I love every "Death set Dream up with Hob on purpose" headcanon, and I love "actually I was planning to throw Chaucer at you but I can wing it pretty damn well and, once I heard Hob call me stupid, I knew, yeah that's going to be Dream's boyfriend". It takes a village (or an older sister) to get Dream a boyfriend.

Now, I'm picturing the entire Endless family blindsided when Dream comes to a family dinner like "I GOT MARRIED! LIKE TWO MINUTES AFTER THE LAST DINNER--" "That was a literal century ago?!"
 "-- YEAH. WE'RE DOING A VOW RENEWAL."

Not a single sibling clocked this. Not even Destiny.

Destiny, out loud: it was an unlikely path in my book, so I didn't give it much attention 
Destiny, in his head: honestly I started speed-reading/skimming through Dream's love life paragraphs because watching him crash and burn and cause massive body counts just seemed so... repetitive and predictable?

Death: knowing our brother, I was carefully managing my expectations and was just glad he was still doing the century meetups last time I'd checked. Good for him, managing to stay with somebody for a century, that outstrips his last relationship by ... like 7 decades.  Kind of offended I wasn't invited to this wedding, kind of not planning to say anything?

Desire: At this point, I stick my fingers in my ears and go "lalalalalala" whenever I hear anything about Dream and want, either him wanting or somebody wanting him, because Death said I had to stop making fun of him for how disproportionate his Yearn to Act Ratio was, and any ammunition I can't use is just ... irritating. I figured if anything really changed, my twin would tell me about his descent into misery.

Despair: He was less miserable, but I assumed it was a fluke and he'd return to his normal equilibrium eventually. And it's not like my twin let me know he'd managed to successfully want AND obtain something?

Destruction is Sir Not Appearing In This Picture.

And Delirium had more important things to think about than her brother's sad love life, like would flying fish fired out of confetti cannons be considered birds until they landed?

Meanwhile all denizens of the Dreaming are never not aware that Dream is happily married, because the weather has been perfect for years and the throne room stained glass is some variation of Hob and Dream being lovey-dovey.

Lucienne: If I see them necking in the stacks ever again I will be forced to take action, and Lord Morpheus is aware of that fact, but we haven’t had a library flood in 103 years, so overall we’re pleased.

hey btw if you're in the USA at  2:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Oct. 4, they're testing the emergency broadcast system. your phone is probably going to make a really loud noise, even if it's on silent. there's a backup date on the 11th if they need to postpone it.

if you're not in a safe situation and have an extra phone, you should turn that phone completely off beforehand.

additionally, if you're like me, and are easily startled; i recommend treating it like a party. have a countdown or something. be surrounded by your loved ones. take the actions you personally need to take to make yourself safe.

i have already seen mockery towards any person who feels nervous about this. for the record, it completely, completely valid to have "emergency broadcast sounds" be an anxiety trigger. do not let other people make fun of you for that. emergency sounds are legitimately engineered to make us take action; those of us with high levels of anxiety and/or neurodivergence are already pre-disposed to have a Bad Time. sometimes it is best to acknowledge that the situation will be triggering for some, and to prepare for that; rather than just saying "well that's stupid, it's just a test."

"loud scary sound time" isn't like, my favorite thing, but we can at least try to prevent some additional anxiety by preparing for it. maybe get yourself a cake? noise cancelling headphones? the new hozier album? whatever helps. love u, hope you're okay. we are gonna ride it out together.

Love disabled people who just lie about their disabilities to nosy, intrusive questions. Sorry, yeah, I lost my arm in the wash one day. It's funny how that happens! Oh, I got back pain from saving nineteen children from a burning fire department <3

when I got Kallamar in my cult all I could think of was Heket and Leshy waiting for him to recover from his illness only to jump him the moment he came out and tear him a new one for trying to get Shamura killed in his place

Mystra has dictated the terms of my potential for long enough. The Crown would grant me control of my own destiny at last.

Miyata-san. Yes?

KOI WO SURU NARA NIDOME GA JOTO (2024) | 1.02

(re: sssniperwolf and jacksfilms) It's laughable that she escalated it that hard. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure stalking him like that is illegal and it's terrifying regardless, but Jack said in a stream (can't remember which one) that he wasn't about bringing up past controversies of hers or cancelling. And now she shows up outside his house (wtf!!!). Like he was willing to only call her out for stealing and freebooting but she's gone and stalked him and Jack doesn't seem like the type of guy to take that shit. Actual WTF moment from her part. wild

omg long post below bc apparently I have opinions: YES!! THAT'S WHAT'S SO INCREDIBLE ABOUT THIS... Jack has been genuinely diligent about keeping things on-topic in his streams, and hasn't brought up any of her other Stuff, or anything Personal. Despite the fact that she kickstarted the whole thing by making it INCREDIBLY personal and attacking his physical appearance... His goal has been to call out and bring attention to content theft, and he's stuck with it. Dude's also cared about this for years, and she's not the first content thief he's criticized. He just hates the way that freebooting has become so accepted-- to the point where youtube praised her for "coming up with such creative video ideas"? Hey! Ew! Dude wasn't trying to get her cancelled though, there was no smear campaign of her character. He's been rallying to get her to CREDIT the creators that she relies on for all of her content. It would set a precedent for all other "react" channels on the platform for one of the biggest channels on youtube to actually give credit where credit is due. Or, god forbid, get permission first? It's not hard. It's already done the job of making some other people who do "react content" self-analyze whether or not their content is transformative, and to maybe care about crediting the creators they rely on for their genre to work. There is a way to make this kind of video that isn't so slimy. And making fun of her lackluster-at-best reactions is so far from even being a big deal. Bc she literally does just sit there and say nothing. Plus, his goal has a clear End built into it: if she started shouting out the creators she takes content from, and put links directly to their pages in her video descriptions, the job would be done! That's what he's asking her to do. Real bare minimum stuff. It legit would have been easy to steer away from the content theft and to also talk about her history of lying to her audience! her ghosting a dying kid with cancer who was a big fan of hers! the fact that she's been arrested for armed robbery! her history of transphobia! He would also get more clicks that way, which is what she claims is his sole goal- to get more clicks. I'll bring it up though! She's been a terrible person the whole time, and has kept a steady course of manipulating her audience of young children and/or, let's be completely honest, simps- into thinking that she's a Wholesome creator. (And now, into thinking she's an innocent victim.) All of the actual effort put in by her has gone toward optics, not the content she puts out. A carefully constructed online persona, for one, but also literal appearances. Jack totally can't say this, bc she already went off the handle and said the only reason he doesn't like her is bc he Hates To See A Woman Be Successful. But I can! That was a cheap shot for her to use that argument when, for once, it's not applicable! Much the opposite, even! Dudes online wouldn't go to bat for her if she didn't look the way she does. And it weakens any case she'd have against him by making baseless claims like that. She banks hugely on being an attractive woman to get her clicks/following. A massive amount of effort is put into her appearance. The makeup, the lip fillers, putting her hair in little pigtails, the chokers and tube tops, the big non-prescription Nerd Glasses, the thumbnails where she has her mouth open in That Expression?

I don't even have to say anything. But making a weird facial expression and putting your hair in pigtails aren't moral failings. Showing up at someone's real life home (whose address you shouldn't even have access to), filming the front of their house at night, doxxing them to your audience of millions of people? Because you were mad at them online? That is fully scary! Yeah girl I'm pretty sure that Jack can press charges! There is absolutely no way to take the moral highground now that she's literally stalked him, and doxxed his home. She tried to goad him and Erin (Jack's wife) out of the house, also, which creeps me out even more-- because what was she planning to do? The fact that she's been arrested for violent crime before does pop into my mind! lmao! Jack was streaming a game at the time that she was outside his home, and these clips of him, his friends, and Erin reacting in real time to what is genuinely a scary situation have been taken down in case he needs to use them in legal action. Shit is legitimately serious!

Indiana University, a major university here in the midwest, recently had a faculty meeting that concluded in a "vote of no-confidence" in university president Pamela Whitten as well as two other academic administrators.

Major concernes raised by faculty included "the university’s barring of Abdulkader Sinno, an associate professor, from teaching this spring and summer after he booked space on campus for a Palestine Solidarity Committe-Hosted Event. Docherty wrote Sinno’s suspension letter, which said he might also be fired following continued investigation.

The second incident mentioned was IU Bloomington’s cancellation of a long-planned art exhibition by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian-American abstract artist."

Link 1

Link 2

More quotes below the cut, in case the links decide not to work.

Faculty cannot remove a leader from the university, and Bloomington Faculty Council President Colin Johnson said the vote is advisory.

Faculty often cheered at criticism of Docherty, Shrivastav and Whitten, and Johnson had to remind faculty to maintain order at least once.

Associate Professor Amrita Myers said IU has changed in her 19 years at the university. She said it’s depressing to work at IU.

“It's very difficult to recruit graduate students here,” Myers said. “It's difficult when they look at you in the face and say, ‘Am I going to be safe because I'm transgender? Am I going to be safe as a woman? Am I going to be safe as a Black person or a Latinx person or an indigenous person?’”

Faculty, including those who successfully petitioned for the vote of confidence, have noted fear of retribution from the administration. An unnamed person took the stand to share a message.

“On behalf of all faculty who feel uncomfortable stating their names, on behalf of faculty who are afraid to be in this room, on behalf of all faculty who feel precarious, please don't leave the room,” the speaker said. “Vote.”"

For Whitten, 827 faculty voted for the no-confidence resolution. Twenty-nine opposed the resolution.

There were 804 people who supported the no-confidence resolution against Provost Rahul Shrivastav. Forty-seven faculty voted in opposition.

For Carrie Docherty, the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, 672 faculty voted for a no-confidence resolution, while 107 were against it.

i have a plan for punctuation day everyone! so here's what i want you all to do!

my goal for the day is to get punctuation trending. is this too ambitious? maybe, but i don't care. i want everyone to appreciate punctuation a little

what are some things i can do you ask? well let's look at some things i could think of:—

you can make a post with every punctuation on it (but try, and here's the hard part) to put some text around it and not just list them all out

you can make up a new punctuation mark! for inspiration i would look at the works of people like hervé bazin, martin k specktor, or other people who tried to invent new punctuation

you can make a post about your favorite punctuation mark and why you like it

you can post anything related to punctuation really, those were my ideas but feel free to. i dunno. dress up as an interrobang or make art or something. go wild

so everyone! mark your calendars! september twenty fourth is the day we get #punctuation trending!

stranger things: the game

nancy and barb gameplay

(or, the one where i have too much fun yet again with this concept)

I'm having incoherent thoughts about clone danny again from the clone/clone^2 au (when am I not?) but more specifically I'm thinking about his reaction to finding out he's a clone. The standalone clone au digs into that a little more than clone^2, which is more focused on Danny and Damian's relationship. But neither (so far) really get into Danny's issues about finding out he's a clone after 15 years of thinking he wasn't.

Because he resents his parents for not telling him for so long. He resents the way he found out; through a trivial school project rather than a sit-down talk. He resents the fact that, apparently, they had meant to tell him sooner. But forgot. He resents the fact that they never told him because finding out feels like something was stolen from him when it had the chance to not be.

Danny Fenton, just fifteen, cloned not even half a year ago, knows what that personal violation of autonomy feels like. He knows what it's like to be cloned and while he loves Ellie, he does, she's his sister, and in this au his twin. But he is still left with that feeling of unsafety after realizing he'd been cloned. Being cloned is violating. The onset realization that it's so easy to get DNA without the other party noticing, and that what was stopping someone from trying to clone him again?

Followed only after with the rest of the inexplainable mix of feelings of being cloned, the rest of that inner conflict and panic that's an ugly mocktail of emotions that range from horror to fear. Trying to imagine what it's like to be cloned from the cloned party, and I imagine that it leaves you with the feeling of needing to crawl out of your own skin with discomfort.

And then he gets put on the other side of it. Danny Fenton, only fifteen, was cloned not even half a year ago, finding out he is a clone. And reactions, I imagine, can vary from person to person. But to him, it feels like something got stolen from him, like someone took a hole puncher and stuck it right into his chest and stole a chunk of himself from him.

It changes nothing about him and yet it changes everything. It's a betrayal on it's own to just find out he was a clone and they didn't tell him for fifteen years -- it shouldn't mean anything, because he's still Danny, and yet it means everything. It's him, it's him, it's about him. It's his personhood. It's about the fact that a load-bearing rock in his identity just crumbled beneath his feet and now there's a rockslide.

Because then he finds out that they used the wrong DNA. Its like pouring salt in an open wound. He's not even related to his parents or his sister, when for years he thought he was. It's the fact that pieces of his identity that he's been so secure in for so long just got ripped away from him in an instant. Then they tell him -- only through his own horrified prompting -- that the person whose DNA they used -- Bruce Wayne -- didn't even know he existed. That they accidentally used the wrong DNA, then didn't tell the person whose DNA they used.

The betrayal of being lied to for years turns really quickly into horror at his own existence. Something very similar to the horror he felt at being cloned and the skin-crawling discomfort that made him feel like his own skin wasn't really his. And then its not. It's actually not. Nothing but his own name feels like it belongs to him anymore -- not his hair, not his eyes, not his heart or his lungs, nothing feels like his anymore and he didn't know what that felt like until it was gone.

It's a question of Nature Vs. Nurture -- where does the line of "nature" begin and where does the line of "nurture" end? What of him is actually his? What of him is Bruce Wayne's? It's not logical, it's not supposed to be. It's a load-bearing wall on the house of his identity being destroyed and now everything else is caving down in on him. What belongs to Danny, what belongs to Bruce Wayne?

What it is about kind male video game companions that male gamers absolutely HATE?

I've seen it happen with Dragon Age's Alistair, Mass Effect's Kaidan, and even lowkey KOTOR's Carth Onasi (emphasis on kind, not necessarily nice, cause dude had a bit of an attitude in the beginnning). Now I'm seeing it with Gale of Waterdeep from Baldur's Gate 3.

Men hate him! Admittedly, many women seem to also hate Gale (Though from what I'm observing, it seems to be because his romance is bugged in a way that doesn't recognize when you've rejected him, so to many it comes off as not taking no for an answer -- but that's the fault of the game, not the character). The other reason I'm seeing from women is that he supposedly doesn't respect boundaries, citing his relationship with Mystra, but... were yall listening to him at all?

1. This goddess took interest in him as a *child* prodigy, became his mentor, and then his lover??? That's sus as hell.

2. It's not like he and Mystra had personal boundaries set specifically for their relationship, and he decided to cross them, it was that Mystra has general magical limitations for magic users in general, and Gale thought he would be an exception because she treated him as special, and because his reasons for pushing his magical limitations were to restore a part of her she'd lost. I've also seen people say he downplays that as a simple mistake made in his youth, but from the actual conversation with him, it's very clear he regrets that so?? I don't get it. (maybe I'm misremembering or missing more of the story, I'm only at the beginning of Act 2)

But this post is a reaction-rant to seeing too many male creators on tiktok hate on Gale so badly it's becoming obnoxious. And their reasons are so weak, yet fuel hatred so strong. They just find him so annoying, and I guess to each their own, but I don't get why, and I don't get why men always seem to find those kinds of emotionally available, kind for the sake of being kind, male characters annoying.

☠️: the fuck you smiling at.

🍓: oh what, i can't smile now ?

☠️ : yeah, you can't. cut it out.

🍓: i can't just stop ! have you ever tried smiling ? it would—

☠️: you finish that thought, i'll take your eye out kurosaki.

🍓: .... :)

☠️: tch. happy bastard

Quick trans tip for those experiencing breast growth:

If you're interested in wearing a bra, please make sure to size correctly. Absolutely, bras can sometimes feel uncomfortable after wearing them for an extended amount of time, but if it actively hurts, please make sure it's the right size. You shouldn't feel like you can't breathe, or your circulation is restricted, or like the band/wires are digging into your skin. Bra sizing can make such a difference, and there're so many wild misconceptions about how bras work that it can be very confusing at times (even for cis people!). Breasts will develop for years, so please regularly check your size if you plan on wearing bras. There are some pretty accurate online calculators and forums, and when you start understanding how measurements translate into sizes, it makes a lot more sense.

If anybody has anything to add, please do! I'm not directly experienced in this, but I want all trans people to be educated and empowered in what makes them comfortable💛

timcassie is so compelling to me. they were not into each other even a little bit. it was such a messy coping mechanism fuelled entirely by grief. they were making out with each other because they were both substituting each other for kon. cassie was far more aware she was doing this than tim was. unironically, dating a girl here is one of the gayest things tim has done

having sally yell at baby percy feels so fundamentally wrong. i didn't mind when she got frustrated with him in the pool because that was just one instance of sally losing her temper but now it's like oh. this is just how the show version of her is.

like. idk. one of sally's defining traits was that she never got mad at percy. that didn't mean she was weak. that was her strength. that she could pull through tough times by putting a smile on her face, so that she didn't scare percy, so that she could protect him.

i just feel like it would have been a much more well-defined scene if we got to see how sally manages to talk percy out of the car by. being nice?? coaxing him??? explaining the situation in a way he would understand instead of just saying "there are things i have to do that you don't understand" (if you say that to a kid they are 100% not going to listen to you bc. yeah they don't understand!! so you have to explain it in a way they WOULD understand!!)

if sally had already been dating smelly gabe at this point, she could have leveraged this. she could have put a funny spin on it and said "i'm just trying to get you away from smelly gabe's stinky gym shorts." if she wanted baby percy to not feel like she was abandoning him and separating him from the rest of society, she could have said "the kids in there are just like you." she could have given him a keepsake, to show she will always be with him. there are SO many ways the writers could have spun this and they just didn't. they went the easy way out.

all of these flashback scenes are painting a very unfortunate picture that percy didn't actually have a good relationship with his mom. and i know that's not the vibe the show is trying to go for, but they've got to understand!! that not everyone who's watched the show has the read the books! we don't all automatically know that sally and percy have the bestest mother-son relationship ever! if you only show sally being frustrated at baby percy, we start to think oh dang, maybe this whole time percy doesn't actually have a good relationship with his mom!