This took way longer than I intended but I just wanted to draw the sillies because of how different they are and I just like drawing Neon’s and Sky’s lambs alot-
For the last pic, I like to think that the lambs haven’t called their Nari’s “my lord” in such a long time that seeing one that does makes them mildly concerned about their well-being. (Rightfully so cause what emotionally well person let their crown stay looking like their brother all the time and becomes a workaholic to cope-) The same with the Naris, they’re like “You really done fucked up for your lamb to not even call you by name-” Lol.
“edit images with AI– search with AI– control your life with AI–”
i keep getting grammarly ads and one i just saw made my blood boil because they hired some dude to say “this AI generative stuff is fantastic! i used to be sooo bad at writing, now i’m so much better!! i love AI :)” YOU STUPID FUCK. you didnt get better at anything. You did JACK SHIT….. You sat back while an algorithm evaporated the atlantic and punched 30 fistfuls of plastic straws down a seaturtles throat all just to generate the worst shit anyones ever read!! im going to put my hands around your neck and wring out all of your blood and then im gonna start whipping people with your limp corpse like a wet rag
halfway through giving my coworker the Fall of the Roman Republic spiel she asked, “so was Julius Caesar, like… a good guy…? or a bad guy?”
Funnily in history you normally have to go “well, it’s complicated”, but in Caesar’s case I feel like you can pretty safely go “oh, he was a bad guy” and keep going.
dunno—kinda has something going for him
This is what the 2024 election has done to Tumblr, the Caesar stans coming out of the woodwork -_-
Caesar was literally the best of guys
Counterpoint: he was the worst of guys
He conquered Gaul is what he did! He was an honorable defender of the plebian class, and in this house Gaius Julius Caesar is a hero, END OF STORY
Since computers, we’ve had another revolutionary semiconductor device, which is LED lighting. Now with solar panels we’re beginning another semiconductor revolution, this time in power generation.
feels kind of crazy that all of our fancy nanotech is based on one idea
Since computers, we’ve had another revolutionary semiconductor device, which is LED lighting. Now with solar panels we’re beginning another semiconductor revolution, this time in power generation.
feels kind of crazy that all of our fancy nanotech is based on one idea
It’s wild to me to see transvestigator conspiracy theories online that could be so easily explained by natural human variation. That woman has a deep voice? Yeah, sometimes they do. A woman has broad shoulders?? Maybe she plays rugby or hits the gym a fuckton. There’s a “bulge” in her tight pants?? Maybe her vulva is just fat. All the “markers” of trans woman that transvestigators use to harass any woman aren’t even things unique to trans women.
Transphobes talk about women like they’re Barbies. Have you forgotten the existence of cameltoe? Tiny boobs? Narrow hips? Broad shoulders? Why do you think choirs have altos and not just sopranos? What do you think female athletes look like? Do you think a woman that lifts weights and plays contact sports will look like a 90s supermodel? At what point in history did we collectively forget that human bodies have natural variability???
I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world.
All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you.
Man, this post makes me feel conflicted, because on the one hand, of the things listed, next-day delivery is the only one that DOES actually exist in the world today. The others are exaggerations, and while I understand the point being made, they do detract from it.
I understand—and agree with—that sentiment of, “I want slower deliveries by drivers who are paid better,” as one recent tumblr post put it. I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to produce and consume less as a culture, and that an actual substantive conversation about politics should involve willingness to relinquish the many modern luxuries that are built on exploitation.
I don’t think these are good examples of those luxuries, though.
Large budget movies are possible because consumers (and investors) are willing to pay for them. A large budget is actually a necessary component in making sure workers are being adequately compensated; the fact that they currently are often exploited by studios is a result of deliberate misallocation of resources, not anything intrinsic to the size of the production. Same thing goes with high-quality video games. As for releasing a new film/game every month/year, that’s only unsustainable because there’s only a handful of monopolistic studios doing it. In a well-regulated industry that encourages growth and competition, we could see tens, if not hundreds of studios producing big-budget films and games. And, with a well-compensated and socially-supported citizenry, consumers would have enough disposable income to support it.
Similarly, the problem with soda isn’t that we have 80 brands; it’s that we have two. And those two brands each own 800 different labels. In a healthy economy, these monopolies would be dissolved, and we could support well over 80 moderately-sized independent beverage companies producing their own sodas.
Same-day delivery, again, could be easily supported with proper allocation of resources. Currently, we have huge centralized distributors like Amazon exploiting gig-workers with slave-wages to ferry cheap mass-produced crap to people, and that’s what makes it bad, not the speed at which they do it. If instead, we had something like a super-robust USPS, with well-compensated deliverypeople working reasonable hours within a decentralized network of independent-but-cooperative suppliers, there would be absolutely no reason why you couldn’t get something delivered to you from the distro ten miles down the road within a day.
When we critique capitalism, and they respond, “Yeah, well capitalism made the cell phone you’re using!” our response shouldn’t be, “Oh shit u right,” it should be, “No, capitalism made the cell phone I’m using break after a year so I’ll buy a new one, and they use slave labor to do it while they pocket the rest.”
There are luxuries, and there are artificially-valued, mass-produced, built-to-break trash that are marketed as luxuries. But we don’t solve the problems of fast-fashion by saying, “Welp I guess I shouldn’t wear clothes.”
it’s always bad for adults to interact with minors, which is why when I was born my mother was positioned at the window and I was birthed down a giant slip n slide that safely transported me to the hospital grounds, where I was quickly accepted and raised by a gang of feral babies who were born under similar circumstances. and that’s why my posts are so bad
lot of people hear “critical thinking” and think it means you have to be a jerk about it and you can’t like the media. The association of criticism and tearing something to shreds honestly sucks, because it’s wrong. Critical thinking doesn’t mean you have to hate everything with flaws. It means you need to think about it at more than the surface level, and discuss why the author made the choices they made, why certain things played out the way they did, and what real-life influences might’ve inspired the story.
lot of people hear “critical thinking” and think it means you have to be a jerk about it and you can’t like the media. The association of criticism and tearing something to shreds honestly sucks, because it’s wrong. Critical thinking doesn’t mean you have to hate everything with flaws. It means you need to think about it at more than the surface level, and discuss why the author made the choices they made, why certain things played out the way they did, and what real-life influences might’ve inspired the story.
lot of people hear “critical thinking” and think it means you have to be a jerk about it and you can’t like the media. The association of criticism and tearing something to shreds honestly sucks, because it’s wrong. Critical thinking doesn’t mean you have to hate everything with flaws. It means you need to think about it at more than the surface level, and discuss why the author made the choices they made, why certain things played out the way they did, and what real-life influences might’ve inspired the story.
Amid the uncaring void, alien to every form of life and sentience, a strange vessel drifts. Ion thrusters correct its trajectory every so often as imperceptible forces act upon it. Within, you are carried before a throne surrounded by weapons of war, the tools which the Paw of History must wield in order to make them obsolete. Upon the throne, elevated as to command worship, the symbol of order and progress: a single tabby cat sleeps on a crimson velvet pillow. The dimly glowing green flesh beneath her grey fur catches your eye - it reminds you of stories told about a terrible formless being dug out of the depths of the sub-surface oceans of Europa, which brought doom to a Federation research mission… Or perhaps a new, higher purpose. After a second, she wakes up, her golden eyes staring into you. She demands you pet her.
Sometimes I see some variety of North American Little Guy (opossum, raccoon, etc. ) and I’m like “okay”
BUT THEN I start thinking about how excited somebody from not-North-America would be to see this Guy. Like, would an Australian be excited to see the only marsupial not from their country? Are there raccoons in zoos on the other side of the world that are regarded as unique and exotic creatures? Idk but it’s made me more excited to see Guys in my area.
it’s me, i’m the person described in the tumbl
I went to a zoo in England this past summer, and there were crowds around the skunks, raccoons, and coyotes.
So, as an Australian, going to the zoo in China with a USAmerican and a Jamacian was an experience.
The first thing you should know about this experiences is I’m a fairly bush-raised child. Not entirely, but the vast majority of my school holidays were spent camping or on a property or otherwise out in the bush. (Not the Outback, although sometimes, but definitely the Bush. The great south-west forests, to be specific.)
I have seen more than my fair share of actually wild Australian wildlife. I am severely immune to snakes, spiders, frogs, kangaroos and wild foxes, rabbits and pigs (those shouldn’t be in Australia, but they are. Also, if you ever see evidence of pigs in the bush, you leave immediately.)
So here we encounter jarring moment of dissonance the first.
We were walking past the kangaroo paddock and I’ll admit I didn’t even give it a second glance - it was a case of “Oh, kangaroos, how normal,” And moving on. Didn’t even register that they would be something to get excited about. It was literally like seeing a bird or the neighbour’s cat.
Anyway, after awhile I noticed that I was no longer with my fellows because they were amazed by the kangaroos. They were staring, they were laughing, they were paying money to feed the fucking kangaroos like they were some sort of weird, special, exotic animal.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, guys, they’re just kangaroos!”
And then I realised I was with non-Australians and felt properly shamed.
We spent some (far too long of a) time with the kangaroos and moved on.
Anyway, as we were leaving we were walking through the American animals section and I’ve stopped dead in my tracks and squealed with excitement and raced over to an enclosure to coo and generally be a weird, animal-obsessed little moron. I’d never seen this animal in real life before but it was adorable and lovely and the cutest thing ever. And my Americas friends were looking at me like I’d grown another head because the animal that I was enamoured with and had never seen in person before, the animal that I was most excited about out of any that was there (including the baby tiger that I actually got to hold, guys)
The animal was a raccoon.
Your trash creature is someone else’s treasured encounter
When my father visited a Zoo in Germany, he was amazed to find people eagerly watching what appeared to be a large patch of dirt with holes in it. It took him a minute to realize that the exhibit was for prairie dogs and everyone was waiting to hopefully see one pop it’s head out. Dad, who went to school in Eastern Oregon and regularly harassed the local prairie dog population there, had long known how to call them. So to amuse himself, he gave the high whistle he used to use at school and, sure enough, about 15 little heads popped up to see what was happening. What was happening was the local German patrons all losing their god damn minds
not normie enough to fit in but not fringe enough to lean into being a freak, worst of both worlds, pure liminality, just the weird coworker, and unrelatable classmate. and your mutual
not normie enough to fit in but not fringe enough to lean into being a freak, worst of both worlds, pure liminality, just the weird coworker, and unrelatable classmate. and your mutual
Getting a bit sick of all the “ooh I’m so glad Laios has a soft body!” “Laios is built like an average guy” style posts. Because he doesn’t and isn’t.
Laios is built like a fucking professional wrestler. He isn’t like, super chiseled or anything but he does not have an “average” body, he his built like someone who does a LOT of physical effort and training.
you’d think that if all that motivates US policy-makers is “we have to beat The Chinese”, then this should be plenty of motivation to actually start taking covid seriously
I mean, it will go on another ten years? almost certainly, in the absence of a totally game changing vaccine, in which case it will go on another five or six years.
And those five, six, or even ten years are five, six, or ten years where more & more people will be protected from the worst outcomes of “let er rip”. Protecting people is so evil and authoritarian 😥😥😥
Videos posted on Chinese social media site Weibo showed people rushing to the park’s gates following the announcement but finding them already locked.
However, those awaiting their freedom at Shanghai Disney can console themselves with one positive: rides are continuing to operate for those trapped inside The Happiest Place on Earth.
love this!
In December 2022, China finally ended its draconian zero COVID policy. Following the sudden opening, the number of positive cases and deaths skyrocketed. The reasoning behind this change has been baffling scholars. Not long ago, the official media praised the zero COVID policy as “most economical and most effective.” Perhaps more surprising was that there seemed to be little preparation for the opening. Soon after the opening, hospitals faced overcrowding, and medicines were sold out.
lol, lmao even;
but seriously I think my assessment remains the same as it did two years ago: the early Chinese lockdowns were a success that helped reduce deaths by curtailing the spread until widespread vaccination, while the later lockdowns were a failure that just increased the cost of the pandemic without helping at all to prepare for the inevitable collapse of the policy and abrupt transition to the “let her rip” approach.
China still did better than America on a per capita basis as a result, but the crisis painfully highlighted the weaknesses of the system as well as its strengths, just as it did for every other country.
Willing to say now I was wrong about the protests in China - I thought they would be outlasted, pushed down, and then quietly zero-covid would be abandoned a bit later slowly, to send the message that protests dont work. Instead they massively succeeded, and the Chinese government has done the most abrupt about face possible in abandoning virtually every aspect of the program. You even have some peak Orwell in the state propaganda channels advertising how Omnicron is mild and shouldn’t be feared in the same exact spaces preaching victory or death a week before.
My best hypothesis for the extremity of the response is that the inner circle was far more divided over zero covid than we thought. I have seen some say the switch is a sign of the ‘tyranny of xi’, that he snapped his fingers and now everyone is overcompensating to switch, but i think that doesn’t gel with how much the old policies were abandoned. Instead i think the protests must have pushed the end-zero-covid faction over the threshold of having power and now they are rushing to cement the new status quo before any slipback on the changes. How bad zero-covid has been for China’s national power is I think a good motivator for the intensity; if you frame this as an issue of national security it makes sense.
the turnaround has been very dramatic!
and the R value may be as high as 16 now, which is certainly consistent with anecdotal experience.
That is the ‘other theory’, essentially that zero-covid was already failing dramatically in obvious ways to state authorities, the protests (coincidentally?) lined up with those failures, so it was a bit of a two birds/one stone situation. I personally am on the fence on that - from my read zero-covid has been failing for a while, case rates in China have been way higher than official estimates. But since they were falsifying data its really hard to say on the outside.
A big tell is going to be what the ‘peak’ of the infection wave is - if it truly hits the highs being predicted by naive estimates then yeah, natural immunity was that low. If it comes out a good deal below a bunch of explanations for that will exist, but “there were previous waves they were just unreported” is gonna be a big one.
we know there were previous outbreaks across multiple cities in 2022 but this is qualitatively different, however it did start building about a month before zero covid officially ended I think that’s one reason why it’s hit like a hammer now
(for example the outbreak was already slowly spreading through Guangzhou, but once zero covid ended it immediately consumed every surrounding city in like a week)
Certainly it will be qualitatively different, but I have seen estimates putting China’s true covid case rates at 100x or more the official numbers, its definitely possible a huge part of the population has already been exposed, in outbreaks we barely even heard about. Zero covid was both bad policy and also they weren’t particularly good at it! Its going to get bad regardless of course - in particular given the population views covid as highly dangerous I would expect severe hospital strain.
(also I can’t find any of those older estimates now because googling “China covid case true rates” get you absolutely swamped with current news)
I’m not so sure, just going by anecdotal evidence, of ten people I happen to know in China none of them caught covid over the past three years and all of them caught it in the past week.
(one of them is a nurse at a hospital, so some indirect insight into outbreaks is available through that channel as well).
Don’t let anyone silence your voice or steal your power, which is your vote.
Your vote is private. Your vote is your own.
Vote accordingly.
How many “Trump votes” are abusive MAGA husbands or boyfriends who essentially got two votes, while their wife or girlfriend got none?
To be clear: abusive men may think their wife or girlfriend belongs to them, including their vote. But legally, this is voter fraud.
Report these criminals.
[ID1: Screenshot of a reply chain showing part of one and two other messages. The earliest poster Darrel Owens @/IDoTheThinking said “Bro I phonebank for Harris and this shit happens all the time. God awful husbands swearing up and down no Democrat lives there when the wife is a Democrat. Women who whisper "I agree with you” and hang up the phone because they dont want their MAGA luna..“. The first reply is from Tom Cox @/OBC15u, "That’s why I make my wife do a mail in ballot so I can make sure she votes for Trump, she’s not gona vote behind my back”. Second reply from edgykristinahart, “Can someone check on Tom’s wife or…” /end]
[ID2: Screenshot of a post with a photo attached. The post says “If your husband has forced you to vote you CAN INVALIDATE YOUR VOTE. Contact your local election officials. Your vote is your own.” The image in post reads: “Text contains those laws in effect on October 30th, 2024 / From Title 52-VOTING AND ELECTIONS / Subtitle I-Voting Rights / CHAPTER 103-ENFORCEMENT OF VOTING RIGHTS / Jump To: "§10307. Prohibited acts / (a) Failure or refusal to permit casting or tabulation of vote / No person acting under color of law shall fail or refuse to permit any person to vote who is entitled to vote under any provision of chapters 103 to 107 of this title or is otherwise qualified to vote, or willfully fail or refuse to tabulate, count, and report such person’s vote. ”(b) Intimidation, threats, or coercion / No person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote, or intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for urging or aiding any person to vote or attempt to vote, or intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for exercising any powers or-“ /end]
ALT
