civilianlillian

[civilianlillian]

[civilianlillian]

latest tmnt x naruto chapter has broken me

Ninja Statue of Liberty

[civilianlillian]

why are dudes in fanfic always getting hit with freight train orgasms. why not an orient express orgasm, classy and romantic. where are the shinkansen train orgasms? his orgasm hit him like the TGV atlantique breaking the passenger rail speed record. like the shanghai maglev, his orgasm was a feat of engineering but something of a commercial disappointment.

[civilianlillian]

Infinite Pieces

Originally posted 6th September 2020

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When she walks through the next door, she finds herself overwhelmed with windows. Windows to an endless council of girls who are and are not her.

The first window she focuses on, she sees an Elizabeth exactly like her. But then, she sees this Elizabeth’s hand, with all four fingers severed, and memories come rushing to her mind, memories that are and are not hers.

This Elizabeth’s left hand has become her dominant hand, while her right is just little stumps she adorns with a ribbon, weaving in and out between them. Bothersome, this Elizabeth thinks of her hand, as she can’t use both hands like all the people she sees through tears and in books and later amongst Columbia’s populace. Lockpicking is slow and tricky in comparison, her short right digits keep losing grip on the pin she has to keep on the tumbler. Dangerous when time is of the essence; there’s a rush of adrenaline as she tries to focus over the sound of gunfire and men yelling and panic as Booker screams from a bullet to his arm -

She turns to a different window, and sees another Elizabeth. This one is missing both of her feet, severed clean halfway up to her knees. Elizabeth grew frustrated with her childhood wheelchair, fed up with Songbird’s clumsy hands messing up her bookshelves to try and get the right book. It would have been so much easier to get it herself to spare them both the trouble, and so she learned to make prosthetics like she made her own clothes, getting better with practise as she outgrew each pair. Walking had been a new experience to get used to, but she had all the time in the world to master it. Then many new sensations she had to adapt to, such as shifting sand or terrain coated in rubble, running faster than she thought she ever could, jumping and landing off of the skylines and stumbling or falling over afterward. Booker takes extra care with their routes and makes sure he’s always close to her, and his concern is appreciated if repetitive.

This Elizabeth has no choice but to keep the bloodied boots when she changes clothes, because her prosthetics can’t fit the shape of the clean pair she finds. They only fit all the shoes in the tower she had crafted the wooden feet to fit perfectly in.

Another window shows an Elizabeth with her right ear sliced in half and on her head a round patch of skin, both cut at the same angle. The patch is sparse in this spot here and entirely missing hair in that spot, and Elizabeth tries to style the rest of her hair to cover up the healed scar tissue. She still draws some looks when she’s finally out, perhaps a tut of pity too many.

Elizabeth has long since childhood become aware of the small metal plate in the middle of that patch, and the window-gazing version of herself suddenly sees how and why it’s there in her mind, a infant memory otherwise lost.

Another Elizabeth, her face obscured with a mask. It’s been painted with detailed decoration, hours of time poured into each brush stroke of each bird and flower. It’s breathtaking, because Elizabeth doesn’t want anyone to see the missing half of her nose, or the horrid open half of her mouth and cheek that makes it impossible to eat or drink without the feeling of judgemental eyes that may or may not be looking on her at the time. She knows too well from when she could once go anywhere how the people would stare and scream in horror, and never again does she wish to know that feeling should she ever get another chance to leave.

Another Elizabeth, a missing arm at the elbow. Another Elizabeth, a missing arm from the shoulder down. Another Elizabeth with no hands for any lockpicking, any painting. Another Elizabeth with no body below the hip. Another Elizabeth, her head…

And for the infinite Elizabeths whose windows she saw, there were as many Annas who mirrored them.

[civilianlillian]

Some thoughts.

[civilianlillian]

“All of the ace/aro rep in Borderlands 2 comes from Burch’s ask.fm and isn’t canon!”

Not quite.

Zer0’s aromanticism is straight-up in the game as of Moxxi’s Wedding Day Massacre. They are asked if they have any romantic entanglements, and their exact response is: “combat is my love / brutal violence, my partner / I need no one else.” The only debates that are ever brought to this are almost word-for-word the same arguments people make to dismiss aromanticism as a whole.

Maya is implied to be aromantic in official supplemental materials and even more strongly in Moxxi’s DLC (likely due to trauma, which is its own problem, but that’s for another post) and oblivious to being considered attractive in Son of Crawmerax, supporting the notion that she doesn’t see herself as a sexual entity at all–a common asexual experience. 

People have argued that she can’t be aro because she has been in a relationship, which is not only horribly misinformed, but ghastly when you consider that the relationship she mentioned was one she was coerced into by Brother Sophis, the man who raised her.

The usual argument against Maya’s asexuality is that there isn’t enough supporting canon, which may be fair if you isolate that part of her identity from its context, but we’re kind of past that point when there are multiple articles about her asexuality–including one by Mikey Neumann, the original lead writer of Borderlands 3. He stresses the importance of representation in media and commends Anthony Burch for his part in the fight for it:

“And the rub of it all, is the best representation I’ve seen of asexuality anywhere in the massive space that is consumable media, was in a game I wrote on, but didn’t even think to do!”

Is this enough to acknowledge us?

[civilianlillian]

We are in SILENT hill. Girl shut up

[civilianlillian]

Fascism thrives on ignorance and anti-intellectualism. Here are some ways you can combat it:

There is an ongoing literacy crisis. Teach kids how to read phonetically (other methods produce poor literacy) and introduce them to fun books, both fiction and educational non-fiction.

Teach kids about critical thinking and the scientific method.

You can also introduce kids to edutainment like Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, The Magic Schoolbus, Bill Nye The Science Guy, Beakman's World, etc.

Help kids develop media literacy skills by asking them literary analysis questions about the media they engage with. Even very young children can begin learning literary analysis if the questions are phrased in words they can understand.

Learn and help other people learn information literacy, ie, how to locate and evaluate information.

Learn the red flags of pseudoscience, and educate other people about them.

Educate people and share media on real science and real history, because fascist narratives are full of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. (Miniminuteman, Gutsick Gibbon and Bart D. Ehrman's YouTube channel are great, by the way!)

Make learning a joyful experience, and show people the beauty and wonder of what's real. Being a discouraging killjoy will spoil your efforts.

[civilianlillian]

whenever i see a post about someone wondering how an  asexual and a sexual can be in a healthy relationship there’s always someone being applauded for saying well asexuals can have sex too or just because someone’s asexual doesn’t mean they won’t have sex but i have never, not once, EVER seen someone say well hey, some sexuals don’t have sex. you can have a full relationship without sex. just throwing it out there

[civilianlillian]

[civilianlillian]

(and don’t let them convince you otherwise !)

[civilianlillian]

yeah.

[civilianlillian]

[civilianlillian]

censorship is a plague. the rest of the internet is not tiktok, stop censoring triggers and tags. i cannot blacklist suicide if you tag it on ao3 as “su!c!de”, i cannot avoid a show with bestiality if you mark it on a site where the entire point is to list potential triggers of a show, specifically doesthedogdie, as “b********y”. if i didn’t see additional comments, i would’ve never known they had an episode about bestiality unless i went in and watched the show and figured it out myself, which destroys the entire purpose of doesthedogdie.

you are not protecting people with triggers, you’re actively harming them by shoving a potential trigger in their face that they can’t avoid. you’re harming people with screenreaders, disabled people, and nonenglish speakers because you are uncomfortable typing out a word. pro tip: just don’t talk about it then. go away. we don’t need our hands held by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing OR doesn’t respect us enough to do it properly. have you people learned nothing from the tumblr porn ban.

[civilianlillian]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[civilianlillian]

[civilianlillian]

This is a really good thread.