The River Rises

I'm K or Web (he/she/they). Current favorite things include Skyblock Kingdoms, Detective Beebo, and 80s-90s era X-Men. I'm an adult.

[annabelle--cane]

I am your computer spider

[mclennonyaoi]

working with kids and one of them says “you know you eat 8 spiders a night on average right?” and another goes “no no no those statistics are actually skewed by people who like eat spiders recreationally for fun and stuff” and my head snapped up like a fucking sleeper agent

[limbel]

we have to thank our brave soldiers in fandom who write gen fics. we have to thank our brave soldiers in fandom who write character studies and stories with no focus on romance or sex. we have to get on our knees and thank the brave soldiers in fandom who write about minor characters and friendship and family with no focus on romance or sex. i know it’s hard to care about characters in a world that seems to only revolve around ships but i see you. and i love you

[jewish-joy]

Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.

[nibeul]

if u think poc talking about fandom racism is ruining ur fun and putting a strain on the community, I wish u a very shut the fuck up

[anteaten-deactivated20220228]

[ninakaina]

everybody leaving tags on my letterboxd roundup like "they didn't do the nobody scene??" we're so fucking past that i need you to catch up. i went into the movie knowing they wouldn't do the nobody scene and frankly i had made peace with it like okay if you don't want odysseus calling himself outis because you don't feel like the joke translates well enough WHATEVER you dont need to film every line of the poem. what i was NOT prepared for is that THEY DON'T SPEAK TO POLYPHEMUS AT ALL. they don't steal a giant wheel of cheese, they don't get him drunk, odysseus doesn't taunt him after their escape, AND he doesn't cry out to poseidon or the other cyclopes on the shore. it's "revealed" that he can speak in the cave before their escape as he prays to poseidon. someone asks odysseus "should we try to reason with him?" and ODYSSEUS says "we're past that." resulting in an adaptation where odysseus does not use wit or trickery to escape polyphemus at all-- which is the case with every single obstacle he meets. this guy does not lie and he does not play tricks. his intelligence is restricted to battlefield tactics, the administration and direction of his men as units. You have to poke polyphemus so he opens his eye before you can stab it! I am very smart. the only point at which he could be described as "tricking" polyphemus is when-- because the movie is allergic to making odysseus look stupid or silly in any way-- they tie straw to their backs to be mistaken for sheep instead of riding the undersides of the sheep, and we are presented with an action sequence of trousered and armored soldiers somersaulting and army crawling under polyphemus' gently dangling hand. which i hate because it is a less clever solution that only works if polyphemus is extremely stupid (shepherd who doesn't know how many sheep he has) -- and more importantly because it removes IMO the most emotionally efficient moment in the odyssey, which is polyphemus talking to the one sheep that's walking slow because it has odysseus on its belly like "oh no are you feeling okay today? you're moving so slow, maybe you're upset because i'm in pain? you're the best sheep in the world and i love all of you my sheeps" like that scene is supposed to instantly retroactively humanize polyphemus and make you realize odysseus has been torturing a person with feelings who basically just wants to be left alone with his pet sheep and it's extremely good at that in every translation i've ever read. but not one of odysseus' enemies are allowed an inch of humanity in this entire adaptation which seems to be a veiled metaphor for the vietnam war so what can you expect. and yes because odysseus never does anything wrong or stupid or silly, OF COURSE he would never reveal his name and allow polyphemus to curse him, and his crew only "believes" that he's been cursed by poseidon thereafter, which removes the ENTIRE MAIN ANTAGONIST of the story and changes the central conflict from man vs. god to man vs. ????

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[dogpuppy]

[nineteenyearoldmeblog]

im fucking crying

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

hearing anything about the nolan odyssey is so funny. it's like "they cut the extremely important and infamous nobody scene" "the cyclops is a giant puppet that they put in an actual historical cave + gave circe animatronics for her pig transformation instead of cgi" "they dumped plastic skeletons in an environmentally protected location they were not supposed to be in" "they recreated ancient greek instruments in order to have an accurate score" "all of odysseus's agency is basically gone" "anne hathaway actually learned how to weave ancient looms" "the women in this movie are treated like shit" "they actually buried actors alive to get those underworld shots" "did you see what the fuck zendaya was fucking wearing holy shit you can't DO THAT, MA'AM" "what do you mean there was a legitimate epic the musical reference" "NOT A SINGLE FUCKING GREEK WAS CAST IN THIS MOVIE"

like did nolan have two guys standing at his side at all times whispering ideas in his ear and one told the truth and the other told lies and they didnt tell him which was which until they wrapped production cause

[notawesternspy]

"Trans men aren't as oppressed as trans women! Look at all these laws targeting trans women but not trans men!"

is as useless of a statement as,

"Lesbians aren't as oppressed as gay men! Look at all these laws targeting gay men but not lesbians!"

I'd be rightfully chastised for saying the latter, but apparently the former is just "transfeminism 101" to some people.

And to be clear, there are STILL places in the world where male homosexuality is punished but female homosexuality isn't. Would you say that queer women are privileged in these places? NO! You would recognise that the methods for oppressing queerness often differs based on the gender one is socially imposed upon birth.

The oppression of transmasculine people is often enacted in ways similar to that of cis women, especially cis queer women. These include tactics such as corrective rape/forced pregnancy and being dismissed as "confused" and "delusional," but also "predatory Evil Women who are going to Corrupt Your Daughters."

Unfortunately, this means a lot of trans men must be considered "not real men" in order to have their experiences validated. Transgender theory and mainstream transfeminism has failed in this regard. Since the idea of "a man being oppressed for being a man" is counterintuitive to decades of feminist thought, it is rejected outright.

Some say, "you're not oppressed for being a man, you're oppressed for being trans" as if those are distinct categories in this context.

If a trans man were not trans, they would be a cisgender woman. People have gotten so far into theory they are forgetting the real people behind these labels.

[marxism-transgenderism]

What always gets me about learning about settler colonialism is how once you learn about it you cannot unsee the violence to the land itself. My home state was previously nearly 100% wetlands, apart of the wider Ohio river valley whose biodiversity supported such large populations of hundreds of different species that many contemporary source from settlers describe it as like the garden of Eden.

The Indigenous people who farmed and hunted here (and still farm and hunt in what land they have been able to keep and reclaim) were able to grow miles of upon miles of crops with multiple harvests a year, encouraging this biodiversity by creating forest gardens with incredible amounts of food from staples like corn and squash to local fruits like pawpaws to European imports like apples alongside controlled burns which allowed fields and buffalo ranges to expand.

Nowadays my state is known almost exclusively for its fields of nothing but corn and soy beans. Driving through in between the comparatively small cities you'll see nothing but fields where the plethora of different trees and plants were chopped down mile by mile, the remaining wetlands drained and flattened, and the rich black soils robbed of their nutrients through decades upon decades of monocrop agriculture now preserved through the life blood of petrochemical fertilizers which destroy the surrounding environment.

This process was done mile by mile as the tens of thousands of Indigenous people were killed and displaced by settlers and the US army, the land measured and sold acre by acre to white settlers who raped the land as described, filling the pockets of wealthy land speculators (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) who bought the land directly from the government in schemes so corrupt historians have dedicated entire careers to mapping out their dramas.

It's like learning about commodity fetishism and suddenly seeing hundreds of strangers in the products that surround you. Once you learn how the land was destroyed for profit you'll never look at the miles of fields or the cracks in the concrete of buildings built on wetlands or the stench of now obsolete canals built solely for a once boat-dependent economy with no care for the environment the same.

[catsandwich-deactivated20240213]

This is a literal sexual harassment training video we had to complete

[quendergeer]

i assumed this was porn

[onthegreatsea]

the removal of physical media is not the inevitable progression of improving tech, its like the removal of the 3.5mm jack: purely a result of profit physical games still account for about 1/5th of all sales of video games

but by only selling digital games sony can be the ultimate arbiter of their price. they can stop you lending games and force another sale instead. they can stop the sale of second hand games and keep prices artificially high. they can set any price they want and that will be your only option.

[apocherri]

SORRY WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHITEPINE FINALE THIS SATURDAY.

[apocherri]

[solarpunk-nightbird]

Actually, fuck the myth of the Tower of Babel. The real beautiful utopia where we can all finally truly understand each other doesn't lie in sameness or uniformity, it lies in the giant and digital Rosetta Stone we are going to build and broadcast across the entire world

[solarpunk-nightbird]

So, genuinely no hard feelings, I get where y'all are coming from, but that was actually kind of my entire point

The Rosetta Stone was and is real.

This is indisputable. You can go see the Rosetta Stone on display right now!! I'd say you could even it touch it, but there's museum glass in the way, so that the oils on human skin can't further degrade this 2,000-year-old stele, which is one of the most important surviving historical texts in the world.

The Tower of Babel is not real, and it never was.

The Tower of Babel is a millennia-old religious story about a mythological tower, which serves as a mythological explanation for the origin of different human languages. Yes, there are some religious historians who speculate that the myth was inspired by one or another physical tower, but no, that doesn't prove anything other than "this is how many people in this cultural explained or understood that sort of event."

The Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, is an object of translation that actually exists

Photo credit: By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved from Wikipedia article "Rosetta Stone." https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3153928

That picture is of a real object. It is not of a picture of a 3,000+ year old myth.

Our attempts to understand each other will not result in us being struck down by some force from on high!

And the true path to a world where we can all understand each other does not involve us all speaking the same language. That's racist bs

True understanding depends on ethical translation and language preservation, not on unity of language

[kaylmao]

idk i would personally rather give up access to certain products seasonally or locally than have people enslaved to give me the ability to have any product any place any time. i think i can go without tomatoes in january.

[aro-culture-is]

Aro culture is putting all of the characters in queer platonic relationships instead of shipping them romantically.

ngl when this is still used to pair/ship everyone off, it feels very "i learned about a new way to ship that's more #progressive" while still being amatonormative, y'know?