let's see how far we've come :)
[image id: digital illustration of john egbert, jade harley, rose lalonde, and dave strider from homestuck. they are all laying on a blue checkered picnic blanket laying on top of one another in a familiar manner and smiling.
john is at the center laughing heartily while jade is to the right laying down on her side. dave is to the left and is in a comfortable lounging position with one leg over one of john's and is resting his head in rose's lap who is smirking at john and jade's antics.
they are all in their respective godtier outfits. around them are some lush grassy hills with variously colored wildflowers spotting the landscape and the sburb sun setting behind them. end image id.]
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The girls have arrived!!
I received an email from the goldfish-delivering company that had “how to take care of your mogwai” vibes, with recommendations I was expecting like “don’t feed the fish for the first three days” but also some I wasn’t expecting at all, such as “don’t make eye contact with aggressive fish”:
If you zoom in on the picture above, you can see it’s already too late.
I decided to follow the timeless human tradition of ignoring things I don’t understand, and moved on to phase 2: poking tiny holes in the bags of fish and letting them float around on the water of their new tank until water temperatures and pH became even. In the meantime I had a mystery on my hands: in addition to the two bags of fish I had ordered, the parcel contained another, smaller bag full of some unknown liquid.
The paper inside is just a page torn off a catalogue, there were no indications as to what this little bag was for and I was puzzled. My first thought was that it contained some kind of big name fish that needed to travel alone—or maybe the aggressive fish that you shouldn’t make eye contact with? An aquatic Pyrgus. But then I opened the bag and it only contained a clear water-like liquid; no fish.
My second thought was that the liquid was a goldfish tonic that I should pour into the tank to help the fish adjust to their new environment. I called the goldfish-delivering company just to make sure, and the man I had on the phone was like “Oh I’ve never been asked this question before! The little bag just contains a block of ice to keep the fish cool during delivery. If there’s still some ice in there you can put it in your apéritif this evening.” I felt pretty silly, but he sounded happy to answer a silly question about ice instead of having someone call to say “some of my fish died during delivery.”
(I shared my initial hypothesis with him—that the little bag contained the fish in chief who travelled alone in its own VIP vehicle—and he said “Vous avez été chercher loin !” (you’ve thought about this a lot!) and I said “no that was my first theory” and he was like “how was it your first theory”)
Anyway—the fish had now floated long enough and were ready to be scooped out! Their travel water was pretty dirty and the bags pretty cramped, I bet they’re enjoying their 1000L tank with water lovingly filtered by my hardworking vegetables.
Here they are exploring the place! You can see the plants’ roots dipping into the water from each tower (explanation in this post in case you’ve missed it) so they have quite a lot of underwater greenery to play with or munch on. I hope they acclimatise well and enjoy their mutually-enriching relationship with my greenhouse plants :)
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I think on this fine Saturday afternoon it's a good opportunity to take a breather and remember that there are really no ethical paparazzi pictures. Every single one is inherently exploitative.
Just because photos were taken on a movie set, when someone is 'working,' does not make the practice any less invasive and creepy. Imagine just going about your day, doing your job and having some weirdo snapping pictures of you to sell without your consent for others to endlessly repost online.
There are thousands of pictures of your favourite actor online already. Plenty taken with his knowledge and consent. I'd really like to see more of them on my dash, rather than the creeper shots.
And don't get me started how disseminating these pictures directly leads to people going to said sets. What starts off as admiring how good someone looks has real world implications.
No, hanging around a movie set and disrupting people doing their jobs is not harmless fun or a way to show your appreciation.
If you hang around a movie set, you are a stalker.
Don't tell me that it's okay to take your online admiration for someone offline. You may admire him but he does not, and will never, personally know you. He will never be your friend/boyfriend/daddy. He is a stranger.
The only way meeting your favourite actor is going to happen is at a convention or maaaaaybe a movie premiere if you're incredibly fortunate. You know, places they appear specifically to meet fans (or not in the case of premieres, where the purpose is to promote a movie. Which is also completely understandable if actors don't stop. You are not owed an interaction).
Of course, you cannot help it if you randomly run into someone you admire in the wild. Even then, consider that they probably won't be all too thrilled to be approached in public by a complete stranger. It's up to you to gauge the situation, but remember there is a person at the heart of all of this.
Boundaries and respect are a kindness which deserves to be extended to each and every human being regardless of their looks/talent/fame/wealth.
Fandoms blur those lines a little too often for my liking and I think just scrutinising what you're interacting with, or what behaviour you could be possibly falling down that slippery slope towards is nice to do every once in a while.
I mean no malice with this post and it is not directed at anyone in particular. It's something I cannot help but feel strongly about because I've seen this destructive cycle time and again in fandoms over the years. It's not healthy and it makes us all a little bit more disconnected from our humanity for it...
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actually, proper answer now that i'm awake and have had some time to percolate lol. best thing armand did!
i should say this is kind of a tie for me because the person armand becomes with daniel is always going to be up there -- he didn't let him die, he gave daniel what he wanted, but more importantly he told him, and showed him, that he loved him, and just in general in their time together he allowed daniel to see so much of his real genuine vulnerability and cared for him and worried about him so much and that fucks me up!!
but!! the thing i actually wanted to mention is his homes! (this is maybe cheating a little bit because it isn't something he did, it's something he does, but whatever.) one of the things i love most about armand is that he's always creating these stable places and central points for everybody to congregate on. while a lot of the others are sort of nomadic and don't stay in touch and you don't really know where they are, he is always (as he says) "a canker in the very eye of the world". he's easy to find, he stays in one place and he uses his resources and his power to create these stable, lasting home bases and then opens his doors to others. he creates stability and then shares it in a way that really nobody else does.
and i think it's very interesting because this sort of stability is a character trait that (i think!) maybe most people would first and foremost think to associate with elders like maharet, or marius, when in actual fact, the truth is that neither of them has ever done that -- for their own disparate reasons they've always been highly reclusive, and have protected their own stability by staying out of touch with the rest of the vampire world, not opening their doors, and for the most part not helping anyone or intervening in anything in any way.
there's something fascinating and honestly poignant about like... armand, maybe subconsciously, running a household according to an ideal which (imo!) is based on marius, except that marius has never actually done that. not for vampires. and so in actual fact, this is something that armand has innovated; this actually comes from him, and is coloured by his experience with the covens (which marius has never shown anything but disdain for), and perhaps even beyond that, by his experience with the sense of community in monastic life (which really ditto).
i personally suspect that rather than praiseworthy, he probably sees this as ultimately pretty self-serving on his own part, because he has this longing for community that drives him to create these places, so he probably just sees it as something he does so that he won't have to be alone. and also, from the way he talks in late canon you get the sense that he rather sees himself as trying to atone, and as trying to emulate those who are better than him. when in fact he's doing something that nobody else is doing, and in many ways (imo) behaving more like a leader of a community than any of the characters that everyone else thinks ought to lead, like marius or lestat. not because they couldn't, but because neither of them has ever had the resources, capabilities, patience, and willingness to create something like that and then open it up.
and for a character who's been so lost, and has spent so much of his life feeling lost, feeling abandoned (and i think, right up until present day, still feels that way really), and has spent so much of his life looking for something to anchor his life to, without ever having the luxury of truly finding it, and having to just sort of go on anyway, keep living anyway -- for that character to be a stable anchor point for everybody else is something that really really gets me about him, maybe especially because i think he isn't fully aware of it himself.
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i see a lot of opinions around, about death, and why she didn't intervene in dream's imprisonment
and i think a lot of people have trouble reconciling the idea that she does care about him, with the fact that she didn't do anything?
so then you get the theories that she couldn't have saved him (as if burgess was ever a match for the endless, he only got dream because dream was still recovering from burning out 99% of his power in overture), or that she was stuck by the rules of the endless not interfering with each other (that's a whole other convoluted discussion topic)
but i feel like these theories all kinda. misread, who death is. or rather, they sort of assume she's a human being with the same mentality as a human, and not the literal personification of death
of course she cares about her brother. and of course she technically had the power to intervene. but think about her existence. think about the way in which she knows everyone, the life she's lived for billions of years, and the life she knows she'll live until she's the last consciousness left in the universe
she's an inherently passive entity, she has to be. because her entire purpose is to stand there for the end of every life in existence, often horrific and violent and unfair ones, and to tell them that's just the way of things. to ensure that that fate does indeed come to pass. she knows how everyone is going to die and she just has to keep talking to them like she doesn't
when she was younger, it was different. granted, she refused to help dream then too, because (at least according to dream) all the endless were incredibly prideful when they were young, and wouldn't even have tried to help each other. but also, we have her word that at one point her job got overwhelming. the fact that she had to stand by and watch so much tragedy, to ensure it happened, really got to her. and for a while, she stopped. one of the few times if not the only time she has ever made a strong decision in the face of fate - she stopped collecting souls. and that turned out much worse. in order to exist as herself, she had to find a way to not only be okay with who she is, but find meaning in it. the person who would get involved, who would stand up against unfairness, that person cannot be death of the endless
and think about death as a concept, for a sec, not just as a person. death is patient. death will come for everyone in time, but time is meaningless to it. i like this panel, from endless nights, for connecting that with death the person, because she is always there and always waiting (in this story she waits here for anywhere between 10 and 200 years, depending on how you look at it. and she explains in this story that time doesn't really work the same to her as it does to everyone else. time is her father, after all. she can wait. she will always wait.)
even when she takes human form, like we see in high cost of living, she is the epitome of go with the flow. she just follows where the universe takes her, doesn't try to change anything, just lets her curiosity and love for humanity put her in whatever situation fate decided she should be. and fate (whether that's her brother, the fates, or something else entirely) does play some role in it, because her human form was created with $10.02 in her pocket, which is the exact amount of money she ended up needing to spend that day. and she trusts that she won't need more than that, no matter how many questions are thrown at her about it
which is not an inherently bad thing! because living in the moment means she is so much more alive than her siblings, it gives her the ability to offer so much more empathy towards the mortals she has to spend most of her time with, it makes her in many ways a wonderful person. she's just, not a person of action
death doesn't show she cares by stopping the bad things from happening to you. she shows she cares by being there for you after. by having the patience, despite her busy job, to sit and chat with every single person who's ever lived, and to comfort them in the best way she knows how
which is exactly what she did
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