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Ted Pim (Irish, b. 1987, b. West Belfast, Ireland) - A Taste of Things to Come, 2021, Paintings: Oil on Canvas

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First off, click here.

The wheel just assigned you one of the Worldwide Box Office Winners from the past 35 years. (No 2024 because we don't know that winner, yet.)

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My latest watercolour and ink painting, the Loon, in time for Canada Day! It’s not my usual style of animal portrait, definitely more whimsical, but I really love the final result. 

Edit: Now available on Society 6

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anyone contrasted Starship Troopers (movie) with Ender's Game (movie) in the way that they both involve teenagers being drafted by a fascist state into genocidal war against aliens?

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take everything I say with a hint of garlic, ginger, spring onions and a dash of soy sauce

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victorian mussel shaped vinaigrette in handcrafted silver, engraved 'Lucy'. 1876.

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Unmute !

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they used to do nothing to me back in the morally neutral lab. it sucked

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“Don’t give them a taste of their own medicine. They already know what it tastes like. Give them a taste of your own medicine. If they lied, let your medicine be honesty. If they played with your emotions, let your medicine be maturity. Don’t be afraid to be yourself, even if it means removing yourself from lives that you want to be in. You are, no doubt, worthy of being valued for who you are. So be who you are.”

— Najwa Zebian

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my pet mold spores

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Because you know a lot about these sorts of things: is D&D the first place where devils and demons are distinct groups of mutually antagonistic evil entities as opposed to being synonyms for one another, or did they steal that from some obscure fantasy pulp novel from the 1960s, as so much other stuff now seen as iconic to D&D is?

Much like making picky distinctions between wizards, sorcerers and warlocks, the general idea of making "devils" and "demons" distinct classes of supernatural beasties pre-dates Dungeons & Dragons in popular fiction, but the specific definitions that D&D uses are basically only applicable to D&D; every work of sword and sorcery fiction I'm aware of that distinguishes between the two terms does so differently.

For example, in Robert Aspirin's "Myth Adventures" series, "Devils" are a specific race of extradimensional aliens who coincidentally resemble pop-Christianity's notion of the Devil (i.e., red skin, goat legs, etc.), while a "demon" is simply any sapient being who's been magically summoned from another dimension. Hence, Devils are sometimes demons (at least when they're away from home), but – unless there's a convention or something going on – the majority of demons in any given dimension are not Devils.

To the point, I can't think of any particular work of pre-1974 (i.e., pre-D&D) sword and sorcery fiction whose demons-versus-devils split hinges on Law and Chaos in the same way that D&D's does; I suspect that the game's authors simply took the pre-existing notion of demons and devils being different things and pasted the terms onto a straight lift of Michael Moorcock's "Eternal Champions" cosmology (which doesn't use either term) – though if anyone is aware of a prior case of fantasy fiction specifically associating "devil" with cosmic Order and "demon" with cosmic Chaos, I'd love to be corrected!

(As always, if anyone would like to offer a counterexample, please check the publication date first; works published after 1974 post-date Dungeons & Dragons, so they're no help here.)

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something that should be taken with a grain of salt are the statistics talking about the high rates of mental illness + neurodivergence among trans people (ocd, bpd, adhd, autism, etc)

I see both sides of the political spectrum taking these studies at face value - conservatives say we're broken, and trans people try to come up with reasons why for example autism + gender dysphoria makes sense and why one of them feeds into another

at the end of the day you have to remember that we're the one category of people on this planet who are legally required to go see a psychiatrist in order to receive non-psychiatric medication and surgeries.

more trans people are in therapy by law than any other demographic of people, and as a result, this captures more comorbidities.

if I had to look at my own family & rates of mental illness?

mom, dad, 2 maternal aunts, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, sister, sibling, and me all have OCD.

7/9 of them are cishet, never been to therapy, never diagnosed. 2/9 are trans, required therapy for hormone treatment, and were diagnosed.

you don't have to do any math to just see that the resulting statistics end up intensely skewed.

and we can think back to how autism was virtually never diagnosed more than 50 years ago - ruling out any grandparents being included in statistics - and even my parents' generation (they're in their 60s now) wouldn't have been included either.

I don't think it's to anyone's benefit to accept these studies uncritically. a lot of these things are hereditary and far more prevalent in the overall population than people realize

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Some absolutely glorious capes, coats, and dolmans that I wish I could wear. It's finally cold and wet where I live and I'd definitively leave the house more if I could go out in one of these.

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