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Good to know I'm not alone on this one.

My dumbass brain visualizing The Stormfather whenever he talks to Dalinar in Oathbringer

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"Elderly Palestinian couple looking at their former home, now occupied by a couple from Brooklyn. 🇵🇸" [@/RamAbdu on X. April 4th, 2024.]

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If you ever feel imposter syndrome knocking at your door, just remember this.

Picasso once visited the Altamira caves to see the Ice Age cave paintings within. When he came out of the cave, he reportedly said, "After Altamira, all else is decadence."

#art #pablo picasso #imposter syndrome #cave paintings #its the neurodivergency

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Kagero is ART!

YT Link!

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I'm probably gonna get yeeted into the sun by angry humourless weebs for saying this, but it's 2024 and we're living our truths here, people.

Okay, here we go. *inhales*

IF YOU THINK MAID CAFES LOOK FUN, I HONESTLY THINK YOU'RE THE TYPE WHO LIKES TO BE BABIED. Seriously, what's the difference between casting a spell on your food to make it taste better and doing a "here comes the aeroplane" with a wee kid's food? What's the difference between almost ANYTHING that goes on in the generic generally safe for all cafes (the more adult themed ones are another story) and a kid's variety show? Seriously, if they brought out sock puppets and taught us how to make pictures out of glitter and uncooked pasta, I wouldn't know the difference. Maybe it's the neurodivergency or my aversion to any kind of "organised fun", but I look at these places, both IRL and in anime, and all I can see is HELL.

#anime and manga #weeb #weebshit #fucking weebs #its the neurodivergency #autism #neurodivergent #hot take

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You ever see someone pop up in your social media, specifically something like FB or Insta, and you know them, but not in an overtly familiar way and they post something about their personal life, you go to respond and then think "wait... do I have the right to? Do I know them well enough to react, let alone say anything?"

Is this just an ND thing or have the NTs not been telling us something (again)

#its the neurodivergency #autism #neurodivergent #neurospicy #neurodiverse stuff #autistic things #autistic adult

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In mine and many other east Asian cultures, the dragon traditionally symbolises things like power, wealth and strength (imperial symbol and all)

I think we often forget that in the story of the Great Race, the dragon came in fifth because it'd stopped to give people rain. Then it'd stopped again to push a rabbit adrift on a log across the wide river so it reached the shore safely (that's why the Rabbit year comes before the Dragon).

Dragons aren't meant to just be powerful - they are meant to do good with such power, and to help those in need.

So in this lunar new year, I hope you gain more power, so that you might be able to help others. I pray you have abundant resources so you may give to yourself and those around you. I wish you courage, endurance, kindness and generosity, for yourself and your people.

I hope you, and I, will be rain givers, life preservers, joy bringers.

I hope we will be dragons.

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To hell with rizz: if you really want to show your interest in someone, challenge them to an inherently erotic dual in which you both progressively lose clothing and end up coming close to kissing more than once only to pull away for another attack.

Seriously, why don't we see those kinds of duals anymore? Bring back the Zorro rizz!

#its the neurodivergency #swords #fencing #cliche #zorro #autistic rizz #silly goofy ahh

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reverse unpopular opinion for....aw heck, go ahead with Rhea for this one as well

This might as well be a part 2 to the previous Rhea ask so :D

I find Rhea to be so compelling for several reasons, one of the biggest being the inherent contradiction that she is very much capable of caring, loving and trusting others, sometimes with some insane gestures when you realize their meaning behind them (ie. Saving Jeralt's life by giving him her blood thus risking outing herself because of it, letting Catherine keep Thunderbrand despite the fact it's the one Relic she could safely recover- implicitly trusting her with one of her family's remains without any obligation to do so, risk angering a noble house to give Cyril a better life and treating him like her son in all but name)... And yet she cannot, for the life of her, bring herself to be honest with them.

Something fascinating I noticed about Rhea is that she ironically seems to prefer people who are blunt with her, because look at the people she's closest to - Seteth spends all of Part 1 openly questioning her, Flayn is constantly on the verge of accidentally outing herself, Cyril is so direct and honest he sometimes accidentally comes off as rude (Shamir too even if she's not as close to Rhea) and Catherine wears her heart on her sleeve.

Heck, all of them are either not that religious or outright non-believers, which ironically I believe helps reassure Rhea they love her because of who she is as a person and not because she's the archbishop, especially given how much she implies to find the position incredibly alienating.

And isn't that just so fascinating? That she is more than capable than loving others and caring for them risking her own personal safety, she appreciates people being honest with her.... But cannot, will not be entirely honest with them in turn.

Because make no mistake, that right there is Rhea's true fatal flaw: her compulsive need to keep everything a secret.

From the big but understandable stuff that would get her and her family scrapped for parts if it became public to downright pointless shit to hide like not liking hot drinks, and it's the one trait that screws her over the most, between being the reason Jeralt left (since she didn't tell him ANYTHING about what happened with Byleth so he assumed the worst and fled) and the thing preventing her from making connections as deep as she actually wants (like even just telling her loved ones how much they mean to her), as well as getting the support she actually needs. And because she feels she has to bear everything on her shoulders, she crumbles under the weight because no matter how hard she tries, she will never be good enough.

In that sense the role of archbishop is a sort of mask to her. It's definitely a part of her, but also something she has sort of burrowed into like a safety net preventing her from being true to herself. Because that'd mean making herself vulnerable, in more ways than one. To say nothing about putting her surviving family and remnants of her dead kin to jeopardy.

If she were to open up she'd be... More lively, I think. Definitely sillier if Heroes is any indication, and arguably more willing to take a direct approach in helping people. And definitely more loved and happier.

And perhaps, one day she'd realize she doesn't need to bring her mom back to fix Fódlan. She's not doing it alone anymore, after all.

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[ Image Description: a 3 panel meme. panel 1 features a young man on a laptop stating "Oh boy, new Hbomberguy video". panel 2 features an image of YouTuber Hbomberguy accompanied by a wall of text that is too small to read. panel 3 returns to the young man at a laptop, reading "I now despise YouTuber James Somerton". End ID ]

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CW: Discussion of racism. Note: I am VERY white, albeit a white person with a grudge, so I'm gonna preface this by linking a piece by Macongolia so as not step over Mongolian voices in this discussion. I've also mentioned other minority creators who can give more grounded and relevant to the struggles of POCs in terms of representation than I can:

So... Mulan. You might know about it through the original Chinese ballad, and you've almost DEFINITELY at least heard of the Disney adaptations which was likely formative media for many of you (well, the animated version). I didn’t watch it until I was a teenager and by that point, the history of the Mongol Empire had become a special interest of mine, expanding further into other nomadic empires such as the Xiongnu, Gokturks and of course, the Huns. I knew already going into the film that the Huns were never a thing in China: the Huns as a people have pretty murky origins before bursting onto the scene during the early part of the Migration era in European history, but a lot of scholars, citing their veneration of the Turkic sky god, Tengri, and existing trace linguistic samples point to them likely originating from the remnants of the Xiognu who, after invading and effectively vassalising the north of China for a number of years, were driven from their homeland by the Han Dynasty, moving steadily westward and becoming more culturally and ethnically diverse as they went (the Hunnic Empire, like most nomadic empires, was a pretty diverse place for its time and location, though probably not by modern standards). On top of this, the original Mulan ballad (along with a factor that I'll return to later) doesn't mention the Xiongnu, but rather the Rourans, another nomadic people that ascended in power after the Xiongnu were ousted, as the invaders Mulan faces in battle. Oddly enough, the much maligned (and fairly so. Fuck that genocide excusing nationalistic propaganda fest) live action Disney "remake" of the original does get the name right, though their portrayal is still dodgy and that brings me to the primary point I want to make with this: the racist portrayal of Mongolian and Turkic peoples in both films, despite being addressed by both aforementioned peoples and other members of the wider Asian community (see Xiran Jay Zhao's videos on the Disney adaptations), it's not something that mainstream media outside of North and Central Asia has bothered to address.

The broader reasons for this, while cynical, are fairly simple: capitalism and the nature of markets. The Chinese film market is an infinitely larger and more profitable one than the Mongolian or broader Central Asian film market for Western media conglomerates, alongside an equally cynical capitalist interpretation of feminism, but to ignore the wider racial and historical background to this issue would be to do a disservice to the cause in question.

The Euro-American and, in many cases, the East Asian image of Central and Northern Asian nomads, up to the modern day, is one rooted in the often violent history between them, in particular the atrocities committed during the conquests of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan and his successors. It would be both revisionist and inappropriate to have this discussion without acknowledging the fact that Mongol conquest and reprisal was often brutal, but in this discussion, nuance is often lost as a result of hyperfixation on atrocity. Additionally, Mongolian populations now can hardly bare the brunt of any condemnation on behalf of the empire, unlike some other existing nations, but the stereotype persists whenever you say the word Mongol. This extends to the media portrayals of North and Central Asian nomads outside of their cultural spheres (see the above post for a Mongolian perspective on the matter). There are a million varying sources that address the realities of life in both the Mongol Empire and nomadic empires as a whole so I won't go into it here, but another factor that is rarely addressed is the history of the steppe nomads prior to the ascendancy of their empires. This context will feed back into the implications for modern Mongolian and Central Asian people in today's media landscape, especially when it comes to Euro-American perspectives.

A primary example is the Mongols themselves: Prior to the rise of Genghis Khan, the Khamag Mongol tribal confederacy, on top of conflict with other tribes such as the Tatars, faced constant harassment from the Jin Dynasty of Northern China, themselves descended from the nomadic Tungusic Jurchens (today called Manchus) who frequently led punitive expeditions or instigated proxy wars against the Mongolic and Turkic peoples. A relative of Genghis Khan, Ambaghai, was crucified after a failed attempt at unification, and yet, these factors, along with the effective meritocracy, religious tolerance and relatively egalitarian social structure (Mongol women were trained to ride, were valued as councillors, controlled domestic affairs could divorce their husbands and under Genghis, the practice of bridal kidnapping, something both his mother and his senior wife, Borte Khatun, had suffered through was outlawed) are often sidelined when discussions of the Mongols, both in history and in the modern day, are addressed, a pattern that is being slowly addressed in the field of popular history, but this does little to address modern day attitudes to Northern and Central Asian peoples outside their respective cultures/countries.

At this point, you may be wondering why I'm drawing attention to ancient history, and the answer is this: when a studio can get away with eschewing nuance in favour of outdated, racist portrayals of one group of people while exhalting the values of another, albeit in a manner that also misrepresents said culture and reinforces stereotypes, it says far more about our wider cultural values than any hollow sentiment about exceptance no matter who you are or where you come from. It also says what we already knew about capitalism being toxic to creativity/any representation of a culture will only go as far as profit will allow it (see Princess Weekes's video on The Witcher for more on that side of things).

Anyway, to bring things back to Mulan, it may surprise people to learn that the original ballad was composed during the time of the Northern Wei dynasty. Why does that matter? Well, the Northern Wei weren't originally Chinese: they were Xianbei, a nomadic group related to, if not ancestral, to the Mongols. This explains why the story of a female warrior occurred here to begin with, given the aforementioned greater sense of egalitarianism (though again, only by modern standards) among the steppe tribes. Therefore, it's fair to say that Mulan, who in the public consciousness is most likely to be associated with defending China (which at the time wasn't even a united empire) against the hordes of northern "barbarians" is just as much a product of the nomadic steppe cultures of Northern and Central Asia as she is the centralised settled agricultural civilisation (which is a shaky term, anthropologically speaking) of China.

Anyway, this post is already fairly long, so I'll stop here, but please go and read the post I linked and watch/support the creators I mentioned.

Blessed be 💚

#mulan #mulan 1998 #disney #anticapitalism #mongol empire #the huns #media literacy #film criticism #media analysis

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Alternative to ladies and gentlemen as a greeting or addressing style for a group that still has a similar air of formality to it: Good gentles, all.

Has Shakespearean roots, makes you feel like you're part of an MC at the Globe during the Elizabethan/Jacobean era and, most importantly of all, it's gender neutral and accommodating of every conceivable form of identity to the exclusion of none.

Unless you're not gentle. In which case, sucks to be you, I guess.

#shakespeare #gender #lgbtq+ #lgbtqia #lgbtq community #its the neurodivergency #bisexual #heteroflexible #queer #autism #silly goofy ahh

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Concept: post-apocalyptic story where people go around houses, pet stores, zoos etc and releasing the animals trapped inside. Extra points if you give them a portal or cute robot companion that can transport harmful invasive elsewhere (seriously, this is something that terrifies me more than zombies or mutants; humanity disappearing and there still being feral cats in places like Australia or pets slowly dying indoors).

#post apocalyptic #story ideas #writing prompt #pets #animals #its the neurodivergency

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THIS

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Targeted ads, but it's just someone addressing you by name and telling you about goods or services you actually need or might enjoy. Example:

"Hi, have you ever considered robbing a bank? Here's five easy steps to do just that!"

#ads #its the neurodivergency #silly goofy ahh

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