#*clicks on Keep Reading*

[lupucs]

Mettaton EX in 3D! 🎤

Some scrapped renders I didn't really enjoy, but have em anyway!

[syncogon]

i love how they went out of their way to censor this new character, as if we knew anything about the first two characters either

[zephyrine-gale]

day 4 of one dan heng a day until he comes out plagued by the past

day 3 renheng i think i hauve mara

[always-a-joyful-note]

Enstars sure is an experience. Did I miss anything?

[deep-space-lines]

Full-Size / True Color Version

Sometimes I think about the fact that first living being to orbit the Earth couldn't understand what was happening to her, couldn't understand the history she was making. Laika wasn't a volunteer. The technology to bring her back alive didn't exist. They sent her up anyway. She died, scared and alone, in a malfunctioning spacecraft hastily built to meet a political deadline.

When her heart rate tripled from the stress of acceleration, did she understand the magnitude of what she was experiencing? When she saw the stars outside her little window, did she believe the world had gone dark? In her final hours, did she feel wonder, or just fear?

"The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog. When you understand that you can’t bring back Laika, that she perishes out there, and that no one can bring her back…that is a very heavy feeling." Oleg G. Gazenko

For me, there's some small consolation, at least, in knowing that although her death was unnecessary and cruel, Laika will never be forgotten. I love you, Laika. May you find peace among the stars.

Prints are available here.

[shahrwrites]

Nah, being a soldier was apparently only Jason’s role.

[dumbfucksystem]

imagine if the shen family was actually a part of the mafia. and shen yuan just never knew.

like his Family is rich and they are all super close. he’s even in contact with some of his distant relatives pretty often, which is kinda cool for him, he’s sure that this isn’t the case for most families so he considers himself lucky to know the extent of his family tree. sure, some of them seem to have lost a marble or two but what family doesn’t have a couple oddballs in their midst, you know?

and its not just sy’s comical obliviousness that contributes to this. his family is well aware that sy is not suited for this life style- especially his siblings. they grew up watching him get himself into all sorts of weird situations and putting himself at a disadvantage simply because he’s too nice. he can try and deny it all he wants (just like how he denies he’s gay- c’mon sy everyone can tell you are not straight) but his sense of justice would only burden him if he were to work for the Family. not to mention his sense of self preservation is absolute shit and they don’t want to have to babysit him his whole life- and he probably doesn’t want that either!

so they send him off to college, help him find an apartment, and basically do everything they can to help him start off on his own, away from the Family. his siblings had to do a whole lot of convincing to let this happen btw- this kind of thing usually isn’t allowed, but sy doesn’t know anything that could be used against the Family, so they make an exception in his case. better for them to not have a deadweight sticking around either is what they say but they all dote on him anyways and refuse to admit they care about him. sy definitely picked up this line of reasoning from them btw.

shen yuan is a little upset and confused that his Family seems eager to send him off (it’s not like they can’t afford for him to live with them after all- both of his older brothers still live in the Family’s massive house and even his aunts and uncles are living there??). he manages to recover quickly though. at least now he can read his web novels in piece without prompting any dick jokes (his cousins had a field day when they found his account with all of his pidw comments…). now he just needs to figure out how to live by himself.

it’s not that sy is incapable of taking care of himself- it’s just that he’s so used to having other people with him that he never understood how much they were doing for him until they were no longer around. but that’s fine, living on your own is just another learning curve and sy is willing to rise up to the challenge. which he did, by the way! he found a job and pays his taxes and even though that isn’t much he still gives himself a mental pat on the back for it. he is still in contact with his siblings, he never misses an update for pidw which he totally doesn’t get excited for and his life is going great.

……until he accidentally eats some expired food and dies.

[marimbles]

does anyone else obsessively scroll through their own art tag or reread their own fics scrutinizing every detail and trying to determine whether it’s Actually Good or not or am I just a freak lol

[asukachii]

(I don’t like putting watermarks so, PLEASE, if you want to post this gif somewhere GIVE CREDITS! Also, don’t use it in edits/videos. Thanks~)

[seafl0wrz]

another thing i did for @tf-bigbang! this time i got to work with @novafire-is-thinking~

check out her super cool fic, "Death of the Phoenix, Return of the Wolf"!!

[leohtttbriar]

this entire episode was incredibly fraught and it's conclusion was almost willfully blind and offensive but also it definitely reveals a lot about the paradigm of thought in which the voyager writers were operating. like, i kept wondering since i started watching voyager why they felt the need to make up a tribe instead of grounding chakotay in the many real people of indigenous american communities. and i guess this episode, "tattoo," offered their reasoning for that choice. as baffling and ill-conceived and un-creative as that reasoning is.

see. there was one moment in this episode where i thought the story they were telling wasn't about to be the most frustrating thing ever. this moment was when young-chakotay references how other tribes are not living in the past, but his and his father's is. the simple idea that not all people are one and the same, that indigenous communities can be and are distinct and not a single amalgamation easily filed under one label, as well as the idea that tribes yet exist--that they are not and have not been vanishing. i thought, after this conversation, that the story was going to go on like a wakanda-type route, where the "fantasy" and "myth" chakotay is criticizing above is actually just a specific sort of highly-developed and protected tech and the people of his tribe were isolationists. i thought when we first saw that peaceful symbol on the alien planet that we were about to be treated to an alternate yet hidden history of a tribe from earth having achieved space-travel far before anyone else from earth did and kept it secret. i thought that might justify, a little bit, making up a tribe instead of picking one and hiring several consultants/writers for the writing room.

obviously, i thought wrong. more fool me--like this episode came out the same decade as dances with wolves. i genuinely should've known better.

i think one of the main mistakes (informed by the umbrella ""mistake"" (i.e. profound and deliberate crimes again humanity) of violent and merciless colonialism, which continues to inform how people interact with the world and will continue to do so for as long as we can imagine) is the treatment of the "myth" and "fantasy." like, another made-up indigenous people in star trek is the bajoran people in ds9, which i think exposes a lot of the writers' perspectives about chakotay. i don't think it's a coincidence that they made the leader of the maquis cell that had to be absorbed into the voyager crew explicitly indigenous. or that said leader had a whole situationship with a bajoran character who thinks very, very little of starfleet and janeway. these are all part of the same creative impulse. and it's a rich idea, started in ds9 and continued into voyager--the maquis, their relationship to bajor and cardassia and the federation, and what their principles are. and through that idea, you can see that the 90s star trek writers were trying to draw from real-world indigenous resistance to shape these freedom-fighters as well as from real-world indigenous insight to shape the bajoran (and chakotay's) spirituality. in that: they made the spirituality "real."

the bajoran deities are real beings. thus the bajoran people have a super special relationship to the land. and the deities are material and there. chakotay's spirituality also is "real", in that it has a direct effect on the material happenings in an episode. this sort of thing can either be: spirituality is drawn from the material world/material insights and human consciousness is a very powerful thing OR these particular people have a "magical" connection to nature. based on everything to do with these spiritualities i've seen in these two shows, it definitely feels like they were going more for the latter.

and then in this episode (!) they make the writing decision to explicitly say that all indigenous people in the americas were inspired by and directly gained wisdom from a bunch of special aliens who wanted to make sure the land of earth was protected and so appointed all the american indigenous people as guardians. like they were One people who both had a super special connection to the land and had to be given that special connection and didn't, like, historically shape and influence and change the ecosystems and flora and fauna in permanent and far-reaching ways, over many tens of thousands of years and many types of tech and city-building and migration patterns and cultural practices, all as or more diverse than the land they were living on.

the reluctance to attribute cerebrality and deliberately produced technology to anyone not of western european descent is just so so present in this episode and in the character of chakotay. him and the bajorans--their gods are real and their myths are real and not the product of richly-thought traditions and reasoning practices. no, their religion is thus far un-evolved. they're not like the white american characters who aren't praying to jesus bc christ is a made-up god and those white people have moved on (""evolved"" maybe, ughhh) and separated themselves from nature and their base instincts about religiosity. no they still pray to their gods who can absolutely answer their prayers if they wanted to.

the thing is. it's just oppression 101 to construct a binary and make one half of that binary Human Beings with Great Minds and the other half Adjacent Human Beings Who Are Close to Nature. like all the oppressions work through that basic framework.

the impulse to use indigeneity as an entry point into environmentalism isn't ridiculous. but people (i mean, white european "philosophy") miss the whole step where the reason you often see tribes making such headway with environmental activism is because they are being politically astute and they recognize that "land" being abstracted in the way it has been since Locke (and obviously before that but Locke is the most relevant thinker in terms of like land policy?) is actually irrational. you can't just build a tube of poison over a water-source. that is Idiotic. that is a thing that Unthinking beings do. iron eyes cody crying over pollution on a highway is not an accurate representation of the land-rights justice that tribes all over the americas have been fighting for.

the thing about "myth" and "fantasy" is that they are philosophies. they inform and represent great abstract and fully-reasoned ideas. and this episode so easily could've been about that. when we start with the flashback of young chakotay noticing the symbol on the rock and his dad praising him and chakotay saying "i only saw it because of a lizard," i thought that could be a way to show how lived experiences allow different people to notice different things about the world. it's not magic, it's practice and thought. but the episode just goes on and on, getting further and further into the racist ideas of the innocent and close-to-nature natives, the "noble savage", and the idea that any great insight originating in a non-white people came from aliens.

(and somehow these biases get transported to the bajoran characters, all of whom are actually played by white characters, which shows how these biases are an actual paradigm and not some sort of 'instinctual prejudice' like racists like to claim their racism is--i.e., not their fault and can't be unlearned.)

this got me thinking about "far beyond the stars." how it works as a futurism and as a comment on racism now. how the futurism is in fact an argument: that the future belongs to everyone; that exploration and great thoughts and great adventures belong to everyone; how this can be framed as inevitable because it is right; how imagining it so is the first step towards actualization; how people are thinkers and they will make a world that is so expansive and so egalitarian that a black man will captain and discover and exist in the stars and among wonder and different people and so much life. and this works as a speculative piece because there is present in its foundation the idea is justice is not retrospective. as going back is impossible, people build forward. sisko imagines forward, and even as he's imagining backward to being a scifi writer in the 20th century, he's still imagining forward.

this episode, "tattoo," completely misses how "far beyond the stars" functioned. how speculation and futurism work as commentaries on the past and the now. it's particular and personal and doesn't imply that an alien species is the reason for any future liberation. or that innocence is a virtue. or that such innocence is due to "protecting the land" (which means one thing and one thing only) and thus gives one magical powers over the weather.

personally, i think chakotay should've found descendants of his tribe from earth on that alien planet--not aliens. i think the episode should've been about how that symbol for peace or something was a symbol for some sort of logical proof of sorts and these descendants should've used it as a technology that could affect the weather through some sci-fi star-treky technobabble that enables telepathy. i think this advancement should've been fundamentally rooted in what the descendants learned long ago on earth by studying the stars and birds and building cities and pyramids. philosophies that are entrenched and informed by a deep understanding of the natural world, expressed not just through tech but through spiritual practice, while not being relegated to """"primitivity.""""

but also i'm definitely not the best person to ask. and the main problem here is that they made up a tribe and put themselves in a position of not really being able to ask anyone.

like i loved chakotay being able to reexamine his past and his relationship to his father and his connection to the galaxy at large. i loved that he found a semi-home so so far away from his own planet. i love that they wrote a character doing that, finding a place of true belonging seventy-thousand light years away. i think that's an interesting as well as important story to tell. but the framing and argument provided in the episode undercut that story so much.

anyway as i am not the person to ask, i'll just leave this excerpt from a paper written by a much much smarter person than me about a sci-fi movie made by navajo filmmaker nanobah becker about the project of cultivating mars:

"Science Fiction, Westerns, and the Vital Cosmo-ethics of The 6th World," Salma Monani

[ar0rin]

Okay how'd 4 and 3 start dating

They started dating 2 years after Octo Expansion. Kanava asked Shio out, and they dated each other for around 2 months before Ikizu joined them!

[fenmirth]

Anyway don't fight a priest just because you think you'll win based on size alone.

[tanked-up]

Murder Husbands

Soap doesn’t consider himself to be a rude person, but if you’d ask him right now, he’d probably tell you who -the fuck was this person and why was he wearing a mask- to add more to the case, a skull mask. Soap didn’t know how or what to answer, considering how it was 2:30 in the morning and somehow a half dead person, or at least that’s how he probably wanted to make himself known for, was standing in front of his bunker.

“... and ye’ are?” Soap tried to manage not to sound as terrified as he was, but a small gulp and the nervous scratching on his arm told otherwise. “I’m Lieutenant Riley, Simon Riley. I was told that I’d be accompanying you on tomorrow’s mission.”

Soap’s heart dropped somehow around the words -accompanying- and -tomorrow-

“I- well, I wasn’t informed about any of this… sir, uh Riley.” Soap tried to lie his way out of this. There were enough dreams on his mind to have them all interrupted by this man. “Ye’ must be confused-” Soap continued, before he got interrupted by the man, somehow his voice sounded…demanding?

“You must be stupid to think I’d fall for a lie like that, sergeant.” The man scoffed at Soap’s words as he handed him a sheet. “What’s this?” Soap managed to sound arrogant while staring at the man’s eyes, or at least what he hoped were his eyes. “You sign those papers, and then were officially partnered up for this mission.” The man replied, while slightly shoving the papers to Soap. “Did Price not explain to ye’ about the coup-”

“The Couple’s part. Yes, yes he did explain.” The man recalled. “I believe we won’t have any trouble with that?” He continued.

“Ye’ okay with this?”

“Are you not?”

[mirokuna-hime]

Yo what if Dazai did his whole speech in ch 101 not because he thought he is gonna kill Chuuya or intended to deceive fyodor, but because Dazai thinks he is gonna die.