#so it's a systemic failure really

[snackugaki]

hi sorry hello excuse if i could just pardon trying to get through sorry just lemme makikiraan po it’s okay gonna sumimasen squeeze in right here perdón yeah no it’s fine just excusez moi just gotta gonna commit a little words crime and i’ll be outta your hair hha ha a

... my humor isn’t so much low hanging fruit as it’s the fruit on the ground that the wasps have eaten and gotten drunk from the fermentation and are uselessly trying to sting the air

click through to see flowers given to people for their gorgeous gorgeous work

... i legit don’t know the general etiquette for tagging people you don’t know two days in a row... 

w elp; y’all should read up, 10/10 i love

Odd Man Out by the @threestripeslider​

We’ll Meet Again, Soon @chiangyorange

Mutant Ninja Midlife Crisis by @mutantninjamidlifecrisis

Trial and Error by @apatheticrobots

Replica by @kathaynesart

EDIT: .......... i forGOT MNMC’S RED CRESCENTS  FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF but I remembered his dumb nipple dents, call that equivalent exchange

[silverserpent]

OKAY SO

Tomorrow, me, @atak-achrativ and @freshlybakedpigeons are going to stream Star-spawned, roleplay made by @prokopetz!

EDIT: time will be at 6:30 Central European Time!

This is a GMless roleplay. The core concept is that we are playing eldritch beings who were just born, therefore we have no idea about what our stats mean.

So, we are applying the scientific method to it. We are gonna make hypotheses and test them. We are very smart eldritch beings.

[ritzcuit]

yea capcom im sure throwing out two (2) corrupt people in the entire monarchy of khura'in will lead to lasting reform 😀

[afniel]

Realizing that I went and wrote a bunch of intentionally aro relationships and my partner was like, "Idk, it seemed like normal relationships to me," and I was like, "I mean yeah it's not that different from ours, I guess, I was kind of going for 45° off from 'normal' romance," and they're like, "Okay, but ours is also pretty much like that," and I'm like, "Yeah, true," and now I'm like, damn hold up, are we both some kinda arospec and THIS is how we figure it out? Because I wrote a long-ass fic about intentionally queer-coded (among other things) robots? Life is weird, man.

Like I've been prone to extreme long-term crushes on a very few (mostly unattainable) people over the years, but I wouldn't have known what to do with them even if they worked out, and cough my ex was not even one of them. I just kind of assumed I was failing to feel a thing I was totally supposed to feel, there, and quite a lot of that relationship emotionally was me going, "Okay, I care like This, but I think I'm supposed to care like That? I'm pretty sure he cares That way. I'm not sure I do, but I mean, there's really only one way*, so maybe I'm just misreading this and actually I do care like That, I'm just bad at it."

*This was me being very incorrect, it turns out. There's all kinds of ways to love someone. It's a very inadequate and nonspecific word.

When I confessed my feelings (which I'd been sitting on for a year) to my partner, their reaction wasn't to be particularly romantic about it. In fact they told me they'd help me move to California if I wanted to. And after I got over my initial confusion of being kissed on the forehead (which is also not super romantic as a gesture and I couldn't decide how to even read that so I kinda skipped over even trying for a while), I was thinking, Awesome, that is a yes. They have promised to assist me with difficult stuff, and said nothing at all about emotions, because that's not a big deal anyway. The important thing is that I can rely on them and vice versa. Cool. We are basically together forever now. Which ended up being true. I just never moved out and now it's like 13 years later, go figure. But that's not what I think actually passes for reciprocating feelings for most people? Worked great for me though.

Anyway I feel like I have accidentally learned something about myself, lol. I guess romance is okay I guess, like it's not repulsive, but seriously, it's WAY more satisfying to me to guess someone else's Quiplash answer because you know they know you would think it's fucking funny, and you do, and because you think it's funny and you're well aware they know your type of humor and you know theirs and that you wouldn't expect them to use "cum" as an answer because that's not usually how they roll, so of course that is the only answer they can possibly give, which is instantly evident to both of you with no conversation whatsoever on the topic. When you got just one brain cell and it's quantum entangled with their just one brain cell so you have a lot of null discussions where nobody has to say anything but it's fully understood anyway, that's The Dream, if you ask me. And like I don't really think that's romantic by the usual definition. You can have that with friends and family, too. But that is what it turns out I prioritize in relationships, which I'm starting to feel like isn't what the majority of people are here for?

TFW it's hard to tell because I've been assuming I'm totally alloromantic so everything I experience must be typical totally alloromantic stuff too, but I'm starting to think it isn't maybe? But how do I even tell, this is like being colorblind, lmao.

[caterpillarinacave]

sorry, I was busy thinking about how fucking peppy Roman would have been if he'd had a normal childhood

[moe-broey]

Ran out of answer spaces but! I felt it was important to split off Team Plasma since there is a significant ideological difference between them (as far as I remember each ideation of Team Rocket has the same goals/beliefs, Giovanni himself just stepped down and changed his mind)

That said! This is less about favorite gen and more about believing in the beliefs -- especially interesting to consider if you align with the Main Villain and their outlook, or if you believe in the so-called "cause" that may or may not be true, or have some truth to it (like, if you wanted to help Pokemon like og Plasma and Aether Foundation).

Sorry to lump Yell and Star together, I was going chronologically!! You'll have to specify which and why in the tags haha (if you want to that is!)

And honestly that goes for any choice, sell it to me. Why should I join Your team?

[lunabeth351]

Hot take

Nowadays, ppl tend to like villains more because they actually have the guts to go against/point out the social/political issues we all see but don’t dare/bother to do s* about.

[cluusheen]

research is actually really cool and a lot of fun when you aren’t doing it for a grade

[timeisacephalopod]

The fact that cigarette companies exist is fucking dystopian and a sign of the failure of capitalism as an ideology- cigarettes are a product that undeniably caused a bunch of different cancers, we've all seen the tobacco death stats on the back of cig cartons smokers have, and yet. And yet, for some reason instead of saying "zero businesses should be selling cancer causing products to their customers, certainly not when those cancer causing products are so dangerous even the smoke of the product causes cancers in the people around smokers. Businesses have zero right to cause a massive health crisis in the population like this when their only function is to make money- you cannot give people cancer for profit."

Like you'd assume giving people cancer for money would be some kind of fucked dystopian novel that'd get ripped on for being way too over the top and unrealistic but no, we literally live in such a morally bankrupt capitalist brain rotted society that we think selling cancer is fine, we won't do anything about a set of companies that exist solely to get customers addicted to their highly dangerous product for profit. Instead we'll act like it's smokers who need to take responsibility for the industry that's exploiting them. Fucking disgusting if you ask me, that we're more okay with companies giving people cancer than we are with governments giving people welfare.

[marklikely]

watching the era of the tentpole blockbuster oversaturation studio franchise cinema landscape crumble before my eyes . :-)

[chamerionwrites]

I feel like I keep writing the same post in different ways but...even as a kid, I was that kid who preferred to crawl under the bed or search the closet for a monster rather than let my imagination run wild with possibilities. And as an adult - for a variety of reasons - I sometimes need a story to lean into its own darkest elements in order to feel safe with it.

Eg as a general rule I'm far more comfortable engaging with graphic violence (including sexual violence) in fiction than I am engaging with the most sanitized versions of those popular fanfic tropes like sex pollen, where the characters want each other anyway and have at most very mild token angst about the consent issues of it all. This is not a value judgment! In part it's frankly down to me falling (for better or worse) much closer to the Tolkien end of the Tolkien-to-Lewis "intricate worldbuilding to explain and integrate this concept" vs "because it's fun, just roll with it" nerd scale, whereas most sex pollen stories I've encountered are uninterested in the idea except as a plot driver to a degree that turns off my personal readerly interest and/or suspension of disbelief. Mostly, though, it goes back to what I said above. As a rule, I find it LESS emotionally taxing to engage with stories where the dark shit is unambiguously centered than stories where it's lurking half-heartedly around the edges of the narrative, even though the atmosphere of the former frequently feels """darker""" than that of the latter.

Again, this is not a blanket value judgment. I'm not saying that the former can't be handled voyeuristically or that the latter can't be handled thoughtfully. What I am saying is that it seems to me that people's judgments about whether a story is Grimdark™️ or Wholesome™️ are frequently based more on vibes and framing than on the actual subject matter - and while I don't necessarily think this is unreasonable, I do personally find it extremely unintuitive and wish more people could wrap their heads around the fact that audience comfort can be a deeply subjective experience.

TL;DR The unexamined view seems to be that some people have thicker skins and some people are more sensitive to "dark"/"upsetting" stories and while in certain cases that may be true, it's also just...vastly oversimplified. Different people are sensitive to (and in some cases triggered by) different things.

[flecks-of-stardust]

shaking sig like a dog toy

[amarrymeinbostonwriter]

He's right; there is an education gap between men and women in many fields. I agree with him on the trades part too. Encouraging many students to go into trades instead of traditional university education is probably the best route for many people. But I do not like the implication that women's success has somehow caused this trend for men.

He also conveniently ignored some history. The fields of education (mainly as teachers to children) and health (mainly nurses) were for a very long time some of the only jobs women could have. I feel like this is missing a lot of information that would round the picture out a bit more. Historically, mainly only Men were professors and doctors, the leaders in these professions. Only recently (the last 120 years or so) did women start being allowed into higher positions in these fields.

I'm not going to write an entire thesis in response to this video. I have some thoughts but I'm still mulling it over. I feel like this would probably be something to share with my grad class next semester for sure.

[eggsnatcheskneecaps]

Hmmm I should really work on my self image issues me thinks

TW for mentions of physical and general (ig?) abuse for anyone brave enough to venture in the tag wormhole rant that I'm about to create down there

[deep-space-netwerk]

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Venera 9 managed to take a picture with one camera, but the other one's lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 10 also managed to take a picture with one camera, but again the other lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 11 took no pictures - neither lens cap deployed this time.

Venera 12 also took no pictures - because again, neither lens cap deployed.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.

[karpad]

This Black History Month, reflect for a moment on the fact that George Washington Carver, famously "the inventor of peanut butter and more than 100 industrial uses for peanuts" wasn't, like, Doc Brown fucking around in his garage because he really liked peanuts but was specifically trying to introduce larger use of a nitrogen fixing legume into crop rotations against cotton monoculture which was destroying yields, livelihoods and the biosphere, and how most agribusiness farming now just destroys that topsoil on purpose and continues to grow a cotton monoculture (or soy or corn or whichever local monoculture is profitable) using petrochemical derived fertilizer, which is one element driving climate change

Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful heart surgery. He also founded the first nonsegregated hospital in America because he was keenly aware of disparate health outcomes by race which is still a problem today.

WEB Dubois was a part of the delegations for the birth of the UN. His proposal to include in the charter that "the colonial system of government … is undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars" was not adapted for the final draft. We might see inaction against colonial violence to this day as part of the failure of others to heed his warnings there.

I feel like so often when we look at Black History Month so much of it is driven by factoids but when taken as history in context its about a direct line from decades and centuries to what is happening right now.