whetstonefires - Tumblr blog

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How an Armadillo gathers foliage for its nest.

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My babies muah muah

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Older than history itself

What if the oldest vampire was a Neanderthal girl 🤔

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if you spend your life bitching and complaining about the fact people are 'expected' to engage in the dreaded pointless banal '''small talk''' instead of learning to trade pleasantries with the people around you, you will never know the true and heady joy of doing a dumb bit with a complete stranger and as a result your soul will remain small

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do you guys wanna see my favorite video on the internet yes you do

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Home protection ideas for ladies. Stay safe, queens!

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Fall asleep on the mead-bench and wait for Grendel to grab you, then press X to grab him back, just like normal. Once you've done that, press X three more times while crouching. This will trigger the climbing animation and put your character on top of Grendel's head. Crouch-jump forward and you'll clip upwards through the roof of Heorot and hit the skybox, whereupon Wiglaf's sword will spawn into your inventory due to an unpatched bug in the item ID system. Hitting the skybox will trigger a loading screen that spawns you right into the dragon's barrow, and you can use Wiglaf's sword to oneshot the dragon and unlock the non-canonical "Fiesta" ending

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no one is born to be alone

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With Kamala/Walz going up DAILY, I've seen more people talking about voting third party/Jill Stein (EW) and I believe the above screencaps from @three--rings can explain WHY Third Party votes NEVER work NOR is this the election to screw around in.

Everyone....like she says above.....PLEASE LEARN FROM HISTORY!!!

(Because if Trump gets in, he's NEVER LEAVING).

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The 2006 Dracula movie on BBC is one of the couple of adaptations in which Mina doesn't cheat/get seduced/hate her husband to be interested in someone else, but because Jonathan dies (early) by Dracula drinking him to death at the castle. She clicks with Jack, though not because of shared traits, common interests, or how they complement each other like in the book, it's more "well they're both single, guy saves girl..." The movie ends after Dracula gets killed by Van Helsing and Jack, with Mina and Jack being together after Mina gives Jonathan a (rather touching) eulogy about how he'll remain forever young. Then we see Dracula, Actually Alive, stalking them.

Like, come on, him again? Dracula drank Jonathan, since he died from it he should be undead now! Forever young, as she said. And back from the castle to find Mina. And the meeting between the three could have been interesting or very, very funny.

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Robin: Now--any other questions before we crash the night?

Azrael: Yeah--how did you get in my apartment?

Robin: Your first lesson…lockpicking one-oh-one.

--Tim Drake with Jean-Paul Valley (Batman #488 – Costumes)

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Batman: The Long Halloween: The Last Halloween #0 (2024)

written by Jeph Loeb art by Tim Sale & Brennan Wagner

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did i tell u guys i got into an argument on twitter bc i said foxes are dogs and someone tried to bring up their actual fuckin. classification or whatever and i just said “foxes are dogs cause they are fluffye” and they kept arguing with me. the entire time i was like “you will not survive the immigration to tumblr you are lucky we are not there right now”

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That one time Slade thought Clark Kent was Bruce Wayne and slipped him a Neurotoxin Mickey only to get his ass kicked anyway.

This comic is great!

[Superman: American Alien #3]

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this picture is so beautiful to me, the colours brothers

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Shen Qingqiu, handing Yue Qingyuan a baby: Hold this

Yue Qingyuan: Of course, Xiao-Jiu. Who is this?

Shen Qingqiu: This is Shen Yuan, our child. I gave birth to him. You will take responsibility

Yue Qingyuan: Of course. I will make preparations for our wedding ASAP

Shen Qingqiu: Good.

Qi Qingqi: I don't remember Shen Qingqiu being pregnant?

Mu Qingfang: I believe that our shixiong just grabbed some random orphan to baby trap Yue Qingyuan with

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With the number of times I've seen Jiang Fengmian made casually complicit in selling Wei Wuxian down the river in AUs like this isn't even shocking to anyone involved, despite the fact that when Jiang Sect abandoned him canonically the fact that Jiang Fengmian would have never (probably) no matter how much jeopardy he put them all in, and Jiang Cheng resents that knowledge and feels it was Bad Sect Leadership, plays a nonzero role, I feel I'm due an AU where Jiang Fengmian survives and is every bit as much 'pig eating my cabbages' about Wangxian as Lan Qiren.

Except he has a diametrically opposed personality and value system, so the way he expressed it would be entirely different.

Lan Wangji getting a shovel talk from Wei Wuxian's 'uncle' come onnnnnn.

Thinking about the parallels set up between Wei Wuxian and Mo Xuanyu, and how actually most of them are oddly specious.

The sketch of the backstory lines up, but on close examination they're mirror images.

Wei Wuxian wasn't kicked out of his sect, he left it. Wei Wuxian didn't hate the house he grew up in, he loved it, and getting the people there killed was the absolute last purpose for which his dark powers were ever intended.

Jiang Cheng was no Mo Ziyuan--his jealousy was a complicated thing all twisted up with love, and while he would lash out at Wei Wuxian both as a casual means of shit communication and more damagingly in moments of high tension, he had neither the desire nor the ability to bully him, and in general respected his boundaries almost too well.

When Wei Wuxian destroyed himself about Jiang Cheng, it was to give him cultivation, and protect his life and happiness. He would never have killed him.

Madam Yu was a domineering aunt-like figure, who hated Wei Wuxian for reasons of reputation, and because she had resented his dead mother, but she crucially did not have the power to actually disrupt his lifestyle to any significant extent.

Mo Xuanyu was shut up in a small room to rot; Wei Wuxian didn't even attend classes unless he wanted to. Mo Xuanyu was weak and disliked; Wei Wuxian was brilliant and popular.

Mo Xuanyu's uncle is a cipher of a figure, without character or agency, a nonentity who is resented to death apparently mostly for what he didn't do; in theory he is the master of the house, but he certainly never protected his wife and son's punching bag from them.

And this is what got me thinking along this track: because people keep interpreting Jiang Fengmian as this, as exactly like Mo Xuanyu's nameless uncle, a nonentity who lets his wife make all the decisions, and is contemptible therefore.

He shows up in fic characterized this way all the time, handled narratively as a gap rather than a person, an absence where there should have been a parent, and it's...totally inaccurate? The man only has a few scenes but the things that are most firmly established about him are:

he regularly goes out of his way to protect Wei Wuxian

he's extremely fond of Wei Wuxian

he cares a lot about ethical behavior

he's conflict-avoidant and gentle

he can and will overrule Yu Ziyuan when he's made up his mind, and there's nothing she can do about it

his communication skills are mediocre at best

he doesn't understand jiang cheng

he has a dumb sense of humor

Now almost none of this made it into cql besides point 4 and maybe 6, 5 is technically there but buried by the cinematic framing, so I totally get why the fandom on the whole struggles to characterize him well, and it's easier to write him off.

But it keeps bugging me to see him and Yu Ziyuan squashed into the mold of the Mo, because not only is that boring and reductive and kind-of-missing-the-point, it's like. Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng's characterization suffers a lot when you alter the environment and take away the influence exerted by their shared father figure.

Jiang Fengmian was Wei Wuxian's primary adult role model and it shows.

Jiang Cheng's relationship to his own sense of ethics is fraught because 'teaching him good ethics' was his dad's number one parenting goal, but they misunderstood each other so badly (partly because Yu Ziyuan kept loudly misinterpreting them to each other, which is so realistic I can't get over it, that's exactly how it works good lord) that Jiang Cheng has a direct association between the concept of 'doing the right thing even when it's hard' and a feeling of personal inadequacy.

The fact that Wei Wuxian got their dad-person's approval for being exactly himself and Jiang Cheng not only couldn't do that, he couldn't even get that same level of approval when he really pushed himself to rise to expectations, because Jiang Fengmian did not intend that warmth as a 'reward,' and so never realized he was withholding it, and therefore misunderstood Jiang Cheng's visible jealousy as a dangerous sense of personal entitlement that had to be carefully restrained, which reinforced his distrust of Jiang-Cheng-the-person and fed into a shitty loop where they were less and less able to relate to one another--that's fantastic. That's so human! I love it so much.

Both their failures are their own but at the same time it would never have gotten so bad if Yu Ziyuan hadn't been interjecting herself in there, in the middle of their relationship, fucking it up. That's family, baby.

I would ofc like if there was more fic engaging with the subtleties of all this because it's so good, mxtx did such elegant work here and it is not sufficiently appreciated. But it's the kind of thing that's hard to write good fic about; I am struggling with it myself.

So mostly I wish there was just more fic that didn't impose Mo Xuanyu's cliche angst backstory on Wei Wuxian, who has a whole different thing going on.