frigid-arnica

[frigid-arnica]

Howdy folks, the Senate will be considering the first ever resolution blocking arms to Israel. This is huge and historic; it would block government contracting and about $20 billion in arms and support. This is an uphill battle, PLEASE urge your senators to support S.J.Res114-115. This is maybe the most important piece of legislation relating to Palestine that we have ever gotten and we must seize this opportunity.

This doc has information on the resolutions and their process, as well as sample messages and a phone script you can use. Please, use this moment to hear witness for your neighbors.

[frigid-arnica]

great question. while a lot of these gofundmes started to fund evacuations, since the border will not open they have shifted to covering the costs of daily survival in gaza

the cost of food alone in gaza right now has been reported by journalists on the ground (including @siraj2024) to be 20 times the normal price.

and it varies based on location. the north is currently being starved by the IOF so food prices are higher

and there is a lot of evidence on tumblr that proves that these fundraisers do help

@ma7moudgaza2 was able to buy a tent for his family and is currently trying to pay for a solar panel

@siraj2024 was able to secure rent for a (bombed out, but still) apartment for his family over the winter

@mohdiwais was able to fund medical care for his sister after she was shot by the IOF using funds he raised on tumblr

a gaza-based charity called care for gaza has also been directly assisting families with funds used from their gofundme. they even post videos of themselves giving out food

and those are just a few examples. hope this helped!

[frigid-arnica]

[frigid-arnica]

Our fandom forbearers did NOT suffer through Anne Rice, strikethrough, and other bullshit for fucking ACOTAR and Harry Potter fans to fucking ruin it for all of us by selling fanfiction. I am not losing novel length yaoi epics because some of you don't know how to act in fannish spaces and yes I do blame the booktokification of fanfic but I also blame those of you that treat fandom like content to consume and not a community to engage with.

[frigid-arnica]

sopping wet beast

[frigid-arnica]

The race to leave Sweden ends at the Finnish line.

[frigid-arnica]

'On the run'

[frigid-arnica]

I've been thinking about the "burn it all down" rhetoric used by a lot of the individuals on this website. Like, the people that are waiting for the violent, glorius revolution to overthrow the United States so they can finally rebuild it as a better, functioning society.

The idea being that if everything keeps getting worse and worse, eventually somethings gotta give. It's gotta break, and then the rebuilding will begin.

This seems to be closely related to the desire to withhold votes for Harris/Walz, because all they will do is maintain the status quo. And while Trump is arguably worse, he will take them toward the desired "breaking point."

But something that I learned during the height of the Covid pandemic is that this is not true. Or at least, not in the way we think it will be true.

Covid, to me, felt very much like a kind of apocalypse. It was definitely the kind of thing that would have been an apocalypse, if real life was the like the movies.

Society collapses, mass panic as all our systems fail and the world returns to disorder and chaos and life starts to become purely about survival. Streets are empty, you're scavenging for food, the world of polite society has ended for good.

Obviously that didn't happen. It was like, this horrible disease tore the world apart, the apocalypse happened... but nothing really changed. I mean, it did. The whole world changed, and it will never be exactly the same as it was before.

But everyone just kept going, too. There was a stop for some people (white collar workers whose jobs could be done remotely, mainly) but not for everyone else.

And everyone kept having to pay bills and taxes and do their laundry and walk the dog and buy groceries and whatever. We were just doing that all as the world felt like it was ending around us.

Like that's what movies don't tell you about the end of the world. It doesn't end. Not in a big way, a huge explosive way. It's just a whole bunch of little endings where the world just gets shittier and harder to bear in all these ways. Your job becomes harder, your life is literally threatened every time you leave the house.

Certain services just shut down and don't come back, new mandates that make everything harder and shittier are put into place, people die in masses but you're still expected to get on the bus to work every day at the same time.

But all those little endings and the all the ways the world got worse and worse and worse, they never add up to the one big explosive apocalypse that the movies promised.

Where life stops being about paying taxes and scheduling dental appointments and paying bills and starts being about learning to shoot a gun so you can kill your dinner and then take shelter in an abandoned Cheesecake Factory before the zombies show up.

In the real world, the zombies are eating your friends and family and your boss still expects you to clock in at 9 am like usual. And you do it because what other choice do you have? The zombies didn't get you today and you still gotta pay all those bills.

And I think that's just what the world is. I think that's just life, to an extent. The world as we knew it ended forever with Covid, but it also kept on going (not to be like "we were the zombies all along" but the comparison is tempting).

It seems logical that something can only bend so much before it breaks. That the world can only get so much worse before it blows up completely. Capitalism, at least. It's a self cannibalizing system, it's not sustainable forever.

But I don't think it will die the way you'd think it would. With the big satisfying explosion, the absolute end where it all burns down and paves the way to rebuild.

The big revolution, the huge overhaul of it all.

What's more likely is it will just get worse and worse and worse in a bunch of smaller ways, until we redefine our tolerance for suffering to accommodate it.

Because that's what we do. We think "this is rock bottom, it can't get worse." But it does, because it can, so we get our jack hammer and go lower because the bus is waiting and we've got bills to pay.

I think we could do that for a long time. Not forever maybe, but decades more? Almost definitely? Another century? Who knows. I won't.

"Burn it all down" may never come. Just smaller deaths, little apocalypses happening all around us every day.

I see the appeal of burning it all down. It almost feels like it would be a relief, at times.

It's much, much more tiring to try and find all the little ways we can build it back up right now. While it's still standing, maybe a little worse than it was yesterday, but functional. To find the cracks and seal them up, plaster over the holes and find a way to repair the little deaths.

Because it gets worse in little ways all the time, but it can get better, too. And it does. In small ways, every day. Good policies are passed, bad ones are repealed. People make connections and campaign for positive change and there's no big, splashy "we saved the day and ended all evil for good!" resolution like the movies, but the little wins do exist.

The thing about real life is that there is no big apocalypse. Not for everyone. And there is no happily ever after.

But there is small happiness, small victory. Small change, small fights that can be won. And just like the little deaths add up to a world that always seems to be getting worse, the little victories add up too.

The trick, i think, is to not get so caught up in the way it's worse that we stop seeing the ways it's better. That we get so entranced by the romance of burning it all down that we forget all the smaller ways we can and should be fighting to build it back up.

Because at the end of the day, you're still gonna have to go to work tomorrow. Might as well do what you can to make it better in some small way, instead of waiting for it to all get worse.

[frigid-arnica]

The Daily Show | Nov. 6 2024

[frigid-arnica]

Solas’s regrets and the conversations that follow are going to be the end of me

SPOILERS FOR SOLAS’S THIRD REGRET UNDER CUT

Harding: The Chant of Light are Andraste’s vision sent by the Maker.

Lucanis: You’re asking if we just disproved the entire Andrastian faith.

Harding: Did we?

DKDNSJDKFKDOEKS DHDJJFKDKSKSLNFNDK

😅🫠🙃

This adds a new layer to Leliana’s visions from the Maker. We know the Blighted Evanuris were talking to Tevinter magisters, so could one of them have talked to Leliana as well? Or were her visions all in her head and she was just telling herself what she needed to hear at that time?

Playing Veilguard and I need to scream about this somewhere

SPOILERS BELOW CUT



*pacing the room, head in my hands*

So the Black City was never the home of the Maker, just like Corypheus said. It was the prison Solas created for the Evanuris. Holy shit. The Blight existed before Tevinter did. So when Corypheus and the others broke into the Black City, they became infected with the Blight and brought it back to Thedas. The Evanuris blighted themselves for more raw power because of how much Solas was undermining them. Is that why they murdered Mythal? Because she objected? Holy shit. Holy shit.

Talking to Solas is 🤯

[frigid-arnica]

i'm sure there's a canon timeline but dao is a springtime game to me

[frigid-arnica]

Anyways somehow I went down the Kuron rabbit hole and felt that type of sheith pain. Like he still loved Keith. He had no idea he was going to betray them all. He thought he was real, and he knew something was off but had no way to stop it. And he was the one to, even if for a moment, snap out of the brainwashing when Keith said he loved him.

And even fighting amongst all those clones, when it was so apparent that the Shiro standing in front of him likely wasn’t the original Shiro. Even if he had been acting a little odd before the betrayal. And despite this Shiro fighting him, Keith still said he loved him.

These bitches were soooooo in love. In a heart breaking and tragic love. Literally till the very end.

Keith looked at Shiro Like This during what he’d think were his last moments alive, as they both fell to their death.

[frigid-arnica]

Finished the cutscene

SPOILERS

Okay, so they were really just high dragons before being bound to the Evanuris. I wonder if only Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain survived in Solas’s prison for so long because the others died when their dragons were slain during the various blights over the ages. Though that doesn’t explain how Solas slept for all that time and didn’t age or waste away or die. Unless there’s something missing. Like he was put in a stasis spell or something after he created the Veil

Playing Veilguard and I need to scream about this somewhere

SPOILERS BELOW CUT



*pacing the room, head in my hands*

So the Black City was never the home of the Maker, just like Corypheus said. It was the prison Solas created for the Evanuris. Holy shit. The Blight existed before Tevinter did. So when Corypheus and the others broke into the Black City, they became infected with the Blight and brought it back to Thedas. The Evanuris blighted themselves for more raw power because of how much Solas was undermining them. Is that why they murdered Mythal? Because she objected? Holy shit. Holy shit.

Talking to Solas is 🤯

[frigid-arnica]

At this point, every time I go to talk to you-know-who, I’m going to need to open this app and yap because I’m much farther along than my best friend at the moment.

SPOILERS UNDER CUT

So the Old Dragon Gods of Tevinter were just weapons of the Evanuris 🤔 So does that mean they were really dragons? Or were they made by Ghilan’nain? But considering there are two blighted dragons now, it must mean that Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain found the last two dragon/arch demons.

Also, I love how this whole conversation prior to the Solas Lore Drop (tm) gradually whittles down your dialogue options about what you’re going to do to convince the wardens to follow you until you literally have no choice but “whatever is necessary” because Solas won’t accept anything else. The parallels the game is drawing between Rook and Solas is super interesting and I’m excited to see where it leads. Though I can’t decide if Rook is supposed to be Solas’s foil or his mirror yet. I suppose that might be up to the player. We’ll see

Playing Veilguard and I need to scream about this somewhere

SPOILERS BELOW CUT



*pacing the room, head in my hands*

So the Black City was never the home of the Maker, just like Corypheus said. It was the prison Solas created for the Evanuris. Holy shit. The Blight existed before Tevinter did. So when Corypheus and the others broke into the Black City, they became infected with the Blight and brought it back to Thedas. The Evanuris blighted themselves for more raw power because of how much Solas was undermining them. Is that why they murdered Mythal? Because she objected? Holy shit. Holy shit.

Talking to Solas is 🤯

[frigid-arnica]

the king and his adviser have something important to discuss 🤫🍃

[frigid-arnica]

i think what’s on a person’s nightstand is very telling so reblog this and put in the tags the things you have on your nightstand