America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)

To anybody asking if the Amish are a cult, the answer is yes, very much so.

They’re a high control group that isolate you from society. The cult decides how you dress, how you behave, who you marry and how. They control what you know, blocking all information from the outside world. They control how you feel and what you’re allowed to think with threats of both social and supernatural harm. They’re a cult.

The best method to determine if a group is a cult, in my opinion, is Steven Hassan’s (cult expert and former cult member himself) BITE model.

BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.

The more points a group “scores” on the model, the more of a cult it is.

I think this model is the best one for several reasons:

This is a great example of Thought Control used by cults whenever they’re confronted with criticism.

#you might notice that there are a lot of similarities between cult techniques and those of abusive partners#and that is an important thing to be aware of

yah that goes in the post

The creator of the BITE Model considers abusive relationships to be two-person cults.

It’s important to note that almost every sect of evangelical christianity in the US today fails the BITE Model.

This was the post that lead to breaking my JW mindset. Been a while since I seen it.

I’m glad I could help in your deconstruction, if only a little bit. I wish you all the luck in your journey moving forward.

it's genuinely bullshit that you should be required to own a mobile phone for participation in literally any aspect of life

this should be illegal and i'm not fucking joking

obviously we know in our hearts that Jabba the Hutt is not a dragon. that’s ridiculous.

But Is Jabba A Dragon Though?

he has the body plan of a lindworm. I suppose you could argue that he is too thick to be considered “serpentine”, but he is longer than he is wide, and not entirely unlike an especially chunky gaboon viper. his upright posture distracts from the fact that he’s built like an abbreviated mole lizard, which are lindworms.

and then of course he acts like a dragon. I don’t know if Star Wars uses gold or something else but whatever it is I’m sure he hordes it. eats people sometimes. disturbing taste for princesses. knights come to kick his ass.

Is Jabba A Dragon?

Jabba the Hut isn’t a dragon. He doesn’t fly. He’s more like a slug.

Ah, but he uses a hoversled, which is much like flying:

And not all creatures under the broad category of “dragon” fly. Lindworms don’t fly, neither do wyrms, drakes, sea serpents, or hydras. Lungs/Chinese dragons can fly but they don’t use wings to do it. Jabba should not be disqualified as a dragon simply because he uses repulsor technology to achieve airborne locomotion.

Jabba is unlike a slug in so many ways. He has jointed limbs, a hard internal skeleton, a skull with fixed spherical eyeballs, and no sensory tentacles or pneumostome. He is capable of facultative parthenogenesis--like komodo dragons and other squamates--continuously growing larger and living for hundreds of years hoarding wealth and power and preying on princesses. His resemblance to a slug is superficial, though we may describe him as such in an insulting fashion... like how a dragon may be called a “worm”.

Also he can and does eat people.

Jabba the Hutt is a dragon and I have convinced myself of this.

No he aint bro hes a fuckin alien. dragons have to originate from the planet earth hes from a galaxy far far away.

The dragons from both The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey and The Pit Dragon Trilogy by Jane Yolen are aliens from extraterrestrial planets called Pern and Austar IV, respectively. 

Jabba the Hutt is a dragon.

I think you will find that Hutts lack a backbone, commonly known as a spine, which, for the most part, dragons have either litterially or figuratively.

Jabba’s motions, limbs, and posture are clearly dependent upon the use of a hard interior support system. Lacking an exoskeleton and being unable to simply squelch out of Leia’s chokehold suggests he is not simply moving around via the hydrolics of a muscular hydrostat. Besides, there’s this art from the making of The Phantom Menace:

ship this is getting dangerously close to morphological taxonomy

do you want a plucked chicken swung at you? because this is how you get a plucked chicken swung at you.

“Dragon” is like “worm”, in my opinion. It’s not a taxonomy because the variety of creatures referred to as “worms” don’t even belong to related phylums. A horsehair worm and a nightcrawler are not related but they share an innate “worminess”. A velvet worm has many legs and is still counted as a worm-thing. Like I’ve said before, “worm” isn’t a taxonomy; it’s a lifestyle.

Dragons are the same way. It’s an umbrella term, and while some irritating pedants insist that only a four-legged creature with words god can be considered a dragon, they only say that to make sure everyone in the room knows that they know what a wyvern is. Wyverns and lindworms and amphitheres are obviously all under the dragon umbrella.

If these things are dragons, then “dragon” is as fluid a category as “worm”:

Jabba has more stereotypical “dragon traits” than some dragons do. He doesn’t hit every point, but a dragon is a worm is a dragon is a worm.

My general position is that the use of the word "dragon" to encompass all these disparate creatures is a bad thing and a relic of eurocentric colonialism. A Chinese Long is not the same thing as an English Dragon, nor is a wyvern or an amphithere, and calling them "dragons" belies the cultural differences in which these disparate creatures arose.

In terms of narrative purpose and lifestyle, Janba fills the role that a Dragon does in many stories, however. I would argue Jabba is a dragon in the same sense that a Tsuchigumo is.

I think enforcing a strict cultural differentiation would eliminate most dragons from fiction. Fiction, which supplies most modern dragons, does not stick to a strict historical consistency in dragon-depiction, either visually or behaviorally.

Take, for example, the dragons from The Last Airbender. They’re clearly dragons, as they breathe fire and have wings, but they’re also more like elemental spirits that visually and behaviorally resemble lungs more than they resemble, say, Smaug. Do their similarities to lungs disqualify them from dragonhood?

Also, it’s not like the medieval Welsh concept of a “dragon” evolved in a vacuum. There are mythical creatures from around the world that bear strong resemblances to That Specific Creature Which We Are Apparently Now Inisisting Is The Only True Dragon. Welsh and British folklore was surely being influenced by mythology from disparate cultures. 

I am firmly against declaring wyverns “not dragons” because even in British cultural history, the distinction only arose out of the technicalities of heraldry, not folklore or even art. 

The only thing that Jabba lacks in terms of dragon qualifications: the innately obvious “dragony-ness” that makes most people take one look and go “oh yeah that’s a dragon”. But i don’t think that that’s a REQUIREMENT of dragon-hood. Like, what the fuck is that thing down there?

That thing does not have innate dragony-ness to me. It looks like a turtle with tentacles. 

But, while I think the answer to “can we consider Jabba the Hutt to be a dragon” is yes, no one has asked whether or not Jabba would consider himself to be a dragon.

there’s a whole list on wookiepedia of dragons in star wars and it turns out there’s a bunch of creatures that have “dragon” in their name and they all have quite a lot of dragony-ness but also none of them seem to reach anything beyond semi-sentience. So maybe Jabba has enough dragon-y qualities to be considered a dragon, but he himself would be insulted if you called him one.

@glumshoe

i’m reading Maul: Lockdown by Joe Schreiber and

he’s a fucking dragon 

@glumshoe

you make some good points and also I ABSOLUTELY HATE YOU FOR THIS

fine.

DRAGON LOCATED

i hate this i hate this i hate this

official dragon post

unfortunately

I don't hate this. You will recall, of course, that the Knight fought him to save the Princess.

The Princess, of course, is the one who slew him.

"You are right that this woman needs a summer, but telling her that is not giving her that. It is not an accomplishment to tell someone they need help. You realize that you can tell her that she needs a summer - and - it isn't fair to ask her to go find one."

- Brennan Lee Mulligan, Gladlands Episode 2

Kids Design Glass

I went to a glass museum recently and they had a program where they let kids design glass artwork and it brightened my day so much that I had to share some of my favorites:

Kids have such neat ideas and I love that a group of artists were willing to bring them to life.

recently my friend's comics professor told her that it's acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can't generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister's screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won't be able to generate a script that's any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.

It's only ever the jobs we're unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence lies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don't.

Wouldn’t leave my mind sorry

they should make a video game where you play as an autistic character and there is a meter that shows you how close to a total meltdown you are due to the overwhelming stimuli and another matter that shows you how much of a weirdo you look like to others and you have to try to balance between having a meltdown and completely masking. and also you’re trying to solve a murder or something

Merry Christmas- I've been meaning to do a quick video breakdown of "that dress", so here you go.

Some video games really don’t let you make old people. You slide the age or maturity slider over and it barely does anything. I want to write the story of a grandma that likes shooting guns and causing problems is that really too much to ask

“This game lets you do anything!”

Well it doesn’t let me be a fat muscular grandpa so jot that down

I wanna roleplay as a weightlifting old man who has been divorced twice and likes punching demons but video games have decided this is unrealistic but dragons and plasma guns are not

You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)

“So this fic has been abandoned but you should read it anyways because…” hold up. Have you not been reading all promising fics regardless of completion this entire time

Today I learned that some of yall are filtering fic by “completed works only” which is WILD to me because some of the best shit I ever read was incomplete. Just like how some of the best friendships fade, the best experiences end, the best partners pass away before you’re ready. Nobody wants good things to end but they do and that doesn’t make them less meaningful. And sometimes a tree must be nurtured before it can grow

new reaction meme just dropped

spent MONTHS looking for this stupid tumblr post bcuz i constantly want to reference it and it wouldn't come up no matter what i searched despite it being (what i thought) was a popular well-known tumblr post only to find that the original blog turned off reblogs and deactivated and that it only got 12k notes total. but im posting it anyway to preserve its legacy

Luigi Mangione related tags/searches have been BANNED

These are the only banned tags/searches I can find so far out of 50+ but it's still five too many. Everything else is currently not being censored.

If you use any of these tags in your post your post won't show up under any search or any tag. The only way to see that post is to either follow you and see it on the dashboard or be on your blog and see it there directly.

Nothing warrants this censorship. People are not using these tags to condone violence.