Kungfunurse

Hey all - I'm Kungfunurse on AO3, Dreamwidth and Pillowfort. I’m a fandom old from pre-LJ days, and an inveterate slash fan

[tarragonthedragon]

in 2026 i am wishing for all of us the energy of bilbo baggins, who was headhunted for an extremely well paid role he had no qualifications or experience for, blagged the interview, and within his first week found a magic ring that does the job for him

[lonicera-edulis]

Commissions for @elodieunderglass feauturing OCs Derek (a big nerdy guy) and Killie (a grumpy little racehorse jockey).

[elodieunderglass]

Look at them guys!!!

[elodieunderglass]

The artist @lonicera-edulis is open for commissions and is so lovely to work with 🥹

[krisrisk]

hey @elodieunderglass your horsebackriding wouldn't let go of my brain so I made a (tiny) poster

A graphic with two stick figures riding horses on either side of a "no shrimp" sign. Text below reads "SHOULDERS OVER HIPS, you horrid shrimp." /End ID]

[elodieunderglass]

❌🦐

Thank you so much oh my goodness. This is your reminder to unshrimp (if able)

[nonbinary-octopus]

oh hey this reminded me of a thing I wanted to tell you

recently I started a new job that involves a lot of bending/twisting, and picking up heavy stuff, and the best way I could get myself to actually do the "lift with your knees not with your back" thing, because those instructions are kind of not detailed enough, was to instead put the instruction of "point your BUTT at the GROUND" which works better cos it makes more sense to conceptualize. trying to reach into a box under waist height? don't bend at the waist to do that, that'll hurt your back. because you stuck your butt out instead of down. instead you gotta point your butt at the ground and bend your knees instead.

and a couple hours into the shift I was like. this sounds like a Killie thing I should tell Elodie. and then a couple more hours and I was tired and forgot.

[elodieunderglass]

Ohh! Thank you for telling me! This is exactly the sort of thing that Killie would be barking at his poor beanbag of a boyfriend:

Another way to think of it might be:

you are wearing a corset/safety vest/plate armour/super tight waistcoat that you’re not sure of/full binder or Spanx that you’re not 💯 sure of. Get to the ground without bending your waist and compromising this garment.

If this doesn’t mean anything particularly to you, because you haven’t worn one, then do feel free to purchase and wear a garment that forces a certain premeditation upon yourself.

Myself (and Charlie) wear an invisible corset, and use the resulting knee-movement to remind ourselves of how sexily supple and versatile we are in the knees and hips 😌

Killie would presume his back is straight and that his sit bones move down on command (as you do)

Someone like Derek, who is unsure of what “core muscles” are in the first place, might benefit from more severe instructions, like being told to balance an imaginary book on their head!

Good on you for making a big effort to lift properly! I am personally proud of your effort and also very proud of you

[kungfunurse]

Just finished Life is Strange 2 and it’s clear that I have An Type. Dean and Sam Supernatural. Tim and Valentine Wilde. Bolin and Mako (Legend of Korra). And now Sean and Daniel Diaz. Two brothers against the world, fighting all comers to stay together and keep each other safe. Codependent little trash gremlins that will burn the world down and count it a win if they do it shoulder to shoulder. I’m eating that up with a spoon.

Any other great brotherhood stories out there that I should check out, pls let me know!

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

What's so great about the great bustard? A lot of things- but the greatest of all is probably that they can lay claim to fame as one of the heaviest flying birds! The heaviest of them can weigh upwards of 18 kg (40 lbs)- and to help them lift all that weight, they boast a 2.7 m (8 ft 10 in) wingspan!

(Image: A male great bustard (Otis tarda) by L. Jargal)

[elodieunderglass]

The Great Bustard is featured on the flag of the English county of Wiltshire! I personally think it’s peak and very charismatic

[prokopetz]

Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.

[stephenleasheppard]

There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"No, why would it?"

[sabotflask]

One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."

[prokopetz]

#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)

It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.

[countzeroor]

It also bears mentioning that the current culture of RPGs encourages a separation of player knowledge and character knowledge. I, as a player, know that the big cat with tentacles out the back is a displacer beast, but my character doesn't, and the character that replaced the one the displacer beast killed. That separation, particularly with Survival Modules, was not the case back in the day. Characters had full knowledge shared between them, so if Dave the fighter got disintegrated by a beholder, Dave's identical twin brother now knew beholders have disintegration attacks. This is part of the reason why it was considered bad form for players to read monster books.

[prokopetz]

It's broadly untrue that the idea of separating player knowledge from character knowledge is a modern development. The practice descends to tabletop RPGs from the historical wargames they splintered off from; tabletop wargames which focus on accurately re-creating historical battles often operate on a gentleperson's agreement to refrain from acting on strategic information that your side's commanders couldn't reasonably have been aware of, or employing tactical doctrines which had not yet been developed when the re-created battle took place, and many early tabletop RPGs adopted similar conventions, to greater or lesser degrees. Heck, games like Paranoia were parodying those conventions as early as the mid 1980s! It's come in and out of fashion in mainstream RPGs over the past half-century, but it's not a recent thing.

It is, however, correct that there typically was no expectation of observing these conventions when playing survival modules in particular.

[magekrove]

may the dread wolf never hear your steps

[digitalkiddo]

If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.

[avelera]

(Arcane Meta) Zaun Died with Silco

I want to open this by saying I understand people who are upset that there isn't more Piltover/Zaun conflict and resolution in S2 of Arcane. However, I'm going to argue here that the reason it's not in S2 after 2.03 is because the conflict is over. Piltover won. There is no more Zaun anymore as a potential political player and, ultimately, this comes back to haunt Piltover in their hour of need.

Overall, while I am invested in the Piltover/Zaun conflict, especially in S1, I'm less focused on Caitlyn and Vi's story which is our main lens for the conflict, or rather the end of the conflict, in S2. Still, I hope to offer my more Arcane worldbuilding-focused perspective. And just to get it out of the way, here are a few things I had trouble with:

I too was puzzled that anyone from the Undercity would join Piltover in the defense of the city.

I also thought it was strange to have Jayce focus on the threat that Viktor posed with his robots while soliciting help from the undercity, instead of on Ambessa, the more clear and understandable threat that would have made a better rallying point and allowed for a final discussion about the Noxian occupation of the undercity and how Noxus turning on Piltover was just them reaping what they sowed.

I was certainly taken aback when everyone was given Enforcer uniforms for the final fight.

That said, I believe there are answers to all three of these. From there, I want to dive into what exactly happened in S2 with Piltover vs. Zaun, to my eyes. Short version: there is no more "Zaun" as a potential nation or political player by 2.03 when the Chem Barons are taken out by Cait's forces, but it really died before that with Silco, who was already in a precarious negotiating situation himself and he knew it.

Very few people from the Undercity joined Piltover's defense of the city. Maybe a half dozen. I felt that was our moment of "you reap what you sow" for Piltover. A few passionate idealists who could see the bigger picture that saving Piltover does mean saving the undercity joined, but there were no hordes of volunteers. Piltover had lost the right to them and was substantially weakened for it.

Jayce choosing to focus on Viktor as the threat makes sense for him, but it was a poor political move and probably lost him volunteers he would have otherwise gained. The robot army threat is too esoteric and fantastical. "The Noxians turned on us and plan to conquer the city," is a threat that would have been better for rallying the troops, Jayce is just too single-minded to think of it. He's a bad politician.

The Enforcer uniforms are an odd sour note, but they do make sense as protective gear. Piltover doesn't have an army. There are no uniforms to give people. All they have is Enforcer uniforms. It is an odd note symbolically, but practically speaking it shows how little time Piltover had to prepare. Piltover is a civilian city going up against a military force like Noxus. They are woefully underprepared and really only have their status as defender in urban fighting to give them a prayer of even stalling the Noxian forces. Ironically, Piltover's only hope against Noxus mirrors Zaun's only hope against Piltover if they had gone to war: the difficult nature of urban fighting against an entrenched, motivated opponent on their home turf.

Now, to get into, "What happened to the overall Piltover vs. Zaun fight?" I get why people think it's lacking in S2, and I get why people find it horrifying that there is no independent Zaun at the end, all we've got is Sevika with one seat on the Council, as far as we can tell but I would point out:

Zaun is dead at this point. It's been dead since 2.03. Arguably, it really died with Silco.

As Jinx said, she didn't just destroy her own family, she cursed an entire society when she launched that rocket into the Council Chamber.

Here's the thing, Jayce was actually right when he said Zaun wouldn't stand a chance in an outright war with Piltover.

Yes, Zaun has a lot of brawlers. They have Shimmer and the Shimmer berserkers.

But Zaun doesn't have any sort of organized fighting force beyond the guards of individual Chem Barons and their factories.

What Zaun has is the fissures. It has ugly, difficult urban fighting in dangerous spaces. But as a counter to that, we have the fact that their ventilation is controlled from Piltover. In a true all-out war, Piltover could in theory just flush out the entire undercity using the Gray. Having your infrastructure entirely dependent on an enemy oppressor is what I would call a "fatal flaw" in any defensive military strategy, particularly when what they can cut off is the air you breathe. That's easily game over right there unless Silco has a way to circumvent that.

In a guerilla war, Zaun could probably hold out for a long, grinding, ugly civil war made up of mostly guerrilla attacks, in which a great number of innocent civilians will die, even in an all-out conflict with Piltover. But it would suffer catastrophic losses and probably still lose in the end.

Now, Jayce is I think somewhat naive in his claim Zaun doesn't stand a chance. Maybe Zaun wouldn't stand a chance in the long run, but they'd make Piltover pay for every inch with blood. They'd grind Piltover down into a shadow of its former self, force them to sacrifice all of their principles. To some extent, I think Jayce gets that, he gets that he doesn't want more kids to die, but I think even he underestimates just how ugly that war would be and how long it would go and how unrecognizable his Piltover would be by then.

The moment that gives Silco pause in Jayce's assessment of how easily Zaun would be crushed isn't the fighting. Silco is pretty confident that they could make Piltover pay and he's arguably looking forward to the chance on some level.

What gives him pause is when Jayce says the Council doesn't care.

To some extent, Silco like any revolutionary against an oppressive "civilized" society (heavy, heavy emphasis on the air quotes there) is that a certain point, Piltover is so soft-hearted they will get tired of the bloodshed.

What Jayce just told Silco is that the Council is more barbaric than even Silco maybe appreciated, for all their vaunted principles. There isn't necessarily a limit to how many Zaunite children will die before Piltover decides to cease hostilities. Knowing what Silco knows of Piltover's brutality, I think that is a sobering moment for Silco. That's when he decides this really is the best time to negotiate.

(Aside, this is by the way where Vi is wrong about Silco, driven by her emotions. Silco is willing to set aside the feud to get his nation of Zaun, he can be negotiated with. He's just not willing to give up his daughter (something Vi can't possibly understand at this point).)

Here's why it's the best time for Silco to negotiate and it ties into everything else:

Without Shimmer, which has been severely hampered by the raid on the factory, Zaun doesn't have anything to counter Hextech.

Jinx's wild attacks against Piltover has helped put the pressure on them that Silco capitalizes on. But it is a paper-thin threat. She is a lone albeit devastating terrorist. She makes Zaun appear more dangerous than it is but that can't last forever. Silco has leveraged her attacks into a pressure campaign against Piltover, but a serious response from Piltover (as seen in 2.03 with the strike team corners and very nearly captures her) could reveal just how fragile that threat is.

Basically, Zaun has some champions, arguably a league of legends lol, but it doesn't have an army. It doesn't even have Enforcers of its own. It doesn't have a concerted force of any kind.

The money is running out. As "Sucker" shows us in 2.02, each Chem Baron that gets taken out means less money on the table, and we're down 2 by the beginning of S2 with Silco and Finn, who arguably both fell to internal fighting.

As the Chem Barons say in 2.02, even if they got total unity in Zaun, they're outnumbered.

However, they don't have total unity in Zaun. They can't even get the Chem Barons to agree on what to do on one topic, with Jinx.

Silco basically has to accept the deal with Jayce when he does, while Zaun appears to be at its strongest. Because if he had waited any longer, the fact that they don't have the strength or money to back it up would have become apparent.

Furthermore, once Jayce resigns from the Council, which he was planning to do anyway regardless of Jinx's attack, would mean Zaun would lose its one champion with the political capital to give them independence. The window for Zaun independence is actually extremely narrow.

With Silco's death and Jinx's attack on the Council, then the subsequent eradication of the other Chem Barons, their resources, their money, including Shimmer which was the only thing Zaun really had to match them against Hextech in that arms race, there really isn't a Zaun anymore.

There's no one to negotiate with. No one to hand power to. No force that can govern itself. Zaun is completely fractured with the eradication of the Chem Barons. By taking them out, Cait removed the need for Piltover to negotiate with Zaun. And the reason Piltover chose not to was because of Jinx's rocket and then the attack on the memorial, which was orchestrated by Ambessa.

This is all according to Ambessa's design, by the way. She divides Piltover/Zaun against themselves by capitalizing on Jinx's attack. She leaves both severely weakened to make it easier for her to take over, and Piltover walks right into the trap. They would have fallen to Noxus if not for Mel's love of the city, even if you remove Viktor and Jayce's plotline entirely.

TL;DR Zaun is gone, guys. It's a distant dream. Sevika is the only person with an interest in making it happen anymore and she can't even get the Jinxers to listen to her. All the factions are easily arrested at the rally. Piltover has no reason to negotiate with any of these people. As the lone torchbearer for that cause, it makes sense for Sevika to be on the Council but beyond her, there is literally no one else to give a voice to (since Ekko doesn't appear to have an interest).

At least, until the Noxians turn on them, and then there's an interest in Piltover and the undercity joining forces, but as I referenced at the beginning of this, Piltover has now lost the right to the undercity's help AND lacks the undercity's resources too. Now Noxus has Shimmer instead of Piltover or Zaun, in addition to their sophisticated and expertly trained military force. As Jayce said, they were meant to lose this fight. Arguably, they never had a chance of winning if not for Mel claiming the loyalty of the Noxians in the wake of her mother's death and everything Jayce did to stop Viktor and the Hexcore.

[thetardigrape]

This is an excellent Watsonian explanation of the end of the class war.

From a Doylist perspective, I think there are 2 important points:

The show was always written to highlight the relationships between characters in the game League of Legends.

The story of the oppressed lower class rising up against their rich oppressors is old and done, and the story of Arcane is not.

To point 1, the creators always set out to make a show about the characters of LoL, not about its locations. And they absolutely did! The relationships between and among these people are what makes the show compelling. It's why there are thousands and thousands of fics for a whole slew of ships with fun names.

To point 2, I think it's so incredibly valuable that they didn't simply write Les Mis, But With Magic. Sure, you want to see the oppressed underdog beat the rich, powerful overlords. Feel free to watch Les Mis, or The Hunger Games, or Mad Max. That story can be great when done properly but it has definitely, exhaustively been done.

A much, much less common story is what we got: a messy, chaotic fight that culminated in a victory not through physical or mental or even magical prowess, but through enduring, unwavering love. An entire world's destruction and salvation built around the fact that two people couldn't accept being apart from each other. Wins for a whole bunch of underdogs, and a message that says, "It's never too late to try to do better."

I know a lot of people were disappointed by S2, and I understand those feelings (you have no idea). But personally, I loved it. I think it's very clear that the show was headed toward the finale it gave us from the very beginning, but it's also so original it was never predictable.

It's not perfect, no, but it's interesting, and that, to me, is so much more valuable.

[fuckyeahisawthat]

I'm gonna split the difference between your Watsonian and Doylist takes and say a little about each.

As someone who is ALWAYS down for a story about the oppressed rising up...I personally would have been disappointed if what seems like generations of inequality had been magically (ha) solved in 18 episodes. I don't think there's a way to do that without it feeling cheap and fake--even if any of the show's other plotlines were sacrificed to give the class struggle story elements more screentime. I also think that expecting that from a show called ARCANE is setting yourself up for disappointment. Magic was always going to be the main plotline. The inequality between the two cities is a backdrop for stories focused on the characters and their relationships, as @thetardigrape says. And given that (in my understanding) that inequality still exists in the world of the game, it seems unrealistic to expect it to be resolved in the show.

Sevika taking her one (1) token Council seat for the Undercity under the stink-eyed gaze of all the old money Pilties was a great moment, actually. That's fucking real, man. It's gonna suck so so much for her both politically and personally and I tend to think it will be nothing but ineffective and frustrating as a strategy for change, but that door toward more equality between the two cities has been shoved open a tiny bit and someone's gotta stick their foot in the gap. Within the world of the show, a tiny, imperfect and resentfully acknowledged crack in the status quo honestly feels way more real to me--and consistent with the tone of fragile hope that most of the storylines end on--than a more decisive political victory would.

And within the world of the show...I mean. Class struggle is never over. As long as there is inequality there will be new rounds of social upheaval, and there are many forms of struggle in between fighting the police and becoming a politician.

I do think that Silco's (and young Vander's) framing of the conflict in nationalist/separatist terms seems to be a very small minority position in their time, and that specific political project dies (for now) with Silco. I have a lot (like a LOT) more to say about this but it does not seem like most residents of the Undercity think of themselves as having a shared national identity. Maybe there is some vague sense of a shared class identity but there is certainly no sense of unified class power. (Again...a lot more to say about this that really deserves its own post.) In general, people's group loyalties seem to be to (1) their families (both bio and found) and informal networks of mutual support for basic survival, (2) gangs and networks of criminal enterprise, which can overlap with (1), and maybe in certain limited senses (miners, probably) to their fellow workers.

This doesn't mean that trying to cohere a national identity for Zaun is an objectively incorrect political strategy (my answer on that is a big fat "it depends!") just that it's not popular. The Undercity is not united at all during the timeline of the show. We're seeing it in a moment of division and defeat and I have a whole theory about exactly why but that's really getting into the other post I just need to sit down and write now.

[bethanydelleman]

hey! so, emma doesn't really stay friends with harriet because of her marriage iirc. is emma really snobby there? or would that be usual for people of her class? would any of the other austen heroines be friends with a prosperous farmer? (are the musgroves that, or does one of them marry into it? i forget...)

It would be usual for people of her class. The friendship with Harriet Smith was always on shaky ground given her birth status as a natural child and unknown parentage, but the wife of a farmer, even a gentleman farmer, isn't really someone Emma can stay friends with without family ties. Also, Mr. Knightley always thought this friendship was unequal, so if Emma is snobby he is too.

The closest examples we see in Jane Austen's works are the Bennets, who associate with both the Philips and the Gardiners, who are outside of the gentry, and the Hayters, who appear to be gentleman farmers at best, but are small landholders:

Mrs Musgrove and Mrs Hayter were sisters. They had each had money, but their marriages had made a material difference in their degree of consequence. Mr Hayter had some property of his own, but it was insignificant compared with Mr Musgrove’s; and while the Musgroves were in the first class of society in the country, the young Hayters would, from their parents’ inferior, retired, and unpolished way of living, and their own defective education, have been hardly in any class at all, but for their connexion with Uppercross, this eldest son of course excepted, who had chosen to be a scholar and a gentleman, and who was very superior in cultivation and manners to all the rest.

Even this is above Robert Martin, as the Hayters own their farm while the Martins are renting tenants. However, both the Musgroves/Hayters and the Bennets/Philips also have the excuse of being family in very close proximity. I'll also note, while the militia officers visit the Philips, we don't see the Netherfield party visiting there or hear of them associating until after the engagements of Jane and Elizabeth.

The other perhaps relevant example is Mr. Weston, who is from a rising local family and has been engaged in trade. He seems to be one of those people sitting right on the line of gentry/not gentry, but is accepted by the gentry class. Mrs. Weston, the former Miss Taylor, is a governess, a profession that also sits on the line. However, by the time of the novel, Mr. Weston has purchased his own estate, though a small one, and left trade, this gives him standing in the gentry besides his connections.

Anyway, no, I don't think we see this kind of cross-class friendship in any other of Jane Austen's works. The only cross-class ties are familial.

[katherinetheok]

I do wonder if, somewhere in her mind (let's be real a justification for wanting/needing a friend her own age when options are thin on the ground), Emma has convinced herself that Harriet is just another of those perfectly normal and admirable charity projects women of her status are meant to do, just with the "improving" influence of Emma's presence as opposed to offering tangible help like she does to the area's poor families.

[bethanydelleman]

There is precedent for that, for members of the gentry supporting the education of "worthy" people from the lower classes. That's basically the story of Wickham (thought that one turned out poorly).

However, Emma does really seem to have convinced herself that Harriet is born from the gentry:

"The misfortune of your birth ought to make you particularly careful as to your associates. There can be no doubt of your being a gentleman’s daughter, and you must support your claim to that station by every thing within your own power, or there will be plenty of people who would take pleasure in degrading you.”

“As to the circumstances of her birth, though in a legal sense she may be called Nobody, it will not hold in common sense. She is not to pay for the offence of others, by being held below the level of those with whom she is brought up.—There can scarcely be a doubt that her father is a gentleman—and a gentleman of fortune.—Her allowance is very liberal; nothing has ever been grudged for her improvement or comfort.—That she is a gentleman’s daughter, is indubitable to me; that she associates with gentlemen’s daughters, no one, I apprehend, will deny.—She is superior to Mr. Robert Martin.”

Honestly, if Emma had a larger pool of marriage prospects to work with, this Fake it Till You Make It plan for Harriet might have worked. Emma's just a big fish in a very small pond.

[themirokai]

Started feeling some type of way about the fact that the fan fiction I have been diligently stealing moments from my stupidly busy and stressful life to work on is one that probably no one will read (except for my couple of die hards who read everything I write regardless of fandom or pairing and I love to the ends of the earth). (The fic in question is mostly about a woman who has zero spoken lines in canon.)

But then I decided that because almost no one will read it, I’m going to take the pressure off myself to make it good. Those scenes where I just have an idea about what happens and a scrap of dialogue? I’m gonna write down the idea and the scrap and that’s what’s going in the fic. I’m giving myself free license to tell, not show. I will not worry about people’s clothes or how they’re moving in a room. I’m just going to write the bits that make my brain go ping and absolutely nothing else.

This feels pretty liberating. Now I just need to steal enough moments from my stupidly busy and stressful life to do it!

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Okay so MASSIVE Project Hail Mary spoilers but

I like to think of what Project Hail Mary was like from Rocky’s point of view.

Keep reading

[kungfunurse]

I love this. I’m hugging and smooching this and having tea and crumpets with it while playing house.

[confuzing]

A Bingyuan where Bingge abandons his PIDW life and goes to the modern world and somehow winds up as Shen Yuan's live-in... Guy. ( He does chores but doesn't pay rent, Shen Yuan adamantly denies he's a servant or a nurse or anything like that).

Everything is going well and Bingge's on track to hold hands with SY sometimes in the next five years- when suddenly Mobei Jun arrives like "I knew you weren't actually dead! You can't get away that easily, I am not handling this mess for you!"

So Bingge has to go back and pick an heir and divorce all his wives- mostly because Shen Yuan insisted he do that when he worked out what was going on.

Shen Yuan comes too, to see PIDW. Surely the partially collapsed harem won't be an issue. Surely. Why would it? He's a man and he and Binghe are just friends. He's just living in Bingge's rooms because he's only visiting. They're sharing the same bed because it's comfy! Bingge is just being a good host when he blows off his divorce/heir choosing plans to go show SY something neat.

I kinda want to moshang this too. Like XF and SY are friends IRL and XF stops by while MBJ is there and gets bridenapped.

XF is having a winter wonderland Beauty and the Beast hostage situation and SY is just stopping by for tea between day trips with LBH.

XF: you don't seem concerned for my wellbeing.

SY: I would be if you weren't into it you little freak.

XF: Bold words from a bonafide sugar baby. Is Daddy Binghe treating you right?

And then they fistfight.

[avoid-avoidance]

I think I enjoy the idea of Rocky & Grace sharing the trait of "Underestimates Just How Special They, The Saviors Of Erid, Are To The Eridian People. To a Comically Enormous Degree".

This could work as any of the following:

1) both of them are just Like That, and were before they'd even met each other; or

2) Grace was Like That already, and even though Rocky was at least somewhat aware of Grace's self-perception issues, Rocky still managed to catch this trait off of Grace somehow, like a pesky flu bug; or

3) both of them had at least a little seed of Being Like That to start, and spending years at a time stuck together in the Hail Mary watered and fertilized those seeds out of control, because each of them got convinced of "Yeah that other guy over there thinks I hung the moons and stars, but that's ONLY because he's my bestest friend in the whole universe. As a [man/Eridian, choose whichever applies] of science, I have a responsibility to keep myself grounded in reality, which means no getting so drunk on my own ego that I over-inflate my own importance". And then they overcompensate way the hell over in the other direction.

Anyway, what I was kind of getting at is: when Rocky comes back to Erid, it becomes clear pretty quickly that his perception of Adrian as "way, way, WAY out of my league, how did I EVER get so lucky?" has not changed even a little, despite Rocky having saved two planets and two peoples in the intervening time.

[bunjywunjy]

Do you know of any arachnids who ventured towards carcinisation?

no because the term "carcinization" was created to describe the tendency for marine decapod crustaceans to convergently evolve crab-like body plans, it was never supposed to be applicable to other animals!

I blame pop science for spreading it around as a funny term that got misunderstood and misapplied basically from that point onward. most other animal groups don't get their own term for this phenomena and carcinization does NOT apply because... these animals aren't evolving into crabs. only decapods do that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(decapods are the marine crustacean group with ten legs- true crabs, lobsters, hermit crabs, robber crabs, mantis shrimp, prawns, slipper lobsters, and all of their infinite assorted relatives in the deep blue sea)

[laurasinele]

give us back carcinization, bunjy. first warning.

[bunjywunjy]

one more word from you and no dessert tonight

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Nah one straw is no problem bro. I'm the strongest camel ever, I'm carrying like TEN THOUSAND straw right now. If I can handle ten thousand straw then what's one straw gonna do? Stands to reason. Just chuck it on bro, it'll be fine.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

By Talos this can't be happening

[anothercrankyblogger]

What they aren't telling these kids that's really dangerous is that if you do make it all the way to the heart of a Scientology building, the autosave will lock you into entering the Tom Cruise boss fight chamber, and you won't be able to leave until you defeat him in combat.