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Iconic outifts in TŘI OŘÍŠKY PRO POPELKU 1973 | dir. Václav Vorlíček

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Do you know Diddl?

As a kid in Germany especially in the 90s and 00s I think it's impossible to not know Diddl. But what about other nationalities? Have you ever heard of Diddl???

For reference:

This is Diddl:

a german character that started as a postcard set and then turned into a nationwide phenomenon, especially known for its trading pages.

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And with that, the TGAGWCAGA showcase is over.

From concept to a showcase with over 150 indie games (and over 500 original submissions!) in roughly three weeks.

I'm absolutely exhausted, but honestly really chuffed with how it went. There were a few hiccups but for anyone who's ever seen one of my streams (regular or charity events) you'll know that's par for the course.

The Live Chat was wonderful, so much love for indie devs who are putting out some really amazing games. If you missed it then please consider checking it out above.

Also want to give a special shout out to @sztupy who was able to turn a fully fledged website around in record time.

You can look through every single submission by release status or genre on the website below. Each game has a link to its Steam or Itch store page, so wishlist anything that you think you'll enjoy.

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Tbh the "Loch in Boden / Bronze rin / Glocke fertig / bim bim bim" is always bouncing around in my head like the dvd screensaver

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Comic based off of @musashi’s video essay on Franziska!!

I’ve watched it three times and cried really bad on my first watch, so safe to say, this video has affected me. So I wanted to draw something that paid tribute to it!!! It was definitely a challenge trying to get all the descriptive metaphorical writing into a visual medium, but I hope I did it a justice!!

Please go watch the video!

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Queer Adult SFF Books Bracket: Round 1

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

The Murderbot Diaries series (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, System Collapse, and other stories) by Martha Wells

Endorsement from submitter: "Asexual and agender main character. In later books side characters are revealed to be in poly relationship."

"As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

Science fiction, novella, series, adult

Hunger Pangs series (True Love Bites) by Joy Demorra

In a world of dwindling hope, love has never mattered more...

Captain Nathan J. Northland had no idea what to expect when he returned home to Lorehaven injured from war, but it certainly wasn't to find himself posted on an island full of vampires. An island whose local vampire dandy lord causes Nathan to feel strange things he'd never felt before. Particularly about fangs.

When Vlad Blutstein agreed to hire Nathan as Captain of the Eyrie Guard, he hadn't been sure what to expect either, but it certainly hadn't been to fall in love with a disabled werewolf. However Vlad has fallen and fallen hard, and that's the problem.

Torn by their allegiances--to family, to duty, and the age-old enmity between vampires and werewolves--the pair find themselves in a difficult situation: to love where the heart wants or to follow where expectation demands.

The situation is complicated further when a mysterious and beguiling figure known only as Lady Ursula crashes into their lives, bringing with her dark omens of death, doom, and destruction in her wake.

And a desperate plea for help neither of them can ignore.

Thrown together in uncertain times and struggling to find their place amidst the rising human empire, the unlikely trio must decide how to face the coming darkness: united as one or divided and alone. One thing is for certain, none of them will ever be the same.

Fantasy, romance, paranormal, series, adult

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For my non-German mutuals wondering wtf is happening in the Bundesrepublik of Beer and Bread, here is an overview over the clown show so far:

Nov 6 - chancellor Olaf Scholz fires minister of finances Christian Lindner (FDP) for being an incompetent little bitch and drags him on live TV, resulting in a government crisis as the three party coalition (named Ampel aka "Traffic Light"), which is ruling the country at the moment, falls apart.

Scholz also calls for a vote of confidence on January 15th which (if lost) will lead to the Bundestag being dissolved, triggering snap elections in March. This sends everyone into a panic because the ultra right-wing AfD (with Best Of hits such as "Russia is sexy.", "We should criminalize abortions and force every woman to have more babies instead of rights." and "Deport all immigrants and traitors." and the inofficial ones such as "Why don't we just kill everyone we don't like, let's start with the queers.") has been gaining support for a while (because MAGA has no monopoly on racism, sexism, hate and overall stupidity) and no one with an ounce of empathy or a triple digit IQ likes that very much and is thus worried they might actually make it into a new coalition.

Nov 7 - minister for justice Marco Buschmann is heartbroken over the Ampel-Aus and resigns.

Volker Wissing (FDP), minister for transport, commits the funniest anime betrayal and backstabs his party in order to keep his job, leaves the FDP but gets promoted to minister of justice as a little treat. The memes skyrocket.

Bettina Stark-Watzinger, minister of education and research, resigns along with Buschmann and gets replaced by Cem Özdemir (current minister for food and agriculture) because agriculture - education - at the end of the day where's the difference, right?

Federal President Steinmeier hands Christian Lindner his official participation certificate in an awkward ceremony at castle Bellevue. This is broadcast live on television so everyone can be sure that the little bitch is really leaving.

Friedrich Merz (CDU) threatens the nation with the promise that if he (Merz) becomes chancellor, he will let Lindner back into the government so they can keep fucking up the country's budget together. Bffs.

Nov 8 - after backstabbing the FDP Wissing's website gets hacked in retaliation to display FDP ads.

Meanwhile concerns are being voiced that snap elections in March might be way too early due to a lack of paper.

Robert Habeck (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), vice chancellor and minister for economic affairs and climate action, announces that he will be running for the position of chancellor with a social media post that shows him wearing a Swiftie bracelet which spells "Kanzler-Era" (chancellor-era). This sends Gundolf Siebeke from the super conservative CDU spiralling.

Nov 9 - Siebeke fires off a tweet stating that if Habeck becomes chancellor that would of course be totally the fault of women alone (who are all too emotional to make rational decisions) and Germany should "inofficially" consider revoking women's right to vote and officially implement "antiemotional" history lessons in school, earning him a massive shitstorm (completely deserved). Siebeke deletes the tweet.

Nov 10 - previous minister of justice Marco Buschmann processes his grief over the end of the traffic light coalition by composing and uploading a song to Soundcloud (feat. Gregorian chants) which is not exactly a banger but is admittedly still better than 99% of Germany's entries in the ESC these past few years.

Siebeke is still on his misogynistic bs and makes another incoherent and sexist tweet, this time yapping about queens and Christianity while trying to paint himself as the misunderstood victim.

There are sadly no more Volker Wissing memes.

Nov 12 - everyone has agreed to move the elections from March to the end of February because paper is no longer an issue, I guess? However, now everyone is unhappy because the date clashes with the carnival. No joke.

Siebeke changes the banner on his Twitter profile to read "Frauen. Wahl. Recht. Der 19. Januar 1919" / "Women. Right (to). Vote. January 19th 1919" in a pathetic attempt to show how much he actually (not) respects women while at the same time claiming in his Twitter bio that "only conservatism can secure democracy, freedom, rule of law, equality, climate and culture". No comment.

Nov 13 - 113 members of parliament have officially called for the Bundestag to open the long overdue investigation in order to finally ban the AfD.

It has been the longest week in the history of the Bundesrepublik. Everyone needs a fucking break.

To be continued

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Miike Snow is such a funny music group to think about because you remember "Genghis Khan" and it's like, oh, yeah, a one-hit wonder, literally just a band with one really big song who fly under the radar otherwise. But "Genghis Khan:" wasn't even "a really big song." One of their most popular, yeah, but its chart performance wasn't actually that impressive, especially internationally, compared to most other one-hit wonders. But that gay james bond shit absolutely charted at #1 with all of us on tumblr dot com exclusively

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rereading a midsummer night's dream and the amount of trust the craftsmen have for the nobles' reading comprehension is just hilarious

"i wonder if they will understand that i'm actually not a lion" "i think we should make it clear that i'm a person playing a wall and not actually a wall" "are they in fact at all familiar with the concept of acting"

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Tear them apart!

[source]

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In 2011 an elderly german trans woman filed a lawsuit regarding the Transsexuellengesetz (TSG) that regulated change of civil status and name for trans people. It required you (among other things) to get two indepedent psychological evaluations, to have had genital surgery and to be "provably" sterile. The trans woman filing the lawsuit had planned to enter a civil partnership with her partner, a woman, which would have been impossible at the time; they would have had to marry (which was a purely heterosexual thing back then I swear I'm not old) with her deadname and everything in the register. The lawsuit concerned the fact that due to her health, getting surgery was out of the question for her. The german constitutional court ruled the requirements of having to have had surgery and being sterile unconstitutional discriminatory, struck them from the law and advised the law makers to draft up a new law. All's well that ends well, right?

Well, at this point I would like to point out, that, apparently, according to that reasoning, requiring trans people by law to be sterile was not thought to be discriminatory against trans people as such, but only against those who would not be able to be permanently sterilized.

Anyway, the court demanded a new law to be put in place, and nothing happened for 12 years. Only last year a new law (the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz, self determination law) was drafted and finally implemented this year, in 2024.

At this point I should probably mention that these laws exlusively regulate name change (which in germany is much more difficult than a lot of other places) and civil status, not medical transition. Regulating medical transition is up to health care providers and health insurances, which in general tend to sort of follow international standards. So in general, if you want to get on hormones the official way, you need a diagnosis that until the implementation of the ICD 11 on January 1st 2022 was called Transsexualismus MzF/FzM (Transsexualism MtF/FtM) and was categorized as a personality disorder. Ironically, often psychologists that specialize in trans people tend to immediately slap you with the diagnosis when they find out that you're desperate enough to DIY, because from their perspective it's of course safer to take hormones under supervision, though that really depends on how sympathetic your psychologist is. Anyway, being trans used to be a personality disorder until two years ago.

So, back to the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz. The core of the self determination law is basically the abolishment of the psychologicalizing and medical requirements to change your name and civil status, which is good. However. It guarantees much less rights than the TSG once that process is over.

Both laws, in theory, make it a finable offense to reveal a trans persons trans status, if the person in question has changed their name and sex entry through the respectuve law. But the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz, while raising the fine, undermines this in several ways. In the draft of the law was originally a paragraph that required the citizen's centre where you filed for the change to inform every single law enforcement and intelligence agancy of your name change. You know, just in case you're a criminal, and not at all to have the state have lists of trans people. This was struck from the final version, because it wouldn't have lasted a second in court.

What was not struck from the law, however, were a paragraph specifically targeting refugees, and two paragraphs specifically targeting trans women:

The paragraph targeting refugees is, sadly, an accurate representation of the rising nationalism and racism, and typical in how callously it is implemented in law. If a refugee, or any other foreigner, changes their name and gender per law, it can, up to two months after fact, be nullified, if the person is about to get deported. In my opinion this is obviously done to stop appeals against deportation that are based on the fact that it is illegal to deport a person to a country that is currently persecuting a group that that person belongs to, by detransitioning them on paper (though I am not a lawyer and thus can't say for sure, but like it is extremely blatant).

There is another paragraph that is entitled "effects of changing name and entry of sex" that explicitly says that the legal sex and name are required to be used in legal relations but not in matters concerning sports, health and more general, the body. A lot of ink has been spilled about how just assuming that a person on HRT will react to every medical problem and intervention in the same way as a perisex cis person who had been assigned the same gender at birth can be very dangerous, so I won't rehash that argument here. It gets worse, though. The paragraph also states that the Hausrecht (I'm not sure how to translate this as I'm not the lawyer, but among other things it's the right of the owner business or place to manage who is allowed to attend and how they have to behave etc etc) is unaffected by the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz and completely up to the individual/organization, basically implying that discrimination against trans people is not discrimination. The draft of the law comes with a paper expanding on the reasoning of the law. The part that justifies that section talks exclusively about trans women. The most prominent example uses a hypothetical women's sauna and states that the law justifies banning trans women from establishments like this, and women's shelters, of course. Explicitly mentioned is a legal reasoning called "desire for protection of the intimate personal realm and personal security". Just to be clear: this is the german legislative authority explicitly saying that the mere presence of a trans woman ought to be treated like the presence of someone who has made actionable threatened or harassed you. The paragraph itself can be employed against all trans people equally, but the official reasoning is to keep trans women out of women's spaces, and, because of how it is worded, public spaces as well.

The other paragraph that singles out trans women concerns military service: if you change your sex entry within two months before a war breaks out, it will be nullified if that nullification makes you male and thus draftable. It doesn't say whether trans men will be drafted, though. In this case transitioning to be a woman or to be divers (if you were wondering, the three legal genders: male, female, diverse), is explicitly cast as a threat to the safety and orderly functioning of the state. By transitioning I am depriving the state of cannonfodder and thereby threatening its very security.

People on tumblr and twitter have a tendency to talk about gender and identity as completely divorced from reality. Whether I chose to identify as a trans woman or not, psychologists diagnosed me with transsexualism anyway. I never had a choice about this. If somebody has a problem with me in public the german state, with the new law, explicitly and actively encourages them to get the people responsible for the space in question to remove me from it, simply for existing. And it encourages those people in positions of authority to accommodate them. To be trite, I have to consider this every fucking single time I take a piss in a public toilet, which is basically every time I have to be outside for longer than like 2 hours, because even I have to hydrate sometimes. The number of trans women that outright refuse to go see a doctor for almost anything, even unrelated to the law, just because of how they are being treated, is distressingly high. For a lot of us there just doesn't seem to be a point.

In 2021 an iranian trans woman, Ella, commited suicide by lighting herself on fire at the Alexanderplatz. She had been living in germany since 2015. Nazis regularly deface her grave. If you look at the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz you can see the nationalist, racist and transmisogynist attitudes that led to her death enshrined in law.

It's not like the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz is all bad, but I find it hard to appreciate its good point. If you compare it to the old TSG, what sticks out to me is that the TSG required sterilization in addition to surgery and everything. Maybe I'm just so fixated on that because everybody is usually (and with good reason) exclusively talking about the two expert evaluations that were required, quite expensive, and paved the way for a lot of harassment and inappropriate behaviour towards trans people. But in my opinion the sterilization reflects an old attitude towards queer people: eugenics. We should not have children or families. The law was implemented by the BRD in 1981, but you can clearly still see the underlying logic inherited from the early pseudo-scientific ideologies that also motivated the nazis: the so called "bloodline" should be kept clean. Sorry. I hate myself for typing out these words. There could also be a different justification for it, namely to guarantee the integrity of the sexes as distinct categories, but that is not less eugenicist, as it too is about encouraging patrilinear, heterosexual reproduction and discouraging everything else and sterilizing anybody who doesn't fit that pattern. But two things can be true at the same time.

The Selbstbestimmungsgesetz in contrast does not attempt to regulate reproduction as far as I remember (though laws about gay and lesbian parenthood are still extremely restrictive). Instead it seems to be driven by culture war concerns: open hostility towards refugees and a lot of attention paid to the supposed dangers trans people in general and trans women in particular pose to society. Pandering to neo-fascists and TERFs, who decry the law as an evil, decadent poisoning of society anyway.

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i don't like john mulaney because he invited dave chappelle on stage with him after deeply praising him at the height of the transphobic controversy around him after his netflix special but i cant say stuff like hope he dies lest people think i'm in the camp of people that hate him because he got a divorce for some reason

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oh shit get mystery dungeon'd

@savedatateam

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is this anything.

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Imagine sucking so much as a fellow politician that the guy known for having No Backbone™ snaps and develops one but specifically for roasting you on live television