#in-depth articles

[fraudulent-cheese]

...So i promised myself i'd try to assign responses to the second Super Mario Game survey Jan Misali made to Total Drama characters. Here's the first couple!

[sentientsky]

oh, my eyes are getting all bleary! u know what that means! ineedtogotobedholyfuckimsofuckingtired time to look at pictures of The Blorbo for five! more! hours!!

[kenobion]

Andrew Garfield for GQ+Saint Laurent

[bumblingbabooshka]

Tuvix Memes

[self-indulgent-paw-patrol]

Someone pointed out that the scene from the first movie where Ryder brings Chase back to where he found him to boost his confidence doesn't make any sense. At least on the scene where Ryder rescued Chase from the truck then say that He sees something heroic and braveness in Chase when he didn't really do much at all other than being scared. Like that scene should've been Chase confronting his fears by rescuing someone in danger.

Ah, THAT scene. I actually believe it MADE SENSE, so let me try to explain why they made it like that. Under the cut because it got kinda long too XD

First, let's take a look at the dialogue in that scene:

Ryder: I remember the first time I saw you. You were a tiny little pup, all alone in a big city. Chase: I know. You saw me and took pity on me. Ryder: Not at all. What I saw was a brave, heroic pup. Even though you were too small to look after yourself and you were up against all the scary things, you got back up and kept going. I didn't adopt you because I felt sorry for you. I chose you because you were the bravest pup I've ever seen.

Now let me just celebrate a moment here because HELL YES I'M DOING A LOT BETTER AT UNDERSTANDING DIALOGUES IN ENGLISH OMG I'M SO PROUD OF MYSELF RIGHT NOW THAT PART ABOUT BEING TOO SMALL TO LOOK AFTER HIMSELF HE SAID IT SO FAST AND STILL I UNDERSTOOD IT PERFECTLY IN THE FIRST ATTEMPT AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I'M SO HAPPY ok let's go

Now, it's time to break it down!

"I know. You saw me and took pity on me."

Here we see what has been Chase's point of view about that moment, which he believed in it all his life so far. He wholeheartedly believed that he was just an insignificant scared little puppy, worth nothing but pity. He was a nobody. He was nothing, and since then, up to now, he believes that it was Ryder who turned him into something, into the brave rescue pup he now is- or believed to be, until he's now back in the big city, feeling all his fears and trauma of being a nobody coming back up to swallow him whole, reminding him that he is nothing.

But then, Ryder tells Chase what was his OWN point of view of the whole thing, and what was his motivation to rescue and adopt Chase. First, let's see his point of view.

"What I saw was a brave, heroic pup. Even though you were too small to look after yourself and you were up against all the scary things, you got back up and kept going."

This is literally what Ryder saw. Chase was small, yeah. And instead of staying in a corner, of keeping quiet, or hiding somewhere, where he would be certainly safer, because he literally could NOT fend for himself... Chase was out there. In middle of the people, SO MUCH BIGGER than him. Risking being stepped on. Risking a car running over him. Risking an aggressive stray possibly finding and attacking him. He was out there, trying to move, trying to go - no matter where, he was on the move. He'd take a couple steps back to avoid being stepped on, and still press on to advance again, trying to cross the street.

He was afraid? Of course. Did it stop him? No.

THIS is the key for understanding Ryder's quote here. No matter how threatening things were for Chase, Ryder saw him out there, insisting, persisting, pressing on, even with all odds against him. Even if what moved him was the fear and uncertainty and confusion as to why his owners abandoned him there, Chase was NOT hiding away. He was trying for whatever, braving into the unknown, into the scary terrifying world of the big city. And it was traumatic, he was probably having a bad anxiety attack right there at that moment (note it's different than a panic attack, I explained a bit about it when I answered another ask earlier). But he was out there and not hiding.

While Chase saw himself as just a scared good-for-nothing baby, Ryder saw him as someone who didn't hide when faced with probably the scariest things ever in his life and facing it all alone. Which brings to the last part:

"I chose you because you were the bravest pup I've ever seen."

Not many puppies would do the same as Chase did, not in such conditions. "Oh but I've seen stray puppies following people and trying to play with them", yeah, same. I've had dozens of dogs in my life so far and all but one were strays I rescued from the street (or were born from said rescued strays). I've also seen tiny puppies trying to interact with people passing by. But in a crowded sidewalk? People walking nonstop, a wall of stomping feet not caring if you're in their way? With so many loud noises of people talking, cars driving by? Cell phones, cars honking, so many echoing steps. This is a complete nightmare to any puppy, they tend to cower in fear and wait for when the chaos is over or at least less chaotic until they venture out again.

This is the reason why Ryder saw Chase as the bravest pup ever. He was terrified, he was risking his life, but he was still out there.

Which contrasts with what has happened in the movie so far up to that point, if you think about it! Since Chase was taken back to the very city that left him traumatized as a puppy, his fears have been taking over stronger than ever and rendering him unable to keep going, much unlike what happened when he was a baby. And why's that so?

The answer is also simple, it's because since then, Chase's point of view was that it was Ryder who made him brave - he didn't believe he was already brave from the very beginning. He never thought of those moments as moments of bravery, like Ryder did. He thought of those moments as cowardice. These thoughts were what caused him to begin freezing and inducing him into this constant feeling of anxiety crisis and eventually leading to panic attacks, making him believe even more that he has always been nothing, and it's Ryder who made something else of him.

Chase never gave himself any credit for what he has become. For him, it has always been Ryder - and for Ryder, it has always been there with him from even before they first met. Chase just never associated it, until Ryder took him to that very place where they met and told him his own point of view, for the very first time, as apparently those two never addressed why Ryder adopted Chase ever before, which explains why Chase always held this belief that Ryder adopted him out of pity.

You see a scared puppy in the middle of a crosswalk, nearly being ran over by a car.

I see a brave little soul, pushing through against all odds and trying to get somewhere, anywhere, just for the sake of not standing still and waiting for who knows what, which might never even come.

And he fucking GOT somewhere and is indeed the bravest pup I've ever seen.

And he's not even my favorite pup XD

[jewfrogs]

earlier i read wikipedia’s intentional distortion of the history of the holocaust (strongly recommend) and i found a post linking the paper in r/kotakuinaction (which i will not be linking to, g-d bless) and it is truly so telling when the comments start out with whining “poland did nothing wrong, this is an ongoing propaganda war against poles, poland was good to those ungrateful jews” and immediately that turns into this:

(“Jebać Żydów” translates to “fuck the jews,” if you thought any of this was in any way subtle)

like hmm, starting to think this isn’t about historical accuracy at all! just a funny feeling!

[tumkaafiho]

"In the early morning hours of May 15, the cargo vessel Borkum stopped off the Spanish coast, lingering in the waters a short distance from Cartagena. At the port, protesters waved Palestinian flags and called on authorities to inspect the ship based on suspicions that it carried weapons bound for Israel.

Leftist members of the European Parliament sent a letter to Spanish President Pedro Sánchez requesting that the ship be prevented from docking. “Allowing a ship loaded with weapons destined for Israel is to allow the transit of arms to a country currently under investigation for genocide against the Palestinian people,” the group of nine MEPs warned.

Before the Spanish government could take a stand, the Borkum cancelled its planned stopover and continued to the Slovenian port of Koper. “We were right,” Inigo Errejon, the spokesperson for the hard-left Sumar party wrote on X, arguing that the Borkum’s decision to skip Cartagena confirmed the suspicions.

But missed in the debate over whether the ship ought to be allowed to dock in Spain were the unlikely origins of the Borkum’s cargo.

According to documents seen by Al Jazeera, the ship contained explosives loaded in India and was en route to Israel’s port of Ashdod, some 30km (18 miles) from the Gaza Strip. Marine tracking sites show it departed Chennai in southeast India on April 2 and circumnavigated Africa to avoid transiting through the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Houthis have been attacking vessels in reprisal for Israel’s war.

The identification codes specified in the documentation, obtained unofficially by the Solidarity Network Against the Palestinian Occupation (RESCOP), suggest the Borkum contained 20 tonnes of rocket engines, 12.5 tonnes of rockets with explosive charges, 1,500kg (3,300 pounds) of explosive substances and 740kg (1,630 pounds) of charges and propellants for cannons.

A paragraph on confidentiality specified that all employees, consultants or other relevant parties were mandated that “under no circumstances” were they to name IMI Systems or Israel. IMI Systems, a defence firm, was bought by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, in 2018."

[adhdandcomics]

adding to my tags because i’ve been thinkin a lot about the post i just reblogged and have more thoughts:

i’ll be real, the more i saw ‘hey adhd influencers are so annoying’ the more i worried that i was unconsciously contributing to the spreading reputation of adhd folks as annoying and over-pathologizing every symptom they experience

and then i realized. i am not a goddam influencer or life coach or representative. obviously i have some obligation as someone who cares about myself and the people that like my comics to not spread harmful ideology or blatant misinformation but i never intended myself to be a “’increase your productivity!!’ blog OR a ‘if you have XYZ you have adhd!’ blog. and i do this for fun, and originally started this blog bc i had a lot of internalized shame and self loathing about my adhd and thought if i could make it funny i might have less of that. let’s get real! and it worked!

i’ve obviously done this kind of thing— (hey these symptoms might be adhd!) a lot before in my life & on this blog, but there’s more to it than trying to be an “influencer” or whatever. a term that didn’t even exist when i started this blog!

i felt very isolated trying to find out if i had any mental problems & what have you originally because of large advice (etc) blogs with staunchly anti self Dx views at the time

so i overcorrected when i DID get dxed and tried to validate everyone who was like me. and of course. not the best course of action always for the ol mental health. tried to be the source of positivity and jokes that i didn’t see because the online adhd presence was near non-existent.

and anyway. i make a lot of fun of myself & the way m brain works in my comics obviously but it is not my obligation to... how do you say.... not be annoying online.

because if folks interpret MY little jokes as a strict guide to diagnosis. that’s on them, really, not me. i also believe “making adhd your entire personality” is a non-issue. so what if people find out they have it and get over excited with identifying as adhd. saying this as someone who DID do it. criticism of this gives the same vibes as people being annoyed that young queers make “being queer” their whole personality. im very obviously more than a guy with adhd, and id reckon other adhd comic artists are too. (im friends with a lot of them!) it’s fine to post about it online.

anyway. i just don’t take myself too seriously and i’m a comic artist for myself first! and you know what, i’ve been considered annoying my entire life. what do i care if a few more folks think i’m annoying. neurotypical or not

[some-teeth-in-a-trench-coat]

I am once again daydreaming of making my own social media platform and how to make it not give a hoot about American laws (no relation to American soil, I'm European anyway) and be structurally resistant to enshitification through independence and community ownership unfortunately I am one inexperienced programmer with not much spare change to throw at such a gamble so I'm only daydreaming

[t4tails]

speaking of gotham tv and queerbaiting i might be entirely off here but didnt one of the actors for ed or oz (idr which one) figure out hes queer while filming gotham wasnt that like. a thing gotham tumblr kept talking about.

idk about figuring it out during filming but robin lord taylor (penguin) is gay and has a husband and corey michael smith (riddler) is queer. in fact that is the only thing stated in the personal life section of his wikipedia page. slay

[fatehbaz]

[D]omesticated attack dogs [...] hunted those who defied the profitable Caribbean sugar regimes and North America’s later Cotton Kingdom, [...] enforced plantation regimens [...], and closed off fugitive landscapes with acute adaptability to the varied [...] terrains of sugar, cotton, coffee or tobacco plantations that they patrolled. [...] [I]n the Age of Revolutions the Cuban bloodhound spread across imperial boundaries to protect white power and suppress black ambitions in Haiti and Jamaica. [...] [Then] dog violence in the Caribbean spurred planters in the American South to import and breed slave dogs [...].

---

Spanish landowners often used dogs to execute indigenous labourers simply for disobedience. [...] Bartolomé de las Casas [...] documented attacks against Taino populations, telling of Spaniards who ‘hunted them with their hounds [...]. These dogs shed much human blood’. Many later abolitionists made comparisons with these brutal [Spanish] precedents to criticize canine violence against slaves on these same Caribbean islands. [...] Spanish officials in Santo Domingo were licensing packs of dogs to comb the forests for [...] fugitives [...]. Dogs in Panama, for instance, tracked, attacked, captured and publicly executed maroons. [...] In the 1650s [...] [o]ne [English] observer noted, ‘There is nothing in [Barbados] so useful as … Liam Hounds, to find out these Thieves’. The term ‘liam’ likely came from the French limier, meaning ‘bloodhound’. [...] In 1659 English planters in Jamaica ‘procured some blood-hounds, and hunted these blacks like wild-beasts’ [...]. By the mid eighteenth century, French planters in Martinique were also relying upon dogs to hunt fugitive slaves. [...] In French Saint-Domingue [Haiti] dogs were used against the maroon Macandal [...] and he was burned alive in 1758. [...]

Although slave hounds existed throughout the Caribbean, it was common knowledge that Cuba bred and trained the best attack dogs, and when insurrections began to challenge plantocratic interests across the Americas, two rival empires, Britain and France, begged Spain to sell these notorious Cuban bloodhounds to suppress black ambitions and protect shared white power. [...] [I]n the 1790s and early 1800s [...] [i]n the Age of Revolutions a new canine breed gained widespread popularity in suppressing black populations across the Caribbean and eventually North America. Slave hounds were usually descended from more typical mastiffs or bloodhounds [...].

---

Spanish and Cuban slave hunters not only bred the Cuban bloodhound, but were midwives to an era of international anti-black co-ordination as the breed’s reputation spread rapidly among enslavers during the seven decades between the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865. [...]

Despite the legends of Spanish cruelty, British officials bought Cuban bloodhounds when unrest erupted in Jamaica in 1795 after learning that Spanish officials in Cuba had recently sent dogs to hunt runaways and the indigenous Miskitos in Central America. [...] The island’s governor, Balcarres, later wrote that ‘Soon after the maroon rebellion broke out’ he had sent representatives ‘to Cuba in order to procure a number of large dogs of the bloodhound breed which are used to hunt down runaway negroes’ [...]. In 1803, during the final independence struggle of the Haitian Revolution, Cuban breeders again sold hundreds of hounds to the French to aid their fight against the black revolutionaries. [...] In 1819 Henri Christophe, a later leader of Haiti, told Tsar Alexander that hounds were a hallmark of French cruelty. [...]

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The most extensively documented deployment of slave hounds [...] occurred in the antebellum American South and built upon Caribbean foundations. [...] The use of dogs increased during that decade [1830s], especially with the Second Seminole War in Florida (1835–42). The first recorded sale of Cuban dogs into the United States came with this conflict, when the US military apparently purchased three such dogs for $151.72 each [...]. [F]ierce bloodhounds reputed to be from Cuba appeared in the Mississippi valley as early as 1841 [...].

The importation of these dogs changed the business of slave catching in the region, as their deployment and reputation grew rapidly throughout the 1840s and, as in Cuba, specialized dog handlers became professionalized. Newspapers advertised slave hunters who claimed to possess the ‘Finest dogs for catching negroes’ [...]. [S]lave hunting intensified [from the 1840s until the Civil War] [...]. Indeed, tactics in the American South closely mirrored those of their Cuban predecessors as local slave catchers became suppliers of biopower indispensable to slavery’s profitability. [...] [P]rice [...] was left largely to the discretion of slave hunters, who, ‘Charging by the day and mile [...] could earn what was for them a sizeable amount - ten to fifty dollars [...]'. William Craft added that the ‘business’ of slave catching was ‘openly carried on, assisted by advertisements’. [...] The Louisiana slave owner [B.B.] portrayed his own pursuits as if he were hunting wild game [...]. The relationship between trackers and slaves became intricately systematized [...]. The short-lived republic of Texas (1836–46) even enacted specific compensation and laws for slave trackers, provisions that persisted after annexation by the United States.

---

All text above by: Tyler D. Parry and Charlton W. Yingling. "Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas". Past & Present, Volume 246, Issue 1, February 2020, pages 69-108. Published February 2020. At: doi dot org/10.1093/pastj/gtz020. February 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[puppyeared]

for like 3 weeks i was wondering why i was sleeping so much and felt listless. and just now I managed to email 3 people and responded to a month old message in the span of an hour because I got back to TAKING MY FUCKIN MEDS..........

[okayto]

If you file taxes in America, here's a reminder that you're probably able to do it for free, and companies work really REALLY hard to make sure you pay

This article from ProPublica (a reputable, nonprofit newsroom that does a lot of investigative journalism) will make you furious. It's from 2019, so the good news is that in the years since, the IRS was given a bunch of money and this year is actually piloting their own online filing thing, which TurboTax absolutely hates, of course. But the article is worth reading to understand the width and breadth of the money and industry that is trying to steer people into paying.

By the way? Approximately 70% of taxpayers are eligible for the existing IRS Free File program (not through TurboTax, they've got their own, deceptive advertising, and aren't part of the official government program), but less than 5% of eligible taxpayers did.

The big companies count on people getting stressed and just giving in and paying even when they shouldn't have to. They've invested a lot of time and energy into forcing taxpayers to needlessly pay for tax returns.

[iwanttobepersephone]

Sometimes I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that the person making a post about how there's no aroace rep anywhere clearly doesn't have my algorithm, where all I see is aroace rep, and if they did, they would have worded this post differently, and there's no reason to get frustrated

But at the same time... ALL I SEE IS AROACE REPRESENTATION AND YEAH Y'ALL DESERVE IT BUT PLEASE I JUST WANT TO SEE SOME OF MY FELLOW LESBIANS P L E A S E

(I haven't written the tags yet but I have a feeling they're gonna be important to read lol)

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

kinda a weird feeling that at chateau haine, for once, liam's dog makes him fit in better rather than stand out more

[eorzeashan]

Blasphemous 2 Preview