#I remain baffled

[qqueenofhades]

Yes, the rise of white supremacy groups WAS a direct response to and result of Obama being president, for obvious reasons, but that still does not make it his fault in any way.

I mean, yeah. Which is, frankly, obvious to anyone who thinks about it for more than two seconds?

[milkweedman]

Knitting a freehand bag and started wondering how often people even use patterns, anyway. So--how often do you use a pattern when you make things ? This include knitting/crochet/sewing/weaving/nalbinding/bobbin lace/tatting/etc but also things like woodworking, cooking, and baking. If you want to just pick the thing you do most often that's fine.

I personally do not use patterns as I find them far more confusing than just figuring out the construction of an item and simply making it. I do very occasionally browse ravelry for inspiration but have downloaded maybe 2. In the 5 or so years since I joined. And have followed exactly 1, which I modified every single aspect of. In my defense, dyslexia.

[ecoterrorist-katara]

I kind of love how Zutara has two distinct ship dynamics

dynamic 1: “I will save you from the pirates,” enemies-to-lovers, Zuko is dangerous but sexy, bad boy x good girl, morally grey antihero, Dramione vibes etc

dynamic 2: Zuko is an awkward turtleduck, idiots-to-lovers, pining for your best friend, having each other’s backs, thinking she’s the coolest thing since sliced bread, Percabeth vibes etc

We can argue about which is the correct interpretation until the cows come home, but I love that the possibilities exist in the first place. From s1 to post-series headcanons there are such distinct stages in their relationship, and you can basically pick whichever point that appeals to you and run with it. There’s something for everyone. Yet another reason why they’re the best ship y’all

[undercat-overdog]

There is more to Tolkien's work than his Catholicism.

I think there's a general tendency in many areas of fandom - fandom broadly, I'm also think academic work and reddit; this post isn't aimed at tumblr fandom specifically. in fact probably a bit more aimed at reddit but there was no precipitating incident that's leading me to write this. Anyways, a general tendency to over-weight the influence of Christianity in his work? Especially when it comes to finding allegories (Andreth talking about her people's beliefs in the Athrabeth is the only thing I think that is one, and Tolkien in his notes talked about how it was too Christian and wanted to change it), but more generally too. And sometimes I think Catholicism is brought into the text in ways that really aren't there. Idk.

Also... I think there is a way that him himself as a creator is. Hmm. I don't want to say under-discussed because it's not. But his work is more than the sum of his influences?

[nuokis]

not to be dramatic but this has finally opened my eyes to the true hypocrisy and straight up evil of the collective west. i realise a statement like that can only from a place of privilege but god damn. intellectually i knew it was bad but maybe there was this naive part of me that still wanted to have faith in democracy and human goodness overpowering corrupt systems and whatnot. there’s no fixing this circus.

[art-that-fucks-you-up-tournament]

Stats Part 3

Now that Round 3 is over, we're down to 32 (well, 33) remaining artworks which feels about time to check in on how our statistics are doing!

And if you're not interested in statistics, I (Mod Salix) wanted to talk about the polls. You may have noticed that I've been trying to keep to 4 polls a day, which would mean that Round 4 is only going to be 4 days, and Round 5 would post everything in two days. Starting in Round 6, we'll probably re-institute week long polls. Hopefully none of us will lose track of what day to post the next round!

We have 20 artworks by male artists, 10 by female artists, and 4 by groups or unknowable entities! And of those, one person is Black, two are Aboriginal (one of whom is Mestizo and Kichwa, the other of whom is Aboriginal Australian), one is Asian-American (and two are Chinese living in China as opposed to living somewhere they're a minority), and one is Indian-British. And also three are left from gay men about the AIDS crisis, in addition to the AIDS memorial quilt, and one lesbian comic.

There are six American artists (including the Asian-American mentioned above), and three Chinese artists (including the Asian-American mentioned above), as well as three Russians (including Ilya Repin, who was born in the future Ukraine and lived near St. Petersburg), technically two different pieces by the same Dutch artist (hi van Gogh), and one each from Argentina, Serbia, Ecuador, Colombia, Canada, Italy, Northern Ireland, Poland, Australia, Finland, Germany, France, and Britain. And one artist I have listed as Denmark/Germany/France, because August Friedrich Schenck was born in a place that was Denmark at the time, Germany now, and worked mostly in France.

Of the pieces with known locations, eight are in the United States (four specifically in New York), two each in Australia and Russia, and one each in Argentina, Finland, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and one in a private collection.

There are two archaic pieces of art, Judith is our last standing piece from anything between archaic and 1843, 8 pieces of art from the 1800s, although five are from 1878 to 1896, one from 1903, two from the 70s or 80s, 5 from the 90s, four from the 00s, four from the span of 2014 to 2016, and three from the last two years. And two unknown dates and the AIDS memorial quilt which is still being added to.

There are 15 paintings, 7 installation arts, one comic, one photograph, one cave art, one sketch, one tattoo, and one fiber art slash installation. And the most common subject of the art are five queer related art pieces, although I have four each I summed up as either horror or grief/anguish.

And, lastly, someone sent in an ask in like Round 1 asking about statistics regarding whether being in first or second place in the poll biased anything. I'm not actually a statistician, so I can't answer that question, but I did compile the numbers of how many first-positioned vs second-positioned arts won! Surprisingly, Round 1 had 64 firsts to 63 seconds (and one tie), Round 2 had 29 to 35, and Round 3 had 15 to 17. Technically speaking that's not a large enough sample size to determine bias but it's... interesting?.

I was going to make a scatterplot featuring the number of votes in each poll to track engagement, but I haven't actually figured out how to do one in Google Sheets yet so maybe at the end of the bracket.

[luckthebard]

Ngl something I’d love to pick Taliesin’s brain about is why he was so focused on Molly’s variant tiefling abilities in combat (DC 10). I just want to (and will never) know what the thought process was there.

[navree]

every jeronica scene: 12/?

riverdale season one episode seven: in a lonely place

[sevicia]

At some point in high school we had a field trip to The Museum of Memory here in Santiago. The museum is dedicated to commemorating the victims of Pinochet's dictatorship.

One of the "features" (not sure what else to call it, really) of the museum is the massive amount of pictures of the victims that are displayed, covering entire walls. I remember, I stopped and stared at the sheer amount of pictures and I felt like my stomach had turned inside out, like it was hollow, I felt like crying. I don't have anyone who was tortured, killed or exiled in my family that I know of, but I still felt like crying.

The total number of recognized victims is over 40,000. I have no way of confirming this, but I do not think there were 40,000 pictures on those walls, and they were still pretty full, and pretty big.

40,000 people were tortured, disappeared, imprisoned, executed, and that is still an estimate, and does not account for those who were exiled, which is estimated to be over 200,000 people.

As of yesterday (January 30th), the number of Palestinians killed since October 7th sits at, at least, 26,751, and the number of people injured during the same period is 65,636. An estimate of 1.7 million Palestinians have been internally displaced as of January 26th.

Pinochet's dictatorship, sponsored by the USA, lasted 17 years.

The Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, also sponsored by the USA, as counted from October 7th, has lasted 116 days, not including today.

I was born in 2003, 13 years after the dictatorship had ended, and to my knowledge, no one I know directly was or has been a victim of said dictatorship. And I am still angry. I still feel like crying when I think about it, and I wasn't there, and I don't need to have been there in order to know how incredibly wrong it all was, even if I have no way of really feeling it the way others did.

The Palestinian people are living through a genocide. They don't get to take a break, they don't get to walk away, they don't get to mourn the ones they've lost without the fear and desperation of not knowing if the person right next to them will be gone tomorrow.

How many walls would a commemoration of the victims of this genocide entail? How many people would not get a spot with their picture, just their name? How many people would stay unnamed?

It's horrible, and it's inhumane, and we should all be angry at the systems and entities that not only allow this to happen, but fully endorse and empower it as well.

I can step away from these thoughts, I can think of something else, but I do not get to fully ignore it.

I don't get to ignore it, because the people in Gaza don't get to, either.

[will80sbyers]

now there are even people justifying what they did to El in s4... wow. for me the world can burn, I will still protect the 14 year old's bodily autonomy FIRST even if she's "the only hope" they have. Owens is complicit in her abuse and there is no justification for tricking her and forcing her to stay there until she's been gaslighted and scared enough from her past abuser that she wants to stay because she's feeling the obligation of saving the WHOLE WORLD when she's 14 years old!!!! I hope that people having these takes that are "ok with innocent little kids being abused if it's for the greater good" are kids themselves and don't understand what they are talking about yet

[gudrunbrangwen]

“idk who needs to hear this but 🤪” so many people have no business doing that big november writing challenge this year. if it’s seriously stressing you out it might be because you realize your energy would be better spent participating in direct action & protest against the israeli/american aggression against occupied palestine. one in ten of you never got over your covid infections. sit the challenge out LMAO baruch hashem you are alive

[theminecraftbee]

keeping an eye on tumblr is doing a great job at making me not get as tilted at splatoon ranked incidentally

[doks-aux]

*raises hand* Okay, but if the FNAF1 animatronics were rebuilt from the Withereds and the Withereds were the ones that the missing kids were stuffed into... how did they not find the remains when they were scrapping/rebuilding them? Did they just work AROUND the obvious smell and swell of rot in the middle of those guys? Just averting their eyes to not see the child-sized skeletons wearing little party outfits inside them?

I guess I wouldn't be surprised, but damn.

[sketching-shark]

U know wgat? I gotta give props to dyslite for making their swk and lemh as twins.

Bc their dynamics fits sm as this rather than in a romantic sense.

Plus! The lemh esper wants swk esper dead. Jusy like the jttw classic ;D

It is so bizarre that sm of swk history gets rewritten in western fandom in favor for lemh. And makes swk OR ANY OF HIS ACTUAL FRIENDS AND COWORKERS BE WORSE THAN THEY ACTUALLY ARE

The lemh favoritism irks me sm—like u completely rework this guy in order for u to like him. Thats no longer lemh—its the better swk who could do no wrong and is emo.

Hmmmm I'm going to actually have to look into what the deal with dyslite is one of these days because I've never played it and am still not sure what's going on there, but I'm glad people are appreciating the "twins who want to kill each other" relationship between the two from the og classic manifesting in other works. Cain and Abel in monkey form <3

[ooc-miqojak]

The State of AAA Games in the Modern Era

"Before the internet became a core facet of gaming, if a studio dropped an unfinished game, that game stayed unfinished." "If a game launched in a poor state, that became the game's legacy."

And a quote from the video linked in #2 in my sources below: "This corporate mindset has encouraged studios to ship now, fix later, and exploit the wallets of players for years down the road. And oftentimes we do see some of the lead developers from these studios even brag about how to pull off this scheme at GDC conferences: [Quote from developer] 'Overdelivery is actually dangerous. With every release that you put out there, you're setting a pattern for your community and for your players. Because it's hard to tell a team, a team that has extra cycles and they have energy and they wanna do something amazing and know how to do it and it totally would be amazing and awesome for the game! Sometimes we have to tell them, like, we shouldn't ship this because it's an overdelivery. Beware of overdelivery, overdelivery is actually dangerous.' "

These are objective facts that people were ready to tear my throat out about during what I thought was a fact-based, adult debate earlier today. Instead, I just had people repeatedly say the same thing to me over and over: "But games still had bugs on console!" Which was something I never countered. I even agreed! My point, however, was that bugs in games were much rarer, and far less impactful to the overall experience of the game - and modern games are often released in a half-finished state, with bugs that massively impact gameplay - just look at Cyberpunk 2077. It's notorious for that very thing! And yet, more than one person was willing to twist my words, and take things out of context (repeatedly trying to nitpick things like Pokemon Gen 1 bugs - things that were not relevant to the discussion, as they were not bugs even remotely comparable to those in modern AAA games upon release) to desperately cling to some idea that console games were released in as bad of a state as modern games are? I don't know why, when console games would have literally killed consoles and gaming as a hobby, if they had been regularly released in as bad of a state as current digital/online only games currently are. It's a fact, and not an opinion that more games in the modern era release in a half-finished, buggy state that makes games unplayable upon release. That is not an opinion. Here's another article about it! (There's lots of videos/articles about this very thing, with just a cursory Google search.)

Yes, console games had bugs - and the ones notorious for those bugs that made story or gameplay basically impossible... bombed! A modern game, like Cyberpunk, that releases with massive bugs? Simply promises to keep patching the unfinished product, which you could not do on a physical product. This is a fact, and not an opinion. Someone claimed that console games would just make a better version, and re-release the game... which doesn't amount to much, because the game already has a bad rep, and no one will pay twice for the same thing (were your parents going to buy you the same $40-60 game a second time back then? Doubtful. No one in their right mind would.), nor would you trust that publisher a second time. That's not the same thing as releasing Cyberpunk in a half-made state, unplayable and bug-ridden and missing core/promised features, and just... finishing it over the next couple years after taking people's money for the half-baked product that wasn't what you promised. They're not asking you to pay for the game twice, they're just making you buy an unfinished product that won't be complete for another year or so (if it ever is). As the video states, there were two years of class action lawsuits - which I don't recall hearing about with console games, because you simply couldn't release only a partial part of a game you claimed was complete, and hope people stuck around for patches, because you couldn't just try and clean up your mess once a disc or cartridge was purchased. If there were incomplete textures, and you couldn't progress the story/engage in gameplay due to game-breaking bugs, that was it. You were screwed.

The modern era and advent of online-only products has led to AAA publishers releasing more and more unfinished products with game-breaking bugs because "we can fix it later"/it's cheaper to fix after launch/because executives simply don't care how it impacts the players, because they have pre-order money in their pockets already/they continue to mistreat the devs of the games, and force them to release unfinished products, and move on to the next cash-grab. These are facts. Not opinions.

Anyways, here's more fact-based sources. One

Two

Three...this video is even from five years ago! (And quotes someone from 8 years prior to that stating that: "The answer for us as publishers is to actually sell unfinished games..."

Four

Five

Next time you find yourself heated by facts that aren't opinions, don't attack the person dealing out the facts, and claim they said something they didn't say - especially if it's the exact opposite of something they said multiple times. Once you start taunting and being childish in a debate, it becomes clear you're not an adult, and shouldn't be partaking in serious, adult conversations - no matter the topic. Objective facts may make you mad, but hey - I'm mad that modern games release in a shitty state thanks to being fully online these days, and not releasing in a physical state that encourages Publishers to release a full, and mostly bug-free game (free of bugs that impact gameplay or story in a serious way, at least. The occasional NPC glitched into a wall or the sky isn't a huge deal, and a wacky texture here and there is mostly hilarious.) Anyways, Donald Trump simply attacks people who use facts in a debate! Don't be like Donald Trump. Don't choose to attack the other person, instead of using objective-based-facts to debate/discuss things. Debates shouldn't make you mad - they should be interesting, and enlightening, and you (or the other person, or all parties) should learn from them. And inevitably, in fact based discussions...someone is wrong! I'm often wrong. I like learning new things. But letting your emotions guide you in a fact based discussion that is very literal and not rooted in emotional appeals... just makes a mess.

[fideidefenswhore]

His motto, in French, said it all. Playfully both explicit and deniable, it read, 'Declare je n'ose' meaning 'Declare I dare not'. In the evening, he held a banquet, ostensibly for Katherine, at which he insisted on serving his wife and, more to the point, the women around her--who included Anne--with their food and drink.

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and The Marriage That Shook Europe, John Guy & Julia Fox