Willow

Mostly random thoughts, they/them, biology/critter enthusiate, starwars nerd

[greenestkite]

I suppose this is an introduction thingy!

Anyway, Hi! wonderful to meet yall! im Will or Gree, they/them. I'm deeply enthused by world building of all sorts, have a deep and abiding love for em-dashes, and think big-picture biology like ecology and ecosystems are super neat.

I write fic sometimes and make fanart more rarely lol, my ao3 is greenest_kite, (i'll probably make a post at somepoint soon talking about my various wips bc i am drowning in them and am hoping that sharing will increase my will to work on them)

feel free to say hi! i'm always down to chat about fandoms, world building, cool biology stuff

My main fandoms that i cycle through:

Star Wars prequels and pre-empire, Mandalorians especially

Les misérables

Marauders

The Martian

[shinywhatsoever]

credit: 보리꼬리 broccoli1221 (x)

[materialist-scumbag-og]

Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025

So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.

Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter — the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).

Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way — they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility — your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.

Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.

What they get in return — and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss — is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy — they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.

This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.

The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge — theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) — and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened — the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."

Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market — Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others — and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.

Anyway, the Q3 number is like 13% up year-over-year in a consumer products environment where basically nothing is growing, and the analyst takes are all about "emotional connection" and "intergenerational brand equity" which — sure, fine, those are downstream effects. The upstream cause is that a Danish family spent fifty years obsessing over whether their plastic rectangles were within two thousandths of a millimeter of spec, and it turned out that was the whole game.

[prokopetz]

That post about meme definitions is lying to you. "Glup Shitto" isn't about how Star Wars characters have silly names. "Glup Shitto" is about how the incidental Star Wars character with a cumulative eight seconds of screen time somehow has a silly name, a well established fandom, and forty years of meticulously detailed backstory.

[blue-sunshine-mauve-morning]

AU where Ryland Grace has a few weeks left of breeding taumeoba when he gets his ‘I didn’t want to go’ memories back and when he’s deciding what videos to upload to the Beetles he realizes this is the perfect chance to get back at Stratt. Now that he’s, you know, had a crying jag and freaked out about the betrayal for a few days, his feelings kind of simmer against the necessity of it, you know? And it helps that he’s not actually gonna die.

So, after uploading all the science and posterity videos, Ryland adds one ‘For Eva’ knowing full well that several governments and possibly the entirety of what is left of the world is gonna see it and he lays on a thick spiel about how he finally remembered that they were gonna get married, right before the accident that put him on this mission, that he remembered proming her the rest of his life and he remembered ‘how hard it was for us to say goodbye’ and ‘you made the right decision. Of course you did. Of course it was the right decision, but Eva, I still miss you. I was missing you before I even fully remembered you. Golly, why didn’t we just – touch more? Talk more? You wouldn’t even let me hold your hand! But I understood. Your hands were full. You had the world in them, Eva.’ And ‘I hope you kept the lights on love, because I’m coming home!’ and he gives the camera this goopy, sweet, broad smile, because he’s utterly tickled, knowing full well that Eva is gonna have to live with this for the months and or years between the Beetles arriving and Ryland making it back, and he even gets Rocky to make him a xenonite wedding band to tuck into a Beetle with his little spaceman, to really sell the whole thing, right, and he’s just freaking giddy about how mad that’s gonna make Stratt –

And then the tauemoeba escape, and Ryland has to go back for Rocky, and he makes another video, explaining the science and the issue and the solution and then he trails off for a minute or so, expression conflicted, and when he looks back up it’s just with this breathless soft ‘Eva’ on his lips, and then he swallows, and then he smiles and it’s – sweet in a sad way, because for Ryland this is really goodbye, and his prank had sort of made him feel better about what she’d done, and honestly – he did miss her. Even still. ‘Eva, I’ve gotta go,” he says, his eyes wet and his voice quavering. ‘You were right about me. It’s gotta be me,’ he shrugs, laughs, wipes away the wet line at the edge of his eyes. ‘There’s nobody else and I mean, I’m on a winning streak, right? Why not try 2 for 2 in saving an entire species, huh? So I just…I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I made it so hard for – for us. And I’ll miss you. Just – do me a favor and in case I don’t make it – I know how you love back-up plans, yeah? – do me a favor and send an extra probe of taumoeba to 40-Eridani for me? You really can’t let me die in vain here, alright? So make sure – make sure to save both our worlds, alright? Yeah……. And just…. if you care for me any bit at all still, do me one other favor, Eva Stratt. Live a good life for me’ He pleads, before he shudders a breath, looking off to the side for a quiet moment, and then he looks down, nods to himself, presses a kiss to his fingers and his fingers to the camera and turns it off.’

And Eva, right, watches these tapes in a room full of world leaders and aerospace representatives and she’s just – fuming red and there is that stupid little ringbox from the Beetle in front of her with the most unique wedding band in the galaxy in it and it fits perfectly and she’s just -seething, because that is not what happened. They were not – secret lovers, they did not secretly marry or promise to marry, none of that –

But the old Petrova Task Force, right, they take this and run with it – “Oh yeah, it was obvious, I mean ,they denied it, but you could tell –“

“Grace was so bad at hiding right, terrible liar –“

“Stratt was always slipping him these – sour skittles packets, and i mean, that was definitely favoritism, you have no idea how hard it was to get anything on the vat –“

“And the sticky notes! She’d leave him these cute little notes, right, on his lab or on his coffee mug or, one time, I saw her just stick it to his forehead –“

“And Grace never let her be alone, you know? I mean, he was always kind of following her around like a puppy, but no one else ever really approached her, so when we were all, you know, together, those two would wander off –“

Eva’s getting bombarded with all this, and she’s shaking with anger and like, maybe cried a tear or two of frustration, denying it because people are acting sympathetic, while she's insisting that; "I paved the Sahara and I bombed the Antarctic shelf and I sent Ryland Grace into space against his wishes –“

And everyone is just like, oh Eva, we know you loved him. We know how hard that must have been –

And they remake the movie about the project, and the new one has this entire romantic sublot, and the theme of her loving him so much, and having to give him to the stars to save humanity, knowing she’s never getting him back, and this really poignant ending about Stratt waking up in prison (because she did go to prison) and Ryland Grace, waking up in space, both of them on these narrow bunks with these tiny little windows, reflecting different suns, and theres this mutual red streak of cinematic glare in that sunlight, right, and they turn her into this doomed tragic heroine in the public eye, right, and Eva goes so far as to try and release the audio of Grace’s refusal to go up on the Hail Mary as proof that it was not what they were making it out to be, except someone (Carl) removed bits of it, and the rest can definitely be interpreted as having some… subtext, and Eva’s like ‘Carl, why?’

And Carl’s just – it’s what our man would have wanted.

And Eva actually wears the damn ring, right? It’s a space ring, from outer space, from another intelligent species, and it she looks at it daily wanting to kill Ryland Grace and knowing she already has, and what to do, with that?

So there’s one generation that knows her as Eva Stratt, World Dictator, and another generation who knows her as Eva Stratt, Ryland Grace’s Widow, and like, in every single public appearance, she has to continue to protest that they were not married, and everyone is just like ‘Damn, she’s so broken-hearted she’s in denial’ and Eva is like ‘No, that is not what is happening.’

And anyways, she lives to an unreasonably old age and when she’s like, one hundred and eight or so a ship arrives from Erid, bearing a delegation and Ryland Grace’s ashes, which one of the aliens absolutely insists on delivering to Eva Stratt, right, and this is Rocky and he’s carrying this most beautiful sort of crystal urn and it’s all very public and touching and Rocky asks ‘Did Eva live a good life?’

And Eva actually cries this time, for Ryland, and it’s stupid and they weren’t ever anything and this whole joke of his has tormented her for decades and now she’s crying over him because he’s dead. She sent him into space to die and it took him a lifetime to do it and she still outlived him and it is – unfair, now. It has always been unfair.

‘He did not actually love me,’ Eva tells Rocky, when they have been ushered somewhere private out of respect for her ‘mourning’. ‘We were not – that.’

‘Rocky knows,’ the alien says. ‘But Grace said…. maybe could have been.’

‘Is that really his last message for me?’ Eva asks, shaking her head.

The alien shifts on his feet a bit. ‘Rocky hate hate hate you sent Grace to die. Grace scared scared scared. But… if not, Rocky not meet Grace. Rocky Grace not save stars....Grace last message: Good job, Eva. Thank you, and - goodbye.’

[turing-tested]

why didnt you call the cops or cps?

how about this: when i was 9 and my stepdad beat me until i passed out and i told my friends at school, my teacher over heard and i was interviewed by cps. they also went to my house when i was at school. when i got home, my step father was waiting on the couch, and told me who visited him that day. he told me if i ever snitched again he would beat me to within an inch of my life.

how about this: my mother locked me out of the house when i was 14 and when i cried so loud the neighbors called the cops, the cop told me i should have been respectful of my mother who was trying to sleep.

how about this. the demon you know is less scary than the demon you don’t.

children in abused households are raised to fear the idea of being taken away. children in abusive households see that help makes things worse.

dont you ever blame an abuse victim for not going to the authorities.

[turing-tested]

yes this okay to reblog!

[isuggestyouthliberation]

cpc + the cops are more invested in maintaining the social power of adults over children than they are in the wellbeing of those children.

[anghraine]

Any take on Luke as just a normal kid whining about freedom should probably account for the fact that he lives on a lawless desert planet controlled by gangsters who kept his father and grandmother as slaves

[anghraine]

#like … every time i see a post about how much easier he has it than leia i’m #he absolutely does in some ways #but also leia’s family are wealthy and powerful while luke’s are eking out water from the air

This post is nearly ten years old and I still think about this, honestly. Luke has no consciousness of the dangers and pressures in Leia’s life when he’s playing with his toy starship; she’s already had to become what he can only vaguely dream of. But she’s also never had to consider “where is tomorrow’s food and water coming from” to anything like the degree that Luke, Owen, and Beru do every day. Luke and Leia both make sure they’re armed when they leave home because their environments are so dangerous, in completely different ways.

It really is possible to talk about the ways Leia has been forced to grow up and Luke has been allowed to remain functionally a boy, without dismissing pretty much everything we ever find out about Tatooine and the Skywalkers, or the drastic differences in their opportunities and access to material luxuries. I promise, she’s a good enough character to stand on her own without misrepresenting Luke’s circumstances to prop her up.

[galactic-rhea]

#luke simultaneously hates the empire AND is desperate to join the imperial academy because it’s his only way out. he can’t afford to leave#not in a danger sense in a material sense. he doesn’t have the resources or the money to ever leave that world—#a world in which his caring gruff uncle is his uncle (and very much not his father) because owen’s father bought luke’s grandmother#to free/marry her—shmi’s freedom and shmi’s marriage to cliegg are inextricably tied together. she’s described just as a good wife—#luke undoubtedly sees her grave (necessary bc she got abducted and tortured to death!) every day as he does his chores so they can. survive#i’m not saying anh luke is actually mature and overtly haunted bc of this—just that fandom seems a lot more comfortable#considering the ways in which luke is sheltered from basic realities of leia’s life than the ways the reverse is also true.#i actually think sw is not completely oblivious and careless about this either. leia’s class really does inform almost everything about her#it’s not super deep about it but it’s there. think of her first kneejerk reaction to chewbacca and how her reactions to han’s misogyny#often invoke class in some way—esp earlier on (and no it’s not just banter). like… i love her and this is actually part of why.#she’s not just strong female character™; her personality is actually informed by both the horrors and luxuries of the life she’s led

reblogging with amazing op’s tags by @anghraine

[violet-prism-creatively]

I tried my hand at one of those two-column (contrapuntal) poems! I have a new level of respect for anyone who writes these lol

You can also read it on ao3 where I learned how to code an HTML table for this.

[yeehawpim]

I can be the ship and its sailors

[teaboot]

Do you think Clark Kent's first few major articles were about the continued presence of lead pipes in parts of Metropolis' water system

[teaboot]

(Average Metropolis reader after investigative reporter C. Kent's 452nd article on yet another case of landlords/business owners/factories' continued use of lead pipes/paint/gas/glass knowingly exposing the public to dangerously toxic lead levels) what the fuck happened to this guy

[teaboot]

One day Bruce Wayne mentions in an interview that heroes like Superman are overrated, as the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide public resources and improve local infrastructure, then cites how neighboring city Metropolis has effectively lowered their violent crime by 13% after addressing their outdated water system and investing low income housing. the reporter conducting the interview suddenly starts looking a little uncomfortable

[teaboot]

To be clear, Clark is still a fantastic investigative reporter. He still has to track down the sources to prove all this shit

[teaboot]

"Who, Clark Kent? Yeah, we're pretty sure he's a Meta. Is he a superhero? Like what, "Lead-detector guy"? "Captain pipes?" Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy and it's a handy trick, but it's lead detection, not laser vision. He's not about to go running around in tights any time soon."

[sindri42]

I just love the idea of a cape maintaining their secret identity by pretending to be a completely different and less impressive kind of parahuman.

[roach-works]

everyone assumes that kent is so squirrely around superheros because he’s just desperately hoping not to be conscripted to the JLA to fix their plumbing

[teaboot]

Local Metropolis Reporter Publically Recognized For Contributions To The City; Awarded Medal Of Distinction

[championofdnd]

They tried to get superman to present the medal but he was offended at being called "overrated" in comparison to Clark so he declined

[teaboot]

Counter offer: Bruce Wayne disguised as Superman

[teaboot]

beating this dead horse with memes

[everythingismadeofchaos]

Hey this was a real fun little read. It's so great to find these treasures on this site

[teaboot]

We’re happy to have you!

[depsidase]

[thememedaddy]

[teaboot]

Does anyone know any male characters I can cosplay as a 5'3" guy?

Here are my ideas so far:

Canon-height Wolverine

A scaled-down version of a character that other cosplayers can stand next to so they look taller

A child of some sort

Two VERY small characters in a trench coat

An oversexualized female character with obviously fake tooters

A background Star Wars alien

????

A different guy. Like a costume of somebody else who is not in costume

Banana

[preserving-tiktok]

[sunderwight]

everybody in the notes like:

[made-in-manetheren]

This is the single best video of a loon I've ever seen. Do you people realize how rare it is to see them that close? How rare it is to see them in that shallow of water? Incredible catch.

[st-just]

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

[booksandchainmail]

#you want to know a sentence that rewrote my brain:#most people have never been 20#more than half of humans ever born never made it to 20#which. is so crushingly sad to me i can't think about it for too long and also weirdly tempering when i'm angry at the state of the world#most people have never been 20! is it any wonder we're bad at being people sometimes! it's so new. we're young to it#anyway#i'm so stupidly grateful to live in the present and for modern medical technology (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

[zenosanalytic]

XKCD: Degree Off

Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.

[burninglights]

The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;

“Tuberculosis was.”

[crazy-pages]

“Smallpox was.”

Fuck. That hit me hard.

[duckbunny]

death and the stars

[hedwig-dordt]

I'm quite fond of the heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse

[dykepuffs]

One of my friends was a university lecturer who had worked in the lab where the final smallpox case escaped from a lab and killed Janet Parker, a medical photographer who worked in the room upstairs. He was a very funny man, always "on", but once a year when he taught the lecture about smallpox and about 'swiss cheese' risk management, he looked like a dead man walking.

[vaspider]

[galactic-rhea]

The Little Slave, The Little Queen, The big Villains, The Little Farmer, the Little Princess, and a Little Happy ending,,,

Happy Star Wars day!!!! and happy birthday to me...Veeery late on the day, but I had 6 hours of no electricity nkjs. Anyways, I'm happy i took my time with these <3

[Tip jar!] || [Commissions Open!]

[this-is-trans-joy]

everyone loves to hate terfs until they realise that it actually entails rejecting bioessentialism entirely and then suddenly you’re “taking things too seriously” and you “don’t have a sense of humour” like i’m sorry but saying protect the dolls doesn’t make you immune to terfism it has seeped into every corner of mainstream feminism and unless you’re actively searching it out and checking your own biases you will always be at risk of sharing a space with terfs

[this-is-trans-joy]

“Only women can—” nope. “But all men—” nah. “The divine femininity of—” gonna stop you right there. “Everyone born ama—” if you finish that sentence I’ll kill you. “Men don’t experience—” you’re wrong. “Gender isn’t real but sex is imm—” *loud incorrect buzzer*

It also goes without saying that bioessentialism inherently can’t be trans inclusive no matter how hard you try. “All men including trans men—” probably not. “This is only a woman’s issue—” is it really? “Afabs only—” why? “All trans men are like—” what? what are they like? finish the sentence i dare you.