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#dmitri volodin
calmthefrontdoor · 5 days
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What if Everyone Had a Normal Job and Just Played D&D Together on the Weekends AU
Hera is the panicked DM
Kepler (Aasimar Oath of Conquest Paladin) and Jacobi (Halfling Artillerist Artificer) are having a macho pissing contest
Maxwell (Elven School of Enchantment Wizard) and Lovelace (Tiefling Mastermind Rogue) are actually strategizing and putting a plan together
Hilbert (Lizardfolk Knowledge Domain Cleric) and Eiffel (College of Eloquence Bard) are having a rules debate that will be absolutely meaningless in 2 turns
and Minkowski (Dwarven Battlemaster Fighter) is not so patiently waiting for her turn
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poorlittleminkmink · 2 years
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His old man pussy has me seeing hallucinations of him after his death
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kelber-4elver · 2 years
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and who doesn't love a divorce arc?
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natandacat · 1 year
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You survive a nuclear disaster that makes you go bald before puberty even hits, you lose probably all of your family and community to the fallout of said nuclear disaster, you watch your sister fight cancer for years and reach the limits of medicine and die, you spend years trying to push those limits and fighting for funding, you make a deal with the corporate devil for a chance to find a cure, any cure, anything that will stop cancer stop illness stop people from dying, you are forced to use your coworkers as test subjects and you do it because there is a chance a slight chance that this might save millions of lives millions of families, you live in abject solitude for years because you can't afford to connect with the people you might have to infect and nurse and let die, you are willing to do anything to make this worth it, you'll let the evil corporate copy your brain and leave you to die on a spaceship seven light years away from earth because at least it means that it might all be worth it in the end even if it's not you, even if your name is forever erased from history and you've had so many names by now it doesn't matter anymore, you're willing to kill to stay alive and continue your research, and in the end you die you die and it turns out that it was all a lie, all this time they were using you they were lying to you, it was never a potential cure, it was never the solution to the terrifying limits of medicine, this whole time they. They were using your desperation to make you work on a virus designed to wipe out all of humanity.
All your life. It all amounted to utter, complete nothing.
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falasteeniferret · 2 years
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A Doctor Aleksandr Hilbert Elias Selberg Dmitri Ilyich Volodin Moodboard
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boyruggeroii · 2 years
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ALSO ALSO Eiffel and Hilbert's relationship? Great! Loved it
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cristianlisandru · 2 years
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OPINIE | Deținuții ruși, ofertați de ”Armata privată a lui Putin”
OPINIE | Deținuții ruși, ofertați de ”Armata privată a lui Putin”
În timp ce oficiali ucraineni anunță că peste 7.000 de militari sunt considerați ”dispăruți în misiune”, presupunând că majoritatea sunt prizonieri în Rusia lui Putin, Moscova pare din ce în ce mai pregătită să își completeze forțele decimate pe frontul din Ucraina. Numai că mobilizarea generală nu a fost, încă, declarată. ”Carnea de tun”, însă, este reprezentată de deținuți care dețin cunoștințe…
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View On WordPress
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britishguy-on-the-tv · 6 months
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Hilbert:
Russian scientist, grew up near Volgograd. After the Volgograd meltdown, his entire family died of radiation poisoning. He went on to earn a PhD in Molecular Biology so that he could develop a retrovirus and make humanity healthier by reversing cellular degradation. He works for the Soviet government, but defects to the USA after receiving a job offer from an aerospace organization there. He ends up on a space station orbiting Wolf 359, where he does research on a virus known as the Decima virus, which is supposed to make the human body more resilient to illness and outside damage. Did he try to kill everyone on the space station? Yes. Did he rip out my girl Hera's brain and leave her in indescribable pain? Yes. But was he also a girlboss just trying his best to build his empire? That's for the polls to decide
Mashkov:
He's fun! He's supportive! He's talented! He's the best friend an anxious bisexual Canadian professional hockey player living in their father's shadow could ask for!
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mongeese · 2 years
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Morality in Wolf 359
A month ago, I made this post about how Wolf 359 doesn’t have any good or bad characters, just people making choices. I also said I’d write a full-length essay about this topic. Well, here’s the essay! Be warned, it’s a hefty 2400 words, because I wanted to be thorough. If you don’t want to read all that, here’s a TL,DR.
People who were interested in reading this: @commsroom, @a-side-character, @firstofficerrose, @afrogsmoraldilemma
Now without further ado, the essay, below the read more.
Wolf 359 is fantastic for many, many reasons, one of the most prominent being its amazing cast of characters. The podcast is practically a masterclass in interesting and nuanced character development, and a huge contributing factor to this is the continual subversion of the hero and villain labels. As Wolf 359 continues into the later seasons, it becomes obvious that while these roles exist in the narrative to an extent, they are not nearly as black and white as we would expect. There simply aren’t “good” or “bad” people of Wolf 359; there’s just people, making decisions, and those decisions can either hurt people or help people.
Wolf 359 is an utterly unpredictable and insane story, with constant (and might I add, incredible) plot twists. There is, however, at least one predictable cycle, which I like to call the “villain escalation”. Basically, the previous “bad guy” gets replaced by another, even bigger threat, which demotes the old villain to “morally grey supporting character”. The new threat forces our main protagonists to cooperate with the old threat, leaving room for the old “bad guy” to change their behavior and develop more complex relationships with both the other characters and the audience. Now, this isn’t the only way Wolf 359 removes the hero/villain labels from the equation, but it’s one of the most prominent. By my count, it happens 3 times over the course of the podcast, though that could be extended to 4 or even 5 depending on how you classify a “new threat”.
The first subject of villain escalation is Dr. Alexander Hilbert/Elias Selberg/Dmitri Volodin, caused by Captain Isabel Lovelace. Hilbert starts as such a stereotypical villain it’s almost comical. I mean, the evil Russian scientist is manipulating our heroes and performing unethical experiments on them; it can’t get much more stereotypical than that. Then Lovelace comes aboard, and suddenly he’s an ally against her. It’s a very uneasy alliance to be sure, but an alliance nonetheless. (Note that Eiffel and Minkowski do accept help from Hilbert before Lovelace arrives, but it’s mostly done by force, and the real turning point in the perception of his character occurs after she comes to the station.) Through this alliance, we learn more about Hilbert: his past, his motivations, his personality. He’s brutal sometimes, yes, and cruel, and externally callous. But he is also motivated by a genuine desire to save people. He had a family, a sister, who fell victim to radiation poisoning, which inspired him to pursue science and push further. When Eiffel is sick, he does everything he can to save him. He repeats over and over again that he did the things he did out of a sincere desire to make the world a better place. Dmitri Volodin is not just an evil monster, and for most of the podcast, he’s on the side of the “heroes”. This pushes the audience and even some of the main characters to start genuinely caring for him, to some extent.
Crucially, though, this does not absolve him. Hilbert may not have been causing pain and death just for the fun of it, but still he did cause pain and death. And it’s all for nothing, anyway, because the Decima experiment is a failure, but even if we ignore that fact, what he did was unjustifiable. (We shouldn’t ignore that failure, btw, but that’s a topic for another essay.) It doesn’t matter what “greater good” he was working toward – he committed atrocities, and there’s no justifying that. And none of the people he has wronged ever forgive him. They work with him, they talk to him, even protect him if necessary, but forgiveness is never considered. Alexander Hilbert, while maybe not a bad person, is certainly not a good person. Even after his death, he doesn’t get to be redeemed.
I said before that this development comes as a result of the villain escalation, from Hilbert to Lovelace. That’s true, considering how I defined villain escalation, but it’s important to clarify that Lovelace was never an outright villain, instead existing as a morally grey character from her first introduction. She absolutely and seriously threatens all the main characters, making it very obvious that she will hurt them if she needs to in order to reach her goal. But at the same time, she’s their best shot at making it off the Hephaestus alive. It’s also clear that that Lovelace’s aggression, paranoia, and callousness comes from a place of trauma, and that despite her harsh exterior and frequent threats, she does want to get everyone out of this situation alive. She cares about them, in her own way. Really, I think her character in season 2 can be summed up by two occurrences. In episode 26, she saves Doug Eiffel’s life, on purpose, with her blood donation, but in episode 28, she very nearly kills him, on accident, with her explosive rig. She wants to save people, but her paranoia and rage makes it so that she hurts people instead. And just as it was with Hilbert, her trauma is not an excuse. What matters most is whether she helps the people around her or harms them, and in season 2, she does both in equal measure.
We also see an interesting dimension of morality in the interactions between Hilbert/Selbert. The worst of Lovelace comes out when she’s with him. He’s the one who killed most of her crew, so she wants revenge on him personally almost as much as she wants revenge on Goddard Futuristics. In seeking revenge, she becomes her worst self. She gets violent, self-centered, becoming willing to hurt any number of people to reach her goal, in a way that is explicitly portrayed as a foil for Hilbert’s obsession with the Decima virus. It’s interesting, because when you compare them, the more “villainous” character, Hilbert, has significantly more noble intentions. Potentially saving lives with a revolutionary medical treatment is a lot more moral than tearing down the people who hurt you. And yet Hilbert is not more moral than Lovelace. This shows that intention is not as important as the effect you have on the people around you. It also shows how goodness is not innate, because Lovelace and Hilbert are quite similar in a lot of ways; they’re both consistently down with murder, for one, but there’s more subtle similarities as well. Thus the reason Lovelace is placed closer to the “good” end of the spectrum by the narrative can’t be because of some inherent morality. Instead, it must be because over the course of her life she has helped people more often than she has hurt them. Hilbert, on the other hand, has hurt much more often than he’s helped. Their day to day actions and decisions are what give them their moral statuses and roles in the narrative, not some designated classification of being a good or a bad person – both of them aren’t either.
The 2nd instance of villain escalation comes when the SI-5 board the station. At this point, we’ve been somewhat primed to view characters in moral shades of grey, but it’s still pretty obvious that they’re “bad guys”. There are repeated references to atrocities the SI-5 have committed, and they never let the main characters forget that they are in charge and that they would do terrible things to them if the situation calls for it. They’re opposite Lovelace, in a way, in that they are externally friendly, pleasant, and helpful, while being internally willing to harm any number of people. But still they’re human. Still they don’t deserve to be murdered, as Eiffel repeatedly reminds everyone.
The SI-5 members claim, as Hilbert did, to be working on behalf of a greater good that’s worth plenty of immoral actions (though to be honest, I’m doubtful how much they really believed that and how much they convinced themselves of it just because they liked being a part of something. But that’s a topic for another day). And as with Hilbert, this is not a justification. It’s more of the same, really. Maxwell cares for and helps Hera, but she still violates her autonomy in a pretty brutal way. Jacobi breaks after the mutiny, and in his brokenness becomes sympathetic, but still is not a completely good person. Then the 3rd and final villain escalation, the arrival of Cutter and Pryce, push both Jacobi and Kepler to make the decision to do the right thing and help the people around them. It’s not that any of them become good or become bad as things progress, or even that they were good or bad in the first place. They always had the capacity to do good things, we just didn’t see much of that side until the stakes got high enough. Their character shows in the decisions they make and the sides they choose to stand on.
Villain escalation is not the only way Wolf 359 flips the script on “hero” and “villain” roles. It also shows us that the protagonists, the “good guys”, can do bad things, and those bad things aren’t justified just because the people are good. Minkowski and Hera are lesser examples of this. Both of them hurt people: Hera tries to kill crew members multiple times and often lets her anger get the better of her, while Minkowski occasionally advocates for murder and actually does kill Maxwell. Minkowski also can hurt the people she cares about in a misguided attempt at leadership, such as when she sends Eiffel away in the finale. But again, these examples are relatively minor, though they are a further illustration of the fact that even seemingly good people can cause harm. The biggest subversion comes from Doug Eiffel.
For the first half of the podcast, Eiffel is portrayed as a semi-irresponsible goofball, who can be a bit of an ass but who is at worst harmless, and at best a resourceful and honorable man. This character assessment doesn’t stop being true, exactly. However, after about 40 episodes, we learn that he is also a man who ruined lives, for completely selfish and destructive reasons. That’s not something you can just overlook, or forgive. Once again, there’s no justification or absolution, even though Eiffel was at rock bottom and struggling with addiction. He did something awful, full stop, and our previous perception of him as a good person is flipped completely on its head.
Eiffel’s also shown to be a bit of a shithead even in the present day, on the Hephaestus. He commits microaggressions frequently as discussed in episode 51, “Shut Up and Listen”, and when confronted with this, he goes sullen and withdrawn. The harm there was unintentional, but it’s treated as just as real and damaging as all the other crazy threats the crew faces. This is a unique case, because Eiffel is actually forgiven by the people he’s wronged (Minkowski, Hera, and Lovelace), but that forgiveness comes because he made a tangible effort to do better, not because “he’s a good guy at heart” or some similar BS. All this is to say, Doug Eiffel isn’t necessarily a good person. He does good things and he does awful things, but because he makes the decision over and over to be helpful, and moral, and better, he is someone that the audience can root for.
I hope by now I’ve fully convinced you that Wolf 359 does not have any heroes or villains, merely people who are working with what circumstances they have, making decisions to either help those around them or harm them. This is a fairly radical position for a piece of media to have, with clear implications for the justice system and punishment. Wolf 359 doesn’t hesitate to explore those implications, either. It is extremely obvious that killing people, even if those people pose a threat to you, even if those people are seemingly reprehensible, is always immoral. The “villains” are kept alive whenever possible, and in those moments where they are killed, it is never a victory, always a tragedy. Mr. Cutter might be an exception, though I imagine Minkowski will still struggle post-canon with the fact that she took his life. That has interesting implications in the anti-capitalist part of the show’s messaging, as it implies that once someone causes a certain level of harm (as billionaires do), killing them becomes the lesser of two evils despite not being a moral act in and of itself. But honestly, I don’t feel equipped to unpack that right now. I will just say, that Wolf 359 wholeheartedly condemns capital punishment, which is of course a necessary consequence of the idea that people are not fully good or bad. You cannot kill only the bad people, because there are no bad people. Therefore capital punishment is just murder, and it cannot be justified.
I also really appreciate this position because it’s distinctly different from a redemption arc. No one is redeemed for their past. Hell, most of them don’t even apologize for their past behavior. They just start doing better. That’s a level of nuance I’ve almost never seen, and it offers fascinating commentary on the ideas of restorative justice. Wolf 359 tells us that even people who do awful, unforgiveable things can do better. No one is in a fixed moral position, and everyone is shaped by their circumstances. But importantly, this does not mean that you have to forgive anyone! You can rehabilitate, work with, and respect people while still recognizing the atrocities in their past, and while still withholding forgiveness. It’s a remarkable endorsement for restorative justice and a really important viewpoint to consider.
In conclusion: Wolf 359 is a fucking amazing podcast, guys. The writing is masterful, and it is incredibly fun and emotional, while also providing a cutting criticism of the current capitalist global system. In regards to morality and justice, it refutes the idea that people are internally “good” or “bad”, instead recognizing that everyone is just a person who does good and bad things, and the balance of these actions can change over a person’s life. This leads to a subtextual endorsement for restorative justice that is very radical (both in the leftist sense and in the cool sense). Overall, it’s a fascinating analysis of human nature and an excellent commentary on how we treat others. I love it so so so much.
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mobydyke · 2 years
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I think it's really purposeful that they put lovelace in the time loop in episode 49. she's stuck in a short-term loop for that episode, but she's stuck in a longer term loop for the entire show. her life never ends, it keeps repeating the same thing over and over again. variations on a theme. she dies she comes back she dies she comes back. things are the same, even when they're different. she's been dead since the beginning. she haunts the story from the start, she certainly haunts hilbert from the very beginning. she is both the haunted and the haunter. both the hunted and the hunter. she is beginning and end. she's in a constant state of death and rebirth. she cannot escape dmitri volodin/elias selberg/alexander hilbert , she cannot escape goddard futuristics, she cannot escape the uss hephaestus, she cannot escape wolf 359. she is not in orbit around the narrative, the narrative is in orbit around her. she cannot escape it because she is it. just like haunted houses are doomed to play out the same story every night, never understanding it, she is doomed to live out the same life, over and over and over again, never achieving a resolution. she is the last surviving member of her crew. the lone survivor of the shipwreck is left alive, but feels incapable of relating to people who didn't die in the wreck. surviving is something from which you will never escape.
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sewerpal · 1 year
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Dmitri Ilyich Volodin smoking cigarette with two oranges one of them moldy.
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poorlittleminkmink · 2 years
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*Hilbert voice* No, Eiffel, I will not “juju on that beat”
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kelber-4elver · 2 years
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who doesn't love a wedding?
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ukrainenews · 1 year
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Moscow has accused Kyiv of staging a drone attack intended to kill the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in the Kremlin, and vowed to retaliate.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that two drones had been used in the attack, but that they had been disabled by Russian defences.
In a statement published on its website, the Kremlin stated it considered the attack a planned terrorist act and an attempt on the life of the president of the Russian Federation.
“Two unmanned aerial vehicles were aimed at the Kremlin. As a result of timely actions taken by the military and special services with the use of radar warfare systems, the vehicles were put out of action,” the Kremlin press service said. It said that debris from the drone “fell on the territory of the Kremlin”.
“There were no victims and material damage,” the Kremlin said, adding that “the Russian side reserves the right to take retaliatory measures where and when it sees fit”.
“The president was not hurt as a result of the terrorist attack,” the Kremlin said.
Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said Putin was not in the Kremlin at the time of the attack. Peskov added that Putin would spend the day at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow.
The Ukrainian president, Volodomyr Zelenskiy, denied that Ukraine was involved in the attack. He said: “We don’t attack Putin, or Moscow, we fight on our territory and defend our towns and cities.”
“We leave it to the tribunal,” Zelenskiy added.
The Ukrainian president made his comments during a trip to Helsinki, where he also said Ukraine would launch a counteroffensive against Russian forces soon.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, also denied Ukraine’s involvement in the attack, saying it was the result of “local resistance forces”.
“Ukraine wages an exclusive defensive war and does not attack targets on the territory of the Russian Federation,” Podolyak said in a tweet.
“[The] emergence of unidentified unmanned aerial vehicles at energy facilities or on Kremlin’s territory can only indicate the guerrilla activities of local resistance forces. As you know, drones can be bought at any military store.”
Podolyak added: “Something is happening in RF [Russia], but definitely without Ukraine’s drones over the Kremlin.”
(snipped for length)
One unverified video circulating on social media showed what appeared to be smoke coming out of the Kremlin overnight. A second dramatic clip appeared to show the moment one of the drones hit the rooftop of the Kremlin Senate, an 18th-century mansion within the grounds of the Kremlin.
The Kremlin Senate reportedly houses the presidential administration, including Putin’s presidential office and his personal apartment.
Putin is understood to spend most of his time at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, although Peskov last week said that the president “occasionally” sleeps at his Kremlin apartment.
Several senior officials called on Putin to take retaliatory action.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said the overnight drone attack on the Kremlin left Moscow with no options but to “eliminate” Zelenskiy and his “clique” in Kyiv.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the chair of the State Duma, said the “Kyiv regime” should be labelled as terrorists and destroyed. “We will demand the use of weapons that can stop and destroy the Kyiv terrorist regime,” he added.
Russia has sustained a number of embarrassing drone attacks on its military bases and fuel depots over the course of the fighting, including in occupied Crimea. In a separate incident on Wednesday, a large fire at a fuel depot in southern Russia’s Krasnodar region broke out as a result of what local authorities said was a drone attack.
Ukraine typically declines to claim responsibility for attacks on Russia or Russian-annexed Crimea, though Kyiv officials have frequently celebrated such attacks with cryptic or mocking remarks.
If Kyiv or domestic opposition groups are responsible for the incident, it would once again expose vulnerabilities in the heart of Russia’s centre of power.
Samuel Bendett, a drone specialist with the Center for Naval Analyses in the US, said the video of what appeared to be the second drone raid suggested the craft had thin wings. That would point to an attack from a relatively sophisticated operator, he said, although not necessarily a state actor, using a drone such as a $9,500 (£7,500) Chinese-made Mugin-5.
Fixed-wing drones have longer ranges and flight times than simple and cheap quadcopters, and a craft such as a Mugin-5 can theoretically fly for seven hours at about 75mph (120km/h), making long-range operation possible.
Analysts speculated the drone could also have been a Ukrainian-made UJ-22, which has a similar speed and range, according to the manufacturer’s website, but the brief footage and difficulty expanding to a clear image meant any firm identification was impossible.
Russian drone experts speculated on whether the drone was launched from as far afield as Ukraine, theoretically possible despite the distances, or from somewhere close to Moscow.
A Russian drone expert, Alexei Rogozin, told a drone Telegram channel that the drone could have been controlled from “several kilometers” away by a pilot relying on the drone camera for navigation, rather than remote preset coordinates.
It may have also been equipped with anti-jamming devices, he added.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said he has seen Kremlin reports of the drone attack but “can’t in any way validate them”.
“We simply don’t know,” Blinken told reporters. When asked about the US position on any possible attacks by Ukraine on Russia, he said: “These are decisions for Ukraine to make about how it is going to defend itself.”
The attack at the Kremlin came days before the 9 May Victory Day parade that marks the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. The Victory Day parade in Red Square, which is located next to the Kremlin, is a highly symbolic annual demonstration of military might in Russia, during which Putin traditionally gives a speech.
Before Wednesday’s drone attack, several regions in Russia scrapped their parades amid fears of Ukrainian strikes. The Kremlin said the parade would go ahead in Moscow despite the incident.
Earlier in the year, Russia installed missile systems designed to intercept aircraft and incoming missiles on top of several defence and administrative buildings in central Moscow.
“We’ll let you know in due time,” Putin’s spokesperson Peskov said when asked if Putin would return to the Kremlin on Thursday.
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thelastgenderbender · 6 months
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Blog directory time!!!
So this is only my technical main (due to Tumblr Circumstances, i won't bore you) but I do actually have a lot of blogs, some of them relatively active.
@levil0vesyou is my personal/misc blog, I also sometimes call it my main even though it never was on either account
@quarks-pussy is my star trek blog, at the time of writing this it is my most active; despite the url it's not 18+ or purely nsfw
@selfrighteousflowers is my cartoon blog (only cartoons aimed at younger audiences tho, adult cartoons go on the misc) and also lazytown, it was only just moved over so I might become active there again or I might not
@dmitri-ilyich-volodin is my podcast blog, it's mostly dormant tho I'm thinking of reviving it once I'm less consumed by the trek
@at-the-thistlespring-tree is my Dimension 20 blog (yes I made one separate from my podcast blog, shush) which is mostly dormant but could be revived at any time
@eating-your-beans is my NBC Community blog (and also Mythic Quest) and it's not really active but I plan on using it again
@system-arbeitet-korrekt is my StarStarSpace blog which has only made like three posts and then died but I may use it once I'm struck again and don't wanna put it on my trek blog
@not-a-sesame-street-sideblog Regrettably, I've been infected and made yet another sideblog (added Nov 5th '23)
@transfemsambeckett I saw That video and had to watch Quantum Leap immediately so now I have a blog for it! (created Nov 18th '23)
I have a ton of other side blogs, both on this and on the old account, some of them are simply saved urls, some are discontinued and some are secret for a variety of reasons - though I assure you, those reasons are mostly comedy.
I don't exactly have a dni per se but if you have shitty views or I otherwise don't like you, I might block you lol
Last updated: November 19th 2023
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boyruggeroii · 2 years
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ALSO ALSO Eiffel and Hilbert's relationship? Great! Loved it
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