RESURRECTION

Nakayama Tadashi (Japanese, 1927-2014)

Dancing Horse, 1974

Woodblock print

68 x 58 cm

Nakayama Tadashi

Neighing Horses (Kaze ni hoyu/ Uma)

1958

My main criticism of Qud is that despite fantastic prose and imagination, it wears its heart on its sleeve.

For instance, there's an order of fascist knights resisting the sticky impurity of the world. They attack you on sight as a mutant, mentally enslave others as "newchildren", etc. All this is cool, but I think the writing becomes weaker when labouring over their crooked spines and excessive jaws from being inbred for purity.

It's not enough that life is the gordian knot they love to cut, they also have to be ugly so no one can miss they're bad guys. I'd let this pass (or view it in another light) but the most anarchistic and disability-friendly factions are unfailingly nice to you.

When the game reaches for the very strange, it excels, but it's unsubtle when it reflects on the modern day. I have more respect for New Vegas's approach of presenting 3 past-bound failures as your only options, demanding you say "no, none of these" and walk your own path. If Caves Of Qud had an Ulysses, he wouldn't be from the Legion and he'd begin as your friend.

[In fairness to the devs, a lot of people do think the Putus Templar are cool. I understand why being subtle is offputting when you have close contact with fans and can see them misunderstand you.]

on reflection, there's a similar crooked-spine line in the grave robber description, so it may be less the inbreeding thing and more a reference to hierarchy; a great deal of kneeling. the jaw thing, as someone else pointed out, may also be a derogatory reference to "the chad" memes.

Kate Bush—outtakes from Hounds of Love album cover shoot

This is a WhatsApp message from Ezzideen. I asked for his permission to translate and publish it.

The message:

Amid the madness, the bombings, and the daily killings we experience, everything seems meaningless. The thought of living in such a world scares me more than the missiles and warplanes. Even after the war ends—and it must end one day—I'm haunted by the thought of how one can live in a world that silently watches the genocide of two and a half million people unfold live before the eyes of the world. We live in the 21st century; how can the world sleep peacefully while witnessing what happens to people just like them? Don't they fear that their turn might come one day? And that the world will remain as silent as it is now?

The world is very frightening, but when I see that there are people trying to help, even with small things like sharing the post I write or donating even 5 euros, and I know that's all they can afford, I feel that there is still some goodness in the world. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, albeit a faint one, and that is the hope that gives me energy and brings me joy, even if just a little. It makes me want the war to end so we can go out to help the world and spread hope to those who are close to losing it like I am now.

I am so grateful to everyone who has helped me, even with just a little message wishing me and my family safety.

Thank you all.

@Ezzideenshehab (Instagram)

@el-shab-hussein

@blackpearlblast

@fairuzfan

@i-am-aprl

@sayruq

@soon-palestine

Your support means a lot!

get in babe we're 30 year old women we're having formative experiences that our teenage years denied us

"Modern consumerism relies on the subject believing that they are in control, while their thoughts and actions are progressively delimited by a fossil infrastructure that molds the ostensible user in its own corrosive image, leading to an inversion of user and used."

something I think more people need to understand is that rape culture has a very simple way to maintain the plausible deniability that enables mass support and investment, and that is the complete separation of the rhetorical construction of "The Rapist" and "The Pedophile" from any actual specific person who engages in sexual violence.

so often people do not believe that we could possibly live in a rape culture, they do not believe it could possibly be true that people do not care about children who were sexually abused-- they say but everyone hates rapists and pedophiles! but that's not really true. they hate the conceptual idea of The Rapist and The Pedophile, but do not actually oppose--in real world contexts, with real actual complicated people--the use of sexual violence to control, degrade, and otherwise abuse other people. they do not hate their friend who joked that their date "took some convincing" or their neighbor who publicly humiliated their adolescent child by telling their church group he was "caught" masturbating, or the cop who performs cavity searches or the guy who posted tips for "stealthing" online, or their uncle who says he "made some mistakes with women" when he was younger, or the person on social media publicly speculating about a stranger's sexual desires and sharing their nudes to degrade and humiliate them, or their granddad who was "falsely accused" of sexually abusing his daughter when "all he did" was leer and not touch, or their professor who has relationships with their students, or their acquaintance who recommends dating girls with "issues", girls who are "crazy", girls who are trans or fat or queer or have low self-esteem, because "they'll do anything", or the person they organize with who is so valuable to the movement but everyone kind of knows not to be alone in a room with them, or...

specific people who rape are usually not the deviant that most people already want a reason to expel from the community, they are the center of power and influence. they provide vital support or resources to people, they are likable and intimately connected with many people, they have an embedded role in the social fabric and many people benefit from it (whether economically, politically, spiritually, etc). Specific people who rape are incredibly buoyant. They are usually buoyed to places of power no matter how far they're attempted to be pulled down from that power, and most people see this and will cling to a person like this, defending them, because people who rape are the social equivalent to a life preserver, whereas people who have been raped are the social equivalent of an anchor-- no one wants to be dragged down by allying themselves with the person who was raped by the beloved person everyone loves and relies on.

On the other hand, The Rapist" and "The Pedophile" as cultural tropes are treated very differently from specific people who have raped others. "The Rapist"/"The Pedophile" is often a racialized, gendered, and classed archetype that exists to be the ideological load bearing pillar of rape culture, to reinforce the belief (against the weight of evidence) that rape is something committed by Deviant Others who can be identified and expelled from social life. When sexual violence is not understood as one of many possible tactics of control and is instead as the result of the uncontrollable desire of innate deviants, then accusations do not even require there to be a specific person who was harmed by a specific act. All you need is evidence of "deviance" and all the justified anger at sexual violence can be offloaded onto whatever scapegoat you want.

In fact, within rape culture, harassment campaigns are much more successful than any actual instance of a survivor asking for support. That is no coincidence either! Rape culture hates survivors! But because in harassment campaigns there is no actual survivor speaking up, rape culture's default of disbelieving specific, actual survivors is never triggered, and so the accusation becomes perceived as more credible because there is no victim to discount.

If there is no actual specific instance of someone engaging in sexual abuse of another specific person, there are no details to question and pick apart ("but why was she naked if she didn't want to have sex?" "was he really raped if he had an orgasm?" "how do you know it was sexual? adults have to bathe their kids" "why did she post that photo if she didn't want it shared?" "I've never seen that side of him!" "maybe you misunderstood" "maybe she didn't hear the safeword" "why wait until now to bring it up?") and no demands of the public that implicate them and demand change from them (are you sending survivors funds to help them move out? to help them afford therapy? are you examining why you didn't notice it was happening or didn't believe it could be true? are you able to understand that as part of this person's community, you failed to protect them, and that actual restorative justice involves you changing your beliefs and behavior too? that it's not just about rehabilitating the person who raped someone?)

If there's no survivor, then the imagined victim can be perfect, innocent, and worthy to rally around. The imagined victims are only good and only hurt and have no problematic opinions about anything (no opinions at all! so they can be imagined to believe whatever you believe), no burdensome expectations of you, no resentment towards you.

Focusing on identifying "The Rapist" as a deviant instead is so easy; it only requires condemning someone who you probably either already dislike or a complete stranger who has no direct connection to your life. It's so much easier to pin responsibility for the entire (abstracted) concept of Rape onto someone you already hate and is already a social outcast and show how much you're "against rape" by venting all your anger and fantasized violence against them. It feels good too! the way righteous anger always does. It can be energizing when a whole community comes together to hate the same person.

Supporting actual survivors does not feel energizing, it feels exhausting. It requires so much work and effort, and you don't feel righteous while you do it, you may even feel ashamed, frustrated, deeply sad, resentful, angry, hopeless, or emotionally numb. It enters the deepest parts of your consciousness and you find it hard to breathe during certain scenes in movies, seeing certain arguments play out in the news cycle. It changes you, too, and that is the point.

We want to be against rape culture, because we want to be good people. but we don't want it to be hard.

I think this reality is the reason why a lot of young organizers think they can throw themselves into restorative justice and then find themselves completely burnt out a few months or a year later. People start thinking it'll be energizing, and then have to contend with the reality of what is, essentially, providing material support for disabled people whose health and capabilities have been permanently decreased from trauma. Some folks think they're gonna be "fixing things" so everyone can continue their reliance on the person who raped someone and the survivor can "move on" and everything can be "restored."

And then (if they're serious and not just performing at activism) they are inevitably faced with the terrifying reality of trying to make ends meet, with cobbling together strategies to meet community needs outside of the person who everyone relies on. they are faced with this person who raped someone losing interest after a few meetings and deciding "the accountability process" is dragging on too long and interrupting "more serious things than one person's emotions." they are faced with trying to get more people involved supporting the acute needs of the survivor even when the survivor is "difficult" or "ungrateful", and realizing that no one wants to do it. it is overwhelming to realize how deep the roots of rape culture run through everything, how much stability is upturned when you uproot any structures and beliefs that rely on rape culture. it is deeply demoralizing when you realize nothing can change without collective effort and very few care enough to do it.

It's so much easier to do nothing and pretend you don't know what happened. It's so much easier to decide it doesn't have anything to do with you and maybe this is something the survivor should "work out" with the person who raped them. It's so much easier to not try.

that's the function of rape culture. and we are all implicated in it.

About Gaza Funds

(Coercive) Gender is a power structure that works to produce certain classes of subjects (men, women, and others) that are useful to the broader political system (the nation, civilization, etc), and to structure relations within and between these groups. 

While gender presents itself as natural, it is far from stable, rife with tension and contradictions that are necessary to its functions. You *are* a man, fundamentally, (passively, unchangeable part of your essence) if you are camab, but you also must *be* a man (actively, complying with the expectations of masculinity). Even if we only look at relatively normative cis men, it's extremely common to feel alienated from the ideals of manhood (“I don't feel like a real man” is a common refrain). 

A certain amount of distance from the ideals of gender is normal, and part of what makes it a useful motivating system. But the system is backed by coercive force, which reveals itself as people deviate more dramatically from gendered expectations. 

Everyone has friction with gendered expectations – both as they grow up and in ongoing ways –but the naturalized, path of least resistance is to identify with your assigned gender, strive to live up to its expectations, and to give up on the sides of yourself that would put you into open conflict with it. 

While the exact details of masculinity are highly variable (over time, and from group to group), common threads are displaying power/competency/dominance and avoiding weakness/femininity. This is structurally tied to being able to produce soldiers, workers, and for men broadly to serve as a class of enforcers. 

The coercion used to produce womanhood as a class has generally been viewed as part of misogyny (and while it’s experienced unevenly, it’s a broad force meaningfully acting on all women and all ppl expected to be women). The coercion that produces manhood forms a core aspect of transmisogyny, and it's primarily focused on a small minority of people, which is part of what leads to the intensity of transmisogyny. Transmisogyny carves away, and what's left is normative manhood. 

In this way, transfems can constitute a kind of sacrifice class. Wherein gratuitous violence against small minority gives potency to the implicit threat when others are told to “man up” or “stop being a sissy,” and tries to render it unthinkable to be anything other than a compliant man.

Another core aspect of transmisogyny is a scapegoating effect in which the harm and abuse caused by normative power (the state, the family, the school, the church, normative masculinity, etc) projects itself onto marginalized groups. 

The Nation, committed to its own righteousness, needs (at an ideological level) to be able to point to an external source for its problems (often along lines of race or religion). Similarly, masculinity casts its blame onto “perversion,” centered at this point on transfemininity.

The long history of depicting horror movies villains as transfem (Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, the original Ring, etc) speaks to this scapegoating/demonization maneuver, and to the way in which transfems can activate deep anxieties and insecurities within cis men. Transfems represent manhood gone wrong, they call into question men’s heterosexuality, they show by example that there are alternatives to being a man, and to an extent show that the whole structure of gender is an artifice.

Violence against transfems, then, provides an opportunity to reassert one's masculinity through opposition to an embodiment of all that threatens it. It also provides an opportunity to resolve the contradiction between the more overt, chauvinist/masculinist aspect of patriarchy that finds expression in violence against women and the more respectable/paternalist aspect that frames itself as protecting women. Transfems embody the hated aspects of womanhood and femininity without activating the taboo towards violence against women. 

While this violence doesn't always actualize, the way these psychic and ideological tensions stack up helps explain how it can erupt and part of how transmisogyny acts as an animating political force.

//

The way that the image of The Pedophile and The Sexual Predator is tied up in transmisogyny works to make accusations of abuse and pedophilia against transfems believable. Even in groups that decry the explicit demonization of transfems this implicit effect is remarkably strong. 

//

We can also understand a significant portion of terf ideology as simply falling for/going along with patriarchy deflecting blame onto transfems and enjoying that this orientation means facing less resistance and being able to wield normative power. 

Theres a common argument that goes like "how can you say the threat I fear isn't real, look at all the things I do to protect myself from it!" And it's not clear how you even counter it. Except just saying "I think you are bad at assessing risk"

if the floor isnt lava explain why i wont step on it

I feel this is often just a desire to be witnessed that runs into an expectation of dismissal, and tries to protect itself accordingly. All the things you do display a kind of emotional truth, if nothing else. Presenting that as an argument gives the emotional truth a hard shell, and it veils what you're actually asking for, which might be as shallow as tolerance or as deep as comfort.

Insane to me that the UK government is slowly trying to legislate trans people out of existence and I have not seen a single person talk about it

Single sex toilets are now legally required in all new buildings, the cass review may lead to a complete shutdown of all trans healthcare, single sex wards are being introduced to HOSPITALS and claims that trans people will be treated in private rooms is almost laughable given the current bed shortages, ensuring that trans people will be forced to wait even longer for life-saving procedures. Trans teenagers are being murdered and the government does not care. We are slowly being driven out of all public spaces and all healthcare.

So the "trans people can't be in 'single sex' wards" thing has apparently been laughed at by NHS bosses who were like 'um can we focus on the wait times and not your "culture war" (I hate that phrase it diminishes the seriousness of the situation but it's what they said) against trans people please?'

I'm still wary,because there are very much people with transphobic views in the NHS and those of us who are trans or nonbinary ourselves are often scared of balancing not losing our jobs (don't come at me about principles I have a family to support too) versus standing up for ourselves and other trans people. Side rooms in hospital already exist. Usually for people who are an infection risk or who are dying. Occasionally for other reasons. But I do think even if these rules are forced in a lot of hospitals are going to end up having to scramble for special exemptions because the bed crisis continues and if you ask folks if they would rather have a) Someone actively dying (who should have privacy and dignity wherever that can reasonably be given to them) b) Someone with a highly infective illness (and no they can't always be housed on infectious diseases wards where everyone has a side room sometimes you've just got C.diff and you've had a heart attack) or c) Someone trans in the bay with you I hope most sensible people would go 'Oh yeah well actually I don't really need to know what genitals bed C has I mostly just want to get treated and go home'. But that doesn't mean there won't be a fight and it doesn't mean we should get complacent but yeah. No political party can practically force anything about hospital wards on anyone while the bed crisis continues to be as dire as it is because they are always going to need to break those rules. There are still people regularly being treated in corridors for heavens sake I genuinely don't know what they're doing.

the toilets thing isn't law yet as of 07th May 2024, it's "announced plans to make law". it's most probably the last thrashing of a government that's getting replaced pretty soon, and there's a decent chance for it to fail and sputter out rather than make it into law.

like yeah okay worry about the risk that Labour are shithead enough to continue the plans when the Tories lose the general election, worry they will eventually bring it into law, but for fucks sake, don't go claiming stuff is in law that isn't. genuinely. it is important to know what's an active legislative measure that's actively right now for real fucking people over and what's just an idea that hasn't been realised yet. it's important to know what needs fought and in what ways.

it's especially important not to cede ground the bastards haven't won yet.

Insane to me that the UK government is slowly trying to legislate trans people out of existence and I have not seen a single person talk about it

Single sex toilets are now legally required in all new buildings, the cass review may lead to a complete shutdown of all trans healthcare, single sex wards are being introduced to HOSPITALS and claims that trans people will be treated in private rooms is almost laughable given the current bed shortages, ensuring that trans people will be forced to wait even longer for life-saving procedures. Trans teenagers are being murdered and the government does not care. We are slowly being driven out of all public spaces and all healthcare.

So OP is correct in that things are really bad for trans people in the UK right now, but as a trans person in the UK there's a ton of really unhelpful hyperbole and inaccuracies here. I get being scared, but there's no need to make people more paranoid and afraid than they actually need to be.

The current UK government is deeply unpopular and likely to lose the next general election. They are running scared and throwing out as many culture war ideas as they can in an effort to claw back popularity (despite most people not caring). We are NOT being driven out of all public spaces and all healthcare, the government simply wants us to think that we are so that we shut up and go away. As a trans 30something in the UK (England if that matters, in a generally conservative area) who has been openly and visibly trans for about 7 years now, being a target of the media and government is definitely really shitty but most people are not transphobic and the general public really don't care about culture wars, it's a distraction. The vast vast majority of people I've encountered in the UK have been nothing but friendly and accepting of my transness. The current targeting of trans people is literally just recycled homophobia from the 80s and 90s, once homophobes lost the war on gay marriage they simply looked for a new target - it doesn't reflect how most normal people think.

(source)

The Yassification of ghouls in fallout