Star Ringer

For reblogs and random shit; this is not my art blog

[starringer]

[waitingforthet]

Check my Patreon out if you’d like to support the comic, even a little bit helps. Or just to check out the reward tiers, there’s some neat bonus stuff and I tried to make them fun: https://www.patreon.com/waitingforthet

[a-mel0n]

reblog if you’ve had an online friendship that’s lasted more than 2 years

[ryan-sometimes]

Working an office job will truly make you have the wildest enemies, bc why is my nemesis rn a woman I’ve never met and who exclusively haunts me by sending diabolical emails, and also a specific guy who left my company before I even worked here and made the system so fuckass that it ruined procedures for like a year

[ryan-sometimes]

Yesterday my nemesis (woman I’ve never met and whose face I’ve never seen) sent my office an email so rude, basically saying we had fucked up every project she ever ordered from us, one of the worst emails I’ve ever read in my life.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

It was the most satisfying workday I’ve had since I got hired.

[winnie-wine]

[r2x2]

The Amnesty International report that JK Rowling is trying to censor through legal threats.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

[cbarc]

Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.

[ms-demeanor]

Here's the report as a PDF.

[temiree]

Ahm sorry for the random message. but i need to explain somethin important i been trying to reach you but i cant maybe theres have a problem can you dm me I cant explain everythng here

For those unaware, this message is the beginning of a scam chain. They'll claim they accidentally reported you (their initial message to me is vague to avoid detection), and will direct you to a fake Tumblr Support agent in order to stop your account from getting banned. The fake representative will phish you for your account details to "verify" you, but in reality, the details will be used to take over your account. Don't engage, report, and move on. 📋🦦✨

[queerautism]

Hey so as the economy continues to get worse in the next few years, gambling companies are going to go extra hardcore predatory as people become more desperate. Yes, even more than they already are. You have to promise me right now you're not going to fall for it. No gambling, okay?

This is going to be especially bad with prediction markets and sports gambling, and it's already really fucking bad. But it also goes for loot boxes, blind box collectables, trading card games, and ESPECIALLY gacha games.

[witch-of-snow-and-stars]

You know what? I'm going to add to this!

Gambling operations like 'Predictive Markets' like Kalshi, sports betting, gacha games, and other gambling platforms have been heavily pushed at men (redpill/manosphere spaces especially are heavily sponsored by gambling companies) and now that a lot of men are hooked these operations will probably be targeting women as a demographic soon too. If Andra's (creator above) experience is accurate for other influencers, a lot of influencers with high percentages of women in their audience will be approached to push gambling (personally I'll be on the lookout for who's promoting gambling in the next 6-12 months).

Blind boxes, gacha games, and loot boxes have also gotten pushed out to all age demographics (see: Labubus) so if you have kids our young people in your life I'd also be checking in on them because gambling issues really can sneak up on you fast.

Remember everybody: The House [gambling operation] always wins.

[prokopetz]

I know this is due to my particular constellation of interests, but for me the funniest thing about the "everything in a given century happened simultaneously" view of history being applied to the 1900s is bumping into increasing numbers of people who are genuinely unclear on whether Dungeons & Dragons pre-dates or post-dates The Lord of the Rings.

[appendingfic]

tolkien had to call them hobbits to avoid running afoul of Hasbro's trademark of the word 'halfling'

[galaxycepheus]

If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules

[dragon-in-a-fez]

actually I think you should be normal about ordinary citizens of authoritarian countries and yes that applies even to that country you're thinking of right now

[cityelf]

this poem is about being nonbinary.

[luna-azzurra]

If you're a new writer and you're asking yourself "is this too personal, is this too much, will people think this is weird" that feeling is the exact location of your actual voice. The stuff that makes you want to close the laptop is the stuff nobody else could write. The safe version is always worse. Always. I have never once read something and thought "this would have been better if it was a little less honest." go further. It's always go further.

[sluglover666]

Hot take, but even if you ARE punching up (instead of punching sideways at a group that is in the same boat as you), there's a limit to what you can say without sounding like a violent facist but woke this time.

Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.

When the only thing stopping you from completely dehumanising someone is your own judgement regarding their privilege level relative to yours, you are not a safe person to be around.

[darkladynyara]

[emfrots]

"convince your followers that their Oppressor Class (whether real or imagined) is less deserving of human rights" is the oldest and most reliable trick in the book to incite mass violence, and you're not immune to it because you're a Good Person with Correct Opinions. you will continue to be a potential breeding ground for fascist thought until you stop dehumanizing people in any context, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, or how serious you are. there can be no acceptable targets.

[standwithdaanes]

Rwandan genocide - Wikipedia

The Rwandan Genocide: From Colonial Roots to a Contested Future - Explaining History Podcast

In the spring of 1994, the small African nation of Rwanda was engulfed in a maelstrom of violence that saw at least 800,000 Tutsi and modera

I always think of the Rwandan Genocide when it comes to this. Thank you for bringing it up.

In particular, from that second link:

As we have already seen in this series of articles, Rwanda’s ethnic division between Hutu (around 85 %) and Tutsi (around 14 %) had deep roots in colonial rule. Under Belgian administration, identity cards fixed ethnicity as a rigid category, and the Tutsi minority was favoured for education and government work. After independence in 1962, this hierarchy inverted, and Hutu elites consolidated control. [...] When RTLM launched in July 1993, it combined pop-culture style with extremist ideology. This hybrid made hatred sound normal, even entertaining. Music, jokes, gossip, and death threats co-existed in the same broadcast. [...] RTLM’s language fused entertainment with ideology. It mocked Tutsis as arrogant “cockroaches” (inyenzi), accused them of conspiring to enslave Hutus, and encouraged listeners to “work” to eliminate them—a euphemism for killing. Humour, music, and familiarity disguised the lethal message.

[brainscrems]

“Anything goes as long as it’s punching up” is also the central tenet of antisemitism. Leftists think Jews are the ultrawhite ruling class, worst of the worst of whiteness, and conservatives think we’re a race secretly controlling the world and pretending to be white as a plot to bring down the white race. People who believe the latter are in charge of the US government rn. The nature of antisemitism is that we serve as a misdirect for the people with real power. Whatever issues you care about, people in power will find a way to blame the Jews. I cannot remember the exact quote or who it’s from, but I will paraphrase it anyways. Depending on who you ask we’re communists, capitalists, nationalists, rootless cosmopolitans, white, least white, liberals, conservatives, fascists, anarchists, or whatever other “existential and powerful” threat one may believe exists. But what we never are to these people is human. We’re the monsters who hurt them and so it’s okay to hurt us. The truth doesn’t matter, of course, because they aren’t actually afraid of us. We’re just a safer and easier target, and the lie that hurting us is dangerous and makes a change is easier than the hard truths and dangers one must face to fight real power. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Because it is not about the truth, but having a comforting lie that you can make positive change through abusing the vulnerable.

[phoukanamedpookie]

Remember Audre Lorde, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Are you dismantling the system or just taking it over?

[smashtoons]

[parasitoidism]

Line read that keeps me up at night

[pinejay]

i want lists and solutions by the time i finish this jiyuiceh box. warning ⚠️ I. AM. TIRSTY! and it is ᶠʳᵘᶦᵗ punch! and it is delicious

[spicyvampire]

The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[dare-to-dm]

I just read a book in which the moon explodes, and starts fracturing into smaller pieces which eventually rain down onto Earth's surface making it unlivable for hundreds of years. Even in that story, sticking by Earth was the better decision.

[fostertheory]

I think the answer is that people don't want to have to deal with other people. Part of the fantasy is taking along only the people you like and supposing the technical problems in the new place will be easier than the interpersonal problems on Earth.

Of course, the problem with that is that people are people wherever you are. Whoever you bring along will annoy you sooner or later. We are evolved to work in groups, so being solitary forever on another planet isn't workable either. It's better to come to terms with the fact that we individually and socially need better tools for dwelling with one another and do the work to learn them.

[tzikeh]

It's eugenics. It's always eugenics.

[therealbeachfox]

My response to "We can terraform Mars!" is always the same: "Until we have the technology to terraform the Sahara Desert, we don't have the technology to terraform Mars. Do that first, then we can talk about shipping all that tech to a different planet with way worse conditions."