Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.
More lessons from Pratchett:
Good isn’t always nice (i.e. sometimes appearing nice is a luxury you can’t afford if you want to do the right thing) (this refers to setting bones and fighting evil, not to being pointlessly horrible)
Evil can appear very nice indeed (watch out for people who smile while they deny your basic humanity)
People can suck, be rude and actively work against their own best interests, but personkind is still something we must protect so they can keep being wonderful in between all the stupid
“Person” is always a broader category than you think
It’s not about who’s best for the job - it’s about who shows up and does it
Be very aware of how you treat those in your power; you will be judged on it
Respect women, which explicitly includes trans women (with or without beards and steel-toed boots)
Kings: no. Hard-boiled eggs: yes
No one - not military leaders, not kings, not patricians, not gods - no one is beyond consequences or above justice
Addendum: those who think they are are often the worst of the worst
Kids understand more than we think and sometimes the best way to protect innocence is to arm them with knowledge, confidence, and skill
How you’re born is intrinsically less important and less relevant than who you make yourself into
I can’t put it into a pithy sentence but that bit where Magrat is like “let’s toss [Lily] off the tower” and Nanny answers with “go ahead then” and Magrat hesitates bc it’s easier to do something like that together than to make the decision alone… impactful.
People don’t like to admit it bcs cringe or w/e but Homestuck really did revolutionize the webcomic as a storytelling medium and I am endlessly frustrated that before webcomic artists could really stretch our legs fucking webtoonz swooped in, set a new, more restrictive standard, and then monetized and monopolized the ever living fuck out of the concept of The Webcomic until it drove away anyone who couldn’t be a professional quality manga artist for free, and now the only webcomics that actually feel like spiritual successors to Homestuck are so obscure they’re basically cult classics that you have to beg people to read.
Like it’s just so wild to be in high school and see Homestuck be like “we’re using like fifteen different artistic mediums to tell this story bcs we can” and be really fucking inspired by that, only to grow up and see basically every webcomic ever have to conform to One Single Standard or fucking perish.
Actually, I realized my real point here: we all need to make our art weirder. Please make weird art. I want more stuff like Prequel Adventure and 17776 and MyHouse.wad and I want it now. Capitalism thrives on conformity. We must be weird at all costs.
So many notes ppl confused by corn wielding Colima dog wait until you see the dancing figures…..blow your mind. Teach you true love
humankind…what more can I say. I can only aspire to have such deep and rich a human connection with anyone in this life that will be as radiant as a ceramic figural pair of dancing xolos
They’re also at the center of a roundabout
Mexican here, fun fact! While we call them “Dancing dogs”, they’re a young pup and an old dog, and the older one is revealing wisdoms right on the pup’s ear.
You’ll recognize the older dog bc he’s got wrinkles!! It’s a wonderful scene!!
It always surprises me how many deactivated users there are here. And maybe most of them are the natural consequence of URL-hopping, but beyond those, the ones that intentionally deactivated–just the idea of actively deciding to terminate an account is so foreign to me.
I’m in the business of atrophy.
My Neopets exist, and persist, and are dying and continue to die for the last ten years my account has been dark. My penguin lived until the day Club Penguin died, immobile in its igloo, decoration among the puffles. My Webkinz stand in rooms which time refuses to allow even the dignity of gathering dust. My footprint stuffs the digital shelves of datacenters for sites and accounts I do not remember making.
I’ve made a horde of scattered exoskeletons, shells which I cannot even call ghosts because that implies a presence. They are husks. They are archives. They are records. I do not ever consider the mercy of allowing them to die.
How short is your temper? Do you consider yourself toxic to others? How mentally stable are you?
And of course, you could put a standard/semi-standard symbol in the white (biohazard and radioactivity symbols are always a hit), but you could also get creative.
I was working with an item today that just utterly flabbergasted a part of me (the other was deeply frustrated with the catalogue record AS SOMEONE APPARENTLY THOUGHT IT WAS PRINTED ON SILK, coming back to that in a minute) … but ANYWAYS … said item is a replica of a medieval manuscript prayer book THAT IS ENTIRELY WOVEN out of grey and black silk … WOVEN … text, images, intricate grey scale, WOVEN … NOT PRINTED …
And it’s flabbergasting because it’s from 1888, Jacquard machine, IT USED PUNCH CARDS to weave these intricate pages … something like 400 weft per near square inch … IT looks like a page of textured paper, but it’s not, it’s entirely SILK … F*CK …
Anyways …
OKS I’ve since calmed down and found out that the reason they used “printed” is because it is essentially printed by a computer … in a weird way; when I import the record, I’m just gonna take that note out …
