ao3commentoftheday:

castles-of-words:

pick your stories. pick… pick fewer stories than that. put some stories back. that’s too many

backgroundnewsies:

prsephonies:

im not INTERESTED anymore in seeing men’s perception of what female leisure time looks like, how we lounge around hairless and small and beautiful on our beds and couches in oversized shirts and lace underwear, unaware and unassuming and all the more beautiful for not Trying to be beautiful, i’m TIRED of it. even our most basic freedom of privacy, time alone with the self, has been butchered and ripped from us by the gaze of male photographers and artists

men’s perception of women lounging:

women actually lounging

whetstonefires:

chiisana-sukima:

fozzie:

howls moving castle: howls vain obsession with beauty is his fatal flaw. this is made extremely clear in numerous circumstances. this is supposed to be the thing you dont like about him

all of us including me: hhgfgh howl … pretty ………

Yeah, he’s sure pretty alright.

But his vanity wasn’t actually his fatal flaw, at least in the movie. It was just a minor charming comic-relief flaw.

His real flaw was refusal to shoulder his responsibility. The beauty of the resolution of HMC, is that by loving each other, the characters all teach each other courage.

in the book, if we’re running up comparisons, howl’s vanity definitely wasn’t his fatal flaw, it was…more of a defense mechanism.

it covers for a number of insecurities, ranging from the childhood self-worth kind to the ‘my ability to feel normal emotions is compromised by having given away my actual physical heart in a magical pact i can’t get out of without killing my asshole friend if at all, and this causes me major identity problems.’

(according to Calcifer he also isn’t actually particularly good-looking under all the cosmetics and hair-care, but Sophie never actually evaluates that so idk.

the first impression he makes, at May Day before she knows he’s Wizard Howl, is ‘dashing’ with a ‘bony, sophisticated face’ and ‘well into his twenties.’ no further details ever come up. his attractiveness is definitely dealt with more as a matter of presentation than of his specific features, tho–like his ability to produce a gorgeous romantic tableau through posture and positioning when courting Actual Lettie–and there’s every indication Sophie wouldn’t be all that interested if she wasn’t attached.)

i didn’t realize the avoidance of responsibility thing made it into the movie! the way he’s half-killing himself…turning into a harpy and…overflying the war…kind of overshadowed it for me i guess. huh, cool.

being a slitherer-outer, as Sophie puts it, is…sort of his flaw, in the book? like, it absolutely is. but it’s also one of his chiefest strengths; it’s how he kept ahead of the Witch’s curse for so long. she had to manipulate Sophie and Michael and threaten Howl’s family in Wales as a distraction to finally catch him up.

(as sophie says in the sequel, “Vices? I’m just describing Howl.”)

this is how flaws often work in dwj’s work, come to think of it. the only fatal traits are the ones the villain relies on to advance their agenda, right up until they push it and/or the people bearing the consequences of it so far they experience overwhelming backlash, and those tend to be of the ‘exploiting/manipulating’ type.

…most notable is that incredibly awful guy who entered the effective field of a poetic-narrative-based reality warping computer he’d imprisoned thousands of years ago, and turned into a dragon.

captainlordauditor:

scarybioloyg:

fuckitandflee:

The real problem with books-turned-movies isn’t “omg they didn’t include every single word in the book” it’s “omg they completely overlooked the main theme, threw out any significant allegories, took away all the emotional pull, an turned it into a boring action movie with a love triangle in it”

the hunger games is a really good example bc on the base textual level of stuff like what happens and the order of events they got it mostly right but they also

1. whitewashed half or more of the cast
   
2. removed multiple canonical disabilities in main characters
3. marketed it as a love triangle
4. basically did literally everything the villains of the book did which made it super fucking obvious

actualaster:

mr-elementle:

captainsnoop:

i feel like counter-trolling is an essential skill that kids online aren’t learning and it’s kinda worrying

like back in my day, the day of online forums, learning how to trick someone in to getting themselves banned was an essential skill. if you could tell someone was a chud, you would ask them short, leading questions and watch them get frustrated and post longer and longer rants until they said something that would catch a mod’s attention and get them banned and/or at least publicly humiliated. 

and guess what? that’s the exact same tactics the alt-right use now. these people are exclusively acting in bad faith. every interaction these people post online is done with the intention of getting someone to respond to them so they can screenshot the massive paragraphs of text and laugh

so, what’s the solution?

dare ‘em to post dick pics.

don’t acknowledge the content of the stuff they post. if you see someone trying to engage you in bad faith just dare them to post pictures of their penis until they either get frustrated and leave or get frustrated and do it. either way they lose. 

this is the tactic used by the fans of a podcast (that i haven’t listened to) called the Chapo Trap House, and 4chan’s /pol/ users fucking HATE them. they hate Chapo Trap House and think they’re crazy because Chapo Trap House fans refuse to engage in meaningful debate and repeatedly demand dick pics. they get frustrated and leave. it works. 

Some of you never used your position as a mod on an a series of unfortunate events forum to get a racist troll to post evidence of their tax fraud and it shows

…that second comment is oddly specific and I’m a little scared

cockyhorror:

hello-copter:

biggest-gaudiest-fish:

cursedcatimages:

OP.. CHANGE YOUR URL OP

Sound. On.

Sound is far more imperative than you ever imagined

todaysbird:

researchers discovered that, with some training, pigeons are capable of understanding the concept of mathematical values. pigeons can rank amounts from lowest to highest by pecking them on a screen. pigeons were able to successfully rank up to nine objects in order. their performance matched that of rhesus monkeys who had previously participated in the same experiment.

(x)