So do people realize that we aren't building new train tracks when we expand the amteak network, I have multiple times seen people say that we shouldn't expand the network because it would destroy protected lands, which would be a fair criticism but Amtrak doesn't build new tracks, we use existing tracks. We are not destroying protected lands, we are using land that has already been clear for a century
A lot of people try to explain this without knowing anything about how voice synthesis works, so here's my breakdown on No, Hatsune Miku Is Not AI, And No, AI Voice Synthesis Is Not Bad.
okay americans i gotta ask because as an European i grew up with lots of american shows and cartoons and in a lot of them there was an episode where they give the protags a doll or an egg or a bag of flour or whatever and told them pretend to be its parents or something
In the end, if children bother you for sensory reasons and that's why you don't want them to be in the same public spaces as you, there are disabled adults who can and would cause the same sensory issues for you. Adults who are loud, who vocally stim, who have poor boundaries, poor hygiene, who cry in public, etc etc etc. And they're already socially ostracized for all of this.
So actually yeah, it's the bare minimum you can do for the group with the least human rights on the planet to figure out how to accept children as part of your public community without hating them for it, even if you are child-free yourself.
I know I’m a few years late to the Gravity Falls party, but I can’t get over how effectively the Ford reveal flips the switch on Stan’s character. From what little I’d seen of the show on Tumblr before I watched it, I’d always assumed Stan was a pretty one-dimensional sleazy con man. And since it was a series aimed toward kids, I kind of assumed Stan wouldn’t get that much development or story outside of Dipper and Mabel. I figured if he did have an arc, it would be the pretty common “gruff bitter loner guy who doesn’t like people gets kids and learns to love them” storyline.
And for like the first half of the show, this kind of seemed to be the case, aside from the mystery surrounding whatever Stan was hiding in the basement.
And then the Ford reveal / backstory happens and you see Stan in a completely new light.
Stan isn’t a con man because he wants to be. He’s a con man out of necessity - first because he was kicked out of his house and forced to make it on his own at 18, and then because it was helping him work to bring his brother back. He doesn’t just run the mystery shack because he likes to lie to people and swindle them out of their money - he does it because he needed a way to make money and keep the shack while trying to figure out a way to reopen the portal. He has a fake identity because he needed to keep people from snooping around looking for Stanford and the easiest way to do that was to take his place.
All the things that make you think he’s selfish and shady throughout the first half of the series are revealed to be because he’s a desperate, heartbroken man who wants to bring his brother back. He isn’t the traditional gruff guy who doesn’t love anyone until some rambunctious kids come into his life at all - he loves his brother so much that literally everything he does is to get him back. And he lies to the kids in an effort to protect them and keep anything bad from happening to them like it did to his brother.
Great twists / mystery reveals don’t just take the story in a new direction - they cast new light on everything that has come before. And Gravity Falls does that so well.
Just look at one of the first episodes in the series where Mabel makes a wax figure of Stan and Stan appears to fall in love with it and mourns it when it melts, going as far to host a funeral for it. Without knowing Stan’s backstory, this whole storyline just feeds into our view of Stan as a self-centered, ridiculous person. It’s ridiculous he would cherish a wax figure of himself. It’s so egotistical that he would host a funeral for it when it died and get honestly choked up about it.
But then you learn that Stan lost his twin brother and that whole storyline doesn’t really feel like the story of a selfish, egotistical man anymore. It’s the story of a man who felt like he got his brother back again momentarily and then had to lose him all over again.
That’s an effective twist. You can’t learn about Stan’s backstory and then go back and view him the same way you did before it.
If you're having trouble keeping up with what's going on in Palestine because of US news coverage of university protests, here are some articles you can read and a video you can watch:
youtube
While CNN & all the other mainstream media try to paint the university protests as "pro terrorism" (which they're not, they're literally anti-war protests.) Palestinians are being slaughtered by the minute.
I cannot express how jarring it was after being raised by a "Porn Addiction Coach" to get into a relationship with a woman and come face to face with the fact that she did actually want me to sexually desire her.
Like, in Evangelical Purity Culture, male desire was basically poison. It was a threat. It was this constant temptation that would destroy everything. And even after leaving, in the sort of queer, feminist spaces i spend most of my time in that wasn't something that pretty much anyone was spending time actively dissuading me from feeling.
But my desire is good. It's not something that I'm being accepted in spite of. It's a positive thing. It's a bonus. Not even just vanilla stuff, all the stuff I'd convinced myself were these weird terrible desires that were shameful to have.
It honestly took me over a decade to fully accept that. To stop dissociating during sex and confront that I was, in fact, being a massive perv and that was fantastic and preferable and that I could accept that into my self-image without shame or self hatred.
But it's important to do. It's important to leave relationships that don't welcome that part of you. To know that your sexuality is valuable and valid and worth owning and celebrating. Because the alternative is just...not being. Either existing as yourself and repressing the part of your identity that is sexual or allowing that sexuality to exist but turning off your self while it does.
oh wow! hey if you take pills check this out. new medicine taking meta just dropped.
according to these models, out of the 4 tested postures, the best position to digest pills is laying on your right side. standing upright has a similar time to laying in your back at twice as much as laying on the right side, and laying on the left side is the slowest by far.
laying on right side: pill dissolves in around 10 minutes.
standing: pill dissolves in 23 minutes. laying on the back has a similar time.
laying on left side: pill dissolves in up to 100 minutes.
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0096877
definitely worth a lot more research.
if you want your medicine to kick in fast, try laying on your right side! if you want your medicine to kick in slower, try laying on your left side.
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