#new wonders of the world

[hussyknee]

Trying to explain what the fuck just happened in Lankan politics today.

The leftist party has won 159 seats out of 218 in the Parliamentary elections. The single biggest landslide win since we broke from the British and achieved universal franchise in 1948.

Any party achieving a super majority in the executive and legislative is, objectively speaking, bad. It disables checks and balances, which is a catastrophic thing for any democracy, and the only two other times it's happened for us has irrevocably eroded the fabric of civic rights and democratic freedom. Also, the reason the NPP won the North and East is that the colonized, genocided and subjugated people there have no faith in electoralism anymore. The way this government has engaged minority issues has been utterly abysmal and now they've been rewarded for it.

On the other hand:

The winners. Are all. Grassroots. Candidates.¹

We have voted out every single career criminal that's been barnacled into the Lankan political arena since before I've been alive. The fascist party has only three seats.² The other fascists didn't win a single seat. The neoliberal legacy party won none. There are only forty people in Parliament that represent any sort of dynastic political legacy. After 76 solid years of nothing but political dynasties.

This is barely five years after the Rajapaksas swept in and absolutely glutted the Parliament with their family members and cronies end to end.

This is the illegitimate interim government we had for most of the last 18 months. We literally, physically, chased the Rajapaksas out of the country and this fucking demon set up a puppet government just so he could finally sit in that goddamn chair and be the despot he'd always dreamed of in exchange for letting them all come back. He's now gone. His entire circle is gone.

THEY ARE ALL FUCKING GONE.

In US terms, just imagine that, five years from now, when Trump's GOP has control of everything, the entire GOP and the worst of the Dems are all purged from Congress and Senate, the Green Party in control of all three branches of government under a pro-union left-wing President and an unmarried female LGBT rights activist Vice President, and the Dems reduced to barely 20% of the House.

This is my anthropology professor. She joined politics from the small nascent leftist coalition to help keep the government accountable. She's now the Prime Minister and the most popular Parliamentary candidate in the nation's history. (Edit: She was knocked off first place by a dude in the final result. Boo.)

(On the other hand— the woman who helped make me a radical anarchist and literally helped write a book on political dissent and resistance...now is the state. Uh.)

But there are so many women in Parliament! We had the lowest female representation in a South Asian Parliament and some of them were from the list of seats reserved for parties rather than elected ones. Most were either anti-feminist conservative embarrassments, widows and daughters of elite politicians and neoliberal shills. It's still only an increase of a few percentage points (Edit: from the previous 5% to 10% in the final result!) but now we have elected academics, feminist advocates, activists! There Is a representative for Malaiyaha Tamils in the Central Province for the first time in history and it's a young woman! (Edit: now it's two female Malaiyaha MPS!!) This is the plantation community that still live in conditions closest to the slavery the British forced upon them two hundred years ago!

I'm like. Completely mindfucked. To be very very clear, the NPP coalition formed around the nucleus of the JVP that used to be communist but haven't been in 30 years, they're now just social democrats who are left of places like the US and UK, whose "left" is now center-right. They're only threatening to the Western mainstream media for some reason who can't stop bleating about how we have a "Marxist" government now. In reality, the actual chances for radical reform are still quite low, and the opportunity for further erosion is quite high with a super majority government regardless of affiliation.

On the other hand:

What the fuck.

Sometimes living through historical events is really damn amazing.

---

¹ Well, nearly. There are a few career politicians and a nepo baby but they aren't so bad either.

² Goddamn it, Baby Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka's answer to JD Vance have wormed their way in using the list of Constitutionally reserved party seats for non-elected members. FUCK the National List.

[bet-on-me-13]

The Villains Daughter

So! Years ago, back when the Justice League was only just starting out, only a year or two after their initial team-up, they had one of their biggest battles to date. A group of Extra-Dimensional Beings had burst into their reality, hellbent on destroying a Government Facility and the nearby small town in Illinois.

They barely managed to beat the Invading Army back, although the Government Facility and a part of the nearby Town had been destroyed in the battle.

Later, they would learn about what had happened. Apparently the Government Base, called a GIW Facility, had managed to finally Crack the secret to Interdimensional Travel a few days earlier. Unfortunately, they had opened a Portal into a Dimension known as the Ghost Zone, ruled over by a Tyrant King who wanted to enslaved all world under him. Their Breaching of the GZ had alerted the Tyrant King to the existence of their Dimension, and he had launched an immediate Invasion to try and take it over.

And the evidence supported this.

Wonder Woman shared Legends of her People, telling that their Founding Ancestor had fled the rule of a Tyrant King when she passed into the Afterlife.

Zatara shared his Magic Tomes, showing them passages detailing the horrific Rule of the Tyrant King of the Infinite Realms.

They even asked Boston Brand, the Deadman and resident Ghost about it. He hadn't been the the Ghost Zone in Years, but even he told them that he had personally fled the Tyrant King.

And they also learned that when the Tyrant King set his eyes on something, he did not falter on his Warpath to acquire it. The Tyrant King, Pariah Dark, would be back for their World, again and again.

And they needed to be prepared. This Battle was what kickstarted their true Commitment to the idea of a Team. They knew they could not defeat Pariah Dark alone, so they needed to remain as a Team.

But there was another thing that came about from the Battle.

While the JLA had been helping clean up, Wonder Woman came across a strange sight. A Baby had been left in the rubble of the GIW Building.

She asked around, investigated, and did all she could to find the babies parents. At first she thought that one of the GIW Agents had brought their kid to work that day, but their records indicated that none of the Agents had children of that Age. And Neither did any of the other workers who worked on the base, like the Janitors or the Kitchen Staff. And of they did, all of their children were accounted for.

She eventually came to the conclusion that the Baby must belong to somebody in the nearby Town, but that lead led nowhere either.

She finally came to the conclusion that the Baby's parents must have died in the Invasion, a very unfortunate but very real possibility. She was going to place her into the System, but over the course of her investigation she had grown fond of the Child.

She decided to Adopt the baby herself. She didn't know the child's name, so she had to come up with a new one.

"How do you like the name, Stella?"

The baby gurgled in delight.

...

Over the next decade of their Teams Existence, the Justice League had to fend off the Legions of the Ghost King's Army many more times. It seemed that Pariah had grown wise to the fact that they were the ones defending the Human Realm, as almost all of the later attacks were directed on them personally.

It made sense, they were the First Line of Defense against his Armies, if he managed to defeat them, their World would soon fall.

But they dealt with the attacks as they came. They had made it their mission to defend their Home from the Forced of Pariah Darks Army, and they would not falter now, or ever.

In the case of Wonder Woman, he Daughter had grown to be a fine little lady. Stella had eventually developed Powers similar to her mother, in that she could fly and had super strength, and had begged to be trained as a Hero.

And who was Diana to deny her Daughter her greatest wish? Over the next 5 years, Diana trained Stella in the ways of the Amazon's. Then, when Stella was 15, she had her join the newly formed Young Justice.

She made a great group of friends on that Team, and even started going by Ellie as a Nickname. Her best friend was by far Conner, though she didn't know why she felt such a strong connection to him? It felt like she could relate to him, but her situation was completely different?

Ah well, her Mom wouldn't mind having another kid, would she? She always wanted a Brother!

...

Meanwhile in the Ghost Zone, the Ghost King was getting anxious. After 15 years, his Agents in the Human Realm had finally managed to set up the Ritual needed to Summon Him into the Human Realm.

Who knew that accepting the Ghost King's Throne would bar him from entering the Human Realm through normal Means? He couldn't even use the Portal, he needed to be summoned or he simply wouldn't be able to leave his new home dimension.

But now, it was almost time. Just another year or two, and he would finally be able to enter the Human Realm. He would finally be able to Find Her. His Daugther.

Danny would finally be able to reunite with his daughter, Ellie.

[cubbihue]

so pixies regularly try to take over fairyworld is timmy on the pixie side?

At first, Timmy was adamantly against the Pixies. He'd tell Jorgen every time he got a notice of their plans to take over Fairyworld, and work to stop it! But it gets a bit harder to resist against your own court the longer you hang out with them.

In the present time, Timmy schedules to be out of FairyWorld during their takeovers. He doesn't try to stop them, but also refuses to be anywhere near when it happens.

He... doesn't like how he's slowly starting to cheer for them. Or how their arguments are becoming more convincing. Or how he's struggling to recall why he was so against them to begin with.

There will come a point where he becomes an active participant. Timmy worries that it's coming sooner than he'd like.

Bitties Series: [Start] > [Previous] > [Next]

[little-pondhead]

DP x DC Prompt

…

There are no more heroes.

Well, okay. Rewind a bit.

Danny has been doing the hero thing for a while now. He’s had a big reveal; everyone has accepted him (including his parents), the GIW disbanded, the Anti-Ecto acts repealed, and generally, everything is going great. Some of the A-Listers are even training as junior ghost hunters to help give him a break from his rogues! (Being Ghost King makes things hectic sometimes, and he just needs the extra help. Sue him!)

The point is, literally nothing is wrong with Danny Phantom’s afterlife.

And then Valerie Gray, the Red Huntress, disappears in front of his eyes.

Danny is baffled! She’s just…gone! Valerie just popped out of existence, like she was never there. But no matter how hard he searches in the Ghost Zone, he can’t find her soul anywhere. His core isn't broken in grief. So she’s not dead. Which is good. So then, where is she?

Some of the others come forward with ideas on how to find her. A few ghosts volunteer to go out into the mortal realm, an area Danny had declared off-limits, to see if she was out there. Danny approves it. He rounds up some of the friendlier (i.e., discreet) ghosts and Amity Parkers and demolishes the outside travel ban.

So everyone spreads out, looking for their dear frenemy and teammate. But it becomes apparent very quickly that something is wrong with the rest of the world.

There are no more heroes.

Every single living superhero on the face of the Earth has just…vanished. Villains are running amok; the countries are in chaos! Some aliens are invading Earth, mythical deities are trying to take over, and society is crumbling to the ground. Everything is on the brink of collapse.

Well, Danny was still there. And so were his people. They were pretty spread out, so could they just…take up the mantles? He also knew where to find the souls of dead heroes in the Zone; surely they wouldn't mind coming out of retirement for a little bit, especially if they couldn't die again. Oh! And that skeleton army leftover from Pariah Dark's reign might be useful in repelling those invading forces.

Honestly, there were more than enough hands to go around! And with the heroes gone, Danny didn't mind letting everyone out for a little break, as long as they followed his rules. They wouldn't stop the search for the other heroes, but hopefully, when they found them, the heroes wouldn't mind Danny's intervention too much. :)

In other words:

Someone fucks up, and all of Earth's living heroes are either wished out of existence or are whisked away to some far-off realm where Danny hasn't checked yet. In the attempt to figure out what's going on, Danny lets the dead run amok over the Earth as they search for clues. The skeleton army repels the invading armies, the souls of dead heroes deal with the world leaders, and his rogues and other Amity Parkers set up shop in place of famous heroes, trying to get the cities under control again.

Basically, they just do their best to keep everything from imploding until the Justice League and others are back.

(And why is it that Danny hasn't disappeared? Well, whatever caused everyone to go poof! only affected living heroes. Anyone heroes that were dead in the first place, or even just half-dead, stayed behind.)

[redrobin-detective]

I think one underrated tragedy of Ice King's scars is that he probably took away Simon's sense of levity.

Like in his very limited appearances before Simon is consumed by the crown we see he's kind of a silly dude. In his introduction video, he only put on the crown in order to playfully tease his fiancee. Plus watching him make light of the loneliness and general misery for a young girl in a broken world. He was a dedicated man, who was generous and loved with his whole heart and threw himself one hundred percent into everything he did. He was also a fun lil guy.

But after almost a millennia of being a mad man, the brunt of every joke, someone who only existed as a broken caricature of himself and couldn't be counted on to take anything seriously, I imagine he was done with it. Now he wants to focus back on his academic endeavors, on his role as a father figure in Marcy's life, on being a proper adult. Any attempts to be silly could easily remind everyone - including himself- of Ice King, something he's eager to avoid.

So his jokes and jibes and general lightheartedness turned to sarcasm and self deprecating comments.

[morii-moth]

"this is me on day one of NO rendog !!"

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

best BEAST!!

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 3 - San Fransokyo

[ansonmountdaily]

First Look | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3

Source: Official clip - July 27 2024

[garagepaperback]

[lorebird]

In which Ford struggles so badly to relate to other people that he wonders if he’s really human at all. The more isolated he becomes, the harder it is to reconcile with his own humanity.

[english-history-trip]

An Anglo-Saxon beaver tooth amulet discovered at the Wigber Low burial site in Derbyshire.

A 6th-century Anglo-Saxon riddle describes the beaver:

I am a dweller on the edge of steep stream banks, and not lazy at all, but warlike with the weapons of my mouth.

I sustain my life with hard labour, laying low huge trees with my hooked axes.

I dive into water, where the fish swim, and immerse my own head, wetting it in the watery surge.

The wounds of sinews and limbs foul of gore I can cure. I destroy pestilence and the deadly plague. I eat the bitter and well-gnawed bark of trees.

The Eurasian Beaver was hunted to extinction in Britain by the 16th century; since 2009, there has been an ongoing project to reintroduce them in Scotland.

[squidokja]

KIM DOKJAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[laurapetrie]

The wedding, when it came, had a fairy-tale quality, in this very remote church, with no electricity, and it happened after dark. It felt quite otherworldly, very dreamlike. - John Perry Barlow

Carolyn was stunning and very stark — as if the few lights were just for her, with the rest of us in darkness and her betrothed's face leaning into her halo. When John fumbled with the ring, Carolyn gently put her hand on his shoulder and laughed. The moment that she put her hand on his shoulder to reassure him that everything was okay, that was quite a loving subtlety. But that was her. - Billy Noonan

It was an incredibly magical moment. I saw it as it was unfolding, almost in silhouette. It was virtually dark outside. John reached for the hand of Carolyn; she was caught off guard. I'm walking backwards in the light rain at dusk, and John does this amazing gesture, taking her hand and bringing it to his lips. It was lovely, the spontaneity of that gesture. - Denis Reggie

[mollysunder]

The Medarda Family and the True Goal of Shimmer

Nature has made us intolerant to change, but fortunately, we have the capacity to change our nature. -Singed

For most of s1 the only versions of magic the audience really gets familiar with are visualized through hextech blue and shimmer pink, but we can't trust it to represent what actual magic is like on Runeterra. People from PnZ are incredibly unfamiliar with magic, it was banned for centuries, and they're mostly retracing steps and doing guess work. The best metric to understand how magic works is to look at characters and regions that are actually inclined to magic, and the Medardas may be the best example yet.

When Ambessa accepts the Wolf totem from Lamb one half of dual aspects of death, her body is enveloped in a bright purple transformation before being reforged into a red that resembles the kind her ancestors and the Lamb wear.

It's the same bright purple that consumes Sky in Viktor's last experiment with the hexcore in s1.

I think this purple represents magic at its most malleable state, where it can be refined or change others into final products with a proper catalysts. By s1's final scene, we know that Mel possesses magic and likely uses it through her golden armor. We also know it's possible for magic to be a hereditary trait that can be passed down (not perfectly) through family lines, which is prized in Noxus (and Ixtal?).

So if Mel has magic that likely means the Medardas family in general has latent magic that flows through them naturally., but qhat does this have to do with shimmer or PnZ in general?

The Medardas are relevant to PnZ because Zaun leading minds, Silco and Singed, have spent their capital trying to replicate what the Medardas can do!Shimmer doesn't exist purely as a bioweapon, that's frankly secondary to it's point. Shimmer exists as a means to artificially make the users capable of performing magic, or at least shift the user's biology into something that can tolerate magic. Hextech as a solution to the mystery of maguc completely sidesteps the relationship between magic and the user by using machinery as middleman, while shimmer takes a more direct route.

Singed can't literally biohack nonmagical people into mages all by himself. Singed instead developed what's essentially a hormone therapy to give users temporary magic abilities by synthesizing shimmer from these mysterious plants that resembles the color of the magic within Ambessa before her deal with the Lamb.

Why didn't Singed and Silco just give people the magic purple plants directly if it's capable turning them into mages? Sky and Rio might be the best examples for why you don't do that. When young Viktor feeds Rio the purple plants we see Rio immediately lose vigor, as an audience most of us assumed that was simply Rio's pre-existing condition acting up, but the relationship is more simple. When Singed said Rio was dying, he said it with surety because Singed KNEW the exposure to magic was killing Rio. And Sky was DISINTEGRATED upon being exposed to the hexcore's magic.

In that vein, Singed used Rio as a work around. From what we see non-mage humans absolutely cannot tolerate exposure to even base magic, but Rio was able to last longer. Instead Singed and Silco exposed Zaun to a version of those magic flowers that was broken down by Rio's metabolism into a more version that non-magical humans can tolerate.

The wild thing is that all this effort is to get non-mage users to Ambessa's UNREALISED state, the purple is just the base magic that exists in mages. Even still, Singed seems to have developed the kind of strain of shimmer that's the closest he's ever come to real magic, and Viktor and Jinx used it.

Viktor's own magical transformation has been facilitated by the hexcore in the same way the Lamb facilitated Ambessa's transformation. Do i think Viktor has essentially created his own Aspect through the hexcore? NO.

But in the same way shimmer is facsimilie of magical ability, so too is the hexcore a subsitute for living magic. And by living magic I don't mean unicorns or mermaids, I mean magic that is given consciousness and shape by being tethered to human concepts. And the hexcore's basic purpose is supposed to be magic that thinks and Viktor has tethered it to the human plane with his blood.

This all begs the question about what could exposure to the hexcore do to long term shimmer users? What WILL it do to Jinx? We all know that's inevitable next season.

You see, power, real power doesn't come to those who were born strongest or fastest or smartest. No. It comes to those who will do anything to achieve it. -Silco

Tldr: Shimmer is a large-scale project to turn the population of Zaun into mages, or magically tolerant, by essentially microdosing the population with magic through shimmer.

[eternity-death]

Had the thought/realization that regardless of if the Dream Master approved or disapproved of Sunday pursuing you, Sunday would still choose not to.

There are just too many factors that prevent him from doing so. A lack of time, for one. Sunday’s duties keep him on his toes constantly; he can’t find a moment of rest even in his sleep. He foresees his negligence of your relationship, and though unintentional, it still wouldn’t be fair to you.

His status as Oak Family Head would be another problem. How would you fare under the overbearing pressures that come with being his lover? Penacony is a planet of lights, glamour, and gossip. All eyes will be on you as soon as your relationship is publicized. You will be held at standards far higher than ever before, and the other Family Heads will be expecting nothing less. Sunday couldn’t possibly bring himself to burden you with all of this.

And of course, there’s his grand plan for Penacony.

I think that he’s been anticipating his sacrifice for a loooong time. Sunday acknowledges that he’ll be hurting you by leaving, and if you were in a relationship, then he would be hurting you even more.

You will be furious with him, surely. You’ve always chastised him for his self-destructive work habits.

But the image of you eternally safe and sound within Ena’s dream is enough to lay any rueful feelings to rest. He hopes that one day you’ll find it within yourself to forgive him.