In writing, epithets ("the taller man"/"the blonde"/etc) are inherently dehumanizing, in that they remove a character's name and identity, and instead focus on this other quality.

Which can be an extremely effective device within narration!

But these only work if the epithet used is how the narrator primarily identifies that character. Which is why it's so jarring to see a lot of common epithets in intimate moments-- because it conveys that the main character is primarily thinking of their lover/best friend/etc in terms of their height or age or hair color.

To elaborate a little, switching back and forth in a scene describing the "blond-haired man" instead of using the character's name makes it increasingly hard to for the reader to connect to who you're talking about. This is a fatally common trope in fanfiction that really, really under-serves the reader.

To you, the writer, it is so boring to repeat the character's name over and over again. But to the reader, that fades into the background. When you need clarity in a paragraph and don't want to endlessly repeat pronouns, just use the character's name. It's so much better for your reader.

what a shithole country

beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine all along the way

Lyra, my beloved cat of 13 years, passed away this year on Father's Day. She's been by my side through very difficult times and was my little rock of steady and unrelenting love. I struggled a lot drawing this, and struggled a lot posting it, but I know I would've wanted to read a comic like this that validated my grief for her when I lost her.

Wherever you are, Lyra my little summer star, I love you always! Thank you for being the best thing in my life.

Thank you for posting this. I don't often comment outside of tags, but this brought tears to my eyes. It reminds me of Lobster, my sweet little boy, who passed away at 5 just a week before I graduated highschool. I miss you, buddy. I hope you miss me too

Been thinking of Lobster and I know wherever he is, he loves you so, so much still

The ideal cook book, 1902

I'd just like to clarify some things about Senator Cory Booker's marathon Senate speech in protest of the present administration and everything they are doing to the American people.

Senator Booker was NOT allowed to sit down, eat, or use the bathroom during his speech. Sitting or leaving the room to use the bathroom would be considered yielding the floor. Eating would have interfered with his speaking and the person who has the senate floor must continue to speak, except when listening to questions that they will then answer.

He only took occasional sips of water.

The person who previously held the record for longest speech on the Senate floor did have bathroom breaks and also did things like read from the encyclopedia.

Senator Booker did not do that. His speech was to point out the damage that this administration is doing and he stayed on that subject.

Senator Booker's speech did reach many people. It wasn't a silly stunt that was done so that he could take the record for longest speech. He wanted to show the country that democrats will do something to bring attention to the problems we are facing. That democrats are listening to them.

Senator Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and 4 minutes to "make good trouble."

also like, a Black man breaking Strom Thurmond's record is absolutely *chef's kiss*

for those who are too young to know about Strom, he was literally a white supremacist

He trained himself to give this speech by practicing and then implementing limits on food and water intake leading up to this. He cut out food for days, then cut out water the day before.

He then went to do an appearance on Maddow after yielding.

New poster for ‘The Life of Chuck’ starring Tom Hiddleston has been released!!!

Hey hey, as a librarian, can I just say don’t pace yourself at the library. I get a lot of customers saying “oh I shouldn’t get too many books out at once” but like you should!!!! Max out your card, take everything we have on a subject you’re interested in, make a book fort in your home. We love that shit! It doesn’t matter if you read them or not; just take them for an adventure and bring them back whenever they’re due!

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

Help your local library; get books out even if you know you can’t read them all!

Literally, this helps us! Even if you loan it and return it the same day or day after. (Especially titles important for us to keep ie queer titles, books from minority authors and more).

My library doesn't have a max loans per card for physical books either. So what the heck grab a couple, walk around for a bit and try them out and return the ones that didn't hook you.

National Library Week is this month, April 6th - 12th! Go show your appreciation!!!

In the past month, Trump has threatened to imprison peaceful protest organizers, falsely declared a national invasion, invoked war powers in time of peace, serially ignored court orders, and sent people to an El Salvador prison without due process or review, all while making outrageous comments meant to distract the public from his administration’s illegal conduct.

This week served up the capper when we learned that Trump officials are coordinating their actions on Signal, an app with an auto delete feature, in violation of multiple federal laws requiring communications to be preserved and protected.

All angles spell danger for the Republic

The Signal breach is appalling from all sides, each so dangerous it is hard to determine which angle is more threatening from a national security perspective:

That Secretary of Defense Hegseth sloppily jeopardized the lives of US service members, or his reflexive, dry drunk anger at being asked about it.

That Trump didn’t appear to know (or remember) anything about the scandal several hours after it broke on international news, or that he doesn’t understand why it matters.

That his spokes child tried (again) to discredit the media, or that she thinks “war plan” vs. “attack plan” is a meaningful semantic distinction when targets, weaponry, and attack sequencing are revealed to enemy eyes.

That the national security advisor went on Fox News to take ‘full responsibility’ for the Signal error, or that he then called the Atlantic editor ‘scum’ for reporting the story in the first place.

That Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, doesn’t know that US intelligence laws apply to all“national defense information,” not just “classified information,” or Trump’s irrelevant, false messaging that “no classified information” was included on the Signal exchange.

As the absurdity of this clown car of ignorance and arrogance unfolds, the most dangerous aspect of it has, at least so far, received the least media attention: Trump advisors are exchanging official communications on an app deliberately set to delete all evidence of their communications, which appears to be their standard operating procedure.

Trump’s team is breaking federal law by deleting evidence

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, testified this week at a Congressional hearing that the Signal app came “pre-installed on government devices,” suggesting its use was not limited to the Yemen fiasco. From the content of the group chat published this week by The Atlantic— only published because Trump officials kept lying about what was on it—Signal looks like the default method used by administration officials to communicate with one another. The Yemen group chat explicitly referred to another such chat, making clear that this was not their first.

Gabbard, in her testimony, did not mention Signal’s primary feature, which is a built-in option, activated by Trump officials, to automatically destroy its own contents on a pre-selected date. The Yemen screenshots show that, in coordinating their airstrikes, Trump officials set Signal to erase all messages coordinating them. Some were set to disappear after one week, and some were set to disappear after four weeks.

Deleting official communications is a federal crime, punishable by up to ten years in prison.

It is a crime to destroy any federal record

Legal mandates including the Espionage Act, the Presidential Records Act, and the Records Management by Federal Agencies Act require that ALL federal records created by the President, Vice President, cabinet agencies, and the intelligence community be preserved, protected, and produced for review by any court of jurisdiction that requires them.

Under the Espionage Act, 18 USC § 793, anyone who through gross negligence permits such information “to be removed from its proper place of custody” or allows it “to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed,” or fails to promptly report any such destruction to his superior officer “Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” Because of the typo-free and specific attack details in his lengthy texts, Hegseth appears to have cut and pasted the attack plan from a secured source into the unsecure app, thereby endangering the lives of the servicemen involved.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 2071,anyone who conceals, removes, or mutilates records “shall be fined, imprisoned not more than three years, or both and shallforfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”The disqualification is mandatory, not discretionary.

The worst takeaway from Signalgate is Trump’s attempts to block scrutiny

Even if sharing the Signal chat on Yemen was a mistake, as officials claim, choosing to set the date(s) on which all content would be destroyed could only be deliberate, a fact not lost on American Oversight. After the Signal breach was reported, American Oversight filed suit against Hegseth, Gabbard, Marco Rubio and other officials, seeking to enjoin the Trump administration from continuing to destroy evidence of their own conduct. As detailed in their complaint, Trump officials appear to be using Signal in other governance contexts as well, creating records that are deliberately destroyed in violation of the Federal Records Act and/or the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”).

The purpose of FOIA and federal records laws is transparency: to make sure we know what our government is doing, to protect American citizens from rogue and illegal government actions. Under the Constitution, this power belongs to the people.

Transparency in government is one of our oldest and most sacrosanct rights; it is what protects us from jackboots in the night. By running “off the books” official communications, Trump advisors are deliberately circumventing federal law to evade public and legal scrutiny, in line with Project 2025’s calls to conceal damning information from the public.

That Trump, his buffoonish cabinet, and the architects of Project 2025 would go to such lengths to hide what they are up to should keep every American up at night.

Family members of detainees being held at Krome Detention Center are speaking out about the alleged harsh conditions of the facility.

(Read on our blog.)

The recently appointed Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth (formerly Fox News pundit, perpetually soused creepy uncle, and current group chat leaker of classified intel) banned images of the Enola Gay from the Pentagon’s website for the offense of “DEI” language. In keeping with the far right’s stated war on anything vaguely resembling diversity, equity and inclusion, even historical photos are up for cancellation. When a literal weapon of mass destruction is censored for being a bit fruity under the Trump administration’s war against inconvenient truths, what exactly is left untouched?

This is clown show stuff, but the stakes are far from funny. While some might be hesitant to compare the current administration to the very worst history has to offer, we can at least all agree that they are dyed-in-the-wool grammar Nazis. Policing language has been the objective of the MAGA culture war long before Project 2025’s debut—the wave of book bans orchestrated by astroturf movements like Moms for Liberty, and Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay bill have already had a profound effect in the arena of free speech and freedom of expression (despite the far right’s long tradition of doublespeak performative free-speech martyrdom to the contrary). Don’t Say Gay ostensibly targeted K-3 education, but LGBT+ content at all levels of education (and beyond) was either quietly censored or entirely preempted in practice. The results were not just a war on so-called ideology, or words alone—but on reality and essential freedoms.

Now, words as innocuous and important as racism, climate change, hate speech, prejudice, mental health, and inequality are targeted as subversive. Entire concepts are being vanished from government institutions, scrubbed not only from descriptions but from metadata, search indexes, and archival frameworks.

If you don’t name a thing, does it exist?

Loki and Sigyn

(A patreon birthday request for Cosmic0cookie with their take on the characters and edits by them!)

Sen. Cory Booker has spent all of Monday night and Tuesday morning on the Senate floor, delivering an impassioned speech in protest of the Trump administration's policies. The effort, which also involves numerous Democrats, is inching closer to a record by the hour.

The New Jersey Democrat took the podium at 7 p.m. EDT, vowing to speak "for as long as I am physically able." He was still standing — with glasses on and papers in hand — as of 2 p.m. on Tuesday, taking periodic breaks from speaking by yielding to questions from his colleagues.

By early afternoon, over 52,000 people were watching Booker's live stream on YouTube.

The Devil, Probably (1977), dir. Robert Bresson