caulk and tall borture

Do Spirit & Warriors have any favourite flowers, simply by appearance/scent or tied to someone else?

Do they have any spending habits, e.g indulging in treats or aren't particularly materialistic? Particularly Warriors, how was he doing on rupees and buying things during the quest with the Chain?

Did Warriors have any go-to stories to share about his war that wouldn't actually reveal much but would satisfy the Chain's curiosity?

Does Spirit have any particular memory (good or bad) that he remembers, or do they all blur together in a way where he has trouble picking out something specific from (unless tied to a physical injury)?

Favourite colors VS colors they most often wear (outside Warriors' hero outfit & Spirit's work uniform)

Oh yes! I love it when people ask me stuff like this!

Do Spirit & Warriors have any favourite flowers, simply by appearance/scent or tied to someone else?

Warriors would probably say roses, if only because he thinks that's the "right" answer (they're symbols of elegance and royalty, etc), but he doesn't know what his favorite flower is. His mother wore a floral perfume and, while he's never known what exactly which flower it’s based on, it's his favorite.

I've mentioned before that New Hyrule is just California. Since Spirit has lived most of his life on the coast, he's probably very well acquainted with golden poppies. I imagine the hills near Trading Post are covered in them during the spring. They remind him of home.

Do they have any spending habits, e.g indulging in treats or aren't particularly materialistic? Particularly Warriors, how was he doing on rupees and buying things during the quest with the Chain?

Warriors is materialistic in that he sees the importance of replicating the habits of the upper class, but he doesn't want a lot of things for himself. During his own era, his hero pension would make him middle class. Outside of his era, he seems rich. Rupees go farther the further back in time Warriors goes, so everyone else in the Chain thinks he's rich. He's just amazed at how much he could buy with such little money.

Because his wallet isn't endless, the money he brought with him on his quest (as well as everyone else's) has been designated as an emergency fund. If the Chain can hunt for food or get supplies and housing through a few hours of labor, they'll do that over using their money. Warriors actually had a lot of fun roughing it out, though he did complain more than once about not being able to go sleep on a comfy bed at night without having to spend a few hours doing odd-jobs first.

I think Spirit has no sense of how to budget or save money, and is only saved by the fact that he doesn't think about spending his money on a lot of things. This takes a lot of people back, as everyone assumes his meticulousness extends to anything beyond trains.

I've been trying to think of a way to explain how he has trouble conceptualizing money, and I'm not sure if I can. In his head, he doesn't have enough money to buy a house now so there's no point in ever trying to save up for it. He doesn't rush out to spend all of his money, but he doesn't hesitate to buy something if he needs it. After all, he needs it. He's lucked out in that he doesn't think he needs a lot, so he lives in a shitty apartment, wears shitty clothes, and fixes anything he can. If you write out his expenses, you would find he spends most of his money either on take out (man can't cook) or cigarettes (whenever he's not trying to quit).

Did Warriors have any go-to stories to share about his war that wouldn't actually reveal much but would satisfy the Chain's curiosity?

Warriors had a goal to never reveal anything incriminating about himself to the Chain, so he avoided talking about himself as much as possible. Whenever he was expected to share his experiences, he found a way to deflect or make it as boring as possible. For the war, his go-to was to talk briefly about a battle and taking as many tangents as he could about whatever forms or paperwork he had to do to make X happen until one of the other boys got fed up and directed the conversation elsewhere.

According to Warriors, he spent a lot of the war behind a desk and writing reports. Sure, he fought. He defeated Ganondorf, after all. But they were small blips between all of the bureaucracy.

Does Spirit have any particular memory (good or bad) that he remembers, or do they all blur together in a way where he has trouble picking out something specific from (unless tied to a physical injury)?

For Spirit, his memories are pretty clear. If asked, he could sit down and recount specific stories from the war in the order they happened. They haven't faded at all, and that's frustrating in his own way. There's a degree of detachment for most of them, to the point where he's still looking back and thinking "what was that?"

He thinks back a lot to his first few weeks in Warriors's era. It was before his first battle. They had just met and didn't know each other well. Warriors was busy and had thrown Spirit into training with the other soldiers to get him caught up to speed with how the military worked. Because he was a hero, everyone training with him gave him a wide berth. He was too shy to try to approach them. He was in a new, overwhelming environment. He was the loneliest he had ever been.

Spirit can remember how desperately he looked forward to the brief pockets of time he had with Warriors. He remembers seeing Warriors go about his business around the camp and how he wished Warriors would turn around and see him. He remembers of much he worried that Warriors wouldn't like him. He remembers when Warriors would suddenly notice his staring. He remembers how relieved he felt when Warriors smiled in returned.

Favourite colors VS colors they most often wear (outside Warriors' hero outfit & Spirit's work uniform)

I like the idea that every Link's favorite color is green. They are so different in a lot of ways yet for some reason, that’s the one thing they share.

Warriors's personal clothes are very desaturated. A lot of navy, white, and black. Dark blue would be a favorite of his, as it wouldn't read as mourning clothing. When he's not on duty, he wants to blend in. He also wants to be perceived as being older and mature, so he avoids bright colors or anything too flashy. Even though he's very conscious of the trends and wants to be perceived as worldly, his attire leans more towards the classic, if not outright old fashion.

That being said, he's probably at his happiest when he wears the simplest pair of trousers and shirt. That's workmen attire, and he likes the idea of not being able to care about his appearance sometimes.

Spirit's personal clothes are very practical. He's prone to getting dirty, so he wears darker colors to avoid doing laundry too much, He just wears whatever he gets his hands on and, if something gets a hole, he'll pick a random piece of fabric to patch it up. So while his base clothes are fairly dark, they're brighten up with patches of every color.

- STOP WAR -

Play wisely, Make the right choice 🔷

OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand

Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.

When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":

the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.

For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.

We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:

Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.

He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.

Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.

We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.

And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.

The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.

This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.

That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.

It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.

Fact has now itself become the myth.

Wimdy boy

After the Threesome, They Both Take You Home Sue Hyon Bae

even though it’s so very late and they have to report to their jobs in a few hours, they both get in the car, one driving, one shotgun, you in the back like a child needing a drive to settle into sleep, even though one could drive and the other sleep, because they can’t sleep without each other, they’d rather drive you across the city rather than be apart for half an hour, the office buildings lit pointlessly beautiful for nobody expect you to admire their reflections in the water, the lovers too busy talking about tha colleague they don’t like, tomorrow’s dinner plans, how once they bought peaches on a road trip and ate and ate until they could taste it in each other’s poers, they get out of the car together to kiss you goodnight, you who have perfected the ghost goodbye, exiting gatherings noiselessly, leaving only a dahlia-scented perfume, your ribcage compressing to slide through doors ajar and untouched, yesterday you were a flash of white in a pigeon’s blinking eye, in the day few hours old you stand solid and full of other people’s love for each other spilling over, warm leftovers.

‘I worked 20-hour days to make Naomi Osaka’s Wimbledon dress’

The Japanese designer Hana Yagi created the striking all-white bridal-inspired kimono that drew cheers from the crowd at the All England Club

The Japanese kimono and the traditional western wedding dress are difficult enough to walk in, let alone play tennis. But Naomi Osaka did so anyway, emerging on to Wimbledon’s Court 3 in a gown that was a hybrid of both garments to play a round of practice shots.

The dress, which drew cheers and wolf whistles from the crowd, was the Japanese player’s latest fashion display, following the gold sequinned outfit that she wore at the French Open and her extravagant turquoise and green dress at the Australian Open in January. Her Wimbledon effort was the work of Hana Yagi, a 26-year old Japanese designer, who created it alone in ten days in her studio in Tokyo.

2026 French open, designed by Kevin Germanier in collaboration with Nike:

Yagi was asked to create an outfit for the “walk on”, when players enter the court before the beginning of a match, a well-established opportunity for fashion statements. At the French Open, Osaka compared her sparkling dress to the illuminations of the Eiffel Tower. Her extraordinary Australian Open outfit was inspired by jellyfish.

Australian Open 2026, designed by Robert Wun for Nike:

But Wimbledon imposes strict rules — above all that all clothes must be completely white (Roger Federer once got a telling-off for wearing shoes with orange soles). “First, it had to be all white,” says Yagi. “Visually, [Harper] gave me the image of a kimono or junihitoe [a traditional 12-layered kimono of the Japanese imperial court]. As a part of the concept, they wanted to reinterpret the tradition in the context of sport.”

The vintage wedding dresses she had in her own stock were cream and ivory — shades unacceptable at Wimbledon. She went to shops in Tokyo and bought the pure white western style wedding dress that forms the lower part of the Osaka gown, and a shiromuku, the traditional nuptial kimono in which brides are wrapped for delivery to their new husbands.

It is this, embroidered with brocade images of cranes and cherry blossoms, that forms the upper part of the dress, but drastically restructured to allow freedom of movement. “I didn’t want her to walk with small steps — in this she won’t have any difficulty walking,” Yagi says. “And it’s not like a tight corset, but a dress that Naomi herself can adjust.” Osaka wore her playing dress, created by her sponsor Nike, below Yagi’s creation, so it had to be lighter than a conventional kimono. The other condition was that the player had to be able to put on and remove the dress quickly.

“It was my first experience of that, because all my past works were art pieces, and not really aiming to be functional,” she says. “But this has to come on and off in three minutes. I kept it putting it on myself over and over again to confirm that it worked.” The secret ingredient? Extensive strips of Velcro.

Some more of Naomi Osaka's show-stoppers:

US Open 2024. Designed by Yoon Ahn for Nike:

US Open 2025. Designed by Osaka herself: