#who authorized this man

[gold-rhine]

ok i used video recording to see actual numbers in neuvi vape and uhhh. thats a burst vape

and thats charge attack vape

i repeat, 141k charge attack vape???? hello????? is this legal????

[badolmen]

People against piracy fail to realize that no, I can’t just ‘buy it.’ They stopped making DVDs and Blu-Rays. They’re barely offering digital copies for download. I am not spending money I could use for food or bills to pay for a subscription service just so I can always have access to a beloved piece of media. Especially not when the service will remove media on a whim without concern for how the loss of access to that piece will make its artistic conservation nigh impossible.

For example, I recently learned that Disney+ had an original film called Crater. It’s scifi, family friendly, and seems cool - I would love to buy it as a holiday gift for my little brother! But: it’s exclusive to D+ and THEY REMOVED IT LITERALLY MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE.

The ONLY way I can directly access this film is through piracy. The ONLY available ‘copies’ of this film are hosted on piracy websites. Disney will NEVER release it in theaters, or as something to buy, and it may NEVER return to the streaming service. It will be LOST because we aren’t allowed to purchase it for personal viewing. If I can’t pay to own it, I won’t pay for the privilege of losing it when corporate decides to put it in a vault.

So yes, I’m going to pirate and support piracy.

Edit: if you are able, use $5 you would otherwise use for a streaming subscription to donate to a GazaFunds campaign.

[bixels]

I watched Starship Troopers tonight.

[direquail]

I think what bothers me most about how John is talked about in the fandom is the implication that a different (implied: better) person would've done things differently and somehow more right than he did.

When the text goes to lengths to explore how suddenly coming into an incredible amount of power in a fatally constrained situation cannot lead to a good outcome.

If you're putting John in dialogue with the concept of the "magical girl", which Muir has said he is (a little tongue in cheek, but)--these are young, often profoundly unready people, who often get taken advantage of by the people who give them their powers. And like, yes, John is not a teenager, but I think that's part of the point, is that at no point is a person really prepared to become as powerful as he did--even before he merged with Alecto. Even when he was fully in control of his powers, even when they were given with honest intent and trust, even when he used them with the best of intentions and tried to do the right thing, there was no way for him to be prepared, especially given the situation he was in.

And it's funny to talk about how bad John must be in bed, but also, this isn't a scenario where John is some self-deluding Elon Musk-like villain or loser. He is genuinely trying to do the right thing, in terms of rescuing the Earth's population, rescuing the Earth Herself, and doing it ethically (see: M--'s insistence that they perfect the cryo containers until they could transport pregnant women).

I really do think this is something people are blocking out, because it is one of the uncomfortable parts of Muir's message with the series. But ESPECIALLY because the people "critiquing" him as an embodiment of patriarchy and empire are failing to see that part of Muir's critique is of human vulnerability to power: That is, that power corrupts.

And this even has echoes with Gideon & Harrow's story! Harrow begins the series in a deeply unequal dynamic with Gideon! And she does horrible things, not just because she is traumatized, but because she is traumatized and has the power to act her desires out on Gideon. She might have the motive (trauma), but that's not enough without the means (power).

And, yeah, I do have a semi-salty angle on this because people are frequently loath to think critically not just about axes of oppression but individual relationships of power when it applies to them and to people they like. ESPECIALLY when there is a very vocal segment of the fandom that is enthusiastically pro-harassment. It's very convenient to villainize John and actively dis-identify with him, because otherwise, you'd have to face the question of whether you'd do any better in his place. But the thing is, the mission of revenge he embarks on is a lot closer to many peoples' hearts than they'd like to consider.

That's the whole point.

[gwenllian-in-the-abbey]

I feel like it shouldn't need to be said, but a relatively faithful adaptation of the source material is actually a very normal and reasonable thing for both an author and that author's fanbase to want. People can sneer about book purists all they want but it's the rare adaptation that surpasses the original, and HotD does not even come close.

[tossawary]

Trying to judge Kakashi for his teaching fuck-ups is hard because everything keeps getting skewed by everything that is wrong with this man and also everything around him. He ends up being graded on the triple wonky curves of: 1) "You know, I'm not sure that you specifically could have done much better." (Child soldier as a preschooler, isolated genius prodigy fast-tracked out of childhood, violently orphaned twice, war veteran, late teenage years and nearly half his life spent in black ops, he's only like 26 years old, etc...)

2) "I'm not sure that the average Konoha ninja could have really done much better in Kakashi's shoes." (Inconsistent prior Academy training for students, little to no apparent teacher training or solid child development resources for genin team teachers, inconsistent oversight from neglectful superiors, promotion exams where it's apparently normal-ish for participants to be either killed or permanently injured, etc...)

3) "I don't think anyone could have handled this situation well, honestly. It was fucked up before Kakashi showed up." (Sasuke.) (Also Naruto if his personality had been slightly different, after 12 years of neglect and shunning. What the fuck.)

[canisalbus]

hi sorry in advance if this is weird but i couldn't for the life of me figure out who machete was reminding me of and just now i figured it out - surku the dog from the moomins. can't remember enough to tell how accurate that is personality wise but something about the image of a distressed pointy-nosed dog shivering in a coat... plus ne on molemmat ahdistuneita queer ikoneita

I love Surku! Surku must be protected at all costs.

If you ask me, he's even more distressed in the comics.

I keep him on my fridge door as well.

But now that we're on the topic of Moomin characters, I must add that I see Machete in various Fillyjonks a lot. The short story Fillyjonk who believed in disasters is one of my favorite pieces of literature ever, when I first read it it shook me to my core, I still revisit it on yearly basis. For someone who seemed so wild and free spirited by nature, Tove Jansson did remarkable job at catching and depicting the essence of anxiety, uncertainty, vague sadness and irrational fears. At least in my opinion.

[tea-cat-arts]

I simply think this fandom doesn't give Wei Wuxian enough credit for the various ways in which he saved Lan Wangji

[sneakyboymerlin]

One more time… Merlin didn’t owe anyone his secrets. No one was entitled to them, not even Gwaine. It’s like, actually bizarre that you will all call magic a gay metaphor and then die on the hill that he’s sadistic if he doesn’t tell anyone, as if it’s “harmful” to others if he keeps it a secret when he actively lives in a place where he will be killed for it. You are all embarrassingly susceptible to right winger anti-lgbtq logic and only surface level pro-gay. Except it’s ultimately a metaphor for religious persecution so uhh anyways… bite a brick

[k4r4ss]

< drag me down into your basement, i’ve done nothing wrong >

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

MDZS Disco Elysium AU part 2 - Psyche Skills

Part 1 - Part 3

[marypsue]

Something about The Lost Boys, a deeply, deliberately queer movie all about vampires (so necessarily obsessed with blood transfer/exchange), where being attracted to the wrong person, taking risks around them, taking their tainted blood into your body, will change your life irrevocably and doom you to death, coming out in 1987, and saying that the real source of the majority of the problems caused by sharing tainted blood is a respectable middle-aged middle-class white man obsessed with power, heteronormativity, and the replication and eternal enshrinement of the nuclear family structure, and that the only way to survive and cure the infection is to destroy him...whoooo.

[bucephaly]

It's kinda shocking to me how few people seem to know how prevalent the 'my great grandmother was cherokee' myth is and how it's almost never actually true, especially when it comes with things like 'never signed up' or 'fell off the trail' or 'courthouse burned down destorying the documentation' etc etc.

People just don't even seem to know the history like.. when the Trail happened. My great great great grandfather was 2 years old during Removal in 1838, so peoples 'my great grandmother hid in the mountains!' is so clearly wrong. And we have rolls. From before and after removal, rolls done by cherokee nation and others by the government, rolls that were not stored in one random flammable courthouse. It's not difficult to find the actual evidence of ancestry.

And just.. there are lots of ways those family stories get started. It was a practice during the confederacy to claim cherokee ancestry to show one's family had 'deep roots in the south' that they were there before the cherokee were removed. Many people pretended to be cherokee and applied for the Guion-Miller payout just to try to steal money meant for cherokees - 2/3rds of the applicants were denied for having 0 proof of actual cherokee ancestry. [We even see lawyers advertising signing up for the Miller roll just to try to get free money.] And the myth even started in some families in the cherokee land lotteries, where the land stolen from us was raffled off, including the house and everything that was left behind when the cherokees were removed. We have seen people whose families just take these things stolen from the cherokee family and adopt them into their own family story, saying that they were cherokee themselves.

If you had some family story about being cherokee and you wanna have proof one way or the other, check out this Facebook group run by expert cherokee genealogists that do research for free. Just please read the rules fully and respect the researchers. They run thousands of people's ancestries a year and their average is only around 0.7% of lines they run actually end up having true cherokee ancestry.

[aurae-rori]

“A HEART, EMBARK, A BEAUTIFUL STAR”

— aventio csm au but no prior knowledge of csm is needed. if you dont know csm then think of this of unwilling roommates and colleagues au but they kill shit too

— fiend ratio & devil hunter aventurine

— featuring mental illness and my lack of will to live

— rip kishibe you would've loved aventurine. thanks for hyping me up guys

— multichap, 1/10 and curretly 5.9k words

+ art of fiend ratio by @j11nko !!

[thecruellestmonth]

Does the mass-murdering criminal Jason "Red Hood" Todd canonically support the death penalty?

No, I can't find evidence that Red Hood supports the death penalty.

There is a difference between murder (illegal) and state-sanctioned killing (legal). Red Hood commits unlawful homicide. The death penalty is lawful homicide. Jason is a murderer. The death penalty is not legally considered murder. Commissioner Jim Gordon is a decorated military veteran, not a murderer.

Committing violence ≠ wanting the government to have the right to commit that violence. Batman and his allies brutalize criminals; they don't necessarily support the state brutalizing criminals. Red Hood kills some criminals; Red Hood doesn't necessarily support the state killing criminals. Catwoman doesn't necessarily support the state committing burglary. Et cetera.

The death penalty is administered by the criminal legal system. Jason does not like the criminal legal system (see some of his run-ins with the police). He grew up as an impoverished child who didn't believe in the system, he was raised by Batman to believe that vigilantes can make a difference that the system can't, and he became an adult criminal who still doesn't believe in the system. He's not interested in using the criminal legal system. He isn't interested in giving more powers and privileges to an abusive system that has wronged him and the people he cares about.

When Jason started up his villain business, the death penalty was legal in Gotham City. (See Detective Comics #644, The Joker: Devil's Advocate, Batgirl 2000 #19, Punchline #1.) The death penalty was also in place during his Robin run. Jason didn't argue in favor of the state having the right to kill prisoners, and the death penalty never addressed his complaints about the status quo.

Jason has rescued people from wrongful* imprisonment and the death penalty. Again, based on his own firsthand experiences, he has many reasons to believe that the system is broken. *Some of us would argue that locking any people in prisons tends to be wrongful and inhumane by default, but we could choose to accept and critique the standard premises of crime fiction as entertainment without endorsing it as moral instruction.

Jason Todd is a criminal: a mass murderer, a terrorist, a villain. He does evil. He doesn't represent or support the legal system. He probably has the least political capital out of all the Batfamily-associated characters. He doesn't promote the death penalty. He commits murder—illegally, as a criminal, state-unapproved.

Some recent comics related to the topic:

Gotham Nights (2020) #11 "One Minute After Midnight", written by Marc Guggenheim

Red Hood and Nightwing team up to investigate the case of a man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to be executed. Both of them disapprove of how the broken criminal legal system botched this case.

Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #8 (2023), written by Matthew Rosenberg

"You familiar with Hannah Arendt's concept of Schreibtischtäter? Desk murderers? It's people who use the state to kill for them, so they don't have to get their hands dirty."

[rusomnia]

just saying jason todd probably wrote batman fanfic as both a form of therapy and karma

my evidence:

- he's a lit nerd. every lit nerd has written fanfiction at somepoint. if you're a lit nerd and you haven't, you're a liar or you will be writing fanfiction soon. be ready.

- you're a liar if you think the batfam didn't have a giant fandom in gotham city (and other cities that had batman shipped with their hero (metropolis im looking at you))

- he'd get to tear the shit out of batman with well thought out arguments against stuff without actually having to try and make bruce listen

- the authors notes.

- 'sorry i haven't updated in two years, i got blown up resurrected and turned into an assassin by my step-mum. here's some fluff as an apology'

- i feel like i could go on for a while but I'll leave it there