#all the time. optimism!!

[kotaerukoto]

>Just a man, not a hero >Just a boy who had to sing this song >He cares very much >The world will never take his heart or break him >He will carry on

[artgletic]

case study of the self-identified god

[icewindandboringhorror]

On average, what is the total MONTHLY amount that you spend on dining out*?

*(This doesn't only count going out to restaurants, but also stuff like picking up fast food to bring home, getting a coffee on the way to work, getting a premade sandwich from a grocery store deli during lunch, buying a quick snack from a convenience store or food cart whilst walking somewhere, ordering a pizza or any other food to be delivered to your home, etc.)

*(If you often dine out in groups/as a household: calculate and divide the costs so that you get a Per Person average. This is for YOU individually, NOT the total household/group costs)

(I'm sure polls similar to this have been made before (very common topic), I just haven't personally seen one that I can remember, so, I was curious to do my own! I was discussing this with a group of people today and it was very interesting to see how widely the number varied between individuals. :0c )

(Reblog for bigger sample size if you can, and feel free to explain your answer in tags if there's anything extra to add!)

[mobius-m-mobius]

Existence is chaos. Nothing makes any sense, so we try to make some sense of it.

OWEN WILSON as MOBIUS M. MOBIUS in LOKI (2021 - )

[mintytrifecta]

Sorry but if you say you're "being realistic" or "seeing the world as it is" and then only spout of the negatives then you're not being realistic and your worldview will devour you whole. Pessimism is not realistic. There is no world void of joy and to believe that is to ignore the goodness in the world and only see things in an unrealistic, cynical perspective that is not and never will be how things are. Find some joy in the smallest of things or perish.

[invisible-pink-toast]

love jepp's character in sweet tooth. like his backstory is how he went from being a star football player, to the "hybrid catcher", to a bitter lonely wanderer but then from the start of the series his character arc is basically:

[thatorangedrank]

Little is Alyx 👎🏻

Little is Penny 👎🏻

Little is a reflection of Ruby in Vol.1 and is a physical representation of “healing your inner child” 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

[bobzora]

various star rail doodles + a comic

[childofmyth]

BUCCHIGIRI?! Episode 1-8 ED || Love Je t'aime

[phoenixkaptain]

Luke’s biggest character flaw isn’t impatience or arrogance… it’s reckless optimism.

Like, Luke doesn’t actually think he can beat Darth Fucking Vader in a fight. He wants to get revenge, yeah, but he doesn’t think he’s a better fighter than Darth Vader, he thinks he’s luckier than Darth Vader.

Luke isn’t actually suicidal, despite how little effort you’d have to put in to provide evidence that he could be. He thinks, no, he knows he’s lucky. He’s used to being lucky, even. His survival tactics all sort of depend on Luke being the luckiest person in the room at any given time.

And he isn’t actually all that lucky, that’s pretty obvious, but he really just thinks “If I stay alive long enough, things will eventually just work out.” Like he believes in the Force before he even knows about the Force, almost. Some thingd are just supposed to happen, and his own continued existence as a free man is one of those things, so if he waits long enough, an opportunity will eventually show itself and all Luke has to do is grab it.

He is stupidly optimistic about his chances. But, he’s also not wrong? Like, he doesn’t win his fight against Vader, but he’s also one of the only people who have fought Vader twice and not died either time. He went and rescued Leia without a plan beyond “rescue Leia” and he made it out relatively unscathed. He got captured by a wampa and hypothermia, one right after the other, and he only has to spend a bit of time floating in space jell-o that isn’t quite set. He goes to Dagobah and gets the training he requests from Yoda, despite Yoda not wanting to train him. He rescues Han from Jabba the Hutt, and he doesn’t get fed to a sarlacc in the process.

But really, just look at his final fight with Vader. Luke just honestly believes that everything will be fine. He really thinks he can just ask his dad to please chill out and Vader will. Luke tells the literal actual Emperor of the entire fucking galaxy “No. I will not become evil. And I won’t be evil because I’m not actually angry at anyone.” Luke is the luckiest man alive, because he is still somehow alive.

Heir to the Empire really has him thinking “If I stay alive long enough, an opportunity will present itself” on the planet Myrkr. As in, the planet covered in ysalamiri that cut him off entirely from the Force. As in, Luke doesn’t feel the Force telling him to be patient because it’ll all work out. Luke just believes that.

And it only really hit me as I read that novel. Luke is aggressively, stupidly, recklessly optimistic at all times about his chances of survival. Like, he is one meta joke away from just being actively aware that he is a protagonist and therefore can’t die in the middle of a plot. He’s optimistic about his own life, his dad’s life, his sister’s life, his droid’s life; Luke is the most optimistic man alive.

He is not the most cheerful person. There’s a difference between optimism and happiness, and Luke is a character who is constantly doubting himself, but he also just fully believes in his own ability to stay alive. Like he thinks “As long as I’m in mostly one piece, that’s a success :)” He thinks “wow I’m a terrible Jedi. I don’t know what a Jedi is, but I’m pretty sure I suck at it,” while at the same time being the character who believes in and listens to the Force more than Qui-Gon Jinn.

All this to say, I really hope that one day I can be as optimistic as Luke Skywalker. That man felled a galactic Empire with enthusiastic optimism and familial love alone, I wanna be like that.

[wundrousarts]

Today is (maybe) 100 days until Silverborn…

…so long as the September 26th date for the UK is real and doesn’t move again, lol.

[carlyraejepsans]

HELPP i found out about character AIs and im losing it over calling deltarune sans "a more manipulative personality" 😭😭 like whatt we've only seen this man like 2 times

sorry im being a hater hgfjdks but you're the sans understander

lmaoo character.ai, look where the fall of ai dungeon got us, smh. thank you for the compliment though!

[fowlfics]

OP Age Comparator

Hello OP writers! Have you ever wondered, "how old was this character when X happened?" or had to do the maths on the ages of a cast of characters at a specific point in time?

Would you like to simplify that process to a mere few clicks?

I have created a google sheet which contains the data of the 432 characters with canon ages*, allowing you to compare any set of up to ten people at once!

*I might be missing some minor characters who had their ages shared, but all the major ones should be available.

How it works is quite simple:

Use the dropdowns in columns E, H, K and cell M2, as needed. These only contain the letters of the alphabet

Use the other dropdown to select the character you want. This dropdown will only list characters whose name starts with the letter picked in the first dropdown

That's it!

Column A lists "years from current canon" (as of August 2024, in case Oda blindsides us with another timeskip lol)

Column B lists some major events that happened that year, up to 38 years before canon. For more events check out the World Timeline on the wiki

Column C lists the in-universe year

The link provided above (and also here) only allows for using dropdowns. Please feel free to copy the entire sheet into your own drive if this is something you would find useful!

If there are any errors you find, or something runs wrong, please do let me know and I'll fix it ASAP!

I cannot guarantee the sheet could run in excel or anyplace outside of google sheets. I can guarantee the sheet won't run if you only copy the visible tab or its contents alone xD

Edit Aug 20th, I slightly optimized the layout of the dropdowns due to a sudden "hey i can just do it like this" realization haha

Please enjoy!

[fulgurbugs]

Doodle pile (it ended up becoming therion-centric oops)

[kaurwreck]

There's certainly Something about singularities in Bungou Stray Dogs presenting as massive, myth-derived creatures with more than passing resemblances to kaiju given the setting predates its analog to World War II.

Gojira and the kaiju genre were born in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Lucky Dragon Incident (in which an American hydrogen bomb test rained radioactive ash on a Japanese fishing boat and much of the South Pacific). Life form singularities (like Chuuya and Verlaine), the Seven Traitors, the Transcendants, Mori's fixation on skill-based warfare, and everything else about the Great War all indicate that skills are akin to nuclear arms.

But unlike nuclear arms, skills are generally framed as intrinsic to their user. They're neurological; as much as part of skill users' wiring as the rest of their synapses. Even for Kyouka, whose skill was inherited but not fully integrated, her skill more resembles hereditary neurochemical wiring than it does nuclear proliferation.

Gojira (1954) ends with Dr. Serizawa's promise that hydrogen bombs would always assure nightmarish, monstrous manifestations of the horrors of war. You'd think Dazai's gift, then, would be the enigmatic focal skill of the series; he's capable of nullifying hydrogen bombs, after all.

But it's Atsushi and his celestial Byakko that Shibusawa calls the antithesis of all other abilities. And, as explained in 55 Minutes, Byakko doesn't heal or regenerate Atsushi, it negates his wounds. Atsushi isn't only a particularly tenacious shounen protagonist, Byakko compels him to stand when he's been cut down. When Atsushi is at the edge of death, Byakko consumes him completely, and Atsushi is lost within him, moreso than even Chuuya is in his Corruption state (Chuuya is fully conscious in Corruption— if Atsushi is conscious, he's either repressing or sluggishly recalling the memory of what occurred). Akutagawa also mentions during the Cannibalism arc that Atsushi's claws cut through skills themselves (even Rashoumon, which eats space). Akutagawa also becomes aware, in 55 Minutes, that Byakko can be triggered by Atsushi's peril, and Akutagawa does so to negate the manifestation of a seemingly transcendant skill that otherwise had utterly defanged them (although he seems sorry to have to do it).

Nevertheless, although Atsushi's Byakko seemingly negates the metaphorical horrors of the Great War illustrated by the others and their relationships with their skills, it's Atsushi who posits that perhaps skills aren't innate. He says to Kunikida, "Maybe they come from somewhere else and stick to us. Maybe they're something we can't understand... I don't really know how to put it into words, but that's how I feel."

Much of 55 Minutes is colored by Atsushi's fear of Byakko and his understanding that Byakko could devour him. His fear is seemingly validated by the antagonist, a manifestation of a skill that seemingly swallowed its human. But although textually consistent with his expressed fear, Atsushi's tone, demeanor, timing, and thought processes from when he speaks that line until the light novel ends aren't. His musings reflect his namesake's exploration of and uneasy relationship with the nature of existence, which he understood to be constructed by one's culture and environment better than most due to his somewhat rootless childhood.

I think it's interesting that someone with a skill capable of cutting through other skills, negating wounds, and antithesizing all skills challenges whether skills are innate at all. And if they're not, what does that imply about the parallels between skills, the horrors of war, and the fear of nuclear holocaust?

It's important to me that the scars of American imperialism and disregard for the sanctity of life are not erased from the narrative when discussing the world wars and nuclear proliferation. So I hesitate to posit anything about what skills may be in Bungou Stray Dogs that is too abstracted from trauma wrought by Western imperialism, Japanese imperialism, or the horrors of World Wars I & II. But perhaps that's it; when Atsushi speculates that skills are something that sticks to you, I'm reminded of how trauma has shaped and informed his own. He is certain that Byakko's negation and restless hunger are connected to his birth and subsequent suffering. At first, I thought we were being teased with his early background. But there's no need to tease; the reason so many characters in Bungou Stray Dogs are orphans directly relates to the Great War and the generational trauma still reverberating in its aftermath, and amid the threat of another, even more destructive war.

Perhaps Atsushi was implying that skills are constructs born not from any innate self, if there's such a thing, but from traumas, experiences, needs, cultures, and environments. Which is to say that skills aren't separable, exactly, from their users, but they're not innate either. They're like our personalities: immutable once shaped in the crucible of our most formative years, but nevertheless reflections of not only ourselves, but of what we need and who we become when confronted by others, in all of their beauty and horror.

Thus, perhaps it isn't Atsushi's skill that's so very antithetical to all others. It's his understanding of it, his ability to cut through to others, his compassion, his cowardice, his curiosity, and his separation from his sense of self that both inflicted him with Byakko and which will allow him to transcend it to become who he desires to be. It reminds me that, shortly before his death, his namesake decided to become a writer. And that although he wrote and lived only briefly, his sincerity, thoughtfulness, and introspective skepticism cut, and continue to cut, with a brilliance emblematic of life.

Anyway. Atsushi is both the main character and protagonist of Bungou Stray Dogs. Dazai knows this, too; even if he can nullify Byakko, he's just as impacted by Atsushi's brimming earnestness as everyone else Atsushi encounters. Atsushi liberates the narrative so that it's not a warning that the horrors of war will proliferate so long as we are capable of mass destruction, but instead it's a promise that hope needn't be intrinsic to persist all the same.