#claim yours now or something!!

[youmustfixyourheartt]

crazy times we live in

[infiniteglitterfall]

I guess this might be why the UK seemed to go so antisemitic so quickly

I'm researching the 1947 pogroms in the UK. (Actually, I'm researching all the pogroms and massacres of Jews in the past 200 years. Which today led me to discover that there were pogroms in the UK in 1947.)

From an article on "The Postwar Revival of British Fascism," all emphasis mine:

Given the rising antisemitism and widespread ignorance about Zionism [in the UK in 1947], fascists were easily able to conflate Zionist paramilitary attacks with Judaism in their speeches, meaning British Jews came to be seen as complicit in violence in Palestine.

Bertrand Duke Pile, a key member of Hamm’s League, informed a cheering crowd that “the Jews have no right to Palestine and the Jews have no right to the power which they hold in this country of ours.” Denouncing Zionism as a way to introduce a wider domestic antisemitic stance was common to many speakers at fascist events and rallies. Fascists hid their ideology and ideological antisemitism behind the rhetorical facade of preaching against paramilitary violence in Palestine.

One of the league’s speakers called for retribution against “the Jews” for the death of British soldiers in Palestine. This was, he told his audience, hardly an antisemitic expression. “Is it antisemitism to denounce the murderers of your own flesh and blood in Palestine?” he asked his audience. Many audience members, fascist or not, may well have felt the speaker had a point. ...[The photo of two British sergeants hanged by the Irgun in retaliation for the Brits hanging three of their members] promptly made numerous appearances at fascist meetings, often attached to the speaker’s platform. In at least one meeting, several British soldiers on leave from serving in Palestine attended Hamm’s speech, giving further legitimacy to his remarks. And with soldiers and policemen in Palestine showing increasing signs of overt antisemitism as a result of their experiences, the director of public prosecutions warned that the fascists might receive a steady stream of new recruits.

MI5, the U.K. domestic security service, noted with some alarm that “as a general rule, the crowd is now sympathetic and even spontaneously enthusiastic.” Opposition, it was noted in the same Home Office Bulletin of 1947, “is only met when there is an organized group of Jews or Communists in the audience.”

The major opposition came from the 43 Group, formed by the British-Jewish ex-paratrooper Gerry Flamberg and his friends in September 1946 to fight the fascists using the only language they felt fascists understood — violence. The group disrupted fascist meetings for two purposes: to get them shut down by the police for disorder, and to discourage attendance in the future by doling out beatings with fists and blunt instruments. By the summer of 1947, the group had around 500 active members who took part in such activities. Among these was a young hairdresser by the name of Vidal Sassoon, who would often turn up armed with his hairdressing scissors.

The 43 Group had considerable success with these actions, but public anger was spreading faster than they could counter the hate that accompanied it. The deaths of Martin and Paice had touched a nerve with the populace. On Aug. 1, 1947, the beginning of the bank holiday weekend and two days after the deaths of the sergeants, anti-Jewish rioting began in Liverpool. The violence lasted for five days. Across the country, the scene was repeated: London, Manchester, Hull, Brighton and Glasgow all saw widespread violence. Isolated instances were also recorded in Plymouth, Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Newcastle and Davenport. Elsewhere, antisemitic graffiti and threatening phone calls to Jewish places of worship stood in for physical violence. Jewish-owned shops had their windows smashed, Jewish homes were targeted, an attempt was made to burn down Liverpool Crown Street Synagogue while a wooden synagogue in Glasgow was set alight. In a handful of cases, individuals were personally intimidated or assaulted. A Jewish man was threatened with a pistol in Northampton and an empty mine was placed in a Jewish-owned tailor shop in Davenport.

And an important addendum:

I've read a whole bunch of articles about the pogroms in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Eccles, Glasgow, etc.

Not one of them has mentioned that the Irgun, though clearly a terrorist group, was formed in response to 18 years of openly antisemitic terrorism, including multiple incredibly violent massacres. Or that it consistently acted in response to the murders of Jewish civilians, not on the offensive. Or that at this point, militant Arab Nationalist groups with volunteers and arms from the Arab League countries had been attacking Jewish and mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhoods for months.

I just think the "Jewish militants had been attacking the British occupiers" angle is incredibly Anglocentric.

Yeah, they were attacking the British occupiers. But also, that's barely the tip of the iceberg.

Everyone involved hated the Brits at this point. If only al-Husseini and his ilk had hated the Brits more than they hated the Jews, Britain could at least have united them by giving them a common enemy.

[ink-the-artist]

holy shit I did NOT realize how popular my "I will remove my teeth, for I want to remain kind despite my anger" quote is. I just googled it for fun to see what would come up, a bunch of people are quoting it not knowing who its from, an artist called Kuma made an album titled that, so bizzare

[beanghostprincess]

Repeat it with me! "Nakedness and SA scenes aren't always fanservice and sometimes they're just things that happen in the story ESPECIALLY when the main character is a woman who's part of a very sexualized subculture! And they're not portrayed in a good light! And if you believe they should not exist because they make you uncomfortable perhaps you should leave the internet and touch some fucking grass!"

[mostlyghostlyy]

Me staring at Dale after trying to have a serious conversation, and he breaks out into song for the fifth goddamn time:

[gingerswagfreckles]

Literally when was the last time that even one single post about feminism that wasn't a criticism of feminism got any traction at all. Like. 2015 maybe?

[blusandbirds]

eli moskowitz - "am i making you feel sick?"

[yuwuta]

twin aus are fun bc sukuna is sooooo ugly and yuuji is soooooooo pretty and beautiful and lovely <3 completely understand why sukuna ends up the deliquent loser twin bc why would anybody choose him when <3yuuji<3 is right there

[adamnablelittledevil]

Full offense, but I think it's funny how some fans immediately accept book changes like Armand's parents selling him as a slave (when on the books he was kidnapped and his family became a wreck after it) or him 'pretending to be a Muslim' (which they left unresolved, but nobody confirmed it to be an act either? we must wait for answers?), but the moment it is something making him worth of empathy, like being a sexual slave, or making a white character that isn't even on the show yet look bad, suddenly people care about book canon? And even justify their arguments with things that go against the books, like, "Armand is lying about his sexual trauma to manipulate people" when on the books it is canon that he was kidnapped, trafficked, abused and objectified several times? And I don't want to get into the whole thing Marius (my feelings about them aren't a secret), but I think everyone can admit that wasn't the best, healthiest, most respectful, romantic and balanced relationship (even by TVC standards) at all? Everything appears to be pretty in line with the source material, though there are some adjustments, the main essence is still there.

It seems to me that the problem isn't book changes, but Armand not being an one-dimensional villain caricature (and he isn't that in TVC either, so I don't understand the surprise) and having crumbs of positivity in his life.

[thelifeofacactus]

I sincerely hope that those of you who chose not to vote are feeling the weight of your inaction and false activism now. Did you win? Do you feel good? Is your sense of self-righteousness going to protect you or the people you claim to fight for?

[pigeon-butch]

I certainly have my own concerns about the treatment of moo deng but um. well i think some of you may just be racist

[serpentface]

What's the Wardi cultural take on Akoshos sleeping with/partnering with/marrying other Akoshos?

It's not highly regulated to a degree that there are overwhelming cultural norms about it. There's a lot of societal focus on akoshos being theoretically suitable sexual partners for both men and women due to being dual-gendered, but not to an extent that relationships with One Another are stigmatized.

They also largely get to escape from the most severe concerns about penetrator/penetrated power dynamics because they're not regarded as Men (they're regarded as dual-gendered, and they're a female social class on every practical level), there's no status of manhood to Lose by receiving sexual penetration. The only real thing you see in that department is people assuming that one acts as 'the man' and one acts as 'the woman', but this is largely due to preoccupation with a notion of sex being Penetration With A Penis (and that Penetration With A Penis means that one person is in a Man's Role and one person is in a Woman's Role). But this will not be regarded as unnatural as in same-gender male relations, akoshos will Have to take up a position in this sexual dichotomy if they want to have Real Sex (Penetration With A Penis) with each other, and this is not unnatural and doesn't involve gaining or losing status since they are simultaneously male and female, not men.

So like you might see individual culture critics finding stuff to nitpick about it as their annoyance of the week or a singular Guy here or there who thinks it's weird, but this isn't a widespread norm. The vast majority of people don't give a shit about akoshos having sex with each other. The worst thing you're likely to experience Solely by virtue of being in an akoshos-akoshos relationship is someone asking you (probably with genuine curiosity) which one does the man stuff and which one does the woman stuff.

Akoshos also don't experience Hard expectations for marriage (though there are societal pressures that make marriage an attractive safety net all the same, ESPECIALLY marriage to a man) so unofficial life-partnerships between akoshos are pretty much the Only same gender partnerships between unwed people that are going to go unquestioned. ((Sworn brotherhood is technically a same gender life partnership for men that is Functionally similar to marriage (in that it's a kin-making practice between unrelated adults), but the tradition is Built upon the assumption that both parties will be married to women and that a primary goal of this kinship is to provide security for both parties' wives and children)). Marriage obligations in general are more lax in the economically secure but not Wealthy lower mercantile classes (as obligations to support and perpetuate one's family are universal, but these obligations can be filled simply by having at least One son who can get hitched, and marriages in the lower classes have no political functions and therefore there's less reason to ensure All your children are wed (there's still incentives like dowry, but this is not desperately needed when a family is economically secure)). So akoshos in this class group tend to have a Lot more freedom in terms of their life arrangements and chosen partners (though still experience the limiting frameworks of structural misogyny in other capacities).

The only thing that is out of the picture is akoshos/akoshos marriage. Marriage in this society has a predominantly reproductive function, the concept of reproductively non-viable marriages is generally considered absurd. This is not JUST this culture's form of homophobia, as marriage is a very practical arrangement at its core - both in a reproductive capacity and as bedrock for the patriarchal blood-kinship family system that forms the core social unit. The idea of same gender marriage isn't just absurd because 'ewwww weird' it's like, that Cannot work within this system, it Cannot fill core functions of what a marriage intends to do here, the ways on which marriage and kinship are BUILT makes same gender marriage practically (rather than just socially) untenable.

The sole exception to the 'marriage = reproductively viable" rule is that akoshos can be married to men (which in practice is almost always as a remarriage after a man has secured At Least an heir). This has a Little bit of internal logic here in that they perform predominantly female social roles (thus are suited to being a wife, even if they can't bear children) (and also on practical levels of them having the same legal status as women) but it's really more of a 'this is just how it's always been' kind of thing. A lot of the older pre-Wardi identity dual-gender roles that got mashed together under the 'akoshos' name would have involved marriage to a man as a second wife/concubine, in addition to his primary wife who would bear his children. Men potentially having multiple spouses has not been retained as a cultural practice, but the notion that an akoshos Can be a wife to a man has survived into modern day legal and doctrinal practices around marriage.

So like this being said, marriage as it is legally defined is only between a man and a woman, a man and an akoshos, or a woman and an akoshos. In practice the latter two are comparatively VERY rare- a man/akoshos marriage cannot provide children (though an akoshos can practically fulfill all other obligations and duties of a wife), a woman/akoshos marriage Can provide children (and while akoshos cannot function as a male heir, these children Will take their akoshos-parent's family name (though the wife retains her father's family name)), but akoshos are legally grouped with women in terms of rights and privileges (including being permanently under legal domain of their father unless they have been legally handed off to a male husband) and Cannot provide hard power patriarchal support that this family system is built upon and therefore depends upon, which makes these marriages socio-economically insecure. They can obviously still be a good partner and parent, but this is not the same as having the Legal hard power of a patriarch.

Akoshos marrying each other would be reproductively and socially nonviable, and is treated as a similarly absurd concept to a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman. It's just not a part of the marriage and kinship framework, it's not a thing that you can Do.

[lsleofthelost]

backstories for the Villains of Merlin Academy

Hades: I’m stealing Blue’s idea that Hades was sent there as a punishment by the Olympians. We’re looking at it through the Disney lens, rather than Classics lens, meaning Hades is a villainous figure. I imagine he made contracts with a number of impressionable/gullible teenagers in an attempt to use them to overthrow Zeus. When this was discovered, he was sentenced to a human existence (hence why he ages later. the Olympians didn’t interfere with his sentence to the Isle of the Lost because they agreed that it’s a part of the human life) and made him a teenager. Intellectually, he knows he’s an immortal God but the human body and brain can not comprehend it, not fully, so he feels and acts like a teen boy. Yes, he has some of his powers, like pyrokinesis and shadow manipulation but they are limited.

Merlin was informed of this by Iris and he thinks it’s a wonderful and dangerous idea. He enrolled the now boy in classes and treats him as a normal student (sometimes he does forget that this isn’t just a punk).

Hades still likes what he likes, which is loud music, black leather and pushing people around, so he organically becomes part of the villain group.

Maleficent: She comes from a proud noble line of fae. They have been preordained to birth the future Mistress of Evil generations ago, and they leaned into it heavy. Every daughter is treated as a possible fulfilment of the prophecy, so all her cruel acts, all callousness, all harsh words were encouraged. When she was younger, she didn’t believe she was the one, and argued with her mother about it. Her family didn’t initially want to send her to Merlin Academy (she could make friends! become soft!) but she won out in the end. The reason she wanted to go was because she’s actually a bookworm, a scholar if you will, and the Academy is known as having the most comprehensive library in all the realms, including otherwise banned books.

Because she herself didn’t believe she could become the Mistress of Evil, Merlin didn’t either, and he could sense her hunger for knowledge, so how could he refuse to accept her? She likes that he’s scatterbrained and easy to manipulate.

She really didn’t come there to make friends, but when she realised that she was in the same year as actual literal God of the Underworld, she decided to make an exception. Plus, he likes good music.

Morgie: I will be so honest with you, I’m afraid I don’t know enough about Arthuriana to make a really good one here but I will try.

His mother doesn’t like thinking about her son. There’s no warmth or affection, really. As a son of such a powerful fae, he’s somehow crushed under the expectations and doesn’t give a shit. He wants his mother to love him, but he kind of realises it is a lost cause.

There was no question about his attendance, not really. Sure his parent is in a very tumultuous position to the realm, sometimes benevolent, sometimes malicious, she is still respected.

He mostly spent his days before the Academy in the Moors, with the animals, so he’s not that great at socialising with people. He spent a long time trying to approach Maleficent but didn’t know how. But eventually, he strikes a connection with Hook and is adopted by the group.

Hook: He is from a completely regular family. It’s not a loving warm family by any stretch of imagination but, unlike the others, there isn’t anything inherent to him. His parents work in a pub by the port, and he spent a lot of his childhood listening to stories from sailors from all over the spectrum of legality. That is also where he got his penchant for drama, because performing for drunk, recently paid sailors is a quick way to get some coin. He’s afraid of turning out like his parents, stuck in a dead end job, where people don’t have respect for you. He contemplated just joining a crew, but he knows that to become a Captain, he would either need to work a ship for years, or graduate an academy. So he sends an application.

He is one of the many scholarship kids at Merlin Academy. Officially, his goal is to enlist in the Navy and become a privateer. Less officially, he doesn’t care if he has a paper from the Crown, he wants to sail the seas, capture ships, and get a prize.

Because he’s attracted to power, he instantly sets his sights on the royal and noble kids. But their lives are so far away from his, and they don’t like his crude jokes so it doesn’t last long. Uliana thinks he’s hilarious, though.

Uliana: She was always the spare for the Royal House of Atlantis, ignored and forgotten. Unlike Ursula, she doesn’t have the bitter resentment of being the eldest child and being passed over in line for the throne in favour of Triton. But since Triton was raised pretty separately from them, Uliana feels more connection and competition to her sister. She knows there’s nothing she can do to be better than her brother (it’s not like she can be born a boy and challenge him for the throne) but she can be worse than Ursula. She desperately wants to be the best at something, to make people regret not paying attention to her.

She’s sent to the Merlin Academy, as is expected of a royal. But she doesn’t fit in with them. The other royal girls are either future rulers (which is partially why she disliked Bridget so much, because she takes that privilege for granted and humiliates herself with begging people to be friends), or they are perfectly happy and pampered princesses, who don’t understand her drive to be great. The nobles are too soft hearted for her taste, and she won’t lower herself to socialise with commoners.

She does connect with Hades, and Maleficent through him, and later Morgie, via James (he’s the only commoner she likes. he has drive). She’s the most motivated and initiating out of their group and becomes the de facto leader.

[backslashdelta]

How To Gif: Glass Shatter Effect

By popular demand (ie, 7 people who voted in this poll), here is a tutorial on how to do the glass shatter effect I used to create the first gif in this set.

I use Photoshop CC 2015 (yes I know it's old) for my gifmaking, but you should be able to apply everything to newer versions of Photoshop. For this tutorial I'll be assuming you know the gifmaking basics, but if not, I would recommend this tutorial, which is the process I use to make gifs. Note that this particular process involves saving all of the frames, importing those frames into Photoshop, and then using an action to convert to a smart object.

Keep reading below the cut to learn how to do this effect!

Before I could start making this gif, I needed three things; the two scenes that I wanted to use, and a video of the glass shattering effect. I already knew the scenes I wanted, so then I took to YouTube to find a video which I can't for the life of me find again (edit: thanks to add1ctedt0you in the replies for linking this video!), but it looked like this:

Something like this is what you want. Ideally the green part would be entirely white, but as long as there are two clearly different colours you can usually work with it.

This looks a lot slower than the gif that I made, but that's not because of the frame rate - which is exactly the same above as in the final gif - it's just because there are extra frames in this slower one that I cut out. In the video I used, the glass shattering happened very slowly. I didn't want that, so I ended up skipping several frames when I loaded the frames into Photoshop before using my gifmaking action. I just did this by manually selecting one frame, skipping the next several before selecting another frame, and repeating this until I had selected 60 frames.

After using my gif action, I had a smart object of the glass shatter effect that looked like this:

That's a much better speed! It still wasn't quite where I needed it to be though. I needed this in black and white, so I slapped a hue/saturation adjustment on the smart object and set the saturation all the way down to -100.

Okay great, I could start putting the gif together now.

First, I made a copy of the glass shatter smart object, because I'll need that later. Then, I pulled in frames from the scene that I wanted to appear in the hole after the glass shatters, and I used those to create a new smart object with my gif action (we'll call it Scene-bg). I pulled Scene-bg into the same window as the glass shatter objects. Then I created a new smart object by combining one of the glass shatter objects with Scene-bg, which I did by selecting both layers right clicking, and selecting "Convert to Smart Object".

I renamed this smart object to Shatter-fg. I opened it by clicking on the little icon next to the layer name in the layers window here:

The most important thing here is that the shatter effect object should be the top layer, and I set the mode to "lighten". This will make sure that the lightest colour of either this layer and the layer behind it is displayed; that means that anywhere that's white in our shatter animation will still show up, but anywhere that's black we'll see what's in the layer(s) behind it.

Then I threw some adjustment layers between them to get the colouring I wanted. I used a curves layer, a hue/saturation layer, and I also added text with an outer glow layer effect. Here's what the layer order looked like and the settings I used for each layer:

After this process, Shatter-fg looked like this:

Okay nice, this is starting to look like something! I saved this and went back to the main file with the other glass shatter object.

I needed to invert that other glass shatter object. There's a weird quirk with the version of Photoshop that I use where it doesn't like it when I apply specifically an invert adjustment to a smart object (it appears correctly when editing, but not on export) so I did this by creating a new smart object which included a separate invert layer, but if you have a newer version of Photoshop you can probably just apply the invert adjustment directly. Just note that you'll need to do one of these options; it won't work if you add a separate adjustment layer in the main file, it needs to be applied specifically to the smart object (which we'll now be calling Shatter-bg). It looked like this after I inverted it:

Once that's done, I made sure Shatter-fg was the layer directly above Shatter-bg, and set the mode of Shatter-fg to "darken" and Shatter-bg to "lighten". Since Shatter-fg is set to darken, it will be visible only when it is darker than the layer behind it. By setting Shatter-bg to lighten, I've guaranteed that the layer behind it will always be lighter (ie, white) in the places we want Shatter-fg to be visible, and will be black otherwise. Once I update those settings, this is what the gif looked like:

This is all there is to the glass shatter effect itself. Next I pulled in frames from the second scene to fill in the black areas. This layer needed to go below both glass shatter layers, so that it only shows through where the black. Then I added adjustment layers and some text. I used curves, hue/saturation, and vibrance adjustment layers, and I also added the "archer" text below the glass shatter layers so that it would be hidden to reveal the "prey" text. The other text I added above all of the layers, since I wanted this to be visible all the time. Here is the layer order and all of the settings I used for each of the layers:

I also grouped Shatter-bg and Shatter-fg and shifted them on the timeline so there would be some time to see the background gif before the shatter effect starts.

And that's all! Then it''s just a matter of exporting the finished product:

This is the first gifmaking tutorial I've ever made, so I hope I was able to be reasonably coherent and helpful! I'd love to hear if you make anything by following these steps, or even if you just feel like you've learned something reading through this. And if you have any outstanding questions, feel free to reply or send me an ask and I'd be happy to answer!

[qiu-yan]

in MDZS the novel, the innkeeper in Yunping mentions that people are too scared to go petition Yunmeng Jiang for help because someone once walked in on Sect Leader Jiang whipping a guy in the main hall, supposedly because the guy was a demonic cultivator.

[thevioletcaptain]

...i see people are on twitter posting lies for clout again