The Evolution of Me

Propaganda

Bruce Wayne AKA Batman (Batman: Bump In The Night):

What if Batman was the last line of defense between Gotham and the supernatural unknown? What if he did less punching and more paranormal detecting (but still a generous amount of punching)? What if he could exorcize, comfort, or rehome antagonists instead of just throwing them in Arkham?

You should vote for Batman (Bruce Waye, est. May 1939 to win this bracket) to win this bracket and upset a D&D Actual Play

My argument: It would be really funny

the thing you have to understand about bump in the night batman is he is that guy. robert pattinson batman but he has to know dracula is real

Bump In The Night has one of the subtlest and strangest batmans I've seen depicted in maybe any media.

This is a batman who is constantly running off of five coffees and twelve packs of cigarettes who does in fact look like he is constantly running off of five coffees and twelve packs of cigarettes and is fully out of his depth but is still trying despite that.

This is a batman that was left out in the rain but needs to come in to do some detecting but is going to be at least a little bit awkward about being covered in rainwater the entire time.

I don't want to just, like, *assume* things about tumblr but I also think this is maybe the global capital of bedraggled guy appreciators and this is a bedraggled guy who is routinely beset by occult crime.

a guy who gets the shit kicked out of him by a ventiloquost dummy

This man is so socially inept that when he GRAPPLING HOOKS A CHILD and then learns the child Knows Things about a case he's working, he gives her GRANDMA CANDY

HE SHOWS UP AT PEOPLES HOUSES AT 3 AM WITH BONES

Did you want a batman who handles his rogue's gallery the way the flash does? With de-escalation tactics and words? Who doesnt just throw them all into Arkham without any thought to helping them?

he is such a wet cat

You wanna vote for batman so bad ooooooh when he's bruce wayne he turns into billionaire philanthropist gay playboy brucie wayne and its a really fun juxtaposition against his awkward and serious batman persona which is closer to his real personality

he talks his villains down and then HIRES THEM AS PART OF THE BAT TEAM

HE'S FRIENDS WITH VIKTOR FREEZE

HE'S EXES WITH SO MANY PEOPLE

Genuinely this podcast rips and this depiction of batman is fucking great

Mod Note: Please only vote for Bruce Wayne/Batman that appears in the podcast Batman: Bump In The Night.

Emmy Acero (Tidal Wave Games Podcast: SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY...):

Latino trans man, college student turned movie stunt double turned space bounty hunter. Father blew his entire college fund on a cryptocurrency scheme, now trying to raise enough money as a gig worker to pay off his debt before his school's tuition office's hitmen come after him. And that's before he finds out about the whole "secret destiny" thing…

Might be inexperienced (don't worry, he's a consenting adult) but he's a very quick learner. Just look how quickly he learned the saxophone!

Accidental rizz levels off the charts. Canonically has the most romantic/sexual success of any character in the podcast, almost entirely unintentionally on his part

You float the idea of knife play and he says "omg I thought you would never ask". Next thing you know you're sitting in a chair watching him perform actual knife tricks for two hours

Special skills: "True Strength is in the Core", "Can Fit in Spaces Most Can't", "Resting Innocent Face" (aka puppy dog eyes). I think you can fill in the blanks

Art of Bruce Wayne and Batman courtesy of @charaznablescanontoyota.

and like. do we have to keep gently phrasing things to protect naturally-thin people's feelings. in my life it has never been fashionable to be fat. "fat" is still a bad word. there has never been institutional power pushing people to gain weight; no trillion-dollar industry to "fix" skinny people. a larger body type has never been over-represented in models, influencers, celebrities. sure, people might say "i'm worried for your health," but they do it with respect and gentleness, like they're talking to a scared deer.

every single fucking time i talk about this, i have to be so careful with what i say, in case i offend even one skinny person. it is just true that skinny people have social capital across many cultures. there is a reason you almost never hear someone say "i wish i was fat," but you will constantly see people say "I wish i was thin." and yet inevitably some skinny person will tell me: i thought you wanted body positivity. it is the same fucking attitude as when a cis man says "when you say men have power, well, i've been bullied for being a man. i thought you believe in mental health awareness. don't you know men have a higher suicide rate?"

two things can be true at once: your experience being bullied for being thin was terrible. and people with larger bodies probably have it worse.

i have been big and small. i know many other people who have been big and small. trust what i'm about to tell you: being small is much easier. the world is kinder to you. people treat you better. honestly, this pattern occurs pretty much regardless of gender - my guy friends have confided that they'd rather be bullied for being thin than be bullied for being fat. if you're skinny, the pressure might be to gain weight, sure, but it's often to do so in a way that keeps you skinny - to gain muscle, specifically.

thinness is seen as innate and natural, genetic. whereas carrying any fat - that is a moral failing. it is assumed to be related to your character, your personality. i have seen people equate it to discipline, to hygiene. that bias is why we need to talk about this.

They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team's statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they'd been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.

It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn't like it was an all-day "today we are doing statistics" thing or "today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation" one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team's history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they'd sent (and copies of any of the responses they'd gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.

The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student's report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator's autograph for part of his project.

I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don't actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it's a great concept. I didn't get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.

Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.

She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because "organizing information into a bar graph" was a specific standard for students that age. "Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject" was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.

But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.

My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school's test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.

My mom's project wasn't the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn't being taught from the textbook and wasn't being taught to the test.

completely forgot to post for Valentine’s Day here 🧍

trope: trapped in an elevator

i love that FatT doesn’t have specific characters here it’s just. every FatT

I mean, like, of my favorite interactions in Counter/WEIGHT, which is the only canon with elevators except Marielda which wrote its own elevator slapstick:

Aria & Jacqui: Aria jumps up onto Jacqui’s shoulders and burns a hole in the ceiling, finding as she does that she’s totally right and it is an assassination attempt! The ensuing fight takes place over three different locations, all of which she destroys.

AuDy & anyone: Upon realizing that they are going to be trapped in an enclosed space with a sentient being, it is AuDy’s settled and considered practice to turn themselves off until the experience is over. If necessary, they will instead pretend to turn themselves off and play as many rounds of mental solitaire as is necessary until the other person stops trying to talk to them. This explains September.

Cass & Aria: Aria is about to shoot a hole in the ceiling to stop an assassination attempt when Cass blurts out that the elevator was programmed to stop halfway between the medical wing and the xenobiology wing! So that they can access the secret back access ladder! Aria is thrilled at this evidence of Cass’s foresight; Cass is thrilled that they’re at the point where they can just say whatever shit they want and their friends will buy it as a master plan.

Maryland and anyone: No elevator has ever broken down near Maryland.

Jace & Addax: Jace gets two lines into the “ha ha, guess we should wait for the rescue crew, anyway what’s your sign–” before Addax has already called on Peace to interface with the elevator and they are out of there. Addax gets all the way to Peace’s hangar before he slaps his forehead and turns around to try to get that precious, precious hitting-on time back, but it’s too late, it’s all too late in space. Life is a series of missed opportunities and connections. He turns it over and over in his mind, sometimes as a fantasy, sometimes as a sharp regret, until years later– when Jace is a figure out of time, resurrected and renewed, and Addax by some grace is sitting next to him in bed and going over his dissertation for punctuation errors– Jace is like, “oh, shit, do you know what I just remembered? That time I tried to hit on you in an elev–” and Addax blurts out “SAGITTARIUS.” 

Propaganda

Magnus Burnsides (The Adventure Zone: Balance):

Just look at the spread of him in the Suffering Game graphic novel where he's sweaty and buck naked and has a sword the size of him and tell me he's not sexy. I will provide images if needed.

Mod Note: Propaganda from official non-audio materials is not allowed.

Konora (Riley Hopkins And Their Amazing Friends: The Legend of Zelda: Oath to Ordo):

What if a rude woman begrudgingly accepted the power of love and friendship into her heart to try and save the kingdom from an evil queen.

KONORA SWEEP!!!

Trans Woman Ganondorf better win on Tumblr.com, otherwise what’s the point of any of this

She's a seven foot tall grumpy woman with a situationship pirate girl that follows her around. She stole the triforce of power. She's got it all

Can we get some trans woman ganondorf love on this website

you know what i don't have so much pride that i won't discard it to encourage people to vote for my oc in a tumblr poll.

she's what if ganondorf was a shy but rude trans woman. she's got a quiet confidence that can sometimes edge into boastful condescension. she's very tall and very wide and can easily sling you over her shoulder to carry. she can't sing but she understands just as well as anyone that in this world music is magic and so will try her fucking hardest. she can use warlock punch at any time. and YES there is a special thief girl in her heart and YES they are trying to use all of their power and wisdom to crush the myths of empire in their fist until all of those illusions fall away, but that doesn't mean she has no time for love.....

vote for konora and it will please my heart forever.

Propaganda

Dyre Owed (Friends at the Table: Sangfielle):

Centuries ago he gave up his bones to protect people.

Now they're coming to collect them.

Very very tall, always wearing a mask and cape, charming and maybe cursed.

David Frost (Riley Hopkins And Their Amazing Friends: Interstitial Investigations):

Propaganda

Verge (Midnight Burger):

COME ON IT'S VERGE

Renée Minkowski (Wolf 359):

She's a 40-something space captain who was desperate to be part of something and to matter, so she went to space. She puts on a serious, no-nonsense persona to feel capable, but she's actually a huge dork who loves poetry, musicals, and ice cream. She's a first-generation Polish immigrant, and her arc is very much tied up in that and in how she feels like she has to be the best at everything in order to have any worth. She's a failgirl who got rejected from the NASA space program five times. She spent two weeks hunting a plant monster in the vents of her ship. She Russian-Rouletted a guy into turning off the bomb he was trying to blow up the ship with. She killed the main villain of the series with the same harpoon she used to kill the plant monster. She loves her crew and would protect them with her life. She learns to embrace her own identity outside of externally-given roles. She's frighteningly competitive in board games. What's not to love?

There's nothing hotter than a beat up woman who shoots a harpoon. And Minkowski is that woman.

"Great! What do you recommend?"

“It is ill-advised to dip your feet in the bog, no matter how hot the day has been… yet some do it anyway.”

Is this why all the numbers look terrible for Canva's blackletter fonts? Or is it because Canva has bad blackletter fonts? I'm trying to look like a turn-of-the-century document here and like...... they were using Arabic numerals in 1899 but this doesn't look right.

Like what I'm going for with the script and the blackletter is something like this:

𝕾𝖊𝖝𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙 𝕻𝖔𝖉𝖈𝖆𝖘𝖙 𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖙𝖊𝖗 2026 𝕽𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖉 2