#for exposing me to the idea that one can give a fuck about the jewish people and also think we're not entitled to do horrible things

[vamptastic]

can we bring back jewish autonomism or something. taking inspiration from a jewish pacifist seems like a good place to start on figuring out how the jewish people can ever be safe without betraying and violating our own values.

[thequeeranachronism]

The first time I heard the term cultural Christianity it gave me words to explain my experiences as a Jew. Cultural Christian atheists aren’t still Christian but they sure do talk to and treat me just like fully religious Christians have. The fact that I can’t go into predominantly ex Christian atheist spaces as an atheist and not be exposed to antisemitism and Islamophobia. The fact that I can’t escape the fucking term “sky daddy”.

A lot of these people are leftists who like to put forward how progressive they are but will spout the most bigoted shit in the name of atheism. How they talk about atheism sounds so much like how evangelicals Christians talk about Christianity. They are the ones who are right about everything and those religious people are mentally ill idiots. It sounds so much like Christian supercessionists who pity Jews for not being able to accept Jesus as the messiah. How they will call themselves the “completed” Jews. Which mirrors how ex Christian atheists refuse to acknowledge religious Jewish atheists.

People from religious minorities need words to talk about our experiences and so far I have heard no suggestions on replacements that fully explain the experiences I and other Jews have had. Instead I have had hate hurled my way by people refusing to understand that having privilege from being part of the dominant culture doesn’t mean they can’t have been hurt by it. The idea that you have no culture is a dangerous one. Just because Christian culture has had a bigoted past doesn’t mean it’s evil. Pushing this idea that Christianity isn’t a huge part of western culture just forces assimilation onto those of us outside of it.

I have had bigoted fully religious Christians understand that they are part of the dominant culture. They and cultural Christian atheists both want Jews to no longer exist they just want it to happen in different ways. Religious Christians want us to either convert or go to Israel to kick start their apocalypse. Cultural Christian atheists want me to shed every part of my Jewish culture because it’s tied to religion all while they get to keep what they want from Christianity. Sundays off, Christmas, Easter et-cetera while I must give up my own and assimilate.

I just want ex Christian atheists to understand. Your culture is not something you have to shed fully. It’s not something you are tainted by. Your culture can be beautiful and it isn’t evil. Just like my own culture is beautiful and meaningful to me and a connection to my ancestors. Take what you find meaningful from it and discard what you don’t but don’t act like you don’t have a culture and have no privilege from it. Having privilege doesn’t mean you have to get a huge amount of power out of it either it just means you benefit in some way. I hope this helps anyone having trouble understanding

[feverinfeveroutfic]

Tijuana sunrise | kinktober 2024 | day xvi.: “‘til tel aviv “

pairing: eric peterson x chuck schuldiner | lars ulrich x eric peterson

prompt: nipple play

word count: 3806

song: “weapon of choice” by black rebel motorcycle club

It was a pleasure to burn.

That was the last thing he heard when I had stopped. He lay on his back and gazed up at me with beads of sweat collected on his left temple; the little curls clung to his forehead as if he had a bit more sweat there, but there wasn’t. I had no idea as to how I pulled it off in one fell swoop with him and Lars, but I did. I lifted myself off the bed, and I rested my feet down on the floor.

He cleared his throat and let out a low whistle.

“I needed that…” he groaned out to me. “God, I needed that so much.” I peered over my shoulder to his agape mouth and his hands rested down on either side of his head. I had left his shirt lifted up over his chest to show off his nipples, which were as red as cherry tomatoes, and I showed him a little smirk as a result.

“You wanna know something?” I asked him with a clearing of my throat. “I needed that, too.”

I shifted around to better face him. The candelabra in the hallway shone on the leather of my vest, such that I wondered what I looked like to him.

“I needed that, too, Chuck,” I repeated, and I leaned forth and gave him one final kiss on the crest of his forehead before I lay back down next to him.

It all began about literally not even the afternoon from before, when Alex and I were making bets with one another in how much we could have one of those groupies with the teased up hair over in the line going into the Anthrax show. The two of us had our sunglasses on, and he had a beer in one hand. I had warned him to keep it out of sight, not just because he was barely eighteen, but because he and I were out in the open on the street.

“There’s a piece of tin foil over the base, Eric,” he insisted. “I’ve got it blocked out of sight. It’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, and then one of the girls over there asks you your age and smells the hops on your breath. I promise you, Lex, it won’t be fine.” I shook my head at that and folded my arms over my chest. I looked on across the street and yet none of those girls were jumping out at me. He took a sip from the can, and then he returned to me.

“I’ve got my eye on this little brunette over here,” he said with a gesture to the little goth girl on the street corner. Her hair was fine and jet-black, much like my hair, and she had on a face full of white foundation with rich dark red lipstick.

“Have dark red lipstick all over your dick like an ice cream sundae,” I joked, and he laughed at that, and then he took another sip.

“It would be like a christening of sorts,” he added. “You know, she could lead me in with a little bit of ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ and have me hanging upside down like a bat in torpor.”

I smiled at that, and I kept my eye on the blonde ones near the front of the line.

“Hey, you know what ‘fine’ stands for?” he asked me.

“What’s that?”

“‘Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional,’” he joked, and that brought a laugh out of me. He took another sip, and then he set the can down on the brick wall right next to him, and he gave his hair a little toss with the shake of his head. “I’ll be right back.”

I watched him walk on over to her to go and talk to her, complete with a quick glimpse up and down the street first. It wasn’t that long ago he was a lonely little Jewish boy with the yarmulke on his head walking to the bus stop by himself. 

That was what happened when you get exposed to booze from a young age.

I kept looking long and hard at the blondes, but I had another thought cross my mind. I ran my fingers through my hair, and I walked on up the street to the next corner, away from the line.

I remembered that Metallica were playing at the next venue up the street, and I decided to give Lars a ring.

None of us had seen Lars since Cliff was killed, but all I knew was he had been going through sort of a difficult time in Cliff’s wake. Of the three of them, he was the one whom I was most concerned about.

With a quick glimpse up and down the street, I padded across the pavement to the other sidewalk. There was another line forming right outside the door, but then I realized that they were all going to the venue behind me.

I turned around and looked on down the block.

I had no idea where Metallica had posted up at, but all I could remember was that they had camped out at the building next door specifically to be away from the tabloids and the groupies. But I wondered on the truth of that.

I decided to look anyway, and I rounded the far corner of the brick building next door, and there, I spotted the back door to the backstage area standing wide open.

I peeked in through the doorway, and I could smell Lars’ powdery cologne from down the hallway. I stepped inside and walked along the tops of the hardwood floor in search of him. The place was dark, and I wondered where they would be in there. That is, until I heard Lars’ laughter from around the left hand corner before me. I peeked around the corner to find a narrow rectangle of light on the wall night to me. I could smell his cologne as well as the strong smell of vodka coming out from the room before me.

Lars giggled at something, and then I caught the sound of a man’s voice in there as well.

I crept up to the door and gently knocked on the panel right in front of my face.

“Who is it?” Lars called out.

“It’s Eric,” I replied.

“Eric?” the man echoed me.

“Eric Peterson,” I heard Lars explain to him. “From Testament. Their bassist nearly became our bassist before you showed up.”

“Oh!”

“Yeah, come on in, duder,” Lars called out. I bowed inside to see him sitting on the desk on the left side of the room with his hair tousled over his shoulder like a schoolgirl; he sat right across from the other guy, this wiry kid with long dishwater blond curls down past his waist and a squarish face that looked as though it came off a mannequin’s body. He showed me a dimpled smile.

“Eric, this is Jason,” Lars introduced me, and I extended a hand to him. His long fingers curled around my own, and then he brought my hand closer to his chest, and I nearly lost my balance.

“Whoa, easy there!” he chuckled.

“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down,” I joked to him, and he laughed again. I then turned to Lars, and I opened my arms for him.

“How have you been?” I greeted him. “I haven’t seen you since Alex’s birthday. I’ve just been thinking about you lately.” I held him and he held my body close to him: it was there I could feel something between the two of us, something that I never thought I would feel before with anyone, let alone a guy, let alone a guy like Lars.

“I have been doing better than most,” he confessed once I let go of him. “Having him around helps.” He nodded to Jason behind me, and I was taken aback by that.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I can’t really explain it but… James and Kirk aren’t really the affectionate types,” he confessed.

“You say ‘affectionate’ like we’re a couple, Lars,” Jason cracked.

“In a way, we are!” And I couldn’t help but smile at that. And then I rubbed my hands together.

“What do we have on tap?” I asked Lars, who then held up the bottle of vodka for me. He offered me a small cup from off to the side, and he poured me a shot. He poured himself a shot and raised it to me.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers all around,” I echoed him, and Jason raised a cup to us as well. We all took a shot at the same time, and then I leaned against the edge of the dresser next to Lars’ crossed legs. The vodka hit me like a fistful of solvent but once I had swallowed it down, I felt something sip through me.

“You know, I have always thought of you as like a big teddy bear, Eric,” he remarked.

“I am a big teddy bear,” I retorted with a straight face.

“Yeah, I would think that he is,” Jason joined in. “Soft round face but he dances with the shadows at night.”

“I have felt somewhat of a dragon or a demonic force inside me,” I told him with a gesture to myself.

“A dragon?”

“A dragon complete with the fire and the claws and everything,” I declared, and I raised a hand up before me with my fingers curled to imitate a dragon’s foot.

“Will Testament do anything of that nature on their upcoming album?” Lars asked me.

“I’m afraid not,” I replied, “but I would love to, though. If nothing else, I would love to do something on the side that involves that.”

“An on the side venture,” Lars decreed with a flash of his eyebrows. “Kind of like how you’re an on-the-side venture, Jace.”

“Nah, you’re the one on the side, Lars,” Jason cracked back at him, and he took another sip from his cup. “On the side with a nice beef sirloin.”

“You think you’re a sirloin?” I teased him.

“Hell yeah,” Jason insisted. “But it’s James and Kirk we can’t seem to figure out from the cow, though.” Lars giggled at that, and he poured himself another shot of vodka. He guzzled it down and turned to me with a slight drop to his eyes.

“I mean it, Eric, you are a big teddy bear,” he told me, and then he stifled down a burp in his throat. “I want you to fuck around with my nipples and then blow me.”

There was a small part of me that missed Alex right then, but the most of me wanted to see where this was going with Lars, however, especially when I felt something with him when we hugged each other there. I licked my lips and held the cup to my lips, but I refrained from taking another sip of the little bit at the bottom of the cup.

“You wanna do that in front of Jason or do you wanna go where it’s quiet and private?” I asked him.

“He will be quiet, I promise,” Lars insisted.

“Besides, I like watching people,” Jason assured us with a straight face. I almost lost it from laughing so hard, but I set my cup down on the floor by my feet, and then Lars did the same with the bottle of vodka. He lay down on the dresser next to me; I stood up to give him some room, but then I returned to the top of the dresser to tend to him. With a rubbing of my hands together and a toss of my hair back over my shoulder, I lifted up his shirt and revealed his bare torso to myself and Jason.

I knew I wasn’t going to have all that much of a move on him from the side, and so I climbed back up onto the dresser. I straddled his hips, and then I rubbed my hands together again.

“Run those thick sausages around my nipples and then kiss me there,” he commanded me with a slight hiccup. I rubbed my fingertips together and I did just that. I started with my index fingers around the rims of those little dark nipples at the same time. Lars closed his eyes and rolled his head to the side from the feeling of my fingertips there. Either he was tipsy or his nipples really were sensitive because he was already breathing hard from the feeling.

“You should put on a dress and let Eric motorboat your chest like he would with one of those blonde women outside the venue,” Jason suggested in a single breath, and I couldn’t help but laugh at that. In fact, I bowed forward and lay my head down on Lars’ chest. We both laughed our heads off at the feeling, and I could feel Lars’ hands clasping onto the back of my head.

I lifted my head up to see him looking up at me with a twinkle in his eye and those little apple cheeks pillowed out with the smile.

“Let’s try this again,” he told me with another hiccup. “From the top.”

“I touch your nipples,” I started again with another rubbing of my hands together, “and then we fuck around together in front of Jace here. We don’t tell James or Kirk about it.”

“Thumbs up their asses,” Jason quipped.

“Thumbs right up their asses,” Lars added to round out the echo in the room.

I ran my fingertips around his areolas again, and then I brought my head down to his chest again, that time to put my lips on his chest. My hair cascaded down onto his bare chest, and he breathed even harder from the feeling. I moved my lips down the crest of his chest, down onto his stomach and his belly button and the waist of his pants. I inched back along his legs so I could have more room.

Carefully, I opened his pants for him, and I tugged them down his legs a bit just so I could have some room for him. I tugged down his shorts and showed off his thighs and his dick to both myself and Jason. In fact, I completely forgot Jason was there, especially when I brought my mouth down to Lars’ dick, which was already beginning to firm up from the feeling that I gave unto him with his nipples already.

I started with the tip first, with my tongue slithered around the head. His skin was smooth and silken and oddly sweet against the pad of my tongue.

I opened my lips and moved my head in closer to his body. I suckled on him, part of the way down his shaft.

I then reached up to his chest to finger his nipples again. He gasped from the feeling, and then he groaned a bit. He groaned louder as I moved in deeper on his dick. He groaned even more when I fingered his nipples with both my index and middle fingers. I closed my eyes and moved in extra deep; I deepthroated him, the first person I ever deepthroated.

Very carefully, I sank the edges of my teeth down into the taut skin.

Lars let out a soft cry from the back of his throat, but he hadn’t come in my mouth. And he didn’t come when I lifted my head off him and I slid my hands down his chest to his stomach all the while.

But he had hit his apex, however. His chest heaved from the feeling, and he rested one hand on his chest. His other hand dangled down over the edge of the dresser down to the floor.

I ran my fingers through my hair, and a little bit spread down over my head and shoulder.

“Dude, you made that look so effortless,” Jason told me, and he extended a hand to me. I shook his head, and a wave of warmth spread over me. Lars sat up on the dresser, and he ran his fingers through his hair. He poured us more shots of vodka, and we downed them in unison.

At some point I had fallen asleep, and I woke up with a dry, parched feeling on my tongue as well as flat on my back on the couch where Jason had been sitting before. The two of them had gone and I had no memory of what had happened between then and when Lars gave us more drinks all around.

It was here when I came across Chuck.

Metallica, or rather Lars and Jason if James and Kirk were over there to begin with, had gone into the venue next door to perform and to settle down in their respective dressing rooms together, which meant I woke up there in that dressing room alone. Or so I believed I was alone.

I stepped into the hallway, which was lit up with nothing more than candlelight. I was met with the peppery smell of incense from the wings of the backstage area. Death had rolled into town, and I had no idea about the time, either.

My head was spinning, but I needed to get back home, get back to Alex because as far as I knew, he was out there by himself. I was a little hungover so there was no way I could drive. But I needed to find him.

I headed out to the hallway, and I brought a hand to my head. I had only been hungover once before out drinking with Lou, and this was my second time.

“Eric?”

I turned my attention to that next dressing room there at the very end of the hallway. Amber light from the candles washed out from inside there. I pushed the door open, only to find Chuck there on the edge of the sofa bed with an acoustic guitar plunked across his lap.

I had only met him once before, and through Jeff Becerra no less, but I liked him as well. He had that head full of curls, those bright eyes, and that mouth full of crooked teeth. I swore that he and Alex were brothers in another life.

“I thought that was you,” he greeted me as he lightly strummed the nylon strings with the side of his thumb. “May I ask what you are doing here?”

“I came over here to see Lars,” I explained with a rubbing of my temple. “We had a few drinks, and then I woke up to find it’s nighttime. That was at like… three. Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s about ten to one,” Chuck calmly replied. “I was just about ready to call it a night and then I saw you outside the door.” He then sniffed in my direction. “Have you been drinking?”

“Just a couple of shots of vodka,” I replied. “But, you know. It’s Lars. Straight vodka and I was out like a light right then.”

“Don’t choke,” he advised me.

“You ‘choke’ like you were playing around with me just then,” I teased him, and then I shook my head at that. “Why did I just say that.”

“Why did you?” he asked me.

“I went to sleep for nine hours,” I told him. “Lars and Jason left me here, and I don’t know where they went. I also can’t really get home because I’m hungover and I still smell like vodka.”

“You can always spend the night with me,” he offered me. “I have this sofa bed here and we can post up for the night. Tomorrow, we can get breakfast.”

“That sounds excellent,” I told him. “And it’s interesting you offered me that after we only met once before.”

“I dunno, it’s after midnight,” he confessed. “I’m feeling kind of sexy.”

I raised my eyebrows at that. And then I realized what he was going from there, especially with that candelabra over our heads, intimately lit up with those little candles to give us a bit of amber light. Through the dim light and the darkness, I caught the view of the sparkle in Chuck’s eyes.

He needed a bit of punishing. He needed more of a punishment than Lars and Jason did.

I squinted my eyes at him.

“You wanna see what I shared with Lars and Jason earlier?” I asked him.

“Is it… tantalizing?” he asked me, and his voice was low and silken, much like how Alex’s voice grew low, whispery, and silken whenever he was turned on.

“It requires you to lay flat on your back,” I told him. “Back there, it was atop a dresser. At least here you have a bed.”

Chuck took his guitar off and leaned it against the edge of the bed. He lay down flat on his back; the bottom of his shirt lifted up over his waist to show me the thin sliver of skin. I was surprised to find that his skin was slightly amber, kissed by the Florida sun and made even more silken in appearance by the candlelight.

“Play with me from here ‘til Tel Aviv?” he asked me with a crooked smile and a giggle.

“You know it,” I assured him, and I rubbed my hands together. Just like with Lars from before, I straddled his body and lifted up his shirt to show off his nipples. But that time, he and I were alone.

I also stayed below his knees so I could have room to blow him and finger his nipples at the same time. I was stretching myself a bit more than usual, but I wanted to do it. My hands up on his chest, my mouth down on his dick. As I moved in closer to his body, I gently sank my teeth into his tightening skin. That brought a slight yelp followed by laughter.

I smiled to myself. But then I pinched his nipples, and he yelped out again.

That time, I could taste him. A fine pearl of liquid on the pad of my tongue. And I smiled to myself once again.

I lifted my head off of him for a moment, only to bring my head down to his dick again for another suckling. I was going to blow him again and again if it meant giving him multiple orgasms, one right after the other. And I gave him multiple. I gave him multiple orgasms to make him sweat and make my mouth grow tired.

I definitely played with him from there ‘til Tel Aviv, and it was something that I could never do with Lars and especially not with Jason sitting there and watching us.

It was a pleasure to burn.

[humusboii2thereturnoftheking]

A Morrocan ex-Muslim take on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This is again taken from reddit, text was posted by user named u/Benjazzi. I found it a very insightful read and I hope you will too:

I'm from Morocco. I'm atheist but my entire family is muslim. When it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, some muslims, sadly, can really go insane. For them, it's our tribe (Palestine moslems) against the enemy tribe.

Israel bombed South Lebanon after Lebanon bombed them ? "It never happened"

Israel stormed the holy Al Aqsa mosque because people throwing rocks took refuge inside of it ? "I don't believe it"

Mass Rapes ? "Fake news. It never happened"

"Our tribe can do no wrong" is literally how many people think.

To be fair, Jews can be tribal. But it's frankly nowhere to the same extent. The Jewish press is full of critics of the Israeli government and debates. Honestly, I have found that as long as you don't sing "Death to Israel" and are respectful, you can have very constructive conversation with most Jews and Israelis, even if you are critical. That's because they have a tradition of debate. Sadly, the muslim world lacks this.

Saudi Arabia just bought Cristiano Ronaldo for $1 billion. I have seen people on arab social media argue that Saudi Arabia doesn't help Palestinians because... the Saudi Prince is a puppet on a jewish-american string. It's totally stupid. He has publically humiliated the President of the United States.

Why he doesn't help ? Well. The explanation is simple. He doesn't give a fuck. But the idea that a sovereign arab leader might not care about "our tribe" is so shocking and so disturbing that some people need to find sinister foreign hands to explain it.

Egypt is right now shooting people who try to leave Gaza. I have seen Egyptians argue that the Egyptian President is....secretly jewish. "Sisi is a jewish dog, his mom is jewish". I mean... really 🤔 ?

The idea that a sovereign arab leader might not care about "our tribe" is so shocking and so disturbing to them that many Egyptians have to find some insane conspiracy to explain it.

This is the kind of cognitive dissonance that I sadly see all around me.

NYT publishes an investigation critical of Israeli behavior? I post it online. Reactions on social media ? "Great job ! Fucking zionist pigs. The New York Times just exposed them"

NYT publishes an investigation critical of Palestinian behavior ? I post it online. Reactions on social media ? "Fuck your propaganda. New York Times is pure zionist filth"

"Our tribe can do no wrong".

A newspaper is reliable or fake... simply depending on how it portrays the tribe !!

Then you have Islamism on top of that. The cherry on the chocolate cake.

Read the comment I posted here :

The real problem today in our world is a guy called Sayed El Qutb.

He was an egyptian intellectual who is considered the father of ALL Islamists.

In his books, he argues that the best period for muslims was under the Islamic Caliphates, when the entire world respected and feared muslims. He believes the Islamic World went through cultural, political and economic decline due to not enough Islam. According to him, only a return to PURE Islam™ can make muslims great again. Sayed El Qutb endorsed creating an Islamic State based exclusively on Sharia Law. He praised violent jihad against the non-muslims (kouffars). He opposed secularism, gender mixing, and hated jews ("filthy pigs") and atheists.

He was hanged in 1964 for attempting to murder President Nasser. But his books have spread very successfully. Sayd Qutb is to islamists what Karl Marx was to communists. Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Nosra front. All of their creators read his books and deeply admired him.

3 countries are particularly behind Islamism : Saudi Arabia, Iran and Qatar.

The first one is Saudi Arabia. In the 70s, using their oil money, they opened a special university called the University of Madinah. Anyone can go study there for free to become an Imam. Saudis will pay your tuition and boarding school. Your food ? They will pay for it. These imams all learned the ideas of Sayed Al Qutb. Westerners are filth, jews are vile pigs, women must obey men, women must be veiled, secularism is a form of mental disease.

After graduating , these Saudi-trained Imams were sent back to their country in Africa, Europe, or Malaysia, to spread Saudi soft power. And this happened for decades and decades. They were the most successful in 2 countries in particular : Pakistan and Egypt. In these countries, a generation of public school teachers received Saudi textbooks. Imagine the result on the general population.

The second country to blame for Islamism is Iran.

In 1979, a secular dictatorwas overthrowed and replaced by a religious dictator. Ayatollah Khomenei became Supreme Guide of the Revolution. He always wears a black turban on his head. That black turban means he is "sayyed", a direct descendent of Muhammed. Ayatollah Khomenei was a deep admirer of Sayed Qutb. He translated all Sayed El Qutb's work into Farsi to "educate iranian people".

His new Islamic regime started using their oil money to fund $$$ radical islamic groups all around the Middle East. In Irak, in Pakistan, Lebanon, in Syria. His successor, "Ayatollah Khamanei" has pursed his heritage. Iran published a Fatwa calling for any muslim who can to murder the UK poet Salman Rushdie for his books. Salman Rushdie has been forced to live in hiding for 20 years. He was recently stabbed during a literary festival in America.

In 1984, Iran published an official postal stamp paying tribune to Sayed El Qutb, calling him a true martyr of Islam. Also, several streets and avenues in Iran were named "Qutb" as a tribute.

The third country to blame is Qatar. They are the favorite headquarter of all islamists in the world today. Al Nosra Front, Al Qaeda, Hamas, The Afghan Talibans. You always find Qatar.

In Morocco, Qataris are big supporters of the local Islamists (حركة التوحيد والإصلاح)

I can testify that what Al Jazeera spreads in arabic is far far worse than what they actually say in english. They had a TV show with a guy called Youssef Al Qaradawi. This guy is a disciple of Sayed El Qutb. He tells people it's okay to beat up your wife, that jews are disgusting pigs, that Islam will take over Europe. His TV show was watched by 60 million people every week on Al Jazeera Arabic. 60 million people. Every week. In 1998, they published a documentary called "Ben Laden : One man standing against an empire"

Here is another thing you won't see in Al Jazeera English. Basically, the rape, slaughter and torture of Israeli civilians is just presented as "a wonderful victory" on Al Jazeera Arabic. That's it. They won't give any more detail. No pictures. Anyone who seriously studies the military tactics of Hamas, reading academic papers, comes to the conclusion that the Israelis - whatever you think about them - aren't actually lying. Hamas really does use Palestinians as Human Shields. It's never mentioned on Al Jazeera. Never. In fact, their "journalists" told a palestinian shouting this to shut his damn mouth.

Saudi Arabia, Iran and Qatar. These 3 countries have become the cancer of Islam.

And they have used their money to spread their influence, including in Morocco. Now the cancer has spread.

The question is how do we cure it? I don't know. I have small hopes for Saudi Arabia because even if their Prince is a dictator, he genuinely wants to improve his country. He is reforming textbooks to remove antisemitism, allowing women to drive, allowing music, ending forced gender segregation, etc... But the other two countries remain a major problem.

[frostyreturns]

“I’ve said for a long time the gmm show/guys are satanists and have speculated that the show (which is rife with pedophilia and occult symbolism) is at least occasionally a front for sex trafficking. Remember in the wikileaks docs where we found out the elites were auctioning off children under the guise of a concert, where they could covertly put children up for sale and the auctioning was mixed in with the weird show so that a casual observer would have no idea what was going on, and would just assume it was some weird avant garde thing... but people who were there to bid would know the signs and codes and how to bid. On past blogs I’ve detailed other similar epiosdes that looked to be doing the same thing... Well take a look at this gmm episode in particular. Keep in mind Rhett has claimed previously that he does have family members who belong to a secret society and has on the show been accussed of abandoning their faith to serve the devil in exchange for fame and money and his response was “that’s exactly right, how did you guess it exactly.” But he said it in that jokey I’m telling the truth in a sarcastic voice kind of way. 

Anyway not every episode looks as nefarious as this one so this kind of content is an outlier but it’s not unique and it’s loaded with red flags.

Red flag #1: Guest is accused pedophile Seth Green who was named by a man who was shortly thereafter “suicided” who claimed Seth personally approached him and revealed not only that he was a pedophile but that Seth tried to recruit him and revealed a dungeon full of chains and childrens toys that he claims Seth said “this is where we keep the “chicken” chicken being a placeholder word for children. What was that show Seth Green did again? You know the one that opens with something being strapped into a chair...robot something...

Red Flag #2 Remember me saying chicken was a common pedophile placeholder for the word children

Red Flag #3

The use of gavels...you know like at an auction

Red Flag #4 This was one of the categories of this game they made up for the episode...a game they never played previously and have not played again.

The round also required the person to give a number, that number could be associated with a monetary value and could constitute a bid or an opening bid. And the person was also asked to detail their sexual skills, which could be the covert description of the person for sale. Also a link quote from this round was “I’m going for a 5 star review and a lot of yelping” which didn’t make a ton of sense in the context unless you see it’s more nefarious potential meaning.

Red Flag #5

In the next round they were required to read out loud their last text exchange. And what he read sounded suspicious as all fuck in the context. This is supposedly the last text exchange in rhett’s phone between him and link “How long of an adventure are we looking for?” “Roughly how many days, the longer the deeper you can go.” “(redacted name) has a lot of experience with this.” “I was thinking two full days, plus a fly day on either end to keep it to four days.” Sounds like maybe what’s up for sale includes a trip somewhere...maybe an island of sorts? Links description said somethign about having a bush removed that made no sense within the context of what he was saying...but again made sense if viewed in the lense im presenting.

This is just me speculating based on what has been exposed about how these types operate, but also keep in mind this is not an isolated thing this is just one of many examples of very suspicious content these shills have put out over years. Like when they did this episode about “products for dragons” 

That episode had them “joking” about eating babies where they make hilarious jokes like speculating that babies taste like lamb, and asking for blood to wash down the immitation baby meat and wondering if it would simulate the screams of a baby being eaten as well. Link even makes a comment about it being kosher for jewish dragons. Seems weirdly edgy for such a neutered tame youtube safe channel meant to be sterilized for mass viewing no? This is also just one of many examples of them simulating eating children over the years. They’ve also eaten ribs out of baby dolls, simulated eating the face off a doll in a separate video and “joked” about eating salt brined children as a christmas snack. So it’s not just one goofy video that could be misinterpreted it’s a pattern.

Again I’m just speculating I have no inside knowledge of these guys or of the people behind their show apart from what they themselves present. But man I feel like you’d need to do more mental gymnastics to disprove what I’m saying than to confirm it...but that’s just me.

[rebelbrat]

Yo I am SO SORRY I didn’t get to this (or your other 2 asks) earlier--life since the beginning of this year has just been an endless series of misfortunes and it decided to give me one last fuck you on its way out in the form of a stomach illness and a head injury at the same time…But now that I’m officially on vacation, I can finally sit down and give you the answer that I’ve been thinking of giving this whole time! Here we go.

OK SO. Now that you’ve mentioned representation, I just have to lay out my entire story with how this dude came to be Jewish. I was planning to talk about this for a while, but I figured responding to your ask with it would be a great jumping off point. Way back when I first started writing human!Lotor, I made him Jewish for admittedly kind of a racist reason. Basically, I wanted him to have European-like features like he did in canon but didn't want to make him mixed with European. In hindsight this was racist to POC (not to mention highly emblematic of the biases I’m sure I have against white Europeans and which I still try to work on because I don’t want to hate anybody like that but it’s hard). Racist because the solution should have been to just give him POC features unlike in canon then, since Voltron and other cartoons aren't always so great at depicting POC features…But I digress.

So there I was. With the blessing of my one (1) close Jewish friend at the time, I had made what was probably the dumbest choice for representation I’ve ever made and most likely ever will make. Because Lotor is the sneaky, manipulative character, right? And Jews are stereotyped as sneaky and manipulative, right? But I literally just made him Jewish because I fucking hated Europeans but I still wanted him to look a certain way. And so like the past 4 years I've also been dreading someone telling me that making my human interpretation of Lotor Jewish is antisemitic. 

Surprisingly, that has never happened to me even once. Someone actually tried to put me on blast for the unintentional antisemitism in my writing, but even then they never once brought up the fact that I picked literally the worst character to make Jewish. I think the main reason why I’ve been able to write him like this for so long is because Tobias is different enough from Lotor that they don’t entirely feel like the same person--which is only par for the course because with my premise being “this is character X except with at least one decent parent and also an entirely different species,” there’s bound to be a massive change. Tobias can be incredibly toxic based on my own interpretation of Lotor's toxicity and he does have the capacity to be manipulative but he's someone whose first priority is fighting for justice and being loyal to anti-imperialism and other social justice causes, and he's a lot more relatable & personable than Lotor too due to the fact that he can talk and act like a normal person and you’re not constantly questioning whether that’s the real him or just a face he put on to get you to like him better. Granted, my canon divergent Lotor is also very anti-imperialist, but Tobias has the advantage in relatability because his left-leaning stance isn’t authoritarian. I guess in that way the representation turned out a lot better than it could have been--

Now here comes the plot twist.

When I first started writing Tobias as Jewish, I honestly had no idea what I was doing. I made a bunch of mistakes and was like this for about two years and, as I said before, someone actually tried to put me on blast over it. Which I absolutely deserved because past me was an idiot who should have learned a book before writing even a single iota of the shit that I dove headfirst into. I managed to escape from it relatively unscathed in my Internet life because within five minutes of the callout coming up it came down because the person behind it got exposed for only calling me out out of spite--but my real life is another story. I am spiritual and I suspect the amount of antisemitic shit I noticed since committing to a conversion has increased about 5000000000x as some sort of test, midah k’neged midah for my past behavior now coming back to me so I can see how shit like what I did affects Jewish people. But you know how I started wanting to convert in the first place? I actually started doing research on Judaism so I could portray Tobias properly and I was like "oh fuck this is super cool.” It was literally my character research for Tobias that inspired me to convert.

And now I'm here, studying Judaism as my hyperfixation, getting involved in the Jewish community (well as much as I could with my mom being here like 3 of the 4 months I’ve been in law school)…And thinking that when I choose my Hebrew name I want it to be Toviyah because he was what brought me here.

So sometimes I looked back at …wow I can't believe this happened, I made a really bad choice for a really bad reason but it ended up changing my life in an incredibly positive direction. 

As to how other people perceive (or would perceive) Tobias’ representation…Well, I don’t reach out to a lot of people because I’m scared to find out. LOL. My Jewish friends adore Tobias and I love having him to express my learning about Judaism with so I’d like to think he’s good representation (in spite of his canon self being the worst possible choice to write this with), but I’m afraid of having a bigger audience because I’m worried that people will automatically jump to conclusions about me and my work. Maybe there are serious flaws in my portrayal that need fixing, but I’m still scared of people telling me that because usually on the Internet feedback is never given as constructive criticism, it’s usually given in the form of telling people to kill themselves. But I would hope that my representation is good enough (or will become good enough) that, just like you say, the only substantial complainers about it would be dumb people imposing their opinions on others and non-Jewish voices speaking over Jewish people being the loudest.

Thank you so much for this ask <3 Being able to write this all up means a lot.

[eddiesfaerie]

Going Under

Summary: As an undercover detective, it’s not unusual to break a few rules to get some classified intel. You just can’t seem to figure out why Flip Zimmerman would want to help you out. (5.3k words)

Warnings: possible spoilers for Blackkklansman, angst, mentions of KKK, mentions of police, mentions of gun violence, period related sexism i guess, f!reader, enemies to lovers?, pissed + jealous Flip :) 

A/N: thank you all for the sweet comments (listed below along with the prompts), and so sorry for how long this took to write, I have 3 prompts combined here and I think i’m pretty happy with how it turned out:) i hope it’s okay that i reworded some of the prompts just so that they fit in better. i hope you enjoy <3

Based on:

Congratulations on your 300!!!! I’d love to request these prompts with Flip, if you’re feelin it! 2 and 4 from the angst prompts list and 5 and 15 from the types of kisses prompt list. Thank you!

from the angst prompts list “Isn’t it obvious? I’m in love with you!” with flip?? You’re such an amazing writer im here every damn day 🥺🥰

Kisses #45 and “you’re driving me fucking insane.” For Flip, if you’re still taking requests, please! Your writing is fantastic! :)

Skin tight and sparkling, dazzling too. This was not your usual work attire.

Well, this wasn’t your typical work outing either.

An informant had come forward, said he had intel on the KKK and their next meeting. Information even Flip (an undercover infiltrator himself) wasn’t aware of. You couldn’t pass it up. And you didn’t want to give up your informant to the precinct, so you decided against telling anyone about your meeting with him.

It was probably a bad idea to have gone back to the office to grab your audio recorder in the outfit you decided to wear to your meeting.

Because of course, the only man who ever stays this late at work, hunched over files and files of names, dates, events, anything relating to his case with the KKK, was here.

Flip Zimmerman.

You thought you could walk by him without catching his attention. You thought if you stayed in the darkness of the hallway, swallowed by the shadows he wouldn’t notice you. But Flip was good at that, he was good at noticing things.

The sequins of your dress reflected the light from his desk lamp, catching your silhouette in the dark hallway. You fucking siren, what were you up to?

“Detective.” He called out to you from his desk, all too cooly with a cigarette bobbing between his lips. He hadn’t even looked up at you. You tried not to flinch at his sudden firm voice, booming at you and jumping your bones.

“Zimmerman.” You waved, stopping in your tracts, lifting a hand to him and waving dumbly.

He finally looks up from his coffee stained files, making direct eye contact with you. A sly smile stretching across his face as he leans back in his chair, his eyes raking up and down your body as you move closer to him, settling awkwardly against the doorframe. He takes a particularly long drag from his cigarette.

“Whoowee, where you headed looking like that?” He asked through his smile, glancing at his watch to catch the time. It was getting close to midnight.

“Just… out.”

“Oh yeah? What’d you have to come back here for? Needed some pepper spray in case the guy tries something?” He’s intrigued now, questioning you like he would an informant. He leans forward on his desk, resting his weight on his forearms, cigarette between his long fingers now. You play along, laughing with him. Fighting the urge to roll your eyes.

“Yeah, something like that.” Flip nods, chuckling to himself as he brings his cigarette back up to his lips, taking another long drag. You try to look away as he blows smoke out of his nose. He stands up from his desk, walking slowly over to you in the doorway.

“Cute.” He nearly sneers, taunting you. “Now why don’t you tell me what’s really going on, hmm?”

“I’m just-”

“I saw you grabbing the audio recorder.” He says, shutting you down. Defeated, you sigh rather loudly, your shoulders sagging as you run a hand down your face.

“I’m meeting an informant.” You try to keep it short and sweet, hoping he won’t pry but Flip just raises his eyebrows, signaling you to continue. You sigh again. “He’s giving me intel on KKK activity, a possible outing that’s coming up.” Flip rolls his eyes.

“Rookie listen... I’m the one who gets KKK intel around here. What does he know that I don’t?” You shrug your shoulders, trying not to let the dumb nickname ‘rookie’ sting as he spits it at you.

“All he told me was that there’s something going on this week that’s really hush-hush, even between members. He couldn’t elaborate more than that over the phone so I agreed to meet him at a bar.”

“Alone?”

“I can handle myself, Zimmerman.” Now you roll your eyes, you hated how much he doubted you, he always had. You were just really good at ignoring him, ignoring his stares and comments. Usually.

“Do you have any idea how fucking stupid that is? These people are sick, they’re not right in the head. I’m… I’m coming.”

“What? No, Flip I’ll be-”

“I’m coming. This isn’t up for debate... Wait here, I’m gonna go get you a microphone.”

You fought the whole way to his truck, which he insisted on taking. You told him he would blow your cover, you told him he would make things obvious, probably scare the guy. You told him that maybe he would recognize him, recognize him as ‘Ron’. Flip didn’t say shit in response, just opened the passenger door for you and jogged to the driver’s seat, lighting up a new cigarette as he drove you two to the bar.

The car ride was tense, you fidgeted with the hem of your dress, acutely aware of how much skin you were showing, you could feel Flip’s burning eyes on you as he stole glances every now and then.

“You’re unbelievable.” You huffed, crossing your arms and looking out the window, trying to keep your mind focused on the mission.

“What was that?”

“I said you’re unbelievable. Somehow you’re going to manage to get all the credit for this too.” Flip brows furrowed in confusion, he turned to look at you properly for the first time since you two got in the car. He said your name but you averted his gaze as soon as your eyes met. A fleeting moment of tenderness passed through him.

“Doll, what are you talking ab-”

“We’re here.” You’re thankful for the switch of subject as you sit up suddenly in your seat, unbuckling your seatbelt and leaning forward to look into the place. You had no idea what the guy looked like. You assumed he would approach you once you were inside. Flip parked further down the street, on the opposite side. Thankfully it was a one way street so a get away, if necessary, would be easy.

“Hey don’t just jump out, the fuck-”

“Hand me the mic.” You said with urgency. Flip felt flustered watching you move, the way your breasts pressed against the fabric of your tiny dress, the soft swell of flesh at the perimeter of the shiny fabric, begging to be kissed, touched. He shuddered but turned quickly to hand you the mic kit, grabbing the headphones for himself.

You lifted your dress carefully so as not to expose your entire body to him. You pressed the microphone right in between your breasts but underneath the fabric, right above your belly button. Flip sucked on his cigarette, watching for a moment too long before turning his head away, giving you some privacy. You muttered a tiny ‘thanks’. Flip just nodded, gaze averted as he stared out his window into the dead of night, images of your body burning into the back of his mind. Fuck, you looked so soft, so pretty. You shouldn’t be doing this...

Once you were done tapping the mic to your flesh, you secured the battery pack to your underwear. Thankfully it was thin enough to not cause too much of an obvious bump in your silhouette, the informant wouldn’t notice, not that he would really mind. He probably knew you would be recording something but he wasn’t the problem. KKK members were everywhere, they blended in, they could be anyone. You had to be sneaky, hide away from prying eyes that look for detectives, for cops.

But you were good, you were good at being sneaky, conniving. That’s why you were hired. Tonight, you would just look like you were on a friendly date.

You opened the car door, your heels clacking against the concrete. You close the car door quietly behind you, nodding at Flip before heading inside. Flip was easily more nervous than you were. He had experienced these guys first hand, you hadn’t. He knew how fucked up they truly were, how sick and twisted their minds were. Not only did they not trust anyone who didn’t look like them, they were weary of newbies too, white folks just like them.

Images flash in his mind of Felix holding him at gunpoint in his stale basement, threatening to pull the trigger if he didn’t prove he wasn’t circumcised, prove he wasn’t Jewish. Flip thought he was going to die that day. Truly thought he was going to be killed by some nazi in a basement. But Ron saved him, Ron sacrificed himself and saved the whole mission. Flip hoped it didn’t come to it tonight but if it did, he hoped he could save you too.

Chatter on the radio filled his headphones, cutting off his looming thoughts. Your sweet voice filled his head, surrounded him, nearly throwing him off balance in his seat. He tried to look into the bar, to see if he could see you from where he was parked but to no avail. You had sat somewhere out of eyesight and that made Flip nervous. He would have to work based on the tone of your voice, he’d have to judge for himself if you were in danger.

“Hey, George right?”

“Nope, but that’s the name I gave ya.” The guy chuckled. Flip didn’t recognize the voice, probably someone he hadn’t met, it did nothing to calm his nerves. “Didn’t think the name you gave me was yer own so, figured I’d play yer little game, right Pamela?”

Pamela. If Flip wasn’t so high strung, he would’ve laughed at that.

It must have been what? Only last week that he and some of the guys were briefly discussing Pamela Anderson after catching Jimmy reading a magazine she was featured in, teasing him about it, perhaps making too many lewd comments. Maybe you had caught that. Maybe it was a coincidence. Either way, Flip was flustered beyond belief.

You laughed anyways at ‘George’s’ comment, the sound made Flip feel drunk.

“So, what do you have for me George?”

“Now now darlin’, what’s the rush? Why don’t we get somethin’ t’ drink first?” You laughed again, fabric rustling too loudly.

“Sure... I’ll just have a Coke.” You say dismissively. Flip can hear ‘George’ ordering in the background while you seem to fidget around, maybe adjusting your dress.

The conversation progressed at a frustrating pace. The informant kept swerving around your questions, ordering too many drinks which made his sentences harder to understand, and that deep southern accent of his wasn’t helping his case either. Flip could hear the anger and frustration seeping into your voice, coating your words with a vicious bite and a sickeningly sweet laugh, trying to play it off cooly as to not give away your cover. There were too many fucking rednecks in this part of town.

On his fourth drink, ‘George’ started letting his hand wander over to yours which rested on the bar countertop. You could tell he thought he was being real smooth, letting his fingers just graze ever so slightly over yours, followed by a gentle tap of his hand over the back of your palm, then he started leaving it there, running his thumb over your soft skin. It made your skin burn, not in that pleasant way but in the way that makes your stomach feel like it’s about to churn your Coke up your throat and out of your mouth, onto his nice shoes.

The worst part is you let him touch you, you let him get handsy all in the hopes of gaining information. Don’t blow your cover, don’t blow your cover, don’t blow your cover.

“So…” you start, stretching casually, trying to rid your body of his grabby hands. “I hear Mr. Duke is supposed to be making an appearance, sometime at the end of this month right?” George nodded, reaching his hand over to you again, clearly he only had one thing on his mind, and that was not David Duke.

“Yeah darlin’, he sure is. I’m sure he’d like to meet somethin’ as pretty as you. I’m sure he’d like to show ya what the organization is really capable of… they’re gonna make things go boom.” His hand had managed to slither itself around your waist, pinching your skin through the dress. He was practically standing next to you now, breathing down your neck.

Even Flip, who still sat all the way outside in his truck, could tell he was standing closer to you now based on the way his voice had moved in regards to the placement of your mic. It was coming in almost exactly where yours was. Was he hovering over you now? Touching you? He heard loud rustling, a clear agitation of the microphone taped above your belly button, how handsy was he getting? Flip’s heart started beating faster as he weighed his options, unsure of what to do, how to go about this situation stealthily.

“What do you mean, make things go boom?” You asked, bless your fucking heart, still going along with the mission. Still trying to coax answers out of this man who did not give one single shit about you or the information he promised. The more Flip thought about it, the more he realized this guy was probably just using you to go out on a date with someone way out of his league. George chuckled darkly, the sound disgusted both you and Flip.

“Why don’t I… explain it to ya real nice and real slow in the bathroom-” Flip flung the headphone off his head, grabbed his pistol and jammed it into the back of his jeans, making sure his flannel covered it as he secured it in his belt. He threw his hat on, tucking it low over his eyes and ran into the bar, only slowing down to a saunter when he entered. Be fucking casual.

He got the slightest glimpse of a man entering the bathroom before he disappeared behind the closed door, and then he saw you, shining in the dark light of this dingy bar like you had a god damn halo around your head, perched perfectly on the stool like you weren’t having the worst time of your fucking life. You made wide eyes at Flip, shooing him away with a flick of your wrist but he just marched right up to you, grabbing the hand you were trying to motion him away with.

“Fli- what the fuck?” You whisper yelled at him, nearly saying his real name. You glanced over at the bathroom door that ‘George’ so confidently stormed into, so sure that you were hot on his trails, so into the idea of him fucking you. You felt sick to your stomach.

“Come on Pamela, we’re leaving. This is over.” You glared at him, squinting your eyes, shooting fake lasers at him as hard as you could.

“But I can still get something out of him, let me-”

“I don’t think you and ‘George’ have the same idea of what it is exactly you’re going to be getting out of him tonight.” Flip glared, his fist clenching around your wrist, so small in his grasp. His eyes were filled with an emotion you didn’t think Flip was capable of feeling, fear.

“Let’s fucking go, pumpkin.” He spat the nickname out at you, it was better than rookie, but it still felt like a slap in the face coming from him in that menacing, annoyed tone.

You abandoned the mission. You let him drag you out of there, ‘George’ being none the wiser as he probably jacked off, alone in a stall with no one waiting for him on the other side of that door anymore. You didn’t feel bad, you just couldn’t help but think of what a pathetic situation this was, how stupid you had been to think this would work.

You thought about what could have happened if Flip wasn’t there to come knock you to your senses and out of your own stupid fucking naveity. You bet he got some weird, sick pleasure from watching you fail, maybe he felt guilty and felt the need to put an end to your suffering. He was always two steps ahead of everyone anyways.

“What the fuck is your problem?” You yell at him once you’re finally outside, standing next to his truck. You rip your hand from the vice grip he had you in, Flip only turning around to glare at you when you do so.

“What the fuck is my problem? Rookie, he had his hands all over you, you were just gonna let that slide? Let him have his way with you?”

“Why do you care how I get my intel? I could have gotten something good, something useful.”

“Hmmm, sure. You go ahead, believe that. Keep indulging yourself in that fucking fantasy. He just wanted to fuck you!” He yells, voice booming down the street and it startles you, quite literally knocking you off your feet. You stumble backwards, stumble away from him.

Flip leans back against the side of his truck, pressing his palms into his eyes, trying to shut everything out, regain control. He didn’t mean to yell, really, he didn’t mean to. He just couldn’t stop the images flashing in his mind, ones of you sitting pretty while that faceless creep put his hands all over you, touching you, groping you.

He groaned something into his hands, unintelligible to you. You rolled your eyes at whatever it was he said and took a few steps forward until your hand rested on the car door handle.

“Let’s just go, Flip. Before he comes back out and notices I’m gone.” You say, voice much quieter now, gentler, smaller. It surprises Flip, he wasn’t expecting you to back down from a fight with him so soon.

You two always had such charged energy at the office whenever you were forced to interact, it came out in sharp comments from Flip and icy glares from you. You were getting sick of it if you were being honest. Flip sort of was too, tired of all the unnecessary coldness he always approached you with. Maybe he was just covering something up, repressing something.

But Flip nods his head and walks to the driver's side, starting the engine and driving back to the station.

The ride is quiet, much like the ride over except now you’re trying to stop your lip from trembling and your eyes from fluttering shut, threatening to spill the tears that well up in your eyes. How could you be so fucking stupid? How could this have worked? How could tonight have gone the way you thought it would?

“I’m sorry.” That low, baritone voice grumbles from the driver’s seat. You wipe your tears away that managed to fall with the back of your hand, turning to look at Flip in confusion.

“For what?” Knowing tonight would be a disaster? Knowing that you would’ve fucked something up eventually?

“That tonight didn’t go the way you wanted it to.” He kept his gaze ahead, not daring to turn and look at you in that dress with that sad expression on your face. He knew it would break him, make him say things he wouldn’t dare admit, say aloud. “I ruined it. I’m sorry that I fucked up the mission.”

That you were not expecting. Detective Flip Zimmerman apologizing to you. You. Of all people.

“It’s fine… you were right afterall I just… I just didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to do this myself, you know.” You shrug, as if it was no big deal. You wipe another tear that falls and Flip looks then, that fateful moment that he allows himself to look at you.

Eyes shiny, wet and big, looking right back at him, into him. Lips swollen, puffy. You sniffle, pulling your lips taught for a moment before they go back to their resting place, begging to be bitten, licked. Your chest moves gracefully somehow as small hiccups wracked your diaphragm and lungs, making it heave slightly as you try to restrain your sobs. Flip thinks he nearly crashes his truck, but he doesn’t, and you say,

“We’re here.” And he nearly gets whiplash from what a déjà vu this is. Reminds him of the beginning of the night when he had no idea what was in store. Somehow he even managed to park without realizing.

“No, I… I shouldn’t have been right. He shouldn't have acted that way. I just- when I could tell he was touching you… no one should touch you like that, not if you don’t want them to.” You sit there flustered, listening to him go on, voice low like the volume on the radio that you didn’t even notice had been turned on this whole time. You’re astonished. You can’t believe this is the Flip you know, standing up for you, advocating for you.

Flip sees the way you’re looking at him and hell, he’s just as surprised as you are. Suddenly embarrassed for going on such a tangent, he unbuckles himself and steps out of the car. You follow quickly behind him, his strides long and fast with those legs of his. You head into the building and follow him into the storage room so you can remove the mostly useless tape from tonight and return the audio recorder and mic that you borrowed.

The room is dark, stuffy from not being used in hours, the windows shut tight. Flip switches on a little desk lamp and you get to work removing the tape from your body. First, you unclip the battery pack, pulling the wire out from your dress and then your only left with the taped part.

You rip it off like a bandage, only a small noise being emitted from your throat at the sweet burn it left in its trail. That red mark would take hours to disappear, you would have to moisturize it when you got home.

“You good?” Flip asks, barely looking up from what he was doing, which was removing the audio tape from the recorder, writing down the date and names on it before storing it away to be reviewed tomorrow.

Questions burn on your tongue, wondering why he decided to help you tonight. Why he ‘came to the rescue’, why he felt the need to involve himself in something he could have just left alone. Something he could have just not asked about when you ran into him earlier this evening. Why did he-

“Why do you hate me?” You settle on, ignoring his question and shooting one back at him as you place the mic back in it’s box. He finally looked up at you, completely puzzled, like before. You roll your eyes, surely he must know what you mean. How could he think that you didn’t know how he hated you.

“Come on, Flip. I’m not in the mood for games, just answer the question.” You frown, shaking your head. It pounded and throbbed from the inside out, you felt like your head could truly combust right now. You just wanted this night to be over with, you wanted to go home and wash it away.

“You think I would have done that if I hated you?”

“You can still hate me and be a decent person.” You spit, turning away from him and willing your brain to stop creating more and more tears. They stung in your eyes, begging to be set free but you didn’t want Flip to see you cry, didn’t want him to know he could do that to you. You were just tired, emotionally drained.

A large warm hand placed itself on the small of your back, its warmth quickly travelling throughout your body like wildfire. Flip’s hand doesn’t wander, it stays put, just letting you know he’s there.

“I don’t hate you, Rookie-”

“Stop calling me that.” You whisper, voice so small, squeezing your eyes shut, willing, willing, willing the tears away.

And then Flip says your name, possibly for the first time all night. And it fucking breaks you. His voice, so soft, gentle even. Quiet to not alarm you, the words caressing your ears, kissing your flesh. You want to melt into him, you don’t know why but you do. You want to stop fighting this…

You turned around to face him, his dark eyes boring into yours. He was much closer than you expected him to be. His hand hadn’t moved from its place, where it once rested on your lower back, now it grazed your hip, ghosting above the perimeter of your body like he was scared to touch you, frightened.

“You drive me fucking insane… but I don’t hate you.” His voice was quiet too, just like your own. Like the two of you were afraid to speak too loud because it would shake the dust off all these old files, awaken the ghosts.

“You drive me fucking insane too.” You want to laugh, you really do. Maybe you never hated him, maybe he never hated you. Maybe you made it all up, confusing one kind of tension for another. Maybe you really were naive, stupid.

His hand wraps itself around your waist, the other coming to do the same nervously. They truly engulf you, his hands. Big, warm and strong, they pull you closer to him and you gasp when your bodies collide.

“Flip-”

“When I heard him… when I heard how he was talking to you I just, I don’t know.” Flip takes a deep breath, letting his head lean down so that his forehead rests against yours. The intimacy startles you. You want to pull away from him but.

But you don’t. Instead you bring your arms up to hold the sides of his strong neck, feeling his pulse thrumming against your palm. What was happening? What were you doing-

“You, in this dress… fuck. I would have killed him if-if… He didn’t deserve to see you in this, didn’t fucking deserve to know what it feels like to touch you in it…” Flip’s voice trails off, it was quiet to begin with. His hands clutch the fabric at your waist, as if trying to draw you in closer to him, and you’re left speechless, just watching in awe as he works through his thoughts. That familiar crease between his brows appearing. You find yourself wanting to smooth it away, whether it be with your fingers or your lips you don’t care. You just- you just want to show him something other than that coolness you always give him. You want to be warm for him.

“And you do? You deserve it?” You tempt, not sure why you’re even bothering stepping on his toes at this point. You suppose old habits die hard.

“You tell me.” He whispered, nudging his nose into yours and you gasp quietly, your breath fanning across his lips and he swears he could just melt into you right now, if that’s what you wanted. If you’d let him.

And you… you’re still too dumb to know what it is you want, too naive to give in, to melt into his hands. After what happened tonight, you’re scared, scared of how easily things can go wrong in ways you never could have foreseen.

But Flip saw.

Flip noticed.

Flip was there. Maybe you two would make a good team...

Taking a chance, you let your hands move to wrap your arms around his neck, nuzzling your nose into his before… before Flip lets you make your move, lets you come onto him, safe in his arms. He holds you so, so close as you let your lips brush against his, breathing him in, still deciding.

So indecisive, Flip thinks. He would laugh at you right now if you didn’t have him completely wrapped around your finger, hanging on your every move, waiting, waiting for you to take what you need from him.

You press into him, with your body and your lips, letting him hold you as close as he possibly could. Flip sighs against your lips, melting into your touch as your fingers comb themselves into his hair, tugging when you reach the ends. He groans, folding over you, tilting his head and opening his mouth for you, he runs his tongue against your closed lips. Asking.

Yes, you want to say, you want to yell, scream it at him. But all you do is moan pathetically into his mouth as you open up for him, blooming like a flower as his tongue dances over yours, pressing into your mouth, deeper, deeper. Flip groans too, he needed this as much as you did.

Whether it was from the frustration of tonight’s events or the tension that had been pulled tight between the two of you like a tightrope, building for months and months on end, but both of you cracked underneath the pressure of the night.

As Flip worked his jaw on you, he stumbled, falling into you, pushing you back until your ass hit the desk behind you, making it scrape and screech across the floor. Files flew off, pens scattered, rolling across the floor, even the lamp rocked back and forth, back and forth with the force Flip tackled you with. You whimpered into his mouth, letting him move you how he pleased.

You felt his hands slither down your body with haste, stopping only to grab at your ass through your dress. His big hands wrapped around the back of your thighs, hoisting you up until you sat perched on the desk, your legs parting all too easily for him to stand between, pressing his body flush against yours.

Flip continued to devour you, you put in as much effort as you could but you felt weak, dumb with the way his mouth was so soft and warm on yours, his stupidly perfect lips so wet and soft, gliding effortlessly against your own. Like he was made to kiss you.

You lost yourself in his kiss, in his caress, in his touch. You let him hold you, shift you however he wanted, you felt like you were in some old classic movie with the way he was kissing you, with so much passion, so much vigour.

As you dove deeper into him, your inhibitions fell further and further away. You tugged at his hair, pressing his face into yours so that his nose was pressed firmly into your cheek. Teeth grazing his plump bottom lip, you entertained the idea of biting into the supple skin for all of two seconds before you indulged yourself in the sick pleasure. Flip groaned, loud into your mouth as you sunk your teeth into his lip, only letting it go for him to pull back and stare at you with an abyss for eyes. His lip was swollen, you could practically see the blood rushing to the bitten area, making it redder, juicer. You did that to him. Flip growled, pressing his hips and his forehead into yours, both of you trying to regain your breath.

“Did I mention how sorry I was?” Flip said darkly, voice rumbling with lust, deep in his chest. You felt it reverberate into you, it made you shiver. That and the way he was looking at you made you want to… to be good for him. Submit. Listen to him for once.

You nod your head, so breathless as you looked up at him. He was so much bigger than you and your neck was beginning to hurt from all the straining you had to do to keep your lips pressed firmly to his.

“Do you hate me?” Flip asks now, his turn to get an answer. His hand rests against your neck, fingers grazing your jawline from how big it is, wrapping around you too easily. You never wanted him to let go. You bite your lip and eyes still looking up at him, chest heaving, hard.

“No, I… I think the opposite actually.”

Part 2?

[criticalintellect]

UGH alright let's try this, hopefully I'll be coherent. So I've had my twitter account for about a year now(?) and every month or so, for about a week, just outta nowhere people suddenly feel like shitting on Lovecraft. The last two times it makes sense how it came about since we had gotten news that a new Call of Cthulhu "sequel" was getting made. The premise we were given was goddamn horrendous, but it's popped up again because it's creator felt like being a cunt on Twitter for some reason: Call of Cthulhu: Death May Die. Shelving the fact that sounds like a Devil May Cry parody, I won't focus too much on the game, though I will say it's NOTHING like the Terminator ripoff we were told it was gonna be (I could be mistaking DMD with another boardgame abortion using H.P.'s work) and the wording in the game synopsis I found is completely contrary to cosmic horror; talking about fighting the Old Ones and "shoot[ing] it in the face". Eric Lang is the man of the hour; he's had quite a bit of experience in boardgames and even video games, working on Duelyst (which I really did like). So to see this man in search of a personality put on his most psychotic stare, trim his pubic hair wig, and stand in front of a cardboard cutout of H.P. Lovecraft and give it the finger, all to post it on twitter and say he hates this man and his work...while at the same time profiting from his work DIRECTLY. I'm a little...perturbed. These retard fests always come in at least 3 flavors: Lovecraft was a racist, dO yOu KnOw WhAt He NaMeD hIs CaT?!?!?!, and Lovecraft didn't contribute anything and all his fans are racist. No to all 3.

Now maybe I'm hanging on semantics, but from my reckoning I would say HPL was more xenophobic than racist. He didn't hate other people or races. Yes he did believe that certain people had "superior" genetics, but never in his notes have I seen him go on tirades about how those of "lesser" genes need to be culled or anything. He literally just wanted them to leave him and his neighborhood alone. He wanted them to live, just not near him. Again, maybe semantics, I leave the distinction to greater intellects. But of greater importance, something these Lovecraft detractors refuse to comprehend, was that we have written proof that HPL RENOUNCED his xenophobic views towards the end of his life. Thanks to the friends he made, his moving to New York, and being exposed to other people he saw the error of his ways. And he recanted. And the people shitting on his grave do not care, saying that it didn't matter. It's cancel culture at it's finest, but since they can't cancel a dead man all they can do is destroy his works. Or at least attempt to, fruitlessly. The plus side of having 100 year old works of fiction is that they've been in circulation for so long is that plenty of people know the fiction and know when someone has made a shit interpretation of it.

Now, about that cat. See it wasn't Howard that named that cat, but rather his father. The cat was adopted by and named by him. And then his father was committed to an asylum and the cat passed into his son's and wife's care. And yes, the cat was called Niggerman, shocker. It was the 1880s.

"Lovecraft had no impact on anything". Stephen King, Gullermo del Toro, Ridley Scott, Neil Gaiman, Junji Ito, Kentaro Miura, Clive Barker, John Carpenter, Mike Mignola and H.R. Giger. All of these artists were influenced by Lovecraft and his horror. But sometimes his touch was a little less obvious, as he was friends with Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Cane. He was a man who would very openly share ideas he had for his own work, but not having a great opinion of said work would pass it onto authors he believed could better implement his ideas. He was never a man to jealously protect his property and openly allowed ANYONE to add onto the mythos he unwittingly created. And that's a major reason how his mythos has engrossed so much of our culture over the last century, even when the property wasn't directly connected to the Cthulhu mythos. As to the assertion that we're all racists: even if I agreed Howard Philips Lovecraft was racist and even if it wasn't public knowledge that he became a better person late in life, I am capable of separating a creator from his work. I can read Shadow Over Innsmouth and Call of Cthulhu and The Dunwich Horror and agree that if you look deep enough there's some skeevy themes, but if you put that aside there's some damn good suspense and horror. For as fucked up as K-Pop is I don't see any of their stans calling out the industry while admitting they still like the music, it's just blanket denial. Yet shitheads with that kinda mindset wanna come after a man's legacy like he enslaved all of Africa all on his lonesome?

At the end of it all, Lovecraft's works will endure all of this mind numbing clout chasing. Eric Lang can do cringey, performative wokeness while being a massive hypocrite all he wants, Lovecraft will endure. But it will always bother me the amount of frothing, myopic hatred HPL gets. The fans have told these people how he reformed, how he shared his works with people of all walks of life, how he MARRIED A JEWISH WOMAN (and yes he had distasteful opinions of Jews too), but it's never enough. If Daryl Davis can change the minds of 200+ KKK members, then why can't we give people from the past the benefit of the doubt. Then again these are also the type of people that called Davis a racist and other assorted idiocy so...I dunno. Lovecraft was a flawed man, plagued by nightmares, coddled by a mother who slowly lost her mind over time and ended up in the same asylum as her husband (the one he died in too). And even through all of that he found a way to be a better man. He shared his works, he found a way to intimately connect with a woman (even though it sounds like it was very difficult for both of them), and towards the end of his life he admitted his ideas of genetic superiority were downright abhorrent. If we can't give even this man the benefit of the doubt, then your only hope of being accepted by the hate mob is if you're born a literal son of God.

And if you dont like HPL then fuck right off out of my fandom because we do not care about your lukewarm take about him being a racist and we need to rewrite his works. Piss off

Edit: Hoo boy this has gotten around and about, further than I thought it would've. I know it's a bit strange, but thank you to everyone for showing support. Didn't think anyone would read one of my long-winded rants, let alone think it worth of sharing. At first I was just a casual fan of Lovecraft like most people; Cthulhu here, "hey I get that"; a shoggoth there, "ah neato." But after seeing him get so much hatred it started to feel wrong. Then learning what a tragic man he was and seeing Twitter attempt to eviscerate this man...I had to put my thoughts somewhere and this was the only place I had a chance to get it out there and people actually see it. So thank ye kindly strange sea of friends

[godsofhumanity]

GODHUNTER by AMY SUMIDA | REVIEW

okiee this was recommended to me by @inkleaves ^-^ uhmm so i have a LOT to say about this book. spoilers under cut.

OVERVIEW: “Godhunter” is the epithet given to a young woman named Vervain who uses witchcraft and magic to go around committing deicide in order to save humanity from gods who drain their energy to gain immortality and other godly attributes. However, when Vervain is recruited by the Norse god Thor, she finds herself in an alliance with the people she originally considered her enemies, as they work together to save the world from the maliciousness of the Aztec god, Huitzilopochtli.

RATING: 2/10. i’m giving it a low rating because it doesn’t really have too much to do with mythology, but i did like its general portrayal of most deities even though this book was insanely cringey and dumb.. now, even though under the cut, i’ve kinda bashed the book quite a bit, i still have to admit that i’d be lying if i said i didn’t have fun reading it. i stayed up to 1 AM trying to finish it because i had to find out what the protag’s next stupid decision would be,, all in all, if you like trash/cringe fiction- this is for you.

WARNING: even though this book is a YA novel, I’d say there’s a definite emphasis on the adult part of “young adult”... Certain scenes and themes are inappropriate for minors.

AVAILABLE ON: pdf link here ^-^ ((i think it downloads immediately if you click))

THINGS I LIKED:

the book is cringe.

great diversity in terms of the god cast. i learned about some new deities that i was previously unfamiliar with, so that was cool

Brahma (Hindu deity) wears a Gucci belt as part of his attire ^-^

whatever Estsanatlehi and Tsohanoai (Native American deities) had going on.... they were really cute and wholesome

THOR-HORUS BROTP AGENDA!!!!!!!! everyone who follows me already knows how keen i am about this idea of all the war deities hanging out together (fite club), and this novel served up exactly that. disappointing that Huitzilopochtli wasn’t a part of it, but i am settling for Thor and Horus’ several centuries old friendship.

Horus’ falcon tattoo detail.. i LOVE the idea of the gods having their sacred animals tattooed,, it’s so awesome!!!

Pan... i liked the way he still had his little horns, and he was kinda chaotic and fun.

in general, the descriptions of the gods were so pleasant and so cool.. i really liked the way that pretty much all the gods were beautiful,, this is very much in line with my own idea of how the gods look, and i think it makes sense, because they’re meant to be charismatic, compelling beings- beings that you worship, beings that you praise- why would they be anything but beautiful? and even if they were considered ugly by other gods, that’s only in comparison to other deities.. from a human perspective,, i just can’t see how any mortal could consider a god to be anything less than perfection,, idk

in particular- i really enjoyed the descriptions of Huitzilopochtli in his debut. i know he’s a piece of shit in the novel, but i LOVED the way he was described with his war-frenzy being triggered by blood, and the way, as god of the sun, his body almost glows, and heats up as though you’re looking into the sun itself, and the only way he can cool it down is by bathing in blood... WOWOWOWOW it’s just such a neat and fantastic visual description. his physical appearance really paid tribute to Huitzilopochtli’s original domain and attributes.

i also liked the linking between Huitzilopochtli being the Father of Vampires.. links between Aztec culture and vampirism is a trope that i didn’t originally suspect, but have become exposed to quite a bit as of late,, and i think that it’s quite a clever little plot. i liked that Huitzilopochtli also debunks superstitions about the sun, garlic, crosses, holy water etc.

Huitzilopochtli as the villain. the man makes a BRILLIANT villain- his motives are very clear and also, i thought, justified, albeit unoriginal. his presence is quite terrifying, and the reader does worry for Vervain’s safety whenever she’s with him- which is good! this means that he fills out his role as a villain well. tbh,, i did love Huitzilopochtli from the moment of his debut, but he got knocked out of my books during a certain temple scene and i have some thoughts about that in the next section.

when Vervain wakes up after the temple dream with Huitzilo, and she relaxes because it was just a dream, but then she looks into the mirror and sees bite marks on her neck!!! CHILLS! now THAT was good writing- it was unexpected, and served well to navigate into the next part of the plot.

Odin and Huitzilopochtli holding a ted talk on “how to create panic and discord among the humans”, and the gods having to bring certain meals depending on what the first letter of their names were.

Vervain’s pop-culture references, and her weaponry- especially the gloves that have blades in them that get released when she swings her hand downwards. very cool, i want them.

casual appearances from Vladimir Putin (yes, i said Vladimir Putin)... i couldn’t stop laughing when i read that Huitzilo was trying to kill Putin’s daughter to instigate a war...... asdhshajdhasdjfhjdhf insane

also i know Vervain was trying to mock Huitzilo when she nicknamed him “Blue”,, but like.. that’s a really cute name and it wasn’t even insulting.. yeah, that one backfired on you Vervain... if anything, that just made it seem like she actually had affections for him and i feel like probably in part is the reason why he felt encouraged to pursue her.

THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE/THINGS THAT DIDN’T MAKE SENSE AND/OR CONFUSED ME:

the book is cringe.

it reads like a 15 year old’s fantasy AU where she’s a humble young woman, unextraordinary- yet somehow, she is the muse of every man’s desire. handsome, ripped gods who never wear clothes are laying themselves down at her feet,, and she is just overwhelmed by the choices before her; and all the while, she has to balance a complicated love life with her duty to save the world (since she’s the only one who can).

Vervain as a protagonist. idk how old she’s meant to be, but since the book is in first-person, and the reader is exposed to her innermost thoughts,, i’ve gotta say- she’s incredibly immature. as a protagonist, i just feel like she’s rude, pretentious, snobby.. she has no idea what “respect” even means. in every scene, she’s either fighting someone, or lusting after them (when Teharon told her off for having lascivious thoughts about him, and she simply responded with “well stop being so sexy then” i wanted to die.... WHAT is wrong with her)

i hate the way she looks down on the gods- even if you didn’t worship them, or even believed in their existence, surely you wouldn’t have the gall to lecture Hades and Persephone on how to be a good couple (especially when your advice is shit). surely you wouldn’t have the gall to say to Thor what Vervain says to him on pg 227, 4th line from the bottom, that i will not repeat here. Vervain is just too self-absorbed. i don’t hate her, but i definitely think her character is a bit,,, iffy.

relating to Vervain as the protagonist- everything just seems to happen to her.. and i know that she’s the protag, and things are meant to happen to her, but it all happens to her one after the other in succession, no breaks. it’s so easy for her... oh? Huitzilopochtli is going to kill Putin’s daughter? no worries, Vervain can read Huitzilopochtli’s thoughts! oh? the gods have never been able to transform more than half their body into their animal form? no worries, Vervain is so powerful she can force a god to change against their will! oh? Vervain is being attacked by blood-thirsty wolves? no worries, she saved the life of one werewolf and now he’s indebted to her and will literally kill himself in order to protect her! everything is easy, and nothing is a problem.

the way every male deity ever sees Vervain once and immediately wants to take her to bed. why was that a necessary aspect of her character? and also, why are the gods portrayed as such lustful beings?? it really wasn’t necessary.

Horus throwing a fit about how December 25 is his birthday and that it was stolen from him by Jesus... to quote:

“No big deal?” Horus puffed up. “I was called the Lamb of God. I had twelve apostles, and my myths spoke of my crucifixion and consequent resurrection in three days. His stories were my stories first!”

it’s fine that Horus is angry about his birthday which was i think, historically celebrated around this date- but the rest of it isn’t even true???? Horus didn’t have 12 apostles, i’m pretty sure he was also not called “Lamb of God”, and he wasn’t crucified!!! aghhhh even Thor says “It’s been so long that even you don’t remember things accurately.”

anyways.. my beef with this is the way it’s phrased so as to imply that “oh christianity just stole everything from the pagans” when this is so incredibly false and sounds like something an ill-informed person would say. you can read more about christianity, paganism and christmas here

kinda related to the previous point- the jokes about Jesus’ skin colour. i quote:

“... when Christ first became a god, he looked Jewish because those were the people he chose to align himself with. However, the Jews didn’t want him, and when Christianity spread, the white people wanted Jesus to look more like them. With the change in belief, Christ’s appearance changed. ... We used to tease him about how he looked whiter every time we saw him... Kind of like Michael Jackson...”

what the FUCK??????? seems like Sumida doesn’t understand that various ethnic groups illustrate Jesus as appearing as the local people do. Yes, obviously in a Western country, Jesus is going to look European, he’s going to look white. If you go to Japan, you will see Jesus and the rest of the gang looking pretty fucking Japanese. the point of this is NOT to erase Jesus’ Jewish ethnicity, and it is certainly not because of something like “the Jews didn’t want him”- it is because it is a way for followers to better relate to the Divine. including Christ in this story isn’t the problem- i’ve seen others do it very well. the problem is how uneducated her writing comes across.

all the gods have human jobs so that they can earn money and stuff,, which is fine- Thor, for example, owns a line of boats, which makes sense. but Pan? his job is making p*rn. now even though it’s true that everyone associates Pan with sexuality and stuff,,, this isn’t his primary role, and making Pan out to be just a playboy who has his mind in the gutter 24/7 i think is a bit of a mockery. Pan is, first and foremost, a god of the Wild. why Sumida elected to make him a p*rn manufacturer and not a wildlife conservationist is beyond me... i’m not even pagan, and i thought this creative decision was distasteful and stupid, especially because his character is actually quite light-hearted and cool.

the temple scene with Huitzilopochtli and Vervain. as i said previously, i really really liked Huitzilo’s character. he made an excellent villain. but this part?? i understand why it was done, but i HATED that it had to happen... not just because it was horrible for Vervain, but Huitzilo seemed so powerful and godly right up to that point- after which he seemed pretty pathetic- going back after Vervain after she’s rejected him countless times. she is JUST a mortal!!! c’mon Huitzilo, give it up!!! you are degrading yourself at the expense of achieving one mortal’s “love”.. the fact that he had to hypnotise her to get what he wanted AND had to achieve it through her dreams (when’s she can’t protect herself) was sooooo pathetic and disgraceful.. IMO, he committed the worst sin any person could ever commit and i just... AGHHHHHHHHH SMH WHY?!

speaking of morons- Thor. Thor just comes across to me as extremely possessive, and over-protective,, and idk how Vervain was NOT creeped out by the fact that Thor had literally been stalking her for two years before she even met him. wtf? god or not- that’s creepy. actually, i think it’s creepier because he is a god. 

Sif. i am still waiting for good media representation of thunder god Thor and his beautiful golden-haired wife Sif- i want them to be HAPPY, and i want them to be in love the way they should be! 

Persephone. i like the idea of Persephone being sweet-tempered, and kind- but in this book, she’s such a wimp??????? she totally just lets Vervain be rude to her, a goddess who’s name means “Bringer of Destruction”. also- her relationship with Hades seems toxic.. i mean,, he like tracks her? she starts stuttering when she talks to him, and gets nervous when people so much as mention his name. not to mention the fact that Persephone says that when she does go back to him, all he demands from her is a certain horizontal dance so much so that she is “sore” (<- quoting from the book here) every time she returns??????? WHAT IS HAPPENING?????????? and no one even questions it. Vervain doesn’t even question it! instead she suggests that Persephone MOVES IN with Hades permanently???? and that Hades should just start verbally saying how much he loves Persephone instead of “showing” her how much he “loves” her.....??? there are SO many issues with this.. i can’t even- *screams*

the Aphrodite-is-madly-in-love-with-Huitzilopochtli side plot. it could have been really good, but then it ends so abruptly,,, i mean.. why’d Aphrodite get done so dirty like that? Also summary of Hephaestus’ first and final scenes:

Hephaestus, entering the room: Right, what’s all this then? Vervain: Your wife is cheating on you (again) Hephaestus: Aight, i’m out *leaves and never comes back for the rest of the book*

what the HECK was the ending with Trevor?? i hate Vervain so much i can’t... okay first of all- WHY did Trevor decide to have a wolf-marriage with Vervain?? he kept on going on about how she’s so beautiful, and kind, and caring... NO SHE ISN’T TREVOR!!! i’m so mad that he would pledge himself for all eternity to this girl who doesn’t even like him in that way!!! you played yourself son

also- Thor accepts the fact that Trevor is going to have to be close by to Vervain because the terms of the marriage state that Trevor will literally die without her touch, which is VERY GENEROUS of Thor... but Vervain?? ooooh i HATE her.. she has the audacity to look at Trevor with her lecherous eyes thinking about lustful things IN THOR’S OWN BED!!!!! and then she thinks to herself “oh whoops i shouldn’t be thinking that”- yeah you’re darn right you shouldn’t be thinking that!!!! whatttt is wrong with her............. 

also- where tf did Huitzilo go??? he just gave up on trying to instigate a war and vanished?? the plot was so unresolved?????? AGH!

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: January 2021

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of January 2021 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

Once again, we knew that Donald Trump wasn’t going to take losing well, but when a legion of his most boneheaded supporters storm the Capitol demanding the election result be overturned because a certain thin-skinned orange gobshite had spent several weeks screaming about electoral fraud and, by the way, also set the date of January 6th for some major event, even Mike Pence couldn’t sanction his buffoonery any longer - especially when said buffoonery involved him saying “I love you” to people who were guilty of sedition and, by the way, murder - all of which led to him finally, finally, getting the boot from various social media platforms

...all while Lauren Boebert appeared to be trying to help out the insurrectionists by livetweeting the location of Nancy Pelosi, presumably because Boebert forgot about that Glock she claims to take to work with her every day and was looking for a convenient meat shield, which naturally has nothing to do with her tweeting the day would be like 1776 earlier that morning

...but the real victim in all of this was Melania Trump as it interrupted a photo shoot she was doing, which she somehow thought it was a good idea to mention several days later in a statement riddled with two opinions: “both sides” and “me, me, me” which shows she didn’t realise the optics of rearranging the china as Washington burned around her

...but according to Laura Kuenssberg it was merely a “scuffle” at Congress, as opposed to an organised group attempting to stage an armed insurrection against the government complete with at least one member carrying zip ties

...and finally, we had Ian Austin reminded us that he’s still alive by saying the exact same thing would have happened in the UK with Jeremy Corbyn supporters storming parliament, as if that happened in the four years Corbyn was wishing Austin would go away, then did go away, but sadly didn’t go away

Once again the Tory government think they know better than virologists, epidemiologists and pharmacists with their one-two punch of thinking they can just mix and match the various vaccines available rather than give people two doses of the same vaccine, but they further weaken any chance of vaccination succeeding by ignoring Pfizer’s recommendation the second dose be given within three weeks of the first by adopting a policy of the second dose is given three months later, and it it’s just as likely to be the less effective but cheaper Oxford vaccine they get a dose of

...swiftly followed by the BBC did their bit to encourage people to get vaccinated by reporting a story of a nurse getting a dose of Covid six weeks after her first vaccination jab not by reporting how she was three weeks overdue for the second dose (or, if you prefer, six weeks before her second one) but simply saying that people vaccinated can get Covid, which goes beyond the BBC’s sociopathic inability to criticise Tory fuckups into being downright fucking dangerous - as does their putting sentient testicle Toby Young on Newsnight to say how we’re all overreacting as it's not as bad as all that

Of all the things proven liar Boris Johnson should have said when the UK’s Covid death toll officially passed 100,000 (as opposed to unofficially, which would have been last December), “We have done our best” was not it, because if their best includes not going into lockdown in order to protect landlords, having Dominic Cummings dictate herd immunity in spite the fact that you need vaccinated people for it to work, refusing to have quarantine at airports until July, thinking it would be a bright idea to tell people it’s their patriotic duty to go to the pub, giving them £10 vouchers to go to restaurants, putting children going back to school ahead of any concerns about every single school could become a petri dish and countless other horrifically mismanaged instances, then we should be kept up at night dreading what their worst would be

The fact that Chartwells were given a contract to provide free school dinners with a budget of £30, and the supposed lunches that arrived had £5 worth of food in them which begged the obvious question where the other £25 went, is appalling - but not surprising, as the Tory government gave them the contract and, equally unsurprising, Chartwells was founded by a Tory donor, and equally unsurprising their response to their grift being exposed was to tell all the public school clients they cater to a pack of lies while hoping nobody found out about them doing so...which worked about as well as you can guess

Something possessed the EU to ramp up the row over the AstraZenica vaccine not passing the rigorous tests for over-65s by threatening to trigger Article 16 and limit the number of vaccines that Northern Ireland received, and that something was it was hopelessly misguided as it allowed the Tories to get their hapless response to the pandemic off the front pages for a few days and let the Leave headbangers say this is why we left the EU...in spite this threat would have never been in play if we were still in the EU

There is no way to make jokes about Kellyanne Conway posting what was, in effect, revenge porn photos of her 16-year old daughter, because that sentence is so far out there that it is borderline incomprehensible

In the space of less than twenty seconds proven liar Boris Johnson claimed that there was no prior warning of the new strain of Covid, he had the SAGE paper stating it was coming which was handed to him last September held up in his face, and then said the government acted accordingly.  Yes, you read that right, he claimed the government acted accordingly to something they had no prior warning about, which is literally impossible, all in the space of ten seconds

In the latest hire by the BBC which is cause for both comment and concern, they announced their new chairman would be Tory donor Richard Sharp, whose credentials for the position are being Rishi Sunak’s ex-boss at Goldman Sachs, donating at least £400,000 to the Tory party, and having no background in journalism whatsoever

Smirking bully Priti Patel said that the UK should have closed its borders in March 2020 in order to prevent the spread of Covid.  Presumably she forgot that she was a.) Home Secretary in Marsh 2020 so could have done that, and b.) Home Secretary when she said that the borders should have been closed as that indicates she doesn’t know what’s going on

The terrifying world which Alison Pearson lives in has now started to cross over into our reality due to her responding to one of the four people she hasn’t blocked on Twitter calling her what she is - namely a liar - by siccing the Torygraph’s lawyers on them claiming libel, doing the usual cry bully tactic of learning the person she is harassing works for GlaxoSmithKline so promptly went to their CEO demanding he be fired, and howling about the hate campaign being waged against her - while telling the person, who was saying he was thinking suicidal thoughts after the pile-on that Pearson had instigated even after he had deleted the tweet and apologised , that “You’re finished”

Someday in the future, scholars will study Ted Cruz responding to Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement within hours of getting his feet under the Oval Office desk by pontificating about how terrible it is that Biden is more interested in the citizens of Paris than the jobless of Pittsburgh and wonder just how somebody who doesn't know why the Paris Climate Agreement was named the Paris Climate Agreement ever got to be a senator

...and judging by how Lauren Boebert also latched onto this brainless rhetoric, not only can it be asked how she got to be a senator when she had the opportunity to actually realise Cruz’s mistake, she also begs the question how she can be a senator after her publicly trying to use Nancy Pelosi as a meat shield during the Capitol riots

Unifying force Keir Starmer stated that Labour should be devoting their time to fighting the Tory government rather than fighting court cases, somehow forgetting that by breaking the guidelines of the EHRC report (which he pledged to follow without question months before it was published) is the reason that they’re fighting court cases, and just so happens to be the reason why people are asking how a meeting attended by Starmer, Angela Rayner, Len McCluskey and others either didn't have a single person taking notes, which is David Evans’ entire defence, or they did take notes by quite conveniently lost them

Oh boy, did Wall Street cheerleaders not take it well when r/WallStreetbets exposed to the entire world that the stock market is little more than a game people play with other people’s money - because the teams the Wall Street cheerleaders support started losing, and all it took was a few Redditors investing in Gamestop and Bed Bath & Beyond 

Nice of Shaun Bailey to remind everyone that he’s a Tory by giving his suggestion for how the homeless could get on the property ladder, namely by saving a minimum of £5000

Clearly Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t get the memo about the Streisand Effect, as the first thing she did after taking her seat in the House of Representatives was go on a mass deleting spree of Facebook posts - which only served to draw attention to her video saying that Nancy Pelosi be executed for treason, her track record of spreading conspiracy theories about the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings, and her claims that a Jewish space laser is responsible for the 2018 California wildfires

Insufferable self-promoter Jess Phillips got her 2021 off to a good start by tweeting out that, as Britait has happened, we should shut up and accept it.  To the surprise of nobody other than insufferable self-promoter Jess Phillips, this led to a lot of people saying that, no, they will not accept an advisory referendum somehow being bolted onto the Ten Commandments, especially as numerous things that were promised wouldn’t happen such as a border in the Irish Sea, leaving Erasmus, losing freedom of movement, leaving the Common Market have all happened

It is wrong to say that smirking bully Priti Patel has lost 150,000 police files.  The actual figure is closer to 400,000 - which begs the obvious question as to what those files were, for example if those files also happened to fall under the same category as the ones that 55-year old ex-minister Mark Francois might want to have disappear for the sake of convenience

At last CD Projekt Red took some responsibility for Clusterpunk 2077 being such a cyberfuck...if by “taking responsibility” you mean “taking responsibility, dumping it all on the QA testers, and saying that everyone should blame them for everything” - and then with perfect comedic timing CD Projekt Red released an update for Clusterpunk 2077 that was so broken they had to release a hotfix for their broken patch

Expenses-fiddler Robert Jenrick decided that the most important thing to protect in the United Kingdom at this exact moment in time is...statues.  Not key workers, not the vulnerable, not any human life at all.  Statues.

So either Rafael Behr wrote a column for The Guardian where he tried to blame Jeremy Corbyn for his heart attack which saw Guardian higher-ups remove that passage from their print edition but forgot to remove it from the online version of the article, or The Guardian deliberately left the passage in the online version of the column in order to get some form of engagement from rage clicks while allowing Behr to act as if he is suffering some great injustice

Of course it wouldn’t take long for Steve Baker to try and claim some spurious victory for Britait, namely him claiming that tampon tax he spent so long fighting against being abolished is proof of the sunlit uplands of our post-EU nation...which ignores the fact that a.) It had nothing to do with the EU in the first place, and b.) The fact that Baker voted to keep it in place in a 2015 Commons vote

Employer of the year WWE went for an interesting twofer, as one minute they were proudly stating that WrestleMania would go ahead with a prospective 30,000 in attendance without any concerns for social distancing or any other Covid preventative measures, and the next telling the wrestlers on their roster that they would not be supplying them with Covid vaccines at the exact same time the NBA were floating the idea of providing vaccines for all their players

Make no mistake, the criticism that Erik Lamela, Sergio Reguilon, Giovani Lo Celso and Manuel Lanzini have received due to the four of them flouting lockdown regulations to attend a New Year’s party is justified - however, the fact that Duncan Castles tried to chase a headline by claiming that Lo Celso and Lamela had tested positive for Covid in a swiftly-deleted tweet is a new low for the noted barrel scraping rumour monger

Self-awareness sceptic Laurence Fox was entirely predictable in his response to the news that talkRADIO had been booted from Youtube for repeated violations of their ToS, specifically the part about spreading Covid misinformation, screaming the usual things about being “cancelled” - and then, within hours, responded to the BBC announcing a plan of educational programming to help during Lockdown III by saying he will be shielding his children from being “indoctrinated” by the BBC’s “left-wing bias” - which not only means he’s cancelling the BBC, but also had people remember that Billie Piper has custody of his children so it's not like he can even enforce his rules on what his children can and cannot watch

...by the way, Fox said nothing about Lord Sumption appearing on the BBC’s Question Time (the same show where failed actor on the grift Laurence Fox announced his new career as a clueless right wing irritant) where he told a woman with bowel cancer that her life wasn’t valuable, it was merely less valuable as she has less life left.  Yes, that is eugenics getting free airtime on the BBC, thanks for noticing

Somehow the best choice of words the BBC could find when reporting the death of Phil Spector was “talented but flawed” as if murder is some character flaw instead of, oh I don’t know, a criminal activity?

You would have thought that Twitch would have simply retired the PogChamp emote permanently in the wake of Gootecks going all insurrectionist, but no, instead they thought of having a rotating cycle of emotes of various creators, in spite of those creators telling them this would be a bad idea - and those creators were proven right when Critical bard was inundated with racist and homophobic abuse in his chat that led him to close his social media profiles when he was selected for rotation, with Twitch doing fuck all about it

Fashion editor no matter what she claims she is Hadley Freeman had a really clever take about The Sopranos...actually, no she didn’t, she had an absurd belief that it’s the exact same show as Sex in the City but people overlook it Because Misogyny, and when she was lambasted for missing the point so badly she had noted dipshit David Baddiel rushing in to her rescue to mock those getting “triggered” by her insipid take while saying he never liked The Sopranos because, as he isn't an Italian-American mobster, the show did not speak to him - in other words, he made himself a subject of equal mockery

...but there was no sign of Baddiel when Hadley Freeman then jumped on the BidenErasedWomen bandwagon alongside the TERFs of Twitter as soon as Biden got his feet under the desk, which also happened to show hard centrist extremist Freeman say how she thought Trump did far more for women than Biden ever has, which as takes go is so bad that the best explanation is that she briefly forgot the difference between the words “for” and “to”, before she then deleted the tweet and tried to deny ever posting it with increasingly nonsensical explanations that rapidly looked uncannily like gaslighting

...although David Baddiel wasn’t quite done being a bellend, as he was soon yukking it up with professional victim Rachel Riley about his latest book which accuses the entire progressive left of antisemitism

The oppressed underclass known as Manchester United fans really showed their colours, first by responding to a loss to Sheffield United by sending racial abuse to Axel Tuanzebe and Anthony Martial on social media, and a couple of weeks later responded to a draw with Arsenal by sending racial abuse to Marcus Rashford, because apparently when your team drops points the most important thing is to look for which member of your team you can racially abuse

And finally, oh so finally, we have Donald Trump and his discovery of electoral fraud at last - electoral fraud that consisted of Donald Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding he change the result and all he needs is Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes while also saying that he had proof of vote-counting machines being removed early...and when told they were still in Georgia, changed his lie to say the inner workings had been removed without anyone noticing.  By the way, the only reason anyone knows about this is because Raffensperger told Trump that he wouldn’t release the call to the public if Trump didn't say anything about it - so, of course, the Orange Overlord took to twitter, ran his mouth, and the Washington Post had one hell of an exclusive as a result

[empiregalaxy]

Leaving Tumblr

Dear Tumblr, 

The cliche goes 'this is a hard post to write.' Well, it's not. This is very easy to write. I'm leaving Tumblr, and you should too. Here's why.

I joined this social media site in 2012, as I was drawn to discussing films. Soon, I got into 'fandoms', mainly Buffy The Vampire Slayer and A Song Of Ice And Fire. For the first few years, there was no problem. Well, except one. Let's call her 'MN.' MN and I met on Yahoo Answers, and we shared private e-mails. I felt safe around her, and I confided in her some of my secrets. She helped me when a Tumblr user were sending sexually crass messages to me. During a time when my social life was falling apart, she helped me. Then one day, she stopped talking to me. She didn't block or unfollow me, but she pretended that I didn't exist. No replies to my friendly comments (she'd reply to everyone else).

 At the time, I thought I did something wrong. But now I realise she was a coward who didn't have the guts to tell me that she no longer wanted to be my friend. That's the thing about Tumblr. It's full of cowards, who lack the intellectual or moral ability to confront their 'friends.'  And when you mention that, they convince you that the problem lies with you.

So I moved away from the film fandom. 

During the next few years, I get more involved in the ASOIAF fandom, particularly the Arya Stark section. And yeah, I was an SJW (vomit!). I would write posts about Arya, how sucky the Sansa fandom was. But overtime, I saw a shift. What started as simple, light-hearted bashing of Sansa fans turned sinister. They 'controlled' the fandom and the mods at ASOIAF university. Looking back it, I want to tell them that Arya and Sansa are both fictional characters. They aren't real. But the Sansa fans you were bashing and calling names, spreading lies about? They are. I often say that 'Tumblr treats real people like fictional characters, and fictional characters like real people.' It's true. All of these characters that you care about... they aren't real. And people don't have to treat them like they are. 

So I 'defect' from the Arya fandom. And oh boy did they turn on me. Some are more slower than others, and they tell me that the reason why they didn't block me immediately was because 'they didn't want to hurt my feelings.' That's utter bullshit. They did it because they were scared of the fallout. They were cowards. But once they did block me, they'd post lies about me. That I was a stalker. That I was a bad person. I was open slather once they decided that I was no longer one of them. That's the thing about Tumblr: it's tribal. People think there actions are morally justified, if the person receiving them is 'bad.' Everything about me was insulted, even my gifsets.

A user who was particularly vicious was Marie. She and I were mutuals for well over 18 months. But she'd call me a bad person, a creep, mentally ill, an evil Reylo or whatever. Worse, was that these Arya stans were discussing me on Twitter. When I exposed them, I only had my closest mutuals at the time supporting me. (I had over 2,000 followers. Only 3 bothered to ask if I was okay). Users I never heard of suddenly had 'hot takes' about me. 

Lies were spread about me, non stop. I realised that not only was this behaviour permitted on Tumblr, but it was actively rewarded.

And it was all over a FUCKING FICTIONAL CHARACTER. 

This happened in 2016, which involved Brexit and the presidental election of Donald Trump. Look, I believe in free speech. I don't care if you are for or against them. Personally, I despise the European Union and if I were American, yeah, I could have voted Republican. But that's irrelevant. Tumblr users were so unhappy with those results, that anyone who did like Trump and Farage were labelled all the awful names in the book. Racist. Sexist. Nazi. Not only did this teach me that Tumblr users have no idea what those words mean, but that they are willing to use them liberally in order to gain power. Looking back at it, I'm glad Trump won. I'm glad Brexit happened. Not only because of politics, but it meant that you guys LOST. You better get used to that feeling, because if you continue to treat people the way you treated me, that feeling will soon be the only thing you know. 

A common misconception in the media is that Tumblr users act like 'SJWs' because they are young and ignorant. I mean, sure. But Tumblr users act like SJWs because they are fundamentally, cultish in nature and adhere to a hideous morality. I study Modern History, and a big part of that is empathy. What motivates someone to join the SS? Or run a gulag? Or torture someone? I manage to answer those questions, with relative ease. But I still have no idea why Tumblr users are so nasty and stupid. Like, none of you know shit about anything. 

The breaking point, when I realised 'we are all fucked' was when neo-Nazi Richard Spencer got punched. Look, I disagree with EVERYTHING Antifa and the Alt-right do. Celebrating any form of political violence leads to a nasty path. One day you are celebrating some one getting punched, and the next, you are cheering people getting slaughtered. People should never be CELEBRATED for violence. There is no moral justification for it. And you guys are too stupid to figure out that once all the 'Nazis' are gone, you are next to be sent to the gulag. You see yourself as distributing justice, but never receiving punishment. And oh, that is going to hurt you long term.

I would subtely mention why Spencer getting punched was wrong. But people on Tumblr were saying 'if anyone doesn't support Antifa, they should get punched too.' That's utter tyranny, and its something a Nazi would do. Since 2017, the countless violence by AntiFa is astounding. And Tumblr cheers it on like its a fucking joke. Like the real world is a theatre, and we are all patrons in the globe. Well, I've got news for you. The world doesn't exist for your pleasure. People don't have to act in certain ways to make you happy. The universe is not a 'safe space.' And you have the arrogant audacity to think you can bully it into changing.

Worse, was that I was fearful to speak out against it. That's utter evil. I understood the meaning of the term 'self-censorship' and since then, have become a free speech advocate.

Of course, no letter about leaving Tumblr would be complete without mentioning Lindsay. Oh Lindsay. We were friends for 2 years, and then I said a historical fact (that the Nazis persecuted people beyond Jewish people) and she flipped out. She blocked me, sent me anon hate, and told all the Reylos to block me. And you know what? Alot did. I was put on hit and block lists. 

Now, anyone who has studied World War II history knows that I am right. But because Tumblr is contrived of people who can't put Austria on a map, I was attacked and slandered. Lindsay would try to bully my friends into blocking me. They obviously refused. But Lindsay probably does the same shit to other people. Good thing she's a boring basic bitch with no personality, who has the charisma of a rock, because people with her mindset can really hurt people. She'll probably call me a 'Holocaust revisionist' for making fun of her. 

I honestly don't care what she thinks of me. I don't care what Marie thinks of me. They will probably interpret me leaving Tumblr as a victory of sorts. And yeah, I'm gone from Tumblr. But I'm not gone from this world. I will continue to live, to write, to create, to argue. I know I matter. I know I'm a good person capable of a positive impact. I am not what you think I am, and I never will be.

You will always have the knowledge that I am out there, being me, being different and weird, and changing the world. Whilst you, are stuck on a computer screen, bullying people who think differently than you.

That's a bloody victory for me, and a sore loss for you. Although I am leaving, I will not delete this blog. I want people to comb through it, and study it. And learn. See my flaws, and know that it possible to leave Tumblr, and still have a good fucking life. 

Goodbye Tumblr. Madeleine.

PS: I will say that the Sansa fandom and (some) parts of the Reylo fandom has been kind to me. It's sad to leave, because I will miss them. If you are one of them and you'd like to maintain contact, send me an e-mail at snowyfictions@gmail.com and I'll give you my Facebook, Twitter or personal e-mail.

[soulvomit]

I really struggle with all discourse about children’s works, but ESPECIALLY The Giving Tree. It’s like having an opinion about a culture you weren’t raised in and ALL you can ever have is an outsider view.

One of the reasons I’m struggling with Giving Tree Discourse has to do with the way I was raised with regard to children’s works. In my own house - the assumption would have been that any books that are ambiguous, that bring up lots of different feelings for lots of different people, would be discussed, and the feelings that they brought up, would be discussed. And this was just assumed to be... all books? I was taught early that EVERYTHING is Your Mileage May Vary? My parents were actually aggressive deprogrammers when it came to messages that I took away from media. Mainstream media often made me feel shitty, ESPECIALLY because of legacy 50s programming on network tv, and because of 80s programming about Perfect Happy Families. My parents were *always* pointing out that stuff I read about or watched, wasn’t real life... from day one. Also, partially due to atheist upbringing, there are very few instances in which I experienced any one book being forced on me as any kind of required foundational pedagogy. There is NO book that I was required to read. (Part of this is that I loved to read so much that I just read a lot of stuff on my own. I did not really get into fiction until my vocabulary and reading abilities caught up to classic fiction and adult works, and my adult figures’ whole focus of teaching me how to read was about getting me up to speed to at least read Steinbeck. Children’s literature *only existed for purposes of teaching reading and grammar* and wasn’t an end to itself, and was supposed to be a temporary, transitory phase until my reading skills got better.)  For whatever reason - The Giving Tree is a book that neither upset me, nor particularly appealed to me. It’s not my favorite Silverstein work by a long shot. The one that always spoke to me? Powerfully? The Missing Piece. (I don’t have much experience with Silverstein being rammed down my throat or spoonfed to me, in any case. NO BOOK WAS.)

Like a lot of children’s books, I was neutral on The Giving Tree. There are a whole lot of semi-contemporary kids’ works (as in, written in the 1960s-70s) that just totally missed me. 

And I didn’t really come to appreciate Shel Silverstein’s broader oeuvre until adulthood.  The only thing I was ever given anything resembling “classical pedagogy” on, was math, because it’s the one thing I wouldn’t study on my own. I was basically encouraged to just study whatever I wanted and if I had a particular interest, my parents got me books on it (that were often above my grade level) and encouraged me to read them and ask questions, and they taught me early on to look up words I didn’t know. Almost all of the books that I liked reading were for older kids (and later, adults). I was actually exposed to classic fantasy work and Grimm’s Fairy Tales before any of the Bowdlerized versions. Because of my limited contact with other children, I just didn’t even know that other kids weren’t being raised in the same world that I was raised in, or reading any of the same material. I only knew that I was different from other kids in ways that made their parents uncomfortable. 

My parents were very, very specifically opposed to certain things that are in standard public school pedagogy, and felt that those things destroy children’s minds. Somehow my household managed to not rear me on 20th century children’s material almost at all and barely even any postwar or later 20th century adult fiction (before my dad got me into sci fi). Somehow fairy tales seemed to just... miss me. They weren’t interesting especially because I KNEW they were Bowdlerized, and my parents didn’t push me to read stuff I wasn’t interested in. (But I liked Disney movies for the drama, the songs, and the fancy dresses.)  My parents' thing was to let me read whatever I wanted - they simply wouldn’t keep books in the house that they didn’t want me to read - and to make themselves available to any questions I had.

My schooling experience is weird, too. When I was in school (before middle school, because I WANTED to go to middle school), it wasn’t with a lot of consistency, so - whatever social noise was going on between teachers and students, *shrug.* Lots of it missed me. My parents provided a lot of buffer between what was going on at school, and my home life. Anything that got discussed in school, was being countered by my parents’ own programming. So... The thing with books like The Giving Tree is that I’m not used to them being *taught out of.* This is not how my parents used fiction books, and I wasn’t in very many environments consistently enough for the schools to do that, either. I’m not used to any particular book being forced on me as a training manual. That was my parents’ job and their job only and that was a rule in my house. They didn’t rely on media to teach me sharing, that was *their job* and it wasn’t via abstract “let’s have a lesson about sharing.” (Very few things were “lessons” or taught “school style” that weren’t specific academic topics. My parents were into reinforcement and modeling.) Sharing is something that was modeled at the dinner table, for example. Also my mom is a hardcore rationer, and my family was poor for the first half of my childhood, so my understanding of sharing was rooted in pragmatic sharing of resources, as opposed to kids sharing their toys. I was even raised *not to eat in public* because it was rude to eat in front of people if you weren’t sharing your food.  And I really feel that a lot of The Discourse around kids’ media comes from the broader culture and its institutions, relying upon mass media to model for kids what parents and schools are no longer able to model. This is the framework everyone is approaching this book from - not as a book on its own merits, but pro-con in terms of its use as an instrument of pedagogy and social modeling that is totally alien to how I was raised to approach any book. They wanted me to question everything I read. I was actually much more reinforced to read science and history material.  Another thing is that as an advanced reader, I didn’t enjoy reading children’s work, and came to despise children’s media BECAUSE of the overbearing modeling in it. It was transparent to me and put me right off, and... lots is aimed at middle class WASP kids’ life experiences, in ways that most people don’t realize. (Sometimes I feel like a lot of standard pedagogy, and standard American kids’ writing, is about SLOWING KIDS DOWN and rationing the amount of information they have access to.) And I’ll say that class is actually a big issue. I lived in a poor urban area and was an advanced reader, so the material dangers presented in a 19th century or early 20th century work were actually more relatable to my real world. I FUCKING HATED POSTWAR PERFECT HAPPY FAMILIES CRAP. My family was weird as fuck, and lots of my family was poor as fuck, and all of us were dysfunctional as fuck. This meant I found mainstream shit TOTALLY ALIENATING AND OTHERING and it only reinforced to me how abnormal my family was. (In fact, I didn’t come to discover how normal we really were for a long time... that most families are “dysfunctional” - and that what’s being measured as “normal” is 100% specific to the propagandized optic of middle class white Christian families.) Mainstream children’s work only made me feel bad about my family and about myself, and I started shunning practically anything that other kids were into, or even discussing. Mainstream kids’ works made me feel suicidal, whereas adult works made my imagination soar. (The irony is that Shel Silverstein is one of the few writers that I actually felt *got* me on some level. I think there is a way in which I picked up on the author’s own “otherness” and connected it to my own.)

This is a case where my background is so different from most people’s that even approaching this discourse, is like trying to discuss specific American problems from the inside, when you were raised outside and have no idea what half of the discussions even are. And when I discuss the kids’ books that people are talking about, it’s not even possible for me to come at it from the viewpoint other people do, because that’s not the way ANY book was ever presented to me... and furthermore, my parents felt that it’s parents’ job to teach their children and model social behavior to them, not schools’. 

I am just so outside of this discourse that I don’t even know how to approach it.  I also don’t know how I feel about the fact that many people are being traumatized by his work because they were forced to read it as Christian-reared children who took different messages away from it than I took, as a secular Jew reading a secular Jew’s work. That makes me have really strong feelings about removing his work, tbh. I don’t know how to feel about this at all. Is there a way that we have to write for children who are Christian-reared, because they will parse some things traumatically? Where does this leave Jewish writers, or outsider writers? Do only specific people get to write for children?  This. is. so. complicated.

[shark-from-the-park]

FIC: The Fitzier of It, Episode Four

A Fitzier The Thick of It AU in several parts. You can find Episode One here , Episode Two here and Episode Three here. With sincere thanks to @casperthefriendlylittlefan and @coffeesugarcream for their cheerleading and encouragement and to everyone else who has read and enjoyed so far. I love you all, your comments/tags/asks/PM’s make my heart swell.

In this installment, James really does go for broke in his attempts to get hired as Francis’s spin doctor. This certainly won’t awaken anything in him... will it?

Warnings for very bad language, NSFW themes, endlessly snacking LeVesconte and a wild Blanky.

@litttlesilkworm @boisinberryjamarama @thegreenmeridian @cinemaocd @the-jewish-marxist @hereliesnils @nashilena @itisa-profoundbond-sarandom @idlesuperstar @what-a-terrorific-mess @kahootqueen69 @jaredharrisankles @shit-in-silk-stocking @bobbole @fellowshipofthegay @aconfusedwriter @uncannybrightside @glorioustidalwavedefendor @zaphodbeeblebro @sasheenka @intrepid-inkweaver @full-of-terrors @anadequatesir

Contact me via semiphore (or some more convenient method) to be tagged/untagged, or just to say hello/hurl abuse. xXx.

Episode Four

When James strode into Baffin House the next day, his confidence was based on more than just his usual bluster and self-assurance.  

He struck it lucky as soon as he reached the second floor.

Ed Little and Thomas Jopson were sat at a desk together near the elevators, heads bent, chatting and laughing. The sideburn brothers didn’t even notice James as he passed them.  

That just left Blanky.  

Who was, of course, perched on the desk outside Francis’s office door like a guard dog, exchanging friendly banter with two women a few desks over (the term ‘duck’ was being thrown about with bewildering regularity).

James steeled himself and approached the Yorkshireman with his palms up in a gesture of peace.  

He also kept his mouth firmly shut.  

Blanky regarded him with crinkly, laughing eyes, almost fondly.  

“Go on then, Fitzjames, lad. Yer’ve caught me in a good mood.”

James reached into his leather satchel, and with the bare minimum of theatricality (that he was physically capable of), brought out his gifts. One by one he placed them on the desk next to Blanky.  

First came a box of colourful Paperchase paper-clips in the shapes of whales and anchors.

Second, and this one was an educated guess really, a grab bag of steak flavoured McCoy’s.  

Thirdly, a folded slip of notepaper with the words ‘Shadow Cabinet’ written on it in James’s neat handwriting.  

Blanky regarded each gift thoughtfully, picking up and unfolding the slip of paper, reading the contents, then meeting James’s eye.  

Blanky refolded the notepaper and handed it back, the beginnings of a grin on his face.  

He rapped on Francis’s office door three times, then held it open.  

“Go on then, lad. Yer’ve earned it.”

With a tiny sigh of relief, James darted through the door before Blanky could change his mind.  

Francis, elbow deep in some report or other, looked up at James from behind his desk in surprise.  

“Thomas Blanky you useless, traitorous gimp, I should have you flogged!” He bellowed after a moment of silence.  

“He brought me crisps, Frank.  And fancy paper-clips.  I’m not made of stone.”  Blanky closed the office door behind James, effectively trapping him and Francis inside together.  

“Class traitor!” Francis yelled at Blanky before sneering at James across the expanse of his desk and saying; “To what do I owe this pleasure, James?” acidly.  

Realising that he had placed both hands up in a peace gesture again, James swiftly dropped them to his sides, feeling like a twat.  

“I just wanted to talk, Francis. I, uh, I brought you this.” He laid the folded piece of notepaper on Francis’s desk and then took a step back.  

Francis unfolded the paper, read it, peered up at James to give him a quick glare, then read it again.  

“Do you honestly think I don’t already know who I want working with me?  You arrogant, snot-nosed little public school wanker...”  He managed to grind out at last.  

James breathed out slowly through his nose.  

Humility. Humility.  

“The thing is, Francis, it’s not just the list. I, uh, talked to them. All of them. I mean, I vetted them all first, of course. Official and unofficial channels. Did some research into their stances on your key issues. And they’ve all, er, agreed. To back you. To serve on your shadow cabinet and toe the line on your fundamentals. All would be willing to meet with you about it. All committed. I mean, I made it clear that it was all speculative, of course. I made it clear that I was doing it off my own back. And then I found out that you’d already spoken to some of them…  It’s just… I’d really like to work with you, Francis. For you.”  James stopped, feeling light-headed.  

Francis’s mouth kept opening and shutting silently.  His face had gone the colour of cooked lobster.  

James chewed on the inside of his bottom lip and waited.  

Eventually, Francis managed;

“Fucking hell James. Why? Why the fuck… I’m no Sir John. I’m not in this for a fucking seat in the House of Lords. You won’t get me to schmooze with any of the great and good. There’ll be no champagne dinners. No golf. No parties with Richard fucking Branson. Have you lost your mind, James? I’m a backwards, Stalinist potato-fucker with bad dress sense, remember?”

“I’ve never said potato-fucker, Francis. About anyone.”

“I just don’t know what your game is here, James.”

“There is no game. I want to work for you. I think I can help you win.”

“You, Mister privately educated, Oxbridge, gap-year-in-South-East-Asia, Paul Smith ties and expensive haircuts, want to work for this ex-alcoholic, Bangor University graduate, backbench, cardigan-wearing Irish...”

“Look!” James interjected desperately. “Francis... Somewhere along the line, I think you might have gotten the idea that I don’t respect you...”

“Whatever could possibly have given me that impression, James.”  Francis said, steely-eyed.  

“But the thing is, you see, that actually, I -”  James’ larynx tried to seize up over the words and he was forced to clear his throat loudly, feeling colour rise to his face.  “I admire you.” He managed at last in a rushed voice that didn’t sound at all like his own.  

Somehow, he felt as if he’d just said something else.

Utterly exposed.  

Francis looked completely astonished. It didn’t suit him.  

They stared at each other from opposite sides of the room, evidently having run off some sort of conversational cliff.  

James chafed under Francis’s intense blue gaze, but having said his piece he found himself unwilling to back down or look away.  

Seconds ticked by, lengthening into minutes and they just breathed in and out and looked at one another.  

The office door opened and Blanky stuck his head in.

“I’m not sorry for interrupting.” He said. “Yers have been quiet for so long I thought one of you must have killed the other.  Now I see it’s just some sort of homoerotic staring contest. My mistake.” He retreated and shut the door on them again.  

“Alright.” Francis finally ground out from between clenched teeth. “I’ll consider it.”

James, whose brain had snagged on the words ‘homoerotic staring contest’, blinked at him in confusion.  

“You’ll...”

“I’ll consider bringing you and Le Vesconte on board. I’ll meet with the names on your bloody list.”

“Oh. Well. Good. Good.”  James felt as though he were having an out of body experience.  

“Just… liaise with Blanky. Set up the meetings.”

“Alright Francis. And… Thank you...”

James exited Francis’s office as quickly as was humanly possible, only to find Blanky, Ed Little, Jopson and half a dozen others crowded around the door, peering at him with rapt curiosity.  

*****

“Fucking hell, Fitz. It sounds about as nerve-wracking as asking him to a school disco.”

“No, it was worse than that.” Muttered James, strangely subdued. “It was like one of those dreams where you…  No, it was like… Like I accidentally took off my face and showed him the horrific writhing mass of gore that is the real me, for a second...”

“Fuck. That’s deep, Fitz. I’ve known you going on thirty years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the real you.” Dundy managed around a mouthful of treacle scone.

“Exactly, Dundy. It wasn’t like I meant to do it.” James rubbed a hand over the back of his neck uncomfortably.

“It worked though, didn’t it?  We’ve actually got a shot at being in government!”

“Mmmm? Yeah.”

Dundy looked both worried and worryingly thoughtful for a moment.  

“James?” He spoke gently, as though trying not to spook a horse. “You do realise that you’re in-”

“Shut up.”  James snapped back into gear all at once.  “Come on, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”  

*****

Episode Five here...

[buzzdixonwriter]

You Don’t Say

For me, one of the unforeseen benefits of Facebook and other social media is that it gives me a chance to do rough drafts of ideas, assembling my thoughts and getting feedback before committing to more permanent form.

And sometimes, like asteroids colliding in space, two separate ideas / posts slam into one another and either create something new and unexpected, or else shatter themselves and reveal interesting aspects of their nature heretofore hidden from view.

That happened recently with a pair of Facebook posts I made on Dennis Prager and Harlan Ellison.

Let’s get the turd out of our mouth first.

. . .

Dennis Prager is a purveyor of herpetology lubricants admired by many on the right-leaning-nazi side of the spectrum, primarily because he keeps his mouth closed when chewing.  Half of what he says is repackaged self-evident truths of the “Don’t eat the yellow snow” variety, a quarter is opinions that if not startling original are at least not genuinely harmful, and the remain quarter is egregious bullshit for which he deserves a public pants down spanking.

Hmm, what?  Oh, yes; purely metaphorically, of course.

I long since wrote off Prager as a. utterer of inanities, but recently his turdmongering was forced on my attention by someone who posted a link to Prager’s argument that the “left” (i.e., basically anybody who thinks Auschwitz was a Bad Idea) is inflicting harm on both the American body politic and the universe at large by denying people like Prager the right to drop the N-bomb whenever they feel like it.

As some of you no doubt already knew, Prager is a member of what polite bigots used to refer to as “those of the Hebrew persuasion”.

That a person from an ethnicity that historically suffered hatred so vicious and specifically targeted that a special word had to be created for it (“anti-Semitism” because the original word -- “Jew-hatred” -- was too damned ugly even for bigots to use) now has his knickers in a twist because he’s “not allowed” to use the only other word of equal or greater impact -- also coined specifically by oppressors for expressing unrestrained hate and contempt against those oppressed -- is so rich in irony that all I can do is swipe a phrase from Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station and say Dennis Prager has “all the self-awareness of a dog licking its own asshole in the middle of the street”.

First off, he’s lying: Neither the “left” nor American law prevents him from dropping the N-bomb whenever he feels like it and I invite him to go down to the intersection of Normandie and Florence in South Central and drop it at the top of his lungs for as long as he is able and please make sure to take plenty of video recorders along because I really wanna see what happens next.

Second, why the fuck would you want to say that? Seriously, other than in an evidentiary context (a cop giving testimony in court, a journalist reporting what some bigoted politician says, etc.), who today gains anything from repeating the word other than inflicting unjustified distress on people who have done nothing to deserve it?

(This is the point where a bunch of alt-right trolls are gonna jump up and say “but whatabout all the times when black people say it?” and to those trolls I’m gonna say STFU & STFD; if you can’t grasp the difference in context then you’re too damned stupid to be allowed out in public except at the end of a leash and with a ball gag in your mouth.)

It’s a word specifically created and designed to be used to brutally oppress people who did nothing to deserve that brutal oppression.  Why would anybody outside that group use it except to participate in that brutal oppression?

. . .

Least there sit any in the cheap seats who presume the above rant was targeted at Dennis Prager simply because he was Jewish, guess again, ya yutzes.

Few writers enjoyed as brilliant and as incendiary a career as Harlan Ellison, and I count myself privileged to have been one of his friends.

Ellison, as many of you know, also was Jewish, a damned tough little bastard, singled out for hatred and abuse as the only Jewish child in his backwater Ohio school, growing up with nerves & balls of chromium, a bona fide Army Ranger, and a writer so honest and fearless that when he wrote about juvenile delinquency in the 1950s he did so by infiltrating and joining a street gang to get first hand experience and insight on the kids who ran in that crowd (and as icing on the cake, James Caan played him in the TV version!).

Top that, Dennis.

Harlan’s electric eclectic career features many highpoints, but the one I want to focus on is his brief 4-year run as TV critic for the legendary Los Angeles Free Press (a.k.a. The Freep) from 1968 to 1972.  

What’s interesting is that Harlan did this while at the same time at the height of his demand as a TV writer.

You got any idea how hard it is to make a living while you’re gnawing on the hand that feeds you?

Harlan may have been crazy, but damn it, he was honest.

Back to the issue at hand.

Recently I’ve been re-reading his TV criticism columns, collected in two volumes, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat.

The depressing thing is that all the evil we see today was in place back in those days, and the same smug pious frauds and their dimbulb marks kept congratulating themselves how wonderful they were as things continued to spiral out of control.

Oh, we've had good moments when we made changes that improved the lot of people who'd previously been marginalized, but the core cancer is still there. Harlan was no cock-eyed sentimentalist -- he was often filled with anger and could vent it spectacularly at deserving targets -- but he did have hope that somehow we could keep nudging the ball further towards the goal lines.

The columns make fascinating reading; they are nowhere near as dated as one might suspect. Sometimes they offer diamond-like brilliant dissections of a particular instant in the cultural gestalt, other times they examine the unseen (well, to most audiences, that is) tides of Hollywood that shape our media, sometimes he turns his attention to bear on seemingly insignificant and forgotten local programming only to show with McLuhan-esque clarity how that tiny piece of seemingly insignificant fluff is symptomatic of a much wider, much vaster, and far more serious problem.

One entry caught my eye in particular, the March 7, 1969 column on a failed ABC pilot called Those Were The Days.

Harlan sat in the studio audience watching the taping of that pilot, and his column praised the courage and insight of producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, the brilliant performances of Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, and the raw honesty of the pilot’s sharp comedy and writing.

Those of you not in the cheap seats have already realized this was the second failed pilot for what would eventually become All In The Family over at CBS (there was an even earlier original pilot called Justice For All back when Archie and Edith’s last name was Justice, not Bunker.)

I remember the hoopla when All In The Family finally aired in January of 1971 as a mid-season replacement.

You might count Archie Bunker as the white Dolemite insofar as the comedy sprang from the shock of all the crude and vulgar things he said.

Lear and Yorkin were mocking that mindset, belittling bigotry, exposing the Babbittry of millions of “good” Americans who lacked either the self-awareness or the courage to take a long introspective look at themselves and realize how badly they were failing as citizens of this country.

Audiences weren’t supposed to like Archie Bunker.

And that’s where Lear and Yorkin made their fatal mistake.

No, audiences didn’t like Archie.

They loved him.

. . .

Asteroids collide, and sometimes they form new planets, and sometimes they shatter and expose what lies beneath.

Prager’s modern day Babbittry crashed into Harlan’s half-century old anti-Babbittry, and from the explosion a stark truth revealed itself.

It’s almost impossible to make an outlaw a villain in popular media.

No matter how many banks they rob, stages they hold up, sheriffs they shoot, the mere fact that somebody wrote a song / dime novel / movie about ‘em makes them into heroes.

Demi-gods.

People to be admired.

Emulated.

Professional wrestling knows this.

You can never be so big a heel that you won’t have a legion of followers.

And you can turn a heel into a baby face in the blink of an eye and none of the fans will remember the despicable acts the wrassler did just last week.

You put an Archie Bunker on TV, you do not get millions of people to recognize themselves in his hateful / hurtful behavior and change their ways.

Oh, hell no; you get millions of people to applaud him for saying and doing what they say and do in private.

And now that it’s all big and bold and brassy on TV, why it becomes even easier to say it in the privacy of your own home, then over the fence with the neighbors, then in the bar down the street, then on the street itself, and then against people who have done you no harm, who have committed no sin other than the heinous crime of not being exactly like you.

I remember watching and liking All In The Family when it first came on because I, like millions of other Americans, got the joke:  Archie was no hero.

But it wasn’t long before the voices cheering Archie began to drown out the voices laughing at him.

Lear and Yorkin tried undoing their damage with Maude and The Jeffersons and Good Times and other spinoff shows, but the bigot was out of the bottle.

Archie Bunker, even though written in a way to ridicule his use of bigotry and stereotypes, became a champion and defender of those who clung to said bigotry and stereotypes.

So tell me again why you want to drop that N-bomb, Dennis.

Explain to me -- even while you talk out of both sides of your mouth and claim even if everybody can use they word maybe they shouldn’t use the word -- how that does anything to help anybody…

…other than bigots and hate mongers.

Your argument is as circular as the thumb and forefinger gesture white supremacists use to signal one another, a gesture deliberately chosen because it lets them transgress openly by lying about the truth meaning of their gesture.

And Harlan, you were right about Those Were The Days as it began evolving into All In The Family.  Absolutely brilliant -- but absolutely deadly.

Not airing All In The Family wouldn’t have eliminated racial / ethnic / sexual prejudice in the United States…

…but it would have denied those ideas a voice.

The narcissist always proclaims, “I don’t care what they say about me so long as they spell my name right.”

Well, that’s what we got with Archie Bunker.

None of the bigots cared if we made fun of their ideas…

…just so long as they got their ideas out there.

Because ideas are made legitimate by their presence.

Now clearly, this is a bade that cuts both ways.

Ideas once unthinkable -- liberty and justice for all in the form of racial and gender equality, f’r instance -- need to be championed in public.

But we need to shout down and stamp out the bad ideas.

The United States took their foot off the neck of the defeated white racists after the end of the Civil War, and as a result jim crow came roaring back, and things did not change for millions of Americans for another entire century.

We allowed bigots and hate mongers and slavers to be whitewashed and glorified and forgiven for their crimes against humanity…

…and in the process we allowed them to continue victimizing African-Americans more and more.

Every song about the Ol’ South, every novel glorifying plantation life, every movie showing happy field hands, every statue commemorating murderous traitors as men of honor and principle, every single iteration of that idea made millions of people’s suffering not just possible but inevitable.

. . .

Now this is the point where the alt-right trolls are gonna jump up and ask “did you ever drop the N-word?”

Not in casual conversation, no.

I was born and raised in the South (Appalachia, mostly); my father’s side of the family were almost all Southerners.

Almost all.

My paternal grandmother was born and raised in New Jersey and met my grandfather when both served in the U.S. Army medical corps in WWI.  When my grandfather died in his 40s, my grandmother originally moved back to New Jersey, but her three children (dad and two aunts) felt heartbroken at having to leave their Southern cousins and friends behind so even though she carried no particular love for the South, my grandmother moved her family back and stayed there for the most of her life (she and one of my aunts moved out to California to be near us, but that’s another story for another post).

One thing my grandmother absolutely refused to tolerate was use of the N-bomb anywhere near her, especially under her roof or in the homes of her children.

This included both the -er and -ra variants, because Southern racists who didn’t want to appear as uncultured and as boorish and as bigoted as their backwoods cousins preferred the second pronunciation because they could claim they were actually speaking respectfully about “colored people”.

So I grew up in the rare white Southern home where the N-bomb merely wasn’t used, it was actually denounced as wrong.

Now, don’t go thinking my grandmother was some great paragon of virtue; she wasn’t (she was hell on wheels, in fact, but that’s another story for another post).

But she did recognize there was something wrong with the use of the N-bomb, and whether she demanded her children never use it in any form to keep them from appearing to be boorish, bigoted louts, or whether she just thought it was simple good manners of the golden rule variety not to use it, I dunno.

But I do know we never used it, and when my parents heard our neighbors or schoolmates use it, we were reminded in no uncertain terms that we were never to use it.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t used it.

A couple of decades ago I wrote a screenplay based on the life of Robert Smalls, in particular his incredible escape from Civil War Charleston by hijacking a Confederate gunboat and sailing it right past Ft. Sumter to join the Union fleet, bringing his wife and several other escaping African-Americans with him.

As a skilled harbor pilot, Smalls enjoyed certain privileges other enslaved African-Americans didn’t.

For example, he was allowed to go about the streets of Charleston unescorted…

…provided he wore a big diamond shaped brass tag around his neck.

Like a dog.

The tag indicated to slave catcher patrols that he was one of the “good” ones, that he could be trusted because he was helping his masters in their struggle against the Union by guiding blockade runners into the safety of Charleston harbor.

But knowing Southerners the way I do, and knowing the kind of low class good ol’ boy types they recruited for such jobs, I couldn’t imagine the slave catcher patrols being particularly courteous to him, even when they knew they had to let him pass because clearly he had the protection of some high positioned muckamuck.  

And I could easily imagine them flinging the N-bomb at him with great glee, taunting him, daring him to act “uppity” so they could beat the crap out of him and teach him some manners and remind him of his place.

So I used the word in their dialog in my script.

Would I use that word today?

Probably not.

It’s not that crucial to the story, and if the viewer doesn’t grasp the concept that these are bigoted bully scum from their actions and attitude, then I’ve failed my job as a writer.

Have I ever quoted people who dropped the N-bomb?

Yeah, I have, in the past.

I’ve quoted Richard Pryor and Blazing Saddles and Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

I would excuse it then as the aforementioned evidentiary context but ya know what?  I don’t quote those lines anymore.

I still think Pryor is hilarious and will recommend his routines to anyone I think might be interested, but he as a member of the African-American community at large (because like any other ethnic group, African-Americans have numerous sub-cultures and sub-communities among them), he could say things in a way neither I nor any other white person could say them.

(And, yeah, there’s a big debate going on to this very day among African-Americans about the appropriateness of that word and you know what?  Whatever decision African-Americans reach for themselves is their business and should not involve any input whatsoever from we white folk; we not only can’t use the word, we can’t even comment on how they choose to use it.  Period.  Full stop.)

Blazing Saddles when it came out used the N-bomb to be deliberately transgressive, to make a sympathetic point re how unfairly African-Americans were treated.

All well and good.

But nine years earlier there had been a movie called A Patch Of Blue and while it wasn’t a raucous comedy like Blazing Saddles it tried making a point about race relations in America and it was a really. Really good movie and it made some important points but today is virtually unwatchable not because of any flaws in it but because the times have changed.

Ditto Blazing Saddles.

We don’t need to approach the problem that way any more.

Quentin Tarantino?  I really like what he does as a director and a screenwriter but his use of the N-bomb to show us how transgressive his characters are is really shallow.  I have a strong feeling his movies are going to be considered embarrassingly passé’ in a generation or two, much the same way as benign-yet-stereotypical characters in 1940s movies render many of them passé’ today.  

Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction lose nothing by changing the N-word to something else.  

Maybe an argument could be made for its use in Django Unchained or The Hateful 8 but even there I think substituting another word wouldn’t significantly change the tenor or tone of either movie.

So I stop quoting those lines from Tarantino’s films, at least not fully.

I can admire his skill / talent / craft without signing off on his problematic elements.

Let me offer an analogy: If a creator can get the same dramatic effect by pretending to shoot somebody but not actually blasting them with a gun, then they can get the same dramatic effect by using something evocative of the N-bomb without actually dropping it.

(By the way, for those who may be curious, my mother was from Naples and a bona fide card carrying member of Mussolini’s Fascist Youth Brigade, but that’s another story for another post.)

. . .

We are plunging into a new cultural conflict -- and while I think there will be violence, I don’t see it being violence on the scale or level of political organization as the Civil War -- and we can only win by refusing to let the bigots and the hate mongers spew their bullshit in the marketplace of ideas.

There is no compromise with an oppressor.

Stand up to it every time you encounter it.

Make it unthinkable, never acceptable. 

  © Buzz Dixon

[rabbitindisguise]

Hey, I saw your "culturally christian" post—may I ask, are you Christian? Jewish? something else? Because I'd like to know what perspective you're coming from in your (very good!) analysis.

Thanks! That's actually a complicated question to answer. It would make things easier for the discussion if I could place myself somewhere intelligible along the privileged/marginalized axis since it would actually give me a place to start this post from but oh well

I actually classify myself as "superstitious" if anything. I'm not religious- I'm agnostic, because statistically I don't think anyone has the right answer. Worse, many religious beliefs are all or nothing on converting, no other god/s allowed.

But my "religious practice" so to speak isn't, technically, acultural but so multicultural that to call me "culturally Christian" is laughable. Christians do not trust the guy saying that hey, maybe the divine order is backwards. Maybe germs are the most important thing in the universe. I mix science with my beliefs like some sort of trinket stealing gremlin because I like internal consistency more than fitting in. By the same token, I considered converting to Judaism because I'm all about debating meanings but I simply do not have the energy for something that still feels ill fitting. Shintoism isn't quite right either. But I pull from all three of those and more in my everyday life. Ultimately, agnosticism, and therefore completely out of the boundaries of any atheism vs religions debate, is the most comfortable for me, but not a very helpful answer to "but who do you hand out with." I try to be easy for anyone to hang out with. That's lead to a Big Mess of cultural awareness.

I tried to summarize the total number of cultures I've been exposed to and picked up habits from and unfortunately that would be "just about everything and the kitchen sink." I genuinely don't know where half of my superstitions come from and adopt new ones easily through learning about new cultures to construct characters in my books. Which is why I'm just "superstitious."

I'd probably say I'm basically religious if religion itself wasn't so restrictive and instructive. I'm an anarchist so I get turned off completely when I get told I have to do anything. Plus many religions shape and inform the values of the culture they come from. People do a lot of bad things in the name of religion and I don't want to be a part of that, but neither do I genuinely not believe that "a religion" can't be possible.

And so far no religion I've interacted with, I feel, has focus on the idea that humans are small insignificant ants and that literal ants can be incredibly powerful, making humans just a different kind of ant. I'm actually very anti-human in many people's view simply because I don't think we're any more special or interesting than anything that has ever existed. I don't think that any religion I participate in should pay attention more to humans than animals. I don't think animals are just here for our comfort. And I don't see anything wrong or dirty with killing for food. That's not covered by any religion I've seen, yet that's basically my religious belief system. My code of conduct, even.

TL;DR agnostic, not religious

(Don't ask me to pick a penny head's down though, lmao I'm not fucking risking that. Better safe than sorry.)

[lentaska]

Deep Water - Part 2

A/N: Featuring Sami Callihan. WWII setting, OFC, third-person POV. Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction using characters from wrestling, I do not claim any ownership over them. Any resemblance to real-life historical events, organizations, locales and countries/union is entirely coincidental.

Tagging people who gave likes to my work: @thecristsandcallihanmadness@monstersmaid @cherryfinolahobbes @i-ship-it-okay @ohcristimhookedonhavocimsodunne @clynch126 @amariemoore @jonmoxley4ever @morie-leigh Thank you for your support (also please let me know if tagging is not ok for you)

To not to bore the only audience, Sami summarized the whole story, starting from the day he volunteered to be sent to Poland. Soon after his arrival in Warsaw, the situation of the city shocked him, almost every street had been bombed into ruins, it was nothing like what he had seen in photos.

“I was in Warszawa for university,” said Anka in downcast tone, “when I was not blind.”

Sami could tell how forlorn she was, despite of the calm expression she wore outside. The strength and will of an individual was crushed into pieces in the war, yet she had to hide her wounded heart and soul, and pretended to be strong.

“It was magnificent city, people would travel far to only take good look of her. Now no one will look at her anymore. I prayed for Warszawa but I guess God didn’t hear it.” the slim female curled herself in old clothes and rubbed hands. Sami was worried campfire could expose their location,so all they had were candles and clothes from the previous house owner to keep them warmed.

“I don’t think God gives shit about it.” Sami spit.

“I thought something would change but we are left alone...”

Sami cut her off, “I ain’t gonna leave you alone. Listen, I can promise you one thing: I will stay with you. Even if you don’t trust foreigner, even this fucking war is unpredictable, but I’m here.”

Anka was speechless.

There was one moment that Sami thought his words were too abrupt for her to accept, because he saw Anka’s brows knitted, but all he received was her smile and gentle voice, “you shouldn’t promise anything in war, but I really appreciate it.”

“You have experienced all the tragedy, I cannot correct that, but there’s still something I can do for you.”

“There’s another thing you can do: tell me more about you, Sami. What happened to you in Warszawa?”

“I was captured by fucking Nazi after several days’ fighting, we fought hard but lacked supplies. They were about to put me on the train to some camp, but I found way to escape.”

“My Jewish friends were sent there... they never come back.”

He had heard about what happened in those camps and was disgusted. Not only Jewish, but also Slavs and other people who were considered as “subhumans” by Nazi had to face the misfortune of being sent there. There’s no way her friends could survive.

Sighed, he decided to not to reveal the cruel reality. Anka had already been through a lot, even only one thing could break her now. To meet her was destined, there’s not much he could help with her situation, but still he wanted to comfort her and to let know she would be fine, even though it’s just his wishful thinking.

Sami took out the knife he received on the first day of joining the army, handed to her, “take it, at least you have a weapon, but I’ll try to make sure you never need to use it.”

Anka was confused.

“Because I’ll protect you.”

The Polish girl whispered “thank you”, buried her face into clothes.

“Want some food? I can only offer water and dry bread though.”

“Tak. Thank you.”

“By the way, what did you study in university?”

“Music, but Nazi destroyed school and killed teachers.” she took the bread and broke it into smaller pieces.

Giving her an apologetic expression - although she could not see - Sami switched the topic, “how did you learn English?”

Dipping the bread into water to soften the texture, Anka said, “my father was diplomat. So much ambition, but little could he do.”

In despite of the accent and lack of articles - Sami guessed it’s because Polish language has no such concept - her English was fine. It made things much easier for him. He had met few Polish immigrants in Britain, their language was complicated as cipher.

Finished her “dinner”, Anka groped around to get closer to the candles, Sami grabbed her hands before she accidentally upset the candles and caused fire hazard. He was surprised at how cold her hands were, she was surprised at his move. The subconscious reaction was to pull the hand back but he had much more strength.

“You’d better save some energy.” Sami recommended, drawing her into his arms, “c’mon, it’ll be warmer. I’m not gonna do something stupid, trust me.”

Anka gave up the idea of struggling. He’s right, it WAS warmer. The sense of security and tiredness dulled her mind, she leaned closer to Sami and eventually rested her head against his chest. “Is it dark outside?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s probably seven or eight o’clock.”

“We should rob Nazi officer and get you watch...” she muttered sleepily. When she had a clear mind, she would never say such silly thing.

Chuckled, Sami brushed her chestnut-colored hair away from her face. Her profile was soft and flawless in dim light.

Anka let out a long breath of relief, asked, “what do you look like, Sami?”

“Me? I look normal, black hair, two eyes, one nose...”

“Do you look scary?” she paused, then apologized, “sorry, it’s stupid question...”

“No don’t worry.” Sami hugged her in more intimate way, it pleased him that she didn’t resist. He took both of her hands and pressed gently on his face, murmured, “it’d better if you can feel it by yourself.”

Her mind was totally cleared up by his action and the touch of his skin. She realized what she was doing and wanted to pull her hands back, but another voice echoed in her mind: don’t.

It might be attachment and feeling of dependency grew from the fact that he saved her in war zone, or sense of belonging that was caused by his existence after days of being alone, Anka wanted to be closer to him. She didn’t know if it’s right to have such feeling towards a foreigner in the time of war, or it might be nothing but ephemeral illusion.

Then she heard Sami’s low-pitched voice, “I want you to know me more.”

Nervously shivering, her fingers drew the outline of his face, starting from the forehead, down to his eyebrows, nose, cheek, lips and chin. She coughed to ease her awkwardness, said, “you have beard.”

“I also have scars from fights, on my back and here - ” Sami led Anka’s fingers to his chest, where his scar was. “Has the cruel world left you scars?”

She nodded, “right in my heart.”

Leaned closer, Sami kissed her forehead, “go to sleep. I will keep you safe.”