Here’s A Hot Take: Giftwrap Is Dumb, 95% Of The Time You Can Just Hand Someone The Thing And Accomplish

大草原不可避 : Keyboard smashing in Japanese

I explained how keyboard smashing in English expresses laughing really hard and she taught me the Japanese equivalent in return!!

As some of you might know, in Japanese, “w”  from the word “to laugh” 笑う 「わらう」 is basically like “lol” in Japanese so when there’s a bunch of “w”’s together it looks like this wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww 

and it looks like a bunch of grass so one slang word to show something is funny is 草 「くさ」 which is the word/kanji for grass so you don’t have to type out a bunch of w’s.

So the step up from 草 is 大草原　「だいそうげん」 which means prairie since there’s a lot more grass.

And if something leaves you laughing so much that you can’t hold it back you could say 大草原不可避　「だいそうげんふかひ」 which basically means “inevitable prairie”. 

The “inevitable part”, 不可避　「ふかひ」 in this phrase means laughter is inevitable and you can’t help but laugh.

Oh, look, what's that?

That is #quality stuff

one of many reasons castiel spent the first year of knowing dean trying not to strangle him: dean’s weird little winchester-only dialect

i’m fucking obsessed with this right now, so buckle in for a meta. a cool fun (horrible) thing about dean’s dialogue is that a good 90% of what comes out of his mouth is:

a pop culture reference (“you’re just gonna take some divine bong hit, and shazam, you’re roma downey?”)

references to real life phenomenon (“i don’t wanna wake up missing a kidney in a bathtub full of ice” “try new mexico, i hear he’s on a tortilla”)

these also often take the form of nicknames, and dean has a tendency to give people nicknames in general or call them something besides their given name, whether it’s affectionate or rude (“easy there, van damme” “so i’m girl interrupted” furthermore castiel = cas, ezekiel = zeke, etc, see also frequent use of “chucklehead” “asshat” and on the nicer/endearments end “buddy” “pal” “sunshine” etc)

an idiom (“a snowball’s chance” “if it smells like a duck…”)

slang (“drinking the koolaid” “jonesing for some hooch” not to mention the literal endless amount of words dean uses to refer to killing - gank, waste, juice, ice, etc)

a metaphor (“power up your batteries” “fly me back to my page on the calendar”)

a euphemism (“cloud seeding” “i’d have given you an hour alone with her first”)

sarcasm (his habit of replying “peachy” or “super” when asked how he is)

wordplay (see: the entire “vampirate” and “werepire” debacles)

completely nonsensical (guessing what happened to a magical artifact: “it was dug up by tomb raiders? it was seized by the king of the dead by warlords?”)

said at lightning speed - if you pay attention, dean actually talks a LOT, usually a mile a minute (this makes me feel a way when you recall his year of mutism at age 4 but that’s another post)

slang IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE (casual usage of “guano,” etc)

a lie, a deflection, a joke, etc

or worse, something dean’s NOT saying, deliberately, because he’s one of the most repressed people on earth

the end result of all this being:

dean winchester is utterly infuckingcomprehensible. 

think about this. there’s an ENTIRE SECTION on EVERY SINGLE EPISODE PAGE of the spn wiki devoted to JUST explaining dean’s pop culture references, because the average viewer won’t have seen everything he’s talking about either. they have a whole page for this called “hunter’s lingo,” but honestly, it’s not all hunters, just sam and dean’s fucking batshit communication style. even i don’t understand dean half the time. SAM gets it, sam speaks it back to dean a lot in the early seasons, but that’s because sam and dean are 1. practically two halves of the same person 2. FREAKS. every time we get an episode that involves outsider POV is devoted to them going “what the fuck is WRONG with them?”

enter castiel. technically speaking, the show implies that angels are omnilingual. castiel should understand every language known to man, but knowing the meaning of words doesn’t help him understand the following:

pop culture references

references to real life phenomenon

nicknames

idioms

slang

metaphors

euphemisms

sarcasm

wordplay

you get the idea.

listen to me. look me in the eyes. castiel cannot understand a single fucking word that comes out of dean’s mouth. my guy laid a hand on dean winchester in hell and immediately fell in love with him and has no fucking idea what he’s talking about ever. because not only is dean winchester’s way of speaking CLINICALLY insane, and sometimes incomprehensible even to other human beings who are not sam, castiel is an angel, and someone prone to taking things even more literally than other angels do

go back and watch and watch seasons 4-5 especially. the reason cas does so much squinting and head tilting is because every time dean opens his mouth castiel has to open up his mental “dean winchester dictionary” and translate entire paragraphs on the fly, because again, dean never shuts up!

what makes this extra hilarious to me is this gem:

this line is from 5.13. at this point cas has known dean for AN ENTIRE YEAR AND A HALF. what you see here is my guy SNAPPING. cas made an EFFORT in this scene. he asked who glenn close was. he’s telling dean that he can’t understand him. he is doing his level best to have a normal conversation with this guy he has a crush on and for the life of him he cannot do it (equal but opposite energy to cas blowing up the gas station and motel room in 4.01, tbh)

yes, cas can understand dean’s tone. he can use context clues, and he usually gets the general idea. and when cas DOES understand dean’s jokes, he laughs at them. the first time we ever see him smile is during their 4.07 heart-to-heart when dean says “it was a witch, not the tet offensive.” since cas has knowledge of human history, he knows what the tet offensive is; he got the joke, and he laughed.

but as far as actual dialogue goes, he consistently struggles to keep up. even after metatron gives castiel the pop culture knowledge in season 9, cas struggles to put it to put it to proper use (dean: “you wanna just walk right into the death star?” cas: “what does a fictional battle station have to do with this?”). whenever he asks dean to clarify it’s always when he’s most annoyed, like most of the time he knows it would be futile but he’s too annoyed to care. (dean: “i don’t know who’s on first, what’s on second!” cas: “what IS second???”) i’m pretty sure he spends seasons 4-6 wanting to shake dean by the shoulders and ask him why he is LIKE THIS. 

it takes cas - who, again, is omnilingual - YEARS to begin to acclimate to dean’s speech and start speaking that language back to him. it’s season 8 before we start really hearing him use slang, season 9 before he begins to understand wordplay, season 10 before he starts using pop culture references (to other angels, who immediately fail to understand him, which disappoints him immensely), and season 11 before he really gets into metaphors. i don’t remember what season he started using “yeah” instead of “yes” but i do know it took a really damn long time. 

and honestly, i don’t think cas truly got the hang of it until at least season 11-12. that’s something like 7 or 8 YEARS. it’s more than half the time they’ve known each other at the point of the series finale. 

so what’s true romance, fellas? it’s falling completely and totally in love with the most inexplicable person you will ever meet in your whole 4.5 billion year life, even though you have yet to understand a single thing he’s ever said to you. thank you for coming to my ted talk

Even if Capcom didn't plan anything with the writing and Project W wasn't a thing until RE5, I still love the fact that the reveal recontextualizes Wesker's line to Chris in RE1:

It's meant to be all smug he's like "I've always been with Umbrella 😏" But now knowing Wesker's backstory it's quite a sad and ironic line. Like he really has always been with Umbrella... This is one of my roman empires my guy thought he was chilling as Dr. Frankenstein when instead, he was actually Frankenstein's monster.

(It's Alfred)

reverse harem, but the mc is a cute old lady who loves spoiling the very young and very hot boys to death because she’s never had grandchildren. The guys are all fighting over her because it’s the most genuine love and validation they’ve ever received in their lives and they also lowkey want to be adopted by her.

goncharov

My coat contains multitudes. Click “Shop now” to see what’s on offer today.

calling tumblr 'tumblr dot com' is the equivalent of a parent calling their child by their full name when theyre angry

Netflix Devil May Cry review

I've taken a break from the overall discourse and replayed Devil May Cry 3 to get the bad taste out of my mouth and I've come to a realization, there are aspects of this show that could have been used to make a great Devil May Cry story...for Nero.

(Breathes in)

The Terrible Shit.

God there is so much stuff in this show that was flatly terrible to include from the outset and I'm gonna need to clear that out from discussion to move forward so...here goes.

The deliberate and blatant allegories for the Iraq War and immigration were terrible ideas and it's pretty clear that they were written by someone who was trying to be "neutral" on immigration and superficially against the Iraq War...let me explain

Immigration

The show presents the idea that many of the demons in the demon world are weak humanoids who can barely breathe the air there due to "pollution" of some kind. It also posits that all demons are descended from humans who were trapped in the demon world thousands of years ago so they are practically just cute monster people being oppressed by Mundus and the ugly and monstrous demons who are also seemingly also descended from humans too...I guess. Anyway, to get into the allegory issues, this presents an explicit scenario where some pitiable "demons" try to escape into earth for a better life and some monstrous "demons" try to sneak into earth, seemingly just to kill and maim people...I can't be the only one here who sees how fucked this is as an allegory right. To top it all off there is a scene where the barrier between the human world and the demon world is taken down and it results in a near apocalyptic massacre, which would be fine in a story that just about fighting demons but this is also a story where demons are mutants trying to escape to a better life so the allegory also becomes "open borders will result in white genocide". It's a bad allegory done badly and I couldn't stop thinking about how bad it is. ONTO THE NEXT TERRIBLE ALLEGORY

Operation Iraqi Demonic Makaian Freedom

So beyond the terrible immigration allegory they also threw in some War on Terror comparisons too....yippee. It is never subtle about this, the first episode has the president of the United States get briefed on Terrorist Demons while he complains that the last guy only had to complain about Saddam, There is a scene where the US military engages in mass murder of innocent demonic men, women, and children with machine guns and portable crematoriums, and it ends with the US military invading the demon world, killing everyone indiscriminately, and establishing private resource mining operations to the tune of American Idiot by Green Day.... and I have to be honest, it feels like all of that was justify having a scene where the US military does atrocities to the tune of American Idiot rather than to make any kind of coherent statement about anything. U.S. Military Bad may be a correct statement but what does any of this have to do with Devil May Cry?

The Bad Shit.

Dante feels like a MacGuffin in this story. He does get some of the better fight scenes but he is also constantly getting knocked out and tied up somewhere 4 times in this 8 episode season. This leaves him separated from the rest of the plot and he mostly just has cool action scenes, but little character development or connections to the themes that the story is (poorly) exploring. I also hate to sound like one of the usual suspects but he shows Quicksilver level speed early on in the story but Lady keeps being able to get the drop on him over and over and over to the point that it's just stupid.

The White Rabbit is a fun and well acted villain who is genuinely unique as far as Devil May Cry antagonists go...until he is revealed to be a human with the most bog standard "I am an ally/member of [DISCRIMINATED GROUP] but I was victimized and driven insane by the actions of [DISCRIMINATING GROUP] so now I will kill them all no matter how many [DISCRIMINATED GROUP] I have to kill along the way" type villains. He even gets a massive power boost and becomes a generic hulk monster. There was so much potential with him but he just ends up boring and standard.

They turned Lady into an IDF Soldier...I don't want her to get a redemption arc, I want Dante to knock her out and leave her in a crematorium truck for the rest of the next season.

Changing all the magic into "quantum physics" is boring as all hell. And it isn't even humans trying to use science to explain demonic magic, the demons explicitly say it's quantum physics as well. The games always had some magitek around but it was never explained and mostly just added to the mystique of the locations, making it explicit science ruins that. It's also just boring on its own, makes everything feel less special.

The CGI demons were distracting, they contrasted way too much from the admittedly excellent 2D animation for me to stop noticing it.

I personally found the decision to make all the "innocent" demons into humans with weird bits and all the "evil" demons into monstrous creatures offensive and cowardly for what should be obvious reasons. The only "monstrous" demon that has redeeming qualities is the one that can shape shift into a human.

They overstuff the ending of the season in such a way that I can't see a good and coherent season 2 that can juggle ALL of the plot threads that they create at the last minute. We have:

The US military invading Hell and doing war crimes

Arius and the Oroborous company strip mining hell, likely connecting to Lucia's (whitewashed) cameo in episode one

Vergil either working for Mundus willingly or being brainwashed and creating demonic ISIS

Dante needing to escape DARKCOM's custody and acquire Ebony and Ivory

Lady's redemption arc

Dante and Vergil's rivalry

It's just gonna be a mess.

Nitpicks and fan rage

The demons get offended when their homeworld is called hell or the demon world. Instead they call it Makai....which is Japanese for Demon World. That's just lazy.

Agni & Rudra are objectively worse than they are in the games, being just generic dumb monsters wielding swords rather than being cordial sentient swords wielding bodies.

I don't mind cursing but holy shit does Lady curse too much in this show, to a very distracting degree.

If Dante ever gets serious in this show then I only hear Nero. Sorry, Johnny Yong Bosch is just too iconic for me not to hear it.

Vergil says that he is the storm and then he approaches all over them.....we get that Bury the Light is a fucking magnificent theme but that was fucking ridiculous.

The licensed soundtrack was honestly distracting at times but that's gonna be hot or miss for people.

The Good Shit

The IDEA of there being a larger number of good or benign demons in the demon world is actually an interesting one, and the idea that many would want to go to earth so that they could escape the oppression that they experience in the demon world is something worthy of exploring in Devil May Cry. I can even see an argument that Sparda sealing off the realms did effectively prevent many demons from "waking up to justice" the same way he did. There is even plenty of support for benign and friendly demons in the games and 2007 anime. Cerberus, Agni & Rudri, and arguably Nevan from Devil May Cry 3 are fairly cordial and honorable, they just oppose Dante because it's their duty and willingly join up with him after they are defeated. Brad from the 2007 Anime was summoned to bring his monstrous master into the world but changed his ways after experiencing both love for another as well as the joy and freedom of life on earth. Modeus was a student of Sparda who chose to become a pacifist, seemingly having been on earth long enough to gain preferences about strawberry sundaes. And then there are Trish and Lucia, one only needing a single act of kindness from Dante to completely turn on Mundus and the other being a full demon raised by humans. My main issue with the way the show handled is that it reeks of cowardice and "shitty magneto writing"

The 2D animation is genuinely great giving us fun visuals and great action scenes.

The first few episodes had a lot of fun and energy to them but the severe vibe changes in Episode 5 are gonna make or break the series for a lot of people.

Episode 6 was honestly pretty good even though it felt somewhat out of place in the story, serving primarily to compare and contrast Lady and the White Rabbit's back stories until they finally collide in tragedy. Its biggest drawbacks are that it doesn't feel like a proper part of the show while also being the primary source that confirms that Lady is indeed party to war crimes. They started gunning down civilians before the portal even opened.

Theoretical alternative show that would have fucking rocked

If you already have Johnny Yong Bosch you should at least look into having him play the character he already plays and Nero would have actually been a really good character for some of this plot...as long as they got rid of the overt Americanization of the story.

Nero is a part demon orphan who was raised by a loving, human, foster family who lost his foster parents to a demon attack. This and other demon related tragedies eventually result in him embracing his demonic side so that he can use that power to protect his family and others. During the events of Devil May Cry 4 he learns that the local Sparda worshiping cult has been transforming humans into demonic hybrids and that he is related to Sparda by blood somehow. After taking down the corrupt church and accepting his demonic power he settles down as a demon hunter and eventually becomes a foster father to a group of children who were orphaned during the events of Devil May Cry 4.

The White Rabbit is a human orphan who was rejected by his human foster family before finding his way into the demon world before being adopted a kind family of weaker demons. The loss of his adopted sister to the cruelty and harshness of the demon realm inspires him to find a way to bring his foster family and other weaker demons to the human realm where they can be safe. However, an organized group of human demon hunters slaughter everyone he was trying to save, leading him to inject himself with demon blood and make an alliance with demon lords for revenge against them, regardless of how many of those he once tried to save will die in the process.

The parallels are RIGHT FUCKING THERE Come On.

By primarily replacing Lady and Dante with Nero you could focus the story on a single person's journey and reactions to everything going on, especially if you are going to stick to an 8 episode format. Instead of retreading DMC 3 they could create a more original story and show how Nero resolves problems without Dante or Vergil around. (you can also have him stop the mass murder in episode 5 cause that was gratuitous and just...not something I wanted to see in a Devil May cry show)

Anyway, way too long rant over. Have fun.

You were in Marketing, so tell me, do you think Jensen agreed to Atomic Heart without realizing that there would be a bit of a shit storm, or do you think he and his promo team were good with the shit storm, because bottom line, it's a worldwide game and it gave him huge publicity? I mean, even the haters blaming him for the entire war really doesn't matter, as 99% of people know that is just stupid. Also, controversy about what nationality a dev is, is not going to stop gamers from buying a game. I just can't figure if Jensen stepped into this unaware, or brilliantly chose this to widen his name appeal?

I think Jensen has far better sense of bearing on media than all the people pretending to be upset off of a well known exaggerated review that intentionally warped it.

I think Jensen is fully aware that media everywhere boils down to about one of three money sources, behind just as many proxy screens. I think Jensen is aware you guys read things funded by Russia and PIF every day, or watch shows with them, or networks funded by them every day.

It's that this is all hilarious noise of people with miscellaneous agendas, and other people reacting to them inflating their importance.

Jensen is fully aware, just like every other actor in the history of ever, he's going to work down the money pipe of one of several major influencing political forces, if not multiple or all of them at the same time, and that's just how it fucking works, and this fandom really needs to wrap their head around it.

It's xenophobia, fam. Someone saw "Russian" and went digging immediately for "dirty money." And if you dig in media enough you will always find it. This is actually more "media welfare" dogwhistling, in Russian font. breaking news, game developer uses locally available funding systems to create game, more at 11.

Jensen knew that people would react to agendas and dogwhistles and that it wouldn't matter a goddamn thing or negatively impact his career, just that narcissists would waste energy yelling about it feeling like they're doing something.

Listen, I support Ukraine, but you're a fucking goof if you think this is about Ukraine. Even if you're Ukrainian, I'm sorry. Half your fucking TV still is probably Russian funded. Stop picking and choosing things to pretend to be mad about when there's a shiny actor's face attached to fight about. If you're gonna be pissed about this shit, fix it at the root, don't attack the small developers that have the sin of Existing In A Country.

I think Jensen was happy to be a shooter bicon rebelling in silent LGBTQ undertones to lead more Russians to his content, and that everyone fucked up the developer happy to do that, and made them give away all their profits.

The game dev giving all their profits to Ukraine should have ended this. You guys aren't here for truth or social justice or even Ukraine, you guys are here to argue about shit until the horse has been beaten into glue. People WANT this studio to die for NO good reason beyond the fact that some idiot convinced them it needs to, and they will not stop beating this fucking horse until they get what they convinced themselves is right.

If you are still talking about this thinking it has any meaningful bearing, I regret to inform you, you as a person are extremely succeptible to propaganda.