#THIS MESSAGE

[sebbiesolace]

(Back to your regularly scheduled stuff)

"It doesn't matter if a blanket does nothing for you, it's at least a start, something that you can enjoy. You need at least some kind of good in this hellhole to not fall to madness. I think the only reason I haven't as well was because I felt like Urbanshade winning if I did."

[Dyna Stick would throw one of the blankets around Sebastian, grabbing another to lay it on his tail]

"I can put some pillows underneath your tail if you want as well. Which book do you want? I have mostly romance because apparently it was popular, but I also have some sci-fi and fantasy if you want it."

[Dyna Stick would huff a bit]

"I'm serious about that food thing by the way, if you're hungry, I'll do what I can. Even though I don't know if I should leave you alone right now."

-🧨

"Please, just- Just let me rot please-"

[That simple act of kindness was enough to break Sebastian. The cocksure attitude he was known for was gone. HE was gone. Everything he used to be, it was all gone.]

"I don't- WHY are you being kind-"

[His words were heavily interspersed with sobs, almost unintelligible. His arm- his arm was GONE, the adrenaline was GONE, he was COLD- Killing his mother hadn't brought him satisfaction. All he felt was empty. He felt sorrow. He mourned for a lifetime that never could have happened.]

[He HAD to be honest.]

".... Dyna-"

[Why were his words so shaky?]

"No one is getting out of this place-"

[The other companies abandoned them.]

"I'm sorry."

[lydia-too-late]

Grace doesn’t go into the basement often. For one thing, it is poorly lit. For another, she can never be sure quite how many flights of stairs it’ll take to reach the bottom. At times, only one. Others, four or five. Once, she counted ten, gave up, and retraced her steps back to the main floor of the townhouse.

(“Foster, darling,” she asked, “How far is it supposed to be to the basement?” His sleepy eyes dragged up from his food, and he shrugged, face unchanged.)

Tonight: two only. How curious it is, she thinks, in the sense that it isn’t curious at all. Earthen floor, a few stray cardboard boxes, a mildewed trunk, and an ancient tube television abandoned in the middle of the space, its fraying cord still laying dead-snake limp in the dirt, prongs bared like inert fangs.

Grace sighs to see it. Taps the screen with her boot, holds her hands on her hips.

“C’mon,” she sighs. “Tell me about the sky burial. Tell me about the tower.”

Nothing.

Grace is more nervous than she appears. Perhaps she should not expect answers from the television; after all, it’s been quiet for so long now. Perhaps she should try to find Madame Sosostris again, and have her explain the cards: the tower, the moon, the priestess. Or was it the emperor? (It was not. It was actually the drowned Phoenician Sailor, the Belladonna, the man with three staves, the Wheel, and the one-eyed merchant, but don’t tell Grace that. They weren’t real cards.)

So many things have been strange lately.

What she thought was Tennessee turns out to be California. The moonflower in the backyard is, to her surprise, actually bougainvillea. The clear winter sky, only days ago thick with snow, is now a muted summer haze, pink with the glow of far-off wildfires.

"What shall we ever do?"

Grace sighs again, turns, and retreats back up the stairs. (We stay.) Somewhere in the distance, a door clicks closed, leaving the basement to itself.

Slowly, the television screen illuminates in flat black and white, a picture of a tower, upside down, accompanied by the sound of wind through dry grass. (That's it. That's all you get.)

[marvelsmostwanted]

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)

[saywhat-politics]

Keep your messaging simple:

“Trump fired everyone in charge of airplane safety, and a week later planes started crashing into each other.”

That’s it. That’s the messaging. Don’t get bogged down disputing Trump’s false claims. Just blame him, in short and repeatable sentences.

[sop-soap]

Biases being broken down on both sides

[gayvampyr]

apartment. i’m at my apartment

[beebfreeb]

Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.

[teaboot]

Sometimes I think a lot about my mom's cat

My mom's cat is a common domestic shorthair we found on the side of the road as a kitten

Regular cat, not a maine coon or one of those massive breeds. His mom was smaller than a loaf of bread

But in a sort of a Clifford The Big Red Dog situation, he grew super fast, and really really big, and took a super long time to stop growing

Worried that she was overfeeding him, she eased back his portions, but he stayed a massive round baby

When he started having kidney problems, she took him to the vet.

The vet took a look at him and said, "holy fuck, what are you feeding him", checked the nutritional listings on his chow, and told her "Yeah, maybe he's reacting badly to the amount of grain in this, try a meatier diet"

So my mom wound up special-ordering this specific high-protein prescription cat food made of like. Kangaroo meat or some shit that cost like sixty bucks a bag

And, as typical act two in an episode of House, he somehow got worse on the fancy specialized stuff that was supposed to be Primo Athlete Olympic Feline Blend

Like. WAY worse. His guts were inflamed and his kidneys were shutting down and he was all sore and HE WAS STILL HUGE, just miserable and sad

So shetook him back to the vet, where they had to help him pee (he was apparently close to bursting and had some kind of blockage too) and went "Yeah no this is NOT normal and we don't know what's going on, we're gonna do some tests but in the meantime you should go back to what he was eating before, at least that wasn't actively killing him" so she did

And he still wasn't great, but he also improved

And so they take his blood and do an ultrasound and a couple g's later she gets a call back like "this is gonna sound crazy, but we want you to put him on a low-meat diet. Just the least amount of protein and iron and shit. We need you to find the grainiest, filler-iest dollar tree kibble available and give him some of that bad bad shit"

And my mother is a woman of science. So she did

And he GOT BETTER

His energy picked back up, inflammation went down, he started drinking normally again, got back to pissing like a fuckin champion

And so it turns out that out of all the random ass freeway bonus cats we possibly could have scooped out of a ditch, WE got the one-in-a-million freak of nature with a SPECIFIC genetic defect that means a paleo protein free range diet is essentially poison and he THRIVES on cheap ass garbage

Like. He medically NEEDS junk food

I dont really understand how that works, but i cant argue with results.

If we had four of him, they'd outweigh my mom. And he's FINE

Also blind, but that's unrelated

Im not using him as a symbol or a metaphor or anything. I just keep catching myself thinking about my mom's Big Fucking Cat

[corvidaedream]

trying to describe poirot to my friend at trivia night: "if youve seen a detective who looks like this, thats him"

[lesamis]

are you a Byron or Wilde apologist?

concerned citizens from 1895 are messaging me

[acorviart]

not to sound like a boomer, but I need some people to learn how to write emails in a semi-professional (at the very least) format so you're not cold emailing a business/potential employer/any other stranger about formal matters in the exact same way you'd DM a close friend on instagram

the formality/language can loosen up in the email chain once you've established a rapport and you match the other person if they're being less formal, but please don't have the very first email you send a stranger be written in all lowercase ultra-casual sms slang with no greeting or signature and a billion emojis

[cimicherrychanga]

what is the FUCKING POINT then???

[fallen-jpg]

wanted to draw some leather jackets. these are all jason's

[seshrat]

flow winning animated feature is the kind of story that's going to be taught like the boogeyman to every big animation studio's intake class for decades

[sparrowlucero]

speaking of how to train your dragon and creature design, the shift from the really naturalistic art direction and character animation for the first movie's toothless- the face getting flatter, the eyes bigger and closer together, getting rid of the little realistic details like the dust collecting between the scales, the pink splotching where the scales end at the nostrils, the muted markings, the animation making a shift from largely realistic animal behavior to much more anthropomorphic- is such a huge downgrade to me, made worse because it's subtle in such a way that you will sound insane if you mention it

(huge L for the "the audience's capacity to find a creature cute and empathetic and expressive is directly proportional to how much it looks like a human baby" principle of character design because the first one is so so much cuter)