alwa’s things

21 and obsessive

[vampantheon]

on the topic of disabled characters, though, i think a LOT of artists give characters mobility aids that their character wouldn't actually benefit from using.

i'm sort of having a mild brain fog moment rn so i can't fully articulate what i'm on about, but i think a lot of able-bodied artists view things like canes and crutches as interchangeable. and they often don't know enough about the wide range of mobility aids to make an informed decision about what their character might actually use based on their disability

i also think that aids like walkers and rollators are sort of viewed as "cringe" on some level, and many people view them to be "just for old people," so many artists will opt for giving a character who has full-body pain and fatigue a cane (which, in many cases, can potentially WORSEN full-body pain) instead. and a lot of people don't realize that most wheelchair users are able to walk, so they don't consider it an option for characters with chronic pain

[vampantheon]

idk it's kind of frustrating. i've genuinely never, ever seen a character that uses a rollator before. not once. i cannot name a single one. i know of multiple ocs who are described to have full-body pain, dizziness, and fatigue that are drawn as cane users and are never shown with wheelchairs or walkers, though

[vampantheon]

it's also sort of sad? i've been diagnosed since i was twelve years old, and i only heard of rollators LAST YEAR. and that was only because i saw one irl and immediately asked what it was. i wonder how many disabled people out there don't even know it's an option solely because they're completely underrepresented online and in media

[vampantheon]

if you're a creative with a disabled oc, PLEASEEE check out this link. it's a very nice and detailed guide for telling which mobility aids suit someone's needs best. it's incredibly important to make the right choice for your character! mobility aids tell you a LOT about someone's lived experience. picking the right one will communicate to your audience #1 what your character goes through #2 that you UNDERSTAND what your character goes through!

[sentient-tent]

This is Tie, she is going to eat all of the notes

[sentient-tent]

reblog to feed her notes

[elodieunderglass]

How is she doing this

[elodieunderglass]

Oh well none of my business

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Random mansion generator

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/random-mansion-generator.html

[something-from-elsewhere]

Oooooh! Saving this

[lady-feral]

That’s fun

[vesperlionheart]

Hey, but don’t fall asleep on this Medieval Fantasy City Generator   

[mothmammoth]

If you want the next step up from cities, check out this world map generator!

A random example:

It can also show you the heights of regions of the maps, what kind of biomes you might expect, generate border shifting, upload base maps from images, assign areas where specific cultures or religions are practiced, you can add, move and name every single town in a country, add provinces within the country, generate place names from language databases, shift rivers, change the direction of global wind patterns and see how that effects the climate… There’s a bunch of stuff you can do with it!

[gremlininho]

let me. innnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

[justthefoolyoutookmefor]

ranted so hard on an obsession post it got liked like 20 times

i may be unhireable but i have likes on tumblr so i am truly successful 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️😎

[throo]

Wh-what do you mean it’s from a birthday cake

[throo]

We could have been eating him

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

I mean i quite like my brain, i’m really very fond of it i just think it’s a design failure that i can’t pop it out of the ole skull basket every night and plug it in to recharge. travesty really

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

we share one collective braincell and that braincell desires a bath apparently

[stalkingchair]

This is brainwashing propaganda

[gaynfl-moved]

what's your "if I won the lottery I wouldn't tell anyone but there would be signs" thing? mine is getting a fully green kitchen

[gaynfl-moved]

[shouts-into-the-void]

One thing about Obsession (2026) that I enjoyed was that it almost asks you to feel empathy for the entity possessing Nikki as well as the real one. Like, obviously the things she's doing are horrific and fucked up, but I think the scene where Bear is asking her to "just be Nikki!" and she eventually just desperatly screams "I can't be Nikki!" does a really good job of showcasing the entity's inner feelings. She's been created with the sole purpose of loving this guy more than anyone else but no matter how perfect it is or how much he claims to love her, its not her that he loves, its Nikki. And any time she stops pretending to be Nikki, he reacts (albeit rightfully) with disgust and horror. She can't be Nikki because Nikki would never love Bear, and so Bear will never love her.

[teejay-kaye]

it's fascinating to see that other people are approaching this movie in terms of "there is another entity possessing nikki" when like. i really didn't get that vibe at all. that's nikki. the whole time it's just nikki. except some compelling force has rewritten something in her brain and has completely stripped her autonomy and agency. she's being people-puppetted by herself.

not to say that classifying wish-nikki as a separate entity is the wrong read, per se, it's just interesting to see a different take. they're structurally identical but idk there's just SOMETHING extra crunchy about there being no distinct Other Entity. that was Nikki. sometimes she came back to lucidity and got control of herself back in tiny bits and pieces. but the Thing that was taking her over and forcing her to be someone else's plaything... it's still just her.

i guess my read on that line specifically wasn't "i can't be nikki" as in "i'm this other entity and I can't be the person i took over", it was "i can't be the nikki you erased because you didn't actually want that version in your life, you wanted me. you wanted the version that loved you like a beaten dog."

[justthefoolyoutookmefor]

i’m not a fan of blanketly accepting authorial intent, but I did find it interesting to hear Curry Barker say he specifically asked Inde Navarette not to act as though she were possessed, but to play like she WAS the toxic obsessed girlfriend.

i suppose the key difference between wrongfully-rewired and possessed Nikki is what the ‘real Nikki’ moments are. Demonic possession has two hosts fighting for control of the body, and the demon usually inflicts harm on the person they’ve possessed. But Wish Nikki never hurts herself, only Real Nikki. The moments she peeks through aren’t her actively fighting herself, but like glitches—her brain going through its well-trodden wiring instead of the powerful new wrong ones.

also, i’ve seen some people point out that without her crystal necklace and later the tiger eye Nikki gives to Bear, she has lost all spiritual protections, leaving her open to the harm of the one wish willow. while for some that points more to demonic possession, i still feel this works for rewiring. (and it’s also messed up how Bear didn’t even get her the actual gift that she would’ve appreciated, feeling it too cringe to give her a crystal wishing her happiness. my guy. wtf.)

regardless of either situation, I love how it demonstrates that Bear wants a version of Nikki that can’t exist. Nikki wouldn’t love one person more than anything in the entire world. she has dreams, a mother, a faith.

Nikki has so much that is important to her.

AND ON THAT NOTE!! I am confused when people say Sarah or Nikki don’t have enough humanity. yes, yes, the tragedy of the story itself is how little they have. but let’s stop for a damn second. Because:

Bear and Ian have way less.

Bear can’t come up with an answer to what he wants to do with his life. he wears his grandfather’s clothes instead of developing his own style. he has no dreams, no more family, and a shitty best friend who tried to sabotage him. Bear’s entire life is his grief, his attachment to the one girl that didn’t make him feel like a freak about it, and his cowardice to face any of it. he is hardly a whole person so he doesn’t see Nikki as one either.

while Nikki has a conversation with a guy living on the street, treating him like a person; Bear’s over here unwilling to genuinely give Nikki a physical token of his desire for her happiness, because it’s too cringe. his desire to be seen as a normal person is stronger than his desire to recognize anyone as a person. listening to what people think, feel, want, and responding with kindness—simple dignity, is more than he can bear.

Obsession is truly a fantastic movie.

[galileosballs]

This interview with Ncuti Gatwa crossed my dash again, and I was reminded of how much I like it. Because it makes the rare Third Argument for representation in fiction, the argument I think is the best, and I'm always happy to see it. I quote:

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.

And that's why Argument 3 is my favourite. I do want the world to be a better place, of course, and I think art is a part of that. But the main job of art is to be good as art. And diversity in all aspects of the production of art makes art better.

[alethialia]

Ya know, sometimes things are cut because they're bad. When that happens, I say well done. Editing is an essential function of creating, good job making use of it. That idea you tried is a bad one, off to the bin it goes.

But no matter how you slice it, if it ain't on screen, it ain't canon.

[mf-dooom]

[yetanothergreyjedi]

that is the face of a man worried he will be next

[ashtraythief]

Good news, he was not next! In fact, she accepted him as her mate, he learned the crane mating dance and now every year, he artificially inseminates her with crane semen to expand the very endangered crane population. True story.

[luulapants]

Sorry, he WHAT? Imagine being this man's boss and having to sit him down like. Listen. Brian. We need you to fuck the bird. You have to act like you're excited about it.

[whetstonefires]

crane husband.....

[roach-works]

this is the diametric opposite of all those awful swan wife stories and i love it.

[alex51324]

(WalWaPo makes you jump through like three separate hoops before you can read the article, so I will share some of the highlights:

Walnut was born in a species-recovery breeding program in the 1980′s.  The program had crane chicks hand-raised by human volunteers, and at that time they did not fully understand the measures necessary make sure that the chicks do not imprint on humans and retain their identity as cranes.  

As a result, her keepers believe, Walnut does not recognize other cranes as members of her own species.  

It has not been proven that Walnut killed her previous suitors; however, there is a persistent rumor in the white-naped-crane-conservation community that she did.  

Because this species is highly endangered, and the gene pool of the captive population is small, it’s pretty important for the survival of her species that Walnut A) mate, and B) not kill a bunch of other cranes.  

The actual name of the keeper is Chris Crowe.

They both arrived at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in 2004.   

Walnut immediately began paying special attention to Chris--and ignoring the eligible male crane in a nearby enclosure.  

Walnut initiated their courtship, performing the opening moves of a mating dance.  

Chris realized that if he reciprocated the mating dance, it might be possible to artificially inseminate Walnut with her participation and consent.  (The process normally involves restraining the bird.)  

It worked!  

Chris and Walnut have had five children, who were raised by other crane couples at the facility--sometimes the biological dad and his mate--both because it’s unclear whether Walnut would accept the chicks as her own, and because Chris is not equipped to be a Crane Dad.  

However, the Institute provides her with artificial eggs to sit on, and Chris takes his turn looking after them.  (This would not work with real eggs because he can’t sit on them properly, but Walnut seems to feel that he is on the job if he just stands over them.)

Chris accepts that he is pretty much married to this bird.  White-naped cranes live to be about 60, and they mate for life, so he knows he can’t retire while Walnut is alive.  (At the time of the article, Walnut was 36, and Chris 42.)  

[thesylverlining]

Legit cannot pick the funniest part of this

she has not been PROVEN to have killed her exes, but there is a PERSISTENT RUMOR (really officers she's simply DEVASTATED, she sobs, wearing a new feather boa unfortunately resembling her most recent deceased husband)

His name is Chris CROWE. (Mrs. Walnut Crane-Crowe?)

the mental images of a whole human man learning and performing the crane mating dance, and "sitting" on artificial eggs so she thinks he's performing his duties as a husband and father (and apparently OBJECTS if he does not?)

"chris, buddy, you gotta marry the possibly-murderous crane lady for the GOOD OF THE SPECIES." (alternately: "chris, my man! good news! we found you a very interested lady! She's 36, she's very spirited and independent, she holds a very important and rare status in her society! ...Is there a downside? WELL...")

chris sits any potential human partners down, like "my love, you must understand before we wed,,, i am already... Attached" (camera drifts wistfully to the above photo) "Lady Walnut and I have an,, Understanding... the relationship is open, but very committed"

[anais-ninja-bitch]

just had to explain this post to my father bc he thought my stifled laughter was a signal of illness.

well done, everyone, good game. hit the showers.

[largishcat]

[eshlimoriarty]

[lazorsandparadox]

Not only is he 'married' to walnut, this has apparently happened SEVERAL times, so he has MULTIPLE crane wives, none of which know about any of his other crane wives. This man is, for some unknown reason, irresistible to cranes

[queersatanic]

the “this content has been removed for violating Tumblr’s Community Guidelines” notice really adds a lot of flavor to this post and somehow makes it MORE obscene than whatever that actually was

[worldheritageposts-official]

World Heritage Post

[kedreeva]

I regret being the bearer of bad news, but I thought it should be shared that Walnut passed away in January of this year (2024). There's a lot of mixed info about the lifespan of cranes (due to people misunderstanding what a median is...) but the average for most species I know of is 20-30 years (in the wild if nothing eats them/they don't die young), and 30-45 in captivity, with the oldest known white-naped crane having loved to be 46. Given that she was 42, this old gal did good, and I'm certain she will be missed by folks here.

[optimysticals]

Fly on forever Walnut Crane-Crowe

[blackshvck]

the idea that every summer will be as hot if not hotter than this for the rest of my life is unbearable i need to (remembers suicide jokes are bad for my mental health) murder an oil executive

[utopians]

people aren't even exaggerating indeed is literally like that. walmart attendant $13 an hour, target attendant $13 an hour, AI dick sucker $40 an hour, home depot attendant $13 an hour, guy who designs bullets that can only kill children $160k a year plus benefits, gas station manager $18 an hour

[filmnoirsbian]

I love getting unaccompanied minors (kids flying alone) who so clearly just. Don't want to be here lol. Sometimes I get to know a little of their story, like their parents are divorced, or a family member died and they're heading to the funeral, but usually they just don't want to talk about it and that's fine. But I always treat the flight like it's a challenge to make them smile. I offer them snacks and soda but that's never enough, that's whatever, they could get those from an airport vending machine. Chump change. So then I tell the worst jokes. Just the most embarrassing, kindergarten teacher, annoying dad jokes you can think of. And those always get a groan, or a "Seriously??" And that's my in! Now I can say "Why, what's your idea of a good joke? No, come on hotshot, make your best joke, let's see it." And they hem and they haw but of course they eventually tell me their very best joke because kids are little competitive comedy goldmines. And it's always super funny, so I laugh, and that's where they slip up. Because you know what you almost always do when your joke successfully makes someone laugh? You smile. And I'm like. Gotcha. Rookie move. Now you're going to end up having a good time in spite of yourself. I win.

[filmnoirsbian]

Did this with an 11yo u.m. today and he said "What did the ghost say to the other ghost?" And I said "What?" "Nothing. Ghosts aren't real."

[filmnoirsbian]

I'm literally a flight attendant, offering snacks and drinks is my job

[this-is-a-name-dont-worry]

gshsjb

[avpdvoidspace]

Having a traumatic childhood means you cannot talk even objectively about your basic foundational experiences without it being "venting", even if you're not actually venting. You just straight up have a huge chunk of your life you can't talk about, full stop, without it being trauma dumping.

And it not being socially acceptable to talk about your own childhood is super alienating. Sometimes people want to know why, and any answer you can give them is going to be off putting.

It's to the point I get irritated when something I said is framed as venting when I'm literally just talking about my life experiences, doing my best to keep emotion out of it.

[savouryduck]

when I was in high school, I overheard two older students talking about a friend of theirs.

One of them said something like, "it doesn't bother me that [Friend] was in residential mental health treatment, I just wish they wouldn't talk about it ALL the time".

The other replied, "Well, that was all of last year for them. So when they say 'when I was in treatment,' it's like when you say 'last year'."

I try to remember that any time someone says something that sounds Shocking to me. sometimes one person's scary special crisis is another person's last year.

[wherethewildcatsare]

If you want to be accepting of mental illness, you need to accept the fact that some people's everyday lives are going to be terrifying to you. That doesn't mean they don't get to talk about it. Stop forcing hurt, isolated people to become even MORE hurt and isolated because you can't fathom toughening up a bit.

[dogpuppy]

[nineteenyearoldmeblog]

im fucking crying