maybe not the absolute best thing about les miserables the novel (it’s a long book) but the one that stood out the most to me and has remained with me most strongly is that when the book is explaining to us the plight of fantine, who basically like finds herself poor and knocked up bc iirc she hooked up with some fuckboy who was never gonna stick around, victor hugo really takes pains to be clear that fantine did a lot of really dumb shit. she made stupid ass choices. she was naive and impulsive and unwise and myopic. it’s not a story where a tragic heroine did everything right and still got screwed. but the moral argument put forth by, i mean, to some degree the entire novel but particularly (to my recollection) by this section is essentially like, isn’t it so fucked up that we live in a society where someone can be functionally condemned to a life of suffering for the crime of being a fallible human being in their youth? isn’t being young and stupid and getting to move on from that a human right that we are denying people? shouldn’t you be allowed to be kind of an idiot without ruining your entire life? it’s such a clearly and expansively empathetic view and it’s an idea that people obviously continue to struggle with based on Any Time Anything Happens Ever and also one that i feel like continues to be rare in narrative art or media, at least expressed this fully or strongly.

Took a shot at translating and typesetting this short comic by @k4m-golden! A great many thanks to them for allowing me to share it!!

Original comic here on their tumblr, among others from the same doujin.

(read right to left)

My brother recently got into Demon Slayer so I wanted to make a kny oc for him since I did it before with both me and my sister and never got around to my brother :)

But I started by refreshing my own design because wow?? It’s been 4 years since I first made my kny insert character and a lot of things are now outdated! Not to mention my art has improved a lot, I hope. More details under the cut!

Meet Ebisu Koharu: youngest of the Ebisu family and physically the weakest. They only barely passed Final Selection by hiding for the entire week and surviving off tips from their older siblings. Nonetheless, they still want to contribute, which is why they hold onto a thick, leather bound book that records every demon they’ve ever met in precise detail, with labeled diagrams and scribbled calculations in the margins of different strengths and weaknesses.

After spending a few years on the job, and properly seeing their data contribute to the successes of other demon slayers, they’ve come a bit more into their own as a competent researcher and fighter, though they still do tend to request paired missions with friends and family to act more as a support role rather than a fighter.

The Ebisu family is one of scholars. The eldest daughter Kaoru is a doctor, and the eldest son Shougen is a chemist. By nature, fighting is not necessarily their strong suit, which is why their family breathing style and techniques are all poison-assisted. Of the three, Koharu is the weakest and most averse to combat— they wield a short half-length blade, with more of a smooth ceremonial hilt and sheath than any practical weapon.

Okita souji with a sensitive s/o headcanons (my baby is so underrated)

Okita Souji my beloved, he's such a cutie beautiful beautiful beautiful, beautiful boy- Also, it's been a while since I've written anything in English so if anything's sounds a bit off it's because of it

Despite being known as a bloodlusted swordsman, the strongest among the Shinsengumi, the Demon Child, Okita Souji himself is quite a sensitive person, his own way. So, as long as you aren't his opponent in a fight, he'll generally be quite nice to you.

Some people, mostly among warriors like him, might perceive your being sensitive as a weakness, but this doesn't apply to him. Okita his able to recognise it as a strenght - the way you'd be concerned about him whenever he fights some terrible foe and the way you'd greet him with a smile, when he approaches you after winning another battle. Sometimes he feels guilty, he didn't want to worry you - seeing you gasp, your eyes reddened as he dodges a hit that could be fatal. Okita could almost think you don't believe in him, but he knows that's just the way you are. Always understanding other, always a tad more emotional than the average, always having a sort of poetic outlook on the world surrounding you - so different from the world made of blood and near-death experiences he faced daily. You allowed him to see life through different eyes, yours. He might've been kind, but at the hand of the day, he was worried you might've just seen him as a cold-blooded murderer? Yet, you were able to go over that, and hold his hands dirty with blood. You wew the one, just like Kondo, who had been able to see the "child", not just the demon. Thank to you, he was one step closer to be human, though that wouldn't change his essence.

and the template here: https://twitter.com/KarlaDoodlesPen/status/1495943787138408457

That's my girl since i was 12 in 1997 and that's my girl at 38 in 2023

Edit mode button sounds from Project Diva Extend, the second + third to last ones can also be used in the main game.

Do you think one could attain decent-ish ability to read Japanese just by studying kanji? Specifically asking because the kanji learnin' service "wanikani" is the single Japanese resource that works best with my brain, but then there are separate resources for grammar and vocab and and and.....

You will get REAAAALLLLLYYY far knowing only the kanji but you're going to have to know hiragana and katakana at some point too. Tofugu, the company that did Wanikani, has two mnemonics-based guides for the kana that are basically Wanikani Lite. They're how I learned the kana and I swear by them.

Here's hiragana: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

And katakana: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-katakana/

Hiragana are especially vital to learning kanji; you won't be able to use 99% of Japanese-English dictionaries without them. BUT they're pretty easy and the rules for using them are consistent. You won't have to remember any irregular exceptions for any of them.

I haven't tried it yet, but I've heard really good things about the Crystal Hunters manga series as a fun/low stress way to learning Japanese vocab and grammar. It eases the reader into new concepts and then repeats them throughout the chapter so you remember them. There are free vocab and study guides/lists for each chapter too. Might be worth checking out once you get some kanji and the kana under your belt? The first book is also free.

Official site: https://crystalhuntersmanga.com/

Good luck!!

I decided on a whim to check out Rui’s event, “I, the Reincarnated Overlord, Magnificently Thwart ‘THEIR’ Conspiracy!!”, since it’s rather short, and ran across this dialogue bit from right at the beginning. I don’t remember ever seeing a chuunibyou (’second-year disease’ in English) that was explicitly aware of their behavior, yet Rui’s completely aware of how she’s acting. But on the other hand, she refers to her ‘chuunibyou’ episodes as delusions, which implies at least to me that the story is treating Rui’s chuunibyou-ness as an actual disorder/disease. Delusions often show up as coping mechanisms for mentally ill and/or traumatized people, which makes me wonder what’s going on with Rui’s background (no, I haven’t read her MSS yet, even though I have her in-game. I don’t have Rayshift, cut me some slack.) 

In fact, Rui’s even able to predict her behavior based on her circumstances:

Which reminds me of both people with anxiety-induced sensory processing issues, as well as folks (like me!) with full-blown Sensory Processing Disorder. Rui here is at Kamiket (which is likely a riff off the real event Comiket,) a large convention for comics and related media, such as music, movies (which is why Seira’s there,) and games (which is why Rui’s there.) I’ve never been to Comiket specifically, but I have gone several times to Otakon, a (very) large anime convention in DC, and lemme tell you, it’s noisy, it’s crowded, and in Otakon’s case, it’s hot, which I can confirm is normal for the region. Basically, a sensory nightmare, and if you have sensory issues, you’re gonna need something to help cope with the overly active environment. For instance, I use headphones/earphones while not attending a panel or event, and using songs on repeat helps to drown out some of the noise. I wonder if Rui’s using delusions for the same reason, maybe by projecting herself into the third person helps reduce the intensity of offending sensory input? 

Anyways, the point is that I love Rui, and now I love her a bit more, and hopefully so do you.

heads up it turns out a lot of the new jukebox the ghost is actually really great!!!! i was out here thinking their music had just gotten worse but it turns out just a couple songs happen to be terrible and the rest is good

Listen the list of things I want to learn and never do is a mile long but I think about learning to read and write sheet music so much bc I come up with all these little tunes in my head that i’ll try to single key on a piano or string on a guitar, but I have the memory of a goldfish, so they’re lost to oblivion within 5min.

// any headcanons how the cat king managed to get a VHS Player/TV to the Cat Kingdom Castle? XD

tbh i think they probably just stole the VCR from the human world and then worked their magic on it so it would work in the cat kingdom laughs

like it's somehow connected to the king's eyes that are floating about the castle, which obviously isn't humans' doing. also if you notice, the TV apparatus itself is more of a crystal ball than a TV ghjfkd it's also connected to something outside the room by wires of some sort, which i'm guessing is its power source

in short there's a lot of weird unexplained things in the cat kingdom and i'm not really about to try to add logic to it lmao

that said i do have a headcanon that a lot of these tapes are either visitors to the cat kingdom that the king wanted to record orrr baby lune videos fjjfioea

literally thank you dovid katz for putting everything you’ve ever published online

(https://www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_bibliography.htm -- his bibliography arranged by date here

https://www.dovidkatz.net/ -- and more of his stuff available here)

14% of the way through....

Adhd will strike you with the sudden urge to hear cascadia’s every time we touch played on a mini harp and you cannot rest until you find a video of the closest thing you can

uuuwaaaaa- i just stumbled upon a new song and the urge to record a cover is sooooooooo strong

aah the moment i have my own space you'll know, cause i'll be cracking out covers/english dubs of shit non stop

Girl help, it's now morning and I'm still fixating on this ship in a fandom I'm not even in, I still do not actually go here and I genuinely don't know how exactly I got here, but I'm having the time of my life