You’ve heard of Earth is space australia now get ready for: Earth is the space Amazon Rainforest. Aliens land on Earth and they are losing their goddamn minds because every square inch of the ground is absolutely PACKED with life like there are hundreds of species just in this one site, there are winged animals flying through the sky and multiple colonies of sophisticated social insects just in the shadow of their ship, this ONE ROCK is covered in MULTIPLE SPECIES OF ORGANISMS that are themselves MULTIPLE ORGANISMS LIVING SYMBIOTICALLY, the tall, woody autotrophs look so different from each other because they’re…holy shit that’s like 5, 6, 7???? different species on this one site???
they start talking to a human and the human is like “haha yeah that’s a crow!” and the alien researcher is like “you called it a ‘bird’ earlier, is that a different name?” and the human is like “oh a crow is just one species of bird, there’s like, 10 others out there”
“On this planet?”
“No, in the back yard right now.”
imagine aliens that come from a tidally locked planet where only a thin band of the planet is habitable, or a planet life was only able to develop in small areas at the poles, or in the few pools of liquid water on the planet’s surface, or just in isolated areas where geologic activity causes geysers and springs, visiting Earth. They seem completely unprepared for the shock of realizing that Earth’s continents appear green because the continents are absolutely covered with green organisms.
The alien biologists are so uncomfortable because there are certain protocols for maintaining certain distances from life signatures to avoid harming unfamiliar organisms, and groves of plant like autotrophs and pools where aquatic life dwells are carefully protected and respected, with very important rules for approach
On Earth, the inhabitants are just. Playing and walking LITERALLY STEPPING ON CARPETS OF ORGANISMS the whole time. the aliens are like “it doesn’t hurt them??? Can’t you just…move them to a place where you don’t have to step on them?” and the humans are like “no of course not, grasses evolved to tolerate being stepped on, and besides, more plants would grow there if we tried to move the existing ones”
It then must be explained that humans would need to regularly spray poisons on the ground to prevent any given area of bare soil from filling up with plant life, and that “regularly” means “multiple times within a single solar cycle.” And that the poisons stop working within a few decades because the plants evolve to resist them that fast.
Human: yeah solar is the dominant energy source these days but some of the recent solar farm projects are pretty controversial because they’re in reclaimed strip mining sites that others argue should be restored as best as we can to their previous ecological state
Alien: I don’t understand…why would you not place the solar farms in an area of the planet with no existing ecosystem?
Human: …what?
Alien: You have rather sophisticated protective gear and have done some space exploration, surely you could establish them in an area of the planet to which life is not yet adapted?
Human: …there isn’t one.
Alien: …what do you mean there isn’t one
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU ’DON’T KNOW’ HOW MANY SPECIES THERE ARE”
“Our biologists would love to collaborate with your Earth scientists to draw up a definitive listing of Earth species and resolve any inconsistencies in the records.”
“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. Only 25% of Earth’s species have been formally described, at most.”
“that’s…that’s most of them.”
“Yes?”
“Well…I suppose the ocean trenches and abyssal plains must be difficult for you to reach…where did you have to travel for your discoveries?”
“Travel? I moved here to Alabama in the first place to study its aquatic ecosystems. The crayfish I discovered live in that creek I showed you earlier.”
“Too bad you couldn’t have come here a few thousand years ago, humanity has really been doing a number on our diversity of species. Some say it might be the next great extinction.”
“Wait. I believe this is something your language refers to as needing 'unpacking.’ The current biodiversity represents a historical low point?”
“Well, a local minimum, as the math people say. But yeah, I think there was some recovery after the Younger Dryas about ten thousand years ago, but for every new species humanity creates intentionally or unintentionally, tens or hundreds have been wiped out. We’re not proud of this.”
“We will need time to digest this, to the point I’m afraid to ask the next question: NEXT great extinction?”
“Yeah, I forget how many there’ve been total, and there’s some arguing over how bad it has to get before it really counts. A comet or meteor strike 65 million years ago wiped out the majority of life…the majority of species or even genera…there’s entire classes of life we didn’t know ever existed until we found their fossils a few hundred years ago. And then there’s the Permian, when a good chunk of a continent erupted and I think we lost…ninety percent of all species? Maybe more? I’d have to look it up. There was also a mass extinction that just happened because all the continents got pushed together and apparently that was bad for life on land and in the sea. You’re looking a little faint…do you need to sit down?”
“But…even a single great extinction has always meant the end of life above the unicellular level, on every world we’ve visited. This planet has evolved complex incredibly ramified life repeatedly despite three mass extinction events?”
“I wanna say…five?”
A Deathworld is scary. A Lifeworld is fucking terrifying.
please boost if you cannot contribute—the destruction in appalachia is devastating and our infrastructure was not equipped to handle this kind of disaster.
i think one of my favourite parts of gravity falls is just. soos in general. a different show would probably have a character like that- y’know, a fat guy who’s in that early-20s age where nobody wants to acknowledge that nobody knows what they’re doing but they’re not a kid anymore so they’re no longer part of the “marketable demographic” for kids, i think a lot of other shows would make him the punching bag or the butt of jokes or portray him as weird or creepy or a failiure. but no, soos is genuinely a big part of the heart of the show. he’s allowed to be a bit of a dork, and have a non-standard path in life- it’s treated as part of the quirks that make him lovable! the twins think he’s super cool, he’s smart, funny, genuine, kind- and when he gets his own episode in soos and the real girl, his issues with talking to people are just treated as so much more HUMAN than i’m used to for characters in his demographic. it’s really sweet. and i’m glad they do that. i really like soos.
It’s disturbing how a successful attack in the eyes of a Zionist depends on how many civilians have been murdered, or how many residential buildings have been destroyed.
it is genuinely bewildering to me that adult human beings do not know this but if you are mean to people they will not like you. like tbh they are probably also not going to like you if you are mean to other people but they are definitely not going to like you if you are mean to them. it doesn’t matter if you are funny or if you can use r/aita rules to prove that you are in the right. people simply do not enjoy being treated like shit.
Our reality is a simulation designed to test whether it would be better or worse to change the social conventions so that shaking hands with someone no longer requires doing a full thumb war with them (which is how they do it in the real world, and you can’t do a half-assed one just to get it out of the way, both of you have to be really trying your best). They’re thinking of getting rid of that to save time but they’re doing this simulation to see if there would be unexpected downsides. It’s vitally important from our perspective that not too many people know about this because then it would corrupt the data and they’ll shut us down early. I’m posting about it here because it’s not a big deal if some people know, but I’m not sure exactly where the line is so obviously use your best judgement when talking about this.
listen. i crave criticism and honesty more than anyone. it’s how we get better. but i’m not gonna lie, cheering on a friend while they gush about their own creative project for an hour, then bringing up yours and only getting back “oh, they already did that in [show you’ve heard of but never knew the plot of]”? that really fucking hurts
Hypothetical scenario: someone is on Ao3, looking for fanfiction to read. This person only speaks/reads English, and they set the language filter to only show fics written in English.
Do you think this is an act of cultural or language erasure?
A rare occasion where it’s both! Animals can’t receive communion/experience the sacraments because they have no souls. Additionally, I am going to safely assume you aren’t a priest, so you aren’t allowed to perform transubstantiation. Additionally, the Eucharist cannot be made of dental treats. Finally this whole thing is making a huge mockery of one of the single most sacred acts in Catholicism. Well done!
You often see people bailing water out of a sinking boat make the rookie mistake of throwing the water back into the sea. That’s no good, that water’s just going to come right back in again through the hole in your boat and all your hard work will be undone. You need to find somewhere else to put the water.
“why is EVERY song about love” I’m begging you to dig just a tiny bit deeper, there’s literally thousands of songs that aren’t love songs. You don’t even have to look for the most obscure underground artists ever, the fucking Beatles of all people have a song about a guy who kills people with a hammer
You can tell this post has breached containment by the people saying “everything is about love” maybe to you, to me everything is about killing people with a hammer
Killing people with a hammer is what makes us human
you don't actually get to cry "ally yourself with trans women" while actively talking over trans women whose traumatic experiences with transmisogyny are wildly ignored in favor of how hard transmisogyny is on the cis women. like why don't trans women get to say privilege plays into how much transmisogyny affects people?
do we not characterize white privilege as being what protects white americans from the systematic racism that permeates the US?
again, what is the preferred way you would have us refer to that privilege? because I am right here telling you that privilege is a part of the construct of tme/tma but you don't really care that trans women are more affected.
like it's crazy that you seem to think my problem is with the transvestigation playing out against a cis woman and not the way everyone pays attention when it happens to cis women but ignores the rampant transmisogyny when it happens to a trans woman. like you don't even pause to look at why there were no trans women at the olympics to transvestigate in the first place so they turned to the next marginalized option, intersex and women of color, when discussing how trans women deserve better.
Hi I'm the trans woman I deserve better from you specifically
To be completely honest this is looking less and less like a good faith discussion and more and more like you simply accusing me of stuff I didn’t say.
You say I am actively talking over trans women. How so? How is “we need to address transmisogyny at its root if we want things to be better” ignoring the plight of trans women?
How is it that I have *repeatedly* acknowledged that there is privilege there, and yet apparently I am ignoring it?
if you want to use the race example: white privilege exists. Racism also affects white people. If white people want to stop being affected by racism (welfare regulations, the war on drugs, low income housing, social programs for community aid, to name a few) then maybe they should ally themselves with people of color because the root of what’s causing issues with these things is racism. That doesn’t mean white privilege doesn’t exist just because a system of oppression affects everyone under said system. It doesn’t even mean that the primary target has changed. It’s just what makes this a system rather than an individual occurrence.
Never once have I said that cis women are more affected and, in fact, in followup posts I have stated that it *is* quite annoying that people have only been talking about this because this year’s Olympics included approximately 0 out trans women. I have been saying that this was the clear end result, once they were rid of the trans women they’d go for whatever cis women they could feasibly get away with, and this time it seems they overplayed their hand.
Castor Semenya is a cis woman who only found out that she is intersex due to being transvestigated. She is, by definition, TME. Except she’s not, is she, considering the same rules that apply to trans women apply to her. That’s why I brought her up! And- correct me if I’m wrong- but out trans women still competed after she was forced to leave the Olympic running. That is why I’m saying that things maybe are not quite so clear cut as “have” and “have not”, because I can point to an example of someone that the definition labels as “has privilege” that according to Olympic ruling bodies no longer counts as a woman either despite being afab TME cis.
If you want to continue to put words in my mouth, then we’re out of things to say to each other, and it becomes clear that this was never intended to be a good faith discussion in the first place.
You say you deserve better.
What do you want, that you would consider better? What do you want me to say? What do you want me to do?
Because I have said the things you’re claiming I don’t say, several times now, each in response to both your asks and the original discussions.
I am asking how someone is exempt from systemic oppression.
A system affects *everyone* because it is built into the very structure of society. You *cannot* be exempt from a system unless you exist wholly outside of that system, and currently there is no existence outside of transmisogynistic systems. This is what I mean when I say this is fairly basic civil rights, intersectional, feminist theory. This is not new. This is taken directly from one of many equity and equality projects trying to undo harmful systems *such as racism and transmisogyny*.
The fact that I log into tumblr and state literally the most lukewarm basic ass social movement theory broadly used and accepted by countless groups including groups intended to help with the very problems being discussed, and somehow that’s enough to label me as an enemy, is absolutely fucking bonkers.
What do you want me to say? What is acceptable enough for you? Because it’s looking like a game of moving goalposts to me.
so we don’t have AC at work, just these huge ceiling fans all over the place. and i remember the first few weeks i was there i’d look up at them and be like. damn, those are some big ass fans. and then one day i looked up at one that wasn’t moving and. you’ll never guess what they’re called
christians: what could possibly be in that evil book…. what horrible spells does it hold within its pages… what black magic does it propagate….
the talmud: so if you send your kid off to Torah school but he has a really hard time with it, send him back home and go to school yourself instead so that once you’ve learned Torah you can go and teach your entire family. in fact, once some rabbi went out to go to Torah school and do just this, and on his way he came through this town and he asked if he could stay in the synagogue for the night. and of course the rabbi said yes but weird enough no one was in the streets and something was kind of off about the whole place. so our hero went into the synagogue only to find a seven headed demon just hanging out in the library!! our hero is terrified and prays super hard and because of this the demon is vanquished. he goes back to the rabbi and is like “dude wtf” and the rabbi was like “listen i know this is unorthodox but you’re well known for how good at praying you are and this demon has been terrorizing us for well over a month and we were desperate. we knew you wouldn’t die” and the guy was like “i didn’t know that!” who do you think is in the right? hm. tough question. anyway. what were we talking about again? oh right. what if you make your sukkah doorway 1/7 of a cubit too short. would that be fucked up or what
once my brother was in a disney store and he saw a child pick up a mickey mouse toy and his thing is he does voices so he said “oh my god put me down” in a mickey mouse voice and the kid threw it across the store and then he had to run away from the store like “What have i done”
there’s a sesame street themed section of seaworld and he would go behind the mascots there and do the character’s voices and then watch the mascots panic because they’re not supposed to speak in costume
got called into the living room because “they’re talking about something you’ll like on tv” and it was a documentary about arsenic poisoning
feels worth mentioning that my response to this was to yell “POISONS??? :D :D :D” and sprint into the room like a dog that’s just been told it’s time for a walk
i think we as a society need to use cell phones/laptops/cars/backpacks to flesh out characters
like. a character has a cracked phone screen and a dozen stickers and a glittery case and a photo of their dog as a background. that says so much
or a character has a completely plain phone with no decorations and a default home screen and all the contacts are people’s first names with no profile photos. except for one contact which is a stupid nickname and a shot of someone taken at a very unflattering angle. you know?
or cars!!! someone who has a disgusting car, with trash everywhere and mud caking the seats, but the passenger seat is always clean, because someone else always cleans it for them.
this has potential to become a blorbo post so now i want everyone to describe what they think their blorbo’s phone/laptop/car/backpack looks like in the tags because i like reading these things
Hello pukicho! I got question. It’s very important and must be answered. So my question is: are we allowed to actually ask important things like relationship advice or is it like just silly goofy questions that we may ask?
You may ask me deep personal questions, because everyone else does anyways whether I want them to or not - but I have the right to not answer you seriously at all and/or completely ignore your entire ask except for one small part to make a joke out of it. This is the pact
