Madzisaur

Maddie (she/her) back for more shitposts I guess? 🔞

[vinnie-cha]

stede and aziraphale having a good time while ed and crowley are fighting for their lives 😔

—

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[inhonoredglory]

Aziraphale’s Choice, the Job Connection, and Michael Sheen’s Morality

I’ve had time to process Aziraphale’s choice at the end of Season 2. And I think only blaming the religious trauma misses something important in Aziraphale’s character. I think what happened was also Aziraphale’s own conscious choice––as a growth from his trauma, in fact. Hear me out.

Since November 2022 I’ve been haunted by something Michael Sheen said at the MCM London Comic Con. At the Q&A, someone asked him about which fantasy creature he enjoyed playing most and Michael (bless him, truly) veered on a tangent about angels and goodness and how, specifically,

We as a society tend to sort of undervalue goodness. It’s sort of seen as sort of somehow weak and a bit nimby and “oh it’s nice.” And I think to be good takes enormous reserves of courage and stamina. I mean, you have to look the dark in the face to be truly good and to be truly of the light…. The idea that goodness is somehow lesser and less interesting and not as kind of muscular and as passionate and as fierce as evil somehow and darkness, I think is nonsense. The idea of being able to portray an angel, a being of love. I love seeing the things people have put online about angels being ferocious creatures, and I love that. I think that’s a really good representation of what goodness can be, what it should be, I suppose.

I was looking forward to BAMF!Aziraphale all season long, and I think that’s what we got in the end. Remember Neil said that the Job minisode was important for Aziraphale’s story. Remember how Aziraphale sat on that rock and reconciled to himself that he MUST go to Hell, because he lied and thwarted the will of God. He believed that––truly, honestly, with the faith of a child, but the bravery of a soldier.

Aziraphale, a being of love with more goodness than all of Heaven combined, believed he needed to walk through the Gates of Hell because it was the Right Thing to do. (Like Job, he didn’t understand his sin but believed he needed to sacrifice his happiness to do the Right Thing.)

That’s why we saw Aziraphale as a soldier this season: the bookshop battle, the halo. But yes, the ending as well.

Because Aziraphale never wanted to go to Heaven, and he never wanted to go there without Crowley.

But it was Crowley who taught him that he could, even SHOULD, act when his moral heart told him something was wrong. While Crowley was willing to run away and let the world burn, it was Aziraphale (in that bandstand at the end of the world) who stood his ground and said No. We can make a difference. We can save everyone.

And Aziraphale knew he could not give up the ace up his sleeve (his position as an angel) to talk to God and make them see the truth in his heart.

I was messed up by Ineffable Bureaucracy (Boxfly) getting their happy ending when our Ineffable Husbands didn’t, but I see now that them running away served to prove something to Aziraphale. (And I am fully convinced that Gabriel and Beelzebub saw the example of the Ineffables at the Not-pocalypse and took inspiration from them for choosing to ditch their respective sides)

But my point is that Aziraphale saw them, and in some ways, they looked like him and Crowley. And he saw how Gabriel, the biggest bully in Heaven, was also like him in a way (a being capable of love) and also just a child when he wasn’t influenced by the poison of Heaven. Muriel, too, wasn’t a bad person. The Metatron also seemed to have grown more flexible with his morality (from Aziraphale's perspective). Like Earth, Heaven was shades of (light?) gray.

Aziraphale is too good an angel not to believe in hope. Or forgiveness (something he’s very good at it).

Aziraphale has been scarred by Heaven all his life. But with the cracks in Heaven’s armor (cracks he and Crowley helped create), Aziraphale is seeing something else. A chance to change them. They did terrible things to him, but he is better than them, and because of Crowley, he feels ready to face them.

(Will it work? Can Heaven change, institutionally? Probably not, but I can't blame Aziraphale for trying.)

At the cafe, the Metatron said something big was coming in the Great Plan. Aziraphale knows how trapped he had felt when he didn’t have God’s ear the first time something huge happened in the Big Plan. He can’t take a chance again to risk the world by not having a foot in the door of Heaven. That’s why we saw individual human deaths (or the threat of death) so much more this season: Elspeth, Wee Morag, Job’s children, the 1940s magician. Aziraphale almost killed a child when he couldn’t get through to God, and he’s not going through that again.

“We could make a difference.” We could save everyone.

Remember what Michael Sheen said about courage and doing good––and having to “look the dark in the face to be truly good.” That’s what happened when Aziraphale was willing to go to Hell for his actions. That’s what happened when he decided he had to go to Heaven, where he had been abused and belittled and made to feel small. He decided to willingly go into the Lion’s Den, to face his abusers and his anxiety, to make them better so that they would not try to destroy the world again.

Him, just one angel. He needed Crowley to be there with him, to help him be brave, to ask the questions that Heaven needed to hear, to tell them God was wrong. Crowley is the inspiration that drives Aziraphale’s change, Crowley is the engine that fuels Aziraphale’s courage.

But then Crowley tells him that going to Heaven is stupid. That they don’t need Heaven. And he’s right. Aziraphale knows he’s right.

Aziraphale doesn’t need Heaven; Heaven needs him. They just don’t know how much they need him, or how much humanity needs him there, too. (If everyone who ran for office was corrupt, how can the system change?)

Terry Pratchett (in the Discworld book, Small Gods) is scathing of God, organized religion, and the corrupt people religion empowers, but he is sympathetic to the individual who has real, pure faith and a good heart. In fact, the everyman protagonist of Small Gods is a better person than the god he serves, and in the end, he ends up changing the church to be better, more open-minded, and more humanist than god could ever do alone.

Aziraphale is willing to go to the darkest places to do the Right Thing, and Heaven is no exception. When Crowley says that Heaven is toxic, that’s exactly why Aziraphale knows he needs to go there. “You’re exactly is different from my exactly.”

____

In the aftermath of Trump's election in the US, Brexit happened in 2018. Michael Sheen felt compelled to figure out what was going on in his country after this shock. But he was living in Los Angeles with Sarah Silverman at the time, and she also wanted to become more politically active in the US.

Sheen: “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it [meant] coming back [to Britain] – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.” In the end, they split up and Michael moved back to the UK.

Sometimes doing the Right Thing means sacrificing your own happiness. Sometimes it means going to Hell. Sometimes it means going to Heaven. Sometimes it means losing a relationship.

And that’s why what happened in the end was so difficult for Aziraphale. Because he loves Crowley desperately. He wants to be together. He wanted that kiss for thousands of years. He knows that taking command of Heaven means they would never again have to bow to the demands of a God they couldn’t understand, or run from a Hell who still came after them. They could change the rules of the game.

And he’s still going to do that. But it hurts him that he has to do that alone.

[madzisaur]

This is such an upsettingly good take

[zohbugg]

After decades of delays and broken promises, coal miners hail rule to slow rise of black lung

A half-century ago, top U.S. health experts urged the federal agency in charge of mine safety to adopt strict rules protecting miners from p

Decades ago, the nation’s top health experts urged the federal agency in charge of mine safety to adopt strict rules to protect miners from poisonous dust, but inaction, denial and lobbying has resulted in thousands of premature deaths from pneumoconiosis, or "black lung" disease. Now, proposals are emerging to cut the silica exposure limit by half, aligning with the standard recommended by The Centers for Disease Control since 1974.

Why this matters:

As miners dig through more layers of rock to reach less accessible coal, generating deadly silica dust in the process, the problem has increased in severity. Silica dust is 20 times more toxic than coal dust and causes severe forms of black lung disease even after a few years of exposure.

An estimated one in five tenured miners in Central Appalachia has black lung disease; one in 20 has the most disabling form of black lung. A former regulator called the lack of protection from silica-related illnesses one of the most “catastrophic” occupational health failures in U.S. history.

[asymbina]

capitalism.

[madzisaur]

Okay but this part of zoolander being timely social commentary warning of the ongoing dangers miners face wasn’t on my bingo chart

[studentofetherium]

CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it's part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions

[studentofetherium]

if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators

[rifleweeb]

[unculture]

THEY ARE TRYING!!!!! SIGN THE PETITION TO GET THE DISNEY ANIMATORS' UNION RECOGNIZED

[clustxr]

this petition is from IATSE (union), btw! it actually has credibility, unlike most change.org/etc petitions! please sign it!!

[urayuli]

i’m sorry i wiggled your skinny boyfriend like a sheet of metal. weeop womp weeoop womp weeeoop womp

[mrv3000]

ALT

[electricpurrs]

it keeps happening

[hobbies306540111]

women should lift weights because it prevents osteoporosis in old age and makes you a more capable person in everyday life please shut up about butts and waists and hourglasses i'm going to fucking kill

[endangeredlove]

;___;♡♡♡♡

[mothric]

genuine question from someone who would rather chew their arm off than go to a public gym, and also doesnt have a lot of money: how do you safely get into strength training? are there youtube channels, apps (android), etc anyone recommends that makes it approachable and don't lean into diet culture / body shaming?

also the biggest thing that keeps me from working out is that I already have joint and spinal issues and moving the wrong way can fuck up a knee or a shoulder or my spine for days. I really don't want to injure myself, and have unwittingly done so before. resources that are extremely clear on exactly how to move and offer gentler / alternative ways to move for people with limited range are vital.

[feenyxblue]

Okay, so this may not technically be strength training, but muscles are dumber than bricks and cannot tell the difference between your own bodyweight and actual weights.

So, may I recommend:

Hybrid Calisthenics

Hey everyone! My name is Hampton and my brand is Hybrid Calisthenics. You can find me by that name pretty much everywhere on social media.

He runs a YouTube channel where he goes over how to work your way up to more complex exercises (for instance, his pull-ups videos start with using a door jamb and moving your weight back and forth) so it's good for easing yourself into things.

[bundibird]

You also don't have to fork out for expensive weights and such if you don't want to/can't. Substitute with stuff you either already have at home or can get from the supermarket and build up the weight you can exercise with. 500 gram cans of butter beans then 750 gram bottles of pasta sauce. 1 litre drink bottle then your 1.5 litre milk bottle. 3 litre bulk-buy bottle of laundry detergent. Etc. One of my dogs weighs 13 kilos and I pick her up on the regular (to her delight). One weighs 16 kg and I pick him up too (to his consternation and mild disapproval). You don't have to fit out some fancy home gym before you can start strength training.

[johannestevans]

the thing i love about the alien movies is how blunt and honest they are about how like. rape is terrifying and traumatic, and unwanted pregnancy is terrifying and traumatic

and bc it's explored under a layer of allegory, it's not gendered in the same way

like these are films that are very explicitly about like. what if a thing wanted to penetrate and rape you, and use you to breed things, and it was terrifying to escape? and institutions and businesses didn't take it seriously? and what if it traumatised you deeply?

just the thought and the threat of it made it impossible for you to work, because it's inherently terrifying, and your thoughts are dismissed, your need for safety and assurance are dismissed, bc this monster, representing sexual violence, is a constant undercurrent?

a lot of horror movies are about how rape is scary but they're always like. made up with straight people's obsessive bullshit and they're all WEIRD about it. like it's about women's purity or the Gift or Miracle of childbirth and what if that was corrupted

whereas alien doesn't truck with that. outright, any unwanted pregnancy is monstrous and evil and violent and scary and it will kill you. it's intrinsically violent and terrifying, there's no way to pretend it's nice or miraculous or feminine or blah blah

[canadianwheatpirates]

Something that really strikes me about the first Alien movie is that there's also a rape-allegory scene completely separate from what's going on with the Alien: when the science officer tries to kill Ripley by forcing a rolled up newspaper down her throat. It's late here so I'm not gonna dig into it on this post but like. The threat of the Alien has already been established, and it turns out that you can't get into a conflict with your coworkers about the presence of the threat because they might try to rape-murder you too.

[johannestevans]

absolutely!!

i'm watching Aliens (1986) right now and similarly, when the android pins down the marine crewman and plays the knife game jumping between his fingers, that, too, is a threat of unwanted penetration! the marine is screaming and terrified, and everyone is just watching and laughing - just like they laugh at the marines joking about raping virginal colonists

it's sexual violence all the way down, baked into the culture, and anyone showing fear at that culture and that violence is mocked and undermined

[kinka-juice]

Also want to point out that it's not just rape allegory. Dan O'Bannon, the screenplay writer, had Crohn's Disease. For those not familiar, Crohn's (and it's sister disease, Ulcerative Colitis - together they are called Inflammatory Bowel Disease/IBD) is an autoimmune disease, where your immune system turns against your digestive tract, acting like your own stomach and bowel are foreign invaders and need to be fought against. It results in a lot of abdominal pain, with your body turning against itself.

O'Bannon specifically credited the chestburster to his experience of Crohn's. He had spent most of 1977 in hospitals suffering (at that time, undiagnosed, he would get Dx'd in 1980), and getting the call to work on Alien at the end of the year got him motivated. He described his experience "The digestion process felt like something bubbling inside of me struggling to get out.” Journalist Jason Zinnorman wrote: "The simple act of eating terrified him, and a trip to the bathroom meant potentially hours of arduous and humiliating pain.”

O'Bannon ultimately died due to his Crohn's in 2009.

Alien is a story about rape and bodily autonomy and unwanted pregnancy, but it's also inspired by disability, and the body horror and lack of agency some disability comes with.

[cherrybuttermilk]

want to fall asleep under the stars(no bugs)

[ebugsdotjpeg]

[gummybearattacktheworldofdespair]

[madzisaur]

One of the many perks

[phroge777]

the passage of time is inevitable

[90skid-com]

Threads

[gnrslashandmcr]

Please bring this back, I want to disappear into the circus circle again

[ruinedchildhood]

[galladegamer]

THE PARACHUTE DAY

[lynx-jynx]

Take me back to the parachute day

[madzisaur]

Do people think that because they haven't experienced it recently it doesn't happen? i se a lot of this about things from childhood that people will lament "they don't do this anymore." No YOU don't do this anymore because you grew up!

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

we saw a phrase a while ago that was “all birds are dinosaurs but not all dinosaurs are birds” and i know and understand that dinos are birds but, i want to ask and educate still, is this phrase true? primarily the last part.

soooooooo kinda yes kinda no

the short version is this:

all living birds fall into the clade dinosauria

all dinosaurs are in the group we call "total (or pan) aves/birds", ie, everything closer to being a bird than they are to being anything else alive today

anything in Pan-Aves can, legally, be called a bird

so the real version is this:

"All living birds are dinosaurs. All dinosaurs can be called birds, and it depends on what you define "bird" as."

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

@markscherz hence the birth of the Bird Political Spectrum, with "Neornithes" being the most conservative and "Avemetatarsalia" being the most liberal

in most situations I use Neornithes. The Mesozoic-Cenozoic dividing line is an actual real thing, and so few Neornithes show up in the Meso that it works

but gun to my head, yeah, pterosaurs are technically birds, and I will die on that hill

[wemblingfool]

For anon, I'm the one who says that, it's paired with a contemporary comparison that's intended to make it easier for people who still struggle with the "How are birds dinosaurs?" I encounter a lot of people that look at a stegosaur and can't fathom how it's related to a hummingbird.

We're not talking about clades, or upper naming conventions. We're talking about (typically older) people who see birds as their own thing that have always been taught they're their own thing.

Basically this

All Birds are Dinosaurs, but not all Dinosaurs are birds. Just like All Bats are Mammals, but not all Mammals are Bats.

Putting it in this context usually helps flick a switch.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

the bat to mammal comparison works the best bc bats are also a small, flighted, weird offshoot of a giant megafaunal clade

[gif87a-com]

Pipe expanding machine

[pjackk]

Wowww

[jasminetea-nightsky]

[bonyassfish]

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.

Nobody my age is voting republican. Let's be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We're all afraid of dying of thirst because there's no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they're trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.

This liberalism and party affiliation doesn't preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is... Well

No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they're immune to conservative logic but they're still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn't have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can't avoid it you're a sex addict. That's a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist

If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can't understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it's because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent's nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We're dumb about drugs. We're dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We're so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don't know how to organize because we're raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.

They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than "young people vote republican and watch Fox news"

[hairasuntouchedaspartoftheamazon]

I've never seen anybody explain it so well

[madzisaur]

Me, in my thirties trying to work out why a chunk of gen Z is so fucking lame and pearl clutchie about the world

[valtsv]

realized my last post works so much better as a greentext

[valtsv]

i think banishment is the funniest possible spell you can cast on someone. like i'm not even going to fight you. YOU'RE going to leave. you have no choice.

[valtsv]

a guy i banished to the desert 10 years ago finally tracks me down after years of plotting his revenge and i immediately banish him to the desert again