#i dont really talk about it at all tbqh

[obsidian-goblet]

I went out for lunch with my sister today, and she was regaling me with tales of conversations shes had with other people, regarding my General Vibe and the fact I sometimes write.

Hey! I say, enthusiastically. Do you wanna know what Im writing now?

Yeah! she says.

Monster porn!

She wasnt even surprised, she just went lmao ofc you are. Didnt question it at all.

[piplupod]

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[yongseungkim]

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[creepy-scrawl]

I CANT W THIS!!! MY MIL IS SUPER IGNORANT ABOUT POLITICS AND WHENEVER I QUESTION HER LIKE "YOU THINK THAT'S RIGHT? THAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS A GRIP ON YOUR HUMAN RIGHTS?" AND SHES FUCKING FURIOUS AND STARTED YELLING AT MY GF WTF

[determinate-negation]

https://www.tumblr.com/beigale-shtuchim/749006144592379904?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/the-catboy-minyan/749015310244446208?source=share

This whole thread is shit tbqh as per usual with smol bean zionists but I wanted to take the opportunity to know your opinion as an open anti-zionist jewish person abt the point near the end of the og chain:

Is it true that at some point in history jews are/were indigenous to the same land without that inherently denying Palestinian roots? Also wtf do they mean with "The Arab Empire" colonizing Palestine???

These are all gen doubts btw you're cool with cool opinions so that's why I'm asking lul

its true that jews lived in eretz yisrael, the geographic land of biblical israel, until the destruction of the second temple around 2000 years ago (and not all of them, even before this there were jews living in various other places) but this really has nothing to do with claims of being indigenous today. the concept of indigeniety is specifically in relation to colonization and modern colonialism. the history of movements of people and the collapse of ancient empires, tribes, kingdoms is really complicated and long, and in palestine in particular there were a lot of different periods of rule and different religious groups living there. i dont really study ancient history or biblical history but there is a lot you can read on it. its not denying palestinian roots to say this because who lived where thousands of years ago and the religious significance of a geographic location doesnt change the settler colonial nature of the modern nation state of israel. its a purposeful misunderstanding of modern colonialism when zionists say this, and ignorance of the academic work that shows israel operates like other settler colonies, and that the basis for something being settler colonial is actually material in terms of the aims, government structure, land policy, displacement and dispossession, justifications for colonization, and economic relations between colonizers and colonized, not religion or ancient history. this article Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native is pretty good

and zionists also are probably referring to ancient islamic empires when they talk about arab colonization, which again is really not the same thing as modern colonialism

theres a few posts in my tag for resources and for anti zionism that have links of books about this

also decolonizepalestine.com

[vidyagamereference]

I have so many feelings about touchstarved character design pt 1 Kuras

So! First lets talk about how his whole outfit is just.... yassified priests garb. Like... the collar, the long sleeves, the "tabbard" straps, the gold. Its all very.... 3 peice suit high fashion is eating a catholic Fathers robes and a protestant Preists robes at the same time. Like the whole suit to me drips power.

Lets count off the different things that imply power to his outfit

Gold and stark white fabric (hard to clean and hard to find)

WELL TAILORED suit (high fashion)

J E W E L E R Y

Religious leader symbolism (Christian)

Fucking EPAULETS???

The hair (weird one but in animated/drawn mediums royalty tends to have longer hair)

If yall told me there was 1 person from Hightown (rich people land) and everyone else was from somewhere else and ONLY showed me the character lineup I'd pick Kuras as the hightowner tbqh.

More analysis under the break

Lets look at his "circles"

I dont have anywhere else to put this so... epaulets look like wings sleeves also imply wings. Makeup = crying gold. Gold bodily fluids = ichor. Ichor = divinity. that is all

A list of imperfect/broken circles/halos on kuras

There's attempted circles with his belts (inturrupted by his buckles and almost always at least two [i'll get to the one on his chest]). The buckles around his thigh in particular remind me of slashed circles.

There is an attempted circle on his chest (implying a flase homesty if you like the theory that veres chest is open bc hes more honest and kuras's is covered because hes more of a lier) that is left open by way of the empty preists collar. Like something religious was taken away. Its highly decorated so i think were ment to see it

The epaulets have some shape language of wings and halos imho and they also continue the trend of doubled up circuits (these are too angular to be circles but square triangular halos were in fact a thing)

His earrings are rayed halos (halos that have sunlight/sunbeams coming off of it) but even they somehow seem inturrupted by his ears when looking at how theres never a perfect circle. Another example of doubling round things

The golden cords on his hip (princely) are also imperfect circles and doubled up round things

What do the doubling up of round things (and honestly most things in some way or another. Makeup, vials on his chest, aprony tabbardy strappy things) mean? I dont know for sure but I'd wager its hinting at a few things

Broken halo

His Angelic body structure (see also: belt talk below)

A duality to his nature

Actually on the topic of halos he seems to imply a lot of shapes of halo! He obviously has the thin circular outline ones (for old testament prophets, angels, saints, Mary, and the symbol of the four evangelists according to Wikipedia), the triangle (less prominently) which is for The Holy Trinity (god jesus and the holy spirit),

and somewhat also (weirdly) square halos. Which was for.... *checks notes* celebrities who wanted to be painted like their blorbo jesus and friends... dont beleive me? Look at the fancy "not a belt buckle" thing he has and if its NOT giving painting frame I'll eat it.

Looking at the belt buckle square halo thing again it has been crossed out which makes me think that maybe kuras hates the rich and idolitry (komrade Kuras)

Another word for halo is glorihole. That is apropos of nothing i just had to learn that and yall do too now. Youre welcome

Anyways back on the topic

His too many belts moment at the hips really makes me think of the standard idea of a biblically accurate angel. Yknow. Rings of eyes around a central flame are a common depiction, the hidden rings on the inside are studded to look like false eyes to me. Especially so hidden behind a decorative false belt

The hiding of so much black (another dye reserved for royalty) under such pristine white makes me think hes lying to us, or at best putting up a facade.

THE ABOVE BEING SAID he only has two stripes of true black, the rest is a humble brown. And the belts look like theyre holding something in. I think theres a third layer to him

Layer 1: The Good Doctor Kuras Of Lowdown. Friends? You mean people im around so nobody suspects I'm not human! Yes i am human man and i eat human food!

Layer 2 possibilty a: MWAAHAHAHAHAHA I AM EEEEVILLLLLLL A FALLEN ANGEL!!! THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED ISNT IT?!?! [Edgelore noises] [terrified screams of those who just realized this edgelord could kill us all]

Layer possibly b: this is the [insert accurate adjective here] of a killer bell- I MEAN MC. emotions. Like 300 gallons of them in one sitting. Possible 0 sum game. More likely hes a living nuke and will Go Off somehow

Layer 3: hey I'm feeling less catholic guilt can i still go sorta wild ish and not be eeeevillll? And also maybe kiss? Also I'm not actually baby I'm just unsure of how to be myself in this new way will you help me figure it out [happy ending noises]

So yeah tell me if i missed anything :]

@hollana

[classpectpokerap]

Give meq tgat fefat <> roxy stuffff please

alright bear with me for a second i gotta paint a word picture

imagine youre roxy lalonde, right.

you just entered the game. youve got a bottle of momslime. your modus was literally built to hold ectobiologized goo. youve been feeling the weight of destiny on your shoulders -- YOU ARE GOING TO MEET HER. she might be dead but you are going to meet her.

and you get to your sprite,

and theres just

a fucking

CLOWN

and two corpses that he throws into the kernel.

(the first homestuck fic i ever read, Conference Call, has a version of the erisolsprite prototyping. they fought gamzee and got their fuckin asses kicked. its great.)

and then youre left with just. Some Alien Bitch. and its like the universe is teasing you, because she's partially the DIRECT DESCENDANT of the fishwitch what killed your mom, and also a cat???? you are so sick to death of cats. you have been up to your fucking ass in cats. its just too much

and then she just. talks to you

and you slowly start to listen

you hear about her lives on alternia. what it was like being a princess, what it was like being the pauper. how they weren't even really friends, before -- they ran in different circles.

but they're one person, now. one person dedicated to *helping you.*

we never find out how roxy quit drinking, or who helped her through it

(it was fefeta)

and fefeta *loves* you. she listens to you talk about boys. you talk about your mom. fefeta never really spoke to her... but her nepeta half *knows what happened to your kitty frigglish* after he died. and frigglish said that your mom was okay.

that everything was going to be okay

and it's just. jane had her shit. jake was up in his shit. dirk had fucked off with his shit. and roxy really only had fefeta!!!!!!!!

and i think they were moirails and i think they loved each other so much. frankly. tbf.

roxy is a trans woman, fefeta is newly plural. they have a lot in common. tbqh. its like. its very beautiful. in my eyes. in my vision.

and then

she dies

and this is like. this is a really big fucking deal honestly?

fefeta's death is like. a huge thing. its one of the only things she tells john about when summarizing the entirety of her session.

and this isnt something she magically gets back in the post-retcon timeline, either

like... when fefeta dies, there isnt a post-retcon fefeta. (we'll GET TO YOU JASPROSE.) it's just roxy who remembers fefeta's existence at all -- her friends dont have any connection to her. *nobody alive in all of reality* remembers her.

fefeta isnt just dead, dude, shes Fucking GONE. shes the goner ever. shes fuckin erased.

but honestly

on a level? good for her.

we've seen what being in homestuck does to people. it warps them, reshapes them. (see the new hsbc upd8 for some cool imagery about it.) fefetasprite was never a real part of the story. she got away with being silent -- her words are hidden from us. she was never in LE's clutches.

and why would LE even want to clutch her

she's the sword that's going to kill him, after all

:3

i call fefetasprite the "cat fish witch" for a very important reason. a) its cute BUT B). if you look at caledfwlch, dave's sword, and just sorta. squint at the word. it looks like cat fish witch. that's fefeta. she Iss the cat fish witch.

so what does her death mean?

well it's not like dave used an UNBROKEN sword to fight LE.

feferi is the part of the sword still left in the stone. the part we forgot and left behind.

which leaves Nepeta, the other half of this broken sword, of the Cat Fish Witch

to kill the shit out of Lord English. B33

the sword was always going to kill him!!!!!!!! fefetasprite was the sword!!!!!!!!!!! NEPETA WAS ALWAYS FATED TO DEFEAT LORD ENGLISH!!!! AM I CLINICALLY INSANE? YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

anyway. all this to say.

i wrote a fic about this.

check out the second work in the series for roxy processing the emotions that none of her post-retcon friends remember her moirail. it's some good stuff i think!!!!!!! also hal is there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

anyway jasprose is just roxy's initial dream of reviving her mom in her kernelsprite brought to life through the most roundabout and indirect and stupid way possible. send POST

[biracy]

abt your post abt bi women belonging in the wlw community just as much as lesbians : i was reading the replies and youre so right abt how ignorant people are abt what comphet really is. im a lesbian and like yea i think we would experience comphet in the most intense way since were not attracted to men in any level, but comphet isnt only abt that, its a symptom of the patriarchy forcing women to center men in their lives and hell even straight women experience comphet, let alone bi women. people just have thrown around the word comphet so much they dont even know the true meaning

I was actually gonna post abt this soon LMAO so yeah!! I think it's also a misunderstanding of what "heterosexuality" as a dominant social force is to say that lesbians who are not attracted to men can experience "comphet", but bisexual women who are attracted to men cannot experience it. "Heterosexuality" as it is defined by dominant social forces is not only "a relationship between a man and a woman" - it's almost always a relationship between a "masculine" man and a "feminine" woman, and quite often a relationship between a man and a woman that results in monogamous marriage and childbirth. When people write about comphet, they're not talking about how movies and TV and fairy tales and children's books and my parents and my teachers and my religion all came together and told me to want to fuck genderfucky bi guythings. There is a specific kind of man centered in the heterosexuality enforced onto women, and a specific kind of role that a woman is expected to take on in that heterosexuality. I think the idea that bi people (women especially) cannot experience "comphet" overlaps a lot with people who believe that all bisexual people have the capability to become "straight-passing" if they enter different-gender relationships, which is in and of itself based on, in my observances, the belief that "gay/lesbian culture" and "bisexual culture" are completely distinct and that bisexual people are in some way innately less capable of being gender-nonconforming (or as some Tumblr scholars will call it, "visibly queer"). Bisexual people often date each other, we're often trans and/or visibly gender-nonconforming, and that's not something that we can just turn off the minute we enter into a quote unquote "heterosexual relationship." I'm bisexual, I'm nonbinary and id as both a man and a woman (so I take part in all these "sapphic" conversations etc etc u know the drill), I'm weird and kinky and switchy, I'm polyamorous, right now I'm dating a cis butch bi girl and a trans + nonbinary pan guy. At this point in my life I have absolutely no interest in relationships with cishet men, I don't want to get monogamously married, I never want to have children. I have not performed heterosexuality any better than, idk, a "gold star lesbian" has, and I FEEL it, I'm given shit for it, every relative I have pressures me already about boyfriends and grandkids and whatever. I do think there are bisexual people sometimes who do conform more to Straight Society but a) I think there are an equal amount of gay guys and lesbians who conform to Straight Society tbqh and b) it doesn't cover the breadth of bisexual people who do exist and who do feel the pressure to conform to the mainstream, dominant social system of heterosexuality and who CANNOT conform to it any more than you, anon, probably can. So yeah TL;DR bi girls can definitely experience "comphet" lmao and people are probably gonna hate that I said that

[mychemicalraymance]

Good art doesn’t have to have accurate proportions or anatomy

?????????? Depends on what you mean by "accurate". What i was implying was the fact that gerards art suffers from an obvious lack of experience in figurative observational drawing, only because his chosen area is specifically comics and illustration. Tbqh a lot of the time you can tell when, in attempting to stylize the figure, an artist does not have that experience and understanding of observational figure drawing. In fact a lot of art suffers from artists not taking the time to learn how to draw from observation (<sue me for thinking this, I went to a very traditional foundations based art school. Also my art often has bad proportions bc I overestimate my stylization not claiming I dont).

All of this also is with the understanding that accurate figurative drawing is way more important to comics and illustration than fine arts generally. In order for people to take your premise seriously, the anatomy and general figurative quality of your characters if by far more important than in say an oil painting that is questioning ideas of pop culture and incorporates those design elements into its premise, rather than something that wants your brain to take as something in its own narrative right and not necessarily question its graphic or material qualities.

Just as an example, compare the figurative quality of someone like yoshitomo nara and Raymond Pettibon to that of, my favorite illustrator, Jamie Hewlett

Which of the above is gerard trying to achieve? The gorillaz, I would say, because hes not trying to question the boundaries of fine art pushed up against popular culture and ideas of ability, and IS trying make a comic that is engaged in one to one language about figures.

Jamie Hewlett DOES break his figures and proportions, like if you take 2 seconds to look at what their bodies actually look like its very easy to see that its entirely stylized, but when you're going for "narrative comic and illustration" his is more successful because you can see his drawing ability underneath quite easily.

Gerard is not a bad artist! In fact his static illustrations are awesome, and why his lightly "inaccurate" album cover is well suited to being an album cover and iconic.

But in terms of comics and illustration, you can see really readily where he could fall through the cracks in comparison to others.

None of this is ACTUALLY that contentious anon, you're not like, wrong? Or even really arguing with me i think but I love taking the time to talk about these things because I love art so. Forgive my long reply

[rigil-kentauris]

9 people you’d like to get to know better

tagged by @valerianvault

Three Ships: JUST THREE???

i am ALSO on that ffxiv juice and as yall MAY have guessed from all my aymericposting its wol/aymeric.

id be here all night if i did ffxiv ships so moving on.

hm.

hm.

ffxiv has really taken oven my brain space huh? tbqh the other games im playing rn arent big shipping arenas for me. what do you ship in frostpunk? coal x generator fics i suppose. if youve got time to fuck youve got time to truck in some more steel from the steel pile. extended shifts for everyone.

this is where i would have put my feh ships if feh wasnt dead to me

well i could put bylad/claude three houses here. power couple of the century. going to get an emulator/mod at some point to restore justice in s supports. i havent got anything against bylass ships but usually the way people write her drives me fucking INSANE.

hm what for three. ugh. ugh. ugh i said no more ffxiv. but i would be lying if - and would LOVE to lie about it though - i would be lying if i tried to act like cidnero hasnt consumed at minimum 15% of my waking thoughts in recent months. its like a fucking perplexus sphere. a very Puzzle. like the rct2(?) roller coaster auto complete function. i WILL figure it out. whatever It is. but everytime i solve a piece another puzzle pops up. gonna reduce this fucking fraction youll see. youll all see.

First Ever Ship: lol. so way back when, my sister was trying to tell me her Lame Older Sister about this cool new thing called shipping. which i was NOT getting at all. and she, i would imagine because of the relative mainstream awareness at the time and the largely practical fact that i knew what marvel movies were, decided to offer the example of 'its like What If iron man and captain america were together'

which i thought was patently silly. i dont remember why now. i think my main objection was that it did not happen, and why would people spend so much time thinking about things that did not happen.

well anyway. tale old as time i thought it was very funny to ironically talk about it. and then it was not ironic anymore. so it goes.

Last Song: well according to my phone music app it was of the night by bastille.

Last Movie: hm what WAS the last movie i watched? i havent watched a movie in a minute. well we're going to be rewatching the gran turismo movie probably tonight. i liked it quite a bit in the theater (went to an empty matinée).

Currently Reading: UGH still slogging through Utopia. im at a part where it seems tommy has lost the thread, so, its difficult. and then my friend wrote a book! and im very excited to read the new draft

Currently Watching: SCAVENGERS REIGN!!!! a very beautiful and thought provoking show about a group of people who get stranded on an alien planet and how they interact with that biosphere and themselves. the animation is beautiful and colorful. it is on hbo max or whereever you receive hbo products. the last episodes drop today idk if i can handle it

Currently Consuming: nothing because i just woke up. im going to haul myself out of bed for some frosted shredded miniature wheats soon i hope

Currently Craving: anything but frosted shredded miniature wheats. bacon cheese egg wrap. chocolate chip brioch bun. pasta. hm i might be hungry. lets say Food

Tagging: @czigonas @plaidypus @lieutenantk thanks for joing me on my breadmaking saga yesterday.

[psychoticallytrans]

This is gonna be a weird question, and im sorry in advance if i dont word it the best. is it possible to only have temporary psychosis, or, i guess, episodic psychosis? im bipolar (type 2, i *think*, my psychiatrist isnt one for divvying the two up tbqh and im not either) and back when i wasnt medicated, during 2021ish, i had what was most likely a psychotic depression episode (and have probably had more before, but my memory is really bad). i didnt get that diagnosed; i told my school counsellor about how i was feeling and she just kinda went "thats... a little out of my paygrade" sdfghjk. now that im medicated i dont have those kinds of episodes anymore, but, well--my symptoms have gotten worse lately, likely due to stress (i am a trans man, easily clockable as trans, living in florida, plus i've had life stuff going on) and i suppose im just wondering if you have any advice for trying to catch an episode before i'm near the end of it. sorry if this is technically easily-google-able, but i'll be honest, i dont trust random articles more than i trust people with the conditions they're talking about, given how stigmatized a lot of mental illnesses are. thank you for your time !! have a good day !!

No, it's not weird at all! It's certainly not easy to google, if you want accurate information. I'm glad you felt comfortable coming here to ask. Psychosis is a symptom. Specifically, it's a response to stress. Some disorders, like bipolar, make you more prone to it than average, lowering the amount of stress that needs to be applied for you to experience psychosis. For some people, the bar is zero stress applied for them to experience psychosis. For most people, the bar is pretty high, requiring major stress sustained over days for them to experience it- and when the stress is removed, they are no longer psychotic. In other words, the vast majority of people's psychosis is temporary!

It sounds like that for you, the amount of stress required is lower than most, and you're looking out for how to manage an episode. That's a great question to be asking, and I'm glad you're taking care of and looking out for yourself.

The first thing is to think back to your first episode, and think about what symptoms you experienced. Were there hallucinations? Delusions? What were they about, and how did they feel? Identifying what you experienced can help you figure out if you have an episode coming up. For me, the first thing is always hearing things that aren't there, like footsteps. Figuring out what your first thing is can help a lot. Next, think about what might help you figure out what is and isn't real. For visual hallucinations, a lot of people use their phones to check by looking through the camera app. For auditory ones, earplugs and recording then playing back sound are both common ones. For hallucinated smells, most people use nose plugs, but I use essential oils because they work better for me. I cannot smell anything past them, so anything that doesn't smell like the oil ain't real. For taste, I hear a lot of people use an ice cube on the tongue, but I don't have those. Anyone who does, please chime in! For tactile ones, usually touching the spot yourself will help.

Delusions are more complicated, especially when you're in the middle of them. The strategy that works best for me is basically examining my thoughts. First, I figure out if it's rational or not by applying logic. Why am I thinking this? Does it have a good reason behind it? Next, is this thought going to harm me or other people? If not, I leave it alone. You can choose to examine your benign delusions if you like, I just choose not to.

If it is (a common one that falls into this category for me is paranoia about leaving my home when I need groceries), I essentially start laying out an argument against myself, using my past experiences and research to resist the irrational thought (ex. going to the store is safe, even if it wasn't I can kick most people's asses, and if I can't do that I can scream loud enough to alert anyone within about a quarter mile, and even if something crap happens to me, I'm trained in First Aid and regularly update my training.). This can be difficult, and sometimes fails for me.

I also noted that you specifically had psychotic depression. this ca make things harder, because it's hard to do things when you're depressed. I recommend prepping for the possibility of an episode. Find ways to make your life easier. A list of self-accommodations you may find helpful:

Get some meals you can microwave. Make sure your meds are right next to something you can take them with. Try to keep enough clean laundry around that you won't have to do laundry during the episode. Disposable dishes and utensils are another great accommodation. Have a big trash bin you can pile trash into, and a misc box or hamper so that you can shove shit in it that you don't have the energy to put away, so you still have a floor to walk on safely.

The episode will be over, eventually, and you'll need to take care of whatever happened during it, but the better you take care of yourself during it, the faster it will be over.

If anyone else has advice, please feel free to add on!

[dateamonster]

what’s your opinion on monstrous transformations (both fast and slow), and also more controversially what do you think about having monsters/nonhuman characters serve as minority allegory (as opposed to society’s hate for them being being an allegory)

ohhh hold on this is a rly good question i think abt a Lot actually.

ok getting the first bit out of the way, love a good monstrous transformation. fast, slow, its all good. i personally like gradual slow shifts the most but its a situational thing. transformation is one of those things that like just always has to be symbolic. even more than the degree to which Everything is symbolic ya know. so like context rly matters when it comes to how to invoke it most effectively.

MOVING ON

i think from the phrasing of the ask ur looking for something more along the lines of like. for example shapeshifters as representation of nonbinary people or aliens as representation of different cultures rather than like monsters vs humans as allegory for racism. but im also not sure you can meaningfully separate the two! the latter i think is more overused so it like registers more as an immediate red flag, but its like. if the aliens from avatar werent being violently invaded by humans it wouldnt make like their reskinned stereotypical indigeneity anymore tolerable i dont think.

which isnt to say i think every story that draws connections between fantastical fictional species and real world people are inherently bad. i dont really think theres any trope that i believe cant be handled well by anyone under any circumstance. the super easy fix to bad rep via monster or fantasy creature characters is basically just have actual humans who also represent those same identities and communities and experiences so that the audience isnt drawn to connect the traits of any one group with your fictional species.

the harder fix is to like seriously analyze why you want this character to be a monster and what that says about them and what that says about you and your own experiences and biases and what you actually want to communicate with the inclusion of this character. and when applicable hire a sensitivity reader. its kinda crazy how many pieces of media seem to prefer half-assing the hard way over just doing the easy thing and not assigning the status of token minority to a literal monster.

of course once again all of this is ya know circumstantial. im speaking to like my own experiences and the things ive observed. and its weird too! bc im also speaking as someone who like is trans and nonbinary and thinks of myself and my gender expression as inherently intertwined with monstrosity. and as someone who is autistic and thinks of myself as a changeling. and as someone who is a fat person who represents themself with a pig themed sona. if i talk abt cringeass hollywood blockbusters engaging in High Fantasy Racism i feel like to be fair i kinda have to talk about independent own-voices creators who write stories and make art about their own identities in the lovely language of monstrosity. theres not rly a way to draw a hard line around the former without the risk of catching some of the latter.

so umm as usual i dont rly have a snappy all encompassing answer for how i feel abt this kind of characterization. im simply too much of a Nuance Enjoyer. i do i guess think this is something that generally turns out better when it is someone making art about their own experiences, but also unless i believe minority artists are a monolith, which i dont, i need to accept that artists will inevitably make stuff that is beautiful and resonant to some people and totally repugnant and offensive to others, and that both of those responses can be like totally justified and correct. thats art babey!

anyway slight digression but i think any case where a character feels more like an allegory than a fully fleshed u know Character is gonna flop for me no matter how relatable it is. tbqh, id rather more ppl try and fail to make beautiful grotesque frightening sensually moving monsters out of their lived experiences and their empathetic connections with others than succeed at creating bland toothless universally approachable Good Rep tm. if u know u know. if u feel me u feel me. that is all.

[popstart]

Dropping a Heathney ask for the ship bingo bc I’m clinically insane

THEY MAKE ME INSANE OKAY. they are sooo rivals to lovers. Theyre both so good at the game that the other person drives them insane with how she can one-up her. They can one-up eachother SO BAD. The constant need to do better than the other person to both get what they deserve (Courtney for being unfairly kicked off, Heather for her elimination which she no doubt sees as unfair) the mutual hatred for the show, chris, and everyone there in general. World tour is THEIR SEASON OKAY. but only the really spesific version that exists in my brain.

Every time i watch world tour i get all 😮that these girls actually fucking hate eachother. Why did they not team up im not over it. Theyre canon to me in the way that ive deluded myself into thinking they have this really gay rivalry going on when their canon rivalry is the straightest shit ever . ok😭😭

They think theyre the only normal people on that show. You know. Everyone else here is inssne thank god im normal. Shut up ill reuse my jokes all i want. They definitely think the other person is crazy but in a way that bennefits them so they can appreciate eachother for that. Then that mutual appreciation grows and grows into smth more.

They could have suuuch a mutual respect for eachother. Like, canonically it was just to make her look better, but heather pointing out how courtney was wronged and how she feels her pain. Heather comforting courtney after getting cheated on... insane. INSANE..OKAY. WHY DID THEY DO NOTHING WITH THAT.

"Heather is a formidable competitor, but i can't say I approve of her tactics" she wants to fix her sooooooo bad. Courtney could be corrupted by her so hard too. Like a pep talk of how much she doesnt deserve to be wronged, causing her to throw caution out the wind and use any tactics possible to win. Basically just becoming far less filtered in the ways she wants to win

I think their relationship mostly works with a foundation of something they can work together towards but also see very differently about. They both crave leadership and cant stand giving it to someone else. If they could work together at something they would be unstoppable. Courtneys ability to organize and plan, heathers ambition to get it done. But their mutual Need for control is their downfall. BASICALLY. Its so tragically doomed and delicious.

I dont realisitically see their relationship being longterm unless something changes between them tbqh. Like sure heather is mostly only mean because of the competition and courtney's emotions are thoroughly exacerbated because of the competition but they would just butt heads a LOT. Theyre doomed and toxic yuri but theyre MY doomed and toxic yuri.

[dakbees]

bias tag game

rules: you're going to pick 10 of your biases (or as many biases as you have and then fill in the rest of the spots with idols you like) and number them 1-10. then answer the questions below! try not to look at the questions before you make your list!

tagged by @ambivartence and @dive-in-the-blue

Biases (just whoever came to my head first):

Yanan (Pentagon)

Wonsang (Lucy)

Changmin (DKB)

Dongil (DKB)

Yeri (Red Velvet)

Hui (Pentagon)

Bang Jaemin (soloist)

Jamie (soloist)

Rena (Pristin/Hinapia)

J-us (ONF)

1. Between 7 and 5, who did you bias first?

Yeri by quite a while! I started biasing her in 2016 (a bit before russian roulette era) and i didn't even discover jaemin until he was in top management (2018, i believe?) after that, i kept up with him and i started biasing him with his debut fairytail: lingering ep :)

2. Between 2 and 6, who are you more attached to?

Nooooo this is so harddddd 😭 i genuinely dont think i can chose, hui and wonsang both mean so much to me.... like if i had to chose between meeting one or the other i dont think i could chose either, i would just flip a coin and let that decide for me so... after flipping a coin i suppose i must chose wonsang (altho i still very much love hui so so so so much)

3. If you were to spend the day with either 3 or 1, who would you choose and what would you do?

im sorry changmin i love you but yanan is my number 1 my babyboo the light of my life and the wind in my sails. tbqh i just want to meet yanan so i can tell him how much he means to unis no matter what happens with cube and contract renewals coming up soon we will all stand behind him :( i know how much he struggles with his own self confidence so i just want to reassure him that we love him regardless, especially since cube has always treated him so poorly. i love him so much :(

4. What is your favorite physical feature about 9?

honestly?? i think rena's nose is very attractive. its one of the first things i noticed about her. shes very pretty in general and i like how silky her hair looks as well, but her nose is so sharp and i love the way it curves up a bit at the end :3

5. What is your favorite part of 6's personality?

what ISNT there to love about hui's personality? hes just so.. hui.. but if i can be a bit cheesy here, it would have to be how kind he is. hes so caring of his members and protective of them (like how he said he could never just watch if one of his members got in a fight aka hes gonna beat someone up) and he always has such a fond look when talking about or just looking at them. hes also just!! such a swell guy!! for boys planet and road to kingdom he just befriended everyone!! he knows mnet is shitty and tried to make everyone happy even though he was there to win/make a name for pentagon. hes so headstrong but can be so gentle when it comes to others

6. If you were to tell 8 anything you wanted, what would you tell them?

oh jamie :(( i know youve been through a lot but seeing you grow as both a person and an artist has been the most satisfying thing. youve been able to find yourself despite everything that has been in your way and everyone holding you back. im so proud of how far youve come and i will be even more proud watching where you go. i will listen to your beautiful voice now and remember the adorable 19-year-old i found so long ago. youve matured so much since then. thank you for coming back despite the hardships and i look forward to supporting you in the furture

7. Between 1 and 2, whose closet would you raid?

fahsBJDnalk neither i wouldnt fit into yanans or wonsangs clothes and tbh they arent really my aesthetic. hmm but if i had to chose one, maybe wonsang?? he wears a lot of sweaters and i do too when im lounging around the house :)

8. What is a style that you want to see 3 try?

i know changmin (and all of the dakbees tbh) are more into streetwear than anything else, but i would love to see him in something a bit more alternative! especially techwear i think he would look soooo good. theres just something about a man covered head to toe in black that does something to me 😔 (but if were talking music, i would love to see him do another hype rap song with the rest of rap team a la samsung!)

9. Between 5 and 4, who are you closer to in height?

considering yeri is like 5'2" and dongil is around 5'8", def dongil lol. im still taller than him tho 😈 (i really doubt thats his real height i was taller than him by a bit when i met them lol)

10. Between 10 and 9, whose music do you like the best?

well pristin and hinapia both have.. a very lacking discography lol. they have about 11 songs total? i love them all dont get me wrong (i am very partial to tina and aloha) but onf have so many more songs than them i feel like it would be a disservice to NOT chose them. plus, onf has one of my fave discographies in the entirety of kpop. moscow moscow, the realist, original, asteroid, geppeto, i do, if we dream, why, we must love, yayaya-- all songs that have had a grip over me at some point or another.

[axemetaphor]

my dad got his hands on a copy of Sonic 06 for the xbox and asked me to be his play-tester after having a lot of trouble with that speed level right at the beginning (catching up to Eggman's ship on the beach) and i got as far as the Silver battle before giving up, so here's my notes

DISCLAIMER this isnt an invitation to dunk on the game in the notes of this post alright we've seen enough of that. i dont hate the game. no, really, i dont. i respect everything it tried to be and feel bad for literally everyone working on it because, from what i gather, they were green and facing extreme crunch time. sucks for everyone involved. anyway:

the load times on xbox were VASTLY better, which makes a lot of sense, given from what i know the ps3 has a ... strange way of storing/retrieving/loading data, but they were still pretty long and a little too frequent for my liking. still, probably not anyone's fault, tbqh. i'll have to see if the emulator my dad's working on getting on his PC (finally, he's been trying to do that for years now lmao,) has the same issue to figure out if it's a programming problem or hardware. personally im pretty sure it's just hardware.

it's much easier to steer sonic if you use the camera and his movement, but the camera will still fuck you over. this isnt 06 specific though game cameras are Always hard to wrangle lmao

the animations for this game are so strange... i dont say this as a negative whatsoever. it looks like they were mocapped, which is fascinating to me, translating human proportions onto sonic--it doesnt always work, and i personally wouldn't've made the choice to do that, but it makes me want to study it lmao

the voice acting as well is strange, at least in english; im not knocking anyone's work, whatsoever. i still really love the performances. but i think back to this one tweet i made about silver's intro dialogue where i mentioned that i loved the performance, but the poor guy sounded like he'd done a hundred takes of the audio and was losing grasp of Words themselves (As happens to everybody) and Silver's english VA not only liked the tweet but started following me because of it. this was during the trend of not actually giving VAs context for their dialogue, and not really.. respecting them at all, and it makes me sad to think that maybe they did stick everyone in a box, hand them lists of lines, and make them say them over and over until the director got whatever they wanted--or, on the opposite end, were only given enough time for a single take out of the inherent disrespect for VAs that's present in Many fields

the environments are fucking gorgeous and i was genuinely surprised by how many things i could interact with in the levels. granted, i did get stuck on them sometimes, but i doubt the poor devs got any chance to fix that shit. i liked especially ramming Eggman's Cerberus into a statue instead of the wall and watching the statue completely shatter, that's genuinely pretty cool, they couldve just had it be like the walls, static and unreacting. i also liked how the Cerberus decimated those pillars, but thats mostly because the camera kept getting stuck on them

there's very little active direction in the game, save for the floating (?)s, which can sometimes be wordy enough that ive already fucked up and died before theyre done talking. that's probably on my dumbass though.

collision physics in this game ... sure is. i cant remember if all games from the 2000s were like this given i have more experience with older games (pre-00's) + brand fucken new ones so someone else weigh in on this s'il vous plait.

the pre-rendered cutscenes are still fucking gorgeous. delightful.

so much of this game is such a lovely awkward development-stage kind of thing, like awkward teen years. the homing-attack mechanics make me grateful for the auto-targeting of later games. the way he goes from 0 to 100 is in character but hard to play (unwieldy) and makes me glad for the more measured sliding scale of other games. the sprint parts of the game, where youre just steering him, are so fucking cool but i am so fucking bad at them and im glad that in future games the sensitivity of the controls was turned down. it took me some lives to get into a proper rhythm with it, get a sense of just how much of a hair trigger the directional changes were. tails' attacks in this game definitely felt like they could've been much better (throwing the bombs is So difficult to aim, thanks to the camera and how long the animation for it is) and i'm glad they're different in other games--the bombs is a cool idea, just needed to be implemented differently imo

if you knwo more about the development n shit of this game id love to hear it, all i know is they had serious crunch time to release the game alongside the ps3 as its flagship game and had to cut a lot of steps from the process/cut a lot of corners. i attribute a lot of its flaws (and "flaws") to that tbqh. sonic 06 is not a bad game, it's a game that was failed by its circumstances. i dont know fully, im just an animator, i have never in my life made a proper video game.

also this may just be me but i have a theory that this game was meant to be like the Shadow the Hedgehog game, and not rated E for Everyone after all. the darker storybeats (sonic's murder, elise's death, silver's future etc) all feel like they'd have been better-executed at a level closer to that. it feels To Me like they were developing the beginnings of this game (script, designs) in tandem with the endtail development of ShTH, and when it received pushback for the guns, swearing, and violence, they panicked and had to neuter the story. i have a lot of respect for what the game COULD have been.

[determinate-negation]

What made you become anti-zionist? Were you raised with a certain vision of "Israel", did you know a lot of people who lived there? Obv it's the correct position but curious about the journey

I just ended up on some posts about antisemitism after 10/7 and it made me wonder if the "left" has been too harsh or w.e. But it seems like to those posters Palestinians don't exist at all and people are only against them as opposed to for Palestine. Idk.

my family isnt zionist, were interfaith and not really observant, and the jewish side of my family never was that interested in israel. when i went to college i wanted to do more jewish stuff and learn more about judaism so i went to the jewish center and was a bit weirded out by the israel stuff. i just happened to meet some other left wing jews in freshman year who told me they were forming a jvp and we connected easily and i thought itd be a good thing to put my time into since our university has a lot of ties to israel. really i was a communist before anything else, i think it just follows from that if you are principled about imperialism and colonialism. a lot of people from my high school were zionists and a lot either visited israel, were israeli, and a few joined the idf. it was also an unpleasant environment indicative of a particular culture and socio economic class of america so its not that hard to be opposed to.

tbqh i just have no tolerance any more for all this soft zionists online who as you said just dont see palestinians as existing in their conception of this discourse. no amount of palestinian suffering or history is even part of their perspective at all, and what they do talk about verges on the hysterical and paranoid. its not that i think antisemitism isnt rising or a problem i just dont care what they have to say about it at this point because their perspective sucks. and if u (general you) dont feel alienated from mainstream jewish institutions rn i question ur morals