not over go3 yet in case you were wondering. not even fucking close
ooo an intro
no dni list. you suck I blocky block
I go by Winter, Icarus, Ziva or Zebra. if you knew me for awhile you probably call me Z
he/they/xe/it preferred, but I use any pronouns other than she
timezone is pst
i don’t really know what to put here??
tiny art blog where I’m currently just posting crap I draw on flashcards at school: @just-an-artblog
fandoms—sfth, star trek (ds9, tos, tng, with my favoritism in that order), good omens, frev, knives out, arcane, malpractice md, the residence, epic, octonauts, the good place, the dragon prince, hamilton, goncharov, WoF
my favorite word is sonder, my least favorite word is brave
If anyone remembers the multiple months following Garashir becoming canon that the top of my intro was just me being unhealthily obsessed, no i have not recovered
I am the number. fucking. one Creepy Jim stan. is this because i am the singular Creepy Jim Stan? yes. but i would be even if others existed i love them so much I will defend him and their helium filled evilness with my life!!!!!!!!!!!!! (my second position is hardcore Amanda Wilson fan she’s literally me I love her so much)
death to ai banner by @ilium-ilia
aphobes stfu banner by @our-arospec-experience
blinking sfth banners by @farraday-yes
a little something I wrote inspired by this post below, if you’re feeling down <3
Do you hope?
Four letters, two syllables. Hope. So small a word, yet so big. How can something as small as hope carry so much?
I will keep going, because I have hope.
I will not give up, because I have hope.
I hope for a world that is kind.
I hope for a world where people are satisfied controlling their own lives and no one else’s.
I hope for a world where people don’t kill each other.
I hope for a world where people don’t die on the streets.
I hope for a world where everyone is free.
I hope for a world where everyone is free to learn, free to live, free to choose and free to be.
I hope for a world where living is a right, not a purchase.
I hope for a world where everyone has a home.
I hope for a world of peace.
I hope for a world where people don’t drive anything to extinction.
I hope for a world where the air we breathe is clean, the water we drink is clean, and the earth we live on is clean.
I hope for a world where food comes from farmer’s markets, where the word supermarket is antiquated.
I hope for a world where the only Amazon my generation’s grandchildren know is the rainforest.
I hope for a world that children don’t grow up afraid of.
I hope for a world where people aren’t afraid to exist.
I hope for a world where the horror of today is taught in history—because then it will have become history.
I hope for a world where the horror of today is a memory.
I get that sex and drugs are fun but even im like. at least have a 3rd thing. at least one more hobby. you can have a 3rd hobby. this isnt a purity thing this is a some of u are fucking boring thing.
This is what's so fucked up about "nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right".
The labor is already being done under capitalism. The laborers are already being underpaid under capitalism.
When you propose removing the greedy profiteers and paying the workers a reasonable wage, people call that "slavery" while they have no problem with the current system.
I have had a lot of evil people say to me that nothing taste as good as skinny feels and every time im like no im pretty sure food tastes really super good actually
The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
Also like do go ahead and ask an archaeologist/anthropologist. Ask them about the healed broken bones they've seen that is evidence of humans caring for one another since we became human. Ask them about the hearths they've found for humans to gather around, and the cookware they've seen crafted by human hands. Ask them about the small circle of bricks in front of hearths that confounded them until someone realized it was to keep chicken chicks in the house where children could play with them. Ask them about the tools of creation they've seen. Ask them about the musical instruments, and the artwork spanning back to when we lived in caves. Ask them about the children's footsteps, their play preserved in mud. Ask them about the clothing they've seen and the hands that stitched them or wove them.
Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.
Ask them why they put their hands on the earth searching for history and spend hours digging through archives and talking to other humans about the past. Archaeologists and Anthropologists are like the #1 people to love humans so much they want to know everything about all of the humans across history, and IMO the questions you ask them are a bigger reflection of the person asking them than anything else.
the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.
does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?
At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.
So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.
I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.
This is the updated version. It’s animated now.
But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.
And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.
For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.
And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.
And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.
While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.
So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.
Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?
This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”
It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.
Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.
It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.
So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.
Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.
It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.
Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.
It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.
Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.
Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.
See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.
It even works for games famously infested with fascists like 40k. Games Workshop coming out with a (really rather tepid) statement of support of BLM had Nazis losing their minds in the comments fucking immediately
I remember the meltdowns when the new Worls of Darkness books came out that this blurb is in. It's pretty easy to piss fascists off by just saying you don't want them there.
The Pathfinder Facebook group did something like this on purpose as a honeypot and immediately banned all the bigots coming out of the woodwork, and immediately eliminated more than HALF of all incidents requiring moderators. Not just about bigotry, everything.
And that is TACTICALLY USEFUL.
Because game companies spend so much money moderating chat spaces (both forums and in-game chats) and they lose so much business when dominant third party online spaces associated with their game turn toxic. Hell moderation is the big money sink for social media. Managing that cost is one of the most difficult aspects of the business.
Now imagine telling a game or social media executive that you can eliminate half of their harassment in a single honeypot operation. Imagine telling them that you have a technique which surgically targets a majority of their most toxic members and immediately gets rid of them. Because that's what this is.
You slap up a big pride or power banner and an announcement that this company stands with [insert group here], or stands against fascism, and you take names on everybody who has angry or quibbling shit to say about that. And then you ban them all. And just like that the moderation load you're dealing with gets so much lighter. Keep it up with a similar announcement whenever a topical opportunity presents itself and you clean out any new trash which walks in too.
And it just so happens that the way to do this is to clear out the bigots and make a safe space for oppressed groups.
There are so many of these companies which are worried that by taking a stand like this they will hurt their user base. There are so many forums online with volunteer moderators who reflexively don't want to wait into politics because they think that will increase their workload. Give them good solid practical examples of this reducing their workload instead, and you will get some of them onboard.
Because this has a real measurable impact with the right follow through, and the impact is a general reduction in all harassment of everyone. And that is worth capital M Money and capital T Time to some people.
i am a catastrophe in motion @justazebra - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
