so, i was exploring the map and i was pretty far away from my home base, basically using a boat to cross deep ocean biomes and investigating islands and smaller landmasses and such
one of the islands i came across had an ABSURD amount of wolves roaming about. “holy shit,” i thought, “this swamp biome is full of free dogs.”
so of course i go on a wolf-taming spree. i wasn’t paying attention to how many i was amassing. by the time i’d covered the island, i had a pack of about twenty dogs in my entourage.
i think, ok, perhaps it’s time to go home, at least so i can leave some of these pups in a safe place while i keep exploring.
problem: there’s a huge fucking ocean between Dog Island and the continent my home base is on.
my stubborn ass thinks, “ok. ok. dogs can swim. we’ll FORD this river ocean.”
this, obviously, did not go well. the dogs are v good swimmers, but also very slow, and if i get too far ahead of them, they don’t catch up, because they can’t teleport to the player if you’re not on land. it took forever to get to the nearest small island, and i’d lost about a third of my dogs.
“i need a better plan,” i think to myself. i mean, i could abandon this ridiculous ‘transport 20+ dogs at least 5000m across multiple deep ocean biomes to my home base’ idea and find some free dogs closer to home. i mean, they’re not really that hard to find. but these are my dogs. i gave them bones and now they love me. i must not abandon them.
…and that’s how dog water skiing was born:
ishouldhavejustdonethisinthefirstfuckingplace.jpg
anyway, by the time i got to the next landmass, i hadn’t lost any more dogs. success!
and not only had i not lost any more dogs, but this new landmass was ALSO full of free dogs. and i still had some stacks of bones, which obviously trumps my own sense of self-control.
fast forward ten minutes:
look at all these pups! and also a really rude spider.
still more pups!
…oh jeez.
this is basically Homeward Bound, but instead of two dogs and a cat, it’s just me and like thirty goddamn dogs. they were continuously teleporting in front of me, i was tripping all over them. it was chaos.
now, i should mention, this was a long-ass trek home.
at some point my sword AND my backup sword broke, because frankly i just was not expecting my expedition to last this long and i did not bring a backup backup sword, so i was flailing at creepers with an axe.
i definitely lost some good pups, especially since at least half that travel was at nighttime peak monster spawn time. AND i have the Mo’ Creatures mod installed, so not only do i have to worry about the standard monsters, but also lions, tigers, bears (which are usually pretty chill but apparently can become hostile when thirty dogs suddenly teleport on top of them), manticores, ogres, SPECIAL wolves that instead of being tamable are just Very Angry All The Time, etc.
but the thing is, i kept finding more free dogs. and, sometimes when i’m walking, two dogs will just breed out of nowhere, so occasionally i’d turn around and there’d be a puppy. who did this. we’re, like, climbing a mountain here. control yourselves
anyways, by the time i got back to my home base, i counted forty-eight doggos.
just look at these Good Dogs. i couldn’t get them all to fit in the frame.
i have nowhere to put them. i feel like Roger and Anita at the end of 101 Dalmatians.
all i know is i love every single one of them.
I’m too stressed to even read these days. Sometimes I can research for a little bit and find it soothing, but mostly I’m just playing the most mindless games I can find.
[Comic pages are from the 1999 Titans series. They show a blank page from a book, and the tip of a calligraphic pen. Names are being signed on the page. Wally’s hair is seen while he’s signing; as well as parts of Argent, Cyborg, and Damage’s hands.
Speech bubbles say:
Hurry!
We can use Donna’s anti-evil thing to fight back Goth! Right. Donna?
Hey, you guys! Your signature disappears right after you sign it!
i took the american dialect test and i hate this i hate because it doest just group me into new jersey but SPECIFICALLY northeast new jersey. which is exactly where im from. like its concentrated only in that exact area
ive lived in florida for almost 5 years now and i still talk like im from new jersey fufckfuc k
how can it be that obvious like nobody else calls typical athletic shoes anything other than sneakers but apparently the site said thats what gave me away
It pin pointed where my parents are from and then two areas with heavy foreign populations. So basically accurate.
It got me exactly haha Miami/Hialeah! but also it gave me some random town in Massachusets
Shit, this is good. I was born in Worcester. haha
This always drives me crazy, because I MUST do all surveys, especially Language surveys, but I’m not American.
So here’s two other, international, options:
(Even if they’re just for me the next time this post rolls around. Save a non-American’s sanity!)
I don’t have any definitive information about this. My instinct is that yes, they would, but the truth is that I don’t actually know. It’s partly hard to tell because a person only knows their own experiences, not what it feels like to be someone else.
Followers, do any of you have experience with rashes and mosquito bites that could help to answer anon’s question?
I’m hypersensitive (and have ADHD). Rashes/bites drive me CRAZY. I tend to scratch them off, because pain is more tolerable to itching. Both bother me, but pain doesn’t build in the same way itchiness does. So most bites end up as small scars.
I can’t sleep when I’m itchy. Sometimes I slap the itchy spot. I’ll put band-aids on even small spots, to protect them from my fingers.
I have flare-ups of eczema as well, thankfully not very bad. But I scratch until it scabs and then I scratch off the scabs.
My sister, however, is hyposensitive. She doesn’t feel pain strongly, but DOES feel itchiness. So she’d also scratch all rashes into bloody wounds, but for her it was because she didn’t feel the injuries as much as the itchiness.
Today at therapy was really hard. I was sitting here crying, and generally being miserable, when I felt a nudge at my knee. I looked down to see that Zeus, my service dog, was doing his job… and brought me a potato.
it is very hard to cry with a gift of potato.
Remember this? I’m having a rough time right now. Zeus has a solution.
That would be an empty pill bottle, the *correct* pill bottle, a bottle of embossing powder, and two, TWO potatoes.
You’re worth at least 2 potato to him and that’s pretty special imo.
I would just like to remind you all that *I don’t own any potatoes* and I have no clue where he’s getting them from.
Scientists hope to hugely reduce the cost of wind energy by removing the blades from wind farms, instead taking advantage of a special phenomenon to cause the turbines to violently shake.
Vortex, a startup from Spain, has developed the tall sticks known as Bladeless — white poles jutting out of the ground, that are built so that they can oscillate. They do so as a result of the way that the wind is whipped up around them, using a phenomenon that architects avoid happening to buildings and encouraging it so that the sticks shake.
They do so using vortices, which is where the company gets its name from. The bladeless turbines use special magnets to ensure that the turbines are optimised to shake the most they can, whatever speed the wind is travelling at.
As the sticks vibrate, that movement is converted into electricity by an alternator.
Wiggling Poles of the Wasteland Harvest Electricity For Power Hungry Humans
These also look like they would cause fewer problems for birds and bats.
This is really cool.
They leave off the important note that when the wind rises, each pole makes a sound like a hundred vuvuzelas roaring at once. In the post-apocalyptic world of the future, villagers will speak in hushed tones about the Roaring Plains, and caution adventurous travelers to stay well away.
I appreciate how they essentially invented very useful yet alien-looking screaming pillars. Science continues to make some suspiciously sci-fi shit.
At least you won’t have to go outside to know how windy it is… You’ll hear it.
They provide us energy
They provide us warmth
They love us
These martyr gods, their twitching agony is our salvation
[Comic cover to X-Men Gold Annual #1. There’s a small logo on the side saying “30th Excalibur” with a Widget head inside it, presumably because it’s been 30 years since Excalibur debuted? Rachel, Kitty, Kurt, Brian, and Meggan are all standing on a roof, echoing the first Excalibur ongoing series’ cover for issue one. Brian has a big beard. Megan is holding a bundle that appears to be a baby.
End description.]
To an extent it’s a problem with fandom: the fact is that you’ve got thousands of intelligent people thinking about a problem, and statistically speaking some of them are likely to come up with something more clever than the creators. […] There comes a point at which, frankly, fandom IS better than the creators. We have more minds, more cumulative talent, more voices arguing for different kinds of representation, more backstory… The thing is that I rarely get involved with a show without a fandom anymore, because I actually enjoy the analysis and fic and fun more than I enjoy the show itself. Similarly, I get drawn into shows I otherwise wouldn’t really consider by the strength of their fandom. And I want the shows to live up to their fandom, but it’s an almost impossibly high bar, because the parts of fandom I choose to engage with are often parts that wouldn’t be considered sufficiently accessible or relevant to a majority of viewers. So… basically, for me, fandom is primary, and canon is secondary. The latter is really only there to facilitate the former.
glitterarygetsit, in a discussion on fan responses to media on facebook
#this is the first time i’ve really articulated this #and i was quite pleased with it #this is the thing: i care so much less about original material than i do about fanworks
On the one hand, sure – fandom of mediocre art tends to be better than the art, or at least more interesting, because there are a lot of creative nimrods out there who didn’t go to professional expressing themselves school to have their sharp corners sanded off – but for the same reasons fandom of good art tends to degrade its subject, because fandom (taken collectively, as this person does) is only interested in telling certain types of stories and can only understand certain character archetypes, meaning that fanwork of property A (absent names, eye color and haircuts) tends to be indistinguishable from fanwork of property B.
But that’s not what this person is talking about, is it? They’re not talking about fandom the mass entity – they’re talking about the outliers, the long tail. “I engage with parts of fandom that wouldn’t be considered sufficiently accessible or relevant to a majority of viewers”, they say, inversely snobbing it up. Far be it from me to speculate about the particular itch this person has, this content which is nowhere to be found in popular media except in certain pieces of fanfiction and “analysis”, but I suspect it doesn’t have as much to do with complexity or quality as it does with recognition, with finding a shared point of view which is otherwise shut out by mass culture gatekeeping.
Don’t say that fanart is better executed or smarter – it’s not, in the vast majority of cases. Say that it’s honest. Say that it’s real. Say that it exceeds commercial art because it does effortlessly what learned craft only achieves at the highest level, which is to reflect the soul as it is. But remember that the animating spirit that makes it all work – the relationship the fanartist has with the setting and characters – is only there because some poor striving fucker made those up.
As a writer both of original fiction and of fic when I can find the time (sorry, but origfic is income!) I agree so much with this.
Also, the idea that fandom people don’t care about original fiction utterly baffles me. Why find a fandom if original work is so uninteresting to you?
I mean, I don’t think it’s impossible for someone to get into a fandom because their friend showed them fic, but *usually* you consume the canon first from what I can tell…
People creating canons still matter, stop shitting on us.
So, I interpreted this quote differently. I really don’t see OP as shitting on people creating original work.
They aren’t saying that fanworks and fan creators on average are better – I think they are saying that for any given work with a large enough fandom, eventually there tend to come along some fanworks that exceed the originals, through sheer number, as well as through teamwork and synergy that is simply less available to the creators of canon, who are working from scratch.
Fans can take a finished work, pick it apart, and find ways to improve it at their leisure. Hundreds of fans can build off each other’s analyses and poke holes in each other’s attempts to fix holes that they found… People creating a tv show that airs on a schedule, or even just a book that they have to mark ‘done’ and publish at some point, don’t have that luxury. That doesn’t reflect badly on the creators! But sometimes it does mean that parts of the original lose a bit of their shine, if a fan has been immersed in parts of fandom that do that. One can respect what an original creator has done, while simultaneously not finding it personally of interest.
(Also, ftr, there are many many fandoms that I either entered fandom first, and then eventually got into the canon, or for which I only enjoy the fanworks and am indifferent to or even actively dislike the canon. I find these through crossovers, through recommendations, through ‘oh hey this author i really like has some new/old stuff in a fandom i don’t know’, through fics that simply strike me as having interesting premises (or narrative kinks of mine, or regular kinks of mine)… any number of ways in.)
I came into fandom as ONLY an X-Men fan. Every other fandom I’ve entered has been through fan work.
Fan work has a unique structure, since it’s allowed to skip worldbuilding/character introduction/inciting drama. It often chooses not to, but it CAN – the original media has already done that work.This gives a unique flow that I prefer.
I’ve never read the Harry Potter books. But I LOVE some Harry Potter fanfic. The meta is incredibly enjoyable. For me, canon in this fandom is only experienced second hand.
Fic got me into the DCU. I read some of the canon but mostly only for research purposes. Canon is a disaster. Good fic transforms that disaster into something amazing.
I definitely value canon creators. Of course fandom doesn’t work without the original content! But that doesn’t mean I have to say it’s better than fan work. Not all, or maybe even most, original stuff is.
Also, I think @some-trianglesis is being slightly disingenuous in saying that OP is “
not talking about fandom the mass entity – they’re talking about the outliers.” That suggests that all fans are forced to experience every part of fandom. I control which people I follow. I only follow people who produce high quality content. Pretty much the only parts of fandom I experience are these so-called “outliers.” That’s what fandom allows fans – the ability to experience the subject in the way that interests them.
Anyways, how is that any different from original works? There’s a lot of bad novels out there. I’m able to choose to read only the ones that interest me there, too. Though it’s actually harder to curate the quality of the original work I experience than the fan stuff.
I like meta. I like reading 15 stories that all interpret a character’s responses and feelings slightly differently. I like exploring the real nitty-gritty things that original works usually don’t have time for.
There’s usually only one canon for an original work. But there are thousands on fanons. Usually one of those is better.
(Except for Discworld. It is an outlier and no fandom can improve it.)
kiragecko 