Game of Thrones Daily
Origami Around
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Acquired Stardust
trying on a metaphor
Today's Document
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Product Placement
Kiana Khansmith
art blog(derogatory)
Discoholic 🪩
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Andulka
Janaina Medeiros
cherry valley forever
Three Goblin Art
taylor price
Peter Solarz
Cosimo Galluzzi
roma★
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@hadanelith
What do you mean that’s not what happens?
didn’t John Constantine do this
The one time I saw him pull this off in the comics (the 90s I think? iirc it was a lung cancer storyline), it was less a cleric/warlock situation than it was John being a triple warlock, where each of the Dukes of Hell had a claim to his soul, and so his dying was going to cause a civil war, so he convinced them to let him to keep living instead, sans cancer.
Getting real tired of these shitty leftists and their bullshit.
Do they think AOC can somehow pass Medicare for All on her own?
She is one of 400+ reps and has very little legislative power because it’s only her second goddamn term.
Right now she is fundraising and doing grassroots organizing to find progressive candidates and then helping them get elected. She and Bernie have raised more money toward that goal than just about anyone else. Getting more progressives in congress is the only way we are going to get progressive policies to become law.
It’s slow. And the slowness is frustrating. And that sucks.
But minimizing her trauma and alienating the person fighting the hardest for the thing you want isn’t going to help things go any faster.
Jesus H Christ.
I worry we are never going to make progress if these jerks keep trying to be divisive. For me, being a progressive is all about compassion and empathy. I sometimes wonder if maybe these folks don’t actually understand the ideals they claim to support.
This is going mildly viral on tik tok so I figure I’d repost it here. (Follow me on ig for show announcements and please book me to perform at your schools!)
OH MY GOD ITS TEENY TINY LITTLE LEGS AND WINGS
vetinari is the funniest gay person in literature like half the "evil" shit he does is just for fun to keep up the tyrant persona but i think he just snapped this time
Learn The Words
I swear I saw a tumblr post on here that said ‘horses have over 4,000 bones’ and i don’t know where it came from because its totally wrong, they have 205, but what kind of fucked up horse has this person seen out there because I’m absolutely terrified of it
extremely thankful this creature exists slightly to the left of our known reality
it sounds like a bowl of cereal when it walks
just because it has 4000 bones doesn’t mean they all must belong to it. you see where I’m going?
OH NO…
BONE THEIF!!!
this post is incredible! I’m in a tremendous amount of pain right now
Aw, did you get your bones stolen by the bone horse?
so the religion practiced in The Lion King isn’t really developed but seems to be based on the structure and stability of the food web
are there religious extremists? is Simba heretical for eating below his normal trophic level?
I assume there is a spiritual aspect as to why the herbivores recognize and respect an apex predator as liege; they understand nutrient cycling and the benefits of biodiversity. The prey animals just fuck off and leave when Scar takes over, so I would guess that there are mutually beneficial religio-social contracts the lions and herbivores usually observe which were violated by overkill…
So. When Simba comes back, having adopted an insectivorous diet out of necessity, is it like… is it weird? Is it seen as a religious transgression? Is there societal unrest over the implications of the king trespassing in on the niche of other animals?
Is Simba Akhenaten ?
No, I don’t think think so. He’s not really an apostate on purpose, and ultimately he returns in order to reinstate the social order as it was under his father. Scar could probably be considered a heretic but it doesn’t seem as though he was attempting to replace the existing state religion with a new one. Scar was more of a Nero than an Elagabalus.
to my knowledge it isnt uncommon for religions with dietary restrictions to allow breaking those in times of necessity
True—but by the time he returns from exile, Simba has spent most of his life eating bugs. Readapting to being an apex predator would probably be difficult; would he even have the gut flora to digest red meat, or would he have to build it back up over time?
Then again, would the spiritual system of the pride lands make concessions for engaging in taboos for personal necessity? If it’s based on acceptance of the circle of life and one’s niche or role in the food web, it seems possible to me that a strict religious interpretation might actually discourage individuals from adopting behaviors to ensure their own survival if it threatens the stability of the ecosystem. I can even imagine particularly devout individuals self-sacrificing in times of hardship for the purpose of returning their nutrients into the community. An antelope fasting to death in order to allow over-grazed vegetation to regrow, a lion choosing to starve itself rather than prey upon the first offspring of a herd of giraffes after a large die-off…
Of course, Simba is a keystone species and even if individualism were transgressive in this hypothetical culture, perhaps he is given extra leeway by virtue of being a lion, royalty, and a liberator from the larger transgressions of Scar’s heretical tyranny…
It could get. Real weird, is what I’m saying.
I mean if we’re gonna bring gut flora into the analysis then we also have to acknowledge that obligate-carnivorous megafauna can’t survive on an insectivore diet, so the whole thing kinda falls apart with that, but at the same time this also makes me wonder how atheism works in this universe if the basic concepts of ecology are a religion.
#how would facing god and walking backwards into hell work if your religion is just the carbon+nitrogen cycle#I mean I guess the boring nihilistic answer is ‘there is no greater purpose to the balance of nature it just happens with or without us’#but I’m curious what the animal equivalent of an edgelord ‘religion is gay lol’ atheist is here#…is that just the hyenas???
What complicates things for me is that ghosts exist and can interact with the living. Simba has a vision of his father, which could be interpreted simply as a manifestation of his internal sense of duty, except that Rafiki totally saw it too and is implied to hang out with Ghost Mufasa on a regular basis. So there is an element of souls being independent of the circle of life and retaining individual identity after death, as well as connections with non-relatives. Possibly ancestor worship? Simba’s reaction to seeing Ghost Mufasa was one of surprise and disbelief, so maybe spirit-interaction is an esoteric aspect of the more mainstream form of the religion.
I’m speculating wildly here (that’s the point), but I would hazard a guess that the “greater purpose” of such a religion might be less about achieving an end goal of being accepted into heaven, creating paradise, reaching nirvana, or ascending from the cycle, and more about just… ensuring the continuation of a particular status quo. Perhaps the “afterlife”, such as it is, is tied to the physical world and the survival of one’s own descendants–and so the spirit world could be imperiled by ecological changes within the living world. Religion, then, might provide social cohesion for a biodiverse interspecies community that is intelligent enough for war-making but theologically invested in maintaining a particular balance.
It seems that the pride rock religion is nontheistic. If there is no defined deity or deities, then “atheism” as we understand it in contrast with something like Christianity wouldn’t necessarily be applicable. The closest equivalent probably would be Scar’s rejection of the established values and laws and the violation of interspecies contracts. Why were the hyenas discontented in the first place, I wonder? Maybe they were expected–temporarily or permanently–to refrain from hunting and behave only as scavengers, and objected to being forced to remain within a singular narrow niche that did not reflect their full instincts and capacities.
folks on twitter have already pointed out that Cruella is perhaps the worst possible choice for a protagonist seeing as how her entire motivation is ‘wants to murder puppies for money’ and there’s just. no way to spin that.
Maleficent worked, okay, she worked because she was a pretty mysterious character to begin with; her goals and motivations in Sleeping Beauty were vague enough that there was room for character exploration. but Cruella?
the reason Cruella was such a fantastic and fantastically funny villain was just how BASIC she was.
here’s Cruella: she designs clothes, she thinks a puppy-skin coat would look cool, she kidnaps a bunch of puppies because she’s rich and spoiled and used to getting her way. that’s it. that’s all there is to her. that’s all there needed to be, because a. her voice actress was god-tier b. her design and animation was flawless c. the story was pretty simple and didn’t need a villain with complex motivations and d. she shared the villainous spotlight with Jasper and Horace (who i might actually be interested in seeing a movie about tbh, just because ‘a weird old rich lady hired us to steal dogs from another rich lady and her husband and now the dogs are fighting back why is this happening where did my life go wrong’ is a fucking hilarious premise)
my point is WHY NOT URSULA
SERIOUSLY. URSULA.
there’s SO MUCH you could do with Ursula. not only does she have all the charisma and visual flare that Cruella does, her motivations, like Maleficent’s, were always a touch unclear.
she fucking hates the king of the sea and it’s never really explained why. she fucks around with two monarchies seemingly for the lols. she can do magic but she lives alone in a cave with only her prisoners and her two eels for company AND she actually loves her eels and is legit sad when they die. she’s weird and mysterious and sneaky and badass and there’s just. so many cool paces you could go with her! does she have a reason to hate the king? why is she the only octopus person we see? why do people still make deals with her given that she’s made a horrifying living garden out of those who couldn’t pay up? she turned herself into a human so she’s a shapeshifter, holy fuck, is that something she’s done before?
ursula movie pls (but like. someone other than disney make it)
bonus with Ursula: she makes reference to having been ‘nasty’ and ‘they weren’t kidding when they called me a witch’ in 'the past’
in a way that suggests she used to get up to way more overt and assertive evil-magic action that she can’t spin the way she can her current favor-trading business, which she presents to Ariel as her post-reform public service career.
Ariel has heard of her as 'the Sea Witch,’ a villainous figure from whose name she recoils, but not so terrifyingly villainous she swims hard the other direction.
there is so much narrative packed into that! what did she do? what did triton do to stop her? why did he stop at restraining her to the extent that he did, so she’s still active in a small-scale way?
(are they related? is she the last representative of a fallen royal house? if so did Triton’s family take that trident from hers, for her to be so fixated on obtaining it? was there a fish-people uprising against the tyranny of the octopodes, or a conquest? is she a representative of a disparaged religion? in what way was ariel’s mother involved in this narrative?)
why was this so sweet, what did he expect people to say, "no mr. brian may from the band queen, you do NOT have permission to play the sea shanty, put down the guitar and go back to the astrophysics" like,,,, what a silly goose
"no mr brian may from the band queen, we absolutely do not want you to play sea shanties for us on your guitar so that we can all pretend we're Freddie Mercury, please stop asking"
This is the cutest.
The original artist is Sandara. Here’s the art without the signature crop.
Her deviantart is here.
Recent events in Texas have added more weight to my suspicion that electric utilities policy is simultaneously one of the most boring and most interesting areas of policy
Unlike some culturally-backward conservative states like California, more the more progressive state of Nebraska has an electric grid that’s entirely run by the state government and membership cooperatives, and in fact Nebraska consumes more renewable energy as a percentage of their total energy consumption than California does
We've mentioned before, but every con we do could in theory be used to pull apart the real-world equivalent of the mark. This is one of the reason we have consultants like Apollo Robbins, or sometimes talk to high-level campaign finance experts or US Attorneys. Fiction, where you can bend and twist the rules, is made enormously easier when you force yourself to play by the rules as you break the story. This is a personal issue I have with some con and heist shows. Two lifts and a fake name don't make a con show, they make a particularly aggressive Rockford Files. Of course, this is probably more about my obsession with systems than it is about the bare minimum requirement for audience entertainment.
There was one truly odd moment, after three days of trying to break this thing, where I said: "Jesus, we've pulled corrupt money-laundering apart, international cyber-cons, kleptocratic hustles -- and we cannot break this fucking cheerleading scam. The real version of it is just too ironclad."
Downey: "This web of companies looks like a mob breakdown on The Sopranos."
Me: "Okay, so how do you bring down the mob?"
Downey (who, you will remember, is a former white collar defense attorney): "RICO Act. It's ridiculously broad."
That's how a cut-down version of the RICO Act wound up on the writer's room wall. The key, of course, being that you need to commit TWO acts of racketeering activity. So while half the room banged various combos of offenses off the walls ("Kidnapping and criminal copyright infringement?"), we tackled the other big problem --
-- we can't write a cheerleading episode.
By which I mean, it obeys none of the structural parameters which allow us to make Leverage on a weekly basis. There aren't really enough "hats" for the characters in cheerleading. Coach, cheerleader, maybe judge ... there's no inherent threat of violence or prosecution or meddling law enforcement. What's the real-time (used to be fourth) fifth Act sequence as we tempo up heading into the back of the show?
Again, back to the research. Jeremy had talked to several groups who were trying to change the cheerleading rules, primarily by trying to get it declared as a sport, where Title IX safety rules would kick in. These groups' primary frustration was in the politics of the situation -- which for once fell on both sides of the aisle. Generalizing roughly, Conservatives didn't want to establish that sort of excess regulation, Liberals didn't want Title IX money being diverted to cheerleading from other women's sports. Few friends on either side.
Well, there you go. Despite assumptions by some of our viewers, we try to stay very even-handed on the political spectrum on the few times we venture into politics. My policy is alway that the primary split in politics is along the money/power axis, and there are plenty of R's and D's chasing both. We'd never done a Congressional episode, and Congress is a lovely, complicated, antiquated ramshackle system all based in a one big, swinging doors-French farce worthy building. Aces. We came up with some prototypical Congresspeople, assigned unlikely humans to deal with them, and turned loose the Fun Train.
LEVERAGE #505 "The 'Gimme a K' Street Job" Post-Game
“The Republican Party and right-wing movement do not believe in real democracy. Their policies are anti-democratic and antisocial. Democratic norms, values and traditions are but a way of getting and keeping power. Once power is won by Republicans and other members of the right, democracy is dismantled — whether piece by piece, or all at once — in service to authoritarianism, fascism, white supremacy, Christian fascism and gangster capitalism. In such a failing democracy, “bipartisanship,“ "consensus” and “unity” are polite ways of announcing one’s surrender.”
— Let’s tell the truth about the Republican Party: It’s the real enemy of the people
Guys I found the only good thing on Facebook.
Update:
Oh fuck they’re inclusive ants, too?!?
Image Descriptions
[Image 1: A Screenshot of an invitation to a Facebook group named: “A group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony.” Under that is a post in the group that reads: “We reached the center of the Earth. Now what?” Four people commented saying one word each in this order: scurry, dig, work, melt. These words are in capital letters and have spaces between each letter.]
[Image 2: Another Screenshot of a post in the group that reads: “It has come to my attention that when we put the spaces in-between letters it makes it difficult for visually impaired ants to know what we’re saying and so I was wondering if we could try to make this group more accessible for them. (The text to voice can’t figure out what we are saying with the spaces) (Picture of an ant for attention)” This text is then followed by a close up picture of an ant.]
[Image 3: A screenshot of some comments on the post in Image 2. Five people commented: adapt, adapt, inclusion, love adapt, adapt. These words are in capital letters and have no spaces between the letters.]
End of IDs.
i’m thanks and this is true i don’t care who lives or dies
this is the best comment on this tiktok btw
"Respect doesn't make history." is honestly one of the rawest lines in The Witcher and it still baffles me that it came from Jaskier only about two minutes after he called his new lute sexy.
...I could have said "two damn minutes" in this post and I fucking DIDN'T
