PLEASE DON'T ASK ABOUT THE HEADER IMAGE I mostly reblog/post stuff about horror podcasts, or Jekyll and Hyde. Occasionally I reblog other things. they/he, adult call me Briar, or butterfly or origami, or any nickname you think fits!
My name is Briar, but you can call me origami, or butterfly, or any other nickname!
My pronouns are they/them and he/him, and very occasionally she/her
I am a christian, but I respect all other religions, and if you don't like the fact I'm a christian, you can leave
I am an adult, but my blog is mostly sfw
I have a gimmick/poll blog, called @wouldyoutrustthemtodoyoursurgery and also a jekyll and hyde themed project which I have an intro post for, here
I don't really see the point in having a DNI- I think I reblog enough to keep bigots away, but if you are pro-israel, don't support queer christians, or are a harry potter fan, please leave. Also no "trans masc vs trans fem" discourse people, all trans people face oppression and you should stop aiming your anger at each other. 🍉🇵🇸
If you want me to share a fundraiser, please don't send it to my asks, I will assume you are a bot, and it will be deleted and reported as spam.
Explanation of my tags under the cut
All personal posts or rambles are tagged as #my random stuff
Ask prompts, and responses to them are tagged as #ask game
Miscellaneous asks are tagged as #asks and asks from mutuals will usually have the tag #friend [name or nickname] <2
Interactions with mutuals are normally tagged #mutus (because I hate the word "moots")
All the "you must reblog this" posts, I will tag as #not ocd friendly and #reblog bait, and I will always use the trigger tags #tw suicide or #tw suicide mention and #tw trypophobia when needed- if you want me to trigger tag anything else, let me know.
If you ask very nicely, I will show you pictures of my cat, her name is Missy, and those are usually tagged with #my cat
you make one fucking post where the point is “women are encouraged to develop disordered eating from a very young age and that impacts how we view the ‘natural’ size and shape of women” and too many reblogs later i am being accused of saying short people wouldn’t exist if they ate better growing up. i’m sorry but if you genuinely think i was saying that you are just a buffoon. i cannot and will not sanction your buffoonery.
i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.
To be very clear about this: CPUs aren't magical devices that can operate forever. They generate heat. They wear out over time. This happens faster when they're operating near capacity. This is not just an attempt to inconvenience you; this is an attempt to damage your property.
For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.
Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.
Fuck Google, and I hope they get sued into oblivion over this.
i see everyone in the notes talking about newpipe but nobody's talking about youtube alternatives for desktop
IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS
https://invidious.io/
it is a free, open-source alternative YouTube front-end. in addition to not having ads, it has other great QoL features like a download button. try one of the several instances on that link up there ^^^^
so i was super pissed and concerned about this but i have just discovered that while this is true, it is apparently only true for google chrome users. i just tested this by having ten tabs open in firefox playing ten different youtube videos at the same time and my cpu usage spiked to 25% as the videos were loading and then dropped back down to 10% as they played.
if you ever needed another reason to switch to a different browser, this is it.
still feel like we have not appropriately tapped into the comedy goldmine that is: Dracula's first canonical appearance features him wearing a goofy hat and a huge false beard. this is uproarious. this is rib-tickling! this has so many implications!!!
where on earth did he get the beard? he lives in the middle-of-nowhere and all of his neighbors are too terrified to cook or clean for him. where did he find someone to sell him a false beard?
was it mail-order, the way presumably all of his books and maps are? did they even have cartoonish disguises available by mail-order back in late 19th cent Romania? did Dracula have to sew it himself? i need to know these things!!!
@chaos-has-theories truly you live up to your url:
#clearly Dracula goes out irregularly as his own servants. The people in the coach weren't surprised to see him as his 'coachman' #he goes to town in his huge floppy hat and hoitily toitily tells everybody that his MASTER wants this and his MASTER wants that #and if they don't comply his MASTER is going to be angry and scahahary and anyway he's having the time of his life #He's convinced that he's fooling everyone. He is not #but the point is he can just buy whatever and the people will be equal amounts terrified and annoyed but they'll get it for him
i like to imagine the villagers are terrified of him BUT also aware that he is rich-as-midas and out-of-touch with human society...so they just charge him a 500% markup and call it a day. over the years he has become the village's primary source of income and this is the true reason he's been allowed to stay. "yeah he's a bloodsucker but he's propping up a half dozen different local economy sectors we're keeping him"
*dracula strolling to the village to buy a roast chicken for his Good Friend Jonathan* "it's one roast chicken how much could it cost 1604 romanian lei?"
APPRECIATE that I had to research & convert historical exchange rates for this post. 1604 romanian lei is an outrageous price for a chicken. appreciate my historically accurate punchline!!!
We don't know many details surrounding the other Harbinger rings not possessed by Adam and Amy. We can infer that one person got their ring from the South Korean military and Damian is implied to have been given it by the Catholic Church (unless I misunderstood the exchange he has with Amy in the season finale). Adam got his while on a research trip and Amy was given hers by a billionaire. This got really long, so it's going to be under the read more.
It's Amy's ring that I want to focus on because there is a consistent theme throughout the podcast of colonialism. Most of the Harbinger sites we know of were in colonised areas, including the one in County Leitrim. Look at the list of known Harbinger sites here and just look at how many are places France colonised and yet of the three ring bearers who's identities we know for certain, two of them received their rings from locations they have no connections to.
Amy talks about how the most major study of the Leitrim site happened in the 70s and was conducted by a professor from the University of Oxford and how the political climate (the Troubles) may have influenced how that study was done. That it was an English professor from an institution with strong colonialist ties studying on an Irish site while paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland were in the middle of a violent campaign against British occupation. It's clearly drawing attention to who gets to study the Harbinger sites. This was the 70s. Ireland was a sovereign nation with multiple universities and yet it was Oxford conducting this research.
Seemingly, not much has changed since given that Oxford academics are multiple times cited throughout the podcast as being leading experts on the Harbingers but no Irish institutions are ever mentioned. Even when Amy is pitching her research project to the board, she mentions several other universities that may try to get to the Leitrim site first or who are sprinting to investigate the Antarctica site, the University of Oxford among them, but no Irish university is ever brought up. Given how often the Irish Harbinger ruins are mentioned throughout the podcast, the implication, to me at least, is that British research institutions historically excluded Irish institutions from the research or at the very least monopolised resources to study it. Oxford has such an excellent Harbingers research department in part because it's Oxford but also, likely, because it has had lots of time to study and access the Harbinger sites in Ireland. After all, for many centuries Leitrim was British territory, they had easy access to it. (Sidenote: I would also expect that Oxford's experience with Harbinger sites would extend to other locations that Britain colonised such as Australia given the implication that the Doomscroller is Australian) Additionally, note the fact that the site in Leitrim is named the Petrie site, being named after the English researcher who studied it in the 70s. I would think it very unlikely that the land the site was within didn't already have a name that the site could have been named after and yet, it was named after an English researcher (dare I say explorer). In this way, Oxford's study of the Harbingers is a part of the broader British colonial project even in the late 20th century.
Now we come to Eckerberg. Eckerberg is, presumably, American. As far as I recall, he has no ties to the UK or Ireland. He is a private individual operating a business, not an imperialistic empire and yet, he recreates the colonial dynamics. Eckerberg, through a subsidiary company, bought land in County Leitrim to create a windfarm. This land happened to be near or include the Harbinger site where his employees investigated the Harbinger ruins and removed the ring of the mind from the site. It entered into Eckerberg possession and he decided to give it to Amy, another American. At no point in this process was a single Irish person involved, certainly not the Irish government from whom Eckerberg was technically stealing from. (In Ireland national heritiage site, which presumably a Harbinger site would be in this universe, are State property). The nationalities involved here are no mistake. English academics being tied to old school colonialism and an American billionaire using his wealth to conduct neo-colonialism.
Eckerberg had a twofold reason for establishing his windfarm in Ireland. Firstly, to sell wind power and make a tidy profit and secondly, to investigate the site in search of a ring. Amy rails against Eckerberg's use of generating electrical power to give himself more power a lot when it comes to his reactor, but the windfarms are that dilemma on a micro-scale. The second purpose, is neo-colonialism plain and simple. A private entity using economic power to strip value from a country with less power than theirs. Then Eckerberg, who is a private citizen, gets to decide what to do with this ring of immense power that he took out of a sovereign nation, presumably without ever telling anyone (apart from Amy) that he did so. Eckerberg's disregard for political institutions is a running theme in his dynamic with Andi and the way he effectively buys the kind of president he wants to see.
Sidenote: I find it interesting how not once does Amy consider the implications of Eckerberg taking the ring as an act of theft. Why would she? It was her initial plan too. She pitched her research plan with the intent of finding another magical ring. It is explicit in her pitch that she wanted to find a ring for her university (and for herself). What grounds did Amy Sterling have to claim such a ring? She doesn't seem to ever consider why she has the right to it other than 1. she has studied this area extensively and was clever enough to think it was somewhere being overlooked and 2. other people worse than her might get to it first. It's a great example of her self-aggrandizement and certainty that she has to be a savior--which are fantastic character flaws.
This is reflected in her determination to classify the Harbinger relics recovered from the South Korean submarine wreck. She is certain that the knowledge the relics give must be hidden and protected lest people do immense harm due to the knowledge. It's likely the correct stance but it is certainly a paternalistic one. She knows what's right and has to make that decision for the rest of the world, the rest of the world cannot even know that the decision had to be made. She gets to decide what is done with the South Korean relics. She gets to decide what is done with the Ring of the Mind. Eckerberg gets to decide what is done with the Ring of the Mind.
This is not to condemn Amy, it's just pointing out a strand of her hypocrisy and one of the ways Eckerberg acts as her foil.
I expect we're going to see this idea developed further as we meet more ringbearers in later seasons. We don't know how the Doomscroller got his ring but I wouldn't be surpised if we see more examinations of how powerful institutions decide how magic ought to be wielded, independent of already existing power structures that they are theoretically accountable to. We saw this with Eckerberg's economic power, I expect to see it regarding the Vatican (another institution with deep colonial ties) and the military.
I've just finished listening to the Harbingers podcast, a show about what happens when a select few people in our modern world get magical abilities and the political ramifications therein. It's really excellent and its first season just finished. The performances and audio design are really good. It's written by the creator behind Wolf 359 so if you like that style of dialgogue, then this will be up your alley. It's heavily grounded fantasy that's less about the magic itself than the implications of the magic. It is also about how two people fumbling each other led to over a million people dying.
*I had to localize this for Japanese funeral processions (“cremate the dead with their smartphone in the casket”) and Japanese cultural beliefs (the dead crossing “the River Sanzu” instead of the River Styx)
There's a non-zero chance that a prominent British fascist will lose his parliament seat (in a by-election he himself called) to a man wearing a garbage bin on his head.
Handing the Google executive currently chained in my basement a piece of paper that reads "Shall I end your torture?" with one checkbox that reads "No" and another that reads "Maybe later."
Vspph Vphdph Vphcph @origami-butterfly - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
