I'm available for more commissions! thank you to all the people who've commissioned 3D models so far!
I'll also mention I have a Ko-Fi and a Patreon, if anyone's interested in supporting me in a small amount or doesn't want a commission. I'm struggling with bills, especially since March just started, so any help is really appreciated!!
Reminder that people aren't entitled to see into your decision-making process unless you've agreed that they are. Just told a business acquaintance that I'd "just finished up my previous commitment". It's not their problem to know that it was DND.
Just to make sure no one schedules meetings on top of my D&D sessions, BUT ALSO to avoid any chance of my coworkers figuring out when I’m playing D&D, I always block sessions out on my calendar with the appointment title:
It’s not a lie, I’m discussing with a small group how to resolve conflict. Not my fault that the answer is often violence.
Bro I love you but if I saw in the communal calendar that one of my coworkers had attended thirty conflict resolution seminars over the last year then I would immediately assume they had committed innumerable acts of workplace violence and management was too scared to fire them
I think that it’s difficult for anyone who wasn’t of age in 2001 to fully appreciate just how fucking bonkers American culture went in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I don’t even mean the wave of hate crimes and military invasions; I mean things like, overnight, American TV shows went from depicting torture as a great evil to depicting it as a Good and Necessary Thing to Defend the Homeland; cafeterias in government buildings in Washington DC started listing french fries as “freedom fries” after Jacques Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq; there was an NHL hockey game in 2002 where the guy who was to sing the Canadian anthem had his car set on fire by a frenzied mob chanting “USA! USA! USA!”; Evanescence had to add aggressive male rapping as a backup vocal to “Wake Me Up Inside” because her label was concerned that the culture had become too feminised; there was a government “terror alert” system that, every few days, would issue vague threats and warnings about formerly innocuous behaviours; Donald Rumsfeld briefly became a sex symbol; they postponed the release of Spider-Man for reshoots to incorporate more patriotic imagery; and all of this is barely scratching the surface.
(This, incidentally, is why I will never have a high opinion of Star Trek: Enterprise in spite of the fact that audiences have rehabilitated it to some extent in recent years; because I will never be able to separate it–and especially its Xindi arc–from its original context as a jingoistic analogue for the War on Terror)
Everyone forgets that this is where the grim dark “gritty realism” trend in television shows and movies came from. Before 2001 there was a lot on TV and in movies that was just dumb campy fun (anyone remember Charmed? Xena? X-Files?) And it was completely okay and it was acceptable and in that dumb campy fun we had good story arcs and we had good character growth and everything. But then after 2001 everything had to have an edge to it regardless of if it made sense to the story arc overall the particular plot or even a single or set of characters. Literally everything became all edge with no point other than to look “realistic” and justify some fake hashtag deep kind of dark philosophy about the world how you had to be hard and tough and realistic in order to survive.
God, this
Seriously, America lost its collective MIND during this time. It was fuckin awful and we’ve never recovered from it.
And I hate it because, yes, 9/11 was a tragedy. But compared to other countries and incidents? Terrible things happen the world over, all the time. But this one, because it happened here and (despite the school shootings and everything else) there’s this collective “things like that don’t happen here” mentality the nation went batshit.
The media started whipping shit up, the 24-hour news cycle really amped up, and patriotism became The Thing. Like everything was just coated in a veneer of the stuff. And if you objected? You were the antichrist.
Also, certain songs like TNT got taken off the radio, everyone suddenly had an American flag somewhere, my peers were rabidly signing up for the military (with very, very racist commentary the whole way), etc.
Everyone fell for it and they fell hard.
I remember them talking about going to Iraq after Afghanistan and everyone just acted like that was always the plan. And me, being a teenager still in English classes, just had a flashback to reading 1984:
“On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns—after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.”
Then this happens:
“The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.”
I will never forget this scene in the book because watching as the war shifted in real life and the way my country reacted to it was like seeing it play out in real-time.
And when I pointed it out to people?
I was the bad guy.
as someone who got caught up in the furore- yes. all this.
Let’s not forget these totally-not-propaganda Disney commercials that talked about how great and amazing the US is. Please remember these commercials played on a children’s network.
Also, rampant censorship of music, like seriously take a look at this fucking list. Crash Into Me by Dave Matthews Band was banned. So was Walk Like An Egyptian by the Bangles. And Rocket Man by Elton John. What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong. In addition to any music that could be perceived as even slightly critical of the US, as you’ll notice reading the list, with Rage Against the Machine’s entire catalog being banned.
Which is also why Green Day’s American Idiot was so revolutionary. Like yeah, it is a BOMB-ass all killer no filler album. But it also was just the right amount of time after 9/11 and it put words to the bullshit people had started to see through. It said the unpopular thing both out loud and catchy, which permanently infused its anti-establishment themes and rebellious undertones into the culture and gave an entire cynical, rebellious, unpatriotic and free-thinking minority the soundtrack and microphone they needed to grow and spread.
I mean, people did NOT just openly criticize america and american culture and americans back then, especially not americans. But to open the album with “don’t wanna be an American idiot” in the middle of the bush administration? It was radical. It was a shift in what you could and couldn’t do. Especially after the Dixie Chicks were blacklisted for doing the same thing.
(it’s worth noting that, while I was very young, I recall the whole “Freedom fries” thing being pretty widely mocked in the media. one specific Republican official asked the House cafeteria to make the change, inspired by something a restaurant owner in his district- North Carolina -did. most people thought it was ridiculous, at least most people around me. but it did still happen, obviously, so…)
It’s not the first time Americans did something that dim, either. I seem to recall certain places switched over to calling sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” during WWI. (Also, I googled to double-check and there was an article about a town named Germania in Iowa that changed its name to Lakota in 1917 because of anti-German sentiments. Ah, America. “We hate you so much we’ll acknowledge the people we stole this land from because of it!”
I joined the Army 2 months after 9/11. I was 17, still a minor, and lived in a very conservative environment. After about a year into my service, talk started to turn from Afghanistan to Iraq, and me and most of the soldiers in my battalion went, “….wait, what?” None of us were down to just invade another country besides the one that (we’d been told) had attacked us first. That was the point that the spell broke for me. Fortunately, I fucked up my shoulder shortly thereafter and my discharge was honorable. Price to pay: lifelong shoulder issues. Worth it.
Having lived through the thick of that bullshit, I feel very strongly that the George W. Bush years were far, far worse than anything Donald Trump can do. Trump is a vile asshole; but Bush is a monster and a war criminal who had overwhelming support from the revenge-crazed US population. Imagine what Trump could have done with a 90% approval rating.
Imagine that 90% of the country had just handed Trump their stamp of approval to do whatever he wanted. That is how insane the culture went after 9/11, and that is how badly it fucked up our country, the world, and my generation. Imagine being 17 and living through this shit. Imagine 90% of the people around you telling you that Bush was right to authorize extraordinary renditions and torture. I’m so thankful that I woke up to it when I did and was never deployed; I’m not sure how I’d live with myself if I had.
And oh yeah: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney belong in The Hague.
The Flying Spider-monkey Tree Fern 🌿
Sphaeropteris lepifera, synonym Cyathea lepifera, the brush pot tree, is a tree fern that grows in the mountains of East and Southeast Asia, which can grow up to 20 feet tall. The plant has existed for over 300 million years and is considered a living fossil. Wikipedia
Class: Polypodiopsida
Kingdom: Plantae
The tree ferns are the ferns that grow with a trunk elevating the fronds above ground level. Most tree ferns are members of the "core tree ferns",
belonging to the families Dicksoniaceae, Metaxyaceae, and Cibotiaceae in the order Cyatheales.
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphaeropteris_lepifera
I think the next Metroid game to be positioned chronologically after Dread should reverse the trend of making Samus smaller and more delicate-looking with every successive instalment and put her right back where she was circa Super Metroid (i.e., six-foot-whatever and two hundred pounds). I think this discrepancy should be diegetically acknowledged exactly once, entirely in passing, as part of a long, technobabble-laden sentence containing the phrase "metroid DNA", then never come up again.
wouldn’t metroid dna be what’s making her so small and delicate in the first place? those little things are like jellyfish with 3 teeth and an adorable scream sound
Those are metroid larvae. An adult metroid is twenty feet tall and looks like this:
happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.
Non-Natives reblogging this are great and wonderful
Please remember that "land back" does not mean "indigenous people are mystical elves with innate epigenetic wisdom of land stewardship and they don't belong in big cities," nor does it mean "non-indigenous people can't be farmers."
What it DOES mean is that "non-indigenous farmers should be paying the equivalent of property taxes to the native governments their land was stolen from."
It means, "there's a great deal of indigenous scholarship on sustainable agricultural practices that farmers should be taking into account, because indigenous agriculture was more advanced than European agriculture at the time Europe invaded the Americas and western agriculture *still* hasn't caught up in terms of figuring out how to produce equivalently high crop yields without compromising the ecosystem."
It means, "non-indigenous farmers should be in an intellectual discourse with indigenous agricultural scientists and indigenous peoples that still do traditional farming, figuring how to repair the damage western farming practices have done to the ecosystem."
It also means that indigenous peoples should regain the right to sustain themselves on the land according to the practices they want, and they should have free reign to perform their cultural practices and protect their holy sites, as opposed to the current model where if they try to honor their dead on public lands they get violently removed.
