hpmor is like, the ultimate fantasy, that you get to be the smartest and turn the bad guys good and even when youre wrong its in a kind of virtuuous way and tis just like. such a soft read
this post obviously isn’t about me or directed at me nor does it have anything to do with me but it still fuckored me to within an inch of my life, i tell you
dashboard simulator
mutual 1: [one million posts about a fandom im not in. in the span of five minutes]
mutual 2: M. Caelius too must not pass unnoticed, notwithstanding the unhappy change, either of his fortune or disposition, which marked the latter part of his life. As long as he was directed by my influence, he behaved himself so well as a tribune of the people, that no man supported the interests of the senate, and of all the good and virtuous, in opposition to the
mutual 3: patricide would fix me
mutual 4: [5000 word theoretically informed breakdown of a book i have not read]
mutual 5: #omg this reminds me of the roman legal system
mutual 6: cannibalism is so mainstream now we need to start posting about necrophilia
mutual 7: so a detailed prosopographical analysis of this roman family reveals that actually they all died due to being haunted by an ancestral curse
mutuals 8-10: this tv show is actually just sophocles’ oedipus. to me
mutual 11: [this post contains filtered tags] [this post contains filtered tags] [this post contains filtered tags] [this post contains filtered tags] [this post contains filtered tags]
mutual 12: here’s why these two words actually have NO etymological connection!!!
mutual 13: i’m just like this 18th century lawyer but a girl
mutual 14: cicero big naturals
mutual 15: scurvy is inherently both transgender and sexy…… put the rot in eroticism or whatever
mutual 16: she moby on my dick until i doomed by the narrative
really i think one of my favorite character dynamics is “i don’t actually like you but we’ve been through so much together that i’d trust you with my life and know that we will always back each others calls. but i still wouldn’t trust you with my car keys.” like “we aren’t really friends but we’ve been thrust into an intense situation where you are the only other person i know so now we’re besties.” and “if it weren’t for our years of history i would have literally nothing to talk to you about at this work dinner.” Enemies to lovers has NOTHING on general disinterest to begrudging acknowledgment to discovering that this person is now an inextricable part of your life
Great Mouse Detective version of Dracula happening simultaneously as the events of Dracula, so there’s just five mice in Victorian clothes unnoticed by the human cast desperately trying to kill a bat.
Or they’re also trying to kill Dracula, but exclusively during the parts of the book when he’s turned into a bat.
Dracula invited a human realtor and a mouse realtor to his castle and there were extended periods of time where he would say to his human realtor “Ah please excuse me I have business to attend to” and turn into a bat to talk to his mouse realtor.
walking around the theology conference asking where you can get some of this godhead everyone's talking about
So there's a new subgenre of deconstructive isekai I've seen lately which I'm going to call post-isekai. It has two or more roleplayers go from the "mundane" world to the "fantastical" one, where instead of the primary theme being about munchkining or gathering a harem or the journey to get home, it is about the relationship between these characters, roleplaying, eachother, themselves, and their history. These relationships are then put into sharp contrast by the fantastical world. Examples include Die by Kieron Gillen, and Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales
fungible "power" in superhero type stories still annoys me. I don't like that stealing coyote's power is even considered an option in Gunnerkrigg Court. Also in The Magicians, the later books. The characters in book two had this theory about "divine praxis", that the gods just know magic that mortals dont, but the truth turned out to be the much less interesting case, they're just full of god juice and new gods come from the death of old ones
what i hate most about fungible power is it creates artificial conflict
even fantasy stories still have conflicts from motivations familiar from real life. The queen curses Sleeping Beauty, because her vanity and jealousy drive her to remove anyone prettier. Sauron wants power, so he conquers and subjugates. Nothing fantastical about any of that.
But ask, why does the Court attack Coyote, provoking Loup? Why is Zimmy in danger? Purely because of a magical rule of the setting, that their power, in the sense of influence over their environment, corresponds to power in the sense of something fungible like electricity. The artist even draws it like a transmutation of Coyote to an electric arc.
And like, there's really nothing in the real world that works like this? You can see this by contrasting to predation. A predator gets energy from the animals they eat, but in terms of energy, a human body is interchangeable with gasoline, despite the vast difference in "power" in the sense of ability. A predator gets nutrients, and can even absorb dyes, like how flamingos become pink, or toxins, like how monarch butterflies are poisonous because they accumulate toxins from milkweed. Notice first of all that this has only brought us up to the molecular level, any properties due to higher levels of structure are not absorbed. And second of all, that it's no longer fungible. Flamingos can't eat pink shrimp and use that color power to become green.
So how could you ever get a conflict between characters in a story, based on some predatory absorption of power? You can't really get a deadly conflict that way. A dead human is just meat, which you can get more easily from a pig or cow. The closest thing you can get is something like enslavement, which, again, is not fungible. You get the abilities of specifically the person you enslaved. Although most stuff you make a slave do is stuff anyone can do--so on the one hand, human slaves are fungible, but on the other, that means any "power" differential between characters is no longer relevant. The Hungry Choir in Pale works sort of like this. It gains "power" in the form of people signing themselves over to be waifs, and all waifs are basically the same regardless of who they came from. But then that power is fungible somehow, like Zed makes a box of Hungry Choir power. And Pale definitely does what I see as artificial conflict for power reasons, like why did character A kill character B, oh, to make number go up, even though they're not using character B's capabilities in any way, somehow them dying just contributes to this number like energy or money or something. Which is just a dumb reason to have conflict in a story imo, it's no longer a fantasy version of a real kind of social situation, there's a reason things don't work like that.
It depends on the type of story, for certain. But you can have conflict with an antagonist over a particular source of magic. You can have people trying to get enough power to escape from the cycle. And you can have almost horror stories where humans and their mana *are* prey to some magical beings. But "conflict over extractive source of wealth" is extremely common.
fucks me up that by total coincidence the sun and moon's size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun's corona possible because the moon just covers the sun completely
The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It's likely that aliens don't have this
The moon is also absolutely gargantuan by moon standards. It isn't the largest moon in the solar system, but it is BY FAR the largest in comparison with its planet. Ganymede is the largest satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the solar system. Its diameter is only about 3.8% of Jupiter's. Titan's radius is 4.4% of Saturn's. Callisto and Io are the next largest in the neighborhood, with 3.4% and 2.6% the diameter of Jupiter respectively.
Our moon is number 5. It is smaller in direct comparison to the above moons. The diameter of the moon is 3475 km. That is a full 27% of the diameter of the Earth. More than a quarter. That's ridiculous. It's unheard of. The universe is large enough that the word unique probably doesn't mean a lot, but this might be about as close as you get.
This has had a huge impact on our planet. Other things aliens might not have are significant tides. One of Mars's dumpy little potatoes wouldn't be able to move oceans the way our moon does.
Our moon has also stabilized our axis to a massive degree. Without her up there our axis would wobble all over the place and our climate would be far more chaotic. Aliens might not be quite so lucky.
I guess what I am really trying to say is that the moon is extremely cool. I like the moon.
Just want to add that the reason we have such a large moon is because a whole planet crashed into proto-Earth. Theia (the planet) and Earth got so superheated by this collision that their component cores fused and the impact jettisoned a lot of material into space. That massive amount of jettisoned material became our moon. So Earth and the moon have very similar composition. This does not seem to be a common method of lunar formation.
what if the answer to the fermi paradox is that life cant exist without a moon like luna
I got a serious beef with the Fermi paradox. There is no Fermi paradox. There stopped being a Fermi paradox once the first radio telescopes went up, and we began to get a true sense of the sheer scale of the universe.
Space is big, empty, and loud. Sunspots can cause enough interference to affect global communications. We’re not even loud enough to talk over our own sun. On our own planet. We can barely communicate with Voyager, and we know exactly where it is and what its signal sounds like.
The Fermi paradox is like doubting the existence of Belfast, because you stood on a windy New York beach shouting towards it and didn’t get an answer.
Turns out the knife was cursed
“I pick up the knife” is now a mini-meme among my party and obviously it just means “I did something impulsive and now it’s going to take two sessions to solve.”
“I pick up the knife” saga continues because listen we can sit around failing investigation checks all day or we could play d&d
They’re learning
I accidentally deleted the og blog follow me here
"I can resurrect people but they come back twice. No I don't know 'which one is the real one'. "
robots posting memes like "metal rusts and algorithms are flawed, i'm gonna become a pristine meat creature that can grow and heal" and when reminded that disease & death exist they're like "no i would be the epic flawless organic lifeform that i just imagined"
harrowhark and dulcinea talking is such cunt on cunt violence. such a bitch4bitch pair.
they're both ineptly flirting with griddle, who doesn't know what's going on, but at least there's tits??
there’s nothing i love so much as an absolute himbo as a pov character. She’s doing her best but her two-hander has the brain cell
all my notes for this chapter are "gay" "ho" "slut" and "whore"
why are they like this?! hope (and am sure) they never get better.
popular mutuals will already blaze your post for free by reblogging it and exposing your cute little joke to an audience of insufferable strangers
I've barely seen any yeti crab content on here and this is very disappointing because look at these fluffy little guys!!!
You build a home for something on your body and then when you are hungry you eat it. Yet how can it complain, when you were the one who gave it life? And how else could it survive?
You let something live on you, give it your very body as an act of worship because it makes your life possible. You lay yourself open to burns for it: burns that could hurt you, kill you. And yet despite your love, worship, pain, risk, you are the thing that kills it and eats it. It gave you life, you gave it death, and yet when you killed it you allowed yourself to exist, which allowed it to exist.
The crabs are God to the bacteria, but equally the bacteria are God to the crabs.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I like to point out that well-formed snow crystals like those illustrated in classification charts are not the norm, and most of the snowflake types shown are actually quite rare. You may not realize this from photos you have seen, because photographers invariably present a heavily biased sample of what falls from the clouds. We stand out in the bitter cold for hours on end, searching for especially photogenic examples that exhibit well-formed, strikingly symmetrical features. Exceptionally beautiful snow crystals are a delight to behold, so we work hard to find them. And because most people are not eager to buy a book or read an article showing unattractive snowflakes, those photos do not get published.
To witness an unbiased snowflake sample, you need only go outside during a light snowfall and have a look. Every snowfall has a different character, and certain weather conditions are conducive to producing photogenic crystals. But essentially all snowfalls bring many examples from the “Irregulars” category. These small, somewhat malformed plate-like crystals are extremely common, and some snowfalls deliver little else. I sometimes call this “granular snow” because the crystals look a lot like icy grains of sand.
An unfortunate truth when snowflake watching is that granular snow and rimed crystals are especially prevalent when the temperature is near 0 C, which includes a lot of snowfalls. Because population centers tend to form in moderate climates, and -15 C (5 F) is considered bitter cold by typical standards, the laws of probability suggest that most people will rarely observe exceptionally beautiful snow crystals where they live, even when snow is fairly common
beep beep sometimes when you have been in survival mode for a long time the parts of you dedicated to Wanting Things atrophy and you forget how to envision a future that feels rewarding because you are busy with the business of staying alive, and it can seem like your life must be pointless because you can’t imagine any long term goals. sometimes even when you leave survival mode you can’t remember how to Want Things. that doesn’t mean you need to give up on having a good and fulfilling life, it just means that Wanting Things is a muscle you need to gradually strengthen. the part of you that has dreams and aspirations is still there, it just fell asleep, but if you wiggle it enough it can and will regain feeling. it’s okay to start small
i’ve been in recovery from this for almost two years now… like, i stopped being super depressed but it didn’t mean i remembered how to feel joy or excitement etc. It’s a process, and sometimes it seems like you’re wiggling as much as you can and you’re not getting any feeling back, but keep at it.
find anything. does warm water feel good? stand in the shower and carefully hold that warm water feeling, feel as much of that feels good feeling as you can, memorize its face, remember it later, look forward to it next time. Anything, the sweetness of a peice of candy, the salty taste of a french fry, the softness of a fleece blanket, the relief from taking off shoes at the end of a long day..
anything that feels even a tiny bit good for even a second; try to cup that feeling in your hands, breathe into it like a tiny flame you are trying to catch back into a proper fire. Keep at it
