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friend of humans

@gwidderntree / gwidderntree.tumblr.com

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[Family life must have been different] in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood - they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet…are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.

J.R.R. Tolkien, from an unpublished letter to Arthur Greeves, June 22, 1930 (via artamanen)

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B.R.F.R.O.

To all unwanted entities in this space: Fuck Right Off. To all unwelcomed beings in my sphere: Fuck Right Off. To all hateful processes in my self: Fuck Right Off. To all disruptive methodologies in my heart: Fuck Right Off. From everything in me: Fuck Right Off. From Everything I Have: Fuck Right Off. From all that I seek to build: Fuck Right Off. To everything you are: Fuck Right Off. I see you, you piece of shit: Fuck Right Off. I know what you tried to do. Fuck Right Off. You are not welcome here: Fuck Right Off. You Will Not Survive Me. So Fuck Right Off.

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protoslacker
All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable. Like the advertising people we talked about, I’m concerned with the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action, not to go out and buy a Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness. You know, they ask me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes. I would go on writing for company. Because I’m creating an imaginary—it’s always imaginary—world in which I would like to live.

William S. Burroughs interviewed by Conrad Knickerbocker in the Paris Review (Fall 1965). William S. Burroughs, The Art of Fiction No. 36

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stop saying “caucasian” when you mean “white” jfc it’s 2015 and yall should be able to find azerbaijan on a map at this point, like

Even my POC friends don’t get the point with this. I’m like white people PREFER this term bc it sounds legitimate even though it’s entirely 100% racist bullshit. You are doing white people favors by calling them Caucasian. Stop it!

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gwidderntree

they’re still the Franj as far as i’m concerned, fuck em 

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Traumatic events that occur early in childhood are encoded in the psyche in a modality that is primarily nonverbal. Neurologic studies of the effects of child abuse on brain function suggest that trauma results in overactivation of right brain (nonverbal) activity as compared with left brain (verbal) activity (Schiffer, Teicher, & Papanicolaou, 1995). Thus, when traumatic events are relived in current reality, they retain a strikingly nonverbal quality. In the clinical arena it is quite striking to encounter patients who are otherwise highly intelligent, verbal, and articulate, but who literally seem to have no words to describe their childhood experiences. For these patients, their experiences of early childhood abuse remain both literally and figuratively unspeakable.

James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders  (via djinn-and-chronic)

Ohhhhhh

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The back of the cards! Probably goig to cut it out of the blue field and try it on some other colours. If I get a super-minimalist hair up my ass about the thing, I’ll probably trace this in a reduced palette in Gimp, flat greys except for the key in some kind of contrast colour.

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Tell it like it is bobby

no mercy run

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When Superman: Man of Steel came out people were saying that the film was too gritty and cynical and it was that cynicism that destroyed the Superman we have always know and loved.

That it was that very cynicism that had Superman break his cardinal rule of do not kill and had him that very thing, kill.

As the reviews come out about Batman vs Superman and the bleakness and cynicism of that film I posit that the reason Superman has killed and the reason he is so unrecognizable as the hero we grew up with and the hero we loved and looked up to is because every essence of his Jewishness has been meticulously and calculatingly been scrubbed out.

Superman was written by two Jewish teens in the early 30′s and they imprinted onto Superman a Jewish identity.

Superman is in Diaspora. His homeland gone, his language, his culture, and his heritage both alien and foreign to were he lives. Living day to day with a part of himself hidden so as to be live a somewhat unmolested life.

He must struggle with what it means to be a member of his people while not having his people or culture around him and while having the outside culture imposed upon him and expected to assimilate to this outside force.

A great example of this can be seen oddly enough in Man of Steel when Lois Lane asks Superman what the S on his chest stands for. He tells it means hope in his people’s language and Lois responds by saying that here it is a S.

Superman is expected to accept this new reality and to let go of his culture and understand that he must rather assimilate instead. That he must let go of what it means in his language and culture and understand that it is now a S.

It is the internal struggle of the Jew. To survive in Diaspora. To endure and still maintain a sense of self and one’s roots. To keep your people’s language, customs, and culture alive especially surrounded by a world where you are the alien. You are the foreign being and you must assimilate and then be grateful that you were allowed to be forced to assimilate in the first place.

Superman has two masks. The mask of Superman and the mask of Clark Kent. Kal-el, is the face of Superman and not the mask. Kal-el is the struggle to survive when you are the alien.

Superman in the films and especially Man of Steel and even more so in Batman vs Superman is meant to be a jesus figure. A Messiah.

But that is not what he really is. He is rather the personification of Tikkun Olam.

Tikkun Olam is that each and every person is obligated to fix the world. To leave it a better place that when it was when you got there. To work towards justice, peace, and truth, the three pillars of Judaism.

Superman is meant to reflect what each of us can be. What we should be and should do. That when given the opportunity to good we should take it with both hands. That is whatever way we can with whatever our own abilities and powers are we should help others when given the chance. That is Tikkun Olam and that is Superman.

The new Superman does not fail because it is cynical. The new Superman fails because he is not Jewish.

You forgot to mention that kal-el, which in Hebrew is famously and intentionally spelled קל א-ל means “voice of G-d”. His story specifically was based on that of Moshe in many ways. His father and mother - knowing that if he stayed with them he would only find death - placed him in a basket. And that basket, they floated down a vast river. The river of stars and particles, and seemingly nothingness. A nothingness that swallows everything which has falls into it. And that basket came to a place where he could grow up, and where in the end, he was needed. I personally don’t know much about the movies - my job as colony paper pusher leaves no time for such fun, but I agree with you. To erase superman’s jewish identity is to erase superman and create an entirely new character, empty and devoid of its original meaning and purpose.

– Administrator

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roachpatrol

Running with this, I want to point out fundamentally different approaches between Christian and Jewish traditions on heroism, and good and evil. To simplify a couple hundred years of literature and parable: in Christian fantasy, you have to eradicate evil. The narrative of Christian goodness is generally a strenuous, violent opposition to badness, and frankly this moral philosophy makes people really fucking dangerous, because in order to define themselves as good, they have to be fighting something bad. Purge their sins, slay their demons, drive out the unbelievers. In Jewish fantasy, to do good, you have to actually find things to do that are helpful and needed. It’s not so oppositional, it’s… supplemental. If no one is helping someone, you help them. If no one is fixing something, you fix it. The hunger of children is as important as the enemy at the gate. Kal-El, the voice of god, protects his people both as a super-man and as a human reporter. In both cases, on both stages, he asks people to stand up for truth and justice, and to stand up for each other. 

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