Good Morning Cruel World

Aurora |21| She/Her

[furryprovocateur]

they should allow you to report posts for being gauche or passé

[girlswater]

[newsandstuffisee]

[nohoperadio]

just saw a pigeon doing the puffed up courtship dance thing to another pigeon, and as he was strutting around he suddenly stopped for a split second to do a very brief preen-peck at his own side, then returned to the strutting around. and i surprised myself by instantly losing respect for the male pigeon in that moment, like come on man i appreciate you had an itch or whatever but how is she supposed to feel special when you're getting distracted by bullshit like that? which on reflection i don't endorse, i mean those are pretty harsh dating norms i'm imposing on these pigeons, from a total outsider perspective, for no reason. probably not all girl pigeons are as uptight about that sort of thing as i would apparently be if i was a girl pigeon, maybe she even found it endearing who knows, i don't know her. it's none of my business really. sorry pigeons.

[mumblesplash]

scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon

[kata4a]

[dreadwedge]

salad is mostly items

[fleetwood-mac-andcheese]

[itsbasil]

you put those tags on this post where they belong

[runawaymarbles]

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

[zz9pzza]

Op's tags

#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op

[runawaymarbles]

The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.

[kyraneko]

This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.

[jeffsatyr]

(ID in alt)

[elodieunderglass]

Approximately one THOUSAND felonies

[thememedaddy]

[magicalnursekomugi]

[itsbasil]

[stonefemmesiren]

if you talk shit about fat dykes around me i will kill you i'm so serious

[pengosolvent]

Edit: the title for this comic is “Puzzle Rat” this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry it’s  just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really

(it’s completely unrelated to any of my songs that have to do with “puzzleboy”) Patreon: www.patreon.com/PengoSolvent

[memorycycle]

dino saurs were not scary monsters they were mamas with eggs and when they drank water they were like fuckk yessss waterrrr

[mylordshesacactus]

For all that the 1800s etiquette guides are--obviously--derangedly sexist from a modern perspective? They're also mindblowing in how casually they will assert things that MODERN DAY CONSERVATIVES would scream and cry and shit their pants about.

"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.

Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:

Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."

Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....

....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.

(I realize the phrasing there sounds a lot less strong than my summary, but--trust me on this. When you're familiar with the narrative voice of these kinds of books, this passage is downright radical. The mere acknowledgement that if you treat your kids badly, it's your own damn fault when they don't talk to you? I've genuinely never seen that before in this genre. Don't freak out over "properly trained", either. It's just a linguistic shift--at the time, "training" was used the way we would say "raising" a child today. )

[mylordshesacactus]

"Delete all the nudes and sexts after a breakup or you're a piece of shit" has been the standard expectation since EIGHT. TEEN. EIGHTY. FIVE.

[mylordshesacactus]

"Men and women being friends with each other is literally normal. Don't be a controlling freak."

Anyway I was wrong the publishing date is actually 1882 so like.

[mylordshesacactus]

"If you have to abuse a child to keep order in your classroom then you're a bad teacher."

So like @ the modern Republican party, are the "traditional family values" in the fucking room with us right now--

[what-even-is-thiss]

I have noticed in recent years that men say “no homo” way less often than they used to when I was in high school at least. Like I’ve witnessed in media and online and in person adult men just willing to say “I love you” or “you look great” to their guy friends without tacking a no homo onto the end of it.

And if you think that’s not progress you weren’t there in the trenches.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’ve seen middle aged comedians on national tv sincerely say “I love you” to their friends with no jokes attached. Nature is so slow to heal but it is possible, I tell you. We have planted trees and seen them survive.

[tranz-parents]

[transmortifried]

[pendaly-archive-deactivated2021]

[gelphienation]

here’s the thing…I’m significantly less bothered by people thinking Taylor swift is gay than them thinking she’s like the consummate songwriter. Like we cannot objectively say that Taylor swift has never had a gay thought or relationship in her life because it’s basically impossible to know that for sure. But we DO definitively know what the lyrics to her songs are.

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

And if I said Megamind is one of the few movies that understands Superman.

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

And if I said Megamind through its three subversions of Superman shows a deeper understanding that the point of Superman is that he was loved and taught to love by good, present parents, and because of that he is able to return that love to a world even if it doesn't always accept it, and he is not corrupted by his power, than many other films either subverting or playing the superman story straight.

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Megamind has three Superman subversions. One is obviously Megamind himself. He was not raised loved by the world, but rather was loved by those hated by the world. Because he was still raised with love, he does care about other people, hence his character development. But because he didn't receive wider love growing up, his own is misplaced at first.

Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.

Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.

All three of these subversions, in their negative space, create the silhouette of the superhero that they are parodying. That silhouette is of a space child that came to earth and was cared for very deeply by the world, and taught love through his experience of love, and because of that holds fast to his duty to the world. Which is Superman.