#The Versus Event

[egophiliac]

c. can i ask what's happening with idia during the whole tsum thing

Idia gets into a fistfight with his tsum and loses

[ghostslazy]

Extremely rough first stab at the Taz Vs. Dracula lineup bc I love them all so so much already and don’t have the time to finish a lineup of characters for fun rn 🥲

Close up sketches, design notes and surprise drac under the break:

Travis’ characters are always the hardest for me to design idk why, but I made him very western inspired with some vampire hunting flair. Lady Agatha Thistle’s breed was one I hadn’t heard of before but I love a good blood hound. I always end up making Travis’s chapters warm toned, they’re all very red/orange coded to me. (Beef would be the exception I think he’s very pink and blue in my mind)

Clint always makes the sweetest roundest characters I love designing his. I wish we had a cannon spelling because there’s so many directions you can go with “Filo” also his characters are usually green or green adjacent to me. I cant wait to see him bust out more booger potions

Justin never misses with a character and I cling onto every single one he makes so quickly and violently it’s getting embarrassing. I like the idea that she would still dress extremely fancy and posh even tho her new body should be in some battle ready armor. Also I made her blue since she is a Frankenstein’s monster and most likely wouldn’t have the blood flow to have a human color. Plus I love the monster high color palettes so I’m referencing a little bit. Justin has very cool coded characters to me, lots of blue and purple and forest greens.

Probably not sticking with this Dracula design but I want him to love a bit more silly and slick, I think having him be lanky and shorter will pair him very well against our rough and rowdy boys

[aroaceleovaldez]

It's honestly wild to me that ToA went through so much trouble to emphasize the fact that Will did not magically fix all of Nico's problems and was explicitly not Nico's only doctor.

Only for TSATS to have Will fix all of Nico's problems and have Nico be entirely reliant on him the entire book and literally helpless without him and LITERALLY have Nico's problems be magically removed.

[vertigoartgore]

1991's Infinity Gauntlet Vol.1 #1-4 cover by artist George Pérez (R.I.P.).

[alliluyevas]

found this random website with trivia about LDS prophets and they have a “favorite hobbies” section I’m crying

the jock Joseph Smith versus the nerd Wilford Woodruff

[age-of-moonknight]

“The Once and Future Knight,” Phases of the Moon Knight (Vol. 1/2024), #1.

Writer: Erica Schultz; Penciler: Manuel García; Inker: Sean Parsons; Colorist: Ceci de la Cruz; Letterer: Cory Petit

[solradguy]

Granblue Fantasy is dangerous because before Daisuke Ishiwatari turned me into a Guilty Gear, I was really into knights and European-ish folklore/mythology and I have 5 copies of Sir Gawain & The Green Knight and a bunch of grimoires just laying around my bedroom. They put Gawain in Granblue. I saw that there's an Excalibur for every day of the week and they remembered Durandal too. Haven't found Galatine yet—that's another sword I have a storage device named after. Don't wanna look it up. It's fun finding these things in a random menu/quest and being like aww hey buddy <3

It's awesome that all the knights are beautiful gorgeous pretty men, too. It's what they would have wanted

[juneblooom]

but daddy i love him is so stancy coded i might lose my mind

[toestalucia]

(smiling emoji) (smiling emoji) (smiling emoji) (SMILING EMOJI) GGGAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH more trailer stuff below

djeets expression especially;________;

can i be the most annoying djeeta gran fan who cannot stop thinking about them that uve ever seen on earth for a second

doen being the most annoying djeeta gran fan

anyhow that scene in general is so cool gggGAAAHHHHHHH

bro shes like as tall as vaseraga inbattle i might pass out the tail animation AAGGAGAHAHAHGHA THATS SO COOL SHES SO COOL

(INCOLSOLEABLE) KKAAAIITTTLLYNNNNNN

(long talk about the boundary & estalucia & the omnipotent)

SHES SO COOL SHES SO COOL SHES SO COOL HAHHAHAAHJDVHADHJASHJAHJ GAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[coochiequeens]

These men just don't want to be around kids otherwise they would be the fun uncle, volunteer for Big Brothers and Big Sisters, be ok with dating women with kids and have a good relationship with the step kids. They just think they were entitled to biological offspring.

Amelia Hill

@byameliahillMon 28 Aug 2023 11.00 EDT

Father’s Day is dangerous for Robert Nurden. Childless not through choice but, as he puts it, “complacency, bad luck, bad judgment”, he tries to stay indoors and ignore the family celebrations outside.

But one year, he went for a walk. “I met family after family. There were children everywhere,” he remembered. “It was terrible. Just so painful. So many ambushes and triggers for my anguish.”

There is very little research into men who have not had children, although that is beginning to change. Research by Dr Robin Hadley has found that 25% of men over 42 do not have children – 5% more than women of the same age group.

Half of the men who are not fathers but wanted to be describe a huge grief and isolation from society. Almost 40% have experienced depression and a quarter feel a deep anger

Now 72, Nurden had a sheltered upbringing. Reaching adulthood, there was a lot he wanted to experience. “Having children was a very low priority. I was complacent: I just assumed it would happen,” he said.

It was not until he was in his early 40s that Nurden started to get broody. But by that point, he discovered, women of a similar age had already had children, if they were able or wanted to.

“I went into this 15-year period of not going into relationships or ending relationships quickly because I knew that person wasn’t going to want or be able to have a child with me – or that the relationship wasn’t going to be strong enough to last if we did have a child,” said Nurden.

He said high-profile older fathers breed complacency in ordinary men. “If I’m honest, even when I was in my 50s I believed that it might happen for me. But in real life, the Mick Jagger and Jon Snow-age fathers are actually very rare – and in any case, it’s medically not wise, as regards sperm quality.”

What compounded Nurden’s pain was that there was no public or private discussion about how men feel when circumstance leaves them unable to become fathers.

“There’s lots of publicity, quite rightly, about women and childlessness but men are very mute about this. Married men don’t want to hear it either: I’ve had men with children react with anger, as though they feel threatened, when I’ve tried to talk about my pain,” he said.

“I was mute too until recently, because as I aged, I found the regret grew into a great pain,” he added. “Unlike many other forms of grief, this compounds itself as it gets older: I wasn’t a father but now I’m not a grandfather. When I’m even older, I might find myself entirely alone.”

Nurden has published a book, I Always Wanted to be a Dad: Men Without Children, about his story and that of some other men. “It turns out that there is a lot of pain, regret and sadness out there,” he said.

Hadley, the researcher, is childless because although his wife had wanted children, by the time she and Hadley met, her age meant the risk of having one was too great. “I chose love but that doesn’t make the pain of not having children any less,” he said. “When a close colleague had his first child, I was so jealous that I couldn’t be in the same room as him.”

Being a father is a marker of status in many countries, said Hadley, but not in the west. “While there has recently been a lot more public discussion about how to be a good father, we still don’t have any narrative or celebration about how important it is for men to become a father in the first place,” he said.

Paul Goulden, the chair of Ageing Without Children, said that, along with the lack of public dialogue about becoming a father, he was “not convinced that there’s this Game of Thrones genetic push felt by men to have children”.

Instead, he said: “There’s this mistaken belief that men are fertile across their lifespan, so there’s no imperative to get on with it.”

That complacency persists because men without children historically have not spoken about their grief. But, Goulden said: “I hope Robert’s book will trigger a change in public dialogue around this issue. I think there’s an overwhelming sense of loneliness and fear out there about who is going to be there for these men, when they’re old and all alone.”

I wonder what their exes for these men would about them. Because the bar for Father's is so low that women showing they didn't want kids with them should really be a sign to do some soul searching.

Personal experience.......I think of my ex fiance who constantly said he wanted ro get married and have kids. However his actions said he wanted me to have the kids while he worked full time, he didn't believe in daycare so no job for me, and he would have to go to the gym almost everyday, he had a physically demanding job, and of course have his weekly card night with his buddies. And yes I stated all my objections but he had tunnel vision when it came to his fantasy family life. There's more but those were the issues relevant to this article.

[thedragonagelesbian]

@isayashai replied to your post “i love the pacing and game design of daeran's...”:

YEAS!!!!!!!! BASS BOOSTING! also your tags. correct

​i'm going to use this reply as an excuse to complain asdfpisajdf wotr may not have bg3's hours of mocapped hyperreal companion cutscenes but it has so many more little moments that make the companions, whether you're romancing them or not, feel real & responsive & present in scenes beyond their individual personal quests. the extended culminating scenes are great too, but it's the little back and forths when resting, or how they interject in conversations, that always surprises & delights me. these conversations are shorter than the longer banters you get in dragon age or bg3, but the economy of wotr's writing is excellent, able to evoke interesting interpersonal dynamics or reveal different facets of each character with only a few dozen words each time.

i'm reminded of something brennan lee mulligan said about romances in actualplay-- characters have different facets, and a romance arc holds a different facet to the light. wotr's writing allows for so many more of those facets to be exposed, whereas in bg3, if you're not doing something that directly concerns a companion, the most you get is a one-line response from one randomly chosen companion

[artements]

Olivia, about a fact: "I didn't set it in stone. I find it very hard to carve in."

Olivia, slowly removing her heart-shaped sunglasses to reveal primordial rage: "Well, I f✨️cking never!"

Olivia, at Jacques: "Unorthodox display of hubris but very well."

Olivia, about herself: "I'm filled with anxiety but in a mysterious and nonchalant way."

Olivia, for a research paper: "Monty, how do you feel about homosexual geese?"

[rakiah]

Ok ok but Jade V.S. Leona has been on my mind for a while since Book 3! I honestly think our lion boy could mess him up he tried since all he has to do is touch him and the mer will dry out, plus shielding magic/bonus physical-intelligence strength (with Jade’s threats being mushroom fuckery/maybe his unique magic, and obvs advantage if they are underwater). Of course, this is only if Floyd and him are separated because I’m sure we all know they are virtually unstoppable together.

From this ask

Who I think will win a fight

Aaaah yes! A versus! I thought a bit of that one but the choice is quite easy in the end. We surely have two great tacticians, the show of their fight would be something! So we need to talk about the field. Jade has the advantage of the water field but Leona has the ground one and the air one. Even if he ends up in the water, I won't take the risk of surrounding a prey who can turn me into sand with a single touch.

So yeah, my answer is Leona.

[chipjrwibignaturals]

THOUGHT ABT CHIP JRWI INCIDENT 40 DEAD 32 WOUNDED

[starsailores]

heard an ominous knocking at my bedroom door and opened it to find my housemate holding a clump of spring onions with a massive block of ice frozen to the stems. this house is a fucking nightmare

[alpineshift]

whence-ever inspiration strikes, jealous!Jack is my favorite trope in 1386 fic and I feel you'd hit it absolutely out of the park. absolutely no pressure or expectations or anything at all, pls ignore if you want.

the glimpses we get of it in the "bewitched" when Jack's trying to figure out who Nico likes and your little endnote in the "april prompt collection" god so so so juicy!

on god please come back and tell me more of your thoughts on the jealous!Jack tropes!! 👀 I would simply like to hear it!!!

I can only imagine there's a certain kind of hunger all hockey players with their eyes on the silver prize have on teams that do survive the season and make it to a playoff run. And I'm channelling a lot of that into my fic version of jealous Jack LOL

I was surprised by the love that little endnote received! so here's a little snippet from the standalone wip so far 😇

“Are these all for Nico?” he demands, scrunching up handfuls of paper like they’re some kind of damning evidence. The guys all exchange looks. Jonas is the only one who speaks, giving Jack an exasperated look. “Yeah, because he was a pretty convincing actor last night and really played it up. You were watching the live feed, weren’t you?” “Of course I was, but I didn’t—there wasn’t—I didn’t see all this!” He waves the beer label at them, where an undeniably male scrawl announced yet another phone number, but it’s nearly incomprehensible. What a fucking idiot, to get the opportunity to give his contact info to Nico and fumble it with bad handwriting. These people don’t deserve him. “You get people flirting with you and dropping you their numbers every time we go out for drinks.” “I’m not working when we’re out. Plus, I don’t entertain any of that!” “Well, it’s not like these people knew we were working either,” Jonas says. “That’s the whole point of a stealth mission.” “Chill, Jack,” Timo says, staring at him like he’s grown an extra head. “People just handed these off to us when they saw we were with Neeks. We had to pretend like we were actually gonna give them to him.” An irrational lightning bolt of fear strikes Jack’s chest. “You didn’t, did you?” he asks. “No, obviously not—” Jack scoops up all of the numbers and stuffs them into the pockets of his sweater, scowling when he spies a fucking lipstick stain on one of them. don’t be a stranger, babe. 856-556-788 Cherri xoxo That one gets shredded and goes straight into the bin. “Oookay,” Jonas says.