hello vonnie
★
⁂
cherry valley forever
blake kathryn
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
wallacepolsom
almost home
will byers stan first human second
noise dept.
shark vs the universe
No title available
No title available
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Jules of Nature
JBB: An Artblog!
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
tumblr dot com
if i look back, i am lost
seen from Italy
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@idfkjustapleb
Minnesota’s Giant Rainbow and Leather Pride Flags
June 28, 1998. Both flags measured approximately 50 feet wide and 75 feet long.
Friendly reminder that the leather flag predates almost every other flag. We owe this community to leather daddies and kinksters
In the era of corporate sanitization never forget it was leather daddies and S&M folks who protected some of the earliest pride parades.
KICK THE CAN!
Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.
To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.
the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now
And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!
Okay, so. Star Wars has all these concepts that weirdo New Left boomer George Lucas tosses in there but because of storyteller limitations it would kill the plot to fully explain them all, so later writers have to come in for the spin-off materials and bat clean-up to fully explain all this crazy crap. And I would like to talk about something that made me actively angry at first, but which I now adore. And that is the Naboo.
So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.
Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.
There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.
The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.
The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.
Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.
The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.
Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.
Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.
Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.
The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.
Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.
They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!
There you go, @charmwasjess
honestly this goes further than anything else to explain why padme heard this bonkers greasy teenage anakin confess to her that he wiped out the entire village of native people who killed his mother, and padme (ostensibly our conscience) (actually a valedictorian of the naboo political school of move fast break things and look gorgeous doing it) was just like '👍'
also Darth Sidious is from there, too, so you can interpret him as to some extent the intersection point of everything weird about the Naboo and, uh, everything about the Sith.
like...a planet destroying laser is pretty Sith Lord, and having a Galactic Empire is classically Sith, but faking your way into being Emperor via elaborate indirect election fraud and a whole faked-up proxy war, and mounting your hyperspace-capable space laser on a deeply gratuitous whole-ass artificial moon? there's distinct traces of Naboo aesthetic sensibility showing through there.
also he hates his home planet, which we may assume is why after becoming emperor and having no more reason to please anybody but himself, he wore nothing but an ankle-length hoodie for twenty-five years.
Imagine washing up on Dinotopia and getting a talk saying "unfortunately, you can't escape this island! You'll never go home or see your loved ones ever again" & then while you're crying they say "I'm sorry, you'll just have to live on the island of dinosaur communism for the rest of your life" and you look up through your bleary eyes and go. Wait what
As a consolation prize for never going home again, dinosaur communism is pretty great.
Bagels and everything!
calvin and hobbes
"You misspelled Weltanschauung" is one of the funniest punchlines I've ever encountered.
one of my faves
It’s still stupid but it worksheet
This is so fun, because it’s a solidly learned superstition.
We’re raising funds to print a brand new book of compiled SMBC comics on Kickstarter right now! check out our project for Parenting - An SMBC Collection
"Why?" is one of the comics that will be included!
Original comic : www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-is-the-sky-blue
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SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE
Only the subtlest metaphors on this Tumblr.
This works as a metaphor for children but also it works perfectly well when played totally straight because horse people are actually like this
it literally took me three solid readings through this to realize that it wasn’t necessarily about horse people, because they are exactly like this
I’m sorry I didn’t mean to refer to your unvaccinated dog as an “empty vessel for rabies.” I’m sure it’s also something else. Like an empty vessel for distemper.
Hey. What's up. Much right.
Let's add empty vessel for parvo to the list. Devastatingly contagious and fatal virus.
#If you don't vaccinate your dog it is also a suitable empty vessel for Ygrothar #the All-Devourer #so there's that (via @sufficientlylargen)
Urban fantasy veterinarians gotta worry about diseases and demonic possession. It's a tough job.
Reenactor throws a spear at a drone
What a time to be alive.
“The medieval warrior, realizing the consequences of his impulsive act, immediately approached the owner of the drone and offered to pay for the damage.
The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.
Drone owners have another year to develop a unique “dragon-like” design for their flying machines.” (x)
I am 100% cooler with this knowing that the spear-thrower realized “oops maybe I shouldn’t have done that” and tried to make it right, and that the guy who the drone belonged to was cool with it
just so everyone knows, this has already been memorialized in a runestone
Everything about this post blesses those involved with a +4 on their next Today is Good Day roll
a rough translation of inscription on the runestone:
On the seventh day of May in the year of 2016 on hither spot the mighty warrior Ulf hath slain a dragon with his spear.
so yeah, happy birthday to this dragon-slaying event and to it only
Happy Ulf Hath Slain A Dragon With His Spear!
i'm the guy who writes the books that the protagonist in supernatural horror movies frantically reads somewhere in act ii. job's pretty easy. lot of "legends of vampires have recurred all throughout human history" and "demonologists agree that the quickest way to un-summon a demon is to trap it in a cursed object". no citations of course; they don't pay me citation money. i had to learn html back in the early aughts when everyone started seeking their supernatural info on websites they found via top search engines like FINDLER and WEBSIGHT but that's died down now which is great because i didn't have it in me to pick up css. currently working on a new book about horses that are evil. it's called HORSES THAT ARE EVIL in all caps so the protagonist can find it quickly to yank off the library shelf. it will be published 35 years ago.
that poll going around of the guy who thought "people only eat tofu as a bit because they're deranged vegans" or whatever really crystalizes something that i have never been able to precisely say - which is "a nonzero fraction of people who start picky-eater discourse just happen to precisely hate those foods which are not from north america and refuse to introspect on this whatsoever"
In contrast some people say "there aren't any picky eaters in Asia 🙄" but this is laughably untrue. I have a cousin in India who refused until his 20s to eat anything in a sauce. as you can imagine in India this was difficult. he basically had to pick things out of curry and wipe them dry
We’re raising funds to print a brand new book of compiled SMBC comics on Kickstarter right now! check out our project for Parenting - An SMBC Collection
"Everything" is one of the comics that will be included!
Original comic : https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-09-08
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SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE
I really like how the scientology speedrunning trend is developing, in this clip we see that the participants are
Not deterred by the closed door
Working as a group
Protecting their identities
Inflicting material costs to the institution via property destruction
Getting away at the end
These ideas were not all here from the beginning. They are genuinely gaining experience that can be applied elsewhere
"The Ancients were capable of wondrous things, but they often made mistakes, and 'dungeons' are the outcome of those mistakes" is a common conceit in dungeon-crawling fantasy, but the Ancients' fuckups are typically framed as products of hubris or madness. I want to see a setting where they messed up for the same reason that real-world engineering and public works projects often come to horrifying ends. The safety reports were suppressed because the architect was somebody's cousin. The plans clearly called for unobtanium rods, but a malfeasant contractor swapped them for mudanium and pocketed the difference. Somebody got sick of having to re-summon the hellgate each dawn and propped it open with a shoe.
The warding sigils would have detected the problem, but they were so overtuned that they were constantly throwing false alarms, so eventually one of the assistant thaumaturges simply disconnected them and forgot to tell anyone they'd done so.
the landscape is littered with half-finished Chthonic Spires that were built by the Ancients in anticipation of demand from the upscale necromancer market, a demand which never materialized. All construction stopped after The Incident (real estate market crash).
The Ancients had grand lyceums in which aspiring wizards learned all manner of arcane secrets. Midterms for Enchanting 202 involved making animated weapons and armor. The professors were supposed to de-animate them afterwards, but, well... anyway, that's why there are floating scimitars roaming the northern plains.
the Ancients weren't actually that ancient, the problem is that they were so good at magic they didn't bother with things like "structural engineering" and "load bearing walls" so everything collapsed the moment there wasn't someone coming around once a quarter to add juice to the structural integrity spells that held everything up and bam, instant ruins
by Laerte Coutinho
btw this is laerte. She is 73 now! Making art and being happy! It's never too late to transition
