Tuesday Link Round Up

[wolffyluna]

(Programming note: the university semester is starting soon, so I may be around less in the near future)

• There is a giant parade float thing of Donald Trump as The God Emperor of Mankind. It's definitely satirical, and not comparing Trump favourably to the Emperor-- but ehh. Least I can say is 'it's pretty.' (IMO, While Trump and The Emperor are both terrible people, they're not that similar? Though The Emperor maybe similar to how Trump sees himself, and that's the artitst's point? Who knows.)
• The Five Worst Dates in Dragon Age: aka The Best Description of the Inquisition Ever.
• (cws: rape, abuse, violence, victim blaming, the ways communities are very bad at dealing with the aftermath of those things) (I would put this under a cut, but dreamwidth is not playing ball.) Accounting For Ourselves an anarchist's essay on the ways that communities' attempts at dealing with problems of rape and abuse through rehabilitative/transformatibe justice fail spectacularly. It's enummeration of the problems these processes have is really useful and well thought out. For example, one of the big problems these processes have is that there isn't a clear idea what success, failure, or a reasonable timeframe is. However, the suggested solutions... are, let's just say, very anarchist. Ranging from "we can't have experts, because then we'll have authorities!" to "what if the survivors attacked their rapists? that sounds like a good idea!" (...one of the great problems in my life if that I am bad at explaining more moral widgets, so I can't explain my visceral reaction to that other than 'revenge is not great, premeditated violence is bad, and any community that is okay with it's members strangling each other* is desperately unsafe.)

*actual suggestion from the article, there.

• All Night Laundry, an interactive horror webcomic-thing that has sucked me in. Has a beautiful atmosphere, especially at the beginning. Also, cosmic horror and time travel are too great flavours that go well together! Very more-ish as a piece of entertainment. (There's a lot of warnings this should have, but they are all spoilers of varying degrees, so--) (Also, queer protagonists. That's nice.)

Comments

[sisterofsilence]

Oh god, the whole Emps/Trump thing is back?

I wish people would actually read and understand canon for five hot seconds before they come up with dumbass ideas. Trump wouldn't see himself as the Emperor out-of-universe, because the Emperor's META is all about helping ALL of Humanity. In-universe-though? Yea, he'd be that shitty ass leader in M41 acting like he's the Emperor come again because Emps being misinterpreted in M41 by fascists as a fascist is sort of half the point of the setting.

In addition, the comparison has also been used by literal fascists and trumpsupporters to show their SUPPORT. So I don't even know what those people were trying to do, other than scare the bejesus out of folk that think its in SUPPORT of trump. Yikes. I can't wait for it to go away.

As an addendum, I can't help but laugh whenever I realise that there's a canon line about the Emperor musing to Malcador about how He never did see eye-to-eye with the builder of the Chinese wall. They should bring that back some time, just casually passive-aggressively put that right there on the Community page. That'd be good.

TL/DR: SoS has a heap of FEELINGS about this shit and she wishes it would just go the fuck away. Assholes and all, preferably.

[wolffyluna]

I'm not sure it's so much 'back' as 'finally got spit out of my tumblr queue'.

I'm mostly heartened by the fact that the artist probably meant it as a satire of how Trump sees himself? (even if it's not true I'd like to believe it)

But yeah, there's no real comparison between Trump and The Emperor. Even if the Emperor was Not a Good Dude, they're quite different, in that the Emperor has, like, self control, and isn't completely self aggrandizing.

[sisterofsilence]

It's Italian carnival, it is for sure satire.

But it is very, very, VERY, poorly researched satire. Like, if you are aware enough of Warhams to make a Trump-Emperor satire image and spend this much time and money on it, you are also aware enough to have seen people do this unironically and therefore think better of doing it.

The fact that this dude didn't, tells me two things - he isn't in the Warhams fandom & he didn't really look to see how his satire fits its context - and both of these conspire to make him fail Poe's law with anyone that isn't specifically aware of Italian carnival grotesques being blatant mockery per default.

Which is a lot of people.