#idk i'm just saying words at this point

[razzle-zazzle]

"Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land" by MARINA is a Between AU World Tour Branch song, as it represents perfectly how as a Troll raised by Bergens who has come to consider himself as both and neither he doesn't quite fit in any mold. It also represents his journey throughout the movie traveling across the genres and coming to find an appreciation for all music, and both of these aspects of his character and arc serve as a direct counterpoint to both Queen Barb's plan to squish every Troll into the mold of Rock and Queen Poppy's ignorance of the differences between the genres and refusal to listen to other voices. In this essay I will—

[ariose-ghoul]

my mom is problematic because she implied that she ships me with medic tf2, which would be RPF

[themthistles]

i think that while micro labels can seem useful and affirming ultimately they're isolating and kind of an obstacle to your understanding of self. that's because you can never find a word specific enough. there will never be a label or two labels or even ten, twenty of them to perfectly capture and describe all of your thoughts, feelings, experiences, preferences, needs, interests, identities, etc. because you learn more and more about yourself every day and then you change and your wants and needs change with you. having to hop between labels, fearing that you don't 'fit' into a label anymore (both in your own and others eyes), worrying how soon your current label will wear out, questioning if you'll ever fully fit a single one. all that causes a lot of uncertainty and anxiety which could be avoided by just picking a more general thing and molding it according to what it means to YOU. because words will always mean different things to different people, you will never be understood immediately and maybe never completely by anyone but yourself and that's fine

[cowboyskeletons]

and sparrow's son loves the world so much and loves everyone around him and how can sparrow tell him that the world is cruel? how can he tell him that love will be punished and that cruelty is the only way to survive? normal's love scares him, he loves his son so much but that love scares him. he would do and has done anything for his son but he knows that it has led to his own ruin. and he loves his son but too much love has only ever harmed him and maybe he can take a model from his own dad and multitask.

maybe he can love his son but he hates him too, hates that normal can love and hates that normal can be loved and hates that normal can be so oblivious to the cruelty around him in a way that he himself lost when the world ended. he wants his son to have everything but loathes that fact that normal'll never try. that he just accepts life as it is. the way his dad did, when sparrow saluted henry and went along with the world's end and turned a blind eye to his wife's infidelity.

he sees himself in normal, maybe. maybe he hates that. because he lost himself, that day he lost his father's care and his mother's respect, and he can't bear to see himself lost again. normal needs to be cruel because otherwise he will be crushed and sparrow can't do that again. can't let himself be crushed again.

[loafofryebread]

Toxic codependency and mutually assured destruction is quite often seen as something vicious and sharp and cruel. But what if it was the opposite.

What if it was soft and sweet and loving. What if instead kisses that leave skin bloody and raw it was a gentle peck on the lips. What if there wasn't hate or greed rather sonething kinder. What if every brush of skin was a silent 'I love you don't leave me I can't live with out you'.

Maybe instead of blood and jagged nails it was feather-light touches and rustling leaves. What if instead of fire it was sickness. Creeping through the soul and hollowing out your insides so flowers can grow from your heart.

Looking and eachother and knowing that if this person was gone you wouldn't be able to function or so much as breathe. You would simply lie down and not move until your body was covered in oleanders and moss and your soul found a home again with the earthworms.

what if toxic codependency was a love so deep you could drown in it? Or something

[ineed-to-sleep]

Girl we r obssessed

[venturelovebot]

Idk how to word serious posts anymore because my brain is so overtaken by memes ┐(´∇｀)┌

[coquelicoq]

been paying more attention to my r sounds in french lately and while i do default to the voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/ most of the time, in intervocalic contexts i'm doing what i'm pretty sure is a voiced uvular approximant /ʁ̞/ maybe half the time? i wasn't sure if it was a tap/flap or an approximant, but it does sound a lot like the audio clip for the approximant, and apparently the approximant is often an allophone for the fricative, while the tap/flap is an allophone for the trill (which makes sense since a tap/flap is basically an abbreviated trill), and i don't really do uvular trills in speech.

the fricative has always been difficult for me and at this point i doubt it will get much easier than it is now. it makes sense that as i learned to speak faster i would end up producing the approximant in at least some contexts, and i suppose that it makes sense that the main context in which that happens is intervocalic, since approximants are kind of like if you took a fricative halfway to being a vowel.

the reason i've been thinking about this lately is i've been listening to a lot of stromae and his r sounds keep jumping out at me. i mentioned in some tags the other day his r sounds in bonne journée (skip to 1:24):

Si l'bonheur [tap/flap?] des autres [elided] te rend [trill] malheureux [trill] C'est qu't'es un rageux [tap/flap?] Si l'malheur [trill?] des autres [elided] te rend [trill] heureux [approximant??] C'est qu't'es un rageux [tap/flap?]

that sound in heureux in the third line is really interesting because he pronounces that exact word (within the word malheureux) two lines before, but there he's clearly trilling the r, and here he is not, and it doesn't sound like a tap or flap to me either! it sounds like an approximant!

he does do the uvular fricative as well...specifically in consonant clusters (also in variation with trills) (skip to 1:37):

Tu profites [fricative] jamais vraiment [trill?] de ce moment présent [fricative] En fait t'es juste dépressif [fricative]

elsewhere in the song he seems to trill a lot of consonant cluster rs, so i think it may also be a function of syllables/second - in these two lines he's going really fast, and possibly fricatives are faster to pronounce than trills? they certainly are for me, but i'm not sure if that's because i'm not a native speaker or because of some fundamental property of trilling.

between a vowel and a consonant he's sometimes doing a trill and sometimes something else, i think an approximant but it might be a fricative. hell, maybe it's a tap/flap. (rs in this context are fairly difficult for me to distinguish with any accuracy if they're not trills or really emphasized fricatives, so fuck if i know.)

ultimately i think he (at least in song) trills every r possible and resorts to (not consciously, obviously) one of the other options when necessary. i am nowhere near that proficient at uvular trills and can pretty much only do them on extended notes (because they take extra time for me to pronounce) and on higher pitches for some reason. i'd love to learn the uvular tap/flap, and it's probably the fastest of all the options (citation needed but it feels right lol), so maybe a year from now, when my speaking speed has increased another incremental amount, i'll notice that i've started spontaneously producing those as well. i live in hope.

[daz4i]

my mind is once again assaulted by people's incorrect views of my special little guy. not sure i can recover from this.

[welcometogrouchland]

Also in the replies of the Steph concept art on twitter announcing she was gonna be in a new project at DC (posted by Travis Mercer), there were at least 3 comments saying "will Tim be there?" I don't care how hard you ship timsteph I'm exploding you with my eyeballs if you do that on my girls post again

[flexibility-love-andtrust]

fellow trans woman whose blog is entirely dedicated to harmless whimsy immediately (cl/m)ocking your su icon & treating you lower than dirt ?

it's more likely than you think !

[muffinrag]

sometimes alan alda writes really well. sometimes he writes the silliest oc fanfiction i've ever seen in my life

[afniel]

Maaaaaaaaaaaan, come on.

(the post has ended up in the tags btw. I am not changing this and I need you to understand that it is just me talking to myself semi-publicly)

[lesbianalanwake]

solely live action mr door and solely live action dr darling 🤔

YEAH. Darling "ascended," in a manner of speaking - wherever and whatever he is now, thanks to Hedron. and Alice in AW2 is an example of someone who begins to only appear in live action, and maybe filmmaker Zane as well, depending on where you place the AWE scene.

but also. film/video as something that is by nature more restrictive than video games, as games allow for a certain degree of freedom and choice (as well as the illusion of it). Alice talks about capturing and freezing the infinite in a photograph, which is what video is - a series of frozen moments strung together. and some of the ways in which Mr. Door and Hatch from QB are described sound a bit like being trapped in a different way - embedded within that maelstrom of spacetime. not playing by localized rules, but there are universal rules all the same?

[punctuation-completionist]

you don’t have to answer this ask but wow how are you supposed to be the bad guy fucking apologizing for reacting badly to being told to kill yourself?? i hate this website

well okay hold up i never said i was the bad guy. i said there were misunderstandings on both sides and that i was sorry for an issue in one part of how i handled it. just one.

[youraveragecatastrophe]

[Image description : Three screenshots from the 2019 show Carmen Sandiego, from the season 2 episode 6 episode The Need for Speed caper. The first one is Carmen on the blimp, talking to offscreen Zack and Ivy. She says "Look, I think you both know you're more than just my crew." The next two screenshots are from the later scene in San Diego, when Carmen is talking to Shadowsan. She says "But Zack and Ivy chose family over career. Throwing down roots for them is the least I can do." The last image is a a picture of a man saying "So that was a fucking lie". /End description]

Rewatching The Need for speed caper after the series finale like