Tumgik
a-river-of-stars · 8 hours
Text
Until you all get actual confirmation that there will be another season and it will be Gay(tm) I think I'll sit this out, this shit is too emotionally taxing for me lol
Ok but the fact that recently theres been a real surge in people who worked on supernatural talking about dean and cas and even openly talking about destiel while theres ALSO been a ton of talk also by people who worked on supernatural about a season 16 actually fucking happening is driving me certifiably insane. Honk honk you fuckers im getting out the clown wig lets fucking do this
2K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 8 hours
Text
Context: Misha Collins is yet again shipping Destiel in public venues
I ASKED WHETHER A KISS COULD HAVE HAPPENED BETWEEN DEAN AND CAS LIKE WITH BUCK AND TOMMY IF THEY MOVED NETWORKS BUT HE SAID IF THEY WEREN’T ON THE CW THEY’D BE BALLS DEEP IN EACH OTHER????!?!?!?!??!?!?!???!???
2K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 2 days
Photo
Tumblr media
187K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 2 days
Text
Tumblr media
just an fyi, those european countries this person is talking about are super capitalist. and while capitalism is terrible, wasteful, inefficient, exploitative, in need of dismantling, etc. even things like public healthcare and livable wages and vacation time can exist within capitalism if capitalism is properly regulated.
america just chose the route of not allowing for those things by deregulating and selling everything off to private capital. which, as a failed experiment in free market economics, should be a pretty obvious lesson to the rest of the world of what NOT to do.
5K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 2 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Elon will go down in history as an idiot fascist.
350 notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 2 days
Text
*multiple genocides.
Tumblr media
5K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 2 days
Photo
Tumblr media
232K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 2 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
3K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 2 days
Text
i feel like seriously describing junji ito's horror works as simply "wouldn't it be fucked up if this happened" is dumb because it's such a vague description that most other horror works can also be described as that. For example:
"Wouldn't it be fucked up if your house suddenly started creating new rooms and changed its dimensions on you?" (House of Leaves, specifically The Navidson Record)
"Wouldn't it be fucked up if the doors, windows, and your parents suddenly disappeared out of nowhere?" (Skinamarink)
"Wouldn't it be fucked up if a clown in a sewer started killing kids?" (It)
among others.
Not to mention, most of Ito's works do have deeper meaning to them, specifically targetting japanese culture. This video touches on his shorter works, but even his larger works have metaphorical meaning.
Junji Ito describing his mindset on writing Gyo as "man it would suck if sharks had legs" is real funny, but it's also critiquing Japan's war crimes in WWII; the origin of the "legs" being from World War II when the Imperial Japanese Army was trying to create biochemical weapons cannot be a coincidence. Hellstar Remina is about a hostile alien planet, but it's also an allegory of fans turning on a girl because of something beyond her control, reminiscent of idol culture. Hell, even Uzumaki, probably one of his greatest "WTF" horror works, is also about a pair of teenagers being unable to escape their hometown, unable to expand their horizons in the outside world. they just keep going in circles, unable to escape.
I don't know, at this point describing Ito's works only being "wouldnt it be fucked up if this thing happened" is starting to feel like "the curtains are blue because the author likes the color blue" but like. for horror
697 notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 3 days
Text
Should copy some of these points and put them on flyers and hang them up around my town
Tumblr media
4K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 3 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Ernie Bushmiller kind of predicted the Internet in this early 1950's Fritzi Ritz comic
24K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 3 days
Text
reblog to increase the note count by one and make this post appear on the dash of people who are following you
837 notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 3 days
Text
Tumblr media
vice news
ironically i am working right now so i can’t do a full post on this like i would really prefer to do… but these are the most cartoonishly evil people that you could possibly imagine, even in a society as flawed as the one we’ve built for ourselves. these are bedrock groups devoted to protecting the american worker and consumer. massive huge giant waving red flags 🚩
24K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 3 days
Text
A coworker invited me over and this is basically exactly how the conversation went. Except the second part was "if you just want to hang out with the creature (aka the dog) that's cool."
sorry i cant hang out i forgot how to mimic human like behaviour
98K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 4 days
Text
Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1
The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.
So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.
So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.
Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.
And the probe is working again.
From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.
89K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 4 days
Text
Tumblr media
Palestinian activists get their message across on Londons iconic Tower Bridge landmark- one of the cities most historic buildings. We need a ceasefire now.
55K notes · View notes
a-river-of-stars · 4 days
Text
Ben Collins: It’s time for journalists to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard
“Triumphs of the truth are not accidents. They are times the American media — including and especially those outside of the disinformation beat — did not equivocate and did not give an inch to lies and the liars who tell them.”
By BEN COLLINS June 13, 2023, 12:16 p.m.
Editor’s note: NBC News reporter Ben Collins was one of the winners of the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, given by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. This year’s awards focused on “best practices of TV journalism aimed at combating disinformation and defending democracy.” Collins included this memo to the judges, along with a compilation of TV news reports.
An update on the information war, for the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards
We’re losing.
I’m hesitant to start off this memo on such a grim note, but it’s true: The people putting out the truth are under siege in the information war, and we’re not doing so great. That’s, in part, because a lot of those people aren’t even aware they’re in an information war to begin with.
There is good news: We can still win. It will take a change in tack, and a little bit of courage.
But first, since I’m doubling down on bad ideas right out of the gate, I’m going to do something else that’s probably ill advised. I’m about to quote Edward R. Murrow, who, I’ve been told by a bunch of books, was not a pal of Mr. Cronkite. They both wound up at the same place — the facts — and they took two separate ways to get there. They were in the trenches and were too deep in it to see they were on the same side. I get it. We’ve all been there. A lot of us are there right now.
Murrow, famously, said this:
This instrument can teach. It can illuminate. Yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.
Stonewall Jackson, who is generally believed to have known something about weapons, is reported to have said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.
We’re back in that very same battle right now, and it’s against the same enemy: ignorance, intolerance, indifference. The box is smaller now. It’s in your pocket. It’s brighter and faster and it vibrates and dings and brings you horror and joy and knows what makes you feel better and sure as hell knows what makes you feel worse. Then it assigns those bad feelings to a political enemy, and the good feelings to anybody trying to get rid of those people.
youtube
That’s what you’ll see in the stories I’ve covered in the last year. Fear and panic and paranoia and lies and deceit that led to terror, death and the attempted disenfranchisement of American voters.
You’ll see that first with my coverage of the Buffalo shooting, a terror attack perpetrated by a white supremacist obsessed with the “Great Replacement Theory” lie that has pervaded extremist spaces online. The shooter posted his own tranche of racist lies on the internet in his manifesto for 4chan and 8chan users, which I had to convey to our viewers without further spreading his hate.
You’ll see midterm election night coverage of the attempts to shoo away voters from early voting ballot drop boxes by “mule watchers,” the conspiracy theorists obsessed with the lie that “2,000 ballot mules” had stolen the election from Donald Trump.
You’ll see the hate campaign targeted at America’s trans youth that continues to make some of the most persecuted Americans fear for their lives to this day.
But you’ll also see interspersed moments of justice and relief. You’ll see my reporting on a day I thought would never come: October 12th, the afternoon Alex Jones was forced to reckon with his decades of lies and pay almost $1 billion to the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. You’ll see how Russia’s global information war fell apart as its military began to invade Ukraine, and how Vladimir Putin’s propaganda arm scrambled to adopt lies first spread by American anti-vaccine groups.
I hope you notice something specific while reviewing my coverage of the last year of hate, and how hate loses. Triumphs of the truth are not accidents. They are times the American media — including and especially those outside of the disinformation beat — did not equivocate and did not give an inch to lies and the liars who tell them. No one attempted to falsely humanize the inhumane — like the horrors of Vladimir Putin. No one tried to bend over backwards to provide positive framing to intentional cruelty — like the lies of Alex Jones — even, or especially, if it was politically inconvenient at the moment.
When media manipulators were met with a unified opposition armed with clear facts — when that unified opposition stood firmly alongside those who were constantly attacked by men with powerful and profitable propaganda machines — that opposition won. We won. The news won.
But it takes unity, and not capitulation, in these moments. There is no meeting liars halfway, because the truth then becomes one-half lie. We must simply be louder, and clearer, with the truth.
The wires and lights in the box aren’t quite so simple now that they’re in our pockets. Some of them are keeping your kid up at night, telling your teenager fantastical tales about the Illuminati on TikTok. (And some of them are keeping your parents up at night, too, telling equally fantastical tales about the nightly gunfight that is actually just fireworks on NextDoor.) The people spreading those Illuminati lies are not playing by the rules, nor are they particularly interested in the truth. They are interested in money and power, and they have been gaming our algorithms to gin up fear and sell a balm for it.
I have been covering this stuff for too long now, and I can assure you that they are not going to stop. So we have no choice: We simply have to tell better stories than them. We have to be better at extolling truth — based in empathy, democracy, and human rights — than fearmongers have become at selling profitable lies.
We can win, but we have to be more unified, and we have to be more human. We’ve faced this before and we’re facing it again. “There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.”
Look down at your phone. The lights and wires in that box are smaller, but they contain exponentially more ways to do harm. If you want your vote to count, or if you were born in any way different, I’m certain you’d agree.
“When the war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” I’m confident I threw away my scabbard.
Ben Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News.
41 notes · View notes