Just A Busybody

Turns out once you start learning enough about words and methods, magic starts looking more and more reasonable as an explanation for how something lives, if not why.

[pocket-deer-belly]

sometimes i remember carl from echo vn and get a little loopy thinking about how the game wants you to look at that and think of him as like a particularly fat guy

[pocket-deer-belly]

furries can't handle characters this fat they start treating them like fetish bait

[pocket-deer-belly]

everything about how he's portrayed is perfectly designed to piss me off. he's not even allowed to just look fat the game has to tell you he works out and is kinda buff too, as if you're not allowed to be attracted to his fatness but then they also (of course only jokingly) portray him as feeder bait. this guy informed my taste in furry media in that i think this fucking sucks

[furryprovocateur]

this is viewing carl as like, some symbolic representation of all fatness that could ever exist through the lens of a free indie furry horror visual novel. i think that's an uncharitable way to view the work. i don't think echo's writers were attempting to say something prejudicial by making carl a fat dude who works out.

[pocket-deer-belly]

i think fat people deserve better than Another self deprecating fat guy that's privy to a mockingly fetishizing gaze whilst having a body type that's decidedly still very average

[furryprovocateur]

i think carl's portrayal is fairly realistic, which fits echo's tone. again, i don't think the text is saying "carl is fat, and that is bad. he can only be hot if you qualify that statement." echo's not even a dating sim and carl's weight doesn't even really factor in to his story in comparison to his anxiety and low self-worth.

i can see how it might be disappointing that his fatness isn't touched upon in greater nuance, but i wouldn't say carl is ever fetishized in that way (isn't the fact that he has muscles only brought up once or twice?). echo isn't even a dating sim and all the sex scenes in it are portrayed to be jarring in some way, so this perspective is like expecting eddie in silent hill 2 to get sexualized more. it just doesn't really fit what echo is doing if it were to slam the brakes and go "carl is fat, unambiguously hot, and makes me ravenous".

like, i don't think echo's writers are perfect, but i think it's not fair to say they're being fatphobic when carl is a fairly nuanced and rounded character. not to mention chase can even make out with him at one point lol

[pocket-deer-belly]

tbh comparing him to eddie in silent hill 2 is really revealing actually holy shit. like that's what i'm saying, he's a fat guy whose fatness is portrayed as part of his self-deprecation. in carl's case, attraction to him is framed as fetishistic (he makes jokes about feedism, that's what i was talking about. not the muscles) and unserious and it's also framed as self-deprecating. but, attraction to him is framed as noticing his strength and muscles, the ways he still "takes care" of his body.

i don't think you fully understand what i mean when i say his portrayal is fatphobic. i think it feeds into larger, extremely narrow tropes about fat people. but i think you could understand what i mean if you dig further into eddie from silent hill 2. it's the way that fat characters, broadly, are rarely portrayed sympathetically unless their narratives revolve around their self-worth in a way that's implicitly or explicitly tied to their body or their eating habits. it's the wat that fat characters, broadly, are rarely portrayed as straightforwardly attractive unless they shape their bodies into something more normatively respectable.

he may be individually well written, that's not really the point. he still falls into what in my view are pretty fatphobic tropes. it's Another fat guy who's self-deprecating, it's Another fat guy who feels like he's only portrayed sympathetically cause he's not that fat, it's Another fat guy who's fatness is portrayed as attractive only as self-deprecating jokes about feedism, whose body is otherwise portrayed as attractive in the ways it's not fat. a work doesn't have to outright tell you that being fat makes you shit for it to still do fatphobia.

[hbmmaster]

"[marginalized group a] and [marginalized group b] need solidarity, we need to help each other and fight against bigotry within our communities" - agreeable and sensible statement

"[marginalized group a] and [marginalized group b] are not enemies, we need to stop treating each other like our oppressors" - sounds very similar to the previous statement but look out! sometimes this means "I don't like it when people point out ways in which I have privilege over them and I'd rather not have to think about it"

[ilynpilled]

actually how many significant female characters fitting this archetype can u think of? and i mean their arc and role being actually substantial

[belladonnafeli]

Women don’t really get these arcs as much as men, but it does remind me of this quote.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“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

[wire-smith]

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.

[titles-for-tangents]

The best-case scenario for Mars being habitable is John Rogers writing how to get that core to start spinning again. And EVEN THEN

In the meantime, you can tell none of these oligarchs have ever read even one short story of science fiction and heeded the warnings inside them with any measure of merit. Elon Musk sure as hell hasn’t read The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and understood the urgent warnings about colonialism.

Also, astronomers learning more about other planets’ atmospheres and what their general compositions are like is very often an excellent pipeline for becoming environmental activists. A great example from recent history is the career of the late Dr. Carl Sagan. He not only accurately predicted the atmosphere of Venus (it’s a hellhole), he helped instrument the Voyager I and II projects. The more and more we learned about the other planets right here in our solar system in the 70s and 80s, the more it became code-red apparent to him how much we need to come together as a species and help to clean up the planet now. Dr. Sagan put together the fantastic TV show Cosmos in order to help encourage curiosity in the sciences and even wrote the accompanying book by the same name, but it was its semi-sequel, Pale Blue Dot, that really starts calling for change here while we still can.

[wheelie-sick]

sometimes people experiencing psychosis and/or mania will come up to you on the street and talk in confusing or upsetting ways. your job is to either have a regular human-to-human conversation with that person or politely leave. your job is not to call 911. do not call 911. you might kill that person if you call 911.

[wheelie-sick]

I don't even have the energy to screenshot and respond to your tags- what the actual fuck is wrong with you? "the cops are scared and rightfully so" "mental health calls are the scariest for cops" OH so this isn't about the safety of psychotic & manic people this is about piggy feelings?

and no, actually, this is not USA specific and no, actually, people from other countries should not ignore this post. police violence and sanism weren't invented in the US and they are certainly not unique to here. if you (or anyone) thinks that this bullshit doesn't happen elsewhere then you are not listening.

[headspace-hotel]

cops r Some Guy with a Gun

do we want Some Guy with a Gun in this situation? answer is usually "NO"

[uncivilliberties]

This is legitimately useful reframing. A while ago I started replacing the word "cop" in my vocabulary with "a man with a gun." It really puts things into perspective.

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?

It makes it very clear what you're saying. I can call a man with a gun to threaten or hurt someone mildly inconveniencing me. You're not calling the cops, you're calling A MAN WITH A GUN into a situation that does not warrant a firearm handled by a volatile lunatic who will not be held accountable for his actions.

[headspace-hotel]

^ ^ ^

[breadandm]

somebody posted this Calvin and Hobbes strip and i cannot overstate just how topical this fuckin thing is

[tf2heritageposts]

millions of american soldiers die every year trying to rocket jump. thankfully their lives are worthless

[caesarsaladinn]

RUN! RUN!!

[mswyrr]

What Happens When Young People Actually Read “Disturbing” Books

Something is missing from the debate over educationally suitable literature

[mikkeneko]

[poetrylesbian]

[tlirsgender]

Watching the discourse wheel turn to "are usamericans of color still benefitting from imperialism?" & I'm (mixed Native & white) just like oh yeah I reckoned with that whole situation like. A while ago. Mad innit

[tlirsgender]

Not a flex btw I'm not saying this to be like "I'm a better leftist than you cause I knew all along 🤓" it's just like. Once again feeling like I'm from another planet. Due to ndn reasons. Like this concept isn't news & yeah the dissonance cleaves your brain in half a little bit but despite everything you can still buy bananas in january. Ykwim?

[tlirsgender]

Maybe one day we can stop moralizing the concept of privilege & everyone will get normaler about being told they have relative privilege over other people. Like literally everyone everywhere in some way. It's fine. Being aware of it can't hurt you

[tlirsgender]

There's such an endless chorus of outraged "but what if I'm poor? What if I'm autistic" and it's like. Ok. You're not getting this at all let's just start over

[vintagewildlife]

"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?

This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.

[untimelytophat]

@crabussy

[crabussy]

as someone in the field of ecological conservation, I can promise without a shadow of a doubt that people DO care. SO MANY people care.

I have to race to sign up to volunteer trips because even with dozens of spots available, people rush to devote their unpaid free time to helping the environment. these trips often fill up within hours. people care.

you will see a lot of bad news because that is the kind of news that people pay the most attention to. I know this more than you'd think from my optimism- not only do I live somewhere facing some of the most extreme ecological issues on the planet, I also spend my time studying the Bad Stuff every single day.

to see all of this firsthand and stay hopeful is proof enough that there IS hope. I promise there is good news, brilliant news, all the time. it's just less visible. but it's no less important or impactful.

[hagiomoto]

It's not just white people who care about this sort of thing. A lot of people still seem to think that only white people care about protecting animals from extinction, but that's simply not true.

[busket]

ngl I feel like this archetype of the trans man who transitions and passes and then begins to join cis men in their misogyny and say awful things about girls without batting an eye is probably more based in hypothetical than anecdotal experience. not saying it cant happen, but all the trans men ive ever talked to are deeply disturbed by chauvanist men. theres an innate sense of "oh this guy is a creep" when talking to misogynists. and trans men may have had experiences of being too uncomfortable or afraid to speak out against cis men when theyre being misogynistic, but they dont just fall in rank because most often they know what its like to be a woman.

and its not like men are the only groups that come together to be misogynistic, either... some of the most misogynistic people ive met were girls; "pick mes" or "not a girls girl" etc. I think this idea that trans men are somehow more susceptible to becoming misogynists in order to fit in with sexist cis men is rooted in the terf belief that we are traitors who will kill all our morals to be men. but thats just not true.

[coyoteroadkill]

ive said this before but it was on my old blog so I'm saying it again

dehumanizing abusers is not effective at doing anything other than make people think they're ontologically incapable of violence

[ajunicetryagain]

it's also creating a class of people who you can abuse while telling yourself that you're Good and Moral and Not an Abuser.

[kyraneko]

if you dehumanize the caught abusers then the uncaught abusers will use their humanity as proof of innocence

if you dehumanize the hypothetical abusers you create incentives for false accusations as a means of dehumanization whenever dehumanization is desired for other reasons

[princess-of-phyresis]

they're selling anti-ai slogans on sweatshop-produced t-shirts. i don't need to write the poem for you to get it do i

[un-javi]

[princess-of-phyresis]

you are not required to exploit sweatshop labour to produce merchandise in order to participate in society though are you? most people don't.

[k-mraz]

Pros of vampirism: cool commissions from over 100 years ago. Cons? You have to pay to see them.