#alas blog

[alasblogpoetry]

soda

the broken glass glinted off the street lamp on the corner. the old soda can sang to its own tune a sickening drip drip drip like the sugar liquid spilling over the cracks. the open sign flickered and then it went out a forgotten earring precious metal discarded and abandoned. (pushed by the wind) it went: crack splinter crack drip drip drip flicker bzzZZZzzZZt flicker clink clatter clink and drip drip drip.

[phantom-peachie]

hhhh,,, skyward sword,,

screams incoherently

[coltonclay]

“The trans community is split between whether you like trans women or not” that is NOT what the discourse is about, and you know it. Trans men are just asking you to recognize that we have specific experiences with our specific marginalization and we would like a word to talk about that and acknowledgement from others that it’s happening. You’re making the connection that “if X happens to trans men the opposite must happen to trans women” because you’re fucking stupid and not actually listening to us. You’re being intentionally obtuse at this point because you’ve got it in your head that women good, men bad.

[tigerbite-art]

reposts an old art some people may remember from the ancient times...the foundational times. the dinosaur ages.

[dkettchen]

Zoro def likes girls, def not just trans ppl who can fight him on equal footing hm hm

[arthursfuckinghat]

The sun is your halo, for it is always above you.

Arthur and Weetabix 𑁦𐂂𑁦 Scarlett Meadows

[vincentbriggs]

Dear person on the bus this morning with the Dracula quote tattoo whose phone was open to my youtube channel, sorry I pretended not to notice and also was too shy to say hello

[viablemess]

Hey you. You know you should be doing The Thing. I don't want to do The Thing, either. But we can sit down and do it for 2 minutes together. Then we can do it for 5 minutes. Then 10. And so on and so forth until it is done. I'll be coming back to reiterate this.

To whoever needs to hear it: it does not have to be perfect. It does not have to be world altering. It just needs to be done. And I'll sit with you while you do The Thing.

Now go. Stop scrolling. Go work on The Thing. I'll be back to check on you and cheer us both on.

[snakeoid]

quick doodle break astarions so i could look at something else for a bit

[kawareo]

Transformers Animated is so funny because specifically Megatron doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that he is in a kids' show. This man is taking everything so seriously. He goes for the kill all the time. He ignores all the 'this show is for kids' things around him. He spends an entire season as a cut off head and tries to kill the main cast at every moment anyway. Starscream betrays him again and he kills him. Starscream keeps coming back from the dead like a cartoon character? Megs kills him again. And again. Dumps his body out and goes back to serious business. Heroes keep attacking him? Fuck you he's bringing out a wholeass sword and a gun and he will use them. Never gonna forget the one time where Optimus saves him and then immediately after Megs picks him up and uses him as a shield. Everyone around him keeps doing and saying silly stuff for the funsies and he ignores them. Amazing. Irredeemable. He does not deal with cartoony stuff and mostly ignores anything that is like a kids show.

Like you could pick him up and plop him into TFP or IDW no problem, he's straight up a genocidal dictator. I love him and his non-silly ass

[alasblogpoetry]

post meridiem

seven : thirty-seven; my back on frozen solid dirt, my eyeballs pierce into heaven; i see the dashing yellow lights and scattered neon signs of godless civilization, i cannot hear a thing; people all around on earth, yet not soul with me in space; the cosmos begs: whom was i at birth?; why am i the i i know?; am i?; i'm the kindest sinner, wittiest moron, i'm so alive for someone who is dead; i'm a conscious oxymoron; i breathe in pride, breathe out regret; i reach up into the sky, my hand concealing jupiter and polaris; i close my eyes and the universe stops, leaving but a taste of the past, a taste so sweet and bitter; i close my eyes and the neon signs vanish, leaving but one self-conscious oxymoron: would i be the i i know, had the yellow lights been blue?, had jupiter been my north?; would regretful pride still be this sweet?; am i of virtuous nature?; seven : thirty-eight;

[adragonsfriend]

Use this one trick to instantly fix all childhood trauma (Jedi Masters don’t want you to know this)!!!!!

That is what every “if Obi-Wan had just— *adds one extra scene to canon* —then Anakin would’ve had perfect mental health and never listened to Palpatine at all,” sounds like to me. Look I am not an expert on any kind of psychology at all let alone early childhood development but,

It is possible to do your very best to help or raise someone and still have bad or imperfect outcomes, especially when you have someone actively, secretly working against you (cough cough Sith Lord of the month cough), (for many reasons, but in this case particularly), because unravelling the mindset built in early childhood is hard, actually.

Coming at this from the “raised in a safe and loving environment” side of things, it took me years to figure out and internalize that my friends whose parents weren’t as great as mine were functioning in an entirely different landscape when it came to their interactions with adults.

Many years ago when I was in middle school a friend (acquaintance? idk I think most people thought I was annoying) told me that her ankle kept giving out and causing her pain. I asked if she'd told her parents so she could rest or go to the doctor. She told me she had, but her mother either hadn't listened or refused to help. My (approximate) responses?

"So it's not actually that bad then?"

"You should tell her again."

"Are you sure you explained it right?"

The only explanation I could comprehend at the time was that there must have been some unclear communication about the situation or its severity--if her mother had understood she was in pain, she couldn't possibly have just not done anything about it? Adults are responsible, caring, etcetera! They wouldn't do that?!

With more experience, I've come to understand better, and learned to respond in kinder, more helpful ways, but the shift in mindset was not and is not intuitive.

And I had the luxury of figuring all that out whilst being safe myself. Coming from the other direction, being in danger and trying to figure out why other people act like the world is safe? I can't say for sure, but I imagine it’s a lot more complicated.

Point with regard to Star Wars being, it really is harder for Anakin, coming in later, to acclimate to the Jedi ways and thought processes than it is for his peers who grew up in the safe environment of the Temple. And whatever arguments people want to have about how much psychology and therapy exist in the Star Wars universe, or how much “Jedi just do cognitive behavioral therapy” (not totally inaccurate, but reductive on several levels), no matter what the answers to those questions, it will still be harder for Anakin.

There is a reason the council changes its mind on training him only after he is suddenly famous and the Sith are proven to be back. When Anakin was not in significant danger of being snatched up by someone else, it was genuinely probably the easier and safer option—for him and everyone else—for him to live a different life.

The Jedi are not necessarily fully prepared for a child with Anakin's history, and, there is nothing bad about living an ordinary life. Anakin would not have been somehow unforgivably robbed by living life as a mechanic or an engineer or something, rather than being a Jedi.

Anakin is a victim of many things in his life—Sidious, Watto, Gardulla, Tatooine’s everything, his own conscious choices—but he is not a victim of malice, incompetence, or idiocy by the Jedi just because they couldn't—in only a decade or so—help him fully and perfectly unravel the mindset he developed in his early childhood. If there was any lack of qualification on their part, it was one they were aware of—but which was outweighed by the danger of little Anakin getting kidnapped out of normal-kid elementary school.

Being brought up in and around slavery absolutely made him more vulnerable to Sidous and became the basis of their dynamic as master and apprentice. Acting like the trauma that affects his mindset and actions for his entire life can be obliterated just by making minimal changes to the plot is wild to me.

And don’t get me wrong, fics and headcanons can do whatever they want, not everyone wants or is trying to write a deep psychological character study (also fanfic and even fiction in general cannot and should not be held to any standard of realism if it's not serving the story and the author)—simple fix-it’s (my love) are fun and an excellent short-cut to other things like happiness and fluff (my other loves)—but don’t act serious about the idea that adding one conversation about his feelings or one extra explanation about Jedi philosophy would automatically lead to Anakin having perfect mental health outcomes and always making good decisions.

Disclaimer (if the ones throughout weren't enough) : please go forth and do whatever you want. the moral of this post is actually just that (1) you won’t convince me, (2) I wanted to talk about this, (3) the clickbait title was too funny not to post, (4) i literally can't open my mouth without phrasing things like i'm in the middle of a heated debate, and (5) i continue to not be an expert in early childhood development—my evidence is very literally anecdotal

[dailyloopdeloop]

DAY 94: antiquing

[dkettchen]

tangerine picnicking

[anghraine]

While I'm on my disruptive Tolkien opinions kick:

Yes, obviously, he was a conservative Catholic and this was really important to his understanding of the world and pervades his work and so on and so forth.

But I'm a bit "..." about reducing everything he thought and felt about the world to that. Like, yeah, there's a tradition of conservative pastoralism that meant the context of his environmental opinions was not inherently progressive in the way it can mistakenly seem in 2024. Do I think he was Like That about trees because of conservative pastoralism, or his Catholicism, or that the particular form taken by his TREES TREES TREES #OLDMANWILLOWDIDNOTHINGWRONG TREEEEEEEEES ethos much resembles most of his contemporaries' feelings?

Not really.

I mean, he would never have said it, but I kind of doubt whether his very sincere and deeply felt veneration of the actual figures of his religion was truly comparable to how he felt about things like That One Oak on the Corner That I Liked Got Chopped Down by Evildoers. I've read other conservative British writers of this era who have their own forms of pastoralism and most of them are way less intense about it. I truly don't think Tolkien loved trees the way he did Because Catholicism or whatnot. I genuinely think he just really loved trees.

Basically, I can imagine some alternate universe in which alternate Tolkien ends up with really different beliefs about religion, about politics, about all sorts of things. But I can absolutely not imagine a universe in which any version of Tolkien did not take the part of trees against all their enemies.

[someiicecube]

im normal about this IF game, i swear