Is someone gonna talk about the use of signage in yesterday's episode? Do I have to be the one to talk about the use of signage in yesterday's episode?
I know we all saw the billboard beside Choso displaying the abilities of his technique in tandem with the narrator, but there were so many more great uses of the signs in the background to convey information.
The first sign (and also one of the first shots) that we see in the episode is a Pedestrian Do Not Cross sign overlaid by the sound of Yuuji running, followed by Yuuji's shadow itself taking up the position of the pedestrian on the sign. You can read this as the sign telling Yuuji not to proceed to where he's going or as an indication of how the upcoming fight will end for the viewer.
The next sign that we get is one telling us to Go Left, which doesn't really seem important, but I promise you, it is. We'll see a lot of arrows pointing left throughout the episode and every single one of them is pointing away from danger. Go Left to avoid danger, essentially.
These two signs are arguably the most important in the episode, but they aren't the coolest use of visual symbolism that we got, so lets keep going.
The third sign that we see focused on in the episode is a No Running sign that Yuuji passes that says "Do Not Rush. It Is Dangerous." Yuuji, of course, runs past it on his way toward the escalators that lead (for him) to Gojo and (for the viewer) to Choso.
Once he does get to the bottom of the escalators, Yuuji is attacked by Choso immediately and Choso's opening move (Convergence), once Yuuji moves his arms up and away from his face, slices up through the subway cieling and the road above to cut the Pedestrian Do Not Cross sign that we saw at the beginning of the episode in half.
We also get out first big Left Arrow, placed immediately in the foreground of the shot and pointing toward the aforementioned sign that's been cut in half (this will be important later), but in a another view, it also points away from station itself. Again, go left to avoid danger.
Our next Left Arrow is on the ceiling between Yuuji, indicating that he should go away from Choso. Interestingly enough, it also points toward the bathrooms that Yuuji will go into later once his fight with Choso in the hallway becomes too dangerous.
That same arrow falls to the floor between them once Choso gets mad after Yuuji tells him about Eso and Kechizu crying, this time pointing directly away from Choso.
Another Left Arrow, this time in a more urgent red. We see this once Yuuji realizes that he's in serious danger, that he'll loose if he continues to fight Choso in the hallway. It's also pointing away from the bathrooms and toward the escalators from Yuuji's point of view beside the bathrooms, indicating that he needs to leave the area entirely.
The previous arrow pointing toward the bathrooms as a safe option has been destroyed and Yuuji has taken some serious damage by the time he moves toward them. The bathrooms are no longer safe. Yuuji needs to leave.
This is followed up by the only Right Arrows that we see focused on in the epsiode, but unlike the Left Arrows, they aren't used to convey how to get away from danger, but rather what is dangerous. Not only do these arrows all point toward Choso outside of the shot, they also have each of his techniques displayed below them.
Once the bathroom fight is over and Yuuji is on death's door, we get a zoomed out shot of his body framed by (two) people cut in half. This sign is shown right before Sukuna makes his only appearance in the episode, where we hear the sound of electricity flickering.
We heard this exact sound earlier from the Left Arrow telling Yuuji to get away from Choso at the beginning of the fight, but I like to interpret it as an audio indicator of Yuuji's life and/or control of Sukuna flickering in and out, becoming weaker.
Side Note: In the previous shot of Yuuji that we get before this one, we see a blade of light cutting Yuuji in half, the same way Convergence cut the Pedestrian Do Not Cross sign in half earlier in the episode. This will come into play later in the post, but keep it in mind.
The next time we see these bisected bathroom signs is when Mimiko and Nanako approach Yuuji to awaken Sukuna. Two people framing Yuuji/Sukuna that have been cut, while those same signs are whole in the hallway to the left. Go left to avoid danger applies to the girls here as well.
Our next important set of signs are actually the same sign, a large green arrow in the foreground that points away from where Yuuji's body is. While Choso stumbles away from it (away from Yuuji/Sukuna) the girls walk toward it.
This is also the first Left Arrow that we see point toward Choso, unlike the one pointing away from him at the beginning of his and Yuuji's fight. Choso, at this moment and onward, is no longer a source of danger to Yuuji or to us, the viewer.
And finally, the final shot of the entire episode, our old friend, the Pedestrian Do Not Cross sign. Yuuji has lost to Choso, the girls have found him to awaken Sukuna, and we get a focus shot of the Pedestrian that previously represented Yuuji cut in half and covered in blood.
I mentioned earlier that we get another shot of Yuuji cut in half by a ray of light in the bathroom.
Here is that shot, and the way that I interpret it is as a reminder that Yuuji shares his body. Yuuji's control of his body has been cut off in the same way that the Pedestrian representing Yuuji has had part of it cut away. What's left is the part that Yuuji can't control, the Pedestrian covered in blood.
Additionally, repeated use of a sign showing pedestrians cut in half and bloody can also represent the civilians in Shibuya, especially now that Yuuji no longer has control of his body.
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One thing I love about Crowley --never stated, but consistently shown-- is that he is, at heart, an engineer.
I have a few different things to say about that. Let's unpack them.
As the Unnamed Angel, we see his designs for the Pillars of Creation are millions of pages long, comprised of cramped text, footnotes, diagrams, schematics, etc. It's very...Renaissance polymath, in the way it implies a particular intersection of artist and inventor.
Also: in the naked romanticism with which he views his stars.
We already knew he made stars, but in s2 we learn that he did NOT sculpt each of them by hand. He designed a nebula ("a star factory," he says) that will form several thousand young stars and proto-planets, and all --aside from getting the 'factory' running-- without him lifting a finger. We also learn that these young stars and proto-planets stand in contrast to those made by other angels, which are going to come 'pre-aged.'
...I'm reminded of Hastur and Ligur's approach to temptations. Damning one human soul at a time, devoting singular attention to it over the course of years or decades, and how that stands in contrast to Crowley's reliance on, quote, 'knock-on effects.'
Ligur: It's not exactly...craftsmanship.
Crowley: Head office don't seem to mind. They love me down there.
Hm.
I'm also reminded of the M25.
The M25 may not be as grand as a nebula (sentences you only say in GOmens fandom...), but LIKE his nebula it's an intricate, self-sustaining engine that does Crowley's work for him, many times over. Again.
That's some pretty neat characterization --and so is the indication towards Crowley's disinterest in victimizing anyone tempting individual people. It takes a considerable amount of planning and effort (and creeping about in wellies), but in accordance with his design the M25 generates a constant stream of low-grade evil on a gigantic scale.
Cumulatively gigantic, that is. Individually? Negligible.
But no other demon understands human nature well enough to parse that one million ticked-off motorists are not, in any meaningful way, actually equivalent to one dictator, or one mass-murderer, or even one little influential regressive. That's the trick of it. Crowley gets Hell's approval (which he NEEDS to survive, and to maintain the degree of freedom he's eked out for himself), and at the same time ensures that any actual ~Evil Influence~ is spread nice and thin.
It's some clever machinery. And he knows it, too:
The Unnamed Angel and Crowley are both proud of their ideas.
(musings on professional pride, Leonardo da Vinci, the crank handle, and 'the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale' under the cut)
In the 1970's Crowley gives a presentation on the M25, projector and all, to a room full of increasingly impatient demons. Maybe the presentation was work-ordered; the 'can I hear a WAHOO?' definitely wasn't.
Before the Beginning, the Unnamed Angel can barely contain his excitement about his nebula. Aziraphale manages a baffled-but-polite, "....That's nice... :)"
11 years ago, Hastur and Ligur want to 'tell the deeds of the day,' and Crowley smiles to himself because (according to the script-book) he knows he has 'the best one.'
(Naturally, his 'deed' has nothing to do with tempting anybody, and everything to do with setting up a human-powered Rube-Goldberg machine of petty annoyance. Oodles of 'Evil' generated; very little harm done.)
Hastur and Ligur don't get it, of course. That's also consistent.
Nobody ever knows what the hell he's talking about.
It didn't make it on-screen, but, in both the novel AND the script-book, Crowley was friends with Leonardo da Vinci. The quintessential Renaissance polymath. That's where he got his drawing of the Mona Lisa --they're getting very drunk together, and Crowley picks up the 'most beautiful' of the preliminary sketches. He wants to buy it. Leonardo agrees almost off-the-cuff, very casual, because they're friends, and because he has bigger fish to fry than haggling over a doodle:
He goes, "Now, explain this helicopter thingie again, will you?" Because he's an engineer, too.
(It is 1519 at the latest, in this scene. Why the FUCK would Crowley know about helicopters, and be able to explain them, comprehensively, to Leonardo da Vinci?
...Well. I choose to believe he got bored one day and worked it out. Look, if you know how to build a nebula, you can probably handle aerodynamics. And anyway, I think it's telling that this is his idea of shooting the shit. 'A drunken mind speaks a sober heart,' and all. He probably babbled about Aziraphale long enough to make poor Leo sick)
Apart from Aziraphale, Leonardo da Vinci is the only person Crowley has any keepsakes or mementos of.
Think about that, though. Aziraphale's bookshop is bursting with letters, paintings, busts, and personalized signatures memorializing all the humans he's known and befriended over 6000 years (indeed: Aziraphale has living human friends up and down Whickber Street. He's part of a community).
Crowley doesn't have any of that. It's just the stone albatross from the Church (for pining), the infamous gay sex statue (for spicy pining), the houseplants (for roleplaying his deepest trauma over and over, as one does), and this one piece of artwork, inscribed, "To my friend Anthony from your friend Leo da V."
To me, at least, that suggests a level of attachment that seems to be rare for Crowley.
...Maybe he liked having someone to talk shop with? Someone who was interested? Someone engaged enough to ask questions when they didn't immediately understand?
...Anyway.
There's also the matter of the crank handle.
This thing:
This is one of the subtler changes from the book. In the book, Crowley knows Satan is coming and, desperate, arms himself with a tire iron. It's the best he can do. He's not Aziraphale; he wasn't made to wield a flaming sword.
The show, IMO, improves on this considerably. Now he, like Aziraphale, gets to face annihilation with what he was made for in his hand. And it's not a weapon, not even an improvised one like the tire iron.
He made stars with it.
[both gifs by @fuckyeahgoodomens]
If you Google 'crank handle,' you'll get variations on this:
Crank handles have been around for centuries. Consisting of a mechanical arm that's connected to a perpendicular rotating shaft, they are designed to convert circular motion into rotary or reciprocating motion.
Which is to say they're one of the 'simple machines,' like a lever or a pulley; the bread and butter of engineering. You'll also get a list of uses for a crank handle, archaic and modern. Among them: cranking up the engine of an old-fashioned car... say, a 1933 Bentley. That's what Crowley has been using his for, lately. But he's had it since he was an angel and he's still, it seems, very capable of it's angelic applications.
Stopping time. For instance.
(This is conjecture on my part, but, I like to imagine that Crowley has the ability to stop time for the same reason I can --and should-- unplug my computer before I perform maintenance on it. Time and Space are a matched set, after all, and in his designs in particular, one feeds into the other.)
I know everyone has already said this, but: I REALLY LIKE that when he needs to channel the heights of his power, he does so not with a weapon but with a tool. Practically with a little handheld metaphor for ingenuity. One from long-lost days when he made beautiful things.
(And he loved it. Still loves it --he incorporated that metaphor into the Bentley, didn't he?)
Let Aziraphale rock up to the apocalypse with a weapon: he has his own compelling thematic reasons to do exactly that. Crowley's story is different, and fighting isn't the only way to express defiance. And if you've been condemned as a demon and assumed to be destructive by your very nature, what better way than this?
He made stars. They didn't manage to take that from him.
Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale are fighters, really --they have no intention of fighting in any war. They'll annoy everyone until there's no war to fight in, for a start. But between the two, if one must be, then that one is Aziraphale. Principality of the Earth, Guardian of the Eastern Gate, Wielder of the Flaming Sword... all that stuff. Even if he'd prefer not to, it's very clear that Aziraphale can rise to the occasion, if he must.
Crowley was never that kind of angel. He wasn't a Principality. He doesn't have a sword.
...And yet.
It's Crowley who protects. He's the one who paces, who stands guard, who circles Aziraphale and glares out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near.
In light of everything else I've said here, I think that's interesting.
Obviously part of it is that Aziraphale enjoys it and, you know, good for him. He's living his best life, no doubt no doubt no doubt. But what about Crowley? What's driving that behavior, really?
Have you heard the phrase, 'loved to the point of invention'? Well, what if 'the point of invention' was where you started? What if where you end up involves glaring out at the world, just daring anyone else to come near? What is that, in relation to the bright-eyed thing you used to be?
What do we name the point to which Crowley loves Aziraphale?
...Thinking about how an excitable angel with three million pages of star design he wants to tell you all about...becomes a guard dog. Is all.
does Rathma know why all of Lilith's descendents look Like Thatâ˘ď¸
"It's the manwhore genes." He deadpans. "Womanwhore. Same difference."
Then he tilts his head in consideration. "Really though, it is simply a case of several dominant genetic traits being passed down offspring to offspring. And yes, hers are stronger than my sire's, cropping up more often throughout the years. "
Rathma makes a face, remembering the case of Uldyssian and Mendeln. Two brothers nothing alike, albeit one of them closely resembling Rathma - and thus, Lilith.
"There is some variation from line to line. For example, my line is cut through with pale blonde hair, because of Inarius. My brother, however, is bald, and none of his descendants have had much luck with their hair."
"Oh, and humanity seems to have weeded it out, but all of my children had my nose. Her nose too, but I'm taking the credit there."
Momma Lilith and daddy Inarius are, once again, at each others throats, bby Rathma is fucking dead and in the midst of all that pop-pop Mephisto is out here living his best life as his fursona. That's amazing...It's awful, but it's great Uăťá´ĽăťU
If there's one thing I didn't have on a D4 bingo sheet, it was Mephisto Fursuitor Extraordinaire. Honestly though good for him. Living his best life, getting belly-rubs and table scraps.
What a family tho right? Seriously, Diablo is just the story of one family messing up absolutely everything for everyone. And that family is Mephisto's. Him, his brothers, his daughter + her fucked up husband, their weird gremlin child. His neice is the only normal one, and poor Leah got wrapped up in it all anyway.
Brumaltides must be a real hoot.
This just gives more credence to my theory that Diablo 5 is going to be about Baal's daughter tho. 3 was about Diablo's. 4 was about mephisto's.
By Three They Come.
On the other side, we have Inarius and his brother Tyrael, both of whom have done a stellar job of Creating Chaos. If one of them isn't stealing the Worldstone, the other is blowing it up. If one of them is trying to preserve humanity, the other is ending it.
I'm like 89% sure they're both dead now, and much as I love them maybe the world will finally know a bit of peace and quiet without the Shenanigan Brothers running around putting things into soulstones and burning villages down.
All in all, Rathma has one hell of a family. I can't even blame him for running away to live in a crypt. Just look at his parents, the snake is definitely the better guardian to raise a child here.
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My boyfriend has to go to the ren fair for work but i can come and he wanted to do a matching costume. He was like âI want to be Frodoâ and I was like âoh cool I can be Shelobâ which was, apparently, not the couples costume he was thinking of
I was like âbabe she has the most screen time of any woman in Return of the Kingâ and my boyfriend was like âthat cannot be true,â looked it up, and said âi canât believe thatâs trueâ
Linkâs vision tunnels. The cavern echoes with the sound of three heartbeats; the loudest from the thing bowed backwards over a stone altar. The figure is frozen in visible agony with skin stretched too tight over bone, lips peeling away from pointed teeth, and long locked hair the color of Dinraalâs fire adorned with gold. Out of the chest, luminous stone-green, a floating hand grips the point where rot geysers out into the room with a hiss. Ribbons of light twist away from the floating arm and where the rest of a body should be, a floating script of symbols drifts up toward the ceiling. Toward Hyrule.
Link turns to Zelda. Her face is a mixture of confusion and curiosity and anger. âGanon?â
This is my second go at making this blog. The first time, I got shadowbanned immediately for writing a post with these words on it, so Iâm going to have to link to a google doc instead.
You can find my current list HERE
If youâd like to contribute tags youâve found, please send it via an ask or submission so I can double check and add it to the list.
EDIT: Right now many of these are only banned on IOS, but that really doesnât make it better
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It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, itâs literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while weâre talking about books, if youâve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely donât go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately theyâre completely free.
what I canât quite get over is how Burn, Butcher, Burn is such an angry, bitter song
and thatâs so out of character with the music we saw from Jaskier from the first season! âToss a Coin to Your Witcherâ is a light-hearted tavern song, âHer Sweet Kissâ is wistful and sweet, and âThe Fishmongerâs Daughterâ is just straight up raunchy
and âBurn, Butcher, Burnâ is⌠none of those. itâs very catchyâhell, it was stuck in my head all dayâbut itâs also spiteful in a very private, specific way. itâs stuffed full of insults that only make sense if you were there, on the mountain, and knew all the things that got said that day
so, just to recap: Jaskier wrote an absolute banger, a total catchy tune that spread like wildfire thanks to his reputation, and he wrote it specifically to sting Geralt (and the âbutcherâ bit is only the most obvious part)
and i just⌠jaskier is such a kind person even if heâs got a spine of steel, and this song is such a sign of how heartbroken he was
okay but imagine being a witcher in a pub and you see jaskier come in and while you like him as a person because heâs made life better for witchers with his songs, you canât help but roll your eyes a little because here we fucking go. time for an hour of listening to how fucking great geralt is.Â
AND THEN
âi hear youâre alive. how disappointing.â and? what? thatâsâŚinteresting. thatâs a departure from the songs youâve heard from him before. maybe this wonât be so bad. and this is. this is. very much. this is, uh, dark? and angry? and not like anything else youâve heard from him?? but maybe? heâs just? singing a normal breakup song? like this CANâT be about geralt, right? this is geraltâs number one fan! the man never shuts up about that white-haired weirdo!Â
but by the time you hear the âwith your swords and your stupid hairâ hOLY FUCK. HOLY HELL.Â
AND! FUCKING! THEN!
âwatch that butcher burnâ?! HOLY. FUCK. THE BARD IS FUCKING GOING THERE.Â
bruh this would be like the first time you heard toss a coin all over again in terms of WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON. O.O
fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. itâs to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals. protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you arenât doing anything likely to get you arrested.
the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than youâd think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity. make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged. and strike. attack.
YES
iâm a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but itâs almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used canât be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word.
above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if theyâre collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that
Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money
TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)
WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string âFuckOffâ. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I canât seem to find it
Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so thatâs good enough for me
the meaning of life is summed up in the story elmer bendiner tells about how when he was a pilot the second world war, his plane was hit with a barrage of anti-aircraft fire from the nazi forces but the crew survived. and how everyone was saying it was a miracle until they investigated the shells that got in the fuselage and found there was no explosive charges in any of them. in one they found a note scribbled in czech, written by the person who had been forced to manufacture the shells, and it just said âthis is all we can do for you nowâ.
every time i see someone acting tough online about how harm reduction is pointless and in some convoluted way worse than doing nothing i think about that person in some soul-destroying nazi factory in occupied czechoslovakia removing all of the explosive charges from their anti-aircraft shells and writing a note that they must have known would probably never be read, just to say âthis is all we can do for you, and weâre going to do itâ. they are trying to make us kill you and we refuse. i do think that maybe itâs all going to be okay.
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@worms.forbrains(any pronouns): well I donât have a pole, but I have a skateboard đ
Short Description: [[MORE]]
Tiktok creator worms.forbrains skating and singing along to the song âMontero (Call Me By Your Name)â by Lil Nas X. For each line, there are seamless transitions that include outfit changes that range from feminine to masculine and everything in between.
the concept and idea of âyou can always start trying to be a better personâ is extremely important to me both in media and irl and i continue to be deeply deeply disturbed by the trend on this site pushing that these ideas in media are bad writing or even morally reprehensible
because theyd rather someone stay terrible or just straight up die than become a better personÂ
from a compassionate point of view itâs deeply distressing
and from a pragmatic point of view itâs outright frustrating
I think part of the pushback about this is the idea that, to âredeemâ bad people, their victims must first forgive them for unforgivable acts.
This is false. No one is obligated to forgive you. You can learn from your mistakes and become the best, kindest person on earth, and the people youâve hurt still wonât forgive you, and youâll have to accept that. And that doesnât mean you arenât allowed to grow. Because we arenât just âpureâ or âsinfulâ, weâre complex.
This. Somebody who did bad things can absolutely do the work and grow as a person⌠and ALSO the people they hurt previously are not obliged to forgive them or to agree to be around them. Both those things can be true
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