crowned with glory

florgi, 29, from argentina. currently in my f1 era. i love fútbol and star wars. this is a very random blog, you've been warned.

[thirteenandten]

hey there!

masterlist of star wars fics

ao3 profile

[asneakyfox]

one big thing i think people outside fandom (like, all fandoms, fandom in general, not any particular one) tend to misunderstand is they know it's a subculture of people who are weirdly deeply invested in fictional media, and they hear about drama caused by people in those subcultures being unhinged in not-fun ways, and they think the unhingedness comes from the fact of being overinvested in works of fiction.

which is a natural assumption, but in my experience that's not really the case? like in my experience the drama llamas in fandom are usually not the ones who are just genuinely very deeply into the fiction. i've known people who are basically thinking about star trek or x-men comics or supernatural pretty much 100% of their free time and ime that type of person is usually very nice and surprisingly functional in their regular life. when someone's a constant nexus of fandom drama it's usually not that they are obsessed with the actual work of fiction the fandom is about, it's at least one of the following:

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but their unhealthy parasocial relationships with one or more of the people who created it

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but some elaborate shared-universe subset of fanfic about it that's only barely related to the original at this point, and/or an esoteric reading-against-the-text reinterpretation of the source material (often if the canon is active and ongoing this leads to becoming actively hostile toward it for its inevitably increasing failure to conform to their preferred fanon)

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but the fandom itself and gathering clout within it, so that the source material basically only exists to them as a tool for scoring points in increasingly arcane fandom disputes

and very often you get the same person doing 2 and sometimes even all 3 of these, and that's where the trouble really starts

[madlori]

holy shit I've never seen this articulated but OP is EXACTLY RIGHT.

[sashayed]

but ykw at least i'm not on mount everest. at least i'm not paying tens of thousands of dollars to slowly suffocate in a 300-person line at the gates of hell. never in my life will i have to be steered in a hypoxic stupor through the maze of poop and corpses atop mount everest. on this earth a lot of horrible things can happen to you without your permission but there are a few that you have to opt into. you can just say no thanks! and be guaranteed never to have to be on mount everest. much to be grateful for actually

[sashayed]

still not on mount everest this morning 😌 alhamdulillah

[rlyehtaxidermist]

one of the best academic paper titles

[rlyehtaxidermist]

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

[imightbeobsessedwithsocks]

I still don’t understand

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR

Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

[charlesoberonn]

Not quite the same since MRIs aren't worthless like polygraphs, but it reminded me of this bit from Adam Ruins Everything

[roycohn]

really annoying form of tiktok user brain rot is that none of them seem capable of doing basic research for themselves anymore. like i'm on so many different subreddits and constantly people come in typing in a way that clearly marks them as young (as in under 30, not even like teenagers) and stupid, and they'll post a question, and someone will give them an answer, and they'll ask that person to elaborate on something that can be easily accessed through google. like as a hypothetical example, someone will say "what seasoning goes well on chicken breast?" and someone will say "penzeys fox point" and the person will come back and say "what's in it? what does that taste like? how do i use it" well i don't fucking know kayleigh, why not google? why not take your little pointer finger and highlight the words "penzeys fox point" and right-click and choose "search google for 'penzeys fox point'" and the answer will be RIGHT. THERE. but if you don't hold people's hands all the way through every dumb ass question imaginable suddenly YOU'RE the asshole. god i never thought i'd be nostalgic for the era of "let me google that for you" links being the norm but holy shit. NOBODY WANTS TO GET OFF THEIR ASS AND GOOGLE ANYMORE.

[roycohn]

people!!! stop saying "oh but google sucks now" please!!! it doesn't suck if you know how to use boolean search terms. did you guys not have to attend a workshop during your first year of college teaching you how to efficiently and accurately look up things on the internet? bc i had to do two of those at the two different colleges i took classes at (and one was a community college in bakersfield california so like, definitely not something that was only offered at high-end private universities) and as a result i can basically find the answer to whatever i'm looking up online with a little digging. it's literally as simple as using the right modifiers...

[st-just]

Really one of my most strongly held beliefs is that it’s deeply unhealthy and soul-stunting for children to only consume media the world’s most coddling and judgemental adults determined was ‘age-appropriate’, and watching stuff that would horrify your parents behind their back should be encouraged and rewarded.

[st-just]

love and light to all of you but the people reblogging this to agree and then citing episodes of literally Spongebob Squarepants as examples had very different childhoods than me.

[eroscestlavie]

I need to stop replying to “how do you make friends in your 30s?” threads because all my answers boil down to “you have to want to know people instead of have friends” and I don’t think people wanna hear that

[sofiabird123]

I got a comment on one of my TikTok videos that really didn’t sit right with me. It basically said “any pretty girl could’ve played Princess Leia.”

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

A lot of people don’t realize this but Carrie Fisher was also a script doctor. She was brought in to punch up dialogue and develop characters in films like Hook, Sister Act, The wedding singer, and more. She even started doing this work on Star Wars, especially during The Empire Strikes Back.

And while Harrison Ford gets a lot of credit for changing the line to “I know” (which was iconic), that was just one moment. Carrie wrote and rewrote so much dialogue some of it even for other characters.

So no not just “any pretty girl” could’ve played her. Carrie Fisher was brilliant and incredibly witty. She added so much depth to Star Wars and the dialogue we all love so much wouldn’t have been the same without her. Thank you for coming to my ted talk lol

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

I just love the super realistic historical shows where they show how filthy and disease ridden the era is by having every nameless peasant look like they rolled in mud right before filming while every noble has three layers of painstaking makeup on to create the illusion that they’re just naturally flawless. Sure we know what it was really like, but clearly only the filthy poors ever had to deal with that kind of thing while the elites of society have always been pictures of beauty and health. No one ever used urine in beauty treatments or got the pox or had a particularly unflattering jaw from years of inbreeding cause everyone would rather fuck their cousins than anyone even slightly below their “station”. Because hey, being realistic is great, praise us for our gritty realism in showing how disgusting the poor are- I mean were, but it’s just too much to ask our viewers to consider them actual people. That’s why we focus on nobles, who definitely all fit into modern beauty standards at all times and in all places.

[integritea]

Meanwhile LOTR allows everyone who has been wandering around in the wild for weeks or months to look like it.

[userfish]

this pride month we’re all going to be radically pro transgender. or else.

[userfish]

hey so this means radically pro ALL transgender. don’t put limitations on this. all trans people are radically accepted here.

[redstonedust]

i hate ai generated photos but especially of things that we already have hundreds of actual photos of. why would you need ai generated images of the eiffel tower people have been taking pictures of the eiffel tower since its construction. you have unlimited eiffel tower photos already. why are you making fake ones. for what purpose.

[leaveme2thewolves]

i block ppl all the time so my blocklist ranges from "actual fucking asshole fascist" n "post that mildly annoyed me because im petty" and if i went thru my blocklist rn i probably would have no idea why i blocked each of them but whatever

[beardedmrbean]

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com

I'm a bit frightened for the time when someone less ethical than the person that did this decides to repeat the experiment but leave out the part where they come in later and announce that it was fake and people wind up diagnosed with the fake condition and all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensues.

[ekjohnston]

They are literally already doing that, and one of the targets is HRT.

Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search

Peptide companies have been doing AI-engine optimization by spamming the biohackers subreddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google.

[razzmothazz]

still caring about internet friends you lost touch with years ago is so embarrassing. yeah i had a deam we met up irl recently. the last time we spoke was maybe 7-8 years ago. i still wear the laces we randomly decided was a sign of our friendship. i dont know what any of your socials are or if youre even active on any. sometimes i see someones art resemble yours and i wonder for hours. do you still go by that name you chose? whenever i see it i wonder if its you. we couldve passed each other in this vastness a thousand times and not have a clue.

[razzmothazz]

we were lonely kids having fun together. do you remember?

[maksverstappen]

the way to make friends is to be your best loving self, to assume everybody will love you upon meeting you, and to be real fucking weird about sports rpf. do all these and you will invariably find yourself with love and light in your life.

[carys-the-ninth]

"The magic system is never fully explained" yeah that's how life works. Imagine having a story set in modern day America and the characters have several pages of exposition on combustion engines and telecommunication networks before we get to the plot

[et-in-arkadia]

i think this is absolutely correct and good writing advice but also victor hugo would like to have a word with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1832

[bendingsignpost]

victor hugo would like to have many words with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1831

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.