Feminism. Fandom. Random.

Whatever tickles my fancy. Usually: marvel fanfiction feminism society mediaotters This is a side blog, so I can't follow back from this url. My main blog is amateurlanguager.

[catsuggest]

breakinge news

feets

[traegorn]

I'm not saying there are parallels, but...

[scottsumrners]

You can't "Russia psyops" your way out of Holocaust Harris aiding and abetting a genocide

[traegorn]

Okay. So, first off what I'm talking about in the video is a well documented, real thing we know that has happened. Your complete dismissal of it is, frankly, bizarre.

Secondly, what's your goal here? The US is a two party system. Either Harris or Trump will be elected President. Now it's true -- neither candidate is willing to walk away from the Israeli government. but while Harris seems unwilling to do so for geopolitical reasons, Trump is a zealot who wants to "finish the job."

Discouraging people from voting for Harris will not save a single Palestinian life. Trump is Netanyahu's preferred candidate. And frankly, Trump wants to do so much worse here in the US. He's coming after immigrant populations, queer rights, women's rights, and so much more. Trump also wants to withdraw our support from Ukraine and abandon NATO.

There are people who will die here in the US and abroad under a second Trump administration.

Over the next four years it's likely two more Supreme Court seats will come up, and who gets nominated will 100% depend on who holds the White House. The reason we've lost things like abortion access in the United States is because of a conservative majority court put in place by Trump. The makeup of the court for the next forty years depends on what happens now.

So, in short, how do you propose we stop this? How do you propose we save lives? "The Revolution" isn't coming, and there are real human lives on the line right now.

If you don't have real solutions to stop a second Trump presidency, you aren't actually helping anyone.

(Also, this "Holocaust Harris" stuff is such bullshit. I get that her position on Israel isn't that different than Biden's, but she's not actually in power right now? The US Vice President has zero say over foreign policy. The biggest power they have is breaking ties in the Senate, showing up as a mouthpiece for the President when they aren't available, and having a heartbeat. Daniel Webster turned down the Vice Presidency saying "I do not propose to be buried until I am dead," for a reason)

[traegorn]

Guess who blocked me instead of actually defending their principles.

Just guess.

[lurks-no-more]

Also, no matter what you feel about US support of Israel, it is the Israeli government and the IDF who directly and actually committing the crimes in Gaza, bombing Lebanon etc. Not the United States.

And no matter what some people think, the US can't just make Israel stop this. If they could, they would have already done so. Israel is a sovereign state with its own government and (well-equipped) military, and military-industrial complex, and they've spent several decades making sure that, in the short-to-medium term at least, they can't be pushed around even by their allies.

Even if you think the Biden administration and US govt in general don't give a damn about Palestinian lives, this is hurting them in an election year, and they definitely care about that. So, I repeat: if the US could just make Israel stop, they would have done so and would be campaigning hard on it.

To sum up: sitting out the election, voting for a third-party candidate, or (God forbid) voting for Trump will do nothing at all to help Palestinians, and almost certainly will make things worse for them. It will definitely make things worse for everyone in America, and make the world a worse place in general.

[montereybayaquarium]

And now, a little sea-esta after our 40th fiesta🌊😴

[tomorrowillbeyou]

chuckling indulgently.. oh go on... i suppose a LITTLE bit of monica in my life wouldn't hurt

[thatonelazyumsomething]

[autism-freaks]

I think it's a common misconception that domesticating animals is somewhat like enslaving them. It really is more of a symbiotic relationship. No wild animal would have willingly put up with early humans if they didn't get something out of it. Wolves wouldn't have stayed with us and become dogs if they weren't getting food and safety out of it. Many large herbivores that are now domesticated could and would have easily trampled their early human captors or broken their enclosures open if they didn't have a reason to stay. Sometimes individual animals still do if we don't give them what they need.

The animals that have stayed with us for thousands of years have evolved to cooperate with us better. Dogs have additional facial muscles around their eyes that wolves lack in order to mimic human facial expressions. Sheep grow their wool perpetually while their wild counterparts don't because a bigger fleece means they're more likely to be allowed to breed and be kept around. Domestic dairy cows produce much more milk than wild bovine species and domestic hens lay more eggs. Do you know how energy costly producing eggs or milk is for an animal? It's pretty intense! They wouldn't be able to do that if we hadn't given them the food and safety from predators and the elements to.

And we really need to show these animals respect and gratitude for what they give us by taking excellent care of them. They gave up a lot to be with us, often including the means to take care of themselves in the wild. That's a huge reason why I'm not against using animal products, but I hate factory farming. They are still living, breathing creatures with needs and feelings. They deserve a comfortable life and, when the time comes, a humane death.

[alexaloraetheris]

Fun fact! Not only is everything here correct, it's the reason we haven't domesticated bears!

This is a bit to the left of my area of expertise, so bear with me (heh), but there had been attempts to domesticate brown bears several times in human history! Vikings were the first ones we have records of (that I know of) and also in the Roman empire, India and even the Victorians. There were absolutely a few generations of tame brown bears, from pets to zoo performers to hunters and war bears. They did have a chance of being domesticated like the wolves had been.

And all of that effort? Resulted in jack shit. Level of domestication remained zero. The bears got out of that domestication experiment with zero genes altered. There is several reasons for that, one of which being that they live too long and don't breed as fast, and also they are very individual animals as opposed to wolves, so they don't play well in groups, which is kinda necessary.

But the biggest reason? BEARS DON'T NEED HUMANS. There is absolutely no point in a bear's life cycle where it's survival would be immensely impacted for the better by human intervention. They can hunt and forage on their own, no help necessary. They have no trouble surviving harsh climates, so human houses weren't a temptation. They're solitary, so they didn't seek out companionship when alone. They occupy a similar dietary niche as humans so were more competition for resources that an opportunity for mutualism. They certainly didn't need protection.

So even though humans (being human) tried to domesticate bears, bears weren't really playing ball with that. They were just fine on their own, and saw no sufficient incentive to change themselves to fit into a relationship with humans. Sure there are some weirdoes who got fairy-napped as cubs and are happy living with humans, but their genes aren't useful enough to bring into the pool. They saw what happened to the wolves who got too close to the human fire and missionaries are mauled on sight.

The bears are bears, and bears they will stay.

[alexaloraetheris]

@mediterranean-ground-cuckoo you have activated a sleeper agent I didn't know I had in my brain.

Because it's kinda already happened, but not really? The thing about cheetahs is that they are very, very endangered, part of the reason being that cheetah cub mortality rate is something like 80%, which is abnormally high even for wild animals. Cheetahs don't make dens where they can stash their cubs, so they have to sort of drag them around with them and hope predators mistake them for a badger and don't attack them (cheetah cubs have very fluffy fur on top of them as camouflage).

Add in the fact that tjey're basically horse software running on cat hardware? These guys are an anxious wreck, every single one of them. And if left on their own they will absolutely form a positive feedback loop of scaring each other half to death and be too stressed to breed.

Enter wildlife conservation scientists.

These guys really want cheetahs to stay around, and stay wild animals. They are very fucking careful to let cheetahs be wild animals while making sure they don't perish entirely to enviroment, starvation and predation, and that they preferably breed.

Cheetahs see humans staying back and keeping a respectful distance but helping whenever they need it. Everyone who knows cats knows this is basically a marriage proposal done right.

So humans want cheetahs to be proper wild animals. Cheetahs have tried being wild animals and said 'Fuck that shit! That's hard! Come pet me and keep me safe!'

Add in the fact that cheetah gene pool is so fucking limited they can basically all be each other's organ donors, you also gotta bolster their diversity, preferably with healthy cheetahs from zoos, and those are so used to humans some of them will just come up to you and demand to be petted. If it's one of those that was raised with helper dogs? That's basically an oversized housecat, or at least it really wants you to think it is.

And there is also a historical precedent for this! Fucking pharaos kept cheetahs as pets, and if taken young they can be tamed in, like, a year. Tame cheetahs were noble gifts in the Ming dynasty. The Mughals used them as hunting animals (though it might have been carcals or leopards).

Quite frankly, the only reason cheetahs HADN'T been domesticated so far is because getting them to breed in captivity is real fucking hard, and consistent sucesses were achieved only in the seventies. The males need to have their bromance packs (pardon, coalitions) and females need to have a large area to roam. Kinda hard to arrange without a whole lot of land.

So this is, in fact, the exact reverse of bears.

[roach-works]

say what you will about the intransigence of cats, those guys LOVE getting ahold of someone with thumbs

[redhairandpronouns]

was thinking about infighting and like. they all see us the same. from the wildest queerest fagdyke to a cis gay guy. we are the same to them. the weird queers are not like. ruining your precious community. we're a part of it

[redhairandpronouns]

@ exclusionists:

[obfuscatingintelligence]

if you set off a rube goldberg type death trap to kill someone, if it's a long enough machine, it ceases to become your fault if somebody dies at the end. that's how I've gotten away with it all these years, and why I'm still going to heaven.

[viviantimmet]

(via @yellowocaballero)

[liberalsarecool]

#LateStageCapitalism

[lady-writes]

[palominocorn]

(sigh)

It wasn’t boomers who made it impossible to survive on a librarian or gardener’s salary - it was rich people. 

Plenty of boomers work as librarians, teachers, gardeners, and so forth, and are finding that as the cost of living skyrockets and corporations take over more and more of the world, that their salary is no longer able to support them.

And thus you have boomers - who understand how much you want to be a librarian because they also work as librarians - going bankrupt, losing their homes, drowning in debt, and dying because of unaffordable healthcare. And they get why you’re becoming an IT specialist instead of a librarian - because they! Know! That you can’t survive! On a librarian’s salary anymore!

On the flip side, the rich people sucking money out of every service and person they can! Aren’t! Always! Boomers! Tons of them are Gen X! And an increasing number are millennials! I haven’t seen a Gen Z billionaire yet but I’m willing to bet there’s a couple by now!

Oh, and it’s not like they “don’t know” how much people want to do these sorts of jobs - they do! That’s how they justify underpaying people, because it’s your passion, you don’t ~need~ to be paid a living wage for your passion.

You have more in common with poor boomers than you do with Kylie Jenner (born 1997). Go and talk to them. Organize with them. You’ll find they have a lot to offer once you stop dismissing them as rich old folks who ruined the economy.

[thequeenofsastiel]

As someone with a super leftist boomer father I feel this

[headspace-hotel]

being a pepper plant has to be so weird.

Imagine evolving capsaicin specifically to stop mammals from eating your fruits, and then a mammal comes along that not only will eat your fruits, but likes them specifically because of the capsaicin, so much that it starts using its weird paws to distribute and care for your seeds, which turns into a strong selective force that literally starts evolving you into producing MORE capsaicin and makes you a WAY more successful and wider ranged species than you ever were before

simply because this mammal LOVES Pain Chemical. that evolved specifically to produce pain in mammals. It's not that the capsaicin isn't WORKING. It's just that these freaks like it.

[headspace-hotel]

This is the same mammal with social instincts so goddamn strong that they literally try to form social bonds with their predators, and end up evolving the predators into a new species that fits into their social communities as a form of mutualistic symbiosis, and exists in several different forms with unique morphology and behaviors based on the function they perform.

Instead of, I don't know, EVOLVING TO BE FASTER, this animal finds a faster animal and sits on it. Which shouldn't even work because the faster animal is a prey animal and this animal is a predator, but SOMEHOW they FORM A SOCIAL BOND WITH THE PREY. So they can sit on it while it runs fast. And somehow the prey animal?? is cool with this?? and benefits from this relationship???

Literally how can you hate humans. Humans are possibly the most hilarious thing evolution has ever done.

[headspace-hotel]

other things humans have done

eat poison plants, decide they like getting poisoned, and evolve the plants to poison them more

evolve to not have hair, but they find mammals with thick fluffy hair and put the hair on themselves, and evolve the mammals to produce extra hair so they can both have a warm coat of hair

split up their parasitic lice species into two separate species because they start taking other animals' hair and putting it on themselves so much

learn how to set things on fire on purpose. maintain body temperature by just standing beside some wood that's on fire instead of literally any normal option

figure out that their prey tastes better and is easier to digest when they hold it over a fire after killing it. get smarter because they digest food so good after it's been held over a fire.

find a poisonous plant and try washing it in boiling water until they don't die when they eat it anymore

go across the ocean by making a floating nest despite not being able to breathe underwater, drink ocean water, or even swim naturally

drink milk from other mammals even though they can't digest it and it makes them sick. Evolve those mammals to produce more milk than their babies can drink so they can drink the milk. Some members of the species evolve to be able to digest milk because they were so hellbent on drinking it.

find flowers, bugs and minerals that are nice colors and crush them up to try to turn other things that color

eat mushrooms that make their nervous systems malfunction because they like malfunctioning their nervous systems

[headspace-hotel]

humans worldwide looking up into the celestial vault of stars a million light years away, separated from Earth by the deadly cold and emptiness of space: I bet there are guys up there to form social bonds with

[beacon-lamp]

hello beloveds ☺️

[iceslushii]

made an alternate version for the mutuals ive never spoken to

[thetreeofliberty]

You are appreciated

[prokopetz]

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.

[xeansicemane]

Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.

We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.

[vexwerewolf]

[depizan]

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

[movedlawl]

You can bend over backwards trying not to be one of “those” cringey queers who wears pride everywhere and goes by arson and has they/it/fluff/pixel/boo pronouns on a catgender pin they wear everywhere and suppress everything “extra” unlikable about your identity and pass as a “normal” cishet and mock everyone who dyes their hair for pride and wears rainbow nail polish and guess what? Conservatives will still want you dead. There is no appeasing them. Stand by your community. Maybe you’ll find that arson (they/it/fluff/pixel/boo) is going to be the best goddamn person to have in your corner when the republicans you’ve given up your life to placate inevitably turn on you and try to sentence you to death because any amount of queer is too damn queer. Maybe you’ll find that we are a community for a reason. We’re all equally degenerate in the eyes in conservatives and equally worthy of joy and life in the eyes of the “weird” queer community you shun.

[foxoftheasterisk]

I've only known arson for two minutes but if anything happened to fluff i would kill everyone in this website and then myself

[thenightisland]

people trying to insist a fandom is tiny when it /only/ has a few thousand works on ao3 meanwhile my current fandom is a sixteen book series and has several hundred fewer works than goncharov, a movie that, and i cannot stress this enough, doesn’t even exist

[feathersandblue]

#measuring the size of fandoms based on their goncharov index#this has been a useless text post you may now resume your normal programming#rote has a goncharov index of 0.63#for perspective ofmd has an index of 26.5#spn’s is 360.8#the cosmere is 2.26 for a fantasy book comparison#i am very normal

The Goncharov Index, everyone.

[dreg-heap]

Can't let British people have air conditioning because first they'd call it something twee like "the climate fixer" and then in 20 years they'll call it "the climb" or "the climmy"

[dreg-heap]

French kids would call it "le climot", frustrating language officials who would prefer they call it "machine pour le contrôle du climat froide à l'interieure de l'édifice"

[elamarth-calmagol]

This is the most hilariously accurate French joke I've seen in my life

[theslowesthnery]

gently staples this thread to the forehead of the people going "ew why would you ship mohg with miquella when you could make an OC/self-insert to ship with him instead"

the answer, you'll find, is shockingly simple: because that doesn't interest me. because that does literally nothing for me. because i'd rather piss in my own eye than ship a canon character with my OC (or self-insert). i promise you, if i had any interest in that, i would do it without needing to be told, but i don't so i won't. you're asking a person who likes chocolate cake why they're not eating banana cake instead as if those two are even remotely the same

[theslowesthnery]

#WHO IS SHIPPING MOHG AND MIQUELLA??? #like I get WHY you’d do it #but

me, the OP, as you can literally read in the original post

[leebrontide]

Every single time I see a take that amounts to "if you write about X happening, or like fiction where X happens, you like X" I'm reminded of this one time I was at a casual friends house as a young kid. We were in her room, pretending to "be orphans" escaping from an evil orphanage and having to take care of each other and fend for ourselves. It was all very Little Orphan Annie/All Dogs Go to Heaven and based on the 80s pop media.

And this girl's mom comes in, hears what we're playing and gets all MAD and UPSET. She says that if we play act something, it's because we want it to happen. So her daughter must WANT HER TO DIE.

First off lady, we were 6 year year olds, so take it down several notches. We barely had a concept of mortality for fucks sake. She made us feel so guilty and ashamed, because she was taking our game personally.

Now I have a 5 year old. And sometimes she looks at me and says "pretend you're dead, and I have to -" Whatever it is. Some adult task she's assigned herself.

And it's just so transparently obvious that she's practicing the idea of having to do things on her own. Which is exactly what 5 year olds are supposed to do. I actually find it very flattering that the only way she can envision me not being available to help her is to be literally deceased. Otherwise, obviously, she wouldn't have to do scary hard things alone.

It's a natural coping mechanism. She's self-soothing about what would happen if I wasn't there by play-acting independence in a perfectly safe environment. She's also practicing skills she needs, and making up excuses for practicing them on her own, without taking on the responsibility of being able to do them by herself all the time yet.

Humans mentally rehearse bad this in their brains all the time. We can do that by ruminating- going over worries over and over again, which tends to lead to anxiety and helplessness and depression. Or we can do it with a sense of play- by recognizing that the fiction is fiction and we can dip our toe into these experiences and expose ourselves to bad things without actually being injured.

My daughter does not want me dead. And I don't want bad things to happen in real life. But fiction and pretend help me face the horrors of the world and think about them without collapsing or messing myself up mentally.