Margaret Killjoy is a delight. And this podcast is full of hope and good vibes, even though the stories go some dark places. And I mean, they secured potatoes as an official sponsor! I love potatoes? Who doesn’t love potatoes??
Do you love history? Do you want to learn about THE MOST badass punk / communist / anarchist / genuinly nice people in history? This podcast is for you!
Almost without fail, the holiday season drops me into depression. Things aren’t helped by the fact that I’ve been unemployed since September after nearly four years at the same place, and well, the state of the world in general. But because I really hate indulging in these feelings, I thought maybe I could make myself happier by writing about the things that brought me the most joy in…
I’ve been listening to a podcast called “ Cool people who did cool stuff”, and came across an episode about the Dutch squatters movement. It was an amazing history lesson for me, and I can’t believe I didn’t already know it! It’s my own country!
So after listening to the episode I went down to my local library, and requested help with finding history books about it. A librarian searched titles with me for 45 minutes!
I got three titles out of it, which isn’t as much as I was expecting. Apparently there’s more, but I’m not allowed to request them from the Amsterdam branch, I’ll have to go down there to review them. I’ve never been in the Amsterdam library, so I’m pretty curious to go there anyway.
Moral of this story: if you’re curious about literally anything, go get books about it. The library is your friend.
“How can I tell you, how can I convince you, brother, sister, that your life is in danger, that every day you wake up alive, relatively happy and a functioning human being, you are committing a rebellious act. You as an alive and functioning queer are a revolutionary.
There is nothing on this planet that validates, protects or encourages your existence. It is a miracle that you are standing here reading these words. You should by all rights be dead.
Don't be fooled. Straight people own the world. And the only reason you have been spared is that you are smart, lucky or a fighter.
It also said, queer can be a rough word, but it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal[…]”
From Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff: Part Two: ACT UP: How Angry, Dying Queers Invented Modern Activism ❤️
This is deeply unshocking to me, my depressed raccoon self absolutely listened to Hozier and Taehyung a ... lot. 👀 Also my Cool People Pod numbers are waaaay higher than that cause I switched to a different podcasting app in like August? So many more minutes than that lol!
oc time again! + her town & culture (heavily inspired by pre-roman italic populations)
she is suri sauthon (later suri laran, after her marriage). her story is linked to my swtor imperial agent, but most of her life for like. the one year away where she meets him, is spent in a town in the mountains of mirial.
despite mirial being cold and desert, and many cities developing underground, her town flourishes thanks to a force nexus, venerated in the form of an ancient, sacred, alive crystal. the ecosystem of that mountain depended on what "the horned crystal" was capable of giving them, but mirialans couldn't live off of that alone, so they developed trade and some rudimental technology, even if oftentimes it was bought thanks to the highly profitable trade of a plant used to make medicines that slowed down aging and had overall healing properties.
note: everything that's generated by this nexus has these healing properties BUT they have to be processed, except for those who bathed in the waters of the cavity under the crystal - the "real" nexus, but not the worshipped one. the waters were sacred but they were not thought to be miraculous, unlike the crystal, who instead was thought of as the keystone of the ecosystem: without it, everything would fall apart (and that is partially true: the cavity was the "real" nexus but thanks to the crystal, also strong in the force, the properties were spread all over the mountains). those who bathed in the cavity's waters - so, all of the town, who had a sort of baptism there - could eat the plant, make whatever food with it, and not only that plant, but everything generated by the nexus, that, again, had similar properties. this allowed people to live up to normal life-spans without advanced medicines or, much, really. to those who didn't live there, though, after the processing, had incredible effects, slowing down aging - for those who took it regularly - and making people able to live up to half a century more than the average]
originally, there were four tribes of nomads that lived thanks to horned farm animals that decided to settle down into one bigger town and other smaller settlements, to live off of transhumance. this division of the tribes stayed into the political and social organization: every person belonged to one tribe specifically, and had slightly different rituals and culture. for examples, each tribe had their own priests and healers, with different techniques and traditions. the town, tho, was guided by a group of people in the high priesthood, a position you could reach only by having earned the trust of all tribes. those high priests had many roles: they guided the people into sacred processions common to all the tribes, they managed the trading with outsiders, they did the maintenance of the temple of the summit (the one that functioned as casket to the crystal) and created a special liquid to offer the crystal that helps it grow.
this particular temple was important because 1. it was very visible, from every angle of the town, and it became an important identity symbol; 2. it stored the venerated horned crystal; 3. it had the altar where sacrifices were made for the crystals. that altar had a hole connected to the cavity, that allowed the liquids to reach the underground; 4. it had various symbols: statues representing each tribe + the high priesthood, and typical mirialan tattoos carved into the wood of the trees that served as columns for the temple, symbolizing 8 values that who dared to enter HAD to have; 5. it was on the way to an important lake (called "mother lake" because the lake the town was built around to depended on the waters of that other lake) where they traveled to in important processions; 6. it was said that a the wizard who unified the tribes made it with its magic, making the plant grow to hold the temple's roof. this wizard was, actually, a force user, obv.
BACK TO HER THOUGH: she's daughter of one of the high priests, who was in charge of managing the trades with outsiders, and lives in a house on the mountains with her mother and him. her parents are from different tribes (that's one of the things that earned him trust from the 4 tribes): when a child is born from two different tribes, they don't pick one to allign to, but they're usually linked automatically to the one with more relatives in it (in her case, the father's tribe: she had many uncles and aunts on his side while her mom only had one sister).
later, though, she got quite tied to her mother's tribe due to a mysterious illness that only her mother's tribe healer was able to cure. she spent 4 years (from 10 to 14 years old) living with the healer and learned her secrets. to better study, she wrote them down. when she returned home, she studied to become a priestess with her father. at 22 (the average age: you can't become priest before your 20s), she was supposed to take a test and become a priestess, but the healer of her mother's tribe died and the tribe asked her to take her place. she couldn't technically do that, but both tribes estimated both her and her parents and she was allowed to become both. she then decided to try to become a high priestess, and became one at 25 (a quite young age). being part of the council, she tried to convince the various tribe healers to unite their knowledges and write them down, and eventually made it. healers still remained tribe based but they now had an "upper, inter-tribe level" similar to high priesthood.
years later, the sacred horned crystal is stolen from the temple by some Hutt mercenaries looking for a profit. given the trust she has earned from all the tribes and the fact that her father is the high priest that deals with outsiders (and she's been hearing stories and advice about it since she was little), she is the one tasked with getting it back. without the growing crystal, the keystone to their ecosystem, the village would have lasted only a few years. in hrr quest, she meets imperial intelligence agent tar'x laran and, as they "solve the mystery" and fight to have it back, they get closer. they'll get married and have a daughter, Vegoia (who's the only one who actually will get to the plot of my story. this was all background)
"There's not going to be a perfect Presidential candidate that will lead us to socdem paradise you stupid slut" not as in "there's no hope" but as in we wouldn't have had the Emancipation Proclamation without people like Frederick Douglass and John Brown, we wouldn't have gotten union protection without events like the Battle of Blair Mountain, we wouldn't have had the civil rights wins of the mid-20th century without countless grassroots organizations leading boycotts and marches and mass civil disobedience and breakfast programs and showing up with guns to intimidate cops, and yes, voting is in no way mutually exclusive with any of that, but the constant demonization I've been seeing from nominal leftists of any action other than shutting up and voting blue is nothing but a hope-destroying denial of history
y'all have gotta learn to act normal about other people's characters
just bc you think they're hot doesn't mean the person who made them wants to know if, or how, you'd fuck them. i feel like that's common sense. it doesn't make it OK now just because it's not a real person you're sexualizing. you don't know what they mean to the person who made them, and if you do, well what the fuck, then.
More notes for Roach conlanging. Roach has grammatical gender, in which only Male, Female, and Object are grammatical genders, whereas Worker uses feminine grammar, Queen and King use a slight variant on feminine grammar, and Drone, and Queen-Alate use masculine grammar. This is because King is derived from Queen, due to their similar positions in a colony, and Queen-Alate is derived from Drone, as both are forms of alate.
Queen is an alteration of feminine grammar that functionally just adds a handful of extra syllables to it, and King is an offsprout of Queen that uses the same grammar with different pronouns. Queen-Alate, despite the name, is derived from Drone, as they are both for referring to different types of alate ant.
Most Roach dialects are intelligible to speakers of Snakemouth Den Cordyceps Roach, but Snakemouth Den Cordyceps Roach is not entirely intelligable to speakers of Roach dialects due to a mix of the excessively specialized vocabulary caused by the specific needs of its speakers, the fact that its speakers do not necessarily have Roach mouthparts and thus may not pronounce syllables in a similar way, and due to the fact that Inanimate Object is a full grammatical gender that does not exist in any other dialect of roach and replaces a decent chunk of terminology for things that previously had Other Words For Them.
okay i know you probably have enough drawing ideas for giant k but i just had this idea invade me.
you know how in snow white (not just the disney version) she pushes together the beds and sleeps on like 3 or more of them sideways? anyway giant k sleeping on 3 beds pushed together.
and now i'm just picturing giant k as snow white and everyone else as the various dwarves
Ohoho big brain!!! 👀👀👀 Big brain. I love this idea so much and not just because Snow White is my favourite fairy tale hdjsbdbdfh
Thank you!!! Of course I have to draw it and not just once, let's make it into a comic! Let's gooo
Giant K series #16: once upon a time, in a land far, far away...
-Celestial Star and Luna Light belong to @help-im-a-gay-fish
-Estrella belongs to @shinechermont
-Aim belongs to @zu-is-here
-Ruby and Meridix belong to @orange-dreamzer
-Ares belongs to @puddle-of-creativity
-Nightingale belongs to @catlover31
-Soltice belongs to @laf-e-taffy
-Diaphanous belongs to @amarald
-Mirage belongs to @ari-cuno
-Mager belongs to @faeroviolet
-Fenzo belongs to @im-to-good-for-names
-Andromeda and Eclipse belong to @dragon-tamer-1
The background+ team (look at how big it was this year!!!):
- @diofasolia did the music (spooky scary skeletons :P) (I did some singing), the customized pumpkins, the bloody chair and the lovely lady coming out of the tv
-@orange-dreamzer did some bats, the big cake, a... flower a bit special and empty wrappers
-@pmd-appreciation did seats (pumpkin pouffe, dusty stool, skeleton armchair), the cauldron of snacks, horror movie poster, string of bats, the window, the drinks, the candles
-@amarald did the table, the black cat, the chocolate cherries and a witch hat