#really fucking intuitive!

[hungersauce]

i get 'ohh the youngins dont know how we had it' sometimes but like you realize you will inherently be excluding people from both their own age group AND yours by basing it entirely on time right. Time is linear but the human experience does fucking loopty loops. You know that right

[bloodsbane]

i think what ticks me off the most about recent changes staff have been making to tumblr is they keep insisting it's necessary bc they need to draw in and retain new users or they're NEVER going to keep things going, so their solution is to... add a bunch of annoying and unintuitive shit that A) isn't going to appeal to anyone, let alone new people, but also B) piss off the existing user base.

like, im sorry, between the two demographics who do you think is going to ACTUALLY care enough about tumblr to use it every day and pay for things like no ads, or your merch based off decade old memes? i give this site the 5 or whatever bucks it takes to get rid of its stupid ad posts in part bc they're annoying but also because i have been on this fucking webbed site for 12 years! and i don't mind giving it some money to keep it running. BUT. not if that's paying for staff's ability to add more useless/convoluted/unappealing features that dont have MY user experience in mind

[yellowocaballero]

So fucking glad to see someone talk about SSS Class revival hunter 😭 I lived it so much and I feel like no one ever mentions it against more popular titles like ORV or even The Lout of the counts family, so I'm so glad to come here and see your amazing takes :>

Thank you for the ask which lets me talk about SSSCRH (the version I read was titled 'Suicide Hunter', which tbh I like more - no beating around the bush).

It's hard to draw an accurate comparison since I'm going off just the webtoon for SSSCRH, while I'm going off both the webtoon and the webnovel for ORV. And I love ORV, ORV is my media blorbo right now, it hydraulic presses my brain, I am writing ORV fanfic - it's, like, funner to enjoy. But SSSRH is just better. In the vast majority of ways it is is better. It's better than the holy trinity by a wide margin. TW talk of suicide obviously.

I can't believe I'm saying this but you need a basic understanding of Buddhism in order to understand SSSCRH. It's not about Gongja's suicides - he doesn't suicide from depression or lack of self-esteem. SSSCRH is about suffering in the Buddhist sense - dukkha. I don't want to make this an essay, so I might reblog this with more information, but extremely shortly:

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. You've heard that Buddhists say 'life is suffering'. To put it one way that doesn't require defining a lot of words: the cause of suffering is experiencing the world as we percieve it instead of how it truly is. Suffering isn't just being miserable and in pain, and life isn't suffering because life sucks and global warming exists and people voted for Trump. Life is suffering because we can experience beautiful and joyful moments in this world, but we do not exist in the moment of that happiness or place our ego/'self' between us and that happiness. Living in that moment, accepting the moment as it is unconditionally, is freedom from suffering. The Buddha tries to free people from suffering through teaching Buddhism.

"What does this have to do with the webnovel and manwha about a guy murdering himself thousands of times" it has everything to do with it. Because SSSCRH is about suffering, and it is about using suffering as a tool in order to experience a world unfiltered by ego and break down the artificial boundaries between human beings. Suffering in SSSCRH is not a bad thing. Gongja has the unique capability to (reincarnate.) experience a person's suffering in unity with them, which dissolves the delusion of separation between people and puts us in touch with the reality of oneness.

The Murim arc was fucking insane because Gongja pulls a Big Bodhisattva Move and walks through the suffering of the world in order to achieve full understanding of the human experience. He takes all of the suffering of the world into himself and is liberated. You can tell it's Buddhist because death was not presented as a bad thing - death was an aspect of a happy ending for the Heavenly Demon lady, because she was finishing her life according to her own joy, and because her teachings were passed on she did not truly die.

But the purpose of embracing suffering is to discover the ability to fully embrace life, and that's where Heavenly Demon's teachings were incomplete - as the ghost dude said, Gongja hasn't even experienced his own full life and the infinite capability for his own happiness. You can only feel the depths of sadness when you've felt the depths of happiness. Sadness deserves its place in the world and it can strengthen you, but so does happiness.

Gongja is attention-seeking, envious, and unbelievably petty. When he drills down into his own desires and why he wants the things he wants, you see that he has a very strong sense of justice and right and wrong - he realizes he doesn't want to be famous, he wants to be acknowledged, but on an even deeper level he is desperate for love and to be loved. Everything he does is to experience love, and as such he learns to love others. His love for the Flamey Asshole was purely parasocial and ego-filled, with no concern for who he was as a human. Throughout the manwha, he grows to care for people as they truly are and pierce through any delusions or misleading outward appearances. He has released all attachment to life and death, and as such does not fear death, and as such has taken a step on the road towards becoming a Boddhisatva who frees others from the cycle of samsara, and as a result has learned sick sword techniques and is sooo good at beating people up.

I think the only other thing I want to mention here because otherwise this is an essay: in almost every time loop/regression story, only the final regression matters. In stories with dungeon monsters and NPCs, only the humans matter. The regressor exists in a space where there are no consequences for their actions, so they act terribly and do whatever because none of it matters. In Groundhog Day Bill Murray acts like an asshole because he can. That's not the case here. Everything Gongja does matters. The NPCs are fake, but Gongja never treats them as anything less than real people who deserve life. Once he understands a person's life he never treats them as unimportant. No loop is thrown away and no person or life is disregarded. His choices matter, the way he treats others matters, and Gongja never treats anybody as if they don't matter except for himself.

That was not short. There is a lot more. The female characters are so good and so rich. From a craft perspective it is excellently paced and has a wonderful sense of set-up/payoff and balances tone and maintains a lot of momentum, which is really hard in a time loop story. You have to do a few very specific things to write OP characters well and SSSCRH does it very well. There's more to say from a craft perspective and it's hard to judge accurately from a webtoon but it's good. I was so strangely struck the entire time about how sincere and genuine it was, how it said what it said with no trace of irony of confusion, and I think that's what stuck with me the most.

TL;DR: SSS Class Revival Hunter is good for a lot of very normal reasons, such as excellent pacing and set-up/pay off and characters, but it's also so sincerely and genuinely Buddhist that it blew my tits clean off.

[aro-culture-is]

Alloaro culture is wanting a similar word to qpr for a committed partner you have sex with sometimes that is not romantic: qpr isn’t right because it has the word platonic in it.

hi! in a very gentle way, i am vibrating to let you know this is incorrect :)

from the POV of someone who's been around the aro community since ~2013-2014 on tumblr, the only time i've seen folks start to say that qprs couldn't include sexual components has been when

they've learned an incorrect definition of QPRs, or

in one particularly notable case, the individual proposing it turned out to be quite sex negative and upset at the mere thought that people could think that qprs could include sexual activity. this individual suggested an alternative term for individuals desiring sex in QPRs in a rather explicitly alloarophobic measure. when gently called out from what had seemed to be a genuine attempt at coining a new term, the above came to light. smaller cases of this pop up every once in a while, but this one got some notoriety.

queerplatonic was always meant to mean "queering the idea of a platonic relationship", "queering the idea of what a relationship means", and by explicit definition, has always been broadly and radically inclusive. any relationship, so long as the partners involved agree it is a queerplatonic one, is queerplatonic. no exceptions. this can mean it involves romance, sex, traditionally platonic elements, and anything and everything those involved desire out of it.

tldr; the word platonic is in queerplatonic to say it is counter to the idea of a restricted "platonic" relationship.

[blueskittlesart]

do u have any navi thoughts from your oot replay

i've been waiting to answer this until I actually beat the game in my current playthrough because navi is another one of those characters that i think of in like a "set" with several other characters who serve relatively the same thematic purpose; in this case that purpose being the "mother" character, and i wanted to have all the characters in that set fresh in my mind. it's notable that while oot shows us very clear and consistent instances of the ways in which the adults of hyrule fail to protect their children, there ARE several adults who DO go out of their way to both oppose ganondorf and protect and nurture the children under their care. All of these characters are adult women, and all of them explicitly help the children out of some sort of parental responsibility or sense of duty towards them. in this group I include link's late mother, impa, nabooru, and navi.

all 4 mother characters, despite being adults or adult-coded, reject the inaction mentality which characterizes other adults in the game. they become either direct supports or shields to their children from the conflict the world has to offer them, and they are always explicitly punished for their interference--link's mother is killed trying to protect her son, impa's village is burned, nabooru is brainwashed. The mother's fatal flaw is that she will protect her child above all else, even in a world in which children cannot truly be protected. however, with the exception of link's mother, these characters manage to persist even in the face of her punishment, and this is where I think navi becomes the exemplary character.

Navi, after a lifetime of being link's only support system, the only adult in his life he could truly, consistently count on, receives her punishment at the hands of ganondorf--in the final battle, she is pushed out. she is unable to reach her child. she cannot protect him. However, BECAUSE link has grown up with her at his side, he is strong enough to take ganondorf down. and when ganon rises again, navi is there to support link, promising not to leave his side, and the intuitive targeting of that battle (a mechanic which navi is inherently tied to!!) makes it a cinch to win. Navi, and the other mothers we meet, are a reminder to the player that the world doesn't HAVE to be the way it is. Their persistence when punished, their insistence that their children ought to be protected, is a reminder that good adults do exist, and that good adults raise good children. link and zelda are able to win in spite of the adults who refused to help them, but also BECAUSE of the adults who DID. It's a reinforcement of the core theme of oot--that childlike idea that the world SHOULD be good and fair and if it isn't, it should be changed until it is. The mothers of oot are examples of what the world COULD be, reminders that it is possible to grow up without losing hope or growing bitter, and they are examples of the next step for the children they've raised to change the word--to continue fighting even in the face of punishment, to refuse inaction, and to foster that same hope and persistence in the generations to come.

[wynns-wonderful-pixel-paradise]

it's wild finding out about wysiwyg software and trying to find a modern version that isn't an Adobe product (or some subscription thing like WordPress or squarespace) and hearing so much whining about how you can't make a good website with it and how you should learn how to code like a real man or whatever

The rude attitudes are extra telling because absolutely nobody seems to be able to consider the idea of making a web page for FUN and experimentation as opposed to bare functionality and corporate use or whatever I guess. I guess everyone has forgotten how to have fun on the internet

Meanwhile I feel like this could enable my stupid ass to make some more fun and experimental web pages without feeling like bashing my face into my monitor because coding is really hard for me to grasp outside of the bare basics

Its wild no web design tutorial mentions it as an option for beginners! I don't have time this weekend to try anything out but in the future I'll post about my findings on the subject, I think I have an idea of where to start but I'd it doesn't work out for me I'll see about getting old school frontpage to work for me (I might do that anyway just for fun)

[odinsblog]

Sometimes I amaze myself at the things I “remember” how to do, at just the right moment when everything is on the line. Things I thought that I never even knew how to do

I am a walking vessel of compartmentalized information. Some of the information is totally useless, and some of the information, if it wasn’t compartmentalized, could probably be connected to other information that could make a nuclear weapon, or an elixir for immortality, or cure cancer, or put together a political algorithm that would solve world peace. But alas, it’s all securely compartmented away from the other bits and pieces of information rolling around in my noggin. It’s probably for the best

(Now watch me never be able to repeat this feat ever again, lol)

[swordsonnet]

not to brag but i've read no less than three books with gay stabbing scenes so far this year 😎

[dullahandyke]

also re looking at the laptops of ppl in front of you in lectures, its actually doing wonders for my perceptions of the average computer user's tech literacy. im so used to circles on here being like 'and of course we're all on firefox with these 6 extensions and digging the algorithms out of our operating systems' meanwhile today in a lecture i saw someone with a lenovo driver pinned to their taskbar. ???

[lightxsheep71]

it's actually kind of insane the amount of people i've been close to who have exited my life without a word and proceeded to assert that i was a toxic person and then upon asking what specifically i did i basically get told to "just think long and hard about it." like is there truly something i'm doing wrong that i'm just not self aware enough to recognize or is it just that entertaining to gaslight me and watch me go on these self-deprecating moral scrupulosity ocd spirals where i rack my brain overanalyzing every single interaction i've had with someone trying to determine if anything i did or said may have been inadvertently offensive

[watery-melon-baller]

it's okay babe i still love you despite your disconnect from the general human population

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

imagining an alternate eotd where when asked about her confusing gay crush under threat of daleks one neuron in yazs brain fired differently and instead of going with "i dont know what you mean" she said "yes". same but opposite energy of when the doctor asks if shes a bad date and yaz super boldly just says "no". same but opposite.

because like imagine youre dan. he probably already had a good guess about what the situation was but his assumption being wrong is not out of the realm of possibilities. the idea that they could have talked about is not out of the realm of possibilities! if youre dan! if you just got here. if you didnt see all of s12.

like just imagine that scene! yaz just baldfaced lying as a way to like, bounce the idea off of him plus double duty to affirm her own beliefs that like the doctor never would plus triple duty paralleling 11x4 for 13 to ensure dan is never gonna ask about this again.

and WE'D KNOW. WE'D FUCKING KNOW. it'd be such a doctor move.

"have you ever told her?" "told her what?" "how you feel about her" "...yes." "well what did she say?" "i think you can guess" yaz snaps because she thinks she can. she has guessed or assumed or sort of correctly inferred a while ago that like, nothing is going to happen here, theres no point in her saying anything because the doctor isnt interested. and dan is like "i find her kind of hard to judge actually" because he still wants to hear an actual answer from yaz but yaz just laughs and goes "tell me about it" and then shes saved by a dalek.

of course we still want dan forcing their hand but thats easy to arrange by instead of him going all battering ram with "she likes you" in the next scene he just has to mention it. and i dont really know how he'd mention it because im not really sure how this would look to him.

so particulars to be determined but he does mention it In Some Way and now theres the doctor in a situation yaz indirectly accidentally put her in where shes suddenly having a Lot to process and also shes gonna lie about :) shes gonna lie about it so hard :)

maybe dan's guess is that whatever the doctor said was less-than-definitive ie vague as fuck because hes known her for like a week and has already seen how good she is at explaining herself and also because of yazs bitter "tell me about it" so maybe what he says is like "you better not be stringing her along"

and the doctor, in her perfectly inscrutable grey area between true What The Fuck Are The Humans Talking About This Time and a carefully crafted mask of obliviousness, goes "string her along what"

"i just mean that you gotta make sure your intentions are clear because it's really not fair to keep her guessing, and hoping"

and the doctor says "i dont understand what youre saying dan" because she really doesnt <3

and dan can still say his canon line "i think that you do, but you pretend that you dont" and in this case hes wrong, but he still hits the mark, wrong calculation right answer because the doctor is still like Fuck.

because she does know, of course. she does know about yaz and shes knows about herself and she knows what shes avoiding. and she will still do the same thing in sea devils. and this weird little lie yaz told will probably never come out. the doctor and her talk, dan isnt there, never sees how New this all is. the doctor has no reason to find out what yaz said to dan.

but we know. we know!!! we get to see this whole comedy of errors play out and still somehow arrive at the same answer. we have to live with how clearly none of them correctly assume each other's understanding of the situation. it'd be frustrating as fuck and such a nice encapsulation of what thasmin has been since the beginning. these half-communications that bounce off each other kind of painfully like billiard balls.

they would never find out. sea devils and potd play out exactly as they did and nobody would ever know. except us. it's a portrait of their shared fatal flaw finally laid out for us in broad daylight at the exact moment they come together. and only we can see it.

[i-appear-misssing]

I just had the horrible thought that I need to fall in love because having devastating crushes on beautiful, competent, authoritative women that I desperately want to please is exhausting and I need it to stop

[snow-and-saltea]

yesterday i spent 45 minutes of my life watching a video essay criticising the use of cheap shock values and crossing of taboos for a video game and i went from "he has a point even if he's explaining it in a really inflammatory way" to "oh umm... i can see how he thinks that way even if i don't agree" to "oh this guy's just straight up using people on tumblr as material for an audience to get mad at like other outdated people on the internet. nvm he's just an asshole"

[sodacowboy]

I just think it’s ironic that crochet is like so fun and easy but it’s also the worst thing to have against your bare skin

[nerdomancer]

I love giving people my Government Full First Name over my commonly used shortened nickname version when I'm interacting with them in a strictly business context because it makes the old "Salesman using your name a lot to trick you into feeling friendlier" trick much more noticeable and insufferable