Frivolity At The Edge Of A Moral Swamp

Level 9 portrait for my Curse of Strahd / She is the Ancient witch boy, Victoro di Terzo.

With his messed up eye that got* poked out by his raven and replaced by a weird eye with three irises.

*"got" as in he did it himself XD

All previous portraits done for respective level ups:

carrie is almost explicitly about the cycles of abuse. it is almost explicitly about how women and girls are taught to reproduce the patriarchy. it cannot be isolated from either message.

it shows cruel teenagers not as a random whacky plot point but instead to highlight that we are taught to mock other girls for not being fuckable; lest we ourselves be considered not-fuckable. we will eat our own kind to survive. nobody helps her because to help carrie would be to turn against the patriarchy.

carrie's mother has experienced abuse at the hands of her husband and religion not as a "sad backstory" but instead because it lampshades her behavior when she then turns and abuses her daughter while citing that same religion. we are forced to ask the question: what is the difference between the patriarchy and religion? aren't they both systems of control? we often see mothers as being the "ultimate" in innocence and kindness - but this book challenges that narrative. abusive mothers exist, and and always have. abusive women exist and always have. white women, after all, love voting for donald trump.

men are almost absent from the book, but their presence lingers. it feels almost like the red mark made after a slap - the men do not have to be there; the women will continue to abide by the rules without question. it is a devastating, haunting condemnation of the notion of feminine fragility. it accurately asserts that women are cruel, are capable, are power-hungry - and often are hiding behind perceived innocence to mask that cruelty. the abuse carrie experiences rests in a doubled betrayal: it is because of another woman. the supposed "sisterhood" is revealed to be thin, a guise of equanimity that is only offered to the "right" type of girl/woman.

many of us were not the right type of girl.

to go back on these main and obvious themes of the book - to rewrite the mother as some caring and sad creature is... a curious choice. i can't explain it, but it feels almost like censorship to me. it refuses a deeper meaning of the book (and one that questions the patriarchy) in favor of the incredibly thin plot of "what if scary girl had scary powers." i literally don't even know what level of misogyny it is that we have to defang everyone around her in order to tell her story. i'm baffled by it.

in the era of trad wives endlessly posting abusive content of their children online - the adaptation had plenty of meat to modernize her mother. in the era of AI and revenge porn and social media - there's a huge amount of space for a competent writer to play around in. after all, if the abuse is recorded and posted to media - and as the audience we're watching it without interfering - the story is now about us. it asks us who we are comfortable bullying.

it's okay if you feel like you don't have the writing chops to talk about how many religions are abusive and tacitly enable domestic violence. it's okay if you feel like you couldn't write a believable teenage bully. it's okay if you're just interested in "scary girl has scary powers."

I’ll still take the chance to show mutuals that this is about the 130th anniversary of HX Cruises (formerly Hurtigruten) and the 1896 style cabin they built on MS Fritjof Nansen to commemorate the first expedition to Spitzbergen:

Guests can book the cabin for one night during their 2026 itineraries. Those who don’t want to book the cabin, can still tour it inbetween bookings. All proceedings made with the bookings go to their foundation.

They used reclaimed timber and tried to source as much as possible from antique dealers. They also developed a special aged timber and sea air scent that’s used for the cabin.

(was asked to put my Bluesky thread on tumblr)

Just because of some stuff I saw yesterday: if you are a minor online, please do not openly identify yourself as such. It is not safe, it allows adults who want to interact with minors for bad purposes to know you are one.

There are different, safer ways to accomplish your goals than to do that.

You do not need to identify yourself publicly as a minor online to:

Ask that people respect your boundaries

Not create or interact with adult material

Not be a victim of harassment

Not give away personal information

All these are normal things anyone of any age can do online.

If you are being invited into spaces you don't want to be in as a minor, or which people have asked you not to be in as a minor, decline for any or no reason. If an adult wants to do something with you they should not with a minor, decline for any or no reason. If people do not accept that, they are not people you should be interacting with. Don't pretend to be an adult, just don't say you aren't.

I understand that recently, more people under 18 tend to say that they are under 18 to protect themselves online. People who are not dangerous don't need that information. People who are dangerous will gladly use it because they know you are vulnerable. You are not protecting yourself.

As an adult who doesn't really care to interact with minors, I probably won't interact a lot with you if you are "young." That's not hard to catch from the way people act online. If you are "young" I care about you being safe and not victimized by opportunists, regardless of your birth year.

Protect your identity and safety on the internet, and if you are a person who is vulnerable, be a mysterious figure. Make silly posts. Complain about "people you know." Complain about "living with your parents."

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

Also consider Mikinakoos' as they're extending support beyond their traditional service areas due to the scale of this emergency!

Donations for Namaygoosisagagun First Nation:

Donations for Whitesand First Nation:

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.

as someone who's dealt with wildfire season smoke for a while (i live in northern california), i implore everyone in affected areas to please wear an n95 if you can whenever you leave the house. (i would also recommend this due to covid, but i mean anywhere now). if you have the ability, air purifiers inside your house will help immensely as well.