#this is a recurring problem

[sad-emo-dip-dye]

Getting to the bookstore and IMMEDIATELY forgetting which manga volumes I already own

[queenofsquids]

i didn't realize that was a stand at first i thought that was sally's penis and i felt a little indignant on her part that you hadn't centered it or matched it to her skin tone

now I feel indignant as well!

I would be so careful to find her a match!

[fortjester]

I must read the fic tags. Not reading the fic tags is the mind killer. Not reading the fic tags is the little death that leads to accidentally reading hanahaki disease fic.

[zeestarfishalien]

Me (a human mimic) watches 3 seasons of a show with at least one regular character who has a very distinct personality: *accidentally becomes character*

[slutdge]

oh boy do i have even more south carolina monkey lore for yall

also worth mentioning this isnt event he first time that monkeys have escaped from this specific research center in Yemassee

I fear those 43 research center monkeys will never be captured and will cause an invasive primate problem in South Carolina.

[dollking081]

if my uncle gets drunk and pretends to have a seizure ONE MORE FUCKING TIME

[vaguely-concerned]

that part in sea of blood where the game is soft tutorializing you on the sunder mechanic as the elite rogue venatori enemy shows up for the first time and lucanis' reaction is sooooo..... 'mierda. these guys'. see this is why he's the funniest and also most endearing character ever made. he really does sound softly, tiredly mildly exasperated in a way so wildly out of proportion with the situation at hand. a knife dude from the secret society slash cult that's been horrifically torturing him for a year just popped out of the woodwork, and the tone of lucanis' voice in response is reminiscent of nothing so much as a man who's just realized the office printer is out of ink again and whose resigned little sigh in response conveys with perfect good-natured clarity to everyone else working late alongside him that he is a bit annoyed but like not at any of them. 'we're in this together' his tone seems to say. fuckass printer and all. I'll go fetch some new cartridges. I'm getting coffee along the way does anyone else want anything while I'm there. he has the most companionable effortlessly comforting and innately hilarious presence of anyone who's ever lived even running through the failing forcefield personal trauma horror prison of all time at the bottom of the ocean. his day job is murder. he met rook and co literally half an hour ago and already these are the vibes, starting as they mean to go on.

the je ne sais quoi factor of this man. unparalleled

[kymal]

[wardensantoineandevka]

the fact that people keep interpreting the word "consequences" to be exactly and only "punishment" and knee-jerk responding to it with "why do you want my precious Bells Hells pookies punished" frankly says a lot about more about you than it does about those who feel that C3 as a narrative never followed through on consequences for anything

this is ESPECIALLY evident when it is remembered that we're all talking about a story and doing narrative analysis and media critique here, yes, all of us, even the casual commentaries, debriefs and post-mortems of the campaign is analysis. consequences. narrative follow through. the consequential story beat that carries the weight and concluded a prior set up. results, negative or positive or neutral, that are incurred as a consequence of what happened before. a continuity of narrative logic. actions that result in the expected and prior established weight and outcome. feeling like things consistently matter and affect things meaningfully on various levels, including the personal.

[bluegillfanboy23]

Can't sleep. Thinking about that stupid bisexual woman with her big brown eyes and her old man boyfriend

[artbyblastweave]

One of the things in my zombie thing is that because I think I'm sooo fuckin' clever I gave many of undead protagonists names that are derived from neurodegenerative diseases and nervous system disorders and the like. Some of the characters pre-dated when I hit upon that idea, so I started doing a run through on wikipedia looking for fatal degenerative diseases that sounded like plausible human names. And I gotta say, it was real funny, because many of the syndromes on that list were very provably real and horrifying things like "spine inverts itself over the course of ten years and then it pierces a vital organ and you die" disorder, you know, the kind of thing that's very difficult to plausibly fold into a purely-social model of disability. And then there were other "neurological" disorders that were just. very visibly the result of the researchers not liking the attitude of one or two guys in particular and creating "acts like that guy over there" disorder

[clumsypuppy]

adhd is when you shoot for the moon but you forgot the rocket fuel and by the time you realize it everyones already on the moon and then you panic and crash into the sun and it explodes

[conarcoin]

mcyt fandom will be like leaktwt dni and then will post shit they found from an old account they had to be digging real hard to find and be like "well my cyberstalking is okay actually because i found shitty tweets from 5 years ago and am just holding them accountable :/"

[coraniaid]

People who feel sorry for Faith in Season 3 -- a group which certainly includes me, by the way -- sometimes suggest that Buffy should have done more for her. Faith was a traumatized teenage girl, the argument goes, she'd arrived in Sunnydale afraid for her life after seeing her Watcher die in front of her eyes, she didn't have anybody else to turn to or anywhere to stay or anyone to teach her about how to be a better Slayer.

And the rebuttal to that, by people who don't agree that Buffy had any such obligation -- a group which also includes me, for the record -- is that ... well, it's really silly? Buffy is herself also a traumatized young woman. She's just come back from some of the worst months of her life, a life she's only now slowly starting to rebuild from almost rock bottom. Yes, of course, Faith needed help; yes, objectively Faith's life is in many ways harder than Buffy's. But it's asking far too much of Buffy -- and letting everyone else in Faith's life off the hook far too easily -- to expect her to take on the role of Faith's primary caregiver. Giles should have done more, or the Council should have bothered to send Faith a new Watcher of her own far sooner. They shouldn't have just delegated that to Buffy herself. No matter how hard Buffy had tried, she was never the one who should have had that responsibility thrust upon her.

And then we get to Season 7, and the Potentials, and ... well. The first time as tragedy, I guess.

Once again, Buffy is just coming back from some of the worst months or her life and trying to rebuild after rock bottom. But this time around it's almost like the show decides to adopt the fan position I criticised earlier. As if it's saying to us: "Okay, Buffy is no longer a mere high school senior worrying about getting into college! She's now a certified college dropout, with a recently dead mother and exciting new bills to pay and a kid sister she didn't have to worry about before. And don't forget that she's a whopping four years older than she was in Season 3. Now it is surely perfectly reasonable for her to have to look after a dozen or more little Faith Lehanes, all of them hurt and scared and angry. Some of them have dead Watchers and some of them never seen a vampire before and all of them are going to die soon, painfully, unless Buffy can do something about it."

I said earlier that Buffy does a pretty terrible job leading the Potentials -- at least before Chosen -- and I think that's fair. She does do a pretty bad job. But I also think that ... well, duh, of course she did a bad job. What kind of idiot would expect her to do more?

She was always going to do terribly, because she was being asked to do something almost impossible with no warning or training or preparation. Buffy isn't a general. This isn't one of her strengths. She works best alone, or in small groups of people she already knows well and can rely on without having to win over. Yes, Buffy has helped organize large groups of people before -- the hell dimension prison break in Anne, the fight against the Mayor in Graduation Day -- but these are exceptions rather than the norm. She also doesn't have any experience in the proper way to train a Potential Slayer, because she's never done it before and she never received any such training herself before getting her Slayer powers.

And the show has always told us that Buffy usually struggles to connect to new people quickly. Her social circle, years after graduation, is entirely made up of either people she met in her sophomore year of high school or people who are either currently dating or used to date people she met in her sophomore year of high school. it's a running joke in Season 6 that she doesn't know the last names of any of her coworkers.

She does better when she can delegate to other people, which is what she actually does in the two examples I gave before (it's Lily/Anne who Buffy puts in charge of getting the other kids out of hell in Anne; it's Xander who she puts in charge of organizing the other kids in the battle against the Mayor). Buffy was -- very slowly, very carefully -- teaching Dawn how to (avoid having to) fight vampires at the beginning of the season. Dawn is the very first person she's ever tried to teach this sort of thing to! Now she has to teach a houseful of girls she doesn't even know, all while keeping them safe from an ancient evil entity and its horde of demonic cultists and taking care of her sister and having a job and carrying out her usual duties as a Slayer. Of course she's going to find that really, really hard.

There are things I think Buffy can and should have done differently. Off the top of my head: nobody in the house should ever have been sleeping alone; they should have adopted some sort of handshake/hug greeting protocol so you'd always know that you were talking to a real person and not the First; Buffy should have recognized that Kennedy (and some of the other older Potentials, maybe?) actually knew more about teaching scared fifteen year olds with no powers than she did and [more formally] delegated training responsibilities to them and had regular catch-ups with them (both because this makes practical sense and because winning over the loyalty of a handful of older girls, the ones most likely to be the focus of any mutiny or protest, is much easier than trying to approach all the Potentials as a single uniform mass); she should have socialized a little with, if not all the Potentials, at least that older and more responsible subset who she needed to stay motivated and onside; she probably should have forced herself to very obviously know all the girls' names and one or two facts about them; she probably shouldn't have told them all that their friend killed herself because she was weak and scared and stupid and so were they. And so on.

But the biggest issue here is that ... Buffy shouldn't ever have been asked to do this! Not by anyone who knew her, or who cared about her well-being.

Again, if this is the point of Season 7 I think it makes some sort of sense, at least from a Doyleist perspective. I think the show actually has (maybe unintentionally), laid the groundwork for this being kind of a weakness of Buffy's. Again, the execution is a little sloppy, but whatever. There's something like a narrative arc there, at least in potential.

But from a Watsonian perspective, and without wanting to be (too obviously) a hater ... isn't this just another abrogation of duty on Giles's part? He is (as far as we know) still a paid Watcher right up to the point the Council building explodes! Looking after the Potentials is literally his job! He explicitly tells us in Bring On The Night that the prospect of somebody going after the Potentials like this is something that the Council "always feared" might happen. And so naturally when it does he decides to ... make it Buffy's problem. Why is she the one who suddenly has to worry about training the Potentials and teaching them how to fight vampires and keeping them safe when, of the two of them, he is the one actually qualified to do it?

(Yeah, I know, it's because the writing of Season 7 isn't even close to good and requires the characters to contort themselves through strange hoops to match the very specific story beats the writers have decided on. But also ... well, giving up and placing all the pressure on Buffy to look after a dozen-odd little Faith Lehanes is actually pretty much in keeping with how Giles ended up dealing with the original Faith Lehane, if you think about it. And he asked the Council to be given the chance to take care of her, too. So maybe this is more in character than I'd like to admit.)

[justajsworkshop]

something that changed my perspective on shifting/manifesting/the void state: bashar says we do not need to learn how to manifest or shift. it is our second nature to do so. we do it inherently as the son of man.

for a while now, i’ve been seeing these as something outside myself: shifting/manifesting as an external process, the void state as an external place/state “to get to”. but how could these be anything outside of me when all there is is me if i am god?

the first principle of manifesting is to be still, and know that i am god. and if i am god, then i am the way. i am the shift. i am the manifestation. i am the void. i AM the process/the method/the way because i am all things now and forevermore.

it’s not just that there is nothing to change but self; it’s that there is ONLY self. there is only you here. i am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. learning how to manifest/shift/get to the void implies doing. the true nature of reality is all there is is being, that one being being you/god/source/all that is.

this is why whenever i’ve “successfully” manifested or gotten close to/had a moment in the void, i wasn’t trying for anything. i simply said it was so, thought nothing more of it, and it manifested. i simply existed and released all trying/doing and suddenly i was in the void/noticing physical reality fall away. trying to manifest/shift/tap into the void state is exactly what was keeping me from all these things because i was denying the truth that i already am that which i desire to be.

manifestation/shifting is effortless because it’s just you being you. the void state is effortless because it’s just you being you. there is no trying or doing, only being. first, be still, and know that you are god. be god first, and you will understand these principles from god’s perspective instead of trying to grasp at them through your limited self. then, as god, who is all things, be that which you desire to be.

[bloodraven55]

istg some people are so ludicrously stubborn about accepting a character being confirmed as a lesbian specifically. “but they talked to a dude without punching him once—” “they never turned to the camera and actually said it—” “idk they just don’t give me those vibes—” like jfc