#anthropicmoose

[qqueenofhades]

I may very well be getting too far ahead of myself here, but reading your last two (back to back, hot diggity damn, queen!) essays got me thinking about the future. In the beautiful possible future where we keep up the fight, elect Kamala, and keep Trump out of office for another 4 years, do you think there's a real possibility we'll be seeing the same election (Kamala vs Trump) in 2028?

I hear the arguments against the possibility - he's old and unhealthy so he'll probably die (not counting in it), the Republicans cannot be stupid enough to try again (they can), his fragile ego will be too broken to try again (his ego disconnected from reality long, long ago), he'll be in jail (unlikely with this Supreme Court, and hilariously we have no laws preventing someone in jail from running), but even the sum total of them doesn't seem like enough to count him out.

Mind you, if he does run against Kamala in 2028, I feel like the odds would be on our side? I'm just. So. Tired of this guy. I'll keep fighting till the day I die, but it'd be nice if we could actually see this dude go down and take on the next one.

We honestly have a good shot to shut ourselves of Trump forever at this election, because of the simple fact that he is in rapid dementia decline and I honestly don't think he'll be remotely sane in another 4 years. Not that he's sane now, but at age 82 after another four years of associated legal troubles and/or penalties complete with his rapidly unraveling mental state... I just don't think it will be possible even for the withered husk of the GOP to trot him out again, and I say that as someone who always unfortunately knew he would be the nominee again in 2024 despite some overly optimistic prognostications to the contrary by others. As I've said before, this is the last-chance saloon for Trump in any number of ways, and that is part of the reason he is so desperate now.

We can't count on the legal system to rid us of Trump before the election, but the delayed sentencing in his NY felony trial is coming a couple weeks afterwards, the Jan 6th trial has restarted, and the 11th Circuit is fairly likely to reinstate the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Trump running for president is a convenient grift to pay his legal bills, and if he gets crushed in November, even the most faithful MAGA diehard are going to find it hard to keep coughing up for his various fundraising appeals. I mean sure, he'll get something, because some of the cult members will be in it to the bitter end, but overall, he will be fucked. On many, many levels.

This is the delightful vision that is fueling me and frankly should fuel all of us, so yes. Vote. Remove stubborn orange stains, once and possibly fucking finally for all. Please.

[mopd]

HELLO I LOVE THIS SMOL CHILD AND THEIR PRECIOUS CINNAMON BUN TRASH DEFINITELY-AN-ANGEL. For super-nerds like me who sort their webcomic by update cadence, do you have a general update schedule you're shooting for? 👀 If not that is totally okay too!

Haha, thank you so much!!

Regarding updates, I hope to upload at least one page a week in the near future. However, I’m moving in with my girlfriend this month, so updates might be a little…. Slow… 🐌

Thank you for your support!!

[qqueenofhades]

bless u for the comprehensive answer to my last question, it is much appreciated! And sincere apologies for coming off as defeatist - you're absolutely right that, at the end of the day, the most important thing is working as hard as we can to make sure trump loses the general election. What this really clarifies for me is that my focus should be on the elections, and that I should file the judicial process under "interesting, could be useful, but will never be a silver bullet". Thank you again!

You're welcome, and I think it's most useful to think of it like this: we need to do our job (defeating Trump in 2024) so Jack Smith's job (indicting the fucker up the wazoo) will stick. We hear endless punditry and hand-wringing about how Trump will just cancel the charges if he wins, and that's often presented as some kind of terrible foregone conclusion that we will only avert by dumb luck, if we do at all. And yet, for some funny reason, we never hear about the flip side: i.e. if Trump loses, he's fucked. He will have no more reason to delay, no last-minute Hail Mary play, nothing to stop him from standing trial, being convicted, and going to jail, and that's exactly why he and the rest of the fascist criminals are throwing everything at the election. It is his last shot.

Honestly, I don't want people complacently thinking that the indictments will do the work for them and get rid of Trump -- because they will, but only if we do our job first and pound that motherfucker into the ground in 2024. I don't want anything to take away from the importance of doing everything we can to help Biden win in 2024 -- voting, volunteering, donating, talking to friends and family, you name it. We NEED to do that work so that Trump is out of miraculous golden parachutes and is left to face the consequences. And if he does (again, please God) lose, at least this time he is not the sitting American president and does not have the full resources of the federal government to attempt a coup. In that sense, if you want to see Trump properly, completely brought to justice, it's so easy:

Support the indictments

Vote for Biden in 2024

Do everything to make sure Trump loses

The end.

It's really that easy. Because as noted, if we do our part and Trump loses the election, he is fucked. That's really all there is to it.

We are in uncharted territory here because the founding fathers were eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalists, and while they obviously did not trust a king and built in all kinds of checks and balances to prevent the president from BEING a king, they also imagined that whoever held the job would at least make a good-faith effort to follow the rules. Besides, the best-designed political system in the world would still be vulnerable to someone like Trump, who gleefully and sociopathically wrecks all norms and precedents however he pleases. That's why there isn't technically a law on the books preventing someone in prison from running for president, because the founding fathers were operating under the idea that people in American government would at least try, however badly, to perform the functions of American government. Trump doesn't. He doesn't give a shit about that. He's willing to take the whole country down in flames if it saves him personally from consequences, and while our institutional guardrails (barely) held last time, they've already said that a second Trump term would involve wrecking all of those, because he is a tinpot narcissistic psychopath dictator wannabe. And yes, it's terrifying, and yes, too many people didn't learn from 2016, and all the rest, but still:

If you want to see the fucker go to jail and reap the consequences of his actions, make sure he loses the 2024 election. That's what you need to focus on. Do that, and the rest of it will come after. So yeah.

[qqueenofhades]

Speaking of Jack Smith and the indictments, follow up questions if you feel like answering! What do you think the chances of a conviction before the 2024 elections are? And (more worryingly to me), how much will convictions matter given they don't actually stop Trump from running or potentially being elected?

I've been following the investigations pretty closely, until I figured out last night that there are no laws against running for president from prison, and nothing stopping an imprisoned president from pardoning themselves. @_@ And while no one running for president from prison has ever gotten much of the vote, I have a terrible feeling that's one of those terrible firsts Orange-kun could pull off.

The thing with all this is that it is, for America, completely unprecedented political and legal territory. As such, while we can speculate and infer from what has happened thus far and what would normally be on schedule to happen next, we simply can't be sure. As I have said and as we all need to prepare ourselves for, Trump WILL be the GOP nominee at the time of the 2024 election, and if you thought he and his deranged cultists were dangerous to American democracy before, that's nothing compared to what they would be now. Which means we have the obvious task of all working as hard as we fucking can to get Joe Biden re-elected and given back full Democratic control of Congress. That is and remains Job Number One.

Next, Trump's only play is to delay, delay, delay as long as possible, in hopes of miraculously winning and canceling all the charges against himself like a proper banana-republic Autocrat-for-Life. That is obviously a terrifying idea, so see above: need to make sure it doesn't happen. The good news is that Biden beat Trump last time and if we do our part, he can do it again. Democrats are over-performing their 2020 margins by an average of 7+ points in the last 20 special or off-cycle elections, and while this isn't a sign to think we've got it in the bag and can just relax, it also means that the electoral trends are overall much better for Team Blue than they are for the Group Of Pfascists over there, especially since state-level Republican parties are basically bankrupt after throwing away so much money on pointless Big Lie challenges. Trump and his entire vindictive fascist apparatus is, again, terrifying. But it is not genuinely popular or in the actual majority, and we need to approach it like something that can and must be defeated, and not some unstoppable demonic force.

As such, we also need to recognize that even if Trump does go on trial and get convicted on any number of things before November 2024, which is still something of a long shot just because Merrick Garland dragged his feet on this for so long, he will try every bullshit delay tactic and appeal that he possibly can, in hopes of elevating it to a Trump-appointed judge and/or SCOTUS (he will try AS HARD AS POSSIBLE to get it to SCOTUS, since like every good mob boss, he thinks he owns them and they're obliged to bail him out). We don't know the timeline on that or what the effects will be, but as I noted last night, the benchmark for "progress on holding Trump accountable" constantly shifts and doesn't seem to be acknowledged, even when we are in the realm of the unprecedented for any former American president. And yet we do continue to make progress, and as I say whenever there's a development on that front, the LAST thing we should do is pre-emptively throw up our hands, despair about how it still doesn't mean anything, or just won't work. I know pessimism is easy and hopelessness feels like our default setting; the last almost-decade has kicked the absolute SHIT out of us and I won't pretend otherwise. But nonetheless, this is still happening. We just have to hang in there and do our part.

If we do that, and trust that Jack Smith and co. do theirs (as they have been doing so far), then things will probably, in fact, be okay. We cannot ever make the mistakes of 2016 again, which is why it's so maddening that a significant minority of leftist-identifying people seem determined to do exactly that, but it's certainly not as if all hope is already lost and the indictments will be a magic wand to speed Trump back to the White House (again, God forbid). We have to keep that in mind and our eyes on the goal, so yeah. We can do it and we must, and that's about all there is to it.

[existingcharactersdiehorribly]

Any chance that nonnie knows about the value (or lack?) of purchasing the season/episodes on Amazon or something like that? I pre-bought the season there but I want to make sure that supports the show too!

Anyone know how season passes count in the ratings?

I have one on Amazon because - yeah, I like to rewatch a lot. Even after the nbc.com and on demand views stop counting.

[borntobekings]

6 or 4 for your Fate favs? (aka the tsundere dorks)

"Rin," he said.

She stirred on the bed. "Mmm." She might have been drooling a little on the pillows.

"Rin," he said again, "is there a reason you're naked in my bed?"

It was strange to say "my bed" as if he was a being who needed such a thing, but since he'd returned from the Throne of Heroes, his Servant body failed him often, and he needed rest to make sure he didn't disappear. So Rin had given him a bed.

At least, she had done that once, but now she was sleeping in it, curled up beneath the covers, her bare shoulders peeking out from beneath the blankets. "Mmm," she said, and she stirred a little. The blankets slid further down her body.

Reflexively, Archer looked away, straight ahead at the wall. He started to count to ten inside his head, but gave up around six. Then he reached down, grabbed the covers, and pulled them off of her.

She rolled over and fell out of the bed with a thump. "Archer! Archer, I'll kill you!"

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said, "but that would be very difficult, since you're naked and defenseless right now."

"I'm not defenseless," she said, but she was as red as if she were wearing clothes. "I'm still a powerful magus, so--!"

"What were you doing, powerful magus?" he asked, focusing on her face.

"Oh, that's right," she said. She stood up. "Archer, I was going to seduce you!"

"I see," he said, his head suddenly blank of any other words.

She nodded. "Sex with me would fix your body."

"What an audacious thing for you to say," he said. "But you fell asleep, Rin. I'm afraid you've failed to seduce me."

"That's true," she said. "About the sleep, not the failure--Archer, I don't fail. But I was tired. I haven't been sleeping well..."

"There are teas I could make you," he said.

"It's not that," she said. "I'm not used to sleeping with other people in the house. It's strange. I stay up at night, thinking of you."

She was naked and saying things like that. He became aware that he had a heart inside this body, beating. "That's a serious problem."

"If we had sex and fixed your connection to my prana," she said, "you could stay outside at night."

"Like a stray cat?"

She ignored that. "I could even have a little house made for you. I'd order you to make a very nice one."

He sighed. "I appreciate the offer, Rin. But it's unnecessary. I won't ask you to have sex with me. We'll find another way to set things right."

But he was still looking at her face, so he caught the way her expression changed, the way the ice in her eyes softened, as she tilted her head to look seriously up at him. "But do you want to? Archer."

"I--" He began.

She stopped him. "Be honest! I know it's very difficult for a sarcastic, rude, cynical, and twisted person like you. But you have to be honest."

"How could I lie, when you're giving me such compliments?" His smile was sarcastic, cynical, and maybe a little twisted, but probably not rude. She had invited it, after all.

"See, that's what I mean," Rin said. "You're impossible, Archer. You don't know, do you? If you want to do a thing like that with me."

He fell silent and glanced down at the floor. He couldn't help but notice that she was wiggling her bare toes a little.

"Archer." Her voice was soft, but the command in it was unmistakable. He had to look her in the eyes again when she spoke like that. "Archer, will you kiss me and find out?"

"Hmmm." He turned his back on her. "No, I don't think so." He couldn't see her face, but he heard the small distraught gasp she choked back. So he kept speaking, even though he could have just walked out on her. "A kiss is a serious thing, Rin. Put some clothes on. Dress for a proper evening."

"Archer..."

"Well, I can't promise anything," he said, which was true. She was right--he was twisted and couldn't be sure he would keep his promises. "But maybe then I'll kiss you, and find out--whether there's something more I want." It was good he had his back turned to her. She couldn't see his face right now.

She must have been smiling when she spoke again. He could hear it in her voice. "All right, Archer! I'll really make you want to kiss me, and more! Then you'll put it in me and all our problems will be solved!"

He sighed. "Just get dressed, Rin. Then we'll see." But he felt like he might smile too.

[nillions]

anthropicmoose answered your question “this is a very very very very important research question that i need...”

MUSHROOMS. THEY'RE NOT EVEN PLANTS. THEY'RE FUNGI AND FUNGI ARE WEEEEEIRRRRRDDDD

smellsliketime replied to your post “this is a very very very very important research question that i need...”

Cheat grass

stalkingbit replied to your post “this is a very very very very important research question that i need...”

Poison ivy, always on the lookout for this creeper when I'm in the woods

ticklemefreak answered your question “this is a very very very very important research question that i need...”

my friend the plant biologist says: Helicodiceros muscivorus (dead horse arum lily)

nihthelm answered your question “this is a very very very very important research question that i need...”

Kudzu

kiwisson replied to your post “this is a very very very very important research question that i need...”

SCUSE I LOVE ALL MY PLANTY COUSINS but mistletoe is pretty wild

underoakandbeech answered your question “this is a very very very very important research question that i need...”

//those plants from jumanji. idk if they are a real plant though but oh my gOD.

curufinwefeanaro answered your question “this is a very very very very important research question that i need...”

|| Very twisted olive trees.

thanks everyone! there aren't a lot of plants that i'm afraid of, but i'lll look at what the hell is so terrifying about these plants and come up with cohesive common points that make them fricken' terrifying

[thirdmagic]

YOU CAN't JUST. POST SOMETHING. LIKE THAT. WITH THOSE TWO. IN A FREAKING. FAIRY TALE. AND THEN. IT ENDS LIKE THAT. I CAN'T. ILYA IS THE BEST BIG SISTER. SAKURA AND SHIROU ARE JUST THE BEST. IC AN'T EVEN.

JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU READ THE WHOLE SCENE IT'S GOT EVEN MORE THAT WILL PRODUCE A SIMILAR REACTION FROM YOU