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#the trumpocalypse#convicted felon trump#adjudicated sex offender trump#trump is a shit stain on the sole of humanity#unfit for office#elon musk#elongated muskrat#ketamine addled piece of shit#malignant narcissist#doge#doge is a fictitious organisation#department of government eradication#department of general excrement#musk is destroying america#lawless oligarch#unelected official#megalomaniac#kakistocracy#oligarchy#fuck musk#this blog is opposed to the continued existence of elon musk
Reblogged a-book-of-creatures
1960s Visible Horse model I scored recently! It’s in need of a few repairs but it’s a gorgeous old model!
Horse identification: Renwal Visible Horse Assembly Kit
Reblogged surroundedbybooks
As an alternative to 'sugar, spice, and everything nice'
I present: 'salt, vinegar, and everything sinister'
Reblogged unreluctantone
Finished my LOTR Studio Ghibli crossover finally... cant wait to do some other scenes!!
Reblogged surroundedbybooks
Centre For Useless Splendour
Reblogged gnollbard
Hanne Zaruma
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Original comic by Rasenth
Leelah Alcorn was a trans girl, a teenager, who sadly committed suicide nearly 10 years ago. I'm happy that her comic touches the hearts of so many people, years after her death.
I saved screenshots of her blog and last message to the world. Her parents had a lot of control over how she was perceived after her death, but it was also to prevent deletion by Tumblr itself. Even back then, Tumblr has been shadow banning trans women on this platform.
My heart goes out to all trans women who are struggling with society's expectations of who they are supposed to be and who they are allowed to be. May you find peace, growth, and respite from whatever you're going through. You deserve happiness, most of all. Thank you for living, thank you for being here with us.
Reblogged spockvarietyhour
EDWARD FURLONG, LINDA HAMILTON & ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER // Terminator 2: Judgment Day, directed by James Cameron (35/∞)
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I think we need to appreciate this part of Brennan Lee Mulligan's WIRED interview a lot more:
"The evangelical right in this country needs to manufacture outrage to hold onto its voting block. [The satanic panic about DnD] was arbitrary, as the targets of their outrage always are. Fight the power."
Keep the workers distracted with culture wars, convince them that their minority neighbors are the enemy, and they won’t notice when you cut their wages and benefits while increasing prices.
Anyone trying to convince you that your fellow workers, that your minority neighbors, are your enemy is lying to you for personal gain
Also- According to a (progressive) evangelical blogger I follow, conservative evangelicals have been trying and failing to claim the moral high ground for the past 200ish years. They were on the wrong side of history when the question was slavery, when the question was civil rights, when the question was abortion, when the question was LGB rights, and they're on the wrong side now on TQ+ rights. Their only hope to maintain some semblance of moral righteousness, to avoid asking themselves if they're the baddies, is to find somebody worse than them to oppose. If they were fighting against Satanic baby-killers, then they would be the good guys.
Hence the opposition to abortion as "the greatest holocaust ever known". Hence the outrage about drag queens and other queer people "grooming" children. Hence the outrage about QANON and Pizzagate sacrificing children to Satan. Hence the outrage about Dungeons and Dragons worshiping Satan.
(Obviously it's never quite this simple and neat, there are a lot of other factors in any social movement. However, this is a clear throughline and motivation for some people's actions.)
There are a lot of things wrapped up in fundagelicals' anti-supernatural-fiction stance, really. Part of it is the kooky belief that literal demons are everywhere, which stems from the thing darthbob88 mentioned about them needing to feel like they're the good guys. If you can convince yourself that the reason everyone else thinks you're a deluded, self-righteous crackpot is simply because they have been deceived by Satan, not only do you have an excellent excuse to avoid questioning your beliefs, you have a bludgeon to use against anyone else from your group starting to question.
But there's also the factor of fundagelicals wanting to control children. I've read a lot of stuff from exvangelicals, and the extent to which their parents wanted to control them is nothing short of chilling. Some fundagelical parents forbade children from showing any signs of being upset with their parents -- not only were kids expected to be obedient, they were also expected to smile and say thank you, even when punished.
Imagination, to the fundagelical, must only be channelled into inventing and fighting Satanic baby-killers... and they deny that this use is pretending, insisting instead that they are simply seeing what others cannot or will not. (And in so doing, causing far more real-world harm than even the most obnoxious murder-hobo D&D munchkin.)
Speculative fiction is a threat to authoritarians because, in the words of Ursula K. le Guin*, its purpose is
"...to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned. Fantasy and science fiction in their very conception offer alternatives to the reader’s present, actual world. Young people in general welcome this kind of story because in their vigor and eagerness for experience they welcome alternatives, possibilities, change. Having come to fear even the imagination of true change, many adults refuse all imaginative literature, priding themselves on seeing nothing beyond what they already know, or think they know." "The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary."
Fundagelicals know that the more their children can experience, even through imaginative play, possibilities beyond the tiny, straitjacketed, demon-haunted world their church authorities insist is the only one, the more likely they are to escape.
*quoted from here:
The outcry over D&D was just one of the ludicrous aspects of the 80s Satanic Panic. Look up Michelle Remembers, the McMartin preschool trial, and the whole "Satanic Ritual Abuse" conspiracy theories.
Anyway, recommended reading for Dungeons & Dragons players:
Dangerous Games by Joseph P. Laycock ~ University of California Press (2015)
The 1980s saw the peak of a moral panic over fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. A coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included representatives from the Christian Right, the field of psychology, and law enforcement claimed that these games were not only psychologically dangerous but an occult religion masquerading as a game. Dangerous Games explores both the history and the sociological significance of this panic. Fantasy role-playing games do share several functions in common with religion. However, religion—as a socially constructed world of shared meaning—can also be compared to a fantasy role-playing game. In fact, the claims of the moral entrepreneurs, in which they presented themselves as heroes battling a dark conspiracy, often resembled the very games of imagination they condemned as evil. By attacking the imagination, they preserved the taken-for-granted status of their own socially constructed reality. Interpreted in this way, the panic over fantasy-role playing games yields new insights about how humans play and together construct and maintain meaningful worlds. Laycock’s clear and accessible writing ensures that Dangerous Games will be required reading for those with an interest in religion, popular culture, and social behavior, both in the classroom and beyond.