#using a phone

[kiwi]

anybody else feel that being human is like being a long-time syndicated cartoon character watching the world get more complex while your own design stays the same until youre incongruous with the reality around you??

[marvelsmostwanted]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[softichill]

I still think the most devastating enshittification I've ever seen has been picrew. One of the few dress-up game websites left that's not flash-based and it's become DRENCHED in ads. You can't open the home screen without being blasted by at least three or four ads. You can't open two picrews in a row without watching a video ad first. When you have a picrew open the ads cover up the different options and sometimes even stack on each other so you have to hit like 2 or 3 different x buttons to get it to go away, only for more to appear seconds later. Evil world

[skyberia]

here's a list of programs/sites/whatever that were helpful to me when i was moving away from using spotify & back to downloading music:

soulseek - peer to peer downloading program, has most music you'd want. there's "rules" to it though and the UI is a little confusing, but you can figure it out. there's tutorials. i believe in you

cobalt.tools, ytiz.xyz, yt-dlp - mp3 downloaders, for the songs that you can't find on soulseek

musicbee - music player, extremely customiseable. reminds me of when i used itunes back in the day. has a lot of good features, including syncing music over to your phone

lastfm & listenbrainz - sites that keep track of your listening stats. i'd recommend this even if you still choose to use a music streaming service

syncedlyrics - cmd thing that gets you timed song lyrics, like the ones spotify has. there's no UI but it's easy enough to use. just grab the lyrics and timestamps it spits out and paste it into musicbee

music presence - program that shows what song you're listening to in your discord status, in case you use discord and enjoy the thought of other people seeing what you're listening to, which i do for some reason

i'm not going to lie to you and say that switching away from spotify/streaming services is an effortless task, it took me half a whole day of nonstop Work to get all my music downloaded and sorted out, but i will say that it was worth it!! and you should do it 👍 if you want to

ETA: for more resources, check the reblogs! Plenty of different people have pitched in more sites/programs/etc that i didn't mention here that might be helpful to you as well

[salamispots]

it got turned into a 17" x14" pillow instead haha

[legalandnotease]

Honestly, I cannot understand this characterization of Bucky as "brutal", not least the examples given in the OP.

As @buckydeservesthebest revealed in her screenshots, the police in Bucharest were straight out trying to kill him. More than that: they were trying to kill him in a an especially brutal manner.

First, blowing him up with a grenade and then on a the stairwell one of them gets bloody close to *shooting him in the face at point-blank range*.

I mean look at the position of that gun after he pushed it out the way.

To call his reaction to somebody trying to put several bullets through his skull which consists entirely of evasion/preventing his opponent from shooting him "brutal" is absurd.

If Bucky wanted to be brutal, he could have thrown each and every one of those guys out of the windows, or down the stairwells. Or even picked up one of the discarded guns and literally mown them down.

He's good with guns. He used them all the time as The Winter Soldier.

Yet he doesn't do that here.

Also, let's be honest here. If any other MCU character was in this scenario, such as Tony Stark, nobody would blink at him firing a missile at his pursuers and blowing them up. Nobody would object to Clint Barton shooting them or Natasha garotting them .

Yet when an unarmed Bucky engaged is non-lethal *hand to hand* fighting against 40-odd men with machine guns all aiming for his head, he's the one in the wrong.

You know what I think?

I think viewers want Bucky to be more brutal than he is, and so they read "brutality" into almost-invariably defensive fights, where there is none.

Because of course he's "The Winter Soldier": he's a "badass". Why is he only fighting to defend himself? Why isn't he just going full on with his missile launcher?

The idea that he might have a no-kill rule, the idea that he doesn't engage in aggressive violence and that he might not be a naturally violent person contradicts everything we have been led to believe about his character.

Not just his character, but the superhero genre generally. Superheroes are not mean to be semi-pacifists who would sooner run or retire to a farm then fight.

Also those male stereotypes come to play. Big man with big muscles metal arm *must* be violent and brutal. Why would he be big and have metal arm otherwise? The dichotomy between Bucky being physically strong but not prone to aggression is there, and is is glaring: and it is something both the MCU writers and audience struggle with.

A similar stuation existed with the Star Wars prequels and Anakin Skywalker. How could the "future Darth Vader" (male power fantasy...) have been a kind, gentle, sensitive young person who cried and cared about women?

How can the former Winter Soldier be a kind, protective and yes *gentle* person who if he has a choice, does not want to fight at all? Who would rather use his metal arm to check if plums are ripe, do farm work, or play with local kids. Or live as an amputee with only one arm.

I think some people mad about the arm is not necessarily about the fact that Ayo disabling the arm itself, it's more of the fact that it was not necessary and the fact that Bucky had no idea they can do that. If I were to be honest, I think it was not that necessary because Ayo is well capable of taking him down without having to disarm him and she is definitely not threatened by him. I think what some people find upsetting about that scene is the fact that it kinda comes off as Ayo putting Bucky in a position where it would make him feel like he doesn't have full control of his own body after all. The Wakandans, especially Ayo, T'Challa and Shuri had every right to feel betrayed and upset but the point is they should have told Bucky about how the arm can easily be disabled like that, they didn't know Bucky was going to set Zemo free when they gave him the arm and regardless of the things they have done for him and if they were ones who gave him the arm, they should have at least told him about it, because it's connected to him, it's a part of HIS body. It doesn't matter if it was necessary to disarm him or not, the point is they should have told him about it because apart from the fact that it's his body and that it was a bit insensitive given his history, it's also a point of vulnerability, and the fact that she did it in front of Walker (and possibly Zemo) --- people who can easily turn on Bucky, could easily that to their advantage and attempt to disable it themselves. Just my thoughts on it.

Thank you for sharing your perspective, anon!

I’m going to use this long-ass reply to address this stuff with Ayo and also voice some thoughts I’ve had over the past few weeks seeing people paint Bucky into being this complete soft and harmless human that needs 25-7 protection which I don’t jive with — and this is me, a complete Bucky stan.

Many moons ago, I saw a post that compared 1940s Bucky moving with stealth and a loaded gun on the train to the Winter Soldier doing the same thing, essentially discussing the similarities and debating how much of non-brainwashed Bucky was in the Soldier. And I think the fandom forgets or chooses to neglect the following when painting him as this fragile, peace-loving guy:

Bucky was an incredibly skilled sniper in the United States Army. His job is to eliminate threats in the most efficient way possible, and he’s good at it. HYDRA gets their hands on him and + the serum, this gets magnified. It wasn’t like HYDRA turned him into someone with the ability and mental capacity to kill — that was already there. The brainwashing and torture just carved out the rest of him to leave those honed skills and an amplified ruthlessness with no moral issues, no sense of self to contend with. That ruthlessness is part of Bucky, whether people like it or not.

When Bucky is outside of HYDRA for the first time and hiding in Civil War and gets attacked, he’s so brutal in his actions that Steve Rogers, the man who literally was ready to die to save Bucky and free him when no one else believed in the good in him, intervenes because “Buck, you’re going to kill someone.” Bucky responds that he’s not going to kill anyone, but the fact remains: with or without HYDRA control, Bucky has a strong capacity for violence that hovers on brutality — again, what’s the most efficient way to eliminate or neutralize a threat? Like, I don’t want to kill you, but I’ll knock your ass out with cinder blocks to the chest.

Bucky has a good heart, he’s loyal, he’s smart, he’s caring, he’s the longest-standing POW in history and was turned into a slave for decades, put through unimaginable trauma and torture and horror with no escape. Bucky is also a strong and incredibly skilled super soldier who has a bionic arm, is a trained sniper, is unnervingly precise with knives, and self-describes himself as “semi-stable.” Zemo notes in the bar that “it didn’t take Bucky long to get back into form,” and he’s right because the ruthlessness and skill of the Winter Soldier is a part of him and always has been. We see it when he has his hand around Zemo’s neck and tells him he will kill him, when he rips the glass from his hand and throws it across the room.

And I’m sure the Wakandans know all this about Bucky, this light and his ability for hard-to-stop violence, whether from talking to Steve and Bucky or doing their own homework. And they still choose to help him out of the goodness of their hearts because he’s been put through hell and they believe they have the capacity to help him and it’s the right thing to do — they’re betting more on those positive attributes. And they put a failsafe on his arm, a literal weapon, and chose not to tell him. You know why I think that shows how much they did care about him? Because they could’ve blatantly come out and said “Hey, we don’t trust you,” and hurt him outright, but they didn’t because they’re betting on the light in Bucky to outweigh the dark or any future manipulation. That it’s a worst-case scenario function they hope to never have to use — so they’re prepared if shit hits the fan, and if it doesn’t, Bucky doesn’t have to be hurt feeling like he can’t be trusted. I see no issues here, they’re just being cautious.

Now coming to Ayo, my QUEEN Ayo. From that beautiful, beautiful opening scene, we get to see her support, her reassurance, her belief that Bucky will be able to work through this, even when he doesn’t believe it himself. She watches him fight and struggle and cry, and you can feel the hope in her and how moved she is when she gets to tell him it worked, he did it — he’s free. And she says it not once, but twice. And you can hear not just the comfort, but the PRIDE and warmth in her voice directed to him, who I’m sure she’s watched throughout the whole deprogramming process and gotten to know and is happy to see him work through the pain and come out on the other side.

And then she sees that same individual make a decision in freeing Zemo that she perceives as a “fuck you” not just to her country, but to her, someone who was charged with protecting her king. She could’ve just disarmed Bucky the second they met up, but she doesn’t. She takes the time to explain her side and her feelings, her guilt and her shame, and basically implies that she feels betrayed by Bucky because Wakanda helped him and now he’s doing something that’s hurting her country. And still, she doesn’t attack or just go get Zemo. She gives Bucky the benefit of the doubt and a whole 8-hour American workday to do what he has to do because again, she believes in the best of him. And then that time limit runs up, and he chooses to get in her way.

And that’s the final straw. She’s angry, she’s guilty, she’s frustrated, and she feels betrayed hurt by someone I think she did respect and care about, someone whom she worked with and helped and supported when he was his most vulnerable. Did she “need” to disarm the arm to fight Bucky? Probably not. But is she doing it in the heat of battle and adrenaline and a whole bucket ton of emotions, including what she sees as the White Wolf blatantly disrespecting her country and her as a person and even friend and she just says fuck it, I’m done? You hurt us and me, and I’m going to hurt you back? Oh yeah. And Bucky looks shocked, not because he’s a poor fragile baby and “oh no, my arm, how could you?? my TrAumA”, but in the dual realization of “oh shit, how’d you do that?!” and “oh shit, I think I crossed a line here.” And also, I don’t think a single person in that room would be able to recreate the disabling sequence other than Ayo — it’s way too targeted and specific for someone like Walker to pick it up in the whole three seconds it took.

People need to stop reducing characters to these black and white extremes of soft and hard, of good and bad. Doing so completely devalues and ignores the REALITY of the complexity of being human, and Bucky and Ayo are both great examples of that played by stellar actors who portray that range and depth extremely well. End of the day, my thought is that the failsafe in the arm was justified and people need to stop coming for Ayo based on this ridiculous narrative that Bucky is too traumatized and sensitive and too much of a fave to ever be challenged or he’ll explode into dust. Boy deserves a life of freedom and healing and mental health support, but he’s also still a formidable opponent with the capacity for violence and skillset to kill. People are more than one thing.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk!!

[dolcegbaby]

[count-pudding]

Wizard Installer🧙✨

[prlssprfctn]

I will forgive DC for not using All-Blades stuff on Jason, only if they give me a comedy little run, where the family finds out that he is a fucking chosen one, because the half of the world tries to reach for his help in magic stuff, which he ignores — so they are forced to beg Bruce to affect his son, somehow.

Bruce: Hey, John. Long time no see. What happened?

John Constantine, tired as fuck: I need you to ask Jason to pick the goddamn phone.

Dick: Is he wanted in LA, too?

John Constantine: Wanted? Guy is having a fucking blast. Do you know how many people need the Chosen One's assistance?

Damian — who actually knows it, so he is not surprised — scoffing: Todd? Assistance?

Tim, who knows as much as Bruce and Dick, which means nothing: Jason? THE CHOSEN ONE?

Bruce, catching Jason near the fridge in three in the morning: Jason? When were you going to tell us that you were chosen to... restore the balance between good and bad, and had magical swords?

Jason, chewing on dry cereals while skimming through the book: Like what, was it hard?

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

so i just 14 seconds ago learned the blonde dude in dragonball is not, in fact, a unique character

[brutusinthewoods]

i just think walker would be devastated

[b1adie]

THE SILLIES !!!!!!!!!!!!

[sunny-knight]

he’s the biggest fan of us all…..

so this was the funny thing HEHFHHDHHD

THANK YOU SO MUCH TO! (left to right)

@f1ns

@floofanflurr

me :3

@sunsestart

@naathanuwu

@mishmash31

@naomiemuffet

and @bunnyehs

for lending your characters and joining in the papyrus fan club meeting!!! love all your sonas they were very fun to doodle….

AND thank you @belbobiggins for giving me this entire idea with this post!!!

…this was truly a team effort

[jomeimei421]

The absolute funniest thing you can do to Kris

[limewashedup]

bet he's real comfy with the blanket on the chair

[fallintomidnight]

officer : "Do you identify this man? "

Sirius :

Regulus, looking like a carbon copy of his brother : " I've never met this man in my life"