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did you hear? a new study found that all the things you think people should do are actually objective failings and people who do those things will become weak, frail, and pathetic

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Read it here!

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woah I’m actually done????

there’s a good lesson here notorious procrastinators should never volunteer to hand-draw 52 unique playing cards 

also they’re animated gifs right now because that’s how they’re formatted on the photoshop files and I’m not in the mood to separate them yet. 

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it gotta be annoying as fuck for barbertorem when other demons mess with it's work like, no pauz, reversing the flow of power from blake to rose is not perverting the natural order, and thinking it is betrays an embarrassing lack of understanding for the nuance of the situation (not to mention being reductive and superfluous). and can you imagine the anticipation, the tension building to when blake would die and rose replace him, only for an absolute oaf of the first choir to erase his connections- leaving rose with no haunting, self-destructive guilt gnawing at her, no silent condemnation from her cabal, only a clumsy and frankly amateurish hole across their memories? like, maybe you don't have to put aftertouches on other demons' work at every opportunity! maybe sometimes, you can just let a piece speak for itself...

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scared to ask the librarian about this poster...

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Spin this wheel first and then this wheel second to generate the title of a YA fantasy novel!

(If the second wheel lands on an option ending with a plus sign, spin it again)

Share what you got!

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Is ‘Unlimited Blade Works’ just a fancy way of saying 'a very cluttered shed'?

I mean the shed is supposed to be drawn into comparison with the thought process that creates an isolating life spent in devotion to taking on burdens for other people at the expense of yourself, which is why the times where shirou talks with other people in the shed are also the times where he is opening up to accept the help of others instead of taking everything onto himself alone

so, it's a very cluttered shed, but the shed is also unlimited blade works

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I saw a conservative political meme that compared the US going to war against Iran with Luke Skywalker blowing up the death star. Deeply stupid of course, but also darkly amusing that the tendency of people to justify their political actions to themselves by using comparisons to children's media seems to be politically universal.

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this randomly blew up on twitter so i figured i’d post it here bc lord knows everyone on this app is neurodivergent

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This narration from Mister Sinister in Immortal X-Men #1 is trying to walk a line that I've seen increasingly often in comics. Hickman has radically changed Essex's characterization from past appearances, towards being an incredibly campy, sassy villain. A world-threatening villain, yes, but a villain who nevertheless is meant to be seen as "fun" by the readers.

However, Mister Sinister has previously been portrayed as an explicit believer in race science and personal assistant to Joseph Mengele. Its harder to have readers see a character who experimented on Jewish children in death camps as "fun."

Plenty of authors have found themselves in similar positions: they want to take a character in an interesting new direction, but that direction can seem kind of disgusting in the context of a character's history. Hell, even returning a character back to their archetypal characterization can seem kind of disgusting, if it means papering over what they've done during darker periods of characterization. And what character hasn't had a dark period of characterization? Who in comics hasn't destroyed a small town/nation/world when an author was feeling especially cynical?

This isn't really a problem for DC characters, since there isn't an assumption that all portrayals of their characters share the same history. Batman being abusive or faschistic can be brushed off as something true of that older batman unrelated to a more feel-good batman of a current run. Earth-2, pre-crisis, aborted New-52 version, you name it. But Marvel tries much more to have all portrayals of a character be part of a single extended history, so it can't pull the same trick of having a radical new take on a character appear while divorcing it from the actions of past iterations.

There seem to be three main ways of dealing with this in Marvel. There's of course the old mainstay of "We won't bring it up if you don't," which is probably the most common. Then there's the reconstructive angel, where authors try to show how the character is trying to actively move past what they see as dark periods of their lives (or reflecting on how they fell from their happier days—I always recommend Ewing's Rocket miniseries as an excellent example of that strategy put into action). And finally, there's the in-continuity "pruning" of characterization we see with Sinister: give some reason why these past aspects of characterization have been excised from the new version. Maybe the new version is from a parallel universe, maybe the old version is revealed to have been a Skrull all along. It wouldn't be too long after this issue that they have to use this trick to keep a usable version of Hank McCoy—after having him perform all manner of black-ops depravity to the point of being completely irredemable, he gets killed off and replaced with a McCoy with only the memories of his younger, kinder self.

I'm always of two minds on how I feel about this trick. On the one hand, it does neatly allow you to get on with using the toys in the toybox. It seems stifling to have a character be beholden to the history of every author with a competing vision for who they want them to be. On the other hand, in the case of Mister Sinister specifically, you start to wonder at a certain point whether the X-Office should've just used a different character to be the campy mad scientist. There's a worry that "oh I just cut out my racist gene" inadequately papers over the ways eugenics and real-world atrocity have been key aspects of what this character is for a while now.

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12/8/22: decomposing vertebrae harboring algal growth.

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Okay you guys.

IF YOU PRIMARILY DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH reply with what you mentally call it, if you have a nickname for it or something

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The newest chapter revisits this. His therapist tells him that this is him using his powers to facilitate his avoidance of problems, so at the very least that part was meant to read that way. Then he learns Parian's identity, and then says he's not going to intervene personally any more than he already is because that would be overly controlling and manipulative. Joe I think you may be a little bit beyond that at this point. Notably he does not actually inform his therapist, or anybody outside of his fanatically loyal team, that he has her on 24 hour surveillance and gaslighting duty. So, nobody with an unbiased perspective has a chance to call him out on anything. Legitimately I am still uncertain on if the author is doing this on purpose or not.

Do we think the BCF guy is aware that his resolution to the Parian plotline kind of mirrors her trigger event on a grander scale? Like she triggered from having her whole social group act to facilitate the desires of her sexual harasser at her expense right. And now her whole social group is composed of fanatically loyal subordinates of that same sexual harasser explicitly manipulating her into a mental state more convenient for him. Like damn.

In his fanfic the harassment was unintentional and due to ignorance, but that just makes the parallel more explicit imo. Twice now the main character has put his own wishes above Parian's wellbeing, too self-centered to realize how he hurts others, then when consequences result in terms of trauma for Parian he dodges any sort of accountability through his own privilege, first as a white het man and the second time as an influential cape. Like for all the story wants to convince us how great he is, ultimately he's doing the same thing. I almost want to believe that the whole thing is intentional because it would be a deeply biting character beat for MC, a real commentary on how little any of his supposed growth really mattered.

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Since you haven't seen Lancer in the HSR collab yet I'm providing some pictures, I'm also curious what do you think about the new design.

it's okay i guess. i like it better than what saber and archer have going on, those two had their existing designs mihoyofied in a way that feels jarring to me because the originals are so iconic largely because they're fairly minimal and rely on some simple and strong core shapes, but modern gacha will die if they don't overdesign everything so they randomly added a bunch of extra shapes that just ended up muddying that strong core design and making them feel more generic in the process. lancer instead got a whole new outfit to match how this game's design sensibilities would represent a guy with this kind of personality, which means it's still a fairly generic cool wild guy in a gacha game streetwear outfit because I think mihoyo's design sensibilities are weak, but like, it works for him and it doesn't feel like they fucked something up by doing this.

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Was I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly; or am I now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

weird route bonus

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Being on multiple different discord servers centered around the same piece of media can be really funny because when you wake up and see you've gotten 8 different notifications you know for a fact that something's gone down in that fandom. Won't know what until you check, but something.