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planetofsnarfs

ALL HAIL OCTOBUTT!

myothertardisisonthemun

This is the ideal gymnast body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like...

so-much-to-read-deactivated2025

Natalie M’phylgwnth from Carcosa just finished her beam routine, which has left another judge screaming and blind. We’re going to take a break as they look for another volunteer.

atalana

bauliya

I love the x-men so much because that's just what leftist infighting is like! that's literally all it is! xavier is a sellout and they all hate him but he's the only one with any money. everyone complains about "they keep switching sides and dating each other it's so fucking confusing" like my dudes have you never been a part of any socialist organisation, ever. then people will go "magneto is so strong how has he not killed a bunch of teenagers" HE DOESN'T WANT TO KILL THEM! this started in a goddam basement over coffee he does not want to hurt them he just wants them to shut up and listen and will fling cars to do so

weissguertena

runawaymarbles

Magneto one drink in: I love Charles but hes such a kiss ass we don’t need to be FRIENDS we just need mutual aid communities and to be left alone

Professor X one drink in: what the fuck is his self sustaining mutant community going to do for all the mutants born to human parents, which is MOST OF THEM, he’s so gay he’s forgotten how babies are made and I want to kiss his stupid face

caustic-light

Thinking about the part where one of Magnetos followers starts badmouthing Xavier and Magneto pops off at him like "This man has done more for Mutants than you could concieve ever accomplishing in a lifetime, now shut the fuck up and sit down."

silverview

https://x.com/tommchenry/status/1428891618770407428/

westingturtle

nudityandnerdery

Sub-Radio, the band that did Stacy's Dad, coming out with another banger for Pride.

artsyarrowl

Cinderella marries the Prince, part 1/2

artsyarrowl

Part 2/2

This was a short story originally written by @batneko ! You can read the original post here: https://batneko.tumblr.com/post/171036276147/cinderella-marries-the-prince-and-its-fine-the

Thank you for reading ☺️

cinderella marries the prince and it's... fine. The prince is great! They're in love, he's very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and

nudityandnerdery

Sub-Radio, the band that did Stacy's Dad, coming out with another banger for Pride.

dr-dendritic-trees

This is my favourite bit of Jon's character arc:

Jonathan refused to be provoked. "I'm not charitable," he said coolly. "My father was. Now the results of... certain of his charities threaten this kingdom. I wish he had been more just and less kind."

...

The sentences for all should have been death - the laws on treason were strict - but Jonathan would not begin his rule with executions. He granted more pardons in the first week of his official reign than had King Roald in all of his.

I'm not being snide, I really like the arc Jon gets of showing how his sense of judgement develops. Later on we do get to see Jon screw up, of course, but overall he's a good ruler and he's a good ruler precisely because he has this incredible sense of scale and of the big picture.

This is easier for me to explain in reference to Daine and Kel, but the sense of bigness is one of my favourite things about Tamora Pierce's writing and the thing that has most influenced me, so I get sentimental about it.

rain-sleet-snow

So I absolutely love your pointing this out, and I think it touches on something about Tortall that kind of sneaks beneath the radar! I wrote a passage about Jon in a recent fic that took me by surprise:

...King Jonathan wasn’t his father or even his grandfather, Lady Yolane would face a fair legal trial before any decision was made, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Lady Yolane would be dead on Traitor's Hill before the year was out.

I really interrogated that when I went back to reread it, because I wasn't sure it was good characterisation. And then I realised I'd hit on one of Jon's big picture things: the books talk about women fighters and schools, the modernisation of Tortall's armed forces and the development of non-hostile relationships with the Bazhir as changes Jon and Thayet make... but in some ways they walk right past something that changes completely between SotL and PotS, and that's the rule of law.

Jon and Thayet are slowly moving the needle from feudal privilege to the rule of law, so slowly we don't see it happening. King Jasson was a conqueror, famous for steamrolling countries that had the misfortune to be his neighbours; that isn’t accompanied by a merciful or clement attitude to justice. King Roald was prone to inaction, and despite what that bit of SotL says about Jon granting pardons, Roald's the only king we actually see grant an effective pardon - to his treasonous nephew, who then proceeds to wreck shit around him, nearly destroying Tortall and killing hundreds if not thousands. And Roger was originally "convicted" of treason through not judicial trial but a form of trial by ordeal during which Alanna killed him. Fast forward to Jon's reign, and traitors to the Crown are tried in court and sentenced, while trials are held for other crimes and agreements are made with Immortals for the enforcement of the law against their citizens - explicitly different to the previous state of affairs, where Raoul tells us lone knights like SotL!Alanna enforced the law they felt like enforcing. We even get one massive legal set-piece, which I think is a demonstration of how much Tortall has changed as well as how much further it has to go. Joren’s trial is a massive deal, in many ways noble privilege vs the law of the land - Joren can't be brought to trial until he's off his family's lands, but the fact that he's tried for kidnapping a servant girl at all is considered an outrage by his advocate and the Stone Mountain steward is stunned by the size of the fine. Duke Turomot goes out of his way to make the fine as heavy as possible. It's meaningful that he did that, and that Jon and Thayet showed up to see it done, and especially that the crown prince showed up to sit with Kel and Neal - Prince Roald is subtler than his parents, but that would have been a huge political statement. You can bet everyone noticed. And it's also meaningful that when Kel appeals to the king for justice, it's not for his personal intervention in the specific case, it's to change the law. I think we overlook the fact that Jon and Thayet want to make the change Kel demanded in favour of assuming Jon's trying to win her confidence, but that's only one of the potential reasons Raoul gives for his complicated friend's decision. And Jon himself explicitly says to Kel that she can't challenge Joren because challenging him would be based on noble privilege, not the rule of law for all, and it's the rule of law for all that they're trying to establish. Kel acknowledges the accuracy of that.

Alanna fights repeatedly to establish Jon's feudal authority. Kel swears an oath to Jon that she won't use feudal authority to take private vengeance. That's how much Tortall has changed in just twenty years. 500 years from Squire there will be very frustrated academics wishing that, just once, dramas about the reign of King Jonathan and Queen Thayet would pay lip service to the massive changes in jurisprudence, but noooo, it's all CGI Immortals and shitty golden armour that looks like it's made of Crunchie wrappers and people duelling when that was illegal by the 470s, can the historians of this world not catch a break even once?

dr-dendritic-trees

Don't apologize for this essay its magnificent and you are so right.

I think the thing with the pardons for me, is that King Roald granted this pardon, and it was because he doesn't like fuss and trouble and Roger was a close relative, and it would be difficult and awkward and he didn't want to do such a difficult, awkward thing.

Whereas Jon grants this whole list of pardons and they're all for very specific reasons. He grants George a pardon because he has this very specific thing he needs from him, and then he grants a lot of pardons because he knows that if he starts his reign with a mass of executions he'll never live past it.

One of my favourite scenes in Squire (a long list) is the one where Raoul explains to Kel the difference between Warriors, Commanders and Heroes. And Heroes, in the Tortall books really exist to let commanders work. Like, when Nonsense goes down you need people like Alanna and Daine to defeat the evil sorcerer duke/defeat the nameless ones/distract the graveyard hag/yell at several gods. But by doing that, they make enough room for rule of law to take effect.

My favourite scene in Lioness Rampant is actually the council where Alanna is named champion, because she was already a hero when she left Corus in Hand of the Goddess... but there was all this controversy, and she was really unsettled, and she still wasn't comfortable with it (or her magic, or her gender, or her friends, or anything else) but she comes back a real established confident hero. And meanwhile, we haven't seen Raoul or Gary for a book and half and last time we saw Jon was his absolute lowest point. But Alanna walks back in as a hero, and she's greeted by these three fantastic Commander-Statesmen, who all fill in variations on the commander role, and are building rule of law, and are competent, and enthusiastic.

And Pierce is really sincere and serious about her world-building so there's no thinly veiled allegories, or snidness about the gods and immortals and etc. Its these three people (+ my beloved Duke Baird) who are trying to do exactly what you say, and instate this rule of law... but they live in a world of Gods and Monsters and Evil Sorcerers, so they need Alanna to give them the space to do it in.

And furthermore I also love (this is getting out of hand but its true), that after two superb hero characters (Alanna and Daine), we get Kel, who is a commander character... but she's much younger, so she has never known the randomness and feudalness that would have been familiar to Alanna, she's grown up under rule of law, she's used to Jon's overall level of success to the point that she can take it for granted and say "that's not good enough, we're not stopping here" which is superb.

And you're SO RIGHT about the historians.

rain-sleet-snow

All of this! And I think it makes an especially fascinating contrast with the fact that, in-universe, Jon's reign is the Reign Where All The Nonsense Happened. Immortals were a half-forgotten nightmare! Wild magic was a disrespected folk practice and a niche academic interest! Alanna was only the harbinger of Tortall taking one giant leap into what her contemporaries consider a time of myths and legends. I think it's Lord Imrah of Legann, or maybe Lady Marielle, who says that when they tell the story of these battles their grandchildren won't believe them.

And Jon and Thayet, as rulers, respond to that with revitalised infrastructure, military reform, and legal innovation.

mala-taste

Okay, last headcanon and I'll stop harassing y'all after this.

So you know how Mark Vorkosigan has been trained to have the same body language as Miles Vorkosigan, whose body language is really a less effortless rendition of Aral's? And then Dono is told to just imitate Aral whenever he's scared he isn't passing well enough and, well, do you ever imagine these four men being somewhere together and just accidentally striking the exact same pose or making the exact same gesture at the same time?

Like someone is explaining something and they are listening attentively, brows elegantly furrowed, hands in their pockets and feet spread apart in a manly, assertive way, and when the particularly complicated part comes along they all rub their chins in contemplation and it goes from manly dignity to absolutely fucking ridiculous?

mala-taste

animusbell

please watch my favorite game changer clip ever

moirainessuspenders

Ms. Rosamund “I have three late-night hours to kill so I’m going to brute force my way into a pineapple” Pike

ha hee hee HEEE! wowza.

sashaforthewin

I was indifferent to her before, but watching her decide to spend the three hours leading up to an interview clawing open a pineapple with her bare hands, I am now strongly in favor of her

#she seems just off the wall as a person #and I love her

ashleysjohnson

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) dir. Rian Johnson

corvidaedream

im just crying while scrolling through the mfa's digitized 18th century drawings which include a really soft and loving drawing of a baby snoozing thats titled "the artist's daughter" thats just radiating love, and also some very weird German birth certificates from a town in Pennsylvania that a man in 1771 painted mermaids and flowers and lions on

there's just something about these acts of love through art, man... they're really getting me tonight.

corvidaedream

i can't explain specifically what about this drawing is making me so emotional, im just having a moment thinking about the fact that this man was another living breathing human like me and 250-ish years ago in france, he sat drawing his tiny baby while she slept, and he is communicating that to me across centuries and an ocean with this image he made, and I can feel the love in my heart that he felt right then.

delphinidin4

Tons more at the source!

scintillyyy

i do think we should consider the following though: modern day well off parenting trends are generally about the idea that by giving your children the Best/Most Superior Infant and Early Childhood Experiences your children will 100% grow up into Healthy and Well Adjusted Adults With No Issues like children are a video game character that can be min/maxed for Optimal Outcomes. so rather than showing-love-is-weakness-and-my-business-baby-can't-show-weakness drakes, i suggest we should highly consider the following drakes who are trying to outdo their social class acquaintances and achieve best possibly outcomes for their son the following possible ways instead:

janet read this once on a blog and all her rich friends agree: primary colors are Bad for Babies. instead of having a house decorated only in white because she's an evil mother who is incompatible with having children, their house is filled with neutral colors and various shades of beige because the house can't be too stimulating for tim!! bright colors would be too distracting and detrimental for his overall development. he needs the calming surroundings of neutral colors. he is a sad beige baby.

(the first time tim sees color is dick's circus costume which is why he's so enamored and amazed with it and the backlash against his sad, beige childhood is what causes him to own at least 5 magenta shirts as a teenager)

on a related note, janet obsessed with the idea of montessori for tim. but not, like, real montessori which is actually an excellent and very evidenced based educational philosophy that is supposed to be cheap and accessible to children of all different socioeconomic backgrounds. instead, janet is about rich people montessori, which is all about buying only wooden toys that have at minimum a $150 price tag on it just because it says montessori on it. she rigs up his toy kitchen to the actual house plumbing so that instead of play washing dishes, he's, like, actually washing dishes. because it's not meaningful work play if your kid isn't actually doing a chore, right? he'll never succeed as an adult otherwise.

maybe she doesn't do montessori. maybe she shells out $24k a year for tim to attend forest school instead (at least, until he turns 7 and he goes to boarding school instead)

janet, as an archeologist, is all about raising her son like the ancients raised their children. and the ancients didn't have their children sit inside. no, children are meant to be outside as much as possible like they were in ancient times, not inside sitting in front of the television. when she's not taking tim to museums and art galleries for max educational experiences, she's focused on tim getting 1000 hours outside. now, gotham doesn't necessarily have a lot of green space and and the park gets taken over by poison ivy a lot so it's not necessarily safe, but they do the best they can. other parents might balk at taking their 6 year old out at 3 in the morning to go stalk batman and robin's patrol routes, but this is what tim wants to do and outdoor time is outdoor time, even at night, so janet takes him and marks off 2 hours on her tracker sheet with an air of self satisfaction. she'll make it to 1000 hours before the rest of moms in her mom group if it kills her, just to see to sour look on susan's face that janet was able outdo her parenting and now tim is on track to do better than susan's son jeff.

anyways, the drakes send tim off to boarding school at age 7 secure in the knowledge that tim is now bound for greatness and normalcy and success because they did everything right with raising him up to this point. tim will be completely well adjusted and totally normal. their job is done. they did it. success.