#Agonistes

[neptuniite]

Halfdan sketches

[picopepin]

Since Ghost got it i can share this little Ago as the doll doodle I did with the inventory themed care package i sent ^^

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

"THE SECRET FACE OF GENESIS" -- WHERE HE WALKS, AGONY FOLLOWS.

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on promotional shots of Agonistes in massively detailed 12 inch scale, plus a shot of his six inch action figure, from Clive Barker's "Tortured Souls," released by McFarlane Toys in July 2001. 12 inch version released in October 2002.

BRAND: Clive Barker's Tortured Souls

GENRE: Horror & Fantasy

PRODUCT TYPE: Action Figure

SERIES: Clive Barker's Tortured Souls

MINI-BIO: "He is a transformer of human flesh; a creator of monsters. If a Supplicant comes to him with sufficient need, sufficient hunger for change - knowing how painful that will be - he will accommodate them. They become objects of perverse beauty beneath his hand; their bodies remade in fashions that they have no power to dictate. As written, The Book of Genesis is wrong in parts -- God did not rest on the seventh day, rather continuing to work to create creatures that did not walk the perfect Garden of Eden, rather ugly demons and destroyers, like that of Agonistes. As a surgeon, he is a monster that appears to those with the most desperate need to be altered, altered into creatures of only death - assassins who feel only pain. "

-- TORTURED SOULS FANDOM (Tortured Souls Wiki)

Source: https://mcfarlane.com/toys/agonistes & https://torturedsouls.fandom.com/wiki/Agonist.

[earhartsease]

Samson Protagonistes

[lunjetlyd]

i love the imagery of these deer by @magpiecrown

[andmaybegayer]

sometimes I forget that while many of my opinions straightforwardly track from the inscrutable memetic subcultures I subscribe to, they're inscrutable memetic subcultures so offline normal people do not expect some of these opinions to go together.

[comrade-corpse]

Apparitor and Agonist are mlm/wlw hostility

[catgrandpa]

I wish the characters weren’t all so great because Kabru should be my favorite character he has everything for me but then the autistic monster fucker guy opens his damn mouth and says something so god damn stupid and I’m done for.

[ddarker-dreams]

ur mention of neurotransmitters and sympathetic nervous system gave me an intense shock bc i had just studied all that in med school today and was not expectimg to see it in a gojo fic 😭 but oh my god if only words could express how wonderful that was and how much i adored it

thank you very much AAAA <3

i was going to have his dialogue get even more technical with it but i made myself exercise restraint 😔 at first, i wondered if gojo would even be the type to start randomly lecturing people about things, but then i remembered his whole 'achilles and the tortoise' bit. he's a nerd. he wanted to make sure reader understands just how much of her his six eyes ability lets him see.

i've always found the physiological/biological similarities between love and fear interesting. obviously, there are differences, but they share a lot in common too. dilated pupils, increased respiration and heartrate, adrenaline 📈, stuff like that. the idea of a yandere being able to see your limbic system going !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! freaked me out. it's beyond invasive. and, quite frankly, really weird.

[neptuniite]

Maniacally posting hal & erres sketch crops at 2 AM

(ive posted this one before i just wanted to look at it again)

[djinn-ghul]

alissa white-gluz

[transmutationisms]

what are your thoughts on the current ozempic/semaglutide ‘craze’ ? weight loss drugs are obviously nothing new but it does seem like these ones are being marketed as being uniquely ‘safe’ with some doctors/medical experts/shareholders hoping that they’ll be prescribed to everyone eventually (red flag to me right there lol)

i don't know enough about the pharmacology of diabetes to judge the consequences of these drugs for their initial purpose, but as weight loss drugs, yeah i find them pretty concerning. i mean, they're just appetite suppressants that work by fucking with the endocrine system rather than (as with most prev weight loss drugs) being stimulants. so, as far as i can tell the claims that they're uniquely or newly safe are coming from the fact that they don't cause the side effects that stimulants would (racing heart and so forth). but the side effects people are reporting are just like... the effects of chronic food restriction lmao. like, losing weight by eating less is kinda the same process no matter what.... it's starvation at a subclinical level, or rather, starvation prescribed by the clinic and experienced as consciously unconcerning because of the drug's effect on the endocrine system. the fact that people are experiencing micronutrient deficiencies, bone density loss, hair loss, the same skin/nail problems as with any other self-starvers, and so forth doesn't bother these doctors because in their minds weight loss is inherently 'healthy' and so ipso facto the biological effects of energy deprivation are nbd. it's pretty ghoulish.

i don't think these drugs have been on the market long enough to say much conclusively about their long-term effect, as in, if you stay on them forever do they actually keep you weight-suppressed forever. as far as i can tell most users do seem to naturally settle at a weight that is at least temporarily stable, suggesting it is a local set point, just one that's lower than the one they were at prior to pharmacological intervention. so maybe the drugs would keep you there long-term if you stayed on them---gold mine for the pharma companies, obviously. certainly the data are showing that people will pretty inevitably regain the weight if they stop the drugs, though. (as with any weight loss studies, there will ofc be a very very tiny percentage of the population who do not regain, because they have 'learned' how to continue energy-restricting at the required level to maintain the loss long-term; without the drugs this will ofc be pretty miserable and uh, no longer distinguishable in any way from regular old self-starvation.)

so i mean, basically what these drugs promise is actual appetite suppression, and tbf they do deliver on that (for most people; reports are that some users just don't lose appetite/weight on them). but the 'safety' claims are ignoring the fact that energy deprivation is inherently biologically stressful, and in the long term who really knows what fucking around with yr metabolism/endocrine system like this will do. i certainly don't fault people for seeking out weight loss drugs, ie wanting to be thin in a social situation that economically and socially punishes fatness! but i absolutely do think the doctors pushing these drugs are fucking despicable, and are lying/in denial about the simple fact that undereating is causing their patients to experience negative health effects side effects, plus whatever the long-term netabolic/endocrine consequences may be.

[omagpies]

bam! bane has now been revamped, so here is a new ref sheet for the guys :) (honestly tragic that this is dreamscape mode only, he looks so much better now lmao)

it means I updated the 3d reference as well, so here goes. rip to agonist, the extra head he has to carry around is so much heavier now

[queenlua]

ok this two-act history of "us politicians being schmaltzy/goofy about their dogs" had me in stitches

Nixon Agonistes referenced "Checkers speech" a couple times, right? so i have to go look it up, and:

The Checkers speech or Fund speech was an address made on September 23, 1952, by Senator Richard Nixon (R-CA), six weeks before the 1952 United States presidential election, in which he was the Republican nominee for Vice President. Nixon had been accused of improprieties relating to a fund established by his backers to reimburse him for his political expenses. His place was in doubt on the Republican ticket, so he flew to Los Angeles and delivered a half-hour television address in which he defended himself, attacked his opponents, and urged the audience to contact the Republican National Committee (RNC) to tell it whether he should remain on the ticket. During the speech, he stated that he intended to keep one gift, regardless of the outcome: a black-and-white Cocker Spaniel that his children had named Checkers, thus giving the address its popular name.

oh my god. "uwu why are u hating on me & my kids for loving our adorable dog." gotta love some emotionally manipulative campaigning lol

anyway, later on, wikipedia tells us: "The idea for the Checkers reference came from Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fala speech, given eight years to the day before Nixon's address, in which Roosevelt mocked Republican claims that he had sent a destroyer to fetch his dog, Fala, when Fala was supposedly left behind in the Aleutian Islands."

which inspired ANOTHER click and. here's the FDR quote

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family don't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I'd left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find him – at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars – his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself ... But I think I have a right to resent, to object, to libelous statements about my dog.

amazing. omg. "pivot to talking about dog" is apparently a tried-and-true maneuver in the political playbook lmao

bonus round: learned that Biden's dog is not the first presidential dog to go around biting people:

Major is not the first presidential dog to have biting incidents. In separate incidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt's dog Major (who was also a German Shepherd) bit United States SenatorHattie Wyatt Caraway, and attacked Prime Minister of the United KingdomRamsay MacDonald, tearing MacDonald's pants off.[19][20][21]Theodore Roosevelt's bull terrierPete bit numerous people, even tearing the pants off of ambassador of France to the United StatesJean Jules Jusserand.

[bebemoon]

look for the name: SIREN

@girlsjournaling

subsurface mother-of-pearl drape "bra"

dolce & gabbana grey floral lace skirt, s/s 1999

agonist "onyx pearl" eau de parfum

alexander mcqueen black beaded thong heels w/ cross charm detail, s/s 2oo3

faris "calla drops" silver earrings w/ onyx and pearl caps

[athetos]

There’s actually a hidden meaning to Baru’s cryptarch title, Agonist, that’s not stated in the book. Yes, it’s explained she picked the name because it means “one who suffers”, and by god, she certainly suffers. But it’s also a term used in biochemistry, . It simply means a chemical that activates a receptor; for example, serotonin is an agonist for serotonin receptors. But there are two types of agonists - endogenous (ones that the body produces naturally), and exogenous (drugs). Keeping the serotonin example, the medication buspirone is a serotonin agonist, as it essentially tricks the receptors into thinking that it is serotonin.

And that’s just it! Baru is tricking the empire into thinking she’s faithful to them, that she’s a loyal agent. She’s doing the work they expect of her, and they are (hopefully) none the wiser. So when she betrays them, much like quitting a drug cold turkey, the empire is going to (again, hopefully) fall apart. I think this is an extremely clever hidden meaning, and since Seth Dickinson studied neuroscience, I think it’s safe to say they were aware of this definition when they gave the title to Baru.