#your ignorance is willful

[worstloki]

you are a disgusting piece of shit like kill yourself or die along with those terrorists

Hope this helps 👍

[tianhai03]

i watched re death island today!!!!!1 it was really good!!!!!!!!! had to draw smth to celebrate :)

[theminecraftbee]

you know the excellent quadruple life fan comic has me thinking about double life again. and MAN. thinking about the soul bonds mechanically. like, before I get into my meta-analysis it’s worth noting that non-diagetically the soulbond mechanic being based on how many hearts someone has is basically the only way I can think to do it in minecraft that’s sensible, but diagetically…

so do you ever think about how the marker of what made people soulmates in double life was pain?

like, soulmates share injuries/pain! that’s the whole premise! like, to the point that day one people were making up elaborate ways to hurt themselves so they could test for their soulmates! you met your (very romantic-coded) partner and confirmed they were the person you were looking for by hitting each other, generally!

being a soulmate in the double life universe isn’t about being compatible, it’s about literally sharing pain, and it’s just… I think about how for some pairs, they share the burden between each other, and it brings them closer. for some pairs, though, the only way they know how to communicate is by hurting one another. and the thing is, this isn’t just a literal thing. like, mechanically, the thing soulmates do is share pain and communicate with pain, but metaphorically, can you say desert duo doesn’t have trouble communicating because half of how they know how to exist is either sharing in pain or causing it for each other? can you say that ranchers’ strength wasn’t a pair of people who understood each other’s pain and desperation to be better than they’ve been before? can you say that divorce quartet isn’t, well—

so pearl wins after scott hurts them one last time don’t you ever think about that,

[sallymew4]

just look how much BRIGHTER Mob’s demeanor is once he has Ritsu safe with him. that is the biggest grin ive ever seen on that boy’s face he loves his little brother so damn much it’s incomprehensible

[the-great-kraken]

some of y'all will say that jason todd has never done anything wrong and then turn around and declare damian an irredeemable asshole and i hate to break it to you but i think you're just a racist

[trappedinafantasy37]

I'm currently writing up a rather lengthy essay analyzing all of Minthara's endings now that Patch 7 has dropped. There was a particular point that I wanted to make about one of her endings, but I think I need to discuss it separately. A discussion I fear is going to make a lot of you 'good only' players hate me.

During her romance scene after the grove raid, Minthara will want to have a little heart to heart with you. She will explain to you that the Absolute owns her mind and her body. She will also say that she does not know herself, as for the entire time she was unable to determine where the Absolute's will ended and where hers began. She also says that everything she has experienced since leaving the Underdark seems like a dream of somebody else's life.

Now, that is a really hard thing to picture or even imagine. Most of us only ever dream about ourselves. So, what is it like to dream of somebody else's? In Minthara's instance, she was dreaming of herself. More, she was dreaming of a bastardized and broken version of herself, doing things that she would not do. A version that she fails to find any reason or rational behind what they were doing. A version that amplified all of her worst qualities to their extreme as those were the qualities that the Absolute needed. And one of the new evil endings gives us a little bit of insight into what this dream looked like.

Look at this. What a beautiful day! A marvelous day! A great day! Going out to the market. Picking up some fresh, sweet, and delicious apples. Meeting and greeting your fellow denizens. Talking, laughing, just enjoying life because life is marvelous. You feel so carefree and at peace, that you just might start whistling and singing. Everything you do is the right choice, the best choice. And you just can't resist. Why would you? What is there to fight? Life couldn't be more perfect!

But this is what is actually happening the entire time.

This person is not even aware of what they are being forced to do. They think they are living the best day imaginable. But in reality, their body and their mind has been stolen from them, forced to do things that they otherwise would not do. Seems horrible and awful right? A nightmare!

This was Minthara's reality for who knows how long. She was living a completely different life in her own mind, a life that did not align with the reality of what her body was doing. And because there was a lack of awareness of her own actions, she did not have the capability to refuse whatever order that the Absolute, or Ketheric, or Orin gave her. She was denied that choice, she was denied her autonomy. She could not fight back because she was not aware that anything was wrong.

And when you free her from the Absolute, memories slowly trickle in, each of them disturbing in their own right. But she also has a line where she says that she barely remembers the grove as she was not herself. So there is a good chance that she only has a vague understanding of the things that she did while under the Absolute, but does not fully remember them. Meaning that these disturbing memories that are returning to her that are clear and vivid, are the ones that happened to her before being enthralled. Of Orin slaughtering her men, of Ketheric holding her down, of Orin torturing her in the colony, of Orin enthralling her.

We also know that the Absolute gave her false memories, ones that paint a completely different picture of how she was recruited. False memories that seemed so good, that they made Minthara worship and adore Orin. And who knows what Minthara and Orin did together when they were alone. All that is important to know is that if they did anything intimate, Minthara was not capable of recognizing it, nor refusing. To make it even worse, she probably perceived all of Orin's actions as being pleasant, when the reality was much more grim. All I can do is hope that she doesn't remember them. But considering how terrified she is of Orin, some of those memories probably did trickle through.

Listen, I am not trying to tell you that Minthara is a good person or that you have to like her. What I am saying is that it is wrong of you to blame her for the grove raid when she quite literally was not in control of her actions. And it is wrong of you to cast judgment onto her for something she was not even aware that she was doing, something that she was denied the right to refuse. And it is wrong of you to hold her morally responsible for something that she never chose to do. All of these companions are victims in their own way and it is wrong of you to act like Minthara is the only one who isn't (she already blames herself enough for what happened to her).

I do not ever want to hear another person claim that Minthara is a "genocidal lunatic" again.

[yuridovewing]

what i will always, alwaysss hate about the crowfeather discourse is how it got several people, even some people who i thought would know better than to spread such harmful rhetoric, to get up on their soapbox and say with their whole chest "child neglect is not abusive, breezepelt should get the fuck over it"

[sarafangirlart]

Honestly, it feels unnecessarily cruel when ppl depict Andromeda’s relationship with Perseus as abusive, like I’d understand if we didn’t have any sources telling us that she loved him but we do, in fact ancient playwrights used their story to write romantic dramas, including Euripides and in his play Andromeda (which survives in fragments) she makes the decision to leave family and country to live with Perseus. Ppl have this warped perception of Perseus thinking that bc he killed Medusa therefore he’s mean to all women which literally not true if you read the damn source material.

It doesn’t help that those negative depictions portray Andromeda as black, you did enough research to know she isn’t yt yet you still want to depict one of the only WOC in mythology as having a tragic unhappy life when she actually had a happy one? C’mon.

[deancasforcutie]

everyone: *talking about how Cas' confession demands to be addressed in any Supernatural followup* *still phrasing it like it's an obstacle or accident they didn't think through and not the emotional climax the whole season was building to and the whole text supports, like the trap it laid on the network to demand acknowledgment in this way somehow wasn't always the plan*

Bobo "emotionally invested" *queering-the-text-to-defy-and-expose-censorship-constraints* *wrote-the-confession-to-expose-how-it-was-already-queer-and-pull-fandom's-pants-down-on-heteronormative-bias* Berens:

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?

Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

The Biden administration features a sizable cohort of effective regulators, whose job is to gather evidence and then make policy from it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/

Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."

This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.

Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/

Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai

Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#fcc

And even better, your broadband speed measurements:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":

https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf

In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/preventing-digital-discrimination-broadband-internet-access

This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/internet-providers-say-the-fcc-should-not-investigate-broadband-prices/

There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/carr-opposes-bidens-internet-plan

The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1

I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."

This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1

Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1

The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

--

Mike Mozart (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325839070/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325905568/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14489390566/

www.ccPixs.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/8210762750/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[butwhatifidothis]

Still baffled that Hopes so blatantly wrote Claude as the typical Evil Vaguely Middle Eastern Man set on destroying the Good White Nation for his Evil Vaguely Middle Eastern Nation that is often seen in fantasy settings - complete with him being seen as worse than a white woman who does many of the same evil deeds he does in-verse, even by his friends (should it be the bad ending route of SB) - and so many in the fandom were so eager to gobble that shit up. INSIST that "Clearly A Racist Stereotype" is LEAGUES better than "Subversion Of A Racist Stereotype" even. Like I don't think I'll ever get over how supremely fucked that is

[lobotomy-lady]

throw back to when a local pitmommy launched a freakishly long lasting campaign against me on nextdoor bc I told her I didn't wanna sit for her XL rescue bully, & also that it's heinously irresponsible to keep that thing in the house with her toddlers. I literally referred her to countless news stories of little kids being mauled by dogs they raised lovingly since they were puppies-let alone her giant beast that was quite possibly raised in some depraved dogfighting ring (though I'm sure the fuckass animal shelter tried to say it was a "bait dog" lol. newsflash, these dogs always go for the kill when theyre set off, if it was a meek little bait dog it would be dead). she literally implied I'm a racist (yes, really) for not wanting to read about her kids horrible painful deaths in the paper. she was like "I don't care about the stats, it's still 1 in 10,000 chance" hello?? if a plane had a 1 in 10,000 chance of crashing would you put your daughters on it or would you choose another goddamn airline that only has a 1 in a million chance of crashing???? fucks sakes

I truly don't understand why these people won't just get a fucking lab or a golden or any of the numerous breeds that are proven to be FAR less likely to snap & kill people out of nowhere. there is nothing you can get from a pit that you can't get from any other breed. I have a theory that they just want to feel like heroes for "saving" a dog that the evil bigots like me would refuse to adopt for silly reasons, like not wanting my family to be mauled. lol

[hypermascbishounen]

There's a deep irony in Berserk being so admired by people who really really hate what Berserk is about on an emotional level, but especially when writers want to take influence from it. Because Berserk is very strong thematically, and someone who can't acknowledge subtext is going to whiff on emulating anything good.

[crownedwille]

.

[wonder-worker]

"[Elizabeth Woodville] was the only member of [Crown Prince Edward of Westminster's] original 1471 council not already on the king’s council and her name headed the list of those appointed as administrators in Wales during Edward’s minority. [She remained on the council after it was expanded in 1473 and granted significant new governing and judicial powers]."

"In 1478 Prince Richard [of Shrewsbury] married the Mowbray heiress. Like his elder brother he had a chancellor, seal, household and council to manage his estates. His council, like that of Prince Edward, comprised the queen [Elizabeth Woodville] and a group of magnates and bishops, few of whom were Woodville supporters [...] It was Elizabeth who mattered, for Richard resided with her and Rivers treated his affairs as their own."

-J.L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445-1503 / Michael Hicks, Richard III and his Rivals: Magnates and their Motives in the Wars of the Roses

[dieselocelot]

I'M HERE AGAIN HELLOO HIIIIII :D

question about vandermorgan cuz I'm curious....

do you have any headcanons and how do you see their relationship?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words