Rather Have Parts Broken Than Glowing

I hear that a new game appeared, so let’s show our love with demon fan art, like so.

I baked some beetle bread!! <3

I really need to do more studying and write an essay on how Americanism is a genuine folk religion which reveres capital and the vague concept of “the free market” as a god of providence to be pleased in order to lead a prosperous life, also that the founding fathers are prophetic, perhaps even messianic figures who basically gave birth to this god through the revolutionary war, and that the vast majority of conservative Christians in America revere capital more than the god they claim to serve in an ironic sort of golden calf situation.

hey! if you're not already aware, my favorite game ever, a boomer shooter called TF2, is currently facing a massive bot problem. bad actors are hosting bot players to farm items and take advantage of the economy, or to go out of their way to disrupt games with cheats like aimbot and wallhacks. an entire game can be put to standstill by 3 sniper bots, and Valve continues to monetize the game despite their several-year long stint of no communication to the community, and no action to stop the bots.

if you'd be willing to take a second, check out this website and sign this petition which will be physically printed and sent to Valve.

a lot of people have a deep love for this game, and it makes me sad that it's made to be as unapproachable as it currently is by people who choose to detract joy from the world because they cannot create it.

Googoo thanks you for your signature. Scout (me) also thanks you for your signature.

Ninjas don’t wear black. They used to disguise themselves as civilians. Unlike ninjas in movies, the real guys were smart enough to know that wearing a black outfit with a face mask wasn’t the best strategy for blending in. Source

Very late response, but I thank you.

Didn’t really understand him until reading this, cleared a few things up.

Hello, I am a person interested in folklore. I wanted to ask if you who Assur or Ashur is and what legends he has and if it isn’t too much of an issue, give some good sources on Mesopotamian myth and folklore as I can’t tell what’s real and what’s bullshit.

Probably the best overviews of Ashur’s character are still Wilfred G. Lambert’s short 1983 article The God Aššur and Grant Frame’s My Neighbour's God: Aššur in Babylonia and Marduk in Assyria.  If you can read German, Wiebke Meinhold’s Die Familie des Gottes Aššur is a must read too. The wikipedia article is actually quite in depth too now, a pleasant surprise - it used to be a nightmare.

Long story short, it is generally agreed Ashur started as a divine representation of the namesake city (or perhaps the hill on which it was built) and with time could become essentially whatever its political interests required; so, for instance, when his cult center turned from a city-state into the capital of an empire interested in military expansion, he gained warlike traits. His early character was fairly indistinct, and he had no signature epithets which would point at a specific sphere of influence, though.

While it’s par the course for ancient Mesopotamia to have gods essentially represent the political interests of their cult centers, this is particularly extreme in Ashur’s case because for a solid chunk of his history it’s hard to even speak of him as a personified deity. For example, the Old Assyrian texts from the trading colony Kanesh essentially make it difficult to tell when the god is meant and when the city. Regarding specific cities as numinous, basically divine, locations are not without parallel either, but rarely to such a degree. It’s possible he was initially depicted in art in non-anthropomorphic form, see here for some discussion. However, anthropomorphic depictions might be present on seals too, see here.

As a result of Ashur’s lack of personhood in early sources, he had very few truly distinct associations with other deities to speak of. Basically the only exception is the minor goddess Sherua, but it was already a matter of heated debate in antiquity how they are related to each other. There are also virtually no references to him having parents; no genealogical speculation centered on him ever developed before the emergence of a Neo-Assyrian trend of referring to him as self created (bānû ramānīšu).

The earliest evidence for a gradual shift towards making Ashur into a more standard deity, as opposed to a semi-personified deified city, are probably theophoric names. Additionally, rulers of the city addressed him as a source of their authority and presented themselves essentially as governors acting on his behalf, similarly to what their counterparts in Eshnunna and Der did with Tishpak and Ishtaran, respectively.

Further important developments occurred in the Middle Assyrian period, some 4-5 centuries later. The idea at this time was to essentially pattern Ashur’s character on Enlil. This is attested to various degrees for the heads of many pantheons on the periphery of Mesopotamia, you can read more about other similar cases here. However, in Ashur’s case this process was nowhere near as straightforward as sometimes claimed, as recently stressed by Spencer J. Allen in Aššur and Enlil in Neo-Assyrian Documents. For the most part, the two were effectively separate, even though Ashur did borrow Enlil’s titles, traits and even some of his relatives and servants.

Ashur generally doesn’t appear in myths. The only exception I can think of is that during the reign of Sennacherib there was an attempt to develop a rewrite of the Enuma Elish with Ashur taking Marduk’s role but it’s… well, an incomplete rewrite and nothing more. A pretty incoherent one at that according to Lambert.  Regarding your other question: I have a recommended reading doc linked in my pinned post, you can find it here.

ok so for those of you who don’t know, there’s this twitter account of a japanese local hero mascot named dentman who went viral recently due to this tweet

but yeah he saw the tweet. and his response went viral as well (which is how i found his account)

and he just has like. hourly posts reminding you to brush your teeth

oh and his rival? his name is mr. mutans. whenever dentman posts he makes a post of his own, ofc

but THAT’S NOT ALL. literally while making this post i found a THIRD ACCOUNT that’s all about taking your meds

safe to say i’m losing my mind

anyway the point of all this was that people are ALREADY beginning to draw them ship art 😭

and the reactions are everything

I CANT ADD ANY MORE IMAGES BUT TRUST ME THIS IS SO FUNNY

toxic one-sided dentman yaoi wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card but it DEFINITELY IS NOW!

Sometime on this site, you can find the info you need, mostly due to people having a hyper fixation on a certain topic. So sometimes the clowns can have knowledge.

Are sharks actually smooth? I keep seeing people saying they aren't but also others saying they are and now I'm confused :(

sharkskin is completely covered with tiny tiny grooved teeth, which gives it some interesting properties!

these denticles are aligned in one direction with the jagged edges pointing back towards the tail, which breaks fluid mechanics in some weird completely bullshit ways that gives it basically no water resistance in that one direction.

this, in effect, means that sharks are INCREDIBLY smooth and can go as fast as they like in any direction, provided that the direction in question is forward.

however, if the shark tried to go backwards, or if you ran your hand down it the wrong way, the opposite effect would take place- the sharp edges of the denticles would create SUPER water resistance and shred the bejeesus out of your hand.

if you’re going to pet a shark, make sure you go from the head back!