🚫Ernest Hemingway DNI🚫

I have a multi-faceted life like anyone else but I’m mostly just here to overanalyze SF and reblog some memes.

[cumdumpstiel]

so cool how advanced the algorithm has become, it literally only takes like a decade or more of spying on all my internet activity and then it can expertly curate a selection of 15-20 youtube videos that i don't really want to watch, and then keep showing me those videos over and over again for a week so i can scroll past them again. the future is now

[partywithponies]

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

[partywithponies]

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.

[so-much-for-subtlety]

[pingintech]

literally a cartoon bad guy

[stealingpotatoes]

Playing DA Inquisition for the first time and both Cullen and Josephine are so pretty. How is my Inquisitor supposed to choose who to romance!?

its a really hard choice so i've made you a helpful infographic to assist your decision <3

[hyperfixationlandfill]

Meatbun every 5 chapters in volume 4: Anyways He Yu started cracking it and by it I mean the volume on hit song My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion

[dracaenacamael]

Me reading BAB and being introduced to He Li: Yeah he’s kind of an asshole but I’m thinking it must have been pretty challenging being raised with He Yu. I grew up with a sibling who would often injure himself, attack others, destroy the house, etc., and while I’ve always understood that it’s not his fault and he has it way worse than me, after over a decade of un-suppressing my feelings on the matter I’ve come to understand that one can be sympathetic while also acknowledging that was a pretty scary environment to grow up——

Meatbun: I’M GONNA STOP YOU RIGHT THERE! this is not an example of well-sibling/glass child syndrome or whatever. He Li was raised separately from He Yu and does not even know what Psychological Ebola is.

Meatbun: What I am doing is pushing the same message as William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies.

Meatbun: …and that message is that Rich Children Are Inherently Awful.

Me: lmfao I’ve got you fuck him then 😂

[etiennelux]

the ideal chai latte is one of the most amazing things on this earth. it’s a shame that most cafes think they have to serve either a cup of grit or milk that they whispered the names of spices to

[mewvore]

"we detected a mature post" yeah I'm in my 30s

[startokkie]

qifrey’s love for dragons gives me so much cuteness aggression 💕

[lesbiangiratina]

Rewatching rgu. I cant stop thinking about this moment where utena appears to help anthy and be The Prince and she goes to remove the tablecloth with Princely Flourish but she just knocks everything off the table

[feralmode]

whenever y'all talk about what an aftg tv/movie adaptation would be like i'm thinking there's only one way to do it right and that's to make aftg into what it always has been at its heart, and that's a sports anime. argue with the wall idgaf i'm right and you know it

[thiscatdraws]

You know how it is with Cumplane

(text from this post)

[loopofrosewood]

because the thing is (i am not on mobile rn picture the index pointing up emoji for me please and thank you its important) is that wynne's possession was never about being possessed at all, which is why it basically never gets brought up in that context, right (seriously there are exactly two companion comments on it total and it's entirely missable for the player); it's about her literally relying on her faith in her (and others') ability to be Such A Good Mage that they don't just fucking murder her right. she dies during broken circle because she was always going to die in the circle. the only thing that keeps her alive in there is her faith that the former is true (and, of course, to annul the circle you have to kill her.) she's on borrowed time and as soon as she loses this belief in this in asunder, where she asks shale to destroy the phylacteries after seeing the sheer mass of them (and also her son got imprisoned), she basically immediately dies afterwards and gives up faith.

you cannot save her from this system because she is already dead and thoroughly enmeshed within it and she died before you even really truly met her. you don't get to know what she was like before dying and being possessed by a spirit of faith (i.e. resigning herself to the circle, with all that entails) because that's the whole point. genuinely devastating to me.

[stephexmachina]

genuinely insane to me that bikinis are the Default swimwear marketed & sold to women. that's nylon underwear. & if you don't want to wear one people treat you like you're childish & insecure & suggest ways to "get over it"

[nessa-fang]

going to be extremely controversial

i don't fuck with the assumption Zevran was trying to reform the Crows that much tbh

Maybe i'm wrong, but specifically with him allying with the cuchillo houses, and just merrily picking Crows off, it always read more as "burn them to the ground" to me

which tracks (IN MY MIND, i might be wrong) with the fact that the Crows still have an open contract on him in Veilguard (implied in The Invitation's description)

[aubergion]

IIRC in WoT2 Zev's got two other Talons (not specified which ones -not Rialto though, that one's dead) "in his pocket", not just the lesser houses, and the person writing that codex acknowledges that something might have to change before the Antivan Crows are completely destroyed. So the Crows are fully schisming over this way back in DA2, and reform is already on the table.

I'd readily believe those two Talons, whoever they are, would have a reform agenda - unlike Zevran, they stand to gain if they can cause the other six Talons to fall, AND they lose a great deal if the Crows are completely demolished. Playing nice with the cuchillos and making moderate change in things like recruitment strategy or compensation is a nice sweet spot that lets them keep their power while hopefully staying off of Zev and co's hit list.

But Zev himself? His open defiance might have lit the spark, but I kind of think his plan starts at "let me quit" and ends at "let US quit". A schism aids his cause, but only insofar as it means he has to kill fewer people who are trapped in the same system he was.

House Arainai could have gone through so many fewer grandmasters if they'd just arranged a severance package that didn't involve knives.

[nessa-fang]

yeah i was approaching this mostly from a place of wanting to deconstruct the idea that is very popular in other DA spaces that Zevran even cares to reform the Crows, i buy that there are reformists WITHIN the Crows though. and definitely agree with your tag that that can't happen 100% offscreen.

+ thank you for that info from WoT2!! that's going in my "to ponder and obssess over" pile.

[soulbrand]

im glad people are talking abt this bc when i first played datv and noticed all the weirdness with the crows, i went on reddit and saw a bunch of takes like 'well the crows are different because Zevran was successful, it's been 20 years' and i felt like i was losing my fkcing mind.

to my knowledge, the one time Zevran it's mentioned anywhere in datv, it's here:

so one thing I do like about this banter is how evasive Lucanis is. he's so cagey with the details that Harding is confused about how the Talons died. like notice how he doesn't really answer her question, and the answer he does give doesn't make a lot of sense.

Lucanis thinks of Zevran's actions as an embarrassment to his whole house, significant enough that even other houses are unwilling to take contracts in Ferelden. which is odd, right? Like Ferelden itself wasn't the problem with that situation? Unless they're afraid to go to Ferelden because they think Zevran might be there, which is actually kind of funny. but in any case, this definitely doesn't suggest that Zevran succeeded in changing them. all it suggests is that they're still afraid of him, and unwilling to admit that.

but this is still weird, right, because if the crows are ostensibly the good guys now, but we also understand Zevran to be one of the good guys...you know?

the resolution of Lucanis' tension with Davrin (which imo really did not need to happen. just let them hate each other. it's literally fine) seems to kind of hinge on the fact that Lucanis is a good guy actually?

so idk about you but these examples seem like pretty small potatoes compared to being sent to kill the only people standing between the Blight and Ferelden, failing, and then choosing to fight by their side. you could argue that Lucanis gets more leeway than Zevran ever would due to his proximity to Caterina, but datv doesn't seem interested in arguing that, as much as I think that'd be interesting to explore.

but okay. so Lucanis can spare people who didn't deserve it and Caterina is not only willing to allow this but also send someone to rescue him when he does fail, but Zevran has to suffer forever for doing more or less the same thing, and Lucanis doesn't do anything to suggest he has a problem with that. all he suggests is that he's afraid of Zevran for...what reason, exactly? if we're to take the crows as presented in datv at face value, Zevran looks extremely unreasonable to be fighting them at all.

it's like. okay imagine if datv did have circles but the narrative was beating you over the head with 'OK but the templars are literarally Niceys now' (i realize i'm kind of describing DAI but bear with me here) & you had a Templar companion and a Templar origin, & maybe you got some mention of the mage rebellion or Anders or the new Divine in banter, (and the banter for sure was like Anders was an insane terrorist who sucks!! and so on) but other than that it wasn't clear what the result of any of this was. they certainly aren't showing you any of the bad parts of circles anymore, which is just really odd because all the hierarchy and leadership structure is the same as it always was, and it was that very structure & the ideology that justified it that led to a lot of the violence before. But it's all cool now, I guess. Changing oppressive institutions has nothing to do with dismantling them and everything to do with making them niceys, instead of violent like they were before for absolutely no reason other than, idk, Meredith i guess, who was of course ontologically evil unlike most templar leadership, who are there to protect mages, obviously, like that's literally in the job description. chantry propoganda? we don't have that here. it's all real and good and the rebellion was all for nothing.

[atiya-nagrano]

the way lucanis phrases that is soooooooooo fucking interesting

for one thing, he's careful to quarantine the embarrassment to one house, as if arainai is an outlier. for another, he says that the crows buried six eighth talons. bc we have meta knowledge, we know that the crows are burying those talons bc zevran is picking them off (and there's smth borderline snarky abt being sure to note that they're burying eighth talons, not, you know, the higher ups of the higher ups). but nothing lucanis suggests that this couldn't be, for example, a sort of intra-crow action. as if caterina or another non-eighth talon culled the bad apples in house arainai for embarrassing the organization as a whole.

and the way he responds to harding's follow up rly only doubles down on it. "some of them weren't dead at the time. but they got it eventually." like there's a little bit of haughtiness there, right? a little bit of "the crows send their regards"? as if he, too, feels they got what they deserved bc, as the later banters w davrin attempt to argue, he's a proper crow who is discerning and merciful when called for. a noble crow.

and you're so right, there's the way the crows have apparently decided ferelden is the issue. no more contracts in FERELDEN. problem solved! except that that wasn't what caused the disaster, what caused the disaster was a crow deemed a "nothing" by his superiors deserted the guild. it makes sense to me that an organization that has invested so much in patriotic mythmaking has decided to frame it as an issue of nations rather than individuals, but lucanis parroting it, even to a nosy outsider, is remarkably like. like if i am harding i'm going that's a big ol lie, which is maybe why she responds so flippantly.

and then there's the crown prince of the crows failing to complete his contracts, which are a source of honor for both individual crows and the organization as a whole. not that, to me, i think those things are viewed as all that separate. the body politic of the crows is more important than the actual bodies of the crows that make it up.

what i find bizarre and funny abt this is dai already gives us an example of what, maybe, a more flexible crow protocol could look like.

(caveat that i do not get the point of the house of repose/assassins' league, like cool that orlais also gets one of those, but given that the crows work everywhere in thedas and also, josephine and her family are ANTIVAN, that is one bit of dai lore that makes me roll my eyes )

BUT the house of repose views letting the target know the terms of what they feel to be an unjust contract as an appropriate intervention. not, you know, voiding the contract. and for all that i think it's the unfun kind of silly that they made up a redundant assassin guild, that is, to me, far more interesting than crow elites getting to pick and choose when they go thru w a contract, esp given that contracts are the entire basis of the crows.

anyway, they can say it was just eighth talons all they want, zevran did shake them up v badly, and for good reason, bc along w being deeply contract-based, the crows are also reliant on marginalized orphans to put in the murder machine — they have a class hierarchy, and zevran completely upends it. per the mystery letter in wot2, "if we do not find him, and stop him, this elven son of a whore — an assassin who never even attained the rank of master — will undo us all." you bet he will!

[ratbastarddotfuck]

tumblr keeps giving me these ads with straight up porn in them (like, nude dickriding) and while idgaf about seeing porn I really am like, exhausted by the double edged swords of "terms of service" and "advertising".

I can't post images that show too much of my stomach, because notable body fat trips whatever alarms are up in tumblr HQ. but advertisers can show me skinny white girls bouncing on it all day long bc like, they're advertisers.

we live in advertising world. companies have more rights to "expression" in public than individuals. once you notice it you won't stop seeing it. you have a moral duty to resist it.

[ratbastarddotfuck]

getting tired of these kinds of responses. "you're only seeing porn because you look at porn and the ads are connected to your data huehuehuehue" like it's some kind of gotcha.

I am a sex worker - a porn creator. Yes, I spend a lot of time on porn sites! sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure. I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Do you think I should be? I'm on testosterone, sometimes I jerk off four times a day. Get over it.

When I said "idgaf about seeing porn" I meant it! What I DO care about is the fact that I as a user and a worker cannot post my creative labour on this website, but that advertisers can show me whatever they want, including AI generated Attractive People doing my job. The implication that they're doing this with the use of tracking cookies makes it worse, actually. I don't like living under surveillance. Do you think it's funny? Or do you think that was part of the problem I was trying to talk about from the start?