Nilotheimp - Impish Shenanigans

at the start of the game karlach and astarion are absolutely fucking reeling from being suddenly freed and are in a state of manic joy that would probably seem alien to them like a week ago, while gale has been locked in his depression tower for so long he's almost completely forgotten how to talk to people. shadowheart has not a single fucking clue whats going on because shar keeps slurping up her memories and lae'zel is literally in the midst of her ultimate nightmare scenario and trapped on an alien planet with a bunch of jackasses who have no idea whats happening. so almost everyone has experienced a situational personality shift and isn't quite the person they were a year before you met them. EXCEPT Wyll. Who is just like "this isnt even the weirdest thing thats happened to me this month." my man got scooped up, tadpoled, and slammed back and said "oh well, not gonna ruin my day" and went about his business teaching self defense to children and slaying evil beasts. He didn't even seem confused he literally did not give a shit. no urgency. He's like "I'll put that in my day planner but is gonna have to wait until after i hunt down this demon." When you recruit him there is no sense of "oh man we really gotta help each other because we have the same problem" he just would have said yes because you asked and he's wyll. Or because you told him he could kill mindflayers. He'd be like "sick" and done, no questions asked. Just another Tuesday for the blade.

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

italian werewolf girl killin a vampire from the inside w dat garlic knot

they did surgery on a pangolin girl as well

Shark friend

🦈❤️

thing i noticed

so the ips-n blackbeard has that bulky torso and those evil shoulder vents

you know the ones.

so basically, what i noticed is that, despite being the mech with The Big Greatsword, as far as i can tell the blackbeard completely lacks the range of motion required to perform complex swordfighting maneuvers (especially ones with a heavy blade such as the nanocarbon sword (although i'm not John Swordfighting so don't quote me on that))

so it's probably less used like a sword and more like a sharp tire iron or perhaps a lawnmower blade that you gave a wildly-swinging maniac. which. i mean it, is the blackbeard.

Get me a fucken job little jelly boi

saw this tweet from tom lancer and had to go silly mode

"Sekhmet killing its pilot" is actually a statistical error. The average Sekhmet kills 0 friendlies. Sekhmet Georg, who cascaded in a cave & kills over 10,000 each year, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Meow meow