#slapping an

[invinciblerodent]

honestly it's like 3 am again and i just plain don't have the time or the energy to unpack this, but now that I think about it, there is definitely something kind of funny in how i, a broadly agnostic atheist with no religious upbringing, no background in religion, and no belief in anything supernatural, find it much easier and far more appealing to engage with the concept of religion in fiction, than I do in real life.

like in DnD/Faerun, it's generally pretty easy for me, otherwise detached as I am from it, to conceptualize worship, devotion, blasphemy, gods, etc., knowing that the gods there are not mere ideas, but genuine, tangible beings in their universe, governed by actual rules and hierarchies, and possessing whatever the universe conceptualizes as "divinity".

but on the other hand, it's just really fun for me how in Dragon Age, despite being very much knowingly made up in the same way, the existence of Andraste and the Maker is still kept intentionally vague and ambiguous- and the "gods" or divine-adjacent beings that we've met so far have strangely kept turning out to be... well, pretty much no more than spirits, upstarts, or unfathomably powerful mages. The elven gods are either real or just mages and slavers, the Old Gods of Tevinter are either real or just ancient dragons(???), and Corypheus, despite posing himself on the precipice of divinity, is nevertheless very firmly established as being not a god. Even the nature of the vision of "Andraste" we see in the Fade is kept ambiguous- maybe it's Andraste, maybe it's Divine Justinia, maybe it's a helpful spirit that has latched itself onto some echo of Justinia's soul. If I recall correctly, there is not a definitive claim made by the game, only one of what you believe it to be, and maybe like, Leliana says it once?? I think???

I think the way divinity and godhood is conceptualized in Dragon Age is really fascinating, in that so far, it's been very much unlike the way most other fantasy series I've read/played have treated their gods, and now I'm actually really looking forward to seeing how it all gets upended in Veilguard.

Like I'm kinda feeling a bit giddy again, just thinking about again playing a character who is ambiguously and casually Andrastian in the general/average Thedosian way (maybe kind of like how Dorian is, in that she'll believe in the faith and not the Chantry), and trying to make sense of the presence of literal fucking elven gods in her city. Like, what a mindfuck, you know?

[traumszenario]

[claypigeonpottery]

a kinetic sculpture by Tim Lewis

I know it’s not pottery but it is sculptural and holy shit

it’s beautiful and disturbing and I feel like I could stumble across this creature in a forest and never be seen again???

[marfian]

So act 3 huh

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

Guy who has wandered through the halls and corridors of your body not with any special kind of love but with the untold intimacy of a contractor assessing the damages and potentials voice: right, so the main issue here is that the body is currently a temple, okay, and what we want is for it to be a home, cause temples are pretty and all and occasionally nice to be in if you're into that sort of thing but very few people would actually want to live in one. So what we're gonna do first is you're gonna take a look at what's here, the carrying walls and windows and all that, and you're going to come up with something you'd actually like to be alive inside of, and it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to feel strange and stupid and embarrassing but you're still gonna do it, because otherwise this construction site is fucked. And maybe what you want to live in is a skatepark or an anime-themed cat cafe or an esoteric library that has a dildo section for some reason, so it might feel like it's a downgrade from a temple, but it's actually the opposite cause the main customer for a body is you and the main customer for a temple are templegoers and maybe higher powers of some kind, - i wouldn't know about those, they never hired me, - not the temple itself, which is what you are, right, cause the body/mind/soul separation doesn't actually do anything, so what you're gonna do is look at the current layout and dig out whatever hope and ability to want you have and come up with a blueprint, and then my boys can actually get to work. Oh, and you have got to change the windows, it's drafty as fuck in here.

[pussyslave]

[gampix]

Guilt.

[paddysol]

they are gossiping your honour

[batcows]

it's so wild that the best lyric in pop music history ("tell your boyfriend / if he says he's got beef / that I'm a vegetarian and I ain't fuckin scared of him") and the worst lyric in history ("do the hellen keller and talk with yo hips") are both from the same song ("DONTTRUSTME" by 3OH!3). just. crazy how that works

[hell0mega]

people are drawing Steamboat Willie Mickey doing all this crazy shit and whatnot, but you could always do that. you can do that now, with current Mickey, just fine. it's fanart and it's legally protected. hell you could take Disney-drawn Mickey and put a caption about unions or whatever on it and it would still be protected under free speech and sometimes even parody law.

what is special about public domain is that you can SELL him. you could take a screenshot and sell it on a tshirt. you can use him to advertise your plumbing business. people have already uploaded and monetized the original film.

you could always have Mickey say what you want, but now you can profit off it.

[mapletine]

i just know he’s on that switch 12 hours a day

[traumszenario]

[mokeonn]

The Princess Bride is such a funny book to read after ONLY seeing the movie. Like Goldman made up a fake author from a fake country and proceeded to write the book as an abridged version of what the fake author wrote... and then he proceeds to add in notes to the "abridged version" mentioning all the boring world building stuff he skipped because it was boring.

Like shout out to William Goldman, man really did make an entire book that is just "the cool scenes you thought of in your head" and then made up a fake author to abridge so he doesn't have to connect them.

And it slaps

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

heartbreaking: none of artist's other songs are as much of a banger as the song I discovered the artist by

[cursedgamerchild]

"internet historian's alt-right anyways" "great day to have never liked james somerton" "never even heard of illuminaughtii before this lol"

that's great buddy but don't go around thinking you're immune to this. if you're not looking for plagiarism, you likely won't notice it unless its egregiously obvious. hell, you've probably consumed plagiarized content without even realizing it. even hbomb pointed out that these people disguised what they presented pretty well as long as you didn't try and dig deeper. don't come away just thinking of this as a callout piece, take this as an important lesson about vetting your sources. if googling scripts in quotes was enough to expose the original, we should all start doing that shit!!

edit: it got a little too doomer-y a little too fast so one quick addition

this is hbomb's curated playlist of queer creators, many of whom were victims of plagiarism

this is producer kat on reddit calling for any more plagiarism discoveries and for queer content creators to be uplifted

please take some time to uplift these creators and recommend any you know! if you can help uncover more of the original creators whose work was lifted that would be great too :)

UPDATE- From Hbomb's twitter: "We're in the process of cataloguing everyone James Somerton plagiarised and finding their contact information. Which is quite a task, so to help us out: If you see this and happen to be one of the people Somerton stole from, please email us at contact@hbomb.zone"

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