aethersea - Tumblr blog

aethersea · 2 hours

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I don't think I believe that people in Sunnydale High School think of the Scooby Gang as "Buffy Summers and her weird friends".

I mean, yes, they know Buffy is (more than) a bit weird and has a history of violence, and they know that she's often at the center of lots of strange things that happen in the school. But if you forget what you know about vampires and the Slayer and look at the dynamics and personal histories of that group from the outside, there's exactly one person who connects them all together. And it's not the (ex?) arsonist and (ex?) gang member who recently transferred to Sunnydale from LA.

Everyone in Sunnydale High seems to know Willow Rosenberg, and everyone knows she's a huge nerd who (A) love libraries and (B) has something of a history of either tutoring (e.g. Rodney Muson) or otherwise hanging out with (e.g. Shelia Martini) some of the school's more violent and dangerous elements.

There's Xander Harris, Willow's best friend since kindergarten (and who, unlike Willow, doesn't really seem to have many other friends at all after Jesse mysteriously vanishes)

There's the (weirdly religious?) ex-aronist from LA who Willow seems to be tutoring in the library a lot (see B above) or who she's possibly recruited as muscle. Sheila and Rodney both mysteriously went missing one day too, so people aren't that surprised when Buffy does herself at the end of junior year.

There's the English librarian (see A above) that anyone who has seen Willow's locker knows Willow has a crush on

There's the computer science teacher that anyone who has been in class with knows Willow also has a crush on, who sometimes has Willow come in to class to help her run sessions for remedial students on the weekends and whose job Willow (somehow) takes over when she dies

There's Cordelia Chase, who Willow has a whole historical Thing with, probably going back to when they were little kids themselves. People say Willow hates her but they're always hanging out together (there's a persistent rumor that they once spent a whole night together in a closet, if you know what I mean) and Willow helped run her campaign for Homecoming Queen. Cordelia was secretly dating Willow's friend for a bit and some people say Willow was really, really upset when she found out; read into that what you will.

There's the mysterious older guy in a band who doesn't talk much and that Willow is apparently actually dating. (This isn't the same older guy in a band Cordelia was dating, but oddly enough it is the same band.) A few kids swear they've seen him naked and locked up in the library at night.

There are (again, from the outside) people like Willow's childhood friend Amy and Amy's friend Michael, who people might remember were once being investigated by the police for ritual murder before Amy mysteriously vanished

To the outside eye, the Scooby Gang are Willow Rosenberg and her weird friends.

(A lot of kids swear that one time they saw her hold the whole Bronze hostage and rip a girl's throat out with her teeth, but of course Principal Snyder hushed it all up and she was back at school the next day. He really doesn't want to have to hire a new computer science teacher this year.)

#buffy the vampire slayer #man I was with you for the whole ride but that last entry took me OUT #buffy meta #love this #if I ever write fic for this show I'll have to remember it bc it's gold #and absolutely reasonable too #love the implications here #willow's going to be running a mafia by the time she's in college

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aethersea · 4 hours

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so there’s this story that my grandmother loves telling (well, in recent years. for the first seventy years of her life she did not talk about her childhood at all.)

the story is that a family friend of theirs was Austria’s finance minister*, and Jewish, and after the anschluss he realized he was in trouble, but like many of Austria’s Jews he seriously underestimated how much trouble. by the time he realized it was too late to get out safely. He was also old and in failing health, so dramatics weren’t ideal.

so he asked a family member to drive him to the mountains on the Italian-Austrian border, and he’d cross there. It was easy enough to avoid the Austrian authorities going out, but you didn’t have a chance of avoiding the Italian ones, and they stopped him.

“Oh,” he said to them, “Benito knows me. Tell him I’m here and he’ll call me a car.” And indeed, they called Mussolini and he called him a car. My reaction the first time I heard this story - and the reaction of everyone I’ve told it to - has been “so Mussolini opposed the Holocaust? He was helping smuggle Jews out of Austria?” And, no, he didn’t and wasn’t. But he knew this guy, they were old friends, the guy was in town, so Benito called him a car. Which is more characteristic of humans than the version where Mussolini was secretly a decent person, really. A million is a statistic, but this guy? I know this guy. He’s a great guy. There’s the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, and I think it applies, but the word that’s always come to my mind is the myopia of evil, the tendency to treat People well but just not look out at the world and see billions of People, not believe that the principles you apply to the ones you know apply to all of them everywhere.

#tales of tumblr

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aethersea · 5 hours

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Jack Black did more of Hit Me Baby One More Time, and I am living for this.

What an ad for Kung Fu Panda 4

#well damn ok then #dance

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aethersea · 6 hours

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pride & prejudice (1995): from book to screen

#nice #pride and prejudice

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aethersea · 7 hours

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Anthony Machuca · “Forbidden knowledge”

#libraries #snapshots from the other place

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aethersea · 8 hours

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#bit of writing #video games

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aethersea · 10 hours

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The following is not my idea; it was the original brainchild of a friend of mine named Omicron, with help from various others including EarthScorpion, TenfoldShields, @havocfett and ShintheNinja:

So, you know what I want to do one day? Run (or play in) a D&D campaign in which the Big Bad Super Dragon that is fuckoff ancient and unfathomably powerful and whose actions have shaped history and bent the course of nations and had repercussions on the whole culture and society in the region where it's set; the Bonus Special Boss for some endgame optional quest after you defeat the direct BBEG and win the campaign...

... is a white dragon.

To explain this for people not deep into 5e monster lore; D&D dragons are sapient beings, and known for their instincts and tendencies, and whenever you meet an big evil dragon that's really old it's usually this ancient creature of terrible intellect Smaug-ing it up all over the place.

Except white dragons are fucking stupid. Like, they're still capable of speech and thought! They're just… feral, hungry morons. And you almost never see them portrayed as ancient wyrms for that reason; they lack majesty. Critical Role did it, yes, but even then, Vorugal is explicitly the most bestial member of the Chroma Conclave, and the others are the more intelligent planners and long-term threats. An ancient white as a nation-defining endboss, though; not a thug for a smarter master but as the strongest and biggest threat around is just not the sort of thing you tend to see.

Adventurers: "Oh wise Therunax the Munificent, gold dragon of Law and Good, what can you tell us adventurers of the evil dragons which rule this land?" Therunax the Munificent, 500-year old Gold Dragon: "Good adventurers, know this: this land is torn apart by the evil of Tiamat's spawn. The eastern marches are the dwelling of Furinar the Plague-Bringer, black dragoness whose hoard is a thousand sicknesses contained in the body of her tributes. The southern volcanic mountains are the roosting of Angrar the Wrathful, the fiery red dragon, who brings magmatic fury on all who do not worship him. And the northern peaks are home to Face-Biter Mike, the oldest and most powerful of all, of whom I dread to speak." Adventurers: "F-Face-Biter Mike???" Therunax: "Oh yes, verily indeed; two thousand years has Mike lived, and his eyes have seen the rise and fall of five empires, and a hundred and score champions have sought to slay him; and each and every one he bit their fucking face off."

Like... I want to see a campaign where Face-Biter Mike is genuinely the most powerful dragon in the region, if not the entire world. Where sometimes he descends on a city to grab himself some meatsicles and causes a localised ice age by the beat of his vast wings and the frigid wastes of his mighty breath and by the chill his mere presence brings to everything for miles around him, and everyone just has to deal with that for the next decade. An entire era of civilization comes to an end, an empire falls, tens of thousands starve in the winter, all because Mike wanted a snack. Where his hoard is an unfathomably vast mass of jewels and artefacts and precious stones frozen in an unmelting glacier, except he is a nouveau riche idiot with fuckall appraising skill, so half of his hoard is coloured glass or worthless knicknacks, and he doesn't give a shit.

"Your Draconic Majesty, this crown is… It's pyrite." "Yeah, well, it's brighter than this dusty old thing made out of real gold, it's my new best treasure. Throw the other one away." "…throw the Burnished Tiara of Bahamut, forged in the First Age of Man, your majesty???" "See? I can't even remember its fucking name." "But my lord-" "DO YOU WANT TO BE A MEATSICLE" "…I will fetch a trash bag, your majesty."

But at the same time, he's not stupid, he's just simple, and in some ways that makes him more dangerous than the usual kinds of scheming Big Bad you see in these things, while simultaneously justifying why Orcus remains on his throne (because he's lazy). Face-Biter Mike doesn't make convoluted plans or run labyrinthine schemes; he just has a talent for violence and a pragmatic, straightforward approach to turning any kind of problem he struggles with into a problem that can be resolved with violence. Face-Biter Mike has one talent and it's horrifying physical power, so his approach to any complicated problem is "how do I turn this into a situation where I can fly down and bite this dude's face off?" with absolutely no regard for the collateral damage or consequences of doing so, because those are also things he can turn into face-bitable problems.

"My lord, the dread necromancer Nikodemion is using his undead dragons to attempt a conquest of the eastern kingdom; his agents are everywhere, his plans are centuries in the making, what can we do against such a mastermind?" "I'm gonna fly over the capital and eat the eastern king." "M-my lord???" "The kingdom will collapse without leadership, Nikodemion will win his war, he'll take the capital and crown himself king." "And that helps us… how?" "Once he does I'll fly over to the capital and eat him." "…" "This is why you advisors all suck. You're all about convoluted plans when the only thing I need to win is know where my enemy is so I can fly down there and eat him. Stop overthinking things."

And, like, yeah, it's a simplistic plan, but when you're several hundred tons of nigh invincible magical death, you don't need brilliant strategy; the smartest way to win a war is, in this case, the simplest. He's not even all that clever at figuring out the consequences of face-biting, he's just memorised the common consequences of doing so.

(If you want to go all in on Mike being the major mover and shaker in the region; Nikodemion only even has a pet zombie dragon because Mike killed the last dragon to show up and contest his turf but wasn't going to eat a whole dragon by himself. Nikodemion got to stick around and amass that much power because Mike ate the Hero of the Realm while he was adventuring because he figured the Hero would come and try to slay him at some point. Nikodemion got started because Mike ate half the leadership of the Academy of High Magic who typically keep evil wizards and necromancers in check. And then eventually this product of Mike's casual, careless actions becomes a big enough problem to bother Mike personally, at which point Mike eats him too.)

He doesn't even really fail upwards, either! He is regularly reduced to nothing but the glacier he stores his hoard in, but he's Face-Biter Mike so nobody wants to commit to actually ending him forever lest they get their faces bitten the fuck off. And his hoard's in a huge-ass magical glacier so nobody can get to it without running into the Invading Russia problem; it's hard to wage war when everything is frozen over and you're both starving and freezing to death. Once he's been beaten back to his central lair and has lost all his holdings… I mean, he's still a problem, but he's a far away problem. So he loses his assets and spends a decade in a cave brooding it up while no one dares risk trying to actually kill him, and then a generation or two later he flies down to a kobold colony and gets himself some minions, or a dragon-worshipping mage comes to offer his service against a pittance from his hoard, or a particularly stupid cult starts thinking they can get in good with him and leech off his power, and then he's (hah) snowballing again.

He's also got a very… well, the kind of weird Charisma that Grineer bosses do. Like Sargas Ruk, who's a malformed idiot, but oddly charismatic. As he's a dragon, that makes him a natural sorcerer and thus Charisma is all he needs. He's pretty relaxed when he isn't in a face-biting mood, and he's kind of infectiously optimistic, because his life has taught him that he will succeed as long as he perseveres. So he just believes it.

And sometimes that's really refreshing to work for, as an evil minion of darkness! It's like, you're coming to your Evil Dragon Lord with terrible news; you've worked for evil overlords before, you know how it goes. You fall to your knees weeping and tell him that you've failed to seize the incredibly powerful magical artifact, you think your life is forfeit. And he's just like "Eh, it's okay, these things are all over the place. Better luck next time. You remember the guy who took it, right?" and you go "Y-yes, oh great lord!" and he's like "Sweet tell me his name later and I'll grab it" and then eats a frozen adventurer he kept around as a snack.

His followers tend to quickly realise that if they fail him, bringing some temple's silver or a sack of brightly coloured beads or a couple of dead cows means he's super forgiving because at least he's got something out of the day. "Oh boy, cows? It's been forever since I had those, ever since the Orc Steppe Nomads took over it's all about goats and onions. Today is a good day." He's a master of delegation by dragon standards, in that he just tells you "Just go get it done, I don't care how" rather than micromanaging you and constantly appearing as an image in smoke or taking over your campfire.

The key part of Face-Biter Mike as a threat to players (because he exists in the context of a D&D campaign) works well in that you can rely on several known quantities:

He will not pull sneaky shit that you don't see coming

He will not make convoluted plans that you must work to unravel

He will consistently attempt to come down and wreck you personally if he finds the opportunity and you are a threat to him

You cannot fight him head-on (at least not until the last leg of the campaign, and ideally as an optional boss rather than mandatory)

So as long as you are good at staying under the radar, thwarting his minions (whom he gives broad orders to with almost zero oversight) and not putting yourself in face-biting range, you can deal with him. If you succeed, it won't be the first time Mike has lost his assets and had to go brood in his glacier for a decade or two before rebuilding. It happens; he can deal with it. And that's a win for you within the context of a single campaign, so take the win.

And if you're not going to use him as an enemy, he works pretty well as a quest-giver, too! The costs for failure are obvious and straightforward, and "do whatever, just get me mine" means that players have a lot of freedom in accomplishing their goals. As far as evil overlords go he is actually one of the least dangerous to work for; his pride is relatively subdued by draconic standards, his goals are simple and typically achievable, and he is easily pleased.

(There's also a good chance he is the forefather of any draconic sorcerer in your party, because Face Biter Mike is a deadbeat dad.)

#this is phenomenal #thanks Tano I am adding Face-Biter Mike to my worldbuilding lexicon forever now #dnd #worldbuilding

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aethersea · 10 hours

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“i don’t know what to do with myself”

“find more hobbies!”

yes, having passions is important for filling time but also having the freedom to do so depends on both time and financial ability.

it’s a privilege to be able to engage in your interests.

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aethersea · 12 hours

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It was an annoying day and I’m not feeling right, so have some art that is also maybe a way for me to take in some positive vibes

#star trek #good swoop on this #feels vaguely...art deco? leyendecker? idk something in that vein #that 1920s rockefeller center chrysler building vibe

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aethersea · 13 hours

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The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison Japanese Book Covers Illustration by Akihiro Yamada

#yeah these have rights #the goblin emperor

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aethersea · 14 hours

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unexpected consequence of using song lyrics for fic titles: getting an ao3 notification for someone else's fic with the exact same title

#finx rambles #stared at it for a full twenty seconds going 'they wrote MY FIC?????'

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aethersea · 15 hours

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you ever go nonverbal but like... online? too fatigued to reblog anything with tags or interact with people

#disability

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aethersea · 16 hours

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I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

#social commentary #it's all fun and games till you need to figure out waste collection #and yeah regulatory oversight & consistent redundant safety nets

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aethersea · 17 hours

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executive dysfunction is legitimately physically uncomfortable. i’ll be trapped between two things, weirdly caught on how-much-time-it-might-take-me. i take hours worried im going to take hours doing things. i’ll sit on the floor for the entire day, caught up in the middle of not-doing the chores i actually do want to be doing.

& the amount of mental energy that goes into it. & the legitimate amount of anger and discomfort and self-hate. is not “being lazy”. it’d be a lot less work if i didn’t have to fight myself to just get up and do it.

i just need you to understand it’s not effortless. it’s never effortless. it’s not “okay let me just get up and finally start doing this.” it’s more like. i am slamming my foot on the pedal but the car is in neutral and nothing is moving. it’s more like shouting instructions into a dying telephone. it’s more like being trapped in a small electric box, and someone who hates me is administering shocks.

im trying. im trying. please help me get up.

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aethersea · 18 hours

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i think ultimately one of my favorite things about crazy ex-girlfriend is that it’s a story about stories. it’s a television show about television shows; it’s a musical about musicals; it’s a romantic comedy about romantic comedies.

throughout the show we see how these genres have the potential to do great harm. the messages they send, the power structures they reinforce, the boxes they try to fit people into: all of these things can contribute negatively to a person’s mental health or life decisions. at the beginning of the show, rebecca has bought into the stories she grew up on, she has internalized the messages they sent her, she has defined herself as a character in a story (the hero in her own story, if you will).

but none of these stories offer what rebecca truly needs, which is self-love and self-understanding. instead they offer roles, personas, and caricatures, which she tries on and casts aside in a desperate effort to understand herself in relation to the world and people around her. she’s the hero! no, she’s the villain! no, she’s just a girl in love! no, she’s the crazy ex-girlfriend! she’s in a fairytale! no, she’s in a rom-com! no, she’s in a horror movie! no, she’s in a buddy-cop tv show (coming soon to cbs)!

what ends up freeing rebecca from this mindset is her realization that she does not have to be bound to the stories she was fed as a child, that she can actually write her own stories. when she returns to the musicals she loved as a child and realizes they are deeply problematic, her impulse is not to bury her feelings of discomfort in order to enjoy them, nor is it to abandon musical theatre altogether; rather it is to rewrite those musicals to say what she wants them to say. and in the end, she decides to write her own musicals, her own songs, her own stories. and it is through this process that she finally finds what she was missing in those other stories: not a role but a self, who is too hard to summarize but still worth meeting.

i really like that ending, for rebecca and for this story about stories. because yes, stories can hurt, they can damage, they can mess you up for life. but they can also heal, they can liberate, they can empower. maybe life doesn’t make narrative sense, but we still can and should tell stories about it. let’s just make sure they’re good ones.

#crazy ex-girlfriend #good meta makes me weak in the knees

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