oh my god i try and try to get into new tv shows but nothing calms my nerves like 90s star trek. new shows are so exhausting in their continuity. like i can’t watch an episode of say umbrella academy and feel relaxed because you never get a sense of resolution within an episode. you get cliffhanger after cliffhanger. and i am actually enjoying that show. but i know i will never watch that it again when i’m done because watching it feels like running a marathon where it’s like i HAVE to keep going, just 30 more kilometers until i actually get to feel a little at peace about this world and these characters i’ve invested myself in. what i like about watching star trek is that i can tune in, watch a storyline unfold and resolve in 45 minutes, and still know that it’s not the end. the show trusts that i will tune in for more episodes, not because i need to see a cliffhanger resolved, but because i like the world it’s created and i want to spend time with it again. that’s what i want from serial storytelling, to give me a little excitement and a little peace every evening, not to have my eyes glued to the screen for hours on end because i can’t help wanting to know what happens next.
“Not like a dragon but like a princess who has dragon things like wings” so I drew her this, and then she and my other sister colored it in, and now she has this cool picture we made :)
one of my mutuals posts xfiles stuff every so often, generally tagged and captioned with the character names, and for some reason starting today my brain refused to read ‘scully and mulder’ correctly and persistently renders them as 'mully and sculder.’
who are those people. sculder sounds like a suspicious character.
Pretty much no impairment is as simple as abled people think it is.
People are taught to believe that disability is a simple “Can’t”. Can’t walk. Can’t talk. Can’t hear. Can’t see. An ability is just excised and no longer exists, if it ever did.
In reality, it’s rarely that simple.
It’s “I can sort of do x thing sometimes, but I get muscle spasms making it very dangerous or impossible to do it reliably or safely”. Or “I can do x thing but it causes me so much pain I will be unable to do anything else for hours or days after doing it”. Or “I can do x thing but I constantly injure myself doing it because of lack of muscle control”. Or “I can do x thing but so badly I functionally can’t do it two inches beyond my face, but now I have a mobile phone I can put up to my face so I can do it in certain very specific circumstances”.
None of these things mean someone isn’t disabled. And if you think it does, then it’s *your* ideas about disability that need to change.
The reason disabled people end up saying “can’t” when the reality is more complex is because people don’t trust our boundaries. They force us to injure ourselves instead of accommodating, or use energy that means we have none left to do *anything* else we need to do for the rest of the day. Or week. Or month.
Abled people need to start trusting disabled people, or you need to shut up, get out of any situation where you have power over us, and provide someone who will. Those are the only options.
The way we are expected to live in a performative hell of the making of more privileged people who then turn around and criticise us for not suffering in the precise way they have decided we should is genuinely nothing but ridiculous.
Modern Pride and Prejudice AU where Mrs. Bennet is obsessed with getting her daughters employed and all of the proposals are job offers.
Elizabeth turns Darcy down because he’s the last man in the world she could ever be prevailed upon to work for (if he’s such a jerk as a neighbour imagine what he’s like as a boss).
Then she visits Pemberley Head Office and everyone is talking about what a great boss Darcy is and how fantastic their benefits are and she’s like “…hm.”
Everyone in the family is relying on Jane because she’s got some easily marketable talent and Bingley was really enthusiastic about it and wanted to go into business with her but Darcy talked him out of it because he didn’t get the vibe that Jane was all that invested in the project (she was).
Mary is that kid who’s doing 5000 different clubs because it’ll look good on her college applications, but all of her personal essays sound like they were written by chatgpt (she would never use it, her writing is just that unimaginative).
Lydia and Kitty are teenage tiktok influencers and Elizabeth is begging her parents to assert some discipline because the girls are exposing themselves to an extremely wide audience and have absolutely no guidelines for safe and appropriate internet behavior, but Mrs. Bennet is just like “well at least SOMEONE in this family is successful” and Mr. Bennet is like “let them get it out of their system, no one will remember when they’re older”
Mr. Bennet runs a company but it’s been barely breaking even for years because he’s not really very good at investments or planning ahead and then in comes tech bro William Collins who won’t shut up about cryptocurrency at dinner and has a reference from Catherine De-frickin-Bourgh and the board is heavily hinting that they want to replace Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet is panicking
Jane is a whiz kid programmer. Elizabeth has a degree in the humanities and her mother thinks that was the biggest waste of money ever.
In general, I think it’s currently really important for progressive Christians to be very loud about being both progressive and deeply religious Christians, and for everyone else fighting for progressive values to be supportive of them doing just that. I know that’s like, idk, counter-intuitive or cringe or whatever, but seriously folks, the alternative is that progressive Christians have to be quiet about their faith to be accepted within broader secular and interfaith progressive advocacy, which means that the regressive asshole Christians (a) sound that much louder and (b) dominate the USian religious landscape all the more. That’s a problem, for all of us.
We need people pushing back within the faith as well as outside of it, because that destroys any edifice that this is about Christianity and religious freedom.
You can be a devout Christian and also:
Openly, proudly, and without being forced to remain celibate or otherwise limit your full expression of self, identify as LGBTQ+ or be a supportive ally.
Advocate for full reproductive autonomy and comprehensive sex education.
Love and support people of other religious groups, non-religious people and/or atheists, by choosing to believe that a truly loving God would not pursue anything less than universal salvation.
Stand against evangelism and proselytizing as they have thus far been interpreted and used, because there are ways to interpret the Great Commission that don’t promote colonialism and cultural genocide.
A steward of the earth, protecting God’s beautiful creation and lovingly tending to it as the unique and incredible gift that it is.
A believer in science, rationalism, and human progress as part of God’s divine plan for humanity.
A believer in history and someone who understands that the Bible can be both divinely given and open to interpretation (no really)(if you’re confused, please talk to a knowledgeable traditional Jew)
An ally to Jews, who stands against supercessionism and antisemitism in the church.
And in before regressive Christians come shouting at me that (1) what do I know, I’m a Jew and (2) no lol you can’t because of ___ reason:
My source is that I’ve personally met and talked to Christians of great faith and integrity - people who embody the closest forms of kindness I’ve seen to what Jesus himself advocated - who are each of these things.
It is 100% possible; you just choose to believe otherwise.
At this point I think it’s time to start preaching and claiming the moral high ground here.
Right-wing evangelical Christians want you to think that they’re the moral ones, when they EXPLICITLY defy the word of God. They routinely:
Evade taxes intended to help the poor
Oppress the foreigner
Hoard wealth
Hate their fellow in their hearts
Destroy God’s creation that they were entrusted to steward, intentionally and recklessly as well as carelessly
Cast the first stone
Preach idolatry through the prosperity gospel and the American cult of nationalism
Sacrifice their children to Molech through encouraging a culture of gun violence
Commit true sexual abominations, such as rape and pedophilia, and/or cover these things up or engage in apologetics
Encourage actual child and spousal abuse while calling it “traditional family values”
Oppress and demean women, when their main guy uplifted and valued women outside of marginal roles
Smugly quote scripture to satisfy their bigotries and to benefit themselves without caring about the true message
Fail to acknowledge God as the True Judge by substituting their prejudices for God’s love and mercy
…….and plenty more. These are not just a few bad actors; this lifestyle is ENCOURAGED by this irresponsible and immoral cult. They are leading people astray into a life of sin and a culture of callous cruelty.
Is this the Christianity you want the world to know you by?
15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
“He has to fund the Justice League. They often have a space program.”
“But couldn’t he do more good if he just invested-”
“The Earth is routinely invaded by aliens, gods, and the forces of an extraterrestrial god of tyranny.”
He has, like, three charitable organizations he funds, named after his father, his mother, and Alfred.
Between both Bruce and Batman’s contributions, Gotham should be a better city than it is, and the only reason it isn’t is DC Editorial Mandate that basically says Gotham has to get worse and worse and worse or there’s no Batman stories they can tell (and, obviously, they have no other characters besides Batman).
There’s a reason Batman thinks the city is literally cursed.
I want to see Bruce Wayne go off
“Oh, oh, just charity my way out of dealing with the Penguin, a living, breathing 19th century Marxist’s cartoon of the bourgeoisie? Just fund anti-Clayface measures? Crack down on corporations who put out shapeshifting cosmetics? What socio-economic pressures turn botonists into actual fucking dryads?! What inspires anti-animal terrorism? THAT’S NOT EVEN A REAL KIND OF ECO-FASCISM!”
For the record, Gotham is canonically curse, because it sits on some sort of evil swamp. I think.
There are like, half a dozen curses. The Lazarus Pits are leaching into the water, Slaughter Swamp is an unconnected body of water a few miles outside of the city that also ressurects people (see Solomon Grundy), the Bat-demon Barbatos and his followers (the Court of Owls) have been fucking up the city psychically and financially, the malevolent influence of the warlock Doctor Gotham’s tomb in the center of the city, the madness hypersigil of Amadeus Arkham (in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth), there were several outposts of subterraneans and aliens beneath the city during the Silver Age, constant chemical warfare that makes it the equivalent of a WWI trench managed by MK-ULTRA, it’s in New Jersey, and I think God just hates it
tired: Batman could do more good by running charities than by fighting criminals
wired: Batman could save literally every other city on the planet simultaneously with the amount of effort and resources he’s pumped into Gotham, which is a lost cause, but this is his city damnit.
Inspired: Batman’s diligence is containing the menace that is Gotham’s madness from escaping too far from city limits.
For all his billions, for all his activity, for all his efforts, Gotham is a bonfire fed by the madness of mortal people, cultivated by dark powers and just existing there makes living souls like kindling for it. And left to its own devices,it’d become a breeding ground for supernatural unrest that no mere social service system or social awareness of activist campaign, no government program, no actions of a singular vigilante, could ever hope to undo.
Batman is single handedly if need be but fortunately not alone so often, holding back the noxious psychic influences of warp and wyrd entities and what they do to the very environment and landscape through the power of sheer, unbridled humanity.
Ascended: Gotham is containing Batman, because the forces of evil, consciously or not, have figured out that if let loose, this motherfucker and his sprawling adoptive family would’ve solved every crime in the world ever, so they throw literally everything they have at his home town in hopes that he stays there.
Because they were foolish and let Alan Scott escape. They aren’t making that mistake again.
What if Gotham is the pump?
Like. What if, because Gotham is such a shitshow, anyone looking to improve their lives has their eye on being able to move out of Gotham, so whenever Bruce Wayne’s charitable endeavors come somebody’s way, they take it, pack their bags, and move the fuck away, and take that money with them.
Meanwhile there’s an ongoing influx of people to Gotham primarily because they’re flat broke and real estate in Gotham is dirt fucking cheap because it’s a shitshow, and there’s always places hiring because 1) they’ve got Bruce Wayne money to try to make a difference, 2) there’s no shortage of places that need to be fixed up a little, and 3) villains are always in the market for new henchpeople.
So you’re a broke millennial from any other town in the country, and you have student loans, a job that hasn’t kept up with inflation, and your landlord has raised the rent three times this year so far and it’s eating up two-thirds of your paycheck. You look for housing on the internet and discover that one-third of your paycheck will get you the mortgage for an actual house in Gotham, a house you own and will never have to deal with your scummy rentjacking landlord again. And Wayne Industries is hiring, and so are sixteen different disaster remediation places, and six staffing services with a sort of weird vibe to them but they offer benefits, since when do temp agencies do benefits, and sure the crime rate is high but the rest of the world’s heading in that direction anyway, especially if you’re homeless, which you’re gonna be in like four months if that jackass your landlord raises the rent one more time, so get in losers, we’re going to Gotham!
And you settle into your bigger-than-expected apartment and get a job that brings you a comfortable paycheck and you learn to live with the terrorist attacks and the explosions and the gunfire and the neighbors and the drunken billionaire swimming in the restaurant fountain, and you pay off your student loans, buy a car, suffer a few months’ unemployment when your boss goes to jail for trying to assassinate the mayor and then your partner loses their job for a few months when the office gets smothered in a jungle’s worth of climbing plants and you develop hospital bills when you both get caught in a hallucinogenic terror gas eruption at the mall, but hey, you’d be homeless by now in any other city, so you live with it.
And then it’s a few years later and you’re wanting to start a family, but the neighbor three doors down owns pet hyenas and the park was firebombed last week and someone froze all the water pipes and you crashed your car into one of the impromptu ice sculptures and you’d really like your kids to grow up in a normal city where they don’t have to receive advice like “don’t talk to strange plants.”
So you visit one of the social work offices and get yourself a bit of assistance, save up your money, sell your house for the price of a down payment to the sort of incoming fool you were six years ago, and use your polished resume to get yourself a job someplace that doesn’t have What To Do If Clown Attack on their safety training syllabus.
You came, you left, and Gotham remains. A shithole.
This is a really well thought out way in what keeps Gotham moving. Sure there’s the people that have been there they’re whole lives, families that go back generations, but these are reasons people move in. The kind of people that want out. And maybe are desperate enough to take that Job hunching.
It’s also weird to see my pithy response circle around over 20 times and end up back on my dash…
When the glimmering hope continues against the tide of the hopeless.
When the glimmering
hope continues against the
tide of the hopeless.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
my other thought that I’m posting now so I don’t lose it before tomorrow is that Shawn needs Lassy in his life because he needs an outlet for all his Being Annoying on Purpose energy and Lassy has great reactions to that but … still likes Shawn (whatever other front he puts up)
truly the fraternal dynamic is incredible
YEAH
And on the flipside Lassie needs Shawn in his life because, like… Lassie needs to be liked and wanted and part of a community, to a degree he hasn’t even registered himself, and even when Shawn mostly likes annoying him that still means Shawn is enjoying his company and actively seeking him out, you know??
Most people look at Lassie like “oh geez, it’s that guy” and Shawn bounds up like “:D HI!! It’s my Favorite Person To Annoy! Hey, hey, lemme drag you into more of my stupid nonsense :) Oh, this is YOUR case? All the more reason for me to get in the middle of it :D Haha your reactions are HILARIOUS”
Okay, I know people as a general rule tend to not care about invertebrates as much as cute, fuzzy mammals, but this is a must-read if you care about animal welfare. The short version is that horseshoe crab blood has been used for decades in medicine as a way to test whether something is truly sterile; the blood clots in the presence of bacteria. Since then millions of horseshoe crabs have been captured and drained of blood, even though a synthetic alternative was developed a few years ago.
They go through a pretty brutal experience in the process. They’re caught by fishermen who often throw them by their tails into a pile in the open air, and they’re then trucked to a bleeding facility where they’re strapped down and their blood is removed with needles jabbed directly into their hearts. Over half their blood may be taken, after which they’re supposed to be returned to the ocean. However, it’s likely many of them never make it back, instead turned into fish bait and sold by the same fishermen who caught them in the first place.
Apart from the fact that this is a horrific thing to put any animal through, the attrition due to fatalities has put a serious dent in horseshoe crab numbers. This is compounded by massive habitat loss, pollution, and the capture of horseshoe crabs as food, particularly as the females of one species are considered a delicacy. And other animals that rely on horseshoe crabs are suffering, too. The American rufa subspecies of the red knot, a medium-sized shorebird, is critically endangered as the horseshoe crab eggs it must have in order to successfully complete migration have become increasingly scarce, and it is likely the bird will become extinct if trends continue.
While there are guidelines for medical horseshoe crab harvest, they’re considered optional. The few laws that exist are poorly enforced. Short of a complete ban on horseshoe crab blood in favor of the synthetic alternative, these animals are in very real danger of going extinct after a history spanning over 400 million years on this planet.
Thankfully, this article is not the first to bring forth the issues surrounding horseshoe crab harvest. Here are a few resources for further information and action (US based, though horseshoe crabs are threatened throughout their entire range):
Okay, so I know the reason the physics in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have so many weird exceptions and edge cases is because the games’ designers are concerned foremost with puzzle-crafting, and only secondarily with producing a coherent world model, and nearly every bit of weirdness can be explained by the fact that some puzzle mechanic required the games’ physics to work that way. There’s simply no deeper unifying logic to be found, and trying to find it is a good way to give yourself a headache.
One of those pieces of weirdness lies in the relative weights of various objects, particularly in relation to Link, the player character. Some objects are incongruously heavy or light for their size because the puzzles in which they appear require them to be, and Link himself is weirdly lightweight, presumably because that was the easiest way to cause him to experience the exaggerated knockback that many puzzles require without making the forces involved ridiculously strong.
Most objects and characters which recur among the two games are at least consistent in this respect. However, it has been empirically determined that in Breath of the Wild, Link weighs the same as 8.5 apples, whereas in Tears of the Kingdom he weighs the same as 10 apples, and now I can’t stop myself from wondering what fucking puzzle mechanic required Link to be exactly 1.5 apples heavier.
There are basically two things I want out of fiction: I want characters who have high emotional awareness and the vocabulary to clearly articulate their needs and perspectives, and I want those needs and perspectives to be the most unhinged thing you’ve ever fucking heard.
Like, there’s so much received wisdom about character writing these days that boils down to “everybody should fundamentally want the exact same things and all interpersonal conflict should arise from miscommunication” – sometimes to the extent of framing an injunction against ever writing characters with good communication skills – and, like, it’s fine if that’s what turns your crank, but I get enough of that in real life. When I read a story I want to read about genuine freaks crashing into each other.
Intermittent fanfic writer & dabbler in language and translation. I ramble about life, sci-fi & fantasy, comics, anime & manga, art, writing, and other assorted interests.
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