#perfect commentary

[celestenoelani-blog]

[heartsyhawk]

You know what I think we don’t talk about enough? With the onset of the mage-Templar war the First Enchanter of Hossberg Circle asked Weisshaupt for aid and the Wardens invoked the right of conscription for ANY mage who wished to escape the fighting and promised protection from the templars.

Obviously some things went to shit with Corypheus, but obviously it didn’t go so hot for Anders but those were very different circumstances and that’s absolutely my favorite “official” canon stance on the whole situation.

[heartsyhawk]

A list of my personal issues with this update so far:

It makes posts longer - it physically takes up so much more space

it’s less cleanly aligned - though it could became a problem on VERY long posts, the old format allowed the eye to follow the words and clearly see who said what (*)

it interrupts the flow of words -  it’s so much choppier now and much harder to follow various comments as parts of the same whole 

it looks really bizarrely ablist to me (**)

organization is too chaotic - the eye cannot follow the comments easily which I predict will lead to valuable middle commentary getting skipped for convenience sake

its a step backward - this new format is one of the most primitive in terms of arranging comments (***)

its too much like twitter - in that conversation and interpersonal communication will still technically be possible but it will be a lot more complicated and hard to follow than it has any reason to be

its too much like facebook - these sites are not two of a kind they are set up very differently, for very different purposes right from their conception. (****) 

* this was a problem on posts with several replies, but an easy fix (much easier than rearranging the whole entire system) was my personal favorite x-kit solution: different color or thickness for the the different bars leading to the name of the the poster

** I’m struggling with following the commentary on posts now. i cannot believe how hard this must be to make sense of for some people. I have dyslexic friends and ADD/ADHD friends who don’t use facebook explicitly for this reason. Ironically facebook recentlyish added a thing where you can directly reply to a comment and create a (limited but still much more functional than it used to be or what tumblr has now) tiered comment conversation that makes it easier to read.

*** I’m pretty sure this is what we did back in the early days of the internet. Like…this is literally how the neopets forums and fanfiction.net reviews are organized and have always been.We have evolved past this; don’t get me wrong its Good if you want disjointed individuality in comments, but is really impractical for involved conversation and commentary. And y’know blogging. Which this site is allegedly for doing. Almost every other blog platform I can name worth using has tiered comment trees. This stacked and isolated comment set up works on fanfiction, where what one person is saying in regards to a story has almost no bearing on what the next is saying (if it has any at all) or even facebook which primarily exists as a photo album and pseudo planner or micro journal (unless you want to hold a conversation in comments and then every holy thing be with you you’re gonna have yourself a headache). Tiered commentary conversation is much easier on the reader and even youtube utilizes a better system than a barely distinguishable stack of disjointed comments and that site isn’t a site where the intended use is conversation and interrelated commentary, unlike this one. 

**** I understand the desire of social networking sites to mimic aspects of facebook in the hope of achieving a similar success and notoriety. But it’s a little like assuming running a veterinarian’s office, a law firm, and a pizza shop are going to have identical experiences because each is running a business; some of the same principles apply but there’s a lot that is unique to each situation. I think a better thing to do than try to copy facebook’s basic format and design would have been to take a look at it on a more general level and figure out what makes certain aspects of facebook good. And there are things about facebook that are worth taking note of and translating. (To name a handful: a fully integrated and much less glitchy private messaging system complete with an outbox so you have a record of what you sent and when you sent it, the ability to indicate you want to see less of a certain type of posts ((ie: the option to not see as many or maybe any from certain undesired sources)),a mobile app that actually functions more often than not, and most importantly the ability ((however flawed and still a w.i.p. it may be)) to control the level of visibility on each post and your profile in general).

[heartsyhawk]

In Defense of Black Widow in AOU

Having actually seen Age of Ultron now I want to toss my two cents in a couple things that’ve got Tumblr in a froth:

namely the “monster” line

For full disclosure, tumblr had me fully expecting to come out of Age of Ultron full of righteous fury and a desire to publicly flog Joss Whedon and kick him out of nerd club. And while there are a few things I’m distinctly unhappy about, I wouldn’t count Widow among them.

I have to confess that I was heartbroken when I saw Tumblr freaking the hell out over Natasha calling herself a monster because she couldn’t have children. I felt really massively betrayed by Whedon on a deeply painful and personal  level and actively considered not seeing the movie or any other Whedon project ever made again because of it. 

I’m so glad I did set my reservations aside and saw it anyway because Tumblr is grossly misrepresenting the context of the “monster” line.

For one thing, Natasha only says that in the first place because Bruce is firmly in the middle of pulling a Remus Lupin. No literally, it’s a spot on parallel. In the scene Bruce is dealing with huge guilt over losing control of “the other guy” and levelling the better part of a city. He thinks he’s a monster and she shouldn’t be pushing this kind of relationship because he sees no future with her: the hulk is an ever present destructive threat, he can’t give her a peaceful life settled down in one place and even though she’s great with kids his incident with gamma radiation means he can’t give them to her and also even if he can whose to say they wouldn’t end up with a baby hulkling (that last part wasn’t said so much as implied and inferred by me). He clearly wants to protect her despite her proving a hundred times over that shes not a dainty fragile flower too precious to do battle. It’s at this point that she reveals she doesn’t need that kind of stability and she can’t have children anyway because graduation from the Red Room means forced sterilization.

When Natasha drops the line “so don’t think you’re the only monster on the team” it immediately chasing a line about killing and how it got easier. While she’s clearly upset about the sterilization (though I’m told some of that emotion might have bled through from a pregnant with her first child Scarlet Johansson filming the scene), the monster comment absolutely did NOT feel like she was saying “I’m a monster because I can’t have babies due to a thing done to me when I was still pretty much a child” but “I’m a monster because I have done a lot of killing and even though I regret it now it was easy. You’re not the only one with a dark side ,Banner; stop treating me like I’m a porcelain doll.”

[murphystarr-moved]

Tadashi's expressions in those gifs you reblogged are killing me! It's like he's thinking "Really Hiro? REALLY? You little shit. Oh c'mon Tadashi you'll enjoy being a big brother, it's such a wonderful experience. Mom, Dad, you two are such fucking liars."

OH MY GOD

[gothtriggers]

mouseborg replied to your post “Urban legend: if you say "my heartland, heartland heartland" into a mirror, Andrew Eldritch appears and snarks at you.”

If you refer to him as a goth, he appears in a cloud of smoke and tells you you're overstating the significance of the occasional black sock.

[sktagg23]

For some reason this guy's commentary spoke to me.

"If you like Japanese culture, Canadian pop stars, or HORRIBLE HORRIBLE GARBAGE"

"Here's a little taste, because more might kill you"

"[3 seconds in] - NOPE, STOP, ALREADY OUT, DONE."

"Let us know, do you think it's fun and we're being too hard on Avril or do you have good taste in things?"

Maybe I just like it b/c his dripping sarcastic tone matches my almost constant inner-monologue, but I loved this.

(So I guess if you've ever wondered what it sounds like inside my head, it's basically this attitude 24/7.)

[eternityinalake]

Marc Andre Fleury gets a little help from his friends.

his friends, the goal posts