The more I learn about mycotoxin exposure the more I’m convinced that most haunted/possessed house stories are just houses with mold in the walls.
That shit’ll fry your brain.
Mold and other fungi. Ungrounded electricity. Food poisoning. Night terrors. Sleep paralysis. Sleep deprivation. The fact that when we don’t see a human face, muscles related to hearing tighten to be able to hear farther for threats. Minerals leaking into pipes.
Carbon monoxide poisoning is usually my go-to when people come to me asking for advice about a haunted house/being cursed, usually followed up by most of the above.
Like sorry if you thought my witch ass was just going to tell you to place a salt ring and burn some incense or w/e, but if you come to me telling me you’re seeing shit/got ill/your partner started acting weird when you moved into your new house, my witch ass is still going to tell you to check you’re not being poisoned by your surroundings before I jump to “you got ghosts in your veins.”
Song of the Lioness re-read wishlist: alternate ending where Alanna gives the Dominion Jewel to Thayet and Buri, and they all save Sarain. so many words given to describing the utter devastation in Sarain, and the similarities to the story Coram tells Alanna about the salvation of Tyra, and the words on the map that said the Jewel was “for the saving of a troubled land,” which, by comparison, Tortall fucking wasn’t. Tortall had a zombie duke; Sarain had eighteen months of three-way civil war, genocide, and famine. like. give Thayet the Jewel and give 75% of Tortall back to the Bazhir
When programmers invented rubber duck debugging they were right but what they don’t tell you is that this also works for like 90% of other complex intellectual tasks. Nothing solves a problem faster than just trying to explain it to somebody.
i feel so goddamn dumb, but it’s just what i’ve noticed and realized so. a rant/vent.
just now, i saw a synopsis/summary of a stucky fic which is only two lines. describing steve and bucky in a line each. in bucky’s, you find out his job, his music taste, and what he’s currently into. in steve’s, you find out that he looks good and he posts thirst traps.
and yet it’s not just this instance. in a majority of the stucky (and stony actually) fics, no matter who’s pov the fic is written in, we find out more about everyone else but steve. steve’s defining trait in the stucky and stony fics is that he’s gone for bucky and tony, respectfully.
he has no other interests. no other wants. no other goals.
this accompanies my sadness over steve not having any sort of recovery tag. there’s steve rogers in the 21st century, but that doesn’t bring forth a specific expectation. not like bucky barnes is recovering or tony stark has a heart.
and fuck, not to mention the amount of times i’ve seen steve be forced into retirement. he almost never gets to choose. in one fic, he had a mental disorder everyone but him actually knew about and they all decided he was retiring before he did. they just ambushed him. a lot of the de-serumed steve tag also has him in forced retirement, too.
from what i’ve seen, steve’s a workaholic, pure and simple. he thinks he’s only going to be useful and competent when he’s working, so that’s what he does. he doesn’t have a home to return to anyway. then he gets forced retired and he just doesn’t have anything to do and nowhere to go. everyone just expects him to go find himself. they threw him into the deep end and he didn’t know how to swim. at least let him keep his job??
some people actually need a routine, something to look forward to or at least expect to do. be somewhere and be expected. as an online student for like 6-7 years, i wish i had somewhere to be when i wake up. i want to go to a campus or something, someone to expect me to show up.
when my dad retired (and i know many other retirees felt it too), he didn’t have a damn thing to do at home. his best friend lived across the globe and he couldn’t walk anymore. wheelchair accessibility is non-existent in my city. so he ended up working again as a consultant.
so yeah, steve’s normally like… just turned 30 or something when he gets forced into retirement in these fics. what the fuck is he supposed to do without a crutch? supportive friends? fine, but they’re all still working, so only he isn’t then. and really, every avenger has worked for much longer than steve. tony and bruce are like 40-50. nat, even without the red room, at least 10 years. the military(like) career is normally the issue. so, steve in the military was just 2 years. then 2011 - 2016 (is usually the amount of time before his forced retirement) is another 5. that’s 7 years. and now he’s forced to retire.
no one good movie kiss?? for the guy who wanted to know if it looked cool like in the movies? for the guy who learned everything through tv?? no kiss like real people do??? hello??? give him his one good movie kiss with that fucking angel or i’m blowing this joint
I still say that Havelock Vetinari’s comedic timing is too perfect to be anything except deliberate, and that he is exactly the kind of person who’d master of a form of “stealth comedy” where he is the only person in the room who is 1. not the butt of the joke, and 2. is even aware that there’s a joke happening in the first place, regardless of who’s playing the straight man at the moment.
And this comes from me having fallen into the “hits are people running away” spiral less than a year ago. I’m here because I was there, recently.
Kudos specifically gets me, though.
There’s this push for people to kudos every fic they finish reading because “It’s the least you can do” or “you owe the author if you read all the way through”, along with some “kudos aren’t good enough, you have to leave a comment”
and I think as @ao3commentoftheday said in the linked post, this is people devaluing kudos. A kudos is literally identical to a comment that reads “Kudos! ❤”
It’s supposed to be a signifier that someone liked your work. It kinda waters down the meaning to consider it an obligation, and the overwhelming majority of people do not use kudos as a way to mark that they finished a work.
But if you’re inundated with people making the argument that kudos should be used as a “made it through the fic” marker rather than a comment reading “kudos! ❤”, kudoses lose their impact. If you imagine them as an obligation, they cease to be a compliment.
And if that’s the slurry you’re in, of course you feel unappreciated and invisible. That’s a totally reasonable conclusion to come to, if you don’t know that very few people devalue kudos that way. Of course it hurts if you think a kudos simply means “I read this”!
And I get why people want readers to understand how authors feel. I really, really do. There’s always a nonzero number of people in fandom who simply haven’t thought about how much it would mean to the author to get a comment, and hearing “authors love comments!!” can be really helpful!
But I do wish that we as authors would put a little more effort into reciprocating that understanding.
i think people should go back and play decade old rpg’s and reset their expectations. remember from whence we came. hell, revisit 20+ year old turn-based rpg’s where the greatest interaction you could have with a lil sprite chicken was having a text box that popped up and said “cluck”.
this isn’t even about “be thankful about what game studios can do today”, it’s about how titles are being expected to cram in more and more Stuff to even be looked at. it’s about development still being pushed on a two to five year cycle but they’re expected to make double the content of the last game only for people to then be upset that the game that promised them 1000 hours of Stuff is full of repeat quests.
it’s me seeing people demand mechanics that make up whole games of their own to be added on top, everything has gotta have roguelike randomized dungeon generation, expansive crafting systems, an entire farming sim, and also the base game needs to have movie-budget cutscenes and 4k resolution rtx lighting and a map that takes a full three hours to run across (which you won’t even do because a teleport system has been added to every landmark).
triple A studios crunching their employees to dust to rush out buggy unfinished massive messes that eat up your hard drive. indie developers having swathes of early players demand they add this, and this, and that because it was so cool in other game and c'mon they paid 15$ they “deserve” a bigger game.
sure we still have hits come out that are sweet and straightforward examples of just a well-done fun game, but the trend of expecting every rpg that comes out to be More and Bigger is wrecking the genre.
we deserved to see len meeting other versions of barry from other earths, you know every time he’d literally be like
like no other version of barry is as remotely interesting as HIS barry & he would be very snitty to all of them. although to be clear he would very much still try to sleep with them. but mainly just so he could mention it to his barry the next time he shows up to stop one of his heists, because it’s giving barry a complex and it’s going to be extremely funny when barry finally just jumps him over it
I feel like they fly under the radar because they are still competent, but Jim is just as stupid as the rest of Stede’s crew. They got fully outsmarted by Lucius and a stick, and when Jim caught him they just kept him in a trunk for a while before Lucius proved to be cooled. They walked right into Spanish Jackie’s trap because they wanted to prove their fake beard was a great disguise. Their plan for distracting Oluwande was to push his cup off the table like a cat and run. The only excuse they could come up for why the crew shouldn’t go to St. Augustine was that the humidity would be bad for their hair. They walked back into Spanish Jackie’s place with no plan b for when she shoots the hostage husband and then just responds “Shit. Uuuuuuuhh… fight to the death?” They use the word oodles.
This should not be overlooked just because Jim is in the top 3 most competent members of the crew. Frenchie is competent as hell and he still thinks women have inner body crystals that attract bad luck demons.
Description: I had a dream the night before last about taking Suit’s hand and laying it on my heart, so he could feel that my heartbeat was faster with him, and not out of fear. So here’s some self indulgence for this because I have to.
If this were to happen according to her canon timeline, things would probably be a bit softer, so take this separately. It’s something she’d do, though.
They stood face to face, too close as per usual by his own initiation. His breath was hot as she felt it unfold against her cheeks, words of mockery and accusations spilling from his mouth like tar, the goal being to trap and sink her.
while i see the validity in “copia is all alone except for sister” i for one am of the opinion of “copia THINKS he is alone because hes convinced everyone hates him but actually thats just his anxiety talking”. the ghouls are his besties
getting really into the idea of there being two distinct throuples on voyager one of which is the janeway/chakotay/tuvok dynamic of sad ambiguous old people romance complete with soft touches lingering glances things left unsaid the whole nine yards. the other is of course the tom/harry/b’elanna dynamic of like. our date night this week is seeing if we can get doom to run on the emh
the doctor tries to complain about yet again having his usual physical appearance replaced with the doom hud but unfortunately voyager’s three most senior officers are far too busy having long, melancholy conversations with each other in the captain’s ready room to care
socially conscious danielle Lecturing her bf about ingrained prejudice and class warfare literally every time they are together
danielle just fuckin throwing apples at the crown prince of france for daring to steal her father’s horse
“i thrashed him” cut to tiny gustav covered in mud
i will deny you the throne and siMPLY LIVE FOREVER
leonardo da vinci just…. in general
danielle being ride or die with her manor servants to the point where she spends a literal fortune to get one of them out of indentured slavery
“you may have whatever you can carry” *fucking picks up the prince of france*
jacqueline always being on danielle’s side and befriending her
little history things like terrible tennis, utopia, the introduction of chocolate, a newly painted mona lisa, etc
the Theme Song™
“it looks like rain” danielle’s FACE
it’s supposed to be in france but no one speaks french or has a french accent
the Villain with his Villain Mustache
“were the only the two of you?” “yes. well, and the chicken sire”
you have TWO HANDS make it YOURSELF /mic drop
*throws temper tantrum* “there was a bee”
danielle’s Entrance to the ball looking like an ethereal angel from another realm
henry showing up for a Dashing Rescue but danielle’s already saved herself
the PAINTING
the entire thing is basically a story to one-up the grimm brothers which i can get behind
Dougray Scott (the prince) in these pants
Dannielle’s childhood friend who is never anything else than just a really good friend, no nice guy™ to be found here, just two besties
an evil stepmother who is still a three-dimensional character, which makes her treatment of Danielle even more heartbreaking
Danielle’s character is defined by her passion, mind and yearning for justice and the prince explicitly tells her that he falls in love with her because of the way she thinks and how eloquently she can argue her causes
the prince is the one who has to learn from her and have character development to be worthy of her
a blatantly romantic movie that is still genuinely funny and smart and really well made and acted and proves how good that genre can be
“michelangelo is trapped under a ceiling in Rome”
IF YOU
suffer your people to be ILL-EDUCATED
and their manners corrupted from INFANCY
and then PUNISH THEM for that which their first education DISPOSED THEM
what else is to be concluded,
SIRE,
but that you first MAKE THIEVES
and then PUNISH THEM?
if you ever wanted to know what i consider one of the best possible movie renditions of cinderella to be, this is it
and i know it’s on the list but seriously, the scene for “you may have whatever you can carry” is THE BEST go watch it
