immature techno-geek with moral autism

real sex pollen has never been tried

I'm right about this

look, pollen is about plant reproduction, so technically all pollen is sex pollen

there are flowers that pretend to be attractive female animals to lure in pollinators! how much sexier do you want

Would a furry for plants be called a pollinator, tree hugger, or a green beret?

I’ve heard “leafy”.

Sounds like the community is cacti and moss exclusionist :(

Spines are highly modified leaves and mosses have leaves…

real sex pollen has never been tried

I'm right about this

look, pollen is about plant reproduction, so technically all pollen is sex pollen

there are flowers that pretend to be attractive female animals to lure in pollinators! how much sexier do you want

Would a furry for plants be called a pollinator, tree hugger, or a green beret?

I’ve heard “leafy”.

real sex pollen has never been tried

I'm right about this

look, pollen is about plant reproduction, so technically all pollen is sex pollen

there are flowers that pretend to be attractive female animals to lure in pollinators! how much sexier do you want

the thing that i just cannot agree with when it comes to people that oppose factory farming and slaughterhouses and thinks eating animals is wrong is when they go all, well im just one individual, if i were to stop eating meat my self nothing much would change, what we need is systemic change.

but the problem here is that the evil is not just on the system, IT IS ON THE INDIVIDUAL AS WELL.

imagine instead of cows it was black people. goberments are ok with corraling black people, putting them on factories, torture them, mutilate them, kill them in gas chambers and then sell their meat.

there would be no "larger system" or "voicott effectiveness" to think of here. if you as an individual went to a market and bought that meat and ate it, the very act of doing that, as an individual, would be considered abominable, regardless of wether it contributes to the system or wether it makes a difference or not.

the argument of "individual responsaility is irrelevant when considering its effect on larger systems" would not fly, to eat that meat would be axiomatically evil, as evil as it would be to rape or kill someone, would it not?

unless animals just fundamentally dont matter. that is the only exit, you have to admit that, yeah, at the end of the day, you DONT actually care about animal suffering, otherwise your moral intuitions would just not allow you to do it. and if your moral intuitions allow you to then you have to admit you dont actually care.

i said i dont believe people really have "principles" and that to appeal to consistency over principles is looking at the problem from the wrong perspective.

but regardless i may have misused the word consistency here, the problem is not so much that they are being inconsistent but that they are being dishonest, they want the prestige of caring about animals when their actions reveal that they dont actually care about animals

if they did care about animals, the action of eating the meat of an animal that was tortured in order to provide that meat when there are alternatives would be as intuitively disgusting as eating the meat of a human being that was tortured when there are alternatives.

there is a lot that can be said about the german people during the nazi regime, and how limited where their options to stop it and how complicit can they be considered and how you cannot escape the evil systems in which you are enmeshed. but if the nazis had started to sell jewish meat in butcher shops and the german people had shrugged and bought that meat and ate it when they had the option to just be vegetarians that would have shown that they truly didnt care about jewish people, and it wasnt just the case that they were powerless to stop the nazis.

is not about consistency, is about revealed preferences

I think this is an all or nothing error. The other resolution of the apparent inconsistency is that these people do care about nonhuman animals, but they care substantially less about nonhuman animals than they care about humans. There are many possible degrees of being upset by something between "isn't actually upset at all, merely pretending to be for clout" and "is willing to accept a substantially lower standard of living for the rest of their life to do something about it and/or express their disapproval of it while knowing that this sacrifice will at best make the state of the world literally <.000001% less bad by their standards."

I'm a "I'm not a morally motivated vegetarian but I kinda believe in their beliefs" person and "I'm some amount of upset by the fact that factory farming of livestock animals is happening but substantially less upset about it than I'd be if it was happening to humans" sounds about right as a diagnosis of my psychology. I can't prove that I'm not lying about the contents of my own mind for clout, but I'll point out that "I basically agree with morally motivated vegetarianism in theory but I'm simply not altruistic enough to stop eating meat about it" seems like a position that's really not optimized for making myself popular; being too selfish to live up to one's own moral ideals is a stigmatized trait, and in most of human society expressing a belief that a vegetarian human is (all else being equal) morally superior to an omnivorous human in an important way is more likely to decrease your popularity than increase it and I don't think Tumblr is really an exception. If I was the kind of person who'd systematically lie about my own motivations for clout, I'd probably either become one of those people who dunks on vegans in a "meat-eating and hunting are culturally important to many indigenous peoples, I think it's very white to..." kind of way instead of a "for every animal you don't eat I'll eat two!" kind of way or simply pretend to be a morally motivated vegetarian (I could easily get away with the latter here!); those would probably be more effective clout-farming strategies than my actual behavior.

I think people who care about nonhuman animals to some extent but less than they care about humans are a lot more common than people who systematically lie about whether they care about nonhuman animals.

Strongly agreed.

I think we need to recognize that you don't have to see animals as people, or even like them, in order to not want them to be tortured.

I often find animals frustrating and unpleasant. I usually don't want to spend time with them. I don't want a pet. I'm aware that commercial animal breeding and feedlot conditions can lead to animals having worse behavior. I'm also approximately vegetarian (no meat most months, usually very picky about egg sources, but i am planning to investigate fish sauce production later).

You don't have to love animals to do this! You can do things based on the moral principle that torture is wrong even if it happens to a being you don't like!

(also people might want to look into ameliatarianism – if you really like meat but don't care a lot about beef vs chicken, have the beef and probably contribute to a lot less suffering. there's a blog @ameliatarianrecipes on tumblr even.)

I think people aren't by default repulsed by things that seem normal, even if they don't like them. It's possible to adjust this, but trying to be more repulsed by things which aren't actually important to avoid seems bad? If I were viscerally repulsed by everything with horrible origins I would be completely nonfunctional.

I think about what my profession would be like on the RI Landship a lot

I think about this literally All The Time.

Even before arknights I’ve thought about working on various fantasy body types but RI having its medical angle just makes me double down on it.

The thing about massage is it has effects on almost every system in the body to some degree, circulatory, musculoskeletal and even the endocrine system to a degree. Because of that you end up needing to learn just a bit of everything for how it can be effected by your work, which means a decent amount of A&P coursework in school.

Put that same kind of thing in the AK universe and the amount you need to know balloons incredibly, even more so in the case of RI because then you’re also contending with the fact that most of your clients are very physically active, regularly under large amounts of stress even off the battlefield and in many cases terminally ill.

All things that will affect what kind of work I would do and how I would go about it before we even START talking about the fact that the clients would have completely different anatomy.

Let’s take an example Operator, Pallas, because she has a tail, animal ears, horns AND is infected. It’s a good spread of the issues unique to Terran physiology that a massage therapist at RI would have to contend with.

First things first, oripathy. That’s something you likely have to be specifically trained for in much the same way that oncology massage is its own discipline, except our cancer doesn’t also come with sharp spikes on the surface of the skin where you’d be working.

Massage can be extremely dangerous for someone with cancer for the same reasons it might pose a risk to oripathy patients. Massage increases blood flow and breaks up adhesions in soft tissues, which means it can rapidly increase the spread of cancerous tissue by it losing cells into the bloodstream that is moving faster than normal. I imagine oripathy has similar concerns given how it’s measured in Operator files.

Next primary concern is the tail, which would almost certainly mean extra work on both the lumbar and glutes as well as stretching for the tail itself. Pallas’s tail is also one of the more reasonable ones! The heavier the tail (Tomimi, Mantra, Ho’olheyak) the more you’re going to have to work it. Given the size of some characters tails I could easily spend an entire hour session on the tail alone!

But the real problem the tail presents is actually when working on the anterior part of the body, Pallas spends a lot of time swinging a weighted flail with her left hand, so the shoulder and pectoral muscles on that side would need targeted work. But with a tail she can’t comfortably lay on her back! So the work would have to be done on some sort of combination recliner/massage table to you could work on her pecs while she’s still able to relax.

Next is the horns and ears, which are a bit easier to deal with as far as massage goes save for maybe needing to cap the horns for safety. It would still be hard work though, using only finger pressure around the base of the horns and ears. The weight of the horns and how they affect how she sleeps would also likely add a lot of tension to the neck so that would need lots of focus too. Something as simple as particularly long or thick hair can affect your neck so horns would be something else entirely.

Finally there’s the psychological aspects of massage, there are many times when massage is used as a way to slowly reintroduce touch as a positive thing to people who have experienced violence or abuse. It should be fairly obvious how useful that would be at a place like RI, with people recovering from being shunned as untouchable Infected or again, outright violence.

And that’s just Pallas! Who still has 100% mammalian traits! If you get into voirvre or liberi or hell SANKTA that’s an entirely new ball game!

Point is a massage therapist at RI would have to love their work, I think it’d be fascinating and rewarding work to have to adjust to that wide a variance of anatomy. It sounds SO fun.

looked up oncology massage and encountered this amazing line:

Amy Hartl, i believe in your ability to say that in simpler terms.

Oh for fuck’s sake, people calling out racist writing in fanfic isn’t “censorship”. I say this as a fic writer but some of you need to get off your high fucking horse.

Truly some of the most irritating culture has sprung up around fanwork and fanfic in specific like… no, making something for free does not in fact make it sacrosanct or immune to criticism! Your right to “do whatever you want forever” or say “fandom is for fun” stops the second you’re being bigoted and making fan spaces unsafe for marginalized people!

"fandom is for fun" except for poc who have to deal with rampant racism and white people unable to acknowledge let alone take accountability for their racism

I almost agree with this. Criticism isnʼt censorship etc. However, then thereʼs

and that no, freedom of speech is still important. These authors do have the write to post whatever they want even if itʼs horrible. Just, they then have the right to be criticized for it. I do not want AO3 or worse the government to take down the fics and in that sense I support even bigotsʼ right to post whatever fanfic they want.

I just donʼt want to see any of it and I want to be able to avoid seeing any of it.

a) technically, it would cut against free speech norms to prohibit people from saying "Given that Alice wrote a fanfic I consider racist and made me uncomfortable, I think she should stop herself with any means necessary, including suicide"

b) however in fact telling people "stop it or kill yourself" over their fiction cuts somewhat against free speech norms also.

to quote the tags here…

come on. don't say this stuff. it's not constructive.

I find it incredibly interesting that nobody goes "you wrote about horror therefore you're a serial killer. Why do you think that's okay???" But then everyone squawks along when it's "if you about racism therefore you're racist". Are we all having trouble with the fact that fiction isn't real? That being exposed to an idea does not activate mind control and make you incorporate that into your belief system?

If it does then fiction does in fact make you gay and the conservatives are correct to censor it lest children be forced into sexual performances by having imagined queers kissing.

Oh no I guess that means queers can't exist in public either.

Though I guess lots of people do earnestly believe that fantasy is rape if you didn't get permission from the object of your affections. Ditto pda and everyone you're sharing space with. Raising yet more questions about whether we should legally prosecute authors for murdering totally real characters and making them fuck.

Remember kids, it's just like Jesus said, if you think about murder it's the same as having actually done it 👍

That is obviously why people with anxiety should be prosecuted and jailed for false testimony. You thought falsehoods about other people, that's the same as making real accusations against them!

There is no """right""" to judge, criticize, or otherwise be foul over things that are not real. If you have zero ""evidence"" of mistreating people except for fiction, which by definition is labeled as a pile of lies, then the actual problem is that you lack the sophisticated understanding displayed by toddlers pretending to be cats. Or are the conspiracy theorists right about kids and litter boxes?

Seems pretty obvious who's at fault for poor behavior, and it ain't the Goosebumps books.

you @daniel-r-h and @moral-autism all have such an interesting idea of what this post says esp considering that nobody left those tags LMFAO

Have a look at https://www.tumblr.com/loveshockerz/780428676187783168. It's where those tags are.

Oh for fuck’s sake, people calling out racist writing in fanfic isn’t “censorship”. I say this as a fic writer but some of you need to get off your high fucking horse.

Truly some of the most irritating culture has sprung up around fanwork and fanfic in specific like… no, making something for free does not in fact make it sacrosanct or immune to criticism! Your right to “do whatever you want forever” or say “fandom is for fun” stops the second you’re being bigoted and making fan spaces unsafe for marginalized people!

"fandom is for fun" except for poc who have to deal with rampant racism and white people unable to acknowledge let alone take accountability for their racism

I almost agree with this. Criticism isnʼt censorship etc. However, then thereʼs

and that no, freedom of speech is still important. These authors do have the write to post whatever they want even if itʼs horrible. Just, they then have the right to be criticized for it. I do not want AO3 or worse the government to take down the fics and in that sense I support even bigotsʼ right to post whatever fanfic they want.

I just donʼt want to see any of it and I want to be able to avoid seeing any of it.

a) technically, it would cut against free speech norms to prohibit people from saying "Given that Alice wrote a fanfic I consider racist and made me uncomfortable, I think she should stop herself with any means necessary, including suicide"

b) however in fact telling people "stop it or kill yourself" over their fiction cuts somewhat against free speech norms also.

to quote the tags here…

come on. don't say this stuff. it's not constructive.

Ezüstfonás / Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik), Gabo 2018. Cover by Cserny Timi Pookah.

The Ghost Sequences (A. C. Wise), Undertow Books 2021. Cover by Olga Beliaeva.

propaganda:

the spinning silver cover does a decent job of displaying important plot stuff and has a striking flat color scheme

meanwhile there's a lot of good art of 'people, but if you zoom out there's a skull' and this arrangement honestly looks pretty forced and arbitrary

Tofu is thousands of years old but it's the coolest most high modernist food ever. Literally just a block of Food. It's like something people would eat in an Isaac Asimov story but it's real.

tofu is Food Cube. it tastes the way that Food Cube should taste imo.

I thought these would just not appeal but no, nictitating membrane sounds great. I could use it for showers and chopping onions and such.

edit: not taking the Velcro texture because at a human weight you’d just remove chunks of paint from most walls or tear skin probably

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

This feels like a question with underspecified baked-in assumptions.

NPC tells party that they need dragons blood. When the party comes back after dealing with/slaying a dragon, the NPC yells at them that dragons blood is the resin off a dracaena plant and they have a bunch out back. What took them so long!?

I think if you're going to do anything hundreds of times, you should get good at it.

If you're going to have a sandwich for lunch every day, you should spend that time getting better at making the sandwich, understand what works and what doesn't, how to be efficient and get the most out of it.

If you're going to bike to work, you want to get good at biking, right? Perfect your form, make it easy, economical, make it feel good.

There was a time when I thought that this was what everyone believed was the correct thing to do, but I guess it's not. Not everyone builds up a series of life hacks and optimizations and refinements for everything they do. There are, out there, people who make themselves a cup of coffee every morning but have never thought about how to make that cup of coffee better: it's exactly as good as the first time they made it, and there was never any experimentation or adjusting of the variables to see whether it could be better.

I don't want to say that this is wrong, but it definitely feels weird to me.

The problem then is that if you ever want anyone to do you a favor, either it's going to kind of suck or you're going to annoy them with nitpicky details.

You better start getting comfortable with the idea of an extremely broad anti-fascist coalition that includes tons of people who you strongly disagree with, because buddy, you're in one

There's nothing more despicable and decadent than prioritizing purity policing over moving large numbers of people together to stop the fucking neo nazis

aha. a good example of lefty complaints about the protest, thanks.

us liberals can put up with your "eat the rich" chants and you leftists can put up with our "eat the pizza" praxis.

(i did not personally have pizza, just, if your large protest is near a pizzeria and is not against pizza it may favor pizza.)

I am not a particularly techno-optimistic person or a futurist or singularity believer or anything like that, but I think it kinda sucks that a lot of people in reacting to the nebulous threat of “the tech bros” have let themselves be negatively polarized against pretty straightforwardly correct ideas like “bodily autonomy and assistive technology is cool” (that is, fundamentally, the spirit that motivates transhumanism) and “death is scary and tragic.” One of the oldest extant works of human literature is largely about how awful mortality is and how hard it is to come to terms with death; it is in fact an incredibly common sentiment throughout history, and just because some people you know who really suck are also scared of dying doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

#especially pissed and sad about the transhumanism thing tbhhh#wdym a website full of furries and trans people has also become radicalized against the idea#that making whatever modifications to your body you'd like is cool and morally neutral no matter how 'inhuman' those mods make you#wdym the website with the largest community of profoundly disabled people i have seen on mainstream socmed#has also easily fallen prey to radicalization about how modifying your capabilities with external tools is somehow#tainting and corrupting the purity of the human spirit

Attributing it to Technological Brothers is only part of the problem; a lot of them genuinely just have reactionary ethics and grudgingly keep socially-pressured carveouts for themselves and their friends.

This is how you get all these trans and allegedly allied people who talk about how cosmetic surgery is evil with the exception of that which affirms your gender (often with a side of treating trans people who want surgery as pressured into the idea). Or people who act like all established medicine is a basic human right, but any new medicine is either literally eugenics, or a dystopian nightmare scenario they saw a movie about.

They’re literally just reactionaries with self-interest-based exceptions! Whether that means “it’s okay when I do it” or “I know I’ll get yelled at online if I’m honest”.