xoxo @ericchangofficial - Tumblr Blog

I’m always gonna be pissed that amatonormatvity as a term and a model for understanding society was literally mocked into disuse by exclusionists because of its association with aromantic folks.

Amatonormativity, honestly, has approximately fuck-all to do with aros. We did not even coin it, we’re simply the only people who actually take it seriously cause we’re among the ones who are most hurt by it. And it PISSES me the fuck off that it is not a widespread model used in greater queer discussions.

ace-and-aro-bloggggg

Amatonormativity is what causes romantic relationships to be prioritized above all else. The adults who find themselves slowly losing friends until their only contacts are their coworkers and their own nuclear family? Amatonormativity.

Rebelling against this culture and embracing a non-hierarchical view of relationships is the first step to making genuine connections and improving our collective mental health.

karl-the-not-so-great

May I also add: Amatonormativity is what causes consensual non-monogamy be treated as inherently abusive, and its the same thing that causes being in an abusive relationship to be seen as better than being single. Amatonormativity is a fundamental part of slut shaming, stigma against sex work and rape culture. Amatonormativity impacts everyone and really should have become a widely discussed and challenged concept but people just hated aspecs so much they were willing to shoot their alleged activism in the foot for it.

anarchistmemedistro

queeranarchism

The way capitalism pushes everyone to organize into two-adult-some-kids financial units that are much more easily exploitable and kept under control than interconnected multi-generational communities where you don’t need to be having sex with someone to share resources with them? Amatonormativity.

love

by Tess Janssen

memewhore

grimeclown

vaginatrainer-deactivated202007

What do you look for in a boy?

did-you-know

Goldstone Books in South Wales is no longer accepting donations of 50 Shades of Grey.

Employees created a fort out of their hundreds of surplus copies because nobody will take them, and they can’t be recycled due to a type of glue in their binding.

Source Source 2 Source 3

tanukiham

electronicgallery

It appears that boredom lies behind the most creative ideas. That's why quarantine has produced some of the most entertaining activities. One of them is the Getty Museum challenge, that so many of you have already seen in our previous article here.

delphinidin4

Narcissus taking a selfie is the ACTUAL best.

aveotardis

Painting recreations are my favorite thing to come out of quarantine.

ambassadorquark

at the beginning of the quarter this barbie doll showed up in my design prof’s classroom and he doesn’t know where it came from but one of his other classes crucified it(????) and when it somehow disappeared a week or so later people apparently lost their minds

callmebliss-got-swamped

indigobuntings

rest in peace freddie mercury. you would have loved lil nas x's music video.

smithsonian-official

i ADORE the anomitinity of tumblr. when i post stupid ass shit from my mush brain on like snapchat or whatever i gotta deal with messages like “are you okay?” and “what does this even mean”. here i can just post 30 pictures of dinosaurs in a row and my followers will be like YEEEEEAAAA BABBY

smithsonian-official

the other day i posted something on snapchat saying “if we gave monkeys guns i think deforestation would end” and someone sent me a link to an online therapy site i hate it here

johnnyjoestarrelatable

help girl i'm lengthwise in the suez canal

johnnyjoestarrelatable

girl help i'm blocking international trade

ackwardroots-deactivated2022090

When you ship cockblock

the-original-b

Here’s one good thing to come out of 2020:

Paleontologists completed a life-sized replica of Sue, the most complete T. Rex ever found.

And she is freaking GORGEOUS!

As I read more about this beauty, I found out some new details regarding things I thought I previously knew about the beast that was Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I’m going to share them with you.

First, and most obvious, her size:

This is nothing new, we all figured T. Rex was big, but I for one never stopped to consider exactly how big it was. Nobody ever really knows what to imagine when they read about something the size of a whale that walked around and ate everything it could kill.

Speaking of eating things, I just want to remind you all that T. Rex had–by miles–the strongest bite of any terrestrial animal living or dead, somewhere around six and a half tons of force. That’s over six times greater than the current estimate of what Allosaurus was capable of, and three times what was delivered by the highest measured reading of the living title holder–the estuarine crocodile. It didn’t have to waste time swinging its head open-mouthed like Saurophaganax for a little extra oomph, or grow fancy serrated teeth like Carcharodontosaurus to cut pieces out of its prey. It opted for the simplest approach: get its mouth around something and crush it to death; imagine the full weight of an elephant on whatever was between this thing’s jaws.

“How did it find something to eat?” I hear you asking. “It can’t see something if it doesn’t move, right?”

Listen, I love Jurassic Park too, but that’s a big crock of shit.

Notice how both her eyes face forward. That gives her binocular vision (the ability to focus both eyes on one target, like you and I). More importantly it means she has impeccable depth perception due to overlapping fields of vision from each, large, eyeball. Researchers agree that T. Rex not only had incredible vision, but that it was probably better than most modern animals–including eagles, hawks, and owls–and that she could likely spot something three and a half miles away. If something that big can see that well, it doesn’t matter if you move or not, she’d be able to tell if it was an animal trying to hide or a piece of vegetation. So pray she isn’t hungry if she lays eyes on you. And even if by some miracle she didn’t see you, she’d still smell you.

If she decided you looked tasty, you probably wouldn’t hear her coming as much as you’d feel her. Modern science indicates that T. Rex didn’t roar like in Jurassic Park, but rather bellowed or maybe even hissed like crocodilians. If she were on to you, you’d most likely feel this sense of unease creep up your spine as a low-pitched rumble in the air permeated through you. You wouldn’t know what it was or where it was coming from until you hear her footfalls. By then it’s too late–you could try to run but she’d probably catch you. There’s plenty on YouTube that reconstructs what T. Rex may have sounded like, and it’s legitimately haunting.

To wrap all of this up, the one bit of good that came out of the cursed year that is 2020 is that this wonderful child of science and art came into the world, and reaffirmed my respect and admiration for the eight ton slab of muscle and teeth that is this magnificent creature.

…and it is nothing if not magnificent.

the-original-b

I honestly expected like three notes, what happened!?

milkfreaker

sue goes by they/them :)

shuttershocky-deactivated202512

Sometimes I think about Red Dead Redemption 2’s development where the devs were begging people to not boycott the game to protest the news about their absurd working conditions because their bonuses were dependent on copies sold. I remember one of them made a statement around the lines of “We worked ourselves to the bone on this and we want to at least see people experience the fruits of that labor”, which makes me think about how we talk about blockbuster games developed under crunch.

I was given a copy of RDR2 to review it, and I couldn’t help but think about how I kept seeing so much that was technically impressive and yet just not necessary. Did some poor guy really work overtime for weeks just so Arthur’s horse had realistically shrinking testicles in cold water?

I honestly did not know how to properly articulate my thoughts on this at the time. I still don’t. Red Dead Redemption 2 was polished - I couldn’t deny that - but it didn’t have to be that polished. I could have connected every bit as strongly to Arthur if every horse in the game had no realistically shrinking horse balls, or even no balls at all. I would much rather have never had it and known the hardworking people who made the game enjoyed their lives more.

Still, I was impressed by the technical proficiency on display. Do I acknowledge that when I talk about RDR2?

I haven’t read any of the reviews for Cyberpunk yet (I want to form my own thoughts and I promised to play through it for a trans friend worried about whether or not she would have a good experience with the game) but I’m betting there’s going to be plenty of praise from people rating specific features as very good. Of course they’re very good; too many people have spent too much time on those features for it to not at least be good. The question is if it even needed to be that good. Could we just have not had this very good part in exchange for the developers living better lives?

The answer should be yes, but all people will really see is “this part was good” and sing its praises and demand more of it. Upper management watches these reactions and concludes that their methods are working splendidly. The company executives laugh all the way to the bank, tickling themselves with the dollars stuffing their pockets as more talented developers vow to never work in the industry again.

It sucks.

shuttershocky-deactivated202512

I don’t know if I properly expressed this in the original post but there is a specific pain I’m probably failing to capture here. There is a special hurt, an anguish, for when you work in games as a smalltimer and you see the fucking magic that the veterans at AAA studios are pulling off and knowing that it was accomplished through crunch.

These developers are accomplishing feats that can only be described as insane when you understand what they need to do to make that shit happen. The thing they made is incredible, and it must have no less than to have its praises be sung in every corner. That it was made under abuse and that your words of admiration that the devs so rightfully deserve to hear will only ensure their continued abuse is heartbreaking.

elexuscal

Adding onto this… I think we’re hitting a real wall. Not in what’s technically possible, but what’s technically feasible.

Because I get it. I get it. We started in a place where video games looked like this:

and then this:

And the desire was: How can we make this more like real life? The landscape, the models, the dialogue, the ability to simply interact in the world.

And you know what? We’ve made it pretty damn far. More than once I’ve seen a clip from a video game and literally not been able to tell at first that it wasn’t live footage.

But

How viable is that really? To have giant, sprawling open-world games where every character, no matter how minor, is fully voice acted? Where you can see every pore on peoples’ skin and the subtle shift of the hairs on their heads?

Cyperpunk 77 was in production for seven years. It was delayed what- twice, three times? CDProjectRed forced its employees into grueling 100+ hour work weeks to get it all together. And by most accounts, it still came out a buggy mess with entire missing systems.

To me, that’s evidence that this style triple AAA hyper-realistic game is getting so out of control that this scale is simply not tenable.

And do we even.. need all this? Really? Because I have had plenty of fun with smaller, less-realistic video game titles like Hyperlight Drifter, Slime Rancher, and Abzu. Near-perfect emulation of reality isn’t the be all and end all of gaming. Maybe it’s time the industry stopped chasing it so desperately.

bunniope

passionpeachy-deactivated202312

I know “slut/slutet” just means “end” in swedish but I literally don’t know how I’m supposed to compose myself looking at these images

willyoufckinglookatthat

alone-to-dance-deactivated20240

This just hit me. I’m so Southern my family has a matriarch and no one in the family knows for sure how old she is. We all also got into a heated debate about the existence of her glass eye (still not confirmed). She’s in her 90s- we think- beat cancer, outlived two husbands, had seven children and has outlived three of them, survived The Great Depression, and either her dad or her grandfather was a full blooded Cherokee Indian… possibly the tribe’s leader but no one really knows for sure.

She also once lit into my dad’s school bus driver, cussing him black and blue about how he treated the kids and didn’t realize she had a butcher’s knife in her hand until he RAN away. She didn’t have any more trouble out of him.

whitebeltwriter

…I wish to know how and why this just occured to you, please

alone-to-dance-deactivated20240

I had an eloquent reason but really what it boils down to is I think Mamaw is a cryptid. The running joke in the family is that Mamaw will be at the end of the world with the twinkies and the cockroaches.

I’m not sure it’s a joke anymore, I think it’s a premonition.

alone-to-dance-deactivated20240

Two years ago one of my cousins wanted to bring her wife to thanksgiving and Joe was all “ew no way” and Mamaw stood her ass up and said “Who the hell do you think you are, saying who is and isn’t welcome in my house? This ain’t your house- you get out! I say who is welcome and YOU is not welcome. Now SCAT!” while slapping at him and then sat back down and asked my cousin if her wife ate catfish. Joe tried to come back in and she popped the tennis balls off her walker and threw them at him until he left

alone-to-dance-deactivated20240

No matter how old Mamaw gets, her hair is still solid black. She still hasn’t gone gray and she’s never once died her hair. Her kids all have heads full of gray hair, and my father- her grandson- is starting to go gray. Mamaw? Nothing. I swear she looks exactly the same as she did when I was a kid.

alone-to-dance-deactivated20240

Mamaw got Covid-19. She presented with symptoms and was rushed to the ER with a dangerously high fever and next to no oxygen. The doctors took note of her age (she’s apparently 93 as best she can guess) and her vitals and, well, Mamaw wasn’t gonna make it past Monday.

By Sunday night the fever was gone and she was complaining that the hospital didn’t get WWE and she was gonna “miss my wrasslin shows!”.

She was home and completely fine by Tuesday. By Wednesday she was calling up the anti-maskers in our family just to call them idiots and hang up.