#i explained i wasn't interested

[flurty]

Welp that saga of my life is over

[thresholdbb]

what's the threshold theory

There was a post about how Tom is the only crew member who isn't really affected by the Borg, and there's a theory that he has so much luck because he saw the past and the future when he crossed the transwarp threshold. He saw the past and the future, all of time and space. There's some subconscious part of him that remembers that experience. In fact, Tom refused to play a part in Chakotay indulging Annorax's temporal incursions, probably because a part of him knew nothing good could come of it.

If we extend that same theory to Janeway, some of her wild luck with time travel and other crack plans starts to make sense. She doesn't verbally hate time travel until after the events of Threshold, since it happens in Time and Again without complaint. Janeway has an uncanny knack for time travel, as evidenced every time she deals with it. She hates time travel, but it might be because part of her knows exactly how to manipulate the timeline. She manages to avoid the "inevitable" temporal explosion in Future's End, saving both Voyager and Braxton. She resets the entire timeline in Year of Hell, and no one else followed her reasoning. She pulled it off flawlessly. In Relativity, she senses the incidents are all related, despite it being just one reading that connects them. By the time she's involved, she has a temporal incursion factor of .0036 and a time travel protocol named after her, even if that may just be Braxton's personal grudge. Then there's Endgame, where she intentionally changes the timeline. Up until this point, she has been dragged into time travel, but for the first time, she jumps in on purpose. How does Admiral Janeway know how to get them home sooner in a way that completely avoids the Temporal Integrity Commission? It's because she has seen all of time, and part of her knows exactly what needs to happen so she can get Voyager home and do it in a way that becomes baked into the prime timeline. Maybe she doesn't consciously remember what happened during her transformation, but the experience lives in her mind somewhere, guiding her decisions.

[ingravinoveritas]

In honor of the Met Gala happening tonight: Pictures of Michael and Sarah Silverman at the Met Gala in 2014.

| Bonus: This quote from Michael from a Daily Beast interview...

[canisalbus]

what part of italy are machete and vasco from? not their birthplace since from what i've seen you're still workshopping that. where do they live? i assume rome?

In the 1500's setting Vasco lives and was born in Florence, his family has lived there for centuries. Machete was born in Sicily, was taken to Naples to serve as an apprentice and ended up living and working in Rome (and more specifically today's Vatican city, which as you may know has been an independent country since 1929 but wasn't back then). They first met when they were both studying in Venice in their late teens/early twenties.

I think in the modern au they live together somewhere in Florence.

[thefirstknife]

New article with more details (from Jason Schreier who first broke the story). If you can't see it, I'll copy the whole text under read more.

About 100 employees were laid off in total (8%) and one of the main reasons listed is "underperformance," "sharp drop in popularity" and "poor reception of Lightfall."

So you know when for the last year and a half content creators have been shitting and pissing on the game as a full-time job and the amount of negativity and ragebait content became the only thing to make content about for them? Well they certainly won't take the blame, but I will let it be known. These people either don't understand the influence they have or they do and they're doing it on purpose, and I don't know which of these two options is worse, but I am 100% confident that their campaign of rage and hate contributed to this.

You don't base your entire community around constantly hating everything about the only game you play (despite clearly not enjoying it anymore) and somehow avoid galvanising thousands and thousands of people into perceiving the game negatively. Imagine being employees who have barely worked there for 2 years and the only community reception they've seen is 24/7 hate train for their work and then they get fired because of "poor reception" and "drop in popularity." How can they not take that personally? I am absolutely devastated for these people who delievered a banger product and who were met with an unrelenting barrage of toxic gamer children which ended up having more sway over their boss than them.

Which brings me to the next bit and that's FUCK THE CEO. He is now my mortal enemy #1. I am projecting psychic blasts directly into his brain. What an absolute spineless coward who is more willing to bow down to fucking gamers than to protect his own employees. This is absolutely rage inducing because this has happened before. From the article from 2021 about the toxic culture at Bungie:

Reading this shit from the new article absolutely fucking sent me into blind rage because I immediately remembered this. Another instance of employees suffering because of comments on reddit. And because of toxic players. And proof that leadership is not protecting employees and is instead siding with players.

Match made in heaven. Asshole gamer content creators and asshole CEOs, all of whom sit at home on piles of money made from someone else's labour. I hope they all explode. None of the people that worked on this game deserve this.

Another article with an infuriating comment from the CEO:

In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.

"Kept the right people." Really. Veteran composers weren't the right people? Die!

Bloomberg article in full:

Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2. Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting. Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons pinned the big miss on weak player retention for Destiny 2, which has faced a poor reception since the release of its latest expansion, Lightfall. The next expansion, The Final Shape, was getting good — not great feedback — and management told those present that they planned to push back the release to June 2024 from February, according the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The additional time would give developers a chance to improve the product. In the meantime, Parsons told staff Bungie would be cutting costs, such as for travel, as well as implementing salary and hiring freezes, the people said. Everyone would have to work together to weather the storm, he said, leaving employees feeling determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up. But on Monday morning the news got worse: Dozens of staffers woke up to mysterious 15-minute meetings that had been placed on their calendars, which they soon learned were part of a mass layoff. Bungie laid off around 8% of its employees, according to documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Bungie didn’t respond to requests for comment. Employees who were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of Bungie-paid COBRA health insurance, although other benefits, such as expense reimbursements, ended Monday, sending some staff racing to submit their receipts. Laid-off staffers will also receive prorated bonuses, although those who were on a vesting schedule following Sony Group Corp.’s acquisition of Bungie in January 2022 will lose any shares that weren’t vested as of next month. The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony’s PlayStation unit, which has also cut employees at studios such as Naughty Dog, Media Molecule and its San Mateo office. TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a report Monday that “events over the last few days lead us to believe that PlayStation is undergoing a restructuring.” PlayStation president Jim Ryan announced last month that he plans to resign. Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.

[ckret2]

What is the equivalent of the phrase "Oh my God" that Bill uses? Is he mentioning some god figure from his home dimension or is he using “Oh my me” or “Oh my Axolotl”?

He doesn't use anything.

Have you ever heard an atheist say "oh my big bang" instead of "oh my god"? In common usage, the word "god" in "oh my god" is merely part of a stock phrase and not a declaration of belief. In fact, changing "god" to another term would instantly make it more religious, since if you just say "oh my god" it's like "well maybe they believe in a god or maybe they're just using the phrase," but if you say "oh my [something else]" it's like "they DEFINITELY believe in [something else] so passionately that they changed the phrase just to emphasize how much they believe in it."

If Bill ever used the phrase, he would use it like a foreign word pronounced omaigohd that's just an exclamation that communicates a specific emotional meaning to English-speakers (anger, shock, excitement)—and he's not going to get all cutesy while speaking a foreign language to draw attention to something irrelevant. This exclamation isn't an avenue to announce his religious beliefs.

There ARE issues he feels passionately enough about that he'd break away from common English. Unless he's in "pretending to be human" mode, at any place where a human would naturally refer to themself as "a person," "a woman/man," "female/male," "she/he," Bill will refer to himself as "a shape," "a triangle," "triangular," "it," even in contexts where that sounds weird to the humans. His gender is triangle and that matters to him. Religion does not.

At any rate, there's no [something else] he could fill into the phrase. He knows for a fact that there are figures powerful enough to alter reality—he is one. He suspects on good evidence that there are even more powerful figures that can conjure an entire universe from nothing—he is not one. He considers "power" and "divinity" to be separate things, he doesn't think powerful figures are divine, and he doesn't think the divine is real. He thinks "god" is an artificial social label, like "king," that only exists when enough people concur that it's real and stops existing when enough people stop respecting it. He thinks "god" is what the weak call the powerful when they've been fooled into thinking the powerful deserve worship. He thinks he's one of the powerful that fools the weak. He doesn't think he's a god—except when he's lying to himself very well—but he loves how it feels when other people call him a god, so he encourages it. He doesn't consider anybody god, he doesn't obey or respect any authority, and generally the more powerful a being is, the more he dislikes them on principle. One trillion years ago, the beliefs he was raised with were the sort a white American boomer experiencing a religious crisis would insist are "spiritual but not religious." He briefly thought gods might be real in his youth, but never worshiped any.

But all that aside—his vocabulary simply doesn't include the phrase "oh my god." He doesn't want to imply he even might worship something—he's too proud and that pride is too fragile. If he has to make an exclamation, it'll be something entirely different—"Oh boy." "Oh, come on!" "You're kidding me." "Seriously?" "Whoa!" "Wow!" "No way," maybe hysterical laughter—whatever's fitting in a given situation. Several times in the fic I've had to go find a different phrase where if he was another character I could've just put "omigosh".

[beebeedibapbeediboop]

About the postwoman, what sprung this idea up? Any specific inspiration or was it purely unique?

One day my mailman flirted with me and I let him in the house because I thought he was cold (it was winter) and I was oblivious to his mating call (I thought he was really cold and wanted to offer him some tea). So after letting him in I realized he was in fact interested in something else and sat him down to talk to me about his work. Embarrassed that I didn't, in fact, desired him carnally, he talked to me about the mailman work.

So I found that interesting and decided to make a story out of it.

[bean-chaointe]

I got accepted into University College Cork's online master's programme for Irish folklore and mythology, beginning this fall. 😄🥰😭 I've been dreaming of it since I did a year in Ireland at University College Dublin in the folklore department, years ago.

[ehlnofay]

It’s not until she hears Sissel’s knees hit the floor that Efri is jolted back into her body.

She blinks, whipping her head around. Sissel is kneeling, bracing a palm on the ancient stone pavement, at the barrier – no, the barrier’s gone, it’s just Sissel on the floor. She lifts her head and meets Efri’s eyes; her hair is wispy and wild, the little plaits meant to keep it neat come loose and tumbling, her eyes wide. The barrier's gone, but still, her pale face is lit up blue.

“Are you okay?” she asks. She doesn’t speak loudly, but it echoes in the great stone chamber.

Nine, Efri doesn’t know.

She blinks again, looks down at her hands, clinging to the metal stick so fiercely that her joints ache. (Her own stick, her nice wooden one, is still on the floor somewhere, where it slipped out of her grasp when she hit the wall.) The lumpy heavy end of it, the clobbering end, is still resting on –

Not on. It’s in the thing’s head, fitted neatly in the opening of its dented helmet, the horns spiralling over the floor. There’s a tooth, perfectly preserved, by Efri’s foot.

One by one, she unwraps her gloved fingers from the handle of the metal stick, letting it drop to the floor with a clang so loud it makes her wince. Kazari is nosing at her side. (When did they let go of it? When did they get so close? She must have missed that. She feels out of the loop. Her heart is juddering like fish on a line, battering like some frightened trapped thing at her ribcage, and her breath is coming fast and heavy.) Absentmindedly bringing up a hand to press over her sore shoulder, she says, “’M fine. Not too – barely touched me.”

Kazari turns and spits on the floor. Efri blinks. She does it again, tongue lolling out of her mouth, face very disgruntled – and oh, Efri gets it. She does not glance down at the thing at her feet; she doesn’t need to, she knows what its arm looks like, chewed almost to pieces even through its banded armour. (If she hadn’t been so busy being scared of it, that sight might have made her a bit scared of Kazari. But not now, when they’re trying to hack and spit the taste of dead man arm out of their mouth.)

Efri unclips her canteen from her belt and holds it out. “Here,” she says. Her voice is rough. Her heart is racing too much to let constructing sentences be easy. “Not much, but –”

Kazari stands still while Efri tips half of the remaining water onto her tongue, and then Efri watches her swilling it around in her mouth, trying to bathe all of her teeth in it, before she spits it again on the floor at the dead thing’s feet.

The water is still clear. That’s something, at least; the dead man was too old to still have blood in him. Or maybe he was embalmed, drained of it hundreds of years ago, thousands.

“Are you okay?” Efri asks Kazari when they’re done, because they were the one doing most of the fighting, who was closest. They tip their head, shift their weight – wince when they put weight on one foot. Their lips peel back from their teeth. Their clothes on that side are singed.

Efri points it out. “Your robe,” she says, which makes it sound much fancier than it is. She’s too tired to think of a better word. She rubs a hand over her face, pushing the hair back over her forehead, says, “I’ll reinforce it for you when we get out.”

Kazari noses at Efri’s shoulder – the shredded fabric of her dress, the fraying edges stained with blood. Efri says, “I know. I’ll have to sew that up too.” Over her shoulder, she calls, “Kazari’s leg’s hurt, I think.”

“There’s blood on you,” Sissel replies. She peels her hand off the floor and leans back on her heels.

Efri touches her shoulder again. “’S fine,” she says. “Just a scrape. The blood’s drying already.”

It’s really sore, actually – the flesh abraded and tender, an ache sinking deep into the muscle – but it’s normal sore, the kind of sore you really should be after being thrown into a wall. It doesn’t feel sprained or dislocated or anything like that.  Just like it will be bruised a whole rainbow of colours come tomorrow.

Kazari noses at it again. She leans too far forward and falters on her maybe-hurt leg – rights herself, wincing, and rolls her shoulder. It gleams, just for a moment, and she nearly stumbles again. Efri puts out a hand to steady her. (It doesn’t really accomplish anything – Efri’s strong, but she’s not that strong – but it’s the principle of it.) “What was that spell?”

“Pain relief,” Sissel says from behind her. “I think. Doesn’t actually fix anything, but.”

“You’ll be okay ‘til we find someone?” Efri asks, and Kazari nods. She presses a hand against their shoulder and nods back.

They both turn to look at Sissel, then, who’s just kneeling on the floor, sitting on her heels.

“You all right?” Efri asks her.

“All right,” Sissel confirms. She doesn’t look at them. “Didn’t even come near me.”

She’s staring.

Efri crosses the floor to stand with her. (She needs to lean on Kazari – her legs are too wobbly, and she doesn’t want to touch the dead thing’s stick, doesn’t want to look for her own. Kazari limps a little on their sore front leg.) There’s a moment of total, humming silence – all of them still and staring, necks craned back, looking up at the thing.

Whatever it is.

It’s a ball. Big and blue and shimmering, it floats above a wide crystalline dish set into the floor, spinning on an axis. Just spinning and spinning and spinning, endless motion. Its smooth surface is cut through with dark wavering lines, etched with lettering, and it doesn’t quite glow but it doesn’t not glow, either, the light moving across it silkily, like clouds in a blue sky. It looks like something that should be humming – a low pitch in their ears, an eerie shiver dancing over their skin – but it’s silent. Inert, maybe, but for the spinning.

“What is it?” Efri asks. Her voice cracks as she speaks. She looks down at Sissel’s face, staring as though mesmerised, illuminated by the room’s dim lighting – the fires that should not still be burning down here, the luminous not-glow of the ball.

Sissel says, “I don’t know. Something important.”

Hovering above the dish, it spins, and spins, and spins.

“Is it what the ghost was talking about?” Efri asks. She tilts her head and squints at it. It doesn’t – well, it looks strange and unearthly and powerful, but it isn’t doing anything. And it hadn’t been clear what the ghost was talking about, exactly, according to Sissel, just that it was something important – but what else could it be?

Sissel, still watching it, shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I think so.”

Efri watches it with her, brushing a bit more hair out of her face. It’s sticking to her sweaty forehead. She feels a drip of not-dry blood running down her arm under her sleeve.

Kazari is staring at it too – just as confounded as the rest of them. Efri sees the light in their irises shifting as the ball spins.

They’re not learning anything from staring, the ball staying strange and mysterious as ever, so Efri raps her knuckles against her sternum to steady her breathing (it’s slowed a bit – not normal, but closer to it) and climbs up onto the stone rimming of the dish. Kazari, behind her, lows in consternation; Sissel catches her breath, a noise like a creaking door. “Careful,” she says.

“Promise,” Efri replies, and places her feet very, very carefully on the glassy blue flooring. Nothing happens. She doesn’t step on the dark curved lines as she treads toward the ball in the centre, slow and wary as if she were approaching a skittish animal. Nothing happens.

She reaches out, and, with just the tips of her fingers, she grazes the ball’s surface.

Nothing happens.

It’s cool to the touch, and smooth, like polished metal or not-frozen ice or delicate glasswork. It continues to spin gently under her fingers, warming her glove with friction, no smudges left on its clouded face.

 It really feels like there should at least be a tingle running up her arm, a strange and unfamiliar current, a spark. But it’s just Efri, standing with an arm outstretched, pressing her hand to a ball.

“It’s not doing anything,” she reports, and Sissel clambers up onto the dish with her, fitting her palm to its gently hovering underside. Kazari balks, begins pacing agitatedly. Efri frowns. “Why isn’t it doing anything? Shouldn’t it be doing something?”

“It’s important,” Sissel says definitively. There’s ancient dust on her fingers, but none of it seems to transfer. “It’s something really special, I think.”

Efri shifts restlessly. She shifts her grip and tries to grab onto the dark ridged curves ringing its surface, but they slip easily away from her grasp as though her touch was no barrier at all. “But what does it do?”

Sissel shrugs.

Behind them, Kazari lows.

Efri drops her hand and grabs Sissel’s wrist. “C’mon,” she says, and when Sissel frowns at her, “We’re not going to learn anything about it this way. We have to look for clues!”

Kazari makes a more impatient noise. (Efri thinks she found a clue.)

Sissel gives the ball one last searching look and lets Efri tug her away, off the weird blue dish and down to where Kazari stands on the stone floor, at the head of the table where the dead man sat. Efri sniffs loudly and tries not to think about it too much. The table is smooth polished stone, worn a little away with time; Efri trails a gloved finger over the edge and directs her attention to where Kazari points with their chin.

There’s something carved into the surface, the edges blunted and shapes softened by however many years it must have been since it was put there. Efri squints, trying to make it out. She has to stand right up on her tiptoes to get the right angle to see much of it in full.

“That’s not letters,” she says eventually, frowning. She’s pretty sure she knows her alphabet well enough by now to know that. “Is it magic?”

Sissel shakes her head. “I don’t know what it is. It’s not like magical writing I’ve ever seen.”

Efri looks at Kazari, who also shakes her head. “Maybe it’s a different sort of lettering,” she theorises. It must have been written a long time ago, if it’s from back when the city had people. Onmund’s been reading all about it for ages, and he’s told her a bit – Saarthal was the city of Atmorans, populated by proto-Nordic people. All complicated history stuff. But they weren’t quite the same as Nords today, he said, so it stands to reason they had different writing, too. They’re supposed to be uncovering and cataloguing artifacts (at the thought, Efri glances back at the hovering ball and swallows an inane bubble of laughter) so she suggests, “Maybe you can copy it and we can show it to someone. I’m sure there’ll be someone at the College what knows what it is.”

Sissel, also standing on her toes, nods dutifully. “What will you do?”

The chamber they’re in is cavernous, and about empty but for the ball in the dish, the altar and chair, the body on the ground. “I’ll check him,” she says, and points. “See if he has anything on him that’s special.”

Sissel follows her finger and grimaces.

She digs out her note-paper and her stick of char, and Efri assumes it’s clues time, but when she turns she feels a hand grip her elbow. She looks back over her tattered shoulder at Sissel’s face, her furrowed brow.

“Promise you’re really okay?” she says, voice anxious and solemn.

“Promise,” Efri says, twisting her arm to touch her friend’s hand. Sissel presses her lips together and lets go of her arm.

Kazari trails after Efri to look at the dead man.

First thing is the metal stick. It’s magic someway, Efri knows – he waved it and threw her into a wall, flung spells with it – but she’s not sure how. Doesn’t know enough about enchantments. Didn’t need to, to use it; when Kazari clamped down on his arm she just ripped it from his grasp and –

She doesn’t quite exactly remember, actually, except for the bitter tang of adrenaline in her mouth and nose, the horrible grunting and scuffling sounds, the heft of the stick in her hands. Impact, over and over and over, against something that had a little more give each time.

Efri scrubs a hand over her mouth and grips the handle of the stick. It takes effort to wrest it out of the thing’s face, caught as it is by the edges of the helmet, and when it’s finally yanked free it’s – actually not as bad as she might have expected. There’s no blood, and the corpse was so desiccated it already didn’t even really look like a person anymore, so it registers less as someone with horrible violence done to it and more as a really gross art piece. It’s not nice. She doesn’t like the twisted, gaping mouth, teeth embedded wrong-ways in its tissue and scattered like coins over the floor. And one of the eyes, which had glowed unearthly blue, is now a dull, rotten black, squished like a plum in its socket.

It's worse the more she looks. She sniffs and turns away.

“This is magic, right?” she asks Kazari, testing the weight of it in her hands, the cool surface of the metal, and they nod. “A good artifact?” she adds, and they nod again, emphatically. Efri sets the stick aside and kneels.

It wasn’t wearing any clothes, really – or if it was, they rotted away. She touches the rusted armour gingerly, tries to avoid brushing her gloves against the shrivelled skin at all. Whoever it was had expensive taste, it seems – there’s jewellery in a shockingly well-preserved beard, pendants around the neck, armbands. Efri asks Kazari if each thing is enchanted. No to the armbands, no to the beard-ring, and then, pressed against the wizened chest where the flesh contours to the ribs, she finds some kind of necklace, sharp-edged and thrumming. Kazari nods to that, and, face scrunched up like an old fruit, Efri reaches around the ancient neck to slip it off.

She tucks it into a belt pocket with the tripwire necklace they found at the weird wall.

“Done,” Sissel says. She folds her paper and slips it into her own pouch. Her footfalls on the echo-y stone floor as she approaches the body for the first time are almost silent. “Did you find anything?”

“Necklace,” Efri replies, watching Sissel’s face pinch at the sight of him. “And – stick.” She scoops up the metal stick and holds it out. “He did spells with it.”

Sissel looks at it warily. “Is he a draugr?” she asks, glancing back down at his mashed-up face.

“I mean,” Efri says, “he’s got to be, right?” She’s certainly never seen a draugr before, but what else could it be?

(Calling it a draugr makes her shiver, the set of her shoulders quaking. She’ll stick to dead man.)

Sissel shudders. She reaches out to grip the handle of the stick, and Efri’s not sure if she’s taking it or just trying to keep herself upright. “I can’t believe that happened,” she says. Her voice sounds, suddenly, fragile. “I can’t believe we’re alive.”

“Me neither,” Efri says. She presses the tip of the stick into the ground so Sissel can lean on it, stands a little unsteadily.

Kazari, with a hushed murmur, telegraphs something. Efri recognises the head incline of understanding – she’s familiar with that word, that idea – and, after a moment, the flickering ear of doubt.

“They’ll have to believe us,” she says with conviction, because she means it. “We’ll show them. They’ll see for themselves.”

Kazari presses their nose to her head.

Efri clasps her hands together. “We’ll go tell someone now,” she declares – though it’s easier said than done; they were lost in the ruins ages before they even found the crumbling wall, the halls, this horrible wonderful chamber. But they’ll get un-lost eventually. They’ll get out eventually. Surely. They have practice enough with walking. “But first – help me find my stick.”

[symbioticsimplicity]

Y’all what if Lilith didn't choose to take a vaycay in Heaven? What if she got redeemed?

[moongothic]

I love your essay on bio dad croc

I was laughing so hard though because if your right and dragon turns out to be straight and that’s why they aren’t together anymore

That would be the funniest thing ever because that means dragon is the token straight one

And also

Dragon - when you ally too hard and your wife is now your husband

Considder this though:

Garp telling Dragon he's okay with Dragon being gay, but refuses to acknowledge not just a filthy pirate, but a fucking Warlord, as his son-in-law

[stabbyfoxandrew]

oh my god my parents almost fell for a facebook scam.

someone they know posted that they were selling a car and my parents asked me to help them send a down payment over paypal.

thank GOD they asked me instead of just trying to do it themselves.

[mama-mera]

okay you know what? I think it's time for me to take advantage of the release of the Percy Jackson series to talk a little about the relationship between the Greek and Roman gods, because I have a feeling that we're going to have a new generation of people who are convinced that the Romans "stole" the gods of the Greeks and... um, I feel the need to talk and analyze this thing with you. Because the matter is much more complicated than you think

Like SERIOUSLY, the pjo fandom and Greco-Roman mythology enthusiasts in general need this chat.

First of all it is important to understand how the Italic populations came into contact with Greek culture, and who the first Romans were.

Southern Italy (Sicily, Calabria, Campania and Puglia) was colonized by the Greeks since the 8th century BC.

Like any colonization, the local population had to adapt to the culture, religion and language of the colonizer (in Italy there are still two dialects coming from ancient Greek. Griko in Puglia, and Grecanico in Calabria). Every part of the territory considered Magna Graecia (Megàle Hellàs) presents archaeological finds relating to the Greek colonies, and with them also temples dedicated to the gods. (So much so that in Sicily, at the beginning of spring the Antesphorie (or antephorie) were celebrated in honor of Demeter and Persephone, for example).

The entire Etruscan pantheon was strongly influenced by the Greek one. The indigenous deities were joined by the Hellenic ones, creating a new religion.

But still: who were the Romans? The legend of the foundation of Rome refers to Romulus and Remus, but from an archaeological point of view the Romans were probably the result of a mixture of Latin, Sabine (plus Samnites and Sabelli*) and Etruscan peoples. The latter influenced the initial Roman Pantheon the most. Just think of the similarities between the Etruscan goddess Menrva/Menerva and the Roman goddess Minerva.

The same applies to Maris and Mars, who among other things share holidays in March (a month dedicated to them moreover).

Unfortunately there is not much information on the Sabine and Latin ethnic group, but it is known for certain that Etruscans had contact with Magna Graecia, and the Greeks in general, so their culture was never unknown to the Romans.

So what does this tell us? That the Italic populations knew the Greek Pantheon, because they had been colonized and/or influenced by the Greeks. The first Romans can't exactly steal something that's already part of their culture.

*Samnites, Sabelli and Sabines were part of the same ethnic group, and although all three groups can generally be called "Sabines", I preferred to specify. At the same time it is not known how involved the Picenes and Irpinians were initially with the birth of Rome, so I have not mentioned them.

[tricoufamily]

those playdough ass sims aren't gonna fit in with that beautiful beautiful lighting let's get a move on i wanna see some realistic skin folds (MODELED not a flat texture) and blemishes and subsurface scattering i want that-specific-breed-of-maxis-match-tiktoker-you-know-the-ones tears

[redrobin-detective]

The Drake Legacy

Janet Drake was born with everything a little girl could ask for.

She was from a high class, reputable family, not famous as the Waynes or Elliots but that was okay. They preferred it that way, they got the money and status without the high expectations. She wasn’t a beauty but she had a sweet face, pouty lips and with the right clothes and styling, could be pretty enough. She had an older brother whom all the expectations and business matters were piled onto leaving Janet free to be a pretty, thoughtless thing before marrying well and living her days in endless luxury. She soon learned to hate the loose but ever present noose around her neck.

-

Jack Marvin was born not quite with nothing but not much above it.

Jack’s family lived in an eternal battle to stay out of poverty. His parents both worked two jobs to make ends meet and Jack was put to work as soon as he was old enough. Jack wasn’t a particularly good at any of the jobs he took; he felt cheated working so hard for the money just to be handed over to his parents. He wasn’t particularly handsome or smart or strong. The only things Jack really had going for him was that he was clever and could be very charming when he desired. He used these traits to skate from job to job, skimming a bit off the top of his earnings to keep for himself. Jack went to bed every night cursing his lot in life and telling himself it wouldn’t always be this way.

-

Janet was dressed in the finest clothing, went to the best possible schools and associated with only the wealthiest Gotham citizens. She hated every minute of it. She felt like a porcelain doll, her parents’ pretty possession for other people to ogle at. Her dainty, pure white tea gloves felt constricting, her high heels too tight and the pearls around her neck like a vice. Like any child lashing out, she found pleasure in the opposite of her upbringing. She took any opportunity to be reckless and dirty, made an elaborate garden just to bury her silken hands in the dirt. Janet thought about sports but she’d never been much of team player, preferring solitude. She instead took up gardening, hiking, anything that got her outside of the polished marble of the Drake estate and into nature.

She hadn’t given much thought to college, it wasn’t like she needed a job after all but it was better than staying home waiting for her mother to make her a match. She looked up jobs that put her in the dirt and signed up Gotham University’s archeology program. Even if she got bored, it could be fun for a bit.

-

Jack wasn’t stupid but school just wasn’t his thing. Authority figures telling him what to do just pulled at his nerves. It felt like the whole world was against him, looking down on him. He walked around with this constantly simmering rage and indignation under his skin. Jack would show them who the loser was. The various odd jobs he’d worked his life gave him some interesting experiences, made for good stories at parties. And Jack Drake was always welcome at parties. He had an easy, affable manner about him so he made friends quickly but they often didn’t stay long. But not before Jack had gotten food, money and shelter out of them. He was a nice guy but you had to look out for number one after all.

High school came and went and it was time for the next step. Jack knew if he didn’t go to school, get some sort of degree, he’d end up with a dead end, miserable job like his folks. He gathered what money he’d saved, borrowed or stolen and headed to Gotham University.

-

Janet met Jack in their shared Introduction to Psychology class. It was hard not to notice him. He almost always came in late, since he commuted from across the city she later learned. Jack also had a habit of challenging the teacher, asking sarcastic questions and making passive aggressive arguments. It made him unpopular with the students trying to learn but Janet was fascinated. The messy hair, the roguish smile, he was no Brad Pitt but he had a nice face and more importantly he was so different from the stuffy, upper crust boys she dated. She asked him on a study date which turned into a real date. He was passionate and fierce, he had real ideas that weren’t determined by popular opinion. Their fights were as heated as their make-ups but she kept getting drawn back into his orbit after every spat by his doe eyes and crooked smirk.

It was supposed to be a fling but Jack really seemed to get her. They spent hours railing against the injustices of their parents upon, about the stupid expectations of academia. She convinced him to switch his major to archeology and the two of them flourished. When his money for school ran low, she thought nothing of dipping into trust to fund his classes, food and other expenses. For the first time in her life, Janet felt seen not as a Drake but as herself. So when two years later, Jack got on his knee with a ring, she said yes.

-

Jack didn’t like college any better than high school but he kept the reins on his temper because he knew this was his only way out of poverty. His classes were stupid and he had to miss out on parties to work part time jobs to pay for tuition. Until the girl with the designer sweater and smarmy smile asked him to study together. One date led to another and another. At first he stuck to Janet because she was an endless money pocket, who pulled out her gold credit card without second thought. He’d wine and dine her as long as possible to keep the free food and expenses flowing. And then the unbelievable happened, he actually started to like her. She was obviously a trust fund baby, a know it all used to getting her own way. But she stuck up for herself, even when she was wrong and bulldozed over anyone who stood in her way. She screamed just as loud as he did during arguments and listened to his rants with an understanding nod. Soon, she stopped just being a wallet and became something more.

She made him switch to archeology and he did, one because she was mostly paying for his degree at this point and two because he wasn’t focused on anything else. He found he liked it to his surprise. Jack would stay up late talking about different cultures and their unique lifestyles, a world neither of them knew and wanted a piece of. Janet was all about the process, the digging and the satisfaction of finding what she was looking for. Jack was interested in the money that could be found with artifacts. One day, he looked up a realized he loved Janet Drake against all the odds and took the plunge. He bought the best ring he could afford and got on his knee and was shocked when she jumped into his arms and said yes.

-

Janet wore a white pantsuit to her wedding, one last middle finger to her mother who was already beside herself that he daughter was marrying outside their social circle. Just before Janet walked down the aisle, her mother hissed at her that she’d regret this one, two, ten years down the road. Everything she loved about Jack now would turn into disgust and she’d be running home soon enough. She nuzzled Jack’s shoulder during their first dance and positively preened when he agreed to take her last name. From now on, Janet and Jack were a team in everything. They finished their degrees and hopped right into the field. With Janet’s money and connections, they had their choice of sites to chose from. They worked hard at their profession but they lost far more money than they made, not that it mattered.

They played hard too, dining in the finest restaurants, visiting the most beautiful locations, attending the most exclusive events. They spent more time abroad than they did in Gotham, only returning for the big events. She was given access to the Drake money but her parents weren’t really speaking to her anymore which was fine by her. One morning, a few years into their marriage. Janet woke up terribly sick. The sickness progressed until finally she was forced to admit that she was pregnant.

- 

Jack took to wealth like a duck to water. He looked good in tailored suits and became quite the connoisseur of wines (as well as other high quality spirits). He loved to travel, to get out of the smoggy, hell hole that was Gotham and indulged in rich luxuries like golf. It didn’t matter that he was becoming one of the out of touch, arrogant elites he’d once hated, all that mattered was that he was better than those who’d looked down on him. Things with Janet were good, so good during those first few years. They still fought hard but they loved just as hard. They had their shared interest in archeology but had their own separate tastes that often had them apart for weeks as a time. He was happiest abroad with her at his side, buying and doing whatever he liked. The worst were the times they had to return to Gotham, attend to those stupid black tie events. It was the time he felt most like a kid who grew up on food stamps, his wife blending in perfectly with the blue blood crowd while Jack felt like a heaving fish out of water. He kept pushing to extend their travels.

He wasn’t too concerned when Janet started getting sick. They were on the other end of the world and they’d both had their share of travel sickness and food poisoning. But it kept going on until finally Janet was presenting him with a positive pregnancy test. This had not what they planned for.

-

They’d agreed, fairly early on in their relationship that children were not for them. They were too independent, too busy, too modern to be tied down by a child. Janet would be happy to travel the world with Jack until she was old and gray but now there was a wrench in the equation. Jack had told her to abort and move on but Janet found herself hesitating. She longed for freedom but oh wouldn’t it be nice to have a little one running after them? Her mother cursed her to be unhappy but Janet was determined to prove her wrong. The more Janet thought about it, the more she realized she could have both. She could be a famous archeologist and a perfect loving mother. She convinced Jack and endured 9 miserable months, working right up until she went into preterm labor and delivered a son. She was exhausted and angry at how long the whole ordeal took. Janet held her son for the first time and felt a kind of weary fondness. Her Timothy wasn’t exactly cute and he screamed like a banshee but he was hers and they were both going to have to get used to it.

-

Jack had not been too crazy about the idea of keeping the baby. He’d disliked children even when he had been one. Even though they had exorbitant amounts of wealth, kids were still money suckers and he wasn’t looking forward to paying for toys and diapers. Plus they’d need to settle down back in Gotham, back where Jack really didn’t want to be and watch as his kid grew up to be another lazy, rich brat. Janet talked him around eventually, selling him on the idea that they’d do it better. That they could still have their travels while also raising a normal kid. He suffered right alongside Janet through her pregnancy and was almost relieved when her water broke while they were hunched over some broken bits of poverty. Jack smoked a whole pack of cigarettes and had two beers before he was allowed back to see his wife and new kid. It was a boy, Tim was small and red and screamed and squirmed like crazy. His first thought was that adoption was still an option. But Janet seemed determined to see this through so he buckled in and told himself that different wasn’t bad.

-

They mostly stayed in Gotham the first few years of Timothy’s life. Janet really tried to combine the best of both worlds her son came from. They took him to the opera and little art theater, to galas and the circus though the less said about that mess, the better. She didn’t know what was normal for kids but Tim never seemed to stop screaming or sleep. That boy wailed at the top of his lung at all hours of the night, tuckering out only as the sun rose before starting up again a short while later. No one could blame her for hiring nanny after nanny to care for him just to escape the noise. She felt a bit guilty but sometimes, late at night listening to her son yell down the hall, she wondered if Jack was right and they should have aborted. Speaking of Jack, the tension from Tim and being in Gotham put the first real cracks in their relationship. When it wasn’t all fun, Jack became surly, sarcastic and it wasn’t as cute as it had been in college. He didn’t want to help with Tim, just hired more caretakers and spent more time away from the house doing god knows what. Her mother’s warning at her wedding came back to her and Janet swore that No, she would win at marriage and motherhood and prove her mother wrong.

-

Jack really wasn’t built for fatherhood. By god, did that kid ever shut up? What was the baby even screaming about anyway? It’s not like he ever went hungry or didn’t have enough toys like Jack remembered growing up. There was a sense of pride in being able to provide for his son but it was steadily worn down by the day to day challenges of sharing a house with a fussy baby. He and Janet fought more, their screams right in time with Tim’s like they were the Von Trapp family singers. He didn’t get why Janet was so mad for him not helping more with the kid, it’s not like he knew what to do to get Tim to settle down. Like, he loved his kid. Jack tossed him around and helped him toddle around but when you had money why did he have to do everything? Why not hire people to do that for them while he and Janet did their own thing? She started frowning at him more than she smiled and he was reminded for all that she was a rebel, she was also a princess. Her presence became more irritating.

-

Once Tim was old enough that it wouldn’t appear negligent to leave him, they started taking trips again. At first just for a few days but then they became a week, then two then more. Tim was always left in the best possible hands, highly recommended nannies, expensive day cares and later posh boarding schools. Janet felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, then would feel guilty and call to check on Timmy. Whenever they spoke, he seemed ecstatic to hear from her, excitement she wouldn’t get if she saw him every day. He babbled about his hobbies, his friends and she would secretly relax. Because she was doing it right, she’d been brought up under suffocating circumstances. Timothy had all the wealth but none of it’s trappings. He didn’t need to dress up and be paraded around, he could eat pizza and wear sweatpants and be a little weirdo. She bragged to her friends about her son’s grades, about his independence but she really didn’t care what others had to say about her boy. As long as he was safe and happy, then Janet would be too. If only her marriage to Jack would improve as well.

When Tim was 11 or so, another curve ball hit them. Her brother died of a sudden stroke, stress related the doctors said. He’d been the CEO and majority shareholder of Drake Industries, the company that gave them their wealth. Suddenly, there was a void where a Drake was needed. Janet had always enjoyed taking from DI but now she had to give back to it. She began taking time off from travels to settle the company which only put her further at odds with her husband. He was an incompetent businessman and to save the company, she cut him out of the decision making. Jack became a nightmare, being unsupportive and aggressive, trying to muscle his way back into the proceedings but she held her ground. The more time passed, the more Janet had to realize her mother was right. She was approaching middle age with a precocious son, a failing company and a husband she was learning to hate.

-

Jack had been counting the days until they could, legally and socially, leave Tim with an appropriate caretaker and get out of Gotham. He’d be there for Tim when he was older, more interesting. When they could talk about girls and cars and sports. Until then, Jack had no interest in stick figure drawings and smudgy fingerprints. So they traveled again and it was good again for a while. He found he couldn’t lose himself to the thrill quite so much, he wasn’t a young man anymore. At various moments, he’d wonder how little Timmy was faring at home, had made his fair share of panicked calls to the nanny just to make sure Tim was okay and hear his voice. He loved Janet, well mostly but there was special kind of parental love he felt for his son and sometimes it aggravated him. Tim didn’t turn out quite how Jack expected, he wasn’t some asshole rich boy like he’d feared. He was small, squirrely, had the strangest hobbies and was, frankly, a really weird kid. But Jack loved him dammit, weirdness and all. He’d teach the kid how to play football or something normal during their next break home.

But then Janet’s brother died and dumped the company straight into their laps. Now Jack would forever be grateful to DI for funding their lifestyle but actually managing it was a pain in the ass. At first, he and Janet were gonna do it as a team like always but she quickly butted him out. She brushed off his ideas, made decisions on her own and soon was doing everything. It burned at him, to be dismissed. Once more, he felt like the poor boy outsider, that he couldn’t possibly run a big company like Drake Industries. It had been happening for a while now but Jack was rapidly falling out of love with his wife.

-

While Jack and Janet were busy running DI, finding new ways to hate each other and squeezing in the occasional archeological trip, Tim Drake was coming into his own without them. He knew his parents loved him, they just had other things to do and so did he. Tim wasn’t worried about their trip to Haiti, they’d been on a million trips and he was busy learning to be Robin anyway. His mother’s death and father’s injury gutted him. He cried and wailed like he’d been told he did a lot as a baby but he knew he was grieving not his parents as they were but the potential family they could have been. It took Tim a long time to realize that his parents did love him but they weren’t perfect. They prioritized themselves over him, were distant and bland and made no real attempts to get to know him. He thinks to himself its maybe why he was so drawn to the Bats, it was the closest thing to a normal family he saw on a daily basis.

Tim Drake is a sum of many parts. His parents may be gone now but their traits live on in him. He is his father’s black hair and widows peak, his mother’s sharp nose and crooked ears. His eyes a blend of mom’s flinty grey and dad’s ashy blue. He has his mother’s Jewish faith and his father’s walnut allergy. His stubbornness and bossiness came from watching Janet and his practiced charm and manipulation straight from Jack. From both of them he learned how to be alone, how to get things done and how to put his vast amounts of free time to use. What he didn’t learn from them was how to be a family but that was okay, he had other teachers for that.

[lindwurmkai]

there's this one person on here whose posts in a tag i follow i have casually replied to two or three times, but they completely ignored me and now i am vividly imagining how they think of me as that creepy weirdo who will jump out of the bushes anytime you mention [topic] to say something totally inappropriate and incomprehensible

which may be a little harsh since i don't think my comments were incomprehensible or even (i hope) inappropriate, but i have felt that way about other people before and just wished they would go away but couldn't really say there was anything actually wrong with their comments. so. what if that's me this time 😭