In case the URL didn't tip you off, a-spec and nyanbinary. "I want a guarantee that I can still be myself."
"There isn't one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you." Partner of Viri(/a-politemelody).
so... like, i get the sentiments of “man, fuck empathy-centric morality” and “man, fuck empathy-centric compassion”, etc, and honestly, i’m pretty on-board with them myself as a low/no empathy person?
but something that does kinda really need to stop is the conflation of “people with empathy” with “people who subscribe to empathy-centric morality/compassion”.
cause when you do that, it’s grouping in, for example, hyperempathetic people with that rather nt-centric perspective.
hyperempathetic people, who, it’s worth keeping in mind, get their own brand of crappy treatment from the “empathy centric morality” people.
they don’t deserve to be made the butt of jokes, and otherwise mistreated, by other empathyweird people.
I'm gonna say it, I do think that even the laziest person imaginable should have a roof over their head, food in their stomach, and access to healthcare
a lot of people are reblogging this saying that most "lazy" people are actually just disabled or that the concept of laziness itself is a product of our society's obsession with productivity. this is all true, but it is not my point.
even if someone WAS just lazy and simply didn't want to do anything but lie on the couch and watch tv, they should still have these things. it's irrelevant whether some people aren't actually lazy because everyone, including hypothetical lazy people, should have their basic needs met.
if we have the resources to do it, there is no defense of letting people die because they don't want to work, and much less because they can't.
I don't want lazy people to have basic necessities because they "actually" deserve them because they ARE working or CAN'T work. I want lazy people to have basic necessities because they are people, and we shouldn't leave them to die when we have the resources not to.
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
"earth is uninhabitable, let's go find another planet to live on" turning into "goddamn, finding another planet to live on is literally impossible. let's go back to earth and try and figure that out, seriously, can't be harder"
is more or less the setup for, of all things, the animated godzilla movie trilogy (planet of the monsters, city on the edge of battle, the planet eater)
You guys need to recognize that the push to treat ace and aro discourse as stupid infighting that never left tumblr is indeed a manifestation of the continued erasure and devaluing of asexuality, aromanticism, and and ace and aro lives in an effort to pretend that the people who did it weren't part of a reactionary hate movement that completely decimated two entire marginalized communities both on and offline.
Like I try to be nice about this but I have seen SO many fucking people being like "lol yeah ace/aro discourse was one thing" and that is deliberate erasure of real and important queer history in service of dodging blame on the parties that did this who, for the most part, never fucking apologized or owned up to it, or, in the case of a few blogs I still see going around, clearly still stand by all of it and just hope you don't point that out, and ofc, no one ever fucking does.
Stop downplaying the absolute fucking devastation the queer community did to ace and aro people and our communities. If owning it makes you uncomfortable, good, go make it right, and start by not fucking lying about what happened, thanks.
I do want to say if you got caught up in this I don't hate you, especially if you learned and changed, because like most reactionary hate movements ace/aro discourse was always presented as righteous and fun, and also it was EVERYWHERE and the people stirring shit were very well articulated. A lot of us were teenagers joining queer spaces for the first time ever and we wanted to belong and sometimes that means hating who the people who already belong tell you to hate. I get why people fell for it, I came close a few times myself when I was at my lowest and most desperate to feel like I belonged again. I get it.
I can't offer forgiveness or absolution to everyone, but you don't need me to forgive you to forgive yourself and move on, and I do think most of the people who got caught up in it have more than earned moving on.
However, what I want is for everyone to stop downplaying it. Don't call it stupid infighting, don't go "ace stuff was one thing but this with trans men is too far" don't claim it didn't leave tumblr or the internet, own how bad it was. If you were there you know, and your history is valuable, so even when it sucks please be honest about what happened. This part of queer history should not be forgotten, and especially not for the people who never really changed and have an interest in making sure everyone thinks this was just some silly infighting.
That's what I ask, do right by us, don't let us be erased again.
Especially because when you forget, when you downplay it, you downplay what's happened with truscum shit, with biphobia, and now with trans masc exclusion. You downplay it and you disguise that it's the same people saying the same things about a new group. I found out about the rise in trans man/masc exclusion because I saw someone saying that trans men are collateral damage secondary to the real targets of transphobia, trans women, and I immediately knew the person saying it was a shithead I should NEVER trust because that is exactly what they said about bi and ace and aro people. Word for word.
You do those who were hurt a disservice when you downplay what happened, but you also make our spaces less safe because if we pretend what happened didn't we can't stop it when it starts again.
Reblogging again after seeing YET ANOTHER person say ace/aro discourse wasn't mainstream and didn't leave the internet. People got kicked out of irl queer spaces behind this, stop fucking lying about what happened. At this point more someone pushes the "ace/aro discourse was bad but not mainstream/offline/as bad as what's happening now with [xyz group]" the more I think you have a vested interest in making it out to be not a big deal and that doesn't say anything good about you.
Like y'all claim to be against oppression olympics, but you're still engaging with it every single time you say anything even remotely like "ace/aro discourse was really bad but nothing as serious as what's happening now" and I'm sick of pretending it's not oppression olympics and also not a manifestation of the continued violence against ace and aro people. If the only way you're going to talk about what happened is through downplaying our suffering and/or spreading misinformation about it, do me and every other aro and ace person a favor and stop fucking talking about us.
i think we are long overdue for a game that does the reverse of 90s first person shooters and actively makes fun of the player for picking the hard difficulty
this in combination with an inversion of "game content locked behind difficulty" would definitely get certain people riled up
that is, if content is locked behind difficulty settings in a game, it is ime invariably done such that to get the "whole game" or the "full story" you need to play on higher difficulties
instead, lock the endgame behind playing on lower difficulties.
i think that, when it comes to discussions around bigotry, way too many people are happy to approach it as a competition - a way to prove that their perspective is the correct one.
i think that, instead, there are ways to approach it that do not come down to arguments about who's right and who's wrong (and thus, a bigot), but instead take into account the fact that the topic is nuanced and complex enough that from different perspectives, it can look very different. that conversations around these topics should be approached not with the intent of "prove the other party wrong" or "prove i am right", but that people should be willing to listen in good faith and go in with the intent of walking away with a more nuanced and informed picture of things, due to having gained something from the conversation.
ultimately, a lot of the models and frameworks we use to discuss queerphobic and gendered forms of bigotry are attempts to describe a complicated, hypocritical, and contradictory set of systems that have complicated, hypocritical, and contradictory motivations behind them. is it any surprise that they struggle to capture the whole picture, or that it can look very different from different perspectives?
there's a couple examples of the kinda stuff im thinking about under the cut, which i put in because this post was getting kinda long.
for reference, im gonna be referring a lot to sexism (about the treatment of men and women), cissexism (about the treatment of cis people and trans people, and heterosexism (about the treatment of people who are straight and people who are not).
here is an example of what i'm thinking about above;
many people seem to regard "sexism" and "misogyny" as more or less synonymous, when i would regard there as actually being some nuance.
i would describe "misogyny" as being about the ways in which the box society has called "men" is broadly elevated above the box society has called "women". meanwhile, "sexism", i would describe as being more about the ways in which those boxes are constructed, what they're shaped like, and the ways in which people are punished for failing to conform to their assigned box.
or, to summarise, sexism is the way in which two boxes are out of inward-pointing spikes, and misogyny is the way in which one of them is set above the other.
the thing is, while seperating them is useful for breaking experiences and how society treats people based on gender, they also overlap to a significant degree- and "misogyny is a subset of sexism" is a view i would struggle to argue against.
for a broader example- i would argue that, while it is useful to consider cissexism and heterosexism as broadly independent from eachother and sexism, and doing so can allow for more nuanced discussion about people's experiences and their intersectionality, they are both heavily rooted in sexism.
a lot of society seems to regard orientation and a person's body needing to be "correct" for their gender as necessary parts of correctly conforming to it, i think. consider how frequently stereotypes and bigotry towards cis gay people lean towards portraying gay men as feminine, and gay women as masculine, in ways intended to be degrading. the way that trans people's bodies are so frequently used as "proof" they aren't really their actual gender.
here's the thing; while, to my eye, much of this has roots in sexism... i would be kind of surprised if there were not decent arguments for viewing things the other ways around here- that sexism and heterosexism are rooted in cissexism, and cissexism and sexism are rooted in heterosexism- as well as each of them being similar and overlapping but independent. and while i consider much of cissexism and heterosexism to be fundamentally based in sexism, that does not mean i consider them to be subsets of it.
You have actually made me stop and wonder what the heck revives are made of in the pokemon world. What do you mean they defied death for the little bug.
Hell if I know! 30 years old franchise and they made absolutely no attempt to explain how the items work!!
Revives are likely an adrenaline boost. Your pokemon are never killed only knocked out. Therefore, giving them a modified version of adrenaline would give them enough energy to keep fighting until they can get some proper rest and medical attention.
Okay, so. Star Wars has all these concepts that weirdo New Left boomer George Lucas tosses in there but because of storyteller limitations it would kill the plot to fully explain them all, so later writers have to come in for the spin-off materials and bat clean-up to fully explain all this crazy crap. And I would like to talk about something that made me actively angry at first, but which I now adore. And that is the Naboo.
So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.
Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.
There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.
The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.
The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.
Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.
The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.
Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.
Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.
Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.
The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.
Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.
They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!
yeahhhh so the thing is that they're stopping using specifically anthropic's product here because they consider anthropic's prices to be too expensive; that doesn't mean they're not still all in on LLM AI chatbot stuff.
see, they're just working on making/utilizing their own LLM chatbot stuff for this now, because then they don't have to pay licensing fees and the like.
Microsoft is working to reduce its reliance on Anthropic's Claude AI models, with AI chief Mustafa Suleyman calling them too expensive. The company believes its new in-house AI models can deliver similar capabilities at a lower cost.
Microsoft is ending its Claude Code licenses because it no longer wants to rent the intelligence inside its own products. Instead, it is pushing developers onto a homegrown coding model built for Copilot
I love showing my non-Doctor Who friends the clip from the five doctors where everybody gets abducted by the weird triangles without context and refusing to elaborate
This is actually such a crucial part of healing from neglect and abuse and I have to add to this.
Because indeed, people who like you will not roll their eyes and sigh at the idea of accommodating your needs, they will value your voice and be upset with you about injustice done to you, not at you for "being difficult". They will be happy when you find a way to live a better life, and help you to get there. If you are struggling, someone who loves you wants to see you smile, not tell you to smile because "you have it so good".
It is... incredibly frustrating how frequently I will see job adverts along the lines of, like
entry level position with minimum required qualifications/skills:
BSc or equivalent in specific field, specific qualifications to the field, 2-3 years experience in the field
like, requiring, say, a numerate degree or something of that level of specificity is understandable for a number of jobs. requiring a specific degree is... less so, although can depend on the field.
needing specific qualifications is, like. that's... not really an "entry level position", is it? if you need to have achieved qualifications to even be worth applying for it, that's... you're asking for experience.
and literally just straight up listing experience requirements- that's. that's blatantly, blatantly not "entry level".
