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You are a shapeshifter who has secretly taken on many fake villain personas across the world. Your goal is to fight each hero you meet with a persona that embodies said hero’s worst traits, forcing them to change for the better in order to defeat you.

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Arboreal Salamander (Aneides lugubris) bite a finger!!!, family Plethodontidae, found in California and Baja California

Arboreal, these salamanders have prehensile tails, and will use their limbs to glide or "parachute" from trees, if they need to.

They can deliver a nasty bite.

photographs by Val Johnson

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AITA for jerkin' it to Goya's Black Paintings?

Emojis for convenience and humor: 🎨🖼🍆💦

I know someone's gonna yell bait about this but idc, like, what? Do you want proof? Video evidence? Grow up.

So I (30x) really like Goya's Black Paintings. Like, Saturn Devouring His Son, Duel with Cudgels, A Pilgrimage to San Isidro. I think they're hypnotic, beautiful, evocative. They make me feel emotions I can't quite explain properly.

As the title says, sometimes I beat my meat to them. Whatever. It's not really about horniness. But the intent doesn't matter.

Recently (in a discussion about sexuality in art, I promise it was relevant, similar sentiments were being shared) I mentioned to my partner (33nb) that I do this. They were pretty taken aback.

Apparently, they find this 'gross' and 'kind of dodgy' because Goya's black paintings were never intended to be shared with a wider audience. They were art that he did not mean to share, painted on the walls of his house near the end of his life. They say it seems like the work is too personal to jerk off to, that it seems invasive or like a violation.

I don't think it's a big deal. The guy is dead, it's not like his ghost knows what I'm doing. It's a good thing to consider, but I don't think it ultimately matters, ethically.

So, I guess AITA for this?

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Not really interested in engaging directly with the couple posts about dog whistles currently circulating, as the people involved don't seem inclined to take disagreement gracefully, but my take on the subject is this: "dog whistle" is a useful concept in cases, and only in cases, where the statement in question covertly conveys actual semantic content.

To take a classic (now mostly defunct, due to being widely recognized) example of this, consider the term "thug." It's widely acknowledged that conservative politicians and commentators in recent years have used this term in a way that's meant to specifically connote black (and occasionally Latino) people, and connect them with violent crime, in a deniable way. After all, the strict denotation of the word just means any violent criminal, and well really if your first thought on hearing it is of blacks and Latinos that means you're the racist, not them, etc. It concretely allows people to communicate unpopular ideas to those who agree with said ideas without getting as much flak from those who disagree with them.

This is a standard of which all this "friendpilled visitmaxxer" 4chan-esque language falls notably short. Talking about being a locationpilled scampercel isn't telling anyone coded messages about how you want to crack down on racial minorities in urban areas or that you agree with that one weird McCain ad from 2008 that Barack Obama is the antichrist. At most, it could signal some sort of affiliation with the far-right, but as loving-not-heyting pointed out in that thread, a signal of that sort that creates a bunch of false positives from people who just like meme words is actually the opposite of useful for a movement.

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"Easter Egg" Weevil (Pachyrhynchus cf. erichsoni), family Curculionidae, Mindanao, Philippines

photographs by Bald Guy With a Camera

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pranking the new kid in the firing squad by telling all the other guys not to pull the trigger during his first execution

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So I recently had the thought that Superman as depicted in the DCAU canon probably has the best-articulated-by-the-narrative and most-consistent character flaws of any Superman I’ve seen, in a way that’s enabled by the long-formedness and consistent creative vision of the series.

He’s got an Atlas complex that grinds the gears of his equally-durable, equally-capable colleagues in the Justice League. He has deep-seated fears of moving the wrong way and breaking something or someone, which is then upstream of some moderate control issues. He’s got anger problems, although it’s rare for someone to push him far enough that this takes center stage; you see this with Prof. Hamilton in the series finale of STAS, but also in a number of fights against opponents strong enough that he starts getting frustrated. When the stakes are lower, he can be cocky bordering on genuinely vindictive; there are lots of examples of him rubbing his opponents’ noses in it when he finally gets them on the back foot, and it’s shown in flashbacks that he was genuinely kind of a dick when he was a teenager and hadn’t completely sorted out what proportional responses looked like. He doesn’t always think through the implications of his grand projects, be that the implicit threat-escalation posed by the expanded JLU, or the massive disarmament project he spearheaded that turned out to be part of an alien invasion scheme. There are probably more of these that I’m forgetting. The final roundup here is that he’s a good guy. He’s far and away from a perfect guy, with perfect judgement. All of this amounts to something that’s more coherent and specific than the contradictory, subject-to-eternal-revision mess you could assemble from his 60-something year publication history in the comics, but nonetheless with a substantial-enough runtime that all of these traits can be put on display again and again.

In turn, this allowed the collective DCAU continuity to get away with at least three “what if Superman went rogue” plots- four if you count the mind-control situation in Legacy- specifically because they did the legwork to establish the concrete neuroses and psychological vulnerabilities that might cause this specific version of Superman to go rogue. It was never completely insane that Luthor might figure out the exact set of words, actions, and personal losses necessary to coax this depiction of Superman into an authoritarian partnership for the supposed greater good. It’s not completely insane that this depiction of Superman, if pushed far enough, might lose faith in the collective judgement of humanity and decide to put the world and all his loved ones in a bottle. And when the Cadmus plot rolls around in JLU, it’s as effective as it is because they’ve already advanced two roads-not-taken, established what levers you need to pull to make this specific version of this guy cross the line, and that Cadmus and Luthor are pulling all of them. 

I emphasize the specificity here, because the flipside of this are Superman-gone-rogue narratives that jump right to that as the cornerstone of the continuity, with no real opportunities for juxtaposition. A major issue I eventually developed with the Injustice franchise is that despite its pretenses of being an alternate universe, there’s no established continuity that it’s deviating from, bar its own. To some extent I feel as though it’s banking on the audience transposing their gestalt-understanding of Superman and the broader DCU- hell, their understanding of the Justice Lords arc in particular- in order to elide that they’re playing extremely fast-and-loose with the specifics of what has and hasn’t happened to Superman in this continuity. The DCEU is a runner-up- jumping right to the Damocles-sword of a bad-future after two movies is jumping the gun, in the same way everything about the 2010s DCEU was jumping the gun. I think you could plausibly attack TDKR’s portrayal of Superman under this logic, although I personally wouldn’t- but that’s its own post.

Point being that you can’t sell me the upset of a paradigm if you never established it-you need to set up the pins before you can bowl worth a damn.

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when your guardian angel quits 💧

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my djs

dom jeans

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Cat & kitten gargoyle, Château de pierrefonds, france, built between 1857-1885

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Reblogging would be a great help, but don’t feel pressured to

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Internet mobs will be like "why doesnt anyone just ADMIT when theyre WRONG anymore??!!" and then treat someone like they deserve the death penalty because they said something off-colour on twitter when they were 14

No one will admit that they were wrong if you treat being wrong like its an eternal indictment against them with no chance for rehabilitation

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dolphin spotting tour