#universe message for me

[gibbearish]

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[tongue-eating-louse-art]

Click for better quality because WHOOF did tumblr decide to explode these. ANYWAYS over here a long time ago I vagued about my STPxTMA AU and so heres some of my fake screenshots of it! A couple are draw-overs but the last one is completely original. Featured here are the princess, the stranger x2, the razor (empty cup editon) x2, and the moment of clarity. Anyways i love these guys.

[nightvale-thoughts]

thinking about how Johnny and Alex met at a shitty night job and decided a few years later to write an audio drama that literally changed the lives of thousands of people. how Harlan was literally unemployed when he decided to start making malevolent, and now he's singlehandedly revolutionizing the audio drama landscape. or Zach Valenti and Gabriel Urbina being long-time college friends who wanted to make something fun with no expectation that over 20 million people would listen to it....not being hyperbolic at all when I say that some of the best pieces of audio fiction have been made in basements by teams of less than 3 people. wtnv has always been a few friends who wanted to make something interesting after their day job. i am just thinking of artists persevering under the crushing weight of capitalism. .. and great art made out of pure love and curiosity for an emerging medium...

[ezioauditore-s]

ok but the real tragedy of assassin's creed will always be the spiralling domino effect that underlies the series and that every protagonist is fundamentally just a pawn in a bigger game they'll never see and that they'll never be able to change because they are just a single piece of a puzzle which also means that every single tragedy that had happened to them doesn't matter to the predetermind bigger picture because it always had to happen the trauma was just collateral you can't escape it. altair watched his family die just so he could pass on a key. ezio's watched his family die so he could deliver one message that wasn't even meant for him. kassandra watched centuries rise and pass and empires crumble because she was only needed to pass on the staff to someone else.

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

can we stop the trend of putting traumatized and mentally unstable characters into romantic relationships as their “happy endings”?

[babyblueetbaemonster]

I think it's cool Manni embroidered his message on a zombie and sent it to us. (yes I was attacked by it but it's still cool)

[neon-impressions]

I AM SOFT AND KIND AND FULL OF LOVE

[ithinkitsdashingshop]

Alright! Shop is up and running at Ko-fi. The page is not much to look at yet, but the shop works.

[sneez]

trying to work out their book designs :-) feat. ursus [id in alt text]

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[clever-adjacent]

i have died. badly

used to be cleveradjacent but they termed me out of nowhere. i'd appreciate if you shared this so i could find my followers/mutuals!

[la-pheacienne]

I just LOVE how both in got and hotd we have established that the root of all evil is women who *checks notes* enjoy sex! consistency is important right? I mean GOD FORBID we genuinely root for anyone that isn't nEd FuCKinG sTark the paragon of big dick masculine honor! who are we gonna root for? a flagrant philanderer that started the war because she's a whore? pwease

but at least they're criticizing monarchy you guyzzz hashtag anti war hashtag subversion!! definitely promising!! never been done before!!!

[batsplat]

It's a thing I already knew but all your beautiful analysis really made obvious (to me) how much of a grudge holder vale is. That man is never letting it go he's gonna hold his grudges into his grave

you know, I do think this is an interesting issue, because I'm not sure this is true of all his grudges. just sticking here with the grudges he accumulated in his capacity as a competitor, rather than just his general approach to life or whatever... how you judge this will kinda depend on how you feel about the 'reconciliation' he's experienced with some of his rivals - and whether you read the whole thing as sincere or not. now, personally I reckon he still dislikes biaggi, but also you are allowed to just dislike people so I'll give him a pass for that. some of the others, I'm a little more convinced by the whole reconciliation schtick

let's get valentino's take:

interesting that he mentions those three together, isn't it? and like, he's still not messaging biaggi or inviting him to his home - "even with max" kind of tells you all you need to know - but the other two? they said some proper nasty things to each other over the years!! I mean, the casey rivalry, there's some remarks from both sides where quite frankly I think I would struggle just a touch to get over it

I don't know, obviously this could all be pr stuff, but I kind of feel like... y'know, why bother? it's 2022, you're retired, who gives a fuck? sure it's a good look to be all magnanimous, sure it can be a bit of a way of twisting in the knife to the guys left in the cold, but also, who would care if you don't play nice? I think especially with jorge, you surely don't need to do all that, inviting him to your home and dancing with him... (which, again, some of the spats those two had...) and with the casey rivalry, if there's one guy who's still hung up about what happened between the pair of them, it's obviously casey (speaking of blokes who can hold a grudge). maybe this is giving valentino too much credit, but personally I buy it's more or less sincere. there's nothing to really indicate he's still particularly bothered by any of their past disagreements - he's basically going for the 'all's fair in love and motorcycle racing' approach. he knows he was an asshole, he accepts they were assholes too, whatever, that's how these things work. he's generally a fan of drama in rivalries, unsurprisingly, and he was happy enough to contribute his fair share - but he does see it as fundamentally being part of the game

to point out the obvious, check out who he's left out: sete and marc. that's where he can't let go of the grudges... because it's not about the offence itself as much as it is about the betrayal. this is the thing with valentino, right, it's about what kind of bond you had with him. if you weren't his friend in the first place and then piss him off as a rival then, y'know, whatever. obviously he's going to be vicious in trying to get back at you, but also he's really not going to waste his time feeling too aggrieved by it. I mean, think about how all the bullshit between him and casey dropped off sharply post-2012... from valentino's end anyway. think about how jorge and valentino pretty quickly got on again whenever they weren't fighting for supremacy within yamaha. they weren't friends in the first place, then they were enemies for competitive reasons for a while there, then it's over and valentino is basically happy enough to call it bygones

but... if it's a certain kind of bond you had with him and then you wrong him... that little mental list of all his past grievances, all your past transgressions, that's where it comes in. that's where he ices you out. denies you any emotional warmth. ensures that any interaction going forward is conducted entirely on his terms. where even any public 'reconciliation' won't truly be sincere.... or, certainly he's not going to forget what happened. if something else happens... it's like you've always got the potential of triggering this lingering resentment, in a way, where all that past stuff is still primed and ready to be called upon. he certainly doesn't just let it go

or, as he puts it in his autobiography:

Biaggi and I never talk to each other. I mean, we've never had a real conversation, anything that's lasted more than the requisite time to insult each other or put each other down, in the nastiest way possible. In any case, I don't hate him. It's true, we've never been friends, but hatred is something different, and that's too serious a word to describe our relationship. Far too serious. No, we have a reciprocal antipathy. No doubt this is a result of what we do for a living and the fact that we both want to win every single time. And perhaps it's also a function of the fact that we have very different personalities and very different ways of seeing things. Still, I don't think this means we hate each other, as some journalists have written. I think I could feel hatred for someone, but only for someone far worse than anything Biaggi has done. For example, if I were betrayed by a friend, then, yes, I could hate him. But Biaggi will never betray my friendship for the simple reason that we are not, and never have been, friends. Our relationship is very clear: we compete on the track - outside the track, each goes his own way. You could say we detest each other cordially.

... I mean. he said it, not me. and given this book was first published in '05... biaggi can't betray his friendship because they were never friends... I'm not saying he's thinking about sete, but it has to at least be a possibility, right? he's talking about one rivalry here and refusing to even mention the other... and the one he's refusing to mention is the one where he was friends with the other bloke. I don't know, maybe that's reading too much into it! and anyway, even if this passage wasn't really about sete, it's obviously still revealing. "detest each other cordially" is essentially what he was doing with casey and jorge (or from his point of view in any case, not entirely sure they'd agree with that). the grudge comes when he feels let down by you... and then, yes, he'll never let it go

of course, he's willing to set aside his grievances for a while if there's sufficient motivation for him to do so. in 2009, when he had so definitively won that rivalry with sete, why bother kicking up a fuss? in 2016, quite frankly it was just too much, and it was getting to the point where it was obviously hurting him too. on the one hand there was the media furore that had been going on non-stop since sepang, on the other hand it was also hurting his own approach to racing. there's reports from the time how visibly aggrieved he still was in the first few races of the season, and it took until they got back to europe for him to... y'know, have fun again. it's not sustainable to be walking around with a constant dark cloud over your head and broadcasting burning resentment towards your two main rivals. certainly not for someone like valentino - he needs to be having fun! the slight rapprochement needed to happen, in a way, because otherwise those years would have been even worse for everyone involved. but that doesn't actually translate to forgetting any of those grudges. this is about convenience more than anything else

goes to show, really... most of the time he doesn't take these things personally. I talked about it a bit in this post, how maybe it's also something that changed over time for him: the question of whether he was willing to develop these kinds of bonds in the first place with competitors... because he does possess a certain level of self-awareness in terms of what these kinds of rivalries are like and what they do to interpersonal relationships. ideally, you don't want to be hurt by a friend like that, right? better not to have that kind of emotional attachment with your competitors in the first place. how unfortunate it'd be if all those years after sete the circumstances aligned for him to see a competitor as something like a friend again... because, after all, those are the only people who could betray him. those are the only people where he thinks he could truly hate them

[jameszmaguire]

Not the kids. You can't kill kids.