The Way of the Fox

Your Friendly Neighbothood Latin Nerd | Broadway Junkie | Multi-fandom Shenanigans | She/ Her

[graves-yard]

The thought of Rocky having a feeder kink is so fun cause you can have something like this happen

[vaspider]

It's even funnier when you consider that in the book, Eridian society has a STRONG prohibition against "seeing others eat or being seen to eat."

[geopsych]

Another public service announcement. This time it’s air quality. Some of you are probably in it already if you’re in eastern Canada, New England or New York, but it’s sliding south, a huge mass of wildfire smoke. Please be careful. When it starts getting bad, especially, like when the sky gets orange or brownish, it’s best to run air purifiers in the house and wear N95 or KN95 masks when you have to go outside.

It harms your lungs and it’s especially bad for children (and pets!) or anyone with health problems. There are all kinds of chemicals in that smoke. It’s not only trees that are burning. The heat already makes it harder to breath. This makes it worse.

If any of you are experiencing it, feel free to tell about it in the comments. 💚

Also, throw out the mask every day and shower before you get in bed if you’ve been out or you’ll be breathing the particles all night. Stuff like that. It gets all over you, your skin, your hair, your clothes.

[so-i-did-this-thing]

It's a large (and shifting) smoke plume, so stay safe, folks. Look up how to make a "Corsi-Rosenthal Box" if you need an air purifier inside.

[crankydevon]

map.purpleair.com shows privately-owned sensors, in case you have a hard time finding a government site. It doesn't rely on government funding, so far as I know.

This map shows fine particle pollution (PM2.5) from wildfires and other sources. It provides a public resource of information to best prepar

[opinions-about-tiaras]

I'm in one of those yellow zones and it isn't great. I can't imagine what the guys in purple are inhaling.

[tepkunset]

I feel like simply calling JK Rowling a transphobe isn't strong enough anymore. Like. This is not your grandpa calling you by your deadname at a restaurant kind of transphobic. This is her wanting to eradicate all trans people (with an extra special hatred towards trans women specifically). This is her trying just that by personally funding transphobic hate groups with millions to push around laws in the UK. It is not hyperbolic to call her a dangerous, genocidal maniac.

It's not about cancelling a problematic writer. It's about literally trying to save lives by denying her as much money and power as possible.

[homunculus-argument]

Wednesday the 15th. What an excellent day. Middle of the week, middle of the month. Truly, we are in the middle of things.

[gandalfsbignaturals]

what if instead of paying companies to delete our info off of databases periodically we like. idk. passed a law that said companies couldnt do that anymore. and set up some kind of task force to disband all the companies that do that. thatd be cool

[yr-tiktok-mom]

[maswartz]

[jonny-r217]

[tgatbc]

[snissel613]

why arent corals kosher

I refuse to believe that Halakha recognizes coral as a fish and not at most a plant

[knaidelmaidel]

let me get this straight, you want to try to eat it???

[snissel613]

all I’m saying that if I did, Hashem wouldn’t stop me

[knaidelmaidel]

i mean בדרך שאדם רוצה ללכת and all that, but someone should stop you

[justanormalpersin]

If it isn't edible, it doesn't need to be kosher. If you want to eat a rock, you don't have to worry about it being kosher. You still shouldn't eat rocks

its not an avera , but it is still a really dumb idea

[snissel613]

you can even argue that being dumb and eating rocks is an aveira. But it's a different aveira

[clayandsorcery]

I need goyim to understand that this is literally what passages of Talmud look like.

[cantotallyeven]

[steelwoolf]

I have questions about whether we’re eating live coral, like a parrotfish swimming around biting chunks off the reef. If we’re doing that, coral shouldn’t be kosher because the little coral animals lack fins and scales. If we’re eating the calcium carbonate deposits the corals have left behind after dying and decomposing, that’s an entirely different question.

Depending on the size and amount of coral you eat, eating coral wouldn’t be bad for you. Are you swallowing large enough chunks to cause intestinal blockages? or grinding it up and using it as an additive? People use coral as a source of calcium in vitamins.

But given that corals globally are in danger due to warming oceans, please don’t eat coral.

[snissel613]

I do t think live coral needs fins and scales to be kosher for the same reason that seaweed doesn’t need fins and scales to be kosher

[tikkunhayam]

I would argue that halachically, corals should count as shellfish. In that they live in the water but have no bones, but possibly a calcium carbonate “shell” that the soft coral animal retreats into. Even fleshy soft corals such as Xenia and the various leather corals found in the red and Mediterranean seas would likely more closely resemble slugs or clams if not considered algae.

Not to mention many species of soft or large polyp stony corals (much more edible upon initial impression, compared to small polyp stony corals) are toxic. Dying of Palythoa toxicity is NOT kosher.

[fromchaostocosmos]

Also if one where to break a piece of coral off of the main body and eat it wouldn't that violate the Miztvah the forbids from eating a part of an animal while the animal still lives?

I would argue is does.

[penrosesun]

Breaking a piece of coral off to eat it would not violate the commandment to not eat a part of a still-living animal because the coral in a colony, not a single being. It would be like eating a handful of bees out of a hive, which, while treif and also inadvisable, would not be a violation the way that eating the claw of a Florida stone crab would.

As for why someone would eat the calcium carbonate deposits left behind by dead coral, I’d have to assume that we’d be talking about someone who is doing so for some sort of mystical or pseudoscientific reason, as I can think of few culinary or nutritional uses for calcium carbonate to begin with, and none at all that you couldn’t better source from other places. If the reasoning is anything to do with spirits and crystals and energy resonances, then it may be an avera on additional grounds, by virtue of maybe being some form of avodah zara.

[lethalbutterfly]

Calcium carbonate is the same stuff as Tums, so theoretically eating dead coral could help with heartburn, but in most cases it would just be easier to find and acquire tums. That being said I would not oversimplify the diversity of the human experience to the point that I would assume an underwater heartburn emergency could never occur. It would be contrived af though.

[penrosesun]

Hmm. I suppose if people were consuming it medicinally, then it would be equivalent to the Bekhorot 7b ruling on the medicinal consumption of donkey urine (and therefore treif, but not completely ill-advised)

[keshetchai]

Oh, also good for osteoporosis, I suppose!

But yeah, it all goes back to "seems easier to just use regular ol' marble dust.

...related important question: are we sure that coral is considered alive, and an animal of any kind, like, halakhically speaking?

I mean:

Coral doesn't bleed (which is the important part about eating a still living animal)

They don't have lungs or gills

They generally don't move? (I guess corallimorphs can...kinda crawl? But otherwise no they don't move).

How is coral really different from like, fungi above water? Sure it can be a collective mass (mushrooms and their mycellium colonies!), but it's not capable of bleeding, and it doesn't have lungs or gills, and it doesn't really move. It just kinda...spreads.

I'm just saying we have to establish that coral is significantly different from like, a portobello mushroom. Fungi are kosher but aren't technically plants.

[keshetchai]

No because fungi are bottom feeders of the ground and yet mushrooms are kosher.

The issue is whether or not these are creatures according to Torah. From Leviticus 11:

These you may eat of all that live in water: anything in water, whether in the seas or in the streams, that has fins and scales—these you may eat.

But anything in the seas or in the streams that has no fins and scales, among all the swarming things of the water and among all the other living creatures that are in the water—they are an abomination for you

and an abomination for you they shall remain: you shall not eat of their flesh and you shall abominate their carcasses.

Everything in water that has no fins and scales shall be an abomination for you.

Now, I am going to reference Bible hub here mostly because they have a nice Strong's Hebrew concordance feature that sefaria doesn't have that is easy to copy and paste from.

But basically I would argue that the important words we have to distinguish here are:

the teeming

שֶׁ֣רֶץ (še·reṣ)

Noun - masculine singular construct

Strong's 8318: A swarm, active mass of minute animals

life

הַחַיָּ֖ה (ha·ḥay·yāh)

Article | Adjective - feminine singular

Strong's 2416: Alive, raw, fresh, strong, life

and creatures

נֶ֥פֶשׁ (ne·p̄eš)

Noun - feminine singular

Strong's 5315: A soul, living being, life, self, person, desire, passion, appetite, emotion

So. Is coral an active (teeming) mass of minute animals? Well. It is a living colony in the same way that mushrooms are colonies of living things. But other things that swarm or teem are like... krill. shrimp. Locusts. Flies. Ants.

Y'know, stuff that moves. Swarms. Coral doesn't teem or swarm. It's static.

Which leaves us with living and creatures.

I would argue again that "living" implies regular movement — for example, you can have living waters. (Same root word for mayyim chayyim).

But also the other terms which appear beside the root word for life/living over and over again are basically:

Creeping, moving (Strong's 7430 רָמַשׂ ramas)

Flesh (Strong's 1320 בָּשָׂר basar)

Flying or soaring (5774 עוּף)

Having a soul (or literal breath) (5315, נֶפֶשׁ)

And nefesh is of course, also the last one in that list!

So is coral alive in the way Torah usually means things are living beings? Well, coral doesn't creep or move. It also doesn't have blood (which, arguably, means it can't have a carcass. It sort of has bones! But no carcass). It...MIGHT have flesh? I'm sort of unclear about this.

It can't fly or soar.

Which leaves us with:

Do corals have flesh? and,

do corals have souls? And if not metaphorically souls, do they have breath?

Well, coral do respirate. But so do plants. And neither of them have lungs. Also according to @montereybayaquarium's website coral get oxygen from algae? (Don't worry Monterey bay aquarium no one is actually going to eat the coral, this is all hypothetical)

Coral reefs get their bright colors from the algae — called zooxanthellae — living in their tissues. The zooanthellae provide the coral polyps with oxygen and nutrients produced from photosynthesis. In return, the coral polyps provide zooanthellae with carbon dioxide (a byproduct of the polyps’ “breathing” oxygen) and shelter.

Coral polyps can have mouths, but they don't really breathe with lungs. So I'm not sure they have that kind of nefesh (breath of life). And corals are like, a bunch of skeletal base material with living polyps on the top. But are they fleshy? But all their color comes from the algae living in them.

For this I go back to the presence of blood being a big factor, because again, mushrooms have flesh but don't have blood, and so halakhically...that fungi is a plant.

Also apparently Octocorals don't have those exoskeletons? So at that point how would we know something is an octocoral versus like...a seaweed?

I think either seaweed isn't meant to be kosher, or actually corals are kosher because seaweed is. Oysters have gills and hearts. Scallops have a gajillion eyes. Really easy to see those aren't plants.

Basically if you look at a coral does it have a breath and soul, does it fly or creep, does it bleed, does it have flesh, does it move around in general? Could it possibly be a plant, halakhically speaking? (Not by scientific taxonomy!) Would bronze age folks look at it and go "yeah, that's a plant."? Also important: what IS a plant? Halakhically?

Many such questions. Anyways I don't think corals have souls.

[yedidnefesh]

So... The Gemara does seem to view coral as a tree, or at least it discusses coral as producing wood in Rosh Hashanah 23a. OP appears to be in the right that it's halachically a plant!

[redstonebug]

happy pride month

[blueishspace]

They are making a greek mythology smp, I don't think you can go gayer.

[leolus11]

If I had a nickel for every time

my comfort MCYT RP streamer was found out to be lying and manipulative and then I felt bad for listening to their music and interacting with projects I love that they were involved in, I’d have 2 nickels.

That’s a lot of fucking nickels.

[stjohnstarling]

In light of recent events, I have begun submitting bug reports when I see mature content labels applied inappropriately to posts, especially if an appeal has been rejected.

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

Extremely good idea - how are you doing it? Through the contact us option?

[stjohnstarling]

Yeah it’s one of the options on the Contact Support form:

[sharas-bae]

for what it's worth: after a few months of submitting help tickets as 'feedback' when i saw a post inappropriately flagged as mature, i tried following this suggestion instead. today i got my first-ever response from tumblr support on this issue, letting me know that a post i'd submitted a ticket before has had its mature content flag removed.

[stjohnstarling]

Hey it worked! Maybe if enough of us make a stink they’ll fix the fucking system.

[yujateaandpi]

Was driving with my grandmother and in broken English she says “no eyes… no nose… no face. Don’t trust.” To which I looked around wildly in search of this omen of ill portend.

Cybertruck. It was a cybertruck.

[musithical]

this part is one that i'm really going to hate. in the wake of all that happened yesterday, i need to talk about finances. i know this is long, but i urge you to read through, because i could really use some tangible, real help right now.

as many of you know, the work we did for Avid was substantial. the music we made with him has been our lifeblood for the past several months as we have been reeling from the onset of a severe, life changing disability diagnosis that prevents us from working a typical job. music, video editing, streaming, and making our own videos are about all we can do. our disabling dissociative amnesia prevents the timely and reasonable learning of new skills. while we have been working constantly with a dissociative specialist to inch towards remedying this, we do not expect that we will be equipped to work in any other capacity any time soon.

the royalties we received from the music we made together with Avid were roughly 80-90% of our income on any given month for the calendar year so far, and they have helped us stay afloat while we have been trying to go through the rigorous and ill-equipped disability system.

putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea regardless, and the fears i had building for the past couple of months only further emphasized this. as such, i have been trying to diversify by engaging with streaming, trying to get my name out there for collaborative work in other SMPs, and reaching out to my creator friends for editing work. i really can't thank two people in particular enough - LeonSBU and NatureOfGaming - for providing me work as they have been able to afford and especially in Leon's case, getting my name out there for other SMPs.

unfortunately, the true extent of Avid's manipulations and lies were more than i could ever have imagined. the fact that my entire understanding of his intentions has been flipped in a matter of no more than 3 days feels like being hit by a truck. for full transparency, i am no longer in contact with Avid, but i did inform them that i was leaving the fate of our music in their hands. in the final messages he sent to me before i cut contact, he told me that he "would never cut [me] off financially". he told me he would never do a lot of things, so forgive me if i have trouble trusting this. regardless, the dropoff in listenership after what has been revealed will be substantial and immediate.

in the best case-scenario, i have a month or two left before royalties catch up to this dropoff, and will see consistent income for that time still. in the worst, i will no longer be able to afford my rent by the end of the month if he does remove the music and disable my royalty splits.

what i need is two things: i need immediate funds to fall back on in case things go poorly, and i need longevity. i have been so lucky to be surrounded by so many truly astounding and generous creators who have been willing to put my name out there for work. i am hoping this comes to fruition. i am already hearing from some about potential editing opportunities which is amazing. but things are still up in the air, and i need to be quick and smart. this is why i am doing something that my fans know i hate. i'm asking for help.

as i see it, there are three pillars to this. all the highlighted text below links directly:

immediate aid - if you have the funds to spare, buying our music on Bandcamp and donating to our Ko-Fi are methods of which we see the funds in a matter of days, if not instantly. this will help us build an emergency fund if worse comes to worse.

supporting our work - by spreading the word about our streaming on Twitch and listening to our music on streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube (and any other platform our music is on), you provide a significant source of consistent income that we can rely on month-to-month.

word of mouth - talking about what we do and why you enjoy it is a surprisingly big help, because it helps us find connections for potential growth opportunities and commission work. additionally, letting people know we have a Discord and are the ones responsible for Avid's music in the first place not only helps us, but it helps the people who loved Avid's music know there is more out there from the person who made his songs possible.

i'm gonna level with you all. i fucking hate writing this. i feel like a beggar. i feel humiliated. these past three days of piecing things together have been some of the worst of my life, and having to once again ask for help is the cherry on top. since i learned about the truth three days ago, this has been constantly looming over me. everything else has been made crystal clear to me, so i at least know without a shadow of a doubt what happened. but with this? i'm terrified. Avid knew my situation, my disability, my reliance on our work together. he has left me in a truly impossible situation. i am taking it as an opportunity to double down on the work i was already doing and try to turn it into a positive. i hope that you all are gracious enough to help me make that a reality. it would really mean the world right now.

for some positivity in all of this, here's a sneak peak of my next song. i'm so ready to move forwards and i'm trying to let this empower me to make some awesome fucking art. thank you to everyone who read to the end. hope to see you all soon <3

[creatingblackcharacters]

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀 nonblack America might lose their shit... But me personally... I would like to see the vision 👀👀👀👀👀

[shofarsogood]

Look, I'm all for switching up character's races. But one, Patrick Stewart isn't dead. Two, Prof X is one of those characters where the race is important. Here's why.

Charles Xavier is privileged as fuck. Yeah, he's disabled, but that didn't happen until he was a grown man. He's white, male, cishet, Christian, well-educated, and wealthy. He spent years just traveling the globe for the fun of it. Charles Xavier is the epitome of privilege. Charles Xavier has never entered a room where his voice wasn't heard. He has always had that buffer where things come easily to him because of who he is. He expects that if he asks nicely, humans will treat mutants with respect. Of course he does! No one has ever taken an aspect of his identity and used it as a reason he shouldn't be listened to! He truly believes mutants will be fine if they help humans and follow all the laws and have conversations with men like Senator Kelly.

So the way Charles handles the treatment of mutants is totally different from how Magneto handles it. Magneto is Jewish and lived with Romani people for a while (presenting as Romani, while not being Romani himself). He watched his country turn against his family for being Jewish. His wife left him when she found out he was a mutant (also he killed a whole ton of people, but w/e). His daughter was murdered because he was a mutant. He has no belief that he will be accepted. He expects that his mutation will be rejected, and he's right. He expects the hatred that he grew up with. Magneto watched his father, a WW1 vet, ask a military friend for help only to be rejected and told that he was wrong for even asking, that he would expect an Aryan to treat him like anyone else. Magneto knows what happens when you ask nicely and play by their rules: you get put in camps. He knows that the legal system made by humans doesn't work. He knows it can be abandoned at any moment.

Charles Xavier is naive and hopeful, but that only works for a privileged person. I truly believe that in order for Charles Xavier to function as he is, in the role he plays, he needs to be a wealthy, cishet, WASP, white male. This contrast doesn't work any other way.

[vaspider]

Jesus Christ.

Patrick Stewart not only doesn't own Xavier, he isn't even the only living actor who has played Xavier. I stopped reading after that sentence, because anything after that is going to be some kind of weird self-justification.

[jaffacake6]

I think Black Xavier could work and be cool, but literally everything after that sentence is a pretty reasonable argument about how privilege is a relevant aspect of Xavier's character - it is not that much to read before completely dismissing their thoughts.

Like I don't agree with "It could never work" but it's a fair reasoning.

[vaspider]

Having gone back and read it once I got less annoyed, I don't actually think that it is fair reasoning at all. Every bit of that reasoning presupposes that there is only one way for Xavier to become who he is, and one reason why he plays the role that he does. That is a very shallow way to view characters.

If someone's read of the character requires that Xavier come from unquestioned privilege, I really wonder how much of the history of the character that person can really understand. Since the 60s, common wisdom, and repeated statements from various writers, has been that "Xavier is MLK and Magneto is Malcolm X". How does that at all square with this idea that Charles has to be white?

Just off the top of my head, you could have a Charles Xavier who grew up as the child of 1960s civil rights leaders who were able to make political careers from their activism, and thus experienced a great deal of relative privilege in terms of his economic status, his education, his connection to powerful people from a young age. This is someone who gets as high in the world as a Black man is allowed to get, and yet he is never allowed to be really equal. The system has worked for him, most of the time, most of his life, and so he believes that the system can be made to work for everybody. (The more I write this out, the more I am saying, "kind of a VP Harris, tbh, with the very significant gender difference.") That is his contrast with Magneto, his belief in humanity and existing human institutions: he believes that what exists can be reformed and mutants can achieve freedom by that reform. That is the core of his conflict with Magneto, not his whiteness.

And then you put that up against a Black Jewish Magneto who has seen the best and the worst of humanity in all the parts of who he is — the solidarity and the racism within American Judaism along with everything else — and who believes that what exists must be destroyed for mutants to achieve real freedom.

There are so many very interesting ways to approach that contrast, and absolutely none of them require either one of them to be white. I would actually argue that a biracial Xavier played by someone like Esposito, who was born in Denmark, lived in Rome until he was 5, attended a private Catholic college in New York, and then struggled as an actor after his divorce due to being typecast as a "thug" until he actually actively contemplated killing himself for the insurance money to provide for his kids might bring something new to the role that speaks to where a lot of people are now. We literally have the Supreme Court saying with a straight face that "racism is over and we don't need the VRA anymore," and then handing the keys to the racism bulldozer to Louisiana, you know? What does "being equal and being free" mean in a world where we get a Black President and VP but it's followed by legal maneuvers that will probably decimate Black legislative representation for generations, and we get "marriage equality" but disabled people are still locked out of marriage in many cases, plus the fact that they lost Obergefell just meant that Republicans turned their hatred onto trans people as their next target? Can you meaningfully "reform" a system like that, or must it be razed to the ground?

The essential question of the X-Men is and always has been "reform the system" vs "destroy the system," and absolutely nothing in that question requires Xavier to be white.

It's a facile argument.

[thisisalovestry]

file -> phrases that are going to shift something in me forever

[insomniparty]

[2dadsfromaz]

Dictionary of Tango-isms

[x] with extra [x]

An intensifier. Usually styled as “flee with extra flee” but can be utilized with any word.

-ificator

Suffix indicating “machine that does [x]”. A “bonemeal-ificator”, for instance, is a machine that makes bonemeal.

niner

Used in place of any large number (“ten million bazillion niner stacks of wool”) or to punctuate the end of a statement in an affirmative way, similar to the phrase “ten-four”.

I’m not a builder/redstoner/gamer

A blatant and heinous lie.

[2dadsfromaz]

skadoodle - verb

An action word roughly synonymous with “move” and/or “operate” (as in “we’re just gonna skadoodle that over here”).

skadoodler - noun

The noun form of “skadoodle”, meaning “that which skadoodles”. Can occasionally be shorted to “skadoodle” which may cause some confusion with the verb form.

dunga dunga dunga

An onomatopoeia depicting movement, usually the footsteps of a large and heavy creature.

happy fun sauce - noun

Lava.

[2dadsfromaz]

Important additions courtesy of @justanotherwanderingone!

[x] harder

An imperative phrase. Normally [x] is a noun (which is not grammatically correct in English but is in Tango-isms). Similar use case to “lock in”, with [x] being used as a placeholder for the task that needs to be completed (eg. “wheat harder”).

[x] of eternal joy and happiness

A literal saw trap. Will probably be said with sadistic glee and whimsy. Exact wording may vary.

pancakes

45% chance this is a filler word

45% chance it’s another murder monster machine scheme

8% chance it’s literally just pancakes

2% chance he’s actually talking about waffles

[sin-ophelia]

Fangirls Through the Ages by Lid Thom