Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, they are libertarians after all.

less a scream, more a sob, but right there with you

Late to the party with this thread but whatever.

A wide range of emotions this week but I think I'm back to feeling normal, if not motivated. The night of the election there were a lot of trans people who look up to me coming to me for consolation I couldn't give and questions I couldn't answer. I recognize that there wasn't really much I could have done to prevent this outcome but I still feel like I stood there and did nothing. I'm trying to network and see what kind of IRL organizing and activism I can do. I will say that the dissilusionment I have seen in my lib friends has been very good and I have been having conversations to nudge them towards more radical left thought.

Beyond that my experiment with vegetarianism has reignited my love of cooking all over again, the weather has been really nice, and I'm in this era of my life where I have never felt so very myself.

I hope you all have a beautiful day, be well <3

<3 thank you, this has been supremely encouraging!

The Void (2016) Its a fucking awesome not very good movie that does suspense and looking nice very well. The plot is pretty loose, a bunch of people find themselves trapped in a decaying hospital by crowds of cultists outside, inside the hospital are body horror abominations and our intrepid heroes try to figure out what the fuck is going on. Tons of practical special effects, a somewhat nonsensical story, remarkably compelling acting and a really good sense of atmosphere. The Void is a movie with a lot of heart.

The first two of the V/H/S series of short horror anthology films are an absolute blast. I haven't seen the rest but I hear they fell off.

This isn't an attempt at debunking, but there could be other reasons for this. These weapons have been nicknamed "teddy bears" for whatever reason and the toys could be gifts sent to the unit or the individuals operating the vehicles. A bunch of the toys seem to be teddy bears holding hearts, which are less common for children in households and more common for care packages sent to soldiers (also hospital paitents). The motivation behind adorning the vehicles with these could be affection for those who sent the gifts, some kind of joke, or as a decoration meant to humiliate their victims.

The explaination given by OP is the only one I could find attatched to other uploads of this image. Given what we gave seen the IDF do in Gaza it is not below them to decorate their weapons with the belongings of the children they have murdered, orphaned, rendered homeless and/or traumatized. Either explaination of this photo suggests something perverse is going on here.

Dawg, is this REALLY the most constructive thing you could be doing with your precious, finite lifespan right now?

I partially disagree. There are creative works that are being made today that are just as thoughtful, inspiring, aesthetically pleasing and engaging as the ones made in yesteryears. Our view of the art of the past is warped by the tendency for the good to be preserved and passed on while the bad is cast aside. However, in the past 30 years or so media corporations have gotten marketability down to a science in the name of creating safe investments, not stimulating art. That approach creates highly sucessful, super visible, and entirely bland slop like the Marvel movies and Call of Dutys of the world. Its not that its all worse, its just that the great stuff is lower profile. In my opinion the advent of high-bandwidth internet has partially counteracted this by making global distribution acessable to the everyman.

Damn, and I nixed that because I didn't want to get called Ellen lmao... thank you for your rates!

Zephyr

Rio

Gwendolyn

Eleanor

I like to think that my runners-up were strong choices but I await your judgement. (This isnt self doxing... right?)

Very haunting at times too, theres this one scene that lingered in my head for weeks. Fantastic movie, highly reccomended.

Unironically, seriously, hear me out, Mice Tea.

It is a beautiful story about community, identity, self-discovery and what we decide to do with our lives... yes there are a couple dozen sex scenes across the eight or so story paths and yeah sure at its core it's about a tea that turns people into furries but it's GOOD. I cried!

While most erotic VNs are obnoxiously saturated in horny-ness Mice Tea avoids that by having a good sense of proper time and place for that kind of thing, it handles sex more like the way a romance novel would. Plus, the explicit content is meant to be optional and it gives you a chance to skip them entirely with a pop up containing warnings about kinks and potentially triggering stuff. Also everyone is in their mid twenties-mid thirties so yeah.

It's $20 on itch.io but it goes on sale on Steam occasionally. There is also a free demo version that can be found on either of those places.

"Wash"

Was this machine translated from spanish?

as much as i would like to be the cute trans librarian there also needs to be a strong agricultural workforce in order to make shit work so I guess Ill work the fields, ill bring my copy of Four Season Harvest though! it could be really cool!

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If I had my way every domicile in human history would have one of these and a pair of decks.

There's something about the smugness and enightened centrism that makes it somehow more enraging than the mask-off queerphobia found elsewhere. To be clear, shame on the person who made the video. Its one thing to have internalized queerphobia, and its another thing entirely to put that out into the world and try to position yourself as "one of the good gays".

It was pretty bad and handled the subject matter extremely poorly. I hated it a lot.

The premise is strong, a summer camp lasher flick but the camp is for "conversion therapy". However it manages to be transphobic, homophobic, and enbyphobic even outside of the scenes of adults abusing queer children. Theres a lot of that "oh theyre queerphobic but actually theyre secretly gay haha gotcha!" bullshit. Theres this femboy guy who plays this femme fatale role, iirc he was one of the camp's "success stories" and he really didnt deserve to get got IMO. At the end the murderer turns out be a victim of the camp from a couple decades back and the teenage protagonist lectures this mindfucked middle aged lesbian about how revenge is wrong and that, if you think about it she's worse than the child abusers (and occasionally murderers) that she killed... because reasons?

It was cool that the protag was a transmasc nonbinary person, you don't get to see that kind of representation very often. Too bad they are an incredibly boring character. I think this movie was made for straight liberals to watch and go "look at those bad people! Good thing Im not like them!" Meanwhile some of these scenes will personally resonate with a queer audience in ways that are uncomfortable at best and triggering at worst. The thing is it's very competently made and at no point does it even approach "so bad its good" territory.

CW for SA mention

Did anyone ever get a 100 that way?

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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A young man comes of age in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war. It's a beautifully written work of magical realism, a subgenre of realistic fiction that incorporates supernatural elements in an unobtrusive way. It is very much not a YA novel despite the main character being an adolescent.

Flatland - Edwin Abbot

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Written in 1884 this is a pretty weird story about a two dimensional person encoutering a three dimensional person. One part social commentary about class and gender, one part uhh... science fiction? Math fiction? Geometric philisophical allegory? It's pretty short and its value as a cultural artifact alone makes it worth the read.

Changing Planes - Ursula K. Le Guin

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A collection of short stories that are strung together by the oddball premise that air travel was so dull that people started slipping into different worlds out of sheer boredom. Each story acts as a study of a society different from ours in some fantastical way. My favorite is the one where people share a single communal dream every night.