Second String Heroine @secondstringheroine - Tumblr Blog

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socialistexan

"Modern Doctor Who is bad because it preaches leftist politics and pronouns!"

moniquill

the-library-alcove

I have a story that’s topical; I’ve told it before on tumblr, but it’s topical to this and thus worth repeating.

Back around 2005, I ran into a Baptist missionary who spotted my kippah and basically took that as permission to attempt to missionize at me.

I defended myself, using the basics of the knowledge I have of Christian theology and texts that I learned specifically to fend off missionaries.

We went back and forth and back and forth, and he wouldn’t leave me alone for… oh, probably the better part of an hour.

And then…

Then this part is seared into my memory. I have nightmares about it.

He smiled at me and said that, with my knowledge of the Gospels, I am sure to be one of the Elect when the time comes.

I asked what the hell that meant.

And he told me. He told me in a tone of utmost sincerity–even envy, because to his belief system, it was a good and enviable thing…

Because to be one of the “Elect” is to be one of the 144,000 Jews who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior at the Apocalypse. This will happen when all of the Children of Israel have been Gathered in the Land of Israel; war will break out, the Assembled Jews will have the Gospels preached to us, and 144,000 Thousand–Twelve Tribes times Twelve Apostles times One Thousand–Jews will spontaneously convert to Christianity.

Once that occurs, all of the Jews die in the Apocalypse, but the Elect ascend to Heaven to be Jesus Christ’s personal escorts down to Earth for his Second Coming (the rest of the Jews go to hell for eternity, in case you’re wondering).

In short…

He told me that I existed to be a human blood sacrifice to bring back his god. I was not a person to him. I was nothing more than a means to that end.

And he was jealous. Jealous of the fact that he viewed my knowledge of his religion, something that I had learned specifically to fend him and his kind off, as proof that his religion was right and correct and inevitable. That in learning it, I had made myself more valuable to his worldview.

Jealous that, because I was more valuable, because I existed to die for his god, I would meet that god before him.

It was terrifying, to be told that I was to die… and he thought that it was a good thing.

This is how Evangelicals view death. Not as something to be avoided, but something to seek, something that is a positive, and not just for themselves… but for everybody.

They are the closest thing to a full-fledged Religion of Evil on the planet, and I say that without hyperbole.

asgardian-viking

When you guys say the US is being controlled by a death cult, you werent kidding!

anarchistmemedistro

crimsonclad

I saw a bumper sticker and thought “is that seductive Daffy Duck” and then when I looked closer I realized it was actually a fishing bumper sticker but also. also it is still very much seductive Daffy Duck???? somehow????????

cliopadra

No, but seriously. How on earth DID HE manage to find a crew???

erikos-libertarian-socialist

flipocrite

reminder that Gregor Samsa’s first thought to his kafkaesque metamorphosis was “aw shit I still have to go to work”

hampop

I’m sorry did you just refer to the metamorphosis in the book Metamorphosis written by Franz Kafka as “Kafkaesque”

atombombtom

tumblr user flipocrite reading Kafka: mmm getting a lot of Kafka vibes from this

m-a-d-luvs-comics

Another by Josh Luna

vriskanon

What the fuck? The original comic is about whitewashing:

source

trashboat

they whitewashed the comic im screaming

whitepeopletwitter

morbid-arachnid

White people at it again. The Flayed Lord’s name is Xipe Totec, he’s one of the main dieties in Aztec culture. He is primarily associated with fertility and agriculture, and is strongly connected to renewal and rebirth (the flayed aspect is supposed to symbolize how corn, a major crop, sheds it’s outer layers). Aside from that, we know *very* little about mesoamerican cultures. What we do know mainly comes from retellings and accounts from Spanish conquerors, who of course had a biased perspective. Finding a new temple is a huge deal, because when the Spanish were systematically wiping out our culture, they made a point to build churches over preexisting temples and shrines. A lot of the churches are still there, but the Mexican government considers them historical buildings, and as such no one is allowed to dig under the churches or excavate the area. There are countless temples we haven’t seen because they’re under these churches. Finding a temple we can actually study is such a big deal!

lesb0

It really is a big deal! also, mesoamerican art history/anthropological research are actually very robust and rapidly growing fields of study. A big problem for what white people call “Aztec” research before the 90s was that, yes, a huge number of readable personal accounts were from the Spanish. The others were written in Maya Nahuatl which used two forms of glyphs, the iconographic type, and the logogram type.

That was illegible up until a boy raised on Maya archaeological sites, David Stuart, was awarded a MacArthur genius grant (the youngest ever at 18) to study the glyphs. he was able to read them as well as his first language, solved several codes, and then other academics were able to easily translate codices and ruins. that was over 30 years ago, so now we are working with about 50 fully translated Nahua codices and hundreds of fragmented ones. there are many beautiful ruins and ancient sites like these all over South America, but the Spanish did make sure to build on top of many very important ones. restoring pyramids and temples that were plundered and destroyed by conquistadors and centries of war before them is crucial to ancient Mexicatl research, but the colonial churches above so many of these sites are also unfortunately historically important sites themselves. Mexico city is also an ancient city; it would be really difficult to excavate where families have built their homes for over 20 generations.

If you need a quarantine binge one of my favorite professors at my alma mater has uploaded so many free fun lectures on Maya, Peruvian, Nahua art and visual culture here :-)

mysharona1987

nealashitposts

I recently found out why my mom would never sleep around me when I was a kid. Like she’d never let herself take naps or sleep if I was awake, ever. Or if she did, she would lock her bedroom door. So when I was 6, I was asleep in my bed in the middle of the night when I hear a loud bang, like a pot being dropped and come out to the living room to see my mom standing by the window, with just a huge pile of spaghetti all over the sill, and a pot on the ground, and I ’m like “Are you gonna eat all that?” And ya’ll she get’s BIG MAD and yells at me and chases me to my room but then a little while later a bunch of cops show up and ask me a bunch of random ass questions about my art? Like this one cop lady keeps asking me to draw dragons for her?! And they seem mad as hell

I didn’t want to get arrested so I just never asked my mom for spaghettis after that. Lesson, learned. Don’t ask mom for spaghettis or she’ll call the damn police on you.

So I have this memory in my head, and it goes unquestioned until I say it outload for the first time a few months back and as soon as I say the words “When I was six, my mom called the cops on me for asking for spaghettis” My adult logic slams into place and is like “Hang on. Your mother definatly did not call the police on a 6 year old for asking for spaghetti.”

So obviously that’s not what really went down. I call up my mom to tell her how I remember it and on top of her figuring out why her kid has always been really cagey around spaghettis for the last 3 decades she tells me what really happened.

So on that night, a man tried to break into our house through the front window. It was just my mom, and her kids so she did what she felt she had too and shot him in the head. He’d been wearing a helmet, which landed on the floor under the window.

Now I just want ya’ll to put yourselves in my moms shoes for a minute here. This woman has just taken a human life. The trauma of that- the instant agony, the panic, the guilt, the fear- all of it hitting her at once, her only solace the knowledge that her children are safe. She protected her daughters. No matter the cost to her soul- her children are safe.

Then she looks up and sees her six year old staring at the inside of this mans head before saying “Are you gonna eat all that?”

nealashitposts

I suspect they were trying to keep me busy and distracted while they cleaned up the corpse in the living room?!?

dankmemeuniversity

berliner-capybara-deactivated20

An old spell but quite effective

gummybearattacktheworldofdespair

oranberryblissey

This is the definition of Chaotic Evil.

alberts-infinite-abyss

goth-slush

oh it’s perfect in every way

araccoonthatlikesmurder

I absolutely hate it

mabel-but-slytherin

You’ve seen rube goldberg, now try rude goldberg

cyborglovesong

wendiana99

I'll never see it any other way

goldenaltar

“I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.”“Did you catch many?” I asked.“Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.”“Why is that?” I asked.“Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.””

— Isaac Asimov (via skinnybaras)

luntfontanne

do you ever think about chuck palahniuk writing “we don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression… the great depression is our lives” in the early 1990s as a young gay man living in america at the peak of the aids epidemic

luntfontanne

like i know the main thing i’ve seen people talk about is the obvious homoeroticism between the narrator and tyler and, y’know, how a fight club is the epitome of constructing intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men BUT if you think about it in the context of the time palahniuk was living in as a gay man there is SO much more to it than that

he wrote a book that’s all about grappling with death and pain and wanting to take them into your own hands… literally the first line of the book ends with “the first step to eternal life is you have to die.” it’s the narrator visiting all these different support groups for different diseases like cancers and blood parasites as a ~tourist in order to feel healthy and alive and free (note: most people who died of aids didn’t die of the virus itself but of opportunistic infections and aids-related cancers). it’s about how “on a long enough time line, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero.” like yes it’s intricate rituals, but it’s very specifically men sharing bodily fluids and blood. it’s about reclaiming death and using it as a symbol.

it’s about feeling abandoned and forgotten and ignored by the establishment and wanting to burn everything down because of that, about an entire generation of gay men trapped in a great spiritual depression, waging a war, a revolution, for their lives but one that was not acknowledged publicly for years while they suffered. it’s about living double lives, becoming someone Different under the cover of darkness, someone Stronger and Braver who could rage against the system the way you never even dreamed of doing in the daylight

it’s about being a member of A Club (where the initiation is a kiss that burns your skin) that exists everywhere and nowhere, and being able to immediately pick out someone else who’s In The Club just by looking at them even though no one around you has a clue, and you just nod at each other and acknowledge your shared experience and save your actual interactions for secret back rooms and basements—except pretty soon other people can tell there’s something Unsavory going on with you because you start exhibiting physical signs that you can’t hide anymore including bloody lesions on your face.

it’s about “only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes” + david wojnarowicz wearing a jacket in 1988 that said “if i die of aids – forget burial – just drop my body on the steps of the fda”. it’s about “his name is robert paulson and he is fortyeight years old. his name is robert paulson, and robert paulson will be fortyeight years old, forever” + this panel from the AIDS memorial quilt that reads “my name is duane kearns puryear. i was born on december 20, 1964. i was diagnosed with aids on september 7, 1987 at 4:45 pm. i was 22 years old. sometimes, it makes me very sad. i made this panel myself. if you are reading it, i am dead.”

literally every line of this book (and the film) mean More if you read it through this lens. “you aren’t your name. you aren’t your family. … everything you ever love will reject you or die.” taking the sentence “i am the toxic waste byproduct of God’s creation” that is the worst thing anyone could fear about themselves (and like.. it’s literally homophobia. especially re: gay men during the aids crisis) and weaponizing it because it means you have nothing to lose. tyler saying fuck the police and telling the police commissioner that “the people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. we’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. we make your bed. we guard you while you’re asleep.”

anyways it’s not just homoerotic, it’s gay in a very specific way grounded very specifically in the moment in time when it was written and in the generational trauma of the aids crisis thanks for coming to my ted talk

ryan-sometimes

To those of you who aren't in the Portuguese speaking sphere, let me give you a hilarious update. Parents in Portugal are currently HORRIFIED because their children are now only speaking Brazilian Portuguese from watching so many Brazilian YouTubers. They are finding this deeply disturbing and want the Brazilian Portuguese to end IMMEDIATELY

ryan-sometimes

There are NEWS articles about this

Translation:

"Luccas Neto (Brazilian YouTuber) is accused of making Portuguese children talk like Brazilians"

"Luccas Neto, who just celebrated his son Luke's first birthday, is becoming the target of criticism among some Portuguese families. The reason? Luccas Neto has become such a success that Portuguese children are starting to talk like Brazilian people.

That's right: the little ones have lost the characteristics of their local dialect and adopted the speech of the 29 year old YouTuber, who was born in Rio de Janeiro.

'All of his speech is Brazilian. We've reached the point where people ask if one of us parents is Brazilian,' said an interviewed mother, who said her son now frequents speech therapy sessions."

ryan-sometimes

"Other parents who spoke with the Portuguese newspaper revealed they don't leave their children alone with tablets or phones, especially when they watch Luccas Neto.

'At this moment we're in a phase of treatment like it's an addiction. We explain everything to him, that he can't watch this because it's harmful. And we notice that he's much better now. What we're trying to do now is play with him more, and block some content, leaving only Netflix and everything that's in Portuguese from Portugal.'"