#wikipedia links

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

What you'll find here (refreshed Intro post, 8 October, 2024)

I generally post whatever is on my mind, especially contemplative and/or silly. Disability rights, queer rights, literature and the arts are perennial subjects.

Rest Assured: I will never make a “Reblog, or else you’re a bad person,” or “Reblog, or else bad things will happen.” post.

(Though I may ask for signal boosts, if someone is asking for specific help / advice, and needs to get their message out)

What counts as "Good Manners" around here:

Don't be mean. There's no need to be mean. Remember, wherever you go, there you are.

Praise what you enjoy before criticizing what you don't.

When you do give criticism, let it be reasoned ("It sucks!" isn’t reasoning).

Don't belittle, or mock, people for the things they enjoy (or what they don’t enjoy, either, respect people’s squicks, even if they seem odd to you).

If you must post provocative things, aim for provoking laughter, and provoking thought.

Remember that anger can splash onto innocent bystanders, and people "reading over your shoulder." If you must have an argument with someone in particular--rather than an argument for or against an idea--take it somewhere else (Send a private message or ask to the person)

When in doubt: Puns!

My blocking policy: When I get a notification that I have a new follower, I check, and I will block

Blogs I suspect of being a bot.

Ableists . (Link to the American Wikipedia article on Ableism). This includes anyone who supports for Autism Speaks; I see a blue puzzle piece, I block immediately. I will also block people who repost images, and remove the Image Descriptions.

TERFs, as flagged by the app Shinigami Eyes.

Self-appointed LGBTQ+ Gatekeepers: Those who want to exclude Asexual, Aromantic, and Bi- (or Pan-) folk in M/F relationships, from the Queer Community.

Speaking of the Queer Community: Any user that tags my posts with “q-slur." Since "Queer" is widely accepted through academic consensus, I use it freely. If that word makes you uncomfortable, you would not be happy here.

Any blog (or Anon who sends a message to my Inbox) that discourages voting in United States elections.

And Finally:

With help and suggestions from many others (some of whom wished to remain anonymous) I designed the Disability Pride Flag (Which is different from the Disability Rights Flag of the U.N.). Here is the flag as designed for computer monitors, mobile phones, and other backlit screens:

To the extent possible under law, Ann Magill has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Visually Safe Disability Pride Flag. This work is published from: United States.

I also designed a version in fully saturated colors, which I recommend for physical media, such as actual flags, tee-shirts, print materials, etc. (Since physical media is more likely to be viewed at a distance, and atmospheric haze naturally filters bright colors).

I've put the full saturation version behind the cut (But please use the version above for online art):

[ninyard]

Neil Josten, born Nathaniel Wesninski

[creativitycache]

Hey for those of you that aren’t polisci nerds like me, I thought I’d share a term for something that happens every election.

“Red Mirage”

Rural areas contain less people. Less people means fewer votes. Fewer votes means faster counting. Faster counting means earlier results. The map turns red as rural republican areas get counted first and without any other data from larger counties.

“Blue shift”

The cities and highly populated counties start reporting their data. It took them longer to count all those votes. Once they report in, their areas of the map either flip from red or get colored in blue. Over time the map turns blue.

If you are looking at early reporting you are looking at the red mirage. It happens every four years. It is not unusual. It is expected.

The question isn’t “what color will the map turn first?”

The question is “what color will the map end as?”

[emberglowfox]

he did get those braids after all

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

So did any of YOU guys know that someone wrote a reverse!AU Jeeves fanfic in 1953, and Wodehouse liked it?

[rubyof-thesea]

look all im saying is if the real life queen charlotte could make her husband grant a famous lesbian couple a pension so they could live their lives together in peace, the bridgerton one can do the same

[develop-your-oc]

Do any of your OCs use a mobility aid?

[dunmeshistash]

In the new episode Laios mentioned being able to see in the dark. Is that a thing for dwarves? What about other races?

I think its something common for dwarves in these types of dnd inspired fantasy?

I can't remember if that detail was mentioned elsewhere, another one of these "race abilities" I remember is kobold poison resistance

Another fun thing, Senshi mentioning their eyes glistening in the dark might not have been just metaphorical then, since animals that see in the dark usually get that type of reflection from something called tapetum lucidum that helps them see in low light conditions.

[c-kiddo]

if caduceus had access to the internet he would use it to browse wikipedia and then email articles to tmn if he thinks they'll enjoy them too

[didoofcarthage]

Denarius with head of Augustus wearing oak wreath (obverse) and comet with eight rays and inscription Divus Julius (reverse)

Roman (possibly minted at Caesaraugusta, modern Zaragoza in Spain), Imperial Period, 19-18 B.C.

silver

British Museum

[orange-cheetah]

Makochi Town Famous Shops Guide!!

Approved by Nii Satoru-sensei!

Saboten (Bakery)　さぼてん

Popular items BEST3

1st Anpan

2nd Curry bread

3rd Yakisoba-pan

Regulars

Sakura - What he buys often: The curry bread is a recent favourite of his　He was surprised when he ate one fresh out of the oven, and was hooked ever since.

Umemiya - What he buys often: Anpan　It's been his favourite ever since he came to this town.

Tsukushi Butcher's Shop　つくし精肉店

Popular items BEST3

1st Korokke

2nd Menchi-katsu [minced meat cutlet]

3rd Ebi-katsu [shrimp cutlet]

Regulars

Hiragi, Kaji - What he buys often: Korokke　Because Hiragi-san treats me often (Kaji).

Kikuchi-ya (Japanese sweets shop)　菊地屋

Popular items BEST3

1st Dorayaki

2nd Mitarashi dango [see above picture]

3rd Warabimochi [1]

Regulars

Yanagida - What he buys often: Dorayaki　He often goes to buy dorayaki to serve with tea at his parents' house.

Sakaki brothers - What they buy often: Warabimochi　Warabimochi is just the best, right (Seiryu). I often go to accompany [2] Seiryu (Uryu).

1　Warabimochi (蕨餅) is a wagashi (Japanese confection) made from warabiko (bracken starch) and covered or dipped in kinako (sweet toasted soybean flour). Kuromitsu syrup is sometimes poured on top before serving as an added sweetener

2　「晴竜の付き添いでよく行くから」 - 付き添い can mean to accompany, attend, serve, wait on, attend to, assist

Café Pothos　喫茶店ポトス

Popular items BEST3

1st Omurice

2nd Handmade pudding

3rd Fully-packed egg sandwich

Regulars

Students of Furin - What they often order: Omurice　The taste is excellent, and there's a discount for Furin students.

Muscle Power (Okonomiyaki [3] place)　まっするぱわー

Popular items BEST3

1st Okonomiyaki that doesn't use flour

2nd Customized protein (banana & milk)

3rd Banana pound cake

Regulars

Tsugeura - What he often orders: Okonomiyaki that doesn't use flour　It's nourishment for the muscles!

3　Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き) is a Japanese teppanyaki, savory pancake dish consisting of wheat flour batter and other ingredients (mixed, or as toppings) cooked on a teppan (flat griddle). Common additions include cabbage, meat, and seafood, and toppings include okonomiyaki sauce (made with Worcestershire sauce), aonori (dried seaweed flakes), katsuobushi (bonito flakes), Japanese mayonnaise, and pickled ginger.

[For the menu see the bonus at the end of chapter 32!]

Penpengusa (Monjayaki [4] place)　ぺんぺん草

Popular items BEST3

1st Mentaiko mochi cheese monja

2nd Corn monja

3rd Seafood monja

Regulars

Anzai, Kurita, Kakiuchi, Takanashi - What they often order: Mentaiko mochi cheese monja　It's delicious, and the restaurant is the perfect place for everyone to hang out! (Anzai)

[photos of before and after cooking for reference, not the ones mentioned in the rankings]

4　Monjayaki (もんじゃ焼き, often called simply "monja") is a type of Japanese pan-fried batter, popular in the Kantō region, similar to okonomiyaki, but using different liquid ingredients.

The ingredients in monjayaki are finely chopped and mixed into the batter before frying. Monjayaki batter has ingredients similar to okonomiyaki. However, additional dashi or water is added to the monjayaki batter mixture, making it runnier than okonomiyaki. The consistency of cooked monjayaki is comparable to melted cheese.

[BONUS TRIVIA]

Saboten - Cactus

Tsukushi - Horsetail

[Tsukushi (つくし) redirects to 杉菜 (スギナ sugina) on Wikipedia. Known as the field horsetail or common horsetail in English. The buds are eaten as a vegetable in Japan and Korea in spring.]

Kiku - Chrysanthemum

Pothos - ...Pothos

Penpengusa - Shepherd's purse

[Penpengusa (ぺんぺん草), or 薺 (なずな nazuna). Known as shepherd's purse in English. It is one of the ingredients of the symbolic dish consumed in the Japanese spring-time festival, Nanakusa-no-sekku.

The Festival of Seven Herbs or Nanakusa no sekku (Japanese: 七草の節句) is the long-standing Japanese custom of eating seven-herb rice porridge (七草粥, nanakusa-gayu, lit. "7 Herbs Rice-Congee") on January 7 (Jinjitsu); one of the Gosekku.]

[all extra information and photos from wikipedia]

[masterlist]

[biteybuddy]

when a flustered robot girl gets passed around at a party, thats an embarrassingly parallel workload

[waytoocrispybread]

toxic yaoi

[sacchiri]

Hellsing 2002 calendar illustration.

Ein wunderliche und erschröckliche Hystori von einem großen Wüttrich genant Dracole wayda Der do so ganz unkristenliche marrter hat angelegt die mensche, als mit spissen als auch die leut zu Tod geslyffen

A wondrous and frightening story about a great berserk called Dracula the voivode who inflicted such unchristian tortures such as with stakes and also dragged people to death

[letters-to-rosie]

The Silco Essay

Long post ahead, TDLR included.

Let's do a little thought experiment. We're trying to institute socialism, worker control and ownership of the means of production. This is currently far from our reality, so we have a lot of work to do. We get together and talk and strategize, but it's difficult with all the surveillance we're under as we work. Not only would seizing the means of production be met with a harsh backlash but even unionization, which doesn't automatically lead to worker control or ownership, is suppressed even though that suppression is illegal in certain countries like the US.

How does that suppression happen? There are a lot more workers than owners. If we worked together, we could take them, right? Well, the owners have the law and access to call upon the state to enact violence on us. We can't exactly own the means of production if we get killed. Even if we overcome other hierarchies keeping us from solidarity, such as miners in West Virginia did by organizing across racial divisions, we can still be beaten. Those miner had bombs dropped on them.

Okay, thought experiment over. What does this have to do with Silco? It's taken me ages to think about how to explain it, but my beef with him is that he has what are essentially perfect conditions for creating a mass movement and does not use them. He is uniquely in a position to protect any burgeoning mass revolt until it would be too late for Piltover to stop it. This is why his comments to Sevika that they can buy another police chief ring hollow. They both know how good they had it.

This is not to say that I think Silco is poorly written or a "bad character." Silco being the way he is all comes down to the entire conceit of the show: two cities against each other, with a sister on each side. However, this does lead me to want to critique some things about the show's premise that lead to my critiques about Silco.

For the cities to be meaningfully opposed, Zaun can't just be oppressed. It has to be "bad" to counter Piltover's bad. This, I think, causes the majority of things that make me sad about the show overall. While I still enjoy it, much of what I enjoyed was a fantasy setting that dealt with real-world issues in its own way. However, for all the realism in the setting, there are some distinctly "not real" parts that seem to blunt discussions of the depth of the oppression Zaunites are suffering. There's only fleeting mentions of labor oppression, even though it must have been key to organizing their society. The way Piltovans like Heimerdinger and great house members like the Kirammans must've had an active hand in organizing and benefiting from this oppression is mostly skipped over. Much of Piltover's evil is shown to us in the form of police brutality, but under any system of police brutality is one of hierarchy that is actively maintained and serves more of a purpose than just violence for its own sake. Even so, the police brutality we're shown is more than enough to have us sympathize with Zaunite characters if they were to have a massive rebellion and change the shape of Piltover forever. But Piltover's shape can only change so much. That's the conceit of the show. We can't completely root for Zaun and have them be entirely sympathetic because it would break the world. This is why I think Silco has to be the face of Zaun instead of Ekko and the Firelights, why Ekko has to befriend Heimerdinger to soften that antagonism, and why the Firelights never gain enough power to challenge Piltover at a systemic level. Even when Ekko wants to, he's thwarted and unable to cross the bridge.

We have a lot more fantasy imagination than political imagination. Silco is very realistic. Authoritarians do tend to rise up and stop movements that are closer in practice to socialism. If there were a mass movement in Zaun, as there seems to be potential for around episode 3, Silco would want to redirect that energy so he can control it, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is, in some form or fashion, what he did while consolidating power in the wake of Vander's death. While I appreciate the realism, it does make me sad that many times we put so much more energy into imagining magic systems and mystical creatures than we do imagining ways people could live freely with each other. It's like we have to keep capitalist realism alive even if we have hoverboards (also, if it wasn't already clear, I think the greatest potential for socialism/other lefty schools of thought is seen in the Firelights; so we could totally have political imagination AND hoverboards if Riot weren't cowards).

Silco's strong individualism works well for his relationship with Jinx and allows him to serve and Vi's primary antagonist. Even as Vi goes on a path that leads her to become more and more morally questionable as the plot goes on (like her sister lol), the sheer horror of what Silco inflicted on her makes Vi's story easy to digest. For Silco and Jinx, Silco's individualist outlook allows him to see her separated from the conditions that he is exacerbating outside. There are probably at least a hundred kids who could be as smart if given the right conditions (which makes Jinx and Ekko foils, for instance), but Silco doesn't care because he doesn't have a personal connection with them. He sees Jinx not as a child among many but as the child. I think this is part of why it's so hard for him to even think of giving her up and why he really never would have. However, I think it would be wrong to suggest that we'd have to sacrifice a great storyline for Silco to be more class conscious. It's possible to hold the tension between seeing greatness in individuals you love and knowing there is similar greatness in every individual that is being stomped on by the various oppressions we face, including the ones we share.

Because of these factors (Piltover being written to be the oppressor but Zaun needing to be equally bad so the show can "both sides" the conflict; a general lack of political imagination, which is also hemmed in by the source material and keeps us from fun fictional socialism except in small doses; and the general individualism baked into Silco's character that leads him to not even consider that a mass movement is the best way to achieve his aim of independence), I find Silco's politics very boring, lol. If we're to think about what his revolution might bring about, I'd find it much easier to compare to a bourgeois revolution (such as the US one) than to a socialist revolution that devolved into state capitalism (such as the USSR). One thing that characterized the US revolution was its unwillingness to include all the potential actors who might've fought in the war, particularly enslaved people. More enslaved people actually fought on the British side, as they were promised independence (even though Britain had not abolished slavery, so this was probably a scam). By desiring to maintain the system of chattel slavery and the hierarchies it created, the US revolutionaries missed out on the possibility to create a mass movement and jeopardized the success of their movement in the process.

This all reminds me of the distinction Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) draws between the Black Revolutionary and the Black Militant:

Now, there are a number of groups functioning in the black liberation movement in this country. I will not give the philosophy of those groups. I will not speak for them because I wouldn’t want their representatives to speak for us. There are, of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress for Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Black Panther Party. Most of these groups have basically been fighting for a share of the American pie, at least until recently. That is to say, they were kept out of the American dream, and many of them thought that if they were to adopt the manners, the mode, the culture of the oppressor, they would be accepted and they too could enjoy the fruits of American imperialism. But today, among the young generation of blacks in this country, an ideology is developing that says we cannot, in fact, accept the system. This differentiates the black militant from the black revolutionary. The black militant is one who yells and screams about the evils of the American system, himself trying to become a part of that system. The black revolutionary’s cry is not that he is excluded, but that he wants to destroy, overturn, and completely demolish the American system and start with a new one that allows humanity to flow. I stand, then, on the side of the black revolutionary and not on the side of the black militant. (From Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism)

Silco's demands to Jayce, along with his exclusion of most of the people from Zaun in the process of transforming society and his exploitation of them via shimmer, place him firmly on the side of the militant in this equation. Silco wants access to the fruits of Piltover's progress while only upsetting the structure where it negatively affects him. Again, while there's a lot I can enjoy in his character, I get frustrated with his insistence at being counter-revolutionary at every turn. I have a long reading list for him, and since he's in the afterlife now, he'll have time to get to it.

TLDR: Silco says he doesn't have to beat Piltover, just scare them. You know what's really scary, Silco? The masses of the people standing up and demanding that their oppression end, for fuck's sake.