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[andromeda3116]

The World is Amazing, Actually (Part 11 or 12, I lost count)

It's been awhile since I made a post about how fucking rad the world actually is, and amidst all the pandemics and climate change and economic troubles, I felt the need.

So:

Today’s Wild Place (The Earth is An Alien Planet):

The Danakil Depression, Ethiopia:

The Danakil Depression is probably the closest you'll ever be able to come to standing on the surface of Venus (without the crushing atmosphere, of course). Choking sulphuric acid and chlorine gases fill the air, while acid ponds and geysers pepper the landscape. 

- Daisy Dobrijevic, published July 4, 2022

(BTW scientists recently discovered microbes capable of surviving in this toxic, extremely hot environment, which means...well, even if we kick the bucket, life will continue. There's something comforting in knowing that no matter how bad we screw up...life will go on.)

Today’s Incredible Feat of Engineering (look! at what! we made!):

Ouarzazate Solar Power Station in Morocco, which has gone solar in a big way.

(Which means they are making a huge contribution to helping fight toxic pollution, noise pollution, water use, land destruction, and carbon emissions. No really, there are charts. Reducing carbon emissions charts. Reducing irresponsible land use charts. Charts! Graphs! Data samples!)

Today’s Cool Life Form (the rare, the weird, the beautiful):

The Hispaniolan Solenodon.

A very rare, nocturnal, shrew-like creature that is one of the few mammals able to produce venom. Look at him! Look at his snout! He's just a little guy! He will bite you and run away on his back legs! He's rare, and endangered, but not gone! Not gone yet, bitches!

(Bonus: 10 Fun Facts About the Solenodon)

Today’s Bizarre Mystery (no, seriously, wtf?):

The Great Unconformity.

Hey, remember the Grand Canyon? Remember how we can see the passage of time through each layer, going back hundreds of thousands of years?

Did you know that apparently, on this massive record of earth's geological history, there's a chunk of time missing? Science has some hypotheses about how and why this happens (and yes, it's been found in more than one place), but they are really only hypotheses, and no one's really sure what happened to, oh, 1.6 billion years, give or take.

Today’s Act of Humanity (yes, we are worth the effort):

After fleeing a war, Ukrainians rush to help Mississippi tornado victims.

"They made the 16-hour drive south to donate bottled water and volunteer with aid workers, buoyed by the idea that they could help a community facing a similar struggle to theirs.

“We had to leave our home,” Pavliuk told The Washington Post in Ukrainian, in an interview interpreted by Hrebenyk. “And they don’t have a place to go back, either.”"

NEW CATEGORY:

Today's Good News About The Future (No, It's Not Too Late and Anyone Who Says Otherwise is Selling Something):

The Saiga Antelope, a species critical to the continued survival of huge swathes of grassland, that in 2003 was down to 6% of it's population and already extinct in it's natural habitat of China and Ukraine, has rebounded back to almost 2 million strong thanks to conservation efforts.

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[andromeda3116]

When people get a little too gung-ho about-

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

That’s…wild. What was I talking about?

[andromeda3116]

Reading The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis (and loving it so far), when--

"But the nature-lovers whom I have in mind are not very much concerned with individual beautiful objects of that sort. The man who is distracts them. An enthusiastic botanist is for them a dreadful companion on a ramble. He is always stopping to draw their attention to particulars."

Is this from personal experience. Is. Is he talking about Tolkien.

[andromeda3116]

Do you ever talk to your mutuals?

not really i just post things and hope they fall in love with me

[andromeda3116]

“By the usual measures, Biden should be cruising to reëlection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history. His opponent, who is facing ninety-one criminal counts, has suggested that if he is elected he will fire as many as fifty thousand civil servants and replace them with loyalists, deputize the National Guard as a mass-deportation force, and root out what he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.””

— Joe Biden’s Last Campaign

[andromeda3116]

Internet Safety

[andromeda3116]

I bet Jar Jar is fucking hung like a whale. God he can raw me anyday.

I spent like two? Three? Entire weeks with this sitting in my askbox and I just. I got nothing. What could I possibly answer? I tried all the “nope” gifs in this god forsaken website, I tried to draw what my face looks like every time I read this, I tried to find fanart of jar jar with his wang out and the universe was kind enough to me so that I couldn’t find any. I got nothing. Nada. Abso-fucking-lutely nothing. What am I gonna say? What in god’s name am I gonna say to that?!

You see, I wanna fuck general grievous. I do. I want him use all his four arms to simultaneously pull both my arms back and touch my tits as he fucks me with his mecha-schlong. I do. I wanna fuck darth Maul, pre-legs cut off or post metal legs+metal dick enhancement. I wanna lick those horns. Okay? I wanna fuck darth vader. Boy, oh, boy, I do. I wanna hear that hard breathing and wrap my legs over that dramatic cape while he force-chokes me and we do the do. Am I a weird robot-fucker? You bet your ass I am! Am I a tad too much on the horny side? Probably. Did I extrapolate my right to be horny on main? Fucking sue me. But this. THIS.

How do you want me to face my family and all the three (3) friends I have irl? How do you want me to walk into an elevator with a bunch of strangers and when an old lady says “the weather has been a little hot lately, isn’t it weird?” just to do small talk like every fucking old people I don’t know do, how do you expect me not to answer her with “y’know what’s weirder, someone at this very moment is thinking about Jar Jar Binks going balls-deep in them and I cannot talk about this to anyone and the knowledge of this? it’s eating me alive. ALIVE, ma’am, and I don’t mean this as some sick vore reference. Someone’s dreaming of those popped-up eyes, of that weird high-pitched voice screaming MEESA COMING while they’re filled up by Jar Jar Bink’s thick seed, and I’m just standing here while this very notion rots me to the core, taking all life away from me. It’s a nightmare. My entire life, a nightmare, because of an anon message from a horny jar jar fucker on tumblr. This is my floor now, ma’am, have a good day”

I leave the elevator. I probably have an appointment, but I can’t remember where, or what for. I sit down on the floor by the elevator doors. I sob for a full minute. I take the elevator back downstairs, I walk home, I collapse in bed and rub one out thinking of darth vader. I feel better.

Five minutes later, I think about this ask again, and my whole world collapses again. It’s only Tuesday. I sigh heavily and sit down to write this reply.-

Edit: a lot of this is exaggeration. Some of it is true. You get to pick what exactly.

[andromeda3116]

Whoever invented "open in app" links that redirect you to the app store instead of actually opening the app even when you already have the app installed on your phone should be involuntarily turned into a beanbag chair

[andromeda3116]

i feel like a lot of Discourse (read: fandom wank) happens in places that have forgotten or never learned the death of the author theory

(which i know is not sacrosanct but it is very useful for handling fandom spaces, particularly fraught ones)

for those who don't know, the death of the author theory goes like this: as far as the work is concerned, the author dropped dead the second that the final word was published, and thus cannot comment, object to, clarify, or expand on anything that is not on the page.

my understanding is that it's most strictly used to mean that that the author's interpretation of the work doesn't matter, but can be expanded to state that nothing which is not on the page matters. imo, the expanded definition is particularly useful for fandoms and needs to be adopted on a larger scale.

because what it means is this:

it doesn't matter what the creator(s) intended. it doesn't matter what they said in an interview. it doesn't matter what the actors think, it doesn't matter what supplemental materials say or imply, even if they're signed off on by the creator(s). it doesn't matter if everyone involved in making it hates your interpretation and says that it's wrong.

they don't get to say that it's wrong. they dropped dead the second the last episode/book ended. their interpretation is simply one more in a vast sea of others.

listen to me, fandom spaces. i am taking your face in both of my hands. embrace the death of the author. you will no longer be bound to the (possibly fickle) words of the creator(s), your interpretation can no longer be the wrong one. if the text can be used to support it in any way, even twisty ways, it's valid. you don't have to jump through hoops to defend it against haters who say you're wrong.

the death of the author. open your heart to it. live it. be free.

[andromeda3116]

thinking about the poll about canon vs non-canon ships that didn't define terms, and the current fandom focus on things "going canon," so i made up a scale.

this is NOT a question about whether canon matters to what you ship (or matters at all), just how to define the phrase "canon ship."

many ships start low on the scale and slow burn their way up, so vote for the point when you would have called them "canon." i agonized over the order (especially #4-6) for a day and a half, but i went with the order in which i think joe random with a nielsen ratings box and no tumblr account would notice/call something a romantic relationship.

[andromeda3116]

you came back wrong and i am racked with guilt because i cannot bear to see you like this and i should have let you rest. i loved you so much that i defied death itself but i do not think either of us are happy

[andromeda3116]

Once upon a time…

[andromeda3116]

“Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… . [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … . I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley on the lifestyle of Lord Byron (via timemarauder)

[andromeda3116]

i miss the part of fandom where we would watch together in real time then hiatus would be a feral expanse of creativity that would bring such innovative fics to the masses that it was just a wild time. it's just harder to tap into that now. i guess we still can but gosh what a time it was. speaking as an introvert who has a hard time keeping in touch it was great to jump on and just be with everyone's enthusiasm. some of my favourite things were jumping on a crack pairing or just taking one throw away line and world building with other fans with that

[andromeda3116]

I might be wrong, but iirc you’ve been involved in fandoms for a while, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts about the degradation of fannish spaces as a result of shows no longer releasing on an episode-per-week basis, and if you think that the fandoms surrounding Game Changer and Fantasy High function differently from most *because* those shows release once a week (or in the case of Game Changer, once every other week with behind-the-scenes on the alternate weeks). I’m not super involved in any fandoms, but of the ones I have been in, Game Changer and Fantasy High have been the most consistently interactive (for lack of a better term), in the sense that there’s week-by-week fanart, meta, memes, etc that correlate to the specific episodes. However, my first interactions with *any* fandoms were in 2019ish, so I don’t have a good sense of what pre-streaming fandoms were like and my point of comparison is pretty limited. I’m not sure if you’ve seen Fantasy High, but I know you’ve posted some Game Changer stuff, and you seem pretty knowledgeable about the evolution of fandom culture in general so I figured I might as well ask what your thoughts on it are :) (if you have other examples of shows that still release weekly that you think are relevant I’m also interested in hearing those—I just picked Game Changer and Fantasy High cause those are the ones I’m familiar with)

I'm not really involved in fannish spaces. I just like things.

[andromeda3116]