It's my 14 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳
Three Goblin Art

Janaina Medeiros
Xuebing Du
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trying on a metaphor
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
h
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

if i look back, i am lost
ojovivo
Sade Olutola

blake kathryn
Stranger Things
d e v o n
occasionally subtle
we're not kids anymore.
Acquired Stardust
Cosmic Funnies

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@atthevoidsedge
It's my 14 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳
Had my heart all set on a relaxing Sunday of planning my week, and now I've got to drop everything and do a new surge on gathering updated intelligence.
I'll admit my first thought was "Cui bono?" but as of this afternoon, Occam's Razor suggests a lone nut at this point. I think the main contributing factors to a sense that "something's fishy here" are 1) Donald Trump's entire public persona has been based on "reality" TV synthetic drama and pure fabrications for decades, and 2) One couldn't have scripted a greater gift to the white nationalists, religious authoritarians, and Good Ol' Boy elites who want a Poor, Persecuted Savior of White Christendom narrative to justify whatever combination of anti-democratic "Green Bay Sweeps" and pure force pulls America back into the unfree world. Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, Gaddafi... all used attempts on their lives to justify their tyranny.
On that note, it's worth observing that the anti-democracy insurgency was already broadcasting their hit list of "traitors" to be made into political prisoners and dead bodies once their real deep state is installed BEFORE this crap happened. In fact, it was one of the larger breaking stories of the weekend that has now - perhaps coincidentally - fallen off radar.
Point being, the insurgency is now squealing with sado-fa$cist glee at the atrocities they now claim are justified by blaming the actions of this lone nut on ALL OF US who dared have the temerity to reject their unjust man-made caste systems and fake authority. And they're screaming, repeatedly, through bullhorns, that if their latest build of fake-elector schemes and lawfare at the state and local levels don't work this November, they'll just triple down on sabotage, insurgency, and "Second Amendment Remedies". Be ready to stand up to this if you want to stay free.
Stay Frosty, My Friends
The America I grew up in was never supposed to happen.
The human race emerged from the mists of pre-history worshiping genocidal psychopaths as gods. Only gradually, grudgingly, did human societies evolve into limiting the “divine right of kings” and acknowledging the rights of (some, landowning) men (but not women). The Confederacy’s defeat in the American Civil War began to normalize the idea that human rights are not subject to whitedude feelings at the state and local level. But even thereafter, America was still highly stratified in ways that dated back to ancient times, with royalty, nobility, serfs, and paupers just going by different names, only now defined less by blood and titles than by race, gender, and most of all, material wealth. It worked out well if you happened to be on the top, but could be cruel and brutal if you were born at the bottom of a caste system in which you existed to serve your betters.
But this, so it was said, was the way it was supposed to be. “Natural law,” you see. The weak, the unfit, the inferior, and the immoral are too degenerate and stupid to govern themselves. They need “natural elites” and religious authority to give them their place, and in some cases, masters to serve. “Hey, I don’t make the rules. This is what GOD said.”
Then, an historical fluke happened.
The national mobilization for World War II together with FDR's New Deal proved that government works just fine at solving problems and mitigating inequality when it's allowed to. Women were integrated into the American workforce at a level previously unheard-of. Poverty in America was cut in half, and the following decades saw the United States rise to a position of global leadership. Strong unions kept the Good Ol' Boys in check, while marginal tax rates gave big business incentive to invest their wealth rather than hoard it. While communism was delivering dystopian blight and starvation overseas, regulated free enterprise brought the "World of Tomorrow" into the homes of everyday folks. What were once considered luxuries for the elites became necessities for all. And not just the material kind. The kind that make the difference as to whether or not you're really free... Civil Rights.
For a certain kind of person, this was the worst catastrophe possible. Not because it "didn't work," but because it DID.
Just as for another kind of person, the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War was the worst catastrophe possible.
And for yet another kind of person, the Enlightenment from which the principles of inalienable rights arose - at the expense of the political power of unquestioned religious authority - was the worst catastrophe possible.
What do the New Deal, the Civil War, and the Enlightenment have in common?
All three were events that in their own ways brought about the kind of progress we now take for granted, and overwhelmingly consider to be self-evident goods, to the extent we ever learned about them in school and remember a little about them. All three to some extent mitigated social inequality along one axis of hierarchy or another: wealth, race, and religious authority in reverse historical order. And in so doing, they brought us a little closer to the ideal of equality under the law whereby voters choose their leadership, rather than micro-cliques of Good Ol’ Boy elites choosing their voters… Or worse, some asshole wearing a Burger King hat passing it on to his grubby little shithead son, forever.
What too many of us seem to have overlooked - or missed altogether - is how long and how deeply certain kinds of people have nursed visceral disgruntlement and resentment over the repercussions of the New Deal, the Civil War, and the Enlightenment... and by extension, of Western multiracial democracy. Not because they suffer from them in any real way, but because it OFFENDS their sense of the what the rightful, "natural," "God-ordained" hierarchy of human society should look like. This takes many forms, and the focus will vary between clusters of the aggrieved. On paper, they may seem to be at odds with one another, but taken together, their various clouds of motives begin to suggest a common set of "enemies":
"Government exists to enforce the Bible and to keep the bad people in their place. Nothing else."
"Government exists to protect natural elite job creators from the looters and moochers. Nothing else."
"Government shouldn’t exist, because fuck everybody."
"Representative democracy was a mistake, because not-white-dudes are unfit to have a say in anything. We need to go back to the good ol’ days of the divine right of kings and elite men telling the riff-raff how it’s gonna be, who aren't afraid to launch a good old fashioned race war when Christendom is on the line."
"We doomed our culture by allowing women to vote, own property, work, and have lifestyle choices besides being married homemakers, or being otherwise under the dominion of their fathers or religious authority. White, uh I mean 'Western' civilization will drown in brown unless we put women back in their place by involuntary coercion, shame, and force whether they like it or not. Has to be done, you see..."
The progress of the last three centuries has been a series of victories - always against resistance - expanding the inalienable rights of landowning white men to apply to all people. These are the best stories America has to tell. But for both the anti-freedom and anti-equity wings of the anti-democracy insurgency, these are catastrophes to be undone at all costs.
We're now in a moment in which multiple varieties of bad actors are laying aside their differences, pooling their resources, coordinating their narratives, and focusing fire on one globally-scaled goal: denying the legitimacy of Western representative democracy to justify tearing it down.
The America I grew up in was never supposed to happen.
We were never supposed to be this free. It was an historical fluke, far beyond any of our lifetimes, a fluke in the greater arc of the history of the human race, fully against the wishes of the little men who see themselves as this world's rightful rulers. The freedom won in the Twentieth Century had never happened before, anywhere, and now, the world's worst people are now set upon ensuring that fire is trampled out and can never be lit again. If they get their way, we're going back to the divine right of kings and worshiping genocidal psychopaths as gods.
This is the year the fash make their move.
Stay Frosty, My Friends.
Last night I dreamed of a place, and I'm still thinking about it. It had the look and feel of a tropical resort paradise, but most of my time there seemed to take place at dusk, deep night, or early morning. I was meeting and listening to multiple wounded and fragmented souls telling their stories. Those I encountered were overwhelmingly men, and many of their stories were tied at least indirectly to one relatively recent armed conflict or another: the Iraq wars, the Vietnam war, likely even World War II. "That's what the Berliners told us," I overheard from one of them. Not all, nor even most were modern Americans; it was more like I simply *heard* English from them because that's what I would best understand. One, I believe, was Vietnamese; another was a full-blood Native American. At least one woman servicemember I know was also there. She kept close by a small group of souls she had close personal connections to. She and I didn't talk; not here.
The stories I overheard each dealt in some way with some form of trauma, though seldom from physical wounds or injuries. They were more to do with things like personal betrayal and abandonment, horror at the depths of all-too-human cruelty, the shattering of faith in old or simplistic beliefs that had simply proven false. But there was no sense of race-tribal resentment or bigotry from anyone here against anyone else. Everyone here was far beyond all that now, in spite of who they may have been before. I could tell that many here had once relied upon "dark/gallows" humor to cope with harsh realities in their former lives, but had come to see such things were of no use to them here. The emotional tone of the place was very somber despite the natural beauty all around. But this was from deep and sincere reverence, not anything resembling hopelessness. If anything, otherwise quiet individuals felt encouraged to share their stories, not because they felt themselves to be special or important, but because they knew such sharing would help others in their own recovery and reintegration processes.
Everyone seemed to be putting shattered pieces back together, or mending the edges of gaping holes or even missing limbs where some part of their old selves had been lost or removed. One of the activities here was playing friendly games with big playing cards. Most of mine bore images of old pictures, the kind you have conflicting or bittersweet feelings about. My deck tended to "lose" the games played here because it didn't have the kinds of cards needed to win. But that was OK; I understood myself to be a visitor here, while the recovering souls I'd met were there to work though different types of baggage to what I was carrying around, at least different enough to require different methods of healing and rebuilding.
The only hostile presences I encountered were illusions from my own past trying to badger and harass me with the kind of guilt-shame-obligation tropes that used to run my life. What do you think you're doing?? You need to do this & that because you are wrong and not OK: the same ol' same ol'. I just blew them off and continued to explore. They'd never had any real authority or power over me in the first place. But I already knew that.
In the midst of this turmoil, let’s observe a moment of silence for the unfortunate Tumblr employees tasked with cleaning up their leadership’s mess by reviewing all the random/harmless/still-pretty-weird content that was wrongfully flagged by that garbage-ass aglorithmotron.
You’re fucking ridiculous if you think tumblr’s porn/nudity ban actually has to do with child pornography. Literally every other site can effectively moderate this issue and tumblr has been actively closing in further on their anti-NSFW move. Many sex workers and NSFW artists were removed starting last month after the iOS app was removed from the App Store. Look at FOSTA/SESTA, look at the moves throughout the year to push sex workers and NSFW artists away, look at the way Patreon, Paypal, Craigslist, credit card companies, etc. have over-policed this issue and forced sex workers away. This is all so obvious.
Also, explicitly banning and calling out “female-presenting nipples” - note there’s an exception if it’s after giving birth or during breastfeeding because OBVIOUSLY the only way breasts and nipples are okay is when you’re fulfilling your goddamn job of being an incubator and not just posting nipples wilfully or for (gasp) money. Because obviously, when we’re talking about the banning of child pornopraphy we must target “female-presenting nipples” and let everyone know that those are the real problem. Nipples are only okay when they’re “male-presenting” and in the proximity of a newborn that is confirmed yours.
Like c’mon… FOSTA/SESTA has been presented under the guise of fighting human trafficking just like these moves are no different. If they wanted to go after these very real issues then they would and they definitely wouldn’t be (dangerously) conflating the issues. Also why can I still look up violent pro-Nazi, antisemitic imagery but not a goddamn nipple??
BTW read into how Apple has been forcefully pushing for this move & how easily they can go after other NSFW-content websites and force them to comply.
Sabotaging the viability of sustainable income for erotic artists and sex workers to own the patriarchy
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Christ and Santa Claus on a bicycle built for two...
From the moment Tumblr was bought out, this was inevitable.
This has been the plan for some time. All they needed was a pretext.
UGH
I kind of stick my nose up in the air when it comes to a lot of late-era TSR products. So much of the output felt like a flimsy cash grab, it was easy to get fatigued. Because of that fatigue, I missed Night Below (1995), one of the last solid gold TSR releases.
Night Below is a 14-level Underdark campaign in one box. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I hold Chaosium campaigns in high esteem – I reckon this is the closest TSR ever got to matching the depth and breadth of those adventures.
Written by Carl Sargent, the game starts with the PCs acting as couriers for a wizards and getting waylaid by bandits near a rural village. Investigating the town yields a number of small encounters and evidence of a dark and sinister plot unfolding underground. Once players venture into the Underdark, the focus of the game shifts not to hack and slash, but diplomacy as they try to find allies among the (mostly) sinister inhabitants and unearth the details of what is going on. The last part is a final confrontation that is, well, fricking crazy. And a bit gross. It’s a delight and I won’t spoil it.
Night Below’s charms are many. The design work is excellent (I even adore the logo font) and there are tons of handouts and art cards and overhead monster illustrations for use on a grid map. Interior illustrators – Arnie Swekel and the late Glen Angus – do a bang up job.
I think the real pleasure of Night Below is how free it is from the fetters of campaign settings. It’s a generic Underdark. There’s no R.A. Salavatore baggage to contend with. As such, it is actually my favorite portrayal of the Underdark – this one can be whatever you want it to be and it will damn sure surprise your players. If only TSR produced more boxes like this…
I’m finally back home from my travels and am resting up so I can get to work on the 2019 Calendar plus catch up on all the things for you all! Thanks for being so patient! Thank you to everyone who came to see me at @newyorkcomiccon over the weekend! You guys made it incredibly special!
Swipe up in stories for 2019 calendar info! #ivydoomkitty #model #cospositive #wcw #photography #b&w https://www.instagram.com/p/BoxWqCwBef2/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=7syqz6h69buz
Ultra-fave
if the horror movie doesn’t have synth in the soundtrack is it really sexy?
I think you mean scary?
i absolutely don’t
The stunning art of David Romero
(source)
I know they weren’t going to show blood in a game like this, but why does the purple ooze makes her creepier?
Maybe it’s season one mutagen? It’ll turn you into the last thing you touched, so Luigi would mutate into an angel of death.
Carmilla is a vampire, thought.