#<- we are not actually at nuclear war

[great-axepectations]

"The Incident" is going to make everything in this post look like a daycare WE ARE AT DEFCON 1 CIVIL WAR IS IMMINENT THIS IS NOT A DRILL

What must it be like to be on a server with Doc? Every time he posts in the Hermitcraft Discord server must be absolutely insane.

Is anyone available to help me kill 3 wardens that got loose on the nether roof? Sorry actually it might be more like 20

Hey if it's not too much trouble, could no one log on for the next 30 minutes? I'm trying to transport an ender dragon I pulled into the overworld and loading chunks could mess it up

Anyone want to play a children's card game? I outsourced my deck building to a think tank made of hundreds of people and I want to absolutely destroy someone in a match

Does someone know a good rap artist to collab with? I want to make an anthem for the nation I founded in my massive hole of a base and Snoop Dog never got back to me

So we're not having a team meeting, just an informal brainstorming session? Cool, can I invite Christopher Paolini? Yeah the guy who wrote the Eragon books

If you see any ghasts flying over spawn town, I released like 30 of them as a prank. There should be like 2 left so don't kill them, they're an endangered species

I left that shulker at spawn FOR A REASON. Whoever took it, YOU KNOW WHAT I'M CAPABLE OF. RETURN IT OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES

Just a heads up guys, I'm inviting some Mojang devs on to the server so I can show them the cannon I made that can shoot an arrow through 3000 solid blocks in one tick and immediately destroys a full set of netherite armor

Grian was annoying me so I built a cannon that shoots charged creepers at his base with startling accuracy. Then he used it for his own gain so I build a goat mech that poops explosives to guard my base. What do you mean that's not how normal people handle disputes? He's clearly the unhinged one!

Be careful going into my base, I have a pet warden at the bottom of the perimeter. No, a PET. Yes it's there on purpose, his name is King

No one touch the chunk loader at spawn, I'm using it to transport items thousands of blocks instantly. No, of course it's not an intended feature but I still managed to pull it off in vanilla, didn't I?

How did the world eater go? Well I needed to use 3 minecraft accounts so it would run properly and at one point it was disrupted by solar flares, which I think might have been God trying to strike me down for my hubris. But other than that, yeah it went well!

Please note that these examples are ONLY FROM SEASON 9

[letsplaythermalnuclearwar]

ok but can we talk how in Legendary, Antinous asked a question. he’s being as rude as possible but “when’s your tramp of a mother going to chose a new husband” is a question. a question that Telemachus does not want to answer. and yeah, the immediate follow up of “why don’t you open her room so we can have fun with her” makes it seem rhetorical, but rhetorical or not, it’s definitely a question. and I’ve always wondered why Telemachus is offended by ‘tramp’ when the ‘why don’t you open her room’ thing is a million times worse. 

But what if Telemachus wasn’t offended that Antinous called Penelope a tramp? The suitors have probably been saying stuff like that for ten years, he’s used to it. What if, more than anything else, Telemachus wanted to make them forget about the question they asked? What if he was just trying to distract them?

[ofswordsandpens]

reblog this and put in the tags your favorite (or most memorable) mandatory reading from school

[sherlockholmeshound]

whenever ppl try to come up with some version of 'romance and love isn't forbidden by the jedi, on this one novel-'

i'm just...

[tanadrin]

Rarely do we predict the end of the world two or three generations hence; it’s always “this generation will not pass away before all these things have come to pass.” And I’m sure there are a lot of reasons for this—if you’re running a genuine doomsday cult, for instance, you don’t want to put the doomsday too far off. And I *think* part of the driving force there is that it’s really hard for us to imagine that the world will continue once we are gone, more or less intact. Like, it’s really weird to look at small children and know that, if everything goes right, they will see and do and think things you will never share in. That your life before they came along will be nothing more than the thinly imagined world beyond the borders of photographs that your parents’ or grandparents’ was before you. That however important and accomplished you are, the world will continue to spin when you have died.

That’s a hard fact to get your head around! And it’s sort of the inverse of the way we ofte treat our childhood as cosmogonic, as the default state against which all else rises and falls. We are prone to a solipsism where the bounds of the word are the bounds of our lives. That’s not a novel idea, but it does make me very skeptical of any eschatology positive or negative. The world has, so far, an extremely good track record of zero transformative catastrophes or eucatastrophes that take place with the sound of trumpets in the twinkling of an eye. Sure, it has lots of moments of *change.* Whole ages of them—dramatic sometimes, but always continuous. Differentiable, you might say, in that however rapidly the status quo is in flux you can see there is one, and how we got here from a previous state.

And not only do doomsayers have a pretty lousy track record, they frequently exhibit telltale signs that their doomsaying is based in something other than careful deduction—like Paul Ehrlich not only missing the Green Revolution (a forgivable error perhaps) but digging in even further the more reality continued to drift from his apocalyptic forecasts. One cannot help but think of Harold Camping, continually reissuing his predictions for the Second Coming. But also—peak oil was wrong; climate change has been bad but looks like it will not be “the end of industrial civilization” bad; a NATO/Warsaw Pact nuclear war never came to pass, (although arguably that’s the one that was in a lot of ways the most rational, and where we got luckiest). The non-doomsday-prophet types look at these fortunate turns and go “thank God that never happened!” But some people seem truly disappointed—after all, if the word will outlast you, how special can you or your era really be?

[hussyknee]

Not so friendly reminder that Tankies are people who deny not only the genocides of Russia but also Vietnam and China (including the Uyghurs), and are apologists for the North Korean regime. They push Russian propaganda of "colour revolutions" every time a Global South country rises up against a totalitarian government because they believe totalitarianism is merely anti-communist agenda; deriding, dismissing and dehumanizing the liberation movements of our countries that come at great human cost. They're not anti-imperialists or anti-colonial; their chief issue with the imperial core is that it's not their ideology seated at the heart of it. They only care about Global South lives when it serves their ideology, and have no genuine concern or curiosity about the ground realities or agency of the communities impacted by imperialism and colonialism.

I also want you to understand that every major power player involved in this conflict is a genocidal fascist. Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis that are fighting Israel are funded by the theocratic Iranian regime headed by Ebrahim Raisi (begging you to remember the hundreds of Iranian girls and women killed for protesting it). Iran is also an ally of the notorious Bashar Al-Assad's regime in Syria, responsible for the genocide and displacement of millions of his own people while actively funding the Islamic State he wages war against. Both Assad and Raisi are allies of Putin, who is currently trying to colonize and genocide Ukraine and is terrorising Poland, Hungary, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia etc. However, Iran and Putin (half-heartedly) are also allies of the Armenians who are being genocided by Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is supported by the US, but also Erdogan in Turkey, infamous dictator that hates the European Union and is a close pal of Putin. Meanwhile the US's best friends in the Middle East is Israel, which hates Arabs, and Saudi Arabia, who doesn't recognise Israel as a country but is hated by most of the MENA and is currently in a Cold War with Iran.

*yanks y'all by the shirt and shouts in your face* THERE ARE NO GOOD GUYS HERE, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?? ONLY INNOCENT CIVILIANS CAUGHT IN A SPIDER WEB OF GREEDY, DESPOTIC, GENOCIDAL, FASCIST CUNTS. THERE IS NO POINT TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHICH ONE IS THE BIGGEST THREAT TO GLOBAL DEMOCRACY BECAUSE ALL THE FALL OF ONE DOES IS CREATE A POWER VACCUUM THAT WILL IMMEDIATELY BE FILLED BY THE NEXT BULLY.

These governments can only be toppled from within by their own people once external threats like war with their neighbours are eased, because militaries with nothing to fight are economic black holes that try to eat itself, and it's this economic stress that act as catalysts for coalition building and civilian revolt. Military losses weaken imperialists' coercive power and legitimacy over their own people, so the best thing you can do to help them agitate for change is preventing imperialist expansions from claiming any more victims.

[alcestas-sloboda]

how did it became a norm for every organisation and person in the West to devalue Ukrainians on every single level is beyond me

[anotherpapercut]

trying to teach other people in their 20s that it actually is essential to learn about the political climate of the 70s-00s to understand our current political climate is like worse than pulling teeth

[selfinflictedgunshotwound]

having twin peaks thoughts & theories bc i just started watching the return (i know spoilers ofc) and i have literally nowhere else to put my thoughts so i'm just gonna dump them here.

obviously i don't every single thing about twin peaks was meant to just be like... One Thing and that's it. i think there's room for interpretation for a reason butttt the one thing i just keep going back to about the show is just that. like. it's about the corruption of innocence and the perversion of family. of cycles of violence and abuse. children being sexually taken advantage of by "trusted" adults. teenage prostitution rings. barely a single relationship in the town wherein people aren't cheating on someone/cheated in the past. bob being "the evil that men do" (tbf this is technically just albert's theory but i choose to believe it) and now this weird thing with judy/the experiment (are they the same thing? idk yet) being the thing that CREATED bob? there's this weird thing i get with the black lodge/waiting room like... good people can't survive there without disappearing completely (nonexistence) or being permanently changed (in the case of annie, ig)

and then ofc you have the tormented souls being trapped there (laura, maddy, caroline(tbh idk what was going on w her doppelganger being there?), leland(he was originally a victim too, i'm getting there)) because of the things that were done TO them. i was thinking like. in regards to the frogmoth that crawled into sarah's mouth (when she was a child) and everything that's going on w/ her in the return (watching insanely violent things on tv, "eating" men, etc.) ... compounded with leland's story about bob "I was just a boy. I saw him in my dreams. He said he - he wanted to play. He opened me and I invited him and he came inside me." ... mr. c's introduction song being a twisted version of "american woman" (i've heard this is also related to diane's doppelganger, as well. makes sense) w/ the stand-out lyrics (aka the backwards ones) being "all my headstrong women... don't let em put you in a corner. make em salute you like a flag on the fourth of july." and sarah palmer having a shortened and remixed version of "good man" blaring in her house that just repeats the lyrics "i'm a good man. i'm having fun." like. there's smth to this i'm not insane...

anyways to go even FURTHER... there being specific emphasis on being in the right time and the right place. opposites (giant and dwarf, young and old, black and white, etc.) and the planets jupiter and saturn.

the experiment violently killing that couple that was watching the glass box bc they were having sex? or because they were(n't) watching? or both? the experiment very obviously being the thing inside of sarah but it pulling off it's own face within sarah and revealing a smile that looks eerily similar to laura's (even if not exact... ppl are such pedants about things being exact in this show where literally everything is drenched in like 8 metaphors at any given time) AND the laura in the black lodge/waiting room removing her own face in the exact same way. it's weird that in this instance, laura's dialectical opposite or opposing force is her own mother who she claims she has so much in common with. but this goes even a step further because when the experiment spawned in the glass box, it has a gold orb (or smth like it) like the one laura's like... spirit? was born from? AND APPARENTLY there's a little clip of what sounds like sheryl lee's voice saying "gone" or "the one" or something like that while the experiment is flying towards them (not unlike an owl) to kill them... hm. not to mention the experiment has a proboscis-like knife that comes out of its mouth that it uses to kill the guy sexually harrassing sarah at the bar... and carrie page has a dead guy in her motel room that has a hole in his head... could obviously def just be a bullet-wound LMAO but idk let's have fun w it!

i do think there's a crazy connection between sarah, laura, and the experiment/judy/whatever. "the room seems different... and men are coming. something happened to me. i don't feel good..." obviously, i will be able to make more connections and add to this theory as i watch more but from what i've seen i think there's a huge connection to children and how easily it is for them to be taken advantage of (literally every member of the palmer family was taken advantage of as a child when an evil entity entered them. i mean. how more on the nose can you be!!) or for their innocence to get stolen (prostitution, drugs, murder, becoming child brides to abusive older men... the list goes on). and there's obvious themes of intense sexual violence and dreams and blahhhh. it's like 5:30am and i'm theorizing about a show that will never have an actual answer LMAO... to be fair though it's not ABOUT actually "solving" it for me. i think most media works well when you get what you want or need from it and just kind of make that The Point and, for me, twin peaks will always be about the tragedy of laura palmer before it's about anything else!

i really do like that theory that dale cooper is just like. an entity that laura dreamed up to save her originally but in the end, after she had finally escaped being laura palmer and that life and that house and her trauma, he ended up bringing her right back to it. it's like. how does that not make people insane?

[nevesmose]

When I was a kid, there was a hill overlooking our little town with a mysterious concrete structure at the top. To get there you had to go over the old canal, through the abandoned quarry filled with unidentifiable rusted-out equipment scattered around, and then past the creepy broken-down barn where some comedy genius had written "INSERT DICK HERE" next to a suspiciously-positioned hole in the wall.

The whole place was forested over thickly enough to muffle most sounds, and every so often you'd tread hollowly on discarded shotgun cartridges from farmers and/or farmers' mums sneaking out to shoot rabbits at night.

It was also haunted by the ghost of a drunk horseman, but being drunk we decided his actual ability to inflict harm on us would be fairly limited.

In any case, having avoided tetanus, gunshot wounds and catastrophic dick chafing, you'd reach a small sunlit clearing right at the top of the hill. The views were truly spectacular - to the north, fields. To the east, fields. To the south, fields. To the west, fields. The benefits of a rural childhood.

Right in the middle of the clearing was a kind of rectangular metal hatchway set low into the ground. Looking at it you could tell it had been opened up and filled in with concrete at some stage, and needless to say our little minds ran rampant trying to guess what was down there. For about fifteen minutes anyway, and then we'd wander off and smack the shit out of each other with tree branches - we were only kids after all.

The main theory, settled on with all the gravitas and judiciousness we could muster, was that it was some kind of Cold War era nuclear bunker. Not that we really knew much of what that meant, all being members of the first post-Soviet generation who didn't have to grow up with ideas like the four-minute warning or Protect & Survive knocking about inside our heads.

Somebody remembered seeing War Games on Channel 4 one weekend afternoon so we based our mental image on that and conjured up a miniature Scottish version of NORAD sitting empty under our feet, all big maps and flashing lights drowned forever in grey concrete.

And then we grew up a bit and thought, nahh, there's no way it was a bunker. It was a radio tower platform or a power substation or something, right?

But it was a bunker though. I looked it up years later and it was a two-person Royal Observer Corps fallout monitoring station to be used for keeping track of the devastation of our closest city, about 20 miles away. The entirety of the UK is hoaching with these things and I can guarantee you if you grew up anywhere in Britain you were much, much closer to them than you might expect.

Not just close to the bunkers but to the people who would have crewed them in the event of armageddon. That's the thing about the ROC, as I've found out since - it was a voluntary service operated by people living nearby.

So who, I wonder, were the unsung unknown uncalled-upon heroes who'd be there when the end came? Who in my sleepy little village with one school, one church and one main street would have had to leave their families to their fate and spend their next, and probably last, two weeks of life in that tiny concrete cell eating strictly rationed food, breathing strictly filtered air, and working out just how many kilotons had been expended on our little corner of the world?

I have my suspicions, but it's not the kind of thing you can just ask your old neighbour out of nowhere. Would they even have gone if they had to? I wouldn't blame them for a second if they chose to stay home instead. I imagine it was something they all had to decide for themselves and no one, least of all the happy beneficiaries of a better world than the one they lived in, has any right to judge.

I feel as though I'm dragging myself to a Meaningful Conclusion here. Oh boy. The past is always closer than you might think, I suppose. Just around the corner, just out of reach, but always there wherever we happen to be.

This post was mainly motivated by reading the excellent Attack Warning Red: How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War by Julie McDowall, who also does the Atomic Hobo podcast which is well worth a listen if you have any interest in this kind of thing. Don't have nightmares.

[sad-endings-suck]

“Jake is a bad father.”

I’m gonna need ya’ll to understand that just because a character is considered a “good guy/hero” does not necessarily mean you should be applying modern real life moral values to them. Jake is born 100+ years in the future, he’s on a completely different planet, him and his family are a different species than us, he’s apart of a completely different culture, he exists in a different social climate, he is at war, and they are fictional. Contextually all this information is so important because it tells us none of these people (no matter how moral or ethical or lawfully good) are not going to perceive what is “right” the same way we are. Because the world that teaches them what “right” and “wrong” are, is a very different world than the one we know. Automatically assuming that a fictional character that doesn’t do exactly what you think they should do is inherently wrong, lacks serious media literacy and basic understanding of fiction as a genre.

[buildoblivion]

hmmmm not sure I liked that one????

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

The Last

slow building apocalyptic thriller

an american academic is at a conference in a remote Swiss hotel when a nuclear apocalypse strands him with just 20 others

50 days in, a body is found in a watertank and he becomes obsessed with investigating to find out who did it

even though the remaining people are just trying to quietly survive as supplies slowly dwindle and the winter approaches

[oveliagirlhaditright]

I can't believe that we're only half-way through February 2023 and so much crazy stuff has already happened this year.

And yet I'm also not at all because I honestly believe these are the "birth pains" the Bible talked about.

And because 2022 was getting so weird, I figured 2023 would probably be the same way and worse. Like, that we'd get more of the same (and maybe more intense things? And perhaps stranger?) and maybe even in faster intervals. (And that also goes hand-in-hand with the Bible mentioning the "birth pains", and how like a woman in labor they would become more frequent and painful.)

[ithacanradio]

sleeping on the floor and marching through the rain: no problem. there's an old professor to wine and dine: one dead three injured. here is a short guide on how to be socially unadjusted communist militants in northern italy

[catgirl-rose]

Hm. Probably not great how there's just. A whole school district. That faces a greater threat of nuclear annihilation than other school districts. And we face that threat blithely.