Benjamin Sullivan, the honorable and somewhat mysterious court magician was married last Saturday to Lettie Hatter, formerly of Market Chipping. The other court magician was also there, presumably as a guest of the matron of honor, Sophie Pendragon nee Hatter, the bride's sister. They seemed wrapped up in some sort of disagreement for most of the ceremony though.

The short version? Things are fucked particularly with the back rent situation. That's our deadline to not get evicted again.

Right now, best way to help is donations if you can. Here's the link for that: http://paypal.me/tormentedartifacts

And I know a bunch of you want to be be helpful and send aid org links. There isn't time and we've exhausted most of those already.

Beyond that, yes, buying stuff helps, but between doomboy and everything, I cannot guarantee a ship date before my surgery on any new orders I don't already have in stock. Http://tormentedartifacts.com

And of course sharing this post helps. PLEASE DO THAT.

i love you intimacy in reverse order. yes we've had sex before and i know all the details of your pleasure, but i don't know anything else. i don't know what it feels like to embrace you carelessly. i can barely hold your hand, the grip is so slight it makes me lose my breath. i want to kiss you but what pressure is the right one? how much is too intimate? yes we've had sex and i've done all these things before - but without the guise of mutual pleasure, can i be sure you won't turn me away? will you allow me the delicate feeling of your hand in mine when you know it is me asking to hold it? i know i've held you before with our clothes off, but can i hold you even tighter? may i listen to the steady sound of your heartbeat? is it alright to look for it in front of everyone? yes, yes of course we've had sex before. i know what you look like naked, ive touched you with the lights off. is it alright to want see you with them on? in the morning, with the sun flitting through the blinds?is it alright to want you when the sun is up? yes we've had sex before but have we ever been intimate? can we be? tell me that it's alright to hold you. no, not like that. just like this.

I can't remember if I've posted this before but my headcanon for a lot of why Vetinari shifts in his characterization as the Discworld series goes on is that he accidentally made himself the Anthropomorphic Personification of Ankh-Morpork itself. He's painted himself as synonymous with the city for so long that people have actually started to believe it, and that's fundamentally changed him as a result.

He starts out as a greedy, selfish bastard in TCoM because AM is entirely greedy and selfish at the time. There are no characters in that version of the city who actually care about anyone. Criminals go unchecked, the Watch is a corrupt and apathetic wreck, and the University is filled with backstabbing bastards. Then as the series goes on he solidifies into a cynical but selfless man who watches over a flawed city, but one that is improving as people like Carrot, William, and Ridcully start to inject some optimism and genuine moral principles into the mix. He becomes much more energetic and cheerful near the end of the series and I think it's because AM is becoming a more hospitable place with better infrastructure and a lot of good people working to make it better, partly due to Vetinari's own design.

With this in mind, the Havelock that we meet in Night Watch would be the "true" Havelock, uninfluenced by this self-made status as the voice of the city, and his progression through the series becomes a path of returning to that identity by shaping the city to reflect a measure of the idealism he once possessed.

with the minor caveat that I think Colour of Magic has a different Patrician, I am calling this canon

— The “Disney adult” industrial complex - New Statesman

“If Disney adults – by their own admission – are seeking escape from a troubled world, then who told them entertainment, not collective action, was the best option? Who told them to seek escapism instead of an escape?”

…

“Those who mock Disney adults suffer from the same misconception as Disney adults themselves: they believe the Disney adult phenomenon arose by accident, and therefore gleefully judge and mock those who they believe to have inferior tastes. As Giroux wrote: “We are losing the ability to recognise, let alone resist, the corporate control of time, space, bodies, and minds.””

…

“Disney has monopolised culture in such a way that makes it very difficult to escape, or critique … Giroux sees infantilisation as a form of depoliticisation. “You infantilise people so they can’t think, so they can’t act.”

it’s actually trivially easy to avoid disney movies

Would be funny if they put forward this argument for the generalised opposition to art, entertainment and hobbies towards anything other than a specific brand of art and entertainment they don’t like.

Yeah, are you less of an activist if you watch romantic comedies? If you watch crime thrillers? We’ve already had this argument about superhero fiction, and it was dumb then too.

Piss on the poor???

So the article is about Disney systematically leveraging its quasi-monopoly over children’s entertainment, and the fact that it produces about 70% of movies in theaters, to position its brand identity as an aspirational lifestyle choice. And how the fact that it has deliberately constructed this brand-based identity, and lashed it tightly to the concepts of ‘purity’ and ‘joy,’ is some late-capitalism shit to keep an eye on?

Like it’s easy for adults to avoid serious engagement with Disney if they want, at least adults who don’t watch a lot of films outside the band of genres Disney doesn’t do, though avoiding exposure is quite a lot harder. But kids do not really get the option.

And inasmuch as kids do avoid Disney saturation, they wind up socially excluded due to missing all the references in a way that’s weirdly like belonging to a minority religion, actually.

Your Band-Aids and everyone’s cool backpacks and sneakers and the mandatory rainy-day recess activity, that’s all Disney.

And the religion comparison is useful when you consider that like. Disney does in fact now have broader indoctrination access to children than any one church, and here they are building themselves up a whole infrastructure to take you from cradle to grave?

About halfway down the article there’s a paragraph about how Disney tried to punish a specific newspaper for publishing an investigative piece about their financials and political lobbying by blackballing them from media reporting on their products, which again are over half the market.

This is an alarming amount of power for a corporation to have! And they have it on purpose! And they’re increasingly driven by nothing but the bottom line.

And the article is about how people being contemptuous of the intense hobbyists serves to deflect attention from Disney’s ideological maneuvering!

I have no idea what most of the reblogs above me think it’s about, but they don’t appear to have even read the excerpts actually in the tumblr post.

Corporation…bad.

oh a slightly different version of the drawing i posted yesterday? cool ill tell em thanks

welp.

Guess we'll be removing the Gilbert Baker 1977 Pride Flag from our site, along with the links to the Gilbert Baker Foundation.

Heads up to other queer artists: if you use the original 1977 flag in anything, definitely don't make any reference to who created it in your listings or you might get threatened by the Gilbert Baker Foundation! :)

Happy End Of Pride Month From CMG /s

I'm just here going "... so, to be clear, you are issuing legal threats to a small Jewish-owned company in the name of Gilbert Baker... because we used his name in identifying the colorway associated with his flag?"

My wife just looked it up -- we've made less than $500 in the last 5 years on any items in that colorway. It is not popular. We spend a lot of time educating young queer people what that flag even is and why it's important.

Well, spent. Because we're not doing that anymore.

Good job spreading awareness of Gilbert Baker's work, guys!

Unreal. What would Gilbert Baker think?

~ Gilbert Baker

Apparently in 2019, after Baker had passed away, the Foundation partnered with an LGBTQ business student group called Pride Corp. and became litigious about the use of the flag?

Nice work guys, honoring Gilbert Baker by shitting on independent queer creators (who are doing your job for you) sure is one way to do it.

It's specifically about the name. We can use the flag, but giving credit to Gilbert Baker as its creator by calling it the 'Gilbert Baker flag' is the issue, because we are 'using the name for promotion.'

It's ridiculous on any number of levels, especially that WE HAVE TO TELL PEOPLE WHO HE WAS. They don't KNOW. Gilbert Baker's name is not a draw for our customers. It's a history lesson.

[Image description: White text against a darkened background of the red, orange, yellow, and green stripes of a pride flag, saying, "A true flag is not something you can really design. A true flag is torn from the soul of the people. A flag is something that everyone owns, and that's why they work. The Rainbow Flag is like other flags in that sense: it belongs to the people." The quote is from Gilbert Baker. End description.]

Update:

They're asking us for nearly 2x what we've made from anything using that color scheme because we referred to it using the name of the original artist.

Fellow artists, I would advise you that if you have anything using the colors of the 8-stripe flag and calling it by or in any way referencing the name of the original artist that you either a) take it down or b) rename the flag, lest they ask you for twice what you've ever made.

This may have the unfortunate effect of keeping us from ever talking about that particular Jewish artist of blessed memory, and that does seem like a strange tactic for the Gilbert Baker Foundation to take, but...

Wow. Just. Wow.

What-- and I cannot stress this enough-- the fuck.

GO BABY GO

I love this. I *love* this.

Not only does the child have the rhythm and their part down precisely, but also, they are clearly doing the very-small-child thing of reserving exactly nothing.

Children have to learn not to use all of the force they're capable of, adults mostly never use all of the force they are capable of, but here someone has given this child exactly the opportunity to use all of the force their body can produce, and do it musically.

The glee of that all-out effort in a context where clearly the people around them approve and appreciate their contribution? Amazing.

ACCORDIONS GEOFFREY & MARY MELODICA IN: Quiet Please!

went for a classic UPA commercial look! fun to animate a bit in 2D again!

Awesome video displaying phenomenal craftsmanship—posted by one of my favorite Tiktok accounts: Tlingit_Haida

Aani (the land known as Southeast Alaska) has been home to the Tlingit and Haida Peoples since time immemorial

Edit: To clarify, this particular video features Git Hoan Dancers, of the Tsimshian Tribe. They say so in the video, but I realize my caption about the Tlingit and Haida Nations might cause confusion.

this is amazing1

The masks look so much like the ones in museums and cultural centres while still being articulated that way. Look at that amazing skill.

Its so smooth that it took me a moment to realize those are modern masks and the historic ones don't move like that.

Just want to clarify some did move like that! Transformation masks aren't new, though it's super cool to see the Git Hoan Dancers showcasing the practice in that video. Here's a raven one from a Gitanyow artist made in 1870 and a Nulis one by a Kwakwaka'wakw artist around 1900–1920:

And for fun, a peek into what the Nulis mask's dance looked like: "This particular Imas mask depicts the ancestor Nulis, who came down in the guise of a grizzly bear at Wakanukw, located on Tribune Channel in Knight Inlet. The mask's dance re-enacts the historic event where the holder of the Nulis name, with the help of his crest figure, the supernatural bear, vanquished a sisiyutl (double-headed sea-serpent) who was damming the river, blocking access to the salmon and other resources." (X)

Absolutely yes! There is another version of this post going around where I corrected that misnomer & shared some older masks with moving parts! Thanks for this addition & these examples.

I curated in a museum where we had the privilege to display Formline art donated by young Lhaq'temish (Lummi) and Tlingit artists, and it’s crucial to remember that these are living cultures & art forms 🙏🏻

Here’s that video again, because it’s such a good watch!

As a rule of thumb, don't reblog donation posts or people asking for donations unless they've been vetted and reblogged by Palestinian bloggers. We usually go to lengths to verify this shit because we know scammers have been faking to get people to send them money, using the urgency of our genocide as bait.

It's disgusting this is what we're dealing with, but people are losing money because of some truly evil people out there.

Accounts don't just randomly spring up on tumblr without gofundmes while asking for someone to help them create a campaign. Fuck out of here with that shit.

I'm also gonna stop listing the reasons why I recognize something is a scam. It's becoming more and more clear there is 1 person behind this STRING of scams and they're leaving less trails behind but it still reeks of them and their MO.

DO NOT TRUST ANY GOFUNDME OR REQUEST FOR CROWDFUNDING THAT PALESTINIAN BLOGGERS HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

At this point I'm fine receiving a bunch of inbox messages asking me to vet x y z so y'all can avoid this shit. But please have some critical thinking!

People are exploiting our situation.

Reblog this post.

Whether you wanna read the whole thing or not idc.

REBLOG IT.

The person this was about deleted the 4th or 5th scam account they made and are definitely gonna make a new one soon. I don't want anybody falling for this anymore.

OP's masterlist of vetted requests

every little bit helps.

im always thinking about that post where someones grandma said “some people have never cleaned a bathroom and it shows” bc it does show

when i was a kid, in 2nd grade (age 7) i and some other kids made a mess in one of the bathrooms at school and the teachers instead of doing the normal canned "punishments" like having to skip lunch recess and sit still inside doing work, had us sit down with the janitors and they talked to us and the janitors explained the work they normally needed to do every day to clean the bathroom, and how what we did created extra work for them. and they took us into the bathroom and showed us what they do and how what we did made it more difficult.

and then they made us clean it all up (with help from the janitors because we were small kids and couldn't even reach everything, we had like thrown toilet paper high up and stuff) and they were very nice about it and there was no further punishment or mention of it again

and the things i took from this experience were:

i think there are a lot of people who could benefit from this sort of experience.

our society often has so many problems not only because we insulate some people from the implications of their actions, but also because instead of facing them with those implications, we impose outside "punishments" that are often unrelated to the original wrongdoing.

like if they had not done what they did with us, and instead had just taken away our recess and made us do something boring and unpleasant, we wouldn't have learned what we did and we would have just learned that we need to get better at avoiding getting caught, which is generally how people respond to punishments that are divorced from explanations of how and why what you did was wrong and hurt people. if instead you confront people with those things, they will change of their own accord.

some adults out there are like full-grown children who never learned this stuff. but the solution isn't harsh punishment like putting them in jail and mistreating them there, the solution is that people need to be sat down with the people who are harmed by their actions and then they can work together to undo the damage, and see firsthand how hard it is.

it's transformative.

beatrice muchadoaboutnothing is a trans woman: a brief treatise

thematically, i think in a play about the social vulnerability of women, having a character be a trans woman just makes sense as a way to provide depth to that idea. specifically, i love the concept of beatrice's view of men being informed by her own experiences as a closeted trans woman (it's amazing what people will say in front of you when they think you're one of them) and as someone later facing sexism and transmisgoyny.

usually when someone does a trans reading of this play/character, they look at beatrice's famous speech about wishing she was a man and interpret her as a trans man, which is perfectly valid! but this idea started for me with the simple thought that i wanted an out and accepted trans character to play with rather than a closeted one who cannot transition, just as a matter of personal preference at that particular time and with this particular text. but then i kept thinking.

as above, the concept of beatrice reading men for filth in the context of having lived among them is great. the "oh god that i were a man" speech is extremely disparaging of men and what they claim to be vs how they actually wield their power. what she wishes is that she had the power that men have automatically in her society--felt all the more keenly because there was a time when she was able to wield that power and she gave it up to be happy, to be herself, to be free in a different way. (here is where i sometimes imagine beatrice regretting ever transitioning, believing that her own happiness and health is less important than having the power to protect hero's happiness and health, because i love angst.) but now that the worst has happened, she is reduced to begging a man for help and it's demeaning and infuriating and tragic.

i also love turning on its head the line "i cannot be a man with wishing, therefore i will die a woman with grieving." being a trans person, dealing with internalized transphobia, knowing that transitioning will put a target on your back, wishing you could just be the gender you're born as--but no amount of wishing will make her not a woman. i think she loves herself and her gender but the play is focusing on points of conflict so that's what i'm talking about here.

in a play about misogyny, the vulnerability of women, and the hypocrisy of men, a trans woman has a unique perspective on both masculinity and femininity both as genders and places in society. (in the ideal version, i think john would be a trans man to mirror this experience, but that would require him to be rewritten to have actual depth and personality and all that is a different essay). there is also just a particular kind of strength that comes from having to carve out and defend your identity in that way which i think fits her very well.

lastly, a couple of other miscellaneous things from the text that can tie in:

beatrice recounting "a double heart for his single one" meaning both "i loved him twice as much as he loved me" and "i loved him as two people: [birthname] and beatrice"

benedick insisting he wouldn't marry her even if "she were endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed." Adam, not Eve. in MY illustrious opinion, this is benedick saying "i don't care HOW big her dick is i'm NOT gonna marry her."

Oh my G-d this is fucking genius and OP when are you directing this version bc I absolutely need it. Like... now.

Consider, for example, @theabigailthorn for Beatrice, pleaseandthankyou.

USA please listen to me: the price of “teaching them a lesson” is too high. take it from New Zealand, who voted our Labour government out in the last election because they weren’t doing exactly what we wanted and got facism instead.

Trans rights are being attacked, public transport has been defunded, tax cuts issued for the wealthy, they've mass-defunded public services, cut and attacked the disability funding model, cut benefits, diverted transport funding to roads, cut all recent public transport subsidies, cancelled massive important infrastructure projects like damns and ferries (we are three ISLANDS), fast tracked mining, oil, and other massive environmentally detrimental projects and gave the power the to approve these projects singularly to three ministers who have been wined and dined by lobbyists of the companies that have put the bids in to approve them while one of the main minister infers he will not prioritise the protection of endangered species like the archeys frog over mining projects that do massive environmental harm. They have attacked indigenous rights in an attempt to negate the Treaty of Waitangi by “redefining it”; as a backup, they are also trying to remove all mentions of the treaty from legislation starting with our Child Protection laws no longer requiring social workers to consider the importance of Maori children’s culture when placing those children; when the Waitangi Tribunal who oversees indigenous matters sought to enquire about this, the Minister for Children blocked their enquiry in a breach of comity that was condemned in a ruling — too late to do anything — by our Supreme Court. They have repealed labour protections around pay and 90 day trials, reversed our smoking ban, cancelled our EV subsidy, cancelled our water infrastructure scheme that would have given Maori iwi a say in water asset management, cancelled our biggest city’s fuel tax, made our treasury and inland revenue departments less accountable, dispensed of our Productivity Commission, begun work on charter schools and military boot camps in an obvious push towards privatisation, cancelled grants for first home buyers, reduced access to emergency housing, allowed no cause evictions, cancelled our Maori health system that would have given Maori control over their own public medical care and funding, cut funding of services like budgeting advice and food banks, cancelled the consumer advocacy council, cancelled our medicine regulations, repealed free prescriptions, deferred multiple hospital builds, failed to deliver on pre-election medical promises, reversed a gun ban created in response to the mosque shootings, brought back three strikes = life sentence policy, increased minimum wage by half the recommended amount, cancelled fair pay for disabled workers, reduced wheelchair services, reversed our oil and gas exploration ban, cancelled our climate emergency fund, cut science research funding including climate research, removed limits on killing sea lions, cut funding for the climate change commission, weakened our methane targets, cancelled Significant National Areas protections, have begun reversing our ban on live exports. Much of this was passed under urgency.

It’s been six months.

god i’m raging we were fucking ROBBED of a finale that starts with sam and dean trying to be normal but they can’t and dean is in such awful mourning but refuses to acknowledge it but sam forces him to address it and then we get a the night we met lord huron montage with flashbacks to their significant moments and dean realizing that he’s in love with cas and they summon cas back from the empty with jack’s help and the scene echoes the scene in lazarus rising and dean FINALLY speaks his truth and they touch foreheads and we get a verbal callback of like “you deserve to be saved too” and jack resurrects all the people chuck took from them like OG bobby and OG charlie and kevin and linda etc. and then we get a soft epilogue of them in winchester’s roadhouse having a big family dinner with everybody and claire and jack meet and hang out and dean and cas share a soft look and and sam and dean are finally free of their codependency and maybe like. OH maybe sam pulls dean aside and is like “i think i’m gonna propose to eileen” and that’s what prompts their convo of like “i’m so proud of you” and their arc resolves itself. and jack narrates but at the end he’s like “i decided to give up chuck’s powers. no one needs those powers…people just deserve freedom. and i think i just wanna be a kid for a while. after all i’m only three years old.” and the last scene is them all laughing and having a good time over dinner and they’re happy and at peace god thinking about this as the finale makes me go feral.

Anyone else on T ever feel like their voice is a bit *too* deep sometimes like slow down I'm still only 5'2 this is getting disproportionate

I mean really this is just getting a bit silly

Wait. Hold on. I need to flex actually

Gonna start applying to voice acting gigs cause I can make my voice go real deep

The thing about speedrunning going from being a first soprano to a second bass in about a week and a half is that now I'm pretty regularly told to speak up instead of being told that I'm talking too loudly, thanks to bass sounds not carrying anywhere near as well as treble.

Also aside from Tall Alan, all the basses in my choir for the longest time were shortarses like me, even though they were cis men. So maybe short + deep isn't that weird.

We have got to put an end to the taller younger sibling industrial complex

When vampires are portrayed as mainly preying on women that's so unrealistic like I'm sorry but they're too careful especially around strange men. Dudes are much easier. You could literally lurk in a bush in the park at night and call out "whoa look at this fucked up looking squirrel" and have 3 grown men climb in immediately

Also almost every woman I know has low blood pressure and so many are anemic. Men make for much better prey because 1) easy to catch yes and 2) so much more blood

Just so long as the vampire understands that those three guys in the park at night are probably drunk af so the quality of the blood won't be that great

That's how we— I mean they, the vampires, get white girl wasted actually

That’s how we— I mean

they, the vampires, get white girl

wasted actually

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Why are you pronouncing vampires with two syllables?

How many syllables do you think vampires has??

happy rishi sunak unemployment day to all who celebrate