shadow-ravin

[shadow-ravin]

if you ask me, the guy who put the sword INTO the stone should be king, not the chucklefuck who got it out.

[shadow-ravin]

I do feel like, as the cost of living crisis skyrockets, non-partnering aros are going to get hit harder and harder. There is no framework built into the infrastructure of our society for people who don't have a dual-income household, and it does become more difficult as you age to reliably live with friends.

There is, of course, the option to live with strangers, but that has it's own varied and dangerous downfalls. Hit just as hard, or perhaps even harder, are going to be those in abusive households who's chances of being able to afford to leave grow slimmer.

Like, this stuff IS grim, so we've gotta start making good financial decisions, and supporting each other where possible.

[shadow-ravin]

Dog wants to feed owner first

(via)

[shadow-ravin]

The Fool and Death

It would have been even more impressive if you'd noticed the massive explosion behind you, as you strolled nonchalantly away.

[shadow-ravin]

PROPAGANDA

No Propaganda submitted for Megamind

Jonathan Crane:

Yeah he keeps poisoning Gothams water supply. But maybe that citys water supply shouldn't be so poisonable :/ (Is it his fault? Maybe, but thats not the point)

haha fear gas go brrrrrrr. Actual Propaganda: he's a scientist with a passion for fear and he wants to know LITERRALLY EVERYTHING THERE IS THAT HAS TO DO WITH IT. In his research, he uses Gotham as his testing grounds and the bats and citizens as his test subjects.

From Mod: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

[shadow-ravin]

I have the sliiiiight feeling that most people don't know gamedev jobs are contract based and you don't get money taken away from you if people don't buy the game you worked on. You don't get extra money if it sells well, either. I dunno how it is with like, directors, lead programmers+artists and shit but it's like that for the smaller hands of gamedev. Go, pirate a Nintendo. Who gives a shit.

[shadow-ravin]

[shadow-ravin]

“When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them.”

— Lemony Snicket

[shadow-ravin]

PROPAGANDA

No Propaganda submitted for Megamind

Jonathan Crane:

Yeah he keeps poisoning Gothams water supply. But maybe that citys water supply shouldn't be so poisonable :/ (Is it his fault? Maybe, but thats not the point)

haha fear gas go brrrrrrr. Actual Propaganda: he's a scientist with a passion for fear and he wants to know LITERRALLY EVERYTHING THERE IS THAT HAS TO DO WITH IT. In his research, he uses Gotham as his testing grounds and the bats and citizens as his test subjects.

From Mod: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

[shadow-ravin]

i can handle one (1) Event™ per day. whether it be a phone call, an appointment, trip to the grocery store, play date with a friend, etc. only one, that's it. any more than that and i am Stressed

[shadow-ravin]

Through a (different) looking glass

You can also read or listen to this post on AO3. A couple of weeks ago, I came across a comment on Reddit from a person who refused to listen to podfics that the author wasn’t involved in creating because they aren’t how the author intended the story. That was not the first time I’ve encountered this attitude. There are many out there with the same opinion and many authors who refuse to allow podfics of their works for that same reason.

I want to take a second to acknowledge that if you don’t want people making podfics of your works, that’s your choice, and while I don’t understand it, you are more than welcome to make it. I also want to acknowledge that if podfics aren’t your thing, then you have no obligation to listen to them, even if they are of your own works. That said, this reason, not wanting to consume or allow podfics made because of some desire to preserve the author’s intent, is one that makes absolutely no sense to me.

Now, I could point out how fanfiction in itself is inherently transformative. The fanfic author has already taken someone else’s work and changed it, changed the meaning and purpose of it. Altered it in ways that are beyond the original author’s intent. And thus, disliking podfic on the basis of author’s intent is incredibly hypocritical, but that isn’t what I’d like to talk about today.

I’d like to talk about reading and writing. An author can pour their heart and soul out onto a page and intend many things, but once they put their work out into the world and allow others to read it, the original intent and meaning of it matters very little. To explain why, I’d like to take a second to describe how reading works outside of letters representing sounds and sounds making words.

If you talk to anyone who is involved with teaching kids to read and actually knows what they are doing, you’d find out that there are a number of factors that contribute to a person’s ability to comprehend what they are reading and one of those factors is background knowledge. Children with more varied lived experiences and greater knowledge of the world have a much easier time reading than those who don’t. For example, a child that has never seen a lion or a zebra before would have a hard time understanding what one was. 

In a classroom setting, a teacher would guide the children and help them interpret the text. They might show pictures or videos so that the child understood what a lion was or they might teach them how to use context clues to use the text itself to determine that a zebra is kind of like a horse but wild and with stripes. Now lions and zebras are concrete objects with easy definitions. So what happens when the thing your brain is trying to interpret and comprehend happens to be an abstract idea or complex problem?

It comes back to the same thing. Our background knowledge and lived experiences become the lens through which we interpret the story, but there are no pictures or videos to give us an easy concrete answer to what something is. Add to this that people are unique. No two people have the same life story and no two people are going to interpret the same story in precisely the same way. I had an experience with this in college. 

For a YA fiction class, I was supposed to read a YA novel and create a book trailer for it. The book I chose was Green Angel by Alice Hoffman. For those of you who haven’t read it, it is about a teenage girl who loses her whole family in some kind of tragedy that affects the whole community. The novel never directly states what exactly happened, only that a lot of people died. As an American 90’s baby who’s first real awareness of the greater world came with the terrorist attacks on the twin towers, I interpreted this book as a post-9/11 novel. The unnamed tragedy sounded exactly like a terrorist attack. The mysterious, unnamed, unknown perpetrators sounded like terrorists. The confusion and fear and grief in the aftermath of the event sounded exactly like what the US experienced. This interpretation of the text heavily influenced the way I approached the assignment, and initially, I got a bad grade on it because of that. 

My professor, 30-plus years older than me, didn’t appreciate the way I interpreted the text because it was different from her own interpretation. Instead of a post-9/11 novel, she saw it as a reactionary text about the Cold War. My terrorists were her communist spies. The fear and suspicion of the community, too similar to the red scare. The unnamed tragedy seemed to her to be exactly what the culture of the time convinced her would happen to the US.

In the end, we had a very productive talk about our different interpretations and decided we were both equally right. Neither one of us was the author and neither one of us could possibly know what the author originally intended. Maybe the author intended something else entirely, but we’ll never know and that’s okay.

Every person brings their own self into a story and walks away with something different. What the author intended has very little relevance to the reader when compared to how the reader interprets the story. A man is never going to interpret a story the same way as a woman. A trans person will never see a conflict the same way as a cis person. A LGBTQIA+ person will never look at a relationship the same as a straight person. A child will never grasp the same subtext as an adult. And a reader will never take away the exact message as an author intended.

Restricting or refusing to interact with podfic on the basis of “preserving the author’s original intent” seems not only backwards and pointless, but a way of needlessly restricting fandom and creativity. 

People re-interpret older works and translate them to different mediums all the time. Most often, we see this when books become movies. I’m not going to argue which is better, but instead would like to offer a different point of view: more cake. 

In most fandom circles, it is highly encouraged to write whatever you want even if it has been done before. And if your fandom circle does not encourage this, I suggest you go find a less toxic one. This is because everyone loves more cake. Just because many people have already written a fix-it fic or a everybody-lives-and-nobody-dies fic or a meet the family fic or whatever it is for your fandom, does not mean that you shouldn’t write one too because it will be equally loved and it does not take away from the others just by existing.

Movies are more cake. They don’t take anything away from the book just because they exist. Instead they give fans a new way of interacting with their favorite story or characters. Podfics, like movies, are more cake. They give something new without taking anything away.

In their most basic form, a podfic is just an audio recording of someone reading a fanfic. No different than an audiobook and great for accessibility, but most podficcers don't create podfic for accessibility reasons. Accessibility is an awesome bonus but, as blackglass put it, we create because it is our way of interacting with fandom, our way of putting ourselves into the content we enjoy and sharing our own interpretations of the stories we love.

And podfic is different from the original. In an audiobook, a reader is paid to read a story into a microphone in a way that conveys the original content to the reader in a format as similar to the original as possible. Audiobook narrators not only have less freedom for creativity in what they do, but also they are doing their job not recording the story because they love the story.

Podficcers use tone, inflection, pacing, sound effects, music, and more to share the story the way they read the story. And, just like with reading a fanfic, a podfic is just as open to interpretation. What the podficcer intends is probably not what the author intends and, just like the reader, what the listener takes away from the podfic is probably not what the podficcer intended, but that's the way fandom and creativity and the human mind work. We take an idea and we make it a part of ourselves, we change it, transform it to reflect our own lived experiences and then we share it with others so that they can do the same.

[shadow-ravin]

look at his flower!!!!1!1!1!1!

[shadow-ravin]

Aragorn n Legolas r so funny to me bc people who don’t know lotr well see gruff manly ranger and elegant princely elf but they don’t know what i know. they don’t know that Aragorn is the long haired sensitive softboy writing sad poetry on his livejournal about not being able to show his girlfriend the awesome new song he wrote for her on his guitar meanwhile Legolas is doing backwards kickflips over gimli at the skate park bc gimli double dog dared him then he and gimli climb the tree at Aragorn’s house n yell at him through the window to come play halo

[shadow-ravin]

Summer Podfic Swap - Back for Year 5!

We're back for our fifth year! Looking for some low commitment podfic fun this summer? Sign up for Summer Podfic Swap, a multi-fandom, no-minimum podfic exchange! Runs June through August 2025.

Create a podfic of any length and receive a podfic in return! Signup via the ao3 exchange by June 15th. Assignments go out near the end of June. Gifts are due by August 17th. Reveals will take place near the end of August. If you’re interested, but not sure about signing up, you are always welcome to make treats for the exchange! The deadline for submitting treats is August 31st.

Schedule Signups Open: June 1st 12:01 am EDT, right after midnight Signups Close: June 15th 11:59 pm EDT, right before midnight Assignments: End of June — Gift Deadline: August 17th 11:59 pm EDT, right before midnight Gift Reveals: Late August — Treat Deadline: August 31st 11:59 pm EDT, right before midnight

How to sign up Please sign up through our AO3 exchange here. [The form will open June 1st!] Instructions are included at the top of the form. You will fill out both Request and Offer sections. When signing up, please list a minimum of three fandoms, maximum of twenty; fandoms listed for giving and receiving can be different. If you would like to list more fandoms, you can do so in your Dear Podficcer Letter, but this will not be factored into matching. Dear Podficcer Letters are required. Your completed signup form will be visible to others to facilitate treats.

How will matching be done? Matching will be done through the ao3 algorithm, with the mods spot checking the results. Matches will be made on matching request/offer fandoms, and potentially shared additional tags. If you have any concerns about matching that you don’t feel comfortable sharing publicly, please email the mods before the close of signups. After matches are made, assignments will be emailed out by the end of June.

For more FAQ please visit the Summer Podfic Swap ao3 collection page. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at summerpodficswap at gmail dot com, comment below, or tweet us at @summerpodficswap on tumblr. We hope you'll join us for some summer fun!

Signups open on ao3 June 1st!

[shadow-ravin]

The Brush tit (Callithrix jacchus), more commonly known as a marmoset, a small New World monkey native to Brazil. Adults weigh between 182–354 grams (6–12 ounces) and are diurnal and arboreal, spending most of their time in trees.