lexlee20 - Tumblr blog

[lexlee20]

Today I am weeping for the power of story.

I know nothing of Bernard Hill, truth be told. Who he was as a person, the kind of life he lived. I never knew him even parasocially. I can name exactly two roles he ever played, and one of them because of a meme.

^ the meme in question

But I will always remember the sight of him, resplendent in armor, glowing with the golden light of day, a proud king of men. I will always remember the way my heart soared and demanded to follow him, to fight and die for him. How many thousands, millions of people felt the same, watching those moments play out? Some sentiments are close enough to universal.

Of course that wasn't the real him. Someone else wrote those words that he brought to life, other people were responsible for the armor, the light, the horses. None of that matters. The emotions were real, are real. What it meant to me, to all of us, that's real. Whoever the actor was underneath, he was able to bring out from himself a Theoden King we could believe in, and follow, breathless and wholehearted for even those few brief moments.

It means something. Don't ever let anyone tell you it doesn't.

Farewell, then, Theoden King. Your glory lives on in all our hearts and memories.

[lexlee20]

second birthday post in a row, but this ones for a BIRD

(aka I draw anghels fantasy universe cause its his special day and he deserves it)

[lexlee20]

Dangit, my crumbling remnants of high school Spanish can barely keep up with following the subtitles (my aural comprehension is now hopeless) but this cast looks and sounds amazing

[lexlee20]

I am so baffled by ppl complaining that TGC (or the gaming industry in general) is “greedy” for charging anything at all for IAP because “it doesn’t cost them anything to make more items”… and yes, I have also seen this reasoning used to argue that all digital content (books, music, movies, any software at all) should be free.

Even excluding the costs of server space and the worth of creative talent, this strikes me as equivalent to arguing that all physical media should be priced at no more than the cost of the constituent paper, ink, or plastic.

[lexlee20]

My cat threw me out the window

[lexlee20]

Almost done audiobooking Narnia after literally decades since the last time reading the series (and still don’t like the current order that puts _The Magician’s Nephew_ first), and boy howdy these books have not aged well.

CS Lewis drops into such a petty sneering tone about people who don’t fit his sense of propriety. You must be mid/upper-class white Brits who can dispense noblesse oblige but don’t try to act above their station (Uncle Andrew’s pretensions), or avoid the Approved Substances (the jabs at Eustace’s parents for being non-smokers, teetotalers, vegetarians, and seemingly worst of all living in Cambridge instead of Oxford).

_The Last Battle_ is practically a proleptic vision of Trumpian apocalypse: Those Foreign People are fine if they stay in their own country, but if a large group shows up, beware enslavement and the Antichrist. I’m typing his rant while taking a break from Tirian, Jill, and Eustace literally putting on brownface, and I am really curious how Greta Gerwig is going to adapt the series for Netflix.

[lexlee20]

Radio political analyst wrt Republican fundraising: “They took the goose with golden eggs and milked it dry.”

[lexlee20]

OK, I’m just gotta abandon “Mortal Engines” a little bit into book 3– am I really supposed to accept that someone with monocular vision (and thus no depth perception) has become an expert at hunting deer with bow and arrow?

[lexlee20]

_Operation Mincemeat_/_Wicked_ mashup with Ewen singing “Popular” at Charles

[lexlee20]

TIL Ben E. King recorded a (mostly) Japanese-language version of his iconic song “Stand By Me”— intro lines are in English but then.

[lexlee20]

Remembering a pastiche vignette about the nefarious Doctor Pooh Manchu whose house was marked with the Yellow Sign of Sanders the Unspeakable and who played Poohsticks with small children in the lake of Hali

Characters who are yellow coded not as in joy and optimism but, rather, yellow as in the first color the human eye will notice, plastered over hazard signs and school buses. Yellow as in a light so bright it burns. Yellow as in illness and disease, just waiting to infect. Yellow as deception, a cover up for something with teeth and claws and malice. Can anyone hear me

[lexlee20]

TFW reaching the end of an audiobook of Mary Renault’s _The King Must Die_ which has been abridged down to a weird Victorian boy’s adventure version by omitting most of the “Golden Bough”/Gravesian culture clash btw matriarchal/patriarchal theocracies and by disappearing both Medea (leaving behind a vestigial plotline that no longer makes sense) and Ariadne (now only a nameless distant figure who appears once and is never seen again— no mention of her helping Theseus at all, and only a cryptic line near the end about “both of us who had blood guilt”)… the arc with Persephone has been reduced to “showed up, killed the previous king, had a few weeks of good food and sleeping in, then got bored and left town”

and yes, I know that so very much of its historicity is now questionable at best, but I have fond childhood memories of reading the full version, which may have been my analogue of Percy Jackson

[lexlee20]

TIL there is a late 19th-century Italian opera which a.) has an aria about Japanese tentacle porn and b.) inspired a delicious-looking pastry (which does not resemble tentacles)

[lexlee20]

Which is where the compulsive caretaking kickstarts the quail boyfriends vortex of doom

Just thinking about Hitori, and how he was a caretaker with so much responsibility from such a young age. He grew up defining himself by how well he could take care of the other orphans. That's the only thing that mattered. He never learned how to exist just for himself.

So when everything is stripped away from him, not ONLY does he feel tremendous guilt about his failure to save Nageki, but now that guilt is the only thing he has left to define himself by... it might feel like, under that pain and the purpose it gives him, there's nothing else at all.

[lexlee20]

Had a middle-of-the-night thought about Hatoful background lore, specifically the names and functions of the Hawk and Dove Parties. It’s already clear from the game that we shouldn’t think of them in terms of war vs. peace, which is based on human perceptions of bird behavior. It would make much more sense to consider them from those birds’ perspectives of historical interactions with humans.

It still doesn’t map exactly, but until very recently, humans weren’t able to breed hawks in captivity and therefore couldn’t domesticate them in terms of selecting and breeding captive populations; hawks were respected as noble savages and pretty much left to roam around and do their own thing but falconers could go out to kidnap and train them individually. (They also became endangered in various ways but I don’t think we did that on purpose— pesticide residue and loss of habitat. Tangentially, Jain sky burials have become impossible because a medication routinely given to cattle in India turns out to be deadly to local vultures.)

But humans have been keeping doves around for a very long time, building structures for them to come live in and commensally glean grain fields after harvest, breeding numerous variations (some of which would never survive in the wild) and routinely harvesting them in several ways— sometimes just collecting their poop to fertilize the fields, but sometimes eating them as adults or squabs or eggs— until they were so common they were looked down on as vermin.

So what would uplifted birds prefer to do with humans? Treat us the way we treated hawks, or treat us the way we treated doves?

(hyuuuu)