#class numbers

[dramatic-dolphin]

when we were studying the bible in literature class (so we have the context necessary for later works that reference the bible), i think we were at the book of jonah, and one of my classmates was studying the text very intently, and then looked up and earnestly said "professor, i don't understand the will of god"

the teacher was just like. well sadly i am a literature teacher and not a priest so i can't help you there. but if it helps, many people throughout history had the same problem.

[nando161mando]

There are now over 15 million empty homes in the US, and 650,000 homeless per the very bias official numbers, or 23 houses per person

[foldingfittedsheets]

When I was getting my associates degree I took a course on human sexuality. It was really fascinating and wonderful. One of our assignments was to write about the first time we ever masturbated which was very uncomfortable and silly at the same time.

Mine was extremely boring because there’s nothing exciting about a five year old realizing that climbing the fire pole feels really good.

I told a coworker at the time about the assignment and she laughed and told me about her daughter. They had these really old dining room chairs with carved legs. The chairs had smooth wood bulbs going up them that the kid loved to rub on.

Her mom didn’t want to dissuade her or make her ashamed but she also needed to establish that masturbation should always be private. So she talked to her daughter and explained that she could do that but must do it in her room alone.

The result of which was that everyone was aware the girl was going to masturbate when she dragged the chair into her room to be alone with it.

My friends was my favorite though, because his discovery was in stages. He liked it when his penis would get hard as a kid because it meant he could grab it and pretend to be flying a helicopter. His aha moment was when this happened once in the shower and the grabbing plus soap made him realize something else might be going on.

That was funny on its own, but nothing could match when in the most betrayed tone he said, “It was so much more fun then, before stuff came out at the end.”

[manichewitz]

imagine you’ve been through unspeakable trauma in one of the most horrific atrocities humanity has ever faced and you’ve convinced yourself that you’re nothing more than the worst parts of yourself and that you’ll always be alone and then some beautiful british guy drops out of the fucking sky and tells you you’re not alone and helps you remember a time before you lost all your innocence and your whole life was torn apart and suddenly the pure acceptance and love you’ve finally been shown makes you realise you’re more than your anger and your trauma and your shame, and from that realisation you unlock a strength so powerful you can turn satellites on their axis and raise submarines out of the ocean with your bare fucking hands. well that’s what happened to magneto

[avadaniels]

THE YELLOWJACKETS + The Great Witches Worlds Beyond Number Campaign 1: The Wizard, The Witch, and the Wild One created by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Erika Ishii

Our coven was formed on the foundation of our opposing truths being brought together to bridge the world between humans and spirit. To address the vastness of the forces of our world, and acknowledge that the faces of truth are many, their wild differences still possible to bridge.

[aalyre]

one thing about the foxes that will always make me giddy is the team taking shots at their own goals knowing that andrew’s gonna catch the ball

[atimeofbeing]

How many stand-alone works do you own written by a single author?

take "stand-alone work" to mean books not related as a series, the series can count as one work (ie me owning all of NK Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy and The City We Became would count as two stand-alone works, even though it's 4 books). Owning multiple copies also only counts as 1 stand-alone work, sorry edition-hoarders

[fisheito]

900 pages......

[3liza]

i don't know how to explain to this website or to economists generally that any definition of "the economy" that isn't measuring the day to day personal subjective experience of the unwashed masses is not interesting or relevant to anyone but people who don't buy their own groceries and/or lucked into generational wealth and/or have permanent fuck you career tracks in some sort of torment nexus agency

[odetojupiter]

uhhh so the number four is associated with death in certain cultures, including japanese, which is fitting for the butcher’s son, yes but just remember neil was supposed to be number three and jean was supposed to be number four ,and in every draft but one jean dies. he is symbolically saved from that fate by dodging the number four (being given, instead, the number three which represents REBIRTH of all things - i made a whole post about that if ur curious) because it means he was never marked for death. so in this draft, where he’s number three, but was supposed to be number four, he comes so close to death - to the point where renee doesn’t know how he’s still alive - because he was supposed to die, doomed by the narrative, but that number three saves him. that number three represents resurrection, and so he doesn’t die like he was supposed to. because he’s not number four, he’s number three. he comes back. he transforms, he heals. he becomes number 29 (i will eventually make a post about jean and the 29)

neil, though, was marked for death. he had the number four tattooed on him, and he goes through his own narrative believing he will die by the end of it. his survival, however, is foreshadowed in the very moment neil thinks he’s about to die - when he is kidnapped. lola burns the number four - the signifier of death - off his face, leaving him scarred, yes, but not marked for death anymore. and so he lives. and guess what: the number 10 represents the start of a new chapter, that one cycle is coming to an end and a new life is starting, one that you’ve worked hard for. so for the number four to be burned off of neil, that tells us neil is going to live. and when neil becomes neil legally, he settles into the number 10 properly. and his new life begins.

[yesterdaysprint]

A Manual of Etiquette with Hints on Politeness and Good Breeding, 1868

[sp7-mr]

[intuitive-revelations]

Jumbled thoughts and theories on belief and metaphysical engines, the Nexus, and fate of the Web of Time...

"Do all those gods seriously exist (not just as alien fakes) in the DW universe? How did the Doctor supposedly meet them?"

Keep in mind, belief making something real is hardly a new theme for DW. The most obvious example for this would be belief in the Doctor being able to empower him in The Last of the Time Lords.

We also know that every story has a place in reality, with the Land of Fiction, not to mention the Doctor's own statement in The Gallifrey Chronicles:

"My dear, one of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip."

But I hear you. Suppose, for example, we want a more concrete example of this applied to religion:

Look no further than the series I've long batted for: Class.

In "The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did", Quill, Ballon and Dorothea literally travel into several afterlife realms using something called "the reliquary", or a "metaphysical engine".

DOROTHEA: This, as best we can tell, is a 'metaphysical engine'. QUILL: Metaphysics? Metaphysics aren't real. It's just thought. DOROTHEA: Everything in the universe is conserved. Everything. Even belief. Get millions of creatures believing something strongly enough for long enough and even space responds.

Quill even gets to meet (and fight) the goddess of her own people:

"Ok, so there is a device that can take you into a theoretical space where beliefs are real, you haven't answered how the Doctor is going about meeting these gods."

Is now a good time to mention that the metaphysical engine is bigger on the inside?

"Yeah, but so are a lot of things, even the Barber's ship..."

Except, there really is more here. Because the TARDIS itself is a metaphysical engine. Canonically. Explicitly.

In the First Doctor Short Trip "Every Day", the TARDIS actually ends up seemingly landing in a man's head, as he struggles to come to terms with his wife having an affair, which manifests as a time loop. Once it's broken, they suddenly find themselves far gone from the loop:

"What happened?" asked Ian, looking around in shock. One minute they had been in the house, the next they were on their way. "I don't know for sure," said the Doctor. "But my TARDIS, you see, is a metaphysical engine. It can travel through all the dimensions related to space and time. It's possible that, on this occasion, we entered the dimension of one man's mind. One man's imagination."

Other stories have similarly seen the TARDIS breach into metaphysical space, even at one point physically landing in the Doctor's own mind in the VNAs.

Some of the Doctor's other meetings with legendary, mythical, or fictional characters (even on-screen: the Devil, Robin Hood, Santa Claus etc.) start to also make a bit more sense, don't they?

This all perhaps also shouldn't feel that incongruous, considering we had the Doctor literally end-up in Bethlehem in time for the birth of Christ just this Christmas (even if that one wasn't itself by the TARDIS).

This, perhaps, also sheds light on how the Barber's plan really was going to work.

I mentioned in my live reaction that the "World Wide Web / Nexus" strongly resembled the idea of the Web of Time (with "signals" even being transmitted through it in a way resembling the Matrix). Well the Web of Time, in expanded universe lore, is partially constructed through something called the "Observer Effect", in which temporal probabilities become fixed in history, named after the real-life effect in quantum physics. Through this, history becomes fixed by those that perceive it - designed to enforce Time Lord dominance over history.

For an in-show example, think of the laws of fixed points established by The Angels Take Manhattan: if you read your own future, you fix it into being. This is one reason why the Time Lords ostensibly forbid Time Lords from interacting with one's own past or future, despite the many times we've seen this violated.

I'd make an argument that the Nexus, if it's not literally connected to the Web of Time in some way, effectively serves a similar purpose. Just as observers can shape history, the Nexus allows believers to shape reality, via the effect Dorothea mentioned previously. By controlling it, the gods secure their own existence, just as controlling the Web of Time secures that of the Time Lords. If it is destroyed, those stories are lost, just as history as we know it is transformed by the degradation of the Web of Time.

This may sound like a lot of fanwank, but I have a suspicion that this kind of thinking with regards to the Web of Time is good to keep in mind over the next few episodes.

I theorised after Episode 1 that the TARDIS trying to "pull" itself back to Earth via the Web of Time is what resulted in those various landmarks somehow ending up pulled into the middle of space between MissBelindaChandra-1 and the Earth. That these represented sort-of "node points" in the Earth's history as represented in the Web, and by continuing to pull when it couldn't arrive, the TARDIS had actually pulled them towards it, rather than the other way round.

One episode on, and we get the "vindicators", devices designed to do exactly what I just said!

DOCTOR: We land anywhere, and the vindicator casts out a signal, like a fishing line - whoosh! - to May 24th, 2025, and we use it to pull the TARDIS in like a hook. So we must land.

ANOTHER episode later, and it's revealed that Mrs. Flood (hey remember she said she literally wanted to seize God's kingdom?) actually wants the Doctor to be using the vindicators? We also discover, even more concerningly, that Earth's future history, despite its significance to the universe, has been completely erased.

Next week in Episode 4, we get a relatively grounded episode, that ends with someone "rejecting the Doctor's reality", who is then seemingly recruited by Flood.

Finally, this week, we get this: a story of someone determined to control / tear down a Web stretched over time and space.

Put all this together with the ongoing decline in Rassilon's established laws of rationality, which started after the devastation of Gallifrey in Series 12 and the creation of the Flux, but accelerated after the Doctor fell to the point of using superstition outside the bounds of the Time Lord noosphere in Wild Blue Yonder, and what we know about the final two episodes, including episode titles (which I won't repeat here for spoilers), and it quickly starts to seem like Mrs. Flood might be planning to tear apart the Web of Time.

This may admittedly seem like a bit too much for casual viewers, but the vindicator element at least I'm feeling pretty confident with. If this WILL actually connect to the Web of Time, we'll see, but today's episode didn't exactly dissuade me...

[foldingfittedsheets]

We have successfully returned from an excursion to photograph mushrooms!

[picklesplitz]

This is the third time I've had to repost this pls pls workk

Pls leave a like they worked really hard on their drawing 😢😢😢

little creature versions of my favs.... Lesbian quartet ™️. Ig LMAO... They're just comfort versions I can draw on a whim cuz they're simple... I'm not scared to post them on the tags anymore.. they'll all get poorly sewn plushies too eventually grahhh

I got. Three hours to work on this in class instead of my norm two. So I took extra time into just. Having fun with it! And no rushing...

Process under the. Read more!

I LOVE MY PROCESS ITS SO FUN G4AHHH

First of all. Ms paint doodle I made before I even decided I was gonna make something . I ended up using this as a reference for how I'd draw all of them ...

Then I just hop into lineart! My sketch is my line art. It's more fun this way lmao. I don't worry about my art being wonky or perfect

I didn't like how Tisha was looking, decided it was better to have her cuddle like the rest of them, so I changed that

Then I just. I start rendering!! I didnt do too much of that on this piece but the process is still the same. I do this without color first because I just find it easier to understand and work with! I make adjustments as my brain seems fit at this stage as well.

And last I use blending modes to add all that lovely color!! I don't use one layer I use like. FOUR so that I can get a nice variety of shades n such... I don't color pic either I just slap colors I think fit... I usually merge everything at the end and draw on top on a normal layer to add finishing touches!

And that's pretty much it!!!