#i mean twitter literally

[thesorrowoflizards]

i am BEGGING twitter to stop showing me doctor and clara content. begging. please. please please please. what do i have to do

[clouvu]

Genshin catgirl yuri on the brain

[cozylittleartblog]

when valve has enough money to buy god, but they let bots ruin their game for 5 years and dox people 🤖🔫 #FIXTF2

everyone who signs this 100k+ petition will have their name printed and sent to valve HQ. this shit is unacceptable.

[mx-nada]

they r qpps to me

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[sergle]

what I was talking abt earlier. we have fully looped back around and away from feminism, societally, whereas before it was very Feminism 101 to acknowledge that many parts of existing as a woman in a misogynistic society are painful and upsetting. not that being a woman is Inherently Negative in a bubble. but that living on this earth, in the conditions we're living in, is hostile to women. and that gender is a performance. that many of the Staples Of Femininity as accepted by society are things that you have to create and perform and mold artificially and aren't inherent, that COMPLAINING about day to day difficulties of existing as a woman is something that you're allowed to do. acknowledging these basic, again, feminism 101 things, that something tied to womanhood is more time consuming or more expensive or more dangerous Because Of The Problems. does not CREATE the problems. that when women complain about having to perform femininity, they are not, in fact, oppressing themselves. the call does not come from inside the fucking house. saying that you HAVE suffered does not fucking equate that you believe you SHOULD have suffered.

like I could talk about this for hours. how braindead and one-dimensional the Takes are getting. "being a woman is looking in the mirror and going fuck yeah i'm a woman" damn. I guess any negative experiences you have by living in a misogynistic world... are your fault if you are anything but positive? "you don't actually want liberation" we've fully gone back to telling feminists "you WANT to be oppressed" when anything negative about our society is pointed out. it's not real until I say it out loud, I guess, and then I'm actually the one who caused it. if anybody expresses any unhappiness with how they're treated or the status quo or the language and culture surrounding womanhood and femininity. they've created it, right that second. they invented it just now. it wasn't a problem before somebody complained, right? also trans women aren't braindead zombies who just follow the flow of whatever cis women around them say. I am pretty fucking sure they are very much aware of pain, and are MORE than aware of the swirling torrent of misogyny and standards of femininity than anybody else. actually. and I am pretty sure someone complaining on tumblr that being a woman means always putting on a performance is going to make someone change their mind about transitioning. also "performing femininity" as a necessity to being treated well as a woman is not fucking NEWS to your Local Trans Woman. I AM PRETTY SURE SHE GETS THE CONCEPT. using trans women as a scapegoat for this braindead perspective on gender politics is spineless, meritless, and pathetic.

[dnpbeats]

besties... a passenger princess is not the same thing as a pillow princess,,,, what do u think the power part of power bottom means

[infernaleikon]

Forever thinking about that one obikin commission you said on X you got from the magnificent artist skynobi. Will you ever share it with us wretched and needful fellow obikin souls?

Like a Christmas present for us poor beggars 🥺

it's so sweet that you remembered that. every few days i myself remember i have it and go stare at it for a bit. and because you asked so nicely, here it is. artist, as you said, is the wonderful @skynobi

[naomistares]

even though rejoice mini comic #1 ended up doing really well on twitter, i'll use tumblr to post updates occasionally ! (twitter makes me nervous)

2nd mini comic is looking to be 19 pages (but ill probably make it 20... i hate odd pages). i have finals rn but i am gods most efficient machine watch me finish this mid finals.

it's a quite linear and silly, takes place 5 ish years before main comic events. kind of meaningless to all but me, but its the type of thing that's funny to look back at once you know more.

that is all, will probably take a few more weeks... but i'm enjoying working on this one way more! there r some cool panels in there

[infinite-beginnings]

My George video!!!

In case you were curious about the latest book he has read and his go to hype song.

Also DBDA Fandom, we have a job to do now 😅

I also shared with him that I lost my grandfather to Parkinson's Disease recently and he had some really really sweet words to share (I didn't include that part of the video but I just wanted everyone to know how kind and thoughtful he is)

[98chao]

truly i love all of you and i'm so grateful for all the support i get on my vanilla milkshake posts here because i've just seen the way people talk about vanilla milkshake and mysticao on twitter and its genuinely taken 50 years off my life. now i've been reminded as to why i should never join the crk fandom on twitter

[royalarchivist]

Fit: It's Friday, where's Pac? Where's Pac? You know, I mean- I- I just– I'm just– I'm just wondering what... why he's not on right now, you know? [Stammers] I- I- I- like, I mean- it- it's– How are we supposed to be Morning Crew if we don't have the full Morning Crew? You know? [Reading Chat] Yeah, that dude asleep!

Fit: Pac is– He's getting his beauty sleep right now, much like Ramon. Not that he– not that he needs beauty sleep. Don't misconstrue my words.

[disfrutalaisla]

Reminder that the qsmp has more admins than just the ones that play eggs. It’s entirely possible and very likely that the random federation worker with an entirely different admin number is not one of the eggs.

[asgardian--angels]

Talking on the phone with my mom I finally broke down and cried thoroughly about the cancellation. I think I'd been holding it in for the last two days, or two months. And honestly I've been wondering all along why this show means so much to me. I am not queer, I am not neurodivergent, I am not POC or disabled or any of the groups that this show has been so important for in terms of representation and being treated with respect and dignity. I understand and completely empathize with all of you, and fight for this show and your rights worldwide alongside you, but it still left me wondering why I myself have latched onto Our Flag Means Death. I suppose part of it is that despite being white and cishet and the privileges that have always come with that, I have been treated like an outsider and ostracized my entire childhood and teenage years, for being ugly and having "disgusting" interests (primarily liking insects, reptiles, other creepy-crawlies - aka the thing I literally do for my career now). I was bullied relentlessly from preschool through early college and became a very lonely introverted person - I still am. Undoubtedly Our Flag Means Death gave me renewed hope that I haven't missed some key window for finding love or relationships of any kind that matter, as I sit here typing this at age 28 having never dated anyone.

But it had to be more than that. And with everything that's happened the past couple of months, and the last few days, I think it finally clicked for me.

Followers of my blog may or may not know that I am a conservation biologist, or pollinator ecologist, whichever hat fits best on a given day, they're quite close. I don't make many original posts like this anymore on here because my job is so busy. Basically, I do a variety of things - academic research, habitat management & restoration, and public outreach - to try and preserve biodiversity and ecosystems on our planet. I'm just going to say it: it's a thankless job. Nothing we do ever feels like it's enough, and burnout is common in our field because we sit with the guilt of feeling like we are the only thing between survival and utter destruction of planet Earth, and work ourselves to exhaustion. It's one of those jobs where your work is your life, and your passion is your work, and it's inseparable from who you are on a molecular level. We are often faced, on a large scale, with hostility, from people that don't believe in science and are more than happy to pull a shotgun on us, or rich old men in power who are content to watch the world burn for another penny in their bank account. There are days when sometimes it sinks in just how bad things are, and it's terrifying, and I feel like we will never be able to do enough, to change enough, before it gets catastrophic. It's paralyzing.

My ability to do my job is dependent on hope. Unwavering, unrelenting hope. Hope beyond hope. We have to believe what we're doing matters, otherwise we'd fall down and never get back up again. I'm no big-shot, I give talks to a few hundred people at a time, and make urban pollinator habitat on a local scale. Is any of that going to make a difference compared to the ramifications of a single oil mogul deciding to cut corners and cause an oil spill that kills millions of seabirds and damages ocean food chains for decades to come? If people in my field let thoughts like that linger, we'd be paralyzed to inaction. I have to hope that the people I teach choose to do something good with that knowledge, and go on to inspire others, or that the patch of habitat I make allows a declining species to maintain a foothold instead of going locally extinct. You just have to keep going.

And Our Flag Means Death got wrapped up in that for me. The Stede Bonnet effect, if you will. He set out to do pirating differently, treating his crew with respect and helping them grow. In return, they internalized that mindset, and it spread to how they interacted with others. It changed the trajectory of individual lives, and also at least began to change how the society of pirates operated as a whole. It was a beacon of hope that choosing small acts of kindness did matter, even if you yourself could not see the ripples it made. It renewed my faith that love persevered and would win. That we could all make life a little better for each other and ourselves through kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and mutual support. I think a good chunk of that is from Taika - these are running themes in his projects, and his films move me deeply for that. This show became in some, perhaps subconscious way, a source of strength for me to keep putting myself out there in my line of work to do whatever I was capable of to help the cause.

The cancellation was devastating, but the second cancellation (turbohell cancelation?) was even more so. Because now it's so clear that this is largely the work of David Zaslav and the regime he's built. It's petty, it's greedy, and more than anything, it's cruel. Indifferently, indiscriminately cruel, when one person at the top can have such power to make or break the lives of thousands, millions, beneath them, and though it would have been barely a drop in the bucket, a hand wave, to renew our show or let it pass to another streamer, he actively chose to shackle it to this sinking Titanic of a company WBD has become. I have always operated on the belief that you can do anything if you work hard enough at it, and believed deep down that there was some order, some justice in the universe, atheist though I be. We as a fandom did everything we possibly could, we loved this show harder than anything. The numbers were there, the awards nominations were there, the critic praise was there, and we were loud and loyal every single day. I felt like we could do this - how could we not win when we've done so much, and the show deserves it so much? Surely cause and effect will prevail.

This fight seemed small, though really it wasn't; we fought for the right of artists and creators to make quality, original stories and have them told to their natural end, we fought for diversity representation to be more than a token character - OFMD raised the bar so much higher on all fronts, we fought to shed light on the chaos and impending collapse of this industry silencing art and exploiting writers, actors, and all manner of production workers. It was a small fight from the outside, one that I really felt we could win. And I put my heart and soul into it, because if we could win this, if we could save this simple, kind love story about two guys on a boat, then maybe there was hope for the bigger, badder stuff too. It shouldn't seem an insurmountable task for several thousand fans to convince a streaming service that they'd turn a tidy profit to give our show one more season.

Yet we lost - through no fault of our own. I am so proud of us. But that really struck deep for me. If one peabrained CEO of a media company wouldn't budge on greenlighting a show that was in his every best interest business-wise - perhaps enough to even save Max from going under in the not-too-distant future - my god, what hope was there for changing anything bigger? The 'real' problems of the world? When no amount of ethos, logos, or pathos can penetrate these men at the top, where's that hope to fight? Lately the world seems like it's just going belly up all over. If we gave everything we could, and it still wasn't enough - if it could never be enough - what hope is there? It's like chaining yourself to a tree and the bulldozer plowing right on ahead. And I think that broke something in me. It shook me to my foundations because it broke my rules of how things are supposed to work. We believed hard enough, we worked tirelessly, and we deserved it for how important this show was to so many people. And it didn't matter. Our best wasn't enough. And that caused an avalanche of all of the horrible, scary things piled on my shoulders - we're losing the Amazon rainforest too fast to save, climate change is going to turn the corn belt into a dustbowl by mid-century, a border wall is going to devastate imperiled wildlife in Texas, deforestation and hurricanes on songbird wintering grounds could lead to entire species extinctions, saltmarshes are our lifeline and they're shrinking and we're still building stupid concrete stormwalls, invasive diseases will completely alter the composition of our forests to be unrecognizable to our children, and if you don't make every slide of this powerpoint utterly perfect and you fail to convince every single person in attendance to get rid of their lawn then you've failed and the world is doomed.

I've struggled with being a perfectionist my whole life. This didn't help.

That's where I was a couple hours ago. But I took some deep breaths. I know the world isn't fair. But I really thought if we could win this one battle, then we could win the war.

But here's what I realized. Everything we did mattered. It mattered so much. Because there's the show, and then there's everything that was birthed out of that show. The community, so many of us around the world who have been uplifted by Our Flag Means Death in a real and lasting way that we will take with us and spread to affect those around us. The Stede Bonnet effect goes global. We raised thousands and thousands of dollars for charities around the world, real people whose lives have been improved, or maybe even saved, because of us and this silly pirate show. We brought a hell of a lot of attention to WBD and their shitty practices, keeping the momentum going in a way that I think is only going to build - and I sure hope it leads to Zaslav getting deposed. We have demanded more queer stories, more BIPOC stories, more disabled and autistic and middle-aged stories, stories with exquisite costumes and award-worthy wigs, dear lord, and we are being heard. We have expressed such love and support for the cast and crew, showing them that we appreciate their hard work and that we will be behind them in their future projects. So many of them have told us how the show and its fans have changed their lives. We convinced Rhys that his career isn't winding down but winding up, and to be unapologetic about his wonderful weirdness - we've proven to everyone through this show that your weirdness is what someone out there is going to love you for, not in spite of. We rallied to help writers and actors during the strikes in a way that was taken to heart and remembered. We have been out here talking it through as a crew, and turning poison into positivity, for over two years now, and that impact is permanent. They can cancel our show, they can try and slap copyright notices on our fan merch, and spew bullshit excuses about the numbers not being there. But Our Flag Means Death sparked a movement, the biggest pirate crew the world has ever seen, using our power for good.

We may not have any more new material for our show for a while, or ever. But I maintain hope that when the dust has settled and streaming has entered its 'new era' that they'll remember us and throw us a lifeline. Because hope is a part of my genetic makeup, and even in cancellation my hope has been renewed that the fight is worth fighting, that our individual choices of kindness are having an effect, and making the world a little easier to live in bit by bit. No one can take from us what we have built out of this show. And thanks to pirating, they can't take the actual show from us either. Despite this, no matter the outcome, I am so happy we got two seasons of this wonderful series. That was more than almost anyone expected. The story belongs to all of us, and it will always live on. We did not truly lose this battle, because in the process we gained more than we could have ever imagined. And I know there's still so much more to come. That gives me the strength to keep doing what I do, every day.

To me, Our Flag Means Hope.

[pinktacotragedy]

to my *checks notes* 1 follower, apologies for any confusion but this is about to become a Colin Bridgerton fan account

I have many thoughts and unfortunately he is all of them

[despazito]

How dare you make me think critically about my wanton usage of the rent-a-serf app I literally have anxiety and depression. Also it's ableist to tell me to buy frozen foods I need it thawed by the Applebee's microwave specifically