vineee2000

[vineee2000]

[vineee2000]

Debating silently showing this to one of the flight attendants while boarding

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it's so funny hearing much more offline lefties talk about "cancel culture" as if it's this fake thing, when i've seen like mass harrasment campaigns aimed at people for crimes like "joking about how cigarettes are bad for you" (👈anti-indigenous racism), "saying one childrens cartoon is derivative of avatar the last airbender" (👈racist against east asians), "drew fanart of the cartoon character rose quartz skinnier than her canon depiction" (👈fat-phobia, infamously this one led to a suicide attempt), and of course the classic "broke up with me :(" (👈a MISOGYNIST and ABUSER!!!). Like ok. you're repeating this line that cancel culture is fake because j k rowling is still an influential person. And it IS true that mass harrasment campaigns are less effective at fucking up rich peoples' lives. But actually there's a whole other bunch of people who have been fucked up over the years by "cancel culture", and it's exactly the worst of the "cancellers" who push the line that cancel culture doesn't exist to unsuspecting relatively-offline lefties (who don't really have a way of knowing better).

[vineee2000]

@spacetronomyfan

weirdly enchanted by this

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i think it is important to recognize the ways in which your favorite thing sucks. i think it keeps u normal

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NEW ~ Choose Your Weapon V

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odie the streamer

more scoobert next week UwU

[vineee2000]

Twenty-five days as an Isekai'd hero

First day as an isekai'd hero I'm trying to explain gunpowder to a sceptical elf but I can't remember what saltpetre is so I'm just here talking about sulphur and charcoal and someone called Salty Pete and she's pretty sure I'm talking out my arse.

Second day as an isekai'd hero I'm still trying to get this busty elf to understand guns and I'm talking about how someone can be minimally trained and still be very dangerous at range and she just says yes I know what a crossbow is ma'am.

Third day as an isekai'd hero and my limited knowledge of fractional distillation is causing me to sound like a nutcase when I talk about the alchemical separation of naptha into more useful things.

Fourth day as an isekai'd hero and I finally manage to do a demonstration of what 'elecricity' is using a piece of cloth and amber and while the elf is pretty impressed, I've got no idea how to get from here to anything actually useful.

Fifth day as an isekai'd hero and the symbol of the Evil Emperor of Woe just kinda looks like the 'cool S' and the busty elf looks at me strangely when I only barely manage to stop myself laughing at it when she shows me a history book.

Sixth day as an isekai'd hero and turns out yelling in pain after I dropped the Holy Sword on my foot has accidentally summoned a demon called Gsh'Dargn.

Seventh day as an isekai'd hero and the elf's still not talking to me after the demon-summoning fiasco but luckily demons of minced oaths are pretty much made of wet cardboard and I managed to beat it to death with the sheathed Holy Sword.

Eighth day as an isekai'd hero and my vague description of what I remember about the Bessemer process makes the elf tackle me to the ground, knife against my neck, demanding to know how I learned the secret elven techniques for coke-efficient steel.

Ninth day as an isekai'd hero and I'm still feeling a bit fluttery after day eight and I'm wondering what else is a secret elven technique I can pretend to know so I can get pinned down more.

Tenth day as an isekai'd hero and I think the elf has worked out that I don't actually know all that much about steel production so she's a bit less wary of me which is a shame good thing I guess.

Eleventh day as an isekai'd hero and it turns out I'm immediately able to guess the major traits and possible weaknesses of the Six Kings of Destruction because they're inexplicably themed after bionicles.

Twelfth day as an isekai'd hero and I was rambling about spreadsheets or something and the elf got very interested and to cut a long story short I think I've invented something called 'double-entry bookkeeping'?

Thirteenth day as an isekai'd hero and I nearly get us captured by the border guard of the Evil Empire because it turns out their salute is a dab and I burst out laughing and now the elf isn't talking to me again.

Fourteenth day as an isekai'd hero and I manage to coax the elf back into speaking to me by describing movable type printing although she doesn't really see the point given how expensive good paper is, and I don't know anything about how that works except that maybe it involves wood.

Fifteenth day as an isekai'd hero and I finally remember how you make saltpetre and run up to the elf yelling something incoherent about guano, startling her so badly she tackles me to the ground again so honestly it's a win-win.

Sixteenth day as an isekai'd hero and we get sidetracked by organising a guano expedition in the dwarf caves and the elf gets bitten by a bat and now I'm trying to explain the concept of rabies vaccines with tears in my eyes but she says we have potions for that.

Seventeenth day as an isekai'd hero and the alchemist we hired is working on the saltpetre maybe so we're going dungeoneering and I manage to solve a puzzle by arranging the tiles into the Loss glyph and I think Isekai God or someone is fucking with me.

Eighteenth day as an isekai'd hero and I finally manage to invent gunpowder only to be undercut by this dwarf alchemist asking why I'm so excited about making black powder, I ask the elf if she knew about this and she shrugs and says she hasn't visited a dwarf city in fifty years.

Nineteenth day as an isekai'd hero and after several hours rephrasing my question to an increasingly bored alchemist I've determined that no-one's heard of a concept like fireworks so I've ordered a massive amount of paper and gunpowder and I'm going to finally get something done.

Twentieth day as an isekai'd hero: healer's tnet.

Twenty-first day as an isekai'd hero and I think I'm getting the hang of this fireworks thing even though the elf is watching me sceptically from a distance with a bucket of water.

Twenty-second day as an isekai'd hero and I ask the alchemist if they've got any chemicals that burn different colours and they're like what do you mean what kind of alchemist would I be if I didn't, so I think this fireworks plan might be coming together.

Twenty-third day as an isekai'd hero and the alchemist agrees to help me put on a fireworks show for a share of the profits and also because it sounds sick as hell.

Twenty-fourth day as an isekai'd hero and I stand under the fireworks with the awestruck elf and. Um. I take her hand and tell her how I feel.

Twenty-fifth day as an isekai'd hero and. Woagh. Elfs good at kissing.

[vineee2000]

the worst part of the classic defense of "its to crack down on CSEM!" defense for giving parents more power over every aspect of their kids lives is like

WHO DO YOU THINK IS MAKING THE FUCKING CSEM. nowadays it is usually either a) directly made by a parent or b) done with a parent's knowledge (a pimping out their child for money type deal)

if the legal system was actually trying to stamp out CSA and CSEM, it would be seeking to disempower and scrutinize parents as much as humanly possible

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you'a recommending me to myself?????

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some people will say the good thing about ageing is that you don't have to give a shit about stuff any more but technically you can do that now without waiting for your joints to give out first

[vineee2000]

Your worldbuilding is your worldbuilding, but if you want your worldbuilding to be credible, you can't have everybody be a catgirl and also have the Catgirl as a cultural object be a thing that exists in your setting. There needs to be a frame of reference. When everyone is a catgirl, no one is.

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Ngl, something I absolutely love about funnybunny is that Pomni knows that Jax is 100% full of shit and doesn’t fall for any of it.

I hate the trope of “Character A is being mean and cleary doesn’t mean any of it and Character B believes all of it without a second thought and runs off crying”

Pomni can see right through him and and I love that.

[vineee2000]

I mean, you're kinda hopping between two definitions of "culturaly Christian", either "has a culture that was influenced by Christianity", or "thing that happens to you when you're not a pracricing Christian but don't practice anything else either", and you gotta pick a lane, these are quite different things

Is it "For the last thousand years at least, anyone in a European culture [..] has been shaped by Christianity", or is it "If [..] you weren't specifically raised as a specific religion other than Christianity, then you are culturally Christian"(empathis mine)? Because culture and religion are connected, certainly, but they're not the same thing, I hope that's a pretty obvious statement!

If it's the former, then it's certainly an idea that has truth to it, it's consistent and all, but then why single out atheists? It's a feature of culture, not religion, and this description applies just as well to an American Jew, or an American Muslim as it does to an American atheist or Christian. They're still American after all, in the same way that a Chinese or Egyptian Jew or Muslim or Christian or atheist are still Chinese or Egyptian. And indeed a Muslim that grew up and lived their whole life in the US would have interacted with Christianity far more than one from Egypt, so it's not a crazy lens or anything, but is is this what you're trying to say? And if it is, what's with the focus on atheists?

If it's the latter, then you've yet to construct an argument about what's so special about atheism to make them such a victim of cultural Christianity in a way that practicing another religion doesn't. Since an American Jew or Muslim could absolutely grow up consuming tons of the same media as an American atheist or Christian, a jew or a muslim could certainly go to the same school and be subject to the same teachers, bosses, and other authority figures as an atheist or a christian; the context of their immideate communities and elders would obviously be different, but it would be different for each of them just as well - a kid whose extended family is mostly jewish is different from a kid whose entire extended family is muslim, ditto for a christian one, and ditto for a mostly atheist extended family. (Yes, there are not a lot of them - one could perhaps call them a minority, even - but they certainly exist. I know such people).

Because so far you're basically appealing in your reasoning to the 1st meaning of "cultural Christianity", but asserting as the conclusion the 2nd one, and well, that's just full of holes

A lot of people hate to hear this, but they in particular really need to understand it.

If you were raised in the US, and you weren't specifically raised as a specific religion other than Christianity, then you are culturally Christian. Yes, even if you were raised atheist. Yes, I know you hate that idea. People who were raised in specific other religions in the US are usually still influenced by it, just not as thoroughly.

But specific Protestant values and attitudes have worked their way so far into US culture that we do not ever think about. (They've gotten into US Catholicism, too, Catholics elsewhere are frequently WTF at US Catholics, or so I'm told.) The "Protestant work ethic" is one of them, that "manager in your head" you should kill. Purity as a principle. The nobility of suffering (very Calvinist specifically). The prosperity culture (again, very Calvinist). A whole list. I'm honestly not good enough at Christian history to list it all. After all, I wasn't raised Christian myself. But I can see and acknowledge that I was raised in a culture with a Christian hegemony. If I pay attention, I can see where it's affected how I think. And when I do pay attention and look at it, I can change it. I can root out those patterns in my head. It's a lot of work, but it's well worth doing.

Denying that you are culturally Christian on the basis of your absence of Christian upbringing, or absence of Christianity now, just shows that you don't understand what cultural Christianity is. It is the culture that you have marinated in all your life, if you grew up in the US. The same way you've marinated in racism, classism, sexism, right on down the line (and generally they are all one thing). All of that affects you, and the only way to fix it is to acknowledge it and work on it.

This isn't a "hot take". It's just a fucking fact.

I'm posting at 10:30pm US Pacific time on a Sunday night, and fucking nobody is going to see this. Or reblog it. But I feel better having said it.

[vineee2000]

first layer: regular sexism

second layer: radfem 'the penis is a violent body part' politics

third layer: ubiquitous low level differentiation of oneself from 'cis straight men' by basically everyone who isn't one, implied to mean a certain level of kindness/understanding/nonviolence that amab straight guys do not possess

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One of the issues with any form of Republic is how you balance between "a majority wants X so we're getting X" and "51% of the country voted for the Greens over the Blues, so we're getting 100% Blue Policy"

What you'd want, abstractly, is some way of taking everyone's preferences and doing tradeoffs and balancing out desires to get a fair spread. Theoretically you'd want a 30/60/10 Greens/Blues/Yellows split to have 30% Green stuff 60% Blue stuff 10% Yellow stuff. It's cleaner, it's nicer, it means there's more satisfaction because presumably even if you're yellow you got your top 10% of stuff

The first issue is that policy is cleanly divided like that; what is the fair balance between "Free Healthcare" and "Death Penalty" and "Lower Corporate Taxes", if there are three major issues between the various groups? The advantage of the majority rules is that you don't have to play those games, you just count what everyone wants and anyone in the minority was simply outvoted.

The second issue is that sometimes it doesn't matter what some people want because what that group wants is just awful: I am, for instance, against the death penalty and even that's the top desire for the Greens in our earlier metaphor, I sort of think it's awful enough that they should Just Not Get It. You can reconstruct this is 'well it seems like you care more about No Death Penalty than Free Healthcare, put that down as a explicit desire and we can negotiate from there' but that a) reduces to the first problem above and b) incentivizes taking as many positions the other sides don't want to waste political capital.

The third issue is that basically every system is based on the old idea of having a Local Representative from Your Town representing Local Interests. Which is still important, but it clashes with the desire to have opinions on National Issues. Even proportional representation only slightly solves this, because ultimately what you want is something that properly adds up the preferences of everyone in the country and outputs policy

[vineee2000]

a good thought experiment is to consider what it means to be culturally atheist, like assuming that humans are lifeforms like any other (and related by descent to all the others) and that there is no afterlife ("your energy goes out into the universe! energy is neither created nor destroyed!") and that all religions are valid pathways to spiritual insight, etc. etc.