am i allowed to say stuff on here?

Dozens of Google employees began occupying company offices in New York City and Sunnyvale, California, on Tuesday in protest of the company’s $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-in, organized by the activist group No Tech for Apartheid, is happening at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s office in Sunnyvale and the 10th floor commons of Google’s New York office. The sit-in will be accompanied by outdoor protests at Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, and Seattle beginning at 2 pm ET and 11 am PT. Tuesday’s actions mark an escalation in a series of recent protests organized by tech workers who oppose their employer’s relationship with the Israeli government, especially in light of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. Just over a dozen people gathered outside Google’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale on Tuesday. Among those in New York was Google cloud software engineer Eddie Hatfield, who was fired days after disrupting Google Israel’s managing director at March’s Mind The Tech, a company-sponsored conference focused on the Israeli tech industry, in early March. Several hours into the sit-ins on Tuesday, Google security began to accuse the workers of “trespassing” and disrupting work, prompting several people to leave while others vowed to remain until they were forced out. The 2021 contract, known as Project Nimbus, involves Google and Amazon jointly providing cloud computing infrastructure and services across branches of the Israeli government. Last week, Time reported that Google’s work on Project Nimbus involves providing direct services to the Israel Defense Forces. No Tech for Apartheid is a coalition of tech workers and organizers with MPower Change and Jewish Voice for Peace, which are respectively Muslim- and Jewish-led peace-focused activist organizations. The coalition came together shortly after Project Nimbus was signed and its details became public in 2021.

You can read No Tech for Apartheid's open letter here.

I would say Bethesda but this is honestly just typical cat behavior

Added some color! Also idk wtf is going on with his clothes. I tride looking at references but still had to wing it. I need to study cloths more.

this geass, i do accept.

While it’s from one of the worst quests in any game of all time, “Oh, so terrible actions are justified only as long as they’re your terrible actions?” was a god-tier line of dialogue

you believe me like a god / I betray you like a man

chess

Yo! I saw the long post about Vivienne and you mentioned your own take and headcanons on Solas and I was hoping you could rant about them please?

Sure man.

If I remember the post right, in it I was talking about canon Solas vs how I would have done him, so that’s what I’ll answer. Apologies if I’m misremembering.

When I played DAI, I had known some spoilers, but mostly without any detail. IE I knew he was Fen’Harel, and there’s some confrontation at the end with him because of it. I knew Flemeth was Mythal. I knew he had set elves free from the other elven gods who practiced slavery. That was about it.

I (wrongly) assumed they were on opposite sides, which honestly would have been funny as hell to watch since neither wants to be publicly outed.

Until Trespasser put his characterization through a wood chipper (and their established canon), he was pretty consistent, and I’d have kept him that way. He claims in Trespasser that he didn’t even see other people as people because of how short lived they are, and he’s got no interest in improving the existing world because he’s going to magic nuke it for restoration (why??? Love that even the devs didn’t know by the end of tresspasser lmao and had to say ‘uhm good question. Next?’). His character in-game before then is explicitly super different and contrary to that. Like, he sure gave a shit about me delivering flowers for a widower and human mage rights for someone who doesn’t see them as people at the time. 🤔

Anyway. My hcs would be how I saw him pre-tresspasser, and how I thought things would go. I wouldn’t have retconned the elven gods being gods (one it’s super racist).

I loved the idea of how he seems. I played all the games back to back in order, and you get these fragments. The wolf statues outside Dalish camps because he’s not exactly welcome in, but he’s honored. He’s seen as a traitor and a trickster because he trapped the gods. But you know there’s more there. You get the Fang of Fen’Harel as a weapon in my origin. And you hear about the war of dales, and how it’s said the warriors fighting for their last homes were each accompanied by a wolf.

You’ve got these thousands of years of history. Of a people group who used to live forever, and lost it to humanity. Who then humans did settler colonialism apartheid to, and stole from, and killed, and enslaved, and tried to erase the culture and history and territory and lives of. And they’ve been fighting. They fought to stay, they fought to keep their reservations in the war of the dales, and the roaming tribes still fight now.

And you’ve got Fen’Harel. You’ve got Solas, who has been alive for so long. Who fought for his people against the other gods, to set them free, from slavery. Who chose mortals over his own. And he did it. He did the impossible and shut out the sky. He saved everyone. By himself. Him alone.

And because of it, elves were conquered by humans. They die faster, they were sold, they were murdered. Decimated.

And he for all his fighting, takes in myth the fall as a traitor to the good gods. No one knows the truth.

And he’s alone now, but he’s still fighting for them. He’s the wolf beside every warrior, dying again and again, but even a god on the battlefield isn’t enough, and they lose, again.

They are beaten back, again. Even their shitty ‘gifted’ lands from their conquerors are whittled at. They paint the sign of their enslavement to other gods on their face, not knowing the past, and he’s the bad guy in stories.

By the time you reach DAI, you’ve got someone who has been utterly alone, fighting in the trenches, for centuries. He says he doesn’t fit in with the Dalish, which makes no sense for a ‘canon’ ‘I was awake 2 years and decided to nuke the world was the only way’ Solas, but makes 100% sense for an old god who is living in the wreckage, again and again, of all his good intentions. There is no one like him. And his suggestions for things to try get him shut out of communities.

It’s someone very desperate, with almost nothing left to lose, and all out of hope. He’s tried the ‘better’ way 1000 times.

And it never matters. It never changes anything, it never saves anyone, it never even changes how he is remembered.

He gave everything and obliterated his species, the gods, for a people he still failed, after everything, to save. And yet he’s still trying.

You get the events of DAI, and this incredibly lonely person, who kind of knows from before day 1 what he’s going to have to do. And this group that all manages to include each other, despite their hatreds and pasts, except him. Notably, Varric /only/ leaves Solas out of the party event. Only him. The only people who spend any time with him are Cole, who knows, and determinately, the Inquisitor, who doesn’t. Assuming you play a good inquisitor, and you’re nice to him, he gets one person. Same species, or enemy species, or if a Qunari like mine, a species that could not be more different. But still. One person, willing to listen and shift blame away from the elves, who are demonized for everything. To support mages, imprisoned from birth. Who is trying to make the world good, and young enough to believe it can be done. And he gets a friend, for this brief time. For the first time in more than a thousand years.

He cares, and he’s smart. He routinely likes being nice to the little people. He also likes smart plans, and he’s extremely self confident. He wears a great mask, too. He really does. Easily one of the funniest times all game was watching that slip twice after the ball because he had such a fantastic time he forgot he was pretending to be some rando and beefed it three times in a row in convo.

And the world gets a little better, if you play your cards right, thanks to Anders and the mage rebellion, and Brialla, and the Inquisitor. To a lot of things.

But the world hasn’t changed for elves. The world doesn’t change in a day, and no power in history has ever stopped oppressing a minority only because they asked nicely and protested in peace. So to him, the Inquisition is a vacation almost. Or a last meal. It’s being good and alive and liked, and having at least a tiny community of two or three, for an instant.

I think that makes dying harder.

You see in the fade that being alone is what he’s afraid of, and how can it not be? He’s been abandoned by justice and the world and his kind and his people. He has been abandoned by everything. He has nothing.

But that’s never stopped him before. I think he’s a very ‘Freedom or death.’ And if I was making it, I’d have just done a Code Geass again I mean 1–they’ve ripped it off twice already, and 2–if it slaps it slaps. They’re under-utilized plot setups anyway. There’s no way the elves will get their freedom and land back peacefully from the Chantry, and humans in general. He’s got thousands of years of heartbreak and concrete proof. So he’ll do what he’s always done. Play the villain. It doesn’t matter if the result is worth it. Save his people, no matter the cost, and be remembered forever as the bad guy. Go as hard as he can, as far as he can, and as alone as he can. Seize power, and take over. Decimate human lands and places of power, so his can take back what is theirs. Not with the help of elves, but with the artifacts he’s found, with the fade, with himself. Be intentionally so awful the elves team up with the rest of Thedas to fight him, which will help their reputation when this is over. Give them a common enemy, while destroying the system that couldn’t be changed, until it /cannot/ come back. Destroy what the humans have built until it /can’t/ go back to the way it was, with them as conquerors, and let everyone hate him for how far he’s willing to go, and how many he’s willing to kill on the way. And once he’s got enough to have truly changed things, let them hunt him down together and kill the dread wolf to sate their hate and usher in a new era of peace, heroes, where it’s the elves who have the most left to rebuild from. The systems of military might and political power of all those who tormented the elves are burned and salted to the ground. And everyone has been forced to work together.

It makes him refusing even an elven inquisitor’s help make sense. You can’t come, when the plan is to play the villain, and die it. You’re the only person he had.

Which would leave an inquisitor who knows Solas, in the awful position of helping him, and that choice being used as evidence of the evilness of their species by everyone (if they aren’t human), as well as evidence against all the good causes they’ve supported or been able to establish; or, fight him, knowing he’s being the villain so no one else has to, and let him die alone, knowing it’s his biggest fear, after a lifetime of giving everything he’s got and being remembered as a monster.

She always looks unimpressed with me when I jump on her table 🥲

"Back before I met you, I'd go whole days without massacring a bunch of things. Honest."

I love this man too much. I'd say send help, but it's too late for me. Save yourself.

Y’all I can’t believe the “whistleblower assassination” and “literally falling apart in the sky” company is being represented by a man named Rich White

You could not call a character this in a movie because everyone would say “that’s not realistic” and yet!

"There may not be, you know, as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some. There's more than one would think. In any case, if you...if you break faith with what you know...that's a betrayal of many, many, many, many people. I may know six people, but that's enough. Love has never been a popular movement and no-one's ever wanted really to be free. The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person, you could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself not to be."

(Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970), dir. Terence Dixon)