Dorks, Dweebs, And Doofuses @nerdy-author - Tumblr Blog

do you think bowser ever gets anxious after kidnapping peach again that he went too far this time and he calls mario up in the middle of the night to make sure they’re still on for tennis and gokarting next weekend

quietwingsinthesky

painstakingly dialing mario’s landline on a comically small telephone only for luigi to pick up instead and he has to ask him to put his brother on the phone. not that luigi isn’t part of weekend plans, but like this is really more of a mario & bowser situation and it’d be rude to drag his brother into it if there’s a problem. so anyway then luigi puts the receiver down to go get his brother and bowser sits there tapping his claws on his table and this is agony, actually, he shouldn’t have called at all, it’s late enough at his castle so it has to be even later over in the mushroom kingdom. but just as he’s about to put the phone down, mario answers all chipper—mario mario speaking, who’s-a calling? which is a ridiculous question because there’s no way luigi didn’t already tell him.—and bowser has to ask him. look, mario, i know i dangled peach in a bird cage over a pit of lava the other day, and when you showed up, i let my son throw giant flaming hammers at you, and there’s no hard feelings about that, right? and there’s a few seconds of silence before mario laughs and reassures him it’s all in the day’s work of a plumber, an explanation bowser has never thought to really question since he only knows two plumbers and it does all seem pretty in their wheelhouse. and then he’s embarrassed for worrying so much so he tries to end the call quickly, but mario just ribs him about how badly he’s going to lose the next race, and then he starts asking bowser how junior is, and does bowser want any of the leftovers since he and luigi really do cook way too much for two, be a shame to let it go to waste. and by the time bowser manages to hang up, this has gone from leftovers into him and junior and the koopalings all being invited over to the mario household for dinner, so long as they don’t park their airship on the front lawn and leave the cannons at home.

quietwingsinthesky

op approved tags. you’re the only person here who sees my vision

elumish

I keep trying to record something on how books are bad at writing fighting training, and it keeps being like 12 minutes long

stonecoldspaghetti

Bad as in prose? Or bad as in how training to fight actually works?

I'm just curious

elumish

The latter.

Basically, "more skilled person just beats the person they're training at sparring until the person they're training improves without doing any fundamentals or teaching them the right way to do things" is a cruel and useless form of "training" and only makes sense if you're trying to show that the "teacher" is being cruel or doesn't know how to teach. Showing it as a legitimate and useful form of training indicates to me that the author didn't bother to do any real research.

rockshitty

There are sort of two ways to look at it as a trope.

It’s either one of those tropes that has no real world basis, but looks/sounds cool in storytelling and is useful for moving the plot along (see: torture, knocking someone unconscious, a lot of medieval fantasy government stuff)

Or it’s one of those things where the overlap between people who write books and people who practice martial arts is so small that most writers trust the trope blindly and never think past it.

sourb0i

Just a few tips from someone who's been doing HEMA fighting (and training) for about a year

-Drills. So many drills. Just doing the same motion, or set of motions, over and over and over until it's muscle memory. And then do it some more. These can be done with another person, so you can get a feel for hitting someone (else's sword), or they might be done to a dummy, or just to the air as part of a series of steps

-there is a surprising amount of reading! A lot of what we do is based on styles that originated in the 11th-15th centuries, and were literally written in manuals for future people to use. Sometimes the explanations and diagrams are very clear. Sometimes they are not.

- There is sparring, with variations on goals. Sometimes the goal is just 'hit each other'. Sometimes you will have specific caveats, like if you both deliver a 'killing blow' at the same time you have to run to opposite ends of the room and back

- Footwork drills

- lots of wrist and arm stretches, both with and without swords

- Moving through different blocks/base positions, and practicing different cuts from each position

- More drills, wearing armor or other appropriate gear

- Weights and cardio training! Both are extremely important for making sure you can 1. Swing your sword and 2. Keep swinging your sword when you're wearing 15 lbs of armor and have been hacking at people for a full 20 minutes

- Learning how to maintain your gear

- Practicing control of the blade- this is usually done by having a dummy target (or sometimes a real person), and swinging with full power but stopping before you actually make contact. Master swordsman can bring their blade within half an inch of their target.

- Even more drills

Obviously some of this is pretty modern, but I can't imagine that it would be incredibly novel even to people from 600 years ago. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

sourb0i

Adding onto this with even more things, now that I'm nearly 2 years in and have done a couple of tournaments!

Footwork drills are really important! Learning how and when to move, and shift your weight on your feet, is crucial

When practicing solo I often do so in front of a full-length mirror so that I can actually see what I'm doing

There is also just a lot of sparring. Unfortunately you can't really get good at sword fighting without getting your butt kicked. A lot.

However! A good teacher will give you tips either during or after the fight, or both! A lot of the time it's things like 'you need to improve your footwork more, here are 10 different drills. Go do them.' However, there is also a fair bit of going back over certain 'plays' in slower motion, where they'll tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it in the context of the fight.

Also, just as a side note, unless your character is the progeny of a wealthy lord, they are probably going to use borrowed equipment. It will not fit right. And it will reek with the stench of 1000 sweaty people. And if you train in it enough, when you do get your own gear that actually fits properly and only smells like your sweat, I swear you get 5x better overnight

At some point, everyone develops their own style. I've fought people who love to just make huge stabby lunges, people who make wild flourishes, big guys who just brute force it, guys who look like they'd blow away in a light breeze but are the fastest people you've ever met. It comes over time, and from learning as many different techniques as you can

Not sure how much they did this in Ye Olden Days but almost everyone I've met in HEMA now fights in at least two different styles (usually longsword and Sabre or rapier). As I said above, the more styles you learn, the better you get at all of them; many techniques that you learn from one style are applicable in some way to the other

Thats all I can think of for now, but if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out!

elumish

It's been a while since I've done martial arts, but this reminded me of some other points specifically about sparring as a training tool:

At least in the modern version of sparring, one of the things we learn is how to spar. There are standard protocols to sparring depending on the form you're learning, and it's super important that you follow them.

This is not just about learning how to be the attacker--you also need to know things like how to fall right, which you learn for real life but also for sparring, because it can be really unsafe for both you and the person you're sparring with if you don't know the basics of how to keep yourself safe.

Tapping out! When you're doing particularly forms where you're touching each other/grappling/doing joint locks/etc., one of the main ways you signal to stop is by tapping out. This is key to keeping people safe during sparring.

People can get hurt during sparring, especially if you screw up. I once almost dislocated someone's shoulder doing a joint lock (they were fine, they tapped out, we talked through it, we figured out what I did wrong), and I had someone hyperextend my elbow once. It also seriously exasperated my wrist's repetitive stress issue, particularly from someone repeatedly muscling through something they shouldn't be muscling through.

You can also give people concussions, cause bruises, or even break bones if you aren't careful. I got a bruise that took months to heal (probably a bone bruise) from falling the wrong way during some exhibition sparring on a wooden platform.

If you start sparring/partnered fighting when you don't have the foundation of how to fight, especially if you're partnered with someone who doesn't know how to properly guide you, it's really easy to build bad muscle memory. The right way to do something, is not always the instinctive way to do it, and if you get thrown into partnered fighting unprepared you will fall back on instinct, not training.

If sparring/partnered fighting is 100% losing with no real guidance, it won't teach you how to ever win, it will just teach you how to lose, which is actively unhelpful. The goal of sparring in that way becomes learning how to lose less badly, which may be great for self defense but isn't particularly great for actually learning how to successfully fight.

hst3000

Does anyone have popular examples of "more skilled person just beats the person they're training at sparring until the person they're training improves without doing any fundamentals or teaching them the right way to do things" in published fiction?

I genuinely can't think of any outside of maybe Eragon. The ones I can remember usually have that as a vignette portion of a larger training exposition (which seems fair since very VERY few people would be interested in detailed descriptions of learning how to polish armor), or it's tied to the actual power dynamics; a teacher establishing credentials to a recalcitrant student, student being shown they have a long way still to go, etc.

elumish

This post was based directly on my irritation at how "training" was written in Shield of Sparrows by Devney Perry.

marcelshorjian

anatomy of a humiliation

robs-your-robins

I want Bruce to be more Gotham. He is a billionaire yes, he grew up outside of Gotham and went to private school but the man literally spends most of his waking hours in the city and yes, he picks up certain Gotham habits.

Bruce walking down the street after getting his morning coffee but the way back to Wayne Enterprises is blocked by police tape. Bruce just lifting it out of the way, stepping under, walking through the crime scene sipping his latte, and out the other side, slipping under the tape. A cop asks him what the hell he's doing and Bruce just spreads his hands, shrugs and goes, "Walking."

I've said it before but Bruce being so unnerved by Clark's colourful ways around saying "fuck". Clark going "gosh darn it" or "golly" or "H-E-Double Hockey Sticks" and it just sends Bruce into a different stratosphere of irritation and he eventually blows up at him yelling "just say fuck" and Clark just goes pale.

Bruce hitting up local places to grab a bite to eat or a coffee. His favourite bagel place is by Ryker Heights, that one little vendor at Robinson Park sells the best ice cream and the kids love it, the best smoothie in town after a work out he gets in Burnley.

Walking down the street and there's a Joker gas attack and there's fucking viral footage of Bruce Wayne just whipping a gas mask out of his brief case, slipping it on, picking up his briefcase and striding down the street like nothing is going.

Getting stuck in traffic and leaning out his window to tell up at somebody on a fire escape what's going on up ahead. The woman on the fire escape above yells back that it's something got to do with Mr Freeze that the tunnel ahead us blocked up. "Fucking typical, isn't it?" To which Bruce just nods, gets back in his car and joins the chorus of horns honking.

mawikoz

We all know that the Dick Jason grew up with versus the Dick Tim and Damian got are like, two completely different people? Cause while Tim and Damian got the version of Dick that was always happy to see them, making jokes left and right and just being an all around great funny guy, Jason got the emo, depressed version of Dick. And I just think how fucking funny it is for Jason to look at Dick and think „what the fuck happened”

Damian needs someone to help him practice bandaging different types of injuries? Dick is the first one to volunteer.

Tim is falling asleep while standing because he didn’t sleep for the last 24 hour? You bet your ass Dick is carrying him to his bedroom.

The both of them are fighting over some stupid shit? Dick is pulling the „stop it guys, we’re family” card real quick.

And Jason is just standing there dumbfounded.

Tim: Thanks Dick for the help with the case, really needed it

Dick, patting Tim on the shoulder: no problem dude, but it’s mostly your doing, you’re great at it

Jason, standing few feet away from them, face scrunched in disgust:

Dick: Jay? Everything alright? You need help? You’re injured?

Jason, taking a step back: who the fuck are you and where is Richard Grayson

inlovewithpsychos

This has so much angst potential

notkatniss

I love baseball

notkatniss

they let the pest control man throw out the first pitch 😭

yorickish-deactivated20230903

this wasn't a quote from a real PDF btw I just thought it would be funny to tex this up so it looked like one instead of posting it directly

adjoint-law

the next evolution of Tumblr shitposting is looking promising

digitalsymbiote

This is what they meant when they said that tumblr was gonna be the next pdf

gae-bolg-alternative-dot-exe

why do they let the worlds most boring people direct movies

diamantcowboy

They explain this in the tinkerbell movies. The light comes from the pixie dust covering every faries wings. This guy hasn’t even seen the tinkerbell movies

gayvampyr

beardedmrbean

swedishjazz

vilecrocodile

very funny to me when people act like animal farm and 1984 are revolutionary anti government texts that the Powers That Be dont want you to read when they have literally been a part of every standard middle/highschool english lit cirriculum in the usa and beyond for decades. precisely because theyre such convenient primers to propagandize that Commies = Bad. the government is quite literally making kids read them

leviathan-supersystem

also, animal farm is not just anti-communist, but anti-revolution in general. the whole point of the story is if you overthrow your oppressor the new order will just become the same as the one it replaced! the story offers no suggestion of how the animals could have overthrown the farmer without the pigs becoming exactly like them, it just seems to begin and end with "never overthrown your oppressor because you'll end up right back where you started anyways." bleak and ugly story.

therosielord

Not to be super English major about it, but Animal Farm was NOT an “anti-revolution” story. According to Orwell, it was inspired specifically by the Russian Revolution that led to the Stalinist regime. The story of animal farm is essentially what happened to the Russian people: they had a revolution against the tyrannical ruling class, only for the very people who had promised them freedom to turn into tyrants themselves.

The moral of the story is not “don’t have a revolution,” it’s that you should always be suspicious of those who promise you this utopian idea of freedom while still aiming to maintain power. The pigs never wanted to actually make everyone free, they just wanted to be the ones in charge. The novel details every small instance of the farm sliding further and further into fascism until it’s too late for anyone to do anything about it.

And 1984 doesn’t have much to do with communism at all. It’s about totalitarianism and fascism. There’s nothing pro-capitalist about the book. A totalitarian government like Big Brother’s could exist in either a capitalist or communist society. The point is the control they have over their people, and how important the flow of information is to that control.

George Orwell literally risked his life fighting fascists, so I think it’s pretty unfair to reduce his books to “anti-commie” propaganda. He was intensely critical of any state that maintained too much power over its people, and at the time, one of the worst examples of that was the recent communist revolution in Russia, which deposed a monarchy to install a dictator in its place.

pleasestopthese

orwell didn't pick up a gun to shoot fascists in spain alongside anarchist revolutionaries and write The book on it just so y'all can pretend the man favored inaction and the status quo.

whetstonefires

1984 notoriously got banned in the US for being anti-capitalist and in the USSR for being anti-communist

bellybuttonblue-deactivated2021

sentientcitizen

Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

You can choose to be the bus driver.

sycamorality

favorite genre of youtube pfp is the minecraft seedfinders who found some cool ravines that shape out the first letter of their username

really like these guys. like damn i want that too

commandtower-solring-go

My desktop wallpaper cycles between these two images so every 10 minutes I am overwhelmed by the loss of my horse or overcome by the fear of its return.

valtsv

i like the term "gallows humor" because it always makes me think of someone getting sentenced to death and being like "i have GOT to be the funniest person at my public execution"

valtsv

kerosene-in-a-blender

I commented on this fact while liveblogging the episode, but it remains insane to me that Brennan described the Pariah Blade on display in the Lloy Wing as having been forged without knowing fire, instead having been directly hammered out of raw ore, in a clear reference to the smithing technique known as "cold hammering", because of what the implies about the effort it took to forge the Blade.

For some context, I live, and more importantly, studied for two archaeology degrees, in the Superior Copper Belt, and cold hammer copper smithing has existed here for many thousands of years; it predates the first indigenous pottery here by millennia. Cold hammer smithing requires a much purer ore than other types of smithing, because it skips the step of smelting the ore to extract the desired base metal. Instead, cold hammer smithing takes nuggets of raw pure metal, heats them until they are malleable, and pounds them together until they are the desired shape. These nuggets, at least of the Lake Superior Copper I'm familiar with, tend to be relatively small, being pebble-sized at the largest, so multiple nuggets are required to create an item as small as a knife, let alone a sword such as what the Lloys forged to slay Azgra.

Assuming the iron the Lloys forged the Pariah Blade with was in similar nuggets (or alternatively small bits of metal they could smuggle away from forges), that implies an incredible amount of effort both from them and their wider community to simply gather the materials to create the sword that would herald their freedom. Tiny bits of metal, scavenged and/or quietly smuggled and given to a family of smiths to be slowly and painstakingly formed into a blade that would slay a god.

epiphainie

media literacy would automatically go up 100% if people knew how to consume stories without self-inserting themselves into the characters' shoes. "if i were him..." you're NOT. you may relate to his story, his past, his traits, his quirks, his identity but the moment you start treating the story accepting what you feel/think as what the character feels/thinks, you're misunderstanding the story.

vonkarmic

i think taylor swift wishes she was bisexual because she knows it would make her slightly more money. whereas sabrina carpenter wishes she was bisexual so she could have sex with someone who looks exactly like herself. and ariana grande wishes she was bisexual because she did too many designer drugs on the set of wicked and now she has kin memories of being glinda for real

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