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Gay Potato out here vibing

@akwardpogayto

she/they/ lesbian/ muslim/ multifandom, multimess/ currently into good omens and avatars/ if u won't hate, stay for a while!

Daughter of fantasy villains decides to rebel against her parents by actually going through with her arranged marriage to a local golden retriever of a prince instead of running off with some local villain-to-be or conquering said golden retriever’s kingdom and ruling it solo like her parents expect her to. Plus, sue her, she’s into the clean-cut earnest look.

At the same time, local prince charming discovers that he’s actually very into the gothic fiance his parents have landed him with in order to try and establish peace with the local evil lair down the lane, he would never have guessed a spiderweb pattern could look so fetching on a ball gown…?

Meanwhile, two pairs of parents in a tizzy because they both expected their offspring to whole-heartedly reject this union and give them an excuse to conquer their goody-two-shoes/evil neighbours, they’re not supposed to actually like each other-!

respective friend groups undergoing culture clash like all of prince charming’s knights are like what vile spell has been used to ensorcel our prince.  we must be on our guard for surely this is but a ruse for an assassination attempt

meanwhile the villain bride’s friends are all like clearly he loves you not, why do you persist in a manner that will ensure your own heart break, i mean if he was taking this seriously there would be at least three assassination attempts by now.  it’s like he doesn’t even notice that you have massive amounts of dark power to covet for his own

smashcut to

fully armored knight, clanging through the hallways in attempts at stealth, blades drawn: i’m just saying, i took an oath of protection.  this feels wrong.

prince charming: it’s not wrong, it’s celebrating cross cultural traditions for my beloved bride

knight: it’s attempted murder

prince charming: it’s a loving attempted murder

@chucktaylorupset  Meanwhile the bride has a bouquet of roses, cornflowers, and wheat sheaves on her desk in her room, and she’s not coming out until she’s written a beautiful and moving poem about how they favourably compare to her groom. It’s been three days. She’s gone through an entire raven’s worth of quills (unethically sourced). The ‘toads who used to be my friends’ list has gone up by one. But she’s bent dark forces and eldritch spirits to her will and, by the powers obscene, this will not be the thing that breaks her.

Sorceress friend: Please, just get him an amulet that will double his power at the cost of his soul, no one’s worth this.

Rebellious villainess: (nearly in tears) No, he brought his best knights to the castle and tried to kill me last week, at midnight, I can’t ignore something like that! He even kicked Cathulhu!

Sorceress friend: He nudged it with his foot. And then he apologized to it. In tears.

Rebellious villainess: (actually in tears now, for reasons of feels instead of poetic torment) He’s trying so hard!!!

A fun meme for y'all

i’m sorry what

Pog as slang comes from the twitch emote, taken from a video with pogs in them. What is a pog? A small cap from a juice drink that is traded and used in games by 90s kids. The juice drink was called POG, short for passion fruit orange guava. Passion fruit was named after its flower, the passion flower. Passion flowers were called "flower of the five wounds" in Portuguese, eventually being translated as passion fruit by the English in reference to the passion of Jesus, aka his last moments alive before being crucified.

I love history, language, words, communication, and humans.

i'm helping out at a creative writing workshop for uhhh i think 10-12s? 10-14s? idk. but that age range. and anyways

a) i forgot how fun this is

b) it's really hard not to like, re-write for them and stick to just "hey add descriptions here, change this grammar, really cool ideas!" bc i'm an adult and not trying to talk over/railroad these kids, but i'm just so excited for their ideas!!!

c) little boys write cool stuff like "what if we went to mars but it sucked so we left, but left behind all our technology and the technology rose up and created its own society and then went to war with us for abandoning them? what if transformers had 100x the war crimes? what if the earth blew up. what if we were the robots all along?"

d) little girls out here writing like "aunt melanie's skin was sloughing off the bones as her beloved dogs tore her apart, turning on her in blind animal instinct. the second she stopped providing food, she became food." and a lot of body horror and dark themes about group pacts and betrayals and ritualistic murder/sacrifices. like a lot

me, turning to the teacher who is also doing this: hey so, i'm personally really cool with the tone and direction these girls take, but is any of this? how you say... a red flag?

teacher: little girls have really rich inner lives to combat the way they're puppeted by society in real life. they'll learn to censor it out in a couple years, but it doesn't go away.

me, who was also a weird little girl who phased in and out of weirdness depending on social settings: nice.

New Ea-nāṣir lore just dropped and I don't know how to feel about that. I hate the meme but the guy having thugs coming after him for bad copper sales is perfect.

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Wait wait WAIT

As someone who hard agrees with all your tags re: tired of the meem

BUT who is also invested in antiquities

Is it possible for you to drop the new lore

So the building in Ur where the infamous tablet was found (1 “Old Street” Ur Excavations VII) was actually full of similar tablets, all detailing how badly this guy's deals went. All of these tablets were collected and put into storage at the British Museum. Typically this kind of thing gets forgotten about, many of these tablets have been sitting there for a century, untranslated or partially translated.

This was recently partially translated and it's incredibly fragmentary, but it's a letter from the man himself reassuring a customer in Larsa about a bad shipment (a lot of goods were missing). He is upset that the customer sent thugs to collect (which is located in a different tablet). In turn, he sends his own to the customer's home. They are to make offerings at the temple of Šamaš together to symbolically "smooth things over". They are taking an oath.

He later goes on to blame the customer for the missing ingots. He (Ea-nāṣir) decided to employ a third party to deliver said ingots to the customer (all the way in the next city-state in the Sumerian cultural sphere). It seems like the third party either stole or got into a fight with the customer over the goods.

Ea-nāṣir now has to haul his ass to Larsa to deal with this personally. There's a lot of "Why don't you believe me?" "They don't listen to me!" "Please don't send-" going on in the tablet. But from what I can gather it looks like this peace offering (making an oath at the temple of Šamaš) broke down too. Everyone is blaming each other for the missing copper ingots and now the man himself has to take the three-day journey to sort out this issue. We have a name for one of the thugs: Mr. Shorty (kurûm). He seems to be a bit scary. The man from Dilmun got kicked out of the Merchant's Guild for a reason, he's had this problem before with copper shipments from Elam. Either he's the world's worst judge of character or he's embezzling, and badly. This is his side hustle stage where he's selling everything from used clothing to speculating (badly) on real estate. He may have dabbled in money lending too. He's your classic failed finance bro.

I think arts funding should be infinite and easily available to everyone. I think 13 year olds who only draw anime should receive funding to buy giant sets of copic markers and shitty local punk bands should receive funding for instruments and practice spaces and performance artists should receive funding for their weird and nonsensical projects

Pick Tumblr's Favorite Pokemon, Day 91!

Here's today's batch of pokemon! Who's your favorite? Remember, these first rounds are not single elimination - every pokemon with at least 9.5% of the vote will move on! (Note: the previous polls in this initial round were judged at 10% rounded, so i will be staying at that criteria to keep it fair)

Also, congrats to yesterday's winners!

i know it is v. cliché and annoying to say 'you'd think this quote is from [text considered worthy of serious critical evaluation] but it's actually from [some 'unworthy' site of cultural production] and that also when people say this it is often about a quote that isn't even that good. but i am genuinely surprised whenever i look up "Loving something unconditionally doesn't mean you love it more, it just means you love it sadder" because i can't remember where it's from and remember that it's something jenny nicholson said about star wars fans