#Strained Metaphors

[ragingtrees]

run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run

[undead-cypress]

Is it still considered cannibalism if we removed the legs

[horatiovonbecker]

Well, when you say "according to their programming", do you mean they have a preprogrammed answer to literally every situation they encounter? Because answers that necessitate "Robotland is a static four-dimensional object" kind of turn Robotland into a bizarre art piece without obvious relevance to reality.

My appreciation for democracy as a system of government is contingent on it being some degree of decisionmaking tool, even if that decision boils down to "show of hands, do we bloodlessly depose person-in-charge". So if Robotland is a democracy in some sort of useful way - like "in the circumstance that Robotland faces something beyond general expectations and therefore settled programming, the voting system allows maximum exploitation of this small window for new thoughts to benefit Robotland", for example - then yeah, I'd probably call it a democracy. Otherwise, I'd say they're more like a weird ecosystem.

Robotland: A Painfully Unsubtle Allegory

(I’d first like to apologize in advance for how blatant and unsubtle the following thought experiment is; hopefully a less anvilicious metaphor will be forthcoming.) 

Imagine, for a moment, Robotland: a society made up entirely of robots.

Robots, it turns out, are very similar to regular people. Uncannily similar, even. Robots have jobs – dentists, plumbers, reporters, doctors, etc. Robots play sports and root for sports teams. Robots produce works of art both sublime and absurd, from the most pretentious of postmodernist poetry to the most moronic of daytime television. Robots have families, and engage in all the love and hate and drama that comes with interpersonal relationships. 

And, most importantly for the purposes of this post, Robots vote. Robotland, you see, is a democracy.

In fact, if you didn’t already know that the inhabitants of Robotland weren’t ordinary people, it might take you a while to suss out this particular fact. You could do it, certainly, but you’d have to be paying attention. It is conceivable that a Robot family that went off to live among humans could do so for quite some time before their neighbors caught on, provided that they went to a community with  a modicum of respect for basic privacy.

Despite all this, the Robots have a terrible secret: they aren’t actually sentient, and they don’t actually think. They can not make decisions of their own; they are forced to obey their programming at all times, in all circumstances. In short, they have no free will, and are the sort of entities that John Searle consideres incapable of understanding Chinese.

The question that I’m writing this essay to pose is as follows: should Robotland count as “real” democracy, or is it merely a sham; a Potemkin village that should not be confused with the genuine article.

Before we try to answer this question, let’s provide more details on how the distinctly robotic side of how Robotland actually works.

When two Robots love each other very much (at least to the extent that preprogrammed "love" counts as real love), they get married and decide that they want to have children. (As a tangent, some Robots have “male” exteriors and others have “female” exteriors but this doesn’t matter anymore, as Robotland has recently legalized gay marriage.) When this decision is made, the two Robots go down into their basement, and begin assembling new robots from spare parts. These “child” Robots are smaller and less complex than their fully assembled counterparts, but are periodically modified by their parents over the course of many years until they become “adults”.

More importantly for our purposes, however, is that that the parent Robots pass on their programming to their offspring. This process, however, is imperfect, and occasionally a bit or two gets flipped in the transmission, resulting in bugs. On other occasions, fully assembled and programmed Robots can be hacked by other Robots, or infected with viruses that replace part or all of their programming.

Programming, remember, controls every action that a Robot takes, from when to stand up to who to marry. How a Robot votes is similarly controlled by their programming. It should come as no surprise, then, that Robots have political parties; Aristotle labeled humans as “political animals”, and this is one of the respects in which Robots are similar to humans. And given  what we know of how Robot programming works, we should be equally unsurprised to find that Robot political parties are engaged in an escalating, Red Queen-esque arms race to see who can most effectively hack each others voting base without getting their own voting base hacked.

With every election cycle, some fraction of Robots will switch parties due to either hacking or general malfunction (some even form new political parties when particularly severe malfunctions force their programming to become incompatible with the party line), but as long as the rate of defection is less than the birth (assembly?) rate, there are always plenty of newly assembled Robots to replace the defectors, and the parties continue to expand. Ultimately, the parties that are able to grow more quickly than their rivals dominate the political landscape.

My question remains: should Robotland count as a democracy? And what does the answer to this question say about real life democracies?

[disguisedcheezed]

[the world is john.png]

[cold--cut]

the thing is that i don't care that much about stuart hatford as a character but objectively he has some interesting stuff going on with his sister

[completeoveranalysis]

[1]

Chapitre 209 - The Demon King and The Puppet

Get in losers we’re going to Outo!

We’re back in the sequence of revisiting family bonding moments in the previous arcs, and to my surprise and great delight this one isn’t a Syaoran and Sakura one but Syaoran and Kurogane! I thought these were a recap montage of the Syaoran/Sakura relationship over the journey, but maybe it’s a recap of Syaoran himself? Our son the clone Syaoran and all the nice moments he’s had on over the arcs we spent together? 

And why would they do that unless they wanted us to hurt us very badly with it? 

They’re either being very sentimental or someone might die, so time to turn up the Suspicion dial for the survivability of all our characters!

Either way, the splash text reads: In order to avoid losing everything, I wanted to become strong, like that person…

IN WHICH WE HAVE A CLEAR THROUGH-LINE BETWEEN KUROGANE AND SYAORAN? BOTH GAINING STRENGTH FOR THE SAME REASON? AND IT GOING OUT OF CONTROL FOR BOTH OF THEM?

For Kurogane his trauma led him down a path of increasing violence where he didn’t value life as much and just wanted to kill people to get stronger. For Syaoran his soul broke so he was forced to follow his clone programming and killed presumably WAY MORE people than even Kurogane could ever have dreamed of, leaving countless worlds devastated in the name of “protecting Sakura” and retrieving the feathers. 

Dark parallels dark parallels!

But eventual misuse of power besides, the splash text sounds like it’s from Syaoran’s POV as he remembers admiring Kurogane’s strength and how he wanted to protect people like Kurogane does. And it’s the past tense that makes it so interesting - as if his soul is awake after all, and he’s thinking back on his memories with the Tsubasa family through this final confrontation. 

Which is only fanning my hopes that he’s planning a ruse and whispered to Lava Lamp to play along. And even more tragic that to sell the ruse he had to MASSIVELY STAB Lava Lamp, absolutely wreck Fai and Kurogane until they were too injured to stand, and kill countless clones. 

So, like. A convincing ruse to say the least!

And we haven’t even talked about the image! Kurogane and Syaoran back to back in Outo! Kurogane holding his sword and Syaoran mirroring his pose but holding wet clothing instead! The matching white top and black pants of their different outfits! Kurogane smiling as he explains and Syaoran listening attentively!

While they stand under a Sakura tree. 

Which (like in the Hanshin cover) is an accurate detail to the setting they were in! The park this training took place in had a Sakura tree in it, but here a branch of the tree is visibly cutting them off from each other. Which makes me want to scream in how appropriate that is - because even here, in Syaoran’s memory, the presence of ‘Sakura’ (and the clone programming that makes him focus on the feathers) is cutting him off from the connection he remembers forming. Despite their bond the Sakura tree is in his way from actually reaching Kurogane - just like his missing soul would have wrenched any feelings for his family away from him, and here in the final battle his need to follow Evil Wolverine’s orders keeps him from even speaking to his family, even if he DOES remember their bond. 

WHICH IT SEEMS LIKE HE MIGHT. 

[joogios]

Farmer kun and Historia rambling. Under the cut cause it gets long.

OKAY so. This is written largely in part of those weird takes that because farmer-kun was Historia’s childhood bully as an adult he’s some kind of aggressor to her. and I won’t deny that its kind of a weird add-in for Isayama to choose her childhood bully to be her child-father when he could’ve just been a Random Person who worked in her orphanage regardless, but the choice was made.

That being said, I think the implication that this guy has power over her like he did in their childhoods is a bit silly. She’s an ex-Scout, and the-yknow-the Queen. And a well loved one at that. He could’ve or knew people who went to her coronation and he lives on her land (!!!) like Alma like Alma like Alm[is tranquilised and dragged off stage]Her friends are also ex-Scouts, diplomats, war heroes. No matter how you slink the technical power imbalance tilts in Historia’s favour for once which imo makes the change of hands in power dynamics in their situationship even more fascinating.

BUT! And my favourite part!!! Is the similarities between their relationship and that of Historia’s own parents!! An influential highly wealthy powerful Reiss getting a child from a lowborn farmhand/farmhand’s daughter and then taking/raising that child for a specific purpose in mind? YES! My patented kids are shitty mirrors of their parents is back in full force!!

Its also been explicitly stated that the guy chose to work at her orphanage to atone for what he was in the past. He doesn’t have ambitions which I think is one of the reasons why the council were fine with him. Extremely machiavelli. There’s a weird little set up where you can question how much autonomy exactly both of them have in this exchange: Where he’s her childhood bully and now a stranger but Historia needs an heir off of someone, and he’s burdened with the guilt of how he treated her to where he spent his teenagehood working strenuous work for her and now she’s the Queen.

Anyways, I think the aot fandom’s issue is that they really can’t concieve any other relationship that isn’t some kind of uber-propoganda 50’s-esque nuclear family. COUGH jeankasa COUGH All of this is my opinion and speculation, but I don’t think they ever married. Correct me if Isayama says otherwise but I think their situationship was like, a best of both worlds thing where Historia gets an heir off of one of her own subjects who won’t use her child against her but not marrying him means that she’s open to any political marriages for Paradis’ advantage.

They’ve both changed. She’s not the goody-two-shoes Krista Lenz persona that she put on to be liked in the Scouts and let her father control her life, he’s not the little boy that ganged up with others to aggravate another little girl. That’s canon so i shouldn’t have to say it but yanno. And this is utterly self indulgent BUT. The intersectionaling of farming-cultivating, nurturing-and death. Hello? Historia working on a farm and then waiting for the Rumbling to kill 80% of the world to advantage her country she now rules? Farmer-kun using his work to feed others as a means of self-atonement and discipline and then being set to marry that Queen? Its giving Hades and Persephone reversed. Also the commoner & noble trope: Paradis becoming a militaristic nation post-Rumbling with Historia at its head arranging with other nation’s leaders while he’s involved more in the inner community alongside their civilians focused on growing the nation back to some sembalance of stability.

I think that their situationship is stilted and awkward and they never truly love each other and that there is a lot of ‘duty’ involved in their Thing and that their individual lives are still pretty seperate, but they do care for each other, if nothing else. They have a sembalance of normalcy after so much chaos.

[eilooxara]

It hurts to see her living on crumbs and it hurts more to see her spend all her time sweeping up everything she can in case the next speck might be a crumb instead of dust

[sysig]

Always rejecting intimacy <<|?? (Patreon)

[bees-nest]

Ok so imagine there's a person who uses a window AC unit, and occasionally a mosquito gets swept inside through it, and they end up getting bit. That kinda sucks (no pun intended), but they just slap the mosquito and move on. No big deal.

Now imagine you've just moved to the florida everglades and you like to go fishing in the summer, so you ask around for how to best keep the mosquitoes off you while you're out by the water. But that person who stays inside and doesn't even live near the everglades keeps telling you, "Who cares? Just kill one when you see it. That's what I do, and you never see me covered in mosquito bites."

That's how it feels to be told, "Just block people! It's your job to curate your online experience!" when you're being harassed online.

[norts-trolls]

*Steals ss's clothes while he sleeps*

He woke up to the smell of burnt troll. SS: 𝕀𝕥'𝕤 𝕚𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕤𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝕖𝕟𝕠𝕦𝕘𝕙 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕟 𝕞𝕒𝕕𝕖 𝕚𝕥 𝕟𝕖𝕒𝕣 𝕞𝕖.

[babymerc]

                     AFFILIATION :      WADE   WILSON.

[cthulhubert]

I was kind of laughing but from a distance at all the, "This too, is yuri," posting on my dash. Then I read Tai Ari Deshita "Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games".

These two literally have nose bleeds during their fight.

There's a classic shounen tier, "During a true battle, exchanging moves, you come to understand your opponent better than if you'd shared a million words," bit, complete with scenes of them diving deep into a dark sea together.

The second female lead sees the first and this side character engaged in this kind of battle and runs out of the exhibition hall like she'd caught a lover cheating.

I think it might be too blatant to actually count as yuri, and instead is just gay.

[sarahsanderson]

all i can say is

let the games begin

on april 19th

[yellingmetatron]

why locusts?

"I DUNNO, I JUST THINK THEY'RE FUCKING BADASS. ALWAYS HAVE. SOMETHING ABOUT A LITTLE TINY HERBIVORE THAT CAN WRECK THE SHIT OF ENTIRE CIVILIZATIONS IN BIG ENOUGH NUMBERS. ALSO THE DESIGN IS JUST FUCKING GREAT. I'VE BRED MY OWN VARIETIES TOO. SOME OF THEM CARNIVOROUS, SOME OF THEM THAT LITERALLY EAT FUCKING TIME, SOME OF THEM HUMANOID WITH TINY CROWNS... THEY'RE FUCKING NEAT LITTLE GUYS." Aside from the shouting, the archangel's voice sounds uncharacteristically warm.

[autistic-shaiapouf]

It's 11pm so I know this is influencing my feelings but. make it make sense, no one in this household has beef with me bc 1) I'm never home and 2) I ingratiate myself with everyone so everyone thinks I'm on their side, when in actuality I can't stand any of them. What I am witnessing has me developing more bitterness for other people than my year and a half of customer service has done. Not one person here has a functioning brain and yet expect me to feel pity. To reach out.

Leave.