Romancing the Universe

Ren | 28 | Libra | Asexual | Nonbinary • This is the personal blog of someone who's still trying to get their shit together. Thank you for your patience. • Side Blogs: corvid-ink (writing) | pluckybirdart (art) | ask-organized-chaos (OC ask blog - Ren, Blair) | kingsnake-drummer (OC rp blog - Eli) | the-game-warden (DbD ask blog) • HEIR OF SPACE • background by cairovercoat “And you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees.” - elodieunderglass

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[mistymossman]

@stickthisbig wish granted!

[asparklethatisblue]

children of any species are very good at being annoying and very cute while doing that

a sphinx child based on this post

[kaijufluffs]

She's being so big and brave.

[thekrimsonnight]

@monstrousproductions

[monstrousproductions]

She's being so brave!!!!!! Well done, baby!! You've got this!!!

[indigonite]

Happy another homestuck day for those who still practice it

[thedustyanarchist]

I love how this resumes the entirety of the beta kids and the trolls' relationship

[unidentifiedspoon]

part 2 of this. what if instead of be not afraid you said Be Afraid but joke's on you, asshole, it's been afraid its entire life

[howaboutapostate]

[andmaybegayer]

sometimes when you're travelling you will see a beautiful unique bird that captures your attention completely and you will discover that the locals call it the Boring Sparrow and there's 70 000 000 of them and they eat nothing but spicy chicken wings they find in dumpsters.

[general-book-nerd]

Some of my favourite examples.

[sinni-ok-sessi]

I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things

my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say

[teashoesandhair]

Spent my evening planning a pub crawl around all the establishments from which my great great great grandfather was banned in the 1880s, as unfathomably every single one of them is still open nearly 150 years later, despite barring their best customer

[teashoesandhair]

The pub crawl consists of 3 pubs over a 1.5 mile radius, and starts with a visit to a coffee shop that now sits on the site of the barn that my great great great grandfather broke into and slept in after being thrown out of a pub, damaging a vast quantity of hay, resulting in his 28th arrest and a 1 month prison sentence with hard labour

[firefly464]

Is this anything

[rainfallsuphere]

I propose an addition

[parchmentengineer]

Been thinking about this graph a little (actually been thinking about it a lot)

[firefly464]

OH THIS IS BEAUTIFUL THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ

[beemovieerotica]

someone on reddit shared texts of her and her husband's exclusive english dialect and it's beautiful

[beemovieerotica]

a linguist is analyzing it

[danielkahndyke]

the op linked the study in the replies & i’ve been skimming it & it’s actually rlly rlly interesting to think abt

https://e1.nmcdn.io/assets/pushkin/wp-content/uploads/imported-files/Wait-theres-torture-in-Zootopia_-Examining-the-prevalence-of-torture-in-popular-movies.pdf

[danielkahndyke]

like this sentence from the introduction alone is fucking crazy. “approximately half of adults in the united states think that torture can be acceptable in counterterrorism.” what!

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

we need a cultural revolution in america.

[headspace-hotel]

not to make this important post about my brain worms but this paper actually discusses captain america: the winter soldier at some length

in the appendix (which you can find by scrolling down) CA:TWS is listed as having one torture scene, which immediately made me wonder because there are two that I can think of.

further on in the appendix when the authors are discussing the criteria for including torture, they give the vault scene in CA:TWS as an example of a scene that isn't torture, with the justification that Bucky seems to comply with his captors, and given the information shown on screen we can't conclude whether or not Bucky is a willing participant in the "wipe." Willing participants cannot be tortured, therefore the vault scene is not counted as torture

That is a WILD take on that scene. "doesn't fight back" does not equal "not being tortured" come on now

now, I could see disqualifying the vault scene as being a torture scene on the basis that the purpose of the "wipe" is not to inflict pain, it just happens to be an extremely painful process.

That's an interesting take. Is doing something incredibly painful or distressing to a person torture when there is ostensibly a secondary purpose to the painful thing, even though it also clearly doubles as a way of inflicting suffering and asserting power? This is a really important question to answer, since a lot of instances of torture and mistreatment in prisons and military situations etc. seem to fall under this. e.g. a strip search is nominally for "security" purposes, but it is also forced nudity which is a common form of sexual violence inflicted as part of torture.

But disqualifying the scene because there is not enough evidence that Bucky is being coerced to do it is nuts, since immediately prior Bucky gets slapped in the face for not answering a question and doesn't retaliate, and immediately before that Bucky gets a bunch of guns pointed at him when he acts up

That's another important question. Does being forced to comply with or participate in your own torture disqualify it from being torture?

The answer is, to me, obviously no, and in fact this seems like a relatively common feature of torture: e.g. forcing prisoners to dig their own graves requires a good amount of compliance from the victim and that's a major reason why it's so distressing

anyways the vault scene was what got me thinking about torture in media and got me to rewatching jacob geller's fantastic video essay "analyzing every torture scene in call of duty" which actually cites this paper.

[headspace-hotel]

@dellerose peer reviewed tags

[dellerose]

[Image ID: tag that reads "#damn even the paper researching torture in media excuses torture in media we are so screwed"]

[headspace-hotel]

okay, for one thing, he doesn't "lean back," he is pushed by the scientists. also! the chair restrains him. but even apart from that, how do you watch that scene and get "active and willing participant." Pierce literally hits him when he doesn't answer a question quickly enough.

[headspace-hotel]

@deus3xmachinablog I think it would have to be the scene where the heroes throw Sitwell off a roof yeah. I kinda want to see the breakdown for ALL the movies listed.

[deus3xmachinablog]

i would be very interested in that, too! partly because I'm wondering which other Hot Takes of theirs I will disagree with (bc I am 1000% with you on The Vault Scene), partly for Academic Reasons (i miss being a cultural anthropologist) and... partly for Sicko Reasons

[headspace-hotel]

Yeah, like, as insanely high as the stats seem to be for torture in media, this weird victim-blaming take on the Vault Scene suggests that they underestimated the amount of torture, perhaps dramatically.

[plucky-passerine]

[Image ID: tags that read "#i can understand them choosing an conservative threshold for deciding what torture is #it's so hard to be objective with these kinds of things #like the last comment said the data is likely a sever undercount #but that they found an effect still should emphasize the point that much more"]

So I really want to focus on prev’s tags here because I disagree that this is a case of “the paper researching torturing in media excusing torture in media.” Jazzafrazz is completely right, the threshold is stated by the paper to be conservative.

[Image ID: excerpt from the linked paper with two lines highlighted: "we erred on the conservative side in an effort to understate our case" and "excluded any incidents where it was unclear whether or not the actions amounted to torture"]

“In an effort to understate our case” and “unclear” are important words to note here. Brainwashing, while absolutely a human rights abuse, causes the scene to have a layer of nuance to it. Yes, any average viewer would perceive what Bucky is put through as torture (that’s largely the point, since it’s a scene setting up how evil the antagonists are), but someone critiquing the paper could argue that the scene is an extension of the brainwashing rather than torture done punitively, or for the purpose of gaining information. At the same time the average viewer might not clock the scene where the protagonists dangle a man off the side of a building to get information out of him as torture, despite it more firmly fitting into the paper’s threshold.

This is what the researchers were focusing on, and why they illustrated that as an example of a scene where they had to split the definition. As prev says, if anything it makes their point more valid, because it means they are underestimating the amount of torture that exists in post-9/11 American media. Referring to this example as “victim blaming” is a) an incredibly reductive critique of the methods and b) completely ignoring the point the researchers are trying to make.

[spltlvlhous]

people who hate pigeons and think theyre dirty filtyhy sky rats. im like. thats ur first fucking problem. u think rats are disgusting. FUCK YOU.

[spltlvlhous]

everytime i see a pigeon im like look ar that georgous bird and its iridescent feathers

[spltlvlhous]

the fuck is these peoples problem,

[shamebats]

[kabretoss]

It does matter. It matters exactly like this.

Last month I was in the ER, the most vulnerable emotionally that I've ever been while putting myself in the hands of a stranger. That the intake doctor had a lanyard heavy with Pride pins mattered. It's such a tiny gesture, but the amount of safety I felt because of it, during an agonizing moment in my life, was huge.

[elkian]

We recently moved to rural area and some neighbors have straight up MAGA flags so the person with the biggest flagpole for miles around putting up a GIGANTIC Progress Pride flag last June and this June has actually meant a lot to me.

[shirodaidancer]

Happy Pride Month 2026, beautiful people!

[leaky-port-nacelle]

You don't have to know everything about your world but you DO have to justify in universe why the reader doesn't get answers to some things. I've seen this done well in two ways

1) the Ryland Grace method: MC would LOVE to know but they don't know so it's not important

2) the Murderbot method: MC literally does not care enough to know so it's definitely not important

[effinbirds]