testing out animating in adobe fresco (spoilers i did not like it) but have the rough bc kissy spamton mwah

Snowy fun!

Deltarune Fun Fact:

Toby Fox has stated that it is an intentional decision that certain kinds of merchandise (such as plushies) haven't been made featuring the Lightners. This is part of an elaborate setup for later in the story, where the player will have to record themselves destroying all Ralsei-related merch they own if they want Ralsei to survive the Roaring.

This is perhaps my new favorite video

you were born in 2006? what are you? a Honda Civic?

can i fucking help you?

pokemon firered and beef greek edition pretzel tribute

everything I hate about ai and love about wikipedia on one image

The Legend of the Bi-Wah-nicle

The ever-wise Wah-ruha

Vakama forging the legendary Wahi

A fiery Wahnok

Onewah, Toa of Stone

A brutal Wahki enforcer

The nefarious Wahkmou

And the Great Spirit, himself: Wah-ta Nui

Bonus:

A tiny Wahrok

Super Hagah Bros.

she likes to think i cant tell shes there. i can.

I think more portal fanfic writers should take advantage of the fact that glados *is* the facility.

She's not just in her chamber, she controls the entire place!!!! She is the entire place!!!!

Need more people to get quirky with it in fanfics. Chell kisses the wall in the middle of a test to distract Glados. or cuddles with her by just like. Sitting in small room.

Instead of holding hands she drags her hand across the wall as she walks through hallways. Takes care of her by cleaning the place sometimes.

Can you tell I'm. So normal about portal.

i forgot

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

Transcription, because it is worth reading:

There’s a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let’s call it “pajamafication.”

So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more “age-appropriate.” IIRC they didn’t cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It’s taught at countless schools and it’s squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

It’s also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.

I’m not going to exhaustively enumerate the book’s flaws—others have done so—but I’ll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.

First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.

Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isn’t antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.

Thus we’re reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.

In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So the taught to their children.”]

Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore…” “We knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.”]

Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I’m sure Boyne thinks he’s being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.

There’s the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: “Off-With,” “the Fury.” Harsh language becomes “He said a nasty word.”

Notice how “it’s a fable” ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.

And that’s our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone’s dad disappears. He’s just…gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying “It’s not very nice in here.”

The ending is sad, but it’s sad like a Lifetime movie. It’s sanitized, it’s quick, there are no details, it’s meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.

Maus’s description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below… often the skulls were smashed…” “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls… and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Until the narrator says, “Enough!” “I didn’t want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.”]

A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn’t just do “bad things, generally,” they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.

Finally, fifth: Fiction.

However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren’t real and they didn’t really die.

Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.

One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didn’t make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]

Because it’s a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.

[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: “At least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. I’ve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Late’y I’ve been feeling depressed.” Someone calls from out of panel, “Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We’re ready to shoot!…”]

Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.

This ends the first part of the thread. But there’s more…

The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives.

And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn’t meet with much controversy.

It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.

Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any “icky” part of history can be a target.

But it plays out along the same general lines: Primary sources replaced with modern fiction, victim perspectives replaced with perpetrators, specificity replaced with Star-Bellied Sneetch-style “Why can’t we all just get along?” metaphors.

really good type of joke that can arise from knowing a lot of systems