grounded-gryphon

[grounded-gryphon]

I was thinking about how I have grown to value mandatory voting over a system that allows allegedly more freedom. Because in country, mandatory voting means I just have to send in a ballot. It can be empty or filled with the write in ballot "pickle farts" if I want.

If I go to the voting station all I have to do is get my name checked off. I don't have to vote if I don't want to.

But it means it is much more difficult for the government to try and suppress voters. Because voters have a legal obligation to go to the polls, so you can't restrict them or try tactics to dissuade them.

Voting polls are open long hours with access to food and water being a fairly standard staple. You don't need any form of ID, you have to be given time to go vote in work hours without penalty if you cannot do it after work hours.

Every now and then a politician tries some small way of voter suppression but it isn't as easy. And so I have learned to appreciate it.

But when I googled, out of curiosity, if the USA had ever had anything like that I was met with a barrage of websites talking about freedom and justice and the absolute liberty of Americans. I thought an eagle was going to bust out of the screen.

Going through some of these I noticed they were think tanks connected to billionaires, one of them was funded and created by the Koch brothers.

Gotta love how often the American "freedom" is actually used as a way to further deny actual freedoms, both linguistically and politically.

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Yes, It Is Just Like The Nazis

Hey so remember Anne Frank? The Jewish young girl who hid in an attic and was killed by the Nazis? The emblematic person we think of when we think of victims of the Holocaust? 

She did not die in a gas chamber or in a death camp. She died in a ‘temporary’ detention center for the mass deportations which preceded the death camps. She was in that camp because a patriotic neighbor ratted her out to the German deportation force. She died, not of a bullet to the back of the head or choking on gas, but of typhus. She contracted typhus because the Nazis couldn’t realistically deport people at the rate they wanted to, because before the death camps their infrastructure couldn’t handle the sudden influx of ethnic minorities they had decided to imprison, and because they didn’t care about the consequences of that so their deportation detention centers were unhygienic and prisoners were underfed and overcrowded. 

And she was picked up by the deportation force not because she was an illegal citizen but because, just like the US is doing with asylum seekers, she was part of a formerly recognized class of citizens who were legally redefined to lack citizenship by a new administration. 

Anne Frank is exactly like the children who have already died in the United State’s detention camps. Exactly. Down to the very last detail. There. Is. Not. A. Single. Difference. 

So unless you want to fucking tell me that Anne goddamn Frank was not a victim of the Holocaust, y’all can shut the fuck up with that “stop making concentration camp comparisons, you’re diminishing the suffering of the Holocaust” bullshit. 

[grounded-gryphon]

Don't ever hesitate. Reblog this. TUMBLR RULE. When you see it, REBLOG IT.

[grounded-gryphon]

Alfred: Timothy Jackson Drake. Tim: Full name....omg, am I going to die? Dick: It was nice knowing you Timmy. Damian: Don't lie to a dead man walking, Richard. Timothy, your existence in our lives was ambivalent at best. Tim: Thank you for your honesty, Dami. It's a comfort in my final moments. Alfred: Stop being so dramatic; you won't die today. I'm not mad; I'm disappointed in you. Tim wince: That's far worse. What did I do? Alfred: It's more like what you didn't do. Why is it that every morning, you do not find the five minutes it takes to make your bed? Tim: *confused* What do you mean? Alfred: Your bedroom is usually spotless, but you never fix your blankets or your pillows, and it makes everything look awful. I have tried to ignore it, in the hope that you will learn some responsibility, but I can no longer stand it. Tim: But I've never done my bed. It's always been done for me. Alfred: Whatever servants you had at Drake Manor are not here- Tim: I never had servants. It was just my parents, and most of the time, they weren't even in the country. I mean, the housekeeper came by every three days or so, but she never went into my room. Alfred: Wait, if you didn't make your bed and there were no servants to make it, then how was it done? Tim: It made itself, duh. Dick: Would you like to expand on that answer for the class, Timmy? Tim: Come on Dick you know what I mean. The sheets move on their own and tuck themselves in, or the pillows constantly rearrange themselves. Sometimes, on a cold night, the blankets will emerge from the closet and wrap around you. Every day, bedroom stuff. Dick: Damian: Timothy, I believe you were being haunted as a child. Tim: What? Alfred: Did anyhing else stop happening when you moved out of your old home? Tim snapping his fingers: Now that you mention it, nothing whispers in my ears anymore. Dick: You were hearing whispers!? Tim: It was mostly gibbersish and hisses so I always ingored it. The ghost should have learn to not mutter. Danny, reading their lips from the Drake Manor window using binoculars: Well, excuse me for having a speaking impediment.

[grounded-gryphon]

DPxDC Urgent Call

"I need your phone."

Tim looks up from his laptop. The boy in front of him looks like he's been dragged to Hell a week ago and just made it back: smudges of soot on his face, his not-so-white t-shirt smelling of smoke, and a nasty looking burn on his hand that he somehow doesn't even pay attention to. Tim thinks back to his mental list of 'Rogues currently on the loose', but it's only Ivy and Harley (who don't even count anymore), and Penguin, who is not known for setting things on fire.

"I can call 911 for you, if you want?" He offers, because this is still Gotham. Despite the fact that a slightly scorched guy casually walking into a coffee shop is not something out of the ordinary here, he's not giving his phone to strangers.

The guy grimaces and starts aggressively rummaging through his pockets.

"No, thanks, ACAB and all that, and they won't do shit here anyway," he says, and then pulls a handful of tangled golden jewelry — rings, chains, necklaces with various gems in them — from his pocket and places it on the table in front of Tim. "I need your phone," he repeats.

Tim stares. First, at the gold — these things look antique, and his parents were archeologists, he knows what he's talking about — then, back at the guy. He looks... ordinary, sans the dirt and smell.

But the burn on his hand looks significantly more healed than it did just a minute ago.

Thankfully, Tim has already had his cup of morning coffee. Which means he is thinking very rationally when he does get his phone out of his pocket and hands it to the guy, just to see what he does next.

"Thanks," the guy grins at him, plucking the phone out of Tim's hand and unlocking it. Tim's eyebrows shoot up — there's a password there! — but the stranger is already dialing in a number and pressing the phone to his ear.

It takes less than a second before someone evidently picks up, and the guy starts talking.

"I have less than three minutes before the phone dies, so listen very carefully. Etrigan is fine, Jason is not, Klarion is still being a bitch. Dora won't help anymore, so you're on your own until Sam makes it there with the staff. I'm in Gotham because, apparently, mazes and I don't mix well together, so if you could summon me back, that'd be cool," he says, a look of mild annoyance on his face.

Tim is back to staring at him. He recognizes some of the names, and, well, one could have been an oddity, two a coincidence, but three is a pattern.

"The fuck you mean you can't, I gave you the incantation two months ago!" The guy raises his voice, his foot tapping on the floor in frustration. "Do you think I just go around giving my summons to people for shits and giggles? Like, yeah, have a spell that unleashes a cosmic being of immeasurable power, use it as a bookmark!"

This interaction, despite Tim only hearing one side of it, gets more and more alarming with every word.

But then, the boy suddenly straightens up and stills, his eyes flashing bright, unpleasantly familiar green.

"You what?" He asks, his voice slipping from just angry to quietly enraged hiss, "Sold it to whom?!" But, before he gets an answer, Tim's phone makes a thin, tiny buzzing sound, and the guy takes it off his ear, looking at the screen.

"No, no-no-no," he mutters, shaking it like that would make it work. To no avail, though: the phone screen flashes a few times and goes black. The guy curses. At least Tim thinks it's a curse because he doesn't understand a word, but the stranger's face and intonation are telling.

"Useless fucking moron of a human, I swear I'm going to drown you in cow shit once this is over," he switches to English, dropping the phone on the table right by the small pile of gold, "I'll bargain your pathetic soul from everyone you've ever dealt with and give it to the Observants, and maybe, after a few millenia of endless Council paperwork, I'll have mercy and sell it back to Lucifer and watch him fry you on a skillet."

...Whoever the boy is, Tim absolutely refuses to ever piss him off, okay. That's an impressive threat to even make, not to mention being able to go through with it.

"Do you need help?" He asks cautiously. If he is getting his context clues right, this is something that involves JLD, and maybe John Constantine specifically since Tim doesn't know any other man who is a magic user, sold his soul numerous times, would care about Etrigan's wellbeing, and could invoke this kind of murderous intent.

The boy looks back at him, his eyes back to normal blue.

"Huh? Oh, no, I doubt this can be helped," he waves Tim off and pinches the bridge of his nose, "Sorry about the phone, but, unless you have a way to yeet me across the globe so I end up in London in the next twenty minutes..." he shrugs, smiling in that helpless 'nothing you can do here' way.

Tim picks up his phone. It's dead, wholly and completely, won't even turn on when he tries.

He really, really shouldn't do that. This is definitely none of his business, and very much out of his capabilities and area of expertise.

But he thinks about the zeta-tube in the Cave.

"Actually," he says, and the guy's eyes snap back to him, a bewildered sort of surprise on his face.

[grounded-gryphon]

Apparently there was some kind of race scheduled at a local park or something so I've been trying to avoid the main trail but a little while ago when I had to cross near it I overheard the following shouted exchange

Higher feminine voice: woo, look at you go! You're jogging! Keep it up!

Lower masculine voice (panting): you know it! Last place is still a place, baby!

And goddamn if that didn't rewire my brain a little bit.

Last place is still a place, baby.

[grounded-gryphon]

This may be the worst use of LLMs anyone has attempted, ever. Up there with recognizing mushrooms.

[grounded-gryphon]

So I had to return a book to the library today and I came straight from the horse farm. I went to the front desk because it was an item on loan from another library and I wasn’t sure if it had to be checked in differently. The librarian said no, it could get returned in the normal slot but she could take it and check it in right away.

It was only when I got back to the car that I realized I had walked into the library covered in dirt from head to toe and handed back a book about grave robbing.

[grounded-gryphon]

Listen, before you say something like “Jim Crow laws were the template for the Holocaust” make sure you know the answer to this question: what’s the etymology of the word ghetto and when and where was it coined?

[grounded-gryphon]

"marriage is the ONLY way to get these protections" "there is NO WAY to hack a legal arrangement to cover everything that marriage grants" "kiddos you don't remember what it was like before we could get married, we finally got rights because we could get married" Okay But You Recognize Why That's Bad, Right. Like that is really, really bad that you have to enter a specific type of relationship to get legal rights. That is A Problem. You recognize that that is Not A Good Thing, Right

[grounded-gryphon]

hey in case you didn't know trans inclusive terminology in healthcare is not about protecting peoples feelings, it's to stop insurance companies from going "well it says here that hysterectomies are a procedure performed on WOMEN and you keep insisting that you're a MAN so we do not in fact have to cover that have a nice day and eat shit"

[grounded-gryphon]

Conlang for Dragon Symbiotes World, continued

Okay, so I now have four complete sound inventories, two sets of word building rules, and a major headache.

How do I transliterate IPA across four different languages, while keeping the transliteration consistent and easy for me to remember/type?

What I'm doing for now (and I'm not entirely happy with it) is I have a table with all the major IPA symbols and I'm adding a transliteration for each symbol as I use it in a conlang.

As much as possible I'm using direct english equivalents (a=a, t=t, j=y) and for things that don't have direct english equivalents, I'm throwing a diacritic over it (a̅h) the same diacritic for all nonstandard English sounds.

This is less then ideal, but it's the best I've got at the moment. I'm not used to working with diacritics OR multiple languages at the same time. The idea of using 5 different diacritics each meaning a specific something honestly makes my head hurt. This way people who care can look up the pronunciation guide, and people who don't can't just ignore the diacritic and read 'as if' it's all English.

I don't know. I'm frustrated with this and ready to move on.

mastpost

[grounded-gryphon]

I'm keeping an eye out for heat stroke in my area and I can't figure out what a full body flush would look like on dark skin since all the pictures are just fake training pictures. Anyone have video/pics of a heat stroke flush on black skin?

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due to factors such as "time pressure" and "tulle is of the devil" my expectations for this shirt are not high. but i spent a lot of time imagining these button bands and they turned out pretty nice

[grounded-gryphon]

Many years after the evil overlord was deafeated by the forces of the light, there are whispers rumors that the evil overlord has secretly returned to his citadel. You know immediately it could only be an imposter, as you are in fact the evil overlord, living a peaceful simple life in exile.

[grounded-gryphon]

Dash, now a Junior, has had a Realization. Fenton does not weigh nearly enough.

He was doing his usual thing, picking on the dweeb but toned down because he's Maturing With Age, when he decided to pick Fenton up. Just to make fun of him for being short, that was all.

But Fenton weighs practically nothing.

Fenton wriggled out of his grip and scurried away with his friends, but Dash couldn't stop thinking about how...concerning. That was.

Dash starts looking up nutrition.

Starts paying attention in Health Class.

Starts watching cooking channels to learn how to cook.

Starts making more food than he can eat, balanced nutritionally for Fenton, and sitting menacingly in front of the dweeb until said dweeb ate the whole thing.

Starts stalking up behind Fenton and shoving snacks into his backpack, with whispered threats against his wellbeing if he didn't eat them.

Dash, over the course of his Junior year, becomes the school's most terrifying fitness coach the student body have ever seen.

And he charges everyone for his services; except Fenton.

He's decided forcing Fenton to be healthy is his new, socially acceptable way of bullying him.