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Where Is My Wizard Hat?

@whereismywizardhat / whereismywizardhat.tumblr.com

He/Him. A Draftsman, an Artist, an Excellent GM. Has had the Nick Cage thumbnail since Obama’s first term. Proud Space Battler and Sufficient Velocity...er(?)
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bad

i looked up the source for this and its from an anime where a dude has to keep a constant boner for a month straight or he loses his house

is this the episode where he lost his house

I have not stopped thinking about this even once for the last 8 years

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Zoozve, my beloved

"...we don't live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club..."

This is my favorite line.

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neil-gaiman

I have learned so many things from this.

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petermorwood

@dduane - one for you!

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dduane

It's a fabulous thing, isn't it! :)

As usual, science is busy being not only weirder and more interesting than we imagine, but weirder and more interesting than we can imagine.

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I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

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absolutely losing my mind that a bunch of nimby assholes spent $500k to build a sandcastle that was promptly wiped away

ted i really could not disagree more this is far from catastrophic. i am ensconced.

literally selling sand to people who live on the beach. some people's hustle and grift game cannot be overstated. world class shit right here

i love tumblr but i hate that we have been conditioned to think you can’t add some of the most insightful shit you’ve ever seen to absolute shitposts. please by all means reblog my posts with this kind of context because it’s so important. excellent points here.

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janemechner

hey guys i just finished a draft for one of the stories in my comic but could really use some critique. basically ive been interviewing multicultural people and then writing short comics based on our conversations. i think ive been staring at it too long and need a fresh pair of eyes. please be harsh idc. are the drawings too stiff or monotonous? do i need to add more background? is it written ok should i rewrite anything?

this is lovely. my first exposure to your work & thoroughly entranced.

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“If I had time travel I’d kill Hitler” “If I had time travel I’d stop my favourite politician getting assassinated” you’re all thinking way too small. If I had time travel I’d stop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from dying on the moon due to Soviet sabotage, kicking off the Great Nuclear War and devastating half of the planet.

Good Job.

It’s from two days ago fam how many times could there have been

do you think no one else has time travel

Happy one month anniversary to this post that has not allowed me a single day of fucking peace since I made it.

STOP IT’S BEEN MONTHS. MONTHS!

YOU CAN STOP.

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roach-works

wow if only you had a time machine

Honestly having reached a billion notes I think it’s safe to say that in the Year of our lord 2041, this is the most popular tumblr post out there.

I’m killing your parents before you’re born

:)

Still here, why’d you hesitate @derinthescarletpescatarian

Your mum’s ability to hold up under active gunfire was really hot. I’m your dad now.

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lizyarikus

Isn’t that the plot of Terminator

Where do you think the plot for Terminator came from?

This is such a classic trainwreck post that has the vibes of a 2014 screenshot posted to Pinterest and then the last addition is just last Tuesday I can’t even

Imagine how I feel

This post is a goldmine

This post is an eagle that has a taste for my liver

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vaspider

Prometheus’ eagle had to get the idea from somewhere.

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btc-official

last week i woke up from one of the most fucked up nightmares ive ever had with that middle panel burned into my brain. like the exact wording and the exact apartment and the exact squidward. i feel like if i didnt make it real something bad wouldve happened. anyway todays upload is spunchbob comic oc

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aquaflv

really recommend getting a partner with a different religion than you and very little knowledge of your religion because the opportunities for explaining things to each other are just exquisite

yesterday she told me some story about the Buddha's wife and child and I was like. Wait. He fucked? And she was like yeah of course he fucked, why wouldn't he, he was the most attractive and loveable and and wise and etc. person who ever lived. why would he not fuck.

this morning she looked perplexed in the kitchen at me and said "did Jesus not fuck?"

I mean, he did. But it was monogamous and his wife was a literal sex worker before their marriage, but people like to ignore that fact.

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scoobycool9

If you ask the Roman Catholic Church, they will swear that the woman wasn’t his wife and he was a bachelor and virgin.

Guess it's time to debunk some conspiracy theories about Jesus.

(My credentials: I have a Masters of Divinity, which is a combination of Biblical analysis, Christian history, and some other odds and ends. I am not Catholic, and have never attended a Catholic school; my school taught using the standard academic texts about the Bible, not doctrinal assertions from any denomination or Christian group. Although my professors were all Christian, the Biblical and Christian history was taught the same way it would have been if an atheist were teaching it.)

There is absolutely ZERO evidence that Mary Magdalene was a sex worker. The belief that she was is based on a combination of Medieval misogyny (on several levels) and sex negativity. As for Jesus, the only evidence that Jesus was married comes from one fragment of a papyrus with shaky provenance that was probably written at least 200 years after Jesus' death (and probably later than that).

"But that's because the Catholic church suppressed everything!" Well, if you knew anything about the early church, you would realize that's nonsense on several levels. The Catholic church as we know it didn't exist yet. Until Christianity became intrinsically linked to the power structures of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century AD, authority was decentralized. Local areas governed themselves. They had bishops, but there was no central authority appointing them, it was "whichever priest or monk the locals think is especially holy and/or wise". There was no central set of scriptures that everyone agreed to, the central set of doctrines was still under hot debate, as were organizational structures and worship patterns and pretty much everything else. The Catholic church has historically done a lot of censorship and suppression of things it didn't like, but that begins in the Medieval era, when it had the power to enforce things, which it did NOT in the early centuries of Christianity.

Early Christians decided things like "which books should be in the Bible" with a series of ecumenical councils between 325AD and 787AD where hundreds of representatives from all around the Mediterranean and beyond came together and decided on things they could all agree on. When texts were not included in the New Testament, it was because only a handful of churches actually used that text. Not because a central authority told them to, because there wasn't a central authority. But because they didn't like it, or they knew that (despite it claiming to be from the first apostles) it was actually written much later.

We know a great deal about what texts the various early churches used because we've spent a LOT of archaeological time and effort over the last century excavating 1st and 2nd century Christian areas looking for texts. And then scholars worldwide spend years analyzing them to death. (Many of them are not Christian.) (Any translation of the New Testament made in the 20th Century is based on those archaeological manuscripts, not the ones sitting in the Vatican, btw.) We also have a bunch of letters from early church leaders where they discuss all of this. We know with a fair degree of certainty which texts (and which versions of texts) were earlier and which were later. In order for all of that to be wrong, somebody centuries later would have had to come in, dig up all of the archaeology, destroy some of what was there, and put it back so neatly that modern archaeologists can't tell things have been changed.

"But what if those early Christians were sex-negative misogynists who didn't want to record Jesus' marriage?" Christianity's hatred of sex didn't get codified until the writings of St. Augustine in the 3rd-4th Centuries; the early Christians would have had no reason to suppress that Jesus was married, and we have a lot of copies of the New Testament texts that date to the first and second centuries. Besides the Gospels itself, Paul spends a decent amount of time talking about marriage and families in his letters, and he never once even implies that Jesus might have been married.

Also the Catholic church is European. The great Christian power in the Levant, Turkey, Greece, and other areas that had large concentrations of Christians in the first few centuries of Christianity was the Orthodox church. So if there was anybody creating a conspiracy and altering things it would have been the Patriarch of Constantinople doing it, not the Pope in Rome.

In Christian communities, sharing stories, myths, and legends about Jesus was a cottage industry. Everybody was making up and sharing stories. Most of them don't seem to be designed to be taken as factual. The Gospels that made it into the Bible were the earliest ones, the ones that everybody knew dated back to the first generation of Jesus' followers. Those, they were careful about keeping accurate and copying precisely and upholding their authority. The other stories that got passed around were held to different standards--and that's why they weren't included in the Bible. Most of them seem to be designed assert what Jesus would have said or done in such-and-such situation, or in response to a particular topical issue, or just make Jesus seem like The Most Awesome Dude Ever. (It was sort of like fanfic. "wouldn't it be cool if Blorbo From My Religion had said/done X?" and it continued to be a major thing up through the late medieval period.)

So, with that background, where does the idea that Jesus was married come from? Mostly, it comes from The DaVinci Code. I mean, periodically people have thought "wow, wouldn't it be cool if Jesus were married?" but with no evidence or source beyond "wouldn't it be cool." Which also is the sum total of Dan Brown's evidence. People who believe it point to a single fragment of papyrus, written in Coptic. And that fragment is not believed to be a forgery but it doesn't have any provenance and there's a lot of mystery surrounding where it was found. And only a small handful of scholars have been allowed to inspect it. So like. It's shaky, at best. (Also, it wasn't publicized until 2012, and so cannot be the source of earlier stories.) We don't start seeing Christian texts in Coptic (an Egyptian dialect) until the beginning of the third century AD. So the very earliest this papyrus fragment could come from is about 170 years after Jesus' death, in a text written in a language Jesus didn't speak, in an area he never lived in. In a time where people were passing around all sorts of legends. Assuming that it is a genuine ancient text, it's still not very good evidence that it's relating historical sayings of the actual Jesus. The Bible mentions Jesus' parents and siblings, why doesn't it mention a wife anywhere?

Dan Brown made a shitton of stuff up for The DaVinci Code and its sequels. It is a great work of fiction, but it is fiction. The thing he's really good at is coming up with puzzles that tie into things people want to believe, and into various historical conspiracy theories. Please take everything he says with a boulder of salt.

So now let's turn to the question of "was Mary Magdalen a sex worker!" And the answer is no, she was not. You have to understand that there are a lot of women named Mary in the Bible, and lots of people conflate them. For our purposes, the other Mary you need to know is Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha and Lazarus).

In the Gospel of John, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. In the next chapter, Mary of Bethany (Lazarus' sister) anoints Jesus feet with oil, presumably in gratitude for her brother's resurrection.

In the other three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), there is also a story about a woman anointing Jesus' feet, but she is unnamed and pretty clearly not Mary of Bethany. She is a sinner who washes Jesus' feet in gratitude for having been forgiven. The context of the story--and the way Jesus talks about it--are completely different. But historically, people would go "eh, all women are the same, right? so this unnamed woman has to be Mary of Bethany" despite all the differences in the text and context.

So then we come to Mary Magdalen. Mary, we are told, had seven demons cast out from her and after that became one of several wealthy women who paid for his and the disciples' bills (this is a patronage relationship, and doesn't imply anything sexual--wealthy people in those days would regularly subsidize teachers they liked. Lydia, for example, supported Paul in his ministry, as did several other women he names in his letters.)

But the medieval Catholic church looked at this and went, "well, all women are basically the same woman, right? Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany and all the other Marys (except Jesus' mom) are all the same woman, pretty much. So therefore, Mary Magdalen anointed Jesus' feet, and therefore she was publicly known as a sinner. (Despite the fact that a) Mary Magdalen didn't anoint Jesus' feet, and b) Mary of Bethany, who did, wasn't publicly labelled a "sinner") And also, look at those seven demons that were cast out from her, that's GOT to be a reference to the Seven Deadly Sins, right? (which were a medieval fabrication, not found in the Bible.) And the sin of women is lust, so therefore Mary Magdalen was controlled by lust and therefore she was a prostitute!

And in addition to the fact that there is zero evidence of this whatsoever, there's the fact that the vast majority of sex workers in the ancient world were desperately poor. She would not have had the money to sponsor Jesus and his disciples if she was a former sex worker.

As someone who believes that sex work is work and should be legalized (and that sex workers should be unionized and have legal protections), I'm not saying this because I think her being a sex worker would be a shameful thing. I really like all the modern theology about "Jesus hanging out with sex workers." I wish it were true! But it almost certainly isn't.

tl;dr: Jesus almost certainly wasn't married, Mary Magdalen was never a sex worker, and Dan Brown is a fiction writer not a historian.

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From Christopher Eccleston, author of this gem of Instagram:

We have a sequel post and it's a gem for the holidays

May his righteous wrath at the monarchy forever burn.

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maamlet

the real problem with necromancy is all of these necromancers are pursuing immortality instead of dying so all the good necromancer names are taken for like centuries at a time. the other day i met a guy who called himself skull james

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imlizy

cower before the might of femur frank 🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴🦴

fuck off femur frank your bone magic sucks shit and we all know it

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vexwerewolf

Felicitations, comrade! We had our session 0 for the IGF campaign im running, and one of my players wants to be a moonlighter pirate "infiltrating" Hell's Gate militia. He was initially thinking of being affiliated with the Hell Hounds, which for obvious reasons would present some challenges. Do you have any advice for making this happen, what with the very first mission putting him up against his true boss? I dont know that he'd have enough time to have truly built up camraderie with the rest of the SRT to truly make his character have conflicted loyalties.

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I mean, he'd have to have been with the militia a while to build up enough trust to be seriously considered for the SRT.

But moreover, let me tell you what being a Hell Hound is like.

CW: psychological and physical abuse

So one thing I want to make it clear that the Hell Hounds are basically an incel cult without the weird gender-sexual overtones. I imagine there ARE women and enbies who join it but in essence Andros Capella is a creepy weirdo who preys on disaffected, primarily male youth with no prospects and indoctrinates them into his worldview of nihilistic violence.

Andros doesn't really have a philosophy, or at least not one that he could describe in words (and even if he could, he wouldn't), but it could be summed up as "the weak exist solely to create things for the strong to take." You are worthy of having things if you are strong enough to take them, but only so long as you're strong enough to keep them.

The closest political ideology I could ascribe to him would be "stateless fascism." Andros is certainly sadistic, devoid of empathy and believes himself to be supreme, but he's too intellectually lazy to bother engaging in justifying why he's supreme. He makes the most basic of naturalistic arguments (i.e. "this is just the way the world works") but feels it's beneath him to actually justify or provide evidence for his claims.

He hates the minutiae of day-to-day life, and derives no joy from anything that doesn't involve someone else's discomfort or pain. He will steal your food for the sheer thrill of having taken something that you wanted to eat, but he won't enjoy eating it because he despises the physical sensations of chewing and swallowing.

And if you are a Hell Hound who, god forbid, enjoys something, he will bully the shit out of you. He will verbally and physically abuse you until you learn to hate the thing you liked just to make the pain stop.

Lemme tell you what the average night on Fort Cerberus looks like when you're not on a raid: you and a couple hundred other sick fucks lurk around the corridors drinking and gambling but you sure as hell better not actually look like you're having fun because you're all desperately trying to avoid becoming the bossman's next chew toy.

Some poor fuck catches Andros' eye. You're not sure what for, but from the sounds of things he might've been counting his poker winnings too loud. He gets a hand on his shoulder from the big man, who tells him that he's being too selfish - gotta learn to share a bit more, yeah? Now, way Andros sees it, guy's got ten fingernails that he's keeping all to himself, so here's a set of pliers - redistribute.

You jeer along with the rest of the room, loud enough to drown out his screams, because you're so very, very relieved that it isn't you. But you fuck up. You look a little bit too enthusiastic, perhaps, or maybe it's the opposite, maybe you weren't forcing it enough. Either way, the bossman's eyes land on you and your blood turns to ice in your veins.

"You," he says. "C'mere."

The room is dead silent all of a sudden, quiet enough that the pitiful whimpering of the first guy, (currently on his second thumbnail) is the only sound you can hear. You walk over, as a prisoner does to the place of execution.

He takes your hands, inspecting your fingernails, and then your hands, then your arms. "No ink yet? You not pulling your weight? Am I payin' to feed a fuckin' leech?"

You say you're not a leech.

"Those pricks over at the Gate are gettin' too clever. Learning too quick. Gettin' the jump on us too many times. I want someone over there learnin' what they know. You 'avin' no ink makes you a good choice. They'd sniff out any of these boys in a second, they would, but not you. You look soft. Don't he look soft, boys?"

The room jeers at you just as you jeered at the first guy (he's on his ninth nail, now, and his throat is so hoarse he can't make sounds anymore). You try your best to remain composed.

"Normally soft'd be fuckin' worthless. But soft'll let you blend right in with the Gaters."

So, to avoid whatever horrific torture he's currently ideating, you agree. The next time they go out on a raid, they pick a ship full of people who don't know each other and slip you in with the passengers when nobody's looking. You don't go to Hell's Gate directly - you do a couple of hops through the Thousand Habs, just to throw off suspicion.

You sue for residency on the station as a refugee from a failed habitat. They give you your own cabin, and they make sure you're fed and clothed. You smirk to yourself - they really are as soft as Andros said they'd be; they have food and water and clothes and they're just giving them away!

You don't have all that many marketable skills, so after a few rotations scrubbing air filters, you apply to take the militia aptitude test. You try to play it down so they don't get suspicious, but if nothing else you're a damn good pilot, so you get fast-tracked. These fucking idiots just give you a mech! God, it's gonna be so easy to tear them apart from the inside.

They put you in a team. You train together, building up hours in the simulators. Then something weird happens. They... trust you? They want to... spend time with you, outside the simulators. They want to drink with you, play games with you, hear about your life. Well, is it more suspicious if you say no? You have to maintain your cover.

You don't always fit in well. Sometimes you crack jokes that are... a little unpleasant, a little off, a little worrying, and you learn to bite those down because it's bad for your cover. You also have this odd air about you, like you're constantly on guard, like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop (like somebody's gonna make you rip your fingernails out if you're too happy). People figure you must've gone through some trauma and are kind stupid enough not to pry.

You feed information about the militia back to Andros - carefully, so as not to blow your cover. Some members of your team get hurt - nobody dies, but they get hurt. You feel... bad. Why do you feel bad? They're soft, they're weak, they don't mean anything. They're not your real friends. You don't have any friends.

Months pass. Jerry says he wants to tap your team for a long-standing project he's working on. This is your chance. Sabotaging this will prove to Andros that you're strong, that you're not weak, that you're not a leech, that you can pull your weight.

Sure, a bunch of your team will have to die. The only people who've ever put their trust in you, the only people who've ever believed in you. But that's fine, right? They don't mean anything, they're not real people, right? They're idiots for trusting you, right? They deserve it, right?

Right?

... right?

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taulupis

Well fuck, that gave me chills. I appreciate the details, and ill pass this on to the player in question- with ample warning first of course.

A story about finding redemption by taking on your abuser has a lot of mileage, I feel.

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maxwell jägerman is so holy trinity coded that grace chastity never stood a chance. man straight up declares he's a god and has the complex to match, when he died his peers were absolved and everyone could be friends (also he was impaled with a wooden beam, vaugely crucifixion) , and then rose as a ghost two weeks later. specifically a ghost who is intangible and omnipresent. he then fucked the virgin. am i insane

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No, because people keep acting like Grace Chastity being consumed with a lust for the power that Lords in Black provided her doesn't count as a world ending Cataclysm - but it very much does. Not only has she shown little to no empathy for others throughout the entire show and only ever felt bad for lying to authority figures and being horny - but the final song of the Musical is essentially a reprise of Max's Murder Song/Manifesto which places her as a parallel to Max. Max sings about how he's going to kill ALL the Nerdy Prudes and not once but twice tells the audience that it doesn't matter if someone is actually a Nerdy Prude because he makes the rules and gets to decide who is or isn't a nerd etc etc. Grace's take is that she is going to kill all the Dirty Dudes but she's literally singing it to a guy who has, throughout the entire musical, done nothing to indicate he's a pervy/dirty dude and only kissed her after she asked him too. Like Max, Grace Chastity doesn't actually care if someone genuinely fits the framework of her stated victimology, because she has the power so she gets to make the rules.

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Honestly it's like some people didn't think about the implications.

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what you have to understand about dungeon meshi is that the entire conflict basically boils down to "every character is autistic but in ways that clash so catastrophically horribly that everyone thinks everyone else is a nuclear-level threat"

For anyone still confused I made this handy chart after smoking a bowl

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