*Imagine a title is here*

A fruity Bird / 20s / Gender sure is a thing I have (maybe), and so are eyes. Currently invested in the magnus protocol, murderbot, and the locked tomb. I mostly reblog things.

[genderkoolaid]

at some point i'm gonna have to write up a whole post about how "consent" (in a sexual context but also broadly) is a concept that stems from legal theory and is, as with most things, a social construct. okay whoops i did it here

an important social construct nonetheless! but like a lot of things about how we conceptualize consent, and the flaws therewithin, i feel come from treating consent as like. some vague form of social magic, and not a concept we made up and have been actively re-making up, and also that trying to take a legal concept and use it as the sole framework to analyze messy human relationships is always going to be problematic.

like. part of the reason the difference between rape and sex in ancient greek/roman myths are so blurry is because (people classed as) women could not consent, legally, because they could not be legal actors* at all. sex and gender and patriarchy are all ultimately about property and wealth. in order to get a wife who will take care of your household and provide you with heirs, you need to get permission from some daughter's father to make her your wife and have sex with her. if you have sex with her without permission, that is rape - because the term "rape" comes from a Latin term which literally just means seizing something by force, stealing something**

at the same time, people did have a sense that the woman in question could have opinions on the sex she was involved in and be more or less a willing participant, and that matter a variable degree depending on the situation. but "rape" was never supposed to be about the harm of violating a person's bodily autonomy, it was about legally regulating the violation of property and punishing those who broke that law. which also meant a woman could be "raped" when she was having willing sex with a person of her choosing, because it wasn't of her father's choosing. and this also means that "person choosing to be a slutty slut whore and cheat on her husband" and "person being forced to have sex against her will" are two situations that might be categorized the same way, making victim-blaming VERY common and easy.

what feminism did was say hey, (people classed as) women can be independent legal actors, and legally you need the person you are having sex with's permission to have sex with them, because they own and represent themself, legally. the sexual damage was re-conceived as coming not from the economic or spiritual or social damage to a father's reputation or a family's honor but the harm done to the victim themself. that change was genuinely vital! it is EXTREMELY important that "rape" stopped being about anyone's permission but the person actually involved in the sexual encounter.

but this is where we get to the problem i mentioned above. consent in this legal context can be much more black and white (although not completely) because the ultimate goal of considering consent at all is figuring out if a law was broken and what to do about that. when it comes to interpersonal relationships and sociopolitical context, things get a whole lot messier.

this is where you get issues like the "enthusiastic consent" model. it seems like a very good idea to define sex around not just willingness but desire, but then you have situations where people are insisting that sex workers are being raped because their sex isn't "enthusiastic" because of the economic factor. which creates a situation where everyone involved in a sexual encounter is saying "yes, i am willing to do xyz with you under these conditions," but a third party finds this problematic. which, you might notice, is VERY similar to the exact situation we were in before that feminist approach to consent, where what a person can choose to do with their body depends on what some other, unrelated but "more knowledgeable" party feels they should be allowed to do. and with that considered, i must ask if "consent" really should be doing the work of weighing desire and emotion and the immense complexity of how that relates to our choices.

similarly, i do not think adults should have sex with children! i think that is not good. but ultimately "legal minors cannot consent to sex with adults" is a legal construct. the law does not recognize sex an adult has with a person under 18 as consensual because that is how our legal framework currently seeks to prevent children from sexual harm from adults, by saying "this class of people is not legally capable of consenting." that doesn't necessarily make it the best way to accomplish that goal, but it is how the current framework goes about it. that can be true without claiming that "minors can't consent because their innocent underdeveloped brains are incapable of having genuine sexual desire and seeking it with an adult" because that just isn't true! and it can diminish the subjective experience of many young people with sex and sex work and deprive them of the ability to understand their own desires, what it feels like to be taken advantage of, what choices they made and why, etc. and can serve to alienate survivors who do not narrate their experiences with sex as a minor in the "appropriate" way. all because the legal inability to consent is conflated with a biological inability to desire or will.

ultimately right now my opinion is that we should try to distinguish between consent and will and desire and allow for shades of grey and multi-dimensionality in our sex lives and moral frameworks. i think someone who does sex work because they are in poverty and disabled and can't get another job should be allowed to explore and express that experience on their own terms, navigating the questions of what they chose and what they didn't and what "choice" actually means for them and what they need and want and how we as a society should react to them having been in that situation, without having people, unrelated to any of the actual sex had, try to do Morality Math to decide whether or not it was "consensual" or "not." we make up the law to help structure our society and our legal frameworks should not be the basis or the extent of our moral frameworks.

*nuance here, i'm talking very generally about a lot of different times and places to make a point, actually laws on people's ability to participate legally when classed as women varied even just in ancient mediterranean europe! however even when people classed as women had more legal autonomy, it was still under an androcentric system where their legal autonomy was subordinate and (cis)male authority was default over the women in their lives was socially default and legally supported

**also want to mention that there's also nuance re: "women as property." yes people classed as women were (and are) treated as property, but also a lot of the time, as i understand it, the legal position of these people was actually more akin to "you are a person who is not a slave (and thus not someone's property) BUT you are legally incompetent and so cannot represent yourself or act legally on your own. which is the situation of both children and people classed as women throughout history. so like, its not always "you are legally property" as much as people being in the socioeconomic role of property while being legally seen as not necessarily "property" but incompetent and under the control of another person.

[deadgravity]

You don't have to grieve alone.

[alexandriad]

woman yelling at cat meme but make it ancient greek red figure pottery

[swirling-orbs-of-disorder]

From ancient to abstract, this one sure got around.

Japanese one made no sense to me until I finally saw the “sale sale/sasa lele” version. セール　セール。 But then it’s a meme so it has to be misspelled?  🤷‍♂️

[everyone-loves-purple]

tHERE ARE MEMES IN THOSE HIEROGLYPHICS

[fromsiberia]

Ohhhhhhh…. Chinese and greek are my favourite, but there is more!

[nongunktional]

i do think the negative interpretations of "im probably nonbinary but i have a job right now" are kind of reaching. it's obviously a waste of time to theorize the op's intended meaning, so instead i think it's better to recognize how the phrase can be a useful framing device to criticize how much of a fucking hassle it is to get gendered correctly. "but i have a job" e.g. will face discrimination that could threaten livelihood; e.g. don't have the mental bandwidth to explain gender to others; e.g. don't have the time and energy for the soul-searching necessary to confirm. all three of these are labor issues. yes you could interpret it as "but being nonbinary isn't important enough to worry about", despite that being a blatantly bad-faith read. it's more useful to interpret it as "but being publicly nonbinary requires a lot of social effort that, in many cultural contexts, will create more problems that you can't afford to deal with". like cmon it's a really good jumping off point for productive conversations about queer labor rights

[simonlegend]

The people of Clacton have been given an opportunity...

Voting for Count Binface would be one of the most surreal, but glorious opportunities to show the entire nation, that given the chance to stick two fingers up to the grifting, entitled & corrupt establishment, personified by Nigel Farage of Reform UK, the good people of Clacton can be trusted to do the right thing and boot him quite literally into the bin.

[litafficionado]

“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…” -Jorie Graham, in a conversation 

[shower-thoughts-last-responder]

The importance of children in this cannot be understated but this is also true for adults. Children and young people who never learned the words needed to express themselves so spend their youth frustrated, disenfranchised and unable to identify/communicate their needs grow into frustrated, disenfranchised adults who are unable to identify/communicate their needs. Ifbthe thesaurus truck doesn’t work there’s also this chart

[drizzledrawings]

I love when platonic love and romantic love is so blurred that it doesn’t even matter anymore. All that matters is the devotion that’s there, the unwavering devotion

[semi-imaginary-place]

MB is hilariously unreliable as a narrator. From the books because that's where MB's unreliable narrator is strongest:

Comany name? [redacted] "the company" and you know that all lowercase is spite

MB repeatedly complains that it's the cheapest flimsiest made unit, the Temu bot. But it's rental was probably really expensive and it and every other SecUnit we see is extremely high performing

1 line about how Ratthi is extremely popular and everyone seems happy. There's just an ever rotating cast of hookups and flings in the background that Murderbot is desperately trying to not notice.

For that matter polyamory seems to be the societal norm and you know there's polyvule drama happening that MB is erasing it's memory about.

In the second novella Perihelion is a complete mystery to MB, it's mostly just intimidated and like "ok this is my life now". Where as in Network Effect and "Rapport" we see that Peri is utterly enamored with Muderbot, it think MB is the best thing to ever happen.

MB has 0 self awareness and doesn't really know much about SecUnits or contructs in general it just contantly projects it's own feelings and opinions onto everyone else. Every other contruct is the series acts counter to what MB says.

For that matter it projects onto humans too. Murderbot has the emotional intellengence of a rock. It hates and fears itself and so projects that into believing everyone else fears it. And most humans don't. I'm not even talking about the hippie commune Preservation people, some of the rando Corporate Rim tertiary characters and Mihira and Tidelands people aren't particularly afraid of MB.

Unprocessed 2.0 emotions

[redacted]

Murderbot does not understand anything (besides security, hacking, and sanctuary moon) and frequently misunderstands things. Every time MB makes a claim not only will it likely be disproven, it will likely be disproven within that same book. Which makes me suspicious every time there is an obvious gap in the narrative, like the polycule drama MB spends like 1 sentence glossing over, or Miki's death. It dies so suddenly in the narrative and disappears so quickly from the narration I suspect Murderbot is once again suppressing it's emotions and memories about Miki. I'm reading System Collapse right now and Wells has upped her game and is planting giant neon flashing signs over all the gaps in MB's narration, [redacted].

[thestuffedalligator]

Human Is is a 1955 Philip K. Dick sci-fi short story where a guy goes to another planet for work and when he comes back to Earth his personality has flipped from an asshole to a sweet, kind, considerate man. Everyone's immediately convinced that an alien has taken over his body, this goes all the way to court, and in court his wife testifies that she's noticed no changes at all and so the charges are dropped.

And then there's a bit right at the end of the story as the wife and the husband are walking out of court:

Jill turned abruptly. "What is your name? Your real name."

The man's gray eyes flickered. He smiled a little, kind, gentle smile. "I'm afraid you would not be able to pronounce it. The sounds cannot be formed..."

Jill was silent as they walked along, deep in thought. The city lights were coming on all around them. Bright yellow spots in the gloom. "What are you thinking?" the man asked.

"I was thinking perhaps I will still call you Lester," Jill said. "If you don't mind."

"I don't mind," the man said. He put his arm around her, drawing her close to him. He gazed down tenderly as they walked through the thickening darkness, between the yellow candles of light that marked the way. "Anything you wish. Whatever will make you happy."

And I. God. There's something there. A soupcon of monsterfuckery. To tell your partner in a moment of intimacy that yes, you're something so inhuman that the lips you're stealing can't speak your actual name. You're a parasite that not only had the ability to burrow under this man's skin and take over his life, but you were so desperate to escape a dead, dry, blasted planet that you did.

And for your partner to then turn around and go "I know, I've always known, and I love you" is just. God I know it's not a great Dick story but something about it is making me lose my mind

[thestuffedalligator]

Also it's explicitly stated that the guy's consciousness is still alive and preserved on the alien planet. Jill is told this and then proceeds to defend the alien anyways, ensuring that her husband's brain is stuck in a jar on a desert planet. You love to see it

[storm-of-feathers]

we don't credit rebecca sugar enough for making the episode with the first gay wedding in a kids show extremely plot relevant so it could not be skipped or cut.

[emeraldspiral]

#rebecca sugar has gone on record saying that they knew from the beginning they wanted ruby and sapphire and they put every inch of planning#in to make sure that the studio could not take them out. sugar has said they’d compromised on hundreds of things they’d wanted for steven#so that they had the bargaining power specifically to keep ruby and sapphire’s relationship#and a number of ‘filler’ episodes were created just to establish counter-arguments that might come up when they pitched the wedding episode#the one that comes to mind is the episode about steven and connie getting lost in rose’s room steven’s central conflict about liking their#fave book series’ romantic ending was later weaponised when producer’s were like ‘oh but steven’s a boy he won’t be too interested in them#getting married’ sugar was able to be like ‘no. in this episode it’s established he loves romance and specifically weddings. and in these#episodes it’s shown how much steven cares about ruby and sapphire and their relationship and happiness. you cannot convince me this is not#good and necessary plot development#and they wrapped it up in the season finale and the big climactic point of the diamonds finally coming to attack earth to make the#episode integral to the series no skipping it without confusion. and had ruby wear a wedding dress because international censors took#advantage of her design to give her a masculine va#and sugar made certain that everybody knew This was a queer love story that an entire town supported and admired and that any child watchin#it at home would know they are not alone and that that support is waiting for them out there somewhere#sugar sacrificed the wider story they wanted to tell for that and it was a horrible decision to be given but they made the right choice

[dante-macabre]

These weren’t even the biggest sacrifices. CN basically gave her an ultimatum and canceled the show for it. She knew this would likely happen and that’s why season 5 is paced so fast. She could have had 2 more seasons but that wouldn’t be worth it without ruby and sapphire

[vaspider]

Yeah, they were given an ultimatum and they lost their show over this.

And they have said they stand by it.

[omagpies]

I sketched this like half a year ago

[ittybittyremy]

Society if people realized that queerplatonic is the nonbinary of relationships

[autumn-sweet-fae]

Cannot get the concept of Eridian Opera out of my head.

It’s the closest thing to show biz on Erid. The orchestra and actors are the stars and divas of culture. Of course someone writes an opra about Rocky meeting the alien Grace and saving the stars together.

The casting call to play Rocky would be so cut throat. And Rocky can’t really give any opinion on who to pick since he’s been out of the pop culture loop for 50 years. (A fact the writers use in writing the script. Purposely giving Rocky dated Eridian slang.)

As for Graces actor, the theater’s master puppeteer becomes invested in making as accurate a puppet as possible to play their alien. In the end they would create a puppet where, instead of stuffing, it is filled with sacks and tubes full of fluid. Including an air pump to churn it and a constant beating of what would be a human heart. The puppeteer tries to capture just how horrifyingly alien Grace is in the best way for Eridians, through sound design.

And that’s just the puppet for the actors to interact with. For the audience, I could see the orchestra Amplifying the sounds of the human body during scenes like when Grace hugs Rocky. Or used for laughs when Rocky points out how flawed the human body is as he describes it to the audience.

Actual Rocky being a puppeteer nerd as a pebble. So when the theater gets approval to send the Opera stars to meet Rocky and Grace during the press tour, Rocky straight up pushes past the glamorous opera divas to meet the puppeteer instead.

Rocky is excited to share with them the fact that so much his and Grace earliest communication was through puppet shows.

The first act , puppet tradition, costuming, more puppetry, the Final Act

[ceruleana]

Eva Stratt's pov of phm is kinda insane really. Because it's basically being told, hey humanity WILL go extinct soon. but we've decided that if one person makes it through all the levels of the Torment Nexus our chances of survival might increase. they might also not. Anyway. We think you're the best person to do this. Your reward is that everyone will hate you forever.

And you're like well. I'd rather trust myself to the fate of the world than anyone else. And I'd rather not let anyone else suffer the Torment Nexus just because of my own feelings. That seems kinda selfish. Alright sure.

So you enter the Torment Nexus. Each level has you pressing buttons like, [abduct innocent scientists to your vat: chances of humanity's survival increases by 0.005%] [everyone disliked that] [congrats! your moral goodness has decreased!].

The later levels get even worse. [blow up Antarctica: chances of humanity's survival increases by, ummm who knows ????] [total humans negatively affected: ????] [congrats! you're an ecoterrorist!].

Then you reach the final level. It reads: [through this door you'll break the news to your friend that he needs to die.] And you're like, wait he has to die??? I have to tell him?? But that's incredibly fucked up. After I went through the Torment Nexus as well. But it's the last level. So oh well. I can do this I suppose. Rather me than anyone else.

You enter the level and you friend is standing next to a cliff. You go over to him and say, hey this really fucking sucks but I've just learnt you need to jump off the cliff. Then we might be able to save humanity for real though. Maybe billions of people can survive if this works.

Then he turns to you and is like, are you fucking insane? And starts sprinting away from the cliff. Suddenly you have a gun in your hand. You're like, no wait. I don't want to do this. For real? I gotta shoot him for real? [Chances of survival if he lives: 0%. Chances of survival if he dies: maybe NOT 0%......????]. You pull the trigger. [congrats! you're a murderer!]

[hyperactivehedgehog]

There's also the part where she was unanimously elected by the UN, which lends itself to speculation that she either influenced the decision somehow or was the only volunteer, so consider this:

You signed up for this. Not did you agree to enter the torment nexus, you walked up to it and got on while everyone was still debating. You bribed the guards to get into the torment nexus. You looked around and realised "damn, none of you will get through level one of the torment nexus, guess I'll have to do it myself"

And then you're finally through the torment nexus and it's like [congrats! You've finished The Torment Nexus! Did you win? Find out in 26 (twenty six) years!]

So now you gotta make sure that all (most) (some) of you actually make it the next 26 years. Which is when you get hit with [bonus level: prison break! Unlocks Hard Mode: keep earth alive while on the run] so you just sigh and try to kidnap new scientists and bribe government officials to share food and please not throw bombs at each other

And then the 26 years are over and the beetles return and then you're being told heyyyy bestie I know we send you to prison after making you go through the torment nexus (which you chose yourself btw)(like we didn't even ask you you just did it) but now we kind of uhhh need you to do it again? But this is Torment Nexus 2: Watch your Best Friend Die in Space :D and you're like damn. Guess I'll have to do it again. So you enter Torment Nexus 2 and the first level is labeled [Your best friend has a cooler best friend now and probably doesn't miss you at all!] and you're like okay this is kind of mean but I guess I deserve that and then the next level hits you with [False Hope: your best friend is coming back to earth! Oh wait! No he's decided to go back and die in space. I don't know what you expected you saw the name of the torment nexus]

[believeripley13]

I love the opening of Heated Rivalry so much because it sets up the show and Shane and Ilya's dynamic so perfectly. From "not the most sociable" Shane Hollander actively going out of his way to interact (because he's already fascinated by him) to "not liked outside of his own locker room" Ilya Rozanov being a bit of a cocky shit (which we pretty quickly realise is a front) to the instant spark of attraction.

Look at this man experiencing freckles and awkward Canadian politeness and developing a fat crush.

My favourite part however is as Shane is leaving clearly uncomfortable with how their conversation went (he does a head tilt like "well, that went horribly")

Ilya notices and that's when he chirps, immediately making Shane more comfortable as he chirps back. And thus, their lovingly teasing, when they say "asshole" and "boring" they really mean "I love you" dynamic is born.

Also, yes, Ilya's lighter doesn't spark until Shane appears which is just an additional beautiful touch.

[dramaticpokemonpictures]

Rest in peace Akihiro Miwa (1935-2026)

I haven't seen anyone talking about this and just wanted to make a quick post on here.

Akihiro Miwa recently passed away peacefully june 20th, and was not only a drag queen and a queer icon, but also the japanese voice of Arceus in the movie Arceus and the jewel of life, as well as the witch from Howl's moving castle and Moro from Princess Mononoke.

Rest in peace and thank you for the wonderfull impact you made in this world.

[maswartz]

[fractally]

This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.

[vergess]

Please stop blaming the fucking software for the abusive actions of capitalist cunts. Please. You need to actually hold the human actors in charge of this shit responsible.

Stop saying "chatGPT" when you mean "Sam Altman and his corporate cronies." Stop saying "AI" when you mean "speculative investor backed environmental destruction".

You CANNOT keep letting these fuckheads scapegoat a computer and absolve themselves of all blame.

The fucking large language models are computer programs. They are not people, and they are certainly not decision makers.

Be angry at the FUCKING COMPANIES WALLING OFF INFORMATION instead of raging about how a specific type of statistical regression is somehow coming into your home and eating your pets.