chimaerakitten

[chimaerakitten]

people need to realise that a poor little meow meow must be a character who has committed atrocities you cannot poor little meow meow a good guy that’s not how this works

#I have said it before and I will say it again #seivarden vendaai #is the *quintessesntial* poor little meow meow

[chimaerakitten]

[chimaerakitten]

The first rule of violent trench warfare is to have fun and be yourself

[chimaerakitten]

You know what’s astonishing about Katara? She grew up in a world without bending.

It’s not surprising that Sokka calls her bending ‘magic water’ in the first episode. It might as well have been magic to them at that point; they had never seen it in practice until they meet Aang.

So not only did Katara not have any teachers, she didn’t have any kind of guidance, no visual aids, no idea of how bending is supposed to look or work. The first time she ever sees actual waterbending movements is when she steals the waterbending scroll from the pirates. The first time she meets another waterbender is when she reaches the North Pole, where within weeks she outmasters pretty much everyone and goes on to teach the Avatar.

Everything she does is so incredibly impressive, and yet I can’t help but feel the most proud of her when she catches a fish on that little boat.

[chimaerakitten]

From episode 225 of Adam Conover's Factually podcast

[chimaerakitten]

I will be 70 years old and I still will never have gotten over the time the Mythbusters used a rocket powered steel wall to - and I use this word as literally as possible - vaporize an entire car into red mist

[chimaerakitten]

my favorite personal dragon headcanon is that like birds they also can't see glass, but it just isn't an issue for them

[chimaerakitten]

Trying to figure out if you’re ace or aro can be so much harder than other sexualities because it’s like, trying to find the absence of something. Imagine you’re at a pond and you want to know if there are any turtles, or fish. Say you find a turtle and you’re like “great! Now I know there are turtles.” Or a fish, now you know for sure there are fish. Or you find both, and now you know for a fact there are both turtles and fish in the pond.

But like, if you don’t find any turtles it might be that there are no turtles or maybe you’re just really shitty at looking for turtles and maybe you THINK you saw a turtle over there or maybe it was just a stick. Maybe there are only a few turtles. Maybe you need to do something special to find the turtles. Maybe a bunch of these rocks are actually turtles but you couldn’t tell them apart. Maybe there are no turtles. You have no idea. Meanwhile some people are saying “Oh there have to be turtles! You’ll find them eventually ;)” or “How many turtles have you found in your pond?” or “Try planting some vegetables at the shore to attract the turtles.” Or “Oh no! What disaster happened to your pond that there are no turtles?” And you’re just standing there wet with an empty net and a tired expression.

But whatever because whether there are turtles or fish or not your pond’s ecology works just fine without them because that’s what eco-communities do they form a system around what they have. You aren’t missing anything if you don’t have turtles you just have a pond system without turtles. If someone tried to change you by pouring a bunch of turtles into your pond it would probably fuck something up.

So you don’t have to be entirely sure. You don’t have to search every inch of the damn pond before you can decide there are probably no turtles. If you want to take the aro or ace label because you think it fits go for it. And if you do find your turtles you can rename the pond. That’s fine.

#this post helped me actually come around to labeling myself as ace #back in like 2017

[chimaerakitten]

Welp. Things get weird with the anesthesia department from time to time. Today a patient, left unsupervised for 5 whole minutes in her room at the surgical ward, chewed her central line out...

[chimaerakitten]

Isn't Hannibal a bad person though?

I can't think of anything bad he did

[chimaerakitten]

okay what did i miss

(yes some of these overlap and some are suppositions. for example if parchment is always used for ephemera, rough drafts, notes, and never re-used or re-purposed, we can also assume that the author is unaware of wax tablets as a concept)

[chimaerakitten]

IG : @emperorofmischief

[chimaerakitten]

A lot of the time when I see people talk about aromanticism they bring up the way a lot of us tend to think that romance is just exaggerated in fiction and are surprised that people feel that way in real life and not just in the movies and that's honestly kind of funny, imagine just going about your life and one day finding out that most people's high school years were actually like disney channel and you're the exception

[chimaerakitten]

Submitted by @sky-the-snail-fanatic

#99 luftballons #hast du etwas Zeit für mich dann singe ich ein Lied für dich…. #also a few bits from anime but not whole songs #and some Xmas carols and stuff in other languages

[chimaerakitten]

[chimaerakitten]

Do you have any opinions on Scholomance?

I do! I like it a lot. I really enjoyed all three books, blitzed through them easily and was much more excited to see how the plots unfolded than I'm used to these days, as a jaded adult, and I also really appreciated them as works of craft.

Especially the first one, I spent the whole time being all 'wow!' at how simple it was. So easy to read, but no waste. You really need to know what you're doing, to get that kind of pared-down elegance of form to work and still fit so much content in.

Like these are dense, there's a fantastic stylistic minimalism that allows El's character all the space it needs to breathe by making absolutely every other thing and person in the whole novel also do character work for her, which is exactly where the first person voice shines.

Also great use of character perspective to make the pacing feel really natural, so the fact that the first book takes three weeks, the second book takes one year, and the third book is like. Five or so incredibly stressful days spread out over the course of a few weeks? Doesn't feel imbalanced.

I actually got distracted from the story a few times by noticing the strength of Novik's technique. 😂 This is a me problem, in itself it's the opposite of distracting. Very low-profile.

I think the Scholomance is a great example of how far you can go in specfic when you aren't cringing from the label 'derivative,' because the Scholomance books feel very fresh ad clean specifically because nothing in them is concerned with standing out as 'original,' whatever that's supposed to mean, only with being well-executed and suitable to its task.

Hm, maybe that's where Liesel was born, the intersection of the efficient narrative style and the vast proportion of the story that concerns the maximization of utility and the instrumentalization of persons by themselves and others, and the forces that incentivize these behaviors. Or maybe she's just the narrative counterweight to Orion 'Head Empty' Lake lmao. How's that for a principle of balance, Galadriel?

I really did enjoy how beautifully it was laid out, over and over, in dozens of shades of humanity, how no matter where you go in an exploitative system almost everyone is being driven by the same survival instincts.

Because I don't think I've ever seen made so cleanly clear why you just can't expect any person or small group of people, no matter their level of goodwill or status, to unmake one of these systems from the inside; how it's not a matter of people being bad but of every single person being very...small.

And then not retreating into the idea of a person who is Big coming and breaking the cruel system from the outside as some kind of panacea, because 1) that is terrible, even if it's necessary and done in the best way possible and 2) that's not a sustainable answer to anything. Getting a balance between the protagonist being able to effect change and not subscribing to the great man theory of history can be really tricky!

Also did I mention, I love El, and I love most of the cast, even the dreadful ones. How am I going around with this many feelings about Li Shanfeng who doesn't appear until the actual climax?

The romance murdered me a bit, but it took up no more space than it absolutely needed to do its job, and I respect that. Also I appreciated Orion as a love interest; Novik has a slight record at this point of a version of that style of male love interest who's like a caricature of Mr. Darcy but old, which was shaping up to be my least favorite thing about her body of work.

...Orion is kind of like if you took the human king from Spinning Silver and gave him an alignment flip come to think of it, so he's not coming out of nowhere. Lmao.

Which reminds me (re: romance character typing) I've heard Novik didn't want it to be known she was astolat, which this series has renewed my sympathies if so. Because if I were a published novelist I wouldn't want people going 'you know, that resolution was really emotionally satisfying! reminds me of that fic she wrote where optimus prime and megatron get stuck in a hole underground and hatefuck about it.'

I don't even like Transformers. That fic almost made me cry. Actually I suspect it reads better if you don't like Transformers because I'm sure it does not give a shit about canon.

Anyway, whoever pointed out that one of the things El has going on is she's Enoby (and we're going to sit down and explore what the true reason to put your middle finger up at preps is, and what are some constructive ways to channel that socioeconomic wrath, and what it means that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism) was right and I'm not entirely over that either.

Fucking love El's mom as a character. Spectacular level of parent relevance and usefulness. A+.

Aadhya and Liu are also characters who fucking delivered.

Re: minimalism though, I laughed at the start of The Golden Enclaves when I realized that none of the enclaver characters who'd gotten development in the the first two books were from London, the enclave El was theoretically shooting for when we met her.

#scholomance series #vibing with This analysis yeah #they really were terribly efficient books I blasted right through them

[chimaerakitten]

Brothers.

Yeah, I drew Demane and Sipho anyway because I love them.

#😍 kiddos… #demane dlamini #sipho dlamini #temeraire