#arbitrarygreay

[toasthaste]

I made The Beans with enough substitutions to probably annoy if I listed them here (and one major offensive risk lol) and it was still delicious. The foundations are that rock solid.

what on earth could the offensive risk be.... did you make,,,, homophobic beans????

[isagrimorie]

What I want for post-canon Hizzie is Lizzie gleefully reminding that Hope is obligated not to martyr herself anymore, because that would kill her sire line, and do you understand me, you dense tribrid, my fabulous eternal undead life is in your stupid self-sacrificing hands, now, bitch!

*gasp* This is perfect!

Yes, this is exactly how Lizzie would react, especially when she learns* about sire lines. And Hope would be so obligated not to throw her life away now!

The only way to stop Hope from constantly sacrificing herself is to realize it would get another person killed and especially if that other person is Lizzie!

This is the perfect way Lizzie can stop her from being all self-sacrificial!

(*I have doubts Alaric added to the curriculum about what happens to the sired vampires when the originator of the line dies).

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Otherside Picnic Locked Tomb AU ideas (including spoilers for both canons!) brainstormed the other day with @arbitrarygreay:

Necro Sorawo, cav Toriko; necro Kozakura, cav Akari (either Kozakura’s cav for some high-larious reason or just a cav in general; after all, she does karate!).

Toriko was, at least in her own mind, Satsuki’s cavalier, but Satsuki became the world’s shittiest Lyctor by eating Runa instead. Toriko went full Coronabeth about it emotionally speaking until she found a reciprocated and relatively healthy love with Sorawo (to be fair, this part is basically just Otherside Picnic canon).

Since the Locked Tomb setting has normalized creepypasta for almost everyone in the known universe already, Sorawo’s main edgelord trait here is her problem drinking; she’s one of the few necromancers who regularly and publicly blows through her own alcohol tolerance.

Absolutely nothing changes about Sorawo’s relationship with or attitudes regarding Satsuki from Otherside Picnic canon.

More to come????

[olderthannetfic]

Talking about Raya in appropriation terms is pretty silly, considering who wrote the screenplay, but trying to posit ATLA as the more original/authentic comparison for ANYTHING is certainly even sillier. People who do Media Crit often call TvTropes facile, but it's rich that their Takes frequently fail basic fact checks that a quick swing by TvT could have saved them from.

I mean, I have long said that Ellis is just... not aware of Asian anything, and it really, really shows even to my white, US weeb eyes.

It’s all through her work in covert ways. The one that I remember really bugging me was in her Loose Canon: Death video. It’s an excellent video in many ways! I enjoyed the tour through Bergman-derived death in pop culture. But then she gets to this:

“Another popular concept in recent years is that of there being a bunch of Reapers on like a payroll, and death being this big bureaucratic enterprise.”

Her first example is Dead Like Me, and fair enough. It was pretty popular, and a lot of its fans seemed to find it fresh and new. (Personally, I think this sort of thing owes a lot to earlier trash like Heaven Help Us and Touched By An Angel, but those were more “guardian angel” and less “reaper”.) Then she moved on to Black Butler...

And here we have the problem. Because Lindsay, my dude, death=bureaucracy is like a fucking genre of anime. How did Black Butler end up in here but not Yami no Matsuei or the five trillion other things from Asia in which Hell has hella bureaucracy??? I’m assuming this is coming from Chinese folklore spreading out through successive generations of pop culture worldbuilding. All I know is that I’ve seen plenty of it in Asian and Asian-inspired media, from a bunch of anime series to that novel series by Barry Hughart.

TBH, most people who think they’re doing media crit on Youtube are just straight up morons. Ellis is actually good... but not on Asian stuff, not even Asian stuff that was a hit in the US with people her age.

[star-anise]

So then where do you think the stereotype of potatoes as medieval food comes from? LotR? A conflation with American pioneer stew? Themed restaurants that don't care about fidelity?

I honestly just think people cannot imagine life without potatoes. They’re so fundamental to our cuisine! Also, for a lot of people, there isn’t a really big difference between 100 years ago, 400 years ago, and 1000 years ago. It all just kind of runs together as “olden times”. So, you know, there was a time before electricity where people used horses and hand tools, and they ate potatoes then, so that’s just what the olden days were like!

A lot of the time it’s hard to imagine what the alternative would be, and also, when it’s made it tastes really different from modern food. Medieval food has a lot of flavours and juxtapositions that sound bizarre to us now (egg and pear pie, for example). Here’s a really interesting article about all the flavourings common to medieval food that have fallen out of fashion. I’ve never tasted a medlar or horse parsley or good-king-henry. If you told me a dish was “fragrant with dittany and vervain,” that doesn’t evoke a single sense memory for me.

And honestly, we just like potatoes better than a lot of things. You can imagine someone happily digging into a dish of potatoes much more easily than a dish of turnips or parsnips or rutabagas. 

There’s been a lot of really good historical work over the past few decades to bring back medieval foodways, beginning with growing older varieties of plants and making old food with old techniques, that are still teaching us new stuff. I know as much as I do about medieval food because my local SCA Baron is a foodie who owns a ton of medieval cookbooks, so I’ve tasted his feasts where we eat things like hens stewed in buckwheat and ale and aromatic herbs. Knowing what actual medieval meals were available makes it so much easier than staring at the screen and writing “They ate [oh shit what’s a food they had] stew with potatoes [oh shit not potatoes um] bread and cheese.”

[earlgraytay]

Terra/Celes gets extra angsty backstory potential because you can see Celes in one of Terra's flashbacks. They knew each other in the bad ol' Empire days! Celes' part of the Narshe conversation about love gains so much subtext when you think about that.

aw, oh no 

...I’m gonna have to write fanfic about these two, aren’t I. 

[toasthaste]

Post about PoI doggo

I don't even have to try to come up with what Reese's fursona would be because it is Literally Just Bear. I love him he's wonderful.

But also. I think they should let Bear attack more people also. They kinda Worfed him tbh imo. He let Shaw just walk right into the library! He let a guy get away after smashing Finch over the head with a wine bottle or whatever it was! Some vicious guard dog he is!

[toasthaste]

I guess I do kind of expect Rinch to be emotionally intelligent? On paper, anyways. Reese does a whole speech in the first episode about how he knows how to cultivate assets (read: emotionally manipulate them), and Finch was a company executive able to teach an AI to care. It's just that at this point they're too lazy to care about preserving the numbers' feefees, which is hilarious. They could do it. But they won't.

hm I guess I expect schmoozing and charming (and even providing passing comfort for the feefees of) relative strangers to be a substantially different skillset than like.... self reflection, being comfortable with one's own vulnerability, cultivating relationships with people you genuinely care about who you're personally invested in? and I also wouldn't expect caring about people's wellbeing the way Finch does to directly translate into actual skill at understanding and meeting their emotional needs! I think those things are more what I'm gesturing at when I use the term "emotional intelligence" anyway