#a reflection of what shines

[saltedplumtea]

Paul Billings, finally having to threaten to torture people in order to get information multiple times while Hank sits beside him, very clearly not having a good month while a literal rebellion is forming around him and everyone is practically setting the pact on fire: >:[

Me: [kicking my feet and twirling my hair] I hope he finds out about the wall of names! I think that'd be a nice treat 🥰

[saltedplumtea]

Everything stated above plus a small emergency/first aid kit. Maybe a snack. Winter gear goes into the bag when I'm inside if it's the season.

Coat/pant pockets can't hold everything, and it's helpful to have a place to put my stuff that is not my hand or pocket.

@ people who carry bags everywhere what do you put in them what is there to bring other than chapstick, keys, phone and maybe a tampon why are you packing a suitcase to be outside for 5 hours

[demigods-posts]

i'm one hundred percent certain that after percy and annabeth made out underwater. and he wanted to make their relationship official. the question was not "will you be my girlfriend?" but "can i be your boyfriend?" i don't care what the canon says. percy gave annabeth the space to take the lead in the relationship. because after a lifetime of being abandoned by everyone she dared to care for. and then watching her on the brink of a panic attack at the thought of losing him the last four years. he wanted to honor a new beginning between them by follow her lead and moving at her pace.

[saltedplumtea]

My uni's fellowship application page hasn't been updated for the current semester and is unclear about deadlines and my research prof is driving home so she can't email a clarification so I'm just. Sitting here checking my email every few minutes hoping I'll get a response soon so I don't have to submit a draft application rather than a edited one 🙃

[saltedplumtea]

Not eating/drinking because you're worried about how "healthy" something is doesn't do anything other than make your body feel infinitely worse. Eating/drinking the thing will give your body energy, always. Do it.

It's always better to eat or drink "junk" than to not eat or drink at all, okay. Full stop. End of statement.

[somegrumpynerd]

Actually it turns out I had more thoughts about that post that I forgot about lol

Would Nightmare actually give up his boys? Yes and no

If it was just a black and white situation of they're miserable, they don't wanna be here, they have somewhere better to be, then yes. He would leave them out to wherever they needed to be despite his own feelings and very quickly realise afterwards just how much he'd gotten used to the noise and company. I think he would get a little clingy with Dream about it, which I'm sure Dream would find very weird after everything but not unwelcome, he did miss his brother after all.

(If he couldn't attach himself to Dream's side for whatever reason, I think he might just sit in his castle and go insane. Or maybe he'd just spend all day at Ccino's trying really hard to project that he just likes the atmosphere and isn't lonely as hell)

But the thing is, most of them don't have somewhere better to be. Horror has his au, and Nightmare would keep up the supply of food even if Horror said he wanted to quit at this point, so he would understandably let him return home. Killer, Dust and Cross effectively don't have aus anymore though, and they tend to get into self-destructive habits when they're left to their own devices. (Obviously bringing Color and Epic into the mix to make sure Killer and Cross are taken care of eases matters, but Dust doesn't really have any friends outside their group he could go stay with - that Nightmare knows about at least).

The flipside of this is that his boys may not necessarily want to be given up. I think if Nightmare got really in his head about this he could easily end up convinced this is the right thing to do without ever asking them if it's what they want, with potentially terrible results. He's established such a pattern of always returning to find Killer when they get seperated, that if he never showed up Killer might just keep sitting there and waiting for him greyfriar's bobby style, refusing to leave because he's certain his boss is coming back.

[incomingalbatross]

I'm trying out another kindle unlimited author, recommended by a friend from school, and currently I am halfway through the first book of a trilogy trying to process "why don't I care about this protagonist" into something actually halfway analytical.

I think there's SOMETHING there about the difference between a powerless character (fine and cool) vs a passive one (hard for me to get invested). Even or especially if the character has the power to DO very little, I think creators need to show them caring about things! Making judgments! Having internal lines drawn or goals their limited choices are driven by!

But this MAY just be my definite personal bias toward liking characters who enter the scene with strong moral convictions.

[saltedplumtea]

Occasionally the MCU hyperfixation circles back around again and I'll dive into the character tags. And as always, the amount of Sam Wilson crossover in the Steve Rogers tag is minimal which is hugely disappointing!!! They're best friends and close partners (and if we're gonna be shipping then their chemistry is out of the park)!! From the moment Sam is introduced he is in literally almost every sequence of the movies beside Steve, till Steve gets Joe Biden'd in endgame. More Sam Wilson 2k25!!!

[saltedplumtea]

instructions unclear, my jaw is now dislocated

girl unhinge ur jaw

[front-facing-pokemon]

[httyd-art-requests]

love all the dragons so far! could i request skyfire from rise of berk? i love typhoomerangs and the colours got me good

I had no idea which dragon this was in the game but now I do and holy MOLY!! This guy is awesome, thank you for requesting him <33

Dragon #37 - Skyfire (Rise of Berk)

I love the glowing firework theme this guy has going on

[saltedplumtea]

I'm gonna steal the beginning of this format to explain why Chinese isn't actually hard to learn for everyone next time someone says that to me. Unfortunately, I can't steal the struggles with prosody. Have a mooncake instead?

Chinese languages are perfectly fine for people to learn and not inherently more difficult because people deal differently with different linguistic features. Tumblr user salvadorbonaparte who gave up learning Japanese age 12 because they got intimidated by kanji and who struggles with prosody in their non tonal languages however.....

[moonshynecybin]

In fco verse when journos do motogp journos things and ask awkward questions like, you said marc was reckless dangerous blah blah, has your view changed or do you still consider it so. How does vale react because it's funny if he says less kisses in bed because now it's true or if he defends it's a reality check for him

this is interesting because i think those little jokes are like. key to the overall thesis on vale’s relationship to the press/media and how he protects himself. funny little deflections are the BEST way to avoid a question because they’re funny ! people like them ! no one is offended and you don’t even have to answer a question that you don’t want to answer… and i do think. mister Gen X addicted to lighthearted gay sex jokes MAKING one of those jokes and seeing eight million stories (i will say that their irl gay sex jokes already have a bunch of news articles god BLESS) that actually and forreal reference his gay sex life is like. weird for him. i mean he loves PDA (they both do lmao) and showing off a hot partner and making outrageous statements about his sex life (max biaggi penis interview. mile high club. etc.) but that doesn’t MATTER. that doesn’t chip at the tender little place inside him that turns over every time he sees marc smiling, soaked with champagne, below him on the top step of the podium.

it’s also. and this is maybe less fun but i stand by it !! one of his little ways to still assert power over marc i think. like especially if he’s still in competition with him, especially if his ego is threatened or he feels really vulnerable about the whole thing which i think he DOES but is ignoring like a champ. like YES this story is about him coming out with marc in order to sort of. shield him from that bullet of being forced out of the closet, but that doesn’t get rid of his weird rivalry complexes. that doesn’t stop him from wanting to win against marc. that doesn’t stop the aforementioned bullet from hurting. so idk i think it takes a minute for him to let go of some bad habits ! and maybe that minute includes a sexy sort of realization that marc winning reflects well on HIM as marc’s PARTNER. and a lot of positive reinforcement via postrace sex

[arianna-irwynarn]

It's comp time!

This week is an arty one! I really like this theme!

Good luck everyone!

Rei

[fyeahygocardart]

Wake Up Your Elemental HERO

[genshin-stats]

On Natlan Characters' Skin Colors

I sampled the skin colors of all of the characters in Genshin Impact with unique models, as well as the upcoming Natlan characters. I didn't include NPCs as there are over 3,000, guaranteeing neutral lighting is difficult, and this blog is a side project. I tried to get the lightest part of the face from the character cards where I could, but there were some cases where I had to find another spot (for instance, Raiden Shogun's face has a purple tint due to her artwork featuring her pulling out a glowing Musou no Hitotachi, but her thighs do not have such a tint). Then, I looked up a list of various foundation brands (listed in the tags), with a focus on getting a wide range of shades. This let me sample the colors of foundation offered (as a stand in for real life human skin tones).

I then took the hex code samples online and calculated the relative luminance of that particular color. Luminance is a measure of reflectivity or brightness of a color. It's a weighted average of the red, green, and blue components of a color. True White (#FFFFFF) has a luminance of 1.00 and True Black (#000000) has a luminance of 0.00. With the luminance of all skin colors calculated, I then graphed it based on luminance. The graph is shown below.

These figures have the top 25% of the sample represented by the line on the top, the middle 50% represented by the box, and the bottom 25% represented by the line underneath. For example, with Liyue's sample size of 20, we would see that the top 5 luminant skin colors range from roughly 0.96 to roughly 0.91 or 0.92. Then, the middle 10 luminance values range from 0.91 to 0.86. The lower 5 luminance values range from 0.86 to about 0.47.

Looking at these graphs, I can only draw one conclusion, especially with the small sample size of Natlan characters right now. They are darker than many of the other nations' characters. They still look very light, however. That may be due, in part or in whole, to the fact that the Natlan characters really start to show up in the same range as the lightest foundation shades I examined (and not for lack of searching!).

There are two issues at play here, ones that became even more noticeable with the release/marketing of Sumeru and Natlan characters.

The skin colors are over-all very light. The lightest foundation shade I found has a luminance of 0.86, while that the 25th percentile for the luminance of Genshin Impact characters.

Hoyoverse has a very strong bias towards making their characters lighter skinned.

Issue 2 is somewhat visible in the graphs shown above, but it's better illustrated in this one below.

[By "% Lighter" on the y-axis, that is the percent of the sampled population that has a greater luminance than the position on the x-axis. For instance, going up from 0.20 luminance on the x-axis, we see that 70% of foundation shades sampled were lighter than that.]

For the makeup, you see that it decreases fairly steadily, showing a reasonable distribution throughout. Genshin Characters, on the other hand, show a steep drop around 0.85 luminance to 0.95. That indicates that the majority of the over 90 characters used for this study are around there. Again, 0.85 was the very highest end for the foundations.

I have a few other graphs I made while making the other ones that can help illustrate just how much lighter Hoyoverse's characters in Genshin Impact are in comparison to a real human range.

Focus is on Natlan right now, which is fully understandable, but the issue is much deeper than just them. It's all the characters from all of the nations. The only solution is to bring all of them to a more human range, and add more variety.