Wishwars

Peacocks are hilarious, really. They really are just like

one of the best tips for Real Life that I’ve ever picked up is to always highball your estimate whenever someone asks you “when can you get this done by” by about 25% (if you can get away with it). that way, if it ends up being harder than you thought, you’ve got extra time to figure things out and if you were right about how much time it takes then you get to look like an absolute genius instead of just a simply competent person.

what you may not have realized is that I learned this crucial piece of life advice from an episode of Star Trek where Scotty is telling Geordi that whenever he told Kirk something on the Enterprise was at full capacity, it was always only ever a notch or so below full capacity so that Scotty looked like the god of all engineers when he was able to magically hack the warp drive to run a little beyond what he’d told everyone else was “full capacity” and honestly that one throwaway gag from Star Trek has changed my life.

star trek heritage post (June 9th, 2017)

Norman Gary Finkelstein, for those asking.

they used to make smackable technology. you used to be able to hit your tv when it didn't work good.

when I was a kid I had an old tv in my room that would always turn to unwatchable static in the middle of shows but one night my sister and I were watching Naruto & every time Kakashi was on-screen the static cleared so we were like “hahaha the tv looooves Kakashi.”

I had a Kakashi bookmark so we held it up against the screen as a joke but the static actually cleared up. Mystified, we tried different bookmarks and objects with the same plastic material but nothing else worked, only the Kakashi bookmark.

We ended up taping it to the corner of the screen and it stayed there for 11 years until we moved out. When I was older people would be like “can you move the bookmark off the screen” bc it did sort of block a bit of the view but I would demonstrate the static issue and everyone was always just like “huh. what the hell?? well…alright.”

No explanation, but thanks Kakashi.

i am a woman at war with herself, torn forever between my love of detective fiction and my hatred of cops and cop media

I hate when people say ohhhh your pets only love you because you feed them. as if that wasn't the first form of love any of us felt. get real.

So true. Food is literally what we use to tell animals we won't hurt them. We give them food and then don't do anything to them and the animal learns you're a cool dude, and becomes open to bonding. When you bond, you Know your pet loves you. It's the primary way we get feral kittens to start trusting humans. It's no different really with people and how we come together, we bond over meals all the fucking time.

Also like. There is no higher praise than knowing an animal feels safe enough to come to you with their basic needs. That's why I like when it's cold and my cat comes to sit on my chest. She could go directly to the heater and often does when I'm at work, but does the heater cuddle back? Does it thumb rub her ears and talk to her in a voice she recognizes as contented and pleased?

TIL In an epilogue at the end of the original 1931 Dracula film, Dracula breaks the fourth wall and taunts the audience, saying vampires are real and to be afraid. In a 1936 re-release, this was censored by the Hays Code, out of fear it would encourage belief in the occult.

via reddit.com

think about how many people have died because they took out the warning

This is hilarious because the biggest edit Stoker’s editor made him do was to cut out a preface that said “this was all real and the Harkers are wonderful people and my friends :)” The editor felt he risked inducing mass panic.

you know i have never heard a convincing arguement as to why AO3 should not moderate the content that is posted to their website and i think a lot of the arguement against moderation on AO3 boils down to, terminally online people thinks community moderation is the same as government censorship and personally sending the cops to someone’s house to arrest them irl/

Just because you don’t agree with an argument doesn’t mean it’s a bad one. When it was founded the people made a promise to its users. “We will host all transformational works(fanfic) allowed by US law.” This promise came about after other sites had routinely purged fanworks without warning. Not just the same things people call for moderation on now but far more reaching and random. Like FF.net purged ALL mature/NC17 fics from their site, they also purged and banned the ENTIRE genre of songfics(written equivalent of fan made music videos made by putting song lyrics between paragraphs of story prose)

Ao3 bringing in any sort of content moderation or limits on what fics they will host would be breaking that initial promise to their users.

I guess if you’ve never woken up and found chunks of your fave fandom, some fanworks you yourself created just gone, because whoever was hosting it decided to change the rules on you, you wouldn’t understand. And unless you primarily read fics at sites other than Ao3 because of their determination to keep that promise you won’t have to.

see that is the thing that i really do not get, Like the thing that i cannot understand about this arguement is that bad moderation means no moderation should be allowed? It’s ok for AO3 to host racist fanfics and child porn, because the alternative is just random deletions? Like why is the alternative to no moderation bad moderation? Why do AO3 defenders keep on acting like the only options are either no moderations at all, or else it will be fanfics deleted without rhyme or reason? Like why is the argument always in black and white extremes?

One. Ao3 does not host child porn. You can stop with that lie right the fuck now. Child porn(or the more correct term Child Sexual Abuse/Exploitation Material) is when someone has a child under their control and forces them to perform sexual acts and either photographs or films it. It is a recorded documentation of abuse and is in fact illegal(and therefore not allowed to be hosted on Ao3) It is wrong, immoral, and illegal because a real live, breathing child with thoughts, and feelings is being hurt and will have to live with the memory of their abuse for the rest of their lives.The term does not apply to non-photorealistic fanart, or to written words depicting events that did not actually happen(meaning there is no victim and no-one has to live with the memory of the events).  Treating either fanart or fanfic as the same as  real life abuse is an insult and dis-service to every single child that has ever been sexually exploited because you think their suffering is equivalents to lines on paper.  That you think the immorality of CSEM is because it makes you feel “icky” and not because they were being hurt and exploited.  People writing fanfic of two teenage characters making out is in no way equivalent to a real life child having their rape recorded, but I routinely see people calling for moderation on Ao3 acting like it is.

Two. As for the racist(and every other kind of bigotry that can be depicted) I’m going to be honest. I don’t trust the various fandom communities to make a set of standards that aren’t just one group of fans forcing their will and preferences onto the rest of fans. I don’t know what fandoms you’ve been in, but I’ve seen fandoms with interracial ships where if you have the black character top you’re being racist because it’s playing into racist mandrigo tropes. But at the same time you would have people claiming that having the black character bottom you’re also being racist for making the black man submissive. So are both depictions/options racist, are neither of them, or are people just trying to make their personal fic preferences/interpretations some sort of moral issue and force people to cater to them?  I’ve been in fandom communities where the admin/moderators refused to let anyone post fics that didn’t match their preferences(despite claiming to be friendly to all fics) So it’s very much coming from a place of experience that says trying moderate Ao3 based on racism, or any other problematic metric/rubric you want to use will just end up being used to silence people(including other fans of color)

Racism exists in fandom because we live in a racist society and that will filter into ALL media, including fanfic. Trying to remove so called racist fanfic won’t make society any less racist. All it does is give a tool for bullies to try to control and harass people. Everyone has their own personal biases some conscious, some only in their subconscious that they haven’t bothered to unpack  Trying to moderate content based on standards like racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc… will inevitably lead to the moderators own personal biases leaking through resulting in uneven, inconsistent moderation resulting nothing but hurt feelings and fighting. 

Third. I would just like to mention just how heartless and unempathic you sounds when you act like random mass deletions and purges are no big deal. You have no idea how much it hurts to wake up and find something you created just gone. To find large swaths of fics that you enjoyed again and again, that you found comfort in, deleted never to be recovered. To say nothing of when Livejournal caved to a bunch of right-wing christian evangelical trolls and deleted a bunch of users and communities. People were devastated. people lost support communities and were frantically trying to find the friends they had made in those communities.

I know it may be hard to believe but fiction and art do not cause harm just by existing. A story that may be upsetting and triggering for one person, may bring healing and comfort to another, because everyone brings their own set of experiences and persepctives into every story they read, and therefore each takes something slightly different from it.  But you and every other person calling for moderation on Ao3 act a story causes harm to everyone, again just by existing.  It’s an insane perspective that makes no sense to me. A story I am not forced to read can’t hurt me any more than someone practicing a different religion can hurt me.

There are several ways that you can moderate AO3.

If you read a story and have strong opinions on it, e.g. you think it’s racist to write Adeline as a bully when she’s such an amazing hero character in the source material or you think that author CerseiFan69 writes such creepy stories that you never want to interact with them ever, it’s great that you’re thinking for yourself and trying to do some critical analysis.

You deserve the power to control your own reading experience, which AO3 gives you. However, I don’t trust you to tell the difference between a badly written story by a young writer who is black and wrote Adeline as a bully because Adeline’s accent reminds her of her real life high school bully, versus a badly written story by a writer who’s actually horrible. Likewise, you shouldn’t trust me to tell you which authors you should read as spine-chillingly excellent takes on dark content versus authors who make you want to scrub out your brain with steel wool.

I love the freedom of AO3, where I might write a bad story but at least I know that some moderator won’t judge me harshly and take it down.

Listen. The 11th Commandment is not “Thine beliefs are codified and just”. It’s “Don’t like, don’t read.”

You have no right to censorship. Period.

now i don't know much about star trek but data being an android named data is kind of funny it'd be like if there was a human being called memories

star trek heritage post (December 1st, 2023)

Came back wrong? How about came back right, except that the world you came back to is wrong. Came back just like waking up from a long nap only to find that the people who love you broke themselves into shards and bloody bargains to get you back.

There are new stains that nobody will explain, hidden beneath the rug in the upstairs hallway. Your mother's left eye is clouded and strange. The cat no longer goes near your brother. There's a sharp-edged shadow now, under your lover's smile.

Everybody says you must be remembering wrong, but your sense of smell is just as good as ever. The closet that used to smell like cedar and cinnamon smells like sulfur, now, and nobody will tell you why.

i know unicorns are usually silver or lavender with those skinny horse legs built for running but id like to see more unicorns with natural colouration built like tanks like these beasts

we need like a scale of unicorn. on one end you have amalthea last unicorn who is the peak of elegant otherworldly unicorns with silver and lavender colours. we need the opposite of that. we need a unicorn who looks like the horse version of a trucker

like this

smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud

this is gonna make me sound very Old Man Yells At Cloud but i just hate how many things in my life assume i will always have access to a quick, reliable internet connection and almost cease to function without it. Obviously certain things Have To Have An Internet Connection, but i want to be able to listen to music if my service is bad. i want to still watch movies if Netflix is down. i want to have a working map when i can’t get a cell signal. nearly every tech product these days bears the fingerprint of the extremely internet-rich places they are developed, high rent offices in Seattle, San Francisco, etc.. I think often the idea of the internet not being available is so remote to them it doesn’t even factor in to development. i remember when the Xbox One was debuted and Microsoft was almost mockingly like “if you don’t have reliable fast internet, then don’t bother buying this”, and there was such backlash they completely went back on so much of that. But now that attitude is just the tech norm.

No you're right and you should say it

My wife (a Professional IT Nerd) constantly tells people There Is No Cloud, It's Just Someone Else's Computer. The idea that you're just putting something on another computer and not in a Magical Cloud doesn't seem to occur to a lot of people.

the funniest dynamc between my boyfriend and i is the chef/baker divide runs so deep. experimentally my boyfriend is a genius with figuring out what flavor profiles will not just taste good together but also will be enjoyed by the specific audience he is cooking for. a recipe is not a guidebook so much as a suggestion and he will frankenstein ideas together to get exactly what he wants to happen. he also didnt know that sugar will not work properly if you dont mix it with the wet ingredients in banana bread and when i asked 'why didnt you do it in the order of the recipe' he said 'i didnt really think it mattered'. autistically i exploded his head in my mind

when your pumpkin loaf or banana loaf is not delightfully moist and soft and sweet like the pillow of a cherub and instead is like a dense fruitcake brick of misery we will see who is pretentious then. beast

So yeah bit of a fucked up name for a clothing store ngl

These companies still exist btw. Standard Fruit is now the Dole Food Company, United Fruit and Cuyamel merged and eventually were renamed to Chiquita Brands International, and the Guatemala coup is barely scratching the surface of the fucked up shit they did over here.

In 2007 Chiquita admitted to financing far-right paramilitary groups in my country as recently as 1997.