#personal babble

[kung-fu-cutbug]

did they give the new Ena war trauma

[betasuppe]

My american grandmother is here visiting & I've been hanging out with her and my mom at a hotel after work the last two days.

Kind makes me feel a bit sad that only now in her older age has she ever tried to get to know me or care about me hah ha

We even lived with my american grandparents for quite a long time as kids because our family was struggling. I only really got to know my maternal grandfather and have 2 really good convos with him right before he died.

Today before checking out, my grandmother went red in the face as I was recounting a story from being in Norway and she told me, like it's a surprise, that I'm really funny and she had no idea.

And, after cutting out some choice images and covering others I'm post it notes lol, I showed her a sketchbook of mine and she was amazed like. She didn't even know I liked to draw.

I'm an adult. I've lived in the same state as her for a long ass time. Now, she suddenly cares.

I'm grateful, considering neither side of my family is perfect and both sides see my nuclear family as misfits, but like. What fucking timing....

[fennethianell]

Why do I always obsess with dead fandoms 😂

Man....

[anaburbononburbon]

Watched Nosferatu and I am unwell. I am unclean. I am unworthy. I’m very, very unwell. My thoughts are spinning. It’s changed me.

I need to write something…anything. It might be very Simon coded because isn’t he Count Orlok?? A monster? A beast? A demon desperate for his bride? Dipped in poison, in pain, hungry for something he can never have… oh, come to me. Hear my calls. Please.

[critterbutt]

my mom sent newt upstairs (shouted up the stairs telling me to call her) after tucking the corner of a tissue in her collar so it looked like a cape

and she trotted into my room, cape flappin, and i was like "awwwh! my baby!" and she started purring immediately so obviously i started petting her

i was like "are you a widdle super hero??"

and she just ignored me while purring so i gasped and went "are you a widdle super villain???"

and she looked over her shoulder at me, slow blinked and went meeeh! and i almost cried

[maxisbea]

Sims in a relationship will no longer receive unsolicited autonomous flirtations from other Sims, unless they have the Noncommittal trait, of course.

but what if i like that level of chaos 😭

[kuroimugen]

I'm gonna throw up I didn't expect an actual answer much less a yes

[kung-fu-cutbug]

the dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called "The Coilheart Games" 😳 you'll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

me: yeah whatever, I don't feel shit

[5 minutes later] bruv I swear the coils of the labyrinth are a prison

my buddy Mr. Huffam, pacing: the tigers are lying to us

[astracora]

someone's probably pointed this out cause i'm not browsing tags but

Caleb's flower is hydrangea.

Not only a flower that changes colour in differing soil (Caleb is a chameleon or changes who is is depending on the person he's talking to or where he is?)

But the meanings are;

One sided/obsessive love, heartlessness, frigidity/coldness, apology, family and gratitude.

[fennethianell]

It is truly in my fashion, to come back to the fandom after 5 years and immediately attack yall's souls and hearts with my sketches

[anaburbononburbon]

Had some phone troubles but very excited to start posting again! I have too many ideas clouding up the brain. Can't wait to unleash new stories and one offs😁

[critterbutt]

got into bed, pulled my blanket up and heard what sounded like something small and metal falling onto my glass desk and bouncing off my mug

i turn on my phones light and look. can't see anything that would have made that noise

but i do see the pill i forgot to take sitting beside my mug

so. thank you whatever the fuck that was??

[ficauthor]

Kinda love the fact that most characters in httyd don't have perfect teeth. Zero human dental care but they do have crazy good healthcare for if you lose a limb or two. They're very prepared to just hand you a peg leg at the drop of a hat. They recover from amputation like its a hobby tbh.

But when Snotlout lost three teeth from a punch he seemed so distraught about it. He has a missing front tooth thro his entire tenure in the franchise. Gobber has a fake tooth made from a rock that regularly falls out and he has to tap it back into place.

They literally have a holiday to celebrate the fact that so many of them have lost limbs. they have an annual 'having a stump fucking rocks!' day but no one is telling these kids to floss.

Like there is a dragon dentist and we see Gobber give the dragons fake teeth. but humans getting fake teeth seems to be an oddity almost exclusive to Gobber.

It's just such an interesting detail in the world building. They fixed an aspect of ableism but at the cost of human dentistry

[littlelamblita]

loud shout-out to the other regressors , dreamers , and critters who want a caregiver but are scared of finding one because of the fear of being a handful , too much , unlovable , or fear they're going to be harmful to you or not a good match

I see you and I understand you completely

[kuroimugen]

Thank you for your fandom work, it sounds so important. All these details about the S3 cancellation just get worse and worse as they come out. It's pretty heartbreaking.

I put a lot of pride in the work I do for DragonCon. I've networked and built up the diversity of the panelists we use, and we're always looking to see what we can do better. DragonCon is one of the largest conventions that is still volunteer run (ReedPop does not own us and I am hella proud of that too), and we do all of this work because we want to. My track director is part-Asian, cis female, I am enby and demisexual, and OFMD is one of the few shows I have seen that has resonated with me and made me feel seen. I don't take this lightly, not when I was losing fandom before now and only DragonCon was what was keeping me going.

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."