I love the fact that the show has changed who was responsible for the Genosha attack here

In the comics making it Xavier's Evil Long Lost Twin Sister was honestly such a stupid cop-out, both because it was so random and also because it had the same energy as "This homophobic politician must surely be actually a closeted gay man himself!" as if the abuses and atrocities that minorities suffer are somehow always our own fault and not the fault of our oppressors

Here?

The people responsible for the Genoshan war crime are both 100% human

Bolivar Trask is a pathetic snivelling weak minded bigot, typical of many like him

And Sinister is quite literally the personification of the coloniser and the slave-trader. I mean he's LITERALLY an upper class asshole from Victorian England for one thing and during that time he bought exploited mutants from freak shows and insane asylums to use in his experiments, similar to the way IRL anyone who was "Deformed" or who was anything other than a neurotypical, physically average cishet white christian male was at risk of being bought and sold as a commodity from such places by people just as despicable as this fucking mad science Dracula is

And his colonising extends to his own genetics. The man appropriated mutant culture in the most literal way by harvesting their DNA to alter his own to give himself superhuman abilities and immortality

Instead of diluting the impact of the story by going "Oh, Xavier has an evil twin sister we've never seen before" this is very much a story about the evil of the oppressor destroying a safe space that the oppressed have created for themselves

Now you've made me realise they totally should have used Mr Sinister in X-men First Class instead of weirdly making the head of the hellfire club a nazi mad scientist or whatever they did to Sebastian Shaw.

Mr Sinister is an evil mad scientist who is obsessed with a master race, plus he's immortal too, so why WOULDN'T he try and work with the Nazis if he was around at the time.

Shaw's whole role in the film feels like it should have been written for Sinister instead honestly

And ironically the film that came out right after would have been a better place to introduce Shaw as the villain, since it was all about the Sentinels and Shaw in the comics was involved in directly financing those to make money playing both sides, because like all arms dealers, he's got no problem if the weapons he's selling are being used against people like him, as long as they aren't being used on him specifically

Who's been lurking behind the scenes? It's been Sinister all along Who's been harvesting mutant genes? It's been Sinister all along

He's duplicitous (ha-ha!) X-gene-covetous That you haven't even noticed And the pity is (the pity is) Pity, pity, pity, pity

It's too late to fix anything Now that Jean Grey's clone has gone wrong Thanks to Sinister (ha!) Mister Sinister It's been Sinister all along!

And I helped Gyrich, too!

People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”

forms of eldritch horror include but are not limited to - nobody will ever believe you, you must live alone with this knowledge - you will never feel safe again, and you realize you were never safe before - everything that was familiar is now strange and abhorrent to the point anything that now seems normal should be held in utmost suspicion - having this new knowledge has opened doors that will continually reveal new equally cursed knowledge without end - death and madness are no longer escapes

I’ve always felt that the idea of madness or sanity in an eldritch horror sense were misnomers. If anything, I feel a better term is a change of perspective. There is nothing inherent in seeing a greater being that “drives you insane”, it’s that this being doesn’t fit into your previous worldview at all and you have to wrestle that. Every character can and should react differently, changing in ways that “make sense” for them. It’s either a change in worldview or attempting to fit the greater being into your preexisting one. Both will have negative results, but will be interesting as hell to explore.

You know what? Unironically, I think this is the best comment I’ve seen on this post.

Reblogging this so I can look at it again as I try to improve the Swatter Cult in my Bug D&D game.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The content is not made by a content maker

Things get AI generated

The employees cannot hold a job

Mere AI generated art is loosed on the world

The shitty artwork is loosed

And the livelihood of artists is drowned out

The best lack all donations on patreon

And the worst are full of passionless art-theft

Surely some fuckery is at hand

Surely some AI bullshit is at hand

AI Bullshit

Hardly are those words out when a vast image poorly made using stolen art troubles my sight

Somewhere in the internet a shape with Gundam body and the voice of a Goku

A gaze blank and emotionless as a piece of clipart

Is moving its slow thighs

While about it the indignant artists whose work was stolen

Burn with rage

The Youtube remix drops again

And what rough sketch

Created by shitty tech

Now slouches towards rule 34

TO BE PORN?

*applauds*

hey good news

there's a specifically designated role in the naked mole rat ecology for "guy who runs off into the wilderness and fucks their way into a stranger's house"

Y'all have no idea how absurdly strange naked mole rats are as creatures They're cold-blooded mammals that live in a eusocial structure with a queen and drones, similar to ants, bees, termites and no other mammal on the planet. They barely need to breathe, with a respiration rate low enough to let them thrive in burrows with 2% oxygen, and survive with 0 oxygen whatsoever for about 20 minutes with zero lasting effects.

They live for over 30 years, which is absurdly long for a rodent, don't grow frail with age, and are basically immune to cancer because their telomeres just never shorten.

Naked Mole Rats are rodents that attempted to evolve into bugs, failed, and unlocked the secret to immortality in the process.

people love extolling the virtues of ball-and-socket joints and how it makes us more advanced and all that but I don't see any fucking octopuses in slings now do I. Bones are overrated and I want a refund.

how dare you lay this curse upon my home

you don't frighten me

Everyone in the notes saying "this is a 10k post to me" "posts that have 100k energy" "posts that are 30k to me" or whatever - alright, fine! Put the fuckin' work in then! You'd better have this queue'd up every day for the next six months! You'd better have all your friends queue'ing it up too!

You want me to suffer?? You want to treat me like my own goddamn bones do??? MAKE AN EFFORT

“I don’t care about dumb weed jokes,” I said naively, before I saw this

nasa: we're going to shoot three rockets directly at the sun during the total eclipse. for study and research purposes.

me: oh cool

nasa: we have named the rockets apep. this stands for atmospheric perturbations [in the] eclipse path.

me: oh cool

nasa: apep is also the ancient egyptian deity of chaos and darkness, who ceaselessly seeks to extinguish the sun. we launch these rockets directly at the sun in the name of apep.

me: oh... cool?

"Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun!"

Listen. We have to remember that nasa is full of dumb needs. I love them.

VALID :D

Why does basil smell so fucking amazing

Good points. Wait what was that first thing

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

Am I the only one who was taught that it was a giant kaiju frog and whenever they struck it it spat up normal frogs?

reminder that digital libraries aren’t owned, also why pirating digital content is a necessity

I know unicorns in modern media are kind of regulated to cutsie, MLP, rainbow plastic toys, or shitting rainbows, 'lets go to candy mountain' but man. I WISH more fantasy media would put them in unironically. There is so much symbolic and narrative potential in a creature that is, depending on your mythology:

Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn't committing to the bit

I mean, we're talking about people whose lifespan is Yes.

"Oh, the weak wine? That is for children. I am two thousand years old, and I daresay one sip from this highball would knock you on your ass for a week."

Look, there's this weird thing people do with high fantasy where they want elves to be immortal/extremely long-lived snooty aristocrats and also somehow incapacitated by imagining the taste of salt too hard. "Orcs and dwarves have the hardest booze" no they don't, they have work in the morning! In any of these settings, elves would pregame harder than hobbits party and everyone else has shit to do tomorrow.

The average high elf builds up the drug tolerance of a mid-70s Hollywood producer and then spends three centuries studying alchemy. While humans seek immortality, the Immortals seek the elusive "philosopher's cocaine."

Elf Fentanyl works exactly the way cops think human fentanyl does

I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like “whatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with you” so he just raises him as normal, doesn’t even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the king’s murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I'mma put him out of his misery.

The king’s son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjects’ grievances, and a general’s like “how will you defeat the prophesied evil now? You’re old and weak.” Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdom’s public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.

No evil lives in this kingdom, says the teenager. It starved to death before I was born.

Oh yes.

Half Goblin, half Hobbit.

Goblit.

God dammit I did this just for a pun but now I’m imagining this whole backstory where a wounded female goblin flees from some battle and winds up on the edges of the Shire and she’s gonna jump some Hobbit dude named Blinko Tumbrush but Blinko’s so unfailingly polite that his first reaction on seeing someone in a rough situation is to invite them in to dinner and gobbo chick is just like “… uh… ‘kay.”

And then she has dinner and it’s the best thing she’s ever eaten and even her little green brain is able to put together “If I knife this guy so I can take his stuff he can’t cook more of this” so when he asks her to stay the night she’s just like “Fuck yeah breakfast”.

And all the other Hobbits in the area are staring at this new arrival who starts begrudgingly working in the garden (she can pull out the weeds they’d normally have to hitch livestock to) and they’re all thinking “Uhhhhh that’s a fucking Goblin there, chief” except if they actually acknowledge that she’s a goblin then it’s a huge to-do and a lot of excitement and possibly there would be adventure involved in chasing her off. So they just sort of silently, collectively decide they’re going to ignore it and all go “Oh, Blinko finally found himself a lady, how nice, she must be one of the Glumbrushes from over the far side of West Farthing, I always did hear they were on the homely side, not much hair on their feet you know.”

And eventually in due time along comes Korbo Tumbrush and decently cute Hobbit baby but the biggest fucking ears you ever saw on a Hobbit and he’s a bit green and everyone is thinking “That’s a fucking half-Goblin you’ve got there, chief, you fucked a fucking Goblin, you made a baby with a damn Goblin my guy” but this would be an immensely rude thing to say to someone so they’re just like “Oh how nice, Blinko, he looks just like you, has those Glumbrush eyes though.”

And Korbo the Goblit grows up a proper little man in his waistcoat and pipe and every so often someone visits from a different part of the shire and sees this plump green dude with massive flappy pointed ears and they start to open their mouth only for a local to leap right in and go “HAHA YES THAT IS KORBO TUMBRUSH A VERY UPRIGHT HOBBIT WE ALL LOVE KORBO HE’S GLUMBRUSH ON HIS MOTHER’S SIDE (WE THINK) THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING!!!” and the visitor just starts nodding along emphatically because this is clearly something that is Not Spoken Of.

I fuckin love it

I. I have to know …

Does Korbo know!? Like is the Gobit aware his momma is a goblin? Or does he just grow up like

“yup us Glumbrushes sure do look different”

He leaves home on an adventure and stumbles n a hoard of goblins marches right up like

“how do ya do fellow hobbits? You know I’m half Glumbrush myself”

Alright, so, Korbo got in a fight once.

Once.

The Tumbrushes are, as a family trade, purveyors of fine pieces of wood. Not of large amounts of lumber, for which Hobbits don’t have a particular lot of call save occasionally, but rather of particularly nice pieces suitable for the making of fine window trimmings, floors, or the occasional carved bit of artwork to be given at a fancy event. Obviously for this one doesn’t go cutting down any tree willy-nilly, and Korbo had spent most of the day out and about looking for suitable trees.

(Korbo also personally assisted in cutting them down, being rather well known as on the strong side for a Hobbit, wink wink, nudge nudge.)

Having put in a genuine hard day’s work and rather pleased with himself, Korbo retired to the local bar to have a few beers and a smoke and to partake in good company, all of whom had gotten so used to pretending there was nothing odd about him that it was almost as if there was genuinely nothing odd about him.

Until along comes Humdil Thumbletoe.

Now the Thumbletoes were what was known in the Shire as “experts on genealogy”. This might sound like quite a good thing when you consider how well-versed most Hobbits are in their family lines, until you consider that most Hobbits are already well-versed in their family lines. A Hobbit being thoroughly knowledgeable of their family tree is not much to be remarked upon, so when it is remarked upon it is more to mean that the Hobbits in question are such tremendous mooches that they have had to dive far more deeply into their bloodlines looking for more relatives to leech off of than any Hobbit would generally consider polite.

Humdil was fairly brawny as Hobbits go, which was about all you could say for him. In fact Humdil had realized that was really all that could be said for him and had become a bit of a bully. And so it was he entered the bar that night with a very put-upon third cousin twice removed (by marriage) and caught sight of Korbo for the first time.

“Why, look at that one!” he bellowed, guffawing. “He’s so ugly his mother had to have been a Goblin, ey!”

The whole bar goes quiet. Aside from the obvious abominable rudeness of this, Humdil has said the thing that is never supposed to be said, and is clearly too stupid to realize he’s right. All heads slowly turn to Korbo.

Now, it is well known that Korbo has inherited his father’s tendency to never give a single solitary hairy-toed fuck about anything. He has currently been in the running to be at least the second most chill dude to ever be born in the Shire. And indeed, right now he’s still looking perfectly calm, puffing on his pipe. He sets the pipe aside, finishes off the last of his beer, and stands up.

“Sir, we’ll be needing to step outside.”

Now Hobbits are mostly a peaceable lot, not given to wars or fighting for any old thing, but a bit of fisticuffs outside the bar is hardly unheard of. Mostly everyone is kind of nervous about this because they’re still not sure how Korbo is reacting to this whole Goblin thing. So someone takes Korbo’s jacket and Humdil’s third cousin twice removed (by marriage) grudgingly takes his, and the two square off.

Now, Humdil was a big Hobbit, it was true, but there were a few things that, being a moron who didn’t realize he was right, and who had never been outside the Shire or seen a Goblin anyway, he could not possibly know.

For one, Goblins have long, spindly arms, giving them a surprisingly good reach for their size… not abominably long, certainly not in the case of a half-Goblin, and certainly not above being concealed by the cut of a well-tailored shirt. Second, they are compact, wiry creatures, with dense muscle over their otherwise lanky forms, and given to that a Hobbit’s already greater mass and the anchoring benefit of large, wide feet, well.

The moment Humdil stepped forward and started to swing, Korbo’s fist shot out like one of Gandalf’s better rockets and struck him directly in the nose. His flight was also, for some weeks after, compared to one of Gandalf’s rockets, though not quite as far and the explosion at the end was mostly him laying on the ground cursing wetly due to all the blood streaming from his nose.

Korbo apologizes profusely to all and sundry for the disturbance, collected his jacket, and goes home. Honey is out picking mushrooms (still being of the more nocturnal persuasion after all these years), but Blinko’s sitting by the fire reading a book. Korbo sees that there’s a newspaper (full of lots of extremely important things like how the pipeweed was growing and which barrels of beer were going to be uncasked that month), so picks it up and sits down to read.

“Evening, Da.”

“Evening, son. Pleasant evening out?”

“Oh, fine. Save for I broke Humdil Thumbletoes’s nose for him.”

“Hm, hm, I see. Why did you feel the need to do that?”

“Well, he called Ma a Goblin, you see.”

Blinko slowly lowers his book, and slowly raises his head. Looks at Korbo for long moments. Raises one eyebrow a little.

“Son. You know full well your mother is a Goblin.”

“Well, yes, but he didn’t know that, and he said it as an insult anyway so it being true or not doesn’t really matter that much, does it?“

“Hm, hm. I suppose that’s true at the end of the day, isn’t it?”

Blinko goes back to reading his book. Korbo continues reading the paper.

“You could have stabbed him,” Blinko eventually notes.

“Aye, could have stabbed him,” Korbo agrees easily enough. “But it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?”

“True, true, probably would have been a bit of a mess in the road, not very thoughtful to the community,” Blinko allows.

And that was the end of it.

I love all of this so much. Also-

“Sir, we’ll be needing to step outside.”

The power. I set down my drink after that one.

Oddly enough, one might expect Korbo to have trouble finding a lady hobbit. He’s not given to being as plump as his fellows, and his feet are a bit small, and he’s rather, well, tall for a hobbit, isn’t he. And green. Always looks a bit like he’s eaten something that didn’t agree with him.

But he runs into Hilda Greebrook one day in town, and she’s lost her favorite pipe, which is of course a tragedy of the highest order. It’s not unheard of for a lady to smoke, but it isn’t particularly encouraged, either, and so the general reaction is “you poor dear, perhaps it’ll turn up, hadn’t you best be getting home for luncheon?”

Korbo, however, stops to help her look for the pipe, and when it’s nowhere to be found he offers to make her another just like it, if she can tell him what precisely made it so special that it was a favorite, for after all a favorite must be distinguishable by something.

Unfortunately the thing that distinguishes it is that she got it from Gandalf and it’s quite unlike most pipes in the Shire, so recreating it is quite the task. But Korbo sets himself to it anyway, working a bit each night and handing it to Hilda daily to see if it feels quite right, and six months later he’s done it—recreated a pipe that came from the world of men, or perhaps elves, but certainly not that of hobbits.

Hilda for her part discovers Korbo quite likes to read, and though he’s from a reasonably well-to-do family—for hobbits are always in need of new toys and fancy party decorations after all—can’t get his hands on books fast enough to satisfy himself, and, well, her da’s a transcriber, someone’s got to write out the papers after all, and she’s got access to practically every book in the Shire, and ways to make copies besides.

At first people think it’s odd, a hobbit who can’t see asking to borrow books, but then they find out Korbo is involved and asking questions could lead to excitement and so they absolutely do not ask and simply offer up their histories and books of poetry and hobbit folklore (for even without want for excitement there are things it’s good to remember, and things every hobbit child should know so they, too, can grow up properly plump and staying well away from adventure), and resign themselves to never seeing their books again.

And then they find that far from their books quite disappearing, they return in fine form—albeit usually in a timeframe rather too long to be polite—but oddly quite a lot seem to have tiny bits of wood shavings in, although one wouldn’t expect it in a hobbit home? And THEN Hoptus Redbranch finds Korbo one day in his workshop, he’s just stopped by for the wood to repair a door after an unfortunate incident with attempting to remove a colony of bees and rather too much smoke for the moving of bees, and Korbo is simply. Pressing small pieces of hot iron into a very thin piece of wood, making small triangle patterns like no hobbit decoration Hoptus has ever seen, and he’s quite frequently checking into a book on his left that turns out to be one of Hoptus’ own books, and very carefully turning the pages with a cloth so as to not get oil from the hot iron all over the pages—

—and THEN, not long after the news of Korbo’s strange woodburning activities have spread across most of the Shire (and caused no small amount of consternation, because goblins are clever but so often the things they make are cruel and the cause of ever so much unpleasantness), Hilda is seen in her own garden with Korbo with a stack of these thin pieces of wood all carefully hinged together, running her fingers over carefully sanded and varnished pieces and feeling the triangles and reciting a hobbit tale.

For all those months of strangely disappeared books, Korbo has been translating Westron into an alphabet that can be read with one’s fingers, and making Hilda books, and teaching her to read them.

Nobody is entirely surprised, after about three years, when the two of them vanish for a few months, and come back quite married.

Within a few generations, this is absolutely going to be a thing Not Worth Remarking Upon. So when a young hobbit finds themselves accidentally ripping the knobs off doors when they’re cross, their parents will sigh and the elder hobbits in the village will remark that ‘that’ll be the Glumbrush in ‘im coming through, I told you his ears were a little bigger than his siblings, didn’t I?’ much the same as they always did on Bilbo and Frodo’s Took relations and the resulting hankering for adventure.

Were anyone from the outside to visit the Shire, they’d find a small colony of goblins thoroughly intermarried and also avoiding the usual goblin tendencies towards stabbing, so long as no one is so gauche as to insult them for being goblins.

(Sooner or later, one very flustered hobbit is going to accidentally do the same thing with an orc.)

The Tumbrushes, as with all Hobbits, were quite proud of their work, and rightly so. Their works are fine, of the highest quality, and they fetch the appropriate price for their labors, making them quite well-to-do. In the Shire, wealth breeds respect, of course, and so the Tumbrushes are quite well respected.

And yet there’s a difference between “well to do” and “scandalously wealthy.”

So when, when Blinko Tumbrush recieved a letter inviting them to the Baggins residence for tea, he of course brought his wife and son along.

Now, Korbo had crossed paths with Bilbo Baggins a time or two in the market, never for much longer than the time required for Polite Conversation, and so wasn’t expecting much. Sure, everyone knew Bilbo was odd, and were willing to talk about it, since Bilbo made no effort to hide his adventures and had, on numerous occasions, commented on visiting the elves or poking around the mountains, but they were in the Shire, no adventure in sight, and so this should be a normal, proper visit between client and craftsman.

And then Bilbo opened the door, pipe in hand, took the three of them in, and said, quite out of nowhere, “Ah, Shoebiter clan.”

Honey Tumbrush, late of the Shoebiter clan of the Misty Mountains, smiled with all her teeth and replied “Dragon thief!”

Bilbo guffawed and waved them inside, offering them hospitality in the goblin tongue, with the guarantee of safety and threat of violence that implied. They had arrived in time for second breakfast, and didn’t leave until past dinner, having hammered out a contract and shared many a story.

Blinko Tumbrush had only one thing to say as he walked home, arm in arm with his wife and son trailing behind. “He’s an odd fellow, that Bilbo, but nice enough. Yes, nice enough indeed.”

I love them

Gets better and better every time I see it

What was removed?! Which guidelines did it violate? This post was complete last time I saw it.

Here’s my art that apparently was too much for tumblr!

ITS APRIL 13 YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

FETCH ME NEIL