nonsensical-ramblings

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It's gonna be such a funny mess when Donald Trump dies of a stroke on April 1st, 2024.

Naturally everybody will think it's fake because of the date only to lose their minds (both positively and negatively based on their opinion of trump) when realizing it's real

There will be massive celebrations in the streets and on social media and lots of predictable "don't speak ill of the dead" discourse about those celebrations

Weird evangelicals will pull some weird number trick talking about how Jesus was conceived on April 1st and that makes Trump a sort of messiah and people will make fun of that

The Republicans (after they're done with the faux-sadness and faux-outrage) will stomp over each other to be his successor but none of them will succeed. They'll tear each other apart and have no single nominee for the November elections.

There will be discourse about if Biden and the living former presidents should go to his funeral (they won't, he was a traitor insurrectionist)

The Ukraine-Russia War immediately goes in favor of Ukraine as morale in the Kremlin is reduced. China similarly backs off from its threats on Taiwan.

Ten thousand new memes are made, some sticking around for years to come.

Not a month later a bunch of unofficial biographies of Trump hit the bookshelves, many with new details about just how awful he was.

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“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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alright! we got one whole person interested, so here's my hot take:

the first "how to train your dragon" movie is WAY better than httyd 2.

i know everyone loves like, the cool warrior mom design, the romance and the "epic animation moments" in 2... but can we for a moment be honest and say the whole "hiccup becoming a leader / which dragon is the Good Alpha" plot was dumb as hell? also, the villain sucked?

the original httyd is pretty good about keeping the structural problem grounded in real societal fears. namely, fear of the unknown and of beasts. it makes sense for any ol' village dealing with such a problem. it was intelligently designed around a solid premise.

httyd 2 is like. actually, dragon taming is a big thing, even outside berk. and theres a Scary Foreign Man dragon tamer who is bad and just wants power. it's okay to other him. being a good guy is about being a protector instead of an evil, power-hungry guy... which hiccup never was anyway... so no real growth there. just be good instead of bad. wow. what a theme. very thought-provoking.

people act like httyd 3 being bad came out of nowhere, but httyd 2 was the original sin to me. it totally dropped the societal themes in favor of generic good vs evil fights and "worldbuilding" - despite having no more interesting stories to tell.

it also kind of ruined hiccup for the sake of developing him. like. his whole thing is that he can't fight, so he has to find other ways to contribute to society. he's the anti-macho hero. which ends up being important in convincing the village that dragons can be peaceful. he's empathetic to the other, because he's been othered.

meanwhile in httyd 2, hiccup's like. Cool Warrior Man, who needs to step up and be the hero king when his dad dies. he can fight just fine, because he has a cool dragon to fight with. so he's just like any warrior, but one who fights with weapons instead of brute strength. aka most fictional warriors who arent just "the heavy."

the first movie isn't beyond criticism, obviously. the animation was a little meh compared to httyd 2 - i get why visually its seen as an upgrade. plus, httyd 1 also did the thing of having like a last minute evil dragon to defeat... but that wasn't the point. the POINT was the village and its fears. the POINT was overcoming that.

whenever people list why they love httyd 2 and consider it superior, its like... lists of details. like, look at the upgraded character designs, the cool flying scenes, the affection between hiccup and astrid, or the clever way hiccup's prosthetic leg is designed.

but these are film *details*, not fundamentals.

if you told me the sequel to httyd was going to have a much more generic story, ignore the themes of the original and makes its deliberately lanky and weak protagonist into Handsome Hero Warrior Boy, i'd be like. that sounds kinda bad. but the Animation Details (tm) i guessssss

i know hiccup is still "himself" in 2 to some extent, btw. he's an inventor, he's intelligent, and he initially tries to talk to the villain. but none of that ends up mattering. its arguably looked down on by the movie, which really, really wants him to step up to be the warrior king like his dad. aka a generic Hero Strongman.

i'm not totally against evolving the themes of a work to fit new conflicts, btw. sequels should generally be different from the first movie. that's fine. that's expected.

but while the new conflict in httyd 2 IS born out of the results of the previous movie, that evolution feels very literal, not thematic.

namely, the evolution is "more people have dragons now." it builds the conflict from there. its based on worldbuilding, not on theme.

i don't think a very interesting evolution.

it kinda went from, in httyd 1: "the theme is fear of the unknown. how prejudice/ignorance manifests, educating oneself through compassion, the dangers of worshipping violent masculinity, and the importance of questioning what you're taught by society."

to, in httyd 2: "the theme is dragons. who has them? what they want with them? how can the Good Guy humans protect dragons from the Bad Guys? also, being a Good Leader means being a strong Hero Man who protects his friends," without asking any deeper questions related to the themes of the first movie.

and i'm like. guys. guys.

the theme shouldn't just be "dragons."

the theme of the first movie was NOT just "dragons." the first movie could've been about people being afraid of unicorns. or large birds. or unusually intelligent bears. it was not just about literal dragons, it was about societal fears and trying to overcome our base gut instincts.

i think this is what really plagues httyd 3: it builds on the themes of the second movie, not the first.

httyd 3 asks further questions that only really revolve around the literal relationship between humans and dragons. it does not understand any broader themes of what that relationship represents.

it clearly thinks its very intelligent for asking "what do the dragons themselves want?", but that question is not respected enough to be explored in any thematically coherent way.

the only real weight its given is the argument that there will always be "bad humans" out there, and so, dragons are safer in the wild. which sure is... an argument. but its a very "othering the problem" kind of argument.

it acts like its caring about the agency of dragons, but its not really. dragons were not actually portrayed as "oppressed" in berk society after the first movie, nor lacking agency. they were only at risk of "bad individuals", to which that solution is stupid. the racialized bad guy in httyd 2 didn't steal all his dragons from berk. he caught and subjugated them, mostly from the wild.

all while looking like... this, by the way. i feel like we don't talk about that enough. all the good guys are white nordics, while the only man of color is scary, domineering and cruel. in a series of movies that was once about having empathy for the other.

MAYBE if berk had been really oppressive towards dragons in httyd 2, we could've had a theme. maybe if they treated them like a dangerous commodity that must be tightly controlled despite their nominal acceptance and inclusion, we could've had a thematically tight 3-movie arc about like fear and oppression or whatever.

but that would require, yknow... making the movies be about broad societal problems, instead of just evil individuals. and only the first movie cares about making any real societal critique.

also, the solution in httyd 3 would've still sucked. these movies, in terms of writing, really decrease in maturity from 1, down to 2, to the plummeting depths of 3.

there is no relationship of oppression that is solved by completely segregating society and going our separate ways (httyd 3). just like there is no oppression that is solved just by defeating bad individuals (httyd 2). we have to learn to coexist as equals, to educate ourselves and be compassionate to the other. even if we're afraid.

that's the dream only the first movie kept in its heart.

#WHOOF #STEAMING hot takes and GOOD takes at that #like fresh buttered bread right out of the oven #I like httyd2 #but nothing will ever compare to the beautiful and valuable and truly timeless messages of the first movie #excellent analysis op!! #httyd #how to train your dragon #thw criticism #httyd 2 #httyd 3 #media analysis

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Made it off of this post

#byler

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Hello OP! Oh my god. I swear on my mother I am not here to ask your opinions or thoughts on anything because I am oh so familiar with the post-hyperfixation coma, and if I ask anything of you, it will be a very gentle request for you to go eat some eccles cakes and soak your brain in a warm lavender-scented bath.

What I am here to do is say that you are right!! You're right!! You're right, you're right, you're right, and I know this with frighteningly rock-solid certainty because the way you described your experience watching GO2 is, word-for-word, exactly how I felt. From the moment you said something odd was going on, and you assured us that you loved returning to the world of Good Omens and thoroughly enjoyed the new season, but at the same time you couldn't reconcile with yourself that creeping sense of strangeness. The strangeness which built and built and built, like a sound so low you couldn't hear it but you could feel it in your bones, and it was just getting LOUDER and delight turned to puzzlement turned to bewilderment turned to incredulousness and you were going INSANE, and why? What was Neil doing? You came away from it wanting to love it, but... "I felt like there was something I didn't understand about it, and so I couldn't yet understand how I felt about it either." Wow. Yeah. Are you inside my brain?

Your theory (and your theorizing, writing, organizing, and formatting skills to be honest) are just unbelievable. Genuinely. And I'm so relieved that you know that about yourself and you say it, because you deserve it. When you introduced the idea that Metatron could be going back, editing history, and manipulating Aziraphale and Crowley's relationship, I cried a little. Just a couple tears, but you actually made me cry with that revelation, because it was just so jarring how obviously true it was.

Enough gushing and rambling though, I have a point!! I'm keeping my promise and I am not going to ask you to tell me things. You've told me 16k words worth of things, and I feel like a new person now, so to give your think-machine the break it deserves, I want to tell you things! And, okay, hear me out- I am begging you to not take this next sentence the wrong way, because nearly everything about your analysis was perfect and astonishingly comprehensive and obviously it doesn't need this detail to function, but Neil came to our houses and personally handed us a big shiny ribbon cut-to-size that perfectly wraps all of this up and by god am I not going to tie it into a bow.

HOW DID YOU GLOSS OVER THE GIANT FUCKING OTHER ELEPHANT IN THIS ROOM THAT IS THE PARALLEL BETWEEN HOW AZIRAPHALE AND CROWLEY ARE MANIPULATING NINA AND MAGGIE'S RELATIONSHIP AGAINST THEIR WILL, AND HOW THE METATRON IS MANIPULATING AZIRAPHALE AND CROWLEY'S RELATIONSHIP AGAINST THEIR WILL OH MY GOD

*pant* *pant*

Okay. Okay okay okay. I'm sorry I'm just SO excited about this. because this is what tipped me off!!!! I fucking thought to myself "wow, this whole business with them trying to get Nina and Maggie together kind of feels... wrong? It's making me a tad uncomfortable. It started off cute but now it's just getting more and more complicated and it's not really working and I don't think either of them are exactly... benefitting from this? And C & A are kind of bad at creating these little scenarios to make them fall in love, Crowley is oversimplifying things into clichés like sheltering together in the rain and Aziraphale is- wait is he... okay, a ball, interesting choice, is he forcing everyone to play along with this weird little themed party? Is he literally getting into their heads and changing their thoughts and making them happy against their will, making them dance, making them speak and dress like they're in Pride & Prejudice? What the actual fuck, Aziraphale??? Man, I... y'know, he's been acting really weird for a while, I feel like I don't even know him anymore, I wonder if... Aziraphale and Crowley are being manipulated the same way they've been... trying to manipulate Nina and Maggie...?"

"NAAAH" I fucking said to myself, OP. "NAH there's no way, that's just too out there, it would be weird and wouldn't make any sense. It would be a dumb way to deus ex machina this."

LIKE I??? I SAW IT TOO! I know you're right because I saw it too, I just wasn't enough of a mad genius to actually follow through and see the light. And now that you probably have gone and figured it all out, we have the tools to make this parallel thing an open-and-shut case.

The Metatron and Aziraphale & Crowley both:

Meddle in the relationship of two people for their own personal gain

Do a pretty bad job of it

Use old and tired clichés to craft different scenarios to influence these people

Literally manipulate their minds and the minds of people around them in order to pull off their end goal, making people act out-of-character

Make everything Really Fucking Weird in the process

So yeah. The whole coffeeshop AU thing was all foreshadowing. It was a smaller-scale, more digestible dynamic to prime us for how that same situation will work between Crowley, Aziraphale, and the Metatron, and it was SO LUDICROUSLY OBVIOUS. To say I'm flabbergasted with Neil's writing is not even beginning to scratch the surface of the emotions I'm feeling right now.

Thank you, OP. Thank you and your spectacular mind for making sense out of this delightful, but supremely confusing and jumbled season. I'm going to rewatch it again tomorrow night and I cannot wait to see everything in a new light with my third eye wide fucking open. I don't know what else to say other than just... thank you. You've put my head back on my shoulders and knocked a good helping of sense into it.

P.s. A couple other things I noticed:

Not only does Crowley ignore and talk over Aziraphale when he says he has a suggestion for dealing with the demons, I found it even more egregious that Aziraphale CONTINUOUSLY ignored and dismissed Crowley's warnings about said demons as they were arriving at the bookshop. Talk about Mr. "Who Cares About Tiramisu?" Fell. It was genuinely hard to watch as he pulled Crowley onto the dance floor instead of listening to him speak, because that's not how the two of them work! Like you said. The poor angel's mind has been scrambled like an egg.

You also mention how a couple people express confusion about what's going on in the story. I'd like to add to your list: remember when the Metatron showed up to take a walk with Aziraphale, and Crowley waved them off saying something along the lines of "go ahead, this day can't get any weirder"? That line just struck me when I first heard it because I was practically shouting at the screen "YES!!! I KNOW!! Why is this all SO FUCKING WEIRD!!"

And finally I can't help but notice this season has an uncanny fixation on three things. Magic and sleight of hand of course, with the magic show, lies ("I'm a demon, I lie, It's what I do", and Aziraphale lying to the other angels in Job), and mysteries and clues (Jane Austen, and also Aziraphale and Muriel and Furfur and his zombies doing investigative work). It's like this show is hitting us over the head telling us "HEY!!! Come take a closer look!!! Please! This story is chock full of magic and mystery and clues and you need to look into that! Not everything is as it seems!!!"

The Magic Trick You Didn’t See: Being An Analysis of Good Omens Season 2

(or: Neil Gaiman, Your Brain is Gorgeous But I Have Cracked Your Sneaky Little Code And Have You Dead To Rights*) (*Maybe)

***

Soooooo I just spent the last 48 hours having a BREATHTAKING GALAXY BRAIN EPIPHANY about Good Omens Season 2 and feverishly writing a fuckin16,000 word essay about the incredible magic trick that @neil-gaiman pulled off. 

Yes, it’s long, but I PROMISE your brains will explode. Do you want to know how magic works? Do you want to know what Metatron’s deal is (I’m like 99% sure of this and it’s EXTREMELY FUCKING GOOD)? Do you want to know about the Mystery of the Vanishing Eccles Cakes and the big fat beautiful clue I found in the opening credits? Do you go through the whole inventory of Chekov’s Firearm & Heavy Artillery Discount Warehouse? 

Here is the essay, go read it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/193IXS11XN46lziHRb6eUpM17yK0BQkRqke1Wh64A_e0/ When ur done u can tell me I’m an insane crackpot, and u know what, i won’t even be offended

In case you don’t know whether you want to bother reading the whole enormous thing on google docs, I’ve put the first couple sections of it under the cut. JUST TRUST ME OKAY, HEAR ME OUT, THIS IS VERY EXTREMELY COOL, NEIL IS GOOD AT HIS JOB–

Keep reading

#good omens #the magic trick theory #the meta theory #the magic trick you didn't see #good omens spoilers #good omens 2 #good omens season 2

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So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom

It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education

602-771-3500 or empower @ azed .gov 🤡

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how many coca cola cans does it take to ward off an actient vampire from the coffe-flavoured toothpaste grasslands if it's 20 degrees in alska on a wednesday in 2020

Ok first things first you need to do some math- you can cancel out the 20 with the 2020, meaning the year is now 20 and the temperature is null. Wednesday is the 4th day of the week and 20/4 is 5 so now the year is 5 and the day of the week is null.

Let's rewrite the problem now that we've done our PEMDAS. We need to know how many Coca Cola cans it takes to ward off an ancient vampire from the coffee-flavored toothpaste grasslands in Alaska in the year 5. Much simpler.

We all know that Coca Cola tastes terrible when combined with toothpaste and coffee, so to ward off the vampire, we'd need to produce enough cans to convince the vampire that the lush grasses are in danger of becoming completely doused and spoiled, if the cans were to release their contents. If we can do this, the vampire would go off in search of a safer food source, and we would be rid of him.

So, how many cans do you need to accomplish this? Well, a typical toothpaste grassland covers 45 square miles, and by modern standards, 500 cans per mile is sufficient to completely destroy the flavor in that area, so you'd need 22,500 cans total. But we have to factor inflation in, since our situation is so far back in the past. This reduces the amount significantly to just 6,117 cans. But keep in mind the year 5 was the year of the dog according to the Chinese zodiac, and dogs can be quite stubborn, so you need more cans than you normally would! Adding an additional 1,000 should be enough to compensate.

Finally, we need to consider that this is happening in Alaska. The location doesn't change the amount of cans needed, but it is important to note that the cold will slow down the speed at which the Coca Cola can disperse and soak into the soil. So the vampire may take longer than usual to leave the grassland, especially if he's ancient and therefore would probably has some arthritis at that point.

This puts our answer at 7,117 cans of Coca Cola to ward off the vampire. I'm confident in my math here but if you see any issues please lmk. Hope this helps!

#anon who are you I just want to talk

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i completely understand the appeal of goldenheart, i really do. but where's the love for Loin Ball

#nimona #goldenheart #ballister #ambrosius

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Nimona spoilers!!!

Aight listen. I’m aro ace. Not even a little bit attracted to men. Never have been, never will be.

But.

If Ballister Boldheart looked at me like THIS???

I would fold in HALF. I’d cave in SECONDS. I’d give this man the whole fucking WORLD.

And he’s not even *my* boyfriend.

Ambrosius. What the fuck.

What the fuck Ambrosius???

You’re telling me that the LOVE of your LIFE looks at you like THIS

AND YOU REALLY STILL THINK THAT HES A MURDERER???!?!???????

BOY ARE YOU BLIND

Anyway that is all

#yeah pretty much #nimona

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WELL if you're already familiar with soundtrackgate there's not much else you need to know, Kids & Being Different were two of the four original songs that I successfully layered to prove that certain byler-related soundtracks were written to have melodies that fit together

however

I could always go back and isolate those two specifically to highlight how they play on each other!

Notice how around 1:20, Kids gets quiet and drops out for a bit so Being Different can riff on an important melody; A# D F D A# D D# D, for a while and then go through its big climatic finale? And then Kids finally picks back up again afterwards and has its finale? The songs are so obviously synced and for what

Being Different is one of the best songs in the entire Stranger Things OST and when this song gets incorporated into byler's love confession i will cry so many tears

#*bear trap i set up in the bushes near my post snaps shut* #MA I THINK I CAUGHT ONE #byler #soundtrackgate #i didn't include this specific combination in my original post bc there were other duets i preferred more #these two by themselves are kinda meh compared to the other combinations imo #and i could only upload a certain number of files so #but you've spoken it into existence and now it is here!!!!

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oh believe me it will be

one could say it's already been incorporated into a byler love confession

y'know

seeing how the song Kids was playing when Will told Mike "it was a seven"

And Being Different and Kids are essentially two parts of the same song

Being Different is one of the best songs in the entire Stranger Things OST and when this song gets incorporated into byler's love confession i will cry so many tears

#byler #soundtrackgate

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It's putting me into hysterics they're SO CLOSE

#byler #*pounds head against wall*

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The Reddit poll is finally over. Great teamwork & congrats on 4th place everyone, I couldn't be more pleasantly surprised!! 💙💛🥳

#byler #right up in the top row with all the other main endgames just like it was meant to be 🙌 #im so proud of them

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Hey all! I've taken it upon myself to meticulously (and I mean METICULOUSLY, I had to get a protractor out and everything) analyze the influence we as the Byler community had on the Reddit ship elimination poll, and thankfully, I think the data I collected is largely in our favor!

I found that even under the best conditions (everyone who participates in organizing our vote on tumblr actually goes to the link and votes, everyone always votes as a group for the exact same thing), we only could have influenced seven out of the seventeen eliminations. That means the majority of the results were the genuine opinion of the Reddit community.

I'm going to compile everything and hopefully get it posted to Reddit either tonight or tomorrow, but I just wanted to give y'all a heads-up. Lmk if you have any questions? Cheers!

#byler #< target audience #st reddit ship elimination #congrats on fourth place btw!!! good teamwork 🫶 #oh and obviously i'm not including any names or urls or links back to tumblr dw

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Dustin and Suzie have been eliminated from the Reddit poll!

There are only seven couples left, which means that Byler is going to become a target sooner rather than later. Let's stick together and avoid splitting our vote, to keep them in as long as possible!

#byler

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St•ncy was voted off in the Reddit poll! Let's make sure we don't split our vote for the next round.

Link to vote: https://strawpoll.com/polls/BDyNENG9wZR

#byler #< target audience