The-crabmaster - So Um, Do You Like… Things?

OK finished. This is gonna sound real funny but i did all this to put chest hair on Maggy yet i could not find it in my heart to do so. he is smooth on a spiritual level. I put that magic on him though!

this is so so important to me and mine, and I'm asking you to Do Something so I'll respect your time and keep it brief

in the UK, if 100k sign a a government petition it will be brought to Parliament and debated. y'all know this country is suffering from some 80s-style bigotry right now, and this is one symptom: almost 200k fuckholes have come together to force the government to discuss whether it is 'appropriate' to tell children that queer people exist. this is a big symbolic victory for them. and i am burning with fury.

please, if you're from the UK, sign this counter-petition so they can at least see how much of a minority they are. simply put, the attempt to put these bastards in their place isn't gathering enough steam. there are barely 2000 more signatures now than there were this morning (27th January 2023), and that isn't enough. i refuse to let these people feel even a moment of victory or satisfaction. please help.

Leyendecker's June Graduate but make it Erin

(reference/original pic under cut!)

Have you read/watched Nimona? If so, thoughts?

The kind of emotional gutpunch I can't bear to watch without ample preparation. The first ten minutes are the hard part for me - it's always a wrench for me to get through a "good-hearted character is cruelly framed" plotline, so I really appreciate how quickly they get that out of the way and how Nimona immediately brightens the mood when she shows up.

Overall, truly one of the best examples of how a creator can use their personal grief and rage at injustice as a medium to sculpt a story. The narrative manages to feel deeply authentic to a real emotional journey while still feeling completely contained within the story. I'm not entirely sure how to put this, but sometimes when a writer gets allegorical with their experiences, it can feel like the story gets put on pause so the characters can turn out to the audience and speak in the author's voice about their thoughts on the subject - a pretty clumsy way to communicate a message. Nimona does not do that. Instead, the many real-world parallels to bigotry, propaganda, queerphobia, church corruption, xenophobia, and regressive policies driven by terror of change feel like they arise naturally from the setting within the story rather than being imposed on it from the outside, which is extremely quality writing and characterization. Nimona's story is so clearly informed by ND Stevenson's life and gender journey, but Nimona herself feels like her own person who is messy and grieving and putting up walls and self-destructing and still - still - a fundamentally joyful, gleeful person who absolutely loves being alive when she isn't being brutally beaten down for the crime of existing inconveniently.

Also, it's a comparatively minor thing, but I really like how, like with She-Ra, Nimona creates a world that is passively non-homophobic, with gay relationships front and center and evidently regarded as completely fine and not worth commenting on - which, to me at least, made both stories remarkably relaxing and comfortable to immerse myself in, because I wasn't being randomly jumpscared by reminders of real-world hate - but it still uses allegory to address the real-world roots of homophobia in the form of xenophobia, correlated injustices like classism, and the monster-ification of The Other. So it can clearly state "hating people for how they exist is Always Fucked And Wrong" without having to dunk the queer audience in the icebath of "hey remember how people in the real world think you personally should be dead?" Again, not sure I'm phrasing this super clearly, but it's a balance ND Stevenson consistently strikes with his work, and I really love how he does it.

Animation's gorgeous, voicework is consistently top-shelf, love the aesthetic of Cyberpunk Arthuriana. Wins across the board.

Here is a more lighthearted one: Either Sanguinius or Fulgrim is helping Magnus fix his tangled hair.

Venting time...

Doodle requests are open!

So during a PlayOn Tabletop live stream, someone asked if nids had toe beans. This lead to the cursed creation of Beans the Hormacat. And who else to own him, by everyone's favorite necron.

There will be more hijinks coming.

So, you guys remember good old Ea-Nasir?  The copper merchant from ancient Mesopotamia who kept stiffing his customers out of their money and copper, and then kept their complaint letters stored in a room in his house, to be found by archaeologists thousands of years later?

Well, I recently learned something that makes that story even better.  Most clay tablets from that time period were made of unfired clay, which means that they degraded over time, getting washed away by weather and such.  Some of the fired tablets were fired on purpose, but others were fired accidentally when the building they were stored in were burnt down.  

That means that in this case there are three options.  (1) The tablets in Ea-Nasir’s house were unfired and just really randomly lucky to survive.  (2) Ea-Nasir’s house was burnt down, likely by someone he owed money to.  (3) Ea-Nasir not only kept a bunch of complaint letters in his house, but fired them to preserve them.

impulse / fix

The Green Knight

More favourite mad science tropes:

Flashy explosions as a result of errors in procedures that have no conceivable reason to involve any explosive substance  

Lab coats in non-laboratory settings  

All mad scientists being versed in mad psychology regardless of their ostensible mad field of study  

“It comes to life and starts eating people” being a potential failure mode of literally every experiment  

WIldly unethical ways of accomplishing goal that could have been achieved more easily without the crimes against humanity  

[noun] reaction/inversion/overload, where [noun] is something that one would not customarily regard as being capable of reacting/inverting/overloading  

The way that you can pinpoint the popular anxieties of the era of the story’s publication by looking at the form factor of the thing that turns people into face-eating monsters (e.g., weird potion versus nuclear radiation versus psychiatric fuckery, etc.)  

QuAnTum  

World-ending superweapons that are also people even though being a person has no bearing on the world-ending part  

“What in God’s name?” “God had nothing to do with it!”