It’s so important to me that the animated Mighty Nein shows Essek being uncool. Yes, I want to see him being the ice cold Shadowhand. Yes, I want to see him cast Dark Star. But I also want to see him trying to explain what soup is and anxiously chugging whiskey hot cocoa and making weird noises while being manhandled by Caleb polymorphed into a giant ape.
you're not stuck. it's not over. you can claw yourself out again and again. find strength in yourself. find strength in others whom you can trust. the fight isn't over until you're dead.
going through the hades 2 stuff and im sorry but i just have to ramble a second because look at Hephaestus
he's not just a wheelchair user but also an amputee. an above knee amputee. wheelchair users are already next to nonexistant in video games but amputees exist in this really...disheartening? spot where they're pretty much just reduced to "person with a cybernetic limb" - it's always just somewhere from "just a cool visual design" to flat out "superpower". I can't think of a video game amputee that is actually disabled by their limb differences - I'm all for futuristic worlds where prosthetics and other disability aids are far advanced from what they are now, but that's not really what's implied by these designs. They're just... Cool designs that in no way reflect on the real-world experience of being an amputee.
Look at Hephaestus, though. Look at that prosthetic. Whilst stylised it very much looks like it functions like common mechanical knees - knee bends when thigh is lifted, knee straightens when thigh is lowered. He's a wheelchair user as well as a prosthetic user - every prosthetic user I know is also a wheelchair user as a prosthetic is not usable in every occasion and also cause exhaustion and pain if used constantly.
Whilst we can't see much of his wheelchair the position he's sat in and the wheels very much evoke active wheelchair to me - this carries on to very specifically the thickness of his arms. Whilst a lot of Hades designs are muscular Hephaestus has very noticeably thick arms - which makes sense, as active wheelchairs require a lot of arm strength.
Just overall this design is making me want to cry - he's not just an actual wheelchair user in a video game, he's a realistic depiction of an amputee, a disability usually brushed over in order to give a character a fun design quirk and nothing else. He's fat and he's hot and he's a realistic depiction of an above knee amputee. Oh my god. Oh my god?
the humble "like" is oft mocked despite what it does for us. "like, three people" is a vastly different statement from "three people". "and i was like 'what the fuck'" is vastly different from "and i said 'what the fuck'". i love you "like" and anyone who says you make people sound stupid will be killed on sight
Dropout & LiveNation present: Dimension 20 Live: Gauntlet at the Garden! A one-night only live event at Madison Square Garden in New York City happening on January 24th, 2025! Pre-sale tickets will be available starting Wednesday, April 10th (code: GAUNTLET), and general sale tickets on Friday, April 12th, at LiveNation.com. Featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan, Emily Axford, Ally Beardsley, Brian Murphy, Zac Oyama, Siobhan Thompson, and Lou Wilson, Gauntlet at the Garden will be an event unlike anything you've ever seen! A video recording of the event will also be available on Dropout at a later date.
A dinosaur obsessed 12 year old studied fossils and found a 69 million year old hadrosaur skeleton embedded in rock while hiking. A fisherman in Australia noticed tiny shrimp in his net that looked slightly different from the others and he sent a few specimens to biologists for testing. Turned out to be a never before described species, going unnoticed in a popular lake. I posted a pic ~here on tumblr~ of a weird parasite on a dead fish and a parasitologist found it and asked to report it as the species has never been seen in my area before.
There is so, so much out there we literally don’t even know. And the best way to find that stuff out is to be intensely curious about everything you see. You might not discover a new species but you absolutely will gain a deeper appreciation for the world around you.