#also by my own space i mean like

[cozybearz]

so cool that i have a friend just a few miles away that i can hang out with and do gay shit with, unfortunately, neither of us can drive and we are both lazy so we still only end up hanging out once a month or every other month or so and i think thats kind of funny

[14dayswithyou]

I am really confused about this game. Is it like "Doki doki literature club" ? the game seems to break the fourth wall after getting bad endings and someone speaks in red text. Is it Ren and is he stuck in the game like Monica?Or is he and Redacted separate people, with him being a game character,but Redacted being some sort of entity who's stuck in the void of the game,or in it's code,and acknowledges that it's a game and someone's playing it and they speak to the player, not the game's protag?

✦゜ANSWERED: 14 Days With You is like 14 Days With You. It's not meant to be similar to DDLC in any way, and Ren isn't supposed to be like Monika or any other self-aware character.

Please don't associate 14DWY with other games just because they share similar tropes. /lh

But!! To answer your question: Ren isn't aware that Angel and the player are separate people. As of right now, he considers Angel and you as the same entity, and speaks to you as though you're part of his universe.

Ren is aware that his entire existence only comes into fruition whenever you play the game — but to him, that's considered normal — the same way getting wifi from trees and not discovering 80% of the ocean is considered normal for us. Nothing is out of place for him, and the way he interacts with his environment doesn't seem weird or out of place for him.

The Dead Ends are the only time Ren breaks the fourth wall, but it's still a massive WIP and there's not enough content for it to make much sense yet. But once more Days get released, this will be further explained!!

[autism-alley]

something i feel responders to pjo criticisms are not getting is book accuracy is important.

rick riordan created this project to be a book accurate adaptation on the screen. it doesn’t matter if annabeth is white and blonde, those people who are mad about that are wrong and their “criticisms” should be just thrown out. no, i’m talking real criticism. because being upset a series whose reason for existing is to be a faithful adaptation isn’t? not stupid. if you can enjoy the series—in my opinion not all the changes are objectively bad, but many, from a storytelling angle? from pure craftsmanship? are objectively bad—regardless, i’m happy for you. truly, if you feel the joy and magic the original series gave me while watching this show, i am overjoyed someone feels the magic. that’s more magical to me, worth more, than the show itself. but if you then insult me for not enjoying the show? tell me i must not love the story as much as you? tell me i am simply looking to hate the newest next thing, and not that i adore this series so much it pains me to see it so? that i don’t wish to see it succeed regardless of the betrayal i feel?

silly me, i thought our shared love of something meant we could all express it, even in different ways. but i guess not. i guess many of the series’ fans are just keen to discuss the show with the same bad faith it was made in.

[obsidianstrawberrymilk]

Tbh a huge amount of the issues MHA has could have been fixed had Bakugo just been expelled from UA in the first season or not gotten in at all

[gearbroth]

[concept-dump] Space-au - (main(?) Antagonist) Skal, enemy of sun and mentor to iron

[synthshenanigans]

I find it hilarious that like, most popular headcanons/ideas of HMS come from something that's in the actual album. Whether its the cover art or from a lyric, it makes sense with context or a metaphor. Then there's just a random ass chicken that came from nowhere.

[cellarspider]

9/30 What remains

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

⛬

We return to the movie that I’m not giving a jokey intro to this time, Prometheus. 

When I was in archaeological field school, we were digging in an area that had been continuously inhabited since the Neolithic period. Untold numbers of people had lived there through the ages.

And so it wasn’t entirely unexpected when someone told the professors that a construction crew across the street had just dug up a human skull.

(https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/work-begins-to-excavate-45-000-skeletons-from-hs2-site-at-london-euston-a3972926.html )

One of the grad students slapped on a dayglo vest and hard hat, and ran over there to speak with the crew. Undergrads were not allowed anywhere near the site, simply because of the liability risk. But the bones themselves? We weren’t allowed to touch them. They went right into boxes for a specialist to take care of. 

All told, remains from 18 skeletons were found, twelve of them children. They’d been there for about eight hundred years. The professors said the construction crew was diffing on top of a medieval churchyard. They’d dug a hole to connect up the utilities, and their trench went right up to the wall of the former church. You could tell that, the professors said, because unbaptized children would’ve been buried under the eaves of the church: rainwater falling from the eaves was thought to be sanctified, so they’d be blessed every time it rained.

The construction crew wasn’t actually obligated to tell anyone about the bones. There was no legal requirement–the dead were everywhere there. As long as there was no reason to suspect a murder, people could just dig.

But because they did stop, just long enough for the bones to be retrieved, those skeletons would be examined, cataloged, and would either be held in an osteoarchaeological collection for further research, or reburied. There was no strong legal or social pressure one way or the other. That’s not universal–some peoples forbid the practice of handling and studying human remains, or require that remains be reinterred with the most culturally appropriate religious rites that can be provided. There is a lack of international or even regional consensus on what to do in these situations.

(https://railuk.com/rail-news/the-archaeology-of-hs2/)

And there are a lot of places where the wishes of descendants and local cultures have not been honored by archaeologists. The twenty year fight over custody of the bones of Kennewick Man (or the Ancient One) is one notable, hard-fought win for repatriation and reinterment of human remains, and there are many, many cases that have been far worse, that are still worse.

But where we dug, the relevant ethical standards for osteoarchaeologists stressed that “[b]iological remains, particularly human remains, of any age or provenance must be treated with care and dignity.”

We students never saw the bones. We didn’t need to, frankly, it would have been incompatible with those values. Is this how it’s handled everywhere? No. And most of the time, our dig was a very casual and lively place. But these professors were trying to start us out with the best ethical standards they could, which I am grateful for.

That’s the context that was running through my head as I watched Prometheus. Movies tend to treat dead bodies with far less reverence. They often carry some sort of emotional weight–fear, disgust, grief, or even excitement or humor. In violent movies, they’re set dressing, less important than the main characters–unless one of them was a main character. I chafe at that distinction, sometimes, but I’m not squeamish about movie violence. Two of my favorite movies of the year prior had been The Raid and Dredd. Two serendipitously similar action movies where death was relentless, graphic, and cheap–content warning in both links, by the way.

Both movies had carried me through because they were consistent on what they were throughout. I didn’t expect anything more sensitive from movies about action-fantasy cops. Prometheus had already lost me, and it was about archaeologists. Ones who professed a belief that they were there to meet their makers.

And so I found the way they treat the discovery of an alien body to be utterly galling. Despite the fact that I didn’t expect anything better from them by this point, I still wasn’t willing to meet the movie where it wanted me to be. I wasn’t feeling their excitement, trepidation over what else they were going to find next, or any voyeuristic excitement over how screwed they obviously were–any of those might have been the intended emotion, I’m honestly not sure what sort of horror movie Prometheus was trying to be at this point.

I was just seething that they were touching the body. Sticking probes into it. That was bad enough. 

We haven’t even gotten to what they do to the head yet.

⛬

(Previous) | (Index) | (Next)

⛬

Citations for alt-text:

All links listed in-line below the images this time.

[navree]

people doing this whole "look at how rhaenys acted with corlys's bastard son vs how catelyn acted with jon snow" to demonize one or the other is weird because, like, maybe it's just me, but i think that catelyn and rhaenys had different reactions because they're different people in different situations.

[realpontchartrain]

So the three of us just had the official talk about all moving in together when Robbie and I finally buy a house, in front of James no less lmao

[spotaus]

Coda and Ichor! (Catacombtale Style!)

These two don't have a *ton* of interaction in the Main story, but since Ichor and Balance are the only two characters I've fully designed, Coda gets stuck next to him, haha!

BONUS art jumpscare:

These two actually exist in another project I'm working on too called Codex, which is basically just removing the UT aspects of Catacombtale and doing a lot more worldbuilding and character design!

Coda is older in Codex and is marked by an old God (which should get him jailed or killed, as it means for everyone else) but he hides it for years and years before he finally flees the complex he's living in to go confront the gods and stop their destructive path. Meanwhile Ichor is much the same, only he's much more ready and willing to help Coda without much prompting. Here he's also sort of a Koi Fish! (His brother is a Betta Fish)

[themthistles]

i think that while micro labels can seem useful and affirming ultimately they're isolating and kind of an obstacle to your understanding of self. that's because you can never find a word specific enough. there will never be a label or two labels or even ten, twenty of them to perfectly capture and describe all of your thoughts, feelings, experiences, preferences, needs, interests, identities, etc. because you learn more and more about yourself every day and then you change and your wants and needs change with you. having to hop between labels, fearing that you don't 'fit' into a label anymore (both in your own and others eyes), worrying how soon your current label will wear out, questioning if you'll ever fully fit a single one. all that causes a lot of uncertainty and anxiety which could be avoided by just picking a more general thing and molding it according to what it means to YOU. because words will always mean different things to different people, you will never be understood immediately and maybe never completely by anyone but yourself and that's fine

[monstersinthecosmos]

As a fellow Marius lover, I always find it kind of disheartening how most of the content/fandom talk about him (meta, fic, fanart, etc.) revolves around m/m ships (Marius/Armand in particular but I’d even go as far to include Marius/Daniel here) when, in my opinion, Marius is like the one male character in the VC universe whose relationships with women are far more interesting than his relationships with other men (the only other character might be Lestat but even then it’s pretty 50/50). They’re so monumental and so full of complexities and pain and so much love and they define him and inform his character in ways that I think, his relationships with men simply do not. Interesting/hot under the right circumstances? Sure but like ARE YOU GUYS SEEING THIS MAN??? AND HOW HE RELATES TO WOMEN??? It’s one of the best things Anne ever wrote and I can never get enough of it and it makes me sad how little content there is of it and I feel I can never say this out loud because I would never want to make people feel bad about what they ship (truly not my intention here) but ugh SO MUCH potential there for life changing discourse and meta about Marius and the women he’s loved and lost and have shaped who he is and there’s like… nothing.

Tl;dr the reason I’m sending this ask is because I’m a firm believer that you must be the change you want to see in this world and because YOU get it! And every time you post or write about Marius/Pandora (or Marius/Akasha! Or talk about Marius/Bianca) an angel gets its (black) wings. You are seen, you are loved and appreciated tysm <3

OKAY FIRST OF ALL THIS WAS SUCH A DELIGHT TO GET IN MY INBOX, SECOND IM GOING TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST AND ADMIT I FEEL TOO INCOHERENT TO TACKLE THIS TOPIC HAHA. I don’t feel articulate enough to do it justice. And I don’t say that to be obnoxious and self deprecating but like in all honesty idk how to synthesize it neatly but I think you’re sharing some GREAT IDEAS. 

I have to say this in bullet points because I don’t feel equipped to string this into a cohesive post:

Marius was based on Anne’s husband, and Marius/Pandora was based on their marriage!!!!! And I think it explains a lot about why their relationship feels so fuckin POTENT to me, like it’s so genuine!!!!!!! And like knowing that I think it makes sense why she wrote him so HOT lol. Like she’s just writing thirsty stuff about her husband right? LOL

Also like insofar as there’s a lot of genderfluidity in VC there’s also something vaguely misogynist about it at times. And Anne Rice was a mega feminist and her work had so much womens lib in it!!!!! So I don’t think it’s intended as misogyny at all vs. Anne having conversations about gender and maybe her own relationship to gender. I think enough characters have said vaguely misogynist stuff that it makes me think it’s an Anne Problem vs being Watsonian. (This is also a historical/time period issue and we can discuss another time if and when vampires are supposed to break out of that when they transcend humanity and social constructs even when they’re still saying weird sexist shit at their big ages.) But I say that to say all VC characters are a tad sexist, even if perhaps she was writing with the intention of her own male power fantasy/male superiority/penis envy. AND THAT MAKES MARIUS VERY INTERESTING. 

Cause like really the three main ladies in his life (Akasha, Pandora, Bianca) DO define him so much! And we don’t see him pine for Armand the way he did for any of them! Why!!!

Like there’s that aspect of sexism where women can be infantilized by men who don’t think they’re being unkind and it makes me wonder, especially when the author is a boomer, like where is that line between condescension and respect? I don’t have an answer here, this is too big-brained for me LOL but like he is SO devoted to the women in his life and I just wonder like if he sees them as creatures unlike himself, you know? 

This is headcanon territory but I bet he’s such a fucking sub to Pandora lol and it just thrills me that he spent 2000 years begging Akasha for affection and she ignored him the whole damn time wow. And he continued to simp!

AND ALSO LIKE, I think people DO NOT DISCUSS THIS OFTEN ENOUGH, but did we forget that he chose Armand because he needed a Bianca rebound? He was absolutely TORTURED by his love for Bianca and picked Armand because he didn’t want to kill her oh my god. Oh my god!!! HE KEPT HER LETTER IN HIS POCKET OVER HIS HEART OKAY??? HE DIDN’T WANT TO DRAG HER INTO HIS COLD AND FATAL DOMAIN????? Fuck lol

It’s so fucked up that he didn’t go after Armand but spent like actual fucking millennia trying to find Pandora. HE KNEW EXACTLY WHERE ARMAND WAS AND LEFT HIM THERE LOL BUT PANDORA HAUNTED HIM EVERY NIGHT OF HIS LIFE FOR CENTURIES.

After everything he wound up spending like 200 years with Bianca or something and ?????? CORRECT because Bianca was the fledgling he actually wanted!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But it’s odd, I know I’ve said this 337589235 times, but Marius like. Has an idea of the person he wants to be and he tries SO HARD to live by logic & reason and he just can’t reconcile with the fact that he has EMOTIONS. And so like part of the person he wants to be like, open/empathetic/wise and he begs his lovers/students/fledglings to CHALLENGE HIM when he’s not actually healed enough to be challenged? And to me there’s something kinda like, extra spicy about it when you’re in Rice World and you’re a lil sexist; how much that burns EXTRA when it’s Pandora or Bianca sticking up to you or AKASHA FUCKIN IGNORING YOU. 

Just really incredible that this person who is like the epitome of a patriarch has such fucked up relationships with all the women in his life. And like he underestimates these women, like the way he tries to manipulate Bianca and she leaves him! PANDORA AND AKASHA ARE UNAVAILABLE TO HIM AND BIANCA FUCKIN LEAVES.

akasSHA JUST IGNROING HIM!! JUST STRAIGHT UP FUCKIN IGNORING HIM FOR 2,000 YEARS!!!! HE'S OBSESSED WITH HER!

Anyway Enkil is ignoring him too but he doesn’t give a shit about that guy tbh lol 

Also the amount of space he gives Eudoxia and Zenobia in his book like there’s more here too but tbh it’s midnight and I can’t start unpacking. I just think like, in 2000 years it’s interesting how Eudoxia wound up having such a lasting impact on his life. 

I did just peek at the Eudoxia part and I’m dying, he goes “Her face was small, oval, and as close to perfection as anything I've ever beheld, even though she bore no resemblance to Pandora who was for me perfection itself.” CERTIFIED WIFE GUY.

What kinda mommy issues are we dealing with here? HIS MOTHER WAS A SLAVE THAT DIED IN CHILDBIRTH AND HE INHERITED HER GENES AND LOOKED LIKE HER AND DIDN’T LOOK LIKE HIS FATHER & BROTHERS? AND HE’S SORT OF AN OUTCAST AS A HUMAN LIKE ? THE STIGMA HERE? AND THEN HE SPENDS 2000 YEARS WORSHIPPING HIS NEW MOTHER??? PERHAPS YOU COULD SAY ENSLAVED TO HER? IDK MAN. 

IS THIS ALSO WHY HE WAS SO OBSESSED WITH LOSING PANDORA?

The irony too, and something I think a lot of people miss, is that he DIDN’T WANT TO MARRY PANDORA LOL. He wanted to be betrothed to a child so that he could FUCK OFF and NOT get married because she wasn’t old enough to get married! He fucked off! He went exploring! He said this is not for me! 

AND TO GO OUT INTO THE WORLD AND BE MURDERED BY HIS MOTHERS PEOPLE???? IDK. 

I’m not sure how these last two points tie into anything but I just wanted to mention his complicated relationship with Pandora and his own heritage lol. And then Akasha like DELIVERS Pandora to him because she’s like “wow this guy needs somebody lol and I am not emotionally available” — Akasha who was famously a violent genocidal radfem and who would not approve of his relationship with Armand but explicitly allowed him to have Pandora and Bianca. IDK WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN! 

Did Akasha approve of these women because she knew Marius was completely pussywhipped and would worship them and she wanted to see someone mommydom the fuck out of him and she knew that Armand would never be that person? 🫢

And again I want to say like, taking the author into consideration!! Anne Rice had a HORRIFIC relationship with her mom so you see these themes pop up occasionally in her work. DESPITE ALL OF THAT SHE IS STILL A FEMINIST AND WRITES ABOUT MATRILINEAR FAMILIES like The Great Family or the Mayfairs. But thinking about Mothers in Anne Rice Works makes me think a lot about this like, the damage they can do and the voids they can leave even when you’re a feminist and love women! You see a TON of this with Gabrielle and I always think that Lestat & Marius are such similar characters that you can do a lot of extrapolating or backwards engineering to ask questions about them and how they work, since we get SO MUCH Lestat POV in this series to work with and how we can zoom out sometimes and ask like, what is common across her entire body of work and what is more specifically common between Lestat & Marius and WHAT EVEN MORE INTERESTINGLY is a result that they were both based on her husband in their inceptions. 

Like how much of this has to do with Marius’s actual feelings towards men vs women on purpose, or how much was subconscious author bias, how much was simply that Anne Rice based him on her husband and she was THIRSTY, idk. It’s always hard to say in VC because Anne was such an intuitive and self-indulgent author and the stories are so weird!!! So your mileage may vary!

But I agree with you that these are FASCINATING relationships!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And I like Marius/Armand too (I recently made a post about how I didn’t “””””ship”””” them but then I spent 2 months working on a M/A fic every day and now I think I’ve corrupted and converted myself LMAO) but yeah like. There’s such a lack of substance between them in the end. He treats Armand like he’s temporary, fucks up and moves on, and it’s such a departure from how DEVOTED he was with all his other partners. 

Wow I didn’t think I had a lot to say, sorry about that. !!! EVERY TIME I BROUGHT A POINT UP I THOUGHT OF 5 MORE POINTS GOSH I COULD TALK ABOUT MARIUS ALL DAY.

[nashvillethotchicken]

And when I get my all black interview with the vampire remake ala the wiz then what

[ante--meridiem]

To socialise or not to socialise, that is the question.

[namisweatheria]

I have a complicated relationship with zosan. On one hand, I find making Sanji out to be a deeeeeeeeply pathetic, repressed homosexual that's deeply in love with the guy he's been constantly picking fights with to be a very cathartic experience. I can even find him compelling through that lens, since he is very important whenever the story explores themes of insecurity or gender norms. The actual story explores insecurity very thoroughly in a really compelling way, whole cake island rules, but gender norms only subtly and very incompletely.

So using him as a character to pick up the thread that's there and improve and deepen it is a fun game. I simply love Zoro, and I think he is very gay, and it's fun to see him in any situation. Zosan was the first and easiest ship reading for me.

I've come to suspect that's a lot of people's experiences. It's almost like a starter ship. Once you explore literally any other Strawhat dynamic through a queer lens though, it is so over for you. They are all so compelling and generally a lot more so than these two together monogamously.

Usopp especially is wildly interesting for both insecurity and gender norms, way more than Sanji, and as soon as you bring him into the mix you really can't go back.

Zosan does irritate me with it's popularity and the endless boring versions of it out there. It does feel like sticking the most conventionally attractive guys in the show together to project the same damn dynamic onto and calling it a day. Which is a shame! Because they can be interesting!

I do especially get annoyed with it when people seem more interested in only paying attention to them and never the female characters or Usopp. Humongous side-eye. Or like, not exploring the whole polycule of strawhat dynamics in favor of acting like one single pair of them is more specially connected than any of the rest. That is simply not true, and I do not appreciate it. They are all obsessed with each other. Go find two other cardboard cutouts to project your yaoi fantasies on I'm trying to have a good time.

Oh wait my screenshot. HA. So yes all that. I feel all that. But I also did stop and go omg. the first time they said their insult nicknames....<333333333

[termagax]

re: "good girl" i think they say it once randomly as a joke and its just one of those things that gets him wayyy more than they expected it would. so now its their secret weapon and they use it very sparingly and every single time he gets super embarrassed about it but it works ill tell you what.