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why-am-i-here-just-to-suffer · 2 years

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intro post?

ok so I'm not really sure what to put here so I guess I'll just put some stuff about me and my interests

agender xe/it/they

aroace apl

I have never had nor am I interested in sex or a romantic relationship. I don't know how repulsed I would be if I actually tried. There definitely would be a lot of sensory problems. Sometimes I reblog allo stuff because it's funny though.

I don't consider myself loveless but I don't really understand what it means to "love" someone platonically beyond just feeling strong empathy for everyone around me, and sometimes enjoying the company of certain people. Like I could talk with someone about shared interests and have a really good time, and do stuff with them all the time, but if they were to suddenly disappear from my life I wouldn't have any desire to go back to them kind of thing. I don't ever get the desire to seek out and interact with specific people who I am "friends" with.

ADHD/autism, low-medium support needs

Ashkenazi Jewish

While many of the issues that I comment on or reblog about do not directly affect me, I'm a radical inclusionist by nature and I care (probably way too much for my own good) about the well-being of other people. I do not aim to comment on any one specific issues and I do not currently have the mental capacity to be a proper advocate about any one specific issue.

Special interests (TW infodump):

FOSS (free and open source software) philosophy as a political movement

User freedom and privacy; software that is written in the interest of the user rather than the developer

Rampant mass surveillance that the public turns a blind eye to. In the EU, there are privacy regulations for corporate, but you still often times find governments doing pretty bad things. In the U.S., corporate mass surveillance is arguably on the scale of a dictatorship like China or North Korea. It's still there, just much less in-your-face. And yes, there are in fact problems with this. "I have nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide" is such a stupid argument. How do you know when the Powers that Be decide to change what is allowed? Suddenly you do have something to hide. What are you going to do now? I'm sure it's an issue that a large portion of this site worries about, y'know, being full of a plethora of different minority populations.

Freedom as in the user gets to decide how to use the software, not the developer. Most proprietary software contains artificial limitations that have been implemented purely to exercise control over the user. This is Richard Stallman's Freedom 0.

Collaborative, communal development not for the purpose of making money, but for the purpose of making a tool to do the job. That tool is then shared with everyone for free so that anyone can work to improve it or use it as a jumping off point for their own work. Under a software license like the GNU GPL, if you fork a piece of software and create your own derivative, and you want to share that derivative to others, you are legally required to share the code to the changes you made. That's what makes such licenses so powerful. Collaboration and sharing isn't optional; it's compulsory. And it should be, because working together as a whole society by pooling our time and knowledge is always better than competing with one another for the same goal.

As should be obvious by now, FOSS ideology is inherently very left wing, but it gets co-opted a lot by right-wingers who use "privacy" and "freedom" as dog whistles for "I get to post hate speech and incite violence online without personal repercussions. Oh, if it weren't for the consequences of my actions!" They completely ignore the fact that FOSS is literally communism as a development model.

Some people will advocate for FOSS from a freedom perspective, like Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation itself, did, (Yes, there was a whole bunch of stuff concerning his reputation that happened but most of that was proven to be false. Of course Stallman's a little crazy. He wouldn't have started what he did if he wasn't.) and some people will advocate for it from a practical, leftist perspective, like Eric Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." (who has sadly since gone Q crazy, but that doesn't change the validity of what he said before.) The reality is that both perspectives are equally important.

the Right to Repair movement, which is very similar to FOSS on a practical level. It targets hardware such as electronics, vehicles, medical equipment, farming equipment, etc. Right to Repair does not ask for $0 products (and neither does FOSS. You can still make money with FOSS. Look at companies like Canonical and Red Hat.), but rather for the ability to legally obtain parts and documentation so that consumers can fix things themselves. Electrical schematics, documentation, and diagrams should be made available to the public in some capacity at all, even if they need to be paid for. Right now you can't even pay most companies to get them. It differs ideologically from FOSS because it doesn't really care about collaboration and sharing. It simply states that you should have the legal right to fix your property.

Unix systems

CLIs (command line interfaces) are superior for almost all purposes. I might not even bother with a GUI if I could run a usable web browser in a TTY. w3m gets the closest with support for rendering images, but still no JavaScript.

I often stim by fidgeting with the command line. Visual from what's going on on the screen and tactile from the keyboard. Don't ask.

Proper package management systems. Imagine an app store, but the entire operating system including core components, libraries and applications are installed and updated through one central system, pulling from one central repository. On your desktop computer. It hurts me every time I need to go look up a website and download a package or executable installer. There's Chocolatey and WinGet for Windows and homebrew for macOS but it's still nowhere near as good as a proper implementation.

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Hardware,I especially enjoy learning about much older 8 and 16-bit machines because there's much less abstraction between hardware and software and it is much easier to visualize and understand what is happening at a very low level that you just don't see on a modern system. Even with a microcontroller like an Arduino there is still a ton of abstraction going on and you just don't get the same learning experience that you would building a project raw with a 6502 and some logic chips.

I'm not really that into programming but sometimes I'll do a little shell scripting. Why do tedious, repetitive work in a graphical interface when a couple lines of code logic suffice?

The history surrounding the development of computers and software is also really interesting to me. There's a multipage infodump that I am omitting here.

Most other general stuff about computers is interesting to me

Feel free to ask me about any of this stuff but there's no guarantee that what I respond with will be even remotely intelligible.

Also THANKS TUMBLR EDITOR for making it literally impossible to make hierarchical lists. They seem to render in the editor but then they disappear when you click post.

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dog-day-morning · 3 years

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THE TRUTH AND SHAKA ZULU WILL KILL YOU

In a once-popular commercial for Calgon detergent in the 1970s, a curious housewife probes the Chinese owner of the local laundry for the answer to one of the world’s eternal mysteries: “How do you get shirts so clean, Mr. Lee?” After peering over his shoulder (so as to be sure that his not-so-discreet wife isn’t standing near) the man turns back around, raises a finger to his lips and says through a smile, “Ancient Chinese secret!”

While the answer to the question posed to the laundry owner by the woman was a closely guarded secret — one that his sweet, no-nonsense wife happily ruined — it was neither ancient nor even Chinese in origin. But the TV spot famously tapped into one of the most enduring legends about the country whose Ming Dynasty rulers had a 16-to-26 foot wall built around it: the age-old traditions of secrecy.

And, like Vegas, what happened in China very often stayed in China, just get the hell out of Alkebulan!!! But if you insist on staying, you and your barbarian invader horde of Ghengis Khan, wannabe warlords can take that beatdown like Hirihito of Japan. You can indulge in Alkebulan's rich resources for a season or get on a junk boat and go back to China and rebuild your own country. If you stay in the Motherland you'll perish🖕🏿🖕🏿🖕🏿🖕🏿. As the saying goes, s**t happens. Wash ya ass. Please, continue reading… my screwed up mind !!!

Take the Black Chinese [Moabites] who once made up the entire population of China prior to Esau's attempt at reclaiming the birthright God decreed would be Jacob's while in the womb through forced miscegenation "Raping of indigenous women." Do not be confused or mislead by this post. My research was sketchy to say the least. The portion of the population before China’s modern era does not register any indigenous Moabites, for example. The fact that you’ve never heard of them proves the point. Here comes the BS. But don’t worry. You’re not alone. China has some 1.3 billion people and nearly all are just as in the dark about them. Well, either that or a billion people all swore to never-ever-never air any [ahem] ‘clean laundry’ about black folks formerly having a place in China’s allegedly homogeneous society. That's a bunch of made up monkey s**t. Frankly, even an ancient culture with the bragging rights to the longest continually recorded history, another myth, is bound to miss a few things like a heart, and some effing genomes. The former presence — up until sometime in the 20th century — of Black people in pre-modern China is one of them. Fortunately, though, old photos taken throughout China around the advent of photography can help us to fill in today some of what the historians missed on purpose. I can't believe I'm posting this. 👎🏿👎🏿👎🏿👎🏿 China’s Qing Dynasty, established by the Manchu people who ruled from 1644–1912, is described as having been a vast multicultural empire. But it appears multicultural could also be a more pleasant euphemism for multiracial. You people are like dogs, stop eating them?! Nothing illustrates this better than the Black and white photos taken by visitors from Europe in the mid-to-late 1800s. Really?!! John Thomson, an Irish photographer was one of the first to capture images that reveal a surprisingly more diverse makeup of then-contemporary China. In one of the most stunning photos taken by Thomson displayed above, six women dine together in a courtyard. Captioned “Manchu ladies at a meal,” the picture was taken in 1869 in the city of Peking (now Beijing). Seated at the center of the photo are two women: on the right sits a typical high class Manchu and on the left sits a smiling Black woman — who could easily pass as the mother of the RZA, the GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, or any other member of the Wu-Tang Clan.

Apart from the physical differences in the women (including the two who were likely seated, but stood for the picture), what’s also remarkable is that when Thomson writes about them, he makes no distinctions — though there were both racial and class differences; some of them were most assuredly attendants or maids. But in the view of Thomson, they were all simply Manchu ladies sharing a meal on a day when he sought interesting subjects to photograph. I saw the photographs. The darker ones were inherently claimed to be lower case workers or servants, while the ones who looked like Lucy Liu were considered affluent, and well off. These racial disparities that evolved from hell are a sad reminder to a wound that won't stop bleeding because of man's inability to stop giving in to his base emotions. I plead cray cray, and insanity. Jacob, they would rather burn in hell for an eternity than let us live in peace for a day. God is coming back for Israel not the Christian Church that has been corrupted by the Evangelical, right wing, nut jobs.

1 Maccabees 3:48

And laid open the book of the law, wherein the heathen had sought to paint the likeness of their images.

If you study history, and read the Bible, you'll see how religion has been used to divide God's people which they're not. Some gentiles will walk into New Jerusalem, the vast majority of them won't. The Bible has been tampered with by people who are shepherds for the Devil. The Catholic Church is Satanic no matter how you cut it. The cathedral of Notre Dame had gargoyles mounted atop the edifice looking over the city of Paris, France. Do you find this to be a bit of a double minded mentality or a slap of defiance in God's face. What god do you worship? We want to know the truth from God. This world can't be trusted with an anorexic T-Rex. You'd call it a crackhead and dump him in the Labrea tar pits unless it was a female, at that point you would attempt to crossbreed it with a Chihuahua, and hope to domesticate this new animal which has disaster written all over his I'm shaking cause I need a fix quick, petrified ass. When Vatican City is destroyed let that be a warning from God to those who still have a sliver of faith in God, get a relationship with Him. Jacob, this writing piece reveals their unwillingness, and froward hearted, lack of sensibility by not telling the whole truth. Instead they give us a revised version of history that wasn't. They have been our teachers for the last 500yrs when we were there's previous. Either you learn from your mistakes or continue to repeat them.

Zechariah 8:23

Thus saith the Lord of hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you.

If you hate being rebuked by a Black professor with a tenure ship, you'll hate being corrected by a Black child who has 5 degrees including a specialist in biochemical, ecological science, and psychology. You're ashamed because you're proud. There were great African kingdoms that educated the anglo European that's been shrouded in history. The book of Maccabees says the people who have mislead, and lied to us are as knowledgeable as a 13yr old using crib notes. I'm nuttier than a can of Planters, the truth is in you Jacob. Utilize the authority given to you. You will have to teach them as it was in the past. Everything from Bible scriptures, to aerospace, science engineering. The educational system is designed to hold back Black children, but the 3 people with the highest IQs in the world at the time was a 10yr old Black male, an 2 Black females under the age of 8. They were the youngest members of Mensa ever. This was about 4yrs ago. You can't stop God's anointing from glowing and glorifying Him and His people. Read the rest of this article and lose your mind. Its a nauseating and frustrating read. The truth will set you free. It ain't in these hood boogers

Written accounts by early Chinese historians tell us that the Tonkin region and its adjacent areas were once a hotbed of various non-Han Chinese peoples, including those from whom the Lao Cai girl descends. But with the southward advance of the Han Chinese, such groups were pushed even further south, or gradually assimilated into the dominant population. Historian Thant Myint-U writes in “Where China Meets India” that during the 9th century, the Chinese ethnographer Fan Cho compiled the Man Shu, or “Book of the Southern Barbarians.” Fan Cho describes there the varied peoples living in and around Yunnan. Included among them were the Wu-man or ‘Black southern barbarians,’ so-called for their dark complexions. And ironically, the French author of the Lao Cai photo had the image annotated with the Chinese word “Man,” and — sadly — with the Vietnamese “Xa” (or Kha), signifying servant or slave.

With this photo of a mother and her two children by John Thomson, taken on the streets of Peking (now Beijing), something finally clicked. For reasons that won’t be detailed here (as it would take far too long to explain) more than a decade of research into the peopling of Asia seemed to suggest that any black Chinese still living in the age of photography would likely all be found in southernmost China. Black Moabites still coexist in China to this day. This is a class study in you must be dumber than an incubator.

In his 1902 book The Boxer Uprising, American photographer James Ricalton includes this photo of several dozen men, many of them likely to be executed the next day for their part in the Boxer Rebellion. The latter was a bloody, anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising that took place between 1899 and 1901; the 2006 Jet Li film Fearless was inspired by events that took place in the aftermath of the rebellion. The same is also true of the 1971 Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury. No actors in the aforementioned films — nor any other martial arts films set in pre-modern China — ever had actors resembling the non-Han Chinese mixed in above. About them, the racist Ricalton writes:

“This is truly a dusky and unattractive brood. One would scarcely expect to find natives of Borneo or the Fiji Islands more barbarous in appearance; and it is well known that a great proportion of the Boxer organization is of this sort; indeed, how dark-skinned, how ill-clad, how lacking in intelligence, how dull, morose, miserable and vicious they appear!” I'm willing to bet you 5 million in Bitcoin that I don't have, a lifetime supply of opium, and 2 happy ending massages daily that this bougie French bastard is rotting in hell praying to white Jesus that Rumiel won't screw him up the wahoo tonight. Tickle his sack!!! Like Thomas Cromwell the powers that be went to great lengths to cover this history in ChinaTown. You can't hide the truth from a people that's tired of being dictated to, oppressed, lied on, abused and persecuted by everybody, and discredited for the contributions they've made to this damnable planet. As previously stated we don't want crumbs [reparations] we want the whole planet Black before you, and the I hate n**gers brigade showed up, that includes Moo Goo Gai Pan. As soon as his Chicken fried, Bat Man eating, pancaked backside came along, and gained some freedoms, he started emulating his zaddy, he became drunk with xenophobia like the rest. If you hate my commentary tell ya boy Biden or his Amerikkka is not a racist country VP, Kamala Harris. She's next in line to preside as Pontius Pilate over this damnation unless Biden loses his dementia. Its a joke, think or buy a vowel. If that doesn't work, swap some Budha, and kiss Mr. Nasty bye bye.

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ckret2 · 4 years

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Home Is Where Your Shackles Are Anchored

Ghidorah, galaxy-trotting interstellar conqueror-explorer that they are, attempts to impress Rodan by telling him all about the diverse wonders of the universe.

He’s kind of only interested in hearing about volcanoes.

Hey check out who’s back. Written to the prompts:

Anonymous said: How about Ghidorah tries (as best as they can) to describe what space is like to Rodan?

Anonymous said: Hey, love the way you characterize the Titans in your fics, if you're accepting prompts atm how abt Rodan/Ghidorah reacting to blue lavs volcanoes ( they're that way due to burning sulfur right?)

... Although the blue lava only gets a short mention lmao.

This is part of an ongoing series of Rodorah one-shots. If you don’t wanna read the others, all you need to know is: Ghidorah’s an empath (telepathically transmits/detects emotions) but it only works with head-to-head contact; Ghidorah doesn’t speak any Earth languages but is slowly learning Rodan’s; Ghidorah was originally mind controlled & weaponized by Xilien aliens; and this one time Rodan made a whole globe out of lava and melted glass and Ghidorah keeps freaking out about how this dude who lives in a volcano and has never been off his own planet knows so much stuff. Links to the other fics are in the source at the bottom of this post.

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When the red sprite asked them about other worlds, they wanted to impress upon him the vast wonders the universe contained. The ghostly filament-like serpents hundreds of miles long that swam glittering through nebulas. The vast artificial asteroid belts consisting of the armada ships of empires that spanned hundreds of populated planets. The dizzying way starlight bent and stretched when you fell almost too close to a black hole to save yourself. Planets of pure diamond, planets with hurricanes that never ended, planets where multiple suns twirled through the skies.

It turned out what the red sprite was interested in was the real estate.

"That other stuff is cool," he reassured them, flopped on his back in his volcano with his legs in the air. "But a planet's not a proper planet without volcanoes."

"Lots planets do not have volcanoes," they insisted.

Patiently, the red sprite said, "Then those planets aren't proper planets."

Oh, well, okay, if those were the definitions they were going by. "We do not look..." They struggled for a descriptor. "Do not look near at volcanoes before we come here." They quickly corrected their grammar: "Comed here."

"'Came here.'"

Irregular verbs were going to be the death of them. "Came here. We see them but do not live in them, do not have reason to learn of them." They felt like they needed to justify why their knowledge of volcanoes was so far behind the red sprite's. They couldn't let him think they were stupid. Merely uneducated. Educated in different fields due to different priorities.

(Because really, they were painfully aware, they were stupid—made from creatures that were inherently stupid and unable to change that—and they didn't know if anything would entice the red sprite to stay with them once he figured that out.)

"Nobody learns about them," the red sprite lamented, and they were relieved that he saw this ignorance of volcanoes as a global problem rather than a them problem. "But you saw volcanoes, right? You can describe what you remember."

They supposed they could do that. Second clacked his teeth together thoughtfully, mimicking the beak-clicking sound the red sprite sometimes made to fill gaps in the conversation. "We saw volcanoes with blue lava," they said. "Not blue like sky. Blue like... ih... sky near night?"

"Dark blue?"

That was exactly what they meant, but they hadn't been sure whether the words "dark" and "blue" could be combined like that without sounding like nonsense in the red sprite's language. "Yes."

"We have that," the red sprite said. So much for trying to impress him. "It happens when a volcano has a lot of—" He said a word they didn't know.

"What?"

"It's a kind of rock. Smelly. Burns blue."

Burns blue. Copper? Butane? They repeated the word a couple of times and filed it away as word-for-smelly-blue-burning-material-that-turns-lava-blue.

"What about the nearby planets?" the red sprite asked them. He rolled over, sending droplets of lava spraying over the side of his crater as he did. "Did you see any of their volcanoes? How about the moons around—" Another new word.

"What?"

"The big one," the red sprite said. "The one that takes... I forget how long it actually takes." He pointed his beak upward and leaned back and forth as if tracing an invisible path across the sky as he spoke: "But it looks like it goes forward ten months, backwards four months, and forward ten months."

He was describing a planet's apparent retrograde motion. He knew astronomy, too. Who let him get that smart? "We are not here long enough to learn how near planets cross your sky," they said, "but know big planets. Is it planet with long stripes and big storms?"

The red sprite gave them a blank look. "I dunno. I've never seen other planets," he said. "From down here, they look like stars. Except—you know—the way they move."

Ah. Yes, they supposed that was what other worlds looked like from here. They tried to imagine what that was like, looking up at little glowing dots in the sky and knowing they were other planets but simply having to take it on faith. Never having been to them to see. They could look up at the nearest planets in the sky and mentally trace the flight path that would lead them to the surface, remembering what the worlds looked like as they drew closer and closer and this planet receded to a single bright point behind them. What was it like to be trapped on the skin of a single little marble in the sky? They had been like that once, but couldn't remember it.

Did the red sprite feel trapped? Or did a little marble like this feel like the whole universe until you'd been off of it? They couldn't fully conceptualize a planetbound life that didn't feel claustrophobic.

The red sprite didn't deserve to spend its whole life anchored to this little world.

"What number is the planet?" they asked him.

"Number?"

"Number from sun, near to far. One, two, three, four... Earth is three."

"Right. It's either five or six. But the bigger one."

"Long stripes and big storms," they confirmed.

The red sprite accepted this with a chirp. "So," he said. "What are its moons' volcanoes like?"

"Its moons have volcanoes?"

The red sprite squawked. "You know what its weather is like but not the nearby volcanoes. Typical."

They reared their heads up, each of them wearing a different expression of haughty, judgmental condescension. "You do not know what it looks like but know where volcanoes are near. Typical."

They wondered what "typical" meant.

The red sprite climbed fully out of the volcano—they decided one of them should drop their feigned condescension in order to watch how the lava rolled off his wings and appointed Third to the task. Lightly, the red sprite said, "Oh, well. What good's a volcano if nobody's living in it, anyway?"

They thought he was probably more disappointed than he let on. If they had to make a trip off-planet—something inside them quelled at the thought, the parts of them that were growing attached to this world afraid that the parts of them that weren't would cause this planet to lose its emotional hold on them as soon as it lost its gravitational hold on them—but if they had to make a trip off-planet, they made a mental note to swing past the storm world and check its moons for volcanic activity.

"Maybe we take you to storm world soon," they said, leaning in to bop Third's forehead against the red sprite's so he could tell they were joking. "We carry you through the sky to it. You can see the volcanoes yourself."

"Ha! And you've got a way to make sure I can breathe for the whole trip, I'm sure."

"Yes, just make a long breath in and keep it inside you the whole trip. Easy."

"Easy! Oh yeah, sure." The red sprite bopped Third's forehead back, snapped his beak at Second just threateningly enough to make him bare his teeth back, and then hopped down the volcano's side.

They slithered down after him. "Why are you so..." They rummaged through their vocabulary for a word that meant preoccupied in the red sprite's language, and settled for, "So focused in your mind on volcanoes? There is more to other worlds than volcanoes."

"Sure, but volcanoes are where life is. You're not going to find life on a planet without volcanoes! Unless it's alien travelers like you."

They tried to think of an example that contradicted him, but supposed they didn't know of any populated worlds that they could guarantee had no volcanoes and hadn't been colonized by aliens. They didn't talk to the locals before killing them, how did they know the locals weren't interstellar immigrants?

The red sprite went on, "Any place without a volcano is just a—" He said another unfamiliar term.

Oh, now what was that? Something important, it seemed to them. A term that set these spaces bereft of hearth and hospitality apart from a home. Surely it had to mean something like cursed location, or dead place, or barren land—something like that. "What is..." They attempted to repeat the term.

The red sprite pronounced it again for them, and then explained, "Oh, you know, it's the kind of place that looks interesting—fun to visit with friends, see the sights, that sort of thing—but once you've looked around you don't want to live there. Day trip material. Two days at best."

"Aha." He'd just taught them his term for tourist destination.

"Hey, what about you?" the red sprite asked. "You haven't told me about your home planet yet."

They froze halfway down the volcano.

The red sprite had started carefully weeding the plants sprouting up along the path from his volcano to the coast; but at their silence, he looked back at them. "What?"

At the mere thought of a home planet, they felt heavy collars around their necks and chains tangled with their tails, piercings through the membranes of their wings around the bones; saw a colorless kaleidoscope, white dust and black sky; heard irresistible orders telepathically splitting their heads like a migraine. "We do not remember," they said.

The red sprite clacked his beak dubiously.

"We don't," they insisted. "We do not have our most early memories. It is common. Some species do not keep their memories of what comes soon after they hatch."

"Oh, some species here are like that too," the red sprite said. He bent down to pluck a particularly stubborn shrub from the dirt and tossed it off into the forest. "What is the earliest world you remember, then?

White dust and black sky and despair and enough fury to let them incinerate a billion worlds. "Dumb moon," they said dismissively. "Boring."

The red sprite looked like he still wanted to press them for more details; before he could, they hastily added, "No volcanoes."

"Oh! So not a home."

"Not even a good tourist destination," they said. "We leave it as soon as we could." They paused. "Left it?"

"That's right."

They'd get these irregular verbs down yet. "We do not know our home planet. Do not care to."

Both of which were true statements. The planet on which they'd hatched had existed to them only as a round dot on a propaganda poster that had failed to stir up any of the sentimentality or patriotism it was no doubt supposed to. They'd even forgotten what color the dot had been.

Nevertheless, they felt their planet somewhere behind them, like a chill up their back, like a weight on their shoulders. Like a black hole inexorably tugging them in, forcing them to fly and fly and fly forever just to stay outside of its event horizon. Like a thin chain tangled around their necks that stretched through the dark voids between the stars, stretched all the way across the galaxy.

"No wonder you bounce from planet to planet," the red sprite said. "If you don't have anywhere to go home to. Everywhere's a tourist destination."

They supposed so. Stay a day or two, burn down the planet, move on.

He sounded like he pitied them. It was surprising to be pitied for freedom—especially when, just a moment ago, they'd pitied him for being anchored down as he was.

Anchors were usually used to keep spaceships tethered to their stations so they wouldn’t float off into the dark sky and be lost. Maybe being anchored was comforting if you weren't accustomed to chains being used to strangle you.

Having finished his pruning near the base of the volcano, the red sprite turned a thoughtful gaze toward them. After a moment, decisively, he said, "If you don't have a home planet, then this one's it now."

They reared up, startled. "What?"

"This is your home planet now," the red sprite repeated. "Unless you have a better one."

They froze, their heart pounding, waiting for phantom chains to drag down on their wings.

The chains never came. Cautiously, they said, "We don't."

"Fine. So now it's here." He flapped up to land in front of them and whipped his wings dramatically into the air. "Welcome to Earth!"

First headbutted him over.

The red sprite kicked First's face and hopped back to his feet. "What about the second planet?" He said its name, and they copied it. "It has volcanoes, what are they like?"

They perked up. Ah, they'd actually seen some of those—they'd spent some time ravaging the second planet before moving on to the third. "Flat," they said.

The red sprite cocked his head. "Shield volcanoes?"

"No, more flat. And more wide. They look like..." What was the word. "Plateaus?"

The red sprite drew his head back and asked excitedly, "Really? How wide?"

"Like..." Was their grasp of the red sprite's math terms good enough to describe proportionate sizes? Probably not. They raised their heads, looking around the island for objects they could use for size comparisons. First's gaze landed on the globe of Earth the red sprite had made to explain the local geography to them. "We will make them. Follow."

They lifted off the volcano with one beat of their wings and glided down to the beach, the red sprite close behind them.

They spent the peak of the day dredging up as many trivial details about the second planet's volcanoes as they could remember, doing their best to answer the red sprite's excited questions, and sculpting volcanoes out of sand.

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(Did y’all know that Venus’s volcanoes are totally different from Earth’s? Most of them are extremely wide and extremely flat and they’re called pancake volcanoes. It’s cool. We haven’t confirmed active volcanism in any of Venus’s volcanoes yet but we’ve found over a thousand probably-extinct ones and there are three that we’re pretty sure are currently active, we just haven’t proven it yet.)

(Next fic features Serizawa Who Is Not Dead and how Monarch at large is reacting to Ghidorah hanging around—not the local Isla de Mara outpost that’s been making memes out of Ghidorah, the main Monarch leadership.)

(Replies/reblogs are welcome and greatly appreciated! Check the “source” link below for my masterlist of KOTM and Rodorah fics, as well as my AO3 and Ko-fi links.)

#rodorah #godzilla #kotm #rodan #king ghidorah #ghidorah #fanfic #my writing #(not proofed because instant gratification)#(... but any bad grammar out of Ghidorah is because they're still figuring out how to speak pteranodon)#(also yes 'ghidorah spent some time ravaging venus before heading to earth' is a reference to three headed monster)#(aka the BEST godzilla movie accept no substitutes)

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ninjakittenarmy · 3 years

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One take that really frustrates me is the idea that there’s no American culture.

There are usually two flavors of this bullshit. One says that because the states are so different that there’s nothing to unify them besides the American state. That’s bullshit. The differences between Florida and California are significant, but far fewer than the differences between America as a whole and say, England.

Every country has regional differences, and naturally, those will be far more apparent if you live there. The differences between a Texan and a New Yorker are far less apparent to someone from another country unless they are familiar with both. There’s a reason so many people stereotype us as cowboys and the like, even though the Wild West was never the predominant culture here. It’s because westerns were marked heavily in the past and the people who actually meet Americans can’t always tell whether we’re from the appropriate region for that culture.

I had a professor recently who is from Argentina, and taught at the local community college (it’s on the east coast, I’d rather not specify the state). One day she asked where I was from, and I said I was local (I live in the county the college is based in). She said she thought I was from the south. My best guess is that my mother (who grew up in the south) has a bit of leftover accent that I never noticed, and I picked it up, but it’s not an unreasonable misconception regardless.

The other flavor is the idea that since the US population is mostly descended from immigrants and carry on their traditions, so it’s not a unique culture in its own right. You know what happens when a bunch of people from different places with different cultures start mixing and exchanging ideas and adopting traditions of each other’s culture? A new fucking culture. I don’t see anyone saying Latin American countries have no culture, and they formed the exact same way we did. Every country in the Americas is an immigrant melting pot. And so is every other culture on the planet, at some point in history. England alone is a combination of Normans, Britons, Saxons, and many others. There are no ethnicity homogeneous countries. The Americas are only singled out because of how widely the backgrounds of said immigrants are, as history most came from adjacent regions and ones from really distant ones tended to come either all at once (like the Turks to Anatolia) or in insignificant numbers. The Americas are in a prime location for Europe, Africa, and Asia, to migrate steadily, sometimes in waves, sometimes in streams.

What really bothers me is how many left wing people seem to view America as some capitalist abomination that wouldn’t exist if you stripped away all of the capitalism. This is not true at all. Yes, America has only existed under capitalism and is the main hub for it, but remember, Russia was an absolute monarchy for most of its history and has since transitioned to communism, then a false communist dictatorship, then to its current capitalist government. It remained definitively Russian through all of it. So many other countries have had radically different changes in government and cultural views on authority and the agency of the people in government without surrendering their culture.

I especially hate the idea that America ceasing to exist as a nation is an essential part of abolishing capitalism. It’s not, it won’t even help. Tell me, what happened to imperialism when Rome fell? It kept fucking going, that’s what. People who had enough resources raised enough money to start their own empires and do it all over again on an even larger scale. Rome falling didn’t end the concept of imperialism because it did nothing whatsoever to eliminate the mentality engraved in so many cultures across the world that one must strive via the conquest and subjugation of others. It also did nothing to eliminate ethnocentrism or xenophobia. Just the same, America falling will do nothing to hinder capitalism. The wealthy or whoever toppled them and claims their hordes of resources will raise armies and forge their own empires out of the scraps. I dare say it will be even worse now that the one thing limiting their ability to do so, the government and its laws and force of arms, is no longer a factor. And through the chaos, capitalism won’t slow at all, only who has the power in what area. It will be meaningless.

There’s also the fact that anti Americanism is frequently used by fascists in countries who advocate for homogeneous ethnostates and colonialist conservatives and upper class elites from the homelands of our ancestors to point at us and say that they’re progressive for opposing us. For example, how many times have you heard about tourists calling our versions of their food cheap, inferior mockeries of theirs? How do you think the people who have made that food for generations and cherish it as a part of their history and culture feel about that? A great many of immigrant and diasporic populations are descended from minorities and poor, working class people who fled persecution and poverty in their homelands. The examples I think of immediately are Italy and China.

Ever wonder why Chinese food in America is nothing like what’s eaten in most of China, according to most Mandarin speaking tourists? It’s because the majority of Chinese American populations in the US are Cantonese. No joke, I once met an exchange student from Hong Kong who said the food was very similar to the food he was used too.

Italian immigrants have historically been from Southern Italy. The north and south have very different cooking styles and foods. Southern Italian food historically had very little meat, as it was expensive. It’s much more common in the northern regions where it’s more abundant and the economy was/is better. Naturally, when they came here, they started using meat liberally in their food while using southern Italian cooking traditions.

This dispute over the quality of American food is but a microcosm of the inherent regressivism of Anti Americanism. It’s built upon the foundations of colonialist xenophobes bashing the people who came here because they made life shit for them there. By making it a cornerstone of Leftism, we feed into those attitudes and amplify the voices of the colonialists. We support the regressivism we’re supposed to be fighting. Anti Americanism isn’t an essential aspect of Leftism, required to be a #trueleftist, it’s a millstone that only hinders our efforts. A cancerous mass that saps resources from the essential parts of the body and inhibiting its ability to function.

#american culture #leftism #communism

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kuroopaisen · 3 years

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@kacchand (i couldn't tag your main but i wanted to make sure you saw this fdlkjfdlkj)

hello dear! i’m sorry it took me so long to respond to this dflskjfdlkfdj i decided to answer your ask in a text post so i can link my thoughts to yours more easily! also, i know i'm going to Ramble, so i wanted to be able to keep it under a cut sdlkfjd

Hi rowan!! I've just finished the final chapter of aot and I just wanted to ask your opinion on it!

(SPOILERS THAT DEPICT MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE STORY'S MEANING AHEAD. READ ONLY IF YOU'VE FINISHED THE CHAPTER)

(FR )

(THERE'S STILL TIME TO BACK OUT)

(DO IT NOW. SPOILER ALERT)

I'd also like to ask a follow up question about it, because it seems that I've come to a different concl. from many of my friends and I'm feeling dumb abt how i feel w it.

first of all (and i say this as sincerely as possible, and if i'm coming off as condesending please let me know hh), please don't feel dumb because you've come to a different conclusion :(

we all read media at different levels (i’ve been told it’s ‘not that deep’ before fdljkfsdlkj) and identify different aspects in it, so the fact that you've had a different experience to some of your friends is absolutely not a reflection on your intelligence. and if anyone's making you feel that way, drop their @. i just want to talk :) furthermore, you’re not wrong for responding to something emotionally, especially if it really... makes you uncomfortable, you know?

i'm from the PH & I've put off determining whether i'm comfy w the manga til the last chap,,,, but is it wrong that I can't shake the feeling that it's a justification of japanese expansionism and genocide? ik this manga has always been in the grey area, and that's what I love abt it! It often shows that no choice they make is absolutely good or bad, and does such a good job at showing you how each complex character came to that understanding (role of environment, etc...) but this last chapter felt too positive abt the rumbling? Like it was justified because paradis was able to advance and there wasn't much choice? idk.

that's totally valid! some of the best think pieces on the show i read mentioned that the concern with the narrative is less "is isayama a nazi sympathiser?" (he most likely isn't), but if he's a imperial japan apologist. and...

well, let's just say that my father is british, and when i was trying to say that colonisation was bad, using british india as an example, he said "well, we gave them railroads." it's... it's uncomfortable and gross and i think it encapsulates how countries with imperial pasts tend to talk about them; even if they don't officially endorse it, there's often a lot of talk about how "well colonialism was good for this country, actually--"

and if the manga felt like it was justifying japanese expansionism, then chances are it had elements that very much did point towards that. i've had a lot of trouble grappling with reiner, annie and bertolt, because they've existed in this grey area of 'victim of oppression' and 'war criminal'; and their existence raises the question of "do people who commit war crimes simply do what needs to be done?" and by victimising them it... it plays into the whole nuremberg defense of "i was just following orders". it's making you feel bad for the people committing said war crimes (and similarly with eren, and all the awful things he's done). but i'll get more into this point later dsfkjfd

i haven't read the last chapter yet (and don't worry about spoilers! i've been approaching aot from a very... specific perspective anyway, so i actually don't mind spoilers -- i read a bunch of analyses of the series before i'd even watched it hh), but... i think if it came off as too positive about, you know... an awful thing that happened, then it absolutely makes sense that you'd feel uncomfortable?

the modernisation narrative in general is one that always skeeves me out. it's one japanese imperialists use to justify the invasion of korea (and even those infamous tweets from the one account purported to be isayama talk about how the population of korea boomed under japanese imperial occupation, which... stop.)

it's also commonly invoked in cases of development. certain members of society (usually the poor), just 'had' to die for the good of the future. who gives a damn if they consent to that? they have to.

similarly, the 'we had no choice' narrative. that's... a concerning one that crops up time and again with history apologists, the argument that "oh if x country hadn't done y, then someone else would've!" or that acts of aggression were done as pre-emptive self-defence, which is so... ugh. i just. i just hate it.

It also feels really weird w the ymir and the whole loving fritz thing. i wish we got to see more of her thought process and what conclusion she came to that led her to destroying the power of the titans.

i... hate this so much. i get that abuse is complicated and victims often have multifaceted feelings towards their abusers, but... most people would focus on that in their story? the story would be about that? but instead, it's just... a thing in the history of the world and that's... icky.

also having the genesis of the titans come from a slave girl in love with her captor... there's many levels of ick to it and i highly doubt it was handled with the appropriate level of grace and sensitivity.

honestly, this might be one of the things that pissed me off the most because of how... contradictory her backstory was with That One Chapter (you know, instead of ymir crying because she wants to be free or because she’s been trapped she........ wants to see mikasa kiss eren’s decapitated head? i guess? what the fuck?)

idk...I just think that context is sometimes everything. and i understand that media can portray incorrect things,,,, and that isayama likely didn't intend for it to become a global sensation, but i guess i'm just uncomfortable w the right wing nazis getting a comfort book ahaha.

i totally get that! even if attack on titan is meant to be anti-fascists, the fact of the matter is... a lot of fascists love it. and relate to it. which is... alarming. especially given just how popular aot is worldwide.

it’s hard because before the ending, attack on titan did feel like it was more grey; i remember saying that i wouldn’t know how to feel about it until the ending because the story was either saying “the military is corrupt and war is hell”, or it was saying “the military is corrupt and war is hell, but it is necessary.”

still sorting out my thoughts, but yeah. I think i'm having a hard time understanding what they really accomplished with the rumbling and how they gave eren a sudden lelouch role and a lot of how they made it out to be a happy thing? perhaps I'm too biased to see it fully but to me it gives a "woah. eren was a hero. he saved us from destruction. those people needed to die for us to achieve this temporary peace and new start". i suppose the rumbling gave them a levelled playing ground?

OH MY GOOOOOD okay. i haven't finished code geass. but i really don't like lelouch. i mean... i think i just don't like characters that sacrifice other people for a purported 'greater good' (i could write an Essay about how much i hate erwin smith looking at him is enough to send me into an unhinged rage), but where i'm up to in the anime, i don't like the direction they're going with eren? i mean, i've never liked eren, but... that whole "martyr for the eldians" is just. ew. especially when you see several eldian characters disagree and resist him.

why does this one guy get to make choices for everyone else? because he’s sPeCiAL? fuck off

sorry for not being coherent. maybe i'm basing this too much on feelings ahaha. trust aot to finish it's scandalous run with a scandalous end.

no omg you're being perfectly coherent :( also, if anyone's making you feel bad or stupid for how you experience media, they’re... definitely not as smart as they think they are fdslskjfdlk.

i'm of that mind that, while media consumption is in part an intellectual exercise, it is inherently very emotional; narrative media tries to make us feel as much as it makes us think. that’s what stories are for, you know? intellectual analysis is well and good but what’s the point of a story if it doesn’t make you feel anything?

that's to say, i don't believe there's such thing as basing your opinion too much on feelings :') especially since it's your personal experience with a piece of media; you don't owe anyone 'objectivity' (which is always a farce when it comes to this sort of thing) or 'logical analysis', because nobody's got any right to criticise you for engaging with media the 'wrong way'.

tl;dr I feel like the mood was too celebratory abt the rumbling, and didn't entail enough on the tragedy so much that it felt like a justification for genocide and expansionism. how do you feel abt it's ending and the message it leaves? is isayama responsible to give a morally correct answer to the cycle of hatred? you're not obligated to answer! and sorry for the rambling.

hhh yeah i guess that’s the thing at the end of the day... is isayama responsible for giving a “morally correct” answer? no, but the way the ending plays out is very telling.

like armin thanking eren? mikasa’s e n t i r e character boiling down to being in love with a mass murderer no matter how poorly he’s treated her? and one could argue that kind of ending is supposed to be unsettling, supposed to hint that the cycle will just continue, but...

framing is everything. and it’s framed like a Good, Emotional Thing, Aren’t We So Grateful Eren Did All Those Awful Things

YI think I would've been fine if we got to see more of Eren's or Yif you have a different perspective on how eren is being portrayed please do share! I just felt really yucky watching armin say "thanks for murdering all those people for us" with love,,, I suppose he was trying to make eren feel better. ach maybe I'm just overreacting. idk. im dumb ahaha . i'll send this in anyway cuz I'd love to hear your take!

HHHHHHH i just hate eren and i never got him. i felt bad for him in the beginning, but he's always been too... violent for me. there was a very short period of time in season 2 where i felt bad for him, but otherwise it’s just been... ugh. the main three have always been the weakest part of the series imo, so it’s really not surprising they’re part of the reason the ending was so. bad.

and... well, that one infamous quote pretty much sums up my issue with armin. he's supposed to be the 'intelligent' one, but he's hopelessly devoted to a homicidal maniac with whom he has a very artificial, unbelievable bond with.

at the end of the day, the "thank you for becoming our monster" thing just makes it seem like attack on titan's core message is "war is horrible, but it is necessary." it feels like it's justifying massacre. and while fiction is fiction, and sometimes it's as simple as that, i think something as politically loaded as attack on titan needs to be looked at with a critical lens when discussing what it’s trying to say or what it means.

do i think it makes someone a Bad Person for liking aot or being attached to it in some way? no, because that’s dumb, and what media someone likes =/= their Moral Goodness TM. ofc trends are a thing and certain pieces of media appeal to certain types of people, but it’s a false equivalency that misses the point.

but by that same breath, nobody is wrong or stupid or has Less Valid Opinions just because what they took away from it makes them uncomfortable.

i’m sorry this is So Long i have so many thoughts about this dskljfslkj

but at the end of the day,

levi sexy

#kacchan 💕#rowan rambles #rowan watches attack on titan #attack on titan spoilers #attack on titan tw

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kc-anathema · 4 years

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Sorry--is this what they mean by “hiding in the comments”? I had to scroll through quite a bit of adult content on your blog before I finally found where this had been buried. I mean, I’m glad you made mention so I could see it, but not even a reblog for my responses on the original post? I, at least, had that much courtesy.

Maybe if I was in sexy lingerie, you would have reblogged. Ah well. I’ll cite myself in case you want to try again with more effort. I’ll just reiterate the one major point--I have one colleague dead of covid from my own department. He left behind a wife and children. Seeing someone not return does make my weak little heart a little more afraid.

Now as for your post...I’m sorry, I just have to do this. It’s in my blood.

Now I’m sorry you clearly had deficient teachers. Sad to say, there are lemons in every job. My principal did a very good job of rousting ours out, but maybe your district(s?) didn’t.

Now, note 1: yes, I’m afraid of contracting a disease that strikes asthmatics (me), those deficient in vitamin D (again, me), and those with underlying health conditions (again me me me). Blame my genetics.

I also don’t like using children as guinea pigs, but that’s just me, and I suppose that’s incidental to the conversation when there’s so much vitriol aimed at teachers. Perhaps, when you love the kids more than you hate us, you may feel differently.

On your next point, “time to take a pay cut” implies that we haven’t already.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/01/29/what-industry-has-seen-pay-fall-below-average-most-states-public-schools/

Now I don’t want to dive into the math and averages inherent in the “high schools get paid close to 6 figures” ridiculousness, but I do want to note two points:

1. Those are in big blue states with some of the largest cities, where the cost of living is much higher. In your own Illinois, it’s--oh, but the average pay in Illinois is not nearly triple digits. Your math teacher was as good as your English teacher. No wonder you’re so irate.

2. At my district, we cap at around 65,000...after thirty years.The teachers making big bucks are probably in their seventies. A third of teachers tend to bail in their third or fourth year because of all the issues in education. So the vast majority of us don’t see that kind of pay.

Now, let me try to explain something here...

You obviously hate my ilk--completely understandable as I don’t like many teachers. I and my handful of friends in my school tend to assign metric tons of writing--to the point that I am grading essays and paragraphs and sentences every day. I’d say most of my colleagues in my school teach a lot of writing, too. I see them at PLC and we note who’s loaded with grading and resubmissions, and who just talks a good game. Many teachers stick to multiple choice and other easily graded assignments. There are teachers who play guitar to their students and don’t teach anything.

I’m sure you’ve met a couple in your time. In short, those teachers do indeed suck.

But rather than attacking a population of roughly 3.2 million adults in the US, wouldn’t it make more sense to sway this dense block of registered voters over to the right? I mean, you already have many, many conservatives in this demographic. We exist--right wing libertarian in the English classroom at your service! But instead you attack, and belittle, and threaten our pay. You use the bludgeon of punitive group testing instead of helping us push out our worst colleagues sitting at their desk to suck up a paycheck.

Don’t come at me with merit pay. I have heard that argument from people who have proven they only understand this problem as it has been framed by the media. I don’t want merit pay. I should--I had the second highest scores in my district. But its fool’s gold. A few bad teachers below me and I’m sunk.

There are ways to fire or push out bad teachers. I’m not going to go into the arguments of how to do it, but the route exists. The issue is not that.

The issue is the hate, anger, and ignorance about this work by people willing to think they know enough without much more research than a lazy English teacher would accept for a sourced essay. You would probably know about that more than I would. The issue is the hubris, the inaccuracies, the unwillingness to educate oneself and the willingness to accept data that should be very clearly inaccurate.

I still vote conservative often, despite the best efforts of your own ilk. It’s a shame that this issue tends to push me away from my preferred party. And I wish you would realize that.

Then again...having scrolled through your blog, between the butts and breasts and the calling of banning religion whole cloth, I noticed you reblogged this image:

A little more self-awareness, old sport?

#bitter teacher #please forgive my own typos #Muphry's law and all lol

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leviathan-supersystem · 5 years

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i feel like people need to get a better understanding of how certain reactionary memeplexes, particularly those relating to conspiracy theories, work.

okay, remember how westpal shut up real quick when i mentioned that his avatar was from the cover of Behold a Pale Horse? i suspect that’s because he has some level of self awareness, in spite of it all- here’s a brief summary of the book’s relevant segments, swiped from wikipedia:

In Behold a Pale Horse Cooper proposed that AIDS was the result of a conspiracy to decrease the populations of blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals.[8] In 2000 South Africa's Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang received criticism for distributing the chapter discussing this theory to senior South African government officials.[13]Nicoli Nattrass, a longtime critic of AIDS denialists, criticized Tshabalala-Msimang for lending legitimacy to Cooper's theories and disseminating them in Africa.[10]

UFOs, aliens and the Illuminati

Cooper caused a sensation in Ufology circles in 1988 when he claimed to have seen secret documents while in the Navy describing governmental dealings with extraterrestrials, a topic on which he expanded in Behold a Pale Horse.[6] (By one account he served as a "low level clerk" in the Navy, and as such would not have had the security clearance needed to access classified documents.[14]) UFOlogists later asserted that some of the material that Cooper claimed to have seen in Naval Intelligence documents was actually plagiarized verbatim from their research, including several items that the UFOlogists had fabricated as pranks.[15] Don Ecker of UFO Magazine ran a series of exposés on Cooper in 1990.[16]

Cooper linked the Illuminati with his beliefs that extraterrestrials were secretly involved with the United States government, but later retracted these claims. He accused Dwight D. Eisenhower of negotiating a treaty with extraterrestrials in 1954, then establishing an inner circle of Illuminati to manage relations with them and keep their presence a secret from the general public. Cooper believed that aliens "manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religions, magic, witchcraft, and the occult", and that even the Illuminati were unknowingly being manipulated by them.[6]

Cooper described the Illuminati as a secret international organization, controlled by the Bilderberg Group, that conspired with the Knights of Columbus, Masons, Skull and Bones, and other organizations. Its ultimate goal, he said, was the establishment of a New World Order. According to Cooper the Illuminati conspirators not only invented alien threats for their own gain, but actively conspired with extraterrestrials to take over the world.[6] Cooper believed that James Forrestal's fatal fall from a window on the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Hospital was connected to the alleged secret committee Majestic 12, and that JASON advisory group scientists reported to an elite group of Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations executive committee members who were high-ranking members of the Illuminati.[2][3]

Cooper also claimed that the antisemitic conspiracy theory forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was actually an Illuminati work, and instructed readers to substitute "Sion" for "Zion", "Illuminati" for "Jews", and "cattle" for "Goyim".[3][17][18]

okay so you get the gist here. the usual dumb shit you see in the right-wing conspiracy theory zone.

now, to be clear, i’m not dismissing the idea that people, and the ruling class in particular, might, at times, conspire- indeed, i’m about to go out on a limb here and suggest there may in fact be something to the notion that AIDS was deliberately manufactured, or at least that the government was guilty of severe purposeful neglect.

this is not synonymous with believing in illuminati or UFO crap without evidence- though the purpose of this book, i suspect, is to try to tie those two things indelibly together in people’s minds. not to mention the obvious barely disguised buildup to antisemitism at the end there.

the purpose is twofold- the first to discredit any investigation into there being more of a story behind AIDS, the second to try to lure left-wing leaning people toward right-wing extremism, the mechanism being obvious- first, they’re lured in by wanting to know more about the possibility that AIDS was deliberately engineered to target black and gay communities, something which obviously would have more appeal to those on the left. once lured in, it hits them with the alien bullshit, as well as the inherently reactionary illuminati nonsense, then tops that off by presenting literally the entire text of the protocols of the elders of fucking zion to really start bringing them into the reactionary worldview- but, knowing that the person reading is likely from a left-wing background, an extremely weak effort is made to disguise the antisemitism- “oh, it wasn’t about jewish people, oh no, it was about uhhhhhhhhhhh illuminati” and then if they swallow that, it’s only a short hop from there to “nevermind, it was about jewish people after all.” it’s a tactic used to gradually acclimate people to antisemitism. manipulative “milk before meat” tactics.

you can see the results of this play out in action with Tila Tequila- obviously she didn’t pop out of the womb seig heiling, and there was quite a bit of buildup in the form of new-agey anti-illuminati conspiracy theorism before she became a full-fledged genocidal neonazi.

and the thing is, if there had been an intervention at the right time, she could have been saved from that, before becoming completely conditioned into an ideology which is immensely harmful to so many people.

so, if possible, it’s good to try to ascertain how deep in someone is- have they been completely re-conditioned into a hardline reactionary? or is there still time to help them see what’s happening to them, and stop it?

for example here: [link] this person is clearly deeply in the clutches of reactionary psychological warfare, but it seemed to me like there might still be some hope for them, so i tried to intervene to help them get a better understanding of the nature of the ruling class and so forth.

but, if you’re going to intervene in this way, you need to do some background research first- just going in there and shouting “illuminati fake!” won’t cut it, especially because there was, in fact, an actual historical group called the illuminati, and to effectively grapple with this kind of thing, you’re going to need to have an understanding of what that group’s history was, and how they became such a boogeyman in the reactionary narrative in the first place. to explore this, let’s look at what Behold A Pale Horse has to say about it- which, interestingly, is shockingly little- the name “Weishaupt” (the founder of the actual irl illuminati) appears only 10 times in the whole text:

Adam Weishaupt, a young professor of canon law at Ingolstadt University in Germany, was a Jesuit priest and an initiate of the Illuminati. The branch of the Order he founded in Germany in 1776 was the same Illuminati previously discussed.

the “branch” in question is actually just. the illuminati. it wasn’t a “branch” of a larger pre-existing movement, as Milton here is claiming, and indeed, he never provides any meaningful evidence of any pre-existing illuminati before weischaupt’s group. in fact, he points to the lack of evidence prior to then as proof of how strong their oath of silence was. of course he does.

Weishaupt advocated "abolition of all ordered national governments, abolition of inheritance, abolition of private property, abolition of patriotism, abolition of the individual home and family life as the cell from which all civilizations have stemmed, and abolition of all religions established and existing so that the Luciferian ideology of totali- tarianism may be imposed on mankind."

In the same year that he founded the Illuminati he published Wealth of Nations, the book that provided the ideological foundation for capitalism and for the Industrial Revolution. It is no accident that the Declaration of Independence was written in the same year. On the obverse of the Great Seal of the United States the wise will recognize the all-seeing eye and other signs of the Brotherhood of the Snake

this is interesting here because there’s a strange tension between the anti-communism of contemporary reactionism, and the anti-liberalism and anti-republicanism of the earlier reactionary movements, which anti-illuminati ideology is an echo of.

the first anti-illuminati conspiracy theorists was the reactionary monarchist priest Agustin Barruel, and all anti-illuminism traces back particularly to his book Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. inerestingly, he did not at any point in this book accuse them of ruling the world, or wanting to establish “totalitarian” rule! quite the opposite in fact- the illuminati and other enlightenment movements of the time were accused of "conspiracy of impiety" against God and Christianity, the "conspiracy of rebellion" against kings and monarchs, and "the conspiracy of anarchy" against society in general. if you understand anything about Augustin Barruel’s politics, you’ll understand that Augustin was if anything, profoundly in favor of “totalitarianism”, particularly that of the king and the church. he wrote angry screeds against the illuminati precisely because they were anti-totalitarian, and espoused democratic values.

but over time, this reactionary social current had to change with the times. thus the strange tension between accusing weishaupt of both wanting to abolish private property and being behind the publication of Wealth of Nations.

for the record, no, i can’t find any evidence that weishaupt published Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations- but that accusation is nonetheless much more in the spirit of Augustin Barruel’s original accusations that the illuminati were behind the spread of enlightenment values, while the accusation he was against private property sits as an obvious later attempt to incongruously graft anti-communist reactionary talking points onto framework which originated in a reactionary anti-republican pro-monarchist context.

its interesting to see how a rectionary memeplex which was, in it’s origins, overtly pro-ruling class, and overtly anti-populist- as anti-illuminism was in it’s origins in the work of Augustin Barruel- over time get dressed up more and more with the character of a kind of artificial class-consciousness, where a short-lived progressive discussion group has been mythologized into this sort of decoy mirage stand-in for the ruling class, to divert people from developing any real understanding of the actual capitalist ruling class.

at any rate, it’s important to understand the origin an nature of this reactionary social current if you want to effectively help people who are caught up in it- to show them this history so they can see how, in their attempt to oppose the ruling class, they’ve been suckered into a reactionary ideology which is, in both it’s historical origins and contemporary functions, engineered to uphold the ruling class.

#longpost #antisemitism

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qqueenofhades · 5 years

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Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day.

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas.

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

#history #rant #long post #i'm sure i have more to say #but that's enough for now #anonymous #ask

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thefantheorist · 5 years

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Monster Arm Part 3: Tying Up Loose Ends

Hello all my fellow Fan Theorists! Today I am finally gonna be putting out the long overdue Monster Arm Part 3 theory that I promised @sge8 I would do. So thank you very much for your request and sorry it took so long to get out.

Anywho, let’s talk about Eclipsa for a second, and if you haven’t seen up to the most current episode in season 4 I’m gonna slap a big SPOILER WARNING on here just in case so proceed at your own risk.

Okay, Eclipsa’s presence in season four of the show has pretty much served to turn everything we thought we knew about the mewman hierarchy on its head. She doesn’t exactly seem like she is evil, however, she also doesn’t seem all that innocent. I mean, her monster husband has been confirmed to have feasted on a bunch of innocent mewmans. But honestly, I can’t quite seem to feel bad for them seeing as literally half the mewman population are complete and total dicks to all monsters, even peaceful monsters like Buffrog. Moving on. It seems as though the show is trying really hard to convince us that Eclipsa is good and honestly, I believe that she is. Or at least she is trying to be. But whatever the case, her being the central antagonist of the series is wildly ambitious of them, seeing as they only have like half a season left to wrap up the plot lines of Meteora’s magic powers, Marco’s monster arm thing, Moon’s arc with the old mewman loyalists, Mina Loveberry (who just kinda sprang out of nowhere and seems like she is going to be one of the series’ antagonists), the whole issue with the wand and the death spell, and all the filler crap they’ve poured into this season even though I still love all of it. Just, the fact that we still seriously don’t know who the primary antagonist is means that Eclipsa is probably not going to be evil, since it would mean that there would be yet another unresolved plot line that we have to deal with. So with that being said, let’s try to figure out what is going on with this season and what is going to happen next.

So, I already talked, in detail, about the Monster Arm plot line in the first two parts of this theory, here’s the links if you wanna check that out:

Monster Arm Part 1 Theory

Monster Arm Part 2 Theory

So leaving that plot line behind, we are going to talk about an easy plot thread that I think we can tie up: Star/Marco/Tom/Kelly love square(?). I am sad to say it, but in tv shows, especially those aimed and younger demographics, the writers have typically already established which couple is going to be endgame and while that can fluctuate over time, the writers of the story usually stick to the first couple. Why do you think they booted Jackie off the show as quickly as humanly possible once Star found herself a new love interest? Either way, I am pretty sure that Star and Marco are set to be endgame, but really, it doesn’t matter to this theory so maybe I’m wrong! And if you are a Tomstar shipper or a Kelco... Melly... Marcelly--yeah I like that best-- shipper or a Starco shipper, I love all of you and all of your ships are great so please don’t hate me. Either way, this is one of the least important theorizable elements of the show for me and for this theory so let’s move on.

Mina Loveberry... she’s pretty much the wildcard of the situation because I literally have no clue what she is going to do half the time, aside from overreact and punch something. However, I do have some speculations as to where her plot line is going to go. So, it seems that Mina is crafting a large suit of armor for... someone, probably one of the people who fought in the war against Globgor and is completely loyal to the throne of Mewni and former Queen Moon. I also think that they are someone who has a great power like Mina does, except they are much stronger, and they are obviously someone that Mina loves and respects, so maybe a family member or former colleague or something, however, that doesn’t really matter. What is important here is that we remember that Mina holds to her belief that Queen Eclipsa is a traitor and that Moon is the rightful heir to the throne.

Alright next: Eclipsa. Like I said before, I definitely don’t think that Eclipsa is going to be an antagonist, but I also don’t think that she is going to be aligned with Star when it gets down to it. Eclipsa, while not wanting to have conflict between the monsters and humans, definitely has a preference towards the monsters, since they respect her more and actually treat her with kindness, but also because she has a kindred spirit with them and whatever happened in the past with Globgor, which seemed to have been pretty bad, Eclipsa sided with him rather than the mewman people, so I suspect that when push comes to shove, Eclipsa is going to protect the monsters rather than the mewmans, which is important for reasons that I will get into in a minute.

Speaking of Globgor, we already know that in the past he killed many mewmans, I suspect because he was protecting Eclipsa, but what does that mean for the show going forward? Well it seems to me that when Globgor is let out of his crystal prison, which he will be I can promise you that if anything, then he will probably be fighting alongside Eclipsa and the monsters in what I imagine is going to be a giant civil war. Yeah, you heard right Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Civil War is upon us, with one side being the mewmans, led by Mina Loveberry and the person in the giant armor, and the other side being the monsters, led by Eclipsa and Globgor.

Now I’m sure after leveling all of these lengthy claims at you, you’re a bit skeptical, so let me back this up a bit. So we know that monster and mewman tensions are high amongst the adult generation in the show, I mean, they had a whole episode centered around it in Cornball.

I mean, pretty much the whole episode is like this. So we know that monster and mewman tensions are high. We also know that most of the mewmans don’t like Eclipsa, I mean take your pick of pretty much any season 4 episode with her in it and you’ll figure that out pretty quickly. Even in the newest episode, Queen-Napped, where they seem to be taking a liking to her, that is only because she got kidnapped. And even then, Ponyhead had to lie to the mewmans to make them think that Eclipsa’s life was on the line and had to live stream the gang trying to save her in order for them to get anyone to care. So there’s that, but there’s also the fact that most of the old mewman subjects have just resorted to Anarchy. Oh and also there is this line from Moon at the end of Ghost of Butterfly Castle.

Segue to...

Moon. What is her role in all of this. Well, aside from the fact that she has created a camp of Mewmans who all would rather go back to their lives living without monsters, than try to assimilate and change, she doesn’t exactly seem to be doing much in this season. Unlike in the past seasons, where Moon was always a very active player in the final episodes, I don’t think that she is going to have that central of a role in season 4, partly because I think that the cast of characters is getting too cramped, but also because of the aforementioned picture. This picture seems to tell us what Moon and her mentality are about this war and her place in it. When the time comes, she’ll want to avoid the fight and conflict, much like she did in the final battle with Toffee, and her only real goal in the matter will be to protect her family, because that is who Moon truly cares about. Sure she cares about her people, but she doesn’t care enough about them to interfere in a war, especially if it means losing someone she loves again. Speaking of, what about Star? Where is she going to be in all of this? Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that Star--and Marco, Tom, Janna, and Kelly probably--will be stuck in the middle. The new generation of people who are going to stop the fighting and save the world. The most accepting generation. The tech obsessed, rebellious, post-millennials, you might say. *cough cough* gen Z *cough cough*

Yeah... if you didn’t get the symbolism this show was trying to hammer into your skull, then this is what it is. Now this isn’t just speculation, the show pretty much blatantly says it in the Cornball episode.

So now we’ve got all of those plot threads wrapped up, but what is happening with Meteora. Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that the “extremely powerful magic spells that haven’t been used for centuries” is Meteora, and if it isn’t then Christ does this show have a problem with too many antagonists. However, I can’t tell you for sure where Meteora’s story is headed. The best that I can do is suspect that either Meteora’s story is going to be happening concurrently with the civil war that I mentioned, or it’s going to end with Glossarick sending Meteora back in time to grow up as Heinous, which would be why she stayed alive for all those years since her parents were frozen in the crystals, which is why Glossarick is training her to do magic in the first place. I like the last one better because it is just inherently more interesting, but it probably isn’t going to happen. But moving on now to the thing I titled this whole theory on: Monster Arm.

Yeah I know I said that I was gonna drop it, but I have to tie this all back together. Remember how I said that Star and Marco would probably be in the middle of this civil war and all, well I do think that will be the case, however, I think that there is more in store for Marco. Marco has this innate pull towards the darkness and dark magic. Remember his wand?

Yeah, I’m definitely not the first person to point this out, but those little bat wings seem oddly out of place, until you look at the title card:

The star inside of the ‘r’ in Star’s name obviously correlates to her wand, the little skull that dots the ‘i’ in evil correlates to Ludo (remember the first Quest Buy episode where Ludo tries to use Star’s dying wand and a little skull comes out of it), but the little wing on the ‘e’ in evil doesn’t correlate to any of the wand’s former users, or even Ludo in his dream sequence about the wand, but it does match up with the little bat wings on Marco’s wand. Essentially, the title card is telling us how this show is going to end. In the end, presumably in this civil war between mewmans and monsters, Marco is going to get corrupted by Eclipsa’s magic, perhaps because she uses that dark spell, that seems to be important again, on him or some other entity and it drives him towards evil, and after he turns, the finale of the show will be about Marco and Star battling it out

Star vs the Forces of Evil

Star vs Marco

Thank you guys so so much for reading all the way through this, I know it was a long post. Finishing up this post was actually really tough for me because I absolutely love this show and I am so sad that it is going to be ending, but I genuinely hope that the finale for this season lets the show go out on a bang and not get bogged down by the multitude of characters. I know that this theory couldn’t address all of the plot lines and characters in the show, like Janna and Marco’s family on earth, but I hope it at least gave you something to chew on. Like I said before, I don’t think that Eclipsa is going to be evil, especially now that it seems like Mina is going to be a pretty heavy antagonist. Honestly, I did my best to give all of you a theory that tried to tie up all the loose ends of this series, but I really can’t, especially with the Meteora thing. Also, would you guys like the ending where Meteora gets sent back in time (since the whole time travel episode with Glossarick made it an actual possibility)? So that’s all that I got for you guys today. Thank you all again for sticking with me and I hope you all have a wonderful week.

Monster Arm Part 1 Theory

Monster Arm Part 2 Theory

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whatamessz · 5 years

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The former Lives of Murdoc A. Niccals (pt. 2)

pt. 1 is here

I’m glad you all are interested, so here is the next part! I’d also like to add that, in this pt as well as pt 1, I tried to find parallels to Murdoc’s canon biography (or fanon, in one or two cases), so have fun searching and interpreting or just ask me.

Also this time I’ll only cover one era. I know I said I thought about Murdoc being a fellow of Aleister Crowley and him fighting in World War II and I wrote several approaches, but even if there are defo interesting parallels in Murdoc’s biography to Crowley’s (not only with the whole occultism but also about Crowley being bisexual and working his ways around it with magic rituals or a wild stay in Mexico or him being a mountaineer that let me think of Murdoc’s trip to the Andes etc etc etc) I struggled finding interesting significance for Murdoc as a backround figure in that life. Still lmk if you want to hear my attempts.

There are some CW’s, so take care: mentions of period typical homophobia; mentions of brief Na/zi party sympathies (I hope you see how I don’t include that for shits n’ giggles)

Between World Wars (1925 - 1933)

Interesting and troubling times that touch on a few points I’d like to address. From around 1900 to 1933 Berlin was the epicenter of one of the first global gay and trans rights movements. Curtesy to several historical figures, but especially the doctor and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who opened his “Institut für Sexualwissenschaft” (Institute for Sexology) in 1919 (if you watched/read “The Danish Girl” or know about Lili Elbe, you might know about the institute too). His theory was, that trans- and homosexuality weren’t chosen or a disease, but inherent and therefore those affected deserved rights and support. Hirschfeld gathered a broad circle of supporters and worked closely with women’s rights activists. The institute harbored the largest library on the subject at the time.

The ultimate goal of Hirschfeld and his like-minded colleagues was the abolishment of § 175 (effective from 1871 to 1994) of the german criminal code, which penalized homosexual encounters.

The institute even survived World War I. By the end of the 19th century, Berlin already had its own, surprisingly public ball culture, but Hirschfeld’s yearlong efforts as well as the thriving economy of the Weimar Republic liberated the social climate for queer people in Berlin a lot more. In the 1920’s, Berlin had the world’s biggest gay- and lesbian quarter. That and the overll party scene attracted an international clientele.

Enter Murdoc. Born around 1900 into GB’s working class, on top of that, struggling with the norms and expectations of a heteronormative life style pretty early (my interpretation from all the canon hints will always be he’s bi or pan). In GB, it was possible to legally pursue homosexual acts since 1885 through section 11 (pls correct me if I tell bs here). London still had it’s own, vibrant queer culture at the time, but afaik it was a more repressed than in Berlin (again, tell me if I am wrong).

1914 WWI broke out. Reportedly, even minors as young as 16 were drafted for military service. I imagine Murdoc was about to be drafted in 1917/18 but was caught fooling around with another boy and therefore, while not strictly punished, found inept for military service. In November 1918 the war ended, but Murdoc faced more and more pressure from his surroundings bc his preferences had become known, so he decided to find his luck in Berlin. And he probably did in the gay party scene of the city.

Downsides of this scenario? Two major points:

The antisemitism of 19th century was still very present. There were so many famous jewish artists, doctors, scientists, writers etc. assembled in Berlin who had immensely shaped the cultural progress of the time, but still they were an easy scapegoat.

Second point was, that the economy wasn’t thriving for a long time. The majority of Berlins population lived under gruesome circumstances in poverty and criminality was at it’s peak (something I imagine Murdoc would have struggled with too). In 1929 the Great Depression hit Germany too and it ultimately helped the political right wing (the german Na/zi party N/SDAP) rise, like crisis are prone to do. This is kinda bleak now, but I find it hard to discuss away Murdoc’s former canon probable right-wing sympathies, or at the very least ignorance. So this is where my suggestion now comes from, that he might first sympathized with the rising party, that got elected into the german government in 1933. That was until he had to realize that people like him where among the very first victims of the new movement and I think he had to learn that the hard way. As soon as the N/SDAP got elected, a mob of Na/zis raided Hirschfeld’s institute, waving flags and shouting parols, not only bc of his advocacy for queer people’s rights, but also bc he was jewish. Hirschfeld fled into exile and never returned. His remarkable library got publicly burned in May 1933 and §175 was aggravated later. After that, I imagine that Murdoc had an unpleasant encounter with a few rightwing lads that made him finally change his mind. He returned to GB quickly and later got drafted into the British army. Members of the LGBTQ+ community in Germany finally were pursued and interned in concentration camps, flagged with a pink triangle.

Ok, I used it this time to talk about a period I really care about and I used to do a lot of research back in uni, but I still think this could fit Murdoc’s characterization.

I can’t make promises on my motivation, but if you have any more suggestions or want me to cover a certain period, just tell me.

Tell me if you find inaccuracies too, I love to learn.

#murdoc niccals #murdoc gorillaz #gorillaz #plastic beach #cw #tw #my fic #still not a fic but fairly long #text post

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arlingtonpark · 6 years

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SNK 105 Review

Alright, this is it: Isayama is finally starting to pull back the curtain to reveal what’s been going on behind the scenes of this whole story arc.

The dealer is about to show their hand; let’s see how much I won:

F----K!!1! G--damn it! What the f----k!?

Life hates me. I know it does. I know it does because I saw the fan-made typeset, saw something that made me concluded I had been vindicated, and was starting to feel like a competent person for once in my lifethen blind-sided by that reveal of Zeke.

So, yeah, I suck. What else is new?

Let’s do a rundown of my scorecard:

Everything else aside, I’ll at least take solace in the fact that I was right about the letter. The idea of Eren communicating with Zeke through the postal system never sat right with me, it just seemed like such an inherently insecure and unsafe method. If, hypothetically, instead of mailing the letter to Zeke, Eren sent it to an ally holed up in a safe house somewhere and then they delivered it across the ocean to Paradis…yeah, that’s much more secure than just sending it and leaving it up to the fates to decide what happens.

Nope, it turns out the actual method of communication that they used is even more out of left field than snail mail. So Zeke has devotees now? I mentioned a Cult of Eren in the past, but apparently it was the Cult of Zeke I should’ve been watching out for. There’s nothing more to say about this other than the obligatory plea for an explanation sometime down the road.

Speaking of predictions, do I win points for foreseeing that the way things were going the only thing left to do was for the Survey Corps to just board ship and haul ass? I said that was what would happen unless Isayama threw in some curveball like Double Agent Zeke, and…what’s that? Oh, so I get nothing? Alright, fine. I framed it as an either/or and it ended up being both, so that makes sense.

This series has this way of being both predictable and unpredictable at the same time. That nothing else could happen but for the Survey Corps to retreat to their ship and leave with maybe someone dying was completely foreseeable. And, I am now forced to admit, the fact that Zeke was working with Paradis was also completely foreseeable. But both of these things playing out was, in my mind, unexpected and unpredictable.

That’s one of this series’ strengths: it still can manage to have a surprise in store even when you think you have it figured out.

Even more talk of predictions! I speculated earlier about what I jokingly called “the cult of Eren,” a hypothetical faction of right-wing zealots who take Eren’s creed of fighting too far. This was more of a wish than a prediction. I wanted this to happen because it would make the story sooo much more interesting. (Not that it wasn’t already interesting!) Eren’s part in all this is tba, but I’m already jumping for joy because (drum roll please) ladies and gentlemen, we got right-wing nationalists!

Not only that, but I speculated on just how pervasive this nationalist sentiment was, saying (IIRC) that it was probably a large part of the general population and especially of the military. Welp, turns out I was righter even beyond my wildest dreams because it turns out everyone in the SC except our heroes is drinking that nationalist kool-aid.

Floch is apparently a leading figure amongst at least the right-wing SC members; you can tell because of his Trumpian hairstyle because he’s the only member of this faction whose name we know. This faction is clearly not going anywhere. In fact, I think it’ll play a prominent role in the final story arc and that means Floch will probably be important, too.

We’re already seeing the roots of conflict between him and Jean. Earlier, Jean was the one who butt heads with Floch over military tactics, and here, while Floch is reveling in victory, Jean is the person the story offers up as the one to present the opposing perspective. And not long after, when Floch proposes throwing Gabi and Falco overboard, Jean is the one to object.

The only way this could potentially be more interesting is if this conflict were centered on the future of the soul of the SC. It makes sense that Floch’s group would want to increase their power within the SC by moving their allies into positions of leadership. It also makes sense that the more reasonable members would be against this, and that Jean would be a leading figure among these moderates given the stature he already has within the Corps. Two people who’re on the same side but with opposing viewpoints is always an interesting setup. They can’t fight each other physically, which means this’ll be more a clash of worldviews and wits.

And that means politics! Hooray for politics! This is never going to happen.

Let’s delve deeper into this nationalist rabbit hole.

Nationalism is an ideology that centers around the concept of “nations,” distinct groups of people that share an affinity. Such an affinity can be historical, cultural, or racial in nature. Nationalism holds that individual needs both are and should be seen as subordinate to the needs of the nation, and that all nations have a right to self-determination, ideally in the form of a sovereign government through which they can tend to their own affairs without outside interference.

Eren Yeager is a nationalist.

I’m serious. Eren is fighting specifically for the freedom of the Eldian nation, and in the name of this holy crusade he is willing to manipulate his friends and kill innocent men, women, and even children; his actions betray a very nationalistic way of thinking. He may not be writing love letters to Ymir like Floch is, (you know he’s doing it) but he is possessed of a nationalist mindset nonetheless.

Before continuing on, a brief word of caution: please be careful not to confuse patriotism (love for one’s country) with nationalism. (love for one’s nation) What Eren is doing is not comparable to a soldier who will valiantly give up their lives to protect the citizens of his home country. Eren is fighting for his nation, not his country. It is the freedom of Eldia, as Zeke put it, that they are fighting for, not the freedom of Paradis. It’s an easy mistake to make, so I just wanted to nip this in the bud before moving on.

Let’s talk about Eren’s beneficent audacity.

First, let’s review the known facts: Eren Yeager contrived a confrontation with Reiner and Falco in the basement of an apartment building. At the outset of this meeting, he emphasized that the building was occupied by men, women, and children, and implicitly threatened to transform into his titan form, an act that would’ve killed most everyone in the building. He did this to gain Reiner’s compliance. At the end of the meeting, without provocation, Eren transformed anyway and killed most everyone in the building. He then turned his sights on his actual target: the civilian and military leadership of Marley, a country that Paradis is arguably at war with. He killed them along with an unknown number of civilians. He did it for his race.

For me, the source of apprehension here is Eren destroying the apartment. Civilians were killed by falling debris and may have even been killed by Eren directly depending on who exactly was in the section of the stands he belly flopped onto, but the thing that earned Eren a place in hell (right next to Armin) is his treatment of the apartment dwellers.

In my last post, I talked about the need to distinguish between an excuse and a justification.

With a justification, it is argued that a seemingly bad act was actually a good act. The circumstance that makes it a good act is the justification.

With an excuse, it is not denied that what happened was bad, but a reason is put forth that at least partially absolves the perpetrator of blame. That reason is the excuse.

Killing innocent people (I hope we can all agree) is never justified. It can only ever be excused, and, unless there’s something to this that hasn’t been revealed to us yet, the excuse that Eren and Zeke put forth here just isn’t going to cut it.

The Eldians have legitimate grievances here. The world wants them dead, recourse to violence is justified here. What isn’t justified here is the callous disregard for the inherent dignity of others.

Eren took hostages. That is dehumanizing and demeaning to the inherent dignity of the hostages.

Reiner and Falco posed no immediate threat to him, but he transformed anyway. He either didn’t care if they died, or he wanted them to die. Again, dehumanizing, demeaning.

And those people Eren took hostage? His demands were met, but he killed them anyway. Not because they were actively impeding him in any way, but because they just happened to physically be in his way. But they weren’t in his way because of bad luck, they were in his way because Eren chose to place them in his way. He wanted them to be in a position to die if he transformed so they could serve as bargaining chips to force Reiner’s submission. Then he transformed knowing full well that because of the way events had been manipulated (with him as the manipulator) people would die. They were marked for death. Eren branded them himself. Once again, dehumanizing, demeaning.

But you wanna know what’s especially sickening about this? Those people Eren dehumanized and demeaned?

They were Eldians.

Those were Eldians that he dehumanized, demeaned, and ultimately threw in the garbage bin.

It was an Eldian apartment building in an Eldian internment zone. It was Eldian property he destroyed, and it was Eldian lives that he extinguished, and it is justified in his mind by the prospect of a free Eldian race. In other words:

He killed Eldians in the name of freeing the Eldian people.

The Eldian people have been demeaned by just about everyone. The Marleyans use them as weapons. Throughout the world, they are held in internment zones. Gabi talks of being figuratively (and maybe even literally) spat upon by others. The list of people who disregard the inherent dignity of Eldians is a long one.

You can add Eren Yeager to that list now too.

Dehumanizing Eldians is wrong because dehumanizing people in general is wrong. It’s wrong when the Marleyans do it, it’s wrong when Eren does it, it’s wrong.

It’s just…wow. Just wow. Eren is fighting for a free Eldia, and yet here he is, dehumanizing Eldians, not giving a shit about them as people, using them as a means to an end. Imagine if the abolitionist movement used slave labor in the name of abolishing slavery, or if eco-terrorists bombed a zoo to protest animal cruelty. That would be despicable.

The Eldian people have been oppressed and mistreated for so long now, and Eren’s thinking here is that further dehumanization and mistreatment on an individual level is justified if it means the freedom of the group? Recall that Grisha had a similar way of thinking.

Grisha saw his son as a tool in the fight for the freedom of the Eldian nation. He put the well-being of the nation before the well-being of his son. In principle, Eren is doing the exact same thing. In his mind, the Eldian nation comes first, people (even fellow Eldians!) second.

Eren is no hypocrite, I’m not saying that. I’m saying he’s a nationalist. That’s how he’s able to rationalize what he’s doing. He can disregard Eldians to fight the disregarding of Eldians without cognitive dissonance because in the end his heart is with the nation, not the individuals that make up that nation.

For added clarity, let’s outline a distinction between two ways of caring about the plight of the Eldians.

The first way is the individualist way. This approach emphasizes the autonomy of each individual Eldian. It is wrong for any single Eldian to be treated as they are because it is wrong for any single person to be treated in such a way. When the individualist says, “The Eldian people are being mistreated,” they’re simply aggregating the mistreatment of all Eldians for ease of conversation.

The second way is the Nationalist way, Eren’s way. The wrong way. This approach is informed by the nationalist creed that the group is more important than the individual. Because of this, the nationalist viewpoint is that the way the world acts towards Eldians is an affront to the dignity of the Eldian nation, not any single Eldian. “The Eldian people are being mistreated,” is to be read literally when it said by them.

I’m not saying the cause of Eldian freedom is a bad one. I’m not even saying violence isn’t the answer. The Eldians do have a right to resort to violence, but that violent action must be carried out in a civilized manner, if that makes sense. Eren’s tactics are barbaric.

If even the lives of individual Eldians are expendable in this nationalistic crusade then what isn’t? Seriously, is there nothing sacred in this world to him?

Even his “friends” don’t seem to be safe. (The fact I can arguably put that word in quotes is awful) He used them. He threw himself in harm’s way knowing the concern they have for him would force them into following his plan. A plan, by the way, that entails sparking a war with humanity, a war that Eren’s compatriots, being soldiers, will now have to fight in. That doesn’t sound like friendship to me. (Hence why I use the term “compatriots” rather than “friends”)

Hange said they’ve lost all trust in him. That may just be the raw emotions of seeing him face to face for the first time since embarking on his crusade, but I would not be surprised if Eren’s relationship with the Survey Corps was more transactional than affectionate for a good while.

The only question that remains is whether Eren is eligible for clemancy; that is to say, if he can be absolved of blame.

Is it possible that circumstances were such that Eren had to proceed as he did? Well, Isayama was sitting on the cult of Zeke for so long, so I can’t really say no. Who knows what he’s got up his sleeve. At the end of the day, what this all hinges on is whether or not it was necessary for Eren to have his talk with Reiner since it was having that talk at all that necessitated Eren taking hostages in order to force Reiner’s surrender.

Regardless of the circumstances, the fact remains that Eren is a nationalist, and because of that, HE. MUST. LOSE.

The nationalist ideology must not be vindicated. In Eren’s mind the lives of even children are expendable if it means the freedom of the Eldian nation. Not the Eldians themselves, mind you, but the Eldian nation. That way of thinking is contemptible; it has no merit. And unless Isayama plans on springing some BS message on us, this will be reflected in the story. Somehow, someway, Eren is going to get his comeuppance. Basic Human Decency requires it.

Moving on.

We at least now know why this mission was undertaken: primarily it was to abscond with Zeke and get him to Paradis.

Throughout the past few chapters it has been pointed out not just by the actual characters in the story but by me and others that Eren’s plan seemingly made no sense. But now things are clearer: they apparently did realize they were prodding a sleeping giant, but that’s okay because now they have someone with royal blood and someone else with the Founding Titan together, and that’s apparently the equivalent of having all five Exodia cards in your hand: you win instantly, so nothing else matters.

They must have known that following through with this plan would draw the world’s ire, but they apparently calculated that the benefits of having someone with royal blood and someone with the Founding Titan’s power together would offset this. There’s only one way this calculation makes sense: their plan involves the wall titans.

That has to be their end game. The ability to mobilize the Wall Titans is the only prize here that makes inciting the world’s anger acceptable to them. To say nothing of the fact that having a royal and the Founding Titan together is necessary for it to happen at all.

Previously, I compared Paradis’ attack to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the point being that, like the Japanese, they were picking a fight they would lose in the long term. Now we know this comparison no longer holds: to put it bluntly, Japan didn’t go to war with the US with the knowledge they were about to obtain nuclear weapons.

That changes everything. Yeah, you launched a sneak attack on the US, but who cares? You have nukes now and everyone else doesn’t! No one can touch you.

So, you’re Zeke/Eren. You have the closest thing to nuclear weapons in the SNK world and you have a monopoly it.

What do you do next?

I can think of two possibilities as to what they’re planning:

I’ll call possibility #1 Operation Madman Nixon. In this scenario, Zeke and Eren’s plan is to threaten to unleash the Wall Titans unless the world accedes to their demands. In such a scenario those demands could be an international commitment to not interfering in Paradis’ affairs. They could even demand that all the world’s Eldians be brought to live on Paradis where they wouldn’t have to suffer further persecution. Depending on how exactly things shake out, this could be the happy ending. An overall Hobbesian message that humans are so inherently violent the only way to have peace is to put a gun to everyone’s head. That sounds like a message this series would go for. Peace through strength.

Possibility #2 is Operation Everlasting Peace. In this scenario, Zeke and Eren’s plan is to release the Wall Titans and wipe out all of human civilization except for the Paradis Eldians, thus ushering in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity (for the Paradis Eldians).

Madman Nixon is the more likely scenario in my book. As disreputable as Eren has been recently, I doubt he’s so cruel that he’d actually destroy all of humanity. Because, really, why would he? Why would he resort to outright genocide if he has every reason to believe his goals can be accomplished through simple coercion?

If Eren or Zeke were to ever go with Operation Everlasting Peace, I think the most likely justification would be that they’d realize it would basically be a retread of what King Fritz had to do to keep the peace among the other titan shifters: use the wall titans to force everyone to stop fighting. This realization would lead them to conclude that humanity is beyond saving so they just wipe the slate clean of all factions except for one, their own. Natch.

Whatever happens, it would not be surprising if a large amount of the rest of the story was dedicated to an internal debate among the cast about whether or not they should just straight up use the Wall Titans to destroy humanity. You know Floch and his ilk will push for it now that it’s a legit option open to them.

Isayama chose to introduce this far right faction for a reason. The fact that such a reason exists, coupled with Floch’s insistence that everyone outside the walls is an enemy, plus the convenient turn of events that Paradis now has the power to destroy the world if they wanted to…and, yeah, it seems pretty obvious where Isayama is going with all this. Jean vs. Floch, moderate vs. extremist, Paul Ryan vs. Mark Meadows. This will probably be a theme going forward.

Eren is already partial in his thinking to Floch, so he’ll probably also be partial towards them in such a scenario. This would also allow for some good character drama between Armin, Mikasa, and Eren.

I can’t wait.

#attack on titan #shingeki no kyojin #snk 105 #spoilers #I truly am sorry about being late with this #And I have asks to answer too #My work ethic sucks >.<

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emptysurface · 6 years

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Unpublished WIP List Game

Tagged by @athanatosora

....I feel like I have to begin by saying I have SO MANY UNPUBLISHED WIPS YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND!!!! *flails* Ahem. So. I’ll.... uh, give you a sample? Also, Time-Travel is my drug. I love it.

1. Speechless - Naruto. I wanted to write a story where Naruto is mute, because there’s just something inherently tragic about a Naruto that can’t speak. Also a time-travel, because I’m a complete and utter sucker for those. I can’t even remember when I started this one, but I’m still very fond of it. Don’t think I’ve written anything on it in over a year... (Naruto’s given the name ‘Kotoba’ in this one.)

Sample:

When Naruto noticed the shadow falling over him and heard the clap, he thought it was one of the older kids, come back to make fun of him again and quickly used an arm to wipe away his tears.

He looked up, glare already firmly in place, but had to blink at the sight that met him.

A man -at least he thought it was a man- was crouched before him. He was wearing a plain wooden mask over his face -with the Konoha leaf carved on the forehead- had hair that looked a mix between orange and brown and wore shinobi garb.

The man tilted his head curiously, staring at Naruto, who just sat there, staring back at the odd shinobi.

Eventually, the man raised a hand and traced a path down the smooth cheek of his mask with a finger and then pointed at Naruto's face.

Naruto frowned.

"What?" He asked defensively, biting his lower lip uncertainly.

Kotoba on his part wasn't entirely sure why he had approached his younger self. But seeing the small child sitting all alone in the deserted playground, he had been unable to just walk by and pretend like he had seen nothing. He certainly didn't know how the rest of the population did it.

Kotoba repeated the motion again, wanting to know why the little boy was crying. He could guess, of course, but he wasn't supposed to know already, and Naruto could benefit from an adult he could talk to outside of the very busy Hokage.

His mask hid a self-deprecating smile, because Kotoba couldn't exactly talk, now, could he? Well, beggars can't be picky, or however the hell it was the saying went.

"Are you- Are you asking why I'm crying?" Naruto's small voice cut through his thoughts, making him nod, pleased to have made himself understood.

Naruto couldn't help but stare back, wondering if this was really happening or if he had fallen asleep. "The other kids call me names, and I fell and scraped my knee," he eventually muttered.

Once this guy realised just who Naruto was, he would walk away too.

To his shock, a hand landed on his head, ruffling his hair almost affectionately. At least, Naruto thought it was because it didn't hurt and he had seen parents and older siblings do that to other kids plenty of times. His wide-eyed stare must have given away something of what he was feeling, because the man -Naruto decided he would think of him as such until proven otherwise- gently wiped his tears away and sat down in front of him.

Kotoba wondered how he could possibly communicate with a kid as young as his counterpart was right now.

He knew what he had told the Hokage, but adults were generally easier.

Choosing an approach that should work, Kotoba began to reach towards his weapons pouch, paused, thought better of it and then used his finger to trace patterns in the dirt instead of the kunai he'd first planned to use.

Naruto watched curiously, scooting around until he was sitting next to the man to see what he was doing, scraped knee already forgotten.

"Oh! I recognize that one!" He exclaimed, pointing at one of the marks. He immediately blushed, clamped his mouth shut and stared up at the stranger with wide eyes, wondering if he'd be sent away for being annoying now. Instead, he received an encouraging nod. "It says 'ko'," Naruto told the stranger, somewhat pleased with himself despite the uncertainty.

2. The Great Escape - Harry Potter/Naruto crossover I started... a while back. Harry gets reborn into the Naruto world, as a girl, only to discover that being the Master of Death before dying left her with some unfortunate side-effects. Harry really, really hates her life sometimes.

Sample:

Her lungs screamed for oxygen, even as she began to feel the acute blood loss. Her throat was slick with blood so hot it seemed to burn her skin.The world swam before her eyes, going grey around the edges, and she blinked repeatedly in an attempt to clear her sight.

Nendo Hari, in a previous life known as Harry Potter, shuddered violently, her eyes grew glassy and her heart -in response to the steadily diminishing blood supply- stuttered to a stop.

No one had expected her to wake up again.

So of course, that was what she did.

3. Crepuscular - Harry Potter. Time-travel, fem!Harry. Was blatantly inspired by Tsume Yuki, just saying... :P Harry ends up tossed back in time, and in true Harry Potter fashion decided to do something about all these Death Eaters running around, but it gets lonely. So in a tentatively strategic ploy, she reaches out to someone who will be vital to future events. Kreacher. (It has some unexpected consequences, shocking absolutely no one.)

Sample:

Leading Kreacher to the wizards' tent she'd put up in the other end of the clearing was the easiest thing Harry had done since arriving here.

Just having something, someone familiar near was... she could allow herself this small comfort, right?

And it wasn't just for her own sake; having a house-elf's help would be priceless further on.

Harry knew it better than most. Dobby would always have a special place in her heart.

He was on her list, too.

On the list of people to save.

4. Taking Flight - Harry Potter/KHR crossover. Wing!fic, because I thought that sounded interesting... ended up on a week-long research spree where I read far too much about various kinds of birds, but it was interesting? :P Also with fem!Harry. Harry/Fon pairing? Hm.

Sample:

Surviving the war hadn't been very high on the list of what Harry had thought was possible.

It had been a realisation that had slowly but steadily grown more firm in her head over the span of years.

Ever since she'd met Ron on the train that first time, his wings small and a downy brown-yellow, hair flaming red and freckles standing out sharply on his face.

Her own wings had been equally small, of course, and just as downy and useless. In the way.

Ron had made her feel better about it, though.

“Nearly all my siblings have wings, see,” he'd told her cheerfully. “Mum and dad don't have them, and not Charlie and the twins, but everyone else.”

It had seemed fantastical to her, who had only known the Dursleys and the people of Little Whinging, who hadn't cared much for Harry's fledgling wings.

Her classmates had complained about them blocking the view, taking up too much space and she had always been shunted off to the back of the classroom where she 'hadn't been in the way'.

Not that her academic life would have been all that different if they hadn't, but... it was the principle of the matter.

Then she'd learned -also courteous of Ron- that Magicals were slightly more inclined to be born with wings. No one knew quite why, but there were theories about it having to do with the magic.

Purebloods in particular could be pretty snobbish about it, Ron had told her, looking sheepish about the whole thing, what with being a Pureblood himself.

Of course, then Draco Malfoy had strutted into their compartment like he owned it and reinforced the sentiment quite firmly.

Hermione had come later, after the troll.

And they'd stuck by her through the years, through ups and downs and always there when it really mattered.

She'd grown into her adolescent feathers in the summer before her fourth year, and the moment Draco had caught sight of her wings, he'd called her a cow. Due to the dark brown and white splotches her feathers had made up, making her wings indeed look similar to the hide of a bovine.

Hadn't made it sting any less when all the other Houses had taken up the nick-name for her once the Triwizard disaster had struck.

Nice times.

It hadn't really helped that Ron had grown into his own feathers, with... slightly different -but at the same time not- results than Harry.

And then, of course, Malfoy had thrown it in his face at the worst opportunity.

“You're a goose, Weasley!” The Slytherin boy had cackled loudly outside the Potions' classroom, and it had been all Harry and Hermione had been able to do to keep him from pummelling Draco's face in.

Not to mention that Harry had been tempted to do so herself on behalf of her friend.

I had been so satisfying when Ron had grown more into himself a year later, snapping his wings open in anger and telling Draco in no uncertain terms that he was a gander, thank you very much; he was male.

And people always got shocked when Ron spread his wings and they realised just how big they actually were.

“Geese are strong long-distance flyers, Ron. They've even been revered in History as envoys of various Gods,” Hermione had told him, smiling encouragingly at a Ron with increasingly red ears.

Harry had been forced to hide a smile with her hand.

5. Bullet to the Heart - KHR. Soulmate AU, Reborn/Tsuna that I started way back, when I first got sucked into the KHR fandom. I still like the idea, though I haven’t written anything on this in basically forever... ^^’

Sample:

The first time Reborn heard about soulmates, he was seven years old and one of his classmates had started humming in the middle of class, as if humming along to a tune only he could hear. Everyone had expected the teacher to scold him, but the boy had received a wide, knowing smile instead and been asked if he'd heard a song. What had followed had been a lesson on soulmates and all the different kinds of 'connections' you could have with your own.

The boy had said he'd heard singing, a local children's tune in a girlish voice.

Reborn hadn't been convinced; he had never heard or seen anything like that, and it sounded more than a little shifty, having someone else inside your head.

When Tsuna was five, he and the other children in his kindergarten group were sat down to draw, and instead of drawing dogs or cats, or trees and flower, or even colourful blobs that were supposed to be people, Tsuna drew a shaky, but recognizable gun.

AND I THINK I’LL STOP HERE BEFORE THIS POST GROWS EVEN MORE RIDICULOUSLY LONG!!! :’D

Tagging @worldtravellingfly @shadowblayze and @epikalstorms because I know all three of you write, ladies! Come join me in the corner of SHAME (I have so many WIPs... omg, they’re too many)

#Empty's writing #EmptySurface #WIPs #this is ridiculous #THERE ARE SO MANY #I don't even know if I'll ever get around to posting some of these #And I definitely have the most in the Naruto fandom -_-'

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lord-wellesbrook-ix · 3 years

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The Problem with Modern Politics by Me, an unqualified, out of touch late millennial/early gen Z Brit.

Advance warning this is gonna be a long post, essay is below the break for those who care to read.

Ok, good, welcome! So yes, time for some personal details, because apparently such things are crucially important now to what one has to say. I’m 19, I’m white~jewish (ethnically, not religiously. And I list both because the distinction is...spurious at best imo), with some limited asian heritage (grandfather is Burmese, you’d not know it to look at me though). I’m bisexual, with a loving trans boyfriend, tragically kept away from me by that most perfidious of enemies, the atlantic ocean. I used to think I was trans, and started hrt, before deciding against it. I don’t know what my gender identity really is at this point, but I use he/him, and was assigned male at birth. Oh and despite my immediate family having some significant prestige (my dad is a VERY specialised doctor, only 8 people in the country can do what he does), because Britain and NHS, I’m also poor enough that I qualify for financial assistance through uni, and all that other fun stuff, so assign me whatever class you want, but I’ve never really had access to money or the like. All of these factors will undoubtedly somehow colour what my thoughts are.

So! Let’s tackle this on two fronts - My beef with the modern left, my beef with the modern right, and my beef with all the current “alternatives”. The Left Why do you make me hate you so? I want to be able to side with you. Economically, we’re almost perfectly aligned. Fuck big corporations, they abuse their workers, and are broadly detrimental to societal progress by merit of the power they wield. The state should use the money of the wealthiest, to help uplift the poorest, bringing everyone as close to a comfortable range of wealth and living standards as is feasible. Wealth taxes I’m against, if only because I look at things like FIRE with some measure of hope, because I find it infeasible that I’ll be able to work a “proper job” my entire life, and equally infeasible that the state will support me before I’m in my 70s. Unsurprisingly I’m all for trans and lgbt rights, and their advancement is imperative. Likewise racial and ethnic discrimination needs to be combatted (though I have a caveat insofar as how), and linguistic minority rights are ESPECIALLY important (not to out myself as Welsh...). Minimum wages, yes, and higher! Benefits should be more generous and more accessible! All of this! And yet. And, yet. I can never stand with any significant left wing party. Because of how they behave on other fronts. The general solution to racial discrimination seems to be mandates, and quotas, which are just...not a great idea? Because they’ll only work insofar as they are maintained, and at that point you’re not solving it, you’re just leaning on people to make it LOOK like the problem is solved. Instead perhaps, a better system would be something akin to a more continental system. Pictures are banned on CVs, as are any obvious racial or sex or gender markers. Further anonymising most processes, to further make any people making significant choices unable to determine race, sex or gender of the people they’re choosing about, allows for a truly blind process. The same, incidentally, should apply to class distinctions (personal story there to follow, because there class mandates have stabbed me personally).

Moreover, however, both left and right these days seems to be based on these vicious and disgusting ideas of guilt and hatred, only changing who receives them. The modern left want me to hate myself, and hate my country. My skin means that I am somehow inherently advantaged, and thereby everything bad that happens to me is fine, my country has committed sins long before anyone alive today was born, and thereby any bad thing that befalls it is right and good. I am guilty of the crime of...being born a certain way, in a certain place, to certain people, and because of that, because of my privilege, I must apparently have the road of life made that much harder to walk for me. I must be told throughout education that this country is evil, that “Britain” and the “British” are evil, with no consideration for the fact that, well, that’s me. Telling someone that they’re evil as they’re growing up is uhhhh, not exactly a good thing. I believe in this nation that reared me. Moreover I believe in its values, I believe in Britain, and I believe every person should have the right to believe in their country. People as a whole aren’t fundamentally evil. And whilst yes every country has sins, great or small, and Britain’s past leans closer to great, that doesn’t give people the right to try and engender a sort of national self-loathing in the population for it. I won’t venture into America (because America breaks my whole everyone should be proud of their country thing, because a lot of areas should frankly be made independent from the US). And as a part of my...I don’t want to use the terms patriotism or nationalism because both have been massively tainted by groups trying to claim them for years now, but as a part of these beliefs, I stand with the British monarchy. Hell, I actually argue they should be allowed slightly greater freedoms. That they should be allowed to speak out when they are slandered (naming no self-entitled actresses), and equally, that they should be allowed to have some limited vocalisation of other political opinions. We let celebrities do it today, and they influence elections far more than the crown could ever hope to. And let’s look at things that Chucky boy, our next king unless they do something VERY silly and skip him, has gotten into trouble for speaking about: Not wanting brutalist modern architecture, which has actually been proven to make for housing that doesn’t last as long, and negatively impacts mental health. And Being an environmentalist.

And

Wanting this country to treat the mentally ill better. Ah...such controversial, evil points, made by a despotic tyrant princ-oh wait no they’re just valid things. I don’t want them to be given the power to ENFORCE their ideas, that way lies absolutism, which runs against the ideas of a constitutional monarchy. But let them speak, there are people who speak freely with greater sway and influence than they could ever have, and far less accountability.

The Right

Oh boy, oh boy. Economically villainous. I despise nearly every economic ideal they stand for. They hurt the poor to help the rich, and just like the left, screw those in the middle. All I can credit them for on that front is that they don’t have as much of a tendency to support ugly, cheap mass housing, but only because they instead support no housing.

Socially...ugh. I look at the modern right as a two headed beast there. There are those like those on the left, who hate Britain, but instead of just hating us and wanting some vague utopia, they hate us and want us to become a corporate hellhole like america, which is arguably worse.

Then there’s the others. Those who take my ideals and corrupt them. Racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, rinse and repeat, and yes I know this is the hazard inherent in enjoying tradition and one’s nation anywhere, but can those traditions not be adapted? Anglicanism is already christianity minus any spine or sense of self, let it allow gays and trans people and all of that. Also uh yeah, don’t be racist. I don’t really know how to phrase that in any other way because...it’s not hard. Just don’t be racist. Treat people as people, not as their race. Do not treat me any different for being a jew, or having an asian grandfather, do not treat someone differently for being a person of colour, do not treat someone different for the circumstances of their birth, quite simply put. Alternatives

So, the non mainstream (LIBLABCON) parties? Let’s see.... UKIP/Reform - Ah racism, fuck off. Plaid - Ah, vote to...leave the country I love? And to be run from Cardiff by people like Drakeford, or Woods, or really any of the major players in modern welsh politics? No. Any flavour of communist - Last I checked they all want me to hate myself, so nah. Greens - Cool. You still want me to hate myself, and have really dumb economic ideas, but you’re a one issue party and I support that issue, so tentatively the lesser of all the evils. Idk why I had this rant, I am just very upset. There is no voice for people like me, and it seems there never will be. And I’m nowhere near rich enough to start a party to become that voice.

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onceuponatimewasnow-blog · 7 years

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Virtual World Radio Exclusive Interview, July, 02 (2002)

Armed with a violin, brilliant imagery, powerful lyrics, and sheer girl-power, Emilie Autumn has already become a fixture at college radio. Now, she's set to conquer the Internet. And she's got some tough words for the RIAA.

Emilie Autumn: Absolutely Enchanted She's played everything from the great concert halls of Europe, to initimate rock venues in the Midwest. Now, Emilie Autumn is set to conquer Internet radio with her unique brand of Fantasy Rock.

Emilie Autumn. Powerful lyrical imagery, a violin....and wings...

Richly talented, multifaceted, innovative, eclectic and unconventional - singer, songwriter, producer, pianist, and world class violinist Emilie Autumn is that rarest of musical breeds...a true original. This is a singer with the power to change the world of rock music as we know it. Whether she is writing and performing original songs that bring together an extraordinary mix of sounds and styles; performing concerts in the great classical music halls of Europe and the US; or bringing down the house with her own electrifying violin rock creations, 21-year-old Emilie Autumn makes music that defies categories, breaks down barriers and builds a bridge to a new era of music with a truly globe-spanning soundAs a classically trained violinist, Emilie revolutionizes her instrument by playing her electric violin live a la Jimi Hendrix, meanwhile belting out her girl-power anthem, “Chambermaid,” during her highly theatrical stage shows. The result is sexy, surprising, and even controversial. You've likely already heard Chambermaid on V-Mix. Emilie talks about the story behind the track, playing concert halls in Europe, and why she chose her own route as an independent artist. VW: You manage to successfully blend a unique array of sounds and styles in your music, much of which you would never believe you could put together in a rock song. Yet, you’ve done it. Since your sound doesn't seem to conform to the standard format tags, how would you describe it?

EA: It’s true that there’s too much variety within my music (and a lot of other music for that matter) to categorize it in any one genre, but for general radio usage, we like to say its Adult Alternative, whatever that means these days. I call my music “Fantasy Rock,” but I don’t think there’s a format for that yet.

VW: Chambermaid is an incredibly powerful track, and uses lots of imagery to tell its story. Is this from personal experience? What’s the story behind it?

EA: Firstly, thank you very much. “Chambermaid” is one of those muses that just flies in the window, grabs you by the throat with her claws, and says, “Feel that? Well, pass it on.” She’s a good girl in a bad world, and she finally got pissed off enough to through the death card in some guy’s face. The details of the story are not from personal experience, but the sentiment is. In the song, this woman gets tired of being pushed around by her lover, so she throws him into the moat and closes the drawbridge. She also wears camouflage corsets to dinner, so I guess that part is me...

VW: You’re one of the few artists that have not only embraced Internet radio, but have successfully harnessed its potential power. What do you think the future of the medium is, and as an artist, how would you like to see it evolve?

EA: Sadly, internet radio is undergoing some really tough times as a result of the latest fines imposed upon it. I think that, three years from now, we will look back on this era as one of the most ridiculous times in music. I mean, the vast majority of mainstream music takes “shit” to a whole new level. The major labels, after experiencing some financial losses in the past year, are petrified by the wrath of their shareholders and will accuse anyone in order to get out of the hot seat themselves. Of course, the RIAA exists solely to support and protect the major labels, so their conniving blather is to be expected. It’s all about control. The majors could capitalize on the advance of the internet (radio, downloads, etc.) and turn the new diversity offered to listeners into increased cash flow, but they can’t have that because, despite their potential gains, they would then be losing the absolute control of the public ear. When people have the opportunity to expose themselves to a larger variety of music than mainstream radio offers (via internet radio programming and various file sharing services), they will not buy less music, they will buy more, but their tastes will also not be as easily dictated, predicted, and manipulated, resulting in loss of marketing control for the labels. They can’t operate in a system where they can’t predict what will be successful. It’s what their whole empire depends upon, and the moment you introduce that question mark into the equation, they’re running around like decapitated chickens, accusing everyone with a modem of thievery. Ultimately, every single artist on, or affiliated with, a major label, is a pawn on the chessboard of global society. I’m not saying all artists on major labels are rubbish, because that isn’t true; some artists happened to get their break on major labels, and have gone on to produce quality music. Still, their releases are coordinated by the label to suit the label, their media is orchestrated by the label to suit the label, even (and especially) their controversies are hatched by the label to suit the label, and their ultimate purpose is to control what you hear, what you see, what you think, so that they can go to their shareholders and say, “We guarantee that this will sell, we guarantee that next year this will sell, we guarantee that the year after that this will sell, and because we dictate public taste through our omnipotent control of ALL media (which everyone knows is the most powerful entity in the world), we will never fail.” That’s what shareholders want to hear, and that’s what the majors are going to tell them, at the expense of internet radio, independent media, independent artists, artistic creation of any kind, and ultimately, YOUR freedom. Fight like hell. VW: You’ve been touring the Midwest quite a bit recently. Any Mid-Atlantic tour plans in the works?

EA: I’m actually contemplated touring schedules as we speak, and I’d love to expand my normal touring regions into the Mid-Atlantic and beyond. I think it’s about time.

VW: Who, if anyone, inspired you to become the incredibly diverse musician that you are today?

EA: I don’t believe I can point to any one or two musicians in whose footsteps I have followed, though I am certainly an admirer of many. I’ve gleaned inspiration from a handful of artists that came before me and combined what I learned with my own claustrophobia when it comes to being boxed in to a certain mindset, a certain category. I’m inspired by the strength and gorgeous female power of Annie Lennox. I’m humbled by the songwriting craftsmanship of Sting. I’m intoxicated by the unnaturally beautiful voice of Morrissey, and I learned how to play the violin more from the albums of Nigel Kennedy than from my master teachers. Put that and a pinch of Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Etta James, Eric Clapton, Hildegard von Bingen, and a Celtic reel all together in a snow globe filled with glitter, shake it up, and smash it against a wall. Add wings, and you have me.

VW: Which artists do you enjoy listening to now?

EA: Anything I can illegally download. Just kidding. I listen to the old as much as the new, so my iTunes playlist is populated by a combination of Vivaldi (Fabio Biondi doing “The Four Seasons”), Erasure (I’m covering “Love To Hate You”), The Smiths (“The Queen Is Dead”), and the new Moby album.

VW: You’ve played everything from small intimate clubs, to some of the great concert halls of the United States and Europe. Which do you prefer, and why?

EA: Both types of venues have their charms as well as drawbacks. In concert halls, you have the honor inherent in playing such beautiful venues, and you get to play music that would never fly in a rock club, for example, Barber’s Violin Concerto with full orchestra. The drawback is that you have the distinct feeling that you are not reaching the whole of society, but only those that can afford season tickets to the opera. I respect those people for helping to keep high art alive, but they are not the only people that count. In rock clubs, the nice ones anyway, you get to be wild and loud and shocking, and you feel like you are actively changing the outlook of the people you’re playing for. The drawback is that, at least when you play the violin, you have to convince people that they’re in the right place. VW: In terms of songwriting, at what moments do you find yourself most inspired?

EA: I find that, unlike a lot of musicians I’ve read about, I am most creative when I’m actually nearing happy. Only then do I have the proper distance from a sad or difficult situation to actually write intelligently about it. The only exception to this was in the case of “By The Sword,” which was composed and recorded on 9/11/01. In general, I think what makes a real songwriter is the ability to transpose oneself into an infinite number of dimensions and record accurately and with elegance what one experiences. I’ve purposely developed my mind so that I can float from one world to the next, constantly gathering seeds, and then arrive back home to plant them, usually inexplicably dressed with one striped sock on and a “My Little Pony” T-shirt I didn’t know I had. It’s nothing more than advanced daydreaming.

VW: You’ve been pursued by major labels, but chose to follow your own career path. Why did you decline major label backing, and have you ever regretted the decision?

EA: I’ve actually worked with major labels in the past, which is why I feel somewhat qualified to criticize them so harshly. I was first courted by a major in my teens and spent a summer locked in a studio, writing songs that were promptly torn apart by the producers, a team of fat, rich, Europeans who thought it was fine to slap my ass. I wrote “Rapunzel” (from the upcoming album “Enchant”) at that time, but it was rejected because they said that “Rapunzal” was an ugly word, that no one knew who it was anyway, and that it would never go over well in Japan. They hated “Chambermaid” because it was supposedly about “lords and ladies.” I was told to stop introducing my fiddle into my songs because they said that the general public was intimidated by anything that remotely reminded them of “classical” music. I was told that I had to add more words like “love” and “baby” to my songs because “that’s what people want,” and again, so that it would do well in Japan (their theory was that those are the only words that the Japanese would understand, and you have to give them something to sing along to). I was told to get a tan and cut my hair so that I would resemble the average fashion model as opposed to something more exotic. When I questioned the system, I was told that if I did not comply, I would never be able to buy my mother a house. When I complained, I was told to shut up because I was embarrassing them in front of their backers. Bearing in mind that this particular brand of hell is the norm, not the exception, who in their right mind would regret any decision that enabled them NOT to work with people like this?

VW: What do you most hope to accomplish?

EA: Everything.

#emilie autumn #enchant #enchant era #interview #emilie autumn interview #emilieautumn

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