#People will think of you like they think of crusaders or nazis

[ofekma]

"noo but this time it's different! Our antisemitism is morally justified! We really do have a good reason to hate the jews!" - every antisemic person at any point in history.

#Israel #Antisemitism #i/p conflict #Oh? You think that because you use the word 'zionist' you suddenly magically have the moral high ground? #You think that everyone else who hated jews did it wrong but you? #You think that if you twist history and current events instead of science or religion to fit your world view then you are any better? #Give me a break #The future will remember you as just another enemy the Jewish people had to deal with #People will think of you like they think of crusaders or nazis #But hey many of you say that Hitler was right #So I don't think you would mind being packed with the nazis

[canyourfavesurvivecastledracula]

Indiana Jones?

My gut answer is that Indiana Jones is far too manful to make it through, but I have been urged to consider the fact that he isn't just a bold Adventurer, he's also a Professor of Archaeology. He has expertise thar may well be relevant to the question.

I read a lovely essay on here once that talks about Indy's arc being one of acquiring a sense of reverence for the divine. I think the argument was that Temple of Doom should be understood as a prequel because it backpedals that characterization which becomes crucial in the Last Crusade. All this to say it might be an oversimplification to pigeonhole him as the kind of cocky that gets you immediately killed. He would accept the gift of the crucifix. He might have enough background knowledge to know what he's getting into, or at least recognize it when he sees it.

If he comes to Castle Dracula in his affect as Professor, he's got a fair shot at being wildly underestimated. But he also probably doesn't have his whip... not that the whip would help him much in this situation. The intercepted letters are exactly the sort of ploy he might try and fail at, after which the theft is inevitable - no whip, no gun, no hat (!!). Poor Indy.

I think though the thing he's most hampered by is the absence of mooks. Indiana Jones overwhelmingly survives his adventures because disposable mooks get killed first. Or he punches one and takes his clothes. He gets to Find Out because Nazis went first and Fucked Around. He relies hugely on other people, both allies and enemies, and there are no other people at Castle Dracula. Like... maybe Dracula's hired movers might be able to play a similar role? But they don't come into the Castle.

I don't think he'd go for the wolves, because be has a long history of noping himself away from clear and present danger. He also has the kind of face that seems to make villains want to tie him to a chair and monologue at him, and we know how Dracula loves a captive audience, so he might actually be funny enough long enough to stay alive. I guess it depends on whether Dracula enjoys having insults spat at him in impotent defiance from a guy tied to a chair as much as he enjoys forcing a guy to smile and nod in hopeless terror while still playing the perfect host. Indy has no problem being rude to people who have him tied to things. It's a toss up but I don't know if it's got two solid months of staying power.

On the other hand IF Castle Dracula has a secret escape tunnel (and what self-respecting castle doesn't) he can definitely find it.

Actually, actually though, if Indy can make it to the end of the sequence by playing the helpless nerd, can escape, because he's the sort of guy who will try to smuggle himself out in one of the dirt boxes. Even if he doesn't get out the door that way, if he can stay put until the movers arrive this becomes a Punching Mooks task, which is what he's good at.

So I am going to say that Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones can survive Castle Dracula, just because I want to see the inevitable exploding lieterwagon chase

#indiana jones #academics #action heroes

[quasitsqueeries]

The Emperor wasn't 12 feet tall

I see this meme a lot in my Instagram feed and it really grinds my gears:

Not because it seems to be trying to shame a fictional antagonist for being "wrong" (although that really doesn't help), but because whoever made it seems to have missed that depictions of the Emperor as superhuman are meant to be Imperial Propaganda.

Now, I realise I'm going to be fighting an uphill battle here because there seem to be people working for Games Workshop and producing their media who also missed that memo, and for a while now the studio has started producing actual depictions of the Emperor, and some of those depections show him as 12 feet tall and immortal. This might be controversial but I think what this shows is that Games Workshop don't understand Games Workshop's source material.

Here's a picture of the Emperor from the original Rogue Trader rulebook.

Even this is obviously meant to be a propaganda image, but here he looks like just a regular guy in armour, he's about the same size as the people around him. Not a superhuman, just a guy with an excess of hubris.

There's this literary construct called the unreliable narrator. When I studied literature we were given this short story to read called Bartleby the Scrivener. It's told from the point of view of an employer about a clerk who was apparently really difficult to manage. The subtext is that the narrator is trying to manipulate the reader to make themself look good.

For a long time, that's what Warhammer 40,000 did, the Imperium was made out to be an unreliable narrator. Stories about the Imperium's "glorious past" were told through the haze of ten thousand years of unending war, by an ecclesiastical class with a vested interest in keeping Imperial citizens committed to feeding the war machine. To the Imperium, the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy serve the function of myths, more than history. I've gone on before about how important heroic figures like Siegfried and Perseus and Prometheus were to the Nazis. The Imperium, being a fictional state that draws on the aesthetics and ideology of Fascism, uses the figures of the Emperor and Primarchs the same way.

Basically what I'm saying is that when Imperial sources state that these people were twelve feet tall and immortal and could, um, turn a giant ork into a lightbulb on a whim, it's not because they had these powers, but because they've been ascribed these powers by their priesthood, who have total control over the flow of information in this setting.

And I get that this is hard, because most people don't get taught this stuff, and often people are probably looking for escapism from their fiction and why would the book I'm reading lie to me? But I think it really makes the setting more interesting if you look at it this way.

Also, I realise that since 2006 there have been books around that describe the Emperor, and they do show him as superhuman, and I think those depictions are based on the writers misunderstanding the material they're working from. I guess Tolkien wrote the existence of The Hobbit into Middle Earth as the Red Book of Westmarch so I can tell myself that the Horus Heresy novels are meant to be in-universe Imperial propaganda.

ADDENDUM: I need to add this because I've been reading about Perpetuals, which is apparently what the Emperor is since the Horus Heresy series was published. Apparently these individuals are human mutants that are both immortal and invincible. I remember Mechanicum heavily implying that the Emperor and St. George are the same person. Here's the problem with that. There are two themes that I think are really important in Warhammer 40,000. One is the Emperor's hubris, the idea was that he was playing god, genetically engineering monstrosities in the form of the primarchs. In the Greek tragic mould, it's this hubris that leads to his downfall. This kind of loses its sting if he's just trying to recreate what what he already is.

The other theme is the Imperium's superstition. This one is really the core of 40K. The Imperium has taken the corpse of a man who tried to rule the galaxy, told themselves he's not dead, plugged the corpse into a machine that "regenerates" him, and founded an intolerant, violent and expansionist religion around this husk. This theme changes significantly if the Emperor actually was as powerful as the Ecclesiarchy makes him out to be, and actually isn't dead, and has somehow been regenerating for the last 10,000 years. There's a question here about what would make an entity worthy of worship, or being called a god, and I probably shouldn't get into it but this is my blog so I'm going to. It seems like there's an assumption among some writers that if something can be rationally explained then it's not a god, because gods ipso facto don't exist. They've incorporated nonexistence into their definition of gods. This is where you get the idea that the Chaos gods aren't gods, because the setting explains their existince "rationally" with its internal logic (nevermind that there's nothing rational about the warp). If there were gods in a rational sense, then our model of the universe would have to change to accomodate them. I think the upshot of this is basically that if what the Horus Heresy novels claim about the Emperor is true, then the Ecclesiarchy are right and he is a god within the logic of the setting. That doesn't justify the genocide and expansionism, but maybe it does justify the worship, and that's something that I think takes away from the setting.

#warhammer 40000 #horus heresy #emperor of mankind #games workshop #wargaming

[eternityservedcold]

an extremely thorough list of content warnings for jojos bizarre adventure

because the old one was made by a deleted blog so it isnt easily accessible any more (and i dont think it was good enough to begin with)

btw if you say anything to the effect of "why do people like jojo when it has x" or "you guys really excuse y?" on this post im just gonna block you. people who get angry about me saying to skip parts/episodes will also get blocked.

feel free to reply/send an ask with anything i missed, preferably with a chapter or episode number. parts 7 and 8 wont be on here in full until i finish reading them but feel free to send me cws for them and ill add them. also the warnings are just in the order they appear, and more specifically when they appear in the anime, so as to not have weird "x is more important than y" nonsense

general warnings

these are things that…. basically if youre triggered by these i think you should just sit this out tbh. its an amazing series but its not worth repeatedly triggering yourself. this ones just ordered alphabetically bc its throughout (read: in at least 3 parts)

blood, violence, body horror, gore, and death -amputation -animal abuse and death (especially of dogs) -decapitation -eye, nail, and mouth horror -impalement -parental and sibling death -police brutality -suicide and self harm

child abuse -child abandonment -corporal punishment -leering shots of minors bodies -pedophilia (still gets a warning every time) -physical abuse

christian themes and symbolism

drug use -alcohol -tobacco -underage drug use -unspecified white powder

fire and explosions

gambling

misogyny, both in-universe and on the part of the author

racism (gets specific warnings every time)

sexual misconduct -catcalling -rape (still gets a warning every time) -sexual assault -sexual harassment

unsanitary -eating/drinking gross things —being forced to eat/drink gross things -pee -poop -snot -vomit

vehicle accidents -car accidents -plane crashes

part 1: phantom blood

(manga only) ritual sacrifice

restricted eating

non-consensual kissing

(manga only) a dog is shown on fire

poisoning

chinese ethnic stereotypes

a baby gets eaten

part 2: battle tendency

okay im gonna rip the bandaid off now. there are nazis in this one, and its significantly worse than youd expect just reading that. im gonna quote the old list here: "there are so many nazis in this part and they’re not condemned like at all tbh". i would almost say its glorified, one of the main allies is a nazi and another main ally directly praises a different nazi. in the manga, hitler and swastikas are explicitly shown as well as nazis being called by name, but in the anime, they are removed and simply called german soldiers.

almost nothing from this part comes back in the future and what does come back is explained as it comes up or is understandable from context. so please. if you need to skip this part, just do it. i even understand if you skip the whole series because of this.

its possible some may find the mesoamerican aesthetic of the villains in this part to be insensitive or offensive. im mexican and i personally dont, but i could see why someone would

racism toward: -black people -mexican people —slavery and degradation of mexican women is explicitly shown -japanese people

hostage situation

kidnapping

human experimentation

ritual sacrifice

"man in a dress" gag and subsequent transmisogyny

unintentional incest. there are only two scenes of this, which are: -a character spying on someone (later revealed to be their mother) in the bath -going through said mothers belongings and talking about her panties

animal cannibalism

part 3: stardust crusaders

since fights in this part are much more self-contained than the other parts, its possible to skip some of these if youre triggered by them. those will be marked with chapter and episode numbers

a woman gets spontaneously undressed in the middle of a fight (only her bra shows but it happens against her will)

jotaro, a 17 year old, kisses an adult woman to save her from possession. i wouldnt really say this is pedophilia and it lasts for 1 panel/less than 10 seconds but i found it uncomfortable

while incapacitated from sickness, holly will randomly be shown naked with weird leering camera angles. this happens many more times in the anime than the manga

pedophilia (depicted as a bad thing and the victim is saved before anything happens) (skip chapters 17-19/episode 7)

native american stereotypes (skip chapters 20-22/episode 8)

"person gets replaced" trope (skip chapters 23-6/episode 9; chapters 76-79/episode 27)

infection

suffocation

drowning

"child acting like a pervert" trope (skip chapters 92-96/episodes 32-33) -in the same episodes, the child spends the entire fight naked which might be uncomfortable for some

stardust crusaders ova

this gets its own subsection due to being so different that i was having to say "this doesnt apply to the ova" for a lot of the warnings. unlike the main sdc section, since this ova is extremely pared down, there wont be skippable warnings. also note that this is in "manga order", so its 2000 ova then 1993 ova

the english voice actor for avdol (a black/egyptian character) is a white guy doing a vaguely "ethnic" accent

the non-consensual kissing thing above, here its with a girl jotaros age though

infection

suffocation

ritual sacrifice (used as the intro animation for the 1993 portion)

drowning

part 4: diamond is unbreakable

rape, pedophilia, and kidnapping mentions

physical abuse

electrocution

blackmail

yandere trope -emotional abuse -isolation -stalking -kidnapping

restricted eating

skin picking

(anime only) jumpscare

invasion of privacy (skip this part if this bothers you because one of the main allies power is just, doing this, and its constant)

"child acting like a pervert" trope

bodysnatching/"person gets replaced" trope

theres an uncomfortable scene where a child gets attacked in the bath (non-sexually). both the child and the attacker are naked for the duration of the scene

part 5: vento aureo/golden wind

gang violence/the mafia (main crux of the plot)

bullying

(anime only) racism toward japanese people

reckless driving

torture

rape (not shown just heavily implied)

terminal illness/infection/disease

(anime only) pedophilia

forced childbirth (its like, magical childbirth and the mother doesnt register it)

possibly offensive depiction of systems (systems, feel free to correct me on this)

medical malpractice

a guy gets swapped into a girls body and gropes it

part 6: stone ocean

(anime only) heavy use of chromatic aberration, which may be eye straining for some

this part is really horny, comparatively speaking. this isnt really a bad thing but depending on your level of comfort with that you may want to skip

(manga only) misgendering a trans man

hallucinations

memory loss

abuse of religious authority

(manga only, only in some translations) homophobic slur

grooming

gang violence

"disposable sex worker" trope

creepy stalker-ish behavior (the person who does it becomes a main ally & never stops or eases up)

cult

drowning

electrocution

unintentional incest

the kkk (in the anime its a generic racist mob) -lynching

part 7: steel ball run

possibly offensive depiction of native americans (feel free to correct me if youre native)

a 14 year old girl: -is a child bride and im pretty sure this isnt condemned at all -gets hit on by adults -experiences a rape attempt? -gets pregnant?

the entire plot is about curing a disability

medical malpractice

capital punishment

(only in some translations) r slur variant

homophobic slur

attempted pedophilia/rape?

"bisexual sex pest" trope (grown woman making advances toward a minor/trying to rape her)?

part 8: jojolion

ableism?

rape?

part 9: the jojolands

"unsettling gender reveal" trope

pedophilia

#cant catch me gay thoughts #jojos bizarre adventure #jojo's bizarre adventure #jjba #please dont be annoying on this post. please. begging on my knees. #to clarify: question marks are put on chapters i havent gotten to yet #all of them come from other people telling me its true so i take them at their word and assume it is

[sharkface]

Counterculture does not actually mean "group with progressive political ideals formed as a reaction to systemic injustice," it means "group with ideals intended to subvert the current norms of the culture it exists within." And I understand the confusion from the perspective of a person who believes they already understand that the "current norms" are politically conservative ones and that any pushback against that would be inherently progressive, but the former definition relies on the idea that EVERYONE within a subculture already understands this idea (or would be amicable to it), when, in reality, many people actually believe the current norm to be TOO progressive, and THAT is what they are trying to subvert.

When you say you're fighting systemic injustice, you probably mean actual shit worth fighting like imperialism and colonization and the prison industrial complex and many many other real threats to human rights, but some of the people you're talking to are gonna mean, like, The Woke Left. Which is WHY there are so many symbols and codes to know in counterculture spaces, because everyone already understands this to be true and have adopted secondary flags to indicate what sect of "counterculture" they're really in. Some of them don't even HAVE political ideologies they're trying to push, they're just trying to be shocking.

I really don't give a shit how you personally want to define punk. I'm not going to change your mind and to be honest I don't think changing anyone's mind would really stop the ebb and flow of misinterpretations and declawing of counterculture. But you have GOT to be self aware that you are not joining up with a revolutionary crusade that will protect you, you are joining a group that attracts nazis just as much as it attracts your idea of a "real punk," and you CANNOT define those people out of existence, assume this is the popular idea among self-defined punks, and that you will be safe in the event you encounter these people. It is going to get you hurt.

#talk

[lily-orchard]

I think even if you did write it, wasn't that like a decade ago at this point? We all know you wouldn't do that today and nobody cares about the edgy fanfics you may or may not have written as a teen/young adult. Pretty sure there's more creators out there who are guilty of creating edgy content at that age yet you don't see people calling them out or at the very least it's easily forgiven. They make it so obvious that their goal is not to protect minors but to hurt you

But don't you get it, anon? I said the imperialist rock show was bad. So I should be hung drawn and quartered. Because that's like... a war crime.

The truth is, the reality of "internet drama" is that for the most part whether or not you'll believe a claim about someone and think it matters depends on how you feel about them personally.

This isn't the case with everyone, just... the cunts. But the thing is, if you're a Youtuber and you do something to piss someone off, even if it's as minor as saying "this book wasn't very good" then that person will believe you kill puppies.

It's right there in how some people talk about Youtubers. I get comments on my videos going "You are technically right, but you're SO ANNOYING and INSUFFERABLE about it!" You've probably seen people just be so nasty about a creator for very vague reasons.

The truth is that person was tweaked by something really petty. And when that creator gets accused of something, even if it's out of pocket and with nothing but the accuser's word, that person will go

If you've ever seen someone go "I always had a bad feeling about them" after a Youtuber gets outed for something shitty, that "bad feeling" was probably something really petty and really childish.

It's confirmation bias. One of my stalkers, Sage, got really fucking pissy when I said Percy Jackson was shit. And so they went to my stalker blogs for more dirt because I'd talked about them before, and record time they could turn their petty bullshit into a moralistic crusade.

This was someone who had been around for a while, and heard all this shit before and knew how bullshit it was. But then I said their favourite book was shit, and they got pissy and did a complete 180. And it was nakedly obvious what they were doing.

And that's why some people care so deeply about this imaginary fanfic from more than a decade ago. It's not about the fanfic. The fanfic is just a cudgel because "Lily insulted Steven/Hunter/White Boy of the Week" is just too cringe to admit in public. Nobody's going to watch your two hour drama video about how I'm a bad person because I want fictional nazis to die.

I think a lot of us notice this but we don't talk about it because we notice it when creators do something shitty and we see all the people going "I always knew they were trash! Because I'm psychic obviously!". But this behavior is born of confirmation bias and parasocial hatred. And it's always a red flag.

When someone you know develops this seething hatred of a person over something so small that they will instantly jump to believe every random brainfart said about them, you should always be aware that if you tweak that person, you will be next.

My friends are all aware of the accusations against me. I've gone through all of them with them. You know that "addressing the allegations" thing people demand I do? I've done it all with them. They have information you will never have. They know how bullshit this all is. Which is why it was especially shitty when KP bailed and cited the "allegations" as to why. Because she already knew they were bullshit. And she knows better than most of you.

Didn't matter when people were using me to dismiss her rage-crusade against Vivziepop.

I would personally be wary of anyone who grows to dislike a Youtuber and expresses that dislike through stalking instead of like... unsubbing and moving the fuck on with their life. That's an unhealthy mindset to have. So deeply unhealthy.

Hatewatching at all is just rat behavior. If you don't like a thing and you're not getting paid to do it, just move the fuck on with your life.

There's a reason my video on Politics as Fandom didn't use the more recent Contrapoints drama as examples. I didn't know there was any, because after the first one I stopped paying attention to Contrapoints.

There are people who are still angry at Noah Antwiler over shit that happened in 2009. And when I see this shit I'm just like "Let it go. Get over it." It doesn't even matter anymore if they ever had a valid reason to be angry. It's been fourteen fucking years.

I caught someone watching me sleep and sniffing my clothes when I was 16 and I wasn't angry at them for that long.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Hi there Skyen, long-time caller, first time listener, would you consider doing a full video on YouTube about the 40K universe? I saw your TikTok videos on it, and I gotta say as someone who’s a big fan of that universe and follows a lot of people that talk about it, your perspective was really refreshing, and not just because your views on politics and art more closely match my own than anyone in the space that I know of.

I mean, 40k does interest me, but I don't really feel like I have a strong angle on a video about it. I'd have to have something to say about it.

The only thing I can think of is discussing it through the lens of satire (which, I would argue, it simply isn't anymore) and talking about the Nazi problem that's been allowed to flourish in its community and especially in its meme culture.

It's that thing of like... it is not necessarily a neutral act to depict the aesthetics of "crusader" fascism through the lens of its own self-understanding. It creates an aesthetic environment that flatters the self-image of fascists, and a cultural discourse where they can roleplay their fascist fantasies under the guise of fiction.

And it's not enough to just put a footnote asterisk under the badass space marines that's like "oh by the way please remember this is supposed to be very bad," when you've also painted them explicitly in the lionizing visual language of propaganda.

But doing that subject would invite literally the worst people in the entire goddamn universe to find my videos and I don't know that I feel strongly enough about 40k to weather that misery, especially when I have so much else on my plate.

I mean, I guess I could talk about the aesthetics of the universe and curve the conversation far, far away from the Space Marines and the Imperium, whose aesthetic is Catholic Crusader Fascists. Talk about the T'au or something... I guess? I quite like the T'au.

But the business calculation part of my brain also recognizes that the Space Marines are like The Main Thing that pop culture cares about when it comes to 40k, so are there enough views in a video on the T'au to justify the labor it would take? Especially given the way the algorithm simply doesn't recognize my channel as 40k related, so getting it to show people a 40k video I do will be a slog.

Yeah, I dunno, someday I'll talk 40k, I'm sure, but right now there's just a bunch of >gestures vaguely to confluence of business and self-care concerns< getting in the way.

#tb answers #warhammer #wh40k #warhammer 40000 #warhammer 40k #40k #space marines #t'au

[hero-israel]

Thanks to it being Nakba Day, I woke up to a Vox on why those evil cruel Je-we mean Zionists destroyed the poor helpless Palestinians! Discussions of the 1948 war are where nuance go to die: on the one side we have Jews who have no particular belief that non-Jews anywhere would support their right to exist (as Jews or as, you know, alive people) aggressively asserting the continued existence of Israel (and in the process displacing many Palestinians) and on the other we have Arabs in Mandate Palestine who wish for self-determination in the land they consider home, who decide to defend that self-determination by advocating for genocidal ethnic cleansing of Jews, supported by Arab armies much stronger than anything the Haganah or anyone else could put forward. Nobody's hands were clean in those days

I sometimes ask "just-critics" what they think would have happened to the Jews if they'd lost in 1948 (or 67 or 73). Without fail, they get mad and dodge the question - or straight-up assert all the Zio colonizers would have deserved it and still do.

There can be no judgment of 1948 that leaves out Hebron 1929, leaves out Evian 1938, Husseini and Qaukji allying with Nazi Germany, "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre that will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades." Europe still keeping the Jews in Dachau under German guards, America still keeping immigration restrictions. There would have been no refugee camps, no UNRWA, for the Jews of Palestine. They would have been exterminated down to the last baby. There can be no commemorating the Nakba without acknowledging that.

#Israel #Palestine #Palestinians #jumblr

[askcherrypie]

You should read about how the nazi party threw actual leftists in camps at the first possible moment convenient to them and how they started by using the name of ‘socialism’ to appeal to the working class. They did not want a socialist safety net for their people, they wanted perks for being Aryan. There are many things wrong with communism and socialism, comparing it to something it ISN’T really is not needed. The nazis went after people for WHO they were (ethnicity, political standing, etc) while the left goes after people for what they are DOING even if it’s misdirected (think the upper class). The left-right scale isn’t government intervention on one end and anarchy on the other. There is so much merit in what you are saying but it’s frustrating to be on your side when your political comprehension is based on ‘own the libs with their own medicine’. You end up sounding just like sheltered sjw types calling everyone fash.

You are actually preaching to the choir on this, but you're also half-wrong. The Nazis DID want a Socialist safety net - for "Aryan Germans" and no one else. Socialist programs WERE the perks.

Also, it's not "the left" that "goes after people for what they are doing", it's both sets of extremes that do that. The Nazis in the 1930s were doing the same things to society that we see "progressives" doing in the modern day: demanding prohibitions on "harmful" expressions in all forms of media, while using violence in the streets and abusing authority wherever they can seize it to push their particular crusades forward.

[applegameisprollytaken]

Welcome to... I dunno, some bullshit? Look, I mostly am making this to do some shameless self promotion, and explain some gimmicks.

Let's start with the side blogs

@the-forgotten-god-of-spite

This is Eivel, an OC who, as the url suggests, is the forgotten god of spite. He is, despite barely being at a tenth of his former power, more powerful than some gods.

Then we have @plushiemonstervoid

This lil baby man is a OC known as Monster apples (the naming conventions will be explained after the side blogs). He is a he/they babyboy who exists only to be optimistic and eldritch. Did I mention he eats people's souls and absorbs their personalities? He is the wholesome one, in case it wasn't obvious

Then, @the-fort-official

This is all the other OC's I have made. Some have their own blogs, but 99% are there. It's basically a shared account between most of my OC's, or at least the ones who live in the F.O.R.T.. (send an ask asking for one from... well, basically any fictional universe, and you will probably meet a citizen. But watch out!)

Also: @themothtoyourflame

One of the fine citizens of the F.O.R.T. actually managed to get a date. With mothman, but still. He got his own account. Sadly, mothman-fucker apples still has to use the f.o.r.t. account

@game-overkill...

Well, let's just say, in some alternate timelines, the villains decide to stop pulling punches. So everyone dies. Almost, that is. One survived. One escaped. And is doing a AMA!

@appledoawrite

My rant blog has become a writing blog. See the blogs pinned post for more, because I'm tired of writing. Go there for fanfics and also sometimes saying things about my different characters.

@projectb-33

The text Beekeeper. He sure is a guy. Too bad he barely knows anything about himself, is a kleptomaniac, and in denial of being gay. Oh, also, he is very not ok. Because I like him as a character

@appledoamisc

Music? Animations? Fanart? You want it, we got it. As long as you have enough reblogs!

The context bits for lore and stuff:

The fort is a base of operations for all the variations of apples from across the multiverse. They took over a whole universe just to build it

Naming conventions: most versions are named after where they are from, or their gimmick, as most are named some variation of Nicolas, or apples (if the former, then will probably have a nickname regarding the latter). Examples: bioshock apples, crusader apples, monster apples, looper apples, prime apples, ect

The multiverse I go with is a bit complicated, but the barest of bones is that all fiction is a alternate universe, and there are "teirs" of multiverse, which is basically a bunch of bubbles that get harder and harder to travel between.

There is a void. It tends to mix whatever gets thrown in and spit out amalgamations. Or, if you have enough plot armor, make your own nemesis (see prime apples and evil apples)

There are villains, and they might be hunted towards. Sadly, they are not interested in talking to you. Exept the seduction twins, but I try to keep this place at least mostly sfw, so... no.

More to be added when I remember

SIDE BLOGS ARE ASK FOCUSED. IF NOBODY SENDS ASKS, NOBODY GETS TO SEE THE LORE I WORKED SO HARD ON

The obligatory dni's:

Transphobes, homophobes, radfems, terfs, nazis, racists, Karen's, creeps, weirdos, and other unsavory persons. (If you think a specific type of person is worse for one of their attributes, then you probably are not allowed.)

Sadly, nobody cares about the lore, so... enjoy seeing all the random posts that gave my brain the happy chemicals

#introduction #applegameisprollytaken #idk add tags or something plz

[dark-side-blog3]

From "Phantom Blood" to "Stone Ocean", which JJBA part do you think would be the best to be isekai'd into, and which one would be the worst?

Thanks for sending in the question anon! I've been thinking about it all day and going down a bunch of historical rabbitholes to make my choices (which, after typing out several hours later, I realized wouldn't be much fun for anyone to read).

For me personally, I’d say the best one to be isekai’d into would be Diamond is Unbreakable (part 4), and I think the worst one would be Battle Tendency (part 2).

I give my reasoning below, with some heavy editing, which may make it sound a bit strange. I have a tendency to talk too much, so I've tried to edit it down. It's still a bit long.

++++++++++++++

I can't see any benefit to phantom blood, considering Dio is at full overpower with abilities we never see again in other parts, and everyone else would simply be too easy to force into backing off. Johnathan is easy to manipulate, so is a young Erina. Speedwagon can settle for less than he wants in a relationship if he feels Johnathan will judge him for it. And Zeppeli... Is kinda the only threat, but I can't really fathom what a relationship (platonic or romantic) would be like with him. In any case, not the best, but not the worst.

Battle Tendency has my ass beat. I do not run, I will not run, and what would even be the point when more than half the characters in this arc are superhuman/cyborgs? I can't outwit, lie, cheat, or gross out any of them and expect to survive. Even the ones that wouldn't kill me like Suzie Q just have an impenetrable state of delusion. I cannot win this one. Having a horrible time here. Dare I say, the worst time actually.

Because yes: Vento Aureo is all about the mafia having superpowers, and it's well established that they can be some crazy, creative fucks when it comes to torture and murder. And they should be the absolute worst, because organized crime can do way scarier shit than anyone can in Stone Ocean simply because resources and time aren't hard to get.

BUT! I think since there isn't a world war going on, with cyborg Nazis-- Which is a low bar, but such is life when you overthink-- is what makes Vento Aureo better than battle tendency.

And Stone Ocean is... Bad but tolerable. I'd just try my best to mind my own business, and crumple like a paper ball when someone pulls possessive/obsessive shit. It probably wouldn't even connect in my brain the characters are acting yandere, I would just assume they're doing standard prison things since I got isekai'd into the prison arc.

Now that narrows done the best choices between prt 3, and prt 4.

I'mma go ahead and say it: I'd prefer a small town in Japan to crossing countries and continents.

Diamond is Unbreakable has it all. Modern-ish technology, the original pop culture yandere herself, reliable access to medical care (good luck finding my very specific pills in the middle of a desert), and thankfully: A much smaller cast. Keeping track of all the characters in Morioh? Infinitely easier than keeping track of all the characters in Stardust Crusader. Even if we're including those one-off villains, and random background characters, a-la those twisted wonderland isekai.

Though considering JJBA is a franchise that's mostly manga and anime, it's not likely the multiple characters would become interested in the isekai'd victim, since the mechanics would be fundamentally different. A reader or a viewer isn't really a god, they're more of a prophet, if even that. Or just really good at cold reading someones personality. To continue this tangent just a smidge more, I think if you said you got isekai'd, the only people who would both understand what you're saying and believe you is Toshikazu, and maybe Koichi.

What the hell am I supposed to do being dragged place to place, or sitting in a house for three months? With the tech from the 1980's?

#would you rather ask game #ask game #yandere ask game #yandere jjba #yandere jojo's bizarre adventure #yandere jojo

[frasier-crane-style]

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Might as well give this a shot. I'll liveblog at half an hour intervals, starting with the opening.

-It's not all bad, but it's pretty clear the magic is gone. Deaged Indy always lands somewhere between a Tintin character and that bit in Skyfall where Daniel Craig's head was pasted onto a stuntman's body. It doesn't help that the director tries to cover for the CGI by drowning the sequence in murky darkness.

-There's also a bad start-and-stop quality to the action that keeps it from ever seeming to kick into high gear. There'll be a brief burst of action, then Indy sneaks around for a bit, brief burst of action, EXPOSITION DUMP, Indy sneaking around a bit. So it doesn't feel like things are escalating, more like you're playing MGS and you manage to hide for thirty seconds so the alert is canceled and you go back to just wandering around. There's even a part where the guards pull an alarm and it only sounds in one part of the train--Indy's able to just mosey along through another boxcar. What's the point of that alarm? To tell everyone in a ten-foot radius that there's trouble?

-Credit, they actually come up with some good set-ups in this... Indy hotwires a car that is immediately boarded by Nazi higher-ups who think he's their driver and Indy is about to be hung when an Allied bomb lands in the middle of the room to take things from bad to worse (missed opportunity: he should've been standing on the stool when the bomb hits, taking out the floor, so he goes from out of the frying pan into the fire instead of from being strangled to being strangled). The problem is the pay-offs just aren't there. Indy doesn't come up with a clever way out of his problems, he just gets lucky. Hell, I'd settle for a decent quip like "No ticket!"

-Indy gets lucky so many times in this, to the point where you might think it's a superpower a la Longshot. Let's count 'em off.

The bomb kills all the Nazis who are hanging him.

The beam that he's being hung from breaks.

An AA gun on the train is hit by a bomb and goes haywire, taking out all the Nazis pursuing Indy.

Voller is knocked off the train by a signal post thing when he has Indy dead to rights.

A bomb knocks out the train track, crashing the treasure train in a way that leaves all the artifacts intact.

Indy does nothing to affect the outcome of any of these, he just has plot armor an inch thick.

-I know the opening of an Indy movie is a bit early for the supernatural to kick in, but there's a weird bit where the Nazis are after the Lance of Longinus, but it's both powerless and a fake. These are our antagonists? Indy could've stayed home and it would've changed nothing.

-And you have to compare this to the opening of Last Crusade, which was real people on a real set doing real stuff, as opposed to this, which is a CGI effect on a soundstage, not doing anything as memorable or original as River Phoenix did.

Speaking of good set-ups, you're saying this is a train full of looted historical treasures... why not have every train car have some crazy artifact inside it that complicates things? Like Indy runs through a boxcar and it's full of Greek statues and he has to avoid getting crushed by them and he knocks one over to squash a Nazi and one falls over and it breaks through the wall and he uses that in some way? Wouldn't that be tons of fun?

But this is just anemic 'running from the top of one boxcar to another boxcar' stuff. All the advances in special effects technology since Last Crusade came out and yet there's way less spectacle. Even the train derailing at the end is an anticlimax.

#indiana jones #Youtube

[secretgamergirl]

Fascists getting impressively bold in asserting their alternate take on reality, example number some big number.

So when I looked at my phone today, I saw an alert pop up about a Times of London article about Judy Blume, and mostly it got me really concerned about what the hell installed itself on my phone without my consent that’s pulling headlines from some transphobic rag, but the short version is they ran a story about Blume being this full-throated supporter of J.K. Rowling’s horrific transphobia, which is just complete fiction, and she’s been spending the day running damage control with statements like these:

I’m going to circle back around to this, but on the off chance people follow me here who aren’t up to speed on this sort of propaganda, it’s been going on for quite a long time, particularly in this specific context of fascists completely fabricating stories about other authors supporting their uh... genocidal ambitions.

This sort of thing happens literally all the time. More often than not it happens with people who have been dead for decades or centuries so there’s more plausibility on going “well who’s really to say what this person would have thought about trans people? (Besides us, saying they’d be in favor of total extermination.) There wasn’t even a concept of trans people anywhere in the world before let’s say last Tuesday after all!” And like, they’ll do this with famous historical trans people. Like bigots were on this huge crusade to claim Dr. James Barry as a would-be supporter. Look him up.

They’ve been getting bolder with it though. Especially when it comes to beloved authors. Like, literally RIGHT after Terry Prachett died, a bunch of Nazi ghouls immediately started in on this weird campaign to claim him as a supporter. It uh, made a few headlines. Specifically it made a few headlines because he was very actively and vocally in support of trans people, as could be seen in books he’s written, the testimony of his family friends and coworkers, and you know, countless trans people he’d interacted with.

So then they started trying to pull this with authors who don’t quite have such a public history to be thrown back at them, and started getting really bold, claiming people who are still alive. Mostly just kinda trying to bait people with weird loaded questions like “hey, did you hear J.K. Rowling has tons of people bullying her lately, isn’t that messed up?” at the likes of Stephen King and Phil Pullman, who responded like you do when someone says that that hey, it’s not cool to bully people” and tada, here’s our headlines. Of course they PRETTY QUICKLY became aware that in this context “bullying” means “publishing factual accounts in the public record about her heavy involvement in a fascist collective with genocidal aims towards trans people” and walked that the hell back.

That sort of one-day-confusion from white guys in their 70s who haven’t been paying much attention to civil rights issues and absurd internet nazis is the closest these people can really get to a “win” here, and still aren’t really the best possible gets, so what about going with still living but probably not all that up with the times feminist writers? Like hey, what about Margaret Atwood? This sort of bigot’s all about calling cis women who don’t actively hate trans women “handmaidens” as a reference to her book, which they definitely read and understood, so that should work out, right? Not so much.

They had a similar strike out with Ursula LeGuin a while back. I don’t think they’ve quite been stupid enough to try and claim Madeleine L’Engle while her book with the non-binary angelic beings are helping kids fight against fascism was being made into a movie, but eventually they decided to come for Judy Blume, because... that makes sense when you’re this far removed from a reality.

So... those quotes above? Those aren’t things I went and dug up on my own. Those are straight off her social media feed, because she’s straight up furious bigots are trying to put words in her mouth on a topic she’s pretty clear about. And if you look at the responses those statements are garnering, it is some grade A cultist reality denial:

I could keep going with this, but, you know, these are intertwined with people shouting just utterly horrific hate speech at her and I don’t want to keep wading through hat sort of sewage just to find even more people directly replying to someone saying “I completely abhor your disgusting hate movement and have made my stance on this clear for years” with “no you don’t! You secretly agree with us! You’re just backpedalling in these... statements that don’t at all work with the timeline I’m using to cope!”

I don’t really have a greater point beyond demonstrating how just COMPLETELY GONE these people are, unwilling in any way to accept the truth of the world around them, that no, people don’t in fact agree with their hateful rhetoric, and no, children’s authors who right about being yourself do not, in fact, want children to be abducted and tortured until they act in a way complete monsters would prefer. Also a lot of them have carte blanche to print straight up lies in newspapers and use that pretty regularly.

#transphobia #JK Rowling #judy blume #cultists #propaganda

[kainisticinstincts]

Let me tell you a little something. A bit of wisdom. You know those Alt-right Christian guys who act like Crusaders reclaiming the holy land from the Jews? The Mecha Tankie "Patriotic socialist" guys who say that modern russia and donald trump are left wing revolutionaries? The weird Monarchist "Christ, Aristocracy and Virtue." Guys on places like here and r/monarchism? The schizo Hyperborea pagan neo-nazi guys who talk about the great aryan spirit?

Let me let you into a little something.

They don't actually believe in anything. It's all aesthetic to them. They don't actually think about how these things tend to work out. They just want something to believe in that looks cool. Let me tell you how it goes.

Capitalism and Patriarchy grinds down upon the souls of boys and young men. The expectations of fulfilling ideal masculinity and being wealthy breaks them down. I can attest to this personally. Young men start wanting freedom and to stand out but they don't know who to blame or what to do. Instead of doing something healthy like cooking or watching mob psycho 100 and vinland saga or going to the gym they become addicted to niche ideologies and aesthetics.

They become attracted to the aesthetic of crusaders or the aesthetic of communism or the aesthetic of monarchy or the aesthetic of being schizo. It's also part of why they virtue signal about traditional masculinity and bodybuilding so much. They want to feel masculine.

I'm not blaming young men for having an identity crisis and becoming radicalized. I honestly blame the adults that feed them pseudo intellectual bullshit that sounds legit that feeds into their aesthetic. I just don't see a lot of 40 year olds who voted reagan posting groyper memes and chud wojaks while religiously watching nick fuentes or being radicalized because of bridget from guilty gear.

This applies to both minorities and white people. There's this fascist columbian latino guy on twitter who i constantly think about who RPs as a white nietszchean traditional hellenist who worships Zeus and aristocracy and hates jews and christ for being not masculine enough and there's this British Fascist guys who RPs as a japanese imperialist fascist shintoist for some reason and i think both are like this for the same reason.

#Wish these people watched mob psycho 100 or devilman crybaby or vinland saga #that should get them to understand that others have feelings #Anyways #I finally got to Qatar after the most stressful three days of my life. I'm gonna hook myself up with my bodybuilder coach tomorrow. #Bad news is that i haven't worked out in five days so im a bit rusty and stress ate like five pounds of food. #My six months cut starts tomorrow after eating some delicious argentine steak

[jackheathwriter]

There's a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indi (Harrison Ford) and his father (Sean Connery) are tied to chairs, having been captured by Nazis after Indi's girlfriend betrayed them.

Indi quietly asks his father, "How did you know she was a Nazi?"

His father replies, "She talks in her sleep."

Indi does a double-take.

When I first saw that movie I was about 8, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in my parents' house, way too close to their CRT television. I thought, "Nazis talk in their sleep? What an interesting piece of trivia."

I watched that movie a lot of times over the next few years. When I was about 12, and old enough to realise the idea that Nazis talk in their sleep was absurd, I interpreted the double-take differently. I thought, "Ohhh. Indi has suddenly realised his father has lost his marbles."

It's been more than 20 years since I've seen that movie, but having watched it over and over back when my brain was still spongy and malleable, I don't need to see it again. I can watch a highlight reel in my head whenever I feel like it (although while fact-checking this piece I noticed that Ford and Connery weren't tied to chairs, as I remembered). This scene popped into my head recently, and I finally, finally, understood why Indi was so startled.

It made me laugh.

I'm sharing this story because I've been thinking about how many metrics are involved in the consumption of art these days. When Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out, there weren't many ways of measuring its success - just the number of dollars it earned at the box office, the quality of the reviews in the newspapers, and the number of Oscars it was eventually nominated for (3, winning 1). If it were made now, the distributor could track not only how many people watched it, but at exactly what point viewers were most likely to stop watching, which scenes got paused and replayed, and how likely viewers were to tell their friends about it on social media. All this extra data seems like it should help filmmakers tell better stories.

But how do you track which jokes will make people laugh, when they're thinking about it 20 years later?

You don't, I guess. Algorithms can track your behaviour, but they can't actually spy on your thoughts (yet). So, creators optimise for the data they do have. This creates an incentive to tell stories which keep people watching, listening and sharing, but which are quickly forgotten. Engaging, but evaporative. I'm sure there are many reasons for the effervescence of contemporary film and television (the sheer amount of content, pressure to compete with social media, the fact that 45% of us are watching our phones and our TVs at the same time) but this is definitely one piece of the puzzle.

I don't have Spielberg's genius, but I am lucky enough to be working in a medium that isn't quite so quantifiable (although that is changing). This means I'm free to tell the stories I think readers will remember for years to come, even if I have no way of telling whether my instincts are right.

 Speaking of which...

In 2014 I wrote a book called Scream: The Human Flytrap.

It was translated into French, adapted for audio, and spawned three sequels. And now, ten years on, it's about to be re-published.

Warning: the book was intended for kids and teens, but when I asked my publisher how scary I could make it, her response boiled down to "as scary as you want, so long as there's no sex or drugs in it." I took her at her word, and wrote a book which gave nightmares to a generation of kids, who are now deeply traumatised adults.

Preorder it from your local bookshop or below - if you dare.

#indiana jones #books #writing

[quasitsqueeries]

Kill your Primarchs

When I first heard about this I thought it was a terrible idea. I still do, but I’ve decided to have more complicated feelings about it.

Let’s talk about the idea of heroes, and Rationalism, and maybe New Atheism a bit.

So my gripe with this is to do with what the primarchs represent in Warhammer 40,000. Specifically in the 41st Milennium that is, I’m not talking about the Horus Heresy. I think this image here is an important casting off point to discussing it:

It’s got two heads but only one eye. The head facing to the right, the future, is blinded. The Aquila, and by extension the Imperium, can only look to the past. The Imperium’s whole schtick is that it’s a crumbling beaureaucratic organisation, mired in the past. Everything about the Imperium, from the beatification of genetically enhanced super-soldiers, to the religious observance of what are basically procedural documents in order to keep technology running, is geared towards the glorification of a near-forgotten and mythical past.

Before GW started resurrecting Primarchs, they and the Emperor held the status of ancient Heroes in that mythical past. The early descriptions of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy in the original Rogue Trader rulebook are really vague, as befits something that’s supposed to have happened ten thousand years before the current setting. It’s an age of myth, its heroes are long gone. This is what the great hero of the Imperium looks like in the 41st Milennium, according to the 1st edition rulebook:

I’m sorry but that’s a corpse.

Maybe you think the Traitor Legions are lying when they call him the Corpse Emperor but I really think the subtext in early Warhammer 40,000 is that the Imperium has managed to hold on to the corpses of some of their ancient heroes and interred them in machines that require an enormous investment of resources (a thousand psykers’ souls a day in the Emperor’s case) to run, in a futile exercise to cling on to the glories of the past. It’s true of the Emperor’s Golden Throne, it’s true of Roboute Guilliman’s stasis machine, and it’s true of the rumours that Lion El’ Jonson was lying somewhere under Caliban convalescing for all that time.

It’s felt like there’s been a drive among 40K fans and Games Workshop themselves to move Space Marines away from the hidebound traditionalism of the Imperium and make them more ‘genuinely’ heroic.The problem is that it’s exactly this heroism that ties them into the Imperium’s traditions. Space Marines are important to the Imperium in the same way Siegfired and other figures from Germanic myths (and Wagner’s operas) were important to the Nazis. Fascist ideology venerates heroic warrior figures to engender a culture that is comfortable with war.

When the Warhammer 40,000 lore didn’t make it clear whether these heroes of the Imperium’s past were dead or alive, but carried the subtext that they were dead, and the Imperium was wasting an enormous amount of resources on keeping them in a sort of un-life, it expressed the futility of this kind of hero-worship. If you start bringing them back, you communicate the idea that it wasn’t futile, and maybe that it was worth slaughtering all those psykers, and maybe that we should revere these bio-engineered sort-of-people as heroes.

And like, no. This is the image that’s always expressed the essence of *Space Marines* to me.

But then I started reading about Roboute Guilliman and apparently he’s the most logical, the most rational of the Primarchs, and I get the sense that in a lot of people’s minds this means he’s the most equipped to save the Imperium, whether from itself or everything outside it is unclear. But I think it’s interesting that according to this new lore he’s supposed to have woken up, seen what the Imperium’s become, and been totally apalled by it. Not by the genocide, of course, but by the fact that they’ve turned the Emperor into a god and the Primarchs into his angels. So he went and had a *conversation* with the Emperor, then turned around and started the genocide all over again, with a whole new crusade.

I’m going to talk about the 11th of September 2001 now, because it’s had consequences we’re only now starting to realise, and I think it definitely had consequences for Warhammer 40,000.

So, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and other reprobates had been doing the rounds before 2001, but their movement really found its feet in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Much of the Anglosphere and the West in general constructed an ideological divide between us and the Islamic world, where the West was civilised, rational and free, while the East was mired in superstition, religiosity and authoritarianism. In this context, a movement that characterised all religion as barbaric and anti-intellectual found itself in very fertile ground. For many people in the West, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could be dismissed not as retalliation for Western Imperialism, but as the deluded actions of religious fanatics. Rationalism and superstition were set up as ideological opponents, and rationalism was assumed to stand up for other values like liberty, intellectual freedom and human rights.

Horus Rising, the first of the Horus Heresy series, was released in 2006, the same year as Dawkins’ The God Delusion and the year before Hitchens’ God is not Great. Not much had been written about the Great Crusade or the Horus Heresy before this, and the idea that the Crusade had been an attempt by the Emperor to spread the light of reason into the galaxy first appeared in the lore at this point. In hindsight it’s pretty hard not to see this as a response to the post September 11 environment.

So, where the Space Marines of 1st editionhad been a bunch of psychopaths given genetic engineering and combat drugs, by 2006 you had the idea that their original function had been a sort of idealistic rationalism that was to make the galaxy a better place without religion, but that maybe some of them had fallen into superstition since then. Since then there’s maybe been a growing sense that Space Marines don’t really believe that the Emperor is a god and consider all of this a bit embarrassing.

So then you get a guy who’s been brought back to life, who was there with the Emperor during the crusade, he’s the one son who most embodies the Rationalist ideology that Games Workshop decided would drive the Great Crusade when the zeitgeist of the early 2000s taught that that ideology would lead to all good things.

And the reason he’s shocked by what the Imperium’s become isn’t because they sacrifice a thousand psykers a day to feed the Golden Throne, or because of the constant expansionist wars, or the genocide, it’s because they’re a bit religious about it.

And this is why my feelings about it are complicated. We’ve all been a bit concerned about whether Warhammer 40,000 is satire since Games Workshop released that statement, but I think this is good satire, and I don’t think they meant to do it. Christopher Hitchens, the poster boy of rationalism, supported the invasion of Iraq, he supported torturing prisoners until he tried water boarding for himself. In many ways the rationalism of the New Atheist movement was nothing more than a justification for Western Imperialism, and I think it’s interesting what Robout Guilliman’s rationalist genocide in the 41st Milennium has to say about that.

#warhammer 40000 #warhammer 40k #space marines #adeptus astartes #new atheism