The plot of A Scandal in Bohemia is Irene Adler orchestrating an elaborate escape to get away from her abusive ex (the king hires people to stalk her, confront her, break into her home, steal from her, etc.). AND SHE ESCAPES! SHE'S FREE!

So every time an adaptation includes her as a criminal, love interest, or femme fatale who loses to Holmes it's not just missing the point, it's genuinely so fucking disrespectful.

Exactly, exactly @skyriderwednesday

#SHE WINS!!!!!#THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT OF HER#she makes holmes see that he was the being used to do evil to an innocent woman because he didn't bother questioning the motive of the king#that's why he keeps her photograph imo#to remind him to keep his eyes open and question all sides of a case#it's a 'norbury' if you ask me#to open his desk drawer and see ms adler looking back at him#is to ask the question of himself ''am i in the right here?''#''am i aiding the correct party in this case?''#sherlock holmes

Imagine the level of whimsy I could reach if I just had $5M in my bank account rn

it's literally the evilest thing in the world to finally have time to write but then be tired. like wow you're telling me these two hours before going to bed are completely free but my brain is just Not Feeling It? fuck off

given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that

hyperfixating on a fictional woman who went underdeveloped in canon is literally FUN and the 80-90% of fandom people who only do the same for background character men have no idea of the degree to which they are fucking missing out

no tumblr i have faith that this post will be found by the enlightened 10-20 percent

[ID from alt: the "post without tags" pop up. End ID.]

hour 1 of thinking about an underdeveloped woman: idk it would've been nice if she had more screentime

hour 100 of thinking about an underdeveloped woman: ok but despite having only eight lines of dialogue she is literally THE most interesting nuanced and tragic character in the entire series and these writers had no idea what they even had. how is no one else seeing this it's literally so objectively obvious

Suprise! After all the Moon isn’t really gray 🌒🎨

We’ve been looking at it wrong this whole time.

With the right filters, it lights up with:

🔵 titanium blues

🟠 volcanic oranges

⚫ iron-rich terrain

These shots from Artemis II proves it.

i want devices that are functional and hardy and i want them to last and fuck the rest of the shit i dont need. my ds and 3ds can lie in sleep mode for months if not years and i can pop them open and they've still got two or three bars left. my old phones in high school could go days without a charge. if i leave my nintendo switch on the floor for a few days doing absolutely fuck all nothing i will turn it on and it will cry to me mother i am dying. i am dying mother. and i tell him he'll never be half the man his brother was and he can't hear me because he's dead

File your taxes for free | Internal Revenue Service (irs.gov)

i feel like a lot of fandoms pride themselves on being gayer than the source material but have they considered being less racist and less misogynistic than the source material as well . could be revolutionary

ngl some of these posts sound shortsighted so i’m pulling out the Marjane Satrapi quote:

The Firefox "AI kill switch" is here.

Go to Settings > AI controls. There, you can toggle the "master kill switch" on to fully block all the features, which means two things:

The default state is, like before, "available". This means the features are NOT on by default (they never were), but Firefox will let you know about them where they exist (e.g. when you create your first tab group) so that you can choose to opt in.

Please note that Firefox for Android or iOS have never included AI features, so you won't see these settings on your smartphones or tablets.

Please also note that, unlike popular belief here on Tumblr, besides "chatbot in sidebar" (which is simply embedding the same page you'd have normally browsed to), none of these features have ever interacted with anything outside your PC, because they download a small model to your computer, to do everything locally. These small models have never been and are not downloaded until you explicitly agree to turn on one of the features.

It's not actually possible to understand Dragon Age.

@lathbora-virann you Cannot leave this in the tags

So... everyone pretty much hated Veilguard's "secret ending", right? Beyond speculation about the Executors themselves, I haven't exactly seen anyone excited about its presence, and for that matter, haven't seen many people talking about it at all.

The closest way I can describe my initial reaction to it was an immediate, visceral disgust. I think I remember uttering at my screen something along the lines of "Fuck off! What the fuck?! Are you fucking kidding me???" and ever since then I've wanted to put into words exactly why it made me feel that way.

For the 88% of you (according to Steam achievement statistics) who didn't see this ending due to not picking up three very specific codex entries by complete chance, you can watch it here. In short, the clip depicts a mysterious voice who sounds suspiciously like Matt Mercer talking about how a group of shadowy figures has "balanced, guided, and whispered" over scenes of villains from the previous DA games, implying that these shadowy figures have been at least partially responsible for all of the bad things happening in Thedas, towards some unknown nefarious purpose.

Now obviously, this sucks. This is hamfisted, unimaginative writing that simultaneously retcons and re-contextualizes elements from DA's past that absolutely no one thought needed further explanation, as well as being exactly the kind of irritating sequel-bait tactics that people have largely grown tired of these days. But why does it suck so much? Why did I feel such palpable distaste for this scene?

For starters, it simply reeks of entitlement, and a lack of respect towards Bioware's own past games. Remember those villains you loved and thought were compelling? Well, their own personal, very complex and thought-out motivations were really just the Executors whispering in their ears the whole time! Loghain making a difficult and calculated decision at great personal cost for a greater good he truly believed in? Executors. Bartrand succumbing to his own greed to the point that he betrays his only family and devolves into a tragic husk of himself? Executors. Corypheus and the Magisters breaching the Golden fucking City??? Executors.

Ignore the infuriating lore ramifications for a second and consider: what do all of these things have in common? They're all instances of complex character motivation; of people in this world doing things for their own reasons that ended up having massive ramifications. In short, they're not events that can be explained easily in terms of black and white morality. And from what we've seen in Veilguard, the current dev team has a serious inability to work with any story elements that do not have absolute moral clarity: the Venatori and the Antaam are Evil. The Shadow Dragons and the Crows are Good. Any nuance; any potential questioning of this duality is quickly explained away or snuffed out.

And that's exactly what they're trying to do, retroactively, with the rest of the series. Having a hard time deciding whether Loghain was right or wrong? Well, worry not, the Executors are Evil and if they were guiding him the whole time, then what he did must have been Evil too! Grappling with how the plot of DA2 was about the inevitable tragedy of a series of oppressive systems reaching their natural breaking point? Well, wrestle no further, for if the Executors were involved then Meredith and Bartrand must've been Evil, no question! What the Magisters did was definitely Not Great, and what do you know, there were consequences for it that they and the whole world very much did pay for. But if the Executors were behind it all, then it was someone else's fault, some Evil power reaching in and making them do what they did, rather than their actions being the result of a horrific series of power abuses done by actual people.

Which leads me to where my initial disgust comes in. Because in a world which has always had core themes of power and its many abuses, actions that have consequences, and the idea that there are no true higher beings; every horrible thing that has ever been done was done by people, the simple act of putting shadowy figures behind key moments in history completely debases and neuters all of those themes. The whole point of Dragon Age as a series up until this point has been to illustrate the complex relationships people and societies have with power, choice, and morality. To remove that link - to place an external force between those characters and their choices - is to rob the series of any meaning whatsoever.

There is a staggering difference between the messaging of a game that tells you ordinary people are to blame for society's wrongs and a game that tells you a secret shadowy faction of evil forces are to blame for them. The former invites thought about one's own society; it has the potential to be uncomfortable and difficult to reconcile with. The latter assures its audience of the fantasy it is couched in. It gives the audience a boogeyman to be angry at, and in so doing deflects any potential for introspection. And that, I think, is the real point of the scene in question.

In a time where our media has become inundated with bland, unchallenging liberal politics, the idea of "cozy" stories have become a growing trend. These types of stories often sport a broad rejection of complicated themes, painful emotions, and nuance, preferring instead to provide a "safe" place to escape to. And with that "safe" space comes a directive not to engage in critical thinking about a work, and not to draw any message from that work and apply it to the real world. Yet this is exactly where Bioware seems to be heading nowadays.

Veilguard has already been faced with heavy criticism about playing things overly safe; removing anything that might be potentially uncomfortable for the player. And the end credits scene is no different. Don't think about things too hard, it whispers to you seductively, in Matt Mercer's soothingly Evil voice. See? The Bad Guys were behind everything, all along.

Yeah... I wasn't sure about bringing it up in the post as it isn't something I felt 100% qualified to speak on, but there was an element to the whole thing that had me cringing along the same lines. To be clear I don't want to accuse the dev team of anything but like, it's pretty apparent they did not really think through any of the tropes they blindly shoved into their game, or examine where these tropes might have originated from.

if you are interested in learning more about the antisemitic roots of conspiracy theories like that of the executors you can read more here from the US holocaust museum, the wikipedia article is also very thorough.

TLDR; though antisemitic conspiracy theories existed long before this ("poisoning the wells" and causing the bubonic plague, for example), the protocols of the elders of zion was a forged document published in a russian newspaper in 1903 that claimed to prove the existence of a jewish plot for world domination. it has been massively influential and is the basis for pretty much all of the antisemitic conspiracy theories you still hear today about "a group of people plotting to take over the world from the shadows" like the illuminati, Qanon, "white genocide" etc. it is still widely spread today in alt-right circles and often parroted in media, whether intentionally or not.

im sure you can see how similar this is to the executors nonsense and that i dont have to keep going lol. i dont think it was intentional by the devs, but it is astonishingly careless and irresponsible and absolutely baffling to me that no one caught this and brought up the issues with it during development.