there is only one empire in the world and it is baklava empire

our glorious baklavastan

From this:

To this:

big fan of characters with abandonment + attachment issues so profound that they leave claw marks in everything they touch but would sooner gnaw off their own leg than admit they just want someone to stay for once. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course.

big fan of characters who are always leaving. who constantly have a suitcase in their hand. characters who start planning their exit the moment they arrive and get nervous when the people in their lives start to Know them. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course

There's a big difference between sect heir jiang cheng and sect leader jiang cheng. Sect heir jiang cheng is ready to beg on his knees his mother while crying to spare wei wuxian in front of an other sect's delegation. Sect leader jiang cheng can't do that anymore because he now has responsibilities.

I just realised something about those old scifi stories with life—plants, monsters, people—on Mars or the Moon or wherever.

They were written or otherwise made by people who had never seen a lifeless world.

We've all grown up with pictures and videos from the surfaces of those worlds. We've seen, since our early lives, landscapes without a trace of life. But before we had those, every human who had ever lived saw only one world and it was our teeming home.

It's no wonder they imagined life everywhere because they'd never witnessed its total absence.

It's interesting to note that our discovery of just how lifeless most of the universe is corresponded to the period during which modern environmentalism emerged.

(This isn't a complete coincidence; a lot of the mainstream scientific attention to things like global warming only started to be paid after people noted the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus; space science is an Earth science)

Tintin, looking out of the rocket on the Moon and taking his first look, speaking to the scientists who stayed on Earth:

"How to describe it to you? A landscape out of a nightmare, a landscape of death, terrifying and desolate... Not one tree, not one flower, not one blade of grass... Not one bird, not one sound, not one cloud... In the sky, there are thousands of stars...

/ but still, frozen, without that spark that from Earth makes us think them so alive!"

Hergé, 1953

(ID: Text reading “what 3 fictional characters do you associate with me?” and three small graphics of a person above. /End ID)

hey guys remember this (rotk appendix b)

Mithraeum host club!!

I was walking home from work and thinking to myself… host club and Gideon the ninth. And here we are, many weeks later. Hope there’s a target audience out there to reach with this lolllll

so I got bored for three hot minute and got bit with the bug to buy and play I am a Teenage Exocolonist nownownownow earlier this week. The predictable consequence is that I'm barely able to think about anything else, which is both good (I'm having fun with the game!!!) and bad (barely able to think about anything else :( ).

I'm on my late, first blind playthrough and having fun and also having a LOT of opinions, some of which about what I think the narrative wants me to think (some pretty serious quibbles about some of the underpinnings, but I'm not even done with my first playthrough, so I hope I'm severely off the mark), but it's very pretty and addictive, and the nice part is that it goes pretty fast, and characters are compelling and storylines are varied and surprising. I don't feel the urge to reload to maximise anything/make the right choice.

something annoying is that I'm definitely on a route I for sure want to do again later with better choices and trying out a different romance lol

It's a very good game btw! Don't let my probably inaccurate quibbles put you off. I originally was concerned that it'd be Too Trying To Be Wholesome, but it's okay. More ~Wholesome than I'd have told you yesterday, I think, but far from insufferably so.

I take back most of what I said re: underpinnings, though I really do wish there was in-game dialogue calling out when some characters are being ecofascists. (Plus the ecological message needing to be disconnected entirely from the game's literal plot to make sense.)

ALL THAT SAID I think this game would be improved by there being a murderknife, because there's more than a handful of characters that it would make total sense for you to try and get rid of. Even if it failed and led to a bad end or something. I can think of at least one in particular where I hope I just haven't found the correct build/roleplay yet!

I can provide a list of characters and moments I think it would sense for there to be a murderknife/narrative plastirifle option for.

op turned off reblogs but i want this post on my blog

I know basically nothing about tarot cards but I absolutely need to make this a reality

Update to OTW Signal

In the past few days, we’ve heard from many of you regarding May’s OTW Signal post. We are sorry for the hurt and confusion it caused and have published an update to clarify: https://otw.news/oqr

I’m concerned about this too, but TBH the responses from the userbase seem a bit extreme. OTW is not going to deliberately hand over the contents of AO3 for machine learning purposes.   It would be stupid and unethical and user sentiment is overwhelmingly against it. There’s no point in even implementing an opt-out setting.  Just plain no.

This Betsy person does not run the OTW no matter what position she has, and does not dictate policy.  While I disagree with her opinions on AI, she hasn’t committed any crime or broken any rules by stating them. 

Also OTW cannot produce a policy statement about AI out of its hat instantaneously, or even in a few days.   Whatever statement they make will be closely examined and misinterpreted if at all possible.  It has to be solid.   Any changes to the platform will take even longer to plan out and implement.

(I don’t think there _is_ a good way to stop people from scraping text without permission. . If OTW can come up with something that will help, that’s great, but this isn’t a sudden crisis or anything.  Our posts on Tumblr and other social media sites are also doubtless being scraped, and those sites aren’t going to do anything about it. )

so I got bored for three hot minute and got bit with the bug to buy and play I am a Teenage Exocolonist nownownownow earlier this week. The predictable consequence is that I'm barely able to think about anything else, which is both good (I'm having fun with the game!!!) and bad (barely able to think about anything else :( ).

I'm on my late, first blind playthrough and having fun and also having a LOT of opinions, some of which about what I think the narrative wants me to think (some pretty serious quibbles about some of the underpinnings, but I'm not even done with my first playthrough, so I hope I'm severely off the mark), but it's very pretty and addictive, and the nice part is that it goes pretty fast, and characters are compelling and storylines are varied and surprising. I don't feel the urge to reload to maximise anything/make the right choice.

something annoying is that I'm definitely on a route I for sure want to do again later with better choices and trying out a different romance lol

It's a very good game btw! Don't let my probably inaccurate quibbles put you off. I originally was concerned that it'd be Too Trying To Be Wholesome, but it's okay. More ~Wholesome than I'd have told you yesterday, I think, but far from insufferably so.

We're up to right before the combat phase of chapter 4 of Triangle Strategy, Hyzante route.

I had to tell her what the English text said more than once, mostly due to nuances that were lost (it matters to me that Serenoa says "the Rozelle" and not "your origins" to Frederica!), and on at least one occasion a sentence that was wholesale replaced. (French text having Gustadolv saying "we're not Glennbrook, we do not discriminate based on blood" versus English text "we're not Glennbrook or Hyzante. In Aesfrost a man is judged on his deeds, not his pedigree"; and then we noted that based on what we knew of Hyzante and Exharme, the second half of the English sentence is also Gustadolph not being entirely justified in his bragging)

Immediately after meeting a few people at the Rozelle village, Mom started talking about Vichy, so I'm very excited and can't wait to hear her thoughts and fffff I hope she enjoys the story

Another thing the French translation does, is pick completely different words from the English translation, giving very different connotations.

For instance, the French text says "rebels" where the English uses "heretics" or "infidels". Where the English text says Hyzante is demanding the "return" of the Rozelle village, the French says "extradition".