#he was one of VERY few communists (I think 3

[fanboy-feminist]

There’s something ironic (and very funny) about how what constitutes “guy-talk” in my brain is me and my older friend meeting for drinks & dinner, so he and I can complain about our gender studies undergrad seminars.

[suuniyunnio]

squid game

HII this is my first time writing here soo im so sorry if this is a little underwhelming<3

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟ SQUID GAME | the 'recruiter' x reader !

! , when the reader is just a random small waitress, meets a man with a suit and a stack of cash accompanied by.. ddakji in his brief case?

Life fucking sucks.

That's one thing that life teaches you, and you've learnt that you've had nothing good happen so far in your life other than the fact that you got yourself a job, even if for a small amount, a car to sleep in and food to eat because you've got nothing else.

"Was I a shitty communist in my previous life?" you muttered to yourself, wiping the table with a cloth as you occasionally mutter small remarks regarding a customer or you, in general. Cleaning up the table from spilled alcohol from a drunkard for what felt like the 7th time, you were starting to think every thing thrown at you felt like karma for whatever bad you did before.

A single ding could be heard from the rundown restaurant as you steadied yourself to greet the customer, smiling rather forcefully and turning your head over to meet whoever came in, your eyes was a rather tall man with a suit and a briefcase who offered you a small smile and a nod along your way.

well, there goes the rest of your luck for the week.

'whatever.' you thought to yourself before shaking your head and heading to the counter to throw the used rag on the previously messy table and making your way to the man. You prayed this man wasn't going to molest you or scam you, but with the way the man looks you doubt any man with a suit would do such thing, any person in general... hopefully.

"Good evening, what can I get for you?" You asked with a tilted head, watching as he taps a few times on the table before looking up at you. What's a man like him doing here, in this shitty place always conquered by assholes?

he looks kind, for the most part.

"Excuse me, can I get two glass of soju?" The man asks as he sets down the briefcase, a kind smile on his face. You sighed internally before nodding in his way, before making your way to the kitchen to prepare two glass of soju. Two glass, huh. probably meeting a client, but why here anyway?

Coming back to the man with two glasses of soju, you hoped he didn't complain before setting them down with a small 'enjoy' and a turn of a head before he called out for you.

"Kyung Y/N."

You probably shouldn't have stopped in your steps and looked back, you probably should've convinced yourself you were hearing things but you didn't. You turned your head around slowly and locked eyes with the man, your expression dropping, but before you could say anything he gestured to the seat in front of him and said , "Take a seat."

A mistake on your part, because you did sit. Taking a seat in front of the man, he took one glass of soju before subtly gesturing to the other cup for you to take it, hesitating to speak a little you shook your head and narrowed your eyes at him.

"Can I help you, sir?" You asked, a silent request from him as you watch him set down the cup and folding his hand on the table. tilting his head, he spoke, "A very unfortunate situation for a pretty lady, a pity." he cooed, and smacked his lips. 

You tensed a little, gosh, guess your luck did run out. Before you could say anything, he raised a finger before he pulled his suitcase and opened it. Inside, you could see stacks of cash and .. ddakji?

"Would you like to play a game of ddakji with me, miss?"

"I am sorry?"

"Ddakji." he repeated before showing you the red and blue paper, gosh now you were starting to think this man was not okay at all. For whatever reason it was, no matter what you were gonna say you just keep getting interrupted. "For every round you win, you'll get 10,000 won. but if you lose.." he clears his throat before standing up, you standing up momentarily afterwards too.

"You'll pay with your body."

"absolutely no-"

"a slap, I mean." the man quickly corrected himself, adjusting his tie before he looks down at you. Holding out the blue paper, and a tilted head, you stared down at the paper. win a game of ddakji.. for 10,000 won? Is this where your luck finally comes into play?

Hesitating for a split minute, you sighed and picked up the paper. The man seemed delighted, with the way he whistled and nodded in approval.

well.

"ouch," a loud slap was heard after the 6th game. your cheeks is red after being harassed by this man, but hey? money is money, and you were gonna get there eventually.

"here we go," rubbing the red paper in your hands, you blew a wind to it before using all your force into throwing the paper and baam!

the paper flipped, and words couldn't express the joy you felt after seeing how it actually flipped to the other side, as if it was your only achievement in years. The man, idly standing, clapped before retrieving 100,000 won and handing the crisp bill right into your hands.

"thank you, sir." you thanked him and looked down at the bill, before looking up and realizing the man had disappeared, the cup of soju had been drank and sat empty, next to it was a card with three shapes.

Circle, square, triangle.

[baeddel]

thoughts i've had while reading the Foucault biography by David Macey:

(1) Foucault was a bourgeois and his entry into the elite higher educational institutions involved a number of processes that were designed very specifically to select for the children of bourgeois, in a way that reminds me a lot of the recent post by gothhabiba (click). one example which particular concerns philosophy is that entering the highly competiitve ENS would require knowledge of philosophy (Kant etc.), which was only taught to highschool students at the fee-charging lycees. further, philosophy was taught at lycees by ENS graduates, who may also be on the comittee that selects ENS applicants. this—along with a few direct interventions of actual nepotism—is how Foucault got there in the first place, because some (FAMOUS) men (like Jean Hyppolite!) met him as a child and decided he was 'very intelligent'. the same story repeats when Foucault gets his first few academic posts, with recognizable names balancing the scales for him. this does not seem to be something special but rather how all applications were judged and posts filled. there is a more subtle example for which analysis would be possible, but the book doesn't offer enough information, which is in the explicit discussion about how the topics for the oral agregation (necessary for graduation) should be selected. Macey concludes the section by saying that "[t]he 1951 agrégation [when Foucault graduated] had been a ‘Malthusian’ process of elimination: fourteen candidates were successful, and five of them were normaliens [ENS students]."

(2) throughout his youth into his late 20s (ie. the part i've read so far), Foucault seems to only ever—with the exception of patients and prisoners he met at the clinic when he worked there—interact with other members of the French elite. even in the communist party he attends a special ENS chapter and so forth. this may simply be because only famous men leave information to posterity, so we know less about Foucault's non-elite associations, or even that Macey just has nothing to say about those relationships, but it is quite striking. the same is not true of Deleuze per François Dosse's dual biography of Deleuze & Guattari (i mean anyway we talk about him in the same breath as Guattari who was not part of this system at all).

(3) he loved serialist music and had a live-in romantic relationship with a serialist composer named Jean Barraqué who was taught by Oliver Messaien. isn't that cool? they would go drinking between classes, just like we did when we studied serialism... haah...

(4) the biography skips around in time quite a bit; when Foucault first meets someone who will become important to his life we get a sort of summary of their whole relationship in rapid diegesis which will reoccur in a slower, although still diegetic, pace later in the book. this reminds me a lot of the way the Norse Sagas are written; in his excellent introduction to the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, Jesse Byock remarks that the author makes clear that he is compiling fragmentary sources by "telling the audience when one sub-tale ends and another begins: ‘Here ends the tale of Frodi and now begins the story of Hroar and Helgi, the sons of Halfdan.’" the biography of course also does this by explicitly mentioning, either in the text or in a footnote, which sources (books, interviews, letters, personal correspondences) the story is compiled from. when i thought about the Sagas i had thought of it as producing a very strange literary effect, almost like a Brechtian distancing effect, freely dispensing of suspense to remind the reader of the structural components of the narrative, and i have written some stories which try to perform this idea. however, now i realize that we still do this quite often, only in that peculiar form of literature called the biography, where it appears quite natural and doesn't surprise the reader. i think one explanation for the strangeness in the Sagas is that the Sagas are primarily in mimesis, and the sudden episodes of diegesis during which the story and the plot become momentarily disimbricated are surprising to a modern reader.

(5) Foucault suffers a bitter quarrel with another gay man named Jean-Paul Aron he was previously friends with which they would never rapproach. the reason for this quarrel is, according to Macey, because "one of Aron’s young lovers fled and took refuge with Foucault." Macey discusses this entirely in terms of "sexual jealousy" and "envy"—i suppose Macey is heterosexual because oh my god. doesn't that sound like such a familliar story to us... the guy had to run away from his partner and go and live with someone else over it... and it caused scene drama for the rest of their lives... what was going on there?

(6) in discussing the homophobia of the official French Communist Party to which Foucault belonged until 1953 (which was explicitly homophobic) the principal example which Macey chooses is a case where they expelled a highschool teacher for propositioning a pupil. for Macey this seems to only have the dimension of homosexuality, and neither the power dynamics of teacher and pupil nor the fact that the pupil was presumably a child are mentioned at all. this biography was written in 1993. it made me think immediately of a number of other instances of an adult man having or attempting a sexual interaction with an underaged boy, being penalized or imprisoned in some way, and the response of, essentially, the legitimate gay movement was to call it homophobic. i don't remember his name, but there was one composer, i think an American, in the 40s or 50s, who was imprisoned for sleeping with a 17 year old boy, and people came to his defense and considered the prosecution homophobic; similarly this highly sympathetic article (click) on the GLBT Encyclopedia Project about NAMBLA (who's periodical Delany used to read and recommend, something which he gets and still responds to emails about today), which opens with mention of "a successful effort on the part of gay activists to thwart a move by then-Boston District Attorney Garret Byrne to ferret out patrons of teenage male prostitutes via an anonymous telephone tip line", paints a picture where NAMBLA were relatively mainstream until the mid-80s. while i suspect this article of being at least a little apologetic it does also talk about gay organizing around changing age of consent laws & a line on how unequal enforcement of the age of consent was a tool to enforce homophobia, listing some impressive names who engaged in this kind of activism like Kate Millet and Gayle Rubin. and we also have, very infamously, Foucault's own advocacy on precisely the same thing, around the time of the petition, signed by Foucault and virtually every other French radical intellectual, to abolish the age of consent.

what do you think? from here doesn't it all look like a catastrophic blunder, something we're ashamed to remember and frightened to talk about? even when we're coming from an anti-carcereal, reparative, critical kind of perspective, something about the kind of narratives, defenses and advocacy from back then on such issues leaves us feeling alienated. i tend to think of it like this: that there was a historical situation where 1. all forms of homosexuality were illegal, 2. homosexuality was primarily understood in society, by both the right and left, as a kind of pedophilia, and 3. the concept of the age of consent was being redefined, socially and legally, at that time. this third point is specifically what Foucault was discussing in that interview, but i was interested to see the same point come up in a Defunctland video (click)(!), because—get this—one of the songs performed by Disney's in-house rock band Halyx was called 'Jailbait', and he asks the writer about it. on relistening to the song she immediately laughs in embarassment and says "please! what was i thinking back then!" and she has to basically do her own kind of historical-juridicial-philological analysis to attempt an explanation (timestamp), saying that they had "just done this thing saying that if you're over 18..." and so forth. her song by that title was performed by a female singer, and watching the performance i got the feeling that the intention was sort of twofold; in the first case, to exploit the imaginary erotic power of forbidden love ("i want you, baby / but you're jailbait"), and, in the context of a live performance, make the teenage boys in the audience feel wanted. i am not sure if the same effect is intended in Motorhead's song by that title ("i don't even dare to ask your age"). by the 90s you didn't get songs like this anymore; Boogie Down Productions' '13 and Good' is both condemnatory and paranoid and explicitly names it "statutory rape."

this isn't really a good thread of argument; i am not comparing like evidence. and i'd like to investigate contrary examples from that period—the documentary on NAMBLA Chickenhawk for example shows lesbian groups attacking NAMBLA members at demonstrations, and Andrea Dworkin was famously critical of NAMBLA—but i am anyway kind of interpreting Macey's framing as a 'pagan survival' of an older approach to these issues when they arose in a very different polemical context.

[acrossthewavesoftime]

top five things YOU have written 🫵🫵 that you're ok with sharing ofc :3

That's a very difficult and interesting question, thank you! :) I don't really know if I can pick five and rate them in a set hierarchy. I like many things I write, shorter and longer, finished and unfinished, so here are 5 that come to mind:

I don't write for it very often, but what I write, I enjoy writing a lot. The early 19th century AU which I came up with for @nordleuchten in which a few generations ago the Stuarts managed to produce some sort of heir, making the Hannovarians bog standard German provincial rulers instead of British monarchs. The man you know as George III and his heir, Prinz Georg stand to inherit the throne as it is expected that the Stuart line will come to an end in their lifetime. Georg is pretty much good old Prinny, who however decides to take drastic measures when he finds that being patronised by his dad as a grown man has become insufferable. He decides to take an alias and join the British navy, because what else cries freedom so much as watching romantic sunsets at sea? In the act of leaving clandestinely, he is caught by one Karoline von Braunschweig, a beloathed cousin acting as his mother's lady-in-waiting. Georg takes to life at sea like a duck to water despite the fact that it turns out to be nothing like what he imagined, and becomes a celebrated hero of the Napoleonic Wars. Hijinks ensue when his cover is blown, his brother Ernst tries to take over the succession, and he realises he doesn't actually loathe Karoline, quite on the contrary, really. Karoline meanwhile has to explain a big belly away, and George sails for a place called Trafalgar... It's all delightfully off and the real George and Caroline would probably disapprove, but sometimes, certain AUs are not meant to be very accurate, just a little silly.

Less silly and as far as my research goes, as close to history as possible, my story on Henry Clinton and Mary Baddeley. I have written so much about the two already, it's almost a novel. I am fascinated by the mutual respect, suppressed affection and surprisingly good documentation there is. Theoretically, their relationship is a communist party meeting worth of red flags; a power dynamic between employer and employee, a substantial age gap, Mary being very much reliant on Clinton's protection from beng sexually harrassed by an officer in her husband's regiment and him falling in love with her while she was pregnant with her husband's child are just the most obvious ones. Regardless of all these things, both, given time, found love. Let's hope I will finish it one day so we can have the big budget adaptation i'm dreaming of ever since learning about the two...

I have a similar thing going for the Graveses, which is a little more light-hearted in that both Mrs and Mr Admiral were two very outspoken people, with Margaret in particular passing judgements on people in her letters worthy of Jane Austen novels. There is some tragedy in that they met at a point in their lives where they both seem to have still been processing the death of a beloved loved one, and both helped raise a child that was not their own. Given their eventful lives, bubbly family and their very loud personalities, however, I think this one writes itself a little easier.

A Stuart AU in which Maria Beatrice d'Este, now Queen of England, has had enough. Identifying, in her mind, her husband's unchanging licentious ways as the reason why God takes all her children from her young, she decides to commit regicide when she realises she is pregnant once more, in order to protect this child at least; because if James is dead, he can no longer commits acts displeasing God, right? The flaws in her logic aside, she makes this last desperate attempt to suffocate James, the husband who has abused her for so long, both physically and mentally, in his sleep with a cushion, but fails as he wakes up. Fleeing England in the middle of the night, Maria Beatrice manages to find a passage to the continent and makes it to The Hague, where the Prince and Princess of Orange now have a political scandal on their hands. What ensues is an intense triangular situation in which everyone is faced with ghosts of the past; Maria Beatrice, who never wanted to get married and have children, is faced by the involuntarily childless Mary who would do everything to be a mother; William by his own conduct towards Mary when they were newly-wed, which he finds himself reminded of by some things Maria Beatrice recounts of her marriage, fearing he may have mistreated Mary, and all three of them by the question of who will one day be James' heir, Mary, or the baby, if it turns out to be a boy, Maria Beatrice is about to have? Includes such memorable scenes as the one in which William feeds a toddler potential pretender a waffle while engineering his ascension to the throne during a council meeting (hey, the waffle-thing at least is based on an event and person during his own childhood, so).

I'm currently writing a little something quite light-hearted featuring Louise de Kérouaille and exploring her perspective on her relationship with Charles II, which I find quite delightful.

If any of you want to know something else about the stories (since I don't post them to AO3), feel free to ask. :)

[sineala]

what are ur must read comics for tony ? i want to read more of him but idk where to start

Unfortunately, for Tony, unlike Steve, there isn't really a comic I can hand people and say "just read this if you want to start reading Iron Man comics and know where Tony came from and what Tony is like." (For Steve, this is Captain America: Man Out of Time.) There isn't a similar newbie-friendly retelling of Tony's origin story with modern art and a modern sensibility -- at least, not one that I would recommend, because Iron Man: Season One is… not set in 616 and is not a whole lot like like the events of canon.

(This took me very long to get around to, and in the meantime you might also like the more Tony-centric entries in my recent Steve/Tony comics recs post.)

So the answer to this question, I would say, depends on how familiar you are with comics in general, and specifically if you know you like reading older comics. Because comics nowadays are very different than older comics, and a lot of people who start reading comics now don't like the older comics when they try to go back to them. The art is different, and the style of narrative is different, and the pacing is different, and also the farther back you go the more likely you are to find something that is sexist and racist as fuck. Some of the early 60s stuff especially can be… not great. (Not that all modern comics are entirely free of this, but, like, I'd like to think that by now we've stopped publishing comics with literal yellowface.)

And the thing is that most of the classic, must-read storylines that I'd point to and be like "yeah, this is an important comic to read to understand Tony," well… they're all older comics.

But I'm recommending them anyway, and you can try a few to see if you like them. I'm putting the dividing point between old and new at the end of volume 1 (1996); some people will say that volume 3 (1998) is not modern enough for them, but I think the storytelling and pacing is modern enough that it should count.

Anyway, here's some volume 1 recs.

The classics:

Tales of Suspense #39: This is the first Iron Man comic. There are later retellings, but this is the original, so you might as well. He is wounded! He has to wear the chestplate forever in order to stay alive! I recommend one of the modern recolorings for, uh. Obvious reasons.

The Senate hearing arc (ToS #84): You should probably start a few issues before this, maybe around ToS #80, because the issues all just run into each other in one continuous storyline. If it turns out you like the extreme melodrama of ToS and you can handle the general Problematic nature of a lot of the plots (there will be more evil Communists than you can shake a hammer and sickle at), you can go back and read some of the other stuff, but this is the arc that is probably the most famous, because #84 is the issue where Tony testifies about the Iron Man technology at a Senate hearing and has a heart attack right there in the Senate.

Tony's first artificial heart (Iron Man #17-19): In case you're wondering when Tony stops having to wear the chestplate, it happens here, in an extremely bonkers arc where Tony makes an LMD of himself who promptly tries to replace him, meaning that Tony has to wander around sadly in the rain and jump his heart off a car battery. He is then kidnapped by people who think they are kidnapping the LMD to force him to do evil. This is actually Madame Masque. It all culminates in him suiting up in the Model 1 armor to fight the LMD in his newest armor, and the old armor doesn't have enough power to run the armor and his heart at the same time, so guess which one he picks. Anyway, he has a massive heart attack and gets an artificial heart implanted.

Demon in a Bottle (Iron Man #120-128): Skipping way way way ahead to the late 70s/early 80s, this is the arc that makes Tony an alcoholic, and it's a classic of the Layton/Michelinie run.

Doomquest (Iron Man #149-150): This is the arc that establishes Doctor Doom as a villain of Tony's, and features both of them time-traveling to Camelot. It's great. (Layton and Michelinie come back for a sequel in #249-250, and then a much later sequel to that in the miniseries Iron Man: Legacy of Doom, which is one of the absolute weirdest IM miniseries I have ever read and features Doom penetrating Tony with Excalibur.)

The second drinking arc (Iron Man #160-200): This is Denny O'Neil's run and it is, IMO, a much better storyline about Tony's alcoholism, and it is absolutely my favorite classic Iron Man storyline. But it also is definitely a comic from the 80s so you should decide if you're up for that kind of storytelling. This is the one where Tony starts drinking again and loses absolutely everything he has (his money, his friends, his home, being Iron Man) and lives on the streets and nearly dies, and then he works his way back up. This is also where Obadiah Stane comes from.

Armor Wars (Iron Man #225-232): Layton and Michelinie come back for a second run in the late 80s, and Armor Wars is pretty much universally agreed to be the highlight of their run. Tony starts stealing his technology back from villains using it for evil. Then he starts stealing it back from literally everyone, including the government, who is not real thrilled.

I realize there's like a hundred more issues of volume 1 but you can probably skip them. The early 90s were sure A Time for comics. Some of Len Kaminski's run has some good backstory, and if you read anything you will probably want to read #313, which is about Tony going to AA and talking about his childhood.

Then we've got the modern stuff. If you try the older stuff and bounce off the art style, I'd recommend Extremis, which most people find readable and has lovely art by Adi Granov, although admittedly I prefer Busiek's Iron Man run for its characterization of Tony.

You will note that there's about ten years here where I am only recommending miniseries and that's because I honestly don't believe there's been a really good Iron Man ongoing since the Knaufs left at the end of v4 and Duggan's current run. So that's, what, twelve years? It's been a long time since we've had good Iron Man comics.

(I will grudgingly additionally recommend Bendis & Maleev's International Iron Man, because I think it's a really good story about Tony searching for his biological parents, but you do NOT want to read any other storyline about Tony being adopted because the rest of them are… bad… and pretty much thoroughly establish that none of Tony's family, biological or adoptive, with the possible exception of Maria, ever cared about him in the slightest, so that's kind of a downer.)

Here are my slightly more recent picks:

Kurt Busiek's Iron Man run (Iron Man v3 #1-25): This is one of my favorite Iron Man runs and I would definitely recommend it as a starting point. Busiek's runs on Iron Man and Avengers (which he was also writing at this time) are basically love letters to The Way Comics Used To Be, so his Avengers run has the Avengers all living in the mansion and being friends (this is the last time they lived in the mansion), and his Iron Man run features Tony being a more updated version of the character he started out as, which is basically the fantasy of the ethical billionaire who sincerely wants to use all his money to do good in society and help people out. It's worth reading the first issue to see if you like it. I think it's really great. Also there's a lot of whump.

The rest of Iron Man v3: There are about 60 more issues of Iron Man in volume 3 after Busiek leaves the book, and they continue the same characterization even if not all of it is quite as good as Busiek. Highlights include the Sentient Armor arc (you have probably heard about the Sentient Armor), both DreamVision arcs (featuring Tiberius Stone), and even more whump with the arc Manhunt, in which Tony gets shot three times, poisoned, attacked with missiles, and then has to go fight the Mandarin, all while being on the run from the government because he's been framed for bombing an embassy and everyone hates him.

Extremis (Iron Man v4 #1-6): I would say that Extremis here is when Marvel really started to try to make Iron Man cool. This is a good jumping-on point for a few reasons -- it doesn't require you to know anything about anything, the art is pretty, and it recaps Tony's origin story in a way that will probably be a little more recognizable to MCU fans, plus Extremis would later be part of IM3. The thing about Extremis is that it actually gives Tony superpowers, which is either good or bad depending on how you feel about this; I will say that it's a massive departure from the way Tony has been written the entire rest of his existence, in that the fact that he is a regular human (occasionally with a lot of disabilities) is important to his storyline, and reading this as your very first Iron Man comic means you won't really be aware of how unusual this is for him.

The rest of Iron Man v4: This is kind of a conditional rec, as it really only makes sense to keep going in v4 if you're planning on reading Civil War, because the rest of v4 hinges on it. There's an arc that leads up to Civil War (Execute Program), then the Civil War tie-ins, then Director of SHIELD. DoS has some excellent angst for Tony, but it's also very much about him being the director of SHIELD -- he doesn't do his usual rich-person stuff. So if you want a run where he does the things you expect him to do, it's not that one.

Iron Man: Legacy: A miniseries consisting of two short arcs; for all that they're supposed to be set at specific points in canon, they're pretty readable and they've got some fun panels that you will often see reposted -- Tony on a winged horse with a lance, Tony falling right into a dumpster, an LMD of Tony dressed in a French maid outfit and painting Pepper's nails. It's cute.

Iron Age: Technically most of this takes place in the past but you don't need to know anything. Tony timetravels through his past and has some entertaining adventures with a bunch of random characters while trying to save the world which is ending and it's all his fault. Features a panel of Tony crying sadly in the rain and also him accidentally hitting on his past self.

Iron Man: Fatal Frontier: This one is so much fun. So much fun! This is a miniseries where Tony makes friends with a Soviet robot on the moon, becomes sheriff of the moon, plays all the parts in a heist, and defeats a villain by using hurt/comfort fanfic.

Any time Ryan North gets to write Tony: Ryan North studied computational linguistics and it shows. He's just really good at writing Tony as a great big nerd with a great big heart who always wants to do the right thing. I recommend all the Tony cameos in The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, the issue of Marvel Comics Presents (#7) where Tony tries to punch the 2007 financial crisis, Darkhold Iron Man (if you like body horror; I can't read this), and the recent Secret Invasion miniseries.

Any time Jed MacKay gets to write Tony: He just really has a good read on Tony's attitude, and he's currently writing Avengers, where Tony is on the team; I'd also recommend his work on the Iron Man and Avengers 2021 (Infinite Destinies) annuals.

Gerry Duggan's current Iron Man run: This is literally the best Iron Man run I have read since I got into this fandom. He absolutely nails Tony's character AND he's done the reading, which means that my brain has been screaming AAAAAAAA nonstop since I read the last issue where Tony was heavily concussed and having several pages of flashbacks where he thinks he's still stuck in the blizzard from IM #182 and dying. AAAAAAAA.

Hope that helps!

[doll-elvis]

I tried asking something like this before, but I'm not sure if it didn't send correctly or you didn't want to answer (which is fine!!) But just giving it one more try, because I am curious about your opinion. This goes back to that prejudice conversation and how much the other guys are possibly projecting their own feelings there - I remember red also saying in that part of EWH that elvis thought catholics were dangerous/the demon referred to in the bible. Do you think that's true? I just always found that a bit strange when he had quite a few girlfriends with that background.

thank you for re-asking!! im also really sorry for not getting around to it the first time you asked, thank you for being patient <3

for a while I was getting loads of ask and I got a little bit overwhelmed as some of them were very heavy topics that I really needed to gather my thoughts/research on before answering them and as a result some other asks have been left unanswered… for a very long time 😭 but I promise I have the intention to answer every ask I get, im just a serial procrastinator 🤧

As for Elvis being prejudiced against Catholics I think this may have been another situation of Elvis holding these views inwardly or even sharing them with a few close friends but not exactly acting on them

What I’ve come to learn from reading many different perspectives of Elvis is that it’s likely he said different things, or acted differently, depending on the person he was talking too and likely the reason we get so many conflicting stories about him

For example I would say the Memphis Mafia group (Red, Sonny, Billy, Lamar, Marty, and Alan) grew up in the same or very similar environments to Elvis: southern, conservative, and mostly in baptist/pentecostal churches (with the exception of Lamar, Marty and Alan who were Jewish). Where on the flip side you have men like Jerry and Joe who were raised Catholic and from my understanding raised in more “liberal” upbringings. So it’s likely that Elvis talked/interacted with the MM slightly different than he would with Jerry and Joe, and even Larry Geller who was born in New York as opposed to the south

Maybe he expressed views like being against Catholicism to the MM because he knew they came from similar backgrounds as him, and wouldn’t be offended by it. This is likely why you haven’t seen Joe or Jerry talk about Elvis’ alleged anti-Catholicism because I don’t believe he would ever express those views to people who he knew were Catholic because he didn’t want to offend them or hurt their feelings, his heart was truly good in that way

(excerpt from “Elvis: What Happened?” where Red and Sonny claim Elvis thought Catholicism was “dangerous”)

I found this excerpt from “Elvis and the Memphis Mafia” below very interesting ⬇️

It seems to be another instance of Elvis acting differently with the some of the group than he did with the others because from what I remember about Jerry’s book, there was no talk over their political differences and definitely never a instance where Elvis called him a communist 💀

in fact Jerry said “Elvis didn’t often speak openly about race or politics”

So maybe this was a situation where when Jerry was expressing anti-war views or views that Elvis deemed too “liberal”, Elvis would then privately complain about them to some of the others because he knew they likely thought the same as him

It’s like how people say they have a different personality for different friends. You might talk to a work-friend different than you would to a school-friend, so maybe that is why we get so many conflicting stories about Elvis from the people who knew him: if that makes sense🤧

* also this is just my personal interpretation, definitely don’t take it as truth until you’ve researched for yourself, I’m honestly kind of spitballing here

What is also really interesting about this excerpt below ⬇️ is that according to Marty Lacker it was Larry Geller who put the idea that Catholicism was “dangerous” into Elvis’ head, likely when they met in the 60s. So I wonder if that actually coincides with when Elvis started telling Red and Sonny that Catholicism was “dangerous”

(excerpt is also from “Elvis and the Memphis Mafia”)

However if Marty, Lamar, Red and Sonny never spoke on any anti-Catholic views that Elvis potentially held, I would have never thought it myself because there is so much evidence that points to Elvis being open about Catholicism

Like you mentioned, he had several girlfriends who were of that faith

To name a few of the top of my head, Regis Wilson (his date for his senior prom), Priscilla Presley, Joyce Bova, and Sheila Ryan were all either practicing Catholics, or raised Catholic, and I’m sure there are even more

And speaking of Priscilla, it was Elvis who decided to enroll her in an all-girls Catholic school, despite her attending a regular highschool in Germany. So if Elvis was openly prejudiced towards Catholics, why would he date girls who were of that faith, let alone date a girl that went to a Catholic school (that he chose) ⬇️

(excerpt from “Elvis: What Happened?”)

He also befriended several Catholics like Joe Esposito and Jerry Schilling along with Mother Dolores Hart who he met on the set of Loving you. She was a very devout Catholic even as an actress, which I’m sure Elvis witnessed, and has now been a Catholic nun for several decades, and has only ever said good things about Elvis

And according to Jerry Schilling, Elvis also had no qualms about flirting with a bunch of Catholic girls in 1955 ⬇️

And according to a story told in Peter Guralnick’s “Careless love” Elvis was more than happy to make out with a Catholic girl, and really respected her decision to stay a virgin due to her Catholic faith ⬇️

Not to mention Elvis literally covered a Catholic song called “Miracle of the Rosary” !!!

and we also can’t forget that he starred in a film (Change of Habit) that was about three Catholic nuns ⬇️

so all in all, if Elvis did indeed hold anti-Catholic views like some of the Memphis Mafia members have alleged, it didn’t seem like he acted on them or ever purposely mistreated a Catholic person

Elvis truly had a good heart and I think his actions should be judged rather than his words, especially when it could be a case of them projecting their own prejudices, and not actually said by Elvis himself 🤧

[thelovelylolly]

I have an Idea like you know in session 3 of stranger things like where a robin x reader and there both in the like tripy state and it’s like reader saying something along the kind of “y-you know your eyes are really pretty and your hands are very soft” and then later after the bathroom seen readers is like “you know I-I ment what I said … it’s like the saying drun-“ and then Robin kisses her

Soft

Summary : While in a trippy state with Robin, you say somethings without thinking. Warnings : reader and robin are tripping on drugs bc of the same reasons as season 3 if that makes sense Notes : thank you for the request! this is a really fun idea :)

You would never had guessed that your summer job at Scoops A'hoy would lead you to discovering communists under the mall with your coworkers and two kids. Another thing you never would have guessed was the communists you discovered drugging you, Robin and Steve.

You and Robin felt sick to your stomachs after a while, so you two stumbled into the bathroom. Steve had wandered off, but you didn't remember where he said he was going. You were too busy making sure you made it to the toilet on time.

The toilet flushed as you wiped your mouth with some toilet paper. You leaned against the stall wall, Robin leaning against the tile one opposite of you. You tilted your head to the side, staring at her. "You know...your eyes are really pretty," you slurred.

"Really?" Robin replied.

"Mhm," you hummed, spinning yourself around and moving to sit next to Robin. Your gaze fell to her hands, and you reached down and intertwined your fingers. "And your hands are really soft."

As you giggled to yourself in your trippy state, Robin just looked at you. Then she glanced down at your hands, the fingers tangled together, and down to her shoes that were bumping into yours. You two were so close that when she looked back up to you, your faces were a few inches apart.

Your laughing stop when you noticed how close you two were. Robin started leaning in first, then you did. Your lips were about to meet when Steve quickly burst into the bathroom. You and Robin jumped and moved away from each other. You glanced at Robin, a sympathetic look in your eyes, before you got up and left the stall.

--

The Starcourt Mall had burned down, which was just the story the public knew. But with the mall gone, you were out of a job along with Robin and Steve. Those two quickly started looking for a new job, but you took your sweet time going back to the workforce.

You were sitting on your couch, mindlessly scrolling through channels. It had been a few weeks since the Starcourt incident and you had kept in touch with Robin and Steve. Mainly Robin. After what happened in the bathroom stall, you were waiting for her to bring it up. You were anxiously waiting.

Your doorbell suddenly rang, causing you to jump. You quickly got up and went to the door. You weren't expecting anyone and your parents had gone out for the evening, so you should've been a bit more cautious. But your gut told you to just open the door, so you did.

Robin stood there, nervously playing with her necklaces. Her hair was pulled up into a messy up-do and she was wearing some torn up jeans and a t-shirt. She was so pretty, and you wished you had kissed her in that stall.

"Hey, Rob, what are you doing here?" You said, a smile on your face.

"Um, I just wanted to talk to you, if that's okay?"

"Mhm, come on in."

You stepped aside and let her in before closing and locking the door behind her. You led her to the couch and the two of you sat down. You had left the t.v. on some random channel, which was a game show channel. The people on the show cheered as they won some crazy amount of cash. But you and Robin were silent, that was until you broke that silence.

"Robin?"

"Hm?" She hummed, looking over at you. You were suddenly nervous, her pretty eyes looking at you.

"Uh, you remember what I said? In the bathroom stall in Starcourt?"

"...yeah, I do."

"Well, I just wanted to say that...I meant what I said. It's, uh, like that saying, 'drunk words are sober thoughts' and-"

You were cut off but Robin's soft lips meeting yours. You melted into the kiss, you arms wrapping around her waist to pull her closer. Her arms went around your neck, and she tilted her head to the side to deepen the kiss. You loved how soft she kissed you, how soft she held you. You wished you could stay like that forever.

But you two had to pull away eventually. When you did, she pressed her forehead against yours, still wanting to be close to you. "I really wished I kissed you in that stall," she said quietly.

"I wished I kissed you, too, because that was perfect."

[honouredsnakeprincess]

Well, friendos, you probably didn't expect three notes in the course of an evening, even if the first was kind of nothing! Season 3 Episode 1 has given me a fair few things to say, though!

First, the pettiness and minutiae:

I like the new yorker fellow. Didn't quite catch his name, but I like his accent (is that a new york accent? don't rightly know).

This might be another 'seeing 3d models where none actually existed' incident, but I couldn't help but notice that ECorp was marked as "Evil Corp" when Mr Robot was going through that power plant search engine, which is something it isn't changed to when Elliot isn't present. I don't recall if Mr Robot does this too, but if he doesn't (and part of me suspects he does not) then Elliot might be more aware of things than immediately apparent.

It really seems like the calm relationship between Elliot and Mr Robot has gone away. :( That's pretty sad, I was happy they were getting on better for a while there, but I guess that wasn't set to last given how much of the show's core drama relies on that conflict.

Angela seems to have been largely stripped of her dynamism and pluckiness. Previously she has been a very active character, moving from one plan to the next and constantly adapting, but that seems to have ceased following the surrealism. We'll see where this goes.

Anyways, the main thing I want to talk is politics. Boo! The scary communist is going to be mildly critical of 2017-era American liberalism!

This show really is a product of its time, and I kind of adore it for that! I regard it almost as a work of fantastical historical fiction, even though I was obviously very much alive in 2017. Still, I think sometime in my coverage of late season 1, I expressed some hesitancy towards how the show portrayed revolutionary activity; obviously the actions of a small cadre of individuals will not be sufficient to usher in a revolution, and merely disrupting large financial institutions is unlikely to actually have a substantial destabilizing effect on capital-at-large. I think I expressed some hope that the show would grapple with this.

It seems to have sort of done so, but in a way I'm not sure I agree with entirely? The 5/9 attack did not meaningfully damage capitalism, or even destroy Evil Corp, it just caused what seems to be a depression and some infrastructural failure, and enabled economic meddling by the Scary Chinese. Mostly, it just made the lives of individual people kind of shittier by disrupting financial services and depriving them of their savings, mortgages, etc. The richest characters we meet in season 2 are largely unaffected in their personal holdings and comforts.

In this episode, Elliot decides to take the blames for every stress and strain caused by these events onto his own shoulders in a montage cutting between clips of Donald Trump, Angela Merkel (I think? Might've been her British counterpart, I've a bad habit of failing to differentiate between German Bundeskanzlers and British Prime Ministers and I don't care enough to check at this point), the construction of border walls, and scenes of abject poverty, and this speaks to a view of politics I don't specifically think is sound.

Certainly, economic instability is something that is latched onto by reactionary elements in government, but I think to contextualize this properly we have to situate Mr Robot as a historical text~! I am not a historian of 21st century Americana, nor do I much want to be, but I think I have the broad strokes down.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, from which this show takes a lot of its first season's politics, was fundamentally not a consciously proletarian movement. It was overwhelmingly white office workers, who tend to hold themselves apart from the wider proletariat (even when they ultimately share most of their interests with said class) by virtue of being "management", and lacked a strong political programme. Ultimately, these were liberals protesting against a liberal system that had mistreated them specifically, they were not protesting against the general predations of capital.

Many of the same people who were strongly supportive of the Occupy movement during its height were shocked and appalled when Donald Trump ran for public office, and even more upset when he won the Presidency despite projections that his opponent would easily best him. This was not inherently an unreasonable reaction, the man's a fucking reactionary and there isn't much to like about him or his policy!

The great difficulty is that many of these liberals took to exceptionalizing Trump as a far more significant figure than he actually was, likely due to his almost complete abandonment of euphemism and modesty when going about the horrid business of American governance. Border fascism had long been a bipartisan position (as we can see by recent criticisms of Trump during the 2024 elections not being for calling to build a wall, but for failing to deliver on said promise), but under Trump this took the form of loudly and belligerently calling to "build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it". Similarly, travel restrictions on muslim-majority countries and on people with arabic-sounding names were not new by the time of the Trump administration, but calling such measures a "muslim ban" certainly was!

Essentially, Trump and his broader wave of reactionary politicians, while certainly a step in a rightward direction generally, were more significant in the respect that they raised the volume of what were already mainstream right-wing or bipartisan political beliefs! Courting white nationalists was not new; courting white nationalists as blatantly as this was new and outrageous!

This was scary! This was apocalyptic! Had fascism finally come to roost in its ancestral homeland? The astute commentators noted that in some respects it had lived in America for decades at that point, and still some elements of fascist politics had yet to arrive. At the end of the day, Trump was only a little bit outside of the norm in terms of actual policy, the horrors of "trumpism" were much the same horrors his immediate predecessors had carried out, and would be carried out by his successor in the presidency as well. Still, this shakeup in discourse if not in policy created a certain millenarian feeling in American and broader "Western" politics, a sense of doom that had long been impending but which now affected the specific type of white, "not rich but comfortable" liberal office-workers who had driven the Occupy movement.

So here is Mr Robot, which has spent two seasons criticizing corporate America, and whose viewpoint character must now absolve everyone from Adam Smith to money to the corporate structure and on and on of their guilt in the deterioration of conditions, in order to place the blame squarely on his own shoulders, and resolve that the current crisis must come to an end, and everything must return to some kind of status quo.

Mr Robot does not want to return to the status quo, for his part, but now he is in the company of a woman who has literally been brainwashed, a murderer/former corporate executive, a shady hacker circle with no ethical standing, and subversive foreign elements from China. I don't think he is meant to be right here!

I don't know where this is going, but the more I think about it the more apprehensive I get, frankly. I could be entirely wrong about this, too, and I'm still enjoying the show quite a lot, so I will keep watching in the future.

Angela's monologue at the end of the episode also had a certain millenarian quality to it, even more literally with talk of the birth of a new world and it being ended by the return of light to the city. I wanted to work this in somehow to my commentary on historical and political context, but I forgot how I was going to do that. Good song, too.

[hello-nichya-here]

Genuine question: If the ppl of Brazil are anti-communism, why are they in BRICS with Russia and China, two communist countries?

1 - My God, this question single-handedly took back me back to my school years. Answering this lowkey makes me feel like I'm taking a test XD

2 - Russia has not been communist for over 30 years. Ya know. The USSR ended in 1991? It was kind of a big deal?

3 - China's government is a VERY weird combo of the worst of communism with the worst of capitalism. Obviously a lot about how the country works is a direct result of communism, but they have zero problem playing the capitalist game, and as a result EVERYONE has some kind of economical relation with China - they sell stuff the cheapest (thanks to slavery) and have literal billions of people foreigners can sell their stuff to. If selling/buying stuff with them made anyone communist, the whole world might as well be communist already.

4 - BRICS is not like the EU, or the USSR, or NATO. Brazil's opinions on anything that goes on with our "friends" doesn't matter because the point of it is not for us, Russia, India, China and South Africa to collectively decide anything about each other's politics (border control, currency, economic system, alliances in wartime, etc). It's literally just a group of nations that are struggling to remain/become relevant to the rest the world, while also trying not to go officially broke, that looked at each other and went "If you're about to crash and burn I'll try to help you out if I can, and then you do the same for me. Deal?" It's the possibility economic back up in case of crisis. The one thing we have to decide together is "Who gets to join this group of countries that are desperately trying to not implode?"

5 - Most brazilians are not really anti-communism because most brazilians don't fucking KNOW what communism is. A few might have heard names like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Vladmir Putin, Mao or Fidel Castro, but they don't know shit about them. Lots of us know BRICS exists, but a ton cannot explain what it is. If you ask most brazilians to point to either China or Russia on a map, I'd say over half wouldn't be able to do it. And if you ask us to point to our own country on a map, a shockingly large number of people here will STILL not be able to do it because our educational system is that fucking bad.

You'll find LOTS of people, especially older generations, that think they understand what communism is, but in reality they were just fed the pro-USA propaganda those motherfuckers were spreading through all of latin america during the cold war by literally backing up dictatorships. And me acknowledging that fact and not calling the coup of 1964 "the revolution that was totally necessary and wanted by everybody and totally didn't lead to all kinds of violations of people's basic human rights" would already make half of my relatives yell at me to go to Cuba or Venezuela so I'll "stop" being a communist - because yes, saying "Dictatorship bad" is enough for them to label people communists.

Our president through 2019-2022, Jair Bolsonaro (I still HATE that dude's gut in case anyone is wondering) literally brought all of that old propaganda back to make people scared of the "communist threat inside Brazil" so he would get elected, and then tried to use that again to stage a coup after he lost to Lula in 2022.

Brazil is not "anti-communist." Brazil is a country filled with people that were never taught some pretty basic stuff about the world, and are thus easily manipulated by any politician.

[the-wolfbats]

Thoughts on Marlfox

After a short break to read an autobiography about a woman in communist China, let's go back to Mossflower Country!

I always thought this cover was the best cover of any Redwall book outside of the US Mossflower and US Redwall one;

I would SO love this as a wordless print. It's really striking.

It makes the Marlfoxes seem....well, much more important, mystical, and unusual than they are in the book :(

Remember how I kept going "Why did we never see Noonvale again?" well we still don't, but we see animals from there.

We never see the concept of Marlfoxes again either which - these are great ideas. We wouldn't need them in every story ever in the Redwall universe but having a Marlfox cub be raised by a vermin horde or something 4 books later and be a side character would be great.

on a positive note, they do mention Tansy and Arven, and it's nice to know they were friends literally their entire lives. I like to think when he went to Dark Forest, he still called her Tansy Pansy.

'Ancient Squirrel Language' actually has a mention of a Squirrel Kingdom in Outcast (I don't remember exactly what), and Mossflower (Lady Amber). Would have been really great for that to tie into Southsward somehow but ... maybe that's what Pondicherry would have been about.

I do think the scene where the rescue of Dwopple and the subsequent loss of Nutwing and the Tapestry, and the young animals get their asses handed to them in a stunning defeat, is a really good twist that's never quite matched in any other book except the climax of Eulalia!

So if you know about Redwall books, you know there were two art styles (maybe 3 IIRC and one was much rarer to see) for like the first 10 books; This kind of clearly medieval inspired style where everyone had clearly defined fingers and toes and it was thin, bold lines, and the wispy, thin sketch like lines.

This one has the latter style and I remember how much I enjoy it (which is weird because it was also in Lord Brocktree). Chapter 19 in particular is a really nice piece!

Every song that's written for, well, Song, is great. I remember reading an Ask Brian nigh on 20 years ago now where he said he didn't actually make melodies for the songs in the books, so it's nice to make up your own.

The emphasis on Songbreeze, Dannflor, Burble, and Dippler being so young throughout the entire story, only to give Song the Abbess role at the end is weird.

You know, we know the origin of the Sword and the Buckler and Belt, but not about the Tapestry. Sure we know it's about Martin the Warrior, but we just presume Abbeygoers made it. Do we actually know? But who else would make it?

Out of all the hero stories this is probably my favorite one, but the villains are not multifaced or very interesting. Especially when you realize that the Marlfox Dynasty literally lasted for a single generation. Give me a villain dynasty.

Song is wonderful, also Dippler. I think Dippler is one of the very few times we see a "good" species murder another good one, but I know it isn't the only one.

out of all the character archetypes in the series, I love the hunting birds with the heavy Scottish ("Northern") Brogue characters, from Megraw to Rocangus.

[eriklehnsherrific]

just saw quite the heated discussion on communist twitter about the “damage” dealt by atla and its pacifist teachings and its inspired some thoughts from me. 

i think it is a valid critic that because atla was written by american white dudes during the bush administration, you probably aren’t going to derive the most revolutionary mores from the show. that’s understandable, and i can understand some viewers’ frustration with aang not killing ozai at the end because of the “violence is always bad!!!” message that the show really hammers home. but i think the original idea that atla is counter-revolutionary because of this lacks some nuance.

for starters, even given the incredible amounts of bias that comes with the show’s writers and writing, atla is still a pretty revolutionary show. especially because it is, at the end of the day, a kids’ show. i’ve written extensively about how atla teaches its audience about anti-imperialism through the lens of critical pedagogy, but i’ll spare you from listening to my whole spiel about it. in essence, it is still widely impressive that a show like that was able to deliver such a message through a kids show on a kids network in a country that was actively engaged in a pointless, imperialist war. as for it not being “revolutionary enough” by failing to more thoroughly teach redistributive justice and presenting nonviolence as something that is “holier than thou”, i have a few qualms.

1. aang is a pacifist monk. obviously its worth knowing that the tibetan monks that inspired some of the air nomads did hold slaves until the communist revolution, but the air nomads are indeed fictional and thus wholly pacifistic. all he has ever known is pacifism and nonviolence. moreover, aang is the only remaining part of a genocided community. the philosophy of the air nomads is literally one of the only things aang has left from his culture and community, so naturally it is extremely important to him.

2. this one i cannot emphasize enough: aang is a literal child. he is 12. asking a child to kill someone, even if that someone is a genocidal warmongering imperialist, is a difficult thing to ask. aang never wanted to be a part of the whole war to begin with, understandably so, because he was just a kid; kids shouldn’t have to make these kinds of decisions. as older members of atla’s audience, it can be easy to put ourselves in aang’s position and be at peace with that kind of decision because 1) this world isn’t real, so our perception of a character’s decision does not materially affect us at all and 2) we, the older audience, are not children. maybe this is a hot take, but it isn’t that unrealistic for a child to be freaked out by the thought of killing someone, especially if killing is against what that child considers to be important. hell, i’m an adult and i am freaked out by the prospect of having to take life. i don’t think i could do it either. 

3. violence as retribution is dangerous. a very smart observation from a different user in the discussion was that violence is a necessary tool of the proletariat because the bourgeoisie will not give us liberation willingly, but this is because violence is serving a means to an end. without this, violence as retribution is a difficult cycle to end. it very much reminds me of the last of us part 2, and how revenge is not always fulfilling and more often than not leads to more death and destruction. the desire for retribution is valid and justified, but acting on it just makes things worse. 

4. we have to remember that this is a kids show. the show is already pretty subversive in including topics on imperialism, colonialism, forgiveness, etc., with most of the deeper revolutionary stuff being noticed by older viewers. these topics are already difficult to understand, so it has to be dumbed down and simplified a bit for the audience of 6 to 12 year olds. there’s a reason why atla is a kids show and not an adult animation or even specifically a y/a animation, and that’s because the intended audience is children. i think its a bit ridiculous to expect a kids show to have a scholarly level discussion of anti-imperialism. while i think teaching these kinds of things to children is super important, as enjoyers of art/intellectuals/anti-capitalists, i think it is also important that kids shows are fun to watch. atla is fun to watch for a whole host of reasons. 

sorry for the length of the rant, but my passion for atla even after my hyperfixation on it has dulled is something that makes me think a lot. while i do consider myself an intellectual and anti-capitalist, sometimes i think we take things way too seriously. shows like atla, even with all of its flaws and deeper meanings, are allowed to be fun. storytelling doesn’t have to be perfect nor does it have to have perfect intentions for it to be important. people deserve to have a respite from intense intellectual thinking sometimes. anyways happy monday!

[agnesmontague]

I'm sending you this ask now on the caleb maupin thing because I WILL forget to ask you later but I'm curious about your playlist <3

oh god right. thank you i forgot about this. come one, come all, to hear the ballad of caleb maupin.

quick summary: caleb maupin is a disgraced former(?) cult leader and former journalist for Russia Times who touted himself as a huge figure in the american communist sphere. for a few years he led a group of young (i cannot stress enough; these were 19-24 y/os, all younger than himself) tankie-ass communists where they repeated extremely wack talking points that often were complete undisguised antisemitism, transphobia, and outright sexually conservative bullshit all under the name of "materialism" or whatever the fuck. he also published several books containing these ideas, priced at ridiculous numbers (one of them hewed close to $1k) so that no one outside his circle could actually read them and call him out on his takes; more on this later.

in november 2022 his victims within this cult masquerading as a communist center published a medium post calling him out for abuse of various natures, including emotional, financial, and sexual. these accusations are made extremely credible by the inclusion of actual screenshots of phone conversations with maupin, which got the post taken down from medium as this goes against their policies. a link to the archived version will be below.

anyway, onto the videos:

Fake Materialism for Real Transphobes by Thought Slime - this is how i learned about CM for the first time. TS goes after CM for platforming a known terf and gormlessly nodding along as she spouts the usual transphobic nonsense. this will kick off a feud between the two that is largely one-sided on CM's part, who develops the biggest hate-boner for what he calls "the CIA-funded breadtube left".

Abandoning counter-revolutionary SLIME and adopting Maupin-thought! by Thought Slime - TS's response video to an absolutely shitheaded response from CM to the first video above.

Thought Slime takes a bite out of Maupin's Way (Borgar Kang will never die) by The Serfs - TS along with her friend The Serfs do a reaction stream to CM's reaction video. just a fun chill time exposing CM and how deeply shallow and poor his class analysis is.

Caleb Maupin has DESTROYED us, we must now resign. Featuring The Serfs by Thought Slime - TS and The Serfs respond once again to this now very funny feud that seems to have sprouted, debunking CM's points.

The War Crime Liker Convention- Cringe Corner ft. Sophie from Mars by Thought Slime - TS and her friend Sophie from Mars watch the event archive from CM's political club conference. one of my favorite videos from this entire affair bc it shows just how uncharismatic and yet influential CM has managed to become among this group of similar-minded, and i hate to say this, fools.

Reading Caleb Maupin's "Satan At The Fountainhead" with Thoughtslime, We're In Hell & That Jess by Sophie from Mars - a group of friends read the CM book that i mentioned above, which was priced at $900 so that no one else would buy and read it. why would he do this? well, if watching the entire 3-hour video is daunting for you (though i recommend it highly; the three friends reading it are hilarious), PLEASE jump to 2:04:02 and just watch that part. in the words of sophie: "he FUCKING said it!!!!!! he fucking said..... IT!!!!!"

Conspiracy on the Left by Sophie from Mars - not directly related to CM for its entirety, but this is a very good video essay about how the left is just as prone to conspiracy-laced thinking and manipulation as right-wingers or QAnoners. she also mentions CM towards the end as a case study.

Caleb Maupin’s Former Comrades Speak Out, His Abuses Must Stop! - the medium post by CM's victims exposing him.

Caleb Maupin exposed for abuses and cult manipulation tactics by Sophie from Mars - this is the stream where sophie reads through and reacts to the medium article above.

Pinko & Mildred watch Caleb Maupin addressing the allegations by Sophie from Mars - after scrubbing his entire twitter and social media presences, CM makes a comeback video. it is, in two words, fucking incredible. TS and sophie (here seen in her clown persona, "pinko", which she adopts to bring levity to patently absurd situations like this one) watch through and react to it; it's one of the funniest videos ive ever seen on this topic tbh.

if you scroll through the related videos or run a search, you'll also find gems from The Serfs about CM and more videos from Sophie reading through CM's books; i haven't included them in this list as they're less directly relevant to CM's run as a cult leader, but they're all very fun imo and good to have on in the background when you're doing chores or working. it's a wild ride, generally. merry rubbernecking to you all

[william-r-melich]

Tik Tok Bill/HR 7521 - 03/16/2024

Bill HR 7521 passed 3 days ago in the house of representatives by a vote of 352 - 65. If this bill passes in the Senate, which looks likely, Joe Biden said he will sign it, which will purportedly ban Tik Tok. It wouldn't really ban it, but what it will do is force Byte Dance, the Chinese company that owns Tik Tok, to divest by providing a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divesture. In other words, they would have to sell it. They would also have to shut down their internet hosting service. Someone in the U.S. would buy it. I've been on the fence with this one as well with whether or not Biden will remain on the ticket. After reading a portion of the bill I saw a loophole regarding what can be done with a foreign person. Donald Trump, who back in 2020 wanted to ban Tik Tok, he's now against banning it. He said that banning Tik Tok would give the government too much power and would make Facebook more of a monopoly. I sure hope his 180-degree shift wasn't partly made because he has a big campaign donor from Tik Tok. Elon Musk is against it. He thinks it will lead to the government having too much control of wording and censorship on all media platforms. He argues that it doesn't just involve foreign adversaries. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie on X posted this: "The president will be given the power to ban WEB SITES, not just Apps.--"The person breaking the new law is deemed to be the U.S. (or offshore) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE or App Store, not the 'foreign adversary.' " The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) controls what content is allowed on Tik Toc, and the version that is used in China is very different to what's allowed on it outside of China, like here in the U.S. In China they're teaching their children strict discipline and loyalty to the CCP without other harmful content, brainwashing them into their collectivist ideologies. Outside of China they are allowing and promoting content that encourages self-harm and suicide. The big concern in Congress is that the CCP is using the platform to collect as much personal data as they can to be later used against us for nefarious reasons.

Bytedance is the parent company running Tik Toc, and it's former CEO, Zhang Yiming, in 2018 wrote an open public letter of apology to the CCP's headquarters. He was in trouble for not directing his tech companies to push the party's communist agenda far enough, including for what they termed as Xi Jinping thought. Here's some of that letter translated in English:

"I sincerely apologize to regulators, our users and colleagues. I have been in a state of guilt and remorse since I received the notice from the regulatory authority yesterday afternoon and stayed up all night."

"Toutino will permanently shut down the app and the Wechat account of Neihan Duanzi. The product has gone astray, posting content that goes against socialist core values. It's all on me. I accept all the punishment since it failed to direct public opinion in the right way."

"I blame myself for failing to live up to the guidance and expectations of the authorities. In the past few years, the authorities have given us a lot of guidance and help, but I failed to understand properly and to correct properly in the past that resulted in the repercussions today."

"I blame myself for failing the support and trust of our users. We one-sidedly focused on growth and scale without paying timely attention to quality and responsibility of guiding users to obtain positive information. We have failed to undertake corporate social responsibility, and lack emphasis and understanding of our roles in carry forward the positive energy, and guide public opinion properly."

"I reflect that the deep-seated problems for the company are: a weak understanding of the 'four consciousness,' a lack of socialist core values, and a biased guidance of public opinion. 'In the past, we have placed too much emphasis on the role of technology, and failed to realize that socialist core values are the prerequisite to technology. We need to spread positive messages in line with the requirements of the times while respecting public order and good practice.' "

The "four consciousness," to which he referred is described in the following CCP directive as translated into English; CCP Central Committee Publishers Plan for Deepening the Reform of Party and State Agencies. March 18, 2021:

"To deepen reform of the Party and state agencies at this new historical turning point, we must comprehensively implement the Spirit of the 19th Party Congress and persist in taking Marxism -- Leninism, Ma Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Important Thinking of the 'Three Represents,' the Scientific Development Concept, and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the guide. We must firmly establish political consciousness, consciousness of the big picture, consciousness of the core leadership, and consciousness of falling in line with party directives. We must resolutely maintain the authority and centralized unified leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core. We must adapt to the development requirements of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era, persist in the general principle of seeking progress while maintaining stability, and adhere to the proper direction of reform. We must persist in being people-centered, and persist in comprehensively ruling the country according to law."

It seems clear to me that the CCP wants to dominate the world and control how everyone thinks. We can't let that happen. The harmful content on Tik Tok can be found on some of the other platforms, but apparently on Tik Tok it's been more harmful and addictive to kids. Amnesty International 2 reports: "Driven into the Darkness: How Tik Tok Encourages Self-harm and Suicidal Ideation and the I Feel Exposed: Caught in Tik Tok's Surveillance Web - highlight the abuses experienced by children and young people using Tik Tok Outside of China. Between 3 and 20 minutes into our manual research, more than half of the videos in the 'For You' feed were related to mental health struggles with multiple recommended videos in a single hour romanticizing, normalizing or encouraging suicide."

Here's how a portion of the Tik Tok bill reads - HR 7521:

(iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or (iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or (B) a covered company that -- (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of -- (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annes and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divesture. (4) FOREIGN ADVERSARY COUNTRY, -- The term "foreign adversary country" means a country specified with respect to a covered company or other entity is -- (A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country. (B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in "subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or (C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) (B). (2) Covered Company -- (A) IN GENERAL -- The term "covered company" means an entity that operates, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), a website, desktop application, or augmented or immersive technology application.

The loophole I see is that there are people here from China that are legal to work and live here (green card) and who have a residence in China. The President (Joe Biden) could divest any website or app operated by a company with such a person in its employ from China with a green card who happens to own at least 20% of that company. I haven't read through the entire bill, nor am I an expert on Congressional bills or policies, but there might be other loopholes to be found. Given all that I have considered on this, I think divesting Tik Tok is a good idea, but only with no loopholes or wiggle room. I don't trust the government, their too giddy about this and I suspect they may have something up their sleeves. Next to our own ability to destroy ourselves from within, I think China is our biggest threat. This is serious stuff and we're in some very dangerous situations. We've got to get this right and get the right leader in the White House, which, in my humble opinion, is Donald J. Trump.

[nitewrighter]

Saw you share that Cillian Murphy post and say you saw Oppenheimer - what were your thoughts on it? Also, did you see it in theatres/IMAX or just at home?

Personally I saw it twice - in IMAX on opening weekend and later with my mom in a normal theatre - and I remember just kinda feeling simultaneously empty and overwhelmed after the first viewing. Felt like I just needed to sit outside and let it wash over me for a bit.

Also, speaking of movies and the fact it’s Oscar season: have you seen Killers of the Flower Moon? Feels like something you’d find interesting.

Argh sorry for taking so long to answer this, but I was like, "Ah, I'll watch Killers of the Flower Moon and then I'll answer this :3" but I STILL haven't seen Killers of the Flower Moon and it's *totally* on my list but it's also 3 hours and kind of depressing so it's tough to set a time aside for it. Ironically I was able to get my fam to watch Oppenheimer, which means I've watched Oppenheimer twice now (AND YES THE NONLINEAR STORYTELLING HITS SO GOOD ON THE SECOND WATCH). I've had to watch it at home both times though. I wish I could have seen it in theaters---I want that sensory assault SO BAD.

But yeah overall I really love the composition of it--it takes you a minute to understand that the use of color is meant to indicate the differences in perspective, but again, it's really obvious on the second watch so you're able to pick up so much more.

Both times I rolled my eyes SO HARD at the framing of the "I am become death" quote because... I mean... really? It's just such a wanky part in SO many contexts.

I do think like, there's A LOT of people involved and like... I feel like the Chevalier incident, even if it was this very important indicting event for Oppenheimer, was kind of clumsily handled--because like, you just have Chevalier as a guy at this party but then it's like "Oh this is a guy Oppie trusts enough to leave his kid with for a few days" but also it isn't clear enough to the viewer that this *is* Chevalier until it's all "Chevalier Chevalier Chevalier" at the security clearance hearing. And I think that's partially to drive home the fact that from Oppenheimer's perspective, a lot of card-carrying communists of the day were just... friends and coworkers, but you as the viewer are stuck going, "Wait, who???"

I thought Emily Blunt was stunning and it's a very complex role--it's a movie that's very aware of its own marginalization of women as it's happening, and I'm glad that you have this moment at the end where she's the one who holds onto the rage and the grudges, almost not just on Oppenheimer's behalf, but her own--like she's just as frustrated at Oppenheimer playing the martyr.

I was getting MAJOR Stanley Tucci vibes with RDJ in that movie, but he also just had a very good simmering darkness to him. I LOVED Ryan Gosling's Ken but I think in terms of like, full-on transformation rather than just riding the high of being a character, I'd pick Robert Downey Jr. for best supporting actor for the Oscars this year. But also I still need to see Poor Things so... *shrug*

Also Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman had me like "My boy!!! That's my boy!!!" And I loved Rami Malek as well.

[57sfinest]

2, 3, 7 and 24 lol

2. a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

mmm i'm gonna go a little sideways from the prompt because harry isn't necessarily my fave but i just do want to say i don't think this man is topping. i think the emotional fallout from martinaise has stripped him of his ability to ever top or dom or be in charge in any sexual capacity like ever again. someone tries to get him to top and he gets the thousand yard stare like oh no... i dont top..... not since The Accident..... like already immediately post-amnesia you've got these comments saying sober sex is scary for him, his blood flow is bad from the alcoholism so his dick is operating at a generous 48% capacity, he's got chronic pain + will probably feel that bullet in his thigh forever and ever and this is a perfect storm that equals to This Man Aint Topping. physical and emotional agony if this man even tries. you put this man in a situation where he's expected to top and he says 'i can't... not after everything women have been through...'

that being said i think if you can convince him that there is a shortage of tops for the future communist utopia of revachol & you remind him "from each according to his means" etc he might try. like if you tell him mazov topped then it might actually work. but otherwise call this man a cheese pizza cuz there's no topping here

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

there have been many. but i think one that angers me the most is the idea that dora was somehow wrong for leaving harry. i did see once (many months ago) that she should have stayed because of what the breakup did to him and i know for a FACT that person completely missed the point of the last dream on the seafort. that shit was crazy

7. what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

i'm very good at maintaining my own separate opinions so there's no character i HATE but [strapping on my bulletproof vest] kim took a back burner in my brain for a while because the sheer volume of genuine sincere unironic 'kim is a good cop and his purpose in life is to be harry's support system' i saw was like. mind numbing. i'm not talking about lighthearted fun with his character i was seeing people genuinely believing that shit and i got so sick of it that kim became a secondary consideration for a while. i do love him his character is super interesting & i'm currently working on an analysis, but i think it was a case of oversaturation for a few months there

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

i am lucky to have not seen much but i think one of the things i see start some conflict is that there are 2 equally good and valuable types of Disco Enjoyment: 1) silly goofy fun and 2) full 10th-grade-english-teacher-mode analysis. and people can do both but i personally have deleted several anons who i think didn't realize this fact and therefore took my character analysis posts as personal attacks on the Silly Goofy Fun activities rather than the braindumps they were. most of the rancid shit i HAVE seen has mostly come down to: we are looking at the same thing through different levels of detail and canon-compliancy and are forgetting that Ignoring That Shit is an option

[tfbsattic]

Huey, Dewey, Louie, and a Magyar PM’s Demise

While touring Budapest during the Balkan Explorer Tour via Expat Explore in 2023, the free day coincided with Philippine Independence Day – also MY 34th BIRTHDAY. Being a Disney fan myself, the city’s sights brought up DuckTales.

And I do mean the original 1987-1990 run.

Photo taken 6/12/2023.

So what does a Disney animated series have to do with Budapest – or rather, the whole country of Hungary? Ask any resident who was between 3-12 years old and living in said country on December 12, 1993, and they’d likely tell you that something somber interrupted an episode of it.

Picture if you will being a kid watching Disney Sunday, the equivalent of America’s The Disney Afternoon in a post-Cold War Hungary (or a few other European countries) on that day. The theme song plays as normal.

“It will never leave,” said Doug Walker, the Nostalgia Critic. “it will never leave. It's like an addiction. You think you're over it. You think, “I only know a few lyrics of the song…’”

“Life is like a hurricane Here in Duckburg Race cars, lasers, aeroplanes It’s a Duck blur Might solve a mystery Or rewrite history." “DuckTales, woohoo! Every day that I've been making DuckTales, woohoo! Tales so daring, do-bad and good Luck tales.” “D-d-d-danger lurks behind you There’s a stranger out behind you Gonna find you What to do?” “JUST GRAB ONTO SOME DUCKTALES!” “WOOHOO!“

“I mean once you hear it once, it will never, ever go away. And you wanna know what the creepy thing is? I think this show stayed on the air strictly because of the theme song! I mean think about it, what do you actually remember about this show?”

Many a Magyar ‘90s kid’s disturbingly thorough answer came to a head during Uncle Scrooge’s breakfast conniption in the Catch as Cash Can story arc episode, “A Whale of a Bad Time.” He was dismayed and enraged when he lost half of his fortune via the boat containing it being eaten by a sea monster. As Huey, Dewey, and Louie restrained him, every TV screen in every Magyar household open to DuckTales desaturated, changed to static briefly, and went black for 15 minutes.

The Magyar Televízió logo appeared in a gloomy grayscale, accompanied by a track of the 3rd movement of Fredric Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B♭ minor, Op. 35. It signified to Magyars of all ages – even and especially the perplexed ‘90s kids trying to make sense of whatever abruptly interrupted their DuckTales fix – that someone very important had died.

That someone very important was József Antall, the first democratically elected prime minister.

Shortly after his inauguration in May 1990, Antall was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He underwent surgery that October, with him having an interview on the response to the taxi blockade in ihis sleepwear. His cancer recurred in May 1991.

Antall died in his sleep due to complications on December 12, 1993. Magyar adults and well-informed teens who knew and loved him were bereft of a strong leader in Hungary’s post-communist history, whereas befuddled kids wondered why the TV cared more of about a prime minister’s death over a Disney animated series.

Those children who grew up back then were dubbed the “DuckTales Generation.”

“I wanted to switch channels to see if there was another cartoon,” recalled one Magyar adult, “but my parents wanted to watch M1 because – unlike me – they knew who PM Antall was and why the news of his death was important.”

“As a result of the shock, I rushed to the bathroom,” recalled another, “but I could barely tell what had happened all the way through. My mom cried to my dad, ‘Antall is dead!’ And then they looked at me, over my head. The children watching DuckTales at the time experienced a minor trauma as they were torn out of the safe world of Disney magic – and the unknown, incomprehensible blackness came.”

“Chopin's funeral march and the deep blackness cast a pall over the country for just a couple of minutes.”

“I called my parents, ‘Dad, I think (Antall) had died,’” recalled the owner of conservative blog Meanwhile in Budapest.

The death announcement of Antall wasn’t the only kids’ show interruption in history. On June 2, 2020, Viacom-owned TV channels (including Nickelodeon) around the world interrupted TV shows with an 8:46 PSA.

The white text, “I Can’t Breathe,” faded in and out to the cadence of a sound effect of a human breathing. The duration matched the one in which Derek Chauvin held his knee down on George Floyd’s neck till he suffocated. Either a Color of Change text number or the Amnesty International website (depending on country) appeared alongside it.

The PSA scared some kids, which lead some of their parents to rant about it on the Viacom channels’ social media accounts, some with some political rebukes.

But whichever their political views, most Magyar children who grew up when a death of a beloved dignitary interrupted a Disney TV show in the ‘90s knew that their moment was a blindingly brighter lightbulb memory. Even a traveling exhibit by Magyar artists on the childhood children in Hungary spent between the late ‘80s and noughties was APTLY named after that episode of which doleful breaking news interrupted it.

As Walt Disney said, “Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality.”

Simply put, life HAS BEEN like a hurricane, anywhere in the world, whether kids and parents like it or not.

Especially in early ‘90s Hungary.

Photo taken 6/12/2023.