#long thought

[pendleton-manor]

It just occurred to me that Chaos does not really affect the ending in Dishonored 2 the way it does Dishonored 1. Like, the final mission is still largely the same either way. In fact, you can play high chaos the entire time but choose to spare Delilah at the end. Which I find very weird. Like it should completely take away my agency at this point.

While the low chaos ending was flat, the final high chaos mission with the loyalists was so so good. The game was telling you “you’ve made your bed now lie in it.” From Samuel turning on you and alerting everyone with a gunshot to the fact that Pendleton dies with or without your interference to the fact that Martin shoots himself to the fact that Havelock will jump off the ledge with Emily, you have NO agency. These events will occur because of what you have already done, completely disregarding what you choose to do in the moment.

Dishonored 2 has more subtle changes based on high chaos. Aside from Emily and Corvo’s dialogue (which, in my opinion, is a classic example of telling instead of showing. Easy to forgive though) there are little hints sprinkled throughout the game that what you’re doing is negatively impacting the world. The clerk at Addermire who hangs herself and the men playing cards who get into a shootout come to mind. But this doesn’t culminate into anything other than a slideshow ending narrated by the Outsider. The player’s return to the tower is the same no matter what you do. The only difference (I think) is that Delilah is either painting or waiting in the throne room.

Why not have the low chaos ending be a bit different? Instead of the Overseers dying when they rushed the Tower, why not have them stationed outside, holding their own, protecting the few citizens left? Why not have the player save the High Overseer who has been captured, winning over the overseer forces? Then the high chaos ending can stay the same—they rushed the tower and failed and Emily finds them all dead.

The same can go for gang presence. You’re gonna tell me the Hatters and the Bottle Street gangs will just give up territory super easily? I know they’re scattered throughout the final level, but they attack on sight! If you’re low chaos, they ought to recognize you as the empress and decide that the only way to save their own skins is to help you kick witches out of their territory. High chaos, they blame you for all this mess and attack you on sight, same as always.

I don’t know.

I just think that the final high chaos level ought to make me confront my choices and force me to face the consequences. I shouldn’t have any control over what happens narratively.

[thatonegaybrit]

; hey, slow down .. life isn't that short and it's actually kinda cool when you js look around for a bit

[sleeplessv0id]

what doesn't kill you makes you weird at intimacy

[clairenatural]

there's a cherry blossom tree in DC that keeps blooming every year even though it shouldn't and the park service keeps thinking it's dead and then it keeps blooming! well they're removing a lot of trees to rehabilitate the area and they've said it's finally time for stumpy to go and they're going to mulch it and use the mulch to enrich all the other trees so it can help everything else keep going. and they're also going to plant spliced little pieces of it all over so that stumpy can live forever and this is genuinely sending me into a spiral

[ameba-from-space]

[onefey]

you're going about your normal day when, suddenly, surprise! you've been pokémon mystery dungeon'd!

unfortunately, due to budget cuts, the pokémon assigning quiz has been canceled. instead, you must spin THE WHEEL, assigning you a random, unevolved, non-legendary and non-mythical pokémon. you must now go on some sort of world-saving adventure as this pokémon. good luck!

tell me in the tags what you rolled, and how you feel about it - for bonus points, you can spin the wheel again for (or just take your pick of) a pokémon to be your partner.

bonus rules:

you're not shiny unless the wheel tells you you're shiny

take your pick of regional forms and evolutions (for example, if you roll vulpix, it's up to you whether that means normal or alolan vulpix)

apply whatever logic you like with regards to gender

have fun and be yourself!

[parasit-kind]

7. On over-positivity & prayer & longing for religion

Seeking religion in adulthood

Prologue.

I am 19 years old,have lived alone for a year.

I was moved here by recommendation of family. My child brain had never comprehended this sort of future. I sit alone for days and I don’t leave the room that I must pay for. I feel like an oyster attached to its shell, and becoming freed means hot and boiling surrender. I let myself become my own parasite and goad myself into anguish. It is warm in here sometimes, but it’s only me.

Over-positivity.

Being stranded requires a self sufficiency in the form of assurance. Lest we escort ourselves into our personal mad demise, caused by mental deterioration and unjustifiable panic, a human is to remain conscious of the state of emotions. This demands excess joy & happiness. This is the guided mentality of a faulted world that one does not accept, but rather manipulates for one’s own sanity.

To accept the world and its conditions as they are is to accept depression.

The human chooses not to accept it. Or so one should.

To compensate, the use of over-positivity to falsify the perceptual reality begins at the most elementary principles of one’’s adulthood, and from thereon extends like an unfettered fungus in rainstorm. It is an uncontrolled infection, chosen to be left untreated. If it is a morning in which the elevator arrives within under a minute, then it is certain to be an agreeable day thereafter. If the pants one wears do not align themselves in a strange way and force one into voided thoughts, then the deities have found you to be favorable. If the battery of one’s device chooses not to dip below eighty percent after the duration of a two hour public commute distinguished by rotten scent and scuffed shoes, then perhaps the week is so soon settled.

Choosing to be overly positive will become a poison. The ridicule one may receive on the street from an unknown passer-by turned into a moment of self-pity is the seed of the sinful thinking.

“Why me?”

This question can warrant one of two responses. Either you are not at fault and could never have been at fault–self-pity, self-praise–, or you can choose to ask again. “Why me?” Why you, indeed. Ask it again and again until you have found reason. No action of any individual is ever truly without circumstance. Choosing to ignore a possible flaw within yourself and acting in virtue is only a hindrance. Once again, it is a sin, and this you realize as you now sense the malice in your own intellect.

Suddenly you are craving religion.

Guilt & Prayer

A struggle of atheist adulthood is the reckoning of one’s own independence. No longer is there a higher being to accost. One becomes the cause and the response for and to one’s exploits. Every mistake is suddenly magnified, unbothered by a juvenile responsibility, as life is your own to delineate. One could, again, choose to ignore one’s guilt and wrongdoing, but from this bears the fruit of sin–and again, the cycle is felt.

Turning to a societally established morality becomes the only plausible solution. You cannot help yourself, no one can help you, but there is one who can help us all. Perhaps it is a more sinister crossover of yearning for a collective to feel kinship to, and of needing to exhaust and expunge an irremovable sin.

It is the holyMother, and She is certain to exonerate her children, just as it once had been. It is a feeling that one cannot escape, for an adult is nothing, but a child in fear, with limbs too long and a stomach too large, so that it can never be satiated.

I can’t bring myself to prayer just yet, even still, but I feel how the itch does not expire. I still live in spite of my own self, cursing at my mistakes, cursing at my curses, unable to accept the conditions under which I have been placed. In another universe, maybe we could have avoided a footstepped path of regretted action, but it is the one life we are given. Over-positivity, hyper-compensation of despicable sin and wrongdoing; these philosophies are made in self-preservation, and detaching oneself from realities, both legitimate and aspired, it is a perilous rule of living. Of this, there is no escape.

The holy mother can only birth, not take.

>parasitka პარაზიტკა

[stil-lindigo]

lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)

if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.

--

no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.

I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.

I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.

If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[goldensunset]

did you know? if you do your laundry you can get your clothes back

[happyroadkillart]

[endusviolence]

Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?

I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?

In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".

Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.

This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.

Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.

The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]

There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.

This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]

As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.

But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?

Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.

[kensatou]

"we know how to move our bodies, but i didn't know how to manage my heart, so you need help for this"

hi we need to talk more about judo gold medallist christa deguchi.

[kushexi]

A mermaid au that has been on my mind for some time now 🥺✨

[gailytine]

coming out

[ultramaggy-archives]

the angle we didn't get to see. very ✨shiny.✨