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the thing about why jack sending tim to boarding school is a sucky decision on his part is that. yes. tim, by nature of being a costumed vigilante is a truly unmanageable teen. there is no world where jack is ever given a fair chance to be a present and better dad in that the narrative necessitates that he needs to be kept in the dark and tim's secret will always be a wall between them. a lot of jack's decisions *in isolation* do make a bit of sense in that yea, tim has done something like run away from home like three times in recent memory so what else is jack to do but choose to send him to boarding school?

however, when looking at jack's behavior as a sum of it's parts, him choosing to send tim away to boarding school after NML is yet another patented "well, i've tried almost nothing else so it's time to go for the nuclear option" yet again. there is a *reason* that despite jack's clear love and pride in his son, the bat bible calls his interest in tim "perfunctory". it is because he notices tim's behavior only when it suits him. yea, he notices tim runs away and punishes him and moves heaven and earth to get him back safe, but he ignores or doesn't notice all the other injuries the vast majority of the times he's home. he generally doesn't try to talk to or connect with tim (outside of cry of the huntress) about what's going on or why tim is disappearing multiple times (he yells a bit and then assumes the problem is fixed, or is just happy to see he's okay and never tries to delve any deeper into the behavior). he talks big talk about getting to know tim again! and then immediately stops paying his son near as much attention once jack gets a girlfriend to spend time with instead. he comes home because tim's girlfriend's dad called him, but his initial response is to not even hear out his son's side of the story. when tim is at boarding school he *gets engaged* and only *calls* to tell tim after the fact, but he'll sure as hell actually show his face only when tim gets in trouble. there are lots of things you could do to try to connect with your kids before going down the last resort path (which sending kids away usually is). therapy. talking to them. (which i know wouldn't have worked, but the point is that jack *didn't try*). but jack's first thought when things get really tough is often to let *someone else* deal with his son for him.

tim lies to jack, but 90% of the time that suits jack just fine.

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How many times can the same thing break your heart?

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truly the most underrated thing that makes the (RJ-authored) WoT books great is the combination of how good he is at inhabiting the narrative headspace of one character at a time, and how dedicated he is as a writer to the idea that people can have different, even contradictory points of view and cultural expectations without someone being wrong and someone being right. he truly writes like someone who understands that everybody is human and everybody is pretty much trying to do the right thing as they see it, and that all human cultures are the result of people living their lives under a specific set of circumstances. (the exceptions, his truly villainous villains, are always people who put themselves first outside of matters of survival - and they aren't limited to one culture or background.)

if there's a flaw in this approach, it's that he is so good at inhabiting one PoV at a time that people confuse 'things the characters think' for 'things the narrative is saying are true about the world', because a protagonist is thinking and/or saying them, when in fact 90% of the comedy and commentary in WoT falls in the space between what PoV characters think or understand and what is actually happening. alternatively, that space is used as evidence that X character is bad in some way instead of being a narrative technique to emphasise that everybody's worldview is limited by their experience and upbringing, and the 'truth' of the world exists somewhere at the intersection of all those worldviews. it's not a skill that's unique to him as a writer but in epic fantasy, especially of his time, I think it's rarer than it should be.

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My Muppet Princess Bride drawings found their way to Facebook and from that came a ton of good suggestions for scenes. Rizzo as a R.O.U.S. has been suggested by a lot of different folks for as long as I've been doing these drawings, but I was never quite sure how to handle the scene until a commenter suggested Rizzo's line. Maybe it resonated with me because I can kinda relate to Rizzo in this moment (especially so soon after Valentines Day!). Thanks to Paul Adams who provided Rizzo's line, and gave me permission to use it in this drawing.

And shout-out to movie-screencaps.com for providing the backgrounds, I like to edit shots from the movie for my backgrounds because it allows me to focus on the fun part of drawing Muppets. There's also just something fun about 'painting' the Muppets into the actual film.

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John Singer Sargent       Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau)  1884

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Not reblogging this to avoid dog piling on this person but...

What the fuck do you mean Amtrak has infinite funding, it has one of the smallest operating budgets of any passenger rail agency? And like Amtrak is the only passenger rail company purely because passenger rail isn't financially viable to run without government funding that Amtrak doesn't have, that's why people complain that amtrak doesn't turn a profit. Also Rail is a natural monopoly, the old rail companies weren't competing against each other, they all had monopolies, that's part of why they died, there was so much anti trust legislation to keep them from extorting their customers that when alternatives arrived they couldn't compete. Also Amtrak does have competition, it's called Planes and Private Automobiles!!

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something you said has been on my mind for a while - "kink is not inherently sexual". good faith! I don't understand that at all, could you explain it a bit?

This post is educational, hooray! Extensive discussion of kink under the cut. Nothing explicitly sexual is described in detail.

Please note that in this post, I use the terms top and Dom/me interchangeably. This is because I personally identify as a "top" and not a Dom. Some communities draw sharp lines between these two terms, and it's useful to make sure that you're using the same definition as other people when you're talking. Some people use "top" solely to refer to the giving or penetrative partner, which is not synonymous with the dominant partner. Topping subs, power bottoms, and all other permutations exist. I just use that term for myself because I don't like being called a Dom. It sounds like a guy's name to me, I don't like it.

When I text my wife in every morning, "Please bring me my coffee," and she answers, "Yes, Sir!" is that sexual? I'm surely not feeling sexual when I'm barely awake. When I hold my other wife's hand when she's having a depressive fit and tell her, "Daddy's got you, it's okay," that's kink, but it's not sexual. In that moment, neither of us feel particularly sexy, and we're surely not engaging in sex, but it's kink that - forgive the pun - binds us more strongly together.

One of my girls wears a 24/7 collar that I locked in place. (She can ask me at any point to take it off, or she can take it off herself if she wants to, but she chooses this.) That's kink. It's also... a necklace. That's not any more inherently sexual than her wedding ring, though it - for us - certainly symbolizes part of our relationship that happens to sometimes include sex, exactly the same as a wedding ring.

There are a lot of types of kink that don't include sexual contact in any way or which might include sexual contact but don't need to. One of my friends is a sex-repulsed ace bootblack. They literally take care of the boots of tops, usually at play parties. For them, this act of service and submission allows them to go into a particular headspace that's very fulfilling for them. They are explicitly serving the people whose boots they clean and polish. The Dom/mes receive that service and not only get really great-looking boots out of the deal but also get the feeling of power from having someone eager to take care of them and serve them. For some of us, that kind of service allows us access to a feeling of power that can be hard to access in our daily life, and that feels really good.

Sometimes, it can feel good in a sexy way, and sometimes it feels good in a "makes lizard brain feel powerful but not sexy" way. Neither one is inherently better or worse or more or less kinky than the other.

Sometimes, people who like being whipped like it because the line between pain and pleasure is like a wave on the ocean, and they want to surf it. Sometimes, that involves mashing squishy bits together, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, it's just about riding that endorphin wave and then having someone take care of you afterwards.

Sometimes, people want to be tied up in elaborate shibari knots and fucked. Sometimes, people want to be tied up in elaborate shibari knots because that process requires a lot of trust and is an intimate ritual that takes a lot of time. Sometimes, it's both. Sometimes, people want to tie up others because it's a beautiful work of art, because that ritual of binding is a ritual and accesses something sacred for them. Sometimes, they want to be tied up because it's playtime, and that's fun for them! Sometimes, they want to be tied up because when they're tied up, they are 0% in control, and they want to just surrender control to someone whom they can trust.

Some people want to go into sub space - that headspace I talked about earlier - because in their everyday life, they have a lot of responsibilities and stress, and going into that space where nobody can ask anything from them, where they have no responsibility to make any decisions at all, is a relief to them. That might involve squishy bits, or it might not. Some people like going into that sub space because being someone's Good Boy, Sweet Girl, or Good Pup is gender-affirming for them. A friend of mine only feels really safe when he's got his pup hood on, because that means he's With Master, who will protect him.

Some people get gender affirmation out of being in control, being someone's Daddy or Mistress, Sir or Boss. It allows them to access a power that helps them to square their shoulders and take on the world.

All of this entirely skips over the fact that a person's primary sexual organ is between their ears, and some people do get sexual fulfillment out of kink even when no genitalia are involved at all, but I cannot stress enough that the reasons that people enter into the multitude of kink situations in the world are as varied as the people involved. People gain access to comfort, to feelings of stability and order and control over their lives, to gender affirmation, to endorphins that are or aren't sexual in nature, to release from responsibility, to ritual and intimacy, to the ability to provide for others and take care of others in a way that their outside lives may or may not permit. For that matter, they may simply gain access to a paycheck, and that's fine, too. That's no more or less "selling your body" than when I used to run my ass off for 13+ hours a day at my retail job, and I guarantee they're making way, way better money.

The fact that so many people see kink as only and purely sexual means they're missing out on so much of what kink can offer, and narrowing down the experiences of others to this tiny little sliver of what actually exists. Yes, it can be sexual, but it doesn't have to be. The reasons that people engage in kink are as varied as the reasons that people engage in any other kind of interaction, and the fulfillment they get from it is as varied, too.

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The other reason that the Romans didn't turn steam engines to practical uses is that the other major early use for steam engines is in mining: engines to power pumps to get water out of mines, engines to power the lifts to lift ore (and miners) out of the mines, engines to haul ore from the mine to the nearest port. And the Romans didn't need that because they were a slave state, that is, a civilization where a very high percentage of the population is enslaved and it is the foundation of the economy. Labor was cheap. The kind of metallurgical work needed to take the proto-engines and turn them into something reliable was expensive. Much cheaper to simply throw a lot of slaves at the problem and work them to death. This is generally the case: when labor is cheap (either through mass enslavement or strict caste/class barriers that keeps low-caste people desperately poor), technology stagnates. The people who would most benefit from labor-saving devices have neither the time nor the resources to develop them, and the people with the time and resources have no motivation because exploiting other humans is cheaper and easier. How does your economy and your class relations affect the technology?

Casually asks ‘who domesticated grain in your fantasy world?’ but while ripping her shirt off with a WWE stage and a roaring crowd just behind and slightly to the left. 

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Bittern at the grocery store

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"lol jews find so many loopholes in their own religion they must hate being jewish" damn just say you're uncreative and have never examined your own religious texts further than the exact words written down on the paper. just say you take everything at face value and you never enjoy reading between the lines to gain a new understanding of something. it's ok, we all see it already

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So happy this man and his husband are safe now but good God he experienced some horrific shit.

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Atheistic goyim: religion sucks, people need to learn to question their religious texts and laws!!

Jews: (question their religious texts and laws)

Atheistic goyim: OMG NO NOT LIKE THAT

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western feminists utterly abandoning iranian women, who have been protesting for their rights for a long ass time and who deal with some of the worst shit women anywhere will ever face, is so par for the course i don’t know why i’m even surprised anymore

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Thinking about BSG'78 and ST:TOS, and the intersection with fandom.

Thinking about these wonderful sci-fi stories that presented an adventure of a week with world-building sketched in around the edges, and how that led to dedicated fans building on those sketches, layering rich worlds in their unauthorized works.

Thinking about the ones that embraced that culture, bringing fannish creations into the world proper, such as when George Lucas allowed Zahn's choice of Coruscant from an authorized by still transformative work to become canon by using it in his own creation.

Thinking about how entire generations grew up with those sketched worlds, and media grew, so that they brought to life new versions of old favorites, layering more world-building in, so that overarching arcs dominated the lush landscape of visual media.

Thinking about the fact that people wanting more and making it to trade under tables in conventions is likely directly the domino that led to the death of adventure-a-week in serial productions, so that every successful series had to always been furthering a plot that spanned seasons.

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Not to be a Boomer but your social media should be your own space, not something employers are allowed to look at to judge you beyond the qualifications stated in your resume and cover letter

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“You are responsible for the minors in your fandom!!!”

No, I’m fucking not. I’m not your parent. My past-times do not automatically sign me up to act in loco parentis. If you need someone else to monitor your own content consumption online, go get mommy and/or daddy to set up a content blocker on your computer.