the-king-in-yellow:

ninjabikeslut:

“Facial-recognition technology is quickly becoming a mainstay of commercial and government surveillance systems. While it can provide benefits in automation and security, it is also a threat to privacy. Sophisticated algorithms can already extract information about your gender, age and even mood from a single image, and then link those physical attributes to commercial or government databases.”
-Face to Anti-Face

The most cyberpunk post on this website, possibly ever. 

monetizeyourcat:

beyoncesupremacy:

liquid-liamm:

what Germans do while waiting at traffic lights

that is soooooooo cute.

i could write a whole essay on the different imaginings of the relationship between human beings and one another mediated by urban society this reflects versus the ampelmännchen / ampelfrau. germany can be real depessing if you think about it too hard

darkamoeba:

chemicalbydefault:

amx004qubeley:

ninastestanin:

christmas-type-furret:

This is literally the most bomb-ass D&D story I’ve ever read in my life oh my god.

Holy shit ._.

NO!!!!

Holy shit, that’s hot.

As a GM there is literally no higher goal then to have a campaign end like this. This is amazing, WELL DONE GM, WELL DONE!

headcanon: the Kaaba is actually a prison for the gods of fallen civilizations, and Salat and the Hajj are rituals to maintain the wards

alternate headcanon: the Kaaba, as the Tabernacle before it, is a prison for the Abrahamic god and Salat and the Hajj are rituals to maintain the wards

headcanon: the original Yahweh was exhausted by the struggle to overcome the Egyptian gods and free the Hebrews and perished, during the wandering in the desert the trickster of the pre-monotheistic Hebraic pantheon began imposing

headcanon: what makes a place particularly supernaturally active is not leylines but mana, which is to the spiritual as humus and petrochemicals are to the physical: a residue of old dead life. Conscious life can both use and replenish mana at greater volumes. Like petrochemicals and soil mana can be exhausted when use exceeds replenishment; this is how cultures decline and achieve palingenesis through war and genocide

headcanon: Joseph Smith discovered a more efficient means of extracting mana, the LDS Church drew down the reserves of the Burned-Over District and then (with the Azusa Street Revival, Taos mystics, and LA neospiritualists) drained the American Southwest and now is powered mostly by the extensive reserves of the Pacific islands

headcanon: general mana depletion is why humans cannot practice magic or become gods at anywhere near the rate they once could; a global extinction event might return magic to the world

bloodandhedonism:

kontextmaschine:

headcanon: Joseph Smith discovered a more efficient means of extracting mana, the LDS Church drew down the reserves of the Burned-Over District and then (with the Azusa Street Revival, Taos mystics, and LA neospiritualists) drained the American Southwest and now is powered mostly by the extensive reserves of the Pacific islands

This sounds like it would be a good story. Develop it.

“story”?

Seriously, though, I’ve had a few universes in my head that might fit into. That pilot I mentioned was for sort of a Xena of the Americas - all the history and mythology mashed together. (Don’t know the native mythologies that well so it mostly would be settler mythologies OF the native mythologies) The migration of African gods with the slaves, the Mormon stories about Jesus in the Americas, the challenge of enlightenment rationalism.

Also since this was 2009 it had zombies (Baron Samedi), pirates (the protagonists) and steampunk elements (Freemasons).

Also I’ve had ideas for stories of the Wandering Jew, who’s actually a North African tribesman whose beloved was sacrificed to a river god, rebelled, and made it his mission to kill all gods, complicated by the fact that by now he essentially is the god of toolmaking and humanity. Jahweh’s his great enemy and a lot of the shit that falls on Jews was his devising, to attack God’s power base. He’s the one who gave Hitler the Spear of Destiny for example, because after all he *was* Longinus.

hitchhikerkisses:

HUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG

BLEEEUUUUUGHRRGHUUUUGUUHBL

BLEEEAAAAUGH 

HUUUUUUURRRRRGHBLHBHEBEEEHEEEEEEELLLLHNGG

kontextmaschine:

bloodandhedonism:

kontextmaschine:

headcanon: Joseph Smith discovered a more efficient means of extracting mana, the LDS Church drew down the reserves of the Burned-Over District and then (with the Azusa Street Revival, Taos mystics, and LA neospiritualists)…

Oh yeah Gaiman was a big influence obvs, specifically that bit in Sandman with an emaciated Bast eking out survival on the prayers of bookish girls for their sick cats.

Speaking of which Portland has a ton of outdoor cats, and I make a point of saying hi to each one I bike past. If I’m on foot I offer them my hand to sniff.

I’m being a politician, obvs, trying to get votes for the next city Jellicle Ball to reincarnate my dead cat, who was basically my familiar and the one creature I’ve had the closest bond with in life.

Do I believe any of this? Who knows, I practice it.

iguanamouth:

ok im just saying that if someone could walk a quarter mile with one of those nine foot neighborhood watch signposts slung over their shoulder with no interruptions maybe the neighborhood didn’t deserve the sign

the SNL interstitals get faster and faster cut not because of prevailing style but because NYC can no longer bear inspection as an icon of cool (neither can SNL)

pornhubcommentsonstockphotos:

via ihatetwizzlers

adrianxxx777:

The Gathering

The meme that freedom of speech only exists as a protection against the government… as recently as 5 years ago you’d see it voiced as that the First Amendment only applies against the government, which is at least true.

If you press one of the memevectors on it today they’ll usually fall back to this, revealing an understanding of the two as coextensive when in fact the First Amendment is merely the enshrining of the prior principle as an imperative of law.

The censorious types aren’t breaking a law or violating the constitution, they’re being unamerican. As always, the distinction between the United States and America should be observed.

The settler tradition here comes from a “free labor” school that held that slavery was repugnant and could best be warded through the conscious exclusion of blacks. Remaining a resource extractive economy to the 1990s if not present, it avoided the Great Migration and thus the black civil rights movement, which was then unavailable as an idiom for later identity struggles. Minorities - racial, sexual, social, were integrated through sufferance and assimilation rather than challenge.

Do you know how disorienting it is to move to a city where you hear women telling more rape jokes than men?

Riot grrl yes but what that challenged was women, to be more assertive. There’s a beloved nonprofit summer camp here that teaches girls to play rock, one of their PR appeals was a riot grrl veteran talking about girl power and a guy rocker talking about how hot he found chick rockers. Riot grrl’s most famous veteran does a PNW-themed show with America’s most famous blackface performer recurring skits of which are “hey aren’t second-wave feminists silly” and “isn’t it ridiculous that we’re both in drag and negotiating sexual boundaries”

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is the most Cascadian famous politician out there. We’re not that Christian, but those who are are pretty so, but in a backwoods outdoorsy way that’s friendly with hellbound neighbors and sanguine about them knocking up their daughters.

She’s also the most politiciany famous Cascadian, with all the bloviation, narcissism, and lack of expertise at anything beyond self-promotion that implies.