#inherent limitation of the format i guess

[jojolimons]

that pokemon rejuvenation personality quiz really is accurate, got npcs using my they/them pronouns even tho i chose the boy option

[escapedaudios]

Hello! My name is Grim, and I fancy myself a bit of a researcher. Now, this is not for anything important or extremely serious. Instead, this is mostly for my own pure enjoyment and something I have in the works that is to be posted on Tumblr. You are not obligated to answer any or all of these questions I have posed. I know it’s a bit much. Feel free to add any additional input! Thanks for your consideration!

1. How different do you think your work would be, in terms of getting across a point, in a different medium thats not Audio RP?

2. How do you think your work would be different if it more reflected main stream industry forms of storytelling where you as a creator would be more separate? (ex. movies, tv shows, games, etc.)

3. How important do you find the voice acting in your work?

4. If you had the choice, would you stop voice acting in your work and take a step back to focus on narrative work?

5. Do you believe your ability to voice characters enhances the story overall?

6. Do you enjoy the idea of a “Listener character” or would you better prefer to not have one?

7. As a writer, how does the writing of the Listener take you out of your comfort zone? (ie their effect in relationships, plot movements, etc.)

8. Is Audio RP your favored form of art?

9. How do you believe Audio RP differs from main stream forms of art/entertainment?

How different do you think your work would be, in terms of getting across a point, in a different medium thats not Audio RP? I've toyed around with re-writing some scenes of my work in screenplay or novel format as a creative exercise. I love the immersive nature of audio roleplay, but there are some limitations. I do wish I could reveal things through visuals that are too quiet or subtle to work in audio roleplay. For example, in the alternate version of Matador Gothic, Scythus reveals himself by puppeteering a dead body under the last street light that he left functional, then stepping into the light and revealing his monstrous and blood-soaked face.

How do you think your work would be different if it more reflected main stream industry forms of storytelling where you as a creator would be more separate? (ex. movies, tv shows, games, etc.) I would make longer, more complex projects with longer periods of time between release. If I was working in legacy media for a mainstream studio, and had the backing of traditional advertisement and distribution I wouldn't be dependent on being recommended by an algorithm or on remaining relevant to inherently fickle online audiences. I would love to have the freedom to be able to work on a project for months or years without losing my ability to reach people. I would also indulge far more in controversial and uncomfortable topics. As a content creator you are extremely vulnerable and extremely dependent on the good will of the social media climate in a way that producers of legacy media are not. As a YouTuber I am also subject to the content restrictions of the platform. If I were making movies or shows, I'd be writing scripts for much more R-rated media.

How important do you find the voice acting in your work? Voice acting quality is important, but not the most important thing. I think the acting quality is roughly as important as the production quality, but nothing is more important than the script. A good script can greatly elevate a mediocre performance, but a good performance can't elevate a mediocre script.

If you had the choice, would you stop voice acting in your work and take a step back to focus on narrative work? I technically do have a choice because I can quit whenever I want and focus on something else, so I guess the answer is no. The only thing that would make me take that switch is if I was offered some massive opportunity as part of a professional studio.

Do you believe your ability to voice characters enhances the story overall? You mean me personally, or in general? Because the answer is yes to both.

Do you enjoy the idea of a “Listener character” or would you better prefer to not have one? I love the idea of a Listener character! It's what makes audio roleplay unique and what separates it from audio plays. Besides the element of immersion, I'm always happy to see the different ways that members of the audience interpret the way their listener's speak, look, act, react, and feel throughout the story. It is at times frustrating to write given things like the limitations of implied dialogue, but I have a net positive view on them.

As a writer, how does the writing of the Listener take you out of your comfort zone? (ie their effect in relationships, plot movements, etc.) It's a real challenge to write implied dialogue and make it feel authentic, that's for sure! When revising my scripts, the majority of my edits are changes to make the implied dialogue more fluid, reactive, and less repetitive (ex: removing crutch phrases like "what do you mean by..." or "so you're saying..."). Writing it to convey information while also leaving room for the audience to roleplay and freely interpret the scene is difficult but rewarding!

Is Audio RP your favored form of art? I've never thought about what my favored artistic medium is, but it might just be. I've consumed more audio roleplays in the past three years than movies, books, comics, and tv shows combined. Hard to say! I'm still a big movie buff, and I have an especially strong fascination with movies made by writer-directors.

How do you believe Audio RP differs from main stream forms of art/entertainment? Before I answer this, I'll need to give the caveat that I think the potential of audio roleplay has barely even been scratched at this point. It's such a new medium that it has a ton of room to grow. That said, I feel like audio roleplay is naturally the most effective form of immersive storytelling. Using sound to allow for interpretive, imaginative, and partly interactive storytelling just works. There's a natural fluidity there that doesn't exist in literature written in the second person point of view, and a range of imaginative freedom that can't fit into immersive video games, and a perspective that simply can't exist in visual media like movies, comics, or television. It's also an art form that is entirely amateur-driven and friendly to remote collaboration and low-budget projects. This environment of collaborative, low-overhead, amateur-driven story production opens the path for a lot of unique and fresh plot concepts, new perspectives on old tropes, and new ways of conveying narrative that have never been seen before.

[xxlovelynovaxx]

L+bodymind dualism+prescriptivism and exclusion of people who have every right to use a term differently due to oppression olympics+misrepresentation of plural history and endomisia as well as "pro"-endo sysmedicalism and not recognizing that origin≠disordered status and mixed origin traumaendo disordered systems exist:

Anyway

There's no such thing as an "able-bodied" neurodisabled person. There's only neurodivergent people who do not identify as disabled and neurodivergent people who do, in which case they have a disability of a physical organ, the organ which is interconnected with and controls all other physical organs no less; and the vast majority of neurodisabilities have EXTREMELY high rates of comorbidity with chronic illnesses to the point it's rare for many of them NOT to co-occur. In fact, the dividing into discrete "mental" and "physical" diagnoses actively impedes our understanding of both and limits treatment and management options for us mad crips. Your bio claims you are "critical of psychiatry and the medical-industrial complex" and yet body-mind dualism is one of the biggest pillars supporting those, what are you even doing?

Words can mean multiple things. That's one of the functions of a dictionary. "Only x group is using [word] correctly is bog standard exclusionism shit and idc how much you echo the "I promise my exclusionism is different this time bro" it's not. "But it makes abled people think that people who are always nonverbal can turn it on and off like people who are temporarily nonverbal" no ABLEISM makes them think that, also temporarily nonverbal people CAN'T turn it on and off and that's also ableism, the whole POINT is that NONE OF US have control over it, because if we did that would just be choosing not to speak.

As an addition to the above, if we wanna get technical, "going nonverbal/semiverbal" or "temporarily nonverbal/semiverbal" in fact actually clarify specifically that they are nonpermanent, implying a permanent state is possible. However, technically, if you are still scribal, you are NOT nonverbal by the definition of nonverbal as nonverbal refers to ALL language. Unless you are relying solely on nonlinguistic AAC, you are NONSPEAKING. Now, I'm not going to police this, I only point it out to note the hypocrisy of kicking people out of a word for using it "incorrectly" while many of the exclusionists (especially many people who are NEITHER permanently nonverbal nor nonspeaking) are doing the exact same themselves.

Endogenic plurality can involve CDDs, even traumagenic CDDs when the trauma occurred after the formation of a system. It can also involve CDDs in traumaendo systems. They're not in fact totally discrete separate concepts and acting like they are is just, you guessed it, more exclusionism! Also no, the online plural community was not about "disdain for trauma survivors with CDDs", ever. It WAS about disdain for medicalization, as in, treating plurality as INHERENTLY pathological. If you're referring to "natural systems" terminology, people actively SPECIFICALLY changed that out of understanding that, however well intentioned, it could POTENTIALLY imply something harmful about traumagenic systems.

[erstwhilesparrow]

i've been thinking about maps and how they're inherently tricky little liars. you know that story about the emperor who wanted a 1:1 scale map of his entire kingdom, but creating that map required them to perfectly replicate the entire kingdom, at the exact same size as the kingdom? you see how that's kind of useless and how maps kind of have to leave things out for us to get any of the usual navigational help out of them? someone has to make decisions about what gets left out. what's important enough to be included. how things and places get represented. modern day maps loooove to promise objectivity and accuracy, but maps have stories and beliefs and historical contexts embedded in them no matter how hard you try to get away from those things. but this also means you can use them to tell interesting stories! how a thing is depicted on a map tells you things about the person / people responsible for its production!

due to being who i am, i think about this a lot in relation to empires smp. the kinds of maps that could be produced as the landscape of the world changes. the way that the in-game maps allow for a kind of instantaneous transfer of information over literally any distance via map copies. the extremely fixed and limited point of view provided by the in-game maps. the biases and interests of the cartographers of any given empire.

some (many) scattered thoughts in list format under the cut:

the particular idea that spurred this post: topographical maps of the regions surrounding the cod empire and mythland -- the way intensity of colour / shading and the choice of scale could be used to emphasize or gloss over the ravine separating them -- the ravine like a scar on the page, deep and dark, or the ravine like a neat line bracketed by the two other neat lines of the empires' respective walls. there are easy enough to guess reasons for who would want to create each type of map and why; tells you something about how each empire responded to the separation and war.

maps of pixandria from above -- i think a lot about how fwhip took copies of maps that the other empires had on display and put them up in his base so he would be able to see immediately if any of them start building something new. i think a lot about how when i was looking at minecraft maps of pixandria, big chunks of it just blended into the desert sand because pix was building with sandstone and i wasn't at all used to seeing pixandria from anything but ground-level. i think a lot about how this could add an extra element to how pixandria is supposed to have a bustling city under the anthill, and how fwhip's secret base is also underground, and how yeah, that's just A Cool Thing People Do Sometimes, but if it's so dangerously simple to get information about the surface of the world... how might people respond to that? consider spycraft in the empires. consider clever tricks and countermeasures. (consider s2, katherine's kingdom is falling apart, and her response, among other things, is to collect maps of her neighbours' territories. what's she worried about?)

itinerary maps -- maps have not always been bird's-eye view and carefully made to scale! itinerary maps were designed for travellers, and interested in accurately displaying the relative length of one's journey from one place to another, as well as the landmarks that one might see along the way (take a look at the Tabula Peutingeriana -- are you aware it's showing you italy?) -- in the context of empires, what types of journeys are so common that there might be demand for itinerary maps? who makes them, who uses them, what's considered a major landmark in this area and also does every mapmaker in this region consider that thing to be a major landmark? can you make something a major landmark by representing it on a map? (consider the turn of phrase about putting oneself on the map. who might want this, or not want this? the conspicuous absences in a map can also be telling. huh. i wonder how often that raid farm impulse built shows up on an empire's map in season 2.)

the usefulness of a given perspective -- kind of related to itinerary maps, i wonder how much more use you can get out of an in-game map when you have elytra? the emperors pretty much all have elytra, and the emperors often keep in-game maps of their empires. is there something there? what might it suggest about the expected use of those in-game maps?

self-aggrandizement -- another anecdote i think about all the time (and this one might be anecdotal sorry take it with a grain of salt) is the one where jesuit missionaries went to china and managed to convince some chinese nobles to trust them more after showing them a world map in the ortelian style, because chinese maps at that point mostly showed china as disproportionately large and at the center of the map, with europe (and the threat of barbarian invasion) dangerously close, and this map... didn't do that! consider how maps can create a nation or empire's sense of itself. the cod empire and mythland, always so fucking careful about the clarity of their borders. mezalea that looks massive on one map and is shoved off to the side in another. pixandrian maps that are cross-sections and not views from above. maps from the crystal cliffs that emphasize the mountain ranges like a jagged warning.

shape of the map -- hey did you know medieval european maps were often circular, with jerusalem in the center and the rest of the world split into asia, africa, and europe? you know maps can be different shapes, and this can tell you about what the creator thought was important (i don't remember exactly how circles are important to christianity but it was something about the perfection of god, maybe?) and how they understood the world? you think it could tell you something about where the map was meant to be used (a big circular map was probably meant to go on display!) and who was meant to see it? (ha, if you live in minecraft, what shape do you think the world is?)

questions and answers -- stuff like "who made this? to what end? under what influences?" are questions i have been specifically taught to ask about maps that i am presented with. in the context of empires worldbuilding, there's a really fun inversion where you do not have to work from the map to the context, but from the context to the map that might result from it. you can do cool things with this!! i am sure of it!!

[justin-chapmanswers]

icant believe how much and how well you put up with the ii tumblr fanbase

Ehh idk I wouldn't really call it "putting up with" cause like. It's pretty fuunnnn. Sure I have like 1300 unanswered asks but that's less because they're not-good questions that I'm unhappy with or something, and much more that I just respond whenever I feel like I have an immediate thought/answer that I think is at least semi-valuable to share. I only put in the effort to type things up when I want to, when I have some perspective or good vibe or funny funny to share.

It's chill here. I wasn't really a Tumblr-kid growing up, most because when I was younger (and now to an extent) I struggle with finding drive to share myself and my interests with the world, and never knew what I'd blog about. But I 100% get the appeal.

Even with my Twitter on which I spend more time on, I'll retweet things all the time and read as much as my very-limited free-time allows, I'll still never feel like the ideas that pop up in my head are pretty valueless. I guess unless I have a gut feeling the tweet will go really well, or is something I REALLY need to say. Or I'm in a wacky mood.

But uhhhhhh all that-said, the ask-blog format is really good for me. Getting a prompt a) tells me that my response will inherently interest at least one (1) person out there, and b) sparks my brain and gets thoughts going.

Hi Tumblr, the internet-experience has been a ride, especially as of late. Thanks for the warm memories.

[nickmakura]

Adult Scooby-Doo TV Show Pitch

So, the idea with my theoretical Adult Swim Scooby-Doo TV Show is to avoid any inclination this is a reimagining. I'm envisioning this is as being a sort of continuation of the concepts and story present in Zombie Island, Witch's Ghost, and Alien Invaders. But, attempting to keep up the original episodic format of "Where Are You?" and breaking some limits of what you can put these characters through.

Part of the reason "Zombie Island" works, is because these are the same characters we grew up with. But they're a little older now too. They all have jobs, they're long past high-school, they have adult expectations. But for the most part, Hanna-Barbera doesn't change anything about Mystery Inc's personality, and instead drops them into a scenario that is dark and gritty. Which makes it far more terrifying.

But another reason is Zombie Island keeps the inherent comedy without sacrificing the horror. Good stuff.

So how do you take the concepts of Zombie Island, and transform it into a monster of the week Scooby-Doo show?

Coast to Coast with Scooby-Doo!

Part I: The Plot

After the harrowing experiences dealing with true brushes with the supernatural and the paranormal, Daphne Blake is now more convinced then ever that she needs live footage of a real honest to good ghost. If they can get one on camera, and report it, this will be the find of a century.

Sticking with the original plan, Scoob & The Gang travel across America investigating real folklore and horrors, in hopes of finding something real.

Part II: The Formula

So, Coast to Coast With Scooby-Doo is kind of a mix of genres. But for the most part, I want it to be a Horror Comedy Mystery show, but it's also a road trip show. One of the things I liked about Zombie Island, is that it took place in New Orleans, and introduced us to real New Orleans cuisine. From beignets, to po' boys, crawdads, gumbo and jambalaya. But it also told us about the voodoo scene in New Orleans.

I'm now dead set on heading out to New Orleans sometime just to try the food, and I think that's something that can really help drag Scooby-Doo down to earth. It makes you really want to visit these places, and maybe investigate a haunting while you're there too.

So, here's the setup.

Spooky Cold Open, probably a Murder

Theme Song

Scoob & The Gang ride the mystery machine into town, probably with some sort of banter. Velma brings up where they're going, and Shag is like "Yo man, it's been a minute since we've been out to New York! You guys think Trinidad Golden Palace is still open? Like they had one crazy Shark Sandwich dude!" Then another member of the gang brings up they're actually looking to go to the statue of Liberty, where, by the way, there is ACTUAL rumors of buried treasure and ghosts. This changes depending on local

The gang stumble upon mystery, ask questions, find out gruesome details, meet suspects. Daphne & Fred interview some people.

They film the hauntings as they're happening, and search for clues.

Then, as the episode progresses we figure out whether or not this thing is real or fake. If it's real, the gang have to find a way to take down the monster using ingenuity and what they've found in the episode, or they have to capture the culprit and breakdown the mystery.

Small things, but I feel like having a constant bet between characters whether or not it's real or if it's fake would be something really fun actually. I think the audience would have fun getting in on the question too, and guessing along with the gang.

Part III: The Adult Part

So, this is a show for adults, but the fact it's FOR adults will not override that it IS Scooby-Doo. Which is to say, that it will have murder, swearing, mentions of sex, but it will not go beyond what you expect in terms of tone from Scooby-Doo. It's a fun horror comedy mystery show about 4 friends and their dog who investigate spooky mysteries. You can't change that core premise or you risk it no longer being Scooby-Doo and something else entirely.

So if you need a member of the gang to swear for a scene, you can, but it can't breach too far out of character for the group. Like Fred can say fuck, but he's still the leader Dad type guy who likes Daphne, and likes building absurd rube goldberg type traps. Shaggy can smoke weed, but he's still the goofy moral center of the group. He makes fun sandwiches, he cracks dumb jokes, he's scared of getting stabbed, but he sticks around for his friends. Velma can be a lesbian, but she's still the quirky smart character who loves books and science.

But most importantly you need to make sure it's still abundantly clear to the audience that no matter how much drama or crazy shit they see, Scoob & The Gang are all best friends who love working together.

[lacrimosathedark]

I have made some DC posts that people actually show interest in (and most of them seem to like with...one exception) but I know a not insubstantial portion of DC fandom watches the Young Justice cartoon, and I don’t. I have no intention to change that in the near future. But because I Have A Problem and constantly feel the need to explain myself for things, I’m going to do that.

Before that, DISCLAIMER: I am NOT saying the show is inherently bad, nor do I think anyone is dumb or wrong for liking it or even preferring it to the comics. It’s just not MY thing.

If you are sensitive to people not liking things you enjoy, seriously, don’t read this. I’m not attacking anyone, this is all my personal opinion and preferences.

So!

Reasons I Don’t Watch Young Justice

1. I suck at watching things.

Honestly my biggest reason. I was that kid in school that everyone was like “you haven’t seen [supposedly culturally iconic or currently popular movie]?! Seriously!?! That’s insane! You HAVE to!”

AND THEN I DIDN’T

A big part of that is my brain is Dumb. I have Inattentive-Type ADHD. This means my brain is very bad at focusing, especially on things I’m not like, super fixated on (and even then, I often overwhelm myself). So I’m not good at sitting down and watching things, even when I AM interest.

People have been telling me to watch and/or read Lord of the Rings for pretty much ever. GUESS WHAT I’VE NEVER SEEN

I loved Supernatural, as shitty as it could be. I haven’t watched every episode in any season past season 6.

I have had lists of anime and video games I want to watch. Still haven’t.

I’ve been recommended books (and I’m generally better at reading than watching) that sound awesome that I STILL have not picked up.

I have been intending to watch Moon Knight, which I actually really want to watch. Guess what I haven’t done.

2. My brain seems to like comic books more.

I didn’t get to have comic books as a kid just because it wasn’t a big thing where I lived so my exposure was limited. However, there’s a crossover exposure that my brain liked.

I grew up loving anime, and read a lot of manga. I also grew up playing Spider-Man video games. And then, I also grew up watching the old Teen Titans cartoon.

All these kind of combine into a certain predisposition towards consuming media in a certain way.

3. It doesn’t mesh with my comic experience.

I, like I presume a good chunk of other tumblr users, got into comics because of ThePandaRedd from TikTok. He is just so fucking funny and it drew me in. And if you don’t know, a lot of his content is Bat family related. So, that’s what I was drawn to. Growing up with the Teen Titans show, I was also lowkey predisposed to an interest in Robin anyway.

I quickly learned all I could about all of Batman’s many kids (because wtf my guy). To do that, I started watching comic videos on youtube, reading wikis, finding comic book pages on tumblr. I eventually grew to love all of them.

But I learned about and almost immediately fell in love with Jason Todd, Tim Drake, and Cassandra Cain.

Why does this matter to my point? Well...

4. That’s not Young Justice.

The show is called Young Justice, but like...that’s not Young Justice. That’s basically the Teen Titans.

I have seen clips of the first episode. I don’t remember all of it, but three characters I distinctly remember being present for the formation of that Young Justice was Dick Grayson, Wally West, and Roy Harper. In comics, they were never Young Justice. Those three specifically founded the Teen Titans with Garth and Donna Troy. Like???

Young Justice in the comics is formed by Tim Drake, Superboy (later named Kon-El and Conner Kent), and Bart Allen. Not long after they add Greta Hayes and Cassie Sandsmark and on and on but like, those three boys are at the center. So much so that them, along with Cassie Sandsmark, are known as the Core Four among the fandom. And they are all intimately close friends and those relationships actually mean a lot to me.

Just a glance at the wiki makes me just...my skin is crawling. Kon joins the team with Dick, long before Tim is on the team. Ugh.

Kon dates Miss Martian, which...I don’t know much about the Martians and Kon is a flirt but like...the other characters he’s usually closer with--ugh.

Tim dates Cassie??? Without the influence of losing Conner??? And also idk does he date Stephanie? Because Tim and Steph are like, a big thing and tbh the only more intimate relationship Tim has is with Conner effin Kent, and I know Steph is in the show. (Also for a show that has a bunch of queer stuff, why does my duck boy not have a boyfriend of any kind? I know Bernard is super recent but he’s been like queercoded forever so like where is it?)

Speaking of that relationship, where is it? Even in a platonic sense, because Kon is consistently borderline obsessed with being Tim’s friend. Tim is probably the most important person to him; throughout especially the Teen Titans run Kon relied on Tim for emotional support and put a lot of faith in him. Tim literally lost his goddamn mind when Conner died. Like, he tried to bring Steph back with a Lazarus Pit. Okay, kinda fucked, but it’s happened. But when Kon died, Tim changed his costume to match Kon’s colors, tried to clone him, and “dated” his ex-girlfriend (who had, at the time, literally joined a cult who had hoped to bring Conner back). Um??? And then when Kon came back, Kon’s support made a huge difference in Tim’s shitty mental health. And the second time they met after Kon came back, Tim threw himself at Kon to hug him. And Conner refused to accept anyone but Tim (Damian specifically, but also Steph) as Robin. To him, Tim will always be Robin (and he will always be Tim’s clone boy <3). These two are a pair, platonic or otherwise, and that they aren’t so close in this show is upsetting to me.

Bart at least doesn’t appear before Tim does but he’s still seemingly not close to the rest of the “Core Four” and that just makes me so incredibly sad. I mean, points for making him not straight I guess but like...those friendships are really important to him. Like, Kon has historically been almost like his mom-friend, making sure he’s taken care of even when Bart is doing everything to avoid his issues (not that Conner’s much better at that, but yknow). The newer Young Justice comics, Conner totally mom’s Bart. He full names him (”Bartholomew Allen the Second! Don’t run away from me!” literally all that’s missing is his middle name and a scolding “young man”), and grabs some of his favorite snacks for when he wakes up after he passes out. And he also immediately called Tim because from the beginning there’s been the joke of the co-parenting Bart. And another point to Conner relying on Tim and just UGH.

And y’know, if they’re just gonna do Teen Titans, where are Vic and Raven and Kory? Like, I’m glad they had lesser known Titans like Karen Beecher and Mal Duncan but like...idk. I personally grew up with them, and if you’re gonna have Beast Boy, I feel like Cyborg and Raven kinda come with that package. And Starfire comes with the Raven package. Just my personal feelings there.

Small note since I mentioned my other beloved Bats: I know very little about what’s happening with them, but Cass is Cassandra Wu-San and Jason seems to still be brain-dead. Like, pre-Lazarus Pit brain-dead. Like I just...don’t know.

5. Artemis unreasonably pisses me off.

Prefacing this with, she’s not necessarily a bad character (I honestly can’t judge that with what little I know). This is honestly mostly because my brain is dumb.

First of all, it takes my brain several jumps to figure out who someone’s talking about when they talk about her.

“Y’know, Artemis.”

“You mean Artemis Grace of Bana-Mighdall, badass redhead Amazon, archer and ax-wielder,  and Jason Todd’s bestie/former girlfriend?”

“No, the blonde archer, in Young Justice.”

“...You mean Cissie King-Jones, Arrowette?”

“No, from the show.”

“...Oh.”

And then she’s paired up with Wally West apparently. Which unnecessarily gets under my skin.

Look, the only person I can see Wally with other than his wife Linda is Dick Grayson, and that is really because he seems just as obsessively protective about both of them. I cannot imagine Wally without either of them, and tbh the idea of him not have Jai and Irey makes me so fucking sad. Man would do literally anything for his children. I know he’s dated other girls before Linda, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

In that same vein...

6. Zatanna

I know she’s implied to have...been with Dick Grayson in the show. In general, who can blame her, it’s Dick Grayson.

However, in the show, she’s around Dick’s age.

In the comics, she was childhood friends with Bruce Wayne. Those two are best friends. They sort of almost dated for a while. I may be wrong, but I think Z may even be a little older than Bruce.

And that just really freaks me out, okay? It puts me off. My brain doesn’t want to compute that her age is different than it is in the comics.

(Also I’m a fan off her on-off relationship with the lovable chaotic fuckboy that is John Constantine.)

7. What the FUCK is going on with Roy Harper? Also Cheshire and Lian.

Like, there’s like, three different versions of him or something? And the “real” Roy isn’t even Lian’s father? Like, this is things I’ve just learned from vague clips and they make me irrationally frustrated.

As for Cheshire, I know she’s played to be sympathetic in the show, to at least some extent. Which isn’t a problem.

But I don’t like her.

She did, at one point, truly love Roy. She genuinely loves her daughter probably more than anything in the world. She is, arguably, the best mother she could be given the circumstances.

That being said, this is a woman who loves what she does. She revels in her job as an assassin. She enjoys the taunting, the fighting, the killing. She finds amusement in seeing people fall to her poisons. And as much as she loves her daughter, she would not give up being an assassin to raise her.

Jade Nguyen is an awful person in my eyes and that cartoon won’t change that.

I’m also not invested in that Lian.

Every clip I’ve seen of cartoon Lian looks nothing like any version of Lian I know and love. Like, the closest is Kingdom Come Red Hood with her long red hair, but her hair was distinctly curly and she looked like Jade, according to little Lian. Then there’s little Lian, black haired, clearly Asian girl, being raised with numerous superheroes and knowing Navajo traditions, sweet and clever and brilliant and whose favorite color is red. And then there’s Shoes, who while many don’t like her mostly due to her amnesia, I do. Blue hair and usually blue lipstick, seemingly temporary (or at least inconsistent) tattoos on her neck and arms, one of Catwoman’s Alleytown Strays and upcoming vigilante Cheshire Cat. Clearly clever, already a hacker, wears a red baseball hat (like Roy!) and fishnets (like Dinah!) and all around a ‘fuck you’ attitude while still being a sweetheart, very much like Selina.

The overall white-looking brown-haired girl in pink I keep seeing doesn’t click as Lian to me. That’s not the girl I adore. And as of late, Lian has been really important to me.

I don’t know if that’s even everything, but I felt I had to get it out of my system. Particularly about Artemis. I really don’t know why that makes me so upset but I don’t like it. At All.

Sorry, my content, aside from maybe a jokey reblog, will never be about the Young Justice cartoon. I don’t intend to bash it, but I’m not gonna watch it, and comment much on it either. If that’s content you want, you won’t find it here.

[the-rogue-mockingjay]

Writer's end-of-year roundup, 2022! 🎉🎆

Despite the myriad hardships of the year for me - losing my old beagle, fighting doctors, a completely stupid amount of grief/loss, migraines and disability oh my! - it's actually been an amazingly productive and inspired year? I'm very proud! I completed the second draft of my first-ever longfic, which needs another round of editing or two before it's ready to be published, and I've discovered I LOVE editing. More than I love writing, actually????? Lots of people talk about the Dreaded Editing but for me, it was vastly easier than writing the first draft was LOL. I also did what I thought I would never do, which is create another Shepard, Morrigan Vesta, and I actually wrote mostly about her during NaNoWriMo this year. I'm finally getting the hang of how to give characters unique voices (or portray a canon character's voice accurately, which is something I used to be extremely hung up on). I can honestly say I've made a lot of progress both as a person and as a writer this year, and I'm finally starting to find my joy in writing again. Very exciting!

Taking a page out of @pikapeppa 's book in how to format this year's data- I love seeing your charts every year!! My own chart ended up being quite a bit messier, but that's probably because of how I tweaked it to fit my fics. I apologize deeply if the image quality gets butchered, I am not wise in the ways of battling Tumblr's nonsense

(HEY GUESS WHO FORGOT A FIC......the one I forgot is Marevera's Dream, which is a Wayfarer post-Ep 1 pre-Ep 2 WIP, and it clocks in at 1,174 words, making my actual total 60,486!!!!!)

*I forgot to note that In this darkness, on my own is a followup to A New and Dark Horizon.

60K........DUDE!!! I haven't written that much since junior high/I got my depression diagnosis in like 2016, so this is. Big!

New things I tried: For starters, I paced myself during NaNo instead of forcing myself to write every day like I did during NaNo 2020. And WOW was that a night-and-day difference! In 2020, I wrote about 20k and burned myself out so bad I couldn't write for another 6-8 months. This year, I wrote about 30k, and only sat down to write about half the days, successfully dodging burnout. I think that's a valuable lesson for me in what works for me, how to balance my desire to write with what I'm actually capable of that day, and how to work with my disability without letting it limit me.

I also wrote in first person for the first time in maaaaaany years, and while it's not as comfy as third person, it wasn't bad, and it was a good way to explore the different strengths of POVs.

And since my laptop had a fatal encounter with a cup of coffee last spring (RIP little buddy), I've gotten very comfy writing on my phone, which I had previously only done for Across the Sea and Part 1 & Part 3 of broken body built anew because I was bored/inspired during a long car ride LOL.

Fic I spent the most time on: Going Over Jordan, easy. I originally wrote it during NaNo 2020, then re-wrote it at some point during 2021 (time is a weird soup so I don't remember). And then I rewrote it AGAIN this year, edited the crap out of it, printed it, and will edit it again sometime in 2023. It's a fic that exists purely because I am at times a spiteful little goblin, and I had Opinions about the MEA main mission Hunting the Archon, i.e. I didn't agree with how Bioware wrote the companions' responses to Ryder's temporary death, and my Ryder is also an anxious neurodivergent wreck like myself, so I wanted to write how that mission would have actually gone with Brynja as Pathfinder. I wanted to highlight the relationships Brynja has with her friends (particularly Jaal), and I also just wanted her take on the mission in general, because it's not the same as what's in-game. I mean....a lot of people die gruesome deaths in that mission and you see the aftermath, you see the gutted and maimed corpses. There's a lot of horror inherent to what Bioware wrote for that mission, but they glossed over it big time. I wanted to fix that.

I'd like to have someone beta read it, but Andromeda is a niche market as it were, and I've never had anyone beta my work before, so that's honestly the biggest reason it's not published yet. It would benefit greatly from beta reading I think, but uh. I don't know how to make that happen. I'm gonna publish the dang thing in 2023 or 2024 at the latest, though, even if it kills me DGKLJDHLG.

Fic I spent the least time on: I can't say for certain, but it's probably the microfics. Those took only a couple hours. Aside from those, not counting WIPs, it'd most likely be Across the Sea, which I wrote on my phone while sitting on the kitchen floor.

Favorite thing I wrote: ALMOST ALL OF THEM. In all seriousness though, there are a few that have a special place in my heart, and the most important one is Across the Sea. I'd been wanting to explore how Marian processes/copes with Thane's death pretty much since the day I created her, but I never got around to putting any of it on paper until the time came for me to say goodbye to my dog, a 17yo beagle named Maggie we adopted in 2019, last February.

It was an absolutely hellish series of events just in those few days alone: I had a sleep study done which gave me the worst migraine of my life, I threw up in a random parking lot, went home and tried to sleep the migraine off, and was woken up a few hours later to my mom sitting on my bed and saying, quietly, "Maggie's dying". My migraine quit mattering at that point. I sat with her on the couch for hours, held her paw, petted her softly. My parents took turns sitting with her in the living room overnight.

Ultimately, she was just suffering so much for so long we had to take her to the vet. It was a weekend, so it was going to be hours before they opened. Maggie got up and stumbled to the kitchen, and she laid down in front of the door to the garage, and I just...sat with her. There was nothing I could do to help or save her, so I kept her company in her last hours. In the midst of moving and the uncertainty surrounding my health, my new disabilities, traumatizing doctor appointment after traumatizing doctor appointment, I was having to say goodbye to the greatest light and joy of my life a mere 6 months after we lost the dog we've had since I was 3 years old (a shih tzu named Reggie, who wore the pride of his breed like a royal mantle and never stopped carrying himself like a king, even when he didn't recognize us anymore).

Maybe it's silly to compare the loss of a dog to the loss of a lover, but...things just clicked in my brain. I wrote Across the Sea for and about Thane and Marian, yes, but it was for me and my beagle, too, in equal measure. Thane was terminally ill but even so he died quite unexpectedly (THANKS KAI LENG), and the same was true of Maggie. So it was....maybe it's a silly thought, but it was a vent piece. I understood my grief through the lens of Marian's, since hers was so much easier to tackle than my own in its huge overwhelming weight. I'm a very private person with big emotions, and my grief was - and is - a very personal thing. Something I needed to keep close to my chest, hidden, at the time. To write Marian's grief as I waited with Maggie for the inevitable, it was like I had a companion, a friend sitting with me in that grief. I understood Marian much better then.

So perhaps mechanically speaking, Across the Sea isn't my best piece (I'm honestly not certain where it ranks quality-wise), but it is....the writing equivalent of those pendants that carry your loved one's ashes, for me. And it's done quite well on AO3. Knowing that people have enjoyed this piece that is so precious to me and comes from a place of such deep sorrow...there is no greater honor I could ask for, I think. It's a fitting tribute to a character and franchise I love, that's gotten me through many hard times, and to the beagle that made the horrors of life worth living.

(Aside from that, my other favorites are broken body built anew (first trilogy piece), Going Over Jordan (first longfic), In this darkness on my own, Farewell to Arms, Des profondeurs dans la nuit, and the ME3 early game Morrilenko duology Never Enough/In the shadow of your heart.)

Favorite thing I read: Imma be real with you chief, I have.....not read much. Not as far as books go, anyway. But I've sure read some amazing fic and interactive fiction games!!

I reread a bunch of stuff, partly to examine the technical strengths of my fave writers and stories, and partly because hey, they're my favorite stories!! Off the top of my head, the pieces I reread were: Flotsam, Ain't Sentimental, and Loose Ends by @asaara-writes; Sorrow and Resistance by @/myrini; and while I didn't get the chance to reread/finish these like I'd hoped, A Lesson in Drowning by @theherocomplex, Where the Winds of Fortune Take Me and Lovers in a Dangerous Time by pikapeppa are bookmarked both on AO3 and in my brain for the same reasons as the shorter pieces

everything @coldshrugs has written in the past year or two. Both as a writer and as a reader, shorter form fiction is more accessible to my migraine-addled brain (I love reading long stuff but it's often migraine trigger T^T) and Azia's a MASTER of short fiction???? So much punch packed into such concise words!! Incredible clarity and emotional depth!!!! There are many writers on this site that I admire and respect greatly, and Azia is one of them

My favorite IF this year is 100% Wayfarer (@/idrellegames). I haven't been able to focus on it as much as I'd have liked, but the COMPLEXITY the DEPTH. I'm in awe of it and Idrelle. The scope of the project is so massive and the intrigue and depth of the story and characters is incredible to see, Idrelle is a one-person-army of a writer. It'd be easy to think that Wayfarer is made by a team, but nope! It's all the genius and dedication of Idrelle. Having followed Wayfarer from the beginning, the only words I can describe it is awe-inspiring

My writing goals are going in a separate post because this is about 19 times longer than I meant it to be DHFLJKDSLKJHG. If you've read this far, thank you so much!!!!!!! I know it probably got a little more personal and a little bit sadder than you were expecting, so thanks for sticking with me- and I don't blame you an ounce if you skim-read this or skipped some sections. It's a lot of words!

Happy New Year, everyone!! You guys make Tumblr great, and without the people I've met through this site, I would've missed out on not only tons of awesome media, but all y'all super cool folks and your blorbos!!! Keep on creating, everybody. Your stories, your art, your headcanons and metas and dumb jokes, you bring light into my life, and the lives of others. I want you to know that your works bring comfort and happiness to the life of one lost and drifting young woman...and I want to thank you for it, sincerely. I know for a fact I'm not the only person whose life is made better by your presence. The fact that we haven't met in-person doesn't lessen your impact by an ounce.

[tokiro07]

Since you read a lot of Shonen jump, is there manga there that isn't that "mainstream" that you wish more people knew about? (Besides Undead unluck and cypher academy)

Aside from the countless manga that I've watched in horrors as they've drowned in the Swamp of Cancelation, I'm gonna go with the ones that weren't big enough to make the trek westward in the days before simul-releases, most notably Medaka Box and Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro

In Japan, all of Yuusei Matsui's works are hits, but over here, it's pretty much only Assassination Classroom so far. Elusive Samurai will undoubtedly get a huge windfall when the anime starts, but Neuro? The anime was on Crunchyroll and had a limited undubbed digital release through Viz, but otherwise it has no presence here at all. Which is a shame, cus it's the best of Matsui's work in my opinion

Sadly, both Neuro and Medaka were just too early. Today, everything in Jump at least gets translated, even if they don't get physical releases, but both of those are stuck with fan translations of...let's say inconsistent quality. I guess that's better than what Psyren got, at least...

Addendum: Hinomaru Zumou arguably arrived at a worse time, since it was in the process of ending when the simul-releases began. We got the first few chapters and the last several translated, but now there's a huge dearth of content that only has a fan translation, and reading everything through fan sites results in poorly formatted official pages that are almost never arranged properly when double-pages come up, inherently making the fan experience worse. I hope that Viz will go back and finish it sooner than later, but I don't even know if they're ever going to do it, and the lackluster anime adaptation preventing the series from gaining enough demand to warrant doing so doesn't help

[helloquotemyfoot]

Book Backlog Busting Reading Challenge

Update two: electric boogaloo. I have finished five books since my last appearance! Yes some of them I read through so fast I didn't get the chance to mention them in the last post. This is how I get into trouble. So let's start with those ones first.

The Appeal by Janice Hallett. FINISHED. This was a fun and easy read in the epistolary style (the entire book is told through text messages, emails, and other documentation). Epistolary is always fun to read and the particular style of this book gave the feeling of snooping on the neighbours and getting all the hot goss without the guilt of intruding on other peoples' lives. As a mystery though, it was only "okay". The framing device is two junior lawyers doing unbiased analysis of the case for their boss in order to (he thinks) get an innocent person out of prison. But you aren't told who this party is until the last third of the book. The murder victim themselves isn't confirmed until halfway through the book. A crucial fact that you NEED to know in order to guess at the motive of the person who actually did it (which is very convoluted but anyway) is only revealed at the 1/3 mark and in order to use that fact to guess at the murder motive you would need to carefully re-read 250 pages, not JUST the specific emails you are actually directed to. This is not only unrealistic but is just not a good use of the format of a book like this. Worth reading, but I would borrow rather than buy for sure.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. FINISHED. I first read this book about a decade ago and really didn't enjoy it but decided to give it another chance after embarking on a Jane Austen re-read-athon last year. It's certainly better than I remembered, but you can tell it's one of Austen's earlier novels. The two actual relationships of the book are built up entirely by telling, not showing, leaving me much more on board with Elinor/Colonel Brandon than any other relationship in the novel. Apart from the absurdity of Mr and Mrs John Dashwood, I also really missed Austen's signature wit. I suspect the intention was for Marianne's dramas to be inherently satirical, but instead they were just annoying. Maybe some of her friends bothered her about how it should have been Elinor and Brandon who got together, because in Austen's other works she is very careful that the central couple be seen interacting. Genuinely still baffled at the construction of this book honestly.

And the other books I DID tell you about!

Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time #6). FINISHED. You can see the size of the books and number of subplots is starting to get away from Jordan a bit here, as Nynaeve and Elayne end up having a plot line that entirely consists of "fuck around until we can go to Ebou Dar", but it's not to the point where the story was too bogged down by it. Jordan's idea of normal marital conflict is really annoying however and well worth prolonging the resolution of all the romantic arcs. I loved Perrin/Faile in previous books but not in this one, my god.

First Contact: the Cult of Progress by David Olusoga. FINISHED. Due to the size of the book I didn't realise how actually short it was, only about 300 pages. I could have finished this ages ago! It was a fun and interesting read, but necessarily limited in scope by the size. I think Olusoga is better when he's given room to roam and draw connections, but it was nice seeing the pretty reproduced artworks.

The War on Heresy by R I Moore. FINISHED. Oh boy, I was excited when the author promised his was a controversial conclusion and I wasn't disappointed. Moore argues, convincingly and cogently, that the "Cathar" heretics of popular history, and indeed academic history, did not really exist and were entirely a construction of the church establishment, all the "heresies" a product of the centralising and reforming church mission and how that interacted with local traditions, the Languedoc being distinguished only by the fact that centralisation had not penetrated there yet and it therefore looked more backwards in comparison to the rest of Europe. Any formal "Cathar heresy" was only established because of this persecution, creating new meaning in continued association with "the good men". The whole book is very interesting and the argument well done, and I lament by no buying rule because the further reading looks delicious. Will certainly return to this book again in the future!

As for my up nexts, I have a few on the go as well as the next Wheel of Time waiting in the wings.

Femina by Janina Ramirez. Promising a medieval history centred on women. I have been wanting this book for ages and waiting for the cheaper paperback to come out.

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North. Started on a whim because I wasn't quite ready to dive back into Wheel of Time, it's so far an interesting mic of post-apoc dystopia, solarpunk, and fantasy. The climate change agenda has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, which is exactly how I like my climate change agendas and exactly the level of subtlety which the subject needs.

A Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time #7). Much shorter than the last few, by which I mean it's less than 800 pages altogether.

Meetings With Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel. My chonky history book of choice for a while. What could be more joyful to someone who loves history and books than reading about old books? And look at it! It's so pretty!

104 books remaining!

[teddyoverthinks]

a conversation about borrowing ideas in literature

teddyoverthinks: hahha I just feel so bad for stealing the bucket thing. I purposefully didn't read any izzy/roach beach scenes while writing, but it must have stuck with me subconsciously, or something.

@bedalk: Haha but that’s the beauty of fandom! We can influence each other!

teddyoverthinks: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think I just get annoyed when its not conscious.

It’s definitely my favorite thing about fanfiction—that it’s a way for literature to be retold, which literature should be.

I hate that copyright and trademark put limits on retelling stories and changing only a little.

@bedalk: Yes exactly! I just love how fan fic builds off of other media. But yeah, it sucks how copyright Iimits people and stunts sharing creativity.

teddyoverthinks: That's a big reason why I made this account, actually. I think the retelling of stories is inherently sacred, whether it's connected to a religious faith or not.

Like, the formation of any canon of lore about one subject means it's important to a lot of people. I love to investigate those canons, whether they’re centered around the classic characters/tales like Heracles or Odysseus or Sherlock Holmes; or new ones like Harry Potter or OFMD’s version of Blackbeard & the Gentleman Pirate. I especially like looking into well established canon-fanon like Star Trek or Tolkien’s stuff*. 

*(Both of which have interesting idiosyncracies. Star Trek has had fanon become canon, and Tolkien wrote as if he was translating a canon of works coming from various sources.)

The internet speeds up the process of the canon-creation we see with Star Trek and it especially speeds up the process of creating canons in general. Fanfiction has something of a limited population, but writing a modern AU of the BBC Merlin telling of the story of King Arthur is faster than creating a remake of the movie version of the musical that was a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet*. 

*(I here referred to West Side Story (2021)).

it was Tolkien who said

[Folklorists and anthropologists using fairy stories as a quarry from which to dig evidence about matters in which they are interested] are inclined to say that any two stories that are built round the same folk-lore motive, or are made up of a generally similar combination of such motives, are ‘the same stories.’ We read that… ‘The Black Bull of Norroway is Beauty and the Beast’ or ‘is the same story as Eros and Psyche’…  Statements of that kind may express (in undue abbreviation) some element of truth; but they are not true in a fairy-story sense, they are not true in art or literature. It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count. …To take the extreme case of Red Riding Hood: it is of merely secondary interest that the re-told versions of this story, in which the little girl is saved by wood-cutters, is directly derived from Perrault’s story in which she was eaten by the wolf. The really important thing is that the later version has a happy ending (more or less, and if we do not mourn the grandmother overmuch), and that Perrault’s version had not. And that is a very profound difference, to which I shall return.

—JRR Tolkien, “Origins” section of Tree and Leaf: On Fairy-Stories

Tolkien argued that a retelling of a story is a new story entirely, because the changes reflect the themes and emotions of the piece.

It is my belief that stories build on other stories whether we want them to or not. Authors who do it knowingly are more likely to create something of worth, because working with purpose to create a good collage generally ends better than battling to create a story that's simultaneously going to be marketable and 'unique'. So, I guess it stressed me out a bit to have borrowed unknowingly because I like the feeling of working with purpose.

Hm. I think this rant will be my next post.

[tuiyla]

Do you think Glee would have changed for the better if it had been a cable show instead of a network one? If there were less episodes, I tend to think the characters would stay more consistent, there'd be less plotlines that went nowhere (though that's not a given, eg AHS from RM himself) and most of the songs would service the story. However, I'm not sure there'd be enough time for a minor character like Santana to stand out and eventually grow in prominence, so idk. Thoughts?

I'm not sure Glee's a show that would have benefitted from fewer episodes. The structure of tributes and lessons of the week in-between openers, closers and competition episodes works well. Sure, the theme is sometimes forced and the show devolves into trying to cover any and all social issues, but the 22-episode format works. Glee, at its best, is a true ensemble. You simply cannot be an ensemble with this many cast members under 10 or so episodes. And I'm not saying Glee was actually a true ensemble most of the time, but the traditional 22-episode network TV season at least presented that opportunity.

I'm not sure fewer episodes would have helped with consistency. Sure, maybe less padding and fewer storylines going nowhere but if it's still the same writers, the constraint of the shorter season is only going to help them so much. And maybe it would result in slightly tighter storytelling, but we just wouldn't get the same Glee Club with the same themes and tributes and most definitely not the same attention paid to members other than Finchel, maybe Kurt and to a lesser extent Puck and Quinn (and Will ofc). I'd personally take a network Glee season with horrible inconsistencies and dropped storylines but with my Santana and Brittany and Mercedes over a potentially better written story that's just about Finchel and Will.

I think it's generous to assume that the songs would serve the story better just because they would have less times and fewer songs to work with. What I see happening is them keeping the Finchel features and Rachel ballads and cutting down on the already disproportionate ratio of the rest of the club. Which, again, no thank you.

Cable also has an altogether different vibe, especially in 2009. Glee's blend of comedy and drama, more so drama and camp than satire as it went on, just wouldn't work as a cable show. Or, well, I guess that's a big topic to get into but they'd be under more pressure to "choose" and let's be honest, they wouldn't choose prestige TV. And yeah, like you say, the natural progression of chs like Santana is inherent to how Glee was filmed. To those 22 episode early seasons, to how there was space for her to grow into. Or, rather, in Santana/Naya's case, an opportunity for her to make that space. Organic growth and spontaneity happens in cable but idk if it would have happened here.

I have a now year-old post that I often like to link back to, a) because no one has read it lol and b) because it explores the ways in which I think Glee's problems could have been solved. I.e. restructuring in how it approaches the cast, songs, etc. And maybe there's a cable version, but I just think network and the 22-episode season was the way to go for Glee. But just saying that as someone who doesn't like the more limited (and limiting) focus of season 1 and would not have liked Glee as a movie (because it would just been season 1A but even less inclined to feature the more minor characters).

[thecornwall]

Cornwall’s Random Card of the Day #208: Griffin Aerie

I honestly thought this was a land when I saw the title. Like, isn’t there a weird griffin-pumping land? I’m sure I’ve faced it before.

Griffin Aerie is a build-around uncommon from Magic 2021. Pays off significant life-gain with a nice 2/2 flier. Seems a bit steep to pull off but if your opponent is pumping out griffins AND gaining 3+ life you’re gonna be in for some tough times.

I honestly have mixed feelings about life gain as a build-around, as it is inherently passive and incentivises decks that just sit back, gain life, and hope to grind you out. I used to be way more into Magic Arena a few months back, and of course I went aggro, cause of course I’m gonna go aggro and there were just. SO. MANY. GODDAMN. LIFE-GAIN DECKS. About 2/3 of the decks I faced were some kinda lifegain build which would counter mine completely. And would be real slow in doing so. Gimme a short game when I’m trounced completely over a slow game I eke out any day. This was the result of having multiple build-around life-gain strats in several sets all in standard. I guess the increase of sets per standard format will inevitably bring forth more of certain old reliable limited archetypes, and in this case it was incredibly frustrating to fight, kinda just made me feel like aggro of any kind was a fool’s errand.

[arifffitriii]

"bL0gGinG is d3Ad" says the Ipad Kid.

Is blogging dead? Some might say the act of sharing your personal opinions/comments on the “cloud” (also known as blogging), is 6 feet deep under the Internet’s graveyard. Although my high school friends would probably laugh at me for having a blog in 2022, personally I still think that blogging is still alive and healthy. In other words, RELEVANT.

Blooging? Blagging? Blogging? What’s that? Although I found it an inherently funny word, the word blog is just a shorter version of the word “weblog”. So basically, when you’re blogging you’re just uploading new material to your own website page for your friends(if u have one) or community.

Blog? i only know Vlog...yea, it's pretty much the same thing just in a different form. In blogs, we write the content and text but in vlogs the content is in video form~.

There’s no way Blogging is better than on TikTok and Instagram…right? Welp, it’s a no-brainer who’s gonna win if we put blogging sites like WordPress and Tumblr Vs trendy, popular social media apps like Instagram and TikTok.

Blogs has been around longer than vlogging, and it used to be other's source of information...but now a blog would receive a lesser number of visitors. But a vlog will get way more numbers in terms of view an reach especially when they can post it on TikTok and Instagram.

Why i think blogging is relevant at this era? 1 thing. Flexibility. As in the flexibility of the length of information that can be given in flexible duration. Reels and TikTok have their own limit in terms of length and duration, but fortunatelyyyy blogs can be either short or long form depending on the topic. So they can put more information in the blogs.

Not just that, Reels and TikTok obviously only support video format whereas blogs can have everything. Text, images and even videos. So i guess it can be used by people a lot more effectively.

If blogging isn’t relevant then what is? You.

[kellylor]

Ok, so, here's a lot of thoughts about queer identity have been rattling around in my head for the past..18 months or so.

My big work project last year involved, among other things, helping design a form for collecting demographic information from the public, to be submitted to my employer, a US government agency. We want to collect race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation information in order to be able to look for patterns of discrimination in certain financial transactions. There's a lot of poorly-designed government forms out there, and part of my role in the project was making sure the layout and instructions for the form were clear. There was a whole working group that made recommendations for language and format on the gender and sexual orientation questions, and the label we ended up with for sexual orientation was "LGBTQIA+". Which is fine, I guess, and very government form-y. It mostly did fine in the usability testing that I ran (though a distinct subgroup of older participants who spoke English as a second language didn't know what it meant until I listed out the words).

But while we were working on the layout of the form, I had a whole series of conversations with the other designer on the project about the impossibility of truly representing someone's identity as a series of discrete checkboxes on a form. Especially because things like racial and ethnic groups are fucking conceptual messes made up based on bad ideas, there are no truly good ways to neatly capture that as data. The sex and gender identity situation is less, uh, fully fictional, but still complex and messy precisely because they ARE rooted in real biology and real lived experience. Because biology actually dgaf about anyone's neat conceptual boxes, bodies will still exist the way they exist and people are gonna feel and behave the way they feel and behave, with a huge range of variation and exceptions to rules.

You have to just pick something as flexible as you can make it, try to be as consistent as possible about it, and know the limitations inherent in the data. For our purposes it's mostly not a big problem to not capture a full, nuanced picture of a specific individual, because the goal of the data is to be able to identify broad statistical trends. And ultimately what we want to learn from the form is "are you at risk of discrimination based on your identity?" and try to give people options that they recognize well enough to self-report. But also, because it is government data, there is a lot of pressure to be granular, to offer extremely precise subcategories. And sometimes that can be a really important goal, because we've seen things like the way lumping "Asian-American and Pacific Islander" into one category fails to show how, for example, people of Indian descent in the US have significantly different experiences than Cambodians or Pacific Islanders. But it's also impossible to do in a truly accurate way that will give everyone good options for self-identification. There are just so many niche experiences and only so much room on a printed page. Also so many unanswerable questions like, Are Brazilians Hispanic? Fuck if I know! The way racists treat people from Latin America is both shitty and ideologically incoherent, I don't know how to put that on a form.

So there's always a lot of tension between the weird messy reality that exists, and the urge to turn it all into clean, oversimplified categorical boxes. And LGBTQIA+, and any other variation of the alphabet soup, always strikes me as a term fundamentally starting from a position of atomized categorical boxes, straining under the weight of reality. The first time I ever heard an "official" term, suitable for use on something like a government form, that was not just "gay", it was "LGBT", and I encountered it in the context of trying to raise the profile of trans people, because just sticking them under the umbrella of "gay" sure elides a lot of differences between cis and trans experiences. But then you know, there keep being more specific identities that get pointed out, and that have to be added, because like, you have to put everyone in the right little subgroup in order to decide whether they count or not. I mean, the number of times I have seen the notes on a post talking about some iteration of LGBTQetc as an umbrella term turn into arguments about what some of the specific letters mean is...the same as the number of posts I've read talking about the terms. People who are ostensibly on the same side of trying to support a community, however you want to label it, still cannot get over arguing about the damn label. Because the alphabet soup is at its core a disaggregated approach masquerading as a flexible umbrella term, and you can't get way from that tension!

Queer, though. Queer is deliberately not trying to sublabel everyone. You don't need to fit into anyone else's defined boxes. Again, there is a time and place for understanding and discussing the differences in experiences among different people, but for me, in terms of community, the place I want to start from is building solidarity. And we all have an extremely important thing in common: we are the enemies of heteronormativity. The people most invested in perpetuating heteronormativity fully regard us all as their enemies, regardless of whichever slot they've decided to put us into! I have questioned a lot, over the years, as an ace woman who has only ever dated men, whether I get to "count" as queer, but that has bothered me less over time as a) I have come to understand queer identity as being as much about political solidarity as about my personal characteristics and b) I have learned that asking "am I queer enough to count?" is an extremely queer-ass experience. For myself at least, asking, "Does my experience conform to heteronormative expectations?" Is much easier to answer (definitely not, to extent I have experienced ace-related backlash or oppression in my own life it's all originated in de-legitimizing queer sex broadly, or in pressure to make conventional romantic life choices), and much more clarifying than reading a bunch of arguments about whether the A in LGBTQIA stands for "ally" or "asexual".

So, that's why I have tried to be more definite in thinking of myself as queer, and why I specifically prefer "queer" as a label. And also why trans rights absolutely do not threaten my rights as a cis woman, celebrating kinky sex is not acephobic, and kink belongs at pride.

[magpiejay1234]

https://twitter.com/YuGiOh_OCG_INFO/status/1638510849630388224

https://ygorganization.com/dune-mirror-formation-of-the-ten-sacred-treasures/

We don’t have a huge reveal for today, but we got possibly the most important card for the next three years. It is Mirror Formation of the Ten Sacred Treasures, a Kuji-Kuri Curse for Level 10 and lower monsters.

We were supposed to get this card back in Series 11 (Rise of the Duelist to Cyberstorm Access) due to massive influx of Level 10 Main Deck monsters, but for some reason it was never printed. Now, in the first set of Series 12, as the first daily reveal, it is shown.

This is an insanely pivotal card for many, many GX-era archetypes, and ARC-V archetypes, and antagonist Decks from various series including Dark Signers’ Earthbound Immortal (well, it is actually kinda the reverse), and Aporia’s Level 10 Meklord Astros, as well as Z-One’s Timelords (lol this got revealed the day prior to Z-One’s Duel Links unlock event’s start). 

What this card means for casual animé fans is, finally, the massive amount of unprinted, predominantly Season 1 ARC-V boss monsters are now open as options, but also your favourite GX-era characters who got recent Level 10 boss monsters will get pumped in lots of new support. And that is the merely the surface level of possibilities of this card can unlock. For example, because of The Legendary Exodia Incarnate statue we are getting, and the previous Three-Eyed Ghost reveal, we might even get main set Exodia support for next DM main set. Or rest of the Dark Signers in Duel Links. Or main set Slifer support for the next DM set.

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Other deets:

*This card’s slot number is 64, which is below the new Evolution Pill card. This doesn’t tell us much, but it means Spells go at least to slot 64.

*The other Levels without Kuji-Kuri Curse/Trade-In analogue are:

**Level 12

**Level 11

**Level 5

**Level 4, 3, 2, 1 (Level 4 has a few draw cards, though. Soul Transition for Normal Summonable/Settable cards, and Gemini Spark for Level 4 Geminis).

Next target should logically be Level 11, but due to recent Level 12 support, I’m guessing we will be getting Level 12 before that. Once Level 12, and 11 draw cards are released, we will likely see the franchise’s first Level 13 monster, to match Numerounious Numeriona. I don’t what will happen after that though (maybe we will finally get LINK-7/8? Also Rush Duels don’t have the inherent Level limit OCG cards do caused by the layout, since the Level is shown inside the star ball as a number, not as x amount of star balls. They can go to Level Infinity if they want.)

Edit: (For a little bit of context, Sacred Sword of Seven Stars (for Level 7) was released in Lord of the Tachyon Galaxy (16th February 2013) as Elemental Lord support, and got reprinted as Yuya support in Structure Deck: Master of Pendulum (20th June 2015). Celestial Observatory (for Level 6) was printed in Cybernetic Horizon (14th April 2018), and Kuji-Kiri Curse (for Level 9) was printed in Ignition Assault (12th October, 2019).) 

*A bit aesthetic difference, but Duelist Nexus tweets use English (well Engrish) date stamp, likely meaning OCG Twitter is now trying to appeal to international audiences. In addition to this, the reveal’s background uses muted colours, similar to VRAINS era reveals, but also heavy shadows, similar to DM era sets. This might hint this Series’ cards are meant to appeal more to older audiences of YGO, as we get more classic themes being transferred to Rush Duels.

This might also imply more of a focus to original 3 shows, but more likely it means ARC-V is old to be considered nostalgic (which basically how they treated ZEXAL’s anniversary 2 years ago.)

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Tomorrow will be Z-One’s Duel Links quotes hopefully, but it will also be the next batch of April 2023 Tournament Pack. We will see if there is anything interesting in them.