Can someone please reply to this post with a gif or video of a cat rotating. I'm not picky, I just need it to regain full HP

GOOD LIRD

scrolling twitter today and then coming over here is like walking out of a burning building and then walking into the calm remains of a building that burnt down 5 years ago and has been reclaimed by nature.

Few words on boycotting mindlessly.

remember when ppl were saying that russophobia was gonna end up fucking over ukranians ?

So many TV shows/movies depict the Epi Pen as a total solution for anaphylaxis...it's not. The Epi Pen gives you 30 minutes to get to a hospital where they can save your life. TV makes it look like you just have to use the Epi Pen and then the crisis is over. Do people without allergies or a loved one with allergies know that an Epi Pen only buys you time? The more I see this on TV the more I worry...

**Maybe you should reblog this because I'm actually worried that most people don't know.

Omg so much this! I have to use my epipens about three times a year and my doctor recommends I shoot both of them in my thigh and then call an ambulance! They are a STABILISER not a cure!!

Since a lot of people don't know this, I'll point out that Narcan works the same way. It's not a one-and-done. It buys you time for the EMTs to show up.

Russian Cossacks during WW1, plate by Andrei Karachtchouk, text by Nik Cornish

reblogging for reference

- Patricia Knatchbull, 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma

wednesday night mood

this is a current mood

TEAR IT UP HARDSTYLE, JOE

Why’s the sound of a whole band coming out of one man?

if it makes u feel better imagine v making this and sending it to eve at like 3:28 am

Recoil-operated’s $12 traditional mead:

So one of the most common things I see on my Mead posts is “I’d love to do that, but I don’t have the stuff”

We’ll sit down and buckle up. Because I’m about to show you how to make a $12.56 traditional mead.

Here’s the recipe:

1 gallon Deer Park/spring water. You don’t want distilled.

3 lb or 32 fluid ounces honey.

One package of yeast.

a party balloon.

The cost total is $13.49, but you only need one pack of yeast. So -$0.90.

Let’s begin:

Everything together on a clean work surface, you will need a clean glass. And while not entirely necessary, a measuring cup will be handy.

Pour a cup of water for yourself and drink it. Hydration is important. Also this will allow you headspace.

Remove about ehhhhh, a quart or so of water to drink later.

Trust me. You’re going to want it

Wash your drinking cup and mixing about a teaspoon of honey.

You have two options for yeast, that bread yeast we bought, or professional brewer’s yeast.

They’re both the same price. You can get brewers yeast off of Amazon.

I already have brewer’s yeast, so I’m using brewer’s yeast

Stick that in that honey water.

Stick your honey in some hot water.

Go outside. Breath the free air. Know what it is… To truely live.

Enough of that bitch. Honey’s hot. Put it in the water.

Put the water in the honey too.

Shake the sin out of it.

Put that stuff back in the big bitch.

Shake the sh*t outta it.

Hydrate yourself with the water you removed earlier.

Shank a balloon with a pin.

Add your yeasty honey water.

Balloon it.

Label it.

If your trad mead says anything racist, or anything positive about Hitler. Straighten that sh*t out.

And there you go. $12 (.56) traditional mead. Stick it somewhere dark and leave it alone for a while.

Shake the hell outta it once a day for the first four days. Then let it be until it’s clear.

Update:

Boozification has begun.

Lots of spices and herbs make for nice additions as well.

Good post.

Who the hell are you to tell your sentient trad mead what to think?

I’m it’s creator. I have deemed racism to be sin.

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

The Raven

There once was a girl named Lenore And a bird and a bust and a door And a guy with depression And a whole lot of questions And the bird always says “Nevermore.”

Footprints in the Sand There was a man who, at low tide Would walk with the Lord by his side Jesus said “Now look back; You’ll see one set of tracks. That’s when you got a piggy-back ride.”

Response to ‘This Is Just To Say’ This note on the fridge is to say That those ripe plums that you put away Well, I ate them last night They tasted all right Plus I slept with your sister. M’kay?

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening There once was a horse-riding chap Who took a trip in a cold snap He stopped in the snow But he soon had to go: He was miles away from a nap.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night There was an old father of Dylan Who was seriously, mortally illin’ “I want,” Dylan said “You to bitch till you’re dead. “I’ll be pissed if you kick it while chillin’.”

I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud There once was a poet named Will Who tramped his way over a hill And was speechless for hours Over some stupid flowers This was years before TV, but still.

THE ONE FOR DO NOT GO GENTLE IM CRYING

A chap from a faraway land Said two big stone legs (topless) stand An inscription fine Reads “this shit’s all mine” But all there’s to see is the sand.

OMFG,

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.

I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?

I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”

I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P 

I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers. 

Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.

This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”

Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)

All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.

it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking

Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.

*INHUMAN SCREECHING*

M Y    T I M E    H A S    C O M E

You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.

STORY TIME

Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.

Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.

But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.

BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.

Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:

For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus. 

With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:

What an interesting find.

Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:

Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.

Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this. 

To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic. 

Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.

All that to say:  Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Further reading:

When there’s a new lesbian in town

STOOOOOOOOOP

World heritage post

Put a QR code to this video on my gravestone

I fucking lose my shit everyone time this video is on my dash.

He killed this shit!!

@spricaspin​

it's always a good day to complain about English speakers

Important addition: Maria Skłodowska-Curie was born during partitions, which means Poland didn’t exist, which means her insistence that she was Polish was a significant act of defiance against the occupation, which means that you should respect that instead of arguing that ‘well she had French citizenship’. She couldn’t have Polish citizenship despite being Polish, that’s kinda the point she was making by keeping her maiden name and naming a chemical element she discovered ‘Polonium’ .

HOW TO PRONOUNCE: Skłodowska

L with a dash through it (ł) makes a “W” sound. and W makes a “V” sound.

skwo-DOV-ska

Thank you for the pronounciation guide instead of the condescending guilt trip

When there’s a new lesbian in town

STOOOOOOOOOP

World heritage post

In Russia a man named Ivan smashed his way through icy water to save a stray dog from drowning, he adopted the dog afterwards and named him Rex.

Hero

God, look at him go. Even money this man was part of some Soviet super soldier program back in the day.

Ivan is only 21 years old here’s photos of them afterwards

when ppl say not all men they’re talking ab Ivan

Look, I gotta be honest… I’m Jewish, and I’ve written literal academic term papers on Tolkien and the messy topic of Jews, Dwarves, goblins, and so forth. Honestly, the ask-sender seems well-meaning, but I think they are off the mark. If anything, Tolkien intended Dwarves, not goblins, to act as “Jews” in his canon, and there is some evidence he really did write Dwarves with Jews in mind, by the time of LotR if not The Hobbit. For example, he admitted to the inspiration, in so many words, in a letter or two, based Khuzdul off of Hebrew, and so forth. Even then, his early work with Dwarves was likely influenced far more heavily by Norse, Icelandic, and Germanic mythologies, and that’s clearly visible in Dwarven names and runes as well as origin stories. I find it unlikely that these early mythologies, especially those from Iceland, Norway, and first-millennia Germanic tales, were in any way inspired or influenced by stereotypes of Jews, who were not a significant presence at the time in those areas.

Although those myths may have been influenced later on by what we might today term either antisemitism or anti-Jewish hostility, as people saw a confluence between tales of dwarves and goblins and stereotypes of Jews as each evolved, I find it hard to fault Tolkien for using pieces of early European mythology while trying to create his own. When it counted, and despite many possible reasons not to (profit, fame, strong involvement in a pre-Vatican II Catholic Church, few if any personal friendships with Jews, certain common upperclass opinions), Tolkien unequivocably stood up for real Jews. In 1937, a letter arrived from a German publisher, asking Tolkien to confirm his Aryan ancestry in order to translate The Hobbit into German, which would significantly increase his book’s fame and sales. You can Google the letter; I’m on mobile. Either way, Tolkien politely told the German publisher to take his Nazi policies and fuck off, saying in no uncertain terms that he held great admiration for the Jewish people, and that he regretted that he could not truthfully tell the publisher that he was a Jew. (To clarify, Tolkien was in fact of German ancestry and was not Jewish).

Even if there were some unfortunate, seemingly “antisemitic” stereotypes of the Dwarf race within the narrative, if we take Tolkien’s inspiration for them to be partly Jewish, I would argue firstly that Tolkien himself was not consciously antisemitic and secondly that it is a matter of opinion whether the narrative actually supports such stereotypes. Bilbo is, after all, an unreliable narrator, and with the exception of Thorin’s gold-sickness (later linked to his lineage’s bearing of one of Sauron’s 7 rings given to the Dwarves), none of the Dwarves ever appear truly greedy or gold-obsessed when allowed to speak for themselves in dialogue or song. They may appreciate valuable objects of varying metals and gems, but I would argue that their love for these objects is most often explicitly linked for a love of craft and craftsmanship, not minerals and jewels themselves. Other stereotypical elements, such as beards and short, misshapen stature, can be linked to the early Scandinavian myths Tolkien used.

I should add, far too late in this long post, that I could find no actual evidence myself that the Tolkien goblins were based on stereotypes of Jews. As I said, if anything, there is some evidence of Jewish inspiration for Dwarves, and regardless of how we may feel about it today, Tolkien indicated in about three different letters and a radio interview (iirc) that he essentially meant Dwarves as a ‘compliment’ and held Jews in high esteem, as an ‘ancient warrior race’. That claim may feel a little iffy in terms of modern social justice lingo, but I would remind you that at the time that he wrote The Hobbit and LotR (dovetailing historically with the rise of Nazis to power, the Holocaust, and the post-war crisis of Jewish survivors/refugees), the main European stereotypes of Jews were that Jews were weak, often cosmopolitan and disconnected from the land, and behind most of the ills of the modern world. The materialism aspect is tricky, and may result from unconscious anti-Jewish bias, faithfulness to the original Norse myths, or a little of both. But it is clear, at least, that within our world, Tolkien’s view of Jews directly opposed the main antisemitic claims of his day, and he went directly against his own interests to tell a 1937 German publisher in quite strident terms that he opposed Nazi policy and admired the Jews, when he could have easily made himself a small fortune by simply admitting what was already true (his “Aryan” ancestry).

The fact that the asker claims that goblins are “formed from Jewish caricatures,” unless they can produce actual evidence of this, seems to me unlikely. Dwarves might have been a better argument, but the record on that is mixed at best and far from a purely ill-intended “caricature”. Either way, the argument over “reclaiming goblins,” especially over Tolkien’s goblins, seems to me altogether ludicrous, to be frank. If they are in fact discussing Tolkien, his record on antisemitism in real life is pretty good. In terms of his fantasy races, the Dwarves are the ones most likely inspired in part by Jews, and generally with positive authorial intent, although the net effect is, of course, a matter of personal opinion. The goblins, as far as I can tell, had nothing whatsoever to do with the debate. Tolkien’s use of race and colonial theory is largely a different topic, and one in which I feel the “goblins” are more heavily implicated.

And frankly? Even if Tolkien had a consciously anti-Jewish agenda, and even if the goblins were Jewish caricatures…. sending @glumshoe a somewhat strongly worded message about not “reclaiming goblins” seems to me to be a terrible way to go about frying the world’s smallest fish when global antisemitism is, statistically, at the highest recorded levels since 1945. Consider logging off Tumblr and donating to or volunteering for your local chapter of the ADL or other organizations fighting antisemitism. This is kinda ridiculous.

This is all A+ commentary. I wanted to add that to my knowledge, as someone who has made a study of Tolkien, the fantasy genre, and goblins in particular, there is only one piece of popular media that portrays goblins as “gold-obsessed” or invokes other antisemitic tropes in their portrayal, and that is Harry fucking Potter.

I for one refuse to cede a thousand-year-old piece of folklore to J.K. Rowling and her bigotry. She doesn’t get to have that kind of power.

My partner and I were talking about this more last night and we’ve theorized that what might have happened here is that people combined or confused JKR’s antisemitic portrayal of the Gringotts goblins with the idea of “the Gnomes of Zurich”, which was a post-WWII caricature of Swiss bankers as short, money-hoarding gnomes who live in the mountains (Switzerland).

There are tons of genuinely racist takes on goblins in the fantasy world. (Tolkien and D&D did us no favors.) Plenty of them are antisemitic, although mostly in terms of how they’re physically presented – George MacDonald’s 1872 novel The Princess and the Goblin, for example, often has illustrations that fit the bill, but their characterization is not, and again is conflated with gnomes or dwarves from northern European folklore. However, the idea that “goblins” as a concept are historically always an antisemitic caricature is just not true, and isn’t even true in most modern fantasy media, with the notable exception of Harry Potter. 

(Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, the conception of goblins that “goblincore” is trying to popularize sounds more like Stitch, Entrapta, or the Doctor – chaotic, a little manic, and easily distracted by the next shiny object, but definitely not the antisemitic caricature of a miserly, manipulative financier. The wiki page for “goblincore” sounds like a pitch for button collecting more than anything else!)

I think it is a big, big mistake to allow bigots to co-opt folklore and I think it’s an even bigger mistake to jump in and tell people that they can’t reinvent a maligned, “always chaotic evil” fantasy creature into something better. Should we be vigilant about incorporating antisemitic or racist tropes when we do that? Absolutely – especially since people keep assigning racist tropes where they didn’t exist before!

Speaking as a Jewish person who’s read a lot of folklore but not done formal/academic study of it, I’d say that the link between antisemitism & goblins is approximately like that between antisemitism & witches/witchcraft.

Witches & goblins are figures that appear in a variety of folklore, often as antagonists or nuisances, sometimes as neutral, sometimes as helpful, always an Other. Witches may be loners, or part of a coven, or making deals with more dangerous figures. Goblins may be all small, or vary in size, may be in nonhierarchical rollicking groups or have a set hierarchy.

Sometimes, yes, the physical description lines up with the storyteller’s contemporary antisemitic caricatures, and sometimes the mannerisms do too. But not always, not even the majority of the time, not consistently enough to say they’re inherently linked.

Witches and goblins appear in Jewish folklore as an Other too; Hershel & the Hanukkah Goblins is a modern children’s book based on an older folk figure, in which a bunch of goblins keeps stopping a Jewish village from celebrating Hanukkah, and Hershel has to trick the goblins into knocking that shit off & leaving the village alone. Does the goblins’ role as antisemitic antagonists mean modern goblincore is anti-goy? No.

The goblins in JKRowling’s Harry Potter series are antisemitic caricatures.

The goblins in Ben Hatke’s Mighty Jack & Zita the Spacegirl series, and his children’s picture book Nobody Likes a Goblin (spoilers: except their friends!) are not.

Neither folklore nor modern fantasy, it turns out, are homogeneous. Those two authors have done massively different versions of goblins, and Hatke’s is way more in line with the goblincore “rollicking group of small creatures the equally enjoy shiny jewelry and moss-covered granite” aesthetic.

Personally, I really enjoy goblincore, but it has never felt like a “reclaiming” of anything. Likewise, when I dressed up as a witch for Halloween or play-pretend as a kid, that also did not feel like a “reclaiming”. Non-Jewish people can call themselves goblins while exclaiming over how fun it is to fill empty nailpolish bottles up with small rocks and clink them together, it’s fine.

Yeah this is absolutely something you CANNOT lay at Tolkien’s feet(I’d even argue it’s difficult to blame D&D for it, as their goblins were, like, tiny angry ppl constantly bullied by larger angry ppl. There are DEF racist aspects TO D&D goblins[they’re the “savage” trope used to justify real world Imperialism], but they dont match up with antisemitism).

If I was gonna blame ANYONE for antisemitic elements popping up in contemporary concepts of Goblins(and honestly I dont see them very often), I’d put it mostly on Rowling(because, COME ON, it is not AT ALL SUBTLE in the HP books >:( ) and, to a lesser extent, on Blizzard.

That probably sounds a bit weird so let me explain. Blizzard obvsl stole their original core idea for Goblins(which showed up in WC2 as explicitly suicidal mad-chemists) from GamesWorkshop(whose portrayals are entirely in that suicidal mad-chemists line[well ok; some are suicidal mad animal breeders]), like they did everything ELSE in Warcraft quite frankly, and those depiction are not, imv, antisemitic.

HOWEVER!

In developing that concept for Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, they tacked on a Greedy Evil Capitalists angle that, whether they meant it or not, obvsl plays into a lot of common antisemitic tropes. Especially when combined with their visual design. Especially-ESPECIALLY when combined with the addition, in WoW, that Goblin corporations are the ONLY Corporations(and the primary form of Goblin social organization), and basically have a monopoly on global banking and trade |:T

Given how HUGE a thing WoW was for ~ a decade(from 2004 to 2014), and how MANY ppl in gaming, fantasy, and general Fandom either directly played WoW or were involved in its fandom, AND and how big a problem white supremacists WERE in WoW for a long time(eventually Blizzard actl started taking it seriously and banning them, but you still had to report the hell out of them), I find it difficult to believe some players didn’t see their antisemitic beliefs reflected/confirmed in WoW Goblins & then carry those depictions elsewhere as visual dogwhistles, even if (as I think)this wasn’t an intentional thing on Blizzard’s part but rather carelessness for the social implications of their designs, and the casual fantasy racism(orcs are naturally violent; goblins are naturally greedy; Dwarves are naturally grudge-bearing etc etc) they built them on[1].

Keep reading