#unified era

[laracroftdaily]

Trinity was a secret society that manipulated the world for monetary gain. Then they killed your father because he got in the way of that, when you were just a child. When I was 12, my father was murdered in Paris by a secret society who call themselves the Light.

TOMB RAIDER: THE LEGEND OF LARA CROFT 1.03

[chocostrwberry]

Akumatized Sabine and Marichat!! And a new chat noir design, I had this planned for a month but I NEVER draw him for some reason?? So I haven’t said anything ab it-

Nurse Desserts power is that she makes anyone within her vicinity contract an illness, which induces fatigue, sneezing, coughing, and greenish lumps/spots to appear on their body. Her sentimonster is a giant cake baby that can also turn into multiple of itself, but get smaller the more there are.

[ktlsyrtis]

Everyone: Regeneration time! I wonder who they got to follow this amazing, charismatic, queer POC doctor we all adore

RTD:

Everyone:

[cissyknowsall]

don’t fuck with the Commander cause she’ll have you eaten fr

[jorrated]

idk why sonic fans care so much about canon timelines. classic sonic is past sonic or an alternate version sonic? who gives a shit sonic canon is the definition of fuck it we ball have fun with your blue rat

[fereldanwench]

finally checking out the tomb raider eclipse overhaul for shadow of the tomb raider

it's so fucking good

power fantasy lara is so back 🙏

[magnetarbeam]

You know, the way the lambent crystal is talked about as, like, giving Anakin a way to bridge the gap between his Force sense and the Force-nonexistent Yuuzhan Vong because its telepathic properties can connect to both sides of it kinda makes me wonder if it might be possible to have a similar kind of interface with regular mechanical systems. Like, if you have some way to convert electronic signals into data that a Force-user, at least, can sense in their mind, and convert back from that, could a computer system be interacted with in the same capacity as a living brain of comparable complexity?

Absolutely keeping this in my back pocket for some post-NJO Tahiri-related headcanons.

[doux-amer]

Usually music polls for past years always throw me because it reminds me that my lived experience is not the same as a notable chunk of the Tumblr userbase (look...let's just say you can see the racial and sometimes geographical breakdown lmao), but this is one of the rare polls where I get it.

[liberalsarecool]

THE ERA OF VANISHING HAS BEGUN

They are not arresting people. They are vanishing them.

Rumeysa Ozturk wasn’t read her rights. She wasn’t told why she was being detained. She was walking to break her fast in Somerville, Massachusetts when masked men in an unmarked SUV pulled up, took her phone, slapped on handcuffs, and dragged her into a vehicle like she was some kind of national security threat.

She’s a doctoral student. A Fulbright scholar. A trauma researcher. But in Donald Trump’s America, she fit the profile: Muslim, foreign-born, sympathetic to Palestinians.

Now she’s locked in a for-profit detention center in Louisiana, hundreds of miles from her lawyer, after a federal judge specifically said she wasn’t to be moved.

They moved her anyway. Because rules no longer apply to those with badges — real or fake.

A MOVEMENT BUILT ON CHAINS AND COWARDS

Alireza Doroudi is gone too.

He’s a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, born in Iran, studying mechanical engineering. No criminal record. No warning. Just scooped off the grid.

ICE refuses to say where he’s being held. No public charge has been announced. His only crime appears to be existing in the wrong body, from the wrong country, in the wrong era.

Mahmoud Khalil was next — a Columbia student, arrested for leading pro-Palestinian protests. Trump labeled him a “radical foreign Hamas sympathizer” on Truth Social. Days later, he was gone.

Jeanette Vizguerra was taken from her Target shift in Colorado, chained at the waist.

Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker organizer, was dragged from his car at dawn in Washington. His window was smashed by federal agents. His voice silenced.

These aren’t isolated incidents. These are deliberate acts of political intimidation.

They are testing the system — testing us — to see how many people they can disappear before we stop calling it democracy.

WHEN ICE IS A BADGE — AND A COSTUME

While the real ICE disappears scholars, organizers, and mothers, the fakes are circling like vultures.

In South Carolina, Sean-Michael Johnson posed as an ICE officer. He pulled over a van of Latino men, screamed slurs, jiggled their keys, and knocked a phone out of someone’s hand. “You’re going back to Mexico!” he shouted. He wasn’t an agent — but he played one with conviction.

In North Carolina, Carl Thomas Bennett used a fake badge to sexually assault a woman at a motel. He told her if she didn’t comply, he’d have her deported. He held up a counterfeit ID and pretended to be the state.

And in Philadelphia, a Temple University student in an “ICE” shirt tried to storm a dorm building with two accomplices. They were dressed for the part, intoxicated by the illusion of authority, emboldened by the climate.

This is what happens when the state makes cruelty a brand. When a badge becomes a fetish object. When the line between enforcement and cosplay disappears altogether.

THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS THE CRIME

Let’s stop pretending this is a coincidence.

This is a unified strategy. The Trump administration is using ICE like a personal strike force — targeting international students, protest leaders, organizers, and mothers with surgical precision.

They invoke secret designations. They bypass due process. They manufacture pretexts out of thin air and rely on the fog of bureaucracy to hide the blood on the floor.

The point isn’t law enforcement. The point is deterrence. Spectacle. Control.

This is what political cleansing looks like when it’s dressed up in the language of national security.

They’re showing the world that resistance has a cost — and the cost is your freedom, your voice, your visibility, your future.

SILENCE IS CONSENT. AND WE ARE LOUD.

There is no middle ground here. No fence to sit on. No neutral position when people are being kidnapped in the name of the state.

ICE doesn’t need your applause. It needs your silence. Every time a student vanishes and the media shrugs, every time a woman is cuffed and the public looks away, the machine gets stronger.

They are daring us to ignore it. They are counting on our numbness. They are betting that we’ll keep scrolling.

We cannot let them win.

This is not border policy. This is not visa enforcement. This is not safety.This is authoritarianism with a PowerPoint presentation.This is fascism disguised as formality.

This is the state stripping people from the land and pretending it’s order.

Let the record show:

They took people.

And we did not look away.

We saw it.

We named it.

We raised hell.

And we did not stop.

(I didn’t write this. Credit goes to Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge)

[laracroftdaily]

TOMB RAIDER: THE LEGEND OF LARA CROFT [October 10th, 2024]

[everestblue]

War Without Reason

Tiamat the Unifier. A silly oc idea i had for a scorching era queen, who used her numerous mixed tribal heritages to rally the dragon clans under her cause. She was hatched scaleless, and thus likes to wear armor everywhere she goes <3

[sexhaver]

in the late 2030s, noosphere analysts in the Unified Irish Republic made a breakthrough: by injecting the souls of people on their deathbeds with specific radioisotopes, they could filter through the greater noosphere for that marker to identify where the soul ended up. the first test subject's soul reappearing in the Mesozoic Era, in turn, led to the discovery that reincarnation is not only real but completely unbound by time or space: upon death, your consciousness is instantly transferred to some other vessel somewhere/when in spacetime at the moment it attains cognizance.

after further research, it was determined that 1. this jump is as close to random as modern nooscopes can measure and 2. the minimum threshold for "cognizance" is incredibly low. this means that most people will end up reincarnating as some kind of insect or vermin, with "human surviving to the age where they start becoming self-aware" being a vanishingly rare outcome. there was also an issue where something like 15% of test subjects ended up returning identical signatures indicating they had been reincarnated somewhere around Orion's Belt, but this was chalked up to a combination of interference from dark matter and insufficiently accurate tools.

this eventually led to the formation of a new religion asserting that there is only one individual "consciousness" in the universe, and that all beings that have ever existed or will ever exist (including you) are all simply different iterations of this one consciousness. the Great Schism of 2037 resulted in this religion fragmenting into two sects due to an argument over the existence of immortal or timeless beings: the larger faction (called "Wombists" due to their habit of referring to the universe as an egg or womb) held that true immortality was impossible in this realm and the endgame for the One True Consciousness (i.e. you) after living every life in the universe was to ascend to godhood; whereas the smaller faction (referred to by the history books as simply "Heretics" after their eradication for heresy) argued that there was exactly one (1) Truly Immortal Being and that the endgame of the One True Consciousness was to end up trapped in this body/life and eventually go mad with power.

in 2041, after the existence of dark matter was conclusively debunked, Cuban astral projectioneers managed to resolve the apparent discrepancy with the earlier Irish dataset: there was, in fact, a planet near Orion's Belt host to an incomprehensibly vast biomass. further expeditions revealed this life to be trillions upon trillions of silicon-based microscopic organisms that were effectively biologically immortal, with metabolic cycles operating on the timescale of stars. the implications of this prompted a second minor schism within the church, since the Wombist line of reasoning implied that 15% of all reincarnations were billion-year jail sentences in the body of an alien tardigrade.

at 1:07 PM GMT on July 27th, 2043, a Mexican observatory detected evidence of a massive eel-like entity emerging from the asteroid belt. it had yet to receive an official name before rendering the issue moot by consuming the Earth whole approximately 28 minutes later.

[qqueenofhades]

hi I hope you don't mind but I would love to hear your long tired historian rant you mentioned in your tags on that one post, if you feel in the mood to share? (no pressure!)

(also thank you for existing, you do wonderful work and the world is a better place for you being in it)

Aha. Well. For context, the mention of said rant was in relation to this post:

Basically, this post struck a nerve because of how it exactly encapsulates the anti-intellectual, anti-academia, anti-historical, anti-reality thinking that is absolutely rampant in social media spaces, even and especially spaces that identify as leftist, liberal, or otherwise "superior" to the right wing when it comes to identifying fake news or misinformation. (Example A: anything ever written by a self-proclaimed leftist on Twitter.) We all know that there are huge problems with the American public school system (and the people writing this are almost always American) and the American practice of education in general, and that yes, there are many things that happened in the past (or y'know, the present!) that are not taught very well, or at all. But because the American public school system is so decentralized and largely autonomous, incredibly dependent on the temperament of local superintendents and/or school boards, taxation and funding, availability of teachers, requirement of useless standardized tests, etc., it is very difficult (if not outright impossible) to claim that this is the result of a Unified Grand Conspiracy To Not Teach Real History To The Youth In Order To Make Them Mindlessly Support Capitalism. That is the exact sort of deranged conspiratorial thinking that the right wing does and fits everything into a sinister narrative about how "They" are planning to keep you ignorant and therefore nothing harmful that you ever think or do is really your fault. It's not good.

(Whoosh. That was very calm and reasonable of me. For the rest of this post, please just picture Captain Holt "apparently that's a trigger for me" dot gif.)

Also: even in public school, and despite the Republicans' best efforts, there are plenty of opportunities to study complex or "controversial" subjects. For example, I spend a week every June grading AP Euro History exams with a lot of other educators in a giant windowless steel box (woo-hoo, fun times!) Every year, there are questions on the exam about women's rights, imperialism and exploitation, slavery/race relations, the development of capitalism and the current economic model, religion and science, the history of labor, and other topics that would be considered "controversial" if you're an idiot. This is an exam taken by high school students in all grades from across the country, and there are also AP World History and APUSH (US history) exams every year which are doubtless making an effort to address similar themes. This is an advanced program, yes, but it's widely available to many schools and is not a result of a sinister plot to keep the youth from discovering the truth. Also: you live in an era of absolutely unprecedented access to information. Put down the ChatGPT bullshit generator and visit a goddamn public library. Or even open Wikipedia. The tools are there for you to start educating yourself and they are so easy to find!!!!!

The "Historians Are Hiding The Truth!!!" narrative becomes even more ridiculous in university-level or professional academic historical-study spaces, especially when historical educators and associations (such as the American Historical Association) have been at the forefront of pushing back against right-wing efforts to censor history, punish teachers, and remove culture-war subjects from classrooms. Also as someone who has advanced degrees in history, has taught/worked in several universities in different countries, writes and publishes historical research, and otherwise participates professionally in the field: trust me, we aren't "hiding" shit. There are vigorous debates and disagreements on various bogglingly obscure subjects and points of clarification and so forth, but that doesn't mean we're not talking about them (trust me, we're often talking about them too much). If you're issuing confident blanket statements about how "historians are conspiring to hide x," you're an idiot.

This also has dangerous repercussions in the field of, say, politics and civics, where a lot of absolutely braindead Online Leftists have spent the last four years posting deranged nonsense on social media and then, whenever they're called out on it for that not actually being how anything works at all, whining that "I was never taught this!!!" (And yet, it somehow never actually changes their perspective or their theories....) They whine about how "they didn't know this" and it was someone else's fault, they make up total fantasy about what the Biden administration did or should have done and now are still happy about Trump coming back because "It will teach the Democrats a lesson!!!" and otherwise accelerating us oh-so-quickly down that slippery slippery fascism slope. Their weaponized ignorance and their magical fantasies about what "should" have happened often come back to this same learned helplessness, where it's everyone else's fault (especially Capitalism's) that they're total wankers. Look: I'm not a goddamn fan of capitalism either. But we all grew up in this same system, and some of us aren't raving idiots, so at some point, you have to take the tiniest modicum of personal responsibility for the information you seek out, the content you consume, the opinions you propagate, and the people you surround yourself with. Shocking.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Online Leftists are actively and unrepentantly enabling American fascism and should be treated in the same way as we treat MAGA when it comes to deciding what is good or worthwhile information. This is because their entire political philosophy (insofar as their beliefs can be dignified with the term) is based on the "make shit up and remove it from any basic empirical references, grounding in reality, or 'should I run the most basic Google search and see if I'm completely talking out of my ass in a distorted social media echo chamber? Nah I'm good' " technique. This is, as the original tweet above references, trying to retcon sheer malicious laziness and stupidity into grand ideological theories about how it's actually "better" that they don't know a damn thing and won't shut up. It's your evil history teacher's fault, or "academics are all rich and elitist" (ask any academic-precariat person like me and we will laugh hollowly and then throw monkey poop at you), or "They" wouldn't let you learn this, or on and on. Even in our terrible, awful, no-good very-bad timeline, there are still ample tools to educate yourself, to learn how to filter out bad information and junk news, and otherwise gird yourself even a little for the even-more-massive assault on empirical reality that we are about to experience in the next four years (ugh). I suggest you take advantage of them.

[demilypyro]

if im not late to the party and you're still accepting infodump requests: from what i know theres a period inbetween modern day earth and the future where star trek takes place that some refer to as "the mad max part of the timeline" whats goin on there? i can understand how modern earth would go mad max but does the series ever dive into how that setting reformed into "modern day" star trek?

So according to Star Trek lore, in 1992 and 1996, several major conflicts broke out, collectively referred to as the "Eugenics Wars". Essentially, a faction of genetically engineered superhumans emerged and started fighting everybody and millions of people died. There were also major riots in 2024, and World War 3 broke out in 2026. World War 3 ended in 2053, and the "mad max" era you're referring to is likely the period after, large parts of the earth having been reduced to chaos due to the nuclear warfare.

In the first episode of Next Generation, the omnipotent being Q considered humanity to be "barbaric" as late as 2079, citing drugged up soldiers and violent courts liberally sentencing people to death.

Change began in 2063, when Zephram Cochrane developed the first human warp drive, breaking the speed-of-light barrier and drawing the attention of the Vulcans, which caused first contact between humans and an alien species. These events are detailed in the movie Star Trek: First Contact.

Change was slow, but given new perspective by the possibility of traveling beyond the stars, humanity began to unify, and by the relatively optimistic year of 2150, a unified Earth government had been established. The chronologically earliest Star Trek series, Star Trek: Enterprise, takes place in 2151, and details the founding of the United Federation of Planets. This would be what we would call the start of "the Star Trek future."

[communist-ojou-sama]

Honestly I feel it's safe to say now that the Iranians were right to wait and that they've actually played their cards a lot better than they've gotten credit for this past two and a half-years. Theres something to be said about the enormous second-mover advantage we see emerging in peer and near-peer warfare in an era where it's increasingly difficult-to-impossible to wage war on peer states without your own home front taking a beating. It seems like people are surprised by the sudden wave of national unity in Iran following the Zionist attacks, but make no mistake: the social response is only this united because Iran waited to be attacked first. Because now any damage caused to Iran by the Entity is "the result of one-sided foreign aggression" and NOT "the consequences of Khamenei launching a war for the sake of Palestine" the Palestinian cause being a less motivating and unifying cause in Iranian society than national dignity. Likewise on the Zionist side all the devastating damage done to the Entity's infrastructure by Iran, becomes somebody's fault, the fault of the occupation government for underestimating Iran's ability to respond to aggression

[nyancrimew]

What do you think is *next* for hacking and "hacktivism" - with the spectre of 2010s idealism seemingly defeated.... can there ever be a wide movement like anonymous again? Or have we grown to cynical to believe in anything.

i honestly don't think a unified movement (as far as it even was that) like anonymous is needed anyways, the reason there isn't one like it now is that the conditions we're working under are very different and we have a lot of hindsight. i think the first half of the 2020s so far have already showed pretty well what works now and how it works.

the mix of both very focused and also less targeted hack & leak campaigns that have defined this current era so far won't stop anytime soon and the more the younger generations lose hope for an easy future the more aggressive the hacks will get. it's also important to keep in mind that hacktivism is global and probably more so than ever before.

and at least for me and a lot of other people ive talked to the hacking is somewhat of a way out of pure cynicism, like sure it feels like you may be sacrificing yourself but fighting like this and doing cool ass shit either alone or with friends feels really hopeful. the changes we make are small but they're noticeable and help move the needle or at least show it can be moved.

i think if anything the fight will get more relentless, especially depending on who authorities try to make an example out of next and how.