Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.
To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.
the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now
And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!
Normally I don't do this, but if you're a UK citizen please sign this petition from the Government website to petition against them introducing Digital ID.
This is being used by the government to introduce more police state-like surveillance over everything you do, before you know it you will need it to access anything.
Anything you say or do online will be tied to you, and if the government doesn't like it (regardless of whether it's illegal or not) you will be in legal trouble if this passes. Please do your part to stop it by signing (if you're from the UK) and reblogging and spreading this around (both if you're in the UK and not in the UK).
Umm hey just Liked all your headcannons for the ghoul girls content, But hey i was wondering if you did the villains part especially with Revolta or the Grim Creeper
#ghoul school headcanons
Thanks! Glad to see there are still Ghoul School fans out there!
I don't think I ever did anything specifically on the villains, but there might be something way down in my drafts so I'll give it a look!
I think if you did expand the villains there's definitely a role to engage with Revolta and the Grim Creeper and how they relate to each other. I'm reminded of the Butt Witch from Twelve Forever actually. Revolta has a similar emphasis on stealing the girls potential, since she's focused primarily on the powers of their fathers.
In that sense I do wonder what her backstory is and whether they'd have a role as villains of the Ghoul School girls over the longer term, or if Revolta is really their dads' enemy who just considers the girls an easier target. I can maybe see her or the Grim Creeper posing as a teacher at least once, although I don't think it would go well for them!
I'd also be interested in what other enemies the kids could have. Maybe Sibella has a rival who's a member of the Van Helsing family, for example? With Winnie it might be worthwhile to play with her dog side and set her up against either a dog catcher or a vicious neighbour's dog.
If the kids at the end of the movie stuck around there'd also be three more living girls at the ghoul school, bringing the total number of dead and living students to pretty much equal and creating the possibility for all sorts of culture clashes.
We need to do what we can to protect the Internet Archive. Here is a petition that you can sign.
This petition alone might not be enough, but everything we can throw at this counts.
(Photos: Patrick Stuart, Scrap)
In Nottingham we visited the Museum Of Curiosities.
It boasts "haunted items from around the world", gathered via its owner's "paranormal investigations and his contacts within the world of the macabre".
Mummies, tools from Victorian morgues, dybbuk boxes. Basically: goth Halloween kitsch.
Besides a shelf of "spell kits", I took no photographs, inside. I have to admit I was unnerved.
Back home, a collection claiming to exhibit cursed items would have been quite serious. Displaying a command of ilmu; an institutional mastery over spiritual entities. It would feel keras.
Here, in the secular UK, it is some dude's prodigious collection of spooky memorabilia. The prop puppet from Saw sits amid a classroom-photo's worth of haunted dolls. (Patrick's thoughts on the Museum are nuanced and worth reading!)
(Image source)
One doll caught my eye. Propped on a desk, red, clown-like---surrounded by a shrine of letters. Wall text explained the doll's name was Tommy:
"We are not going to give out any information about the effects he has on the living ... if you do get affected in any way and it continues you can write a letter to tommy to ask him to stop affecting you"
With the museum's address appended.
Tommy's letters spilled over and were tacked onto the facing door. Some were in Arabic. Signed greetings from all over. "We believe in you Tommy!" "You are very nice." "We all love you very much!"
Were these genuine petitions to Tommy, so he'd stop haunting them? Or an ironic, impromptu museum guestbook?
Whatever the case: people seemed sincere participants in this letter-writing ritual; in juicing Tommy up; in saying they believed his story.
In paying tickets of their attention to make him realer.
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(Image source)
In mid-March 2025, it came out that the century-old Dewi Sri Pathrakaliamman temple---a small place of worship in downtown Kuala Lumpur; built in 1893, predating Independence---was slated to be demolished.
Jakel Group, a textiles and property-development corporation, was staking their claim to the temple's land. Jakel intends to build a shiny modern mosque, in its place.
(Image source)
Lawyers and activists came out in support of the temple. Jakel explained they had purchased the site from City Hall; it is unclear how City Hall had ownership of the site in the first place.
Eventually things were "resolved"---the local Hindu community agreed to have their temple moved to a nearby site; Jakel will build their mosque, as planned.
A frustrating resolution, in a Malaysia riven by ethnic and religious supremacy. In a different time, in a better Malaysia, the temple need not have moved.
Yet:
("People sleep in tents, ministers sleep in mansions." Image source)
The truth is that situations like these are pretty common. Kuala Lumpur's face is ever a-blur: old communities and edifices making way, often against their will, for towers and glass; malls, condos, mixed developments with rooftop pools.
Under the Torrens system, City Hall gets to decide who owns what land. And City Hall has always been developer-friendly, if not developer-bought.
How many low-cost flats and semi-rural kampungs and "squatter" communities fall before the diggers of the wealthy? How many of their disappearances go uncommented on, or are waved away in the name of "progress"?
The Dewi Sri Pathrakaliamman temple became a national story is precisely because it is a temple.
Devotion is attention.
And while religion often devolves into fascism or communalism, it is nice to have a god on your side, if you are up against Mammon.
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(Photo: John Smalley)
I've been thinking about shrines a lot, lately.
Shrines as play. I built a shrine to a crocodile god, in a gallery show about TTRPGs.
(Photo: Grace Wong)
Shrines as memory. Sharon's Portal work is a performance piece, fire ceremony, and photo posters permanently installed at a Port Dickson beach to remember two beloved mangrove trees.
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(Image source)
In the popular Malay cosmology, geographical features both natural (trees, termite mounds, mountains) and man-made (mansions, highways, museums) are often inhabited by penunggu---literally: "waiting entities"; in other words: "guardians".
Datuk kongs, earth deities worshipped by Chinese communities here, whose shrines dot the landscape throughout the Archipelago, are a kind of penunggu.
Worship of a datuk kong usually begins with a dream. The deity appears to a local in a vision, and commands them to build a shrine.
In 2018, after a spate of homophobia and transphobia in the news, Sharon dreamt of a sea goddess coming out of the sea, wearing the rainbow colours of the queer flag.
(Art: Shika)
In obedience to Sharon's dream I wrote her datuk into a short story.
If the same dream came to us today, maybe we'd be more confident in our convictions, and build a shrine to this queer goddess in our town, for real.
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("Tree Shrining", Gabrielle Bates)
I was once told that Australian governments are obliged to consult Indigenous communities before approving any development plans.
And since the most features in the landscape are imbued with history, with stories, with ecological and cultural meaning, development always happened slower than developers liked.
Honestly? This is how it should be anywhere.
Much of Australian artist Gabrielle Bates's work is about challenging gentrification and community-shattering urban change. This is explicitly a magical practice: "Artist-as-Witch".
Beginining 2016, her practice of tree shrining, the artistic and ritual investiture of trees with divine and magical significance, has been performed around Sydney.
(Photo: Sharon Chin)
It was also enacted in Kuala Lumpur, as a way to reify an otherwise dour and conventional protest action, to save the Taman Rimba Kiara forest park.
Turning trees into small gods---does that protect them? I don't know. I think it gives them attention. An opportunity for devotion.
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(Photo: Jamie Sutcliffe)
On Saturday 22 March 2025, at Bonington Gallery, as part of WEIRD HOPE ENGINES, I was on a panel with Chris Bisette and Laurie O'Connel and David Blandy.
We are tabletop roleplaying game-designers. "Game Design For Planetary Survival" was the subject we were meant to discuss.
I was very nervous about speaking, and panicked, and forgot what I wanted to say. (I spent my time waffling on about my hometown, mostly.)
I wanted to say this:
(Photo: Bonington Gallery)
You cannot have "planetary survival" without a relationship to place.
Late capitalism has become really good at keeping us "un-placed"---digital ghosts drifting frictionless through the world at the speed of a map app's "x hrs away" estimate.
"Globalised" (meaning: rootless) beings are easier to atomise into units, commodities.
How can we claim to have a handle on any sort of material reality if we skip over the material realities where our actual bodies live?
Placedness, rootness, localness. Gradual relationships to your immediate neighbourhood, your specific landscape: the trees on your street, flowering in season; the history of the bus you take daily; the habits of animals in your municipal waterway.
As game makers and players we are pretty good at imagining stuff. We play with secret histories, strange magics, odd gods, alternate futures. We are already good at creating shrines to such things, at our tables.
Why not make shrines, IRL?
What is the genius loci of your landscape? What memorial can you build at the entrance to your neighbourhood? What spirit lives in your favourite tree? What is an appropriate votive offering for the fish-god gestating in the canal; the engine-god in the car you drive to work?
We are very good at immersion, at playing as if things were real.
So make it real. Speak to your trees, aloud. Let your neighbours see. Leave candles at the memorial you made on your roundabout. Build an altar to birds. Cast spells at a protest rally.
Because attention is devotion, and devotion is attention. If that dark god Mammon, whose name is Capitalism, has seized speedy, frictionless materialism---deliberate animism is radical.
Have relationships with the gods of your life, your community, your stories. Build shrines to them. Focus on them. Make them real. Make your place real.
I just finished Win or Lose and I feel like I'm seeing a lot of people treat Kai's episode as if the trans rep is a "tee hee" Easter egg snuck in to get past the censors, which frustrates me. Like no, the episode is explicitly about being trans. Disney may have got cold feet and cut several lines, but I don't think they could have removed the transness from the show without taking a sledgehammer to every episode.
I think we should celebrate the months of time and effort that went into making Kai's story so good and so integral to the show as a whole, rather than pretending it's a grab bag Pixar salvaged from Disney censors at the last minute. The team who made it consulted researchers (as well as Chanel Stewart and her family), went through multiple storyline concepts (as the so-called "censored scene" going around shows), and must have been fighting Disney every step of the way to get it across the finishing line.
UK people: a transphobic petition to repeal the Gender Recognition Act currently has over 10,000 signatures; this is the point at which the government is legally obligated to respond. Please sign and share this one as widely as you can to show the government that there's more support for trans people than the transphobes want them to believe.
Please remember to confirm your signature! This is important as your signature won't be counted until you verify it through the email you'll receive.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/701159
Boss is asleep, cannot stop me from frogposting
First like and this has already found its intended audience
uh oh
***The following fundraisers have all been vetted by either Gaza Vetters or @90-ghost***
A ceasefire deal may have been struck, but this is still a time of uncertainty for people in Gaza. They still face an uphill battle to survive and hopefully to recover and rebuild - as they have many times before, with courage and resilience. Part of that uphill battle has been because of Gofundme and Tumblr unjustly terminating people's accounts, and I cannot stress enough how the vast, vast, vast majority of Palestinians' accounts that you will find on here genuinely do represent struggling families. Out of the 34 that I have checked (against other authorities, as I can't vet myself), only 1 was a bot. The following families have all reached out to me, and I really want to make sure you know how even a little donation makes a huge difference, and even if you can't afford to donate right now, please, please, please share.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/
I am sharing Khawla and her family's story right now as she has reached out to me urgently. Please donate what you can soon as her children are sick and injured and need specialist treatment as soon as possible!
How long will we stay in this war? How long will we continue to endure death, destruction, fear, torture and heartbreak?💔
What is my children's fault in all this? They are innocent children. We live in fear. We suffer from the ravages of war. Please be with us, support us, and donate for the benefit of my children. War is cruel, and I cannot do anything but protect them with my body from the cold and fear.
Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #196 )
Hassan has reached out to me personally on behalf of his family and I really want to stress that their fundraiser is still very low on donations after a month. Please donate if you can or share if you can't - it truly does make a difference
