#what if I read it again

[aliciarose-art]

Thanks to Gravitation for introducing me to gay people at the ripe age of 10

[holographings]

someone on twitter said Imagine what s2 jayce would give to talk to s1 viktor just one more time. and someone had a time travel alternate dimension fic ready to go. and i read it. and now my face is being eaten by 3750 feral dogs i think

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[ered]

Here’s my take on the whole audio books vs. reading:

Oral tradition of storytelling predates written ones by millennias, and honestly, which one you like is just a personal preference.

The actual difference is

when listening, you have no idea how to write characters’ names

when reading, you have no idea how to pronounce characters’ names

hope this helps!

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[ahsokalegend]

One of my favorite choices the Apothecary Diaries made was making the Emperor a “normal guy” (as far as I know as an anime-only). He’s not evil. He’s not hindering Mao Mao’s journey. He respects the concubines.

If anything his lack of autonomy and presence as the most powerful person in the country further enhances the show’s themes of working within the confines of class and gender inequality.

The previous emperor was a horrible, horrible pervert. Okay, then this emperor only weds women of age… Until he’s forced to take his father’s precious wife due to politics. The current emperor reasonably avoids her.

Eunuchs exist? Bam! now the surgery is outlawed, but this will create a reduction in male labor around the palace.

The emperor clearly favors few women. Well, now he must recognize a concubine with a powerful politician father playing the system.

He supports Mao Mao toeing the line of social expectations for women, but hasn’t removed the law against women preparing medicine. It makes one think, if he wanted to, could he make the change at all? For every two steps forward, he’s forced to take one step back.

In this universe even the Emperor is limited by social pressure and the expectations of his station. His life and that of his children is out of his control, and if that isn’t such a compelling piece of world building I don’t know what is.

If that’s how the author twists the narrative of the Emperor you better believe her female characters dealing with women’s issues in this society are even better written.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

honestly my mother was a huge champ about her eight-year-old asking to be bought an unabridged edition of the Odyssey for a birthday present, and then she was an equally huge champ about reading her eight-year-old the unabridged Odyssey as a bedtime story and pausing every four lines to define something for me, and let me just say that I have fucking TREASURED the opportunity to reverse that old tradition by more or less forcing her to sit on my couch and listen to Epic and pause it every four lines for my dissertation

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

Suddenly, bell bottoms aren't so bad

Bonus sketch, because I had to vv

"Stop checking out my assistant, Stanley."

[coddda]

I wish we could have met in some other way.

Lawlight Week Day 2: Soulmates

If you saw me repost and re-edit this several times uh No you didn't </3

Still frames/Individual gifs:

If you know what every frame is from you get a free cookie. by the way

[mangozic]

archivist be upon ye

[egophiliac]

buckle up lads we're going BACK INTO THE BOOK

[tornado1992]

When faced with the imminent fear of death people instinctively call out for their mom. A primal reaction, driven by the need of comfort and sense of protection the figure of our mother gives us. Ideally, a mother should be the safest place for every child, the one who loves them more than anything, who will protect them no matter what. "Mom" means loved, "Mom" means safe.

Happy Mothers day to Sonic The Hedgehog!

[late-night-chai-latte]

Platinum getting her mettle tested

Plat came pretty close in the last Patreon poll, so I figure now's a decent time to post this old pic!

[Bluesky]

[blueboyluca]

“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)

[lucabyte]

some thoughts on Claude

alt title: diversity win! this Butch Nun is crafting bombs in an unventilated room in her convent while actively courting Mother Superior! Do Not Give Them Access To Unlimited Power No Matter How Nice They Are

+ bonus

[llamahearted]

two people will go through similar things & learn to cope in different ways

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