englishlaboratory - Tumblr blog

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Small town murder mystery where it eventually turns out that literally everyone in town is a member of some secret society or sinister cult – except it's not one big secret society, it's a bunch of little ones, ranging from as many as a couple dozen members to as few as three. Each secret society is aware of their own immediate allies and rivals, but none of them have the complete picture of how extensive the town's secret society problem is, nor do they know that every single resident is a member of at least one. Some residents are members of multiple secret societies. Some residents are unwittingly members of multiple secret societies, having mistakenly concluded that Secret Society A is Secret Society B's hidden inner circle, when in fact they're unrelated. There's at least one pair of secret societies whose leaders each believe that the other is a false front that they set up to distract their enemies. This goes on for five seasons.

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yeah I'm hyperfixated on Fossil Fighters....

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if you never hear from me again, just know i moved here

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finding my self having feelings about spinel once again.

its just so perfect, so fucked up, so... chef's kiss, that at the end of this moving story about reconciliation, about listening, about learning and having empathy for those who think differently, about having patience for those with cold broken hearts and rigid minds, about breaking rules and about emotional intelligence, spinel shows up as a sort of final boss. is just so incredible that after this touching show about reconciling with abusive relatives while crying and singing, the final villain is a manic depressive clown who nobody remembered even existed.

she is just so uncomfortably out of context, and she knows she is out of place! and she resents this so so much! whats interesting about spinel is that unlike the diamonds, unlike basically all other villains steven faced until that point, she knows exactly what is going on. and she knows she has no place in that story. steven universe is a story that is perfectly neat and encapsulated, with rose as a complicated figure who ultimatly seemed to operate under the best of intentions, if a bit naive at the time. spinel sticks out like a sore thumb in some senses, she is a clown! she is completly ridiculous! her powers are a display of cartoonshness we never saw in the show before, she is awkward and uncomfortable to deal with in a way other villains werent. she comes to reveal the one truly evil and inexcusable action pink commited. her conflict cannot be resolved without ruining steven universes happly ever after, and she does it not by wielding the known and understood trappings of an abusive mother or a fascist leader or a violent soldier, things the crystal gems know how to deal with, spinel kicks their ass while being ridiculous and pathetic, by juggling and bouncing and squashing and stretching and singing an electroswing song.

and to make matters worse, she is aware of all this! she knows exactly what she's doing! if there was any drama across the entire series of steven universe it all hinged on the diamonds lack of perspective. in them not knowing that pink had actually been alive all along and them not understanding or accepting her desitions. the entire challenge was in having them learn and understand.

spinel knows everything, she understand exactly what is going on and still chooses violence. she "heard the story over and over again" and she doesnt really care how it ends. spinel is someone who saw all of steven universe and didnt like the ending, lol.

her problem is not that she is a closed minded bigot or a megalomaniac or a control freak. she was a perfectly innocent and silly clown. she just wanted to be funny, her problem is that she learned about steven's story and she realized the whole fucking show we just saw, the moving touching tale of steven universe, was just a giant joke on her.

and she didnt find it funny.

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I miss episodic stories like the Monster of the Week formula so much. Or whatever Phineas and Ferb had going on with the contraption of the week style of writing.

This might not be the same thing, but I also miss shows that do self-contained stories with a scene at the end that ties each episode together and culminates in the special or season finale that either shakes up the status quo for next season or just never gets explored again so the formula can remain (like Gravity Falls, MASH, Doctor Who 9-11's first season, Clone Wars 2008, Miraculous Ladybug before season 4, etc.)

i really could write an essay on how shit is that we’ve completely abandoned the monster-of-the-week episode format even when rebooting shows that relied on it to replace them with grimdark edgy plotlines where nothing feels good or accomplished at the end of the day

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POV: The executioner of the Auld Gods saw you and a health bar appears- I had way too much time on my hands and decided I wanted to animate a cool technique you can do with big swords or polearms where you kick the end and use the momentum to enter a stance. Many hours of kicking one of my own swords around in my room later, and a phone app without a timeline feature later and you get this. Im going to bed.

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posting niche fic on ao3 is like releasing a small creature into the wild and hoping it survives and finds sustenance

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literally obsessed with the design of blobjects

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oh uh. scuse me. just a lil snail crossing your dash

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soup de jour: soup of the day

soup de jure: soup the government wants you to eat

soup de facto: the soup everyone actually eats

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Anakin Solo: If you put a milkshake in one yard and crack open a cold one in another yard, which yard would the boys go to? Jacen Solo: Schrödinger's boys. Jaina Solo: FUCK! Tahiri Veila: What about cracking open a cold milkshake? Jagged Fel: As we all know, the milkshake brings the boys to the yard. The presence of the boys is a prerequisite for the cracking open of a cold one, but cold ones do not have any inherent boy-attracting abilities. Milkshakes, however, do. Jagged Fel: All else being equal, the boys would proceed to the milkshake yard. While it is possible to announce the presence of cold ones in the hope of attracting some boys, the pull of the milkshake is much more powerful by comparison. Anakin Solo: Jaina Solo: Tahiri Veila: Jacen Solo: Jagged Fel: Mind you, all of this nonsense hinges on whether or not the boys are back in town.

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not even JRR Tolkien, who famously developed the concept of the Secondary World and firmly believed that no trace of the Real World should be evoked in the fictional world, was able to remove potatoes from his literature. this is a man who developed whole languages and mythologies for his literary world, who justified its existence in English as a translation* simply because he was so miffed he couldn't get away with making the story fully alien to the real world. and not even he, in extremis, was so cruel as to deny his characters the heavenly potato. could not even conceive a universe devoid of the potato. such is its impact. everyone please take a moment to say thank you to South Americans for developing and cultivating one of earth's finest vegetables. the potato IS all that. literally world-changing food. bless.

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one time my friend and i came up with a basic “language” called wheat vegetable root. wheat represented every noun. vegetable represented every verb. root represented every adjective. it was very body language based. if my friend beckoned and said “vegetable”, i understood that my friend was telling me to walk with them. if my friend pointed to something and said “wheat”, i understood that they were showing me something. if they said “root wheat” and smiled, they’re saying this thing is good. if they say “root wheat” and frown, they’re saying this thing is bad. we spent a whole day talking like this and drove the rest of our friends insane.

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Fantasy worldbuilding: the other races consider humans deceitful and scheming to the core, and there is one example of human behavior that they name each time they warn their young: Humans poison trap their own food storages. Anyone who has been to human residences has seen it, somehow they all do it - to deter thieves, naturally, though some think it is also to avoid suspicion when poisoning a guest or visitor.

Only members of one's own household would know which meats have been rubbed with poisonous plants, and which bulbs grown in the garden will kill you. And they're all stored right next to the proper edible food! And the humans never mistakenly poison themselves this way, they are far too cunning to fall into their own traps.

If you ask a human about this, they will be baffled and insist they've never heard of this custom in their lives. While they may suppose that some other human cultures might do something so wicked, each one reassures asking visitors that their people do not do anything like that. And the truth is, they really don't. Not on purpose, at least.

It's just that humans are the only ones immune to garlic, mint, and many other plants and herbs that are poison to all the other races.

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This video made me cry so I wanted to put it here