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Not today Justin
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@wordsandrobots
This is a pinned post
I thought it might be useful, for me and for you, dear reader, to have some sort of index for everything that's populated this blog over the past few years. Thus, here is a list of links to the musings and ramblings of one bi Englishman.
(I am of the generation taught to be extremely leery about sharing personal details on the internet but I fear the cat is out of the bag on at least these aspects of my positionality.)
I will not call myself or other people "gooners" or "npcs" or "larpers". i will not call things i dont like "slop". i will not use terms like "-oids". i dont like how common language is slowly becoming more focused on shorthand terms for hate and apathy
Tags from @crystaltoa
Broccoli Knuckle Duster by David Delahunty
I reeeeaaalllyy don't like how widespread gender realism is in supposedly feminist circles on this website. You are one step away from becoming a radfem.
"Woman" is a socially constructed category and "women" have nothing intrinsic in common, other than viewing themselves as whatever "woman" is defined as in their society, or being judged by the standards of whatever "woman" is defined as in their society. Gender is as "real" of a category as race or neurotype, which is to say, it's not objectively real at all. It's an artificial category created on the basis of perceived shared traits among certain people. The people came first, they were grouped into their artificial category later. There are no intrinsic differences between men or women or nonbinary or multigender people.
Do you actually believe gender is a social construct or are you just mindlessly repeating the phrase because it sounds cool
Watching the queer way of interacting with gender go from "Gender is a social construct that can be fun to play with but at heart is a dangerous toy because it has been used for generations to oppress and divide people." To "Everyone has a perfect crystal of true gender which you must deeply introspect to discover, and you can be wrong about its nature." Has been a disaster.
As a trans person this view I feel is deeply harmful and wrong. I do believe gender is a real and not socially constructed concept. I feel no one “gave” me my gender and people telling me my gender is a construct is insulting to who I am and how hard I worked to discover myself. Not everyone has the same experience as I do but to say as an objective that gender is made up is extremely presumptuous and rude. In my personal spiritual beliefs I feel every person’s soul comes with its own relationship to gender that isn’t given by society. Do not try to tell me my religion and my relationship with myself are made up. That’s not your place. Believe your beliefs and let others believe theirs. It harms no one.
Gender is undeniably a social construct. Your spiritual beliefs are also a social construct. Both was created and shaped by society and people's understanding of it changes constantly. A medieval Catholic's religious beliefs and experience of church were completely different from a modern Catholic's.
Children aren't born having a full understanding of gender or religion — they have to be indoctrinated into it. It might be inherent to people to seek out some kind of gender expression or spiritual belief, but the way we do it is not innate. We aren't born knowing that skirts are for girls and big trucks are for boys.
Money is also a social construct. That doesn't mean it isn't real or that it doesn't matter. It's just that people made it up and assigned meaning to it. We have no choice but to participate in it, so money is still important and meaningful to pretty much everyone in society because it defines our experiences of existing as humans right now. Still a social construct though, and has very recently changed from being exclusively bills & metal coins in your wallet/under your mattress to numbers in an app. Children have to learn how to interact with money and most people are pretty bad at it and it cases a lot of problems. The same could be said for gender.
The example that got my (really quite Catholic) mother to understand social constructs as both important and made up was days of the week.
There is no law of nature that proves it is Wednesday. Days are real - the Earth rotates, the sun rises and sets, that’s physics. Deciding to build our entire westernised lives around 1/4 of the moon’s orbit is made up. There is no law of physics that links this moment in the lunar procession to ‘Wednesday’.
And yet it really is Wednesday. Mum, you need to go to work and later your choir who practice on Wednesdays will be pissed if you skip practice because ‘Wednesday is a social construct’.
It’s also completely valid to have a favourite day of the week - Sunday for my mum since she goes to church, doesn’t work and avoids domestic chores on Sunday. And all those feelings about Sundays are completely valid in the absence of any law of nature which proves ‘it’s Sunday’.
And all those feelings about your gender…
💚❤️🩷💙
Polyamory is safe for work. Polyamory is safe for kids. Polyamory is safe for day time tv. Polyamory isn’t more sexual than any other relationship and it can be just as romantic, sweet, and healthy.
Aggressively reblogs.
3x11 - Ceremonies of Light and Dark
Jurassic Park Concept Art
Hey, you, cis girl that's very (correctly) vocal about women being allowed to talk about their periods, do you include trans women in that?
I ask because every single time I've tried to talk about it to anyone that isn't a trans woman they get fucking angry. Which has caused me to have to just suffer in silence every single month. So I really relate to cis women when they talk about literally the exact same thing; being shamed by everyone around them their whole lives for talking about their periods, so they just suffer in silence every month as it negatively impacts their work and social lives. But I don't even feel like I can voice that I am literally dealing with the same exact thing because most of y'all react like you want to throw me in front of a bus for saying it, even those of you who act like your such big great transfem allies.
I guess I'll take this opportunity to talk about trans women periods. The first thing any tme person thinks when they hear this is always "how can trans women have periods? They don't have uteruses!"
The answer is: the uterus isn't what causes your period, it is effected by your period. What causes your period and what causes trans women's periods is the same thing: the endocrine system.
HRT changes the sex of your endocrine system. Feminizing HRT makes it a female endocrine system, giving us a 28-day hormone cycle just like cis women. At the end of that cycle, the hypothalamus floods the body with prostaglandins. Those are what cause all but one of the period symptoms, because they make muscles inflame and contract. They are what make the uterus shed its lining, they are what cause intestinal cramps, they are what cause body aches, they are what cause headaches and migraines. The only period symptom not causes by the release of prostaglandins throughout the body is depression, and that is caused by your endocrine system simply not processing as much estrogen and from simply feeling like shit.
So, the only symptoms trans women don't get every 28 days is menstrual cramps, because yes we do not menstruate since we don't have uteruses. But migraines, depression, body aches, intestinal cramps, and the infamous "period shits" don't exactly add up to us having any better of a time. Except we have to pretend that we're fine and nothing is different because no one believes that we get periods, not even cis women.
"But you can't call it a period then because that refers to MENSTRUATION!" is another one I hear all the time. This is incorrect. You use the word "period" instead of just "menstruation" because it doesn't just refer to menstruation. It refers to a period at the end of the hormone cycle where we experience a host of symptoms. And not all cis women experience all of the symptoms that encompass the period. Not all cis women get migraines, or body aches, or have severe depression. If a cis woman gets a hysterectomy she doesn't menstruate either! In that instance she experiences an identical period to what trans women experience. Yet, I doubt you'd insist that cis women who've had hysterectomies don't have periods.
Oh, another thing that I personally discovered after bottom surgery: vaginal odor changes for trans women during our periods too. I was not expecting that because I always thought it was just from menstruation. But nope, the ph levels of a trans woman's vagina are the same of as a cis woman's vagina, and it changes during our periods just the same.
One day I am going to snap and go on a long, unhinged rant about the importance of retaining sight of the conditions under which a piece of media was produced when applying queer readings.
Not because I object to the queer reading (more! Give me more!) but because I object strenuously to giving artists and writers more credit than they deserve. Is something gay or was it created by people who think only male emotions and physicality should be taken seriously? Does the lead have the most chemistry with his rival because of sexual tension or because the female characters are badly written? Are they badly written or do they reflect societal assumptions you disagree with/don't experience? Etc, etc, from all angles, genders and directions.
It's far from the only example to irritate me, but in some ways I respect the average trans reading of Amuro and Char from Mobile Suit Gundam more than I do the average reading of them as gay for each other. At least the trans readings seem to be latching on to the ambiguity the writing carries towards how young men are raised to take their places as society's warriors and thus towards masculinity in general, rather than just the fact their emotional connection is deemed worthy of greater attention than any of the women in their lives.
The fact remains that both these facets have non-queer explanations rooted in the time, place and gender identity of the major creative figures. It's important to remember that, not because it invalidates any particular reading but because it's setting yourself up for disappointment to grasp for 'this is what they really meant'.
There's a high probability they didn't. And we have so many examples at this point of what happens when large numbers of people pin their hopes for queer representation on big, corporate stories that haven't a chance in hell of being allowed to go in that direction, or smaller-scale stories written by people who aren't inclined to provide that way. Not to mention that collapsing queer reading into queer expectation is so easily and obviously exploitable! How many 'first visibly queer' Disney characters are we up to now, exactly?
Which is without getting into the fine grain of what 'queer' looks like to different audiences and how all of this swings around in the other direction to complicate life for those genuinely trying to explore atypical gender and sexuality in fiction grumble grumble fume.
*deep breath*
No, Gundam, Star Trek and quite a lot else painted with this brush have not been 'queer all along', despite providing so much scope for queer readings. There is an important distinction between those two things (e.g. queer content vs content that can be read as queer) and it frustrates me no end when people act like they're the same.
I had a strange revelation reading/rereading the Brother Cadfael series recently.
I think Olivier is the only positive depiction of an Arab man I've seen in a published work that wasn't written by an Arab or a Muslim.
I'm not quite sure what to do with that. That a work set so close to the Crusades, that actively uses them as part of the background for the world and characters, a work using a portion of history so often used to dehumanise, insists so firmly on humanity.
It's very true to Peters general approach to the series, to everything she writes. From the focus on the civilian fallout from battles during the Anarchy, to having her main character insist that every dead man in a butchered castle be accounted for. From the poor travelling beggar, to the lepers.
It's not what I was expecting from a book series older than I am. And I appreciate it, I do. But there's a knot of feelings that go with it finding that particular, personal first now.
Console buttons from Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-69)
Culturally significant forbidden candy
BONDED PAIR, DO NOT SEPARATE THEM!!
The critical part of any bonded pair activity.
@wordsandrobots and his partner are watching Gundam Wing and i am being unfairly persecuted for unjust and cruelly terrible reasons such as my belief that Wing is good actually and makes sense if you REALLY look at it and also ignore the many things that do not make sense and are not good.
AND IS THIS A CRIME???
NAY, I SAY
and yet, ladies and gentleman of the jury, I have been subjected to such indignigites and offences AS:
Scruffing by the neck until sideways
the damages were severe.
AND:
UNAUTHORIZED LION COLORS
the changes have left me vulnerable to ducks, and VFX background removal.
BUT YOU WILL NOT SILENCE ME!!!! I SHALL NOT YIELD TO THIS VICIOUS CAMPAIGN AGAINST SMALL BONELESS FELINES!
WING IS GOOD! IT'S GOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!
(i love u)
@thedancingwalrus-blog
For your immediate attention.
(Full disclosure, I am subjecting my partner to the English dub AKA how I first encountered Gundam Wing. This is likely compounding the *gestures* everything.)
Hmmmmmmm
HMMMMMMM
You know I think I'll be good.
@ask-the-oz
i keep seeing people say that barbatos is the strongest gundam and for the life of me i can't understand why. like, barbatos isn't even the strongest gundam in ibo, let alone the entire franchise
I'd say that's debatable within IBO itself, but only because 'strongest' seems to be more a factor of how suicidally you plan on piloting, rather the specifications of each Gundam frame.
To address the point, though, which I admit I've not seen in the wild before, it might potentially be spill-over from the short-lived Gundam Evolution online multiplayer game released a few years ago? While I never played it myself, I recall some talk at the time of Barbatos being a particularly potent choice in matches because its melee damage was dialled up since that's what IBO mecha are known for.
It's either that or the same melee focus from the anime is skewing perception all on its own. And, honestly, if we're just talking about physical strength, I genuinely have no idea how to compare that across series. Its all relative to their own continuities and beam-sabers have got to mess up how we measure the power of impacts...
It’s probably also influenced by most Gundams’ “power” being in their beam weaponry, and IBO having that nifty nano-laminate armor that makes beam weaponry wildly ineffective, at least at the scales Mobile Armors were working with (no clue how that compares to all the other timelines’ beam weaponry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
So! Interesting things about nanolaminate armour.
The best 'test' of it undoubtedly comes in 'Gravity of Wishes' when a Graze Ritter is (unwillingly) put through the effects of re-entry. It's important to note that Mika kills the pilot before using the Graze as a heat-shield. We therefore lack information on whether the friction heat would have killed him, had he gone in alive. Given heat definitely transfers into the cabin in other cases, I wouldn't bet against it.
As you can see from this sequence, the Graze appears generally intact but has suffered structural stress on the way down. As Tekkadan realises Mika has survived, the Graze's rear skirt breaks off entirely.
Again, with the pilot dead, it's not super clear whether the 'suit is functional in this state. Very clearly, though, you don't want to raw dog re-entry in an IBO mecha. The armour provides some protection and the individual plates come through in one piece. That's not the same as making the whole machine invulnerable to something traditionally implied to be certain-death in Gundam shows.
Which we of course see reflected when the armour performs it's intended purpose. Because, yes, Ride's Shidan is -- without even the help of its shield -- able to disperse the effects of a full-power beam-weapon (contextually, not good).
However, the magazine on his exposed rifle detonates with the heat, destroying the hand that was holding it.
And the whole machine is left smoking and disrupted by the intensity of the attack.
Even for a mobile suit equipped with nanolaminate armour (which is canonically strengthened by the flow of Ahab particles from the 'suit's reactor), a head-on beam-weapon blast isn't something to be taken lightly. Part of this does appear to be how prepared the pilot is for the effect. Ride charges in without knowing what he's facing. In the next episode, however, Chad is able to weather the attack much more easily simply by knowing that it's coming.
If it's not clear from the screengrab, he's using his Landman Rodi's arm to shield the main torso, rather than unintentionally blocking with his chest. Mika will later deflect another beam in the same fashion.
Something that we do not see is how well the armour holds up to multiple beam-weapon strikes. All the instances covered in the show see a 'suit resisting a single attack, or only tank one out of several (the apparent charging time of the beam is a factor here; Mika deflects Hashmal's aim when he arrives for the final confrontation, sending the blast into the sky, and it's a short while before the mobile armour fires the above shot). This is potentially significant since we know the nanolaminate is a coating on the armour, not an inherent property of the components themselves. There's such a thing as nanolaminate paint, and we know it can wear out (see McGillis' slightly confusing comments vis a vis Barbatos' thrusters in 'Beyond the Red Sky').
It might therefore be possible for repeated beam-weapon attacks to overwhelm a mobile suit's defences. This may be a factor in the re-entry problem too, where even this miraculous protection would be worn away by the sustained heat.
Additional evidence for the limits of nanolaminate comes in the form of Biscuit mentioning 'anti-ship napalm' as a close-range weapon for space combat. If we assume this shares qualities with regular napalm, then it would be a sticky substance delivering high heat to an affected surface. Ideal, perhaps, for burning away the nanolaminate coating protecting a spaceship's hull.
The picture that emerges from all this is of a coating easily capable of handling glancing blows from high-intensity beam-weaponry but that might rapidly degrade under repeated impacts, multiple angles of attack, or a sustained assault. This would still allow IBO 'suits to weather the 'average' beam-weaponry from other Gundam series, but wouldn't completely neutralise the higher-output models such as the Wing Zero's Buster Rifles or, crucially, beam-sabers. You're not immediately cutting off limbs with one of those, but if you're able to stab a beam-saber right up against a piece of nanolaminated armour, it's plausible you'd nevertheless be able to melt through it.
Where this leaves us in terms of overall 'strength' or 'power' when comparing mobile suits from across the franchise, I don't know. It's not like 'can easily weather glancing blows from beam-weaponry' isn't utterly game-breaking in the wider context. However . . . well, I already mentioned the Buster Rifles and those are far from the only beam-weapons that are comparable to or higher-output than the mobile armour beam-weapons in IBO. With the best will in the world, I doubt any IBO 'suit is surviving, say, a direct blast from the Solar System or a Colony Laser, something that taxed even the Unicorns . . .
i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while
i am kissing you on the mouth right now
you are the only person who understands me. you and the person who tagged a series of unfortunate events
