hardly anyone understands when i say “xbox liek water” or “xbox HATE water” when i like or dislike something and its tragic so here are the images that comes from
Some Dipshit Grifter : If you take an average of the heights of every mountain in the world and divide it by 2, that’s the height of the Great Pyramid.
Just heard about the mess that YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall has been dealing with. tl;dr, Her publisher offered her the chance to be part of an initiative that would’ve put her work in a lot more stores and libraries. It’s an initiative specifically aimed at amplifying Asian voices… but only if she removed the word “racism” from her author’s note. On a book about the Japanese internment.
I am very glad she rejected this offer, and I 100% agree with her that this is pure cowardice. I’m appalled at Scholastic – or any other publisher who’s doing this but whose authors can’t take the risk of speaking out. This is the kind of crap that marginalized writers have to deal with all the time – and it is also how fascism takes root: “just business” decisions that perpetuate injustice, systematic erasure of targeted groups from their own damn stories, institutions choosing to do what’s easy over what’s right.
(I have been very fortunate to never have a publisher do this to me. Plenty of disrespectful bs from institutions and individuals within the industry, but never from the people who signed my checks. I’m also somewhat insulated from the book ban bullshit because my work is genre and isn’t aimed at kids – though that’s coming, of course. Fascists don’t stop until they are stopped.)
Anyway. Pop over to Maggie’s blog to read the full story – or better yet hop on a retail site and buy her books. It’s up to readers now to support marginalized authors, since it’s clear nobody else will.
What wizards do is study, understand, and then utilize one of the facets of their reality. Years of research is required to enact said practice, and even more years of active practice to become respected.
Pick a Science, and that’s a wizard. Physics? Classic wizardry of spacetime. Phycologists? Physics, mages of the mind. Engineering? Artificers. Biology? Ever hear of the Simic Conclave?
If you liked this, you can support the Kickstarter for The Universal Flaws of Robotics to get this and 18 other robot stories! We’re an indie comics publisher and this is our biggest book yet! https://tinyURL.com/UFRComic
If you liked this, you can support the Kickstarter for The Universal Flaws of Robotics to get this and 18 other robot stories! We’re an indie comics publisher and this is our biggest book yet! https://tinyURL.com/UFRComic
when your mutual reblogs something with a full page of tags its like. girl (gender neutral) i am filling my mug with coffee and reading this like the morning paper. i am so interested in your thoughts on this post. i love you.
Death Note is a show with a very clear central premise: no one should have the power to kill others without consequence. Not the cops, not corporations, not the Mob, not civilians, no one.
Even outside of the 2000s-era criticisms of the Japanese justice system, even if you’re looking at it in a vacuum, Death Note makes it incredibly obvious what it’s trying to say. It starts this off by making it very clear, right out of the gate, that the audience identification character really, really should not have this power.
For Death Note’s original target audience, Light is everything you’re supposed to be. He’s smart, diligent, good-looking, athletic, popular but not too popular. He’s The Perfect Middle-Class Japanese Teenage Boy. If you’re the kind of edgy, smart Japanese teenage boy who would want to watch an anime supernatural crime drama in the mid-00s? Light is built for you to imprint on like a baby duckling.
…And then the show goes out of its way to point out, in the first proper story arc, that Light is the villain of this piece. From the introduction of L to the end of the Raye Penber/Naomi Misora arc, the show makes it very, very clear that Light is a hypocrite with a massive ego. Sure, he says that he’s only killing criminals to make a better world. Sure, maybe he panicked and killed fake-L in self-defense. Sure, maybe the life of Reye Penber and any law enforcement chasing Kira were worth the clear drop in the crime rate. Maybe.
But then Light kills one of the very few unambiguously Good members of the Death Note cast, does so in a smug and cruel way, and the entire scene is framed as tragic in a way that none of the criminal deaths really were. The whole world goes quiet. And Naomi Misora stumbles off to commit suicide. By the end of that arc, even if you’d otherwise be sympathetic to Light- even if you’re still rooting for him to get away with it- it’s a lot harder to justify what he’s doing. He’s not just breaking a few eggs to make an omelet- at this point, he’s actively happy to kill anyone who gets in his way.
So. Okay. The Perfect Japanese Teenage Boy ™ can’t be trusted with the power to kill indiscriminately. Maybe the problem is just that Light, as a person, is an asshole with impure motives, and if you gave the Death Note to someone who’s a better person, you’d be better off. Maybe you could find someone who’s motivated by love, and they’d do a better job with that power.
Everyone, say hello to Misa Amane, who is utterly driven by love and devotion, and probably one of the crazier/more evil characters on the show! She’d do anything, no matter how terrible, just because Light told her to do it. She is utterly without remorse, utterly without fear, and utterly driven by a darkly Romantic fanaticism.
Light gets to dodge what’s coming to him twice because of Misa and love- once because Misa’s love for Light lets him start the Yotsuba arc, and once because Rem’s love for Misa becomes a diabola ex machina. In the world of Death Note, love is not a pure enough motive to let you kill indiscriminately - in fact, it makes you worse.
Okay, well, (our hypothetical edgy teenage viewer might say), cLEARLY the problem is that everyone here is too emotional, and you need to be able to detach from the situation to use the power of life and death. Of course you’d kill indiscriminately if you’ve got feeeeelings about it, but someone who is driven by Logic and Reason? Surely they’d never do anything wrong.
…And then L gets his hands on the Death Note, and immediately starts trying to figure out how to use it to prove that some of the rules in the Death Note are fake and Light is guilty. L’s plan is to have a criminal on death row write in the Death Note and wait the 13 days to see if he dies. It’s simple. Logical. Effective. It’s also extremely reminiscent of the stuff Kira’s been doing this entire time, and the implication is that, had L lived longer and used the Note more, he might become No Different.
(I think it’s significant that in The Movie, L uses the Death Note exactly once, with himself as the victim, and he turns down the Death Note when it’s offered to him. TheMovie!L is an unambiguously heroic character, and therefore, he will not kill without consequences.)
The power to kill without any consequence to yourself corrupts you. It makes youwant to use it to solve more and more of your problems. It turns you into a fucking monster, one name at a time. And nothing can stop that process except refusing to use that power. Love cannot shield you. Rationality cannot shield you. Justice cannot shield you.
And every other character who gets the Death Note reinforces that theme. The Yotsuba Group? Big corporations should not get to kill without consequences. Mello? Criminals/genius detectives should not get to kill without consequence. Mikami? The Perfect Japanese Adult is outright sadistic about how he uses the Death Note. And on, and on, and on.
Near outright tells Light, in their final confrontation: “You are a murderer, and this notebook is the worst weapon of mass murder in the world.” Using the Death Note is not justice; it’s not going to bring about a perfect new world. It’s murder, full stop. Light has become a mass murderer, a monster, by killing over and over again.
Death Note has a theme: no one should be allowed to kill without consequences, because it makes you a monster. It is not subtle about that theme. It is very, very blatant, and the only way it could be more blatant is if Near stopped to deliver an Atlas-Shrugged-style monologue about it.
and so seeing people reduce that to ‘haha ACAB’ gets my goat, because no. No, it’s not just ACAB. anyone with the power to kill indiscriminately and without consequence- whether it’s a cop, a megacorp, an autistic supergenius, a mob boss, or a perfect audience-insert- would become A Bastard.
this is a show that makes it abundantly clear that there is Symbolism and it has a Point, in the way that only stuff aimed at teenagers that’s trying to be Deep can do. how you get through the entirety of Death Note and walk away with “there’s no point! a cop’s son decides to be the worst person ever! Light is Uniquely Terrible and that’s all there is to it!” is fucking beyond me.
I was just going to blithely reblog this, and then I thought of something.
There is a category unmentioned here in the 'people who use the death note’ and that category is the Shinigami. Yes, Rem’s mentioned in the 'things you do for love’ situation, tho she’s not the only one who uses the Death Note in a selfless way (even under manipulation).
Because Rem and Gelus both use the Death Note to save Misa, and they both DIE for doing so. And that’s an important context here, the Shinigami, the people who are MEANT to use the Death Note, are near-immortal immoral monsters. And the one way for them to be killed? Is to use the Death Note to benefit someone else.
Not only is there no 'good’ way to use a Death Note, it was never INTENDED to be used for 'good’, just as a way to elongate the lifespans of actual literal monster people in another dimension.
Death Note goes out of it’s way to have characters just straight-up monologue several times about how it’s the power to kill that’s evil and that corrupts anyone who accepts it, that there’s no good way or good person to have power over life and death. They even put the Death Note in the hands of someone who refuses to use it either directly or by proxy (Light’s father) and he gets to die peacefully with the belief that his son was innocent and Ryuk straightup explains this to the audience just to make sure everyone gets it.
Was at a restaurant recently where they’d converted both their bathrooms to gender neutral (nice) and as i was washing my hands a guy came out a stall and saw me & said, “Oh!!! my god!! Is this the ladies’?? 😨😨😨😨 I’m so sorry!!!!!!” and I was like “No, it’s fine, it’s gender neutral” and he goes “…….Oh. uh. Ok.” And then walks straight out. without washing his hands.
Sir. You need to be less embarrassed about hypothetically crossing some arbitrary gender barrier and more embarrassed about getting your Peepee DooDoo Shit Hands all over this fucking RESTAURANT
“Separate bathrooms are unnecessary” false. Actually we need every building to have TWO gender neutral restrooms, one for People Who Wash Their Fucking Hands and the other for people who don’t, which is actually just a door leading to a 10ft pit with scorpions at the bottom. And also a mandatory power point presentation on disease vectors
I know this isn’t a novel observation but I’ve been reading a lot of articles about colonial and imperial policy (specifically demography history papers) & one pattern that keeps coming up is that colonial/imperial governments try to institute what can reasonably be described as “good” social policies in colonised places (like vaccine programs, funding for schools, etc, things that are associated with the smooth functioning of a state), and these are often rejected by local colonised governments and people because like obviously they don’t trust colonial/imperial administrators wanting to become involved with their healthcare or education. And what often ends up happening is this backlash against “progressive” policies because they’re being pushed by colonial governments, so you get shit like the Catholic Church running all the primary schools in Ireland because they refuse to open British-funded state schools, or people refusing to immunize their children because those “public goods” are (rationally & understandably) associated with things like US imperial population management programs. And then these colonial & imperial administrators turn around and say look! These people won’t even accept money for schools and vaccines! Look how backwards they are! And paint colonised populations as Great Rejectors of Democracy which western populations then readily eat up. Just a really horrendous feedback loop of misery that generates a lot of ‘secondary’ death and violence on top direct colonial oppression and plunder
the vaccine thing is insidious even now. the us government using healthcare workers to gather intelligence for directing drone strikes in afghanistan led to a suspension of the polio vaccine campaign in taliban controlled areas. afghanistan was the polio capital of the world in 2018. they’ve resumed polio vaccination campaigns now under the taliban, but the death and misery of those infected was completely avoidable.
Hey OP do you have any papers that you especially like on the subject that you’d be willing to share? I’m interested in this topic and would enjoy some more academic reading on the subject.
Yes! Hopefully all the links work, if not you can search the title online (all of these are technically open access, although you may need to create a JSTOR/academia.edu account to access them, sorry!)
A paper detailing how the Belgian Empire sent missionaries into the Congo in the 1920s to increase fertility by evangelizing Christian gender roles. This is technically a “population management” policy, as many European colonial powers were obsessed with managing the population of their colonies on the logic that more people = greater colonial labour capacity. You can see how the church functions as an organ of the colonial state, operating to achieve ends “unrelated” to the church, such as population control, through evangelizing against birth control and encouraging people to think of themselves as components of the cis-heterosexual christian nuclear family (this is not exactly the process I was talking about above, but is still related to how colonial domination influences social beliefs in colonized populations)
A paper talking about the use of “reproductive rights” as a population management tool by imperial powers, most notably the mass subsidizing of birth control, particularly in African countries that have been colonized. It talks about how some of the foundations/organizations used by the US government (such as USAID) act as a front for these imperial population management programs, particularly in Latin America, describing it as “a willing conduit for US government funding through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), thereby shielding the USA from accusations of direct involvement in promoting the control of Third World population.” (375).
There is also discussion of how World Bank loans are used to enforce population control on colonized countries - “There is a strong suspicion that the timing of the Nigerian government’s population policy in 1988 was related to the acceptance of a $78.5 million loan from the World Bank. The imposition of a structural adjustment programme (SAP) has resulted in reduced spending on primary health care, so that treatment for malaria and the provision of clean drinking water is being ignored, while contraceptives have become widely available.” (387)
I particularly like this paper because it also gives historical context to the eugenicist strains within the US reproductive rights movement (most notably from Margaret Sanger); this history is not an unfortunate, misguided 'whoopsie’ on the part of an otherwise progressive movement, but rather, was/is embedded in the deep racial anxieties of Western states around the supposed decline of the white race.
An intellectual history of the idea of development and population growth. There is a lengthy case study of British colonial rule in India and how that informed the development of sanitation practices as a result of mass death under said rule, both from British troops and colonized Indian populations
I can’t find the other article I was reading about vaccine hesitancy, but this is an open-access article talking about the history of Canadian colonial medical violence towards Indigenous peoples and how that contributes to vaccine hesitancy. A lot of people in the notes have also brought up the US-backed anti-vaccination campaign in the Philippines during the early COVID-19 pandemic
I am once again thinking about how batshit crazy it must’ve been for paleolithic humans to encounter kangaroos for the very first time
I suspect OP knows but when humans first hit mainlaind oz there was a very real chance that procoptodon- a giant kangaroo that had a flat face and walked instead of hopped- would have been there.
(art by nobu tamura)
i woulda turned the boat around and tried my luck with the rest of Oceania, tbh. that there is an ogre.
That’s it. That’s the dream. I’m almost mad that that’s the dream.
That’s half the dream. The other half is being fairie fucking godmother to everyone on the planet.
See, I had 100k for a hot minute. Doesn’t matter why. But for nearly a calendar year, I picked up the tab every chance I got, i lavished people with gifts, I took a friend to Greece, I paid for healthcare for myself and a few other people, for lawyers to help someone get out of an abusive marriage, Christmas presents for a single mom of 3.
It felt incredible. Just to take away the worry and say, “I’ve got you.” Instacart groceries to a grieving friend of a friend across town. Pay the unexpected car repairs. Gift a young artist a yearlong subscription to Procreate.
That’s why I’ll never understand billionaires. If you could fix it, if money could actually make even one life better, why would you not do it? Even just for the kick? Hell, i don’t care if it feeds your ego. Be Tony Stark, be Superman, idgaf. When you’ll never be able to spend all that you have, even if you some up every damn day like it was your job, if you could end world hunger six times over for the price of a social media company, why wouldn’t you just DO IT?
I don’t have a coherent conclusion to this, except that if I ever meet Jeff Bezos, I’ll beat him to death with my bare fists.
There’s an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.
A “playable state” would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.
I don’t think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.
Even if you’re not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don’t care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.
There’s an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.
A “playable state” would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.
I don’t think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.
Even if you’re not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don’t care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.
My low IQ idiot friend: im growing an apple tree in my backyard. Fuji - my absolute favorite. You sho…
Me, genius, visibly thinking extremely hard, not paying attention to a word he’s saying: *apple tree … apple … worm … worm HOLE … apple car … apple shaped car … worm driving apple car*
Me, now having decided on how to respond: I wish id never met you. I wisb youd never been born
ALT
