Not that you should be looking to Andrew Hussie for advice on things, but he’s officially endorsing pirating his comic because the Homestuck website is utterly broken. The Unofficial Collection is now Officially Official
I do not remember liking this, but clearly past me has good taste
I’m experiencing such joy thinking about how excited youd get when you hear the sound of hooves coming down your street - it’s the post!! It’s coming!!
Like an icecream truck response but for mail
“I do declare, I have me here a parcel for ya.”
What’s so awful and hope-eroding about the pandemic at this point is how consistently the value of life is cheapened before our eyes. The number of deaths go up. We are appalled and scared. The number of deaths go down, we talk about the economy. Hospital wards are full to bursting. The number of deaths go up. That number isn’t as scary as it was. We can get through that. The number goes down. It’s not zero. It’s hundreds and thousands, but it’s less than before and there are profits to be made. The number goes up. We’ve seen worse. The numbers go by. We don’t blink an eye anymore. They’re just numbers. The profits go up and the deaths go up and it’s business as usual. People are dying. People are always dying. It doesn’t make your stomach drop anymore. The number goes down. The economy goes down. Add another covid booster shot, make the numbers go the right way. My neighbor gets evicted because he can’t work anymore due to Covid side effects. Make him a number. People live out of their cars. But they didn’t die, don’t count them. Restaurants are open. Shops are open. People are dying. It’s not scary anymore. 526 Covid deaths yesterday. That’s not so bad. This is normal. It’s all numbers. 4.5 million dead around the world. How many is that? Is that a lot? I don’t know anymore. I feel sick.
Nazis: *burned entire libraries worth of knowledge as part of a massive systematic effort to restrict all access to information they disagreed with and destroy the very history of entire ethnic groups they wished to exterminate from the world*
Everyone who ever cites nazi book burnings in any kind of argument today: “that was bad bc they hurted those poor booksies :’’’( ”
Drew my newest Pathfinder character Wel Hel the merfolk Plains Druid and her animal companion Stormend the Air Titanoboa.
A short story
Kathy Rich and Mike Boyd were really out here going “I’m proud of being an antivaxxer and I don’t care who dies because of it.”
COVID taking the trash out this week.
I keep seeing people going “Oh the poor misled victims of propaganda” but the elephant in the room that they’re blatantly ignoring is that it’s all based on eugenics. These people know they’re killing the chronically ill and disabled. They don’t care.
Bye assholes!
[ID: Three Facebook posts: Kathy Rich, Apr 3: “No, they don't "got" me. I'm not afraid of the flu. I go where I want. I not only see my family but I hug and kiss them as I always have. My neighbors can take care of their own business. I was already fat but never lazy and certainly not docile and I've never been isolated. And I will not get their vaccines. So, no, they don't "got" me. I will not comply. I will defy!” Mike Boyd, Aug 24: “Look man I get it get your shot wear your mask do what makes you feel safe but don't be pushing your shit on people who don't want it. If we wanna catch covid and risk spreading it and possibly dying or spreading it and someone you give it to dies we have to live with that. So keep your 6ft and you won't have to worry about it just like getting your shot and wearing your mask like the government tells you, but me not having a mask or a vaccine shot is my business. To many people have gotten to convertible with disrespecting others and not getting your shit rocked... #mybodymychoice” Angela DeVille, Sept 6: “In the last 72 hours a great friend from middle school passed away big Mike Boyd , my uncle Robert & two amazing women Ms. Terry Daniels & grannie Kathy Rich 3 of them was due to covid. This is not fair, the good ones always get taken way to soon🥺 I hope you're all resting in peace, you all will be missed so much!”]
Antivaxxers really out here going "if we wanna catch COVID and kill someone then that's nobody's business but ours because we're the ones who will have to live with that."
What. The actual. Fuck.
You really think you killing someone affects YOU the most.
Not the dead person. Not their family and friends. YOU. Who probably won't even fucking know how many people you killed and definitely will not care.
Damn I am so happy these assholes are dropping like flies.
Fucking DIE already. Just do it at home in your own damn bed assholes.
don’t know if this is as ~deep~ as i think it is, but by all of gaston’s own personal standards of identity/values, the beast is a better man than he is: brawnier, bigger, fightier, & of course every last inch of him’s covered in hair
ohmigod, it’s true though! the beast was basically gaston, and the ticked off fairy turned him into the purest manifestation of his toxic ideals to make him learn to be less of an ass
…..now I really wanna see the version of the movie where instead of dying, the curse passes from the beast to gaston!
except gaston doesn’t have a swag ass castle to sulk in, so he’s out running around the countryside, hiding in forests and stuff, alternately terrorizing the populace and being hunted. it’s a turnabout of his “peerless hunter” backstory– he is now both the monster and the prey.
untillllll he, idk, meets some humble woodcutter(?) that takes him in when he’s wounded or offers him shelter in a storm? and etc, etc, LIFE LESSONS, toxic masculinity slowly vanquished. (ooh, or maybe it should be like–a flower seller or herbalist or some feminine-coded profession he would have devalued to really set up a foil.)
also the gaston-beast needs antlers. terrifying claw-hooked sprawling antlers. antlers for all of his decorating.
BRUH
So if the curse is transmittable, is there a way to - rather than breaking the curse with true love- transfer it to some other asshole who happens to be nearby? Because that would kind of explain why the enchantress decided to go knocking on the doors of dickish eleven-year-old princes on stormy nights, and also why she seemed to look hideous until she suddenly transformed and then ‘cursed’ Adam. Maybe the enchantress was also a beast, and maybe there are two ways to ‘get rid’ of the curse. One is to have true love break it, but the other is to just sort of pass it on to someone the curse decides is worse than you are.
And the curse, rather than seeing ‘ah well he’s just a kid’ and not taking, instead went ‘oh he’s a kid - so his dickishness is also the fault of his caretakers’ and then applied itself to the entire damn castle.
Enchantress was probably like ‘…uh, oops? Oh well lol not my problem anymore’ and skipped off, after feeling juuust bad enough to tell Adam about the True Love option. But not the transfer one because what if he comes after her and the curse decides that after a week of beastification, he’s less of an asshole than she is now? Not risking it.
So Beast and Belle hook up and Beast thinks it’s the True Love cure, but in actuality he gets cured after the fight with Gaston because the curse decides ‘welp this guy is DEFINITELY a bigger asshole’ and that’s why the timing is kind of… odd Belle really does love him, though, but maybe the shift back is supposed to be more gradual with a love cure, because true love really does linger more in gradual adjustments and quiet moments than in grand displays. It’s a slower process (the time limit was really just the enchantress trying to make sure that the prince would hurry up and go that route for curing himself, and not waste time trying to track her down - it’s total bullshit, she’s a con artist, that’s what got her into this mess in the first place).
The slow cure is what happens with Gaston, instead of getting a declaration and then a magical girl transformation sequence back into his sporty lumberjack self, he just, bit by bit, starts to look more Gaston-y again. It spreads out from the eyes. His fur starts to get a bit thinner, his claws start to soften, his teeth no longer fill up his mouth like a packet of razors. At first he thinks it’s just because he has a place to stay and access to, like, brushes and warm water and stuff like that. But then he wakes up one morning and his antlers are shedding, and he can definitely see more of his old face than he used to.
His woodsy herbalist ‘friend’ doesn’t really say anything. He’s heard of curses and things, and he doesn’t like to pry - he’s just the sort who sees a need and tries to help with it. In the end, it’s really not Gaston’s looks (in either form) that when him over. It his skill, either, because Gaston can’t really hunt much without risking being seen and having to leave and possibly getting his herbalist in trouble for housing a monster. It’s just his company. Talks by the fire. Quiet mornings spent side by side. Sheer boredom, and a begrudging sense of indebtedness, have Gaston asking about his host’s tasks, and then offering to help with them. He’s insufferable about it at first, of course. But after a while he finds that he likes the scent of herbs, and that gathering is as interesting as hunting, and he even paws carefully through a few of the herbalist’s notebooks.
Being trapped gives him a somewhat better appreciation for books, though he still never loves them.
At night he can venture outside, just so long as the moon isn’t too bright. He takes to sitting on the roof, and looking up at the stars, and remembers… it was his mother who taught him how to read the stars. In case he ever got lost. His father died when he was fairly young, and Gaston had done his best to try and make up the difference. And he had done; he’d been a good hunter, he’d kept the village fed through a lot of cold winters, but he’d never quite been able to escape the sense that he needed to absolutely make certain that he was following the right script. That there was something about him that didn’t… that wasn’t what his father would have wanted. Or his mother, either. He had a long list of things that made a man worthwhile, and maybe that was part of the reason why he had set his eyes on the one woman in the village who refused to give him the time of day.
Because that list included marriage and a house full of children, not quiet nights in a tavern, looking for too long at the woodcutter’s arms.
But even if he had never really wanted Belle, he had been angry enough at not winning her, too. Even if the script never really made him happy, he still wanted to follow it. Wanted to be the kind of man who could. The man who killed every beast and conquered every challenge.
He can’t go back to that life, now. It’s not even an option anymore.
The knowledge is an unexpected - but very visceral - relief.
The next morning, Gaston is about a foot shorter, and the cleft in his chin is back.
It’s more than a year, though, before he looks human enough to ‘arrive’ at the little village near to where his herbalist lives. He introduces himself as a friend of the healer’s family, an old friend who used share correspondence with him, who’s come looking for work. The townsfolk find him to be a quiet man, burly but skilled, and more boisterous if you can get a few drinks into him. Though, he avoids the tavern more often than not. Some folks talk about him and his herbalist, living out in that little house all by themselves; but Gaston’s skills quiet most tongues, and the way his eyes sometimes catch the firelight, and his teeth seem just a little too sharp, manage to quiet others.
Years pass. It is, funnily enough, only when Gaston looks almost entirely himself - though still different from how he used to - that trouble really comes, with the mayor’s son, who decides on a dare to vandalize the herbalist’s door and destroy some of his best plants.
Gason is only meaning to make the boy pay for the damages, when he goes and finds him out in the fields. But he’s barely had time to get impatient with the brat’s sneering - seventeen, god, he had nearly forgotten how insufferable he was at that age, too - when he feels a weight leave him. A weight he has grown so accustomed to, that he had long forgotten it wasn’t supposed to be there.
There are no witnesses to the change that happens in the field, though later, many people in the village will whisper that a werewolf must have savaged the mayor’s son. All Gaston can do is offer the boy some advice, before he flees in howling terror:
Find kindness, first.
Going to work on labor day really had me feeling some type of way
"Awwww, I'm so sorry you have to work today!"
"How are the kids, Susan? Good? I'll have to stop by the office sometime to chat, I know how slow you guys get this time of year!"
How you gon leave these gems in the tags?
I’m really glad I got the day off despite being retail. A lot of companies are fucked up
wilwheaton