Snape, Cats & Kylo Ren

I ship what I want. I'm grown. Beta reader for @paracosim author of That Awful Boy on AO3

[mommahoney]

Lying Liars

YES!

[gaeliclass]

Law to make it illegal to lie in elections passed in Senedd

Welsh parliament agrees law to outlaw lying in future Senedd election campaigns.

[katiedingo]

I had to check this wasn’t The Onion

[depsidase]

[inthemoodforblastt]

"Lily was the Hermione of her time."

Bitch, Hermione would've never stood by while Draco Malfoy hoisted Harry into the air and stripped him in front of the entire school. She would've broken the noses of anyone bullying her friend in about four different places long before it ever got that far.

But y'all aren't ready for that conversation.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

today I found out my mother doesn’t know what dandelions are and now I’m wondering what other strange secrets she’s been quietly harboring

[krystal-prisms]

Where do you live that you don’t have dandelions?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

we have dandelions EVERYWHERE, they are basically our State Weed, it is absolutely impossible that my mom has never interacted with a dandelion before, this requires further investigation

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

So after extensive interrogation I have an update:

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

she answered, with complete confidence: Daffodils.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

gosh I enjoy this website

[authoratmidnight]

For comparison, this is a daffodil

[quietlygrousing]

See, folks in the southern US will tell you up and down those are buttercups, actually.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i don’t think so? i’m southern and buttercups are what we call these things (much tinier)

[maejacrezz007]

Wait I thought those bigger cup ones were Easter Lillies???

[fractiousrvt]

This is an Easter Lily. It is an actual lily and therefore deadly to cats.

[blood-trip-god2]

They’re marigolds and I know a bitch when I see one!

[delphinidin4]

This is a marigold:

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

….we need to start taking the phrase “go touch grass” more literally. go outside and examine a flower i beg u

[lorienlady]

In the UK these are also Marigolds, but I don’t think anyone is going to confuse them for any of the flowers in the above thread

[victusinveritas]

There's worse to come, folks. Strap in and stay strapped.

[thevonntrapp]

Fascists get months and these guys get decades....just incredible how far the USA has fallen.

[victusinveritas]

From PM Press on Instagram:

[1968bullittmustang]

Prairieland ICE protesters sentenced to decades in prison

Activists who didn't plan the protest and left when asked still received 50-year terms.

The Road to Prairieland

The crackdown on anti-ICE activists in Texas reflects a pattern of intensifying repression all around the country.

[victusinveritas]

[vaspider]

Just so we're connecting our dots together, Reed O'Connor is "that Rhode Island hospital should give me all its trans kids records and I pinky swear I won't just give them to the DOJ and I am commanding all the other judges that they don't have jurisdiction, only I do, despite the fact that none of what's happening is actually in my district," among a million other shitty things.

He is a horrible fucking human being and a terrible fucking judge.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

when fictional creatures are characterized as having superhuman agility (e.g. some versions of vampires) i think they should also canonically have flabby skin. "this species has catlike predator traits" ok now give it catlike baggy skin for flexibility. make its tummy jiggle like a slinky

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

this website feels like home

[vadergf]

I feel like someone is standing next to me talking about how I'm dead

[rudolphsboyfriend]

The chemical they put on ants and all the other ants think they're dead that's what happened to tumblr except the chemical is unmarketability

[bisexualalexmercer]

tumblr may have censored porn but check this out

i hope Elon musk KILLS himself and DIES a thousand DEATHS. and i hope every other billionaire a very merry DIE DIE DEATH KILL MURDER DEATH KILL

[the-trash-eating-llama]

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Sometimes I think about the fact that Rocky was out there alone for 46 years and then Grace shows up and just… fuckin solves the problem that's been plaguing two entire species in, what? A matter of weeks??

And like yeah, obviously there's more to it than that. They're a team, a Grace alone would have probably died trying to get the samples from Adrian. Or, tbh, might have never got out of his original Mental Breakdown phase and just gone fully crazy.

But from Rocky's perspective, this has to feel insane. Like we talk a lot about Grace feeling inferior to Rocky, but there's no way that Rocky wouldn't have a similar (or worse) complex about Grace.

And this isn't getting into the fact that (from Rocky's perspective) the moment he leaves Grace, everything goes to hell again. Goes to hell again because, as he later finds out, Grace bred the taumoeba in xenonite breeder tanks that Rocky designed.

Do we think he wondered, on the way back to Erid, whether things would have been fixed 46 years ago if it had been one of the Blip-A scientists who survived, and he'd just succumbed to the radiation?

Do we think Grace had to reassure him, over and over, that it was if anything Grace's fault for not foreseeing that the taumoeba would adapt to the xenonite, and that there was no way that Rocky could have designed the tanks better?

Do we think he felt like an imposter when they got back to Erid and were both hailed as saviours, because it was Grace who had done the science, Grace who had made the sacrifices, while all Rocky did was wait for him to get there?

[manyblinkinglights]

#that is like loadbearing book rocky characterization. he doesn't wonder. he KNOWS anyone else from the crew surviving would've been better#he says so outright. the moment grace's life is in peril he essentially kills himself to give him the barest chance at survival#he's wished he could do it for his crew since the first of erid's best dropped dead without a cause#guy who doesn't want to die but wishes he was dead in someone else's place

[cipheramnesia]

Lakes and graveyards are very similar in that if you detonate a large explosion inside either one a lot of dead bodies come to the surface.

[geekandmisandry]

Hi, um. How is being the necromancer's apprentice going for you OP?

[cipheramnesia]

You want I should raise dead, I raise dead, no problem. You want banish dead, no problem, have plenty more nitro. I do this, ten minutes.

[dee-the-red-witch]

CHUNKY STEW IS NOT BANISHMENT.

[cipheramnesia]

Chunky stew, very bad necromancer. We banish, no problem, no chunks. I give you number of cousin Yvgeny. Will power wash house, very good prices. No other necromancer does this for you.

[geekandmisandry]

Is....is...is Yvgeny....alive?

[cipheramnesia]

Eh. Is alive enough.

[unsolicited-opinions]

“you’re not immune to propaganda” applies to you too

Yes, it absolutely does!

Propaganda is baked into our daily reality so seamlessly and thoroughly that it mostly feels like common sense.

It's why we defend brands like they're old friends.

It's why we discuss celebrities we've never met and who don't know we exist as if we know their hearts, defending or condemning them based on how talented their publicists are.

It's why we confuse relatability for trustworthiness

It's why we mistake emotional resonance for moral principles.

It's why we think our opinions are purely self-generated despite being nudged by countless carefully curated narratives which have more (and more subtle) ways of reaching us than at any time in human history.

It's why we treat people's lives, public policy, and geopolitical matters like team sports.

It's why we need to constantly interrogate our own assumptions, habitually subjecting them to fact checking, methodical scrutiny, and cynicism.

It's why we need media literacy and media ecology to be taught to kids of all ages.

It's why everyone should read Orwell, Huxley, Neil Postman, and Marshal McLuhan.

It's why we should all study logic, rhetoric, and ethics - so we can understand and apply moral reasoning based on principles.

The point isn't whether or not we're affected by propaganda, because we all are.

The point is whether or not we know we're affected...which ironically is the exact blind spot that makes people think they're immune.

The moment you assume you're above that influence? That's when it's working best.

That's why, Anon, the post you're responding to didn't say "you are not immune to propoganda."

It said:

If you think you're immune to propaganda, that means the propaganda is working.

Hope that helps!

[unsolicited-opinions]

About an hour after posting, I got another Ask which I think is from the same Anon:

That was what...500 words? So Anon's problem is aliteracy.

That's ironic because aliteracy makes one much more vulnerable to propaganda.

[daughterofstories]

"You're not immune to propaganda"

"You're right! No one is! That's why we all have to put constant effort into identifying and resisting harmful propaganda!"

"OMG, I didn't, like, mean it. I just thought it was a quippy way to call you stupid."

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[fullmetalwindbreaker]

[lakevida]

[thequeeninyellowlace]

[antebellum13]

I wanted to share my journey with you all. By now you've seen a couple of pieces I've done recently.

As a kid and through college I was always the "talented" one to my art teachers. But I stopped drawing after early college and moved into building digital scenes instead. Editing what was already there. Photo manipulation, sort of, though more involved than that, since I'd take many images and combine them into one believable scene or portrait, like the Dragon Age Inquisition piece below.

So I hadn't drawn from scratch in well over a decade. When I picked up a mechanical pencil one night at work early last year, that was the start of all this. The drawing was admittedly not my best work. But I decided to put my nose to the grindstone. I wasn't new to digital art, but I was new to making everything from scratch, and new to Procreate, which was a steep climb on its own.

The first real piece I attempted was young Snape as a Death Eater. It took me two weeks, more hours than I can count, and dozens of YouTube videos, TikToks, and Insta reels just to learn a medium I'd never touched. The result was something I both loved and hated for what it cost me. Was art supposed to be this hard? It never had been with physical mediums. So why now? I got discouraged and didn't open Procreate again for a while, falling back on my composite renders instead.

Then I found SamDoesArt on Patreon and decided to start from the bottom and actually build up. I took a couple of online courses on foundations, on Procreate itself, on applying what I already knew in a new way. And you know what? It clicked. One day I didn't need a tutorial open. I didn't need to trace over a reference (to be clear, I absolutely still use references, I've just gotten much better at drawing what I see instead of tracing directly on top of it).

Now that it's clicked, I wanted to go back to that first sketch, after 15 years of not touching any physical medium at all, and see what I could do with it. The result is what you see at the top of this post.

For reference, here's the before:

Safe to say I've come a long way. Thank you to everyone who has reblogged and liked my work along the way. ♥️

[inthemoodforblastt]

I find it so weird how people don't understand that Snape's story is what happens when the "good adults" don't protect you, so you seek protection from "bad adults". They need to say he was always racist and prejudiced. Look, I'm gonna be direct: for a vulnerable child it doesn't matter if the adults are evil. What matters is who keeps them safe. And that's a human reaction: you stay close to people who don't hurt you.

It's like this quote I once heard: if society turns its back on kids, crime will open its arms.

There’s a proverb I really like, and it feels very true: “It takes a village to raise a child, but the child who is not embraced by their tribe, when they grow up, will burn the village to feel its warmth.”

And that applies to this case, and more broadly to cases of vulnerable children who only experience rejection, abandonment, and violence during their developmental years. Raising a child is a political and collective act: from the basic resources they can access to the authority figures around them and how those figures relate to them.

When you see a kid who ends up going down questionable paths, instead of individualising the problem and focusing solely on the subject, you have to ask: where did the collective system fail? Because only in that way can you actually implement safeguards and protocols to prevent it from happening again.

The issue with the system we live in is that it tends toward individualism and rejects or even criminalises collectivism, even though it’s been repeatedly shown that only through collective structures can healthier societies be built.

But try saying that in a fandom that’s 80% people from the US and you’ll see how far that gets you, mate.

[inthemoodforblastt]

Hot take, I don’t like snily reconciliation (at least in canonverse)

Most of AUs and HCs are just Severus has to ‘buried his past grudges’ to be civil with his abusers and Lily just being the ‘sweet, morally righteous angel’ she is, completely disregard his traumas

I’m not into the Snily reconciliation thing because honestly, I believe that in life you need people who are willing to throw hands for you and commit crimes for you if they’re your friends. Like, one night some guy spat in one of my friend’s faces and I literally launched myself at him like a rabid rat and two of my friends had to pull me off him because it was instantaneous. He spat in her face and I went at him like a feral dog or cat with claws out. That’s the kind of friends you need in life, you know? Not some girl who hears you call her the equivalent of a slut once and then never speaks to you again. Girl, okay then, leave. People like that are better out of your life anyway.

I mean, yes, obviously Severus should’ve apologized for calling her that. Of course. If you screw up with a friend, you apologize. You don’t just refuse to say sorry. But then what’s the point afterward? Your friend ends up getting together with your fucking abuser. In real life you need friends who would skin your abusers alive, not friends who fuck them and have children with them. So I’m really not in favor of them reconciling at any point, because why would you want to reconcile with someone who sleeps with your abuser? I genuinely don’t get it. What’s the point?

[evyshnya]

Snivellus

just a simple portrait to practice rendering and to take a break

[gilderoy-lockhart-n1fan]

I can't, i just can't, I'm gonna write a fic where Severus gets to be happy and every person that hurt him gets blown up.