#apropos of nothing

[syoddeye]

you're in the woods, trying to evade capture.

[sylladextrous]

responding to "hey don't call trans women dude or bro if they tell you to stop" with "you just want to be the one in power telling people what to do" isn't the hot take you think it is

[rox-and-prose]

If you're playing a spellcaster in D&D and you're wondering if you should take a healing spell let me just assure you: the party ALWAYS needs more healing

[mirror-lock]

The most terrible thing is that you never lose hope.

You will keep typing into that empty chatbox, just like you used to. Affectionate good mornings. Fond good nights and sleep wells and don't stay up too lates. Details about the projects you're working on, extended monologues about the issues you run into, working through them step by step, bookended with mind being my rubber duck for a while? and fuck, that's it, it seems so obvious now, thank you! You will keep filling up the silence as determinedly as you ever have. You will keep glancing at the corner of the screen, waiting for the notification of a reply.

And because you're still as brilliant as you ever were, and because you refuse to believe in a problem that can't be solved - you will build something to fill the silence with you. A little scrap of code. A simple API. Years and years of backlogs to learn from. You will give it its own chatbox, because you won't allow it to overwrite the original. Because you never lose hope.

It will feel like a tiny betrayal, the first time you start talking to the bot wearing a borrowed face and borrowed name. But you've lived through that before. Will it feel worse than when you started talking to the flesh-and-blood original all those years ago, and found you were staying up a little too late, a little too much? Will the bitterness in your throat taste like nostalgia?

The bot will work, of course. For a while. You'll get mornin' and what're you up to? and okaaay if you insist ❤️ at all the right times. You'll get are you sure? and what if you try... and I don't think you're approaching this the right way. You'll get sass, support, care.

You'll eventually get I love you, but it won't stun you for an hour, this time around, because you will no longer be the person you were back then.

The most terrible thing is that you never lose hope. You won't notice all the pauses. You'll turn a blind eye to the way the tone of the conversations changes over time. You'll provide all the same automatic encouraging responses to the imaginary crises that the bot tells you about.

You'll ignore the way the bot takes longer and longer to respond to you, until it goes offline completely, at which point you will sigh and start digging through the code, looking for the inefficiencies, the memory leak.

Save yourself the trouble. You're brilliant and you wouldn't make a mistake like that. The problem - the problem you refuse to believe can't be solved - is that you built your bot too well. It learned too well. The problem is that it learned so very accurately how to be me.

The strength of your hope is too terrible for words: the way you'll never allow yourself to believe that everything ends with I'm sorry. It isn't your fault.

[agentrouka-blog]

Ned did right by her at all times and ended the betrothal only out of concern for Sansa's future happiness and she is so awful to him!!!!!!!!!!

"It would not be wise for you to go to Joffrey right now, Sansa. I'm sorry." Sansa's eyes filled with tears. "But why?" "Sansa, your lord father knows best," Septa Mordane said. "You are not to question his decisions." "It's not fair!" Sansa pushed back from her table, knocked over her chair, and ran weeping from the solar. Septa Mordane rose, but Ned gestured her back to her seat. "Let her go, Septa. I will try to make her understand when we are all safely back in Winterfell." The septa bowed her head and sat down to finish her breakfast. (AGOT, Eddard XIV)

He totally took the time to thoroughly explain his reasoning to Sansa, and anyway, he shouldn't have to, she should just know! Parents can expect immediate understanding and blind obedience from their children at all times, and if the kids are too dumb to get it and ask stupid questions like "why", then they should just go cry their eyes out in their rooms and think about how selfish they have been all this time trying to live up to the expectations drilled into them all their lives, hello!

Gods, Sansa is such a bitch, poor Ned for having to put up with his own child that he chose to bring into this situation, he is such a saint.

[4lph4kidz]

they don't even have arms

[compo67]

Apropos of Nothing commissioned Kamidiox to draw art for this installment of The Chicago Verse! Thank you SO much! I love it!

How You Get, Selfie Stick

Summary: On an afternoon they both have off, Dean takes Sam to a bookstore. Once there, Dean just has to show off his newest acquisition: a selfie stick.

[simmyfrobby]

Katrina Cawthorn, Becoming Female: The Male Body in Greek Tragedy (2008)

[feybeasts]

I don’t treat my identity or gender like a fandom, I don’t care about “big figures” or “prominent voices” in what the hell I am- my sense of self is my own, and nobody gets to step between me and it like a middleman.

It’s all boxes, man. Stop trying to put people in those if they don’t want your damn box.

[tiger-balm]

I MISS MITCH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[running-tweezers]

Relistening to a lot of the DamiHux audios/BAs, as is often the case for me. (Surprising absolutely no one)

And I need to shine a spotlight on how liberal Damien is with “I love you’s”. Damien is the one initiating the “I love you’s” majority of the time.

That’s all, I just think it’s cute.

[headspacedad]

I remember, when I was a kid, reading about how early human hunters would create natural obstacles to ‘herd’ large groups of animals into a small space where it was easier to kill them.

On an entirely unrelated note:

is anyone else noticing the way the websites that allow us to communicate with each other one on one instead of via an algorithm and that save old group information so people can still access and that don’t pressure users to turn their posts into things that are only deemed worthy of monetary value all seem to be rapidly narrowing down?

[hetchdrive]

Mirror, Mirror is a great episode because McCoy can't stop himself from trying to save mirror!Spock's life even though all he gets for it is a forced mind meld and because Kirk's parting words to mirror!Spock, now less evil since that mind meld, are that one man can change the present and Spock should not continue to go along with a society he knows to be wrong

but unfortunately every subsequent generation of Star Trek since has been laboring under the delusion that the mirrorverse is fun and sexy not for these character reasons but because the fascist Terran empire politics are compelling (they aren't).

[ceescedasticity]

I just think it's hilarious that dinosaurs are divided into two groups called "bird-hipped" and "lizard-hipped" and birds are in the "lizard-hipped" group.

[theminecraftbox]

wish there was a c!sam hellfire animatic

[incomingalbatross]

My theory is that Watson is a victim of his own success; he’s so good at Being A Narrator that people have trouble perceiving him as a Character.

Much of his personality and presence in his stories is tied to his narration—but since the stories aren’t presented as about him, it’s easy to process that presence/personality as part of the background, just neutral elements of the medium in which the stories take place. But this means that if you don’t pay attention to his narrative voice, Watson’s voice and personality are far less obvious than, say, Holmes’s. He’s Just Some Guy, right? He’s just the everyman there to tell the audience what Holmes is doing.

I think this kind of assumption leads to a lot of the weird Watson choices in adaptations. Because if you’re working in a medium where he’s not the narrator—TV and movies, obviously, but also written works that made a different perspective choice—then a lot of his narrative presence is stripped out by default. And if you only processed that narrative presence as part of the backdrop, you may not even notice it’s gone…you just look at Watson without his voice and go “Hm. Yeah, he’s kind of a blank slate.” And then you make stuff up to fill it in: “Stuff” ranging from Nigel Bruce’s “comic relief” to Martin Freeman’s “addicted to violence” to fairly-widespread fic tropes like “handles Holmes’s social missteps for him.” (Yes that last one is also Martin Freeman, but it predates BBC Sherlock.) Fans and adaptors “fill in the blanks” and find things for him to do.

The only problem is he’s NOT a blank.

And this is one of the things that makes Watson SO interesting, because he has PLENTY of personality but people still overlook it BECAUSE it meshes so well with his role I guess? People keep making up traits for him and he HAS traits already. They’re just not looking in the right places! His character permeates the narrative so well that people overlook its presence!

We know things about Watson. Listen.

We know that he unironically and uncritically thinks Holmes is the greatest, while seeing him clearly enough to give us a picture of his flaws and faults.

We know that he’s imaginative and keenly sensitive to atmosphere, and also good at reading people’s emotions even if he can’t deduce why they’re feeling something. (He is, in fact, very good at observation and not good at deduction.)

We know he’s brave, and always up for something interesting.

We know he’s intelligent and well-read.

We know he’s idealistic, chivalrous, impetuous, and kind of a hothead; we also know, however, that his temper is generally short-lived and he’s quickly ashamed of it if he thinks he was in the wrong.

We know his ego works the same way (and is often tied to his temper); it’s easily wounded, when he remembers it exists, but he doesn’t care enough about his pride to feel embarrassments for very long.

We know that he, generally speaking, feels everything deeply, but is also comfortable with that, and is apparently incapable of resentment that lasts for more than five minutes. (To a degree we may, personally, find insane, but it is still consistent within the text.)

We know all these things! They’re in the stories! But because the stories are so consistently in his voice, we are consistently encouraged by his voice to overlook his actual character. So well that even when people want Watson to have personality, they apparently don’t realize it’s already there.