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That post about Marcille and Laios' relationship actually got me thinking about Chilchuck and Laios' relationship. Which is harder to see in some ways because it mostly consists of positive absences.

At first, viewers might be inclined to wonder why Chilchuck sticks with the party. He says it's because he took payment up front, but he could give back part of the deposit and leave. Two other party members left; Laios explicitly gave Marcille and Chilchuck a choice as to whether they would stay or go, and they both chose to stay.

We know why Marcille chose to stay; she wants to save Falin and she considers the other party members her friends. Why did Chilchuck stay?

Chilchuck actually respects Laios a lot -- food and monster weirdness aside -- and that mostly comes I think through the positive absences from above. The things that Laios does not do.

Laios doesn't deliberately expose Chilchuck to danger or regard him as expendable. When Chilchuck starts to get enthralled by the sirens' song, Laios immediately snaps him out of it. Contrast that to Chilchuck relating that other adventuring parties will sometimes bring half-foots along just to sacrifice them or use them as bait!

Laios doesn't insist that Chilchuck put himself in danger by getting into combat. Even in situations where they're in danger and could really use more combatants, he only ever asks Chilchuck to take on non-combat tasks such as creating distractions.

Laios doesn't get in the way when Chilchuck is working and follows his directives of what to do around traps. He respects Chilchuck's work so much that he will even hand over his sword without hesitation, even when doing such a thing causes it to be damaged!

Laios doesn't press Chilchuck to divulge private information. When Chilchuck says he doesn't mix his professional and private lives, Laios respects that and doesn't push.

All the other party members infringe on these boundaries in some way. Izutsumi tries to egg Chilchuck into combat; Marcille pries into his home life; Senshi deliberately provokes him when he's trying to work. Not Laios. Once Chilchuck sets a boundary, Laios does his best to always respect it. (And I think Laios appreciates having clearly defined Rules For Chilchuck.)

Laios is a good party leader and he takes care of his team. Maybe this is my age showing, but when you find yourself in a good work situation with a good boss, you stay in that job.

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I'm rereading Thud, and I've just got to the point where Chrysoprase and Vimes are having a meeting. When Vimes tells Chrysoprase Carrot is investigating the Grag Hamcrusher murder case, which Chrysoprase just assured Vimes definitely wasn’t a troll, and asked him to investigate personally, Chrysoprase first asks him to reconsider. Vimes refuses. Then Chrysoprase asks if Vimes trusts Carrot, and Vimes says yes. Then Chrysoprase says:

"Okay. He shiny. He a thinker."

And for the first time that word jumped out at me. Shiny. Diamond King of Trolls is going by the pseudonym Mister Shine at the moment, and the slogan "Mister Shine - him diamond", is popping up in Ankh-Morpork graffiti, literally the writing on the wall. The connection is so striking Vimes jumps straight to it. He doesn’t ask Chrysoprase what he means, he asks who Mister Shine is, because at this point he doesn’t know.

But. Troll kings are diamond, and we know from Thunderbolt the lawyer, who also has some diamond to him, (I wonder if he was ever in line for the throne?) that having any diamond in you means you can't lie. It makes you truthful and it makes you royal. It also makes you highly conspicuous. Diamond King of Trolls goes about wrapped in a cloak, and he is called by the use-name Mister Shine.

And what does Chrysoprase - a well-informed and intelligent gang boss - call Carrot, a hidden royal heir who hasn’t taken up his crown, and who uses the truth as a shield and a sword? Shiny. Chrysoprase calls him shiny. It's a compliment I can't remember anyone else in Discworld getting or giving.

I just think that's incredibly clever.

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“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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“nice blog”

thank you im really good at clicking reblog

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Is it weird that I want the holding cell flat? I wanna put my friends in there and give them puzzles to solve to be let out 🥰🫶

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far too old to care about fandom opinions i am an adult with a *sees a take* hm. never mind actually. i am in fact so blessed to have a huge brain and correct inconsequential opinions on fictional characters. there but for the grace of god go i

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Imagine how fucking balls to the wall amazing a Hobbit Seder would be. It's all the things Hobbits love. You sit around a table for an excessively long meal, you make your seat extra comfortable, you tell lots of stories and sing songs telling those stories, and you eat and drink so, so much.

And you just know 18% of the time, Gandalf is standing there when you open the door for Elijah.

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The Razor Which Cuts Through Self-Deception

Artifact ••••: The Razor Which Cuts Through Self-Deception (Black Jade Reaper Daiklave)

Master Iron Breather is a widely-respected scholar from the Littoral tradition of Immaculacy -- the Pure Way and its fellows. Known for his unusual teaching style focused on humor, subversion, and deprecation, Master Iron Breather is often called the Great Wise Monkey of Kamthahar or Old Master Bastard.

In his youth, Master Iron Breather defeated a mighty spirit with his bare hands, and took the spirit's mighty sword. For the rest of his life, the Great Wise Monkey of Kamthahar wielded it not as a weapon, but as a razor for his bald head and a knife for his bread -- a final insult to the spirit's arrogance that its legendary sword was put to mundane use.

Master Iron Breather was said to use the sword to cut the hair of his students into embarrassing haircuts to teach them humility. Legends say that once a prince of a mighty Prasadi family came to him and boasted that she was wiser and stronger than the old, bright-eyed monk. Without looking up from his meal, Iron Breather unsheathed the sword and threw it at her head; as it sliced through her hair, a fingernail's breadth from her skull, it embedded itself in the wall behind her, it sliced through her arrogance and she fell down crying, humbled for the first time. It is said that she bore a slice in her hair down the middle of her head for the rest of her life.

Iron Breather's sword is now known as the Razor Which Slices Through Self-Deception. Today, it is known to be wielded by a hero who styles themselves as the monkeylike reincarnation of Old Master Bastard: an itinerant warrior and self-styled monk who uses its edge to bring justice to bandits and criminals. It is said that the Great Wise Monkey's laughter can be heard echoing in the hero's shimmering slices.

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every single thing further i learn about the locked tomb series makes me more confused. there's...necromancy? memes? mythology? space? honestly at this point, you could tell me a main character is the reincarnation of both jesus and a homestuck character and i'd be like 'yeah sure, that tracks'

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"if you ship this thing it's because you're too naïve to understand that it's toxic and that you wouldn't like a relationship like this" actually it's because I see one of them as a mentos drop and the other as a bottle of coke zero and I want to watch the mess they'll be together

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god she is always serving cunt.

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never fucking smoking weed again jesus christ

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how jingo went

close ups on his face, bc i like when hes holding on by a thread

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a fact about me is that i was an early bloomer who hit puberty in elementary school and was immediately, obnoxiously horny in ways that were uncomfortable for everyone because no one is prepared for an elementary schooler with b cups and a deep fascination with movies where people get tied up. another fact is that because i was considered smart for my age in the ways that mattered, i just accepted all this as a single package, the many ways that i was not really a child the way other children were children but was instead a miniature adult. i was technically a child, but not really, as far as i was concerned. it also did not occur to me until around high school that i was fat, because i instead considered myself to be sturdy, to be buff, to be built like a tank.

so somewhere around middle school i am noticing the ways in which i am Not Like Other Girls, the ways in which i am not what society says a girl is and the ways that things marketed to girls do not appeal to me. i don't know how other girls dealt with this, but i very rationally decided that i was only technically a girl, in the way that i was only technically a child. so i looked at the things that did appeal to me, and that i did enjoy, and reverse engineered my demographic to decide that on a practical and functional level i was a middle-aged man. i had also gotten really hornily into wolverine because of the first x-men movie, and ended up reading a lot of comics, so as you can imagine the comic book version of wolverine who is short and built like a tank and older than he looks despite being for all intents and purposes a middle aged man really had some appeal to me.

there are idiots who say shit about how tomboys would be considered trans these days or whatever, but i can assure you that was not what was happening here. by middle school i already had to special order bras and i was fine with that because of the many weird fetishes i was developing, none of which can be blamed on the internet because i hadn't found that shit yet and also to this day you would have a hard time finding anything similar to the things i wrote in my secret notebook and immediately destroyed. the fact that i was technically a girl was vital to all this. media where there was a big reveal that some cool dude had been a hot chick the whole time was my shit. weird feral beast people who turned out to be hot women once they took a bath? fuck yes. i would never have cut my hair because that would have ruined my chances to take off a helmet and reveal that i had girl hair. at no point did i think i was anything but a girl, it was just that i was functionally a middle-aged man, who was a girl.

what this means is that i still liked all the things i already liked, such as leather jackets and comic books and anime and old stand-up comedy, but i also did extensive research on the other things i felt i should like according to the demographic i had assigned myself. i watched vh1's 'i love the 70s' with the air of someone trying to hide their amnesia, even though my parents were children in the 70s. i got into the beatles. i tried to get into cars for a while before accepting that i only liked the vintage car aesthetic and couldn't be fucked to know actual car facts. i wore nothing but cargo shorts and aloha shirts for a while, which didn't really stand out that much because it was middle school. i bought a fedora and became a libertarian atheist. i made plans to buy a motorcycle (i could not ride a bike).

i gave up on it after a while because quite frankly my titty situation meant there was never really going to be a big reveal that i'd been a girl the whole time. it was pretty obvious even with the cargo shorts. also the older of a teen i was, the more likely it felt that i could maybe get laid, except i could tell that was never going to happen as long as i kept wearing cargo shorts. it took longer to give up the fedora because it was leather and i wore it with my leather jacket and fingerless gloves, which i convinced myself worked a lot better after i'd gone full high school goth. i lived in the desert so you can imagine how well that worked out for me, smell-wise.

anyway that's how my female socialization went, i don't think it was particularly successful tbqh

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Every. Fucking. Morning.

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I’m halfway into the first Miles Vorkosigan book, and so far it’s basically been “How to DM Around a Diplomancer: Space Opera Edition.”

Miles: “I tell the mercenaries I’m a mercenary commander and I bought up all their contracts from their captain, so they’re part of my company now.” DM: “Roll for Bluff. :)” Miles, who has a higher Bluff bonus than most gods: “34.” DM: “They want to know when copies of the regulation handbook will be distributed and what the health insurance plan is like. (: (: (:” Miles, sweating: “UUUUUUHHH”