#and even that fails commonly as a categorization

[mxtxfanatic]

There’s something to be said about how gender is weaponized in tgcf. Like, the gods can transform between different physical genders, but their powers aren’t divided into “girl weak, boy strong.” Ling Wen is more powerful in her male form because her followers worship her as a male god. The Brocade Immortal forces her into her male form when she wears it not because that affords it more martial skill and power but because it can’t handle being pressed against the female form of the woman it loves. Shi Qingxuan is the opposite: his female form is more powerful because he is worshipped as a female god, and he enjoys that. The gods go between their forms depending on which one brings the most benefit, making gender into a weapon.

Then we have Xie Lian who, though never physically transforming into a female form, repeatedly and successfully uses people’s gender assumptions as a shield. He makes himself into a bride as to not use an innocent civilian as bait to catch a ghost, and he later disguises himself as a mother to hide from the crowd of cultivators. Because his enemies in both cases perceived women as weak and fragile, the ghost bride did not think to see if Xie Lian was a threat, and the cultivators were embarrassed at having barged in on a “defenseless woman” dressing with her “child.” The shield of “woman” allowed Xie Lian to fool his enemies and complete his goals in both cases.

Anyways, just thought this was cool.

[sarshles-cheescake-li]

Lu Guang's love language: Words of attack

The English subtitles for Link Click, from what I can see, universally translate Lu Guang's various insults towards Cheng Xiaoshi as "idiot." There may be a "moron" and "fool" or two in there, but I will be honest when I say that I don't really want to re-watch the entirety of seasons one and two to check. However, there is a little bit of subtlety in the exact words for "idiot" that Lu Guang uses.

Mandarin has… a lot of words for "idiot." Ones I can think off of the top of my head are 傻瓜，白痴，笨蛋， 蠢货，biao (an insult in the Muping dialect which I don't know the character for)，二百五，傻子，无脑，傻逼. For your reference, those are just the insults that specifically mean "stupid." If we get into other insults, we'd be here all day.

So the conclusion is that insults in Mandarin are an art. And man, does Lu Guang master said art perfectly. The insult he most commonly uses for Cheng Xiaoshi is 弱智 (ruozhi, weak intellect) which is one that allude to disability (please take this with a grain of salt! I really, truly don't know anything about the disabled Chinese community, so it's possible that it doesn't really carry the same meaning). This particular insult is interesting, because it's a really hard-hitting insult. Like, if I call someone 笨蛋 (bendan, stupid egg), it's a pretty weak, sometimes even affectionate term, frequently used by children. But ruozhi is an actual, legit insult, that someone will punch you for calling them. It's also something I would categorize as kind of an adolescent-young adult insult -- you would hear older folk using 蠢货 or 白痴 more often for "idiot." But Lu Guang calls Cheng Xiaoshi that like it's his second name.

The way Lu Guang uses the term, it takes on its own affectionate feel to it. He uses it whenever Cheng Xiaoshi's done or said something he's not happy with, even when the action isn't necessarily [being an idiot]. It's got a similar feel as a resigned sigh, or perhaps frustration.

But there are times when Lu Guang uses an insult that isn't ruozhi. During episode five of season one, while he's comforting Cheng Xiaoshi after a dive, he calls him 傻瓜 (shagua, stupid melon). Shagua is probably one of the most gentle of all the "idiot" insults, tied with maybe bendan. It's frequently used as a term of endearment, especially between couples (make of that what you will). The "stupid" in shagua also means a slightly different type of stupid than the one in bendan. If I had to define it, sha is stupid in terms of wisdom, and ben is stupid in terms of intelligence, in D&D terms. Like, if I failed my physics exam, I would be more ben. If I didn't read through my insurance policy before requesting my medication and had to cough up forty dollars for them (totally didn't happen just a few hours ago), I would be more sha. So Lu Guang, here, is calling Cheng Xiaoshi something like "unwise" or "naive," which is very fitting for the situation.

Interestingly, during Cheng Xiaoshi's flashback to Lu Guang in episode one of season two, Lu Guang cycles through three different insults: baichi, chunhuo, and bendan. Of these, baichi and bendan are within the "yeah couples call each other this sometimes" group, and chunhuo is a more genuine, demeaning insult. The fact that three of the nine different Lu Guang dialogues Cheng Xiaoshi flashes back to include Lu Guang calling him an idiot in various affectionate ways is pretty funny, I won't lie to you. There's also that a vast majority of the remembered sentences, even the ones that don't explicitly say "idiot," are basically Lu Guang clowning on Cheng Xiaoshi. As a side note, it's interesting that the last thing memory-Lu Guang says is bendan -- the softest, most childish insult, and the one with the most explicitly affectionate connotations in general use.

Lastly, in the twelfth episode of the second season, when the two are in the tunnels fighting and Cheng Xiaoshi tells Lu Guang to not push himself, Lu Guang responds with "baichi, you're not doing much better than me." In this case, he switches from ruozhi to baichi likely because it's a more serious situation, where the almost joking ruozhi wouldn't have been as appropriate. The stupid in baichi (the chi) is more of a "dim-witted" connotation, akin to calling someone slow or head-in-the-clouds.

In conclusion, Lu Guang's insults for Cheng Xiaoshi are:

弱智 (ruozhi) -- basically his nickname for Cheng Xiaoshi at this point, commonly used when he's annoyed with him or wants to make fun of him. Appears to be the default when Cheng Xiaoshi does something he doesn't like in a dive. 白痴 (baichi) -- the most commonly used alternative to ruozhi, I can't see any patterns of its usage. Seems to be the one he defaults to when the mood isn't right for ruozhi. 蠢货 (chunhuo) -- used only once (that I could see) in a sentence without context, so… /shrug 傻瓜 (shagua) -- a rarer insult, seems to be the one he uses when he's trying to comfort Cheng Xiaoshi but still needs to insult him. 笨蛋 (bendan) -- a more teasing, casual insult, one he flings out when he just wants to insult Cheng Xiaoshi in a non-serious situation.

[qweerhet]

the other thing is like. being perceived as a failed man isn't inherently incompatible with being perceived as a failed woman; trans people of all genders are perceived as both, to varying degrees and with varying contextual intent. transmisogyny covers a whole host of intersection points of misogyny, including being seen as a failed man, yes, but also being seen as a subclass of woman (able to be categorized as a woman when convenient to deny access to something, but inherently a woman that does not have access to womanhood, a woman that is not a woman but is being maliciously categorized as a woman, in a twisted form of malicious compliance), and also being seen as a failed woman in certain contexts (this most commonly happens to trans women who have chemically and/or surgically transitioned and regularly "pass" or are read as women by systems & individuals).

failed womanhood is a particular social class; it's not "this person tried to transition to womanhood but i don't see [her] as a woman," it's a class of women who step outside of gender bounds in a mirror to the failed-man class. women who are infertile or otherwise refuse to bear children, women who are testosterone-dominant, severely disabled women, women who do not intentionally present femininely. and like--yes, trans women who are perceived as women regularly get slotted into the "failed woman" class--tma people of all genders who are perceived as women regularly get slotted into this class--which does not deny the fact that a significant portion of tma people are not perceived as women by systems or by individuals.

and like--again--it's contextual! someone can simultaneously be seen as a failed man by her parents & doctor, and be seen as a failed woman by the people she goes to school with. the same person can swap between categorizing you as a failed man and a failed woman based on what's most convenient for them to support their presupposed biases and deny you access to resources. (and quite frankly, it's difficult to tell when this is malicious compliance and the perception is entirely artificially affected vs. when it's deeply internalized bigotry and the perceptions are genuine, but both do exist and both are different manifestations of deeply-embedded societal narratives.)

"transmisogyny is solely based on the societal categorization of transfems as failed women, and transmisogyny has no links to societal perceptions of men" genuinely doesn't make much sense when considering the cis women who are categorized as failed women & how they are treated--i think of my developmentally disabled classmates in sped, who experienced degendering violence because of their status as failed women, and i see certain parallels. being seen as sexually predatory, violent, uncontrollable, angry--all an area of overlap. but there's unique factors as well; failed women are treated as childlike, as in need of condescending & coddling education on proper gender roles, as in need of deportment, they're treated with the intention of softening them & leading them to femininity. adult failed women are treated as children long, long past childhood.

and trans women who are perceived as women regularly experience those things, particularly if they're also gnc in some way, but also just by virtue of being incapable of reproducing in the cisnormative way. simultaneously, though, there's unique aspects to transmisogyny in its "failed man" state; being treated as an adult long before it's developmentally appropriate, being reprimanded with the intent to "toughen you up," being treated as in need of masculinizing, needing to learn to enact violence and repress emotion, being backed into social corners to try to get you to violently lash out as ~education~ on your role in society.

those are not things that happen because someone is being, in that moment and by the structures enacting those things, perceived as a woman! some of them are even mutually exclusive, at least simultaneously--the same action cannot both reinforce that you are a misguided child undeserving of agency who needs patriarchal agents to teach you how to live and that you are a pathetic predatory wretch who needs to buck up and live up to your role as a powerful patriarchal agent! you can swap fluidly between having these experiences in life, but they're still experiences that are dependent on you being perceived differently at different times.

[nova--spark]

Earth 101 : A Manual for the Visiting Cybertronian

Introduction : Welcome to Earth !

To preface this manual, we would like to add that all Autobot and Decepticon alike who is found within these pages consented to their usage as an example of what NOT to do.

If you are said Autobot or Decepticon reading this manual once again, we simply hope the kind refresher truly remains within your memories this time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Greetings and welcome to Earth, the ‘Blue Planet’, ‘Gaia’ or ‘Terra’ if you prefer!

This comprehensive guide has been crafted with the aid of both native Earth inhabitants known as ‘humans’ and long-time Cybertronian residents of the planet, who have learned the curious planet’s customs, culture and general manners. With this guide, we hope to make your stay on Earth, no matter its length, smooth and relatively free of possible 'road bumps' as the Earth saying goes.

We will cover a number of topics in this extensive guide, ranging from Terran laws when driving on their roads to avoid detection by human authorities and locals, to explaining the native species of Earth and how to cohabitate with them, and the culture of the planet’s various continents.

Earth is a very small planet in comparison to our beloved home of Cybertron, but is still a planet rich in culture, technology, and life so different yet similar to our own all the same.

However, this does mean that we Cybertronians are to be cautious when it comes to interacting with the natives.

Earth’s native species, called Humans, number close to 8 billion, and average a height of five to six feet, and are generally divided into ‘female’ and ‘male’ categories , though there are sometimes outliers in this categorization due to genetic differences.

Humans are naturally curious creatures, and in the past, when Cybertronians encountered them, they reacted in varying degrees.

Most commonly was shock and fear, though some of their species likely originating from their warrior class reacted with aggression and were commonly those that used offensive techniques of their kinds battle strategies, seeking to protect their kind.

It is for this reasoning that the Autobot faction of our people has generally sought out human liaisons in the human militaristic factions.

There has however been small exceptions to this, in times where inadvertently, we created bonds with non military human liaisons, who perhaps found us in our vehicular forms and without our intentions, would find out our true nature.

These cases are highly monitored and we insist that newcomer Cybetronians to Earth maintain the following motto:

ROBOTS IN DISGUISE.

We implore that this motto be followed at all costs.

Countless breems (or hours as they are known on Earth) have been spent to ensure our utmost secrecy, and yet still we have found that many in our ranks fail to uphold this singular motto.

We have spent too much time scrubbing the entire datanet of Earth of our presence and even then, some of these incidents still are hard to cover up, especially as the human datanet is vast and ever evolving.

We hope that this guide to Earth and its customs is an enlightening and informative experience and aids in your adjustment to the vast differences of our homeworld and this new planet.

This guide was written in collaboration with various leaders, medics, researchers, native Terrans and Cybertronians who have lived here for decades, and is constantly evolving with the times and various eras lived through in our time here.

If there are subjects you believe should be added to this manual, please inform the correct officer, medic or official who has authority to create entries.

Please do not suggest entries which are : practical jokes, inside jokes, suggestive in nature, entirely misinformative, or may cause harm to your fellow Cybertronian and human alike.

Enjoy your time on Earth, and please remember to drive safely on the Terran roads.

[pb-dot]

Let's talk about the MBTI

If you've heard me speak on the subject before, it may not shock you to hear that I'm not a huge fan of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or as it is more commonly known, the MBTI. For those that haven't had the pleasure yet, I find the MBTI to be little better than a horoscope, what descriptive power of one's personality or mental processes are concerned. It's a reoccurring weakness of psychology, frankly, that we seem to struggle so hard with finding any reliable metrics for measuring the human mind, maybe that's a feature and not a bug.

The one factor that the MBTI that I find personally useful, though, is the Introversion/Extroversion dichotomy. I, myself, am pretty introverted as these things go. I need time to decompress after being social, I'm not particularly outgoing as these things go, that whole situation. That said, I don't consider myself antisocial. I love people. I love talking to them, learning from them, figuring out how they tick, or just shooting the breeze and spending some time outside of my own head. I've always scoffed at self-declared "ambiverts" because it appeared as self-evident to me that introversion does not mean being asocial, and that being somewhere on the scale between the two extremes was quite normal.

As I read up on the damn thing, though, it appears I have been too charitable with the MBTI. As it turns out, the MBTI operates on the assumption of a bimodal distribution, which is to say that the majority of test scores would fall close to the two extremes, and not be distributed evenly around the mean as in a Standard Distribution

Where I'm from, there's a satirical observation, or perhaps a very dry joke, stating that "There are two kinds of people. People who own a boat and people who don't." (my translation) This is meant to mock binary sorting systems, as even the untrained "folk psychologist" can plainly see that any such dichotomous categorization of the human animal is plainly ridiculous. And yet, here is the MBTI telling the same joke but four times over and meaning it every time.

Me and my interpretation of local witticisms is, however, not the only one to have picked up on this little inconsistency between the model and what we can observe in reality. A conga line of researchers, see this and this for examples, have looked at the MBTIs assumption of distribution of results and found the dichotomies to be considerably less dichotomous than advertised.

So, without even getting into the other criticisms of the model, let's just say this thing is shaky as fuck from an actual scientific perspective, and the model doesn't have many, if it has any, defenders among the labcoat crowd.

So, why is this important to me at all? Partially because it annoys me on a personal level when junk science circulates in a field I actually know enough about to pick it up, but also because I find it shady as all fuck how this test still lives on in the popular conscience. Part of it is mine and younger generations desperately seeking identity footholds to cling onto in this post(-post?)-post-modern world we flounder around in, but our dearly hated nemesis Late Stage Capitalism also has its share of the blame. You see, while the Tinder profile-havers and Ted:x talk-enjoyers of the world do their part to keep this particular piece of failed psychometrics going, it's a comparatively small push compared to recruiting and business factors.

Businesses love Metrics, and it's easy to see why. In a world where everything is about increasing one number, namely the bottom line, it's immeasurably easier to evaluate the effect of actions and choices if they come with their own tidy little numbers. If spending X dollars on this or that decision ends up increasing the profit by Y%, that's a considerably easier piece of math for evaluating whether doing this was a good idea than if there were no numbers attached and you had to go partially by gut feeling.

Hiring and other personnel decisions are tricky from a business perspective partially because there are considerably fewer good metrics by which to evaluate an actual person than, say, a change in office supplies. Psychometrics is a notoriously tricky field, and although there are some metrics that supposedly covary with productivity or other words the C-suite likes hearing, many of these can be pricy to administer and generally give results with more nuance than fits comfortably in a spreadsheet.

In that context, I can easily see the MBTI standing out as a more attractive option. It doesn't take long to test for and it gives everyone a convenient combination of letters that you can tell yourself means something significant. Granted, it doesn't really tell you anything useful and has terrible test-retest validity, but that's apparently not enough of a deterrent, and if that doesn't tell you a lot about how nuts recruitment has gotten lately don't you worry, I have plenty of other thoughts about the matter.

Those are for another day though. This little rant was originally going to be about introverts and extroverts and how there should be room in a healthy society for both, but then I came across the actual state of the MBTI while making sure I knew what I was talking about, and then that was suddenly all I could write about. Life takes you on some journies at times dear friends, and sometimes you just have to buckle up and ride it out.

[arcane-abomination]

I guess you could say this is my UPG when working with this element. I haven’t really seen a lot of in-depth discussion around some of the things I’m going to talk about regarding darkness so I suppose this label fits.

What is Darkness?

The element of darkness is often categorized as a celestial element, grand element, or greater element. This is because it stands out from the more commonly utilized four elements also referred to as common elements by some. However while the typical four; earth, air, fire, and water are consistent the greater elements can often diverge and incorporate other unique titles. Darkness and light always seem to appear on this list regardless but additional phrases such as chaos and order, life and death, can sometimes be seen along side them. For the purpose of this blog though, we will only be focusing on darkness and what it entails as a whole.

So then how does one explain what darkness is? Well that’s actually very simple, it is merely the opposite of light. Something altogether different in comparison that’s needed to benefit the other. Both work in tandem, utilizing their own strengths to not only stand out in their own way but assist in helping the other to do so as well. You see you can’t have one without the other. You can’t come to fully understand darkness if you don’t know light and vise versa.

Representation

Darkness represents everything that light is not. It is the perfect opposite. Where light can symbolize warmth, darkness symbolizes the coolness. Where light symbolizes the seen and the physical, darkness takes claim over the unseen and the metaphysical. When light speaks of life, darkness sings of death. Where light is energetic and hasty, darkness is calm and calculating. Light brings forth your outward emotions where darkness connects to your inner shadow self and all that you keep held inside. Light is the speaker of the conscious mind and darkness is same to your subconscious. It is an energy that thrives in quiet focus and self calculation. Connecting that which is deeply rooted in our very souls.

Misconceptions

One of the greatest misunderstandings about darkness is in the thought that it is evil. This can’t be farthest from the truth. Darkness is not evil, as we just discussed it is only the opposite of light. So then how did such a rumor get started? The answer to that can be found in our basic genetic makeup as a species. Humans by nature are largely diurnal, meaning we are most active during the day. Our basic makeup isn’t suited for nocturnal living, this means we have natural instincts to me more wary when night falls. Before civilization as we know it, primitive mankind had to fight predators at night. It was a time to be cautious and more watchful. So naturally as time went on we developed new and interesting ways to protect ourselves. However, even in this day and age that instinct isn’t completely gone.

Time eventually gave way to media’s ever present and grasping hold over the notion that dark equates to bad and religion in society only added fuel to that fire, but if we really analyze what darkness and light are we can see the truth fairly easily. The argument stands that darkness lays cover for bad things to hide but there are many that use the cover of day to do that as well. Compare a nocturnal animal hunting to a diurnal animal. Each have their own unique genetics that aid them during this time. They are different but each have the same goal, they just go about it in ways that are more beneficial to their nature. So you see, you can hide in the light all the same, we just fail to acknowledge it most of the time because our gaze is often drawn to another direction. With this we can understand that both light and darkness have their positive and negative points, just like everything does. They are opposites but nothing more. The dark is just as evil as the light and likewise just as good. Like all energy it really depends on how we use it that makes it positive or negative.

[mdhwrites]

Concept Pitch: Spirited Witches

Thirty years ago, magic came into existence. Or more so, it became concentrated enough in our world to be tapped into. The aether around everyone got denser than it used to be and some found themselves more greatly attuned to it than others. Minor desires they had would happen, like lighting a cigarette without a lighter or something just out of reach coming to them.

The next twenty years were spent studying and understanding this phenomenon. In understanding that this magic was mostly not dangerous if one didn’t train it but that it had great potential and humans are not the sort to leave a resource fallow like that. So schools began to be built and the magic categorized. Elemental, Transformative, Illusory, etc. and it would take a while to have it be standardized.

Then ten years ago, one type of magic was outlawed outside of specifically government sanctioned experiments with it: Spirit Magic. The spirit realm that this magic commonly opened one up to was simply too dangerous and unpredictable and despite twenty years of time, very little had been learned about it anyways. Rumors said there was a final event that sealed the magic’s fate but it was never televised.

Jump another ten years and we have two girls preparing for a magical boarding school. One is an outgoing girl we’ll call Ellie who is constantly wanting to help people, studying, volunteering, etc. She is as sweet and kind a person as anyone knows, if not to the point of annoying some. The other, Sarah, is a mysterious, quiet girl with dyed hair and a penchant for mischief. When talked to, she rarely talks back, letting her expressions speak for her or quick little hand movements. It’s confirmed she CAN speak but she chooses not to.

And then there’s the boy. A free spirited sort of guy, he believes in freedom and self expression. That no one should be trapped or constrained and that people should be who they are, though he can’t force anyone to be something they’re not. He can just try to open up their mind and maybe help them be who they truly want to be. He also doesn’t really care about names because they’re only one part of someone’s identity so if the fact that his name is Leslie makes you remember him better, wonderful!

He also uses magic the other two have never seen before and teaches them bits of it as they grow closer. A spell to allow Ellie to talk to anyone in their preferred language and understand all languages, even if it strains your throat. Sarah the ability to see ALL that is hidden, even that which might hide from things like True Sight, so she can feel more at home in her surroundings. Empathy for Ellie to better connect and a spell to touch magic itself for Sarah to better feel like she isn’t about to lose control over things.

This has to do with the two girls’ baggage. Both have seen someone who’s recently died, or the moment of their death. For Ellie, it was walking into a room and finding a close friend who had ended their own life. She had thought she’d done right by them, known everything, talked enough to them but it hadn’t been, at least in Ellie’s mind. So her already good nature went into hyper drive, alongside a new level of paranoia where she’s uncertain if anyone’s smile to her is genuine or not. She is determined though, no matter what, to never fail a person again and to make up for this failure in the past.

Sarah on the other hand has never been a loud girl but she didn’t used to be so guarded. One night she convinced her parents to let her and a friend stay the night just the two of them. She was off in the kitchen making popcorn when a knock came on the door. Her friend answered it, uplifted by the good mood and them being tough girls who didn’t need to fear anything. Two gun shots were what Sarah heard when the timer for the popcorn went off and she hid when she realized she was so helpless. Ever since then, she’s never wanted to feel so helpless and, even more so, never wanted to let someone close let she convince them they can do something wild and adventurous and that gets them hurt again because that part of her has never died, as much as she somewhat wish it would.

And so for the first half or two thirds, the story bounces between the two girls as they start the school year, do things like run for office or get into trouble trying to better learn their magic, and keep meeting Leslie. As they both independently grow closer to him, he seems to grow more and more sick, blaming it on the worsening weather of Fall and then Winter. He’s sure with the new year, he’ll feel better. Maybe after the equinox, when the spirit and human realm are at their closest.

He does ask to be left alone for a while and just kind of vanishes leading up to it, though not after asking the Ellie blindfold herself during the Equinox as a way to respect any spirits that might be roaming the halls and don’t want to be seen. She promises but this means that when she’s taken down into the bellows of the school in a surprise trip for all Student Council presidents, she does so blindfolded.

Meanwhile, Sarah doesn’t like not getting an answer at Leslie’s door when the Equinox comes. She knows she shouldn’t worry about him so much, not when she shouldn’t mind him seeming to get distant, but teenage hormones are teenage hormones and he hasn’t technically done anything wrong. Not only that but the peppy girl Leslie also hangs out with, and Sarah can’t stand, is wearing a blindfold today that looks suspiciously like a scarf Leslie used to wear, just like how she now wears his gloves.

So with a combination of spells, she peaks into his room while her advanced form of true sight is going.

That night, in a lower level of the school, the presidents are brought to a memorial. The teacher says that the person who the memorial is for has no name as ten years ago, they used spirit magic to summon something that tore the boy apart and destroyed his name so thoroughly that no record exists. Worse yet, it tied the school with the beast and the spirit realm in general so every year on the Equinox, the teachers and the student council presidents have to shove it back down.

Sarah sees monsters there. Spirits and not even ones that were new to her. She’d caught glimpses over the course of the year of these things who would have only two of their facial features but they would be connected by black, oily ink scrawled upon the white canvas of their lanky, humanoid bodies. You’d end up with oval mouths that were actually both nose and mouth. You’d have eyes that bled into the mouth and moved in tandem with it. Mouths two thirds up the face that were actually the eyes and ears connected together and there were at least a half dozen within Leslie’s room.

The beast Ellie faced let out a horrible scream as it emerged. It howled in a way that hurt one’s very soul. That beseeched them to speak even as every instinct screamed at you not to. The presidents are told to ready their spells and even for Ellie to take off that stupid blindfold but she won’t break a promise. It’s not who she is. And who she is connects with people so after her an empathy spell to feel the beast is in pain, she casts the communication spell and whispers, “Hi. I’m Ellie. How can I help you?” just as she has a hundred times before.

The beasts in the room seem to somehow know they’re being perceived and stop to look towards the window while one holds what looks like an eye in their hand. Sarah takes away her far sight so she can see around her and sees that the entire wall of the dormitory is COVERED in the spirits. And they’re all looking at her before they come crashing down in almost a wave.

The creature screams for its son. Begs for where they are. That they can make a new name. That will help them, right? The teachers say it has never been so frantic but Ellie tries to stay calm. “Who is your son? I’ll find him.” To which it says that he’s right here but also not and... And that she has met him. Before vanishing back without having to be fought.

The creatures chase Sarah until she trips and falls in the woods around the academy. When she turns around, one of the creatures leaps at her, claws missing their mark but digging into the dirt beside her. Without options and unsure if her magic will even work on these, she punches it. All of them seem to stop at that before their body language reads of curiosity. And celebration?

Everyone is dismissed and told not to speak of it. The ground shakes as the bell tolls, saying the equinox is over. Ellie breathes a sigh of relief at everything turning out fine before realizing she can take off the scarf now. She thanks Leslie quietly, wondering if she’d been able to show the spirit the same sort of kindness if she had seen it for what it was. She then turns around so she can see the memorial too, having only been one step away from leaving entirely.

Sarah watches as they all start leaving once their curiosity is sated, running back the way they had come. She finally gets to relax and think about what she had seen with her magic. The eye, the monsters and something had been on the floor. It hadn’t quite looked like the creatures but not like a person though. She had... felt something though. The same sort of pull that she thought was her heart whenever she used her true sight around Leslie. And whatever that thing that made her feel like that was the one being given the eye in whatever ritual she’d interrupted.

And the statue, of course, is that of Leslie but instead of an emover that covers one eye or his hat doing it, he had two eyes and was immortalized in stone. And the next time either saw Leslie, he was beginning to feel his strength return and they got to see for the first time both of his eyes.

The two don’t immediately know how to confront this though. Both think they must be wrong in one way or another. So the two start spending more time together while trusting Leslie less. Not that either can just abandon him at this point, especially as the new year is kind to either of them personally either. In helping resolve their own issues, such as Ellie’s tendency to try and kill herself for others effectively and Sarah wanting to stop being afraid of letting anyone close, they finally first tell each other what they know before finally asking Leslie what is his deal?

Ten years ago, he sought to commune with a spirit and stop the stigma that was growing against them. He summoned the Mother of Names. Or... Of Identity as she likes to call it. She actually doesn’t like the names that bleed off of her. She feels they say too little about someone. They are a title with no purpose. As such, whenever someone has said their name around her, she sees it as them wanting to be rid of it and taking it. Ellie told her its name though and Leslie explains that that’s what the two talked about. How people use names and the identities they have alongside them. How she has hurt them which she never desired. She is a mother after all and the creatures Sarah has seen her children. They are facets of identity and they have a lot more personality than you’d expect.

The mistake and tragedy wasn’t the spirit’s... It was his. He lost his family at a VERY young age and never found community. He was rejected everywhere he went and was never able to put down roots. Everywhere he went, he left nothing behind. He didn’t want to do that to that which he wished to be his mother so he tried to use spirit magic to make a copy of his very being. The more comprehensive, the better.

HE tore himself apart. In trying to save him, the Mother of Names tried to save him. To put him back together and the best she could see for that was to add him to the brood. She didn’t know how else to though but to rip his name away. And thus he became Nameless. Or Less Enam as he first called himself but Less made people suspicious so he changed it to Leslie. It’s all still a play on the title instead of a name though.

Two years ago, the rest of the family found enough of him to put him back together enough to form a ghost. What he is now. They’ve found almost everything and what Sarah saw was them putting in one of his eyes because they’re still looking. They don’t think they’ll ever find the heart though. A heart is something different in the spirit realm after all. It contains too much of who you are and so is as much its own spirit as the person. Even he has to admit he must have a shade of it as he still has his goals and desires. Without it though, he’ll never be whole and never be able to pass on, be reincarnated, etc. etc. This form is also unstable and the closer the spirit realm is, the closer he comes to tearing apart anew and so he can’t even go see the Mother of Names like this.

And so the ending part is them trying to figure out how to maybe find his heart, even as he tells them not to. They quickly understand why: He’s been alive again for two years with a veritable army of spirits at his command. He has tried and maybe elsewhere could have the answer, but this place wont.

Not that a girl as focused on helping as Ellie, or an adventurous, wild child like Sarah will let that stop them. They know one thing he hasn’t tried after all and she already knows one of them. It’s time for momma to come out and help her kid and for the two girls who still haven’t confessed their feelings to Leslie to go meet their future mother in law.

And that’s when we get the last test. If the two are willing to open themselves up and be tied to Leslie, he can be revived with a new heart born of love and care. They aren’t even forced to love him forever but they will know when he dies. When his time runs out, they will feel it in their own hearts, as well as each other’s. Neither ever wanted to see another friend die, or even consider it, but that past trauma is also the reason why they can see Leslie while most can’t. Are they willing to know the pain will come again when instead they could just leave him in the state he’s in. He says he’s content like this after all. Ready to just accept this as his identity.

But they of course aren’t. So a ritual is performed and Leslie brought down and the moment when he would be torn apart, the two express their feelings, bear their hearts, and the Mother releases her own font of power, all of which is enough to force it to all come together around a new heart.

Now all together, the three hug, though the moment is a bit ruined by the Mother of Names whispering, “You know, I’ve never had grand-children. How quickly can humans start working on that?”

The end.

This was the first of two ideas I got that were inspired by Magical Diary: Wolf Hall and I explained all of this to a friend two days after finishing that game and the idea hasn’t really changed or grown since that chat with my friend because my brain works VERY fast. While I only went big for the big plot points that make up the big story beats, the majority of the book would be about the two girls’ self discovery of how they want to deal with their trauma and finding a balance versus the memory of their friends and moving forward. It’s one I think could be a lot of fun but also by structure versus other works of mine, I could easily see it being a 100k+ words work so it’s a little daunting to put it mildly.

So, at least for now, I wanted to just share it with you all instead. Honestly, I think I’d just like to do this more often in general because I like my ideas but I know I won’t get to all of them so why not share some of them? Anyways, thanks for listening to this long ramble and have a lovely day!

=========

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead, If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

And finally a Twitter you can follow too!

[talenlee]

Magic, Eugenics, And How To Do Not That

Magic, Eugenics, And How To Do Not That

Do you have magic in your setting?

Does that magic have a genetic component?

Okay, bad news, you’ve justified eugenics.

It isn’t quite that absolute but you have to remember the gap between magically enabled humans and non magical humans is kind of categorically vast. There are ways around it, but in the default context, where magic is a thing that people can do that provides immense results compared to an individual human’s, a system of magic where a person’s genetics can influence it is a pretty easy to justify outlay for actual literal eugenics.

In the real world, setting aside eugenics’ moral or ethical framings, part of what helped to undermine it was the fact it just didn’t work. The people who believed in it weren’t receiving any inherent advantage due to their breeding, and it was kind of notable that no matter how well bred you were, it didn’t take many muddy peasants to pull you out of your castle by your feet and kill you. Eugenics is a fairy story in the real world, where a real true thing (we can change gene expressions in population through selective breeding) gets refined to a point of nonsense (we can lay out the genes of an individual like we’re picking out baby drapes). It’d be nice if eugenics failed just because of the moral reasons, but it turns out that there are lots of immoral things that get to persist despite that. Eugenics was, and is (hi there, Musk’s weirdoes) a fairy story privileged people tell themselves to justify the immense unfairness of the world.

The fact is, humans exist within such boundaries of capabilities that even the best of the best at things are not that far beyond what other humans can do, and often, the peaks of performance come at the expense of immense training regimes. Olympians live in food jail, pro wrestlers are extraordinarily good at performance and pain, and researchers specialise within their fields, and none of them mean that any one person is capable of just exceeding other people without infrastructural support. The best of the best are individually very intimidating but enough hands throwing enough bricks can make the differences disappear.

In the context of a magical setting, though, where you have individual mages capable of exerting immense force, force beyond a single human’s ability, or even a dozen human’s abilities, in first-order strategies like ‘can throw fireballs’ or ‘can fly,’ then suddenly the ability to breed that ability more commonly into a community represents a very meaningful incentive, and it seems like the kind of thing where, given enough time, the idea taking root and being acted on are kind of inevitable. This is obviously, a bad thing. Magical prowess being inborn and genetically predictable seems to directly represent a powerful incentive to begin mass producing People Of Mass Destruction.

Of course, this can be a bit of a bummer for settings to give up. After all, institutions and social structures give you a lot of stuff to work with for characters, and we have them in our world, so they can work as useful parallels. Magical colleges that pick up kids in their early tween years so you can have adventures learning magic in a school setting don’t necessarily have the same tools if there’s a hard rule that no, there’s no genetic bias or predisposition to magic, because at that point it can feel like there’s no institutional capture at work.

Alright, then what are some alternatives?

Internal Control, External Power: Sure, you can breed the best wizards possible, but they’re all only just drawing on the magic in an area. Two wizards having a duel are chucking the magical energy of an area at one another, and adding a third wizard to the mix reduces the amount of power they both have by about a third. Wizards aren’t something societies can marshall in opposition to one another because every army just fields a few dozen really crap wizards that suck up the bulk of the resources in the area.

Magic Alters Genetics: Wizards do have altered genes, but it’s the magic that they use that alters them. Kids of wizards wind up weird and all, but it’s not necessarily ‘magically weird’ as much as it is they’ve been subjected to a kind of radiation. Kids of wizards are therefore worth tracking and observing (in say, wizard colleges), but they aren’t necessarily going to do better magic than their parents, and they might just ber weird in other ways.

Magic As Unlock: In a setting where anyone can use magic, but you don’t want everyone using magic, consider the value of magic not as a sort of can-you-roll-your-tongue genetic quirk, but rather that magical access is something you can go your entire life without doing, and the longer you take to do it, the harder it gets to do. This lets you have a classical magic system where children learning magic at a ripe age is important, without completely shutting out any adults who want to get involved based on their ‘breeding.’

Culturally Genetic Magic: Okay, you have your magical colleges and dynasties and the importance of family names of wizards and they belief in breeding and all that, but also, they’re just wrong. There are lots of persistent beliefs in the world that are based on completely afactual nonsense, after all, and institutions are really good at justifying their continued existence. Plus, if magic is a cultural practice, then institutions like this will create more and better wizards, just not for the reasons they claim they are.

Personally, I favour the two ideas of Magic as an unlock and a dose in areas of culturally genetic magic. Not every kid has the concentration and focus to open that door, but there are lots of reasons you might.

One fun thing to consider, by the way, if you’re the kind of tumblr-centered author who wants the push, the population of wizards in a given city according to the old 3e DMG is about .5% The population of Australia, according to the carer surveys, that are autistic, is about .5%.

Just saying, if people want genetic magic.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Making

[drbased]

Conservatism and optimism

It's commonly said that right wing thought is pessimistic; it's based on a belief that there are certain immutable types of human, and that some of those types of human are simply not very good at living, and in a Darwinian-esque fight for survival, the 'not as good' people should simply be left to die out on their own, shunned by the society of good, hardworking and competent people who deserve real success. It's staunchly individualistic and anti-community.

But it would be a lie to think of conservatism as purely pessimistic about human behaviour. For example, one of its tenets is the 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' mentality, another is the concept of the 'marketplace of ideas'. Within these overlapping ideas is the concept that left alone, people will squabble, and they will fight, but ultimately when faced with challenges, people will rise up and come to the right conclusions about what needs to be done, and act on that accordingly.

The idea that if we just let freedom of speech roam uninterrupted and unmanaged then people will end up gravitating towards the objectively best solution becomes patently absurd when you think about it for long enough. There are so many examples of this system utterly failing; 4chan was considered to be the ultimate bastion of free speech; an experiment, if you will, into what happens when there are zero social consequences for saying what you really, truly think. And what happened? It became the most disgusting cesspool of bigotry and psychopathy known to humankind. Turns out, that when you let anyone say anything, the people with the worst ideas, the cheapest ideas, the ideas that appeal to the basest, more bigoted impulses that only serve the existing oppressor classes get a real audience, and as such the more reasonable kinder person you leave, and a sort of spiralling sifting effect happens where the more reasonable people leave, the more nazis stay, the more nazis are attracted, the more reasonable people leave and so on.

The 4chan example is not perfect, because 4chan is not a perfect mirror of the real world. But then, in the real world itself, where people have to stake their reputation on their ideas, things aren't much better. We even know on a day-to-day personal level just how unfair the social system is. The biggest, loudest, confident people will always get their way through sheer charisma alone. That's why we have to have democracy, that's why we have commitees, that's why parliaments were set up so the king didn't have a monopoly on power. We all know that in practice, letting the 'market place of ideas' play out is a categorically terrible thing for society.

But it doesn't sound very nice, does it? It sounds kinda... pessimistic. It's also insulting; people really, really want to believe that we're ultimately in charge of our own destinies, that we respond rationally to the information we're given and that we, ultimately, when left uninterrupted to engage with pure logic, will make good decisions. Imagine being told that no, actually; no matter how good you think you are at making decisions, you shouldn't be allowed to have any power, and instead you need to be surrounded by red tape, prevented from making any movement by a chatter of other, contradictory voices that hold just as much power over the masses as you do.

Make no mistake, here; conservatives do not apply this logic equally; to the right wing, those other people in the committee will always have worse ideas because they're just built that way, and the person with the biggest and best ideas should have got to the top by pure strength of will and commitment alone. They were built the right way, they're the genius, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and now they've earned that power. No committee of npcs/lemmings is needed, because the person in power has all the best ideas, and they can take the risks needed to push society in the right direction.

Within this conceptualisation there's an optimism: that person could be you. If you really put the work in, you could turn out to be the secret genius who through sheer hard work and determination has earned power and a place in history. To the conservative, saying that no, actually the people in power did not get there fairly, that things are unfairly stacked against you and it's very unlikely that you're a secret genius - and that even if you were, there's a limited chance that you'll ever get to demonstrate your full potential... well, that's pretty damn miserable. There's a phrase that describes a lot of people: 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires' and it applied here. Under conservatism, the system is running as it should, which means if you're good enough, people will recognise that goodness because people are fundamentally good, and the system will recognise that goodness because the system is funamentally good, and you will rise to the top in the most natural way possible, because people and the system are not just good, but naturally good.

And, of course, if you never rise to the top, you can be safe in the knowledge that that isn't because of some great injustice against you, where you were robbed of your true potential by an unfair system; rather, you've lived an honest, noble life of a worker. You have played your part in the machine, you are valuable as you are, as the type of person that you are. This is how conservatism appeals to the most downtrodden by the system. It doesn't say 'you're disgusting and you should stay there', rather it says 'you are a type of person, and that's not a bad thing - it's a very good thing, actually'.

[digitalmarketing-01]

Understanding Endometriosis in Elderly Women

Endometriosis is a chronic condition that affects millions of women worldwide, causing significant discomfort and pain. While it is often associated with younger women, endometriosis in elderly women is a growing concern that deserves attention. This blog aims to provide a clear and informative overview of this condition, its symptoms, and treatment options for elderly women.

What is Endometriosis?

Endometriosis is a condition where tissue similar to the lining inside the uterus grows outside the uterus. This tissue can be found on the ovaries, fallopian tubes, and other areas within the pelvic cavity. Endometriosis in elderly women is less commonly discussed, yet it can be equally debilitating. The pain and symptoms can persist or even worsen with age, making it crucial for older women to seek proper diagnosis and treatment.

Symptoms of Endometriosis in Elderly Women

One of the most common symptoms of endometriosis is chronic pelvic pain. This pain can range from mild to severe and can significantly impact daily life. Other symptoms include:

Heavy menstrual bleeding

Pain during intercourse

Painful bowel movements or urination

Fatigue

Infertility

It’s essential for elderly women experiencing these symptoms to consult with a healthcare provider to rule out endometriosis.

Endometriosis Treatment Options

There are several endometriosis treatment options available, tailored to the severity of the symptoms and the patient’s overall health. These treatments can be broadly categorized into surgical and non-surgical methods.

Non-Surgical Endometriosis Treatments

Non-surgical treatments are often the first line of defense. These include:

Medications: Pain relievers such as NSAIDs can help manage mild pain. Hormonal therapies, including birth control pills, gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists, and progestin therapy, can reduce or eliminate the pain by controlling the menstrual cycle.

Lifestyle Changes: Regular exercise, a healthy diet, and stress management techniques can help alleviate symptoms.

Physical Therapy: Specialized physical therapy can help manage chronic pelvic pain and improve the quality of life.

Surgical Options

For more severe cases, surgical options may be necessary. These include:

Laparoscopy: A minimally invasive procedure to remove endometrial tissue.

Hysterectomy: In extreme cases, removing the uterus may be considered, especially if other treatments have failed.

Pain Management in Endometriosis

Effective pain management is crucial for improving the quality of life for women with endometriosis. This can include a combination of medication, physical therapy, and alternative treatments such as acupuncture. It’s important for patients to work closely with their healthcare providers to develop a personalised pain management plan.

Support and Resources

Living with endometriosis can be challenging, but there are many resources available to help. Support groups, both online and in-person, can provide emotional support and practical advice. Additionally, healthcare providers specializing in endometriosis can offer the latest treatment options and research findings.

Conclusion

Endometriosis in elderly women is a significant yet often overlooked issue. With proper diagnosis and a comprehensive treatment plan, women can manage their symptoms and maintain a good quality of life. If you or a loved one are experiencing symptoms of endometriosis, don’t hesitate to seek professional help.

For expert care and treatment options, contact BR Healthcare at Plot №13, Bawana Rd, Shabad Extension, Sector 17, Rohini, Delhi — 110089. Visit their website at BR Healthcare or call +91–9205666381 to schedule an appointment.

Remember, effective management of endometriosis can lead to a better, pain-free life.

[xtruss]

Are Canadians Really As Nice and Polite As Everyone Thinks? Canada Has A Reputation For Being Nice. It Might Be A Myth.

— By Jake Rossen | Feb 27, 2024

As stereotypes go, one could definitely do worse than being thought of as overly nice and polite. Those are labels often applied to residents of Canada, the North American country that has brought the world everything from poutine to Ryan Gosling. Visit Canada and you might expect people to be unfailingly respectful. But is this cliché actually true?

Why are Canadians nice? Are Canadians polite?

Why Are Canadians Nice?

It may help to first understand where this belief originated. Nelson Wiseman, director of Canadian studies at the University of Toronto, spoke with MacLean’s in 2017 about the country’s reputation for near-subservient dispositions. Wiseman pointed to Canada’s previous subordinate roles under other regimes, particularly the British, whose mannered traits may have become endemic in the population over time. Good manners, of course, imply a certain politeness.

Once entrenched, the trait seems to have become pervasive. Some have noted Canadians tend to honk their horns less, and even commit fewer murders. (In 2020, the homicide rate was 1.95 per 100,000 people, compared to 6.5 in the U.S.) A 2015 BBC travel piece by Eric Weiner described Canadian hospitality down to the demeanor of its border guards.

“We experience Canadian nice as soon as we reach customs,” he wrote. “The U.S. border guards are gruff and all business. The Canadians, by contrast, are unfailingly polite, even as they grill us about the number of wine bottles we’re bringing into the country. One year, we had failed to notice that our 9-year-old daughter’s passport had expired. They, nicely, let us enter anyway. The niceness continues for our entire trip, as we encounter nice waiters, nice hotel clerks, nice strangers.”

Are Canadians Polite?

It may be true that Canadians at least appear to be more optimistic and well-mannered. A 2018 study published in the journal PLOS One examined words most commonly used by both Canadians and Americans on Twitter over a one-year period in 2015. Canadian Tweets were over-represented by words like beautiful, happy, and thanks, while Americans tended to lean on hate, ugly, and slurs, none of which are terribly nice.

But the study had limitations. For one thing, it may be that Canadians simply chose to broadcast more positive messaging, or that they self-selected to express those sentiments publicly. It doesn’t suggest a characteristic indicative of the entire population.

So is this ultra-niceness accurate? In reality, it’s probably more a portrait of perception than anything. Canadians enjoy “nice” amenities that appear altruistic, like free health care; celebrities hailing from Canada appear nice, but most celebrities are cognizant of their reputation and aren’t likely to appear overly rude. That’s hardly limited to Canada.

It’s also possible Canadians are perceived as more modulated thanks to constant comparison to Americans. According to Wiseman, Canada is seen as a collective—again, think health insurance—while Americans are thought to be more about individual fulfillment.

Ultimately, broad categorization (i.e. stereotypes) is a poor measure of a culture regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. Canadians probably aren’t any nicer than anyone else, but they might be too polite to argue about it.

[taxhelpers]

Singer Beyoncé Squares Off with Uncle Sam over Alleged Tax Liability

A tax attorney in San Jose has learned that Beyoncé has squared off with the Internal Revenue Service regarding a tax liability of $2.7 million. The singer brought the challenge to the IRS in United States Tax Court.

According to Forbes, 41-year-old Beyoncé filed a Petition for Redetermination concerning tax bills for 2018 and 2019, which together totaled almost $2.7 million. The singer received a Notice of Deficiency for those years, which included penalties and interest.

IRS Claims Beyoncé Owes Millions in Tax Penalties

The agency assessed that Beyoncé owed $805,850 more than she paid for the taxable year 2018, and more than $161,000 in interest and tax penalties due to this alleged delinquency. For the taxable year 2019, it was also determined by the IRS that $1,442,747 in additional taxes were owed, and interest and penalties for that year were assessed at more than $288,500.

The total amount the “Lemonade” hit maker is disputing comes to almost $2.7 million. Beyoncé alleged in her petition that the IRS erroneously disallowed millions of dollars of legitimate deductions, such as those for expenses, professional and legal services, management fees, insurance, utilities, depreciation, and other expenses.

For example, the IRS alleges that a charitable contribution carryover, totaling more than $868,000, should not be allowed. This amount was reported in 2018, but the pop star disputes the agency’s claim.

Beyoncé also stated that the IRS was wrong when they determined that she failed to report $1,449 in 2018 as income from royalties. The singer has the option of seeking tax audit representation, but how the petition plays out remains to be seen.

Accuracy-Related Tax Penalties Also Assessed by IRS

The petition contested IRS-assessed penalties as well, which the Bureau categorized as accuracy-related fees. The agency calculates penalties of this kind at 20 percent of the total amount of the underpaid taxes according to Internal Revenue Service Code Section 6622.

The IRS website states that “disregard of rules and regulations,” “negligence,” and “significant understatement of income tax” are the most commonly awarded tax penalties in this category.

Beyoncé Asserts No Wrongdoing

Beyoncé asserted that her 2018 royalties and deductions were all properly reported and there should be no additional tax liability on her part. She went on to say that she “acted reasonably and in good faith,” and therefore should not be given accuracy-related penalties even if the IRS determines that additional taxes are indeed owed. A tax audit attorney is often consulted in such cases.

It Was a Very Good Year

Beyoncé enjoyed a profitable year in 2018, during which time she released an album with her husband, Jay-Z, entitled, “Everything Is Love,” and afterwards, the couple began their high profile “On the Run II” stadium tour. Beyoncé was also a headliner at the 2018 Coachella Valley Music Festival.

In addition to her 2018 accomplishments, Beyoncé made a profitable agreement with Netflix in 2019 regarding her concert film “Homecoming” and released a live album by the same name.

More than one tax attorney in San Jose will likely be following the developing story and providing updates. Regardless of celebrity status, those who find themselves at odds with the IRS should seek legal help from a back-tax attorney or other qualified legal professional.

[blazingstar24]

The assassins never failed to kill their targets. The Zephrah attack cannot have been an attack on Keyleth. Yes, she’s a moon druid, yes she guards the planar rifts and leyline, but she was barely even hurt by their attack. She wiped the floor with them. The ones who died were her guards.

And they never attempted again? These assassin that are so through that they even stole the Lumos Twins research after murdering them and poisoning their bodyguard? They never tried to stop Keyleth from doing whatever it was that sent them after her in the first place again?

So Keyleth logically cannot be the target. So what’s the other options? Maybe these weren’t the Gray Assassins and instead were from Vasselheim? Highly doubtful as there’s no way people from Vasselheim would attempt to take out a member of Vox Machina and the leader of the Air Ashari. That would cause more social unrest than the news of forgotten deities.

That leaves us with this: The real target was someone or something else in Zephrah. Orym said the attack was out in the open. The assassins came out of the trees. (Which is a reoccurring theme) It’s possible that Keyleth just so happened to be out there that day and the true target was amongst the crowd of people going about their day in Zephrah. Or possibly one of her guards was the true target.

Now Liam has said that the choice for the moon tattoo was a coincidence, but I’m like hmmmmm is it? For Orym, it is probably just something him and Will had between them. Their inside joke or saying. But the question is, who started it? It’s one thing to have a cute nickname for your partner, but it’s another to specifically have the moons categorized as being a symbol for your partner. Especially when one is commonly known to be an omen of ill tidings. You either have to be completely ignorant of that. Or be really into the moons.

Do I think Will could have been the real target? Maybe. There’s a good possibility he was. He could have kept secrets from Orym. Not to mention, Mr Liam “Sad Angst King” O’Brien created Orym and his backstory so I wouldn’t put it past him to go “Yeah, his husband died and he’s trying to find his killer but turns out he may not have known everything about his husband” And Matt going “Neat! Your husband was in a moon cult”

But at the very least, I do believe that Keyleth was not the true target in the attack on Zephrah

[depressedhatakekakashi]

fandom sometimes labelling characters as "the devoted rule-follower" and "that rebellious little shit" can sometimes be so funny especially when they're just plain wrong XD My favorite characters are always commonly categorized as "the devoted rule-follower" when in canon it's always like "bitch he literally commited treason 10 minutes into his introduction- tf are you talking about??" (this is from another fandom not Kakashi XD, im not sure if he actually commited treason in canon but-) Kakashi has a lot of issues when it comes to rules and he holds them important plus his superiors to some varying degree, even those he hates he was never exactly spitting fire tearing down the entire village over but that doesn't mean he didn't do shit to rebel or break the rules especially when it comes to his friends and students. His first lesson to Team 7 was literally the iconic "Breaking the rules is scum but abandoning your teammates makes you worse than scum"

I think Kakashi is somewhere in the middle?? i obviously could be wrong but he never striked me as the type to full on go through a rebellion, guns ablazing and ready to tear the village down (unless in an AU where things are really simply that bad) but he definitely can see the flaws but instead of wanting to burn the system down he simply wants to change it for the better, he did a fantastic job as rokudaime and no one can tell me otherwise T.T

Kakashi techniclly committed treason rescuing Tenzo, because he went against Hiruzen’s orders to do so and Hiruzen basically decided ‘this is a top not h shinobi i can’t risk losing so he’ll get away with a little treason’

Kakashi is a ‘on the febce’ character in a lot of ways

The system broke him from a young age and made him a ruler follower from age five-11 because of his fathers death and that part of him never really went away. It’s still a very important part of his person and it’s WHY he never turned away from the village. Because with his fathers death and the exact reason/way he died it was cemented in Kakashi that he HAD to follow the rules. The those who go against the village and the rules die and that they DESERVE to die. That’s why i always say the village broke him. Because it did.

But Obito helped Kakashi see the importance of teammates and friends again (he had that view becore his fathers death but lost it when his father died because of how he was shunned explicitly for saving his teammates and failing the mission) and he realized that sometimes the mission simply isn’t worth it. That letting his teammates die for the mission was not ok

So at the end of the day Kakashi became a moral rule follower. If the rules go against his moral compass he won’t break them but he will put them off (going after sasuke and naruto when tsunade had a mission for him, saving tenzo when Horuzen wanted to just ‘send a letter’ to danzo, etc)

He’s not a blind rule follower. It’s why i hate seeing people call him a bootlicker because that suggests he follows without question, but Kakashi is constantly questioning and judging. He chooses for himself what is more important. He chose to go against the village rule of no shinobi leaving the village during a kage summit, so that he could escort Naruto to the raikage to plea for Sasuke. Kakashi had ZERO obligation to do that. He could have restrained Naruto and forced him to sit out.

But Kakashi 1) still cared for Sasuke on some level no matter how much he tried to ignore that fact 2) he knew it was better to support Naruto than to adhere to village rules

Anyone who calls Kakashi a blind rule follower or even a ruler follower on ever just didn’t pay attention to his story at all

[antoine-roquentin]

best result for the gop among asian people since 2008, latinx people since 2004, and black people since reagan got 14%, tying bob dole’s 12% in 1996. weirdly, people are reading blame into these charts when it’s clear that some sober-minded analysis should be done as to why the supposedly more racist candidate doubled his vote among black women. when you remember that biden wrote the 1994 crime bill and that racists like richard spencer, curtis yarvin, rahm emanuel, madeleine albright, bill kristol, max boot, jeffrey goldberg, bret stephens, george will, rick wilson, eliot cohen, stanley mcchrystal, william mcraven, miles taylor, tony blair, rick snyder, david cameron, moe davis, joe lieberman, and others felt comfortable enough to endorse and vote for him, people responsible for untold numbers of deaths, then it starts to make a bit more sense.

this all brings to mind a new york times article from september:

The results are sobering. We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.

These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.

Hispanics, of course, are no more monolithic than any other group, and internal differences influenced how individuals reacted. The single biggest factor was how respondents thought about Hispanic racial identity. More than whether the individual was Mexican-American or from Cuba, young or old, male or female, from Texas, Florida or California, how the person perceived the racial identity of Latinos as a group shaped his or her receptivity to a message stoking racial division.

Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.

In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

The minority of Latinos who saw the group as people of color were more liberal in their views regarding government and the economy, and strongly preferred Democratic messages to the dog-whistle message. For the majority of Latinos, however, the standard Democratic frames tied or lost to the racial fear message. In other words, Mr. Trump’s competitiveness among Latinos is real.

But our research also suggests good news. There’s a winning message Mr. Biden and his party can deliver that resonates with most Hispanics no matter how they conceptualize the group’s racial identity.

The key is to link racism and class conflict. The pivot we recommend was also the most convincing message we tested among whites and African-Americans.

Democrats should call for Americans to unite against the strategic racism of powerful elites who stoke division and then run the country for their own benefit. This is not to deny the reality of pervasive societal racism. But it does direct attention away from whites in general and toward the powerful elites who benefit from divide-and-conquer politics.

This is the race-class approach that one of us helped pioneer. It fuses issues of racial division and class inequality, and by doing so shifts the basic “us versus them” story — the staple of most political messaging — away from “whites versus people of color” to “us all against the powerful elites pushing division.”

Here’s what this looks like:

We had come so far, but now Covid-19 threatens our families — for instance with health risks, record unemployment and losing the businesses we worked hard to build. To overcome these challenges, we need to pull together no matter our race or ethnicity. But instead of uniting us, certain politicians make divisions worse, insulting and blaming different groups. When they divide us, they can more easily rig our government and the economy for their wealthy campaign donors. When we come together by rejecting racism against anyone, we can elect new leaders who support proven solutions that help all working families.

This message was more convincing than the dog-whistle message among Hispanics no matter how they saw the group’s racial identity. It also beat the dog-whistle message among African-Americans and whites.

To understand why this works, it helps to compare it to the standard Democratic responses to Mr. Trump’s messages stoking racial fear.

One standard reaction is to directly challenge Mr. Trump as a bigot while also condemning structural racism. We tested a message like this. It said, in part,

Certain politicians promote xenophobia, racism and division. And it’s not just their words. It’s their policies, too. We see it in how they rip families apart at the border. And in how the police profile, imprison and kill Black people.

Compared with the dog-whistle fear message, this “call out racism” message lost among whites, perhaps unsurprisingly. It also lost among those Latinos who did not perceive themselves as people of color.

Denouncing racism against Latinos seems like an obvious strategy to those of us who see ourselves as people of color and are outraged by Mr. Trump’s denigrating language and his administration’s violence toward Latin-American immigrants. Yet this approach ignores the fact that our racial self-conception is not shared by a majority of Hispanics, who seem to balk at understanding themselves as people of color under racist attack.

The other standard Democratic response to dog whistling is to sidestep racial issues as much as possible. Let’s call this the “colorblind” approach, which we also tested. Our version partly said,

We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, but Covid-19 illnesses and deaths are worse here than almost anywhere else. We must elect new leaders who have a plan and are ready to build this country back, better.

This approach seeks to build a coalition by emphasizing shared concerns, for instance around health care or the economy, while avoiding divisive conversations about racism. But it is dog-whistle racism that cleaved the white working and middle classes from the Democratic Party in the first place, and failing to counter that strategy directly leaves its potency intact. In our research, the colorblind message basically tied the racial fear message among whites as well as the majority of Hispanics.

In contrast, Democrats can build common cause across economic classes and racial groups with a race-class approach.

We tested seven race-class messages woven around different issues, including immigration reform and criminal justice. Among whites — often seen as more likely to be comfortable with messages that avoid challenging racism — all seven race-class messages beat the colorblind narrative. Indeed, five beat or tied the dog-whistle message, something the colorblind message failed to accomplish.

Framing racism as a class weapon also proved effective at nurturing support for racial justice reforms. The race-class approach urges people to view the real threat in their lives as emanating from powerful elites stoking division, not from supposedly dangerous minorities.

[mdhwrites]

Willow or Gus Should Not Have Been in TOH

This is... NOT about their characters. It simply isn’t. It also ISN’T to say both shouldn’t have been in the show or to say one should have been more important than the other. Who they are honestly has nothing to do with this blog. Their magic is what is fundamentally wrong with having both characters in the show because they do not fit major themes of the show simply by how their magic is. Let’s get into it. And to do that, we actually can’t talk about Willow and Gus. Instead, let’s discuss the Coven system as it is presented by the show. The coven system is an oppressive order put upon witches to force them to choose one coven to join for the rest of their life. It robs them of the ability to do any other type of magic and is implied in story to be much of why the current state of the Isles is so selfish, mean and unruly when compared to the time of the Isles when people used all types of magic as they pleased. It is also explicitly a selfish lie made by the evil ruler of the land so as to work towards a grand plan of his literally hundreds of years in the making, or at least 50 since he first came to power. It is meant to be seen as a categorically bad thing. A lie to under power people with the claim that the dead god, if it’s a god at all, believes that the coven system is the ‘right’ way to use magic. This, in story, wouldn’t actually be hard to keep consistent actually. You have characters always showing themselves at their most powerful using combinations of magic while also avoiding having anyone who seems... blessed... to only use one magic. Yeah... NOW let’s talk about Gus and Willow. The twin prodigies. We’ll talk about Gus first because he is the actually less egregious of the two. He is called a prodigy in story and skipped two grades in school due to how good he is at illusion magic. He is also commonly depicted as the best illusionist in the show, even to the point where an errant panic attack of his is strong enough to accidentally beat the literal strongest illusionist in the government ON ACCIDENT. I also don’t believe we literally ever see him use another type of magic. The closest is when he borrows Luz’s glyphs and that is hardly him using a different school of magic when lack of faith in those glyphs and his abilities still lead to incredible results (Luz’s glyphs being bad is another blog itself). All of this... CAN be explained though. Or most of it. There’s no excusing the panic attack taking out a head of state in their own field. Gus is an energetic, imaginative guy and that energy goes well with illusions. He theoretically has been training with and mastering illusions from a young age. He has put in the work to be where he is and so at least there’s a basis for why he is as strong as he is. For anyone wondering why I’m not discussing Amity in this blog, THAT’S WHY. She explicitly put in the work to be a skilled abomination user and she honestly doesn’t do anything outrageous with those powers when compared to other abomination users in the show. She never shows up her dad. Gus shows up literally everyone else. But uh... Let’s talk about that other side and Willow. Half a Witch Willow who is never depicted as having practiced plant magic in a serious capacity. She likes plants but she was explicitly made to study a different track because of the career options tied to it. When we see younger her, she’s not using plant magic but she is failing at other types of magic. In fact, ANY time Willow uses a different track of magic than plants, she fails miserably at it. Without fail. BUT with plants? Well... With no training, no preparation, and a single seed, she turns the common area of a school into a garden of vines INSTANTLY. In episode six of the show, three episodes after she starts practicing plant magic, she takes out an entire group of monster hunters, who are adults, and specifically trained for combat, SINGLE HANDEDLY as neither of her companions have any form of combat magic at that point. She is so good at plants that once she is no longer the target of Amity’s bullying, she is somehow immediately extremely popular for her use of plant magic as to overshadow a sport’s star at the start of their team’s season. With no training. Willow is in fact actually stated by one character (and this could be hyperbole by a friend tbf) as “The strongest witch they know” while they are actively apprenticed to a witch who studies all types of magic and is the self proclaimed strongest witch in the Boiling Isles. The show backs this claim up though. Willow is CONSTANTLY defined by just how stupidly powerful her magic is and how often it is effortless for her. She doesn’t break a sweat, she doesn’t need to try, she is just on a DIFFERENT LEVEL. As if blessed by a god. As if a god said to her, “You will practice plant magic and nothing else.” So technically, if either Gus or Willow were to be taken out, I would personally argue for thematic integrity, Willow should have been above Gus because she is so much more blatantly blessed to just be powerful. To simply be better but only with one magic. But they both have this problem. So why not get rid of both? Why aren’t I saying that they’re flawed and problematic characters for the show? Well... There is a case to be had there, especially with Amity existing. Especially with Amity’s social pressures from her parents making it so she should be more pro-coven than any other character (another reason why Reaching Out is a bad episode). But I’m kind of trying to be fair and not say cut them both even if a reduced cast probably would not have been a bad choice for the show. But the other reason is argumentative balance. If you have one character who has a reason to believe in the coven system and another who is firmly against it, and Luz in the middle being pulled between them, that opens up some good possibilities for conversations, dynamics, episodes, etc. The two trying to make their point made and prove it. And who would be this theoretical other character? This champion for multiple magics? Do I have some new OC to show- IT’S FUCKING VINEY. VINEY WAS RIGHT FUCKING THERE AND THEY DIDN’T MAKE HER A MAIN SUPPORTING CHARACTER! WHAT THE FU-

*cough, cough* Sorry. Lost it for a moment. But yeah, Viney. She is a force of personality, steals the show in almost any scene she’s in and, oh yeah, USES MULTIPLE MAGICS. Healing and beast keeping. And she’s not depicted to be some god at either, sure (not until they claim she’s the best healer in S2 but *SIIIIIIGH*), but that actually strengthened the point in S1. She shouldn’t be the best in either but how she incorporates the two should allow her to best others who only use one. That would actually disprove the coven system. Because as it is? We have to take the show’s word that the coven system is a lie. That it’s a bad thing. Because if we take the show’s actions, if we look at our supporting cast and what they use... You have an abomination mage who at least has an excuse to be the best at her age. You have an illusionist who is younger than even the rest of the main teenage cast but is literally able to beat the strongest mages in his field on accident, he is that blessed with power. And a plant mage who never trained but once she starts using it is immediately the best in her school where PLANT MAGIC IS TRAINED. And only one of these people ever uses another type of magic, the first one, and it’s not even a type of magic technically claimed by any one coven (that has to do with general issues with the coven system being dumb though and that’s another blog). And she does it ONCE. So... Yeah. Someone needed to be cut and Viney needed to be added. Or either of Viney’s friends. Or just literally anyone who could rep ‘wild magic’ besides Eda because Eda never makes a case beyond “It restricts a witch’s freedom.” Well... Sorry, but if literally all witches, especially those we get to know, seem just to be wasting their time with other types of magic, it seems like to me the coven system is simply helping them live better, more enriching lives by it being okay for them to use the one magic god blessed them with rather than them being forced to be taught multiple in school. Sure worked out for Willow and Gus.