I’m reading “What Doesn’t Break,” the novel detailing Laudna’s backstory, and Delilah is genuinely so fucking funny in this.

Like, this is the bit where Laudna figures out who “the voice” is.

Laudna: You literally murdered me.

Delilah: Yeah, but the past is the past.

I’m reading “What Doesn’t Break,” the novel detailing Laudna’s backstory, and Delilah is genuinely so fucking funny in this.

Like, this is the bit where Laudna figures out who “the voice” is.

Thinking to myself "they can't possibly have written this entire 20 000 word fic exclusively in 4chan greentext format", like a fool.

Give us the fic

Let the record reflect that you asked for this.

@lidsel replied:

I mostly just look up what's being referenced when people blorbotag my shitposts.

I low-key love this? They're certainly making use of the format; the chaotic and comedic flow of events would feel lower quality and wordier in standard prose

I don't know how anyone has found this as the only ao3 tag it has is "original work." There's not even a rating or relationship type. The fic summary for anyone intrested is:

"in 2069 AD, the region once known as the United States of America is a world of complex lore and political intrigue that our heroine doesn't really care about because she's too busy trying to find estrogen in the post-apocalyptic Midwest."

Give that roughly two thirds of the comments and kudos appear to post-date the creation of this thread, at least in this particular case the answer to "where do people find this stuff?" is apparently "right here".

Some say many years ago, before Joseph Rudeboy was Smokin' Joe…

He had a wife, her name was Beau

i'm begging you guys to start pirating shit from streaming platforms. there are so many websites where you can stream that shit for free, here's a quick HOW TO:

1) Search for: watch TITLE OF WORK free online

2) Scroll to the bottom of results. Click any of the "Complaint" links

3) You will be taken to a long list of links that were removed for copyright infringement. Use the 'find' function to search for the name of the show/movie you were originally searching for. You will get something like this (specifics removed because if you love an illegal streaming site you don't post its url on social media)

4) each of these links is to a website where you can stream shit for free. go to the individual websites and search for your show/movie. you might have to copy-paste a few before you find exactly what you're looking, but the whole process only takes a minute. the speed/quality is usually the same as on netflix/whatever, and they even have subtitles! (make sure to use an adblocker though, these sites are funded by annoying popups)

In conclusion, if you do this often enough you will start recognizing the most dependable websites, and you can just bookmark those instead. (note: this is completely separate from torrenting, which is also a beautiful thing but requires different software and a vpn)

you can also download the media in question (look for a "download" button built into the video window, or use a browser extension such as Video DownloadHelper.)

if the "Complaint" links are not visible for you:

personally, i'm a huge fan of r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH. they keep their links up to date and they also rank them, basically. they also have all kinds of little pages explaining how to safely pirate shit.

^^^^what they said. I'm surprised people are still reblogging this post now that google's flushed itself down the toilet. so here is your

2026 UPDATE:

just go to r/FreeMediaHeckYeah and r/Piracy. it's easier, more reliable, and will take care of all your piracy needs!

Another comic based on a favorite post of mine, because what can I say? I love posts

Original post by @cryptotheism

i love this tweet

"Now...I hear you ask 'but why?' Ya see Dark Lord Sauron had the most motive of all. He wasn't satisfied with just powah, no... He wanted to dominate all life. So in his ring he poured his malice and his cruelty and his will....And that ring is none othah but the very ring you see before eyes. 'One ring tuh rule them all'. 'But how did it get here?' See, despite the success of his forey with powah, Sauron was defeated by the king's son, [Isildur] Isuldah though that ring.... this very ring... corupted him with the very same lust for powah. Which got 'im killed, of course. Legend says this ring has a mind'a its own. Though, you all wouldn't know about that because the legends were lost over time. All the same, it came into posession of a foul lil thang - by the name of Gollum. Gave him longevity but corupted 'im all the same. Until 500 years or so later, it came into the posession of one Bilbo Bagins who has since turned it over to his nephew Frodo. Now, our friend Frodo here will be the one tah destroy it once and for all... before it kills anyone else."

wizard college is going to kill me I swear to god. I just saw someone without a component satchel reach into their pocket and pull out a handful of LOOSE tapioca to use as a substitute for blood in their fell ritual. and it worked. I've never been so fucking mad.

experiencing microaggressions apparently

‎

It has been brought to our attention that some students have experienced discrimination. We want to reiterate that this sort of behavior is unacceptable. It has been deemed necessary to dispel some common misconceptions.

- "Goblinoids" such as goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears are culturally and genetically distinct from orcs. It is considered offensive to conflate the two and is a result of the historical tendency for human and elf sources to not distinguish between the two.

- While the finer points are difficult to convey concisely, many orcs and goblinoids have converted to human or elf religions and it is a fundamental misunderstanding of Gruumsh that leads many to believe orcs are religiously inclined to violence. The lack of knowledge about orc religion stems from the lack of written sources by them due to a preference for their rich oral tradition and the decrease in native speakers of orcish.

- While many orc and goblinoid communities retain their nomadic tradition, none of them still pillage. This modern image was popularized by the factually dubious book "The Owl-Bear-Killer". Most orcs and goblinoids practice some form of craft or animal husbandry if they retain the nomadic lifestyle, but there is a large orc and goblinoid diaspora in many cities and kingdoms who are scholars, alchemists, doctors, or any other job one would expect.

- Orcs and goblinoids have the same capacity for magic as any other sentient species. There are many notable orc or goblinoid wizards, such as Christina Kil'kdar, Harold Mor'tek, and Yvonne Fisher.

- Half-orcs or half-goblinoids are not "more civilised" than full orcs or goblinoids, nor is it possible to reliably tell if someone is a half-orc/goblinoid or not by their personality. While half-orcs amd goblinoids tend to be more common in urban areas and tend to be less "traditional," the same may be said for full orcs and goblinoids or any other species.

- Orcs and goblinoids must go through the same admissions process and entrance exams as everyone else. Rumors of orcs or goblinoids receiving "extra help" on exams are false, as with any student accommodations are only made for those with a demonstrated need.

Thank you for contributing to a more inclusive campus environment for all students.

Reblog if you love bread or hate the United States military industrial complex

pokèmonize yourself!!!!

hi my name is long-running tv show heres where you can find me: seasons 1-3 are on netflix. seasons 3,4, and 7 are on tubi. seasons 5-6 are on poob. season 2 is on pheebo free with ads. all seasons are available on pheeboTV+ Premium with the Starz add-on... with ads. season 12 is a pheebo original. nobody has it for you.

hi my name is Google "(tv show) watch free online" and Adblocker. i have it for you. I love you

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc

and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.

this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told

when that's just not true.

the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.

there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.

there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.

there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.

Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.

Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.

Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.

There really really ought to be a book about how the staple crops of different civilizations shape and influence those civilizations, and I really want to read it.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (three are alcohol, three have caffeine) are not quite that, but may still be of interest?

I read Salt back in the day and it's so so good, second the rec. I have heard of 6 Glasses and not read it but I am sure I would probably love it. Gotta see if the library has it. Thank you!

Gonna throw Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert in the ring here! You'll never see the modern world the same way again.

A Short History Of The World According To Sheep by Sally Coulthard blew my mind. So many things are tied to wool and sheep and weaving and so many words and phrases are tied to wool, people have no idea.

Example words which come from textiles/weaving, if not specifically wool (go look them up!): subtle, shoddy, tabby, Brazil, rocket, twit, warped, going batty, on tenterhooks, text...

I'll throw in a rec for Pickled, Potted, and Canned by Sue Shephard - a very interesting look at food preservation and how the availability of different types of food preservation shaped cultures and cuisines.

Sweetness and Power is this but for the topic of sugar

The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past might also be up your alley. It's about "forgotten" foods and staples. They talk about different types of wheat, sauces, veggies, etc and a little about the cultures from whence they come

Also: Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser. One of my favourite books.

DO I HAVE A SERIES FOR YOU. University of California Press has a gift for you and it is a 80+ book series on food studies. There are even some that are open access (legally free), but the rest are in libraries.

I also highly recommend Frostbite by Nicola Twilley. It’s about the impact refrigeration has had/is having on food preservation and culture, globally. It was one of my favorite books of this last year.

So I’m reading the 2014 monster manual right.

So half dragons come from shapeshifted dragons boinking a humanoid. Yeah, makes sense.

But it says that they’re sterile and can’t have children?

But like. Where do draconic ancestry sorcerers come from then???

You are a sorcerer because your great great granddaddy was a dragon.

But also the offspring of a dragon and a humanoid can’t have children.

So how did you happen then?

This is a really good example for introducing filial number! It would be useful to understand the offspring not as being always sterile but as being almost always sterile. To the point where for an individual character, you probably have full sterility. However, if almost every offspring further tries to mate with one of the original parent species, you will OCCASIONALLY get viable offspring of the F2 generation. These are more likely in turn to be viable and non-sterile.

The interesting part is Haldane’s rule, in which a male F1 is almost certainly sterile, but a female F1 is more likely to be fertile, meaning that the dragon ancestry has to come from a line of male humans bonking female crosses for probably at least 4 generations.

Grandma dragon face defied the odds and granted me the ability to cast magic missile.

I always thought that it came down to who bore the child. If it was the humanoid, it would be a sorcerer. If it was the dragon, it would be a half dragon.

I’ll be honest at least in bg3 trickster domain clerics are kinda useless. Their thing is what? A thing that makes you sneaky? I usually have someone that can cast invisibility by third level.

So I basically always respec Shadowheart into a different kind of cleric alright making her better at fighting or healing is almost always better

I don’t know about bg3, but in 5e the trickery domain is geared more towards social interaction, by pairing the remote control clone with illusions, enchantments, teleportation, and polymorph. It’s more for tricking people, rather than combat. The idea is to evoke figures like Loki, Hermes, and Sun Wukong.

It’s probably much more useful in table top rather than a video game, cuz the GM can improv a lot more.

Absolutely obsessed with how up until this point Caleb's primary motivation was just. Revenge against Trent. And like I knew that the "saving parents via time travel" plot was going to show up at some point but like. The fact that TRENT HIMSELF planted it is so fucking delicious. Imagining Caleb tearing himself apart between "it's just another of his manipulations" and "but it COULD work" is just, AUUUUGH.

And it'll land so fucking good when we finally get the T dock scene

T dock scene’s not coming for a good eight years.