underrated threesome dynamic of herding dog x lamb x wolf

it's about being caught between the grip of somebody who wants to protect you and somebody who wants to devour you and knowing that what they both share is a desire to possess you in your entirety btw

@unpretty Leonas/Minnow/Ari

harwin canonically being super overprotective of larys because of his disability is such an insanely interesting detail for both of them i wish they’d shown it. does larys want to be pitied does he want to be loved can he tell the difference and which is this he burned him to death

oh OOOOOOH their deaths mirror each other. Tamerlane and Leo are both driven to what looks like suicide chasing hallucinations around an apartment that architecturally represents their psyche (as they destroy it), shortly after leaving/planning to leave their loving partner. (Both of them invite her in, at first. Both of them want her there. But now she's in the mirrors. She's in the walls.)

Vic and Camille are both killed/driven to death by Vic's experiments, their rivalry leading to both their deaths (Camille to prove it doesn't work, Vic to prove it does), immediately after they get left by people they are using in professional/personal ways - Camille hires Toby and Tina to sleep with them, Vic dates Ali to get her to work with her on the heart mesh.

Perry and Frederick both die in the same warehouse, looking at the ceiling, waiting for death to come to them - Perry with a look of ecstasy, Frederick in terror. Both of them are in that warehouse because they've been humiliated by Roderick and are now determined to prove themselves. Both get led here by drugs. Both involve the mutilation of an innocent, Morrie. Both of them see Verna not as another character, but something like her true self. And there's the parallel between all the mercy that Verna offers Perry - the most she offers any of them, other than Lenore - and her glee in explaining to Roderick exactly why he deserves to die like this.

And then you get the final pairing/quartet of deaths - Eliza Usher + William Longfellow vs Madeline and Roderick which is obvious but oh my god. oh my god you guys. Eliza's wall of crucifixes and clinging to Christian faith and the sanctity of pain as a way of hoping for reward after death vs Roderick putting Madeline through the agony of vivisection to 'honour' her + grant her Egyptian immortality. Both William and Roderick eat their young. Fuck.

2 silver cups, part of the so-called Boscoreale treasure, buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

okay so that’s at least one person who would have no problem if they got sent back to medieval times, the guild hall absolutely going off to this mashup

@honey-wine-and-time

Husband: That tune is really familiar.

Me: It’s the Pirates of the Caribbean theme.

Him: Ah.

Me: Mashed with Carol of the Bells. On a harp.

Him: *stares*

Me: Everything is on the internet somewhere.

Anna Passini on the balcony of Palazzo Priuli in Venice, c.1866 by  Ludwig Johann Passini (Austrian, 1832–1903)

@lgbtqcreators creator challenge ➻ blending + inspired by another creator

Lionel Luthor had three sons.

Lex, who he damaged beyond repair, molded, cut, struck, abused, bullied, coaxed, threatened until he was a monster that Lionel could respect.

Julian, who would have no mark of Lionel's failure as a father (which is why he is so fixated on the baldness, I think)--but died--sudden, chaotic, random, out of Lionel's power and control, like the meteor shower that scarred his heir.

Lucas, a mistake, an accident, a distraction, an opportunity? A way to turn a sour scandal into a great dynasty? He must get him away, from foolish influences like his hysterical mother. Lionel has visions of powerful warrior sons, perhaps in an uneasy alliance but with tension, a violence he bred into them. But then--just as he grasps for control--Lucas is dead, another marker of Lionel's failure.

Lex feels grief for his father and his lost brothers.

But Lionel is not grieving. He is brooding on lost opportunities and thwarted plans because that is all he sees in his progeny.

not to like, poke the beast, but poking the beast,

kory’s arc begins and ends when dick is involved. when dick isn’t involved and the company decides to push dickbabs, kory has nowhere left to go because george perez and marv wolfman didn’t perform the labor involved to make kory a woman in a relationship instead of the relationship. for god’s sake - what do wolfman and perez give her as a job? this ex-princess refugee, this survivor of war trauma, who could’ve been consumed by the desperation to not let another planet fall to the conflict that so shaped her. she could’ve been anything. she could’ve worked her ass off to learn of this world and nurtured the desire to protect it from what destroyed her home, became an outspoken activist - or it didn’t even have to be that large in scope, it could’ve been simply that she wanted to defend human rights as a lawyer on a small scale. kory has the history and the motivation for all of this. you know what they gave her?

model. she’s a model. because she’s the perfect girlfriend - princess, model. beautiful, sexy, implied to be independent but not too independent, goes where her (male-led) team needs her. her backstory is mined for plot. it’s not allowed to be an experience she lived, a thing she lived that hurts her still, that inspires her. no, of course not. this narrative is the thing that has dogged kory since her inception - it’s the thing that has held her back time and time again, as she was shuffled from meaningless team to meaningless team, and it followed her even when she finally got a series of her own, because no one cares enough to dig in deep and try and change how she’s written fundamentally. kory was written into every sexist pitfall imaginable, and fans have come to expect that narrative for her. her worth is scaled down to how much better she is for dick than babs. and no one gives a singular shit whether dick is actually good for kory’s longterm development as a character. why care about her? she’s just the girlfriend.

kory needs what barbara got to have - complex relationships outside of who’s she’s dating, and independence. babs gets to be a motherly figure to cass, babs gets to be close with dinah in a way that has ups and downs like a normal relationship, she gets to be defensive of her dad and close with the batfam even still. she gets to bark orders at batman, and batman listens. she gets to lead a team of women in an interesting way. babs is the rare female character given agency over her trauma - she gets to tell the joker to fucking suck it, and even though she’s done that she still gets to handle that moment not fixing her. babs got redeemed from a long, and frequently sexist history, and in a matter of years was transformed entirely into one of the most well-developed female characters in comics. her writing isn’t consistently perfect, and some writers plop her into the crazy domineering bitch/crazy ex-girlfriend stereotype, because she’s threatening. oh god, a woman, with development? complex emotions? trauma that doesn’t define her but also doesn’t affect her? lads, we’ve got to find a stereotype to tear her down -

kory needs that. kory deserves that. kory needs a gail fucking simone. she’s not going to get that if you keep insisting on putting her in a relationship that curtails her development.

This be me talking about all the awful things Blackfire has done:

Orson Welles on Woody Allen.

Kontober day 9. It's hard being a big city boy stuck in a small town. Being unable to express yourself how you want to. Feeling trapped.

The layers of this arc, I swear.

Just so we're clear, what I'm saying is Kon didn't even know the closet existed until Clark put him there via Smallville and now he has to act straight. Whaddup!🤟🏼

Oh huh

I didn't know Glastonbury Tor has a Welsh name

It's Ynys Wydryn, which Wikipedia says means "Isle of Glass", but my dictionary says more accurate would be "drinking glass", not just "glass" (as in glazier, or as in the lake that once surrounded it, if you'd like to be poetic)

Which I suppose can be used to put greater proof to the myth that that's where the Holy Grail is, being a drinking glass once

I have another dictionary (this one from the 1950s), which says gwydryn means "a small glassful", and that Stonehenge is called "Gwaith Emrys" - Emrys's work!

I'd also forgotten that the word for dragonfly is gwas y neidr, snake's servant

Apparently there are two words for butterfly - pilipala, which I knew, and "îar fach y haf", which I didn't - "little hen of the summer"?

Also the name for Liverpool in the 1950s dictionary is Llynlleifiad, and in the one from 2009 it's just Lerpwl, which is the one I knew

Trying to properly translate the older name, like you can do with place names usually, is a bit tricky

Llyn means Lake, I know that much, but I'm not sure of the rest of it at all

If I just Google translate "lleifiad" it says "a mutation", which is lovely I'm sure, "lleifia" supposedly means "cry" - in my 1950s dictionary cry is "llefain" as a verb, or "llef" meaning a voice - but it has a letter missing! Lleiaf, which is closer but actually not at all, means least or smallest

If I split it, lle ifiad - lle means place, or where something happened, and ifiad has no entry cs it's not a word

But, it'll be mutated from the vowel of lle, possibly, so it could be gifiad or hifiad, neither of which make sense either, but then there's a table of how vowels in the middle of words also can be mutated, so I don't know at all what's going on and anyway it's probably in like whatever the Welsh version of Old English is (Old Welsh?), so who knows

Certainly not me, I have the least amount of Welsh these days

Lleif sounds like it should mean something

The "vowel mutation and affection" table in the 1950s dictionary has "ei" being from "a, ae, ai", so llaf, llaef, llaif - that brings us back to little (llai, lleiaf, smallest, somehow from bychan meaning little), or to llafar meaning sound/speech, llafn meaning blade or youth (how does that mean both?), llafur, labour

The modern dictionary has blade and least and speech the same, and llef meaning voice

I don't know what -iad means really, but it's sort of a plural or a verb or smth? Idk the correct grammar word but like, cyfarch and cyfarchiad, greet and greeting, or cyfeiriad direction and cyfeirio to direct (yes I have just been reading through to find things that have that ending)

Lake of ... vocalisation? Well that would be, accurate,,, even if the translation is shonky as hell, people don't half talk

Can someone explain, actually, how llafn means "blade" and also "flake", "plate", and "a youth" - with llafnes meaning "a strapping girl", however that means in 1950s-speak

I do not one bit understand the connection there

Flake and plate sort of make sense with blade, flat things? Sort of? Metalworking?? No? But blade and youth? I do not know

Yah me I can

So llafn really means, like, "a flat piece" I guess? Hence blade, plate and flake. But the "flake" definition is what then gives rise to the "lad/lass" part, because the child has sort of flaked off the parent. And then, you know, add various cultural understandings and dialects to it and the connotations change until you get what you do.

Concerning Llynlleifiad, offhand I would actually say it's more likely to be a verbal corruption of 'lleiddiad' imo - which could be from 'lladd'? Not sure on that one! Fascinated by the name though, I had no idea we knew it as anything other than Lerpwl

! Thank you!

Lleiddiad meaning killer, right? That makes sense too, really, I mean, England

It's very interesting, this book, tho

As I said, my Welsh isn't very good but there's a lot here I didn't know

On subject of place names, tho, London, which I only know as Llundain, is also listed as Caerludd

Caer is like, castle, city, right? I don't know ludd, but lludded is weariness? Have I got that mixed up too? Or lluddio, forbid?

HA okay, that one may be very interesting

So Caer = fortress, correct, equivalent to the Latin "Cester" (side note - the English Town of Chester is literally just called Caer in Welsh; direct translation. I like that.)

Classically, Llundain is the name because it's the Welsh corruption of Londinium, which was the original Brythonic Celtic name. But, here is an Alternative! Now, it could be that it's another example of a verbal corruption, so Caerllundain -> Caerludd. Those aren't actually unheard of. Our capitol damn city has one, actually, since Caerdydd was once Caerdyf.

BUT, those normally happen either because the letters are verbally similar (like f and dd), or because it's an example of hypercorrection where the incorrect new world seems to make more sense and so is presumed to be correct. That's what happened in the case of Cardiff - the original 'dyf' part was itself a corruption of the river Taff, but people didn't recognise it. But when it became 'dydd' it was suddenly a familiar word, and thus Cardiff's name went from the functional and banal "fortress of the Taff" to the fantastical and poetic "fortress of the day".

So I don't think it's happened here. In Welsh, dd and f are very similar, but dd and d? At the end of a word? Doesn't ring true.

BUT ha, step forward Welsh mythology.

I submit this is a very interesting and romantic name meaning "the fortress of Lludd", I. E. Him Out Of Lludd and Llefelys who was king of the Britons (I. E. the Celtic originals) and held his fortress in Londinium. Had all that trouble with the faeries that could hear anything said on the wind. You know the one. Breton brother. That guy. Made a really big megaphone. Him.

- Prime Minister Harold Holt (drowned, 1967) after being asked by his staff to stop swimming in dangerous surf