This is mainly a fandom blog: Good Omens, Our Flag Means Death, Shadow & Bone, Heartstopper, Harry Potter, Tolkien, Star Wars, Sherlock, Doctor Who, Merlin, Supernatural, Sleepy Hollow, Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney, Jane Austen, Star Wars, Superwholock, music (of course it's a fandom), Legend of the Seeker, BBC's The Musketeers, Narnia, Firefly, so many books, and anything else shiny that makes me laugh or that I like. OTPs here are vast, and ocasional political rants or important topics such as mental health may be sporadically sprinkled throughout the 90% fandom content…you have been warned🙃 This blogger believes in equity and equality for all🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽✊🏼✊🏻Trans non-binary💛🤍💜🖤 Ember. They/Them Welcome to this chaotic corner👻
Sometimes people think they're dealing with a Torment Nexus but what they actually have is a Jumanji. And sometimes people think something's a Jumanji but oops it's a Torment Nexus.
So a Torment Nexus is something that is either a metaphor for a larger societal problem (e.g. The Platform, The Long Walk) or a social issue/trend taken to an exaggerated extreme (e.g. The Purge), with a lot of shades of grey in between (e.g. Squid Game). If it isn't about a larger societal issue/trend/structure it isn't a Torment Nexus.
A Jumanji can be dangerous and high-stakes (to the characters), but it doesn't need to have a metaphor or lesson, it can easily just be a "Would this be fucked up or what?" situation (e.g. a lotta Goosebumps stories). If there IS a lesson/metaphor, it will be on a smaller scale like psychological issues (e.g. Magnus Archives), family/relationship issues (e.g. Zathura), or about a specific topic (e.g. Magic School Bus). Large-scale social issues may be present (after all, Everything Is Political), but they take a definite backseat.
Now. A Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory is a trap based around morality and vices. These can be cultural, religious, or bonkers bullshit like "children shouldn't chew gum." There is generally not discussion or criticism of this morality system. Regardless of the morality system used, if it's not a trap, it's not a Chocolate Factory.
Gamergate was like 200 people. And now look where we are. “A lot of emails” on a topic to congressional staffers is like, 20. Are politicians spineless idiots? Yes. Use that to your advantage! Is this the only thing you can be doing? No! But it can be the first.
The internet has completely short circuited our sense of scale. The number of people required to move almost any needle is remarkably low. Your involvement in local causes, political pressure WILL have an impact.
Ok, get out there.
Activists and lawmakers say a phone call can have more weight and be harder to ignore than an email or social media post.
Here’s the English transcription, found behind a paywall at the link below:
Mr president, Mr prime minister, ladies and gentlemen ministers, my dear colleagues.
Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is crumbling, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.
Washington has become the court of Nero, a fiery emperor, submissive courtiers and a ketamine-fuelled jester in charge of purging the civil service.
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose more customs duties on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.
The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is all about. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down before Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is probably accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.
Never in history has a president of the United States capitulated to the enemy. Never has anyone supported an aggressor against an ally. Never has anyone trampled on the American Constitution, issued so many illegal decrees, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military general staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.
This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.
I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.
Eight days ago, at the very moment that Trump was rubbing Macron’s back in the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.
Two days later, in the Oval Office, the military service shirker was giving war hero Zelensky lessons in morality and strategy before dismissing him like a groom, ordering him to submit or resign.
Tonight, he took another step into infamy by stopping the delivery of weapons that had been promised. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it.
And first of all, let’s not be mistaken. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic States, Georgia and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.
The countries of the south are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.
What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with its first principle being the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.
This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the attacked, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.
Mine is Greenland, Panama and Canada, yours is Ukraine, the Baltics and Eastern Europe, his is Taiwan and the China Sea. This is called, in the evenings of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago, “diplomatic realism”.
So we are alone. But the talk that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is in bad shape. In three years, the so-called second largest army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country three times less populated.
Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves and the demographic collapse show that it is on the brink of the abyss. The American helping hand to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made in a war.
The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.
Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that it holds out, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.
This will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to circumvent Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself by a coalition of only the willing countries, with, of course, the United Kingdom.
Second, demand that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we must build the neglected European defence, to the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and scuttled since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.
Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is to recognise that France has been right for decades in arguing for strategic autonomy.
It remains to be built. It will be necessary to invest massively, to strengthen the European Defence Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, to harmonise weapons and munitions systems, to accelerate the entry into the Union of Ukraine, which is today the leading European army, to rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, to relaunch the anti-missile shield and satellite programs.
The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And much more will be needed.
Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be implemented. For good.
But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.
We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and especially in the face of Putin’s cronies, the extreme right and the extreme left.
They argued again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defence.
They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of de Gaulle Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain at Putin’s beck and call.
The peace of the collaborators who have refused any aid to the Ukrainians for three years.
Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great. But in the last few days, the public humiliation of Zelensky and all the crazy decisions taken in the last month have finally made the Americans react.
Polls are falling. Republican lawmakers are being greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.
The Trumpists are no longer in their majesty. They control the executive, the parliament, the Supreme Court and social networks.
But in American history, the freedom fighters have always prevailed. They are beginning to raise their heads.
The fate of Ukraine is being played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the United States who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, to find the means for their common defence, and to make Europe the power that it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.
Our parents defeated fascism and communism at great cost.
The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.
Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.
A French senator has given a powerful speech setting out how the continent must deal with the twin threats from America and Russia
The latest 11.0 update means that Google Analytics is a thing on the switch and turned on. What that means is that Nintendo has a deal with Google to share with them your data for advertisement purposes.
To turn it off
go to the eShop
go to your profile where your funds and account info is
go down to the bottom of the page
there you will see “Google Analytics Preferences”
select the Change
select “Don’t Share”
Please spread the word. Really shitty of Nintendo to just quietly start allowing Google to spy on users for advertising.
I’ve seen this post going around and went “Ah it’s from 2020, I remember I already turned that off.”
Then I turned my switch on this afternoon for the first time in a while and it had an update. And I thought hm. Maybe. I had better just check on that again.
And you’ll never guess what I had to turn off again.
this post was aimed at the discourse-addled and terminally online, but i'm glad it's reaching an audience of people who are just excited about stargazing in general
FRIENDS IN AMERICA: DO NOT SIGN UP FOR ANY LGBTQIA+ STUDIES OR SURVEYS. chances are they’re fake/being monitored and your real/legal name will be recorded
As has been pointed out by more legally-savvy people than me, the problem is not "oh no! The VA is running a totally fake study as a front to collect info about LGBT vets!" That's conspiracy-brained fearmongering. Slightly better is "oh no! someone is impersonating the VA to collect info about LGBT vets!" but it doesn't quite hit the root of the problem.
The problem is that even a perfectly legitimate study collects data that someone else might access. It's not enough to ask yourself, "Is this a real study, and is it being carried out for well-intentioned purposes?" You have to also ask yourself, "Do I think this organization is equipped to safeguard any info from the study for as long as Trump and his buddies are in positions to demand that info, knowing that he intends to lie, change the rules, ignore the rules, and appoint people who will help him do all of the above?"
The VA study is a potential risk because the VA is a federal institution, and as such it may be easier for other parts of the federal government to rifle through their records for anything they can use.
I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.
Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.
He was really nice.
Yeah.
It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?
You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."
You didn't, loves, you didn't.
We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.
I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.
Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.
When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"
No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.
Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?
Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.
That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.
I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.
A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.
I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.
So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!
Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.
You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.
I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.
I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.
It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.
Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.
Shared here today by Matthew Boroson on Facebook. (ETA: Gaining inspiration from other authors is great. Lifting passages and avoiding giving credit isn’t.)
Tanith Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel, for the second book of the Flat Earth series. She died in 2015. You can buy Tales From the Flat Earth here and here .
i love how Gandalf invested in Hobbits in year one and has been pushing them ever since. Thorin, i hear you need help with a breaking and entering. Can I recommend one of these little cunts? Silent as fuck, trust me. Elrond my dude i know you're skeptical but these four chucklefucks just transported a weapon of mass destruction all the way here. Theoden, you've gotta get yourself a hobbit man, I've got a spare one here. Denathor you big prick, take a hobbit - literally this is the bottom of the range but listen to him sing. Beautiful little bastard.
In "Unfinished Tales" there's a section where the Fellowship gets Gandalf to tell his side of the story about how he recommended Bilbo to Thorin's company and this is literally how it went down:
