Formerly @shieldposts. There's no theme, I just reblog whatever I like. If you need me to tag something, let me know. If I do something offensive or problematic, please message me and let me know.
big fan of the "best friends who tried dating and quickly realised they were NOT into eachother and perhaps not into that gender at all" character dynamic. friends who have kissed in the past and have no desire to kiss now but will use that information to embarass eachother. able to pull the ex card when needed. powerful.
See the thing about Stratt putting all media ever in the Hail Mary is that it isn’t just for lolz or to keep the crew entertained, it always struck me as something deeply sad.
Because even if all the crew survived, there was no way they could consume all possible media ever, language barriers alone would present a problem. And even then, they had a job to do and focus on first (which could have theoretically taken decades of work to figure out) so they wouldn’t have much use for The Great Gatsby or a week’s worth of poorly written amateur Guatemalan experimental opera. Let us remember that Stratt is practical and true utilitarian
Instead, I think it was another part of the Hail Mary. If the scientists failed, if the Earth died, then what? Everything would have been completely lost. Art, music, film, history. Destroyed. Without a single living soul to remember it by. It would be as if all of humanity had never existed.
But if it survived? If other alien civilizations discovered traces of humanity? Then the memory of mankind could live on and be remembered.
What better way to do that than to send everything (literally everything, the art, the music, the science, the history) out as far as humanly possible so that it might connect with someone else in the universe? It would be a long shot, a Hail Mary, but it was the best chance that humanity had to be remembered
crazy that in the 1970s they were like, "fine, women can play sports. but because they're innately less athletic than men, only in a special ghettoized League For The Frail And Delicate where they get paid less 😊". And not only is that still the system in 2023, but viciously lashing out at the smallest challenges to that system gets framed as Feminist Praxis
even setting aside the fact that gendered bodytype averages aren't universals, and plenty of individual (cis) women and (cis) men could easily go to toe to toe. have we considered that the fact that all the most prominent and well-paid sports are ones that require things like Being Tall and Having Muscle Mass, as opposed to, ex, gymnastics...is itself an artifact of sexism
Also consider the existence of sports where women would have an advantage, and yet, somehow, the most famous and well paid ones are not women.
I'm thinking of jockeys. Jockeys get an advantage from being smaller and lighter, and while obviously you need sufficient strength to stay on the horse, a well-trained horse does enough of the work that you don't need upper body strength to do the job. Given this and that the majority of children obsessed with horses are female, you'd think most jockeys would be women. Yet somehow they are not.
NASCAR at one point threatened to handicap Danica Patrick by putting extra weight in her car to compensate for the fact that she is smaller and lighter than other racecar drivers. If she gets an advantage as a driver, why is she like practically the only female racecar driver, or at least the only one anyone knows about?
Women, apparently, have an advantage in long distance swimming. Higher body fat percentage and higher endurance means that women can go greater distances in the water. Is long distance swimming even a competitive sport?
Women have actually been excluded from competitive Olympic skiing on the grounds that the jumps required could damage their uterus. The people who actually have unsupported reproductive organs hanging outside their body are considered to have better support than the people whose reproductive organs are nestled in alongside unisex organs like the small intestine and stomach. How does this make any goddamn sense at all? If a uterus could dislodge from the force of a skiing jump, so could intestines and the sport wouldn't be safe for anyone.
Theoretically, any sport where you get an advantage from low center of gravity, better balance, higher flexibility, or being closer to the ground, women should have an advantage. This should include soccer (football in non-US places), and might include hockey if the hockey players hadn't introduced unnecessary viciousness to the sport.
So in any sport where women would excel over men, they're either excluded, unfairly penalized, the sport doesn't exist, or the sport is considered unimportant and no one makes money on it. Hmm. I am thinking the problems here are not actually what the TERFs and transphobes make them out to be.
While I agree with certain aspects of the basic premise, a few portions of this conversation struck me because they're factually wrong, ahistorical, don't take things like "money" into account, or are simply written without any nuance or consideration for the differences between sports.
Sports like soccer, football, basketball, and swimming are more prominent than sports like gymnastics because they're easy to teach and have a low financial barrier to entry. Sports like gymnastics, ice skating, etc. are either prohibitively expensive for many people, require specialized equipment or geography, or simply aren't feasible to implement at scale. Advertising and compensation issues are absolutely impacted by sexism, but the prominence of any given sport has very little to do with its popularity among a particular sex and more to do with practical implementation issues and/or how interesting it is to a given population as a spectator sport.
The rest of this is probably best put under a cut, because it includes me gushing about Katie Ledecky, a lot of nuanced discussion/statistics about equestrian sports and swimming (swimming is sex-segregated, equestrian sports have been fully integrated for decades, and I've participated in both at a competition level and thus have a bit of a unique perspective), and talk about how sex integration and trans-inclusivity in competitive sports is ultimately a nuanced topic that neither side really wants to address properly:
Horse racing is a bit of a unique situation where sexism WAS the principal reason why there weren't more women in the sport but now no longer explains the problem. Until 1968, horse-racing commissions simply denied racing licenses to women who applied. The first female licensed jockey was U.S. Olympic equestrian Kathy Kusner, in 1968, who only won her license after suing the Maryland Racing Commission for denying her based on her gender; racing has been integrated ever since. Jockeying is a situation where "the 1970s" actually completely solved the issue legally, since the racing world has been fully co-ed for decades. Yet despite that reality, ~90% of jockeys continue to be cis men because the problem now is a much more complex interplay of societal and healthcare-related issues combined with lingering sexism and the way jockeys are recruited. Obviously, if 90% of jockeys are men, statistically the most famous and highest-paid jockeys are also going to be men.
Speaking of equestrian sports, you know what equestrian sports are female-dominated? The ones you see at the Olympics! In 2019, two-thirds of the ~30,000 athletes in the International Equestrian Federation (FEI) database of competitors in the Olympics disciplines of dressage, eventing, and jumping were women, with 83.10% in dressage, 73.18% in eventing, and 61.31% in jumping. Most medal winners and record-holders in those disciplines are also women. I would also like to point out that only women are allowed to ride for NCAA teams and receive athletic scholarships unless they are riding for a school that participates in certain IHSA competitions. As a result, the U.S. collegiate jumping and eventing circuits are dominated by women (largely from East Coast womens' and historically womens' college teams like Hollins, Sweet Briar, and Mount Holyoke).
So if you're only looking at racing when you question the gender imbalance in equestrian sports, you're not getting the full picture. Equestrian sports (in the West, at least) have been fully integrated for decades; the Olympic teams even integrated two decades before racing did, in the early 1950s. The reality is not that equestrian sports are unnecessarily sex-segregated or that female equestrians are absent: it's that they are participating in different types of equestrian sports than their male counterparts. This is obviously happening for a variety of reasons, including sexism and financial issues, but from a sex-segregation and trans-inclusivity perspective equestrian sports are, generally, not actually a problem.
Meanwhile, long-distance swimming is a sport (in regular competition, as a singular event, and as part of the triathalon sequence), and it's a pretty big one too! In fact, one of the most famous swimmers in the world right now, Katie Ledecky, is a distance swimmer. She's famous for swimming the 800m free and the mile and remains the world record holder in both events after several years. FiveThirtyEight did a great write-up of Ledecky's dominance in long-distance swimming back during the Tokyo Olympics; I highly encourage everyone to read it.
Ledecky's fame is actually the reason the women's mile was finally added into the Olympic swimming races; everyone loved watching her blow everyone else out of the water by 10+ seconds, so the Olympics committee finally added it. But while the mile unfortunately wasn't considered an Olympics-level event for women until Tokyo in 2020, and that was due to sexism, it's been a regular event in every other level of swimming competition (U.S.-based and worldwide) for years (ask me how I know; it's because I got forced to swim it at a meet once so my team could get the completion points).
Marathon swimming and open-water swimming are also established sports; open-water swimming is a popular (if niche) sport worldwide and swimming a mile in open water is part of the Olympics' triathalon race. Marathon swimming was introduced into the Olympics for both genders starting in 2008. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, Ana Marcela Cunha won with a time of 1:59:30.8 in the women's race, becoming the first Brazilian woman swimmer to win a gold medal in the Olympics, and Florian Wellbrock won the gold medal for Germany in the mens' race with a final time of 1:48:33.7.
I have a lot of complicated feelings about sex integration in swimming specifically because the gender performance imbalance at the competition level, and especially the Olympic level, is so obviously prominent (look at those marathon times; the 1st place man finished more than 11 minutes before the 1st place woman!) in a sport where most of the faster events are decided by hundredths of a second and people train for years to drop a second from their personal bests.
I was just gushing about Katie Ledecky up there, right? Her world record mile time (15:20.48) wouldn't even qualify her to go to the Olympics in the first place if she was competing against the men. The Olympic Qualifying Time for the men's race was 15:00.99. Katie would have to shave an additional 20 seconds off her world record-setting personal best to even qualify for the men's event. And 20 seconds difference for a mile-long race doesn't sound like a lot to non-swimmers, but that's....an astronomical difference. A ridiculous difference. If you want a visual example of what that 20 seconds looks like in the pool, check out Ledecky beating the second-place finisher of the 800 free by 22 seconds; that woman is completely out of the frame when Katie touches the wall.
And I desperately wish we could have a nuanced conversation about the participation of trans people in competitive sports and what sex integration in those sports might actually practically look like in terms of competition, one that is inclusive of athletes from a variety of sports, without immediately dismissing it as an impossibility OR saying people are just sexist and/or transphobes for pointing out the very real problems that would exist if we did so.
So many conversations on the subject are just "trans people (usually women, because trans men almost never come up) shouldn't get to compete because they'll have an unfair advantage!" or "trans people have no advantage in any sport, all sports should be co-ed" without any understanding of the complexities and nuances underlying the realities of many competitive sports.
Because yes: there are some sports where sex and gender absolutely don't matter and any sex segregation that exists is completely arbitrary and largely based around sexist exclusion. Archery. Shooting. Skiing. Volleyball. Probably baseball/softball. Both sex integration and trans-inclusivity in those sports should be considered a complete non-issue and done as soon as possible. Some sports (like equestrian-based sports, as previously discussed) have already been integrated for decades and there's clearly no problem there.
And then there are some sports where sex segreation is a useful tool to keep players safe and the competition field fair, but a serious conversation needs to be had about whether it's actually the best way to divide competition up moving forward. I'm thinking of sports like wrestling, boxing, fencing, hockey, gymnastics, and tennis here, where other division considerations (weight class, height, game/match time length, introducing different events, etc) might be more helpful ways to level the playing field rather than sex-segregated competition.
But there are some sports where the physiological differences of biological sex do have a notable and undeniable impact on both ability and performance (track & field, swimming, bike racing, triathalon, etc), and it helps literally no one to pretend differently. And listening to athletes in those sports is vital to understanding why those differences matter and why cis female athletes feel the competition becomes unfair when they compete against trans women and/or cis men.
There's a lot of space to be trans-inclusive in competitive sports that goes undiscussed. But likewise a genuine, thoughtful conversation needs to be had on why certain sports may inherently need to be sex-segregated in order for a level playing field to exist, and how trans-inclusion in those sports is undeniably complicated and potentially impossible. The difficulty of figuring out how to balance social justice with competitive fairness doesn't mean we shouldn't have those conversations; it actually makes them more important to have than ever. But this isn't a problem that can be solved by a blanket ban, total sex integration across all sports, unfair testosterone level testing, or social shaming people into compliance, and I think people need to realize that.
Okay but people have physical advantages all the time and don't get prohibited from playing sports. Like I'm a short person and yet I have never demanded that tall people be segregated in basketball.
No, but we do tend to separate athletes into separate categories to make the playing field level for both them and everyone else, and sex-segregation is a valid, understandable way of doing so for some sports.
Note that we don't bar physically disabled athletes from participating in competitive sports but we also have a separate competition stream for them, culminating in the Paralympics. They're clearly not barred from playing sports, and there have been several physically disabled athletes that have successfully competed side-by-side with abled athletes. But they are, generally, separated into a category that makes the playing field fairer for them for the purposes of competition. Are you also arguing that we should get rid of the Paralympics and make those athletes compete against fully physically abled Olympians? Would that result in competitively fair and equitable outcomes?
When we encounter consistent physical differences that hold true across a sport and would have a direct impact on the representation of a major part of the world's population in that sport, we look at ways to deal with that imbalance. In some cases, that means changing how the sport recruits and trains athletes. In others, that looks like changing how the sport works entirely, like changing the scoring system or events athletes participate in to make the playing field more level. But in some cases...sex is the major consistent dividing line in performance ability, and it's not a bad thing to recognize that and separate the sport's categories accordingly.
That doesn't mean that physical differences within a sex aren't considered and accounted for during training or competition. But even the fact that there's a handful of individual atheletes in any given sport who have a certain mutation or obvious physical advantage over other competitors placed in the same category doesn't erase the reality that as a categorical distinction, biological sex (specifically, post-puberty) remains the biggest, most consistent, and most logical distinction between and indicator of performance ability in some sports...as I noted in my initial response when I compared Katie Ledecky's world record times to the men's qualifying times in the same race.
Maybe we should talk about whether integrating basketball is a good idea. While height, stamina, and endurance are all factors that impact performance, it's also ultimately a skill-based sport, which we know have smaller differences in sex-based performance outcomes. I don't know the answer to that question; I don't play basketball, which is why we should be listening to basketball players and coaches on that matter and not a swimmer and horseback rider like me. I can only speak to the sports I've participated in, and that experience has led me to the conclusion that sex-segregation is wholly unnecessary in some sports and vital in others to ensure a collective level playing field in the sport as a whole.
Wait I can't believe I haven't talked about my holiday bits on here before. So I work in grocery and I always work holidays and big events that mean we get a ton of tourists in our town and a ton of customers non stop all day. When you work retail on holidays you end up having the same conversations over and over again, so this year I made it a point to choose a bit or a lie for each holiday to keep up for my entire shift that serves solely to mess with customers without them realizing what I'm doing, and ensure I have fun and make myself laugh. Here are the 2026 holiday bits so far:
Memorial day: I pretended I didn't know what it was, and I wanted to see how many customers would correct me if I kept referring to it as "America's birthday". Some people wanted to kill me with hammers for this I wont lie
Easter: I pretended to be catholic and would tell people at the register while making small talk that I gave up lying for lent and couldn't lie again until the new year because it's something I've been meaning to work on (not how lent works) (not catholic) (actively lying about lying)
Valentine's day: I invented a fake boyfriend at the beginning of my shift and wanted to see how developed of a character I could create by the time my shift ended with the rule that I could only add to his lore by telling customers things about him out loud (I have a boyfriend named Jake who surfs and is a photography major at UC Santa Barbara who I was going to celebrate Valentine's day with the following weekend because he's on a camping trip in Big Sur with his surf buddies and I also managed to sneak in that hes lived in 2 houses that burned down and that's where his passion for photography comes from, he wants to preserve his memories)
New years: I decided to tell every customer a different new years resolution but I could only make them up on the spot and couldn't say the same thing twice
Superbowl Sunday: every time someone asked me what team I was rooting for, I would confidently and excitedly say any team I could think of except for the two in the actual Superbowl and whenever someone told me that they weren't in the Superbowl I would look super crushed and disappointed
I'm sure that's true, but something tells me googling "nun tied up by other nuns" "hot wax" "confessing sins" will likely get what you might call rather un-academic results
So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
I’m a costume designer and there are live bears outside the theaters on a regular basis. We have received multiple warnings. They have already gotten in to some other buildings.
