Sometimes...characters being in a romantic relationship is worse.

noticed a dip in posts about palestine on my dash, so i think it deserves to be said again: palestine is not a trend. caring about genocide is not a trend. there are still reports about humanitarian aid trucks intentionally blocked off from gaza, meaning so many fucking gazans, a big portion of them children, are just bleeding out with no help. it just came out recently that israelis disguised as women and medics infiltrated a west bank hospital, at which point they killed 3 palestinians (whom they claim were militants. right). these people are living day to day without even the most basic utilities. anyone who claims to have “activism fatigue” needs to question why they’re so severely lacking in the most basic forms of compassion. you don’t get to just grow bored of talking about palestine. please never stop calling attention to the genocide happening full force in front of us.

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

idk if this is accurate but i’ve felt like in previous seasons riz & gorgug have been one of the inter-bad kids dynamics we’ve seen the least of & this season has been so great in that aspect. gorgug having helped make some of riz’s magic gear. riz helping gorgug with his studies. the shared birthday party. gorgug’s gift to riz being something he himself made to protect riz. riz’s gift to gorgug being something he illegally grabbed to protect gorgug. gorgug who utilizes rage to put his body on the line for his friends & riz who will take deep levels of mental stress for his friends. even though it was within the context of a joke, riz calling gorgug an “absolute sweetie.” like yea they might not be in a band together or both part of a presidential campaign team or owlbears teammates, but they’d go to war for each other, because they’re best friends.

i wonder how many more people would've vehemently hated gale right off the bat on full release if his introduction conversation had stayed like this or something similar

getting the attention of the humanoid typhoon

Thank you. I'm sorry.

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I currently have writer's block and fucked around and made Iliad and Odyssey memes :'D Some look like "repeats" but aren't. Just different scenarios/people. Enjoy!

There's... A LOT. I don't care if you pick out your favorites! I put this all in one post as I don't want to spam the tags! :D

Highkey so sad to see Kim's character get butchered by people who see Harry as whichever addict wronged them in their life.

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

"I love men who're freaks🥰😳😍"You guys can't even handle dudes with physical disabilities

thinking about c!dream earlier on in the server just makes me sad man. like, c!dream has never been a perfect character. he's always been flawed, always been a bit of an asshole, always had control issues. but also he knew that. he tried to work on that. he and tommy were friends, despite being flawed people with their own issues that would bump into conflicts because of the ways that they differed. c!dream tried, god, he tried; he wasn't even on the server, when the drug van happened, and walked into a place with someone who was practically a stranger to him building a wall and calling for war and having turned half the people dream knew against him, apparently, for no reason that he could've known at the time, and he had looked straight at tommy and tubbo and asked if that was what they really wanted when wilbur told them that there was no such thing as dual citizenship. he tells tommy when he has to sell a disc for spirit's leather even though tommy had surrendered the discs to him at the end of the revolution because he knows it'll matter to him. he and tommy truce, multiple times, and c!dream gets tangled into conflicts that literally don't involve him repeatedly and gets targeted Because He's Dream repeatedly and he plays along with that trivia contest and he gives gifts to fundy and tommy after terrorizing them a little for fun and he plays along with the dreamon thing and he keeps getting pulled into fights that weren't his but tries to make them a little more fair when they get him involved. he fucks around with tommy and they have fun, they're friends, and when he and wilbur look like they're in danger dream is one of the first to find them and lend them real, practical, valuable aid. he calls himself "Big D" in that book and he tells the man that wrote him as a tyrant that he doesn't want to be a villain in the story anymore. he asks tommy if he's okay, and watches that kid's back when he walks alone and unarmed into manberg, and fights with him at the battle of the lake and all of that is thrown back in his face as being a lie. half the intial community structures that exist were built by him; the community house, the nether portal and hub, the prime path. during a time where every other piece of leverage got burned or killed (rip the casualties of the pet war), dream was kind of known for being one that could be fairly traded with, that would minimize permanent damage. the kills in the final control room were originally to strip lmanburg of their gear, which he had kept in a chest so it could be returned to them after the war.

like no c!dream isn't perfect at the beginning of the server. yes he's kind of a jerk sometimes, kind of an asshole sometimes, kind of neurotic most of the time. but god dammit like c!dream does try to mitigate the worst of his control issues, when they flare up early on; the initial disc war ends with tommy getting his discs back as well as a stack of diamonds, in exchange for a netherite chestplate. he's a flawed character and he's still someone pretty friendly on the whole to most of the server, he's also kind of just known for being a little weird. he gives gifts randomly. he fixed creeper holes, and houses, and went along with bits. like whatever im a c!drolo c!dream woobifier and i admit it lol but for as much evil as he ends up doing, pretty damn consistently early on, he's . friendly? kind? funny? helpful? their neighbor. their friend. c!dream isn't just some stranger that flew off the handle; he's someone they knew and lived with who had his actions taken in bad faith because the goddamn story said so and kept fucking trying anyway until he believed the lie too. like he was just a guy!! a guy they knew and lived with!!! like my god

Local Alchemist needed to be stopped.

My formula of restore fatigue:

Spring salad: lettuce, radish, potato, (optional: apple, orange, watermelon). Unfortunately it has Burden side effect. (if choose orange, you'll get a bonus Shield effect) Can also side with Ranch dressing: cheese wedge, leek, onion, garlic. And this one has Damage Agility side effect. It can be fix by removing the garlic.

Potato soup: potato, garlic, leek. This recipe has Frost Shield side effect. Perfect choice for a cold weather.

Corn salsa: corn, tomato, onion, garlic. Unfortunately it has Damage Agility side effect, but you can get Detect Life in the process.

Grilled cheese sandwich: bread loaf, cheese wedge, cheese wheel. Unfortunately it has Damage Agility side effect. I should have removed the cheese wedge. Sorry Baurus :(

Classic ham sandwich: bread loaf, cheese wedge, ham, lettuce. Unfortunately this recipe also has Damage Agility side effect, but bonus Fire Shield woohoo!

Gyudon: beef, onion, rice

Mix berries: blackberry, strawberry, (we only have two kinds of berries?) (optional: apple, orange, pear). Actually, don't put apple or pear in it. They will cause Damage Health.

Crabby corn soup: crab, corn, onion. You can add cheese wedge for bonus Fire Shield (and Damage Agility) effect.

Chili con carne: beef (/boar meat /mutton /venison), onion, garlic, tomato. Side effect is Detect Life. (Beef flavor will grant you Shield effect. Unfortunately Boar meat will have burden side effect and Venison is Damage Health)

Pumpkin pie: pumpkin, sweetcake (/flour /sweetroll). Unfortunately both flour and sweetroll has Damage Personality side effect

Carrot cake: carrot, sweet cakes

Strawberry cheesecake: strawberry, cheese wedge, flour (/sweetcake /sweetroll). The flour version has Reflect Damage side effect. I highly recommend it.

reverse robins aus have great potential, but it always feels like they're less character studies/stories and more tim fans going, "hey, that's some interesting trauma Jason has, how about we give that to Tim instead"

wait is it the row anniversary? wow. happy three years to UNETHICAL YURI and KALADIN i guess

spartacus and crassus :)

this is actually a rejected panel from a much longer comic I’ve been fucking around with on and off for awhile- I had plans to do a long form spartacus comic for a long time, I just keep missing the last book on my research list in second hand stores 😔 I always have money when the last copy sells out aughhh

anyway! I might call crassus my girl in the group chat, but I’ve actually spent more years wishing that spartacus got to run crassus through on his sword and then read the fate of rome out of his entrails. ALAS. on that note, isn’t it kind of interesting how spartacus’ funeral games for crixus turn roman order upside down and feel like both a foundational sacrifice and a curse? isn’t it kind of fun how crassus will not die in rome, and neither will pompey, who came in like a vulture to take credit for crassus’ work? (it’s VERY fun)

Plutarch, Crassus