I've been really enjoying playing with my new smart telescope and seeing what deep space objects I can image when weather and skies permit 💖

Origami Around
trying on a metaphor
Sade Olutola
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosmic Funnies

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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
sheepfilms
Cosimo Galluzzi
Show & Tell
DEAR READER
Claire Keane

Love Begins

pixel skylines

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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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todays bird
seen from Indonesia

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@theempathiccub
I've been really enjoying playing with my new smart telescope and seeing what deep space objects I can image when weather and skies permit 💖
It was worth spending 7.5 hours on the road driving to and from Waco for this view 🥰 I've been in love with space since I was little, and getting to see this view in person and capture these photos myself is one of the best moments of my life.
Amazing happening for humanity - Stonetoss was Doxxed, found out his neonazi affiliations, alt accounts, how he did own RedPages, and him being in Spring, Texas. Cannot recommend reading more - https://accollective.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/12/stonetoss-redpanels/
Hey are you offended by the word bitch? I'm going to send you a hate anon, but I saw that you go by she/her and I respect women
don't let anything stop u from being a hater king
take your time
The days of our years gone,
Our souls soaked in sin.
they announced one of the main writers for FFXIV: Dawntrail is the one who wrote the Shadowbringers trial series, "Sorrow of Werlyt", and the amount of people going "ew no that's the one that redeems Gaius" drives me kind of insane
That storyline takes Gaius and says "Behold this idiot, watch and be stunned as everything he ever said to anyone turned out to be fucking obviously wrong. Watch as the fascist imperialist philosophy he ingrained into his beloved children makes them run to their deaths, even as he pleads them not to, and they tell him to fuck himself and do it anyway. Marvel as he watches them die by your hand, you, who destroyed Gaius himself at the peak of his life, and he can do nothing to stop it", and that's a redemption arc to people
The only surviving kid only makes it because her brother acts to protect her, she doesn't make it because of any act of Gaius'
The entire story is literally "In case you somehow missed it in ARR and most of Stormblood, everything Gaius believed in was horseshit and there's no such thing as a 'noble general in the evil empire'". All his meritocracy bullshit vanished the second he was gone, no-one but his own children believed it or held onto it, and the empire put someone directly opposed to that belief into his old seat when he vanished. No-one cared, no-one else "believed", the Empire was never about that, it was only propped up in his own singular legion by him being there and the second he was gone the legion dumped it and moved on and only Gaius was too naive and stupid to see it.
I mean for fuck sake, the Empire digs up the chemical gas weapon he explicitly had sealed away and destroyed all record of after he's gone and if it wasn't for a particularly dedicated and enterprising catboy and his comedy crew of hardcore engineers, it would have caused the eighth apocalypse
Even the follow-up in patch 6.4, of the family portrait, isn't some "aw he good now" thing. The family portrait you help organise for him has to have four of its six members be projected onto the scene via a machine's reconstruction of them as normal people because they're dead, they threw their lives away because the ideology Gaius taught them meant they could only think to die fighting and nothing else. That's his loving family portrait: four ghosts stood at his back as his last living child smiles through her pain.
"well the people of Werlyt didn't kill him for conquering them" they let him clean up the mess he made (which meant watching his children be killed) and as "thanks" they're letting him stay there to live out the last third of his life or so attempting to atone by fixing the damage he did.
He's 56 at the time of ARR; the Empire he gave 3-4 decades of his life to is gone, it's a smouldering ruin, all but one of the people he loved is dead, his surviving daughter is scarred by the path he led her down, and what few friends he had are also dead. He learned that his beliefs were all horseshit and pretty much everyone around him except for himself knew it, he must live knowing that those beliefs got his children killed, all that he achieved that he once considered "good" was for nothing, he learned that the cool old emperor he idolised who had no magic but built an empire by pulling up his bootstraps and who told him that magic and gods were bad was actually an ancient incredibly magical sorceror attempting to resurrect his own god.
That's not a redemption arc, he's the most owned man still alive in XIV
Gaius himself says, a few times, he's not looking for absolution, just to do something useful about the errors he made and sins he committed. Werlyt is the deconstruction of whatever shreds of belief in the empire and his old way of thinking Gaius may still have held. If there's a redemption story to be had--and I don't think it's necessary--it comes after the hell of Werlyt's tragedy.
Cuz if Werlyt was meant to be redemption...they never got there. There isn't time or space for it in the quest chain. And Gaius's redemption wouldn't be a single great moment (and it never is anyway), but a lifetime of work, which he is now set up for.
As for bashing on the writer going into Dawntrail; the frame of a good story is there in Werlyt (part of why it irritates me so). Working in the constraints of the sidequest setup with all the elements requested, during the early pandemic, while pivoting a character likely meant to have had more going on if they'd done a Garlemald expac...it may have been a bad fit for the writer, there might have been a lot of things not clicking with the team to bring it together, I still don't know the differences in translation and how it goes over in Japanese...And even Ishikawa's had misses for people. I dislike how Werlyt was handled and turned out, though I see what they meant to do. There are other folks who love it as it is! Not everything will work every time, or for all people. There's more than 1 writer on the team handling MSQ and the various quests. To borrow from Neil Gaiman, "wait and see."
lmao so Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of that giant crypto exchange that just collapsed was apparently famous for playing League of Legends during business calls which was impressive to venture capitalists for some??? reason so in an effort to add insult to injury someone dug up his ranking in League and found out that he's actually really bad at it and, just to rub salt in the would, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of all people is *significantly* better than him
this all made even better by AOC's contribution to the thread
SBF secretly played League of Legends during a virtual pitch to a venture capital firm, and they all still fell for his bullshit
how the fuck did this site outlast twitter
Receptionist in question
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) dir. Beeban Kidron
Uni is cute when he is mad! :3