Lex 2.0

I’m tired of the myth that Ronald Reagan drove in on an eagle-shaped bulldozer and dismantled the Berlin Wall all by himself. A lot of the credit actually goes to the protestors who vigilantly pressured the government. 

Also, the beginning of the Wall Fall was the result of an incompetent bureaucrat.

“When the wall started to fall on November 9th, it was a mistake. In the face of mass protests against the regime in 1989 and thousands of East Germans seeking refuge at West German embassies in Eastern Europe, East German leaders waived the old visa rules stating that citizens needed a pressing reason for travel, such as a funeral or wedding of a family member. 

East Germans would still have to apply for visas to leave the country, but they would supposedly be granted quickly and without any requirements. Yet the Communist Party official who announced these changes, Guenter Schabowski, missed most of the key meeting about the travel procedures and went unprepared to a news conference. In response to reporters’ questions about when the new law would take effect, he said, “Immediately, without delay.” Schabowski left the impression that people could immediately cross the border, though he meant to say they could apply for visas in an orderly manner. 

Over the next several hours, thousands of East Berliners gathered at the checkpoints along the wall. Since the country’s leaders hadn’t intended to completely open the border, the supervisors at the crossing points had received no new orders. The chief officer on duty at the Bornholmer Street checkpoint, Harald Jaeger, kept calling his superiors for guidance on how to handle the growing mass of increasingly angry East Berliners expecting to be let through. Jaeger finally gave up around 11:30 p.m. and allowed people to pass through en masse. Guards at other crossing points soon followed suit. The East German regime never fully regained control.”

Perhaps instead of Reagan, we should build a statue of Guenter Schabowski worriedly looking at his watch. The plaque can have the caption, “I hope I didn’t miss anything important at that meeting.”

I posted this in the middle of the night and didn’t know it would connect with so many. But shitting on Reagan and correcting whitewashed history is a favorite pastime of mine, so I guess it would make sense others would feel the same. 

Schabowski was also the only person higher up in the GDR hierarchy who admitted that that state has caused lots of suffering.

i was gonna say it in the tags but no

reagan has NOTHING to do with that wall being down

that was the PEOPLE of the germanies that PROTESTED that chanted WE ARE ONE PEOPLE

that was the failings of a government being unprepared for the news conference and everyone else hearing or deciding to hear the same thing and just cheering over that dude and going to the wall

that was the people working there being overwhelmed and asking someone higher up what they should do because half of half germany went to the fucking wall at once

that was the higher ups being overwhelmed as well and giving up and saying open it

this was the german PEOPLES the german PEOPLE and if i hear one single fucking thing about anything american having any influence on that ever again i’ll go into politics and advocate shunning this shithole of a history-washing country for the rest of eternity!

I bet in the 20s all the weird German emo girls were thirsting after the Somnambulist

German emo girls be like “ich will 😍🥺”

Don’t hide this magnificent piece of info in the tags.

The bloke (Conrad Veidt) was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism, and when he refused to divorce his wife (who was Jewish), Joseph Goebbels had him blacklisted.

He also donated tons and tons of money to poor children who had been negatively effected by the Blitz in London after he moved to the US, following his becoming a naturalised-British citizen after leaving Germany in the 1930s.

Don’t forget that in 1919, he starred in “Different from the Others”, a German film protesting the anti-homosexuality laws in place. It’s widely regarded as the first pro-gay film. Conrad Veidt was a goddamn hero.

I just feel like this pic is relevant to the discussion

He was also the highest paid member of the cast in “Casablanca” (where he played a Nazi officer, again), even if he only got second billing, because he was THAT big a star.

He and his first wife divorced after… well she said it better than I ever could.

“I excused a lot of his failings and whims because I loved him. But one day he did something to me that I couldn’t forgive. I was singing that evening at the cabaret. I left him home and he told me: “I invited a few friends; we’ll dine while we wait for you.” And it just so happened I had received a new dress from Paris. That evening, after work, I arrived home and what do I see? All these gentlemen dressed as women. And Conrad had put on my Paris dress. At this point, I divorced!”

And as  Anita Loos put it

“Any Berlin lady of the night might turn out to be a man; the prettiest girl on the street was Konrad [sic] Veidt.”

Good to see the tumblr sexyman precludes even tumblr

It’s important to mention, I think, that he served in WWI on the Eastern front. He became I’ll in the trenches and while recovering joined up with the theater his girlfriend worked for, and spent his recuperation putting on plays for the troops.

He also believed in spiritualism and thought that he himself was a medium.

He was sexy man, Betty Grable, and Alistair Crowley all at once. So…no wonder tumblr likes him so much.

I was unaware of his existence until just now but this is amazing.

However since Crowley was an antisemitic malicious selfish bastard I’d have to say he was the opposite of Crowley.

Fair point. Didn’t know much about Crowley, just that he invented tarot cards and popularized them. I personally stay well away from all of that nonsense. Alright, let’s amend it to a benevolent psychic witch or something. As you like it.

Veidt’s role as Grand Vizier Jafar in “The Thief of Baghdad” (1940) was the inspiration for Disney’s version in the animated “Aladdin”. 

His makeup as Gwynplaine in “The Man Who Laughs” (1928) was the inspiration for The Joker.

And his role as Cesare The Somnambulist in “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” (1919) was the inspiration for Tim Burton’s…

Well, look at him.

All slapstick is horror because people get hurt and that’s scary

every gym leader is like “I lost!?! UNBELIEVABLE!” buddy you live in a world where every ten year old child has always been offered a free fire breathing monster at least once and you brought nothing to this fight but anthropomorphic flowers

gym leaders’ whole job is to provide a specific challenge, a battle of a certain type and difficulty level. if you’ve brought the tools and skills to complete that challenge, you’re going to win by design. the pokémon in that battle are probably not actually the strongest pokemon they have.

when gym leaders go “argh, how could i lose??” they’re acting to give your victory legitimacy because you’re 10. they’re like a villain cosplayer letting a baby knock them over. they’re being nice!!

Contrary to popular belief, there are three states a cat in a box might be: Alive, Dead, or Bloody Furious.

- Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett.

……… different fantasy races should be impacted differently by each other’s alcohol

no more if this “fine elvin wine” shit, I am going to personally write a fantasy setting in which every human knows that elf booze tastes and feels like fantasy la croix. there’s barely even a flavor, and you’d need to drink a few to even get tipsy.

meanwhile, every human with a lick of common sense knows that you need to plan accordingly if you’re going to be drinking dwarven liquor, because it hits you hard and fast and you’ll lose feeling in your legs faster than you thought was physically possible. the hangovers are the stuff of legend.

the flip side is that elves are an entire race of (comparative) lightweights, and a whole gaggle of teenange elves can get piss drunk passing around one bottle of fruity human wine

I think there’s some compatability among drinks brewed by reptilian races (dragonborn, lizardfolk, tortles, kobolds, etc) although you run into similar translation issues as mammalians, but there is absolutely no crossover. like if a drsgonborn and a dwarf in a (very cosmopolitan) tavern were to switch drinks it would be a nonstarter.

“this is basically just a capri sun,” the dragonborn says, disappointed.

“cool, I’m pretty sure I just drank actual paint thinner,” the dwarf says. “get me to a hospital.”

humans and halflings are probably the most compatible drinkers of any two races, although halflings find most human wines, beers, ciders, etc, a little too dry and bland for their liking. halfling alternatives are very sweet, which makes them a huge hit among the ‘I like alcohol but I don’t want it to taste like alcohol’ crowd

I think it would be very funny if being drunk was like… a relatively new cultural development for gnomes? there’s just something about their wacky gnomish constitution that prevented them coming by it naturally (traditionally they’re more into a variety of mushrooms and other recreational plants) but once they started mingling more with more alcohol-happy races they learned VERY quickly and started opening, basically, turbo-breweries that are basically one part distillery and one part wizard tower. VERY popular job for young alchemists trying to make some good money, and the reason why gnomes are known (among other things) for operating the craziest night clubs

here’s who I think should be able to get drunk but become sober at will:

1.) sufficiently powerful paladins and clerics

2.) aasimar [all of them]

2.) very very few tieflings. it’s not universal at all, but few tiefling traits are. I know 5e has really solidified them as horns + tails + inhuman skin color but we need to be making them weirder 

titanic taught me about class war

Shoutout to the all queer family heroes

wow this actually makes me feel really happy cause that person is me…

It me

I have to tell this story.

I thought I was the first person to come out on either side of my family, but like three years after I came out, my mom was like, “By the way, my Aunt Mildred was a lesbian.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah. My mom just told me this story the other day about her. She also had really bad depression, so bad that she was hospitalized. Her father flew out to San Diego to see her there. The nurses caught him on the way in and told him the no matter what she said, he was not allowed to get upset.” (This is the Catholic side of the family. Like, serious Irish Catholic with eleven kids and multiple priests in the family. Also super-duper Southern. And this was the 1940s and it was illegal.) “And he got real scared, but he went in. And she said, ‘Daddy, I’m a lesbian.’ He threw his hands in the air and hollered, ‘OH THANK GOD! I was worried it was gonna be something bad.’”

So. Shoutout to my Great Aunt Mildred, because she got there before I did.

Further shoutout to my second cousin Jared, who thought he was the first in even the extended family until he turned up for Granny’s 90th birthday, saw me for the first time in probably fifteen years, and heard me utter the words, “My wife…”

General shoutout to anybody who even thought they were the first in their family when they came out, even if they found out differently later on.

Y'know what, I love this story so fucking much that I’m going to schedule it to reblog when people will see it.

shoutout to those nurses who were ready to throw the fuck down for their young depressed lesbian patient like… when we talk about allies that is actually the kind of ally that has helped us to survive. in the most literal sense.

The kid will cherish this for their whole life. If they remember it.

went to look this tweet up so I could rt it and discovered this is the same dude as the tubthumping tweet masterpiece

King

Friendly reminder that LGBTQ+, Queer, and LGBT+ are the preferred terms for the community (x).

Friendly reminder that Queer is approved by 72.9% of the people, and the groups who don’t prefer it’s use as an umbrella term are straight people, exclusionists, transmeds, truscums, sex-negative people, and sex work critical people (x).

Friendly reminder that aros and aces are excluded only 9.2% / 8.1% of the time respectively while being included  78.9% / 81.2% of the time (x)

Friendly reminder that exclusionists are in the minority and aro/ace people are included in the LGBTQ+ community by the people within the community.

Also, i checked out the survey the second claim sources a while back: this is not OP choosing the words truscum, exclusionist, etc. These are labels that the survey gave people the option to self-identify as. It’s self-proclaimed exclusionists who dont like the word queer, not random accusations

yeah that’s super important. 

This one gets reblogged on main. The reclassification of ‘queer’ as an inexcusable slur is a recent development which stems in part from exclusionist rhetoric. We reclaimed it decades ago. Learn our history. You are not immune to TERF propaganda, but you can absolutely choose to educate yourself to spite it.

Be kind. 💜

HELP

Happy Pride :)

@windewehn why would you hide this in the tags

I love you grandmother who helped me pin a trans flag to my battle vest, I love you leather daddies checking on us, I love you trans dykes driving the forklift loaded with water and ice, I love you queer kids in your renfair outfits, I love you faggot punks sizing up the cops, I love you drag queens laughing in the dressing room, I love you i love you I love you I love y

not to be a hater but if you’re gonna tag my post with this you might as well not reblog it at all

self care is writing a fic that you’re literally the sole target audience for

“in-ear headphones are bad for your hearing” actually they’re perfect because the music is inside of you

what do i focus on here

try focusing on making you life and the lives of your loved ones better each and every day 

i learned that actor Danny Trejo has the most on-screen deaths of anyone in Hollywood history, with 65. Followed by Christopher Lee (60), Lance Henriksen (51), Vincent Price (41), Dennis Hopper (41), Boris Karloff (41), and John Hurt (39). (x)

Yet poor Sean Bean is stuck with the reputation for dying in every movie. Unfair.

Give him time, he still has many years of dying yet to come.

Also there’s the question of density vs quantity. If you make a hundred movies and die in 50, and someone else makes 30 movies and dies in 30, the first one has died more, but the second one has died more often per movie.

It’s the DPM ratio that really counts, IMO.

65/402 16% Danny Trejo 60/282 21% Christopher Lee 51/259 20% Lance Henriksen 41/211 19% Vincent Price 41/205 20% Dennis Hopper 41/204 20% Boris Karloff 39/209 19% John Hurt 33/117 28% Sean Bean

I’m so proud of the statistical side of tumblr for coming through on this.