#I can't figure out why

[teaspoonofdragons]

This was a joke on my friend @iknowicanbutwhy​ ‘s part but little did they know I was obviously going to go wild with it. I’ve already started writing about him. augh.

Anyways. Here’s a yellow, “nice” Schezo :) he’s very friendly he likes the sun his Dark Sword is a blacklight and he’s so very deranged. He deals with his problems through toxic positivity and pretending they don’t exist, so obviously he’s doing fine and no one should be worried.

Mild warning for blood splatters under the cut

no yeah he still kills people. But he’s really nice otherwise!! You just gotta trust him

#puyo puyo #Schezo Wegey #tw blood #I put it under a read more I know but just in case #scars #I want. to commit violence to him. #something about him fills me with insurmountable rage and fury #I can't figure out why #His Dark Sword is also. a greatsword #For fun!! For sillies

[siyurikspakvariisis]

There are people who really think Mara Sov's writing is better in the new seasons than in Marasenna?

Lol. Lmao.

#«nicer» doesn't mean «better character» #and ngl after sotl being a bit all over the place i'm quite liking her in seraph #but blease give her a thing that isn't moping about her brother im begging you #loved her in marasenna. the weirdo behind the queenly mask. #the emotional constipation that contained a deep love for humanity #not naming any names but i think that part of this fandom has built a bogeyman around dickinson #i can't figure out why #hala.txt #vent

[karasimpno]

my situationship really got me fucked up

#like #he lives in a different STATE #we knew he was leaving from the start and it was cute while it lasted #but then he wanted to keep sending me memes and shit which I was like #okay yeah we can be friends #but god now all he wants is for me to fucking debate him on shit #it's so gross #I just feel like I'm enabling some philosopher-wannabe god complex #it just feels gross #any time I reach out to him it's like in a kind 'I hope you're well and imy' way #but any time he reaches out to me it's like #let me argue with you #and it's GROSS #I can't explain it I just #need to cut him off #but I like him as a person and I hate not being nice #but it just feels me with bad vibes #I can't figure out why #elle speaks

[noracharlesandherdogasta]

Things that amuse me:

My dog won't come to bed (in my room) until my roommate goes to bed (in her room), but the second I say that I'm going to bed, her cat is off like a shot to my room, where she will try to convince my roommate to let her stay the night

#cheshire wants to sleep in my room so badly #even though my room is hotter than the other bedroom #and there's 100% more dog in here #i can't figure out why

[baronvonriktenstein]

Something strange is I have my adblock off on tumblr but I still never see ads and Tumblr will occasionally ask me to turn off adblocker or subscribe to the ad-free experience?

I mean I have the popup blocker on still but... yeah idk what's happening here.

#i can't figure out why #it's not that i'm complaining about not having ads #it's just that i don't know what's causing this

[wasyago]

dance of the moonlight jellies ^_^

wait no, wrong game--

#jrwi riptide #gillion tidestrider #my art #sketch #debated posting this one for so long... it feels off for some reason but i can't figure out why #i quite like how it turned out tho

[trans-der-vampire]

Man, I love the Trust AI with all my heart, Alisaie just watched her brother die in Malikahs Well and instead of rezzing him, she used limit break and then immediately died to the next hit

#ffxiv #ffxiv spoilers #shadowbringers spoiler #ish #Alphinaud keeps dying to the last boss #I can't figure out why #maybe the way I move interfers with his movement pattern or he just sucks at dodging AoEs

[kissedkass]

nico di angelo, totally devoid of any sort of metaphor. (< sarcasm) estimated time - 8-10 hours (2 sessions over 2 days) - 76 layers

details below

okay one detail below.

#nico di angelo #kassfanart #pjo #can i be real with you this looks nothing like my other nicos so if it randomly disappears its because i couldn't take it anymore #rah. #can't figure out why he looks wrong #eat up my like 6 followers

[minhosblr]

T.leeknowsaurus first insta live aka. Minho not being satisfied with instagram's filters for 18 minutes straight

#bystay #createskz #linosource #stray kids #lee know #*m.gif #*minho #analook #kpopccc #malegroupsnet #stays kept telling him stuff would happen if he did thumbs up and he called them scammers when nothing happened #someone asked him why he touched jeongin's whole face during s-class and he was like “why? can't I touch what is mine? Is there a problem?” #he also said he had his hair cut really short for their break and the stylists told him not to cut his hair anymore and he debated #on ignoring them and doing it anyway #the pain it brings me to know he wants short hair when i'm a loyal long-haired minho stan :( #he also couldn't figure out how to see the comments cause the comments only showed who followed him lol #he said the filters were boring and pretended to end the live because of it #there was a cat filter but it was a wineglass and not a cat and he wasn't satisfied #stays were annoying and told him not to do filters as always stays let him have his fun!! >:(

[sualne]

(wip) a comic about a haircut im procrastinating

#undescribed #my art #my comic #secret modern au #this is nearly word for (translated and slightly adjusted) word conversation i had with my dad. #working on the modern au i was still trying to figure out how to go about sanji's transness. then one day i had a #meltdown where this convo happened and i thought it was kind of fascinating how even though the context is different. the meaning of the #words too it's still very much the exact same 'i can't be how i want and i hate it' the difference is sanji doesn't understand why #he feels this way. it's a 'had a breakdown. bon appétit' kind of comic tbh idk if i'll get around finishing it #but it helped me figure out this version of sanji. #i need to go cut my hair

[fairyroses]

He was about to kill you, Lex. Or divulge something you didn't want me to know.

— SMALLVILLE, "Forever" (4.21)

+ bonus from "Arctic" (7.20):

#smallville #smallvilleedit #svedit #lex luthor #jason teague #lionel luthor #clark isn't in these scenes but they're still very much #clex #sv 4x21 #sv 7x20 #dcmultiverse #my gifs #'why can't you see what's right in front of your face lex?' god. god. godddd. #I think there's a really interesting discussion to be had (with many potential viewpoints) #re: to what extent lex actually knew the truth either consciously or subconsciously at any particular time #and how much he was just in denial about it (and why) #I'm not really prepared to have that discussion in these tags but like #let's face it - lex figured out that clark had powers all the way back in 1x12 #just because clark convinced him he was wrong at the time doesn't mean he just forgot that whole thing #and yet it seemed like the more seasons went on and the more obvious the truth became #especially the fact that clark was so heavily tied to all the alien weirdness of smallville #the more lex seemed to (subconsciously?) push back against accepting or recognizing that truth #I mean that's literally what he's doing in the 4x21 scene with jason #so it's like he both desperately wanted to know clark's secret but also didn't want to know at all #and that's just SO interesting #I mean jesus the 7x20 scene is supposed to be peak evil lex and yet he STILL has to be pushed into accepting the truth #and he does so with his eyes glistening because yeah he wanted to know clark's secret once upon a time but he never wanted THIS #(remember when lex told jonathan in s1 that he just wanted clark to have a happy normal life bc clark was such a good person? #and then he's told in 7x20 that to save the world he has to KILL clark and take that life away from him hahaha [crying] it's fine I'm FINE) #wow I really said 'I'm not prepared to have this discussion' and then just. proceeded to have it anyway huh. lmao oops

[strawberry-jan]

Back in late 2022, I started working on a long story about Ishin: a tale of two dummies whose weird one-night stand blossoms into a surprisingly caring relationship even as a (mostly) canon-compliant series of tragedies plays out around them. It’s a now-complete series in approximately 125,000 words and three parts, and you can read the whole thing right now on AO3: The Glorious and Bloody Deeds of Okita Soji, Volume 1: Okita Soji Versus the Scoundrel Saito Hajime; The Secret History of Saito Hajime, Volume 2: The Shiraume Incident; and, finally, Brief Notes on the Domestic Life of one Saito Hajime.

Taken as a whole, it's a story about identity and history and the stories that people tell each other and themselves about those things. And it's a story about one guy getting way too into weird Edo-era egg dishes, and another guy finding himself embroiled in an extended detective sequence, and a third guy composing a series of corny haiku that (almost) nobody wants to read. And, of course, it's also a story about people who are shamelessly and sometimes explicitly in love (so you probably shouldn't read it at work).

This whole big, sprawling thing has been a labour of love on my part: it turns out that I adore writing historical fiction and finding excuses to read books and journal articles in order to write it better. In addition to making not one but four little illustrations to celebrate the fic's completion (and please look at them up-close; I hand-inked all those kimono patterns), I've drawn up a list of some of the sources that I consulted for my writing, and you can find those under the cut.

This is not an absolutely exhaustive list of sources; I don’t think it’s super useful to catalogue the extremely nitty-gritty stuff, like that time that I felt compelled to find out what the state of strawberry cultivation was in 1860s Japan, or when I needed to picture exactly what it looked like when Haruka was repairing Ryoma’s kimono. That being said, I’ve added a couple of things that are really particular to my stories but that I thought were cool enough to share.

Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. U of California P, 2015. (This one was a really fun read – it combines a short history of yokai in folklore with a little catalogue of yokai.)

Jansen, Marius B. Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration. Stanford UP, 1971. (Super useful as an introduction to the Bakumatsu era and for biographical details about Ryoma and the figures around him.)

“Japanese Wiki Corpus.” https://www.japanesewiki.com/. (This is a machine-translated collection of articles on the Japanese side of Wikipedia related to Kyoto. As with a lot of things on Wikipedia, the citations on these articles tend to be poor or nonexistent, but it’s a useful starting point for information on figures and events that don’t have an English wiki equivalent. Definitely more useful if you can then head over to the original wiki articles and parse them out yourself.)

“Kabuki21” and “The Noh.” https://www.kabuki21.com/section.php, https://www.the-noh.com/en/plays/index.html. (I’m lumping these two together because I tended to consult them in tandem. Without getting too much into my personal details I am – among other things – a non-practicing theatre scholar, so whenever I wanted to have characters in my old-timey fics refer to something cultural, my first stop was old plays. These sites have, respectively, summaries of kabuki plays and full texts of Noh plays available for you to browse. If you’ve read my other fics you will probably have seen that I referred to the kabuki play “Fuwa” in 亀が如く.)

Katsu, Kokichi. Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai. Translated by Teruko Craig. U of Arizona P, 1988. (A book that needs to be taken with a grain of salt because it’s an autobiography written by a guy who sounds like a real blowhard, but it’s still a really fascinating look into the daily life of a low-ranking samurai.)

Leupp, Gary P. and Tao, De-min. The Tokugawa World. Routledge, 2022. (Of particular interest is Kimura Sachihiko’s essay, “The Shinsengumi: Shadows and light in the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate” [1104-1124], which gave me a bunch of incidental details about the Roshigumi that I incorporated into the sections of this series that were told from Inoue and Hijikata’s perspectives.)

“Old Photos of Japan.” https://www.oldphotosjapan.com/. (Pretty self-explanatory. Very useful as a resource for picturing scenes!)

“Shinsengumi Archives.” https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/. (A long-running tumblr dedicated to cataloguing resources about the Shinsengumi. There’s an absolute wealth of information collected here, and best of all, the creator cites their sources and even provides links to the original texts. Although it’s focused on the Shinsengumi, it’s impossible to overstate how useful this site is for prospective Bakumatsu-era fic writers in general. The collection of Hijikata’s poems with links to others’ translations and commentary is here: https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/post/683071924948058112/hijikata-toshizos-haiku-poems. The creator of the blog also links to a translation of Nagakura’s and Shimada’s diaries, and while the document is machine-translated, it’s still a great source of historical details: https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/post/678083336614428672/where-can-you-read-the-memoirs.)

Smits, Gregory. “Warding off Calamity in Japan: A Comparison of the 1855 Catfish Prints and the 1862 Measles Prints.” EASTM 30 (2009): 9-31. (Okay, this one is highly specific to my fic – it comes up in Part 2 when Okita tells his story about Kashima and again a couple of chapters later when his pile of remedies includes a crudely-drawn picture meant to ward off indigestion – but I love little details like this so I did want to make a point of sharing it here.)

“Tamago Hyakuchin” and “Tofu Hyakuchin.” http://codh.rois.ac.jp/edo-cooking/tamago-hyakuchin/recipe/, https://toyama-tofu.jp/tofuhyakutin.html. (These are collections of Edo-era egg- and tofu-based recipes. They’re two of the sources cited in Cookpad’s collection of modernized Edo-era recipes: https://cookpad.com/recipe/list/14604664.)

Vaporis, Constantine N. “Linking the Realm: The Gokaido Highway Network in Early Modern Japan (1603-1868).” Highways, Byways and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World. Ed. Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 90-105. (Some of the works cited in this article also sound interesting, but I didn’t have a chance to dig any deeper as I just wanted to know a bit about the Tokugawa-era roads. Also interesting in this vein is Jilly Traganou’s book The Tokaido Road: Travelling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan [2004].)

Wert, Michael. Meiji Restoration Losers. Harvard UP, 2013. (Not directly useful as a source for writing about Ishin – it’s about later events and it mostly tracks the posthumous construction of one specific Tokugawa magistrate’s history – but it was an engaging read and I found it interesting as an exploration of how people continue to look back on the Bakumatsu era and the Meiji Restoration, which is something that the game is, of course, also doing.)

Yamakawa, Kikue. Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life. Translated by Kate Wildman Nakai. U of Tokyo P, 1992. (Another one of those bits of essential reading on everyday life for low-ranking samurai, this time with a focus on women’s lives and households more generally. I didn’t use a lot of from this book in my fic, but it has everything from translations of songs to records of families’ financial transactions, and it’s fascinating to read about all the turmoil in Mito playing out in the background of these families’ lives.)

“Yokai.com.” https://yokai.com/. (The creators of this site make a point of not going into detail about their sources, and they’re very careful to state that they don’t intend for the project to be “the final authority” on yokai, but I enjoyed browsing the site to get some ideas for Okita’s stories – and once you know the name of a particular yokai that you’re interested in, it’s easy enough to go look up other sources on them.)

#like a dragon ishin #crime boys #my art #I know I said I was going to turn my attention to the mainline games after wrapping this series up but #what if I just never got off the ishin train #I mean there's pretty much nobody writing ishin fic at this point and I can't figure out why #it almost feels like I have a duty #anyway I hope if you read this fic you also find yourself thinking about my extremely cringe ishin rarepair

[fictionadventurer]

What was the point of Scrooge's trip with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? On a structural level, it makes sense--three is the fairy tale number, and you can't visit the past and present without also including the future--but on a character level, it doesn't quite seem necessary. Showing a man that he'll die alone, unloved, and unmourned seems like the strategy you take as the last-ditch effort to convince a guy that he needs to change his ways. But that situation doesn't apply to Scrooge. He started softening immediately after he first arrived in his past. By the time he finished with the Ghost of Christmas Present, he was fully onboard with the need to reform, so the Ghost's vision of his future seems like unnecessary cruelty. Why show him all this when he was already planning to change his ways?

A few things come to mind. One is that this vision of the future wouldn't have affected Scrooge unless he had already changed his ways. A cold, hard businessman could have seen his lonely death as just the way of the world, might have viewed the people who stole the clothes from his corpse as just people doing what's practical in this world. He needed to relearn the value of the intangibles--human connection, respect for others--to see the true horror of the lonely death and the vultures who defiled the dead man.

But why the horror? Can't he reform without being threatened with doom? It's possible--but it's also possible such a reform would be temporary. After all, Scrooge started as a friendly, loving young man, but retreated into himself and his business out of fear of poverty and fear of the way the world looks down upon poor people. Even if a reformed Scrooge started on a course of Christmas charity, there was always a chance that the enthusiasm would fade, and the worldly fears would start creeping back in. The only way to beat those fears is to give him something to fear that's even worse than poverty. He needs to see the horrible end that his selfish ways would lead to, so he won't be tempted to slide back into them.

There's also the fact that seeing his death makes him ecstatically happy to find that he's alive after the Ghost is gone. Had Scrooge been spared the vision of his future, he might have been happy to find himself on Christmas Day, but his joy would have been nowhere near the manic glee he experiences after coming back from the future. Now, he doesn't just get a new start--he gets a second chance. Coming back from his own grave makes him mindful of his death, but it also makes him hyperaware of the fact that he's still alive. He isn't in the ground yet. He still has time to do good and make connections with others so he doesn't die alone.

Seeing the past reminded him of the innocence he'd lost. Seeing the present reminded him of the people whose lives he was missing out on. Seeing the future reminded him that death is waiting, so it's important to live virtuously while we can. All three are important because all three brought him outside of himself and taught him to value the wider world, just in time to live through another Christmas Day.

#a christmas carol #charles dickens #once again i've ponderously worked my way to the explicitly stated moral of the story #but i had to work my way there because stave 4 left me unsettled #had i been scrooge that trip probably would have squashed any desire i had to reform #the ghost *doesn't say* whether or not the future can be changed #what if this is just proof he's doomed no matter what so why bother changing? #fortunately scrooge was much better than i was about logic #namely: no reason to show him this future if it *can't* be changed #the point of these ghosts is to save him from marley's fate #plus we did have the ghost of christmas present's implications that future shadows can be changed #it's kind of interesting when you step back from familiar stories that just go this way because it's how they're supposed to go #and really dig into 'wait a minute. why did it go like this?' #it usually winds up with me figuring out that the writer knew what they were doing #but it's also nice to see the scaffolding that got us to the story

[theminecraftbee]

okay now that i'm no longer trying to keep a project secret from certain people i can complain publicly about a thing i've been losing my mind about:

why the fuck is the evo wiki like that.

listen. i know. i know fandom wikis being decent entirely relies on whether there are people who both want to obsessively categorize things enough to fill out the wiki, with the free time to do that kind of obsessive categorization, and the desire to manage it all as a wiki. believe me, i know. but please i'm just trying to do research please, please at least bigb's page was just Entirely Empty so i knew i had useless information and just left. why the fuck did the mafia's page, by contrast, have this:

a sentence that is actively LESS USEFUL THAN IF IT WERE NOT THERE.

and then grian's page - GRIAN'S. GRIAN'S. THE ONE PAGE I THOUGHT MIGHT HAVE A SHOT OF BEING FILLED OUT. JOKE'S ON ME I GUESS.

BECAUSE IT HAS THIS????? I'M LOSING MY MIND. WHY ON EARTH IS THE WIKI LIKE THIS. WHY IS IT THIS BAD. PLEASE I'M JUST TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT EVERYONE'S RELATIONSHIPS WITH JIMMY AND MARTYN WERE PLEASE,

anyway thankfully i had friends who could help me with their own knowledge and who also found the evo recap but in conclusion i have been being driven mad by this for weeks, thank you for coming to my ted talk.

#evo smp #wailing and screaming. why is it THIS BAD #and like i know. i know fandom wikis can be very abandoned. #it's not like the hc wiki is actually all that good either (especially for less-watched hermits) #but this feels like 'bad because abandoned and lots of blank pages' and more ACTIVELY TRYING TO UN-HELP ME #ITS MAKING ME CRAZY #anyway. ANYWAY. i can FINALLY do this rant publicly because this project had to stay secret until today but now it can be public #.......which is to say hi i'm writing an evo thing don't worry about it. #anyway. the only vaguely useful page was the watchers one and even that one didn't have much detail in the places i actually wanted it #this is a call to action for any evo fans who really like wikis i guess? mostly i just wanted to share these two screenshots #because like. look. me having trouble figuring out who salem was because her page is blank is one thing #getting a 'i can't bother' in the ACTUAL TEXT OF THE ARTICLE is another #once again: thank god my beta found the recap.

[blotsjunkyard]

#failed attempts at a character sheet #idk why i keep doing this #i wanted to figure out how i might wanna draw aang and zuko differently #and while i GUESS i have a hand on how i wanna draw zuko #i can't decide on a face shape for aang #[sigh] #i should make them kiss #ig that'll fix me if not them #consistency? don't know her #im just in one of those phases where i put perfection over progress #it'll be over soon and i'll be back to drawing inconsistently with no remorse #gotta hold on till it blows over #I had this urge to draw Zuko with his hair a little grown in before he cut off his tail #aang #zuko #avatar the last airbender

[yasmeensh]

Some Tam concept art. Warm-weather attire edition.

#personal project #Tam #paleolithic #idk why I find him difficult to draw ksjdgnds #I can't figure out how I want his face to be #I know his adult version tho #Second half of the story is still pretty vague right now so not sharing more than that on it.