and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

actually, hey, friends! :) i’m so glad and flattered and even overwhelmed by such warm welcome. i thought for sure that i would be looong forgotten after all these years!

in these years i. Well, not to brag but i. finished my bachelor’s, got my master’s, almost got into phd but couldn’t since i’m the only one who writes on the topic in this country, got the job i once dreamed about (turned out to be a bit lamer than i thought). became convinced - still am - that one can be either a good art historian or a good artist, and for better or for worse i have degrees with honors and no imagination.

i’ve had a hard time with drawing but i do wanna try to get back to it! eventually, at least. i’ve thought about setting up separate blogs to maybe split up the main one from naruto one. i don’t even have the main one. is your main one still forever locked in place? will shammikorn be forever cursed to be a naruto blog…please do let me know!

i've also gotten into a relationship with a guy who used to be a mod on narutopedia. Unknowingly the way that shounen shapes my life is indescribable and also our country grows worse by day. but that's not new

Anonymous asked:

Yaayyayayyyayay!!! I'm jumping up and down right now; it's so, so nice to see you again!!!!! I've always loved your Naruto interpretations and my day feels 10x better now!!

I adore your Rin… She looks like an ordinary girl you'd see walking the shoreline of a beach until she passes you, and it feels like she's seen every piece of your soul with only a flick of her eyes… And she keeps that fact hidden behind her tiny, placid smile before leaving forever, never to cross your path again… I love it!!!!!!

hey, friend! thank you so much, that’s very poetic :)

it’s funny now that i think than rin was probably THE character with which i for the first time felt the intense need to both try to understand the character, and to leave her alone- since every attempt to understand, to get under the skin would prove fruitless. whatever theory i had (i still think that root!rin is a fun and promising way to interpret her, don’t you worry), i was still bashing my head on the wall, i was still trying to GIVE rin meaning and sense. and, well. it all turned around. nowadays the idea of “inner dignity”, the outer inability to pierce one’s intentions and character and leave it at that (as its singular aspect) has become, like, one of the main thing i seek in art and the crucial measure of it.

and it is partly because of the silly naruto girl and similarly “unto-herself” character i came up with as her mother. Life is surely fascinating!

also, thankfully to some discussions on rin’s nature here, she’s started to charm me as THE character in general. the way she works - “because of, not in spite of”, as one great soviet philosopher would say - her role and place in the narrative is so interesting! i’m really glad rin has grown on so many people. in her weird ways, as always.

for a bad day
captainhahab
kianspo

Random things. What happens when you protest in Russia? You are immediately arrested. It’s not a game of chance, it’s a guarantee. All protests are forbidden. We are not allowed to call the war – the war, you’ll be fined at best, arrested at worst if you do. In fact, as of today, if you’re caught at an anti-war protest, you’re considered a member of a radical extremist group and are facing 6 years in jail. People “detained” for protesting are invariably beaten. Concussions, contusions, broken bones. Men more so than women, though women can’t rely on it. You can be asked to strip since they “need” to check your underwear. You’ll be verbally abused and threatened the entire time. And yes, of course, it doesn’t stop there, since they now know you and your family and where you all work and live. In this country, there is nothing truly independent, there never was. If the words “1937” mean nothing to you, you are very, very fortunate. For us, it’s this again, only a thousand times worse because now it’s empowered by technology.

The other day they arrested a bunch of kids. Literally kids, four of them, aged seven to eleven. They, along with their mothers were carrying flowers to the Ukrainian embassy and a small simple poster “No to War”. They were all detained and immediately separated, kept locked up for the night. We don’t know how the kids were treated. Mothers had their possessions confiscated, not allowed to call anyone, stripped, yelled at, threatened. The harshest threat was to be stripped of parental rights on the spot, never see their kids again. The kids were released closer to morning when a lawyer from a group that helps people in these situations arrived. I have no idea how these lawyers are still allowed to function. Small mercies. (Support them here: https://donate.ovdinfo.org/)

But it’s not just the pain of punishment or jail sentence. It’s the utter uselessness of it all. He won’t care if half the population comes out to say “No to War”. He won’t care if it’s all of us.

A few days ago, every school in the country received instructions to hold special classes to explain to kids why “the liberating military operation” was necessary and what happens now. The teachers have been given manuals on what to say and how to answer the kids’ questions. Some of the answers include: “Don’t worry if you hear that some countries don’t want to be friends with us anymore. There are other countries who do, and besides, Russia is a very big country, so we have everything you can possibly need right here.” By “other countries”, my guess is, they mean North Korea. After the class, the kids are supposed to take a test. It’s electronic, entered through a QR code, and the answers are automatically logged in. Questions include: “Explain why the liberating military operation was necessary” and “Expand on what the Russian government is doing to help people of Lugansk and Donetsk.” The results of the test are tallied, and if some kid doesn’t give the right ones, their parents are called in for “a talk”.

We will either end up with a bunch of really smart kids or another generation of completely deluded people. The last time something like this had happened was in 1991, when the Soviet Union was falling, and my classmates and I were asked to make a choice of do we want to pledge allegiance to the communist party or not. I was ten. My class, as I remember, was split roughly in two. The kids who voted “yes” looked at the rest of us with teary eyes and whispered “our parents told us to do it, they are too afraid.” And we got it. We all got it. Nobody hated anybody for the choice, because we all knew that fear and we all knew what it was like, to be hostage of the regime. We who voted “no” knew what we were risking. At ten years old, we were more politically savvy than a lot of full-grown adults across the ocean. It’s not a good thing.

For roughly twenty-something years, we lived in the illusion that we were out of that prison. Sure, our democracy was not perfect, but whose is? It was maybe incredibly naïve of us, but can you blame us that we wanted to believe it? That we still desperately want to, which is why there are a lot of really confused people in the country right now who still can’t grasp that their leadership has betrayed them?They will, in fact, believe anything but this. They will sooner believe him and ignore the facts, because a) they’re not getting the facts, and b) the truth is terrifying.

Nothing has changed. We’re still in the USSR. Yesterday, in Nalchik, students of the local university were ordered to go out and express their support for the president. They had no warning. At some point the university staff members entered their classrooms, handed out banners and t-shirts, and ordered them to go outside “to stand in solidarity” with the president. Refusal was not an option on pain of expulsion. Among other statements, they were made to hold up banners saying #wearenotashamed which should tell you everything you need to know about how the Russian people really feel.

I’m not going to talk about the independent media, because the last survivors of this extremely rare breed are being shut down as we speak. Meduza is still holding up by some miracle, but their turn can be any hour. They have been declared “a foreign agent” some years back, which means that they can no longer be properly financed and have to preface every single post and article with a huge all-caps statement that this information was created by a foreign agent, presumably to turn “loyal citizens” away. They have been subsiding on crowd-funding this whole time, can’t imagine how, since all transactions are now traceable and giving them money is not without consequences. (Support them here: https://support.meduza.io/)

The world has turned away from us, and I get it, but they don’t understand what they’re doing. Or maybe they do but don’t care. I don’t mean this on an emotional level, but purely practical. The more they punish the Russian people, the more, unfortunately but sadly naturally, the Russian people will unite in their support of He Who Must Not Be Named. He will feel even more legitimate in his actions and he won’t stop. Not that I can imagine anything that could make him stop now but… It’s not helping. It might make a lot of people out there feel better about themselves, but it’s not helping.

Worst of all, we can’t help Ukraine. So much as saying that we’re fighting a war or that we are losing that war can earn you up to 15 years in prison for “spreading misinformation.” It’s impossible to send over money, and as for supplies we can only gather those for the refugees that are fleeing to Russia. Our economy is on the brink of collapse, and the people that are running from the war and come here will have to share it with us. We’re doing what we can for them. It’s not enough.

And personally… My mornings these days start like this. I wake up. I don’t want to get up. I do eventually. Splash water on my face etc. Take my heart medication. Wait for it to take effect. Then I open Telegram and see if Meduza is still broadcasting. Read the overnight update. Learn that the horror continues in a multitude of fresh new horrifying ways. Remind myself that I have no right to sympathy or feeling sorry for myself or any of that. I was not the one who spent the night in a bomb shelter. I was not the one whose house was destroyed. I wish I was but I’m not. I’m just a useless spectator who’s too chickenshit to even go get beaten up and who rationalizes her cowardice any way she knows how. I want you to know this about me before you decide to continue knowing me. I am unaccountably grateful having known all of you.

I don’t know what else to say except maybe this. Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.

this is beautifully put and all of this is true please DO try to learn as much as possible about the war and please DO donate and spread info and don't stop to speak about it and for the love of God do not let this happen in your country

Anonymous asked:

hi, obito anon again! thanks so much for your answer! (« baby moose » fucked me up it’s adorable) obito is totally endearing as a young character and interesting as he grows. for the redemption thing, i was also talking about the kyubi attack (i still don’t fully get the point assise from sheer vengeance). and i totally agree with you that his change of heart in the war arc is strange, esp since kakashi’s speech is like... not good, and doesn’t address most of obito’s issues with (1/2)

(½) the shinobi world. fighting with someone just because he cares doesn’t absolve any of the suffering caused by the system naruto is precisely defending and it’s kinda heartbreaking that kakashi is unable to form his own point. in an obito-lives au, is he still trying to change the shinobi system? (also loved your last rin drawing, it’s soft)



SO. it’s happening. i’m not sure how much time passed. hope you are still alive, ma dude!!!! 

the whole vengeance dilemma- i simply don’t have it! because a) i love obito and i’ve spent way too much time in this fandom to care about m*nato or konoha or hundreds of village npcs; b) i actually find it *just* in a pretty twisted way. it was the village, the hokage (as a Title) that had failed obito in the first place, and it was the hokage (as a person) who’d left both him and rin to die in the literally meaningless war - both deaths having little to no effect on villagers, on the government, on the course of war, both probably forgotten in several days. something about the idea of a nameless casualty becoming the force that destroys konoha is incredibly appealing to me tbh :)
it’s just– the whole attack is inhumane and awfully cruel, and there were a lot of innocent victims BUT. but. at that moment obito is still aching and angry in a very human way, and he is overreacting, in a human and therefore violent way as well, and it’s something that we rarely see in konoha’s heroes and defenders. it’s the opposite of konoha’s ideology, and it’s most likely considered a weakness - except this time it overpowers the village. if we think of it as a sort of confrontation between obito and minato, this can become even clearer: obito revenges over his friend (and himself) on the village, minato sacrifices his son for it. human vs institution. kinda. if you squint.

plus, as with most of obito’s antics, we must remember that at that time he’s been dead once, revived, brainwashed by madara and losing his personality, and he also had a mind-controlling seal. i’m not really trying to justify the attack - of course, there must have been a good old revenge motive behind it - but i find myself incapable of condemning it either. 

the second question is UGHH. Hard. i am in love with his characterization from NFWMB (as yall know), and i’m kinda stuck on the idea that he has A Lot of more urgent issues at hands. it depends greatly on the verse, and if we are talking about my *main* verse for the past year (surviving root operative rin, her weird pseudo-relationship with kakashi, their conflict and involvement with anbu/root and danzo-hiruzen even weirder pseudo-relationship, all the mystery about obito’s survival, etc, etc), he’s pretty busy…then, at this point obito has virtually no chance of becoming hokage.
i guess, deep inside he still believes in good things and possible changes but at the same time he must be *very* disenchanted with shinobi world in general.