My husband, @mikermccall is strongly considering running a new D&D game. The basic hook would go like this:
“Above, the Sky Kingdoms are a glittering collection of domains, each one an island in the sky, ruled by nobles and populated by happy merchants, craftspeople and farmers.
"Below, the land is a twisted land full of magic and monsters, the remains of a centuries-past Mage War.
"But the wastelands hold metal and magic, necessary components of the Sky Kingdoms’ prosperity. Who will go and seek them out?”
The game would run on a West Marches basis. For those not in the know, that means that the dm would post adventure hooks, and people would organize their own adventuring groups and set a time with him to run the adventure.
We’re looking for a few people who would be interested in actively participating - making a character or two of their own, helping make some premades, and organizing a group at least once every two weeks (from Jan-Mar at least). People who want to participate on a more casual level are welcome too, we just need at least two other actively involved players (i.e. besides me) to reach critical mass for this thing to actually exist.
Anyone interested please send me or @mikermccall a message or a reply asking for the discord server link! Even if you’re not interested, please please reblog! Thank you so much!
EDIT: my husband revived his tumblr so I included it. Please reblog this version!
being individuals together is so intimate. let’s read different books but curled up next to each other, let’s visit a coffee shop so you can study and i can write, let’s just be near each other
✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but try to keep it spoiler-free to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖 Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll’s conclusion ✨
This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.
Don’t deny Jewish history in Palestine. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn’t succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn’t mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn’t help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.
Don’t whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel’s Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they’re in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying “Jews are white Europeans” is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.
Don’t invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to “go back where they came from”. Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can’t return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can’t return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on “other people’s land”, the difference in Palestine is that we’re the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.
Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It’s true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that “most” was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country’s Black population, so…) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was “None is too many.” Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.
Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that “the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing” is specific and precise. To say that “Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want”… do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say “Zionists”, what you really mean is “Jews”?
Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don’t apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn’t involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.
For fuck’s sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They’re very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they’re also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don’t give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.
Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not “when Jews do a thing I don’t like,” and a Zionist is not “a Jew I disagree with/don’t like”. Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn’t fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it’s oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they’re wrong. They’re doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they’re wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.
This post is your reminder that you are not obligated to blog about current events.
Things are bad. Really bad. Do not let people guilt trip you into tormenting yourself even further over the fact that things are bad. Doomscrolling is not activism.
If you’re just on tumblr to blorbopost or reblog pretty pictures, you are not harming people by inaction.
You are not a bad person for not dedicating every aspect of your life and leisure space to whatever disgusting mask-off attack on human life and dignity some government has decided to enact.
Take action where you can, but don’t confuse doomscrolling and digital self harm for action.
If you need to lose yourself in blorboposting, go for it.
If you need to log off for the day, whether it’s to take irl action or to protect what little sanity any of us have left over the past 7 years, then by all means, do.
Morale is important. Hope is important. Small joys keep us from burning out completely in times like this. Do not let any “if you don’t reblog this I’m judging you” guilt trip convince you otherwise.
your existence ALONE is a radiant blast into the void. you are creating futures where there was darkness and filling the empty space with perfect imperfection. thank you for this gift it is an honor to trot along beside you
in the tradition of outcast (2014), dragon blade (2015), and the great wall (2016), we need a movie set in the 1630s where a disillusioned member of the embroidered uniform guard and a profit-driven jianghu mercenary flee the corrupt and crumbling ming dynasty and somehow end up in the equally corrupt city of cologne, where they become key players in the fight against the sinister forces of cardinal richelieu and eventually secure the peace of westphalia and the end of the thirty years’ war. this is a million dollar idea i’m telling you
i really do love this concept. the protagonist is like i’m sick of dealing with wei zhongxian’s shit, i’m gonna go someplace where people are holy and don’t even know how to act like this (the impression of europe he got from the jesuit missionary he had a tactical lunch with once), and so he travels 5000 miles and as soon as he stops to catch his breath he runs into cardinal fucking richelieu, the european wei zhongxian
Transfem horror protagonist who realizes she’s a woman because she’s the Final Girl
[Image ID. A three panel digital comic.
Panel 1. Shows five teens in a wooden cabin with boarded up windows. One o them sits with their head in their hands, thinking “Oh no, nerdy guys don’t survive slasher films! I’m fucked!”
Panel 2. Later, a masked killer sits over one of the teen’s body with a knife. behind them, the door is kicked open with a bang, revealing a silhouette . “Hey asshole!”
Panel 3. The nerdy teen from panel one. She is now wearing a skirt, a rainbow bracelet, pink cat years, and a blood splatter. Holding up a baseball bat, she says, “I’ve realized some things.” End ID.]
People? In MY computer?? It’s more likely than you think!
The following is a fanvertisment and is not connected to the show. ****Yet.*** *Also yes, this is the fourth time I’m posting this because TUMBLR WONT LET ME EDIT SPELLING MISTAKES!
ANYWAY,
Once upon a time, back in 1987, Dire Straits put out this music video for “Money for Nothing”, which, as you know, was a song about wanting my MTV.
The video was made by two guys (Gavin Blair and Ian Pearson) on a very moody computer. After the video went out, these two guys went to a pub:
Ian: “Hey, we should make a whole show like this!”
Gavin: “Dude, making three minutes almost killed us.”
And so it was decided!🎉
The two guys were joined by two other guys (Phil Mitchell and John Grace) and created the Hub, which then became Mainframe Entertainment. They got even more people, and then they all holed up in this hotel.
They were mad lads with a dream: a whole cgi animated show, and they made it happen a whole year before Toy Story!
Behold! ReBoot!
(Yes that fever dream was real)
Now before I get any of this:
Let me lay this down. If you can’t with the animation of the first season because it was CUTTING EDGE IN 1994, you can close your eyes and listen to it. ReBoot wasn’t just a CGI gimmick. The characters are fully developed, the voice actors are peerless, the plot is sharp, and there’s so many easter eggs that you’ll never find them all.
Never
(And yes the episode “Bad Bob” was the actual catalyst for Fury Road. Look it up)
ReBoot is about what life is like in a computer (in the 90s, because it was the 90s) called Mainframe (because of course it is). People are sprites, the guys that look like 1s and 0s are binomes (which represent 1s and 0s). Bad guys are viruses, and the good guy is a Guardian named Bob, who is a certified cinnamon roll.
In the first season the eps are light and self-contained, mainly because there was constant friction between the Mainframe studios and the Board of Standards and Practices.
They still got away with some pretty dark stuff, like Megabyte (virus) making Enzo (the kid) watch his dog get sliced open (dog got away, obviously) , Dot (sprite) have a hallucinatory breakdown, and the fridge horror of realizing the thousands of worm things (nulls) that plunged off a bridge to their death were actually people.
And Hex’s (virus
best girl) scary face single-handedly traumatized an entire generation. 🙂
But busting through a window was a no go, because WhAt If tHe cHiLdReN dID iT tOo?
Anyway, halfway through the second season, ABC cut them loose, so they were like, fuck it, we’re going to start going hard. The story shifted from episodic to arcs and things start to get serious.
Third season the show moved to YTV in Canada, which gave no fucks about shielding the innocent children.
So it got DARK
How dark?
The UK refused to show the entire season, so the audience there had to wait until pirated copies made it across the pond to see how it ended.
Also by 1997, the animation was gorgeous. (Best example of third season animation I could think of that didn’t have spoilers)
The show was green-lit for a fourth season on Cartoon Network, but halfway through production Warner Bros took over and the same fucking thing happened.
Because Mainframe was halfway done, they decided not to scrap all of it, but knowing they wouldn’t be able to finish it correctly, Mainframe stripped anything that would hint at Season Four’s true ending, then left what remained on a cliff-hanger of angst.
FOR 22 YEARS
(It’s also why the last four eps of season four seem to make no sense)
And so it was.
Other crap happened, the soul left Mainframe, and its animated corpse spat out “The Guardian Code” in 2018.
But never say die! The year is (almost) 2024, 30 years later. ReBoot shall rise from the dead, because here come the documentary!!
Do you dare see what you’ve been missing?
What the (UK) government doesn’t want you to know??
Then come on down to ReBoot!
We got:
Magnificent bastards with sexy voices!
(Tony Jay at his best)
Kickass women who could probably crush your head with their thighs and you’d enjoy it!
Innuendos in a kid’s show!
💗 This adorable cinnamon roll!! 💗
Insane third season glow-ups!
YOUR NEW GOD
These guys!
(Gay roller-skating binome is my boi. I named him Jerry)
Nonstop cultural refs (You’ll never find them all. Never.)
(There are literally videos dedicated to trying)
So many computer puns!
Body Horror!
Existential Crisis!
HAVE I MENTIONED YOUR NEW GOD?
This is it, folks! The real thing, the gem hidden in the moose-filled forests of Canadia!🌲🌲🌲
Take a trip inside a mid-90’s computer!
See the World Wide Web! (omg):
Witness the original purple Gamecubes that randomly fall from the sky when the owner of the computer (OUR GOOD LORD THE USER) wants to play a game. If it lands on people and they lose, they dissolve into mindless energy leeches, fated to tormented by their former bretheren for all of eternity.
Just like in real life! 🙃
So watch the eps! They on YouTube!
I think they’re on Pluto, Hulu, Sling, and Tubi too! Also DVDs for people who have the patience to wait for them!
WATCH! BELIEVE! SUFFER THE SOUL-CRUSHING RAGE OF THE SEASON 4 CLIFF-HANGER!* (come on, its fun!)*
HYPE THE DOC!
The more people hype, the better the chances of actually getting it finished.
NOW SHARE THIS WITH EVERYONE!
And now I will leave you with this screenshot from the ep “Painted Windows”, where dicks can clearly be seen drawn upon the wall behind the fleeing anthropomorphized television.
(PS: If you heard the clown pic at the top of the page in your head, you’re welcome)
This short story by Junji Ito is about a fault that appears in Amigara mountain after an earthquake. The earthquake exposes countless human-shaped holes in the mountain which seem to have been made about a thousand years ago. People, intrigued by these
silhouettes, gather at the site and that’s when things get creepy.
It’s about a 15-20 min read, but if you haven’t read this before, you’re in for a treat. Link above.
i mean it’s not like i can just NOT reblog amigara fault. what if one of my followers is one of the lucky ten thousand who HASN’T been unutturably altered for life by it yet? go read it! it’s creepy, but trust me, it was made for you.