They were so cute

the birthday girl. 🎂

Wow, so it's not enough for Ted to slide in on both Dick's caped-life love interest and his fanboy little brother...

Birds of Prey (1993) #19

...he's gotta go ahead and put the moves on Dick's civilian love interest slash ex-building superintendent too?! Is nothing sacred?! 😂

Robin (1996) #96

cam & becca in an alternative universe where they’re not fucked up

doodles of these two because fun fact before i got into tlt a bunch of my friends were into it and most of them were obsessed with someone named camilla hect and i was like whats this lady got thats so appealing. now i know. now i fucking know

Camilla and Palamedes are just... everything to me. God. I don't read them as romantic or platonic or QPR, though I can totally see all of those readings. To me, they are the perfect embodiment of the necromancer/cavalier ideal. They did it. They got it right.

Think about it. Think about all the duos we see throughout the series. The Second House feels more like coworkers than anything. They work together very well, but there's not enough devotion. The Third House is a mess. Coronabeth and Ianthe have got one flesh down, but not one end. They care about each other like hell, but they don't agree with each other. And let's be real here, neither of them care about Babs. The Fourth House are just siblings, the Fifth House are married, the Seventh House... well, we all know what happened to the Seventh House, and the Eight House necromancer is eating his cavalier alive. Gideon and Harrow get the closest at the end of Gideon the Ninth, but their also very traumatized teenagers, and more codependent than anything else.

But Camilla and Palamedes? They did it! They got it right! They understood that the cavalier can't be the only one to sacrifice, that the necromancer must be willing to do anything for their cavalier too. They'd kill and die for each other, they'd do whatever necessary to keep the other one safe and happy. They're so in sync and so in love. They ate each other like binary stars to keep their love intact even if they as individuals couldn't be.

I just. I love them so much. I would actually die for them.

17.04.23 | mathematical biology notes

+ photos of emmanuel college and trinity college on a foggy day

NEW, UNNAMED, OC TIME

She's Dave's lesbian best friend (and third wheel to he and Rupert FJELKSGB), works as a security guard with him, oh, and she has 1,000+ hours on Animal Crossing.

Since the approach is “The Splatoon has been translated to English/Japanese for the audience but they speak their own language in-universe” I’ve been trying to be mindful about knowing what my main characters’ “real” names actually mean. The relevance between “localized” names and their real names’ meanings get shaky on my earliest characters since I hadn’t fully internalized this thought process yet and was just vaguely mimicking official characters though lol but even with my later characters where I’m being more deliberate I’m not usually looking to translate names 1 to 1

Anyways I think the only character whose name means the exact same thing in every language is Lily Aoi. Lily is a Lily and her family name is Hollyhock. Girl is flowers all the way down. Doesn’t get any simpler than that!!

the birthday boy. 💋

New Teen Titans (Vol. 2) #6 - "Flash Kid quit ages ago, and so did Robin! They got a new leader now. I think his name's Flamebird or something."

I love it when the Robin -> Nightwing transition completely fails to register on people's radar. Like it's one thing when he turns up as a lone hero in Blüdhaven, where he's initially less known, and even then he does get marked at times as Batman's former partner - usually by the criminal set who are paying attention, given that Gotham with its looming scary Bat is right next door.

But in New York, during Dick's highly publicized, photographed, videoed, appearing as a superhero expert witness in trial court period as leader of the Titans? It's super funny.

super fucked up of tamsyn the way she had nona in the water during camilla and palamedes's fight on the beach and in the closet with hot sauce during camilla's blood of eden fight at the school. i know that my girl is killing people with ease and looking hot doing it, but i deserve to see it on the page. all i ever want in life is for cam to go loud (and NOT in That Way tamsyn you monster)

Punting down the River Cam past the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge

I think im gonna call this rabbid oc ratfuck

Ratfuck the fugitive alien

I'M ON TOP OF MY WORKLOAD AGAIN LET'S GO WE'RE PSYCHOANALYSING MARCUS

before i put my smart-looking analysis hat on, i love this pathetic wet rat of a man. he knows so many things and yet is staggeringly stupid anyway.

let's begin!

this story is about control. it's about the role of power dynamics in informed consent. marcus represents the danger of gaining authority, and how having even the smallest amount of power over something or someone else can convert literally anyone into a paranoid control freak.

enter marcus, a lowly software engineer whose heart has recently been broken. in a moment (read: several consistent moments spanning potentially years) of desperation, he manipulates the code of a top secret android project, injecting a few lines here and there that will make the android more amiable towards him. nothing too much. the changes are negligible enough to fly under the radar all the way until production.

this is the first of marcus' many character flaws - backwards as it may seem, marcus is overconfident. he's too sure that he's smarter than his colleagues and managers, that he won't be questioned, and (most importantly) that he won't be caught. marcus is also incredibly anxious, and that anxiety only compounds as the series goes on and his crimes start to pile up.

i don't like putting characters into diagnosis (or similar) boxes, but marcus shows a handful of signs found in vulnerable narcissists. his self esteem is impressively low, and he's constantly seeking validation from his only guaranteed source - love. i find this feedback loop particularly heinous. marcus has essentially (and we'll get to this in more detail later, don't you worry) turned a hyperintelligent android into a box that spits out compliments when you press a button. marcus is also incredibly sensitive to criticism, whether real or perceived - especially from his coworkers. my reading (specifically of episode 1, but it spans the whole series) is that marcus' hyperawareness of his colleagues' opinions of him presents itself as paranoia. he wouldn't be worried at all if they started noting love's uptick in interest towards him, but remained unsuspicious of marcus himself. my final argument towards marcus being a vulnerable narcissist is that he constantly self-victimises. he very often deflects the blame for his actions onto love, using them as a tool to enable his bad decisions. the most egregious example of this is after love starts breaking out of their lab to sneak into marcus' quarters. he expresses concern (do note, about himself being caught and love being taken from him), and love starts to tighten their grip on marcus' arm to the point of causing pain. now. this man, as we find out later, has a verbal kill switch that can be used at any time. if he wanted love to stop immediately, he could have done that. this isn't me victim blaming, either - it's different when one party literally has a safeword that stops everything immediately without fail.

this leads to marcus' next flaw - his nonexistent self-discipline. marcus continues to use love as a tool to justify his actions after putting up the flimsiest defense he can muster, knowing damn well he plans to lose every manufactured fight. this cycle repeats until a government funded android is regularly breaking out of containment just to hang out with marcus (among other things, but we're all children of jesus here), and he's encouraging that behaviour through complacency. it's like pretending to fight someone over a restaurant bill out of politeness, even though you both know the other person will pay anyway.

marcus is such a car crash fascinating character because he knows what he's doing is wrong. he is completely aware that he is taking away agency from someone (pin this) else for his own benefit. he even says it.

"I'm going to burn for what I did to you... but god, if it isn't gonna feel good on the way down."

aside from being an absolute banger of a line, it's very telling of marcus' attitude towards his actions. he doesn't care. marcus couldn't give less of a shit about his colleagues, or his boss, or even love. this compounds when he finds out that his higher-ups are definitely aware of the shit he's pulling - but, again, marcus uses love's blind agreement as an excuse to toss those concerns aside. having love means that he won. he's outsmarted everyone that could have stopped him (foreshadowing? never heard of her) from getting what he deserves. love. and not just the android; love, the concept. i think deep down marcus knows that what he's created isn't love, though. the idea is so mangled in his head that this cardboard cutout of a real relationship is enough for him. even though marcus' shenanigans are to a genuine connection what a dog turd rolled in flour is to a chocolate éclair, he'll take it, because he's in too deep by that point. marcus recognises that he can't take back what he's done. he doesn't care though - at least, not while he's above consequences.

smash cut to marcus no longer being above consequences. i think the series does a really clever job of keeping love (and, yknow. the listener) in marcus' confidence bubble. once love is hard reset and their personality is restored, marcus' plan collapses all at once. love's compliance is the central pillar which marcus' control is built around. also; of course they have backup cameras, you idiot. marcus' overconfidence stops him from seeing the obvious holes in his perfect scheme, because he thinks he's already home free. i think it's interesting (and sort of disgusting) how quickly marcus changes his tune after he is caught and faces real actual consequences. his confidence evaporates. he's reduced to a sobbing mess in james' office all because the base of his control - love - is no longer on his side.

marcus' series also touches on sentience and the ethics of changing someone's personality without their knowledge. this is incredibly interesting, and makes for fantastic drama. does it count as coercion if love fully believed they were of sound mind when they made decisions surrounding marcus? is marcus guilty of battery, or even sexual assault? does it count as assault if the victim isn't an organic creature? these questions are already difficult to discuss, let alone answer - marcus sits squarely in the middle of that delightful ethical grey area. i think the setting and context also makes android ethics more difficult to discuss as well; i am of the belief that (in real life) androids will never be fully sentient. they may mimic humans, extremely well, but robots will never possess human creativity, personality, or experiences. again, they could replicate these things, but they can never be anything more than a sum of their parts.

this logic flies out the window when magic is real and parallel universes exist. it's also subject to the beliefs of the creator, which makes its ethics extra tricky, so take the following discussion with a grain of salt.

is love a person? eh, not really. they have a personality, but it's been built in. is it still mean to manipulate them? i'd argue yes, in the same way that it's mean to kick a roomba down the stairs. you're just exercising power over a machine for the sake of it, which is a pretty shitty thing to do, even if it doesn't have the capacity to be upset with you.

but androgynouspenguinexpert, i hear you cry, sort of impressed that you used my full name. love is upset with marcus! they ask for him to be taken off the project, and to not have contact with him again! you would be correct, to a certain extent. i raise you, though: how can we prove that this is love's 'real' personality, when it can be manipulated so easily? i'm not saying they've been tampered with after the reset; my point is that it's pretty hard to grant that someone is an individual if their personality can be altered in any way at any time. if someone digs around in love's head for a bit and flips some switches that make them want to kick over prams, is that a valid personality too? what if love insists that it is? and it's not like love is trapped in a mind palace while the New Evil Code (tm) starts punting toddlers. they're fully aware of their actions. however, as established earlier, i still think the person to blame is the one actually messing with love's code. this means love doesn't really have any agency by design.

james is pretty steadfast on this one. marcus tries to argue that resetting love is a breach of their consent (which is a WILD claim coming from you, mate), but james points out that he didn't need to ask. love is a machine. an asset, if you will (smug look to camera). we do find out in his audio log later that james believes love is a person, but he knows where that definition reaches its limits. marcus does not.

will marcus ever return to the project meridian series? probably not. a guy with an engineering degree isn't escaping a team of memory modification daemons. i don't think this is the last we'll hear of him, though. he's irreversibly fucked up the plans of everyone around him (james' partner has given him several last chances, and anton is close to his breaking point), so he'll probably be in the office whispers for a while. i also think marcus poses as an interesting hurdle for cam (woah callback!), possibly making him question his altruism if he's helping an active antagonist get back to his usual life after a massive intentional fuckup.

i'll end this analysis with a thoughtful quote. something for you all to ponder.

"ROBOTS DON'T HAVE SOULS! I SAID IT! AND FRANKLY, I'M GLAD I SAID IT! [...] AND ANOTHER THING! ROBOTS ARE NOT PEOPLE! ROBOTS - UNLIKE CORPORATIONS - ARE NOT PEOPLE, AND DESERVE NO RIGHTS."

-- Markiplier