I Dont Know Either

Cygnus-they/them-legally an adult Pictures of my pets are under the tag “ain’t that precious?” Art is under the tag “my art”

[rumwik]

I will use my laptop to pester everyone with silly dog doodles this August

[discoursedrome]

so "incubus" means someone who lies on top of something, and "succubus" means someone who lies underneath something, and the former also turns up in the word "incubate", which means to lie on top of an egg. To ensure closure we could therefore posit an analogous term "succubate", which would be something like this:

he is succubating.

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[caleod]

10-8-26

[nepenthean-sleep]

straight white people making a romance movie: haha what if it was illegal to have sex? wait what's lawrence v texas. wait what's mclaughlin v florida. wait what's loving v virginia

[ninewheels]

As preposterous and stupid as this fucking movie's premise sounded (for a light-hearted rom-com, and not The Handmaid's Tale) I didn't want to think about it too much until the movie actually came out, and then I could see if it was somehow more intelligent and subversive than the trailer let on, but guess what, it's even worse!

One Night Only review: Pull out from this sex-negative rom-com

If this is what it takes to get a rom-com greenlit these days, maybe we should just let them die.

Sex workers are thrown under the bus, shown only as thieves who fleece men in the woods at night, while queer sexuality is relegated to a few scenes with Allie’s roommate (a woefully underused Quintessa Swindell) and a handful of pans past blurry same-sex extras making out in the background. “This night is for the straights,” Swindell’s character says to Allie, before saying that queer people have worked around straight laws for centuries.  This is supposed to be a nod to queer resilience, but largely comes off as straightwashing the history of anti-LGBTQ legislation in this country that led towards raids of queer clubs and incarceration of queer people in the not-too-distant past (let alone the current barrage of anti-Trans and LGBTQ legislation currently in the works and on the books). It’s also ignorant of the long and fraught fight for the normalization of age-of-consent laws, which, by the way, did not happen in all states in this very country until 2003. Yes, that’s not even thirty years ago.  By the end, our intrepid protagonists have not had sex with anyone, because this is a film about Romance with a Capital R (and I guess sex is not part of romance!) and for that very same reason they ultimately embrace the fascist state of things. They aren’t the only ones who refuse to fight back. No one in this cursed film is protesting this mandate beyond “repeal” signs in various windows and some creative graffiti (...) (...) If we are supposed to believe that the film is making some subversive statement about the state of sex and bodily autonomy in this country, it cannot end with its leads embracing their chains. That’s just warmed-over conservatism running around in sheep’s clothing.

[nepenthean-sleep]

yeah i wrote this post having only seen the trailer, but jesus christ. was this movie a psyop LMAO??

also, for the unaware: mclaughlin v. florida was a 1964 supreme court case that struck down a florida anti-miscegenation law that criminalized cohabitation (and thus, as implied, sex) between white people and people of color of opposite genders. anti-miscegenation laws made marriage and sexual relationships between white people and people of color, most often specifically black people, a FELONY in several states in the united states up until the 1950s and 1960s. though it was already struck down by the supreme court, the state of alabama didn't repeal their law until 2000! there were THREE ATTEMPTS at codifying anti-miscegenation into the us constitution!

like yes, the issue here is partially straight white people's ignorance on the united states's history of homophobic policy, but it's also really important to recognize that arguably the majority of the issue here is straight white people's ignorance of the united states's history of codifying eugenics and antiblack racism.

the premise could have been interesting as a serious dystopian story, especially taking that history into account, but it wasn't written that way at all. this movie should never have been a fucking romcom making light of the violence the united states (and many other countries) has enacted on any kinds of sexual relationships it deems undesirable.

[nepenthean-sleep]

can y’all maybe reblog this version i feel like people are forgetting about the racism and just focusing on the homophobia

[imadoctornotanescalator]

PHM Textposts pt 44-???

[voidsetup1]

nothing here to run from

[girldraki]

[leavethepuddle]

@sarumans

[asooffa]

they really had him wear straight bs bro

[nchntd]

In the club

[vacuously-true]

I think I’m literally never gonna be sick of this masterpiece. I think watching it on a loop for eight hours could fix me. Dancing’s what clears my soul. Dancing’s what makes me whole.

[dimmadoome]

I just love that this very video is an accumulation of thousands of years worth of art made by people who have never met each other. The concept of this video was so completely unfathomable to every single artist who made the sculptures and yet they’ve all put something toward the creation of it.

[tincta-aurum]

eurydice doodle

[spindle-and-nima]

Privacy just isn't a thing with this kid

[spindle-and-nima]

.....I can still see you bud.

[firem4ge]

Get so fucking real, the princess is not unbuckling the knights armor. The knights squire is going to unbuckle the knights armor and the princess is simply going to wait in her chambers for it to be done. You're mistaken if you think the princess is going to touch your field armor.

[qsycomplainsalot]

The princess is sitting in the cuck chair while the squire unbuckles the knight's armor. The knight doesn't know what's going on.

[vraska-theunseen]

DID YOU ALL KNOW THAT YOU CAN DO WHATEVER UOU WANT WHEN YOURW MAKING ART ISNT THAT WILD

[vraska-theunseen]

i have no defense against this. you've got me

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Was thinking about Tobias being trapped in Morph in the first book again, and how that weirdly bolsters Jake's leadership; the Animorphs have a very early example of how bad things can go when someone Doesn't listen to him. They'd both probably be horrified to think of it that way I assume.

The Invasion is such an excellent one-two-three punch of an opening that I've never seen it topped in series fiction. Animorphs tells you EXACTLY what you're getting into with the first book.

We get about 3 pages of our heroes having wonder and joy at aliens being real before #1 hits us with the graphic onscreen death-by-cannibalism of this kind, caring stranger. And if Jake being chased by 7-foot blade monsters wasn't scary enough, he only escapes because a human bystander dies in his place.

So Jake goes home. To his nuclear suburban family, and his piddly sports problems, and his nice morph-training sequence with his friends. And just kidding there's a yeerk living inside your home already and it knows where you sleep. But that's fine, we'll just tell an adul — oh shit the cops are controllers the reporters are controllers the camp counselors are controllers the vice principal's a controller Elfangor really fucking undersold this problem.

So it's up to them, they guess. And Marco might be scared of dying, and Cassie might be reluctant to fight, but Tobias seems 100% confident they can save the world! So they go. And they don't save Tom, and they get people killed, and they do nothing to hurt Visser Three. And they don't even all make it home at the end of the day. Because it turns out Animorphs is not only a series where supporting characters die; it's a series where the main characters get permanently injured and will never be the same again.

Welcome to the war, kids.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I also don't know if there's a term for the trope, but. Horror pretty much always has a beat where a main character dies or gets permanently harmed really early on, because a) it tells the audience that this is a story where anyone can die, and b) it tells the protagonists they're in a setting where anyone can die.

Like [SPOILERS FOR VARIOUS HORROR MOVIES] Kane in Alien, Johnny in Night of the Living Dead, Dan in Frozen, Jonathan in Dracula, Hutch in The Ritual, Jason in Cloverfield, Mathias in The Ruins, Mary in Sinners, or Frank in 28 Days Later. [END SPOILERS]

Those characters all exist to be not just supporting cast members but people we know, people we like... who then encounter terrible fates that make the stakes of the rest of the story all too real. Each of them gets a moment that shifts the story from being adventurous (Alien, Cloverfield), family-oriented (Sinners, Night of the Living Dead), or "scary but we're handling it" (The Ritual, Dracula) to HOLY HELL WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE at the moment the eldritch forces eat them alive. They make clear this is a space where damage is permanent, where death is real and Captain America's not gonna popping back up 6 issues later good as new, and where anyone can die.

Again, I don't know if there's a term for that trope. But there's clearly a deliberate choice to have Tobias end up permanently, for-real, trapped in another body in the very first book in the series. Because it tells the reader, and more importantly it tells the characters, exactly what's at stake here.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

@miniaturetyphoonhologram

#animorphs#horror#oh oh sacrificial lamb and sacrificial lion depending on the character#on tvtropes

What I'm getting from this is that Tobias is their Sacrificial Lamb (future Break the Cutie) and Rachel is their Sacrificial Lion.

[bagelbarr0n]

Really funny one two punch on my dash this morning

[markscherz]

I realised today that frog feet are kind of ideal for wearing heels and well then I accidentally

[aspiring-weird-old-man]

Get the look:

[markscherz]

This is a fucking phenomenal addition.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Upstairs Kevin Is Actually For Real The World's Most Perfect Betta Fish

So for those of you not familiar with my recent descent into fishkeeping, about 2 months ago a friend of mine who does Hazardous Waste cleanup (specifically cleaning up hazardous places like meth labs) called me up and asked:

"You have fish, right?"

"...Why?" I asked, having become aware that the Fish Distribution System is even more aggressive than the cat one.

"I found a fish in the back of an abandoned trap house. Alive." She clarified.

I could feel my fate settling upon my soul.

"...Send me a pic so I can ID the species and I'll see what I can do."

She sent me a picture of a small purplish squiggle in six inches of fetid green muck. But when I arrived to collect the sludge creature he turned out to look like this:

He's difficult to photograph in focus, but he's a deep wine-dark creature with an iridescent blue sheen. The red patches on his fins mirror where the fins of a Plakat/wild Betta splendens would be, and the rest of his fins are a ghostly shimmering white. This fish was in six inches of toxic green shit.

Naturally, he needed the finest tank I could put together that afternoon.

I think I did alright.

He's so fucking cute. He always swims up to watch when anyone approaches. I've got him trained to do a little dance when I feed him. He likes watching me doing anything in front of his tank.

That's all actually pretty typical of Bettas- they're very intelligent and curious creatures and like learning, which is more than I can say for some of my relatives.

Where Upstairs Kevin (so named because his tank is in my upstairs bathroom) really shines is that a lot of Bettas are... Not sociable. They often eat shrimp, attack other fish in their tank (or get stressed out of they can't commit enough violence to maintain their personal space) or constantly harass and nip the snails in their tanks. Most Bettas are genuinely happier being alone.

Kevin fucking loves his snail (Bluebert) and will shimmy as fast as he can over whenever Bluebert falls off something (it's fine, this is a normal way for mystery snails to get from one place to another).

When I had my Nego D'Aguas in the holding tank, I had to put three of the smallest ones in with him because they were being harassed in the small tank, and he was a perfect gentleman with them. He was trying very hard to shoal with them, but they're very zippy. He was visibly upset (lethargic, dulled colors) when I moved them back to the big tank.

Today was the real acid test: I'm going to move him from his 5 gallon to the 10 gallon so I can use the 5 as a hospital/spare plants tank, and I needed to know if I could have shrimp in with him. Even Betta that are cool with other fish can still see a shrimp and decide they're at the buffet. Unfortunately, there's no real way to know without putting shrimp in with the Betta.

So earlier today, I got half a dozen super-discounted Rilli shrimp (LFS has a massive overstock of them for some reason) and added them to his 5 gallon. There are a bunch of hiding places for shrimp in there and if he was aggressive with them I'd move him to the 10 gallon immediately (I don't want to do that just yet because I need to move the furniture around in there a bit).

Friends.

The shrimp are fully swimming in the open and Kevin is just following them around, curious, but only curious. No gill-flaring, no posturing, no lunges or snapping. Some of them are red, a color that normally triggers aggression in Bettas, and he's just. Hanging out, watching them eat biofilm off the moss. One of them accidentally landed on his head and stayed there for 3 seconds and he only went "???" Until it took off again.

My beautiful and perfect and son who is so kind and gentle with his tiny friends.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Pictures that are paintings, to me:

They're both so curious about each other.

(Kitty Fishtank Time is closely supervised and the room is closed off when we're not there. The tank also has a heavy glass lid that covers the whole tank and has anti-kitty safety clips)