#argumentative assignment

[mimefish]

nevermind everyone winner's symbolism cancelled. we cannot have another scar earth/mercury/comet situation again. I vote we all lay down our weapons and join hands in peace and accept that the one true symbol for Joel is the Car. wherever he goes whatever flavour of symbols you particularly enjoy. Car. Just Car. Because it would be really funny

[asha-mage]

MDZS AU where Jiang Cheng realizes that Lan Sizhui is the Wen orphan that Wei Wuxian took care off during the Burial Mounds arc, decides that's close enough to qualify him as Nephew, declares that no Nephew of His (much less a surrogate son of Wei Wuxian's) is going to be raised in the Cloud Recedes, and immediately launches into a custody battle with Lan Wangji.

But since neither Jiang Cheng or Lan Wangji can acknowledge that Sizuhi has any connection to Wei Wuxian, both begin steadfastly and stubbornly insisting that he is a Cultivator of peerless potential and skill and he belongs in their sect thank you very much, and would clearly be very unhappy in the other's. This confuses the hell out of the already mystified Cultivation world, who had barely adjusted yet to gossiping about Sizhui being Wangji's illegitimate child by mysterious love affair.

(Eventually the common consensus in the rumor mills is that both JC and LW where in love with Sizhui's mother and both believe themselves to be Sizhui's real father.)

(LW couldn't care less what gossips say, but JC has to bite his tongue till it bleeds to avoid telling anyone the truth in a fit of anger.)

(It was Nie Huaisang who put that rumor out in the first place, partly to troll JC, partly because, in a way, it's a little true.)

[burningcheese-merchant]

I think more ppl need to see this

Yeah for real lol. That's exactly what it is with him. Not to toot my own horn too much but I believe this post I made ages ago hits the nail on the head haha

"I'm bored" is... technically true. In a sense. Personally, I think it's a very simple and vague allusion to the real problem. That thin sheet of snow coating a massive, freezing cold iceberg. Just barely obscuring it from proper view.

imo it's been a bit disappointing seeing people take to extremes with Burning Spice's character. I've seen people either woobify him, downplay or excuse his actions by saying "he's not evil! He's hurting! He's depressed! He doesn't hate people, he's lashing out because he can't internalize his pain anymore!", or just demand he be put to death immediately on sight without trial. You can like a morally repulsive character and sympathize with their issues while also acknowledging that they're repulsive and need to face justice for their crimes. Burning Spice is one of my favorite characters, I love everything about him, he's sexy as fuck, I understand why he's the way he is, I'm still happy to see his ass beat because he's a piece of shit and he deserves it lol.

Not to throw shade at "simpler" villains ofc. I love me some assholes that are assholes just because they can be. Like Jack Horner in Puss in Boots 2. But Burning Spice isn't Jack Horner and he honestly shouldn't be. The deeper, sadder, more complex reasons governing his actions suit him better than just "I'm bored fuck this shit" and nothing else ykwim

and of course, he's still wrong. Burning Spice's view of the world is wrong. Does a book begin just to end? Does a song play just to finish in a few minutes' time? No. They begin so that we may read, listen, and enjoy. So that they may make us laugh, or have us shake our heads in disappointment, or tell us some hidden truth. Make our days and lives a little more interesting than they were before. Life is beautiful BECAUSE it is fleeting. Born, grow, wither, born, grow, wither. Yes, that's how it goes. But there's so much more to those things than just what we can gather from those three words. Every day is different. Though the sun rises every morning without fail, it's never quite the same color, is it? Always a bit of a different shade of yellow, orange, red, bleeding into the sky a little differently each time. There are so many things to see and do, games to play, people to meet and love and cherish. Maybe some of those things and those people won't be here someday but that doesn't mean their existence never meant anything. We are not born to die, we are born to live. We must die for those who are to live, and live for those who have died. Regardless, we must never lose sight of the intrinsic value of all that surrounds us. Burning Spice very much did. Underneath his bitterness and anger and (not unfounded, to be fair) lamentation for the unstoppable cycle of life and death is a deep-rooted selfishness and fundamental lack of understanding and appreciation for life and other people. In the face of despair, he gave in and chose evil. He was and is wrong for doing so, regardless of why he did it. He could've stepped down. He could've just admitted he didn't have what it took to be the Herald of Change. Hell, if he really hates being alive so much, he would've committed suicide a LONG time ago. But he never did any of that; instead he chose to inflict an equal or greater suffering on everything and everyone else, even the undeserving. And for that he MUST pay. And Golden Cheese, with her personality and her experiences and the wisdom she came to attain when faced with the exact same despair as Burning Spice, is exactly the right person to make him do that

[communistkenobi]

a prof in the department retired last year and was like just raid my office for whatever you want idc im not cleaning it out so it was like book whalefall. and because nobody in my department cares about theory i got to take all of his books on states and revolutions. I’m finally getting around to looking through them and he had some gooooood fucking books dude, I got Lineages of the Absolutist State by Perry Anderson, States and Social Revolutions by Theda Skocpol, Social Origins of Dictatorships and Democracies by Barrington Moore Jr, an edited collection on apartheid, and a book about settler colonial policy in Canada

[t1sunfortunate]

I truly do think one of the largest pitfalls among the "media consumption is my passion" crowd is the tendency to treat characters as human beings with agency rather than narrative tools manipulated by the author

[printed-paws]

I love thinking about aus where Billy raised Sam

He'd be such a bad dad it's hilarious

[sorryiwasasleep]

sorry to the 7 year old I heard trying to make the argument that Bill Cipher would beat Bugs Bunny in a fight because all offense to Bill, Bugs Bunny would wipe the fucking floor with him and not even break a sweat

[toad-games]

Discord sillies prompted further fanart.

Lucy may be a vampire now, but she’d still like to finish her degree. Even if that means doing a group project with her bodyguard situationship and a prolific vampire hunter.

📝🩸📝

“I am not going to do a group project with you,” whispered Nathan, his scowl so deep it created two furrows bracketing his nose.

“Then you shouldn’t have followed me to class,” she hissed, “how long have you been stalking me?”

Nathan looked away, and for a moment she thought she saw a flash of guilt in his dark eyes. “I thought you were feeding on students here.”

“You’d probably get a good caffeine buzz if you did,” said Iliya conversationally, “and I have my suspicions about that one,” he nodded towards a boy who was talking animatedly to the girl next to him. His rapid steam of consciousness seemed interesting enough, judging by the girl’s expression, though his eyes were half lidded and red rimmed.

“If we snacked on him we’d be in for a very good time,” said Iliya with a toothy grin.

“And why are you here, exactly?�� Demanded Nathan, “are you also enrolled in Introduction to Poetry?”

“I go where Lady Blackwell goes. Besides I do not need a class to enjoy poetry,” said Iliya, reclining in the cheaply upholstered seat with his arms behind his head, “but if I was, I would get A for sure.”

Anyway go play Thicker Than by @barbwritesstuff

[quibbs126]

So we were talking about Paradise Lost in my English class, and I had to read some of it, and I’m not gonna lie, I kept thinking of the Decepticons while reading it, like I could see this fitting them

And we got to a point where we looked at the Fallen Angel painting because someone brought it up, and I wanted to talk about how I’ve seen people remake that piece with both Sentinel and Megatron, but I kept quiet

Because like, online here is one thing, but do you know how embarrassing it would be to compare Paradise Lost, one of the most significant works in English literature, to Transformers, which the average person knows as just a glorified toy commercial for kids and the Bay movies? Especially when people most likely wouldn’t have the context of Transformers One, which is what I was specifically thinking of here

Like my professor’s chill, she’d probably be fine with that, but I don’t think I could take that public shame

[eldrbraus]

im sorry i personally cant see malleus and silver as siblings at all.....

and i dont really understand why people do either?

to silver, malleus has always been like. the future ruler of his country? a royal figure he has the duty to protect? hes not even on the same social status, something they are both very aware of......

yes of course he has a deep relationship with him after everything that happened in book 7, but it really doesnt feel like a sibling relationship at all? it really feels like. well. the same relationship sebek has towards malleus... and i really never see anyone saying that sebek and malleus are "like siblings". both silver and sebek see malleus with devotion and admiration as his knights

the "they were raised by lilia" argument is also very ?? because malleus was not raised by lilia completely like silver was lol. lilia could barely see malleus as the senate wanted him GONE from the castle, and he could only come back every so often (which is one of the reasons why lilia would just say "its ok malleus dw" when he fucked something up, how is lilia going to blame a kid who he only sees like once a month or whatever and its the reason why malleus was SO lonely on the first place-- if he had been raised by lilia he wouldnt have had this whole flashback about how lonely and alone he always was)

and when malleus went to lilias house to see silver, silver never saw him as a brother or anything like that. it was the big dragon man who was the prince of the country, he never had any kind of familial relationship with him

respect to you if you do see them like siblings, but i personally cant and never saw any indication of them being like that

[borealing]

bbc ghosts panel at mcm, laurence confirmed that robins name is "roh", and if asked his name he would say "roh" but humphrey decided that roh was short for something and introduces him as robin 😭

[aromanticasterisms]

the epic highs and lows of rereading your own writing to seek out parts you disliked and analyze Why you disliked them to do better in the future

[scarrunner05]

god I could write essays on the idea of family in for the gods and more specifically the way each PC is alienated from their family in a different way.

Especially how that ties into Cona and what I can argue she represents. because like there are textual things she could represent as like. The child of the god of nothing and the god of civilization, even if she doesn’t have a domain or anything as a godling. Or I would more argue she’s a representation of that loss/absence of familial connection taken to the extreme, abandoned by her parents in an isolated pocket dimension and clearly coping with that by taking mortals and forcing them to play the roles of a happy nuclear family specifically, and currently every character is LITERALLY trapped by the expectation of what family should be and the desire to recreate that until it works even if it’s failed you. Through cona.

This is why I can’t be left alone with hiatuses I start doing half baked analysis because technically we don’t have enough information yet for me to truly formulate a concrete idea of it but we have enough in what like 70 hours worth of play time for some really interesting connections to leap out at you.

[arrowmoose]

Argumentative Essay Against AI for Artistic Purposes

Welp, I’m finally posting it.

I decided to post it as screenshots rather than just copy and paste, so apologies if you can’t see it.

I’m open to discussion and feedback, but please note that this has already been turned in and graded.

I got a 92, for anyone curious.

[0rotsu]

i mean if you want to get all "it's not that deep" with me, that's fine. generally speaking, it isn't that deep. but it does still make me question your treatment of trans women and transfems when you treat canonically explicit transfeminine characters this way.

[bitegore]

I strongly believe that refusing to let teenagers have any access to public, social drinking spaces is part of why so many of my friends' relationships with alcohol over the years has been so completely fucked.

I'm American, for context. The drinking age here is and has been 21, but it's pretty easy to get access to alcohol when you're underage and I really fervently believe the drinking age should be lowered to 16. Usually I see 18 discussed and I seriously think it's not far enough.

There are a lot of reasons I think that, but the first and foremost one is that 16-year-olds are drinking anyway and they will continue to be drinking no matter how strict the laws get. All it means is that they're mostly drinking with other teenagers and they're well aware that they can get themselves and other people around them into serious legal trouble if they get caught, which doesn't stop them drinking but does make them nervous about it especially in the context of emergencies. Are you going to call 911 if you're 16 and your friend has alcohol poisoning? Maybe you know there are protections for you so your friend can get medical treatment... and maybe you don't.

That's relevant because I'm going to come back to that later. But let's go back to the first point. (BTW: this post gets long.)

Everyone learns how to deal with stuff from somewhere. And no one who is drinking, underage or overage, is getting alcohol completely in a vacuum. Someone has to give it to you, and if you're underage, you have to genuinely go out of your way to find someone and/or live in a household with alcohol that someone lets you have or doesn't notice you're taking. The former is alright sometimes; the latter is worrying a lot of the time, but there are exceptions (I was in that situation myself specifically because my parents were both non-drinkers but kept a handful of alcohol around for relatives who did drink, and also to occasionally to take tiny sips of for religious reasons and then go "blugh, gross" and put back into a cabinet and ignore it).

But the vast majority of people I know who were drinking underage were drinking because they were hanging out with someone else who was underage and drinking with them. So that's where we learned our drinking habits.

This means several things. Because: 1. Teenagers largely don't know very much about how to function in an adult setting for years or decades, on account of how they haven't gotten to do that yet. 2. Teenagers have to be secretive about drinking, because underage drinking is an open secret but it's still illegal and there's only so much that one can talk about safely, even if your family and all your friends are cool with it, which most aren't. 3. Teenagers usually drink relatively rarely, and don't necessarily know when they'll be able to get a drink next, because they're dependent on other people to get their alcohol for them. Even teens with relatively easy access to alcohol (like myself) are still going to be aware that they can't just go out and get more if they want more - there's a lot of steps involved that an adult does not have. And this is a shared social context, where a lot of the time teens are also only drinking because their friends are the ones with the alcohol.

There's also other factors that go into what I'm talking about, but this is what I want to highlight. The experience gap, genuine need for secrecy, and what I want to call "access insecurity" (point #3) even though that's kind of not a great term. Maybe I'll just call it point 3.

Underage drinking "culture", such as it were, includes (at least in my experience) drinking to excess every time. I know I'm painting with a broad brush, but from my perspective, this is in large part because - if you do not actually control when you're able to drink, and it's something you like to do, then you should indulge now or risk not getting another chance for a long time. And if you learn this is the right way to do it, this is the approach you'll take every time. And if you're introducing other people to drinking, they'll take cues from you, and do the same as you.

Being anxious about being able to get your hands on alcohol is kind of a hallmark feature of alcoholism, at least as we're told to consider it. It's also, honestly, a perfectly reasonable (or at least understandable) response to being in a situation where something you like is only available to you outside your control, you can only ask a small group of trustworthy people because there are consequences to talking too much to the wrong people about it, and you have no recourse for this but to wait anywhere between a year and almost a decade. (Some thirteen year olds drink. There is no good reason to pretend otherwise.) The fact that many people are drinking heavily and used to being anxious about whether or not they'll be able to drink when they want to before they turn 21 and can just go legally buy their own alcohol means that this particular hallmark of a problem is going to be ignored, because either it's something you're used to or something you genuinely see as normal.

Honestly, a handful of my friends in high school had serious alcohol problems. We all (in my friend group, at least) knew about it. But there was also the question of: what can you do about it? When your friend might get their entire family or their friends' family in trouble for trying to get help, outside of all other barriers not mentioned but also fully present? Teenagers aren't known for having a lot of agency with what they do with their lives; that's a really common reason for people to develop disordered relationships with substances of all sorts...

But beyond that, it just trains you to drink like your life depends on it every time you drink. Drinking is to get drunk, because the social element is we're all drinking as much as possible to be drunk because we don't know when we'll be drunk next, and it has to be a secret how much you drink and it's an open secret and you can brag about it but you can't talk too much or you'll get in TROUBLE. Be careful what you say or you'll put yourself and your friends in actual real danger, at least from the legal system.

So that's the underage drinking culture that I know about and that I was part of. That's problematic for the obvious reasons and it's also like that as a response to other, realistic conditions.

It is unrealistic in the current situation we live in for these conditions not to result in this kind of attitude. The 1920s "Prohibition" period saw the entirety of the adult drinking population also adopt similar attitudes, to the point that literature during and after the Prohibition era talks about how the general population was more likely to have a heavy drinking problem after[1].

There are, however, pretty obviously, lots of people with functional and/or perfectly under-control relationships with alcohol. And a lot of the time people who live around people who drink "responsibly" also have a more-functional relationship with alcohol than people who mostly interact with people who don't.

Like I said, everyone knows teenagers drink alcohol. It's an open secret. Any teenager you know might drink, and they might keep it a secret or they might not (or they might be bad at hiding it, which is true of a lot of them lmao). At present, if someone overage is drinking with someone underage, they are legally responsible for serving that person alcohol, which is illegal unless (and only in some states!) they are a family member. Teenagers can't hang out at places where drinking is like, done. Functionally this means it's very difficult for teenagers to get to spend time around people with a functional relationship with alcohol unless they already live with them.

The reason I want the drinking age to be 16 is because I want sixteen year olds to be able to legally go to bars, when they want, and get up to something in the vicinity of four drinks or so.

I don't necessarily think it's unreasonable for someone to say that teenagers shouldn't be drinking very heavily. It's probably not a good thing for them to do that, so it's fair to say that teenagers probably shouldn't be able to get super strong drinks, or be limited to only one, or something. But teenagers do in fact want to get drunk, is the thing, and it's already true that most teenagers who drink are drinking heavily and in secret. As I already pointed out, having little control over one's ability to drink and having to be secretive about it means that drinking to excess is a logical response to the current situation. So I also think it's important to remove the part of the equation where teenagers are being materially encouraged to drink to excess every time, which means they have to be allowed to drink to excess sometimes so they don't feel the need to do it whenever they get a rare chance.

I would probably still like to see some sort of restrictions on how bars serving teenagers operate for everyone's sakes. Maybe teenagers should only be allowed until 9pm or something. Maybe teenagers should be limited to specific kinds of bars that require someone to check on them or something. Maybe they should have to be accompanied by someone over 21 but I really don't think that that's a good solution to the problem at hand whatsoever.

Largely this comes from the fact that I'm aware that outside the US, the drinking age is lower and also there are systems in place where teenagers can drink around adults who are also drinking in public where they can like, talk to people who arent exclusively their parents who are also cool with them drinking which not all teenage drinkers have. I promise I know this is also not the end-all-be-all solution to alcoholism. But it creates different pressures that will change the, again, understandable choices that encourage teenagers to drink the way they do as far as I've seen. Other people have done it and not had the entire world end. We can too.

Furthermore. I know there are laws in place to protect teenagers calling for medical help when their friends are drunk and someone's gotten alcohol poisoning. I also know that there are situations where someone needs to call some authority for other reasons and they've been drinking and that gets much hairier. One example: people are a lot more likely to get violent when they're drunk and teenagers are already more likely to be violent because they already have trouble with risk-reward judgement and emotional regulation just like, as part and parcel of being a teenager. If someone gets drunk and you two have a disagreement and they threaten you or pick a fight, and your friends aren't able to break things up or are worried you're going to get really hurt, do they feel like there's nothing they can do and no one they can ask to help? Or are they going to be - drunk, scared, and already worried about being caught - confident that they can go get some authority to break the situation up?[2] Or suppose (common situation unfortuantely) a bunch of teenagers are drinking together and someone is sexually assaulted - obviously it's important for the person who hurt the other teenager to not like, get away scott free, but the part of this equation where everyone in the room was doing something illegal with potentially real legal consequences is kind of a good incentive to cover it up and tell whoever was hurt to just keep it to themselves or risk taking everyone there down with them. These other teenagers are usually their friends. It's bad and it's dangerous. It hurts people in very real and tangible ways. These situations happen in real life all the fucking time.

There are laws protecting underage drinkers who call for help. This is true. There are also issues making sure teenagers know about them and there are also issues with the fact that drunk people don't think straight. If they're just not illegally drinking then the entire "we're drinking illegally" complication is removed.

Anyway underage drinking is bad in the sense that it's dangerous, I'll stand by that. This is a pretty normal harm reduction stance - safe/supervised consumption sites, decriminalization, education - in a more specific part of an already-broadly-legal substance. I also consider this broadly true for basically every other substance. that's a conversation for another day but I want to be very clear that the reasons for this behavior and these patterns are broadly applicable to a whole lot of other substances as well.

-

[1] There were also factors that involved the relative access of hard liquors and spirits compared to wines and beers with lower alcohol content but which were harder to make illegally. Anecdotally, my friends were mostly drinking vodka, and I drank vodka with them. The first time I hung out with friends drinking beers, it was when I was already in my 20s and so were they. I know people who were drinking beers in high school but my own personal experience is that hard liquor was the go-to because we wanted to get drunk and it was cheaper. The explanation given in what I read (sorry I'm not sourcing this, I think it came from Deborah Bloom's The Poisoner's Handbook and then some googling because I was curious if it was true but don't quote me on that and just look it up yourself instead) was that between the nature of the speakeasies - clandestine, subject to closing at any time, and stocking whatever they could get their hands on rather than what people necessarily preferred - and the kind of alcohol available - largely industrial spirits and moonshines, sometimes cut with poisonous wood alcohol or other poisons to 'deter' drinkers (widely attested: the government has always hated people who use substances that are demonized and just because alcohol is socially accepted does not mean they won't still kill you if they make it illegal today so you should extend some courtesy to your friends and neighbors who use substances that are illegal today, especially with regards to safe supply!) but which wouldn't kill everyone who ingested them but did sure mean everyone got NASTY hangovers... these conditions meant that many people who went into the Prohibition Era enjoying alcohol like wine or beer but preferring to drink only a moderate amount came out of it drinking heavily, and drinking high-content spirits they were now used to. Sounds like the drinking culture my friends and I had. Lol. Lmao.

[2] Not that I expect the police to actually be helpful in that situation anyway, but still.