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@crankyoldmage
Nicked from xitter
There's way more red tape surrounding how and when you're allowed to modify your own body than there is around how and when the president can drop bombs on other countries.
This country has been having a ten year debate about who is allowed to wear a skirt in public, but Congress didn't even have to approve a whole fucking war with Iran for it to happen.
You are not free. Your freedoms are just dangled above your head like collateral, so you don't dare interfere with all the war your taxes paid for.
Sorry to keep banging on about this! I just have a few days left to meet the funding goal!
Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.
My Huernia zebrina, a succulent from Southern Africa, finally bloomed!
Like their close cousins, the carrion plants, another group of African succulents, they have a vague dead animal smell, and are pollinated by flies. One of the common names for this plant is the little owl. 
Family Apocynaceae
Photos by Paxon Kale CC
Bow before Z. rex! 🦐 Better known as the emperor shrimp (Zenopontonia rex), this tiny crustacean can be found throughout tropical waters in the Indo-Pacific. Notice its colorful “throne?” This species is a hitchhiker that can most often be found riding on the backs of marine organisms like sea cucumbers and nudibranchs! Thanks to this living arrangement, the shrimp is able to move from location to location with ease and can more effectively avoid predators. What’s in it for the nudibranchs and sea cucumbers? Scientists think the emperor shrimp might “clean” its hosts by removing harmful parasites, but this has yet to be determined.
Photo: Julian Hsu, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist
This interview with Ncuti Gatwa crossed my dash again, and I was reminded of how much I like it. Because it makes the rare Third Argument for representation in fiction, the argument I think is the best, and I'm always happy to see it. I quote:
At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)
What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:
It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.
It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.
These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.
But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.
3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.
For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.
For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.
And that's why Argument 3 is my favourite. I do want the world to be a better place, of course, and I think art is a part of that. But the main job of art is to be good as art. And diversity in all aspects of the production of art makes art better.
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ラミーカマキリ(Ramie Longhorn Beetle )
Agate bi, Western Jin Dynasty, China, 226-420 AD
from the Luoyang Museum
Fuck Trump!
This blog is proudly Antifa!
Egyptian Vulture (Neophron percnopterus) - (c) SaritaWolf - please do not repost
Slack Wyrm #1554