i re-watched it several times, looking for what he does differently. finally i spotted it. look at the line of motion in his strike. it’s not especially fast, he doesn’t wind up more than the others, and it’s not a matter of strength – the guy who knocked over the stand probably put more muscle into it. but there’s a unity of movement he has that the others lack. his body and sword are all one curve. everything moves at once along the same line.
from a physics perspective, that means all the force he’s applying is concentrated at the point of contact between his sword’s edge and the target, and it moves at just the speed that breakage propogates through the material. too slow and it wouldn’t have enough force; too fast and he’d get ahead of the break, shoving the target over instead of cutting it.
from a writing perspective, that means that i should focus on describing a master swordsman’s smoothness more than their strength or speed, and can also have witnesses be confused at the effectiveness of strikes that don’t actually seem all that fast.
Martial arts are all about physics, my karate sensei is has a mechanic/physics diploma and he loves to explain the biomechanics of human body and how this was turned into fight via martial arts. It’s a very good way to teach. The sword master has a larger stance of the feet, much more than the others, allowing his barycenter to lower and thus giving more stability. This, united with the movement of the sword that follows the angle of his body increases the power of the blow without actually using too much muscle strength. Pretty sure he’s also just tending (not contracting) the muscles under the armpits, near the rib cage, the serratus anterior. That makes a huge difference.
masterpost cw: the JL are going into the GIW facility so there's mentions of experimentation. Nothing is too graphic though.
The GIW really are overconfident bastards.
Barry tries not to cuss about this whole thing around the kids. It isn’t that he thinks the kids haven’t heard cussing, or even that cussing doesn’t have its place. It’s more that he’s worried if he starts that he won’t be able to stop. The kids didn’t need to deal with his frustrations over this. They need him to be strong.
Most of the time.
Right now is about wrecking these overconfident bastards.
Barry can feel the anti ghost shielding. Moving through it is like pushing through a door strung with clingfilm. It slows him down, but it doesn’t stop him. Wally is fractions of a second behind him. Barry would have rather had Wally at the other locations where there would be less chance of being shot at, but there had been no convincing the Titans of staying away completely.
Wally takes the left path as Barry takes the right. Something about them coming through the shielding triggers the alarms. Something about them says ‘ghost. Barry tries not to think about it, because he can’t afford to think about it right then. They have a mission.
Locking the GIW out of their own armory is ridiculously simple. Again, overconfident bastards. He avoids taking out any of the agents just yet, just to cut down on panic. Next step was to find the security room. Wally made it there first. Two agents are passed out on the floor. Barry leaves the computers to Wally for the moment and focuses on securing the agents with zip ties. He uses their ties as gags. Which really, white suits? Overconfident bastards.
“Security room is secure,” Wally says. His voice is an even double through the comms. “Relay the time to breaching.”
“Five minutes,” Bats replies.
“Armory is locked up. There didn’t seem to be any exterior guards, but not promises,” Barry added. There was a soft noise of confirmation back.
Barry crosses his arms, foot tapping. Five minutes was an eternity for a speedster.
“Did you feel it?” Wally asks.
Barry nods. “Coming through the barrier? Yeah.”
Wally nods. “There’s also a feeling of, like, static shock when touching the goons.”
“I just thought that was the ugly carpet.”
“It is really hideous carpet.”
An eternity later, and far too much time staring at the carpet, the rest arrive. After grabbing the hard drive that they hope Technus has moved onto, Barry and Wally speed back to their teams and then forward again, mapping out the facility and taking the odd agent out as they go.
The full alarms are blaring now. The GIW are doing the equivalent of shredding the documents, except it’s trying to wipe data. There are Bats making sure to stop that. That one is easy. Harder is stopping the GIW from destroying the active experiments. From destroying the ghosts that they have pressed into cages and test tubes and machines that Barry doesn’t look too closely at but that turn his stomach.
Most of the human shaped ones rise with a wail as soon as they’re freed. Some vanish. Others swoop through the building. The ghost of a lunch lady embraces another that looks like a dock worker of some sort, but it’s hard to tell with the pieces that hang off him like dripping skin. Something large and white and furry attacks an agent.
Barry doesn’t stop them.
“Flash,” Wally says across the comms. “Left side, big lab.”
The strain in his voice is enough that Barry rushes to his nephew’s location, arms full of weird, blobular ghosts that rumble like purring cats. He’d been grabbing them out of one of the machines—at least grabbing the ones that weren’t… bits of green are stuck to his suit like mashed up jelly. The ghost coo as Barry zips at full speed.
Bits of green go flying as he slams to a stop next to Wally.
One of the blobs rumbles deeper and nuzzles Barry in a weird sort of comfort. Absently, Barry dips his chin down to shield it. He doesn’t look down. He can’t. His eyes are glued to what he’s seeing in the large tube in the center of the room.
“Is that…”
“…It looks like it, right?” Wally asks. His voice isn’t above a whisper. “Danny said they had his core, but I didn’t…”
“How could we?” Barry asks back. Ludicrously, Barry says the first thing that comes to mind. “We’re going to have to move. We don’t have enough bedrooms.”
Wally barks out a surprised laugh and covers his mouth quickly. It’s not the time to be laughing. Barry bites his lip to stop his own, slightly hysterical laugh.
The blobs purr.
The Flashes watch the floating figure in the tube. The figure that has Danny’s face, a glowing sphere in their chest, and fades to nothing before their feet can touch the ground.
once I did an Americorps position & I won’t get into exact details but two months in my one other coworker & I were rly frustrated bc we weren’t doing anything in our job description or the contract we signed whatsoever & instead we were basically being used as extremely underpaid retail staff and slowly the ppl in charge of us were cornering us more and more into that until I was finally like okay….what the hell? I opened up the work contract I signed and realized I hadn’t done a single thing listed in my role so I sent a long (professionally worded) complaint email to Americorps and they called me an hour later in total outrage because it turned out the work we were being made to do was explicitly prohibited by the program and we were being 100% exploited for cheap labor and the very next day we got a new supervisor and spent the rest of our year doing what we signed up to do and it rocked.
I’m kinda surprised that nalbinding isn’t as popular as crochet and knitting tbh because it has an even lower barrier of entry tools wise and unlike crochet and knitting it makes fabric that you can cut.
I feel like part of it might be casual people are generally aware of the existence of crochet and knitting, even if they don’t know very much about either, but have never heard of nalbinding
Yeah I hadn’t heard of it until recently and I ordered a big bone needle for myself to try it out and that should be arriving soon.
I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.
It seems like the sort of thing that would be popular even if not as popular as crocheting and knitting, considering the low barrier of entry.
You also don’t need a bunch of different sized needles for nalbinding or whatever. The size of the stitch is controlled either completely freehand or by pulling it against one of your fingers. Most people who have a lot of nalbinding needles seem to either have tried out wood, bone, and metal ones to see which kind they liked or they enjoy carving wood or bone and like making their own needles as an extra hobby.
It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.
Maybe the lack of accessories also makes it unpopular idk. People do like collecting things in their nests.
I've been wanting to do so, I cannot find anyone who can teach me, and any books I can find on it are Ass in the Visual Learning department. Otherwise I'd be making the hell outta some nalbinded fabric
I thought this would be kind of a niche post to make but I was quickly reminded that I’m on tumblr, the website full of gay people with one billion hobbies.
Why do they even make apps for ADHD. You want me to use my 24/7 handheld immediate distraction device? To manage my 'gets distracted too easily' disorder? Ooooh we developed the perfect tool for managing your anemia. Its hosted in Dracula's castle. 👍
I'm instituting a new policy of "if I can't easily read your crusty scanned PDF then I'm sending it back to you, telling you to get your shit together and save your .docx as .pdf, and causing snakes to manifest inside your house"
this but also if you are in accounting and you have an Excel file please do not save it as a PDF or take a screenshot of it and then paste it into another Excel file
Similar story from a couple months ago: there’s lots of kids in this neighborhood, and mine like to go gadding about and making friends and they all go across the street to the park to play. One of the older kids that Eris bonded with comes over to our house sometimes, and very recently this kid rolls up to our front yard while we’re going some garden work and asks do I like their new hair cut?
Looks home done, like you know, buzzed it in the bathroom mirror with a pair of clippers, which is exactly what I’m rocking too, so I say yeah, looks great because I think it does. And the next thing this kid does is say with chin stuck in the air, “I’m trans, you know.” And I can see the look on his face, expecting the adult to challenge, push back, or scoff, or maybe just blink ignorantly and say “what’s that?”
I smile and say, “cool, brother, same hat.” And my god the way his face lit up. Absolutely beaming. We fist bumped and he started chattering at me full tilt, not even about anything to do with gender but just talking. Because in that moment he was safe to be himself. Since then he’s got a full wardrobe change and a binder so I very much hope his mom is also being supportive, but he still likes to pop by just to chat about whatever.
Protect our trans elders and protect our trans kids. You never fucking know where you’ll find them, and what kind of impact you’ll have.
I just had the most incredible experience in front of my apartment building and I have to share it.
There’s a little old man who walks up and down the street and says hi if we’re out there smoking cigarettes. I was outside smoking and he was walking past and said “good afternoon young lady!”
And normally I’d probably be too scared to correct a stranger but he’d said hi before.
No I said “actually I’m not a young lady, I’m a man” and immediately got nervous and try to explain my high voice and, uh, tiddy. “I have a condition.”
And this little old man goes “oh are you transgender?” And having painted myself into a corner I say yes.
“Me too,” he says
And I realize this little old man is shorter than me. And he’s got suspenders and a cute hat (hello call-out post for my fashion sense). And he’s smiling so warmly.
I am meeting a trans man elder and I don’t even have a good bowtie on!! WTF Kivan!
And he called me brother and said he was honored to meet me and hugged me and just after everything with my dad I can’t even begin to put into words how much I needed to see a little old man I could grow to be.
I’m actually crying right now because I just really really need that.
You’re all great, let’s protect our trans elders, and grow up to be the good trans elders for those after us. /end ID]
other superheros get training from their mentors, from the super secret society, from alien tech,from the monks or they have some kind of military background.
phantom, on the other hand, got training from the firefighters in his town after he crashed on their cases one too many times and they decided that "yup, if your gonna try to help, might aswell give you some training so you could be useful.", he got training from the paramedics because they were worried he wouldn't know how to help an injured human, he got training from his local town detective who smokes too much and gives him cookies when he can help with his Ghost senses and figure out if this was a human crime or a ghost crime.
Hero: Where did you learn how to sew up wounds so cleanly kid?
Phantom: Barbara taught me stitches.
Hero: As in Barbara Gordon?
Phantom: Um... No? Barbara Johnson. She's a nurse from the hospital in my hometown. Wanted to make sure I knew a bit about human biology since I save injured people.
Hero: Ah. So does Barbara know you tell others her civilian name?
you have the right to eat way too many pierogi and make yourself a little sick. you have the right to go skydiving. you have the right to pull an all-nighter building the Imperial City of Tamriel in Minecraft. you have the right to get drunk in your living room watching football.
life is not about making the safest most logically correct choice at all times. you're a blob of salty meat piloting a flesh mech and you get to act like it.
it's always funny how people will advocate for bodily autonomy when it comes to certain things but then shy away from anything they personally wouldn't do to their own body. like yeah, that's why it's your body buddy. i can do what i want with mine.
Episode 112, Thrill of the Chase. I met a highland cow today, he is seven months old and his name is Andy, and he was the CUTEST THING i ever saw. Martin was completely right, they are good cows
Episode 111, Family Business. Thank FUCK for Gerry. If he hadn't showed up to explain all this we would have been left in the complete dark until MAG 160.
