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Star Wars scifi is when there's 1 human on the screen with 50 aliens in the background. Star Trek scifi is when there's 1 alien on the screen with 50 humans in the background. Hope this helps!

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"Tumblr users love to subvert a thing that's already subverted and end up with the normal thing again" is a nice punchy quote but unfortunately it's catnip to the sort of person who can't distinguish surface-level features and deeper themes, so you get people attacking genuinely counterhegemonic works because in the process of doing something interesting they happened to hit a boo light.

As we all know, Disco Elysium is just a story about an old white cop, PMMM is grimdark sexist torture porn, Dungeon Meshi is imperialist because the protagonists are dungeon-delvers, and if a character questions their sexuality only to decide they're straight then that entire arc retroactively becomes pointless.

Some people use 'subversive' to mean 'unexpected' and some people use 'subversive' to mean 'opposed to prevailing cultural norms' and one possible way to make media discussion worse is to pointedly ignore that distinction.

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Some people use 'subversive' to mean 'unexpected' and some people use 'subversive' to mean 'opposed to prevailing cultural norms' and one possible way to make media discussion worse is to pointedly ignore that distinction.

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we shpuld make a tumblr bar with drinks like sonic screwdriver and the baker street mule

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i read somewhere once that etrian odyssey's original designer set the party cap at 5 because otherwise your party would feel "too complete" and at 5 it always feels like it's lacking something. and while i think this is a really good game design paradigm i actually am realizing this may be apocryphal because i can't find a primary source for it. huh.

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holy shit, an ask game thats actually good

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It would appear that shortly after taking office Trump¹ did indeed reinstate the Mexico City policy.

"Should the USA government block all and any federal aid to NGOs that provide abortion counseling, including those operating in third-world countries, affecting the allocation of millions if not billions of dollars" is a question that approximately zero people on this site struggle to answer, and approximately zero people think doesn't matter.

If there was a nationwide binding referendum on this question, this site's userbase would be up in arms about it. The suggestion that voting in this referendum would be pointless would be extremely fringe, and would invite an actively hostile response.

The thing is: functionally the presidential elections are this already. The Mexico City Policy tracks democratic/republican presidents exactly as you'd expect, and has done so for the ~40 years it has existed.

So why is 'voting for Biden does not actually matter' common, when it's definitionally a less defensible version of 'voting in the described referendum does not matter'?

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re: veganbeetlegate

I honestly think the reddit poster is... really sympathetic?

Like yeah, your moral system should, ideally, be tenable. You shouldn't live your life by rules that force you to indefinitely sustain a box of beetles under your bed. But also, I think it's good to acknowledge that killing those beetles is, however slightly, immoral, in the sense that the suffering and/or death of any animal, no matter how small and no matter its conditions, matters.

(You may disagree with me on this point, and that's understandable, and I'm sure you have opinions on what sorts of animal death/suffering we should or should not care about, but the thing is that I think a lot of people actually don't have anything worked out beyond 'hurting animals is bad but you can go too far in that conviction')

Now, having done that you should go on to accept that a perfectly ethical life is unavoidable and you have to set some standards for yourself that you can actually maintain throughout your life. That's where Beetle Poster goes wrong - but at least they set a step on the right path, y'know?

Meanwhile, this website's median engagement with an ethical dilemma is to deny it exists. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, there's no such thing as a lesser evil, and if you're ever in a trolley problem, just stop whoever tied all those people to the tracks. The average jeering reblog just feels like that same flinch reflex, now backed up by an appeal to normalcy.

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Canon mtf trotsky

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yeah i'm a false prophet but you believed me so whose fault is it really that we're in this mess

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excellent daydream concept: ACOUP posts from the alternate history timeline created by your playthrough of Crusader Kings (a game you started playing because of how it was described in ACOUP posts)

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From the introduction to “The Collected Musical-Plays of Essendim” published Sept. 3039

Six works of Essendim survive, more than any other single composer of American musical-plays. They are The Barber-Devil Suindoda, Joroga in the Pleasure-Garden upon the Sun’s Day, The Companions, The Foolish Acts, The Ones that Venture into the Forest, and We, The Gaily-Proceeding. (The Foolish Acts’ title is an untranslatable pun: the word in ancient English referred not only to ill-conceived deeds but also to a kind of extravagant live entertainment that features prominently in the piece itself.)

The titles of other musical-plays survive, but the works themselves are irrecoverably lost. Two of these lost works, The Evening’s Small Song and The Peaceable Prelude, were regarded as masterpieces.

Essendim wrote virtuosically, but always with a keen regard for character. He was famed for his skill at rhyming, and indeed his verses are meticulously arranged. But he also garnered a reputation early in his career for writing harsh music. While none of the notated music survives, contemporary sources characterize his melodies as lively and covering large intervals—without many pauses for the singer to recover breath. This meant that a performer of Essendim’s pieces needed great vocal skill and exactitude.

To introduce Essendim’s particular style, I have translated an excerpt from The Companions below. Any attempt fully to render the many rhymes and intricate structure in our language will inevitably fall short. However, I hope to give at least a flavor of Essendim’s urbanity and probing intelligence.

It sounds! The ‘phone*– And, yes, so does the door’s bell– The companions flood in;

Held not by firm ties But by conviviality, And the companions make the chamber ring.

O, sleepless nights, brief meals And entertainments, heartfelt murmurs, lengthy ambles, conversations upon the telephone—

Minds join, Spirits mingle, Secret names are said, And we gaze upon a gallery of photographs** Filled with love And the days too are filled with love Seventy times they are filled, To Bohabi***, lovingly From these gentle madmen Who are my friends– My friends who are wedded.

*short for “telephone”, a rudimentary communication device popular when Essendim was writing **something like flat, still, two-dimensional holograms; the most modern and widespread type of image in his day ***the central character of The Companions and the speaker of this excerpt

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It's crazy how the kinks I'm into are innately much more interesting and deep than the ones I dislike. And headcanoning a character to share my identities is basically guaranteed to lend itself to intriguing situations. And meanwhile all the stuff I don't care about is textually shallow tripe!

No, I don't mean on a personal level, I mean objectively. If you're so self-absorbed that you can't even understand that, then I honestly just feel bad for you.

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You ever remember how incomprehensible Moon's name must be now that the world is overcast 100% of the time.

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"I believe in gender essentialism; but I believe that only like 5% of the human population has the gender essence. The rest of you are on your own. You'll just have to pretend to be a man or a women or whatever. For you, it is just made up and fake. For me, though, it is real and meaningful."

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Only on tumblr do people advance theoretical frameworks under which 'conventionally attractive headless corpse' becomes a possibility.