#im not saying this to be a contrarian or anything this is based on personal experience and realizing its not as fun as i thought

[lottieratworld]

u know. considering the boomer shooter craze is dying and its being oversaturated with kinda shitass games, i wonder if anyone will even give a shit when ultrakill is finally finished

[meanbossart]

so im curious what DU Drow considers to be too sacred to kill, if anything. I know that durge generally refuses to commit acts of murder that are beneath them, but I wonder if there is a type of victim that IS an appropriate sacrifice to bhaal that he cant bring himself to harm? (This referring to before he lost his memories, though if you have anything you'd wanna say regarding after that too)

This is an interesting question to which I unfortunately don't have a very interesting answer 🤔 and I thought about it for a couple of days too!

Bhaalist DU drow was completely faithful to his father. He did practice a little of the good ol' "what he can't see can't hurt him" school of thought - at least in regards to his masochism and some of his more pointless acts of debauchery,which he justified through being otherwise a very obedient son. Otherwise, there was no separation between his will and Bhaal's; If daddy wanted it done, consider it done. This extends even to Orin, who, if ordered, Bhaalist DU Drow would have killed, even if reluctantly.

One caveat to this, I guess, is that he did not easily accept orders from Sarevok or any of the other bhaalists. If he didn't like the sound of something, he would demand Bhaal confirm it true through a vision, prayer, or otherwise intervened in some way or another. However, his friction was usually originated from DU drow's contrarian personality, not genuine disagreement over what was and wasn't a worthy sacrifice. He truly didn't care about anything or anyone else's lives except his own and Orin's - men, women, children, elderly - the last two were probably a lot less satisfying to kill, but it didn't exactly give him any pause.

I think the only form of life he considered somewhat "sacred" were animals - having lived out in the woods for a long time meant he had an understanding and appreciation for the lawlessness of the wilderness and related to their very base-line needs. He obviously has no issue killing animals for self-defense, supplies or food, but anything else would seem pointless. Humanoids have their gods which they serve - animals do not, hence they shouldn't be brought into this. I don't think this matters though as I doubt Bhaalists make a habit out of offering up deer to their murder lord.

(As a note, in DU drow's campaign I never came across the infamous squirrel scene, hence making this headcanon possible LOL)

[fiberglassandflowers]

Hey idk if there’s some master post about mbts but if there is may I please ask where and if not could I perhaps humbly request a description because it sounds cool as FUCK

omg yayy okay so there's not a masterpost as of now (though there is a google doc in the works that will probably be. very big) BUT i will try to give a brief rundown. underneath a readmore 👍

OK SO. IN SUMMARY

MARY BELL TOWNSHIP: more like mary bell CLOWNSHIT ha ha. heavy surveillance like everywhere (including in peoples homes. how fun). it's also got some like radiation stuff going on. all the residents are a lil radiation poisoned But it's mostly fine. also the town moves and i dont know why.

VANNIE OVERTURE: based on suburbia overture. the mayor who is a vampire. major control freak. sucks shit. like most of the reason mary bell is the way it is. permasmile swag. has killed before. hates when people are weird freaks and is actively passive aggressive if not outright aggressive.

TRIP LETWO: based on 2econd 2ight 2eer. world's silliestguy contrarian and infamous public nuisance. deeply tortured individual but shes dealing with it i guess. physically cant leave mary bell township. he has too much goddamn lore

LYDIE LAPLACE: based on laplace's angel. so lame. just deeply lame. killed a guy and got kicked out of office building heaven (laplace's inc. id give this its own section but it doesnt really matter all that much). i dont ever think about it unfortunately im sorry women.

MINA BYRD: based on i/me/myself. very sweet very nice. ladybugpilled socialanxietycel. doesnt have a whole lot going on but she is nice im glad shes there. im gonna have a significant relationships section of this but im saying that shes roommates with lia here bc its not really significant otherwise

WALTER LEE: based on ...well, better than the alternative. worlds first cis father to be a butch lesbian. probably a girl but she doesnt know that. weird nostalgia issues so bad his wife left him.

DOTTY LEE: ten years old. strange little girl but i dont really think about it a lot. not much else to say about her really.

LIA CRATES: based on outliars and hyppocrates. her name is pronounced like lie-uh cray-tees not lee-ah crayts. i have to clear this up because i realized most people were wrong LMAO. a little mean but not so much when you get to know her.

WARREN LEARY: based on blackboxwarrior. actually the worst therapist you will EVER meet. isnt even licensed. you book a session with her and she only talks about herself the entire time. constantly referencing a dark and contradictory past.

MARSHA TILLIS: based on marsha, thankk you for the dialectics. slightly better therapist! still not that good. has the spirit of an old man despite being in his 40s. will begin to psychoanalyze your behavior upon the first thirty seconds of knowing you.

NORMAN LEE: based on love, me normally. guy trying really really hard to be a regular guy. has a loooot of problems that stem from this. hugest people pleaser the world has ever known. a little bit offputting. has hair symbolism :-)

MORTIMER: based on memento mori. doesn't have a last name. worlds silliest grim reaper death thing. works in the death division for laplace's inc. lived a pretty normal life. then it died :-(. more here

FERN O'DYNAMIC: based on thermodynamic lawyer. hates his bitch wife (who is a praying mantis for. unknown reasons? will elaborate). just has a lot of anger inside him and doesnt know how to deal with it so he takes it out on other people. he kind of sucks but he's a neat character.

MIRANDA WRIGHT: the person being sung about in thermodynamic lawyer. bug wife (i can blame anything on radiation). she wasnt always a bug she just kinda did that idk. there's not much about her but she's an etymologist.

COTARD LETWO: based on cotard's solution. she has so many problems oh my gooood. deeply lonely person. fascinated with the macabre. its like coping mechanism that makes you worse. im insane about her writing a basic description is so difficult fkdjsfhsjd

RAMONA MCLAREN: based on red moon + hand me my shovel (though the latter was included later on bc it fit her). worlds most intelligent and stupid single celled organism. patheticswag. absolutely batshit insane. attempting to solve the end of the world.

KUIPER SUNSHINE: based on dr sunshine is dead. uh. i dont really know much about her to be honest SORRY... its really silly though + haver of prophetic dreams that she is NOT transparent about. fucks with people a lot just for funsies

COLIN THESIER: based on cover this song. girl who used to be in a band but got kicked out bc of friend drama. survivor of a toxic codependent queer friendship. trying to be a better person bc she used to suck pretty bad unfortunately. a bit more here

theres like a couple more characters but none of them are really important enough to give their own sections. debbie letwo is trip and cotards mom, laplace is the head of laplace's inc, maude is walter's ex wife who left him (heres the scoop on that).

OK NOTABLE CHARACTER DYNAMICS TIME:

VANNIE/NORMAN: norman has been pretending to be a normal dude this whole time + vannie totally fell for it. normans stuck in this friendship bc hes too much of a people pleaser to break it off even though vannie actively drains him emotionally. also he feels validated by vannie thinking hes normal. its so awful im so insane about their dynamic

VANNIE/TRIP: THEY HAAAATE EACH OTHER. their entire core beliefs are at odds (guy who thinks everyone should do their best to conform vs. guy who loves being a weird freak and doing fuck all). their dynamic is honestly pretty simple in comparison but theyre so petty and stupid its insane. if you put them alone in the same room one of them isnt coming out

TRIP/NORMAN: theyre gay together. there's a weird lore thing about the way relationships are handled in mary bell but long story short theres paperwork that has to be filled out if you want to be registered for one and trip thinks its really funny for xem and norman to constantly break up so they'll have to fill out the paperwork because it fucks with vannie. theyre also kind of awful and tragic

WALTER/DOTTY: that is a father and his daughter. walters trying his best and hes doing well but nothing would have been better than just moving out of mary bell township to raise his child.

WALTER/NORMAN: they’re brothers 👍 not much else to say there but they’re cool

WALTER/MAUDE: already linked a more in-depth explanation of their deal but ill summarize it here. maude thought living in mary bell township was really bad for a child (and it is) but since walter has issues about idealizing his childhood he was like "whaaat well i was raised here and im fine" and they fought about it and once it became clear walter wasnt changing his mind maude figured shed just spare herself from all of it. so she left 💯

WARREN/MARSHA: what if the two worst therapists ever were queerplatonic and violated hipaa together. also what if one of them [marsha] was helping the other [warren] because they're on the run from the law. would that be crazy or what

FERN/MIRANDA: actually awful. they really want to divorce but trip and norman keep clogging up the paperwork so theyre on a waiting list forever. their relationship was really good at one point but its not anymore :-( more info here

NORMAN/FERN: fern haaates norman because of the previously mentioned paperwork debacle but normans ass cant deal with the thought of anyone disliking him so hes just been really trying to get on his good side to no avail. also theyre coworkers so its more relevant

MORTIMER/TRIP: man how do i even summarize this one. due to lore reasons that you can read about in the link provided in trips session they have a super weird dynamic present day. or at least on trips end, mortimer is just super friendly to them and it wigs her out.

TRIP/COTARD: OUGUIGHJ. AOAUYFGDSFHSJ. tragic sibliiings. man i dont even know if i can go into this. go here and here if you want to learn more about them. jesus

COTARD/COLIN: frienndsss :-] classic extrovert forcing themselves into introverts life trope a little bit. they play music together and its great. mina's also in their little group but the two of them are closer

KUIPER/RAMONA: have been described by my friend as being "nonromantic freak4freak" and this is true. theyre working together on the end of the world stuff. they also rope cotard into it but thats lore i havent talked much about yet. go here and here for more info about them.

that might??????? be it?????? if there's more ill update it but thats the general basics i think. thank you for being interested and hopefully reading i greatly appreciate it :-)

[mugentakeda]

mujin headcanons ?? or just samurai champloo headcanons in general,,

you have seriously no idea the kind of beast you have trifled with asking me this. most of these are specific and kinda complicated because im insane and put deep thought into everything abt samcham but some are just simple and silly. Lets begin

OK SO. i have deep reasoning for almost any of my headcanons because im a stickler for abiding by canon as much as i possibly can no matter how ridiculous the headcanon is. headcanons for ME personally esp with aus and stuff are like "how would this character act in this fucked up situation" rather than coming up with fanon bullshit based on absolutely nothing which just strips characters of their bare essentials which is stupid so yeah. im gonna get the big ones out of the way then get smaller as i go

-i use they/she/he for jin. my hc for their gender and sexuality is kinda hard to describe and idek if theres a label for it but i just phrase it as any gender and no gender at the same time. i think jin doesnt personally view their gender as anything specific and presents mostly neutrally and people just perceive them for what they choose to see. women like seeing jin as a handsome androgynous woman (like a bifauxnen). men like seeing jin as a beautiful man. vice versa. jin has no attachment to such things they just go with the flow and presentation doesnt mean anything profound for them personally other than like. an accessory or something???? idk. i like to see shino and jin as nblw because their story reminds me of something tragic lesbians would do. but tdlr no matter what gender you are being into jin is gay inherently -jin is a virgo, fuu is a libra, and mugen is a scorpio. common traits for virgos include loyalty, practicality, overly critical of self and others, dislikes rudeness and asking for help. they can be closed off and can be misunderstood by others due to this, but they have deep senses of humanity. traits for libras include social, gracious, desire for companionship, in a constant chase for justice and equality, a dislike for comformity and loudmouths. traits for scorpios include resourcefulness, passion, assertiveness, fearless, a dislike for dishonesty, small talk, superficiality. i originally based the specific dates (sept 4th for jin, oct 9th for fuu, and nov 3rd for mugen) based on the number of diamonds in jins mon, the number of letters in 'sunflower' for fuu (sunflower season ends in october!), and the 3 corners of the triangle on the back of mugens happi. EVERYTHING IS INTENTIONAL!!!!! -jin is actually left handed, but such a thing is forbidden for samurai, so jin had to force themself to use their right. you wouldnt know it at first glance but if you saw jins fancy kanji caligraphy using their left hand compared to their uniformed and almost robotically perfect handwriting with their right youd be able to tell what theyre truly most comfortable with -mugen and jin have to bicker about literally everything. like jin will say something and mugen sometimes will actually agree but he’ll say something purposefully contrarian and stupid just to get on jins nerves. it takes hard work to get an actual rise out of them but sometimes just the blank stare or the raised eyebrow is enough to make mugen cackle

-making clean kills is practiced for jin because the feeling of sticky blood and the stench makes them antsy. the night that they stumbled out into the dark after accidentally killing enshirou, itd been everywhere. soaking their clothes, under their nails, on their lips, in their eyelashes and hair. theyd thrown up and wailed hysterically like a wounded animal and then collapsed into an ice cold river to claw it off in panic and nearly drowned from the force of the river waves and the shock of the whole situation and then they just passed out on the bank from exhaustion and didnt wake up for 15 hours

-after the finale, mugen recovers (somehow) from his injuries after 2 weeks. however, this did not account for the chronic pain that sticks with him and worsens in the cold and rain. hed find later that jin, his perfect bird of a feather, gets debilitating migraines and back pain in the cold and rain. they can be in bed and in pain together

-jin doesnt force their meticulous and traditional routines onto mugen so theyll slink out of bed at the ass crack of dawn to do their weird praying and katas and meditation and mugen will sleep until past noon and he'll always complain about them letting him sleep the day away and theyll always just hum in response

-jin can NOT cook for shit but id like to think they work to improve as a way of remembering shino fondly. before meeting her they could brew a mean ass cup of tea and steamed rice. but that was literally it. but now they can make some simple things like clear mushroom soup and dumplings and they intend on expanding

-mugen is a closeted fine arts snob. he thought the shit was flowery and boring before but jin reads their favorite poems and epics to him and theyve furthered his education where sensei bundai left off so they do a lot of poetry writing as exercises. mugen likes haikus a lot. and he likes those weird noh theaters that jin loves. especially the vile ones with the drama and violence and cheating and death and betrayal. jin forces him to go to the romance ones too its just against his will those times

-jin will not let him hit until he has bathed. the first time he propositioned them they threw him in a huge hot bath like an animal and combed through every matted knot in his hair, scrubbed his back and behind his ears, carved the dirt out from under his yellow fingernails with a small knife, forced a wad of mint leaves in his mouth. jin plucks their eyebrows so maybe theyre kind of over the top about it but then mugen considers rinsing himself off in river water bathing so maybe theyre being perfectly reasonable

-they tell each other scar stories and random events that happened before they met each other. theres a lot of observing without words that they both do to get to know each other but they also do a lot of talking. it always happens at night when theyre both kind of tipsy on sake or wine because thats the only time jin feels loosened up enough to not clam up over memories

[tiktaalic]

sorry if this is personal, but i vibe with bisexual dean because i am bisexual. is this similar to why you vibe with gay dean? i am not trying to start anything so feel free to ignore this lol

(also about prev ask... i'm not sure who you are attracted to, i just mean if gay dean vibes with your own identity)

Again I love being an ambiguously gay man and or lesbian it’s very # affirming. But basically yeah. I linked my gay dean manifesto in n earlier ask today and it’s basically like. Well I was a very closeted gritted teeth “I’m straight. I am straight.” Teenager slash twenty something and ended up a dyke. Wjat if…. Dean did that. And not transplanting persay but interpreting certain bits of text based off my own person dumb closeted overflowing well of experiences. I have a much more nuanced old post about this but tumblr search bad. I’m not saying anything new. You COULD read dean as gay if you wanted to make the effort. And I do because I’m one a contrarian two a lesbian three love dean being miserable and it just like. Makes sense to me? Deans like I have a “wife” and a dead marriage bed and were only staying together for the kid I’m going to fuck women like a bullet train but only when I have “I am going to kill myself I want to die I am going to kill myself” on a loop in my brain / when cas is AWOL. This is very genuine and reflective of a real meaningful attraction to women btw. And im like okaaaaaay dean. Gotcha. 😉

[squireofgeekdom]

also speaking of being weird and feral about star trek i went to check the menagerie transcript for something ... and also i’ve had two memory alpha pages open for weeks... anyway i’m still feral about this episode so if you want to witness me being Very Unhinged and speculating flagrantly on the (im)probable occurrence of makeouts and sucking of dicks on alien planets and/or in starfleet storage closets and alternate timelines and somehow just a weird unnecessary incoherent rambling contrarian... here you go

so the menagerie takes place towards the start of year 3 of the enterprise’s 5 year mission, so spock’s been serving with kirk as captain for three years. 

- for reference, year 3 of spock’s service on the enterprise with pike as captain was around the events of s2 of discovery (spock started serving on the enterprise in 2254 -- the same year as the events of the cage on talos iv -- and the events of season 2 of discovery are in 2257) so kirk in year 3 is like ‘my first officer would never lie (except would he? maybe?)’ and pike in year 3 is like ‘my science officer would never murder people and your video evidence is wrong, im taking my ship on the run about it’ step. the fuck. up. kirk. 

okay okay so what was i actually checking in the transcript was this

MENDEZ: You ever met Chris Pike?

KIRK: When he was promoted to Fleet Captain.

MENDEZ: About your age. Big, handsome man, vital, active.

KIRK: I took over the Enterprise from him. Spock served with him for several years.

SPOCK: Eleven years, four months, five days.

okay, so a lot of things about this

first of all, pike’s age makes no damn sense. from his wiki:

“Pike was said to be "about [Kirk's] age" as of 2267 in "The Menagerie, Part I", which suggested a birth date around the late 2220s or early 2230s, however, it was later indicated in Star Trek: Discovery that he was already in the Academy by the early 2220s.A biography of Pike was included on the Star Trek movie app. According to that source, he was born in 2205, to Charles and Willa Pike, and spent part of his childhood living on the planet Elysium.“

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ nope. not gonna even try there. 

timelines are good when i like them and they’re funny otherwise im just not going to try

second of all, mendez’s third thing on pike is ‘handsome’ like. okay. good that we got your take on that. incredible

third, I know spock knowing how long he served under pike down to the day is a ‘spock is very precise guy with facts and figures’ but also. im emotional about it. e l e v e n  y e a r s and he knows it down to the day. 

okay okay so the actual point here is ‘You ever met Chris Pike?’ ‘When he was promoted to Fleet Captain.’ 

so kirk is basically implying that he only met Pike at his promotion ceremony. which. I think snw should happily ignore off the cuff one lines in s2 and beyond if it lets them tell fun stories, which i think it will. but I also think it’s entirely fair to say that kirk is just semi-bullshitting / giving the short instance of the most recent time he met pike, just based on the moment after

When he’s in the room with pike, mendez refers to him as captain pike when introducing the others (and spock also refers to him as captain pike) 

kirk, however, immediately refers to him as chris. which - yes, kirk refers to mendez by his first name, jose, even though he’s his superior officer, and mendez refers to him as jim, but the vibe i get from that is that they know each other prior to this, and not just meeting at a formal promotion. kirk doesn’t normally go around immediately first naming officers - and he refers to him as captain pike when talking to others, but this is a personal interaction. 

KIRK: Chris, if there's anything I can do for you. 

that’s right off the bat. I would take that as the implication that they know each other better than just having met at a promotional meeting. And that’s consistent with the rest of the episode, where he tends to be taking pike seriously and consistently asking for his input, and also using his first name when he’s talking directly to him, but usually not when he’s talking to others, which is an interesting distinction

(sidenote ‘MENDEZ: He went in bringing out all those kids that were still alive.’ I take that as pike not bing in the site of the engineering failure, but *going in* and I have some feelings about that)

what was i saying? oh yeah anyway 1) kirk indicates he’s met pike in passing 2) he actually knows pike personally and is being weird about saying that and then 3) they’ve definitely made out 

could they just have a good working friendship? yeah! of course! we love that here! but hey a) i told yall there was flagrant speculation about makeouts and b) listen i know it’s an alternate future timeline but at the end of the s1 finale, out of Several Normal Sitting Places kirk chooses to perch on the *footstool* like he’s right about to jump on pike’s lap at the first opportunity and im i just?? supposed to?? Ignore that? here?? in my unhinged ramblings about a star trek episode that contains the footage of another, horny star trek episode? absolutely not

anyway the rest of the episode

“MENDEZ: You have something to report, Miss Piper?

PIPER: Oh, yes, sir. I'm afraid our investigation turned up very little, Commodore. There is, of course, Mister Spock's years of service with Captain Pike. Indications of his extreme loyalty to this former commander.”

hey im very fine and normal about this being the thing that comes up in, yknow, a brief investigation into what’s going on. what the hell is in the files that that’s the conclusion you draw from looking at it for a few minutes. cool cool cool i hope the snw writers are continuing to have Fun with That 

(thank you, personally, from the bottom of my heart for every moment of utter Ride Or Die these two have in discovery and snw)

Anyway anyway anyway

i’ve already mentioned the absolutely unhinged part of this episode that is showing the entirety of the cage in all its horny glory 

just

you know

the cage 

the telepathic talosians, who want to breed a servile race of humans, tapping into the subconscious of chris pike to try to create illusory scenarios to get him to fuck vina and then keep fucking her forthwith. and failing but, just. yknow. extended illustration of kinks and preferences.

perfectly normal thing to show at a starfleet hearing. definitely. definitely a normal thing to spock to pull up as evidence that has to be shown. checks out. sure that happens at lots of starfleet hearings.

yes obviously they just wanted to show their unaired pilot but hey sensible doylist explanations isnt what you’re here for youre here for unhinged nonsense

so was this the talosian’s idea? yes. obviously. they live for drama. they accepted that they weren’t going to be able to rebuild their society by breeding a new servile race and just decided fuck it, we’re going to make popcorn and watch the most messy drama we can. these are the people who had spock and michael ‘pay’ for fixing spock’s brain with painful dramatic childhood memory. 

they were definitely like ‘yes let’s not show a short simplified version to illustrate the nature of our technology and that pike knows us, let’s make sure we show the horny version’

and spock was like ‘yeah okay this is a fine thing to show onscreen for me, captain pike aka the guy it happened to, my current captain kirk, an illusion of a starfleet commodore, and some poor starfleet ensign transcribing the hearing who’s having a weird fuckin day. this is a perfect delaying tactic to make sure we get to talos iv’ 

there’s no way this isn’t weird but it’s slightly -slightly- less weird if you assume that most of the people watching this have seen pike in a more *cough* intimate context than just trying to have sex with him

yeah im saying they’ve both fucked pike prior to this point and im also saying that hey, putting on a viewing of the kink tape is, yknow, a logical thing to do if you’re intending to encourage all of you fuck again when you’re on the surface of the holographic fuck planet

thank you for coming to my unhinged ted talk. welcome the talos iv fuckparty into your hearts. 

[mittensmorgul]

if d/c does become explicit text (im setting my sights on an ambiguous ending)do you think theyll wait until the last episode? or before? i Love the buildup and relationship work weve had this season and it very well could take 8 more episodes for them to reach that point but i keep thinking about the empty deal. they wouldnt pull that out in the finale, but they also wouldn't forget about it. misha said cas was euphoric when jack came back, but thats not his happiest moment? makes you think...

Hi there! First off, thanks for framing the question as “explicit text” instead of “going canon.” Because “going canon” is such a subjective term as to have lost all meaning. You stated what you’d like to see, and “explicit text” means something concrete that I can actually grasp on to for discussion. :’D

That said, what sort of Explicit Text are folks seeking? Because that’s gonna be up in the air until after the finale. Love declarations? But then what if it can also be interpreted as familial? (not to be a contrarian, but more to defend your stated expectation of an ambiguous ending, but i’ve been saying for years that they could kiss on the mouth and offer marriage proposals, and there will still be people denying it and saying it wasn’t romantic, but was all about family blah blah blah, because some people are Like That™). I just needed to put it down in writing, again, that the entire discussion is just... personally, pointlessly exhausting. 

Since you brought up the empty deal, still lingering in a shadowy corner of the narrative since 14.08, I’ll just take this opportunity to remind everyone of my personal view on that deal. I think, and have thought since Jack burned up the rest of his soul eating Michael in 14.14 (and DEFINITELY since we heard the announcement that s15 would be the series finale just two weeks after this episode aired), that it’s more an emotional demand on the narrative to leave one last “painful secret” hanging between Dean and Cas than it is an actual narrative threat to Cas of the Empty attempting to collect on it at this point.

If s15 had not been the announced final season, I think they could’ve used this as another painful emotional go-around of Dean/Cas angst, another round of grieving and loss and fighting to get back what you love, but once Chuck stepped in in 14.20 and burned down the narrative spiral, and Billie and the Shadow finally got their private conference with Jack in the Empty and have set an entirely new plan in motion, I just... don’t think the threat is real to Cas in a physical way anymore. Emotionally? ABSOLUTELY. I mean, hasn’t all the drama and tension between Dean and Cas in s15 been DIRECTLY about hiding Big Important Things from each other, and not saying the Big Important Things to each other? I mean... it’s like they’ve still got this in place because of the potential for it to cause grief and conflict between Dean and Cas, but ultimately there’s no time to explore it textually via Cas having to Pay Up, but it’s not like the characters know that, you know? So... tension it is.

With only 9 episodes remaining, and since Cas wasn’t hoovered into the empty before the midseason finale, I’m thinking that option is less and less likely as the story plays out. I just don’t think it will manifest as “Cas has a moment of happiness and is traumatically pulled into the Empty.” Even if it’s something that he, on a character level, is likely afraid of, despite Jack having returned from the Empty with a specific mission from Billie and the Shadow. Like... you’d think that Jack, having specifically known about Cas’s deal with the entity in exchange for his own soul, and now working directly with the Shadow... you’d think Jack would’ve tossed in the nullification of Cas’s deal, since Jack wound up in the Empty DESPITE Cas’s deal for him, you know? Kind of a dick move for the Shadow to cash in on Cas when it got what it wanted already...

But again, yeah, I think that’s still on the table on an Dean/Cas character level, for Cas to choose to confess about the deal to Dean as a show of trust and honesty, and Dean being upset but determined to help Cas find a way to save himself. If they do use the deal this way, let’s just say I will be very optimistic about how they could potentially use this to illustrate the depth of Dean and Cas’s relationship. So I’m pretty hopeful for it in that respect.

I’ll also say again, here, that I personally hate this sort of speculation. It’s not based on anything. I hate being asked to guess about what the end of the series will give us, what everyone’s relationship will look like in text at the end of the road. People tend to read that sort of thing and then set their expectations accordingly, and then end up angry or disappointed because of it. All I can say is... please don’t do that. Don’t set a bar of expectations based on what random people on the internet say. You’ve got the right attitude, anon, hoping for ambiguous but potentially romantic. But to everyone looking for “proof” that some specific ending is being promised, the only proof will be the final scene of episode 20. I would personally rather enjoy living in the moment, watching the end of the show unfold, than pinning some arbitrary goalpost to it all. 

[sagittariusboyfriend]

lmao oh man. ok ive been talking to a guy who from the start knew i wasnt interested in any romantic stuff - i told him up front, he told me he wasnt either. cool cool. so we met for a coffee and yeah im not attracted to him, but he is intellectually stimulating u know. like where you can have many hours of conversation because hes really communicative and blunt and honest and has a very different view on life than me etc. which i like about him. i learn so much from direct opposites. we become friends. well, flirty friends, but honestly he is the only one doing the flirting during this entire time. ive been very specific not to as to not send any mixed signals, and have had to dodge some straight-forward sexual stuff a few times. not at all because i dont want to talk sex, we have absolutely talked sex, but not with each other, and i just really dont want him to think im attracted.

however he turned out to be a pretty... petty and unchill person. at times, anyway. as i said i like talking to him and do so quite often, or did so anyway, up until recently. a while ago he started to get very contrarian, like, edgy? rude, but at first in a playful way. i dont have a problem with rude when its in a playful/comunicative way, im amused by that and i indulge in dishing it back playfully from time to time. but it was very obvious he was doing it because i mentioned i was into "rude" guys, maybe once, when we were talking about my former love interests. and by rude i definitely dont mean as in someone whos all high and mighty, self-entitled, or stuff like personal attacks, im talking about a kind of humor, or in a charming, charismatic and mischievous way. and maybe that is my fault for not specifying what that actually meant, idk. its still kind of strange completely rearranging your personality based on something i said once, you know? it all felt very contrived to me.

but anyway, he also started to get pissed off that i would see my friends but couldnt see him (he lives in a different city...) and about how i could afford to go drink beer with my friends and not drink tea at his place (he also doesnt drink and, again, lives in a different city) and im like... ok first, im not even that into you in comparison, i will always pick my friends over others, i prioritize my money (i am by NO MEANS wealthy omfg) the way i want and on what is proportional to what i get out of the experience. im not going to put out a lot of money on a train ticket to sit at home with you, a guy ive met in public ONCE, when i have all of my biggest friend groups in this city, here, where i live, and we enjoy drinking beer, watching soccer, going to the beach, hanging out in parks, having game nights and hosting and going to parties etc etc. heck yes im going to spend my last money on being with them. and i have told him this, and also that if i had more of a disposable income right now i would obviously be freer to do whatever. ive never been against going to his place to hang out and not having it involve any alcohol, thats all cool, but right now i just cant afford it, and i would prefer to hang out in public some more. but hes not into my scene, so what am i gonna do. and i dont think its strange to think like, i know my last bucks will get me two beers at the cheapest bar, but two beers are still not the price of a (one-way) train ticket. but he just... gets mad about it. in a very childish way. and i keep a very open an honest discussion with him, and most of the time he gets it. hes not dumb or socially awkward, i know hes not, but hes kind of... hard to deal with, i guess is the right word, when there is a personal relationship. in a not so charming way. where he can come off as uncertain, distristful(!) and a bit egocentrical. a classic "ive been hurt by hierarchy for most of my life so now im always on high alert and im going to be as obtuse and snarky as possible so i can feel like i have some sort of control and i WILL take up space and society WILL give me what i feel ive been cheated of my entire life also emotionally im a scared child and really really need validation but im never ever going to admit that". most of the time hes not, but when he started "demanding" to know why i couldnt hang out, or what my expenses were(!!) i immediately got turned off. having to motivate or explain your life and choices to a person youve met once and that you, sure, appreciate, but that you dont really know? no thanks. people not trusting me or my reasons makes me angry, because i put so much value in honesty, so i got angry at him (which is VERY not my character). and he kind of took a step back.

we havent spoken as intensely since then, maybe two weeks ago, and i honestly dont mind except for i like to write and communicate with a lot of people about a lot of stuff to keep myself occupied and he is now one less person to do that with i guess. but now he casually struck up a convo on my snapchat on a post "where i looked hot". i was like heh thanks! and he went on saying "i need to remind myself of how good-looking you are sometimes... kind of stupid actually"

so im like... uhuh... why would you need to remind yourself of that? already finding it a bit cringey

and he says "because i forget about you? xD"

aaaand im rolling my eyes trying not to gag. he is obviously looking for a reaction and im like wtf are we 15

then he fucking says, all philosophical like: "sometimes we need to be reminded why we start talking to/hitting on someone in the first place" and i was just like...... ok stop... what a fucking backhanded compliment. that actually was you telling me that i havent been paying attention to you that much and you want my attention.

god.

again, so turned off by this kind of personality. and i dont mean that only sexually, i mean... i dont think we can be friends, man. youre acting kinda gross. "we" as in, people of the earth, dont need to be reminded of that. that is not a universal truth. this is cringyness, a wounded ego on a high horse.

idk maybe he was trying to be nice or trying to say hes sorry because he was out of line earlier, but i genuinely dont think he thinks so himself, but... ugh. i am not into this. i am not into him. i have been doing my best not to string him along by the way, by being veeeery open about the fact that i sleep with different people, and not just guys, and that i like being single right now and that i have many issues to take care of and heal, so i hope he doesnt feel like ive been doing that to him for some reason.

im just very over this guy. i basically answered him that it sounded more like a backhanded compliment than anything else and that i know ive been bad at ~paying attention~ to him in that way lately, and that im aware of that because im just not interested in paying that kind of attention to anyone at all right now. lets see what his response is. i bet on either a douche guy "lmao ok i was just giving you a compliment chill" or a niceguy/neckbeard "wow youre not better than me". or perhaps hell be an adult about it. i feel like i do have some faith in him still.

but jesus christ the cringe

update: this was a while ago and i dont remember what he answered but it surprisingly wasnt any of the above. we stopped talking for a few months tho and now im in love with a gorgeous person that i recently became exclusive with. this guy is still someone i talk to now and then on snapchat. he semi-regularly drops compliments on my selfies and i guess thats just fine, but his snaps are very very bitter and sometimes i can tell he wants to get my attention. 🤷‍♂️

[marsixm]

edit sorry this post is both long (if the readmore fails i am truly truly sorry) & longwinded im just reflecting and thinking; (another edit: u can probably just read the tl dr and get it)

anyway allow me to spin some very personally based theory here for a mo while i put off/warm my fingers up from the cold in preparation to email my therapist

so growing up i had, i think only, het ships, but i never quite had the ones you were (narratively speaking) “supposed to” have

in most media i recall when i was a kid, there were like, 2 diff structures of character romance plot arcs in media i consumed, there was the main lead and 2 best friends model, where thered be the star of the show who had outside romantic leads and the 2 best friends (who were always a boy and a girl) would have their secondary romance, OR there were ensemble shows where there was a more clear romance set up between the main boy and main girl, then side characters whod pair off in whatever ways ended up happening. in the first, see: hannah montana, the second, see: zoey 101. obv this isnt a hard rule and there were loads of exceptions but like, lets just say i tended not to care for the romances set up for the main girls in the trio models, or quite as hard for the main boy and girl in the ensembles, and in general if there was an obvious romance between two leads i either didnt care or outright hated it

basically i never liked the ships they set up for us in straight media, as a kid (namely, a girl) i liked being that “ew pink!” “i hate valentines day” sort of contrarian, but what i remember actually disliking was the predictability of it, because i clearly still shipped characters, so it wasnt /really/ that i hated romance, per se

looking back on it i think it was probably or at least to a degree more like that i hated the hetero expectation of it- i can nit pick down to more specific examples of why i disliked the main pairings (kataang, for example, i thought was weird bc katara acted like a mother/older sister figure to aang, and i didnt feel like there was romance between them at all except where it felt shoehorned in) - maybe it was also that i thought it made more sense for a main character to be with someone they clearly already spent a lot of time with and not some random new hot boy in town (i very distinctly remember shipping miley and oliver on hannah montana, and i believe that was the first time i ever read fanfiction @ age like... 11 lol) as is often the case w like these things.

theres another level to this though, which is that i notice i tended to ship characters who were more vaguely similar to each other, like, physically (ie, similar heights, or hair colors mainly) obviously this is funny now since my main pairing is johnlock which is such a physically different ship we can construct them from basic shapes and colors and theyre still recognizable as who they are, but i have some thoughts about this- but i think there might be two interesting things about this again in retrospect

first of all, this sounds silly ik, but shipping the vaguely similar ones as a child’s way of queering heterosexuality is an interesting concept and not that difficult, like, two boys are also vaguely similar to each other in a similar way a boy and a girl with the same hair color and height might be, which is something i thought of a while ago

the other way in which this is really interesting to me now, that i think might have been more actually pertinent to myself as a trans child, is that i think i shipped the characters i did in an attempt to morph the concept of boy and girl? to find the boy counterpart to every girl??? that second one makes more sense actually. anyway, i digress

2 start off i definitely had gender feelings starting from a very young age so i think these observations ring more true than just reflections, PERHAPS

so the first thing i remember shipping, ie wanting them to be together, thinking about it an inordinate amount of time outside watching the films, even imagining them eating ice cream together in their pjs (i was NINE DHFJGghfkg) was jack sparrow & elizabeth swan from potc (basically my franchise of choice as a kid bc i never read harry potter) now this doesnt quite fit the “visually similar” thing bc actually orlando bloom looks more like kiera knightly and is prob due to them like making out in one movie, but i think this works for the “shipping as gender expression” theory, because elizabeth swan dressed up as a boy, spent most of that movie wearing boy’s clothes, etc- meanwhile jack was a wacky pirate which like hello duh i’d want to be. so i wonder if beyond the fact that they kissed and flirted, there was something to this concept of me wanting two characters to be together, meant i wanted to marry together two conceptual things happening with two characters, or absorb the cool dude and the boyish girl characters into each other to make one whole archetype for myself? i likewise shipped aang and toph (toph who, normally doesnt really have anyone to be shipped with, since she likes sokka but he has a gf) who we all know is the VERY boyish girl character, so boyish im p sure her actually being a trans dude later in life is a p decently accepted headcanon (i dont actually delve into aatla fandom though so i can only hope) 

another thing about this ship thing, is most of my ships had brown hair (like miley and oliver), just like i always have, and in certain cases the girl character would look a LOT like me (i also shipped logan and quinn on zoey 101, which to my surprise n delight actually came true later (although looking back im like... 11 yr old me is glad they made out a lot but adult me is like uhhh why were the kids on this show making out a lot? anyway thats another issue) and i def was a weirdo girl with glasses and long brown wavy hair) which sort of further fuels my feeling that this was an attempt by my brain to do 1 of 2 things, if my own involvement really was a greater motivating factor in this thing, 1. ship MYSELF with a boy (which is like def possible for my gay kinnie ass, but not quite my thesis here) or 2. morph these boy and girl counterparts by imagining them together, seeing them together, etc

for example, i realize now, when i was a kid i drew an avatar sona for myself and said sona looked an awful lot like how id imagine a katara/zuko fusion would be, and the fact that i shipped zutara (very hard lol) was what lead me down this thought path rn

i feel like even to me this concept sounds weird and far fetched but like, gem fusion made enough sense for someone to write with its clearly, usually, romantic implications and we all “get” that, so whom knows???

another thing ive noticed while writing this is for a good few of these ships you can argue the boys in them can be read gay, like jack sparrow and zuko and aang, which feels even more strongly like me trying to marry my gay boy feelings to my tomboy realities [thinking emoji]

the biggest reason i think this makes sense to me is because when i was 10 i became obsessed with the idea that this boy i was friends with and i were secretly twins separated at birth, like i was so into the concept that we looked alike, i like hoped and wished so hard for it to be true, i wished a christmas miracle would happen for fucking real and a magic door in my house would open and be his new room and itd all work out perfectly! and you might think this was a manifestation of my difficulties with my family and wishing to leave it, but in my dream world my parents were still my parents and he came to live with us- which makes me think the obsession of ME looking like this BOY was a manifestation of my gender feelings, which i think can maybe be traced to this concept of pairing a visually similar, possibly gay, brunette boy to every brunette and/or tomboyish girl

anyway. if you actually read all of this id love it if you lmk somehow (doesnt need to be a like) like this is clearly very long and strange but i hope it makes sense. i think i stop myself a lot from ever commenting on gender or theory or whatever but i am a living breathing trans person who has experienced things and i have opinions and i dont think im claiming anything destructive with this lol i think its not unusual to reflect on the way you interacted with the world as a gay/trans kid

also im obviously not saying that shipping straight things is somehow inherently queer, im not trying to retroactively claim something about straight ships, like, those two characters are still functionally straight, and i definitely also shipped probably all of them for normal shipping reasons (although, kid ones, so less “oh theres a lot of ACTUAL romantic subtext between these two” but rather “oh theyre friends and would be cute together!” (or like they kissed and i was like O: )) but im just trying to theorize about something its possible my tiny trans brain was trying to express- and who knows maybe im not the only one!

anyway i guess the TL;DR is: when i was a kid i had a lot of “unconventional” straight ships- i already observed that i eschewed the main canon pairings in kids media in what was probably my tiny baby brains rejection of hetero culture, but i also actively shipped side characters who looked like me, and also looked like each other (ie, both tall and brunette, a boy and girl counterpart of Each Other) OR characters who seemed to be a gayish boy and a tomboyish girl, and im theorizing that maybe the reason that was was my tiny trans brain wanting to gem fusion those two together because of my Gender Feelings and fuse the boy with the girl and this desire manifested in shipping therefore thinking about a lot these pairings of boy and girl counterparts

[kingjaffejoffer]

Thursday Thoughts #20

I love how much Plies hates Papa Johns Pizza. It cracks me up.

When it comes to how I live and function, I’m aggressively individualist and isolationist. I go through great lengths to not ask for or depend on anyone else for anything. There aint a nigga breathing who can say I owe them anything or that I take more than I give. That sounds good in theory but the flip side is how taxing and tiresome it is. Putting all that pressure on yourself to “be your own everything”.  But what other alternative do I have.... every time I depend on someone else they let me down. 

Occasionally, I find myself yearning for closure. There are certain words I want to hear but I know I won’t ever hear them. 

I’m not religious but some of my favorite songs are based around religion/God. 

Killer Mike - God In The Building 2, Scarface - Someday, Chance - Finish Line/Drown

Speaking of Killer Mike, I saw him on Twitter last week telling people to support Umar Johnson and it rubbed me the wrong way. Still my favorite rapper but I don’t like some of his moves lately. 

Pussy eating videos are so much less entertaining to watch than dick sucking videos. The niggas head be all in the way and you can barely see shit. 

I guess im the only black person that dont care about characters saying the word Nigger in quentin tarantino movies. People really be pressed over it. 

The marketer inside of me looks at how some sex workers are running their business online and im just thinking “NO NO NO WROOOOONG” “are you deliberately just not trying to make any money”.  I don’t have time for it but I’d love to guide someone’s career of smutting online, just because I know I’d be good at it. 

Part of having a ghetto ass family means that random members of your family will have their mail sent to your house without asking you. Niggas who have never stepped one foot in my house are getting mail here. How you even get my address nigga?

I really dislike our current "We need content, so take a contrarian/pointless take on [insert pop culture event] to spur equally pointless discourse" publishing culture

I’ve been spending recklessly the last 4 weeks.... time to dial it back. 

I’m a 2 minute titty sucker. I’ve heard some women talk about how so and so sucked on their titties forever and how good it was..... I aint got the time for it. I give em a coupla minutes then im on to the next. 

I’m gonna go to therapy soon. I’ve went back and forth with the decision to go to therapy because I’ve questioned if I really need it. I’m not depressed, im not sad, I feel perfectly fine. I’m happy with where I am in life.. But at the same time I feel like I’m not the best version of myself that I could possibly be. I want to get more out of myself. And I do feel like I self sabotage sometimes.... So I’m going to try it out and see if its helpful in any way. 

I reject the new Jumanji 

[artcanary]

1-50

oh my god dude 

im gonna put this under a cut bc this is a lot. this is a ride, have fun i guess

1. Your first OC ever?god. its got to be Super Kitty. when i was like … an incredibly small child I used to draw comic strips about this feline caped crusader, who was friends with everyone in the city, and the comics always involved him stopping an evil banana man from stealing money from the local bank. He was paid with donuts for his service to the city. i still remember how to draw him. 

2. Do you have a personal favourite among your OCs?i’d get arrested if I didn’t answer this with Bronze, probably… but really, they’re very important to me

3. Have you ever adopted a character or gotten a character from someone else?man, i cant remember! i really dont think i have… P:

4. A character you rarely talk about?there’s loads of characters ive never even posted a single picture of on tumblr, i wouldnt even know where to start asdf

5. If you could make only one of your OCs popular/known, who would it be? bronze is the easy answer, but… i guess that could also go to Servant or Westrin. Servant has a comic project in the works that basically stars him, sort of a series of one-shots about the things he’s experienced, i feel like that would be a good thing to take off and run with. Westrin’s just fun as hell, i love the guy.

6. Two OCs of yours that look alike despite not being related?real talk now… there’s at least five different characters that i refer to as a whole as “bronze-tangential”, who started out as, “what would bronze be like if they were in this world?” and then becoming their own thing within said world because i just get stupid attached 

its an epidemic

7. Are your OCs part of any story or stories?nearly all of them, actually. that’s the main reason i make characters, after all! too many to really go into specifics here, again P: 

8. Do you RP as any of your OCs? If you do, introduce one of your RP OCs here!not often, but i think Bronze and Westrin are the most common ones. unless playing a character in dnd, or running an npc in dnd counts… then a whole lot more hahaha

9. Would you ever be willing to give any of your OCs to someone else?it depends on the circumstances. i don’t really like the idea, though. 

10. Introduce an OC with a complicated design? Westrin’s old getup is a pain to draw, and there was one other design i did that I cant find anywhere… whichever way, i dont often tend to draw super complicated things often 

a couple fakemon ive designed though… heheh those can get pretty finicky

11. Is there any OC of yours you could describe as a “sunshine”? hmmmmmmmm my immediate thought was Eric Silverdale from a comic i was working on a few years ago. hes a darling, i want him to be my friend irl

12. Name an OC that isn’t yours but who you like a lothow could you do this to me i love each and every one of all my friends ocs GOD the first one who comes to mind is @d20-official‘s Smith, whos Bronze’s friend… everyone in that DND party actually

13. Do you have any troublemaker OCs? Rated on a scale from “harmless” to “honestly somewhat frightening”: -Baromet (charming and quite friendly but definitely a kleptomaniac),-Westrin (demigod of bards and travelers), -XEN09 (a nonsense hacker), -Conny (needlessly contrarian and dumb as HELL), -Enza Colie (long fucking story but hes a good-for-nothing), -Hemlocke (mad scientist, chaotic evil), -Iris (AI and hacker, VERY bad), -The Terminus (glitch-in-the-matrix demon, chaotic evil), -and Sydd (the Queen of the Faeries, hopefully the danger there needs no explaining :’D)

14. Introduce an OC with a tragic backstory Mmm… there’s a few of them, most obviously Lent (whose background I did a short comic about). Basically his entire town got eaten by ghosts and turned into zombies, he only barely survived with a sliver of his soul left. 

15. Do you like to talk about your OCs with other people?yes, i often discuss storylines and such with friends

16. Which one of your OCs would be the best at biology (school subject)? Probably Bronze’s dad! I don’t talk about him much, but his name’s Devon Reed, and he was a biotech developer specialising in android design. 

I often describe him as being something of a reverse Arthur Weasley - a very fatherly scientist fascinated to the moon and back with the concept of magic. 

17. Any OC OTPs? having trouble thinking of a lot of them right now, but there’s Eric + Lent & Naiadine + Tailias from Emerald Sigil, Avken + Baromet from my space campaign world, Sydd + Wyvv from my unnamed campaign world, and I’ve been considering Westrin + Servant as an interesting dynamic in Servant’s story

18. Any OC crackships? My character Bismuth and @autistictimeknight​‘s oc Eros. Theyre so fucking in love, I love it. Its been awhile but I do still think about them sometimes.

As I recall, Eros is an empath, she can read other people’s emotions. But Bismuth is a robot, and Eros can’t read her. Because of this Eros can let go of her fear of unintentionally manipulating the emotions of her date, which would hold her back from most other relationships. 

19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why)Hey, meet Bronze! I definitely do not talk about them every five minutes, why would you say that. 

Bronze was with me through two of the hardest years of my life so far, and being a DND character they grew with me, both as a fighter and as a person. They were non-binary before I started using those pronouns, they were the first character or person or anything who I fought someone about using the right pronouns for, they make a great icebreaker for if I want to see how someone reacts to non-binary pronouns … 

One funny anecdote about Bronze is that when I first made them, their “gimmick” was that they would sometimes glitch out and mess up their speech, mostly because I wanted an excuse not to engage in the roleplaying (which I was very bad at). The interesting thing is that as I got better at interacting with the group, we both grew out of needing it very quickly. 

I’m very proud of Bronze. 

20. Do any of your OCs sing? If they sing, care to share more details (headcanon voice, what kind of songs they like etc)?Westrin is a bard! His singing voice sounds like Bill Wurtz and these are his theme songs.

21. Your most artistic OCProbably Westrin again, he writes a lot of songs… and Hallux is a game designer?

22. Is there any OC of yours people tend to mischaracterize? If yes, how? I honestly dont know… no-one talks to me about them, haha! 

people use all manner of pronouns for bronze, though. 

23. Introduce OC that has changed from your first idea concerning what the character would be like?I’m gonna go with Enza for this one. Enza Colie was originally written entirely because I wanted an antagonist for a short starring his sister, Jane Colie. But the more I fleshed out his reasonings for acting how he did and explored his character, the more I realised he’d make an even more interesting character if allowed to have a redemption arc, too. 

I just want to state for the record that I was very reluctant to the idea, and he basically dragged his way out of the villain pit entirely of his own accord. I am dubiously proud of him, and also a bit scared. 

24. If you could meet one OC of yours, who would it be and why?Probably either Eric (Big Man, Best Friend), Crocus (Mother figure), Reed (Father Figure), Westrin (hed just make a good friend u kno??), or Bismuth (she makes good conversation!)

25. The OC that resembles you the most (same hobby, height, shared like/dislike for something etc?)probably the homestuck fan-troll Hallux, but that’s mostly because they were based on a troll-sona I made awhile ago. They’re a hope/prospit game designer who is small and full of rage and love

oh, and there’s dave! dave’s a superhero speedster, existing in a modern-day superhero version of seattle. theyre idiot, just like me,

26. Have you ever had to change your OC’s design or something else about them against your will? this is an interesting one… i don’t think ive ever had something Bad in a design ive done called to my attention by someone, but I did create my character Servant at around the same time I was first really expanding the diversity of my casts. (since i don’t talk about him often, a little context: he’s a magic spirit creature bound to human form to serve the royal family of the land and follow their orders.) 

somehow, younger-and-more-stupid me managed to have the revelation that making this “eternal slave” character literally anything other than a white man, especially as a white author, would be Pretty Not Good. im … thats really, really not something i should pat myself on the back for, but i do consider it one of the biggest bullets dodged in my artistic career so far that i realised that not all representation is good representation so quickly, before i could make that incredibly, incurably stupid mistake. 

after that, trying to make sure my characters and their presentations don’t harm anyone pretty much has become a paranoia. i don’t seem to have stepped on any toes yet, but when it inevitably happens, please let me know - i didnt know, and i want to fix it! 

27. Any OCs that were inspired by a certain song? None that I can think of, actually! I don’t really do that often. 

28. Your most dangerous OC? god damn it i have no idea!!! is it the terminus? glitch in the matrix god of chaos motherfucker?is it sarle? terrifying calculating scientist with the power of the soul at her fingertips ??? is it ares??? is it athena????? is it petra?????? the gatekeeper???? 

… actually, the gatekeeper might be it, if “dangerous” just refers to “the amount of raw power it can wield”. the Gatekeeper is a titanic entity that exists in interdimensional multiverse space, and its implied to have the ability to create and destroy entire universe bubbles at will. for what cosmic purpose, no-one knows. 

at a more personal scale, though, literally all of the aforementioned characters are pretty bad to run into too. 

29. Which one of your OCs would go investigate an abandoned house at night without telling anyone they’re going?god. Mina or Tawn. Tawn is the Indiana Jonesy type and probably dumb enough, but also competent enough not to get into too much trouble there. Mina would probably drag her friends along. 

30. Which one of your OCs would most likely have a secret stuffed animal collection? XEN09. No-one knows, because no-one knows xir personal identity. Xe absolutely does, though. It’s less of a secret if you know xir in person, but good luck finding out about it otherwise. 

31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their tumblr blog would be like (what they reblog, layout, anything really)dave just reblogs memes all the time tbh. they like to keep tabs on the ridiculous superhero news going on, and they show human jokes and cat videos to their alien gf. they dont really post or add to posts, but they talk in tags a lot. 

32. Which one of your OCs would be the most suitable horror game protagonist and why? i want to say tawn because i literally just realised ive been imagining their voice as sounding like luigi this entire fucking time and i never realised until this exact instant

33. Your shyest OC?probably baromet. they prefer to keep to themself in their hideout, with their collection of shiny things. they don’t really enjoy trying to communicate much, mostly because they expect to get yelled at. 

34. Do you have any twin characters?Yes! At least two sets; 

- Crocus and Sarle. (x) (x) They don’t exactly have a very well-developed relationship, but they are both quite important to the plot of my campaign world, and they are both very interesting. Crocus is a motherly figure who just exudes friendliness, while Sarle is .. very much not that, a researcher studying very gruesome things and pushing the boundaries of reality. 

- Jane and Enza Colie. I haven’t talked a whole lot about either of them here, but I’d rather leave their story to do the talking whenever I get around to it. Essentially, the both of them were intended to do the dirty work for their crime boss family, but Jane ditched to study medicine. Most of the conflict between the two of them comes out of Enza not understanding why she made the choice she did, and coming to understand how he’s been manipulated. 

35. Any sibling characters? I can’t really think of any off the top of my head, I should … I should really work on that. 

I can talk about Westrin, though. Westrin (a demigod of many things, but namely bards, travel, travelers, and people who are lost) often becomes close friends with mortals, sometimes practically adopting them. These people who consider him family, and people who have received his blessing, are able to use his surname, Brilanta, as their own if they choose. So I guess all of the Brilantas are siblings, at least in spirit. 

Oh, and XEN09 has like, seven siblings. Xe is the second-oldest, and least remarkable. 

36. Do you have OC pairs where the other part belongs to someone else (siblings, lovers, friends etc)? I already talked about Eros and Bismuth up there a ways in question 18, but I’ll talk about another relationship here. @autistictimeknight​‘s character, Nova the Alchemist, is mentor and adopted parental figure to my character Munna. Munna … Munna isn’t a very good apprentice. She tries very hard. 

37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human That’s most of them, I’m not quite sure what to say here. Bronze is an android? Bronze again? Westrin? All the aliens ?? 

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer? man. uh. westrin or jean. or perhaps valencia. 

39. Introduce any character you want ??? uhhhHHHhhHHH Lord Brillium is the reigning deity of the Cloud Kingdoms in the other campaign setting I’m working on. They represent light and the quest for knowledge, and spend most of their days in the Cathedral Observatory watching the stars. 

40. Any fond memories linked to your characters? Feel free to share!one time bronze flew a hover-bike through the stained glass window in a cathedral blaring all star by smash mouth on their iguana

also one time bronze rickrolled a rakshasa demon and then pulled updog on it like, two minutes later

another time bronze scared off an entire army by pretending to be an automated security system 

41. Has anyone drawn fanart of your OCs? If yes, maybe show a picture or two here (remember sources & permissions!)ive got a whole little folder on here from all you blessed people !!!! right now ive got a drawing quinn did of one o fmy characters as my lockscreen

but i think the one i’ll really never ever get over is this piece of Jane, by @rabendraws​ / @owoltron​: 

(i bet you thought i forgot about this, dude. dude. think again.) 

42. Which one of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek gods? this is kind of a weird question, m, I feel like Bismuth would find learning about the mythos utterly fascinating, as would Tawn. 

43. Do you have any certain type when you create your OCs? Do you tend to favour some certain traits or looks? It’s time to confesshaha. uh. i might. 

aside from the entire “bronze-tangential characters” thing i mentioned awhile back, I tend to really like designing characters with hair color lighter than their skin color. it just looks so cool man. i love drawing freckles but dont put them on enough characters. i like really curly hair, but also really long and flowy hair. i like drawing triangular body types, and pointy/prominent noses. 

44. Something you like about your OCs in generaluhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this is a really vague question. m. m. 

45. A character you no longer use?there’s old versions of characters, but a lot of my older ones have been somehow repurposed. I guess there’s Turien, my first-ever DND character, who’s just kind of sitting dead now. Haven’t really done anything with him other than a pretty recent tangential character. 

46. Has anyone ever told you that you treat your OCs badly?Not that I can think of.

47. Has anyone ever (friendly) claimed any of your OCs as their child? Im certain it’s happened, but I can’t remember any specific instances. 

48. OC who is a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pureSpring. spring knows nothing of th dangers of the world who is letting them into fights someon eneeds to stop this

(spring roll, hehe.) 

49. Which one of your OCs would most likely enjoy memesim not sure what this question is asking since many of my ocs actively enjoy memes including but not limited to westrin, dave, bronze, xen09, iris, and doctor archersen

50. Give me the good ol’ OC talk here. Talk about anything you wanti think. i think im going to pass on this one. i gave you the good old oc talk. your damn turn, yall: 

if you have any questions about any of these guys feel free to shoot one at me!

thats all from me im tired and its one am. techskylander you absolute madman 

[orindasfinest]

Critical Theory is a Disease and I Ain’t Got the Cure (versus the People on GWH)

Hello,

Interesting that a semi-serious post could arise on this platform at such a time of internal strife. I considered posting on Medium instead but then I heard something about George Soros and got scared.

Anyway, engaging in good faith with just about anything produced by Barstool is a fucking fool’s errand. I’m talking sending your court jester to go pick up a carton of eggs - level fool’s errand. He’s just gonna come back with yet another box of decorative scarves!

But as wave after wave of disaffected former college students combine their half-baked critical reasoning skills and desperate need for online attention into “hot takes” that really just serve as Rorschach tests for the mistakes your parents made when they were raising you, it was an inevitability that one of these Bad Posts would come into my orbit and irritate me enough so that I’d make my own dumb emission and accidentally invalidate the sentient ziploc bag filled with swamp ass that fell zip-seal first onto their keyboard enough times to churn out a thing like this.

What sort of thing am I talking about? Hah, well, a thing like this thing right here: https://www.barstoolsports.com/barstoolu/the-ponytail-harvard-guy-from-good-will-hunting-won-that-argument (go ahead, I already gave them my pageview, and you won’t even recognize your elementary school if you go back because the passage of time doesn’t give a fuck about your existence). I don’t mean to spoil your dessert, but: it’s a bad take! And as stated, debating this it at face value, especially when it comes from a company like Barstool Sample (really sure no-one has done that before), is just setting yourself up for a raft of meaninglessness.

Unfortunately, I can’t let this Bad Post slide. It features the sort of willful textual misreading that’s allowed narratives such as “Ryan Gosling is a cornerback in Remember the Titans” to become embedded in the cultural consciousness. So I’m gonna embrace Francis’ debate or whatever and tell you why this cute little bit of contrarianism is actually a sign of fourth-degree brain rot. And, as always, it’ll likely be very mean, as I am a big baby.

-OF

Title: The Ponytail Harvard Guy From Good Will Hunting Won That Argument

Already off to a bad start. I think much of Francis’ confusion here -- aside from the general problem he faces of not knowing his ass from his elbow -- is that he thinks Will and Clark (yeah, the guy has a name, which you would know if you watched the scene, but wouldn’t know if you just so happened to be the physical embodiment of an old-looking anthill in the outfield of a shitty little league diamond) are having some kind of university roundtable on the evolution of the market economy in the Southern colonies. They’re not. Clark is forced by Will to pivot from a broad display of learned knowledge into a broader ideological discussion about methods of information acquisition and the general value of academia. That is another thing you would notice if your head wasn’t filled with dyslexic cat food.

Interregnum: [EMPTY BARSTOOL PLOT POINT SYNOPSIS DONE WITH ROSEART CRAYONS]

Point one: Will only jumps in because he’s trying to impress a girl

Aaaaaand WELCOME to another broadcast of Major League Projecting! Francis, m’boy over here, strides to the plate, currently batting a crisp .482 at unwittingly copping to the fact that he sees all conversations held in the vicinity of a woman as an opportunity to weasel into her pants. He eagerly points to Will’s “thirsty smile” at Skylar’s -- rebuke of a universally acknowledged douchebag? -- and that’ll be another trip around the missing-the-point bases by our mainest man!!!

Dear god. Yes, Will displays his relentless horniness by not introducing himself to Skylar in any way, barely looking at her during the confrontation, and then capitalizing on his victory by ignoring Skylar for the rest of the night to the point where she has to come over and chastise him for not following up on his finishing maneuver. IT’S SO CLEAR WHY DIDN’T I SEE IT BEFORE, ALL I HAD TO DO WAS REPLACE MY EYEBALLS WITH PUDDLES OF JIZZ

In fact, the only thing that may be more off-base is Will’s claim that Clark’s out to impress some girls. The familiarity and exasperation with which Skylar says Clark’s name indicates that they have a long history with nary a positive note. Clark is not going to “win over” Skylar by bodyslamming a wayward townie. This is a classic macho pissing contest. Chuckie is trespassing in Clark’s yard by entering a college bar and passing himself off as a student, and it’s an insult to Clark’s tenuous sense of identity that such a thing would occur without some sort of consequence.

Will’s fierce sense of loyalty is what drives him to enter the discussion and bail out his overmatched friend. To be fair, though, it’s easy to miss that character trait which is absolutely integral to understanding Will as a person provided that during every other scene in the movie you shove forks in your ears and then shove that new apparatus into the nearest electrical socket.

Point two: Will also plagiarizes the works of authors.

The dictionary defines plagiarism as (emphasis mine) “an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author's work as one's own, as by not crediting the original author.” The dictionary goes on to say, “Oh, Francis? Don’t even fucking talk to me about that dude. He tried to tell me that rigatoni was a fleshlight.”

Plagiarism involves passing off someone else’s work as your own, which is why any researched assignment ever requires a works cited page so your professor can see whose ideas you decided sounded the smartest when you were slamming 99c shooters and yelling through your bedroom door that you’d be out for the pregame in a minute. If you’d like to learn the difference between plagiarism and not plagiarism, I’d recommend examining an instance where one person pretends that they’re having original thoughts but are really just wholesale quoting more reputable sources, while another spouts direct lines from textbooks and then immediately attributes the author, book title, and page number. If only there was a way to witness such a dichotomy...

Point three: Will threatens to fight him.

Here’s where that pesky misunderstanding from earlier really rears its ugly, looking-surprisingly-like-Francis head: we are not witnessing an intellectual debate, no matter how much Francis would like to pretend we are and would also like to pretend that his “friends” don’t just feel bad for him every time they let him pick where they’re going to go out to dinner.

The only statement made to the given topic is made by Clark in his opening salvo. After that, Will and Clark are not having an honest discussion about the economic modalities of the colonies, but are having an argument about the value of academia first through the surrogates of researched theories and then outright through class-and-value-based accusations. There is no point to be won in this scenario. Clark places value in his education because he knows it will lead him directly to a financially stable future; Will ridicules spending an exorbitant amount of money on something he can learn for free because he was raised in a blue-collar environment and has been conditioned to disdain such frivolous expenditures. Neither is going to leave this confrontation with their viewpoint changed in any appreciable fashion. Will understands this, and digs in further to his rough-and-tumble roots by inviting Clark to take it outside. He’s made his point and is now transitioning to the earlier issue: Clark was fucking with Chuckie, and if that’s going to continue, then there’s going to be a problem. Wow, I just went like a whole paragraph without taking a cruel potshot! Sheesh, that was maybe five or six sentences. Shame that Francis can only read two per day or his itsy witsy peanut brainy brain has to power down completely and he dookies right into his pants in feeaaarrrrr

In conclusion, I am everything I hate, and perhaps Francis and I share the same central consciousness, leading me to shame him for his traumatically bad comprehension skills in the hopes that he decides to stop watching movies while upside down and spooning Frosted Mini-Wheats up his nose until they blow out with such force that they crack whatever screen is displaying the motion picture. Will did not lose the argument, because there was never going to be a winner in the broader scope of the debate that was actually taking place; he did not enter the arena to impress a girl, but to help his friend, who was in danger or being embarrassed, being thrown out after caving in Clark’s face, or both; he did not plagiarize, because he cited his sources while only using them as a cudgel to belabor Clark’s phony intellectualism; and he lost no credibility for issuing the challenge to fight at the end, because he demonstrated his intelligence and then displayed the nature of his violent upbringing, which makes him uhhhh a three-dimensional character that can’t be qualified by reductive maxims like “That’s thuggish behavior” ya fucking dafty.

By all means, though, go the fuck in on the “How Do You Like Them Apples” scene because that has been and will always be one of the cringiest sequences committed to film. It’s right up there with a clip of Francis going around the office holding a red Swingline he bought off Amazon using a Kinja Deals code and asking people if they’ve seen his stapler while doing a reprehensible Milton Waddams impression.

Anyway im gonna go jerk off for twelve days or whatever’s left lol whole foods is putting RFID chips in your celery because they know you won’t even notice with all the $35 hummus you’re slathering on that bitch

[adambstingus]

Whats Worse For Your BrainDrinking or Playing Football?

Our correspondent drinks for a living. Is he putting his brain at more risk of damage than a football player?

I woke up Sunday morning with a throbbing headache. Id spent the previous night heavily sampling a selection of rare whiskeys with some friends.

That may have been fun, but now here I was, still in bed at 11 a.m., barely able to keep my eyes open, hardly able to think, certainly not wanting to turn on the days NFL games.

A parent cant consent to giving their kids a cigarette or a beerwhy can they consent to him playing tackle football?

And I thought this cannot be good for my brain.

The effect of NFL action on the brain is one of the hottest topics of the moment, with the movie Concussion opening this Christmas weekend.

In that film Will Smith portrays Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who first brought to light the appearance of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in American football players.

Thanks partially to Omalus work, nowadays when we watch the constant brutality on the football field, when we see players crashing their heads into each other down after down, when we notice aging players getting dementia (and worse) once retired, many of us have even started to wonder, Can I ethically enjoy football any more? Myself included.

At the same time, though, I often put my own brain in serious jeopardy too.

Yes, I am a professional drinks writer. Mid-day cocktail tastings. Evening scotch samplings. Beer festivals on the weekends. Trips to breweries, distilleries, and wineries. You should see how much free liquor gets delivered to my house on a daily basis!

People often tell me I must have one of the best jobs around. But they arent the ones that have had to drink literally every single day for hell, who knows how many days in a row it has been now. They arent the ones that wake up many mornings with a hangoverjust another occupational hazard.

So, with all this in mind, I decided to ask some football concussion doctors about the effects of my equally dangerous profession on my own precious brain. I wondered, how bad is my drinking compared to playing football?

Was a single whiskey shot equal to a QB sack?

A night of heavy beer drinking equal to a half of football?

Did my brutal Sunday morning hangover feel worse than it did on a Monday morning for a running back?

Neither Dr. Omalunor Will Smithreturned any of my calls, but luckily I had other accomplished doctors willing to answer my questions.

Dr. William Barr is the Director of Neuropsychology at NYU Langone Medical Center.

He is a clinical expert on epilepsy, forensic neuropsychology, and sports concussions. He has testified in numerous cases involving forensics and in civil cases involving MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury). More importantly, from the mid-1990s until 2004, Barr was a neuropsychological medical consultant for the NFLs New York Jets.

He quickly understood the somewhat silly concept behind this piece, and even why a professional drinks writer had reason to be concerned.

I used to think about boxers, he told me, noting that this was before all this concussion talk was in the mainstream. People used to say boxing was the only way for a kid to get out of the ghettobut he had to put his brain at risk. How terrible it was that society forced them to do this! But I also thought about the typical Mad Men-era businessmen. They had to do the three-martini lunches for their workthey too were pickling their brains just to get ahead!

Barr is a bit of a firebrand when it comes to talk about concussions. In fact, he believes concussionswhether from football or otherwiseactually have a fairly minimal impact on future cognitive functioning.

When you look at the studies and what happens three months after a concussiondo you know what meta-analysis is? he asks. I dont. He explains that, In science, rather than making conclusions based on a single study, you look at all the literature. Put it into a similar metric. Whats the overall effect based on many, many studies? So now, maybe, youre looking at 300 people over 10 studies. What it shows is the overall effect (on your brain) of a concussion after 30 days is lower than the effects of intoxication.

The study Barr is citing is Grant L. Iversons 2005 paper Outcome from Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.

Iverson didnt study alcohols traumatic effect on the brain per se, but he did find chronic cannabis use to be worse on overall neuropsychological functioning than an MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury) was on a person just one to three months after the injury had occurred. Likewise, he found chronic cannabis use to be slightly worse on future memory functioning than an MTBI.

For Barr, that was enough for him to deduce for me that alcohol abuse would be probably likewise worse on the brain than head injuries from playing football. Uh oh.

Barr isnt completely speculating, as he has co-authored his own significant studies. With a team of other doctors and PhDs he helped pen Cumulative Effects Associated with Recurrent Concussion in Collegiate Football Players and Acute Effects and Recovery Time Following Concussion in Collegiate Football Players.

Ive studied athletes more than the general population. With them we can get information before their injury and then after, he tells me. And what that shows is that 95 percent (of athletes who have a concussion) recover back to normal in 7 days or less.

He tests alcoholics brains in a similar manner to how he tests concussed athletes. He interviews them and then gives them a series of tests, ones mainly based on memory functioning (they have to remember a certain story).

So I might notice, this person has problems with attention and remembering things. In the past theyve been a 10-drinks-a-day alcoholic and now it looks like theyve pickled brain.

Though well-honored and quite thorough, you can probably see how Barr is considered a bit of a contrarian for his thinking on concussions.

Barr was even dismissed from the NFLs MTBI committee in 2004 by then-chairman Elliot Pellman, another former New York Jets team physician who is not without his own controversy.

I wanted another doctors opinion on my potentially pickling brain. Dr. James Paci, a professor and orthopedic surgeon, specializes in sports medicine at Stony Brook University Medicine. Hes also the football teams doctor.

First, he clarified that he was neither a neurologist nor brain physician. Despite that, he was trained to deal with concussions on a day-in, day-out basis in his own role as team doctor.

My expertise is how do we treat these athletes, Paci told me. What do we look out for? How do we prevent long term consequences?

However, unlike Barr, Paci somewhat struggled with the comparisons I was hoping he would draw for me.

Certainly there is some connection between alcoholism and Alzheimers, brain diseases. Drawing a parallel between drinking and football though? I dont think anyone has made that correlation. Though he does note, The rock n roll lifestyle and athlete lifestyle certainly do have some comparisons.

A man like Paci believes that both football and drinking are inherently dangerous, but thats OK, so long as we acknowledge the risk involved in both activities and, thus, let potential participants make informed decisions.

Ive had concussions before, Paci tells me. Anyone who plays sports has had one before.

Paci is about my age, having played football at Yale University in the late-1990s, while the slightly-older Barr played during a time head injuries werent treated all that seriously.

Back in the day when I played high school football, Barr tells me, you pretty much had to be in a coma before they did anything about it.

So both men had played football at a fairly high level, had head injuries on the field, and were still able to become prestigious doctors. But did they drink?

Not routinely, but I do, Paci tells me. Most doctors do. There are certainly benefits to some alcohol.

(Ive been saying that for years.)

I do, Barr also tells me. Everything in moderation. A little bit of alcohol can be good for the heart. Theres good data for the red wines. Some scotch in moderation, a finger a day maybe.

So you guys drink, but now knowing what you know, would you let your own children play football?

On that point Paci is fairly strict, believing young children simply dont have the body control and should stick to flag football or two-hand touch.

A parent cant consent to giving their kids a cigarette or a beerwhy can they consent to him playing tackle football?

Barr has a six-month grandson he absolutely wants to play football some day.

Should that boy play football or not? My take, from what we know right now: the chance of getting dementia, the prospect of a 13-year-old boy who starts football getting dementia one day is, lets say, 1 to 2 percent. Im being liberal, Barr tells me. But lets say that boy is not allowed to play football. Instead junior becomes fat and gets diabetes and high blood pressure. Now he has a 30 percent chance of dying of dementia.

So to Barr inactivity in this country is a much bigger problem than helmet-to-helmet contactinteresting, because drinkers on the whole are statistically much more active than non-drinkers according to the Center for Advancing Health.

That papers lead author, Michael French, a professor of health economics at the University of Miami, found that alcohol users not only exercised more than teetotalers, but the differential actually increased with more drinking.

I dont fully understand the relationship, Barr admits, though he has a speculation. Maybe people feel like after visiting the gym, they deserve to do something bad.

Its true enough anecdotally for myself, though Im a bit more of the reverse. I do something bad the night before, then feel the need to go jog five miles the next day.

I ask Barr point-blank, It seems like you ultimately think its safer to play in the NFL than to drink heavily?

Yeah, you could say that, he confirms.

This did not sound good for me. But what exactly did heavily mean? This week alone I sampled new whiskeys on Monday, drank wine with dinner on Tuesday, visited a hot new cocktail bar on Wednesday, went to a brewery opening on Thursday, and hit happy hour with friends on Friday.

Luckily, Barr relieved some of my concerns about any sort of future with dementia, simply telling me, You would not be on the phone with me, or even able to write this story, if you were drinking too much.

Regardless, I think Ill start trying to be more cognizant of my intake. As Paci ultimately summed up for me: The brain is an amazing thing. Your head hurts when you bang it. So you try not to bang your head again. With a hangover, theres obviously something similar going on there.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/28/whats-worse-for-your-braindrinking-or-playing-football/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/165813833432

[samanthasroberts]

Whats Worse For Your BrainDrinking or Playing Football?

Our correspondent drinks for a living. Is he putting his brain at more risk of damage than a football player?

I woke up Sunday morning with a throbbing headache. Id spent the previous night heavily sampling a selection of rare whiskeys with some friends.

That may have been fun, but now here I was, still in bed at 11 a.m., barely able to keep my eyes open, hardly able to think, certainly not wanting to turn on the days NFL games.

A parent cant consent to giving their kids a cigarette or a beerwhy can they consent to him playing tackle football?

And I thought this cannot be good for my brain.

The effect of NFL action on the brain is one of the hottest topics of the moment, with the movie Concussion opening this Christmas weekend.

In that film Will Smith portrays Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who first brought to light the appearance of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in American football players.

Thanks partially to Omalus work, nowadays when we watch the constant brutality on the football field, when we see players crashing their heads into each other down after down, when we notice aging players getting dementia (and worse) once retired, many of us have even started to wonder, Can I ethically enjoy football any more? Myself included.

At the same time, though, I often put my own brain in serious jeopardy too.

Yes, I am a professional drinks writer. Mid-day cocktail tastings. Evening scotch samplings. Beer festivals on the weekends. Trips to breweries, distilleries, and wineries. You should see how much free liquor gets delivered to my house on a daily basis!

People often tell me I must have one of the best jobs around. But they arent the ones that have had to drink literally every single day for hell, who knows how many days in a row it has been now. They arent the ones that wake up many mornings with a hangoverjust another occupational hazard.

So, with all this in mind, I decided to ask some football concussion doctors about the effects of my equally dangerous profession on my own precious brain. I wondered, how bad is my drinking compared to playing football?

Was a single whiskey shot equal to a QB sack?

A night of heavy beer drinking equal to a half of football?

Did my brutal Sunday morning hangover feel worse than it did on a Monday morning for a running back?

Neither Dr. Omalunor Will Smithreturned any of my calls, but luckily I had other accomplished doctors willing to answer my questions.

Dr. William Barr is the Director of Neuropsychology at NYU Langone Medical Center.

He is a clinical expert on epilepsy, forensic neuropsychology, and sports concussions. He has testified in numerous cases involving forensics and in civil cases involving MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury). More importantly, from the mid-1990s until 2004, Barr was a neuropsychological medical consultant for the NFLs New York Jets.

He quickly understood the somewhat silly concept behind this piece, and even why a professional drinks writer had reason to be concerned.

I used to think about boxers, he told me, noting that this was before all this concussion talk was in the mainstream. People used to say boxing was the only way for a kid to get out of the ghettobut he had to put his brain at risk. How terrible it was that society forced them to do this! But I also thought about the typical Mad Men-era businessmen. They had to do the three-martini lunches for their workthey too were pickling their brains just to get ahead!

Barr is a bit of a firebrand when it comes to talk about concussions. In fact, he believes concussionswhether from football or otherwiseactually have a fairly minimal impact on future cognitive functioning.

When you look at the studies and what happens three months after a concussiondo you know what meta-analysis is? he asks. I dont. He explains that, In science, rather than making conclusions based on a single study, you look at all the literature. Put it into a similar metric. Whats the overall effect based on many, many studies? So now, maybe, youre looking at 300 people over 10 studies. What it shows is the overall effect (on your brain) of a concussion after 30 days is lower than the effects of intoxication.

The study Barr is citing is Grant L. Iversons 2005 paper Outcome from Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.

Iverson didnt study alcohols traumatic effect on the brain per se, but he did find chronic cannabis use to be worse on overall neuropsychological functioning than an MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury) was on a person just one to three months after the injury had occurred. Likewise, he found chronic cannabis use to be slightly worse on future memory functioning than an MTBI.

For Barr, that was enough for him to deduce for me that alcohol abuse would be probably likewise worse on the brain than head injuries from playing football. Uh oh.

Barr isnt completely speculating, as he has co-authored his own significant studies. With a team of other doctors and PhDs he helped pen Cumulative Effects Associated with Recurrent Concussion in Collegiate Football Players and Acute Effects and Recovery Time Following Concussion in Collegiate Football Players.

Ive studied athletes more than the general population. With them we can get information before their injury and then after, he tells me. And what that shows is that 95 percent (of athletes who have a concussion) recover back to normal in 7 days or less.

He tests alcoholics brains in a similar manner to how he tests concussed athletes. He interviews them and then gives them a series of tests, ones mainly based on memory functioning (they have to remember a certain story).

So I might notice, this person has problems with attention and remembering things. In the past theyve been a 10-drinks-a-day alcoholic and now it looks like theyve pickled brain.

Though well-honored and quite thorough, you can probably see how Barr is considered a bit of a contrarian for his thinking on concussions.

Barr was even dismissed from the NFLs MTBI committee in 2004 by then-chairman Elliot Pellman, another former New York Jets team physician who is not without his own controversy.

I wanted another doctors opinion on my potentially pickling brain. Dr. James Paci, a professor and orthopedic surgeon, specializes in sports medicine at Stony Brook University Medicine. Hes also the football teams doctor.

First, he clarified that he was neither a neurologist nor brain physician. Despite that, he was trained to deal with concussions on a day-in, day-out basis in his own role as team doctor.

My expertise is how do we treat these athletes, Paci told me. What do we look out for? How do we prevent long term consequences?

However, unlike Barr, Paci somewhat struggled with the comparisons I was hoping he would draw for me.

Certainly there is some connection between alcoholism and Alzheimers, brain diseases. Drawing a parallel between drinking and football though? I dont think anyone has made that correlation. Though he does note, The rock n roll lifestyle and athlete lifestyle certainly do have some comparisons.

A man like Paci believes that both football and drinking are inherently dangerous, but thats OK, so long as we acknowledge the risk involved in both activities and, thus, let potential participants make informed decisions.

Ive had concussions before, Paci tells me. Anyone who plays sports has had one before.

Paci is about my age, having played football at Yale University in the late-1990s, while the slightly-older Barr played during a time head injuries werent treated all that seriously.

Back in the day when I played high school football, Barr tells me, you pretty much had to be in a coma before they did anything about it.

So both men had played football at a fairly high level, had head injuries on the field, and were still able to become prestigious doctors. But did they drink?

Not routinely, but I do, Paci tells me. Most doctors do. There are certainly benefits to some alcohol.

(Ive been saying that for years.)

I do, Barr also tells me. Everything in moderation. A little bit of alcohol can be good for the heart. Theres good data for the red wines. Some scotch in moderation, a finger a day maybe.

So you guys drink, but now knowing what you know, would you let your own children play football?

On that point Paci is fairly strict, believing young children simply dont have the body control and should stick to flag football or two-hand touch.

A parent cant consent to giving their kids a cigarette or a beerwhy can they consent to him playing tackle football?

Barr has a six-month grandson he absolutely wants to play football some day.

Should that boy play football or not? My take, from what we know right now: the chance of getting dementia, the prospect of a 13-year-old boy who starts football getting dementia one day is, lets say, 1 to 2 percent. Im being liberal, Barr tells me. But lets say that boy is not allowed to play football. Instead junior becomes fat and gets diabetes and high blood pressure. Now he has a 30 percent chance of dying of dementia.

So to Barr inactivity in this country is a much bigger problem than helmet-to-helmet contactinteresting, because drinkers on the whole are statistically much more active than non-drinkers according to the Center for Advancing Health.

That papers lead author, Michael French, a professor of health economics at the University of Miami, found that alcohol users not only exercised more than teetotalers, but the differential actually increased with more drinking.

I dont fully understand the relationship, Barr admits, though he has a speculation. Maybe people feel like after visiting the gym, they deserve to do something bad.

Its true enough anecdotally for myself, though Im a bit more of the reverse. I do something bad the night before, then feel the need to go jog five miles the next day.

I ask Barr point-blank, It seems like you ultimately think its safer to play in the NFL than to drink heavily?

Yeah, you could say that, he confirms.

This did not sound good for me. But what exactly did heavily mean? This week alone I sampled new whiskeys on Monday, drank wine with dinner on Tuesday, visited a hot new cocktail bar on Wednesday, went to a brewery opening on Thursday, and hit happy hour with friends on Friday.

Luckily, Barr relieved some of my concerns about any sort of future with dementia, simply telling me, You would not be on the phone with me, or even able to write this story, if you were drinking too much.

Regardless, I think Ill start trying to be more cognizant of my intake. As Paci ultimately summed up for me: The brain is an amazing thing. Your head hurts when you bang it. So you try not to bang your head again. With a hangover, theres obviously something similar going on there.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/28/whats-worse-for-your-braindrinking-or-playing-football/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/09/28/whats-worse-for-your-braindrinking-or-playing-football/

[jimdsmith34]

Whats Worse For Your BrainDrinking or Playing Football?

Our correspondent drinks for a living. Is he putting his brain at more risk of damage than a football player?

I woke up Sunday morning with a throbbing headache. Id spent the previous night heavily sampling a selection of rare whiskeys with some friends.

That may have been fun, but now here I was, still in bed at 11 a.m., barely able to keep my eyes open, hardly able to think, certainly not wanting to turn on the days NFL games.

A parent cant consent to giving their kids a cigarette or a beerwhy can they consent to him playing tackle football?

And I thought this cannot be good for my brain.

The effect of NFL action on the brain is one of the hottest topics of the moment, with the movie Concussion opening this Christmas weekend.

In that film Will Smith portrays Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who first brought to light the appearance of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in American football players.

Thanks partially to Omalus work, nowadays when we watch the constant brutality on the football field, when we see players crashing their heads into each other down after down, when we notice aging players getting dementia (and worse) once retired, many of us have even started to wonder, Can I ethically enjoy football any more? Myself included.

At the same time, though, I often put my own brain in serious jeopardy too.

Yes, I am a professional drinks writer. Mid-day cocktail tastings. Evening scotch samplings. Beer festivals on the weekends. Trips to breweries, distilleries, and wineries. You should see how much free liquor gets delivered to my house on a daily basis!

People often tell me I must have one of the best jobs around. But they arent the ones that have had to drink literally every single day for hell, who knows how many days in a row it has been now. They arent the ones that wake up many mornings with a hangoverjust another occupational hazard.

So, with all this in mind, I decided to ask some football concussion doctors about the effects of my equally dangerous profession on my own precious brain. I wondered, how bad is my drinking compared to playing football?

Was a single whiskey shot equal to a QB sack?

A night of heavy beer drinking equal to a half of football?

Did my brutal Sunday morning hangover feel worse than it did on a Monday morning for a running back?

Neither Dr. Omalunor Will Smithreturned any of my calls, but luckily I had other accomplished doctors willing to answer my questions.

Dr. William Barr is the Director of Neuropsychology at NYU Langone Medical Center.

He is a clinical expert on epilepsy, forensic neuropsychology, and sports concussions. He has testified in numerous cases involving forensics and in civil cases involving MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury). More importantly, from the mid-1990s until 2004, Barr was a neuropsychological medical consultant for the NFLs New York Jets.

He quickly understood the somewhat silly concept behind this piece, and even why a professional drinks writer had reason to be concerned.

I used to think about boxers, he told me, noting that this was before all this concussion talk was in the mainstream. People used to say boxing was the only way for a kid to get out of the ghettobut he had to put his brain at risk. How terrible it was that society forced them to do this! But I also thought about the typical Mad Men-era businessmen. They had to do the three-martini lunches for their workthey too were pickling their brains just to get ahead!

Barr is a bit of a firebrand when it comes to talk about concussions. In fact, he believes concussionswhether from football or otherwiseactually have a fairly minimal impact on future cognitive functioning.

When you look at the studies and what happens three months after a concussiondo you know what meta-analysis is? he asks. I dont. He explains that, In science, rather than making conclusions based on a single study, you look at all the literature. Put it into a similar metric. Whats the overall effect based on many, many studies? So now, maybe, youre looking at 300 people over 10 studies. What it shows is the overall effect (on your brain) of a concussion after 30 days is lower than the effects of intoxication.

The study Barr is citing is Grant L. Iversons 2005 paper Outcome from Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.

Iverson didnt study alcohols traumatic effect on the brain per se, but he did find chronic cannabis use to be worse on overall neuropsychological functioning than an MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury) was on a person just one to three months after the injury had occurred. Likewise, he found chronic cannabis use to be slightly worse on future memory functioning than an MTBI.

For Barr, that was enough for him to deduce for me that alcohol abuse would be probably likewise worse on the brain than head injuries from playing football. Uh oh.

Barr isnt completely speculating, as he has co-authored his own significant studies. With a team of other doctors and PhDs he helped pen Cumulative Effects Associated with Recurrent Concussion in Collegiate Football Players and Acute Effects and Recovery Time Following Concussion in Collegiate Football Players.

Ive studied athletes more than the general population. With them we can get information before their injury and then after, he tells me. And what that shows is that 95 percent (of athletes who have a concussion) recover back to normal in 7 days or less.

He tests alcoholics brains in a similar manner to how he tests concussed athletes. He interviews them and then gives them a series of tests, ones mainly based on memory functioning (they have to remember a certain story).

So I might notice, this person has problems with attention and remembering things. In the past theyve been a 10-drinks-a-day alcoholic and now it looks like theyve pickled brain.

Though well-honored and quite thorough, you can probably see how Barr is considered a bit of a contrarian for his thinking on concussions.

Barr was even dismissed from the NFLs MTBI committee in 2004 by then-chairman Elliot Pellman, another former New York Jets team physician who is not without his own controversy.

I wanted another doctors opinion on my potentially pickling brain. Dr. James Paci, a professor and orthopedic surgeon, specializes in sports medicine at Stony Brook University Medicine. Hes also the football teams doctor.

First, he clarified that he was neither a neurologist nor brain physician. Despite that, he was trained to deal with concussions on a day-in, day-out basis in his own role as team doctor.

My expertise is how do we treat these athletes, Paci told me. What do we look out for? How do we prevent long term consequences?

However, unlike Barr, Paci somewhat struggled with the comparisons I was hoping he would draw for me.

Certainly there is some connection between alcoholism and Alzheimers, brain diseases. Drawing a parallel between drinking and football though? I dont think anyone has made that correlation. Though he does note, The rock n roll lifestyle and athlete lifestyle certainly do have some comparisons.

A man like Paci believes that both football and drinking are inherently dangerous, but thats OK, so long as we acknowledge the risk involved in both activities and, thus, let potential participants make informed decisions.

Ive had concussions before, Paci tells me. Anyone who plays sports has had one before.

Paci is about my age, having played football at Yale University in the late-1990s, while the slightly-older Barr played during a time head injuries werent treated all that seriously.

Back in the day when I played high school football, Barr tells me, you pretty much had to be in a coma before they did anything about it.

So both men had played football at a fairly high level, had head injuries on the field, and were still able to become prestigious doctors. But did they drink?

Not routinely, but I do, Paci tells me. Most doctors do. There are certainly benefits to some alcohol.

(Ive been saying that for years.)

I do, Barr also tells me. Everything in moderation. A little bit of alcohol can be good for the heart. Theres good data for the red wines. Some scotch in moderation, a finger a day maybe.

So you guys drink, but now knowing what you know, would you let your own children play football?

On that point Paci is fairly strict, believing young children simply dont have the body control and should stick to flag football or two-hand touch.

A parent cant consent to giving their kids a cigarette or a beerwhy can they consent to him playing tackle football?

Barr has a six-month grandson he absolutely wants to play football some day.

Should that boy play football or not? My take, from what we know right now: the chance of getting dementia, the prospect of a 13-year-old boy who starts football getting dementia one day is, lets say, 1 to 2 percent. Im being liberal, Barr tells me. But lets say that boy is not allowed to play football. Instead junior becomes fat and gets diabetes and high blood pressure. Now he has a 30 percent chance of dying of dementia.

So to Barr inactivity in this country is a much bigger problem than helmet-to-helmet contactinteresting, because drinkers on the whole are statistically much more active than non-drinkers according to the Center for Advancing Health.

That papers lead author, Michael French, a professor of health economics at the University of Miami, found that alcohol users not only exercised more than teetotalers, but the differential actually increased with more drinking.

I dont fully understand the relationship, Barr admits, though he has a speculation. Maybe people feel like after visiting the gym, they deserve to do something bad.

Its true enough anecdotally for myself, though Im a bit more of the reverse. I do something bad the night before, then feel the need to go jog five miles the next day.

I ask Barr point-blank, It seems like you ultimately think its safer to play in the NFL than to drink heavily?

Yeah, you could say that, he confirms.

This did not sound good for me. But what exactly did heavily mean? This week alone I sampled new whiskeys on Monday, drank wine with dinner on Tuesday, visited a hot new cocktail bar on Wednesday, went to a brewery opening on Thursday, and hit happy hour with friends on Friday.

Luckily, Barr relieved some of my concerns about any sort of future with dementia, simply telling me, You would not be on the phone with me, or even able to write this story, if you were drinking too much.

Regardless, I think Ill start trying to be more cognizant of my intake. As Paci ultimately summed up for me: The brain is an amazing thing. Your head hurts when you bang it. So you try not to bang your head again. With a hangover, theres obviously something similar going on there.

source http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/28/whats-worse-for-your-braindrinking-or-playing-football/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2017/09/whats-worse-for-your-braindrinking-or.html

[allofbeercom]

Whats Worse For Your BrainDrinking or Playing Football?

Our correspondent drinks for a living. Is he putting his brain at more risk of damage than a football player?

I woke up Sunday morning with a throbbing headache. Id spent the previous night heavily sampling a selection of rare whiskeys with some friends.

That may have been fun, but now here I was, still in bed at 11 a.m., barely able to keep my eyes open, hardly able to think, certainly not wanting to turn on the days NFL games.

A parent cant consent to giving their kids a cigarette or a beerwhy can they consent to him playing tackle football?

And I thought this cannot be good for my brain.

The effect of NFL action on the brain is one of the hottest topics of the moment, with the movie Concussion opening this Christmas weekend.

In that film Will Smith portrays Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who first brought to light the appearance of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in American football players.

Thanks partially to Omalus work, nowadays when we watch the constant brutality on the football field, when we see players crashing their heads into each other down after down, when we notice aging players getting dementia (and worse) once retired, many of us have even started to wonder, Can I ethically enjoy football any more? Myself included.

At the same time, though, I often put my own brain in serious jeopardy too.

Yes, I am a professional drinks writer. Mid-day cocktail tastings. Evening scotch samplings. Beer festivals on the weekends. Trips to breweries, distilleries, and wineries. You should see how much free liquor gets delivered to my house on a daily basis!

People often tell me I must have one of the best jobs around. But they arent the ones that have had to drink literally every single day for hell, who knows how many days in a row it has been now. They arent the ones that wake up many mornings with a hangoverjust another occupational hazard.

So, with all this in mind, I decided to ask some football concussion doctors about the effects of my equally dangerous profession on my own precious brain. I wondered, how bad is my drinking compared to playing football?

Was a single whiskey shot equal to a QB sack?

A night of heavy beer drinking equal to a half of football?

Did my brutal Sunday morning hangover feel worse than it did on a Monday morning for a running back?

Neither Dr. Omalunor Will Smithreturned any of my calls, but luckily I had other accomplished doctors willing to answer my questions.

Dr. William Barr is the Director of Neuropsychology at NYU Langone Medical Center.

He is a clinical expert on epilepsy, forensic neuropsychology, and sports concussions. He has testified in numerous cases involving forensics and in civil cases involving MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury). More importantly, from the mid-1990s until 2004, Barr was a neuropsychological medical consultant for the NFLs New York Jets.

He quickly understood the somewhat silly concept behind this piece, and even why a professional drinks writer had reason to be concerned.

I used to think about boxers, he told me, noting that this was before all this concussion talk was in the mainstream. People used to say boxing was the only way for a kid to get out of the ghettobut he had to put his brain at risk. How terrible it was that society forced them to do this! But I also thought about the typical Mad Men-era businessmen. They had to do the three-martini lunches for their workthey too were pickling their brains just to get ahead!

Barr is a bit of a firebrand when it comes to talk about concussions. In fact, he believes concussionswhether from football or otherwiseactually have a fairly minimal impact on future cognitive functioning.

When you look at the studies and what happens three months after a concussiondo you know what meta-analysis is? he asks. I dont. He explains that, In science, rather than making conclusions based on a single study, you look at all the literature. Put it into a similar metric. Whats the overall effect based on many, many studies? So now, maybe, youre looking at 300 people over 10 studies. What it shows is the overall effect (on your brain) of a concussion after 30 days is lower than the effects of intoxication.

The study Barr is citing is Grant L. Iversons 2005 paper Outcome from Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.

Iverson didnt study alcohols traumatic effect on the brain per se, but he did find chronic cannabis use to be worse on overall neuropsychological functioning than an MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury) was on a person just one to three months after the injury had occurred. Likewise, he found chronic cannabis use to be slightly worse on future memory functioning than an MTBI.

For Barr, that was enough for him to deduce for me that alcohol abuse would be probably likewise worse on the brain than head injuries from playing football. Uh oh.

Barr isnt completely speculating, as he has co-authored his own significant studies. With a team of other doctors and PhDs he helped pen Cumulative Effects Associated with Recurrent Concussion in Collegiate Football Players and Acute Effects and Recovery Time Following Concussion in Collegiate Football Players.

Ive studied athletes more than the general population. With them we can get information before their injury and then after, he tells me. And what that shows is that 95 percent (of athletes who have a concussion) recover back to normal in 7 days or less.

He tests alcoholics brains in a similar manner to how he tests concussed athletes. He interviews them and then gives them a series of tests, ones mainly based on memory functioning (they have to remember a certain story).

So I might notice, this person has problems with attention and remembering things. In the past theyve been a 10-drinks-a-day alcoholic and now it looks like theyve pickled brain.

Though well-honored and quite thorough, you can probably see how Barr is considered a bit of a contrarian for his thinking on concussions.

Barr was even dismissed from the NFLs MTBI committee in 2004 by then-chairman Elliot Pellman, another former New York Jets team physician who is not without his own controversy.

I wanted another doctors opinion on my potentially pickling brain. Dr. James Paci, a professor and orthopedic surgeon, specializes in sports medicine at Stony Brook University Medicine. Hes also the football teams doctor.

First, he clarified that he was neither a neurologist nor brain physician. Despite that, he was trained to deal with concussions on a day-in, day-out basis in his own role as team doctor.

My expertise is how do we treat these athletes, Paci told me. What do we look out for? How do we prevent long term consequences?

However, unlike Barr, Paci somewhat struggled with the comparisons I was hoping he would draw for me.

Certainly there is some connection between alcoholism and Alzheimers, brain diseases. Drawing a parallel between drinking and football though? I dont think anyone has made that correlation. Though he does note, The rock n roll lifestyle and athlete lifestyle certainly do have some comparisons.

A man like Paci believes that both football and drinking are inherently dangerous, but thats OK, so long as we acknowledge the risk involved in both activities and, thus, let potential participants make informed decisions.

Ive had concussions before, Paci tells me. Anyone who plays sports has had one before.

Paci is about my age, having played football at Yale University in the late-1990s, while the slightly-older Barr played during a time head injuries werent treated all that seriously.

Back in the day when I played high school football, Barr tells me, you pretty much had to be in a coma before they did anything about it.

So both men had played football at a fairly high level, had head injuries on the field, and were still able to become prestigious doctors. But did they drink?

Not routinely, but I do, Paci tells me. Most doctors do. There are certainly benefits to some alcohol.

(Ive been saying that for years.)

I do, Barr also tells me. Everything in moderation. A little bit of alcohol can be good for the heart. Theres good data for the red wines. Some scotch in moderation, a finger a day maybe.

So you guys drink, but now knowing what you know, would you let your own children play football?

On that point Paci is fairly strict, believing young children simply dont have the body control and should stick to flag football or two-hand touch.

A parent cant consent to giving their kids a cigarette or a beerwhy can they consent to him playing tackle football?

Barr has a six-month grandson he absolutely wants to play football some day.

Should that boy play football or not? My take, from what we know right now: the chance of getting dementia, the prospect of a 13-year-old boy who starts football getting dementia one day is, lets say, 1 to 2 percent. Im being liberal, Barr tells me. But lets say that boy is not allowed to play football. Instead junior becomes fat and gets diabetes and high blood pressure. Now he has a 30 percent chance of dying of dementia.

So to Barr inactivity in this country is a much bigger problem than helmet-to-helmet contactinteresting, because drinkers on the whole are statistically much more active than non-drinkers according to the Center for Advancing Health.

That papers lead author, Michael French, a professor of health economics at the University of Miami, found that alcohol users not only exercised more than teetotalers, but the differential actually increased with more drinking.

I dont fully understand the relationship, Barr admits, though he has a speculation. Maybe people feel like after visiting the gym, they deserve to do something bad.

Its true enough anecdotally for myself, though Im a bit more of the reverse. I do something bad the night before, then feel the need to go jog five miles the next day.

I ask Barr point-blank, It seems like you ultimately think its safer to play in the NFL than to drink heavily?

Yeah, you could say that, he confirms.

This did not sound good for me. But what exactly did heavily mean? This week alone I sampled new whiskeys on Monday, drank wine with dinner on Tuesday, visited a hot new cocktail bar on Wednesday, went to a brewery opening on Thursday, and hit happy hour with friends on Friday.

Luckily, Barr relieved some of my concerns about any sort of future with dementia, simply telling me, You would not be on the phone with me, or even able to write this story, if you were drinking too much.

Regardless, I think Ill start trying to be more cognizant of my intake. As Paci ultimately summed up for me: The brain is an amazing thing. Your head hurts when you bang it. So you try not to bang your head again. With a hangover, theres obviously something similar going on there.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/28/whats-worse-for-your-braindrinking-or-playing-football/