#Using props

[williamrablan]

Transforming Stage Fright into Confidence: A Personal Journey

Daily writing promptHave you ever performed on stage or given a speech?View all responses  For many, the idea of talking in public is about as close an approximation to hell on Earth as you’re ever likely to get. People find that their voice quivers, their mind goes blank, and it takes everything they have to desperately get from “Good morning” to “Thank you.” For me, speaking in public started…

[bbugspray]

I love love love all the wall painting options, but this one really stuck w me

[platoapproved]

armand & louis playing out echoes of his relationship with marius

[ihatebrainstorm]

[It's Just a Theory!]

Just a simple theoretical discussion ^v^

Wanted to see what he would sound like with MatPat's voice then got. just a tinyyy bit carried away..........

[saint-nevermore]

PHEN-228 taking a fat bong rip at a frat party

[mxtwister]

"Wah wah he's so booooring that's why I leave him in camp constantly and never give him the chance to be interesting" you are weak and you will not survive the winter

[thebluebygracieabrams]

is anybody in else still thinking about this

[gingerswagfreckles]

Am I the only one who gets straight up infuriated when I see this post and the number of notes it has? I know it's not very Kumbaya of me but yeah it does piss me off how many thousands upon thousands of Hamas supporters will reblog posts about how Jews support THEM but god fucking forbid we ask them to stop straight up celebrating antisemitic terrorism.

Literally not a single post about antisemitism has even broken 1k notes since Oct 7th (unless it's about Elon Musk, who they already hate). It's unlikely any post about purely Jewish issues will ever recieve this kind of attention ever again. I don't know man. It makes me angry. Stop using Jews as props to support progressive policies and then straight up celebrating our deaths in the next breath.

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[magic-worms]

got da freakin intel

closeups because the quality will definitely be violently crunched on this one!!

[spacedace]

I've seen the concept of Jason being adopted by various people other than Bruce while he was still a little tire stealing Crime Ally kid a few times, but I've yet to see anyone put forth the idea of Duke and his family taking him in.

Like, depending on the continuity Jason and Duke are only like 4 or 5 years apart in age, and we know for a fact that Duke was a terrifyingly brilliant kid already shaping up to be able to take down the Riddler in a battle of wits at the age of 9. Now throw in protective older brother Jason into that mix who didn't think twice about trying to steal the tires off the Batmobile and then try and hit Batman with a damn tire iron when he was caught.

Just imagine how terrifying it would be with the two of them growing up constantly feeding each other's unhinged Fight God and the Devil in a Waffle House Parking Lot at 3am and Win energy. Imagine the chaos they would cause. The terror they would strike into the hearts of their enemies- all before Duke ever even gor his powers.

They would be unstoppable. Just a pair of two of the smartest motherfuckers you've ever met who know they're smarter than you, and the only thing sharper than their minds are their vicious verbal take downs.

Also I just have the imagine in my head of Doug Thomas, half asleep early one Saturday morning stumbling into the kitchen after following the smell of breakfast to see his 8 year old son happily stuffing the most delicious looking pancakes imaginable into his mouth. Blinking in confusion as he realizes it's not his beloved wife cooking but some scrawny kid in worn out clothes, covered in engine grease and bruises manning the stove like a seasoned line cook - complete with the most foul mouthed swearing even Doug, a construction worker, has ever heard in his life and a cigarette tucked behind the kids ear.

And Doug has a moment where he's just staring, full on Who's Goddamn White Baby is That? when Duke pipes up to explain:

"This is Jason! I caught him trying to steal your catalytic converter this morning. His mom's dead and his dad is a deadbeat so he's gonna stay with us now!"

And oh. Well. Shit. He knows that look in his son's eye. Knows he's already lost the fight before it evan began. It looks like it's theirs. It's their god damn white baby now.

He's gonna have to call Elaine.

(Elaine, for her part, goes through the full range of human emotions when she gets home to realize that the boy Duke has decided they're adopting is the Todd boy Elaine has been trying to track down for months now.

She's Jason's social worker, not that she's been able to really do her job and help him when he's managed to stay under the radar of every single vaguely responsible adult in a ten mile radius. The one time he had been picked up by one of the few decent cops in the city and Elaine thought she was going to be able to finally finally help him, Jason had managed to climb out of a window of the precinct bathroom and disappear into the night.

He'd managed to steal the hubcaps of six different patrol vehicles while he was at it. Just to rub it in that there was nothing they could do to stop him.

Point was, the kid has been her damn white whale for almost a year. And now she walks into her home after a maddening unhelpful phone call with Doug about needing paperwork to adopt a child only to find the boy she'd spent so long looking for teaching Duke how to take apart and reassemble their toaster in the living room.

She isn't sure if she wants to laugh or cry.

She is sure that there's no way she's going to be able to convince Duke that they can't just adopt his new friend, not when she can tell that both boys have already gotten attached to each other in the scarce few hours they've known one other. Or when her husband is just sitting there eating delicious pancakes with such resignation in his eyes.)

[bloggingboutburgers]

We see you talk about being aro ace all of the time, but rarely do we get to see you talk about being a lesbian

Is there a specific reason for that?

...Cus I'm not a lesbian?

[catostrofiqu]

Danny the Aggressive seamstress.

So I can see this as the justice league looking to hire both someone to help newcomers with costumes and also help fix up old costumes.

Batman finds out about Danny looking into Tailors and seamstresses. He decideds a retired superhero probably knows how costumes should be functional as well as comfortable.

I can see Danny as just an old mentor Esk figure for the younger age group.

Not many of the younger age group take him seriously until he beats up Darkseid with an L square ruler

[snowyfrostshadows]

So.

We went from this for Starclan Cats:

To.

This:

Biggest downgrade of my life.

[whathorselegs]

Teen Chuuya with reading glasses

Dazai, whilst explaining his plan for how they're going to infiltrate a building, spreads a set of building blueprints across the table. He points to various sections of the map. "Okay, so you're going through here and-"

"Wait, wait-" Chuuya interrupts him. "I can't see the plans." He makes a show of getting out his glasses, sliding them on and blinking into focus. He looks directly at Dazai, not the map, Dazai and recoils. "EW, I take it back, I'd rather be blind that see that!" Then takes his glasses off again.

To which Dazai starts hitting Chuuya with the tube the blueprints came in shouting, "That's not how reading glasses work and you know it!"

---

Chuuya is reading in the HQ lobby. He doesn't have anymore responsibilities today so he decides to wind down with a book.

He's been ignoring Dazai who's been silently stood in front of him for a full 2 minutes now, just watching him. Finally, he gives in, asking Dazai what he could possibly want.

"You know Chuuya," Dazai leans forward, his finger delicately brush Chuuya's cheek as he takes hold of Chuuya's glasses and lowers them from his face. "You'd be so pretty without-"

He pauses scrunching up his face in disgust and putting the glasses back on Chuuya. "Nevermind, my mistake."

Then he bolts, knowing Chuuya is about to throw his book at him.

[volvolts]

part 7: to town

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(content warning: self harm (no on screen action but placed emphasis). proceeds under the cut)