#the innocuous things

[thatlittledandere]

I love learning about regional differences within countries or even regions. It's an American internet so even I know that New Yorkers are on a whole 'nother level of exceptionalism and being from Brooklyn specifically Means Something. Tell me, how does the rest of Brazil feel about people from Rio? What sets the Quebecuois apart, aside from speaking French? Does South Africa have stereotypes about people speaking all the different languages they have? Does being closer to North or South America mean something in Mexico? Italy hasn't been one cohesive country for very long, how shattered is it still? Etc etc etc tell me about regional stereotypes in your dear homeland Ethiopia make it a fight if you have to. I want to HEAR

[cemeterything]

kinda wish i didn't have PTSD but then i wouldn't be able to joke that it means Potential To Suck Dick so you win some you lose some

[theminecraftbee]

okay, so in a rare moment for me, there's a discourse thing i want to bring up, and that thing is. okay. so on iskall's stream there's this thing that can happen where someone brings up a criticism of his content or vault hunters. frequently it's self-evidently wrong, but sometimes it's not. and then iskall spends the next thirty minutes shadowboxing this guy, explaining himself, and completely derailed. and this is an iskall trait we all know and sigh bemusedly about, because he cares about the community and wants people to understand his intentions! he wants the community to understand his decisions!

however, it's not the community as a whole he's fighting; he is in fact, arguing with One Guy, who often doesn't represent the wider community, and who normally won't have their mind changed. hell, sometimes it's believable that they're satisfied having just managed to upset iskall, and they'll leave, no change to their mind, perfectly pleased that iskall's responding at all (that's what i firmly believe the people who poke at the 'you don't upload enough and that means you're falling off and a bad person' wound are trying to do, at least).

in the vault hunters community, we refer to this as iskall getting One Guyed, and it's typically viewed as bad, because it ends up focusing an entire moment on a single guy's negative opinion as opposed to on the larger picture. and it's an understandable thing to have happen! but it's frustrating to watch from the outside.

and so now i am looking at that cat poll. and the way everyone is still shadowboxing someone who has since apologized. and the way i would have never ever known about any of the negative comments about jellie if it weren't for fellow mcyt fans constantly putting them on my dash to dunk on them. and it's like. if you look through the notes most of them are just... normal? it's only a tiny few of people (and the pollrunner, who has since apologized) who were being dicks. it's a very, very ignorable demographic.

but. well. there was One Guy. and we had to correct them.

and folks, i don't know how to say that i almost never see "lol mcyt is cringe" type comments unless one of you puts it on my dash. both because i don't go looking through the notes of things that are likely to have them or go looking for reasons to be upset and because it's just... not that common! very frequently these days it is, in fact, One Guy!

i have almost never seen that poll on my dash without at least one instance of the One Guy. instead of being for fun, it's mostly become about explaining ourselves to someone who will not listen and will not change their minds, and treating this as a the whole of the Other Side of that poll, when most people are being... fine. they're fine! the majority of the people voting for the other side are doing it for perfectly normal reasons that don't require fighting about.

and man. let me tell you. after spending as long as i have watching vault hunters development? it can be just as frustrating to watch a fandom get One Guyed as it is to watch iskall.

[bit-odd-innit]

Eddie who cries a lot, Eddie who cries openly and easily and unabashedly, Eddie who cries not only when he’s upset but also when he’s frustrated or happy or full of some overwhelming cocktail of positive and negative emotions, Eddie who cries so often the kids are used to it vs. Steve who has not cried in years, Steve who has endured countless horrors and unfathomable physical trauma, Steve who puts his body on the line time and time again and has never broken once, Steve who shatters a glass on his kitchen floor—not even a nice glass, just a plain drinking glass, he was getting juice for Erica—and inexplicably bursts into tears, and it’s so unexpected and so jarring that everyone starts crying and nobody knows why.

[oodlesodoodles]

laughter

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

Milk theory? 👁️👁️

ANYTHING FOR YOU TWO!!!!

ok this is gonna be short and mildly insane. i would like everyone to understand that this is pretty much Entirely unfounded & i'm just reading too much into a teeny little thing. however i've convinced myself that this theory is viable against all better judgement

take these mad ramblings with a Monumental grain of salt. im not to be taken seriously ever

so it all boils down to This

Little

Motherfucker.

the milk carton behind Barnaby's house.

it was added with the last large update, and it Immediately made me lose my mind. it's such a... strange thing to add to the map, which already has Teeny Secrets - along with other choice objects that make me narrow my eyes. but this isn't about them.

The very first thing I thought of when I saw the milk carton was the phrase "no use crying over spilled milk". which, of course, essentially means that there's no point in crying over things you can't change / things already done. There are a couple ways i'm interpreting it with this context

Something is going to happen that Barnaby feels personally responsible for. or is responsible for - either indirectly, or maybe he'll do something terrible. i think it's entirely possible that he might do that possible something for Wally. and again, take this with salt, but Clown has implied through trivia and fun hypotheticals that Barnaby would go to lengths for Wally. and yes, i know. taking evidence from "what would the neighbors do in Among Us" is absurd. IN MY DEFENSE! while the trivia isn't really to be taken seriously, there's always a thought process behind character roles and dynamics and behavior, and that is something that can be (carefully) looked into and applied. like in Among Us, apparently Barnaby would, and i quote, "Barnaby does all the Dirty work if Wally is an Impostor- Anything to help his little Buddy out...". anything to help his little buddy out, huh? like, it's been stated that Barnaby knows things about Wally that no one else does. and it's been mildly implied that he's fairly protective of Wally. and we all know that Wally is getting into some deep shit, and whether he means to or not he's likely gonna fuck everything up for everyone. it's not that big of a leap to speculate that Barnaby might do something drastic/horrible/regret-worthy in Wally's name / for his sake.

2. something terrible is going to happen to Barnaby / directly related to Barnaby, and he's going to be absolutely powerless to do anything about it. though i think that's kind of a given... yeah this section is pretty self explanatory

3. Barnaby is going to go missing. because what used to be on milk cartons? Missing Posters! yes yes i know this one is even more of a reach, since milk cartons didnt have missing posters on them till the 80s, but yk. it's a Thought.

my second thought was "oh ok so when the carton spills, it's curtains for Barnaby." this part of the theory is just me being paranoid that Barnaby is going to wind up kicking the bucket - though i suppose if that were the case, there would be a bucket, not milk. well, if a bucket ever appears, i'm going to start prematurely mourning. Still!

the point is - at some point, that milk is probably gonna spill. it may be just a detail as things get better Worse, or it could be indicative of something terrible happening to / because of Barnaby. the milk spills, Panic Time.

Milk Theory.

[meanbossart]

alright but what was drow's reaction to the circus, and did he and astarion take the love test?

He's definitely not a circus guy. In fact, this was a party composed of DU drow, Shadowheart, Gale and Astarion so I dont think anyone here is a circus guy, making it kinda fitting that my ass missed most of the interactions you get in there, seeing as I kind of breezed through it pfft.

Killing a clown was fun though, definitely a highlight!

And in true DU drow fashion he was way too sincere during the love test and Astarion got mad at every answer he gave except for when he said he enjoyed being chin-deep in gore LOL

[ducktracy]

spotting Sponge merchandise in the wild has become one of my favorite joys in life because of how perplexing so much of it is. do you think there’s some kid somewhere throwing a tantrum and screaming because his mother won’t buy him Plankton Hotdog

[mxtxfanatic]

Ngl, I’m actually pretty uncomfortable reading my old posts defending the goodness of the common people and their right to defend themselves—as persecuted groups or as individuals—from hierarchical tyranny, given how easily in this current irl moment a not-insignificant amount of people have fallen into supporting an active genocide, because I cannot separate this from how much pushback I got (and still sometimes get) for being consistent in my politics

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

Things My Wife Does That I Think Are Great Part 1

Every day during my break she comes into my office and asks me "what's your tumny telling you about dinner" as a way of asking me if any of my intermittant dietary needs should be taken into consideration when she cooks

If she notices that I'm sad or stressed, she asks me for permission to get me a little present like a snack from the store, a book I want to read, or an album I like

When she wears a skirt, sometimes I will hear her quietly singing "swish, sweesh, swoosh, swish" to herself on a loop while doing a little twisty motion with her hips to make her skirt swish around her legs

Every time I tell her I love her, she gasps and pretends to be surprised

If I kiss her on the nose, she will pretend to power down like a robot and refuses to "turn back on" until I kiss her nose again

One time we were hanging out around a campfire with a friend and wifey was splitting some wood for us to throw on and apparently I got so distracted that our friend took a picture to show wifey when she sat back down

Before bed she always puts on her silk bonnet and it's the only time I can pet her hair without damaging her curls so sometimes she lays her head in my lap for a few minutes after she puts the bonnet on so I canpet her hair and scritch her forehead and she just says out loud "purr purr, purr purr" like not making the sound but saying the words???? And I love it so much????

[hypersaw]

given that the FR team already went out of their way to gut established lore that they've had for most of the decade in order to rework it into something that doesnt draw as many parallels to real world colonization, i do believe this was just done out of ignorance. i have some hope that they'll rework the auraboa short story (where i think most of the issues lie?) to not feel so... off-putting.

i do think this is also a bit of a wake-up call for the team to hire sensitivity readers full time or something. or at least whenever they want to push out more prominent lore things.

[txttletale]

the linguistic hoops that liberals will go jump through to describe the institutional violence of non-western states without acknowledging the obvious truth that america does the exact same things on a larger scale is ridiculous. “country X is such an authoritarian nightmare, they have prison camps/internment camps/gulags!!”

“no, because people are sent there for no reason! they’re imprisoned on false charges just because of their ethinicity!! people are forced to confess even though they’re innocent!”

“no!!!! it’s different!! in country X the detainees are forced into modern-day slavery to make money for the government!! the guards illegally torture, rape, and beat them!!”

[sideprince]

I've seen the same post a hundred times now. Sometimes it's a few days old, sometimes it's from years ago, but it's always the same. Some anti posts about how they don't understand how anyone can like Snape because he was so awful, and then there's a long reply that goes something like, "imagine this happens to you, and then this, and then this" to describe Snape's experience. Sometimes there's some James Potter hate thrown in.

Look. You can go through describing a character's entire experience but you don't really need to. Here's the thing that antis don't understand:

For all her faults (and they're big, bigoted ones) Rowling understood a really integral part of the human experience and conveyed it through Snape. Everyone needs love and to feel accepted. It's that simple. Snape became a Death Eater to seek acceptance (Rowling has confirmed this, though I can't remember the source - whoever wants to add it please do), because it was the only way he could find any.

Snape's understanding of morality, like everyone's, is subjective. Some readers understand this and some don't. When faced against a morality that says there is good and bad in the world, everyone makes choices based on their personal experience. Context is everything. Someone who experiences pain and suffering will not see the person inflicting it on them as moral. That's it. 'How can this person be good when they caused me so much suffering?' = human psychology. Most of the people who think 'I'm a bad person and deserve this' have been gaslit and abused into thinking so, because it's not a natural reaction - it's one that has to often be socialized into someone at a young age, exactly because it's not natural. Everyone is the hero of their own story; no one sees themselves as a villain, because they see the valid aspects of their own perspective.

You can write essays on how vulnerable people needing acceptance is what cults and fascists exploit to recruit vulnerable people, or on how the standard anti's un-nuanced reading of Snape both ignores canon and displays a disturbing lack of empathy or compassion, but at its core it just boils down to context. From Snape's perspective he experienced cruelty, therefore the people inflicting it must be cruel. Again, it's that simple. He was a person, like any other, except he was fictional so he wasn't even real. On the flip side is James Potter, who, for all his faults, didn't get to live long enough to get a chance to change and grow unlike Snape, and I think the Snapedom also needs to acknowledge that.

They're fictional characters representing things an author wants to say, not sports teams, not martyrs, and not all good or all bad emblems that define your identity depending on how you feel about them. It's depressing how much time is wasted arguing with bullies and trolls whether from the Marauders fandom or just random antis. I literally can't find more than three blogs to follow without this argument coming across my feed daily. I know the Snapedom is Not OK™ and that's kind why we're all here, and I know that my take is super unpopular but like Snape, I don't care what others think: this fandom has been having the exact same argument for years and nothing has changed. There's fanart and meta and fic and so much content out there appreciating this character, you're not going to change an anti's mind who's deliberately trolling in the tags, so why are you trying? What are you getting out of it? What does it give you? It's exhausting just scrolling past it.

[schrodingers-slut]

Sabo showing up to his super stealthy terrorism day job everyday in his fruity ass steampunk top hat, a perfectly ruffled cravat, and a five foot solid lead pipe

[journey-to-the-attic]

huh????????

[dawnssummers]

— i never liked that ending either. more love streaming out the wrong way, and i don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

buffy the vampire slayer, 5.07 fool for love + 5.18 intervention + 5.22 the gift / richard siken, litany in which certain things are crossed out