when you have to tutor the teenage kiramman heir physics but she has absolutely zero interest in the subject and would rather be out shooting things instead

we absolutely deserved more of jayce and caitlyn being a sibling duo

“You guys don’t want morally grey characters because you refuse to relish in their evilness and constantly downplay their horrible actions.”

I don’t know how to explain this to you but… you don’t RELISH the evilness of a “morally grey” character. That’s not how it works. Relishing in a character’s badness while ignoring their goodness pushes them out of the “morally grey” camp and into black and white good v bad territory.

With morally grey characters if they do something good you are happy they did that, and when they do something bad you are sad/upset that they did that. You’re not supposed to RELISH when they do bad things. You’re supposed to be DISAPPOINTED when they falter and do bad things.

I hate to keep using children’s media as examples, but since these idiots have never watched anything else, this is the best comparison I can think of.

Zuko.

Zuko is a morally grey character. He starts doing bad things and being the antagonist, and slowly he has an arc where he grows and learns to be a better person. But at a crucial moment he faulters. He does something abjectly bad and spend the greater half of the next season wrestling with his bad decision.

And at no point was I RELISHING in his badness.

I was sad. Disheartened. I wanted him to see the light and realize the error of his ways. And whenever he continued to do bad things it made me disappointed to see how far he had sunk.

If you were sitting there RELISHING in Zuko sending an assassin after Aang, destroying his pictures of his family, yelling at his friends, and throwing food at his imprisoned uncle while telling him he was worthless… there is something WRONG with you.

When we “downplay” the atrocities of Caitlyn Kiramman, it’s because you’re deliberately trumping her atrocities UP past the morally grey line and into outright evil villain status. And your assertion that we should be relishing in her descent into dictatorship is psychotic when you spend so much time moralizing AGAINST her role as a dictator.

You’re the ones who don’t want morally grey characters. You want to call them morally grey, but what you actually want is for them to be black and white. That’s honestly the only way I can see you wanting to RELISH in the badness of a character. Because when they’re purely bad, it’s okay because you can grasp that what they’re doing is bad. Because it easy to understand.

Morally grey characters BY DEFINITION are not “easy to understand.”

WHY DON’T PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT CAITLYNS CORRUPTION IS HER FUCKING TRAUMA COMING OUT??? like they would understand my girl so much more😔💔 and like the icing on the cake was when she was talking to jinx in the cell when she said “Hating you?- I’ve hated myself” LIKE UHH HELLOO???

It's very clear to me that Fandom needed something to hate and so very many people have taken such weird takes on Caitlyn. To the point of wondering if we watched the same show.

If I have one piece of advice for being in the arcane fandom, it’s just stop caring. It’s super easy for people to convince you that you are a horrible person for liking a character or ship. But really who cares what a bunch of random people you will probably never meet think about you over your preference FICTIONAL SHOW. If you take a step back and realize how stupid it is to do that, and you genuinely do not have to care about their opinion the fandom and show itself becomes a lot more fun to enjoy. And if someone bases their opinion on what characters you enjoy, they probably aren’t a person you should care about opinion. So just stop caring. Enjoy Caitvi, you aren’t a bad person for it. Enjoy Silco, you are not a bad person for it. Enjoy Jayvik, you are not a bad person for it. Enjoy timebomb, Caitlyn, Meljay, Ambessa, Maddie, jinx, vi, literally anyone, it doesn’t make you a bad person, even if the fandoms bad. It doesn’t matter if some random person thinks you suck because they wanna group people together over something as small as a character they enjoy, just enjoy what you want and what makes you happy.

i so deeply understand the reasoning of every comment

The face-eating panther feast continues.

But seriously, if somebody says this in front of you? Don't point and laugh. Don't say "PATHERS ATE YOUR FACE" or "SERVES YA RIGHT YOU MAGA PIECE OF SHIT" or "BOO FUCKING HOO"

Instead, express sympathy.

Agree with them that yeah, what happened absolutely sucks. And yeah, it appears he maybe lied to get your vote? Politicians lie all the time, and it's a shame he took advantage of you this time.

Remember: deradicalized, ex-cult members are some of the angriest people on earth, and we need that anger. Because we need everybody we can get if we're gonna beat these fascist assholes.

exactly. these people were consistently duped and the moment they stop denying that to themselves, they will want to fight back. not all of these maga weirdos are nazis or white supremacists or culty evangelists. many of them are just low information voters who got tricked by expensive rhetoric that was specifically designed to trick them.

What’s going to need to be done to improve this situation is deeply annoying to me (because I have to admit that I often sneakily enjoy watching the faces of the cruel and uncaring get eaten). And I’m sure others will share my annoyance. But when these people fall, and realize they’ve fallen… if the rest of us ever want such folks’ original behavior to change—to have a chance to shift toward something less toxic—somebody has to be there to catch them.

This approach has at least a chance of making meaningful change. And some people on the Other Side know this, and hate it… seeing it as a way they’ll lose power. They betray their true motivations by trying to discredit empathy and compassion—by characterizing them as weakness. And the language they use, trying to be clever, csn accidentally be most revealing.

“The ‘empathy exploit,’” Musk called it the other day. As if the manifestation of understanding someone else’s trouble, and feeling/expressing compassion for it, was somehow unfair, like using a cheat code in a game to get an unearned advantage. That’s the level such people are operating on: that the only thing that matters is winning the game—whatever they’ve decided the current game is—and (from their POV) fuck whatever human suffering’s being experienced on the other side. If those people weren’t weak, and losers, they wouldn’t be suffering, right?

(exasperated sigh) I know which side of this argument I prefer to come down on, even though it’s gonna really annoy me, sometimes, for years to come. Somebody in the room has to swallow her grim amusement and, when confronted by one of these people, move through into a mode that has a chance to make someone’s life less painful.

(shrug) Can’t be helped. Might as well get on with it, day by day: decreasing local entropy by increments…

Sometimes it’s all one can do. But it makes a difference.

Seen someone say “I can’t die, I got graves to dance on that hasn’t been dug yet.” And honestly, that goes hard. We need to keep that energy.

I hear you

ink: ferris wheel press, "Sugar and Spite"

Tumblr isn't giving us back the boops for ides of march so I will do it myself.

Get your boops everyone!!!

I just put these together real quick feel free to use them.

I thought I might share one of my new tattoos. A couple years ago, a dear friend and I coined the term “fish bag moment”

A fish bag moment might be sitting all alone in an empty new apartment after coming out and upending your life, or starting a new job in a brand new line of work because it’s closer to your dreams

It’s what happens when you take a leap of faith or make a hard decision for yourself, when the future is so hard to visualize and everything feels scary. You’re just a fish in a bag and you can’t see where you’re going

But you’re on your way to a bigger aquarium

Ugh a coworker I adore is leaving for a new job opportunity. She was talking about how she’s happy and excited, but also sad and scared and nervous. I was like “omg you’re having a fishbag moment! Those feelings are what this tattoo represents!”

She said “I don’t like this feeling why would you get that tattooed on you”

And I said “because it means you’re on your way to a bigger aquarium 😌”

She had to walk away bc she started crying lol, and then shouted “THAT WAS CUTE” at me from down the hall

Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

in another, another universe

im gonna call this arcane no angst universe

Jesus breakdancing to impress his friends (AD 20)

One of the oldest buildings in Hattfjelldal municipality in Nordland, Norway Photo:  Elin Kristina Jåma

Hat tip @merwey ! Practical and stylish!

#look I am not saying there is a witch in that house#I am just saying that I personally am minding my manners anywhere near it