But in Dreams

kermit: *stunned open mouth silence*

miss piggy: yet every day since i first saw you at the dance all i have been able to think about is how you are suitable for nothing in life but to be my bride! you are below me in every possible way but you simply must let me marry you!

All that to say that it translates as “make a movie about black people, they said” but directly translated it says “make a movie about blue people, they said”.

However the word for fireplace, thinteán (tin-tawn), is very similar in pronunciation to the words tinn tón (teen tone) and they sometimes get swapped out for comedic value or to low key make fun of someone complaining.

See, tinn tón means sore butt.

having a water genasi on board is good luck, even better if they’re higher ranked (captain, first mate). however, if they’re a prisoner, it’s extremely bad luck for the crew that has them imprisoned. 

holy people of sea gods closely follow water genasi in good luck/bad luck.

sailors tend to get tattoos of a land god’s symbol in hopes that if they drown, a land god will get them back safely. however, sea gods find this extremely rude and disrespectful, so sailors have to find ways of hiding the tattoos at all times, whether with magic, clothes, or makeup. 

every port city has a shrine or temple to a sea god. the very last thing sailors do before heading out on the ocean and the very first thing they do when they get back on land is pray at one of these places. bigger port cities have special roads for sailors to take.

the only time it’s okay to sing sea shanties on land is if you have a vial of seawater on you. if you don’t have any, sea gods think you’re singing for the land gods instead of themselves. and if they think that, things will turn nasty when you get back to sea.

sailors don’t talk about their families/friends/loved ones while at sea. the sea could get jealous, and try and keep the sailors all to itself–by whatever means necessary.

there are various tattoos one can get for certain accomplishments (ie. defeating a monster, sailing for a certain amount of time/for a certain distance, which port you hail from, etc)

every ship brings a small animal that’s special to a sea god on board (ie a crab). that animal has all priority–in food, in defense, in healing. it’s said that if that animal dies, the rest of the crew will soon follow.

bonus sea shanties:

dwarf and orc shanties have a very steady rhythm and often involve drums–meant to keep rowing easy and sailors focused.

tiefling and elf shanties are melodious and often eerie to hear from another ship–especially in foggy/stormy weather. they’re meant to simulate the sound of the wind, waves, and those who died at sea.

dragonborn and genasi shanties often involved overlapping lyrics and melodies, causing them to sound like the storms out at sea. they’re meant to pay tribute to and appease the gods.

halfling and gnome shanties are cheery and peppy, meant to keep things interesting after monotonous days at sea and to make sure morale is up.

Dwarf sea shanties historically started out as modified mining chants – the sort of haul-together thing you sing to keep everybody on rhythm. There are still several shanties and mining chants in use today that have identical tunes and some of the same lyrics.

Common themes of halfling shanties are “what will we eat first chance we get when we’re back on shore” and “weird/delicious/terrible things I’ve eaten in different ports of call”.

One well-known elf shanty is meant to be sung in both Elven and Common, in alternating verses. Most versions, unfortunately, have hopelessly distorted the verses in Elven – some to nonsense syllables, some partially intact but riddled with wrong words, some rendered into almost-nonsensical Common that sounds vaguely like the original Elven words. As a rule, it’s a bad idea to sing it around elf sailors unless you know the real words.

just a friendly reminder that this type of rhetoric is misleading, (in my opinion, slightly antisemitic) and not the way to go about fighting religious homophobes.

religious jews still follow these laws. we dont wear clothes that have a blend of wool & linen (laws of shatnez). fresh produce in israel follows all of the agricultural laws outlined in the torah. as for some of the other laws i always see referenced: we don’t eat shellfish or pork or anything prohibited by the torah. clean-shaven men will only ever use electric razors never blades. we don’t work on the sabbath, we observe the sanctioned holy days, we believe in, love and fear God and obey God’s commandments.

personally, i find the rhetoric harmful and insulting for three reasons. one, it only works on the (very christian) premise that the torah is outdated, and that ~nobody in their right mind~ would follow those laws anymore. two, it tends to ignore the fact that lgbtq+ orthodox jews exist and have to live through the struggle of being lgbtq+ and observant, despite community backlash, severe judgement and institutionalised homophobia. and three, it gives homophobia-masked-as-religious-observance some sort of legitimacy because yeah, the rest of those laws are kept in varying degrees by millions of people.

don’t fight homophobes by saying ‘look at all of these other ridiculous laws’ – those laws matter to a lot of people, including me, a jewish lesbian. instead, say ‘do not stand idly by your fellow’s blood (leviticus 19:16)’, ‘whoever humiliates another in public forfeits their place in the World to Come (avot 3:11), ‘one shall not say to a person words that hurt them or cause them pain against which they cannot stand (sefer hachinuch, mitzvah 338)’, ‘do not do to others that which you would not wish them to do to you. this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary (gemara shabbat 31a)’, and what is perhaps one of my favorite verses in tanach, ‘to what is good and just is more preferable to God than sacrifice (proverbs 21:3)’.

Ok so something else that does NOT get talked about enough but that’s so central to who Flint is is the fact that he was the son of a carpenter and yet made it into the officer class, a lieutenant in the navy! I don’t think people really understand how huge this is, and it leads to people not understanding the depths of his conflict with England and himself. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I saw a post somewhere saying that they didn’t like that James was waging this huge war purely out of a lost love. But no no no, of course his love for Thomas was a huge driving force, but to say that that was the only thing? No, that’s a huge misunderstanding of who James McGraw was and what he had to deal with. Strap in, folks, because here it comes:

We are told so much in so few words when we are told that James was the son of a carpenter and had no formal education, and yet became a lieutenant. This is such a big deal in a way that’s hard for us modern people to grasp. It was nigh on impossible for a man of such a working class background to break into the officer class, because young boys were educated and signed on as midshipmen at like 12 and then promoted to lieutenant thereafter. To be an officer you not only needed to be of a higher social status and have connections, but even more importantly you needed to know how to behave in ways that showed you were a gentleman. You needed to know where to place your hat when you took it off, how to cut up a fowl correctly, what minutiae of conversations you had to put forth to show you knew the status of the people around you. Being the son of a carpenter and having no schooling, James simply would not have known that. Hennessy was the scrap that allowed him even the fuzziest of chances at breaking into the officer class, to have a chance at promotion, at command, at making a living. James had to fight like hell to even be given the chance to prove himself worthy.

It was only some twenty years before we see him, in the 1680s, that the examination for lieutenant was even instituted. Before that, you were appointed by a captain, which of course allowed for all sorts of noblemen to be put in places they didn’t belong. To take the examination for lieutenant, you needed a royal appointment and a recommendation from your captain that you were not only fit to be an officer, but also a gentleman. Before he even learned the all ins and outs of naval strategy and warfare necessary to take his examination, James would have had to study the behavior of gentlemen around him on the ship, to refine himself and imitate them in such a way that allowed him to mask the unfortunate circumstance of his birth. And to do this would have been difficult: as a noncommissioned officer or a seamen, he would not have bunked or eaten with these men of higher status.

And even when he became a lieutenant, the struggles would not have stopped. Now, he would be allowed to bunk with the officers, to be among gentlemen, and of course he would have messed up, would have committed some faux pas that reminded them just how much he was not one of them. He would fight and fight, but there would always be that division between them that would not allow this to be forgotten. This is coupled with the fact that he is James McGraw, a surname from either Ireland or Scotland, both countries that were propagandized as uncivilized. His very name reinforces the divide his fellow officers would perceive between them. The fact that Thomas Hamilton, upon first meeting him, brings up the circumstances of James’s birth shows just how anomalous this is, just how much this reputation precedes him and how much he has been able to accomplish in spite of it.

James had the makings of a great leader and a great sailor, and he knew it. We see it when he commands The Walrus. He would have seen countless men of higher birth but less skill promoted ahead of him, and he would have dug in and fought harder to prove himself. Because I think this is what he’s been fighting all along: he’s been told from the very beginning that he is inherently inadequate because of who he is, a carpenter’s son, and he has spent every waking moment fighting against that judgment of him.

When he met Thomas he was finally seeing a bit of the fruits of this lifelong struggle, and then in an instant, everything he had fought tooth and nail, against all odds, to build was stripped from him because of who he was. Again, he was told he was inadequate, unworthy of the life he was trying to build because of an immutable characteristic no more his choosing than his own low birth or surname.

When Miranda accused him of fighting for the sake of fighting and of fighting because this is all he knows how to do, she is entirely correct. He’s been fighting his whole life to make other people see him as the man he is and not what they’ve already decided for him to be. We all know how important what other people think of him is, because that’s the way he’s been raised. He’s been battling against the way other people perceive him all his life. So it is such a natural extension that at this calamity, at this turning point, he directs his battle against the institutions that told people to perceive him so in the first place. The turning point is Thomas’s believed death, yes, but it is also because James’s entire life’s work has been pulled out right from under him. His entire life means nothing because England has told him so. Because of who he is, he is unworthy. She has told him this now with a finality she never has before. She had told him before that he was inadequate and he fought, mustered up enough to shove his way into being a lieutenant. Now she tells him again, and he has no choice but to fight against it, just as he’s been doing all his life. He doesn’t know how to exist and do anything but fight.

He’s fighting against the little voice in his head, the same voice that tells him to be ashamed of loving Thomas, because it doesn’t tell him just that. It tells him, more broadly, that England was right. That he is inadequate, he is lesser, simply because of who he is and he cannot let that voice be proven right. That’s the fight he’s dedicated his life to undertaking. He’s fighting against a world that would tell him or anyone else that they cannot be good because of who they are.

including the very real lyrics “oh, we’ll emasculate him slowly/all the better to enjoy/how delicious to humiliate the boy”

Disney why

the kids are confused about Rattigan

Blender is an excellent freeware 3D renderer,possibly better than After Effects

Lightzone to replace Lightroom

Inkscape to replace Illustratr

Audacity to replace Audition (I also received a free version of Pro Tools with my Scarlett Solo audio interface)

- Medibang Paint and Fire Alpaca for more cartoon style illustration

- Krita for painting

- Clip Studio Paint (not free, but often on sale and cheap even at full price) is better than PS for art and I’m about to cut adobe entirely. Even does some photo editing.

- Paint Tool SAI (again, not free but cheap) old but good, there’s a ton of hacked copies around too. Not hard to get for free.

Also, heads up to anyone using it,

As of July 5th 2021, Audacity is now considered a potential spyware security risk,

Smut fans: *gasp!!!!!*

Writer: So They Spooned All Night And The Brooding One Allowed Themselves To Feel Vulnerable For The First Time In Years And The Chirpy One Got Some Quality Snuggles

There was only one bed and so they lay there together, only inches apart physically but it may as well have been miles for neither could muster the courage to tell the other the true depth of their feelings and so they lay there sleepless in their mutual pining

Angst fans:

Hurt/Comfort fans:

My sleep deprived ass:

Me, who just wants domestic curtains found family fic:

Enemies to lovers fans

My OT3-loving ass:

It turned out to be a defective Murphy bed and it trapped them in the wall.

Crack fic fans:

Update in my ongoing “you need to protect yourself” research:

In June 2020, Google was hit with a $5 billion class action lawsuit (source: Rueters June 2020) accusing them of “illegally invading the privacy of millions of users by pervasively tracking their internet use through browsers set in “private” mode.”  That number isn’t arbitrary, either, it’s calculated by charging $5,000 of “damages per user for violations of federal wiretapping and California privacy laws.” Google just settled the case in October 2020. Sort of. (source: Business Insider Oct 2020).

Here is a list of how to find and delete all the data (source: CNET, June 2020) that Chrome grabs from you. Important note: Google owns that data, and yes, they absolutely do attach it to a name and an address, as of 2016 when they quietly slipped that change in. (source: Propublica, Oct 2016). Oh, and in 2019 Chrome made some changes to its permission system (source: the literal Chrome coding team’s blog, Feb 2019), which remove the brower’s ability to block a request before it’s loaded. “For end users, this effectively cripples all non-compliant ad-blocker extensions on Chrome.” (source: Lifehacker, March 2020).

Once you’ve deleted your harvested personal data from everywhere that you can, I personally recommend you then delete Chrome, and any chrome-coded browser such as Vivaldi, Brave, or Microsoft Edge (list of chromium-based browsers, source: ZDNet, Jan 2019).

Yes, yes, there’s a whole argument that just because a browser is chromium-based doesn’t mean it reports directly to Google, but look, Google has made it a high priority to wipe out every non-chromium-based browser coding on the internet (source: Wall Street Journal, 2019) while never making a single peep about all these supposed ‘rivals’ that are just Chrome at the core. Draw your own conclusions.

Further useful links:

Easy way to compare browsers (such as Chromium v TOR) Allows you to pick 2 browsers and see their base code, their owners, some features, settings, etc. Source: Slant.com

How to move from Chrome to another browser. Source: The Verge, Jun 2019.

Here is a truly horrifying list of apps that make it incredibly easy to look up your name, phone number, address, work place, and so on, just by typing in your name. Fortunately, it also tells you how to “opt out” of these “helpful” apps. Did you know the white pages were still around, but in searchable digital form available to anyone with an internet connection? Source: Poynter (website for journalists), Oct 2020

You think this doesn’t matter? This doesn’t apply to you, a nice quiet citizen of whatever country who always obeys the law? May I ask: have you ever searched, read, liked, reblogged, commented on, or otherwise interacted with a post/article/tweet critiquing a current government? Google knows. They know, they have attached that information to your profile, and they can sell it to…well, you don’t know.

Remember: