#i literally had a terrible day

[sluckythewizard]

YOU JUST HƎARD IT FROM [HIS MOUTH] FOR SURƎ!!!

[lazylittledragon]

don't you love when you Just stopped feeling guilty about eating the things you like and then one of your parents drops the "i'm concerned about your diet"

[magpie-trove]

“After all he’s done he doesn’t deserve—“ listen can you honestly say YOU *deserve* a happy ending?? There is no deserve!! A happy ending is a happy ending cause it always always always comes as an unexpected gift. There is always always always the 2/3 point in the story where it is undeserved and unattainable and not going to be given. Because it can only be given!! And yet!!! Still it comes!! A eucatastrophe!! For you and me!! Undeserved!!!

[elloras]

Ted Lasso: All Apologies

[kindahoping4forever]

Via Ai FM

[miodiodavinci]

head in hands like "maybe i should have realized this about myself sooner" as i am surrounded by neon flashing signs that Very Clearly Indicate the thing i should have realized about myself sooner

[xinanigans]

IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW????????

[todayisafridaynight]

Why not combine them? You could post about MineDai eating pasta! Does Mine bulk with pasta? Does Daigo have a favorite pasta dish? Do they cook it together for a date night? Does Daigo even know how to boil water?? (Genuinely if you have any interest in posting about this please do, would read)

mine could, in fact, be the one who makes daigo pasta with a lil olive oil and salt and parmesan youre right ......

[kris-mage-fics]

So we have a mouse in our apartment, which scared the living daylights out of me! Not because I'm scared of mice, but I just assumed we'd never see one in here. (We are on the third floor, and we've lived here for close to 13 years and have never seen one.) The landlord is going to bring over some poison but I'd really rather not use it. I don't know, maybe that's dumb, but it's just a little guy trying to live it's life and not be cold. I really don't like killing critters. Of course if we want to catch it that means we have to get something ourselves. Which is a pain when you live quite a few km from any stores that sell live traps and don't have a car. I'll have to talk to my partner and see what if he's up for a trip to the store or not, but he's at work right now.

[reamed]

ya know what I’m deciding not to give a shit if my job doesn’t like me missing work bcuz I’m in agonizing pain

[trans-axolotl]

having the worst fucking night and i need to scream + i want to fight someone so bad rn i need to just like. get this out of my system jesus christ

[quietwingsinthesky]

oh, yeah, another thing i noticed that was odd about s5 in comparison to earlier seasons was how much they relied on like. not the history of the doctor, exactly, but the image of that history. whether from little easter eggs of the first doctor’s picture popping up everywhere to i think the two(?) times in the season we get a montage of past doctors. and i honestly can’t remember anything like that happening earlier (with the exception of the time crash short, which felt more substantial to me and was also like. 7 straight minutes of david tennant being allowed to fangirl.)

and i say ‘the image’ because hell knows the RTD era was pulling from doctor who past left, right, and center, but it rarely felt like a moment of ‘look at this old thing, you remember old thing? old thing was cool and so are we for continuing it.’ and more like ‘here’s a species/character/etc from classic who. and here’s how they’ve changed and fit into the new world we’ve built for the show.’

I guess, the difference here for me is that. i haven’t watched classic who. s5 shows me a slideshow of doctors and to me, those are the guys i once ranked by how sexy i think they are. and not much else. i don’t have an emotional connection to an image. but take, say, school reunion? an episode that was my favorite even back when i was a kid specifically because i adored sarah jane? i had no idea who she was then, i only just figured out a little bit ago which doctor she traveled with, and exclusively all i’ve watched of her is that episode in s2 and the sarah jane adventures. and yet, that episode, without the context there for me, managed to make sense to me. i’m sure it was probably even more impactful to fans of sarah jane from classic who, but it didn’t lose its impact without that knowledge.

so, that’s a shift. i don’t want to say it’s a negative one, exactly, because maybe people who have seen classic who like these references and i’m missing something. but, to me, it feels a little more shallow.

[jewishfalin]

There is a very specific sort of antisemitism that is seemingly common in mental health facilities and its fucking terrifying

[stellerssong]

For the Fan Fic Writer Asks: 9 and/or 10

9—do you write every day? if you wrote today, share a sentence of what you’ve written!

this is actually the only piece of writing advice or technique that’s ever worked for me and my swiss-cheesed brain: somehow i managed to convince myself, in the depths of a very bad creative injury, that Increasing The Fucking Thing by a sentence, just a few words, every single day, counts on some nebulous cosmic scale as Increasing The Fucking Thing, and therefore has value. this is why my creative output is so [wiggly hand gesture] in terms of quantity, but hey, This One Weird Trick has kept me in the game for some years now when i would otherwise have quit, so we’ll call it a good thing overall. Doctors Hate Her!

here is my contribution to the cosmic scale today, in screenshot format because moving the annoying formatting from my notes app to any other rich text field is, as previously stated, annoying. and yes, i am definitely looking forward to having to reformat this entire fucking fic line-by-line when it is uploaded to ao3 (lying) (lying so hard) (was looking at another section last night and just experiencing profound despair)

10—is there a fic that got a different response than you were expecting?

something that is true in every single fandom ever is that you will publish a high-effort longfic that you poured your heart and soul into and people will be like “meh” and then you will publish an off-the-cuff gag ficlet that you barfed out in a day and a half and people will come crawling out of cracks in your walls to tell you this is the FUNNIEST and SMARTEST thing you’ve EVER written and OMG PLEASE WRITE MORE LIKE THIS and then you will be like. how did you get in my house. please get out of my house. i didn’t even go to the effort of looking up Finnish syntax and sentence construction for this fic i’m an EMBARRASSMENT. STOP CRAWLING AROUND IN MY CABINETRY

to that point, and to the original question: “we’ve got the power now, motherfuckers” has far and away received the most enthusiastic response of anything i’ve posted for Control (2019) fandom. and part of that might be because i did dash it off without taking myself overly seriously, and part of that might’ve been a fandom actually getting interested in a fic centered around a major character who up until that point largely hadn’t been utilized in fic, and idk maybe i actually did better than i thought i did in terms of mimicking the style of the in-game lore collectibles…but also y’all. please. “laterna magica” and “barren face, desert eyes” are better. like objectively. you are tearing me apart Lisa

[afterthefeast]

re lrb in any case to me astarion’s arc is less about regaining agency than becoming aware that he already has it and has to act like that. there's a distinction between agency as a material fact, ie having the ability in theory to make your own decisions and act on your desires, and the awareness of having that agency.

i'm no psychologist, but in my experience one of the most helpful steps in recovering from mental illness has been the awareness of my own agency ─ yes, sometimes I feel as though my life is completely run by my intrusive thoughts, but invariably getting out of that place has involved a recognition that ultimately, I am the one in control of my thoughts and I have the agency to work through them. that doesn't mean that it isn't hard, or time-consuming, and sometimes I don't succeed in the way I'd like, but nonetheless the ability to at least try is and always has been in my power.

in baldur's gate 3, your companions appear with varying degrees of agency (aside, obviously, from the tadpole they all share). they range from gale, whose current situation physically and magically restricts him but who at that moment in time doesn't have many other immediate restrictions on his day-to-day actions, to wyll, whose every move is watched by his abusive warlck patron.

nonetheless, your companions benefit from being shown that they not only could have agency at some point in the future, if they break their pact/shar's curse/free cazador/free orpheus/fix the infernal engine/get the crown of karsus, but they have agency now and must therefore use it responsibly. wyll is already to some degree aware of this, i think, even if it's only because he is so morally forthright ─ he's one of your companions who remains actively trapped by their abuser during the game, yet he refuses to kill karlach because he knows that would be wrong. even within his severely limited circumstances, he makes a choice, he demonstrates agency. in the shadowfell, shadowheart ─ a cult victim subjected to extreme psychological and religious abuse ─ has the choice whether or not to kill aylin, and can make it either way.

astarion, at the point at which you meet him, has just been given freedom for the first time in, essentially, his life. it's no surprise that he doesn't know what to do with thise newfound agency, and doesn't recognise it for what it is, given that he literally cannot remember ever having control over his own life. that's deeply tragic, but it doesn't erase the fact that he has control over the things he does during the game. those actions (for example, given i am still talking about that last rb, talking about the children he kidnapped and gave to cazador as though they were nothing), are things he has agency over and is responsible for. nonetheless, he acts as though he does not, lurching from one attempt to gain power to another (killing the druids to suggesting you use whatever's in moonrise to your advantage), because his own self-perception as someone completely powerless is so overwhelming. he must accrue power because that is the only way he can make sure he's safe and can never be hurt again. it's just that that self-perception is not completely accurate, he does have agency; if he makes choices that result in moral wrongs, those moral wrongs are his to bear.

i'm not getting at astarion here, I don't mean to imply that he's at fault for this attitude. it is, obviously, the natural response to 200 years of enslavement and abuse. kind of the whole point of the game, of all of your companions' quests, is that if people are hurt and abused often they will feel as though their only avenue towards power is to do the same to others. but being severely traumatised doesn't make his behaviour okay; he doesn't get a free pass to do whatever he wants because of cazador. you can like him, literally who am i to say otherwise (i like him too!), but don't just excuse everything he does or get rid of the most interesting parts of his character because you're unwilling to grapple with the fact that as it stands in the game, he's morally incredibly complex.

i think there's a tendency to assume that a character either must or must not have agency, and to present it as a binary, because for some reason it's used as a shorthand for moral culpability, when in reality the relationship between agency and culpability is significantly more complicated. i haven't really been getting into coerced choices here because that's a whole other kettle of fish (though i will give the necessary disclaimer that my stance on this is quite clearly influenced by the fact that deep down i'm a bit of a virtue ethicist). nonetheless, while this is my pop philosophy take and i'm not trying to impose this overall moral framework on people, i think it's pretty reasonable to say that lack of agency does not mean that what you did was not wrong.

implying that astarion is at fault here would be indicative of the very attitude I am trying to oppose ─ the idea that people either have agency or don't, and if they do bad things with agency they are evil, but if they don't have agency they are victims. astarion is both ─ he is the victim of horrendous, harrowing trauma and yet he has done bad things and in fact visited that same trauma upon other people. there's no escaping this, and i think it would be bad for astarion to just brush everything he did for cazador under the rug because he did it for cazador. he still did those things ─ he might not be culpable, i do not think he can be considered as such, but there's no way you go through all of that and don't feel guilty for it.

notably, if shadowheart kills aylin and wyll kills karlach (if he can? i actually don't even know if he can do that, but hypothetically), they are still responsible for that action and it was still morally wrong. they have to deal with that: part of dealing with it can be to recognise the coercion they were subject to, but the fact that they lacked agency doesn't just erase the wrong or mean it was never wrong in the first place. likewise, astarion becoming the ascended vampire is still obviously a terrible thing to happen for him and everyone else, and is in no way justified just because it might finally give him the sense of safety and control he craves. the whole point of that moment is that even when he is being retraumatised, when he has returned to the place and person that hurt him, astarion has the capacity to choose, and to choose the right thing. acting as though his trauma means he has absolutely no agency whatsoever and so never has to address the fact that he can, at various points, greatly fuck up, just removes one of the biggest themes of his whole character.

tldr: astarion has agency, one of his greatest challenges is realising that he does and that he must use it responsibly, and acting as though that is not the case does a disservice to his character and the story it is trying to tell. also it is deeply deeply boring. the end.

[talentforlying]

sometimes i get caught up in constantine's old man era and forget that by issue 9 of hellblazer he was only 35 years old. fuckin introduced the guardian of the green to the world of magic, helped stop the crisis on infinite earths, defeated a centuries-old wizard cult, saved new york from a hunger demon, and lost most of his friends before he turned 35. and then everything he's done and gone through in the 35 years since? god damn.