this is a controversial opinion and I’m not a gamer but I don’t need my graphics to be that good. I don’t need to see every individual feather on a bird. my poor computer doesn’t deserve to carry that weight either.
i would love to talk about moral ocd its just that like any time i mention it i worry im coming across like an asshole whos trying to excuse his bad actions and shitty behavior
I have never watched a mr beast video and every time I see his face doing that weird dead smile he does in every thumbnail, it just looks like that one photo of charlie from always sunny to me
i don’t understand, are they supposed to get nicer or just less bruised up?
Shoutout to the guy Iknew in college who was always a rich asshole, but has doubled down on it in the last couple years to the point where he looks like he’s about to walk into an 80s movie and tell the kids that he’s going to demolish the rec centre to drill for oil.
He’s posting photos of himself in a cowboy hat, head to tow denim, and snakeskin boots. The guy is Austrian and lives in a rich suburb of Dublin.
Ive never really met anyone that thought of ribs as interesting… that’s such a shame. Ribs and the things they do are fascinating…. I think about them everyday.
I may not be the biggest fan of snakes, but this is fascinating!!
I may not be the
biggest fan of snakes, but this
is fascinating!!
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
When creating art, how do you deal with the fact that seemingly everyone's opinions and tastes are completely individual? Like, how do you make good art, when around 40-50% of what even is "good art" changes from person to person? Sure, we have points we can all agree, but I'm baffled by how three people can agree and disagree on the same pieces of media. I can like movies A and B, and feel like they're very alike, but a friend might love B and hate A and another friend thinks the opposite.
The confusion is because “good” is being used to mean several different things:
To My Personal Taste. If you like a piece of art, you could very easily describe it as good just because you had a good time with it.
Well Put Together. If a story is well-crafted, lacking in plotholes or contrivances, broadly carefully woven, makes sense the more you think about it, etc - you could deem it to be good because it’s been put together well. If a work of art looks good, the light sources and shadows make sense with one another, the colors work well together, the composition has clarity, the anatomy is correct - then the work was put together competently and skillfully, and could be called good for this reason.
Objective Quality. When people describe a movie as good, this is usually what they are trying to judge. Whether an objective judgment can be rendered on something as subjective as art is something people have been yelling about for centuries. In my estimation, the quality of a work has to be judged based on what the artist was going for and how close their execution was to that goal. An attempt at photorealism might be seen as “objectively bad” if it doesn’t look photorealistic.
And by the same token, “bad” can mean a BUNCH of different things:
Bad Because I Had A Bad Time
Bad Because It Didn’t Deliver What I Expected From It
Bad Because It Hit Me With A Personal Dealbreaker
Bad Because I Couldn’t Take It Seriously
Bad Because It Didn’t Make Sense To Me
Bad Because It Said Something I Really Disagreed With
And many more. This is why I think it’s helpful to unpack a story further than just “is it good or bad” because those judgments are almost always concealing a more interesting personal analysis. There are stories I find highly ineffective that are still professionally well-crafted and accomplishing the creator’s goals. There are stories I enjoy the hell out of that are weighed down by ropey characterization and dubious values. It’s usually more effective, in my experience, to narrow in and identify what parts of a work are working for you, and what parts aren’t clicking.
If any one of my posts is to break containment, make it this one.
Before January 2025, download your favorite fics, especially those with smut or queer content.
If Project 2025 goes into effect (which it very likely will now that we have three red branches of government in the US), they may attempt to restrict the use/sharing of media on sites like ao3.
This particularly applies to fics with smut or any type of queer content, because the official Project 2025 document states, “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance… has no claim to First Amendment protection… Pornography should be outlawed.”
Now, I don’t expect ao3 to disappear or go anywhere without a fight, but it’s best to be on the safe side these days.
To download your favorite fics:
Go to archiveofourown.org and open the fic you want to download.
At the top right corner, to the right of the ‘subscribe’ button, is a button that says 'download’. Click it.
A drop-down menu will give you the option to choose the format of your download. Choose your preferred format (.epub and .pdf are my personal favorites – .epub lets you open a fic in the apple books app and .pdf is compatible with like every device and program out there).
When you click the button for your preferred format, a pop-up window appears confirming your choices. The title of the document will default to the title of the fic, so be aware of that and consider changing conspicuous titles to something ignorable, especially if you share the computer.
You’re done! Now do this with all your favorite fics!
Stay safe out there, your favorite characters are rooting for you <3
If you’re like me and looking at your decade plus of history, bookmarks, works, and subs makes you want to cry at the thought of trying to download them all individually, check out this link.
This will help you download all your stuff from AO3 quickly and easily. You will have to download Python, but don’t panic. The instructions and the application itself walk you through everything.
If you keep the fics in the folder, it even has the ability to check for duplicates and not download something it’s downloaded before, OR check WIPs for new chapters and download an updated copy. It’s fucking amazing.
“After that first incident, the thing kept coming back. It’s looking for something, and I don’t want it here.
We went down and asked the retired fishing mech on the other end of town to play as bait for us. All they have to do is rest in the yard while we wait. They’re about the same size as this ‘Crusader’, I figured with how damaged it is, it must be looking to repair itself. Should be easy, right?
I don’t know why I thought that. Took a few days of waiting before it showed up.
Everything was set up. It wasn’t even that long of a wait after nightfall. But our ambush failed.
It saw us immediately.”
———————–
Crusader would be a terrifying thing from the perspective of an average dragon. There’s not quite anything like him, and that’s probably a good thing. After all there’s no need for more space entities to make a mess.
Last art post of the year! Kept forgetting to get this one up.
The real problem with the Hasbro monolith re-defining “indie RPG” to mean “literally any tabletop RPG that isn’t Dungeons & Dragons” is that now when you ask somebody what their favourite obscure indie RPG is, that twelve page zine game about robot catgirls having sex with each other is competing for oxygen with, like, Vampire: The Masquerade, and that’s just not good for the ecosystem.
“Smartphone” this, “superpowers” that, I want to see an isekai where the protagonist is one of those young women with an incredibly cluttered purse and that’s what she takes with her into the world she’s been swept off to. And then she uses her purse’s contents to her advantage, and not in a stereotypical way or anything like that, I want this to be Lady MacGyver and her purse of resources. I want to see a pair of nail-clippers with a file on it be used as the multi-purpose tool they can be. I want lipstick war paint. I want to see something really clever done with that handfull of grocery receipts she never threw out. And the title would be something like “I’m Going to Save the World by Cleaning Out My Purse.” And the show’s emphasis is on her being cool, clever, and creative, not on getting as much fanservice in as possible.
Bonus points: During the final confrontation with whatever the Big Bad is, our heroine finally runs out of stuff in her purse, it’s completely empty. The villain gloats about her being out of ammo and stuff, and while the villain is busy doing this the heroine grabs a sizeable rock, shoves it in her purse, and starts using the whole thing as a flail-style weapon against them. The purse and its contents aren’t the source of her power, it’s how good she is at making do with whatever she has to hand.
(…look, regardless of anything else about it, the movie ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy II’ had a lasting effect on me in regards to the effectiveness of a purse full of rocks as a blunt-force weapon.)
Also, when her friends arrive to help her finish off the confrontation, they get in because of all the intuitiveness and creative problem-solving the heroine has taught them, not just through brute force. I want a cool, badass final battle that would also make Jackie Chan nod approvingly at the clever use of environment and items at hand.
Oh! And at the very end, after the final fight’s over and the Big Bad is defeated, our heroine takes a moment to go sit by herself and go, “Well, I guess I finally got my purse cleaned out… empty counts as clean, right? …I need to replace some of that stuff, but they don’t make all of it here…” :/
And then her friends and associates start showing up a few at a time, and one of them hands her a ball of string, because she’s been mentioning the whole series that she really ought to be carrying one at this point. And another one tells her that the alchemist she gave it to managed to replicate that awesome, water-proof war-paint she showed them and sent her a couple tubes of it. Someone else pays her back for a meal she helped them get.
Someone even found and returns her nail-clippers.
And it’s one of those really fun, touching scenes that makes you feel good just to watch it, with lots of acknowledgement of the kindness that has been shown and the bonds that have been made, and it ends with her going, “Huh, my purse is a total mess again… I guess I’d better go on another adventure to clean it out!” And everything feels good and nothing hurts and it’s great!