#but i try and get it out at least!

[purrpickle]

Honestly, and I mentioned this in another post, but Tee, Jim, and Kade's plan of making Sam jealous to keep Mon and not fire her, made everything so much worse.

Maybe Sam would have changed her mind on her own, but we can't know that for sure.

Instead, that jealousy fueled reversal is what caused Sam's whiplash and absolute further shutdown when telling Mon she had changed her mind. We see that in Sam's flashback to Tee telling her that she would never let Mon leave her company.

I mean, c'mon, Tee, Kade, and Jim! You know your friend! You think someone who grew up under such trauma and forced repression is going to react well and balanced to having the woman she's obviously fallen for so easily taken away and pursued by someone else? Especially since you already know Sam thinks Tee actually likes her?

Look, I'm not saying Sam's reaction was okay, at all. I've already discussed that in my other post. It was absolutely not okay. But what I am saying is that the outward backlash caused by Sam's internal emotionally and angrily panicked reversal of Mon's firing (because if she went through with it, Tee would swoop in and date her when what Sam wanted was to fire her so she could date her), along with her complete shutdown and inability to open up or realize she should or even could talk to Mon about her reasons or why she so suddenly looked like she was just so easily changing her mind and that the firing didn't matter at all - when it really had! It really, really had! Just for horribly stunted and selfish reasons - was fueled so much more by her friends' actions.

Sam had had her plan: fire Mon so they could date. She'd spent two days pushing everything down to come up with her plan, and had set it into motion, pushing everything else away and shutting down until it came into fruition.

And then, in the span of ten minutes, she'd had her plan, her desire for being with Mon, and Mon herself threatened to be taken away from her, all wrapped all up in an oh so casual insulting insinuation of Sam's ability to run her company being lesser than Tee's if she lets Mon go: "It's my company. I can fire anyone I want," versus "If Mon worked for me, I'd never let her go," and Tee would "...take care of her properly," along with Jim and Kade's absolute fawning over Tee's company as well.

So in one fell swoop, Tee and Jim and Kade threatened Sam's pride, her ability as CEO of Diversity, her decisions on how to somehow get her life in an order so she could live with it in a way that finally let her have something she desired (after running away from a proposal from Kirk, even!), her feelings for Mon, and her hoped for future with Mon.

So now, after having built up her walls for Mon's firing in two days, Sam only had an evening to prepare for her emotionally tailspinning reversed decision, so forcefully shoved at her by her friends.

A decision that meant she couldn't date Mon anymore.

But also meant it would hopefully stop Mon from dating Tee and that she wouldn't be working for her.

That meant Sam would see Mon every day and be unable to do anything about it or explore the relationship she wanted with her now that her feelings were known to her.

But also meant she would still be able to see Mon every day and get to be around her.

That meant Sam's desires would be taken away from her again.

That meant Sam would have to marry Kirk anyway.

That meant all the good things Sam finally let herself feel and pursue and hope for and start to build with Mon didn't matter anymore and would never go anywhere.

Really, that meant that to keep Mon, she was now going to lose Mon.

...

And the worst part is, you see all of that overwhelming conflict on Sam's face in the scene in her office!

You see her spiral of destroyed plans hammered over with quickly thrown up walls as she stays away from looking at Mon and keeps herself moving and looking at anything else so the tears fighting to come out don't and pushes pushes pushes for Mon to drop it and go back to work so Sam doesn't have to show her her own horribly torn apart heart.

I've already covered that it doesn't occur to Sam that she can talk to Mon (or anyone), or that she should talk to Mon (or anyone), which makes her shutdown so much worse. She wants Mon out of there. She can't be around her, so her only way to get through this is to tell Mon she changed her mind and to go back to work.

And it's not like Sam doesn't see the hurt she's doing to Mon, or doesn't care about it. She does! You watch her react, in her expressions and in her eyes and body movements, but Sam honestly cannot do anything, at that moment, about it. Because everything is roiling around in her brain and she's overwhelmed and stressed and does what she's learned to do: become cold, dismissive, and shut down.

So yes. Sam was already mentally exhausted before meeting with her friends, but afterwards, they tore her plan apart and she was left reeling and angry and now had to pivot and treat the serious decision of firing Mon and pushing her away as trivial and without consequence.

Which was wrong. Absolutely wrong. I say Sam had to change her plan, but I do truly mean she ultimately chose to reverse the firing - Sam is still one hundred percent culpable here!

This post isn't about trying to excuse Sam. No, it's about further getting into her actions and how good intentions spiraled into terrible reactions, and how there was more behind Sam's coldness and cruelty than just her ignoring Mon or belittling her or changing her mind 'because she could'. And as I have said before, I hope the show moves forward with letting Sam learn and heal and work through her trauma and issues, and makes her be responsible for her actions.

And that maybe Tee, Jim, and Kade stop trying to make her jealous now that she's started dating Mon. I love them, but they absolutely misstepped here.

[thetimelordbatgirl]

The police in Scotland have the chance to do the most funniest thing right now.

[wardingshout]

Zelda goes mushroom girl

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 271

“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-”

Now wait one moment-

“YOU HAVE ANOTHER BROTHER?!” 

[welcometogrouchland]

[ID in ALT] I've made posts before about Talia/Dick co-parenting Damian moments (will never happen but let me dream) and this came to me in a vision. Took me ages to finish for some reason 😭 and then even longer to post

[aunmenosheteroenespanol]

2.12 Chimney Begins - 2.09 Hen Begins - 2.16 Bobby Begins Again - 7.04 Buck, Bothered and Bewildered

Tommy's family arc

[nmzuka]

my humble offering

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

[cozylittleartblog]

worst way to start my new year, thanks. i have a lot of things to say about these companies but i'm tired and just keeping it focused to the pin side of things for this one. do not ever buy pins from these companies, literally ALL of them are stolen from small artists like me. if you want to buy enamel pins, check out etsy, and artist's personal websites and shops! (though even Etsy has some bootleg pins that ship straight from china, so tread carefully…)

Every pin I've designed is, thus far, EXCLUSIVE to my etsy. if you find it anywhere else, it's been ripped off! and once these stupid bootlegs pop up, it's basically a never ending game of whack-a-mole trying to get them all taken down...

[fudgecake-charlie]

"rebelle painter has an in depth brush engine to simulate traditional painting techniques" is all well and good until you only use your digital painting method. at least the impasto is really pretty

[pummelingbat]

Persecution Complex, or: "Just You, Me, And The Weight Of Your Dead Girlfriend Between Us"

[sheerakk]

[crengarrion]

edit: please read my additions at the bottom before reblogging this post. please do not reblog this post without also reblogging the others i've linked!

if you saw my reblog(s) of ahmed's donation posts in which he includes his crypto wallets (and my links to those posts), anyone else's posts explaining how to donate to him using those wallets, or any aid post that mentions his ability to accept cryptocurrency and decided to villianise him and accuse him of being hamas for it... you are repulsive. you are not welcome here.

people are dying. paypal and ko-fi take percentages. paypal has a monthly withdrawal limit. i'm the first to admit i know nothing about cryptocurrencies, but ahmed has said it goes directly to him without a service taking a cut. i assume there are fewer or no withdrawal limits. it is harder to track and less regulated, which, in this case, provides an additional layer of security for people being precision targeted. get over it.

anyway. donate to ahmed's ko-fi. donate to ahmed's paypal. follow ahmed @90-ghost for updates on how to help him, and check his ko-fi and tumblr posts for updates. send him a nice ask. reblog his posts depicting he and his family's life in gaza. read tumblr user neaeach (naoual sahe)'s interview with ahmed. bring hope. listen to palestinians, don't speak over them.

ahmed's reblog of his interview, with a link to it:

direct link to the interview:

edit: i don't need reblogs, but palestinians, muslims, arabs, and other people suffering directly due to zionism and islamophobia do! please reblog their posts!! @el-shab-hussein has also made a post about these accusations against ahmed, which @fairuzfan added onto. and please reblog this post with ahmed's latest ko-fi update and all the ways you can DIRECTLY donate to him! thank you

[anneapocalypse]

I love every YouTuber who has ever made "[Character] dialogue - all options" video.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 169

Danny is from a world where everyone has wings, even if most have long since lost the ability to fly. Something about loading and aspect ratio, wings being too small, body too heavy, now mostly used as display, whatever. 

It doesn’t matter even if he had blueprints from when he was like six of a jetpack to help fly. It won’t work anyway and hey, he has his ghost form! Which uh, might be perhaps, affecting his wings which were maybe sort of scorched black and practically down to the bone thanks to the accident. 

It doesn’t matter, he swears. Though he’s admittedly relieved to see the new feathers growing in are different from Dan’s angry sunset. Even if they’re not even supposed to be able to grow back. Alright, this is fine, no one is going to notice! It’s not like everyone knows about the poor Fenton kid whose wings were absolutely destroyed thanks to an accident! It’s fine. 

He’s not flying in a half-panic towards the Far Frozen while crying because his wings are coming back and he’s so scared. He didn’t panic and instantly fled the moment Jazz pointed them out while changing the bandages. 

He definitely didn’t trip over something while wiping away said tears and blacking out from all the stress and all of his problems that he definitely mentioned to someone and isn’t keeping a secret. Definitely. 

Hawkwoman and Hawkman would like everyone to know that neither of them were expecting a very small child to be spat out of the villain of that week’s machine that should definitely not be a portal. A very small child, maybe nine or ten, with a multitude of concerning wounds both old and fresh. Which isn’t even beginning to touch on the wings. 

Feathered, like baby down despite the gnarled scars, unlike their own metallic, with the beginning of tiny specklings like stars amidst the darker fuzz peeking from the wounded flesh. 

Who?! Who dared?! It’s (at least to the forever reincarnating duo) a literal baby! They still have down! Tiny baby fuzz! Was it the portal?! Oh this villain is going to taste their maces for causing this if that’s the case! 

The rest of the Justice League would honestly like to know what just happened and are honestly unsure on if they should stop the two…

[ferronickel]

A bunch of webcomic Ralseis! I've been wanting to do fanart for all of these comics for a while and I've got an upcoming page of my comic that requires a mix of styles/shading, so I thought this would be good practice!

Eldritchrune by @lynxgriffin

Looking Glasses by @ferronickel

The Chara Timeline by @lilybug-02

Reconnecting by @purplebehittindifferent

Twin Runes by @akanemnon

Flat colors under the cut because I think you can see some of the stylistic differences better without shading.