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monstrous sapphic love, nothing else like it tbh
[Image description: an illustration of Imogen and Laudna from Critical Role. Imogen is unconscious from being torn up in battle, and Laudna towers over her protectively in her form of dread. Tree branches and flowers and fungi sprout from Laudna, and she's framed by other crooked, creepy trees in the background. She snarls ominously at the viewer, daring anyone to touch her girlfriend. End ID]
the way these strikes get framed is always so funny to me
"the strike could stretch on until the end of summer" or the execs could pay their workers
"there won't be ANY new shows because of this strike" or the execs could pay their workers
"no more content for us because the mean old writers and actors are-" OR THE EXECS COULD PAY THEIR WORKERS
I know, I know, gatekeeping the outdoors, that's supposedly bad, right, but I think if you show up to do a hike and you brought a portable speaker with you to play music while you hike, I think, like hear me out, there should be a gate, and someone at the gate should keep you from doing the hike.
playing music in public should get strong social disapproval
Recorded music, anyway. Live music is different rules. If you want to lug an entire cello up a mountain you can do whatever the hell you want.
Carrying a speaker on a hike to make everyone listen to your bullshit, and simply sitting under a tree and playing a fiddle in the woods, are two activities so different they may as well not exist in the same world.
I think the critical difference is that the bringing of recorded music with you ties the space to Elsewhere, whereas the creation of live music with an instrument you brought both binds you to the space, and drags everyone who hears you play into it as well.
I think you're right.
Yeah I'll accept this into my belief system.
There’s a regular at the fabric superstore. She’s at least 80 years old, and she just got back into sewing after giving it up for 40 years. We’ll call her Irma.
I love Irma.
Irma is constantly surprised by the newfangled sewing gadgets our store sells. Today she bought some extra-fine glass-head pins and a magnetic pincushion. As I’m ringing her purchases up, she tells me very seriously, “did you know, if you’re careful, you can sew RIGHT OVER those pins? You don’t need to take them out!”
I told her that I liked that you can’t accidentally melt the head of the glass pins with your iron, and she nodded. “They used to all be like that, but times changed.”
I love old sewing machines and asked what kind of machine she has, and she goes, “Oh, it’s an old Singer Featherweight that my husband bought me when we were first married. It’s probably not worth anything anymore, but the thing sews fine. Have you seen the ones those girls over there–” indicating the sewing machine sub-store in my location “–have? Those things go in every direction and the needle always comes to the top when you stop sewing! Imagine how handy that is!”
I mention that I used to sew on my grandmother’s Featherweight but now there’s a intra-family war about who owns Grandma’s Featherweight and so no one gets to use it. It’s genuinely the best portable straight-stitch machine I’ve ever used.
I warn her to never let anyone tell her that Featherweight isn’t worth something. “I know, I miss my husband and it’s always going to have a place in my heart, just like your grandma’s.”
“I mean, Irma, there’s that, but they’re also worth a really notable amount of money. The Singer Featherweight is really financially valuable. I almost never see them for sale around here for less than about $400, and that’s in bad condition.”
“It’s a good thing my husband’s dead, honey, because if you told him that he managed to buy a sewing machine that’s worth more in 2021 than he bought it for in 1950, well, he’d be so smug that I just wouldn’t be able to tolerate driving home with him.”
please tell irma I love her
the problem with knowing things about battle tactics is that an ever-increasing subset of popular media becomes impossible to enjoy properly because you have to sit there like 'wow Captain Protagonist good to know all those dead people on your own side are a direct result of your total lack of anything resembling brains'
seriously i'm not talking about anything elaborate, just basic common sense, but common sense is so much harder to ignore once you've got systematized data to back it up, like
what do they even think a fortification is for???
what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????
make the other sonuvabitch have a hard time killing you without getting killed first! most basic goal of combat! why are movies so bad at writing characters who actually attempt this on even a very small 'army' scale?
and like i said in the first post, it's not just that it's Dumb, the thing is that once you put the character in a command role, their ability to think their way through a combat situation with some degree of optimization becomes a reflection on their character on like. a moral level.
if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it's just you punching people that's one thing. or even if it's you and five guys who've decided they like how you roll!
but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don't know what you're doing. that's not okay.
it's not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.
when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn't have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn't want and weren't competent to handle, without support.
or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.
even if they win! i don't want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there's triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!
no! they fucked it up is what they did! this is some Light Brigade gaslighting shit! shut up. our boy just massacred people who trusted him.
This is reminding me of the extremely weird experience I had watching, of all things, The Kid Who Would Be King a couple months ago, because it was one of very few fantasy movies I’ve seen recently wherein actual tactical thinking is evidenced.
And like, granted, it wasn’t especially brilliant tactics, but it was weird as hell to be watching a bunch of middle schoolers fighting hell zombies display a better understanding of concepts like fortifications and ambushes and traps and bottlenecking an invading force than most purported “good leaders” in fantasy with far more adult target audiences
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