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Okay so, got here from a book on animal behavior but: Vulcan stand-up comedy as a competitive activity.

Because most Vulcans don't actually pretend they don't have emotions, it's all about self-regulation, right? And good comedy usually hinges on manipulating the relationship between our faculties of recognition and surprise in various ways, you can get pretty scientific with it.

So Vulcans go to the comedy act, and the idea is the comedian is trying to make you crack up, and the audience is trying to not even crack a smile, and if you do laugh, you lose. Like all in good fun, but Vulcans are both really competitive and really aware of how dangerous that urge can be to a society, so this could actually be classified as highly orthodox Surakian practice.

So of course the comedian has to actually be funny, or there's no challenge and the game is boring.

Which means the really good Vulcan comedians (most of whom tend to extremely dry delivery of their bits) are going to go around playing to packed houses, which mostly sit staring stonily back at them, with occasional breaks when someone loses it and reacts.

And after a show you'll have Vulcans walking out discussing with great approval how very humorous that was, with varying degrees of muted smugness or chagrin depending on if they won or lost.

I bet there are human comedians whose grandest fantasy is being good enough to do a set in Vulcana Regatta and have people going around bragging about not laughing at them.

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‘He’s’ – the first speaker waved his hands vaguely, trying to get across the point that someone was a hamper of food, several folding chairs, a tablecloth, an assortment of cooking gear and an entire colony of ants short of a picnic – ‘mental.’

-- Terry Pratchett - Hogfather

#Discworld

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Official Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak Concept Art: Doctor Tadori with Cohoot

#mohun

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#ffxiv

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You know, something I think is fun/funny but I don't see often enough in svsss crossovers with other stories that have much higher power scaling/power ceiling is like. Let the visiting characters keep their original power levels, so Binghe's protagonist halo manifests in increasingly cartoonish hijinks that keep him alive and unharmed in the face of a cultivator who should, by all rights, be able to reduce him to a greasy stain with a wave of their hand. It would kinda highlight how, despite the wife plot nonsense and million magical flowers and plot devices, the svsss world is really quite tame and pales in a lot of ways in comparison to some of the truly insane shit that can go on in cultivation settings.

Sure, you can just ignore that and bring everyone down to svsss standard (which really only goes up to maybe nascent soul level) for story cohesion or whatever, but that's not nearly as funny imo.

#I've been thinking about dvawt and how wenren e would handle a vacation to svsss #he would be fascinated I think #but also like I've been thinking about that possible ffxiv crossover #dropping the WoL in svsss would be unfair to everyone bc breaking the narrative is kind of their JOB #anyway I can probably name like three different danmeis at the top of my head where even side characters should be able to like #wreck anyone and everyone including binghe #half of them would be amused the other half would be frothing mad about it that they actually can't

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people who draw fictional characters cuddling or napping together are the backbone of pur society, truly where would we be without them

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https://twitter.com/sssA_km

#ffxiv

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yin hanjiang

#devil venerable also wants to know

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all goofing aside I genuinely don't understand the urge to reimagine Taylor Allison Swift as a secretly queer icon when the pop music scene(TM) is like. literally overflowing with women who actually like women. Gaga and Kesha and Miley and Halsey are right there. Rina Sawayama and Hayley Kiyoko and Rebecca Black and Kehlani and Victoria Monét and Miya Folick if you're willing to get slightly less top 100. Janelle and Demi for them nonbinary takes on liking girls. like what are we doing here. like I'm not even saying you can't enjoy Taylor but why would you hang all your little gay hopes on her.

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Peacocks are hilarious, really. They really are just like

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it's funny, I was talking to someone last night who didn't really know what an illustrator was. so when I introduced myself as one, he gave a speech that would've probably gone over well with a gallery artist, but which was precision-tailored to make any illustrator within a 50 mile radius go into eyes-glowing-red kill mode.

his speech was about how there is a difference between craft and art, and that people can practice craft (as in, skillfully execute a painting) without it having any artistic merit.

so I'm someone who gets paid to paint waffles for restaurant menus and dinosaurs for museums exhibits, and AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH! you can't make art without it being something something you've made. does that make sense? like every illustrator I know has an individual way of approaching any given imagery that is informed by a lifetime of inspiration, and of passive intake of culture, and of the specific mistakes they make because of whatever their particular mass of grey matter deems as important thing to render or unimportant, just fuck it up.

I can make something that is informed by both a century of Canadian print-making and by my own particular neurosis, and it can also be commissioned commercial imagery that I regurgitate without care because I want to pay my mortgage. everything is art, nothing isn't art, art is something sticky and impossible to shake off of you.

anyway he got very wide-eyed and said "I'm sorry if I offended you," so today I feel a bit bad for having gotten so, uh.... excited.

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Just a big pile of Shen Qingqiu/Yuan sketches and what not from twitter! He's so fun, and wow...such a huge loser. Had lots of fun drawing my take on him!

#svsss #he looks great #dumbass millennial one-person clown show

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🌊

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The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol

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Sometimes you just have one of those moments where the progress we've made as a culture get thrown into stark relief. You look at something and go "Holy shit, that would never have happened when I was a kid."

Today, I had one of those moments when I realized that the teenage boys I'm working with are just. genuinely, openly enthusiastic about going to Build-a-Bear for their outing.

These are sixteen and seventeen year old boys! They just had a whole conversation about what to name their "cute", mostly new squishmallows! They're genuinely excited that they're going to Build-a-Bear this weekend and asking other kids to pick up specific accessories for them!!

Holy shit, that never would've happened when I was 16. None of the boys would have dared to be visibly interested - and neither would most of the girls! There would have been a million gay jokes and "Haha, you're a girl" jokes and "What are you, a baby?" jokes. Teenagers weren't even supposed to care about anything back then!

Less than 15 years later, and I'm watching three 17 year old boys treat all that as not even worthy of comment.

So let's call that a reason for hope. Even when the kids aren't alright, in some ways apparently they are alright. Go Gen Z, honestly. It's so lovely to watch you guys just openly doing and saying stuff that, when I was a teen, would've been a social death sentence.

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Hmmm. Do I want to potentially fuck the tags up on my fic to try and reorder the relationships again? AO3 refused to let me last time I tried, but we have very definitely arrived in QiJiu town and this bus ain't going nowhere.

I also should honestly just redo my summary and general tags, because the general theme of the story has moved past the original gimmick, but I don't really know what new thing to put there.

At least the title can stay as is, because connecting through creative pursuits and understanding each other - being in tune if you will - is still the driving theme and eventually we will get back to some music. There will be a concert sooner or later - SQQ promised an event to the BZP servants and it would be a good opportunity to pay them back the wages that were stolen from them.

I need to think about things...

#shut up tc #tbd