Season Liberally With Wild Falsehoods

Cis White Male, He/Him pronouns, 38 This is predominantly a place for me to geek about my fandoms (heavy focus on anything and almost everything BioWare - expect much Mass Effect and Dragon Age, but also Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek, Supernatural, and some others) and things that make me laugh. The latter often overlaps with the former. Organization here is a perpetual work in progress, but feel free to look through my tags at any time and reblog with more comments - if I've got commentary on something, I love talking more about it. For the record, anything that I post is free to reblog unless it has the tag 'dg gets personal'. Those are posts about me, to get things personal to me off my chest, not to be reblogged. Oh, and do note, I am a sucker for puns. There is a dedicated tag for them. There will be many.

[beggars-opera]

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

[formerlyanon]

and we need that! keeps us humble. 

[dabouse]

Then I'm just like WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE AN ADULT

[tomboy014]

It goes the other way, too, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A CHILD?!!

[dabouse]

I'm 16, that's like, barely a child

[tomboy014]

I'm in my 30s. You are baby

[digitaldiscipline]

I'm older than both of you in a trenchcoat.

[kabretoss]

honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.

[lyricwritesprose]

It is useful for people to understand and experience the fact that people of all ages, from all walks of life, can be compassionate, wise, delighted with the same things you are, and also, on occasion, blisteringly stupid. Because that's humanity.

[cricketcat9]

Heh heh heh (™ Old Hag Cackle), I'm older that all of you in a trench coat and don't plan to go anywhere yet 😁

[anxietyproblem]

[evviejo]

STAR TREK - S2E3 The Changeling

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

Apparently some people still need to hear this so: using an 'ai checker' is still using ai. If you are feeding someone's fic to one of these checkers, you will still not be sure their fic is ai because they are not 100% accurate, but you can be 100% sure that you are using ai. For fic. Furthermore you are doing the work of an ai scraper for them. You are, personally, feeding the machine. There is no actual excuse for using an ai checker on fanfic as a hobby. YOU are the problem.

If you think a fic is ai, mute it and move on. That's it. That's all you do.

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

Um. Yikes

[diekaduwee]

When a Mako and a Geth love each other very much .

[wardencommandershepard]

"OK Shepard, the modifications you requested for the Mako are complete. Don't tell Tali it was me."

"Thanks Garrus, I won't."

[goldensunset]

>‘this thing is too generic and tropey’

>look inside

>forefather of that genre

[firestorm09890]

[frankbelloriley]

[imoutofsoupyo]

[okthisway]

Harding saying Rook is great while she's still healing from the danger they got her into 🥲

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.

[reasonablywittyatbest]

It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.

I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.

I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.

[sunspotpony]

Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”

Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

important

In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."

[anthurak]

Something-something, the option to discourage a romance between EDI and Joker in Mass Effect 3 should have led to an equally if not more nuanced and interesting character arc of Joker and EDI examining their relationship and deciding they both prefer things more as they were before EDI got her mobile platform and ending up with a non-romantic, but equally close and important platonic partnership.

Also this will lead to a EDI hooking up with an unromanced Traynor XD

[spockvarietyhour]

Star Trek (2009) directed by J.J. Abrams

[polarity-disturbed]

With the whole "Markiplier making his own DVD copies of Iron Lung to sell" thing, it's been fascinating and slightly concerning how many people seem to genuinely believe that if a physical release isn't coming from a giant corporation, it must automatically be a bootleg.

Look at me.

Look me directly in the eyes while I say this.

You can just make things.

You can simply create something and put it into the world.

That's allowed.

People have been doing it for centuries.

They sell blank VHS tapes. They sell blank DVDs. Blank CDs. You can buy flash drives by the bucketful if you really want to. If you create a movie, an album, a game, a documentary, or a four-hour video essay about the mating habits of fictional space goblins, you are entirely permitted to put that thing on physical media and sell it.

That is not piracy.

Piracy is taking something that belongs to someone else and reproducing or distributing it without permission.

If I buy a DVD of a movie, I own that copy of the movie. I do not own the movie itself. I didn't acquire the rights to duplicate it, press a thousand copies, and start selling them out of my garage like I've become the regional distributor for Warner Bros.

The copyright, distribution rights, and intellectual property still belong to whoever created it or whoever legally acquired those rights.

If I start burning copies of Iron Lung and selling them myself without Markiplier's permission, that's piracy.

If Markiplier, who made and owns the rights to Iron Lung, burns copies and sells them himself, that's just distribution.

He's the rights holder.

He's distributing his own work.

If you made it, if it came from your own mind, your own work, your own time, your own resources, then congratulations. You own the thing. You don't need a corporation to bless it with legitimacy.

The corporation is not what makes it real.

The fact that it exists is what makes it real.

I think we've accidentally spent so many years living inside a world dominated by mass-produced media that some people have developed the strange assumption that all media emerges from a factory somewhere. As if films naturally occur in shrink-wrapped plastic cases and descend from the heavens aboard a pallet truck.

But independent artists have been burning discs, dubbing tapes, printing books, pressing records, and mailing things directly to people for longer than many of us have been alive.

That's not a bootleg.

That's just a product.

It's not "bootleg."

It's just... leg.

The normal kind.

The original, free-range, locally sourced leg.

[atopfourthwall]

Hell, Youtuber DVDs used to be a bigger than in the early-2010s. I still do 'em, but I've had to put the next volume on the back-burner to focus on other stuff (plus redoing the previous volumes). And I still get sales for Winter of '83's DVD. I'm making a Gameboy game right now. In 2026. You can, too! Nobody can stop you! Just make stuff, people.

[anthurak]

I feel like Kelly Chambers is ultimately a really tragic character?

In the sense that looking back at Mass Effect 2, she really was in WAY over her head as part of the Normandy team.

Particularly in hindsight by the time we meet her again in Mass Effect 3, it’s clear that Kelly was ‘handpicked’ by The Illusive Man not for any actual ability she might have, but because he considered her to be a useful, malleable and unwitting pawn who could be used to manipulate and spy on Shepard. In truth, Kelly really wasn’t cut out to be part of the Normandy team.

Something which she will always end up paying for. As in, her BEST outcome is ‘just’ getting horrifically traumatized by Collector abduction, to the point that by the time of Mass Effect 3, she CANNOT actually return to the Normandy even if Shepard invites her back, simply due to the immense trauma she now can’t help but associate with the ship. Even though the Normandy is probably the safest place in the galaxy for an ex-Cerberus member like her. Which in turn means that unless she changes her name and appearance, Kelly will end up being killed by Cerberus.

After everything she goes through, you really get the sense that Kelly shouldn’t have been on the Normandy to begin with. Partly because she really didn’t have much of anything to truly offer to the team, but mostly for her OWN sake.

And notably, I feel like this makes Kelly a very interesting foil to Samantha Traynor in Mass Effect 3?

In contrast to Kelly, Traynor was NOT handpicked or even so much as supposed to be part of the Normandy crew, having simply been part of the refit staff who got roped in when the Reapers invaded Earth.

Yet also in sharp contrast to Chambers, Sam turns out to not just be ‘cut out’ for work on what becomes the most important ship in the Alliance fleet, she outright thrives as the Normandy’s Communications and Intelligence Officer. Becoming an extremely valuable and even VITAL member of Shepard’s crew.

[libraford]

A mole found its way into our house somehow and our cat has NO IDEA what to do about it.

[libraford]

Come to think of it, I also have no idea what to do about it.

[libraford]

If we're being really honest, the mole was also unclear of her motives, so I think we were all a bit confused.

[stellaluna33]

Several times on here I've seen the take "I know local theater is bad and cringey, but you have to support it anyway!" And while I understand what they're getting at, I'm always like, why do you assume it's going to be "bad" just because the artists are members of your own community? I just saw a local production of The Importance of Being Earnest and it was HILARIOUS. Everyone was DELIGHTFULLY funny and we thoroughly enjoyed it! There have been so many times I've been greatly moved by "amateur" or student art, and if you can't allow yourself to appreciate anything but "the Best" (and who decides what "the Best" is anyway? This production of "Earnest" was way funnier than the version that Judy Dench and Rupert Everett were in, as deservedly "famous" as they might be) then you are just being a joyless snob. There's beauty and talent all around you. And if that makes me "easy to please," then well... That means I'm pleased more often! And why should I want to apologize for that?

[jessss-ica]

if anyone needs me i’ll be alone in my tower

[helsex]

Guy who is touch starved but emotionally repressed goading you into punching him for completely normal reasons