#a logistical clusterfuck

[cricketnationrise]

thanks for the tag y'all @welcometololaland and @kiwiana-writes

rules: give us the links to your fic with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the least words.

MOST HITS: Going Platinum - RWRB; the camboy!alex au (E)

SECOND MOST KUDOS: Burnin' Through the Sky - RWRB; my piece for @thebrownstone Anniversary Exchange, a speed-dating to basically married speedrun (E)

THIRD MOST COMMENTS/FIFTH MOST WORDS: Got Your Back Means I'll Get You Out - OMGCP; canon divergence after year 1 where Bitty comes out to his parents and it Doesn't Go Well. Shitty to the rescue. (T)

FOURTH MOST BOOKMARKS: a little heat goes a long way - RWRB; part 2 of the firstprince cockwarming 'their desk has seen a lot' series (E)

LEAST WORDS: (excluding drabbles because it would have been a bajillion-way tie otherwise) a logistical clusterfuck - OMGCP; this is a RWRB AU ficlet featuring Georgia Martin's powerpoint to Jack about dating a fellow Falconer, originally written on tumblr about a week after reading RWRB for the first time, it didn't get uploaded till over a year later, 218 words (T)

i'm tagging: @the-lincyclopedia @cha-melodius @appalamutte @parvuls @weneedtotalkaboutfic @parseisflat @zimms @dessertwaffles @princesseugenefitzherbert @ivecarvedawoodenheart @omg-whiskey and anyone else who wants to play!

#cricket writes #fic stats game #rwrb #omgcp #tag game #going platinum #burnin through the sky #got your back means i'll get you out #a little heat goes a long way #a logistical clusterfuck #mind the ratings at the end

[itsbenedict]

so many baseball bats

get a haircut, hippie

WK reviews +5 lessons

make a list of art assets necessary for the launch

do something off that list of assets

update loop for fight screen, go through lifecycle

okay sure it's 1:43 AM but i did get everything done, and i don't have to get up early tomorrow

#sc accountability #i also caught up on cleveland quixotic today and man #good good shit #isekai logistics clusterfuck slash theodicy story slash raw exploration of the theme of desire #perfidia is there and she Cannot Catch A Break #s'great

[qqueenofhades]

i do genuinely hesitate to ask, as i am sure i will find out more than i meant to in time, but atm my various feeds and an uninformed google are not telling me what most recently exploded about the british government, so if you have the time and the inclination i'm agog for your summary/take

HOO BOY. It has been a Things Exploding In the British Government day to the extent that in the hour-odd between my previous post and this one, I had to go back and check if anything ELSE had exploded while I wasn't looking. Everything that they are currently denying will probably be confirmed within the next 12 hours or less, though, so nobody get too comfortable.

Anyway, we all remember how Liz Truss succeeded Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, met the Queen, the Queen immediately fucking croaked which honestly was the funniest time she could possibly have done it, the country ground to a total halt for ten days, and then when it got going again, Truss and her chancellor (aka finance minister, for those of you happily ignorant of British politics), Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed a Thatcherite wet-dream economic plan of unfunded massive tax cuts for rich people, because something something Stimulate Growth. We are also generally aware that this crashed the pound through the floor, blew up people's mortgages and other mildly important bills, and did nothing to deal with the actual energy bills/cost of living crisis currently engulfing the UK. Oops.

After absolutely everybody, including the commie socialists at the Bank of England, screamed OH MY GOD WHAT ARE YOU MORONS DOING???, and the day after Kwarteng insisted he would absolutely remain in post and he had 100% confidence in the Plan, he... got sacked for creating this, the Plan that Truss had asked him to deliver and which had won her the Tory party members' election. This made him officially the second-shortest serving chancellor in UK history aside from the guy who literally died in office. Womp womp. That will be a pub quiz answer for you. You're welcome.

Having spent all this time hiding from the press, then giving eight-minute press conferences during which you could literally track the pound crashing in real time, and performing more U-turns than a dancing dashboard hood ornament, Liz Truss took a break from her busy schedule of conducting the Economic Disaster Waltz in the key of B Fucked to appoint Jeremy Hunt as the new chancellor. Jeremy Hunt is mostly notable for being a Tory who can put his pants on without assistance and being a genteel failure at all the previous cabinet posts he's held, which is why he is now regarded as a "safe pair of hands" in a party that has dissolved into a lot of shit-flinging coked-up gibbons who can only scream BREXIT BREXIT BREXIT and IMMIGRATION IS BAD!!! (Side note: they recently had to cancel a festival designed to "celebrate the freedoms of Brexit" due to logistics issues associated with, you guessed it, Brexit. That is not directly relevant to the current clusterfuck, but it is too funny not to include.)

To nobody's surprise, Jeremy Hunt then ripped up the entire economic plan and offered a new one, which was not measurably better than the last one but at least reversed some of the most egregious cuts, and which made everyone ask if Liz Truss had been tied up and duct-taped in the boot of a Range Rover and/or if Hunt had secretly staged a coup with the help of Larry the Downing Street Cat and taken over the government. Probably nobody in the Tory party would mind very much if he had, because they were all busy either planning how to oust Truss or publicly denying that they were indeed planning to oust Truss. One of the popular names for her successor? Boris Johnson! No, I am not making this up. Maybe this has all been a horrible dream and we're going to wake up and find that BoZo is back in charge, after massive public scandal for being a serial liar, which he had been from Day 1, finally made him resign. I repeat, what even the hell is going on here. Nobody knows. Meanwhile, Hunt is warning about even more budget austerity and "eye-watering" cuts to public services that can least afford it, because the last decade didn't result in quite enough preventable deaths for the Tories' tastes, and because they have been forced into this by a car crash completely of their own making.

....anyway. This brings us, more or less, to today. Yesterday, Truss refused to commit to protecting something called the pensions triple lock, which guarantees that old-age pensions (the UK form of social security) will rise in line with inflation, costs, or earnings. A) Inflation in the UK is now at a whopping 10.1%, and B) given as old people are literally the only demographic still willing to vote for the Tories, this miiiiiight seem like an even more unnecessarily stupid and self-sabotaging idea. Sure enough, U-Turn Number Eight Million was duly performed this morning, and Truss insisted she had always intended for the triple lock to be protected. But would Universal Credit and other welfare/benefits programs also be adjusted upward for inflation? HELL NAH! THOSE ARE FOR POOR PEOPLE! GROSS!

This, however, was only the beginning of the unpeeling of the latest idiot banana. Keir Starmer, riding high on the back of recent polls that have given Labour a 36-point lead and predicted that the Tories could be left with as few as 22 seats in Parliament if a general election was called tomorrow (leaving the SNP as the official opposition), appeared at Prime Minister's Questions and got to shoot fish in a barrel. Truss did not dissolve into a pile of goo on the floor and/or have a bucket of water thrown on her and melt into Margaret Thatcher, so that was taken as a win. Well, at least for two hours or so. Then Suella Braverman, the ex-Attorney General who had briefly run for the leadership when BoZo resigned, and who exists along with Priti Patel in order to prove that in the modern Tory party, women of color can heroically be just as much as awful xenophobic monsters as crusty old white dudes, resigned as Home Secretary. Did you even know she was Home Secretary? Neither did she. She took over Patel's job in a bid to apparently make Patel look cute and cuddly by comparison, as she is even more determined to do horrible things to migrants as much as possible. The official reason given for her resignation was that she sent an official document from her personal email account, and this had something to do with immigration and/or the Office of Budget Responsibility forecast that the Tories have, in the valiant spirit of freedom, resisted actually publishing for any of their current economic plans. CONSERVATIVES ARE GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY!! yell people on both sides of the Atlantic. Oh-kay.

Anyway, Braverman used her resignation letter to blast Truss for pretending that everything was fine and dandy, which means the BUT HER EEEEEEMAILS was absolutely just an excuse and even she wanted off this sinking ship as fast as possible. Grant Shapps is now the Home Secretary. It's not important. The point is, if more ministers start resigning, the government will probably implode just as it did when they deserted BoZo en masse. What the hell happens then? Fuck if anyone knows. Since they will, as noted, get absolutely cosmically annihilated if they call a General Election, the Tories will resist doing that with all their might (the next one isn't due until 2024, which is about 1004329 years away at the current rate that time is passing here). Truss was already elected by a tiny minority of the country (about 160,000 Tory party members). STICK RISHI SUNAK IN THERE AND CHANGE THE RULES AGAIN?? HECK, SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN! KEEP THOSE MUSICAL CHAIRS COMING, CHAPS!

(Also: we will recall the Daily Star's Lettuce Cam, where a picture of Liz Truss has been placed next to a head of lettuce to see if she is kicked out of office before it rots away. It now has a special companion, Tofu. This is because Braverman, just yesterday, gave a speech attacking the latest round of climate protesters as being spurred on by Labour, the Lib Dems, and the "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati," which she doubtless thought was a very clever line at the time. Because British Twitter is British Twitter, the Tofu: 1, Braverman: 0 jokes have been rife.)

And since we are still not done: tonight, Labour forced a vote on a fracking ban which was being treated as a de facto confidence vote in the government. Aka if the Tories voted for it, they would be considered to be defying the government. Because Britain is a cartoon country run by clowns, the method of Parliamentary voting literally involves walking through Door A for Aye and Door B for Nay. The "whips," or the people whose job it is to assure that party members vote according to the government's position, have thus been known to physically stuff recalcitrant MPs through these doors, because Hail Britannia, or something. So we soon had reports that the anti-fracking vote was, dare I say it, a total clusterfrack, and the Tory whips were literally throwing crying Tory MPs through the Nay door so they would Vote To Support The Government. This sounds like a beginning to a Monty Python sketch, but it is just another ordinary evening in British politics in 2022! (Did Truss herself vote? Or BoZo, Patel, or any of the other Tory big beasts? Nope. Evidently she was "too distracted" with all the other crises going on, which probably means she just didn't want to show her face or she might get killed. Hard to blame her.)

So: the fracking ban was defeated, Labour MPs were like "oh my god the sheer clownery," even Tory MPs were spitting mad, we soon had more rumors that both the Tory chief whip and the deputy chief whip had resigned (currently in the Official Denial stage, so yeah, that will be confirmed before tomorrow morning), and I haven't even mentioned the part where one of Liz Truss's press aides admitted that they used to lie about various relatives of hers having just died so Truss didn't have to do interviews (actual quote: "just aunts and cousins, not any major relatives!"). We all wondered if that wasn't actually a lie but the minor members of the Truss family had voluntarily decided to die rather than have anyone know that they were related to her. Either that or she just sent MI6 after them. It's entirely possible.

#rionsanura #ask #politics for ts #uk politics #i truly cannot explain the magnitude of this clown show #truly #long post

[kooldewd123]

let's talk about this image for a moment

i mean just really process it. because the logistics of this bedroom just keep getting worse the longer i look at it.

that bed is not touching any walls. the shelf is blocking the back wall and there is clearly room to push it to the right.

the bed is only half-blocking the shelf, leaving an awkward gap behind the baseboard.

because the bed is so unnecessarily close to the bureau, he can't open the lower drawer without banging his shin.

the fact that the bureau is so close to the window makes it look like the bureau is also pulled away from the wall, although i'm willing to give tobias the benefit of the doubt on that one and say he just has a really narrow room because his family doesn't love him.

he's definitely banged his elbow trying to open that window with how cramped it is back there.

the position of the blanket implies tobias was sleeping with his feet towards the wall (possibly lying on the bed backwards if that's the baseboard we're seeing, although it might just be a big footboard).

as an added bonus, the model was clearly sitting with his hand resting on a ledge and they did not properly align it with the bed when they photoshopped him into this clusterfuck of a bedroom.

#maybe tobias should have tried rearranging his room before resorting to the “accidentally on purpose get trapped as a bird” plan #a little self-care can go a long way #animorphs #animorphs tobias #idiot teenagers with a death wish #koolmathgames.com

[mixelation]

I have a question about the time travel Minato fic they you wrote!!!

So, I remember in Naruto that he had an ANBU guard as a kid. Do they exist in this universe? If they do, why didn’t they immediately jump the guy who’s pretending to be the 4th hokage?

Maybe they don’t actually guard him 24/7 or something?

Adding to this, was there any kind of chakra flare when Minato flashed into this universe? I’d inagine that it would take a lot of chakra to power a jutsu that would send you to other dimensions.

If there WAS a chakra flare, are there people who are tracking down Minato right now?

Oh, I meant to include a note about this and then forgot.

I am ignoring several popular fic tropes for this genre of fic. First, there is no canonical evidence that Naruto was ever persecuted in any way besides being shunned/ignored and that one time Mizuki tricked him. No one's ever hunt him down or beat him.* Second, I am using the anime or manga portrayal of his living situation (haven't decided which yet), which to me looks like an older building that's otherwise largely free of disrepair/neglect. He's not living in squalor. Third and most relevant to your question, he doesn't have a 24/7 ANBU guard. The ANBU guard thing is purely fanon, and while I don't mind it in fics and might use it in a different fic, I personally don't think it jives very well with what canon actually shows us, and I don't feel like including it as a logistical hurdle for this fic.

IIRC, the main village security is a perimeter thing. Like, they sensed Pein coming in because of some sort of perimeter, but Itachi was able to bypass it because "he knew how." Given the clusterfuck of the chunin exams, during which they knew Orochimaru was lurking and just couldn't find him, I don't think there's any canon evidence they'd be able to pick up on foreign jutsu usage that wasn't like.... loud/obvious. So Minato is accidentally in stealth mode right now. (I did intentionally make a point to describe the park as empty and poorly lit-- no one is around close enough to recognize him.)

*I did want an explanation for why Naruto is living alone at such a young age, because him living alone IS implied in the anime, but the logistics of how a small child could do that has no canon explanation. So I decided he was removed from an orphanage (which we know canon DOES have a concept of) due to abuse, and he had various caretakers visiting him until he was deemed responsible enough to care for himself. I still didn't want to lean into "comically physically abusive" so I picked some punishments that I thought a ninja village might consider fine/normal except when issued excessively.

[ataleofcrowns]

Sorry if this has already been said but I've been thinking about the story logistics behind the poly routes and just how fucked the Crown will be in some of them.

Like imagine the X/D route- the reader sends two of their closest allies out and then they both get into trouble

Or the R/A route where you turn your head away for just a second and now A and R are out of commission

not to mention the crown just internally screaming when they realize how A and X's backstories intertwine

if the crown thinks they have it bad now just wait till everything is 2x

(also i know its not a legit route in the future, but the mental image of the crown being in a relationship with all the LIs and just by ch 10 having everyone get into some trouble amuses me to no end- like at that point they just need to sit down and put their head in their hands)

Considering all of the above: you can understand why I'm so excited to write them, right? They're going to be such a gigantic clusterfuck of emotions and conflict, both personal and political.

But it's also another reason why I can't write these while writing the solo routes at the same time. Each poly route is going to be twice the size of a solo route, basically!!

#ask #anonymous

[freezerprince]

I'm done with Dogsled forever it is dead to me. If you are lucky enough to have steered clear of my Petrigrofian obsessions during my winter-long breakdown, Dogsled is an upsettingly tragic gothic/magical realist marriage horror clusterfuck of method acting and desperate astral metaphor on the ethics, dimensional logistics, and the destructive implications of "making an Ice Betty" on the sanctity of the timeline. Follow this link 2 a pdf file, or go here for an epub version of the novella. HAPPY LESBIAN VISIBILITY WEEK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (These links keep going out for some reason so lol just check the notes).

#general uhhh cw i dont get too detailed about anything but i definitely mention drugs and self harm quite a bit. #you gotta read into it btw cause i dont explain nothing #simon petrikov #betty grof #wintergrof #casper and nova #petrigrof #winter king #dogsled

[nellie-elizabeth]

Grey's Anatomy: Never Felt So Alone (20x05)

Man, Nick sucks so much as a character I cannot believe.

Cons:

I'm going to be a broken record about Jo and Link, but wow, I don't care about their relationship. This pregnancy scare is a cheap way to introduce a shot of lightly-comedic drama into their honeymoon period and I'm bored to tears by all of it. It's a shame, because I actually think both actors are really charming and funny, and yet when they're playing off of each other in a scene, I feel absolutely nothing. The idea of going through a Jo/Link marriage and babies story just fills me with a sense of defeat and ennui. Alex Karev I miss you so much.

I feel like the takeaway from this episode is supposed to be that Meredith is being unreasonable about the Nick situation, but... nah. Nick is a boring lump of coal and Meredith has a lot of trauma around the death of loved ones, and Nick should have called sooner. I just wish that Meredith had been settled off-screen with a less annoying endgame love interest. It feels like we've lost our chance for Meredith to find a new forever person on screen, because Ellen Pompeo isn't interested in doing that anymore, and fair enough, but Nick? God, he sucks so hard.

Usually I get really moved and emotional about the "very special episodes" that this show pulls off, about all manner of serious subjects. I have to say, I felt a little alienated from this one, though. There were things I liked about it, but the core of it, the med student Eddie standing on the ledge, with Simone and Kwan talking to him, just felt very... generic, maybe? It was a lot of standard talking points about suicidal ideation, without the magic of making every guest character come alive, the way Grey's usually pulls off. I don't know. I don't feel like it was terribly done, it just didn't quite grip me.

Pros:

I really liked Owen and Amelia spending the day working together. Their romantic relationship was always such a clusterfuck but I think they have the kind of friendship that really stands the test of time. They do a risky and complicated surgery to give a med student a chance to be able to walk again, and seeing them triumph and feel that thrill of surgery again together was really quite lovely! Also, when Teddy and Owen don't have hella drama going on between them, their relationship is perfectly tolerable. I liked the ending little bit where Teddy gets cleared to go back to surgery, and she and Owen are talking over logistics for picking up the kids, etcetera. Their energy together does work for me; I remember shipping them way back in the before-times.

Bailey and Ben are really the best long-term relationship on this show. I'm almost anxious about Station 19 ending, because if Ben hops back over to be more of a main character on Grey's, they might give them relationship tension and I don't want that! Ben calming Bailey down, the two of them talking about mental health and being there to support each other... this was the part of the suicide prevention plot thread that worked the best for me. Just these two married people having a frank conversation about being there to support one another.

Despite hating everything about Nick, I did like some of Meredith's stuff in this episode. Her being able to talk through her fear with Richard was really touching. Of course she has baggage and fears around specifically this outcome! Something totally survivable happening to someone in her family, but the potential of the hospital fucking it up? I like that now that Meredith has moved to Boston and she's only a part-time character, she really does feel like more of a mom. Not to be cheesy, but it's such a fitting way to wrap up the overall arc of Meredith Grey, given where we started with her, and all her own issues with her mother. I wish Nick wasn't the person she was having the conversation with, but I also liked her being willing to process her messy emotions and admit the harm she did to others because of it. Real growth for our Mer!

As I keep saying, I really do love these new intern characters a lot. Let's go through some of these stories really fast.

Jules and Winston! Jules is growing on me more and more. I love that she stood up to Winston, and that he admitted he'd been a grump lately. Her compassion and care for the people around her is so lovely, and she manages to seem like a really strong, pragmatic person all while having empathy off the charts. We love to see it.

Yasuda gets stuck with the unpleasant job of babysitting a bunch of drunk med students with minor injuries, and things take a turn for the worse when she learns from Schmitt that Helm kept her from an interesting surgery, and made her stay in the pit. We don't know the outcome of this little betrayal yet, but I'm interested to see their relationship get more of a spotlight, even if it is to work through a difficult moment! I loved Jules comforting Yasuda at the end using a technique her mother taught her. Their friendship is so lovely.

We get some insight into Kwan's relationship to his own mental health; I loved how he stepped in and talked to Eddie after letting Simone take the lead for so long. I think it's telling that in an episode themed all around connection and reaching out to people, Kwan didn't actually open up to Simone after that experience. He didn't go to Jules, or to anybody else, to talk through what had happened. We'll have to see if he's able to form those important bonds moving forward.

And as mad as I've been at Lucas for being such a dickhead recently, I did find the scene at the end with him and Simone quite lovely. It's not a fix to everything broken between them, but it's this moment where they're able to come together to comfort and hold each other. Simone definitely needed that after the day she'd had, and I like that Lucas was willing to put aside everything else and do that.

So that's all for this one. It looks like from the promo for next week that Richard is going to have some sort of freak-out or incident at work, and I'm... kind of already tired of seeing this story again. But we'll see!

7/10

#review #grey's anatomy #grey's anatomy review #greys anatomy #greys anatomy review #grey's abc #greys abc

[bigskydreaming]

@romanticism-is-maudlinism Hey nudge me when you next see me on here for more than just a hot sec, if you don’t mind? I have thoughts that your post just now stirred up....I mostly agree with you, although I’d say the eldest daughter jokes are certainly amplified by fandom, rather than being an accurate depiction of canon - but that there IS a canon basis for that view of him and his role within the Batfam.....SITUATIONALLY. But just because Dick’s expected to navigate family tensions while in that role doesn’t innately mean that he has the full range of emotional maturity that people expect of an eldest child put in that role....because like you pointed out, those expectations are unrealistic and unreasonable. 

So I just mean, I agree with you that Dick’s not the paragon of emotional maturity he’s often made out as, nor should he be expected to be....I just disagree that the trope itself is a largely fanon thing. Again, its not as BIG of a thing in canon as it is in fanon - but I think that has more to do with how the canon Batfam as a whole just isn’t nearly as interconnected as they’re made out to be in fanon. They simply don’t play off each other’s stories and character arcs nearly as frequently as fanon treats them as, and thus logistically, that trope isn’t anywhere near AS present in canon as is implied by fanon.

But I do think its there, such as in the context of how he’s expected to handle his brothers’ conflicts over the Robin mantle, and the dynamic it gives them with Bruce, with little to no consideration ever given to what a clusterfuck his and Bruce’s relationship was at the end of his time as Robin, and how little resolution Dick’s ever gotten for that himself. Etc.

That said, I also agree that Dick’s relationships with the Titans are often overly romanticized as being so superior to his dynamics with the Batfam, when like...his relationships with the Titans are often trainwrecks happening in slow motion. But there’s another interesting angle to consider there, I think, that I want to touch on later when I have time.....and that’s the role Dick plays within the Titans and the Batfam franchises CONTEXTUALLY....and how that affects how writers approach him and his dynamics differently in each franchise.

Like, I do think that at least part of why a lot of people default to seeing the Titans franchise as a better showcase for his character....is because situationally, Titans writers as a whole are a lot more conscious of Dick being a PEER to the other Titans, even when he is their leader. The conflicts crafted for him to have with various other Titans are crafted deliberately TO be conflicts that need a resolution....and so they generally get a resolution - even if we personally might not always find a given resolution satisfying.

In contrast, I think a lot of writers (especially these days) tend to approach Dick-in-the-Batfam-franchise as being a utility player. He’s the ultimate supporting character because LOGISTICALLY he’s occupied most of the roles the other Batfam members rotate through at various points. He’s been Robin, Batman, Bruce’s junior partner, Robin’s senior partner, Bruce’s sole current ward/heir/son, the reluctant older brother, etc. He’s been fired, replaced, been both a mentor and a protege, been viewed as the golden standard Bruce is proud of and the rebellious prodigal son Bruce is estranged from, etc, etc....so he has a unique ability within the Batfranchise to fill most any role the writers WANT someone cast in, in order to play them off of one of his siblings or Bruce himself when they need someone for that other Batfam character to relate to or act as a foil to, etc.

Which leads to the problem I frequently rant about in terms of DC’s entire approach to Nightwing over the past decade especially....where its not that DC hates Dick Grayson (well, at least non-Didio DC) or wants to make him look bad or tarnish his reputation, its just that.....they’re more focused on how useful he is for telling all kinds of other Batfam and Bat franchise stories at the expense of keeping in focus his own narrative needs, character arc and stories. 

He’s CONVENIENT for the Bat franchise in a way that isn’t true of the Titans franchise, and thus the Titans franchise tends to have a better track record of telling stories that showcase Dick-Grayson-the-character rather than Dick-Grayson-the-plot-device.

And to tie this back to what I was saying about the appearance of the Titans being a better environment for Dick-Grayson-the-character than the Batfam is......from a character standpoint, as seen by fans who are keeping his character in focus the whole time, both when reading his Titans stories and his Batfranchise stories.....I’d say there is a marked difference in how Dick is written and treated by Titans narratives, and the KINDS of stories he gets to be part of, allowing him more of a range of characterization....with him seeming ‘better off’ as a member of the Titans because all those conflicts he has within the group are deliberately sown by the writers, and thus, they’re very aware that they HAVE to come up with some kind of resolution to those conflicts, even if its just a temporary one, set within a much larger/longterm character arc.

In contrast, within the Batfranchise, his own needs as a character and his own nuances and even shortcomings....even when fully on display to readers, who are approaching the Batfranchise stories from the same angle they are Titans stories.....these elements of Dick and his stories are far more glossed over and neglected, rarely getting any kind of satisfying resolution to the conflicts that readers see as ones that SHOULD logically be on display....

Because the WRITERS aren’t approaching the stories the same way. And thus when writing Dick-Grayson-the-plot-vehicle whose presence in another Batfam character’s story is largely just to facilitate their emotional arc (such as Dick being targeted by KGBeast JUST to fuck with Bruce, followed by the sheer lack of any resolution as to what Dick might feel about that being the reason his life was derailed for a couple years, or actually a better example of this might be how Dick was written in the issues around Bruce’s wedding)....the writers aren’t really even thinking about the conflicts or issues this SHOULD raise for Dick-Grayson-the-character....because he’s not there TO be a character, he’s there to be the utility player that nobody else (again, SITUATIONALLY) is as optimally positioned to be as he is, by virtue of being the first and oldest Robin/son/heir/protege.

All of which leads to a clear discrepancy in how Titans stories and Batfam stories depict his actual range/level of emotional maturity or wellbeing....because the former is INTENDING to pull Dick’s emotional issues and trauma into frame, specifically in terms of how these things affect his dynamics with his peers.....while the latter isn’t prioritizing those things at all, let alone how they might factor into his dynamics with his family. And this leads to a purely artificial inflating of his emotional maturity in Batfam stories.....because no matter how Dick SHOULD be reacting or impacted by events or other characters, realistically.....he’s always able to be the precise voice of reason, middle-man, mentor, confidante or whatever other role the story has cast him in....that the story NEEDS him to be....because that’s literally why he’s there.

And thus I’d argue there’s a SUPERFICIAL basis for seeing the Titans as a better franchise/setting/cast for Dick’s character than the Batfam ever could be....because the reason is purely situational and COULD be easily changed just by shifting writer focus and priorities in the latter, to match the former. But really, it has nothing to do with the Titans just being predisposed to be better for him emotionally and a better showcase of his emotional maturity or lack thereof.....its wholly logistical. 

Especially because - as you pointed out - his relationships with the Titans are very frequently a mess. They’re just a mess that tends to get cleaned up more often than the messes that linger in his Batfam stories because the writers failed to notice they even made them.

#oh look #and once again I have started with remind me to write this post and then proceeded to write the post anyway #in other news: i continue to be me

[nuthin-up-my-sleeve]

Just completely blew corporate accounting away.  I’ve been complaining for four fucking years that there is NO protocol or process in place for ordering materials and it always fell on deaf ears because these peeps I work with are masters at hiding shit and redirection.  I come from a rigid accounting and logistics background and find shit ALL THE TIME and still no one seems too care.  I just unraveled a mess I’ve been working on for a week and found and documented where the genius that orders materials WITHOUT a purchase order (which is why we use them) and pinned his ass to point because he is a clusterfuck and has ordered a project TWICE!!!!!!  A huge over spending.  I’m sure nothing will be said except “clean it up Darren” and then business as usual.  I need a drink.

[deirdreskye]

My vegan redditor chapo trap house listening brother isn't coming to visit after all because he got exposed to covid and I'm pretty bummed :( oh well. I've got a lot going on this weekend anyway and it would have been kind of a logistical clusterfuck anyway. And he's gonna come visit some other time soon. As the Japanese say, it can't be helped 🤷‍♀️

[bisquid]

Hey, you okay? Shit seems to be going down in your life in a pretty significant way, from your posts

The long answer is ... Long

The short answer is that there is Shit Going Down in a discord server I've been in since I was like 20 in which a bunch of people are taking sides and insisting that the other people are mean and evil and horrible and a bunch have decided that I personally (and my one other friend who backed me up in an argument) am directly to blame for all this and have been being generally obnoxious and hurtful, and I can't just leave because said other friend is the owner of the server and can't leave without shutting the whole thing down and she's refusing to just do that but I can't just abandon her, so I can't leave either and it's just a whole fucking clusterfuck

(i discovered today that I have reached the point where I get an actual anxiety attack every time i see notifs from that server)

In my brickspace personal life there is also a lot going on including the logistics of moving to another country, the ongoing titration for my ADHD medication and the long slow health decline of a long term family friend which is also not great for my like,,, sanity lol

Meanwhile this other server I volunteered to mod for is in the middle of a big rules rewrite and some people are taking the opportunity to air some - clearly long standing - grievances they've had with the mod team's modding. Which is fair and reasonable and part of why we asked for suggestions! It's just that emotions are running high, and the mod team got accused of not caring, basically (by someone who was clearly Going Though It, so I'm not holding it against them or anything!) but having spent multiple sleepless nights (timezones are a BITCH y'all) working on these rules updates and answering questions and trying to maintain an open dialogue (while my entire brain is still used to 'discord notif = brace for Bad Faith Takes and/or Outright Insult' because see above) and generally trying to not vomit my Emotional Fuckery at the people who are honestly just trying to help - is. Well the combination of these things has been extreme, and tonight I had an actual panic attack after an ongoing anxiety attack and then realized I had to vent somewhere before i literally exploded lol

#squid stuff #sorry for the wall of text lol #ask #anon

[sparring-spirals]

Okay folks, logistics post for exandria unlimited calamity!

Tagging is going to be a bit of a clusterfuck, as my non main campaign stuff tends to be. I'll be tagging everything with #critical role, #exandria unlimited, #exu calamity, and #cr liveblogging (if i remember). I'll also try to tag everything from today in the style of #exu calamity part 1, but. I might forget. Similarly, I'll try to put #exu spoilers, but if you're trying to be completely safe, just block #cr spoilers as well.

I'm also running on about 3 hours of sleep after a long week and a full day of work, so if my posts are slightly delirious and/or I bail out early, I apologize.

Okay folks! End of the world! Lets gooOooOoOooOoOoooo

#spar speaks #exu calamity #exandria unlimited #exu calamity part 1 #logistics #i see people using #exandria unlimited: calamity #but ill probably be sticking to the shorter version #did people see aabrias insta stories for today #i am AMPED #critical role

[arverthishar-hrravak]

think i'm gonna be forever adjusting hrravak's pre-bg3 timeline

dragonborn mature really quickly (equivalent of 10yo human at like 3yo; grown adults at 13-15yo) and that kind of throws off a lot of timing for her life events. her younger years are Really Busy and then there's... a really long lull (like a decade of no major events) until bg3 happens, and that bugs me

though, for the folks around her, that's kind of the goal, so i guess it would work? still gotta think of some interesting (if not major) things that happen in that time

actually the more i think about it i think that lull would be good. i can work with that

the clusterfuck of her early life is another thing though, there is a Lot that happens in a relatively short amount of time (before she's fully grown) and trying to figure the logistics of that is Fun

#hrravak

[doonarose]

Fuckity fuck. We all knew I was gonna crash hard after a couple of weeks of absolute madness and, in particular, the five days of running this big deal clusterfuck well with constant adrenaline and four hours of sleep and too much alcohol.

So the last two days I've taken afternoon naps and yesterday I only left my little solitude den to walk around the block and grab food.

And now I've of course woken up at 5am, bored out of my skull which bodes well for tomorrow's 5.30am Doctor Who.

And I cannot make up my mind what to do.

Because it's a direct eight hour drive to my parents (where dog is at so priority) but I won't do that because the drive is awful.

There's several scenic routes which take more like twelve hours, including one I've not done before because it's over the top of Australia's biggest mountain (not actually that big) but that would add more hours.

My dad's big family christmas party is tomorrow and I beholden to show up because i) I can and ii) I always do. But the logistics of who is driving who and when and how are messy and I kept threatening not to make it because I finally kind of have an excuse this year.

And also Doctor Who tomorrow morning... which might be devastating, to be honest, but last week's episode and then my five hour drive immediately after were hysterically happy and blissed out. Like i will remember those six hours fondly for decades just because of how happy I was. So watching it at my parent's house and then having to deal with them sounds awful...

But then if I don't go all the way home I have to spring money on a motel somewhere... but then I can watch DW in peace and drive quite a bit afterwards and still make the christmas party...

Fucking hell, I'm overthinking this. You should have seen my brain right after the conference. Eight of us got together at one of the airbnbs for a BBQ and I could not switch it the fuck off. Like every minor mishap I was coming up with plans and contingencies and solutions and everyone around me was looking at me like I'd grown a second head. I was so decisive and definite which I rarely am, and not loudly or in quick succession.

Anyhow, this is a spiral post. I'm grabbing my mountain of dirty clothes (almost three weeks on the road now) and checking out and getting a coffee and a hashbrown and driving to Jindabyne.

#doonas rambling

[hell-heron]

Ok so. The complaints masterpost bc I won't be sleeping OR writing my thesis today very obviously lmaoooo

The premise is: the kids aged 7-13 roughly of people who work for a certain company have a convention to go on a 14 days camp in the mountains which is organised according to an American college admissions officer's idea of wellroundedness even though no such thing exists here. So we have like 5-8 activities a day many of which are recurring/are trying for some sort of end result for example there's a 'film class' where we're attempting to wrangle our 40 tweens into all appearing in a 4 minute videoclip set to a The Family Madrigal filk. The amount of 'yesss show us the unique talent which you surely have and are comfortable performingggg' of everything is overwhelming. The wellroundedness anxiety clusterfuck timetable is theoretically varied and well split but actually everything that isn't about sports or performing is heavily sacrificed for the sake of logistics and the film project. I'm really hating the film project because the main task Is getting the other 35 to shut up while a small group is filming their talent and i feel like a prison guard.

Obviously this age range is insane for the lenght of the stay, the younger kids are constantly weeping and failing to mesh, the one-size-fits-all supervision policy does NOT work, and overall we have ten thousands logistical issues from it

The parental feedback and communication aspect is suffocating. They call home every other day, they receive messages every night (which obviously causes projectile weeping when some logistical issue means we lose a message or when someone has sane parents so they don't get messages every night like their roommates) we must post 50 pictures at least a day, which the parents use as basis for their complaints: someone for example called to ask why their child wasn't smiling in it, while one of mine, who I remind you are aged 10-12, told me his mother told him to ask why he was only in one of the pictures posted during the day. This is super alien to my formation and my ideas of what a sleepaway experience should be for and overall I don't wish to repeat the experience

Another issue is that we can't allow the younger kids to manage their own meds so we can't allow the older ones either, we confiscated all medical supplies on arrival, gave them to the infirmary and at morning and night we have to take the kids there and queue up so they can receive their allergy meds and ear hole disinfectant from a doctor. This is insane for our age group and a huge waste of time for the kids given out doctors keep some comfy hours and scold us if we ask them to come for some too minor emergency.

Another is we have uniforms which we replace and wash every day, this is both to make them more easily recognizable and because the younger kids are not really capable of managing their luggage etc that makes sense. However the whole process of managing the materials is so convoluted and fast-paced and unintuitive, the time allotted for the morning, shower and night transitions is kind of narrow, so it means that every time the kids are inside their rooms they have to be completely focused on quickly carrying out their procedures, if they goof off or leave the room or do anything else but prepare it complicates things immensely and that just sucks. There's a resentment this breeds in the worker because you think 'wtf, we provide 14 hours of unstopping fun for you all day, we only ask that you be focused and cooperative and not prioritizing fun for 30 minutes thrice a day, how can you make it so hard for us instead?' but it's not really what's happening because so little of it is real unstructured fun of the kind they want when they're chilling in their rooms, even though they really do enjoy the activities. The uniforms and backpacks and water bottles and everything are also low quality AND scarce so we can't do anything about the constant complaints which really erodes trust imho that you will be the person Who can help with their more serious problems. I feel like only using the uniforms for trips outside the Camp might have been better.

We also do pretty elaborate evening parties which are just unnecessary imho after very long intense days of activities and the entertainers are just so fucking whinyyy lmao the kids enjoy it plenty are plenty engaged but they still complain that the counselors don't motivate them enough and don't sit with them and don't participate actively enough like sorry if we need to keep a bit of a distance to observe discipline problems and also we work 15 hours a day with no break.

We always finish at midnight bc there's not enough night workers and we have to put the kids in bed ourselves and can't leave til they're calm, and after bedtime we have a group reunion and age-group reunion, the second of which is useful but both of which run long, and after that my coworkers still appear to hang out. I don't lol. This obviously leaves just the bare 8 hours to sleep, no time for anything else in the day, some of my coworkers I think have a bit more time for hygiene bc they live on the premises but they put me in a B&B a couple minutes away and it does sadly make a difference, i can't go to my room at any point during the day.

I had NO introduction to my duties whatsoever no tour of the premises no anything lmao, on the days where I should have done that I instead was sent to another city to bring home the Kids from the June Camp, sleep there and pick up the July ones. None of that was in the job description, it was told to me that I would Need to do that while I was on the train for the camp. My roommate Is a freshly 18 year old girl still with a year of high school to go and she still had to do that, though not on her own like me. Overall the circulation of information is painfully stilted, there's too many groupchats none of which i was added before the start.

#op