#human is arbitrary

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Emotional scene from Muppets Star Trek.

[lichenteeth]

fuck gender I’m not even human dude

[dufferpuffer]

its crazy to me that Acromantula are considered 'untameable'...

Hagrid hasn't tamed Aragog, but he does get along with him and his children safely enough through the power of... having chats. Respecting his territory borders. Giving a shit about his well-being.

'Untameable' because that's a fucking person that spider is someone you can discuss philosophy with, no shit he can't 'tame'

[childrensrightsrehumanrights]

If you aren't prepared to have a disabled child you aren't prepared to have a child. If you would be greatly disappointed by having a child with certain traits, gender, ability, appearance, you are not ready to have a child.

A child is an individual you are ready to guide and care for, for the rest of your life. A child is not a customisable accessory.

Most people will become disabled in their lifetime.

Your child can be born able bodied and then be diagnosed with autism. Your child can have chronic pain from a back injury playing sports as a teenager.

And if you have an ableist or otherwise oppressive mindset, your child could have a trauma disorder or mental illness.

Your child is not a character you're customising to be how you want them to be. They are a human being you are building a parent-child relationship with. This is a person separate from you, even if you created them.

And if you are not willing to accept any child of your own as they are, you are not ready to be a parent.

Your children deserve acceptance and unconditional love, you can't add on conditions.

[otaku553]

Something funny for your spy x family ASL au

Luffy took ONE look at loid and internally went 'oh sweet. He's a spy like sabo' and never brings it up while anya just stares at him horrified and like with ace and sabo, he just never brings it up.

This also happens with yor and anya makes a funny noise

(As i am typing this my dog has the zoomies and is running around like a maniac)

HAHA YEAH THIS WOULD DEFINITELY HAPPEN

I think loid’s a good enough actor that luffy wouldn’t figure it out immeditely from like just a few seconds of meeting him but give him a minute or a few and he’ll figure it out on vibes alone

[chocodile]

Small character detail I have no good excuse to mention: Hyden hates anything remotely similar to "fast food". This applies to all AUs. He finds greasy, cheap, oversalted/overly sugary food disgusting. Additionally, he hates--HATES--messy food. The only foods he will eat with his hands are ones that are very clean and dry and leave no residue. Getting some sort of sauce or grease on his hands is one of the worst sensations in the world (doubly so when he's a bunny… to be fair, can you imagine eating barbecue while wearing fur mittens? Ew!)

When he was younger, he was slightly more flexible on these limitations. Here he is eating a "ham burger" normally to show how normal he is. He is fitting in with the common man. He is pulling it off. He's got this. Look how relaxed he is. You could almost miss the Rolex on his wrist.

Of course, every rule has its exceptions. As has been mentioned before Hyden often has no idea where food comes from or what goes into it. At some point, somebody failed to mention to him that Cinnabons come from kiosks at the mall and cost less than $100 each. Therefore, they escaped his "fast food is disgusting and I hate it" filter, and, in a modern AU, became one of his favorite desserts. He has a pastry or two each morning with his coffee and then wonders why he never seems to lose any weight.

[bytewire]

Are Architects Smarter than Humans?

The way AL-AN talks mixed with the fact that Architects are more technologically progressed than humans in the Subnautica universe leads him to seeming ‘smarter’ than the average human. He has a wide range of knowledge and despite his lack of experience with human social cues he is able to articulate himself extremely well. He also has access to tons of information due to his prior position as a scientist, but also because of what comes with existing as an Architect in the first place.

I mean, if your brain had direct access to all information available currently, you'd of course seem smart, but is that just you retelling what things have already been discovered or is this you being ‘smart’?

In that case you are only as smart as Google allows you to be (and the proverbial Architect GoogleTM is damn good). If you took an Architect never connected to the network and a human with no access to the internet how would they compare with their baseline intellect?

Wait a minute—what does that even solve? You could also argue the fact that because Architects are (usually) always connected to the network that this hypothetical is entirely unfair because it strips Architects of something that defines how they function. Being connected to the network is their normal existence, which would indeed imply that they are smarter than humans, yes? As they normally should have access to this advantage.

The average Architect has all the available knowledge that their species has learned available to it at all times while the average human has to rely only on things they’ve learned and how well they can research a certain topic. Again, being connected to the network for Architects is like if your brain was connected to Google and also literally everyone that currently exists and those that existed in the past. Just because a singular Architect may not have learned something for themselves doesn’t mean they can’t implement and use that knowledge. Just like how humans don’t need to have been the one to discover something for them to learn about and understand said thing.

Except then we go back to the issue of are they smart or do they just reiterate things they have available information on without actually having had studied or learned about said things? Even that fails to acknowledge the fact that they’re a hivemind! Trying to measure just one Architect is pointless when the only Architect mind that exists singularly from the rest of the network is AL-AN—besides he was never supposed to exist individually in the first place… and we have gone back around in a circle.

How could you even begin to compare the two species at all when they are so inherently different? Architects have senses that humans cannot begin to comprehend as we have never experienced them and vice versa. Their perceptions are very different from ours. Differences that make them seem so otherworldly to the other that it’s difficult to ascertain where you begin to measure which is ‘better’ and which is ’worse’.

To complicate things even further you would have to consider what each species considers to be intelligent at all, and then both would have to agree on these requirements. Is a fish lesser than a human just because it experiences existence in a way unfamiliar to us? What even is ‘smart’ or ‘intelligence’ and who decides what that means? It’s always going to be biased when the beings who created the definition also makes the rules and the criteria that must be met to fit that definition. An IQ test would mean nothing to a species that evolved under entirely different circumstances and whose minds work in entirely opposite ways to our own. Just as whatever they use to measure intelligence might not apply to how our brains work…

…Oh my god, it’s a loop that never ends. I can’t even remember which side I was arguing for, or if I was ever even arguing for one at all. Quite honestly, there’s no answer to my original question. I’ll be frank with you I cannot come up with one anyhow. I tried, but the more I kept writing the more I realized that each point contradicted itself again and again until we end up here. Back at the beginning.

“Are Architects Smarter than Humans?”

[hadesoftheladies]

there's moments when i still realize i have a ways to go in recovering from religious trauma lol. like yesterday, when I let a family member pray for me (cause it would make them feel better), i'd mentally (almost reflexively) contradict what she said about god. she'd be like, "god you've been so faithful" and i'd be like "god you ain't done shit" and then she's like "god i know you're able" and i'm like "you're super horrible and a waste of time actually"

and i had to pause while she was praying and meet with myself and be like "why do i still assume someone is there? why am i still so angry?" and then i realized that while i had agreed to let her pray for me assuming i was over such visceral reactions to religious stuff, prayer still triggered my anxiety and brought out the part of me that was still a very frightened, hurt child

i'm still hurt and still angry. angry because i feel like my whole world was taken from me when it wasn't even my fault. in my mind, someplace, it was god's. god's for not showing or proving himself to me when i needed him to. and the bitterness of being young and thinking "my family is blaming me for god's failure" and it not mattering whether i believed in him or not.

i don't miss who i was in religion, but i do miss who i had. i miss being trusted. i miss not being looked at like an injured puppy or horrible sinner. i miss not being suspected. i miss not every word from my mouth being viewed as maliciousness.

but for every nostalgic fantasy my mind can cook up, my body never forgets.

[underthehedge]

I'm having A Thought about cultural assumptions and how people often conflate their own cultural quirks and patterns as being either universal or Obviously Logical, based on seeing a post with someone's lock screen, because I have ADHD.

It was a simple example but a very neat one, and it's about how we write and speak about dates (as in the measure of time, not the fruit of the date palm or an intimate meeting). Americans write dates backwards, by the standards of nearly every culture (inc. other English speaking cultures). They write them MM/DD/YY instead of DD/MM/YY, this is known.

But the thing is, ok there is a good reason most people write the day then month but none the less, what a culture decides on is still just a little bit arbitrary, the point is it's a cultural agreement that This Is How It's Done. Earlier I saw a post with someone's lock screen, an American, and it displayed something like "Wednesday, December 12" and that caught my eye because mine obviously reads "Thursday, 9 March", because I come from the UK, where we use DD/MM.

And I was reminded of an American once telling me how MM/DD obviously makes more sense though, because you see, that's how you say dates in English! You would say "March ninth", so you write the month then the day! Except, well, that's not how we say dates here, we say "the ninth of March". But this guy had assumed that the standard phrasing in his culture was just how all English speakers would say it, therefore the date format they used was clearly the more natural and intuitive way, and of course you think in terms of the month something is happening and then when in the month it is!

To me, however, this feels like someone earnestly and confidently explaining that naturally you put your socks on over your shoes.

Obviously there's a bunch of examples of this kind of thing, and many with far greater importance, but it just seemed like a really very telling and concise example of how people will see features of their culture that result from specific quirks as universalities that make more sense than any other system.

[rigginsstreet]

I bring a real “no person is above me and no person is beneath me so I practice empathy and compassion for everyone” vibe to the function that not many people enjoy

[banyanas]

robot transgenderism flavor of the day is t4t nuzi

[hagfishviperfish]

all my friends think im into feet but i actually just think they are a very personal thing to find beautiful on someone like who would love someones feet. instead of their eyes or their face. You know you really want someone if you love their feet

[cosmic-espero]

Hades is still a good game and all but I can't stop thinking about how Supergiant scrambled to make greek myths as "non problematic" as humanly possible by fucking up half of the pantheon's family tree to avoid Icky Incest Implications...

... and then for some reason they put in step-sibling incest as two out of three romance options. And the third one ends up platonic anyway.

Thing that they could have easily avoided by having Hades tell Zagreus that he was born from his blood or any other body part, a la Aphrodite or the Furies in some versions of their myths, instead of claiming that he was Nyx's son.

Well, that was rather pointless, wasn't it.

[arbitrarycategories]

Part two of the explain yourselves au! Once again thanks to @megamindsupremacy for sparking this au. This time, the whole Pines family gets to eavesdrop on Ford and Bill having just. the worst conversation. These guys are so messy.

[cruyffista]

The cyborg age is here and now, everywhere there's a car or a phone or a VCR. Being a cyborg isn't about how many bits of silicon you have under your skin or how many prosthetics your body contains. It's about Donna Haraway going to the gym, looking at a shelf of carbo-loaded bodybuilding foods, checking out the Nautilus machines, and realizing that she's in a place that wouldn't exist without the idea of the body as high-performance machine. It's about athletic shoes. "Think about the technology of sports footwear," she says. "Before the Civil War, right and left feet weren't even differentiated in shoe manufacture. Now we have a shoe for every activity." Winning the Olympics in the cyborg era isn't just about running fast. It's about "the interaction of medicine, diet, training practices, clothing and equipment manufacture, visualization and timekeeping." When the furor about the cyborgization of athletes through performance-enhancing drugs reached fever pitch last summer, Haraway could hardly see what the fuss was about. Drugs or no drugs, the training and technology make every Olympian a node in an international technocultural network just as "artificial" as sprinter Ben Johnson at his steroid peak.

Hari Kunzru, You Are Cyborg (Wired Magazine, 1997)