#ask;; sending word

[arabian-dream]

@grandvizier asked;; what will nasira's reaction be when she finds out her brother is an almost professional belly dancer (belly dance is prohibited in agrabah and if they dance it, it's only women who do so. jafar made his slaves teach him.)

"You can WHAT?" The woman looked almost furious. Her own brother? BELLY DANCING? "Where is your sense of loyalty to your home and its tradition?! Where's your pride?! Why would you even WANT TO do that?"

"..."

"... Teach me as well. If we get in trouble, we get in trouble together." Of course she supports him through anything. Truly partners in crime.

[prettyklttenprincess]

begging dad to please just mount me like a dog and fuck me, acting like I’m in freaking heat around him, barely wearing clothes to just to tempt him

[linkcharacter]

arghhgh your analysis of jimmy is so good... it's so thematically important that he isn't a monster. he's completely disquietingly human. the game sets him up as an antihero protagonist who's making the best of the godawful hand he's been dealt and people forget that when you start your first playthrough, you believe it. jimmy's calm and collected during the crew meeting. he sticks up for daisuke when swansea insults him, even going along with his rescue fantasy. sure, he's cruel towards anya, but the player's handed the premade justification that she's supposedly completely incompetent. sure, it's implied he's torturing curly, but genre convention is surprisingly lenient towards that sort of pointless revenge. the screen even blacks out during the pill-feeding scenes - we get to look away. we're given excuse after excuse for his behaviour while every background detail screams that something's horribly wrong. mouthwashing uses its medium to instill a sense of complicity in jimmy's actions and i think its narrative does the same for curly's inaction. by the time we watch curly freeze in place as jimmy sends the ship to its death, we can't judge him without also judging ourselves. this game's writing has me in a chokehold

Nice writing, well put.

[traumasurvivors]

If you have trauma as a result of dealing with delusions and/or psychosis, your trauma is valid.

Trauma is largely about how you feel and how something impacts you. And even if you know something isn’t “real”, it doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t real. And it doesn’t change how real it feels to you.

[minyard-05]

don't take this seriously but it's really funny to me when people only accept what's in the books as being canon because that's basically saying 'i only trust what neil josten, notable liar, tells me' and i for one think that's just ironic lol

[itty-bitty-sunshine]

Heyyy uhh can you fuse your sun and moon together pretty please btw oh my lord i love your art keep going you rock! 😁✨️✌️👍

d. do you mean like. Eclipse.

and thank you very much <3

[starriesbackupblog]

so um. i got sh@dowbanned. yep.

I've contacted tumblr regarding it but most likely it's gonna take some time. I'm hoping it gets resolved by this month Aamin 🙏🏻

so mutuals, if you haven't seen me in awhile even long before I started taking a break due to Ramadan, now you know why -

anyways, let's pray this is a temporary thing so i can get my blog back online! thankies and have a nice day :]

[cowardlybean]

Teruki Hanazawa and his perception of himself via Mob Psycho’s art styles

hi so I had this planned for the whole of mp100’s style but I think it’s easiest to see with Teruki so here we are

ONE’s intent with some of mp100’s themes was to poke fun at typical shonen tropes, hence why Mob is so bland in appearance, Reigen is a fraudulent mentor, and Teruki is obsessed with his rivalry with Mob that is pretty much one sided. I think the same applies to Teruki’s blonde spiky hair—he wants to be a protagonist.

Strip away the hair and you’re left with this

The metaphor about Teru’s true nature being revealed with his bald head has been done to death, but I haven’t seen anyone mention how the animators making him significantly uglier contributes to the scene. He’s ashamed of himself without his perfection! I think that the moment Teruki thinks of himself as the ugliest he’s ever been is when he nearly chokes Mob to death after only just meeting him. Whether it’s intentional or not, the style change here In My Opinion reflects how Teruki feels.

Now let’s shave him again!

Again, this may be the animator’s style, but this really makes me think of classic fighting anime aura pose things. In this case, Teruki is proclaiming that he’s Mob’s rival for life (callback to that trope) and he Definitely looks the part. I feel like in his partially delirious state he’s thinking of himself as some kind of super saiyan.

Whether or not you interpret it the same way I thought I might point this out because I Personally haven’t seen these comparisons drawn!!

[arabian-dream]

Tag Dump

Tag Dump

ooc;; 🍑𝓹𝓮𝓪𝓬𝓱𝔂🍑

aesthetics;; Arabian Moons

my art;; depictions

ic;; Nasira: Wicked Sorceress

ic;; Hakime: Seamstress

Lore;; Scriptured

rp;; Threads of Fate

musings;; Passing Words

asks;; Questioning

ask;; Sending Word

anon ask;; Hushed Whispers

psa;; Read My Rules

psa;; Reblog From Source

reblog;;

promo;; Pass it Along

rp meme;;

ask starter;;

meme starter;;

one liner;;

crack;;

mobile;;

mobile friendly;;

starter;; New Beginnings

starter call;;

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

If Jin Ling is bald because WWX cursed Jin Zixuan then why are Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao bald🤔🤔

Jin Ling was always going to be bald, Wei Wuxian's curse was just an accidental prophecy that will haunt Jin Zixuan for exactly one month.

[prettyklttenprincess]

mom pushing my head down between her legs, making me lick and worship the body that birthed me

[danceinthedarkk]

Show the bulge

I hope this suffices

[ekingston]

Hello! So sorry to bother, but have you had any updates on the Word-Stream/Speechify situation?

Just one: like I posted on Xitter and Bluesky last night, as of yesterday afternoon, the links to individual works as they were listed on WordStream are gone from both Google and Bing. Hurray, right? Surely we’re all sick of this whole debacle and there’s far more important things to worry about. If all is well that ends well, surely there’s no need to still be angry.

Well, I am. Here’s why:

When I checked on Wednesday, the links to my own work on WordStream were still listed. So rather than it taking a week after Cliff Weitzman first hid the fanwork from view, it took a little over a week from the moment he first promised privately that they would be deleted. Which, fine. Perhaps Cliff didn’t really know what he was talking about when he gave that timeframe. Or maybe he told a little white lie to create the impression that he always intended to do the right thing. It seems more likely to me, though, that Cliff still believed—even after the backlash he received—that he would get away with honoring only individual takedown requests. Or worse, that he needed just a little bit more time with the stolen material to figure out an alternative way to profit off it—preferably without us noticing, this time.

But who knows? I certainly don’t! All we can do is speculate, because publicly, Cliff Weitzman has remained completely silent on his copyright infringements. All we got was the initial justifications he and his sockpuppet accounts used in comments on the original Reddit and Tumblr posts. After those were so understandably ill-received, Cliff only ever communicated with a few individual authors who contacted him directly and repeatedly, blocking people who addressed the issue on Twitter and quietly distancing himself from WordStream by deleting a blog he’d posted to Speechify.com dated December 20th—where Cliff promoted WordStream’s platform specifically to fanfiction readers. (See my enormous timeline post for details and screenshots of said posts before they were taken down.)

And this is why I’m still angry: As long as Cliff Weitzman faces no real consequences for his actions, he won’t see a need to own up to his mistake; and as long as he’s able to delay taking responsibility, this isn’t over. This didn’t end well.

After all, wasn’t this the next-best scenario for Cliff, second only to him turning WordStream into a (for him) effortless, infinite money-making machine? He took something we provided for free and fed it to AI so he could more easily put it behind a paywall; we found out and protested; Cliff quietly erased all evidence of his crime; and we went—almost equally quietly—away.

I want to make sure you know that I continue to be genuinely amazed and intensely grateful for how quickly the news about WordStream’s copyright infringement was shared—and continues to be shared—throughout fandom, on tumblr in particular. If it hadn’t been for our collective outcry here and on Reddit, WordStream would very likely still be up in its original form, and Weitzman would be reaping the benefits (those subscription prices were steep) today.

But it’s been frustrating to see that, with the exception of mentions in articles on Substack and Fansplaining (the latter of which is a particularly awesome and thorough read on fandom’s decontextualization) and a Fanlore listing, our outrage never really spilled out beyond the safely insulated, out-of-the-way spaces that are tumblr, a handful of subreddits and bluesky. And I believe that—unfortunately—we are collectively responsible for that part, as well.

Most of us seemed content to only spread the word by circulating the same two posts on tumblr. (Have we all given up completely on every other social media platform? Am I the only remaining straggler?) And soon after Cliff Weitzman hid WordStream’s fanfiction category from view, our interest in the issue took a sharp dive even there. Are we genuinely deceived into believing the issue has been fully resolved? Do we truly fail to realize that Weitzman’s refusal to admit that what he did was wrong left the door wide open for the next greed-driven tech bro to wander through? Or is the true naivety in thinking that, as a community, we can keep this kind of attack on fandom from happening again? Has our disillusionment already gotten that bad?

However the situation spins out from here, Cliff’s actions will set a precedent. If we fail to show Cliff and his ilk that attempts to profit off fandom’s unpaid labor have consequences, their tech companies will keep trying until something eventually sticks. They might be a little smarter about it next time; obscure their sources a bit better, maybe leave the titles and the authors’ names off. Or maybe they’ll go a bolder route: maybe next time they cross the line they’ll do it boldly enough for IP holders to take notice and stop tolerating fanwork entirely.

Doesn’t that make you angry, too?

There’s this whole other mess of thoughts I would love to be able to untangle about how commercial influence is contributing to the steady erosion of fandom’s foundations, but I’m tired, and other people have said it all much more eloquently than I ever could. Seriously, go read that article on Fansplaining. Or listen to the podcast version of it. Better yet, as long as you’re wearing your noise-canceling headphones, go listen to a podfic of one of your favorite fandoms’ works, and enjoy the collaborative joy and creativity of the people who Cliff Weitzman refuses to believe exist. (In one of Speechify’s other blogs, Cliff claims there are only 272 podfics on AO3. Would you like to run that ChatGPT prompt again, Cliff?). Honestly, much like Cliff Weitzman’s infuriating denial of the fact that fandom fucking has this covered, thank you very much, there’s so. Many. More. Things for us to talk about. There’s the connotations of WordStream’s dubious ‘upload’ button, for instance, or the fact that the app scraped (and in some cases, allegedly, still lists) copyright-protected original fiction as well, or WordStream’s complete lack of contact information, which is illegal for an internationally operating app. And oh! Has anyone reported more thoroughly on Cliff’s app’s options to ‘simplify’ or ‘modernize’ uploaded works, or—my own very favorite abomination—to translate them into something Cliff calls ‘Gen-Z Language’? Much like his atrocious AI book covers, it would be hilarious, if it didn’t make steam come out of my ears.

Anyway, there it is. I highly recommend you do all of that. And then, if you aren’t familiar with it already, go do some research re: fair use and your rights as the copyright owner of your works. A good number of people commenting on this controversy expressed stunned surprise or fearful hesitation about claiming any sort of ownership of their fanfiction. The more informed we are about our rights, the more willing we will be to defend them.

Please don’t stop writing or sharing your work. If you can’t bring yourself to work on your WIPs today (trust me, I get it), post about this situation instead. Tweets, skeets, whateverthefucks—about WordStream’s theft, about how this reflects on Speechify’s already shady business practices, about how Cliff’s actions and justifications have personally affected you. You’re welcome to share or copy my posts on these platforms, but since Cliff already blocked me, I very much prefer you post your own. If you do, call Cliff Weitzman by his full name and tag or include both WordStream and Speechify to ensure Weitzman will recognize he has both a personal as well as a professional stake in handling the situation with integrity. Leave your concerns in reviews on the Speechify app. (We weren’t provided with a more appropriate place to put them, after all!) Consider calling for a Speechify boycott until Cliff accepts accountability for his actions.

Do avoid making exaggerated claims, and don’t call for physical retaliation against Cliff’s person or his property. We don’t want to give him or Speechify even the weakest of grounds to claim defamation or threats of violence. Focus on the facts: they’re incriminating enough by themselves. Show Cliff that we’re determined to keep bringing up his company’s wrongdoings in public spaces until he demonstrates that he understands why taking these freely shared fanworks and monetizing them was wrong, and takes steps to ensure it won’t happen again.

One last thing—and this is really more of a general reminder—please stop suggesting I handle this situation for you. People have come to me asking for action items. The resulting flashbacks to my days as an office assistant were extremely upsetting. In all seriousness, casting me as some sort of coordinator or driving force behind this backlash actively hurts the cause. Not only does it downplay fandom’s collective efforts, it also makes our message extremely vulnerable. It would be all too easy for Cliff to silence one singular source. Wikipedia will not maintain mentions of this controversy as long as it leads only to Easter Kingston’s attempt to summarize what happened as it was happening. You only know my name because I stumbled upon WordStream’s theft and decided to get my friends involved. I am not more knowledgeable, more skilled or more angrily invested in this issue than you are (or can, or should, be). I draw pictures and I write stories and I worry about the shift I’m seeing in fandom after having been on this ride for even a few pre-livejournal rounds.

I’m not going to stop doing any of those things. But I am going to allow myself to step away for a bit, make my wife dinner, and catch up on our shows.

I trust you’ve got it from here.

[winter-iris13]

[nordidia]

having a very rough night so raph doodles needed to be made

when in need, mash two interests together

[ziyechs]

joe'marr bengals reunion — a (somewhat) comprehensive timeline

1 — “have you spoken to the cincinnati bengals and what would it mean to reunite with joe burrow there?” — “i have talked to the bengals. i don’t know how many times i’ve talked to them though. but, me and joe, you know, i wouldn’t mind going back with joe. if we go back together we’re trying to do nothing but get back our chemistry and have some more fun.”

2 — “i'm really excited for this draft. i don't really know what's coming but, you know, if me and joe could get back to it... i’d love to have some fun with him again.”

3 — “i assume you'd be okay with a potential reunion in cincinnati if that were to happen?" — "yeah, i wouldn’t mind.”

4 — “me and joe talked about [a reunion] maybe like three, four times actually. we talked about it a good bit of times. he texted me this morning, just letting me know: ‘get your bags packed’, so i guess that meant that was gonna be the pick. i don’t know if that was a hint or what. so, he sent me that little text this morning, i was like ‘okay… i'm ready, bro’.”

5 — “what was your reaction like when he was lowkey recruiting you?” — “i actually was believing him sometimes, sometimes i was like ‘stop playing with me’ and sometimes i was just like ‘okay bro, i gotcha, i'm ready now’ so. i believed him this morning when he told me, you know, pack my bags. so that's when i finally was like: ‘yeah he might really be calling this’ so that's when i took his word.”

6 – “jimmy burrow, did joe tell you—he’s always been kind of coy about what he said to the bengals—did joe tell you that he wanted the bengals to select ja’marr?” — “yes, i think we figured that… and eventually… yes, he pretty much told us that he wanted ja’marr.”

7 — “it was like a week before the draft, ja'marr said: ‘dad, joe texted me.’ […] he didn't say what he said, you know. but he said: ‘joe just texted me’, [...] so he had talked to joe like... or texted with joe once or twice that week. and then he told me, he said: ‘dad, if i get with joe, we're gonna kill’ [...] so he was all excited about getting with joe.”

8 — “what was the first thing joe texted you when you got drafted by the bengals?” — “make sure your bag's packed and ready. yeah, that was what he told me.”

9 — “the cincinnati bengals are on the clock now. earlier that morning, i had got a text from joe. he said: hope your bags are packed. i know it's me, at the moment, that's what i'm saying to myself. i can't wait to be a part of it.”

10 — articles: 1, 2, 3, 4