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Reblogged seananmcguire
THE ERA OF VANISHING HAS BEGUN
They are not arresting people. They are vanishing them.
Rumeysa Ozturk wasn’t read her rights. She wasn’t told why she was being detained. She was walking to break her fast in Somerville, Massachusetts when masked men in an unmarked SUV pulled up, took her phone, slapped on handcuffs, and dragged her into a vehicle like she was some kind of national security threat.
She’s a doctoral student. A Fulbright scholar. A trauma researcher. But in Donald Trump’s America, she fit the profile: Muslim, foreign-born, sympathetic to Palestinians.
Now she’s locked in a for-profit detention center in Louisiana, hundreds of miles from her lawyer, after a federal judge specifically said she wasn’t to be moved.
They moved her anyway. Because rules no longer apply to those with badges — real or fake.
A MOVEMENT BUILT ON CHAINS AND COWARDS
Alireza Doroudi is gone too.
He’s a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, born in Iran, studying mechanical engineering. No criminal record. No warning. Just scooped off the grid.
ICE refuses to say where he’s being held. No public charge has been announced. His only crime appears to be existing in the wrong body, from the wrong country, in the wrong era.
Mahmoud Khalil was next — a Columbia student, arrested for leading pro-Palestinian protests. Trump labeled him a “radical foreign Hamas sympathizer” on Truth Social. Days later, he was gone.
Jeanette Vizguerra was taken from her Target shift in Colorado, chained at the waist.
Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker organizer, was dragged from his car at dawn in Washington. His window was smashed by federal agents. His voice silenced.
These aren’t isolated incidents. These are deliberate acts of political intimidation.
They are testing the system — testing us — to see how many people they can disappear before we stop calling it democracy.
WHEN ICE IS A BADGE — AND A COSTUME
While the real ICE disappears scholars, organizers, and mothers, the fakes are circling like vultures.
In South Carolina, Sean-Michael Johnson posed as an ICE officer. He pulled over a van of Latino men, screamed slurs, jiggled their keys, and knocked a phone out of someone’s hand. “You’re going back to Mexico!” he shouted. He wasn’t an agent — but he played one with conviction.
In North Carolina, Carl Thomas Bennett used a fake badge to sexually assault a woman at a motel. He told her if she didn’t comply, he’d have her deported. He held up a counterfeit ID and pretended to be the state.
And in Philadelphia, a Temple University student in an “ICE” shirt tried to storm a dorm building with two accomplices. They were dressed for the part, intoxicated by the illusion of authority, emboldened by the climate.
This is what happens when the state makes cruelty a brand. When a badge becomes a fetish object. When the line between enforcement and cosplay disappears altogether.
THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS THE CRIME
Let’s stop pretending this is a coincidence.
This is a unified strategy. The Trump administration is using ICE like a personal strike force — targeting international students, protest leaders, organizers, and mothers with surgical precision.
They invoke secret designations. They bypass due process. They manufacture pretexts out of thin air and rely on the fog of bureaucracy to hide the blood on the floor.
The point isn’t law enforcement. The point is deterrence. Spectacle. Control.
This is what political cleansing looks like when it’s dressed up in the language of national security.
They’re showing the world that resistance has a cost — and the cost is your freedom, your voice, your visibility, your future.
SILENCE IS CONSENT. AND WE ARE LOUD.
There is no middle ground here. No fence to sit on. No neutral position when people are being kidnapped in the name of the state.
ICE doesn’t need your applause. It needs your silence. Every time a student vanishes and the media shrugs, every time a woman is cuffed and the public looks away, the machine gets stronger.
They are daring us to ignore it. They are counting on our numbness. They are betting that we’ll keep scrolling.
We cannot let them win.
This is not border policy. This is not visa enforcement. This is not safety.This is authoritarianism with a PowerPoint presentation.This is fascism disguised as formality.
This is the state stripping people from the land and pretending it’s order.
Let the record show:
They took people.
And we did not look away.
We saw it.
We named it.
We raised hell.
And we did not stop.
(I didn’t write this. Credit goes to Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge)
Reblogged seananmcguire
“Magneto’s backstory should be changed, it’s unrealistic that he’d still be alive after all this time!” Have you forgotten what franchise he’s from?
You can suspend your disbelief for the man transformed into sentient rocks by space radiation, the interdimensional bird, and the flaming biker skeletons, but one guy being a little old is where you draw the line?
It's the ~antisemitism~
#its also worth noting that marvel *DID* change magneto's backstory#he was originally presented as someone who had survived the shoah as an adult#and marvel retconned it to him surviving it as a child#iirc his original debut backstory involved him losing a wife and two kids??
Well, no, not really. When Magneto was made to be a Holocaust survivor, he was a survivor from childhood, though by the end of the Holocaust he was in his teens. His daughter Anya was killed by an antisemitic mob after the Holocaust, at some point in the 1950s.
It's also an attempt to pretend that the Shoah is ancient history, when it's really not.
"It's unrealistic for a Holocaust survivor to still be alive."
Assholes, there are Holocaust survivors still alive in the real world.
They're really telling on themselves because Wolverine is like 170 years old.
wolverine being a hundred and fucking seventy: normal
magneto being the same age as currently alive holocaust survivors: impossible
While there are definitely living Holocaust survivors today, most of them aren't up to doing half the shit Magneto does, and it seems to be affecting the impact his stories have on audiences. I remember reading Magneto stories as a kid in the 90s, knowing he was a little younger than my grandparents, and getting hit with a truckload of sympathy for the dude. He just wanted to have a normal life like Grandma and Granddad, and then the war happened and oh FUCK. Younger readers now are much less likely to have that personal connection; that's just how human lifespans work. And it's only going to get worse. Magneto does need some future-proofing.
That's not to say I think Magneto's origin should be changed, or that he should be permanently killed off. Far from it. This is comics; all kinds of timeline bullshit happens all the time. As someone pointed out above, Wolverine is most of the way into his second century of life.
What I'd do--and what I'm shocked Marvel writers don't seem to have done yet--is wave the mutant bullshit wand and make Magneto functionally immortal. Secondary mutation, maybe. Something something magnetic fields. The mechanics don't matter any more than "Wolverine is functionally immortal because healing factor" does. What matters is this:
At some point, Magneto will be the last living Holocaust survivor. And he will not let the world forget.
There was a story I read as a kid where Magneto took a handful of soil from the camp where his family died and spread it on the surface of the moon, where he was building a mutant haven of some kind. The image of him on his knees with soil running through his fingers and an agonized look on his face has haunted me ever since. To some part of him, it's always 1945. Never again is quite literally now.
I want to see Magneto as the furious conscience of the Marvel universe. I want him to rip a hole in the UN General Assembly building and stride in with his full regalia on--except for one sleeve, stripped to the forearm to show his tattooed number--and read the UN the riot act in all his nigh-unkillable glory. I want him to storm into summits between warring planets, atomize the ferrous metal in everyone's weapons, and lay down the galactic law that is There Will Be No More Genocides On My Watch, And My Watch Is Eternal. And I want future writers to use his story, and his enduring popularity as a character, to make sure that audiences don't forget either.
Magneto being a Holocaust survivor is only a flaw in the storytelling if you're a goddamn coward.
Reblogged inqorporeal
reblog this if your blog is a safe space on april fools and won’t have any jumpers, screamers, or anything scary or anxiety inducing
Reblogged inqorporeal
I want to address a couple of things here - first, there’s nothing wrong with supporting Palestinians, and that in and of itself is not what Rachel is being criticized for. she tied her views directly to promotion of this film, and that is the issue - she caused immediate backlash and harm to her costar, further fueled antisemitism and xenophobia, and did this entirely for her own selfish purposes to court favor and publicity. she knew full well that she had to distance herself from looking like she “approves” of Gal, as the mob had already been coming for her and Rachel wasn’t going to let herself be canceled by daring to appear accepting of Gal’s existence.
second, she can hold whatever views she wants, but free speech isn’t some limitless thing without parameters, and there are often professional and contractual aspects to it, which came into play here.
Gal has advocated for the hostages, spoken against antisemitism, and raised awareness about 10/7 (none of which is inherent approval of any government action and certainly isn’t supporting violence), but she hasn’t done any of that on Disney’s dime nor has she entangled it with her work, even going so far as to not wear the hostage ribbon to awards events in an effort to separate her advocacy and her job.
tying these together wasn’t an innocent mistake, it was intentional and it caused negative repercussions.
Marc Platt discussing this with Rachel directly isn’t “bullying her” nor is it creepy or abusive. actions like this have consequences. for all intents and purposes, he is her boss, and he was speaking to her as an employee who jeopardized the project and other employees depending on it.
the leftist antisemites screaming about and harassing and threatening Gal (and Israelis and Jews whenever they encounter them), and review bombing as “antizionism,” are no different from the right wing extremists hurling racism at Rachel - making it even more frustrating that she exacerbated this, when she herself has faced unfair cruelty and prejudice.
I’ve shared this before, but it’s so important that I’m bringing it back. this is Marc Platt explaining how to discuss these issues on a compassionate and direct human level:
this is not a zero sum game, and it should not be impossible to hold sympathy for affected people. if the stances someone is taking are causing direct damage and bigotry towards others, then something is wrong with that approach and it should be assessed.
Elica wrote this as a response to the vitriol Gal received last year and it is worth reading again as this continues to happen:
you’re not progressive for threatening and hating someone based on their ethnicity, religion, or nationality. you’re just a bigot.
when did choosing to practice care and humanity become a controversial choice?
I should’ve included this report here again - Variety broke the news last week that she received death threats and had to have extra security:
Damn, can't we just not see a movie that's a blatant cash grab with horrible CGI and ugly costuming? Why did this need to be a "boycott"? It's not a boycott if you're not boycotting other Disney movies and products.
Reblogged blackkatmagic
I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.
- A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.
- The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.
- The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.
- A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.
- A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.
- Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.
- Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.
- Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".
- "This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "It works with my tome"
- "This spell causes the hair to fall off cats." "That's fixed in Xaranthius' latest publication, you just have to rewrite your entire spellbook for compatibility."
- "This spell causes the hair to fall of cats." "Magister Olaus of Writhington uses it to help with his allergies. WORKING AS INTENDED."
I want to see wizards snarking at each other over different magical languages/scripts, the same way programmers do it over different languages.
- Sure, "High Tower is a powerful language, but it's such a pain to write. I just use Unity* as it's simple to write and can do nearly everything I need" "cranky because you can't memorize all the conjugations and declensions, aren't you?" "LOOK MAN, I CAN MEMORIZE ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACE OF YOUR MOTHER IN ECSTASY. IN FACT, BEHOLD!" *a little time window appears between them, demonstrating exactly that. The first wizard (seen through the window) turns around and winks at the "camera".
- "you kids today with your lizardman. How can you get anything done in a language without gendered pronouns? It's like fingerpainting. Sure you can learn on it but once you've got the basics you should switch over to a REAL language"
- "the Kalic have been here already. We better get out before the rest of their army marches in." "how can you be sure?" "you see that teleport?" "no" "well, if you COULD see it, you'd see it's written in Adevic Yevi. That's the Kalic magic language." "couldn't it be someone else? We saw those Monon traders, maybe one of them..." "no. No one writes Adevic Yevi unless they're being paid to. It's a language written by committee."
- Wizards going on a quest to get the spellbooks for a lost spell, only to find out that it was written in skydove cant. No one can read that shit! The creator must have been one of those weird "functional wizards". (They're obsessed with making sure their spells have no side effects)
- There's a small library on the outskirts of Freeport which tries to collect versions of basic spells in every language. The Adevic Yevi version of "fireball" takes up 7 pages, mostly boilerplate setting up the interfaces with fire and explosions and ExplodingMagicalBallFactorySingletons. The Lizardman version is basically "AHAHAHA, YOU GO BOOM!"
- There's a bunch of wizard apprentices working on porting an old "Summon Bread and Fishes" spell from the absolutely archaic language it was written in. Once it's in Unity, it'll be easy to modify and teach to more wizards, which'll obviously be good for disaster areas. It's just too expensive to keep paying the ancient guys who can still do magic in TRAN-FOR.
- Eccentric wizards keep inventing new languages for spells. You look at them and they're neat, but it'll never catch on. And either you're right, or the next time you're applying to be a court wizard, the advisors want to know if you have at least 5 years experience in Tilted Runic and you're like "it only came out 2 years ago!" "aren't you a chronomancer?" "oh good point. Yeah I've been using it for 20-30 years."
- There's wizards who will spend incredible amounts of time doing silly things with spells in strange ways. There's this guy (Vorth) who made his own language where there's only one basic spell: fireball. Everything else is basic magic glue tying multiple fireballs together. So like, he's got a breakfast spell. Stand back (good advice for all his spells), and you'll see a fish get knocked out of the local pond, flung through the air by successive explosions, and eventually it lands on his plate, nicely cooked and deboned, if slightly charred (the glass of milk is harder to explain). His magical door locks involve a quicksilver sphere and molten lead changing shape when heated... It's tricky but it seems to work. He's working on a teleport spell, but so far it's mainly just killed test subjects (primarily sheep from a nearby farm).
* so the funny thing here is that this isn't a reference to the unity game engine. The main country in my One Hundred and One Magical Pistols setting is called "the union" and their language is called "unity".
It's wands vs staves vs bare hands.
Wanders are like "they're available everywhere and once you learn how to do it it's so powerful!"
Staffguys always talk about how you can do ANYTHING with a staff. Wanders claim it's a pain to carry around an overpowered device that can do ANYTHING when you just need to cast fireball or a simple one man teleport.
Meanwhile the bare wizards are showing off how they don't need any magical tools and can just do hand motions.
Wanders and staffguys retort that when a spell goes wrong, THEY need to go to store for a new magical tool. YOU need new hands.
Reblogged emptysurface
Reblogged inqorporeal
I want to try so many little hobbies. Candle making, soap making, basket weaving, wood carving, book binding, baking, weaving, I want to try them all.
I almost made a post about this the other day (unless i actually did and totally forgot) but there’s so many
I was going to make a list, but then i realized this is a good time to share this book
Making Stuff and Doing things is a whole collection of old punk DIY zines about making and doing just about anything, even things you probably never knew you wanted to do.
Book binding? In there.
Making bowls from old vinyl records? I made a whole ton for my brother’s grad party last year.
Basics of guitar? Making rubber stamps? Silk screening? Composting? Homemade beer, root beer, and wine? Soymilk?? Quill pens??? All in there.
Since it’s more punk, it doesn’t have a ton of the folksy, cottage vibes/hobbies, but it’s all about being resourceful and sustainable, which they both have in common.
If i ever need to do anything I’m not sure of, I double check this book to see if there’s anything in there. It’s one of the only books on diy I’ve ever needed.
You can download the entire book as a PDF in the link above.
Reblogged seitosokusha
"I did it for you" has gotta be my favorite form of betrayal. You gave me a gift I never asked for, and now I have to look around at the world you destroyed with the knowledge that it was gift wrapped and addressed to me.
Reblogged inqorporeal
If you ever encounter a conspiracy person of any type irl, you can act like you've never heard of
- their particular conspiracy
- online communities
Don't start arguing with them headfirst, or tell them that they're wrong. Make them explain the entire thing to you from the start, and once they have, ask them where has this happened? Whom has it happened to? How do they know these people that have experienced this? Like was that their uncle or a co-worker or who exactly is it that has told them about these things?
And as soon as they mention online forums, just look at them with deeply baffled confusion, and as slowly as possible, ask "so you were told all this by... someone from the internet?" with the exact same cautiously incredulous tone as if they had just said they receive all of their news from a talking dog.
I did this to a man who claimed litter boxes were being used in schools and got him to admit no it wasnt his school, actually it wasnt a school at all and no he had no proof of it ever happening. When he said he heard it on fox news and facebook i just looked at him like 🤨 and he shut up pretty quickly
this is just “people in real life: hey man how’s it going”-ing them. excellent
If you can't find a normie for contrast to highlight how batshit someone is, playing the role of one yourself is fine.
Reblogged inqorporeal
Girls will be boys
Boys will be girls
Fascists will 💖 be shot💖
The amount of terfs I blocked on this post, that complained about the fascist part is very telling.
Reblogged ceiaofsilence
this is without exaggeration the funniest story ive ever read in a youtube comment
Source: funnypicsdept
Reblogged inqorporeal
I haven't purchased a HP item in close to a decade - I use the books I already had as doorstops or to prop a laptop up for meetings nowadays.
There is NO "death of the author" with JK Rowling - she controls and continues to profit from her IP, and uses that money to fund hate groups.
Here's your periodic reminder of why it's so important not to buy any Harry Potter merch or watch anything JKR profits from.
It isn't about cancelling problematic media, idgaf. We're capable of reading books we already own with a critical eye.
It's about not giving more power to someone who is using it to materially harm our community.
And yes that includes that shitty video game, yes that includes the Lego sets, yes it includes visiting the theme park. Stop giving Transphobia Georg money.
This ALSO INCLUDES FANWORKS. Because fanworks both drive new fans into the fandom and also is used as a metric to show popularity (as is pirating Harry Potter media--the companies use the statistics of pirated files as though they're people who would totally have bought the things).
Reblogged seananmcguire
Reblogged ceiaofsilence
Unfortunately couldn’t find the artist’s name but this sucks and is wrong.
You can be a hater about more than one thing.
What OpenAI has done to Studio Ghibli is nothing more than cultural fascism against one of the most outspoken artists against AI.
I don’t believe for a second that OpenAI hasn’t seen that Miyazaki video. They built their recent marketing push around humiliating him.
Lol, couldn’t find the artist’s name because there isn’t one. It appears to be Gen AI.
Reblogged ceiaofsilence
Im sorry but it is so funny how people outside of tumblr view us. Like why are the tiktokers treating tumblr like some professional ass website you need to do extensive prep before you begin posting on. And the follower farming advice is so fucking funny to me when this is the website where people actively hate getting new followers
this is my aesthetic: