the nature of star wars is robes, capes, & ponchos

the Cow Lore is definitely worth a read

you were just a kid. what kid deserves this?

quick ahsoka doodle!!!

(self) discovery 🎆

have you guys done that “what kind of reader are you” quiz and if so what did you get

here’s mine

ah here’s the link guys

shit ton of people are repeating the thing about hayao miyazaki saying AI art is an "insult to life itself" and just as a reminder he was talking about the zombies that team made that were intended to be scary in how much they shook, but instead reminded him of his disabled friend. the insult to life itself was referring to the team trying to make scary real symptoms that people live with.

it was a quote about ableism. if he has said other things about AI type stuff, that is a different thing. but that specific quote was about ableism.

this is the full quote.

His actual answer to AI is this which is just a few seconds after the insult to life speech. [source]

sorry I couldn't resist

these people understood the assignment

Tona

Hyangmok Baik (Korean) - Crowd

obsessed with how fixable society is, on a structural level.

obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.

obsessed with how easy it all becomes, if we can just figure out how to wrench the wealth out of the hands of the hoarders.

i've lived in four different cities in my adult life and talked to literally tens of thousands of people about politics and the change they want to see in the world and the overwhelming majority of them wanted life to be better, happier, easier for everyone, and dreamed of that world. the only people who didn't think that way were A) really obviously in need of mental/medical care, or B) rich.

wanting universal free healthcare, well-funded public education, and social support for all people is the most unbelievably normie opinion that exists, even among people who have lots of bad or misguided opinions about other things. when you feel alone, know that the reason you feel that way is billions of dollars are being spent to obscure the fact that you are in the majority.

I genuinely believe that the new SW trilogy wouldn’t have flopped out into irrelevance like it did if they hadn’t dumped Finn on the side of the freeway like a new pet rabbit the week after easter

Anyway in my heart Finn became a Jedi alongside Rey and inspired a Stormtrooper insurrection and Kyle Ron went back to his mom like he should have day fucking one and that angry redhead dude blew up with the star destroyer and Poe got to make it happen and at the end Rey doesn’t give a shit who her bitch ass non-palpatine parents might have been because she gets her new family like she needed and palpatine stays dead at the bottom of his musty hole like he should have and Finn and Poe give each other approximately 130% the amount of lingering meaningful looks and then one of their run-together-to-reunite moments results in a heat-of-the-moment make out like it should have and Luke and Leia meet in person a minimum of once so she can sibling slap him at least once for being a useless dramatic old hermit for a billion years and tell him to get the Chanel boots back on and stop being a sad hobo and then for no reason at all there is an ewok style moon of Endor forest party at the end like God intended

Me: yeah in the future we make fun of hipsters again. But we don't call them that, we call them "guys into stomp clap hey" and joke about how they like mediocre overpriced burgers and make podcasts

The 2010s fandom blogger I time traveled to, visibly shaking: can we please go back to that thing you said about destiel

how to say "I love you" in x-files [121/?] ⤷ 1.18 — “Miracle Man”

You want to know why Inigo Montoya remains such an iconic and beloved character even 35 years after the Princess Bride came out?

It’s because he’s one of the few characters in fiction who has a story where he has dedicated his life to revenge, his whole motivation is about getting revenge….and he gets it! and then he isn’t empty or despairing! he doesn’t regret it! he’s totally satisfied!

because so many stories about revenge or rage are about characters “seeing the futility of their actions” or learning “their desire for revenge has only made them the monsters they hated” FUCK THAT.

Inigo Montoya kills the man who kills his father, is allowed to live in the narrative after and be happy about it and it is so satisfying. it’s fantastic. it’s iconic.

let more characters rage against the world, bring it down with bloodied hands, and let them be FUCKING RIGHT about it. Let them celebrate their success with sharp grins, and let them live happy, full lives where they always remain proud/fulfilled for what they’ve done

Another thing that set Inigo Montoya apart from other characters with vengeance arcs is that Inigo’s vengeance drove him but it didn’t consume him. He was wronged and wanted - needed that injustice to be corrected - but his vengeance was focused. Rather than taking his pain out on the whole world, Inigo was a charming, pleasant, good-humored person that treated everyone respectfully, even folks he was fighting. He even asks politely to people he meets about any extra digits they may have.

Would a bitter, angry, vengeance-consumed man swear on the life of his father and help a guy he was planning to duel, then give him time to catch his breath? Would he hand his sword over to his future opponent to lovingly show off his late-father’s skill as a swordmaker?

“You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.”

I think part of what makes Inigo so iconic and beloved is because while vengeance was his story, it wasn’t who he was, so when he achieved his vengeance it was less an emptiness and more of a satisfaction, a story completed, a wrong made right, and a man suddenly baffled at the possibilities before him, not sure what his next story would be.

At that grad school happy hour, where I toasted everyone "l'chaim" and that Trevor jackass smirked at me and toasted "Free Palestine," he didn't see a Jewish woman bringing warmth from her own culture into a social event. He saw a Jew saying something in Hebrew, and therefore declaring her allegiance to the state of Israel. He saw an agent of the Israeli state-building project, and took it as his sacred duty to let me know that he saw through me.

When I posted something here about my research on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and someone replied AND NOW YOU'RE DOING IT IN GAZA. They didn't see an American Jewish woman posting about her research. They saw an agent of the Israeli state-building project, deftly molding Holocaust memory into an instrument of political repression to be wielded against Levantine Arabs.

When someone posted on the substitute teachers subreddit about a student doodling a swastika on their desk, and Jewish users in the comment started talking about their family's experiences in the Holocaust, someone commented GEE I CAN'T WAIT TIL GAZANS ARE POSTING ABOUT SURVIVING THE CAMPS. I asked them a. why on earth they felt that Gaza was relevant to Jews discussing their generational trauma; and b. what they were hoping to accomplish with said comment. In return I was verbally abused by multiple commenters who clearly felt that they held the obvious moral high ground, subjected to 102-level anti-Jewish speech, downvoted, and banned. Because they didn't see Jews engaging in collective mourning and healing. They saw agents of the Zionist state-building project making up reasons to ignore and speak over Palestinian pain and suffering. In none of those circumstances was I, were we, simply random Jews existing in the world. We were first and foremost, inherently, Zionists. Everything we do or say in English or Hebrew or any language about our family history, or the Holocaust marks us in the minds of these people as simply and completely agents of the Israeli State. Evil, hiveminded Jews, secret Elders of Zion, who will stop at nothing to forge their past into a bomb with which to terrorize Palestinian civilians.

We could never simply be individuals, each with our own unique, complex, multi-faceted understanding of those geopolitics and political appropriations of memory. No. We are Jews. Our existence is inherently political. And in the eyes of most of the world, we are--and always have been--guilty.

all of this said, i would choose the company of these assholes over Christo-Zionist MAGAts who pretend to care about anti-Semitism any day of the week.

i think about this frequently

I’m watching Splash (1984) which is a romcom about a guy who falls in love with a mermaid, and when she chooses a human name she chooses Madison and guy says “that’s not a real name, but alright” which seems to imply that Madison was not a name until at least the 80’s and all girls named Madison are actually named after the mermaid. thought you should know

I think...you might be right