#true article

[fairuzfan]

Looking through Wikipedia talk pages about anything related to Islam and being like "ohhh ok so you're an islamophobe". Literally citing right wing/anti-immigration books as sources and then say "the point of Wikipedia is to convey the perspective of secondary sources" like ok. There's no point changing these pages because these wikiepedians will just bully you and overwrite them.

[violinsandblood]

why is lestat's turn of events more truthful than louis'?? like, no doubt about it that louis is an unreliable narrator. which he also does admit to himself, he is very aware that he is speaking from his perspective and he doesn't know everything and time does change memories and views of those memories.

but why do so many people in the fandom believe lestat over louis? why is he automatically more reliable and truthful than louis?

[frnkiebby]

give the poor guy his soda damnit~🎃

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I'm kind of obsessed with the wikivoyage page for israel like... just read it

[hellsite-hall-of-fame]

That other guy would fuck it up so that you made macaroons instead of macrons

They're approaching menacingly with a bag of shreaded coconut

now see that would be quite interesting, and definitely be making the most out of the use of time travel

also if someone goes that far, then they absolutely deserve the chance to ruin my macarons lol

[kimio7]

F1 driver and his scandalously young gf is my favourite strollonso trope

[aclickbaittitle]

What do Fiction Podcasts have to say about the future?

Whenever you write a story set years from now, how you construct the world around it creates a new way to see the future, a fictional image to a reality we could be headed towards.

Fiction podcasts love to play within the sci-fi genre, and the thousands of audio dramas they have given us new pictures of what our world could look like in the next century (or a few years closer).

In this article I want to analyze the settings in the following shows: Hello from the Hallowoods, Desperado and The Strange Case of Starship Iris.

Hello From the Hallowoods

Hello From the Hallowoods welcomes us to a world ravaged by black rains and capitalism’s greed. After a natural (but man-made) disaster involving acid rain and flooding the world’s successions gave birth to two different types of beings: those who prefer to dream in a company’s “Prime Dream” and those who stay awake to continue living.

Even though the world is post-apocalyptic on paper, it never feels like it. Rather it is enchanted, there are woods where gods, revenants, devils, giants and zombies fall in love with themselves and with each other, places where community is found.

This, I attribute this to the fact that most characters don’t lament a nebulous “end of the world”, since this is the world they have always been living in and they are going to make the best of it: find family, friends, lovers, build homes and destroy bigots.

You leave the world of Hello From the Hallowoods knowing that even a doomed world is worthy of being awake for.

Desperado Podcast

Desperado Podcast also takes us to a world that was looted, but this time mainly by religious colonialism. 

Neo-colionalism has made itself tangible through genocides and direct targeting to believers that worship other than the “Old man in the Sky”.  In its first episode a community in México which revere La Catrina (a goddess in the show inspired by a popular figure in mexican art) is wiped out by the crusaders. 

From there our protagonist Elio is the sole survivor of his people, however all is not lost as he teams up with Talia (the chosen of Baron Samedi) and Shinji (whom I believe is a death kami?).

Elio now literally carries the memories of his community as the vessel for her goddess. Likewise in Desperado, the magic of the characters is the legacy their ancestors gave them, and it is what keeps them alive in the violent world. 

Though if we are ever to worry that our protagonist could fall into its clutches, the structure of the world soothes our preoccupations. You see, it is the characters within the story that are narrating their own experiences to the audience so we know that after all the pain, they ended up safe.

What Desperado tells us about the future is that, even with the ongoing genocides, white-washing of our culture, and neo-colonialism in general we will end up victorious in the end, and that our history will be forever within our memory.

The Strange Case of Starship Iris

The Strange Case of Starship Iris, is the most sci-fi audio drama out of the bunch. It follows the crew of the Rumour, a smuggler's ship, as they try to uncover the dark secrets of the Federation and evade persecution.

As with the other two properties, the future is not an easy world, but our characters are making the most of it.

In a post-war galaxy, the crew of the Rumour is smuggling space-ship parts, medicine, and erotic magazines until they find a help alarm coming from the Starship Iris and rescue biologist Violet Liu. From there they are involved in a mystery which, if the truth comes to life, they could be charged with treason against the Intergalactic Republic. 

Throughout the two seasons of the podcast, Violet Liu and company heal together the scars that the war and its result: the Intergalactic Republic left them. They fight against the government not only through robberies, infiltration, and coordinated efforts with rebel groups but also by eating latkes, drinking, singing shanties, and getting gay jewish married.

To conclude

if queer podcasts are telling us something about the future, it is that it may be equally messed up as the present but that queer, disabled people of color will exist beyond the end of the world and that even in the bleakest of futures we will continue to love and thrive.

[cocksley-and-catapult]

I personally don’t understand the idea that these guys hate each other this is like the most accurate depiction of a friendship I’ve ever seen and I really get the sense they care about each other dispite the maiming.

Also I think we should print this comic in a newspaper but the whole newspaper is lime green and all the articles are in red and written like social media rant posts

[third-king-of-salmonids]

i think you guys should unionize

OH WE ALREADY HAVE WE’RE BIG ON UNIONS HERE LIKE THATS WHY THE GRILLERS NEVER GO TO UNDERTOW SPILLWAY THE GRILLER UNION WAS SUPER AGAINST IT

[alpineshepherdbadboy]

it’s been lovely to be on instagram today to see all of the heartwarming stories about mark margolis shared by brba and bcs actors, but my favorite has got to be from vincent fuentes (arturo), who shared some texts that mark sent him:

bonus:

[aidelly]

What makes Elly and Aidan so special to me?

I think we can agree that the bond between Elly/Rachel and Aidan is really strong, unusual, original… and I absolutely love it all the points.

Want more details?

Okay.

Professionally trained agents with a focus on espionage. Partners who worked together and protect each other. They literally fell in love on the battlefield.

They probably knew each other for years. And for years after that, Aidan protected her, at least from afar. He thought of her safety and how not to destroy her hidden memories, even if it took five long years without her.

Elly refused relationships and turned down offers of dates. Subconsciously, she felt she couldn't be with anyone else, though she didn't know why.

Elly still had their song in her life. Her feelings for Aidan were still there.

Aidan triggered the return of her memories (associated with hallucinations) immediately upon their reunion.

He knew how to calm her down in a panic. And she trusted him enough to fall off the roof with him.

Their "are you okay?"

Aidan allowed her to kick his ass (with the possibility of killing him) just so he wouldn't have to hurt her. You could literally see how much he didn't want to hit her, and how much it hurt that he had to do it in self-defense at all.

Elly was not mentally balanced (which is more than understandable in this case). Aidan had such strong feelings for her that they were experiencing a folie à deux [a mental disorder occurring simultaneously in two persons who are in close contact. Induced delusional disorder. If one of the partners becomes ill with psychosis, he can influence the other with his delusions or hallucinations, who will start to share them] in the dance fight scene vs. the camera footage that shows their behavior during a fight scene was exemplary professional. (Cool point by @thesnowybiscuit)

Aidan had always loved her and took the last opportunities to tell her so. Even though she had just tried to kill him under psychic control.

She had always loved him and just a few memories of the last few days had helped her disobey the order while under control. If she was really aiming for his head, breaking the music box wouldn't be enought.

Aidan accepted Alfie, even though he didn't like cats and was allergic to them. It may not sound like a big deal, but it is. (And I think he liked him after all.)

Aidan joined her newly built life. And he loved her, even if she wasn't quite the same as before.

Anything else? If you have some thoughts, feel free to share them.

[intermundia]

in general, i think engaging with star wars from a place of realpolitik and political analysis is a fun thought exercise, especially with the canon and legends lore fleshing out the world a bit beyond lucas's archetypal story. there's a whole swath of authors who have written books and comics for adults that all take the premises of the movies seriously, the work of james luceno jumps to mind, so you can choose to dig into that lore and take it seriously as well.

the politics of the saga are related to but greatly simplified from our reality, and there is much that can be said about the way that the galaxy is designed, from george's viet cong inspired rebellion to his prequels era citizens united and bush era executive overreach. i think it's a mistake to take the jedi's role in government too seriously, as they are kind of a hand-wavy organized militia answerable to the legislative branch (and later executive during the war).

they're both a symbol of how the system works at its best and its worst. under the flourishing galactic republic, they're ideal ambassadors of peacetime diplomacy, whose arrival at a conflict resolves it using negotiation and limited force, before those conflicts sprouted into inter-system military engagement. but under sidious, they're arguably willingly misused to enforce peace on a wider scale, due to sidious's design of breaking the galaxy with a civil war.

i see many, many takes that say that the jedi should not be involved in politics at all, but i really think that's missing the point. you can take how they are being used as like a health test of the body politic, they're an epiphenomenon dependent on the republic as a whole. by the era of the prequels, they were a tool of an age that no longer existed, a more civilized one, where conflict could be resolved locally.

should they not have participated? as george has said many times, they were in a bind. would you act to save civilian lives from an invading army of droids who didn't care for or actively sought collateral damage? could you live with yourself if you had the power to help but did not? it was doomed from the beginning, they were in a trap and about to die, but is it better to fight or run away?

anyway, i got slightly off topic. engaging with star wars politically can be a fun and meaningful exercise, which even academics are not immune from the lure. here are a few articles that i enjoyed reading, if anyone is interested:

Charles, M. B. (2015). Remembering and restoring the republic: Star wars and Rome. Classical World, 108(2), 281–298. https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2015.0014 (link) Conor Casey & David Kenny (2021): How Liberty Dies in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Star Wars, Democratic Decay, and Weak Executives, Law & Literature, DOI: 10.1080/1535685X.2021.1991610 (link) Rackaway, C. (2020). Star Wars: The Fascism Awakens: Representation and its Failure from the Weimar Republic to the Galactic Senate. Studies in the Social Sciences, 1(1), 7-22 (link)

have at them and enjoy :)

[fairymonk]

Butt Stuff

[fob4ever]

the first printed review for tttyg ever in the illinois daily chronicle, april 24 2003

[wonder-worker]

"Administratively, too, [...] queens were considered the legal lords of their landholdings. [...] Grants noted that the queen's officials had administrative autonomy without being subject to the king or anyone else, and evidence of the same assumption can be gleaned from court rolls that were recorded with headings indicating the lord of the manor whose court proceedings were being enrolled. As an example, some court rolls for the manor of Haveringatte-Bower specified that it was the court of [Margaret of Anjou] that was in session, while later rolls recorded Elizabeth Woodville as the lord of the manor court."

-Michele Seah, 'My Lady Queen, the Lord of the Manor': The Economic Roles of Late Medieval Queens", Parergon, Volume 37, Number 2, 2020.

[khaopybara]

Aren't you tired of doing this tradition every year with your mom? I can't say I'm not. What can I do? I don't have anyone yet. Hurry and find one. I can't wait to see who your lover will be. It would be great if it's that easy to find. How hard could it be? You can always be the one who makes a move. It's okay, I can do this with you, right? How many more years can you do this with me? I'll keep doing this with you for as long as I can. We'll see.

NARINTHORN NA as HONGDARUN KANSAMUT and KHAOTUNG THANAWAT as GAIPA in MOONLIGHT CHICKEN Fantasmas, Humbe