"Why didn't the Jedi help Shmi after TPM?"

Why didn't Padmé.

Ignoring the expanded universe stuff about Qui-Gon sending the expensive lens or Padmé dispatching Sabé years later, so long after that Cliegg had already met, wooed, and saved up to free Shmi himself, why did Padmé not include "paying back the slave woman who helped me save my planet" in her post-invasion plans?

The Jedi have budgets that are regulated, to some unknown degree, by the Senate. Sure, there's probably some discretionary spending, but an Entire Slave would be flagged. Not a purchase you can hide easily! They're also NOT supposed to operate in Hutt Space unless undercover OR as official Republic envoys.

Padmé? Literally a queen. In the same galactic neighborhood. Has inherited wealth. Probably has room in her staff for a mechanic or something. Can easily justify freeing Shmi to her cabinet as payment for services rendered; remember, that Nubian hyperdrive was paid with Anakin's winnings, meaning they came at the cost of Shmi's freedom.

The real answer is that George Lucas needed Shmi to still be on Tatooine in AotC, and never bothered to expand on how Shmi was freed, himself, so other people took up the slack.

But if we ask why the Jedi didn't free Shmi, then I think we also need to ask: why didn't Padmé?

(I love Padmé. I fully believe she would have sent someone to free Shmi after Naboo was in order post-Invasion, and that it was just an oversight or even plot necessity from G Lucas. I just dislike the double standards of hating on the Jedi for not helping when Padmé is right next door and has That Cash Money.)

poll plagiarism <3

I think an underappreciated element of Leia's character is that even after days or weeks of ruthless interrogation interspersed with torture, she still had the presence of mind to identify a feature of the Stormtrooper who barged into her cell that she could mock.

The legendary Cynthia Khan 🥰🔥👊

via @p0tato-kn1shes

I don't think I shared these sketches of her highness Empress Acina and Alliance Commander Kallig Sepho who is definitely not a saboteur))

Coming up with ways for Jango to have way too many sons in aus is kinda fun tbh. I know the most common thing is just for him to have a big family and that's fine but ideally could be way weirder. Maybe all the sperm at the sperm bank got swapped with Jango's and there's a nationwide epidemic of mini Jangos. Maybe someone discovered a compound full of a hundred of boys in the desert in idk Nevada or somewhere and only the first ten or whatever even have birth certificates and they're all 'homeschooled' (badly) and it gets a lot of press and everyone has a lot of questions, such as "what the fuck?" and also perhaps "how?". Maybe there was an actual secret cloning project not unlike canon but it's in a modern au.

...in the case of the desert compound kids one possibility is that about half of them were born female but they were all raised the exact same anyway and they had no access to the outside world so they aren't really aware of the concept of girls. They all got dressed in the same clothes and given the same haircut and fed the same toxic masculinity juice and gun training. No one ever told them they were girls. They don't really know what that means.

"You're saying that like it's a bad thing." - weak and lukewarm, meek and sluggishly defensive. Leaves too much wiggle room for unsatisfactory agree-to-disagree conclusions. A vain attempt to appeal to the kindness and pity of the unkind and pitiless.

"What a strange thing to word as if an accusation." - Fine, firm, aggressive defense. Clearly judges the judger for judging. Annoying enough to make people slap you first, giving you plausible deniability for smacking them right back as self-defense.

impressed with prince yu’s audacity in believing he’s mei changsu’s evil boyfriend when mei changsu himself is the official court evil boyfriend and also whacks prince yu with a cartoonishly big hammer every chance he gets

OP i need to share this version of What Happens When Prince Yu Finds Out 🤣

I have the impression that Anglophones, if they've never learned a language with gender-neutral third person pronouns (as usually is the case; these languages are not rare at all but they don't happen to be commonly learned in America or western Europe), have some difficulty fully grasping the concept and tend to imagine instead "a pronoun marked for lack of gender", something that is conspicuously rather than naturally ungendered

…and in this context, it might be illustrative to consider something similar-but-different. A language I've been recently studying has gendered greetings — it literally does not have a gender-neutral word for 'hi'; there's instead four separate words that would translate roughly as 'hi boy', 'hi girl', 'hi ladies', 'hi guys'

(the first two differ only in their tones, and are seemingly from the same root as 'boy' and 'girl'; the latter two are derivatives from the roots for 'female' and 'male'. they all share a common 'greeting suffix', which FWIW happens to be -lo. interestingly it's also not the same as the vocative suffix, which you can use to more specifically address someone)

If you have strong opinions about gendered pronouns and their usage for / by strangers, imagine that it's now not just possible but obligatory to state your reading on someone's gender, or on the "average" gender of a group, just when opening an interaction? And others will do the same to you? Do you react to this by starting to think how, hey cool, you could now try to express yourself also by creating neogreetings, asserting preferred greetings, etc.? Do you think regular old "hi" now seems somehow deficient? Or do you just go "what the fuck I don't want greetings to be gendered"?

perhaps now you will have a better inkling of what us people who speak something like Finnish are likely to end up feeling about English Pronoun Discourse: that there is an obvious type of solution that would leave everyone chill, and yet it seems to often elude the imagination of the people involved themselves

And I just got confirmation from a second ex-colleague that a deal with midjourney has been brewing since months ago. Not any extra details, just that's a real thing.

Shit, I don't see any way for this to happen that doesn't make it an apocalyptic event the size of the porn ban. Fuck.

Shit. This may be pure chance and coincidence, and it's not he is in a position to be able to talk about anything, but seeing prominent staff members announcing they are moving their original photography out of tumblr just two weeks ago seems a pretty significant cue of shit to be about to hit the fan.

Just tested. It’s possible to swap out pictures on already-published posts. So in that case, a solution:

Nightshade your photo posts now.

Even if you don’t post your own art anymore, go back to your old stuff and watermark it.

Do it ASAP, before the deal goes through and the scraping begins.

This will not only protect your art, but has the opportunity to fuck over this deal on a pretty large scale. The more of these posts that are glazed or poisoned, the less valuable this deal becomes for tumblr and midjourney.

Share this with everyone. And i do mean everyone.

I think the reason folks get confused about whether tabletop RPGs like Dread (i.e., the survival-horror RPG where you determine whether your character dies by making pulls from a Jenga tower) should be considered "diceless" or not is because they're thinking of conflict resolution in RPGs as a binary between "rolling dice (or performing other random-outcome-outputting procedures)" and "non-randomised resource management", when tying conflict resolution to the player's ability to successfully execute a particular skill is actually a third thing. Functionally, games like Dread belongs to the same category of RPGs as boffer LARPs; trying to classify an RPG where conflicts are resolved by having the players get up and hit each other with sticks as diceless or diceful is committing a category error.

Arguably, a game where conflict is resolved by a test of player skill is a sport.

Sea Dracula, the anthropomorphic animal courtroom drama RPG where challenging evidence and cross-examining witnesses are resolved by having the opposing lawyers' players physically get up and have a dance-off, with any uninvolved characters' players acting as judges, is a sport.

More sports could use a narrative fiction layer, tbh. Make football games into the resolution mechanic for a political thriller RPG about the struggle for the soul of a nation

Thinking about the dichotomy of "I feel uncomfortable/triggered in the presence of x/y/z environments I would like to be someplace without that" that I constantly see online and when I tell my therapist I really get uncomfortable when people raise their voices around me even if they aren't actually mad and her response of "you can only control your own reactions and emotions, it's not really fair to police others on how they should exist in your presence" and honestly it sucks to hear but she's right.. it's good to have people be conscientious of what triggers you but really it's up to us to do the hard work of building that emotional resilience. The idea of people around me having to be hypervigilant of what they say and do lest I start getting dysregulated does not sound fun at all, I want people to feel comfortable being themselves around me and that means training my dumb lizard brain to chill tf out. Living in a constant state of avoidance sucks ass for everyone involved.

Seuraavan kerran kun kuulet nurinaa lapsen nimeämisen vaikeudesta, muista Ilmari Kiannon jälkikasvua ja ehdota räkänokalle annettavaksi esimerkiksi vekkulin leikkisää Sotavaltaa tai hieman iloluontoisempaa Iltatähteä.

Miten mä tulkitsen tätä:

The number of people responding to this post claiming to be bodhisattvas is hilarious. If you'd resolved your karma you wouldn't be on tumblr.

A warlord asked his teacher, a great monk, what he would do in his next lifetime.

“Oh,” he said, “I think I will spend a few lifetimes on Tumblr, most likely.”

The warlord was astonished. “Your merit and virtue are renowned far and wide!” he responded. “Why on earth would you be condemned to Tumblr?”

“If I did not post on Tumblr,” his teacher responded, “who would be your mutual?”