Dragon's Den
-
-
hey uhhh but fr the concept of fallen angels existing but risen demons being an impossibility is kind of a great summary of sin in christianity
holy shit
no, no, come back here and tell me how stupid it is to talk about how the power dynamics inherent to christianity are built upon the rhetoric that failure is unavoidable and there is never enough you can do to make up for it
(via septaofficial)
-
I hope he sues for libel.
“No adult should be telling children that they’re safe, it is creepy as hell.”
Transphobes act like they’re “protecting kids” and then say shit like this completely unprompted and unironically.
Tennant?
TENNANT?
She’s coming for David Tennant??
OK BUT REBLOGGING BECAUSE OF THIS:
The pin reads “You are safe with me.”
So if anyone out there STILL wants to hang on to that H@rry-P*tter-adjacent username
GO FUCK YOURSELF
Why did she change her name from Kellie-Jay Keen to Posie Parker? Is she trying to confuse people into thinking she’s actress Parker Posey?
Anyone who supports ether kellie-jay keen otherwise know as poise Parker and JK Rowling needs to get off my dash and stop fallowing me.
It doesn’t even refer to children in any way! It’s from the Gayprideshop.co.uk and it looks like this.
What a stupid fucking maneuver. Graham Lineham lost his agent, his marriage, and his career after making the same accusations against Tennant for wearing a “Leave Trans Kids Alone” t-shirt and this random transphobe thinks she can make a swing based on literally nothing at all? Good fucking luck.
i would like to also point out that this is exactly why people are being told to stop supporting jk rowling financially, and to stop supporting her work entirely. jk rowling has some actual powerful influence, both politically and monetarily. if she can pay for legal fees of other people when they get sued for libel for claiming LGBT+ allies are all pedophiles*, then this is an example of how she can be a very real threat to LGBT+ and trans people especially.
*not saying this is what actually happened as i don’t know what those legal fees they mentioned she paid were actually for, but it still demonstrates her financial power.
People occasionally suggest separating art from artist, but that really only applies if the author doesn’t profit off their works anymore. Like, Lovecraft was a racist bastard, but he’s dead and so can’t use the money from his books to further a racist agenda. Rowling is alive and uses her money for shit like this. And so I think the solution is simple. People can be Harry Potter fans again when Rowling is dead.
“Anyone telling kids they are safe is a pedophile”
Uhhh. Ummmmm. Uhhhhhhmmmmm. Uh. Okay? Uhm
(via injuries-in-dust)
-
-
So I wanted to know what kind of crystal could go in a wizard staff, right? so I googled “big crystal,” as one does, and got an Etsy ad for This
And as you all know I Am currently taking a geology class, so I am probably more emotionally invested in minerals than usual. But that is…very obviously not a natural crystal.
So I did some looking around on Etsy.
Now, these shops all seem to advertise to the “witchy”/“spiritual healing” type of person. And there are a lot of them. Crystals are a Big Thing on Etsy. And ALMOST ALL of them are obviously artificially cut into the same sort of prism with a triangular pyramid top, regardless of the actual sort of crystal it is supposed to be.
Even like, fucking, obsidian. Obsidian is volcanic glass, it doesn’t form crystals at all, it is not a crystal
I’m not throwing any shade at people who are into crystals for like witchy reasons, but it really seems like if crystals are spiritually important to you, you should know what a crystal is…right…?
So there I am. Caught in the helpless anger and distaste of looking at geologically inaccurate Etsy crystals.
And as I scroll, I start to see items in…interesting shapes:
“Oh,” I think to myself. “Oh no.”
But it is too late. I have heard the siren’s song, singing to me of knowledge that will destroy me, but that I cannot help but seek.
These…elongated objects are almost always ambiguously described as “massage wands,” “crystal healing wands,” and other such innocuous things. The egg-shaped objects are, um, “yoni eggs.”
…Right. Okay.
Maintain the youthfulness of my sacred organ.
IT’S A SEX TOY. SAY IT. BITCH, IT’S A SEX TOY, IT’S OKAY, SERIOUSLY, THERE’S NO SHAME IN IT, SAY IT WITH PRIDE, SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST,
OKAY.
Okay. I’m good. I’m fine.
Actually, you know what, never mind. There is shame in this and I want it to be never acknowledged again.
Additionally, I am not fine.
Why the fuck are there so many of these—
At this point I stop and start googling.
Now, Selenite is the crystalline form of gypsum. It is also known as satin spar. Selenite is brittle and breaks easily, and has a Mohs hardness scale of 2.
For those unfamiliar with the Mohs hardness scale, a mineral with a hardness of 2 is soft enough that it can be easily scratched with a fingernail. It also is dissolved by moisture.
NO. DON’T PUT THAT IN YOUR BODY???? DON’T PUT THE GYPSUM, WHICH HAS A MOHS HARDNESS SCALE OF 2, IS BRITTLE AND BREAKS EASILY, AND IS WATER SOLUBLE, INSIDE YOUR LITERAL ACTUAL VAGINA??????????
I try to reassure myself with the fact that these things are probably not actually selenite, because making a dildo out of such a soft mineral in the first place would be very difficult. Having seen fluorite before, I feel pretty certain that the fluorite yoni eggs are probably actually just glass.
I google fluorite.
Okay.
Further exploring online shows me that fluorite is soluble in various strong acids.
Some guys on a forum in 2004 have strong contradictory opinions on this.
(I google the pH of the vagina.)
I don’t understand how pH works. I give up on the solubility question and google the toxicity of fluorite:
I now know at least one orifice fluorite does not go inside.
Science.
No, dear followers, my journey did not end here.
I have opened Pandora’s box, except Pandora’s box is filled with minerals God did not intend to be anywhere near the vagina carved into the shape of dildos. Etsy is advertising me sex toys I wish I could forget.
And vaginal steam herbs.
It seems that there is potentially a correlation between wanting to steam your vagina and wanting to put rocks in it. I know, groundbreaking discovery.
Okay, so we’re talking therapy substitute therapy substitute.
(I begin to think about how desperately we need universal health care. Maybe I just need someone, something, to blame.)
At this point, I realize that I haven’t done any googling on whether dildos made of rocks are a good idea at all. So, very tentatively, as if typing it more slowly will make it any less observed by the FBI, I google whether quartz should be used…internally.
First result that pops up:
That’s, uh. That’s reassuring.
I decide I’m incapable of unpacking this particular suitcase.
There are, of course, a small handful of articles debating the safety of rose quartz sex toys. But I’m getting the feeling that this is not a normal question to have in the first place. I close the tab with little relief.
Etsy is still enthusiastically recommending me things that hurt me psychologically.
…pleasure chalk?
How can I describe the fear that this image struck in me, reader?
Pleasure Chalk? What could that be?
Is knowing worse, or is not knowing? I scarcely have a choice:
I check in with my emotions.
Is this relief? Am I relieved that they are eating the dirt instead of fucking it? One review complains about the taste. I don’t know what they expected.
I try in vain to struggle against the tide, to return to the relatively normal side of Etsy. I begin to resent, no, hate, these deceptively aesthetically pleasing hippie shops eagerly spreading medical misinformation and things as yet unknown.
This, unlike the other “crystals” I have shown, appears to show naturally grown crystals. They are, of course, quartz crystals, and $45 comes off as extremely overpriced. I have a quartz crystal I got for a dollar at an Eastern Kentucky rock festival, about the size and quality of the ones in the photo.
Quartz is the most common mineral in the Earth’s crust. But at least this is regular levels of annoying.
Then I see this:
Well, I see the photo and the price, and I think, that looks like a regular quartz crystal. There’s no way a regular quartz crystal is $1,347.
I read the description:
I am crying. I don’t want to google any of this. I am beyond googling. I no longer desire knowledge.
THATS A QUARTZ CRYSTAL. MOTHERFUCKER THAT’S QUARTZ. SIO2, MOST COMMON MINERAL IN THE EARTH’S CRUST. ITS FUCKING QUARTZ IM—
I click on a malachite.
The malachite promises to protect me from emails. And at this, darkest hour, I want to be protected.
I have been broken. I have been lured to my demise.
Big Brother: loved.
Geology lab I’m supposed to be doing: incomplete.
God: unmerciful.
This post has everything. Price gouging quartz, eating dirt, and fucking poisonous rocks.
I’m absolutely ascending at this part of the entire post
I’m absolutely
ascending at this part of
the entire post
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
(via graf-spectre)
-
Jason & Friends
ALWAYS REBLOG
Jason doing ASL is the funniest shit I’ve ever seen
(via graf-spectre)
-
Reblog if you’re over 20 and still read/write fan fiction.
-
Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.
People make shit. It’s what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, “hey, wouldn’t that be fucked up? Wild, right?”
Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.
I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I’m not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don’t think I can’t handle it, I don’t watch it. It’s that simple.
#this excludes writing pedo or incest.
If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it’s allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn’t like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:
No, actually, it doesn’t exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, “oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it’s morally okay now.” The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He’s a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they’re all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren’t Freddy Krueger’s fault.
Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, “oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!” The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.
Guillermo del Toro’s film Crimson Peak didn’t kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it’s okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” isn’t making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.
John Wick isn’t making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death–the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!
Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you’re into that sort of thing like I am.
Arcane didn’t put grenade launchers in people’s hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs–and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren’t out there terrorizing New York City, because they’re fantasy supervillains who aren’t real and can’t hurt you.
The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I’m not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn’t gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.
It’s all fiction.
None of it is real.
The characters are fake and do not exist.
Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.
[ID: a comment left by tumblr user msexcelfractal, which reads “Cool post OP, now do Birth of a Nation. End ID.]
Content warning: antiblackness, antisemitism, sinophobia, general discussion of bigotry and oppression
You really want to try and go there as if that’s some kind of gotcha on the subject of dark fiction? Fine. Let’s go there. I’ve got sources and free time.
Birth of a Nation is a horrific hate crime of a film. It is flagrantly racist and was connected to a surge in KKK membership. Nobody should watch that film for enjoyment. It’s horrific. Nobody should be forced to watch it, either. You don’t have to watch the film, and I don’t recommend you do, unless you’re actively involved in studying it for whatever reason. It’s a bad, hateful movie.
I have not watched it in its entirety and I don’t really ever intend to. There are Black scholars who have already broken it down and discussed it at length, and I don’t feel I’m going to get anything out of the film that they haven’t already covered. If I need to study Birth of a Nation in more depth for whatever reason, I’m going to defer to Black scholarship on the subject.
But if you tried to ban the film altogether? If you tried to erase it from existence? I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you. Banning Birth of a Nation does absolutely nothing to combat the racism that created it. It wouldn’t stop racists from making racist art. It wouldn’t erase the damage done by the film. It wouldn’t go back in time and make it retroactively never made.
You know what banning it would do, though? It would strip film scholars of the ability to discuss it. It would prohibit people from talking about exactly why it was bad. It would inhibit honest conversations about what the film was and who it affected.
You know what you do with horrific bigoted art like Birth of a Nation? You have content warnings, like the one I put at the beginning of this reply. You don’t spring it on people who don’t want to discuss it. You don’t put it on for people to watch without warning. You don’t tell everyone you know to go and watch it and give it money.
You do things like what Warner Brothers did with their Tom and Jerry disclaimer:
“These animated shorts are products of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”
You damn sure don’t erase it from history and pretend that ignoring it will solve bigotry. Censorship is not the answer, because censorship is always enforced harder on marginalized artists. You ban racism in film, you ban films by Black artists who are exploring the topic from their own perspective.
When the Hays Code banned "offense to other nations,” you know what happened? It didn’t stop racism in film, that’s for damn sure. It instead gave bigoted censors a perfectly legal and easy way to shut down art by marginalized people, which they did gladly.
The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany resulted in the Reichsfilmkammer demanding the removal of all Jewish workers from Hollywood’s European locations. American films began receiving heavy censorship and bans in Germany, and so American studios complied with the Reichsfilmkammer’s demands in order to avoid legal trouble in Germany.
Despite the Nazi party’s outright hostility toward Hollywood, the MPPDA office discouraged any negative depiction of Germany or the Nazi party. Germany had been such a huge market for American cinema that the Reichsfilmkammer’s censorship codes for German films began impacting American-made cinema. Jewish representation in cinema all but disappeared overnight. Joseph Breen, the head of the censor board, was an open antisemite, going on open tirades against Jewish people. His censorship policies were flagrantly bigoted and only served to reinforce that bigotry on a systemic level.
In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe tried and failed to make an anti-Hitler film titled “The Mad Dog of Europe.” The Hays Code was used to deny the film’s production. On July 17, 1933, Will Hays himself ordered the filmmakers to cease and desist, all in the name of “not offending Germany.”
Said Joseph Breen, “It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.”
Variety said about the subject, “American attitude on the matter is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market no matter what the inconvenience of personnel shifts.”
Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actress, lost out on a leading role in the film “The Good Earth,” due to the Code’s explicit ban on interracial relationships. The leading man had already been cast with a white man wearing yellowface, meaning that Wong was unable to be cast as the leading lady and love interest, even though the characters were supposed to both be Chinese. The role instead went to a German-American actress wearing yellowface, who went on to win an Oscar for the role.
Censorship doesn’t help anyone. Censorship does not protect anyone. Censorship does not prevent bigotry, and in fact only serves to reinforce it.
Anyone who read this far and learned something: being an independent media censorship researcher doesn’t exactly pay the bills, so check out my Ko-Fi or Patreon if you learned something and feel generous.
My main sources for this post are:
- Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, by Thomas Doherty
- The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, by Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons
- The Encyclopedia of Censorship, by Jonathon Green & Nicholas J. Karolides
- Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code - Stephen Vaughn
- Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mark A. Vieira
- Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934), When Sin Ruled the Movies, by Mark A. Vieira
- Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration, by Thomas Doherty
And since you made me talk about Birth of a fucking Nation, here are some additional resources for people who are actually interested in Black media history:
- Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, by Nicholas Sammond
- Archival Rediscovery and the Production of History: Solving the Mystery of Something Good - Negro Kiss (1898), by Allyson Nadia Field
- Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque, by Lawrence E. Mintz
- The Original Blues: The Emergence of the blues in African American Vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
- Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era, by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
- Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen
- Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott
- The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville, by Prof. Kathleen B. Casey
- Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. And the Long Civil Rights Era, by Matthew Frye Jacobson
- Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture, by John Strausbaugh
- A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary, by Geoffrey Jacques
- Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers by Donald Bogle
- The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film, and Television, by Tim Brooks
- Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser
- America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin
- White: Essays on Race and culture, by Richard Dyer
- Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara
- Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, by Wil Haygood
- Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, by Ed Guerrero
- Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, by Donald Bogle
- White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side, by James Snead
- Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, by Nancy Wang Yuen
- The Hollywood Jim Crow: the Racial Politics of the Movie Industry, by Maryann Erigha
(via neil-gaiman)
-
poor things, well we should definitely make this easier on them by never repeatedly mentioning their name and deeds on the “reblog things forever” website
(via septaofficial)
-
To whoever made this mod and to everyone who downloaded it
I hate you and you’re cowards. Fools. Weaklings. Wimps.
I’m killing each one of them with my mind. None of them deserve Karlach >:(
I feel like I need to reblog this version just in case people think that people might be using this mod because of triggers or the like.
This is sexism. Pure and simple.
(via brenna-ivy)
