#US House of Represenatives

[camillescreations]

Our Flag Means Death x Good Omens Crossover I did before Season 2 came out. What if Ed was a demon?

I imagine that Edward Teach's demon animal would be an octopus. I gave him octopus-like eyes and changed his tattoos. In this universe I imagine Ed used to be an angel named Esteriel, and after the Fall, he was sent up to Earth as its demon representative (the serpent of Eden does exist in this universe, but was replaced by Edward as Hell's represenative after the serpent failed their duties. Note that the serpent isn't Crowley, he doesn't exist in this universe. He's off being a notorious pirate in an alternate world. The angel of the eastern gate, who is not Aziraphale, and also not Stede, is the angel that Ed must "thwart." Ed finds it all monotonous after a while, though). Ed lives on a large house boat off the coast of New Zealand.

I haven't gotten around to drawing a Stede to go along with this piece, but I'll share some of his story for fun! I imagine he is an angel who hates his life in heaven and wants to live on Earth, see the world, have an adventure. So he sneaks away and is sort of "on the run" from Heaven. He meets Ed by chance one day and they form an unlikely bond.

[yolowritter]

In Offense to Emilie Agreste

Hello there everyone, and- ...okay, put down your pitchforks, I haven't even started yet! Before an angry mob gathers 'round my blog, allow me to explain what today's rant is about. Unlike Lila Rossi, whose existence makes me want to hurl bricks at my screen whenever she appears, Emilie Agreste is actually a pretty interesting character. However, there are things about her (both canon and implied) that have me giving this picture-perfect gal a very intense side-eye. So today I'll be talking about what I think of her character, why I think she could have been written better, why she absolutely isn't a good person, and how the narritive does her a diservice by reducing this poor lass to an insignificant plot device, just so her clinically insane husband can have a reason to bully teenagers in spandex!

Firstly, let's quickly establish what we know about Emilie. I'll explain why I believe anything that isn't directly stated later, now it's just the basics. She and her sister Amelie are coming from a well-off family in England, presumably with quite high standards and expectations. We know little about her early life and it frankly isn't important, but she does at some point take an interest in the creative arts. She firsts meets her husband-to-be Gabriel when she arrives in Paris to further her education, and it's easy to assume they become friends due to similar interests. Then, later down the line, they meet Nathalie Sancoeur, with whom they scour the world to find the Miraculous jewels. After they do find the Butterfly and Peacock in Tibet, they all return to Paris and she creates Adrien Agreste, her son, using Duusu's powers. About twelve years later, she falls ill and "into a deep sleep" because the Peacock Miraculous was broken. This kicks off Gabriel's descent into madness and his crusade as Hawkmoth, which slowly drove him to insanity for reasons seen in this post. But still, this vague timeline leaves us with a lot of questions as to who she was as a person, and how she lived her life.

Before I delve deeper into this, I would quickly want to clarify the sources for the above information. We know from Represenation that Emilie met Gabriel when she went to Paris for educational reasons. I honestly don't remember if her field of study is mentioned, but considering she later stars in Andre's film "Solitude" it isn't hard to derive that said studies could be related. The high expectations from Emilie's family come from the fact that Gabriel had to change his name at some point in life, possibly because Emilie's parents wouldn't accept her marrying some "lowborn". Additionally, we know Amelie's marriage to Colt was arranged, so there definately is a sense of "securing the family lineage" here that exists in what remains of aristocracy today. In Passion, Nathalie is implied to be a treasure hunter of some sort at the time she meets Gabriel and Emilie, though how long she's been at the profession isn't clear. Still, they do work together to find the Butterfly and Peacock Miraculous. We see in Evolution that they are occupying the Agreste Manor with the Peacock in hand, so it's possible they purchased the house either right after their trip to Tibet or before. Other relevant information comes from the thumbnails of Emilie's videos and photos from the Passion episode.

As an aside, Astruc better give us that Tibet special, because I need more Agreste family Lore! These people made their drama the entirety of France's problem and while I respect that, I need to know more! Also, Thomas' quote of "a lot can happen when three people are in close proximity for a long time"? Pretty sure that's from Twitter btw, if you want to look it up. I see you, Thomas...I see you...

Anyway, onto exploring Emilie's themes as a character. From the very start of the show, we have a lot of clues that point to her being an angelic, kind and can-do-no-wrong type of character, at the very least in Gabriel's eyes. There is a whole other topic here about him being obsessed with the past and looking at it with rose-tinted glasses, but I digress. The portrait of Emilie in the atelier, her photo in Adrien's room, and Gabriel's fond remniscing all give us the idea that she was a wonderful, lovely person! In fact, we even get a bit of personallity added to her in the Simon Says episode, where Gabriel tells Chat Noir "you have some of her (Emilie's) flair for dramatics". So of course, she was goofy sometimes, which is a trait we see Amelie share at least a little of in the Felix episode, what with her Elsa-style entrance into the manor. For Season 1, we got plenty of information as to her character, even if we didn't know her name quite yet.

In Season 2 we get more of these examples of her being a wonderful person who is dearly missed, such as the whole plot with the above-mentioned Solitude movie, and Adrien wanting to go see it. Why exactly Parisian cinema is playing this movie in the first place considering what we know about Andre abandoning his career as a director is completely unknown and reeks of a plothole to me, but then again so do half the episodes in general. Point is, from very early on in this show we get a positive perspective on Emilie's character. Sure, there's a lot we don't know about her, but I'm sure her wedding day, her early years with Gabriel, their actual relationship, whatever she had going on with Nathalie, and the whole drama with her parents and later Amelie's husband isn't important...right?

Yeah no I'm not letting her off the hook. Aside from the obvious Adrien stuff that I'll get into in a bit, it seems suspicious to me that nobody can ever come up with anything negative to say about Emilie. And I don't mean a genuine character flaw, even if nobody is perfect, I mean just...something embarrassing? An old joke shared between friends from college, a little detail that sheds light at her sense of humor, even a fond recollection of something silly that happened in her youth. There's nothing. Aside from Gabriel saying she had a dramatic flair, which I will talk about, we know nothing about Emilie Agreste as a person. She barely feels alive, almost existing solely to be the "dead wife" archetype of the show. And okay sure, some of that is the fault of whoever was in the writing room when they try to bring her up. But come on, you're telling me Nathalie doesn't have a single memory or photo in that large stack of recollections that shows her being alive for once?

And of course I don't mean Emilie being literally alive, we see plenty of that. But think back to the photo with Gabriel, Audrey, Emilie and Andre for a second. As an example. I can't recal the exact details, but Emilie is standing to the side, closer to being out of frame than anyone else. In the middle of the shot, the other three seem to be having a good time, but she's only giving a polite, proper smile to her friends. Naturally, not every person out there is extremely expressive, but this is a safe space. Emilie is with close friends and everyone is enjoying themselves, yet her face looks like she came out of a portrait. When I noticed that little detail, I went running to find more. Aside from the videos that she left behind, we've never seen her speak or interact with any character excepting that Evolution scene where she first gets the Miraculous. So can we please think about this logically for a second? What kind of person is Emilie Agreste?

She was born in high society, with a lot of expectations on her shoulders and only her sister for company in her formative years, if Adrien and Chloe's sibling-like bond is anything to go by. And yes that's another post entirely, but they were childhood friends and he had almost nobody else his age to talk to, so I'm drawing a parallel. I won't speculate at all about Emilie's childhood, because frankly it's irrelevant to today's conversation. What I will say however, is that everyone we meet who has interacted with her has fond memories and good things to say about her. And every depiction of Emilie we get, even those not made by Gabriel, she seems to radiate perfection. And that right there is her character's theme. Being perfect. She presumably was the perfect daughter, the perfect (or at least a good enough) student to go to France in order to further her education, so on and so forth. But her family life very much isn't anything close to that. For one, her sister is stuck in an arranged marriage with an abusive a-hole who seems to have been spat directly out of a Texas steretype. There is no indication that Emilie knew about this, but...she also eventually let Colt borrow the Peacock Miraculous to make Felix. Clearly she entrusted Colt Fathom of all people with a magical artifact that can make sentient life, because sure, that seems perfectly reasonable!

Of course signs of abuse are hard to notice even when directly pointed out, but for the purposes of Emilie and Amelie, it seems fundementally against the good, pure and angelic character that Emilie has been presented as to even consider handing Duusu over to Colt. I'm ignoring the issue of Tomoe since that hasn't been explained, but there's clearly something wrong here. And now...now we come to Adrien's home life. We know that he has never been to public school before Origins, which happened only because Chloe enrolled him by the way, and Gabriel does allow him to go at the end of the day. We didn't know at the time, but it does seem reasonable for Gabriel to refuse him completely here, seeing that in hindsight, Adrien's class specifically becomes a hotspot for Akumatizations. But despite this danger, Gabriel still allows Adrien to remain in public school. Additionally, it's completely reasonable to assume that a pre-teen and later teenager would want more freedom to explore the world, and I find it incredibly unlikely that Adrien only expressed this after Emilie keeled over. Surely, this child would have wanted to make friends before then, especially if Chloe would brag about how many friends she has in school, which seems like a thing she would absolutely do to impress him. Sure, that last bit is speculation, but Chloe does act like this all the time in Season 1, so it's natural to consider that she did so before too! The thought of Gabriel being the permissive parent here, and therefore not the one keeping Adrien inside all the time...it really frightens me.

And just to be clear, this isn't a tinfoil-hat "Emilie is secretly evil" theory or anything like that. I'm just saying that she isn't perfect, never has been, and actually made a lot of mistakes during her life. Especially with Adrien. Because doesn't it seem like a loving mother's attitude to want to spend time with her precious son, showing affection and being with him at all times? As a reminder, unless the concept of adoption was never invented in this universe, Emilie Agreste could have just grabbed a child out of an orphanage at any point during her lifetime. But instead, she specifically wanted this one, Adrien. And what does she do to get her precious, perfect baby boy? Why, she scours the entire planet with her huband (possibly to-be) and her definately-not-side-chick Nathalie the treasure hunter to find a magic brooch that gives her the power to make him herself, exactly how she wants! Plot aside for a minute, doesn't that sound a little bit insane to you? The desire to have a child alone wouldn't drive anyone to go to such lengths, and this is assuming she is infertile or has some other problem that a good night under the stars with her pals Gabriel and Nathalie won't fix!

Clearly, Emilie had something very specific in mind when going through all the magical, mystical and half-maddening hoops that she had to go through in order to make Adrien in the first place! She practically dragged her husband and their friend on a worldwide trip just to find some tiny bird goddess stuck in a brooch! Are you reading this correctly? And then after Adrien popped into existence (presumably by being carried to term, etc.) Emilie made sure to shower him with love and adoration. But she also kept him isolated, and secure. This isn't as much speculation as it is just reading between the lines, but Adrien seems constantly awestruck throughout the show when presented with new experiences. Not to mention another disturbing thing, she was put inside the life support pod with Adrien Amok on her finger! That's a huge red flag, right in front of us, but it's been ignored because Gabriel is the one who uses it on-screen. Consider that by the time he does use the Ring, Gabriel is well on his way to utter insanity, considering that Shadowmoth is already unhinged enough to quickly evolve into Monarch once the conditions are right. Gabriel has absolutely no chill when it comes to terrorizing innocent people, or using Adrien's Amok to control him when need be. So why is there an implication of Emilie doing the same when she should have been perfectly sane and not driven to desperation because of a loved one's loss like her husband? Again, go check out this post for a full Gabriel analysis.

I'm not saying that Emilie was evil or crazy or a psychopath or anything of the sort. I'm telling you all that she had control issues. Among all the other stuff we know, and with said information pool being tiny to start with, Emilie Agreste seems so intersting! There should have been a whole plot point about removing the rose-tinted glasses that her death cast down on Gabriel, Adrien and Nathalie! There should have been flashbacks to when she was alive! We should have seen her interact and show love towards Adrien! To her credit, Emilie did see that her death was going to mess with Gabriel's head tremendously, and left him a little video politely asking that he doesn't become an internation terrorist. You know, just as a failsafe. It sure is a shame that she never had that conversation with her husband when she was still awake, or that to our knowledge, never said goodbye to Adrien. The public narrative is that she "disapeared". Are you joking me? Of course Gabriel covered everything up, but this is never adressed!

The writers have a ironically perfect character in their hands! Emilie is a mystery to the audience, she has a complicated relationship with both the show's main villains (Lila doesn't count if she's in barely a dozen episodes), one of the titular characters, and is also literally the reason why the show's events kick off in the first place! But we are shown nothing of her for over one hundred episodes of Miraculous! Even Ephemeral, one of the episodes I hate the most in the whole show, could have given us a glimpse into whatever Gabriel's restructured world would have looked like! It was the perfect oppurtunity for us to see Emilie up on her feet and actually having a role to play, instead of just discount Mrs Freeze! Yes I know her name is Nora, I know it's not the same situation, shush, I'm making a "Emilie is in the basement fridge" joke. The writers and Thomas did this woman so dirty it's not even funny! And I am offended at her, because at the end Emilie serves no purpose than to have Gabriel be "sympathetic" in Season 2! There are a dozen plot threads just dangling around for them to rip out of the ceiling and play with, but Emilie's very existence amounts to absolutely nothing! A gravestone would have served as a better character, because at least there could be something useful writen on it! Some kind of descriptor that gave us any insight into her personality!

But no, she's a blank slate! She's just some gal that showed up, found a magic peafowl and keeled over, ultimately leading to Adrien's sheltered home life, social awkwardness, and mommy issues! Because you cannot tell me that Emilie's parenting, no matter how well-meaning, didn't screw Adrien's early life up! She could have been the best mum in the world and it still wouldn't have mattered, because she considered him her perfect creation! Can you see the irony here? Can you observe the myriad of metaphors and the hundreds of ways this can get included in a story? Does Thomas Astruc and his team want me to have a mental breakdown??? Like, excuse me, honestly excuse me, but the sheer amount of offense I take both on Emilie's behalf and to her utter uselessness in this franchise is astronomical! I love this character! I really do! Wrote a whole alternate backstory for her where she and Nathalie are college roomates and everything! Heck, I love her so much that I did make her into a crazy psychopath in one of my AUs just so she can play a key part in that story as the Hawkmoth-equivilant! My love and adoration for Emilie Agreste reaches the god damned moon and back, but unless she actually has more than ten seconds of dialogue in some kind of flashback or prequel, I will continue to be offended! I'll continue to be pissed! And I'll continue to pray for the day where she becomes more than a practically irrelevant plot device!

Anyway, I need to cool off. I need to have a drink. I need to relax and take a break before making the post in defense of poor Chloe, because she too got shafted by the narritive, just like Adrien's mum. Expect it sometime soon, or at the very least when I'm not going insane over the fact that despite directly causing every major event in this franchise to occur, Emilie Agreste is a bigger question mark than the dude in a banana costume. Seriously, what the heck is up with Mr Banana anyway? I'll be seeing you all soon, but until then, Stay Miraculous everyone!

[folketro]

Bunad Basics: the Terminology

What does "bunad" mean? How is it different from a "festdrakt" and what on earth is a "fantasistakk"?

On this blog I use a number of terms that may be confusing if you're not already immersed in the world of historical fashion and traditional Norwegian folk costumes. Since my goal here is to make this world more accessible to anyone who may be interested, I figured I should make a glossary of sorts.

Illustrations by Johan F. L. Dreiers

Folk Costume

This is an umbrella term that refers to any complete costume has been constructed using traditional techniques.

While the word "costume" today has connotations to playing a character in, say, a show -in this context it simply means an outfit.

Bunad [bu:`nad]

From old norse: búnaðr. May be directly translated as "to be used at home".

In modern Norwegian the word refers to a type of formal folk costume that represents the traditions of a specific geographical area. The platonic ideal of the bunad is that it should show exactly where you are from, where you consider your "home". Not every adult norwegian has a bunad, but it's common to recieve one from a family member as your 15th birthday gift. You're expected to only own one bunad for the rest of your life (unless you pass it on to the next generation).

There are around 450 distinct bunads in Norway, according to Store Norske Leksikon. While there tends to be a common consensus of what regional traditional costumes are considered real bunads and not, there is no official registry of bunads. The number of 450 is an estimation, and there tends to be disagreements on who is allowed to call their folk costume a bunad.

Some bunads have deep roots and has been in continoous use for hundreds of years, while others are only loosely based on a few archeological finds. The definition is often up for debate.

Left to right: Festdrakt originating from Tromsø, Northern Norway, and Senja

Festdrakt

May be directly translated as "celebration-costume".

A festdrakt is a formal traditional outfit that is not considered the absolute represenation of a specific geographical area. It may be inspired by local traditions, but has for some reason not been granted recognition as a real bunad.

If you can trace the composition of a folk costume back to a specific designer, it will most likely be called a festdrakt. Though a few costumes that fill this requirement are commonly considered bunads regardless.

Left: women wearing homemade fantasistakk. Right: woman wearing the fantasistakk "alvedrakt" by fashion house Embla Bunader

Fantasistakk

May be directly translated as "Imagination-dress" or "fantasy-dress".

This is a relatively new term that was born from a modern folk fashion movement. In recent years it has become popular to design a "bunad" from your own imagination, and sew it yourself from any materials you have available.

The motivations behind doing this vary, but a few common reasons are: - wanting to wear something beautiful on important occasions, but not having the money to buy a "real" bunad - feeling overwhelmed about choosing a bunad, so instead going for an option that represents your own personality instead of a specific place of origin - wanting to learn how to sew traditional garments, but being intimidated by the near sacred status of the bunad. - just thinking they look cool

Some fashion houses, like Embla Bunader and Eva Lie have become known for coming up with avant-garde fantasistakk designs.

Bunadspolitiet

Another young term. "The bunad police". This is not an actual authoritarian force, but rather a name for people who feel it's their moral obligation to call out anyone who uses bunad "wrong". Often used as a kind of "boogey man" in discussions about bunad.

These are just a few terms that tend to pop up, if you have any other words you'd like me to explain, ask away!

[savage-daughter-of-nikitie]

Another resource with contact information for your "Represenatives". I hope everyone is using these to let them know we don't support this.

[misfitwashere]

July 14, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 15, 2024

Shortly after 6:00 yesterday evening at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a shooter on the roof of a building about 400 feet from the stage appears to have shot eight bullets at the former president and into the crowd. Trump appeared to flinch and reach for his right ear as Secret Service agents crouched over the former president. When the agents got word the shooter was “down,” they lifted Trump to move him out. He asked to get his shoes and then to put them on.

With that apparently accomplished, Trump stood up with blood on his face, exposed to the crowd, and told the agents to wait. He raised his fist in the air in front of an American flag in what instantly became an iconic image. He appeared to yell, “Fight, fight, fight!” to the crowd before being ushered offstage.

Pennsylvania firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, was killed. David Dutch, 57, was injured and is hospitalized in stable condition. James Copenhaver, 74, was also injured and is in stable condition. 

The FBI has identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service agent. Crooks used an AR-type semiautomatic rifle that apparently belonged to his father. Crooks was wearing a gray Demolition Ranch tee shirt advertising a YouTube channel for gun enthusiasts and people interested in explosive devices. The channel has more than 11 million followers. Crooks appears to have been a registered Republican.   

Trump said he had been “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” So far, no doctors have briefed the public. 

In the confusion immediately after the shooting, MAGA Republicans blamed the Democrats for the violence. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is in the running to be Trump’s vice presidential pick, posted on social media. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Representative Mike Collins of Georgia called for a Republican district attorney to “immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.” Indeed, he said, “Joe Biden sent the orders.”  

Edward Luce of the Financial Times noted, “Almost any criticism of Trump is already being spun by Maga as an incitement to assassinate him. This is an Orwellian attempt to silence what remains of the effort to stop him from regaining power.” Indeed, MAGA Republicans appear to be trying to stop discussion of their extremist plans— which are enormously unpopular— by claiming that such a discussion is polarizing. 

The idea that Democratic opposition to authoritarian plans like those outlined in Project 2025 caused violence might convince MAGA Republicans, but it will likely be a hard sell for Americans who remember things like: 

•Trump’s own suggestion in 2016 that “Second Amendment people” could solve the problem of Hillary Clinton picking judges; or his 2020 attacks on Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who became the target of a kidnapping plot; or election workers bombarded with death threats as Trump lied that the 2020 election was stolen;

•the October 2022 tweet by Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. mocking then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul after a home intruder hit him in the head with a hammer; or Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 2022 campaign video in which she promised to “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda” as she took aim with a rifle; 

•in 2023, House Republicans wearing AR-15 lapel pins on the floor of Congress; Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) saying his wife slept with a loaded gun after he voted against Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) for House speaker; or Republican representatives sending Christmas cards showing the whole family toting guns;

•in 2024, the Kansas Republican Party’s March fundraiser where attendees could donate to kick and punch an effigy of President Biden; or Don Jr.’s reposting an image of Biden bound and gagged in the back of a pickup truck;

•or Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who is running for the governorship and who is scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention starting tomorrow, saying just two weeks ago: “Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it.”

Indeed, in March 2024, in Vance’s home state, Trump said: if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole…country,” and a 2022 campaign ad by Representative Collins himself showed him shooting a rifle at Nancy Pelosi’s “agenda” and at a cardboard rhinoceros he says is a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only. 

Republicans under Trump have increasingly advocated violence as a way to gain power because they know their unpopular positions cannot lead their candidates to victory in free and fair elections. In this moment, when there is still little evidence about yesterday’s tragedy, it appears they are projecting their own behavior onto Biden and the Democrats, blaming them for advocating violence when in fact, Biden and the Democrats have tried hard to enact commonsense gun safety laws and have consistently condemned the violent language and normalizing of political violence by Republicans. 

Republicans’ embrace of violence is a hallmark of authoritarian leaders; by definition it  undermines democracy. In Nashville, Tennessee, today, neo-Nazis shouting “Hitler was right!” were involved in fights in the streets. Ending that resort to violence, which never advances society and always injures it, is key to restoring the guardrails of democracy.

Biden spoke to the nation tonight, warning that Americans need to “lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies. We’re neighbors. We’re friends, coworkers, citizens. And, most importantly, we are fellow Americans. And we must stand together.” He condemned yesterday’s violence, noting that “[a] former president was shot” and “an American citizen killed while simply exercising his freedom to support the candidate of his choosing…. There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.” 

The framers of the Constitution, he said, “created a democracy that gave reason and balance a chance to prevail over brute force. That’s the America we must be, an American democracy where arguments are made in good faith, an American democracy where the rule of law is respected, an American democracy where decency, dignity, fair play aren’t just quaint notions, but living, breathing realities.”

Biden rejected the idea that criticizing the Republicans’ extremism was polarizing. While they can “criticize my record and offer their own vision for this country,” he said, “I’ll continue to speak out strongly for our democracy, stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law, to call for action at the ballot box, no violence on our streets. That’s how democracy should work.” 

Biden paused all campaign ads and events after the shooting and told staffers to “refrain from issuing any comments on social media or in public.” Trump is fundraising off the attempt on his life, but he spent the day golfing rather than campaigning. 

The Secret Service has launched an investigation of how a shooter could get so close to Trump; Biden has ordered an independent investigation as well. Biden said he has also directed the Secret Service to review the security measures in place for the Republican National Convention, which starts tomorrow in Milwaukee.

Within hours of the shooting, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that “THE HOUSE WILL CONDUCT A FULL INVESTIGATION OF THE TRAGIC EVENTS TODAY,” saying, “The American people deserve to know the truth.” Although the FBI investigation has barely gotten underway and Congress has no law enforcement power, Johnson promised to have officials from the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI “appear for a hearing before our committees ASAP.” 

Observers noted that it sounded like MAGA plans to have yet another investigation designed to spread a narrative, in this case, that the “Deep State” was involved in the shooting. 

[danielloscar9630]

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[sakurarebin]

This is a letter to be sent to Congress (House Representatives and Senators) to push for UBI (Universal Basic Income) during the pandemic. This will help many people. The House Democrats just proposed a bill to give anyone above 16 years old $2,000 a month until employment levels fall to pre-coronavirus levels. Please help spread the word.

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/ongoing-letters-to-congress-the-people-need-ubi-now?source=direct_link&

[heytherecentaurs]

A long article (1200 words) about Dimension 20: Neverafter and horror, and how to create a horror D&D campaign.

*Spoilers*

Preface: I really enjoy Neverafter and have the utmost respect for the players and Brennan. This isn’t a critique of them, their actions or the season, but an analysis and thoughts on how it could better conform to the horror genre. These may be ideas to consider for your own D&D horror game.

As a D&D game Neverafter is what we’ve come to expect from Dimension 20 – excellent players, a fantastic DM, amazing miniatures, interesting combat and mechanics, high level improvisation and lots of comedy. However, it was billed as the horror season, and that’s what I’d like to discuss.

Despite being marketed as a horror season of Dimension 20, it would be more accurate to say Neverafter is a D&D game with horror elements. Below I'll discuss the ways in which Neverafter effectively uses horror and the ways its ineffective if viewed as an outright horror story. Following that I'll discuss some ways to create a horror campaign.

Why does Neverafter only occasionally work as horror?

Three of the most effective pieces of horror this season have been the body horror of Rosamund’s introduction, the D&D equivalent of a jump scare when the wicked fairy ripped her eyes out at the sight of the stepmother, and the existential horror of Ylfa’s backstory. Despite using different horror elements they accomplish their goals in similar ways. These scenes put characters up against a wall with no easy way out. They can escape but it will come with a cost. There’s a reason horror confines its characters or makes the danger ever present and too close for comfort, always there, biding its time. In comparison Neverafter as a whole is too open and too large in scope without being unfathomable or existentially unsettling enough to be cosmic horror. Even when the setting is expansive in horror, the setting should be used to make the characters feel trapped; characters can be trapped in a house or trapped in a vast tundra, but they need to feel as though there is no way out. In horror not only is the setting claustrophobic but the plot has to be as well. Horror plots are submarines taking on water—you’re only goal is getting out alive and most of you won’t make it.

The pacing gives us and the players too much breathing room. Breathing room in horror has two primary effects: it creates a false sense of security or it is used to further isolate a character (e.g. nobody believes the character when they say there’s something evil stalking them). In Neverafter there’s too much time to decompress and to get in all the bits, which as a comedy show is understandable but not effective horror. Once the horror starts it can’t retreat so far into the background. It has to ramp up in pace and escalate in intensity. There are too many side quests and too much downtime role play. In order to sustain the heightened levels the role play would need to be focused on the task of escaping the horrible circumstances and as they get closer to the end it seems less and less likely they will. The pace needs to build up so much momentum that by the climax the ending feels inevitable.

The tone needs to be consistent once the horror starts. Use classic horror story structure—establish a tone at the beginning then disrupt it with the introduction of horror. Then the tone is set in stone and you reinforce and intensify the tone in the same way you do the pace until you reach a point where all hope is lost. Until it’s not. (The structure of horror tends to roughly follow Joseph Campbell’s monomyth inasmuch as at the end the characters return to the world they know having changed.) However, Neverafter is tonally all over the place, which is fine for a D&D campaign but not for horror.

The stakes need to be more immediate and less philosophical. Horror thrives on the digestible metaphor. You have a philosophical point to make? Find the metaphor. What does the monster represent? What do the characters represent? What dichotomy is presented? How do those who survive best represent your argument? Neverafter has too much grey area and too many sides, and the characters have to form a competing philosophy. This isn’t effective as horror because horror comes from a fear of our mortality, what it is to be a living breathing human being. That’s why the characters’ only goal is preserving their lives. By the time we’re into the meat of horror, it’s too late for anymore nuance. While the world ending is fine as stakes, the immediate stakes need to be life and death. Not in an “If we don’t succeed the world ends!” way but in an “I’m fearing for my life every second we’re here!” way. As such the characters and their demise need to reinforce the danger by being brutal and most of all permanent. And if they’re not permanent they need to have an escalating hook like every time they die they come back with less and less humanity until they are the monster. Characters have to be at risk of losing something significant and it has to stay lost.

What would I do differently in a horror campaign?

Simplify everything. Introduce the characters, the setting, and their status quo and then disrupt it. Example: Five college kids are travelling to a resort in the desert but get lost and make the foolish choice to stay the night in a ghost town? Guess what they’ve angered the crazed bloodthirsty Manhattan Project mutants. Now, survive.

Make the campaign no more than six sessions. Have only the first session be a role playing session ending with rolling initiative. Set it in a single primary location, have one concrete horror monster/killer/alien (or many weaker ones) that expresses a metaphorical sociological, psychological or philosophical fear, make the characters increasingly vulnerable and make death permanent with no backup characters. I’d start the characters at a higher level and make a mechanic based off their choices which causes them to either level up or down each session; whereas the killer’s challenge rating increases each time it kills. The worse the character’s position, the lower their level and the easier they are to kill. And the weaker the group, the more vulnerable they are and the higher the odds are against them.

Using Neverafter as an example, I like the folklore and fairytales but I’d narrow the scope. I’d centre it on the idea of the stepmother as an archetypal figure and the monster and create the basis of why she’s doing what she’s doing. Set it on the anniversary of her death. Put them in the home where she lived with her family and provide clues about how she devoured her daughters and sneak in a weakness she has (she’s sensitive to bright lights or she’s afraid of cats or whatever) in the first session. At the end of session 1 the PCs realize they’re in trouble (cars and phones don’t work, only road is washed out, there’s a dangerous storm outside) and they’ve got five episodes to get out, defeat the stepmother or survive until morning.

I hope this has been an interesting look into some of the ways Neverafter successfully and unsuccessfully utilized horror in the campaign and gives you some ideas on how you could make a horror campaign for your table.

[one-blaze-of--glory]

I posted 13,602 times in 2022

That's 1,611 more posts than 2021!

2,423 posts created (18%)

11,179 posts reblogged (82%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@classical-music-wh0re

@jewishdainix

@chipzienist-felixetto

@mister-finally-found-himself

@quillsink

I tagged 5,134 of my posts in 2022

#falsettos my beloved - 308 posts

#the owl house - 101 posts

#into the woods - 88 posts

#falsettos - 71 posts

#andrew rannells - 60 posts

#in trousers - 58 posts

#dead end: paranormal park - 56 posts

#goncharov (1973) - 45 posts

#so true - 39 posts

#prev - 39 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#aita for leaving my wife and kids for my gay lover? also i want him to cook for me cuz my fragile masculinity can't handle me being gay :'c

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

If we'd get canon aladarius, we'd have mlm, wlw, wlnb and aroace represenation in TOH

Dana please please please do it

403 notes - Posted May 23, 2022

#4

I love that we're all freaking out over the "I'm trans" line, but I think we should equally be freaking out about Norma's "i guess I'll just spend another 15 years hyperfixating on something else" and how generally she's portrayed to have Pauline Phoenix and her movies and theme park as a hyperfixation

I just don't think I heard the word hyperfixation used by anyone in a cartoon before and I'm very happy to see this aspect of autism represented

441 notes - Posted June 22, 2022

#3

Just your daily humble request to please stop forgetting about aplatonic people when talking about aspec issues

665 notes - Posted September 11, 2022

#2

One of my favorite things about Heartstopper has to be Tao, a heterosexual male teenager having a crush on a Elle, a trans girl. Because both in the show and the comics, it's treated in such a normalized way! Tao doesn't for a second question his sexuality, his mom is completely supportive and while Elle is nervous about being with him, it's not because she'd doubt a straight boy would love her, but because she just doesn't want to ruin their friendship. Elle being trans is not an issue in their relationship for a second.

678 notes - Posted May 13, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Reverse little mermaid. Aroace girl with comphet leaves her boyfriend to live in the ocean.

1,403 notes - Posted May 26, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[maladaptive-ninja-returns]

The Bad Guy (1)

Bucky x fem!Reader

CHAPTER 1: THE FAKEOUT

Series: A Bad Guy ruins Bucky’s day. But turns out it’s the bad guy he needs to seek help from after all. New York may not have changed much for him, but there are certain things he is discovering to be quite new!

Chapter warnings: swearing.

A/N: @writing-prompt-s​ once gave a prompt last year that stuck with me…I don’t remember the exact wordings but it had something to do with the reader/writer being the villain having a crush on the hero, always finding excuses (or crimes) to meet them. One day they are getting their ass beat and you decide to jump in and save the day. This one is same but with a liiiiiiiitle twist

Word Count: There are times I wish I was a llama. or a cat. Now is one of those times.

“You can do it. You. Can. Do. It. You’re the man. You’re the freaking man. Yes. Yes. You got it. You absolutely got it.”

“You okay, man?” Bucky had to ask.

“You absolutely don’t got it. I can’t do it, man. I’m outta here.”

Bucky grabbed Scott’s arm before that guy could rush back to the SUV they had come in. As much as he wanted to kick this sweaty ex-thief out of here, he knew the plan wasn’t going to work in Scott’s absence. He needed a guy to make him seem legit. At least that’s what Natasha had told him.

“Calm down,” Bucky reassured the man who was sweating tennis balls by now, “you just need to show the ID. Natasha has taken care of the rest and I would be doing the talking. Okay?”

Scott was half-listening by the time Bucky had finished. “Huh? Yeah! Yeah! Cool cool cool cool cool cool cool!”

Bucky could empathise on some level with Scott. After all, it was weird for an ex-con to visit a prison as a fake lawyer while trying to get a felon out of there under the noses of the authority. 

The plan was pretty simple. Arrange a meeting with that woman whom Bucky had met earlier, gain her trust, get her out of jail under the pretence of getting her to help with an unsolved case and find out the location and identity of the people behind the theft of Tony’s precious painting.

Simple.

Then why was Bucky’s back feeling so wet whenever a humid wind blew at the opening of every rusty door in the maximum-security prison?

The room was covered in cameras in all corners. To Bucky’s satisfaction, Natasha already told him and Scott they did not record any conversations for lawyer-client confidentiality- so any conversation that was about to happen was going to stay between these three. The musty smell of the room was somehow familiar to both of them, bringing mixed feelings to the surface- to which they barely had time to react when a figure in orange jumpsuit walked in, forcing all their attention on it.

“Hey boys!” You greeted the party, already recognising Bucky from the rendezvous you two had a few days ago. “Ay!! You’re that beat cop no one listened to that day!”

Bucky did not know how to react to that. He was not really expecting their interaction to go this way. Scott, on the other hand, was a little relieved to have your attention glued on anyone but him.

“Oh, right! I told you we’d be having the conversation after I get processed,” you added with a tone of realisation, “Wow, I didn’t know you were so into that robbery!”

You dragged the chair out with your leg and sat on it, legs spread wide- keeping comfort over societal mannerisms. Resting your cuffed hands on the table you gave a knowing smirk to Bucky, who was trying to figure out what exactly was going on behind that viciously delicious smile. “Or is it something else that is intriguing you?” You raised a brow. "Did I use that right? Intriguing you? Something that you're intrigued by?"

"That sounds better," Scott blurted out, regretting it the very second because now your suspicion-filled eyes were all for him.

"You…" you narrowed your eyes at Scott, making the man sit straight in his chair.

"He's my lawyer," Bucky was quick to dive in, "I mean, he's the lawyer we-I... he is interested in represen...He’s a lawyer." For the first time in his life, Bucky was glad Scott and Sam had forced him to watch Law and Order.

“...ok...kay.”

"Scott. Scott Lang," he introduced himself, bringing his hand forward for a shake.

“You have the eyes of a thief,” you stated while Scott’s hand was still in the air, making the poor man slowly take it back while his pale face looked at Bucky with an ‘I told you so’ expression. “No wonder you’re a lawyer.”

Next moment, you slumped into the chair, looking a little offended at something Bucky did. Or so he thought. “Did I hurt you?”

Bucky blinked at you before his brain smacked his accelerating heart to give something instead of just sitting there. “I’m sorry?”

“Did I hurt you the last time we met? I get that I have some kinda...powers but I don’t just throw them around. We could have had a conversation over some prison coffee. You didn’t have to bring your friend here.”

It took three seconds at minimum for Bucky’s brows to shoot up and his lips to crack wide in a smile. “W-what? No! He’s not here for me. He’s here for you. We’re getting you out of here.”

It was hard to put a word into the expression you just gave. Your eyes shifted between the two men while your open lips were shut and your face tilted a little towards the door.

“Uhhhhh-” was the only thing coming out of your mouth till your body got up from the chair and your cuffed hands pressed together towards your company- “listen, cop guy...man. I really meant it in a casual way when I said we’ll ‘talk later’. I don’t really know how much you’ve read into this. I mean, I would say ‘at least buy me dinner first’ but I am kinda scared as to where that might lead us. Good, God! Now I’m wondering what would you have done if I’d said something more like ‘hey, let’s f-”

“NO!” Bucky nearly jumped off his seat, his hands over the table trying to stop your words from coming out from a safe distance. “I’m not getting you out of here because I like you-” he stopped right when he heard himself, watching your curious eyes witness his mouth play him like a ten-cent flute- “no, I mean I like you but not in that kind of...what I mean to say is I know why you tried to steal that painting. I found out from my sources that these paintings are being used by this new mafia around the world supplying narcotics and codes on the trafficked girls and boys to their buyers for bids. And I was hoping you could help us catch the people behind the...painting.”

Bucky was cursing himself right and left, feeling the heat rise in his cheeks at nearly messing it up. Why did she have to be this accurate? His inner voice mocked him before smacking him in the head and calling him a jock.

“I don’t know if you remember but I was caught by you guys while threatening the New Yorkers.”

“While you were trying to help Ste-Rogers. Captain Rogers. And no one caught you. You surrendered yourself.”

“I hate cops. I can’t work with them.”

“You won’t be working with them. You’ll be working with us. Me and a couple of my friends.”

“I don’t work for free. And before you put a price tag on my work, remember that I am inside this prison because I want to stay here. For now.”

“How about a date with Steve Rogers?”

“Dude, you can’t put a price on my-wait what?”

“I’ll ask him to go out with you if you catch those sons of bitches.”

Maybe it was the serenade playing from somewhere inside the prison. Or maybe it was the sun strolling in from the windows. Or maybe it was the mention of his best friend that made your pupils go wider, your fingers work over the skin on your arm, doodling some invisible hearts with a bitchface before you straightened from the table and the sound from your cuffs nearly made Scott fall off his chair.

“I don’t work with supes. They disgust me. Especially Tony Snark and his redhead sister and that C-grade Legolas. I’m out.”

“We won’t be working with them. But I can pull a few strings to get you that date. I promise. And I’m sure Steve...Rogers would be more than willing to go out with you if there is one less bad guy walking out on the streets.”

“...you better not be joking about this-”

“James Barnes.”

“James. Because if you are, I will drive a monster truck into your house, take away your pet and fuck your mother till she forgets her own name.”

“My mother’s dead,” he was quick to add while Scott gasped at the audacity of this bitch- you; you were the bitch.

“Your girlfriend, then,” you simply shrugged. Bucky’s brain straight away flashed to a two-second fantasy of you and Natasha in her room, on her bed.

“Bold of you to assume he has a girlfriend,” Scott chortled till he could see Bucky’s Winter Soldier parts staring at him with all the coldness.

.

It wasn’t in his nature to give a place to bad things inside his Bucky heart. It definitely wasn’t in the now peaceful Winter Soldier’s nature to peek from inside Bucky and stare with stars in his eyes at the woman coming out in her shirt and jeans topped by a leather jacket. She’s bad, his mind kept ringing the gong, real bad. And when that wasn’t enough, she put on those aviators to shield her eyes from the harsh noon sun, walking towards him with the strut that said she was woman enough to grab someone by the balls if need be. You’ll get yourself killed by a woman, Barnes, his mind went off again.

“No, I won't,” he muttered out loud.

“What?” Scott asked.

“What?”

Bucky tried to ignore him, his eyes stuck on you as you came and stood by them.

“Keys,” you ordered, watching Bucky fish his pockets without breaking eye contact and handing the keys of the Land Rover to you. “Let’s go.”

Scott grabbed Bucky by the arm to pull him closer. “Dude! She has the keys!”

“...okay? Why are we whispering?”

“Wh-What are we gonna do if she tries to do something...evil!”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t know, throw us off a cliff! Or drive us into a wall. Or worse, go over the speed limit in the city!!”

“Relax! I’m here,” Bucky reassured before opening the door to the back seat of the car for him. “I got you.”

Hopping in and sitting next to you, he noticed for the first time how you smelled like a pleasant mixture of spring and citrus.

“What cologne is that?” you called out from nowhere while turning on the engine, turning to look at Bucky.

“Uhhh….it’s an aftershave. For men.” He nodded, cursing himself instantly for adding that last bit. Of course, it’s for men, you twat!

“Smells nice,” you complimented before turning out of the parking spot.

“I’m glad you’re on board with this,” Bucky stated, trying to undo the mess he made a few seconds ago, “I wasn’t trying to overstep when I-we decided to get you to help us out.”

You chuckled, shifting gear.

“Oh, sweetheart! One, I loved this isn’t an automatic. Those are for weak testicled-babies. And two, you clearly misinterpreted me in there. When I said I was not expecting you to bail me outta jail for a date, I wasn’t grossed out by it, darling. I liked it.” You leaned a little closer to Bucky- having a glorious view of his pupils go wide like oceans with endless pits- to end him with one last whisper and wink. “In a very kinky way.”

And just as the car swerved out to the wide road, Scott could feel the air leave his lungs. “What have we done,” he whispered to himself, questioning all that was about to come.

[joyfulprincessdragonlover54]

Do you have a favorite book--one that you could read multiple times? If not, what about a movie or tv show?

Hello again my friend.   Was this meant to exclude How to Train Your Dragon (or Disney/Pixar) so you could hear about what other pieces of fiction I am a massive fan of that don’t appear on my Tumblr?  If so, I still have answers for you.  But being brutually honest though.  The How to Train Your Dragon trilogy is my all time favorite story.  Never could tire of it. If you want I can always send you the link to my “What HTTYD means to Me” post through the pm system.�� Even if that one is older and in need of polishing.  That’s up to you.   But back to other options you might be curious to hear about.   

My all time favorite novel (rather in this case it is a novella) is Washiongton Square by Henry James.  A rather simple plot to be spun out about how a plain looking young heiress in mid 1800′s New York comes into conflict between her domineering father and a man she is infatuated with is really a gold digger. This is where I discovered that books are treasures beyond comphrension.  When plots such as this that are considered so simple can in fact be filled with absorbing descriptions and crackling dialogue. Only to later to discover what kind of pungent questions they leave you with in their wake.  It has capitvated me for the past decade.  Henry’s prose is so elegant but his characters speak with such a force I find it addicting to re-visit.  Granted I also admit that the way people spoke in older centuries is fascinating as it is. But there’s something mind boggling as it is delightful to read what Mr. James put into a narrative.  This one in particular of his earlier publications holds my attenition because of his minisucle details to recognzing women’s lack of rights and the instintcual desire to garner freedom without ever going full fledged blunt on this controversial topic at the time is an artistic approach to such a signifcant matter.  Unlike another famous (and infamous) story called The Doll House by Henrik Ibsen who was so direct with this it gave the audience whiplash.  Henry James was so gentle and subtle it needed time to simmer but he was being vocal about the concerns of a woman’s position in society.  The questions I myself still ponder about what would have happened to me if I was born back then and would I have been more like this story’s leading lady. Who starts off the epitome of a damsel in distress who is so meak it makes contempories today feel sick to their stomoach. Only for her arc to forge from that pestering Mary Sue type into a person while deemed a “spinster” in that time period to what many today would call a heroine.  Her transition from stereotypical timid shy girl who blushes into a woman who defies society’s expectations without ever being crass about it is a deeply rewarding story to read in my opinion.  

The film I can re-watch and never tire of now that I think about it shares configurations to Washington Square on a philosphical level.   It’s also considered to be one of the 2000′s biggest film flops and most hated by mainstream audiences.  For good measure, it also infuriated historians.  Needless to say that ever since I saw this film in the cinema back in 2005. It has touched me profoudly.  Even if the screenplay took liberties.  Then again, I still love watching Disney’s Pocahontas and not feel guilty about it. Now you may be asking yourself what does that have to do with anything? Well the film I am referring to is called The New World.  A film that dives into the account of her life on a longer and heavier scale.  Released more then a decade after Disney tackeled their own version. Acclaimed filmmaker and writer Terrance Malick (who actually did enjoy the Disney film much to the suprise of many)   decided he would take his dormant script he started to brainstorm in the late 70′s  and bring into life on his own terms.  Now I’m not sure if you are familiar with any of Mr. Malick’s work.  But he has a very specific form of shooting and editing his movies.  In a nutshell, his films  are considered slow and even dull by the mainstream as there is very little dialogue, action and even his  color scheme is mostly made up of brown and/or grey.  He also likes to hone in on what are seemingly random shots of nature. Leaves blowing in the wind, sunlight coming in through the tree branches and water flowing in creeks. But for me. This presnentation of filmmaking for this story was poetic.  I loved how it evolved with a film score that was essentially a collection of classical music and only occasional narration by it’s lead characters.  The editing of Pocahontas’s journey as a free spirited young teen into a woman as she encounters a life filled with fascinating discovery, sensual desire, agonizing despair, new found love and the resurrgence of joy.  Q’orianka Kilcher who portrays her in the film is outstanding! It was her acting debut but you would never know it with how she carries the weight of the film by her shoulders. It was effortless.  The film features a great ensamble cast spead out by people Pocahontas meets and is surround by over the years. They include Colin Farrel, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, and David Thewlis. All are commendable. Still, this story belongs to Ms. Kilcher’s character and she does an exquiste job of holding the story thread together. I try to keep my opinion from venturing into the “This should have had an Oscar” chatter. Not in this case however.  I saw all of the leading actresses that held the main accolade attention that year.  All were great in their own right but I would be lying if I said I didn’t believe that there were performances that were over-rated. Q’orianka did something so magnificent (and bare in mind she did it while internalizing dialague)  she created a full flesh and blood human being whose story is now legend and gave it 1000% soul.  I can’t say that every woman nominated provided that. There’s also a quote (from the novel Corelli’s Mandolin) that I love to share with people when I like to describe how the screenplay juggled the love triangle in this story.  The maturity and depth of how it unfurled and evolved I find that most romance stories lack.  “Love is like a volcano. It errupts and then subsides. When it subsides you have to make a decision.  You have to decide if your roots are entwinded together that it is inconceivable should ever part. For that is what love is. It is not breathless. It is not excitement. It is not the promulgation of eternal passion. For that is just ‘being in love’ which any of us can convince ourselves we are.  Love itself is what’s left over after ‘being in love’ has burned away. “  This quote matches ideally to this specifc film’s theme of love and how to value it. I really do think this is one of the greatest represenations of love for not only another person.  But for re-discovering one’s self-identity in a world that craves to put constraints on it.  This film may be at times emotionally difficult to watch but seeing it unfold and going through all of these heartaches to come out the other side makes me feel as if I have had a reprieve. I love how Terrance Malick’s off kilter filming and editing depicts this beautiful age old adage.   :)  

[cazort]

nowadays it is easy to look up your representatives in both state and US congress. not counting local reps like city council, township supervisor, county commissioner, or other local elected officials, in most states you tend to have 5 reps: 

2 US senators, 1 US house representative, 1 state senator, and 1 state representative.

US senators and house rep are the people you write to about Federal laws as well as Federal appointments like supreme court, presidential cabinets, etc, whereas state senators and represenatives are the ones who you write to about state laws.

Write to them. When you learn about a law you don’t like, or if you just have an idea about something you’d want them to do, write to them. Here are a few tips and ideas:

You don’t need to write about the “hot” or “controversial” issues. If there is some issue that few people are talking about, but you think is important, you can write about that too.

If you have a rep whose views are really far from yours, it still helps to voice a minority viewpoint. For example if you have a Republican who is strongly anti-LGBTQ, you might still have some influence over them. There are examples of Republicans who have more moderate stances on LGBTQ rights, and part of the reason why they do is that their constituents voice support for these views.

If you have a rep whose views are really far from your own, you can appeal to their own beliefs and ideology. For example, when I’ve lived in a district with really conservative state reps, I would write to them about unnecessary laws that I thought could be eliminated, for example, in PA, the law banning municipal broadband. I said I thought this was an example of big government and interfering with the free market. If your rep is a progressive democrat, frame your idea in more progressive terms, explaining how it will help marginalized people. If your rep is a moderate of either party, you can frame your idea in moderate language. There are legitimate aspects of all sorts of ideologies, whether progressive, conservative, or moderate, and you can learn how to speak all these languages to advance your views.

You can tell your friends to write too. Most people don’t contact their reps often or at all, so if you encourage a handful of people to do this, you can make a big difference.

Go online and look up your US and state reps. Bookmark it and go to them next time you have an issue you feel passionately about.

wish tumblr users demanded as much action and accountability from their elected officials as they do from celebrities and strangers on the internet

[tomasorban]

Fallen into Milk

As Burkert has rightly suggested, Pythagorean, Orphic and Bacchic mysteries might best be understood as distinctly overlapping religious domains. While minimalist scholars have tended to play down any suggested connection between Pythagoreanism, Orphism and Bacchic cultus, the discovery of new evidence—notably the gold plate uncovered at Valentia in southern Italy in 1969—provides a positive and incontrovertible link between Orphic and Dionysian ritual and an initiation to immortality through death and revivification.  The process—mirroring on an individual level the cosmic journey undergone by the Egyptian solar divinity—is clear: it is inaugurated by a katabasis or descensus into the underworld. The full implications of this have been drawn out most adeptly by Peter Kingsley, who situates the gold lamallae—and the related Bacchic and Pythagorean mysteries—precisely in the context of initiatory rebirth symbolism.

Among the bewildering complex of overlapping evidence for underworldly initiation, one textual fragment strikes a note of resonance that enables us to tie together a number of important threads. In an Orphic lamella discovered in a tumulus at Thurii (southern Italy), the Bacchic initiate is identified as a kid (eriphos, a young goat), signifying the renatus regenerated from initiatory death and nourished by the milk that flows from the breasts of the goddess (in this case, Persephone). Inscribed upon a thin sheet of gold, the inscription runs:

theos egenou ex anthrōpo. eriphos es gala epetes

You have become a god instead of a mortal. A kid you fell into milk. 

Here, falling es gala, ‘into milk’ suggests a deeper cosmological coherence. The Greek word for milk—gala—gives us our word for galaxy because it was originally applied to the ‘milky way’ (gala, ‘milk’; galaktos, ‘galaxy’; the via lactea). To fall “into milk” takes on the additional meaning of “diving into the stars” and thus of joining one’s primordial, divine lineage. In effect, the milk of the goddess and the stars of the milky way are identical realities and the initiate’s descent into the underworld is simultaneously an ascent into the nocturnal heavens.  

This motif of falling into milk to become a god, along with milk as an Urelement that provides the newborn divinity with its essential nourishment, brings us directly into contact with the deification motif of the magical papyri: drowning—literally, apotheosis—in the milk of a black cow. Through these connections—deification in milk, rebirth, being suckled by a goddess—we begin to discern the significance that ingesting a divine substance—an entheon—holds for the process of apotheosis; at the same time, we realise that it is explicity bound to the process of initiatic death. All of this points to a very particular paradox lying at the heart of initiation: just as one must die to be reborn, so too is it apparent that the means by which one is killed is also a deifying source of nourishment. This explains why, in the Pythagorean, Orphic and Bacchic katabasis, it is Persephone, the queen of the underworld, who plays the role of divine wet-nurse and initiatrix.

Heimarmenē

One further point needs to be made to properly understand the meaning of falling into the goddess’ galactic milk. The galaxy specifically represents the domain of fixed stars that lie beyond the seven wandering stars (the planetēs or planets, which in traditional cosmology were seen to govern fate in the sublunary realm). The integration of the initiate into the primordial, celestial lineage is thus tantamount to overcoming the phenomenon of astral fatality—heimarmenē—transcending thereby the seven ontological levels of the hermetic cosmos. This is the deeper meaning of the voces magicae. The magician demonstrates his mastery over astral fatality by singing the seven descending and ascending vowels, sinking into fatality from above and rising above it from below. In effect, the initiate willingly drowns to be deified because, at the root of the septenary, but also beyond it, lies its transcending culmination—its alpha and omega. Beyond the seven lies the eight—the octave or ogdoad—the eight hypostases of the god Nun that form the roots of Egyptian cosmogony and into which both the dead and the divine sink in order to be regenerated.

This distinction between astral fatality (the seven planets) and astral immortality (the fixed stars) is symbolically replicated in the choice of waters offered to the Orphic initiate. Repeated references in the gold lamellae to the Lake of Memory allude to the topography of the Greek underworld. The soul arrives “parched with thirst and dying” and a choice between two rivers confronts the deceased. On the left is the river Lethe (the waters of forgetfulness), which wipes one’s memory clean and casts one back into the cycle of incarnations to live out another embodied life in the “heavy, difficult circle” (kyklo barypentheos argaleoio; cf. samsara). On the right is another river, which enables memory, for its waters are those of anamnesis. The memory afforded by this water, however, is of a specific kind: it is not the memory of common, accumulated, human knowledge, but of the soul’s knowledge: a knowledge of one’s true, eternal and divine nature, which is not earthly but sidereal.

In several of the gold lamellae, the Orphic initiate is admonished to “drink from the water of the river on the right,” and it is evident that this remembrance―this gnosis of one’s divine origin—is tantamount to apotheosis. As such, gnosis equates to victory over the forces of forgetfulness induced by the process of incarnation. For the descent into matter corresponds to amnesia (amnēsis) of one’s divine nature, just as ascent corresponds to its remembrance. Plato, writing after the Orphics but before the Gnostics, affirms the same essential motif as a philosophical doctrine: knowledge is memory. Moreover, with Plato the fact is found encoded in the Greek word for ‘truth’—alētheia—literally, ‘freedom from forgetfulness,’ where the alpha privatum signifies ‘absence of’ or ‘freedom from’ the condition of lētheia, i.e. Lethe, (the river of) ‘forgetfulness.’

The astral or sidereal dimension is emphasised throughout the Orphic Totenpässe. Indeed, identification with one’s sidereal lineage forms the key to the process of immortalisation; the Orphic texts specifically and repeatedly admonish the initiate to proclaim their astral geniture in order to be able to drink of the immortalising waters of anamnēsis (Mnemosyne, the well of memory). To the guards who protect the well, the initiate is specifically admonished to proclaim:

I am a child of Earth and starry Sky, but my race is heavenly. You yourselves know this. I am parched with thirst and am dying; but quickly grant me cold water flowing from the Lake of Memory.

A lengthier lamella runs as follows:

This is the work of Memory, when you are about to die down to the well-built house of Hades. There is a spring at the right side, and standing by it a white cypress. Descending to it, the souls of the dead refresh themselves. Do not even go near this spring! Ahead you will find the Lake of Memory, cold water pouring forth; there are guards before it. They will ask you, with astute wisdom, what you are seeking in the darkness of murky Hades. Say, “I am a son of Earth and starry Sky, I am parched with thirst and dying; but quickly grant me cold water from the Lake of Memory to drink.” And they will announce you to the Chthonian King, and they will grant you to drink from the Lake of Memory. And you, too, having drunk, will go along the sacred road on which other glorious initiates and bacchoi travel.

Such remarks draw out the duality of human nature, described here as part mortal (Gē pais eimi, “I am a son of earth”) and part divine (Ouranou asteroentos, “of starry heaven”). Clearly, to realise—to have gnosis—that one’s true race (genē) is “of heaven alone” is to re-orient oneself toward one’s sidereal and Ouranian genus rather than one’s human and earthly genesis. Falling “into milk” thus bears not only a linguistic but a symbolic coherence with the concept of celestial immortality.

To conclude our discussion of the goddess as galactic matrix of apotheosis and to tie it into the evidence adduced for the sun’s journey through underworld, it should be noted that the essential identity of the Pythagorean, Orphic and Bacchic Totenpässe on one hand, and the Egyptian Unterweltsbücher on the other, becomes all the more clear when we recognise that the solar journey passed through the body of the goddess Nut (night). Whether it progressed through the celestial world or the underworld, the sun’s procession was always conceived as proceeding through water (the divine entourage was depicted traversing the depths and heights of cosmos on barques).

Conclusion

In the rite from the magical papyri with which we began, the galactic “river” of the milky way, the celestial mirror of the Nile, is specifically evoked through the power of Orion, “who causes the currents of the Nile to roll down and mingle with the sea.” For just as the Nile was the source of all fertility on earth, so too was the galaxy of milky stars a deeper, cosmic reflection of the same nourishing life-force. In this way, the Egyptians and Orphics alike affirmed an essential, fluid continuity between the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. Here, the fertile character of Nile and the immortal character of the heavens themselves proceeded precisely from their still deeper connection to the primordial regenerating source of all being: the cosmogonic waters of Nun.

Given the foregoing, the essence of the PGM rite may be seen to reside precisely in the role of the feminine numen as a matrix for apotheosis. As Evola emphasises, “a very widespread symbolism has seen in woman a vivifying and transfiguring power, through which it is possible to overcome the human condition.” The divine via lactea, moreover, also represents the galaxy—the river of fixed stars—the white which is born from the midst of the perfect black. Just as the primordial darkness, the ocean of Nun, bears the river of eternal stars, so too are the waters of final dissolution also those of primordial deification. Initium is telos. Just as Dante’s ascent to heaven required a descent into the inferno and only proceeded upwards once he had reached the cosmic nadir—the centre of the earth, the core of hell—so too, at the root of Orphic, Egyptian and alchemical cosmology lies the perception that the underworldly journey is the gate to a celestial journey. Both seek to dive into the river of rejuvenating milk by descending into the de-existentiating darkness of the underworld. And yet it is clear that the underworld is only the realm of death for mortals (with the further implication that mortality is a moral state); for those of celestial origin, it is a path home: a gate to the eternal.

[canmom]

Teleportation ritual

(this is part of the ‘Max2019’ ARG that’s been taking place on Tumblr over the last few days! you can read timelines in various places e.g. here, on @max2019arg or in this google doc, or in the discord)

The instructions I’m following in this post were provided by the Seraph @sceneteenz​, as a ritual to help Anita aka @lovely5500​’s guardian angel Max2019 escape from Limbo, and the control of H.U.R.L., the Hierarchy of Uniform Resource Locators aka angels. This will, if the ritual works, save Max and Anita from death by ‘sickness stench’.

Look, it makes sense in context!

T: Transmit a song that holds sentimentality to your mind. Listen closely to it.

The music of Keiichi Okabe, composer for NieR, DoD 3 and NieR Automata, means an awful lot to me at the moment. I’ve been listening an awful lot to Black Song from the DoD 3 soundtrack:

It’s a beautiful song, and reminds me of the feelings DoD3 and the NieR series in general create, of loss and hope and dealing with a hopeless world caught in seemingly endless cycles of cruelty and grief and oppression and struggle, and choosing to live anyway.

E: Examine an appendage. Think about the effect your human brain has on it.

I am looking at my hands as I type this. I realise looking at one’s hands is a cliché about being on drugs, but what an incredibly complex and amazing thing they are, the complexity of the movements, the incredible coordination of signalling through my nerves it takes to let me type these letters so quickly into the computer, the muscles and tendons winding back into the arm and up to the shoulder.

I mean look at all that stuff! And what’s more like, all this forms from just the information that can be packed into a single cell and its interaction with the womb it grows in.

Human robots are pretty impressive but we aren’t anywhere close to making anything as sensitive or flexible or capable of as many movements as a human hand and brain.

L: Look into your own eyes in a reflective surface and come to a conclusion about yourself as a being living the human experience.

Yeah, I’m doing that huh.

However messy and futile and confusing it is. Somehow I’ve been put in the world to live a life in it, pushed around by things way bigger than me, and ultimately the contribution I make to its course will be tiny, but that’s what all of us are doing I guess.

I don’t know how much of a general “human experience” there is, but I’m having a human experience.

These are some of the organs I use to sense the world and other people. Light gets absorbed at the centre.

E: Engage in the washing and cleansing of your human hands. Embed a photo of your hands to the internet.

It’s surprisingly difficult to take a picture of your own hands!

P: Pick a plant from “outside” and examine it. Take a photo of this plant and embed it to the internet.

This plant is growing outside my house. Unlike a lot of the plants nearby, it was not planted by my parents or another human, or deliberately cultivated in a particular area.

I’m not sure what kind of plant it is, but it’s done an astonishing job of growing through all these stones and, I believe, the plastic mat underneath them!

The rules of evolution are simply survival, and duplication with errors.

Here’s another plant I took a picture of!

This is a fern that was growing somewhere near the Haytor granite formation. It’s probably not been so long that this fern has died. I found the way its leaves are slowly unfurling incredibly beautiful.

Ferns were some of the earliest plants to evolve, and while this fern has evolved and changed just as much as other plants, it’s incredible that this particular general form of life has stuck around for the last several million years. Unfurling, spreading seeds, taking in sunlight, dying, being destroyed by bacteria, coming back...

And occasionally a person will walk past on a family visit and think, ooh, that looks pretty, lemme take a picture, and a bunch of data in some rather abstract sense ‘representing’ the fern will be stored on her computers and copied around the world to Dropbox’s servers, and who knows how long this picture of the fern will last...

The picture will outlive the fern. Ferns, however, will surely outlive the picture, and the species that took those pictures.

O: Observe the sun or moon in the heavens above. Take a photo of it and embed it to the internet.

It is very dangerous to look directly at the sun, of course. So I just pointed my phone in the right direction and hoped.

The laws of thermodynamics are based on simple, statistical principles. Entropy - the number of ways that the microscopic constituents of the system can be organised corresponding to our macroscopic observations - always increases.

This is why it is difficult to create a ‘closed loop’ economic system. We need resources to be in particular, differentiated states to give us the uses we want, but temperature tends to average out, objects get broken, chemicals get mixed up; instead, the world’s economies work in an extractive way, taking in resources from the ground and putting out waste.

The world’s ecosystems, on the other hand, work as a ‘closed loop’ system, where energy is constantly being transformed, necessarily inefficiently, between different forms but somehow always cycling around the system, which can persist for literally billions of years. How is this possible? Surely the laws of entropy would demand that the system ultimately breaks down?

Thinking about this, I believe there are two aspects. First, the Earth is constantly radiating heat away into space across a broad spectrum of wavelengths. Radiation in space is a very high entropy part of the system, so the Earth as a whole can ‘dump’ entropy into that.

The necessary corollary of that is that the Earth is constantly losing heat as it sends energy into space. Thus, the Earth needs a vast source of energy to maintain itself at a constant temperature. How is this achieved? Well, the sun of course. The heat gradients produced by the sun drive the chemical processes of life; heat comes in from the sun, and goes out into space in all directions.

This will last for as long as the sun lasts, which is to say, there’s a few more billions of years in it.

No matter the social relations regulating it, industrial production based on mining and depositing waste cannot last for as long as life has. And the incredible engineering limitations and energy costs of space travel make it very unlikely that it will be possible to feed the ongoing accumulation of production and waste by a kind of imperial expansion into space.

Instead, it is necessary to produce a ‘closed loop’ economic system modelled after life, where every single part of every single product is ultimately reused.

The fact that life exists, and is stable and even able to recover from global catastrophes like asteroid impacts and adapt to steady orbital-dynamics driven cycles of climate change, shows that such a ‘closed loop’ system is possible; whether it’s possible for humans, and whether it’s possible to transition to such a system from the current capitalist system that depends on endless accumulation and growth of the number of commodities, which are built from necessarily limited resource inputs, is a lot harder to answer.

Anyway, that’s a picture of the sun! It looks like a lens flare because phone cameras aren’t designed for taking pictures of the sun, and bright light scatters off part of the camera system. Lens flares are fascinating.

R: Record the sky outside. Embed it to the internet.

I’m not sure if this is calling for a video recording or an image. Since it’s a sunny day and not much is happening there’s probably not much point in recording a video so let’s just put a photo up.

Notice the very distant hills are slightly bluish and washed out. This is due to light scattering in the atmosphere, the same reason the sky appears blue to our eyes!

That leads us, I suppose, to the old cliché question that rarely gets a good answer: why is the sky blue?

The major mechanism of atmospheric scattering is Rayleigh scattering from atoms and molecules much smaller than the wavelength of light. I won’t go into the details in this post, but the scattering intensity is proportional to \(\lambda^{-4}\) where \(\lambda\) is the wavelength of the light. This means short wavelengths, towards the violet end of the spectrum, are scattered much more strongly than red wavelengths.

Why then, is the sky blue and not purple? There’s two aspects to this question: the incident light and how it’s scattered, and the way the human eye responds to light.

These two plots show the intensity of light at different wavelengths in sunlight, and in ‘diffuse sky radiation’.

The sun’s radiation is closely approximated by a ‘black body radiator’ with a temperature of 5800K. The differences are generally explained by specific interactions between chemicals in the sun with light - see absorption lines.

A black body at this temperature peaks with light of 499.6nm, which is a greenish blue; it falls off quite quickly as we move into the purple part of the spectrum towards 400-450nm. If we look at the plot of the intensity from a blue sky, we see that the spectrum peaks close to 500nm as well, similar to the sun. So why does the sky seem like it’s a different colour to the sun?

The colours we sense are determined by the activation of the three types of cone cells in our eyes. We receive a mixture of light at different wavelengths; each wavelength of light activates the cone cells more or less. Depending on the relative proportions the three cone cells are activated, we see different colours. (If two different spectra of light activate the cones the same amount, they look the same to us - this is the basis of computer colour and painting!)

So the colour we perceive is determined by all the wavelengths in the light we observe, not just the highest ones.

Sunlight does not appear greenish blue to us, but rather more like a pale yellow, due to the energy in the rest of the spectrum towards the yellow and red end. It’s pale because it’s activating all three of our cone cells a similar amount. That makes sense: because we evolved under this sun, we see its light as the ‘neutral’ colour against which other colours are measured. If it activated the cone cells very different amounts to each other, it would appear ‘saturated’, i.e. strongly coloured.

Rayleigh scattering pushes down the red and yellow parts more than the blue parts. It doesn’t completely suppress them; light is scattered at all wavelengths, but more so at shorter, blue-purple wavelengths. So the S cone is activated a little more, and the M and L cones are activated a little less, and the light seems bluer.

This is actually something that people doing computer graphics tech have to worry about! In Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation, the authors illustrate this with this pair of images:

Anyway, I hope that was interesting. Let’s carry on!

T: Tally the amount of times you exhale in 30 seconds. Embed it to the internet.

I exhaled six times in thirty seconds. However, it’s difficult to count breaths without consciously controlling your breaths, so I was probably breathing omre slowly than normal.

A: Allow yourself to rest shortly. Allow your human body to do this.

Some forms of work are necessary to maintain our existence. Many are not, or are only made so because capital has a gun to our heads. Rest is good.

T: Tell another human that you love about something you thought about in the recent daytime.

I’m going to be sending this post to a lot of people I love very much shortly. And I told people just now about cuddles, which have thought about a lot in the recent daytime.

I: Illustrate a picture of something beautiful you remember during an unconscious state with a simple tool on paper. Embed it to the internet.

I have a great deal of difficulty remembering my dreams :(

I remembered dreaming about sleeping in a bed, one of three trans women, talking about things I can’t remember anymore. It was good. I struggled to draw it. This was my best attempt:

This is pretty messy and tiny on the paper. I find it very hard to draw pictures that aren’t tiny, where my mistakes can be hidden by the small size. I find it very hard to draw without an undo button.

O: “Oxygenate” once.

I assume that means: breathe in. So I did that.

N: Finally, Nourish yourself. The ability to go through the biological process of the creation of energy is what makes you human.

I will go and do that as soon as I’ve posted this.

Your sacrifice was not in vain, sceneteenz. This is for you, @sexygirlmax2019. I hope this ritual honours the spirit of the whole thing.

And to whoever created this ARG: thank you for finding a way to make a human connection through platforms designed for anything but.

[concerned-third-party]

An interesting take on my take.

First, a bit of context. This is a take from an outsider looking in. I’m from Canada, and we’re used to dealing with minority power up here, becuase we offer more than two choices of party.

Usually, minoity groups have to split off and start their own party, gain enough support from their local communities to get a few seets, and then they’re included in the house once they’ve been able to do this and show that the people actually want them. Sometimes they split off and get no seats, because the people don’t actually support their cause. This happened with our own fascists in the last couple elections. Becuase they were unable to force the Conservative party even more right, they split off, formed the Peoples Party of Canada, and then proceded to loose every seat they had, becuase the people didn’t want them.

If they do gain seats, because people actually want them to represent them, they then gain some power and a voice in the house. Not a whole lot of power, but a small ideological group shouldn’t have more power than they have sway over the population. This is like our Green party.

And they don’t have the power to a) shut down government indeffinately, or b) bend a different party to their idology, and effectively change what everyone who voted for that other party voted for. Thats just seems undemocratic and to be evidance of a hilariously broken system to me.

(I’m also not saying we’re perfect up here. People regularly vote for larger parties rather than the ones they actually want so that parties they don’t like won’t get the seat. This could be fixed with ranked choice voting, and that reform remains one of the most angering broken election promises of the current governenment. Party lines are also largely defined by donors rather than voters, so many people arent super well represened by their representatives)

If you have a system where 5 fascists can shut down the government indefinitely, maybe you just don't have a very good system.