wildstoats

[kidmograph]

DOOM (2017)

[dariakonnova]

Thank you for commissioning me!

[wildstoats]

Sick!

[cosmichorrorlesbians]

ttrpg games are insane and make you insane in ways that are fundamental and irreparable. sometimes the best piece of fiction you will ever experience will happen to you and your friends over two to five years of your life. it will be your work and their work and yet somehow exist between and beyond you all. there will only be like three or five of you in the room and nobody else will ever be able to experience this in the way you did. it will be ephemeral and immediate and it will occasionally make you feel so bad you see hell. fuck. what a concept

[antipiper]

Now we fight on two fronts, my child.

[retro-scifi-and-fantasy-art]

Artist: Steven Vincent Johnson Ringworld (Larry Niven) From Future Life magazine 1979

[plaidadder]

The Battle of Minneapolis

I have been real busy and very horrified but I want to say one thing about what's going on in Minneapolis right now.

I was talking to a close friend of ours who lives in Minneapolis yesterday. When ICE first arrived in the city, it was shocking and appalling and terrifying for everyone. Renee Good's murder and the federal response to it made that a thousand times worse.

But yesterday he was cheerful. He's hooked up with mutual aid in his neighborhood and is delivering groceries; he's volunteered to foster the pets of people who've been disappeared. He hammered away for many minutes about the ridiculousness of Greg fucking Bovino and all the ways in which people are coming out to do their bit to protect people in their city from these goons and their impact. This is a guy who has always had a close relationship with depression.

And I said that I think what they didn't understand when they started this "surge" to Minneapolis is that for an entire year now, so many people all over this country have been looking for a way to fight all the evil this administration is doing, and most of the constitutional ways we're used to doing that just don't seem to work under these circumstances. Yes, we clobbered them in the most recent election cycle and that has made a big difference. But like...in the face of all this...calling our Congressional representatives has really started to feel pointless.

So by trying to occupy Minneapolis, Steven Miller and Kristi Noem and Bovino and all those other goons made one very stupid mistake. They gave people a place to fight them. They gave people a way to DO something productive, generative, and nonviolent with all of this anger. They created a battlefield; but not the kind they wanted. They gave people a place to take action against what they are doing to our neighbors. A place where care can be raised up against cruelty. Help against oppression. Shaming against shamelessness. There is room for everyone in this kind of fight. You don't want to go outside and scream at ICE goons? You can do the laundry for a family that can't get to the laundromat. Literally anything you know how to do, you can do as part of this fight, and know that it's mattering to someone.

And now on January 23, we have a kind of experiment about whether we can pull off a general strike. I wish it well.

These fuckers only know one way to fight. And if they had any sense of history, they'd know that their way never works in the long run. We spent 10 years trying to occupy Iraq with the entire US military and eventually we had to give up. They're trying to occupy one small US city, and it is not going well for them.

[plaidadder]

So I just want to clarify that I wrote this on January 23, one day before a group of either ICE or Border Patrol agents executed Alex Pretti on camera in front of witnesses.

All of this is still true but today my friend is a lot less cheerful. I'm sending him chocolate chip cookies. We're donating. It's what we can do from here.

I feel like I should acknowledge, for the sake of the younguns, that this is the most dangerous things have ever gotten in the US in my lifetime. 9/11 was bad but it was not as bad as this. I personally did not trust George W. Bush's government, and I still believe they exploited that tragedy and thereby made life worse for millions of people at home and abroad. But what I thought was the worst thing that would ever happen in my lifetime still did not involve a deliberate attempt to occupy an American city and control its inhabitants through continuous state terror.

Similarly, the destruction of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005--which I thought would be the worst thing I'd see happen to an American city in my lifetime--was certainly exacerbated by the incompetence, indifference, malice, and racism of the Republican Party, George W. Bush's administration, and the idiot asshole in charge of FEMA at the time. All of that was still neither as intentional nor as aggressive as this government's attempted destruction of Minneapolis.

In so many ways what's happening now is just an intensified expression of problems that were visible in George W. Bush's administration. And yet, there are some very important differences. One is certainly the nature of the people put in charge of these federal agencies.

People talk about how disturbing it is to 'watch' the videos of Good's murder and Peretti's murder, but to me what's worst about them is the audio. In both of these incidents--and in some of the videos that circulated during ICE's operations in Chicago--the violence elicits involuntary, instantaneous, and horrifying vocalizations from the witnesses. Some of it is just screaming. In one of the Pretti videos, you can hear someone near the camera yelling over and over, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Because for the witnesses, watching another human being's body destroyed by violence is universally and viscerally distressing. But the people doing the violence are not in distress. They will later claim that they were in fear for their lives; but that is certainly not what it looks or sounds like. It looks and sounds as if they are doing this violence because they want to do it, and that they find it immensely satisfying.

Back when Kristi Noem was nominated for head of DHS I reblogged a post about the controversy over her memoir, in which she tells a story about shooting two family pets--a puppy named Cricket and a goat. What I said about this at the time has often come back to me in recent days:

"Noem wants to make it a story about 'making tough choices.' But based on the way she herself tells it, it is actually a story about impulsively murdering a dog who embarrassed her in front of her friends/community. She turns on Cricket because not only did he misbehave in ways that brought disapproval upon her–ruining the hunt, eating a neighbor’s chickens–he enjoyed himself while she was being mortified. She kills him because his behavior made her feel shame.

Again that is not me reading into it; *this is how she herself explains her motivations.* And that is what is so profoundly unsettling to me. Not only did she kill the dog and the goat *to make herself feel better* and *to punish them,* she then told the story clearly thinking everyone who read it would sympathize with her and not with the animals she shot.

...

The desire to annihilate anything that makes you feel shame is something that’s obviously animating a lot of right wing 'culture war' politics and this story gives us a really clear view of where that desire can lead. And it also shows us that Noem, at least, sees that desire as normal and expects to be praised for acting on it, even when her victim is a 14 month old terrier."

Or, as the case may be, a mother of three, or a VA nurse. Or a five year old child who's been sent to a detention facility in Texas. Bovino is the same. He went out there on the Sunday shows to tell people that the "real victims" in the Pretti murder are the agents who murdered him. These are people who not only don't consider themselves public servants, not only don't give a shit about the jobs they've been hired to do or the people their agencies 'serve,' but also so fundamentally misunderstand...everything...that they can't even hear how grotesque they sound or how unconvincing their lies are. Pete Hegseth, who has now gratuitously inserted himself into the situation, is the same. His entire career as a pundit before his elevation to defense secretary was based on a single hot take: we should be allowed to commit war crimes. We should in fact be praised for committing war crimes. And sure enough, apart from his personal aggrandizement, the thing he appears to love most about this new job is the opportunity to commit war crimes. If in fact he does get the authorization to send the US military into Minneapolis, they will certainly commit war crimes because that what Pete Hegseth loves most. Atrocity.

So this is terrifying. But again: it doesn't change most of what was in that January 23 post. What they are attempting will eventually fail. I just hope it fails before more people die.

[witchamajigit]

The whole set of mood boards for Vox Machina

[ether--net]

[dummy-kanji]

[inprnt]

“HanginAround” by Tina Goparaju on INPRNT

[catrollsdice]

CAMPAIGN 4 CHARACTERS

if you need me I guess I'll be screaming about this art and these characters until the campaign actually starts

[mia-890]

[unbothered-muse]

x

[kirokazepixel]

Outer Chill

[elusivee-phantom]

The entirety of Pritzker's speech today is extremely important, and I highly recommend everyone read it (or listen to it if you prefer), but I would like to share some segments that highlight the overall point of his message.

"I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city, and as a state, and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country."

"Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago."

"What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American."

"If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?

Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.

This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections."

"There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention."

"So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump's military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois."

"To the members of the press who are assembled here today, and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is."

"Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidence, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab."

"Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, 'Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?' Instead, I say, 'Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.'

You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power."

"To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your National Guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, you would be failing your constituents and your country. Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to."

"Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back."

"You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."

[drunkenskunk]

So that latest Major Order in Helldivers 2 is making me laugh, but probably not for the reasons Arrowhead intended

Wielder of Ballots, Seeker of Democracy, King of Super-Swords, Breaker of Bots, Squid Smashing Lord,

KILL SIX BILLION TERMINIDS

Bearer of the Word Patriotism, and President of the Seven Part World.

[soyoumusik]

“Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

— Kurt Vonnegut (via lazypacific)

[mapsofnonexistentplaces]

leaving out a very vital part of the quote

[funstealer]

Victor Clavelly S/S 2026 "Les Fragments" via glazamirz / lomeeb / gastt_fashion

[wildstoats]

This goes so hard, damn ...