hillwench16

[hillwench16]

not only is it pride month, but it is also mens mental health awareness month

take the time to check in with the trans men, nonbinary men, intersex men, queer men, disabled men, and men of color that you know

let them know that you support them

[hillwench16]

i feel strongly about this

[hillwench16]

a soft reminder that you are not at all difficult to love.

[hillwench16]

Btw you should hug that t girl who's always putting others before herself

[hillwench16]

late night reminder to self: your depressive episode will not last forever. it will have an end. tonight will not be the end of you.

[hillwench16]

The Rain World Undergrowth AU cast lineup! (which is basically just everyone)

I tried doing one of these way back in 2024 and never finished, which is probably a good thing because some of these designs have changed a decent bit since then. (Those who've seen the old, incomplete lineup know that my original Rivulet was a cis guy, and Watcher didn't even have a design yet.) With this, I'm hoping to start up the askblog soon-ish.

Anyway, Undergrowth synopsis and lore, as well as some alternate outfits under the cut:

Undergrowth is an anthro AU that takes place during the time of the Endless Winter. The blizzards of Saint's timeline have come sooner and deadlier, forcing most slugcats and scavengers to settle in underground geothermal pockets or adopt lifestyles suited adapted to the cold. All the game's events and timelines are compressed so that everything happens in quicker succession.

The AU takes place in Moon and Pebbles' retaining wall and centers around Saint after the events of their campaign, who has taken to the teachings of Rhinestones Beneath Shattered Glass and started a garden in Undergrowth. Here they have gathered all the other slugcats to live in safety. The other slugcats see Saint as a mysterious benefactor who knows more than they should, rescued each of them from certain death for unknown reasons, and has given them shelter from the blizzards, but for Saint, it's all part of a comfortable routine formed from countless lifetimes of repetition.

In their most recent lifetime, however, things have started to change. Things aren't where they should be. People aren't where they should be when they should be. Events that have always fallen on consistent times and dates simply don't. Saint starts getting dream visits from someone they've never met before in all their past lifetimes, one who brings ominous warnings about the future.

The Characters Survivor / ommuy aka omi One who persists most of all cis male - he/him

Monk / sahini mayabi aka maya One of the peaceful way cis female - she/her

Gourmand / makikanae aka maki One who knows food Yongasabi 3rd gender - they/them

Saint / sapinae aka saen One who suffers; saint agender transfem - they/them/any

Spearmaster / masinabi aka nabi Messenger nonbinary trans man - they/he

Hunter / hanitae aka hanta Hunter trans female - she/her

Artificer / sattokubi aka satto Arsonist cis female - she/her

Rivulet / yanginaeja lamlan aka lani Wandering stream afab demigirl - she/they

Watcher / banolnak yopwa aka banno Atop the watchtower unstable genderfluid - she/he

Enot (???) N/A - it/its

Survivor, Monk, and Gourmand are from a colony that has historically lived outside the retaining wall, but got lost and were separated inside the retaining wall before Saint found each of them and brought them back to the shelter.

Saint is from a retaining wall far away, built atop one of the few true mountains in this world. They were born and raised in a monastery, trained for a grand purpose that they have long since abandoned.

Spearmaster and Hunter were in the retaining wall on business before the blizzards outside kicked up and the land outside became impassable while Hunter's supply of medicine dwindled. With Hunter bedridden and cut off from NSH, Spearmaster had no choice but to take her underground and follow the stranger who promised treatment in their garden.

Artificer was taken in and trained by a corrupt scavenger clan who saw her grief and rage as a tool to be shaped and used; first, to exact revenge on the scavengers who killed her children, then to demolish the clans who had apparently enabled such a corrupt system. When she overstepped her station and terrorized Metropolis, she was deemed an outlaw and enemy to all scavs. Saint found her buried in the snow on the edge of death.

Rivulet comes from a far off retaining wall, given the mission of delivering Five Pebbles' rarefaction cell to Moon by whatever means necessary. She had no idea that removing it would have accelerated 5P's collapse so immensely. She would have met her end at a toll full of scared and suspicious scavengers had Saint not arrived just in time to defuse the situation.

Watcher has been plagued since childhood by visions, a sense of lacking identity, and a spiritual burden spanning thousands of generations. After exhausting all other leads, she hears a promising rumor: There is a former member of a religious order, sheltered away in a garden deep underground, who may have the answers he seeks.

Enot (???) kohga ota gimok juhei ha giga naka. shou kolgi cho yoshouja ihoga palakkida. kagihei nakani deila sin pagsada.

[hillwench16]

snoopy and miffy told me they are a femme4butch couple in real life

[hillwench16]

Reblog to hug prev

Please

[hillwench16]

what i’ve failed to understand since i was a kid is why these ghouls want war with iran so badly. is it resources? do they have money in defense contracting? is it just that iran is too strong an opponent to us hegemony? why specifically do they want to see iran destroyed?

There is not one singular motivation behind the drive to send the US to war with Iran. There are multiple motivations which often overlap, but which are held in different orders of prioritization by different advocates of war. Most of these motivations are irrational and/or immoral, while others are legitimate complaints that could be addressed through diplomacy far more easily than they could through militarism.

Here's ten common motivations and arguments for a US war with Iran which you might encounter:

Independence from the US: The Iranian government is among the world's least-willing governments to obey US demands and subjugate themselves to the US-led order. For certain US primacists, this independence means that their very existence poses an existential threat to US dominance (similar to North Korea, Cuba, etc.) To a particular type of US militarist, it is necessary for the Iranian government to fall in order for the US to remain the unquestioned leader of the world.

Real Fear of their Nukes: There is a substantial contingent who really does believe that Iran is close to developing a nuclear weapon and that they could well use it if they were to develop it. Logically, the best way to address this concern would be through a diplomatic deal similar to the 2015 JCPOA, which Iran complied with! But the intensity of anti-Iranian sentiment among US hawks tends to convince them that direct military confrontation is somehow a better option, thus explaining why Trump decided to break this deal.

Desire for Revenge: Many older foreign policy hawks in the US have never forgiven Iran for 1) the 1979 US Embassy hostage crisis, and 2) the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Lebanon, which was orchestrated by a terror organization with ties to the Iranian government. In their minds, both of these incidents were embarrassments to the US' military prestige which we have never properly gotten revenge for. (These people tend to ignore the massive wrongdoings which the US has carried out against Iran during this same time period, like the US destruction of Iran Air Flight 655). There are people in and around the Pentagon who have wanted to bomb Iran over a grudge for more than 40 years now.

Iran's Regional Proxies: Over the last several decades, Iran has engaged in an aggressive campaign to expand their influence throughout the region by supporting proxy paramilitary forces in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, etc. Many of these proxies have undeniably engaged in acts of terrorism. This strategy is both opportunistic (taking advantage of the power vacuum caused by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein) and defensive (countering the regional influence campaigns of Saudi Arabia and Turkey). This is probably the most legitimate cause of US anger towards the Iranian government, but it is a grievance which will only be worsened by backing Iran into a corner militarily.

Israel (and Saudi Arabia) Hates Them: Iran is unfriendly with two of the US' closest partners in the region: Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Israeli government, in particular, has long been laser-focused on the overthrow of the Iranian government, and they are fully committed to dragging the US into such a regime change operation. For the most fervent defenders of Israel in the US, overthrowing the Iranian government is near the top of their wishlist.

They Got Oil: Oil is a factor which is often overstated in these discussions, but it definitely is one of the factors. Iran currently produces 5% of the world's oil and has the potential to produce far more were the current sanction regime against it to be removed. They also have the ability to shut down the Straight of Hormuz, an important chokepoint through which 25% of the world's oil flows. Regime change in Iran would significantly increase the leverage that the US and its allies hold over global oil markets and further weaken the strength of OPEC.

And Other Commodities Too!: Though the separation between the US and Iranian economies hurts the US economy as a whole, there are certain sectors of US industry that benefit enormously from having Iran so heavily sanctioned. Some of the big names in the US pistachio industry have lobbied heavily to keep US-Iranian relations unfriendly, because the elimination of US sanctions on Iran would allow the massive Iranian pistachio industry to compete with the US industry. As long as these two governments hate each other, a few politically-connected US businessmen make way more money.

Diaspora Pressure Campaigns: Most Iranian-Americans hold the following two opinions at the same time: 1) they hate the current Iranian government and want to see it replaced, but 2) they strongly oppose US efforts at regime change in Iran. However, there is a vocal minority of Iranian-Americans that do support regime change efforts, and they tend to cluster into two well-organized groups that wage pressure campaigns against the Iranian government. The first are the monarchists, who want to see the son of the former US-backed Iranian dictator restored to power. The others are those who are loyal to the MEK, a cult and former terrorist organization which has been extremely effective at building relationships with US politicians. Both of these groups work full-time to push the US towards overthrowing the Iranian government so that they can step in and take over; it's fairly easy to find both of these groups in online social media threads about US-Iranian relations.

Who Cares, We Want War: As I have written about many times before, the US military-industrial complex encourages the US government to engage in militarist behavior in order to boost their profits. Iran is one of their favorite boogeymen to justify increased levels of US military spending, second only to China. These companies fund think tanks and other policy initiatives to argue that Iran is an immediate threat to us, and then they fund political candidates who want to spend more money preparing for this "threat."

They're Crazy! You Can't Trust Them!: We are led to believe that the Iranian government cannot be negotiated with because they are irrational, they're anti-Western religious zealots incapable of reasoned decision-making. This is a convenient excuse for war, but it's entirely incompatible with the restraint that the Iranian government shows in responding to Israeli attacks, their continued willingness to sit down for diplomatic talks with their aggressors, the way that they helped the US government deal with al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11, and a million other indications that the Iranian government is just as rational as any other government in its geopolitical decision-marking.

Add all of that together, and you get a deranged political ecosystem obsessed with inflating the scale of foreign threats, finding excuses for maintaining the trajectory of our militarist status quo, increasing regional tensions, and rejecting obvious opportunities for diplomacy and a peaceful resolution of our differences.

[hillwench16]

[hillwench16]

“This wee lady that has been stopping by the bakery I work at all week”

(Source)

[hillwench16]

new propaganda campaign just dropped (now an actual print!)

[hillwench16]

I know that some British people take umbrage at Americans calling the Great British Bake Off relaxing, but it's just because GBBO is such a different kind of stressful from American baking shows.

American baking shows will be called something like "Cupcake Knife Fight", there's horror movie lighting everywhere and dramatic stings every 5 seconds. All of the contestants are shit talking each other and fist fighting over the one single deep fryer provided by production. It will show the judges all whispering to each other at their super villain table overlooking the whole kitchen, and one will be like, "Oh my god. Everyone look at Brenda right now. She's straight tanking it." And it will cut to Brenda, who is running around covered in flour and crying and also bleeding for some reason. Then you get a clip from an interview with one of the contestants, and they're like, "I really need to win this. Without this award money, I'm gonna need to close my restaurant, sell my dad, and live out of my car. AGAIN." Then the giant digital doomsday clock overhead lets out a horrid klaxon, the judges tell half of them that their cupcakes taste disgusting, and one of them gets eliminated and sent to walk down the dramatically-lit shame hallway never to be seen again.

Meanwhile GBBO is in a lovely, brightly colored tent, there are delightful and friendly hosts/jesters there to keep everyone entertained, and all of the B Roll is of like... a bumblebee going into a flower, or a lamb running in a field. And yes, there will be moments where someone will mess up their timing or something, and they'll be looking at their bake through the oven door like, "oh gosh I don't think this will rise in time!" Then they stand up to find Paul Hollywood directly behind them ominously. His creepy whitewalker eyes will glow white, and he'll say something like "the 12th of June. 2035. Drowning." And his eyes will go back to normal and he'll walk away. Then the baker gives a playful grimace to the camera and says "that didnt sound great, did it?". Cut to a sweet looking older woman sipping tea on a stool and she says "oo I do hope that Prue enjoys the taste of my sugary, sticky baps!". Then, at the end, someone gets a gold star for doing good, and the loser of the episode gets in the middle of a giant group hug. You see all of them at the end of the series at a giant carnival with their families and the post credits informs you that all of the contestants have become a Partridge Family-style traveling band and stayed friends forever.

[hillwench16]

may god forgive my wretched sins (spent money)

[hillwench16]

crop of the piece I did for the 2019 Homestuck Calendar!!! You can pre-order here 

[hillwench16]

i hope luigi mangione is proven innocent & gets to sue a ton of companies for slander and win & i hope he gets enough money to rebuild his life and get any help for his chronic pain that he needs & i hope he’s able to disappear from the public eye entirely if that’s what he wants

[hillwench16]

in wigan, it's as good as gone