#these two platforms have destroyed out society

[fabuloustrash05]

The world would be a better place if Twitter and TikTok no longer existed.

#i will stand by this #from my experience #these two platforms have destroyed out society #I swear cancel culture is never satisfied and sees everyone as an enemy #and woke culture is getting ridiculous #not to mention the toxic people on both cites #random thoughts

[papuhater]

EARFQUAKE

┊ ˚➶ ｡˚a/n: i'm fixiated. this is short because this is kind of them getting to know eachother ┊ ˚➶ ｡˚ cw: reader knows spanish ┊ ˚➶ ｡˚ pairing: miguel o'hara x spiderwoman!reader

in which miguel o'hara falls in love with a married woman, married to his variant.

"so this is awkward"

"shut up parker" he spat out "what did you say?"

"y-you can't be-" she stepped away "miguel? why do you look like him, this doesn't make sense, i-"

"why did you call me cariño? huh?" miguel was aggravating

"y-you look exactly like my husband!" she was walking in circles, she had taken her phone out, and seemed to be searching for something

"look, ninety nine, that's not a good pickup line, so-" before he can talk, she climbs to his platform and showed him her phone

"no, i'm married, you look like my husband!" she showed him a picture, a picture of her, being kissed on the cheek

by him

miguel stares and then looks away

"i see."

"yeah, in my dimension i'm married to miguel b o'hara."

"oh." peter said and mayday babbled, he held her up "mayday took a dump, i gotta change her, goodbye." he ran with mayday in his hands, while the two of them just stood there.

"yeah."

"so i'm married in your dimension?"

"yes."

"to you?"

"mhm" she nodded, clearly annoyed

"¿qué vi en tí?"

"that's rude."

"you were too."

"because you were first, estupido." he rolled his eyes and shook his head

"anyways, look, ninety nine, i want you to join this society."

"why should i?"

he sighed loudly and massaged his temple, then he faced you

"look, we keep the multiverse in check, and we are a spider society, we fight anomalies, and we keep dimensions from dissapearing."

she took her mask of, revealing her face, and she stared at miguel with serious eyes

"what if i want to destroy the multiverse?" he visibly stiffened "just kidding."

"you better." he huffed while glaring, he grabbed a gizmo from the table and threw it to her direction, she quickly caught it and eyed it curiously, her lips tightening into a straight line as she cocked her head

"so... do i put this on my wrist?"

"no" he stared at her with full on seriousness "you place it on your neck, even though the gizmo looks like a watch" he huffed "of course you put it on your wrist."

"damn you don't need to be sarcastic"

"i have to be when i'm surrounded with pendejos."

"are you a fucking imbecil?"

"no, but you on the other hand, possibly"

"i told you empanadas de carne" he got closer, as if he was explaining to a little kid "not empanadas mixtas."

miguel had sent you to the cafeteria to get empanadas de carne, it had been a few months since you had joined, but you always ignored his wishes, it was hard to see him in a serious light, mostly because he has the face of your husband, it was very hard at first, your tongue slipping and calling him amor, cariño, etc., at first it bothered him, a lot, but then he got used to it.

"but you like empanadas mixtas-"

"warm, freshly baked ones, not cold freezing ones!" he growled, he turned away while muttering 'ya no puedo más' repeatedly.

"didn't you mami taught you to not be picky?" she swung towards him, with the carton in hand, she got closer to him "or did your mami feed you, until you were 10?" she cooed while grabbing an empanada

"aquí viene el avioncito~" she said in a sing-song voice, she made airplane sounds and lifted the empanada to his lips, they lightly touched them, he had a scowling face, and he pushed her gently with his arm.

"stop it" he scowled, while turning away, but you did the same

"oh c'mon" you pushed the empanada against his lips again

"¡parala!" he roared, expecting you to cower away, but you didn't, you shrugged and left the carton with the empanadas in his desk

"you better eat them or i swear-"

"ya, ya, lo hare." miguel shrugged you off

she took one empanada and left

"i'm clocking off, amor!"

your home was comfy, a nice apartment in the city of york nueva, you always made sure to check the windows, to see if miguel, well, your miguel, had arrived.

he hadn't, it was still afternoon, and he was at work. so she quickly dipped in one of the windows and took her mask off, she took a deep breath. and her routine began, she went to her room, changed into civilian clothes, and began cooking, possibly some caldito, and as she boiled the chicken, her phone rang.

"yes?"

'hola mi amor' miguel's sweet voice filled the speaker, and she smiled, this was her miguelito, not her boss.

"hey, how are you? how's work?" she asked,

'boring as always" he chuckled "so i called you to tell you that i'm not gonna make to dinner" her smile dropped "some co workers invited me to get some drinks"

"i could come" she offered, her miguel had started to drift away, as if there was a wall between them. there was a pregnant pause, filled with tension "that was stupid, you know, you can go, you don't need to ask for permission, have a nice night."

"okay, love you"

"...love you"

she hanged up and left the phone on the counter. she sighed and massaged her temples.

her and miguel were having a rough patch, it possibly began when she stated that she wanted kids, a lot.

miguel didn’t like children, and it created a big argument, harmful things were said, and a barrier was created between them

she sighed, went to her room and laid down, staring holes into the ceiling, the lone feeling crawled into her skin, and she felt cold.

“mierda” she mumbled and turned around, hugging herself.

it was going to be a long night

series list

translations:

"¿qué vi en tí?" =what did I saw in you?

amor, cariño = love, sweetie

párala= stop it

ya, ya, lo haré = okay, okay, I’ll do i

'hola mi amor' = hi mi love

caldito = soup

mierda= shit

taglist

@simeon-lovergirl

@allysunny

#miguel o'hara x reader #miguel spiderverse #atsv miguel #miguel x reader #miguel o 'hara #miguel o'hara x you #miguel spiderman #miguel x y/n #miguel x you #atsv #atsv x reader

[dailyanarchistposts]

Four months into the assault on Gaza, the Israeli military has forced over a million refugees to the edge of the Egyptian border and is now bombing them while threatening to mount a ground assault against them. In the following text, Jonathan Pollak, a longtime participant in Anarchists Against the Wall and other anti-colonial solidarity efforts, explains why we should not look to international institutions or protest movements within Israeli society to put a stop to the genocide in Gaza and calls on ordinary people to take action.

A shorter version of this text was rejected by the liberal Israeli platform Haaretz—an indication of the diminishing space for dissent in Palestine and within Israeli society.

Human Rights Discourse Has Failed to Stop the Genocide in Gaza

We are now more than 120 days into the unprecedented Israeli assault on Gaza. Its horrific repercussions and our inability to bring it to an end should compel us to reevaluate our perspective on power, our understanding of it, and, most significantly, what we have to do to fight it.

Amid the spilled blood, the endless days of death and destruction, excruciating dearth, starvation, thirst, and despair, the ceaseless nights of fire and brimstone and white phosphors raining indiscriminately from the sky, we must grapple with the bare ugly facts of reality and reshape our strategies.

The officially reported fatalities—in addition to the many Palestinians who remain buried under the rubble and aren’t yet included in the official count—already amount to the annihilation of nearly 1.5% of all human life in the Gaza Strip. As Israel escalates its attacks on Rafah, it seems that there is no end in sight. Soon, the lives of one in every fifty people in Gaza will have been extinguished.

The Israeli military is inflicting an unprecedented toll of suffering and death on the 2.3 million people of Gaza, surpassing anything ever witnessed in Palestine—or elsewhere during the 21st century. Yet these staggering figures have not penetrated the thick layers of dissociation and disconnect that characterize Israeli society as well as Israel’s Western allies. If anything, the reduction of this tragedy to statistics seems to hinder rather than enhance our understanding. It presents a whole that obscures the specifics: the figures conceal the personhood of the countless individuals who have died painful, particular deaths.

At the same time, the unfathomable scale of the massacre in Gaza makes it impossible to comprehend through the stories of individual victims. Journalists, street cleaners, poets, homemakers, construction workers, mothers, doctors, and children, a multitude too vast to be narrated. We are left with faceless anonymous figures. Among them are more than 12,000 children. Probably a lot more.

Please pause and say this aloud, word by word: over twelve thousand children. Killed. Is there a way for us to take this in and move beyond the realm of statistics to grasp the horrific reality?

The cold blunt numbers also veil hundreds of obliterated families, many of them completely erased—sometimes three, even four generations, wiped off the face of the earth.

Overshadowed by these figures are more than 67,000 people who have been injured, thousands of whom will remain paralyzed for the rest of their lives. The medical system in Gaza has been almost completely destroyed; life-saving amputations are being carried out without anesthetics. The extent to which infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed surpasses the Dresden bombings at the end of the Second World War. Nearly two million people—roughly 85% of the population of the Gaza Strip—have been displaced, their lives shattered by Israeli bombings as they shelter in the dangerously overcrowded south of the Strip, which the Israeli government falsely pronounced “safe,” yet continues to pummel with hundreds of 2000-pound bombs. The hunger in Gaza, which was created by Israeli state policy even before the war, is so severe that it amounts to famine. In their despair, people have resorted to eating fodder, but now even that is running out.

About a month ago, an acquaintance of mine who fled to Rafah from Gaza City after his home there was bombed told me that he and his family had already been forced to move from one temporary refuge to another six different times in their attempts to escape from the bombs. In despair, he said, “There is no food, no water, nowhere to sleep. We are constantly thirsty, hungry, and wet. I’ve already had to dig my children out from under the rubble twice—once in Gaza and once here in Rafah.”

These rivers of blood must breach the walls of our apathy. If only time could stop long enough for all of us to process our grief. But it will not. It continues passing as more bombs fall on Gaza.

Decades of injustice have paved the way for this. Some 75 years have passed since the Nakba—75 years of Israel’s settler-colonialism—yet its defenders continue to deny the facts. Even after the the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asserted that there is indeed cause to fear that genocide is being committed in Gaza, the US and many of Israel’s other Western allies have effectively remained silent.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the court’s mere willingness to discuss the case “a disgrace that will not be erased for generations.” Indeed, the ruling is a disgrace. Despite everything being laid bare in plain sight, the court did not order Israel to cease fire. This is a disgrace to the court itself and to the very idea that international law is supposed to protect the lives and rights of those being crushed by the military force of nations.

It will undoubtedly be said that the law, by nature, is meticulous and that it considers the forest not as a whole but as individual trees. To that, we must answer that reality, facts, common sense must be above the law, not beneath it. Israel dedicates considerable resources to a legalism of the battlefield, intended to give cover to its murderous acts. This approach involves carving reality into thin slices of independently legally-approved observations and actions. A military target was present in high-rise X, justifying the deaths of over two dozen uninvolved civilians; apartment tower Y was the home of a Hamas-employed firefighter, legitimizing, according to the principle of proportionality, the decision to wipe out three neighboring families. But this practice cannot turn genocidal water into legitimate wine. This is legal gaslighting that shreds reality to pieces in order to conceal a pattern of indiscriminate mass murder.

If the slaughter of 1.5% of the population in four months is not genocide; if Israel’s acts are not deemed grievous enough for the court to order it to immediately stop the killing, not even in light of open incitement to exterminate Palestinians by prominent Israeli politicians and members of the press, not to mention Israel’s president and Prime Minister; when lack of punishment for such incitements and such acts is accepted rather than branded as genocide in the simplest of terms—then the words we use to describe reality have lost all meaning and we are in dire need of new language beyond the confines of legalese.

Leaving the butcher’s knife in the butcher’s hand—leaving Israel unhindered, unimpeded—means letting the slaughter in Gaza continue. This is the absolute ongoing failure of international law and the institutions entrusted with keeping it.

This failure passes on the responsibility of forcing an end to the ongoing catastrophe, so that it falls on the shoulders of civil society. This ought to compel us to move beyond the empty liberal paradigms of human rights, which have replaced liberation as the dominant discourse in leftist politics.

#Gaza #genocide #human rights #Israel #Palestine #rights #anarchism #resistance #prison abolition #acab #jail #prisoners #autonomy #revolution #community building #practical anarchism #anarchist society #practical #practical anarchy #anarchy #daily posts #communism #anti capitalist #anti capitalism #late stage capitalism #organization #grassroots #grass roots #anarchists #libraries

[catdotjpeg]

For over 20 days, Israeli snipers and tanks have been besieging the Nasser and Al-Amal Hospitals in Khan Younis, the second-largest city in the Gaza Strip. Over the past few days, several videos appeared of Palestinians being shot while attempting to enter and exit the medical complex of the Nasser or Al-Amal hospitals. On Sunday morning, an Israeli sniper shot and killed a Palestinian man just meters away from the main gate of the Nasser. Cautiously and under the fear of being shot, Palestinian medics lifted the body back to the hospital amid the mourning and cries of his relatives.

A tweet with video of the man's body being moved is included in the Mondoweiss article.

The Nasser Hospital is the largest equipped medical facility in southern Gaza, which currently shelters at least 300 medical personnel, 450 patients wounded, and around 10,000 displaced Palestinians. Over the weekend, a woman who braved Israeli sniper bullets and rushed to rescue a bleeding Palestinian outside the Nasser hospital was identified as Dr. Amira Al-Assouli. She is a gynecology and obstetrics consultant from Khan Younis, recently retired from the Nasser Hospital but went back to volunteer and help her former colleagues following Israel’s aggression on Gaza in October. Assouli talked to the Wafa news agency about the moment that went viral on social media when she ran to help an injured man on Friday.

“God removed fear from my heart. I felt that someone needed help. I will not think about myself, I will think about saving people,” she said. Assouli had seen some of her colleagues get shot and killed near the Nasser Hospital, such as Dr. Muhammad Abu Lihiyah, who was killed by Israeli snipers when he tried to rescue an injured Palestinian.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the chief of World Health Organization (WHO), wrote on the X platform on Sunday that they are deeply “concerned about the safety of patients and health personnel due to the intensifying hostilities in the vicinity of the [Nasser] hospital.” Ghebreyesus said that Israeli forces denied the WHO mission entry to the Nasser on Sunday, which remains partially operating.  The Al-Amal Hospital has also been under Israeli siege for over 20 days. In January, Israeli forces raided the Al-Amal and detained dozens of medical staff, and patients and seized medical equipment. Israeli forces also mined roads and destroyed residential buildings around the Al-Amal and Nasser Hospitals in recent weeks.

“We urge for patients’ and health workers’ immediate release. Health personnel, patients and facilities MUST be protected at all times,” Ghebreyesus added. On Sunday, the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), which runs the Al-Amal Hospital, said three patients died after Israel blocked the delivery of oxygen cylinders. 

“[Israeli] occupation continues to prevent the entry of fuel, necessary for operating electric generators [in the Al-Amal], even though fuel stock is about to run out in two days,” PRCS added in a statement.  Since October, Israeli forces have pursued a policy of besieging medical facilities and intimidating staff as part of a goal to cut lifelines for Palestinians and to push them outside Gaza. The Al-Shifa’ Hospital is, perhaps, the starkest example of a Palestinian medical facility being targeted by Israeli forces. Israel claimed that Hamas housed a command center underneath it but has yet to provide any solid evidence. Israel bombed the vicinity of Al-Shifa’ for weeks, where hundreds of Palestinian families sheltered. Eventually, in November, it stormed the hospital, detained medical staff, and ordered displaced Palestinians to evacuate it before retreating from the area in December.

-- From "‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 128" by Mustafa Abu Sneineh for Mondoweiss, 11 Feb 2024

#palestine #khan younis #gaza strip #gaza

[workersolidarity]

[ 📹 Israeli occupation forces fired at and then struck a group of Palestinians with tank shells as they were waiting for food aid trucks near the Al-Kuwaiti roundabout in Gaza City, resulting in several casualties.]

🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸 🚨

💥MOSQUES DESTROYED AND SHELLS FIRED AT CIVILIANS ON DAY 121 OF ISRAEL'S WAR OF GENOCIDE IN THE GAXA STRIP💥

On the 121st day of Israeli aggression, dozens were killed and scores wounded in occupation bombing and shelling targeting mosques, civilian homes, and gatherings of displaced residents.

Local sources are reporting the martyrdom of two and the wounding of 7 others after Israeli jets bombarded the Abu Sefer family home in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, using plane-launched missiles.

Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) bombarded several homes in the city of Deir al-Balah, while Israeli warplanes also targeted the central, eastern and western sections of Gaza City to the north of the enclave.

At the same time, occupation aircraft launched several airstrikes on the central and southern Gaza Strip, while occupation artillery shelling and shells launched from gun boats targeted various areas in Gaza.

Occupation bombardments and artillery shelling also targeted Khan Yunis, in the south of Gaza, with artillery concentrations focused on the east and south of the governate, causing several fires to break out in civilian homes.

Also in Khan Yunis, the Israeli occupation leveled several civilian residences in the Bani Suhaila neighborhood to the east of Khan Yunis with firebelts launched from occupation aircraft.

Israeli Occupation Forces also besieged the Al-Shifa Medical Complex for the sixth consecutive day, preventing medical staff, patients or displaced civilians sheltering inside from the bombardment, from leveling the buildings as intense occupation shelling bombards the vicinity of the hospital.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) is reporting the wounding of two displaced Palestinians after occupation soldiers fired small caliber weapons towards civilians in the vicinity of Al-Amal Hospital, which has been under siege in the central Gaza Strip for nearly two weeks.

PRCS is also reminding the International community of the disappearance of the 6 year-old Hind whose family was killed by an Israeli tank shell, trapping the young girl in the vehicle before calling the Red Crescent for assistance. PRCS deployed two ambulance personnel to retrieve the young girl, however the ambulance staff and the young Hind have gone missing and have not been heard from since.

Additionally, PRCS is reporting the death of the Director of their Youth and Volunteers Department, Hedaya Hamad, who was killed by an Israeli soldier's bullets as he rushed to save a group of civilians who'd been injured by occupation gunfire and shelling in the vicinity of the hospital complex.

"Until the last breath, Hedaya embodied the meanings of sacrifice, humanity and volunteerism that she has always believed in throughout her life and the course of her work and volunteering," PRCS said in a statement about the martyr on the social media platform X.

In the south of Gaza, Israeli warplanes targeted a civilian vehicle with an airstrike east of Rafah City, killing multiple Palestinians.

According to local witnesses, the occupation aircraft launched a missile that hit the civilian vehicle as it passed through the streets of eastern Rafah, killing everyone inside.

In addition to targeting the civilian vehicle, Israeli jets also bombed neighborhoods in between the cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

According to Gaza's Ministry of Health, the death toll in Israel's ongoing war of genocide in the Gaza Strip has resulted in the deaths of more than 27'238 Palestinians, while another 66'452 civilians have been wounded in Israeli aggression since October 7th.

Additionally, the Gaza media office says the Israeli occupation has destroyed a total of 140 local government buildings, while more than 100 schools and universities have been completely demolished. The government media office also said the Israeli entity had fully destroyed 183 mosques and partially leveled another 265 mosques, while 3 Christian churches have also been destroyed.

The Gaza media office added that the Israeli occupation army had also completely flattened more than 70'000 Palestinian housing units, while another 290'000 units have been partially destroyed and are now uninhabitable as occupation warplanes dropped more than 66'000 metric tons of explosives on the most densely populated enclave on the planet.

#source1

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#videosource

@WorkerSolidarityNews

#gaza #gaza strip #gaza news #gaza war #gaza genocide #genocide in gaza #genocide of palestinians #israeli genocide #israeli occupation #israeli occupation forces #iof #israeli war crimes #war crimes #crimes against humanity #palestine #palestine news #palestinians #war #israel palestine conflict #middle east #politics #news #geopolitics #world news #global news #international news #israel #breaking news #current events #gaza massacre

[annabellewynter]

Hi! I'm new to Writerblr and excited to be here.

The name I go by is Annabelle Wynter.

I am a married female in my 40s.

I have two kiddos that keep me busy and an adorable pup named Beast that loves to snuggle. Here's my buddy.

I love to read every genre! There really isn't one I don't like, it mostly just depends on my mood.

Some of my favorite books are Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Stephanie Plum novels, Court of Thorns and Roses, Bridgerton Series, Grapes of Wrath, I'm seriously all over the place.

I am the same way with television and love Schitts Creek, true crime documentaries, Sons of Anarchy, Vikings, and cheesy reality TV.

My daughters are really into WWE and I love Rhea Ripley and Becky Lynch.

I also write in several genres and currently have two WIP.

The first is a novel that's in its second draft. I'm working on additional changes and will be sharing them on this platform as well as Wattpad. It's a romantic mystery called Surving Karma.

The second WIP is a Regency Romance called Wild Lavender. I have posted the first chapter on here and Wattpad. Summaries are below the cut.

I would LOVE to read some of my fellow writerblrs, so please Tag me to check out your work.

My DMs are open and I love making friends.

Happy writing/reading!

Karma, the universe's funny little way of keeping a tally on each of us and making sure that before the end, it all evens out.

I believe in Karma. And that is why I have spent the past five years working my ass off to try to add some good juju to my scorecard. The first twenty-something years? Well, let's be honest, I have some serious marks against me; and that's just what I can remember!

My name is Collins Alexander, and I'm a recovering alcoholic.

Five years ago, I hit my bottom in a serendipitous fall from grace that landed me a month in rehab, an end to my law career and an eviction from my high rise apartment in the Chicago loop.

Now I'm trying to offset my negative balance with Karma by devoting my life to helping other addicts in a state run rehab. And things were going pretty well too, until the handsome District Attorney, Keaton Donnelly showed up with a picture of my former defendant, missing a few appendages and news that I was next.

And if that wasn't bad enough, they assigned an undercover agent to assist. His name is Derek Nowak and he's got intel on the Chicago gang scene and a smile known for dropping panties all over the Midwest. This is doing nothing to help my mind stay focused on keeping all my appendages intact.

So here I am, in my black bootie Louboutins, a final remnant of my prior life, holding a steaming cup of black coffee and running like hell.

Cause Karma is nasty bitch, and she's coming to settle a score.

Summary: Everett Greenwood never expected to be the Duke of Rorchester, that was a job for his older brother. But when sudden tragedy strikes, he finds himself thrust into a life he never wanted. Then he sees Melina delivering honey to the grand hall. The girl who lives in a shack in the woods becomes the only love his heart has ever known, but can society accept the simple woman as his choice? And will secrets from her past destroy their chance at love? Find out in Wild Lavender.

#writerblr intro #writerscommunity #writing #romance writing #creative writing #original writing #writers of tumblr #mystery #wip #writerblr

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Clay Jones]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 30, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 31, 2024

On Tuesday morning, on his social media outlet, former president Trump encouraged his supporters to buy a “God Bless The USA” Bible for $59.99. The Bible is my “favorite book,” he said in a promotional video, and said he owns “many.” This Bible includes the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance. It also includes the chorus of country music singer Lee Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA,” likely because it is a retread of a 2021 Bible Greenwood pushed to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of 9-11.

That story meant less coverage for the news from last Monday, March 25, in which Trump shared on his social media platform a message comparing him to Jesus Christ, with a reference to Psalm 109, which calls on God to destroy one’s enemies.  

This jumped out to me because Trump is not the first president to compare himself to Jesus Christ. In 1866, President Andrew Johnson famously did, too. While there is a financial component to Trump’s comparison that was not there for Johnson, the two presidents had similar political reasons for claiming a link to divine power.

Johnson was born into poverty in North Carolina, then became a tailor in Tennessee, where he rose through politics to the U.S. House of Representatives and then the Senate. In 1861, when Tennessee left the Union, Johnson was the only sitting senator from a Confederate state who remained loyal to the United States. This stand threw him into prominence. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln named him the military governor of Tennessee. 

Then, in 1864, the Republican Party renamed itself the Union Party to attract northern Democrats to its standard. To help that effort, party leaders chose a different vice president, replacing a staunch Republican—Hannibal Hamlin of Maine—with the Democrat Johnson.

Although he was elected on what was essentially a Republican ticket, Johnson was a Democrat at heart. He loathed the elite southern enslavers he thought had become oligarchs in the years before the Civil War, shutting out poorer men like him from prosperity, but he was a fervent racist who enslaved people himself until 1863. Johnson opposed the new active government the Republicans had built during the war, and he certainly didn’t want it to enforce racial equality. He expected that the end of the war would mean a return to the United States of 1860, minus the system of enslavement that concentrated wealth upward. 

Johnson was badly out of step with the Republicans, but a quirk of timing gave him exclusive control of the reconstruction of the United States from April 15, 1865, when he took the oath of office less than three hours after Lincoln breathed his last, until early December. Congress had adjourned for the summer on March 4, expecting that Lincoln would call the members back together if there were an emergency, as he had in summer 1861. It was not due to reconvene until early December. Members of Congress rushed back to Washington, D.C., after Lincoln’s assassination, but Johnson insisted on acting alone.

Over the course of summer 1865, Johnson set out to resuscitate the prewar system dominated by the Democratic Party, with himself at its head. He pardoned all but about 1,500 former Confederates, either by proclamation or by presidential pardon, putting them back into power in southern society. He did not object when southern state legislatures developed a series of state laws, called Black Codes, remanding Black Americans into subservience.

When Congress returned to work on December 4, 1865, Johnson greeted the members with the happy news that he had “restored” the Union. Leaving soldiers in the South would have cost tax money, he said, and would have “envenomed hatred” among southerners. His exclusion of Black southerners from his calculus, although they were the most firmly loyal population in the South, showed how determined he was to restore prewar white supremacy, made possible by keeping power in the states. All Republican congressmen had to do, he said, was to swear in the southern senators and representatives now back in Washington, D.C., and the country would be “restored.”

Republicans wanted no part of his “restoration.” Not only did it return to power the same men who had been shooting at Republicans’ constituents eight months before and push northerners’ Black fellow soldiers to a form of quasi-enslavement, but also the 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole people rather than three fifths of a person, giving former Confederates more national political power after the war than they had had before it. Victory on the battlefields would be overturned by control of Congress.

Congressional Republicans rejected Johnson’s plan for reconstruction. Instead, they passed the Fourteenth Amendment  in June 1866 and required the former Confederate states to ratify it before they could be readmitted to the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment put the strength of the national government behind the idea that Black Americans would be considered citizens—as the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision had denied. Then it declared that states could neither discriminate against citizens nor take away a citizen’s rights without due process of the law. To make sure that the 1870 census would not increase the power of former Confederates, it declared that if any state kept men over 21 from voting, its representation in Congress would be reduced proportionally. 

Johnson hated the Fourteenth Amendment. He hated its broad definition of citizenship; he hated its move toward racial equality; he hated its undermining of the southern leaders he backed; he hated its assertion of national power; he hated that it offered a moderate route to reunification that most Americans would support. If states ratified it, he wouldn’t be able to rebuild the Democratic Party with himself at its head. 

So he told southern politicians to ignore Congress’s order to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, calling Congress an illegal body because it had not seated representatives from the southern states. He promised white southerners that the Democrats would win the 1866 midterm elections. Once back in power, he said, Democrats would repudiate the Republicans’ “radicalism” and put his plan back into place. 

As he asserted his vision for the country, Johnson egged on white supremacist violence. In July, white mobs attacked a Unionist convention in New Orleans where delegates had called for taking the vote away from ex-Confederates and giving it to loyal Black men. The rioters killed 37 Black people and 3 white delegates to the convention. 

By then, Johnson had become as unpopular as his policies. Increasingly isolated, he defended his plan for the nation as the only true course. In late August he broke tradition to campaign in person, an act at the time considered beneath the dignity of a president. He set off on a railroad tour, known as the “Swing Around the Circle,” to whip up support for the Democrats before the election. 

Speaking from the same set of notes as the train stopped at different towns and cities from Washington, D.C., to New York, to Chicago, to St. Louis, and back to Washington, D.C., Johnson complained bitterly about the opposition to his reconstruction policies, attacked specific members of Congress as traitors and called for them to be hanged, and described himself as a martyr like Lincoln. And, noting the mercy of his reconstruction policies, he compared himself to Jesus.  

It was all too much for voters. The white supremacist violence across the South horrified them, returning power to southern whites infuriated them, the reduction of Black soldiers to quasi-slaves enraged them, and Johnson’s attacks on Congress alarmed them. Johnson seemed determined to hand the country over to its former enemies to recreate the antebellum world that northerners had just poured more than 350,000 lives and $5 billion into destroying, no matter what voters wanted. 

Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand the country back to the Democrats who were rioting in the South and to a president who compared himself to Jesus. Rather than turning against the Republicans in the 1866 elections, voters repudiated Johnson. They gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress, enabling them to override any policy Johnson proposed.

And, in 1868, the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, launching a new era in the history of the United States.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#history #Andrew Johnson #Civil War #political #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #Fourteenth Amendment

[sleepyorchidmonster]

Remember the "Last line Challenge?"

Tagging @banterismylovelanguage , @isnt-it-pretty and @canonical-transformation because I'm about to ramble about the story.

So, imagine if, in a future installment of Star Rail, we face off against another one of the Lord Ravagers (Irontomb in this case).

However, this time they're targeting Nous and all of the cyberspace, after all, is there anything more destructive than erasing all manner of communication and data between worlds? Everything would plunge into chaos.

Let's say that their choice of attack is using the denizens of propagation (Tanzzyroth), as literal bugs in the system, similar to how Phantylia used the Abundance to destroy the Luofu.

This would happen in Hertha Space Station (or anywhere that's related to the Genius Society). And, although we would have Hertha and Screwllum on our side, only the Trailblazer would actually be able to enter.

The bossfight has 5 stages, one for each firewall we have to bypass (the bugs ate most of the wall but we have to get to Nous).

The first is a 2d platformer where we have to avoid the bugs and find the first entrance, then the second is a simulated universe themed encounter with plenty of riddles, the third one is to literally "surf the internet" (think of a mix between Elysia's Herrscher music video and the first half of Dvalin fight).

During each of the stages, we can see Silver Wolf's chibis hiding in the background, sometimes even giving tips on how to proceed.

The last two stages are the actual bossfight, the first round is basically the Traiblazer and Silver Wolf, who joins the fight, against the Lord Ravager, with the two of them being the last line of defense between him and Nous. (The other character slots are locked).

It's just us, the Emanator of Destruction and everyone that is watching because the whole thing is being livestreamed to the entire Galaxy. (Something something let me crush all your remaining hopes by defeating the resistance in front of your eyes.)

The first round ends with everyone almost dying, only to be saved by Nous (and Silver Wolf usung her chibi friends as a respawn feature). The background changes to the Simulated Universe, Screwllum's disembodied voice is giving us directions, and we can now choose the last two party members from the ranks of the Nameless and Stellaron Hunters (you can only choose one from each faction, though).

Turns out that our friends in the Astral Express and the Stellaron Hunters have been trying to hack their way into the fight as soon as the livestream started, Welt was doing his best while the Mara got the best of Blade and he decided to headbutt the monitors to see if they were portals, Kafka wasn't fast enough, though Elio prophesised that the devices had to go, so no harm done.

Anyway, Nous noticed their efforts and decided to help out, by giving them gsme controllers and letting them pick a fighter. Notice that Blade is awful at any games so his character acts erratically, think Donald from Kingdom Hearts. He is playing on a Wii remote. Help him.

Nous summons all of the Genius Society, represented as shooting stars, as an extra attack, similar to the Engine of Creation or Inhibitor Lunae. Sometimes we get a different effect based on the Genius Society member, like a freeze reaction for Hertha.

We manage to beat the Lord Ravager and return to the real world for some much needed rest (the Stellaron Hunters don't have to worry about their bounties for a bit because they did help save an Aeon so they've been temporarily pardoned).

And that's how Silver Wolf returns home to see all of the monitors destroyed, leading to Kafka's line: "Sorry sweetie, Bladie destroyed all of the monitors!"

The funny thing is that I had all of this thought out before the 1.3 trailer. And now we're getting Tanzzyroth bugs in Simulated Universe!

#march welt kafka and sam are the best characters for the last round #because they are pros at playing games #blade only started destroying monitors when the emanator killed silver wolf and traiblazer #they respawned but he panicked #pom pom also tried the same thing #silver wolf and traiblazer giving their teamates the scare of their lives #the stellaron hunters were pardoned for their crimes #they are now commiting as many crimes as possible #they had a score excuse you #hsr #traiblazer #silver wolf #kafka #blade hsr #screwllum #hertha hsr #screwllum was affected by the attack so he was temporarily out of comission

[12pt-times-new-roman]

c3e48

The Bells Hells manage to escape the jabberwock for the time being, and come upon a cerulean-colored ruin, "some kind of ritual site."

Imogen sends a message to Morri asking for help, and although she doesn't respond, a short time after a massive fucking hawk crashes into the jabberwock and preoccupies it enough for the Hells to make it to the gateway.

There's certainly something to the color symbolism of Imogen's powers normally being white and purple, but are all crimson red when Ruidus is involved

Oh, that hawk-thing is literally Morri. The Hells see it swoop overhead and get hit by the jabberwock's fire breath, but Morri distracted it enough that it's definitely off the Hells' scent.

"Terosh, the Lidless Slumber" guards the gateway.

Matt is effortlessly and without looking down at his notes speaking in meter and rhyme. This riddle is so fucking cool, the gatekeeper needs something from each of them but they have to present it with a rhyme, plus it's a timed encounter because the thing is still on their trail.

They come out of the Feywild in the Highland Bluffs, a forested section of the Taloned Highlands. From the trees, they can see Imogen's hometown, and the mountains where the seat of the Stratos Throne sits.

"I still can't taste anything, but maybe if I keep trying, I'll be able to." ......please don't tell me that FCG taking the chef feat and learning how to cook is an allegory for their foray into religion.

the first time Imogen used her more potent sorcery powers was when she saved Laudna from angry villagers. my heart ;-;

Other members of the Grim Verity are investigating the Shadowfell malleus key, while Ryn herself is scoping out the Tishtan excavation site on Exandria. People at the Exandrian key are "adjusting, reacting. A last-minute scramble." Ryn's message gets cut off (after Laura rolls a 6 on a straight d20 roll).

Also, some random rolls (1 d20, then 1d20, then 2d10 for both Liam and Marisha) seem to be determining some things at the Ruby Vanguard's sites.

"Everyone who's known me has been dead for 998 years." that's awful fucking specific FCG.

There's no response from a sending to Ryn. But this is also 7 years after Jester's antics, so it's entirely possible that Ludinus and his surroundings are warded against sending.

The Ashari are underneath Terrah investigating a danger to the rift that Keyleth thinks could be connected to Ludinus and his plans (or to a "god-killer" that Imogen mentioned in her sending to Keyleth). The rift itself exists near the surface, but the danger sounds like it's subterranean. (my bet is on the Vanguard secretly excavating a mineral from there that they need to make arcane batteries.)

Dream time!

Chetney, FCG, and Laudna go in with Imogen as she focuses on Ryn.

"Shapes go past rapidly. Shadows, trees, cliffside rock, until you come upon a gargantuan pit. A drop-off in the surrounding landscape, a chasm, a massive hole in the ground. Pieces of equipment along the outside, excavation cranes, staircases, platforms in this sinkhole... there are half a dozen figures shifting equipment, some that walk around like patrols. It's busy, busier than you recall; you also see two large, hulking figures, just walking. Humanoid, standing about 12-15 feet tall. The shapes are armor-like, they walk bipedal with thin upper arms and massive fists; you feel the arcane crackle within, and these are large guardian automatons that patrol the exterior of the site... you continue to think of Ryn, and there's something pulling you downward. You see chunks of structure, ancient stone. Buildings, spires, hallways, ruined and destroyed by time, they emerge at certain angles from the side of this excavation. You can see elements of an expose glimmer of society from long ago, and more of these figures going along bridges and tunnels... as you descend further, you see the massive tower, the singular fork-like structure that sits center to this excavation pit, this towering piece of ancient intent that has been retrofitted and built-upon. Around it, other structures and ruins, and a bustle around its base. You see a handful of other large automatons, dozens of dark humanoid shadows, and the details become even clearer. They're building equipment and moving things. You can see glimmers of energy -- they're moving energy sources, cores are shifting, they're being pulled further beneath the ground and separated. You get the sense that they're reflexively enhancing their build based on recent circumstance, but they're bringing them beneath the ground. As you look at this central spire, you also see a malleus key-like structure far larger than the one you encountered in the fey, built against, onto, and around the spire. You get the ominous sense that this may be the centerpiece of what is to come. You also see a figure standing at the base of this tower -- standing, hand out in front, frozen in stone, Planerider Ryn. Locked in place and left for all to see -- whether it's a trophy or a warning, you don't know."

FCG gets closer, and there's something familiar about the machinery assembled around the tower. "There's an odd familiarity to the way this has been designed and implemented around this spire. You also notice a flash of glowing eyes, not far from where you stand. You see a female figure that looks in your direction, and a voice enters your mind. How interesting. I know you." Imogen and Laudna wake up, leaving FCG and Chetney in the dreamscape as it turns to black and white. Otohan Thull's eyes are glowing like a nighttime creature that caught the light. "The last thing you hear in your mind... well, then. Punishment it is." They wake up screaming after taking 36 points of psychic damage.

With an arcana check, Laudna recognizes that the spire is likely what amounts to an arcane lightning rod -- something either meant to receive energy, direct energy, or both.

From everything that the Bells Hells know, it seems like the keys in the two parallel planes are designed to syphon more power to the Exandrian key, since the leylines are in similar position across all three of those planes (so the key would be pulling power from 3 sets of leylines instead of 1). With one destroyed, they seem to be attempting to compensate with arcane power sources.

Within a day or two of travel, the Hells make it to Jhovaan. They -- especially Imogen -- get weird looks as they walk toward Imogen's childhood home and ask for her father.

Liliana kept her powers a secret from him, and only told him just before she left. It was a year or two after Imogen was born, and she said she started having dreams -- her desire to know about her powers was stronger than her desire to stay in Jhovaan with them.

Upon asking for belongings of Liliana's, Imogen's father gives her a golden chain necklace with a locket set with an opal. Inside, instead of a picture, there's a tiny fingerprint pressed into metal with the caption, "the better halves become a better whole."

"You sail toward the Hellcatch, and you swear there's almost an aurora in the sky."

#critical role #critical role spoilers #critical role liveblog #critical role campaign 3 #critical role c3 #note watches c3 #y'know what? I'm wondering if the malleus keys are just the second half of the puzzle. #what if the hammer was already enacted in Aeor #when it fell all those mages put themselves inside the bubbles #and now Ludinus is going to release them in order to enact the second half of the plan? #I dunno I just feel like there's such a huge difference between hammer and key that they have to be two separate things

[simonalkenmayer]

I’m sorry, could you explain more how humanism is linked to right wing fascism? My only prior knowledge of the term is the art movement, and even trying to read more about it is just telling me that it’s a belief system that prioritizes people over divinities, which strikes me as a good thing. I’m just not really understanding the link between these two.

Humanism is good. It’s about elevating the human experience in all its diversity, and protecting it. Making up for what humans lack through organizing a society. It’s what “liberalism” has been in the US for a hundred years.

Let’s see…how to say this without a chronological essay that you can get through your own reading…

Let’s start with Joe McCarthy. It goes all the way back to the slave trade, but for now let’s just start there. McCarthy and other conservatives in the post WWII era, were angry about how badly the Nazis had done. So were the remaining Nazis. Many of them went to South America and aligned themselves with dictators there. In dribs and drabs here and there, former Nazis joined right wing groups and began to say things like “in the power vacuum, communism will rise.” And so it did, but they vilified it. In fact, the World Anti Communism League was founded by a Hungarian Nazi sympathizer and death squad runner. They raised money for dictators, no joke, to “reject communism” but that is merely code for “keep Nazi ideals open”. Back here in the states, anti-communism became a dog whistle and a scare tactic. Any liberal who said a social welfare program might be good, was called a communist and their careers were destroyed.

When McCarthy tanked his career in back-biting narcissistic stupidity—as bad people often do— the communism scare fell apart. And those organizations split into two primary groups, reforming under different banners but with the same leadership. One wing targeted the end of segregation and the civil rights movement, and one began preaching moralism, specifically Christian moralism. This is when the myth of America as a Christian nation began, and through clever manipulation, they equated non-Christian to unAmerican.

Barry Goldwater jumped into that full speed, joining a group that evolved out of the anti-communist garbage. It was he who said extremism in defense of liberty is fine. When he ran for President, he allied the party to this new right wing religious stupidity. The several groups he was a part of folded up and flipped into the Christian Right and Moral Majority, and they are the Old Testament NeoCon radicals I’ve talked about. They’re the ones who are malicious and sneaky. Yes. I mean that.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson single handedly turned themselves into king makers, using their television platforms and the Christian Broadcasting Network to funnel shit into people’s ears. Their principle bone to pick? That Humanism, celebrating or protecting the human condition, is an act against god, who demands obedience. To them Gay people deserve to die. Anyone who isn’t Christian ought not hold office. To them, women should not have any rights, and the idea they can control their own uteruses is horrendous. It’s against god!

During his presidency, Reagan courted these radicals to use their clout. But he also sympathized with them. He had many ties to white supremacy and Nazis, but that’s another story. He destroyed the “Fairness doctrine” in broadcasting (easy to do since nazi-affiliated neocons had already gotten key positions in broadcasting) allowing for the new genre “infotainment” to exist. Television personalities who discussed news no longer had to give balanced coverage.

A couple months later, Rush Limbaugh put out his first episode, and within weeks was syndicated by over 200 stations. Roger Ailles, who worked for Reagan, loved his style, his crass, divisive, speculative hatred. It was on that model that he built Fox News for Rupert months later.

Conspiracy theory has often been used to influence voting, but in this case, conspiracy theorists and all their garbage, ties DIRECTLY back to Nazis. Humanism says being cruel to anyone is wrong. It is anathema to their way of life.

But wait! There’s Newt Gingrich. When he became minority leader, he put out a memo to all GOP candidates, specifically outlining how to manipulate voters. He listed words to use. He talked about how critical propaganda is. We have him to thank for “radical left” “leftist media” and other Trump phrasing. And then he rolled that over into his Contract with America, aka the GOP platform. During the Clinton years, when he wasn’t quietly passing these horrific changes, he was working with an entire group of right wing researchers to find dirt on Clinton and the mill it into something that would stoke the moral outrage of the right. When they found the Lewinsky scandal, they struck gold. Ken Star, recently fucked off to hell, was not even supposed to be investigating sex. He was supposed to be investigating the Whitewater business. He claimed that during the course of hearing from witnesses about the real estate deal, he’d uncovered an affair, and when asked about it, Clinton lied, because his wife didn’t know. And then? They impeached him for lying about a controversy they dug up.

Go google the news. McCarthy just enacted a new contract with America. In it? Abortion bans. It’s the same MORAL Majority, Nazi-backed platform it always was. Except that now they’re saying the quiet part aloud.

The problem was that the opposition never called a spade a spade and just let it happen.

That, my friends, is how we got Trump.

The GOP is so closely interwoven with these groups, it doesn’t actually know who it is. It really doesn’t. And it sculpts its base through vilifying humanism as an act of rebellion against God. They do not have solutions. They are a party built around gathering power, influence, and wealth. They hate anyone who is not male and white and Christian.

[lightningblade1994-blog]

{Sonic the Hedgehog} PILOT: Preliminary Story Arc ideas (Rough Draft)

PART I:

While cruising over the ocean in his antique biplane, the Tornado, Sonic notices a small island particularly lush with greenery. He flies down for a bit of vacation time, closely followed by an unseen figure that lands on the opposite end of the island... The tiny resort turns out to be West Side Island, which, as the folklore goes, was once the home of a flourishing civilization. The people of the island utilized the power of seven mysterious stones for the advancement of their society. However, their prosperity lead to avarice, which did not sit well with the gods. The displeased deities reclaimed the stones and sealed them away.

After a few days on the island, it occurs to Sonic that he's being followed. His pursuer is a young fox with two tails who, upon being discovered, dashes into the shade of a nearby tree. Sonic ignores him and zooms off, but the fox whirls his two tails like a propeller and follows the blue stranger at full speed. Sonic is impressed both with the fox's tenacity and his ability to keep up, so he decides to let him tag along. He learns that his new companion is named Miles Prower, though the animals of the island call him "Tails" after his unique mutation.

Early one afternoon, Tails discovers the Tornado sitting on a beach. Being fascinated by all things mechanical, the young fox eagerly runs up to the machine for a thorough investigation, but shyly pulls back when he spots Sonic snoozing in the shade of a wing. His awkward moment is interrupted by a huge explosion from the island's interior. Sonic snaps up to see the forest ablaze and robots scouring the area. It doesn't take the blue hero three guesses to figure out who's behind the disruption: Dr. Eggman, who had discreetly followed Sonic onto West Side Island, is now tearing the place apart in search of the seven Chaos Emeralds. He needs fuel for his Death Egg, a planet-sized space station with unthinkable power. Sonic and Tails take off to locate the Emeralds before Eggman and squash his evil ambition once more.

PART II:

After Sonic and Tails defeat Dr. Eggman during their previous encounter, Eggman's space station, the Death Egg, crash-lands on the floating Angel Island. The impact from the Death Egg's crash causes the island to fall into the ocean. There, Eggman meets Knuckles the Echidna, the last member of an ancient echidna civilization that once inhabited the island. Knuckles is the guardian of the Master Emerald, which grants the island its levitation power and has an equal power level of the 7 Chaos Emeralds. Robotnik dupes Knuckles into believing Sonic is trying to steal the Master Emerald, turning the two against each other while he repairs the Death Egg.

Sonic and Tails approach Angel Island in their biplane, the Tornado. Sonic uses the Chaos Emeralds to transform into Super Sonic, but Knuckles ambushes him and steals the emeralds. Sonic and Tails travel the island hindered by Knuckles and Robotnik. At the Launch Base, where the Death Egg is under repair, Sonic and Tails fight Knuckles, but the Death Egg relaunches. On a platform attached to the Death Egg, they defeat Robotnik, causing the Death Egg to crash-land on Angel Island again. The story resumes in Part III.

PART III:

The Death Egg, Dr. Ivo Robotnik's space station, has once again crashed on Angel Island after the events of Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Robotnik needs power the Chaos Emeralds to power it up again, and because of this, Sonic and Tails have to find the Chaos Emeralds before him so they can stop his plans of world domination. However, Knuckles, the guardian of Angel Island and the Master Emerald, was tricked by Robotnik into thinking that Sonic and Tails are after the Master Emerald, so he is equally determined to stop the duo. But while all 3 are going round with each other, who's gonna stop Robotnik?

PART IV

Taking place after Sonic & Knuckles and the destruction of the Death Egg destroyed and Angel Island returned to the sky, Sonic takes a break and explores new territories by himself; however unknowingly his nemesis Dr. Eggman had somehow survived their last encounter, and revisits - and improves - the very best of his creations to defeat Sonic.

#sonic the hedgehog

[blackboxwarrior]

Ok this is a genuine question bc you’ve talked abt good allyship to people experiencing mania, psychosis etc, and I’m sorry to be asking it on anon but it’s bc it’s also about cyberbullying.

Basically, I need to figure out how to deal with a cyberbully who is clearly motivated by the fact that they’re having a mental health crisis and probably experiencing delusions, but is also extremely hard to get away from and spewing awful stuff everywhere at random targets.

Content warning for mentions of (not-real) C/SA, abuse libel, and real antisemitism & transphobia of the QAnon style, sort of

.

.

.

There is a person who’s in multiple fandoms and has recently started to have what, as far as I can tell from their posting, is probably something like an ongoing delusion: that everyone (or a specific segment of society anyway) is secretly abusing people (especially children); that this is genetically predisposed and therefor everyone with the ‘abuse gene’ must be killed; they can ‘detect’ this trait in people online based on how they post; and that them seeing anything on a post (fandom or otherwise) which seems even moderately objectionable is proof that the OP is a dangerous real-life predator.

Up until a month ago or so they posted fairly regular stuff, her friends, etc, and recently changed even their pinned to say that they have a new “mission”, to “destroy” evil people. Whenever they see something they think is suspect (every day if not more than once a day), they do what they call “raids”: a combination of going into the person’s posts, comments, and/or asks to scream at them—often suicide bait—and making ‘callout’ posts accusing them of heinous RL crimes (including accusing multiple admitted strangers of having ‘personally’ assaulted them, in addition to graphic accusations of sexual and animal abuse), tagging them in the post and tagging it with that person’s username etc. Sometimes they reblog ‘suspect’ posts with long screeds about the person’s supposed crimes. They then tag all of this with as many popular fandom and ship tags for whatever fandom the user is in as they can, thereby flooding the tags with graphic & hate content that’s not-quite-hateful-enough to have reports taken seriously

It has been really upsetting and triggering to other people. They’ve gone after survivors for talking about being survivors, which is especially what’s caused hurt (in addition to people who just… received random libel and threats from a stranger)

The bullying side is largely incoherent and conspiratorial, but because of how CTs often work, it’s also riddled with bigotry and they seem especially intense about targeting Jewish people and trans women, but they don’t ever get to reportable hate speech because of the weirdness of the phrasing (they don’t say ‘Jews’ but ‘Epsteins’ eg). Again the genetic-predisposition thing leads to statements about how ‘all of the Epstein race must be killed off’, which as you can imagine is pretty upsetting to read as a Jewish person.

The other important thing here is that they loudly talk about how they have sockpuppets, block-evade and stalk across multiple platforms (they keep being banned from others and re-making within a couple of hours). Each “raid” is usually pretty brief (a day or two of hyperfocus per person with occasional returns), but it’s also constant and jumping between dozens of people. It’s relentless and upsetting.

They’re also not someone who can be effectively blocked, filtered or talked down because of the sockpuppet thing. They’re clearly in genuine distress. Tumblr will not take any action to limit their blog use (they’re about the only SM site they’re on which hasn’t, ironically). They do not seem to be posing an RL threat to others or themself.

I’m trying to figure out a way to respond to it effectively because I and several friends have been among the group of people libeled as having committed CSA because one of us said that suicide baiting is bad and I guess that’s ‘proof’ of evil to this person. I can’t talk to them voluntarily, but also can’t long-term prevent them from engaging with me, and at this point it’s hugely anxiety-inducing to try. But I also feel bad for them because the world is obviously a very scary place for them. Is there anything better to do than “just don’t engage”/“ignore it” when not-replying leads to escalations but also anything I say seems to upset them more.

A few people are quite mad at them, which makes some sense based on their actions, but I’m really mostly just worried that they’re living in so much fear, and seem to have no visible support to speak of (they’ve alienated a bunch of mutuals/online friends by going after then too), but also edging towards having anxiety attacks whenever they pop up. I hate knowing that there are posts out there about how I/my friends/just random marginalized people are child abusers, but I obviously can’t get rid of them or stop them being made.

Is there a good compassionate response to all this, or is it just a matter of ignoring however much awful shit gets posted about me/my friends and waiting it out and hoping they recover?

Block. Report if it gets too bad, but know that carries a risk of them remaking and doubling down. Unless this person is majorly popular (as in 5k+ followers) it carries little risk to you and at least in my experience (both personal and from what i know about others) you will not help in talking someone down as the object of someones delusions and run the risk of making the delusions worse by engaging. Seeing you is bad for this persons health, and seeing them is bad for yours

Delusions, though not something that can be easily helped, are not a free pass to commit harrassment

#ive been on both sides of this situation #and it sucks for everyone no matter what

[ameliedebruyne]

World Anvil Worldbuilding Awards

I'm a finalist in 2 categories for the 2022 Worldbuilding Awards on World Anvil (a worldbuilding platform you can use as an author website to present your novel projects)! I'm nominated in the "best new world" and "most beautiful new world" categories, so I thought I would share links here :D

Voting: link

Deadline: Friday 17th March 2023

My world is "Dark Lord Seduction Plan"

In a world on the brink of a civil war between the Light and Dark political parties, Alina doesn't care much about what's going on beyond wishing well on the Dark. Far more pressing is her unwanted upcoming marriage arranged by her parents. But she has a plan. If marriage is inevitable for her, she will snatch the most desirable match of all: the Dark Lord himself.

More about the world:

Purpose = written in preparation for writing the novel + used as a fun way to present the characters to future readers.

POV = written from 2 POVs, either Alina's plotting to gain the Dark Lord's interest, or the administrator of the rune guild who is writing sarcastic leaflets for the guild.

Presentation = I'm trying for a minimalist style that mimic official leaflets, and I'm using icons and text boxes to keep everything pretty and clear (I coded the css myself :D).

Bonus = I'm slipping in touches of sarcastic humours and hints about hidden discriminations and conflicts in the world.

If you want to know more, here is a link to the introduction!

Below I have screenshot examples of my articles with links, and also links to some of my competitors :D

Example of articles:

First, two examples of the leaflet style, written from the POV of the guild administrator.

Noble Houses: Extremely powerful families who gained their influence by conquest and are ruling over land and people. Loyalty to the king optional. They have many privileges in society, resulting from their magical power and wealth, but they are torn by internal divisions and are on the break of civil war. Link

Blue Syndrome: Terrible fungi spores causing the destruction of nerves, necrosis of the tissues, and death. Remember the 5Ds when handling dangerous material: detect, decontaminate, delimit, destroy, denounce! Only with everyone's collaboration can we all be kept safe. Link

Link. Blue Syndrome: Terrible fungi spores causing the destruction of nerves, necrosis of the tissues, and death. Remember the 5Ds when handling dangerous material: detect, decontaminate, delimit, destroy, denounce! Only with everyone's collaboration can we all be kept safe.

(totally not inspired from Covid leaflets from the NHS XD)

Now two examples of characters written from my MC's POV.

Mistress Alina Lange: A rune mistress from a Dark minor noble family, and very determined to seduce and marry the Dark Lord! All I have to rely on for this is my magical skills and my unique way to approach artefact design and crafting—a great way to stand out! Link

Her Highness Luna Kitten: Luna kitten is the cutest and most intelligent kitten of them all, and anyone looking down on her for her mixed pedigree and criticising her manners is a rude imbecile! >:( Thankfully, she'll bite you before I'm forced to deal with you. Link

(featuring many cute pics of my cat XD)

Link. Her Highness Luna Kitten: Luna kitten is the cutest and most intelligent kitten of them all, and anyone looking down on her for her mixed pedigree and criticising her manners is a rude imbecile! >:( Thankfully, she'll bite you before I'm forced to deal with you.

(featuring many cute pics of my cat XD)

---------------

Many of my friends are also among the finalists. Unfortunately, I can't link to them all or I would share 3/4 of the finalists 😅, but those three are also on Tumblr:

@anniemst who has a fun space opera world, nominated for the same categories as me, "best new world" and "most beatiful new world". Link

@tjtrewin who has a dark fantasy world, nominated for the article categories "Hearts & Mind" and "Rise of Nations", as well as for the timeline, map, and chronicles categories. Link

@mh-biscup who has a sci-fi fantasy world with "wholesome necromancy", nominated for "best world". Link

(this is a very subtle hint for the rest of them to also make an account and join us here :p)

And special thanks to another nominee, Strixxline, who made the collage pic I have at the top of this post! (nominated for best world and for her map). Link

#worldbuilding #world anvil #my wips #my post #fiction

[foxgangfoxgang]



I just wanna talk about my Spider oc cause I love her and she is so precious.

Her name is Alyssa Jones and she's a southern belle,

she lost her mother to childbirth of her little brother, and her father passed cause he's a police captain (canon event),

she has butterfly locs cause she loves butterflies and anything with Butterflies,

she has braces cause she got into a fight with a bully who was mocking her universes peter

She has a crush on her older neighbor (Minho jung, yes I copied from Yunho of Ateez) and I made this stupid headcanon that he finds out her secret identity and in order to hang out with her more he becomes another version of spiderman but he has no spider powers, (I call him pseudo spider) and Alyssa is always having to stop him from getting hurt cause he has no superpowers

Alyssa is stronger than your regular spiderman she easily stop trains, speeding cars, and pick up heavy rubble with ease

She can't heal as fast though, so she has to be extra careful during fights

She made long range web based weapons to help her fight

Her Peter knows of her secret identity and helps her with her webbing and weapons

Her brother is 3 years old

He calls her bubu cause he's trying to say butterfly

Alyssa in turn calls him caterpillar

Alyssa is actually Miguel's apprentice

Alyssa loves cats (a entire liter of stray kittens came up to her and she was stuck sobbing on the sidewalk cause she couldn't hold them all Peter has recordings of this moments)

Alyssa is allergic to cats (her tears were an allergic reaction)

Alyssa specializes in web crafting thus she makes a lot of web related stuff

She made a hammock that used to hang under Miguel's moving platform

Miguel had destroyed the hammock cause he almost crushed her by accident when the platform was descending

Alyssa was pouty about it for like a week before Miguel made a small rest corner for her

Jess helps Alyssa touch up her locs

Jess also made Alyssa an unofficial god mother to her unborn child

When Gwen joined Alyssa let her rant about her issues and simply gave her hugs after so

Alyssa fights with Hobie constantly, she can't tell if Hobie is aware that he agitates her or he is oblivious to it all (he's aware)

Alyssa purposely says Chai tea to annoy pav

Alyssa became the go to babysitter for Mayday (Mayday reminds Alyssa of her baby brother)

Alyssa tends to ride on Miguel's back when he walks around the spider complex (though they wont say it aloud the spider variants find it adorable)

When Miles came to the spider society Alyssa was the first to greet him

The two had a spider connection happen as Miles accidentally bumped into her

Alyssa would try to secretly warn Miles to leave (though she would fail)

When Miles tries to go back to his dimension Alyssa does chase after him though she makes no attempts to stop him

Alyssa captures Miles for a moment and ask if he can save his dad and not break the canon

When Miles says that he knows he can do it, Alyssa helps him escape

As Miles is leaving and Miguel is trying to stop him Alyssa webs him (Miguel) by his wrist and uses her strength to stop him long enough for Miles to leave

Miguel is pissed she stopped him and sends her back home

Alyssa joins Gwen's team to save Miles

#miguel spiderverse #spiderverse oc #miles morales #atsv gwen #atsv hobie #astv #spiderverse spoilers #atsv pavitr

[w0rped-moss]

tell us about something you love!

you don’t even UNDERSTAND how much I can ramble about that hollowed knight. read more because Im gonna go crazy

hollow knight is an indie metroidvania game released in 2017. it’s about bugs. the player is a little guy only referred to as “the knight” or “little ghost” (that is a reference to the fact that you are small). the game takes place in the kingdom of Hallownest, which was once a thriving kingdom but has now been basically completely destroyed by a plague. the main mission is to find the three dreamers in three different places, fuck em up, then beat up the hollow knight, who was created to stop the infection

you and the hollow knight are the same type of thing, a vessel. They’re these fucked up little guys that are the kids of the king and queen of Hallownest and then got thrown into the abyss to be absorbed by the void. all but three are dead by the beginning of the game, and you can see their shells scattered throughout the game. Vessels were created to stop the infection, which was caused by a funky moth goddess lady who’s also the sun called the radiance. I’m gonna go crazy about her later. The reason they needed a vessel is because the infection preys on emotions. As the king himself says in a flashback sequence, “no mind to think, no will to break, no voice to cry suffering” which he believed made them immune to the infection, and therefore could contain the radiance herself. Unfortunately, although its unclear exactly how the king knew, but only one of the vessels was “perfect”. That was the hollow knight. You escaped the abyss and left Hallownest after the hollow knight was chosen. However, the vessel wasn’t perfect. It’s unclear if the vessel was always imperfect, or if the king caused the imperfection, but I believe it was the king because I like it. In a six second cutscene after finishing the hardest section of platforming in the entire game, you see the king and the hollow knight sitting together. The king looks at the hollow knight, and then everything goes white. My personal theory is that despite how much the king needed to think of the vessels as objects, he still thought of the hollow knight as his child, which caused it to gain feelings, and then could be effected by the infection.

Hallownest is also full of a bunch of places that are really cool from a lore perspective, like how there’s several giant corpses in the kingdom’s outskirts. One is the king’s corpse, though he has two. One is his bug form in the palace, and one is his wyrm form, which he shed when he arrived. The king is also the founder of hallownest, which is stated by the characters. This is shown as just the nature of the wyrms by the character of Mr mushroom, who says that “wyrms pull bugs into their thrall”. There’s also the coliseum of fools, which is built in the shell of a big thing. It’s unknown what the hell this thing is. There’s a weird spider thing in the ancient nailmaster’s house, there’s queen Vespa’s corpse. There’s also a lot of lore implied in the story, through the ghosts and the important characters. Like there were five great knights, and only two of them are alive. One of the ghosts attacked the king and got fucked up. Gorm.

there are a lot of npcs that i love. There’s cloth, a cicada trying to find a battle to die in, there’s tiso, who tries to find the coliseum and fucking dies, there’s zote who dies, there’s the nailmasters who have beef, there’s the nailsmith who’s in gay love with one of the nailmasters, theres quirrel, who was the assistant of one of the dreamer, theres elderbug who ruins speedruns, theres a bunch of little freaks, theres myla. im still sad about her and there’s Hornet, who’s your half-sister (the king is a whore) and the protagonist of the companion game silksong which is hopefully coming out this year.

im talking about the societies now. fuck you. There’s only one still-functioning town in Hallownest, which is dirtmouth. It’s the entrance to the whole kingdom. Deepnest and the mantis tribe technically aren’t a part of the kingdom since they never accepted the king’s rule (tho the mantis tribe was chill with him. they hung out. to me). The mantis tribe likes you if you can beat up their leaders, who are three sisters. Then they think you’re pretty epic because they respect fighting. There’s also the abandoned town in the forgotten crossroads and the cities. you can go into the sewers. there’s a poop boss. I love him. dung defender is my best friend. the Deepnest village WAS full of weavers and other spider people but the weavers fucked off.

then there’s the moth tribe. The radiance was originally the god of the moth tribe, though they abandoned her for the pale king. My theory about it is that the radiance only appeared in dreams and the king was right there. so she got pissy about it and made a zombie virus.

OH there’s also dlcs and they’re cool one of them has grimm and I like grimm I think he is neat. he’s a scary vampire looking bug with fire powers who talks like someone who’s smoked a thousand cigarettes a day for thirty two years. The other one is Godseeker and she likes to fangirl about the bosses. it’s basically just a boss rush but there are two new endings so that’s neat.

there’s more shit I can talk about but I’m done now

[dancing-to-architecture]

25 - ABBA - The Visitors

*Creepy* album cover. Just eerie and off-putting.

So, cards on the table, I am not a big fan of ABBA. (Spotify has them listed as 'the 149th most popular artist on their entire platform', so i know this is An Unpopular Stance). I also don't know a single song on this album.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

•The Visitors-

Creepy synth strings on the intro. Is this Dark ABBA? Maybe not, the singing came in and it's pretty overtly poppy.

That said, the proto-autotune here sounds pretty damn cool, and the actual lyrics perfectly describe 'having social anxiety and you're throwing a full dinner party in 20 minutes'.

Very "Who are these people and why the fuck are they in my house?" vibes.

Maybe this IS dark ABBA.

•Head Over Heels-

A song about the Toughest Woman On The Planet, which this musical journey has shown me is Decidedly a Type of Woman.

Interesting instrumentation on this one. Almost ethereal at some points.

Only problem i have with it is that i don't know if what they mean by hear over heels isn't exactly what that saying means.

•When All Is Said And Done-

Gotta say, i like a pop breakup song that is mature enough to say "actually, neither of us is the reason this didn't work out, sometimes things just don't work despite what we want".

•Soldiers-

Regarding the chorus: i urge you to listen to The Monks' Black Monk Time about 'songs that soldiers sing'. (Then again, when i was in, i knew far more punk/(nü-)metalhead soldiers than hooah-assed cadence-singing dipshits.)

Also, i get the idea that civilians often get pulled into wars despite the efforts of the soldiers, but that's way less on the soldiers themselves and mostly due to the horror of war finding a shitload of new and interesting ways to destroy humans over the last 120 years.

•I Let The Music Speak-

I'm not sure which of the A's is singing lead on this one, but: THOSE PIPES, GIRL. holy shit, she's straight up belting on this one.

Kinda darker, but still somehow a little upbeat throughout the darkness.

•One Of Us-

Not quite the inverse of 'Said and Done', but i do like the novelty of the song's concept: writing the sad breakup song from the pov of the dump-er who's still feeling pretty miserable about it.

I've definitely been here before.

Soul-shredding but still quite pretty, overall, which is a tough line to walk.

•Two For The Price Of One-

Okay, right off the bat: A. A trivial occupation? TRIVIAL?!

Sanitation workers are what keep "civilized society" from immediately collapsing into a total cesspool of human filth and you from contracting all the typhus and cholera and the numerous others in the horrid violently-shitting-yourself-to-death genre of diseases, so i won't be having any smacktalk on my custodial engineers out there.

B. Nobody should be excited about a BOGO sale on... *checks notes* ...Women?

[Office_space_million_dollars_two_chicks_same_time.gif]

Last line reaction: wait a minute, IS HER *MOM* "GIRL NUMBER TWO"? WHAT IN THE PORNHUB IS GOING ON HERE?

What a weird, "creepy in a bad way" midpoint song.

•Slipping Through My Fingers-

Songs like this make me feel a bit better about not being a parent, because I'm certain this song is a common lamentation regarding parenting: "there's so much i want to do and i feel like I'm missing so much of my child's early life because I'm stuck at goddamn work."

•Like An Angel Passing Through My Room-

Feels like a lullaby, but the subject matter is about remembering the dead.

Which... might be a Scandinavian lullaby for all i know. I've seen some old European lullabies that were pretty wretched.

•Should I Laugh Or Cry-

So far, this one feels the most like 1981. Pads and synths and then synth drums and then somehow still more synth.

Okay, see, there are way too many songs like this and not nearly enough like the Dixie Chicks classic: "Goodbye, Earl".

If you don't want to go so far as to kill 'em, then just leave 'em. Either way you deserve to finally be happy again.

•The Day Before You Came-

Severe Tonal Whiplash after that last song. This one is pretty great, the instrumentation feels a little "Castlevania"-y, and the lyrics perfectly capture that utter Bolt From The Blue feeling that is "meeting someone who you already KNOW is gonna change your entire life".

Just going through the motions, without really thinking about the time going by, and then someone comes out of nowhere and shakes your whole world up like a cheap snowglobe.

•Cassandra-

One of my favorite of the classical Greek tragedies, tbh. A woman cursed with detailed knowledge of future calamities, and nobody believes her.

An interesting modern take on the story.

•Under Attack-

The metric foot is all over the place, one line will have like 12 syllables and the next one has 5, but it really adds to the off-kilter, kinda disoriented vibe of the lyrics.

Also, NO MEANS NO.

NO MEANS FUCK OFF.

NO MEANS IF YOU KEEP ASKING ME I'LL HAVE TO TAKE ACTION.

NO MEANS I'M GONNA EMPTY THIS ENTIRE CAN OF MACE DIRECTLY INTO YOUR EYEBALLS IF YOU ASK ME ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME.

Well... surprisingly, i really enjoyed an ABBA album. Wasn't honestly expecting that after a lifetime of not digging their singles. (There was a point in time during high school where i legitimately believed the worst part of having so many gay friends was the sheer OMNIPRESENCE of "Dancing Queen".)

I'm certain there's going to be more ABBA along this journey, but I'm feeling a lot less trepidation about it now.

Also, i just might have to relinquish my title of "the only person on the planet who has yet to see 'Mamma Mia!'"

Unrelated entirely, but Spotify automatically started playing more music, and it just now hit me that the intro to Blondie's "Heart of Glass" is basically the same as Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole", just without Trent's trademark stank (affectionate) on it. That is all.

Favorite Track: The Day Before You Came, what an interesting way to describe what's effectively a day of no real importance, only important because of a lack of something you didn't even know you were missing.

Least Favorite Track: Two For The Price Of One. Even removing the possible incest-y shit in that last line depending on how you read it, this song is just creepy as shit, AND it insinuates that janitors can't get laid without paying for it, which i am here to tell you is categorically incorrect. Utterly bizarre to have it on the album, let alone its placement inherently making it the centerpiece of the album.

#1001 albums #dancing to architecture #ABBA #The Visitors