Thornhedge by T.Kingfisher is out today! I made this cover that ended up getting cut before it went to print but I still like how the piece turned out and the book is great too! Many thanks to AD Peter Lutjen for taking a chance on this one!
[Image ID/
A closely cropped screenshot of a tiktok video featuring a woman in a bright pink outfit, sitting in a car
The text on screen reads "Chronic illness girlies gaslighting themselves into thinking they're healthy and doing whatever they want and then flaring later on that night begging for sweet mercy"
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Remembering the one Hades and Persephone fanfic retelling I read where the author had clearly never eaten a pomegranate in their life and just had the character in the Persephone role take a bite out of the side like an apple
“While cameras generated a mechanical reproduction of a scene, she explained that it does so only after a human develops a ‘mental conception’ of the photo, which is a product of decisions like where the subject stands, arrangements and lighting, among other choices.
“‘Human involvement in, and ultimate creative control over, the work at issue was key to the conclusion that the new type of work fell within the bounds of copyright,’ Howell wrote.”
Absolutely ghoulish dogwhistles being used to imply Richard Silken’s cringey fanfiction hobby is something other than completely harmless and mildly charming.
No one on earth has ever referred to Supernatural as a show “meant for high schoolers” before this person decided that it was a way to make the nastiest, most popular kinds of insinuations against a gay man for being snippy in response to a kid asking him to do her homework. An adult gay man openly lusts after fictional adult men played by real adult men on a broadly popular network tv show, so let’s reeeeeach to make him sound like a pedophile.
brendanicus asked:
Tell us about the wellness to fash pipeline tho
cryptotheism answered:
“Wellness” is not just alternative medicine, it is essentially a theory of the body which posits if something makes you feel better, you are better in some meaningful way. I would argue it one of the most commonly held nonreligious magical beliefs in the modern world.
Wellness as a concept has its genesis in the 1950s with “workplace wellness” programs, a sort of budget alternative to offering employee healthcare benefits. This was an era soaked in itinerant business preachers offering classes on things like “hypnosis at a management level” and “yoga to improve leadership abilities”. I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much.
The capitalist medical system regularly abandons people. We’ve all heard stories of profit driven pharmaceudical companies holding the ill hostage for extreme markup on life-saving medicines. People have real, legitimate, reasons to mistrust medical professionals.
Let’s say you have chronic pain, and everything your doctor offers you is either ineffective, expensive, or addictive. You are desperate for literally any release, so you start looking into other solutions. You will find an OCEAN of snake-oil salesmen willing to sell you “the secrets doctors don’t want you to know.”
What is frustrating, is that pain is actually partially psychological. Some wellness techniques may have an actual, medical, benefit on some patients. The worst thing a conspiracy theorist can have is a point. So now you actually do kinda feel better, and you have a sense of loyalty to the grifter selling you 300$ Sumerian Cock Oil Pills. These people are the core of the wellness industry. They are the examples that everyone else points to and says “Well it worked for them!”
Reactionary thought blooms in environments like this. If the medical industry can’t be trusted, what else can’t be trusted? At any given time, you are two clicks away from “vaccines cause autism.” Three clicks away from “Cavemen were 15 feet tall because they only ate meat.” And four clicks away from “The medical industry is controlled by The Jews to drain our wallets and keep us sick.” Echoes of Nazi attitudes towards German-Jewish doctors are a common backbeat.
Wellness itself is relatively harmless, (compared to the things it is adjacent to) but it acts as a sort of idealogical airport that exposes the curious to a deluge of potentially radicalizing communities. The longer you spend in communities like this, the higher the chance you’ll come across something that meshes perfectly with your own biases.
No single line has ever wrecked me as hard as this one from the Good Place and I think about it constantly
when someone says "why would you want a physical copy of that? you can just stream it" i physically recoil. a feeling of dread comes over me like an evil spirit just passed through my body
ok this tag really got me
one of the rooms in my house was exclusively filled with elephant-themed decorations and furniture. We called it "the elephant room" and we only used it for guest visits and Christmas. We had the bathroom, bedrooms, living room, and elephant room. It tended to derail casual conversations with strangers
Having grown up in the house where people were constantly making up silly little songs to sing to small children and pets - or just in general - and all kinds of little nicknames and stuff, it’s really REALLY jarring and strange to then go to a house where nobody sings dumb little songs.
My sister’s name was “Moonie” for, like, a solid decade and a half. (I don’t remember the specific chain of events that led to it, beyond that it had been “Bunny” and she wanted to be called Moonbeam for a while, and none of these things are remotely her legal name.)