Jewish Self-Determination and Nerdiness

IMPORTANT NOTE:if you are rude or insulting to me in reblogs or comments on my posts (or are just boring) I will block you—I don’t owe you my attention 36 year old Oregonian Jewish Pantheist Progressive Nerd Librarian White Male who believes in the right of all peoples to self-determination. Not too old to care, not too young to count. I oppose the murder of Jews for political purposes, and I reblog stuff I like.

[stupidjewishwhiteboy]

My instant block policy has officially evolved to include making arguments we’ve all heard a billion times that have counter arguments we’ve all heard a billion times. If you’re boring, you are not worth my time, and you’re getting blocked

[pukicho]

I have animalized you. Now, roam free:

[heebyjeeby-doesnt-do-anything]

mgrrrroaaaaaahhg

[pukicho]

Go on, don’t be shy

[swanjolras-blog-archive-deactiv]

when i find myself in times of trouble

terry pratchett comes to me

whispering sam vimes once arrested a motherfucking dragon

you are capable of literally anything

[worfsgoldspeedo]

Sam Vimes once arrested two opposing armies to end a war.

[pasiphile]

x

[mage-pie]

Sam Vimes fought an ancient mind-controlling spirit and won. Sam Vimes killed a werewolf with his bare hands. Sam Vimes happily wears the awful lumpy itchy socks his wife knits him. Sam Vimes causes traffic jams in order to be home in time to read his baby a bedtime story. Sam Vimes fought at the barricades— twice. Sam Vimes waited until his interviewee had left and then put his coat over his head so no one could hear him laughing hysterically at her silly name. Sam Vimes is my hero.

[witchylana]

Sam Vimes overcame a crippling alcohol dependency. Sam Vimes examines and confronts his internal prejudices. Sam Vimes lived in poverty because he was giving his salary to the widows and orphans of fellow officers. Sam Vimes cleaned up a corrupt police force and made it inclusive of the different ethnicities in his city.

Sam Vimes is my hero too.

[cosmictuesdays]

He turned to leave, then seemed to have a thought. “Sergeant Dorfl!” he said, turning back. “D’you think you’ll believe in gods now?”

Every eye in the Watch House turned to the golem sergeant. “Not Gods, Yet.” said Sergeant Dorfl. “But Always Sam Vimes.”

- Mister Vimes’d Go Spare

[kiss-my-aspergers]

do it for the vimes

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[prokopetz]

Being into it ironically, in the sense that my appreciation is sincere but it's ironic that I'm into it.

[hymneminium]

#oh my god did gallagher just discover the term dank this is so exciting #does he know it's a weed thing?? there's no way right

Of course Peter Gallagher knows that "dank" is a weed thing. He also knows that "in heat" is a sex thing and that when aliens "probe" someone it's in the anus.

These are words, not things. Heathcliff is a comic about symbols.

You're never going to get a comic where an alien actually probes someone any more than you're going to get a comic where the Man-Eating Giant eats a man. You're just going to get a dozen comics where aliens like the word "probe".

Heathcliff wears the ham helmet because it's the helmet you wear when you eat a ham. You can tell it's that helmet because it says "ham" on it. The helmet's function is determined not by its form but by its label.

summer = beach = sand = desert = mummy and thus there is the Summer Mummy. Because of symbolic associations that do not otherwise cohere.

Robots don't wear clothes but the mere act of labeling them "nude" makes them nude. And once a painting is a nude painting there has to be a fig leaf because a "nude" without a "figleaf" is "indecent".

A "ham" is a ham even when it's a car. A yam can be a ham can be a car because "yam" sounds like "ham". Symbols have overtaken things.

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

This is certainly true, but it's important to note that the fundamental act of a Heathcliff comic strip is for a character to remark on the fact that the symbol has overtaken the reality. The meat store invites the existence of a meat container, which invites the meat tank (tank both the vehicle and the bowl) which invites the enthusiasm of children for powerful mechanical objects. However, the gesture of the strip is not complete until the human identifies the irregularity which has occurred and states it aloud for us. The human does not question it, but they do name it. "Children love the meat tank"

It's important that Heathcliff is not the one speaking. Heathcliff is the character who dives the furthest into symbols, but he does not have a voice to speak of them. He is the avatar of the symbols and he is only spoken about. We must imagine the speaking characters in Heathcliff strips as the rebellious voices of the material crying out against the tyranny of the symbolic. At every moment once we've stepped into the treacherous world of Heathcliff, we are at risk of being pulled away by the tides of free association and similarity. However, the voice calls us back. It shows us when we have slipped too far, names the distance between us and the particular and specific which we have nearly lost. Symbols in Heathcliff are powerful; they can take you almost anywhere they want to go, but that power can be revoked simply by identifying what has happened. By explaining it. Heathcliff reassures us that the physical can win out, if only we are wise enough to perceive and to speak it, against the encroachment of the symbolic. Once we stand together and name the world truly, Heathcliff is merely a cat.

[prokopetz]

If your fantasy or sci-fi tabletop RPG doesn't have any playable archetypes for which "batch-siblings" is an intelligible concept, what are you even doing?

[prokopetz]

The way some people react to the Monty Hall problem is a good illustration that correctly identifying that you're being tricked and correctly identifying how you're being tricked are two separate skills. Some folks immediately intuit that there's a statistical sleight of hand in play, but because they have no insight into how it works, they interpret any attempt to explain what's really going on as further trickery. It's like showing someone that the rabbit was inside a secret compartment in the hat the entire time and having them respond "haha, you won't fool me that easily!"

[prokopetz]

(And, of course, while hypotheticals like the Monty Hall problem are a relatively harmless way for this to happen, they underline a very important fact: going in against a scammer without fully understanding how the scam works can easily have you doing exactly what they want you to do while totally convinced that you're beating them at their own game.)

[prokopetz]

Look, I understand that you're going through some shit, and you know I'll always support you, but I just had to fight your shadow-self in the kitchen. Yeah, I was getting breakfast and the enfleshed eidolon of your existential alienation was shooting, I don't know, some sort of beam.

[prokopetz]

It banished the Froot Loops to a far and sunless realm. I really wanted those.

[froxictog]

#also i recognise that the self that walks in darkness is not inherently any more true than the self that walks in the light#but i've gotta ask: is there something going on that i should know about#like#pronoun-wise?

[prokopetz]

It's extremely funny that there have been multiple writers in multiple mediums who've been allowed to write Wolverine from the X-men who clearly had no idea what a wolverine is and assumed it was a fancy word for "wolf", and at no point did any of the literally dozens of other people involved in bringing their writing to life see fit to challenge this assumption.

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

Sometimes the rest of the team gets handed a once in a lifetime opportunity to do the funniest thing, and all they have to do is keep their mouths shut long enough for it to go to print.

[acorviart]

another batch of honse rocks (worry stones)

[shop] - ceramics drop on Aug 8, 2PM CT

[nonbinaryjudean]

Not reblogging the full version of this mind numbingly stupid post but here’s the sparknotes lmao

“I’m an anarcho-communist and I have some fairly recent Jewish ancestry, although I am an atheist/satanist myself.”

Quote of the year

[nonbinaryjudean]

Antisemites who use their “recent Jewish ancestry” as a crutch to be a fucking antisemite are one of the worst types

[killing-the-prophet]

The painter Marc Chagall teaches children in the colony for Jewish Homeless Children in Malakhovka, Russia, in 1921.

[weedle-testaburger]

'being secular does not automatically make you progressive and being religious does not automatically make you conservative', i say. everyone boos, but i know I'm right

[dispassionedgrace]

mamdani is an antisemite but please, by all means, make him your blorbo. whatever i dont even care anymore

[edithsweetithh]

too many people are under the impression that the holocaust is well known because they think it was white on white violence and not because the nazis fucking invented murder factories

[pusheenthenerdcat]

for clarity's sake i feel the need to point out op doesn't mean "murder factories" metaphorically, the holocaust is notable for the industrialised methods of killing people. like, the nazis strategised about how to kill as cheaply and quickly as possible at scale

[queenwille]

dude they fucking mastered the art of mass murder to the point that a whole new term needed to be coined for it.

[gingerswagfreckles]

"(((They))) Won't Let Us Talk About Palestine." Literally what alternate universe are you guys living in and how can I move there.