#Fortune and Effort

[wickedzeevyln]

Stroke of Luck

There are two types of people pursuing success. One pursuing luck, the other opportunity. One is cursing the heavens for bad luck, the other thanking the above for the lessons that failure teaches. One attributes success to good luck, the other with a sense of fulfillment for whatever was won, was earned. —e.d. maramat Luck is so unreliable. Don’t count on it. Yes, it shows up when you least…

[renshengs]

i just think if you are going to get really passionate about any deeply cultural show with distinctive ethnic names, and you are going to be so passionate about it, in fact, that you are going to consistently post about it in a public space for other people to see and/or you're going to write fanfiction about it, then you should at least make an effort to correctly spell the characters' names and know how to refer to them.

while fandom spaces are indeed for your personal enjoyment, there is a willful ignorance in the way a lot of people navigate fandoms surrounding media that is more culturally alien to them that reflects their subconscious unwillingness to take these cultural differences and intricacies into consideration. in my post's case, as i am chinese and am frequently in fandoms for chinese media, i can only speak on the fandom etiquette around names from shows that are generally more popular in english-speaking circles, like word of honor, the untamed, etc. and to be completely straightforward i think the name and terminology butchering has been pretty bad with some fandoms and absolutely unbearable in others.

"but i'm bad with names/i'm bad at spelling!" i can empathize. but i think making excuses is also a terribly avoidant thing to do. type with more care. find a method that works for you. the cultural context is crucial to the show and its characters; why are you here if you don't care about it? and yes, not paying mind to name usage is absolutely an ignorant thing to do, even if you are doing it unintentionally. obviously, spelling a name wrong does not indicate you are someone with that kind of prejudice, but not making any effort to get it right is irresponsible and insensitive, especially considering that native english speakers in the west have an extensive history of being dismissive and rude toward ethnic names, chinese ones included.

lastly, because this website has a victim complex that almost rivals twitter's:

the aim of this post isn't to imply that anyone who misuses or misspells names are bad people who should be witchhunted and torn apart (nor am i going to do that, which is why i am making a post about it), or that people who have dyslexia and other disability issues with reading & spelling accurately just need to "get better" (see: "find a method that works for you"). typos are not morally wrong & my point is not to shame anyone. i just hope people can find it in themselves to reevaluate their own stubbornness and just—learn to tread with more care. to treat these stories and their characters with the consideration that they already give to the media they're most familiar with, and to approach the cultural learning curve with willingness, or else just don't engage with such things at all if you are not able to understand that to enjoy them fully and deeply requires you to actually interact with the cultural context in which they were created.

[marypsue]

I just finished watching the 1966 Hammer flick Plague of the Zombies, and I'm fascinated by it. The premise is that the squire of a small Cornish village, who was raised in the Caribbean before being called home to take over after his father's death, has turned to voodoo to try to get workers to reopen the tin mines that made the village's fortune.

The movie sits neatly in an uneasy horror space between the original horror of the zombie - of your will being overridden by another's, of continuing to be enslaved even after death should have released you from all earthly woes - and Romero's ghouls and everything that they spawned. A nightmare sequence features hands pushing up out of fresh-dug graves, dead faces closing in all around one of our protagonists - but in the end, the only person the zombies are truly dangerous to is the man who created them. The true horror of the story is the absolute power that the squire holds over the people of the village, made metaphorical as voodoo.

The tin mines were closed after multiple fatal accidents caused the men of the village to refuse to work there anymore, so the squire removed their ability to refuse by killing and raising them as zombies. At the end of the day, he owns these people, body and soul, and there's nothing that the police or the vicar or anyone else who is supposed to be responsible for the villagers' wellbeing can do, so long as the squire holds this position of absolute power.

If you feel you simply must transplant zombie horror based in voodoo into a white European context, I feel like using it to highlight the injustices of a system of government directly descended from feudalism is not the worst choice you could make.

[sakom75]

xmas gift for @shithowdy!! A flashback scene from the ongoing Fallout RP, Oliver and a much younger Dr. Wei (seen here, 3rd image down) during a nightstalker ambush.

[alipeeps]

Ahhh there's full MV of the ending theme dancing. It's fucking adorable and it's breaking my heart.

[gomzdrawfr]

You asked for asks so I'm here to ask you to hype yourself up. What's your favourite piece that you think deserves more love?

Grah how dare uuuu /j

Well def the latest priceghost piece but im also over it 😂 engagements works differently across all site and unfortunately this one got bonked real fuckin’ hard by the system here on tumblr

[byanyan]

ok minor updates to byan's carrd: updated file to include neurodivergent developments, added their arcane verse (i'll do a proper writeup for it one day i swear), and removed someone from mains who isn't in my life anymore + the verse associated with them

[moeblob]

It's been stormy all day and we lost power and I have no energy take OCs I've been thinking about recently after ignoring them for a long time.

Tremaine (left) and his wonderful and amazing and superb big brother Germaine (right) while Tremaine talks about his brother's best friend because best friends like each other which is a good topic to talk about with the person you admire most! (Germaine then goes to find Motka and accuse him of trying to win over his sweet little brother's heart and how that's really mean to do how dare you betray him like this. Motka just sighs bc it's only the millionth time it's happened)

They're just part of a group based on the layers of hell and hoo boy they are just ... the most codependent siblings to ever sibling probably. It's pretty bad.

[larkspire]

i just realized almost every secret shanghai character has faked their own death at some point

[lynnthefrenchtoast]

if you wish to save the common people then my wish is only you if your dream is to save the common people then my dream is only IF YOU WISH TO SAVE THE COMMON PEOPLE THEN MY WISH IS ONLY--!!

[hotwaterandmilk]

I'm still not well so this isn't going to be articulate, but I wanted to say something anyway.

In the wake of Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies (amongst other titles) being purged from streaming I've seen countless posts saying "This is terrible, we need to stop this practice -- they might purge a good show next!" and yeah, for sure a lot of titles being impacted by streaming purges/lack of physical media/a decline in archiving right now aren't going to be remembered for changing the world.

However, I think it is vital that we fight to preserve these titles for their own sake not just because "What if next time it's something we actually like?!" There is value is preserving things widely regarded as "bad" not just because I have firm beliefs about the absurdity of taste, but because who gives a shit if something is deemed "good?" Actual human people put their time and energy into realising these artistic visions. Even if the results are arguably not "good" or "popular", should the efforts of these artists be lost to the sands of time? No, no they fucking shouldn't.

I share a lot of art on this blog from titles very few people consider culturally important or valuabe. However, I don't look at the things I collect & share like that. Even some of the most objectively absurd titles I own are still pieces of art that were developed, published, and consumed by humans in the real world. Whether they've turned out to be broadly memorable or not is irrelevant because they existed and that in itself makes them worthy of preservation so that others can choose to familiarise themselves with them long after the original creative team is gone.

So yes, we should all be trying to preserve the media that's important to us and not let corporations try to stamp out every trace of a financial (though not necessarily artistic) misstep. However, it shouldn't take the threat of something we, personally, like being taken away to stir us into giving a shit.

Even the demise of less admired works should concern us and make us start to burn copies of Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies because it might not mean anything to you or I right now, but to some kid in 20 years it could be a seminal experience that leads them to follow their dreams. Or it could become a cult classic that people reflect on at watch parties years in the future. Or it could continue to be a footnote in the history of television that nobody really cares about.

Ultimately I don't think it matters what level of value we arbitrarily assign to media now or in the future, we should be trying to preserve as much of it as possible so that generations from now people can enjoy the option of engaging with these titles should they so wish.

[subjectivemortality]

the world: do you like waking up early?

I like being up early, the waking up part is considerably less likable

[coffeeworldsasaki]

One would think that when you're someone that has to constantly do fiber crafts to not have breakdowns and then decided to try to put on sale stuff you make you would be calm, since there's literally nothing to lose in trying and there's fundamentally no change in your life whatsoever but no, when you have anxiety even this literally 0 effort thing is nerve wracking 🙃

[naivety]

have to go pick up a washing machine tomorrow a coworker snagged for $75 [!] and lug it all the way upstairs [....] to hook up before somehow draining the old one [...] because it broke mid-cycle washing sheets not once but twice thrown up on by cat [...] and we can't even get it to drain [....] 🙏 and hopefully finish putting together a 2 weeks late little birthday gift box for my sibling because i literally forgot until the night before and wanted to die. and get my axle looked at cause it might be bent. day off ❤️

[teh-nos]

sorting your fandom's fics by kudos to depress yourself 👍fantastic idea. DON'T DO IT.

[camfusedly]

Hi Cameron ! I love the concept of rock reading (what stones do you use and why did you choose these specific stones ? Since there is such a variety of stones/attributes to them I’m quite curious about this aspect as if for instance you follow the astrology wheel or the tarot order like I’ve read stones can be linked to major and minor arcana cards).

And I would love to have a general guidance using this technique if you don’t mind please :) thanks for it and have a nice day/ night ! S.

Hi S.! Thanks for the question!

(To anyone else, this is about my call for rock reading questions, which I've gotten a bunch by the way! I'm excited to crack down on these tomorrow.)

I have been doing this for two years now (two years?? Time flies), and I'm also self-taught/internet-taught, so I am not an expert and your mileage may vary! :)

My sense of people who do rock readings (better known by the unmemorable term "lithomancy" lol) is that they often either learn tarot or astrology first, and then apply that framework to doing rock reading. For example, one of the first things that comes up when you google lithomancy is a framework where most of the rocks correspond to a planet. So someone who does astrology could cast the stones and read it like an astrology chart.

A handful of my rocks

I come from tarot, but to me it's less a strict sense of one-to-one relationship between a certain rock and a certain card, and more about the framework: Every object has a specific, pre-determined meaning (card/rock), and I am drawing them in a randomized way (from the deck/from a bag) and I make meaning from the randomized relationships between the objects (where a card turns up in a tarot spread/how stones randomly fall on the surface I use (it's literally a cat bed lol)).

If I remember correctly, most of the online info has you cast your whole set of rocks for every reading (and a manageable set of 8-12 or so rocks) but I prefer to have a bigger pool in the bag and draw randomly. (Again, the tarot framework, though I certainly don't have 78 rocks, lol.)

To answer your actual question about selecting rocks, I think my rock collection mostly comes from a magpie-like desire to collect pretty shiny things. I don't look up meanings for the rocks online, instead I pick a meaning for each rock based on what it looks like to me. (I have an excel doc with pictures, lol.) Each meaning I give a rock gives my collection that word in its "vocab," and so sometimes I will specifically search out a stone that can mean something I feel is missing from my collection's "vocab."

I think there's something very ancient about selecting a few random objects and tossing them in order to learn something unknowable. I just read 1 and 2 Samuel from the Bible (I'm an atheist, it's a whole thing, I was posting about it, lol) but in those books, they cast lots ALL OF THE TIME in order to learn the will of god. And we don't really know how casting lots worked or what type of thing the objects were, but "tossing stones randomly on the ground" very well could be what they did!

I hope these disorganized thoughts helped you picture how this works! Let me know if you have any follow-up questions, and I think seeing some samples when I do the reading tomorrow may also help you understand. :)