#i've thought about this

[evilfloralfoolery]

So I know Caspian can't lose his voice under normal circumstances, but what about breath support? Can a cough or chest congestion throw him off his game?

Great question! I've actually "asked him" about this.

The weird thing about Caspian is that he doesn't really get those kinds of symptoms for very long (if at all) because of his Fae blood. The worst thing that happens to him is some sinus congestion and fever. Because he's a siren, his lung capacity is exceptional and difficult to disrupt. The man can basically breathe underwater, if he wants to lol. So, he's not prone to anything that fucks up his lungs or their function.

Conversely, he's extremely sensitive to nasal issues because of his heightened sense of smell, so he doesn't get away THAT easily lol.

[professionalowl]

so. um. the good news is we found your boyfriend. the bad news is that, well, we sort of…dug him up…in the middle of a car park. in leicester (buckley et al. 2013). leicester, yeah. sorry. they demolished the friary he was hastily interred in when henry viii dissolved all the monasteries. you know how it is. and as it turns out, well, shakespeare was…sort of right about him. scoliosis, yeah, sorry (appleby et al. 2014). if it makes you feel any better we analysed his bones and it turns out he had a pretty high-protein diet before he died (lamb et al. 2014). and he drank so much wine that it changed their chemical composition, which we didn't know could actually happen before we analysed him (lamb et al. 2014), so he was having a good time, at least. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appleby, J., Mitchell, P.D., Robinson, C., Brough, A., Rutty, G., and Morgan, B. (2014). The scoliosis of Richard III, last Plantagenet King of England: diagnosis and clinical significance. Lancet 383, 1944. 

Buckley, R., Morris, M., Appleby, J., King, T., O’Sullivan, D., and Foxhall, L. (2013). ‘The king in the car park’: new light on the death and burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars church, Leicester, in 1485. Antiquity 87, pp. 519-538. 

Lamb, A.L., Evans, J.E., Buckley, R., and Appleby, J. (2014). Multi-isotope analysis demonstrates significant lifestyle changes in King Richard III. Journal of Archaeological Science 50, pp. 559-565.

[clarisse-doodles]

inspired by this post, in which Damian does not know what Vine is

[blueboyluca]

“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)

[agentravensong]

thinking about how the extra area added on to a pacifist run of undertale, the true lab, is about alphys's past mistakes. how it ends with the story reaffirming that, despite the pain she's caused, the thing that matters is that she has now made the choice to do the right thing. she's still worthy of her friends' love.

thinking about how undertale doesn't expect the player to get a pacifist ending for the first time. how it's more likely than not that the player will kill toriel the first time they battle her, how lots of players don't initially figure out how to end undyne's fight without killing her, etc. what it expects — not even expects, really, but hopes — is that the player, if they care enough, will use their canonically acknowledged power over time to make up for those mistakes.

no matter how many neutral runs a player has done before committing to the pacifist run, the thing that matters to the characters, to the story, is that you've chosen, now, to do the right thing.

compared to alphys, the player honestly gets off lightly, in that you're the only one (other than flowey) who really remembers any harm you might have caused. and any direct guilting the game could have done about it is long past at this point. instead, as undertale often does, it makes its point via parallels: alphys caused harm, and she knows it. she has committed to being better. in doing so, she has unlocked for herself a better ending to her story. and she deserves it. she's forgiven.

those structural narrative parallels are all over undertale, if you know where to look. and that's one of the things that makes it so fuckin' good.

[madamemiz]

sad: falling out of a hyperfixation

tragic: watching your beloved friends and mutuals fall out of the hyperfixation while you're still in it

[fictionadventurer]

Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

[adxmanial]

find familiar

[cleric4vampire]

wyll.y.am ravengard, I love you so

everyone loves to put him in gold (rightly so) but my personal style is lots of silver jewelry + heavy eyeliner so that's what I gave him. also roses because he's so damn venusian

[itsybitsyjoltik]

the response to this poll is baffling to me and i'm wondering if it's an issue of definitions so here's a more comprehensive poll:

(belated clarification: i meant watching a playthrough/series you haven't finished as counting as experiencing them)

[hailsatanacab]

A Persuasive Argument - dpxdc

"Great!" Danny says, clapping his hands together to get everyone's attention. The dinner table falls silent as everyone looks towards him. It's a full house today and, honestly, Danny's a little nervous. "I'm sure you're all wondering why I gathered you here today."

"It's dinnertime. In our house." Duke mutters, while doing a very bad job of concealing his yawn. He holds his fork poised over the braised beef, but, just like everyone else, still looks towards Danny before tucking in. It's intriguing enough to wait.

"Yeah, no one misses Alfie's dinner." Dick says, with a brilliant smile that Danny can't help but return.

"Precisely! What better time to talk to you all than when you're all actually here!"

"Wait, I thought you came round to work on our English essays?" Tim asks, blinking owlishly.

"I'm afraid I've lured you here under false pretences, Tim."

"This is where I live."

"I would still really appreciate help on that essay though, I mean, what the hell is Hamlet even about? I just don't get that old time-y language, like 'Hark! A ghost hath killed me!' - absolute rubbish, what does that even mean?"

"The ghost never kills anyone in Hamlet, he's there to tell Hamlet that he was murdered. Have you actually read it?"

"No, but it sounds like you have. Tim, I want this guy to help me with my essay instead. I know for a fact that you haven't read Hamlet, either."

"So? We don't need Jason, I've read the Sparknotes."

"Hi Jason, I'm Danny, pleasure to meet you, summarise Hamlet in three sentences or less."

"Am I auditioning to help you write your essays? I can't believe you’ve gone through your whole school life without reading it, it’s good!"

"Hamlet, along with a number of other classics, was banned in our house because it portrayed ghosts as intelligent and sympathetic beings rather than evil, animalistic beasts. I didn’t even get to see The Muppet's Christmas Carol until last year with Tim! It was surprisingly good, and I hate Christmas because everyone always argued and it sucked. But we're getting off topic. I—"

"No, no, please go back to that, because what the fu—"

"Boys, please." Bruce interrupts, looking to the world as if he wants to hang his head in his hands. "Danny, you were about to say something?"

"Oh, yeah, Mr. Wayne! Thanks!"

"Please, call me Bruce."

"Well, that very succinctly brings me to my point, because I'd actually really like to call you dad."

Nobody says a word. Nobody even blinks, all as shocked as the other, watching open-mouthed as Danny pulls his laptop out from beside his chair. Bruce can definitely feel a headache coming on.

"Before you say anything, I've prepared a 69 slide PowerPoint presentation on why you, Bruce Wayne, should adopt me, Danny Last-Name-Pending. Please save your questions, comments, and verdict until the end, thank you."

[dunmeshistash]

I have been thinking about this for a while but can someone explain or their own interpretation of the relationship between Kabru and Milsiril? I have been seeing people post their thoughts about them and I'm really interested in seeing other people's opinion about them

I think understanding Milsiril is important to understanding her relationship with Kabru. But Kabru's relationship chart pretty much says it all "Overprotective adoptive mother"

Milsiril from what I understand is an outcast among other elves, since she was bullied by them before, as her bio says in the adventurer's bible, she seems to have very negative feeling for her own race.

So she has a preference for other races and likes to raise orphans which can be considered an act of altruism (and it is obviously something positive that she's helping children with no home)

But, just like other elves it seems she doesn't really respects their individuality. In this one she wants Kabru to consider the sweet from his hometown the elven one.

Even other Elves (like short lived species lover Otta) have a bad interpretation of what she does

But I think in the end of the day she just wants a family and someone to love, while a little misguided I believe she's doing her best. Meanwhile Kabru is a rebel son that doesn't want to be smothered by her love (and he's right, I'm glad he confronted her to get what he wanted). And he does call her mother (although it's the more formal version) so I believe he considers her family, there's even an extra where he asks her to take him to a family reunion.

I think they're a great representation of a type of family I don't see often in fiction. I think its great Milsiril isn't a perfect adoptive mother and I love that they're still family despite it all.

This might have been way longer than you expected but I had to jump on the opportunity to share about Milsiril.

[mizandria]

so the occurrence that almost every woman was sexually harrassed by a man at some point in her life is just a cluster of a few individual experiences that you cannot formulate any general conclusions based on BUT a few reddit porn addicted losers not having a girlfriend assigned to them as soon as they're born or being rejected by three girls in middle school is a world scale epidemic that gets its own name, psychologists and media and useless video essayists devoted to finding out what its causes are and to figuring out how to solve it, and every woman is now responsible for solving it. i love living in this world i am totally not chewing on my arm right now!

[felsicveins]

I'm so lonesome all the time

Some sweet day

Gonna take away

This hurting inside

[jonnywaistcoat]

When writing, did you ever suffer from a fear or underdelivering or misrepresenting a topic? If you did, how did you overcome it? I enjoy writing but rarely bring it to the public out of fear that I am either not doing good enough or badly portraying the themes or aspects of what I write.

Absolutely, and on the one hand it's a very healthy fear - it prompts you to do your research and be thoughtful in how you write. On the other hand you've just got to accept that occasionally it will happen. Inculturation is a hell of a thing, and leaves us all with a thousand kneejerk preconceptions and perceptions of the world, some benign and some downright awful. And sometimes they crop up no matter how thoughtful you try to be. And you gotta understand that when it happens and people call you on it, you just have to take your lumps and learn what you can from it.

It doesn't help, of course, that the words you write are only ever half of what your audience reads: five people reading the same book are reading five different books, each filtering the text through a lifetime of psychology and experience. And they will find themes and problems in there you never even considered, and they will also find resonances and beauty in your work that you could never have foreseen.

At the end of the day, writing stuff thats meaningful to you (hell, writing anything at all) is a messy, bruising business, and anybody who tells you there are simple solutions or clear rules to follow is either lying to you or to themselves.

But you can't let it paralyse you. Its like if you're playing football and you're worried about falling over. It's a reasonable fear and you should do your best to avoid it, but occasionally it's gonna happen, and unless you want to spend the whole game just standing still in a field, you've kinda just got to get on with it. Just try not to be one of those writers who's always taking dives and... screaming for the ref to get a free kick? Hm. That analogy may have gotten away from me. I don't actually know much about football.

Point is, I'm aware that this isn't the most reassuring writing advice I've ever given, but yeah, its a messy, scary business. Just do your best. Be thoughtful. Be kind. And always do your research.