#some of these I barely remember writing

[lucabyte]

I don't know how everyone isn't also always constantly thinking about how burial rites seem to be potentially one of the few things Siffrin instinctively remembers about their culture. But rest assured. I am in fact always thinking about it.

Textless version where they're just hanging out. It's fine!

[orengejoshi]

Hell yeah dude congrats on the mini human!!! If you’re craving chocolate chip cookies, brownies etc but don’t want to worry about a messy kitchen after, there’s a few ways to make single servings in a mug in the microwave and a few of them don’t use egg if you’re worried about things like salmonella and any other health concerns that come with not using a conventional oven. Also, if you REALLY want another layer of protection, heat treating flour can kill a lot of harmful stuff as well for extra peace of mind. Either spread a thin layer on a cooking sheet and bake at ≈150°C (converted from freedom units lol) for 10 minutes, or you can nuke a bowl of it in the microwave for 30 second intervals, stirring occasionally.

I know when my mom was having my sister years ago, she had to be careful about things that were normally okay before and my dad would take a couple extra precautions when cooking for us.

I’ve also seen packets of Betty Crocker mix in stores marketed as “(X) in a mug” (the blueberry muffins are my favorite personally)

They’re marketed as just “Mug Treats” and so far I’ve seen one with Hot Fudge Brownie, one with Soft Chocolate Chip Cookie, and another with Funfetti.

Whew, sorry for the yapping 😅 I just remembered you mentioned craving chocolate and sweets so I thought I’d share with the class in case you wanted baked goods quickly and without all the mess afterwards.

Congrats again on the pregnancy, and don’t let the bastards get you down👏 you’re doing awesome

THANK YOU this is godsent, omg🙏🏻😭💗

I'll share it for everyone who's also pregnant or just hungry for no reason🫡 this is amazing and easy (and I'm a great cook and baker! I love being in the kitchen) I made one a week ago and then I made 5 more (aka my own mom made them with/for me) and I said it was literally the best thing my taste buds have ever witnessed in that moment. it really hit the spot. we also threw some cherries from a jar in that bih and it's🤌🏻 chef kiss

I should have put some empty mugs around him but this still conveys an accurate picture of what my past few weeks looked like

[becausebuckley]

fuck it friday!

happy friday, everyone! here's a little bit of the marriage of convenience au to celebrate <3 thanks for the tag @spotsandsocks! no-pressure tagging @playinginthunderstorms @kejfeblintz @unlifeira @serenelystrange @inell @smilingbuckley @team-118 @fruitsdontknow and @heygirltimeformorning!

“Married,” Margaret repeats, stunned. “No, that’s- how could you be married?”

“It was pretty easy, actually,” Eddie says. “Vows, paperwork, rings.”

“It’s a lot easier when your fiancé doesn’t have encephalitis,” Maddie agrees, laughter just a tinge hysterical.

“But you didn’t invite us,” Margaret sputters out. Somehow, she’s decided that this is the point she’s worried about. Privately, Buck is glad that it’s this and not the part where he’s a man married to another man, if not for his sake then for Eddie’s, for whom all of that is just a little more new, but that doesn’t make it less bizarre.

Even if they’d had more than a couple hours to prepare for their wedding, he wouldn’t have invited his parents.

“It was a last-minute thing,” Eddie says. “We didn’t invite anybody, really.”

“So your parents weren’t there either?” Phillip asks. Wow, they’re getting stuck on this parent thing.

“Eddie’s parents live in El Paso,” Buck cuts in, before Eddie can say something unhinged-but-true like my parents were a little busy holding my kid hostage several states away after he saw me and my dead wife together. “And, anyway, that’s not the point. He’s my husband, so he’s here with me.”

[otaku553]

Thinking very hard about an AU idea of mine. Reluctant king Sabo AU!

In which Sabo isn’t saved by Dragon, but survives long enough to drift ashore and be saved by the doctors of Goa Kingdom, who do so only to ransom his medical bills from Sabo’s parents. Sabo’s parents take him back, thinking that his amnesia makes him a clean slate, but Sabo, young and stubborn and unsure of his entire identity, knows that everything is wrong and runs again, and again, and again.

Until at some point, he meets the Revolutionaries, and realizes that he can be useful to them, provide them information, make something good of an inescapable situation. From then on, he starts acting the noble that he was born as, in order to be a more useful informant to the Revolutionaries, until sunk cost fallacy hits and he believes that being a noble is the only way that he can be useful to the Revolutionaries. So at that point, why not take it all the way?

At 17, Sabo becomes one of Princess Sarie’s suitors, and at 17, he has doubts about using the princess for his own goals. Sarie is a romantic, and she wants a dramatic fairy tale of a romance, and she was already charmed, but the moment Sabo opens up to her about not wanting to use her to get to the throne, having lofty ambitions of helping the people (just not the people she thinks he’s talking about), Sabo becomes the one she simply must marry, because surely if she tries hard enough, she can make him love her back.

Soon after, the king and his son die. Sarie’s father and brother die. And while Sabo conveniently ascends to the throne, he also swiftly implicates his father, Outlook, in the assassination of all heirs to the throne, resulting in Outlook’s arrest and subsequent execution. And thus, at 18, Sabo becomes king, and begins to gradually institute great changes to Goa Kingdom.

Design-wise, Sabo wears an eyepatch because his damaged eye is considered a grotesque sight by nobles’ standards. Under the eyepatch, he wears heavy makeup to hide the burn scar. These are both at the behest of his birth parents, who spin a story about Sabo having been born half blind to hide the fact that Sabo had been shot by a Celestial Dragon and save face. To those who have seen his scar, they fabricate a second secret story that he was unfortunately kidnapped as a child. Sabo never does find out, until he regains his memories, where the burn scar is actually from.

[daretolovemyrambling]

What is it with long-running shows and killing off beloved characters in unstatisfying and cruel ways lately.

[twilight-deviant]

[aurantiumred]

see i wanna go to sleep, but i cant, because i have another THREE HOURS. im gonna sue./ref

see elmo wants to go home, but elmo cant, because elmo has another 40 MINUTES. elmos gonna sue.

[whatudottu]

Regarding cerebrocrustacean’s teeth: DJW stated that they’re actually filter feeders, so I think it might actually be stylized baleen?

Hehe, cerebrocrustaceans don't need a toothbrush since their teeth are already brushes :P

Hmm filter feeding means that you gotta intake a lot of water with your food, and no matter what the water is filled with (different planets, different rocks, different elements eroding into the water of rivers and oceans), swallowing that water is not going to treat the body well. Baleen whales open mouth a lot of food and water and their 'teeth' are used to keep food in while they spit out the salt, using their tongue to do so, so if cerebrocrustaceans have a baleen then they might have a similar process.

Thinking thinking (mentions of vomiting below)

In comparison to a whale cerebrocrustaceans are incredibly small, the fact that their filter feeding is centred around keeping food in rather than letting it pass over internal gills (the method I like making orishan fed) makes it seem like their food is a little too big for gill based eating, but with the size of their brain aka one of the most nutrition and energy taxing organ in the entire body (so much so our extinct cousins the neanderthals had BIGGER brains they couldn't maintain) they probably need to have bigger if not many MANY small prey to eat in relatively large quantities. Well if cerebrocrustaceans have to filter feed like a whale, do they also have a tongue or tongue-like replacement? Well considering that Brainstorm was capable of vomitting in War of the World part 2, with the addition of a retractable baleen, cerebrocrustaceans have the physiological capacity to adjust pressure levels (increase pressure in the stomach, lower pressure in the thorax which I'm just using terms in reference to humans) as well as have the abdominal muscles to move stomach contents out.

Technically emptying the contents of your stomach is not indicative of anything but I imagine since they're kinda all torso (all thorax) that they might have a water stomach, perhaps even combining it with some form of gizzard since cerebrocrustaceans don't have teeth to chew with. They open-mouth a whole bunch of zooplanktain and maybe larger prey (closing their mouth if something bigger comes obviously), water enters the gizzard where a vomit-like function occurs, expelling all the water while the baleen catches the mouthful of food. Also! This is when underwater, especially in zooplankton swarms, does this process occur. Cerebrocrustaceans have evolved to filter feed and have a gizzard that facilitates the act to chewing thus doesn't necessitate the evolution of teeth should they (and have) live on dry land.

Of course Encephalonus IV would have a different culture to Earth, so making the transition from a reliance on the water to being able to live between environs of land and sea, they retained the habits of filter feeding habits (swallowing food and water and spitting out the water) until fully acclimating to a dry(er) setting. Technically one could say they were the type to 'drool' or 'spit' randomly all over the floor until collectively agreeing it's more of a hassle on land than in water to filter feed. Instead with the move to land cerebrocrustaceans have developed a separate cuisine culture between dry and wet settings, eating larger (though still swallowable/gizzard-chewable) foods, perhaps beginning to create and invent foods rather than rely solely on live prey. Kind of like how you can't have metal without fire, you tend not to be about to have a cuisine culture without fire too, but unlike human evolution where obviously food came before smelting, cerebrocrustaceans developed both cuisine and technology at around the same starting point; though technically it's technology they're mainly interested in as there are more niches technology can fill in invention over cuisine, those roots still exist in a passion for well crafted delicacies packed with more nutrients per square inch to make smaller meals worth the same as a feeding frenzy.

[recurring-polynya]

My Top 5 Bleach Filler Characters, Appropos of Nothing

5. Inaba Kagerouza, Reigai Arc

Inaba is, simply put, the pinnacle of Soul Society worldbuilding. He's got this long dramatic backstory and a bunch of rage bottled up in his chest, but also a guy needs a paycheck, so he's just been doing the R&D grind for a hundred years. He knows a shit-ton about the Dangai, which is relevant to his evil scheme, but it's also just his day job (also the Dangai owns, I want a PhD in "the Dangai"). No one else in Squad 12 seems to have the least bit of beef with him, even after he builds an evil duplicate of every person in the Gotei. Unlike a lot of mad scientist characters, he's good with his weapon. Maybe he's weirdly jacked under his villainous smock?? Also, his evil scheme was generally well thought out, and took into account the fact that the Gotei is a bunch of buffoons. ngl, I kinda wish his plan had succeeded, if only for the fact that it would probably really piss Aizen off.

4. Ran'Tao, Bount Arc

Everything about Ran'Tao owns, including:

Sexy glasses

Condemned so hard by the Central 46 that they gave her a kidou seal back tattoo

KIDOU. SHOTGUN.

Stabbed Kariya in the gut

Noped out at the end of the arc because Who Needs the Gotei's Shit?

3. Kuchiki Kouga, Zanpakutou Rebellion Arc I think that when you hear the story about how Byakuya was forbidden from marrying Hisana because she was a commoner, you're supposed to feel this great sense of injustice, like wow! Byakuya actually showed character by standing up for his love! And that's great and all, and then you get the Zanpakutou Rebellion Vintage Kuchiki Bullshit Flashbacks and it's like, oh, the last guy they married into the clan mass murdered a bunch of people and then they had to seal him up in a cave and I feel like that's an important piece of context in the entire Kuchiki Family-Being-a-Bitch-About-Who-Byakuya-Marries debacle.

Which isn't to exonerate the Kuchiki, here! It's very clear that Kouga wasn't that bad before he got pushed over the brink by Kuchiki family machinations. I mean, this is very much an Everyone's The Asshole situation.

I love the fact that they never come out and say that Kouga is Byakuya's uncle, but he's very obviously Byakuya's uncle.

I love the fact that he dramatically cut his kenseikan off with his sword and threw them at Ginrei and they made a gree card of it.

I love that he appears to be exactly Renji's height and has one chunk of hair that is the same color as Renji's and he over-accessorizes horrifically, and at best the Squad Six old-timer's had to be like "Byakuya don't do this to us again" when he hired Renji, and at worst there's a chance that Renji the secret baby that was born after Kouga was banished and he was hidden away in the Rukon so he didn't screw up the succession line but he's actually the true Heir to the Kuchiki.

2. Harugasaki Seizo, standalone episode 313 This dude had a homoerotic rivalry with Ikkaku (doomed, of course, because who could compete with Yumichika?), lost his shinigami powers when he took a blow meant for Ikkaku, and then spent the next hundred years putting his entire pussy into doing laundry for Squad 11. This man invented yearning, even if he did choose the worst possible person in the history of ever as the target of his affection.

1. Amagai Shuusuke, New Captain Shuusuke Amagai Arc He looks like Ross Poldark. He can't hold his liquor. No one knows who witnessed his Captain's Exam. Ukitake and Kyouraku tried to talk him into a threesome. He was nice to Kira. His bankai was a tuba that made a foghorn noise when it belched out fire. His dad was the shinigami equivalent of a narc, who got done dirty by the Captain-Commander. He fought the Dangai Cleaner and won. I love him more than anything.

Honorable Mention: Kenryuu and Enryuu, New Captain Shuusuke Amagai Arc Because they are an important reminder that for all the shinigami buffoonery I am forced to witness, day in and day out, some people graduate from Shin'ou, get shikai even, and still can't get hired by the Gotei.

[soundwave-radioandbroadcast]

Okay so, the silly fic idea I was humoring is becoming a reality. Yes, the song chapters may be all based on songs (feel free to recommend songs that are based on or give you a certain TFP soundwave ships vibes btw. Because I gen may use inspo for that for the oneshot).

[astranauticus]

was talking to a friend about how the last piece of genshin merch i ever got was a print of albedo and his clone (from back when the plant albedo event was still,, fresh) and had the extremely abrupt realisation that a. my current obsession with clones and the associated horror tropes started WAY earlier than i thought b. "'imperfect' clone harbouring resentment towards 'perfect' original clone who's also an artificial human, just better made" is literally the backstory to one of my ocs. what the fuck???

[cat-brrr]

.

[raingoyeet]

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originally posted june 17, 2022

original description:

It's been like two months since the last comic part I'm trying I swear- Eyyyyy comic timeeeeee let's gooo Grey's got some ✨issues✨ with that parasite wanting enough nutrition, it seems Those issues seemed to have led to him mauling someone, but. Oh well Time wise, this is a while after the last part, being at around midnight. Blue is not happy about that, clearly

I don't really know what to say, I'm gonna throw a question box on my story so you can ask stuff there ig I'm sorry this took so long, a bunch of mental stuff and a complete loss of motivation for everything made it hard to finish, but hey, here's part five This entire thing is super inconsistent and scuffed but I don't have the patience to fix it so yeah

Next

[smile-files]

i continue to find ii3 baffling. why did they make it (this isn't to hate on the season, i'm genuinely curious)

[neverenoughmarauders]

I am sorry all but I am not going to lock my fics. The day I do that is the day I stop writing fanfiction. But read my writing and laugh, because I genuinely think the joke is on anyone who thinks they can train AI based on that...

[o-uncle-newt]

I read Possession by AS Byatt after people told me "if you liked Gaudy Night you'll like this" and WELL.

Warning- spoilers for both books abound below!

So it sounded great- as a lapsed academic (though not in the field of literature by any means) there's a part of me that loves reading about academia because it's full of such obsessive people, and this book seemed to be exactly that and so I was excited.

Then I read it, and on the one hand, my first thought was "all these people are dull as heck, the only sane modern-day one is Val, and at the end of the day the historical stuff is just two people having an affair, who cares." My second thought was "there's just enough stuff here that makes me think that maybe the author knows that all of this is stupid, like the fact that Val is obviously one of the few sane ones here." But the ending made me doubt even that. Essentially, and I say this even as that lapsed academic, the author could not convince me to care about the important things at stake here, and as a result couldn't get me to care about the people who only seemed to care about those things.

I didn't care about Ash and LaMotte- they came across as two people high on their own supply who had a tawdry affair. (And each of them is the less interesting person, as a person, than their official partner!) As a result of not caring about them, I couldn't POSSIBLY care about Roland, Maud, and the rest of their crew, because their only functions were to be possessed by, and weirdly possessive of, these two entirely unworthy individuals, whose in-universe historical and literary significance Byatt couldn't convince me of, and to use that possession as a mirror for their own very lame romance. Beyond that they're utterly uninteresting, and there isn't even meant to BE much beyond that so it's not that surprising.

Anyway, I didn't like this book much, but it still made me think a lot. And there's a way in which a certain kind of person might say "well if it made you think then that's surely a sign of some positive quality" and... maybe? I don't know. I didn't hate all of it, and some parts were interesting, and I do have a whole separate list of things about the book that bug me including a breakdown of some of the book's (perceived by me) themes that I particularly disliked lol. Perhaps I'll post it another time. So I guess you can say it spurred me to thought, but loads of things that I don't like do that, and the only positive thing that that draws from me is that they're not downright dull.

The thing is, after finishing the book I was immediately struck by that "if you like Gaudy Night..." element, because it has a situation that felt weirdly similar (if for totally different reasons)- a young scholar stealing a letter from a library/archive. The circumstances are different- in Gaudy Night, the scholar does it to hide its existence so as not to contradict his thesis, and in Possession, the scholar does it so as to explore the document further, though still secretly- but there are still some interesting parallels vis a vis class. Possession goes into the class thing more than Gaudy Night does, but neither book goes much into it- the scholar is lower-class and someone who has scraped their way to their position, and is encumbered by a female partner of lower social and academic standing, and in the end they are juxtaposed against scholars who come from an elevated class and who have more money and opportunity. In Gaudy Night, Arthur Robinson is judged by the likes of Lord Peter Wimsey and a college full of women who don't have to do anything but think, teach, write, and grade papers; in Possession, Roland has to convince a bunch of academics of standing and resources to take a chance on him (and while this is more about money than class, he's the main one who's like "maybe it's good if Lady Bailey gets her wheelchair"). Byatt elides over this at the end by having him magically become in demand and on his way to achieving his academic goals, but I think in both books, the class element really could have taken on more significance in the text.

(I'd add as well that Byatt pits the upper-class and moneyed Maud, who of course is doing things for "the right reasons," vs the evil American businessman who clearly... doesn't care about Ash enough? Despite how much he clearly and obviously cares about Ash? The book was way more interesting when he seemed like a valid rival to the British team, who only thought that they deserved the letters more because of their obsession, rather than how it turned out at the end where the American dude is an actual cartoon villain. What made him genuinely less worthy besides having money without class, and of course having the bad taste to be American? What makes one scholar's possession more justified? Sayers was never this unsubtle.)

So that made me think more about Possession vs Gaudy Night, and the thing is, there are actual living people in Gaudy Night! Say what you will about the unworldliness of the academics at Shrewsbury, but you get a very keen view of their personalities by the end, even as they are (by necessity given the rules of their world) subsumed by academia, or subsume themselves in it. And the people who do fall in love are REALLY in love, and you understand why...

And somehow a book from 1935 feels far more interrogative of the possession (or lack thereof) found in love and romance, and just about the place of women in academia and relationships overall, than one from the late 80s. In Gaudy Night, Harriet accepts Peter once she has determined that despite their power differential (brought on by class, money, history, and to a degree gender) he will not threaten her personhood, because he has proven himself to her. In Possession, Maud accepts Roland because she has the power (money, class, position, even height) and so Roland actually cannot threaten her- and yet still that final scene is about her being taken by him, basically to prove some kind of a point. In contrast, in Busman's Honeymoon, the euphemistic sex scenes are about Peter trying to please Harriet.

When I say it's to prove a point, I'm paraphrasing Byatt, incidentally- who said: "And in the case of Maud I had made it very inhibiting. She was a woman inhibited both by beauty (which actually isn't very good for very beautiful women because they feel it isn't really them people love) and she was also inhibited by Feminism, because she had all sorts of theories that perhaps she would be a more noble kind of woman if she was a lesbian. And so she was a bit stuck. And Roland was timid because I am naturally good at timid men. It's the kind of men I happen to like. He's a timid thinking man, so of course it took him the whole book." I mean... yikes, but also that explains a lot. Maud can only bring herself to be with a man who is weak/effeminate (?) enough to justify whatever weird psyche Byatt has imagined up for her, but still she needs to get over her inhibitions and under him because... reasons. I don't know.

(Height is also interesting here as a point of contrast- Byatt makes Maud taller than Roland to make a point about how on the one hand she retains the power but on the other hand there is now even more of her that has to surrender. Peter and Harriet are the same medium height and wear the same size gown.)

I think the thing that most stuns me is how regressive Possession feels when it comes to gender politics on relationships than Gaudy Night does. I'd need a whole other post to talk about this, but the theme of Possession seems to me to be "relationships that produce things (whether art or children) are worth more than ones that don't." Roland is better with Maud than with Val because Val is a second rate scholar who drags him down (while supporting him financially) and Ash is better with LaMotte than with Ellen because LaMotte didn't only inspire his writing (Ellen's contributions are described only in the negative "didn't impede"), she gave him the child that Ellen refused to. Incidentally, in both cases it's the man pursuing a relationship that will give HIM something... But, to paraphrase Peter in Busman's Honeymoon, one wouldn't want to regard relationships in that agricultural light. Gaudy Night is about how two people can produce great things without each other but choose to be with each other for their own, and each other's, happiness. They aren't each less apart, and as I noted in a prior post, they don't need to solve cases together or conjoin their work in order for their relationship to be worth something. It is worth it for them to be together because it encourages some kind of inner balance within them and between them, as people. They enjoy collaborating but that is by no means the basis of their love (and, incidentally, I think that a lot of, if not most, detective series romances fail this basic test of "would they have fallen in love if they were accountants who met on a dating app." Peter and Harriet definitely would have- would, say, Albert Campion and Amanda Fitton have? I do NOT think so).

And here's the thing- another reason why Byatt's quote above is so off-putting is that it makes it clear that not only in the text but on a meta level, the purpose of the relationships is to prove a Point. I found Roland and Maud to have zero chemistry, and honestly I was expecting them to get together 3/4 of the way through and split up at the end when it turned out they had nothing in common- it seemed like that kind of book. I was kind of stunned when they only got together at the end in an "it's meant to be" way because nothing about it seemed meant to be. They were stuck together by that one thing and they each apparently needed the relationship for some kind of self-actualization or historical rhyming or other. (Whatever I say about Ash and LaMotte... at least they seemed to like each other!)

Peter and Harriet... they get together because they love each other. Do they change over the course of Gaudy Night, and over the course of the other books they share together? Of course they do. But if it makes sense, I'll put it this way- Harriet doesn't accept Peter's proposal as proof that she got over her hangups, Harriet gets over her hangups so that she can accept Peter's proposal. Her hangups only matter because they were keeping her from this particular kind of happiness- she was a fully actualized person even with them. She is a person who does things for human reasons so that she can build a mutually happy life with the person she loves, not a little plot mannequin being moved around in order to tell the author's desired Message. People can say what they want about Gaudy Night and its flaws, but despite the intricacies of its construction, nobody can call the characters' actions and motivations anything but brutally human.

Whether within their universes or on a meta level, the books have SUCH different things to say about the value and nature of love, the place of and purpose of sex, the place of art and intellectual accomplishment in relationships, all of the above in the context of femininity… and I can't help but feel that each time, Gaudy Night wins the contest. It's possible I'm missing something major about Possession, and maybe sometime I'll post the rest of my notes about the things I disliked and people can tell me what I'm wrong about- but if nothing else it made me appreciate Gaudy Night even more, so for that I'm grateful.