my latest gamedev idea is "guy on the corner of the screen who gives you personalized tips when you die". original idea do not steal

Tumblr flagged this post as sexually explicit and it's literally just a trans dude in high fantasy art.

Make it make sense.

The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.

Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”

major props to christopher eccleston for acting out the lines "i couldn't save your world. i couldn't save any of them" with such subtle and layered emotions while also struggling against mannequin people trying to throw him into a pit of lava (he is very clearly standing on a styrofoam pad lit by LED lights)

So, I think I may have accidentally found the worst book ever written by a human being.

I don't know if you guys have ever heard of Savitri Devi; she was a Hitler stan who moved from Greece to India, got really excited about "Aryan" racial mythology, changed her name, and tried to fuse Nazism with Hinduism. A lot of her ideology is patently absurd (e.g. Hitler is an avatar of Vishnu), but none of it is funny because she spent her entire life actively trying to build a coalition of the most violently racist people you can imagine. Hindutva paramilitary groups, American neo-Nazis, early ecofascists; you name them, she probably went to their meetings and wrote propaganda for them.

So, knowing this, it makes one feel particularly deranged to learn that she also wrote fiction about- and from the POV of- her many cats.

The book in question is called Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, or The True Story of a "most objectionable Nazi" and half-a-dozen Cats.

Published in 1965, this text features a protagonist named "Heliodora", who Devi admits in the introduction is just her lightly fictionalized self-insert. In the beginning Heliodora heroically rescues a stray kitten and its mother, but then the narrative grinds to a halt to explain the weird racial theories that brought her to India, before it picks right back up with the cat fancying. Here is an excerpt that may convey a little of how jarring these transitions can be:

"An unexpected thought crossed Heliodora’s mind, like a flash of lightning: “Had I gone to Europe in 1939, or even in 1940, 1 should not have had this lovely creature, nor, in fact, any of these cats to which I have given a home. They probably all would have been dead, by now — would have died of misery, in some gutter, without love, poor beautiful felines!” And a strange question followed that thought: “Was it for them that I was fated to remain here?” She knew the thought was a nonsensical one and the question too. For of what account was the life and happiness of any creatures, nay, of any human beings, including her own, compared with the Service of the Aryan Reich and of the Cause of truth?

It is all. Fucking. Like This. There are grim descriptions of feline suffering contrasted with long, ecstatic descriptions of her cats learning to trust the only nice human in the world (her). There are passages on the virtue of vegetarianism and the evils of (especially Kosher) slaughterhouses. She thinks it's a great idea to do medical experiments on criminals rather than animals! She thinks kids who throw rocks at cats should have their hands cut off! She starts chapters with direct quotes from Mein Kampf! When her favorite cat runs away she writes the (fully imaginary) story of his adventures on the streets, including him having cat sex. Here is the cat sex:

"The coquettish she-cat jumped up and ran away, only to stop again some twenty yards further and again to roll in the grass, calling for love, — and again to ran away as soon as the lover was about to take her. At last, however, — after many an unsuccessful leap and further and further galloping in the moonshine, Long- whiskers overcame her faked resistance and possessed her. He forgot himself, and she — his black silky panther — forgot herself. Their individualities ceased for a while to exist, and in him, the eternal He-Cat, Creator and Lord of everything, and in her, the co-eternal, sphinx-like, dark Feline Mother, Lady of all Life, once more mingled their opposite polarities and took consciousness of their double Godhead, as they had been doing for millions and millions of years. And once more the divine spark — the Creative Lightning — flashed through their furry bodies, and the daily miracle took place: there was life in the female’s womb."

Sooooo......anyway...........the lost cat finds its way back to her, but has caught feline distemper and dies in her arms, but then he is REINCARNATED IN ENGLAND, as a kitten in a decent (white) home where his family loves him. Heliodora is coincidentally going back to Europe at this time (she lists her religion as "national socialist" on the travel paperwork), which means we get pages and pages of her obsessing over every 'misstep' in the war, and Germany's tragic loss, but more importantly, she meets a random cat and he is (unknown to her), the reincarnation of her beloved Long-whiskers, the Cat Who Fucked. She sees that he's well-fed and happy and is like "I finally understand why Hitler was so nice to the British; they treat cats well so I guess they're Aryan too". I am not making any of this up:

“They have poured streams of fire over Germany; betrayed their own race; identified themselves with its worst enemies ...”

“Prrr, prrr, prrr,” purred back the cat; “that is because they had been (as they are still being) misled, deceived. But one day they shall wake up from their delusion, tum against their bad shepherds, and help the people of their own blood to build up a new Europe — the very Europe of your dreams, in which we creatures will all be happy — for they are good people at heart; good people like Aryans generally are, taken as a whole. Prrr, prrr, prrr . . . The proof of it is that they have taken such good care of me! Prrrrrrrrr . . .”

This version of her cat grows old and dies. Meanwhile, Heliodora is arrested and imprisoned for distributing Nazi propaganda. When she gets out, she meets the reincarnation of a different cat she had left behind in India. (All of her cats want to find her again after death because they love her so very much.) In between her banal, mundane descriptions of caring for this new cat, she describes her various arrests, interrogations, and brief periods of imprisonment. And then she moves, gives that cat away and gets another fucking cat. It is at this point where I completely lose track of which cat is meant to be the reincarnation of which other cat; this woman goes through cats like potato chips. She says she doesn't even love them as individuals, but as one piece of "the intangible Essence of Catdom", so I guess it doesn't fucking matter whether I know their names or not.

This woman's primary thesis is "human suffering doesn't matter, only animal suffering matters" and she beats it into the ground. Her secondary thesis is that national socialism is the one true religion and will save the world. Not only is this a deeply self-obsessed, morally incoherent, grotesque piece of writing, it is also boring as hell. It's half stories about how people who are mean to animals all deserve to get murdered, and half a travelogue where the protagonist goes on screeds about race-mixing every time she visits a new city. While you're reading it you feel as if time has stopped, and you will be stuck reading this terrible book for the rest of your life. All she knows how to do is repeat her two ideas over and over again. Honestly, it reads like heavy-handed satire of a very specific type of white woman. Heliodora wears golden swastika earrings.

I'm exhausted. Never read this book.

my favorite part of utena is that she in fact did not study the blade, she was just so good at basketball that it by proxy made her awesome at sword fighting, in fact better at sword fighting than the people sword fighting their entire lives. the most jock of all time

i do think it's notable that one of the reasons people can be attracted towards the antagonist characters in archetypal "hero's journey"-style narratives is that the antagonist here is the one with actual motive desires, whereas the protagonist is a fundamentally reactionary and responsive force. in the paradigm followed by these narratives, the antagonist is the one who disrupts the status quo, who attempts to bring about some sort of change and new state of affairs; while the protagonist only acts in response to that challenging of the status quo, in an attempt to restore that status quo and return to 'normalcy'. like, say what you will about the evil emperor, but at least them overthrowing the previous ruler and building an evil fortress was compelling self-expression

Fucking wack how a lot of people seem to have redefined "gatekeeping" from "trying to kick people out of your community for not living up to some arbitrary standard you made up" to "making me feel intellectually insecure"

this is all, at the core, @lake-shark ‘s fault and all criticism should be directed at her

we were doing our catws10 rewatch and i said that in the highway scene, I had heard that sebastian’s pronunciation of russian is quite bad and instead of saying “i have her, find him”, he’s saying something about a brick. i am trying to be humorous.

misha shoots back “yeah almost like the language got brute-forced into his head.”

i don’t know why it never occurred to me how stressful bucky learning russian probably was, probably because he already speaks it in the comics, but now i’m running through everything regarding language and it’s through a whole new filter. holy shit. he’s got to learn it from torturers and abusers.

first, how fucking isolating. how embarrassing and degrading in a real way. people talk to him like he’s stupid. he doesn’t fully understand why he has this other language in his head that he wants to use, but is almost certainly not allowed to. his internal language is severed from his external language. the words he does say feel unwieldy in his mouth and harsh to his own ears. he can’t practice it, and no one is gonna sit down and teach him.

second, to quote dialect quoting james baldwin, “people evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, in order to not be submerged by a reality they cannot articulate”. if you don’t have the right language, you cannot describe what is happening to you. you can’t call for help. you can’t beg for mercy. you don’t have the words to picture your future as different from your present.

third, no wonder bucky takes to pierce better than karpov. no wonder karpov needed specific words and pierce has many to control him. much has been said about how pierce tries to manipulate bucky with his words, like what weak points he presses on to try to keep bucky on track, how he uses language as weapon, and to top it all off, pierce literally speaks his language.

i am chewing on glass.

new ship dynamic called schrodinger’s divorce where characters are simultaneously bitterly divorced and fondly married for twenty years

"that's ciri's hair"

"ciri hasnt been to the apartment in a MONTH, geralt!! i know its yours! clean it up!!!"

"read: 2:15pm"

"THIS IS A VERBAL CONVERSATION"

modern AU where geralt and jaskier share an apartment and jaskier is constantly cleaning long white hair out of the shower which geralt refuses to do anything about