Every day is a day of love, if only you believe it so

The biggest misconception in public schools is that literary analysis is about proving you can be right or wrong about a book you read

Literary analysis isn’t about the book

It’s not even about being right

It’s about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury

It doesn’t matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didn’t, you’ve won

And the incredible life skill of spinning bulletproof bullshit out your ass with a handful of facts and a prayer is soooooooo much more valuable than anyone’s ever gonna tell you

If the average tweenager knew that good media analysis meant you could force your English teacher to admit that fuckin- (rolls dice) What’s Eating Gilber Grape is a metaphor for (rolls dice again) Why the crack cocaine epidemic is good actually- we would have far better literacy and critical thinking skills as a nation. And I stand by that

You could develop the magical psychic and illusory power to force the middle aged bitchfuck who makes you raise your hand and beg for permission to take a shit accept the premise that Cocomelon is a subversive and scathing artistic commentary on the pitfalls of modern democracy. Chat GPT essay engines are stealing this from you

I see a census has been reached on what this episode was

The trembling fear is more than I can take When I'm up against the ECHO in the mirror

i have had this sketched up for a million years. but only now have i actually managed to finish it.

Tragic. Tumblr user made a good point but was unnecessarily condescending about it. Will not be reblogging

"you're a monster if you can't reblog." Well rawr girl rawr 🧟‍♂️

The thing is, Nintendo was so close to dominating it this year with the Switch 2. The games they're showcasing alongside it look amazing.

But a lot of the hype is destroyed entirely by the incoming prices of the games. $80+ for a game is absolutely insane.

If Switch 2 games were to just cost $60 like Switch 1 games, with the really heavy hitters costing no more than $70, I think that would've been fine. I doubt much of anyone would've batted an eye if that were to have been the case, and Nintendo wouldn't have obliterated the hype so fast if they were to have just done that.

When I say really heavy hitters, I mean Mario Kart World and Zelda games similar to BOTW and TOTK, I could maybe see the reasoning for those games being $70. Donkey Kong Bananza however is not what I'd consider a heavy hitter. Like I'm sorry, as great as that game looks, I wouldn't spend $70 on it.

At this rate, there's absolutely no way that the Switch 2 will sell nearly as well as the original Switch. It will underperform by comparison, especially because of the prices for the games. Many people just simply won't be able to afford to consistently do $80 for a Switch 2 game.

I see people saying that the ones complaining about the prices are still just gonna buy the stuff anyways and that the Switch 2 will still sell like hot cakes, but honestly I'm not sure I really agree. To an extent that may be true, as I'm sure there will indeed still be people that buy a Switch 2 and games for it, but definitely not as many people who bought the original Switch. I really do get the feeling that there'll be some legitimate hesitancy among many people to buy Switch 2 games because of the pricing.

Consistently buying $60 video games vs consistently buying $80 video games is a huge difference, enough to where it will almost certainly change things. A lot of the people that do make the decision to buy Switch 2 games would, more than likely, do it at a less frequent rate than when they bought Switch 1 games, mostly just sticking with the franchises they care about the most, and that'd be playing a part of how the Switch 2 will sell much more poorly than the Switch 1. People can only spend so much on video games.

There's a reason why people are referring back to the 3DS and Wii U incidents. Even taking into account that there were different circumstances in those incidents and that the Wii U had more factors that led to its failure and that the Switch 2 has more going for it, it's worth saying that the Switch 1 was unique and revolutionary for its time when it released that was part of the reason why it sold so well. The Switch 2 won't have that going for it, even despite the momentum from its predecessor.

The disparity between how the Switch 1 sold vs how the Switch 2 will sell may be notable enough for Nintendo to take note.

I originally created a site skin based on this aesthetic about 2.5 years ago, but it was frankly pretty broken in a lot of ways. As I was looking through my list of site skins, I remembered this one and decided to revive it and make it a little more usable.

If you like it or want to try it out, you can find the CSS code over here on github, along with instructions for how to copy/paste it into a skin for your own AO3 profile.

(as always when I attempt a site skin, if you find stuff that's broken, you can let me know and I'll try to un-break it)

Hold on. THIS IS WHAT SKINS DO. HOW DID YOU DO THIS??? Well I know what I'll be wasting 4 hours on today

This is just the start of what skins can do. You can also use skins to hide stats so you don't see comment and kudos counts etc. You can use them to take all of those tags and put them into a little box that you can scroll through so that they never take up more than 3 or 4 lines. You can use skins to hide a particular fic or series that you never want to see again. You can even use skins to hide tags.

You can change the font, font size, margin widths on the sides of the page. You can remove the entire footer if it bugs you (although I wouldn't recommend it). You can change the words at the top from "Archive of Our Own" to whatever else you want it to say.

If you like separating tags visually, but colour is too much for you, you can separate each type of tag onto its own line. If you want to be able to easily see the comments left by your favourite readers, you can give them their own styles.

There's a billion things you can do with site skins, because all a skin does is change the way the Archive looks - and that includes changing what AO3 actually shows you and what it doesn't.

How you do it is with CSS (cascading style sheets) or by finding skins that other people made and frankensteining something together. Although an easy entry point is using the Wizard. I linked to that FAQ in that part where I mentioned fonts and margins.

I always kind of assume everyone who follows me is vaguely liberal so whenever I find out one of my followers is insanely bigoted I just get vaguely gobsmacked like are you lost

ID: A screenshot of a Twitter thread by GoLikeHellMachine @ golikehellmachi with three parts reading:

"the whole conversation about trans kids is very different if you know any of their parents, who are often fucking terrified that their children are going to kill themselves, not whether they're going to win sports medals.

"source: me, a person who is worried about his nephew after talking with his father

"it is a fucking game to conservatives and op-ed columnists. it is the life of a kid i have known for their entire life to me."

End ID.

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

My favorite part of this is the little “Yet I’m still failing” at the bottom of the screencap. It’s not yet occurred to you to change something you’re doing? Maybe try not using ChatGPT?

rb to tell prev they're being so brave right now and pat their head a little please

old old old old drawing that I found

I know most people don't care about anything unless it has to do with the U.S. but can we please start talking about the Canadian election.

Please don't vote for Poilievre. He's basically the Canadian Trump and plans to put in place laws that harm trans youth, and lots of other shit.

Please vote istg this is the only way anything will get better. Poilievre has been kissing millionaires and billionaires asses. He'll make life even harder, and he loves Trump.

Reblogs are appreciated, especially if you aren't Canadian.

"And... there! We're recording!"

Welcome one and all to the official Stardom Bound ask blog! this intro post will be updated occasionally, so check up on it every now and then, yeah?

Currently there are two of us working on this blog! here's a little character info for the 6 currently askable characters! :]

 Hourglass - The host with the most, an old 80s action film star with a love for being in the spotlight. He's a larger object, with four arms and four legs! He really likes spiders. He isn't quite sure how all this internet stuff works just yet, though... his messages look like this: "Mic check?"

Folder - Hourglass' co-host. She's a bit camera shy, and a little high-strung, but she gets the job done! For all the time Hourglass spends slacking off to be the face of the show, she makes sure everything is running smoothly. She doesn't talk much, but give her a little time to open up, and you'll get a very devoted friend. Her messages look like this: "Can this wait?"

Pocket Watch - He's a bit scattered, very nervous about the whole "becoming a TV personality" thing. But, he couldn't pass up the chance at winning. Their actual biggest worry is... finding someone to take care of their cats. He's a sweetheart at his core, once you get past the nervous, quiet exterior - even if he's a bit of a push-over. Their messages look like this: “Am.. am I doing this right..?”

Bass - Bass doesn't say a whole lot, but when he does, he is LOUD. A bit busy with his band, but always happy to speak with a fan! He's easy-going most of the time, but pretty easy to rile up. Has gotten kicked out of venues for starting fights that he swear weren't his fault. His messages look like this: “Are we recording?”

Safety Goggles [and occasionally Round Bottom Flask!] - She, and her partner, are quite the duo. They joined the show together and plan to win for each other, using the million to fund their scientific exploits. She owns her own lab where most of her time is spent, and would love to share her work with the world. Her messages look like this: “Oh, look!”

Laser Pointer - A loud, excitable, weird little fella. She bounces around, steals things, and causes all around mischief. He's not too aware of people's feelings, thinking whatever brings him a smile must be fun for others, too. Even if that is… far from true. They have no off switch. Wonderful. Laser's messages have yet to be assigned a colour.