overwatch is a silly piece of shit on its best days but its continued insistence that magic is real but only in japan is especially hysterical
hanzo and genji have haunted their hodgepodge of a narrative since 2016 with unambiguously magic powers in a soft-SF setting that went out of its way to conceptualise bogus technology like hard-light and biotics in order to fit its weirdness into some kind of “science” category. the fact they then didn’t extend that consideration to hanzo and genji? they just left them as is? as witches? as fate-touched human vessels of ancient dragon spirits?? if genji wasn’t a cyborg they could feasibly be minor sekiro bosses and that’s weird dude!! and then kiriko gets released?? and these people had all the years in between ow1 and ow2 to find a way to hand-wave whatever weird shamanistic magic they accidentally let get into the game, and instead they make the only other japanese character a fucking spirit vessel as well. they doubled down. magic IS REAL in overwatch but ONLY on the BEAUTIFUL ISLANDS OF JAPAN, and no it’s never ever going to be addressed because overwatch has as much coherent story as a themed puzzle page on the back of a kids cereal box. hysterical.
this also extends to the ability to wall climb
overwatch said if you are japanese you can do the following:
contain within you ancient spirit magic with powerful destructive and/or restorative capabilities
parkour
forgetting the fact that being a buddhist also gives you magic powers
zenyatta is specifically a civilian chassis but he can become invulnerable and throw balls at you
the point of overwatch is to say shinto-buddhism is the only correct religion i think
It’s surreal being on this site again after five, six years on Reddit. I’ve walked into my childhood home with moving boxes, a place I thought I’d outgrown yet so steeped in familiarity and drenched in memory that I feel I should know every cobweb. But someone’s cleaned up while I’ve been away, applied fresh paint. The cabinet with the old CRT is gone, and in the living room the ‘mid-century’ has been dropped from ‘modern.’ The blog I used to keep has been lost, a diary tossed when my parents’ cleaned out my old room, and I’m still standing here box in hand trying to figure out how to unpack.
_I’m home,_ I think, but the conscious self has yet to catch up, and I pine for a space to once again call my own.
What a poetic sentiment, Tumblr user last remaining testicle.
using tumblr mobile and seeing people talk about a desktop layout change is like hearing a timer suddenly start ticking down. I am safe for now but I hear the danger
When I’m out with Deaf friends, I
put my hearing aid in my purse. It removes any ability to hear, but
far more importantly, it removes the ambiguity that often haunts me.
In a restaurant, we point to the menu and gesture with the wait
staff. The servers taking the order respond with gestures too. They
pantomime “drinks?” and tell us they learned a bit of signs in
kindergarten. Looking a little embarrassed, they sign “Rain, rain,
go away, come again another day” in the middle of asking our salad
dressing choice. We smile and gently redirect them to the menu. My
friends are pros at this routine and ordering is easy ― delightful
even. The contrast with how it feels to be out with my hearing
husband is stunning.
Once my friends and I have ordered, we sign up a storm, talking
about everything and shy about nothing. What would be the point?
People are staring anyway. Our language is lavish, our faces alive.
My friends discuss the food, but for me, the food is unimportant. I’m
feasting on the smorgasbord of communication ― the luxury of
chatting in a language that I not only understand 100% but that is a
pleasure in and of itself. Taking nothing for granted, I bask in it
all, and everything goes swimmingly.
Until I accidentally say the word “soup” out loud.
Pointing at the menu, I let the word slip out to the server. And
our delightful meal goes straight downhill. Suddenly, the wait
staff’s mouths start flapping; the beautiful, reaching, visual
parts of their brains go dead, as if switched off.
“Whadda payu dictorom danu?” the server’s mouth seems to
say. “Buddica taluca mariney?”
“No, I’m Deaf,” I say. A friend taps the server
and, pointing to her coffee, pantomimes milking a cow. But the damage
is done. The server has moved to stand next to me and, with
laser-focus, looks only at me. Her pen at the ready, her mouth moves
like a fish. With stunning speed, the beauty of the previous
interactions ― the pantomiming, the pointing, the cooperative
taking of our order ― has disappeared. “Duwanaa disser wida
coffee anmik? Or widabeeaw fayuh-mow?”
“Everything was going so well,” he says. “The waiter was
gesturing, it was terrific. And then I just said one word, and pow!!
It’s like a bullet of stupidity shot straight into the waiter’s
head,” he explains by signing a bullet in slow motion, zipping
through the air and hitting the waiter’s forehead. Powwwww.
Hearing people might be shocked by this, but Deaf people laugh
uproariously, cathartically.
“Damn! All I did was say one word!” I say to my friends. “But
why do you do that?” they ask, looking at me with consternation and
pity. “Why don’t you just turn your voice off, for once
and for all?” they say.
Hearing people would probably think I’m the lucky one ―
the success story ― because I can talk. But I agree with my
friends.
“"The index, Monroe said, is named in honour of Pratchett’s creation Sam Vimes, who in the Discworld novel Men at Arms lays out the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness”.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
The Pratchett estate has authorised the use of the name, tweeting its own Pratchett quote in support of Monroe’s campaign. “Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness,” wrote the late Discworld author in Men at Arms.
Rhianna Pratchett said: “My father used his anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work. One of his most famous lightning-rods for this was Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch - a cynical, but likable, man who attempts to better himself whilst railing against the injustices around him. Some of which he’s had a hand in perpetrating in the past.
“Vimes’s musing on how expensive it is to be poor via the cost of boots was a razor-sharp evaluation of socio-economic unfairness. And one that’s all too pertinent today, where our most vulnerable so often bear the brunt of austerity measures and are cast adrift from protection and empathy. Whilst we don’t have Vimes any more, we do have Jack and Dad would be proud to see his work used in such a way.”
This campaign came about because the current poverty index tends to look at mid-range luxury items, the price of which is often less affected by inflation, rather than the bottom-of-the-range necessities that the poorest in society actually rely on, and which have been massively hit by inflation.
don’t forget during the WGA strike that animation is not covered under the WGA deals and as a result animation has gotten the shortest possible end of the stick in under-staffing, under-paying, and generally turning the field into gig employment.
please sign the petition here for Disney to recognize animation production workers as a union and reblog this post!
As of July 15, they are looking for about 9,000 more signatures. It takes less than one minute
Cause I'm gonna be free and I'm gonna be fine, but maybe not tonight.
They/Them, I'm nonbinary and pan-ace.
DNI: TERFs, exclusionists, and nazis.
I have ADHD and I will talk about it a lot.
I post a lot about video games and fandom stuff.
My writing/art sideblog is @bookwyrm214
ALT
