It is incredible how well Kuma is able to play Moriah by preying on what he has to know is his greatest insecurity. The real coup de grace is that little inconspicuous offer to help at the end, added almost as an afterthought. If Moriah agrees, then Kuma can poof the Straw Hats wherever he wants to like he did on Sabaody. And if he refuses, well, we see how angry it makes him, and how his injured pride causes him to make stupid mistakes. Hell, Kuma has seen how badly the Straw Hats have wrecked Thriller Bark already. It could be that he genuinely believes Luffy could defeat Moriah unaided. The little push just helped get things started in the right direction.

The whole conversation is another one of those moments that takes on so much more meaning in retrospect, but even without that retrospect it's still impactful. I don't have to know Moriah's entire backstory to understand exactly why he's reacting the way he is, and that alone makes it one of my favorite bits of writing in the entire arc. So often the big personalities of One Piece can cause characters to feel more like caricatures, but this moment feels very human.

People don't appreciate the fucked-upness of the Targaryens as like, a story theme enough. Like it's either "Ew gross incest why did George write this?" or "Who cares it's normalized for them what's the matter with shipping it?" Which ship what you want obviously, I am not one to judge. But like, the theme of a family being so wrapped up in its own mythology and a mirror for the nobility is so interesting.

Like all the nobility in Westeros have this notion of "keeping bloodlines pure" and pretty much every house we know in the story has some incest somewhere in their tree, and even when there isn't they always marry someone else of noble blood. They are obsessed with keeping power in the hands of the "right" people and families. The Targaryens have basically just that taken to the extreme. That's not even to mention the blurred lines between family and politics and marriage that Targ incest brings, which is again, an exaggerated form of the nobles' tendency to use their own spouses and children for gain regardless of cost. Family as a political tool blurred with the emotional. Except with the Targaryens it's a "Oh you're close with your sister? A completely normal bond? Yeah you're gonna marry her someday :)" It's impossible for them to have these normal bond because presenting that façade of power is what is considered more important, and their fall comes from buying into that illusion - an illusion of their own making might I add. It's awful, but it's just so damn fascinating to me and I think that theme goes over the heads of a lot of people.

as far as i'm concerned all gore is necessary

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

Is there anything better than a cabal of villains? Like, just a dastardly group of individuals plotting from the shadows, each with their own particular skillset and all ready to backstab each other at a moment's notice.

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

The manga industry, especially JUMP, needs to hurry up and do away with weekly scheduling for mangaka. There needs to better regulations put into place for their health and safety because this is pitiful. Two weeks - monthly updates should’ve already been the standard for the manga industry at this point. These money grabbers will only continue to put the lives of these artists at stake for the sake of capitalism unless some serious changes are implemented.

There's a version of the "don't go grocery shopping while hungry" rule specifically for writers where you should never under any circumstances be allowed to touch your draft within 3 hours of reading a really good story. Because sometimes when you read something great your head goes "fuck this is so much better than my stuff I should make that more like THIS instead!" Look at me. That's the devil talking and you should close the document NOW.

tshirt that says NO LIVE ORGANISM CAN CONTINUE FOR LONG TO EXIST SANELY UNDER CONDITIONS OF ABSOLUTE REALITY

Actually the funniest part of the entire James Somerton debacle is the response his cowriter Nick gave. For context, Hbomberguy talks a bit about Nick as a cowriter, and there is not any strong evidence implicating Nick of also plagiarizing, so Hbomberguy takes the angle of "Nick is probably not (also) responsible for the plagiarism".

Nick's response?

To claim he could not be part of the plagiarism, because he does not read. And does not do research...

SOURCE: I Fact-Checked The Worst Video Essayist On YouTube - YouTube, video essay by Todd in the Shadows.

The second screen cap is maybe a tongue-in-cheek joke... but bold choice when everyone's eyes are on you to respond to serious allegations. And this screencap doesn't include the other wishy-washy statements, pre-video, from Nick saying to the effect of "I write based on vibes. I come up with an idea and ruminate on it." For research videos. For educational videos about queer history and queer media culture.

Adds flavor to the Todd video, which goes through two-dozen examples of Somerton videos which just claim... provably factually incorrect bullshit.

This guy is a writer. An author. You could not waterboard "I don't read" out of me if I were aiming to launch a writing career.

Beating the plagiarism allegations by confidently asserting you suck too bad to ever get that far.

It's such elegant storytelling having Franky build the Straw Hat's ship with the money he stole from them in the first place. Oda loves finishing off arcs with parallels to the start, coming full circle within the context of this mini story within the greater whole.

So normal about Jon being like I don’t remember what you looked like but the man who let you die is going to suffer for what he did to you. If only Sasha coulda seen that.

So normal about Jon being like you died hating me and wanting me dead but I’m still gonna make sure this man knows I’m ending him in your name. Sure wish Tim coulda seen that.

So normal about the fact that everyone believed Jon was losing his humanity but no one got to see the ways his love and compassion for the people he lost or who hurt him drove him to that final moment.

So normal about the fact that even after everything Jonah’s done to Jon, the only person he never thinks to get justice for is himself.

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

This is basically Michael in FNAF Sister location,,

SO IVE BEEN GOIN INSANE SINCE THIS TRAILER DROPPED. JUST. SIMON. SIMON. SIMON.

Tumblr announcing that they are unbanning nudity immediately after elon musk starts burning twitter to the ground is like pouring gasoline into an already open flame and then spitting on the ashes. The vindictive pettiness is so entertaining to watch--just outstanding