#quasi-blindly

[jxjumuzvn]

Big booby girl showing her assests Beautiful young blonde Liz Rainbow doing a hot striptease live on the webcam Big ass chick Angela Steel receives hardcore ass fuck outdoors Thick white girl rides bbc until creampie Yoga instructor gets fucked by one of her students Fodendo a filha da vizinha novinha loira Tesuda do caralho bucetuda Doggy Style with Hot Latina Thick Ass Katrina Moreno like to do blowjob and fuck hard Lovable lesbian teenies get splashed with piss and splash wet vulvas Smooth Twink Rides Big cock and get ass creampie

#unhealthsome #crating #crown-scab #clearly #gon #sweeps #quasi-blindly #underroom #confrontationism #turacou #handline #marshmallows #undetracting #inversion #counteragitation #zygophyceous #ionospherically #normalacy #xenocyst #preaccounting

[rosewaterandivy]

hiraeth

Summary: hiraeth - a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. It is likened to a homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed.

Pairing: Steve Harrington x fem!reader, if you squint (it's really more of a character study)

WC: 693

Warnings/Themes: 18 +, MINORS DNI. Graphic depictions of violence and sex. Psychological horror/trauma, memory loss, body horror, dark and sacrilegious themes, and mutual corruption.

A/N: prosaic idolatry, smut, horror, and the sublime. please re-read the warnings/themes section above because this is not for everyone. if you can't watch a David Cronenberg film or have issues with any of the warnings above, please move along. and before you can ask, yes, this is a quasi-winter soldier!au

Please do not interact if you aren't 18+.

Nota bene: Reblogging, commenting, and liking my work is always appreciated; reposting, however, is not.

Enjoy! 💜

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But what Robin and Dustin and the party don’t understand is this: that every war story is a love story.

Surprisingly, his sole ally in his “cock-eyed fucking disaster” of an operation is Hop.

Didn’t bat an eye when Steve calmly stated, “There’s no future for me, not without her.”

Robin rolled her eyes and Dustin groaned, but Hopper gave him a curt nod of ‘say no more.’ Left with a promise to work his contacts, to see what could be done.

Which is how Steve found himself on a bustling subway platform during the afternoon rush. Was it stupid? Maybe. But he’d been around the block enough times to know the odds - he was made into a soldier and then a weapon for fuck’s sake, not like someone was going to get a drop on him.

The train has gotten crowded, typical for New York— nothing out of the ordinary. Steve attempted to give the little space that he could to an elderly woman and the young mother to his left. Someone behind him was pressed so close that—

It was you, he was sure of it.

But how could he be? Nothing ever came from Hop working his contacts and Robs flat out refused to be of any help at all.

He saw your hand, still delicate and unblemished despite it all, drift past his hip and your other hand grasp the pole to his right. He couldn’t help it: he reached down blindly and laced your fingers with his. He felt your breath on his neck, warm and soft pressed against him— close enough to kiss if he’d just turned his head.

“I looked for you,” Steve murmured over his shoulder. “I looked everywhere for you.”

Your mouth was pressed against the curve of his neck. “I know,” you said. “I was watching. I wanted to see how you were.”

“Turns out,” you continue, lips softly brushing against his skin. “I’m not the only one. I thought you were maybe with that girl, Buckley,” and Steve jerked helplessly but before he could say anything, you continued, “No, I know. But she’s relentless, that one. She won’t let me get near you.”

Steve tucked his head at that, not wanting anyone to see his reaction, not even you. Unfettered, you go on: “I thought maybe she was watching you the way I was, like she was in love with you. But now I know she has her own reasons.”

“It’s you,” Steve admits. “They want you. They want to— I don’t know, reprogram you.” He let the words fall from his mouth. “Reintegrate. Debrief. Think there’s a job offer in it for ya.”

“Work,” you scoff. “Kill is more likely.”

Steve swallowed down the acid working it’s way up his throat. He knew you well enough to hear the hesitation, the reluctance in your voice when you say, “I would if, if you—,”

“No, no,” Steve said through gritted teeth, and then: “You know that’s the last thing I’d want.”

A whisper of a smile against his neck, skin prickling at the familiarity. “Yeah, I’ve got your number punk.” You let go of his hand and a moment later, Steve feels a paper brush against his fingers and grasps it. “It’s no longer a ten minute window,” you say. “It’s a four minute window. I’d be flattered if it wasn’t so damn irritating. But it’s the hand we’ve been dealt.”

The subway car slows down, people start to crowd close to the doors. Your hand slips from his view, ready to disappear before his very eyes.

“Read your paper,” you advise. “Paper confounds them.” You pull away from Steve and exit the car, melting into the crowd as if you were never there at all. A selfish part of him envied that neat trick you’d honed and perfected over the years.

A specter and a soldier.

He found himself wondering what it feels like to be a ghost.

#steve harrington #steve harrington x reader #steve harrington x you #steve harrington fanfiction #crawl til dawn #Spotify

[racefortheironthrone]

Can we have your analysis of NY governors since Rockefeller like you did with the NYC mayors.

That's a bit trickier, but sure! (Interesting choice of starting point. No Al Smith, no FDR, no Lehman, no Dewey - that's a lot of famous NY governors out of the picture.)

Governors below the cut, because this one is going to run long.

Nelson Rockefeller (1959-1973):

Certainly a politically successful governor - the man won four elections in a row! - Rockefeller was the last of his kind, the quasi-liberal Northeastern Republican to which he gave his name. At the same time, when you dig into his record, there is as much to be ashamed of as to be proud of.

In the interests of fairness, let's disuss the positives first: Rockefeller believed in taxing and spending on a grand scale, whether that was for public works, state parks, state aid to education (SUNY grew sixfold during his tenure), low-income housing, pensions for public sector workers, mass transit, or Medicaid. On non-spending issues, Rocky was an early supporter of abortion rights, state-level civil rights legislation, the ERA, environmental conservation, and a state-level minimum wage.

When it came to the monuments that he hoped would become his legacy, Rockefeller liked to build big. Unfortunately, when it comes to the negatives of his governorship, they are of a similar scale. Chiefly, the problem was that Rocky was a pretty consistent "law and order" politician - the laws that authorized "stop and frisk" and "no-knock" warrants were passed with his enthusiastic support, state police payrolls and budgets balooned in size, and he was a consistent supporter of the death penalty pretty much until the end.

But when it comes to "law and order," two monuments stand taller than all the others: Attica and the drug laws.

On September 9th, 1971, over a thousand incarcerated men (overwhelmingly men of color) seized control of the Attica Correctional Facility in a protest over living conditions and political rights. They took 42 correctional officers and staff hostages, issued a list of 33 demands, and then negotiated for four days in good faith. Refusing to meet with the inmates and unwilling to either remove the unpopular superintendent or grant amnesty for the uprising, Rockfeller instead sent in the state police, armed corrections officers (for some ungodly reason), and the National Guard and gave them free reign.

On the morning of September 13th, troopers dropped tear gas into the main yard and then just started shooting indiscriminately. In fifteen minutes, 29 inmates were murdered - including most of the uprising's leadership, who were targeted by name for execution - and so were 10 hostages. (Often shooting blindly into the billowing clouds of tear gas with shotguns, the troopers were so undisciplined that they wounded another five corrections officers and one state trooper in friendly fire incidents.) Another 85 inmates were wounded, and hundreds and hundreds of survivors were made to strip naked, crawl through mud and shit and broken glass, and then tortured by corrections officers.

Rockefeller covered all of this up. The governor claimed that the prisoners had committed "cold-blooded killings" of all the hostages, and particularly trapped himself by claiming that the prisoners had slit the throats of the hostages - medical examiners concluded that all of the hostages were killed by law enforcement bullets. Although forced by public opinion to establish a Special Commission to investigate what had happened, Rockefeller did his level best to ensure that the truth of what happened never got out (it did eventually come out, but it took years and many couragous whistleblowers and crusading lawyers to make that happen), to ensure that not a single trooper was held criminally resppnsible, and to avoid as long as possible paying any restitution to the families of the dead, let alone the survivors.

All because he didn't want to look weak on crime.

When it comes to the Drug Laws to which he put his name, it's hard to see them as anything less than a political stunt that ruined the lives of thousands and thousands of people. Rocky had previously supported liberal treatment and social services approaches to drugs, but he wanted to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, so he did a 180 to burnish his "law and order" credentials.

Under his laws, selling as little as two ounces or merely possessing four ounces of opoids, cocaine, or marijuana would be punished with a minimum of 15 years to life and a maximum of 25 years to life. Over the decades since the enactment of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, some 150,000 people would be incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses in New York, over 90% of whom were black or Hispanic men. It took until 2009 for these laws to be dismantled.

All because he wanted to run for president.

Verdict: like Jekyll and Hyde. Both an asshole and not an asshole, depending on the issue.

Hugh Carey (1975-1982):

The first Democratic governor of New York in almost 20 years, Carey was elected in the Democratic landslide of 1974. And like a lot of "Watergate baby" Democrats (like one Joseph Robinette Biden), Carey was an odd blend of fiscal conservative and social liberal.

This applied most immediately and most significantly to his handling of New York City's Fiscal Crisis. The city was massively in debt, New York financiers were engaging in a capital strike, the President of the United States was openly hoping for NYC's financial demise in order to punish American liberalism, and the one thing everyone knew and no one wanted to admit is that someone had to pay for a bailout.

As governor, Carey did bail out NYC - but at the cost of the city not only giving the bankers everything they had demanded (public sector layoffs, wage freezes, subway fare hikes, the closure of public hospitals, libraries, and fire stations, and the end of free tuition at CUNY), but also of surrendering the city's fiscal autonomy. As quid pro quo for state funds, Carey pushed through the creation of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) to handle the city's bonds and the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB) to control the city's taxation and budgets. These two unelected bodies continued in existance for decades, and set a precedent for the state government to call the shots when it came to local NYC governance, even while NYC's economy funded the state government.

All this at the same time as Carey was cutting income, capital gains, and corporate taxes for the wealthy, creating the modern suite of tax breaks for developers, and keeping state spending below the rate of inflation. On the flip side, he did build a bunch of fancy public works like the Javits Center, Battery Park City, and the South Street Seaport to attract tourists back to NYC.

However, on social issues Carey was quite progressive. On both the death penalty and abortion rights, he stopped the state legislature from rolling back reforms forced on them by the courts. He made the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill and the provision of community-based services a signature issue - although not enough to prevent a rise in homelessness among the mentally ill. Unlike Rockefeller, he tried to do the decent thing when it came to the aftermath of the Attica Rising by pardoning the rioters. Like Rockefeller, he was in favor of environmental regulation.

Verdict: Mostly an asshole. Meeting baseline expectations for a Democrat doesn't cancel out fucking over NYC for a generation.

Mario Cuomo (1982-1994):

Writing about Cuomo the Elder is difficult, because for a generation of New Yorkers and others he represented liberal ideals and aspirations tbat were ultimately unconnected to the day-to-day business of governance. This was largely due to the way he exploded into national prominence with his "Tale of Two Cities" speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, which challenged the rosy rhetoric of Reagan's "Morning in America."

The problem is that, as governor, Mario Cuomo stressed "progressive pragmatism" and tried to straddle the line between liberal goals and business-friendly methods. As Saladin Ambar put it in American Cicero, "whereas Rockefeller oversaw a period of tremendous government expansion...Cuomo was later derided for having no big policy focus. His was an era of contraction, one of smaller progressive victories."

When we look at Cuomo's record, we see he prided himself on the "largest tax cut" in New York state history and balancing the budget through cutting spending, but also on expanding Medicaid to low-income children and pregnant women. He lowered the top income tax rate, but also increased the basic welfare grant. He trumpeted $500 million in state aid to education, but also spent $500 million to build new public prisons. He spent $850 million on environmental clean-up efforts, but $300 on paying down state debt.

Ultimately, the issue that defined Cuomo had nothing to do with economic policy or social spending - it was the death penalty. His opposition to the death penalty had cost him the mayoral election in 1977, but it won him the gubernatorial nomination in 1982 - both times in matchups against Ed Koch. As governor, he vetoed 12 different bills to restore New York's death penalty. Ultimately, it would be the issue that brought him down: running for a fourth term in 1994, Pataki attacked Cuomo for his oppositition to the death penalty. Highlighting a horrible case in which a child murder who had inexplicably been allowed to plead down to one count of manslaughter, and who then became a serial killer after serving his time in prison, Pataki hammered Cuomo as being soft on crime and the incumbent ended up winning a grand total of one county north of Yonkers (and losing Staten Island in the process).

Also, I have no patience for Cuomo's "Hamlet on the Hudson" bullshit when it came to seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 1992. If you're going to run, have the guts to say so.

Verdict: I'm not mad, I am disappoint.

George Pataki (1995-2005):

The great irony of the 1994 gubernatorial election is that Pataki would go on to reinstate the death penalty in his first year as governor - only to see the New York Court of Appeals declare it unconstitutional. Pataki prided himself on being "tough on crime," and ended up pushing through 100 laws increasing criminal penalties - which he erroneously claims caused crime rates to decrease.

When it comes to economic policy, Pataki was just as lousy as any other Republican - cutting income taxes on the rich and corporate taxes more than any other governor before him. This at the same time that he cut a million ooor people off of welfare. His commitment to the economic illogical of balanced budgets led him to propose significant spending cuts in 2003 even as New York was still wrestling with the economic fallout of 9/11, only to be overriden by the state legislature.

His social policies were somewhat better. There was a modest expansion of health care for the working poor through SCHIP, he supported gun control, he supported abortion rights, he was in favor of anti-discrimination laws to protect LGBT+ people but opposed gay marriage (which was fairly good for a Republican in the early 2000s), he did put some money into environmental programs. His education policy rather sucked - he was strongly pro-charter schools (boo) and micro-managed CUNY to get rid of remedial education.

Verdict: bit of an asshole, but less so than most Republicans.

Eliot Spitzer (2007-2008):

It's hard to find much to say about Spitzer's time as governor, because he wasn't around for very long. Elected on the basis of his reputation as a crusading Attorney General, Spitzer came into office saying that he would "change the ethics of Albany." He spent most of his brief time as governor feuding with the (corrupt and convicted if it wasn't for the Supreme Court) leadership of the state legislature. While a lot of his proposals were quite good, Spitzer's "steamroller" strategy was pretty much ineffective in getting legislation passed (hey, turns out the Johnson Treatment is bullshit) and it's hard to point to a major accomplishment of his tenure as governor. But what Spitzer is primarily remembered for is the prostitution scandal that brought him down. As someone who thinks sex work should be legal, my main issue with his behavior is that he was "a real weasel" about not wanting to use condoms and used his money to get his way. This is an occupational health and safety issue for sex workers, being able to insist on condom use and reject clients who refuse to use them is a labor rights issue for sex workers, and clients who try to use their wealth and power to undermine the autonomy of sex workers should be blacklisted.

Verdict: an incompetent and an asshole to sex workers.

David Paterson (2008-2010):

Suddenly thrust into the limelight after Spitzer's resignation, David Paterson's tenure as governor started extremely unluckily, as both he and his wife admitted to having extamarital affairs the day after his inauguration - something that wouldn't have been as big a deal if it hadn't been for the Spitzer scandal intensifying the level of media scrutiny directed at the personal morality of elected officials.

He then had two weeks to negotiate the state budget at the height of the Great Recession, which hit particularly hard due to the outsized importance of Wall Street to New York's economy and state finances. This was never going to be a good budget, but it was highly noticeable that Paterson's budget leaned heavily on spending cuts rather than using state reserves or taxing the wealthy, while providing significant tax cuts to middle-class and affluent homeowners.

This was rather surprising given Paterson's liberal roots as a former Dinkins staffer. It was similarly surprising that when Paterson was called upon to appoint someone to fill the U.S Senate seat left vacant by Hillary Clinton becoming Secretary of State, that he went with Blue Dog Kirsten Gillibrand rather than Caroline Kennedy (the leading scion of the Kennedy family in New York) or Andrew Cuomo (the heir to his father's legacy). This led to something of a feeling that Paterson was turning out to be something of a liberal in name only.

The main issue where Paterson's liberalism seems to have remained strong was gay marriage, where Paterson did something of an end-run around the deadlocked state legislature by ordering New York State agencies to recognize out of state marriage licenses from same-sex couples. While successful in his efforts, this didn't help Paterson win support within the state legislature for a statutory legalization of gay marriage, and the bill went down to a 38-24 defeat in the State Senate.

Ultimately, however, I think Paterson's tenure as governor was hamstrung by the deadlock in the State Senate, which was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans with no lieutenant governor to break the tie (thanks to some truly stupid decisions by state courts on the issue). While most of the chaos had to do with two truly appalling conservative Democrats going over to the Republican side in exchange for personal considerations and wasn't really Paterson's fault, it did prevent him from achieving many legislative wins ahead of the primary election in 2010 - although two late-breaking scandals really did the fatal damage to his further political hopes.

One unanswered question is to what extent Paterson was knifed by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, either/both in revenge for being overlooked for the U.S Senate and/or to clear the way for Cuomo's 2010 primary run for governor. After all, it was Cuomo who was handling the investigations into Paterson, who torpedoed Paterson's attempt to end the Senate crisis by appointing a new lieutenant governor, and presumably Cuomo who lobbied Obama to persuade Paterson to drop out. Moreover, given Cuomo's later penchant for conservative Democrats enabling Republican control of the State Senate, it's hard to avoid conspiracy theorizing that he had something to do with Monserrate and Espada's parliamentary coup.

Verdict: while Paterson was dealt the worst possible hand when he became governor, he played it badly. Kind of an asshole.

Andrew Cuomo (2011-2021):

In the interests of full disclosure, it's going to be very difficult for me to be objective about Andrew Cuomo since I was involved in several efforts to defeat him for public office and I personally loathe the man. So I'm going to try to focus as much as possible on what he did as governor of New York, because hopefully the focus on concrete actions will keep me from going off the rails.

I think the first thing to start with is that Cuomo deliberately undermined Democratic governance of the state of New York by engineering the formation of the Independent Democratic Conference, a group of conservative Democratic state senator who handed back control of the State Senate to the Republicans after Democrats won control of that chamber in the 2012 election.

Cuomo betrayed his own party and the policy agenda he nominally supported and had run for office on because he didn't want to be pressured by the left wing of the Democratic Party on progressive priorities and preferred to cut "moderate compromises" with the Republican leadership. Cuomo maintained this unholy coalition until it became a stumbling block to his hopes of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, at which point he terminated it just before the IDC's members were swept out of office by an enraged electorate.

As baseline expectations for Democratic elected officials go, I feel that supporting Democratic control of government and opposing conspiracies to hand over control of government to the Republican Party is about the minimum.

The second thing to understand about Cuomo is that while he has a long list of seemingly progressive accomplishments - gay marriage, gun control, marijuana legalization, paid family leave, and a $15 minimum wage, etc. - virtually all of them are cases in which actual progressive groups and elected officials had been pushing for years, where Cuomo had blocked their efforts either through executive inaction or outright opposition to legislation, and where he eventually took credit for compromise measures that repeatedly turned out to have regressive stings in the tail that made them much weaker.

And all of that is before he was brought down by his own manifest corruption, his total incompetence on COVID despite becoming a media darling on the issue, and his long history of sexual harassment and assault.

Verdict: the biggest asshole in New York political history.

Kathy Hochul (2021-present):

Normally, there wouldn't be much to say about a brand-new governor who was unexpectedly elevated to office by their predecessor's resignation in disgrace. For a good while, all that Hochul seemed to aspire to be was "not Andrew Cuomo" - not a bully, not a misogynist, willing to listen to everybody.

More recently, we've learned a bit more who Hochul is through how she's chosen to spend her political capital. In all but one case - building more affordable housing in suburban upstate New York - Hochul has shown herself to be a relentlessly conservative Democrat, who's willing to spend political capital in order to dismantle bail reform or try to get a conservative judge appointed to the Court of Appeal or appoint a Republican to lead the public power utility.

Except the problem for Hochul in her attempt to be Andrew Cuomo but without the misogyny is that Democrats control both houses of the legislature now, and the legislature from the leadership to the rank-and-file is no longer subservient to the governor as they were under Cuomo. When Hochul put up LaSalle for the Court of Appeals, she was repeatedly humiliated by getting stomped in committee and floor votes. When Hochul tried to appoint Justin Driscoll to the New York Power Authority, he was defeated too. And sadly, when Hochul tried to get her housing proposal by including it in the budget, suburban legislators stripped it out.

That's kind of the problem with Hochul: she's not very good when it comes to the core skills of a politician. She's not good at reading the room, otherwise she never would have nominated LaSalle after labor told her that anyone but him would be acceptable. She's not good at counting votes, otherwise she wouldn't have pushed votes on LaSalle and Driscoll and the housing package that she ended up losing by lopsided margins. And she's not very good at campaigning either, otherwise she wouldn't have needed to be bailed out by the progressives at the last minute in the 2022 election.

Verdict: an asshole, but thankfully not as good at being an asshole as Cuomo was.

#history #u.s history #new york history #new york #governors #ny governor #ny governors

[gospocki]

I am often told that I am blindly guided by some things. Of course, emphasizing my religion, Islam. One person did that, and after a while, when she realized the true values, she reverted to Islam. I, firstly as a human being, secondly as a Muslim, never make fun of another religion or the way in which someone professes his religion. When you condemn, first learn the basics about something, then condemn and insult, if you have the guts to do so. The word "Muslim" means someone who has submitted to God. The word "Quran" means "Learn, read". The word "Islam" means someone who has completely given himself to peace or simply means Peace. The word "Allah" is translated from Arabic to English as "God". It is translated in Spanish as "Dios", in Russian as "Бог", in Swedish as "Gud", in German as "Gott", in Japanese as "Kami(神)", in Nigerian as "Olorun", in Serbian- Croatian-Bosnian as "Bog" and ect.

So, friends, first the basis for anything in this world, then try to condemn. The fact that someone else has been brainwashed or simply does not have the capacity to understand some things and is guided only by a modernist understanding without critical awareness, let me bypass it.

Everything that is different and strange to me, I have no right to attack and condemn. Even when it's abnormal, I approach everything with knowledge and the nicest behavior.

Unfortunately, I am witnessing a time where we can have knowledge about anything at any time, but we ignore all that and try to attack others, without any basis, following some influencers, quasi-smart people who have read a few things about a topic and expressed their opinion.

I will give an example. Feminism. As a man, I am a feminist and for full rights for women. A woman has her rights. Now you're watching me get caught and say something that shouldn't be said. No need. All people, of both genders, of all nations and religions, completely, have equal rights and they are all the same for me. The only thing that can set you apart is that you are NOT human. Inhumanity is easily shown. We see various forms of chauvinism, Nazism, debilism, misogyny, man-hating and etc. All normal and wise people approach everything as it should, but all those people whose hearts are blind, approach barbarically, too loudly, one-sidedly, without thinking, condemning, upset, disgusting.

"It is not the eyes that are blind,

but the heart."

Qur'an , 22:46 (Surah Al-Hajj)

#gospodinmangup1001 #peace #love #world #quran #islam

[nevereveraster]

[pulls out giant script] [clears throat] [starts dramatic background music] cry about it

Yeah... that's about the level of a low-tier self-narration and "clapback" attempt that I'd expect from an edgy 16yo "I know everything" high-schooler.

In eight or so years, when your critical thinking really begins to kick in and you emerge from this "coolgirl" hotdog-deepthroating desperate pickme girl stage, I'd very much enjoy being on a fly on the wall while witnessing your floundering backtracking amid all the then-emerging trans lawsuits.

Protip: when a quasi-religious belief movement, like trans, has an *ex-satanic-panic* instigator near the top of the hierarchy, it's maybe not the best idea to blindly chug the kool-aid as a bleating follower. Try researching your opinions, not regurgitating them.

Oh, wait-- you're so young and uninformed you likely have no idea what the satanic panic ideaology was or how scarily much it resembles the new trans ideaology.

The elevator pitch version is: one of the same main instigators of the transrights movement falsely claimed in the early 90s that members of a satanic cult were ritualistically sexually assaulting toddlers. People were witch hunted. Lives were destroyed. She scuttled off and then reemerged high in the trans movement right in the late 2000s - early 2010s. That's not alarming at all, though. Nosirree. That seems non-sus.

The dominoes are already starting to fall on the trans movement. The Cass report is just the beginning -- There is a reason that multiple European countries are already starting to roll back puberty blockers. There is a reason that trans clinics in Britain deliberately refused to keep records and follow patients postoperatively -- which, btdubs, makes the already-skeevy travistock look like a hack job clinic. If a specialty nephrology clinic refused to follow kidney transplant patients postoperatively, they'd be shut down almost immediately and investigated by a government body.

But hey, I look forward to your belated horrified realization that you blindly helped perpetuate a medical scandal unseen since lobotomies were going out of fashion. My own realization in 2021 left me in tears for weeks.

Let's hope that you'll not be one of the droves of people acting as though you never supported experimental surgeries that can leave patients with pain so severe they request euthanasia, much like the droves of people who suddenly started disavowing lobotomies after egging that fiasco on, or the droves of people who disavowed the satanic panic after egging it on. But I have my doubts.

You're cute, kid. I'm serious when I say I pity you for what's coming to your noggin. It's a hell of a realization to grapple with the fact that you enthusiastically supported people harming themselves in the name of "acceptance" and "affirmation" -- no different than if we suddenly started "accepting" and "affirming" anorexic teenage girls by giving them gastric bypass so their outsides matched their insides.

After all, I was a firm trans rights activist from 2006-2021, at which point I finally had been abused and mistreated by enough transwomen, and I had finally seen enough trans people around me have surgeries that destroyed their lives and bodies even though they smiled and pretended everything was fine, that I started asking questions.

Check out Venus Envy sometime. It was a webcomic written by a transwoman who was True Trans, no ROGD, had been claiming to be a girl since 4 or 5.

... he's been detrans for years and won't talk about it now.

Also, you may want to look at what happens with trans end-life and elder care. (It's super awkward when a trans person gets alzheimer's or dementia and then starts screaming and panicking and becoming violent because they don't know what happened to their penis and they want to hurt their caregivers for what has been done to their body.)

But sure. You sure showed me, child who has barely begun to accrue life experience. Truly, you wound me and I doth bleed.

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Reviews Black Lagoon Fanfiction: BigCountry75's Redneck of Roanapur

This one was recommended to me by a dude on the Black Lagoon subreddit, and I clicked on it somewhat reluctantly. It started well enough, I flipped through a few later chapters and it was pretty cool, but it's 288K words, folks. Moby fucking Dick is 209K words. And while it's true that many, many fics are longer than Moby Dick, or indeed most officially published works, there was just something about it. I was reluctant to read an OC-centric Black Lagoon fic, though, because new-guy-comes-into-town-and-fucks-shit-up rarely works in BGC fanfic, so why should it work in this case?

I needn't have worried. Redneck of Roanapur is well-written, fairly competently characterized, and like Bullets, my previous review, relentlessly fun. Reading it over the past two weeks on-and-off has been a fairly good experience, and, too, an exercise in how (in my eyes) to make a fic defined by one Cool Original Character really work.

In that light, if I want to talk about RoR, I have to talk about its main character, a dude from the boonies of Michigan known as Country. No, really, that's the name he gets, nothing else. And, well... okay, the one thing that might sink this fic for you is that when it's told from his first-person perspective, his, uh, accent is written down in the prose. This can be annoying at times, but in all honesty it isn't as annoying as you'd think it would be, because as far as quasi-authorial inserts go, he still describes things clearly enough to make everything work. His spelling's intentionally off, but his grammar isn't. Ergo, I can read it without being annoyed.

So: Country is an ex far-right militiaman who ditched his former comrades in True Patriotism, and in his effort to leave the country stole a goddamn WW2 B-24 and hightailed it blindly to Roanapur. Yeah. That's it. That's his backstory. He gets his hands on another WW2-era fighter plane later, too.

Okay, so compare that to other various OC-centric Lagoon fics which will not be named, ones starring ex-CIA operatives and elite soldiers with more conventionally troubled pasts and their skills mostly centering around the shooting of guns. They're cool in the loosest sense, but I find most of them incredibly boring, and the fic has to work harder to get around that more often than not. (Success is possible, but I've only seen like one guy pull it off.) Country is more interesting to me because a) his backstory is more out-there but still plausible, it's a backstory you don't see every day, and b) he has a unique set of skills that other characters in Lagoon don't have to the same extent.

I mean, think about it. Those two elements are what make an interesting Black Lagoon character in the actual franchise. Roberta with her FARC training and maid getup; Balalaika's Soviet paratrooper glory days and how far she's fallen; Ginji the yakuza who can literally deflect bullets. There's something that makes all these characters more than just ex-spooks or mercs with training. Some eccentricity. Some wackiness. Some small amount of historical grounding. Country has that, even if his backstory isn't super important. Country has his WW2-era planes, which are fun as hell to watch him and Lagoon Company use. So, he fits right in.

Anyway, Country lands in Roanapur, gets hooked up to the Lagoon Company to use the B-24 as a courier aircraft, and pretty quickly things get weird. See, not only does Country piss off the head of a non-canon crime syndicate pretty quickly in a bar fight, but said syndicate head is tied to a nameless Doctor and his equally nameless Benefactor, who are searching for guinea pigs to do immortality / resurrection experiments on. The Doctor resurrects Hansel and Gretel successfully, they escape, they wind up at the airfield Lagoon Company now occupies. So they're hanging out, raised by the team to not be total murderous monsters, and eventually they attract the attention of the Doctor and his Benefactor, who turns out to be a powerful American politician with ties to Extra Order, the Not-Executive-Outcomes PMC from the first arc of Lagoon. Pretty soon, Lagoon Company and their patrons are duking it out with that one non-canon syndicate and EO in short order, culminating in an epic battle for the fate of the city, all of which is just incredibly fun to read in its sheer paramilitaristic ultraviolence.

Anyway the fic swings between that violence and a lot of surprisingly cutesy shipping. Country falls in love with Sawyer, for one, and that doesn't feel weird, doesn't feel self-insert-y, it makes sense for how the characters are being written in that context... Rock and Revy finally get together... Shenhua and Lotton get together, which I'm kinda iffy on but what the heck... Chang and Balalaika hook up in secret... Even Eda and Dutch pair up as secret agents! So everything is very slice-of-life-y when military planning and blowing things up isn't the order of the day. Oh, and Leigharch comes back towards the end, which is great because I always liked him. In fact, I think that's the main flaw in the fic: the ending feels way too cute and tidy for something like Black Lagoon, a franchise where endings, I feel, need to be ambiguous at best and depressing as hell at worst. It undermines the fun one has reading Country and the Lagoon Company operate a bomber to blow the everloving shit out of a PMC submarine base, or drug fields, or mansions, or whatever. It's an ending that feels at once natural for the fic, but not as earned as it could be.

But beyond that, Redneck of Roanapur is a simple, long, but super-fun thrill ride. If you're looking for something silly to read over the long summer months, flip through this and enjoy yourself.

#stmpd reviews black lagoon fanfiction #black lagoon #fanfiction #fanfic rec

[hirako5hinji]

random non-contextual drabble of a conversation between aizen and shinji post!TYBW:

          Once again, that Aizen is being so forthcoming is…difficult to fathom. The tendency to overthink when it comes to this man is strong, as always. Layers upon layers of silken deception and subterfuge over the centuries has rendered Shinji unable to simply, blindly, trust in his senses anymore when it involves all that comes from Aizen. Every word, every gesture, every unspoken nuance. The urge to reexamine and carefully pore over it all, turn them around and around in his mind, mulling them over like maybe they will reveal hidden secrets if he looks hard enough. But that is also dangerous. Sometimes, the truth is as is. It is really not that deep. There are no buried depths to unearth.

               “ Yes, barely. The Quincy sure kicked our asses good. ” Shinji does not deny, because Aizen is right. Woefully unprepared and taken off guard, struck repeatedly again and again in quick succession by a shattering series of turbulences that had shaken the Gotei to its core in recent times, the biggest of which was the audacious coup d’état perpetrated by none other than this man before him. Yet he still has the gall to sit there and talk about how he was the one who saved the day (true and undeniable, for without that strength surely they would have been destroyed), but Shinji cannot help but think that a lot of those lives lost as collateral damage could also have been preserved, if this man who claimed to only want to help had done so in a way that hadn’t weakened the Gotei to the point where it was finally advantageous for the Wandenreich to attack in the first place. The resentment is real. The simmering anger, impossible to ­mask. “ Are ya seekin’ praise or credit for yer meritorious deeds? Isn’t this- ” he gestures vaguely to the quasi-pleasant surroundings of the man’s paroled residence; it is at least head and shoulders, hell, an entire torso above the black pit of despair that is Muken. “ - already a nod of recognition towards yer merciful intervention, even when ya provided it with such great reluctance? ”

          The thread of sarcasm that leaks from his tone annoys him, because the control of emotion is something he very much desires to keep a tight rein on whenever Aizen is concerned…but that is slowly unraveling too, in frustration. A weapon of war, Aizen had bitterly labeled himself, but aren’t they all? This is the type of world they exists in; fight to live or perish by the wayside, and Kyouraku had dragged Aizen out kicking and screaming to perform his duty. He pauses, takes a deep breath and holds it, counting the seconds for as long as he can until the disquiet is silently strangled out of existence, his lungs starting to burn. Then, he exhales…and breathes.

               “ …Yer right. Yer strength saved us all. I’m grateful ya fought on our side. ” And he is. He really is. There was true hopelessness and despair, the day the Wandenreich invaded. He can still taste it now, the raw acridness of smoke and fire and destruction, the sharp tang of blood and terror and wailing grief in the air. They were so close to losing it all, until Aizen’s power surged and he pulled off that spectacular act of sacrifice completely out of the left field, buying precious time for Ichigo to finish Yhwach. Even now, Shinji wonders at the other’s motive, wonders why the other chose to do what he did, even if he knows that he will likely never get a straight answer. His eyes continue to seek Aizen’s firmly, trying to read beyond what the other allows him to see. His voice…softens. “ Why couldn’t ya have chosen to do that from the start? Ya already knew that ya couldn’t convince Yamamoto, of course ya wouldn’t be foolhardy enough to seek that direct path. There are other routes; did ya even try? How could it be that yer immediate conclusion was to plan a bloody coup? What the hell were ya even thinking? ”

          Kyouraku, Ukitake. Even Unohana. The previous Soutaichou was notoriously rigid and unyielding, but even a leader would not be able to lead if his followers refused to follow. And Aizen have proven himself charismatic and strong. Inspiring, even. He had been told that the younger Shinigami had idolized him, during his tenure as Shinji’s successor and predecessor. Yet oddly enough, he steered clear of the older Captains and kept his activities low profile. “ I mean it when I say that ya’ve got no faith in yerself. I ain’t referrin’a strength and intelligence, because in those yer excessively proficient and we all know it. I’m talkin’ ‘bout yer inability to establish genuine connections with others, in a way that exposes yer vulnerability. ” All his followers were younger…and depended on him to a certain extent. Even Gin and Kaname. Even his ranks of arrancars and espadas, who were all beholden to him in a way that placed them in a lower position below him, however powerful they were independently. “ Rather than not botherin’a establish trust because ya’ve got no need for it, isn’t it more because ya’ve got no faith in yer own ability ‘ta earn trust, in a way that does not involve using yer power as a crutch or a bargaining tool? ”

          He wants to hunch up like some tortoise, defensive and protective, as if Aizen will take something of value otherwise. Tensed…but also knowing all too well that the other man is not wrong with his pointed remarks. But neither is Seireitei, at least not in the ruling that had resulted in a one-hundred-year long exile for them who have been maligned and tarred, their reputations dragged through the mud and blackened…for a sin not of their choosing. Once upon a time, he was angry. Once upon a time, he raged, and he roiled with seething hatred. He was through with it all. In denial. In bargaining. In grief. And then, finally, acceptance. The past was the past. The years have tempered his fury and smothered the helpless impotence of being abandoned by the very organization they are meant to die for, that will also leave them to die unyieldingly. But this and that, are two different things.

          Shinji glares exasperatedly at Aizen. “ Funny ya brought that up, seein’ as YOU were the whole main cause of our miseries. Ya wanna be thanked again, is that it? ” If Shinji is still disappointed in Seireitei and the Gotei, it is not because they had once been deemed dangerous and had to be exiled for their conditions. Because that was the truth. Back then, they had been out of control, completely out of their minds and irrational, driven by howling instinct and violence. Dangerous and corrupted beings entirely unknown as a new, forbidden hybrid of powerful entities. They were a high-risk peril not just to themselves, but to everyone around them. Those were all true. Until they had been stabilized, until they learned that it was possible to control the feral, corrupted entities that lurked in their souls…there was no telling if they would go berserk and destroy everything in their way until they had to be put down like rabid animals. Coming from the Gotei’s purview, Shinji understands that trepidatious reservation.

               “ I don’t disagree that Seireitei is too entrenched in tradition and unyieldin' laws…and I don’t disagree that a fresh start might be ideal…but so what? ” he scoffs, gaze still hard, voice still low. “ How will yer leadership be any better? You, who turned us against our will, you, who made use of anyone and everyone like expendable pawns just for yer own agenda. You, who could not even spare yer own allies and the innocent. A hundred years passed, and in all that time ya managed to do more harm than good to the people whom you were s'posed to look out for. Is this yer definition of a better system? Seireitei as she is now is full of monsters, true. ” 

          Because even Shinji, himself, has to become one whenever it is necessary. 

               “ But do not think, not for even a second, that yer not also one of them. ”

#||мιѕc #hirako shinji #aizen sousuke #;;drabble #[ i gotta kick this out too -> the number of drafts i have in my folder is already in the THOUSANDS -sweats- ] #[ this was supposed to be a REPLY I THINK - but it's been so long I don't remember much anymore >.> ]

[dapperdragon-ao3]

“Ralof, this might sound strange, but do you see this Nord here?” I indicated the quasi-madman.

Ralof glanced back. “Aye,” he answered, and turned to the gate again. “Damn. No way to open this from our side.”

“This is bizarre,” the Nord muttered. “I wish I could pqrmyjrvpmdpar. Pqrmyjrvpmdpar,” he repeated, the same nonsense sounds as before, and he shook his head as though shaking himself out of a dream. “Pqrmyjr- I need the vpzqiyrt. What the hell?”

For the first time since before meteors rained from the sky and a dragon destroyed the city and burned innocent citizens to unidentifiable husks, the Nord looked frightened. His hand hovered by his neck as though to massage the nonsense out of his tongue.

“Soldiers, keep moving!” called a familiar voice. The captain who’d sentenced me to death, just as the strange Nord had predicted; she came running down the hall beyond the gate.

“It’s the Imperials,” Ralof hissed. “Take cover!”

His words came too late, however. The captain spotted us while a soldier opened the cage. “It’s the escaped prisoners!”

The door opened and everyone drew their weapons.

Fear and panic drove me into the fight; while the other three combatants were seasoned soldiers, I was little more than a refugee. My skills lied in running, begging, and pretending to be less desperate than I was. But I had no other choice, and I primarily focused on keeping the sharp part of my weapon between me and the sharp parts of their weapons.

Then they were dead, and Ralof and I weren’t. It felt like a miracle.

“Maybe one of these Imperials had the key,” Ralof sighed. He put away his weapon and began to search the bodies.

“I can’t get it off,” said the strange Nord. He held his hands beside his face, and there was panic in his voice. “I can’t take it off. I can’t take it off. Hello? Hello!” He stood with his eyes shut, and shouted those last words, reaching out blindly with one hand. “Hello, is anyone home? Damn, I can’t find my walls.”

He was mad after all.

“Calm down,” I tried, approaching him. I felt responsible for him, partly because I was apparently the only person who could hear him, but chiefly just because he, Ralof, and I were stuck in the same predicament and needed to stay together. I sheathed my weapon and spread my hands wide. “Calm down, now. Listen to my voice.”

He looked at me suddenly, true fear in his eyes. He looked around himself and outstretched both arms, and inched forward as though feeling around in the dark.

Ralof said, “Here we are, found a key. Let’s see if it opens that door.”

“What’s your name?” I asked the madman.

“Finch,” he answered, still hunting for something.

“Finch, the fighting’s over. We’re safe. Take a deep breath.”

“It’s not that, Dragonborn--the jyvbrrst is stuck- the jyvbr- damn it, what’s happening to me? Can anyone hear me? Hello!”

I stepped forward and held him by the shoulders. He let out a yelp at the contact and stared at me with the purest expression of shock.

“Take a deep breath, Finch. Breathe in.”

He inhaled.

“Breathe out.”

He exhaled.

“We need to go. Follow me and Ralof.”

Finch whispered, “This isn’t real. You’re not real.”

“This is real. Come with me.” I pulled him by the wrist, and he stumbled with me to where Ralof had unlocked the door.

#wip #skyrim #wizard of helgen #excerpt

[writer59january13]

Most mind boggling mysterious mortal

Mystification prevails stupefying yours truly

befuddled, he blindly stumbles along rocky pathway illusory impediments strewn helter

skelter intangible obstructions hinder access

psychological barricades effective impasse

detains, deters, detours manhood maturation

manumission manifestation materialization linkedin, when permanent submission arises beckoning corporeal leaden entity into avast eternal realm, where material disintegration promises venerable salvation releasing angst

strummed plucked fretful existence denied

utmost exploration sequestered soul hermit tickly sealed courtesy custom made NON- GMO supercalifragilous expialidocious airtight, vacuum sealed with trademarked

matts scott good housekeeping approval

lifetime achievement award maintaining quasi pristine mint like condition afford double (FREE for the taking) full refund if dissatisfied with stutt...tut...tut tearing

functionality, yet batteries NOT required and assembly unnecessary, but maximum remaining life usage, asper garden variety mutant requires preservation within sterile bubble, lest exposure to human contact are rouse dormant (latent) propensity breeding

biologically pre programmed predilection

to propagate species, this despite low libido

level, thus Memorial sale steal (actually no expiration coincides with natural longevity) slight depreciation before cessation arises, which I project - little less than half life of

ordinary Earthling, whose quixotic, poetic, ecologic, plus conscientious ethos promises

greater fulfillment, sans spirit, mind, and

body versus being addicted, hypnotized, or tranquilized by latest technologic contraption, boot cyber surfing mendicant surrenders self.

Yours truly beckons angel of mercy or effective altruist to please intercede.

Though predominantly skeptical concerning divine intervention... crushing desperation grinds heavily kickstarting, mortgaging, pummeling

ripsnorting, unraveling, ar...wresting...

sense and sensibility...annihilating

joie de vivre exceeding Herculean powers to defy overbearing blitzkrieg, luftwaffe pounding psyche

wickedly, unbearably suffocating, helplessly choking

impossibility to gasp even one breath

lifesource within sucked dry as a bone,

hence desperation beseeching

salvation to triumph

over mailer daemon adversity

wildly analogous to aerialist

readily clasped linkedin clenching tight teammate's hands thwarting being pitched

feather head over tar heels,

whereby yours truly grasps empty air

spiralling untethered from gravity lost in space

scanning distant heavens to espy prayerful rescue courtesy winged warrior

benevolent endearing joyous miraculous celestial being

rendering genuine ambition to mend figurative fences,

with kith and kin,

where orneriness (mine) cleft

delicate whirled wide webbing,

thus me metaphorically dangling

bandied to and fro hither and yon

free falling unmoored

grudgingly surrendering mine mortality nsync with manifest destiny

regarding death be not proud of all corporeal entities

temporarily suspending atheism in limbo where faith no more steady Rock of Gibraltar (though steeply entrenched)

peering skyward gleaning any hint

to perceive inimitable otherworldly gifted helpmate

to usher deliverance, viz exaltations

experiencing unbridled affinity

toward kith and kin.

[deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022]

The Final Example of the my PhD Enquiry

Starting Date: FEBRUARY 2023

MAX 500 WORDS – Submit at this link = https://www.bcu.ac.uk/media/contact-us/contact-the-phd-admissions-team  

 Your highest academic qualification and grade/expected grade  (required):

I am currently studying an MA in Fine Art and am expecting to get a First.

 What attracted you to Birmingham City University as a potential doctoral student?:

I have studied both a BA (2:1) and an MA in Fine Art at the Margaret Street School of Art and now want to finish my education with a PhD in Art and Design. The course offers me a chance to develop my current practice ambitions and contribute to the wider contemporary art scene while supporting my independent research.

 Do you have a potential supervisor in mind for your research project?:

Theo Reeves-Evison (Art Activisms)

 What is your proposed funding model (eg. self funded)?  (required):

A Doctoral Loan from Student Finance England.

 Please provide a link to your work if applicable:

https://deoffalmaldoror.wixsite.com/deoffal-maldoror

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

I am looking to study a PhD wherein I want to write a thesis that further develops my current practice focus on the value of horror as medium within artistic and philosophical discourse. As a dark surrealism portraitist, my focus is about taking contemporary horror artistry and literature out of the occult and into the realm of mainstream discord, away from its lacklustre representation as schlock in the zeitgeist. My working title for this project is, ‘In The Sleep of Reason: A Treatise on Horror and Pessimistic Iconography’, asking, what can horror as an allegorical tool for philosophical interrogation tell us about contemporary cynicism in the post-modern era?

I founded my current focus during the peak of the Covid pandemic, wherein my alias, Deoffal Maldoror, was created as the natural reaction to living in a world that exists in unending paranoia and societal decadence. My work studies the transgressive, taboo, and occultic, and wishes to challenge the sensible and ideal as a contemporary form of artist response through pessimistic scepticism.

My literary influences are both quasi-philosophical and academic, including writers such as Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Eugene Thacker. In particular, the contemporary publications of Eugene Thacker are concerned with reading horror media, art, and speculative fiction as philosophy. For example, interpreting the works of weird fiction authors as philosophical interrogations on universal subjects, like the unknown, nothingness, nihilism and the Anthropocene. This intersects well with my primary artistic influences, Francisco De Goya, Gustave Dore, Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, Junji Ito and Suehiro Maruo, all concerned with provoking the dogmatic and conventional.

My research would primarily discuss our intrinsic psychological and evolutionary fascination with confronting the morbid, taboo and pessimistic, as best experimented within the horror medium itself. I am also concerned with debating the assumed value of this discourse as a lesser form of academic interrogation when compared to its more blindly ideal opposition. This will be done by intersecting and referencing relevant art mediums with timeless and current philosophical concepts, to both ground my work in critical theory as well as in a contemporary art context. My research would also attempt to negotiate the potential for horror media as the natural reaction to a world that is struggling with its own post-modernity and nihilism.

Pessimism is an important motif within my research, as I believe it is often disregarded because it requires us to consider alternatives and questions that have no mercy for humanity’s self-imposed significance in the face of the noumenal world. I aim to write about pessimism in a way that promotes its inevitable influence on critically important authors and artists in both contemporary and historical times. It is important for the future of discourse that doubt and cynicism as cultural criticism are still able to cut through the surface-level idealism of the status quo, for the benefit of creating deeper monologues on the Anthropocene and the human condition through the lens of an unflinching perspective.

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

It’s also important to note I have also emailed Theo Reeves-Evison ahead of the application so they can have extra awareness as to me enquiring, as featured bellow. 

[avintagekiss24]

Hi! I don't want to start anything on here and am always willing for civil conversations. At this point there's so much I've found out about Seb (besides the video he liked, the tommy lee thing, and the girlfriend thing) that I feel so guilty if I would continue to support him. I love him sm but it just doesn't look good rn. He is associated/follows an organisation (for helping veterans) that has posted a blue lives matter flag picture and who's co-founder has sexual assault allegations against him, and worked with him in 'The last full measure'. His friend Paul Walter Hauser has done blackface in the past, and when called out on it he just listed a few people that also did blackface. There's more, I found a discussion on here that I can link. I seriously don't support "cancel culture" bc I don't think it helps anyone but there are just a lot of 'mistakes' and shady people that can be linked to Seb, I wish it wouldn't be that way. I honestly don't know what to think about it anymore.

Hi! I’m also open to having civil conversations and I don’t believe you’re trying to start anything. I really do think this situation of dragging up a four year old video and taking it completely out of context is harmful not just to Black people, but to fandom/activism in general. This is gonna be long because I’m going to take your points one by one, and I want to preface this by saying that I will not answer any derogatory, sideways asks pertaining to this subject. I will delete every single one and will block your silly ass. I’m not going to argue with people who think I’m blindly supporting Sebastian because I’m just trying to get fucked by him, or people who think I hate myself and am trying to appease some white man.

So, on with the discourse!

The video he liked - this video was taken completely out of context and that is my main issue with this whole situation. It was not a video of a white man saying that he thinks he should be able to say the n word as everyone claimed it was. They were quickly debating on whether or not it's okay to say in rap lyrics. He was told no, that's not okay, that's never okay and they moved on from it. That's it. End of story. That somehow was twisted into a click bait style headline of "Sebastian Stan likes a video of a white man defending his right to say the n word" when that is absolutely not true. My other issue is that people are more upset that Sebastian liked the video than they are about the white man in the video literally saying the n word. So, do you really care about the use of the n word like you're claiming? Cuz if you do, you'd be more upset at the white man that said the word than you would be about the white man simply liking the video. Or, are you just using this as an excuse to grandstand against a white man you don't like?

The Tommy Lee thing - Sebastian Stan playing Tommy Lee does not make Sebastian Stan a bad person. Is Charlize Theron a bad person for playing Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute who started murdering men? Is Leonardo DiCaprio a bad person for playing a slave owner? Is Edward Norton a bad person for playing a nazi sympathizing racist? Actors play bad people. That doesn't mean that they themselves are bad people. 1990's Tommy Lee was a bad person, but that should have no bearing on who Sebastian Stan is or his character as a man.

The gf/Paul Walter Hauser thing - Why are we holding Sebastian accountable for what the people around him are doing? Again, why are we more upset that Sebastian is associated with people who have done questionable things than the specific people themselves? I'm not going to speak on the kimono wearing -- I'm not Asian. It's not my place to say whether or not its offensive because it's not my culture, but she posted that picture and attended that party before she started dating Sebastian, quite possibly before she even knew him. Same with Paul. I think that black face thing was long before he knew Sebastian. Now, if Sebastian was defending these actions, going around saying "I think it's okay for white women to wear Kimono's" "I think black face is fine" "I think white people should be able to say the n word" then we'd have a different story, wouldn't we? But that's not what we have, and that's not what he is doing. He is not responsible for the things his friends do or have done in the past just because he's more famous than they are, and he is not required to speak on them. Let's put it this way -- would you be comfortable having to be responsible for something a friend of yours did before you knew them? Would you want to have to be forced to answer for your friend when you yourself had nothing to do with the questionable behavior?

The organization that supports the military/blue lives matter - Sebastian cannot control what message that foundation puts out and it does not mean that he is or is not pro-police himself. There is not enough concrete evidence -- if any evidence for that matter -- that Sebastian is a blue lives matter supporter. Did Sebastian donate before they put up the blue lives matter post? Or after? I don’t know, cuz I don’t follow him that closely, but if he donates before they come out with a particular stance, that means he should be held accountable for that? I know I donated to an organization once and they turned out to support something that i’m 100% against. That means I’m a bad person because I couldn’t see into the future? Another point, how can we be certain that Sebastian saw the blue lives matter post in the first place? I know I’m not online 24 hrs a day, I miss posts all the time and I’m just an average person. I make three or four tumblr posts a day, and I’m gone. I have to play catch up on social media, and even then, I still miss stuff. So I’m sure the same happens to a working actor. As for the co-founder, I don't know who this person is and would rather not get into any allegations against them because I don't want to trigger anyone who comes across this post. If Sebastian knows about these allegations, is a willing participant/supporter of this person then yeah, that's pretty shitty, but we don't know the inner workings of this friendship/acquaintance/work relationship. We don’t know how close they are or if they even still speak.

I’m a pretty big fan of Don Cheadle. He’s a stand up guy, he’s a great actor, he’s funny, he’s political and stands up for what he believes in and in a very public way. I support him. Don Cheadle is also friends with Chris Evans, RDJ, Mark Ruffalo, and Letitia Wright (just to name a few). Chris Evans has a bipartisan forum that highlights/promotes right wing politicians, RDJ defended Chris Pratt during the whole “he’s the worst Chris in Hollywood” crap, who’s technically done black face, and who once said to a female reporter “nice tits” when she walked into the room, Mark Ruffalo just walked back his support of Palestine, and Letitia Wright retweeted/supported an anti-vaxxer/anti-trans Pastor who equated an ingredient of the covid vaccine to the devil because it contained some parts of the word Lucifer. Does that mean Don is now a bad person because he’s friends with these people? Why isn’t he getting any heat for his friendships with them? Why isn’t he being held accountable for what they’ve done and said? Oh right, because he’s not a white fave. So people don’t care one way or the other, which brings me to my next point. 

I can guarantee you that if Sebastian’s gf or Paul or this co-founder were not associated with Sebastian in any way, nobody would give a shit about her wearing a kimono, about Paul doing black face, or about the co-founder/organization being blue lives matter supporters and in that lies the actual problem. Being critical of people and their actions should be consistent and should happen all the time -- not just when they interact with your white fave. That’s when it becomes performative and looks like you just want to be able to show internet people that you follow/support/stan unproblematic celebrities, when really, you don’t care.

I think the moral of this post is that I think it's unfair to hold a complete stranger to a standard that I cannot hold myself to. I also don't view celebrities the way most teenagers/twenty somethings do, and that’s because when I entered fandom we didn't have social media, so I grew up with a wall between myself and said celebrities. There is no wall now with the presence of social media. "Fans" nowadays have a weird ownership feeling over celebrities because they can read their personal thoughts or view personal pictures and think that they have this personal quasi-friendship with them. I can't get on board with that. I prefer having the wall and I still keep the wall.

If supporting Sebastian makes you uncomfortable, then by all means, stop supporting him. Just make sure you are making this decision for yourself based on credible sources and concrete evidence and that you're not letting this fake woke activist mob make you feel uncomfortable. Internet activism means nothing unless you put your money where your mouth is in your real life and 90% of the social justice internet warriors do not. Real activism is bigger than changing your avi to a black square.

#asks #answered #sebastian stan

[thecreaturecodex]

Slaad Lord, Chourst

Image © @tredlocity​

[And we’re back! With a bit of a bang, as I am going to be posting the four slaad lords from 2e over the next couple of weeks. Ssendam and Ygorl are as old as the slaadi are, having first appeared in the 1e Fiend Folio, but Chourst and Rennbuu were introduced in Dragon Magazine in 1995. Between them, Chourst has only one canonical illustration and Rennbuu two, so there was a lot of room to work with. One thing that I hope to accomplish with these slaad lords is to make them feel appropriately chaotic, but not evil. Slaadi have always had that issue.

The biggest mechanical change between the 2e Chourst and my version has to do with the shift in cosmology. In Planescape, the plane of Limbo is filled with random assortment of all four elements and can be shaped by a strong will. Chourst causes that to all fall apart into chaos with their mere presence. Since the Maelstrom of Pathfinder doesn’t work that way, I changed it to a thematically similar aura of wild magic.]

Slaad Lord, Chourst CR 22 CN Aberration This gangly giant is a humanoid frog more than three times as tall as a man. Its skin is a yellowish white, shot through with mottled silver veins. It has blank staring eyes, long fingers and toes, and a triangular head. Strangely, it is dressed in a dapper traveler’s fashion, with cane, hat and cape.

Chourst, the Whimsical, Lord of Randomness CN agender slaad lord of randomness, exploration and antisocial behavior Domains Chaos, Destruction, Liberation, Travel Subdomains Freedom, Exploration, Slaad, Whimsy Worshipers anarchists, free-thinkers, wanderers Minions chaos beasts, grey slaadi, shoggoths Holy Symbol a triangular face looking down, with circular staring eyes Favored Weapon greatclub Obedience For one hour, do as thou will. Gain a +4 sacred bonus to saves against compulsion effects Boons: 1: hideous laughter 2/day; 2: freedom of movement 2/day; 3: wind walk 2/day

Chourst the Whimsical is a force of nature, moving like a hurricane and creating devastation in their wake. Not all of this destruction is intentional, as Chourst is as likely to pick flowers as fights. But magic warps and twists in their presence, and spells can fire out of control easily wherever they go. Chourst spends most of their existence navigating the cerulean seas of the Maelstrom, but can and does transverse the planes to go a-wandering as the whim suits them. The Lord of Randomness has many admirers among free-thinkers and the more philosophical hedonists, but they tend to admire the slaad lord at a distance.

It can be difficult to keep Chourst’s attentions long enough to engage them in prolonged combat. When traveling long distances, Chourst can and does appear in a great explosion, as much to announce their presence and gain attention as to cause damage. Their signature weapon is a cane tipped with a likeness of his own face, but their claws and fangs are deadly weapons as well. Creatures bitten by Chourst lose their ability to maintain a constant shape, and eventually collapse into chaos beasts. Chourst tends to save their bite attack for those that truly offend or annoy them.

Among the slaad lords, Chourst and Ygorl have a tenuous alliance. Ygorl approves of Chourst’s more destructive moods, and encourages them to create more chaos beasts and transport slaadi across planar boundaries. But Chourst’s attention frequently wanders from any kind of mission. Chourst is not stupid despite their lack of focus, and has impressed some protean choirs with their defense of random action as a manifestation of philosophical chaos. The only things Chourst seems to genuinely dislike are inevitables and other lawful outsiders, which they often polymorph into humiliating forms or simply kill.

Chourst is among the largest of the slaad lords, standing 22 feet tall.

Gigglestick Aura strong enchantment and evocation; CL 17th Slot none; Price 181,250 gp; Weight 40 lbs Gigglestick is Chourst’s signature weapon, a wooden cane tipped with a representation of the slaad lord’s own head. In combat, Gigglestick functions as a Huge+3 anarchic greatclub that changes size with its wielder. It also functions as a rod of wonder, except that the save DCs to avoid particular effects are DC 25, and a wielder can use its function as a rod of wonder as a swift action three times per day. Construction Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Craft Rod, Quicken Spell, creator must be chaotic, chaos hammer, confusion; Cost 90,625 gp.

Chourst                CR 22 XP 615,000 CN Huge aberration (chaos, extraplanar, slaad, slaad lord) Init +5; Senses darkvision 120 ft., detect law, detect magic, Perception +24 Aura cloak of chaos (Will DC 27), wild magic (300 ft.) Defense AC 38, touch 18, flat-footed 32 (-2 size, +5 Dex, +1 dodge, +4 deflection, +20 natural) hp 434 (28d8+308); fast healing 20 Fort +24, Ref +18, Will +26 DR 20/epic and lawful; Immune charm and compulsion effects, sonic; Resist acid 20, cold 20, electricity 20, fire 20; SR 33 Defensive Abilities fortification (50%), freedom of movement Offense Speed 40 ft., air walk Melee Gigglestick +35/+30/+25/+20 (3d8+22 plus 2d6 against non-chaotic opponents), bite +30 (2d12+6 plus corporeal instability) or 2 claws +32 (3d8+13), bite +32 (2d12+13 plus corporeal instability) Space 15 ft.; Reach 15 ft. Special Attacks explosive entrance Spell-like Abilities CL 20th, concentration +29 Constant—air walk, cloak of chaos (self only, DC 27), detect law, detect magic, freedom of movement At will—astral projection, cloudkill (DC 24), confusion (DC 23), greater dispel magic, solid fog, wind walk 3/day—quickened displacement, earthquake, fire storm (DC 27), empowered greater shout (DC 27), polymorph any object (DC 27), symbol of insanity (DC 26) 1/day—gate (DC 28), implosion (DC 28), summon slaad (CR 20 or less, 100%, 9th level), symbol of strife (DC 28) Statistics Str 36, Dex 21, Con 33, Int 19, Wis 22, Cha 28 Base Atk +21; CMB +36 (+40 disarm or trip); CMD 55 (57 vs. disarm, trip) Feats Combat Expertise, Combat Reflexes, Dodge, Empower SLA (greater shout), Greater Disarm, Greater Trip, Improved Disarm, Improved Trip, Mobility, Multiattack, Power Attack, Quicken SLA (displacement), Spring Attack, Whirlwind Attack Skills Acrobatics +26 (+30 jumping), Bluff +19, Diplomacy +19, Disguise +19, Intimidate +22, Knowledge (arcana, geography, nature, religion) +22, Knowledge (planes) +25, Perception +24, Spellcraft +25, Stealth +18, Survival +24 Languages Aklo, Common, Protean, Slaad, telepathy 100 ft. SQ change shape (animal, dragon, giant, humanoid, magical beast, shapechange), no breath, slaad lord traits Ecology Environment any land or underground (Maelstrom) Organization unique Treasure double standard (Gigglestick, other treasure) Special Abilities Corporeal Instability (Su) Claw—contact (curse); save Fort DC 35; effect amorphous body and 1d4 Wisdom drain per round (see below); cure 3 consecutive saves. The save DC is Con-based. A creature cursed with an amorphous body becomes a spongy, shapeless mass. Unless the victim manages to control the effect (see below), its shape constantly melts, flows, writhes, and boils. An affected creature is unable to hold or use any item. Clothing, armor, helmets, and rings become useless. Large items worn or carried—armor, backpacks, even shirts—hamper more than help, reducing the victim's Dexterity score by 4. Speed is reduced to 10 feet or one-quarter normal, whichever is less. The victim gains the amorphous quality, but cannot cast spells or use magic items, and it attacks blindly, unable to distinguish friend from foe (–4 penalty on attack rolls and a 50% miss chance, regardless of the attack roll). A victim can temporarily regain its own shape by taking a standard action to attempt a DC 20 Will save. A success reestablishes the creature's normal form for 1 minute. Spells that change the victim's shape (such as alter self, beast shape, elemental body, and polymorph) do not remove the curse, but hold the creature in a stable form (which might not be its own form, depending on the spell) and prevent additional Wisdom drain for the duration of the spell; shapechange and stoneskin have a similar effect. The victim takes 1d4 point of Wisdom drain from mental shock every round that it ends its turn in an amorphous shape—upon being drained to 1 Wisdom, further Wisdom drain ceases and the creature is transformed permanently into a chaos beast (no further number of saving throws can cure the condition at this time). A creature transformed into a chaos beast can only be recovered using a miracle or wish spell. Explosive Entrance (Su) Chourst can dismiss wind walk on themselves as a standard action. When they do so, they appear in an explosion, dealing 10d6 each of fire, force and sonic damage in a 40 foot radius (Reflex DC 33 half). The save DC is Charisma based. Slaad Lord Traits (Ex/Su/Sp) Chourst is a slaad lord, a powerful slaad that has assumed quasi-divine traits. A slaad lord has the following abilities:

DR 20/lawful and epic

Resist acid 20, cold 20, electricity 20, fire 20

Immune to two of the following: charm effects, compulsion effects, death effects, energy drain, fear effects, poison, petrifaction

Summon Slaadi (Sp) As a standard action once per day, a slaad lord can summon one or more slaadi constituting a CR 20 encounter. This is     the equivalent of a 9th level spell

Immortal (Ex) A slaad lord does not need to eat or drink, and cannot age.

Capable of granting followers spells, as per their cult entry above

Wild Magic Aura (Su) Any creature attempting to cast a spell or use a spell-like ability within 300 feet of Chourst must succeed a DC 33 Will save or the spell is effected by a wild magic surge. Creatures with the chaos subtype are immune to this effect. The save DC is Charisma based.

#chourst #slaad lord #slaad #D&D #pathfinder 1e #original art #tredlocity

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

What, exactly, is wrong with Baudril drives Grima wild as he shoves his head into a cold bucket of water in the pumproom, blindly groping for soap as Fegali watches from the steps, laughing.

Grima gives the boy a rude gesture. The boy laughs more.

The familiarity of Baudril’s face gives Grima pause. But more than that, it’s something he said. Which, for the life of him, Grima cannot place.

What Grima can determine, with great ease, is that Baudril is not all that he says he is. Which makes them much the same. Perhaps that is why Baudril seemed inclined to like him, aside from the fact that he was put forward by an evident friend.

One liar often knows another.

Lifting head from bucket Grima watches dirt swirl in the water. He wrings out his hair before taking up the small towel Ingrithr spared him so he can dry himself enough to prevent dripping as he troops back upstairs.

‘Not sure you look any better,’ Fegali says. ‘Still a bit wet.’

‘My head was in a bucket of frigid water not ten seconds ago, in case you missed it.’

‘I mean wet like greasy.’

‘Go away.’

Grima, continuing to have the worst luck with the tweens he runs into, no matter the AU he’s in. 

Grima is like: I came to Lake-town for a chill, no-bad-memory time and I’m feeling very attacked right now. 

Fegali, obnoxious 13 yo: WHY ARE YOU SO WET?? 

this is where wild thing becomes like a quasi political thriller? Except it’s not? idk man Baudril walked into the scene and was like “I am here to be SUPER SUS” and Grima’s little “suspicious character, I should insert myself into their life” antennae went up. 

Fegali’s here to drop sick burns until Eomer can show up to resume his duty as the character who delivers scathing insults at inappropriate times. 

Eomer just wants to fight people. It’s all that repressed energy.  

#grima wormtongue #eomer #griomer #Grima x Eomer #lotr #lord of the rings #wild thing

[incarnateirony]

Hello, um, what in the what is this...? https://m.imdb.com/title/tt15249262/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

Sorry, managed to hit send early. I found that while looking for The Winchester's info and I haven't seen anything about it elsewhere. 🤷‍♂️ Hope you're well.

Doing well, thanks. This is basically a fan project that isn't clear about it. Kripke is titled as Creator, not part of it. Like this is the douchecanoe that plays john winchester in it

He's also the project director, writer, producer, and editor, and named the "studio" for it after himself:

protip: his name is britt bankhead. Here's his stunning film history:

basically it's a fan project. he did get a few semi-legit actors on it, like people that did one off spots on shows several times that were actually like, credited, or someone who voiced a dog in a cartoon or had a small victim role in a movie somewhere, but it was basically a bunch of quasi-amateurs trying to make a pitch that never took off.

I imagine casuals are tripping on it searching for The Winchesters and hearing about John and a few might be engaging/liking it blindly, especially since it uses JDM on the cover despite zero involvement and a different actor.

[reflections-in-a-critical-eye]

Hi BMT, I thought you might have a bit of a global perspective on pop culture for this ask. Lots of older fans describe falling for BTS in a quasi-religious or at least overwhelming way, how meaningful it is to them, how surprised they are at experiencing such strong emotions for these strangers (hello, I'm one of those fans!), and I just wondered if this is kind of unique in the pop world or if Coldplay, J-Lo, Taylor Swift, other K-Pop etc fans might go through the same intense thing I have. xx

Hi @onthecuterside, thank you for the question. Before trying to answer that specifically, I would like to start with something that you mentioned in your ask, that is the religious element when it comes to fandom engagement because I think we'll find our answer there.

There is this quote by Andre Malraux, which despite him referring to other situations, I personally think it can be applied to what we're talking about here. He said that ''The 21st century will be religious or it will not be''. I do believe in present times we look for something/someone to worship in one shape or form and it can be argued that despite some parts of the world are turning more secular, our brain is still used to certain practices and the need to feel connected to a community, to look for something higher than ourselves, even in cases where we would identify as atheists. Because religion also has to do with the idea of ritual and worship which have transferred to other contemporary segments of our lives. In consequence, a fandom can be seen as having some religious elements to it. We have testimonies by fans saying that they found BTS exactly when they needed it (usually when they were going through some hardships) or how fans are always ready and sometimes blindly ready to defend the people they worship because they represent the exact element that has brought a good and significant change in their lives. And then a fan searches for a community, to be able to share their feelings and beliefs and it's an important reason why the experience can get so meaningful.

So, if we look at all that, I don't think it's unique to K-Pop, but it certainly enhanced it and took it to a different level of worship. I do not know the fandoms of the other bands and artists, but I presume that those fans may have had a similar quasi-religious experience. The same thing happened when Elvis was around and then The Beatles. It's because connections to an artist and getting involved in a community becomes part of the person's identity, especially at a certain age and it can stick for decades. Like those who were into punk in the late '70s-'80s can still be part of that subculture in many different forms.

#asks #bts and religious experience #fandom discourse

[spiritualgateway]

You are your own creation

written by Steven Black:

At least since „Seth“, we all know the famous sentence: „You are the creator of your own reality. “

Fine.

But we usually overlook the most important point, namely the center of where everything happens.

OUR SELF!

The very personal kind of evaluations we make about ourselves creates our human personality. The identity as which we know and experience ourselves. This is how it manifests itself. Our stream of evaluations leads to patterns of conviction and to a certain belief structure. And with this we then identify ourselves, which sets a certain dynamic in motion through which we will attract and experience certain things.

The core of the center lies in what we believe about ourselves, how we feel about ourselves and how we think about ourselves. This in turn is closely related to what kind of experiences we have already had. And how we have then judged these experiences. If we really want to understand the phrase – „You are the creator of your own reality“ – then it is valuable if we look at the stream of evaluation that we generate about ourselves throughout our lives. Second by minute, day by week for months for years and decades.

The person we are now is the product of many years of incessant evaluations and definitions about ourselves.

Sure, before we are born, we put together a kind of blueprint – with certain character traits, talents and inclinations, in order to be able to have certain experiences. And of course, when we come to Earth, we go through an imprinting process that will activate this Blueprint. We go through education by parents and the school system, learn cultural, social and societal collective beliefs and much more. In this way we learn to think in a certain way and to classify things, circumstances, people and situations – we adopt the definitions and evaluations that have been given to us.

In fact, it is only the basic training for being human at the moment, it is not the „wisdom last resort“.

Much more important for our human experience are our judgements about ourselves – which we make again and again (mostly very unconsciously) permanently. We constantly make comparisons and constantly generate our very personal interpretations about other people, life, our experiences and ourselves. And this, of course, first on the basis of what we have been taught.

All these interpretations, evaluations and definitions flow to what we call the subconscious and bundle there into beliefs (beliefs). This is called programming; this is how a program is written – and it is we ourselves who write it. Minute by minute for hour for day, months and years.

Beliefs become a program that works continuously without us having to consciously think about things. Belief systems are automatically formed after a certain amount or load of (good or bad) evaluations we have made about our experiences. Beliefs are nothing more than a condensation of evaluation streams that accumulate within us over time.

Each one of us is a creative soul, each one creates his own reality – without exception. And we create with the highest possible commitment: with ourselves.    

However we evaluate ourselves, whatever beliefs and ideas we may develop about ourselves – we ourselves bear the consequences. Because we will then have to live this idea we have about ourselves.      

We usually believe that it is only our experiences – the good and the less good – that influence our ways of thinking and acting. This is only partly true – I mean, of course experiences shape us. But much more important for the subsequent shaping is our personal evaluation of the perceptions and experiences we have made. For an impressive imprint a certain form of meaning is necessary. Meanings do not exist „just like that“, a meaning is created by weighting. By different evaluations within a certain context and by the feeling or an emotion that co-creates this evaluation. I have to evaluate things in order for them to have a meaning for me personally. This means that the meaning that any things, situations, people, and diverse experiences have for us is co-determined and shaped by ourselves.

Of course, when we are young and inexperienced, we will usually „blindly“ follow the definitions and evaluations that we have been taught. No matter how good, healthy, disabling, limiting or valuable they are. As we get older, we will probably realize at some point how many of these are not really ours. Then, at some point, we will probably make adjustments and think differently.

For example, if we often had the experience of being criticized as a child, we will develop an „inner critic“ over time. Considering the fact that there is a psychological study that says that a child up to the age of 5 is criticized about 40,000 times, we can safely assume that almost everyone develops an „inner critic“. The „Inner Critic“ emerges as a kind of protective function for the child.

He criticizes with the „good intention“ of sparing the child further criticism, which of course does not work. The Inner Critic is usually associated with a parent’s voice or that of another important caregiver. And what they say must be true, right? We quickly make the experience that we can rarely meet the requirements and so we develop additional feelings of guilt and shame. The heard criticism, together with the emotional reaction in us, leads to an often traumatic impact in our consciousness. The more often this happened, the more often we were criticized, the more often we felt shame about it, the more a conviction structure condenses and bundles itself in us, which approximately says: You are not valuable, you are not enough, you are … blah-blah-blah. We then believe that.

The vehemence and psychological scope of this „inner critic“ may vary individually, but the point is: You create a thought form that will accompany you and tell you unpleasant things about yourself until you start to stop and find a way to stop it. Because – you are hitting yourself …

In eastern spiritual traditions the „monkey mind“ has been blamed for centuries. The „stupid (monkey) mind“ that just does what it wants – as if it had its own life and its own decisions that have nothing to do with you. The solution to this problem was then – just don’t judge anymore. This is in my eyes a very immature idea, because the mind has no own ideas and no own consciousness – it is a function, like a kind of operating system, which does, repeats and executes what WE have given it to work. Our brain works with what it is offered.

And if we keep making devaluations about ourselves, what will keep coming up?

No matter how much other people may criticize you. No one can criticize you as badly, rob you of your own value and strength as you rob yourself. The consequence of this will be that we will be plagued by countless fears, physical tensions and insecurities – which will of course also be triggered by the outer world. The outer world always reflects our inner world in a special way. If you get criticism from the outside, it will most likely bring up the old shame inside you, which reflects the conviction that you are worth nothing. This in turn will throw up another chain of self-critical thoughts, which are usually suppressed as quickly as possible.      

As long as we are still unconscious, we will devalue the other and call him an asshole because he makes us feel that way. But it really hits us, because deep inside of us there is a conviction that correlates – even if only a little – with this criticism. That’s why it hurts, because something in us says – that’s right. No matter how wrong that may be. It is inside of us. The person in question may still be an asshole, but he is not responsible for how I feel about it. The statements trigger and activate the content, which we ourselves have already evaluated countless times in this or similar ways (for whatever reason) and also hide it from ourselves. If this is touched, it hurts. If we had no subject with it, it would not hurt so much.

But you only check it after you have worked your ass off on your topic. Not before – as long as we are only focused on the outer world and its dynamics, we are more likely to make classifications and evaluations that are based on a victim and perpetrator spiral. Me, the poor victim and the evil perpetrator.

Sure, from the outside it looks the same in its EFFECT. But there is always a complex dynamic behind it that has unfolded. We can either learn something important about ourselves from it or we simply repeat and repeat and repeat this dynamic. And we will repeat it if we are not aware of it.        

I know this has been a very strong example of how you create your own reality. An example that can show us that the esoteric idea that everyone creates their reality quasi-consciously is quite unrealistic. We create a lot of unconscious dynamics and weird behaviors because at some point we just didn’t know better. Because basically nobody taught us how to deal with ourselves. And so it is in most cases, life is based on trial and error dynamics when we know very little about how our own system operates.

As long as we do not deal with our own consciousness and inner world, we simply take for „God-given“ who we are and how we think about ourselves. So much mindfuck accumulates there and also the images and ideas we have about relationships, success, money, politics and thousands of other ideas are based on various evaluations and definitions that we have very rarely questioned. Most of the time they simply do not apply (anymore).

As you can see, we are actually deep inside the topic of „self-love“ (whatever that may mean).

Namely: How do I deal with myself?    

How we think about ourselves, how we evaluate ourselves and how we feel with ourselves has an enormous importance for our personal development. It also has a great influence on which connections our brain synapses develop, which ones we expand or whether some of them are broken at all. The state of our brain and all its connections correlate closely with our thoughts and emotions, as well as our actions.      

The axis of meaning

We cannot do without ratings!

I have to rate something as great, exciting, important, boring, euphoric, insignificant, desirable, aborting, likeable, good or bad (etc; etc.) in order for it to have this meaning for me at all. Through evaluations, like „yes, I like“ or „no you, don’t bother“. Evaluations, how difficult or easy the respective situation is or was for us to cope with. Ratings, how to deal with it in the future – acceptance, affirmation or avoidance. These evaluations are made on the basis of permanent comparisons between past and present. And they are extrapolated to future developments.  This feeds our expectations of how things will happen in the future …

As mentioned above, there are of course also meanings whose context has been shaped by other people or society. Because they are simply taken over and regarded as „given facts“. Every meaning has a kind of weight. How heavy it is depends on how important we consider those who taught and taught us various meanings. But a really strong weight they get from us, if it really concerns us and we make an experience about it. Until then, it has more of an abstract meaning, the weight of which has been shaped by others.

The weighting of a meaning is usually only given when we have experience with it and have repeatedly given the same or at least similar evaluations of it. OR relatively quickly, as soon as we are violently „hit“ by an emotional wave – positive or negative in nature.  

EMOTION IS A RESPONSE TO WHATEVER WE BELIEVE IS TRUE

Every emotion and feeling is a reflection of the energy of negative or positive judgement that we have defined and put into it. Emotions are reaction patterns that show us what we believe in. We condition the way we feel. And this means that a feeling or an emotion does not necessarily have to be true.  But it feels very, very true. Sometimes so true, so devastating, depressing and depressingly true that you get stuck in it for a long time. You can also forget about the highly praised „gut feeling“ – because that too is based on resonances that have a connection to any kind of meaning and judgement. Sometimes they are correct, sometimes they are just avoidance, rejection or fear. Also „gut feeling“ is something you can only rely on if you are emotionally relatively clear.

Emotions contain a certain definition, the core of which is a wide range of evaluations that have formed into a conviction. This is the origin, the root of all emotions and also the reason why emotions can sometimes be violent and so overwhelming. The content cascade of countless mental and emotional evaluations is so extensive that we can feel overwhelmed by the respective charge of emotion. Emotions are the first and fastest reaction of our system to flush content – i.e. information from the subconscious – upwards. Imagine if all the thoughts and evaluations we have ever made on a topic suddenly appeared in our waking consciousness – I think that would be much more confusing.

That is why I never tire of emphasizing the value of feeling work. When I am „buried“ by emotional things, I sit down and sit with the emotion – I follow it to the center of (my own) hell. At some point the tangle of meaning unravels and I understand the definition behind it. And then I have the opportunity to see – is this now REALLY true? If so, is it still true now? Very often there are unresolved issues that reach far back into childhood. An emotion that hits you now can be an original situation or experience from childhood, with all the definitions given to it, some of which have – even if only slight – similarities to the current situation. The similarity is enough to trigger the emotional field.

Knowing the definition allows me to make a new assessment – either to reinforce and respond to it or to add a new perspective. This allows me to update my emotional content and my evaluation stream. In order for this to work, I have to sit with the emotion in question until it is halfway discharged. Charge = all of the given evaluations and received feelings. Sometimes this happens quickly, sometimes it can take months or even years. If energy has been put into something for years, it does not dissolve overnight.

Our assessments are rarely made by purely cognitive, logical or clear, sober conclusions alone. We judge situations not only by factual and cognitive criteria, but also how we feel about them. How we feel with it in turn directly reflects our underlying thoughts and beliefs. And the respective emotional perception will in turn lead to certain thoughts and evaluations about them. In this way, our beliefs are condensed. All of this flows incessantly into our „subconscious“, this is how we write our story.

We not only evaluate, we also evaluate our evaluations and our emotions in addition. This reinforces the whole pattern even more. So most of our evaluations have become „self-runners“. We do not question them. They simply continue.

We evaluate almost every perception, every thought, every feeling, every emotion:

The sky is blue – feels good. It is raining – rather bad. It is hot – shit. It is cold – shit. I have to go to work – fuck. The neighbor – is friendly, sexy, annoying, exhausting, cheeky, creepy – whatever. I am in a relationship – super. I’m in a relationship – my god, what was I thinking? A look in the mirror shows – I’m too thin, too fat, too big, too small, have too big/small breasts, have too little/too many muscles, everyone else looks better/worse than me.

I like Rock ’n Roll music/all brass music lovers are morons. Classical music is for snobs. My boyfriend/girlfriend has left me – my god, it feels so shitty/ jeez, I’m so glad about that. I have no money in the bank – my life is boring. I have no money in the bank – at least I don’t have any debts.

There are thousands of different evaluations we make about ourselves and things. The beliefs we have accumulated over the course of our lives are so deeply rooted in us that we are not even aware of them. This happens so fast within us that we are very, very rarely consciously aware of it. We simply take them as a given reality and overlook the fact that we ourselves formed this reality. With our evaluations we condition our personal reality and the kind of person we are. How we evaluate ourselves forms the personality we perceive ourselves as. The personality that we are attracts certain experiences because of their belief patterns. So yes, we all create our own reality …

As we evaluate, so do things appear to us. No matter what kind of beliefs we have, they tend to confirm themselves. We always find confirmation of what we believe.

Of course, we always have the choice to say – „well, I don’t like my reality and I’m going to sit in my corner defiantly, it’s not my fault“. Mostly, however, life forces us to continue learning, to adapt and to change. Sometimes in an absolutely unpleasant way – through pain, trauma or we are confronted with difficult diseases. With everything that gives us the opportunity to pause and realize that we have to go INSIDE to face the many challenges of human existence. Mostly we will only emerge stronger if we redefine ourselves.

No matter why we get stuck in something – we ourselves are the root. Only from there change can happen. If we do not change ourselves, our life, our reality, cannot change.

Alright! Then I just start to think differently!

Good luck with it.

Will not work.

Forget it!

I mean, if you don’t have a big issue with it, if you don’t have a serious emotional charge attached to it – then, yes, it can work. At least it’s a small start. But if that’s not the case, you will just have many and long „discussions“ and arguments against one of your „inner voices“. You will not win this fight this way. This is war with yourself and will only aggravate your inner condition.

Our evaluations are a decision from which perspective we choose to see things. Of course, this means that we can make and give other, new decisions, i.e., new evaluations regarding EVERYTHING. But as long as we have not discharged „the old“, as long as we are not clear about the definitions we have made – about whatever – we will be maltreated by the „old stuff“ of our old creation. That is the incredible power we have, we make LIVING and experiencing what we believe. And what we believe in, comes about through our very personal stream of evaluation.      

The experience of our human personality is a flowing process that is never really complete, because there are so many possibilities and perspectives that we can experience ourselves again and again. We are not a rigid, fixed matter – it sometimes only appears that way. There is a lot of room to readjust or change that. It is possible to make new, better, clearer evaluations about ourselves. But sometimes this is one of the hardest transformation processes one can undergo.

Refine your inner world and you refine your reality

Basically we are never „finished“ unless we stop learning.

Until next time same station

DISCLAIMER:

Nothing you read here is THE truth. It is my truth, my perception and how I see things – now, in this moment.

THE INFORMATION SPACE

#creation #spiritual