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You're a helpdesk for "Adventech", a company specializing in managing training dungeons, gear inspection & repair, bounties, etc. And today you're receiving some calls
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I enjoy when people give me a hard time about using the term "sequential art" because they think it's just a pretentious way of saying "comics", because when I point out that "comics" and "sequential art" are overlapping but non-identical mediums, they invariably demand an example of sequential art that isn't comics, and I get to hit them with "PowerPoint presentations".
Reblogged fullmetalpotterhead
Please make art. You don't have to bare your soul or make a masterpiece, you can be silly and you can be derivative if you want. You don't even have to show it to anyone. Just please make something, it's so good for you
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It's no doubt extremely frustrating when it's a topic you actually care about, but there's a certain je ne sais quoi to watching a bunch of folks on social media attempt to have a serious discussion about some subject where it's clear that everyone involved has simply inferred what the words they're using mean based on vibes, and no two sets of conclusions agree.
Reblogged pearlescentmoo
pearl and her many jobs!
Reblogged the-typing-dragon
nothing scarier than activity on an old post.....where did u find that thang
This is gonna be so funny
Reblogged etherfemme
I downloaded the book Unhumans: The secret history of communist revolutions (and how to stop them) by Jack Posobiec. (Thanks oceanofpdf.) This is the book that the current USA Vice President wrote a blurb for, so I expected it to have its finger on the pulse of the current fascist ideology in USA.
The thesis is like this: Communists, leftists, progressives, and revolutionaries in general are "unhumans:" zombie-like, hollow shells of people with rabies-style senseless violence and hatred toward civilization and order.
The book proposes essentially that leftist ideology is worthless to engage with, because it does not exist. The Left is purely driven by hatred and jealousy of people it characterizes as oppressors, and this manifests in a completely nihilistic urge to kill and destroy.
The book opens with this melodramatic meditation on Darkness and Light, the opposing forces of beauty, truth and goodness versus ugliness, lies and badness. These "good" and "bad" forces are eternal, and the "bad" force is kept in check by "civilization."
"Communism" is a manifestation of the "bad" force. Key to the book's argument is an apparent presumption that human society is meritocratic. Though the book acknowledges that yes, Russian peasants had miserable lives and good reason to be resentful towards the tsar, it seems to show that people who revolt against "oppressors" or the more powerful are acting according to the "bad" force, by seizing power through violence rather than "earning" it.
I don't think the author is saying that all human societies have had merit-based systems of upward social mobility; I think he just thinks that seizing power or property through revolt and societal upheaval is always bad because it isn't "earned," regardless of whether a mechanism to "earn" exists.
Which is where we get to the weird part. Much of the book is a retelling of history, specifically various revolutionary movements including the French, Russian, and Haitian revolutions and the end of apartheid in South Africa.
The author seems to characterize revolutionary movements as generally bad. "Well, how was the American Revolution different?" one wonders. The book doesn't answer this at length. In fact, it doesn't have a chapter or subchapter dedicated to the American Revolution the way it does with other revolutions.
Here is a quote from page 31:
...this ubiquitous belief that no one culture or society is better than another so can’t we all just get along. And yet no country or people on earth lived in such a way naturally for all of history. When mass migration dilutes and unbalances a shared culture, there is one force alone powerful enough to hold it all together: an all-powerful state at the center. Only great empires have maintained multiple ethnic groups living within their borders simultaneously, keeping everyone in line with the overwhelming power of the emperor’s unyielding hand. These were not republics with civil liberties and equal standing for all classes. It is unlikely a republic could exist in such a condition.
From here, he explains that white Americans share a common culture because they all assimilated into an American culture derived from "western civilization", and then swerves into talking about how George Floyd died from a drug overdose actually and bringing in illegal immigrants is a communist plot to tear America apart.
He does not appropriately deal with the shocking meaning of his argument: that a multi-ethnic or multi-cultural nation cannot exist without authoritarian tyranny. This is an amazing departure from the fundamental narrative of the USA's values (whether that narrative is true or not).
By his own admission, either the USA must cease to be a democracy and become an authoritarian autocracy, or the USA must get rid of everyone who isn't a single race, ethnicity and culture, and both of those things are fundamentally contradictory to the Constitution and arguably to the conception of the USA.
The book's proposals for "what to do" to defeat the "unhumans" are pretty anemic and in line with what conservatives are already doing. Unhumans is nothing new in terms of racism and white supremacist ideology; it keeps these things implied in its warped idea of history and the core concept of total dehumanization of anyone and everyone left of hunting the homeless for sport. The book explicitly states that it does not advocate violence, and also explicitly states that this is to prevent "leftists" from using that as a criticism against the book.
I think the author genuinely could be against violence, or at least any violence that isn't directly carried out by the state, but he is also overwhelmingly clear that being a "leftist" is essentially rabies: "leftists" have ceased to be human, they hate all that is human and all that is good, and they systematically work toward destruction as an end in itself.
Unhumans has simple ideas and simple writing, almost to the point of being condescending. It reads like children's books written by adults who are out of touch with children's intelligence and ability to think for themselves. Its worship of Elon Musk as one of the "great men" of history leads to some hysterically funny lines. But I'm afraid it would seem like a great book to someone who doesn't read books.
The first chapter, in particular, is perfectly formulated to appear grounded in wisdom, history and fact to someone who hasn't read anything since high school. It uses a lot of famous quotes on government and democracy, and cites Aristotle and other "big names" in Western thought.
But it doesn't want to introduce its readers to new ideas: it repeatedly urges readers to listen to their automatic and instinctive reactions to the text, saying "You're right" or "You're onto something." It reassures readers of what they "already know," telling them that their gut feelings are correct and any information that might have caused them discomfort or dissonance is part of the communist plot.
I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from all of this. I'll have to think about it more.
This is one of only two direct statements about the American Revolution in the entire book (page 89):
Although the American Revolution is considered the most modern sociopolitical revolution, its leaders did not aim to overturn British society; the American Revolutionary War was a conflict over the colonies. It was elites against elites, haves versus haves. A war was simply fought over who got more.
This is not false. What's extraordinary about it, is that it's not being used as a criticism.
This is the other statement:
And yet Francisco Franco and his forces the Nationalists were more akin to 1770s George Washington and the colonial patriots. Much like the United States founding fathers, Franco and his fellows saw themselves as rebels intended to overthrow a corrupt, tyrannical government that aided and abetted murder and rape as well as other repugnant sins. We believe the Nationalist cause was righteous and neo-American. These words of Thomas Jefferson, excerpted from the Declaration of Independence, perfectly describe the 1936 counterrevolution in Spain: "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government." As in the American Revolution, the defenders of principle had a steep uphill battle.
He is favorably comparing Francisco Franco, the brutal dictator of Spain who executed tens of thousands of people, to the american founding fathers.
Unhumans shows American conservative thought reaching the point where it is uncomfortable to discuss the founding of the USA itself. This is bizarre.
Here's the Wikipedia for the White Terror, in case anybody wants to read about just how horrifying it is that Posobiec thinks Franco is a good guy. He was an ally to the Nazis and sent people to Nazi concentration camps.
The statement about rape in the quote can only be a purposeful lie, since mass rape was a deliberate weapon of terror used by the Francoist soldiers.
Page 252
Consider Elon Musk, the sole protector of anything like freedom of speech on the internet, who has been subjected to cruel and unusual lawfare by unhuman bureaucrats and activists. He must have our full support. Franco needed his generals; Bonaparte, his officers; Musk, his netizens.
This is the cringiest sentence ever written
I've been walking around all day with this shit in my head and I don't really know what to do with it. I'm writing this on my silly little blog, which is seven years worth of silly writings many of which were ill-conceived or ignorant, but I have little access to the people that would actually buy this book and read it.
The fellow who wrote this is Very Online--- he uses the term "normies" 8 times and quotes or paraphrases many tweets and memes--- and he is cunning in how he writes; he implies and skirts around his more vile ideas without providing "quotable" material to prove it. This makes it hard to communicate how horrified we should be in "short-form content" style.
The Vice President wrote a blurb for this book. This is mainstream.
Posobiec treats the concept of "oppressors" and "oppressed" as a fundamentally communist idea. This is not true--- the idea of "oppressed" and "oppressor" as categories of people and key sources of conflict on Earth is found in many places, notably, the Bible from Christianity.
However, seeing through this framework and wanting to overturn oppressive hierarchy and create equality turns you into an "unhuman"---literally a husk animated by the ultimate, primeval evil.
Posobiec leads with this concept of the "unhuman," before any evidence or examples have been presented. Before he launches into historical narratives, he has firmly and evocatively created this image of a primordial darkness that underlies everything evil in the world, which possesses living humans and turns them into "unhuman" vectors of death, misery, and anarchy. Posobiec goes beyond arguing that communism is evil, and argues that evil is communism.
Then, he characterizes social justice and activism in general as basically unilaterally bad.
In Posobiec's view, capitalism effectively eliminated the need for any attempt to fix inequality or improve society, by creating a "meritocracy." Outcomes differ between people and groups because those people and groups differ. Therefore, attempts to promote equality in outcomes are actually discrimination against the "dominant" group.
Hence, Posobiec's many rants about how white people are oppressed, ethnically cleansed, and discriminated against in America--- he believes that any program which improves the disparity in outcomes between white and black Americans (or any people of color, but he particularly targets black people) cheats white Americans out of the privilege they earned through being the superior race.
I am shocked at how many people don't have an actively hostile relationship with advertising
I am skipping your ads as fast as I can. I'm skipping past your sponsor read. I'm muting the tv. I'm muting the tab. If they get too annoying I will simply stop trying to watch.
If advertisers can use every manipulative trick in the book to get me to buy their product, I am fully within my rights to do everything I can on my end to make their job impossible
Reblogged theminecraftbee
did this very speedy. go my mumble jumble
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Source: x.com
salty-noob-deactivated20200310
My favorite thing about being an archer in Skyrim is when the slow motion kill cam follows the arrow and you get to sit back and watch as it just absolutely misses the target.
cyberlesbiab
the great thing about this is that the computer has calculated that the arrow will strike the target as a critical hit, but then when the kill cam engages it changes the physics in game (I think having the arrow be the focal point rather than the player causes the formula to change) and in doing so, it can change the trajectory so dramatically that you miss. I once saved the game and tried the same shot multiple times with kill cam turned on and then off, which proved with perfect correlation that it was the camera itself that was messing up the shot
Reblogged etherfemme
[guy who doesnt do literally anything voice] there just aint enough hours in the day to get everything done that needs to be done am i right
How long before we start seeing cases like these for just being queer? Do we have to get to that stage for people to start to mobilize against this loudly? We can't let the fight against internet censorship and puritan outrage against NSFW content be another controlled narrative by the right wing grifters.
it's probably already happening to queer creators but also that it's happening to porn creators is enough already. This is already way too far.
