Always nice to be reminded that the people with bad judgment about the middle east also have bad judgment about the former Soviet space. Setting aside the fact that Russia's de facto president-for-life and other top officials given speeches about the need to cleanse Ukraine of undesirables, while Ukraine is governed by a Jewish guy who won a fair election as the opposition candidate, and focusing only on explicit Nazis rather than substantive ones -- as the Ukrainians have pointed out before, they would be happy to have check where all combatants remove their shirts and we count the Nazi tattoos, because they are way more common among the Russians, both their regular army and among the PMC named after Hitler's favorite composer because one of the founders is an explicit Nazi.

Claming that Ukraine is an "unsympathetic" party here, as LNH did, is telling about her, not about Ukraine.

a certain type of leftist will see an authoritarian regime and go "is anyone gonna engage in whataboutism on their behalf?" and not wait for an answer

just a reminder that "listened to marginalized people about their oppression" means "people know their own experiences better than you do" not "the most oppressed person in the room is always right about everything"

also ‘knows their own experiences better than you’ does not mean ‘understands the systems of oppression that create those experiences’ either

a sign that someone hasn't been listening to marginalized people about their oppression: they expect no one to be concerned about things that people frequently point out as concerns related to that oppression

not a sign that someone hasn't been listening to marginalized people about their oppression: they come to a different conclusion about how to address those concerns

dungeon meshi & steven universe are in no way a 1:1 and greg and shuro aren’t alike at all but can you imagine for a second if marcille was in pearl’s shoes. if falin sacrificed herself to have a baby with SHURO out of nowhere. the things she would do….. she’d be in western elf jail for the rest of her sad gay life

ive seen people mention that a perk to using a mace or warhammer is that they can shatter a sword. while yes, a sword can be pretty fragile in comparison to what is essentially an upgraded club, the thing about that is swords are nimble. they have the center of mass that close to the guard for that reason, it allows them to be quickly moved

so if you swing that mace AT a persons sword, that person can just...move the sword really easily. and you, already in mid swing, will have to commit to that swing all the way back up to a ready position

also did you know that a mace and a one handed arming sword are almost identical in weight? the difference, generally, is like. 5 grams. negligible

none of this was about "mace isnt good", but since you said this ill bite:

mace was quickly outdone by warhammers for a reason. mace is not as good against armor as you would think, try hitting a cuirass with one sometime and youll notice that itll be basically unscathed. hit the head and you might cause a concussion, maybe a shot at the joints if you can manage to hit that on a moving target. and yes, this even includes flanged maces. the mace went the route of the truncheon and was more ceremonial or used by the pigs to enforce whatever laws they felt like

maces walked so that warhammers could shine, and thats where a lot of anti-armor weapons were towards the 14th century. this is why they have the points that they do. not to pierce armor, thats a myth, but the idea was to take all of that weight and force and apply it into a single point to maximize how much itd hurt the person wearing the armor...and maybe dent it if you got especially potent

sorry for spamming this, i just really think about this sort of thing a lot. i liek swordplay, what can i say?

anyway, the thing with a mace, is that its for wearing out your opponent. its VERY effective at doing that. one blow wont do much, but repeated blows will wear down someone very quickly. hit someones hand and they wont let go of that weapon right away...but the more you slam that gauntlet, the harder itll be for them to hold on. fatigue is one of the biggest things to worry about in a battle like that.

and that, thats what maces are excellent for. wearing down your opponent! half-swording also achieved this, if you flip a sword and grip it by the blade...the weight on it is pretty much the same as youd get with a mace. was done quite a lot, swords were just like. a sidearm rather than the actual star of the show

so why arent maces documented more in combat, you may be wondering. theres almost no treatises that mention their use, so what gives?

well, it turns out that in unarmored combat, a spear or a sword is pretty effective at killing. and if your target is armored, as mentioned previously, a warhammer will do even better than a mace will. warhammers were built with longer shafts, you can thrust with them, and in the case of lucerne warhammers, they were excellent at yoinking people off of their horses and stopping charges.

maces just kinda were left behind, not totally unused at all, but not at all to the extent that warhammers were used

adding on to OP's post: high fantasy has projected this image of warhammers being massive fuckoff sledgehammers/mauls when, in fact, the actual hammerhead of a polehammer (like the aforementioned Lucerne war hammer, or the more common bec de corbin) was usually no more than five pounds/2-3kg. after all, if it's on the end of a long pole, it doesn't need to be very heavy to deal massive amounts of damage (see the formula for kinetic energy: KE=½×mv²). take all that energy and concentrate it down to a tiny point of contact, like a hammerhead or a spiked hammerhead, and you're crushing plate armour with relative ease. also, most warhammers were kinda "multitools" in that they incorporated a spear point as well, because if you're toting around a six foot long pole you might as well add extra pointy bits to it.

swords are sexy, yes, but they really were the sidearms of medieval combat. hells, this is true even outside of europe - for most of history, in most of the world, the preferred method of fighting an enemy has been to stick a pointy thing on the end of a long stick. the chinese qiāng, the japanese naginata and yari, indonesian tombak, the assegai (which was used throughout the middle east, africa, and the indian subcontinent), the aztec tepotztopilli - these are all various examples of spears and polearms being the dominant weapons of war throughout history.

actually, a question for OP - would you happen to know why swords became so popular in modern depictions of medieval combat? it's always something that's struck me as odd, but i am far from anything resembling a historian.

swords were a very important weapon to have, even if they werent particularly the most effective thing all the time.

swords being sidearms was mentioned, but it bears repeating 🐻🐻🐻

them being sidearms meant they were paired with many things! projectile weapons, polearms, they were easy to make, easy to use, nimble. once a sword is in its scabbard, its super safe and easy to take with you wherever you went. and, like is famously the case with iaidō, swords are very quick and easy to deploy. very good for self defense! they oftentimes even come with hand protection built-in...well, generally speaking, not always.

youll also notice that when you look at a lot of old depictions of battles, a lot of them are in clumps. like people being all up in each others business. a spear isnt going to be much help in that kind of close-quarters combat, their range is pretty much their main point and once you get too close it becomes a wrestling match. even a fully plate-mailed combatant can just draw their sword and hammer on someones head with the pommel. a sword in that situation will be harder to grab and grapple against.

incidentally, these shortcomings are also applicable to bayonets on rifles

a rifle with a bayonet, a polearm, they are effectively just pointy bits of metal on the end of a really long handle. and that really long handle is very very easy to grab and control. you need two hands, generally, for that weapon. a guy with an arming sword just needs one for his weapon, and his other hand can control your polearm once he gets close enough.

thats the biiig deal there. close combat. thats the big game changer. i know you were asking why swords are so popularly depicted, and i gave more of a comparison between swords vs. polearms, but all of those things are things to do with it.

swords are popularly depicted, because they were a popular and very commonly used weapon. everyone had one. they were applicable to almost any situation. and when all else fails, you had that to fall back onto! and they look pretty cool, they have a certain powerful appearance that resonates with people

when you pause to think about it, its actually not that odd. maces and truncheons have been associated with the law and knocking things out rather than killing.

and what does a priest, generally, not want to do? kill. and then theres the status that a mace is sometimes viewed with...as i said, maces tended to be ceremonial, status symbols, a display of "superiority". and back then, there was no higher status than the church. and the church had a habit of writing and enforcing the law

With respect to medieval Europe in particular, another motivating factor behind the association between maces and the priesthood was plausible deniability. Priests and bishops were generally forbidden from directly participating in combat – the Church understandably viewed bishops riding about lopping people's heads off as bad optics! – but they were allowed to be present at a battle in order to lend moral support to their side's troops. A sword or spear was liable to be construed as evidence that the priest in question intended to flout the prohibition against direct participation, but a mace could be passed off as a symbol of office; should a priest who attended a battle in order to encourage the troops happen to be approached by enemy forces, and thus be obliged to defend himself with the purely ceremonial heavy iron rod he happened to have on hand, well, shit happens, right?

(The practice of martially inclined priests arming themselves with maces for plausible deniability would eventually inspire the myth that priests limited themselves to blunt weapons because they were forbidden to shed blood, as seen in modern fantasy fiction.)

The internet is so fucking weird to artists who make anything interesting "thanks! I hate it" "this is cursed" "i love this but i hate this" you realize some people aren't drawing memes all the time right and art can be a medium of expressing complex feelings and writing off ppls expressions as a joke is so weird i hate meme poisoned weirdos

Why'd you even fucking reblog this you dork ass loser. You're exactly the type of disrespectful person im talking about that mocks artists' work whether they're joking or not and think that artists don't have feelings just cuz they're online. The world doesn't revolve around your irony-poisoned memebrain interpretations of art. L + ratio + you're a little bitch + get lost

memebrained comments are also a huge problem on twitter to the point that they're making non-English speaking artists delete their works/private their accounts because the "jokes" don't translate well and the artists feel harassed.

also it's legitimately important to learn how to communicate without hiding behind memes and irony for more reasons than just this.

ok but "wow I hate this and I love this" is a way of saying "I have experienced deep and complex emotions as a result of this art" like... it's a better compliment?

Like yeah cross-cultural translation is a Challenge and people should think carefully before posting gun memes to ppl outside their context.

But I internet-grew-up in a Russian-speaking writer community - and we had our own brand of this exact comment culture. And I am talking here about WRITERS TALKING TO OTHER WRITERS, not outsiders being weird. I'm talking "writers feed on people's tears" etc.

The goal of serious, non meme-y art, as well as the meme-y art, is to Make People Experience Emotions. "Wow I loved this / I liked this a lot / This is really good" is a good cross-cultural default to make sure you're not misunderstood but it's always going to be a little bland compared to "this work made me cry, in a good way".

Horny Dracula fans, take two

I made this poll already but I left off names like an idiot so let me do my spiel again

You have been given an unlimited budget and an unlimited run time to make your ideal adaptation of Dracula. You can be as faithful or unfaithful as you want, it's all up to you, with one caveat:

Dracula has to have a relationship, sexual or romantic or both, with one of the humans.

Now if I just made a poll right here, the answer would overwhelmingly be Jonathan Harker. Let's be real. Even if you don't personally ship it, he's the one Dracula spends the most time with, he's the one Dracula declares to be his and stares at while saying "I too can love," Jonathan's plot parallels so many damn "pretty lady with dangerous man" narratives like Bluebeard and Scheherazade and so on and so forth, it all writes itself

so I have removed him as a choice because I'm genuinely curious as to who your second choice would be and why

You don't have to vote on what you think would be cute or whatever (I mean you can if you want but given what Dracula is and his goals I don't think he can have a cute or even vaguely healthy relationship with a human), just whatever you think would be most narratively interesting. Whether within the narrative of the existing story or going off in some other direction.

Give me your vampire romance thesis

do you guys remember the lilo and stitch tv show. they find these weird creatures causing problems and then they figure out how their weird specific abilities make them really helpful for one particular task. i need some organization to lilo and stitch me. was the show INTENDED as a fantasy for weird lonely children? i guess lilo herself is also a fantasy for weird lonely children.

Speaking of therapy, I say, as though we're old friends, and you're not a stranger trapped in this metaphorical elevator with me and you can hear the suspension wires starting to fray.

I've been doing a lot of work recently that's focused on imposter syndrome and the feeling that no matter how well or how much I do, I'm not good enough. That I'm somehow tricking everyone into thinking my work is actually good.

Some days it's a minor niggle in my head that I can gentle and soothe with logic and affirmations. Or smother, depending on the mood. Other times it's loud and all-consuming and the mental anguish it causes me is so real I can feel it twitching in my muscles. This desperate fight-or-flight instinct with nowhere to go and nothing to fight but myself.

Anyway, because I'm several types of Mentally Unwell™, I was switching between workshop sheets ahead of next week. Filling in different forms. (Trying to get a good grade in therapy) And I got my "recognize your harmful ADHD coping mechanisms" worksheet mixed in with the "you're not actually lying to people, you just feel like you are because your brain is full of weasels" worksheet, and seeing them side by side made something go topsy turvy in my head, and I just had to sit and breathe for a couple of minutes until the urge to scream passed. Because it clicked, it all suddenly clicked.

The reason the imposter syndrome workshops and therapy sessions aren't sticking was because I do routinely trick people into thinking I'm someone I'm not.

Because I'm masking my ADHD for their convenience.

I've always known there was something wrong with me. My neurotypical peers made it abundantly clear I didn't fit in or was failing in some way I couldn't see nor remedy, no matter how hard I tried.

So I compressed myself into a workaholic box of hyper-competence in the hopes they'd stop noticing the flaws and exploit like me instead. And then subsequently lived with the daily fear that if they looked too close, they'd realize I'm a monumental fuck up with enough personal baggage to block the Suez Canal.

If you ever need someone to burn themselves to ashes for your comfort and convenience, I'm your gal.

Or I used to. Until I had a bit of a breakdown, and the rubber band holding my brain together snapped and pinged off into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.

Unfortunately, the trauma of living like that didn't also fuck off and instead left a gaping maw where my personality ought to be, so now I get to deal with that aftermath.

And it's that aftermath that's affecting the imposter syndrome shit. Because yes, I am hyper-competent and good at what I do-- but it doesn't feel real because that is how I mask.

And the truly frustrating thing is I am good at what I do. I am not pretending. I worked hard to be good at this. It just feels like I'm dicking around because 90% of my personality turns out to be trauma masquerading as humor in a trenchcoat, and having people genuinely like something weird I'm doing is so foreign my brain has decided it's just another form of masking.

I'm pretending to be a good author so people will think I'm a good author, and my brain thinks we are in Danger of being found out. We are in Danger, and writing is Dangerous because then people will know I'm Weird and not whatever palatable version I've presented myself as for their NT sensibilities.

Like the neurotic vampire with a raging praise kink wasn't an obvious giveaway.

Anyway. I got nothing else. Thanks for listening.

I'm going to go be very normal in another room and not stare into the abyss of my own soul for a bit.

I brought this post up with my ADHD therapist today (who also has ADHD), and she got so still that I thought our Zoom call had frozen.

Turns out she just needed to stare into her soul for a bit and it looked like this:

Every so often, I see notes from this post go past in my activity feed, and the tags really do look like a mass of people screaming as the suspension wires holding up the metaphorical elevator snap and we all plunge into the abyss.

Sorry/happy to have helped rip the bandaid off that coping mechanism for you. Hope it wasn't too load-bearing...

Anyway. I'm starting EMDR trauma therapy for this soon because I haven't been able to gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss DBT my way out of this one, so, y'know, really puts the trauma of masking in perspective when you have to resort to the same desensitization and reprocessing therapy you use to cope with the cPTSD from literally almost dying.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Unrelated but ADHD flavored note, where the hell did you get such a crystal clear image of Lisa staring at the table??? I can only find versions that look like they got converted to pdf or some shit

r/memeresotration.

The image looks grainy on the google search but when you click on it, it clarifies.

Nobody in this game has any chill

He is but you would not believe how little relevance that has to the case

taylor swift is compelling to me as a horror figure

i think it’s a different form of horror than the psychological price-of-fame horror of something like black swan or even tár… and it’s not really the fame horror you can evoke with the idea of say marilyn monroe, there’s no head shaving like britney.. It’s not tragic like that, theres no crack in the plastic. it’s more about like brand-as-horror. it’s ontological metaphysics horror. What is it like to be a brand. whats the line between the person and the idea of them. the horror of one’s Image. Does taylor swift feel like a real person? What does it do to you to have to perform every single day of your life everywhere you go with nearly no reprieve, and even the mundane things you do are a knowing part of the performance, and even then it’s performance in service of…. what, exactly? bland catchy pop music that plays at target. hints towards art, but again, it has to exist within the brand.. it’s all for nothing. mediocre synth wobbling our way to Maximum Tswift Saturation. existing across all nodes of pop culture, all the time.. Having to at once be eternal victim to root for and overpowering billionaire uncrackable unfuckable monolith. Monoculture as horror. The ship of theseus of a body and mind constantly repackaging itself as a brand. But maybe she was always this. Was she ever there. There’s something thrilling about it, something mildly reprehensible, but it’s also tragic in its own way… It’s something you cant look away from. She is cthulu to me

Small artists you need to understand that when you see an artist who you think has 'made it' tells you not to worry about the numbers and to not fret about getting more likes than reblogs they are not telling you it because they think you are stupid for caring or because they dont need to network to survive they are very likely telling you that because they have witnessed first hand the way the numbers game tears people to shreds in terms of mental health and motivation

Beginner artist: It’s easy for you to say not to worry about the numbers because you don't have to do it anymore.

Advanced artist, shaking them by the shoulders: DON'T DO THIS, it's a never-ending loop of trying to satisfy the nameless statistical tables that make you think your worth is measured by the number of people you can entertain.

I really don't know how she did it - actually I do, but I'd never be able to explain it - but ryoko kui wrote in a way that no one in this manga feels like a "villain". It's really difficult to go around hating anyone that appears long enough to be relevant (or maybe Laios really got to me and I don't feel like putting any effort in hating, I'm focusing on enjoying and understanding the story and its characters as he goes about everything around him) (damn he DID got to me)

it's always bad for adults to interact with minors, which is why when I was born my mother was positioned at the window and I was birthed down a giant slip n slide that safely transported me to the hospital grounds, where I was quickly accepted and raised by a gang of feral babies who were born under similar circumstances. and that's why my posts are so bad

Hey what the fuck happens in homestuck

A civil conversation with your local lake fish sturgeon

I can't explain how much I love baguette child. I would protect them with my life.

At first I was amazed and delighted and then I realized this is exactly the level of wit you should expect from a child who chose to dress as a baguette for trick or treating and I was even further delighted

"There's no such thing as a fish because you can't define it phylogenetically without also including things that aren't fish"

Man I have bad news for you about lizards. And reptiles in general. And wasps, but I guess that depends on your opinion on wasps. And I don't think you're ready for trees.

I'm defineiely not prepared for trees but if you want an excuse to make tumblr suffer i will be the sacrifice

Trees aren't a phylum or an order or anything like that, being a tree is just a thing some plants do

It's been described as a biological strategy - you want light, an efficient way to do that is put all the bits of you that want light (that is, leaves) high up so they're not in the shadow of other things, spread out both to cover a wide area and so they're not in their own shade, because that would be a waste of leaf

So the same shape of doing this has evolved independently dozens of times - crabs have nothing on trees. But this also leads to disagreement as to what a tree even is

For example, is a palm a tree? They don't have branches, but they do have a canopy - what about how a lot of conifers don't have a canopy? Just a cone of green that comes down to the ground! If that's a tree, what's the difference between a tree and a bush?

But we can agree they're centred around a single woody trunk right, so there's a starting point - except no, in comes the quaking aspen, which is one huge organism below the surface that shoots up trunks wherever the hell it feels like it, each of which is by any casual observer's reckoning obviously a tree.

The last thing we want to do is answer any of these questions, because that's how we end up with the whole berry situation, where a tomato is a berry but a strawberry is a "fleshy receptacle"

The timing for the TikTok jingle at the end did it for me