What's going on here?

[konfettiklown]

i love this picture she is so helpful and sweet thank you fluttershy

[literallyaflame]

my partner doesn’t use pet names nearly as much as i do, which is very funny because i will crack my gay little knuckles and say some shit like “good morning my sun and moon, my loveliest boy, my baby my sweetheart my darling dearest” and he will reply “hello adrian”

[isaiahomega]

[oliviawhen]

Job hunting in a hostile environment. ✨

[tench]

Sometimes I stop reading an old sci-fi book just to go check the author's personal life section on Wikipedia, for no particular reason

[celine-deyonce]

Cannot stop thinking about this moment

[canichangemyblogname]

At this point, if you use twink incorrectly, I’m blocking you.

[canichangemyblogname]

Except my best friend’s mother, who thought it meant TWo Incomes No Kids.

[canichangemyblogname]

Happy PRIDE to all you TWo Incomes No Kids out there.

[shitpeoplesayinwarcraft]

[phantomrose96]

Personally? I would never deny Hiromu Arakawa her right to a short bratty braided blond character in a kickass red coat

[phantomrose96]

Invent a look this iconic and I think you should get to use it in every series.

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[smadsel]

would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.

[smadsel]

that’s not the whole flag, now is it

[manuciruja]

hey staff what the fuck

[villainessbian]

hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose

[shrodingers-catgirl]

HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE

[charlesoberonn]

Aperture Science Announcement Voice: “Congratulations, Homosexual! Your existence has been deemed profitable in the following regions: North America, Western Europe, and Australia.”

“To celebrate the occasion we have temporarily recolored all Aperture Science appliances in these regions to your favorite flavor of gay.”

“For further pandering on a wider area please continue fighting for basic human dignities and Aperture Science will be right there to celebrate your victory with you. Afterwards.”

[charlesoberonn]

[charlesoberonn]

It’s that time of the year again.

[charlesoberonn]

It’s neither. I was trying to capture the speech patterns of this guy:

[charlesoberonn]

This post feels more depressing than funny this year.

[moociao-after-dark]

Rest in peace, John Blanche

The father of Warhammer 40k art direction and the man that has inspired me as an artist, down to inspiring my current artstyle (and I am sure will continue to inspire me, even in death). 40k just wouldn't be 40k had it not been for the foundation of grimdark sci-fi that he laid.

Farewell, you absolute legend.

[targetedknowledge]

[alex-and-nova420]

made this into a gif bc i liked it so much. shark Denied

[riverofmolecules]

true allyship

[pangur-and-grim]

[allthingslinguistic]

The International Phonetic Alphabet consonants found in English, with keywords and relevant parts of the mouth highlighted and colour-coded. (Source.) 

[pervocracy]

Pronouncing each of these in sequence is a very strange and amusing physical sensation, and I highly recommend it.

[elodieunderglass]

haha look it’s where those noises live in your dang FACE, TRY IT

[elamarth-calmagol]

Very helpful actually

[todaysbird]

Today's bird is this White Faced Heron

[probablyasocialecologist]

Welcome to Warhammer 40K’s anti-fascist future

Games Workshop has turned a corner after years of silence allowed hate to fester in its community

Despite its recent association with the right, Games Workshop’s games from the 1980s adopt a broadly anti-authoritarian if not leftist stance. Zhu, who has written extensively about the politics of games set in the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy universes, notes that the company frequently poked fun at the right.

An early Games Workshop scenario invites players to side with dwarven characters patterned on the workers in the 1984-1985 U.K. miners’ strike, a labor action that was crushed by conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s government. One orc figurine appearing in White Dwarf #81 (Sept. 1986) even hoists a banner with Thatcher’s face on it.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader takes on a similar political bent. The Imperium of Mankind often borrows from 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd comics, a British science fiction satire that mocked Dirty Harry-style tough cops celebrated in much of American popular culture for their excessive vigilante justice.

As Zhu says, the early Space Marines were painted as petty tyrants rather than superheroes: “A lot of the artwork emphasizes their dehumanized nature. They’re presented as kind of monstrous, horrible. […] More often than not, they are depicted getting shot by space goblins, or carrying out trivial duties like arresting graffiti writers, or doing obviously bad things like taking slaves.”

Zhu finds other radical political elements in early Warhammer 40,000. For example, the alien Genestealer cultists in the 1980s appeared as limousine-driving industrialists who exploited rural planets in what seemed like a warning about the dangers of capitalist and colonial oppression.

Games Workshop has downplayed these more satirical elements in later decades. Some of this tonal shift was due to personnel changeover, Williams argues, but much of it was driven by the company’s growth. As Games Workshop expanded into overseas markets such as the U.S. in the 1990s, it dropped its working-class critique of British politics along with characters with names like “Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau” in favor of a more corporate style that would translate better for young American gamers.

As the most popular faction in the game, the Space Marines and their allies in the Imperium began to get the good-guy treatment in marketing. Warhammer 40,000 fiction in the Black Library series has been better about emphasizing the morally problematic nature of the Imperium, but advertisements and fluff as well as tie-ins such as video games undermine this by asking players to pledge loyalty to the game’s totalitarian empire.

Williams sees Games Workshop’s Primaris redesign of the Space Marines as reflecting a broader context of creeping authoritarianism. While the old Space Marine lines looked like “bulky space knights,” he says, the new models wear armor influenced by the “tacticool” aesthetic favored by SWAT teams and right-wing paramilitaries.

Games Workshop did not invent the glorification of violence, Williams argues, but it has been shaped by a global culture that glamorizes deadly shows of force.

[theoutcastrogue]

The Imperium of Mankind often borrows from 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd comics, a British science fiction satire that mocked Dirty Harry-style tough cops celebrated in much of American popular culture for their excessive vigilante justice.

I know nothing at all about Warhammer so no opinion there, but I once asked a congregation of comic nerds (so, a forum) what’s the deal with Judge Dredd. I knew the concept (a cop / judge / jury / executioner dripping with machismo in a fucked up future), but what’s the angle? Is it played straight? Is it satire? Is Dredd the hero of the story, the anti-hero, the villain? Is it a device to say something else entirely? And pretty much everyone replied “YES”. It’s all of these things, occasionally at the same time.

So I tried it, I read a few volumes before I lost interest (it’s not bad there’s just a lot of it), and I came to the same conclusion. Depending on the story, Dredd can mean “fuck Dirty Harry” or “fuck yeah Dirty Harry!”, and sometimes it’s straightforward and other times it’s very complicated.

But here’s the thing. When an author with clear anti-authoritarian intent uses an authoritarian POV and narrative framework in order to ridicule it, and goes at it for too damn long, the framework takes over. The POV wins. The medium is the message.

I firmly believe that Verhoefen’s Starship Troopers would be the best satire ever made (that’s a big award, I mean it 100%) if it was a short film. It started very strong, and it was hilarious throughout, but there was one problem: it went on for too long, and by the end you were kinda glad that the drill sergeant made it out of the giant slug alive, because that’s just how film works.

hooray!

It isn’t an intellectual failure, it’s only a natural emotional response. You just gotta refrain from rationalising it (“actually the drill sergeant was a good egg!”). Of course this doesn’t negate the satire, but I think it does weaken it.

Think of nature documentaries. If the camera follows the wolf, you root for the wolf. If it follows the caribou, you root for the caribou. And if it’s complicated, it follows both the young frail caribou that got left behind and is getting eaten AND the wolf cub that starves to death because daddy didn’t find any caribous and didn’t bring home any food.

Now, if the camera follows a ridiculously exaggerated caricature of a wolf, you are at first conscious it’s a caricature. But keep that up for an hour and the gimmick fades to the background, the caricature becomes just a wolf, and you root for the wolf.

No idea if this applies to Warhammer (again, I know nothing about it, no opinion there), I’m just noting it as a general phenomenon.