A Dyson Sphere in every home

Those who will not follow are doomed to lead

[maklodes]

Guy who is anti-communist, but also thinks Real Communism Has Never Been Tried. He thinks that true, principled adherence to the tenets of Marx and Engels (or any other version of True Communism that was unconstrained by compromises, corruption, and wrangling of power politics) would have created a dystopia far more horrifying than the mundanely grimy, repressive authoritarianism of, like, 1970s Poland, and most of the ways in which Actually Existing Socialist states fell short of their ideals mitigated their awfulness.

(Maybe he also shares the anti-revisionist conception of people like Mao and Stalin as being the real world leaders truest to communism -- although even in their case, they fell short of being truly communist, and a truly communist system would have been worse than Mao or Stalin.)

[that-foreign-guy]

Pressure “the untold true story of dday”

The usa is going back to básica in the govt propaganda.

Remember kids, this movie is GOVERNMENT STATE PROPAGANDA. the usa came in LAST in the war, and dday was an essential part of OPERATION PAPERCLIP!!!!!

Op paperclip, if you don’t know, is when the usa joined the war in order to RESCUE THE NAZIS FROM THE SOVIETS!!

The very concept of “world war” is white supremacy and does not take in account the perspective of non whites.

[isaacsapphire]

Interesting perspective. Really weird how the US sent all that equipment to the USSR given your position.

[barryogg]

This has single digit notes. Where do you find these people!?

[barryogg]

wtf i love Universes Beyond now

Designers are having a field day with the goofiest Marvel characters, all the while people with hammers and sickles in their twatter handles are going "Uhmmm yikes!? Orientalism much?"

[silverbridge-harbor]

A juvenile bug isn't called a larva until it reaches the surface. While it's still underground it's called a margma

[garmbreak1]

Y'all heard about women?

[shieldfoss]

Go on?

[barryogg]

I saw a woman once

[pixelskylines]

Sonic Advance 3 (Game Boy Advance) (2004)

[barryogg]

[internet-sentences]

[barryogg]

if she wasn't so autistic

Throwing stones in glass houses, aren't we?

[animate-mush]

I decided to try making Dove Knots for the first time this year. Online recipes mentioned that they keep their shape better if they don't rise too much so I used the same dough as my ever fraught egg bread, but a half recipe

Birb

Getting the hang of it

Ended up with eight of various qualities. If I'd been thinking about it I would have gone for seven to represent the seven Gifts of the Spirit, but Oh Well

I used big ol black sprinkles for eyes, but I am afraid it's giving more Worm on a String than God as a Dove

Into the oven wit ye!

[animate-mush]

Okay so uh. Don't bake sprinkles!

Motherrrr whyyyyyyyyyy

Welp. Now I know. This year's Holy Spirit brought to you by KISS.

Birds go in tree

[barryogg]

Glory to Phyrexia! Glory to the Father of Machines!

[squishysphealgirl]

One of the most frightening things I've ever heard is when somebody pointed out that the existence of flinching away when you touch something hot implies that at some point there was an evolutionary reason to be afraid of scary fire monsters that attacked people 😨

[barryogg]

The way some loud online trads feel about porn, I feel about D&D youtubers.

[helenvaughans]

[helenvaughans]

the thing is that for all its supposed faults, i would take this brand of 90s utopian globalism over whatever the fuck we’ve been doing for the last 10 years in a heartbeat

[barryogg]

These days a kid in a first world country can get knowledge of one or more vastly different cultures just by attending school, or going around the block. This has resulted in greater appreciation of those cultures, surely.

Hold on, I am being handed a note.

[alan713ch]

"The mexica didn't sacrifice people that was a lie the Spanish invented"

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I HATE THE DECOLONIZER MOVEMENT SO MUCH

[alan713ch]

WE FUCKING KNOW IT HAPPENED! WE CAN SEE IT IN THE GLYPHS IN THE RUINS AND IN THE SURVIVING CODEX AND EVEN IN THE STORIES TOLD ACROSS MULTIPLE TRIBES!!!

The historical argument whether it was a sacrifice or an offering - whether they killed captive people or people offered themselves for the sacrifice is an ongoing debate, but for crying out loud, WE KNOW IT IS TRUE

Fucking decolonizer movement. Fucking idiots.

[alan713ch]

GAH I'm still angry

This is why I have never liked the decolonizer movement, at least not how it's been presented in Mexico - it tries to blackwash the Spaniards more than they already were.

Mexico sits in a weird spot in the Spanish Invasion narrative becaue Hernan Cortes saw what Columbus did and said "ew, no?" and mostly succeeded at not wanting to kill people! Also, like, literally EVERYBODY HATED THE MEXICA because they were FUCKING HORRIBLE PEOPLE! It is known that Cortes would've failed had it not been for Malintzin successfully negotiating an alliance with the Tlaxcalteca. But we also know that had Cortes failed, then it would've been fucking Pedro de Alvarado and now that bastard was probably even more cruel than Columbus ever were.

And yes, there were different attitudes from the Spaniards based on who had the crown - particularly with the Bourbons there was a stronger introduction of the caste system, while before it was less strong as there was a lot of early mestizaje. And it's not like I am trying to absolve the Spaniards - indigenous people are still feeling the effects of the Conquest.

But not to bring someone down, you need to elevate someone else. People are complex, and nobody's a saint, for fuck's sake.

[thestuckylibrary]

#when we say “you don’t become an empire by being nice that applies to the aztec empire too#two things can be true: Aztecs committed human sacrifice and that’s bad#and that didn’t justify what the Spanish did to them#and the Europeans did exaggerate human sacrifice and misapply it to tribes who didn’t participate in it

[hazzardevil]

Nobody ever seems to remember that the Aztecs ruled over a variety of ethnic groups that we know sadly little about today because of their colonialism.

They won a total cultural victory by getting the descendants of their subjects to identify with the empire after it ended and whitewash its behaviour.

[shieldfoss]

I think you'll find that only capitalists can have empires actually. Other systems are just sparkling Negusa Nagast.

[barryogg]

There's an old satirical story by Sapkowski, In a Bomb Crater, in which Poland is at an irregular war with Lithuania. A subplot involves the protagonist's friend with a last name Indyk (Turkey), whose family tries to naturalize as Lithuanian citizens.

The problem: their last name would be translated to Kalakutas. The friend's father tries to sidestep this somehow, but is rebuked by the immigration office, who point out that "kutas" is only a slur in Polish (being one of the many words for dick), and if he truly considered himself Lithuanian, he would have no problem with it.

I think of this every time some pagan or decolonizer tries to 'splain away human sacrifice, be it by Vikings, Aztecs, whatever. I'm sorry, I thought you wanted to repudiate the white, western, Christian morality? Why would you have a problem with human sacrifice then? The peoples you advocate for didn't consider every human life to be dignified and worth preserving.

And they continue to do so, even today.

[clonerightsagenda]

Literary criticism terms I use on this blog despite making them up myself, much to the chagrin of anyone who does not have my back catalog memorized:

are we the baddies: SFF subgenre focused on agents of an imperial power realizing that and grappling with what to do next, in contrast to stories focusing on the scrappy rebels resisting said imperial power

I could fix him (the empire): SFF subgenre where the colonized subject being nice and/or sexy enough Ends Colonialism, frequently tied to the John President of Racism problem

librarian bait: books centered on the transformative life-changing power of books and libraries, cousin to books focused on the transformative life-changing power of storytelling and narrative in general

college brochure fiction: stories where the protagonist has an artfully arranged group of diverse friends who are as flat as paper and whose cultural backgrounds never come up meaningfully

the Dave Strider: character the fandom fixates on to the detriment of everything else, until the weight of that attention warps fanon and sometimes even canon around them. almost always male. it's happening to Gurathin from Murderbot right now

[clonerightsagenda]

#OP tell us more about the John President of Racism problem!

It hails from an immortal tumblr post by penultimate-step, except not immortal apparently because I get 'not found' when I try to go back to the original. So here's the text:

It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.

[barryogg]

[nonexistent-triangle]

asexual cuck who shows up to you fucking their wife with a big foam finger that says SEX and a eastern european football fan style flag scarf with the ace flag on it

[barryogg]

Wait, you don't have team scarves in the West?

[symdog]

"no you can't control the computer because uh that would be user unfriendly" <- shit they expect us to believe

[barryogg]

Oh yeah she's almost half a year old now, I just couldn't find the right way to break the news to you people.

[argumate]

who is going to be the first to bring the tricorner hat back into fashion, make it the next fedora

[barryogg]

The results are in, and the anticipated trendsetter is: