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Anonymous asked:
Asexual watching monster porn for the creature designs
You want to get off your computer
You want to get off your computer and go here.
This guy... kinda gets me
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Jet from atla is so funny bc like, he's fighting zuko and taunting him being like "bet you wanna use some fire instead of those swords, dont u fireboy" which is a funny thing to say to a guy who is clearly very eager to fight using swords
someone pointed out (1) time how big of an a-hole move it would have seemed like for jet to accuse the kid with the giant visible burn scar on his face of fire bending.
not only was zuko very clearly eager to fight using swords, i'm betting several members of that crowd were also eager to see zuko kick jet's ass with said swords
Epic tag discourse going on here
# There is no good conclusion to come to about Zuko’s scar.
This is the truth. Zuko’s scar is too carefully placed and too old to be anything other than the act of a firebender deliberately burning a child. A child who would have been held or restrained in some way for the damage to be so contained.
That’s the sort of thing that once the tea shop patrons realized that, it didn’t matter where “Li” was from, only that he never be forced to go back.
# There is no
good conclusion to come to
about Zuko’s scar.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Reblogged they-bite
We have always existed, and we always will.
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25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025
- Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality
- Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway
- Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups
- Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay
- Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward
- Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient
- Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative
- Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!
- Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community
- DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!
- Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?
- Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.
- Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability
- Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough
- Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing
- Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work
- Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market
- Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question
- Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them
- Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area
- Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...
- Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable
- Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact
- Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive
- Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people
I mostly talk about transit and local politics but seriously do as much of this as you can, it really does help
Reblogged deadmomjokes
Of all the redemption arcs in popular fantasy media, I feel like Theoden's in The Lord of the Rings is the most overlooked.
The movies emphasize the magical control that the evil powers exercise over Theoden, but in the books, it's more obviously a depiction of bad kingship, in the British medieval sense. Theoden takes bad advice; he neglects his family; he fails to reward his knights; and he leaves his people vulnerable to attack. He also does not honor his kingdom's promises to help nearby kingdoms, as we can tell from Boromir's account of what Gondor has been going through.
Gandalf doesn't just cast out the curse and magically fix everything. He encourages Theoden to free himself from his bad advisor, but Theoden has to take all the subsequent steps. And those choices are not easy; after so much neglect, his knights are scattered, and his only option for defending his people is to gather them at Helm's Deep. The siege does not go well. His people are afraid and despairing. But nevertheless, he holds firm and charges out to meet the enemy -- and Gandalf literally meets him halfway, bringing with him the lost knights, whom Theoden welcomes and rewards after the battle.
Theoden could have just gone home after that. But when Gondor calls for aid, Theoden proves his worth by honoring his promises. He keeps his oaths not only to his people but to his allies.
And the climax of his redemption in the book is not his death, but his leadership. The ride of the Rohirrim against Sauron's armies is described in lavish detail, with an uncharacteristically heated pace: Theoden leads the entire line of Rohan, his banner streaming behind him in the wind as they race toward their foe. And that's the end of the chapter.
I love Theoden's arc so much, and especially that moment so much, because the message is not that he has to win battles or seek power. He just has to keep fighting. Theoden's greatest enemy isn't really Sauron: it's despair. And over the course of the book, he keeps choosing hope and action over despair and hesitation, until finally he can lead his people with courage.
As someone who struggles a lot with despair, I really needed to hear that story.
and it’s contrasted against Denethor’s arc; who also struggles against despair, and doesn’t overcome it.
yooooo. so I literally wrote a 20 page english paper about the Hope/Despair theme in Tolkien’s work once. It was like ten years ago and I don’t think I have it anymore, but oh boy do I have feeeeeeelings about this topic. And I have drunk a little bit of wine tonight! So here are my unasked for thoughts:
Yes, Theoden’s greatest enemy is despair! Everyone’s greatest enemy is despair. It’s the biggest fucking theme of the series IMO and it makes me crazy how often it gets overlooked.
lord of the rings is a story written by a man whose experience of war was crouching in the bottom of a trench. People like to make a lot of hay about the charge of the light brigade and it’s similarity to the ride of the rohirrim, but no. Tolkien’s experience of war was getting fucking trench fever, not watching cavalry charges. Tolkien’s experience of war was listening to the shells fall around him, knowing that death could come at any moment. He experienced war in a way where the soldiers on the other side of the line were a faceless threat, and the closest and most present enemy was his own fear.
this is the hill I will die on. This is why I hate it when people talk about LotR as a morally cowardly story about fighting mindless orcs that exist to be cannon fodder. No. Lord of the Rings is about seeing the dark coming on the horizon, and fighting yourself. Fighting the fear and despair that rise up inside you. Struggling with your own terror and powerlessness, knowing that you are small, and nothing you do will matter in the face of this massive conflict— you’re just here, one more meaningless soul to feed into the machine guns. Lord of the Rings is about taking a deep breath, and bracing yourself, and deciding that if nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it. The ring can’t possibly be destroyed— we choose to form a fellowship anyway. Helms deep will surely fall by morning— we still choose to fight. The quest can’t possibly succeed— and yet we choose to march into the teeth of mordor to distract the enemy. It’s not hope, exactly? But’s it’s not not hope.
I did at one point have twenty pages written about this. Tolkien was a deeply christian man— he believed in eucatastrophe. Salvation. A better world to come, after suffering, if you bore your suffering well. But he was also a world-class Beowulf scholar with a kinda viking-warrior-type view of the world. And do you know what the vikings believed? (Pls don’t anybody @ me for saying viking, I know it’s a verb and not a culture). The vikings believed that the time of your death was preordained, and that all you had control over was how you met it.
And that is some seriously Rohirric shit!! Like, we’re all mortals doomed to die, Ragnarok is coming, and this whole world is an inevitable grind down into oblivion… but if we’re fighting a long defeat, all the more reason to fight it gloriously!! That’s epic. Eomer approves the hell out of that message.
I’m gonna be a real nerd now, and quote from a poem called the Battle of Maldon.
“Courage shall grow keener, clearer our will,
More valiant our spirits, as our strength grows less.
Here lies our good lord, all leveled in dust
The man all marred. True kinsman will mourn
Who thinks to wend off from battle play now?
Though whitened by winters I will not away,
But lodge by my liege lord that favorite of men;
By my dear one and ring giver intend I to lie.”
That’s a translation from an Old English poem that’s literally a thousand years old, but it always gets me how much it sounds like something Tolkien would write. Theoden and Eowyn are practically leaping out of that poem: We’re all going to die, I choose to meet my end fiercely. We’re all going to die, so I want to die beside my king.
It’s an acceptance of death, and even of failure, but not of defeat. Because— to get back to what I was talking about earlier— Lord of the Rings isn’t actually a story about battlefields. It’s a story about being at war with your own heart. Despair or faith? Hope or defeat? Tolkien wants you to know that even if your city is overrun by orcs, or you’re killed in a meaningless push for another 50 feet of french mud, you can still hold on to your courage with both hands and not cede up your soul to despair-- and that’s the battle Tolkien thinks is really worth writing about.
It’s a battle that every major character in the story fights. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Theoden, Denethor, Merry, Pippin, Boromir, Galadriel, Eowyn, Faramir, Eomer, Saruman, Gollum, Aragorn. Some of them hold onto hope through everything. Some of them break utterly. Some of them are defeated, and then with help find their footing again, and make a redeeming last stand.
But the point that Tolkien hammers home again and again is: Death and failure are natural parts of life, and should be accepted. Despair shouldn’t be.
Tolkien says: hope is hard, actually. Fuck that Game of Thrones grimdark bullshit. Hope is hard fucking work. And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place.
Anyway, I fucking love these books. I am going to stop drinking wine, and go to bed now. :)
A hearty support to all of the above. And this is a wonderful reminder to humanity—-this is WHY we tell stories. Why fantasy is important. Why heroes and heroines greater than ourselves are needed. Because we can read and remember that in the horror of the trenches, Tolkien created something stunning and lovely and, to quote Sam, ‘worth fighting for’.
Theoden was a king and a knight. But he battled his despair and won. I’m a civilian and a teacher. I can do the same. I believe with all my heart therefore, that teaching literature and history are crucial for the health of humanity. Courage can be found in fiction and in reality. And I like writing about it as well as reading it.
Thanks to the people in this thread for discussing something so foundational. I hope folks are encouraged.
All of the above, but also:
The crisis facing us all right now is, at bottom, meaningless lives. Tumblr is full of laments over the ways industrialization and globalization have made people nothing but interchangeable cogs. That corporations treat employees as expendable resources. That community has broken down, leaving everyone isolated and relationships fractured. And these points are all valid.
Outraged, angry people of all stripes want to fix everything that is wrong in society and rage at those they believe are standing in the way of their efforts. And I completely understand that desire to build utopia. The world is deeply broken and it hurts to see that brokenness. Worse, to have to live in it.
So this is another way that reading literature is so valuable. Because Tolkien reminds us that the world has always been broken. That when one evil is defeated, another will rise in its place (implied in the way Tolkien takes such care (in the chronology in the LOTR appendix) to weave his story into the flow of later history, a history that leads directly to the evils of early and mid-twentieth century). We cannot build a perfect world. And if we focus on that fact, we will despair.
But Tolkien comes alongside us and says, "If nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it."
To see intractable problems and imperfect solutions and say, "I know that even if everyone worked together in exactly the same way, we could not create a truly just and whole society, but I will do my small part to stand against the tide of darkness, even within myself, and to build, even a little bit," is to seize meaning for our lives, even when all that surrounds us presses us toward nihilism and despair.
"And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place."
Reblogged amimefreak
and now: deadpool (2019) #10
We respect a consistent king
Reblogged baddywronglegs
Btw, this is how conservatives keep getting to claim that trans people are a new thing no one has ever heard, because our history and existences have continually been erased or obscured systematically through out history.
The most famous example was 92 years when the Nazis raided the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the medical practice where the term transsexual was first coined and the first gender affirming surgery was performed in in 1931.
What did the Nazis do after raiding the library on May 6th, 1933? You may be familiar with these images
It is happening again.
oh ok we’re just speedrunning fascism now
Always include a link. Screenshots are not news. But yes this is real.
Reblogged amimefreak
It’s uncanny how similar Trump is acting like Hitler. People are now doing the Nazi salute. They’re drawing the symbol. The KKK was seen in Kentucky asking people to join them. ICE has been ripping families apart. Companies have pulled back Diversity Initiatives. We’re no longer part of WHO and there won’t be any communication from the CDC at least until February 1st. We’re being censored and the news can’t be trusted. Thousands of Americans didn’t know there were protests against Trump yesterday outside the U.S. Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Frank have been compared to what’s going on right now.
According to The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention the U.S. has officially been given a red flag alert for Genocide.
I’m exhausted but I will never stop being angry.
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imagine how much of a fucking horrible person you have to be that on the first day your elected into office the crisis calls of a Suicide Prevention Project Go Up 33%. The Trevor Project Received over 1,400 Call By Early Monday Afternoon. Most of those calls, if not all, are coming from children. Children scared of you and what you will do. Imagine how much power and how horrible you have to be to do that.
Reblogged unpeeled-human
About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.
It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.
So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.
So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.
Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.
The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.
... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.
Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.
Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.
And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.
Totally unrealistic, prisoners would also be forced to watch ads
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I know we all make jokes and memes about it, like ‘lol, Trump said we are the gender we were at conception, we’re all female now. 🤪’
but like
that doesn’t…scare you?
This is your administration. This is the knowledge that your government has….and they get high-school biology wrong. This law had to have been cross-read by several people before it was passed.
This is your government.
A bunch of rich fascists who don’t know basic science.
So many dumb laws are going to cause a disgusting number of deaths and possibly some strange lawsuits
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canada dropping retaliatory tariffs and in response to this trade war. as they should. they need to cut off electricity exports, too
canada, mexico, and the EU need to issue tariffs against industries held by american oligarchs and sanction them, like musk, specifically. if you're a non-american and live somewhere where you can pressure an elected representative to do this, please do it
funniest thing is that Musk of everyone is uniquely vulnerable to trade tariffs, like the man runs a car manufacturer
Reblogged unpeeled-human
For no reason here is a library story
There will be millions of actions like this over the coming years. An important thing to remember is that for them to work (anywhere, not just libraries) is people absolutely can’t announce that this is what they are doing.
Not seeing constant acts of resistance doesn’t mean it isn’t happening all around you all the time. Some very effective methods require silence and secrecy.
Something to keep in mind.