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If you don't know how to end Griddlehark AU fic, just can have Abigail show up like "This is not how it happens" and abruptly end it right there

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Back in my early twenties when I was hanging out a lot with Brendan and Charlie, I got introduced to possibly the most grueling board game in existence.

It was called War of the Ring. It was essentially the entirety of Lord of the Rings in a board game. You had all the troops and armies, and you tried to succeed in destroying the one ring while the other player(s) tried to stop you.

Have you ever wondered how long it would take to set up all the individual troops of Mordor and Middle Earth? Two hundred and forty game pieces all had to be placed. Just to start playing the game? It took. Forever.

An age of men passed in the time it took to set that game up. It took even longer to play obviously, sometimes spanning multiple sessions across the week because the boys took it seriously.

I did not particularly ever want to play War of the Ring because setup was such a grind all by itself. But I did love one thing about the ordeal. And that was that the boys had a house rule that was utterly whimsical and delighted me to no end.

Once all two hundred and forty pieces were standing at attention, the Nazgûl hunkered upon Mount Doom, the hobbits cozy in the Shire, Rohirrim galloping their fields, once every meticulous tiny figure was painstakingly placed. They rolled the dice. All four d6’s required for gameplay.

It was for Isildur.

To see if he cast the ring into the fire.

If it was all sixes Isildur succeeded and destroyed the ring and the game would then be packed away unplayed.

So before playing the chosen one would assume the role of Elrond and call “Isildurrrrrrr!!!” (and it was very important to roll the R as much as possible for maximum drama).

They would cast the dice, and Isildur inevitably claimed the ring, and the game commenced. This was a well established tradition before the first time I played. So the first time I joined I got to be Elrond and roll the Isildur dice.

I rolled. Three sixes. And one. Five.

The room erupted into screams. Chaos. We were all losing our minds.

“This is like Isildur got all way in and held it out, and tipped his hand 95% of the way before deciding to keep it!”

“This is like Isildur actually dropped it but then caught it at the last second!”

The moment lived in infamy for years afterward and sometimes we’d just throw back our heads and cry, “Isildurrrr!” in memory of that moment when Isildur got so close to casting away the ring.

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FUCHSIA!!!

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u/Emotional-Macaroon64

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heartwarming: girl who hasn't earned one is developing a massive ego

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Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).

Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.

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five essential juggling patterns anyone should know

#5: very simple trick, too elementary to name

#4: the stretch

#3: zzwzs

#2: the pole

and finally: #1: rubinstein's revenge (variation)

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The Spaniards are always talking about how they don't have to apologize for colonization because they brought civilization here and it's their fucking fault Mexico city is simultaneously flooded every year and also doesn't have water because their ignorant asses didn't understand how the water infrastructure worked.

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“I think a lot of people don’t understand that when we talk about these issues—blackface, rape jokes, the appropriation of marginalized cultures, and so on—we are having an ethical conversation, not a legal one. There is no thought police. No one’s coming to your house and carting you off to Insensitivity Prison. But you, as a person living on this planet, get to make a choice whether you want to hurt people or help people. Whether you want to listen or shut people out. I can’t imagine why you’d choose “defensive shithead” over “nice lady capable of empathy,” but okey dokey.”

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there's a really fun balance when you know someone has a crush on you where you can tease them for having a crush on you without letting them know you know they have a crush on you. this only works because people who have crushes will analyze everything you say but not very well. anyway, i love playing with my food.

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'a shrine to the Lover'

In ‘a shrine to the Lover’ I wanted to explore what idolization of a lover looks like. In it, a figure is depicted holding a lit match over an altar, on which a halved papaya, peaches and a bottle of wine have been arranged around a candle. Above this altar and the figure holding the match, is a large framed image of another figure, not unsimilar to images of deities religious people tend to have around their homes or, more fittingly, places of worship and prayer. There is also a note on the altar that reads “I manifested the loml (love of my life)”. The significance of this note is that it conveys the amount of value this figure places on having a romantic relationship and also, in having found their specific romantic partner. At face value, this work may appear sweet, and even idealistic as a show of romantic devotion. However, the intimacy between the figure sitting at the altar and their partner pictured in the image above them, is marred by a disproportionate level of admiration on the part of the former, toward the latter.

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from my non-gamer pov (I'm an #ally), what this has looked like is a critical mass of maddened and delirious silksong posting for the past ~week that built to a sustained frenzied climax for about ninety minutes either side of the game's actual release, at which point everyone went absolutely dead fucking radio silent. I have not heard a single peep from any of you about what is happening in this game. no liveblogging, no screenshots, no reactions, nothing. my girlfriend emerges from her room every five-to-eight hours to intone "I've been skonging it too hard," grab a morsel of food, and withdraw to her chambers once more. Is everyone okay Are you having fun Is the silksong loud and beautiful and are you so very afraid.

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tgirl horror/erotica media in the “found frottage” genre

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she is just like me fr...

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Angel and Spike are both equally bad for Buffy and arguing in circles about who's right for her misses the point entirely.

The thing about BTVS is that it's fundamentally a tragedy. it's about how Buffy can never really escape her obligation to the world and her destiny as the slayer, everything she has either gets caught up in the slaying or is destroyed by it, and in my mind Angel and Spike (and Riley as well but I don't see these arguments about him so much) are both supposed to highlight that.

Buffy can't have anything normal, no matter how much she wants it, her life revolves around being the slayer, and therefore so do her relationships. Her two longest standing romantic relationships are with vampires who, when you actually look at it, both treat her incredibly badly. But in her mind this is just how it is. She's the slayer, and she can't do anything about that, and it ruins her life! Neither of them are actually good or healthy for her but Buffy's life is fundamentally not good for her. It's not the life she wanted to live, so she gravitates towards people who understand, even if they're bad for her, because it's easier than trying to be this way around "normal" people. That's why she goes back to Angel after everything he did, and why she ends up with Spike. The thing with Spike is also a product of her hopelessness and self-destructive behaviour in season 6.

Buffy genuinely doesn't believe she deserves better, and every time she's tried to look for something better, her life as the slayer has ruined or destroyed it, so this is what she gets instead. And she does deserve better than either of them, but she also deserved to get to be a normal teenager and enjoy her life, and she didn't deserve to die twice before she could legally drink, or to have her life wrecked because she wasn't allowed to spend her young adulthood learning to be a person. Everything about her circumstances are tragic and fucked up and her relationships with Angel and Spike are no different. They are not supposed to be healhty or good for her, and to pretend they are removes a lot of interesting narrative points from Buffy's story.

She says it herself early season 1