Who wants to see my cat totally brave and not at all scared at the vet
Excellent. Here she is, being super brave:
Not posting this as a reblog because I don't want to screw with somebody else's notes, but the whole "theological implications of Tolkien's orcs" business has some interesting history behind it.
In brief, a big part of why the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe™ is so cagey about what orcs are and where they come from is that later in his life, Tolkien came to believe that orcs as he'd depicted them were problematic – albeit not because of, you know, all the grotesque racial caricature.
Rather, he'd come to the conclusion that the idea of an inherently evil sapient species – a species that's incapable of seeking salvation – was incompatible with Christian ethics. Basically, it's one of those "used the wrong formula and got the right answer" situations.
In his notes and letters, Tolkien played around with several potential solutions to this problem. (Though contrary to the assertions of certain self-proclaimed Tolkien scholars, there's no evidence that he ever seriously planned to re-write his previous works to incorporate these ideas.) In one proposal, orcs are incarnated demons, and "killing" them simply returns them to their naturally immaterial state; in another, orcs are a sort of fleshy automaton remotely operated by the will of Sauron, essentially anticipating the idea of drone warfare.
Of course, this is all just historical trivia; any criticism of The Lord of the Rings must be directed at the books that were actually published, not the books we imagine might have been published if Tolkien had spent a few more years thinking through the implications of what he was writing. However, the direction of his thoughts on the matter is striking for two reasons:
- Tolkien's orc conundrum is very nearly word for the word the problem that many contemporary fantasy authors are grappling with fifty years later. They want epic battles with morally clean heroes, and they're running up against exactly the same difficulty that Tolkien himself did – i.e., that describing a human-like species who are ontologically okay to kill is an impossible task.
- After all the work he put into solving this impossible problem, one of Tolkien's proposals was literally just "what if they're not really killing the orcs, they're just sending them to the Shadow Realm?"
So anyway aromantic and asexual people are inherently LGBT+ and belong in the LGBT+ community
We are the Pride Knights, and this is our battle cry No enemy can shake us, as hard as they can try There’s a fire in our eyes that no hatred can kill A passion in our hearts that’s as strong as our will To our fellow queers who fight their battles on their own We promise to fight with you, you are never alone To our fellow queers who have fallen with the pain We thank you for your courage, your fight is not in vain We are defenders of the right to be proud of who you are To love who you love and to accept every scar We are your knights, protectors of our pride Together we stand, together we ride
LIMITED EDITION: The Pride Knights Playing Cards are now officially available for pre-order in our store until June 30, 2023!
prideknights.com ⚔️🌈
ameliaace
HAVE THE BEST PRIDE MONTH!
Happy Pride to the Aces!
We need a digital archive of LGBTQ+ works of art, science, and every other conceivable work we can share between each other because we are beyond the genocide warning level in most countries in the west and they're already trying to purge us from libraries.
If other people are interested I'll make this a priority
Speaking as someone with a background in archives, stuff like this does already exist. No need to reinvent the wheel. Creating an archive and making sure it's accessible and searchable and actually preserves things for the long time (especially digital things) is actually a huge undertaking. Show some love to these already existing collections and maybe even consider contributing. There's the Digital Transgender Archive off the top of my head. I know more I just have to think.
The History Project, based in Boston, is an LGBTQ+ community archive that's existed for decades. Many of their collections are digitized.
The Lesbian Herstory Archives, based in Brooklyn, is similar.
The Digital Public Library of America covers a great many topics, but they also have LGBTQ+ stuff.
I'd also recommend searching "lgbtq+" and "libguide" in your preferred search engine. Many universities list helpful resources and databases, some of which are freely accessible.
Many public and academic libraries in the US and Canada (not sure where you're writing from) subscribe to the Gale Archives of Sexuality and Gender. If you have a library card or are a student at a given library, you can access it for free.
In general, I'd really recommend searching around to see how you can support existing museums, community archives, college and university archives, etc that specialize in LGBTQ+ history and media local to you, whether that's in your same town or regionally.
You are not alone! People are working on this and some of them have institutional budgets!
But also kind of looping back to the first post: you personally might have relevant records. Photos of Pride or protests you've been to, journals, a blog full of trans headcanons even. That's all part of queer history and that's the stuff these archives and museums are made of.
Label your stuff carefully, make backup copies, and get to know your local organizations!
We're also working on building an open access archive and actively looking for content contributions! https://about.jstor.org/revealdigital/hiv-aids-the-arts/
people in the US: you may be able to order 4 more free covid tests as long as you do so by 11:59pm May 31st, when the government will be ending the program. it takes like 10 seconds and anyone who has not ordered free tests using this program since December 15th 2022 is eligible
do it now!!
Oh dear.
So as some of you may know, I love to point and laugh at bad legal arguments. And as fun as legal dumpster fires are when they are made by people who aren’t lawyers but think this whole “law” thing seems pretty simple, it’s even funnier when an actual, barred attorney is the person dumping gallons of kerosene into the dumpster.
And oh boy folks, do I have a fun ride for y’all today. Come with me on this journey, as we watch a lawyer climb into the dumpster and deliberately pour kerosene all over himself, while a judge holds a match over his head.
Part two! My apologies for the accidental cliffhanger.
When we left off, a second attorney had just entered the picture, a Mr. "Steven Schwartz." However, I had recognized his name from somewhere...
I know most of you are here for the cats and the chaos, not the law, but I've been keeping an ear out on this case, because pretty much as soon as I heard they were trialling AI for legal stuff, I figured someone would be dumb enough to do this. And sure enough...
Part of what makes this aggravating is that after you've been doing it a little while, legal research isn't hard. It's time consuming, sure, and you can potentially chase down rabbit trails of caselaw forever, but it's not like other professions where you might have a lot of separate databases to trawl through--with very little work and very few exceptions, you can find the bulk of American law in Lexis or Westlaw, and most of it is also posted free on government websites, though in less easily trawlable format. It's the law; it has to be accessible. So it's not like you'd have to put in much effort to check your citations, and you should never trust an out-of-context quote anyways! It could mean something totally different in the context of the case it came from.
This was a deeply stupid move. I have to assume that the attorneys who did this are of the particular flavor that's not tech savvy enough to know better than to trust new toys, but they really kept digging when they should have stopped.
It's an honor to stand with the Ukrainian President and people, but we need you to stand with us, too: https://donorbox.org/collins_demining
People back home keep asking me, “What can I do?” This is something we can all do. Please help us clear land mines from civilian areas of Ukraine to prevent thousands of senseless deaths.
This demining effort will save the lives of thousands of innocent Ukrainians. Every dollar will go to the effort with zero administrative costs. This is something you can do to really help Ukrainian families. Please give the most you can. It is tax deductible.
Contribute whatever you can & then please share this as widely as you can so we can make a real material difference for the Ukrainian people. Thank you. https://donorbox.org/collins_demining
Misha Collins becomes a United24 ambassador.
leopardheart-deactivated2023022
it’s amazing the entire dashboard is just old things. shakespeare. arthuriana. gargantua. the epic of gilgamesh. the brothers karamazov. beowulf. wuthering heights. medieval mystics. dracula novel discourse. lawrence of arabia 1962. al pacino. die girlies auf tumblr are thriving and having a ball going about as if media stopped happening post 2010
leopardheart-deactivated2023022
preach!
Gilgamesh fandom grab your ancient sumerian tablets
Everyone else talked about outdoor cats, it's time for me to talk about offleash dogs
Reasons not to have your dog offleash at a public park:
1) roads (this one is self-explanatory)
2) it makes the park inaccessible to like, entire swathes of the population. If you have experience with police dogs or guard dogs in your neighborhood, or you're a new immigrant from somewhere with a large population of feral dogs, it sucks ass going to the park and having someone's massive lab bound up to you!
3) If, for example, you are in a protected wetland area plastered with friendly signs asking you to please leash your dog to avoid causing an ecological impact, having your dog offleash might cause an ecological impact! "Oh no, my dog is well-behaved, they would never bother the wildlife" wrong! your dog is in the pond trying to eat the endangered Blandings' turtles!
4) Non-zero chance of a jokerified park guide (me) just clipping your dog to a leash and stealing them
5) “Oh but my dog is friendly!” If your unleashed “friendly” dog runs up to my leashed UNFRIENDLY dog, and my dog bites yours, guess who’s getting the blame despite doing everything right?
The other thing about adapting the Problem of Lydia is that usually the way it goes down is that at the end of the adapted story Lydia or her equivalent is traumatized, but there is little or no lasting public impact. The situation is resolved privately. Lydia is haunted privately. This also does not happen in Pride and Prejudice. After Lydia elopes with Wickham her social status is permanently changed. That decision shapes her public reality for the rest of her life. Meanwhile as far as the text expresses, Lydia herself is not traumatized. An adult contemporary reader can and should feel concern for her, as she is a sixteen year old girl running away with an adult man who has a track record of going after other teenage girls and she ends up in complete and permanent economic dependence on him. You can read anything you like into the likely fallout: the odds of him mistreating her, in any of a thousand ways, over the long course of their relationship, and the terribly disadvantaged position she will be in if she should wish one day to push back. But Lydia herself does not ever appear on the page as someone haunted or injured by what she has experienced. And there is nothing about what Lydia does that is private. So what these adaptations do is take a social crisis and turn it into a personal one. They remove the complex long-term social/cultural/economic event that is the abandonment of Lydia and turn it into an internal horror.
from previous tags: #the real question lydia makes us ask is if saving a womans virtue in society is the same as saving the woman herself
THANK YOU. yes. you've nailed it.
Every single time I see a take that amounts to "if you write about X happening, or like fiction where X happens, you like X" I'm reminded of this one time I was at a casual friends house as a young kid. We were in her room, pretending to "be orphans" escaping from an evil orphanage and having to take care of each other and fend for ourselves. It was all very Little Orphan Annie/All Dogs Go to Heaven and based on the 80s pop media.
And this girl's mom comes in, hears what we're playing and gets all MAD and UPSET. She says that if we play act something, it's because we want it to happen. So her daughter must WANT HER TO DIE.
First off lady, we were 6 year year olds, so take it down several notches. We barely had a concept of mortality for fucks sake. She made us feel so guilty and ashamed, because she was taking our game personally.
Now I have a 5 year old. And sometimes she looks at me and says "pretend you're dead, and I have to -" Whatever it is. Some adult task she's assigned herself.
And it's just so transparently obvious that she's practicing the idea of having to do things on her own. Which is exactly what 5 year olds are supposed to do. I actually find it very flattering that the only way she can envision me not being available to help her is to be literally deceased. Otherwise, obviously, she wouldn't have to do scary hard things alone.
It's a natural coping mechanism. She's self-soothing about what would happen if I wasn't there by play-acting independence in a perfectly safe environment. She's also practicing skills she needs, and making up excuses for practicing them on her own, without taking on the responsibility of being able to do them by herself all the time yet.
Humans mentally rehearse bad this in their brains all the time. We can do that by ruminating- going over worries over and over again, which tends to lead to anxiety and helplessness and depression. Or we can do it with a sense of play- by recognizing that the fiction is fiction and we can dip our toe into these experiences and expose ourselves to bad things without actually being injured.
My daughter does not want me dead. And I don't want bad things to happen in real life. But fiction and pretend help me face the horrors of the world and think about them without collapsing or messing myself up mentally.
Used some ancient colored pencils to draw this chonky neighbourhood kitty. Every time I go to the supermarket I see him sunbathing.
