My favorite idiot gay wizards

I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

It frightens and discourages me how pervasive "tribal" stereotypes and imagery are in the fantasy and adventure genres.

It's all over the place in classic literature. Crack open a Jules Verne novel and you're likely to find caricatures of brown people and cultures, even when the characters are sympathetic to the plight of the colonized peoples - incidentally, this is the biggest reason I can't recommend 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to everyone, despite Captain Nemo being one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

You can't escape it in modern cinema, either. You'll see white heroes venturing bravely into jungles and tombs to steal from natives who don't know how to use their resources "properly." You'll see them strung up in traps, riddled with sleeping darts, forced to flee and fight their way out. Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, a remarkably inclusive franchise in many other ways, had an extended sequence of the white heroes escaping from a cannibal civilization in the second film.

And when fantasy RPGs want a humanoid enemy, the "bloodthirsty natives" are the first stock trope they jump to. World of Warcraft is one of the most egregious examples, with the trolls - blatant racist caricatures with faux-voodoo beliefs, cannibalistic diets, Jamaican accents, and a history of being killed in droves by (white) elves and humans - being raided and slaughtered in nearly every expansion.

It doesn't matter how vibrant and distinctive the real-world indigenous, Polynesian, Caribbean, and African cultures are. It doesn't matter how much potential these real civilizations offer for complex and sympathetic characterization. Anything that doesn't make sense to the white western mind is shoved under the same "savage" umbrella. They're different. They're strange. They're scary. They have to be escaped, subjugated, eliminated, ogled at from the safety of a museum.

Modern writers, directors, and developers don't even seem to realize how horrifying it is to present the indigenous inhabitants of a place as "obstacles" for non-native protagonists to overcome. "It's not racist," they say, "because these people aren't really people, you see." And if you dare to point out anything that hurts or offends you as a descendant of the bastardized culture, you're accused of being the real racist: "These aren't humans! They're monsters! Are you saying that these real societies are just like those disgusting monsters?"

No, they're not monsters. But you chose to design them as monsters, just as invaders have done for hundreds of years. Why would you do that? Why can you recognize any other caricature as evil and cruel, but not this?

This is how deep colonialism runs.

winter ❄️⛄

humbly making my contribution to the dorian wearing the dorian shirt pile!!!!

“We are allies today. Perhaps in the future we will be allies again.

ngl one of the most useful things i’ve internalized from doing art online is never tell people what to criticize. don’t preemptively apologize for things or point out where you think you fumbled, it’s just priming people to notice minor issues that might not actually matter and hit you where you’re sensitive and throw you off your game. don’t tell people your weak points. if it’s a genuine problem they’ll point it out

@runfreebirdrun THREATENED me at GUNPOINT to do this drawing of GAY PEOPLE (🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮) KISSING (??!?!!?!??!?)

his post of the same pose is here, and the image we both drew was sent to iwcat by @kurocyou

My half of our Essek art trade with the amazing @zmeess ! I've been obsessed with this Aeor outfit they designed for him since forever...♡

I love that Keyleth is finally experiencing the other side of “group of quirky adventurers cornering the wise powerful NPC and taking the chance to ask them about all the random unrelated shit they been wondering about“

Keyleth IS the new Allura

Dean and Cas should have gotten to poke fun at Sam’s career choice more often. When Cas is annoyed, his response is always ‘ok law boy’ with an eye roll. Anytime Sam utters ‘so get this’, Dean and Cas rush to be the first to object. Dean threatens to sue Sam anytime he interrupts his alone time with Cas. The party city wig was actually one of those white British judge wigs.

I find idioms derived from scripture to be particularly fascinating. They seem to have this extra weight to them. One of my favorites is “out of the mouths of babes” which speaks to the surprise of wisdom coming from unexpected sources.

The phrase’s origin is a particularly funky translation of Psalm 8:2: “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, That thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.”

Such evocative phrasing. It *almost* paints a picture.

Anyway, it’s Thursday.

See you soon.

i dont know who needs to hear this, but the word "queer" is one of the most inclusive words out there, and it should stay that way. Yes, "queer" includes cishet aromantic men. all "queer" means is that you're don't fit into society's standards of cis/hetero/a normativity.

He’s back baby!!!!

El Hopper

decided to try and draw a wheelchair for the first time and why not shove prinxiety in there

commission me!