#it's a great way to be

[softpine]

all this talk about storytelling has made me appreciate just how many things i’ve learned how to create for my story! i was tired of throwing good ideas away because i thought they were impossible to create, so at some point i decided.. fuck it, i’m teaching myself how to recolor, make skin details, make accessories & poses, create & edit meshes, etc. so i just wanted to put some of my favorite creations in one place to remind myself how far i’ve come :’) and hopefully it will be inspirational for anyone who has also worried that you won’t be able to execute your ideas the way you want to! you can!! the sky is the limit!! and i’m always here to help if you need it 💖

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[yamada-ryo]

I was talking to the guy with the rifle on the island in disco elysium and he was talking about the past and getting deep into it and suddenly there's a whole screen effect and I was thinking about how it was really cool but no it just happened that my entire screen just decided to die right there and then

[cozymodeonpoint]

senshi fans: learning how to make nutritious meals for themselves

laios fans: down bad

marcille fans: lesbianism

chilchuck fans: putting that man in situations

[frownyalfred]

“You wanna fight someone, you fight me” seemed like a silly rule at first. but after there was more than one batkid living in the Manor at the same time, suddenly the prospect of having to spar with Bruce on the mats because you couldn’t stop yourself from throwing a punch at Tim earlier is terrifying.

[orriculum]

"all men are evil" is radfem/terf rhetoric, but clarifying "all cis men" because you want to signal that you're not transphobic doesn't work because it's still deeply rooted in radfem beliefs. It's saying you believe there's something inherently evil in being born/assigned "male", and you carry it over in how you treat ppl who transition in or out of that gender. "All cis men are evil", is gender essentialist and you can't get around that.

Fucking tired of ppl who think their terf soundbites with a fresh coat of paint are sooo progressive

[descendant-of-truth]

Shipping is fun and all but I swear every single time someone makes a comment, whether as a joke or in a legitimate analysis, about there being "no other explanation" for a pair's interactions, I lose just a bit more of my sanity

Like, no, you guys don't get it. Romance is not about the Amount of devotion, it's about the COLOR. the FLAVOR of it all. a character can be just as devoted to their platonic friend as they are to their romantic partner, and they don't love either of them more, just differently.

But because the majority of people still have it stuck in their minds that romance exists on the highest tier of love, I'm stuck seeing endless takes that boil down to "these two care about each other too much for it to NOT be romantic" as if that's the core determining factor to how literally any of this works

In conclusion: stop telling me that I don't understand the story if I don't interpret the leads as romantic, I am TIRED

[jedi-starbird]

Palpatine: My boy, I'm afraid to report that Master Kenobi is very likely sleeping with your wife.

Anakin, who knows for a fact that Obi-Wan is sleeping with his Commander, a good chunk of Ghost company, the Organas and Quinlan Vos: ...where is he finding the fucking time???

Palpatine, oblivious: Oh I've heard from some very reliable sources that-

Anakin: *pulls out a spexcel spreadsheet, the 3rd System Army's shared spoogle calender and a calculator*

Anakin: Your Excellency. That's just. not logistically possible.

[mwagneto]

the companion will go oh god doctor who is that?? and the doctor will get all serious and somber and say listen. he's the most evil creature in the universe. he's the worst enemy i've ever faced. he's horrible and unpredictable and you can never ever let your guard down. and then the villain will walk into the room like this

[nerdpoe]

Danny is about to be kidnapped in Gotham This is not a good time.

He's studying for the SAT, he's already been kidnapped by Vlad like, four times that week and it was a fucking Tuesday, he forgot his wallet at his new apartment, locked himself out of said new apartment (he could phase through the door but that wasn't the point), he's just been informed that the grant he applied for was denied so he needs to ask his mom and dad for college funds when he'd already told them he had it covered, and just...it was shit.

It had been shit. The entire week had been awful and annoying and he was ready to either murder everyone on the planet or go find a corner to cry in for the next three days.

So when the band of wild goons working for whatever villain of the week pulled up and tried to kidnap him, he snapped.

He used them to vent.

Shouted about how terrible his day had been, how terrible his week had been, how he'd already been kidnapped by his creepy godfather who was way too into him, how college funding was shit and the grant system was rigged, and how he'd have to call a locksmith or break down the door to his own apartment if he wanted to go to bed-all of it. He unloaded all of his frustration.

The goons actually backed off.

One of them gave him an awkward side hug and told him it'd get better.

Danny wasn't paying attention to his surrounding. He doesn't realize that the whole thing was livestreamed.

So when he gets home to his apartment later that day, his door is opened for him by the vigilante Spoiler before he can even turn intangible.

She brought over BatBurger and kidnapped Bruce Wayne, Gotham's bumbling Prince, to talk about college grants.

[andthebeanstalk]

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

[the-one-who-lambs]

This is a super super gentle reminder not to put your favorite authors on a pedestal. We're real people living average lives and not trying to be influencers. We criticize ourselves enough and we don't want to be held to an invisible standard (we start to worry we fail to exceed our own selves) or compared to other writers (we are not competing) or tailor our craft to cater to a wider audience (the right people will find you).

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i vote that next year instead of reading Dracula we do a Jeeves & Wooster Book Club. those two never got the rabid tumblr shipping fandom they deserved (disqualified for the sheer technicality of being published a century too soon). we must correct this injustice

[crescentfool]

december 31st but i make it silly (based on a tumblr post, below the cut!)

everyone say thank you xenia, i made adjustments for the december 31st context but nyx avatar is still fitting.

original draft of the last panel. i considered putting the bi flag but i didn't know how to squeeze it in. we love ryoji mochizuki in this house.

[touchlikethesun]

the naming of hunger games characters is absolutely masterful. each one could have a whole page written about it, and tho i can't say anything that hasn't already been pointed out a million times, i do want to highlight one generality. most of the names in the districts are one of two things: common words (altered or not) to become names, often in line with their district's culture (Gloss, Thresh), or phonetic shifts of contemporary common names (peeta being derived from peter). this suggests, without changing how the characters speak, the idea of linguistic evolution, which in turn is representative of change and of local cultural. the districts are a people in dialogue and evolution with one another. and now compare this with the names of those in the capitol. off the top of my head i think of Plutarch, Coriolanus, Flavius, fucking Caesar. these are, one, roman names, which further serves to reinforce the comparison between the capitol and rome and all that entails, but these roman names, names that have been etched in stone and unchanged for millennia, are a stark contrast with the alive and dynamic names of the districts. it's just another (not so) subtle way that collins reminds us of the differences and the values of the capitol versus the districts.

[aethersea]

honestly it was a red flag when bbc sherlock went “well obviously the word written in blood isn’t the german word for revenge, it’s clearly the beginning of the name ‘rachel’, what absolute idiot would fail to see that” when in the original novel it is, in fact, the german word for revenge, which sherlock points out gleefully to a roomful of policemen who all figure it’s the beginning of the name ‘rachel.’

and by red flag I mean it was a clear sign that the adaptation was trying to one-up the source material, instead of engaging with it with love.