#uninformed broke opinions

[jccheapalier]

5 Types of People Who Will Gladly RUIN Your Financial Life

[sgiandubh]

I’m reading the new Clanlands book. I was hoping it would be a fun read like the first one, no narrative. I’ve now read two different passages in the book where Sam talks about running into a woman he finds attractive whether it’s a hotel patron, hotel staff, or shop worker, including this passage about Valentines Day. He hoped to ask the woman making his smoothie on a date and instead ended up alone in his hotel room on Valentine’s Day dreaming about a romantic night in his hotel room with the fantasy date that never came to fruition.

I wish for once we shippers could get a win instead of taking one step forward and two steps back if you know what I mean. It’s hard to hold out hope of Sam and Cait ever coming out publicly when there’s interviews and books filled with the narrative.

Dear Valentine's Day Anon,

You start with a lie. You are not reading that book. You have read someone else's (dutiful Marple, as always, all hands on deck) choice of salacious/commercial/crappy sentimental passages of a 150 to 200 pages book chock-a-block full with other things. You, therefore, have an F- from me for laziness and naïveté. When you speak about a text, any text (and this, Anon, scarcely is literature), please be honest with yourself and wait until the end. The same way you should never judge a book by its cover, do not judge a book by some excerpts someone picked up in order to show you how desperate the author is to sell it.

Reading is a personal affair. Buy the book. Read it all. And then you'll be qualified to have a grounded opinion. I am not in a hurry to read it and I certainly had no hopes he would give us a single ounce of his reality or truth in a commercial companion to a TV show, as this book clearly is.

Then, there's also that: it is a ghostwritten book and not a very good one. Travel books are also always rife with false self-references and I hope, for one, you do not believe there is anything remotely objective in Marco Polo's Book of the Marvels of the World (some say he never got where he told all the Western World he did!). And if Marco Polo himself lied shamelessly, why wouldn't SRH do exactly the same, for the needs of a scantily cobbled show where he is playing the decoratively fit clown along his older, wiser, nerdy companion?

I was shown the reactions to those dutifully poisonous posts. A mob, cackling and the host gleefully throwing gasoline on that fire (but oh, no: she is not a hater - my foot she isn't). The only comment that truly broke my heart, Anon, is this one:

What a terrible person must the woman who wrote that be! What a horrible, empty life she must have! Please, for the name of everything holy, leave Chrissie Heughan out of your putrid pettiness! She raised her boys by herself and with very little. Whoever wrote this comment should really, really be ashamed of herself. She can even say whatever she wants about SRH, but she should leave his family out of her hatred. Not a single woman in that thread corrected or challenged her. Not. A. Single. One.

You also tell me you are tired with the tango. I also think no real shipper could fall, by now, for these tired tricks. And if you do believe the interviews and books more than they should be, you are the perfect fodder for those interviews and books that can and should be questioned, as anything else in this strange story is critically questioned every single day.

So you see, Anon, I will perhaps be interested in your grounded opinion the day you will come back after reading the whole book, not Marple's Reader Digest version. If anything, your uninformed, gluttonous curiosity backfired. Unless you came here to spread the holy shite on this doorknob, too. But that is your problem, Anon. Not mine.

[gingerhastoomanyobsessions]

for a webbed site that claims to love rehabilitative justice tumblr sure has a love of vengeance huh. somehow we’ve created a digital atmosphere where literal murder is less bad than (checks notes) not emerging from the womb with a perfectly calibrated moral compass and the Correct Political Opinions

I’ve seen people on here say that, not only can people Not Change, but that people who try to change are a) lying b) manipulative and c) undeserving of the chance to change. besties…becoming a better person isn’t about whether or not you deserve to become a better person, it’s not even about becoming 100% perfect, it’s about doing damage control after you realize you fucked up. like yeah people you’ve hurt aren’t obligated to like you/forgive you/interact with you, but tumblrites seem to think that anyone who’s ever made a serious mistake should be exiled from society and/or guillotined. we’ve gone from reasonable and correct takes about how people change (ex. “it’s not my responsibility to teach you”— yes! of course it shouldn’t be up to underprivileged random people on the internet to educate the uninformed!) to utterly deranged ones (ex. “nobody with privilege will ever realize that they’re doing harm and the ones who claim to be in the process of learning are just virtue signaling and should be punished for it”— a take I’ve seen applied to men learning about feminism, cishets becoming allies, white people learning about antiracism, relatives of shooters who go on to advocate for gun control, etc)

you do realize that people can genuinely change for the better, right? I’ve seen my parents un-transphobia themselves firsthand, going from thinking that my sibling came out “for attention” to wholeheartedly believing in trans rights. my grandma’s father was every kind of asshole imaginable and she grew up indoctrinated, but as an adult she broke away from him and has spent the rest of her life working on unlearning stuff. my cousin grew up in the rural south and parroted his rural southern dad’s opinions until he was thirteen and started actually thinking for himself, at which point he did a total 180 and is now studying history with a focus on the evolution of the rights of the underprivileged

so when I see people on here say that people shouldn’t change because they don’t deserve to change it rubs me the wrong way. cause at that point it sounds like you’d rather have that person stay harmful so you can stay mad at them, instead of letting them change and gaining yourself an ally. again, you don’t need to interact with them, but. at this point it kind of feels like you care more about hating The Oppressors than about protecting The Oppressed.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Apr 20, 2023

I am at the home of a psychopath. Here on the easternmost point of the island of Capri, the ancient ruins of the Villa Jovis still cling to the summit of the mount­ain. This was the former residence of the Emperor Tiberius, who retired here for the last decade of his life in order to indulge in what Milton described as “his horrid lusts”. He conducted wild orgies for his nymphs and catamites. He forced children to swim between his thighs, calling them his “little fish”. He raped two brothers and broke their legs when they complained. He threw countless individuals to their deaths from a precipice looming high over the sea.

That these stories are unlikely to be true is beside the point; Tiberius’s reputation has done wonders for the tourist trade here on Capri. The historians Suetonius and Tacitus started the rumours and, with the help of successive generations of sensationalists, established a tradition that was to persist for almost two millennia.

All of which serves as a reminder that reputations can be constructed and sustained on the flimsiest of foundations. Suetonius and Tacitus were writing almost a century after the emperor’s death, and many of their lurid stories were doubtless echoes of those circulated by his most spiteful enemies. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of prurience. Who can deny that the more lascivious and outlandish acts of the Roman emperors are by far the most memorable? One thinks immediately of Caligula having sex with his siblings and appointing his horse as consul. Or Nero murdering his own mother, and taking a castrated slave for his bride, naming him after the wife he had kicked to death. For all their horror, who doesn’t feel cheated when such tales turn out to be false?

Our reputations are changelings: protean shades of other people’s imaginations. More often than not, they are birthed from a combination of uninformed prejudice and wishful thinking. And we should be in no doubt that in our online age, when lies are disseminated at lightning speed and casual defamation has become the activist’s principal strategy, reputations are harder to heal once tarnished.

I am tempted to feel pity for future historians. Quite how they will be expected to wade through endless reams of emails, texts, and other digital materials — an infinitude of conflicting narratives and individual “truths” — really is beyond me. At least when there is a dearth of primary sources it is possible to piggyback onto a firm conclusion. “Suetonius said…” has a satisfactory and definitive air, but only because there are so few of his contemporary voices available to contradict him.

As the culture war rumbles on, and I have found myself ostracised by former friends who now interpret even minor political disagreements as evidence of malevolence, I have learned that reputation is invariably a form of fiction. One such friend used to complain endlessly about a certain conservative commentator, asserting that he was a mendacious hatemonger whose every action was motivated by contempt for marginalised communities. These ideas were so frequently repeated in conversation, and confirmed by others within our circle, that I had no doubt they must be true. Imagine my confusion, then, when I eventually became well acquainted with this man, and found him to be both generous and empathetic. It’s like meeting Beelzebub and finding that he has been secretly baking cupcakes for the poor.

The same sense of bewilderment has struck me whenever I have happened upon bad-faith critics attempting to summarise my views. I have been variously described as “far-Right”, “bigoted”, “racist”, “sexist” and even “homophobic”. Of course, I would not expect total strangers to know my mind, but given that my actual opinions are freely available to anyone with a search engine, it does feel odd to be so wildly mischaracterised.

I am not alone in this. That false narratives can be more powerful than reality is, of course, the reason why our opponents so readily resort to distortions and smears. A colleague recently alerted me to one of the more bizarre hit pieces that has been written about me in an online magazine. The strategy was at least novel: the writer had contacted former students from my time as a teacher in order to trawl for unflattering anecdotes. According to one account, I had sent a pupil out of the classroom because he dared to disagree with me about the use of metaphorical language in Of Mice and Men.

But perhaps funnier than the story itself is that the author of this article was gulled into repeating it as though it could possibly be authentic. It is a reminder that reputations are often cultivated by those who must first suspend their critical faculties. This kind of nonsense is harmless enough, of course. It falls far short of defamation and, as RuPaul so neatly put it: “what other people think of me is none of my business.”

For all that, more serious attacks on people’s reputations can be devastating. Three years ago, I lost a friend to cancer after he had been falsely accused of sexual assault. In his final days he told me that he had no doubt that the years of intense anxiety following the trial had exacerbated his illness. The source of his distress wasn’t even so much the initial accusation, which was easily disproved in court, but rather the gossip that continued to reverberate and the loved ones who no longer picked up the phone.

In the past, I have often made the mistake of assuming the worst of my detractors, simply because a scurrilous lie has seemed more appealing than a complicated truth. Few of us who have been dragged into the deranging ideological skirmishes of the past few years will have avoided making these mistakes, but these days I like to keep in mind Philip Roth’s remark in The Human Stain: “our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.”

No doubt it is hopelessly optimistic to assume that this approach will become the default. Our brains are hardwired to take mental shortcuts — known as heuristics — and we are generally more willing to believe the worst of others than make the effort to consider that we may have been misinformed. Worse still, the inherent appeal of scandalous and titillating tales means they will be propagated at an accelerated rate, so that even outright lies can quickly become received wisdom. We tend to accept that there is “no smoke without fire”, when more often than not it’s just a few troublemakers with a dry ice machine.

So perhaps we ought to give Tiberius the benefit of the doubt. In that spirit, let us consider one of Suetonius’s more flattering accounts. While living on the island of Rhodes, Tiberius remarked that he ought to visit all the sick people in the town. His servants assumed that this was some kind of decree, and the local invalids were hastily summoned. Rather than turn them away, Tiberius took the time to speak to each one and apologise for the misunderstanding. This story may not satisfy our appetite for murder and depravity, but at least it might be true.

[mwolf0epsilon]

Olly for the ask game!

Headcanon A: What I Think Realistically

Riot Troopers have a very bad reputation among GAR clones because their job entails "assaulting civilians", a rather cowardly position to a clone's point of view. Even their use of shields is a point of mockery.

Olly being one of the highest ranking riot troopers prior to the Warehouse Incident made him a target for some rather... Unsavoury rumours. And considering he often helped break-up fights in 79s he definitely didn't make a good name for himself in the eyes of the GAR.

His very stoic and silent nature didn't help his case, and once Lich and PB weren't around to defend his name he just got used to being on the Frontliners's shitlist. It wasn't like he cared about their uninformed opinions anyway. He didn't have much time for baseless gossip.

Headcanon B: What I Think is Fucking Hilarious

Olly is a very needy cuddlebug once you get past his unflappable and unyielding exterior mask. He needs physical comfort and sometimes forgets he can't just randomly grab a vod to hold like a teddy bear.

He always apologizes if he oversteps any boundaries and is lucky most of the vode don't mind being manhandled or held like tooka kittens.

It's kind of funny seeing him drop the usual resting bitch face and taking on such a shy and sheepish look, considering just how gosh darn huge he is.

Headcanon C: What is Heart-crushing and Awful but Fun to Inflict on Friends

His chronic pain from Sulu Ra's enhancement serum experiment, and his struggle to deal with his grief and abandonment issues can lead to him becoming incredibly volatile and physically reactive. He's hurt at least three people he trusted dearly due to what happened on Umbara alone, and he's forever ashamed of the lasting scars (both physical a psychological) those moments of weakness caused his friends.

He usually has good composure and can compartmentalize his troubles. But Lichtenberg being supposedly KIA and Pretty Boy being MIA broke something in him. They were his rocks after all. His ori'vode. It's hard to deal with loss and personal betrayal like that...

Imagine the added agony and shame when they were all reunited on Epifania... He lashed out at his friends for NOTHING...

Headcanon D: What Would Never Work with Canon but the Canon is Shit so I Believe It Anyway

Olly's stature of 8'2". The Warehouse Incident altered his already abnormally tall height (canon says the clones are 6 feet tall, but she a goddamn liar they're 5'7") into something freakish for a human, and he's incredibly self-conscious about it.

It doesn't help that he was put on permanent Prison rotation and had to relocate to the prison barracks specifically to stay out of sight of civilians. Poor guy only sees his best friend or his boyfriend once a week if he's lucky...

Gets to know Boba a little better tho. He pities the kid a lot, but tries not to show it least Fett's little terror feel patronized and personally slighted.

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

Re: the tax break thing, it was very shitty of all of them but the one who gets the biggest side-eye is Roger, considering he was the most political of the bunch and he liked to give off punk-ish vibes

Not to mention Sun City, like you said earlier

----

This is such a bold take, anon, one that few in the fandom will voice.

And it's a take I agree with lol. Yeah, they were all ignorant and privileged in these situations, but you can understand on an intellectual level why people who were apolitical and uninformed would do the tax evasion thing or not think their performance could hurt people (I should quickly mention that other celebrities like Elton John also broke the embargo, though). But when you claim to be a political person and are the most informed out of the group, you have a lot less of an excuse. I've spoken of this many times, but it's why it's so ridiculous and dishonest when Roger stans act like he was ever an activist. He wasn’t! And he never claimed to be tbh. He's hardly ever used his platform to support a political opinion besides something as basic as "fuck Nazis" and something as try-hard as "gangsters are running this world." He wasn't even the one advocating for AIDS victims in the "one week later" interview--that was Brian. And Roger hasn't talked about gay people nearly as much as Brian over the years, if ever, despite his best friend being a huge victim of homophobic smears in the press. Roger has only talked about the press being awful to Freddie in general terms without ever having publicly talked about the prejudiced, political aspect of it all, and this is supposed to be Mr. Political?

There's a reason why Briam got the Ally Award and he didn’t, not because Roger is bigoted, but because he quite simply hasn't publicly talked about LGBT rights really much at all, but Brian has. I know this has gone off a bit, but it’s all to say Roger's political awareness is vastly overstated in this fandom.

[dumbestthingiveeverheard]

Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 8/4/2023

Fifth Place: Asa Hutchinson

As Asa Hutchinson continues his Presidential run, the writing on the wall--which was always against him--has become so clear that the only person who doesn't think he should just drop out is, well, Asa Hutchinson. However, another reminder of his failure of a campaign can be found on The Hill, which today ran the headline "Hutchinson says he’s ‘close to halfway there’ in reaching GOP presidential debate threshold." If he is in a race for the presidency or a race against Spongebob is currently unclear.

Fourth Place: John McWhorter

His New York Times column "One Sentence Does Not Define a Curriculum" goes after the critics of Ron DeSantis's recently approved educational standards in Florida, noting that much of this complaining is about a single sentence.

However, from the tone of coverage of this passage, one might suppose that it was a central plank in the curriculum. Instead, it was but one passage amid hundreds of others, which constitute an almost exhaustive coverage of the gruesomeness of slavery in the United States. Taken together, they are such an informed recitation of our racist past that it is almost surprising DeSantis would approve them.

This is an amazing rebuttal of the people who believe that sentence is the only thing in the entire curriculum, although given I have yet to see anybody make that claim I would call this nothing more than strawmanning. Unless something about the wider context of that statement changes its meaning, bringing up that most of the document is fine (as if we'd accept an A for effort regarding how children are taught about history) is just nonsensical. To put it another way: Although he is right that this one sentence being bad does not make the entire curriculum racist (something which nobody is claiming), that does not make said one sentence any less racist.

McWhorter also makes this note:

It’s important also to note that the principal purported gaslighter was himself Black. The person responsible for the infamous passage, according to fellow group members, was William Allen. He is an academic and also a Republican, but, as challenging as it can be to perceive this in our times, that party affiliation does not automatically render him suspect on matters of race.

Although it is true that Allen's political party does not make his statements on race any less correct by default, the mention of him being black seems to come with the implication that his race adds validity to his statements, which is equally untrue. People of color can have stupid, uninformed, and bigoted opinions on issues related to racial minorities just as everybody can, because idiocy knows no race.

Third Place: Mark Levin

Speaking of idiotic things said about slavery, Levin made a rather moronic comment about the Trump indictment yesterday:

We were reminded last night by an Israeli, Caroline Glick -- born in America -- who said one of the great legal minds in Israel who she spoke to said, you know, in the United States, the Dred Scott decision, which was decided in 1857 - the impact of that decision took a few years to really settle in. It served as the foundation for the Civil War.

And here I was thinking it had to do with the South--who agreed with Dred Scott v. Sanford--attempting to leave the union after the election of an abolitionist President.

This is one political party trying to destroy another. This is one political party trying to monopolize elections, federal law enforcement, and the entire justice system. And if they get away with it, it's over. It's over.

Of course, nobody is trying to destroy the entire Republican Party, what they are attempting to do is imprison Donald Trump because, you know, he broke the law.

Second Place: Mike Huckabee

Mother Jones has an article out on his recent children's book The Kids Guide to the Truth About Climate Change, and although I will not cover every error they documented, I will show you my personal favorite:

The visuals used in the guide are even more blatantly misleading than its text, [Glenn] Branch [deputy director of the National Center for Science Education] noted. One graph, titled “Thousands of Years of Carbon Dioxide Levels,” spans 400,000 years ago until “present day,” and is summarized with the conclusion, “looking back in time, carbon dioxide levels have always gone up and down.” But the data the graph labels as “present day”—peaking at a little over 280 parts per million—actually represents levels from 2,300 years ago, around 391 BC, Branch pointed out. The vast majority of the carbon dioxide driving climate change has been emitted only since the Industrial Revolution, with atmospheric CO2 concentrations currently over 420 parts per million, higher than any data point included on the graph, which has a scale that only goes up to 300 parts per million.

This man seriously confused 391 BC with the present day.

Winner: Marjorie Taylor Greene

Regarding the Trump indictment, Greene said this "feels like communism" which is an economic system that has nothing to do with the ability to charge one's political leaders and usually results in authoritarian states where such a thing is impossible.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, you've said the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

[bonnielass23]

I originally didn't have an opinion at the time because I didn't have the time and spoons to look into it other than what was on social media, and my stance has been that if I don't have an informed opinion then I don't voice an opinion. So in some ways I'm definitely not condemning people who had an opinion based on the information they saw on social media and didn't enter the fray. If it was kept to themselves, then I don't necessarily blame them for having an uninformed opinion. People who went on social media and blasted Amber I have an issue with.

I recently looked into all the evidence with an open mind. Didn't go in believing one person over the other because I wanted to go off the facts, not confirmation bias. This website does have a pro-Amber bias, but it's also a good resource for looking at all of the evidence, both presented at trial and sealed. Again, I went in without bias and allowed the evidence to shape my opinion, I did not look at commentary about the evidence until after.

First off, in terms of the unsealed documents. This was a civil trial based on an article that Amber wrote. Although whether or not Johnny abused her was integral to whether or not it was defamation, it was not a criminal trial to prove Johnny abused her. It was to determine if Amber lied. So just because evidence was not allowed in the trial does not mean it's not actual evidence. It's only because he had an entire team of lawyers on his side and Amber had one local defense attorney who came in at the last minute that he was able to keep so much of it out. When going up against a legal team of equal standing he lost the defamation case against The Sun. He only won against Amber because her legal team kept changing due to insurance issues, and was not prepared to go against his legal team. I think it's very telling that he sued Amber and not the Washington Post, because he knew he had an unfair advantage.

Going into the evidence, both presented at trial and unsealed documents, I had to stop. Johnny's behavior outside of the sexual violence was so similar to abuse I received as a child, that it was triggering my CPTSD. This is stuff that was backed up by the notes provided by medical professionals. Both Amber's personal therapists and then the doctors and psychiatrists that he forced Amber to use instead. So no. That wasn't he said she said, it was medical professionals' official notes that went into their charts said.

Also to note. She didn't abuse her sister and she didn't abuse her girlfriend. Her friends who had to give statements about her did so because Johnny's lawyer Adam Waldman threatened and coerced them. Waldman also fabricated evidence. He also has ties to Putin and was kicked off the case by a judge in CA for leaking confidential information.

The way Johnny talks about women, not just Amber, is disgusting. Including when he saw the woman who "broke his heart" in high school and how happy he was that she was "a mammoth" after having 4 kids, and it was a fitting punishment for her. The burn her body then fuck her corpse texts were sent in 2013, before they were engaged because he was aggravated about her "haranguing him" about his substance abuse. He was violent around his ex Ellen Barkin

He also abused their less than 10lb yorkies, one of which slept on the bed and they knew was incontinent and had shit on the bed before. A UK judge ruled that it was unlikely that Amber or her friend popped in the bed and it was most likely the dog. This judge did see the pictures of the poop on the bed.

He has an epic bromance with MBS, the Saudi prince who had the Washington Post journalist brutally murdered. Additionally, the social media hate was started by Saudi twitter bots. I suggest listening to this podcast six part series "Who Trolled Amber Heard", I'm linking episode one. Even if you hate Amber, it's very informative on how social media bots are used to spread misinformation and influence public opinion. Also how affordable it can be for the average person to create a bot campaign. Not necessarily as sophisticated as those used by wealthy individuals and government agencies, but still dangerous.

Johnny Depp is an abuser, and I also hope he never has a moment of peace the rest of his life.

amber heard had to legally change her name, abandon her career and move to spain because she had the audacity to write an article about how she was abused (without even naming the abuser) and the fucker sued her for it and made sure it was televized for maximum humiliation. I truly hope depp never knows a moment of peace for the rest of his pathetic life and the same goes for anyone who supported him. you people are genuinely the scum of the earth

[tintysun]

Long ago, in the Underground...

(A BioCyberPunk Tale)

There came a time, in a place not many hear of these days, when underground cities were actively built. Mostly hidden from view, many of their inhabitants enjoyed a sense of seclusion and anonymosity. They could simply exist.

This, for better and for worse, allowed them to profoundly explore themselves and their surroundings. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Run experiments, too. But unfortunately, among them, unhinged, deranged, and vile individuals mingled. Accompanied by masses of weak or vulnerable minds that they could access, exploit and mould. Making it so that what could have been benign discovery soon turned into a twisted nightmare. Dire situations arose as the communities within began to corrode.

One of these communities was composed of young and curious intellectuals in search of their true nature and the answers to life's deepest and greatest questions. They stood as neighboring leaders in their fields. One of them more feisty, witty and clever than you might imagine being ahead in the game without failing to practice solidarity and collaboration with peers. And though they could be wildly different from each other in certain aspects, they all shared in common an intolerance for what seemed incoherent and incongruent. Shallow and nonsensical explanations wouldn't do. Uninformed opinions weren't taken too kindly either. They'd exchange data with each other, engaging in discussions and debates, in order to expand their horizons and polish their worldviews. So, by merely their own traits, they consequently were the liars' most dangerous threat and enemy.

Yet, sadly, lies can be manufactured faster than the truth can be dug out. And when packaged in even more lies to make them enticing, they also spread and are welcomed much more readily than meticulously articulated (and often harsh) truths would. The odds were against this crew. And while being so young, there was only so much that they could do or knew how to do. Especially when faced and caught off-guard by more than one unspeakably wicked being.

Fights broke between them as they looked for approaches they could agree on and their ideas were in conflict. The growing falsehood, and the poison that came with it, was impacting their work. But what's worse, it was negatively affecting the lives of those they had been helping with it. Something had to be done, but protecting everyone was already a lost cause under their circumstances. At some point, it became evident that they could only protect their own clarity.

Older experts in vicinity later joined in, contributing more knowledge and wisdom to them. Basically assisting in restoring and maintaining sanity.

However, after their symbiotic environment, consisting of mostly amicable banter and trades, was destroyed, and how tiresome (not to mention scarring) enduring such an ordeal was, it was never the same again. Resuming as before was not possible. Not desirable either as it proved unsustainable amidst the ill-willed. They would have to take numerous measures to prevent similar tragedies from happening again - and ironically, that is one of the biggest takeaways they got out of it, witnessing multiple forms of behavior, how it harms and how it heals.

The cities continued to be in decline, to where they can be called dead despite a few that remain wandering them. But life doesn't start nor end there...

Tool: Leonardo.AI

[jade-eclipse-lithium]

The entire building is engulfed in flame, do not enter!

I have to save the people in there!

If you die in there, you deserve it.

Setinel is the best prime after Optimus Prime!

From experience, from people tellings or from your opinions?

My opinions.

Listen here you illogical shit-

Excuse me, are you having trouble reaching the top shelf?

That’s the last words that’s gonna come out of your mouth.

Did you just shoot me?

Yeah.

I’m already been shot! Oh wait it’s patching up.

It’s a healing shot!

You’re so proud of yourself, aren’t you?

Fate is cruel.

No, you are cruel, life is cruel, everyone is cruel. There’s no fate, there’s only consequences of our choices.

Sorry I’m late, my training wheels broke.

Training wheels?

Yes, i have training wheels like a child and i have a job like an adult, I’m a very complicated person!

Sure go with complicated.

Do you think this looks good on me?

You look stupid in anything.

I wanna check something with you real quick.

Why?

I’m scared that my answers might be wrong seeing your answers aren’t the same as mine.

Then maybe I’m wrong, or you’re wrong.

Don’t stop me from self-doubt.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yeees, pleeeaase?

No.

Pretty please?

No.

I use physics, geometry and old-fashioned hard work to create the perfect laundry-doing system

I even made a paperboard for my siblings use

I’m ready to scrub the moral stain off my character.

I hate everything about you.

Hey, do you wanna help me?

Oh, i would if i wanted to.

You’re a selfish prick.

No, just want to mind my business and my own only.

A tautology.

A statement that’s true but uninformative.

Origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, is the surest means of perfecting a nimble touch.

Essential for the successful picking of pockets.

Origami that can kill you in hundreds of different ways.

Preferably slicing you like sushi.

I see this as an experiment.

Be back for the results.

[dreaminmetaphors]

Yo Mama So Republican

Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Well yo mama so dumb she wants to fence in all the gay people —so that they’ll stop reproducing! Yo mama so dumb she thinks the Great Wall of China is between us and Mexico. Yo mama So Stupid that after 40yrs of warnings about climate change, when the weather goes wonky, she's like, “Well, maybe it's The Jews? And their space lasers!” Yo mama is so ignorant she thinks talking about racism is “the real racism.”

Yo mama so ugly she does pretzel twists and contortions to avoid saying: “Black Lives Matter.” Yo mama so slutty she doesn't believe in using protection. She let every single variant of covid-19 inside her. Yo mama so lazy she tells everyone the Bible is the literal word of God. Still hasn't read it. Man, when yo mama sits around the house, she sits—in front of the computer thinking she knows more about immunology than people with advanced medical degrees. Yo mama so gullible, you can turn her against anything just by adding an adjective to it: Culture? Cancel culture. Using correct names? Political correctness. She hates them now. Yo mama so gullible she hopes we replace social security with separate, market-vulnerable accounts. You know: anti-social insecurity. Oh, you wanna say something? Nah, yo mama says money is speech, so you and yo mama too broke to talk back. Yo mama so gullible, she still calls herself an evangelical Christian while taking a selfie in front of a golden image of Barabbas, whom she voted for. Yo mama so gullible, she watches Fox News��and thinks it’s news! Or I don't know, maybe it's just because she's so old... Yo mama so ancient, she thinks family values means bludgeoning a gay man to death with rocks, then going to bed alone while her husband impregnates a twelve-year-old. Yeah, she's so conservative, she takes a firm anti-slavery stance, expects us all to be impressed, ...but she's still on the fence about Jim Crow. Yo mama so conservative she gets triggered by the word trigger. ...and still wants more guns out there. Dead kids? Meh, who'd be triggered by that? Yo mama so conservative she hates participation trophies like they tell her to on Fox, —which IS a participation trophy for voicing uninformed opinions “It's okay, Sean. You didn't study the material or learn anything, but you still had something to say. Who's my clever little proud boy?” Yo mama so Republican, she hates Obamacare. So terrible. Not like the Affordable Care Act that saved her waste of a life. (Thanks, Obama.) Yo mama so Republican, any time she has to do something she doesn't want to, it's tyranny. And any time we don't do what she wants, that's also tyranny. If freedom isn't everyone doing what she tells us, then she doesn't know what it is. Yeah, she doesn't know what it is.

See, it all fits together. The lazy ignorance. Intentional gullibility. The ugliness. Yo mama so stupid, she thinks she's brilliant because she doesn't even know enough— about anything—to know how much she still doesn't know, you know? And that's how we got here. Mamas. Some people's mamas so stupid and ugly and mean, it's obvious she taught them everything they don't know.

[anakinskywalkerog]

Yeah I don't think the second heartbreak was Adam either. I remember her saying in a podcast in 2021 that she was in a really happy place in her personal and profesionnal life when she was finishing the OC so she didn't really felt the need to grieve the show. And we know Rachel and Adam broke up during season 4 so... I would def rule him out.

ALSO (I’m sorry I’m sucked into this now and want to explain my opinions but to be clear I have lots of love for Rachel and Hayden and everyone involved, no hate) Rachel was shooting Jumper around that same time I think? Which is when shit started to happen between her and Hayden…I don’t think Adam ended that relationship lololol

(THESE ARE MY UNINFORMED TAKES WE DON’T KNOW SHIT)

[mysteryhack]

being surrounded by trans people in my immediate friend groups makes it really easy for me to forget how bringing up trans stuff to other people is like navigating a minefield

I went looking in the replies of Rowling’s recent transphobic tweets, I was hoping there would be trans positive stuff there, but it was horrible. that’s what happens when you’ve got over 14 million followers on twitter I guess

[inquisimer]

For the DADWC: Forehead or cheek kisses

hello and thank you for the prompt!!!

pairing: ariya tabris x zevran

@dadrunkwriting

She learned quickly that Zevran was confused by casual intimacy. He took her to bed without a second thought, made her body sing in all manner of ways that she’d never imagined, and never batted an eye. But she kissed his cheek once, when he lingered behind the group for her to catch up, and it was like his brain short-circuited.

It amused her to no end. In the alienage, physical touch was exchanged freely and openly, often because it was all they had to give. That, or a kind word often functioned as nameday or Satinalia gifts, or just the thing that cheered a downtrodden neighbor on a rainy day. In her youth, she’d spent many nights curled between her parents on their deflated mattress, as much for the comfort of their touch as for the warmth.

But that was a luxury learned in childhood, something Zevran never had. It was a survival mechanism, the assumption that any touch had an ulterior motive, or was nothing more than a means to an end. But it wouldn’t be the first time Ariya broke a lifelong habit—Shianni had the healthy nailbeds to prove it.

He didn’t seem perturbed, so she kept at it. A casual brush across his knuckles; a press of lips to his forehead before she rose in the morning; she even braided his hair in a more intricate pattern than usual, though it was sloppy for her lack of practice. Her other companions gave her no small amount of grief about it: Leliana played romantic trills whenever their hands touched and Oghren kept up an endlessly lewd commentary. But Ariya had grown all but immune to uninformed opinions long ago; she would have died from shame in a hovel long ago otherwise.

They were on watch together one night, resting on a log at the edge of the fire’s warmth. She pressed her leg against his, for both their comfort and also for solidarity against the oppressive fog of the Frostbacks. To her surprise, though not her displeasure, he looped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer, fiddling with the end of her braid.

An aimless touch, not to get her into bed, and not to gain her favor for any requested task. Ariya bit back a triumphant grin, though she expected her lover may have sensed the very urge, because his lips curved upward in the slightest smirk.

“Mi amor,” he murmured, and pressed the words softly against her forehead.

[dearcat1]

(Conflicted)

Part 6 of Of Scars and Open Wounds

The irony of the situation is the timing, Squalo thinks wryly. Years ago, Xanxus and he had spent their days looking for their third. They looked everywhere they could think of, up and down Italy and other allied territories and they always returned empty-handed. It almost drove them  apart, the fruitless search that got into their skin. If they had found Sawada before the cradle affair, it would have been fine. Xanxus would have raged, he would have grieved but he also would have accepted it in the long run. A part of their triad would have been more important than a throne Xanxus didn’t want to be denied. 

But it didn’t happen before the cradle affair, it happened after. And that makes all the difference.

Sometimes, when Squalo allows himself to think about more than Xanxus’s grief, he worries. He stresses about all of this. A part of him feels so incredibly dirty, ignoring Sawada’s distress, the pain Xanxus is so gleefully inflicting. Most of him, however, finds it an acceptable sacrifice. Is he happy about this? No. Does he feel nothing for Sawada? Also no. But for all this time, Xanxus has been his soulmate and Squalo is more than ready to renounce a possibility for the sanity of the man he loves.

What terrifies Squalo is Xanxus’s impulsiveness.

Xanxus might be determined to ignore Lussuria and Squalo can’t quite blame him. The man has never met his own soulmate and he’s a romantic to boot. An irony, given the medic’s usually sadistic personality, despite the nurturing side of him. But Mammon? That’s a different matter altogether. Mammon is ruthlessly realistic and if she’s fretting, then Squalo most likely has something to worry about. The swordsman doesn’t dare press it, however. Xanxus is lashing out, he’s angry and vulnerable. The last thing they need is for him to feel like Squalo has turned against him. So Squalo worries but bites his tongue. 

It doesn’t mean he goes about it uninformed. Squalo took the time to sit down and talk to the miser. The fact that Mammon didn’t even bill him for the information is concerning enough. The amount of information she gave is outright alarming. Reborn will kill him if he ever finds out just how much of his private life Squalo is privy to. Being Sawada’s soulmate will not help him, the hitman might even consider it a kindness to his student. It terrifies Squalo. Not death, of course, he’s an assassin. His line of work means he knows he will die young. No. The implications.

Only a blind man can ignore just how much the cursed baby means to Sawada, just how much the young Don respects the man and his opinions. 

If Xanxus ever changes his mind, and Squalo hopes desperately that he won’t, it will not only mean healing. It will mean starting a relationship already based in pain, in hurt and betrayal. It will mean earning a trust they already more than broke. It won’t be simply courting, it will mean groveling. If Xanxus’s pride can stand such a thing it’s a different matter, it might be up to Squalo. He’ll do it, of course, if Xanxus ever changes his mind. But even then, even their best efforts and swaying Sawada might not be good enough.

Reborn will see to that. Sawada will pick his tutor a thousand times before he picks either Xanxus or Squalo, no matter how much Xanxus believes he can still hurt the young man. That’s not to say that Sawada isn’t in pain, Xanxus is cruel and precise when he wants to be. It just means that Sawada doesn’t look at them first, not like he used to when they first met each other. Squalo knows the decision Sawada will make, the swordsman made the same one for Xanxus. 

And the hitman will not be swayed. As far as the man is concerned, Xanxus and Squalo are a liability. A set of chains Sawada will be better off without. If he thinks, even for a second, that Xanxus and Squalo are going to interfere with his student… After what they’ve done, Squalo isn’t optimistic about their survival. No, Xanxus has closed this door too tightly and Squalo helped him do it. Now all it’s left is to hope that the Commander never falters in his decision.

[ruby-whistler]

It’s funny how much the fandom fights to dehumanize c!Dream because it’s such a disservice to his character — what makes his character so impactful is how human it is.

the use of “it” in the last sentence really cracked me up considering what you’re talking about dkhfk

no but i totally agree. but it’s also just,, really difficult to notice? like, back in the dark ages (aka my pre-apologist days) i never noticed that i was biased against the character because he was the villain, but i was now that i look back at it.

a few days ago i was looking through old discord messages for some references and i found me saying “dream was manipulating sapnap and george in the dethronement scene, really scary to think if quackity hadn’t stepped in it would’ve probably worked” and i just went oh. i really thought that lmao

like that’s a scene of his friends abandoning him which has become really personal for me lately. and i had perceived it differently only because of my preconceived notions about the character, you know, “puppeteer” - because people like wilbur, tommy and quackity had called him that.

and it wasn’t like i was always like that either. just from the pogtopia era, i did a whole bunch of analysis in this one discord channel of the vassal scene because the whole wilbur “villain arc” was such a big deal back then. i characterized dream as “morally grey” there; wait, actually, let me find it.

“Dream was the hero from the beginning, but after Tommy bribed him with the discs, he gave up on helping the revolutionaries get out of Wilbur’s manipulation, and let them be. He was also pressured a lot since he was unfairly villainized. 

He knew that Wilbur did this in order to have power over others, and he wanted to stop this scheme, but people, much like Tommy, believed Wilbur had good intentions. Which was wrong, now it seems. Like this Dream became a neutral, and ended up trying to get into the peoples��� favor again by helping Wilbur- but this time, Wilbur was the villain.

Does that make sense?”

“I feel like at the end, Dream actually was one of the good guys. Tommy and Tubbo and Fundy and Eret also, because they were all doing what they believed was right for others. The true villain was Wilbur, because he did everything from a selfish intention.

Idk morality is a difficult question.”

ofc those were very bad and uninformed analyses, i was literally just theorizing in a discord channel, but you could say i had the spirit before i,, villainized dream like everyone else did because the narrative seemed to be pushing it so much.

the thing that actually made me a dream apologist (again), was three things at once. first it was dream’s “i don’t wanna come back down” and desperate shouting during the disc finale. i am very high on empathy as an infj so this literally broke me for some time as seen here:

“when dream says "i'm not coming back down" he sounds so vulnerable how dare that bastard try pull at my heartstrings??? i'm a sucker for scenes where villains are scared/helpless because it really brings out the humanity in them and this is honestly just amazing and i don't feel accomplished i just feel sad”

i lived through that, found out dream apologists exist and got very confused, and then this freaking sad-ist fanart dropped and ruby.exe has stopped responding.

then i found dr3′s threads when my techno apologist friend retweeted the “dream doesn’t break beautifully” one and,,, it went downhill from there.

what i’m getting at is, i’ve been in that position.

dehumanization isn’t something we decide to do. it’s a subconscious process, which is so incredibly subtle that the majority of the fandom are actively doing it without realising it. it’s even harder to admit it than to notice.

dehumanization is often how we mentally justify something bad happening to someone. which is how people excuse things let’s say, quackity, tommy or wilbur do to him; because they don’t want to admit that the characters they like would hurt someone on purpose. and let’s be honest; c!dream is easy to dehumanize.

he’s done bad things, and just by calling him “ab///r” or “manipulator” or “tyrant” or “murderer” - any of these titles, and our inner moral compass is soothed.

it’s not a lack of empathy. i’m too empathetic for my own good, but i fell for it!

i think the best we can do is try to analyse, explain, and especially make art. art will always be so much more powerful in shaping the public’s opinion than talking to someone directly ever could be.

when you say “you are wrong, and here is why” you are talking to the person’s logic. it is easy to ignore logic in favor of bias.

if you make art (drawings, animation, writing) and make people actually feel things? it’s impossible to ignore that and you will question your opinions.

what i mean is before we expect to see people stop dehumanizing him, we need to try humanize him first. 

are people who do it justified? no. does it make them terrible people, uncompassionate or stupid? also no! they don’t do it on purpose.

what i mean is that if dehumanization is a process, so is re-humanization.

just, you know. showcase that impact of humanity in c!dream. show them there’s a different perspective there, and let them pick for themselves - don’t force anything, just do you. if they were ever going to pick the right option, they’ll do it at some point :]