Nerathul's lair

She/Her. Mostly lurking, I write stuff too! Born in 92' (do the math) Find my stories at: www.wattpad.com/user/Nerathul

[man-peach-reborn]

oots text posts part? 7 now?? damn

Part 1/2/3/4/5/6

[lostinhistory]

[fouroclockwren]

YES OMG BRÜNNHILDE

[official-library-posts]

official library post

[no-one-offical]

‎

[whatbigotspost]

Today I learned that the murderous US christo fascist white nationalist government has decided that not only should it be illegal for trans people to access the hormones they need… They are now attempting to force testosterone on cis men in the military

[whatbigotspost]

Sorry suckers...hormones are only for really dudey dudes who put their whole backs into the killing efforts.

[whatbigotspost]

I remember back when the news only used to horrify me with something uniquely newly terrible like… weekly? It’s a couple times a day now. Yay.

[mariacallous]

[what-even-is-thiss]

The American mindset, that being distantly related to a farmhand who left in 18-something, somehow means you have meaningful claims to a country's citizenship is unironically insane.

That’s literally how German citizenship works currently lol

[what-even-is-thiss]

If my direct ancestors had registered at a German consulate when they came to the US I would already be going through the process of getting German citizenship. The only reason I’m not is that they were poor and didn’t have time for it.

Poverty cuts off one’s ties to the old country and makes people say you have no claim to it. Interesting, that.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You know until relatively recently German citizenship only followed the father? Meaning someone born outside of Germany to a German mother and non German father had no right to citizenship.

These rules are made up. They’re stupid rules. Citizenship requirements for residence somewhere are stupid. I’m not allowed to live in a place that I have cultural ties to and have family living there. Is that not stupid? Like what’s your requirements for who deserves to live in a place?

[onetruelurker]

My partner’s dad is exploring Italian citizenship and interestingly enough his grandfather had to renounce his Italian citizenship when he was naturalized an American - but his grandmother didn’t have to because she was a woman. If your ancestor renounced citizenship you can’t claim descent but if they didn’t you can. So currently the family’s citizenship case rests on a sexist legal loophole from the early 1900s.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Ah, citizenship law. I hate it so much.

[nerathul]

I wonder if that 'Only men' rule had something to do with conscription, since only men could be conscripted, what if they had two citizenship from opposing countries? But just a wild guess.

[cyberpunkpavlichenko]

The moral of Death Note is that cops raise evil children

[omamervt]

I wish I was better about paying attention to channel names because I did watch a video a while back and this was basically the whole video summed up. Like, everyone knows Light was an arrogant fool who sewed the seeds of his own destruction but his solution to the societal problems he lamented about in the first chapter was literally something only the juvenile son of a cop could have come up with.

To Light, Crime was the source of society's "Rot." And his philosophy on what constituted "crime" was basically about normal-ass people who were willing to break the law. you know, the laws Cops enforce.

It also explains why he's indiscriminate rather than surgical. Because of his own biases, he never stops to consider the flaws in the methods of who gets arrested, or how that never actually seems to have an impact on Crime Rates tm. Cops (like Light) simply see this as evidence that they're not arresting enough people! That they're not going far enough! And these are the values our protagonist was raised with. A surgical strike would let Real Criminals off the hook, while targeting people who, yes, may be more evil by orders of magnitude, but they do it in a LEGAL way!

I don't think the story ever consciously addresses this. The Watsonian explanation for that would be that we don't really get to see exactly WHAT values Light's dad instills in his children - he's a major character, but Light spends far more time putting him on a pedestal than actually engaging with him. A couple Doylist explanations might be either that Ohba didn't condone Light's actions, and considered an outside exploration of his motivations to be either uninteresting to explore, or perhaps too much of a challenge to pull off in a story that so heavily revolves around the protagonist's inner monologue. I think it's far more likely, though, that this wasn't intentional - Light's dad was a cop so that he could be on the Kira taskforce and we could get the drama of Light being hunted by his own father, and the blind spots that created for both characters. Knowing the story, and how these characters are used, I find it hard to believe there were intentional ramifications beyond that. But that doesn't change the fact that they're there, and more than anything it serves as an explanation for why Light was the way he was.

[vexwerewolf]

Corollary: the Netflix adaptation that moved the action to America could've been so fucking good but they were too cowardly to write an actual exploration of how Light is basically a school shooter

[nerathul]

Also the japanese criminal justice system is incredibly stupid and bullshit, operating on a kangaroo court basis. Cops are so obsessed with keeping their statistics looking good they are well known to ignore crimes they can't easily finger someone as guilty and intimidate victims and witnesses into silence if they can't.

[noelle-ism]

I will not call myself or other people "gooners" or "npcs" or "larpers". i will not call things i dont like "slop". i will not use terms like "-oids". i dont like how common language is slowly becoming more focused on shorthand terms for hate and apathy

[skylarrikin]

Tags from @crystaltoa

[jakeperalta]

not using AI genuinely feels like the rest of the world is experiencing some kind of mass amnesia. if someone says they never use it, the immediate response is that can't be true because "everyone" uses it to write their emails or answer their questions. saw a comment suggesting that not using chatgpt to write an essay is "like the 90s". girl I graduated in 2021 and we weren't doing that! how is it that everyone has suddenly forgotten that they were entirely capable of doing these things all by themselves for their entire lives up until the past few years!! am I going crazy!!!

[nedlittle]

yankees will see 16 million canadians harmed by ongoing wildfires and act like we set them on purpose. meanwhile six first nations communities are under emergency evacuation protocol, one has been completely destroyed, and the entire province (1.5x the size of texas in freedom units) has the netflix mexico piss filter over it. but sure, it sucks that you can't sit by the pool!

if you'd like to donate to namaygoosisagagun first nation, who only had minutes to evacuate via boat before their community was burnt to the ground, you can do so HERE

[nerathul]

The level of self-centeredness it takes to think that Canadians are doing this seemingly on purpose to mildly inconveinience their summer holiday sure is something.

"Explain to me why has Canada been on fire for three years," well you see there's this thing called climate change...

[twoblogger-deactivated20260714]

Shout out to this tiny yet crucial error on an otherwise actually very informative post about myths about tax returns and the IRS

[daughter-of-sapph0]

oh boy! something in my mailbox from the IRA? I wonder what it could be!

[fraught-with-peril]

I don’t know where the idea that drivers hating uber eats customers = drivers hating disabled and poor people comes from.

I don’t know why y’all think the drivers are wealthy and privileged or that we “own the means of production” (you don’t own a car w/ a payment left on it and we do NOT own the app)

Especially when WE’RE mostly disabled people, immigrants, and trans people w/ no other options. We’re not being paid enough to eat. We’re not being paid enough to cover rent anywhere. We’re often not even paid enough to cover gas.

You should feel bad if you use gig economy food delivery apps even if you actually do NEED to use them, anyway. You should be siding with the drivers to advocate for better pay (else the abolition of the apps.) You need to be aware of what you are participating in even if you have no other choice, especially when the same is true of us. We don’t have a choice, either, so why do your needs negate ours? We’re both disabled, you asshole!

Every night I deliver junk food to massive houses with 6 or more bedrooms in the richest suburbs in the state for hours on end. It is destroying my body and making my condition worse. If things do not change I will eventually die from this. You argue that this is what’s necessary to keep you alive and you feel no shame or disgust?

I am frequently not paid enough to cover the cost of gas because most (if not all) of them do not tip. I am exposed to ostentatious wealth over and over in a long, empty, agonizing, isolating string of trips for which I was paid a mere $1.50 each regardless of how long the drives took. I am sexually harassed inside the restaurants while I am waiting for the food. I am followed to my car by men. I am yelled at by men. I am threatened with a knife at a McDonald’s for rejecting one of their advances.

Gas is $4.40 today. Base pay is $1.50. Every trip is at least 20 miles. I can’t buy a car with better mileage because I’m not being paid. Every trip costs over $3 to complete. After the trip, a $10 tip is reduced to $2, a common tactic used to get the food faster because we reject trips that wouldn’t pay enough to cover the cost of gas. We are not stupid. We do not take these orders willfully.

I just paid a dollar to drive for nearly an hour to bring a rich person a single taco.

tell me again what’s ableist about my disabled ass hating the motherfucker who did that to me?

[nerathul]

And for anyone who thinks that without UberEats or similar service some people wouldn't be able to get food; restaurants used to have drivers either their own or contract to a company they'd ring up when there was an order.

These drivers had proper hourly wages as employees, they weren't exploited under independent contractor loopholes.

All that UberEats has done is shift the cost away from companies and toward the people they have performing the deliveries.

[annsfics]

i'm lowkey very excited to see you mention twilight because whenever i've seen people mention charlie in your asks i've always immediately thought about charlie swan lmao

LOL. Growing up meant switching from Team Edward or Jacob to Team DILF

[nerathul]

Honestly we need stories about the YA protagonists middle-aged parents realizing just what the fuck their kids got into all the while lying to them about it.

[mylittleredgirl]

I keep trying to like red wine like a grown-up but like … it’s rotten grapes, guys. You can drink things that don’t taste like rotten grapes. Why

[mycaptainsharon-deactivated2017]

Okay I don’t know when this post is from (I came across it stalking multiple blogs). But in case this might help, here is a brief science/wine lesson.

To start off, some facts:

-White wine is made from sweet pulp inside of the grape (minus the seeds).

-Red wine is made from both the skin and the grape (and the seeds and stems…sometimes? Can’t remember).

-Tannin is the substance found in red wines, coffee, dark chocolate. Tannins are responsible for the bitter taste in those foods.

-Tannins are found in the skin of the grape, as well as the seeds and the stems. Therefore, most red wines will have tannins, versus most whites will not have tannins.

-Red wines vary in level of tannins, depending on variety of grape, climate, and fermentation process. Pinot noir tends to be very low tannin. Shiraz/Syrah, choice of poison for our beloved brunette surgeon, is very heavy on the tannins.

-Some white wines (most commonly Chardonnay) are aged in oak barrels instead of metal containers. Oak barrels have tannins, which seeps into the wine during the fermentation process. That’s why Chardonnays tend to be “drier” aka it has tannins.

-White wines like Sauvingnon Blancs are usually fermented in steel barrels (aka no tannins. Aka usually very fruity and light and sweet).

Your ability to taste tannins is genetic.

There is a genetic marker determining whether your taste cells are sensitive to tannins.

Basically two people can drink the exact same wine and have wildly different reactions because: 1. Person A can’t taste tannins, so they taste the actual wine flavor. 2. Person B can taste tannins, and that tends to overpower ALL the other flavors in the wine. Basically all they taste is tannins and none of the wine.

I am super tannin sensitive, so if I drink a wine like Cabernet Sauvignon (very tannin heavy, aka “very dry”, it tastes like bitter ethanol alcohol to me, whereas my best friend can’t taste tannins so the same wine is maybe a little bitter but they can actually taste the grape and different flavors. To her, a wine like Sauv Blanc is too sweet, tastes like sugar water. But to me it tastes good.

So unless it’s the taste of the alcohol or all wines you hate, chances are you might hate the taste of red wine, especially the heavier red wines, because taste the tannin overpowers everything else. And all you taste is bitter bitter ethanol bitter more ethanol. 

More tannin info: -Tannins bind to fat.

-This is why tannin heavy wines are recommended with fatty foods (Shiraz and steak). Whenever you eat food with high fat content, the fat builds up on your tongue. A sip of red wine will bind with the fat on your tongue and clear it away. That’s why the sip of wine between bites of fat heavy foods is considered a palate cleanser.

-By that logic, this is why white wines are recommended with low fat foods, like fish. Salmon is fattier than most fish, which is why Chardonnay (tannin heavy white wine) or Pinot Noir (low tannin red wine) is recommended with salmon.

-People who are sensitive to tannins can drink tannin heavy red wines with fatty food and generally the wine won’t taste gross. The fat on your tongue (from that steak) will bind with the tannin and neutralize the tannin taste. Aka the only time I ever drink Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz is with a steak or heavy, creamy pasta. Aka never bc I don’t often eat either.

-The reason dairy helps coffee taste better is because the fat in milk/creams binds with the tannins in coffee and neutralizes the bitter taste. This is why people who can’t taste tannins can generally drink coffee black without milk (sugar is a different story). It’s also why almond milk in coffee is the worst idea (almond milk is already bitter and has no fat).

More wine facts: -90% of the “aromas” of wine are marketing BS

-You know the labels that say like “cherry with a hint of blackberry?” There’s no real way to infuse cherry or blackberry into grape wine without screwing with the fermentation process. It’s all created by the wine marketing industry to sell you win. Sometimes if you smell cherry before you drink the wine, you might taste it in the wine (because majority of flavor comes from smell). Or if you think there is cherry flavor in the wine, your brain can trick your taste buds into tasting it.

-The only true flavors found in real grape wine are grapes (obviously), oak/earthy flavor (the barrels), vanilla (barrels, oak sticks), tannins. (There are a few others but can’t remember. I think maybe cinnamon?).

-People’s perception of wine often affect how good it tastes to them. Social psychology studies show that people will rate the exact same wine differently if they’re told the wines are different in price. (They rated the more expensive wine as tastier).

tl;dr Whether you can taste tannins is genetic. Exact same wines taste different for different people depending on your genetic makeup. If you’re sensitive to tannins, red wines won’t taste like anything other than bitter alcohol. Genetics/tannins are why people generally have preferences for red or whites.

[mylittleredgirl]

this is extremely informative and i have learned a thing about myself, which is that i CLEARLY inherited the tannin-tasting genes from my teatotaling mother and not from my dad who subsists entirely on espresso and cabernet sauvignon.

[themummersfolly]

I suddenly understand why my goddad can drink black coffee and those wretched tasting dry wines and think they taste good.

[paradoxspaceheater]

dry ≠ tannic!!

dry means a wine (or other alcohol like cider or mead) has little to no sugar in it. dry wines can be bitter or sour or fruity depending on the type, they just aren’t sweet. and very tannic red wines can be sweet, in which case by definition they are not dry, even if they are also very bitter.

[stupidjewishwhiteboy]

I don’t think my issue is with tannins, I think my issue is with how all alcoholic beverages taste like alcohol and alcohol tastes like battery acid

[allosaurusfragilis]

This probably isn't going to change people's minds, but sometimes it is easier to evoke sympathy for dogs than it is to evoke sympathy for trans folks.

Giving money to J.K.Rowling is the same as giving money to eradicate transgender people. I'm sorry, but it's true. Equivocate all you like, but it's as true as the day is long.

[mapswithoutwyoming]

Starting to think all the backlash to the idea of the trolley problem is just people trying to hide the fact that, deep down, they know they would be too scared to pull the lever.

[astra-the-dragon]

I suppose one of the advantages I've gained from having been in the military is that I went from a suspicion I would have the conviction to make those kinds of calls, an absolute certainty that I do have it. I've held lives in my hands, but thankfully I rose to my training and my convictions. I chose the best of the options I had available to me at the time.

There is nothing shameful about being too afraid of making the decision, in my view. But yeah, it's cowardice to project your anxiety by claiming the philosophical quandary itself is meaningless.

[zaprowsdower27]

No reason to wonder. A ton of people openly bragged about how morally pure they were for not pulling the lever in 2024. They just hate it when you contextualize it like that and insist they were taking a third option to sound less terrible when their actions are 1:1 compared to the thought experiment.

[nitpickspot]

If anything, the reason I reject it is because I consider the thought experiment ITSELF to be cowardly.

All human lives are worth the same amount, and any LOSS of human life is as large a tragedy as any other amount of lost human life. You aren't doing a GOOD thing by condemning one person to die to save four more, you're not even doing a BETTER thing. It might be the more valuable thing in a coldly utilitarian point of view, but from my moral stance death is death. You don't get to compare and contrast your way out of that.

[dappercat123]

You’d be too scared to pull the lever huh?

[nerathul]

Five people might die but at least you get to walk off feeling morally unblemished!

[thememedaddy]

[lordadmiralfarsight]

Hello, Tumblrites of all stripes, it is I, the Economy Side of Tumblr. Now that Orban’s defeat has restored some of my reserve of mental spoons, I can make a post about one aspect of the Iranian crisis. Just one though. I don’t think I can stomach doing more right now. So then, what shall I speak of this day ? Naval transit and straits. Yep, we’re going for the high engagement, high octane, passion-ablazing topics today. But actually … it’s very much a subject, and one worth looking at.

First off, a map :

It is indeed a map. With plenty of purple and turquoise strings on it. Very pretty, slightly psychedelic, and for the artistically inclined, maybe reminiscent of a black light painting. So, what is and what do ?

Well, this is a map of maritime trafic. Where there’s a line, there’s a ship. Or was. Ships have this tendency to move, it’s apparently very common among vehicles. The lighter the string, the more ships go there. So you have plenty of purple lines that are, yes, not very commonly used. And then you have the turquoise lines that are very very used.

OK, so what’s the link to the Iran crisis ? I’ll give it to you straight : the straits. No, I’m not talking about the sexual orientation, I know we’re on tumblr, but last I heard, geological formations do not have sexual orientations. Or if they do have one, they aren’t telling. Besides, how do you even confuse straight and strait when it’s in writing ?

As you may have heard or, if you don’t look at the news, as you may be learning now, the Strait of Hormuz is closed right now. There was a small period of almost opening, but it is now closed again and the US apparently want to blockade it. While the Iranians also blockade it. Iran and the US are having a kind of blockade off. And that’s actually bery fucked and stress inducing, to be quite honest with you, dear tumblrites.

Moving on closer to our topic, one of the points the Iranians insist on in order to reopen the strait is a toll. Related professions have taken to jokingly call the Strait the Ayatollbooth, but make no mistake, they hate everything about it. And hopefully, by the time you’re finished with this, you too will understand why everything about it is hateable.

Now, I know there are people here that think that would be amazing and great and fantastic, because it would give Iran money to improve life and hel – no actually, I’m not going to humour that idea any further. If you think the Islamic Republic of Iran would spend that money on their own people instead of using it to prop up terror proxies you are being willfully naive and obtuse. I’d like to remind you that they prioritized funding Hezbollah (AKA fuck what all the other Lebanese want, I wanna bomb Israel) or the Houthis (AKA sexual and chattel slavery, at all time of year, at all time of day, localized entirely in the north of Yemen), over making sure Tehran had goddamn tap water.

Now that that is established, let’s look back at the map. What do you notice ? Yes, indeed, there are quite a few straits on the map, good observation. Yes, another good answer, many of those straits are covered in turquoise ship trails, so there’s a lot of trafic, very good. Now, can anyone in class guess why I’m bringing it up in relation to the Hormuz toll idea ? Yes, yes, very good, international law is very much vulnerable to precedent-setting events, indeed, man you guys are good today.

So yes, if Iran does get to install a toll on Hormuz … what about the other straits ? If there’s a toll on one strait, why not on the others ? How large does the strait have to be ? How long ? What are the conditions ? How is the price of passage fixed ?

For canals, like Panama or Suez, they’re on national land, an artificial waterway that requires maintenance and reduces the available territory of a nation, so a toll makes sense, but straits ? Those are sea-ways, there was no land lost. And freedom of navigation has been a thing for … well … a fuck ass long time. If we start putting tolls on straits, that’s a knife to the ribs of freedom of navigation, and the implications are … urgh

Let’s clarify : if a precedent is established that allows a state to demand payment for the use of a natural waterway, what’s stopping Spain and Morrocco from demanding payment for going through Gibraltar ? What’s stopping Japan to demand payment for going through the Tsugaru strait ? Or Indonesia and Malaysia for the strait of Malacca ? France and the UK for the Channel ?

What do you think the effect of that shitshow would be on the worldwide economy ? How horribly would prices increase ? And on damn near everything. Inflation would ravage all economies.

"« "A small price to pay to fight capitalis..." - PEOPLE WOULD DIE. MANY people would die. This kind of nonsense would impose tremendous inflation and impoverish everyone, but especially those states with less favourable exchange rates, AKA most of Africa, parts of Asia and parts of South America. And with the increase in poverty, that means a lowered ability to have consistent access to food, which itself would be compounded by the reduction in harvest yields due to lower accessibility of fertilizers. If you thought the fertilizer crisis that’s coming from Hormuz being closed is bad, I am sorry to inform you it would be preferable to the costs if all straits got tolls.

The world economy is a complex and complicated balancing act, and freedom of navigation is one of its main points of support. If that falls, the world economy gets destabilized, and people will die. Add to it that then, some self-declared genius would propose to put tolls on peninsulas as capes, at which point someone would have to pick up a shotgun and exercise their right to self defence to put the idea to rest.

So, yeah, that’s why the Ayatollbooth is a horrible idea and needs to die immediately. I will never forgive Trump and Netanyahu for putting Iran in a position where they can start making that kind of demand, and I’ll never forgive the ayatollahs and the IRGC for making that demand.

[lordadmiralfarsight]

Oh look, Trump said something else about Hormuz, let's see ...

... 20% toll on all cargo shipped.

20%

WILL YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT GIVE IT A GODDAMN REST ALREADY ?