personalmoshiakh

[personalmoshiakh]

reblog for something t4t to happen to you this summer.

[personalmoshiakh]

£92/£1200

help me cover an unexpected gap in fixed income

so tl;dr, my last student loan payment was at the start of June. i’m too sick to continue with tertiary education, so there won’t be any more. my next regular, non-deducted UC payment (welfare benefits) is at the end of July.

this is a serious problem.

i’m disabled, long-term unemployable due to that, and estranged from birth family. my only regular income is from state benefits.

rent is covered, B”H, so i’m looking to raise £1200 to cover me for July, plus extra margin just in case.

£0/£1200

if you can’t afford to donate, please boost! thank you 💙

[personalmoshiakh]

help me cover an unexpected gap in fixed income

so tl;dr, my last student loan payment was at the start of June. i’m too sick to continue with tertiary education, so there won’t be any more. my next regular, non-deducted UC payment (welfare benefits) is at the end of July.

this is a serious problem.

i’m disabled, long-term unemployable due to that, and estranged from birth family. my only regular income is from state benefits.

rent is covered, B”H, so i’m looking to raise £1200 to cover me for July, plus extra margin just in case.

£0/£1200

if you can’t afford to donate, please boost! thank you 💙

[personalmoshiakh]

I would love to learn more about mesothermic pangolins and what they have in common with Cardassians!

Disclaimer that I am not a biologist and also that I looked it up and I misremembered: Pangolins are not mesotherms! I was moving fast. But!! Pangolins are heterothermic, having periods of warm-weather homeothermic thermoregulation (maintaining a steady internal body temp) and poikilothermic thermoregulation (allowing the environment to influence their internal body temp) to a degree during colder months. Overall, their bodies prioritize conserving their energy reserves over thermoregulation, especially in situations when their food is scarce. I felt like I needed to clarify.

So! With that said, here are some of the ways I like to imagine pangolin Cardassians:

mammals! helps to explain Cardassian hair and breasts! also helps to make sense of Cardassian-Bajoran babies, if we assume Bajorans are mammals! (big assumptions ofc)

mesotherms! being entirely cold-blooded would make life for Garak basically impossible on a space station that's not adequately equipped with the external heat sources he'd need to allow for certain metabolic processes like digestion to occur. I enjoy the headcanon that lizard Garak is wearing thermal clothes, but my understanding of thermal undergarments is they only work if there's sufficient body heat being produced to trap (unless we are going full Twilight here and imagining Garak's doing a bit of sous-vide before work each day (also fun)). A mesothermic Cardassian who generates some heat, but lacks the ability to control their inner body temp, makes more sense to me

(I also think it'd be fun if Cardassians were heterothermic and in times of health on Cardassia, everyone has the energy reserves to regulate their body temperature; makes Mila's basement and everything after The Fire even more fraught to me, too)

nocturnal! makes sense the space station is so dim and the bright lights hurt Garak's eyes (provided we assume that's a Cardassian trait rather than an 'I'm high 90% of the time I spend awake and also in a lot of distress right now' statement)

plate-like scales! made of keratin!!! that's fun and I haven't seen anyone suppose that. it helps me square with the mixture of scale and skin we see on our actors. the Cardassian scale design looks a lot like reptile scales, but join me in my daydream and imagine they're like overlapping pangolin scales instead, and we just didn't see it because Andy Robinson has suffered enough

they curl up in an adorable ball to sleep during the day and that's a lovely mental image for good times, and a really sad one to think about when imagining Ziyal or Garak in distress (esp. little Elim in a closet)

sometimes pangolins exhibit bipedal stances to move around for a bit! how fun!!! fun to think that Garak strains to be bipedal when working. they look exceptionally cute while doing so and big pangolin Cardassian redesign hits my lizardy Cardassian buttons in new and different ways

I like the idea of Cardassians being insectivorous because the thought that Taspar and Regova eggs are insect eggs is a delight. Lovely! Gross!! No wonder tojal and rokassa juice are acquired tastes if they are squeezed from a bug. I hope Klingons and Cardassians flirt with each other by arguing about gagh

[personalmoshiakh]

well!

[personalmoshiakh]

help me cover an unexpected gap in fixed income

so tl;dr, my last student loan payment was at the start of June. i’m too sick to continue with tertiary education, so there won’t be any more. my next regular, non-deducted UC payment (welfare benefits) is at the end of July.

this is a serious problem.

i’m disabled, long-term unemployable due to that, and estranged from birth family. my only regular income is from state benefits.

rent is covered, B”H, so i’m looking to raise £1200 to cover me for July, plus extra margin just in case.

£0/£1200

if you can’t afford to donate, please boost! thank you 💙

[personalmoshiakh]

the faggots and their friends between revolutions, larry mitchell (1977)

[personalmoshiakh]

thank you for your answer!

you know, the point about how it's possible to separate Rorschach's politics from his worldview and philosophy is striking because i think it very much gets at why he's so much ... you know, a recognisable Type of Guy. he's a fascist because it fulfills an emotional or psychological need, but mostly it screws him over too. he's a mark.

he's a foil to Ozymandias in that way, i think. Ozymandias is a wholly different kind of fascist, and one whose idealism and self-sacrifice come off as grotesque self-justifications and not unsettling and almost ... poignant? not in like, an "awww poor guy" way but like.

"shit, if only he'd caught half a break and didn't end up being such an easy mark for the fash"

incidentally, speaking of New Frontiersman and Rorschach — do you have any insights or thoughts about the last panels of Watchmen? and on the New Frontiersman's role in the story in general.

and relatedly, if you wanna get into it, on Rorschach's whole ... thing. i can't say with a straight face "Rorschach's politics" because that seems too narrow a term. you know what i mean.

The New Frontiersman's status as a right-wing rag is essential to the ambiguity of the ending and the book's larger idea that nothing ever ends- "nothing ever ends," as in, nothing wraps up neatly like it does in the comic books. The Minutemen die off in mundane ways or disappear one after the other with no closure or fanfare. The surviving capes all slowly walk away from each other at Karnak, and Laurie is initially confused because she's still waiting for a genre appropriate climactic blowout that missed its moment. And the worldshaking truth about what happened has been distributed to a right-wing rag with no credibility, who thought Rorschach's journal was the manifesto of a crazy person despite the extent to which they were publicly boosting him, and an Intern is making the call about whether to publish or even read it, and there's a note in Rorschach's psyche profile indicating what he wrote might not be legible because he runs off sugar cubes and adrenaline, and the full details of Adrian's plan aren't even in there, and and and and. There are one million plausible permutations of how things could shake out from the last panel based on the stated facts, but the last line is directed at us, the readers- the outcome is entirely in our hands, because there isn't going to be a sequel. None of this ambiguity is possible if the journal ends up in the hands of Doug Roth, the guy who had the balls to take a swing at Doctor Manhattan on live TV. It's also the capstone consequence of Rorschach's self-inflicted ideological bubble- he's lost the perspective necessary to understand that throwing in with the Frontiersman is akin to being the boy who cried wolf, and he puts his faith in the support of an editor who recoils the exact second he gets a glimpse of the internality of the guy he was going to the mattresses for one editorial ago.

As a form of self-flagellation, I've been watching reaction videos for the 2009 film, and almost universally the final shot of the film is taken as slam-dunk indication that the truth is coming out; one guy even assumed that Rorschach, competent superhero that he is, probably did a background check on these guys to ensure they were journalists in good standing who stood the best chance of getting the word out. I'm not taking anyone to task for reaching that conclusion. It's what the film implies. It's one of the film's more prominent betrayals of the ideas of the book.

Rorschach's politics are... what they are, which Is I think a major point of the book. Textually homophobic and misogynistic. Implicitly racist through his endorsement of The New Frontiersman. He supports nuking Japan for the greater good and balks at nuking New York under similar logic. He's projecting his absentee Father onto the Comedian and that turns him into a rape apologist despite otherwise being so committed to killing rapists he goes to jail over it, and he projects his hatred of his mother onto basically every woman he's even peripherally aware of. He gets the exact scouring of the world he fantasized about on page one and then dies trying to repudiate it when it actually happens. He's a bundle of contradictions pretending to have a coherent and universal schema because he'll go crazier if he doesn't, because the stance of the book is that everyone is a bundle of contradictions whose negative and positive qualities, such as they are, are often inevitable outgrowths of each other. He rings true in that a lot of the people I know with bad politics got on that path through a failure to healthily contextualize legitimately bad life circumstances and personal traumas, and it can often be legitimately difficult to truly hate even an archetypically awful person once you understand enough of the details of how they happened.

Lastly, I think that you can fairly easily disconnect his philosophy from his politics- The idea that the world is chaotic and random and unfair and probably doomed and it's our fault and that we're all fucked forever and ever and we gotta try and do something about all of it anyway is, to be frank, a sentiment that would go gangbusters on this site if you dressed it up as a quote from a Discworld character. It's basically what I believe. And I've met people of every political tendency who could have given the "I'll whisper no" speech with a few of the words shuffled around. The worldview is portrayed as infectious because it is infectious, which is why I like Doctor Long as a character so much; despite being Rorschach's opposite politically, he's turning into another one of him by the end of the story. They both reach basically the same conclusions about the necessity of having to try to do something in the face of the enormity of the evils of the world, even if it never ends, even if you're doomed for it. Long, I think, has a much better idea of what that actually looks like- which is a component of why it sucks so bad when he gets killed by the Squid.

(It really is grotesque that Doomsday Clock of all fucking things is the spinoff that got closest to recognizing how important this guy is to the story. Not close, but closest.)

[personalmoshiakh]

Artwork for 'Tom, Thom' by K. M. Ferebee, 2016 (Rovina Cai)

[personalmoshiakh]

I am creating a life i don’t want to run from i am creating a life i don’t want to run from i am creating a life i don’t want to run from

[personalmoshiakh]

it's all because of @infimace-blog

i guess i'm actually re-reading Watchmen. time is a flat circle.

[personalmoshiakh]

i guess i'm actually re-reading Watchmen. time is a flat circle.

[personalmoshiakh]

help me cover an unexpected gap in fixed income

so tl;dr, my last student loan payment was at the start of June. i’m too sick to continue with tertiary education, so there won’t be any more. my next regular, non-deducted UC payment (welfare benefits) is at the end of July.

this is a serious problem.

i’m disabled, long-term unemployable due to that, and estranged from birth family. my only regular income is from state benefits.

rent is covered, B”H, so i’m looking to raise £1200 to cover me for July, plus extra margin just in case.

£0/£1200

if you can’t afford to donate, please boost! thank you 💙

[personalmoshiakh]

help me cover an unexpected gap in fixed income

so tl;dr, my last student loan payment was at the start of June. i’m too sick to continue with tertiary education, so there won’t be any more. my next regular, non-deducted UC payment (welfare benefits) is at the end of July.

this is a serious problem.

i’m disabled, long-term unemployable due to that, and estranged from birth family. my only regular income is from state benefits.

rent is covered, B”H, so i’m looking to raise £1200 to cover me for July, plus extra margin just in case.

£0/£1200

if you can’t afford to donate, please boost! thank you 💙

[personalmoshiakh]

£56/£1200

not a bad start! but please keep circulating the post and please consider donating if you’re able 💙💙

help me cover an unexpected gap in fixed income

so tl;dr, my last student loan payment was at the start of June. i’m too sick to continue with tertiary education, so there won’t be any more. my next regular, non-deducted UC payment (welfare benefits) is at the end of July.

this is a serious problem.

i’m disabled, long-term unemployable due to that, and estranged from birth family. my only regular income is from state benefits.

rent is covered, B”H, so i’m looking to raise £1200 to cover me for July, plus extra margin just in case.

£0/£1200

if you can’t afford to donate, please boost! thank you 💙

[personalmoshiakh]

help me cover an unexpected gap in fixed income

so tl;dr, my last student loan payment was at the start of June. i’m too sick to continue with tertiary education, so there won’t be any more. my next regular, non-deducted UC payment (welfare benefits) is at the end of July.

this is a serious problem.

i’m disabled, long-term unemployable due to that, and estranged from birth family. my only regular income is from state benefits.

rent is covered, B”H, so i’m looking to raise £1200 to cover me for July, plus extra margin just in case.

£0/£1200

if you can’t afford to donate, please boost! thank you 💙

[personalmoshiakh]