#thinking about…things!

[makethemorning]

i can’t stop thinking about vampire elvis.

[gongyussy]

good thing from jp twitter this week is queen of old man yaoi michiru sonoo discovering the term old man yaoi

update: somehow it got impossibly more wholesome

quick translation: おかえり: welcome home あ 終わった 終わった: ahhh, it's over! it's done! コーヒー? お茶?: coffee? tea? コ~ヒ~ ありがと: coffee, thank you~ ネクタイレア★★ ネクタイ取るレア★★★★: seeing him with a tie on, rarity level ★★, seeing him take a tie off, rarity level ★★★★ にあうな~: it suits him~

also please do follow: AraigumaSha: sensei's twitter account marureviere: maru, who does such valuable work highlighting bl manga for an international audience

[koobiie]

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

[some-pers0n]

I hate how people will look at popular indie artists who had one or two songs go viral on TikTok and start making fun of anybody who listens to them. "Oh you listen to Lemon Demon, Will Wood, Jack Stauber, Glass Animals, and Mother Mother? Tsk, don't you know that is stupid TikTok neurodivergent white transmasc preteen music? It's so mid and bad you should listen to real music–" you are a pit of misery

[desolationlesbian]

sometimes I think too hard about like. how the ability to record audio fundamentally changed how humans interact with music. can you imagine if the only time you ever heard music in your whole life was when you or another human being in your actual physical presence decided to create it. and 99.99% of the time that person was not a professional but just like your wife or your dad or your co-worker or church choir singing or playing whatever they happened to know. i honestly don't think we can fathom it

[dionysus-complex]

funniest Kamala Harris VP picks go

[inkskinned]

please i love you i'm begging you bring back suspension of disbelief bring back trusting the audience like. i cannot handle any more dialogue that sounds like a legal document. "hello, i am here to talk to you about the incident from a few minutes ago, because i feel you might be unwell, and i am invested in your personal wellbeing." "thank you, i am unwell because the incident was hurtful to me due to my childhood, which was bad." I CANT!!!!

do you know how many people are mad that authors use "growled" as a word for "said"? it's just poetics! they do not literally mean "growled," it's just a common replacement for "said with force but in a low tone." it's normal! do you hear me!! help me i love you please let me out of here!!!

[riacte]

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

[cannibalchicken]

[druid-for-hire]

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

It's always so weird to come down from the biology heavens to see what the average person believes about animals, plants, ecosystems, just the world around them. I don't even mean things that one simply doesn't know because they've never been told or things that are confusing, I'm talking about people who genuinely do not see insects as animals. What are you saying. Every time I see a crawling or fluttering little guy I know that little guy has motivations and drive to fulfill those motivations. There are gears turning in their head! They are perceiving this world and they are drawing conclusions, they are conscious. And yet it's still a whole thing if various bugs of the world feel pain or if they are simply Instinct Machines that are Not Truly Aware of Anything At All????? Help!!!!!! How can you look at a little guy and think he is just the macroscopic animal version of a virus

[beyourghost]

and obviously you find yourself thinking oh i do wish i could get severed to do this one thing. would you actually maybe not. but you do wish you didn't have to undergo medical procedures you do wish you didn't have to do the things that give you anxiety you do wish you didn't have to do tedious tasks that barely even require you to be present for them. it's tempting. that's why the premise works. but the premise is also that somebody has to do it. somebody has to go to the dentist and somebody has to get on that plane and somebody has to write those thank you notes. just like somebody has to clean the house and somebody has to harvest the food you eat and somebody has to make the clothes you wear. you can't eliminate inconvenience you can only delegate it. you can't eliminate suffering you can only delegate it. and always the easiest way to live with this is to see that somebody as less than. less than you less than people. and if that somebody has to wear your body to do it well maybe it's not all that different. they're not a person. you are. it's capitalism all the way down baby

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[pangur-and-grim]

alright, I’m annoyed with the class that I’m taking. it’s about writing novels, and I thought it would have cool stuff about balancing your narrative and developing themes etc, but instead she spent the first class talking about how every book fits into the Hero’s Journey (the monomyth template). and I was somewhat of a contrarian, and said “can you give us examples of books that don’t fit into this template?” and she said “no. because all books fit.”

but I dunno man, I just finished reading this Korean book where the plot is just the character having a string of hookups and reflecting on them without changing in any way. I don’t know if it’s possible to contort that into the Hero’s Journey.

[salamispots]

it got turned into a 17" x14" pillow instead haha

[gongyussy]

MONKEY MAN (2024)