But The One In Front Of The Gun Lives Forever

(25) nothing is certain but death taxes and an absence of god in thunderdome 🙏🙏

[amongthespaghetti]

[bewbin]

in World War 1 around 8 million horses died but in World War 2 it was under a million which can only mean horses started to evolve bullet resistance

[lordoftablecloths]

im sorry i couldnt just let these slide

[woodsdyke]

ok there's also something funny i'm mad about. i know he lost so it's a moot point or whatever but What was ryland grace doing in that tumblr sexyman poll. that's not a tumblr sexyman. That's Ryan Gosling

[wizardelf]

[dogpuppy]

[mylordshesacactus]

Hey so I'm gonna be very very honest here.

And this is going to make a lot of people very angry to hear.

But a lot of y'all on this website are truly deeply genuinely never going to be capable of any kind of real narrative analysis--and I don't mean 'being right all the time' I mean 'meaningfully engaging with the text in any way'--

Because you are, fundamentally, incapable of comprehending that writers usually do things on purpose.

[mylordshesacactus]

The themes are there on...purpose.

The match cuts were meticulously designed and put there to communicate something.

The VA's delivery of a line was being directed. Inflection and tone change the meaning of dialogue. This is intentional. There are entire teams of people shaping those choices and deciding which take to use based on what works best for the story.

Information is being revealed in a specific order, on purpose, to craft an emotional arc and guide the audience's understanding.

A character's romantic preferences are only, and SHOULD only be, their primary motivation if the genre is romance. That is why there is a genre called that. Most stories are other genres.

Creators who dislike a character generally give them LESS attention, MORE boring storylines, and LESS screentime.

Sometimes curtains are just blue. But if the shot composition or written narration takes time to HIGHLIGHT, especially more than once, that the curtains are blue, then the blueness of the curtains is by definition narratively important.

"Cite your sources" is not a witch's curse that banishes People With Different Opinions to the shadowrealm of Being Wrong. Someone making points that challenge your perceptions, while including screenshots and explicit examples, cannot be dismissed with "cite your sources" because they are literally doing that. Don't @ me on this one I've seen shit in the wars, y'all.

Failing to understand these things WILL bar you from ever really engaging with or understanding any narrative more complicated than Paw Patrol for the rest of your life.

I am very sorry if that makes you angry.

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Not letting @griseldagimpel's tags fade away:

[anneemay]

[datafags]

honestly it wasn't my impression that it was our reference point for state *violence*, but rather *censorship*. basically every reference to tiananmen I see on the internet is centered around chinese state censorship.

[tuulikki]

Hundreds, possibly thousands of people died at Tiananmen. We won’t ever know how many the government killed because, unlike literally every other event mentioned, the state continues to threaten violence as a punishment for even talking about what happened.

When I was studying at BeiDa literally only people whose families were from Beijing knew that “something” had happened at Tiananmen.

You know what you get when you search for “the June Fourth Incident” (aka the Tiananmen Massacre) on the Chinese internet?

You get this:

The entirety of Weibo. 600 million active users. And there is nothing.

On Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, you get a jumble of random unrelated crap:

(The scene with blood is a photo from a Baghdad market.)

Literally nowhere can you find this image:

To even show my roommates this picture, I had to get a VPN to get through the Great Firewall of China. And one of them frankly told me she was pretty sure it was Western propaganda hoax and that the event had not occurred.

And it happened at Tiananmen fucking Square! That is the stage for political symbolism! Imagine if the U.S. government used Black Hawk helicopters to kill hundreds of protestors who’d been inside the torch of the Statue of Liberty and Americans couldn’t even google it. And the consequences have been with China ever since. Not just the politics, but even the physical space: they put you through TSA-level security now before you can even step out onto the Square because they need to control speech acts on that symbolic stage.

The protestors wanted freedom of speech. And even the fact that they spoke up has been obliterated from history.

By contrast, the American government lets you google every single one of those American incidents. I have heard Neil Young’s “Ohio” at the fucking grocery store. We are all here talking about these events! We don’t even need to come up with coded alternatives!

Tiananmen should be remembered as a reference point of state violence. The subsequent blackout censorship is a direct result of the threat of state violence backed up with tanks. Until people are afraid to mention Ferguson on social media for fear of getting harmonised, I don’t see why we need to belittle the heroism of Chinese students and workers by making false comparisons.

Talk about American atrocities. Talk about Wounded Knee in both 1890 and 1973, while we’re at it. But there is a reason we talk about Tiananmen as state violence.

[ryebreadgf]

how life feels when you don’t give a fuck about love island

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

At some point on the journey back to Erid, Rocky gets around to asking Grace exactly why he was so mesmerised by seeing the astrophage in the Petrova line.

Grace describes it as best he can, but all he can really manage to get across to Rocky is that he was surrounded by small floating lights.

Later on, Grace is talking about the stars and how important they've been to human cultures for millennia. “What do the stars look like, question?” Rocky wants to know.

Oh, y'know, they're a bunch of small floating lights.

There's a disco ball on the Hail Mary. Grace says it's there because it “makes me happy”. “How does it make Grace happy, question?” Rocky wants to know.

Oh, it creates the illusion that he's surrounded by small floating lights.

Rocky begins to do some research.

Glitter: a substance invented by humans to make things look like they're covered in small lights.

Human jewellery: mostly involves gemstones or polished metals, designed to reflect small lights.

Christmas lights. Candles. Lanterns. Fireworks. Glowsticks. Glow in the dark paint. Rocky is beginning to notice a pattern here, statement.

It takes Grace a fucking while after getting to Erid to notice that a lot of the gifts he's receiving from grateful Eridians are either a) sparkly, b) incredibly shiny, or c) fitted with lights.

While the last one is obviously a concession for his human light sense, he's confused about the former two. Are Eridian materials usually this shiny? Is there some quality about sparkly or highly polished surfaces that makes them sound better? Or is there something about Eridian geology/metallurgy that makes their materials like this?

He asks Rocky about it.

“Simple. I tell people humans like lots of small lights. Humans are easy to make happy.”

Grace kind of wants to protest that humans are much more complicated than that.

But honestly… it fucking works. Like yeah the polished gemstones, shiny metals and glittery rocks are beautiful. Yes those Christmas lights you put up around the house did markedly improve my mental health, Rocky. Thank you, I hate it.

Grace spends a lot of time trying not to think about whether his species' urge to explore the cosmos (that saved their planet and nearly killed him several times) is tied to the same instinct that made his students like glitter gel pens.

[witchsteria]

i do think what gets ignored about carrie as a character is that she’s an incredibly easy target to bully; she’s a chubby, sheltered acne ridden teenage girl who wears frumpy grandma clothes and regurgitates the jesus freak shit her violently abusive mother tells her. she has violent thoughts about her classmates and is uncomfortable to be around. she’s far more interesting being a victim that’s somewhat uncomfortable to be in the head of than a tragic waif. she’s not a martyr, she’s a child and a child who’s been victimised her whole life shouldn’t have to be kind and angelic to be recognised as a victim. suffering teenage girls shouldn’t just be presented on screen as toned down glamorous thin ophelias, suffering teenage girls can be fat and poor and think violently. i do think we need to examine why culturally we need teenage girls to be beautiful and kind to valorise their suffering and treat it as bad

[subaru-copilot]

[tagfer]

cell phone doesn't like water because it is a combination of the other three elements. it is a rock (earth) that we fill with lightning (fire) that can control radio waves (air). if it contained water too, it would be too perfect; it would be like a god. to prevent this, the universe kills the would be uniter-of-the-elements. it's basic science.

[heronbrew]

Hey op google what LCD stands for

[tagfer]

i took an oath in third grade to never do drugs

[prokopetz]

"Toxic yuri" is a very context-dependent term because half the people using it are clearly picturing some sort of subtle psychological warfare and the other half seem to be describing the girl version of whatever is going on between Batman and the Joker.

[fallout-lou-begas]

if you'll consult the graph

[h0lyshift]

The older i get the more i understand why some people become obsessed with privacy, not because they’re hiding something, but because being constantly perceived starts to feel spiritually exhausting.

[melyzard]

Did you know that soda machines at restaurants and movie theaters spy on you? That most common new cars now record your sexual preferences and send it to the manufacturer (and also data about anyone who also gets in your car, walks by your car, and maybe happens to be within visual range of your car)? That grocery stores are trying to force customers to download an app to scan barcodes on shelves instead of putting up prices, so the app can scan the phone, decide how much that customer should be squeezed for, and adjust the price? That more and more innocent people are being sent to jail for crimes committed hundreds of miles away because an AI facial recognition algorithm spit their faces out and the cops didn't bother to do the most basic of checks?

I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.

And often, they are assholes, too.

[guessillalwaysbethisway]

The discovery of the statue of Antinous in Delphi, Greece in 1894

[fuckblast]

Really obsessed with this one like how old cameras worked making everyone blurry against the statue and just makes you realize how long the statue has been right. There.

[transmasc-is-life]

'Why does every nonbinary person want top surgery' I dunno maybe because having visible breasts immediately makes everyone assume you're female and only female, and therefore put you into a binary. Also why are you assuming every nonbinary person has breasts.

[catilinussy]

I think people who believe that should also put some thought into whether every nonbinary person with breasts actually wants top surgery, or whether they've just decided that the nonbinary people with breasts who want to keep them don't "count" as nonbinary.

[furbearingbrick]

#i know plenty of nonbinary people who want breasts or like their breasts#but they're viewed as either transtrenders or trans women in denial <- prev tags

[blanketcoffin]

shoutout to adrian for the great view