How to work your Pole: tips for Sellsword Arts (and anyone else who’s having trouble)
Find out more about shows and events (and my armour project) here
Today's Document
Xuebing Du

oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

Love Begins
KIROKAZE
dirt enthusiast
RMH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

Product Placement
Not today Justin

titsay

⁂

Kaledo Art
Game of Thrones Daily
d e v o n
No title available
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Misplaced Lens Cap

if i look back, i am lost

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@tinypinkmouse
How to work your Pole: tips for Sellsword Arts (and anyone else who’s having trouble)
Find out more about shows and events (and my armour project) here
every time i sit down 2 watch a horror movie i think of that one tweet :/
rb if you too sit down in ur room and watch horror movies alone
Love the moments in Xena: Warrior Princess where the music swells and Xena says something like “Gabrielle, stay back. This is Menthos, god of brain aneurisms” and the camera cuts to, and I cannot stress this enough, Literally Just Some Guy From New Zealand
the tags in the notes are incredible and they're all 10000% accurate, i am wheezing
George Takei was so excited to do this shirtless episode. He spent all his free time doing push-ups for a week before they shot this.
they were going to give him a katana and have him be a samurai, but he didn’t want to be stereotypical, so he told the execs that he could fence and they wrote in references to the three musketeers instead
he could not, in fact, fence
he spent the weekend before shooting learning how
Not only that, but he found he liked fencing, kept it up, and became a master fencer.
When I had the privilege to hear him talk at AwesomeCon 2015, he informed us he is a master fencer. It was a very clear implication that he is still fencing at his advanced age. No wonder he’s so healthy.
He had far too much fun with this episode and it shows.
Hikaru Sulu, our first Space Pirate.
Reblogging for all this cool trivia
And also for George Takei running through the Starship Enterprise with a sword and cackling sinisterly
Reblogging for ALL of this, and for the coolness of George Takei still kicking butt with a sword to this day!
Reblog if you trust George Takei with a sword to protect you
“In the end, [Takei] loved his sword-fighting scene so much he held onto the rapier for several hours, poking stage hands with it and engaging in mock duels off the set.” – IMDB’s trivia
having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left. having a clear and accessible pathway for people to be socially (if not interpersonally) forgiven is how you get people radicalized against capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy. its how you turn "these people think i am a bad person" into "these people think something and someone coerced or forced me into doing bad things, and these people want to help me do something about that."
if you want more revolutionaries, you must have a system to turn guilty, traumatized, angry bystanders and collaborators into revolutionaries. and I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.
Okay, but are they willing to take the biggest risks to make things right?
Like, if these people have done the most damage to society, to the safety and dignity of minorities, to the basic decency upon which the world functions, are they willing to stand at the front of the effort to fix that damage?
As a trans person, I'm not particularly inclined to forgive transphobes unless they've put themselves in harm's way instead of us.
Part of the issue is for that sort of thing to happen, people have to want to change and do better.
Many don't.
And many do. Why would we waste that desire? Just because many people don't? It's a pessimistic perspective that only hurts the goal of meaningful progress. Progress will not happen because all the Bad People just stop existing.
I am genuinely begging people on this post to realize that our current system CREATES the issues y'all come onto this post to use as proof restorative justice won't work. There are many reasons people resist change, but one very relevant one is that a system where accountability is inherently tied to suffering does not motivate people to put in the effort to change. A deeply hurt person who has developed a lot of very toxic habits, who struggles to imagine a life for themself where they don't rely on those habits to have a sense of identity and safety, may seem like someone who "doesn't want to change." If we assume that is true, then no one tries to help, then there is no reason for that person to believe change is possible or that they could ever be cared for by society given what they've done, so why try?
I am truly fucking begging y'all to talk to like. Any poor white person from the rural US South who realized how evil and systemic white supremacy is, and becomes extremely personally invested in fighting that in their community. This is not some abstract hypothetical. & there are MANY people who would very much be willing to change, if change actually seems feasible. If you see yourself as unforgivable, because everyone around you seems to see you as unforgivable, is it not easier to just dig your heels in?
We NEED!!!!!!! people to be willing to come over to our side and that simply will not fucking happen if your every reaction to "we need to have a process that allows people to make amends and which incentives meaningful change" is "ohhhhhh but that's hard tho :("
Compassion is a practical revolutionary necessity. It's not a thought experiment. Yes, it will be hard, and complicated, and cause a lot of discomfort for everyone on a lot of levels. It will take a hell of a long time to get where we actually want to be. We will fuck it up a lot along the way. There is still no other choice. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy and it does nothing for anyone.
You're moving the goalposts and I'm starting to lose my patience. Your original post started with this premise:
having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left
Then, when me and @magicrainbowkitties rightfully pointed out that people who do the worst things have to both accept that they've done those worst things and also that to make amends they'll have to accept the greatest amount of risk in making things right.
You then promptly shifted entirely to
Any poor white person from the rural US South who realized how evil and systemic white supremacy is
Motherfucker, I'm not fucking talking about some guy from Biloxi who said slurs a couple of times - and neither were you, until it became useful to completely misrepresent our caveats.
"people who do the worst things have to both accept that they've done those worst things and also that to make amends they'll have to accept the greatest amount of risk in making things right."
That is literally what this post is saying we need to have a process for. What exactly are you caveating here????????????
I'm not moving any goalposts. I didn't say "someone who said slurs a couple of times." In the notes of this post, I have elaborated on how this post was prompted by reading about a woman who worked as a fucking drone operator for the US military. I have also responded to people talking about child rapists.
I am really frustrated and annoyed by your "caveats" because they make no sense. I do not fucking understand what you people think I am saying with this post. Like, genuinely, what the fuck did you think I meant by this section:
I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.
Did you think I was just fucking around and smashing random keys when I wrote this? By "process" and "there is no shortcut" I meant "people who did the worst things don't need to accept they've done anything bad and don't need to accept that making amends means accepting a great amount of risk"? Is that what you think I meant?
Its not just y'all. Other people keep coming on this post and adding "caveats" because, as far as I can tell, y'all cannot see a person talking about restorative justice without immediately assuming that they don't understand that bad things require actual effort to amend. The point of this post is that it is necessary to have systems for people to make amends, that actually facilitate and incentivize people to do that hard work, rather than providing zero support or clear pathways to actually go about doing that.
Not a SINGLE part of this implies anything remotely like "you should just forgive anyone whose done anything horrific even if they have done nothing to make amends simply because they said sorry." In fact I LITERALLY included a part of the original post where I explicitly said that's not what I'm saying. So why do people keep feeling the need to come onto this post and just restating the things I already clearly said as if its something that I left out of the post? Why is there this need to keep reiterating, on a post about how it is important to provide mechanisms for people who caused harm to make amends, that people who caused harm need to make amends?
Okay, having calmed down a little bit, I want to make myself clearer. @vexwerewolf blocked me (after coming onto my post calling me a motherfucker unprompted, but whatever) but still:
My original post is about the need for a formal, explicit process that facilitates people making amends. These caveats seem, to me, to suggest that people want those who have contributed to harm to make amends, but then get defensive at the suggestion that communities need to put effort into actually allowing that change to happen, making it clear how it needs to happen, and having that change actually matter, rather than simply talking about it in the abstract but doing nothing to facilitate it.
I will never disagree that people need to actually make amends and take on responsibility. I am saying that we need to make it clear what we expect from people and actually let that change matter and reintegrate them into our communities. What is best for victims is what actually works to prevent harm, not just in the moment but on a systemic level. If we want people to change, we have to actually make change possible, we have to make the mechanisms for change explicit and accessible, and make it actually matter.
We can talk all day long about how people need to take responsibility and it needs to actually matter and they need to be willing to take risks etc etc, but we do at some point actually need to grapple with what that means. If someone does harm, we need to be able to actually say "okay, this is what the process for taking accountability looks like," and then we need to live with the fact that the end point of this process is that person is still a part of our community. I see a lot of people talking about wanting folks to take accountability, but then also don't seem to want to discuss what that would actually practically mean, don't want to imagine being in a community with people who have done harm, don't want to imagine what social changes would need to occur for this process to be as productive as it could be. And then you end up with this fixation on people who don't want to change, itself a product of a system which does not incentivize meaningful change, used as a cudgel against any discussion about how to incentivize meaningful change.
I understand why people immediately go to "but will they actually take accountability? but will I be expected to personally make a person who harmed me a better person?" but there is a reason I distinguished between social vs interpersonal forgiveness and emphasized this being a process with no shortcuts. Trauma causes an aversion to nuance, because nuance is discomfort and vulnerability and risk, and that's all entirely understandable. But we can't just sit here in our trauma responses forever and talk about how much we want a better world while also being viscerally uncomfortable with what getting to that better world actually involves.
Once again: Yes, it will be hard, and complicated, and cause a lot of discomfort for everyone on a lot of levels. It will take a hell of a long time to get where we actually want to be. We will fuck it up a lot along the way. There is still no other choice. If we cannot hold multiple concepts at once and synthesize them productively, then our great-great-grandchildren will be dealing with the same trauma and horrific systems we are right now, because we want the fruits of a better world without doing any of the labor to get there.
What is frustrating to me most is not people pointing out that those who have done harm need to really take on the burden of accountability and repair. It is the attitude that this is not inherent to the restorative justice ideal I am describing, that clearly I must be forgetting that harm is real and serious or that accountability needs to be equally real and serious. Its the reading into my post some innate dichotomy between being victim-centered and try to keep our community pure of all perpetrators of harm, or being perpetrator-centered and utterly naive to what harm actually means and how it occurs, when the entire point of restorative justice should be that this dichotomy is fake and unhelpful to actual, long-term healing.
#you people will do Anything to avoid even the thought of potential future discomfort i s2g#i think people see ''we need clearly defined processes for people to make amends & reenter the community''#and read it as ''MY community? My PERSONAL friend group?? you want me to go out for beers w/ my abuser & be besties & let them move in???#why would you say that?!''#nobody is saying that you personally ever have to want that person back in your life#what people ARE saying is that after they've participated in a process of restorative justice & made amends you don't get to-#-demand that they be fired from their job bc seeing them exist in public makes you uncomfortable#in a world where restorative justice has been successfully implemented sometimes your childhood abuser is going to be a teller at your bank#and that has to be okay. you don't have to go through their line! but you do have to accept that they have a right to be there.
This, exactly.
In a world where restorative justice has been successfully implemented sometimes your childhood abuser is going to be a teller at your bank. And that has to be okay. You don't have to go through their line! But you do have to accept that they have a right to be there.
"absolutely fucking wild shit" and its the idea that people who have abused others will have jobs and exist in the world, as opposed to idk being stood against the wall and shot. because that's working out so well for everyone right now. 99% of punitive justice advocates stop just before the emotional catharsis of violent revenge actually leads to meaningful safety and prevention of harm!
unfortunately i dont think its queerbaiting if the creator is just so terminally heterosexual that they never remotely considered the same gender relationship their show is centered around could be read as romantic. it is deeply painful however.
Maybe accidental queer baiting? The way someone may not mean to say something rude, but it may come off rude, so it's rude. Frustrating either way.
Not being a dick, just a friendly clarification.
By definition you can't accidentally queerbait. Queerbaiting is specifically using a same sex pair from the show to market the show to queer audiences with no intention of ever following through on a romantic relationship.
There is officially licensed Destiel merch signed off on by Kripke. Teen Wolf had a commercial with the actors for Derek and Stiles draped over each other talking about being "on a ship." Both shows actively used scenes between them as marketing while actively mocking fans for wanting them together. Sherlock has multiple characters refer to Johnlock as a couple, including characters we're supposed to believe are never wrong about human behavior and pushed those scenes in marketing. Then they acted insulted when fans saw them as a couple.
That's queerbaiting.
Done on accident it would just be queer subtext. Done because they had no other choice due to censorship is queer coding.
The specific meaning of the word is really starting to get lost and it's a pretty important one to keep accurate. It describes a very specific phenomenon that was done repeatedly and maliciously for decades and is meant to examine that specifically.
Doing it on accident sucks, but it isn't a tactic of capitalism intentionally intended to suppress queer representation while making money from queer fans.
ladies if youre a kpoppie, please occasionally take the time to remind yourself that you are a fan of just some guy
ladies if youre into mcyt, please occasionally take the time to remind yourself that you are a fan of just some guy
ladies?
minecraft youtubers.
No one ever expects the spanish ministry of science and technology
is jake gyllenhaal gay??
why would you ask us, a narnia blog, this
idk guys sometimes you just have to accept a ship dynamic is unhealthy, insane, and sometimes abusive. and its not real people so those factors just make it interesting
please stop unfolding the origami crane and smoothing it out bc you got worried the paper was hurting from the bends
okay see i don't want to be a dick because i'm not saying you're entirely wrong- showing abusive relationships and clarifying that they're abusive in media does help people recognize abuse in real life. it's probably a really good thing to include in media aimed at kids or 'family viewing'. but that's not what my post is about and it's not the only reason to write abusive fucked up relationships, and acting like it is flattens stories in a way that is ultimately really bad. and you're completely misinterpreting my post if you think the point of it was sometimes we should include Bad Relationships so Kids At Home Will Know Its Bad.
my point was that sometimes it is interesting to read about or write about really weird unhealthy relationships. not educational.
I don't think an author should have to preface their gothic horror with "and of course, fucking a guy whos secretly your cousin and maybe killed your mom is bad and i disavow". i don't think every fanfic that decides to make the love interest a rapist should end with "and he goes to jail, because that was a Bad Thing to Do, and the victim of his behavior went to therapy and got help dealing with the ramifications".
It's fictional. It's not real. It's not a PSA. sometimes the point is to deconstruct the viewpoint of a rapist who doesn't know they're a rapist. sometimes it's exploring how codependent two characters can get if you put them in a jigsaw trap and tie their legs together. sometimes the point is the author thinks it's sexy to imagine getting fucked at knifepoint. sometimes its literally just this:
and all of that is awesome, actually.
or to put it much much shorter and continue the metaphor of the original post.
please stop demanding an artist justify why they'd make an origami tiger and that they better publicly state they know that real tigers are dangerous. that the only reason to make an origami tiger is so that you can show it to people so they know what a tiger looks like and they know they're dangerous so they never go near a real tiger!
Compound bows? Fixed it mate!
Hey look, there’s more content here!
He's prostrating himself before the Eucharist, in case you're wondering. Or possibly planking.
@apocrypals
Hi, pope expert here. This isn’t funny — popes only do this when they’re in extreme distress
We're all in extreme distress, he's not special.
Shoutout to the time my partner and I got so excited to see Ea-Nasir's hate mail in person that we failed to notice the Code of Hammurabi next to it
[ID: a cuneiform tablet displayed on glass, with a museum label that reads 'Complaint about delivery of the wrong grade of copper' - 'About 1750 BC (Old Babylonian Period), from Ur'. There is a larger tablet on the left, cut off by the border of the picture. End ID.]
some interesting things about our guy Ea-Nasir and his hate mail
1: the most famous one is the first one we found and it was by a person named Nanni. I just think we should remember the person who wrote it
2: we wound up finding like, a whole closet full of complaints about Ea-Nasir
3: I read translations of several of them as well as suplemental information on Ea-Nasir by the professionals that studied him, and it's been a while, but i will now tell you a summary of his life story to the best of my ability as i remember it
He started off early in his career becoming one of the main copper dealers working directly for the palace, where he built up a good reputation for himself.
Then he moved into being more of a middleman, buying the copper from the outlying city states and then selling it to his old contacts at the palace. And also on the open market. Soon he was dealing in both the wholesale ingots (which is what most of the complaints are about) and finished copper products direct to both smaller merchants and the general public - things like decorated copper pots etc.
At some point he wound up in one of the city states buying copper and stayed there.
It was the island city state of Dilmun, in the Persian Gulf, downstream from his hometown of Ur.
There is absolutely no evidence to say i am right about this next point, but i know how people work, and given what follows, i strongly suspect he got in with the wrong crowd and developed either a gambling problem or a drug problem (or it could have just been women and beach parties, but i do suspect drugs or gambling more)
Anyway, what we do know is that he sort of stopped coming back to his old city, and started running a sort of scam. I really think it was basically like the bernie madoff thing, he would say "if you give me the money, i can buy you the best copper at a good price" and someone would give him the money, and then he would spend that money, and then he would get really really hard to track down, and then when the person finally did track him down he'd be like "fine!"
So he'd get someone else to give him money for top shelf copper, then he'd spend like half that money on bottom grade copper and send the shitty copper to the person who was hounding him to complete his contract. That person would write an angry letter, often threatening legal action, and Ea-Nasir would basically be like "listen, you gave me money for 100 ingots of copper, i sent you 100 ingots of copper; if you don't want them now, that's on you"
He did this a lot. Two of the guys in charge of buying copper for the palace itself (his old job) had to buy good copper with money out of their own pocket after he took the palace money they gave him and sent shitty copper to the palace. And remember, he KNEW what the palace standards were.
At some point in all this he got himself a business partner, and one of the tablets is from this business partner, and it basically says "i'm sending you a good customer with good money who is exactly what this business needs. Please, please do not be the asshole you usually are."
Another complaint tablet i liked is like the third one this author is sending him and among other things it says "do you not know how tired of you i am?"
Anyway, as you can imagine, he burned all his bridges, ruined his reputation, and drove himself out of business. At which point he had to move back home. My guess is he left some angry loan sharks in Dilmun holding a large IOU when he bailed.
Then he tried to start a lot of other businesses. I think he opened a restaurant briefly? He even did some speculative real estate.
Somewhere in here, he had to sell some of his house to his neighbors. All the houses were touching, like, they all had shared walls like an apartment complex, so he basically plastered over the doors to, idk, half his house, and they knocked a door in one of the shared walls to access it, and just like that half his property became part of his neighbors' home. He must have been very broke.
In the end, he wound up running a second hand clothing store out of what was left of his home.
So that's the tale of Ea-Nasir, people really have been living the same stories since always, haven't we.
Anyway I think we should try to remember Nanni's name, the person who wrote the most famous of the complaint tablets
just wanted to add some pictures of Ea-Nasir's "hometown" the city state of Ur so you can get a sense of the setting
here it is today
im trying to go to sleep but i cannotttttt stop thinking about this and laughing
Listen, we have to keep this thing circulating on the internet for at least another two decades, because I have to believe that one day that little girl will be grown enough to stumble upon it and She Will Explain
We’ve made it 5 years folks
If I had a Silmaril for every time a Tolkien character in Silmarillion was in Angband and lost a hand during the escape from it, I will have three Silmarilli. Which, while not a huge number, is the total number of Silmarilli in existence and would have been enough for the sons of Fëanáro to fulfill their Oath.
As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".
So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:
Excuse me???
you are right and you should say it.
Is this the face of a man who would put his own infant in front of a plow to avoid going to war?
Absolutely not
You know who would try that shit?
Is this the face of a man who would defy the very gods to get home to his wife?
You know who would defy the gods just to show he could get away with it?