sakura is teaching sasuke how to do the “sakura pose” bcus he cant do it
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
I am not in favor of “support all brown women” because it precludes the need to see what kind of brown women I will be supporting as a fellow brown woman. I need to know their ideology and their ethics and their understanding of the current world order to see if I give a fuck about them or not. If they are liberal brown women who have little to say about what is going on in the world because they are too busy assimilating into the normative, I don’t care for them. They are not my sisters. The same goes for women of any other race. “Support all brown women” quickly becomes a catchphrase that ignores the material reality and differences between brown women. We are not identical in our goals. We are not all sisters.
Monday, September 29, 2014
virborassan replied to your post:I used to be able to get off just from giving…
Honestly I’m going through the same thing. I am married and the idea of sexual contact just freaks me out. I don’t want it. You’re definitely not alone!
You are such a sweetheart. <3
And still I dare to love
the sound of the light in the hours of deadness
the color of time on a ruined wall.
In my eyes I’ve lost everything.
Asking is so far away. And so close, this knowledge of want.—Alejandra Pizarnik, “A Beggar Voice" (translated by Yvette Siegert)
Im sure most of my followers on here are at least peripherally aware of a page I help moderate called transhousingnetwork because I reblog posts from there often.
It is a page where trans people who are in need of shelter (most often temporary, emergency shelter) but who are unable to or feel unsafe getting it elsewhere. The way this page works is by way of people who are willing to read, signal boost and respond to “need couch’ posts and hopefully submit “have couch” posts advertising available space.
Demand for emergency shelter for trans people is especially high in all major metro areas but especially those in California (especially the Bay Area and Los Angeles) and the Pacific Northwest (especially Portland, Seattle, and Olympia) which tend to be major centers of refuge for a lot of trans people.
I’m making this post to spread awareness of the blog transhousingnetwork and especially to encourage anyone residing in one of those major metro centers on the west coast to signal boost or respond to some of the recent posts up on there and to submit “have couch” posts if you are able.
A lot of the people who are posting on there are on the street or imminently facing homelessness and in many cases have been turned away from or faced harassment, violence, and sexual assault in shelters and this page is their last resort.
Thanks everyone who reads this and can help
http://www.transhousingnetwork.com
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Ah! Quality! Something my scanner doesn’t give a shit about!
Anyways, the idea of Team 7 getting back to their original dorkiness gives me life. So why not try to see Kakashi’s face one more time? XD (that’s one of the little fillers in Naruto I’d love to consider cannon)
Also, this is dedicated to dattebae (specially the NaruSaku Brotps parts). I really hope you like it, dear.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Saturday, September 27, 2014
BREAKING: Another young man killed by Ferguson police at the scene of cop shooting
- @ABC7Chicago: #BREAKING: #Ferguson, Mo. police officer shot, officer not killed, according to St. Louis Co. police
- All members of @handsupunited_ + @lostvoices14 are safe. We are hearing the police officer was shot in the arm. Suspect was killed #Ferguson
- Pretty sure #Ferguson just went from bad to worse.
- Another ambulance is coming. Think it’s for the body of the boy that was killed. #Ferguson
- In this moment, the crowd is pivoting from Martin to full-fledged Malcolm. Many people have said they are tired of hands-up. #Ferguson
- There’s a lot happening in #ferguson right now. We all need to pay attention and uplift the humanity of the people on the ground.
Every thinker, at the start of his career, opts in spite of himself for dialectic or for weeping willows.
Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
If Nietzsche, Proust, Baudelaire, or Rimbaud survive the fluctuations of fashions, they owe it to the disinterestedness of their cruelty. What makes a work last, what keeps it from dating, is its ferocity. A gratuitous assertion? Consider the prestige of the Gospels, that aggressive book, a venomous text if ever there was one.
If melancholy has vouchsafed me such a dearth of ideas, that’s because I loved it too much to let my mind deplete it.
Every aspect of thought has its moment, its frivolity: in our time, the notion of Nothingness … How dated seem Matter, Energy, Spirit! Fortunately the lexicon is rich: each generation can delve there and come up with a word as important as the others — uselessly defunct.
Any and all water is the color of drowning.
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be … optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?
We always love … despite; and that “despite” covers an infinity.
Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided (via heteroglossia)
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→Things that make Morrigan, Morrigan:
Morrigan is the only companion who instantly knows she is in the Fade, because the demon could not create a convincing representation of Flemeth. Morrigan says that Fade-Flemeth was showing her far too much attention, prodding her too much, almost like she cared about Morrigan. When Fade-Flemeth finally strikes Morrigan, she simply replies ‘that is far more like it’ indicating that the only attention she ever received from Flemeth was in the form of either mockery or abuse, and Morrigan reacts accordingly.
#which actually shows that all Morrigan wanted from Flemeth was her love and attention#but because she was given that she knew it was false (natasi)
Friday, September 26, 2014
Thursday, September 25, 2014
I AM DOING A GIVEAWAY!
( Thank you so much to Marie - tinymarie89 - for the awesome giveaway banner! <3 )
It’s been exactly a month today - September 25th - since I came back to Tumblr and it has been such an amazing experience. Getting over 200 followers in the time I’ve been back has been so overwhelming in the best way possible. I’ve loved reconnecting with old friends and making so many new and amazing ones!
So to celebrate, I am going to be doing a Dragon Age: Deluxe Edition Giveaway! I know a lot of people can’t really afford the game, and I want to give my amazing friends a chance to get it for free. :D
GET TO THE GOOD STUFF JENNIFER, WHAT ARE THE PRIZES?
First place prize will of course be the Dragon Age: Inquisition Deluxe Edition for their console!
Second place will receive a copy of Dragon Age: Last Flight.
Third place will get a one-shot of their choice written by yours truly. :)
I’M SURE THERE ARE RULES SO WHAT ARE THEY?
You must be following me. If you want to follow me because the giveaway inspired that, please just make sure you want to stick around after. I’d hate to lose a bunch of followers after the Giveaway, that would make me sad as hell.
Only reblogs will count.
Multiple reblogs are okay but don’t be that person that spams people’s dash, that’s never fun.
****The giveaway will end November 6, at midnight EST.****
No giveaway blogs! Yeah that’s right, I’m talking to YOU.
The winner will be picked by a random Number Generator.
After the Giveaway is over I will be sending out an ask, and the Winner will have 24 hours to respond before I reroll.
Good luck, my loves and thank you so much for following me and for being such an amazing and supportive group of people! <3
Sasuke shakes, because after the hell of the last three years, after digging his own grave and coming back again, after vengeance and loss and madness and so much pain,
Sakura offers him a happy ending, an absolution of his burdens, a way out.
And he can’t take it, can’t alter this path he’s on, can’t invalidate every choice he’s made, because he has to see this through, and no one, not even someone who really truly has the power to make it all better, can change the facts.
No matter how much he wishes she could.
Why Mixed with White isn't White
-By Sharon H. Chang
When I wrote my first post for Hyphen, Talking Mixed-Race Identity with Young Children, I was deliberately blunt about race. I wrote about how I don’t tell my multiracial son, who presents as a racial minority, that he’s white — but I do tell him he’s Asian. While the essay resonated with many people, others made comments like this:
“Your child is as white as he is Asian… Why embrace one label and not the other?”
“Why is he Asian but not white? He has white ancestors as much as Asian ones. So if it’s OK to call him Asian, it’s OK to call him white. Or, if it’s not OK to call him white (because he’s not completely white) then it’s not OK to call him Asian, because he’s not completely Asian either.”
“Your child is neither white nor Asian. I once heard this description: When you have a glass of milk and add chocolate to it, you no longer have just a glass of milk and you no longer just have chocolate because you have created something completely different. A bi-racial or multi-racial child is not either/or.”
In the 1990s, psychologist and mixed-race scholar Maria P.P. Root wrote the famous Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage, stirred by her examination of mixed-race identity, interviews with hundreds of multiracial folk across the U.S., and the struggles multiracial people face in forming and claiming a positive sense of self. “I have the right not to justify my existence to the world,” it reads. “To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify. To create a vocabulary about being multiracial or multiethnic.”
Almost two decades later, these proclamations still ring so true. Some people are completely unwilling to honor my family’s choice to identify as mixed-race and Asian because it doesn’t align with their own ideas about how we should identify. The right of a mixed-race person to self-construct and self-define, even today, endures continual policing from people with their own agendas.
“If it’s not OK to call him white…then it’s not OK to call him Asian”; “Your child is neither white nor Asian.” These critiques are so often centered on whiteness: a sense of disbelief that I would “deny” it to my son, and the conviction that, if I won’t teach him he is white too — or at least partly white — then he is nothing at all. Even the problematic chocolate milk analogy — which the commenter clearly thought was progressive — begins with a glass of white milk with “color” added. White is seen as normative, and there is a total failure to recognize that racial categories are political.
Of course I talk to my son about our white family members who are a part of his life and his identity. But those stories are about growing up in Virginia, or window candles at Christmastime in New England, or his Slovakian great-great-grandmother who came through Ellis Island alone when she was sixteen. Those stories are about our history, not about being “white.” “White” is not an ethnic celebration, a food festival, or a heritage parade. It’s about having unearned power and privilege based on the way you look.
In Dr. Peggy McIntosh’s famous essay on white privilege, she listed a series of unearned privileges white people enjoy. Among them: “I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time”; “I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented”; “I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial”; and “I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the ‘person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race.” Are any of these true of my multiracial Asian son? My son, who barely has any children’s books that reflect his racial image, who is constantly scanned and assessed aloud based on “how Asian” he looks, my son who has had many more white teachers than teachers of color?
Telling my child he’s white also won’t help him understand why children who were less than one-quarter Japanese were interned during World War II; why a stranger would look at him and say there are no “pure races” anymore; why a leading theatre company in our city unabashedly staged a yellowface production of an operetta; why kids on the playground pull back their eyes in a slant and spit out one of those ridiculous anti-Asian chants that just won’t go away. When I tell my son that he is Asian, mixed-race, multiracial, and a person of color, I’m not denying him parts of his ancestral-ethnic heritage. I’m teaching him about the race politics that intrude upon our lives whether we want them to or not. I’m preparing him to exist in a world that obstinately persists in being racially divided. And I’m trying to let him know something about the ways he has and will continue to be judged throughout his life, not because he’s white — but because he’s mixed with color.
Why Mixed with White isn't White
I can directly trace the formation of my shipping preference for absolute redeeming love that’s laser-focused like a missile on one person and one person only, no matter whether they’re alive or dead, good or evil, to Tobias’s feelings for Rachel and Sakura’s love for Sasuke.
Why couldn’t I read something else as a kid.
I WAS NOT PRepARED FOR THIS CHAPTER.
I love my baby girl Sakura more than the world, but I can’t help but feel this chapter was more about SASUKE and his feelings. As many have pointed out, Sakura’s reaffirmation of her love for Sasuke was a direct parallel to her first one in chapter 181.
She nearly repeats all the same words to him - I love you, no matter what, I’ll follow you anywhere, please, stay with me - and from Sasuke’s near identical response, he remembers.
Imagine how it must feel to Sasuke to know that her feelings haven’t changed. Sasuke willingly and knowingly went down a dark path. He purposely tried to sever ties with Team 7 and Konoha. He did dark and terrible things because he believed there was no other choice, no other destiny due to him or his cursed family. Even now, working side by side with his old teammates, he must continue down this path in order to set things right.
He didn’t asked to be loved. He never expected it. He doesn’t feel like his DESERVES it when his family paid the ultimate price and he’s left in this godforsaken world, carrying the burden of the whole Uchiha clan.
After Sakura tried to kill him in the Land of Iron, he probably assumed her feelings had changed. It’s what he wanted. Maybe he was relieved, in a way, just another love lost in his past, like his family.
So imagine when he heard Sakura’s words. Dredging up the feelings from a cool night under the moon. Despite all he is, and all he’s down, she loves him. Despite all the pain, she loves him. And this time I think he knows just how deeply and painfully she feels this love.
Because despite all the pain and hardships, Sasuke still loves his family deeply, and he can’t let them go. Sasuke knows this feeling. To go to the ends of the earth for the one you love. He knows what Sakura is capable of. He knows she will stop at nothing.
For a second, it leaves him breathless.
So he has to put her under a genjutsu. Because if he knows her, and he does, she will try to stop his and Naruto’s fight. And he doesn’t want that.
Her words managed to shake up his whole being and determination he’s so carefully built up over the years.
Such an annoyance.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
My biggest problem with the Anders vs everyone (and Fenris vs Anders in particular) is that yes, most of the companions in DA2 hold shitty bigoted views, but Anders is the only one of them who seems to relish being an asshole.
Almost all of them will bring up their shitty views if you thrust them into a situation where those values are being directly addressed. Anders is the only one who is constantly prodding and harassing others outside of those situations, mocking completely uninvolved people (Aveline), dredging up sensitive subjects with people he knows hate him, etc etc.
This is also probably why he’s always felt like the afterthought of the group to me, asides from Sebastian. Sebastian has the obvious handicap of being DLC, which alienates him a bit. Anders just seems out of it because no one actually seems to like him. Isabela tells him to his face maybe he’s the problem she has with mages. Fenris’s stance on Anders is pretty clear. Merrill is nice to him (Merrill is nice to everyone) but they’re hardly friends. Aveline and Anders have never given the impression of being close.
We don’t get a sense of the interconnected near-decade spanning friendship the other companions share from Anders; the closest we get is his relationship with Varric, but even that falls flat for me because we get no reason for Varric to favor him other than a throwaway line about Anders swapping stories from his time in the Wardens with him.
Unfortunately for South Asian writing, what the publishing industry has decided is best for Western readers is pandering, cliché-heavy, lunch-buffet fiction that’s easy to digest and doesn’t contain too many weird, foreign ingredients.
“Those books” Thayil refers to are South Asian diaspora novels about the Indian subcontinent. Mangoes, spices, and monsoons. I’ll add saris, bangles, oppressive husbands/fathers, arranged marriages, grains of rice, jasmine, virgins, and a tacky, overproduced Bollywood dance of rejection and obsession with Western culture. The frustration Thayil expresses has been echoed by other South Asian writers and readers who don’t identify with the stories and struggles presented in many of the South Asian novels published in the West from 2000 forward — the era ushered forth by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies and all the copycats that followed. They see nothing of the real India, or the real Pakistan, or the real Bangladesh, or the other real South Asian communities reflected in these novels, which are designed for a primarily white reading public. What they do see are stereotypes — a colonialist “jewel in the crown” version of the subcontinent that includes tall servants named Raj and palm fronds, mosquito nets and teatime and exiles longing to return to their super romantic homeland. In much contemporary literature, South Asians are exotic little creatures fluttering about in glass jars for the bemusement of monocle-clutching Western observers.
[…]
Perhaps this seems a highly cynical position. How can it be that South Asian novels, primarily written by South Asians and published by the intellectual one-percenters in cosmopolitan centers who understand the world and wish, through literature, to edify it for the rest of us, skew the reality of South Asia and its people?
Jabeen Akhtar, Why Am I Brown? South Asian Fiction and Pandering to Western Audiences
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Progressive Jewish women and the women’s movement as a whole must take a stand on the question of Palestine and Israel, without allowing charges of anti-semitism to cloud our view of what Zionism is really about. We can’t cop out by saying it’s just too confusing. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir articulated a fundamental tenet of Zionism when she stated in 1969: “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Behind this chilling lie is the reality that “Israel” was carved in blood from the homeland of the Palestinian people. Before the Zionist invasion, Palestine had a population of a half a million people. Muslims, Christians, and 20,000 Jews lived together for over thousands of years.
The Zionist leader Herzl commented that if the Zionist movement was to receive British support, it must show the British government “spot in the English possessions where there were no white people as yet.” Uganda, Argentina, and Palestine were all seriously considered as possible sites for the Zionist settlement. British Zionist Lord Melcher argued the reasons why Britain should support the colonization of Palestine: “The advantages to the British Empire are obvious. The Suez Canal and air stations, the oil-pipe outlet in Haifa and its harbor, have become vital to our naval strategy in the Mediterranean. The security of the imperial complex of interests can be better assured by a large European population than by the few battalions that can be spared." (emphasis added)
The Zionist and British usurpation of land and power was accomplished through terror and genocide. In 1948 alone 385 Palestinian villages were destroyed and their names erased from the map. Over the years 1 and 1/2 million people were displaced at gunpoint. By the hundreds of thousands, Palestinians were forced to flee into the desert, living for decades in tent villages while the settlers took over their farms and groves.
At every step, the Palestinian people resisted being driven from their homeland. Since the Zionist invasion, there have been six major revolts and scores of popular uprisings; 30,000 martyrs have died in the process. This is the reality behind the Zionist myth that the colonization of Palestine has “made the desert bloom.” The Zionist state of Israel could not exist without the backing of US imperialism, which has built Israel into an outpost of white supremacy. 20% of the US foreign aid budget goes to the Zionists; in turn Israel operates as the policeman of imperialist interests in the Middle East. Just as South Africa invades Angola, Namibia and Mozambique to enforce imperialist domination of Southern Africa, so Israel bombs Lebanon, Iraq and annexes Syrian land with impunity. Like the white settlers in South Africa, the Jewish settlers in Israel provide the manpower and political base for white supremacist aggression.
On a world scale, Israel actively supports other fascist regimes and military dictatorships. Israel is a major supplier of military aid to South Africa and the repressive regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. It supported Somoza in Nicaragua, the puppet government in South Viet Nam, and now Pinochet’s rule in Chile. Fascist South Africa and Israel are each other’s number one trading partners. This situation cannot be brushed off by blaming the right wing policies of Israeli Prime Minister Begin. It is not the particular administration that is in question, but the basic nature of the Zionist white settler state. From the very beginning, Israel’s takeover of Arab land has depended on aggression, the threat of aggression, and on serving the interests of US imperialism.
"The Issue of Zionist in the Women’s Movement" published by Women Against Imperialism (April 1982)
Dragon Age Keep Code giveaway!
Hey guys, I have ONE more code for the Dragon Age Keep Beta to give away. All you have to do is Reblog this with what your first Bioware game was! I will be randomly selecting a winner in THREE hours!
DA:O
I will never get over the time a bunch of mostly white Americans tried to lecture me, a brown Spanish girl, about the racial dynamics in my own damn country.
But honestly I would pay good money to see one of them try to explain to one of the white fascists who worship Franco or one of the kids who used to hurl “sandn*gger” at me they’re not “really” white, they’re actually PoC, lmao.
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Elaine Kruer was able to watch a mother carefully move her cubs to their den. The process was very special and a reminder of how gentle nature can be. “When her grip began to slip, rather than tighten her grasp, she would lay them down and use her paws to reposition them ever so carefully,” says Elaine. (source)
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Fan Ho is one of Asia’s most beloved street photographers, capturing the spirit of Hong Kong in the 1950s and 60s. His work shows a love of people combined with unexpected, geometric constructions and a sense of drama heightened by use of smoke and light. More
Approaching Shadow, 1954. Photo: Fan Ho/AO Vertical Art Space
As one turns to one in a dream
smiling like a bell that has just
stopped tolling, holds out a book,
and speaks: “All the vulgarityof time, from the Stone Age
to our present, with its noodle parlors
and token resistance, is as a life
to the life that is given you. Wear it,”so must one descend from checkered heights
that are our friends, needlessly
rehearsing what we will say
as a common light bathes us,a common fiction reverberates as we pass
to the celebration. Originally
we weren’t going to leave home. But made bold
somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward.Now it’s years after that. It
isn’t possible to be young anymore.
Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;
my own shoes have scarred the walk I’ve taken.—John Ashbery, ‘Token Resistance’ from And The Stars Were Shining
Okay, but no, seriously, now I need to talk about Rachel and Cassie in the end. Because we get totally screwed out of seeing these two women talk, toward the end- we’re done with their POVs at book 50, with only a snippet of Rachel at the beginning of book 54 and then Cassie POVs post-Rachel’s death. So we got fucked out of seeing these two talk and try to reconcile, which blows in every possible way, but just- the post about Rachel nearly punching Cassie was painful.
But I think it’s sorta important to remember that Rachel nearly punched Cassie right after this:
Rachel glared at her. “Okay, Cassie,” she said in a sarcastic-sweet tone. “So, what do you think we should do instead? Just sit here and wait for the Yeerks to find us? Or maybe we should make it real easy on them and all go hop on the train for a little swim in the pool.”
“Why do you have to be so horrible?” Cassie exploded. “You are, you know. And you get worse every day. Your own mother can’t even stand you.”
So here’s Cassie, knowing that she handed the morphing cube over to Tom, and only she and Jake know, and she’s stressed and upset and she’s watching her best friend (who, unbeknownst to her, two books ago realized that she needed to be the bad guy in order to protect everyone’s innocence, but especially Cassie’s, and hey, do you hear those echoes in that conversation above? With Rachel asking Cassie what they should do? When two books ago she asked Cassie if she would kill David for her, since she was so adamant that Rachel not do it? And Cassie faltered?) spiral into this war even more, and she has to know that they might not have gotten to the point where Rachel WOULD spiral this bad if she hadn’t given up the morphing cube, so not only is she stressed and upset and guilty in general, but she’s specifically feeling guilty because Rachel is getting worse, and it could be her fault.
And Rachel, Rachel expresses a lot of her frustration and anger physically, which is why a page later she makes a fist and goes to hit Cassie, but Cassie is verbal. Cassie knows people, she knows where to hurt them and how to do it, and maybe she doesn’t punch them or morph into a grizzly, but the girl can do a whole shit ton of damage with her knowledge and her tongue. So she hits Rachel, hard, where it hurts.
So yeah. A page later Rachel makes a fist and goes to hit Cassie. Which I would imagine, at this point, is as much anger about her perceived betrayal as it is about the fact that Cassie just told her that she’s basically irredeemable. Like, this is fucking Cassie, y’all. The girl who can see the good in Yeerks- and she just told Rachel that’s she horrible, and she’s getting worse. I mean, just- wow. Ouch.
But then? A book later?
I said, “Cassie, you guessed that letting Tom take the morphing cube might weaken rather than strengthen the Yeerks. You guessed that Ax was…” I stifled the most bitter word that came to mind. “… conflicted. I’ll back your guess any day of the week.”
“I think he means he’s sorry he doubted you and treated you like crap,” Rachel said archly.
And then in the same book:
<Okay, then. Get started. Make sure Cassie doesn’t know.>
<You still don’t trust her?> Rachel said angrily.
So, despite the fact that Cassie basically told Rachel she was irredeemable, and despite the fact that Rachel would have hit Cassie if Tobias hadn’t stopped her… Rachel still gets angry on Cassie’s behalf. Still defends her. Still demands respect for her. And after Rachel is dead, Cassie thinks about her constantly. Her narrations are peppered with little asides about Rachel would have thought of this, what Rachel would have said about that. She’s the one selected to identify Rachel’s body, along her Naomi. Rachel is dead, but Cassie carries her with her at all times.
Their friendship is pretty messy at the end. You put someone who wants to cling to her pacifistic ideals with her best friend who is basically a weapon and yeah, there is going to be tension. But I think the core of that friendship remains. Respect and trust. I think that, ultimately, Cassie still thought Rachel was fearless and admired that; and Rachel still thought Cassie was pure and admired that. And it gave them both a lot of strength, but it also hurt them, because Rachel needed to be fearless and all that that entailed for Cassie while Cassie needed to be pure for Rachel and in putting themselves into those roles, they ended up severing a lot of their ability to grow and change and adapt within their friendship. (All the Animorphs did this, though, really. It’s just so much more obvious when talking about Cassie and Rachel’s friendship because they end up occupying opposite ends of a moral spectrum in the war.)
But yeah. I think it’s important to remember that no matter how many times Rachel and Cassie disagreed throughout the series, Rachel was always the one who defended Cassie and her beliefs, and Cassie always believed in Rachel, and they had each others backs. I like to think that, had Rachel survived, Cassie would have been by Rachel every step of the way as she tried to return to civilian life.
DA: Keep Beta Giveaway!!!
Hey everyone! First post for Dragon Age News and I would like to give away a couple Dragon Age Keep Beta codes!!! :D All you have to do is follow me and re-blog this so you are eligible to win when I randomly select two of you lovely people this Sunday!
anarchists-for-big-government:
getting turnt af with the holy spirit
I don’t know how you could ever be more sterotypically innocent than to be a 91-year-old Vatican librarian. How do you have 8 pounds of fucking coke in your car.
Friday, September 19, 2014
I remember I was explaining that part of my life to G. once and she had the most appalled look on her face. What was wrong with you?
Uh, I was poor and hungry and had a little sister, that’s what.
Anyway, after that I resolved to never tell anyone about that again. Except for you guys, of course. The Internet doesn’t count.
[audio https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/bruixeria/97939558236/tumblr_mhh5tbI52O1qzhav6?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio]
You’re mostly what I think about and I’m proud
I’ve been coasting on this singles route
But I still hear your name in wedding bells
Will I look better or will I look the same rotting in hell?
You’re the only proper noun I need
[audio https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/bruixeria/97932199451/tumblr_mx98byRu6L1ss0jrf?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio]
did you know that there are people in the world, annoyed with all the other people in the world? and of all these angry people in the world, i am the angriest boy!
I am trapped in a rotting fleshsack and I want to die:
a memoir of how I peeled off my own skin and ascended to cloud consciousness.
there's nothing you can't mourn for in 2014
even rich people, or at least their constituent molecules that are being misused so badly at all times
Thursday, September 18, 2014
To believe in God is to love
What none can see. Let a lover go,
Let him walk out with the good
Spoons or die
Without a signature, and so much
Remains for scrubbing, for a polish
Cleaner than devotion. Tonight,
God is one spot, and you,
You must be one blind nun. You
Wipe, you rub, but love won’t move.
Jericho Brown, Another Elegy
DA: Keep Beta Giveaway!!!
Hey everyone! First post for Dragon Age News and I would like to give away a couple Dragon Age Keep Beta codes!!! :D All you have to do is follow me and re-blog this so you are eligible to win when I randomly select two of you lovely people this Sunday!
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Interesting.
SCREAMS i freaking LOVE THIS because it means they totally went shopping in orlais together. morrigan probably showed up in the middle of all the chaos, before the inquisition had been formed to deal with it, and said something like ‘i am ready.’
'ready? for what?' leliana asked.
'to go…' dramatic pause. 'shopping, as once you offered.'
'but now, of all times?'
”tis your chance. take it or no.’
and then they spent hours trying on shoes.
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All That Remains + things that cannot be unsaid
This is exactly how I see Leandra too. There’s an element in there, of course she doesn’t HATE her children, but there’s such an incredible amount of resentment between her and her eldest child that to write it off as simply grieving is a misnomer, I think.
I think it’s fairly clear that she resents Hawke for a number of reasons: knowing Malcolm better than she does (implied at the end of Legacy), failing to save him/acting as the head of the family despite the fact that she’s clearly not stepping into the role or even trying, the dead twin, etc. Moreover, I think it’s fairly obvious that Leandra and Malcolm were very much what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet hadn’t had a typically tragic ending: they were young, impulsive, and in “love,” but once you’ve given up everything, what does that really leave you with? A partner you barely know, who you’ve put all your trust into despite that, and despite however much Leandra says she puts love above all-else, we see even in her conversations with Gamlen that this very much isn’t necessarily the case, and she carries a lot of her bitterness with her. She wasn’t ready for what running away really meant, she was young enough to have very likely acted impulsively on a romantic ideal that didn’t pan out in any way she’d actually hoped.
It’s a really dysfunctional, bittersweet relationship, and I can’t at all blame Hawke for thinking this. Hawke’s already got a guilt complex a mile wide, no matter how you really play it; there’s a reason they take on all this responsibility that isn’t even necessarily theirs. With Malcolm, it’s all responsibility, and honor, and doing the right thing no matter how hard it is, and with Leandra, it’s all guilt, residual affects of growing jaded with where unchecked romance really leads.
She can be a caring figure, certainly, when she feels like it, but finding her to be a truly supportive one it a little harder for me, when she relies on her eldest child the way her younger children do. There’s such a lack of responsibility on Leandra’s part: something must always be someone’s fault, because surely SURELY there must still be some good left to come out of a foolish decision she made as a teenager. Their status in Kirkwall is Gamlen’s fault (which is true enough, but he DOES have a point in that she’s been away from home for 25 years; anything he does to drag the “family name” into poverty and squalor is his own doing, and while it’s hard to support his methods, he’s at least grown up enough to recognize the reality of his situation. Is Leandra’s anger at her brother entirely unjustified? No, but at the same time, she continually fails to recognize that she gave up her status, her family name, and her inheritances, and this attitude doesn’t come out of nowhere, suddenly rekindled after two decades of “hiatus.” It’s a failure to take responsibility.
TL;DR, I seriously appreciate just how incredibly fucked up and dysfunctional Hawke family dynamics really are. It’s a family full of love that Hawke would and continually does put their life on the line for, but it’s not a healthy one. It’s not a supportive one. And I find it really telling that despite Malcolm’s questionable allegiances as an apostate, it’s THIS name that Hawke chooses to symbolize and hang onto, despite the fact that Leandra is clearly very ready to step back into the role of a noble that she’d “left behind.” Is it any surprise that Hawke seems so used to the responsibility, so easily stepping into the role as head of household when their parents are so embittered, disillusioned, and in Malcolm’s case, paranoid and uncommunicative?
Hawke’s so used to being the parent, being the one to take up responsibility that of course it’s going to kill them when they fail; they’ve been conditioned to impossible responsibility and the constant looming threat of guilt.
This depth makes my heart hurt.
Wow, this is such an excellent take. This is not how I’ve usually seen or headcanoned Leandra, but all this insight is really making me want to take a long second look at their relationship.
I love this. Because it’s not that Leandra doesn’t love her children — of course she does, she adores them — it’s that she’s not a perfect woman: She makes mistakes, jumps to hurtful assumptions, and thrusts too much responsibility on her children, particularly her eldest. Not to mention that she’s still struggling with profound grief, not just over losing her child and her home, but the life she sacrificed everything for.
She’s not a bad mother (just look at how her children turned out) nor is she a bad person. She’s just a complicated human being, with warts and flaws. Sometimes it’s hard to see them because we self-insert as her child, and it’s always tough to see your parents as people, not ideas, even when said parents are digital. But I think a read on her character that acknowledges said faults and mistakes is far more illuminating than the alternative.
Personally, I think you can see a lot of Leandra in Carver and vice versa; certainly they manifest their grief in similar (hurtful) ways. I’ve always headcanoned that the two of them were particularly close (and I think there’s some good evidence in-game to support the theory).
this especially makes sense for a mage!hawke, since Carver is like her and not a reminder of how much she gave up for magic and mages.
During the “favorite female video game characters” meme earlier this month, I list Leandra in my top 10 even though she is an NPC, even though there are many other playable female characters and companion female characters I could have listed.
The meta above is why Leandra won a spot in my top 10. I especially like how Hawke’s dialogue choices and my headcanoning-the-gaps allows me to view some of my Hawke families with Leandra having a sometimes difficult but certainly loving relationship with Hawke and other of my Hawke families as complex and dysfunctional.
Leandra is the kind of female character I don’t see often enough in video games.
Love this analysis of Leandra and the dynamics in the Hawke family. How messed up they are feels so real, because there are so many flaws. They are like any of us.
I think it’s the most poignant when playing male!mage!Hawke, he would remind Leandra so much of Malcolm - I can imagine it being almost too much to bear, especially as he grows up and becomes the de facto parent of their family…
all my sadsGreat analysis of Leandra and Hawke. I have always been a fan of the Hawke family simply because it reminds me so much of my own.
From the oldest child being parentified, to the loving but bitter mom and well meaning, responsibility laden an eventually absent father.
Carver is a lot like my brother too.
Honestly my own personal parallels is freaky.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
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Sept. 17 1:10 pm
- DARREN WILSON TESTIFIED IN FRONT OF GRAND JURY
- Shaun King exposes corruption (storify)
- Elected black officials feel disrespected (1) (2) (3)
Sakura doesn’t degrade herself by continuing to love Sasuke. Those fans who dislike her feelings are the ones who completely demean her character by degrading the love she feels by saying she should stop ‘chasing Sasuke’ like she were some love-sick dog.
There was a point in part 1 during the chuunin exam arc where Sakura stopped acting like a girl with a crush and began to act like someone who had genuine, strong feelings. Most of her dynamic with Sasuke early on had to do with her observing him, worrying about him, and wanting to understand him. Most of all, she wanted his happiness. She told him herself, the path he was going down wouldn’t make him happy.
Sakura fucking Haruno has only ever been concerned about this kids well-being. In part 2, she saw that he had a darkness in him for reasons that she didn’t understand, and it tore her up inside. She thought that, in death, he would be better off, because he wouldn’t sink farther. Even more recently, Sakura was much more worried about Sasuke’s intentions and his feelings towards the people he should care about. Only now does she seem secure around him, now that she knows that he does care still (and he does, don’t even dare to try and convince me otherwise with some cheap ass ‘he tried to kill her!’ excuse while ignoring the rest of the story) about his team.
Her love for Sasuke isn’t selfish. When she wanted Sasuke home, when she thought she had to take his life, when she expressed sadness at the thought of him not caring, it shows how much she cares for him. That she wants not only him to be happy, but that she can’t stand to see him become a monster. It’s deep, and it’s real, whether you like it or not. This delusion that she acts like some crazy woman who chases after him with the intent of wanting to selfishly be with him is of your own making, if you think this way. Sakura has never acted like that. She’s a girl in love with a very difficult guy, and she shows her love with a grace that should be respected, not ridiculed.
I’ll say it again. Sakura does not chase after Sasuke. She loves him. That’s it.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
can you elaborate pls?
forte-fievre-deactivated2014101:
What is there to elaborate. Posts that use Asia only to refer to East Asia exclude the rest of Asia to the point where it is dangerously assumed that nothing happens to other Asian women. Asia is not just East Asia. “Asian” girls aren’t just stereotyped as submissive and school-uniform wearing infantilized girls; other “Asian” women are viewed as incubators, spicy nubile whores, virgins, hypersexualized and dehumanized. When you start referring to East Asia as the only Asia, mindfully or not, you omit other realities, a massive fucking lot of historiography and struggles. It also shows you’ve internalized the fetishizing of East Asia by thinking of Asia in only terms of Japan, China, etc. It’s embarrassing.
Monday, September 15, 2014
What You Crave vs What You Need
Chocolate: Raw nuts/seeds.
Oily/Fatty Snacks: Kale, leafy greens.
Soda/Carbonated Drinks: Actual, literal bubbles.
Chips/Salty Food: Topsoil.
Cookies: Freudian psychology.
Sweet Tea: A strong Southern gentleman to take care of you.
Pasta/Carbs: Pasta/Carbs.
Ice: The sweet release of death.
Oily/Fatty Snacks: Kale, leafy greens.
Soda/Carbonated Drinks: Actual, literal bubbles.
Chips/Salty Food: Topsoil.
Cookies: Freudian psychology.
Sweet Tea: A strong Southern gentleman to take care of you.
Pasta/Carbs: Pasta/Carbs.
Ice: The sweet release of death.
[gallery]
Sweet Lad, Tender Lad
A Pictorial History of Afro-American Same Sex Couples
Sweet lad, tender lad,
Have no shame, you’re mine for good;
We share a sole insurgent fire,
We live in boundless brotherhood.I do not fear the gibes of men;
One being split in two we dwell,
The kernel of a double nut
Embedded in a single shell.(From ‘Imitation of the Arabic’ by Afro-Russian poet, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin)
Playwright & historian, Trent Kelley, has curated these photographs from his personal collection documenting love and affection among African American gay male couples. The essay is entitled ‘Hidden in the Open: A Photographic Essay of Afro-American Male Couples.”
Kelley has written in the Huffington Post:
Afro American same-sex loving gay men who were coupled with one another in the distant past walked the streets, ate at the dinner tables, and generally participated in their larger ethnic community out in the open, their relationships known only to those who were consequential to their everyday lives. In this respect, they were out in the open but hidden to those who didn’t know about their sexual proclivities. Hence, the title of this series of pictures dating from the mid 19th century to the late 20th century is “Hidden in the Open: A Photographic Essay of Afro-American Male Couples.”
Some of these images are sure to depict gay couples, whereas others may not.
The end result is speculative at best, for want in applying a label. Not every gesture articulated between these men is an indication of male-to-male intimacies. Assuredly, what all the photographs have in common are signs of Afro-American male affection and love that were recorded for posterity without fear and shame. Friendships where men often wrote romantically to one another, walked arm in arm were not uncommon to straight and gay men alike during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Depending on economic situation, many even slept together and this may have precluded or included physical intimacy between the sheets.
But there were past generations of Afro American gay men who lived and love bravely. They exist in these photographs. Like today’s gay male of African descent, the majority of them were never victims who whined nor required rescuing. Their presence here defy a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community often wanting to make them an impotent footnote absent of any self-empowerment within gay culture and those vocally homophobic pockets within a black community wanting to write these men out of the narrative to Afro-American history.
See the rest of this outstanding collection here.
Last night just before 9pm, they sent us a warning over the phone that ‘We will bomb the hospital, so you need to evacuate. We insisted that we cannot leave the hospital. Our patients are, all of them, paralyzed, they’re unconscious. They’re unable to move, so we need to stay in this hospital…
But just few minutes after the call, shells start falling down on the hospital — the fourth floor, third floor, second floor. Smoke, fire, dust all over.
Basman Alashi, executive director of Al-Wafa Hospital, the only rehabilitation hospital in Gaza and the West Bank. (via lastuli)
Sunday, September 14, 2014
I get irrationally upset when people imply that there was no other end for Rachel but to die at the end of the series; that she would not have survived without the fight, the thrill, the adrenaline, that it’s her “true end”.
Rachel didn’t want to die. Rachel wanted to live. Rachel saw a future for herself beyond the end of the war. She had a family. She had friends. She was in love.
She was just a sixteen year old kid who had been fighting nonstop for the past three years. Who had done terrible things to protect her friends. She was a sixteen year old kid who walked to her death when asked because more than anything, she wanted the war to be over and for humanity to be free.
Were there parts of her unearthed by the war that were ugly and brutal? Yes. Could she have gone back to the life she lived before the war? No. But all of the Animorphs struggled with what the war forged them into. And none of them ever went back, not all the way.
But there would have been a life for her afterwards, and happiness, and peace. I wish she had gotten her chance at them. She deserved it.
Fenris’ conversation with Orana though
Fenris asking her if they’d touched her because he knows how slavers and mages in the Imperium exert control over their “property”
Fenris’ look of absolute guilt and shame when Orana says Hadriana sacrificed the elven slaves to blood magic because he was coming to kill her; no concern for Hadriana, but for the elves he is is indirectly responsible for murdering
"We tried to be good; we did everything we were told. …Everything was fine until today." "It wasn’t. You just…didn’t know any better", implying that at one point he felt exactly as lost and confused and broken as she was. Implying that he had tried so hard to obey and ‘be good’ but it was never, ever enough and the more he gave the more Danarius and Hadriana took
His absolute shock at her suggestion that he is her master now because he knows what masters want from their slaves, he knows what they’re capable of and he will never, ever become that person
friendly reminder that when Fenris says “I would have given you everything” to Varania he is actually way understating what he did, which was sacrifice his personhood, autonomy, dignity, body, and mind for his family’s freedom only to have it thrown back in his face when he doesn’t even remember them
it’s even sadder if Hawke does end up selling him to Danarius for a few sovereigns; Fenris allied himself with him/her out of trust even despite the fact that mages made him deeply uncomfortable, and s/he cast him out like he was nothing
Fenris tried so hard and the world failed him again and again
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Friday, September 12, 2014
we really do jump to the conclusion that it’s white people being racist and making fun of brown/black people but idk where ur from but everyone is gross to each other regardless of race lmfao not on the scale of whites of course but it’s not a rare thing for a person of any color to say really racist things about another person of any color literally every race does it and only blaming and jumping on white people doesn’t solve anything lol
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