sirenalpha reblogged
my atla posts are going around again and rereading some of the responses to me lol
I really think I ignored how weirdly this person wrote at the time and how they bragged about being deeply intellectual when they admitted they couldn't follow an argument and believed in a flat arc as a concept
They also followed it up with this banger:
why should I read a science journal to learn the structure for literary (or in this case tv show) analysis?? I also literally have an English degree, I read and wrote actual essays including on tv shows/film not just books
I was definitely casual and snarky at that time because it's the internet not an essay I'm submitting for a grade and I'd had multiple people intentionally misunderstanding me at that point
but I still had evidence for my positions and structured my arguments and didn't mischaracterize anything or state anything factually untrue (when this person mixed up Aang entering the spirit world with him entering the avatar state in the s1 finale)
I really skipped a lot to stay on focus with some of these people lol
I still can't believe that a fic that was just supposed to be a few thousand words long and that I started like last September is now over 100k
truly you can accomplish great things if you let yourself have fun and be insane about something
I'm back to report that there is not really any King Kuei fic on ao3 and for some reason his tag is just Kuei which why??? Why cant he be King Kuei??
commenter: I loved all the politicking and actually King Kuei is my favorite character so I was excited to see the mention and I also liked all the clothes and etiquette
me: yeah if you like that stuff I could see how you would like King Kuei as a character there's definitely a wild historical/fantasy cdrama style au where he goes from a puppet who doesn't think anything is wrong to finding out from a bunch of kids there's a war on and his most trusted advisor is lying to him then he's usurped by a 14 year old princess like a week later and cast out of the palace but instead of wandering the countryside and meeting the people he rejoins his surviving generals to create a rebel government and tries to learn politics then boom the wars over and he has to figure out world peace with a sixteen year old boy king, an isolationist chief grieving his daughter, and another chief who has mostly been operating as the captain of a war ship, and a twelve year old arbitrator and they all know about as much as each other about doing any of this
me:....actually that sounds really good has anyone written this??
sirenalpha reblogged
Hey, happy Earth Day! Who wants to talk about climate change?
Yeah, okay, fair, I kinda figured the answer to that would be "ugh do we have to?" What if I told you I have good news though? Good news with caveats, but still good news.
What if I told you that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we've avoided a whole degree celsius of global warming by 2100, or maybe more?
Current projections are 2.7C, which is way better than the 3-5C (with a median of 3.7C) we were expecting in 2015. It's not where we want to be - 1.5C - but it is big, noticeable progress!
And it's not like we either hit 1.5C and avoid all the big scary consequences or fail to hit 1.5C and get all of them - every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid is going to prevent more severe problems like extreme weather, sea level rise, etc.
This means that climate change mitigation efforts are having a noticeable impact! This means a dramatically better, safer future - and if we keep pushing, we could lower the amount of global warming we end up with even further. This is huge progress, and we need to celebrate it, even though the fight isn't over.
It's working. Keep going.
sirenalpha reblogged
On top of that, a lot of (foreign) names for tribal groups or communities boil down to:
"Those Guys Who Aren't Us".
This happened for the same reason, explorers talking with a group they had contact with and asking them about their neighbours. These names are known as exonyms because they've been applied from outside the group.
One famous example is Eskimo - the etymology is disputed but the most accepted meaning is "The Guys Who Wear Snowshoes", as named by tribes who did not wear snowshoes. That's why the word has been phased out for Inuit - lit. "The People" (or, essentially "Us").
Or my favourite one - we don't know what the Celts called themselves. Celt comes from the Greek keltoi, meaning "Foreigner". The Romans referred to the Celtic peoples of modern-day France as gauls, meaning... "Foreigner". The French refer to the Welsh as gallois, meaning... "Foreigner"!
Even "Welsh" essentially means "Foreigner"! It's derived from a generic Old German word for people living in Gaul. But the Welsh call themselves Cymry, which means "fellow countrymen".
In short: scratch the surface and many names mean either "us" or "them", and no one in human history has had any imagination.
You can't complain about people being called 'The People' when you live on a planet called 'The Ground'.
sirenalpha reblogged
ironically i am working right now so i can’t do a full post on this like i would really prefer to do… but these are the most cartoonishly evil people that you could possibly imagine, even in a society as flawed as the one we’ve built for ourselves. these are bedrock groups devoted to protecting the american worker and consumer. massive huge giant waving red flags 🚩
i am telling you this is going to snowball into something nobody wants to see. the only upside is that this might actually lead to a worker uprising. this is fucking ghoulish.
this caught my eye so i checked it out
christ fucking almighty we are so boned
sirenalpha reblogged
an interesting take on this from matt braly, creator of amphibia
Imagine being a business that has managed to get THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS IT IS POSSIBLE TO HAVE, and you've managed to make it so this is a bad thing.
You did it. That's late stage capitalism in one sentence.
"What was promised as infinite growth proved to be finite" feels like a very concise summary of every business person ever everywhere.
sirenalpha reblogged
So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????
I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.
Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?
Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.
Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.
wow. really hope this isn't actually a norm taking hold with new users! this isn't facebook, you don't need to know people before following them
this is the '10 year mutuals you've never spoken to once' site
weirdest thing to be annoyed about but I had another sync issue w dropbox and it somehow ended up eating my writing history and I hadn't copied it all down yet
so I went from 22k this month to 16k and that just annoys me
I can't believe grey's s19 just ended like that wtf
I definitely have a pet peeve about people who can't take differing opinions
maybe this is because I've found myself on the outside when it comes to stanned characters/ships too many time or just because I've liked enough rare pairs but
I do not like it when people go agree to disagree to shut down a conversation and be like it's just an opinion
like a) your opinion should still be evidenced, b) the conversation especially when it involves other people not just the two of us is not beholden to your whims alone and c) I usually want to know why someone thinks differently than me which means you need to talk not brush off a different opinion as agree to disagree
I think it's also because I don't really vibe with stan culture either, I try to keep my feet on the ground and understand the criticism of my faves even if I don't agree, I'm not gonna stand there and act like there is anything in this world that doesn't have flaws
my favorite show can have bad episodes, my favorite character can have poor writing, my favorite artists can have bad songs, my favorite actor can have bad performances and be in flops and it's especially true when it comes to real people, I don't actually know them and they're not my friend
the negative consequences of a parasocial relationship and being unable to take a differing opinion or any criticism is not an opinion either you can just decide to agree to disagree on
so I listened to part of the tortured poets department for florence welch and tried a few of the songs after
and I thought they were bland like the lyricism was good but thats not enough to carry it imo
and a swiftie friend (or at least listens to more swift than me) is telling me those are the good ones???
rip swifties and having to sit thru 2 hrs of that
