antotheethnographer

[antotheethnographer]

Aparentemente, es común y hasta deseable que un mandatario que se presenta como liberal se dedique a decir que es el enviado de Dios para derrocar al populismo... en un estado laico y siendo él populista.

Lo peor es que parte de su núcleo duro, por lo que pude ver cuando me metí a Reddit a ver si le encontraba sentido al fanatismo, son prácticamente el estereotipo de ateo de internet que tanto les gusta demonizar a los yanquis. Literalmente algunos de ellos expresan, paradójicamente, que la religón es el opio del pueblo, solo que en vez de entenderlo como parte de la estructuración social lo ven como una falencia moral e intelectual de cada individuo. Pero El Javo sigue siendo el más racional, el más inteligente y para nada termo del espectro político en su conjunto.

Pasa que los del gobierno son fascista caricaturesco y la gente que los apoya es, parcial o totalmente, conservadores reprimidos.

Encima Milei abiertamente expresa lo fanático y cabeza cerrada que es todo el tiempo, diciendo que cualquier cosa contra su ideología es una "perversión moral" y nadie lo cuestiona. No solamente eso sino que algunos hasta se dan el chiste de decir que el político más fanático de la historia argentina, completamente aferrado a su ideología hasta el borde de la locura, es "apolítico".

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Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Physica sacra, 1731

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The Mermaid Nebula Supernova Remnant Image Credit: Neil Corke

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Wooden Ships and Obscure Disney Films

The RLS Warrior was three days out of Montressor, sails full of the solar wind, and her commander closed his eyes and felt the Etherium around him.

For a number of reasons – not least his old ties with Admiral Amelia – Jim had been heavily involved with the design of the ship, as well as the tradeoffs involved. For all that he wasn’t even twenty-five, yet, the ship was built as much to his ideas as to those of anyone else in the Navy, and after three days he was really starting to get a feel for her.

And he was proud of the work.

The yards had done right by them, and no mistake. She sailed the winds as sweetly as the old Legacy, and if that was partly due to her studdingsails to give her extra sail area – they’d calculated it out a dozen times, even getting Doppler involved, and every time it had come out that the sails were worth the hassle. And the engines sang a fine note, while the treated timbers making up her hull were finely seasoned and showed no sign of weakness or wear.

“Captain?” a nervous voice said, then the voice’s owner corrected herself. “I mean – Commander?”

“Captain is preferred,” Jim replied. “Can’t have more than one captain on a ship.”

Then he opened his eyes, and grinned at the young woman who was nervously clinging to the ropes around the mainmast crow’s nest. “But since there doesn’t seem to be anyone else up here, you can call me Jim if you want.”

“I couldn’t do that!” the woman said, astonished, and her ears flicked down. “You’re – you’re the Captain! And you’re a hero of the Second Procyon War…”

Jim chuckled.

“Midshipwoman Brooks, ten years ago I was a complete tearaway,” he said. “So, did our other midshipmen and women put you up to coming to ask the scary captain about his past? Or is this you personally with a question?”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind either way, I’m just curious. And come on, sit – it’s good you’re comfortable in the shrouds, but there’s no reason to hang there while we’re talking.”

“Right,” Brooks said, still sounding nervous, and clambered into the lookout spot.

For a long moment, there was silence.

“It was just me,” she said. “I was… I suppose I wondered about something, and – I wanted to ask, but it feels like a silly question now.”

“Take it from me, sometimes a silly question is just the question that needs asking,” Jim replied. “Or answering.”

The Warrior shivered a little as they came about, turning six degrees port and adjusting their vector four down as the helmsman pointed them at a different star.

“Well-” the midshipwoman said. “I… why are we on a ship like this?”

Jim raised an eyebrow, something he’d been practising, and Brooks flushed.

“I don’t mean that as a criticism,” she added. “It’s a good ship, of course! I’m just thinking of…”

“The ironclads?” Jim replied.

“The ironclads,” Brooks agreed. “I know they were important in the Procyon war. I also know the Procyons lost, but… the ironclads were so difficult to damage. It feels like even sailing ships like these is a strange choice, let alone building new ones.”

Jim nodded, doing a quick assessment of the girl.

She was… definitely less delinquent than he’d been. She sounded curious, and… realistically speaking, this wasn’t going to stay a secret for long anyway.

It was his decision, and… in this case, he was going to nurture the young officer.

“You’re not wondering anything that we didn’t,” he said. “I was heavily involved in the discussions, actually… perhaps we will end up building the same kind of ironclads as the Procyons were building – I wouldn’t be involved in those decisions, because they’re going on right now and I’m not exactly there.”

He stood, and looked out over the sails of the Warrior. They glowed with inner fire, both directly propelling the ship by catching the wind and also providing the power that let her engines burn at high power for long periods of time.

“I’ve already given you the answer,” he added, glancing at Brooks. “Your academy scores show you’re a bright young woman, midshipwoman – what do you think it is?”

Brooks frowned, and her tail twitched as she thought.

“I think…” she began. “You said… the same kind of ironclads. What other kinds of ironclads are there?”

Jim patted the royal mast, the highest of the four huge cylinders making up Warrior’s mainmast.

“You’re sailing on one,” he answered.

Brooks looked confused, then stood up herself to look down at the sails.

“...how?” she asked. “Ironclads – they don’t look like this!”

“What makes an ironclad?” Jim asked. “It’s the iron, that’s what… experiments showed that it’s actually helpful to have the iron backed by wood, that makes it more resistant to attack. So that’s what Warrior is. She’s a test ship, all right – an ironclad cruiser, with the masts and sails to travel long distances on patrol in a way the Procyon War ironclads never could, and with armour that’s almost as strong.”

He tilted his head, a little. “Midshipwoman, have you ever used a solar sailer?”

Brooks looked a little thrown by the sudden change of topic.

“...no,” she admitted. “I’ve sailed a cutter before, but those have a proper keel and mast… solar sailers seem too dangerous to me. They’re not much more than a board, an engine and a sail, aren’t they?”

“That’s right,” Jim agreed. “And they’re very able to manoeuvre, in ways you can’t even manage by just welding an engine directly to a board. The key is the sail – you’ve done vectors in your classes, the key point here is that you can combine the vectors from the sail and the engine, and the transverse resistance from the sail if you push it to go in a direction against the one it’s meant to go. You can pull some incredibly tight turns.”

Brooks was frowning, clearly processing that information.

“That sounds like it’s personal experience, Captain,” she said. “You’ve done that?”

“I’ve done both,” Jim agreed. “And I’ve captained wooden ships against ironclads… ironclads struggle to turn fast, because they only have differential thrust, and they struggle to move quickly as well. And the former is what let us run circles around them… and strategically, they were dependent on covert support ships carrying fuel. Do you think the Warrior is the same?”

Brooks shook her head.

“No,” she replied, then frowned. “So you’re saying that… the sails are an advantage?”

“They might not be forever,” Jim conceded. “Maybe some day all our line warships will have to be full ironclads, where even the risk of mast damage is too much. But I think even then there’ll be a place for cruisers to have sails, for some years longer.”

He clapped her on the shoulder. “And maybe we’ll both see that day – but right now, if we ran into an ironclad from the Procyon Wars, I’m sure we’d clean their clock. Because this is the finest ship and crew I’ve yet seen, and I’ve seen a few crews.”

Then he looked slightly awkward. “Admittedly, my first one had about ninety percent of it be pirates…”

“Pardon?” Brooks asked. “Was that during the war?”

“Before,” Jim replied. “During my misspent youth. Though… you may as well tell the others this, Miss Midshipwoman – I think I’m going to have all of you young officers, and perhaps the rest of the crew, have at least one go each on a solar sailer. I believe there’s four in one of the holds, and it’s a useful skill… once you’ve flown one, not much else can scare you.”

The feline midshipwoman looked at her captain, still not sure how to take the oddly informal conversation.

“Should I be worried?” she asked.

Jim shrugged.

“That’s more BEN’s department than mine,” he admitted. “He flat out refuses to come up to the crow’s nest, though, so I’ll have to ask him on deck…”

[antotheethnographer]

imagine watching Star Wars in theaters in 1977 and pointing at Darth Vader boarding a ship with Stormtroopers and then choking some guy, and exclaiming THAT'S CLEARLY JESUS CHRIST, THAT'S WHY I'M INTO THIS

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Ship wars in my tumblr? More likely than you think.

Everyone of you is pretty and smart and the best, don't worry. Take your ship-based ethnocentrism and question it, my dudes. Go hug your fellow romaione, dramaione stan. Wholesome-ship-dynamics person, go take the hand of your enemies-to-lovers-to-therapy partners-to-my parents lil' guy. We are all cringe here, there's no need get our collective nickers in a twist.

I know some of people have a... very high self identification with shipping and antishipping to the point of being part of their personality, but there are better reasons out there to hate someone's guts. Like, have you met any nazis lately?

We all like to think that people who ship our notp are delusional, but are we not the same?

You, multiple individuals reading this, see any controversial/crack/unpopular ship you don't like getting hate, and you think it's justified because they're annoying, inmoral or whatever label you prefer, so the people doing the hating have the moral high ground. Buuuut it's usually hardcore fans of other equally cringy ship doing this, or some snobbish dudebro (gender neutral) whose understanding of concepts like mythology or transformative work are self-serving or limited, usually framed by some ambitious ideal of The Craft of StorytellingTM that's only undestandable by like-minded individuals and not by uncritical and shitty shippers.

Do you guys see where I'm going with this? All this sides sound like religious zealots, worst case scenario. People go preaching equallity and world peace and what not, and then act like any good old sectarian of your favourite christian variety.

Oh, and Lèvi-Strauss contacted me by means of hierofanic nature (came to me in an email). He says you should really check out works on the social aspects of storytelling and the importance of seemingly secular narratives to put the perceived chaos of the universe into order, which is related to our social and cultural organization.

(Besides the sarcasm, and surprisingley enough, sociological, anthroplogial and literary studies of religious beliefs have a lot to teach us about how we face the more secular aspects of our social lives. You should really check it out, random person reading my rant.)

Or you know, keep annoying eachother without reaching full-blown and multidrectional attempts at bullying. That's nice enough. You do you, and that's what's important.

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Y’all want to see a page from the comics that Haunts Me™

Star Wars: Darth Vader and the Cry of Shadows #5

😬😬😬😬

Anakin Skywalker Darth Vader: Child Killer is such a Theme in Star Wars media. It should just be a cliché. It’s a very easy shorthand to communicate to an audience that a person is losing or has lost their humanity, and is becoming the embodiment of pure evil, and yet, every time, it makes me cringe.

It reminds me of a fascinating sequence when Vader kills his younger self in a vision in Darth Vader (2015) #24. There’s this really charming exchange where he kills Obi-Wan (again) and gets the last word this time (not that he’d probably been obsessing over what he wanted to have said or anything of course not).

“I’m more powerful with every step I take away from you.” Sure, Jan.

Anyway, the memory of young Anakin Skywalker shows up allllll angry because Darth Vader killed his beloved Master!!

They fight, and of course Vader wins (it is his vision after all). He then says it himself:

“You were a child. I am well accustomed to killing children.”

Anakin Vader knows what he’s doing. He knows what he’s done. He is able to admit it to himself, without any self-censure. It’s just a statement of fact. He is an executioner of children. This is the evil of the dark side at play. He’s lost all compassion, all humanity.

It’s very fun to tell stories about ~sexy and morally ambiguous gray jedi~ and easy to avoid engaging with the premise of Star Wars worldbuilding that the Sith and the dark side are evil, and that evil has a real, concrete meaning (aka children die).

I love the comics a lot for not shying away from engaging with Vader’s worst deeds. There’s so much fascinating characterization and worldbuilding going on, and you get to see panels like the first, which can haunt your nightmares! So it’s good times all around, highly recommend 😂😭

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I have very few issues with yor analysis, but I think your class categorization of artists according to their approach to capitalism could benefit from some nuanced (I know, such an overstated and empty word) to the material aspects of technology access, specially for those workers whose tools are, ever increasingley, monthly-paid and corporate-own software. Do these artists truely own their own means of production? What are their options in a capitalist world? I think we have some food for thought there.

We have all been maybe far too cynic at some point, it's kind of unavoidable. Thank you for being open to debate.

Fanartist, directly after drawing the forty-seventh page of their unauthorized Marvel x Riverdale graphic novel: AI is bad because they didn't get permission before using other people's art.

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'It's nothing romantic. They just have a symbiotic relationship.'

'It's nothing romantic. They just have a cosmic connection.'

As a bonus, Redditors are allergic to them both.

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Hello this a long shot call, am a citizen of Palestine. I am here to request for your support to help get my insulin, I was diagnosised with type 1 diabetes and due to current situation in Gaza I'm unable to get my insulin injection as a result I'm here begging for little financial support to help me purchase insulin for this week.My donation link is available on my pinned post

I don't really have a reliable source of income (my country going through some economic issues). I'll share this so you can reach more people!

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Hear hear

one of my fave posts honestly

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Encima todos los discursos de Milei son el tipo leyendo lo mismo

Argentina eligió un cambio

Hay que abrazar los ideales de la libertad de nuestros "padres fundadores" (expresión yanqui si las hay)

Equilibrio fiscal

Volver a la Argentina de hace 100 años

Según Macabeos nosécuanto, que las fuerzas del cielo nos acompañen

Quien quiere pasar un domingo escuchando eso?

Digan lo que quieran de las cadenas de Cristina pero la tipa no leía y a veces hasta te mostraba el lanzamiento de un satélite

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What strikes me as Kemen's most morally repugnant action is washing the blood off the sword.

Let me explain. He orchestrated a coup with his father against the people that actually fought and suffered, he stripped the naval officers off their ranks in a humiliating manner, he disrespected their leader, trespassed and destroyed a sacred temple, forced an old sick man, tried to fight an officer and when he showed him mercy he literally backstabbed him.

What does he do after he's fallen so low? Wash the blood off with seawater.

He shakes off the responsibility. No blood on his hands. And where does the blood fall? In the sea, the sanctity these men bled for. The ultimate fuck you.

Could not have written a more morally corrupt villain

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When I speak of artists in regards of their work as artists, I'm clearly referring to people whose aim is to get an income or even live from art. Maybe it's different where you are from, but not every artist under capitalism has the same resources to establish themselves professionally and live from this activity. I hope you don't mean to say that proletariat artist have the same chances of earning a livelihood through their craft.

Look, I'm only saying that you fear may not come to pass exactly as you think it will. In my country piracy thrives in their own way. Bootleg DVDs and games, and whatever kind of transformative work you can imagine gets sold in community fairs, fandom events, random Parks, our local amazon-like online platforms and even on comic book stores. We are proud defenders of our right to transform the world based on our own idyosincrasy.

Even when social media cracks down on them, these artists find new ways to promote their work. Hell, here only some filthy rich people and far rigth idiots are above the free circulation of art (and science, and philosophy, and literature) and the right of artists to reimagine it, both professionally and recreationaly.

"AI art is theft" IS a simplistic argument that comes from an ethnocentric and capitalistic understanding of knowledge, that turned to IP, becomes another alienated product. But I can't blame these artist, who are mostly unaware of how AI even functions, of fearing this new technology will greatly lessen their chances of working and earning a living in the particular hellscape we inhabitat.

"Why would capitalists need a specialized worker that has to be paid as such when they could simply replace me with AI? I'll just have to work in whatever position is open regardless of its proto-industrial working and paying conditions." This is what these artist and many other not freelance workers in other fields fear, even if there probably is some symbolic capital prestige-wanting thing going around too. The IP and art theft thing it's just the way they found to express it, probably framed by their sociocultural lenses (specially if they are usamericans I think).

Even if their narrative is basically "superstructure 2.0", deep down what's being said is that the further fexibilization and precarization of every type of worker will allways be in the capital's interest, against which they know themselves to be mostly defenceless. It' not really about AI itself.

Anyways, I have to go back to work. Heat me up later if you want more friendly chat.

Fanartist, directly after drawing the forty-seventh page of their unauthorized Marvel x Riverdale graphic novel: AI is bad because they didn't get permission before using other people's art.