#original screencaps from reddit

[aroguexenolith]

I opened tumblr to 78 notifications (which is a lot compared to my usual!) and had a brief moment of excitement when I thought that maybe lots of people also wanted an Average Not-Exciting Adult Discord server.

Ahhhh but no, the gneiss post is going around again.

[elodieunderglass]

hi! i was just wondering if you’re getting a piece of this pie. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/voidrealmminis/rise-of-the-eldertubbies?ref=profile_saved_projects_live

Oh my goodness! Haha thanks for showing me! And no, of course, this guy is still selling my dream while claiming it’s totally nothing to do with me. I hadn’t heard about it so thank you.

For those just joining us, here is the saga of the elder teletubbies:

1. in 2017 I posted a dream I had on Tumblr. In the dream I discovered that the childish teletubbies shown on BBC’s Teletubbies are merely the children of a species that grows up to be forest cryptids as adults. The post contained a detailed character description explaining how the children’s simple antennae become more complex antlers; their coats become thicker hair; their eldritch screens are unknowable; here, look:

The adult Teletubbies have more branching, complex antlers and shaggy coats. They are less brightly coloured. They are terrifyingly large. Their strangely human faces, emerging from the thick fur, are unquestionably adult; remote, serene, reproachful. Their television screens are glitchy, esoteric and unknowable. They are cryptids whose public exploitation has undermined their rarity and their strange, alien dignity.

That’s a pretty clear description.

2. The post quickly gained attention and many people drew art, made sculptures, designed in-depth character concepts, and even made DnD character sheets and entries with detailed notes. It was 2017. The post got over 90k notes. It had an extremely clear description of the cryptid in it. This wasn’t at all obscure.

3. The post and four pieces of the concept art, including the first piece by were screencapped and posted on r/tumblr. The post included this art by the now-deactivated @finoliatav which is, I think, the first piece of art. Most screencaps don’t show that it’s animated! Once you see it you can no longer pretend that any more work needs to be done in designing these characters, really - they’re all variations on a very clear theme.

4. A guy called Jars started drawing the BBC Teletubbies as adult Teletubbies. He noted on Reddit that his inspiration for the first one was the r/tumblr post but after that, he considered it entirely his own creative work. He drew each of the 4 BBC Teletubbies as adults using my character description and wrote a little story about how his character had stumbled upon them in the woods. He’s a good artist and his work went viral on Reddit and instagram. Those places being separate from Tumblr by the walls of the enclosure, they quickly believed the Jars was being highly original and praised him for it.

5. jars got carried away by his fame and started merchandising for all he’s worth. He’s selling elder teletubbies placemats. He got a collaborator to help him make and sell plushies.

6. Plushies of my character design applied to BBC characters. Jars sells them. To people. Who buy them. He sells these.

7. I think this is like… his job.

8. It has been years of this. I don’t think he has actually come up with anything else to sell by himself. But given that he now has millions upon millions of views on platforms I don’t use, let alone dominate (Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok) he seems to have fully subscribed to the idea that this is his THING.

9. After a while I wrote him a friendly email expressing that since my original dream was very much about discomfort with how the teletubbies were being exploited, I didn’t mind him selling his own art but that I wasn’t happy with him selling plushes based on my writing.

10. He wrote back along the lines of it all being his original intellectual property and absolutely nothing to do with me, etc, so jog on and don’t interfere.

11. I’m not entirely sure where the original intellectual property is when taking BBC characters and drawing them according to someone else’s detailed description of how to “evolve” them (branching antlers, shaggy coats, eldritch screens, serene adult human faces) especially having drawn them after seeing four separate detailed reference photos to base your own drawings on; especially when they’re the existing BBC characters from the show and not even your own. Like, Jars, you were given an entire detailed brief, several sets of references, an entire concept and a television show: the only artistic choices made here were to pick up your own personal pen and do the drawing. You have never deviated from my description, which you did not come up with yourself in any way. But okay Jars. You did some real intellectual heavy lifting here, this is Intellectual Property suddenly, and I guess this is your day job!

12. I myself actually have a day job, am capable of generating lots of other original material just for funsies, have never asked you guys for money, and I’m not generally huge jerk I don’t think. Also, I’m uncomfortable but have never been clear on how to stop him - I don’t think I can. So I don’t do much about this, apart from occasionally scream with hilarity with you guys about it.

13. Like this is the opposite of Goncharov. This is a guy making his wage on a 2017 tumblr collaborative shitpost insisting that this is the beautiful fruit of his only brain. And millions of people believe him.

14. There are now YouTube documentaries with millions of views and TikTok lore about Jars, and his lore, the Elder Teletubbies, which apparently he invented. People are making their wage talking about the history of Jars and his teletubbies lore. These documentaries are, if you can’t tell, not especially well-researched, as it is not difficult to find the original elder teletubbies art on the internet, which is all timestamped. Occasionally hilarious people from Tumblr point this out in the comments (thank you, you guys are hilarious) but the juggernaut is unstoppable!

15. Jars is now, apparently, doing a kickstarter to raise money for some kind of DnD sheets using the grown up BBC teletubbies.

16. I will point out that tumblr made and played with DnD teletubbies in 2017 for free and nobody had to pay $3000, but again. The juggernaut is unstoppable.

I have never, ever known what to do about this guy.

I have always been open to advice but genuinely never been able to articulate how it “damages” me, apart from ethical discomfort about how much I hate my writing being monetised by other people, especially when it was about my discomfort with exploitation. The juggernaut is unstoppable though. He fully intends to get thousands of dollars from this. He almost certainly will!

[rallamajoop]

A needlessly detailed analysis of Heisenberg's Conspiracy Board

One of the random details I was most eager to find in the RE8 game assets was Heisenberg's conspiracy board. (It's labeled 'strategy board' in the game files, but I think we all know what we're looking at here.)

The assets consisted of a base layer (below) with separate higher-res photos of Chris, Mia, Rose (with Ethan!) and the other three lords (clean versions of those last three, plus Heisenberg, can be found over here). The actual model is more 3-dimensional than you might think, with many of the photos displayed as separate 'flaps' that stick out from the base board (which does unfortunately make stitching together higher-res screencaps of the full board very difficult).

There are a few reasons why I wanted better pics of the board, but a real big one was catching an in-game glimpse of this one smaller photo on the upper right of some guy in sunglasses and going, wait, is that Wesker?

Having extracted the highest-res version of that photo possible... well, for that to be Wesker, he'd have to have come back to life and aged about 20 years. Which wouldn't entirely be out of character (he's come back from the dead at least once already, and even Chris is looking his age these days) but is really that who it's supposed to be? IDEK, and neither does this one Reddit thread I found discussing the same question.

There are a few other human-faces around the board ‒ mostly some mustachioed dude(s?) ‒ some of them entirely hidden under other photos on the finished board, but none I recognise. Presumably they're meant to be folks who are/were involved with Miranda or other bio-weapons research, past or present, and maybe they're characters set to appear in some future RE installment. But they may just be stock photos, thrown in to fill space.

But having finally posted this thing and come back to it again this morning, I'm looking at that one larger guy in one of those photos and going, wait, isn't that the Duke?

Goddamn, it is, isn't it? You can even see the lapels of his jacket and the curve of the wagon roof over his head. How did I miss that? XD No prizes for guessing why Heisenberg might think he's worth including on a conspiracy board!

Most of the rest of the board is covered with photos of various monstrous bio-weapons. Again, this is probably meant to represent a mix of Miranda's work and that of other bio-weapons manufacturers. Someone more familiar with extended Resi-canon than I am might even be able to identify some of these creatures, but none were immediately familiar to me.

Even the one zombie face below that looks almost exactly like a screencap from that first iconic zombie-reveal-scene from the very first Resident Evil turned out not to be (and yes, I checked both the original version and the remake), though it may still be meant to evoke that moment. The photo behind it, meanwhile, looks to be just a pair of soldats.

The other big 'notice me!' feature is, of course, the big map with 'BSAA Come!!' scribbled on it. The circled target location is the ceremony site, identifiable by the four huge statues, and the date at the bottom (February 10, 2020) is the date of Miranda's planned ceremony (tomorrow morning).

Presumably, this is supposed to be a map the BSAA themselves prepared for troop briefings, but no-one's going to get much out of trying to take this thing too literally. Realistically, the only reason "BSAA Come!!" is written in such big letters here is to let the player know at a glance that Heisenberg is clued in enough to be expecting a BSAA assault.

That's about it for really obvious features. There's not a lot else here that the casual viewer is likely to recognise or find particularly significant. But I'm way past 'casual' in over-analysing this damn game, and I can point out a dozen other features on this board that might (or might not) be awash with implications about all the juicy intel Heisenberg's got his hands on.

Basically, it's time to play my favourite game: Cheaply Reused Asset or Significant Callback?

See, much as I'd love for every last detail on this board to be dense with important lore, the reality is that the player gets barely a few seconds to look at this thing in-game, and so most of what's on it was probably thrown together in a hurry by some overworked member of the asset team without much thought. And nothing demonstrates this better than the fact that two different photo clusters (circled below) from the right edge of the board are duplicated wholesale as you move left across the board.

Someone's just copy-pasted these in their entirety, slightly reduced them in size, and assumed no-one would notice. The asset team is only human, and believes in working smarter not harder as much as anyone.

Then there's the fact that a number of other assets you can find on this board are actually posters advertising fishing equipment, which you can find around the reservoir, near where you pick up the boat key.

Why would Heisenberg include these on his conspiracy board? There's no good reason, they're just a convenient assets to fill in some space.

And then there's my all-time favourite random detail on this board ‒ a completely random photo of a bottle of Dulvey Beer, two bags of Half-Whole flour, and a carton of orange juice.

Now, maybe somewhere in these games, you can find these exact items arranged in this position next to never-before-found coded clue to the future of the series! But more likely, this is just the asset team making an inside-joke about asset recycling, using a picture of some of the most oft-reused assets in the game, on a board that's already covered in reused assets from elsewhere. (Look, I thought it was funny, even if no-one else looking at the board is going to get it.)

So, yeah, a lot of what's on this board means nothing, except that whoever made it had limited time and a lot of space to fill. And That's Okay.

But then we get to the stuff where I do really wanna believe its inclusion means something. For one, the board contains copies of both the mission briefing Chris' team is carrying when they abduct Ethan (the one you find by the overtuned truck), and Rose's BSAA-headered medical checkup report.

I already have this whole theory that that same medical report being leaked to Miranda might just be a major unsung catalyst for how she realised Rose's potential, and thus set all the events of the game in motion. So finding that the same report has made it's way onto Heisenberg's conspiracy board is a lovely bit of potential validation. Similarly, the implication that Heisenberg might have known about Chris' mission to Ethan's home before it even happened has some tantalising implications (or maybe he just found it out by the van where Ethan left it).

Rose's medical report isn't the only BSAA-headered document on the board either ‒ there's another on the top right (outlined in yellow) that doesn't correspond to any in-game asset I can find (presumably it wasn't actually needed for whatever it was created for). There's plenty elsewhere in this game to suggest Miranda has contacts in the BSAA feeding her all their secrets ‒ and whether Heisenberg got these reports from Miranda or independently, the fact he's got them at all suggests one hell of an info-leak.

Speaking of Miranda, you can find a couple of copies of some of her own research notes on Heisenberg's board ‒ this is the same asset used in her lab under the graveyard, where you can find notes about her experiments on 'Alcina D'. So that's another interesting file that it makes total sense Heisenberg might include on his board.

The board also includes a couple of extracts from that issue of The Dulvey Daily from Ethan's home, with the article about the closing of the Baker investigation. Realistically, this is likely to be another case of a random asset being used without much thought, but it does make sense that Heisenberg would have followed that investigation (and I can't help but loved that Heisenberg felt the Horn of Plenty article was worth including in his vast conspiracy-network ‒ I told you they were shady!)

You can find bits of a couple of Heisenberg's own Soldat-x-rays on the board too. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but they do look nicely sinister, so onto the board they go! (In multiple places again)

That's about it for assets I could identify. However, there are also a few photos from around the village itself on the board ‒ two of which were evidently screenshots taken from Ethan's own point of view, given that his gun is clearly visible in the bottom left of the screen in customary position. Objectively, this makes no sense, but it sure does add to that "someone's been watching you" atmosphere that any good conspiracy board should aspire to.

(I also feel like I should totally be recognising that doorway in the photo about the 'o' in 'mother', but can't place it.)

And for one final, bizarre detail, you may notice this weird photo of someone's feet appears in a few places on the board. And it's definitely the same photo ‒ the details line up perfectly, right down to the pin and that bit of string. But for some reason, someone's added a lace skirt to the feet in the example on the left.

You can't even see that skirt in the finished board (it's under Miranda's picture), but it amused me nonetheless.

Before we finish, have a few more close-ups on some of the other weird photos you can find on the board.

So, what conclusions can we draw here? There's a ton of detail on Heisenberg's conspiracy board to suggest he (or perhaps Miranda) has access to files from the BSAA and whoever Chris is now working with/for, that he's researched what happened at Dulvey and has certainly helped himself to Miranda's own files, if you'd like to read significance into what was included on the board. But there's also a ton of complete nonsense, so, you know, pretty much just RE lore operating as per usual.

I hope you've all enjoyed my little descent-into-madness while picking this thing apart.

[esther-dot]

I feel really bad for the originator of the Ashford theory, reading those posts you screencapped. It's not a 'crack theory' (unless they're putting it down because Jonsas took a serious hold of it), since structural foreshadowing is a basic storytelling tool. Hiding poetry in history, which seems a past-time GRRM particularly enjoys--- it's not just there to be there, but to lesson us in reading the past and make us understand the current story more deeply.

We should be confident in our analyses, regardless of whether we share a ship in common (I am do believe in Jonsa, but this goes for everyone), because storytelling can generally be trusted to be intentional. Anybody who wants to act like being incurious is more intellectually justifiable because it's less emotionally fraught is not worth spending time on. It is actually disappointing when stories are not considered and thoughtful (which is not a testament to so-called 'complexity'; The Little Prince is considered and thoughtful)--- fault in reading too much into things usually lay in perspective, less in doubt of substance.

Then again, Originator of Ashord Theory being possessive as claimant probably points more to dismissing it as crack because other people have taken ahold of it in a way they didn't like. If I am perfectly honest, were it not them having noticed it, someone else would have later (and someone else on Reddit did).

It's exactly the sort of thing I look for when I am engaging in a story because it is a tool I see used often. It was what attracted me to Jonsa, not that I was looking for evidence.

(about this ask)

The issue definitely wasn’t a lack of confidence in their own reading, they’re a tumblr BNF! I think Jonsas have written so much about it and so convincingly, it’s become widely viewed as a Jonsa theory and eclipsed the original intent which is their problem with it. Sometime ago someone shared an AltShift video here (a YouTube BNF), and he had included the Ashford Tourney as evidence for Jonsa, so I do think the goal of the blogger now labeling it “crack” is to detract from the Jonsa of it/for shipping reasons, not because they don’t believe in their own work.

As for the broader idea, I certainly agree that pre canon characters and events are written to add depth to the canon events. We can all expect that and look for parallels and contrasts with assurance that they are conversing with each other. It seems to me that every part of the fandom attempts that in some way, we simply come to different conclusions about what those things mean. I can look at something and accept a Jonsa interpretation but also understand, there’s another factor here too. And while I agree that many things are intentional in ASOIAF, I’m also aware that things can subconsciously influence and slip into a work. I recently watched this clip of Spielberg being told, he didn’t recognize this on his own, that he had included his parents love story in a film. Anyone might think, it had to be deliberate, but it wasn’t!

So, not saying anyone should be less confident, I just think it’s good to be aware that after a parallel is recognized, our interpretation of it is where we can all take off in different directions. For example, Jonnel and Sansa is perhaps the most beloved Jonsa foreshadowing (if it isn’t the Ashford Tourney 😅), and I absolutely think it’s groundwork for canon events. The question isn’t if it is, but how. Will it be a parallel, only, the point of the marriage this go around is to right a wrong? Give the girl her home back? (If say, Robb’s Will is recognized). I’ve questioned that simply because it seems like a big task to get everyone on board with Jon being legitimate and becoming their Lord and/or their King only to have them then immediately turn around and all accept he’s actually a Targ and will marry his “sister.” I wouldn’t be mad if that’s what Martin did, but when I think about how much agency he likes to give non POV characters, I’m a little skeptical he’d pull that turnaround off.

So then I think, well, maybe the idea is that unlike Jonnel, Jon will refuse Winterfell again and insist it is Sansa’s again only to ultimately be rewarded in the end by marrying her when she has the power to choose, and she chooses him? People have been very outspoken about how dumb they think the idea of Sansa being QitN is, and maybe that’s too much of a leap for the North because Martin does like his realism, but considering all the female heirs talk going on, Martin is certainly going to say something there, and Jon will have some complicating factors that might make Sansa more favorable to people.

Basically, Jon is a good person, he’ll do right by the Starks, is that the entire point? Look at the way the older generation of men treated women, this generation will be better? Or will Martin use the extraordinary circumstances to benefit Sansa / female heirs? Create an entirely new normal for the North? The story will talk to itself, but what exactly is it saying? That we can endlessly debate!

[writingplotsonflashcards]

Brainstorm: what would missing-nin!Kakashi wear?

For those unfamiliar: I'm currently writing a Naruto AU on AO3, in which Kakashi is a missing-nin (I won't spoil much more of the story ;)). The fic is currently eight chapters long.

I was writing along, happy as a clam, when I realized a thing. I'd written in one of the earlier chapters that Kakashi was wearing a flak jacket and hadn't given much more thought to it - of course he'd be wearing a flak jacket, he always wears a flak jacket.

Except, in this fic, that didn't make any damn sense. And thus ensued a brainstorming session that I absolutely devoted far too much time to (and, if any of you has a good suggestion, I'm absolutely prepared to devote even more time to).

Just because my process might be helpful to someone else, or maybe just fun to read, I'll share my clumsy process here. (I'm studying Communication and Multimedia Design, so I know a thing or two about the process of designing, but I'm relatively new to AUs, so bear with me ;))

---

The knowledge we're working with

By chapter 8 of my fic, we've established a handful of things about this version of Kakashi:

He is a missing-nin, and has been since the day after the Nine-Tails' attack.

He still finds himself in fights occasionally (so his clothes need to be comfortable enough to fight in, while also protecting him).

He does not like the title of missing-nin; he would rather not be recognized as one, and doesn't wear his Konoha headband. Also, Naruto thinks that he might be a civilian when they first meet, implying he also does not dress like a shinobi.

...It's specifically the third point that made me realize I'd overlooked something. Yeah, a flak jacket ain't gonna cut it.

---

Commence the Brainstorming!

If a flak jacket wasn't going to work, then I'd need to give Kakashi some other kind of armor or protection from weapons - something that's hidden.

Does something like that exist in canon? Yep!

According to this Reddit post, it's probably chainmail or kusari. We can at least assume that it's something that helps protect against weapons, because that makes more sense for shinobi than, say, mesh would. As we can see, it's canonically easily hidden underneath another layer of clothing.

So, that was my first major decision. No more flak jacket: instead of that, Kakashi would wear chainmail that he'd probably hide underneath a sweater or something. (More on that later.)

These were my earliest sketches:

More changes that I decided to make:

His hair is slightly longer than in canon, long enough to cover his Sharingan, since he no longer has his headband to cover his Sharingan with.

Since Kakashi left Konoha when he was in ANBU, I like the idea of him outgrowing his ANBU boots at some point and swapping them for civvy boots instead.

(I had some space left in the lower right corner and decided to sketch out what a wrist splint would look like, just in case I messed that up in my writing as well. Thankfully, it looks like I described that one correctly even though I originally used the wrong source '^.^)

If you look closely, you can see "cargo pants??" written in pencil in the middle of the page. That's because my sister made this suggestion as a joke and I ended up liking it a lot.

---

Commence Round Two of Brainstorming!

Another issue with removing the flak jacket, is that Kakashi is missing a bunch of pockets that he would normally store scrolls in. Additionally, since he prefers to look like a civilian, he wouldn't be wearing weapons pouches either.

Enter cargo pants. And hoodies. Which both have pockets, and both would probably look inconspicuous enough to be mistaken for civilian clothes.

It took me a second to figure out whether hoodies and cargo pants even exist in the Naruto universe, but fortunately they do. There's a couple of kids in hoodies in this screencap, and there's at least cargo shorts (the third kid on the right (edit: also Naruto lol)).

So, here comes the second round of sketches:

I wasn't originally sure about the hoodie, since the emo vibes are Pretty Strong and I'm not sure if that's what I'm going for, but then I painted with it a bit and... well, it's growing on me, honestly. It's also practical, since Kakashi could use the hood to hide his Very Recognizable hair from shinobi without having to use a henge or genjutsu. Not 100% sure about the colors yet, but I figured something dark would make sense, as it'd be practical to not stand out in the night.

I also tried to pull inspiration from Kakashi's canon civvy outfits, but I gave up pretty quickly. I feel like my version of Kakashi takes himself a little too seriously to walk around like Sukea or like he does in the Steam Ninja Scrolls arc in Boruto (though it was really fun to draw hahaha).

---

Conclusion?

I feel pretty good about the combination chainmail-hoodie-cargo pants, though if you guys have any suggestions, please let me know! I'm very new to this sort of thing, so if you can give me some advice or ideas, it'd mean the world to me!

[tlgtw]

"Malenia Remembrance Decoder"

Video's nowhere near done yet but a couple of the diagrams for it are done and this one in particular was designed specifically to accomodate screencaps of it anyway.

The diagram I don't doubt does speak for itself--especially in lieu of my original failure of properly addressing the topic of how Empyreans are defined in Episode 1. So just take it now as well lol.

Send it to arguments on Discord! Send it to arguments on Reddit!

And whatever response you get, when they ask "Yeah so who's exactly the smart alek supposed to have made this, huh!?"

Send them to me.

And also, just in case: Yes. The Remembrance's description is accurately translated from Japanese.

[nancydrewwouldnever]

Nancy, do you think chris is as generous as ppl think or believe in matter of money? he himself doesn't live that glamorous life, private jet rides excluded and we don't know for sure if he really pays for the family and friends.yes he does let his homes to be used as air bnb by people, but do you think he is that careless to spend it on ppl just like that.

Yes, I think he is. I don't know if you ever read this story in an old interview, but he once said one of the first things he did with one of his first Hollywood paychecks was take his two roommates out and bought all three of them Sean John velour tracksuits (lol). I think he's one of those people-pleaser types who do fall heavily into buying things/gifts for people.

I spent some time looking for a screencap I know I have somewhere in my stupid unorganized files of an older story that came out of either a Reddit thread or an old ONTD comments thread. The original poster had been a waiter in an L.A. restaurant that Chris and his friends group would come in to a lot pre-Marvel years. The original poster was pretty clear in how much he/she hated the friends because they were loud and obnoxious. What was interesting, though, is the poster said Chris always paid for everything when the group was out. This was at a time when he was nowhere near as financially secure as he was after Marvel. The poster even said that many times he would be in a quiet mood and leave very early, but pay the check before he left, while his friends would continue to eat/drink on his dime when he was already gone.//

I remember Octavia did an IG post about him and mentioned that he always pays for dinner, he'll even sneak paying for it to make sure he takes care of everyone. I think it was a birthday post, may be from last year.

I do think that is very nice of him, but it can get people to use him for his money. He should really pull back on things like that. He needs to know and have people around him that want him for him not what he can buy for them. It sounds like a depressing life.

Yes, Octavia once shared the story of how he pre-payed for her large birthday dinner in Prague while they were there filming Snowpiercer in 2012.

[teaveetamer]

Okay, so let's address this since it's so obviously meant for us. And for the record, I'm not blocked by OP. I went to check their blog to see if they had anything else interesting to say about the conversation started yesterday. I'm taking a screencap because the post this is attached to has little to do with the issue at hand, and frankly my beef isn't with OP.

Personally, I wouldn't have screencapped the post. I believe that if someone blocks you then you should respect that and not interact with their posts. That's why I personally, when talking about the situation, did not reblog or spread the post with the screencaps further. Since I know Gascon will probably read this I'll make my feelings clear: I think it was a bad call to screencap someone who blocked you.

However, I'm not surprised that you, my not so anonymous dude, decided to present this entirely devoid of any context to make it seem to your friends and followers like there's somehow a moral equivalence between what you do and what was done in this situation. I know you struggle with nuance and context, so I'll spell it out very clearly.

Gascon was directly invited to contribute to a conversation. The user who invited him had no idea that Gascon was blocked by the OP of that post, because Gascon didn't even know he was blocked by the OP of that post. The invitation was a good faith attempt to engage and provide the OP with analysis from a user they believe has expertise in the subject at hand. Gascon screencapped the original conversation that he was invited into and probably would have never seen otherwise, in full with complete context, and gave his response (as well as notifying people that the user in question had him blocked).

Now, I'm not Gascon, but I can say with almost 100% certainty that he does not care to interact with this person beyond this encounter, and he was never going to be invested enough to actually seek this person out beyond what he'd been tagged to respond to. And I know this because Gascon has repeatedly said over the course of the last year that he's bored of 3H and has no interest in discussing it further unless specifically prompted by a third party.

You, on the other hand, have been relentlessly stalking and screencapping and harassing people for months now. You have no qualms about sending hate anyone's way, in fact you even pass blog names on to your buddies on Discord and Reddit and then brag when harassment happens. You find people on other social media sites to continue harassing them even after they've blocked you on one platform. Your blog has literally hundreds of screencaps from Nilsh and FantasyInvader and probably others that you use to whip your followers up into a frenzy. You are literally so obsessed with some users that you stalk their blog and then leave rude comments on the fics they recommend. You learn that you are blocked and you take it as a personal insult, and you do not stop harassing them until they have gotten so sick of you that they leave the platform entirely. And even then you don't stop. You still can't take Nilsh's name out of your mouth even though he's been gone for like six months. If you were a fictional character, I'd be Enemies to Lovers shipping you two by now with how obsessed with him you are. I mean really, full nine yards, 500k slowburn.

An analogy: you're basically saying a guy getting rejected by the same girl twice is the same level of harassment as a guy getting rejected by the same girl two hundred times. Like yeah, Guy #1 probably should have been better about hearing her "no" the first time and it was definitely an error in judgement to ask again. If she's upset by the interaction, I'd call him out. But good fucking lord it is not even remotely as severe as refusing to take no for an answer two hundred times. The only reason you would ever present them as equivalent is, frankly, if you are Mr. Two-Hundred and you're trying to make yourself look less creepy. You are Mr. Two-Hundred, my dude.

Also nice of you to continue insinuating that the women who call you out for your blatant harassment are all histrionic just because we don't like... *checks notes*... being stalked and harassed by some random 35 year old man on the internet over our opinions about a video game character. For your information, I'm neither screaming, crying, nor throwing up. I'm just holding you responsible for your behavior. Sorry if that upsets you, but there's a pretty simple solution to getting me to go away that you haven't tried yet. It's called leaving us the fuck alone like we've been asking you to for months. I would blissfully never talk about you ever again if you just stopped harassing people.

Not tagging you in this post because again, I don't encourage harassment. I doubt I need to tag you anyway, considering you've been stalking my blog ever since I called you out for that other little harassment situation you incited, so you'll definitely see it.

[unhingedhearties]

Liz Is The Lowest, Most Disgusting Person Ever

This absolutely put me in a bad mood. Liz has reached the lowest, subhuman piece of shit behavior and I hope no one ever lets her forget it. She deleted the original comment, but the responses can be found here. So one of the young actors on When Calls The Heart, Mamie Laverock, recently experienced a horrible accident. I have seen some disgusting, heartless comments from Hearties on Instagram, Twitter and Reddit (and believe me, I'll get to the subreddit at some point), but this is the lowest, most reprehensible thing I've ever seen and I hope Liz faces real consequences for this.

...

She can't even humanize the poor woman and say her name. She's just "that girl". At this point I don't even know if she's referring to Erin's real life boyfriend and frequent MS donator, Ben, or if she's referring to the fictional relationships between fictional characters on the TV show Erin stars in THAT ISN'T REAL LIFE. I hope reality comes up and punches her in her dumb face one day.

Two people, TWO PEOPLE, tried to explain how fucked up her behavior is. Do you think she listened? No, because Liz is the poorest, most "bullied" adult-baby ever and never did anything wrong.

She's not bullied enough.

"She used 'tragedy' before to go into a 'guys arms'"

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT YOU STUPID WATER HEAD!?

"That's not hate. That's love."

I was going to say something like "if you think the way you act is love, I hope you remain miserable and alone the rest of your life".

But the reality is I don't need to hope that. Liz will spend the rest of her life alone and miserable with no one besides whatever poor family members she leeches off of that are forced to tolerate her.

Because Liz is profoundly stupid, she uses the old "if you don't like what I say in public, just don't respond" approach that she herself never uses.

"I'm not shaming her, I'm telling her she's bad."

I hope no one ever treats you with human dignity ever again.

I know I said I don't want the people featured on here to be bothered, but after seeing this, I'm rescinding that in Liz's case. I hope people remind her of this on every post she makes. No matter how many accounts she makes, whether it's on Twitter or Instagram or whatever, anytime she posts, I hope someone responds with this screencap:

I want it never to be forgotten what a sub-human bitch Liz is. She's had more than enough chances and more than enough people try to explain to her what's wrong with her behavior, but she refuses to even entertain the thought that she might be wrong.

May you never know happiness or peace Liz.

[olderthannetfic]

re: reposting anon. I am genuinely curious - where’s the generally agreed upon line?

People repost content all the time and get celebrated for it. Tweet threads, reddit posts, memes, and quotes from various sites get screenshot and put on tumblr all the time, and the only complaining I see is folks who want everyone to use image IDs.

I personally always ask before I post someone’s art to another social media site, and am often directed to the artist’s profile to share from there, but even more often am told it’s fine with a direct link and credit to the artist. I’ve never reposted fic. That feels more invasive to me in some nebulous way, but I do post fic recs, and I’ve never asked permission to make fic recs, either.

Clearly no one (sane) is saying there should be no content moving between sites unless the original artist puts it there, but tweets et al are just as much the intellectual property of their OPs as art and fics are of those creators.

--

It's hard to say.

I do have qualms about the endless twitter reposts on tumblr even as I reblog some of the funnier ones. I have zero qualms about using that one bird rights screencap as a reaction to things all over the internet. I never have qualms about reccing in whatever space I choose to use. The desire for historical preservation and the desire for control of one's own content are directly in opposition, and I tend to fall somewhat more on the historical preservation side.

Reposting to twitter is especially contentious because twitter is even more of a generator of mass harassment than other platforms. If you reposted to Dreamwidth, that shit isn't retweetable/rebloggable, and nobody's paying attention anyway, so the level of drama is going to be lower. If you save a copy on your own computer or repost to a private discord, who's going to know?

I don't mind a pithy quote being quoted elsewhere because it's funny. That's typical fair use. I absolutely mind my content being used to further sites I think we should mass abandon and make die. Twitter is at the top of that list.

[historyhermann]

Steven Universe, vegetarianism, and media representation [Part 1]

My response to how some fans feel about Steven as a vegetarian. Cropped screencap from one of my favorite scenes from "Snow Day"

On December 23rd, "Snow Day," the 8th episode of Steven Universe Future (herein SUF), the mini-epilogue series to cap out the Steven Universe franchise, apart from possible games, aired on Cartoon Network. Among some fans there has been  anger and annoyance with the line by one of series protagonists, Steven Universe (voiced by Zach Callison), in declaring to his friends/guardians, Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst, that he has been a "vegetarian for, like, a month," saying it goes against his character and is "wrong." I'd like to defend this development, using existing canon, explain its importance in the show as a whole, and media representation of vegetarians. On this occasion, I have to laugh at that article in VegNews which claimed Pearl was a vegetarian because she is grossed out by eating and "...the only thing we see her consume is tea...[and] we're willing to bet she's not adding honey or milk, either." [1] Some of these sentiments are summarized from my Reddit comments.

Reprinted from my History Hermann WordPress blog and also on Wayback Machine. Originally published on Jan. 2. 2020.

Let's start with the episode itself. With that, warning of spoilers ahead for that episode if you have not seen this episode on Cartoon Network or any other platforms. As the episode begins, Steven is overworking himself, waking up early in the morning, preparing for a day full of activities to help those un-corrupted at the end of Season 5, helping them learn how to express themselves and enjoy themselves in a universe free of the repressive rule of dictators (as Steven called them in "Famiilar"), figureheads at this point. He leaves the house without breakfast, only taking a protein shake, decides to not take his novelty backpack, and drives to the school after Pearl bundles him up for the cold, saying he had "errands" to do. When he comes back that night, the Gems (Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst) greet him, trying to cheer him up, but he rejects their entreaties, rejecting activities and foods (like a pepperoni pizza) he enjoyed in the past. The next day, he wakes up at the same time, rejects his classic meal (a "together breakfast") as having "too much sugar," and tries to leave his house, but the snow stops him. As such, all the classes are cancelled and he gets out his notebook to work on changes to the third-quarter schedule. Amethyst sees he is too stressed out and begins a game of Steven Tag, last featured in "Keep Beach City Weird," a season 1 episode, when each Gem tagged becomes "classic Steven" (i.e. Steven from seasons 1-5), later joined in by all the Gems. The episode ends with Steven, after he is tagged and turns into "classic Steven" criticizing his fellow Gems not seeing him as grown up but rather a kid. They come around to this and rightly apologize to him. He wakes up the next day and travels with Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, riding all in the car together, Amethyst with her own protein shake!

Perhaps that summary doesn't do the episode complete justice, but it sets the stage for the next part of my analysis: the importance of Steven becoming vegetarian (not a vegan). Steven is changing and maturing just as the world is changing, as he isn't the same person as the one who liked shows like Dogcopter (or "pupcopter" which is one for younger children), ate meat, and used a Cheeseburger backpack, like he did in the past. People like the cute, younger Steven but he is 17 years old now and fans should treat him that way. Without a doubt, he is putting a lot of emphasis on his responsibilities and it is stressing him out. You could even say that his rejection of a lot from the past is dangerous.

However, he is still making his own choices, just like every character, trying to cope with the stress, as he has "his own skin-care routine" noted by the fandom page for the episode. Steven's development reminded me of Connie in her debut in "Bubble Buddies," who talked about how her parents won't let her eat donuts because they have trans fats, although there is isn't an exact parallel of course. He seems to be cutting himself off from almost everyone, dedicating himself to his work, with Connie nor Lion making an appearance in the episode. I'll expand on that a bit later on.

Steven's choice goes beyond seeing the error of his past ways (being a meat-eater) or the possibility he is like "every teen" now (he isn't). He was acting within character, as some fans reminded us of how he acted during "Warp Tour" toward the Gems (the debut of Peridot, an autistic character like Entrapta):

In snow day he just gets kind of exasperated with the gems treating him like he's still 12, which is a totally normal way for him to feel. Part of growing up involves growing out of old interests. In the end he was happy to join them playing the new updated Steven tag and bring them with him to help do errands, and the next episode ["Why So Blue?"] had Steven being his usual happy self enjoying art and dancing and singing and stuff. So Snow Day honestly wasn't out of character for him imho.

This refutes the claim that he is "out of character" or the supposed "manipulating fan service" that some fans claimed. For those that say its a "betrayal" of his dad or of the saying "if every porkchop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs," because that saying is supposed to be symbolic, and he is not the same as his dad, Greg, who can do what he wants. As one fellow user put it,

Steven has always been incredibly sensitive to the welfare of other living things, and that's only grown as he's gotten older. Honestly, for years now I've been predicting that he'd become a vegetarian eventually, although I wasn't sure if they would ever actually say so on the show.

To be fully fair, we should have seen it coming. As Leah said on Twitter, this should be a natural confusion based on all the hints in season 1 that "showed he was somewhat uncomfortable with meat." Certain users have cited the cookout at the end of Change Your Mind, that Steven seemed to eat pepperoni pizza in "Guidance," and other examples (like eating a hotdog in the openings to Season 1 episodes), we have to recognize that Steven has only been a vegetarian for ONE MONTH, so those examples are mute. Additionally, the time period between "Guidance" and "Snow Day" is not established, but is more than a month, as its assumed to be winter in "Snow Day" but perhaps summer or fall in "Guidance." Some have said that Sapphire may have made it snow, but I'm not sure she has that power, unless she worked with Lapis, of course, but Lapis didn't appear in the episode, so I don't know about that at all. He also had only potatoes and veggies during "Rose Buds" as one user pointed out, another detail worth noting.

Some can say that the episode was "depressing to watch" or grumble about Steven supposedly "starting to become unlikable and that's not good for your protagonist." The latter especially is absurd because people disliked him at the beginning (and the show in general) BECAUSE Steven was annoying. As I noted elsewhere, there is no doubt that SUF has a different tone, but Steven and the Gems are trying to deal with the aftermath of their victory in "Change Your Mind," and enforce the victory, dealing with the changes. Additionally, the Steven Universe franchise, itself, is about people changing. Not everyone stays the same and even though Steven is changing, the other Gems (Amethyst, Pearl, and Garnet) don't see it or fully recognize it, hence offending him with Steven tag, treating him like a kid. Steven has felt they don't completely understand him in the past, so this isn't a new sentiment. Those that say that Steven becoming vegetarian made them "legitimately nauseous" are about as bad as the person who argued with me on Twitter last week. I rather sympathize with a fan who said that the development is on-brand for Steven, adding that:

It shows growth and maturity; it shows that he finally understands the hypocrisy of "everyone is equal" but continues to contribute to animal agriculture. I know everyone won't agree with me, and that's okay.

Building upon this, I would say that his switch to vegetarianism, which is a recent development in the show, is an indication, among many others, that Steven is becoming more mature and modified, although not completely different from his youthful self. As one reviewer put it, "the world strikes on and Steven is shifting with it." Perhaps you could say he is doing a "speed run to adulthood," but he is growing and changing, with the show striking a much more mature tone. This is understandable because has a lot of work to do to maintain the "established peace across the stars," disbanding the "tyrannical and colonizing ways" of the Diamonds "to improve Gem life on the Gem Homeworld and Earth," as it is an ongoing struggle in an imperfect universe.

It's not flimsy that Steven is vegetarian, its awesome, showing a degree of maturity on his part and a representation of change in and of itself. I don't need funny memes to tell me that either. Sure, he needs therapy, without a doubt, which is a focus of later episodes. This brings me to the most important part of this post: representation. Before this episode, some of the best representation vegetarians had in animated shows was Lisa in “The Simpsons," still a canon vegetarian and Stan in “South Park” (not a canon vegetarian), so it should be praised that the Crewinverse and Rebecca Sugar allowed this representation in a show with great LBGTQ representation in the past, meaning that has done a good step forward. More than that, this shows "natural growth, hes becoming a teen and changing" as one user put it, and fits with his generally pacifist attitude and/or adopting the ideals of his mother who seemed to love all living things.

You could say that Steven's line about vegetarian is a throwaway line. It's not like Lisa Simpson who had a whole episode dedicated to her vegetarianism ("Lisa The Vegetarian") where Lisa reaches a compromise with her father, Homer, while spending the "majority of the show being ridiculed and ostracized by her family and friends." That leads to some songs like “you don’t win friends with salad!” chanted by Bart, Marge, and Homer. At the same time, Lisa disrupts a community event, is "saved" by vegetarians, with her belief tolerated but "for the price of no longer being a vegetarian outcast and being accommodated," in a show that has a strong tolerance for meat eaters. You could say that Lisa's moral outrage is muzzled. In fact, if we use Frinkiac as a measurement, the only other episodes that even mention the word "vegetarian" are in Homer's Phobia (in passing), Blame It On Lisa (Homer tries to convince Lisa to cheat on vegetarianism), Grade School Confidential (Bart threatens her with violating her values), Lisa's Wedding (a vision of the future), and jokingly elsewhere. This is still often cited as an example of representation in media of vegetarianism and veganism. [2] I think the one critic who noted that while it seems to be preachy, it is "overflowing with great individual scenes: the opening trip to Storytown Village; Lisa’s revelatory moment at the dinner table" with the Meat Council propaganda video as "the funniest isolated segment in the history of the show":

The fact that Steven is a vegetarian now is positive and fits with existing canon. Its really about damn time for this development, even if it is, ultimately, "pretty insignificant" in the show itself. Likely Steven will be like Mr. Peppy in Futurama: he'll be vegetarian but not "preachy about it." Nevertheless, it is worth highlighting, in part because it puts Steven among other noteworthy vegetarian cartoon characters like Tish Katsufrakis in The Weekenders and Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender, the latter compared to Steven. [3] While it's hard to say that someone like Marceline the Vampire Queen in Adventure Time is vegetarian, we could easily assume that Perfuma, the hippy princess in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, is vegetarian, and maybe even Lapis and Peridot in Steven Universe, if they eat food at all, like in my fan fics, lol. Of course, that's just speculation. On an additional level, this is important due to the "pattern of vegetarians making people uncomfortable in the media" (indicated by annoyance from some parts of the SU fanbase in response in "Snow Day"), along with common "negative representation of vegetarians and vegans in the media." This episode counters that sentiment on its head. I am reminded of But I'm a Cheerleader, a great film if you haven't seen it already where the emissary of the conversion therapy camp, "True Directions," Mike, declares that vegetarianism is a "homosexual tendency." It's so absurd I have to laugh.

The fact Steven is a vegetarian is not only confirmed by further developments, like Steven eating a cheese pizza at the end of "Prickly Pair," but fits with two episodes which aired on December 28, the last two SUF episodes before the beginning of the hiatus, likely less than previous hiatuses in 2019, which was, by far, "CN’s most sparse release schedule for the show as they released the show in three chunks with massive hiatuses in between" as one fan noted in their statistical analysis of the show. We are all, clearly, being Spinel'd, but that's beside the point, lol. There has been a lot of chatter about these episodes. The first of these, "Little Graduation," begins with Steven looking happy and overjoyed, a good sign to see due to everything he is been through. But this doesn't last long: he is quickly depressed by the fact that his friends Sadie and Lars are not together as he had imagined in his mind (he was literally shipping them, like a sizable portion of the fanbase), with Sadie now dating a non-binary individual named Shep (which would may make Sadie pansexual or queer), voiced by Indya Moore, Lars & the Off Colors are going back to space, and sadly...Sadie Killer & the Suspects are breaking up! [4] The latter development is no surprise, however, as Buck Dewey predicted this in "The Big Show" where he said that their rise to stardom will be "followed by the inevitable infighting and creative disagreements that will tear us apart in a beautiful explosion of emotions," which Greg dismissed as hogwash. It didn't pan out exactly this way but, the band still broke apart nonetheless. Anyway, in "Little Graduation," Steven's emotions get the better of him and he almost kills everyone by suffocation, turning into Pink Steven, including the new graduates with a rose-colored dome, which is only stopped when Shep tells Steven that he needs to figure himself out and give his friends space to grow rather than suffocating them (literally). Symbolically the dome represents, as one fan put it, "Steven's inner perceptions of reality" since he has always worked hard for his friends, but now his friends are growing up without help from him (and moving on), as he feels neglected, combined with abrasive feelings he has toward his mom along with his own problems. And the toxicity bubbles up into a dome itself.

This episode was one of the best so far, as Steven realizes that not only does the world not revolve around him, but things happen when he isn't there. At one point, he asks when Lars and Sadie talked, declaring angrily, "but when did this happen? I didn't see any of this!" to which the response is that it was private, which makes sense. This also pokes at the fact that the show is, basically, all from Steven's perspective. I think the parallels between Lars leaving Steven and Pink leaving Spinel behind is a good one, which portends problems in the future without a doubt! Anyway, after freeing them and everyone departing, the episode ends as he contemplates by himself, in a scene reminiscent of the ending of "Mother Simpson" as AwestruckVox pointed out in his analysis on The Roundtable. In the latter, Homer sits and pensively stargazes, realizing that "Homer’s long-lost mother may disappear again, but he learns that she loves him, and that’s enough," with the ending serving as "a model of restraint and a signal to start crying...[and] a sobering reminder of how powerful silence can be."

© 2019-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

[thehattertheory]

Im trying to understand why I just saw a tumblr post on writing bilingual characters and it was a photo post....of the original post?

Person : Huh, this is good advice, let's screencap this to reddit for some karma

Other Person 5 minutes later : Yep, I'm going to port this over to tumblr for reblogs

Other Other Person on TokNine 3 months from now : Ah, yes this will absolutely be taken out of context to somehow sound as ill intentioned as possible in 15 seconds or less

[singingrainbows]

Why does most of tumblr seem incapable of linking to the original as soon as its a written post? Especially the damn meme blogs. If you screencap someone elses post then you need to link to the twitter/reddit/fb/blusky/etc post you got it from. Credit where it's due!

It's seriously no different from art theft. (Which is also wrong.)

[janetsnakehole02]

Give this movie the l(o)ve it fucking deserves (c)hallenge

[coralinesbuttons]

why is my header floating around other media platforms??

[elodieunderglass]

At the very least you should be able to contact makeship and let them know what’s going on about the plush toy since they’re a big company who only take on people with large followings and original ideas for plushies so telling them someone started a campaign with something that doesn’t belong to them might have them totally stop the project

(In reference to the dude profiting off my Eldertubbies dream)

That’s a good idea. I do feel viscerally uncomfortable about the guy selling plushes from my dream. It was an absurd and hilarious dream borne out of eco-anxiety and my grief about conservation, humanity’s loss of spiritual connection with nature, etc.

This… ain’t it. I don’t hate a side hustle, but Polyester capitalism is not what I want to see coming from my words and dreams, which - despite me not owning BBC’s Teletubbies - are still mine.

Even if “mother void” is intended to be me…

I think the guy just genuinely forgot he hadn’t invented this. We’ll see what he says (I emailed him this morning - i realised I was ascribing MOTIVATIONS to the guy and this whole thing, then suddenly realised that a twentysomething Reddit BNF probably had no idea that myself and the artists in the screencap are in fact real people.)

These are the pieces of art that were in the Reddit post he cited as inspiration at first. Although they’re only a selection of the art made for that post, they’re the ones that Reddit screencapped. If you look, they make it hard to claim the plushie design as 100% the visual product of one mind, so if we can’t reach a compromise I might go to Makeship with it.