Hello and welcome! My name is Anna (she/her), and I am known to reblog things that make me happy (including but not limited to Steven Universe, Harry Potter, LGBTQ+ content, and art). I am also studying mathematics and music in college. Welcome and have a lovely day :)
Korra and Asami only held hands because Nickelodeon wouldn’t let them do more. Nick infamously cancelled Korra and put out the rest of season 4 as a webseries only.
Marceline and Princess Bubblegum only kiss in the very final episode because Cartoon Network wouldn’t let them do more. There are a ton of interviews with Pendelton and with the voice actresses where they talk about the CN censorship.
Steven Universe got as far as it did because Rebecca Sugar fought tooth and nail, and risked the show getting cancelled (which it did in many countries, if not heavily censored), because Cartoon Network wouldn’t let her. Ruby was often dubbed over with a male voice, and Pearl/Rose interactions were completely cut.
She-Ra managed to do it largely because it was specifically on Netflix only, and even then, Noelle has said they had to build 4 seasons of storyline very subtly around it so they had enough ammo to convince the execs that Catradora was the only logical conclusion to this show they had already aired. She didn’t just go in on Day 1 and make it gay; she had to plan many years in advance for how to set up her argument. Her argument, y’all.
And now we have The Owl House. Which is an absolutely wonderful show. And it’s so amazing that we actually get to see queer characters get the kind of representation that so many straight characters get. And it’s amazing we get to see the romance build up, instead of just a quick peck in the series finale!
Let’s not forget that in the US, it was illegal for gay people to get married until 2015. Korra aired in 2012. In Texas, it was a punishable felony to even be gay until the mid-90s. No, literally. Just being gay was an arrestable offense here in Texas until 1993. We have come a really long way in 20 years!
But don’t fucking dare disrespect any of these other shows by saying they didn’t try, or that their representation didn’t matter. The Owl House is standing on the shoulders of giants. Lumity is only where it is because Korrasami and Bubbline helped get them there.
This same concept goes for all media. When looking at media, you should consider the year it was made before declaring it queerbating because often with older media, it was queer voices trying to sneak in hints of representation without getting canceled, fired, or getting in huge trouble. This isn’t to say queerbaiting didn’t happen, but like for example, Star Trek wasn’t allowed to have same sex relationships but they hinted at them because they wanted it there, but if they had done it at the time the show would’ve been canceled.
As expobeau so aptly put, queer media today is standing on the shoulders of giants.
I remember being in elementary school and feeling a deep alienation at people’s just vicious rejection of mathematics, the reason being, like
It’s like. A classic approach to hypothetical communication with aliens that you start with the things you know you have in common and proceed from there. Mathematics is that.
Imagine you approach someone you don’t understand with a thing specifically designed to be something they and you can agree on as a starting point for communication and they just react with “yeah i hate this”
imo this approach says a lot about astronomers themselves being into math, and less about the universality of mathematics itself. there’s no reason at all to make math the thing that humans & aliens can agree on – like your example shows, it assumes that aliens approach math from the same point of view, giving it the same intellectual value, that (some) humans do.
it assumes you have mathematics in common, and we don’t know that about an alien species.
it’s not even true for humans.
i understand why human scientists use it as a marker of intelligence, but it’s an extremely limiting one.
imagine you approach someone you don’t understand with a thing specifically designed to be something they and you can agree on as a starting point for communication and they react with scorn – and you think that “i hate this” isn’t communicating a huge amount of information.
i’m not alienated by mathematics. i’m alienated by the idea that mathematics is inherently superior to other forms of communication.
I really want to respond to this sympathetically and not argumentatively, because I fully understand where you’re coming from. But I think there’s been some level of miscommunication. My reading of the OP was as primarily an expression of a certain experience —an experience that I relate to strongly, as a non-neurotypical person who grew up as basically “the math kid” in school— and not principally as an argument about how we should or shouldn’t communicate with aliens etc. I think it’s best if I just explain my own experience here and why the post resonated with me, and hopefully that will clear things up. This is something I have a lot of strong feelings about so I ended up sounding a little, uh, impassioned at points but my intention really isn’t to argue, just to achieve understanding I guess. Anyway yeah, this is just my perspective.
So, a thing that has been commented on a lot is that at the elementary school level, math is basically the only subject that people have no qualms about expressing outright disgust for.
See, most adults view it as at least a little sad when a kid says “I hate reading”. Now, there’s a hefty dose of both ableism and classism in this sentiment; many kids who express a distaste for reading do so because learning to read has been a struggle (or been outright impossible) for them, due to a disability or another neurodivergence or lack of access to materials or a myriad of other things. The social expectation to be able to read at a certain level, therefore, can be frustrating at the best of times and genuinely oppressive at the worst. I understand this because I was one of those kids, learning to read was a huge struggle for me and it remains quite challenging, and I remember how ashamed it made me feel. I was privileged enough, in various ways, that this didn’t end up effecting me materially, but of course many (most) people in that position will not be so lucky.
But the thing is, when adults express sadness upon hearing a kid say “I hate reading”, I don’t believe it’s just ableism. It’s also an expression of the fact that those adults think reading has deep value. Not just instrumental value, not just “it’ll help you get a job” or “it’ll help you do your taxes” or “it will make people think you’re smart”, but inherent value: value as a way of connecting to the human experience. Fundamentally, people think of reading as something that enriches your “soul”, even if they don’t believe in the soul per se. The sadness that adults express when a kid doesn’t like to read is, I think, at least partly a reflection of this fact. If you recognize reading and writing and literature as valid and powerful ways of connecting to the world and engaging with the experience of being a person, it makes sense that you might feel a little sad when you see that someone isn’t getting to experience that.
At a basic level, math is just not given this sort of acknowledgement. It is not presented to kids, ever, as being an inherently worthwhile way to connect to the world or their feelings or to other people. As being a valid way to engage with their humanity. The notion that math could mean something to someone, emotionally speaking, that it could be powerful and moving and that someone could care about it very deeply, is just not one that exists very widely in our culture. Math is “cold” and “robotic” and “asocial” (huh, a whole bunch of adjectives that are often weaponized against people who aren’t neurotypical in one way or another. Wonder if that’s a coincidence…). To a kid who does find passion in mathematics, who does connect to the world that way, and especially to one who otherwise has trouble connecting, this near-universal attitude of dismissal is profoundly alienating.
And when a kid says “I hate math”, very few adults respond with sadness. Very few adults acknowledge that there would be anything emotionally or personally worthwhile about not hating math. They understand that being good at math will help you make it through the system (because, to be clear, the system responds with all the same ableism and classism to someone who struggles with math as it does to someone who struggles to read). But when an adult hears a kid saying “I hate math”, their default response is almost certainly going to be “ughh, me too. Everybody hates math!” Because, like, everybody does hate math. And they say it. All. The. Time. Your teacher hates math, your parents hate math, every other kid and every adult you’ve ever encountered is completely unabashed in saying “ughg, I hate math” every time they encounter it. A practice that’s widespread in US elementary schools is assigning teachers to cover math class as a punishment, because even the people who are supposed to be conveying knowledge to the next generation hate math.
So, you see, I didn’t read the OP as saying that math is “inherently superior to other forms of communication”. In essence all the OP did was acknowledge that it could be a basis for human connection at all, that math is something with unique value as a way to relate to other people (just as reading is, or art is, or anything else is). And this acknowledgement was immediately met with, just like always, indignant dismissal.
And I said that I sympathized, because I really do. When I was a kid, this is exactly how I felt about reading. Because reading was a challenge for me. It was something that teachers and parents and others in positions of authority expected me to be able to do, and I struggled and I failed and it felt awful. So I built up a similar kind of resentment to that which I think others have for math. “All those kids who love books just think they’re so damn smart, they just think reading is the most important thing ever! Well guess what, it’s not! I don’t even want to be able to read!” (This is the way a lot of people act about math well into adulthood.)
And the truth is that my feelings of frustration were justified. It’s just that as an adult, I recognize that the real source of my discontent was the system itself, which expects kids to perform mostly arbitrary rituals of compliance to authority figures for eight to sixteen years so they can be properly conditioned into servile cogs of capital. The concept of books and reading was not to blame.
If I had lived in a different world, a world were literacy was less common and numeracy more common, I might have managed to succeed in a wholesale rejection of the value of reading. I might have gone on to adulthood without recognizing the real source of my discontent, and ended up passing on a vague indiscriminate anger at words and books and people who read to the next generation. If I had ended up with a child who was shy, or an outcast, or queer or disabled or otherwise in a position to be shunned and picked on by society, and that child found refuge and beauty and connection through books (as many such children do), I would almost certainly have done some lasting damage to their sense of self had I and their teachers and most of the other adults in their life agreed that reading just sucked and we couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever do it, now that we all carry portable screen readers in our pockets every day!
If you’re a kid who doesn’t fit in, who struggles to connect, and you reach out to others through something that is deeply personal to you, then watching them reject and dismiss it over and over again can be seriously hurtful. But learning from the adults in your life that the world actually agrees with them, that most people react to this thing which is so personal to you with vague repulsion… that has a big effect on someone.
—
Now, all that heavy shit aside… because I am that kind of dork, I also do have something to say about using math to talk to aliens. But bear with me, because it does end up seguing into a more earthly point; I end up on tangent about universality and Eurocentrism and mathematics across cultures and so forth. I think it’s, uh, related enough that it’s reasonable to include in the post, but also enough of a diversion that I’m going to put it under a “read more” link.
Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like
Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?
Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?
Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?
Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.
Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like
Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money.
These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them.
Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad.
This casual rant is like a primer on weight science. Amazing. I second their book recommendations, and would add to the list Body Respect by Drs Bacon & Aphramor, Body of Truth by journalist Harriet Brown, and What’s Wrong with Fat? by UCLA professor of sociology Abigail Saguy.
Asked to explain why not, Gates — whose massive fortune as founder of Microsoft relies largely on intellectual property laws that turned his software innovations into tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth — said: “Well, there’s only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it’s novel — it’s only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all.”
I had a friend who honest to god IV bred and trained several Qwilfish. He didn’t tell anyone about them, you found out because he’d suddenly pull out the Qwilfish team against you when you didn’t expect it.
And every single one of them knew Explosion.
All of his Qwilfish were IV bred and EV trained for speed and max damage, they all held choice scarf, and his entire gameplan was to trade KOs with exploding Qwilfish.
Their names were ‘So’, ‘I’, ‘herd’, ‘u’, and ‘liek’.
The man was an avid mudkip fanatic at the time that joke was relevant, so here you are expecting his last pokemon to be a Mudkip or a Swampert, but no.
It’s a Snorlax. Who’s name was ‘QWILFISH’
And his plan from that point out was to stall for ages with Rest, Yawn and Giga Impact. Slowly whittle away at your hitpoints while putting you to sleep with him and retaining his massive HP pool with rest and leftovers.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering, this was Gen 4, when the R4 was rampant and everyone knew someone with one, so pokemon with moves they shouldn’t know was pretty common.
So once you were down to your last pokemon and on your last legs…
His Snorlax also knew Explosion.
250 base damage + stab.
it’s true you can’t draw one continuous line that would do the trick. but if the kitty and bunny set out by going through the doors they’re marked beside and each walked the certain way their colored arrows show at the same time their “collective path” as a team would go through each door only once. The moral of the story is actually about friendship , and cooperation, because in this world there are tasks you can’t do on your own.
im just fucking with you i’m pretty sure this has no right answer
You can switch the tracks so the trolley will kill one person, or you can allow it to attempt the fruitless crusade of running over each person in the maze only once.
This is a graph theory problem looking for eulerian paths. If we represent each room as a dot (a vertex) and each door as a line between dots (an edge) we have a graph. We say the degree of each vertex is the number of edges that go to it. An eulerian path goes around the graph using every edge exactly once and an eulerian circuit does the same as well as ending up back where it started. Here’s a graph for the original setup.
Note that the degrees of the vertices are 9, 5, 5, 4, 5, 4. Four of them are odd. A connected graph has an eulerian path if and only if it has exactly two vertices with odd degree. A connected graph has an eulerian circuit if and only if it has exactly zero vertices with odd degree. This has four, so it has no eulerian path or cycle.
NOW, as for whether there’s a path that goes through every door TWICE, that’s the same as finding a path that goes through every door in this new diagram once.
And look at that! All the vertices have even degree! Of course they do, because we basically duplicated each edge in the original. So now we not only have an eulerian path, but an eulerian cycle! A path that goes through every door exactly twice AND ends up back where it started! Here’s one that’s kinda tangly for fun as well as a tamer organized one. The organized one involves often just going on one door and leaving immediately, but the tangly one demonstrates that’s not the only way to do it.
Graph theory is fun!
Also, the rest of this post is hilarious, trolley problem is my favorite addition.
HEY!! this is a twitter thing, but i figured i should promote it to you guys here anyway:
r/infinitytrain are planning a twitter event to help spread awareness about infinity train's cancellation, support it as a show, and make our wish for more seasons be heard! the goal is to get the hashtag/phrase #FinishInfinityTrain/"finish infinity train" trending sitewide on april 29th, 10 AM EST. if you have a twitter account, this is a great opportunity to give the show and crew some well-earned love!
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE:
owen dennis himself has acknowledged the event, and wants to give the fandom something in return!!! this is what he said:
[image description: two seperate walls of text written by owen dennis, regarding the twitter event.
the first image reads:
"On APRIL 29 at 10AM EST, Infinity Train fans are planning to trend #FinishInfinityTrain to try and get the 5th season (or more) of Infinity Train greenlit on HBO MAX.
I'd like to support this fan push, because you supported us, and I wanna return the favor! So I thought I'd put some Infinity Train themed prizes into the mix to help you guys along!
I'll give out the prizes randomly to anyone who uses #FinishInfinityTrain on April 29. I'll contact via DMs.
If the hashtag trends at:
#5) 100 random people will get stickers!
#4) 90 random people will get buttons!
#3) 5 random people will get a Chicken Choice Judy shirt!
#2) 1 random person will get a passenger jacket!
#1) Owen will release an Infinity Train book 5 frame mock up!" - end description of the first image.
the second image reads:
"SOME THINGS YOU CAN DO:
Talk about why you like the show.
Find people to reccomend the show to.
Post fan art, images from the show, music, cosplays, fancams, etc.
Talk about theories with other fans.
Share a link to watch the show (legally).
THINGS I WOULDN'T RECCOMEND:
Spamming the show in unrelated comment sections.
Putting down other shows.
Accusing anyone of wanting something to fail.
Eating an orange before you brush your teeth." - end full description.]
let's all respect owen's wishes and appreciate his generosity, and let's get this thing DONE!!!
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