#but this topic is. HUGE

[a-driftamongopenstars]

the topic of found and blood family in destiny is so very important and so very well done, i'm chewing it like a toy.

for example, let's look at the guardians. when they are born, their have neither mother nor father, only their Ghost. and as they go out into the world, they get to choose their new relations, and they commit. they establish a certain hierarchy that builds off experience and what one can offer another. but they also love and they care. many older lightbearers choose to become mentors, and eventually parental figures to other guardians. for example, the way Saladin mentors Zavala - and from the recent TFS lore, considers him his son.

but there is more! my favourite example has to be of Rasputin and Felwinter. it could so easily be a machine and its child offspring, just a program, but it's so much more than that. because Felwinter acquired true consciousness. became a Guardian, with a heart and mind of his own. and Rasputin did consider him his son before that - and after, tragically. and when Rasputin himself achieved a level of humanity and humility, he saw the wrongs he committed. he cared.

civilians, too, have this. so many families are broken apart by the violence of the Darkness - and the Guardians. and so they form familial bonds. the way Zavala adopts Hakim with Safiyah. the way Devrim adopts Suraya with Mark. how Cayde takes Amanda under his wing.

and then we turn around and we look at other factions and i lose my mind. the Osmium siblings, that's a whole topic of its own, but it's love and violence and care in a volatile mix. "i kill you to make you stronger".

the Sov twins, their power imbalance, the craving for familial love - and a rejection of it. and when one is dead and brought back, does blood still hold up?

Caiatl and Calus, where personal needs and selfishness far exceed familial love, yet it is still there and it struggles against the other fiercely.

the Bray family, the question of legacy and choices to uphold it or turn away from it.

anyway, this is a massive topic to discuss. it's so complicated and it's so compelling. and it's both at the forefront of the story but also somewhere in the background, always present and threading through the plot. chewing it like a toy, i say!

[sparkoflena]

Kon: Why are you staring at me so intently?

Tim, completely casually: I think I want to stab you with Kryptonite a few times. In different areas. For science.

Kon: ...why is my best friend considering torturing me?

Tim: I'm wondering if it takes you down so badly because it is truly that dangerous to you or if the invulnerablility of Kryptonians gives you a weak pain tolerance.

Kon: And you're asking me, a half human, instead of Clark or Kara?

Tim: They'd start telling Bruce about my "concerning villainous behavior" again.

Kon: And I won't?

Tim: I've kept fighting through pneumonia, a gunshot wound, and broken bones. And you go down when I poke you with a rock. Come on, you've got to be curious.

Kon: ...okay, I am a little curious.

Tim: YES! You won't regret this!

Kon: I will absolutely regret this.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The Death of Wei Wuxian.

(Thank you to everyone who participated in the poll!)

[mango-peach-strawberry]

Snow Peach Pit and Dark Cherry (Dark) Pit. Haha, get it? Peach pit? I’m really funny

Fun fact: Peaches originate from China, and cherries from Anatolia (modern day Turkey)!

[dailygihun]

day 6 || this era lasted like 2 minutes but i love it anyway

[copper-sands]

the nefarious lurker 👁️👁️

commission for @top-quality-garbage commissions open!

[ventablxck]

I think it’s funny but also very wholesome that Josh Hutcherson was open about how he’s bicurious/flexible.

“Maybe I could say right now I’m 100 percent straight,” “But who knows? In a f**king year, I could meet a guy and be like, ‘Whoa, I’m attracted to this person.’”

Because yeah he’s right who knows. It be like that sometimes! It’s okay to just be like wow! I like this person regardless of gender!

[canisalbus]

Did Machete or Vasco ever commission portraits of each other? Can only imagine future historians scrutinizing the relationship they shared.

I'd like to think they did. Or perhaps more likely they commissioned a pair of self-portraits of themselves and then traded.

Moreover, I find the idea of them owning miniature portraits of each other really charming. They were small enough to fit in your pocket so you could carry one on your person if you wanted to, and more subtle and inconspicuous than having a larger scale portrait of someone on your wall.

[reasonsforhope]

"The world's coral reefs are close to 25 percent larger than we thought. By using satellite images, machine learning and on-ground knowledge from a global network of people living and working on coral reefs, we found an extra 64,000 square kilometers (24,700 square miles) of coral reefs – an area the size of Ireland.

That brings the total size of the planet's shallow reefs (meaning 0-20 meters deep) to 348,000 square kilometers – the size of Germany. This figure represents whole coral reef ecosystems, ranging from sandy-bottomed lagoons with a little coral, to coral rubble flats, to living walls of coral.

Within this 348,000 km² of coral is 80,000 km² where there's a hard bottom – rocks rather than sand. These areas are likely to be home to significant amounts of coral – the places snorkelers and scuba divers most like to visit.

You might wonder why we're finding this out now. Didn't we already know where the world's reefs are?

Previously, we've had to pull data from many different sources, which made it harder to pin down the extent of coral reefs with certainty. But now we have high resolution satellite data covering the entire world – and are able to see reefs as deep as 30 meters down.

Pictured: Geomorphic mapping (left) compared to new reef extent (red shading, right image) in the northern Great Barrier Reef.

[AKA: All the stuff in red on that map is coral reef we did not realize existed!! Coral reefs cover so much more territory than we thought! And that's just one example. (From northern Queensland)]

We coupled this with direct observations and records of coral reefs from over 400 individuals and organizations in countries with coral reefs from all regions, such as the Maldives, Cuba, and Australia.

To produce the maps, we used machine learning techniques to chew through 100 trillion pixels from the Sentinel-2 and Planet Dove CubeSat satellites to make accurate predictions about where coral is – and is not. The team worked with almost 500 researchers and collaborators to make the maps.

The result: the world's first comprehensive map of coral reefs extent, and their composition, produced through the Allen Coral Atlas. [You can see the interactive maps yourself at the link!]

The maps are already proving their worth. Reef management agencies around the world are using them to plan and assess conservation work and threats to reefs."

-via ScienceDirect, February 15, 2024

[calibrationneeded]

Idk if I'm the only one, but the fact that Damian and the rest of the Al Ghul's heritage is so underdeveloped makes me feel like that image of the guy with the red string board from it's always sunny.

Because like, Damian is 1/2 white, we know this, this is the most fleshed out part of his ethnic background. And many people say that Damian is 1/2 Arab, and 1. from what country? and 2. he's not even 1/2 Arab, he's part Chinese as well.

Ra's Al Ghul himself is from a mixed background, hailing from a Chinese nomadic tribe that traversed across Eurasia for hundreds of years, meaning he likely is largely ethnically Chinese, as well as a combination of a lot of other ethnicities across the continent.

Talia's mother, Melisande, is a very underdeveloped character, as she died when Talia was a little girl. Mixed sources claim her heritage was largely similar to Ra's, being mostly comprised of Chinese and ambiguous Arab descent.

So, from this, that would mean Talia herself is also probably a (un)even split of Arab and Chinese with some other middle eastern and East Asian background, which would put Damian at 1/2 white, 1/4 Arab, and 1/4 Chinese roughly. And despite ethnicity, Damian spent his prime developmental years living with his mother and grandfather, so despite his 1/2 white heritage he would largely lean into Middle eastern and East Asian culture (outside of religion, as Ra's is a staunch atheist).

I think Middle Eastern and East Asian culture are so interesting so i just wish DC actually did something with it instead of making Damian look and act soley white, and I'm not referring to skin color, as both ethnicities have varying looking complections, but rather i mean his facial structure. (A great example of Damian having both Arab and East Asian features is Bernard Chang's artwork in Monkey Prince #2, as well as the 2021 run of Robin, specifically issues 1-11 drawn by Gleb Melnikov (not every frame but some are pretty good).)

[bogkeep]

tbh my thesis on the astronomical clock in prague might just become a redo of a tenth grade thesis i did about the history of clocks. like the question i want to answer is "why does this clock fascinate us so much" and i think the surface level answer is that it looks cool as hell and is in a touristy part of a touristy town - but on the deeper level it's like. well it's one of the oldest mechanical clocks in the world that's still ticking, and it barely looks like the clocks we have now. it's like pshaw of course i can read a clock, you just look at the dial and the hands, right? and then this clock is like. unreadable because the upper dial shows no less than four kinds of time: babylonian time (twelve hours of day + twelve hours of night, but the length of the hours varies depending on the place and time of year), bohemian or italian time (24 hours that start at sunset, good for seeing how many hours of daylight there's left), old germanic time i think it was called (that's just like what we use now except it doesn't account for daylight savings!), and sidereal time (uhhh is this the zodiac circle thing?????? i should know this)

because the thing about how we count time is, WHY do we count time the way we do? why Twelve hours specifically. what matters more, exact measurements of time units, or following the ebb and flow of daylight? has the way the shaped clocks shaped our lives?? MUCH TO THINK ABOUT. or at least i think about it when i see a clock like the orloj.

[shitty-tma-aus]

Au where Elias is Santa (he Sees you when you’re sleeping…he Knows when you’re awake) but instead of giving presents they get nightmares based off the Fears

martin is immune bc he’s canonically jewish

**edit: he’s not, post canceled go home

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

A procession of confessions.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[lenodrysalad]

"Eddie said he's straight! Buck said Eddie was straight! Buck said he's not in love with his best friend! They shut down Buddie in the show it isn't happening ya'll are delusional! Queerbait! Queerbait! Blah blah blah"

I feel like I'm going insane. I'm sure we're all tired of people shouting "media literacy" every five seconds, but like... Yeah, develop some media literacy, please.

I'm saying this as someone who doesn't usually like romance, despite being subjected to it in basically every piece of media. As someone who doesn't generally look for love stories. As someone who loved Buddie but didn't consider any serious possibility of it becoming canon before season 7/8, who refused to believe Buddie was truly happening until I couldn't deny it anymore: this episode is loud.

Please understand how narrative arcs work. How character arcs work. How character development works. How serial broadcast television works. Understand how writing works. Consider context; take the whole episode, the whole season, and the whole series into account instead of treating things like they exist in isolation.

I'm too tired to go through the step-by-step details of the episode to prove why these, "they said it on screen, therefore..." takes are shortsighted and ignorant; plenty of people have done that already.

But that episode, even if we do take it in isolation, is textbook. Do people really take everything characters say at face value? Do people not watch other character's reactions? Listen to what else is being said? Watch what is being shown? Consider the implications? Themes? Narrative devices?

Consider that maybe, just maybe, characters can be unreliable narrators, or believe something to be true only for that belief to change later. These things don't happen in one episode. There's such a thing as set-up, foreshadowing, the starting point of a plot. 911 is a serial drama, therefore it is going to have A) long-form story and character arcs, and B) drama.

Characters are not going to move in straight lines, or talk in therapy speak, or solve every problem in an hour. They are not always going to be right, or self-aware, or truthful, or rational. Direct dialogue does not equate to honest dialogue.

Also, saying, "well in real life, people do this, I do that, their feelings would be this, yadda yadda yadda" means nothing. Your experiences are not universal, and more importantly, this is a work of fiction. Realism is whatever the story says it is; it's going to do whatever creates the most dramatic, interesting, developmentally beneficial, or emotionally satisfying story. Whether you like that story or not is irrelevant to the fact that stories are not going to cater to all your expectations or real-world experiences.

To people pointing to Tim or the actor's interviews as "proof" they're shutting down Buddie: again, please understand how broadcast television works. They are not going to tell us everything that's going to happen before it happens. They are going to play the neutral zone, the "wait and see," the "will they/won't they." They are going to lie. That is television production 101. You can compare what they've said in the past with canon and list all the contradictions, misdirection, and twists you didn't see coming because they didn't spoil it for you. Watch the show. That is the canon.

They're also not catering to fandom--people they already know are devoted to the show, familiar with Buddie, and consistently tuning in. They're introducing the idea of Buddie to the general audience, people who likely haven't considered the possibility before. The GA has to see that Buddie is an option, so the show needs to manifest it as if it's a brand new concept. This episode pulled the pin on that grenade in a very obvious way; the idea that Buck could be in love with Eddie and that Eddie could not be straight has been planted. The next seed will be Eddie's feelings. Now the show needs to water it and let it grow.

One last thing. Been seeing a fair amount of hand-wringing and condescension over people interpreting this episode differently. As if this is some sort of "gotcha" for bad writing, baiting, or people being stupid. Listen, genuine complaints about this show's writing aside, different interpretations or inferences are completely normal. This isn't unique. That is how people interact with stories, through personal biases, experiences, emotions, and expectations. That isn't inherently a bad thing. It's totally fine to have your own views; media is all about interpretation.

However, it is also true that just because you have an interpretation, that doesn't make it true. Not all interpretations are equal in their validity, evidence, or warrants. The show has an intention, it has a story in mind. If you don't see it, sure, that could be a failure of the writing, but it could also very well be a failure of your analysis, especially when the show hasn't finished telling the story. Looking at one thing in isolation and forming your whole conclusion based around that makes for poor critique.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see who's right.

[elluqien710]

the problems about being in the silm fandom…

nobody’s in the silm fandom.

…at least, people I’ve met in real life. There’s an amazing community here on tumblr with a good amount of (super talented!!) people in it, but so far I’ve barely met a single one in real life.

Which makes about sense, considering most people, especially considering that I’m in an academia environment with other young people that think of lotr more of an “old-timey,” “stuffy,” and “another one of those old classic boring books our teachers make us read,” and sure, yeah it’s sort of justified for them to think that, but it just makes me go ARRRGH YOU JAIL CROW OF MANDOS

I’ve met a fair amount of people who’ve at least watched the movies or read some of the og trilogy and the hobbit (yay!)…but haven’t read Tolkien’s other books, such as the silm (nay!).

…THE PROBLEM WITH THIS THOUGH is that I, being an avid Tolkien nerd, get beyond excited to hear them say “oh I’ve watched the movies and they were pretty good :)” and dump a butt ton of lore on them.