me. rn.
nerd shit
alright you guys have posted some pretty bad jokes on here but not one comes close to this doozy
brace yourselves
so there’s a far-off place that consists of a perfectly triangular lake surrounded by land, with three kingdoms on the three sides of the lake. the first kingdom is rich and powerful, filled with wealthy, prosperous people. the second kingdom is more humble, but has its fair share of wealth and power, too. the third kingdom is struggling and poor, and barely has an army.
the kingdoms eventually go to war over control of the lake, as it’s a valuable resource to have. the first kingdom sends 100 of their finest knights, clad in the best armor and each with their own personal squire. the second kingdom sends 50 of their knights, with fine leather armor and a few dozen squires of their own. the third kingdom sends their one and only knight, an elderly warrior who has long since passed his prime, with his own personal squire.
the night before the big battle, the knights in the first kingdom drink and make merry, partying into the late hours of the night. the knights in the second kingdom aren’t as well off, but have their own supply of grog and also drink late into the night.
in the third camp, the faithful squire gets a rope and slings it over the branch of a tall tree, making a noose, and hangs a pot from it. he fills the pot with stew and has a humble dinner with the old knight.
the next morning, the knights in the first two kingdoms are hung over and unable to fight, while the knight in the third kingdom is old and weary, unable to get up. in place of the knights, the squires from all three kingdoms go and fight. the battle lasts long into the night, but by the time the dust settled, only one squire was left standing – the squire from the third kingdom.
and it just goes to show you that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides
This really struck me.
Ms. Marvel #6 (2014) // Marvel Comics
Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan)
Story: G. Willow Wilson, art Jacob Wyatt
This was one of my favorite outfits from the second trade. She is so fucking stylish!
Welcome to Night Vale and Phantom of the Opera both contain hypnotic inductions written into their scripts nearly literally word-for-word how I or people I know would use them and tbh I’d say this is a trend that should be adopted more in media, but I can’t see many other films/books/plays/podcasts accomplishing it with as much subtlety and finesse and quality as Phantom and Night Vale
I still remember sitting on the subway listening to Night Vale and having this fleeting moment of “this would be a really nice set-up for an induction, I wonder if they… Oh hey, YEP.”
I feel like good trance = good storytelling on some level.
god, tony stark and his COMPLICATED BEHAVIORAL REWARDS SYSTEM, OH MAN
okay, i promise that one day i will learn to control the tony feelings, but the thing is, i have been trying to put my finger on this one for such a looooong time. because, see, tony stark is weird about stuff, isn’t he? and i don’t mean like, the existential version of stuff, i don’t mean “stuff” in the most general sense (although, let’s be honest, TONY STARK: WEIRD ABOUT STUFF is true in pretty much every context)—i am talking PHYSICAL stuff, INANIMATE stuff, i am talking stuff that a person can possess. i am talking things. i am talking tony in IM springing a lavish personal plane party on rhodey, clearly both because he felt like it and to prove that he could; i am talking tony in IM2 giving pepper the company out of the blue, clearly both because he knew she was the best choice for CEO (UGH PEPPER I LOVE YOU) and because he genuinely wanted her to have it. i am talking tony at the middle of the avengers offering to fly coulson to portland, i am talking tony at the end of the avengers with plans pulled up to build everyone on the team their own FLOOR—you see what i am saying here. tony stark expresses a considerable amount of emotion through gestures like this, and that in and of itself shouldn’t be enough to give me pause. i mean, canonically extraordinarily wealthy emotionally repressed genius expresses affection with cash? it’s not a stretch. fine. done.
ONLY THE THING IS, it’s…really so much more complicated than that, because there is also the shit in the above gifs, and there’s the thing he has about being handed things (seen in IM2 and in the avengers), and it really came together for me during that scene with bruce and the blueberries. because the thing is that quirks, no matter how random they are, COME from somewhere—even if you don’t remember the impetus of an unusual behavior, you did, at some point, learn to do it/find comfort in it/become dependent on it/get so used to it that you hardly notice it. that’s just how quirks work. and if you’re tony stark, and you put a valuation on everything because that’s been literally your entire life experience, there’s a certain amount of implied cost/benefit analysis that has to go into the way you look at emotional interactions, right?
so look at what this shit says about the way tony looks at himself. people who tony doesn’t completely, 100% trust emotionally (this is why pepper is the exception) can’t even hand him things, because on some level tony associates the exchange of physical goods with the exchange of emotional response, and he won’t be capable of giving it; people who have showed tony affection or friendship deserve these lavish, over-the-top gifts, because putting up with tony is such a struggle. and tony himself? well, for surviving a kidnapping and the insertion of car battery, and then an arc reactor, in his chest, he has earned an american cheeseburger. for fighting off an invading army and making the sacrifice move neither he nor steve believed he would, he has earned himself some shawarma. because that is totally what he’s doing, when you really think about it—tony stark doles out physical rewards for behavior, without even noticing it, and the best he ever honestly thinks he deserves is something delicious when the carnage is over.
and this is what makes that blueberry scene with bruce (shut up i know calling it the blueberry scene is ridiculous, I KNOW IT IS IN FACT A SCENE ABOUT THE AVENGERS NOT TRUSTING NICK FURY, i can’t help that i look at the world through stark-tinted glasses) so interesting, in that it’s that behavior-reward system on a much smaller scale. first bruce is offered the blueberries, clearly as a reward for making a point that supported tony’s argument; then steve, clearly as a TEST, is offered those same blueberries along with tony’s admitting to hacking the SHIELD system. and it’s when steve doesn’t even acknowledge the offer that tony goes from “hey look I’m trying to explain this to you and get you onboard” to “who’s in a spangly outfit and not of use?” because he’s got all these emotional cues tangled up with all these physical ones and always has, and because on some level this is just how he does relating to human beings, because stuff is so much easier and everything always has a price and just, augh, tony.
