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@punk-lunch
Do you have any stories where a character experiences visions of the future and explores how that simultaneously leads them to be emotionally disconnected from outcomes while still reacting emotionally to things happening in the present?
Steven Universe
i need to slay the dragon and take the princess.
the fact that those two happen to be the same person doesn't change anything
"I Recreated Star Wars out of Cardboard" by Zach King
Sending love to anyone who is just… tired.
Of the bills. The responsibility. The emotional labor. The constant pressure of trying to make life work for themselves and the people they love.
Be gentle with yourself. The caregiver deserves care, too.
why can rockstar games institutionalise you for life like nikita kruschev for being autistic
He didn't steal 10 million dollars. They made that number up as a loss, they never fucking had it. Rockstar has spent more than a billion fucking dollars on GTA VI and will likely make billions more when it gets released.
Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.
Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.
And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?
Capitalism is disgusting.
Nobody should buy GTA til they free Arion Kurtaj
What with GTA VI going up for pre-order i'd just like to remind everyone that rockstar conspired with the UK government to lock an 18-year-old away for life for hacking them.
it exists to divide the working class. All labour is skilled labour. Yes including that one. Yes, including that one too.
Do you know what's unskilled labour? Owning capital. There's no labour involved, thus requires no skill. And you can tell because people can be born into owning capital.
Art is by BreadPanes: instagram
Fun fact! This npc is standing there because that tile is on the same tile as the entrance to wayward cave underneath the cycling road. Because of how the bridge tiles and the tiles below them are programmed, if there wasn’t an npc there biking over that tile would count as going into the cave entrance and would warp the player to the cave. Rather than creating a way for bridge tiles over entrance warps to work with it that happening, they did the simpler thing of just putting a stationary npc on the bridge above
OBSESSION (2026) dir. Curry Barker
Here’s a community reminder that the New York Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, and is generally considered to be an arm of the far right’s propaganda machine.
They just do a slightly better job of pretending they’re centrist or liberal than Fox News, because their goal is not to sway conservatives, but to sway everyone to the left of the far right.
Animorphs #23: The Pretender thoughts (pt. 5):
Controversial opinion incoming: I don't like the end of this book.
Like, this post really sums it up:
Animorphs is not that bad. Cassie's not related to anyone important, at least, and Jake's tie to Tom is mostly just inconvenient. HOWEVER. It's still canon that the Ellimist "stacked the deck" by recruiting Animorphs who are relatives of people like Eva and Elfangor and Tom, and the implication about ~*~superior genes~*~ is still in there.
To me, the reveal about Tobias being related to Elfangor:
Cheapens the message about these being ordinary kids — dumb jocks, bully magnets, screw-ups — who are literally in the wrong place at the wrong time when superheroism gets thrust upon them. Jake is my favorite because he cuts against type for SF heroes: he's not an outsider nerd, he's not talented; he's just some dumb jock who is also kind and brave and optimistic. Giving Tobias the classic SF backstory makes him less relatable, in my book.
Undercuts Tobias's friendship with Ax. Along with the backlash to "they're such good friends they must be in love", I'd like to start a backlash against "they're such good friends they must be related." Because it's still implying that some types of love are more valid than others. The shorms are family before they find out they share genes; do we really need that added element?
Undercuts Tobias's own call to action in the first book. Tobias makes this instant connection with a stranger from another species, in a way that Jake notes only Tobias could ever do, and it ends up pulling all five human kids into the war. There's heartbreaking power to the idea that Tobias is this overflowing with empathy and also naïveté. But whoops, nope, turns out it was a genetic connection all along!
Straight up doesn't make sense? It's a rare case where Animorphs' otherwise pretty good continuity slips up big time — Loren's three husbands, Chapman's contagious amnesia, both Tobias's parents going from "dead" to "missing", Ax's childhood suddenly being illogical. There are so many ret-con gymnastics going on that this twist doesn't feel worth it.
Loses the realism. Animorphs has my love forever for details like Marco not being able to afford admission to the Gardens and Ax fighting tears at the thought of disappointing his dad and Rachel having to be the second parent to her sisters. Tobias having a dogshit home life, just because, and using morphing as a desperate escape hatch — that's realism. That feels perfectly in line with the themes of the series. It feels like things I saw as a kid that no adult, and no other kids' book series, would talk about. Tobias having a dogshit home life because his dad's an alien prince who got time-warped off to fight a cosmic war while his mom was attacked by his dad's ancient enemies and given fantasy!amnesia because of her former role as the first human ever to be mind-controlled... Fuck off. If I wanted fantasy escapism, I'd read a different book.
Animorphs books can be read here | Book Club schedule is here
To be fair, id argue Tobias being Elfangor's son (beyond them seeming to have some connection when they meet) doesn't really make HIM anymore special or fanatastical as a person. Its not like his alien heritage gives him some special powers and he stil lived his life on Earth as an avaerage kid, magical space reasons or not, his life DID still suck for reasons outside his control. Though I would argue that hits on an an issue I might find more with this twist nowadays: It....doesnt really MATTER?
Like, "Tobias is Elfangors son" feels like a twist that could be done in Animorphs (honestly, they couldve just had him leave either by choice or Andalites coming to Earth to bring him back and Lorens memory just erased by Andalite tech, thus hitting on those themes of war and duty and the Andalites kinds sucking.) But him being Elfanors son doesn't really change anything. Tobias's stories are still more about him being a hawk or being with Rachel. Even his relationship with Ax feels like it should....change more considering Tobias is his nephew. Heck, maybe it'd even be cool to see what the Andalite's as whole think on that. Like, what ARE the Andalite rules for interapecies breeding while in morph? Feels like something that should come up. Hell, how does Tobias feel about Elfangor now, since he has to ASSUME his father abandoned him and his mom to go fight the Yeerks? Resentful? Angry? Hurt? Tobias being Elfangor's son isn't really something that changes anything like it should. I'd even argue Marco's mom being Visser one has more effect because it drastically changes how Marco considers his mission in the war and his motivation.
Like, the twist itself doesnt bother me, its more how it feels like it SHOULD really change more for Tobias in SOME personal way.
No, you're right, and to me that's an extra frustration. I think it'd bother me less if it ended up being setup for a plotline where Tobias communicated with the andalites somehow, or it mattered to, like, the war-prince they negotiate the treaty with in #54. But it's basically just a weird little fun fact for the rest of the series.
And yes, all the other family connections pretty much get a pass from me as well. Tom's role is mostly 'surprise, kid; you thought you could ignore the war but it turns out there's already a yeerk living inside your home." And even when that yeerk does become important for the war effort, it becomes important because of Jake -- it steals the morphing cube and gets a giant promotion by holding Jake's family hostage against him. So that connection isn't coincidence. Ax is similar -- he was the only aristh on his Dome ship because he's Elfangor's little brother, not out of luck.
As you said, Eva and Marco feels more coincidental, but even then you can argue that Marco is an Animorph because of Eva. And it's a major plot point that Marco wants Visser One in particular dead. Just like it's a major plot point that Visser Seventeen* wants Jake in particular dead, just like it's a major plot point that Elfangor's death requires Ax to kill Visser Three.
All this space opera crap with Tobias is just... there. It's never important to the story that Tobias is half andalite, other than being another reason (besides everything we already got with Loren) for Elfangor to love Earth and trust humans. And even then, Elfangor says outright in #23 that he neither knows nor feels attached to Tobias. So it's basically just space opera nonsense.
*Visser Seventeen = the yeerk that controls Tom from #6 - #54, and ends up head of invasion security for the Empire. Whose name we never learn. And who might in fact be several yeerks.
Weird headcanon: The letter says Tobias is Elfangor's son, but is there any actual evidence that's true? Elfangor wasn't there when Tobias was born, he only thinks Tobias is his son because the Ellimist told him so, right? The same Ellimist who sent the letter in the first place? Do we as a fandom consider the Ellimist a trustworthy source now?
I'd argue that Tobias being Elfangor's son is massively important -- but not to Tobias. I think it's something that the Ellimist allowed to happen in order to manipulate Elfangor.
Elfangor had an escafil device on his ship. There is absolutely no reason for that to be the case. He could already morph, and it was critically important that such devices not fall into yeerk hands; why would they be flying them around space? Why wouldn't they be confined to the home planet by the military? There was no reason at all to have one, unless he knew when he left that he would need it.
Elfangor didn't attempt to morph to escape or heal after crash-landing. Most people explain this away as him not wanting to provoke a search and get the kids killed, which is a reasonable explanation, but given how much of a fighter he is at heart and that he knew where the time matrix was hidden and would be expected to at least attempt a last dash for it even if he had to play distraction at the same time, I think a more reasonable explanation is that it was part of a longer strategy -- he knew that he would die there, and that was the price he was paying. He knew that he wouldn't find the time matrix in that construction site. He landed there knowing how it would play out.
Elfangor knows that Tobias is his son immediately. We're told they feel a connection to each other etc., but this is a weird thing to be certain about if you weren't informed in advance.
My opinion has always been that the Ellimist let Elfangor have a son, because he needed him to later on give his life and break one of the andalites' most sacred laws, and he needed leverage to make him agree to this. He couldn't be sure if "this planet where you once met a cool alien is in trouble" would be enough. But "your wife, who you fell in love with and spent years with, and your one and only son who needs your help, are in danger of death or enslavement and only you can give them a chance?" That's absolutely enough leverage.
In-story, though, the connection felt very jarring, and if this was the intended point of it then it should have been spelled out better in the text.
I love it when media fucks up the wording of the Rasputin disclaimer and ends up with shit like "any resemblance to people or locations living or dead is coincidental". I'd love to know what committing libel against a dead location would entail.
Fuck the Fiesta Mall in Mesa, AZ. I heard it ate someone once.
this sea sucks shit. it doesnt even have any scrolls im sure
#Sorry what do you mean “rasputin disclaimer” (via @big-condiments-official)
For once I'm not actually doing a bit; those "any resemblance to real persons living or dead" disclaimers genuinely exist because of Rasputin.
(In brief, the 1932 MGM Studios film Rasputin and the Empress is a dramatisation of the life and times of Grigori Rasputin which is partially adapted from the personal memoirs of Felix Yusupov, one of the principal conspirators responsible for Rasputin's assassination. The film, which was heavily marketed as being based on real events, falsely claims that Rasputin fucked Yusupov's wife, Princess Irina Alexandrovna. As both Yusupov and Princess Irina were still alive at the time, they jointly sued MGM for libel – and won. This is actually, literally the reason the practice of including those disclaimers was taken up.)
Ra Ra Rasputin Life adapted to the screen But doing so they slandered a prince Ra Ra Rasputin Felix hatched a legal scheme And MGM was thoroughly rinsed
ive seen enough superhero movies (both voluntarily and involuntarily) that ive come to the conclusion that the easiest way to fuck up a superhero movie is to make the villain bland
superhero solo movies love having them fight an evil version of themselves or a giant cgi monster so they can tease the better villain for a sequel
i think that half the reason spiderman and batman movies are so popular is because they never do this, even if the movie itself is bad you still get at least one freak that chews the scenery and has a silly costume
I’ve gotten sooooo spoiled by Murderbot Diaries fandom. TMBD fandom if you have a cool idea about SecUnit physiology or Preservation planetary worldbuilding or Corporation Rim political organization people are generally willing to go “oh cool! That’s a neat idea.” I s2g every time I post about Project Hail Mary and Eridian worldbuilding ideas I get someone going “um sweaty Andy Weir said that Erid has no problems and Eridians are perfect and anyway we don’t know how Erid works so your idea is wrong” yeah that’s why it’s called fanwork
Listen I love Andy Weir's writing as much as the next person but I think we can all agree that he just didn't put that much thought into building Erid at all. I'm pretty sure that he knows exactly as much about the place as he thought absolutely necessary to put on the page to make them seem sufficiently alien-like. "He didn't write about their complex social problems" no shit the story wasn't about that. I firmly believe that Andy Weir has no clue whatsoever about how Eridian resource distribution works or the details of how their clusters operate beyond 'seminar that's also sort of a hivemind and Reaches A Decision' or how social roles and social status operate or anything. Eridian problems being absent from the story doesn't mean 'Erid is a utopia', it means 'this story is not about Erid'.
