The Star Seed Will Bloom And The Flesh Will Rise

21 | Transfem (she/her) | Dragonkin, Kitsunekin (kin blog: @dragon-and-kitsune) | Demisexual | WLW | Header drawn by Vivziepop, icon drawn by @sometimesdailynihilego

[mephostophilis]

are non brits aware of count binface.

[mephostophilis]

to give some entirely bizarre context, nigel farage (extreme cunt) has stepped down from his position as MP for clacton (due to a scandal where he received £5 million from a crypto billionaire that could have been laundered) only to run again so that he can prove people like him. and the only person running against him is count binface. who has been a staple of british politics for many years. and now the british press is forced to interview him seriously while he sits there with his binface.

[mephostophilis]

sorry. correction. laurence fox is also there

[mephostophilis]

[major-trouble]

There are now 10 named candidates in this riding, including Rob Pownall, who is an anti-fox hunting independent and also usually dresses up as a fox in protests.

Edit: forgot to mention that Luke Worley, also standing as an independent, is the only one of the candidates actually from Clacton.

[happysami]

update:

[dovewithscales]

*googling Laurence Fox*

Okay I think Rob Pownall dressed as a fox should hunt Laurence Fox for sport.

[witchofanguish]

[mahead-ithurt]

Always remember that the EU did a study in 2013 about the effects of piracy on media publishers and found that there is no correlation between piracy and sales! (And then they tried to hide that study bc that's not the result they wanted)

So piracy is at worst not even a problem, and at best it's free advertisement.

Source: (the link to the actual study is in the article)

EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales - Engadget

In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU

[rabbitindisguise]

Plus this one:

Study Again Shows 'Pirates' Tend to Be The Biggest Buyers of Legal Content

A new report out of the UK once again deflates the common narrative that pirates are exclusively looking to obtain free stuff.

[dovewithscales]

Piracy is media preservation. Torrenting is literally the form of media storage which is most resistant to data loss. Dozens or hundreds of movies and even more television episodes no longer exist because the only copies were destroyed due to neglect, disaster, or deliberate destruction.

It wasn't that long ago that a number of lost episodes of Doctor Who were recovered because someone pirated them the first time they aired. That wasn't torrenting, but it was still the democratization of data preventing its permanent destruction as a result of the indifference of capitalism.

Piracy is a moral good.

[ohcorny]

sleep paralysis demons HATE him. this cartoonist discovers one weird trick to make them go away every time.

[dovewithscales]

I'm going to tell you all the story about how I traumatized my sleep paralysis demon.

I had sleep paralysis for years. About once a week, for probably a decade. It was obnoxious. Finally, this one time I woke up in what should have been the middle of the night, and my husband should have been in bed with me, but it was dawn and I was alone in the room, and naturally I couldn't move. It was sleep paralysis. I could just see in the corner of my vision the bedroom door opening and a figure I couldn't quite make out creeping silently into the room.

Rather than being unnerved, I was pissed. I was lucid enough to know this was a sleep paralysis nightmare, and I had just about fucking enough of this shit.

I have spinal cord damage, so limbs sometimes not cooperating is a thing I actually have to deal with while I'm awake. A leg will turn into spaghetti mid step, or my hand will just decide not to grip things anymore. So I focused all my concentration on one hand as this figure I couldn't see quite right started moving around behind me, and started trying to get it back under control as I sometimes have to do with my fingers when I wake up in the morning for real. I managed to get my fingers to move, and then my hand, and then I started pushing myself up and making my body move.

I heard whatever the thing was behind me turn tail and scramble loudly out of the room, and I threw myself to my feet and followed.

Where should have been my living room was weirdly like the inside of a pub for some reason? But as I got out there, the front door slammed as the Thing hauled ass away from me.

And then I woke up. Middle of the night, husband snoring beside me. Not only have I never had sleep paralysis again, but I've never had a nightmare at all in the... eight or so years since.

[docholligay]

Possibly my spiciest take is that it's actually good to have people you respect and like that have some dogshit takes.

I think part of what is making young people lonelier, in discussing why they're increasingly isolated, is that they're so afraid of meeting someone who doesn't hold their same beliefs, and instead of being just core beliefs it is kinda ancillary shit.

It's actually okay to disagree even on social topics! Even on some political ones! But I mean, online you can start with "i love this mutual but they have a really bad/uninformed opinion about x media"

I know this is IMMEDIATELY going to be taken in bad faith, and yes babygirl, you are so right, I DO want you to go make best friends with both the KKK grand wizard AND your nearest nazi leader.

But seriously, as someone who has spent two decades doing community organization: finding ways to connect with different people is so so so important. There are people i follow here who ate 80% smart and their brain falls out of their head 20% of the time and that is GOOD FOR MY MENTAL ECOSYSTEM AND GOOD FOR LEARNING HOW TO BE A PERSON

LET'S ALL GO PISS ON THE POOR

[mikkeneko]

[notaplaceofhonour]

It’s also good to assume you probably are the friend whose brain falls out 20% of the time.

We all have blind spots, assumptions, and dogshit take from time to time. They can’t all be winners.

[dovewithscales]

To add to that last point, if you think all of your opinions are correct and you aren't already aware that you are the friend who is completely full of shit sometimes... You still are, you're just not self aware about it.

You are, in fact, definitely full of shit some of the time. So am I and so is absolutely fucking everybody. And the only way you can get better is to know that about yourself and be on the look out for when you might be wrong, and ready to change your opinions.

In a similar vein, go watch and enjoy some problematic media and engage with it critically. Acknowledge its flaws while still enjoying yourself and praising what it got right. Go watch, I dunno, Star Trek Voyager or something. Some 90's tv show that had some good points and some epic monologues and also some lazy writing and some astonishingly bad takes. Because it's good for your brain and if you can't handle enjoying shit that's got problems, you're denying yourself almost everything that's ever been made and you're not actually consuming media that's morally beyond reproach, you're consuming media that reinforces the biases and blindspots you already have, because you can't tell that it has problems.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

wear the fuck is all the furry art of Smokey the Bear

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

literally he's a fat outdoorsy anthro bear in jeans who loves nature and has a noble job... this is a fuckable guy. where is his recognition

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

like I don't even want to bang him, that's not my cup of tea, but I'm offended on his behalf. this guy has to be countless peoples gay furry awakening.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

oh my god I used the wrong version of "where" in the first post and didn't even notice. take me out.

[dovewithscales]

I see your point. He is a bear in every possible definition of the word.

How is there Tony The Tiger/The Grinch porn, but Tumblr has yet to expose us all to Smokey The Bear as a leather daddy?

[loveforblackpeople]

[dovewithscales]

Love.

A lot of people don't seem to understand (because the elite have spent enormous resources keeping anyone from understanding) that peaceful protest only works if it's backed up by force. That's why they call it a "demonstration." A peaceful protest is a demonstration of how many people are going to show up to kick in doors and drag the people in power out into the street to be guillotined if they don't comply with the protest.

Ghandi (who also separately was a racist asshole, but I digress) was only effective because the imperialists knew that he was the only thing between them and an angry mob that would burn their houses down with them still inside.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was effective, it was largely because giving ground to him was the only thing keeping more people from picking up guns with Malcolm X.

Peaceful protest can help to raise public awareness as well. The second protest might well have more numbers than the first one, because there are always some people who didn't know your grievance existed until you protested, but it will never actually change anything unless the people in power believe that eventually you will resort to use of force.

This is why peaceful protest is effective in France. Because they have an entire holiday the purpose of which is to remind their government that they once decapitated their entire government and they can and will do so again if necessary.

Trump is still Trumping because Republicans are confident that no matter what they do, there will never be a time that a hundred people kick in their door and beat them to death in their beds.

[dovewithscales]

There are exactly two messages a peaceful protest can send:

"We are trying this first because we don't want to have to kill you and think you should have a fair warning, but violence is on the table and this is how many people are going to be at your execution."

or

"Pwease mister rich man can you stop oppressing us because it would be really nice if you completely changed your character and stopped exploiting and abusing us because a cardboard sign caused you to have a moral and spiritual awakening. uwu"

One of these makes people in power sit up and pay attention. The other makes them laugh all the way to the bank.

The idea that it's important to prevent a peaceful protest from ever being followed by violence and that direct action harms a movement is a psyop to ensure we'll never use methods that are actually effective.

[lovrboyx]

The Last Unicorn really said “There will be times when you can’t find other people like you and there will be times where you'll wonder if you're really the only person experiencing the world as you are and others will even try to take advantage of you through commodification and exploitation to the point where it starts to dilute your own sense of self and will make you question if you were ever you to begin with but it’s important for to resist the urge to assimilate and find community because there will always be people like you who will understand and have experienced these same things and the only way to combat a dark world who wants to smother your light is to FIGHT FIGHT RAGE AGAINST THE RED BULL DO NOT GO GENTLY INTO THAT OCEAN.”

And I just think there’s something beautifully and inextricably queer about that

[dovewithscales]

Go to the ends of the Earth if you must to find your people, because I promise they exist. You are not alone. You are not the last. People will try to cage you or tie you down. Don't let them.

[cryptic-forge]

mushroom twins, mushroom twins, whatever tea could they be spilling?

the purple shroom is the absolute first prototype of this sculpt and still has some joint issues, while the red one is a low-quality print of the fixed, final version. looking forward to printing this one in high quality for the first time.

i painted them as a bit of a self-care exercise after working on the computer too much and needing to touch if not grass, at least a physical paint brush.

[photo credit: posnakkel]

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

the raven (1845) - edgar allan poe

[actual-mothman]

op change ur fucking url

[dovewithscales]

Is there a way to tell which deity a mantis is praying to?

[dovewithscales]

If they're pagan I want to invite them to my church

[dovewithscales]

You're so right. My bad. I'm counting that as pagan and inviting them to Lughnasadh.

[tinyyellowflowers-blog]

Was talking to a coworker today who explained that her grandfather was like Snow White “but Californian. And an old man.” in that the creatures of the forest would follow him around and presumably duet with him.

“When he died the ravens sat in the trees outside for a week, watching. Taking turns. A horde of raccoons tried to break into the house every night, tearing at the siding. Eventually they gave up, but it was unsettling.”

“Aww. They were checking on him!” I said, like a normal person. Internally, I thought “Maybe you could do the thing you do with dead pets, where you show them to the living pets so the living pet understands they’re gone. But I guess if you did that to a bunch of scavenging species, they’d be like “Well, that’s very sad but he IS food now.” So what you’d need, for human sensibilities, is some sort of transparent corpse barrier. Like a see-through coffin oh that’s what the dwarves were doing! You’ve stopped paying attention to this conversation about the loss of a beloved family member you gotta phase back in.”

[sun-ni-day]

oh that's what the dwarves were doing

[gauntletqueen]

Never gonna forgive Disney for making people think Alice had a good time at that tea party

[gauntletqueen]

Does this look like the face of a child who is having a good time?

[im-mender]

Alice at that party

[dovewithscales]

The point of that scene and really the entire story is that the annoying absurdity of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare is how every normal adult tea party feels when you're six. It's a bunch of grownups making a fuss about stupid shit that doesn't make sense to you, while making you follow a bunch of pointless rules and pretend to be listening when you'd rather be off climbing trees or something.

Wonderland isn't a supernatural world. It's a normal Tuesday for Alice. That's just what the world looks like and how you imagine it when you're a kid. A seven year old hears "grinning like a Cheshire cat" and imagines a magical cat that can smile. Or hears someone mention a dragonfly and pictures a dragon with insect wings. Or listens to a completely normal political discussion and understands it as being as ludicrously nonsensical as the Dodo Bird's caucus race.

Threaded through with Lewis Carroll's commentary to the effect that the world is in fact exactly that ridiculous and a lot of the things the people around him did and said were exactly as inane as Wonderland seems.

[quasi-normalcy]

I find this fascinating because C.S. Lewis has this whole theological argument about the pure and simple faith of children; and then it turns out that, when you show a movie based on a Bible story to kids who weren't raised in that tradition...they just end up thinking that God is a monster.

(Prince of Egypt still has banger songs though, obviously)

[smoke-puff]

tbh if someone believes in god(s) and is not a misotheist, what are they doing

[quasi-normalcy]

Being happy and enjoying their life, I'd imagine.

[smoke-puff]

also ignoring a lot of problems their god could but won't solve.

[quasi-normalcy]

In my experience, most of them console themselves with the idea that God is infinitely wiser than them and that there's a purpose to of the suffering, even if they don't have the context to see it. I mean, I don't agree, but I can see how that would be a comforting thing to believe.

[dovewithscales]

*sigh*

Why must people insist upon projecting their perception of Christianity onto all religion? If you make a statement about all religion, you're wrong. Full stop.

The assumption being made in this thread is divine omnipotence. That the divine could make a perfect world without suffering and chooses not to.

That is a fallacy unique to monotheism and mostly unique to Christianity. The rest of us don't think of our gods as omnipotent. They're limited and fallible and bound by rules. The linked video is only about Christianity. It's not about divinity in general.

[weevil-mastermind]

Famously only Christians believe in the story of Moses.

My hindu mother believes that God* is incredibly powerful, powerful enough to alleviate suffering but for some reason is very selective in which suffering he chooses to alleviate. For example, she believes that when someone recovers from a serious illness that it is the work of God, but she is reluctant to grapple with what that means about all those sick people who never recover. When pressed on this in the past, she basically fell back on the same cope as Christians.

So no, this is not at all exclusive to Christianity.

*Hinduism is a polytheistic religion but she usually refers to God, singular. I assume it’s because she is a follower of Sai Baba of Shirdi who as I understand it syncretized aspects of Hinduism and Islam.

[dovewithscales]

Please note that I did not say it was exclusive to Christianity. I said it was exclusive to monotheism. Which it is.

I'm quite familiar with Hinduism, actually. By no means an expert, but familiar. It famously simultaneously has elements of monotheism and polytheism, hence your mother saying god singular. What is true of religion broadly (that all generalizations are probably wrong) is also true of Hinduism individually. There are a lot of contradictory ideas which are simultaneously true, including complicated and nuanced ideas about how powerful the gods are and the way the cosmos functions, and whether or not it can be considered a quasi-monotheistic religion.

And yes, your mother's reductive interpretation may be influenced by Islam, famously a monotheistic religion, and an Abrahamic one. Nor is your mother's personal set of beliefs representative of Hinduism as a whole.

I say it's a mostly Christian problem, because there's a great deal more nuance in... pretty much all other monotheistic religions, including Islam and Judaism. Nuance is a thing which exists.

[muffinworry]

Hey don't cry, okay? We just found Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a species thought to be extinct for the past 60 years.

[1968bullittmustang]

Attenborough’s echidna rediscovered by combining Indigenous knowledge with camera-trapping - npj Biodiversity

We confirm the ‘rediscovery’ of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi), one of only five modern egg-laying mammals and

[mecha-cthulhu]

So Sir David Attenborough was already a well known naturalist(the docementary kind, not the nudist kind) in 1961 to have an animal named after him, then lived 60 years thinking the animal went extinct and now lives to see evidence of it not being extinct. That is both incredibly heartwarming and a very Elf-core thing of him to do. He truly is an archdruid

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I do wish we could make it a little more socially acceptable to wander the streets at night weeping inconsolably I feel like that would have a great catharsis factor for a lot of people

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

listen it was a lighthearted goof but I am a little sick of people going "um what's stopping you?? no one will care." I'm glad that you live somewhere that people walking around showing signs of loud emotional distress never get harassed or bothered or have the cops called on them! not everyone does.

[dovewithscales]

Your desire to become a yokai is valid and I support you.

[ao3commentoftheday]

Did you know that AO3 allows fics with homicide in them? There’s a whole tag for Major Character Death and even more tags so you can find exactly what kind of character death you want to read. 

Don’t they know that murder is illegal? You just know there are a bunch of homicidal maniacs out there who love to read those stories. They write them, too, in between killing people. 

Anyone can read the stories on AO3! Kids can read them! They’re getting exposed to stabbing, poisoning, even guns! And they’re writing the heroes doing the killing, too! That’s basically telling kids it’s okay to go out and murder their families. It’s promoting violence and encouraging homicide and if we don’t do something about it soon, you’ll be murdered next!

[zoanzon]

[ao3commentoftheday]

The devil came to my house and tried to burn it down, which is why this post exists in the first place.

[jennelikejennay]

When I see people say "abolish copyright, it only serves big corporations," I imagine saying, "The whole system of employment only serves big corporations....so abolish wages. People appreciate service workers and will tip them even if they don't have to."

Like. Clearly you have not tried to pay the bills on book sales.

We definitely need to reform the copyright system so they actually protect small creators instead of Disney, but a state of total anarchy has never yet been demonstrated to protect the vulnerable. In the absence of regulation, the strong oppress the weak. Bad regulation only helps them oppress the weak more, but no regulation is not the answer.

How to do that is a complicated question. I have some ideas. But I feel like once the end goal is protecting the individual who does the creative work, it's not that hard to brainstorm better solutions.

[dovewithscales]

I mean.... "The human who put pen to paper (hand to keyboard, brush to canvas, etc.) owns the full copyright for their work and it cannot be transferred by any means to any other entity."

That pretty much solves the problem. Everything else is just details. Disney shouldn't be able to own a copyright and the copyright for Mickey Mouse should have ceased to exist when he died.

We could maybe maybe do something to the effect of a creator being able to pass copyright to an heir on their death, but I don't think that's actually that important, and it needs to be an actual human and not a company. What's most important is that Josh D'Amaro (current Disney CEO) shouldn't have a say in shit because he's not the artist. If the artist who draws a character decides to take their art and go home Disney should be fucked, so they should treat their artists well.

I legit think the writer of a book shouldn't be able to sell copyright to a movie studio, because then they cannot be pressured into doing so. Peter S. Beagle had to fight for literal decades to get paid for The Last Unicorn movie because he got ripped off by the studio. That couldn't happen if the studio couldn't give him a contract to sign but instead had to just give him money and a director and let him control the entire process and take their percentage of the money he makes on his work.

You make it, you own it. You didn't make it, you don't own it. Simple.

[jennelikejennay]

I more or less agree with you. I've done work for hire and it's an important way creatives can pay the bills (sometimes on the driest, least creative stuff ever), but I feel there can be a way you can rent your intellectual property while retaining your ultimate rights. I think Germany has something like that.

Now where it gets hairy is team projects. A movie is the work of thousands of creatives. How do we honor all of those rights? But I do think there are ways. A limited term would have to be part of it. It's deeply unfair to creators when a corporation hires a bunch of people to make a movie and then trashes their hard work so nobody can see it. There's got to be a limit on it, so that even if the corporation doesn't care to profit by it, the people who worked on it can still share it around and get it seen.

[dovewithscales]

My instinct on movies is that the studio's involvement should end when they write a check. Every movie has to begin with a conversation between a studio executive and a creative. Studio calls a director and asks them to make a movie, or director calls a studio and asks them to fund a project, or studio reaches out to a writer and asks to make a movie out of their book.

But that one (1) meeting should end with the executives writing a check, and then they don't even need to see anything until the movie is complete beyond the extent to which the production crew needs their equipment, sound stages, etc. Writer and/or director hire everyone else. Only those people have any say at all.

It's already built into the process that the director has final say on every creative decision and takes feedback from everyone else. Or if the movie is based on a book and the writer is alive then it's the same but the writer of the book has universal veto power over the director. But what's important is that the studio executives shut the fuck up and aren't even allowed to see the script at this point. They do not get to tell the director that they want the movie to be more pro military or less queer or they want the protagonist to be played by someone who's already famous.

I don't have an answer for whether or not the novel writer and the director should be able to replace the screenplay writer or the camera crew when they make a sequel, but I do know the studio's only involvement with the sequel should be deciding whether or not to write another check for it, and if the novel writer and/or director don't want to make a sequel, the studio should sit down and shut up and accept that they can't have a sequel.

I'm also on the fence about what to do if the writer/director wants a sequel but an actor doesn't want to come back. There has to be some kind of obligation to that actor before they can recast a character that the actor brought to life. Which, usually they write the character out of the script anyway because it breaks the audience's immersion, at least in live action. Recasting is more common in animation, but it seems to me that once a movie's been made the ownership of the character is sort of shared between the writer and the actor, and the animator.

But things like... off the top of my head, the creator of the Sonic The Hedgehog comics got completely cut out of the creative process of the games. And Peter S Beagle didn't get paid for The Last Unicorn movie. That should be impossible.

Conversely, I don't really give a shit what the Tolkien Estate thinks about anything Lord of the Rings at this point. I mean fuck Amazon in general and I'm not watching their Middle Earth garbage, but I kinda think copyright on Lord of the Rings should have died with Christopher Tolkien, and that only because Christopher literally helped write The Silmarillion. If you want to write a sequel to Lord of the Rings or what the fuck ever and publish it for money, you should probably be allowed to do that.