#max is talking

[aahsokaatano]

people love extolling the virtues of ball-and-socket joints and how it makes us more advanced and all that but I don't see any fucking octopuses in slings now do I. Bones are overrated and I want a refund.

[aahsokaatano]

something that I feel the movie (and the novelization I had as a kid) and honestly most fanworks I've seen kind of gloss over is the fact that in A New Hope, the VERY first planet that Luke goes to after leaving Tatooine is a fucking rainforest

Like can you imagine. You've spent your entire life in a place where water is so precious that an entire industry has been built around pulling tiny bits of moisture from the very atmosphere, every single drop is precious and worth twice it's weight in gold.

And then when you leave, you go first to a space station with extremely strict climate control, and then to a FUCKING RAINFOREST

It would be like someone who has lived their entire life in Death Valley suddenly being picked up and set back down in the middle of the Amazon

Luke should have been complaining that the air is like soup bc this boy has never experienced humidity over probably 8% in his entire life and now he's being faced with 98% humidity. Han what is this. Why is everything WET. Stop laughing at me I feel like I'm drowning WHAT IS THIS.

[aahsokaatano]

I gotta admit, my dash made me think that "Only Murders In The Building" was about an older gay couple who get reverse-adopted by a spunky young woman who has a little bit of a death wish, and they have to run after her making anxious noises as she keeps trying to fist fight every other suspect

This is not at all the case, but I'm enjoying it nonetheless

[aahsokaatano]

From an evolutionary standpoint, the egg came first, of course. Eggs evolved many millions of years before birds, let alone chickens. Granted, they were the jelly-like fish eggs, and then the leathery, soft shelled reptilian-like eggs, and the hard shelled eggs we associate with modern chickens would be even further down the line, but they were eggs nonetheless.

However, in the Latin-based English alphabet, "chicken" comes first, because C is before E, so you'll find "chicken" before "egg" in the dictionary. But this is not applicable, of course, to all languages - for instance, "huevo" (Spanish for "egg") comes alphabetically before "pollo" (Spanish for "chicken").

And from a strictly single-individual, linear point of view, the egg comes first, because every living thing begins as some form of "fetus," and for chickens, that takes the form of an external egg that must be brooded over by a mother hen - who, of course, came from an egg, laid by her mother hen, who came from an egg, and so on. Thus, the egg is the starting point.

Except, of course, for the fact that the chicken egg cannot exist without the chicken, which was domesticated by ancient humans out of wild birds, so what we call a "chicken egg" today cannot exist without the larger foundation of "chicken" as defined by humans (who just think they know everything, including how to define nebulous concepts). So the chicken had to come first, as long as we're specifically talking about chicken eggs.

Except no one ever specifies that, do they? They imply it, sure, but that just leaves so much open to interpretation - and if we're going to be really granular, no one ever specifies what kind of chicken, either. You're just supposed to imagine a generic, perhaps slightly cartoonish, hen sitting on a nest of eggs. That's pretty imprecise wording for a question that challenges a precise answer.

And if we do get into the specific breeds of chicken, then we look at where those lines started, and it's with other chickens, who were selectively bred to produce eggs that would contain chicks with desired traits.

Don't even get me started on tracing chickens back to dinosaurs, because then we end up back at the first point, which is that the first eggs evolved before bones did, much less chickens, and then we loop back to the fourth point, about defining what a "chicken" is in order to define what a "chicken egg" is.

Honestly, at this point, I'm pretty sure the poor things are crossing the road to get away from the purposefully-vague questions that philosophers keep bothering them with.

[aahsokaatano]

the worst part about falling into new media that is both highly quotable AND extremely niche is that you cannot just wait for situations where the quotes work naturally, because that will probably never happen. I so very badly want to use "what a despicable thing to say! I still, however, would let you kiss me on the mouth" but where the fuck would I use that

[aahsokaatano]

maybe it's just because I'm literally majoring in rhetoric but honestly to me the most interesting little detail of the VP debate that just finished on CBS was that Tim Walz referred to JD Vance as "Senator Vance" consistently (the few times he did feel the need to address him by name), while Vance was taking every single opportunity to call Walz "Tim" rather than "Governor Walz"

I also noted during the closing remarks that Vance almost slipped and referred to Harris as just "Kamala" but quickly corrected himself to "Kamala Harris"

The reason why this is noteworthy at all is because of an unconscious respectability bias that we all have - it might have different forms across different cultures and languages, but in this context (American English), people generally expect that referring to someone as [Title] [Surname] is a way of showing that person respect. Calling someone by their first name implies 1) friendship/familiarity (probably what Vance was hoping people would read it as), or 2) lack of respect/indication that you view that person as beneath you (quite possibly what Vance really meant by it, especially considering that Walz is older than Vance, and the Republicans are all about "family values," including respect for your elders).

I've seen a handful of posts about referring to women politicians by their first name being disrespectful (unless it's how they're branding themselves, such as Hilary Clinton's 2016 campaign being under just "Hilary"), and I personally think it's a very, very tiny concession that the Trump/Vance team is making in referring to Harris by her full name, instead of "Vice President Harris" or just "Harris" - Vance, to my recollection, didn't once refer to Harris with her title throughout the debate (in fact, he gave her the rather stupid title of "border czar" which doesn't mean anything and isn't remotely accurate, as the border situation is overseen by the Dept. of Homeland Security, not the VP).

Vance is, in my opinion, trying to both make himself look more put-together and respectable to the undecided voters (who may be turned off by Trump's unhinged ranting), while also still checking the boxes for the rabid MAGA fans in a more subtle manner - though, very notably, when Walz asked him directly "did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?" Vance just sort of danced around the question without actually answering. I wasn't keeping a tally or anything, but I don't think he gave more than one or two straight answers throughout the debate. Everything was a meandering little sidepiece that he tried to desperately relate back to his grandmother, because that's the only thing he has going for him when you really get down to it. Hillbilly Elegy, as much as it's a heap of nonsense and hatred of poor people disguised as "folksy charm," is the only thing Vance really has to cling on to in terms of what he's known for. So he's still trying to sell it - and himself - as worth something.

[aahsokaatano]

Hey I think I finally found the most broken Tumblr ad. It took me longer to scroll past this than the original "do you love the color of the sky" post.

Do you love the color of the beige, vaguely Christian Tumblr ad