lmdhawk

[lmdhawk]

[Image ID: 1. A photograph of a probably-man who looks to be of south-Asian decent, sitting sideways on a bus seat, wearing baggy grey underarmor shorts and a beige t-shirt, sitting with a repurposed five gallon water jug from a water dispenser that is filled with boba tea, the boba themselves coming to about halfway up the drum, sipping through a large straw.

2. A screenshot of three replies from tumblr. @eva-porazione: "I don't think that's enough boba tea", @mrrhorse: "I think that's too much boba tea", and @ashenchromatic: "I think thats the right amount if boba tea".

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[lmdhawk]

Cowboy Bebop

That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science

Can you reblog this and tell me where are you from and what was your starter anime?

[lmdhawk]

The real version is: We need somebody to be in the kitchen making the damn sandwiches, or nobody gets lunch, and it wouldn't matter that's it's mostly women if you just respect the damn sandwich makers.

aha! you may have mistaken my statement of "women belong in the kitchen" as misogynistic, but you see, i think being in the kitchen is a good thing. women's innate desire to make sandwiches is a positive trait, and we all know if it's positive it doesn't count as a stereotype. i'm very smart and i know what feminism is.

[lmdhawk]

Sure for pain but also for more banal stuff. For example:

"My ear feels weird."

"Weird how?"

"I don't know, just...weird. Like it's stuck or something. Just off."

"Okay. I'm going to need more than that."

"I don't...I can't...It's just not right. It's not normal. It doesn't hurt except when I swallow, but it's like...heavy?"

"Hang on, let me flick the collar."

*tilts head breiefly.* "Huh. I would not have described it that way, but I see what you mean now. That's just a sinus issue. Easy fix."

As someone who has trouble articulating what's wrong half the time, this would be so helpful. Also for non-verbal patients and those who don't speak the same language.

I wish they could invent a medical device that temporarily transfers your symptoms and pain to the doctor treating you and it worked like a shock collar. “I think light exercise would-.” and then bam they’re rolling around the floor clutching their stomach in agony and dry heaving.

[lmdhawk]

I think the misconception comes from the fact that there are two reasons that consumer goods are expensive. A) The material and labor costs that go into the thing are higher and that gets passed along to the consumer or B) Corporate price gouging and artificial scarcity.

IPhones, as an example, are not as expensive as they are because the people mining the rare earth metals that are needed to make them and the workers in the factories where they're built are being paid full living wage (though they should be, of course). IPhones are as expensive as they are because Apple wants to make a profit. If you take away corporate price gouging, the prices go down. If you make sure everyone is paid fairly, the price goes back up. But, the money goes to all the people along the way, instead of tech CEOS, so it evens out.

This website sometimes seems to think that leftism is when you can buy cheap things, and the cheaper they are, the more leftist it is. I really don't know how to explain the world to people like that.

[lmdhawk]

[Image ID: A screenshot of a post by Aaron D. (@MrBrownEyes2020) whose profile picture is a artfully exposed photograph of a tree-covered rise. "It's 80,000 BC. You are immortal. The world is still frozen in an ice age. You decide to save $10,000 EVERY Day, never spending a cent. 82,021 years later, it's 2021. You still don't have as much money as Elon Musk. Tax. The. FUCKING. Billionaires."

"Every day" and "Tax. The. Fucking. Billionaires." were both entirely in all caps. End Image ID] Transcriber note: Apparently the all caps thing is very frustrating while using a screen-reader, so I kept enough to get the yelly vibes, but not all of it, so hopefully it doesn't get too annoying

[lmdhawk]

The last medication you took is now your wizard name, are you happy with it?

[lmdhawk]

[Image ID: A low resolution image of Elmo from Sesame Street, arms up, photoshopped onto a black background with flames behind him. End Image ID]

“If I had time travel I’d kill Hitler” “If I had time travel I’d stop my favourite politician getting assassinated” you’re all thinking way too small. If I had time travel I’d stop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from dying on the moon due to Soviet sabotage, kicking off the Great Nuclear War and devastating half of the planet.

[lmdhawk]

[Image ID: 1. A screenshot of tumblr tags "#this post confuses me #why would i ever be in a car or train for 16hr... #even the train to france only takes like 3 hours"

2. A screenshot of tags from when @eruhamster reblogged it from @xollos "#oh good a post that treats europeans with the same kind of irritation at their tiny worldview as they constantly treat americans".

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You shouldn’t date or become serious friends/partners with someone if you can’t stomach the thought of being stuck in a car or train with them for 16 hours.

[lmdhawk]

I wouldn't be *so* bad if you could turn it off. The AI assistant on my phone is always there, asking me if I want to use it. No setting will make it stop. Adobe Acrobat has a very prominent AI button. The button will not go away. Co-pilot requires unintuitive hoops to jump through to uninstall it, and I'm not entirely sure I got it half the time. Zoom won't let me toggle away the AI button. It shouldn't be this hard to not use something. It should be an optional feature at best.

Please forgive me for ranting, but...I am so tired of AI. Just so tired. I don't want Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, or Meta AI, or whatever other energy-sucking, water-wasting, mediocrity-spewing LLM is currently being thrust upon me. I just want to be left alone to create in peace.

[lmdhawk]

[Image ID: A screenshot of black text on a white background. "There's a method to growing rhubarb called "forcing" where it's raised in total darkness and tended to in brief intervals of candlelight. The plant thrives only because it's looking for an absent sun, and extends so fast you can hear the growing pains. Forcing can weaken the crop but if done correctly can yield a sweeter, more desirable result. Not everything needs to be an allegory. All the same, I am aware that there are things that have happened in my formative years that I have no words to describe and that only God's eyes have seen."

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how’s that house that raised you?

[lmdhawk]

Okay, I can kind of see the outline of your logic, however you have to remember that all these characters come from human creators who often do not actually think that deeply about things, and you can convey all of these things in various different ways. Plus which, understanding the way choices you make are influenced by and, in turn, influence readers and culture.

Regarding your points about three and five: Being fat being a result of hording resources only makes logical sense if food is the one and only resource worth having in the kingdom, and there is no social backlash against being fat. In a modern corporation, hording money in the main problem. Most people are not literally starving to death as in lack of calories. They are able to afford adequate calories, but cheap calories don't offer anything beyond the most basic nutrients, and are packed with all sorts of additives which in turn cause all sort of problems with metabolism, hormone levels and energy levels and overall health, including, paradoxically, putting on extra weight. Conversely, those with more money can afford to be picky about what they eat, and get the high nutrient, relatively low additive foods that cost a premium, and can look after their health better overall, which means that they very rarely put on extra weight because they can get any problem with hormones or metabolism taken seriously, because they can afford to go to the best doctors, not just whoever happens to take their insurance, and can actually clear their calendar for follow-up appointments. And if they really can't be bothered to keep themselves healthy, there's liposuction.

It's also very possible to be greedy and evil without specifically having excess food. Forcing people to work in unsafe conditions so that you can get more gold in shorter amounts of time to bring in luxury trade goods is arguably more detrimental to a kingdom than overeating. And, once agriculture really gets going, it is entirely possible for a king to have two or three times as much food as strictly necessary and get fat while all of the peasants also have enough food, let alone any kind of industrial economy, where access to food has virtually nothing to do with underproduction, so any one person having extra food is not going to mean everyone else starves to death. Rather, the lack of food is just a symptom of unequal wealth distribution overall (Do you know how much food rots in Industrialized countries due to corporate greed and poor management systems? A fat leader liking extra cookies who solves those problems is actually helping his people not starve.). With all that in mind, unless the actual problem in the story is a famine, the king being fat is just shorthand for not giving a fuck about his people getting what they need, and you could just as easily show that with him having really nice clothing while peasant children are forced to go barefoot in the snow. So the question circles back to: if it doesn't really have any basis in actual economic conditions, *why* is that the visual shorthand?

As for mixing gender being "degeneracy": You know that's not actually a thing, right? People who fuck around with gender are statistically no more likely to be perverted, or at least not in a dangerous, predatory way, then anyone else. Most people who are trying to sexually manipulate or prey on others try to maintain socially accepted standards of dress and outward behavior to blend in and put victims at ease. Purposely making yourself a very obvious target is not going to help your case. Having mixed gender/sex presentation is *seen* as a problematic trait, as the witches in Macbeth show, but that's at a meta level. There's no reason it has to be the case.

And as for not making your heroes trans women? Lots of authors write about people who have traits and life experiences that they themselves don't. Part of being a good author is being able to find commonality and portray characters who are not like you. And since plenty of trans women actually exist, it stands to reason that any competent author could make a character who was a trans woman if the setting allowed for it, and if the book is modern or sci-fi, then you know it does.

I just think everyone should take a moment to consider the question "what is your visual shorthand for cruelty?" and then follow it up with a critical "and who taught you that?"

specific examples include but are not limited to

why is an evil timeline character design disabled? (why do the heroes go through equally punishing battles and never lose an arm, a leg, an eye?)

why are the futuristic scifi terrorists uniformly darker skinned? (why are the heroes so much lighter?)

why is the greedy boss fat? (why are the heroes skinny?)

why is the criminal mastermind heavily scarred? (why is the brooding, traumatized hero unscathed?)

why is the predatory creep a bearded person in a dress and makeup? (why are none of the heroes trans women?)

who taught you that this is how things are?

how long do you plan on repeating it?

[lmdhawk]

Vaguely correlated even.

infantry and adultery sound like they'd be opposites but they're in fact completely unrelated

[lmdhawk]

Canon: They were cis

Fanfic: So this is how their transition went...

canon: they died

fanfic: fUCK YOU

[lmdhawk]

I once wrote a short story for a now out of print anthology about a young woman captured by the Empire government in my fantasy setting, and she could have been saved because he cousin had gotten an army job and was willing to look the other way, but only some of the party could really get out and she chose to stay behind.

My cousin, on reading this, asked why a good guy ended up working for an evil empire and my first thought was that The Empire isn't *evil* evil. Yeah their the bad guys, but they haven't done anything much worse than the US has done historically. Except for the death penalty for being gay, but that didn't come up in the story.

You know the thing about having basic human empathy, respect for other cultures, and caring about the environment as an American it makes you fucking hate your government as you listen and realize the damage your country has done to everyone. “You American hating leftist.” Dawg we are like factually the greatest evil on earth right now. If you wrote an evil empire with America’s current foreign and domestic policy in fiction it’d be called grimdark and ridiculous.

[lmdhawk]

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[lmdhawk]

Usually, you get a little bit of a grace period before your health insurance ends. Use that time to talk to your doctor about tapering it down would be my advice. Also, figure out if there are ways you can get your med through other means. I managed to make deals with doctors to see me anyway if I paid cash and if your meds are generic, you might be able to manage. Depends of what it is though.

If things go sideways suddenly, maybe self taper? Take every other dose, then every third so that by the time you get to the end of your last bottle it's not as sudden a shock to the system. Medically inadvisable, but probably better than full on suddenly ending it.

Ignorant question from someone who has been fortunate enough to have health insurance their entire life: What happens if you lose your health insurance and you're on prescription meds that you aren't supposed to quit cold turkey?