Phoenix’s Nest

Dervla, ae/aer/aers/aerself I haven’t really been on social media for some years. I’d like to try again. You’ll see stuff I like and some thoughts

[video-game-jams]

Visit Original Link

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX - Defy the Legends (Vs. Rayquaza)

[in-your-spoon]

I think beauty for me is the strange desire to look at something for a very long time. I first remember experiencing this with women when I was little, and I still experience it, because I find women beautiful, but I also experience it with art and other fascinating things. I also feel the desire to look at strange things for a long time, so I suppose strange things are beautiful. I think I am very glad to be able to experience something like beauty.

[xenosaurus]

it’s a shame more vampire media doesn’t pull from vampire bat behavior because they’re such sweeties. they can only survive their incredibly specialized diet because bats will share blood with colony members that didn’t find a meal! there’s evidence that suggests the donors sometimes initiate this behavior themselves by approaching hungry bats! the colonies are mostly harems of females with a few males but they’ve been observed letting unrelated males in when it gets cold so they can all stay warm! cute little social critters!

[xenosaurus]

@yupekosi your tags have created such a beautiful world

[tanoraqui]

Merry Brandybuck would’ve fucking loved Excel spreadsheets.

[tanoraqui]

Pippin meanwhile is two hours and 17 tangentially related pages deep into a Wikipedia dive, for the third time this week.

[tanoraqui]

Frodo is editing Wikipedia. He’s the one who teaches Pippin about the joy—and strict requirement—of citing original and/or reliable sources.

[tanoraqui]

iNaturalist user SamGardener is an MVP of identifying flowers, grasses, and herbs, and adding little notes suggesting how to use them in cooking. His accuracy record for Shire-local plants is matched only by Strider2931, whose record is perfect in nearly every category and biome and the popular is that he’s an AI.

[legendofthefireemblem]

#bold of you to assume frodo isn't also almost 150k deep into a slowburn enemies to lovers melkor/fëanor wip#chapter updates posted every sunday after elevensies to ao3 (via @zweizimtsterne)

[justanapothecary]

[strwbryslut]

NEVER KILL YOURSELF . SOMETHING LESBIAN MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOU SOON .

[transcyberism]

[gothycollie]

A long time ago, in the Age of Physical, software would be stored on beautiful mirrored discs, and inside each disc a tiny wizard lived who would install the software for you.

[notgreatbob]

''i wasted those years'' who cares. you lived the only life you could've lived in those moments

[callmezeemonic]

You did the best you could with all you had and knew. That was then. Here is now

[victusinveritas]

[rostekhorn]

It's even better than that.

At least according to the old continuity, the Wookiees were skilled explorers, and their Clatuuvac Guild had the secrets to a number of hyperspace routes, especially through the Core (it's why the Separatists were so keen to take the planet in Revenge of the Sith)... And Chewbacca was one of the people who knew these hyperspace routes.

So the Millennium Falcon being the fastest smuggler ship in the galaxy? About half of that is down to Han's modifications, the fact that he drives like crazy, and the fact that he's almost as good as he thinks he is. The other half? Is just Chewie knowing a bunch of shortcuts, which he got from all the classified information he knew when he was a commander.

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Look, if the respected commander wants to bring his rescue human along, so be it. Even if said rescue is poorly socialized.

[silverskulltula]

listen hobbit pussy could be mediocre (doubtful) but even if it was it's still followed by a 17 course homecooked meal and the kind of weed that would make sauron scared. lithe beautiful immortal elven pussy has no power compared to the simple, hardworking hobbit. and it goes without saying that you cannot handle dwarven pussy.

[gayweeddaddy69]

you know her bush is adorned with elaborate braids representing a long family tradition of training a grip that could deglove your member if she so chose

[gayweeddaddy69]

dwarf pussy could shuck your foreskin off like a corn husk

[themainspoon]

There's so many horror games about having to try to weed out and deal with inhuman imposters, but I want one where the script is flipped. You are something inhuman, you are an imposter, and if you want to survive you have to blend into a world that is trying to hunt you down and destroy you. You aren't human, but you must masquerade as one and infiltrate their world, or you will die.

[themainspoon]

I actually think we need to start inverting more Horror premises/tropes.

Like "You have to venture into the scary insane asylum!" VS "You're a patient who was admitted by force to an asylum, and you are very clearly in real danger, but everyone is pretending that you're just deluded, and are essentially leaving you to die because they don't really see you as a person."

I feel like there's a lot of Horror tropes built off of the fear of the other, when in reality it's actually often the other who is in danger. Maybe we could start recognising that more.

[themainspoon]

Interesting how the first half of the post has picked up popularity while the second part, which perhaps clarifies the idea of the original post, hasn't.

It's been interesting to see what media people are recommending based on the first post alone. A lot of recommendations for games/franchises like World of Darkness, Carrion, Kill All Humans, Among Us, etc. It's interesting because these are games that put you into the shoes of the violent other that has to infiltrate, without actually challenging the idea that the other is a threat. They actually parrot the ideas of the other as violent.

Funnily enough, the people recommending the comedy game Octodad understand the post much better than most of the people recommending horror media. A few mentions of Am I Nima, which isn't finished yet but does look like it could be what I am describing, so brownie points to the people recommending that.

But everyone saying stuff like "This is just being Trans/Autistic/Etc" really gets it, like really really gets it. Horror always communicates the fears and anxieties of the people who create it, this post was basically: "What if instead of communicating the fear of the other, we communicated the fears of the others, which are actually vastly more legitimate than the dominant groups fear of the other. We should recognise that it is overwhelmingly the others who are the ones who actually suffer and die, all for the perceived "saftey" and "comfort" of the dominant group."

This idea is about transphobia, it is about ableism, about anti-imigrant rhetoric and white supremacy, about queerphobia, it's about all of it. It is horror from the perspective of minority groups. It is the twisting of a trope built upon reactionary fears and narratives in order to critique them, it is a direct allegory for all those experiences you are describing.

Overall, it's just interesting to see who gets it and who doesn't.

[shithowdy]

hey. if someone tries to smear you on the internet for something asinine, what you need to do is block every single person engaging with the post and remind yourself that absolutely under no circumstances are you obligated to draft a PR response defending some out-of-context screenshot or kink fanfiction or thing you said when you were 15 or whatever put your blood in the water. you are not a public figure or a brand. you do not have to respond to something if you know in your heart it is bullshit.

[towerologia-sideblog]

What to do if you get cancelled online.

Keep your cool, minimize the damage, and only make amends to those you owe it to.

[mikkeneko]

Lots of good advice in the link above, but the one line that really sticks out to me: Don’t try to satisfy a public that is setting out not to be satisfied.

[shadesfalcon]

J. R. R. Tolkien: no, my books aren't about the war I experienced. It's just a story

J. R. R. Tolkien's works: you cannot go home, war ends entire bloodlines, you are mourning the death of your brother alone, you dug into the earth and permanently scored the land, you cannot explain what you have been through, you cannot go home, "that wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life", leaving the women behind does not save them, the young die first, you cannot go home, the parent will bury their child, you have lost the wives and you will never connect with them again, "how shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?", you are not the same, you cannot go home, you can never go home, your father will only side with those he sees as worthy bloodlines and you cannot change his mind, it is more meaningful Not to kill, sometimes your sacrifice accomplishes nothing, you cannot go home

[thinkinginquenya]

What he actually said was(paraphrasing): "I had no hidden messages in mind when I wrote the book, people are bad at guessing what an author's intentions are, and to those people who keep telling me the story is about the horrors of WWII: I fought in WWI, dummies."

Actual quotes from the foreword of LotR that I was paraphrasing:

"As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none."

"The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted."

"The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron."

"An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous."

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."

[argentumcor]

Tolkien's works were hitting popularity when it was becoming widespread to see fictional stories as metaphor. We live in that now, to the point where if there's any kind of racial tension in your fictional universe people assume the groups involved are a stand in for one real-world group or another.

His experiences inform a lot of his writing, as they do for all writers, and his themes are truths about life he learned. But the Ring is not a metaphor, though it can be likened to some things. The animosity between the elves and the dwarves is not a metaphor, though it is a lesson on getting over the past to unite for the good while still holding onto the good things about your own culture. The nearest thing to a metaphor might be the Scouring of the Shire, but I think it's more a reflection on the way the shadow can touch even places and people you think are safe.

Heaven help us in genre fiction, no one argues Flannery O'Connor's continuously writing metaphors about having lupus. Fantasy and sci-fi stories are not necessarily- in fact, are rarely- metaphors, but even non-readers and non-academics are addicted to understanding them as such and it brings everything down.

[thinkinginquenya]

My understanding of Tolkien's writings on fiction is that he's fine with people seeing his works as metaphorical, as long as it is understood that *you* are bringing the metaphor to the table, and he has simply given you the tools to make a metaphor applicable to your own concerns.

[xenobotanist]

Caption this

[unamccormack]

I don’t have a caption but I saw this production. Most of the rest of the audience was from a school, teens who didn’t know the plot. The lights went down for the interval at this moment and they all went fucking wild. It was magic.

[scorpionlafemme]

[autistic-af]

Look, if you're having a bad day, here's a 6,000 year old pig-shaped pottery pot.

[foggystarfishmaker]

My day's been fine can I still have the pig pot?

[autistic-af]

Have a row of them

[wisteria-mutterings]

Times are tough; Have a Bat

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