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From Girl Scout’s social media. The original Twitter thread is here.

Hamlet as a D&D paladin.

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some gems of insight from the reblogs (@aspiring-protagonist​ and @moderndayathena​):

Jason Todd needs to want to kill himself and he also needs to be certain he'll live until the sundeath of the universe (he's right)

Pictish drip was insane. Look at this choker:

Chances are thats going to be the only thing a Pict warrior is wearing as he charges at you naked covered in blue paint and screaming with a sword in hand

Loveee that illustration on the left with the chain on. Definitely worn by the sexiest bitch above the Antonine Wall circa 400 AD.

One of my favorite online cartoonists, Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant), had a cartoon of hers published in The New Yorker last week! I’m very thrilled for her, and thought I’d share it here too since it’s a pretty fantastic example of her work.

hot take possibly? but i actually think it’s okay for things to be marketed for adults. it’s literally okay if things aren’t suitable for children. i feel like we are losing the plot

I mean, considering that Poirot is a Belgian refugee who fled from the attack of the Germans, for a Modern AU (as in set in about now) Poirot should be like.

A Syrian refugee or something.

Hastings can be his tall English self or whatever, but yeah, Syrian refugee Poirot.

I love this.

Your tags are telling the reason why I got the idea in the first place, because if he was Belgian today, he'd have no reason to be in Britain for safety, but the Middle East got bombed to smithereens. And sure, the British (as any north/western European country) today are still xenophobic towards foreigners, I mean, we all saw this Brexit thing go down. But still. I just think it'd be really interesting.

Also, I wanna hear him say "wallah habibi" to Hastings, ngl

#i have no idea what to do with Hastings backstory tho; ngl#like. he wouldn't have HAD to go to any war to get injured and leave; would he?#so how is he becoming a captain?#maybe he's just a civilian ship captain or a airline pilot or something?

Ok this is the funniest thing ever because if poirot is still seasick it would be so ironic for hastings to be a pilot or sailor

It would be cool to have themes about xenophobia and racism and the way refugees are treated be explored more in a modern perspective. In canon it's more like "oh haha british people are just like that and poirot can take it to his advantage sometimes". I have no idea how much animosity there was towards belgian refugees of wwi (or percieved french immigrants in the later books) in england at the time so maybe this outlook makes sense... but something tells me that there was probably a lot more nuance to it than what this english lady was writing.

In the great spirit of improv, yes AND. I think there is actually a lot of nuance in the books that Agatha Christie is writing, and that is not getting picked up by later audiences, in part simply because of the passage of time, and in part because I think Christie and her contemporaries are done a great disservice by the nostalgic "cozy-washing" (term I just made up) of their work.

Poirot, as a Belgian refugee, is an example of the kind of immigrant that allows England to feel good about itself. Gallant Little Belgium™ resists The Hun™ in vain, which allows the British Empire to clasp them to its vast bosom. The first novel (1920) sees Poirot dependent not just on the charity of England, but on the individual charity of a particular member of the gentry who is dedicated to philanthropy, and he is keenly aware of this. Before he becomes a celebrity, he becomes a gimmick, his sleuthing reported on in the newspapers as something of a fad. And Poirot's instantly legible foreignness is usually read, pejoratively, as French. After all, the French may have Escoffier, and they may have sexy novels, but they are the nation of the non-glorious revolution, and that of Bonaparte (boo hiss), linked with Scotland in the Auld Alliance: in short, an ancient and untrustworthy rival. The internal contradictions and hypocrisies of England's xenophobia and nationalism are always, I would argue, inescapable in the books. And a lot of the drama of Poirot's famous final denunciation/deduction scenes is linked to the ways in which he is exposing respectable, complacent middle-class English society as... if not entirely rotten at its core, certainly hiding all sorts of secrets from itself.

Also I think Hastings should have been on the ground with UN Peacekeeping Forces, embracing a vision/vocation linked to an idea of an England that may never really have existed, except in the hearts of some of its sons.

I love all of this, but I particularly love the concept of retrospective “cosy-washing”! I think lots of Christie media doesn’t realise how dark the world she portrays is. It’s a world where any person could be a killer, where your prejudiced actions could have real consequences. It’s deconstructing the cosy, if anything, and showing the foundations it’s made on. It’s about the secrets and evils of real people doing real things. The idea of cosy mystery is built on something else that it could have been. But it isn’t Christie.

I think it's similar how people think Ghibli movies are only cosy and cute and without conflict) or something (there's like. TWO. Maybe three depending on how you count).

And completely forget the anti-war- and the "Stop destroying nature!"-messages inherent in them.

Poirot is regularly ripping the cozy façade off of English (high) society. That's like. Practically his whole schtick, isn't it?

university professors love to create the most fucked up pdf ever known to mankind. it's enrichment for them.

what HAPPENED here

This is really cool, but imagine you're a camera or a coffee pot just chilling and suddenly you're the set dressing in a Tarsem Singh movie about inanimate objects

It’s weird that we keep trying to armchair diagnose asshole behaviour with mental health labels and in doing so throw people with mental health conditions under the asshole bus when we could just call a guy an asshole and leave it at that

It just seems far more straightforward, you know

Like yeah I know it’s wild but having narcissistic personality disorder or low empathy isn’t actually worse than or equal to being a straight up asshole, it’s like your choices and actions dictate who you are more than the qualities you’re born with or something

I mean ngl I feel like at a certain level of malice assholery becomes a mental disorder. As in, there should straight-up be an Incapable Of Not Being An Asshole Syndrome. Simply because I feel like the level of disregard for other people involved at that level of malice cannot possibly be a normal human baseline. I've met bugs I was more concerned about than Elon and Trump seem to be with like, the vast majority of actual human beings.

What you're looking for I'd say is a combination of group think, ethical philosophies like """"ethical"""" egoism on display, the weird shit too much money does to the human brain i'd have to do more specific research to cite anything specific but tldr the dopamine from money fades FAST that's why people who win the lottery have mental health issues, white fragility, toxic masculinity, likely a random grab bag of unprocessed trauma responses to spice things up, a high need for external validation, and staking a sense of identity/ego on very shaky ground that needs to be constantly defended.

It's closer to being a high ranking member in a cult then mental illness if i had to compare, because while you do have power over the peons and compared to them live a life of immense privilege, you too are still bound by the ludicrous nonsensical demands of the cult that you ESPECIALLY can't afford to question or go against or else you risk being torn to shreds by the very people you have been giving tenuous power over, or worse, the cult breaks apart or splinters and you lose ALL your power and status despite the fact that the cult was also actively ruining your life as well but distracting you by letting you ruin other people's lives MORE.

As such causing a cycle of toxic and controlling behavior that shuts down all dissent because it knows it cannot survive dissent

It's actually the Rich Asshole thing I was thinking of specifically (I don't have the study on hand either but I'm willing to bet you and I read the same one), so yeah, this is a decent sum-up.

the closest thing to an official term i could think of would be, Dopamine Dysregulation Syndrome, it's not a perfect fit because that's usually more of a result of dopamine medication for conditions like Parkinson's or in some cases from substance abuse or brain damage.

However, if I was tasked with doing a study based on the effect high amounts of money have on the brain through dopamine and the seeming link to impulsive or grandiose risk taking behavior DDS would probably at least be my starting point for further research.

Not armchair diagnosing to be clear, just musing that there is definitely a dopamine factor at play and that's the closest comparison i can think of. Someone can have DDS and not be Like That of course and there are still all the other stuff i mentioned likely aggravating it, but dopamine needs to be studied more anyways its discovery in the human brain isn't even a century old so I feel like looking for a correlation would make at least an interesting and important subject of a study or two.

Yeah, that sounds reasonable.

I think it's also dangerous to suggest, as seems to be en vogue right now, that mental illness can't cause negative changes in behavior. Like, the most obvious "I could pull up the literature right now" example I can think of is that people with ADHD are more likely to be gambling addicts than the population at large. It's not because people with ADHD are stupid. It's because our brains are screaming and begging for dopamine and we have none to give, so you wander from thing to thing looking for anything that makes you feel normal. And what gives you dopamine? The lights, the sound, the win. Casinos are designed to give you dopamine.

Pathology causing changes in behavior should not be stigmatized. That only causes further problems.

Yael Bar Tur

That's not really the question, though. The question is, why has Gaza been left so reliant on Israel for its electricity?

I am going to assume you are asking in good faith, so here's a quick explanation.

Gaza is so reliant on Israel because Hamas wants it to be.

There was a big discussion a few years back about Gaza having brownouts because their infrastructure is old and failing. So multiple countries stepped up to help. Not just the U.S. (an Israel ally), but also Switzerland, a neutral country (one might argue that they favor Palestine but won't say it outright). You'd think that since their hospitals were losing electricity, they'd jump at the chance to have another country bring in engineers and electricians and fix the grid, right?

No. Hamas refused.

There were protests in Gaza about this. Gazans were PISSED. Keep in mind that it's in the Middle East and it's hot and suddenly there's not AC and no fridges. People needed electricity, and Hamas said no. By the way, it's illegal to protest there. People were tortured and killed as a result of these protests.

Hamas could use any amount of aid to fix its failing infrastructure, but they are instead using that money to build weapons caches and tunnels and bombs. They are actively choosing to put money into war instead of defense.

In Israel, people joke that you can't be more than a minute away from a bomb shelter. (Which isn't exactly true, but they have a lot.) Israel has bomb shelters and a warning system because it has invested in that. Israel is trying to keep its citizens safe.

Hamas is the opposite. Gaza has no bomb shelters, no air raid sirens. The IDF alerts people before bombings by dropping leaflets to keep the death toll low. Hamas does not care if Gazans live or die. People who live there know this. It's why there are currently protests against Hamas and why Hamas has started killing everyone asking for fair elections (Hamas was elected, killed all of the opposition, and hasn't allowed an election since). They are putting civilians in harm's way because the more dead Gazans there are, the worse Israel looks. And I wish I was making that up, but you can find Sinwar saying exactly that on Memri.

By all means, Gaza should be independent. It should be a functional country. But it's currently ruled by a death cult who put destroying Israel over their own people. They functionally have no government, because their elected leaders aren't providing services to the citizens. In order for Gaza to really be free, it needs to have leaders who will accept outside help in building their own electrical plants and leaders who will try to protect people. I hope that Hamas is deposed and Gaza can be a functional country soon, but I don't think that will be any time soon.

TLDR: Gaza is dependent on Israel because they're spending money on bombs and not infrastructure.

He's not in good faith. Look at the username.

I feel like if you are not Jewish and you don't want to commit to the aspects of Judaism that involve actually doing/changing something (e.g. keeping kosher) but you do want to participate in aspects of Jewish culture, your best bet would be to stay non-Jewish but get some Jewish friends. Not unilaterally declare yourself a convert, post a video of yourself eating bacon and eggs, then point out that a lot of irreligious ethnic Jews don't keep kosher as your excuse for not keeping kosher after you converted to the religion

Then again, if you're the type of person who would do that you'd probably have some trouble with the "befriending Jews" thing especially if you're only doing it so they'll invite you to a Purim party

Based on what I've been seeing for that case, they seem to be a JVP-associated Palestine cultist who performed a sham conversion in order to be able to say "AsAJew." And it's so incredibly offensive.

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

Conversely Supernatural ended several seasons ago when Sam and Dean defeated Satan because as cruel as it seems the cycle of life and death follow a natural cycle that must be upheld lest reality crumble and so Sam being a human with demon blood who has always been taken for granted as the good and vituous and healthy and sympathetic one is bound to the duty of ruling hell while Dean the sinful and indulgent one always forced to sacrifice his own happiness and get his hands dirty takes rule of Heaven, both tragically forsaking their humanity and never really getting the normal human lives they both desired and never got to have while at the same time coming to peace with aspects of their own nature they were never able to accept- Sam, his rage and violence and dark desires always pushed down out of sight in shame, and Dean, his self-hatred and kind heart that always hated hurting people and never believed himself to be good or worthy- each in a place of power they never wanted but were always uniquely suited for, in defense of a humanity they always defended but were never truly home in- and they are good rulers because they have always cared for justice and the living, but it is bittersweet because they will never again be the living- never settle down, have families, and grow old like they wished, nor die young and violent on the battlefield like they were resigned to- but to always do what they have always known, standing in the place of the gods they have usurped

The Transformers movies should have started on Cybertron and begun with corruption in the senate and the beginning of the war with the bombings of civilian cities Vos and Praxus, then followed the course of the war with Megatron as the sympathetic leader of the rebelling oppressed class who slowly grows to become an equal or greater evil through good intent reminiscent of Paul Atreides’ false prophet narrative in DUNE, continuing as a political intrigue/diplomatic house of cards/cultural examination piece and peaking at Orion Pax taking up the mantle of Prime, concluding with the journey that landed them on earth to begin with in the canon G1 series, with known human characters only appearing in the final seconds before a hard cut to black with a hopeful but uncertain future; a space opera that explores the reality of a functionally immortal mechanical race ruled by a rapidly deteriorating totalitarian regime facing total societal collapse and extinction. I’ve been disappointed by bad execution of good media concepts my whole life I can do this all day

it really is crazy how quickly people were willing to just let chatgpt do everything for them. i have never even tried it. brother i don't even know if it's just a website you go to or what. i do not know where chatgpt actually lives, because i can decide my own grocery list.

i wisely turned off the notes on this when it was at 700 but oh my god stop telling me what you "just" use it for in the notes shut the fuck up shut the fuck up I AM NOT A CATHOLIC PRIEST, I DO NOT ABSOLVE YOU. WRITE YOUR OWN EMAILS.

matt just fired half the remaining tumblr support staff lmao

from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.

i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.

“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?” -enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside

“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?” -ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie. “PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES” (we did make 1 giant tray cookie)

we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.

we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.

two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺

got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks

expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv

was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this

tiny……….

the class went well and they asked if i wanted to do another one in a couple weeks and i said yeah, and they’re taking uh… fuck, what’s the word for inventory when it’s people?? attendance?? whatever, they’re trying to see who’s interested to get a feel of if it’d be 1 three hour class again or if there’s too many kids so we’d do a couple classes. anyways, i love the emails from Concerned Parents.

“will there be knives involved?” we are baking cookies.

“what temperatures does the oven get to/will it be hot enough to burn?” we are baking cookies.

“will there be [insert ingredient used in cookies]?” we are baking cookies.

“are you using fahrenheit or celsius?” ??????? d-does it matter?? it’s going to get Hot. (also celsius; this is ontario)

“are the ovens childproof?” no?? i’m assuming you’re asking if i’m going to let your kids reach into the ovens while i’m staring out a window in another room. i will not be allowing your children to use the ovens. they will not be left unattended. 

“why is the library baking class taking place at the high school?” the library does not have 10 ovens. the library does not even have 1 oven. the high school has many ovens.

“what if i don’t want my child to have cookies? can you let her make muffins instead?” this is a baking class for cookies. we are baking cookies.

“cookies aren’t healthy. why don’t you make [insert whatever]” do you know how many cookies i can make with a $40 budget and a trip to the bulk store? we are making cookies.

“who needs a class to bake a cookie, why not teach something more valuable?” IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE COOKIES, KAREN, IT’S ABOUT FAMILIARIZING CHILDREN WITH THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BAKING/COOKING/FOOD, ABOUT TRYING NEW THINGS, MAKING MISTAKES AND REALIZING THAT THE MISTAKES ARE NOT ONLY OKAY TO MAKE BUT VALUABLE IN AND OF THEMSELVES, FAMILIARIZING THEM WITH INDEPENDENCE, THE UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THINGS CAN COME TOGETHER TO FORM A NEW AND BETTER WHOLE, ALL WHILE HAVING TRYING TO INJECT A MODICUM OF JOY INTO THEIR LITTLE LIVES. SORRY THAT THERE ARE CONCEPTS AT PLAY YOU CAN’T SEEN TO UNDERSTAND HERE. MAYBE YOU SHOULD COME JOIN AND I’LL LET YOU MAKE A FUCKING COOKIE.

well he certainly nailed that