My most old-school internet opinion is bring back chunky scroll bars! I don't want some scroll bar so discreet I can't even find the fucking thing. I want a nice Windows 98-level of obviousness.
people in books and tv shows are always getting so upset they throw an untouched meal in the trash. that would never be me. i'd receive the worst news of my life and still be like Let me put this in the fridge.
sometimes i think about the progression of Tortall heroines' power levels and am super amused
Alanna: I have an incredibly powerful Gift of magic, a magic sword granted to me by the Old Ones, and the blessing of the Goddess herself
Daine: oh yeah? Well I have Wild Magic that allows me to sense and communicate with mortal and Immortal animals, heal them, and transform into any animal I choose. I am also a Demigod myself, the daughter of Weiryn, God of the Hunt, was once granted additional powers by the Graveyard Hag, and am under the protection of the Badger God.
Keladry: ...i have autism
You are a long forgotten god. A small girl leaves a piece of candy at your shrine, and you awaken. Now, you must do everything to protect your High Priestess, the girl, and her entire kindergarten class, your worshipers.
The stone was immovable, in the past. Indestructible. A spire of granite no mortal hand could even alter.
But mortal hands build clever tools, and these last few hundred years I have lived in dread that they will break this, my sacred stone, the last link that preserves me, a faint shadow of a forgotten god. While my sacred stone stands, I do not, quite, fade away.
I am in a park, now, clipped and tamed, my forests long gone. But they landscape around me and my stone, admiring its beauty, so I do not complain. While they take pleasure in the stone, I am safe.
There is a playground a few lengths away, and the laughter and happy shrieking rouse me a little from my sleep. I watched over children, once. It’s nice to hear them again.
But I don’t truly awaken until the Offering is made.
Little hands touch my stone, with curiosity and a sort of reverence that only the very young feel now. For a child young enough the world is still a mystery, and even an ancient granite stone provokes wonder. So I stir, when she touches the stone, becoming hazily aware.
And then, solemnly, the child places a tiny colourful object in the roughly shaped alcove in the stone’s side, the place where offerings were laid two thousand years ago and more, and I awaken. Many people have put things in that alcove, of course… to take pictures, usually, these days, or putting a lost object where it will be seen. Merely to place an object in the alcove isn’t enough. A true offering is given as a gift, with intent.
I’ve always personally headcanoned that if Mandalorians DID have certain stereotypical family/relationship roles it wouldn’t be anywhere close to gendered, like one person is the man and one person is the woman. It would be like, one person is the shield and one person is the sword. One is the guard and one is the hunter. The bigger and stronger of the two — traditionally, though obviously every marriage would be different and most wouldn’t conform exactly, especially with polyamory — might be the one to stay home and guard the kids and the clan. While the faster, more maneuverable and perhaps deadlier of the two went out and hunted, provided, initiated raids. A Mandalorian couple fighting together would be so dangerous for so many reasons but principally because if they’re both there it probably means you’re on their territory and both the guard and the hunter are after you, and now you’re seriously fucked.
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
Referring to the Jedi Order as Space Catholics demonstrates yet another profound misunderstanding of the Jedi Order.
I grew up in the Catholic church, and went to Catholic schools for 12 years. I've been spending the better part of 20+ years deconstructing all the bullshit the church filled my head with.
I fucking wish my experience had been anything like what growing up in the Jedi Order was like, but it wasn't. My experience with the Catholic church was deeply traumatizing.
Religious trauma doesn't come from the simple act of being taught religion. It comes from religion being used as a weapon of control. Too many people in this fandom think religion = evil and that is simply not the case. There are a lot of religions around the world who believe what they believe and don't try to force those beliefs on others. They aren't evil or wrong for existing. They certainly don't deserve to be punished for having faith in something.
The Catholic church is the largest and longest surviving denomination of Christianity, currently sitting at roughly 1.4 billion members. Do you know how they got so large? Through conquest. Through colonization and indoctrination. Through violence and forced assimilation.
The Jedi Order exists in a galaxy with a population significantly larger than the population of Earth and there are roughly 10,000 Jedi Knights in the entire galaxy. They're a religious minority (even by Earth standards in comparison to all Abrahamic religions), and they don't force their beliefs on others. They don't use intimidation, violence, or the threat of eternal suffering after death as a way to control the lives of those around them.
What the Jedi do teach is that we are all connected through the Force.
"The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together." - Obi-Wan Kenobi
The Jedi do not worship the Force, nor do they view it as something that exists outside of themselves. It is part of them and what allows them to so easily connect to others. They use their connection to the Force with care and compassion. They learn to master their emotions (they were actually really good at teaching emotional regulation), and the reason they were so good at not giving into their fear is because they were given the tools to not only identify what they were feeling, but able to seek counsel during their most troubled times and often faced their fears head on. Even as Jedi Masters, they understood they didn't know everything, and accepted that even their own padawans would teach them new things. The Jedi perspectives were wide open and it's why they were able to find friends in all the weirdest places. They didn't judge or look down on others (it's why Obi-Wan was able to form a sort of friendship with Hondo Ohnaka), they didn't feel threatened by other Force users who believed differently from them (Mace was actually able to repair the relationship between the Jedi and the Dagoyan Order, the Jedi were aware of the Nightsisters but they did nothing to interfere with their way of life, the Jedi archive was filled with information about nearly everything because the Jedi were mega-curious space nerds who loved to learn about a wide variety of perspectives). They didn't choose sides, which is what made them such good mediators (they were robbed of that choice during the Clone Wars because the Sith made negotiations impossible and literally murdered the Separatist senator who came closest to peace talks between them and the Republic senate).
The Catholic church taught me that an all-powerful elderly white male God with anger management problems was the true ruler of my life and that to love God is to fear him. To love God is to obey and to give up your identity for the one the church enforces on you (in my case I was "straight white female whose only purpose in life to marry a 'good' man and have as many babies as he wanted"). I wasn't given the tools to identify or understand why I was feeling the way I was feeling by the very church that was psychologically abusing me (I wonder why they wouldn't want to teach me how to identify abuse…). I just thought I was broken. Then again, the church also taught me that self-care and self-love were forms of pride, which is vanity, which is a sin. So I never learned how to take care of myself, but I got really good at putting everyone else's needs above my own at the expense of my own mental well-being. Being an undiagnosed autistic child with the kind of empathy that caused me physical pain made moving through that world absolute hell, and my coping method become dissociation. Any time I tried to name what I was feeling, I was told I was wrong for feeling that way (a woman feeling a negative emotion about her life is just her being crazy and not at all like she feels boxed in by the life the church is trying to confine her to). I was taught that all other religions are wrong and we are the only ones who have it right, which is something that didn't even make sense to my six-year-old brain because even then I wanted to ask my teacher how we knew we were right but everyone else was wrong, and the only reason I didn't was because I was already familiar with how they handled unwanted questions and it was usually met with public humiliation (again I was six-years-old). Fear is an excellent tool when being taught you should avoid your fears instead of facing them head on (they don't want you to realize you're stronger than they made you think you were or that there's no real reason to fear what they told you to fear) and that the only one who can save us is this far off man in the sky who determines whether or not we spend the rest of our lives in Heaven or Hell (and as a woman I was already born with Original Sin because Eve's sin was our burden to bear too and often used as a way to blame us for the bad things that happened to us).
You know who uses fear-based teaching and psychological torture? The Sith. The Sith, do in fact, come much closer to representing what the weaponization of religion looks like. The Sith think they should be allowed to dominate and control everyone, which is exactly what Darth Sidious does as Emperor. He taught those at the Imperial core that the Jedi were dangerous and that the people should fear them. He erased their culture, destroyed the Jedi Archive (that's like the Earth equivalent of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria), and literally tried to erase all memory of them from the minds of the people. He colonized, enslaved, indoctrinated, and eradicated anyone who stood in his way. "Loyalty is obedience" is Imperial rhetoric and Palpatine harshly punished anyone who refused to assimilate and submit to his "unlimited power". He had absolutely zero regard for everyone beneath him but demanded the utmost loyalty and respect from everyone regardless of how he treated them. He was allowed to use the Death Star to blow up an entire planet, and yet the rebels were the ones who were considered terrorists simply because they refused to be governed by a genocidal dictator. The Emperor doesn't hesitate to use deadly force, has no capacity for empathy or compassion, believes his demands are all that matter, and makes sure people are too scared to stand up to him. The Sith were not a large religious organization at all (literally there were two of them), but Palpatine gained enough political power to impose the ways of the Sith onto the galaxy.
This is not something the Jedi ever did.
Were the Jedi perfect? No. Did people still fall through the cracks? Yes, the Jedi were a very small religious order and lacked the numbers to protect every single planet in the galaxy. People didn't fall through the cracks because the Jedi saw them as disposable, they fell through because there were more planets than there were Jedi. We saw the Rebel Alliance dealing with the very same issue when Mon Mothma was trying to explain to Ezra that it was impossible to help everyone because everyone needed help. The Jedi (and the Rebel Alliance) helped as many people as they could though, and that's the whole point. It's not about being able to save everyone when saving everyone is physically impossible, but saving as many people as you can along the way is how you make a positive impact.
Too often, Christianity is taught in ways that frame pain and suffering as the path to salvation (and used as an excuse to inflict pain and suffering on others), and has aggressively started trying to teach everyone that empathy is a sin and that unconditional love is a weakness. Those interpretations often feel completely at odds with the compassion and empathy that Jesus actually taught because they have inverted everything he taught and twisted it into something much darker. What we often see Christianity turned into reflects the attitudes and the actions of the Sith, not the Jedi.
So no, the Jedi aren’t “Space Catholics.”
If anything, they stand in direct opposition to the kind of fear-based, control-driven systems that taught people to equate belief with obedience and compassion with weakness.
And the fact that so many people can’t see that difference says a lot more about how those systems operate than it does about the Jedi.
#THIS MOVIE DOES NOT GET ENOUGH CREDIT FOR THIS
#SOME OF IT IS FROM THE ORIGINAL SCRIPT
#WHICH SHOWS SO CLEARLY THAT ANAKIN’S JUST PARROTING PALPATINE HERE
#HE BELIEVES NONE OF THIS IN TRUTH
#IT’S JUST HIS DESPERATE GRASPING AT THE STRAWS PALPATINE HELD OUT TO HIM
#BECAUSE HE’S SO AFRAID TO LIVE WITHOUT PAMDE
#THAT HE WOULD LITERALLY DO ANYTHING
#AND HE KNOWS IT’S WRONG
#’WHAT HAVE I DONE!?’ HE MOANS IN PALPATINE’S OFFICE BECAUSE HE KNOWS
#HE CRIES ON MUSTAFAR BECAUSE HE KNOWS WHAT HE’S DONE
#BUT HE CAN’T FACE THE TRUTH OF WHAT HE WAS CAPABLE OF WITHOUT ANY REAL JUSTIFICATION
#HE LET PALPATINE TWIST HIS MIND
#NONE OF THIS IS ACTUALLY ANAKIN’S CORE BELIEFS
#EVEN GEORGE LUCAS IS LIKE ‘THIS IS JUST A RATIONALIZATION BECAUSE HE WANTED TO SAVE PADME’
#BUT ANAKIN DESPERATELY NEEDS SOMETHING TO YELL AT OBI-WAN
#SO PALPATINE’S ‘THE JEDI ARE EVIL’ IS THE ONLY THING THAT KEEPS HIS TINY LITTLE ROWBOAT FROM CAPSIZING IN THE OCEAN OF HIS OWN DAMNED CHOICES
#AND HE DOESN’T EVEN REALLY BELIEVE A WORD OF IT
#THANKS STAR WARS I’M CRYING AGAIN
I dusted off this nine months old draft because of the previous day’s post about how “if we were meant to think Anakin had a point about his betrayal of the Jedi, Star Wars wouldn’t have shown it through the lens of murdering children”, but I also wanted to further examine how the above (that Anakin doesn’t actually criticize the Jedi in his fall beyond echoing Palpatine’s words) is something I actually really love and I think informs Anakin’s choices in this movie so much. That we get used to how Star Wars is so blatantly obvious in some ways that we miss the ways it’s sometimes a purposeful paralleling that’s not immediately obvious, yet that is incredibly consistent:
That Anakin isn’t expressing genuine criticism of the Jedi, he’s literally just parroting Palpatine’s lines as a justification for his actions.
The thinnest veneer of Anakin’s protest, “It’s not the Jedi way!” is stripped away in Palpatine’s office (despite that it’s a blatant hypocrisy on Anakin’s part, given that he killed the actually unarmed Dooku, unlike Palpatine, who was both still physically powerful and in the very central seat of his political power) when the final moment comes.
“I need him!”, Anakin cries, because he needs him to save Padme’s life. This isn’t about the Jedi, this is about Anakin’s fear of loss.
Anakin’s immediate horror, “What have I done!?” he moans, showing that even in this moment he knows he’s made the wrong decision, that saving Palpatine was the wrong choice.
“Just help me save Padme’s life. I can’t live without her.” That’s what this is all about at the heart of it, that Anakin can’t stand the idea of losing her, so he’s willing to do anything Palpatine says, including becoming a Sith Lord, including marching on the Jedi Temple, including killing the family that took him in, including killing their children.
And his excuses reflect that–they’re nothing that Anakin expressed up to this point, not even his “I’ve been so frustrated with the Council” is given much merit in the movie, because Obi-Wan Kenobi, one of the most narratively reliable characters in this movie (and GL has defended Obi-Wan as telling an emotional truth in the OT, so he’s pretty reliable in ROTS, too) tells him to calm down and that he’s way ahead of things already.
Anakin, having just accepted a position granted to him not by the actual body he’s sitting on, but an outsider forcing their will on the Jedi (and Anakin is apparently fine with this act of nepotism and refuses to understand why this would affect the political situation between the Jedi and the Chancellor, if they just gave Palpatine everything he wanted within their already shrinking agency to govern themselves and why they would want to resist and it’s not just about Anakin), is complaining about this, but it’s not exactly well supported in the actual movie.
Same for his conversation with Yoda, that GL has indicated that this was very much a pro-Yoda moment, that his advice of learning to let go was Actually Really Good and it’s pretty much one of the core themes of Star Wars, that you’re supposed to let go if the person is going to go. Protect them while you can, love them while you can, but ultimately people die and you can’t stop death. Audiences often hate Yoda’s advice, but the movie itself did not. (This is all setting aside that Anakin gave Yoda basically nothing to work with in that scene, he doesn’t tell him any details and just wants a way to Stop Death.)
Anakin’s criticism of the Jedi is nowhere to be found in these important moments in the movie. You could make a case that maybe TCW added some context, but the movie itself makes it very, very clear that this is about his fear of losing Padme, that’s it, that’s what’s going on with him.
Further, it’s why George Lucas chose to show Anakin’s immolation scene, precisely because he betrayed his friends.
This is not the narrative arc of someone who had a point, but the narrative arc of someone who did an unjustifiable thing:
Anakin doesn’t actually believe the Jedi are evil, he has show more than once that he actually believes in the Jedi teachings, in moments like after the Brain Invaders, he helps Ahsoka with finding the line between caring about people and not getting Attached to them (clinging, grasping, so afraid to live without them that you’ll do terrible things, unable to let go when the time comes, that is Attachment as SW defines it). He teaches her the same thing on Onderon–purpose before feelings, he tells her. He teaches Rex the same thing on Skako Minor–you hope for the best, but you have to be prepared that Echo might be dead, that you can’t save him.
Anakin believes in Jedi teachings until they apply to him. And then he just absolutely loses the plot because his fears consume him and he can’t handle the idea that he might lose Padme, that he can’t stop death from happening, that he’s wanted this all the way since Attack of the Clones, to learn how to Literally Stop Death.
He doesn’t actually believe the Jedi were evil, not in the bottom of his heart–and this is why he ultimately returns to them, appears as a Force Ghost specifically in traditional Jedi robes–but he’s so desperate for an excuse to save Padme that he parrots back Palpatine’s lines as a desperate rationalization for what he’s doing.
There’s no actual criticism of the Jedi in these important moments, there’s nothing he throws at Obi-Wan that’s actually about the Jedi, just “I’m not afraid of the dark side! I see through your lies! The Jedi were plotting to take over! I’m going to create a new Empire! The Jedi are evil from my point of view!”
That’s 100% Palpatine right there. He twisted Anakin’s mind to make him the very thing Anakin swore to destroy. And Anakin ate it up because he couldn’t face his own fears.
Dipping toes back into SW fandom (been watching The Madalorian of course but mainly with Obi Wan ramping up he’s my favorite character) and I really appreciate this post. Too many people are too quick to criticize the wrong things about the Jedi. Lucas wasn’t saying they were perfect but at the end if the day they were by and large GOOD mostly unselfish people trying to serve the greater good and in no way shape or form did they deserve to get slaughtered and hunted.
Anakin personally slaughtered Jedi children, children who we were shown looking to him for help and guidance, they thought he was there to help them but he was there to kill them. In no way was Lucas saying “hey you know he had a point”.
An unenforceable ban (which this is, because it's not possible to 100% correctly identify every AI fic and only AI fics) is just license to do witch-hunts. Like autistic people and people writing in their second language and people with weirdly large vocabularies don't get enough 'you sound like a robot!' already.
AI fics, which I hate with every fibre of my being, should be allowed, because banning them just encourages them to hide. I want them allowed - as with every other kind of fic I hate - and I want them tagged so I can avoid them.
If you use Firefox, you can go to the about:config page, search for "media.mediasource.enabled" and double click on it to set it to false. After you restart Firefox, all youtube videos will load entirely even when paused! This also affects other streaming websites :)
go to About:config
find media.mediasource.enabled and toggle it to false
find media.cache_readahead_limit and change it to 9999
find media.cache_resume_threshold and change it to 9999
additionally if you'd prefer mp4 to webm
also in about:config, find:
media.encoder.webm.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.audio.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled
media.webm.enabled
and toggle them all to false
note!
this will limit video to 1080p
and use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/ to kill WebP
Fuck Google
So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).
Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.
So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.
You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.
And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.
It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.
I got a call from the vet regarding blood work, and it looks like Bea will need to go back next week to get some kidney tests done as well. ☹️ He said there are some elevated numbers that are a bit concerning. I'm not sure how much this will be, but I thought I'd throw the kofi link out again just in case.
http://ko-fi.com/rainbowbarnacle
Thank you so much, and also thank you to everybody who has donated or signal boosted so far--I am ENORMOUSLY grateful.