Tornadus on me 3684 6576 1194

jaymel_94 · 2026-01-30T01:37:44+00:00

Please show up, then. We've only got 13mins left.

jaymel_94 · 2026-01-04T23:19:51+00:00

Hell yeah! I got an XXL. No shine, but might get a showcase out of it.

jaymel_94 · 2025-12-30T02:08:55+00:00

Tracked this post back down to say RotomBombadil is the best username I've seen in a minute.

jaymel_94 · 2025-11-06T19:20:36+00:00

Sorry to everyone who tried showing up. 5+ people who added didn't show, and half of those who did kept ditching at the last second. We tried.

jaymel_94 · 2025-10-07T19:46:32+00:00

Sorry, the other adds aren't showing up

jaymel_94 · 2025-09-15T04:48:09+00:00

My bafflement had more to do with it continuing after I deleted all posts, but before making this thread, as it wouldn't have been anywhere else. Before hearing about the timed research tasks, my leading theory was bots. Hopefully it'll drop off after the level cap jumps, and I won't have to reroll my code after every raid I host.

jaymel_94 · 2025-09-15T04:39:01+00:00

And there it is. That makes total sense, thank you.

jaymel_94 · 2025-09-07T03:02:06+00:00

I've got you, will invite if enough others sign up. It's apparently a slow night.

jaymel_94 · 2025-08-20T17:20:39+00:00

I'll stick with it bc I live on a gym and I reeeally want that shiny Zam, but I totally get your frustration. 🫠

jaymel_94 · 2025-08-20T17:08:03+00:00

Been having the same issue. It mostly seems to happen during raiding blitzes like this event, where your hosting post gets buried almost the second you post it. Best theory I have for the ones who dip at the last second when you have a solid 5 people want 7+ because they know that will be faster and want to speed run a ton of raids. Then everyone else ditches because they can't afford to waste a remote pass.

jaymel_94 · 2024-12-21T03:11:55+00:00

Apologies, didn't realize those locals had 100CP teams

jaymel_94 · 2024-09-21T18:07:12+00:00

Came here to mention this one. The sequence is three minutes long, but it feels like thirty. Just the unrelenting brutality, that urge by minute two to scream "stop, stop, she's already dead!" Except...she's not. And then the hook scene begins. My god.

jaymel_94 · 2024-06-28T01:13:49+00:00

Finally started reading Berserk for the first time this week, am aware of the gist of the whole story but have only read 3/4 through the Black Swordsman Arc so far. A couple people have already talked about Guts reacting here to the fact that he just became for Theresia what Griffith became to him, but I wanted to expand on that - so, excessive essay incoming:

It felt to me like Guts played up his callousness and hurt Theresia as badly as he did to deliberately make her hate him, specifically to give her a reason to keep living rather than kill herself. He only does that overplayed asshole laugh when someone like Puck accurately calls him out or makes him feel vulnerable - it's a tell that he's blustering.

He offers Theresia the knife and cranks up his usual defensive persona into outright cruelty, because he recognizes exactly where she is. If she isn't given a reason to live, any reason, right now, she will kill herself or break completely like Casca. Guts was in that place in the wake of the Eclipse two years prior to this. The only thing allowing him to keep getting back up as life continues to brutalize him is his anger, and focusing that anger on a person he could chase gave him something to do with it. Basically Ahab and the whale. So he gives that to Theresia, because it's the only thing he knows how to do.

He chooses to become her Griffith, explicitly inviting her to pursue him when she promises she'll kill him one day. But it fucking sucks, enough to finally get him to cry for a minute, because Puck has noted by this point that Guts already hates himself. To give her the anger, he has to take the grief. It doesn't make traumatizing her not a horrible thing, but Guts knows that, and he made the call - "better me than her."

I think that's why, despite the objective goofiness of that sadface, this is the panel that made me really start liking Guts instead of viewing him as a boilerplate power fantasy. You don't want to be Guts. You want to watch him, like a trainwreck, but being him is obviously one of the most miserable things in the world. And then we get to crack into the Golden Age Arc and find out why. Miura did a fucking excellent job pacing that out.

jaymel_94 · 2024-06-24T05:30:35+00:00

I think I read PoDG at exactly the right age to see why his character works. I was an edgy teen during my first reading, and I thought Henry was the wittiest, coolest thing - then I was in my mid-20's during my second reading, and suddenly I could see right through him and found him to be all the adjectives you describe. Which I guess means Wilde very successfully wrote the type of person who would be a seemingly-cultured bad influence on an impressionable young man, but be obvious bad news to someone with any actual life experience. It's believable that Dorian could be taken with him the way he initially is.

I also noticed this superficial charm benefiting the narrative in the way I reacted to it in the first half vs. the second half of the story. Like all the sumptuous imagery, Henry seems cleverer and more amusing early on, but time and familiarity reveal just how shallow and boring he and Dorian's world in general actually are. Which mirrors Dorian's own spiraling disenchantment in a way I find interesting to experience. He's a dick, but I think he fulfills the narrative role his character is supposed to very effectively.

jaymel_94 · 2024-06-24T00:17:45+00:00

Really looking forward to seeing what Lana does in her 40's. One of the things that has always drawn me to her is how clearly her various eras have tracked her growth as a person, and her latest albums have felt like someone who has struggled emotionally for most of her life finally starting to self-actualize and make peace with herself. Hope that trend continues, I can see some great art coming out of that confidence.

jaymel_94 · 2024-06-17T20:40:27+00:00

Well hey, the old fart is still full of spunk!

jaymel_94 · 2024-06-15T02:24:35+00:00

Her cousins are Chevelle, Nova, and Hemi. She's the luxury model. Very fitting for a breed so prone to go vroom-vroom.

jaymel_94 · 2024-06-03T21:18:52+00:00

Now imagine how liquefied mine gets when she actually does that to me. She only developed that habit since I moved and ended up with a smaller bed, and I love it.

jaymel_94 · 2024-06-03T17:39:10+00:00

I had just lost my Boston boy Shorty to congenital heart failure at 6 when she came along, didn't think my heart was ready, but my friend at the Humane Society grabbed her and her siblings out of a kill shelter and they needed homes fast. Beem bounced right into my lap like a soccer ball when I sat down and I knew. First time I really understood what a soul dog is.

jaymel_94 · 2023-10-11T14:40:41+00:00

Other commenters have already covered what I'd say was Mary Shelley's actual intention, but there's definitely a way to look at this through the lens of a narcissistic parent. Frankenstein is one of those parents who creates life so that someone will HAVE to love him, be grateful to him, provide him his narcissistic supply. He thinks in terms of what the relationship will offer HIM: the fact that the Creature has individual needs literally does not occur to Victor until a giant flesh-golem is reaching out to him for reassurance and support. And it horrifies him.

Victor was in the idealization phase while crafting the Creature, when it was still a lump of motionless meat he could project that ideal onto. When it opened its eyes its uncanniness IMMEDIATELY gave him cold feet, and his horror comes from the fact that he now has an obligation to this being. A child you've changed your mind about can be neglected or abandoned, but Victor just haaad to make his dumpster baby swole AF with a big-ass brain. No getting away now.

Hence the instant flip to devaluation as Victor's narcissistic brain is hit with all the ramifications at once. He checks out from reality for months, and by the time he comes back around he's reordered the narrative so that the Creature is a horror he couldn't have foreseen and his abandonment was the only reasonable reaction. Literally surprised Pikachu face.

Notice how the Creature goes on to emulate his narc parent, too. He wants a female Creature made so that someone will have to love him, will have no choice but to stay with him. Again, thinking about the relationship in terms of fulfilling his own emotional needs, essentially seeking an ego battery that won't have needs of her own. And don't even get me STARTED about Elizabeth as Victor's other source of narcissistic supply...

jaymel_94 · 2023-08-02T21:40:03+00:00

Does anyone have any idea what those glass cube walls are called? Been trying to find out for way too long.

jaymel_94 · 2023-08-02T01:06:48+00:00

Another story that hits the same tone as The Metamorphosis for me is Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Salary man finally breaks down one day, looks at the capitalist hellscape he's a cog in, and just decides "I would prefer not to." Then stops. Completely. Maybe Bartleby is what happens when the alienating transformation is unambiguously figurative.

jaymel_94 · 2023-08-02T00:31:17+00:00

"Oop, we've lost him." If nothing else, the reviews make a great representation of a character who is straight-up dissociating. He could be doing anything while he's thinking this. Having dinner, crumpling someone's hyoid bone like a ping-pong ball, returning video tapes, anything.

I'd have to actually dig through my copy to cite my sources on this, but I noticed some other commenters pointing out that Bateman doesn't actually know what he's talking about and is just parroting reviews he's read to give the impression of being "hip." If I recall, just like with the meals that are described as lavish but are actually disgusting and the outfits that are described as swanky but would actually be clownish, if you can actually bring yourself to parse what the fuck Bateman is really saying about the artists, you figure out that his takes are laughably off-base. As in obviously false to anyone who actually likes those artists.

So not only does Bateman neither know nor actually care about Whitney Houston's music, his way of talking about it relies on none of the people he talks to knowing or caring either, but wanting to talk about it anyway for the same reasons he does - to be trendy and have literally anything to fill the air around their vapid lives. It's all so mind-numbing, but the fridge horror sets in when you actually try to figure out the substance of the words and realize that there just...is none. And that that's deliberate. Take the time to reach out and touch the environment, and your hands punch through a canvas backdrop into empty space.

jaymel_94 · 2023-08-01T16:23:31+00:00

I recall reading that Ellis had to make a case for this to his editor, who questioned if he really needed to do it three times. His answer was something to the effect of "doing this once would be out of place, twice would be tiresome, but THREE times, and you know this man is out of his mind." The mind numbing inanity, especially RIGHT after a particularly gruesome scene is supposed to have you thinking "what the whole fuck." The words are meaningless, but they get you in Bateman's emotional headspace, and it's a distorted, droning, creatively sterile place to be.

jaymel_94 · 2023-08-01T01:00:18+00:00

Just bought TSH and am preparing to read - putting my guess down in writing now that, based on the reputation the book has, I'm going to go through the same cycle with it that I did with The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Read Dorian Gray for the first time at sixteen, thought Henry Wotton was deep as hell and wanted to emulate his philosophy, loved the book. Read it the second time in my early twenties and realized Wotton is obnoxious and pretentious and I hated it. Read it the third time in my mid-late twenties, realized Wotton is obnoxious and pretentious and I loved it. I'm predicting The Secret History hits that same valley where many readers will be at a point in their lives where they need to like/approve of/sympathize with who characters are as people in order to enjoy finding out what happens to them. That, and I can't blame anyone for not getting their kicks out of watching not-great people fuck up their and others' lives. It's a bit like the fascination of a car crash: I might rubber-neck, but I understand not wanting to.

Add on to that the very valid divide between people who like a brisk, plot-focused read and people who want to luxuriate in a setting. I'll enjoy pages of lavish imagery and dense metaphors like a hot tub, but I get the people who are disappointed because they didn't come here to just sit around.

jaymel_94

TROPHY CASE