#frothing at the mouth like a rabid beast. actually.

[ummick]

mick schumacher on the grid before the race, bahrain - november 2, 2024

[charlottepuddingsama]

I have other WIPs I’m theoretically “”working on”” but currently I have in my head this idea about the crew gets captured and the bad guy segregates Zoro and drugs him with something that reduces him to his base instincts for like 24hrs and the guy’s like, “MWAHAHAHA, I shall unleash this rabid beast and he will tear his own crew to shreds as he is not but a man of carnage and death!!” And he expects them to quake in their restraints but they all look at each other and shrug and are like, “Oh, yeah, okay. Sure.” And he’s like “???? Uh… okay…. Anyway, RELEASE THE HOUND!!!!” And Zoro, who really has been frothing at the mouth in the cage they had him in, launches out at impossible speed, and Luffy like yawns, unsheathes all three swords, and Sanji is checking his nails, winds up for a vicious attack, Nami is distinctly spacing out, and then… he cuts all their restraints and immediately turns heal to just completely obliterate the bad guy and his whole crew bc Zoro, at his base instinct, is protective of those he loves.

The rest of the story is him like following Sanji around the market, or not letting Chopper more than five feet away, actually reacting to “good boy” and perking up at being rewarded with booze, and it ends in a giant cuddle pile

[confluence-and-drift]

Anyone else noticed that zionists are taking on even more weirdly contorted positions in order to excuse their rabid ethnonationalism and genocidal hatred whilst squaring it with the sense that they're the eternal victim?

I was watching an interview with an Israeli genocide scholar (who, we can safely say knows his shit as he grew up in the belly of the beast and isn't a zionist) about how that's surprisingly common among all genocides. Even as they murder and despoil, they don't see themselves as killers, they see themselves as protectors of their own.

That's said, reality is still a thing; objective fact exists. They're the literal instruments of genocide, there's no getting away from that, no matter their delusions and paranoia.

But onto the recent thing I mentioned ; I don't know whether this is just a tactic from those students the regime is paying to disrail online diacussions, but the idea that you can be a raging zionist, frothing at the mouth at the supposed antisemitism in the left (no examples of course they'd get laughed at for lying through their teeth otherwise) whilst repeating zionist slogns with ethnonationalism trickling from their seams and still leave a token sentence about how you still supposedly care about Palestinians.

Just the text does not support the conclusion, so to speak. Instead they spread the usual whining where they centre themselves and their delusional bullshit victim complex and attacking the left for supposedly wishing ill on their emotional support ethnostate.

Fucking hell, you don't get to live stream a fucking genocide in the 21st century where we can see the numbers who agree within your nation, can see the vile shit they post on social media, can see what your democratically elected leaders say, see the networks of rape and torture camps you set up, see the sheer bloodthirst of the occupation soldiers as they gleefully loot and kill and torture. They snipe kids in the head. They do this every day without compunction.

You don't get to do all of that and play the victim. You don't get to carry out one of worst crimes of our age and be well regarded. Hell, you don't get to do all of that and not have people wish ill on your nasty little colonial project. You don't get to act all aggrieved and wheel out the false antisemitism accusations when plenty of jews who also think you're vile, openly genocidal monsters who've taken their faith as some sort of perverse emblem to enable your crimes.

This isn't the mainstream western media, I'm not going to entertain your bullshit and I'm disappointed to see when people I follow do. Like... Come on, that blog decrying antisemitism on the left? Look a bit closer. Even if what they shared isn't bad in itself (I too dislike antisemitism), you have to wonder what kind of person bat's for the zionist project even now 10 months into a genocide? Why the fixation on the left in the west vs any discussion on their prime minister's constant derailing of peace talks that he blames the other side for or, you know, anything else actually pertinent to the actual conflict and it's continuation?

Come on people, this doesn't exactly require genius level intellect and an encyclopedic knowledge of west Asian political affairs.

[margridarnauds]

Actually, something else:

Some of Sreng's final dialogue of the First Battle is him as a totally broken man, declaring, fundamentally, that he knows that he's very likely going to die in the coming battle and that all the Fir Bolg had found in Ireland was trouble. He has, at this point, lost almost his entire extended family, including his king and his cousin, and the forces of the Fir Bolg have almost been totally demolished. Even though he's able to negotiate terms with the Tuatha Dé, the overall impression of Sreng is very much that he's not the man we met at the start of the text.

And, in the centuries that followed, the Fir Bolg were routinely spoken about as either not being worth the effort or spoken of derogatorily, as, essentially, brown, evil, stupid savages who deserved to have Ireland taken from them. (Yes...these people were racist.) Sreng himself, in a number of retellings, has been made into an evil, stupid, violent domestic abuser who froths at the mouth at the prospect of war and is hungry for vengeance after the battle, a rabid beast that needs to be put down. The First Battle itself, even among scholars, still hasn't been analyzed nearly enough, and is often dismissed as a Mediocre Early Modern Irish text, barely worth the trouble of discussing. Sreng, despite being, in my opinion, one of the most remarkable heroes in medieval and early modern Irish lit despite his short heroic biography (only one text and a couple of mentions elsewhere), is NOT well known as a character, even among professional medievalists.

But...I have a lot of mixed feelings about the portrayal of the Fir Bolg in fantasy media, namely because their Irishness is routinely stripped from them, but there's something to be said just for the fact that they do LIVE in some way, not just as a caricature of The Savage™, but as well-rounded characters, and that so much of this portrayal is due to Sreng, the obscure, maligned champion from a text that no one cares about, the stubborn mortal who put the gods on their knees.

A fun thing about Medieval Irish Sreng mac Sengainn is that he is VERY LIKELY the reason why Firbolg in DND (and elsewhere) are portrayed as almost supernaturally tall -- he's described by the other Fir Bolg as "fer mor agarb aindiuit" -- "a very fierce, stubborn large man", and Bres, the ambassador for the Tuatha Dé who interviews him, describes him as "fer mor fraechda fornetmur, 7 airm aidble ingantacha aige. Fer agarb imdochair e fos, gan egla gan urumon aeduine fair" -- "a large, fierce man with large, remarkable weapons. A man without fear and without ??? [translated by Fraser as "awe"] for anyone".

This is the only reference we get to any of the Fir Bolg being large, which means that Sreng is very likely the template for the Fir Bolg any time they show up in fantasy media as large, including in DND.

[cyberneticlagomorph]

She waits for you in the castle garden. A pulsating pustule of evil, in the form of an eerily massive flower bud, tightly closed around the horror it so carefully gestated in its unnatural womb. Reports from Cheshire and your guards state that it appeared sometime during the night, and all attempts to remove or destroy it have been in vain. No one can get close to it, or else fall prey to the potent miasma of adoration that the loathsome thing oozed like slime. The ground around the bulb is blackened and dead, never to host life again, strewn with the kneeling wide eyed bodies of your guards and any foolish enough to dare tamper with the flower. Their faces stretched to the limit by hideous grins and half lidded eyes, steadily crying blood onto the lifeless earth.

They have to be dragged away, pulled to a safe distance with lassos on long steel poles, like stray dogs caught by animal control. The bulb's range is a short one, so you hope that given enough space and time, they'll be alright. By the time you get there, the last are being cleared away on makeshift stretchers, you need medical supplies and actual doctors here badly. Ada can't handle a job like this alone, and you feel terrible for asking her to help so often. Everything around you is a constant state of dangerous chaos that threatens to swallow all you love, and every attempt to distance yourself from one conflict ends with you falling into the frothing maw of another. It's exhausting, you hate it, more than anything else, you hate it.

The bulb senses your approach, petals bulging like flesh or rubber as something presses against them from the inside, you swear you see the palm of a hand or an eyeless face with its mouth stretched wide in a soundless scream. The whole thing shudders violently and begins to unfurl, releasing more of that choking adoration fog that saps your will to fight and end this once and for all. Your knees tremble, and every thought suddenly vanishes from your head, your fear, your pain, your worries. They all disappear and you are left with nothing but adoration for the Queen. Your Queen. Your everything. You are the dust beneath her feet, she is the air you breathe, you are the dog at her heel, she is the benevolent goddess that spares your life just one moment more. You want nothing more than to please her, you'd slit a thousand throats just to see those obsidian eyes alight with amusement. You'd slit your own throat to see her smile, hear her praise you...

The wretched bulb blooms into an unfathomable rose, stolen blood dripping from the spread petals. The stench of blood baking in summer sun coats your tongue and makes you gag, your consciousness fighting to claw through the Queen's control. Within the rose, a figure is curled, coated in blood and chlorophyll laced mucus, but otherwise naked. She doesn't so much as get up as she is jerked to her feet like a puppet on frayed strings, wearing the body she fashioned from your blood. She takes the watery first breath of a newborn, staggering like a reanimated corpse towards you, the rose dissolving into a blinding cloud of petals that coalesces into a dress for her, a crown of thorns and bone atop her head. You stare into a face too much like your own, you're starting to bleed now, from the eyes and nose. It trails down your face and slithers down the back of your throat, making breathing an impossibility. She holds you fast, a deer in headlights awaiting the oncoming truck with sheer animal stupidity. You see her draw the sword, black and cruel, winking red in the sun as it arcs towards your body.

You dissipate into a swarm of blue fireflies, curling back and around to reform behind the Queen, drawing the Vorpal sword despite your evident disorientation. She scowls at you, raising her hand. The bloody ground boils and seethes, the tortured roots of that ugly rose rising from the earth to become thorny snakes the size of trees, each tipped with the smaller sister of that first rose. Single black eyes with white heart-shaped pupils stare accusingly from within their petals, smaller snakes end in bulbous mouths lined with row after row of needle teeth. Mouths not meant to chew and consume, but to tear and crush their victims into horrid puddles of pulpy gore. She flicks her finger with a sneer, a solitary toothy snake lunging at you with jaws wide and dripping with strands of green spittle. You slash with the Vorpal blade, cleanly severing mouth from wriggling stalk. Both spasm disturbingly, like an animal in pain, trailing ropes of green gore before seizing and going still. The Queen thinks you distracted and sends another vine careening towards you, its mouth foaming and rabid.

Your hand raises without your permission, a consciousness nestling beside yours with almost practiced ease. The vine begins to squirm and writhe, curling and flailing in pain as purple-black streams of smoke swirl from it to you, spiraling up the darkening length of your arm. You watch the plant wither and die within moments, its life force settling heavily within your chest as you approach the Queen, your eyes burning red and blue, sickly dribbles of that same smoke trailing from the tips of your dagger-sharp claws. Within your mind, Moira grins.

"How... adorable." you drawl in a voice that echoes itself, your tone full of boredom and venom that leaves a taste in your mouth as plain as the Irish accent that colors your words. The Queen scowls, then smiles, unleashing more thorns than you can counter or drain, you're left helplessly dodging blindly against the shuddering plant-based hydra. You tumble headlong over one limb, only to see another hurtle towards you at high speed, too late for you to escape. The sound of plant flesh against unyielding earth is finite and deafening, but not as chilling as the peels of laughter that claw themselves free of the Queen's throat. Moira's mind and yours are instantly disentangled, her flung almost painfully back into her body back home. Something else, someone else, oozes from the darkness and fills your mind with an endless shrieking hivemind, nearly drowned out by the hissing and groaning of some diabolical machine. A voice calls to you over the buzzing, screaming din in your head, inky and cold

"Because I owe you one, now let's dance doll..."

A dark, spreading pool leaks from beneath the great limb, and the Queen nearly mistakes it for blood before she remembers that yours is luminescent and blue. She strikes too late, you're already upon her, forming a new self from the terrible ink. Your skin is black and gray, trimmed with white, all of you dripping ink onto the ground below. Your lips curl into an unnatural smile, as you speak without moving your mouth in a voice that rings out a dozen times over.

"Surpriiiiiiissse..." you hiss, summoning limbs and misshapen shambling things from the dark pools around you. The Queen shrieks, pulling the strings on her creature, making it lash out against you. The Vorpal sword becomes an ink pen in your hands, its nib razor sharp and gleaming. You prune the plant-beast with ease and resume your assault on the Queen. She can't touch you like this, the moment she thinks she has you, you draw on another friend's mind to break the shaky hold of her miasma. Bendy, the ink demon with his black well of souls, does this the best. She can do nothing but throw physical attacks at you so long as he's here. His hivemind is deep and disorienting, the longer he stays with you, the more you feel yourself drowning in the churning sea of noise. The hydra swats you aside like a pathetic fly and sends you to splatter against a nearby wall. Bendy leaves the moment you pull yourself together. The rose winds itself around the Queen, becoming a vicious looking fortress with glaring floral eyes and snarling mouths. Two more minds brush against yours, longing to throw their hats in the ring.

The first is giddy, gleeful to be out and causing mayhem rather than confined to her cell back in Arkham. Her agility is astounding, the vines can't touch you, and any too slow to draw back become crushed pulpy piles of vegetable mess on the already sticky ground. The Vorpal sword makes a wicked warhammer, paired with Harley's acrobatic and you're the cheeriest tank Wonderland has ever seen. A vine strikes low, you jump high and perch on the stem just behind its drooling maw, one of its brethren darts for you, sinking its teeth into the flesh of its kin with no remorse, you take off running as the vine starts to spasm in panic. Others try to do you in, either to be bashed with your hammer or left snapping at empty air. You spot an opening in the shivering thorn wall, and dive through. Harley reluctantly retreats from your mind and another consciousness takes her place. The Queen strikes with her sword but is left slicing the space between a churning cloud of blue moths, she reorients herself just in time to receive a merciless kick to the teeth.

The Red Queen staggers back, bleeding the same green as her monstrosity. All six hundred years worth of Jeanne's whiskey-soaked rage courses through your veins, stoked white hot by sheer proximity to the Queen. You give her no time to attack, drawing your guns, putting her back on the defensive. Blade and bullet clash, gun-heels unleash devastating assaults, yet she refuses to die. Every limb lopped or shot off grows back in an instant, but it's nothing you can't handle. The Queen drops the thorn barrier in desperation, searching for any space she can put between you. You could almost smile at her stupidity. You step on a discarded limb and slip, one of the larger thorn vines hits you full on as you stand and sends you careening away. You hit the ground, bounce once and roll for some feet. Jeanne is reluctant to leave you, but you force your bond apart. It hurts to breathe, many things are definitely broken. Good.

You play dead as the Queen tiptoes near, face splitting in a smile. She chuckles darkly, her sword dragging in the blood and muck as she waits to crave your heart from your chest and your fool head from your shoulders. You draw on one last person, feeling her pain and panic as she enters your mind. Your magic manifests her abilities and you feel your wounds start to heal, though you keep your breathing as shallow as possible. The Queen raises her black blade, your strength returns just in time to roll away and spring up as her blade comes down.

"Why. Won't. You. DIE?!" she snarls, half mad with frustration. You wipe blood from your lips and straighten up, your blonde hair falling over one eye.

"Haven't you heard?" you half whisper in a voice accented with German, skin glowing as your wings unfurl, carrying you off the ground, "Heroes never die."

Somewhere in the back of your mind you think you hear Angela laugh, slightly manic and panicked but a laugh just the same. It makes your heart flutter as much as the wings on your back bearing you so proudly upwards. The Queen screams like a damned thing, flinging the whole of her beast at you, as bloody and weak as it is. Its attacks are pathetic and sluggish, vines falling apart midair as you climb higher. Those few still healthy enough to do damage meet the business end of your scythe, true its not the weapon of an angel of mercy, but you aren't feeling very merciful today. You swoop low and take a vine out at the base, watching it crash down on its sister-shoots, pinning them to the ground.

"Now!" you shout to the pair in the shadows, Rewind and Bub, the two who have been watching this fight since it began. They take the Queen by surprise, trapping her in a bubble of time as chains of shadow bind her wrists and ankles. You don't stop hacking and flying until the rose hydra is nothing more than sickly green mulch melting into the abused earth beneath. When the time bubble drops, so does the Queen, left screeching and flailing as tears well up in her black eyes. Her tantrum continues as she is dragged to the castle dungeon to stay. You slump, exhausted on the grass and let Angie go, promising to thank her in person the moment you got the chance.

[fantasyrat]

So... doing this again? Eh, Why not?

So, yesterday I came on Tumblr in the hopes of finding some art to help build a fan forum (currently obsessing over the ADoriBull ship and well as Love Nikki Dress Up Queen) I’m working on when I notice two replies to an old reply I did last year. Well, I tend to feel obliged to thank them and thought little else of it. Then the I noticed in my feed that OP, winterywitch, decided to throw a tantrum when it’s been weeks... months even since our exchange. So it left me a bit bewildered. So, being my curious self, I looked into it and decided to respond and maybe even do a bit of a mental analysis. First thing I saw was this.

Oooh my... The lack of self-awareness is strong here. So, I go a bit further and wouldn’t you know it, this apparently got them in such a tizzy she had to rant about it.... but not actually reply to what was said even though she writes as if they’re arguing with someone else. Curious... For a bit of convenience sake, I took the liberty of taking a screenshot, highlighting and numbering certain bits of her rant. Not all. The rest I will address in quotes.

So, to start, we’ll so by the numbers.

(1) - If you took the time to look at my original response I never claimed to be an anti-sjw. I was simply pointing out the issues with the community and the blatant hypocrisy the willfully chose to ignore. And this image you have of me frothing at the mouth like a rabid dog is just silly plain silly as one can see by my original response. I can admit it was a while ago and I have learned more about choosing my words more carefully. Be that as it may, this image you have in your head of me being some primal beast with no thought save destroy the enemy is completely ludicrous. 

(2) - So, you are admitting you are a troll then? If that’s so, why do immediately contradict yourself with number 3?

(3) - And that is your opinion if that’s what you truly believe. However, terminology is not evidence of one's mindset, principles, and beliefs. There are people whom I have personally known who are wise, kind and intelligent individuals but they have difficulty in eloquence. And now I ask for evidence. Where are the anti-sjw trying to pass laws to silence those like yourself? If you’re speaking purely of people on the internet mocking you then, I’m sorry, but they have the right to do so and you have a right not to listen and to choose to be happy despite what others say.Meanwhile, Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn go to the UN on this matter claiming that random comment like ‘You're a liar’ ‘You suck’ and harassment and the basis for censorship. And if a bill got passed for such things, the line would be blurred. And that can lead to serious issues. That’s why people are pushing back because they know once that line is drawn than the 1st amendment is doomed.Now, being fair, you’ve probably not been hearing this from more reasonable sources who have the same knee-jerk reaction that you’ve shown time and time again to have. However, I highly recommend getting out of Tumblr or Twitter. It’s not a reliable source of information. Try opening your mind a bit and go a bit of research on the history of the first amendment.If not for the 1st, Thomas Paine would never have been able to write The Age of Reason or Frederick Douglass The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. These are only two of many books that helped shape the nation and it’s thanks to the 1st Amendment.So when we see people complaining about the use of some word and trying to ban it, people rally around to nip it in the bud before the problem gets worse. I personally don’t care what you say, you have the freedom to say it and I would defend your freedom though I disagree. But when people are actively trying to turn those opinion into law, it needs to be stopped before it gets worse.

(4) - Minor note; using a cliche allegory doesn’t help your argument. I’d highly recommend avoiding it in the future. This is not malicious. This is simply advice from one human being to another.Now, to the quotes because... oh boy...

even now, you're interpreting me picking apart your sources as some kind of horrific oppression and as sjw buzzword-filled rants, but that's because you don't see "sjws" as people, you see them as an object to use in some epic pwn fantasy to get attention online

*sigh* What you’re saying, what you’re feeling right now is called projection. It’s not I seeing you as inhuman, but you see me as an inhuman monster. Therefore, since in your mind I’m not human, I’ve fair game for you to be wicked, cruel and vile to by hurling insults because let’s face it. It’s easier not to see the humanity of another person behind a computer monitor. Try taking a deep breath and reread your rant. All you’ve done is exactly what you accuse me of. Assume I’m doing this for internet fame... How would that even work exactly? I’ve no interest in it. also it's been two entire real-life years, you need to grow up and let go of this online oppression fantasy. Let me repeat what I said earlier: ‘So, yesterday I came on Tumblr in the hopes of finding some art to help build a fan forum (currently obsessing over the ADoriBull ship and well as Love Nikki Dress Up Queen) I’m working on when I notice two replies to an old reply I did last year. Well, I tend to feel obliged to thank them and thought little else of it.’ I don’t have many posts on my Tumblr, so when I return, I see old ones and sometimes they have new developments. I responded to them, not you. If anyone needs to grow up it’s you. You were barely a footnote in my mind when I responded. And then that was it. But then you replied to my reply to them. Seems like you’re the obsessed one here. Now, I won’t bother to quote the entirety as it’s simply inane jibberish with horrid grammar and punctuation only a toddler would spout in a hissy fit and that is far beneath me, and anyone wants to read it, it’s there above. However, I will point to one thing.

someone used their free speech to criticize your flawed argument Funny that... that you didn’t reply to another who I thanked for their generosity.

You see, I’m normally a very reasonable lady. But it’s hard to be reasonable when someone is so unreasonable. You promote critical thinking, but don’t dare apply it to yourself. So, I’m doing you a favor. After looking at the things you’ve written and said, and if your age on your page is correct, you may want to seek some help. If you have already, get a second opinion. I’m not an expert by any means, but I have noticed some patterns that could possibly be symptoms of Histrionic Personality Disorder Here’s a link to more information: https://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/histrionic-personality-disorder Now I’m not saying you have this, but as one human being to another, I’d advise you to look into it.