wisdom etc

[creatingblackcharacters]

It's always hard reading about the violence committed to steal America, but the buffalo is always like... That's some inhuman shit. Everyone is burning in hell for that one. Wdym there were thirty to sixty MILLION buffalo in 1800, and by 1900 there were only 300 left. THREE HUNDRED. Do you know, can you fathom the amount of purposeful cruelty required to kill NINETY NINE PERCENT of a population of an animal, just to spite and murder the living Native people who existed and thrived with them? All this, for White Power and Entitlement?? Sickening.

[sangreconcrema]

1. Man is a MORAL animal.

2. You can get human beings to do anything IF you convince them it is moral.

3. You can convince human beings anything is moral.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

"Just because I'm right, doesn't mean I'm being helpful" is a vastly underrated thought process that I strongly encourage others to get comfortable with

[rosslynpaladin]

No one cares how much you know

until/Unless they know you care.

[photos-of-space]

Venus just lost its last active spacecraft, as Japan has officially declared the Akatsuki orbiter - which took the clearest ever picture of the planet, as seen below - dead

[coffee-khaleesi-deactivated2020]

When I was training to be a battered women’s advocate, my supervisor said something that really blew my mind:

“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”

Any now whenever anyone in my life, either a friend or a client, frustrates me, disappoints me, or pisses me off, I just tell myself They are doing their best. Their best isn’t that great today, but I have days where my best isn’t that great either. 

[bogfox]

Op I’d like to thank you for sharing this. Ever since the first time I’ve read it I’ve held it in my mind and it really has helped me to be kinder to others and to myself.

[ot3]

i wish people were more capable of articulating critiques about exploitative conveniences like doordash without implying that the exploitation and the convenience are both equally objectionable.

[immigrant]

i kinda think it is because u cant rlly have one without the other

[ot3]

well see now i don't think that's true. its entirely possible to adequately compensate people to do stuff like "pick up and deliver food or other objects to someone's house," or any other kind of situation where you're paying someone else to do a task for you. it's the desire for third party entities to extract as much money as possible out of these interactions that causes the exploitation. like, having a neightborhood mailmain isn't exploitative just because there's a world where people could pick up their own mail at the post office because the mailman gets stuff like health insurance and paid leave and overtime.

[neon-rose]

I think there's a decent degree to which it depends on how much convenience you need (and at what price); mail delivery works wonderfully but it doesn't run individual trips from the post office to each house for each letter; food delivery is much more efficient when batched, but that means it takes longer and is less predictable, which would be less convenient.

[ot3]

i picked mail delivery as an example because it is a case of what in isolation would be almost unthinkable levels of convenience - people manually transporting packages hundreds of miles right to your doorstep over shockingly short periods of time for less than the cost of a cup of coffee - that is nevertheless extremely normal and benign due to the degree to which it has been effectively systematized and adequately compensated. but food delivery is already very much something that happens in scenarios that are significantly less exploitative than gig work while still being individual trips for specific people.

delivery drivers who are employees for restaurants are still bringing bespoke meals to your house on demand, and this is usually both cheaper And better compensated than gig work. some people have housekeepers or some kind of part time aide who will shop for them - elderly people more frequently so. obviously this is not a type of service that's super financially accessible for the average person, but when you consider how many grocery stores have started offering pickup orders at no additional cost, you can see how it could be feasible for a situation analogous to the post office to crop up in this space. grocery store employees who are already making an hourly wage based on the profits of the groceries get paid to prepare the orders for pick up, and a second person who is more like a mailman than an instacarter could do nothing more than pick up and deliver all orders for specific areas. much more efficient - and so much less costly - than each of those households needing to pay someone to spend an hour of their time in a grocery store on their behalf. we used to have a whole person whose job it was to bring fresh milk to your house every morning when that was a service the average person had a demand for.

i just feel like saying "how much convenience you need" kind of gives away the game on how much unexamined ableism plays into a lot of these discussions. without getting into the weeds of where one draws the line between convenience and accommodation, i really don't think that there are universally applicable 'quantities' or severity of convenience. there are just conveniences that are taken for granted and conveniences that aren't.

can having someone go to the grocery store for you really be thought of as "more convenience" than having an entire government agency with thousands of employees in place to hand deliver pieces of paper to the homes of every person in the country? personally i think not, but the difference is that mail delivery is something that almost everybody needs and wants, and the people who need or want grocery delivery are seen as only being in that position because there's something Wrong with us. we're too sick or too old. or we're just lazy. we just don't want to interact with people because the internet has made everyone misanthropic shut ins.

do you see what i mean?

[bumblebeebats]

I hope you don't mind me butting in, but this reminded me of another post that always drives me up the wall whenever it goes around that said essentially, "Having stores be open 24 hours is fundamentally exploitative. You all need to accept that in the communist utopia, every business will be open from 9am-4pm."

Which is just... complete nonsense?

I used to work a closing shift at a grocery store until 10pm. I specifically requested never to be given early shifts because my circadian rhythm runs late, and if I have to wake up before 8am more than like, two days in a row, I grow violently depressed and sleep deprived.

There are plenty of people like me who don't mind working at night. There are also plenty of people (carers, nurses, doctors, firefighters) who literally must work at night, and quite frankly, if they want a coffee on the way to the ER at 10pm and (AND!) the person making it is paid an actual living wage and happy to work at that time, then what the hell is wrong with that??

(I know the answer, ofc, because people have spent my whole life telling me I'm lazy or incompetent or unhealthy because my biology dictates that i feel better when I sleep on a different schedule from them. Because if someone can't get dressed and out of the house in time to go grocery shopping until 6pm because they're disabled or sick or have small children or just enjoy living life that way, that's a fundamental moral flaw, right?)

Anyway I hate the idea that these kinds of things are like, inherently exploitative Modern Luxuries, and that the only way to structure a just society is to toil away in misery and go to bed at 9pm because anything else is frivolous capitalist excess. Just because YOU, personally, do not think a service is necessary or wouldn't want to do it doesn't mean that other people do not need it, or that others wouldn't genuinely enjoy providing it if they were given healthcare, adequate pay, and safe and comfortable working conditions.

[jhoomwrites]

when reading a book, do you read the prologue/epilogue?

yes

prologue only

epilogue only

no

nuance (comments/tags)

Voting ended onApr 13

[yusuke-of-valla]

Looking at the tags, a lot of people are blessedly unaware of the Discourse, for posterity:

[orcboxer]

do they think... that prologues and epilogues... which take place within the story and are very much inside of the same book as the rest of the pages... don't count as part of the book....???.....

[gardenofava]

[tiny-forests]

moss mfriday #3: Glacier Mice

[image credit]

That's right - it's glacier mice. One of my favorite things maybe on the entire planet. Let's talk about these freaky fuzzy little rats!!

Glacier mice are balls of moss that live in large herds like this in a few select glaciers. They are moss all the way through, with a center consisting of dead moss matter, implying that they begin as small growths of moss and simply accumulate over time, like snowballs. However, their outside surface is alive and well on all sides. Glacier mice have been observed, through tagging and tracking, to roll across the glacier like a majestic herd of wildebeest, exposing all of their sides to the sunlight. They trundle along at a pace of about 2.5 cm per day. That's 30 feet in a year! They're really schmovin'! Certainly further than most mosses can claim to travel.

What's really exciting, though, is that they all move in the same direction, and we're not sure why or how. Scientists experimented to try and attribute their coordinated behavior to wind, sunlight, and the direction that their grazing ground slopes, but to no avail. They speed up, slow down, and change direction in unison, based on some mysterious moss code that we haven't cracked yet.

Cross-section of a glacier mouse. Note the dead moss matter inside, and the short gametophytes on the outside, adapted to harsh winds and sunlight. [image credit]

We have figured out how they roll, though - while the moss ball sits on the ice, it insulates the ice directly underneath it, protecting it from melting. This forms a little pillar of ice that the moss eventually rolls off of. The insulating power of glacier mice also gives it the wonderful ability to host all kinds of microorganisms that otherwise wouldn't survive the glacier's harsh conditions, and their ability to move makes it possible for microorganisms to spread from one habitable spot to another. They're like a bunch of little tardigrade passenger ships, braving the dangerous glacier to go where no water bear has gone before!!

Glacier mice have been found to consist of several moss species, most of which must reproduce asexually in order to survive in the dry climate. They've been observed to live for at least six years, but are projected to live much, much longer. I love them. So much. I hope they know that I love them!! I LOVE THEM!!!!

[source][source][source]

[owlservice]

Imagine walking around and hearing the gutters and trashcans talking to you. And your teeth of course. No wonder people were religious

[hexjulia]

i wanted to make a joke about my sudden bouts of silmarillion/tolkien obsession when stressed being 'the Elvish Disease' because it really is like rickets for the soul. however. that's when i started doubting myself because i vaguely remembered syphilis also being called the English Disease. so i decided to check and

damn.

[edderkopper]

Today I learned that cuttlefish experience REM sleep, and that it makes their skin flash random colors. This is the cutest thing ever.

[blackbearmagic]

The electric eel at my aquarium has a voltmeter attached to his tank, and whenever he pumps out a burst of electricity–either when he’s navigating his tank or getting fed–the meter lights up and makes noise. Sometimes, I’ll walk past him when he’s snuggled up and totally motionless on his log, and see the voltmeter going crazy.

I am left to assume that he is dreaming, and is sleep-zapping at the things in his dreams.

[arachnospooky]

I am absolutely delighted to learn that electric eels dream of kicking ass.

[targuzzler-deactivated20180224]

[penandinkprincess]

beloved friends and colleagues, mango was on sale during my last grocery shop, so naturally i had visions of sticky mango rice this week

well then i asked myself "i wonder if i could use coconut greek yogurt to make it higher in protein but with the same flavor profile?"

THE ANSWER IS YES

[notaplaceofhonour]

Ryan Gosling’s career has just been one long quest to climb the Warner Bros water tower

[notaplaceofhonour]

that man has been trying to climb this tower since he was 16. he has asked multiple times, and every time they said no, but now he’s famous enough & variety was able to convince them to do a shoot on the tower. it all led here. it was all for this.

[notaplaceofhonour]

I’m obsessed with the implication that this was a coming-of-age ritual where a boy becomes a man, like a bar mitzvah

[cyberglittter]

cholitas skaters by célia d. luna

[theslowesthnery]

anyway i looked up the post about seeing your grandma's boobs and tumblr has deleted the screenshot of the story where the finnish dude says that americans are "like that" because they haven't seen their grandma's tits

good job tumblr 👍

[antarctic-octopus]

[catboytitty]

[image description: a screenshot of a tumblr post. the first post is an answer to an ask. anonymous asked: boobs shouldn't sag like that asirensseng answered: what a funny way of admitting that you've never seen a pair of boobs outside of porn

a reblog on this post from tumblr user "that1betch" is a screenshot of the following text:

I always think of one of my co-workers at a husky farm near Inari, who told me apropos of nothing while we were clearing out dog shit together that he thought the reason Americans are "like that" ("like what, Veikka" got the response "you know what I mean") is because "they never see their grandma's tits." His logic was that "in Finland, you go to the sauna with your grandma from when you're a baby, and you see her naked, and this is years and years before you ever see any porn, so you know before you see any of it that it's temporary and fake. And when you get a girlfriend later, you know it's only a matter of time before her tits look like that too, you accept this.

And Americans don't know that! They don't! They look at porn, and then they get a wife, and then they're surprised and bitter when she gets old - it's true!"

Like, to be clear, I think Veikka's analysis might have been missing more than a bit of nuance, this is the same guy whose motto was "Driving 600km south to Rovaniemi to get therapy is expensive, chopping wood till you don't care about it anymore is free", but I do occasionally still look at some British or American take online and think to myself, in his voice, "they've never seen their grandma's tits"

it has 44,547 notes. end I.D.]

[mush7221]

Table Top Transition

[cosmospicegender]

@this-is-trans-joy

[this-is-trans-joy]

This is trans joy!!!

[wrens-roost]

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

GNU Terry Pratchett

[iconuk01]

The full quote is fascinating though, and adds an interesting context as it's Angua (a werewolf) and Carrot (human, but raised by dwarves) discussing a dwarf colleague, Cheery.

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

And to Terry Pratchett's credit what started out as a throwaway joke about dwarf sex, gradually becomes a multi-volume subplot which is a fascinating exploration of gender and social identity as more dwarves start to "come out" as being female, and not just identifying as female, but changing their form of dress to something which matches who they are (they keep their beards though, because to a dwarf, that has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with being a dwarf) and how their society has to adjust, with differing levels of comfort, to this new reality.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Carrot was also prejudiced against the undead early on as well. And the fact that he unlearns these views is a good example of a common theme in Pratchett's work

The overwhelming theme of Pratchett's work is change. Not good vs evil but progress vs stasis/going backwards. The protagonists of Pratchett's stories are people who can take on board new ideas and change and grow and adapt. Some of them start out as very stupid people with very stupid views in fact until they learn and grow and improve. The villains on the other hand are people who desperately want things to either stay the same or regress back to some imagined "Good old days" that they prefer.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

While we're talking about Terry Pratchett gender, there's also golems, who are basically lumps of clay that have been brought to life but don't actually have any gender or secondary sexual characteristics so everyone defaults to male and he/him. As the books story goes on some of them decide to try being women just because.

[yukinojou]

Feet of Clay came out in 1996. I cannot overstate how pronoun discourse wasn't anywhere on the radar then. I'm fairly terminally online, active in fandom, and the first I can remember is some timid discussion of neopronouns in the mid-2000s, where "how could you tell other people to use them for you" was a major puzzle. (I still love neopronouns - zie/hir appeals to me in a way they distinctly doesn't, genderfluid though I am.)

[prismatic-bell]

ALSO also also

1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.

2) Pterry had the best goyische take I've ever seen on golems, and I will die on that hill. It's not perfect, but it is really well-done, and it was done with respect, and to me that might be even more important than perfection.

[strawberry-wizzard]

I had the book to hand because I reread it recently. The quote goes:

When you've made up your mind to shout out who you are to the world, it's a relief to know that you can do it in a whisper.

[prismatic-bell]

THERE we go.

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

The thing to remember about Carrot is that he's a good person who cares a lot and very much wants to do the right thing, but he's still meant to be A Person. The text shows him fucking up and defaulting to Society Says or Everybody Knows when he gets caught sideways by a new situation or idea at least once per book in which he's featured prominently. The younger he is, the more he does it.

The reason that he's A Good Person™ is that he stops and listens and actually thinks very hard about the issue when someone is like "Well, that's bullshit and here's why." He looks at the evidence instead of what he's been told, and he values people and outcomes more than tradition and feelings of comfort or vague ideals. When it turns out the thing he thinks is actually bullshit, he usually changes his worldview to be fairer and he definitely changes his behavior to be better.

The older and more mature he gets, the more we see him actively seeking out opportunities to learn and grow and understand more about what people need and where they're coming from and why they do what they do. Instead of learning during moments of crisis and fucking it up, he's exploring on his own and learning how to handle unfamiliar situations better.

Much like with Vimes, he's meant to model the fact that good people don't spring from the ground fully formed with no bad thoughts or impulses or prejudices. People will fuck up and trip dick-first into blind spots they didn't even know they had and find things they never even thought they had to think about. You act like a good person by reevaluating received wisdom and valuing people over dogma and learning the difference between facts and bigotry.

It's never "Oh, Good People™ never do anything bad," it's "What makes someone a good person is how they handle it when they fuck up."