terrible concept: BBEG who is sick to death of being forced to sign up to websites just to watch a tv show decides to enforce total anonymity on literally every person in the world in a twisted show of benevolence
It's right there: total anonymity. Mom doesn't know who "the boys" are, and the boys don't know who "Mom" is. Candace is the only one unaffected. And maybe Buford, for some reason.
If you're in the US military or National Guard, and are given an illegal or unconstitutional order, the GI Rights hotline (1-877-447-4487) is there to help give you the support you need to do the right thing by refusing it. It would be good to think about this now before it becomes a live issue for you and it would be smart of you to memorize that number.
In fact: you SHOULD share it without your thoughts on the US Military. If someone in the military sees this number and is considering it, they already know. Just let them see the resource.
Is this about how ppl born in the late 20th century have a unique and fluid experience of navigating barriers to information access and its our responsibility to teach the younger folks how to tinker with technology to avoid being spoonfed everything we experience in order to have critical skills that keep us informed, autonomous, and able to hold power despite looming threats of authoritarianism or..........???
Terry Pratchett started his career as a crypto-monarchist and ended up the most consistently humane writer of his generation. He never entirely lost his affection for benevolent dictatorship, and made a few classic colonial missteps along the way, but in the end you’d be hard pressed to find a more staunchly feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist, unsentimental and clear-sighted writer of Old White British Fantasy.
The thing I love about Terry’s writing is that he loved - loved - civil society. He loved the correct functioning of the social contract. He loved technology, loved innovation, but also loved nature and the ways of living that work with and through it. He loved Britain, but hated empire (see “Jingo”) - he was a ruralist who hated provincialism, a capitalist who hated wealth, an urbanist who reveled in stories of pollution, crime and decay. He was above all a man who loved systems, of nature, of thought, of tradition and of culture. He believed in the best of humanity and knew that we could be even better if we just thought a little more.
As a writer: how skillful, how prolific, how consistent. The yearly event of a new Discworld book has been a part of my life for more than two decades, and in that barrage of material there have been so few disappointments, so many surprises… to come out with a book as fresh and inspired as “Monstrous Regiment” as the 31st novel in your big fantasy series? Ludicrous. He was just full of treasure. What a thing to have had, what a thing to have lost.
In the end, he set a higher standard, as a writer and as a person. He got better as he learned, and he kept learning, and there was no “too late” or “too hard” or “I can’t be bothered to do the research.” He just did the work. I think in his memory the best thing we can do is to roll up our sleeves and do the same.
Sam “held a burning hot coal until it nearly took the skin off his hand while maintaining perfect calm and eye contact with the asshole in need of intimidation Just Because” Vimes? Sam “sitting on the stoop with a mug of cocoa and a cigar, cautiously aware of every inch of the scene he’s building” Vimes? Sam “could just tear his sleeve to show the mark of the Summoning Dark but instead tears off his whole goddamn shirt” Vimes? A drama queen? Reaching a bit don’t you think
Yep, certainly doesn’t seem to describe Sam “pretends to eat poison as a power move” Vimes. Not Sam “buries an axe in the table in the Rats Chamber” Vimes.
I mean are we really talking about Sam “yes a whole room full of candles with wicks dipped in holy water is the best way to beat this vampire” Vimes, here? Sam “has fought bad guys on top of a speeding train AND a riverboat during a flood” Vimes, really? Definitely Sam “nearly gets shot in the head by a crossbow bolt that shatters his shaving mirror and then uses the bolt to prop up a shard of said mirror to finish shaving” Vimes we’re discussing here?
vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork
I’m watching The Sword in the Stone for the first time in decades and I’ve gotten to the part where Merlin is trying to get Arthur to lose his virginity to a squirrel.
“Squirrels mate for life Arthur, so the chances of her fucking your best friend and inadvertently causing a schism that leads to the downfall of an entire utopian kingdom are completely nil!”
Ok hopefully this is the last time I add onto this but Arthur marrying the squirrel would stop both of the events that destroyed Camelot - namely the aforementioned falling out with Lancelot AND the birth of Mordred. Being with him since youth, Squirrel would keep Arthur from being seduced by his half-sister Morgause (or Morgan Le Fay in the versions of the myth that cut Morgause out) when he was young and foolish, as he’d already be in a committed relationship and thus wouldn’t be able to be tricked into starting one with said half-sister. No incest means no Mordred. Then, as mentioned above, Squirrel would be a faithful wife, which means Guenevere would be single, which means Lancelot and Guenevere could pork each other without causing a huge row that ends with Lancelot killing dozens of his fellow knights of the round and inspiring several others to turn against Arthur out of loyalty to him.
Camelot would have been saved if Arthur just. Fucked. That. Squirrel.
It started as “I can’t believe Disney made a movie where Merlin tries to get a squirrel to take Arthur’s virginity” and slowly became “I can’t believe Disney’s weird bestiality subplot actually solves the two biggest problems that cause Camelot’s downfall.”
Because as baffling as the squirrel fucking plotline is just on its own, the fact that it’d actually be solution to the eventual problems Arthur faces - whether anyone at Disney was actually thinking about that or not (and I’m guessing not) - is even more so. It is bizarre and unsettling to me that squirrel fucking could have saved Camelot, and that’s, uh, the point of this I guess.
So, pointless fun fact. Around 2008, someone on 4chan actually made a ‘humanized’ version of the squirrel called ‘Hazel’ (i.e. one who had been changed to a human to be with Arthur). For a little while, there were a number of artists making pieces about her, and stories written suggesting alternate histories.
I know it’s a minor point, but I still love the notion that people are still finding ways to rewrite the story so Arthur can f*@# the squirrel.
Whole gallery of pics here, because some of this artwork gets downright amazing…
I think I’ve posted about this before buuuuuuut fuck it? This makes me deliriously happy and sad.
The resolution of Arthur becoming human and having to try to explain himself to a sobbing squirrel is one of my strongest childhood memories about having to deal with heartbreak and I’m literally fucking tearing up right now GOD DAMN YOU TYRANTIS.
I’d just like to point out the growth in this post has mostly coincided with elon’s public spiral downward and I’d like to think we’re all a small part of that
"what if someone calls me a groomer" they already do, quit acting like a fucking democrat and be a comrade and friend to the young trans people in your life
Fanbinding(ish): Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
(More photos below the cut, and I'll add the rest in another reblog.)
I had the idea for this four years ago. I actively started on the typeset about two years ago. I finished the typeset in about two weeks before the NG news broke--in fact I'd sent him an ask on tumblr just before he left, asking him if there's an explanation for Good Omens's inconsistent dropcaps. Maybe I'll ask the publisher.
Anyway! I almost didn't keep going, but I'd already put an insane amount of hours into the typeset, and also, fuck it. So I did it mostly for me, but also for Terry Pratchett, and also for the vine.
For those who aren't familiar, a red-letter Bible is one where everything Jesus says is in red. I thought it would be funny to do one where everything the antichrist says is in red--and then I also thought it would be funny to do pull-out quotes like my Catholic Youth Bible had, and then I thought, why stop there, and that's when things started to get weird. Trying to get the text to line up coherently around the trees and the mountains especially was delicate--and of course if I changed something on the page before it would throw everything out of whack.
The cover was inspired by those giant Bibles with covers that are an inch thick with a cross or something like that debossed in the middle. The text wasn't long enough to make it that thick, but it's two layers of thin board glued together. Leather on top, and then I used a foil quill to do most of the design--anything that's a circle is a brass stamp.
I make the design on Illustrator, and then had the cricut trace it onto the foil with a sharpie. I found that a lot more effective than printing it out and trying to do the foil quill through the paper stencil. I'll let you try and guess what shape I used instead of a cross, and will put the answer under the cut.
Doing gold page edges was a bitch and a half; I sanded off attempts about a dozen times. Fake gold was a bust; so was heat activated foil. I ended up doing one layer of acrylic paint and about five layers of gold acrylic.
And because I got this a lot about My Immortal: no, I'm not going to share the typeset. Even before Everything, I feel fine justifying this because I own the paperback, the deluxe edition hardback, the DVD, the script book, and the coffee table book. But I'm not actually into book piracy. (Unless you are the Terry Pratchett estate, in which case, sharing is caring.)
I'll do another reblog with the rest of the interior images.
(And for those who were looking for it: the cover is, of course, the dread symbol Odegra/the M25 motorway.)
Thinking about how when the Oceangate sub imploded, the coastguard picked it up on their radar and knew from the moment it happened that everyone on board was already gone, and yet there was still a five day manhunt.
And how like a week before that, a refugee ship sank off the coast of Greece, whose officials knew this was happening and had ships within reach, but intentionally did nothing.
And how there was like the most expansive manhunt in recent history to find a suspect in the UHC shooting. In a city known for its unsolved crimes. How Briana Boston was arrested for a vaguely perceived threat to a CEO she wasn't even speaking to nor mentioned, while internet stalkers are never addressed unless they hurt someone, and then it's a maybe
And just how there is always money to perform for the rich, even when they can't actually be helped. And there is never money to help the poor, no matter how easy they would be to save.
And for some reason it's considered "dangerous and extreme" to want a world where our lives aren't just fodder at the whims of the rich.
i dont know why anyone else misses analog board games, but to me, it's because physical parts let me cheat. there's no moving pieces around when someone isnt looking in a chess app, no sneaking bonus pieces out of the graveyard in checkers, no double drawing cards in go fish.
i spent years developing those skills as a Professional Little Brother. what am i supposed to do now, go back to college? learn how to play games the right way? i mean, who gives a shit? the fun part was never the game, it was the Getting Away With It. or, you know, for the rest of my family, Catching The Bastard. now that was entertainment.
When I was teenie tiny, Liz had a toy shark that I feared more than death. This meant that under sibling law, she was required to chase me with it. Frequently. Failing to do so would have invalidated her Professional Big Sister license.
One time she was chasing me it and I asked her very nicely to stop, and she did not which left me no choice but to grab a knife and repeat my request.
I know this may sound like an extreme reaction. But there really was no other rational choice. What was I supposed to do, ask nicely a second time? Like a goddamn hippy? No. Knife time.
Unfortunately I was bluffing and Liz called my bluff by grabbing a knife of her own. Which meant I was then getting chased with a shark AND a large steak knife. I started off continuing to be more scared of the shark than the knife, but that was a mistake because Liz actually made a lunge for me with the knife (I think she mixed up her shark hand/knife hand?) and managed to lightly stab our new couch. Which Liz then had to explain to our mom. I think the conversation was something like "Mom, the good news is that I missed, and the bad news is that I tried, and the worst news is that I got the couch instead.”
My mom handled it very well. My survival to adulthood hinged entirely on this weird one weird exploit in human psychology where confusing someone enough temporarily turns off their ability to be angry.
Incredibly that wasn't even our worst dumb sibling chase incident. The worst happened when I was chasing her through the house, and she ducked into our freshly mopped kitchen. She managed to cool girl skate over the puddles and make it to the other side of the room, which led to me trying to cool boy skate in her footsteps. This failed horribly, and instead resulted in me sailing headfirst into the dishwasher.
The good news was that I was able to absorb the entire blow with my left eyebrow, which I wasn't using very much anyway. The bad news was that I actually cut most that eyebrow off as a sort of fuzzy flap, which was disgusting, not to mention painful. Fortunately, with my dad being a doctor, he was able to glue most of it back on, albeit slightly crooked, such that I spent the next two years with a Resting Confused Face. Like so.
(I know this probably sounds inconvenient to you, but those were ages 6-7, so I was probably going to be confused all the time anyway. If anything, this helped me conserve precious eyebrow calories, which I was then able to use for more important tasks, such as spitting, or lurking near my dad so that when he left his Dave Barry books lying around I could swoop in and learn bad words from them. I learned most of my bad words that way.)
ID: The raised-eyebrow emoji, which is frowning dubiously. End ID
