and gender is one of those things where it's so deeply culturally ingrained that these categories must have overwhelming significance that most people are deeply reluctant to confront just how arbitrary most of our signifiers of them are. like there's no reason women should have short hair and men should have long hair, or that different sexes should wear different clothing or whatever, but there are still subcultures within our society today that would treat the idea of long hair on a man or a woman wearing pants as a transgressive sexual perversion. a lot of the really deranged behavior from the cis types, like confronting women with short hair when they try to use the women's bathroom, or the transvestigation conspiracy stuff on twitter, is, i really believe, a desperate emotional defense against the creeping awareness that without these arbitrary markers of difference, it would be really hard to tell men and women apart! if men and women generally wore similar hairstyles and clothing styles and had similar patterns of speech and posture and mannerisms, you might guess wrong twenty, thirty, even forty percent of the time! very awkward for you if your cisness and/or straightness is a load-bearing part of your identity. but your neuroses are kind of exhausting for the rest of us.
How people can see this as anything other than fascism is way beyond me
You cannot be neutral about this
me: chat what do we think
the angel and devil on my shoulders: can you not call us that please
The naming of female characters in Bond movies makes a lot more sense if you headcanon them as trans women who picked their own slutty names.
Like, can I believe "Pussy Galore" is a cis woman who was named that as a baby? No. But a trans woman who got vaginaplasty and is very proud it of? Of course!
... so, uh, true fact, when I created the countdown widget for my wife's vaginoplasty back in 2022, it was titled " The Long-Awaited Arrival of the Fabulous Miss Pussy Galore."
Literally a French pastry called a gougar
Elizabeth Sweetheart, “The Green Lady” Kitten Kay Sera, “The Pink Lady” Ella London, “The Yellow Lady” Sandra Ramos, “The Purple Lady” Zorica Rebernik, “The Red Lady”
Leverage had a lot of well-researched things to say about the real world, but the one I always come back to, from The Double Blind Job:
Sophie: These are not small fines. Last year, my department handled a case where the company had to pay out $2.5 billion.
Hoffman: Oh, yeah. Everybody heard about that. But what the news didn’t tell you is that that company made $16 billion on the same drug. That fine was 14% of the profit. 14%. That’s like tipping your waiter.
“A fine is a price” – John Rogers, creator of “Leverage”
Lilo & Stitch is a great example of a story that has no villains. It has antagonists, sure, but most of them are well-meaning. The worst person in the film is that little shit Myrtle, but she’s not in the film that much anyway.
Since this post is getting traction I want to clarify how not-villainous the antagonists are:
- The Grand Councilwoman is literally just responding to what she sees as a threat to the galaxy and is extremely reasonable.
- Gantu is much the same. He’s a bit overzealous, yes, but he thinks he’s saving the galaxy from stitch.
- Cobra Bubbles is literally just doing his job, he’s obviously not happy about it but he is doing what he feels is best for Lilo. And much like the Councilwoman, he is extremely reasonable.
- Myrtle is, again, just a little shit. She’s a schoolyard bully and is truly small potatoes.
- Jumba calls himself an “evil scientist,” but literally nothing supports that. His only onscreen crime is creating a bunch of Pokémon that have powers that will mildly inconvenience people and can be persuaded to be nice over the course of 22 - 90 minutes, to say nothing of himself seeing as he decides to change his ways at the softest bit of persuasion.
- Pleakley is literally just gay.
The "villain" of Lilo and Stitch is, rather directly, societies and social systems that write people off and do not provide support and care.
It is obvious to the audience -- and deliberately presented this way by the film -- that it is better for Lilo to stay with her sister, even if her sister is a bit of a mess and not financially stable. Mr. Bubbles is not evil. He is there because he wants what's best for Lilo, and he is not unreasonable to think that the sister without a job who leaves the stove on and whose house nearly burned down two days later is not it. The solution is not to "defeat" Mr. Bubbles; the solution would be for society to help Nani succeed, rather than watch as she fails.
Similarly, no one provided any help to Stitch when he was created and discovered. They wrote him off as an abomination, something too dangerous to be destroyed. They weren't evil, and it wasn't unreasonable to think that the experiment created to be an agent of destruction would be better off scrapped. But what would have happened if they had at least tried?
Lilo and Stitch are two characters who were caught in systems that were cold, uncaring, and unsupportive, even if the people in them were not evil and were, in fact, just doing their best.
It's a movie about people who have been written off finding one another and building a found family where they can get and give the support and care they didn't get from the people with authority and I love it so much.
That tag sent me
bovine babies <3
What I was taught growing up: Wild edible plants and animals were just so naturally abundant that the indigenous people of my area, namely western Washington state, didn't have to develop agriculture and could just easily forage/hunt for all their needs.
The first pebble in what would become a landslide: Native peoples practiced intentional fire, which kept the trees from growing over the camas praire.
The next: PNW native peoples intentionally planted and cultivated forest gardens, and we can still see the increase in biodiversity where these gardens were today.
The next: We have an oak prairie savanna ecosystem that was intentionally maintained via intentional fire (which they were banned from doing for like, 100 years and we're just now starting to do again), and this ecosystem is disappearing as Douglas firs spread, invasive species take over, and land is turned into European-style agricultural systems.
The Land Slide: Actually, the native peoples had a complex agricultural and food processing system that allowed them to meet all their needs throughout the year, including storing food for the long, wet, dark winter. They collected a wide variety of plant foods (along with the salmon, deer, and other animals they hunted), from seaweeds to roots to berries, and they also managed these food systems via not only burning, but pruning, weeding, planting, digging/tilling, selectively harvesting root crops so that smaller ones were left behind to grow and the biggest were left to reseed, and careful harvesting at particular times for each species that both ensured their perennial (!) crops would continue thriving and that harvest occurred at the best time for the best quality food. American settlers were willfully ignorant of the complex agricultural system, because being thus allowed them to claim the land wasn't being used. Native peoples were actively managing the ecosystem to produce their food, in a sustainable manner that increased biodiversity, thus benefiting not only themselves but other species as well.
So that's cool. If you want to read more, I suggest "Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America" by Nancy J. Turner
And then I think about:
How we hunted the beavers to near extinction, and a beaver pond effects the soil moisture level, wetlands, etc.
How we banned intentional fires, and now are dealing with bigger, hotter, more dangerous fires. And that one of the tools in invasive species management is intentional fires.
How we have all these invasive plant species invading everywhere, and if people were still allowed/encouraged to "forage" like they did pre-colonialization, that would include removing those invasive species. And people would have eyes everywhere, so the populations of invasive species would not have had the chance to get established.
The land needs people. Leaving it "wild" and "untouched" is actually neglect.
Aging is hot. Gray hairs are hot. Smile lines are hot. Get with it.
I was trying to find out if Kermit was eligible to be pope and I found a blog that says he's the perfect example of a catholic priest
My favorite thing about the walrus vs fairy debate is that there's no right answer. It's not "what's more likely" it's "how would you FEEL in that scenario?"
You can explain your reasoning all you want, and that might resonate with some people, but ultimately there's not much convincing to be done because how you would react in that moment is personal.
And that makes reading other people's perspectives so interesting! How we define surprise differently, how the improbability of each scenario would play into it, how many questions would we have upon opening the door, how quickly those questions come to us, etc.
Anyway, I picked walrus because with a fairy, I wouldn't believe it was a fairy at first and once I did, while I would be confused and curious there's no initial surprise reaction. The questions come gradually. Meanwhile, with a walrus I would have many questions immediately that the walrus can't answer because it's a walrus. I now have a large and possibly dangerous mammal blocking my only means of egress that may or may not be too heavy for the floor but definitely will injure themself if they try to leave. (My apartment location is not very walrus accessible, let's just say that.)
The Walrus v Fairy question really is a perfect example of the Internet Argument. I've been reading a bunch of posts on both sides and it's very clear that everyone is interpreting the question in a way that the other side finds ridiculous. And if you take the read of one person, it makes perfect sense why they'd think it was more/less surprising, and the question become more about agreeing with priors than the actual question being asked. Like, a lot of people saying the walrus is more surprising make comments to the effect of "how did a walrus walk all the way to my house" or "how did the walrus knock on the door". And for folks that think the fairy is more surprising, there's a lot of comments saying they assume the walrus was put there by someone. The question doesn't mention how the walrus/fairy got there, so someone reading it as saying that the walrus knocked is answering a fundamentally different question than the one where someone assumes that a person knocked and then like, hid, or whatever. Likewise, a lot of people on both sides talk about the number of assumptions that each creature's presence brings up. People who think the walrus is more surprising comment a lot saying that a fairy being there is just one fact, that fairies exist, and that the walrus being there involves a huge logistical chain at the very least. Where people who think the fairy is more surprising comment a lot saying that the walrus being there is one fact, that elaborate prank shows exist, where the fairy being there calls into question a lot of biology, as well as the massive and world-spanning coverup that would be necessary to keep fairies out of the public eye if they've been around so long, that it brings up a bunch of existential issues if not logistical ones. People are even disagreeing about the definition of the word "surprising". I saw two posts side-by-side, one basically saying "a huge animal on your doorstep is shocking" and the other saying "fairies existing is way less likely than a walrus being dropped off at my door". Two totally different (and accurate!) definitions of the word, one emphasizing the initial reaction, surprising like a jump scare, the other emphasizing the overall likelihood of fairies versus Mr. Beast's Epic Walrus Prank.
It's just a wonderful thing to watch a hill to die on being raised right before my eyes, and to see a new Airplane Treadmill be born.
trout reznor (trent reznor if he was a fish): my whole existence is cod
nine inch scales. whatever.