Man, I Almost Drank Myself To Death Yesterday, I Can't Even Remember My Name, If Only There Was Someone

Also interesting to note, the minor erdtree incantation specifically separates acts of affection and care from order. Marika's attempts to heal her people are classified as "the kindness of gold, without order", implying kindness, and love, are absent from order entirely.

If chaos is entwined with love, it would only make sense for order, its antithesis, to be divorced from it.

The fact that all of the lords of frenzy became the lords of frenzy for love.

Vyke sought out the three fingers because he didn’t want his maiden to burn.

Shabriri uses our love for Melina as a reason to become the lord of frenzy so that Melina doesn’t have to burn.

We don’t know that exact circumstances with how or why Midra inherited the flame, but he loved Nanaya enough to endure the madness and asks for her forgiveness before he becomes the lord of the frenzied flame.

But also Melina uses the fact that life endures despite hardship, which means that love endures as well, as a reason to not inherit the flame of frenzy.

Chaos and love are entwined with each other.

When you show up to the clinic to get a new blood vial after killing Gascoigne and Iosefka's voice sounds different

Okay so we have this huge problem with forgetting about everything that’s happened by the time the next election rolls around so I’d like to keep a running list of things as they’re happening to help remind us when the 2026 midterms roll around. And please add to this if I’ve missed anything.

January 2025:

Donald Trump pardoned 1500 people who participated in the insurrection of January 6th, including those who violently assaulted and nearly killed police officers.

Donald Trump has declared that trans and non-binary people don’t exist.

Donald Trump is working towards firing everyone in the government who isn’t loyal to him.

Donald Trump has effectively fired everyone who he claims is an “illegal DEI hire” …whatever that means

Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization

Congress are trying to pass the Laken Riley Act to, effectively, round up every immigrant in the country, including LEGAL immigrants

Donald Trump removed caps on prescription drug prices.

Donald Trump wants to withhold federal aid to help combat the LA wildfires and help the thousands of people who have been displaced and lost their homes.

The Department of Justice has put a hold on all civil rights cases.

Donald Trump has cut off aid to Ukraine.

Laken Riley Act has been passed by Congress and is awaiting being signed into law by the President. Here’s the breakdown of the votes: House Senate

Donald Trump purged a dozen inspectors general from the federal government and intends to replace them all with people loyal to him.

Pete Hegseth has been confirmed as Secretary of Defense. Here’s the breakdown of how the Senate voted. Note, it was a 50-50 tie that JD Vance had to break.

Donald Trump imposed a 25% tariff on Colombia after the Colombian government turned away two airplanes carrying migrants. Columbia has retaliated by imposing a 25% tariff of its own on US goods.

Donald Trump has also issued a travel ban for Colombian citizens and revoked visas from Colombian migrants coming to the US.

Donald Trump has now backed off the tariffs and other threats against Colombia. Note for future reference: this comes just hours after Trump made the threat in the first place and he and the Colombian president got into a big fight on social media.

Nearly 1,000 migrants were arrested mostly in Chicago on January 26th by ICE and ICE has been told to meet a quota of 75 migrant arrests every day.

Donald Trump rescinded an anti-discrimination executive order from Lyndon B. Johnson

Donald Trump signed an executive order banning trans people from serving in the military and also ordered that people who were discharged for refusing to get mandatory vaccines be reinstated.

Donald Trump has frozen all federal grants to institutions.

After pressure from state governments, activist groups, and the general public, the White House has rolled back some of the freezes on federal funding.

This.

Donald Trump is trying to fire all federal employees who don’t want to return to the office (work-from-home saves the federal government millions of taxpayer dollars in overhead). He also sent an email to federal employees saying that if they’re not loyal to him, they’ll be investigated.

Donald Trump has signed the Laken Riley Act into law.

Donald Trump has said he doesn’t think Palestinians should be allowed to return to Gaza but instead should be sent to Egypt and Jordan.

Also this.

Donald Trump has ordered undocumented immigrants to be sent to Guantanamo Bay

Donald Trump signed an executive order to expand federal funding for school choice programs. [x]

Donald Trump signed an executive order saying that he will deport visa-holding students who protest against Israel. [x]

Donald Trump has blamed DEI for the plane crash that killed 67 people in Washington D. C. [x]

Donald Trump signed an executive order that schools should no longer teach about racism and discrimination. And that schools should only teach history that is “patriotic” [x]

Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna wants to add Donald Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore. [x]

Trump’s Department of Education has called book bans a hoax. [x]

I’ll keep adding to this list as new things come up and, again, please feel free to add anything I’ve missed. I know that in this world of constant news it’s easy to forget, so let’s give our future selves a little help!

The Hank Pym drama is one of my favorite parts of marvel content tbh

Didn't know which one fit better so i made both versions

Be wary of linguistics rant, Elden Ring ahead

Ok so I just made a different post about this but I need to elaborate: The Elden Ring messaging system is legitimately such an interesting microcosm about how language is used as a tool and shaped to suit the needs it's being used for. I could actually make an entire study about how this can be used to better understand the formation of pidgin languages in the same way that epidemiologists studied the Corrupted Blood Incident in World of Warcraft to better understand the mechanics of how disease affects human behavior. Video games as an academic lens into peoples' minds has always been a fascinating topic to me, and by the end of this, you'll see why.

First off, message.

So for those not indoctrinated into the series/game, Elden Ring is a big open world game made by From Software, which won game of the year 2022 among some other awards (if you've played it or know anything about it, just skip to the next header). Each player plays as a Tarnished and explores this massive environment called The Lands Between individually, but if another player is walking in the same area that you are, you can see their "ghost" moving through the world, and you can "invade" or "be summoned" into another player's iteration of the world in order to briefly interact with it before returning to your own iteration. This occupies a weird space in between singleplayer and multiplayer, with these heavily limited and kind of random methods of interaction between players, but that's not the most interesting way of communicating with your fellow Tarnished; that title goes to the messages system. You can write a message onto a small stone, and leave it on the ground, and then that little stone with the message on it will have a random chance to appear in any player's iteration of the world for them to read. This is a tradition which has been going in From Software's games long since before the inception of Elden Ring, although I'm mostly going to be focusing on the message system of that title, because documenting the history of the 13+ years running Soulsbourne franchise is way too much, even for a nerd like me. The point is that messages are a lot more likely to be seen than any other method of player-to-player interaction, and you can even leave little "gestures" to go with them, where the reader can see your character striking a pose while they read the message. What a neat little mechanic, which definitely doesn't have any hidden layers of depth, and certainly wouldn't spawn an entire emergent system of pseudolinguistics, right?

No message ahead, be wary of mimicry

Well, when I said that messages are written by other players, that was a lie. To make a message, you don't type it out with your keyboard, you select what you want to say, from a big list of preset phrases. It works that way for a lot of reasons, foremost of all as a profanity filter, but also to prevent too many spoilers and maintain atmosphere. The sets of phrases are incredibly limiting, famously requiring players to use weird fake old-english diction in order to express a simple thought (Strong foe ahead, be weary of death. Look carefully ahead, visions of item. Suffering, o suffering, why is it always bad luck? etc). This seems like a limitation which would put a serious damper on anyone trying to actually communicate their thoughts, but gamers are a persistent sort, and have a lot of trouble taking no for an answer. They also have way too much time on their hands, and like to solve puzzles, a terrifying combination of traits, and the perfect one to accidentally create a conlang. With the unexpectedly massive audience that this game picked up on launch, millions of people left messages desperately trying to get something across, and if the game's preset vocabulary didn't contain the phrases to express it, they would forge their own path. Any big fans of linguistic history can already tell the direction that this might be going, as we move on into the next chapter:

Teacher, Liar, Lovable Sort

When the game released, there was chaos. The Lands Between are fraught with hidden passages, deception, and blatant bullshit, and the first kind of players leaving messages tried to helpfully communicate what you could trust, and what you couldn't. This is what the message system was intended for after all, giving advice to your peers, and what many people still use it for today. The second kind of players tried to do the opposite, deliberately leading people to their doom, just because they could. The third, and most numerous sort, were simply awestruck at everything the game had to offer, and left a series of remarks on the beauty and humor of the world. The messages left by each group are pretty easy to differentiate to the trained eye, which is the main feature causing me to point out this division of players. Let's call these groups the teachers, the liars, and the lovable sorts. A teacher can be recognized if their messages suggest something within reason, and being backed up by the peer-review of nearby messages to the same effect. If three messages are all sitting on the ground next to eachother, each saying something along the lines of "seek up, look carefully ahead", then a local collage of teachers are trying to let you know about a secret path ahead leading you up towards a hidden objective. However, a single message next to a bloodstained cliff-edge stating "jumping required ahead" is almost certainly a liar, trying to deceive an unsuspecting player into making a dubious leap. Liars sometimes use slightly simpler grammar than teachers do, being less committed to getting their point across. Wait a minute, linguistic variance based on intent? No no, this is just a video game about fighting monsters, surely such an interesting emergent system wouldn't arise from something like that. Lastly, the lovable sorts have the most ranging grammar, spanning from a simple word such as "dog" (a word used colloquially to describe all creatures, from turtles to dragons), to complex sentences requiring the combination of many phrases. However, a lovable sort can be differentiated by the fact that they merely remark upon the world as it is, instead of trying to offer advice to other players, as a teacher or liar might. Some of their most iconic phrases are "Elden ring ahead", used to sarcastically denote a dead end where a player might have been expecting treasure, "you don't have the right, o, you don't have the right" which indicates a locked door, or the world-famous "try finger, but hole", a phrase which explains itself. The most incredible thing about the words of the lovable sort, is that they all require a little bit of thinking to understand their actual meaning, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes like a second language to you! Wait a minute, a second language?

Message? Wasn't expecting introspection

As time went on, the three main groups of message-writers still kept chugging along, creating new works of writing every day, but advancements in understanding of the game's inner workings allowed these messages to become more and more complex. Compound words started to be formed to represent concepts outside of the preset vocabulary, like "skeleton, house" for coffin, "dung, key" to describe the donkeys accompanying traveling merchants, and "edge, lord" being used to refer to the NPC Ensha, a man wearing flamboyant armor made out of bones who takes himself way too seriously. It's worth noting in this section that for a specific period of time, The Lands Between were overtaken by a horde of messages stating only the words "fort, night". Despite the crude and humorous nature of the entire thing, it was clear to see that the linguistic patterns of the Elden Ring community were evolving into their own beast, far beyond the usages that the developers had intended. Words had shed their original meaning, to instead take up contextual meanings based on how players used them, effectively becoming different words entirely. Depending on how you define this, it's either a microcosm of incredibly fast and severe linguistic drift, or the emergence of a new pidgin or conlang entirely. If you really stretch things, you could almost call the message system of Elden Ring an entirely new language in and of itself.

Well done, victory ahead!

I think that video games are an excellent way to observe human behavior under conditions which are controlled, accelerated, and completely recordable, and this is the closest that we've ever seen to an entire language growing completely from scratch. People are always the same, whether you want to call it instinct or just cyclical tendencies, but normally the formation of a new language can take incredible periods of time, hastened only by tragic events like diaspora or massive losses of cultural knowledge (research what's been happening to Gaelic as a spoken language for more info about this sort of thing, it's kind of depressing but is also important to learn about, and there's a lot of people on this site talking about it who can do the topic way more justice than I can). Even for other topics which either require great passage of time, or great tragedy in order to research (I.E. geology or epidemiology, respectively), there are a lot of simulations and predictive models which can tell us how these systems behave without actually experiencing them. Linguistics has never had this sort of thing...until now, perhaps. Obviously there won't be any academic breakthroughs based on a bunch of people online all writing "rump ahead", but it's an incredibly interesting thing to see happening for a field which is so hard to actively advance, and it could lead to actual scientific methods of generating new languages via human interaction for research purposes. Of course, there's always the sizable chance that this goes nowhere and I just wrote this insane rant because I like to type, but if nothing else, I at the very least exposed some of my mutuals to "try finger, but hole".

I have returned from my abyss of "im too lazy to post", despite this hellsite's unwillingness to let me, and i am back to ledaposting (kinda ? Ig shes technically in the post)

Anyways, i have made the shocking realization that i own a pen and paper and decided to try my hand at sketching leda's armor. I drew the helmet but didnt finish the full armor, i switched to drawing it digitally on my phone like halfway through.

It was fun figuring out how close helms work for this

As a side note, how often do you think characters in souls games remove their armor ? Logically they should do it once in a while to keep it in good condition but some of the armors look a bit too complex to put on / remove by yourself so idk. Also theres never really a good place to do so.

An attempt at analysing the last scene from The End of Evangelion

Warning ! I will be spoiling both the movie The End of Evangelion, as i am talking about the last scene in the entire film, and the original series, since EoE is by necessity taking place after it.

If you're still here and don't remember exactly which scene i'm talking about, or just really want to read this post abt sth you haven't seen, i am specifically referencing the scene where Shinji attempts to strangle Asuka on the shore of the LCL sea. Without further ado, let's get into it.

Shinji is hurting himself here. He is strangling what might be the only other person left in this world, the only being that could give him the affection he craves.

He is strangling asuka, whose facade he interprets as a mirror of his inner self, an arrogant entitled asshole with no consideration for the feelings of others. He is attempting to better himself by physically assaulting a reflection of his past self.

Asuka is trying to help herself here. She is caressing what might be the only other person left in this world, the only being she could open herself to.

She is caressing shinji, whose facade she interprets as a mirror of her inner self, a lonely child who longs to be loved, but cannot open him/herself to affection. She is attempting to better herself by giving a reflection of her past self the affection it deserved.

Shinji drops his façade, and grows into someone who will take action for what he believes to be right.

He sees the both of them as unredeemable, as deserving of punishment.

Asuka drops her façade, and grows into someone who can provide affection and receive it.

She sees the both of them as two children failed by those who should have helped them, as deserving of love.

They see each other, without façades, without pretenses.

Shinji sees asuka, Asuka sees shinji.

They are forced to confront their diametrically opposed yet coexisting statements on themselves and humanity.

Both are right.

Shinji and Asuka were both selfish entitled pricks who consistently let their impulsive actions hurt the people around them.

Asuka and Shinji were both scared, lost children who were denied the love and support they should have been given.

They deserve retribution and love in equal measure.

This is contradictory.

This is true.

This is real.

This is impossible.

This is Adam and Eve, cast from the garden of Eden, grappling with the knowledge of the world they now possess.

This is human.

How disgusting.

Obsessed with Isshin:

Isshin knows about The Horrors.

He lives for fighting. He killed a tyrant, won a country, but his only real goal in life is to perfect his fighting style.

Yet, he is so full of life and joy, even in his old age.

He will see a young person, ask "Is anybody else gonna mentor that?" and then not wait for an answer.

He will make the same joke twice and laugh about it.

He used to throw legendary parties.

He outdrank Owl.

He will drink with Wolf even though Wolf kicked his grandson out of his own castle.

He will drink with Wolf, make his jokes, help him on his quest in what ways he can – and in the same breath he tells Wolf that he can see the shadow of Shura in his eyes and promises that he won't hesitate to cut him down should he give in to his violent urges.

If Wolf does betray him, Isshin will get up from what is essentially his deathbed to kick his ass.

He once cut off Orangutan's arm to stop him from going down that same path.

He allows Orangutan to stay in the dilapidated temple near the castle and hang out with his doctor.

He taught Emma swordsmanship because she wants to be able to kill a demon.

Isshin is known as the Sword Saint and has developed and perfected multiple fighting styles.

He is deathly ill.

He dresses up as a character from folklore to hunt down enemy spies and assassins and his grandson's allies. While he's deathly ill.

Emma and Wolf know that he's the Tengu, but they never bring it up. Let the feudal Japanese Batman have his hobby.

Isshin knows they know and he lets Emma tease him about it.

Isshin loves his grandson.

He also told his grandson's very important hostage about a secret escape tunnel at the reservoir. And then he let that hostage stay near that tunnel in a tower with half a wall missing.

He told Emma to rescue that hostage's bodyguard from a well.

The way he talks about Genichiro's plan to use the black mortal blade makes it's clear that Isshin has no interest in self-sacrifice, even for immortality, even for Ashina, and he is greatly disturbed that that's what Genichiro has in mind.

He tried to help Kuro escape for Genichiro's sake more than anything else.

Again, he hunts down Genichiro's allies – who happen to herald from a corrupt buddhist temple that has experimented on and killed countless children in their quest for immortality.

In a story about (im)mortality, Isshin's opinion of immortality is a clear "hell, no!"

In a story about things ending, Isshin is firmly on the side of letting those things die that must die.

He goes behind Genichiro's back to prevent him from using the Dragon's Blood or the forces of Senpou temple and their corrupted immortality. He holds no ill will towards Wolf for defeating Genichiro. But he WILL fight Wolf to the death, despite having no beef with him, not because he cares about Ashina or the invasion or being rescued from the underworld, but simply because it was his grandson's last wish.

When Kuro first formulates his plan to sever immortality, his first instinct is to ask Isshin for advice.

When the besieging forces draw nearer, Kuro tells Wolf not to worry about him, because Isshin visits frequently. Isshin frequently checks on Kuro to make sure he feels safe.

When Isshin finally succumbs to his sickness, you find him lying dead in Kuro's room, sword in hand. He was gonna go out fighting, defending this child his grandson had kidnapped.

Emma stays with him to the end, and remains at the castle, watching over his body.

The way Isshin mirrors this gesture in the Shura ending, gently holding Emma's dead body.

The fact that Emma gets away with teasing Isshin about his exploits as the Tengu.

The fondness between them.

The faith Isshin puts in Emma, when he asks her to go behind Genichiro's back - who happens to be her childhood friend, on top of being the de facto leader of Ashina.

Isshin.

i feel like a lot of the leda fanart leans wayyyy too into the whole "murderous religious fanatic" thing by way of giving her bugged out eyes and stuff but like. she's literally calm and nice in all her dialogue delivery. which is her charm point. in her eyes miquella is so self evidently worthy that she's more just confused than anything when seeing someone who doesn't see things her way. she literally thinks others just don't get it lol, like her conflict with the others in the band comes from questioning why their older vows/history remain with them *after* having met miquella. in her mind she is literally just fighting for a gentler world guided by love and goodness. it's less incensed "fear of god" and more frigid "love for jesus", i guess?

which for her does lead her to the same ends but. idk i love insane girl art as much as the next guy but that's not her...

Is this anything ?