"i believe that there is a special type of person who is born ontologically, inherently, biologically evil and must ritualistically self-flagellate at all times, or otherwise be killed on the most brutal way possible. anyone who disagrees with me on this belief is one of these people" <- a more than concerning amount of you
fuck it 10 pm post we like to party
this video feels like seeing an old friend for the first time in a decade
the guy who designed scythes definitely knew that shit was badass. he didnt care about wheat
hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don't work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)
reblogging for personal use
ART REFERENCE NOT FULL OF AI?! YESSS
starting a collection
My neighbors left this outside last week but frankly I don’t have time to become the protagonist of a horror audio drama right now.
Six years after the deadly COVID-19 pandemic began, shocking new research has found coronavirus traces in the wastewater of nearly every international flight tested
So "post-covid" it's in all our airplane wastewater
I want the world to know that in Iran, we are not protesting the Islamic Republic just because of the currency collapse or economic problems. Every part of our lives has been destroyed by the Islamic clerical regime. All we ever wanted was a normal life.
So
Woman, Life, Freedom forever.
تا ابد زن زندگی آزادی
Sci-fi: Credits?
Fantasy: Gold pieces. Quests?
Sci-fi: Missions. Bounty hunters?
Fantasy: Sellswords. Magic?
Sci-fi: *sigh* Science.
Sci-fi: . . . Crystals?
Fantasy: Crystals!
Sci-fi: Crystals!
Both: ♪ Crystals! Crystals! Crystals! ♫
Fantasy: Princesses?
Sci-fi: Princesses! Ancient civilizations?
Fantasy: Ancient civilizations! Dashing rogues?
Sci-fi: Dashing rogues! Non-human people?
Fantasy: Non-human people! . . . Sexy non-human people?
Sci-fi: *wiggles eyebrows* Sexy non-human people.
the evil amulet is a classic but have we considered The Good Amulet . villain who switches sides because they put on The Amulet That Makes You Good and fell too deeply under its spell to ever take it back off and the heroes are trying to figure out how they feel about that ethics-wise
Vinyl records are circular because it's an efficient use of space: the grooves that encode the music are laid out in a spiral on the disc, so that the needle only has to move as far as the disc's radius to read the entire thing. Before this clever idea was thought of, the grooves were instead laid out in a straight line, and every LP was a narrow rectangle more than a thousand feet long. To flip an album to side b at least two people were needed, one at each end, coordinating via shouted instructions.
For the cassette tape they revived this idea with the genius addition of rolling the rectangle up so it would fit inside the tape player.
Once you start noticing how the incapacity to handle discomfort affects how people live their lives it's actually pretty shocking how it ruins pretty much every conceivable aspect of existence. Interpersonal relationships, romantic and platonic. Career and education opportunities. Your politics Your willingness to go anywhere. The kind of food you eat. The kind of art you expose yourself to and your ability to read it. It's never just one thing, it touches everything, and once you notice it it's like suddenly being able to see germs or something. Just this horrific catastrophe people look at you askance for screaming about. As I grow older and see what became of my friends and peers who could not learn to handle discomfort, the more I'm like. This is a genuine societal issue
When you can't handle discomfort, eventually discomfort itself starts to feel like you're under attack. Your body enters flight or fight mode, and your amygdala starts screaming at you that you are In Danger even when the "danger" in question is like, making an unpleasant phone call or like, you're reading a book about something gross.
Your ability to make frank assessments about your situation becomes compromised, because, well, when you're under attack who's going to stay still and go "Let me think this through?" Of course you're going to panic. The phone call isn't just unpleasant, it's potentially life-ruining. Someone is going to think you're dumb and that's going to be TRUE and then I guess you die or something except dying would be better. The book isn't just gross, it's actively coming for you, tainting your mind with the memory of its contents, it has RUINED you.
Obviously, you want to try avoiding danger whenever possible. So you create a world in which you avoid all dangerous things. Traveling? Well that's scary, what if you get robbed or lost? Better to avoid it (plus there are so many things to read, rules to remember, forms to fill out... it's just too much, it makes you uncomfortable, which means YOU'RE IN DANGER, what if you FORGET SOMETHING CRITICAL? Better to avoid). A new job? Well what if it's worse than your current one? You at least know the rules here. The unknown is so much more uncomfortable, which is DANGEROUS, so better to stay where you are. A dark-skinned foreigner? Do they even speak English? You don't know how you'd communicate. They don't know the laws here, surely? Plus what if other people think you're racist? It's so uncomfortable which means THEY ARE A DANGER. Best to avoid at all costs, keeping your bag clutched tightly to your chest. Vaccines? You don't really know what's in them. The explanations have a lot of words you don't understand. That makes you feel suspicious and dumb, which is DANGEROUS. You said something that was kind of rude? UNCOMFORTABLE. THIS PERSON IS ATTACKING YOU. FIGHT OR FLIGHT. Someone says you were incorrect about something? DANGER. Someone says you reacted impulsively and seem to have misconstrued someone's words as a personal attack? YET ANOTHER ATTACK.
Eventually you lose yourself and become this. I don't even know. This totally reactive thing, unable to think analytically about anything (which is uncomfortable and a danger), unable to assess harms, unable to encounter anything new without having a meltdown. And none of it is a real escape because, well, you've created a life defined entirely by aversion to discomfort, which is the most uncomfortable life you can possibly imagine. Of course such people end up falling into fascist ideas about Why Your Life Sucks. When you build a life around trying to maintain as comfortable an equilibrium as possible, you cauterize the parts of you capable of growth, expansion, creativity, learning; at the same time, the knowledge of your own stuntedness is haunting so best not to think about that either. The world becomes this horrifying mirror maze where the only way to survive without offing yourself is by projecting your flaws onto others, bitterly externalizing your self-hatred (who could live like this and NOT hate themselves) just to avoid turning it inward. You end up living like a hollowed-out sea urchin
A lot of people I've met seem to think that mental healthiness is characterized by a lack of discomfort whatsoever, and are therefore justified in building a life where all discomforts can be avoided. On the one hand, I completely understand the impulse. Lord knows I have had colossally shitty times and wished I could just retreat into bed and fall asleep for as long as needed for everything to blow over. But like. You also have to understand that that's a fantasy, not a solution. When you have grown up living a crap life with nothing but discomfort, the ability to avoid it feels like exercising autonomy. But you really do have to be careful about making this your life ethos. I know so many people who have lapsed into total learned helplessness, so consumed by discomfort (mentally catastrophized into dangers) re: looking dumb, looking rude, looking X, looking Y that they just. Idk. Don't do anything except be bitter. You don't have to be that way. The solution isn't "tough it out" because that's also just a manifestation of your inability to handle discomfort. I also hesitate to say the solution is to focus on how much better your life will be when you do X and Y, because the entire point of the inability to handle discomfort is that it constantly manifests in precluding the possibility of even wanting X and Y in the first place since to want it and not be able to do it IS in itself another source of discomfort.
Idk what the solution is, exactly. I just think it's important to understand that sometimes things can feel awful and still not necessarily harm you
people who are just finding out about internet tracking and data mining in the year 2025 and that your special robot friend does not respect your privacy lol
yall know human trafficking isnt just sex trafficking right? right????
The MAJORITY of human trafficking is for labor; factory work, garment/textile work, agricultural work, construction, and domestic work/cleaning.
And that's without counting -legal- human trafficking: Prison labor.
https://www.ilo.org/topics-and-sectors/forced-labour-modern-slavery-and-trafficking-persons
caption by @/ashleytheebarroness on tiktok: People reach for the Gestapo comparison because it sounds extreme and foreign. It lets white Americans pretend this kind of policing came from somewhere else. But ICE looks closer to slave patrols because that's our history. Local enforcement. Racialized suspicion. Vague authority. Taking people first, justifying it later. Gestapo is a warning. Slave patrols are a mirror.
You know I hadn’t made this exact connection at first but something in my gut told me that people comparing ice to the gestapo didn’t quite feel right. This comparison does fit a lot better.