[kal8elle]

Art by https://twitter.com/hokkemaruyaki

[husborth-deactivated20241109]

you don't get it. i miss batman. except not that batman, and not that guy's batman, and not that guy's batman, but this highly specific iteration of batman that coalesces after you're hundreds of batman comics deep and you figure out that everyone in your entire life has lied to you about batman this entire time. i miss that specific batman

[husborth-deactivated20241109]

i miss this batman from detective comics #457

i miss batman from legends of the dark knight #79

i miss batman from legends of the dark knight #67

i miss this highly specific sequence of panels from batman: black and white that is genuinely one of the best pages about the character anyone ever fucking wrote and i'm so fucking pissed no one ever doubled back to this shit

I MISS THIS STUPID CUTE SHIT FROM DETECTIVE COMICS #474

I MISS GOTHAM KNIGHTS #45

[husborth-deactivated20241109]

they did the, "what would happen if bruce wayne's parents never died?" story decades ago. they've done it again, and again, and again since then, but no one has ever done it half as fucking good as they did it in detective comics #500, and the hilarious thing is, it's not even the full issue, it's one story in an anniversary issue, and it is fundamentally the best batman story ever told. the singular best one. the whole gist is that phantom stranger appears to batman and is like hey, i found a universe where your parents didn't die, would you like the chance to save them? and batman of course says fuck yeah, carts in robin, and they go a-huntin, but the strange thing about this universe... is that it lacks, entirely, the concept of a hero. there's no greek heroes. there are no superheroes. you don't have achilles, perseus, or superman. there are no stories about heroes; it's a universe where "luke skywalker" a character concept is impossible to fathom.

and robin's the one who discovers that, and he's like, look, dude... you're this universe's last shot at a hero. if you stop your parents from dying, you'll never be batman, and there will never be a hero here, and in the narrow worldview of cape comics this is a Big Fuckin Deal, because then who is going to save all of those innocents? and naturally batman is like dude, fuck you, i'm gonna do it anyway. and then he goes and he saves his fuckin parents. but then you get:

he just becomes batman fucking anyway. because the whole fantasy of batman is that it is never wrong to save someone's life - even at the deep personal cost, this is fundamentally worth doing. batman's not bruce's Darker Side or this twisted alter ego that is a monument to his trauma and pain - it is the precise and exact opposite. it is the weaponization of something that terrified and scarred you (bats, violence, the night) and using it to help people, therefore this is the greatest batman story every fucking told, bar none.

and yet frank miller slaps his dick repeatedly on a typewriter and i'm supposed to think that's somehow better. but once you fucking know this is out there, people could just be writing about this goofy-yet-elegant character concept instead of trying repeatedly to beat the shit out of it and make it into something it isn't, once you fuckin know, you fuckin know forever. you have to spend the rest of your goddamn motherfucking life seeing batman stories that reach a mere fraction of, what, 10 pages published in the fucking 70s? you've had since the fucking 70s to do this shit better and you made it worse? what the fuck? you don't get it. i miss this highly specific version of batman, i don't miss that guy's batman, or that other guy's batman, or that other guy's batman, i miss this very one right here. i miss this fuckin guy

[kal8elle]

Art by https://twitter.com/hokkemaruyaki

[mylittleredgirl]

the thing about cracking open a long-established popular ship tag on ao3 is that it allows you to be extraordinarily picky, and i think it must be the closest thing i will ever experience to being filthy rich. i scroll along at super speed like no today i am only interested in fics with this precise range of words and one of these three tags. only authors i’ve heard of, please. hmm, i suppose i could consider an unknown quantity given its apparent popularity with the people, but… no, no, this summary doesn’t do it for me. no particular reason, it’s just… eh, i don’t need to explain myself. bring me 50 more like this for me to choose from and we’ll see.

[mylittleredgirl]

someone just lamented that their new pairing has only 5000 works ("where's the rest of them?") which is approximately the size of the pairing i was celebrating in the original post, and it really threw into relief that it's impossible for us to even conceptualize the extravagance of a true scrooge mcduck fandom if we've never been in one. i am a reasonably well-off dentist who takes her family to cancun once a year.

[mylittleredgirl]

state of the union update at 45k. my unscientific analysis reports a fairly even breakdown between:

people crying in the gutter

people crying in a 2-bedroom bungalow

the nouveaux riches (steddie fans)

these guys:

bonus shout out to:

very picky people crying from their summer home in the hamptons

the 4 people who think i'm actually a dentist

[cooperhoward]

i just found out merriam webster has a time traveler feature that tells you some of the words that were “born” the same year as you. it’s pretty neat yall should do this

[larkstonguesinaspicpart1]

i was born with vape and i will die with vape

[weirdo-city]

Cyber sex and mixtape. I’ll fucking take it.

[official-lucifers-child]

tag yourself, i’m rock snot

[dear-ao3]

[fair-itself]

Normies talking about getting whiplash from recipe blogs. You know nothing

[babycharmander]

[ID: An AO3 author’s note reading, “Sorry for vanishing, I did a little too much research on cults an coercive control for Damian’s arc, and then realized I was raised in a cult, and THEN I ran away to a fishing town cabin on the other side of the country and had to start learning to be a person in the real world. I also forgot how to write. But I’m learning again, so I’m back now! Have some more.” The “I” in “I was raised in a cult” is emphasized by sparking emojis, and the note is ended with heart emojis. /end ID]

[babycharmander]

Aaaand THIS is one of the many reasons why it’s not only not a bad thing to portray dark subject matter, but EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to do so!! You can learn a lot when writing, and others can learn a lot when reading! This can save lives, dudes.

[the-real-seebs]

I am so proud of the author though. That took multiple kinds of courage at once. Good job, author.

[deadpoolsmom]

anime twunk slade in my adventures with superman is so funny to me and I think people who definitely do not read or think about deathstroke getting mad at it made me like it more lmao cause it made me realize a very silly detail

it’s a story about Clark starting out as Superman so everyone is younger than their comic counterparts. That means that this young, but still clearly Adult Man’s actual arch-nemesises are currently kindergarteners, still with their parents at the circus or a few years from turning green. Which. just very funny in general.

It also means, I realized, that he still has both eyes. This is Slade early in his mercenary career, seemingly post experimentation but pre eyeloss. Which is a very specific time period in his backstory that means he has a very funny trait for an edgy floppy-banged white-haired anime man:

He is currently married but (not by his choice) absolutely not going to stay that way.

it turns out about to be divorced is literally the funniest possible characteristic for a shonen villain to Me. I literally can’t stop calling him pre-divorce era Slade.

Oooo he’s edgy he’s dangerous he’s about to get shot in the face by his (absolutely justified) wife.

This man has at least one possibly two very young sons at home. He’s currently fighting Superman to avoid parenting. He is not going to get visitation rights and he Will be dodging child support payments.

Will they change it and make his eye related to Superman for narrative reasons, not covering his family stuff? I hope not but possibly. Until that happens though Schrödinger’s pathetic loser here having two eyes means his wife divorcing him is literally always impending.

[a-really-bad-decision]

sometimes I remember how Everything about veth must look to people in felderwin, and feel like I’m losing my mind

like imagine you’re some small town nobody who went to high school with this chubby, awkward girl that no one paid attention to except maybe to make fun of her or push her around. The only thing you really remember about her is that she brought her button collection to third grade show and tell and the cool kids bullied her about it for like a month. Smart, real quiet, but just an all around weird girl. Married her nerdy AV club boyfriend and had a kid right of of high school, but you’re small town folk, and that’s what you do, so w/e

a few years later, you find out she was murdered. Sad, definitely shocking, but at the end of the day you didn’t really know her all that well. You give your condolences to her parents, maybe bring over a casserole to her grieving widower, but you and the town collectively move on. The most you hear about the brenattos for the next year is that yeza snagged some big time government contract, which is a little weird for a small town chemist, but hey maybe there was something to veth’s nerdy AV club boyfriend after all.

then out of nowhere, the Russians™ airdrop into your podunk little town, torch some buildings, kidnap yeza brenatto of all people, and peace out. Easily the wildest thing that’s ever happened in this shithole, cause what the fuck. What the fuck was yeza working on?

then a couple of weeks later, dead-for-a-year, button collecting, squirrely little professional doormat veth brenatto shows up, not only alive, but with SEAL team fucking 6 at her side and an AK-47 strapped to her back. What the fuck. Every single one of them looks like they could kill you in 10 different ways, and you can tell at a glance that veth has seen some shit. What the fuck. Her and her hypercompetent looking friends announce they’re chasing after the Russians on foot and leave. What the fuck.

you never see veth or her friends again, but last you heard she’s doing black ops wet work for either the government or the russians. Depends on who you ask. She might or might not have helped broker peace between them. Also old edith wrote and the brenattos are living in Sicily and are millionaires now

what the fuck

[ristay]

Sorry if it’s a little cramped- had to make this all fit in ten photos. Hope you guys like it….. and again…. sorry Andrew

Follow me on Webtoons

[ruby-white-rabbit]

The window visual did me in I’m wheezing

[floralpopie]

NO

[greatmountainfloofsquatch]

WELP

[doctor-seamonster]

I haven’t seen this in years and yet it is burned into my memory forever.

[zechery-deactivated20220114]

Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

No guys you don’t understand.

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing

[shadows-ember]

This is humanity

[siawrites]

Happy Birthday, Curiousity.

[labelleizzy]

Happy birthday, Curiosity.

[headspace-hotel]

tbh i don't really get why we divide the oceans into different oceans because they're all connected it's the same ocean

[headspace-hotel]

no metaphor here just pure confusion...is there a line where one ocean stops and another begins? or is it like a smooth gradient of percentages of one ocean shading into another ocean?

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Yes, there is a line. There are confluences you can see and touch and they are NOT subtle in the slightest.

That's the Atlantic and the Caribbean on a particularly pronounced day.

This is the Indian and the Pacific. It's not always this obvious everywhere but the dividing lines are very much there.

Oceans have their own properties as far as temperature and salinity and unless something like a storm or a current forces them to mix they won't. Mostly this applies to vertical mixing and it gives you things like thermoclines and haloclines but water is wierd and won't mix horizontally either.

The ocean basins tend to have their own currents that go in a circle and define that ocean, and those patterns mix the water within that ocean. Like a washing machine.

The Caribbean has a little loop of its own that not on this map, but that current keeps that ocean pretty internally consistent. It's got clear warm water because of the shallow bowl of limestone sand it sits in. Where it meets the Atlantic with wildly different conditions the water is traveling in opposite directions, and it acts kind of like an oncoming lane of highway traffic. Species that have adapted to a narrow band of temperatures and salinities (most fish) can't cross, while species with a stronger homeostasis hang out there on purpose, (marine mammals, turtles, sharks). Plankton, that cannot control their horizontal movement in the water column, are held in their home territories by these barriers.

[posallys]

i'm literally begging people to relearn how to use earbuds and headphones. i don't wanna hear your fucking tiktok while im waiting for my flight.

[southbreak]

100% this.

[do-you-have-a-flag]

i was going to be like “there are burgers that cost more than headphones”  because i know some places make $15-$30 burgers but then i checked the cheap headphones prices at a major chain here and

there are headphones cheaper than not just a maccas burger but also the Loose Change Menu mcwhatever burgers

like you are not an audiophile anyway if you are using the tinny phone speakers so you might as well just get a couple pairs of cheap headphones

[unpretty]

i will never complain about a book seeming like a fanfic with the serial numbers filed off because that means the author had the invaluable ability to tell when their au had diverged enough that these were just straight-up different characters now

[unpretty]

even as we speak there is probably someone out there writing a delightful 100k+ word gay romance novel about a genderqueer bisexual single parent who lives in a beach town and fixes classic cars and falls in love with the sexy tentacle monster mermaid that saved their life, and that writer could probably make pretty good money self-publishing it, but they won't because that would mean admitting that they aren't really writing destiel anymore

[unpretty]

love that despite not being in the fandom i hit the middle of the venn diagram of 'characters that the average person would never in a million years recognize as dean winchester' and 'characters that a certain subset of fans would immediately think are dean winchester' so perfectly that i've since been told i described multiple popular fics

[coldopenadhddadjoke]

my only disagreement is that nothing over 100,000 words can be "delightful"

file the serial numbers off and get an editor

(or at the VERY least, have the self-respect to hack it into three books and call it a 'triology' if you /want/ to tap into the market of people who want doorstoppers.)

[unpretty]

just checking stats in calibre using its wordcounter, it tells me:

gideon the ninth is 141k

the welcome to night vale novel is 101k

the long way to a small angry planet is 132k

the duchess war is 100k

good omens is 113k

dread nation is 105k

network effect is 117k

one good earl deserves a lover is 108k

priory of the orange tree (which i do consider a doorstopper! you could murder mr boddy in the library with this hardcover!) is 266k

have you considered that if you think the average paperback romance novel is a doorstopper, you might prefer novellas

[thebibliosphere]

I was reading that comment and thinking to myself, three books out of 100k? Maybe three novellas, but not three novels.

Three YA novels, maybe.

For adult fiction, it's about 60-100k per average for a novel, depending on the genre. Anything under about 50k is a novella, iirc.

Which is fine if that's what you like reading. But 100k is not unwieldy. And many of us churning out those word counts do have very exacting editors :)

(Hunger Pangs was 120k-ish, and people still complain to me that it was too short.)

[high-quality-tiktoks]

They gotta pay extra to unlock Spanish😂

[loth-catgirl]

it’s a skill and should be compensated ad such

[caparrucia]

If you speak a language your employer doesn’t and they make use of that knowledge?

My dude, 20% is not enough.

You ask for minimum 50% upfront raise to keep you in the building and a billable translation fee for every task in the other language they want you to do.

Your boss is not your friend.

You do no work for free.

Any work you don’t do will be done by someone else, who WILL be paid for it.

So why not be that guy?

Advocate for yourself!

[elfwreck]

Whether 20% is reasonable depends a lot on how many customers you’d be supporting.

If you get 1-2 Spanish-speaking customers a week, asking for a 50% raise seems like a lot. If you weren’t there, the company would probably ignore them and not lose much money.

If you get 5-10 a day… you’re actually supporting a substantial, likely recurring client base, in which case

Charge all the market will carry - start by asking for double and negotiate down slowly, and

Put “translator” on your resume.

(If you also help them convert their store flyers into Spanish? Add “Localization translator.”)

If everyone at Don Chuy’s speaks Spanish, there’s probably more than 1-2 customers a week who want it.

[funnytwittertweets]

[toxicyurienthusiast]

love wins actually

[gallusrostromegalus]

This works as an answer to the metaphorical problem because the key is for the hedgehogs and prcupines to be a bit flexible about how they position themselves and keep thier spines pointed in such a fashion to minimize poking, just like how in human relationships you have to be a bit flexible and concious of your position relative to others, and to manage your sharp bits to minimize the harm you do to others.

[blackpyrefly]

today im thinking about the huge buff bread guy from kikis delivery service. highly underrated guy

[uzmashroom]

Genuinely just a good man. Wife adopts teenage witch that needs a place to stay in the city? Sure. Even though you got a kid on the way? That’s fine. Cat too? Love cats. 

[furrama]

My favorite moment with him is when he goes to get some prepped baking sheets and he does this fancy twirl with them in front of Jiji. Like, there’s no other people in the room, he does this to impress a cat.

I don’t think he ever says more than a whole word the entire movie, and I still love him more than most Disney princes based on this one moment alone.

[fujiwaradivebar]

And the part where he wanted to surprise Kiki by making that beautiful elaborate sign OUT OF BREAD to advertise her business and he was all anxious for her to get home and see it

But then when he sees her coming he gets all bashful and runs away 😭

[judas-jpg]

the most underrated thing about the ghibli movies is how deeply they are love stories to working people, to the small folk, to moments of love and kindness. its not just about magic, many movies are about magic and fairytales. Its not only about the people in the stories, but about stories in the people. And they are just loveable.

[memewhore]

[rhube]

This video is so much better than it looks like it'll be.