Me going into this weekend: Well, it's time for the local anime convention, the one that I've been preparing for since December and worked super hard so I'd have lots of mage plushies in the store I sell them at downtown, all ready for excited anime fans to buy them!
This weekend: Protesters gridlock downtown on Saturday (aka, the Busy Day, aka the Profitable Day) because they can't handle the concept of a drag queen doing story time for kids at the library, someone escalates this to a very effective bomb threat that's fortunately fake but still forces local shops to close and the reading to be cancelled for the sake of safety, it pours rain, and is the coldest weekend we've had all month to boot. All the shops and the downtown farmer's market that brought in extra stock and produce in preparation for what is traditionally a very profitable weekend for local businesses due to exploring convention members are left in the lurch.
Me, now: (lying in my bed trying to console myself with humour) ...this did not go according to keikaku.*
*keikaku means plan
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more and more it's feeling like we just...don't have room for people trying anymore. it's all or nothing; get it right the first time, or be crucified by a jury you can never fully see or convince. and this isn't new, isn't born of current events. it's become more and more prevalent over the last ten years thanks to social media putting every little thought on blast, but i'd put money on the idea that it's actually been brewing much longer than that. and, for me, it goes beyond being tiring or upsetting. it feels bleak. it feels downright fucking broken that we're all so busy trying not to condone anything remotely problematic that we don't leave room for good faith learning. watching people trying to suss out their own identity--something literally ONLY they can fully understand or explain--be vilified for trying to fit words around their own experience sucks. watching people misunderstand something and try to apologize for it later, only to be told they should have known all along, sucks. seeing people who once held truly toxic beliefs actually grow and learn and apologize and still be told to fuck themselves as if they're a lost cause--it sucks. just. does that not fill you with despair for the state of things? does that not break something in you, to think that if you one day don't understand something, or misuse a word, or grapple with complicated feelings, it will forever stain you in the eyes of perfect strangers?
dude the world is fucked, and we all see it, but like. it doesn't feel like it helps to be so goddamn reactive. it doesn't feel like it helps anyone to demand perfection out the gate. it's exhausting. there are enough people out there who don't want to learn, who aren't trying, who actively revel in cruelty. looking for malice in every little fuck-up from people who seem to be genuinely striving to live their lives with kindness strikes me as lending strength to an army that already glories in suffering. and makes the world look more fucked than ever. and i really don't know that that energy is what we need when there's already so much to set right.
maybe it's just me. maybe this last decade just shattered something in me. but i really, really hate the idea--reject the idea, frankly--that people can't learn and change and grow. that people can't be better than a bad day or a failure of understanding. i reject the idea that people are something to be thrown out because they fucked up. it just seems...yeah. bleak. really fuckin' bleak.
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Words and captions are hard. My brain is no longer words, but only the sounds of the masterfully written soundtrack of Spies are Forever. In Clark Baxtresser we trust 🙏🙏🙏 I'm drawing every Spies are Forever character daily until I've drawn all 55.
Today's character is Tessa's casino worker from Richman's Casino in Monte Carlo, Day 22/55
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Not to get too deep into the weeds on the unseen events referenced in 1.1 "Eric Bittle", but I had always assumed that this flashback from 4.24 "Class Day" is showing us a glimpse of that first day that he met the team.
It's a pecan pie. In the present he's talking about what it was like to come to Samwell at first and in the flashback it seems like this is one of the first times that he's going to the Haus - it's not a familiar place to him, he's uncertain about how he will be received. Ngozi loves a good bookend, so a flashback to the very first episode at this point is a slam dunk on pretty much every level...
Except that for that to be the case, some of the early comics have to have a less than obvious chronology. The episode where Bitty tells his followers that he's found regular access to a kitchen and we see Shitty give the tour of the Haus happens a significant amount of time after the events of 1.1 - in the first episode Bitty is going to the team's first skate more than a week before freshman orientation and by 1.2 classes have already started.
So, is there a way to make sense of the timeline so that the pie pictured in the 4.24 flashback is the one REDACTED? Maybe?
My vision for what happened is that the day of 1.1 had a number of team events; first skate with the team at Faber, where they took care of things directly related to the hockey part of being a team. Then the freshman were given a tour of the Haus which we see in 1.4 (making those scenes a flashback) and then some kind of party that evening at the Haus that we only see in the 4.24 flashback.
I'm taken with this idea (as you can see by this whole ass post I'm writing) for a couple of reasons. One, Bitty IS the pie - metaphorically, repeatedly, over and over in the comic. This flashback being to the time when he offered his first pie (his true authentic self) to the team and for them to absolutely love it in their own raucous unhinged way is very appropriate. Two, I like the first pie being offered at a social event at the Haus and not at Faber/First Skate because it makes sense to me that that is where the real emotional stakes lie for him - do these people accept Eric Bittle the person away from the structure and context of hockey? (That being said, showing up to Faber with a pie is exactly the sort of thing Bitty would do, and is a very good reason for the team to do something "felonious" like eat the pie with their hands.)
Further ruminations:
If Bitty had known about the Haus kitchen for weeks, why go multiple updates before mentioning it? The meta-narrative of Bitty's vlog introductions could be out of order, but I don't think it's unreasonable at all that he just decided to focus on other things before getting to the vlog where he talks about the Haus kitchen. Especially if he wanted to something like actually show the kitchen to his followers. The way the comic is structured is such that when events actually happen, when we the comic readers get to see them and if/when he tells his vlog viewers about them are all related but have the potential to be disjointed.
What about the clothes? I had written a whole thing about how it's in character for him to change from what he's wearing to the Haus tour to what we see in the 4.24 flashback, but he's wearing a striped shirt in the post pie-defilement bit of 1.1 so I got nothing.
What is the truth of the flashback pie? Did SMH hold Bitty down and draw stripes on his shirt? Maybe some things are meant to remain a mystery.
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i wont lie, h q has spoiled me bc just getting a GLIMPSE at the at la fandom has me quaking in my fuckin boots.... the last time id seen shipping wars like this was 2013 p jo fandom and that's what made me leave ajdbsj
yall are wild the show first aired 19 years ago and ppl are calling ships morally bankrupt this is so silly
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