my habit of using a ship name when i mean “these characters are close friends and queer which blurs whatever platonic/romantic line that is enforced by cishet standards”
Sometimes it does feel weird talking about NSFW bans because you either see it discussed in the sense of “NSFW bans are bad because the systems just randomly shoot innocent queer people!” or “The NSFW was bad (supposedly) but all the weirdos who jacked off to porn went away so things are nicer now” and its like
man that’s great meanwhile I don’t think Mastercard should decide if I pay someone to draw Cynthia from Pokemon being brainwashed or not.
There’s just this unspoken rule that kink art is inherently disposable or cheap or not worth defending and man kink art rocks. I love people who create it. People who write about kink and draw it and live it are the coolest fucking people ever and they shouldn’t be targeted period.
life has become so much better since deciding to consume media with unbridled joy. i don’t care if people think it’s cringe, i don’t care if there are flaws. i can simultaneously acknowledge these faults while loving and consuming media that brings me joy.
PSA: Please for the love of God stop using the word “cretin”. It’s a slur for people born with congenital hypothyroidism (CHT, that used to be called cretinism) that causes physical and intellectual disability.
I think it’s unrealistic to expect a blanket moratorium on insults about intelligence, but words like “mong/mongoloid” (anti-Asian slur later applied to people with Down Syndrome), “spaz”, “downie”, “midget” and “cretin” refer to people born with specific developmental disorders. If you care enough not to use the “r–word”, please steer clear of these as well.
Reblogging with the addendum that the r-word is making a comeback nowadays, which tracks with the rise of fascism. If making intellectually disabled people (like my brother) into an object of mockery is right and normal for you, you are an eugenicist piece of shit who can’t clear the absolute lowest bar for humanity and decency.
PSA: Please for the love of God stop using the word “cretin”. It’s a slur for people born with congenital hypothyroidism (CHT, that used to be called cretinism) that causes physical and intellectual disability.
I think it’s unrealistic to expect a blanket moratorium on insults about intelligence, but words like “mong/mongoloid” (anti-Asian slur later applied to people with Down Syndrome), “spaz”, “downie”, “midget” and “cretin” refer to people born with specific developmental disorders. If you care enough not to use the “r–word”, please steer clear of these as well.
Reblogging with the addendum that the r-word is making a comeback nowadays, which tracks with the rise of fascism. If making intellectually disabled people (like my brother) into an object of mockery is right and normal for you, you are an eugenicist piece of shit who can’t clear the absolute lowest bar for humanity and decency.
You know what? This actually isn’t funny at all because this really does happen. Baby boomers can’t afford to retire; that’s a big part of why millennials can’t find jobs in their fields. And if they lose their jobs (which can mean a variety of things, including their companies finding an excuse to fire them so they don’t have to pay anything for their retirement, which happened to my uncle and 5 people he worked with over one year), they aren’t as desirable because they’re retirement-age. The world has changed a lot since they got jobs they thought were supposed to be secure, and now their old strategies that used to work for finding a job don’t work anymore and they don’t know what does work. So a lot are desperate; I recently talked to a woman who had to be in at least her mid-60s who was begging on a street corner because she was replaced by a younger person and lost her job of 18 years, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard a story like that. A lot of people who were never rich to begin with lost a lot in the 2008 financial crisis and never fully recovered. Baby boomers didn’t all just magically become financially secure as they got older.
This generation war bullshit is 100% manufactured to keep our anger misdirected. It’s not baby boomers screwing over millennials. It’s rich capitalists of every living generation screwing over baby boomers, their parents, gen x-ers, millennials, and gen z-ers all at once and all in different ways. And if we collectively realize that we’re not enemies and that we actually have a common cause with common enemies, it’ll be really bad for the people doing this to us, which is why they’re pushing the generation war thing so hard.
How much of the medical progress we’ve made in the past 150 years has been wiped out by millions of people deciding that if you have a medical condition you’re going to die anyway, so you’re not worth protecting?
Society has condemned seniors, the disabled, and those with various non-fatal health problems to death or isolation or playing Russian Roulette when we interact with other people for the rest of our lives.
Please click through and read the article. It just keeps getting better and better.
Because the crabs are raised in a lab, they don’t have any experience with predators. So before putting them onto the reef, Spadaro and his team may have to condition them to fear things like octopuses, snappers, and groupers.
One way to do this is by using puppets modeled after predators. By putting these puppets in the tanks while poking at the crabs, the crabs learn to move away from the threat. Several months ago, Mote partnered with a local elementary school and had students craft hand puppets, modeled after crab predators, to use in fear conditioning. (Fortunately, the crabs don’t have great vision.)
so many bands write songs about “relatable issues” that don’t resonate while the mountain goats write songs about issues no one has ever experienced before that are universal
Female surgeons have better overall patient outcomes than male surgeons.
Departments with a significant percentage of female surgeons have better overall patient outcomes for all surgeons.
This is demonstrated in study after study after study.
Why? Because surgery is such a male-dominated field that a female surgeon has to be orders of magnitudes better than her male peers to be considered for the same job positions/research grants, etc.
And when you get enough female surgeons in a department, they start being able to influence decision-making to improve patient safety and procedure efficacy for the entire department.
But hospitals don’t like hiring female surgeons because they might do something inconvenient like needing time off to give birth to the next generation.
DEI in medicine doesn’t just ensure a genuinely merits-based hiring process, as opposed to a convenience-based one.
weeks having a prime number of days is fucking pissing me off. wanna do something every other day? every three days? four, etc? can’t use day-of-the-week to remember which days to do it on cuz it’ll always be switching around. useless bullshit. joe biden needs to make days 12 weeks long and add some kind of glue to the tap water to make it sticky
socks are the primary producers of the laundry biome. they typically mate for life and come in a wide variety of patterns, though—unlike shoes, which many theorize to be a symbiotic species—they lack sexual dimorphism. juvenile socks resemble their parents, but have yet to develop the long necks that distinguish socks from other species of the extremity family, such as mittens
the lint trap is a fascinating example of a decomposer. it relies on the environment to bring food in the form of detritus, which it then breaks down into lint. lint traps have relatively long lives in comparison with other species (especially given the recent downward trends in lifespan, which are likely caused by a combination of genetic bottlenecks and poor nutrition). the lint trap has an unusual relationship with fire—some theorize that it uses fire as a tool to increase resource availability, while others believe that its frequent proximity to fire is due to environmental factors
the apex predator of the laundry biome is, of course, the dreaded duvet cover. duvet covers lead solitary lives, and are rarely seen socializing with one another. its preferred prey is socks, although it is an opportunistic eater and will prey upon much larger targets, such as t-shirts, leggings, and even sheets. aside from its large territory and antisocial nature, its behaviors are poorly known and highly controversial. one major theory is that the duvet cover is an ambush predator, lying in wait for its prey. another is that the duvet cover seeks out prey, using its superior size and large mouth to overwhelm its victims in a matter of seconds. a third, less popular supposition is that the duvet cover lures its victims to it by mimicking the laundry bag, a preferred shelter for many residents of the laundry biome. more research on this topic is necessary
Absolutely living for the fact that in ancient Greece, it was said that when Apollo was drunk he created people with the “wrong” genitalia,, which, first of all, means that 1. trans people are not a new thing, we’ve always been here and we’ve always found ways to justify and explain our existence, and 2. the way that we chose to explain ourselves at one point was, “Yeah, the sun was wasted as hell when he made me, but it’s cool.” and that is fucking awesome
I couldn’t find any sources for this myth. However, other examples exist of transgender-ish and/or intersex-ish stories in Greek mythology. Like Tiresias who was changed into a woman and then back into a man by the goddess Hera, both times for interrupting sex between two consenting snakes, Caenis who was assaulted by Poseidon and demanded to be turned into a man, which Poseidon did to atone for his wrongdoing, and the story of Hermaphrodite, who was merged with a nymph and became both female and male. Or the story of Iphis, an assigned female person raised as a boy who prayed to the gods to be turned physically into a man so that he could marry a woman named Ianthe.
There was also the cult of the male Aphrodite, who was a depiction of Aphrodite who was male. Members of the cult would cross-dress as a part of rituals and in a modern perspective and interpretation, given that Aphrodite was born from the remains of some cut-off male genitals, it’s absolutely possible to read Aphrodite as transfeminine.
Also also the god Dionysus in some versions of the myths was raised as a girl and didn’t much care for it so is a figure often associated with androgyny. And worshipers of Dionysus did and still do often break down cultural norms.
Not to mention that the creation of man is often attributed to Prometheus and Athena. Not Apollo. And the creation of Pandora (the first woman) was a team effort. Also the current race of humans is supposed to exist because an old couple that survived a great flood were were told to throw rocks over their shoulders and those rocks turned into humans.
There’s a lot of really cool gender based myths out there but none that I could find involved a drunken Apollo. If you want a trans-ish myth that’s way older than the Greeks look up the Akkadian version of Ishtar’s descent into the underworld where she is rescued by an intersex/gender ambiguous person named Asu-shu-namir.
Basically.
“Two consenting snakes”.
That made me spit out my drink.
“I cast trans your gender” is the funniest thing I’ve heard all fucking day dude
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
And I’ve never forgotten that.
THIS.
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
I would also add that giving as broad an education to as many as possible gives everyone the opportunity to follow a career that might use calculus. Or colour theory. Or electromagnetism. Or [insert specialism here]. If we gatekeep specialisms, those careers are only available for the ones who were privileged enough to have the background training. That’s why Classics as a degree subject is full of private school kids: it’s not offered in state education.
And when you gatekeep classics you get people who turn up their nose when people enjoy things ‘the wrong way’ like some (thankfully few) of the comments on the video of the girls playing Vivaldi on their marimbas with such joy.
I love when a meme gets so many steps away from its source material that it would be completely incomprehensible if I didn’t know what today’s date was
What they don’t tell you about writing is that as you write, you discover scenes and entire plots that you hadn’t accounted for that need to be written. So you can spend two hours writing and editing only to realise you’re further away from the finish line than you thought you were when you started
As I grow older I feel my capacity to understand that Miss Piggy is not a real person reached a peak in my adolescence and is now on a steady decline. I watched a Wendy Williams interview and there’s this part that’s like “can we get a ring cam!” and Miss Piggy shows her bling and I’m just like fuck she’s so iconic. Miss Piggy who are you wearing? Miss Piggy have you ever considered running for office??
Like literally every time I see Miss Piggy there’s a period where I need to readjust to the fact that it’s not a person, and I feel that period is getting longer and longer with every instance
now all my Youtube recommendations are filled with Miss Piggy interviews. I’m not complaining. Miss Piggy what’s your secret to ageing so graciously
It’s not just the audience; professional journalists, hosts, and actors report it is legitimately difficult to not see the Muppet as a person, and it is, in fact, incredibly easy to interview or act with them once the performer gets properly set up.
Like that one time they couldn’t figure out why Kermit’s audio was so garbage… then realized they’d put the mic on him instead of the performer.
this has been a very longstanding issue - before the muppet show was even a thing some muppets appeared in commercials, such as rolf the dog
they had a continual problem where when people directing/shooting the dogfood commercial would give dirrection to rolf that they would be speaking to the muppet, to which rolf REPEATEDLY had to tell them ‘i cant hear you, you have to talk to him’ and point at the performer underneath him
rolf is one of the most embarrassing muppets to need this direction as the performer is this, damn, obvious when not on camera
‘sir, i am a bathroom mat, the man you need to talk to is back there’
I did an interview with Gonzo one time, and when I got into the Zoom call, it was the actor on screen trying to figure out his audio. And then once he did, he went like “OKAY!” and then just like dove to the floor and it was Gonzo and there was never a moment when I doubted that the dude was just Gonzo’s tech guy
I have met a muppet-like puppet in real life and when I tell you that my brain was hacked FUCKING INSTANTLY….. It was a person, I swear it was a person. I asked it for a hug (no i was not 5 years old, i was like 28 at this time). i genuinely don’t know what came over me, it was just. It was a person???? Witchcraft
A couple years ago, I was invited to the birthday party of one of my former preschool students. I decided to bring my teaching puppet (a big rat) along because I knew several other kids from that class would be there, and she was always a huge hit with them.
They were, of course, very excited to see her. But what surprised me was that after the kids ran off to play in the sprinkler, the parents around me struck up conversation with the puppet. They continued for at least fifteen minutes, asking her questions like, “how long have you been teaching?” and “eaten out of any good dumpsters lately?” until one dad exclaimed “why have I been talking to a rat puppet this whole time!”
There’s a guy who comes to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science with life size Skeleton puppets of mammoth/young T-Rex that he wears. You can fully see him in the middle of the skeleton, and it’s a SKELETON, but absolutely everyone interacts with the puppets like they’re living, breathing animals. I watched multiple people attempt to feed pretzels to the baby rex.
legitimately my first feminist awakening as a ten year old child was realizing that girls were expected to respect “boy stuff” but boys were never expected to respect “girl stuff”
my science fair project in fifth grade was basically i had this printout of a bunch of toys that were stereotypically boy toys and girl toys, and i would have my classmates study the sheet for some short period of time, idr if it was like 30 seconds or a minute or whatever, then put it away and had them recall to me as many toys as they could remember. my hypothesis was officially that boys would remember more boy toys and girls would remember more girl toys, but secretly in my head i knew that girls would probably remember boy toys and girl toys relatively equally but boys would still remember mostly boy toys. and that ended up being the case. and i still remember this 20 years later because it hasn’t fucking stopped. and you know what they didn’t even like my project. participation ribbon. i was a fifth grade feminist theorist and no one cared
I wonder if “we have to torture this special character. in the lab facility. with secret science.” is an interest all 12-year-old children share or were we just the generation exposed to Maximum Ride
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You’re right. How could I forget to credit anime for its role in putting the special character in the secret torture facility (for science).
Genuine question: Isn’t this just Bond villainy and/or medieval torture dungeon? Or what kind of facility are we talking about?
The Facility is a critically important part here. See it’s a Science Facility. It’s run by a very shady clandestine organization, which is incredibly powerful. They’re maybe part of the government, or if not the government then something Illuminati-like.
As such The Facility is very high tech, and likely buried underground or hidden somewhere no normal person can access. The Torture being done is for Science, which the Facility is for. It’s all scientists in lab coats doing the torture. There is so much lab equipment and probably a lot of devices hooked up to the special character which will beep and go off the charts when the special character has a violent mind explosion. This part is important.
A lot of really good mentions in the notes here
Mewtwo
Secrets of Nimh
Wolverine
Akira
Elfen Lied
Shadow the Hedgehog
And a special mention to the couple of people identifying that a 12-year-old stuck in school all day is, perhaps, in a way, a special character being tortured in the science facility.
Growing up, one of the things that was a regular ritual for me was to read the micky mouse magazine, and to play with whatever little knickknack they came with that week until it was thoroughly destroyed.
I’d often skip to the pages with the jokes, right around the middle of the magazine- I was terrible at telling jokes. My own attempts at jokes would often be completely abstract- I did understand, on some level, that part of humor was a subversion of expectation. I remember, in particular, thinking up a joke I thought was totally hilarious. It went something like… “Imagine if you were in a haunted mansion…* and then you fell through a trapdoor! but then… it started raining McDonalds** coupons on you!”
It absolutely crushed me that my older sister didn’t think this was even a little bit funny. She did laugh, but it was at how funny I thought it was.
My jokes did get better, with time, and careful study. When it came to the comics themselves, I had little interest in the ones that featured Mickey, or… most of the cast, really. Donald was the one who really caught my eye. In almost every story, he’d end up being the one who catches the short end of the (slap)stick, with his misery being the thing that is funny. That’s not what I read those stories for, though.
Every now and then, one of the comics would have Donald being triumphant, cool, and competent- especially when he’d don his secondary identity as- huh. Just discovered that the english name for that identity is “The Duck Avenger.” What a downgrade. Over here, his name was Phantomias, which I hope we can all agree is objectively cooler.
My shelf must’ve had… hundreds, if not thousands of those slim magazines at some point… precariously bending the wood they were placed on near the top, where I could reach them from my bunk bed, a steadily growing repository to pick from. It reminds me of how I now listen to podcasts or comfortably familiar youtube videos to fall asleep- (not that I didn’t usually finish settling in for night with one audiobook or another. Der Liebe Herr Teufel my beloved…)
I do realize that this might seem like pointless rambling, and like the image up there was placed by mistake- but, if I’ve learned anything about humor and people in the time since my childhood, it’s that everyone loves an underduck story.***
Image description: The stick figure violence meme with the following words in the middle:
“narc abuse” “male/female brain” “dark empath” “love language” “MBTI” “surviving a sociopath” “traumadumping” “borderline abuse” “brain not fully developed til 25” “toxic”.
(Stick Figure Violence refers to six stick figure cartoons that are bloody, gruesome and committing violent acts of murder and cannibalism against each other.)
My problem with heterosexual romance novels (which I am reading under duress due to my coworker book club but find somewhat entertaining cuz they’re not something I normally wld read) is that whenever the love interest is an asshole the author also makes him all dommy dom. when what I really want is for him to be thoroughly put in his place. All of these shithead Christian grey knockoff guys in these books would be excellent brat material but nobody cares what I want. Nobody cares what I want
I’m really not apologetic with this hard stance, either. I’m very firm on this, too. My art has already been used, twice now by people who did not ask my permission, so they could “enhance it” with Gen AI. I really see nothing good coming from generative AI except poor excuses for laziness and glorified search engines that don’t work.
This is an important time to make the distinction between generative and analytical AI. Analytical AI is what AI is supposed to be for. It’s all the boring stuff like analyzing data for patterns. For example, you probably heard about that AI that was designed to tell apart bear claws from croissants for a bakery that is now being used to detect cancer cells with greater accuracy than human doctors. That’s an analytical AI, while everything mentioned in the post above is generative AI. (Which sucks!)
oh good oh boy oh golly gee my city police dept has robot dogs now. that’s so fun. hey siri where is the weak point of a boston dynamics quadroped located
We need her now
Did u find out where it is btw because i think it should be basic knowledge for the public for safety reasons
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