#until then. rest in peace

[justaz]

arthur is immortal in the same way merlin is immortal, he can die but he bounces back after a while. merlin putting arthurs body on a boat and sending him out onto the lake but not burning him as he did to lancelot and freya. merlin disappearing off the face of the earth, unable to go back to camelot where every stone is carved with arthur's name, every room holds the faintest echo of his laughter, the shadows cast by the flickering flames of torches match each line and curve of arthur's body which merlin had memorized after years of dressing and undressing him, wandering and lingering hands that were just casual enough to pass off as platonic.

arthur crawling out of the lake the night after the morning merlin put him to rest, dazed, confused, and alive. arthur searches for merlin but can't find him. he's disappeared. gwen rules camelot as queen, she lifts the ban on magic, and rules fairly. arthur is content to leave his kingdom with her as he searches the land for merlin. he visits every place he and merlin every visited but he's nowhere to be found. time passes but arthur only grows more desperate. he's sure he's searched every inch of albion twice. no merlin.

enough time passes, everyone he's known has died and he looks exactly as he did when mordred drove his blade into his abdomen. arthur is forced to admit to himself that enough time has passed that merlin was bound to have died, leaving arthur all alone. immortal merlin is literally like chilling in ireland or some shit. but both immortal idiots are living in the same area and end up just missing each other. literally like end up holding the door to a coffee shop for one another but they don't meet each other's gazes bc they're busy mourning each other

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

Today, U.S. Air Force serviceman, Aaron Bushnell, 25, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington:

"I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”

His last words were “Free Palestine”.

[theside-b]

FIRST NOTE OF LOVE + the opinion that matters the most

[brainrot-sy]

(last) day 136 of drawing gojo every day until he comes back - jjk 261 spoilers

he came back, just not the way we wanted

[yulen-the-ghost]

TGCF AU where it turns out Xie Lian IS the strongest martial god even BEFORE his first banishment and actually defeats Bai Wuxiang and avoids the fall of Xianle.

[spatio-rift]

lawl

[yumemiruuuu]

The Season 2 (slays) Gays 💅✨

[be-my-incubus]

When will my suffering end.... when will my beloved return from the cruel war... when will AO3 be back 😔

[dewitty1]

Legendary sex therapist Dr Ruth dead at age 96

The legendarily frank sex therapist and cultural icon Dr Ruth Westheimer, known simply as Dr Ruth, has died at the age of 96, according to her publicist.

Westheimer died on Friday at her home in New York City, surrounded by her family.

Westheimer never advocated risky sexual behavior. Instead, she encouraged an open dialogue on previously closeted issues that affected her audience of millions. Her one recurring theme was there was nothing to be ashamed of.

“I still hold old-fashioned values and I’m a bit of a square,” she told students at Michigan City high school in 2002. “Sex is a private art and a private matter. But still, it is a subject we must talk about.”

[show-tunes]

Drawing I did for Inscryption’s anniversary!

[thefirstknife]

Some important stuff in regards to the harassment of developers came from Bungie today. They won a lawsuit against a guy who repeatedly harassed a community manager and his family (not fully confirmed in the official document, but people are fairly certain this is about A_dmg and his family). This is a twitter thread from the lawyer who went into some details about the situation. The court document is also available to read (featuring some of the horrific harassment tactics that were motivated by racism and also used racism as part of the harassment so be advised if you want to read).

This isn't just a win for the individual community manager and Bungie, but also has potential to set a bigger precedent in the future. It's basically the first time this has been done to this extent and some ruling in this case made it clear that companies can pursue this sort of legal action in the future if their employees are harassed and threatened. This is HUGE because the protection of employees in the gaming industry has been abysmal otherwise. This case will allow for the company to file a lawsuit on behalf of their employees in cases of harassment.

Before I add some of the more heinous stuff about this situation below, I want to say that the majority of reactions to this are positive. People are happy that this happened as it did and a lot of people are excited about potential big influence this will have in the future to combatting harassment of this type in the gaming industry.

Extra details and thoughts below (racism tw):

This started because the community manager highlighted a black content creator, Uhmayyze, who is himself a victim of harassment more often than not (usually of racist nature). He is most often harassed because he is unapologetically positive for which people have continuously sent him awful shit and comments. Because he enjoys the game and isn't jumping on the hate train. Just recently he commended Bungie for a ban wave and had hundreds of people hound him on twitter for his comment, including Gladd who started it by specifically replying to Uhmayyze and putting him on blast (warning for a lot of gross comments, including photoshopped screenshots of fake discord texts to make Uhmayyze look bigoted, nsfw images, r slur, suicide baiting and so on). This is important because the incident of real life harassment was fuelled over a community manager highlighting a content creator that is himself being harassed and despised online for the crime of... being positive. And you know, for being black. This situation isn't an isolated incident. The community, including other content creators, are absolutely horrible towards this one person that they feel, I guess, does not follow the content creator NPC questline of hating Bungie and Destiny.

So of course, at some point, someone from that crowd will feel confident and justified taking things further. How dare Bungie promote this person they hate. How dare they focus on a positive creator. They're clearly biased and don't want to listen to criticism, only to "toxic positivity" streamer. How dare a community manager highlight this creator. It's a personal slight to them, and "proof" that Bungie is bad and evil and "ignoring criticism." There's someone out there (and probably not the only one) that hates this creator and the game so much they were willing to harass and threaten a community manager and his family in real life.

The community manager was first harassed by phone with text messages and voice mails featuring racist bile, including apparently a voice mail telling him to "convince Bungie to create options in its game in which only persons of color would be killed." This is the worst part for me and super concerning in general, as well as showing the dedication of this person to racism, motivated by his hatred of a black creator (which also, by proxy, technically makes the streamer being harassed as well). Absolutely ghoulish behaviour.

This escalated to also harassing the CM's wife and resulted in doxing them; the harasser somehow found their address. Most of the reports on this will say that the asshole "sent them pizza" which doesn't truly capture how horrific the incident was. First, it's a random guy who has your address which is concerning enough given that he harasses you by phone already. Apparently the pizza was made to be "inedible" and the delivery was instructed to bang loudly on the door upon arrival to maximise discomfort. The order was also deliberately made to be paid on delivery to create as much pain for the victims as possible. The harasser also kept track of the delivery and then called the family again when it was done to tell them to "enjoy the pizza." The family immediately contacted Bungie who contacted the police and provided the family with protection. There's no telling how this would've escalated had they not been in the position to call Bungie and had Bungie not reacted to them asking for help. It's absolutely crucial here that Bungie is the type of a company willing to immediately assist in this situation.

Immediately following that, Bungie organised a long and expensive manhunt to identify the harasser and bring them court. That's where most of the expenses went; finding the culprit and protecting the employee and his family. This is the money Bungie earned back by this court decision because they could prove that the expenses were caused by a person harassing and threatening their employee.

This is a big win overall for the whole industry. It's Bungie setting a precedent on how a company should protect its employees. No matter what people think about Bungie or big corporations or whatever, this is how you can use a lot of money and power to make sure that your workers have rights to decency and safety. That's huge for the rights of workers and worker protections. I hope it becomes a standard and that any future harassment is prevented altogether or at least punished accordingly.

Naturally, the commentary on the news from a big part of the community is super positive. Unfortunately, there's also a part of the community that has a lot of really awful shit to say about this. The comments on twitter are littered with people who are using THIS specific moment to yell about Bungie being a greedy corporation, how the money they won should be used to "fix the servers" and "make more pvp maps" or how Bungie will greedily put this money "into Eververse" or "into Marathon." There's comments about how time was uselessly spent protecting an employee who should expect harassment anyway, instead of working on "fixing the game."

This is what I mean when I talk about how impossible it is in the current situation to have a meaningful discussion about any sort of criticism or feedback. There's thousands of comments from people who think that this specific instance shows how Bungie is greedy. This is what I mean when I say that none of these people actually understand what they're talking about. You can't make proper criticism when you can't separate game development with a company's legal effort to stop an escalating harassment campaign of an employee. The majority of gamers are simply not fit to offer any criticism or feedback. The idea that we all have something useful to say and that employees at Bungie are obliged to give us their time of the day is simply incorrect.

I genuinely 100% stand by the claim that the recent barrage of content creators promoting the idea that Bungie is "the greediest company in the world that's scamming players and increasing costs out of greed" as well as the idea that Bungie is "abandoning Destiny for Marathon, isn't working on the game anymore and is deliberately ruining it" is the reason for these comments existing. If a big streamer said that Bungie is getting too much money but also not doing anything "good" with it, then any money that Bungie receives (including compensation for expenses they took to protect an employee from active harm) is a result of greed. The nuance of any situation is lost; when you only learn the mantra of "company has money therefore company bad" you WILL end up causing harm for people and you will most definitely not be an advocate of workers rights. That's where we're at right now.

The dehumanisation of people who work at Bungie (and the harassment itself) is a consequence of this crap and other similar crap that's been thrown into the ether for the past year, disguised as "we're just offering feedback." People heard that Bungie is a "microtransaction hell" and that Bungie is only investing in Eververse and Marathon and they feel like this story reflects that; they feel like an employee being harassed is not deserving of proper condemnation and that this isn't important enough and that Bungie is a greedy corpo anyway so who cares about that. They do not understand how companies work, how games are made, the state of the industry as a whole (or the world as a whole), the treatment of employees or workers' rights, and you cannot meaningfully critique a company's business practices without understanding that. And they don't because they think that legal expenses used to protect victims, finding a culprit and bringing their ass to court is money that is being used for game development and that Bungie receiving this money should result in... new pvp maps or "fixed servers."

And there's even seemingly good commentary where people recognise how this is good, but they initiate the comment with "As much as I hate Bungie and Destiny and I think they're awful and greedy and destroying gaming as a whole..." : that's not the time and place. You don't have to excuse your support of a big win for potential new employee protection policies just because those policies are done by a company. Of course it is. Companies are the only ones capable of pursuing this sort of legal action. It's one good way a big company can put their power and money into a good place to actually help people and bring forth positive change. And like, you don't have to tell us how much you despise Bungie before you're "allowed" to admit that this is good news. Sometimes companies do good stuff. It's literally not that complicated.

I hope that this situation will help other employees demand the same protection, that other companies will follow suit and that this will also make potential other harassers rethink whether or not they will engage in this or similar type of behaviour. In the meantime, know that the community is largely positive about this, but that there are still absolutely detestable human beings who should feel ashamed of their reaction to this. They shouldn't feel welcome here. And there's still people doing this to the devs and I hope Bungie takes their asses to court too.

[robotpussy]

last thing I say about this but rest in power supposedly coming into prominence in the 2000s doesn't even sound real that is a phrase that definitely came to being in the 60s..... (and is. it was not invented in the 2000s)

[flamescale-venomcaster]

They got turned into dragons.

Yeah.

Edit because I didn't realize people would get confused: I did NOT draw this. They are dragons I own on the pet site Flight Rising, and drawn by someone else.

[kaelidascope]

Hey there! Just wanted to say that I started reading this toxic ooc rwby au of yours. It's actually incredible how good of a writer you are!

I mean, I've only read like 2 chapters so far, but I really like how you reinvented their original stories and used those aspects in their background. It feels very real, the characters are well written (at least I feel that way).

And I usually don't like to read tbh, I rarely find something that can actually make me want to read more, that keeps me intrigued.

I want to see more of your works after this one, I think I'd like them. You're really great 💙

Hey excuse me while I just

Anyway

HELLOOOOO OH MY GOSH I AM SUCH A MEGA FAN OF YOURS THIS IS REAL LIFE I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS 😭😭😭😭

I'm so honored you like my work, thank you so much!! It's also refreshing and relieving to hear that despite Toxic Bees being OOC on purpose, they're still true to their source material so I know I'm doing something right there LOL

Ah and another big thank you for finding my work worth it to endure reading!! I hate reading as well, so the work has to be exceptional for me to actually sit down and read through something without giving up halfway through. That means so much to me thank you thank you 😭🙏

Bless you dear 😭🙏🌺 you are one of my all time favorite artists and I feel like this is a DREAM I'm so honored and I hope you enjoy anything else you find in my kitchen <33 (Midnight Menagerie is the most popular atm)

[gideonisms]

See I think if I'd been born a guy I wouldn't be this pathologically avoidant trying to plan my career because there are plenty of situations you can find as a cis man where you just Do Tasks in awkward silence and you can get to those as a woman but you have to go through the rings of hell socializing first and then besides, a lot of those jobs already have so many men that you stand out when the whole point was you Don't want to do that

[arolesbianism]

Time for more eternal gales isat au, this time featuring Sier as Isabeau, creating a sprite I can never use next to Aris’ because despite my best efforts it would make them look tall