[smashingorpassing]

if you are unable to donate financially to help palestine, you can donate your time by protesting, boycotting, and putting up posters!

if all you have is your device and internet access, you can put your clicks to good use on arab.org. they use the advertising revenue generated by your clicks to help good causes.

and i would urge those able to spare a few dollars to donate to one or more of the following organizations:

eSims for Gaza

Direct aid for Gaza

Care for Gaza

Women for Women International

Institute for Middle East Understanding

Medical Aid for Palestinians

Palestine Children Relief Fund

Muslim Aid USA

Direct Aid for Gaza

Palestinian American Medical Association

Urgent support for medical professionals in Gaza

Emergency Relief for Gaza

Anera

Taawon

[snapscube]

whats your preferred plushies storage method if any? do you have them on a shelf or in a pile or some secret third method i'm unfamiliar with

it’s pile city

[theunsubtleknife]

Sci-fi short stories are so efficient; they take 15 minutes to read and then you think about them for the next 5 years

[bonediggercharleston]

Hey guys, what if *puts the most horrifying mindblowing concept into your head with about 15 pages*

[broken-horn-of-equius]

[cartoon-fanaticism]

GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face

[wassuppeas]

[casualcryptid69]

We’re under a severe thunderstorm warning rn and my dad just opened the door to show my dog because he was begging to go out and it reminded me of that part in Dracula where Dracula opens the door to the howling wolves and Jonathan’s like um actually I’ll stay inside thanks

[thydungeongal]

"Games are art" doesn't just mean "games are good," to me it also means "games have meaning and deserve to be looked at as pieces created by people that actually reflect the circumstances of their creation." This means looking at games critically beyond a lens of "is it good on the scale of gameness?"

The Call of Duty games are actually popular not just in spite of their quality, but they're actually well-crafted games. However, there is merit in critical analysis of them that goes beyond "how many graphics" and "how much gameplay," but also looking at them via their quite real connections to the US military and how they basically mirror the ideology of the US military. This doesn't mean that you should treat the Call of Duty games as infohazards which will turn anyone who interacts with them into drones for the US military, but as reflections of real ideologies that are larger than the players themselves.

And like, there's a lot of art that carries ideologies that when transplanted into the real world would be morally repugnant to me, but as works of art they are worth engaging to me. Old-school D&D doesn't actually describe a real world but the fictional folks and structures used to populate it still say something about the people who made it, their priors, and what concessions they were willing to make in the fiction for the sake of gameplay.

This is something you should keep in mind when someone makes a point like "well the orcs/bandits/cultists deserve it because they did bad things in the fiction." These are in-setting justifications, ultimately come up with to frame the narrative of the game as heroic. There's not a lot of interesting ground to be covered in discussions of "how do we find an enemy in D&D player characters can kill without it morally compromising players" because the game isn't a cursed tome that'll turn you evil for engaging with it. What's more interesting is "what kind of priors went unexamined to uncritically make bandits/cultists/orcs the default enemies instead of, say, the lord's soldiers?"

And an unwillingness to think about these things doesn't make anyone morally deficient; however, in my opinion an unwillingness to entertain these ideas or an aggressive and vitriolic rejection of these lines of thought may be indicative of intellectual incuriosity and ultimately I feel it emerges from a similar place as "D&D must be woke or it'll infect me:" D&D must be protected from evil criticisms because otherwise D&D may seem morally deficient. Which is like so far besides the point.

And at the end of the day, I enjoy D&D when it's basically fantasy cops and robbers, or robbers and other robbers: it's a game of accumulating power by killing creatures and stealing their stuff. It's a really fun and I would even dare say good game when played that way. The reason I caution against approaching D&D from the point of view of "we must find the right type of monsters our characters can kill with moral impunity" is because you might accidentally end up from going from one unexamined trope to another but more importantly part of the buy-in of D&D is accepting that D&D the game as it exists thinks certain classes of monsters (and as we know from earlier, more equal opportunity editions, Men are also Monsters) are okay to be kill. It's literally fine, you won't be morally compromised for engaging with the game as is: but also, if you're fucked up like me you might find joy in thinking about "hey isn't it weird how this medieval fantasy world looks more like the American frontier than an actual medieval society?"

[indigosfindings]

i really like this thing where websites will have separate "log in" & "sign up" buttons and if you click "log in" it takes you to a sign-up screen anyway so you have to click "i already have an account" and then it will ask if you want to sign in with your facebook account or with instagram or linkedin or deviantart or whatever, and if you choose "username & password" it asks if you want to put in your username or use your thumbprint, and once you put your username & password it emails you a confirmation code, and once you put in the code it says "do you want to give us your phone number for future sign-ins? do you want to sign up for facial recognition? do you want to give us your bones? give us your fucking bones?

[girlballs-archive]

websites prior to like the 2010s: sign in with your username and password

websites now:

[clubpenguindoneright]

[softichill]

I loooove ominously giggling when I'm getting my friends into smth new. They ask me a spoilery question and I get to do this

[xxdrixx]

tick, tick... BOOM! (2021) dir. Lin-Manuel Miranda

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

Hey I'm trying to explain Transfem Jax to my friend who doesn't watch the show, but I can't find that big tumblr post that lays out all the clues. Do you have it?

here ya go!

[redstonedust]

i dont envy youtuber friendship fallouts like im imagining the times ive had to ditch a toxic ex-friend but with the additional baggage of a) having to maintain some professionalism as a public figure and b) there being hundreds of gay teenagers on the internet who headcanon us as found family and/or lovers. i think i would crash out.

[schlarklezyaoi]

i don’t usually find “[x character] has committed war crimes” jokes all that funny because they usually forget that what makes a war crime a war crime instead of a regular offense is that it’s happening during a declared war. i’m rewatching avatar though and nothing brings me more pleasure to be able to say shit like “sokka has canonically broken the geneva convention” and have it actually check out

[shnowyfox]

it would be so awesome

it would be so cool

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

i got my ribbit plush in the mail

[prince-frederic]

in light of events in belfast rn, im gonna post this fundraiser

Support people and groups impacted by racist attacks

We are raising funds to support people who have been attacked, displaced and traumatised in racist attacks in Belfast.

if youre able to donate, itd mean a lot to everyone whos been affected by this

[astriiformes]

Anyway the real questions I'd like to ask allo people in fandom in an attempt to get them to understand maybe a little bit why aro and/or ace fans feel so upset and lonely all the time are:

Do you have any aro/ace headcanons? Are they of main characters? Your favorite characters? Characters you even like?

When was the last time you read a fic that featured an aro/ace character? Did you bookmark it? Did you leave a comment? Have you ever put one on a reclist?

Have you ever participated in a genfic exchange? Have you ever considered that things like exchanges rely in part on having a certain number of participants, otherwise assignments won't work?

Have you ever had your art tagged with the name of a ship you didn't personally like? How did that make you feel? Have you ever thought about the fact that other people might feel the same way? Maybe even about the ships you do like?

Bonus hard round:

Have you ever considered what kind of a message it sends to say "Just let me write stories/make art/reblog posts about the things I like!" and to then exclude an entire group of marginalized people from "The things you like"