Avatar

Be the Change you wish to see in the World

@official-enjolras / official-enjolras.tumblr.com

||Apollo||24||Occupation: The Family Disappointment||
Avatar

“How can we take down this flag and erase the honor of those proud Americans-”

Confederates weren’t Americans. They were actual, honest-to-god Not Americans; that was the whole fucking point of the Civil War. They were a bunch of people who collectively said “fuck America” and then spent years desperately fighting in order to not be Americans anymore. Flying the Confederate flag doesn’t honor Americans, it honors Confederates, and they don’t exist anymore because they lost the war, so there is no goddamn point to this flag ever at all. Right-wing folks really love to talk about “anti-American sentiments” and “treason” until it comes to the (white) people who actually did commit treason and were anti-American in every sense of the word. 

ALL OF THIS

and it was all because they wanted to keep slaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaves

Avatar
spiletta42

Also, they didn’t fly those damned flags in the years following the Civil War, they only flew them again after the Civil Rights Act was passed.  They were literally flown to protest the abolishment of Jim Crow. 

There are two appropriate places for Confederate flags:

a) inside of museum displays, with accurate historical context, so that future generations don’t make the same damn mistakes

b) the trash can

I thought about the appropriateness of using them in Civil War Reenactments, but that particular flag wasn’t universally flown on the battlefield, and if you’re going to reenact historical battles as a hobby you should at least get the details right.  So even that’s a maybe.

It is literally my PAID JOB to teach people this. I want to scream this from the rooftops. Bless this post forever and ever, amen.

Avatar
tiasmusings

Treason is what that flag represents, at its very most generous interpretation. Racism and slavery are its heart.

An American patriot wouldn’t be caught dead with it.

Avatar

can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

That stuff is scary.

Avatar
somethingdnd

shit just got creepy

Avatar
celynbrum

Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

…what makes me so different?

Here we go someone who GETS IT.

Avatar
Avatar
bunjywunjy

man that’s not just a heck of a read it’s fuckin GROUNDBREAKING is what it is!

this dude actually found a large fossil deposit that was created not just close to, but actually DURING THE K-PG EXTINCTION EVENT.

IT’S LITERALLY A WINDOW BACK IN TIME TO THE CHICXULUB IMPACT, AND TURNS OUT IT WAS WORSE THAN ANYTHING WE COULD POSSIBLY HAVE IMAGINED

it’s a geologic snapshot of the apocalypse.

reading the full article is certainly a trip, and to summarize for those who are intimidated by longer reads:

- chicxulub is the given name for the meteor that struck/initiated the event

- the paleontologist within is described as making groundbreaking discoveries of multiple species every day, but many of his peers discount him because they’re grouchy old dudes he accidentally had a fragment of a turtle bone involved in a larger reconstruction of a fossil this one time and they won’t let him live it down.

- the extinction event was so fast and so destructive, this guy describes this particular dig-site as being so densely layered with dead and dying creatures, there is a lot of organic tissues that have been preserved, and he is able to even discern that many of the marine and freshwater fish may have still been alive as they were buried due to molten glass being found in their gills, implying they were still attempting to breathe.

- they looked into exactly when and how this could have happened, having freshwater and marine animals stacked on top of mammals and larger dinosaurs (including an amazing deinonychus forearm discovery he was able to match to feather fossils he was finding atop the pile), and rather it being the initial tsunami, they are fairly sure that it was caused by a seiche of catastrophic proportions, which would have been set off within the first hour of the event. denser and larger creatures sunk to the bottom, leaving lighter debris like leaves, small fish, feathers, and molten glass on the surface.

summary: terrifying!

Avatar
lastoneout

This is fucking incredible

Holy SHIT!

Avatar
peannlui

Here’s a famous book snippet describing how feasible that we could find dinosaur fossils on the moon.

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.