Wow did you see this unreleased official dungeon meshi comic???

petition to tell biden and harris to comply with the icj’s ruling and provisional measures here if you’re a us citizen. so far they’ve sent 47,074 letters out of the goal of 51,200!

Out of curiosity! Any good reason for your preferred spelling?

Either gryphon or opinicus.

A silly little gif I made based on my favorite card art from the Pokemon TCG art book.

some of the "vote blue no matter who" finger-waggers on this website should learn to engage with politics in ways deeper than kneejerk terror at the thought of losing your own rights because you would not be using this authoritative tone if it were 11,000 of your children who had been killed by american bombs. real politics would be, if nothing else, understanding the power of threatening to withhold your vote. instead for as long as i've been on this goddamn website every four years i see you morons telling people to just vote for the lesser evil, vote for the lesser evil, while we warned you over and over that you are also voting on behalf of the rest of the world that has to suck up the consequences of your votes. and now joe biden has explicitly sanctioned the death of 11,000 children and the best you can come up with is "it sucks but you still gotta vote."

that's not doing politics. that's avoiding politics. if you can't recognize that a genocide creates a fissure in your communities as great as trans rights, abortion rights, gay marriage or white supremacy then you are not fully embracing politics. imagine joe biden had sanctioned the death of 11,000 american children in under 100 days. im not even going to scale this for the american population. 11,000 is an inconceivable number of children to be killed in under three months. 11,000 children who died violent, preventable deaths, crushed under rubble, eviscerated by debris. that is over 100 children per day.

in 1982 reagan stopped the israeli invasion of lebanon with one phone call. in 2023, israeli military officials admitted they could not continue for more than a few days without american military aid. in 2024, biden commemorated 100 days of a war where over 100 palestinian children had been killed every single day without mentioning these children once. now imagine him doing this if israeli bombs had been killing 100 american children per day and you were watching their parents and siblings gather up their remains from the rubble with their bare hands in plastic bags to bury them. every day for a hundred days, new bags full of bits of small children who were once loved, dressed carefully, their hair brushed, children who spent the past few weeks drinking dirty water and sleeping in cold tents.

his re-election would not even be a matter of conversation, regardless of whether or not trump is worse. it would be completely unacceptable. the party would've been forced to choose another candidate. but of course 11,000 palestinian children (who are just at the mercy of your votes as american children are) do not warrant even a moment of shame before berating people to vote blue while there is an ongoing genocide trial at the hague. if you really want to engage politics seriously, you would be directing your ire at your administration first and foremost, not trying to sweep it under the rug for elections. you would be threatening to withhold your vote until a ceasefire. you would be making this a key issue for his re-election. you would be too horrified to contemplate asking people to vote for a lesser evil when it is so much evil. we know trump is worse. but unfortunately this genocide didn't happen under trump. refusing to confront that is going to get you nowhere.

acknowledge the genocide and the escalating regional wars. acknowledge the administration that did it. acknowledge that your rights are now at risk not because of leftists, but because joe biden let 11,000 children die. acknowledge that your vote is the only thing with the power to change this reality. acknowledge that presidents should be terrified to sanction a genocide without losing their chance at re-election. no president should have the assurance that he can kill this many children and still believe he will be re-elected. israel believes they can get away with genocide because they know american diplomatic immunity will protect them. joe biden openly bypasses congress to deliver bombs that eviscerate toddlers because he believes the american public doesn't care if he kills 11,000 arab children. and every time you say "vote blue no matter who" before you say "ceasefire now" you agree with that statement. you assure the next american president, whoever it is, that he too can get away with a genocide streamed right into everyone's phones in the comfort of their beds. and you better pray it's not your children dying live on tiktok next time, but there's no guarantee.

the world will get more cruel in the coming years; it's already too late to change that. the laws and exceptions made to excuse the death of arab children have been made before. mccarthyism was here before. this is a regression of hard-won rights, a violation of fought-for red lines and you will have to win them all over again and fight for those red lines all over again. otherwise you will continue whittling away your rights as you whittle away our rights.

i won't pretend i think this is a bloodless vote. but im not addressing the people who already understand that. im addressing the 'lesser evil' liberals i've seen on here since 2010 who have never once changed their tune on the presidential elections.

your vote is important regardless of efforts to suppress that. i don't deny it. you are voting on behalf of the entire global south. they have no say in the wars they get dragged into. america (and israel) are executing one of the ugliest atrocities of the 21st century, but unlike the uae, bashar al-assad or even putin, they are claiming to be representative democracies. that means you are voting on behalf of everyone receiving your bombs and your vetos and your military aid. so act like it. if that sounds unreasonable because you know you didn't sanction this war, that budget or these war crimes, then you're beginning to understand exactly what everyone else in your country has been saying.

voting isn't just the day you go to the ballot box. it is not exercised once for trump or biden. it is a power you hold every single day you have the ability to vote in the future. it's your voice. you can use it to berate the ones trying to stop a genocide, or you can use it to threaten your leaders. use it accordingly.

started playing ooc but couldn't stop thinking about la so here's ww :) it makes sense 👍

I asked my girlfriend what she considers a Round pokemon to be and she sent me this.

Fic writers!!!

Please reblog for sample size!

No, no, listen. The kissing was a metaphor. They're not actually —they're not actually gay. It's symbolism. The car thing? No that was real. She literally turned into a car.

a lot of people have already pointed out how totk has a lot of themes of imperialism and generally leans conservative ideologically, but what i think is interesting is how totk subtly redefines what a “researcher” is.

zelda wants to be a researcher in botw, and what this means in the context of botw is largely someone who works with sheikah technology. she wants to figure out ancient sheikah tech, she has an interest in botany and otherwise nature and biology (the whole silent princess and the frog thing), robbie and purah, the two characters who are the closest to us seeing what a researcher in the context of botw is are basically inventors. in totk, however, the main researchers who are presented to us are all historians.

this is an interesting pivot, because in botw zelda is not really interested in history. if anything, the one who’s deeply concerned with history is rhoam, wanting to preserve historical tradition and his uncritical reliance on said tradition and historical precedent is what leads them to their doom. in botw, zelda is narratively opposed to history, if anything, all the ancient tech backfires on them and traditions fail to awaken zelda’s power. zelda’s urge to be a researcher is in wanting to understand the world around her, not just blindly follow ancient plans but rather have agency within them.

totk, however, is obsessed with ancient plans. the only real moment where zelda gets to geek out in totk is her getting all giddy about finding out more about the divine origins of hyrule. all the researchers in the game are concerned with finding out more about the zonai. since all the mentions of ancient sheikah technology are scrubbed from the game purah and robbie read more as strange outliers, the sheikah slate is no longer, now it’s the purah pad, a product of purah rather than something larger. the whole game is literally about following an ancient plan, a plan most characters don’t fully understand as they sign up for it. totk’s main story is built on confusion, on the characters not knowing what’s fully going on but having faith in ancient sages telling them what to do. in botw, following ancient plans you don’t fully understand was the thing that doomed you. in totk, following ancient plans you don’t fully understand is the gimmick.

that juxtaposition between the two games has an ideological through line: botw posits that progress is necessary. mindlessly relying on tradition doesn’t work. prophecies are omens, not instructions. history must be learnt from, not repeated. the ancient sheikah aren’t a group to be emulated, but rather to be learnt from, considering their machinery backfired and the royal family betrayed them. totk, however, is obsessed with the mythical history of hyrule, a time where everything was idyllic until one bad man showed up, a time we must emulate in order to win. i already talked about how the past in totk is zelda’s life pre calamity but better here, but that also plays into the idolisation of that era and its royalty. in botw, even the myth of the first calamity preserves the fact that the yiga clan has origins in the royal’s family persecution of the sheikah, even the time when they successfully held back the calamity is tinged with mistakes that still affect the world ten thousand years later. in totk, ganondorf’s origins are nebulous. nobody provoked him, nobody did anything wrong, he’s just evil because he is.

a lot of right wing ideologies are hinged on preservation, but more than that: the belief in the nebulous mythical past in which everything was better. “make america great again”, the fascist’s idolisation of ancient rome which is represented largely inaccurately, look at any conservative rhetoric and you’ll see people complaining about how things nowadays are ruined or are being ruined, how in the past things were this way and they’re not anymore, which is bad. the belief in the fact that in some past period we were great and are not anymore, and the strive to emulate that past is a trait highly typical of right wing ideologies. and in totk the past as a great era is an idea presented completely uncritically, the narrative is entirely controlled by the game and doesn’t dwell on any of the inconsistencies in this idea.

now, obviously, not every story in which a great ancient era exists is fascist, right wing or conservative. but to me what’s interesting specifically in totk is this shift between the two games: botw is critical of the past. it’s critical of arrogantly repeating history, it’s critical of having blind faith in great relics of the past. totk isn’t. totk idolizes the past, totk tells legends and tells you to believe them without any doubts. botw believes researchers are those who seek to understand the world, innovate it and solve problems without relying on ancient ways. totk believes researchers are those who discover ancient instructions, ancient ways and relay them to great men in the present to be followed. the four mainline regional quests in botw are about discovering four ancient relics that are terrorising the land and fixing the mistakes of the past. the four mainline regional quests in totk are about discovering four ancient legends are true, and receiving instructions from an ancient sage on what to do.

totk is not simply neutral, it is ideologically conservative in stark contrast to botw, because of the things it chooses to leave uncriticised, notably the things botw was very poignant about examining critically. the way totk redefines what is a researcher is indicative of this, indicative of the way it chooses to idolize or present as an unexamined good that which was nuanced in botw. totk isn’t just conservative in the sense that it presents uncritically a “good king” and “evil conquerer”, it goes deeper, it’s notable because botw was starkly opposed to the thematic axioms totk presents.

i just think it’s very interesting that they made a sequel to botw, and completely redefined or otherwise ignored botw’s thematic core.

Watched the new Madoka movie trailer and blacked out until I finished this pic