Certified Dino Nerd

Asexuality, dinosaurs, and whatever video game I'm hyperfixated on at the moment. Plus some other stuff. In other words, no theme, only chaos. She/Her, grown adult.

[tobiasdrake]

People hate on the ending of Mass Effect 3 for a variety of reasons. For me, it's the way they, like.

They know. The developers know that the Destroy ending is the obvious correct answer. The kneejerk reflex after all this fighting is to want them destroyed.

That's why they arbitrarily hold a gun to EDI and the Geth's heads over and go, "You better not. You BETTER FUCKING NOT. I'll shoot. I SWEAR I'LL DO IT."

Which completely ruins any philosophical nuance that deciding the Reapers' fate might have. "Should we seek symbiosis with them, take control of them, or kill them and also murder a bunch of other unrelated people in cold blood too why not?"

They knew the choices they were offering weren't very compelling. So they put a hand on the scale.

Because the thing is? Destroy is the kneejerk, of course. But after much consideration? Objectively, Destroy is the right answer for the Reapers. Or would be if they didn't have that gun. The very existence of the Control ending proves that.

The problem with Control as an option is that it eliminates the Reapers' capacity for agency. The ME3 ending states in no uncertain terms that the Reapers are slaves to program. They obey the Catalyst unthinkingly. They destroy societies in an endless cycle because that is what the Catalyst believes is best, based on his own ideas.

He, the Catalyst, is a self-aware AI.

But the Reapers are not. They just obey the Catalyst. For all their bluster in ME1 and 2, for all Sovereign and Harbinger like to talk big, they're all just word-processing. The Catalyst is the only thinking machine among them.

And the proof of that is that if Shepard replaces the Catalyst and sends them contradictory orders, the Reapers all universally obey the new protocol without question. They're in the midst of destroying worlds when the program "Do not destroy these races," comes through. And so they all drop what they're doing and leave without an ounce of hesitation or consideration.

Because they're just obedient machines.

And if that is true? If they're not intelligent, free-thinking artificial life like the Geth or EDI?

Then what value is their existence? They're just complicated warships built for genocide. That is the totality of their being.

And if that is true? Then why would we "seek coexistence" with brainless killing machines? Why would we want to control them, to arm a god-emperor with an armada of planet-killing super-weapons to keep the galaxy in line?

If Reapers obey the Catalyst unquestioningly, if they will obey Shepard unquestioningly, if they are just unthinking and unquestioning machines....

Then obviously we should just destroy them. That is the conclusion that the Catalyst and his choices inevitably brings us back to. If they're just the Catalyst's weapons of slaughter and nothing more, then those weapons of slaughter should not exist. They should all be destroyed and their destruction celebrated in the same way we would celebrate all the world nations disarming their nuclear arsenals.

But the game says no. If you destroy the Reapers, you destroy EDI and the Geth. Because it thinks they're the same, even as it introduces this plot point that completely upends any claim the Reapers have to being intelligent.

In the end, the final choice of ME3 is flawed at a point of basic principles. I reject the notion that it's founded on, that what you choose to do with the Reapers is a reflection of your beliefs towards EDI and the Geth, and their right to coexist with organic lifeforms.

Because they're alive.

And the Reapers are not.

The ending itself told me that.

[anna-antoshchenkova]

XIII - Death

[beardedmrbean]

how to commit to the bit properly

[foxes-in-love]

[homunculus-argument]

How long do y'all think it took for people to forget mammoths? One generation, two, three? They got rarer and rarer, until the clan felled the last one that they would ever kill, and the hunters who were there would, for the rest of their lives, keep telling the story of how they once slayed the most elusive grand beast, that was only seen once a generation. And the youths would listen their descriptions of them, and though the description didn't make much sense - there was nothing else quite alike a mammoth that it could be compared to - they listened and thought that one day, they would encounter a mammoth, too.

They might tell their children and grandchildren of this, how the old hunters would tell them of a spectacular beast that one might see only three times in a lifetime, and perhaps kill just once. It must be true, since the clan still has the tusk of one, but no-one alive has seen one.

Their children and grandchildren would tell their own children only vague tales they used to hear the old folk tell, of grand beasts bigger than horses and bovines, the grandest game of them all, but no-one alive has met someone who has seen one.

[prokopetz]

There's a thing in Classics studies where you'll read surviving descriptions of Ancient Greek automata which attribute all manner of near-lifelike behaviour to them – then you look at the reconstructed plans for the automaton in question, and it's a device with roughly the sophistication of a wind-up mouse.

The broad consensus seems to be that the authors of such descriptions are exaggerating for clout. For my part, I look at all the people in the year 2026 who've managed to genuinely convince themselves that LLMs are not only sapient, but smarter than they are, and I think: hmm.

[frontmansdefender]

RIP to the legend

[silvermoon424]

This goose fucking rocks and had a crazy life!

I really just have to summarize Thomas's entire life:

He was in a committed relationship with a male swan named Henry for 18-24 years before a female swan named Henrietta showed up and mated with Henry.

Thomas was initially jealous of the pair and attacked them, breaking 2 of the 5 eggs Henrietta had laid. However, once the remaining eggs hatched, Thomas warmed up to them and helped raise them.

Henry couldn't fly because of an injured wing, so Thomas taught the cygnets how to fly.

When they needed to reduce the goose population in the pond where Thomas and the swans lived, they dyed Thomas's feathers red so he wouldn't be separated from Henry.

Henry, Henrietta, and Thomas remained in their happy throuple for years and raised 68 cygnets before Henry died in 2009. After Henry's death, Henrietta found another swan and flew away, leaving Thomas alone.

Thomas finally met and mated with a female goose in 2011 and had his own babies. However, another goose named George stole them and raised them himself.

As Thomas grew elderly and blind, he was relocated to a wildlife center where he raised orphaned cygnets.

His caretaker at the center described him as "pretty high maintenance."

Thomas died in 2018 at the age of around 40. He had a funeral that included a small coffin and a procession that was led by a bagpiper. He was buried under the stone where Henry was buried, the two finally reunited in death.

Before and after his death, Thomas has been celebrated as an icon of the LGBTQ+ community for obvious reasons.

[cartoon-fanaticism]

GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face

[moghedien]

One like nitpick thing that drives me crazy is when people call Blue Whales the largest whales or the largest living mammals or some shit like that

Because yes that is true. But when you frame it like that you are completely disregarding the absolutely batshit reality that Blue Whales are the largest animals that have ever existed on earth through the entire history of the planet and they are alive right now today

[paladingineer]

Am dinosaur nerd, can confirm.

There were some dinosaurs that were longer than the blue whale. But "biggest animal" refers to mass, not dimensions.

There's constant squabbling over which sauropod (long-necked dinosaurs like Brontosaurus) was the biggest because we generally only have fragmentary remains and you can theorize different sizes depending on how you calculate the animal size from the few bones we have, but here's a size comparison of a few from wikipedia, which I photoshopped a blue whale into, based also on wikipedia's assertion that blue whales reach a maximum of 30 meters.

As you can see, even though the sauropods have it beat for length, there's just so much mass in that whale by comparison.

Sauropods were the largest animals ever to walk the earth only by virtue of the fact that whales don't walk.

[computer-voiced-by-majel-barrett]

Shoutout to my favorite genre of TOS episode:

[convenient-plot-device]

Unknown planet perfec t place for put senior staff on to exp/lore! Surface very Safe and Science officers traverse soundly put senior staff on Unknown Planet. Put Senior Staff on Unknown Planet. no problems ever on unkknown planet because good Flora and Fauna for interest officer brain bored of big officer head. Anunknown planet yes a place for senior officers put entire senior staff on unknown planet can trust unknown planet for giveing good love to officers. friend planet

[banchie]

i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges

[darwinisbae]

This is one of my favorite parts of the field museum. It makes me laugh so much more than it should. I will always love you step one: die

[peregrinethegryphon]

Speaking of PCOS getting renamed, let’s take a moment to celebrate that medical scientists are actually allowed to change the names of their discoveries, because paleontologists can’t fucking relate.

Sorry, why did you name this whale “King Lizard”? They thought it was a reptile when they first discovered it? Ok well can’t you change it? No?

Hey why is this clade called “False Crocodiles” when it contains all crocodiles? Oh, it used to be classified differently and only included an offshoot of crocodile-like animals, but now it includes the entire crocodile branch of the archosaur family tree? So, now all crocodiles are false crocodiles? Uh huh. ok. great.

[paladingineer]

We have bird-foot dinosaurs which are in the bird-hip family.

Birds not only don't belong to the bird-foot group, they don't even belong to the bird-hip family.

Birds are beast-foot lizard-hips.

[audliminal]

Thinking about the whole "there is no platonic explanation for this" thing and how it doesn't account for intense platonic situationships and anyways I think we should start saying "there is no casual explanation for this" bc really what we're talking about is the way the characters in question are Obsessed with each other

[cococoffeee]

commed deinonychus!

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.