Hello to everyone who followed me over the post about Tor and VPNs.
I regret to inform you that at least 75% of what I post is reblogs of Miraculous Ladybug fan art, and most of the remainder is other things I thought were pretty and/or funny. Nerdy explainers like the one that caught your eyes are few and far between. Also, I can’t be relied on to tag anything consistently.
If that’s not what you want on your dash, there will be no hard feelings on my part if you unfollow.
If you want more nerdy explainers, the best way to get them is to send me asks, because I do enjoy writing those but it’s much easier if I have a prompt to start from.
Sorry to break it to y'all but believing in anything, participating in anything, has the capacity to harm people. There's no perfect system of belief that exempts you from having to continually work to not be an asshole.
Like, it never stops. It's not like you're gonna read the right book of philosophy or religion or magic and be like "I've found it! The perfect idealogical framework! Now all of my actions for the rest of my life will finally be perfectly moral and impossible to criticize!"
Angua has massive 'the one with the brain cell' vibes, not because she's the token girl at this point in the series but because she's the one who's most like Vimes
I've been thinking about this on and off ever since I posted it, trying to come up with something coherent and cohesive, but I can't. So instead of a proper meta post here is a list of things where I compare Angua and Vimes:
Vimes's control over his temper = Angua's control over her inner (and sometimes outer) wolf. You have to do it, because if you don't, you could kill someone, and that's the last thing either of them ever really wants to do even if (and especially BECAUSE) a little part of their brain is telling them it IS what they want
GRUMPY AS FUCK LMAO
Sarcasm mode as default
Eating a salad in abject misery while The Beast Within howls for, I dunno, a kebab probably
"At the end of the day we're all somebody's dog" jesus FUCKING christ. Yeah. The unquestioned loyalty to people who drive you absolutely mental because they are, ultimately, incredibly dedicated to the city you all call home and more importantly everyone in it, and despite the times where they're being a total loon you know that actually, in their own way, they'd do anything for you even more than they would for everybody else. They're just Like That and you have no choice, it's ride or die forever
Tfw Nobby Nobbs tells you stuff you'd rather not know (there's a 50/50 chance of it being gross as hell or hugely traumatic and either way you're not sleeping for three days)
As well as all of this I just think like, the way they think about the job is pretty similar? They're both very direct and logical in their thinking, and aware of their own biases, although they do both also have a tendency to just go I'VE CONNECTED THE DOTS and do something bonkers about it
Short version: my spouse and I moved into the lower half of my in-laws' house a year and a half ago. We are now making active plans on moving out and completely cutting ties once we are out. (Apparently I'm a hypochondriac who is faking both Long Covid and a hernia, for starters, and it gets worse from there).
So we're hunting for housing. There are several points that render us unable to move out as quickly as we would otherwise--like the surgery and recovery period for the aforementioned hernia--but given everything, we can't stay here any longer.
Normally, this would be the point where I would ask for financial help, and while I won't turn any of that down, what I will do instead is as follows:
As noted by the pinned post on this tumblr, I'm trying to go pro as an author. I'm currently independently publishing my own work serially online, which you can find at @fractured-legacies, with weekly updates. I have a Patreon there.
So what I'm asking is please help me gain an audience. Give my original writing a try. Support it if you like it, or pass it on to people who you think will enjoy it.
And to seed that, here's the general blurb for the current novel being published, Imprudent:
The world of Nephaas is old, with deep histories lost and unknown to those who dwell there. It is a tumultuous world, with nations vying for influence and power, and with seasons whose power and fury shape the lives of those who live on the world.
Raavi ava Laagan is a young man, trained as a simple ironworker, facing his first winter as an adult. Months will pass before he sees the sun rise again, before his family wakes from their winter hibernation... and in that time, he and his companions will travel far, learn secrets long lost and forgotten, and attempt to stop events in motion that will result in the deaths of entire nations.
Thank you for your time and attention, and I deeply appreciate any help and support you can toss my way.
Do you ever eat popcorn out of the palm of your own hand with such ardent desperation that you feel like both a wild horse and the gentle schoolgirl feeding it treats to gain its affection
Hey there guys. It’s me, in 2022, commenting on this post from 2016. There’s been a lot of people on this site lately being like “oooh no don’t make viral uwu I’m so pathetic, little, and defenseless and my poor notifications can’t handle 10k reblogs” well first of all ALL of us are pathetic, little, and defenseless and secondly none of our notifications can handle 10k reblogs and thirdly I’m not a coward and I think this should have a million notes. Not because of its own merit as a post, I just think it’d be funny if when I turn 30 this year and I reflect on the greatest accomplishments of my life thus far, I have to at least consider putting “famous tumblr popcorn post” on the list
Hey there guys. It’s me, in 2023, in May specifically, I’m 30 and for the record it rules, I had a lil aging crisis and now I’m past that and I’m just like goddamn it is great being in my thirties and I had a wonderful birthday NO THANKS TO YOU GUYS
actually, much thanks to you guys. Some of you were inspiringly crazy about this post. Frankly you worked harder for this than I did, and your efforts were touching and inspiring and funny and yet we STILL FAILED. GUYS WE GOTTA PUT OUR EYES BACK ON THE BALL. We have ehhh about six months before I turn the big three-one, which is actually the most important birthday because now you’re in your thirties For Real, and I personally can’t think of a better way to ring in my 31st year of life than by trying and failing to do something that I was hoping to knock out in my twenties.
A lot of folks are responding to the whole Reddit situation by calling for the return of decentralised forums, and I think it's important to remember that, contrary to certain popular narratives, the reason early 2000s forum culture has fallen by the wayside is not because people are Just Lazy. Certainly, ease of use is part of it, but a much larger part of it is how vulnerable self-hosted forums are.
Basically, the problem is that even the largest and most carefully managed self-hosted forums can be rendered unusable more or less indefinitely by a single sufficiently determined hostile actor. This can take the form of both attacks on the forum's social infrastructure (i.e., via sock-puppet accounts, botting, organised "raids", etc.) and attacks on its technical infrastructure (i.e., via hacking, DDoS, etc.). In either case, a self-hosted forum has no real defence, and the majority of decentralised forum communities survive only by virtue of their relative obscurity; once a self-hosted forum manages to attract the attention of That One Guy who's willing to devote his life to shitting the place up over some microscopic slight, it's effectively game over.
Right now, there are essentially only two mitigation strategies:
Gathering huge numbers of communities under a single, massively centralised technical infrastructure that's simply too large and robust for any one hostile actor to bring down; and
Hardening the community's social infrastructure either by going private and invite only (i.e., the Discord approach), or by making use of a vast centralised pool of volunteer labour to aggressively enforce community standards (i.e., the Reddit approach).
To be clear, these are not intractable problems; other solutions may well exist. However, any proposed plan for bringing decentralised public forums back needs to address them. If you're going in operating under the assumption that forums have become marginalised simply because corporations are evil and people are lazy, you're setting yourself up to learn the hard way why self-hosted forums no longer seem to be capable of growing beyond a certain point.
What do you think about the Mastodon infrastructure when applied to this problem? Each subreddit would be analogous to one mastodon server, with its own separate invite-only community, but the ability to read, or (say) reply to content on that "forum" would be more open. It seems like there could be a design here that could work?
I think anybody who wants to propose the fediverse model as a magic-bullet solution needs to take a hard look at what's happening in the fediverse right now. And I don't mean "right now" rhetorically – I mean, like, the past 24 hours.
ykno the thing about poetry is that 99% of it is bullshit and the other 1% will cut you like a material knife, and for every person that 1% is a different section of the whole. this is probably true about all art.
"He would not fucking say that" does not apply to Yoda. You could write the most batshit sentence and I could see him saying it if only to fuck with someone
Now. "He would not fucking say that seriously" does apply here
AEIWAM - Some details about whats going on with Komamura. IIRC canon said he was a werewolf, are you doing anything with him?
Me: What IS Komamura's backstory?
Me: *reads backstory and eventual canon fate of Komamura*
Me: Hm.
Me: That's thematically weird and depressing.
Me: I'll just ignore that :)
---
So in An Elephant Is Warm And Mushy, there's ALL KINDS of animal-people and supernatural creatures of varying degrees of anthropomorphic states in the Soul Society! Wolf people! Yokai! Centaurs But Bad! Snake people (sneople)! Mothmen! Whatever the fuck The Philosopher Wax is! Hell, Zaraki Kenpachi was raised by eagles! More nonhuman persons than you can shake a stick at!
They just stay away from the humans because The Humans are TERRIBLE.
...Not as terrible as my immediate family though, The Young Wolf is willing to gamble. he has to leave his home suddenly, in the middle of the night, frightened and injured. Family feuds are bad enough, but a drought year for a large group of apex carnivores and great-grandmother dying and creating a power vacuum? I'm lucky I got out alive! He reasons, tightening the bandages and wincing.
It doesn't look so bad. he lies to himself, looking at his reflection in the where he had finally collapsed from exhaustion and blood loss the previous night and somehow woke up alive this morning. Great-Grandfather did me a favor, trying to bite me in half like that- a tail would just make it even harder to blend in with the humans!
...Clothes would help more though. He sighs.
One man's trash is another's treasure, and that has never been more true than in the case of wolves that want to live with humans. The Young Wolf nearly weeps with joy when he finds the dump- barely-rotted animal carcasses to eat! broken wood for a fire! and clothes! Big enough to fit him! Alright that's definitely a bloodstain with a big, sort of sword-slash-shaped hole in the middle, but nothing a dunk in the river won't solve!
...Or not. Well, at least being covered in mud is less suspicious than being covered in blood? How does this thing even go on anyway? The garment is so confusing, he almost doesn't hear the humans who came to dump something until they are nearly upon him, and realizing they'll panic if they see his face, he grabs a broken basket and jams it over his head.
"Hey!" one of the humans calls out, seeing the movement. "What're you?" An old man peers around the pile at him, curious.
The Young Wolf sputters- he's heard tales of humans before, but this is the first human he's ever actually seen- The stories tell of their strange dark eyes and flattened faces how their fur is so fine they're nearly bald all over, and this man fits the description perfectly. An old woman- he guesses this one is a Woman, because what little fur she has is longer- she appears behind him, equally curious, then smacks the man under the ear.
"You dummy!" She snaps. "That's a monk!"
"Big damn monk!" The man laughs- indeed, even though he's one of the smallest of his people and not even grown, The Young Wolf towers over him- but still, he extends his open hand. Like the stories say, his claws are blunt and pale and the pads of his paws are soft. "What's yer name, venerable?"
"He can't answer that, he's a monk!" the woman snaps, exasperated. "They got- whatchyamacallit- Vows of Silence!"
"Oh, right!" the old man laughs. "Well, wouldn't matter if you could talk anyhow- my Old Lady's deaf as a post and I'm dumb as a rock! Come on, this is no place for a holy man!" he waved.
"Our home is up this way- it isn't much, but it's better than sleeping in Garbage! You stay with us and I'll fix that ratty old robe right up!" She said, grabbing him by the hand-
Belle of the Pthalo Blues: Kindly young thing with a voice like an angel doesn't. She wasn't the first girl to look up at the night sky and sing stories up into it--but she was the first girl the night sky sung stories back down to.
Castaway Joe: Huckster, criminal, a mortal who stole a shipment of divinity from the flagship of the gods. Smugglers say that when a job goes bad and all the contraband has to be jettisoned, it was Castaway Joe demanding a tithe.
Hungry Sal: Boy kept eatin' and eatin' until one day he looked up and realized he was only his mouth, and he was still hungry. We still don't know what's behind the black holes but we sure do know how to tell tales about it.
Momma Knows-Best: Sailors of the stars know their place is out where sky meets void, but then again, girls grow up knowing a lot of things that aren't true. Momma Knows-Best lives at every port you might stop a shipment by (and some you wouldn't), making sure all her family remembers to come back down into real-grav for an actual meal every once in a damn while.
Poppa Impatience: Momma might want her kids to come for dinner, but after they ate it's Poppa Impatience that reminds them they've all got work to do that they ain't getting done. God of foremen and slave-drivers, allegedly, though we ain't never seen one that wasn't the other.
