big yeet

big yeet.

[sheabutterbitch]

How I donate to incarcerated individuals for the holidays:

I browse the website writeaprisoner.com to search through profiles of people who are currently incarcerated throughout the country. You can filter your search by location, race, age, sex, etc. I utilize this feature because I typically donate to individuals who are marginalized by race, gender, sexuality, etc. 

You can also view each person’s charges if you have preferences against donating to folks incarcerated for specific offenses like sexual predation. 

I check their profile for their institutional e-mail which should be called “JPay.” Click the JPay hyperlink on their profile to be directed to this page which will instruct you on how to write letters and send money through the service.

Unfortunately, not every detention center on this site provides access to this service, but most of them do. I do not have experience with other institutional e-mails, but I’m sure most of them work in the same way as JPay. 

From there, simply create a JPay account or login if you already have one. They pretty much walk you through how to send money and e-mails to a person of your choosing using their Inmate ID# which is listed on their profile under the “Contact” → “By Mail”” section. 

There are several other ways to put money on someone’s books, this is just a method that has been proven to work for me personally. Please let me know if you are confused about anything or run into any problems.

[rustchild]

I am mere centimeters away from writing a full on essay about how the “goblins are inherently antisemitic” myth spawned by this website propagates misinformation, displays a huge misunderstanding of what folklore is and does, and contributes to an environment that distracts people from how antisemitism actually operates and the ways in which it’s dangerously on the rise in our current climate–something which, surprise surprise, has almost nothing to do with little green fairy men

[rustchild]

There are antisemitic iterations of the goblin! There are also antisemitic iterations of basically everything in European folklore, because if there was one thing people in Europe loved it was hating Jews! But those aren’t definitive and the problem there didn’t originate with the invention of the goblin–which was an evolution of other existing fairy myths, overlaps with them, and isn’t nearly as distinct, differentiated, or universally codified as people seem to think. It originated with people hating Jews, and using pre-existing stories and myths to express that hatred. Most of the time, though, they just wrote about Jews, because they didn’t need a secret magical creature code to be terrible to us. They could just do that! The way that people on this website are obsessed with a single, “original” version of a story, which can then be deemed morally acceptable or unacceptable, goes fundamentally against the way folklore is created, propagated, modified, and used to fit different locations at different times. There isn’t a single “problematic” goblin canon you can point to! They aren’t defined that simply! And no, A Certain Popular Fantasy Series doesn’t count! By focusing on the goblin as the problematic thing, and not the stories about Jews that the antisemitic goblin myths–which are rarer than people seem to think–draw off of, the Discourse™ focuses on a single pass/fail signifier of wokeness instead of actually educating people on the complex narratives that have built different iterations of antisemitism over the centuries. It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, not how folklore works. Learn about blood libel, learn about the myth of the Protocols, learn about how antisemitism uses Jews as the powerful other to justify other forms of prejudice and oppression, and don’t write stories about money-obsessed people with hooked noses. Goblins themselves don’t factor into that as anything other than a footnote.   

[purellis]

moved to calain.tumblr.com

[wishbzne-deactivated20210526]

“Most girls and women understand the risks they take when they become angry. No matter how justified, appearing angry won’t do her any favors and will actually undermine people’s perception of her competence and likeability. Studies show that when men are angry, people tend to lose their own confidence and defer to men’s opinions. When women are angry, the opposite happens. Studies also reveal that people will opt to work for angry-sounding aggressive men, but not with angry-sounding aggressive women.”

— Soraya Chemaly, from Does Your Daughter Know It’s OK To Be Angry?

[gnometheartist]

The Ride of the Rohirrim . The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers / J.R.R. Tolkien

[gnometheartist]

Fingolfin across the Helcaraxë. The Silmarillion / J.R.R. Tolkien

[minotauri]

yiling laozu

[keikosamachan]

Universe

[tombliboos]

Joe Biden using the Italian NHS as an example against universal healthcare *at this particular moment in time* is everything I need to know this fucker is worse than Donald Trump.

I want to clarify something because there are many Americans on the internet and it seemed that neither Biden nor Sanders have adequate understanding of the situation, that is why Sanders could not counter attack properly to Biden's disgraceful remarks.

First, no healthcare system in the world is well-equipped to deal with a massive influx of patients, let alone many requiring intensive care because we are sick from a virus we have no cure or antibodies for.

Second, the funding for Italian NHS has been cut dramatically (approx 37 billion over 10 years) in the name of neoliberal policies, with the blessing of the European Union pushing for cutting the public and outsourcing healthcare to privates.

Third, the Italian NHS is decentralized. There are 20 regions in Italy and each one manages its own healthcare services. This has been a problem since ever because poorer regions = worse healthcare and decentralized system = no coordination for national emergencies.

Fourth, we are managing as best as we can DESPITE the cuts. There has been executive government mismanagement at the beginning and people partyin' and wildin' even though corona was around, which did not help.

Fifth, DESPITE everything Italy consistently ranks among Top 5 in Europe and world. America is, like, #37 or sumn. No healthcare system is without problems, the American one is just too insane to sustain. Whether universal healthcare works or not pretty much depends on how much funding it gets.

Sixth. Cutting funds to public healthcare is no less of a violence than lynching an immigrant or denying abortion. Cutting funds to public services, healthcare on top of everything, is violence. It's a violence against those who cannot afford to go private. It's a violence against those who rely on it to fucking live. Proper funding of public services is a way to ensure equality. Neoliberalism is not the lesser evil. Neoliberalism IS the evil.

[rudjedet]

bartering is way worse than having tokens that are worth something to everyone. you want some food? too bad! the farmer wants wood, and you can't get wood

You don’t actually know how barter systems work, do you?

[bubobubosibericus]

That’s one short sighted farmer if he only settles for wood.

Does he not need my help in the harvesting season? Does he have no interest in silver, which he can exchange for wood? Does he not have a fence in need of fixing? Or someone to help him process that wood? Did I not help him with his cattle a week ago?

Bartering is not colonists of catan, anon.

And besides, not like your premise wouldn’t apply in a money based economy: if you have nothing to sell, you won’t earn anything.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Same weight value means nothing to this anon. 

In a non monetary economy, say, ohhhh I don’t know….Ancient Egypt, it is not about what the merchant needs personally (they can barter for those items themselves), but is the weight value of the item. Ancient Egypt worked in weights (here’s an ask I did ages ago on some measurements) and the most common ones for everyday use were khar (grains), hin/jar (liquids), and copper deben (solid items). If you worked in fields, your pay might be 3 khar of emmer wheat, and 4 jars of beer and maybe some cooking oils and some ungents for a weeks work (I’m pulling these numbers up theoretically. I could find the real numbers but I don’t want to rn) and you’d go home. Most of it would go towards feeding the family, but you could swap one of those jars of beer with a friend for…a chicken. With this chicken you can go to the market. You know a chicken is worth about 4 deben weights, so when you go out you can barter with various merchants for items worth 4 deben in weight. At one merchant you barter the chicken for good upper egyptian linen 2 deben, 1 hin of honey (say, 0.5 deben), a wooden toy for a child 0.5 deben, and some vegetables 1 deben. Those numbers are made up for the example, but this is how it worked. 

It’s not about what the merchant wants, though undoubtedly they will want certain higher value items to resell, but about the weight value of an item. A chicken has a high weight value, and therefore they can get a lot more with it. You could purchase a cow with the right weight in fruit and vegetables, and the merchant can use those vegetables to feed his family. There wasn’t this concept we have now of ‘I must hoard all of the coins until I alone have the most coins making me the best coin hoarder’, the Egyptians actually helped each other. 

[rudjedet]

I wasn’t going to dirty more words on this, but since we have these on-point additions so far, I’d also like to point out that it’s absolutely not the case that there are only two mutually exclusive options in “barter system” and “monetary system”. 

There are, in fact, different kinds of market economies within either monetary or barter systems. For instance, there exists bilateral trade (an exclusive trade between two parties) or multilateral trade (trade between more than two parties). There’s also the gift system, which economists consider a separate system entirely from barter or monetary. In addition, as I’ve pointed out in the tags already, bartering can and does exist parallel to monetary systems.

In ancient Egypt, we’re likely dealing with a (pre-capitalist) non-monetary market economy, functioning through a barter system based on weight value of items, as Lottie described above. 

I’ve answered an ask about this before, but I’ll copy-paste the relevant bit:

As for the economy, there are two main theories concerning the economic reality of ancient Egypt.

One is the redistribution theory, which is centred around the idea that the Egyptian state would simply stow already-existing agricultural surplus away for use in more difficult times. Although we have evidence that agricultural surplus did, in fact, get redistributed, farmers generally aren’t in the habit of producing more than they need (“need” includes creating surplus produce which they could use to barter for items they couldn’t produce themselves or animals).

The other theory, mostly spear-headed by David Warburton, is that the Egyptian economy is best described as a non-monetary market economy, meaning that production was guided by supply and demand even in the absence of a specific medium of exchange, such as money. We know of fiscal measurements, and we know that for example the temples were economic institutions in addition to religious ones, which supports the idea that the Egyptian economy was at least in part based on a model of supply and demand.  

While the idea that the Egyptian state only took what the farmers naturally overproduced without any intervention or push to create more is shaky, at best, this doesn’t mean that redistribution theory is completely wrong. The Egyptian economy may have started out as a pure form of redistribution, which might have proven unsustainable for a growing state, even if the redistribution is what helped the young nation flourish. That’s where supply & demand and fiscal measures come in: when farmers have to produce more and relinquish this surplus to the state as a form of (non-monetary) taxes, the state is able to keep up a supply for redistribution in times of need.

Of course, that need could be “there was a drought last year and now the people are starving”, or it might just as easily have been “the king needs a third pyramid and we need grain to provide the worker’s wages”.

The idea that a barter system is “way worse” because it has no “tokens” that are “worth the same to everyone” ignores complicated economical and societal realities of cultures both past and present, and quite frankly operates on an unwillingness to consider the history of the world, as Barry Kemp literally pointed out in the quote that this was undoubtedly a response to. 

Monetary systems aren’t the end-all, be-all my dudes. And it’s certainly not as simple as “har har barter bad money gud”. To genuinely believe that would require ignoring the fact that societies with a barter system such as Pharaonic Egypt existed and flourished for thousands of years. As with anything, both systems have their advantages and disadvantages.

[jedusaur]

why you should not dismiss research unless you rly truly mean it

Internet, I am a queer researcher of queer health and I have something to say.

A few weeks back, a study went viral about the relationship between marriage equality policy and queer teen suicide rates, and a lot of people reacted thusly: “queer mental health is better when we’re not discriminated against! BREAKING: SKY IS BLUE, WATER IS WET”

This happens a lot. People see research about a thing ~Everyone Already Knows~ and they mock it. Now I want to make two things really clear:

1. Everyone does not already know.

2. This shit can lose these projects their funding.

Did you know that media coverage is a crucial factor in funding allocation? When we submit our application for grant renewal, we have to provide a list of news articles about our research so they can decide whether the public cares enough about us to let us keep doing our work. And most research doesn’t get all that much coverage, so individual reactions can really matter. If the primary reaction to our publications is eyerolling, we legitimately might not be able to continue.

I’ve seen some frustration from people who believe this research funding would be better put to use “actually helping” the affected populations instead of–I don’t know, pinning them under microscopes or whatever it is they think we do. But funding for policy initiatives is driven by research. I know you wish politicians would listen to individual voices telling them where the problems are, but that’s honestly not a smart way to direct limited resources. We need solid evidence. And a lot of the areas that need the most attention aren’t obvious–who knew bisexual people are at a much higher risk for physical and mental health disparities than gay and lesbian people? Who would have guessed that transgender folks are more likely than any other group (including straight people) to be military veterans, but overwhelmingly don’t claim their benefits? I’m sure some people noticed these patterns, but they definitely weren’t common knowledge within the queer communities I’ve grown up around, and those findings are leading to direct action as we speak.

I get that it can be frustrating to feel like your identity is being reduced to facts and figures for the benefit of red tape. But trust me, the researchers aren’t your enemy here. Most of us are queer too. All of us are just as frustrated by this crap as you are. We are doing our best, and I swear to you this work really is making a difference. Please don’t sabotage it.

[tvatemybrain]

I’m reblogging this because it only has 9 notes, and it should really, REALLY have a lot more.

[sidereanuncia-blog-deactivated2]

Also, given the current US administration’s plan to stop collecting data on LGBTQ identities as part of the census, we are in need of accurate, useful data now more than ever.

[downtroddendeity]

Plus the ability to cite peer-reviewed evidence of these sorts of things and quantify the extent of “obvious” effects can be pretty important to researchers who are working in adjacent fields that don’t produce the sorts of headline soundbites that get mocked on social media.

And often headlines and summaries are misleading and reductive- a study about wage gaps across a variety of demographics might get headlined “Women Still Make Less Than Men, New Study Shows” when the bulk of the paper is about the intersection of race and gender identity, and I’ve seen people on Tumblr mocking a study about the flavor compounds in food across the Indian subcontinent, conducted by Indian scientists at an Indian university, as “LOL white people don’t know how to cook.”

[jamyesterday]

And to add to this– it’s also important to be able to point to something and say, no, the problem is not that these people aren’t straight. Being able to point to actual science that says, “no, it’s not us, it’s you and how you treat us”– well, that’s a a good thing.

There are a lot of people out there who genuinely believe that being any flavour of queer is intrinsically harmful to you. That unhappiness is a natural result of being gay, that to be trans is to be mentally ill, that bisexuals are confused and troubled. There are people who believe that you cannot be happy or well if you’re queer, and not all of those people are bad people. Some of them have what they perceive to be your best interests at heart, and they want you to be happy, to be well, to be physically, emotionally and mentally safe. And they still act in a way that causes harm, that damages lives, isolates kids and tells them that pain is what they should expect for being who they are.

It’s important to be able to say, “these policies kill kids”, to say, “no, this wouldn’t have happened anyway”, to say, “yes, it does matter what you do.”

[solrosan]

I would also like to add that research take time. Most of the time it’s not throwing up a survey on Tumblr and doing some pretty charts after a week. It’s interview upon interview, it’s third-source data collecting, it’s reading everything that was written by people before you, it’s crying in the shower, it’s transcribing those interviews, it’s looking and finding and analyzing patterns within your data set, it’s realizing half-way through that you don’t have enough material and need to go out and do it all again to make it statistically reliable…

Research take time. Years. And it’s not just the research itself. The results of a social change can’t be scientifically measured two days after it became law. It takes time to see how that effects people. It doesn’t happen over night.

I saw a study published in the early 00′s that said that exercise was good for you. Like, no shit, Sherlock! The researcher, however, had followed about 500 people for 20 years to see if that jogging lark was just an 80′s fad or if actually did good. Turns out, it did, and they can say for sure that there were a lot of positive, long-term effects.

Research takes time. Let it.

[gone-elsewhere-see-ya-soon-deac]

some TES lore stuff you should know about

dragons are actually gendered! and, barring Alduin ofc, the male dragons aren’t SHIT compared to the Jills: female dragons tasked with keeping Tamriel’s time and timeline intact. if you’ve ever wondered why someone couldn’t travel back in time with magic to prevent shit like baar dau falling in morrowind or finding a way to stop dagon without having martin sacrifice himself, it’s probably because a Jill ate them.

TES is actually post-apocalypse! tamriel’s mannish society reached their height sometime in the 2nd era with actual fucking astron- excuse me, “mananauts” and spaceships and technology. elven culture peaked in the Merethic Era. everything from the 3rd era to 4th era circa skyrim is basically a huuuuge dark age for society as a whole. it fucking skyrockets to abstract star wars shit by the 5th era, so everything’s alright

every culture in TES has a tower: the altmer have Crystal-like-Law, the orcs with Orichalc, humans with White-Gold, bosmer with Green-Sap, etc. the khajiit’s tower is a literal tower of khajiits stacking on top of each other to reach the moons like a bunch of furry dorks

Lorkhan is not an Aedra (as, by definition, he did not give to Mundus), not a Daedra (no, Nirn is NOT his realm in Oblivion), not a Magna-Ge (duh), and not an Ada (as he was fundamentally changed after viewing the Aurbis on its side). What IS he, then? /shrug

Alduin isn’t the first son of Akatosh so much as he’s the first son of Aka-Tusk/AKA, but skyrim doesn’t mention this because it would confuse the fuck outta casuals, so Akatosh is the closest to what Aka-Tusk was.

SPEAKING OF: Auri-El, Akatosh, Tall Papa, Alduin, and such and such are all shards of an oversoul of the OG god of time Aka-Tusk. Why are they all separate now? Blame Marukh and his Selectives.

[gone-elsewhere-see-ya-soon-deac]

some more lore shit (with tags! and point lists!!) to know about:

CHIM is not becoming God, and it’s not becoming a Godhead. the closest analogy is something like having access to the Creation Kit and the tilde menu, but it’s closer still to “lucid dreaming” in that sense

Khajiit are closer to Mer genealogy than Bosmer! khajiit are referred to by altmer as “kinsmer” while bosmer are seen as…not so much that. it’s weird, i know

when someone refers to a “dragon break”, it basically means “time fucked itself silly and now a million million possibilities have occurred, and Weird Time Shit is going on”; a DBreak is used to explain the multiple endings of Daggerfall back when Bethesda probably thought TES wouldn’t take off (the same probable reason as to why Dragon Age: Origins has multiple endings while 2 and 3…don’t) and, to the fans, explains TES:O’s general existence

SPEAKING OF DAGGERFALL!!!! TES: Arena was originally meant to be a fighting game! and, like another popular series that started as a fighting game, it spiraled into a complete different genre!! except it became a different genre like halfway into development, soooo yeah

Morrowind is where the name “Michael Kirkbride” officially becomes synonymous with the series. for reference, Michael Kirkbride is to TES what Grant Morrison is to DC Comics.

Vivec and MK’s OC have a baby who births a new universe and that universe houses Akavir, whose leader is a tiger-dragon named Tosh Raka.

redguards have a technique called sword-singing, where they basically argue a Not-Magic Sword into existence and, using the technique known as Pankratosword, set off a nuclear explosion (this is how yokuda sunk)

btw the redguards lost the usage of this technique, and perhaps for the better

like no really, playing a redguard in Skyrim and getting ready to face Alduin and you just…nuke him? and all of sovngarde? and the dreamsleeve collapses???????

dwemers are basically fedora-tipping atheists except they atheist-toned their entire race’s existence into the skin of a massive brass robot whose sole existence is to break reality by saying “NO” really fucking loud at everything and everyone in its vicinity at the same time. it actually failed; it was meant to, upon activation, BREAK ALL OF REALITY ALL AT ONCE (thank the eight nine they failed)

btw this was supposed to be their god, manmade and tailored to their goals

there was a lady named saint alessia, and she freed the nedes (the humans before humans we have now) in the 1st era and her partners in crime were pelinal whitestrake (the closest thing to a Tamrielic Terminator powered by the pendant she would soon be gifted at her deathbed) and Morihaus (a winged bull that she fucked)

yeah, she fucked the bull. that’s how minotaurs happened

SPEAKING OF WTF SEX: reman cyrodiil, the big honcho after alessia, was born from a dude fucking a mound of wet dirt that kinda looked like alessia and he was born…after he jizzed in the dirt and died, and a witness got…injured? from seeing this??? (i mean i would to)

actually just…read about reman cyrodiil. please. this man is a national treasure

OK SO SPEAKING OF ALESSIA AGAIN there was this bipedal monkey named Marukh, and he had this HUUUUUGE Alessia-centric cult and tried to enforce a kinda-sorta monotheistic religion centering around aka-tusk akatosh. problem is: aka-tusk akatosh has elven aspects to him, and Marukh HATES elves, and really so does EVERYONE in this Selective. soooo they dance on top of White-Gold Tower, recreate Convention, and basically purge Aka-tusk Akatosh of his elven elements, which breaks the dragon HARD and creates the Middle Dawn, or: “Man Got Salty About Elves And Fucked Reality Right In Its Eyesocket To Spite Them“.

also when you change something in the present when it comes to shit like the divines, it retroactively becomes true forever and always, e.g. akatosh is ALWAYS akatosh

AND SPEAKING OF AKATOSH (AND ALESSIA, AGAIN): the modern “Imperial cult” and its pantheon is actually a cultural mish-mash of the Elven Aedra and the Nord totem spirit-gods. some gods translated well (e.g. Dibella, Mara, Zenithar) and some not so much or not so well (e.g. Akatosh, Arkay, Julianos). “where’s Lorkhan?” you ask. well: the Nords have Shor, but Shor Is Not Lorkhan (Per Se) and is the Nords’ cultural hero-god; Lorkhan, to the elves, is Evil And Awful And Terrible and they hate him

so he’s technically not part of the Divines, originally

that would be the role of Shezarr, who’s kind of a blend of Shor and Lorkhan

but Shor Is Not Lorkhan and Lorkhan Is Not Really Shezarr and Shezarr is not Shor but Tiber Septim is All Of Them Combined (yes, like Captain Planet)

but they still kind of are the same being (blame Hjalti Early-Beard/Tiber Septim, Wulfharth, and Arctus Zurin)

[alandrosul]

oblivion crisis denialism. it didn’t actually happen, it’s just a thalmor false flag

[boethiah]

oblivion crisis relativism. it happened, but was it really such a crisis from the daedra’s point of view? let’s look at different perspectives

[alandrosul]

mezzik the clannfear says “EEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” revealing the dark truth that we DID go into their homes, kill their families, and steal their sigil stones. really makes you wonder if WE’RE the bad guys here 🤔

[chameleonspell]

Yeah, are you xenophobic or something? Immigrants are the lifeblood of our economy and countries aren't real, people and daedra deserve free movement! #noborders

[boethiah]

conjurers have been exploiting daedra for menial labour for ages, but the moment we want to move to tamriel they’re suddenly an “existential threat” to “reality itself”? that just doesn’t seem fair! 

[thekatbirdscrolls]

the ‘dagoth ur did nothing wrong, sincerely!’ crowd worry me a bit because it’s pretty damn clear (to me anyway) in morrowind that his rhetoric is reactionary. like his liberating morrowind schtick isn’t anti-colonial action, it’s about enforcing a certain type of dunmer supremacy.

an actual anti-colonial struggle would involved the most oppressed in morrowind, which are actually argonians and khajiit: the slave class. it would abolish slavery and provide reparations for the formerly enslaved *on top of also* ridding morrowind of cyrodiilic colonialism. ashlanders, who have been driven to more and more barren lands by house dunmer, would also have to be greatly involved and reparations (including land that was taken from them) would have to be provided for them as well.

INSTEAD, in the game, dagoth ur /the 6th house is allied with the commona tong, a racist and reactionary force in morrowind. it is thoroughly anti-abolition of slavery and is very comfortable with keeping the khajiit and argonians as a slave class. this is speculation on my part but i’d imagine they would be more okay with the eradication of these races before accepting the abolition of slavery. 

on top of that, corprus. its use as a biological weapon to weed out the unworthy is very fascist.

so yeah this was a far too serious ramble on why dagoth ur and the 6th house are reactionary forces that use the language of liberation for propaganda purposes. he’s a very interesting character and his back story allows for hints of tragedy, but by the time the events of morrowind occur he is extremely not a good dude and he did quite a few things wrong! i think part of his tragedy IS the fact that he ended up the way he did: not just his almost quasi-undead state, but his worldview and politics (which are, as stated, reactionary and fascistic).

ok i’m really done now i promise

[chameleonspell]

today in: i can´t believe we still have to say this

[skirris]

i cant be the only one who cares about jane prentiss’s red dress??? i cant be the only one overwhelmed by the image of this style icon?? hole-covered, dilapidated flesh; barefoot; flashy red party number; worms

[cantarellangel-deactivated]

Martin, the 2 weeks he was trapped in his apartment, eating canned food and listening to the knocking on his door:

[hunnybunnytriesart]

"I do not know why the hive chose me, but it did. And I think that it always had. The song is loud and beautiful and I am so very afraid."

[purellis]

wow this is so good???