#i'm going to tag this as

[tedkaczynskiofficial]

I love Zutara as much as the next girlie, but I think people romanticizing Zuko catching Azula's lightning in the Final Agni Kai are doing Zuko's character a massive disservice. He would have done that for anyone. Not just anyone in the Gaang, anyone.

He did it for the division he ended up getting burned over. He did it for his subordinate that was going to fall to his death after the ship was struck by lightning. He did it for Lee, when he was kidnapped by Gao. He did it for Iroh, when he confronted his dad and tried to break him out of prison. He did it for the whole Gaang at the Western Air Temple. He did it for Sokka, Suki, and Hakoda at the Boiling Rock.

His whole character revolves around saving everyone else first. Hell, he tried to save Zhao of all people! There's no way that would have gone well for Zuko if Zhao had actually taken his hand. He always does what he thinks is right first before considering his own safety.

Zuko always saves other people. Even if, especially if, he can't save himself.

[fun-esta]

Honestly, every time I see this I am very surprised by the size difference.

And especially because my conclusion is how incredibly strong Joker is! Bruce talks about how fast he is, but rarely is it talked about how much it takes to stand up to one of the most trained people on the planet.

We can put his size/strength into perspective by thinking that he can carry a giant solid wooden mallet by himself.

Have you ever seen a person irl doing log lifting carry a piece of wood the size of someone as big as Superman with this ease??

He can even drag Jason and Tim's dead weight WITH A SINGLE ARM.

It's obvious that he can also carry Batman, he has to put him in traps or tie him up alone. But we actually see him do it and it seems like he has no trouble??? The guy who needs to be carried by two people??? As if he were carrying a kitten???

You're right Bruce, this clown is scary 😭

[mightydragoon]

genuinely curious, what was it about annabeth in SOM you disagreed with?

Annabeth got the Golden Fleece story completely wrong. I am genuinely in awe how Rick screwed up so badly when doing it. But In-Universe, it shows how confidently wrong Annabeth is about her knowledge, which she prides above all else.

The Golden Fleece and Cadmus and Europa become very straightforward once you get the hang of the Greek Gods and Mortals genealogy and then it makes way too much sense.

So the version Annabeth mentions in SOM. Cadmus and Europa are the demigod children of Zeus and who were to be sacrificed. Prayed to Zeus to save them and Europa fell off and died. Annabeth got the gist what the Fleece is (and the main thing anyway) but Rick should've known better and especially for a character whose main thing is being an expositor of information. She also says this is the REAL story. Greek myths have differences but none of them say Cadmus and Europa were carried off on a Golden Ram or were sacrifices.

Europa is carried off. But she's carried off by Zeus in the form of a Bull to Crete and she is the mother of Minos (yes THAT Minos), Sarpedon and Rhadamanthas (oh hey father-daughter incest that didn't originally exist yay!) Her disappearance has massive repercussions as her brother Cadmus and other members of her family try to set out to try and find her and never can.

Cadmus is the King of Thebes who killed a monster and married Harmonia (daughter of Ares and Aphrodite). His family was basically cursed (Oedipus is one of his descendants for reference) but one of his children was Semele. Aka he's Dionysus' maternal grandfather. And while he had to leave his home, it was because Zeus abducted his sister.

The children who had to flee from their stepmother (incidentally, it's Ino one of Cadmus ' daughters in some versions) are

Phrixus and Helle.

Apollodorus mentions it in the Biblotecha (which is essentially the Spark Notes version of Greek Mythology), but Theoi has other versions that say the same. And the Ram wasn't sent by Zeus, either. They were to be a sacrifice to Zeus. It was sent by Nephele, the children's mother. Oh and the Ram was a Son of Poseidon, too.

Helle in particular is interesting cause there is an actual place NAMED after her called Hellespont, where its said where she fell off. It's the Dardanelles today but Helle having a geographical location named after her and a notable one in mythology (she was deified in some places), should have been mentioned.

Europa and the Bull is very famous in terms of imagery, which might explain the confusion with nowhere near the same as two children on a ram

Honestly more than anything. I am insulted on how confidently wrong this was. And rereading this scene after getting into the Classics annoyed me even more.

[canisalbus]

I’m an amateur poet and I poem I wrote reminded me suspiciously of Machete and Vasco

“You smile with all the radiance of the sun

I smile with a slight curl of my lip

Could you love that

Could you love me”

Maybe Machete possessed me while writing it

.

[cocoasnail]

[britneyshakespeare]

i am sitting in the morning at the diner at the corner

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[redjennies]

as a hater, it's important to keep in mind that true fandom is a long game. for example, yeah, it's fucking annoying when you genuinely enjoy a show or something for multiple reasons and it happens to have gay people (or people who could be read as gay) in it and so the fandom gets flooded with the kind of fans who are literally just here for the "Hot New Thing to Slash Ship" and therefore have bad opinions on everything because they think entirely in shallow fanfic tropes and are going to get mad every time something doesn't line up perfectly with their fanfics, but with time they will move on to the next "Hot New Thing to Slash Ship," and you'll realize your real enemy is and has always been That One Blogger who Sincerely Loves this Show as Much as You But Has the Worst Fucking Opinions on Planet Earth.

[tio-trile]

Hey Lil Sammie

Bonus filter version that I liked:

[loveletterworm]

It is done (enough)!

I would hype it up more but this is really really simple. It randomly generates a set of symbols, colors, and a word, and then the expected thing to do with those is you draw some sort of character based off the result you get. So it's just an art challenge toy thingy.

There are also some practical features like you can lock parts of the result in place to rerandomize the rest, or hide parts of the generation you don't care about (like if you want to pick your own colors or hate the words being there)

You can try it out over on itch.io!

It should run in browser, but there's also a downloadable version for Windows if you want to use it offline. (No mac/linux versions for now, because I don't have appropriate computers to test those on and I...don't want to deal with mac's developer accounts or whatever their problem is...)

Here's something I made from one of the results I got for the sake of example:

(It's a bit of a rushed drawing sorry I just wanted to get the actual generator out there)

I hope everyone has fun with it :]

[ains-art]

She's an excellent subject for texturing fun if you ask me 😌 Also she doesn't really have golden nails but it felt fitting for the vibe...

[krysmcscience]

Did somebody say Bill shouldn't be allowed to swear? I think somebody said Bill shouldn't be allowed to swear. Thanks to that, have these retooled The Good Place jokes:

The "powers that be" can refer to either the Theraprism staff, the Axolotl, or just. Ya know. Disney in general. Or all three! Whichever you think is funniest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The "party" Bill's referring to is Weirdmageddon, of course. He was quite the ashhole to everyone back then.

Ford has probably gotten pretty good at the 'tune out your psychopathic ex with dank memes' challenge.

It must be very cathartic to be able to make Bill shut up whenever you want with just the press of a button. I'm sure Ford doesn't abuse this ability at all.

Oh, sure, 'Not now,' he says, before he immediately backs out of the newly-made hole in the Theraprism wall. 🙄

Don't worry, Bill doesn't get far.

also yeah i know this one doesn't have an attempted swear - i just wanted to use the joke because of the massive stink-eye involved in it because it makes me laugh

⬇️ More goofs beneath the brief ramble if you wanna skip it lmao⬇️

Why is Ford even there, you might ask? Well, he either decided he preferred to watch Bill suffer in person over being distantly and repeatedly harassed with the same evil desperation book for the rest of his life, or he got roped into some kind of contrived community service for 1.) all his many counts of interdimensional thievery, and 2.) his ignoring all the very clear warnings to NOT summon Bill in the first place (which I like to imagine is also illegal). Theraprism staff were just like, 'Wait, this guy matters to Bill? Ooh, we can USE that! It might be the only thing that can help him want to get better!' It is not considered that throwing Ford at Bill so soon after Weirdmageddon could instead make them both WORSE - in new and altogether special ways! :D

Anyway, I'm calling it the Community Service AU, and I am most likely not going to do anything else with it beyond appropriating these silly Good Place jokes. So, feel free to adopt the concept if y'all wanna??? Just make sure that Bill is still not allowed to swear, no matter what, full stop. It's gotta be a real linguistic corkblork of a situation for him, is all I'm sayin'.

Finally, have these bonus Good Place jokes, but with Handyman!Bill this time:

'Opposite tortures' doesn't sound so bad...at least until it's an all-powerful chaos entity known for torture saying it.

you may think i forgot mabel's cute pink cheeks but the truth is that i did in fact forget but then immediately stopped caring which makes it okay, SHHHHHHH

And, finally:

lmao this is shit

True facts, if you cram Season 1 Eleanor Shellstrop and Michael into a singular triangle shape, they turn into Bill Cipher. This is science, look it up. Or don't, and just trust the source that is me, bro.

Anyway, I should be in bed, y'all have fun with these, I guess. Tune in after like a week or so and maybe I'll have an addendum to my comic about how Bill was drawn naked for karaoke night. Because him actually being naked was not the only thing I considered as a plausible explanation. XD

Also if you see any inconsistencies or errors in any of these comics, No You Do Not :D

Also also, reblogs are rad as hell and I appreciate every single one, just don't repost, please and thanks. Every time a repost is made, an artist somewhere cries. :,)

[misscammiedawn]

Just read The Strange Case of Harley and Harleen and my god I needed a little bit of positive plurality in my life this week.

The way Pam and Harl's relationship adapts to accept the Harley/Harleen split makes my heart swell.

The way Pam sees the difference between her girlfriends.

And assures her that she accepts and loves all sides of her.

And does what she can to accommodate Harleen's memory holes.

The core relationship of this book is just so sweet and positive in accepting things as they are without judgment or pushing. Just acceptance and love.

And after finding that in our own life, I know what a powerfully positive thing it can be.

But the Harley/Harleen relationship is well handled too. There's friction and denial at the start but the two develop and trust one another by the end and Harley takes a seat as my favorite kind of character, the morally ambiguous protector.

I love the way Harley's protectiveness of Harleen is depicted and how she tries so hard to keep her from interacting with the criminal underworld of Gotham.

It's just saccharine and kind.

Highly recommend the book to anyone who just wants soft and kind plurality vibes. Heaven knows the majority of the fiction involving split personalities are flooded with angst and darkness and though this book contains a few dark plot beats like DV it never feels painful or sorrow inducing.

I'm so happy I read it.

[autistickaitovocaloid]

Today in vc we discussed the concept of a gmod funeral so I drew my interpretation.

[phanfinger]

I'm in a multiple subject credential program currently.

So I get to student teach. This is not my first rodeo. I've student taught two times before.

First time was 9 years ago. I was a child development major at the community college that I went to. I did the practicum class, for preschool. Oh my god, I had the worst experience ever. The mentor teacher or whatever the fuck she was called was so incredibly bad at giving my constructive criticism. I thought that I was bad because she never had something nice to say me ever. I seriously remember that the only positive thing she ever said to me was that I noticed things in children that she did not notice. I was in the preschool classroom once a week for four hours. I spent the entire time on edge because of her. But I did enjoy being around the children. When I was getting my end of the year review from her from my lecture teacher, I really thought that I was going to fail. My lecture teacher misplaced my review from her so she called her right then to review me. To my disbelief, the mentor teacher gave me a glowing review. I was incredibly shocked. Fuck that bitch honestly. I almost quit the whole major all together.

But I continued on. I got into a California State University. Majored in Early Childhood Studies. I still enjoyed learning about children. I enjoyed my lecture teachers. It had its own student teaching program. But uh oh! Covid happened! So student teaching had to be online. It fucking sucked so bad. Not because the children I had to observe were annoying or anything but mostly because of the state of the world. My teachers assigned us videos to watch and create curriculum that way. It was not ideal for sure. I got my degree in early childhood studies in spring of 2021. I was so done. I was finished. I was burnt out so badly. Got a shitty preschool job. I quit after three days.

But then I got a good preschool job. I stayed there for three years. There was a moment in my first year where my co teacher's husband had open heart surgery and so she was out for 2 weeks. I was able to run that classroom. I was so happy. I felt like that I proved that mentor teacher bitch wrong. I could do this. I can be a teacher. I just finished there about two weeks ago. It feels weird but I needed to move on.

Why? Well, TK (Transitional Kindergarten, which takes kids as early as 4 years old) is taking enrollment away from preschool. Unless I wanted to work with children who were barely 3 years old and not potty trained, I am shit out of luck. Also, preschool doesn't pay shit. I fully believe in preschool though. If you have the means to, send your child to several years of preschool. Your child needs the social skills, believe me. Your child knowing their ABCs and their numbers up to 20 doesn't mean shit if they're hitting their friends, taking things without permission, or being unable to listen to people in general.

Anyway, I've been assigned 3rd grade. Quite different than preschool. I think it's pretty funny because I actually repeated the third grade. My family was moving across the city we lived in and my science skills were not up to my science teacher mom's standards. So moved schools but repeated third grade. I remember my second year of third grade being much easier and reading a lot. My teacher was on the verge of retirement so she didn't care what I did when I finished my work. I am very excited to relearn the material again 21 years later!

I've met up with my cooperating teacher twice now. She seems fine as a person.

However, her entire classroom and the way she has organized her classroom is entirely Harry Potter themed and based. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty impressive but at the same time so incredibly cringe. I mean, she's had years to change it and she hasn't. And she's basically admitted to me that she has spent so much time, effort, and money making her classroom look and operate like this. She asked me if I was a fan. I said that I had read all the books and seen all the movies based on the books. She interrupted me and said that I was way ahead of her previous student teachers. I told her that I was 30 that I grew up with it but I'm not a fan of it anymore.

She's vaguely aware of J.K's assholery but not really. I told her what J.K. just recently did and her response was literally, "Well, that is too bad."

She's kind of an ally. I guess. A very basic one. I referred to my non binary twin as "they" and she stopped me and told me to say that it again as she wants to get pronouns right. Her 20 year old majoring in art daughter always yells at her about getting pronouns right for her friends. I took the opportunity to tell her that I was agender. She was as supportive as she could muster I guess. But I told her that in the classroom that I was a woman. She said that was best because the elementary school that I've been assigned to hosts military families and they can be a bit conservative. It makes sense because there are two local bases.

Anyway, first day is Wednesday. I'm hoping to muster enough energy to write about my experiences every day but we'll see.

[utane]

This is basically what happened, right? 🤔🤔