We had a garden

Saber really knocks Gilgamesh down a peg.

I hope you enjoy this comic dub! Special thanks to the artist, Rin (@kaleidorubied) on Tumblr, for letting me use their artwork. You can find them, and the original comic, in the links below.

ARTIST LINKS

kaleidorubied’s Tumblr: http://kaleidorubied.tumblr.com/ Original comic: http://kaleidorubied.tumblr.com/post/169121535136/comics-based-off-of-inside-jokes-with-friends-are

CAST

Shiro Emiya - LegendByDesign (me) Saber – Bulma Bunny (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv9DohTjvUCjH1_R6o4IjFw) Gilgamesh – Ivan LeRoy (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoRL5mqyvY26ZRfACXgr5ww)

Video end card created by TehJaxks on Twitter. Give him a follow: https://twitter.com/TehJaxks

daisy johnson in every episode  ✰ 1x05 - girl in the flower dress

it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.

this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.

now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.

as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:

here, also, is a comedy punch:

the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.

Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special - just people talking.

AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.

It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,

“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”

“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”

“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”

“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”

All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.

By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.

And when 3PO is complete, he has wires and things showing at his midriff.

hello friends! let me take you on a journey. a journey about how i unknowingly, and very much unintentionally, released a fake terry pratchett quote into the wilderness of the internet, where it’s been roaming free for nearly 3 years. 

the v. short version: in january 2016 i reblogged a post and commented in the tags that it reminded me of something terry pratchett said about the use of satire. terry pratchett said something to that effect somewhere that i can’t source because i didn’t stop to write it down, it’s just something that stayed with me. it could have been an interview, or a non-fiction piece, or even a scene in one of the discworld books. i honestly don’t know. but he never said those exact words. i made a throwaway comment in the tags of a tumblr post, which later got picked up and reblogged, eventually hit twitter and has been thrown around social media as a legit terry pratchett quote since. 

before i move into the long version where i try to document how this happened, i want to clarify two things:

1. i’ve been aware that quote was on twitter for a while, but never realized the extent to which it had spread - for reasons i’m going to explain in a bit. it first came to my attention in october 2016 when i got an ask about the origin of the quote. the problem is by then i’d lost track of the original post, so i had no hard evidence that my tags were the source. you can see how going around all ‘yeah i accidentally made up a terry pratchett quote and now it got famous but i have no proof to back up my claim’ wouldn’t fly with most people. now that i found that post again, i can try to fix the situation. 

2. i feel very guilty about this. i realize there’s no way for anyone to control how things spread on social media, but all the same, i want to make it clear: this was not intentional. i admire and love terry pratchett, and the discworld series was formative for me as a teenager and young adult. misattributing a quote to him - a quote that doesn’t even sound like it came from him - is just about the worst thing i could think of doing as a long-time reader and fan. so, while i realize that this wasn’t something i could have predicted or controlled, i would like to apologize all the same. 

the timeline: 

1. january 2016: i reblogged this post and commented in the tags about how it reminded me of terry pratchett’s idea about the object of satire - again, the one i can’t source because i never wrote it down or bookmarked it. all i can say clearly is that he did not say those exact words. they come from my tags:

my tags were later copy-pasted by someone into their own reblog of that post, and made their way into the reblog stream (note that the post has nearly 400k reblogs/likes). this is a pretty common practice on tumblr. 

2. march 2016: here’s a tweet that picked up the tags as a direct quote and got some 2.7k retweets. there might be earlier ones too, i don’t know if this is the original post that carried the quote to twitter. at this point i was not yet aware of what was going on. there are some comments already questioning whether the quote came from terry pratchett himself because, well, it doesn’t sound like terry pratchett. at all. 

3. october 2016: i got a message asking for the source of the quote. this is the first time it came to my attention that it had reached twitter and was seeing a bit of traffic, but again, since i’d lost the original post i had no evidence to show that it came from me. all i could do at that point was to admit that yes, i did make a comment about it, but it wasn’t a direct terry pratchett quote. 

i kind of. left alone it after that. partly because i felt couldn’t explain it any better than i already had without solid evidence, and partly because i never realized it would later take off as much as it did. 

4. january 2018: quote started circulating a lot more. as far as i can tell, this tweet may have started the upsurge in traffic, with 23k retweets (again, there might be others, this is just the first thing that shows up when you google the quote). 

5. between january 2018 and now: it’s spread to facebook, reddit, pinterest, several tumblrs and wordpress/blogspot blogs (here’s one trying to source it) and even linkedin, for cryin’ out loud. 

i found this out recently, after i decided on a whim to check if there was still something going on with the quote. then a friend here on tumblr helped me finally track down the original post/tags so i could put all of this together. 

hey vrabia, what do you plan to do about it?

after posting this, i’m going to try and get in touch with shaula evans and ask if she’s willing to tweet about this explanation. unfortunately there’s nothing much i can do aside from that. i’m not on twitter and don’t have an especially large following on tumblr. i’m going to put this in the terry pratchett/disworld tags, in hopes that more people see it, and i would appreciate if you reblogged it.  

finally, a small reminder:

what happened here was the internet equivalent of a post-it scribble that fell behind my desk being picked up without my knowledge and published on the front page of a newspaper. please understand that, while i do feel uncomfortable about the whole thing for personal reasons, i’m not responsible for what gets shared where. 

And it really isn’t your fault. (The flip side of the coin is that people have stolen your words without your permission/knowledge or credit, misattributed them, and used them to go viral, gathering notes and attention, without giving you any benefit.)

… srsly whe you look at the responses you can see that some people just didn’t read the explanation properly, and still want to blame the op and/or find someone to ‘properly attribuate’ the quote to.

There’s a common phrase amongst older Discworld fans, you don’t see it so much on tumblr but you’ll see it on pins at conventions or on Facebook groups, which is “Be More Terry”, by which we mean, be kinder, be thoughtful, speak up about injustice, improve upon yourself and leave the world better than how you found out–and try to do it with a sense of humor if you can. And frankly I can’t think of a more Be More Terry moment than to make more people realize that satire is a tool intended to punch up at power, and not to punch down while your words run away from you and take on a life of their own.

Quite frankly I think he’d be proud of you for grasping it so well, and for making others aware of it.

As for everyone jumping on your case, they’ve clearly never had a post go viral or know what it’s like to have the Internet rip something you’ve said so far out of context that pinning it back down is like attempting to herd cats.

One of my quotes about fear gets misattributed to being from Dune all the time. I’ve seen my own words go past me here on tumblr with a famous author’s name attached multiple times, and half the comments are people irate that it’s not the actual quote and then when they find out it’s from me, acting like somehow I lied and said it was from Dune, even though it very clearly came from a personal post where someone just lifted my words out, posted it as “anon” and then someone else said “this reminds me of Dune” so then the hivemind said “ah, must be from Dune then” and that was that. I see that quote maybe once a month, and there’s nothing I can do about it anymore. it’s outwith my control. Because no matter how many times I make the correction, it’s lost in the notes.

So again, I reiterate, if your first reaction to this post is to knee jerk and be mean to the OP one: that’s not Being Very Terry Of You, and two: you don’t understand tumblr very well, or just how muddy a game of telephone the whole reblog system is. You can say the sky is blue in your tags, and someone else will misatribute them as red, and suddenly that becomes your legacy.

This is Arwen, she’s a Husky/Kelpie mix and a little Asshole:

“I wonder if she can jump?” my dad asks the first five minutes we have her.  She perks up at the word, and clears a six-foot fence form sitting on the ground. “Oh.”  Says dad. “Shit.” Later that night she got up on the counter and ate three pounds of corned beef in roughtly 68 seconds but this was considered part of the learning curve of having a new dog.

I wake up at 4 AM to the sound of the toilet being flushed repeatedly in the hall bathroom, and assume plumbing is now posessed by angry and wasteful ghosts.   I get up to disconnet it and find her in the Bathroom, standing to flush the bowl, then shoving her head in to drink the running water.   I’m not totally awake, so I stand there like an idiot trying to understand this, and my sister gets up to see what the noise is, sees the same thing and also stands there.  Fiance notices my absence and does the same.   Mom eventually wakes up and finds us standing around like very confused zombies and almost joins the parade of baffled zombies before shreiking “THE WATER BILL!” We got her a circulating water bowl after that.

My parent’s don’t have AC, but they haveone of those “fridge on top, pull-out-freezer below” fridges.  Last summer, we were remarking that we might need to shave her so she didn’t get heatstroke, to which she looked up and made a disgusted noise at us. …Then got up, used the dishrag to pull open the freezer and climbed on top of the frozen vegetables, stretching out and sighing contentedly.  “Arwen,” Mom began, but was interrupted by a loud ‘WHAAAaaaaarrr?” from Arwen.  “Ok you can stay there for now but we’re getting you a kiddie pool so you have to get out when we get back.  Don’t eat anything.” She ate a bag of frozen green beans and farted for three days straight.

Took her walking along the lake with the long lead so she could sniff things to her hearts content.  She went about shoving her head in the undergrowth, usually coming up with her head covered in leaves and pollen. Except for the bush where she came back out with a 7-foot Bull Snake wrapping itself around her ehad and neck, trying it’s best to strangle her before she can eat it.   She immediately ran back to me, the parts of her face not occupied with the snake arranged in a gleeful expression of “Look!  I found Snacks!” I screamed, not immediately regognizing that it wasn’t a rattler, and fell, splitting my knee on a rock.  The screaming made her let go of the snake, but I still had to grab her and wrestle the snake off her because it lacked the sense to just scuttle away.  I finaly got it lose from her (Despite her best effort to continue trying to eat it and turned around to fling it off the trail-  -And directly into the face of one of my 90-year-old neighbors who’d come out to see what the screaming and profanity was, making her collapse. I’m pretty sure being told “I accidentally threw a snake at my neighbor.” was the highlight of that EMT’s day.  Dottie was unharmed but she still doesn’t speak to me.

One day, we left her in a Harness and overhead tether in the (at the time) unfanced back yard so she could enjoy some relatively free-range outdoors time.  I walked by the window not a minute later to find her completely GONE, and race out to the yard to find her.  It took me a good heart-pounding five minutes to realize the overhead tether was goign UP into the ancient silver maple and realized that  1. Arwen can apparently do something really weird with her shoulders where they pop out sideways, allowing her to bear-hug the tree and  2. climb a good 40 feet into the three to fight 3. A porcupine, which i didn’t even know LIVED out here. Fortunately, Porcupines weigh considerably less than Awen and she couldn’t get a good enough foothold to get all the way up to it, but I still had to climb up there and lower her down, barking dog profanities at the porcupine the whole way.

My parents recently acquired a mechanized recliner which has been instumental inmom’s hip surgery recovery.  Execpt that Awen Also likes lounging on the furniture, and is more than capable of hitting a large, elder-friendly button with her paw.  So now when she gets back from a walk or the dog park she makes a beeline for the living room, get in the recliner and pushes the button until it’s flat and stretches out in it.  My parents didn’t have a problem with this because she gets out of the chair when they ask her (Mom even tells her “Go get my chair ready” in winter because she does a good job pre-warming it), until last winter when Arwen taught my dog Charlie, another devoted couch animal how to do this. One afternoon there was a tremendous outburst fo barkign and snarling from the living room and we rished in to find both dogs in the recliner, Charlie on the fully-reclined back and Arwen on the elevated seat and foot rest, bellowing at eachother for control of the recliner, thier movments having pitched it back to it’s two hind feet, the device swaying to and fro like a leather covered boat upon the high seas, a furry mutiny on board.  Neither dog was willing to yeild the plush throne, nor to listen to the humans yelling at them to knock it the hell off, until Arwen tackled the usurper, kocking him off and managing to cantaleiver the recliner clean over, flipping it into the hall, both dogs and all humand miraculously unharmed. She still doesn’t let him sit in it.

I love her so much.

One of the regulars at the dog park was an unfixed basset hound with an obnoxiously indifferent owner.  “Brad” shows up pretty much to smoke weed and let “Bojangles” harass the other dogs, in spite of regular complaints about Bo starting fights and trying to mount every dog, leg, and toddler in sight. 

One evening, Bo was particularly interested in Arwen, aggressively following her, nipping her heels and trying to mount her, even after her usual wolverine-like Snap’n’Snarl, which has tended to discourage unwanted suitors before.  Brad was Too Damn High to notice, as usual, but mom knew that if Arwen actually bit Bo, Arwen would be the one in trouble and was trying to call her when Bo made yet another attempt and Arwen finally had it.

Instead of rightfully tearing his face off, Arwen instead did what Mom described as “A Judo-style front-flip” that pulled Bo clean off the ground and threw him on his back, Arwen landing on her feet like a cat.  Bo’s stubby little legs didn’t allow him to right himself before Arwen  jumped on him, front paws slamming into his saggy basset balls, squatted over his face, and peed on him.

“ARWEN NO!!” howled my mother as nearly everyone else present laughed, but having made her point, Arwen daintily got off Bo, and trotted to the gate, ready to go home. Bo yelped but got up and skulked away, only moderately bruised, cowering under the bench by Brad, who finally noticed something might be amiss.

…ninja’d her way onto the vet’s roof despite there being three people in the yard watching the dogs and no clear way up there. She had a pleasant hour of watching the vet staff try to figure out how she did that and how they were going to get her down before mom came to pick her up.

“Arwen, get your furry butt down here!”

At which point Arwen obidently got down by jumping into a nearby tree that’s technically inside a neighboring house’s yard, shimmied down that like a bear, then walked out of their side yard and back around the block to come sit at Mom’s feet, putting her paws up like she expected a treat.

That tree is not accessible from the daycare yard. We still have no idea how she got up there.

I have fostered doggos for a good majority of my life and my brain simply cannot process half of the bullshit in this post…

1. She’s a mix of two extremely smart breeds 2. She’s a mix of two extremely energetic breeds 3. The inmates trained her to do lots of “Extracirriculars” like veritcal leaps, how to climb chain-link fence, agility courses, physical-comedy type tricks becuase they finished teaching her the regular Service Dog Cirriculum and wanted to keep working with her.   4. Due to said Extrcirriculars, she doesn’t have any fear of heights, strangers, animals, or the nonsense of other dogs.

She ate a four inch hole in the carpet because someone dropped a pork chop there. She’s completely fine, it all passed without so much as an upset stomach on her part.

-also ate the garden hose because we weren’t spraying her with it.

-conned one of the guys that installed the AC out of his sandwich by pretending to bark at something on the other side of the house, and doubling back when he came to investigate.