Murphy's Lore

[elodieunderglass]

I had a dream last night that I had invited a lot of people including a lot of executive leadership for some sort of training meeting, but due to one of those nightmarish video-call-won’t-work-for-some-reason anxiety-dream things, was late logging in. (In the dream, logging in created a portal that transported you to a reserved physical meeting space.) However, when I physically entered the meeting, it was into a bizarre situation where a director was already chairing, thanking everyone for attending, thanking someone else for setting it all up, and handing over to an external trainer.

Disoriented, I realised that someone else had stolen my meeting, taking advantage of the fact that I’d gotten so many directors etc. into the same room, and had spent time and resources arranging a desirable room and portal-setup. Bewildered, pained, and in anxiety-dream logic unsure of what MY own meeting had actually been for, I sat down to take the training. There had been pre-reading (I hadn’t done it) and we were supposed to bring in a piece of work (I hadn’t.)

“This,” I said, “is like one of those dreams!” And in realising that I had simply aged out of the forgot-about-an-exam dream, and my shock at realising that I had simply created the professional equivalent, I stood up to leave. This caused everyone else to realise that it was a dream. They became cross with me for saying this, as this realisation destroyed the linkages to the hybrid-working portals! Now they would have to get back to their homes physically, by public transport!

Because I had booked the meeting - IT WAS MY MEETING!! THE MEETING RECOGNISED ME AS CHAIR!! - I simply picked up my laptop and left 😌

So if you’re still having school-anxiety dreams, take heart! They may… evolve ?

[thethirdromana]

I used to get school anxiety dreams, specifically about having to retake my French A-level. I have forgotten most of my French, so this was always thoroughly anxiety-inducing.

Then one time my subconscious decided to mix it up a bit. This time, it was my English A-level that I unaccountably had to retake as an adult. The dream followed its usual course - sorry, your A-level is invalid, you have to resit it, right now, no time to revise, ARGH...

Hang on, dream-me thought, I have a degree in English. First class honours. Writing is a significant part of my career. I might not enjoy the experience, and I wouldn't do as well as I did the first time around, but I'm sure I could scrape a pass at A-level English if I had to. This is not anxiety-inducing. This is fine.

Oh, said my subconscious, and I never had a school anxiety dream again.

[fission-mailure]

I still get school anxiety dreams, although weirdly they now all follow the same basic story:

Namely, that I am for some reason back at school doing A-Levels (I'm still my own age, and I've still done my A-Levels as I did in life, but for some reason I'm doing them again and while some of the subjects are different, some of them are the same) but it's near the end of the year and for whatever reason I've barely attended any classes, with the anxiety coming less from an 'oh god I'm going to fail' (because even in the dream, it doesn't matter if I fail, like I already have A-Levels after all) but just a nebulous sense that I've done something wrong. Also usually a sense that I shouldn't be there and that being there taking classes is some kind of transgression, which tbf, it kind of would be.

Sometimes this is added to with 'I haven't got a timetable so I don't know which classes I have or where' or 'I have a timetable, but it is for some reason utterly inscrutable.'

[muppetshow2026]

WHAT IS THE CHARGE? EATING A PENGUIN? A SUCCULENT ADÉLIE PENGUIN?

[desmolbean404]

QUIZ TIME!! Take this quiz, then come back and answer the poll!

100 REAL or FAKE Pokemon

100 Different 'Pokemon' will be shown to you. Choose if you think they are FAKE or REAL. Goal is to get a high score so you can brag to ever

What Was Your Score?

0%-20%

20%-40%

40%-50%

50%-60%

60%-70%

70%-80%

80%-99%

100%! (You're one smart cookie!)

Remaining time: 1 day 23 hours

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

you're laughing. charles dickens had a son named plorn and you're laughing

[mediummarketpaperback]

HE HAD A SON NAMED

WHAT

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

Plorn

[mediummarketpaperback]

NICK I LOOKED IT UP AND SAW NOTHING OF THE SORT IS THIS A PRANK

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

technically his name was edward but everyone called him plorn

[mediummarketpaperback]

Edward “Plorn” Dickens. my god.

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

I have something worse

[mediummarketpaperback]

oh???

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[mediummarketpaperback]

imagine getting stuck with the nickname Plorn

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

imagine getting sent to live in the Australian outback when you were sixteen

[mediummarketpaperback]

WHY WERE THEY SO CRUEL TO MY BOY PLORN

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

I have an answer to that one too

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[cogentranting]

The face of a man whose father nicknamed him Plorn.

[elodieunderglass]

Born without a groove 😔

[linguisticparadox]

[telomeke]

With each addition to this, I find myself nodding and murmuring, "Mm hm. The Plorn Dickens."

‌

[fission-mailure]

Keep sneezing. I'd better not be coming down with a cold.

[f-liner]

I know many people are saying Kyo should just open up about his past with the kids and let them help but honestly I don't blame him for how he acted.

Breaking their hearts with his words is nothing compared to having them fear for their lives. We know that the kids are capable and can fight, but we must remember that Kyo LITERALLY saw Souji kill two people along with their digimons. Like this is terrifying when compared to what they have dealt with until now.

Also let's not forget that Kyo was against them interacting with KLAY during the tactics arc so it's not so weird that he outwordly decided to force the others to hate him in order to protect them.

IF COUGARMON who until now acted as the voice of reason and reminded Kyo various times that the kids are stronger than he thinks also doesen't try to make him reason more than just asking him if he is sure about his choice, it means Cougarmon himself isn't sure the kids could deal with an enemy like Souji.

[fission-mailure]

Also, even if Kyo thinks the four of them can feasibly take on Souji (and that is a fairly dubious prospect when the guy has three Perfect-levels that he can supply with theoretically infinite energy), he also can't ask them to help him because from his perspective, there's no non-murder way of dealing with Souji. If he asks them, they become accomplices in his murder of Souji and thus effectively murderers by proxy.

He tried bumping one of Souji's mons down to Baby-level. It worked for like two seconds and then Souji just evolved it straight to Perfect-level again.

There maybe is a non-death way of dealing with him, by removing the White Core, but we the audience don't know if that's possible and Kyo knows even less, since I doubt Wong filled him in on the thing even existing.

[fission-mailure]

It is probably not a good thing that I have made a particular character's dialogue style 'somewhat over-elaborate.' Not exactly loquacious, just always using slightly more words than necessary and with a slightly overly-formal register.

Like, it's a decent characterisation beat, it is just also, um. What's the word. Annoying.

[fission-mailure]

I do have to wonder about the thought process for this arc of Digimon Beatbreak. In the writer's room was it just someone going "Okay, so in this arc we'll introduce a third guy who is psychotically obsessed with Kyo, but to be real different this one will restrain him face down on the ground with tentacles while grasping his hair and whispering into his ear," and everyone else nodding and going "Yes, of course. My favourite thing about this idea is that there's simply no way anyone could interpret it as having any kind of innuendo. You've done it again, Shun Sukebe."

[fission-mailure]

A second recap episode is, um. Certainly a choice.

[joepickett]

Galavant 1.05

[renthony]

It's wild to watch the phrase "tumblr sexyman" morph into "man that tumblr thinks is sexy," because when I first saw the phrase come into use, I always saw it used in reference to the phenomenon of "when presented with a wide array of fictional characters, tumblr will always pick the skinny white man to obsess over, and if the fan-favorite character has no canonical human appearance, the fandom will inevitably create a popular fanon of the character as as a skinny white man."

When I hear "tumblr sexyman," I think of Cecil Night Vale being constantly depicted as a skinny white man instead of literally anything else. I think of the background character white men who get elevated over protagonists that are women, people of color, or otherwise not the white man power fantasy.

"Tumblr sexyman" is, like. An insult. I DON'T want any of my blorbos to win a "tumblr sexyman" poll. "Tumblr sexyman" is the exact opposite of what I want my own OCs to be. If any of my characters ever get called "tumblr sexyman," I will have to immediately re-evaluate myself and the art I'm making.

[renthony]

Things I think of when I hear "tumblr sexyman":

Cecil Night Vale, as previously mentioned.

Oncelercest, because if there aren't two skinny white men to ship, tumblr fandom will start shipping the skinny white man with himself.

Bill Cipher inexplicably being fanon'd as a white twink despite being a fucking triangle.

Everyone fawning over Marvel Loki while shoving every woman and Black person in the MCU aside.

The way nearly every single character in Hazbin Hotel has the same "tall and skinny" body type, along with all the criticisms Black audience members have made about the issues with Alastor's design.

The way tumblr got obsessed with the white man villain in Sinners.

[fission-mailure]

So, er. Who is this.

It's barely a few frames in the trailer, so I sort of assumed just based on it being a Hannibal Lecter cell that it was Souji, the most Hannibal Lecter of all the Digimon Beatbreak characters, but now that it's not flickering by in less than a second -- clearly it isn't Souji. The hair and head shape aren't right, for a start.

It looks like it could be Klay. The hair would be right for that. Either that or it's a character we haven't seen before.

[redstonedust]

if vampires existed in real life i think there would be shady companies advertising "organic blood" sourced from "willing donors" who are coincidentally all poor people being paid like $5 per blood donation. and like haughty vegan vampires who only drink a synthetic blood drink thats brewed in a way thats actively worse for the enviroment. and radical traditionalist vampires who go on tiktok and claim that true alpha chads have to drain and kill people and anyone who leaves their victims alive is a liberal cuck. enter the world of hypothetical insufferable vampire politics with me.

[fission-mailure]

Just had a manageable but somewhat rough night panic-wise, and conveeeeeniently it kicked in just after I'd had two coffees and is now passing.

Will I ever stop making this obvious mistake (drinking coffee) which I know is a mistake? Hopefully, although available evidence suggests that I will actually keep sporadically making it forever. A lot about mental illness can't be helped, only ameliorated, but in this case it is unambiguously a case of "You did this to yourself by making a bad choice despite having all the information you need to not make that bad choice."

[fission-mailure]

Saw some people on Twitter going "If the Air Nomads in ATLA had only benders, does that mean they practiced eugenics?" and -- no, it doesn't, let's use our brains the lost paragons of virtue in a children's show weren't eugenics, but also. Also. The idea that bending is genetic badly misunderstands ATLA in a way that's nearly as bad as the 'lavabenders happen when a firebender and earthbender have a child' bullshit.

Like, look, bending ability is clearly not genetic. Bending ability is a spiritual trait nominally bound to particular cultural groups (implicitly, the groups that came from each element's associated lion turtles).

This is why, for example, it's entirely possible in the world of ATLA for a bending child to be born to a family that has never had benders, and vice versa, for a non-bending child to be born to families that have only produced benders. It's why the Air Nomads, who are highly spiritual, are always benders. It's why families with two types of bending basically only start existing once the Fire Nation colonies in the Earth Kingdom become independent from both with their own hybrid culture, despite the fact that -- like, it's not as if nobody has ever crossed a border before, relationships between people of different nations did happen beforehand. It's why nobody except the Avatar ever manifests two forms of bending. It's why not everybody is a bender, despite the whole Wan backstory kind of making a big deal that everyone who left the lion turtles (which is everyone) had those elemental powers passed to them, so if it was genetic, there'd be a near 100% population of benders.

If you start trying to superimpose genetics on this very much not-genetic magic system, you will firstly go insane and secondly start really quickly sounding like someone who watches Glenn Beck.

[fission-mailure]

I feel like the problem with the 'Rhaena has to live in a cave now' storyline is it hinges on the idea that Rhaenyra would immediately fly off the handle and kill Rhaena being remotely credible.

But that's not really the Rhaenyra we see? Alicent was pretty heavily involved in Rhaenyra's life spiralling into war, a thing that led to the deaths of two of her sons, and while it's doubtful they'll ever be best buds again, Rhaenyra hasn't killed Alicent and is fairly cordial with her.

Obviously Rhaenyra is furious over Jace's death and blames Sheepstealer's rider, but she also believes said rider to be an unknown party who deliberately killed Jace, rather than what actually happened, which is that Rhaena made a kind of stupid decision, Sheepstealer went off the rails, and neither of them actually killed Jace, just distracted him enough for the Triarchy to do it.

Would Rhaenyra be unwilling to accept that explanation from Rhaena, a girl who she trusts enough to leave in charge of her youngest sons? Wild dragons being difficult or impossible to tame is a pretty known fact, after all. Idk, man, I feel like the Rhaenyra we've seen would believe that and wouldn't jump to killing Rhaena, even if she'd probably never trust Rhaena again.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’ve started listening to the book project Hail Mary and frankly there’s no room in the plot of this book for that man everyone seems to be shipping Grace with so I decided to look it up and apparently instead of letting a character not have a romantic interest y’all have yoinked a character out of some kind of Markiplier project

[what-even-is-thiss]

This is the goddamned Jack Frost and Elsa situation all over again

[handsomejackshairplugs]

#phm is becoming a fascinating case study in distilled fandom behavior#not in a good way mostly#<- prev. Yeah#It’s gratifying every time I see someone new start Project Hail Mary and go ‘they’re shipping what??’#Same as every time I tell a friend who likes The Murderbot Diaries but isn’g in the fandom trenches about MB/Gurathin shippers#Their shock reminds me I’m not crazy there’s just a lot of fans who care about One Thing Only and it’s not the source material#And just like MB/G shippers the Bloodymary shippers pitch absolute temper tantrums when anybody even slightly expresses dislike of the ship#Bloodymary was entertaining for like a week before it became Ubiquitous and the shippers badly behaved about it - @specialagentartemis