors being medical professionals, gender specialists, but not, so far as I know, trans themselves—still, the whole article is very good in content and well-sourced)

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they let the fucking skull wraith on the mound again. this is such bullshit i hate this league.

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People talk all the time about autistic people not understanding others but there's also the accursed autistic "saying exactly what you wanna say, straight to the point, very little nuance & then people misinterpret it because they assume there's a hidden nonliteral meaning" phenomenon

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