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zhuanghongru:

1400 year old ginkgo tree.

 地點:陝西省西安市古觀音禪寺 

Photography: Han Fei

Gender reveal variant: Tree.
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headspace-hotel:

Not to be That Person, but tapeworms don’t have circulatory systems at all, let alone heartbeats.

Neither do the fetuses at the stage the heartbeat bills want to classify them as people, so this tweet works on multiple levels.
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baixueagain:

chaos-and-cookies:

antivancrcws:

antivancrcws:

“straight people have never known what it’s like for their love to be illegal!” hey quick question have any of y’all ever heard of anti miscegenation laws in your life

the same month my dad turned five, his aunt was denied a marriage because she was brown and her fiancé was white. this was not that long ago! like, please do call out and talk about straight privilege. but as a queer person of color: i am begging y’all to do it w/o erasing the history of racism

I keep saying ppl on here love to confuse whiteness for straightness. Just because white het ppl have it easy doesn’t mean its the same for poc or ppl in interracial relationships (ESPECIALLY non white interracial relationships).

Quit invalidating m/f love just because u think its straight, and even if it is, straight poc need just as much validation and representation as any gay couple because we rarely see ourselves in healthy loving relationships in media either, and it’s especially rare to ever see interracial love! Its fucking 2018 and the scarcity of good poc and interracial love representation is disgusting.

There are also disabled couples who can’t get married or live together without losing their government benefits, meaning they wind up without housing and/or other basic needs.

There may not be any laws against disabled marriage but when the government is going to penalise you anyway by starving or freezing you to death, the result is virtually the same.

Graves of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, who were not allowed to be buried together.
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aegipan-omnicorn:

friendlytroll:

the1timelady:

silverhawk:

dare i say that stuffed animals are one of the single greatest inventions of all time and im thankful every day for the fact that someone thought to make animals but in huggable plush form…..saved me from a lot of bad nights and nightmares as a kid, i love you stuffed animals

 You may offer your thanks to Magarete Steiff

She lived in Germany and could be considered as the first person to sew stuffed animals merly for children to play with and to counter the common “hard” toys out of wood or metal wich were popular back then.

There is even so much more to the story, because she was as you can see paraliezed from polio, she couldnt walk or use her right arm, she had to fight all her life just to be accpeted as a human being, she wasnt even allowed to sit in the front row of church in her home village and had a pretty abusive mother. One time she and her brother almost drowned but the townpeople only attempted to save her brother because he was healty. Her father saved her from drowning in last minute.

 Only her father and brother stood behind her, still she learned to accept her faith and make the best out of it. After a failed operation she said she had gone around living this way anyways. She started to sew, more importantly she started to sew with a sewing machine wich was realy new at this time. People would not buy from her at first but then she made a realy beautyfull dress for her best friend and suddenly everyone was crazy for her work.

Then she started to sew little elephants as pincushions, but when she attempted to sell them around christmas she quickly realized that for one children were crazy for them and wanted them as toys and also. this was what she wanted to do, bringing happiness to kids.

She expanded futher and gave work to over 20 women as sewers in her factory, her brother helped her to do so, and she started producing stuffed animals of all kinds (almost) their trademark was a button sewed into every anmals ear. It still is to this day.

Whit the economy crisis her factory, and she almost lost it, she already couldnt pay her workers, he factory was about to be forceclosed and the last hope was a toy fair they would attend,

and then she had an idea, she sewed a bear, the very first stuffed toy bear there was, with moveable head and limbs and realy soft fur and glass eyes, it was beautyfull, but at the toyfair most people thoght it was to expensive

most people because one american buyer fell in love with the bears, he bought them all and he ordered 3000 more, it saved the factory

you may ask why would anyone need 3000 stuffed toy bears easy, to support and advertise the candidacy of  Theodore Roosevelt as the U.S. president, trough that the toy bear invented by Magarete Steiff became well known as the

Teddy Bear

<3 

Disability history matters!

The fact that she faced so much ableism and discrimination in her life was indeed sad (and infuriating!) – and that may be the reaction of many abled people when they hear her story (the poor disabled little girl).

But the fact that she survived, and innovated, and brought modern machines to her hometown, and advocated for herself, and brought joy to so many people, in spite of that discrimination (and I do mean “spite”) is not sad at all.

It’s downright victorious!

Also Theodore Roosevelt had adopted a bear cub at the time, hence the connection.
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bravinto:

ellicelluella:

prettybirdy979:

tygermama:

itsthespidersman:

eclipsemidnight:

straight-outta-hobbiton:

victorian-sexstache:

navajolovesdestiel:

arodrwho:

duckapus:

hundredyearspublishing:

The worse the explanation, the better.

bad bee birthday party

[id: white text on a blue background reads “Writers! Badly explain your current project in one sentence.” end id]

tentacle porn

Evil twin tries to seduce good twin

Bootleg cyborg child leads new guardian on merry chase through hive mind logic he has been lucky enough to avoid for the last decade or so by literally unplugging.

current original fic: Reincarnation in uber capitalism. 

current fanfic: two old spirits reluctantly end up in symbiotic relationship with each other and a somewhat human child by the power of counterarguments.

local kids bond over cool rocks, unintentionally destroying centuries of fear and hatred

Man and associates finds out their assumptions about his brother were wrong

Local demon rules lawyers himself into act of faith he doesn’t believe himself capable of.

subs with a side of devilish paths crossing

good shepherd: dick out edition

Vampires have no idea what they’re doing and neither do I.
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the104yearoldvirgin:

Every year the Cullens go to Burning Man

And every year people think they’re doing performance art like Malcolm’s family from that one episode of Malcolm in the Middle. Eventually they get a reputation.

“Oh the Cullens? Yeah. Every year they show up absolutely doused in body glitter and just…go about their normal days like that.”

“The doctor has a first-aid tent and his wife sells homemade soaps and candles out of their van. They always smell so good I can’t say no.”

“The hot blonde one doesn’t even see any shows, she just lays there and sunbathes. She never burns.”

“The tiny one only hangs out with the really stoned people and braids their hair. I’ve never seen her or any of them sleep.”

“The moody one with the eyebrows, I think his name might be Jessie? Jackass? Whatever. He just lays facedown in the dirt sometimes and doesn’t move for a while. Drugs, man.”

“Edward? The one who just played Wonderwall for 14 hours straight on acoustic guitar last year?”

We should just get all the weird Twilight shitposts from the last year and publish them.
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dog-of-ulthar:

I’m not usually one to repost twitter jokes, however

And if the current election cycle is any indication, makes it to number 10 and revokes article 50.
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everentropy:

returnsandreturns:

Snopes is struggling due to mounting legal fees and they are a crucial organization for the fucked up, anti-truth time we’re currently living in, so I’m donating what I can and also writing drabbles* in exchange for any level of donation.

If you donate $50+, I am also willing to update the WIP of your choice lol 

Just donate & send me a screenshot and a prompt/pairing. 

*in this case, drabbles means at least 100 words; they will likely be more because i have no restraint or good sense

Here’s the letter from the Snopes page describing the issue:
November 1, 2019 by David Mikkelson, Organizer

Dear Readers,

We wish we had better news, but they have filed another appeal. This time they’re appealing our successful defense of our First Amendment rights.

Parties suing us — including newly minted CEO of Salon.com, Chris Richmond — have spent years filing losing motions, asking for continuances, changing legal counsel, and appealing adverse rulings.

It is all part of a scheme, our counsel wrote, “to ‘bring legal hell’ on Snopes employees in retaliation for terminating Snopes’ contract with Proper Media.”

Even the court described their tactics as “hostile.”

With the truth on our side, we have foiled their attempts so far. But now the case will drag on even longer and legal fees will continue to drain our revenues, threatening Snopes’ existence.

But even while they try to drag us down, we are showing up to make Snopes work better for you.

Soon we will bring you two major new developments:

A membership program that will reward sustaining Snopes supporters with special features and exclusive content.

And Snopes News, a feed without the falsity, where you can find headlines of the day curated by fact-checkers and editors you know you can trust. Sign up for updates here.

So long as we have your support, we will not give up.

Make a contribution today to defend Snopes.

Truthfully yours,
Team Snopes

I’d like to add Snopes is one of THE most trusted sources out there, and if it goes we will lose a great deal
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beanarie:

rheintochter:

ladylouoflothlorien:

imfemalewarrior:

injuries-in-dust:

Female firefighters at Pearl Harbor (1941).

Donna Tobias - the first woman to graduate from the US Navy’s Deep Sea Diving School in 1975.

Brave women of the Red Cross hitting the beach at Normandy.

Dottie Kamenshek was called the best player in women’s baseball and was once recruited to play for a men’s professional team.

Kate Warne - Private Detective. Born in New York City, almost nothing is known of her prior to 1856 when, as a young widow, she answered an employment advertisement placed by Alan Pinkerton.
She was one of four new agents the Pinkerton Detective Agency hired that year and proved to be a natural, taking to undercover work easily. She had taken part in embezzlement and railroad security cases when in 1861 the Pinkertons developed the first lead about an anti-Lincoln conspiracy.

Catherine Leroy, female photographer in Vietnam.

The three women pictured in this incredible photograph from 1885 – Anandibai Joshi of India, Keiko Okami of Japan, and Sabat Islambouli of Syria – each became the first licensed female doctors in their respective countries.
The three were students at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania; one of the only places in the world at the time where women could study medicine.

Female Samurai Warrior - Onno-Bugeisha - Female warrior belonging to the Japanese upper class. Many women engaged in battle, commonly alongside samurai men. They were members of the bushi (samurai) class in feudal Japan and were trained in the use of weapons to protect their household, family, and honour in times of war.

One of the most feared of all London street gangs from the late 1880’s was a group of female toughs known as the Clockwork Oranges. They woulde later inspire Anthony burgess’ most notorious novel. Their main Rivals were the All-female “the Forty Elephants” gang.

Maureen Dunlop de Popp, Pioneering female pilot who flew Spitfires during Second World War. She joined the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in 1942 and became one of a small group of female pilots who were trained to fly 38 types of aircraft.

In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston marathon. After realizing that a woman was running, race organizer Jock Semple went after Switzer shouting, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers.” However, Switzer’s boyfriend and other male runners provided a protective shield during the entire marathon. The photographs taken of the incident made world headlines, and Kathrine later won the NYC marathon with a time of 3:07:29.

Women have always participated in fighting; whether that is in war or in breaking down barriers that have been set in front of us by society. 

Take inspiration from our foremothers and continue breaking down barriers, wherever you are. 

-FemaleWarrior, She/They 

nothing to do with my blog but how could I not reblog this???

Where are the movies or tv series about the London street gang or the Pinkerton detective?

also grace humiston, aka mrs. sherlock holmes

among a dizzying array of accomplishments, including going undercover to expose illegal slave labor camps, she solved a murder the nypd had given up on, setting off an intense investigation of police incompetence and corruption

Guys, the Clockwork Oranges is a proven hoax, can we please fact check?
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nonasuch:

marzipanandminutiae:

marzipanandminutiae:

BRING ME THE BOY

(1908 silver belt buckle designed by Ferdinand Erhart, Musee d’Orsay)

okay let’s talk about Victorian/Edwardian bat jewelry

because they LOVED bat jewelry

We’ve got 1890s Brooch Friend:

Unspecified Decade Victorian Locket Friend:

Similarly Unspecified Victorian Chatelaine Friend:

and so many more

all these friends…must become M I N E

My favorites are the one with the pearl bellies and enamel wings:

I can really see why Dracula thought he’d fit right in.
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agirlcalledfrost:

imfemalewarrior:

vaspider:

autismserenity:

lovinnelily:

autismserenity:

katiemoss2001:

strawberry-kitkat:

swampgallows:

showmesomeoneinnocent:

aro-bot:

idk can we stop…treating a.ce disc.ourse like it’s some haha funney cringe compilation or whatever the fuck because it fucking destroyed the entire ace and aro communities. there is no solid aspec community on tumblr anymore (which was by far the biggest number of aspec ppl). exclusionists took our community and fucking smashed it to pieces and y'all treat it as this fucking stupid joke when they traumatized, gaslit, and abused an entire group of queer people back into the closet. fuck every single person who doesn’t take that seriously.

My personal experience is just that, but it’s really indicative that I have watched almost every single ace and aro person I know, irl and online, actively recloset themselves as a direct result of the consequences of The Disc Horse™

I watched irl queer groups disintegrate bc a few ppl who got into leadership positions used that to make the space hostile towards ace ppl (among others as well), saw friends go from being loud and proud aces n aros to actively avoiding any mention of it and letting ppl assume their sexuality. I myself, having been IDing as ace for 10 years at least, have in the past couple since this whole “"discourse”“ came into being, actively and intentionally stopped telling anyone at all that I’m ace. To put that in some kind of perspective, I am incredibly out as trans and will actively out myself pretty constantly except to total strangers I will never see again. I feel safer telling ppl I’m trans than ace. Especially in queer spaces. It’s fucked me up so much I didn’t even quite grasp how much but today my therapist asked me for the first time about like romantic relationships and I physically could not say I am aro and ace. Completely incapable, utterly frozen, and I just kinda let her believe what she will. Ironically the fact that I’ve gone from being willing and ready to tell ppl I’m ace as just another facet of myself to entirely unable and unsolicited to tell anyone, is probably a thing one might want to talk w one’s therapist about.

This has really fucked not just the community at large but fucked up individual ace ppl in so many ways. It’s not something “funny” or remotely harmless, it’s absolutely devastated us.

for people in the notes looking for “elder” aces, i just wanna say that i’m 28 years old and am also desperately searching for that representation. i first found out about asexuality through tumblr when i was 21 and started identifying as asexual when i was 21-22 (around 2012). i’ve sought other online ace communities but nothing compared to tumblr. i mean, props to aven for existing as a repository of resources but in terms of just chatting with other aces “in the wild” as it were, tumblr was the perfect place.

but then this fucking shit happened. around 2015 is when it really kicked into high gear. “discoursers” or exclusionists or aphobes or however you want to refer to them consider asexuality to be a joke and that everyone who identifies as ace is a cringey cishet college-aged white girl who loves dr who. recycled biphobia, homophobia, and even terf rhetoric made its way into the mainstream tumblr conscious by reframing the arguments to target ace people (you’re only X because you’re ugly/can’t get laid; you aren’t part of the community if your partner is of a different gender; maybe something happened to you to make you this way; have you had your hormones checked?; by accepting this identity you are allowing the oppressor to infiltrate our spaces; etc.). you know, in case you think this is just about “snick snack” memes.

this has alienated ace people of color, who already struggle with desexualization/hypersexualization, disabled aces, ace survivors, trans aces, mentally ill aces, neurodiverse/AUTISTIC ACES (you guys get REAL fuckin nervous when i highlight that the majority of your jeering about aces’ perceived awkwardness, missed social cues, infantilization/dehumanization, or “unfuckability”/“cringey-ness” are repackaged ableism, especially considering that a good percentage of the ace community is also autistic), and both young AND older aces. 

younger people are being discouraged from exploring the possibility of being asexual by exclusionists for reasons that vary from internalized homophobia to asexuality being a side effect of SSRIs. they are being told that they are “actually” something other than what they say they are, or that they are broken, or that they’re too young to know, or that our ace identity is simultaneously something that must be excruciatingly examined to determine its “cause” yet so irrelevant that it’s unworthy of discussion or representation—”nobody cares that you don’t want to have sex”. i WISH i had known about asexuality as a teenager, as a kid. I wish i had saved myself from so much grief, abuse, pain, and corrective rape by not subjecting myself to experiences that i hoped would “fix” me. 

and older people like me, who in the grand scheme of things is uhhh really not that much older than the majority of tumblr, are ridiculed for having a presence on tumblr in general, let alone as an asexual person. aces over 30? 40? 50? unicorns. conjured rhetoric. people straight-up don’t believe they exist. people ten years my junior attempt to deny and erase the lived history of aces by saying asexuality was “invented” only ten years ago. i have been terrified of attempting to enter Q* spaces irl because i have heard from even my IRL gay friends that aces do not belong, that “it’s not important enough to form an identity around”, that we are not oppressed enough or we just desperately want to be oppressed. 

i have only heard in passing of people much older than i am who are ace. i have absolutely zero examples to turn to of people like me continuing to live a long life or any evidence that i am worth loving unless i become a parent, which i don’t want to do. when you’re a teenager there’s more discussion about sexual boundaries, but what about dating in my 30s? what adult is going to be satisfied knowing i can never validate their sexual attraction, unless they were ace like me (less than 1% of the population)? am i forced to be alone forever? you can imagine how bleak my future feels. 

it pisses me off that i’m seen as a curmudgeon who “just doesn’t get the young people’s humor” when i have to beg people that i consider friends, for the eight billionth time, to stop making/reblogging jokes about how “cringey” aces are or are tongue-in-cheek declaring themselves to be aphobes, and then those people try to assuage me with respectability politics about how it’s about “THOSE” aces on tumblr and not, yknow, me, who is “one of the good ones”. and since the jokes themselves are so juvenile, it further compounds on the poor social graces and stoicism assumed of asexual people if I’m getting upset over ace war criminal moodboards or whatever the fuck. EVERY time i post about asexual ANYTHING on tumblr, to this day, i lose followers. without fail. people dont bat a lash when i spam 20 untagged posts in a row about a fandom they dont care about but i post two positive words about asexuality and theyre gone.

the environment promoted on tumblr condemns asexuality as a social deficit, as an attack on other Q* identities, as a subject of derision and embarrassment, as an identity lacking in “woke” capital, and makes every effort to expunge us from communities we have already belonged to in favor of making our own while also actively seeking out and dismantling those communities. if tumblr really is in its last days, i sincerely hope that these awful practices will die with it. 

this picture was taken in 1973, asexuality has been part of the lgbt+ community longer than you’ve been alive.

The first mentions of asexuality as an orientation are from a leaflet published in 1896 and the X on the Kinsey Scale for non-sexual was added in 1948. It was not invented by white teenage old girls on Tumblr.

ASEXUALITY WAS NOT INVENTED BY TEENAGE GIRLS ON TUMBLR.

For more information on sexual history read this http://wiki.asexuality.org/Asexual_history

Before aromanticism was used as a term there was non-limerant. Limerance described romantic attraction and so a non-linemerant person didn’t experience romantic attraction. It has a lot of similarities to aromanticism and it’s first documented appearance was in a book called ‘love and limerance’ published in 1979.

Aromanticism was also not invented by white girls on tumblr.

AROMANTICISM WAS NOT INVENTED BY WHITE GIRLS ON TUMBLR.

Tumblr might be the first place you saw these terms and where they are most used but the orientations were not invented here maybe the words were first used by a lot of people on here but the orientations not.

(Image transcription: The sign behind them reads: “YEA - IT’S A HEAVY TRIP. BUT! This is a chance to CHOOSE YOUR OWN LABEL instead of having someone else do it for you: straight, asexual, lesbian, bisexual, anti-label, dyke separatist, ?, lesbian feminist, [something partially obscured but i think it might say anti-sexual], or whatever”)

When I saw the picture I just started crying and what came after it… I cant, is like someone put a hand on my shoulder and said “is okay to exist” and I’m sobbing right now.

I did know I needed this. But I never thought it would get me to tears. I never knew I needed it for me, to show to myself, to tell me it’s fine to be me.

I can’t stop crying, fuck.

💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

This is why representation is important. This is why visibility is important.

Sometimes I see exclusionists shooting their mouths off about how the way you can tell aces aren’t oppressed is that our main need is for representation, that our positivity posts are about being valid.

And I’m just like… you have maybe temporarily forgotten what it is like to not see yourself reflected anywhere?? You maybe have been lucky enough to find people like you in history and in media before you came out?? Perhaps you are blissfully unaware that if you don’t have that kind of representation, the only messages you get are that you are a shitty gross broken person that doesn’t have any worth????? Possibly you do not know the effect of hearing that from both the straight and the “LGBT” communities at once??

I don’t know if anybody has studied this (I’m gonna find out!) but I would bet a lot of money that that stuff has a huge impact on health, and that it’s a big part of the reason that m-spec and a-spec people (including aros) have such incredibly high rates of things like suicidality.

We’re valid. We have worth. We are incredible people, part of incredible communities and cultures and histories. We deserve to exist, and the world is much better off with us.

There were older aces on here. I watched 2 ace folx in their late 30s, one in her early 50s and one in her late 40s get chased off of here by constant harassment. I’m in contact with all 3 on other platforms and have been friends with all of them for 5+ years, so.

One of them specifically came to Tumblr to be a resource for younger aces (the one in her late 40s) and left in horrified disgust over the level of direct, awful harassment she received.

So, yeaaaaaaah, they’re out there, and Tumblr dis.course succeeded in making Tumblr so vile to them that they left.

I also want to point out the exclus also usually have sideblogs for this stuff, so they can choose when they engage in dis.course, but us Aces can’t choose to engage or not engage in it, because we are always Asexual. 

We especially can’t escape when it’s purposefully flooded into our positivity tags. 

So: I am asexual. I hate it when people are actively working to shove us back into the closet and fracture our community when we have been acknowledged as existing since ancient times, and when we have had a term to name ourselves since the 1900s. 

This is our history, we have always been here, we will always be here. 

-FemaleWarrior, She/They 

“this has alienated ace people of color, who already struggle with desexualization/hypersexualization, disabled aces, ace survivors, trans aces, mentally ill aces, neurodiverse/AUTISTIC ACES (you guys get REAL fuckin nervous when i highlight that the majority of your jeering about aces’ perceived awkwardness, missed social cues, infantilization/dehumanization, or “unfuckability”/“cringey-ness” are repackaged ableism, especially considering that a good percentage of the ace community is also autistic), and both young AND older aces.”

YOOOOOOOO.

I was very lucky, because  when I was 16, nearly 20 years ago, I was a satanist. And whatever you might say about Anton LaVey, the guy was really fucking thorough about covering everyone’s sexuality. 

Satanism condones any type of sexual activity which properly satisfies your individual desires
- be it heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or even asexual, if you choose.

The Satanic Bible was written in 1969, btw.

And yes, 90% of what LaVey wrote about being ace was wrong, but at least he was aware we, y’know, EXISTED. 
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aziraphaleisagender:

ambular-d:

aziraphaleisagender:

aziraphaleisagender:

Fanfic where Aziraphale meets a pope and they have a Very Heated Argument and Aziraphale is banished from Italy for all of time

Like they literally still have the proclamation or whatever, “DO NOT LET THIS MAN INTO THE VATICAN”, hung on the wall, with a drawing of Aziraphale

Crowley laughs himself sick every time it’s brought up

Aziraphale visits the Vatican anyway multiple times to yell at various popes until there’s about fifty signs warning about him and everyone thinks it’s a joke until he shows up waving a copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls shouting “AND ANOTHER THING—”

I think Aziraphale would actually get along fairly well with Francis. (His predecessor would have been a different story.) Doesn’t matter, though; they can’t keep him out no matter how hard they try.

The last sign is just this defeated little hand-scrawled note that says ‘nm just give him a cup of tea and let him speak his piece he’ll wind down eventually and go away’

I am H O W L I N G at the idea of Aziraphale barging into the Vatican City with Murder on his face and then when he yells enough and meets with the pope the guy just sighs heavily and says, “Would you like some tea, sir?”

“Only if you listen for once when I tell you about your deplorable actions regarding buying up hospitals and banning abortion! You have no right to decree what people do with their bodies! It goes against several of Jesus’ points—” and he goes off on a rant, reciting Bible passages in the original Hebrew and then translating them, while the pope just sits there nodding. Someone is live-streaming it to Youtube. Cardinals are cowering. The tea is getting cold.
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goosegoblin:

goosegoblin:

broke: using ‘boys will be boys’ to defend abusive and predatory behaviour

woke: using ‘boys will be boys’ to describe boys and men doing jackass-style stuff for fun

‘of course he’s teasing her, boys will be boys!’: bad, hate that

‘we got bored so we decided to tie a roman candle to a drone and have it chase us’: outstandingly good

But still why gender fun?
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takerfoxx:

Right, okay, let’s talk about Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.

Oh boy, do I have a lot to unpack here. And, uh, content warning for discussion of rape and genocide.

Right, let’s start with my thoughts on the first one. Overall, I liked it a whole lot, but mostly I’m astounded that it got the go-ahead in the first place. I mean, a bizarre subversive take on Sleeping Beauty of all things that recasts Disney’s most iconic villain as a sort of anti-hero with a heavy feminist slant that had a blatantly unsubtle rape metaphor as its centerpiece? It should have been a trainwreck! Hell, it almost was a trainwreck, one that threatened to jump the tracks the entire runtime! It shouldn’t have worked, it almost didn’t work…but it still did.

Part of that was just how committed everyone involved was to its own mad premise. Say what you want about the idea, but it was ballsy as hell, and it totally went all in with…everything. I mean, you kind of have to just to make something like this work, as any kind of drawback or halfass would’ve caused the whole thing to come crashing down, so the only chance you’ve got is to point the whole endeavor straight at that brick wall and slam your foot down on the ignition. And it went in deep, recontextualizing King Steffen as a paranoid, manipulative, power-hungry madman; the three fairies as total dolts; Prince Philip, someone who might seem dull in comparison to later princes like Aladdin, Eric, or the Beast, but was still the most proactive prince Disney had at that point, as kind of a duffer whom Maleficent had to literally drag along on his own quest and who was understandably squeamish about kissing an unconscious girl against her will; Daival as a dashing sidekick; and completely flips the Maleficent/Aurora relationship on its head. That’s the sort of thing you see in those What If? fanfics that you tend to obsess over in highschool, and it comes packing all of the raw emotion of one of those fics, and because of that it pulls its own crazy premise off. Yes, it was flawed. Yes, there were things that didn’t work. But they almost don’t matter in light of just how impressive it was that they managed to pull something this audacious off.

And as for the rape metaphor…actually, scratch that. Let’s call a spade a spade, okay? It wasn’t a metaphor, that was straight up a rape. Maybe it wasn’t sexual, but what a lot of people forget is that rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power. It’s about dominating another person to take their power away so that the aggressor can feel powerful, and that’s how it was played, and they committed to showing it in all of its ugliness. I mean, holy shit that takes balls.

But the bulk of the reason why it worked was because of Angelina Jolie.

I mean, what an absolutely mesmerizing performance! The OG Maleficent was so memorable in part because everyone else in that movie kind of…wasn’t, but also because she was super cool and super badass and totally in love with being THAT BITCH! And Angelina Jolie absolutely owns that role.

I mean, she is Maleficent. She just took a DNA test, and I don’t need to tell you what the results are. She embodied all of that iconic character’s regal majesty, menace, cruelty, confidence, and knowing that she was the badass bitch to ever vamp about in a long black gown with a bitching pimp staff just ready to show up uninvited and wreak some unholy vengeance, and then some. There is no longer any need to wonder where your god is, because she is right there, and she is all out of mercy.

But then she goes and gives actual depth to a really awesome but still kind of one note character, from the young innocence before she was betrayed to genuinely bonding with young Aurora to her desperate heartbreak over being unable to break her own curse to actual fear when it seems that the mad king has finally got her to…well, the agony of betrayal when she wakes up and fully realizes what Steffen has done to her. That’s a wide range of emotions to have to portray in a character only known for being smirkingly evil or ragingly evil, but she goes in hard, and basically holds the whole haphazard production together through the sheer gravitational pull of her performance.

So when they announced a sequel, I was intrigued. In fact, I was hoping for another totally insane, probably a bad idea production that just goes HAM on whatever crazy topical stuff it wants to talk about with Angelina Jolie just owning everything she touches.

But what it turned out to be…

Sigh.

Okay.

Let’s do this.

All right, I won’t go into specific plot details until I reach the spoiler cut, because they’re not really important. What I want to get across is the first third of this movie, it really had me. It was good! It had everything I liked about the first one. Different situation, sure, but we had Maleficent being Maleficent and bouncing off other characters, both old and new, and it was good.

Then the second third rolled around, and things started to come apart. I mean, it didn’t totally lose me or anything, there was a lot of good stuff, we learn a lot of cool lore, there’s a kickass Zootopia-type place we visit with a whole bunch of biomes, and I was generally okay with how things were, assuming that they could stick the landing. But the big problem here was that there was a whole lot less of Maleficent. Oh, she was there, sure, but she wasn’t really…doing much, mostly just walking around while some other character explained exposition to her, to which she barely even reacts, so we’re left with Aurora and Philip and Michelle Pfieffer as the new evil queen to do all the heavy lifting. And they do an admirable job of it I suppose (though the lack of romantic chemistry between Aurora and Philip was really noticeable here), but this part was seriously missing Angelina Jolie’s overwhelming presence that the first movie had, so the seams started to show.

And then we get to the third act, and that’s where it all fell apart for me. So, I guess it’s spoiler time.

Keep reading
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unexplained-events:

Horror Icons In and Out of Makeup

1. Pumpkinhead - Tom Woodruff, Jr.
2. Satanico Pandemonium - Salma Hayek
3. Nosferatu - Max Schreck
4. Grand High Witch - Anjelica Huston
5. Samara Morgan - Daveigh Chase
6. Pinhead - Doug Bradley
7. Frankenstein - Boris Karloff
8. Phantom Of The Opera - Lon Chaney, Sr.
9. Regan MacNeil - Linda Blair
10. Freddy Krueger - Robert Englund

SOURCE

I did once hear a story that when Hellraiser was having it’s release day party, Doug Bradley kept being asked who he was and why he was there.
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amuseoffyre:

agirlnamedkeith:

te-amo-corazon:

nadiacreek:

reuters:

With a large chin, a prominent slightly arched nose and delicate lips, the “face” of England’s King Richard III was unveiled on Tuesday, a day after researchers confirmed his remains had finally been found after 500 years.

A team of university archaeologists and scientists announced on Monday that a skeleton discovered last September underneath a council parking lot in Leicester was indeed that of Richard, the last English king to die in battle, in 1485.

Devotees of Richard, who have long campaigned to restore his reputation, proudly revealed a 3D reconstruction of the long-lost monarch’s head on Tuesday, introducing him to reporters as “His Grace Richard Plantagenet, King of England and France, Lord of Ireland”.

READ ON: Face of Richard III, England’s “king in the car park”, revealed

i am so happy we all thought the same thing

I respect this, but every single time I see ANYTHING about Richard III and his bones, I think of this documentary:

In which the like…head of the Richard III Defense Club absolutely loses her shirt because she was convinced that the scoliosis and whithered arm were ‘bad press’ because people didn’t like Richard III. 

When the examination proves them to be true she has to leave the room to compose herself.

I will tell you, I appreciate passions. But the attractiveness of a historical figure is not a hill I ever expected to see a person die upon. 

(Also, SO ABLEIST and not okay???? I’m not??? sure??? what??? part??? of him??? having??? scoliosis??? and a weak arm??? make him??? less??? likable???)

To be fair, historically, there is historical media precedent of people being “abnormal” or with some physical and/or psychological problem to make them monstrous villains. Bond films still do this to this day and when the Tudor propaganda machine wanted to blacken Richard’s name, in an era when Kings were meant to be the embodiment of strength and goodness, turning him into a limping hunchback villain was Shakespeare doing the standard media approach.

The difference being that, in this particular case, he took Richard’s well-remembered medical condition and turned it up to eleven. Yes, Richard did have one shoulder slightly higher than the other, but we’re two generations down the line and naaaaaah, no one else my age’ll remember that it was only a mild aberration of his shoulder. Let’s turn that into a full blown twisted back that is his entire motivation.

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them

Technically, they’re not wrong about it being bad press, because it was. Shakespeare made him a very physically and visibly disabled villain. It came as such a shock to them that the bad press was based in reality and that Richard was actually not the embodiment of physical perfection they decided that he must be. They forgot that some people around in Shakespeare’s time would have remembered Richard. There probably were nasty jokes about him, just like there are jokes now about William’s thinning hair and Harry’s red hair (and/or legitimacy).

However, if you want to see something nifty (and I wish I could find a link, because it was awesome), they did a documentary some time later about a man with a similar degree of scoliosis as Richard III being dressed up and trying riding and armour and things like that, to see how someone with scoliosis would have coped. And what do you know? The armour served as a support truss and apparently made things easier for him, which he was really excited about. Also, they think Richard had a special saddle made to ensure stability on horseback, much like Kaiser Wilhelm did in the early 20th century.

I love that they went digging to see how Richard came to be reputed as this fierce and stalwart soldier by working out what mechanisms were put in place to help him deal with his scoliosis. The man died in battle and even his enemies reported he was fighting like a lion until the end. Unfortunately, ableists are useless at seeing past the “disabled” part.

It brings a new meaning to that famous line in the play ‘A horse! A Horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ With his condition Richard was very capable on horseback, but once dismounted he’d tire quickly and be unable to defend himself.

There’s also the possibility that few people actually knew of Richard’s disability until his death, it would be fairly easy to cover up from any but his most trusted servants. however when he was killed, his body was stripped and it would have been obvious.
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kansascity-elffriend:

teaboot:

teaboot:

Too bad the prophet Cassandra never met Odysseus

They say if she made a prophecy Nobody would believe her

I’ve gotta say, that is exactly the kind of stupid thing that probably would circumvent a curse.

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