#this is another 2021 dumpster fire

[nights-at-crystarium]

Okay, the recent surge of new followers thanks to the twitter exodus, and now your boy Vivien Fucksalot Rell on the tumblr radar, has me wanting to make some kinda welcome post.

The face of a man who made it to the tumblr radar for the first time C:

Who’s this guy you just saw? Yeah, first and foremost, it’s a cis male, he’s just full of gay and Gender (tm) \o/

Vivi is my WoL who I ship with G’raha Tia and I like to make it everyone’s problem. He’s the main character of the fancomic Fragments that I started this summer. I love ShB so much that I’ve decided to dedicate the next few years of my life to drawing and writing about it. And I believe I’ve got what it takes to tell a story that, in equal amounts, will entertain and break you 🖤

Vivi was tailor-made to interact with G’raha. I’m an experienced oc maker and, how to put it, character chemist? Give me two characters with some fun traits, like the base ingredients for a cocktail, I’ll toss them in a blender, shake it real good, and make the magical chemistry happen. My wolgraha ship is almost 1 year old at this point, I’m still spending every day thinking about them and writing down A LOT of things, random art ideas, fics, and, of course, the comic script, so.. Yeah it’s a good cocktail.

I’m keeping most of the Vivi things close to my heart since you’re yet to learn about him in Fragments. That’s the whole point. But the non-spoilery material is already fun enough imo. You take a look at him and you see: edge, intensity, duality, gremlin, idiot.

He was made in December 2021, got decently developed as a character by April 2022, kept getting more polished since then. I wanna make another post talking about him in a month or so, on his first birthday. For now please perceive him being the fun lil guy he is C:

What about the person behind it all though? My artist username is NextLVL, my own name is Aho or Vel, nb, he/they, a 32 years old self-taught artist who has a bit too much to deal with irl, and I’m holding on to my wolgraha obsession as the only means to stay sane. These guys are my everything. Seriously. Fragments is my first big project that so far has been incredibly validating for me as an artist, and that has given me hope to work on it fulltime thanks to my Patreon. Yes, plugging it because I’ve gotta eat. I’m earning for my living with my art, recent events in the social media sphere have thrown my livelihood into an even greater risk territory. I literally don’t know if I still can earn for my living tomorrow. So, I’ve been pushing my Patreon which looks like the safest and most stable option atm.

Here’s a “nutshell” for how I feel as an artist. Look, I didn’t say it, others did.

I’m working hard to bring something beautiful to the world that’s just an unceasing dumpster fire nowadays. I’m under a METRIC TON of mental pressure, yet I still manage to isolate from it and keep arting, for you and for myself. So yeah.. Thanks for looking, hope you like what I create. If you like it so much that you wanna support me, it’d mean literally everything to me. Thank you 🖤

#ffxiv #vivien rell #g'raha tia #crystal exarch #wol x g'raha tia #wolgraha #own: next lvl

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Abortion surveillance only incidentally involves period-trackers

I get it. The deeper we get into this GOP christofascist Handmaid’s Tale LARP, the more it feels like we are living in a dystopian novel and the more draw on stories to understand our experience. The idea that a cyberpunk Red State sheriff — Boss Hogg meets Robocop — would use period-tracking apps for dragnet abortion surveillance is a great setup for a novel, but it’s not very reflective of reality.

I’m a novelist and I work on public policy, and the difference is that novels are very, very simplified. They tend to work in linear, verse-verse-chorus fashion, where causes beget effects in a way that is easy to understand; if a cause-effect relationship is complexified, it in service to a surprise ending or plot-twist — it’s not just par for the course.

In actual public policy fights, things are really messy. I’m not saying that we don’t live in a causal universe, but I am saying that figuring out which intervention will produce what outcome is a matter of informed guesswork and requires constant iteration and revision.

That’s not just because of the complexity of the real world, either — it’s also because real world policy fights are adversarial. Every move you make begets a countermove from your adversary. If your adversary is attacking you on one front, moving defenses there may not do you any good — not if you have another flank the attacker can costlessly shift to.

Which brings me to period-tracking apps and abortion surveillance. It’s 100% true that many period tracking apps are privacy dumpster-fires. Over and over again, investigations of period-tracking apps have found an indefensible mix of poor security practices and indiscriminate data collection, usage, sale and sharing, compounded by outright lies from the vendors:

https://www.consumerreports.org/health-privacy/what-your-period-tracker-app-knows-about-you-a8701683935/

But just because period-tracking apps could be a way to trawl for people who might have had abortions, it doesn’t follow that getting rid of your period-tracking app will make you safe. Giving up automated period-tracking imposes a high cost — and it’s a cost with very few benefits in terms of security from forced-birth law-enforcement attacks.

Why? Well, the data-leakage from some period apps might be ghastly, but it isn’t exceptional. Apps — sold as a tool for improving software quality and security by subjecting it to oversight from Google and Apple — are privacy nightmares. The same high-stakes data-mishandling that plagues period-trackers also plagues childcare apps, Muslim call-to-prayer apps, distance-ed evaluation apps, and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/23/peek-a-boo/#attack-helicopter-parenting

Indeed, the whole tech sector, from bottom-feeding ad-tech also-rans to multi-trillion-dollar global giants, spies on you all the time, in every way, and both their security policies and their law-enforcement cooperation policies are both exceptionally weak.

Take location data; this is harvested by many of the apps you routinely use, sometimes without the app-maker’s explicit knowledge — widely used, free app development kits are notorious for gathering and selling location data from their customers’ users. This data is then passed on to location brokers, who make it incredibly easy to discover who visited an abortion clinic, and who sell this data cheap to cops and anyone else who wants to snoop on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

The Dobbs decision brings all this into focus, but for millions of people, primarily people of color and poor and/or indigenous, fertility has long been a criminal justice. This is the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve in action — when you want to inflict technological harms with a new product, you try it out on the people with the least social capital and privilege, which lets you sand down the rough edges and normalize the technology as you move it up the privilege gradient:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Longstanding government intrusion into marginalized people’s fertility has produced a rich evidentiary record. By looking at how cops inflicted themselves on the uteruses of excluded and marginalized people, we can gain insight into how they will impact a widening sphere of targets. Take “Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary,” Cynthia Conti-Cook’s open-access article for The University of Baltimore Law Review:

https://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/ublr/vol50/iss1/2/

Conti-Cook trawls through the record to examine the role of technological surveillance and forensics in abortion prosecutions. She finds that cops and prosecutors use things like text-messages and search history to produce evidence that a miscarriage was the result of a medication abortion rather than spontaneous abortion.

I found Conti-Cook’s article through “Fear, Uncertainty, and Period Trackers,” a must-read Medium article from Kendra Albert, Maggie Delano and Emma Weil, which sharply critiques the focus on period-tracking apps for a lack of factual grounding in the history of abortion criminalization:

https://medium.com/@Kendra_Serra/fear-uncertainty-and-period-trackers-340ab8fdff74

The authors stress that criminal prosecutions of abortions turn on that question of distinguishing medication abortions from spontaneous miscarriages, and for that, they need to establish intent — to produce evidence of the thoughts that preceded the miscarriage.

As Melissa Gira writes in the New Republic in “The Growing Criminalization of Pregnancy,” abortion cops are dependent on tips from people in your life: partners and ex-partners, relatives, health-care professionals, con-artists working for “crisis pregnancy centers” and snoopy neighbors who rat you out to the cops as a suspected abortion-criminal.

https://newrepublic.com/article/166312/criminalization-abortion-stillbirths-miscarriages

Once the cops suspect you of procuring an abortion, data from your period app is of limited value to building the case against you. But your search history (“buy abortion pills, mifepristone online, misoprostol online”) and messages with friends or out-of-state helpers are devastatingly effective in building that case.

This factual analysis of the recent history of criminalized abortion allows us to construct a framework for minimizing criminal prosecution risks when seeking a self-managed abortion. EFF’s “Security and Privacy Tips for People Seeking An Abortion” is a good starting point:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/security-and-privacy-tips-people-seeking-abortion

Tambien en Español:

https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2022/06/security-and-privacy-tips-people-seeking-abortion

Of course, privacy is a team sport, so abortion providers should familiarize themselves with “Digital Security and Privacy Tips for Those Involved in Abortion Access”:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access

Tambien en Español:

https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2022/05/digital-security-and-privacy-tips-those-involved-abortion-access

This short video, starring EFF’s Eva Galperin and Daly Barnett, is a great and accessible entree to the subject:

https://archive.org/details/Digital_Security_for_Abortion_Access

Note that none of these guides advise deleting your period app. Here’s Consumer Reports’ guide to privacy-preserving period apps, which gives high marks to Euki, Drip and the Apple Health app:

https://www.consumerreports.org/health-privacy/period-tracker-apps-privacy-a2278134145/

I started off by noting that the privacy problems of period apps are not unique; the entire mobile world is a horror of bad data-handling. Albert et al stress the importance of never consenting to a law-enforcement search of your mobile device. Make them get a warrant (“Consent searches are inherently coercive and should be banned”).

US law enforcement agencies have gone on a spending spree, buying up sketchy mobile device search tools. Thousands of agencies have these tools, produced by Vichy nerds who use their technological freedoms to take away other people’s:

https://www.upturn.org/work/mass-extraction/

One final note on the fight for abortion rights: despite the revisionist history emanating from the illegitimate SCOTUS justices as they perch on their stolen seats, abortion is indeed “deeply rooted.” If you don’t believe it, check out Dr Eleanor Janega’s “medieval abortion reading list”:

https://going-medieval.com/2022/06/29/a-medieval-abortion-reading-list/

Image: Paul Sableman (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/pasa/6149265334

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A Planned Parenthood clinic; over the roofline, we see a giant glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey; it has lines radiating from it that wash out the sky.]

#pluralistic

[toastedkiwi]

Popstar Evans keeps getting asked about where she’s been and what she’s been doing since she dropped off the face of the earth. She finally does a Midnights Mayhem With Me vibe of a TikTok— she’s also promoting some music. Anyways, she’s in a leather chair right by the fireplace. Kal is taking a nap at her feet on a faux fur rug. An Ironman blanket is draped on the back of the chair and a. She’s got three calendars— 2020 (it’s a firefighter one), 2021 (an angsty Anakin Skywalker calendar), and then 2022 (SpongeBob). She starts off “alright, here’s the background before we get into the juicy details of what happened in Y/n’s life: Covid started in March 2020.” She gets to September 2020 which is when shit went down and- and the page is gone— clearly torn out. She said “huh. Something happened to September. —You know what? Let’s skip to 2021. 2020 was a dumpster fire anyways.” She’s skips to March 2021 and said, “some asshole stole my heart. He’s keeping it safe for me.” And cut to the date of her album release “and oh look at that! I’m having another baby- it’s music guys!”

#henry cavill x popstar evans!reader #chris evans x sister!reader

[absolutebl]

September 2022 BL Line Up

9/11 Fahlanruk (Thai) 

GaGa Sundays, 10 eps, 45 min ea.

Fahlan (smart jock) meets Sherbet (edgy bad boy) sparks fly and they end up in bed together. Fahlan feels a lot more for Sherbet than is allowed, so he hides his feelings. Fahlan’s friends Ping and Tap, try to help their boy win his man, but are struggling with friends-to-lovers woes of their own. Looks to be a strong contender in the Thai BL pulp dumpster fire of joy arena. It’s using tropes we rarely see and it tonally seems like a combination of Nitiman + Y-Destiny’s players episode (2 of my 2021 favorites). I like sexually messy and identity confused college dramas but Love Mechanics might have tapped me out. 

Y-novel adaptation featuring a pining seme and high heat, from director Koo who has a long back catalogue of shows, if not a great track record with BL (Club Friday and Tonhon Chonlatee are his). 

9/14 Once Again (Korea) 

Viki Thursdays, 8 eps, 25 min ea  

Time-slip fantasy BL from Moving Picture studio & Idol Romance behind Wish You, Ryu's Wedding, Tasty Florida, Tinted With You, and Kissable Lips (also forthcoming Happy Ending Outside The Fence and The Circumstances of Pungdeok Villa Room 304). Stars actors (no idols) Moon Ji Young (also star in an upcoming BL The New Employee), Lee Hyuk Jun, and Kang Woo Jung. 

JaeWoo lives with childhood trauma. He travels to the past where he meets JiHoon, a law student who JaeWoo admires most in the world. Will he be able to change both their fates?

9/16: More Than Words (Japan) 

Amazon Prime Video JP (only?)

Adaptation of Etsuko’s two mangas In The Apartment and More Than Words, starring Ryōko Fujino (Fujoshi, Ukkari Gei ni Kokuru), Yuzu Aoki (Kakafukaka), Daisuke Nakagawa (Colorful Love), and Daiki Kanechika (EXIT).

Told from the perspective of the female best friend who is against (?) the workplace gay relationship of her bff. Also there is another gay plot line. 

9/22: My Tempo (Thailand) 

Unknown distribution. 

BL movie about the Thai music industry. What joy is mine.

9/26 Ai Long Nhai (Thai) 

No international distribution as yet, 10 eps 45 min ea. 

About a man expelled from foreign university who returns to a Thai university in disgrace and meets A Boy.

From Thailand’s Mflow Entertainment for Ch3Thailand. Adapted from a Y-novel, directed by Nob (La Cuisine, Gen Y). Secondary couple Nan & Sippakorn are IRL husbands Arm & Porsch (Together with Me). Familiar faces include Gun (Love Area’s Valen) and Jom (Nitiman’s Jin).

This is actually the inception story of the characters of AiNi in Tonhon Chonlatee which I didn’t realize. Now I loved those characters, but I disliked that series from a story standpoint and this is the same author so I’m now nervous.

Comfort the Boy AKA A Shoulder to Cry On (Korea) 

No international distribution as yet, 12 eps 20 min ea (?)

Looks to be a longer than usual KBL, got an R15+ rating for topic & vulgarity (we likey), stars idols Jaehan & Yechan BOTH from Kpop group OMEGA X (we scairedy). Interesting that an idol company is allowing two idols from the same group star in a BL together. *danger will robinson.” 

Adaptation of Dongmul's manwha A Shoulder to Cry On, high school set, features a teasing confident gay, and a rich/poor pairing, about homophobia/gossip putting a scholarship in jeopardy. 

SELF the series (Thai) 

No international distribution as yet, no known length.

From Studio Common about a young artist who mysteriously loses his reflection and sees a strange boy in the mirror instead. Stars fresh faces, directed by Too (Triage) and NutSor (screenwriter of Dew).

Happy Ending Outside the Fence (Korea ) 

No international distribution as yet, probably usual KBL length. 

JungWoo is a writer who disappeared after being treated unfairly in the publishing industry. TaeYoung, the head of a publishing company, admires and wants him to write again. JungHyun became a star by borrowing JungWoo's writings. The three characters interact and drama results. Stars idol Leo of VIXX. 

Magic of Zero: Zero Supporter (Thai) 

GMMTV feat advertisement specail (c 45 min) on their YT channel 

Cupid's Last Wish spin off, features EarthMix in another bodyswap on this time with each other (KornWin). I disliked the origin show intensely, so I can’t see myself watching this. 

MPD (missing presumed dead): 

Ghost Host, Ghost House. Thai PNR pulp BL was billed as dropping in August. 

(source)

Information dated beginning of September 2022. If you have updates, leave a comment share the love. 

#upcoming bl #2022 bl #september bl #bl line up #coming in september #new bl #forthicoming bl #forthcoming bl #Thai BL #Ghost Host Ghost House #PNR #body swap #Cupid's Last Wish #EarthMix #KornWin #Magic of Zero #Zero supporter #Korean BL #KBL #Happy Ending Outside the Fence #VIXX leo #VIXX #Triage the series #SELF the series #Comfort the Boy #A Shoulder to Cry On #adapted from a manwha #OMEGA X #Tonhon Chonlatee #AiNi

[foundry-fabrications]

Happy 5-Year Anniversary!

Hey folks! 5 years ago to the day I posted my first ever homebrew creation for the masses to enjoy (or ruthlessly tear apart), a little brew I lovingly called The Goo of Primordial Chaos. It would be fitting to have gone and reworked it for such an occasion (it certainly needs it), but alas, I haven't. I could have, and I've tried a few times, but honestly I don't really know what to do with it. So, I'm just not going to, and it shall remain a relic of the past and a reminder of humble beginnings.

Other than that, I have nothing special planned to celebrate, at all. So instead, I'd just like to take a moment to look back at my time here and take a trip down memory lane.

2018-2019

When I first got started doing homebrew for the Foundry, I hadn't been doing it for very long. Hell, I hadn't been playing 5e for long either. But inexperience didn't stop me from taking a stab at it. At the time, I had boundless creative energy and all the time in the world. I committed to doing one brew a month and that came pretty easy. Most of what I was making were conversions of other things, so they were easy to churn out at a regular pace. But I did quite a bit of original stuff too. The Medic was my first ever released class, and my Hellraiser supplement kicked off my now yearly tradition of doing a big project for spooktober. Around that time, I started a Patreon and got my first commission in the Awakener class. The first version of my Mourner was also released. I also hit 2k followers, which is insane to me still. Oh yeah, and I totally tried to jump to another platform when Tumblr became a dumpster fire for a bit. Forgot about that. Other than that, pretty good for my first year!

2019-2020

Kicking off my second year, my Corpseweaver class was released for Halloween, which is still one of my favorite things I've made. For much of the year I was still going strong with monthly releases and even putting out some pretty big projects. But the biggest project I put out that year, or at least the one that took the most effort, was a commission for John Carpenter’s The Thing. It was around this time that I started kicking around the idea of opening up commission to the public, not just my patrons. Spoiler alert, I shouldn't have. I also hit 4k followers that year. Still wild.

2020-2021

This was a huge year, but things did not begin well for me. The year began with Flesh and Bone, my Necromorph supplement, which was an utter train wreck. That monstrosity came together in a panicked 3 weeks after October blindsided me and was the first time I had ever tried to make a custom style for the Homebrewery. The mad dash to meet a frankly arbitrary deadline yielding a worse brew started to show the cracks in my process and was an ill omen for things to come. I kept up the monthly releases for a while longer, and put out some great stuff in that time if I do say so myself, but in July I hit a wall and just couldn't do it anymore. Since then, I've had a “post it when it's done” policy, and I don't intend to change that. I also stopped taking commissions from patrons after getting super overwhelmed and not handling it as well as I should have, BUT then proceeded to start taking commissions from the public. Other notable events included changing my name from 5e Foundry to Foundry Fabrications in an effort to expand into other games, not just 5e, I updated my logo to fit the rebranding, and I started a Discord server that burned hot, died fast, and is a desolate wasteland now. Otherwise, it was pretty much business as usual.

2021-2022

Year 4 began innocently enough, aside from the cultural faux pas regarding a certain Native America spirit that shall not be named that I later had to apologize for. Other than that, it was pretty much business as usual. But then in April came my crowning achievement. After 6 years of development, I finally released my Engineer class! I still can’t believe that this thing I've been wrestling with for years is finally real and for all the world to see. Kind of hard to top that

2022-2023

Another year, another spooky project, this time a much-needed rework of my Corpseweaver. And all was great, for a time. But then January rolled around and WotC dropped the shitstorm of the century on us with the whole OGL debacle. I, like a lot of people, did not take very well and went so far to abandon everything D&D, a rash decision I still regret making, even if I did come back to the game I love so much. But I bounced back pretty easy and jumped right back into making stuff, not that I’ve released much this year. But that’s future talk! We’re here to reminisce!

So yeah, that’s my history here in a nutshell. If you’re still here, thanks for listening to me ramble. What a wild ride it’s been, and I’m so glad I could have you all at my side and along for the journey. Thanks for sticking with me for 5 years, and here’s to 5 more! As always, stay safe, don’t forget to love each other, and I’ll see you all again soon.

Oh, one more thing, I’d love to hear from y’all in the replies! How long have you been with me, and what’s your favorite piece of content I’ve produced?

#yall i cant believe its been 5 years #anniversary #dungeons and dragons #5e foundry #foundry fabrications #thank you #yall are the best #5 years

[bulletproofbanditsorbust]

On the Run

apr 7th, 2021

Characters: oc!Russell Davon, oc!Dylan Harley

Word count: 627

Warnings: None! Just some language and bad manners 😂

Summary: A rapid presentation of Russell Davon, an original character from a Cyberpunk Dystopian AU I have been working on with @arnold-layne (yes I’m gonna tag you everytime I’ll make content about them lmao), while he’s escaping a gang he stole some goods from. Plus an appearance of Dylan!

A/N: Sooo in the structure I go to there’s a club of creative writing of some sorts, and this week’s exercise was about coming up with a character and basically tell as much as we could about them in a few pages in less than an hour, inserting them in a context, narrating how their life is etc. and you BET YO ASS I would talk about my OC’s!! I felt pretty proud about it so I decided to translate it and post it here too. Excuse the vagueness (it was just an exercise after all) and any grammar/syntax errors or redundancy, I’m trying I promise :^)

Russell ran through the lanes of the suburbs of Rhinestone City with his heart pounding in his chest. His red hair, shoulder-length, irregularly cut, was a burning flame that warmed and colored the street in an instant for passersby, and a bullfighting cloth for the armed-to-the-teeth henchmen who were chasing him at breakneck speed. Russ grinned: he knew it. He knew how pissed off it made them, to realize that they got screwed over once again by a brat, a stupid punk who has no sense of danger or self-preservation instinct. Food was scarce for everyone here (let alone money), every day there were people dropping like flies dying of starvation — “… But better them than me,” Russ told himself as he jumped over an old abandoned stall, clutching the loot he took from his chasers under his clothes. While looking back, he pushed some pallets to the ground to create obstacles for his pursuers, unwilling to stop to catch his breath. He heard them cursing at him as he turned the street’s angle. He had to stop himself from laughing.

It was a cold, dreary morning and Russell could feel it through his jacket, pants and boots, all in leather (the latter stolen from “A special forces cop,” Russ claims), but a rainy day certainly would not have discouraged this stubborn child of the streets to want to survive another day. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and he was determined to keep his streak of being the dog that eats and doesn’t get eaten.

Russell sped through another corner, and then another, ending up in one of the main streets where people were pouring into; finally, he could slow his pace down and blend into the crowd.

Suddenly, there was a whistle, and a familiar voice called his name. The boy turned toward the sound: it was Dylan, looking out the window on the second floor of a building in an alley nearby, filled with dumpsters and garbage blocking the other end. Russell nodded to him with a smile, but in the meantime, another much less friendly voice declared that he had “found the little bastard” and incited his mates to come there faster. Shit. He had to think quickly. The boy sprinted toward his friend — olive skin, dark-brown mohawk with a red bandana on his forehead, eyes glistening in excitement —, who promptly held out his hand to him. No questions asked, not a word said: considered the number of times they’ve both been in similar situations, there was no need for those extra pleasantries. Nasty Redhead* quickly walked up a flight of rusted fire escape stairs. Then, with a leap, the punk grabbed Dylan’s arm and scrambled through the balcony, landing clumsily on his partner in crime, making the ladder collapse beneath his feet with a deafening crash of metal. The two boys watched it fall on top of the bunch of apes who were after Russell, leaving them stunned and with a dumb, dazed expression on their faces. Russ and Dylan looked at each other for a second, and immediately burst out laughing for the adrenaline rush, giving each other high-fives and pats on the back. Meanwhile, the gang was still under them, spewing empty threats at both. Dylan leaned over the windowsill, raising both middle fingers with a shit-eating grin. Russell did the same with one hand — fit into a mucky fingerless glove —: he first touched the finger with his lips and then he directed it to the mugs below, imitating a blown kiss, but less elegant.

Once again, Russell Davon had looked death in her eyes and laughed in her face.

*Nasty Redhead: transl. from Italian, “Rosso Malpelo”, a nickname which combines Rosso (red) with Malpelo (literally “evil hair”), as Sicilians believed that people with red hair were malicious and had an evil disposition. It became a common saying in the Italian language after Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga published a short story with this title in 1878. (A/N: when I wrote this in Italian I thought the nickname would fit Russ very well so I used it, shame it got kinda lost in translation)

#bulletproof bandits #my writing #i still love this piece despite its outdated by now #it has a special place in my heart #btw arnold sorry if i keep tagging you lmao but your only fault is to have helped me so much to come as far as i am now #a. #Spotify

[troythings]

happy 2024. yall still have to suffer my rants. sorry

so i think everyone remembers that period from 2015 to 2021 or maybe later, when everyone was creaming themselves over the dead horse scenario of “wHaT iF the NaZiS wOn ThE wAr”

yeah i aint gonna go into specifics but im pretty sure everyone remembers. mostly because of what they wrote with superman.

god people need to stop milking this shit.

so I’ve gone into detail in other posts about how dc is notoriously flimsy and escapist with the subject of nazi germany and just…nazism in general, either they’ll just use it as a vehicle to virtue signal or they straight up deny its horrors. yeah, sad but true. same with this.

except there was someone (obviously non-dc affiliated) who actually got the superman scenario right. not grant morrison, venditti and every other weirdo who had their fingers in this literal dumpster fire. kim newman, who wrote “ubermensch” in 1991, before “red son” and the other superman alternate histories, and showed more empathy for the holocaust and the victims of nazi germany than dc could ever care to.

because. unlike dc, newman wasn’t running on propaganda tradition and cutesy escapism like they were.

continued under the cut.

tw: nazism, the holocaust, genocide, anti-semitism, racism, murder, historical gore, literary mention of israeli imperialism, and nazi propaganda

so right off the bat it’s obvious that newman knows his history. the story takes place in a recently reunified postwar germany at the end of the cold war. metropolis is analogous to berlin, it’s a famous city in-story that was split into an east and west sector. the main character is avram blumenthal, a holocaust survivor turned nazi hunter, much like the real life simon wiesenthal. the superman analogue in this story is held in spandau prison, the real-life facility for nazi war criminals where rudolf hess was imprisoned for the remainder of his life.

just by looking at that. you could never find a dc writer who puts in this much time and effort to research the past and depict it in a non exploitative manner.

there’s also some commentary on western us capitalism/consumerism that defined ‘our’ progress in the cold war (pizza hut and mcdonalds in the ussr anyone) and the “third position” of fascism being the “alternative” between capitalism and communism:

and! newman actually respects superman’s jewish mythos! he includes it in here, which is something i’ve never seen the overman writers do. jerry siegel and joe shuster were both jewish. and, no matter what dc tells you about nazis having ‘superheroes’ of their own, this was actually one of the reasons comics were hated in nazi germany.

newman also integrates the basic superman lore pretty well here, everything is recognizable. a ‘man of steel,’ ‘the man of tomorrow,’ ‘curt kessler’ (which, by the way, is way more creative than dc’s ‘karl kant’) is clark kent, the ‘green stuff’ is kryptonite, so on

newman also isn’t afraid to get dirty with the mythos, unlike the comics which like to play it safe with this (up to and including never talking about the holocaust at all). the johnathan and martha kent analogues of “ubermensch” aren’t the kindly couple that they should be. because this isn’t them and we're not supposed to like them. johann beats his adopted son and curt grows up arrogant. luise lang, the lois analogue, is a snotty propagandist that curt describes in ideologically typical misogynistic terms (another thing to note down dc, nazis did not respect women) who commits suicide to avoid being raped by the red army.

there's also something else that's interesting, the commentary on how harmful propaganda and journalism can be when serving a purpose. its implied a lot in here that the 'supervillains' that curt kessler/übermensch faces are actually all staged by the nazis, or if they're genuine (like the golem), their intentions are twisted to serve the bigger narrative.

curt kessler/übermensch is a state propagandist like luise lang was. the 'tages welt,' daily planet analogue in this story, sounds a lot like a version of der sturmer. he writes his own propaganda narratives to prop up his übermensch persona and vilifies innocent people in the process. the targets of nazi ideology get the names of villains from 1920s german fiction and they're like dogwhistles in itself if you know the context. "orlok" was a vampire that looked uncomfortably similar to anti-semitic caricatures, "mabuse" was a hypnotist "master of disguise" who "operated through a network of agents," characters co-opted and then twisted by nazism in-story. in real life we also have this with racists adopting "sh****k" as a slur from the shakespeare character.

newman also throws a curveball with that whole ‘nazi superhero who actually turns out to be good all along’ or whatever the shit that trope is. whatever. kessler apparently ‘defects,’ like he says here

but before that, he said this.

dude’s the same. sorry guys, no redemption arc here. this becomes relevant later.

kessler still blames "mabuse" for pornography, jazz, cabarets, things that defined progressive weimar germany before the nazis took over and shut it all down. again. another aspect taken from real-life history. and since a "red skull" is also name-dropped here, i'm also thinking that the "hydra" reference in this refers to the marvel organization of the same name.

you know. the one with tentacle iconography, the secret society that's framed in the mcu as controlling the world, starting wars and infiltrating governments everywhere to install global totalitarianism. which makes me wonder what kind of writers at marvel thought nazi germany would accept an organization that exemplifies the kind of fake "international conspiracy" they were railing against but that's another conversation. see here.

blumenthal recalls a time when he was a child in germany who naively hero-worshipped kessler/übermensch because of the propaganda around him. he wished he could fly and he wore a black blanket like a cape. while he was young a rabbi created a golem (the figure in jewish mythology made of clay) who was killed by kessler, and blumenthal swallowed the propaganda. even when his anti-semitic classmates aped kessler and beat him up.

kessler obviously doesn’t give a shit, he’s still brainwashed no matter how he tries to wave it off. he doesn’t care about the tattoo. instead he talks about using his x-ray vision to look at women’s breasts. like real-life racists confronted with their own wrongdoings kessler also resorts to whataboutism and goes “your family is dead but so is my whole planet”.

and he also says he’s only locking himself up because of his guilt. not actually over the atrocities of nazism. it’s that nazi germany is gone and so is his planet so he has nothing else to do and he doesn’t want to do anything. that’s it.

blumenthal retorts with this, which is just great in itself. im not going to outline it, newman does it pretty good already

this is one of the things i really liked. because it’s important and more importantly, relevant!! it’s so relevant because kim newman is fucking right. im reiterating that everything about the world in that second image is true.

i was a kid when charlottesville happened. tmi but that whole time is a blur. when i got older and learned about things, i remember thinking that maybe after that, we would take a good hard look at ourselves and just try to find out where we went wrong.

did we maybe have a history of being eugenicist slaveowning imperialists in the past who inspired nazi polices and still rallied around the flag and the military. did racism and nazism happen to run deep in america before 2017.

why were children and young adults so vulnerable and still are vulnerable to the alt-right pipeline, what are we putting out in media that could be desensitizing them to nazism. what kind of message are we sending when we don’t cover it in detail, and leave them to figure out nazism from shitty comics, or movies.

yeah. the majority of people ever asked that.

here’s what they actually did. especially in art and media, and im going to say, with dc since this is relevant to the image. they doubled down on some of the societal shit that led to that in the first place

you wanna know what the cw, bunch of braindead idiots, did right after charlottesville? pretty much the entire thing from the last paragraph, except with some vanilla bullshit because of course the arrowverse can’t ever portray nazism correctly even if they tried.

there’s an article that covers their failure in detail and also a reddit post which, obviously, some weirdos in the comments are brushing off. and it’s also not coincidental that a comic series came after this and cited the political climate. again. a bunch of important dc people were involved in promoting this. phil jimenez in particular also has a problematic history with depicting modern neo-nazism. grown adults put money into this. their actors and their fans supported them.

want proof?

mmm. alright smart guy. here’s that “different set of ideals” for you.

yeah, apparently they didn’t think through the consequences of a world where the fucking dirlewanger brigade would be celebrated as heroes.

you know what they actually cared about? some fucking stupid comic issue from the 1970s that was suddenly relevant because everyone felt the need to deny our own nazi-sympathizing rotten history and pin it somewhere else, rather than actually take a step back and evaluate where we went wrong as a society.

and actually they essentially made radicalization easier. they showed this bullshit to kids and basement-dwelling adults who don’t know anything about the world and only care about their typical comic high. how do they fucking sleep at night knowing that they’ve whitewashed real life atrocities?

they still are doing that. they casually throw around the words “hitler” and “nazi” to the point where it fucking means nothing. they’re using exploitative images of concentration camps just to get a rise out of people without ever covering their themes seriously. and you wanna know the worst thing about that? only a few people are calling this out. everyone else? nah they’re ready to consume that because it doesn’t matter to them like it does for some people.

in the story blumenthal believes that, without kessler existing, the ‘fire’ won’t start up again. this comes when nazism and genocidal neo-fascism are resurging and the israel bit is also pretty relevant today. like in real life the kids are ignorant because all they know about nazi germany and world war ii is from kessler. again. this man is a living symbol of nazism who has media getting made about him.

blumenthal’s right. because the world actually doesn’t need kessler and it’s better off without him. he passes a kryptonite suicide pill encased with lead, which kessler can bite through. and he gives him a choice.

living swastika kessler who has nothing to live for and is more of a problem than an actual help to humanity, bites the pill and kills himself. that’s it. he dies. his only worthwhile achievement is sucking it up and dying like a human man.

he’s dead. now finally humanity can start to heal.

so to round it all off basically. i think this book is part of a lesson. about swallowing that bitter pill that you don’t want to face and realizing, maybe there’s something problematic how we portray and in a way, whitewash nazism to the population through the comic industry. because the golden age, nobody actually knew about the holocaust when they were writing the whole “punching nazis” schtick. the comics were wartime, jingoistic and often racist propaganda.

and yet!! we’re still doing it. thanks to some escapist tradition that actually does more harm than good. because we actually know about the holocaust, we have the internet and the ability to push ourselves to research. and we don’t. and i think tbh, that is much worse. that the people with money and platforms just don’t care.

it’s in other media too, mostly movies.

chaplin got it right, he said he would’ve never made the great dictator if he knew about the final solution like we did today.

spielberg couldn’t include nazis in indiana jones after making schindler’s list and im pretty sure he said he disowned it, but. it looks like everyone decided to shit on that because of nostalgia.

jojo rabbit was originally adapted from a novel where the protagonist was an unrepentant scumfuck HJ who gaslit, controlled and raped the jewish woman hiding in his house. and for some reason, people hate the novel. why? because it rightfully doesn’t give them the cozy feelgood feeling that the film did. it rightfully portrays a brainwashed child who never got out, was never interested in getting out and grew up to be, you guessed it, a fucking nazi. those jojo rabbit viewers were actually looking forward to this before they got the hard reality. who the fuck in their right mind would ever consider nazism ‘feelgood’?

and i think that’s another thing we need to get in our heads especially with radicalization. tw isis execution being brainwashed as a kid is not funny, it’s not childish or anything to make fun of, and it’s nothing to make a wes anderson movie about. you are being exploited and taken advantage of by people who know you’re angry about things beyond your control and they are molding you and you believe everything. and the ensuing trauma if you ever get out, ends up being a bitch because your brain was still developing and now it sticks for the rest of your life. yeah try taking that in, taika.

so. by all means. wise up and kill the living swastikas wherever you find them. it could be anything, but. get rid of it. because we are going to be so fucked up as humanity otherwise.

#the holocaust #nazi germany #antisemitism #propaganda #us politics #politics #dogwhistling #extremism #troythings gets political #superman #kal el #clark kent #lois lane #johnathan kent #overman #martha kent #dc comics #comics critical #mcu critical #anti mcu #tw genocide #tw antisemitism #tw holocaust #tw nazism #tw gore #tw isis #anti arrowverse #arrowverse #dammit

[radikylie]

Journal entry 5 million years later

Wow. It’s been well over a year and a half since I posted anything super personal and probably close to two years since being active on here. It has been a rollercoaster. In November 2021, I accepted a job at a university in the state where my love lived. After my graduate assistantship ended in 2020, it took me a year and a half to find a full-time job because of Covid. I applied to nearly 100 jobs and only heard back from maybe 10% of those jobs. And then I had exactly 3 and a half weeks to move my entire life across the country and move into an apartment with my then long-distance girlfriend when I was offered a job at a mid-size university.

Sometimes my life still doesn’t feel real. I’ve been so happy to be with my Emily and our quirky little sweet cat, but navigating life as an adult in this clown world has been extremely hard. I still can’t believe I live in fucking North Dakota. Our first two winters here have been the most brutal I have ever experienced. Boy, I thought I had SAD when I lived on the east coast but it sure is worse here. We hate living in a red state, but at least we live in the biggest city that is the most progressive.

My job as an admission counselor has been rewarding, difficult, draining, fun, and now mixed with frustration and disappointment. Our education system is a complete dumpster fire. Our incoming students and current students are having mental health crises every fucking day. It tears me apart sometimes to think that I am promising students a future I can’t guarantee with how the world is right now and where it’s going. In a week of traveling, I can drive over a thousand miles and spend over 30 hours in a car. There are high expectations and pressure to bring in first-year students because they are the true cash cows and there’s been a national decrease in enrollment across all institutions. The people I work with have been genuinely great people and are the best parts of the job sometimes. But the pay is absolute shit, and that coupled with rising greedflation and my outrageous private student loan debt feels like it’s crushing me. I don’t know how much longer I can take.

I recently applied for another job within my office that pays 10k more, and I know deserve something insanely better, but it would have been a good transition point and actually allow me to save money to move, and to get an EdTech job that is remote. I was denied this new job, the other candidate had “years of direct marketing experience” where I didn’t, but I had almost 2 years of experience in my office. I’ve shown them consistently that I have strong project management skills and organization for handling all of the texting/calling campaigns we do for students which was another part of this new job. It was handling all of the communications for print/emails (project management) and the job description didn’t even place a strong emphasis on design or marketing. But that’s what they went for in the other candidate. A white man. He wore a fucking flannel to the interview. If he didn’t have an awesome portfolio to present and he doesn’t bring the “wow” factor to this job, I’m going to be even more pissed.

And you know what also makes me mad. Last year around this time, we were actively hiring for another admission counselor position, and I was on that search committee. We were down to two choices, someone with 14 years of experience, and another person who interviewed so strongly but only had previous tour guide experience in terms of higher ed experience. We asked our supervisor if we could choose the person with less experience and she said that she would support that. We offered the position to the person with less experience but they eventually declined because the salary was so low (which we did advertise the salary??). So for this position I wanted, why would they not elevate another person in their office who has worked so fucking hard and has gone above and beyond for this position, and knows this office and best practices. So why does years of direct of experience matter now?

I cried for like the whole day. People in my office were rooting for me to have this job. The woman who previously had this job, she came from my position before that and didn’t even have a master’s. I cried because I felt trapped in this job, mainly due to capitalism. I cried because I felt so betrayed and underestimated. My direct supervisor was the chair for the search committee, and I know she doesn’t want to lose me as a counselor. Our director told me that my supervisor “adores” me, and that I consistently come up in their conversations about how I do great work and I get shit done. My director said she was excited that I applied and hoped they chose me, so I went into my final interview feeling very confident because she had already met the other two candidates before me.

When my supervisor called me to tell me the news (she was a at a conference), she started out saying that she appreciated me so much and that the other candidate would let them go in another direction that they didn’t even know they could go. I couldn’t speak. My voice cracked and I said thank you for letting me know and we ended the conversation. She followed up with a message on Microsoft Teams saying she appreciated me again and would like to help me build my skills to get me a job in EdTech, which is what I ultimately want. And I wonder if this response is because I low-key indicated to my director (because she flat out asked me) if I would leave if I didn’t get this job and I said yes. I don’t think my supervisor realizes how immediate I want (more like need) to leave.

I went home early crying after spending the entire week, waiting for the call, with extreme brain pain (psychophysiological disorder) symptoms and upset stomach to where I couldn’t eat because I was so stressed. Essentially, my nervous system thinks I’m in “danger” when thinking about travel season so it sends me unpleasant physical symptoms, like nerve pain in my face and muscle aches and nausea to where it gets debilitating at times. And travel season is both Fall and Spring. This past spring, I had to drive on icy back roads to rural parts of ND where my phone service does not work at times and once my tire starting leaking because it had a screw in it. I had a lowkey panic attack because I didn’t know what to do and needed to go to small town (population of 207) to get it patched. I was raped on a back road in a car with a man I thought I could trust when I was 20 so being out in the middle of nowhere gives me so much fucking anxiety. I’m stressed at the thought of college fairs starting in less than 2 months.

Stressed because I can’t do this fucking job anymore. The thought of being in this job for another travel season, like 6 weeks or more on and off of traveling start mid-September through November. And what’s worse is that we get “reimbursed” for our meals that we are out on the road but because North Dakota is North Dakota, I only get reimbursed up to $35 dollars a day meanwhile my coworkers traveling within MN can get up to $70 per day. So, when I travel, I have to be as frugal as possible and still lose money because I only get $6.50 for breakfast (unless I’m at a hotel and they have breakfast), 10.50 for lunch, and 17.50 for dinner. It was fine when I first started out but because of greedflation, it’s so much harder.

My student loan payments are like $700 dollars a month, and even though I have three fucking degrees, I’m stuck at an entry level pay despite having an MS degree. The pay across campus is abysmal. The pay for people with advance degrees is absolute shit. They advertised a mental health counselor position here which required a master’s or above and a license in counseling or social work for 43k. Like WHAT. That is what was offered to me when I started. I can’t save money long-term to get out of this fucking state, and we can’t even pay to go on a mini-vacation for a weekend trip. I had to tell my best friend from high school that I couldn’t go to her very fancy wedding on Cape Cod because there’s no way I can even save for myself. And I don’t think she will ever understand what its like to financially struggle and it feels like she lowkey resents me for it, and it makes me feel alone knowing she could never understand since both her and her husband come from a family with money. I worry she thinks I am just dumb as hell and not responsible with money but I can’t save for fucking anything. 

And my god, it could be so much worse. I know this, and am grateful for what we do have but it feels like we have very little to look forward to, and we pretty much can only spend what we need and not for things we want long-term. My family was exactly middle-class and moved into upper-middle class by the time I was in late high school, so it’s brought me more perspective. We are what they call “new poor” - we are one unexpected medical bill/car repair bill away from financial insecurity. I never had to worry about things like this before, I grew up blessed, and I know this. I try to give what I can when I can to my community and family and friends in need.

I tried to pick up a second job at really, really cool brewery but the shifts are so long (6-8 hours) and I sprained my knee on the job which led to my entire back seizing up two days before my birthday a few months ago. The worst birthday I’ve ever experienced. When my back spasmed, I couldn’t walk for three days. I cried the entire time almost. The first day it happened I screamed in pain with every little movement, like so much so Emily worried the cops would be called. Emily had to do everything for me – help me shower, eat, go the bathroom and she cared for me so well. I am so blessed and lucky to have her. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I had to go back to physical therapy and that was expensive also because health insurance is a fucking scam. It took me about a month to get to 60% okay.

I couldn’t work at the brewery for months and the money from there was so good because it’s an insanely huge operation so now I’m back in the same position now, and don’t know if I can physically keep up with the work. They work their employees so hard, not in a bad way necessarily, it’s just the nature of it because it’s in the top 10 breweries on untapped or whatever. I don’t think I can physically handle more than one or two shifts a month, but I’m afraid to work a whole shift again.

My health is not great. My desk job already has me gaining weight paired with PCOS that feels like it’s out of control, and my body hurts from sitting all day. My face is constantly breaking out from hormonal acne, I’m sure it’s been from all the stress I’ve been under too, but also because everything in this fucking world is harmful to us in one way or another. I’m not at the highest weight I’ve ever been but close to 20 pounds extra since I moved here. Its just so hard to find time and energy to workout because I have so little of both. Especially when I’m traveling, and it’s harder because the cheapest food when I’m out on the road is fast food so there’s not a lot of options to be healthy, especially in fucking ND. I think the only healthy/salad bowl kind of place is in the city we are in and the capital of ND and that’s it lol and its also more expensive. Driving for hours and hours is so exhausting. So. my mental health and self-image have been suffering from all of that too.  

But it feels like we are stuck in this city that is filled with terrible drivers and roads, and these brutal winters. The winters wouldn’t be so bad if the city actually maintained the roads better but every other week it feels like we are risking our lives to go to fucking work. I’ve had to drive through blizzards when I’ve never had any winter driving experience before. I’ve had an entire panic attack/mental breakdown on the interstate here that was completely iced over for 75 miles and I needed to get to the other side of the state for a fucking career fair for work. There were cars in ditches, and another fucking blizzard on the way after receiving well over a foot of snow in some parts of ND. If we weren’t visiting Em’s parents in the same town, and if she didn’t take over and drive on the icy parts for me, we would have never made it. I would have been paralyzed in fear at a truck stop without her, and she really showed up for me that day.

Spring and Fall both lasted maybe 3 weeks before it was either hot or cold season which seems to be all that ND has. Spring used to be my favorite season, but here the flowers don’t bloom until late May and its just mud and rain. Its depressing as hell. At least the summers have been mild in comparison to the disgustingly humid summers MD/VA have. When we do get a few really humid/hot days everyone complains so much and its funny to me because that’s basically any day in the summer on the east coast. It wouldn’t be so bad if our apartment ac unit actually fucking cooled our apartment below 72 degrees on a consistent basis. When its extremely hot and humid here, our apartment has gone up to 79 degrees if we do any sort of cooking or baking. It takes days to cool down, even with extra fans.

The city we live in does have a cool community and lots awesome local businesses. That’s been a saving grace. They do a lot of farmer’s markets, vintage markets, community/mutual aid events. If the world ever completely collapsed (which I feel is inevitable), I would feel pretty safe here and secure knowing the community is full of genuine and resourceful people. It’s a very safe and cheap city to live in because nobody wants to live in these winters. But we have no real friends here. We have our work friends who are just that, and it’s incredibly disappointing. We are both introverts but crave deeper connections with others, even if its only a few. One of the hardest lessons I have ever had to learn, and still learning, are that friends are like the seasons – they come and go.

I miss my family. I miss those summer days where I would wake up late, and my brother’s family would come over to swim. The dogs would be playing, and my niece and nephew being silly. My dad would grill and my mom would make a bunch of sides and we’d eat outside on the deck together. No plans except to go play a silly little video game by myself or with some people later that night after going for a walk or a run in my neighborhood in the woods. I miss sitting out in my driveway under the stars and trees with a good playlist, smoking a bowl, and reading about aliens. I miss my niece and nephew coming over every Tuesday and the house being so crazy with them but never a dull moment. I didn’t think I would miss that so much. My brothers can be assholes (my older brother more so), but it was nice when we were all getting along.

My relationship with my parents has gotten better as I’ve gotten older but they still can’t give me the emotional support that I need. Emily’s mom has been more emotionally supportive. My parents never ask me how I’m doing, just what I’m doing. I wish they would come visit me but I don’t think they ever will. They wouldn’t even fly me or Emily out for Christmas even though they have more than enough money to do so. They’ve been going on 10-day vacations in Jamaica at fucking Sandals, and doing weekend trips all over the east coast. But seeing me is not enough of a reason to fly here. 

They keep telling me how much they miss me and want me to move back but then don’t do anything to help me do that. They said they would help us move if I got a job on the east coast but don’t care that I’m drowning in student debt.  They disappoint me still and it feels like I have to grieve my relationship with them of what I need versus what they give me. It’s been that way my entire life. I know that they will never apologize for the things that they did while growing up. It’s a sad thing to come to terms with.

Another thing I have had to come to terms with is my purpose in this world, I guess. When I was 18, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to help people in some capacity. When I was 21, I had this grandiose idea and plans for how I could do that and save the world. When I was 24, I wanted to be a recreational therapist and create a holistic community center. When I was 25, I had started a master’s degree in Higher Education because I wanted to be a graduate assistant to a unique women’s college program within my university, which I worked hard to desperately create a safe space for young women, but the university didn’t give an actual shit about it. I didn’t think I would end up in higher education but here I am.

This is not where I expected myself to be at all, but I really did enjoy working with my students. So, I stayed in it. I finished my degree. And now I feel “stuck” in an education system that is very much a fucking dumpster fire. I’m feeling burnt out, I guess. It’s wrecking my mental and physical health. My nervous system is on high alert all the time, I think. I feel like I can never get enough time to actually rest and recover.

I’ve also had to re-evaluate my “purpose”. I’m an extremely spiritual person and have very much moved away from New Age completely but very interested in paganism or Mother Earth spirituality. I used to think that I had to have this grandiose purpose to change the world, but I recognize that the most important change comes from the self and extending that out to your community. Small acts of kindness can go a long way and encourage others to do the same, creating a chain reaction. But where exactly does that leave me?

Part of me wants to go to another university because of the “prestige” around it, but every institution has its own problems and is still within America’s education system that is a fucking shit show. I’m so concerned about how others see me sometimes, especially in professional sense. I felt like I was a late bloomer in all things because it took me 6 years to get my bachelor’s, but I also had a complete thyroidectomy after struggling with severe symptoms from it, and then being raped 3 months after the surgery. I was academically suspended for a year after my surgery and SA because my GPA was so low. There are so many people from that period of time who wrote me off as a dumb stoner and had no idea I was abusing weed because of trauma. Even my ex-girlfriend and her friends just thought I was a dumb stoner.

So, I guess I feel the need to “prove” that I am more than what they assumed me to be. I thought that I needed to be so career-driven to change the world and I am starting to understand that having that mindset is not a healthy way to live and will lead to self-destruction and burnout. I never thought I would hate my current job as much as I do. And I’m realizing that I don’t necessarily hate the work, but rather the expectations and circumstances surrounding it. I could stick out this job longer if I was paid more but it feels like I am running out of time to find something different before travel season starts again.

I’ve essentially quiet quit at this point. I feel like I have to detach myself from everyone because it hurts that I’m going to have to leave some of the people in my office, and I would go to bat for them at any time. I’ll be doing just above the bare minimum, and will not be volunteering as often to do extra things any more. A coworker of mine just got placed into her dream job and I’m so excited for her, but her leaving also gives us more work to cover. Another reason why I need to leave. And if I can leave before travel season, I feel a little guilty leaving during an important peak time, but they put me in this position. 

I can’t do it. I won’t if I don’t have to. And if September comes, and I am still searching for a job, I will do the college fairs with the goal of leaving before October. They could have given me the other position and I would have grown into it, and worked extremely hard to exceed their expectations and they could have arranged to have a new admission counselor in my position by the time college fair season started. But they made their choice. I need to make mine now.

But now I feel like I have to redefine what work means to me. Fuck the system. I can make my own path. I can change the world without a grandiose career. Its okay to just show up to work and then live your life. And so, I hope that my next job is in EdTech (and remote) that can give me financial freedom and security because that’s what it really all comes down to. I want a “lazy girl” job. A job that I feel good about and is not as emotionally/physically demanding so that I have the money to help others and do what I want. I just want to live a comfortable life, and one where I am not always worrying about money.

So, in order to get that, I think I need to release all of this. It’s been holding me back. I deserve a job that pays me well, and lets me live the life I want. A job that lets me help my friends and families, and give back to my community. I don’t have to bear the burden of being in a career that is glorified for how much you give and destroy yourself for it. I can’t imagine what k-12 teachers feel every day.

I think the next piece is letting go. Doing a trust fall for Mother Goddess to catch me and deliver me to my next opportunity. Trusting that the perfect job is on its way to me, and I won’t miss out on something that is for me. I deserve a job that gives me a better work-life balance. That I don’t feel like I am killing myself to survive. I have the money to live how I want, and all of the time and energy I have for other things is abundant.

I get so caught up worrying about making the right or wrong choice, or missing out on a job posting. I get caught up thinking that I’m not quite enough – I don’t have quite enough experience or direct experience or the right degrees. I get caught up with thinking about the cost of living in other states and what I can’t do or where we can’t move to. What if I’m meant to focus on the good, and all of the possibilities and different lives of Kylie. The possible exciting adventures in store for me.

Its reminiscent to how I felt when I couldn’t find a job after my graduate assistantship. I was stressing over every little thing. And then I finally just surrendered. That’s what it felt like after my huge disappointment with Bryn Mawr College and they decided not to hire me but not long after that I was offered my current job. And how I felt after running into my ex at a grocery store and having a panic attack and obsessing over how I’m going to meet my love and what I do or don’t do that could lead me to missing that connection. I eventually had to acknowledge and say that I surrender to the wonderful mystery that is the Universe. About two weeks of recognizing my need to let go of control, I met my Emily.

The catalyst this time is not getting this position within my office. It was a devastating disappointment. I’m still trying to reconcile that. But it has also opened me up to the fact that I do deserve something insanely better - better pay, better benefits, better work-life balance. I know my worth. And while I feel betrayed that I wasn’t picked for this position, I don’t need to punish myself or the people in my office for it. I do still feel a hint of resentment towards my supervisor, but she’ll understand the choice she made when I get offered my next job.

At first, I wanted to sulk. I wanted to quiet quit as loudly as possible. But now I see that I need to cherish my time with everyone. I want them to miss having me. I want to leave the office on good terms. But I want people to know that they lost my loyalty as well. I want people to think that they wish I was still there because of all the light and humor I brought. So. I will not be jumping at every opportunity to volunteer extra time and energy towards things. I will not be half-assing this job completely, but I will not be going above and beyond as often anymore either.

I am still incredibly sad and frustrated at this disappointment, but I see it was necessary and its time for me to move on, as scary as it seems. I will miss these people so much. So now I need to let go. Trust fall. Mother Goddess, A-team, I trust that the perfect job will find its way to me and will bring about the most exciting and best chapters of my life. Thank you for this.

#personal #holy shit this is by far the longest journal entry i have ever written on here #i have not been active in well over a year and a half p much #dont know if i will be again but i needed to post this for my own sanity #so hey if you remember me hi hope ur doing well #are people still really active on this idk i left bc the radfem community drama and life #anyway i wrote this at work otherwise i was going to lose my damn mind and according to word it is 4474 words and 6 pages so

[ladywildwood]

My D&D Campaigns

Since I'll likely most definitely be posting about my D&D campaigns and characters a fair bit, I figured I'd throw a post together about them so that anyone who decides this dumpster fire of a blog is worth reading has a clue what I'm going on (and on) about.

So here we go! Fair warning, some spoilers ahead for two official modules.

Curse of Strahd / Nimalia Nimalia, a 200+ Wood Elf Druid (Circle of Stars). Her clan has been at odds with the town of Daggerford forever, so she has to suck it up and make nice when a bunch of human and elvish kids go missing. She meets the other PCs at the temple, they agree to help her investigate a lead, and it's been all downhill from there.

(art by necromandi on IG)

Since coming to Barovia, Nim has been nearly killed several times (one which earned her the attention of a Dark Power known as the Evening Glory), found out another PC, Theodora, is her great-great-granddaughter, boned Rahadin several times, and been turned into a werewolf. I also recently found out that Ismark is the reincarnation of her human husband that she abandoned forever ago. He and their daughter tried to find her and wound up trapped in Barovia. Who knows if Nim will ever figure this out though because she gave up the memory of him in order to reconsecrate one of the fanes. So that's absolutely heart-breaking.

We started in December of 2021 and are closing in on the finale (maybe. we do a lot of roleplaying - on more than one occasion we spent an entire session in one room)!

(art by NoGlory on YCH.commishes)

Descent Into Avernus / Teya > Kallan > Tyshara > Kallan again Technically I had three characters throughout this campaign, but two of them were the same (sort of), and those are the two I'm going to gush about most. My Divination Wizard, Tyshara, might get an honorable mention here and there, but this was not the campaign for her. We tried, girlie.

I started the campaign with Teya Amell, an early twenties Aasimar Paladin of Ilmater. Her family is part of the nobility of Baldur's Gate, and her father spent her whole life leveraging the fact that she's angelic to Get Places. She was a high-ranking member of the city's guard (because of her family name, not actual ability). She died during a fight in the secret sewer shrine? to the Dead Three, and that's how Kallan was brought into the game. Kallan's soul was forced into Teya's body by Bane. Kallan has no memories of a life before joining Teya and Feels Bad about stealing her body.

(art by anotherliz.art on IG)

She died outside the gates of the High Hall in Hellturel (stabbed by her Not Boyfriend, another PC, that had been charmed by a scary red lady), which is how Tyshara got thrown into the mix, but before that she had a lot of conflicted feelings about things. She even went to Teya's funeral! Towards the end of the campaign she was brought back by Krull, a tortle cleric of Tiamat, and allowed to finish the quest with the party under the agreement that she would then serve Tiamat for the rest of her life. Joke's on him though because Bane overrules Tiamat and he's got dibs on her soul. We just finished this campaign, so I'll probably have a whole big write up about it at some point.

We actually just finished this campaign after a little over two years, but I still fully plan on talking about it.

Unnamed Homebrew Campaign / Primrose My Monday night group is abandoning official modules and heading into our DM's homebrew world! I'm waiting until our DM gives us the player primer he's working on to figure out more of the details, BUT my character is a Primrose (real name currently Karisha Peveki but may change depending on if it's lore-friendly) a late 20's Tiefling Bard who's incredibly shy and anxious. She is an accomplished poet with a reverse pseudonym - she first published under her real name, wanting to prove herself to her family, but when she Made It she realized she absolutely does not want the attention (mostly), so she adopted the name Primrose. She also likes to dive into her cups.

We'll be starting this campaign in early November!

I don't have any art of her yet, but here's her HF mini!

#dungeons and dragons #dnd #d&d #oc showcase #nimalia #teya amell #kallan #descent into avernus #curse of strahd #primrose peveki

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I was spoiled last summer because I got to go on 3 trips, essentially 3 vacations, the first vacations I'd taken since my cousin's wedding in 2018.

For my birthday in May, I went to Busch Gardens and a youtuber boxing match with some friends. In June I went to a week-long family reunion in DC, Maryland and Pennsylvania; we had a memorial for my Grammy who passed away in 2021, visited some of my mom's cousins I'd never met before, spent a whole day at Six Flags America with my own cousins, and toured the National Mall/Smithsonian. In August, I had a longshot job interview at a library in the city I want to move to, so I took time off work to bus up, crashed with my sister, and aced the first round with flying colors; I spent a congratulatory week in town looking for an apartment, then headed home with some promising leads and absolutely BOMBED the second round, evaporating my best chance at getting off the godforsaken rock I've been stuck on since I graduated college.

This year, I don't have any real plans. I finally bought my own car, but now I have to start the whole job and apartment search from square one with severely diminished savings. I wanted to quit my current job last weekend, but I chickened out because I need the money. If I leave sometime this summer and find an apartment to sublease, I'd have to move out in August anyway because all the leases expire just in time for the fall semester. Move-out and move-in are a week or two apart, so I'd have to come back home anyway while I was between leases, assuming I was even able to secure a full year lease when I'm competing with something like fifty thousand college students in a town with a population of less than 150,000. It seems like every new building being constructed up there is an apartment complex, but they fill up almost immediately and rent never goes down.

I can't stay in the Keys much longer. There's nothing for me down here. If I can't move until August, I at least need to take a break from work and travel before my student loans inevitably come due because the nazi bastards on SCOTUS think only rich fucks deserve debt forgiveness and the measly poors have to prop them up. I want to enjoy my summer, because it's all downhill from here. The economy is on the verge of collapse and we're heading into another dumpster fire of a presidential election (it feels like every cycle is worse than the last). I need a distraction. I need an outlet. I need to take advantage of the freedom my car affords me before shit hits the fan and I'm forced to come crawling back to a job I barely tolerate on an island I despise with every fiber of my being. If I don't get out soon, I don't know when I'll get my next shot.

Next April I'm going on a roadtrip to Ohio to view the total solar eclipse, so I at least have that to look forward to if nothing else. Just 11 months to go.

Who am I kidding? I won't survive down here another year. This place is eroding my mental health. It is absolutely imperative that I move before summer ends, lease or no lease. I'd rather live out of my car for a while than be stuck here indefinitely.

[themichaelvan]

I posted 5,387 times in 2022

That's 5,387 more posts than 2021!

268 posts created (5%)

5,119 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@schmope-is-dead

@nachosforfree

@miiilowo

@fazbear-ent-official

@cherry-flavored-content

I tagged 3,060 of my posts in 2022

Only 43% of my posts had no tags

#favorite - 188 posts

#👀 - 149 posts

#goose tag - 88 posts

#inspo - 77 posts

#important - 50 posts

#server tag - 42 posts

#me - 37 posts

#prev - 26 posts

#blazed post tag - 25 posts

#prev tags - 23 posts

Longest Tag: 124 characters

#🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

why nearly every character in all of the fnaf musicals are insane in distinctly different but still very much insane ways: an essay

(this is like 80% from memory and its. checks time 2:15am as of writing this so excuse inaccuracies.)

mark: oh my god starting off with a bang, are we? okay okay. he was there for ONE NIGHT. one. one night. he spent like basically all of it crying in the corner because of puppets. theyre puppets. freddy is literally punted across the room on multiple occasions YOU ARE A FULL GROWN ADULT MARK. "in all my dreams i see / a maze of halls with bloody walls / and countless scrawls reminding me "it's me!"" YOU WERE THERE FOR ONE NIGHT. he IMMEDIATELY decides that the solution to this is not 1) taking it up with his manager 2) just fucking quitting bUT INSTEAD THAT ITS 3) BRING A DUFFEL BAG FULL OF WEAPONS, INCLUDING SEVERAL KNIVES AND GUNS TO HIS WORKPLACE INTENDING TO KILL THE ANIMATRONICS YOU WERE HIRED TO PROTECT. AND THEN THE ONLY THING HE DID TO CHANGE HIS IDENTITY AFTER NEARLY KILLING A MAN AND GETTING CAUGHT WAS TO DYE HIS HAIR. he didnt even change his ADDRESS. dipshit. he acts all tough and crap afterward too like he spent 40 years in prison. he was reduced to literal actual tears by puppets. god i love him so much.

nate: sassed the man holding a knife to one of the animatroniocs he, AGAIN, was HIRED to PROTECT. drove the animatronics to a man they KNOW is willing to use guns to protect himself in the FIRST PLACE. also he just ??? fuckign Had bb on hand like. did they give him bb when he quit the first time?? like. okay. say you have to distract an easily distracted but immensely murderous animatronic and your first thought is "hmm what if i use that rc car that looks like a child from my old workplace". bitch if its been 7 years since i worked there and witnessed a traumatizing event im gonna bury that fucker at the bottom of my closet not just have it with me. also his first concern when he was faced with a very much "i am going to die" situation is that he hasnt caught up on a tv show yet???? nate buddy please i appreciate you but get some self-worth and some therapy while youre at it

aj: he was nearly killed by an animatronic as big as he was, stopped only by like a foot or smth, and then IMMEDIATELY accepted the transfer to ANOTHER place with animatronics in it like. why would you actively choose to keep working with fazbear entertainment. im sure literally any other company ever would look at aj "nearly killed two men because he wanted to work more hours" purple guy and hire him in a millisecond. SPEAKING OF WHICH, HE NEARLY KILLED TWO MEN BECAUSE HE WANTED TO WORK MORE HOURS. DO YOU NEED THE MONEY THAT BADLY OR DO YOU JUST REALLY FUCKING. WANT TO WORK AT FAZBEARS THAT MUCH. i honeslty cant decide which is worse. he also mocked the guy with a chainsaw who burst through the wall not ten minutes before??? who was also like 2 feet away from him???? what were you EXPECTING him to do??????????????????? give you more hours????????????????????????

phone guy: yeah.

mike: looked at the absolute flaming dumpster fire that was the lawsuits, filthy animatronics, extremely low budget, and EXTREMELY sketchy boss that was the new fazbears and said "yeah i can work with this." also i think he got killed by pan stan which is such a sad way to go my god. i dont have quite as much to say about him but i DO love him very much and he REALLY SHOULD HAVE gotten a better job.

lizzy: other than the fact she hasnt quit fazent yet (which is excusable considering it looks like shes looking into the sketchy stuff and is probably mostly there for mikes death), actually not that bad. props to her tbh if i had to deal with a boss like phone guy id go considerably more feral.

those police officers who showed up for like 2 scenes in the og fnaf musical: just fucking, like. let an actual murder perp ESCAPE because they Forgot To Lock The Car And Went To Go Get Food and then just. DIDNT REPORT IT. because this, apparently, is NOT the first time theyve let someone escape, and because theyd LOSE THEIR JOBS IF THEY REPORTED IT. if the police is THAT bad in this town no fucking wonder phone guy's gotten away with everything so far.

41 notes - Posted August 7, 2022

#4

drops dead on the floor

43 notes - Posted October 7, 2022

#3

buddy.... are you..... sweeping..... the evil rune circle............

45 notes - Posted October 20, 2022

#2

SIGHS. okay whatever. 10k notes and i finish reading homestuck

81 notes - Posted October 3, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

i hope the admiral knows i love him

(original image under cut, id in alt)

2,341 notes - Posted September 12, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#y'know i never did get those 10k notes to read homestuck #also ?!?!?!!? WHAT do you mean my 4th blog was fazbear-ent-official i don't even follow them that closely #i could have sworn i did tags with the max amount of characters (139 or smth) too but ...???

[gvftea]

“blowing up on tiktok was the worst thing to happen to this band and i'll die on that hill”

AGREED! I’ve been a fan since 2018/2019 and let me tell you how downhill this fandom has gone. Stan twitter was waaaaaaay nicer to each other and wasn’t as cliquey. Yeah people had their friends but it was still super easy to make an account and meet people because everyone would interact with everyone. Even being in the pit was a different vibe because people were always respectful of one another (well from what I’ve seen) people weren’t cutting in front of others (AGAIN from what I’ve seen) and people didn’t have these bad attitudes. But then they blew up on TikTok in 2020/2021 ish and you TikTok roaches ruined the fandom. You all came in with your cliquey, nasty, low vibrational attitudes and ran people out of the fandom because they don’t want to be associated with this dumpster fire of a fan base anymore. I love how you guys will tweet “my page is a safe space for anyone, i will literally talk to anyone” but then ignore new people, not follow back, talk shit and only interact with those in your cliques like you bitches are so unserious 💀 Even the shows are a different vibe now. You guys will cut, push, or do whatever it is so you can say you had barricade. You guys have the most unapproachable energy ever, you have horrible breath and are just straight up unfriendly, the exact opposite vibe of my first show where everybody was respectful, hygienic, and kind to one another. I met so many amazing people in this fandom who no longer want to be associated with this fandom because of you TIK TOK ROACHES who make all the fans look bad. Hell, I’m on my way out myself because you guys sucked the fun out of twitter and going to shows. I’ll still always love the band but just support them from afar. I wish you guys would’ve taken your catty, high school, mean girl shit over to the 5SOS fandom.

#greta van fleet #gvf #josh gvf #sam gvf #jake gvf #josh kiszka #danny wagner #danny gvf #jake kiszka #sam kiskza

[louisianaprelawland-blog]

Sydney Powell And The State Bar Of Texas

By Lauren Barrouquere,  University of Louisiana at Lafayette Class of 2024

February 26, 2023

Sydney Powell, Donald Trump’s former attorney, became involved in litigation with Texas’ Bar Association, who she is licensed with, in November of 2021  [5]. Allegedly, Powell engaged in unethical conduct such as “engaging in misrepresentation” or other fraudulent behavior, and bringing frivolous lawsuits [4]. The ethics complaint specifically made note of multiple election-fraud lawsuits Powell filed in multiple jurisdictions where there was no logical reason for them to be filed, leading the Texas Commision for Lawyer Discipline to believe they were frivolous [1]. The penalty for such behavior may be as harsh as disbarmment [5]. Some examples of the alleged unethical behavior include a lawsuit in Michigan, where Powell falsely named another attorney as her counsel for a case contesting the election results in Michigan [5].

Previously, in 2022, Powell filed a motion to dismiss the case [4]. This motion contained claims such as the lawsuit being unfounded because it was supposeduly born of the Democratic Party’s “partisan grievances” against her, as well as arguments that if the lawsuit was successful, it would make it much more difficult for attorneys to dispute the results of elections going forward [4]. This motion was not granted [4].

Ironically enough, it was actually the Texas Commision for Lawyer Discipline, and not Powell, that brought the lawsuit crashing down [1]. As of February 24th, the lawsuit against Powell was dismissed [1]. Judge Andrea K. Bouressa of Texas’ 471st District Court, Collin County, threw the case out based on the presentation of the evidence [1]. Though the disciplinary committee apparently had all the necessary evidence, it was innaproprialtey labeled and organized, leading Judge Bouressa to only consider two documents- one of which was a pleading filed by Powell herself [1].

Allegedly, the Texas Commision for Lawyer Discipline listed their evidence as Exhibits A through F in their appendix in a brief, but the actual appendix contained documents labeled A through H, which did not match with the documents described in the brief [1]. Furthering the confusion, the commission only made three citations referencing two documents when discussing summary judgement evidence, and one of the citations described the document contained in Exhibit G but referred to it as Exhibit E [1]. When alerted to the evidence mix-up, the commission declined to partake in any corrective action whatsoever [1].

Bouressa also explained that, aside from the proverbial evidence dumpster fire, she also tossed the case due to the commissions failure to respond to a motion submitted by Powell challenging pieces of their claim [1]. There is still a chance that the dismissal may be contested, but that remains to be seen, as the disciplinary commission has not released any comments on the matter [3].

______________________________________________________________

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge-tosses-ethics-case-against-sidney-powell-citing-numerous-defects-in-regulators-exhibits

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/trump-2020-fraud-backer-sidney-powell-s-texas-ethics-case-tossed

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/23/politics/sidney-powell-disciplinary-action-tossed/index.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/06/23/sidney-powell-could-still-be-disbarred-as-court-lets-case-against-her-move-forward/?sh=1d65eb4e25df

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/02/revealed-sidney-powell-trump-us-election

[hongssami]

some abandoned wips in my tumblr drafts

welcome to the dumpster fire that is my tumblr drafts, i won't be showing you the gdocs anytime soon :^D

(she's definitely a post, my dudes. please bare with me. or ignore altogether lol)

ɛ chan ɜ

↳ once upon a dream | blurb | circa 2021

besties to lovers, just the scene of chan dancing with mc in the forest but it's always a dream but then one day chan begins to hum the song they always dance to and mc is taken aback and kinda admits to chan that they've been dreaming about that song and it just blah-

↳ another shirtless chan | blurb | circa 2021

a kind of continuation to this drabble. yeah idk where to go from here now fdsgfsd bye-bye shy shirtless chan. you were loved by a handful of my readers fdsgfds

ɛ lino ɜ

↳ body-switching with lino | drabble/fic idk | circa 2021

it is what it is, kinda childhood frienemies-to-lovers too. but it was going to get awkward bc they realize they know each other too well that they pass too well when they're switched. i would have loved to expound on this bc i was going to make soondoongdori be weary of mc in lino's body lol so whenever lino im mc's body came over, his cats would go to him and not lino's body hehe

ɛ choi hyunsuk ɜ

↳ In A Week | full fic | circa 2021

she was supposed to be my first proper angst fic,,,,, i was too weak to pull through 😔😔

#mai's dungeon drafts #wingkkun babbles

[no-stabbing-wednesdays]

hey tumblr, when we called you a hellsite it was not a challenge

#tumblr #post+ #post plus #why would you actively promote an easy to identify system of monetizing fanfiction? #how can you not end someone's subscription if they're harassing you? #this is another 2021 dumpster fire