“Grandmother is visiting,” Damian suddenly said with no warning and with his usual not-quite demanding tone.
“Who?” Tim wasn’t the only one to startle, seeing as Bruce had practically froze, a downturn to his lips in a silent show of confusion.
Damian scowled. “Are you deaf Drake? Grandmother is coming to Gotham to, quote, make sure I am being properly cared for.” None of them had known that Ras was with anyone actually. At least Tim was pretty sure that would have been in the files.
“Oh?” Dick didn’t quite crouch to Damian’s height but it was a near thing. “She-” “He,” Damian corrected, interrupting him. They all exchanged a glance before Dick continued.
“Is he coming to the Manor or…”
Damian scoffed again, a tiny bit of a flush against his face. “No, Grandmother will most likely be staying with Akhi-”
it bums me out to see (esp younger) artists talking abt quitting in the wake of this dumb ai shit or worrying that there will be no place in the world for their art in the future... i know it's hard but u HAVE to trust other humans to care abt art. u have to trust ppl to give a shit
i've spent the past few weeks near-constantly simmering abt this shit but then i spent literally one weekend seeing the artist/fanzine alley at a convention + going to a screenprinting fair and my soul is healed tbh. u have to zoom out. ppl have always given a shit and they always will
it's one thing to have the courage to make art. it's another to have the courage to trust other ppl to respond when u are vulnerable enough to share it. i know that most of the time the latter is way harder, bc it's not rly in ur control. but u have to!! sorry!! or uve already lost
u have to have a high enough opinion of humanity as a species to recognize that we love creating art + we love experiencing art + we always have + we always will. it's mandatory. scream abt it if u want but after ur done screaming u have 2 go back to the hard work of loving the world
so my boyfriend is very into cologne and i have smelled a whole freaking lot of cologne because he usually asks me to smell them before he buys them and so i have this weird pocket of knowledge of mens cologne that i never use until im watching celebrity interviews as background noise and they inevitably answer the "what do you smell like" question and then i judge them heavily because they all say either fucking chanel blue or tom ford ombre leather or dior sauvage like. you are a millionaire. you can afford to not be basic thank you and goodnight.
“The Artificer’s campaign has little impact on the overall story” bitch I cannot stress how much of an impact the Artificer had on the entire world. You just need to pay attention to some things.
By the time of the Artificer, Scavengers are basically in the middle of a massive golden age. They have a Chieftain (with a mark of communication (maybe Five Pebbles gave them the mark and citizen ID drone and tried to use them for something but they rebelled and found Metropolis)) with armour made from Red Centipede Scales, they have a permanent home in metropolis above the rain, they figured out how to harvest electrical scrap and broken down Rarefaction Cells from the ruins of Looks To The Moon and pieces of Five Pebbles to make electric spears and Singularity Bombs, they even have specially trained Elite Scavengers, which did exist before in the time of the Spearmaster but it’s still worth bringing them up.
Overall, Scavengers are at a golden age of invention and life in general.
And then they anger the Artificer, who slaughters countless Scavengers, kills their Chieftain and drives them out of Metropolis, locking the gate behind them.
After that, a new Chieftain is never made, armour like the chieftain once wore is never made again, Scavengers suffer a massive population loss, they can’t enter Metropolis without a Citizen ID Drone and Elite Scavengers slowly disappear as the methods used to teach them and the knowledge of how to scavenge and create electric spears and singularity bombs is lost, with the last Elite Scavengers being seen in the Hunter’s campaign, which happens next in the timeline. In other words, the Artificer literally sent Scavengers into a dark age.
It takes until the time of the SAINT for Scavengers to show real signs of recovery, now appearing in larger numbers than before. And even THEN Scavengers never do anything like they did during the time of the Artificer. The Artificer plunged Scavengers into a dark age for countless years, and they STILL haven’t recovered.
And that’s not all. According to the wiki, Scavengers are afraid of Slugpups, most likely because they remember how the last time they killed one they were hit by the full force of an angry explosive lobbing goddess of destruction that slaughtered countless members of their kind. They are afraid of Slugpups in all campaigns, even the Saint’s. So even by the time of the Saint Scavengers know not to mess with Slugpups, presumably because the last time they did so is a legend among Scavengers by that point in time.
Hell, the Artificer’s existence even explains something about the Hunter. The reason that the Hunter starts with a negative reputation among Scavengers is because they look like the fucking Artificer. Scavengers look at the Hunter and see the goddess of vengeance and destruction that they’ve only ever heard of from stories.
Both of them have red fur and a scar on one eye, and will the time gap between campaigns, there’s a good chance that only a few Scavengers that saw the Artificer in person are even alive by that point in time (without even taking into account how the Artificer murdered so many Scavengers that it’s probably rare that a Scavenger saw them and lived to tell the tale), meaning that the Artificer is probably told about in Scavenger stories and her appearance would therefore differ, leaving the most obvious details like the scar on one eye and red fur.
In a modern universe, Cersei Lannister would get sent to one of those fancy private rehabs/psych hospitals (she doesn't want to go but Jaime booked her in after her latest breakdown and convinces her that actually it's super trendy these days for rich white women to go on "mental health retreats") and immediately tries to convince her psych team that she's totally fine and actually doesn't need to be here only to promptly be diagnosed with Bipolar and put on an ungodly amount of Seroquel.
Every single meeting she's forced to attend, she sits in her chair huffing up a storm while everyone else speaks, and when it's her turn goes on a fifteen minute rant alternating between insisting that everything wrong with her isn't actually her fault, insulting everyone else at the meeting because can't BELIEVE people actually fall for this psychobabble therapy nonsense, and sobbing uncontrollably over how her life has turned out.
After she's done she goes back to ignoring everyone.
Would absolutely look down on the people in there for narcotic addictions despite the fact that she's spent roughly the equivalent of the GDP of a small country on cocaine over the years.
Also freely admits to her therapist to having had an incestuous relationship with Jaime during childhood and adolescence but insists it doesn't matter anymore because they "grew out of it" after Jaime went to military school and she realised it would've been social suicide for her modelling career if anyone got photos of them together while she was dating various other celebrity guys, and remains completely oblivious to the ongoing emotional incest and codependency that's running through her entire family.
She emphatically insists that the only problem with Tywin's parenting was that he didn't send Tyrion away at birth and that he got Jaime a spot at Harvard Business School even though he didn't actually WANT to go and SHE did.
If this sounds like I'm bashing her, I promise I'm not. These are simply things I know to be true.
I'm sincerely very happy for anyone who is enjoying the show but every time I see takes that the show has improved the book characterizations or that the book characters are underdeveloped in comparison to the show...
After we get the Sad Furina backstory with mandatory cutscene, I hope she mentions how Traveler and Paimon are the first ones to know about this, and how she has been carrying all of that burden alone for the last 500 years or so.
Paimon: Not even Neuvillette knows!!??
Furina was about to answer no, only to be cut off by the sound of a booming thunder. Lightning strikes, illuminating a previoulsy obscured part of the office, where we can now see the imposing figure of the Chief Justice.
He came to the office to deliver a few papers and overheard the entirety of the conversation. He is currently bawling his eyes out, mentally listing everything the melusines like to do when thy're sad to see if he can help Furina.
Meanwhile, Fontaine is just dealing with a torrential downpour of cataclysmic proportions.
you ever stare into the middle distance and just. think. about how Doctor Who series one episode eight "Father's Day" first signaled that time itself had gone screwy by having the radio start playing a song that didn't exist yet in 1987....... and then lapse right back into Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." in an episode that aired on 14 May 2005. two full years before the invention of the rickroll.
What he says: Honestly, Ed? I don’t like who you are around this guy.
What he means: This entire scenario makes me uncomfortable because Jack’s banter is akin to the bullying I’ve dealt with my entire life. He reminds me of those who stoned me for picking flowers, or those who blatantly mocked me for being soft. I know he’s your friend, and I want to like him for you. But seeing you willingly engage in something that brings up bad memories is hard for me.
What he says: This is who I am, Stede. Do you see me now? You’re always going to realize what I am.
What he means: This is a part of me that I’ve never been able to escape. This is who I’ve masqueraded as for years and years. This is something I’m afraid I’ll always have to be. Jack feels like a representation of that persona, and you dislike him, so I don’t want you to dislike me. I don’t want you to see who I believe myself to be, and consequently hate me as well. So I’m leaving before you can. I’m leaving before it’s too late. I’m choosing to leave before I lose you.
It's kinda shocking to me how few people seem to know how prevalent the 'my great grandmother was cherokee' myth is and how it's almost never actually true, especially when it comes with things like 'never signed up' or 'fell off the trail' or 'courthouse burned down destorying the documentation' etc etc.
People just don't even seem to know the history like.. when the Trail happened. My great great great grandfather was 2 years old during Removal in 1838, so peoples 'my great grandmother hid in the mountains!' is so clearly wrong. And we have rolls. From before and after removal, rolls done by cherokee nation and others by the government, rolls that were not stored in one random flammable courthouse. It's not difficult to find the actual evidence of ancestry.
And just.. there are lots of ways those family stories get started. It was a practice during the confederacy to claim cherokee ancestry to show one's family had 'deep roots in the south' that they were there before the cherokee were removed. Many people pretended to be cherokee and applied for the Guion-Miller payout just to try to steal money meant for cherokees - 2/3rds of the applicants were denied for having 0 proof of actual cherokee ancestry. [We even see lawyers advertising signing up for the Miller roll just to try to get free money.] And the myth even started in some families in the cherokee land lotteries, where the land stolen from us was raffled off, including the house and everything that was left behind when the cherokees were removed. We have seen people whose families just take these things stolen from the cherokee family and adopt them into their own family story, saying that they were cherokee themselves.
If you had some family story about being cherokee and you wanna have proof one way or the other, check out this Facebook group run by expert cherokee genealogists that do research for free. Just please read the rules fully and respect the researchers. They run thousands of people's ancestries a year and their average is only around 0.7% of lines they run actually end up having true cherokee ancestry.