The best parts I like about old treaties is when the masters teach you some real, everyday life survival skills / advice, sometimes oddly specific. I’m talking about the REAL stuff, not the usual “if he do this then counter it by stabbing them in the face“
Examples: “When you have a rapier some people use in the other hand a cape, or a parry dagger, but just take a pistol and decide for yourself what’s the best off-hand weapon”
“If there is a large group coming for you, throw your sword at them this way, then run in the other direction REALLY fucking fast. _Buy a new sword as soon as possible_”
“If you have a disagreement with someone and he is stronger than you hold up your sword like a cross and ‘vow to this cross’ that you will make peace with him. When he isn’t paying attention bash his face with the pommel.“
“If someone tries to do the ‘cross trick’ to you put your hand on it saying ‘I vow to it too’ so he can’t bash your face with it“
“Some people put acidic/poisonous stuff in a hole in their mace so when they swing at you it will also go into your eyes. You TOTALLY won’t do this dishonorable thing, but here is the recipe for that stuff for the sake of knowledge“
“If in a duel you have to change swords with your opponent to make sure there is no cheating, and his sword is more expensive than yours, just run the fuck away with it.“
Enfin terminé! Here is the full circular ouija board I’ve been working on since april. It is the first real piece of ornamental design I completed. It was a big learning experience on many levels: with design, shading, style and color application. First I created the black ink outlines and hatched shading with a crowquill and then I applied color with a brush in transparent acrylic ink. I created a cycle of life design with the trees creating life from the dead in an endless cycle.
For the record, if you’re out walking and you see a depression in the ground where the grass is brighter green and there’s lots of clovers, azaleas and other nitrogen-fixing plants,
KEEP WALKING.
It could be a body dump.
…I really expected this to be about the dangers of walking into a faerie ring and being offered food by faw folk and foolishly accepting, leaving you trapped in faerieland forever for having cosumed the offerings of a host, a warning that I was given as a child (and nobody I go to school with was, those kids are gonna end up in some troublel.
But this is interesting too.
I mean, given what faeries get up to, there’s a strong likelihood of it being both.
I have never seen an advertising campaign more evil, more insidious than the one for the army currently airing in the UK
“This is belonging”
We’re introduced to a group of earnest young men. they’re white, they’re black. they drink tea. they play practical jokes. they quote popular TV shows. they talk about sports. they face their fears. it’s loving and domestic and all too easy to overlook the guns and camo and helicopters blaring overhead.
make no mistake, these adverts are aimed at the young and disenfranchised. poor people, people of colour, people who have been bullied and abused by society and made to feel like they don’t belong anywhere. Join the army, they’re told, and you can have the love and acceptance you crave but have always been denied. Elsewhere, you might get called racial slurs. you might get called a pansy or a fairy, but not here. You belong with us.
For example: Islamophobia is rampant in the UK. here we have an advert of a Muslim soldier praying while his squadron, armed to the teeth, sits in silence. the message is clear – while the rest of society may despise you, here, you will be respected. this is belonging.
here’s one called ‘expressing my emotions’, featuring a white man in his 40s – practically the posterchild for the UK’s current mental health crisis.
you don’t have to worry about bottling up your feelings in the army. after all, this is belonging.
here’s another one called ‘can I be gay in the army?’. we’re told: “I was really worried about whether I’d be accepted, but within days, I was more than confident in being who I was.” Clearly homophobia is a thing of the past in the army. don’t worry. this is belonging.
and it works. while the response to these adverts from an unfortunately vocal number of people is basically “fuck you, we’re racist and proud of it!” there are young people being taken in by this. I have met gay children, trans children who are determined to join the army because, after being rejected by their parents and peers, they’re now being told “here you will be accepted. here you will be loved.”
fuck that. don’t be groomed; don’t let the vulnerable and desperate people in your life be groomed. we need to fight the root causes of these problems in our society and stamp them out so that wielding a gun and cowering in some blown-out building in a country you helped destroy is no longer seen as some sort of salvation. fight racism. fight homophobia and transphobia. fight the stigmatisation of mental illness. fight the system that prioritises the rich and leaves the rest of us to rot.
don’t be taken in by something that offers easy answers, chews you up and spits you out, destroyed, guilty, with PTSD and nowhere to go. where do you belong when you can’t fight any more? where do you belong when you can no longer be used?
i just want to add that not only is the UK the only country in Europe that recruits 16 year olds (known as ‘recruitment of child soldiers’ when other countries do it), they also target their recruitment to secondary schools in economically deprived areas with high long-term unemployment. in areas where there is a sense among kids that they should move somewhere else as soon as possible, the army tries to be the first people kids encounter to offer that.
Yeah, they play these ads in cinemas as well, it’s why i stopped going in at the scheduled time and waited till AFTER the ads before entering
Today is Armistice Day, and so we as a nation wrap ourselves in an uncomfortable tension; pride, joy, loss and sorrow mingling with awareness and anger.
On this Armistice Day, let’s remember all the people who fought in our armed forces because they didn’t think they had other options. Let’s remember the times when our politicians have used our forces as a blunt instrument for personal political gain. Let’s remember unjust wars. Unneeded wars. Wars that gobble up our young, our poor, our needy – and drain the money that could have been spent on our most vulnerable.
War has a cost. Don’t let our political situation draw us into mindless complacency and blind nationalism.
Our military-industrial complex is not to be praised or lionised. Remember our veterans, used up and thrown away by a country with no more use for them. Remember the children recruited to feed our seemingly endless wars, in far-away places we can comfortably ignore. It’s true that 16 year olds can’t serve on the front line, but they can’t just quit if they turn 18 and don’t want to be deployed to combat. 16 year olds can’t drive, can’t vote, can’t drink – but they can sign their life away?
We need to reform our military, the way we use it, and the way we treat our serving soldiers. Not cover our bloodstained hands in poppies and hide their costs under empty promises of remembrance.
Another Unpopular Opinion I have is that, if people think you’re a faggot, you don’t get the same kind of social capital a gender-conforming man gets. Whether you’re cis or trans, gay or straight- doesn’t matter. If you’re not measuring up to the level of masculinity other people expect from you, they treat you worse.
Bro-y guys joke about having a ‘man card’- “Aw, shit, my girlfriend is teaching me to crochet, guess I’ll have to turn in my man card”, that kind of thing. And it’s one of those jokes-that-isn’t-really-a-joke. Masculinity is fragile- in the sense that the popular idea of ‘masculinity’ is an ideal that no one can live up to. All guys can really do is put up a front, pretend they’re tough and strong and unbreakable and not ‘girly’, and hope no one notices the truth.
If people think your masculinity is broken, you’re not afforded the same kind of respect as a man who’s putting up a good front, from men or women. I’m not saying that GNC men get treated the exact same way trans women do- or even the same way as women in general.
And it’s super socially dependent, too. Some gay men in some places do have a man card, because ‘sleeping with men’ is not a thing that breaks your masculinity there. In a lot of other cultures, men who are physically affectionate with their platonic friends do not lose their man card, because physical affection is not unmasculine. And so on, and so on.
But if you’re a man who wears skirts everywhere or paints his nails- or a man who can’t get a Solid Jerb and Provide for a Family- or a man who cries about things (justified or no)- you do not get the full amount of social capital that a gender-conforming man does. Your man card goes in the paper shredder.
A lot of pop feminist analysis is… flawed, in that it does not acknowledge this. It treats ‘men’ as a singular bloc of people who all have the same amount of Privilege Over Women. If pop feminism does try to tackle this subject, it treats the dynamic as Completely Normal And Just The Way Things Are, or As Something Men Do To Each Other That Feminists Don’t Have To Worry About. It also tends to treat men without a man card as pathetic subhuman losers- look at all the articles about Men Feminists Shouldn’t Date that put ‘men who still live with their parents’ on par with stalkers and rapists, or the way ‘neckbeard’ and ‘male tears’ are common internet-pop-feminist insults.
In doing so, a lot of the time it upholds and even reifies this dynamic. …And since the dynamic is based in misogyny and queerphobia, that’s not a good look for people who are trying to fight both of those things.
screaming into the void since '89 