Hate To Be The One To Say It But The Only Real Way To Watch Merlin (2008) Is To Ship Basically Everybody

Listen, if a Bad President can come in and take away our rights and we're dependent on a Good President replacing them in four years to give us back our rights, then we do not have any rights.

If politicians can take or distribute them, then they're not "inalienable" and they're not "rights."

We don't have inalienable rights we have conditional privileges, divvied out according to the whims of whoever currently holds the reins.

And if we want to have actual rights, then we must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.

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The wildest thing about Ben 10 is that it took until 2005 for someone to have the idea "what if a kid could turn into a bunch of aliens" like this isn't obviously the coolest and most marketable premise for anything ever. Each design is a new toy. A new powerset. Come on.

But to prove that it wasn't a fluke, they continued to have the best ideas for every aspect of it. How does he transform? A cool watch you can also sell as a toy. That watch's name? Omnitrix. Say it. It's so satisfying. How many aliens? Ten. Nice round number. The kid's name? Ben. The show's name? Ben Ten. His full name is Benjamin Tennyson, a normal, plausible name, but he also turns into 10 aliens.

Bigger brands dream about this synergy. Better writers would kill for this coherence. So holistic. So intuitive. The identity alone!!! The retro alien sound motif? Chilling. The green? Any other color would be wrong. The kirby krackle pattern? It seems so obvious in retrospect. The roadtrip format? Genius. Lesser writers would've done the spider-man high school thing. His arch nemesis being Cthulhu darth vader? Inspired, iconic, intimidating!

The execution has its highs and lows, but the idea??? Game changing. So self-evident that it seems inevitable. If Ben 10 didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Quick reminder as we head into Trump’s first week in office. We are about to see an onslaught of executive actions designed to strip of us our rights. We’ve seen this before.

Many of them won’t be legal, many of them won’t take effect immediately, and some of them will be just plain nonsense. Trump alone can’t change the law (yet anyway- that’s Congress) and there is an official government process for enacting most executive actions that works slowly.*

There will be time to fight against these orders—either by stopping them entirely, weakening them, or at least slowing them down.

The purpose of doing so many terrible things at once is to scare us. Is to intimidate us to cede more ground than we need to. Don’t let them.

Stay engaged, stay angry, stay hopeful (or spiteful- me tbh), and—most importantly—stay strategic. Find an organization you trust, follow them, and take action when they ask you to.

(Side note- pick just a few issues to care deeply about and only follow a few organizations you trust. Don’t try to solve everything all the time or consume every piece of news. You WILL burn yourself out and that’s not helpful for anyone. Trust me, speaking from experience. Staying 15% engaged is better than 120% for three months and then 0%).

What we’re seeing right now is a backlash to decades of progress—a dying (and by extension dangerous I’m not gonna lie) breath of those in power desperate to maintain control. They wouldn’t be trying to squash us if there wasn’t something to squash.

TL;DR- there’s gonna be a lot of bad stuff in the news today. Don’t give into panic. There will be time to fight most of it. Stay engaged.

*Unfortunately, there will be some actions the President can control on his own and will take effect immediately. ICE Raids being one of them. Here’s a Know Your Rights factsheet. To learn more and stay informed on this issue, recommend following National Immigration Law Center, CASA, Immigrant Defense Project.

yeah yeah yeah mortifying ordeal of being known and all that but sometimes a friend mentions something about you that you didn’t think was noticeable and it feels like your heart is being cradled in their hands

BOTTOMS (2023) + text posts Dir. Emma Seligman

posting a lone emo fah-biaan because i was too lazy and tired to finish a drawing i had of him being emo with fig

tumblr: on languages

Just rewatched this episode and I was bamboozled to see the origin story of The Scooter bc I, too, forgot about it.

The intrepid heroes may not remember where Adaine's scooter came from but I, obsessed with rewatching Fabian's no good very bad day, know exactly where that scooter came from