#it changes the foundation of the media in such an interesting way without changing the core concepts

[rainyraisin]

Blue Stray on the brain…

First of prolly like. A billion pieces of fanart I want to draw for @tumble-witch ‘s Bread Girl AU!!!! I wanted to post a bunch at one time but I am so impatient lmao ITS BLUE STRAY HOURSSSS‼️‼️

Gotta draw Golden Beetle next I am 3-1 on Marinette vs Adrien drawings my boy needs some love 🙏🙏 (Im just a sucker for angst)

Went. Insane in the tags bc that’s the best way to yap 💖🌸

[unsolicited-opinions]

Why does it feel like some people are trying to gaslight you into being a trump supporter all because you said "no matter the political party, the administration has a right to revoke the visas of individuals who espouse their support for designated terrorist groups"?

Probably because some people are, Anon.

There are some MAGA folks in my inbox who are furious with me for being a Jew and despising Trump:

This gentile Trump fan knows so little about Jews that he uses the phrase "final solution" in telling Jews how they should feel.

The same Ask contains this:

"You people."

He thinks that Trump caused Jews to "have [our] holy lands back."

So, yeah. You're right.

But there's a bigger issue here, and that's US political polarization and the rejection of nuance.

Right or left, social media is mostly filled with people arguing from ignorance and treating politics like a team sport where one cheers for one's team loyally.

Let's look at this particular example you mention. Neither the mainstream liberals nor the mainstream conservatives want to acknowledge that these things can be true at the same time:

1. Trump is pushing the US towards autocracy as best he can. He and his administration do not actually care about antisemitism and are using the issue as a political wedge and to punish people they don't like. He's using Mahmoud Khalil's case to expand presidential powers.

2. Any administration can legally ban foreigners based on their support of terrorism.

Example: In February of 2024, President Biden banned anyone who committed and promoted violence in the West Bank from having a US visa for any purpose. This was legal. This was ethical. I supported it, and so did most Americans who noticed it.

That both Dems and Republicans seem to take a side on the issue exclusively based on party and utterly without nuance illustrates something important I'd like to ramble about.

That ramble is below the break, but It's longer than the line at the DMV and probably about as interesting. There's no shame in skipping it.

You're sure?

Okay, you were warned.

When Obama was elected in 2008 and the Democrats took a 70-seat lead in the House, the Republicans lost their @#&*ing minds. They were in the wilderness, out of power, and rejected by the US electorate. (And, as many have observed, there was a wildly racist backlash to the election of the first black President of the United States.)

The Republican plan to change this and get back into power was to make themselves the party of opposing anything Obama did.

They didn't just treat him like the president of the opposition party, they treated him like an assault on the American Way Of Life. This isn't an exaggeration.

If you weren't alive or politically aware at that time, here's some examples of Republicans rejecting their own policy ideas because Obama embraced them:

- The Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare")

The ACA’s individual mandate, which required individuals to obtain health insurance, was based on a policy developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation (yes, the authors of Project 2025) in the 1990s and was implemented in Massachusetts as Romneycare under Republican Governor Mitt Romney. It was a massive gift to the insurance companies.

Despite the plan’s conservative origins, Republicans labeled the ACA as “socialist” and spent years attempting to repeal or dismantle it. The individual mandate, once a free-market solution, became a target of intense criticism.

- Cap-and-Trade for carbon emissions

This was originally a Republican-supported, market-based solution to environmental regulation. It was championed by Republicans like John McCain and even used successfully in reducing acid rain under George H.W. Bush.

When Obama proposed a cap-and-trade system to address climate change, Republicans denounced it as a “job-killing” scheme and labeled it a “tax on energy.” The bill ultimately failed in the Senate due to Republican opposition.

(Guess which president got the Environmental Protection Agency into existence. Republican Richard Nixon. The environment wasn't always a partisan issue and Republicans used to care about the environment before the issue was polarized.)

- The DREAM Act

The concept of providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children had bipartisan support, with some Republican co-sponsors when first introduced in 2001.

By the time Obama advocated for the DREAM Act, Republicans opposed it, citing concerns about "amnesty," and blocked its passage through a Senate filibuster in 2010.

Then there were all the ridiculous personal attacks. This kind of nonsense, which hadn't been normal previously, became the daily norm:

The Republican philosophy became: If Obama and the Democrats are for it? We're against it!

I will abuse this moment to share the brilliant Groucho Marx singing "Whatever it is, I'm against it."

Anyway, this strategy worked for the Republicans and has been increasingly the norm for the Republican Party ever since.

That was bad enough, but a lot of left-leaning criticism of Obama focused on the idea that he was too centrist. That he kept trying to reach across the aisle to the Republicans, despite the way they slapped that hand every time he tried. They were pissed that Obama's administration bailed out the banks in 2009 (when they felt Democrats should be the party to break banks up and let them fail, Obama thought the economy wouldn't recover without a bailout and I think economically Obama was proven right, but politically, it hurt the Democrats). These left-leaning democrats thought it was time that the Democratic Party, originally a Labor party, had a leftist wing again.

(Sidebar: Yes, the internet has also contributed to polarization and the demise of nuance in a big way, but that's a topic for another time.)

I'm not suggesting that the polarization of the US electorate has been symmetrical. It hasn't. The rightward movement of the Republican Party has been much greater than the leftward movement of the Democrats - but we got reactionary far-left Democrats, too.

While the Republican Party is now run entirely by far right ideology (and that's a disaster), the Democrats helped make it happen with their own end of the Horseshoe.

The loudest democrats, the ones with good Q scores in the Democratic base are the likes of AOC/Ilhan Omar/Rashida Tlaib. They married the leftist wing of the Democrats to "global South" and Islamist causes (oversimplification, yes), which helped decrease support to Israel (which the Democrats used to support enthusiastically when it had a lefty government) and caused the Democratic party to completely ignore the rising antisemitism of the left, particularly on college campuses. How could it be wrong, they argued, to support protestors who are advocating for human rights?

This gave Republicans the opportunity to *own* those issues. Elise Stefanik didn't give a single shit about campus antisemitism, but the Republicans owned the issue in the minds of most Americans from this moment on:

Claudine Gay was very badly prepared for this hearing. She spoke like a lawyer, not like a human being. It was obvious Harvard hadn't done anything to protect the civil rights of Jews on campus in acoordance with federal law.

Americans (correctly) saw that liberal institutions, aligned with Democrats, hadn't done anything, nor had congressional Democrats who didn't want to alienate the "Pro-Palestinian" part of their base and didn't want the Republicans to have an excuse to go after colleges. This was a huge mistake. Biden should have had the Department of Education sue these institutions for their failure to protect civil rights. It is tragic that the Democrats did less than nothing, but that helped get us where we are.

So where did this get us?

Now, fighting antisemitism is a partisan issue which the GOP "supports" (for its own reasons, mostly a political wedge) and the Democrats oppose it as a symbol of Republican fascism.

This is why they lionize Mahmoud Khalil.

Now, being a liberal seems to mean believing that claims of antisemitism are wildly exaggerated and being dishonestly used to deflict criticism of Israel.

Now we have liberals saying "criticism of Israel isn't antisemitism" as if that hadn't always been the view of US Jews who love to criticize Israel.

Now we have liberals who are opposed to every sort of religious/ethnic persecution except one- because as David Baddiel said, Jews Don't Count.

Now, the support of the only liberal democracy the MENA region is a partisan issue which the Republican party "supports" (for its own reasons, mostly geopolitical advantage) and which the Democratic party base associates with Trump's autocracy and fascism.

There's seemingly no room for nuance on either side.

So if I express the belief that the law permits Trump to ban foreign nationals who promote violence, despite their support for Biden doing the same, liberals think I'm a fascist.

(Guess which President, by the way, was the biggest deporter of foreign nationals in modern history. Hint: it was Obama.)

If I support declining visas and/or residence to foreigners who promote terrorism (as Biden did in 2024, remember), Democrats see me as a fascist, aligned with Trump, and an enemy of civil liberties. The right sort of Jew, for Democrats, disowns Israel and opposes anything Trump does.

If I criticize Trump's efforts towards autocracy and fascism, I'm the wrong sort of Jew because I don't appreciate his strategic support of Israel or feigned caring about antisemtism. The right sort of Jew, for Republicans, is the Jew who still thinks of politics in the predictable framing of the "is-it-good-for-the-Jews" mindset and isn't concerned about the dismantling of the liberal democracy which made Jews (and everyone else) safer and more prosperous in the US than at any time in history.

If the Dems are for it, the GOP is against it.

If the GOP is for it, the Dems are against it.

These partisan policy positions are, for now, locked.

If you watch the news with this framing in mind, it may make more sense.

If you've actually reached the end of this ramble, I'm shocked and grateful. Have a cookie: 🍪

[journeytothewestresearch]

As someone who’s Chinese w/ a degree in social science + (art) history regarding East Asia I’m always super intrigued and interested to how others interpret changes in new titles on older religious texts- but I will ask in particular if you have any personal ties to Buddhism/Taoism/Confucianism (and Chinese culture) when you find yourself interpreting BM:W’s change in allegorical use of Buddhism as contemporary political adherence! BM:W’s religious and soul mechanics follows their previous game without much overt linking between the two.

Overthrowing Gods in East Asian media is a very common trope in videos specifically due to player involvement (contrast to books where you are separate as the audience) and often is used as an allegory for the system/recent events we exist in. In such it does shift a lot from the original text in base but I think it’s not supposed to relay the same allegory due to the time period in which the writers exist! Wukong’s story changing to him still being chained by the principles that envelop life is far more relatable to late-stage capitalist environments viewers and artists exist in- as such he fulfils the contemporary variant of his original role in JTTW!

I think the change in purpose the Buddhist mythos serves in this game is decisive by nature due to inherent bias present in the original text as a religious piece, and such is core to the allegory. However I don’t think BM:W is supposed to relay that allegory, I think it is supposed to branch off on its own as an alternate contemporary extension of the foundation JTTW set out (plus with the 2 DLC’s on the way, there is plenty of time to extend the universe in game to validate a shift in religious purpose compared to the cut 7 chapters planned during development). And such i think attributing it to the CCP can be a bit of a touchy statement (especially if one doesn’t have long standing ties to East Asian culture or Regional religious practice!) and can accidentally play into sinophobic phrasing and attitudes.

Buddhism as a practice and way of life has a very different presence in writers centuries ago compared to now, as well as how we use religion in audience-involved stories. And such I find it an interesting shift regarding a game made with an international and widely multi-religious audience (that isn’t consuming it as a psycho-socio poem compared to a much smaller and more culturally homogenous readerbase. I think the friction caused by thematic changes is more due to how the game relays the physical journey so closely with reusing characters and having to shift them according to the foundational changes- if it was closer to other written “sequels” that created characters connected to the original cast through descending from them etc, the changes wouldn’t grate on completed arcs or how we compare the experience to wukong’s parallel one

No, I do not have any direct personal cultural connection to Buddhism, Daoism, or Confucianism. I live in Asia, though, and beyond my research of JTTW, I do study religion here (with more of an emphasis on folk religion as it pertains to the Great Sage). My negative view of Black Myth: Wukong is colored by my deep love for the original story. In general, I don't like adaptations.

Thank you for your explanation of the game.

[mesetacadre]

Hi, I'm someone relatively new to communism and I wondered if you could help me with a question: what is it that the communist party can *do* to actually be a reliable ally of workers? I've heard many people say this is how workers will support the party -once they see both the bourgeois institutions and unions fail them, but I'm not entirely sure what, say, a modern party in Europe can actually do besides agitation. What are the practical steps, or one example of them? (I understand this might be highly dependable on context and therefore not have an easy answer, but I think even one example might be useful, because what I'm struggling to wrap my head around is how a party actually starts showing they're an ally of the workers BEFORE having the political power to change the workers' material conditions -other than by doing agitation)

It's organizing, but this is a relatively vague word if you've no experience with it. I'll first go through a hypothetical example and then get into the more theoretical weeds.

Say there's a new metro extension being built under a town, the government didn't pay attention to surveys and they built the tunnel through a section of ground which doesn't drain water that well, the tunnel begins to flood a few weeks after opening and this is seriously affecting the structural integrity of residential buildings' foundations. Massive cracks are spawning in these homes, and the government decides to evacuate all the affected streets to demolish the buildings, 600+ families, without providing adequate or even sufficient compensation and reaccomodation.

You'd first need to make contact with the affected, through whoever brought the situation to your party's attention. Maybe a militant is one of the affected, perhaps some of the affected contacted you directly, maybe they contacted a worker's union or a neighborhood association and made its way to you through the interpersonal networks that always exist between people involved in various social movements and platforms. You should see and ask what they need, inform yourself of the legislative process surrounding it, when evictions are happening, etc. And then put what the party can give towards supporting them; setting up supply drives and money collections, giving them strength if they want to resist the evictions and offer legal support, before and after, help them legalize protests in front of the responsible legislature and providing logistical support for what's needed (megaphones, materials and knowhow for banners, a cheap sticker printer, etc), in general, agitate about this and make the situation known. Work in earnest with them, you don't need to be self interested to put in mind and body to oppose such a negligent act.

I've glossed over a lot, and of course these things are always easier said than done. But this is in essence what organizing is, getting actually involved to put forward your political program, it's managing resources and people in such a way that you can continuously put in effort without burning people out. Notice how agitation was a small part of the example I gave, this is because for agitation to be worth it you must be agitating for something, and I know that sounds like I'm making a big deal out of something a 12 year old could tell you, but it really is easy to fall into the cycle of agitating for agitating's sake, becoming a sort of acronym spirit who never actually does anything but has a consistent presence in the form of impersonal agitation (social media, posters, banners, stickers, leaflets in some cases, etc). What gives agitation a purpose and what makes it effective is what it agitates, the organizing itself, what you're informing about, what you're trying to move people towards.

Most of the times a party that's in a context such as western Europe can't change the material conditions of worker's lives, that's what not having power is, but sometimes it can do it, through organizing. Sometimes you do get a win, and you can help stop a law before it passes, or you can generate enough pressure to stop the firing of a union delegate, or you can get the workers on the negotiating table for better conditions after a 1 week strike. But the failures don't necessarily mean that those workers will stop trusting you, because if you've actually accompanied them, and helped them in the struggle for a goal, those failures are also theirs, just as much as yours. So unless you flagrantlly vacillated in their support, or acted like an opportunist, etc, it's the course of these struggles themselves, and less their result, which build the confidence and referentiality a party needs. Of course, if you manage to get a win that's even better, but workers aren't stupid, and like I said, a failure after actual organizing is as much yours as it is theirs. But what actually matters, for the purposes of building that referent and trustworthy Party that we want, is the fight itself.

[cupidastrology]

What the 12 signs experience with Pluto ♇ in Aquarius ♒︎ ✨❇️

Please do not repost or copy.

Associate with your Pluto position within your birth chart.

Notes: All 12 signs react to the power of Aquarius ♒︎ and the planet’s influence differently yet so despite not having this position Nataly.

Aries - more focus within an element of needing the self more than ever. a time where you carve new trends, styles, and mannerisms thats unlike others. the opportunity to establish a following or new career in life.

Taurus - advancements in cooking, and how you express your wants/needs in the world will be important. becoming a lot more progressive with your skills, a growth in the world of beauty may help you to reach new heights is creativity and talents in style.

Gemini - the subject of social media, literature, and study of new structures in architecture become interesting to you. there is high chance of wanting to connect with intellects, but a yearning to meet new people more than ever.

Cancer - to birth a new life for you in massive here; the subject of care and nurturing becomes obsessively involved in your life. you will want to create your own ways of living with your own rules, without anyone getting involved to sabotage that. a focus on your roots will expand.

Leo - your image, body, and the way you care for yourself will increase. expectations and different outlooks in the world of physical expression will advance, wanting you to grow an understanding of how more beautiful you can be in the world.

Virgo - the argument of fact or fiction will irk you, wanting to throw yourself into different forms of knowledge, experiences, and literature of fantasy, non-fiction, and consideration of dreams. health matters and dependency change big time.

Libra - the everchanging influences of artistry, equality, and peace will be a constant reminder to make changes that are necessary to your mindset. This transit will change you in ways where conforming to the same routine will not work, and independence in love will start to carve a deep point inside you.

Scorpio - privacy concerns will be a highlight for you in this transit; to focus on the subject of respect and honesty with your emotions will be a big deal as well. this transit influences to stay progressive, but yours will involve massive needs to let go consistently.

Sagittarius - your need to travel and learn new subjects become borderline obsessive; the relationship of learning and finding comfort outside your home is changing in rapid motions with this transit. you find yourself understanding the true meaning of independence and growth through new places, books, and movies.

Capricorn - it will be important to understand what it means to stay standing through building a larger foundation within your life. This transit invokes an intention to grow something that will last you a lifetime, while also focusing on what it means to keep up with the rapid changes of your world.

Aquarius - this is a long period of outgrowing the values, morals, and understandings of what you once had believed in your life. it is a time for stronger influences to help you connect with the ins and outs of life, carving a more solidified persona.

Pisces - what is true and what is not will awaken you to channel that aura of fixation into creative work, or to focus on a higher power in this long transit. you may want to understand more about the health and impact of others, understanding how healing can happen for the collective.

[cipheramnesia]

Hey I'm not a big horror person myself, I get scared very easily, but you're telling me the overuse of cozy has extended to horror?

I genuinely don't know what or where cozy is going, but I decided to poke around and at least find out what it means. The simplest and easiest way to contextualize "cozy horror" is as modern folktales and campfire stories. It's a bit more complicated than all that, but that's kind of the foundations of it.

Alright, so first, my basic searching points to "The H Word: Getting Cozy with Horror" by José Cruz, published in Nightmare in 2021 as the place where it was coined, and seems to be what the few articles trying to define it point to. As far as I can tell, that site is offline, but you can read it archived here. Anyway, this thing breaks it down as "Familiar" (which seems to be primarily described as nostalgia), "Sensuous" (in the sense of stimulating senses - distinct from stimulating emotions), "Distant" (feeling insulated from the frightening elements, or safe), and "Fun" (meaning it tends to resolve without significant emotional or physical trauma). Some of that is me putting words in his mouth, so I'd encourage anyone interested to poke through the article. To me, his examples are what speak more directly. With the exception of "Night of the Creeps" he uses examples like Dracula, gothic horror, IT, the Goosebumps series, Creepshow, and the old Peter Cushing and Vincent Price 70s movies. These examples, to my eyes, all have something of the scary story that gets passed around between adolescents or as online urban legends and sometimes creepy pastas.

Anyway, as with any new idea there's the option of throwing it away and calling bullshit (generally my inclination with "elevated horror"), or taking it more at face value, which I'm a little more inclined towards with "cozy horror." For me, I suppose it's the way the core elements seem close to slightly more old fashioned "thrills and chills" horror that makes me charitably inclined - if you read the article, it's practically dripping with the abstract concept of "the good old days." And that serves as a solid foundation for quite a lot of horror. There's coming of age stories, updated vampire tales, folk horror of all ages, dark fairytales, sure. You know, it fills a useful spot, yeah? It may help that I'm coming from the perspective of a horror movie fan who very ardently seeks out dusturbing and transgressive movies or gouts of blood or warped flesh, without any interest in whether it makes me frightened, that it's easy to see how much enjoyment someone can get out of an evil murder clown which is safely defeated at the end of the day - just like it happens in Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

So it's not quite folktales, but it overlaps and next time a person talks about it you probably know the vibe. However. This subgenres has got a HUGE ASS or, put another way, a big but.

If you clicked through the article first, I imagine your reaction to the first few paragraphs might be something like mine, a knee jerk "this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about." I think that's not correct, but after the cool off period, it's clear that he's either in some kind of a horror media social bubble, or he's not engaging with a lot of the genre. There's a kind of distastefulness about modern horror, described like a friend who changed into a pretentious stranger after college - as if modern horror has become all about emotional shock value, serious psychological torture porn. Which is not only unfair and incorrect, it's myopic. The ugly undercurrent to cozy horror is the overly pleasant and sickeningly kind suggestion that we don't need all this modernity, followed by the paternal recommendation that it's much better if we all just embrace the old traditions. And I don't think that's innate to cozy horror or cozy whatever, more that we don't always realize when we pull some ugly undercurrent of society up with an idea, and like when has horror not had problematic elements right? But there's no ignoring that a drive towards nostalgia, isolation, emotional suppression, and total safety can take a very bad turn in excess.

So that's cozy horror I figure. Interesting branch of folklore, but needs moderation like all things.

[bluef00t]

heyy, you said a bit ago that you’d been reading comics but weren’t posting about them because they weren’t superhero comics, but I’d be interested in hearing about them, if you’d like to share

This post got LONG because yes, I LOVE talking about comics, thank you for asking :)

Let me start with a list of good titles and get into my thoughts more under the cut: R.U.R., Terrarium In Drawer, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Parable of the Sower, Watchmen, Parenthesis, and The Nice House On The Lake.

Starting out with the realization that I never posted my MICE haul to Tumblr, because my favorite read of the year so far was from that:

R.U.R. (drawn by Kateřina Čupová) is well-executed and SO well-aligned with my interests that it's crazy. It's an adaptation of the 1920s play which I somehow still haven't read, and it's just… robots, foundational vintage sci-fi, supply-chain parables, cleverly deployed stageplay metaphors, doomed tower defense scenarios, "simplistic" eurocomic styles that carry massive amounts of emotion, gorgeously bold CMY watercolors with strong color symbolism—everything. My copy is a misprint (two pages are duplicated, though I don't think anything is missing) and it's too bad that the English translation uses a machine-typed font where I suspect the original dialogue was handwritten, but those are small quibbles. Some day I'll read the play to compare/contrast; the logic of text-story-to-comic adaptations always fascinates me.

Since I began typing up this ask, though, I read something which takes a close second place: Terrarium In A Drawer, by Ryoko Kui. Really effectively Twilight-Zone-y little anthology in a variety of styles (both visually and subject-wise). It's often unclear going into a story how you're going to feel by the last page: is there a joke punchline coming? A surprisingly astute, perspective-changing observation? A deeply unsettling, unanswerable question about being alive? Most stories have all three, in some order or another. God, I love Ryoko Kui—she's maybe the ONLY author to successfully convince me that fantasy has certain merits over science fiction when it comes to looking at the world, not just as escapism.

I also, with the release of the second book, got around to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. There's a very established American Literary Graphic Novel Topic: "precocious gay(/disabled/ethnic) coming-of-age in the 60s(/70s/80s) filtered through escapism into mass media and obsession with the Holocaust(/war/sexual/family) traumas of a previous generation who would rather repress all that". (Maus, Fun Home, and two other books I read called I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together and Victory Parade fit in here as well.) So the plot is "transgressive" in a very familiar way, but that cluster of topics does remain consistently interesting to me. And honestly, I wasn't reading it for the PLOT. The artwork, the integration of famous paintings and pulp cover motifs, is crazy: it reminded me of the forms of Chris Van Allsburg and the color crosshatch of Melanie Gillman, both turned up to 11. The format isn't conventionally comic-y, but the text and image were still inextricable in a way that felt intuitive to me. Without panels, the text walks you through landscapes.

I re-read Parenthesis and read Crazy Like A Fox and the unrelated A Fox In My Brain, which are members of another Adult Graphic Novel subcluster—brain-illness educational autobio. Parentheses, about a cognition-disrupting tumor, was my favorite; it was originally published in French, so my BD bias may be showing.

Parable of the Sower knocked me off balance by being the most brutal graphic novel I've read in a WHILE. I knew Octavia Butler from Bloodchild and Kindred, so I was expecting something messed up, just, holy shit. I should have read the original book back when I was a teenager; it would have changed my brain chemistry and fed my little false prophet complex. The translation to a "comic" felt a little clunky, with dense and not very well integrated chunks of text—it was more "illustrated" than anything but I did like having faces to match with names.

Watchmen, which I already posted a bit about on my superhero comics blog (and probably will more later) was a surprise in the opposite direction. I'd heard a lot about it being super brutal and cynical and deconstructive, but, uh, after reading Moore's Miracleman [ACTUALLY INSANE] I found it merely "noir" and maybe despondently neolib by comparison. It probably has as much in common with Tom Strong, Moore's most optimistic genre loveletter, as it does with Miracleman.

Oh, and I read Where The Body Was. It was fine. I like whodunits, but the payoff didn't make me kick myself in a really satisfying way, and the framing and art was all very normal modern American comic. I blame The Nice House On The Lake a couple years back for raising my expectations about things that look like that. Which, hey, speaking of which, apparently there's a second series being published now, The Nice House By The Sea! Putting that on the reading list now, right behind Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky when that hold comes in…

[dreamyelectronicmusic]

Why did Amalie and Wille break up? Amalie was fine with Wille stepping down so why did they break up ?

And now Wille and Simon are running away. But one day they will have to return back so how will they (especially Simon) cope up with the stress of the media ?

Thank you so much for sending this ask!

One of the reasons Wille and Amalie broke up is because they realised they’re better as friends, but mainly because they really want completely different things in life. Amalie is fine with Wille stepping down in the sense that she understands it’s what’s best for him and she doesn’t want him to keep doing something that’s hurting him, but she doesn’t want the kind of life he does. She likes the spotlight that he’s running from. And she’s a princess in her own right, so if Wille stepped down but stayed with her, it would be impossible for him to fully break free from the royal lifestyle.

Simon and Wille will definitely face some media interest once they come back, but the idea is that it won’t be as intense as it would be right after Wille’s abdication because a lot of people will have lost interest by then. But more importantly, they will have time to build a foundation for their relationship. I think Simon is absolutely 100% willing to brave anything to be with Wille, but he needs to feel secure in the relationship first. Right now they literally just got back together and the public interest would be a lot of pressure to put on what is essentially a brand new relationship – like it was in canon. Simon is justifiably scared to go through that again when he has no way to know that they can withstand it. What if they have changed so much that they don’t work anymore? He has no way of knowing. But if they have a couple of months to just be together and build something stable without that pressure, they’ll be strong enough to face it together.

Thank you for reading 💛

[mariacallous]

In a sunlight-filled classroom at the US State Department’s diplomacy school in late February, America’s cyber ambassador fielded urgent questions from US diplomats who were spending the week learning about the dizzying technological forces shaping their missions.

“This portfolio is one of the most interesting and perhaps the most consequential at this moment in time,” Nathaniel Fick, the US ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy, told the roughly three dozen diplomats assembled before him at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia. “Getting smart on these issues … is going to serve everyone really well over the long term, regardless of what other things you go off and do.”

The diplomats, who had come from overseas embassies and from State Department headquarters in nearby Washington, DC, were the sixth cohort of students to undergo a crash course in cybersecurity, telecommunications, privacy, surveillance, and other digital issues, which Fick’s team created in late 2022. The training program—the biggest initiative yet undertaken by State’s two-year-old cyber bureau—is intended to reinvigorate US digital diplomacy at a time when adversaries like Russia and China are increasingly trying to shape how the world uses technology.

During his conversation with the students, Fick discussed the myriad of tech and cyber challenges facing US diplomats. He told a staffer from an embassy in a country under China’s influence to play the long game in forming relationships that could eventually help the US make inroads there. He spoke about his efforts to help European telecom companies survive existential threats from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in the battle for the world’s 5G networks. And he warned of a difficult balancing act on AI, saying the US needed to stave off excessive regulation at the UN without repeating past mistakes.

“We really screwed up governance of the previous generation of tech platforms, particularly the social [media] platforms,” Fick said. “The US essentially unleashed on the world the most powerful anti-democratic tools in the history of humanity, and now we’re digging our way out of a credibility hole.”

Restoring that credibility and expanding American influence over digital issues will require tech-savvy diplomacy, and the State Department is counting on Fick’s training program to make that possible. To pull back the curtain on this program for the first time, WIRED received exclusive access to the February training session and interviewed Fick, the initiative’s lead organizer, five graduates of the course, and multiple cyber diplomacy experts about how the program is trying to transform American tech diplomacy.

Fick has called the training program the most important part of his job. As he tells anyone who will listen, it’s a project with existential stakes for the future of the open internet and the free world.

“Technology as a source of influence is increasingly foundational,” he says. “These things are more and more central to our foreign policy, and that’s a trend that is long-term and unlikely to change anytime soon.”

Maintaining an Edge

From Russian election interference to Chinese industrial dominance, the US faces a panoply of digital threats. Fighting back will require skillful diplomatic pressure campaigns on every level, from bilateral talks with individual countries to sweeping appeals before the 193-member United Nations. But this kind of work is only possible when the career Foreign Service officers on the front lines of US diplomacy understand why tech and cyber issues matter—and how to discuss them.

“The US needs to demonstrate both understanding and leadership on the global stage,” says Chris Painter, who served as the first US cyber ambassador from 2011 to 2017.

This leadership is important on high-profile subjects like artificial intelligence and the 5G war between Western and Chinese vendors, but it’s equally vital on the bread-and-butter digital issues—like basic internet connectivity and fighting cybercrime—that don’t generate headlines but still dominate many countries’ diplomatic engagements with the US.

Diplomats also need to be able to identify digital shortcomings and security gaps in their host countries that the US could help fix. The success of the State Department’s new cyber foreign aid fund will depend heavily on project suggestions from tech-savvy diplomats on the ground.

In addition, because virtually every global challenge—from trade to climate—has a tech aspect, all US diplomats need to be conversant in the topic. “You’re going to have meetings where a country is talking about a trade import issue or complaining about a climate problem, and suddenly there’s a tech connection,” says Justin Sherman, a tech and geopolitics expert who runs Global Cyber Strategies, a Washington, DC, research and advisory firm.

Digital expertise will also help the US expand coalitions around cybercrime investigations, ransomware deterrence, and safe uses of the internet—all essentially proxy fights with Russia and China.

“We are in competition with the authoritarian states on everything from internet standards … to basic governance rules,” says Neil Hop, a senior adviser to Fick and the lead organizer of the training program. “We are going to find ourselves at a sore disadvantage if we don't have trained people who are representing [us].”

Diplomats without tech training might not even realize when their Russian and Chinese counterparts are using oblique rhetoric to pitch persuadable countries on their illiberal visions of internet governance, with rampant censorship and surveillance. Diplomats with tech training would be able to push back, using language and examples designed to appeal to those middle-ground countries and sway them away from the authoritarians’ clutches.

“Our competitors and our adversaries are upping their game in these areas,” Fick says, “because they understand as well as we do what’s at stake.”

Preparing America’s Eyes and Ears

The Obama administration was the first to create a tech diplomacy training program, with initial training sessions in various regions followed by week-long courses that brought trainees to Washington. Government speakers and tech-industry luminaries like internet cocreator Vint Cerf discussed the technological, social, and political dimensions of the digital issues that diplomats had to discuss with their host governments.

“The idea was to create this cadre in the Foreign Service to work with our office and really mainstream this as a topic,” says Painter, who created the program when he was State’s coordinator for cyber issues, the predecessor to Fick’s role.

But when Painter tried to institutionalize his program with a course at the Foreign Service Institute, he encountered resistance. “I think we kind of hit it too early for FSI,” he says. “I remember the FSI director saying that they thought, ‘Well, maybe this is just a passing fad.’ It was a new topic. This is what happens with any new topic.”

By the time the Senate unanimously confirmed Nate Fick to be America’s cyber ambassador in September 2022, tech diplomacy headaches were impossible to ignore, and Fick quickly tasked his team with creating a modern training program and embedding it in the FSI’s regular curriculum.

“He understood that we needed to do more and better in terms of preparing our people in the field,” Hop says.

The training program fit neatly into secretary of state Antony Blinken’s vision of an American diplomatic corps fully versed in modern challenges and nimble enough to confront them. “Elevating our tech diplomacy” is one of Blinken’s “core priorities,” Fick says.

As they developed a curriculum, Fick and his aides had several big goals for the new training program.

The first priority was to make sure diplomats understood what was at stake as the US and its rivals compete for global preeminence on tech issues. “Authoritarian states and other actors have used cyber and digital tools to threaten national security, international peace and security, economic prosperity, [and] the exercise of human rights,” says Kathryn Fitrell, a senior cyber policy adviser at State who helps run the course.

Equally critical was preparing diplomats to promote the US tech agenda from their embassies and provide detailed reports back to Washington on how their host governments were approaching these issues.

“It's important to us that tech expertise [in] the department not sit at headquarters alone,” Fick says, “but instead that we have people everywhere—at all our posts around the world, where the real work gets done—who are equipped with the tools that they need to make decisions with a fair degree of autonomy.”

Foreign Service officers are America’s eyes and ears on the ground in foreign countries, studying the landscape and alerting their bosses back home to risks and opportunities. They are also the US government’s most direct and regular interlocutors with representatives of other nations, forming personal bonds with local officials that can sometimes make the difference between unity and discord.

When these diplomats need to discuss the US tech agenda, they can’t just read monotonously off a piece of paper. They need to actually understand the positions they’re presenting and be prepared to answer questions about them.

“You can’t be calling back to someone in Washington every time there’s a cyber question,” says Sherman.

But some issues will still require help from experts at headquarters, so Fick and his team also wanted to use the course to deepen their ties with diplomats and give them friendly points of contact at the cyber bureau. “We want to be able to support officers in the field as they confront these issues,” says Melanie Kaplan, a member of Fick’s team who took the class and now helps run it.

Inside the Classroom

After months of research, planning, and scheduling, Fick’s team launched the Cyberspace and Digital Policy Tradecraft course at the Foreign Service Institute with a test run in November 2022. Since then, FSI has taught the class six more times—once in London for European diplomats, once in Morocco for diplomats in the Middle East and Africa, and four times in Arlington—and trained 180 diplomats.

The program begins with four hours of “pre-work” to prepare students for the lessons ahead. Students must document that they’ve completed the pre-work—which includes experimenting with generative AI—before taking the class. “That has really put us light-years ahead in ensuring that no one is lost on day one,” Hop says.

The week-long in-person class consists of 45- to 90-minute sessions on topics like internet freedom, privacy, ransomware, 5G, and AI. Diplomats learn how the internet works on a technical level, how the military and the FBI coordinate with foreign partners to take down hackers’ computer networks, and how the US promotes its tech agenda in venues like the International Telecommunication Union. Participants also meet with Fick and his top deputies, including Eileen Donahoe, the department’s special envoy for digital freedom.

One session features a panel of US diplomats who have helped their host governments confront big cyberattacks. “They woke up one morning and suddenly were in this position of having to respond to a major crisis,” says Meir Walters, a training alum who leads the digital-freedom team in State’s cyber bureau.

Students learn how the US helped Albania and Costa Rica respond to massive cyberattacks in 2022 perpetrated by the Iranian government and Russian cybercriminals, respectively. In Albania, urgent warnings from a young, tech-savvy US diplomat “accelerated our response to the Iranian attack by months,” Fick says. In Costa Rica, diplomats helped the government implement emergency US aid and then used those relationships to turn the country into a key semiconductor manufacturing partner.

“By having the right people on the ground,” Fick says, “we were able to seize these significant opportunities.”

Students spend one day on a field trip, with past visits including the US Chamber of Commerce (to understand industry’s role in tech diplomacy), the Center for Democracy and Technology (to understand civil society’s perspective on digital-rights issues), and the internet infrastructure giant Verisign.

On the final day, participants must pitch ideas for using what they’ve learned in a practical way to Jennifer Bachus, the cyber bureau’s number two official.

The course has proven to be highly popular. Fick told participants in February that “there was a long wait list” to get in. There will be at least three more sessions this year: one in Arlington in August (timed to coincide with the diplomatic rotation period), one in East Asia, and one in Latin America. These sessions are expected to train 75 to 85 new diplomats.

After the course ends, alumni can stay up-to-date with a newsletter, a Microsoft Teams channel, and a toolkit with advice and guidance. Some continue their education: Fifty diplomats are getting extra training through a one-year online learning pilot, and State is accepting applications for 15 placements at leading academic institutions and think tanks—including Stanford University and the Council on Foreign Relations—where diplomats can continue researching tech issues that interest them.

Promising Results, Challenges Ahead

Less than two years into the training effort, officials say they are already seeing meaningful improvements to the US’s tech diplomacy posture.

Diplomats are sending Washington more reports on their host governments’ tech agendas, Fitrell says, with more details and better analysis. Graduates of the course also ask more questions than their untrained peers. And inspired by the training, some diplomats have pushed their bosses to prioritize tech issues, including through embassy working groups uniting representatives of different US agencies.

State has also seen more diplomats request high-level meetings with foreign counterparts to discuss tech issues and more incorporation of those issues into broader conversations. Fick says the course helped the cyber officer at the US embassy in Nairobi play an integral role in recent tech agreements between the US and Kenya. And diplomats are putting more energy into whipping votes for international tech agreements, including an AI resolution at the UN.

Diplomats who took the course shared overwhelmingly positive feedback with WIRED. They say it was taught in an accessible way and covered important topics. Several say they appreciated hearing from senior US officials whose strategizing informs diplomats’ on-the-ground priorities. Maryum Saifee, a senior adviser for digital governance at State’s cyber bureau and a training alum, says she appreciated the Morocco class’s focus on regional issues and its inclusion of locally employed staff.

Graduates strongly encouraged their colleagues to take the course, describing it as foundational to every diplomatic portfolio.

“Even if you're not a techie kind of a person, you need to not shy away from these conversations,” says Bridget Trazoff, a veteran diplomat who has learned four languages at the Foreign Service Institute and compares the training to learning a fifth one.

Painter, who knows how challenging it can be to create a program like this, says he’s “heard good things” about the course. “I’m very happy that they've redoubled their efforts in this.”

For the training program to achieve lasting success, its organizers will need to overcome several hurdles.

Fick’s team will need to keep the course material up-to-date as the tech landscape evolves. They’ll need to keep it accessible but also informative to diplomats with varying tech proficiencies who work in countries with varying levels of tech capacity. And they’ll need to maintain a constant training tempo, given that diplomats rotate positions every few years.

The tone of the curriculum also presents a challenge. Diplomats need to learn the US position on issues like trusted telecom infrastructure, but they also need to understand that not every country sees things the way the US does. “It's not just knowing about these tech issues that’s so essential,” Sherman says. “It's also understanding the whole dictionary of terms and how every country thinks about these concepts differently.”

The coming years could test the course’s impact as the US strives to protect its Eastern European partners from Russia, its East Asian partners from China and North Korea, and its Middle Eastern partners from Iran, as well as to counter Chinese tech supremacy and neutralize Russia’s and China’s digital authoritarianism.

Perhaps the biggest question facing the program is whether it will survive a possible change in administrations this fall. Officials are optimistic—Fick has talked to his Trump-era counterparts, and Painter says “having an FSI course gives it a sense of permanence.”

For Fick, there is no question that the training must continue.

“Tech is interwoven into every aspect of … American foreign policy,” he says. “If you want to position yourself to be effective and be relevant as an American diplomat in the decades ahead, you need to understand these issues.”

[jadelotusflower]

Look I so old, to young eyes?

So I've been watching the original Star Wars trilogy with my niece (10) and nephew (5) for the first time. I think a lot about foundational media, nostalgia, and generational storytelling, so this was an interesting experience. They both are aware of Star Wars, because they live in the world, but thankfully none of the big plot points had been spoiled for them. Basically they knew Darth Vader is the bad guy, Jedi fight with lightsabers, "Baby Yoda" is cute, and R2-D2 is a funny robot, so were as fresh eyes to the franchise as you can probably get.

Like many an elder millenial, something I've had to come to terms with is that the films and television I loved as a kid might not resonate the same way on successive generations, even when introduced to them at a similar age. My childhood entertainment was shaped by particular experiences - when going to the cinema was a special treat, watching the Saturday/Sunday night movie on tv, going to the video store on a Friday night and picking one film to rent, having a small collection of tapes (and later dvds) that were watched over and over.

There was less to watch, and so we watched more of it - these days entertainment feels more transient, we binge and burn through franchises and quickly move on to the next thing, and consequently they seem to imprint less upon us. On the other hand, fandom has become so much more accessible, broadening the collective viewing experience and connection through fandom, and the ubiquity of streaming does allow for easy rewatching and deeper examination, as well as broader dissemination through meme culture.

I came of age in a post-modern world - where our parent's cultural touchstones were on the one hand fed to us wholesale and on the other repackaged through half satiricial lens and half referential devotion (The Simpsons is the ultimate example, but that's a whole other post). Now we're far post-postmodern but have somehow circled right back to it on the reboot/sequel/spinoff merry-go-round, but rather than increasing an IP's longevity, there seem to be diminishing returns, unable to move these stories forward generationally but simply regurgitating it as the same, again.

But I'm getting into the weeds. The crux is this: does the holy original trilogy of Star Wars hold up as a timeless classic resonant to successive generations, or is it only a remnant of a bygone era (a more civilised age), groundbreaking for its time but oversold through the veil of nostalgia?

Well, I don't know. Maybe both.

Obviously this is all with a grain of salt. Ultimately the viewing experience of this Millenial with two gen Alpha kids doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this world (wait - wrong movie). But what is tumblr for but to post my myriad ramblings?

Overall, my niece and nephew liked the movies. I think A New Hope was a bit of a slog for them at first - film pacing has just changed so much, there's less time to let a story unfold, and my nephew in particular was restless during the more talky parts of the film. But they really liked whenever Artoo was on screen, and the Jawas. At the end of the day they were interested but not particularly enthralled.

I think its easy to forget just how different ANH is divorced from the context of the films that came after - in many ways it suffers from a case of the Citizen Kanes, in that you can appreciate why it was so groundbreaking for its time, because it introduced, re-invented, or re-contextualised storytelling and filmmaking in ways that were revolutionary, but watching without that layer it is inevitably compared to content that came afterwards and built upon its foundations.

Kids have grown up on a diet of superhero, fanstasy, and sci-fi media with elevated special effects and refined pop culture narratives - ANH is ultimately a pretty straightfoward and small scale story that introduces us to the core elements of the story: Rebels vs Empire, the Force and lightsabers, droids, aliens, and character archetypes, but where setpieces like the Obi-Wan vs Darth Vader fight are less impressive to modern eyes. That said, I do think the final attack on the Death Star holds up (although we started watching a bit late so the kids were pretty tired by that stage), and were generally invested in the rebels winning.

The Empire Strikes Back was overall more successful which makes sense - while it's generally considered to be the "darkest" out of the trilogy, it leans into the action upfront and is therefore more immedately engaging for a younger audience (my nephew really loved the AT-AT's).

ESB is when the philosophy of the Jedi is solified - both kids loved Yoda and it was this point that they really started to get invested in the idea of using the Force beyond swinging a lightsaber - we did have some discussions around Luke and the dark side cave, why he couldn't lift the X-Wing, etc. My niece in particular queried why Luke wouldn't listen to Yoda and stay on Dagobah (she's a rule-follower by nature), and we talked it through and in the end she decided that she would want to save her friends too, and would have probably made the same choice.

I think we sometimes forget that these are ultimately fairy tales, and while the original trilogy's morality may seem simplistic (especially compared to more adult content like Andor) it's intended to be a child's introduction to the nature of good and evil and, among other things, the internal struggle between adherence to authority and belief in ones own instincts - and the consequences of those choices. I actually don't think these are simplistic concepts at all, and are open to interpretation even within the confines of the film.

My niece also started to get a bit worried when Luke shows up in Bespin, more than once she said "They're not going to kill off the main character, they wouldn't do that. Right?" Which I thought was very sweet. They were both also concerned when Han got frozen in carbonite, wanting us to confirm we was still alive.

Both kids were surprised by the twist that Darth Vader was Luke's father, demanding to know whether he was telling the truth or not. I'm really glad that reveal was preserved for them.

Then onto Return of the Jedi, which they knew was both mine and my sister's favourite so we might have oversold it a bit. My nephew was slightly more restless than he was for ESB, since ROTJ actually reverts to the ANH structure of a slower beginning/buildup. Once we got to the Rancor and the sailbarge they were more into it, although interestingly neither really had a strong reaction to the reveal that Leia was Luke's sister (and I actually expected my niece to be a bit more invested in Leia as a character than she was - although that might be because she's at the stage where she thinks kissing is gross and therefore wasn't really interested in the Han/Leia plot as much as she was the Jedi stuff).

They LOVED the Ewoks though, unsurprisingly. The speederbike chase was the first time the quality of the special effects were questioned, my niece saying that it looked like it was filmed on a screen, to which we had to point out the movie was made forty-five years ago. That it took almost 3 movies for her to comment on it probably indicates the vfx is pretty timeless (say it with me: “real sets, practical effects”)

I sometimes do forget how cracking the final act of ROTJ is, cutting between the Endor battle, the Space battle, and the Throne Room battle. The kids were fully invested at this point, mostly with the Ewok's antics (we did fudge a bit and say one of the dead Ewoks was just unconscious), and the AT-ST's getting wrecked, but also Lando on the Falcon, and of course Luke fighting Vader. My niece was clutching my hand quite hard when Luke was getting fried by Force lightening, and there was some anxiety about Lando/Wedge and then Luke escaping the Death Star before it blew up.

They both were pretty sad when Anakin died as well. I will say there is just something about Darth Vader as a character - they love him as a villain, and they love him being a good guy at the end.

So, has the original Star Wars trilogy been resonant? Yes, at least for now - they both like to play at being Jedi and "use the force!" has become a frequent catchcry. However they haven’t asked to watch any of them again, so it’s unclear if the trilogy will be as influential as it was on me and my sister - probably not - but they are primed to enjoy more stories set in that galaxy far far away.

My nephew is probably a bit more invested - his favourite character is Luke (my niece vacilates between Yoda and Wicket/the Ewoks in general), he has been turning any cylindrical object into a lightsaber, and opening any automatic door “with the force”. He was chatting with a little friend of his the other day about Star Wars ("Darth Vader has a machine head" "No, Darth Vader has a machine on part of his head!") and he came out with "Did you know Darth Vader is Luke's father?" Got to talk to him about spoilers!

My niece did ask why there weren't any girl Jedi, which I think shows how far we've come that it's now expected that female characters will show up in those type of roles, so it seems odd when they don't. It really is a shame the sequels are so terrible overall because I think she would really enjoy Rey, but we really don't want to spoil the happy ending for them (and none of us adults are really that interested in rewatching the sequels).

But we do plan on watching the prequels with them next, and they are interested in seeing "how Anakin became Darth Vader". I think there's something to be said about watching in chronological order or machete order, but I am still a proponent of release order, at least for first time watchers. I think it's important for the story to unfold in the way it does, and only then go back to see how it happened.

[rabbitcruiser]

World Bear Day

Advocating for the preservation of wild habitats to protect these magnificent creatures and the delicate balance of nature they represent.

Show some love, along with tons of respect, for these fluffy, strong animals who are so iconic – and also just enormous!

World Bear Day brings attention to how cool these mammals are, but the day is also meant to raise awareness for the ways that their habitats may be at risk and reminding people how they can help.

History of World Bear Day

World Bear Day has been celebrated for more than three decades since it was first established in 1992. Starting out small, this day has grown in scope and popularity over the years as it shows appreciation for these spectacular furry creatures.

Other than Australia and Antarctica, every continent has a bear that is native to its lands. But with six of the eight species of bears on the threatened or endangered list, bears face some difficult circumstances.

Because these are solitary animals that require a great deal of space to live and hunt, the places where bears live have been severely limited over the past several decades. Due to the expansion of logging, agriculture and climate change, as well as human encroachment, bear populations are declining.

Celebrate World Bear Day to show support and raise awareness about the needs of these marvelous creatures!

How to Celebrate World Bear Day

Get on board and have loads of fun by sharing in the excitement of World Bear Day. Celebrate by getting started with some of these ideas:

Learn Fun Facts About Bears

Perhaps one enjoyable way to get involved with World Bear Day might be to learn some interesting bits of trivia about them and then share with friends, family members and more. Certainly, parents and teachers will find that children benefit from sharing the excitement about and interest in this fascinating beast.

Consider some of these amazing facts about bears in honor of World Bear Day:

While they can usually only survive for around 25 years in the wild, when kept in captivity a bear’s life span may last up to twice that – up to 50 years!

Even though they are big, bears are also super fast. Depending on the species, a bear may be able to run upwards of forty miles per hour.

When a bear hibernates in the winter, it can spend up to 100 days or more than three months without waking up

Make a Charitable Donation

Many of the world’s non-profit organizations are dedicated to helping various animals by protecting their habitats.

World Bear Day would be an ideal time to show support by making a small donation on behalf of the bears. A quick online search will reveal a wide range of different bear charities, including the American Bear Association, the Grizzly Bear Foundation, the Great Bear Foundation and many more.

World Bear Day FAQs

What unusual laws exist about bears around the world?

Some U.S. states have quirky laws about bears. In Alaska, it’s illegal to wake a sleeping bear to take its photo.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, it’s unlawful to feed bears, as it can lead to dangerous habituation. These laws protect both people and wildlife.

Are there ancient myths about bears that influenced human culture?

Norse mythology revered bears as sacred. The god Odin was often associated with bears, symbolizing wisdom and strength.

In Ancient Greece, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, was linked to bears, and her temple at Brauron featured a bear-worshipping ritual for young girls.

What is the connection between bears and constellations?

Bears have inspired celestial names. The Ursa Major (Great Bear) and Ursa Minor (Little Bear) constellations were named by ancient Greeks.

They believed Zeus placed them in the sky to honor a bear-shaped nymph named Callisto.

How have bears influenced modern literature and media?

Bears appear in iconic stories. A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh depicts a friendly, honey-loving bear inspired by a real black bear at the London Zoo.

Baloo from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book represents wisdom and mentorship, reflecting cultural perceptions of bears as noble protectors.

How do indigenous people incorporate bears into their traditions?

The Ainu of Japan view bears as deities. Their Iyomante ceremony honors bears with songs, dances, and offerings.

North American Indigenous tribes often regard bears as spiritual guides, using their imagery in art and storytelling.

What are some fascinating bear behaviors beyond hibernation?

Bears can mimic human postures, sometimes sitting like people. Sloth bears carry their cubs on their backs, a rare behavior among bears. Grizzly bears also use tools, flipping over rocks with sticks to find insects.

How are bears featured in global art and crafts?

Russian Matryoshka dolls often depict bears, reflecting their cultural symbolism of strength.

Inuit artists carve polar bears from soapstone, showcasing their deep connection with Arctic wildlife. These crafts preserve traditions and honor bears

What unusual foods do bears eat in the wild?

Bears have eclectic diets. Black bears eat ants, termites, and even carrion.

Grizzlies devour moths, sometimes consuming 40,000 in a day. Pandas, although primarily bamboo eaters, occasionally eat eggs and small animals.

What are some strange bear-related superstitions?

In medieval Europe, people believed carrying a bear tooth could ward off illness. In Finland, mentioning bears by name was taboo, so euphemisms like “honey eater” were used to avoid bad luck.

What are some quirky traditions involving bears in sports?

The Canadian Football League’s Calgary Stampeders have a bear mascot named Ralph.

During games, fans toss bear-themed items, including stuffed animals, for charity drives. The tradition combines fun and philanthropy.

Source

[reasoningdaily]

Black women are disappearing at an alarming rate. In 2022 alone, more than 97,000 Black women were reported missing, according to the 2022 NCIC Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics, and we believe there are even more. Yet their stories are not making the national headlines. Carlee Russell’s case going viral was an anomaly that we had hoped would change that and spark nationwide interest in our cases. 

Instead, it led to backlash due to the outcome. We’ve heard it all, from people saying they will never share a case of a missing Black woman again to resentment and anger, and even a halo of distrust that has others in our community looking at every Black missing woman’s story with a side-eye. 

The sad fact is that we can’t afford to look the other way because the statistics and reality of the number of missing Black women is too glaring to ignore.

When I started as the co-founder and publicist for the Black and Missing Foundation, families were reaching out to us in desperation, seeking any help to bring awareness to their loved one’s disappearance. We were their last hope because no one was taking their cases seriously. There was a lack of media coverage, law enforcement support, and community engagement was sparse and disheartening. Although over the last 15 years, the Black and Missing Foundation has made some progress with national and local media partnerships, it is still not enough, with the number of missing Black women continuing to rise. 

According to the Urban Institute, only seven percent of missing person cases involving people of color receive national media coverage. In those early years, beyond the Black press, I can’t tell you how many times my pleas for media coverage were met with silence or disinterest despite Black women representing 18 percent of all missing persons cases.

What I didn’t know in those early years of the foundation that I know now, is that Black women are often targeted, particularly regarding sex trafficking. Interviews with predators and pimps revealed that they target Black women because they believe no one will look for them and the penalty will not be as harsh for trafficking them. Also, Black women are not seen as victims. They are often stereotyped as promiscuous and responsible for their disappearance. Their white counterparts, however are viewed as a damsel in distress, needing to be rescued. 

Without media coverage to raise awareness, the cases of missing Black women often fall through the cracks. Media coverage sets a sense of urgency in motion, galvanizing the community and putting pressure on law enforcement to add resources to the case, which can result in a quicker recovery. Sadly, our cases remain open four times longer than our white counterparts. 

Missing Black women are rarely front-page news; sadly, many of us don’t even know their names. Tarasha Benjamin has been missing for over 13 years after disappearing from Selma, Alabama, following a trip to the flea market. The family of Emily Victoria Benjamin have been searching for her for nearly a year after she disappeared from Culpeper, Virginia, on September 2, 2022, after leaving for a road trip. Then there is Javitta Brockington, who was last seen on August 6, heading to Atlantic City, New Jersey. These are just a few of the cases we are actively working on. 

These are our mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends, and if we don’t search for them, who will? While Carlee Russell’s level of media exposure was unprecedented, it doesn’t have to be.

 What if it became the norm, and we brought more of our missing loved ones homes? The Black and Missing Foundation has been able to help locate more than 400 individuals with the community’s support over the years. We are working with thousands of families right now. That’s why we can’t afford to be deterred, derailed, or defeated by the Carlee Russell situation. We ask our communities to be our digital milk carton by sharing the profiles of those missing. 

Help us to help the cases go viral. It only takes one person to come forward with answers to help bring home the missing individual or provide answers to families who are desperately searching for their missing loved ones. Elected leaders must work to enhance the public communication alert systems. When time is critical, you need to be able to reach the most people in the shortest time. The media and social media are the only entities that have the power to amplify these cases and to keep them top of mind with the public, which is critical for bringing our loved ones home. 

Race, zip code, income, and education should never be factors in who gets media coverage and law enforcement support. Our missing Black women are counting on us. They matter, too, and deserve to be found.

Natalie Wilson is the co-founder of the Black and Missing Foundation. With two decades of experience in public and media relations, she knows the power and reach of media coverage. Natalie, who is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), holds a Master of Arts in communications from Trinity University and a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Howard University.

[bigvee1]

How Web3 and STON.fi Are Changing the Way We Experience the Internet

The internet has come a long way. From basic web pages and emails to social media and streaming, it’s hard to imagine life without it. But here’s a question: Do you feel like you really own your online experience? Probably not.

Most of what we do online is controlled by a handful of companies. They store your data, determine what you see, and take their share of your money in fees. Web3 is here to change all that, and platforms like STON.fi are leading the way. Let me explain how this works in a way that’s clear, simple, and relevant to your daily life.

What Is Web3, and Why Should You Care

Think of Web3 as the next version of the internet. Right now, we live in a Web2 world, where platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and banks act as middlemen. They connect us, but they also take control—of our data, our privacy, and even our money.

Web3 is about giving that control back to you. It’s a decentralized internet where you own your information, make direct transactions, and interact without needing a central authority to mediate. Imagine it like owning your house outright instead of renting it from a landlord who can raise the rent or evict you at any time.

Blockchain: The Foundation of Web3

Here’s where things get interesting: Web3 runs on blockchain technology. If that sounds intimidating, let me simplify it.

Think of blockchain as a giant spreadsheet that everyone can see but no one can tamper with. Every time a transaction happens, it’s written down and locked in forever. This removes the need to trust a single institution, like a bank, because everyone can verify the records.

For example, when you send money to a friend through a traditional bank, the bank handles the transaction. With blockchain, it’s like handing your friend cash directly—but digitally. No delays, no hidden fees, no need for “approval.”

What Makes TON Blockchain Special

Now let’s talk about The Open Network (TON). Think of blockchains like highways. Some are slow and congested, others are faster and more efficient. TON is like a six-lane expressway—designed for speed, scalability, and ease of use.

This means transactions on TON are quick and cheap, making it perfect for platforms like STON.fi, which rely on fast, secure exchanges.

STON.fi: A Better Way to Trade and Earn

So, where does STON.fi fit into all this? If you’ve ever traded cryptocurrency, you know how centralized exchanges work. They’re like traditional banks—they hold your assets and charge you for using their services.

STON.fi does things differently. It’s a decentralized exchange (DEX), which means you’re always in control of your funds. Trading on STON.fi is like buying goods directly from a farmer instead of going through a supermarket. There’s no middleman, so it’s more transparent, often cheaper, and gives you full ownership.

Even if you’re new to crypto, STON.fi is built to be user-friendly. It’s not about overwhelming you with technical details; it’s about making decentralized finance accessible to everyone.

Why This Matters to You

Let’s make this personal. Think about your money. Right now, it’s stored in banks, managed by financial institutions, and subject to their terms. What if you could take control of your finances without relying on anyone else?

Web3 and platforms like STON.fi offer that possibility. It’s not just about trading crypto—it’s about financial independence. Whether you’re sending money, investing, or exploring new ways to earn, these tools empower you to be your own bank.

For instance, STON.fi allows you to participate in liquidity pools, where you can earn rewards by providing funds for trades. It’s like renting out a spare room in your house—you earn income from something you already own.

Getting Started Without the Jargon

You don’t need to be a tech wizard to explore Web3 or STON.fi. If you’ve ever used online banking or shopped on Amazon, you already have the skills to get started.

The first step is simply learning. Visit STON.fi, experiment with small trades, or read more about how decentralized exchanges work. The goal isn’t to become an expert overnight—it’s to take one small step toward understanding this new world.

The Bigger Picture

Web3 isn’t just a tech trend; it’s a movement. It’s about creating a fairer, more transparent internet where individuals—not corporations—are in control. Platforms like STON.fi are making this vision a reality, one transaction at a time.

Think about the shift from cash to credit cards. At first, it felt unfamiliar and risky, but now it’s the norm. Web3 is following a similar path, and those who adapt early stand to benefit the most.

Final Thoughts

Change can feel daunting, but it’s also an opportunity. Web3 and STON.fi aren’t just technologies—they’re tools to help you take control of your digital life and finances.

You don’t have to jump in all at once. Start small, stay curious, and explore how these innovations can fit into your life. Because at the end of the day, the future of the internet isn’t about technology—it’s about you.

[blushcoloreddreams]

Glow up 2024 - The reality of polarities

This text will be very short but at the same time one of the most important for your glow up

It's going to be short for a special reason, I'm not going to say the things you need to understand. I'll just show you the direction of where you need to look. What you need to understand before we start is that there is what is reality and what is reality in the world.

Objective reality is what things really are. Stripped of personal interests or opinions, masks and all emotional factors. That's why when we look for relationship references and people we look up to we tend to use completely distorted references. I'll give you an example, if you follow couples who are on the social media or celebrities , whoever they are, you don't see reality, you only see what the couple wants to show through the lens of a camera. This fragment of the story leads you to half-believe and understand things. Therefore, if you base your relationships or your financial life on stories of famous people, it will be difficult for you to understand what is happening in your life and have good references for action. The same goes for characters in stories, films and soap operas and series. They are just characters, useful archetypes used for a narrative but do not represent reality.

This makes most people confused these days. Because people are basing their values ​​and their lives in comparison to media fiction. That's why women expect sweeping passions, romances full of soap opera nuances. That's why men expect women with unattainable physical and behavioral standards. That's why men and women are so confused about what success is and how to find it. That's why people get bored with their relationships or their work when things are simply in order. Because real life is not a soap opera, it is not a movie. Real life happens day after day, year after year. It won't change chapters after an hour, it won't become a trilogy or have a season 2.

In this post I’d like to bring examples of successful relationships and financial life. I wanted to bring history references and success references so that you could take this for yourself and observe your behavior patterns through this lens. But that wouldn't work, that's what I realized years ago. Internally I had no real references to what a relationship is or what a life that really satisfies a woman is. What I did was look for references in reality and that is what I propose today. May you think about your life and all the people you've met. In all the women, couples and men you've met. Your family, neighbors, teachers, friends, co-workers, bosses and businesspeople. Friends of friends anyway. People that you really had some level of proximity to or that had ways of validating what the reality of each person's life is. Think about the most successful man you have ever met, try to observe which areas of life he was successful in. What was his family like? What was your work like? What was your lifestyle like? Think about the most successful woman you have ever met. Try to notice what areas of life she was successful at. What her family was like, what her job was like, what her lifestyle was like. You can understand that a successful real person is very different from the people you see on screens.

In real life, ordinary men and women who do the right thing day in and day out are the people who become successful. They may be very financially successful people, but note that all this success comes from a solid foundation and was built over some time. Now try to observe the difference between this woman who you observed who really has a well-ordered, successful life and those women who until today you considered successful women. What I want to provoke here is now for you to think about whether the ruler you use to measure a woman's worth is right. Due to the influence of the media today, without realizing it, most women measure the value of other women by how much they expose themselves for financial success and fame. But is this actually what really has value? Look at the women who really have an orderly and happy life around them, they are looking for the same things you see in the media. What we observe most today, with the little bit of reality that leaks from the lives of these people who only seek fame and wealth, is a chaotic life, relationships completely destroyed, with multiple stories of betrayal, fights and abuse. I won't name names, but if you look at the most famous women in the Brazilian media today you will see that they are all single, extremely exposed and with their romantic lives destroyed.

Can you see that these are exactly the women who want to dictate behavior to other women? That a certain level are these women who teach women to compete or try to be superior to men within relationships. Now realize how you have measured a woman's worth. What is a successful woman to you. Remember your personal references, happy women with an orderly life that you have come into contact with throughout your life. What are the factors that prove to you that these women had a really happy life? I can bet with you that these factors include a lasting relationship, a life dedicated to family, a good, hard-working and honest man by your side. Am I right. Nowadays its normal that to be rich and make money are the main goals in life for many women . And as they compete with men, thinking that this is what made them more desired and admired is having the same things as men have in themselves. So they sought to increase all those masculine qualities in theselves. As a result, they will kept finding men “smaller than themselves” men that I had no admiration for, men who looked in them for what they lacked, masculinity. So I changed my references, I changed myself. I became much more feminine and found what I dreamed of. This is how important having good references is in your life.

[muqsspace]

FANDOMS

Final Tumblr post for my semester

For the final topic, we will be talking about fandoms. Pretty sure everyone has heard about it and maybe some of us are part of a fandoms. Maybe some you might be interested in a certain gaming channel, and you constantly post about them or reposting their contents. That is considered as fandom. Maybe some of you are die-hard fans of Taylor Swift and you become a part of her fandom which is called Swifties. These are just the surface level understanding of what a fandom actually is. In today’s post, we will be going in details to understand what a fandom is and what it means to be a fandom and how does that affect someone’s self-value.

Before we begin, let us understand the definition of fandom. According to Zhao, Yang and Tan (2023), fandom is star-struck admirers initially created the fandom as an unplanned entertainment community, but it has since grown into a structured and niche group of interests. Basically, it is a group created by the community with one topic at the center. For example, if it is about football, the fandom will be about football. It can stem out to which football team type of fandom. Fandom can be about anything. From influencers, artists, famous individuals, pets etc. Fandom its not a new thing to humans. It existed way back in the 1800s. According to Seagriff (2023), Communities started holding events and get-togethers where people could connect as fandom continued to develop into other fields of interest. In the 1930s, the science fiction community took over, establishing groups in every city and even coining their own vocabulary, or "fanspeak." Since 1939, the World Science Fiction Convention has been held annually. Like humans, fandoms also evolve. From one topic to another and it gets interesting as it goes into deeper detail. This good for the community as it brings people of the same interest together. Conventions such as comic-con bring people together and allowing them to meet new people of the same interest while also have sharing sessions with everyone else in the convention.

Now that the internet exists, fandoms too has changed by the internet. You might think of the change in a bad way but instead it was a change in a good way. People around the world can connect with each other with internet applications such as social media, forums and fan sites. Fan culture grew in popularity along with the internet's widespread usage. You might just look up your favourite band or TV show online and discover a community of people who share your interests. Fans quickly jumped on websites like LiveJournal to post and create communities, ushering in an era of blogs and forums (Hanai & Trikosho, 2024). With the online fandom communities, that became the foundation where fan activities are born. Examples of fan activities include fan fiction, fan arts and even role-play. Generally, it is a fun idea by the community so that they could engage and have with each other without having to be there physically. In a sense, it does promote inclusivity inside the fandoms. The way these people communicate with each other is with the help of social media and the help of AI. People with the same interest will have similar algorithm to ensure the contents that they see is the contents that they have interest in. Applications like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X etc they all have a different purpose for different fandoms. That is how online fandoms expand and have more reach for other people in the digital community.

Next, what exactly is the impact of fandoms on mainstream culture? According to Yellowbrick (2023), the power of fandom culture to mould and impact popular media is among its most important features. Fan communities have the ability to generate excitement, build hype around a new release, and even influence the creative choices made by game developers, authors, and filmmakers. Fandoms have the power to make something, or someone go viral. With the large amount of people in a fandom, it is possible for a fandom to help increase the popularity of a certain subject. Fandoms also have their benefits for personal value. For example, when someone is a part of a fandom. It gives them a sense of belonging, allowing them to feel like they are a part of something. Since a fandom is a community group of people with the same interest, you can freely express what you feel without the worry of being judged. This helps with mental health and even provide emotional support. When it comes to the industry. A fandom could influence an industry of any sorts. When a huge amount of number of fans requests for something from the industry, it gives pressure for the industry to create something special for the fandom. This act of service by the industry is called fan service. Where the power of fandom could directly influence the industry.

In conclusion, fandom is more than just being part of a group in the community. It has existed way back in the 1800s and with the existence of internet the fandom also evolve to adapt with online community and its direct impact on the industry and towards individuals. Fandom is important in the community, it helps to provide a safe space for like minded individuals and it also helps with individuals to make new friends and share the experience with other people.

REFERENCES

Buzz, n.d, What is Fandom? Understanding the Essence and Significance of Fandom and Fanclubs. Essential Terminology Every True Fan Should Know, Buzz, <https://mytour.vn/en/blog/bai-viet/what-is-fandom-understanding-the-essence-and-significance-of-fandom-and-fanclubs-essential-terminology-every-true-fan-should-know.html>

Hanai, T, Trikosho, M, 2024, From Deadheads on bulletin boards to Taylor Swift ‘stans’: a short history of how fandoms shaped the internet, The Conversation, 15 February, <https://theconversation.com/from-deadheads-on-bulletin-boards-to-taylor-swift-stans-a-short-history-of-how-fandoms-shaped-the-internet-210970#:~:text=As%20the%20adoption%20of%20the,to%20write%20and%20build%20communities.> 

Pitt-Bradford Bloggers (n.d), What is Fandom?, [Online Image], Available at: <https://upbintrotoblogging.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/what-is-fandom/>

Seagriff, C, 2023, The Beginnings of Fandom Culture, That Fangirl Life, 24 February, <https://thatfangirllife.com/2023/02/the-beginnings-of-fandom-culture/>

Taylor, S (2020), We the Fans: How Our Powers Can Change the World, [Online Image], Available at: <https://popcollab.org/learning/wethefans/>

Urban Plains (2022), Raised by the Internet Episode 3: The World of Fandoms, [Online Image], Available at: <https://urban-plains.com/raised-by-the-internet-episode-3-the-world-of-fandoms/>          

Yellowbrick, 2023, Unveiling the Power of Fandom Culture, Yellowbrick, 22 August, <https://www.yellowbrick.co/blog/music/unveiling-the-power-of-fandom-culture#:~:text=The%20Influence%20of%20Fandom%20Culture,%2C%20authors%2C%20and%20game%20developers.>

Zhao, Y, Yang, L, Tan, GY, 2023, Analysis of the Characteristics of Fandom Culture and Its Influence on Group Behavior of College Students, SHS Web of Conferences, <https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2023/20/shsconf_mhehd2023_01032.pdf>

[dogaquarium]

Hey Laika, I saw your post about nightmares and I hope you’re doing alright :( that sounds really hard and on top of all the other stressors must be rough.

I’ve been curious about your thoughts on alien 9 recently, and was wondering your thoughts on it! If thats too much to think about right now how about some of your favorite foods or items?

Hope this helps a little 🫶 <:D

Hi star thank you so very much for the ask <3 I'm feeling a little better now, just takes a little bit of wind out of me whenever I wake up from something like that. Let me focus on answering your questions now though....

Asking me my thoughts on alien 9 in such a vague sense is a recipe for disaster, lol. I have so many thoughts and opinions on so many different elements of it. So feel free to ask for specifics later if you'd like, but I suppose I'll do a quick overview on as many things as I possibly can! Also going to try to make this as relatively spoiler free as possible since I'm pretty sure neither you nor a few other people following this blog have seen it yet, and I'm not sure if you're interested in attending movie night or not whenever I have time to plan a date for that.

Boy, where do I even start..... alien 9 is something so special to me. The entire franchise definitely does have its issues, and I do wish some moments were expanded upon or changed slightly. The pacing can be a little strange in the OVA, and even stranger in the manga (which is one reason I enjoy the anime a lot more; the manga sometimes feels almost detatched entirely). But it's something really valuable as it is regardless. It's such a foundational media for me that I came away from differently. Something I've found a lot of comfort and security in! The characters are all extremely charming, the story itself tackles such serious taboo topics in a proper sense, such a large part of it corresponds to the young queer experience, it doesn't poke fun at childhood mental illness, the core concept of the universe it exists within is endlessly compelling, the list goes on..... plus, kumi's character themes of identity (which I've already mentioned in precious posts) is something you can dig into forever. It's all so interesting. And it resonates a lot with me!

Episode 3 is one I'm especially excited for everyone to experience when I stream it. It's my personal favorite episode for a lot of reasons that I think we're masterfully tackled. It's a beach/vacation episode! Which sounds, admittedly, very frivolous and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. And to some degree it is!!! But what I personally find so compelling about episode 3 is the fact that it serves as a medium through which we can see how the main three girls function outside of a traumatic environment. It provides a baseline for us. It allows the audience to see them just be kids. I truly do not think it'd be as impactful of a series for me without that.

And now, since you can't have a general dump of my thoughts on alien 9 without mentioning the spinoffs.. prepare yourself......

I firmly believe that hitoshi tomizawa should have not been allowed to expand on this franchise any further after the original story had been wrapped up because after seeing what he's done with it you're bound to get a headache. There's two spinoffs from the original three classic volumes: namely alien 9-emulators and alien 9-next. I will not dwell on emulators (at least in this ask) because my rant on it will likely be even longer than this response, but know that with the way it handles the original subject material, it's not only incredibly insensitive, but I'd go as far as saying actively harmful. Tomizawa is a fuckin pedophile which SHINES in his later works in particular, and is very ironic considering so much of the point of the original classic series concerns the harm done by csa and how cyclical it can become (most blatantly in relation to kasumi's character). That's all I'll get into it for now because if I talk any more on it I'll get even more pissed. Idk where to even begin with Next, though.... such a strange expansion of the universe...... this spinoff takes place after the girls have all grown up and are on some kind of outer space mission.. idk how to even explain it to you and it's been far too long since I've read it but it's utter horseshit, such an anomalous entry in the series. Also the art style changed to be 3D models for no reason and it's ugly as sin.

Besides all the....... obviously glaring problems with both next and emulators..... there are also some simpler things that don't work for me in them. Namely kumi and yuri's relationship! In the classic volumes, such a major plot point is the evolution of their relationship from one that is tense, angry, and unhealthy to one that is mutually supportive and uplifting. There's a lot to be said about this change in relation to both parties- be it relaring to kumi's home life/preconceived expectations of her to yuri's mental illnesses/the way others treat her due to that. They act the way they do for a reason, is what I mean. And so when the audience finally gets the relief of them forming a genuine bond together, you expect that to be that, it's a plot point wrapped up and done with. And does stay wrapped up..... in the classic volumes, at least. In the spinoffs, kumi suddenly reverts back into someone aggressive and untrusting. Yuri reverts back into someone who has made no advances in her bravery and independence. All because fuckin tomizawa had no idea how to craft a story with meaning after he finished the first three volumes.

^ so cutes.. awwee......

I suppose this turned more into a response of why I dislike all the spinoffs rather than why I like the originals.. oh well..... easier to avoid spoilers in that way I suppose. Maybe you still found this interesting enough? Don't hesitate to ask more if I didn't answer how you'd expected!