Alec Hardison: Fashion Critic.
Leverage S02E10 The Runway Job.
It’s once again called personal growth, Your Honor! (With added confirmation from Parker.)
(Part 1 here!)
Leverage S01E10 The 12 Step Job/Leverage Redemption S02E04 The Date Night Job.
in junior year of highschool my art teacher would let our ceramics class play music of our choice off of her desktop. we usually used spotify or youtube but she did have one album downloaded on her computer. it was a halloween sound effects/ambience collection. i dont remember why she had it. there was a track on there called "burning screams" which was exactly what it sounds like. just a cacophony of screams alongside crackling fire. she only let us play it on very special occasions, and we would cheer and jump with joy every time. it was like a pizza party to us
please imagine 6 teenagers with giant sad puppy eyes looking at a dear sweet 50 something year old art teacher and asking "may we please hear burning screams"
i dont know where burning screams came from. ive looked. its lost media to me. burning screams is my white whale
Track 3 "Burning Screams" on "Scary Sounds of Halloween"
Found it, around the 17:20 mark… op I am in love with Burning Screams
[OPENS FRIDGE, REMOVES TUPPERWARE CONTAINER LABELLED "Pomegranates from land of dead do not eat"]
[I REMOVE A SECOND CONTAINER LABELLED "Fairy apples do not eat (Autumn Court)]
[I APPROACH THE BLENDER]
my beloved mutual, were you aware that you’re the funniest person on the planet?
Just heard someone say “30 years ago, in 1993,” and stopped what I was doing. I froze. What do you mean 1993 was 30 years ago. That’s illegal
image description: a set of tumblr tags
#nope nope lalalalala #can’t hear you
tumblr users: i hate tiktok it's the worst
every post of a tiktok video: 12,746 reblogs, 45,094 likes
yes but the experience of occassionally seeing a curated-by-my-homies tiktok vid on my dash is so violently different from the endless stream of scrolling through algorithmic video content. i crave variety. what is my social media experience without walls of text interrupted randomly by videos of ducks and pictures of weird vegan brownies.
I’m all for going about queerness with the goal of not being able to be understood by outsiders but like. you’ve GOT to be normal about aro & ace people if you do. you can’t go on about being confusing to cishets for fun and then complain about ace & aro people who go about sex and romance and attraction in ways that don’t make sense to you.
supporting queerness that confuses others should include queerness that confuses YOU too even if you’re queer yourself.
Earlier today, I witnessed a miracle. No, water didn’t turn into wine. Nobody walked on water. The bakery didn’t even start to smell like fresh-caught fish, which would be pretty gross if you think about it even medium hard. What happened to me was: I saw a Mazda MX-3 V6. Running, on the highway.
You might not think that this is remarkable. Those of you equipped with especially fast internet connections are probably opening up another tab to look at a picture of it right now. Any confusion you may express is understandable, as this car basically looks like any other early-90s front-wheel-drive sporty cough drop, such as the ST180 Celica (praise be upon it) or Ford Probe. What is interesting about this car are those last few alphanumerical digits: V6.
Generally, a V6 is a bigger engine. It’s got six cylinders, of course, and those cylinders take up a lot of room. In North America, it’s really rare for one of these suckers to be less than three litres in displacement, and as a result they’re super lazy, low-revving engines in the pursuit of smoothness. The old joke is that V6s combine the fuel economy of a V8 with the power of an inline four, and that’s not incorrect. V6s are a terrible, immoral engine. Mazda, however… Mazda has problems. Mazda, either because of legislative reasons or because of engineering bravado, decided to make the smallest V6 they could: just 1.8L. The pistons are smaller than a can of Coke, and I suspect the lowercase-c version of that concoction was imbibed of thoroughly during this engine’s development.
Now, this isn’t the smallest V6 on the planet. Mitsubishi went even more nuts and put a 1.6L into a Mitsubishi Mirage after this, just to prove that they could. It’s just the smallest V6 I’ve ever seen, and to hear its wasplike thrum at highway speeds, nearly thirty years after this little econobox hit the streets, was inspirational to me. I began to tear up as I watched him recklessly swerve across multiple lanes, his right turn signal hyperflashing the entire time as the shitty old Mazda daytime-running-lights module attempted to turn itself into ozone. They should have sent a poet.
not to be problematic but i literally do not give a shit about age gaps when dating vampires. they thirst for your blood. "but it's predatory!!!!" yeah. it is. "they're preying on you!!!" they're vampires. they do that. "it's a power imbalance!!!!!!" what part of vampires are you not getting
they eat people and can turn into bats and crawl around on walls, lizard fashion, and can hypnotize you with your eyes. a) the age gap is not the creepy part and b) the creep factor is kinda the appeal
they don’t age. that’s part of the horror of it actually. would you accept eternal life, if you can never progress? can never grow or change? you’ll live forever, eternal youth, but frozen exactly as you are now. you will never become the person you’re meant to be. you are trapped in the mind of a 17-year-old forever. also ‘theoretically old if you disregard the fact that he’s a vampire’ doesn’t even make the top 20 worst things about edward cullen list. girl he’s mormon. prioritize
I was nodding along with this the whole time until that last sentence, which hit me like a folding chair
On a sliding scale from Watership Down to Redwall, what is the default setting for Tiny Frog Wizards?
Those are the ends of your scale?
I mean, I could have made it narrower, but it seemed better to me to pick endpoints beyond where I expected the game to fall, yes?
Unless you're saying that Tiny Frog Wizards falls outside those points on the anthropomorphism scale?
What I mean to say is those are weird end-points for a scale of relative anthropomorphism because they make it difficult to pin down exactly what we mean by anthropomorphism.
The rabbits of Watership Down, for example, are almost entirely non-anthropomorphic in terms of their anatomy and use of technology, but they're considerably more politically sophisticated than a lot of media that's ostensibly much further up the scale of anthropomorphism; heck, they even have rabbit Fascism!
Redwall, conversely, is weirdly inconsistent; early books strongly imply that the mice of Redwall Abbey are roughly the size of real mice, while later books back away from that and adopt a more human-normative scale. Anatomic anthropomorphism, meanwhile, seems to vary not only between species, but also between members of the same species, based on how civilised or, ah, "savage" they are (and isn't that a can of worms).
Let's put it another way: if Watership Down and Redwall are the end-points of your scale, where does The Jungle Book fall? The Wind in the Willows? The Great Mouse Detective? Bambi?
Well.....it’s actually a completely reasonable scale, is the thing?
Like. Try this phrasing instead: “Where does this story fall, onn a scale from ‘To an outside human observer, these would be completely normal animals doing completely expected animal things (and not because they’re hiding/faking it)’ to ‘these animals wear clothes/armor, write/draw, use tiny human weapons, cook food that they eat at tables, and otherwise act like tiny humans’?”
And your examples kind of....make the point? Bambi would be just inside WD (there is a zero percent chance of any WD owl ever giving playful relationship advice to a rabbit), and Wind in the Willows/Great Mouse Detective would probably be about even? I’d argue GMD would be less so than WitW because due to the presence of human stuff in their setting, it’s much more relevant/restrictive to the characters that they are in fact mice, whereas there’s functionally no humans in Redwall to ground it.
Personally, I am VERY firmly of the opinion that anything further along the scale than Redwall is no longer an animal story. Like--I adore Disney’s Robin Hood as much as anyone, but that’s not an animal story? It’s Robin Hood with furries, which is extremely valid, but it’s not anthropomorphic fiction, it’s a normal story with anthro character designs.
Again--that’s not, like, derogatory, or a criticism, it just is what it is.
I suppose you could argue that the back marker in the Watership Down direction should really be something like Black Beauty, where there’s no culture worldbuilding and the horses really don’t have any rich inner lives or mythology of their own; but I think that’s measuring “anthropomorphism” on a totally different axis than the one the asker was thinking of.
....Okay I might actually need to make a larger post about this because I saw this post and then spent the entire bus ride home thinking about sliding scales of anthropomorphism and I got, like, really into it but I’m genuinely just thinking out loud here and don’t want to come across as starting an argument on someone else’s post for fun.
HI I’M BACK AND I MADE GRAPHS
For me personally, I think there’s two primary axes here--the first is like I said above, a scale from “a real-life human observer, looking at these animals in a brief snapshot of their lives, would experience them as normal animals” to “these animals live their lives as tiny humans complete with clothing and period-typical technology”.
The OTHER axis is the degree to which the animals have a distinct culture independent from (though generally not untouched by!) humans. As in--do the animal characters, as in Watership Down, have their own mythologies, their own worldview, their own ways of living that would go on just fine without human influence? or, as in Black Beauty, do the animals primarily define themselves according to the roles humans give them?
(Note that the latter isn’t a mark of, like, bad writing--I literally used Black Beauty as the ur-example! If you’re writing from the perspective of a DOMESTICATED ANIMAL, having them mentally define themselves by their place in human society is the only thing that IS realistic! This is actually where the Warriors books lost me as a kid--it got to the point where even as a member of the target audience I was going, “but they’re domesticated cats? the fact that they have to live in and around humans is like, the Point, that’s what made this interesting--”)
So, for example:
You will notice this gets super weird if you go ANY further right than Redwall--Robin Hood: Men With Fursonas flipped to the other axis for no clear reason because if you go any further along the scale than Redwall, there ceases to be any relevance to the characters being animals at all*. It’s no longer an animal story. If they behave 100% like humans and there’s 0% human influence (ie, no humans in the setting at all), then they’re just...............people. The Y axis ceases to have any meaning.
*(Anthro characters having animalistic traits isn’t the same thing and I’m not dismissing the use of that trope! Their TRAITS are still relevant and can be part of a super compelling story--but it’s no longer an animal story, no longer anthropomorphic fiction, ie telling a story about animals with human traits. Frankly, NARNIA falls into this--Talking Beasts are full citizens 100% and Narnian culture belongs to all Narnians, so they don’t really fit into the concept being discussed.)
So Robin Hood flips the axis because on a technicality, you literally cannot have a Robin Hood adaptation that’s not dependent on human civilization, but normally, after you pass Redwall you break the quadrants and enter non-euclidean furryspace.
Then there’s that z-axis I added, which I’ve made a reference for--the Z axis is there to account for “talking animal” stories, where an animal might have totally natural-looking behavior but also be able to speak to one or all humans and confuse the placement somewhat.
I used 101 Dalmations as the anchorpoint, dead center--they can clearly understand every word their humans say and can even read, but aren’t capable of communicating back in any way other than dog behavior (tm).
On one end of the scale is The Rescuers (all the animals are clearly ABLE to speak to humans at will but choose not to for their own protection). The other is again Watership Down, where human speech is comprehensible to the reader but the rabbit characters don’t understand it, and in which only a few of them are--just barely--capable of almost grasping the vague concept of writing or even of pictures/images being capable of conveying meaning.
For media like Redwall where humans just don’t exist or don’t functionally exist, they’d join 101 Dalmations dead-center because the question is irrelevant.
A new version of Phineas and Ferb is being released. It is on a streaming service, and will be rated MA. Everyone wonders what this mature version of their beloved kids show will be. The first season is released, and you start watching it. It is just the same as the first season of the old show. Is this some elaborate joke? Finally at the end of the first episode, it happens. Dr. Doofenshmirtz is defeated, as he usually is. This time, however, as Perry is making his exit, you here Doofenshmirtz yell, "Fuck you Perry the Platypus." This is the only thing that has changed in the show.
I assumed that Ferb would finally be allowed to kill
We have hope
petting a dragon's warm scaly snout would fix me forever i am so so serious
or a sea serpent's cold wet slimy snout. i'm not that picky.
rip to all the “fuckyeah___” blogs that carried our society at one point </3
