kristina100000:

i like that

(via cowntfagula)

i bet you got a feminine ladyboner watching cuties lmao. stay away from kids you fucking freak

birlinterrupted:

this kinda thing is what i’m talking abt when it comes to relative good faith levels in this conversation. Like, between this, and this commentary on the original post (i blocked the person eventually so it doesn’t show up on the post proper):

So like, there’s multiple issues that both of these responses show. One is that, none of this concern actually cares about csa or csa victims and the problems that lead to our harm. in fact, for someone who is using this topic as another cuture warrior talking point, csa victims talking about our experience is being done to be “edgy” rather than an actual explanation of the experience. When i talk about the things that lead to csa (or insights from what kind of person commits it), she just acts lke that has nothing to do with the conversation, even in a coversation about csa. There’s no actual concern for stopping the actual causes of csa, or even any engagement w critiques some of its victims make.

The other is that participation in this conversation is in fact an outlet for what i consider libidinous participation. Both of these people feel the need to imagine the concept of some adult masturbating to images of children - and to mockingly provoke csa victims to imagine such. For people like this, there is some sort of charge that they get off on imagining csa (or child attraction) in process - for me, this is a banality. I’ve already experienced an adult man doing this with me, while emotionally activating, I dont feel the need to constantly counterfantasize about csa, its typical, I remember it. i might be emotionally activated by it, but not libidinously or erotically so - i would rather not have to think about it. And yet! for many of these people (just like some homophobes and many transphobes) they spend time imagining the depraved sex acts that they hate, encouraging other people to also imagine them in detail. i’m uninterested.

baeddel:

nyaanarchist:

lizzy-b:

lost-hues-of-days-past:

bigwordsandsharpedges:

baeddel:

I know its a old point but it is really striking just how much of world history is reconceived in technological terms. Colonialism is often read as, as they put it in Civ 5, the triumph of “muskets over spears”, when really this was not how any of the involved generals perceived it at the time. Colonial wars were hard won, the natives were not crushed. During the invasion of (what we now call) South America, Cortez himself wrote about his fear and bewilderment at the Aztec’s weapons (which were made out of stone, despite their advanced metallurgy) for being remarkably effective against their cavalry. In 1899 John Ardagh, a British colonial administrator conducting a campaign in the Phillipines, turned up to the Hague on the day they ruled the use of expanding bullets a war crime to make a breathless argument that (get this) regular bullets don’t work on Phillipinos! (He was laughed out of the trial, nach.)

But people also extend it to the succession of the bronze age over the stone age, and the iron age over the bronze age - the bronze weapons just couldn’t compete with the iron ones, we tend to think. This is not true in any case, as far as I know. It would actually be quite late in the iron age that iron weapons would surpass bronze ones in terms of quality. The reasoning was a little more like the succession of LCD screens over CRT ones - ease of use and distribution, etc. In particular, bronze was greatly restricted by access to the ‘tin belt’, a slim region in South East asia which was the only part of the world where tin was available outside of the Americas. Countries closer to the tin belt were the first to enter the bronze age and typically the last to leave it.

Early iron weapons kinda sucked, actually. Soft iron is bendy, hard cast iron is brittle as glass. Some soft iron could be on par with bronze, but mostly on small blades like axes and spearheads. Sword blades were relatively long, so you could get enough leverage to really bend them badly.

Bronze offered the best combination of hardness and durability until some clever smiths in a couple locations figured out how to make iron into steel, which is basically perfect.

Steel is hard and tough and springy, but most of all, it’s controllable. Changing a few additives, or slightly altering the heat treatment, can give you the exact performance you ask for. Modern high-alloy supersteels are like magic.

Aluminum is good for stage props, but an aluminum sword has few benefits over bronze except light weight, and that only useful for some types of blade that depend on velocity to cut.

Titanium blades actually kinda suck. It’s extremely tough and durable, but that makes it extremely difficult to forge, or even grind. Ask any knifemmaker, titanium fucking eats abrasives.

Flint and obsidian are actually superb for making blades. The edge can be astoundingly thin and smooth at a microscopic level, and even good steel looks like a saw at that level. They make great surgical scalpels, they even cause less scarring.

That’s why the macuahuitl, a sort of wooden sword edged with obsidian, allegedly decapitated Spanish horses with a single blow. It was made with a special flaking method called prismatic flaking, which produced long, consistent, replaceable razor blades.

Cortez had a good reason to be afraid.

Conchoidal fracture in microcrystalline silicates produces pretty sharp edges, be it obsidian or chert/flint.

this actually touches on another point, specifically regarding the stone/bronze/iron age thing: it’s not like in a strategy game where you research Smithing, and suddenly all your infantry throw away their flint spears and pull out bronze pila. typically, the demarcation for each age is simply when the culture started working with that material. think of it like how the “computer/digital age” is used to refer to as early as the 60s despite it taking several decades before computers became a common household item. during the early “iron” age, the vast majority of people would still likely be using bronze or even stone implements, especially in Britain, which had the bulk of Europe’s supply of readily available tin. also, contrary to perception, usually the first thing to start using new materials are tools, not weapons.

On the topic of how strategy games distort the way we think about history, strategy games have a tendency to take the logic of colonialism and imperialism and present it as fact, even pasting it onto pre-colonial civilizations. The idea that the only way to have a successful civilization is by expanding your borders by any means necessary to acquire new resources is basically a staple of the strategy genre.

It’s not just strategy games that do this, the same happens with capitalism and city builders, but I don’t want to derail. There’s an amazing article about it and my original points that I’ll link below

SimCities and SimCrises

International City Gaming Conference 2017 keynote.

molleindustria.org

please derail this post with city builder crit~

(via baeddel)

cornedbeefhashtags:

In 2004, Drew Barrymore revolutionized the horror genre in 50 First Dates, where she starred as an ill-fated amnesiac doomed to rediscover each morning that she was married to Adam Sandler. In this essay, I will

(via fuckyeah2000s)

whatbigotspost:

maculategiraffe:

gaptoothsupremacy-deactivated20:

I love when I’m in the middle of speaking and suddenly I’m like wait I literally don’t agree with what I’m saying

normalize suddenly saying “wait hang on I might have just talked myself out of this” mid rant

Ohhhh hello fellow “talk to think*” people. If you relate to this, I bet you’re someone inclined toward external processing! Sometimes you GOTTA talk something out to fully realize things you’ve thinking/feeling or even ideas you have. This is just 1 reason to normalize therapy for allllllllllll.

*some people are more “talk to think” and others are more “think to talk.”

lmaonade:

if we’re mutuals feel free to use me as a powerful summon during a tough battle 

(via sidechica)

angrylatinxsunited:

usa: *steals half of Mexico*

usa: *cuts Panama in half and then retains the rights to the Canal for about 100 years*

usa: *sets up Banana Republics in Central American*

usa: *orchestrates coup d'etats everytime they don’t like an elected leader in Central American countries*

usa: *continues to fuel civil war in Nicaragua by giving money and training to the Contras*

usa: *is an ally of dictator Manuel Noriega and even has him working with the CIA*

usa: *is the main consumer of the drugs that cause drug cartels and drug related violence to exist"

usa: *supports autoritarian regimes in Guatemala (Ríos Montt) and El Salvador (José Napoleón Duarte)*

usa: *fuels gun violence in Central America in order to have a market to sell more (smuggled) guns to*

usa: *forces neoliberal policies like CAFTA that harm local Central American industries and brands that are not able to compete with their American counterparts*

usa: *uses Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine to justify their fucked up foreign policy*

usa: IT IS NOT OUR FAULT THAT CENTRAL AMERICAN CHILDREN ARE BEING TORTURED AND KILLED AND THOSE ILLEGALS SHOULD GO BACK TO THEIR COUNTRIES AND STAY OUT OF OURS!!!!! IF THEY ARE SUFFERING THEY SHOULD FIX IT THEMSELVES AND LEAVE US ALONE!!!!1!!

(via fyqueerlatinxs)

fuks:

socialmaya:

(via we-kant-even)

allahrakhii-deactivated20210317:

okay i’m just gonna say this but i don’t think neil gaiman deserves all the praise he gets cause the work i’ve read of his either sucks or is so boring i can’t finish it (with the exception of coraline) but him citing female authors as his influences when stardust is just the shittier version of howl’s moving castle is so funny to me like men will just write worse versions of a woman’s book and profit huh