Nutjob427 - Brain Likes This

If you have achieved something, please remember to observe a mandatory period of basking in the warm glow of your achievement like a lizard on a stone, lest you teach your brain that effort is futile, actually, because it didn't get to enjoy its happy chemicals, so, naturally, nothing good ever comes of trying. (And no, avoiding punishment is not a reward!)

I recommend, like, 5% of basking time in relation to whatever time you invested into achieving the thing minimum. And if you can't make your own bask, friend-brought is fine (= tell your friends!).

average couple: let's go on a date

lunatic couple: let's take out a star destroyer

I would like to see them actually doing it in the next game thank you so much EA and respawn

let's face it, Obi-Wan is only a stickler for the rules in comparison to Anakin. this guy thought lightsaber nunchucks were cool as a teenager and jumping out of politicians windows was cool as an adult. he regularly sasses the chancellor of the republic. he saw Anakin and Padmé being super obvious and decided it was none of his business. he sits pussy facing the world in important meetings. hes's a lonely single in your area. he won one (1) fight against a sith lord and decided they were his speciality despite getting his ass handed to him by Dooku multiple times. he's annoying on purpose as a battle strategy. every man he meets desires him carnally and he doesn't notice. he puts one foot on Han Solos ship and is like "damn bitch you live like this" despite having spent 20 years in a desert hole. he gets himself killed to one-up Vader one last time. he's winning the idgaf war

A couple years ago I saw a production of Sweeney Todd done by my university that featured an extra song, the Beggar Woman's Lullaby. Sondheim added it briefly after the show originally opened, but then cut it back out again because he felt it slowed down the pace of the ending scenes. Essentially it's a moment when Lucy enters the barbershop searching for the beedle, she stops for a moment and has a moment of near lucidity as she starts to remember her surroundings. She goes to Johanna's empty cradle and sings a lullaby to the tune of "Poor Thing" to "my Jo, my Jing." Sondheim wrote it originally to address the issue of audiences not figuring out the plot twist in time for the dramatic ending, but removed it again when he realized that everyone ends up figuring it out at various times throughout the show anyway.

Anyway all this to say, I think that song should be restored in an official capacity. I think that whether or not it serves the plot twist is immaterial. I think what it actually does is bring a much needed pause in the middle of the frenzy of the final scenes, it gives Lucy another dimension, and it makes what immediately follows so so SO much more heartbreaking because she was THIS CLOSE to remembering everything. Literally every time I listen to the final scene, everything happens so fast it feels almost unsatisfying. Like we're just rushing through everything to get to the end. And I think that song gives it a badly needed breath of air, without interrupting the flow.

She actually says this out loud. I'm not joking.

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile. 

You should try it. It’s peculiarly enlightening.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Happy Valentine’s Day.

I hate the attitude that so many people in the RDR2 fanbase have that gun = strong. When discussing the women - Abigail, Molly and Mary specifically here because they are who I was talking about when I was told these things - who are, to me undoubtedly, strong women who withstand horrible circumstances, I am told that no, actually, they’re not strong. Only women like Sadie are strong, or maybe Miss Grimshaw, on a rare occasion Karen, but always Sadie, because Sadie has a gun and she kills people with it.

I know I pin a lot of things on misogyny in this fanbase, but in a gaming space mostly full of men, you’re going to see a lot of it, and the way men and some women who like Sadie discuss her has always reeked of it to me. They reduce her down to only being a gun, taking away the actual depth and emotion of her character in favour of seeing her as one of the men, because she wears boy clothes and has a gun and she’s nice to Arthur, so she’s cool. Not like Molly who cries all the time and wants to die, not like Abigail who’s doing everything for a man, who aren’t strong at all despite what they have been through because they never go on a shooting spree, which as we know is the only thing that makes a woman strong.

The way Sadie is viewed by these people also completely diminishes the person Sadie actually is. I have so often found that Sadie is only held in such favour by certain men in the fanbase because she is the easiest woman to turn into a man, as it were, or they’re attracted to her. She dresses like them, spends most of her time around them, kills lots of people like them, and she’s still very pretty, so if you only value women for fitting in with men or for how attractive you find them, Sadie is the perfect candidate. She challenges plenty of men, but not Arthur, so she’s a good one, and she’s even got a more neutral stance on Dutch, so she’s doubly a good one, because now she’s not angry with the cool leader either.

This is not to say Sadie gets no hate. She absolutely does, and it’s all as unwarranted as you’d expect. Sadie has established skills with her gun, she’s going to be skilled with it when she picks one up, her and her husband shared the work as she says. She is rash and she has a short fuse, but her husband was murdered and she’s not going to be at all calm about that. Her final mission is optional. If you don’t want Arthur to go on that, don’t make him. She got a lot of people killed unnecessarily. She’s flawed, she’s very, very flawed, and she’s also not the only character to cause the deaths of innocent people during the game. But just as much as overly criticising her behaviour and looking at no motivations or reasoning she might have had, treating her more critically than you would the men, reducing her down to her flaws is an unfair view of her character, so is reducing her down to a generic cool woman character with nothing happening besides guns and chest, because that’s apparently all women are good for to plenty of the men in the fanbase.

The point of this ramble is just that Sadie is more than her gun, she has a whole personality in there, and while I do think it’s a shame that the entirety of her character was hinged on her revenge until the epilogue since it gave us quite a limited perspective on her, we still get to meet her properly when the epilogue comes around and she has mostly gotten over her grief. Sadie isn’t just a gun and her strength doesn’t just come from her killing lots of people, and there is no lack of strength in Molly, Abigail and Mary because they either kill very few people or none at all.

The strength these women have does not come from the bodies at their feet. Arthur Morgan isn’t a strong man because he kills people. Why is that only a condition for the women? Why does Abigail coming from being a teenage sex worker, a dangerous industry at the best of times, to a very young mother trying her best to keep her family together, to give her son a better life than she had not constitute as strength? What about that does not make her a strong person? Same for Mary, same for Molly. Both went through a lot of abuse, Mary did all she could to protect her brother and Molly’s drove her off such a frightened, paranoid edge, leaving her convinced everybody in the gang who she already knew weren’t the biggest fans at her were laughing at her, and yet she still went through multiple sessions of being sweater by the Pinkertons - who, I’ll remind you, treated Strauss rough enough to kill him - and didn’t say a word. How aren’t they strong?

They don’t have guns. Abigail kills Milton, but he’s a character you 100% hate by now. Mary and Molly never kill anybody. If your one condition for a female character being cool and strong is they shoot a lot of people, these three don’t fit that, but if that’s your condition for the women, that says more about you. Stop using Sadie Adler to back up your misogynistic feelings about the other women, she’d hate that

cal has had too many run ins with the empire to care at this point

Been playing AC 2 a lot lately