Personal Riddles

BEKKATHYST Autumn 2023 Giveaway!

~This giveaway is in no way affiliated with Tumblr.~

Please read thoroughly before entering!

Hello lovely Tumblr folk! It’s that time again- I have a giveaway for you all. 💜

We have an online store that could use your support!

You can also find us on Instagram.

About us: My business is a small, family-run establishment that I started here on Tumblr in 2013. I’ve been lucky enough to grow to the point where this supports me, my partner, and our daughter. In the US we also had a brick-and-mortar shop in which I employed my mom and a few of my siblings. However, we closed it to be able to move to Austria, my home country! 💜 I strive to put compassion and ethics above all else in my business, and I hope that shines through. We have a website but also run many fun sales directly here on Tumblr!

This giveaway will have two winners.

What the first winner receives:

All the pictured crystals, plus a $100 gift card that can be used for our online store or our Tumblr sales. Pictured crystals: rose quartz freeform, nellite sphere with stand, kambaba jasper sphere with stand, purple labradorite freeform, silver moonstone freeform, polished chevron amethyst, thullite sphere, lizardite sphere, Mongolian black quartz crystal, amethyst rainbow amethyst druzy cut base, blue labradorite pebble, and a polished amethyst point. I wanted to pick some more unique stones for this giveaway!

What the second winner receives:

A $50 gift card that can be used for our online store or Tumblr sales!

Rules:

You must be 16 or older. (If under 18 you MUST have parent’s permission)

You can be from anywhere in the world! I am shipping from Austria.

Shipping is entirely free, I will cover it. But if you live in a country that charges import tax on gifts, you are responsible for it. If it gets sent back to me, you will need to pay shipping to have it sent again.

You must be following me, so you can get updates if anything about the giveaway changes.

Please check out our online shop!

Reblog this post to enter. Likes count as additional entries. No giveaway or spam blogs. If you reblog on a side blog, let me know in the tags what the name of your blog is that you’re following me with.

At the end, each entry will be assigned a number and the winner will be chosen by a random number generator.

The giveaway ends on December 20th, 2023.

The winners will be messaged and must respond with their full name and address within 24 hours, or a new winner will be chosen.

The Great Smudge - Table Cat

hey so uhhh here’s an important update on what’s apparently happening at the border, especially with the use of the old japanese internment camps

all i can say is i’m sickened by this mess, by the atrocities committed against innocent people. and now there will be no surveillance. no one will be able to see what happens to these people. the UN, the media, and any other human rights organizations cannot get into these facilities, either, in order to stop what’s happening. by the way, coast guard members were apparently aiding in this process as well. so now it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a military movement.

no one gets in. no one gets out.

so when are we going to call this what it is? it’s fascism. it’s genocide. and if we don’t stop it now, it’s going to be disastrous.

baby dragons with wings that are disproportionate to their bodies until older but nonetheless stubbornly trying to pick themselves up off the ground by running and aggressively flapping and managing to only get a few feet off the ground for a few seconds before crash landing

baby dragons that haven’t been exposed to priceless things such as gems and gold pieces and instead infatuate themselves with other unusual shiny things — like silverware, brass clocks, instruments, and pots and pans

baby dragons being afraid of the family cat for a while until after a few days the cat wanders up to the sleeping pile of scales and fire and curling around them for a nap in the sunshine

baby dragons stealing the shiny car keys and chewing on them

baby dragons using the cat’s scratching post

baby dragons wearing tiny saddles with knight-in-shining-armour action figures riding on their backs

baby dragons roasting mini marshmallows mid-air when you toss them before eating them

And not just me being vaccinated, but everyone around me too, because there are some vaccines I cannot safely have and I rely on everyone else around me being vaccinated to avoid it.

Things like, oh, say, whooping cough, which I actually had as a child because I went to school with the victims of antivaxxers, and we all got super sick and coughed so hard the blood vessels in our eyes ruptured and every fit felt like you were going to die choking for breath.

And tonight, a friend of mine who happens to be a mother, hauled me into an argument on Facebook where people in her neighborhood group were hosting a “whooping cough party” cause one of their kids got sick, and the tag line was “come on over and get it over with lol”, and words cannot convey how much visceral hatred I had for this person in that moment. If I could have set them on fire with my brain, I probably would.

Because I can wholly remember sitting in bed clutching my little chest, desperate for the pain to stop, making that horrible wheezing sound, with tears streaming down my face, utterly convinced I was going to die if I couldn’t draw breath. And that went on for months because even with treatment, the cough can take up to three months to subside. And that is a horrible thing for a child to go through. I cannot stress enough how painful and terrifying it was and my parents for all their faults could do nothing. They’d done everything they could to keep me safe from other illnesses. I had all my other vaccines, I just couldn’t have that one.

And the thing is, you can get it again, it’s not a one time deal. You can get it more than once, and doctors actually recommend you get a booster shot for it every ten years, and I can’t do that. I cannot protect myself from it. I rely on other people being responsible, and taking the necessary steps to keep whooping cough outbreaks low, and the only way to do that is through regular routine inoculation.

And these fuckers are throwing a party??? What???

Let me be clear, it is through profound measures of willful ignorance, hubris, and yes privilege, that people have allowed for things like measles and whooping cough to make a come back. It is a privilege to live in a healthy society where you can expect all your children to make it out of infancy. It is a privilege to not die young from TB, it is a privilege that many people before you had to suffer for and work hard to bring about, all in the hopes that another child wouldn’t have to go into the iron lung from polio. And through the privilege of never having had to suffer, you have elected to do harm. You have elected to allow for the resurgence of mumps, and measles and coughs that sound like a death rattle in the lungs of infant children, and then you have the absolute audacity and malice in your souls to celebrate and throw “sickness parties” because you’d rather let your child suffer through unnecessary illness than be vaccinated?

How dare you. You have a moral and social obligation to protect your children and the people around you, and not only have you chosen to wave this responsibility, but you are actively endangering others?

How dare you.

And the thing is I know, I know in your own misguided way you think you are doing what is best for you child. But if the road to hell truly is paved with good intentions, I can tell you now with absolute certainty that you fuckers have got your own burning stars on the walk of shame.

Vaccinate your god damn kids. And get your booster shots while you’re at it. You might just save someone’s life without ever knowing or trying.

I am just old enough that the vaccine was unreliable when I was a child, and my mother set up as many playdates as possible for my sister and me with kids who had chicken pox, because she knew people who had never had it as kids and she was terrified we’d miss out and then encounter it as adults (when it is much, MUCH more dangerous).

Having chicken pox sucks. Vaccines are fuckin’ great.

I now have a compromised immune system due to side effects from chronic conditions, so you know what else is great? Herd immunity.

Vaccinate yourselves. Vaccinate your kids. If you can vaccinate, DO vaccinate, for the sake of everyone who can’t (for medical reasons), and for the sake of people with weak immune systems. The story of humanity is human beings helping other human beings. The link between vaccines and autism has been disproven, the ingredients used to preserve vaccines are not dangerous, we’ve been making vaccines for quite some time and we’re well versed in the potential risks and have done everything to minimize them. We have never lived in an era in which diseases like measles, whooping cough, and more ran rampant, and so a lot of people have forgotten how BAD they were, but read a damn book, figure it out, and weigh the risk of vaccines against the terror of disease in the time before vaccines.

Haruka “I’m not jealous” Tenoh

How to throw away a bouquet as if it’s a fucking bomb

Pls

This is an issue of how American budgets work, because America is the most idiotically designed country you could ever imagine.

American budgets are not organized by need, they’re effectively PRESCRIBED.  There’s no pool of government funding that is assigned according to where money needs to go at any given time.  We assign budgets in advance and they’re extremely difficult to change.  Guaranteed if you ask any American politician about this, they’ll tell you it’s to “reduce government waste” by making people use their resources carefully instead of taking on unnecessary projects.

This is not what actually happens.

Because if you DON’T USE 100% of your budget every year, you will be assigned a lower budget for the next year, “to prevent government waste.”  So they prescribe you a budget in advance and then you HAVE to use all of it, or else it’s a NIGHTMARE to do anything new in the future – you have to go through a billion hoops to get funding for a new infrastructure project that is a one-time expense.  It’s not cheap to build a new thing, but because it’s a public good that will last a long time, you don’t need to budget for it every year – but the one year you do need to budget for it, it’s an enormous pain in the ass because everyone responsible is desperate to “cut government waste.”

So with American construction projects, especially on roadways, you basically have a system where people are FORCED to take longer than necessary just to use up their budgets.  It is literally a regular occurrence in America for a road to be torn up for no reason, just so they can spend money filling it back in for the next four months.

And that’s why the crumbling, outdated, and underfunded infrastructure in America is an embarrassment to western civilization.

And the fact that this fucks up transportation, stresses people out, makes us all sicker and more miserable, and forces us to sit in traffic wasting gas that we have to spend a bunch of money on because one of the things we never invest in is mass public transit (because of heavy lobbying by the automotive and oil industries) – all of that should probably not be considered a coincidence.

In the name of “efficiency” and “cutting government waste,” we’ve invented the most fucked up, purposefully wasteful mandatory maximum budgeted spending that has totally eliminated our ability to respond to short term budgetary needs.  Potholes take years to fix, construction goes on for years even as nothing actually gets done, etc.  All because the budgets HAVE to be wasted in order for anyone to keep their funding – and notice how much of American budgets go toward things like “administrative costs”.  

Our entire country is a money laundering conspiracy.

American capitalism is the most wasteful garbage budgeting system on earth.

It is fundamentally designed to be inefficient and stupid, because doing it this way allows us to keep government spending (on public goods) as close to the absolute minimum as humanly possible in order to preserve the lowest possible tax rates on the people who ‘matter’ to the people who are making the decisions – which of course means the wealthy donor class created by the dramatic shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan.

It’s not hard to make countries look decent when comparing them to the US. There is still suffering and injustice in all these ‘progressive’ countries.

The major song from Revolutionary Girl Utena: Bud of the White Rose! I had this stuck in my head for so long, it’s super catchy. Just a little preview of what’s going to be in the stream tonight!

Edit: OMG JUST OMG EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS SONG IS PERFECT FROM THE WEIRDLY GRIM LYRICS AND UPBEAT TUNE TO ANTHY’S BEAUTIFUL VOICE AND THE FACT THAT THIS IS THE ONLY TIME TOUGA DANCES IN THE ENTIRE MUSICAL OMG we’ve watched this over and over trying to get the translation done and it gets me hyped every goddamn tiemmpwiefohpqwddkc;jaSLD

Come watch the show!!!

✨ Eternal Sailor Mars! 🔥 and Eternal Sailor Neptune! 🌊 ✨

Although I’ve had the manga canon in mind while working on this fanart series (past pics if you’ve missed them!: 1, 2, 3) but when it came time to think about which senshi pair I’d draw next… it just had to be these two. And the reason for that is not their manga iterations, but that classic episode at the beginning of Sailor Moon Sailor Stars where Mars and Neptune have to team up and work together. IMO it’s one of the most memorable episodes from Stars, and I just love it so much, it makes me wish we got more interaction between them. Neptune is basically the kind of person anime!Rei is trying to be… the dynamic is so perfect!