#fanart will resume soon I just wanted to post something more personal | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lovelylogans · 4 years

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making a post about the month-long break i took from social media on social media, because, like, it be like that, it’s social media, i can send all of these thoughts out Into The Void again

i’ve wanted to do the whole “month long” break thing since this early this year, so i ended up waiting until @ts-storytime (which i am the sole mod of) was over so i could, like, actually fully step back. i watched this video by matt d’avella and it basically sealed it.

i. gotta be honest, my dudes? it was pretty awesome. save three nights (two airings of t100, in which Absurdity Happened, and the presidential debate, all three spent on twitter) i avoided tumblr, twitter, facebook, everything except tiktok and youtube. sure, i missed some things—esp in time of quarantine, stuff like getting asks and getting into conversations on twitter—and i missed seeing fanart, and posts from people i’m not friends with but am generally fond of, but on the whole, after the first week or so, the urge to log in just kind of... faded to the back of my mind?

it also might have been a Thing that i focused less on social media because i had to deal with some health stuff (totally treatable, am mostly okay now, whatever’s left is pretty like.... normal, it’s just something i have to keep my eye on) so that kind of occupied a lot of my brain space. in terms of like, what i filled my time with:

uhhh, i ended up reading more Actual Books last month than i usually do, which was really great!! finally figured out how to get my library card to connect with the kindle account—i Personally recommend that you read, if you haven’t already, “red white and royal blue” by casey mcquiston and “the night circus” by erin morgenstern. both were very fantastic in very different ways.

didn’t just read books either!!! i absolutely DECIMATED the ao3 works of some of the less popular fandoms i’m in, as well as reading some highly recommended stuff from a very popular fandom; genuinely would not be shocked if i topped, like, genuinely a million words. maybe even two million—one work i read alone was 700k. so yeah, in retrospect, definitely read a few million words last month.

played a LOT of the sims!! the houses i’m building look halfway decent now and i started like three new save files. currently about to start sending eight sims to university simultaneously, pray for me.

uhhh, revamped my ios14 homescreen! light academia themed. i didn’t bother changing the apps to be aesthetic, though, the way it goes to shortcuts then the app Kills me

wrote!!! wrote a lot!!! though i didn’t publish anything last month, i definitely broke through some writer’s block, and i added a Substantial enough amount to fics in progress and a fic about to be published (hopefully over the weekend?) that it, like, was very nice.

listened to podcasts and music! i’ve been dedicated to listening to mbmbam in order for a while now and i’ve reached 2013-2014.

plus like real life stuff like cleaning my room and working out and applying for jobs, tragically nothing on that front, but i did redesign my resume so hopefully something DOES come on that front soon

however i Would Recommend that you try, like, a day or a week away from social media, it’s nice to clear your mind and it makes you appreciate it a little bit more. like i said earlier, i’m not fully Back yet, i don’t think, but i’ll probably try to load up the queue again so it seems like i am.

#my post #text #not ts #me

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loquaciousquark · 5 years

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Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E56 (March 26, 2019)

Gooooood evening, everyone. @eponymous-rose is taking a well-deserved break, so I’m stepping in to ruin reputations and botch direct quotations all over the place. Here to give us the appropriate gravitas and fear for the evening is the Chamber of Chairs:

Tonight’s guests: Liam O’Brien & Marisha Ray. Dani flips Liam off to start the show and it’s pretty funny. “What did I doooo?”

Tonight’s announcements: Last night was the season finale of Between the Sheets, featuring Ashly Burch, who is shockingly short in person. The VOD’s up for subscribers now, and it’ll be posted on YT tomorrow for everyone else. The Ashley Johnson episode will be up soon! Yay! Remember, no new episode of CR this week, and no new episode of TM next Tuesday as a result. Normal CR broadcasting resumes April 4. The Kickstarter hit $8 million today. Liam: “Oh boy oh boy oh boy it’s fine it’s fine IT’S FINE.” The final goal is $8.8m with 23 days to go, and a behind-the-scenes filming of the theme song was posted today on the KS. The video’s actually pretty cool & features Ashley in a feather boa!

Anyway! Episode 56: The Favor

CR Stats! This was the shortest episode of this campaign at 2h19m15s of gameplay. Only Shopping and Shipping from C1 was shorter. This episode tied for the fewest spells cast in one episode (six) and all were cast by Caleb. Over the 44 episodes & 136 days the M9 had the dodecahedron, they gained 25 fragments of possibility and actually utilized 13.

Liam and Marisha talk about having a timer in the office: “It has been 27 days since the last Holy Fuck ending.”

None of them thought Matt was going to cut it off at that point, but when he explained he wanted Taliesin there for the next part, it made sense to all of them & they all agreed it was for the best.

Beau has four thousand thoughts racing through her head right now. One of them is excitement about getting to learn the Kryn more, but she’s also terrified. Henry interrupts with the most adorable baying howl and he walks offstage. What a good pupper.

Liam describes the moment as everyone frozen in amber as they wait for the next episode. Beau will figure out something to her advantage between now and then.

Marisha likens this moment to the Emon attack and the Lorenzo fight with Molly in terms of emotional shock. Brian remembers Sam was in a tux that night; Marisha: “I knew it was going to be a funeral tux.”

There’s another question about how Marisha/Beau feels about the dodeca handoff, and both Liam and Marisha start laughing about how this entire TM episode is just going to be about the ramifications of Caleb’s decision. Liam: “No regrets,” but he understands there’s going to be a lot of fallout. They talk about how the ramifications will depend on how public the Krynn make their gift: will it be parades in the streets, a handshake and dismissal from a private room, etc? What if there was a Dairon-type spy in the room who’ll tell people they don’t want to know about their actions? They’re eager and afraid to see the fallout.

Brian points out everyone could see on Travis’s face he would rather have gone to jail, but further discussion is derailed by questions.

The group had discussed the possibility of handing off the dodecahedron in the past, but he hadn’t considered ever handing it off until the last sixty seconds when “everything was going to shit. It was more mathematical than anything. It felt a lot like Avantika. We’ve got a plan, the plan’s broken, but we can get away, no, we can’t get away, now this is changing--I don’t want someone outside our group to control the situation if I can act first, if I can punch first. Everyone’s trying to negotiate and it’s failing, I don’t want to give up this thing either, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, here’s--this.” Caleb wanted to save the group. He wouldn’t have taken the gamble even two minutes earlier. Then, suddenly as it began to work, he & Caleb began realizing that not only did it work, but it worked very well and now his brain had split into two: “oh, thank God, I care about these people, I can save them,” and “how do I use this to my advantage.”

Caleb was quiet through most of this episode because he really wanted to discuss several things in private with other group members--that’s what he was thinking about for most of this.

Dani points out everyone expected physical travel between this fight & the audience with the queen where there would be downtime to discuss things. None of them expected immediate teleportation.

If Beau had been in a position to stop Caleb from giving up the beacon, she would not have stopped him.

Beau was wincing as Nott & Jester asked questions they should have already known the answers to. Liam points out it’s the war room in Dr. Strangelove--only the most powerful people would have been there. Beau dislikes authority but doesn’t think she’s stupid enough to have gotten herself seen as an obvious traitor.

Everyone revels in Matt’s Caduceus impression.

GIF of the Week: Liam pulling the dodeca out of the haversack by Will D. Brian singsongs “Travis is tilted~, Travis is tilted, look at his face~” over the GIF playing. Haaaaaahaha, poor Travis.

Liam: “I think I’m just in the shithouse.” Marisha: “You blew the shit whistle.”

Brief hilarious aside where they discuss Tetanus Terry (ft. on Travis Willingham’s YeeHaw Game Ranch) & Caleb Widogast getting fully replaced by Terry as a backup character if he gets assassinated.

On a scale of 1-10, Beau is following Dairon’s advice to a 7. She’s trying not to get attached, not to die, to listen, to not get impatient, to not be biased. She’s probably going to get closer to people than Dairon would suggest, but thinks she’s trying pretty hard.

It wasn’t cathartic for Caleb to renounce the Empire like this. His parents were very pro-Empire, and now that he’s on this journey to atone for his parents’ deaths, he’s done exactly the last thing his parents ever, ever wanted him to do--walked into the heart of the enemy and gave them everything they wanted. (Brian, Liam, & Dani briefly rag on Tumblr still having faint life somewhere. “Female-presenting nipples” comes up. It’s funny and also very sad.)

Brian discusses how it’s a big moment, but it’s not a victory for the group. Caleb was just shooting for a short-term immediate solution. Marisha: “It feels like a sitcom bait-and-switch. Nah, it’s cool, guys, we’re gonna pretend to be waiters and we’ll sneak into the kitchen,” but then they sneak into the kitchen and the cook laughs that the sous-chef is out today, and “now we’re in over our heads!”

Brian reveals dramatically that last night he came out as a supporter of Liam for President of D&D Beyond. Liam: “Beneath all the chicanery & hair product, there is common sense."

Liam & Marisha talk about the difference between Nott/Caleb’s original first podunk jail and this potential maximum security prison.

Caleb imagined the BDSM straps over his shirt and coat. Apparently most of the fanart generated this week has failed to include them.

Both Marisha & Liam VEHEMENTLY agree they hated not being able to be main parts of the Brightqueen talks. They also talk about how they both are far better at CHA than Nott & Jester, though they point out in fairness that Matt’s told them he always adjusts the social DCs based on the arguments they make.

As far as the slavery part of the disguise, Marisha: “Marisha has laughed at every piece of fanart. Beau was surprised. Beau’s gonna have a talk.” She (Beau) felt they had discussed the costumes, the pretense--but not the bullying & active degradation her group put her through. It was huge, an eye-opening moment for Beau in a way she (Beau & Marisha) absolutely did not expect. She never thought they would abuse their status over her in that way.

They discuss how on a meta sense, they all knew that the scene was just Travis and Laura trolling them and having fun at their expense, but at the same time it’s still happening in game and will have in-game consequences. Marisha: “It’s like at a party where your good friend starts getting a little too drunk and starts making fun of you a little too much--it’s a little too real.”

That said, one of Marisha’s favorite fanarts from this week was Beau (as a table) swearing under her breath at Jester with her feet up. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.

Fanart of the Week: The Brightqueen by Nikki Dawes.

Beau does not feel she’s betrayed anyone by being present at this event. She knows where her allegiances lie, so just because this happened doesn’t mean it’s changed anything about what she believes. That said, she has no love for the Empire. She’s very personal with whom she cares about. She doesn’t have as much obvious disdain as Caleb does--she’s just more indifferent.

Caleb has a high CHA that he just doesn’t use anymore, because the people he knew with high CHA that used it did so to do bad things. Liam thinks when Caleb was young he was very gifted, charming, and attracted people to him; now it’s all gone. He can hold it together like a sandcastle by the tide for an hour, but in the end it always washes away.

On Nott speaking for the group: Marisha always likes hearing Sam talk. In some ways Marisha felt it was the same thing she used to get for Keyleth-- "why are you talking? You shouldn’t be talking. You shouldn’t be the talker.” Everyone should have their own voice, regardless of the scores on the page. “Your stats are there to influence the effects of what happens; they’re not the Bible. They’re not law.” She reminds us Vex once entered an arm-wrestling contest with a strength of 7.

How does Beau feel now that Caleb’s made another huge decision without consulting the rest of the M9 (i.e. Bowlgate)? It’ll play out in game. It’s a big deal. Liam admits he loves it. “The whole point is conflict resolution, so you need conflict.” He loves things like this, like the Astrid letter, because it opens opportunities to explore characters. In some ways it’s the same thing: they were in an impossible situation and Caleb sees it as protecting his friends, but that’s not how it read to anyone else. Marisha points out that once again he made himself the authority to make this huge decision without discussing it with anyone else in the group.

Marisha and Liam start talking about the decision more, decide it should wait for the game, but then keep talking despite themselves. Marisha points out that on top of his (once-again) unilateral decision, his speech was also framed selfishly (”I did this thing, I brought this back to you,”). To her, it still feels like the same thing with Caleb deciding things with major consequences for the rest of the group without their input, though she admits it’s colored by their (Beau’s & Caleb’s) history. Liam talks about how in the moment he was scared of deception checks, so he just tried to be as truthful as possible--nothing he said was false because he was only speaking for himself. He could not have spoken for the group & still been truthful. It’s a really interesting dichotomous discussion, both of them talking about what they felt in the moment versus how it came across to everyone else.

Liam feels it’s more like seeing someone dying in front of them & wasting time discussing whether they should do CPR or not, rather than him making decisions for the whole group. Marisha’s face obviously disagrees (so do I, ahaha). Liam also thought they were going to continue the episode & talk more, which would have kept it from being as much about him. This is gonna be super interesting when it actually plays out, for sure.

Once again, no new CR this Thursday or TM next Tuesday. Most of the rest of the programming will stay the same. This Tuesday’s Mame Drop will feature Max James of CR production fame.

We end on this eldritch horror:

"Weuuuh, Caleb knows best! Caleb will make the decisions for all of us in this D&D game!”

Aaand we’re out. Stay turnt.

#critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina #talks machina spoilers #long post for ts

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