wandersoffdoodling

[wandersoffdoodling]

gotta give credit to gravity falls for having a cartoon explicitly set during the summer but going

“hey we wanna do a halloween episode” “but it’s summer” “the town has a regional not!halloween called summerween fuck you”

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[wandersoffdoodling]

it's okay, ulysses ogre. you can back up and try dubliners, it's a short story collection with much more straightforward prose, you can dive deep on one piece at a time, and once you've toyed around with that then I'm sure you'll have an easier time with ulysses. besides, I had an irish lit professor who'd been studying finnegans wake for twenty years and she said she still didn't really know what was going on in it. ulysses ogre, what really matters is if you are enjoying your time with literature and feel like you are gaining something, not whether you reach the "correct" conclusions. there's no need to try and force yourself through something if you feel like you aren't on an even enough plane with the text to reap any of its rewards.

[wandersoffdoodling]

[wandersoffdoodling]

I came up with this three-way table to help me (and now you, if you want) to rate things out of 5 stars. I was thinking of books and films when I made it, but you can probably use it for other stuff.

The idea is that you rate the thing on how much stuff you loved and how much stuff you hated, and those things weight against each other. There's only one way to get 5 stars or 1 star, so those should end up as the rarest ratings, wtih 3 stars being the most common.

'Spicy' means that the thing inspires emotion, whether positive or negative, while 'bland' means it doesn't affect you much either way.

An example of a 3-star (spicy) - for me personally - would be the Twilight series, because there's plenty of garbage in there but also some things that are like crack to me. I can't think of an example of a 3 star (bland) because by nature they don't stick in the mind.

(This also assumes giving 0 stars isn't allowed. That'd throw it out of whack...)

[wandersoffdoodling]

In the canon context, there is something extremely funny about Phantom running around with so much ghost gear from Fentonworks.

I assume the Fentons make enough of a spectacle with their ghost hatred that everyone knows they're out here hunting Phantom for bloodsport. Like there's no uneasy truce or tense partnership going on like the Fentons have not partnered with Phantom in any way. There's not even any chance of a secret partnership because the likes of Jack Fenton would not be able to keep a secret like that.

Which really just leaves the conclusion that Phantom stole all that gear. All of it. Repeatedly. And he's still doing it. He's got some brand new FentonTech-of-the-week every week and he Absolutely is not supposed to have that. Like some raccoon in the trashcan the Fentons can't keep out despite all their broom-swinging and lid locks.

The ghost-net wristwatch that Jack Fenton is parading around with at 10am is on Phantom's wrist by 11am. Jack and Maddie have so many pieces of matching gear but if One piece is missing from One of them you can almost certainly bet it's clipped to Phantom's beltloop somewhere. Sometimes Fenton gear on Jack or Maddie will vanish and then reappear and the best idea anyone has is sometimes Phantom steals too many things and just gives the least fun pieces back.

[wandersoffdoodling]

It's Juneteenth yall. And I'm not letting this day go unmarked.

Black people fight for everybody. We stand in solidarity with women, lgbt people, poor people all over the world of every skin color and background. Every religion and nationality.

Today, stand with us. Be with us. Tell a black person you love them. Hug a black person (with consent). Ask that hot black girl out today. Make a black person smile. Black lives matter to everybody and you matter to us.

Stand with us on Juneteenth like we stand with you all year round, and I hope a happy Pride month continues for all of us

💝

[wandersoffdoodling]

minecrap in the librarby

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[wandersoffdoodling]

Back by popular demand. English Willy part 3

(Idk if I'll do another bc I feel like its run its course and unlike Scott Cawthon I would like to end my series on a high note! But to everyone who sent in asks or showed support or generally took part I love all of you and had so much fun with this. I might do more in future but I don't want part 4 to hang over me as something I HAVE to do)

[wandersoffdoodling]

nobody move. i've just successfully articulated the sentiment that taylor's power turns her into a panopticon because she was living in one & explained her trigger in a way i feel satisfied with for the first time in my life

the concept of the panopticon is not just about surveillance, but about creating an environment where people cannot be sure whether or not they are being surveilled, and thus must constantly act under the assumption that they are. which is exactly what happened to taylor--we see from when we first meet her in the school that she's anticipating attack from every possible direction to avoid it, and the one time she lets her guard down a fraction and assumes she's found a safe spot to hide from abuse, she's targeted with the juice spills. and this is after her trigger event, but it's clear she behaves this way because it was beaten into her over the entire course of the bullying. it's what she describes when she recounts the trigger:

“I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.  But I made a friend, one of the girls who had sometimes joined in on the taunting came to me and apologized.  ...  Her approaching me and befriending me was one of the big reasons I could think the harassment was ending.  I never really let my guard down around her, but she was pretty cool about it. “And for most of November and the two weeks of classes before Christmas break, nothing.  They were leaving me alone.  I was able to relax.” I sighed, “That ended the day I came back from the winter break. I knew, instinctually, that they were playing me, that they were waiting before they pulled their next stunt, so it had more impact. I didn’t think they’d be so patient about it. I went to my locker, and well, they’d obviously raided the bins from the girls bathrooms or something, because they’d piled used pads and tampons into my locker. Almost filled it.”

the precise moment when she stopped consciously anticipating and preparing to react to abuse--when she relaxed, when she stopped acting as if the lack of danger didn't mean that she couldn't still be hurt at any time--is when she was brutally reminded that she's never safe. she's still in the panopticon. she isn't literally being watched every second, she isn't literally in lifelong danger of having her vulnerabilities exploited, but it feels like she is. she can never ever be sure she's safe.

so she triggers, and she gets a power that turns her into a panopticon, and lets her watch everyone right back. it lets her regain control by turning her into a source of danger that could attack anywhere, from any direction, any time, fully unexpected.

& the reason her power enables her to watch Everyone--not just a single person, or a few people--but Everyone, is that the other major aspect of her trigger is the trauma of facts like this:

“It was pretty obvious that they had done it before the school closed for Christmas, by the smell alone. I bent over to throw up, right there in a crowded hallway, everyone watching. Before I could recover or stop losing my breakfast, someone grabbed me by the hair, hard enough it hurt, and shoved me into the locker.”

"All I could think was that someone had been willing to get their hands that dirty to fuck with me, but of all the students that had seen me get shoved in the locker, nobody was getting a janitor or teacher to let me out."

for months, for years, she was in a community where everyone regularly witnessed her humiliation and abuse, and everyone, dozens and dozens of kids and teachers, either contributed to it or was knowingly, silently complacent. this is what sticks with her: the idea that she is so universally reviled, so deserving of revile, that any crowd of witnesses would, without hesitation, consign her to the filth of the locker.

what else is she supposed to conclude, but that everyone she interacts with is a threat? that she can't drop her guard ever again, because no one will be coming to help her if she does? of course she has to become the panopticon. of course she has to watch everyone, all of the time, if she wants to stop it from happening again. of course she has to live among the teeming lowly and crawling things she has been taught via one firm shove that she is worth less than, and of course she has to use them to watch everyone back. and it would be inaccurate to say that doing this--monitoring everything with her bugs--makes her feel safe. all it does is allow her to remain in a constant state of paranoia and traumatized hyper-vigilance more efficiently.

[wandersoffdoodling]

shards are so fucking funny to me because like. theyre alien eldrich supercomputers with thought processes beyond humans and also like half of what they do is coming up with metaphors. fuck STEM the hyperlogical space crystals have to devote their thinking power to analyzing the motifs in human's lives

[wandersoffdoodling]

Siberian, Narwhal and Scion are three different sides of the same coin- and I am not being snide here, this isn't a bit- all three of them are examinations of the fact that if you are sufficiently personally powerful, they don't really have a way to make you wear clothes

[wandersoffdoodling]

So, the undersiders are actually set up way differently from most supervillian teams we see. And that's part of why they're so effective, they're built by Coil to be effective, and are thus kind of designed top down to be the perfect team. They're recruited from a selection of unrelated teenage parahumans who don't know eachother or have much in common, but who all have something for the team to give them, either needing a way to make money off of their powers, being new capes trying to get into the business, or being capes that could benefit from being on a team. Coil even realizes he can bring on Lisa (whose basically in trouble with him) and Bitch (whose a wandering threat nobody would approach in most circumstances, much less realize they could recruit). He then takes this group of teenagers and gives them a unified headquarters where they all have rooms, along with common areas, to make sure they end up seeing eachother as freinds, as a way of making sure they have loyalties beyond money. He's their boss, but he's not the person leading them into combat, instead appointing one of their own to be the leader. And he gives them missions, which are a diverse set of jobs they can do, that they can choose to not go on. He even makes sure that they can work well with allied teams like the travlers. And while they are all teenagers, the way the team is set up grooms them to be effective adult villains.

This is a really effective way of creating creating a villain team. And it's way different then the merchants, E88, or the ABB who are basically just normal criminal enterprises who have capes as high ranking members. But you know who that is exactly like: the Wards/Protectorate. Coil is a PRT agent, he understands how they run teams, and why their way is so ruthlessly effective. So when he created a supervillian team he basically created a crime version of the Wards, mirroring the structure, just doing villain work instead of hero work. And with himself as the PRT stand in. After leviathan they basically graduate from being the crime Wards to the crime Protectorate. Every single one of them is a Wards style recruitment, even Lisa is basically a probationary member. And I'm pretty sure Coil knew this, because the name undersiders makes much more sense if he actively understands that they're a villain version of the Wards.

Mostly unrelated but it makes me think of what things would have been like if Chariot was recruited onto the undersiders and Imp was sent to spy on the Wards for Coil.