#if that's the right word

[starpros-sunshine]

There really could never have been a better phrase for sanctuary then "linger a while thou art so fair!" it encapsulates Wataei so well oh it fits like a house on fire. And it really hits different when you understand the original german because every english translation I have seen translates it like "When I say to the moment flying / Linger a while thou art so fair / then bind me in thy bonds undying / and my final ruin I shall bear!" and that just really doesn't hit the same as "Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen / "Verweile doch! Du bist so schön" / Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen / Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!" It just really doesn't have the same vigor to it there's something missing especially in the last line the rest is fine actually but "and my final ruin I shall bear" sounds so resigned so accepting but in a sober way like it's a consequence to those actions it's so matter-of-factly and I think the "gern" just makes a lot of difference there because the german original has more passion behind it it's the same accepting of consequence but it's different and the verse before that too "dann magst du mich" feels like it's giving explicit permission it doesn't sound as sober as the english either it's. I really can't explain it. but it fits wataei so well because Eichi would also be fully on board with letting Wataru lead him into ruin oh and it is so good

[number5theboy]

god i feel like i've sent so many asks to you but you have a very nice logical way of putting things into words so have another ask i guess:

i cant wrap my head around the writers intentions for reginald. s1 was so reliant on him being incredibly smart and working behind the scenes of everything, and to extent this carried onto s2. but if his plan for the kids all along was oblivion and the seven bells then why:

did he drug and brainwash the kid with the most destructive ability when he knew that even specially trained soldiers couldnt match the guardians. i guess this is a bit of a meh point as viktor didnt need his power to stand on a star but still...

did he purposefully stunt the umbrellas but let the sparrows develop to a higher level of expertise with their powers. if he needs to fight the guardians, and thinks they may die in the process, then fully train your soldiers instead of handicapping them.

did he let five get so arrogant and out of control to the point where he ran out of the house at thirteen never to be seen (by reginald) again. the second he loses even one of those kids his entire plan falls apart, youd think hed have a tighter hold on things.

did he try to keep the academy after bens death. related to the above point, maybe he does have a way to reach five (televator?) but ben is still dead and i imagine dragging a dead body into oblivion would be difficult. ben would have been a rotten corpse by the time reginald finally took the umbrellas to oblivion, not in a fit state to be transported to a battleground through a thin walkway. plus the siblings would probably get suspicious at this point, maybe even back out completely.

did he even stop at 7. i get that he doesnt like kids and at a certain point theres too many to control, but dude needs a backup plan. he lost 2/7 in a scenario where losing even one means total failure. also, it was always a possibility that someone could die in oblivion, so why kill klaus and only take 7 in the first place.

did he unalive himself in s1. if he needs to operate the machine in oblivion for this to work, and hes stunted klaus to the point where he doesnt even know how to summon ghosts... what was his plan... what was he going to tell klaus in the day that was... what could klaus have even done at that point. (and he was 100% dead bc klaus found him in the void)

whats the point of freezing abigail on the moon, and sending luther to protect her, if your just going to rewrite the universe entirely... full offense to reg but luthers mission was entirely pointless.

if you can rewrite the universe.. bring back your old planet... why stay on earth.

ik this is a lot and i dont expect you to have the answers to any of these but s1 set up so many questions and we're 3 seasons in and theyve only been added too and contradicted? i feel like having a villain with understandable motivations is a pretty big part of a successful story. and reg is so complicated, and the implications that he does have feelings of guilt or affection towards the kids (giving viktor the violin that his dead wife left him, talking to luther under his favourite tree and the almost affection when he finds out luther found his unopened packages, everything about retraining klaus in s3)

again, sorry this is so long and out of the blue, i just want to idk vocalise how stupid this set up feels, like the writers are backing themselves into a corner they dont know how to get out of..

Anon, I can Ockham's razor all of this really quick for you: the writers did not fucking know about Oblivion or the seven bells or anything remotely like that when they wrote Season 1. That's why everything seems stupider in retrospect now. I wish I could offer some deeper explanation to your very eloquent and valid questions, but sometimes the answer is just 'this is a show written season by season by different writing teams that clearly do not get enough time to go back and study the existing canon in order to craft a coherent narrative, which is why everything is off the rails now'. I often mourn the show we could have had if Season 2 had properly built on what was set up in Season 1 instead of going full light entertainment.

I think that Reginald is an incredibly compelling character anchored by a truly great performance by Colm Feore, but also that they keep using Reginald whatever way fits them best depending on the season, and by this point it has become jumbled and contradictory, which is such a shame.

I really would love to discuss your questions, but it would always circle back to 'this makes no sense anymore because there was no overarching story plan by that point in time that would let the writers know about bloody project Oblivion'. I'm with you on the fact that this set-up feels stupid. It's becoming really difficult to care about consistency in the story if half the things happening each season are forgotten by the writers in the following.

[just-spacetrash]

the 'what if you played it a little risky' post literally Changed my life but i cant fujkign find it in my blog because its. a tiktok screenshot

[lazylittledragon]

can't believe we're all adults being forced into the club penguin level of censorship in 2024

[runawaymarbles]

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

[littlemsterious]

i was thinking about that post comparing Jessica Rabbit as an asexual to Barbie and an asexual and then i thought of the Neil Gaiman post (was it a post?) about Crowley and Aziraphale being asexual sexless and then this happened.

anyways. thoughts?

sorry it took so long I meant to do this a week ago but my brain is full of rocks.

[Image ID a three sided venn diagram. the big circles show Margot Robbie's Barbie sitting in front of a mirror, Jessica and Roger Rabbit from the poster of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens standing back to back. Between Barbie and Jessica Rabbit it says "sexualised by society". Between Jessica Rabbit and Aziraphale and Crowley it says "Knows what sex is". Between Aziraphale and Crowley and Barbie it says "no reproductive system(?)". the center is the asexual flag. End ID]

Also i haven't seen the Barbie movie as of this edit so at least please tag your spoilers.

[lepartiprisdeschoses]

"Magic as science and technology" isn't unique to Frieren I'm sure, but it's an interesting piece of worldbuilding still.

[musicofthenightphantomoftheopera]

URGENT UPDATE ON KOSA.

This is exactly how they were finally able to pass the tiktok ban after trying for 3 years. And this is exactly what I was worried about them trying as a result. Again, all info and resources for fighting KOSA are in the pinned post on my page. Plz spread the word. Even if you don't live in america, Share this with any american friends and mutuals you have. We can still fight this bill we still have a chance at stopping it just like we have in the past. The only reason it hasn't passed yet is because we keep fighting it. Don't forget that. make sure your reps and senators don't know a moment of peace

[lgbtqtext]

[disasterdandelion]

First base is violence second base is convoluted codependence third base is applying pressure to the vulnerable parts of their body to keep their entrails from spilling out

[comradekatara]

to me, the funniest thing about “that’s rough buddy” isn’t the fact that sokka says something patently insane with zero context seemingly out of nowhere, or the fact that zuko clearly doesn’t know how to respond. it’s the completely incorrect use of the word “buddy.” zuko would obviously like to be friends with sokka, but sokka is not, in fact, his friend. this is the most time they’ve ever spent together, and it’s because zuko invited himself to tag along on sokka’s suicide mission. at this point in the episode, sokka still hates this guy, perhaps less than he did a week ago, but he still hates him enough that he didn’t bother forcing zuko to stay home, which means he still didn’t really care whether or not zuko lives or dies. which, considering that he had tried to kill zuko multiple times in the past, is not all that surprising. this entire episode is essentially just zuko forcing his friendship onto sokka while sokka is legitimately too depressed to care. so when zuko calls sokka “buddy,” there’s a spirit of dogged optimism characterizing that epithet, because in no possible realm would sokka consider zuko his buddy at this point in the episode. and that’s something we miss when noting the iconicness of this exchange, simply because, by the end of this episode, they are buddies, so in our minds looking back on these lines, the implication of friendship doesn’t feel out of place at all. and really, it isn’t out of place, but only because zuko’s tenacity and determination (in this instance, his determination to befriend sokka) has always hugely outweighed his ability to read the room.

[newttxt]

crisis of disbelief

[autismserenity]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)

[wolfythewitch]

Do I have any marine biologists following me HAHA

Weird thing to be hung up on considering. Everything else. But I'm also vaguely curious

[metamorphicrocky]

doctor who coming back in the year of 2023 when terfism and biological essentialism and transphobia are on the rise and making one of THE most hyped up episodes by bringing back fan favorites david tennant and catherine tate. all about being trans

showing rose being bullied and her grandma struggling to get it right but still being supportive. and shaun and donna being the greatest parents by being ready to burn the world down to protect their daughter. the doctor asking for the meep's pronouns AND IT'S NORMAL???

and all of that is brilliant to see rose as a trans character and it is important to the narrative. BUT THEN. ROSE BEING TRANS SAVES DONNA'S LIFE BY TAKING HALF OF THE METACRISIS. BECAUSE THE DOCTOR IS MALE AND FEMALE AND NEITHER AND MORE. AND THAT IS INTEGRAL TO DOCTOR WHO AS A WHOLE. and it saved donna's life

to see doctor who be so BLATANTLY trans and nonbinary at the core of the series. the multiple references to the fact that before fourteen, thirteen was a woman. so to see this? trans people stay winning. thank you doctor who for doubling down on the importance of the doctor being trans because oh my god I am so emotional about this

[chaiaurchaandni]

have humans developed a language that can accurately describe the intensity of this grief?