Oh Hey I Saw You On Reddit Lol

i loooove being a hater but please. don't tag your hate (EVERYONE following #fencing had to see that)

as well they should. epee wielders are scum. maybe I’ll respect them if they ever pick up a real sword.

The current geopolitical rivals of America are Russia and Red China. If America falls, one of them will take its place as global hegemon. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have a liberal-progressive republic as the world leader than a fascist dictatorship.

America is not perfect. No state currently in existence is (except Canada 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦 ofc) . But American hegemony is a damn sight better than hegemony of any of its rivals.

as trans activists we have GOT to get more comfortable with embracing the idea that we are a threat to the usamerican status quo. no more of this "we're the real america lovers, we make america great" shit. usamerica isn't and should not be made great, because it is a racist imperialist patriarchal state that has caused huge amounts of death and devastation worldwide. all our struggles are interconnected.

we should not be licking the ideological boots of a political system that gives zero shits about any of us, we should be dismantling it and replacing it with something that does. if trans existence is a threat to this country, then GOOD. I'm fucking proud of that. and you should be too.

you know that farmed fish are like… not from the ocean, right? this is like saying that the billions of chickens we’ve got are a part of the environment.

you can’t have it both ways. either the problem is overfishing or the problem is industrial farming. not both.

Silicon Valley's Fish Killing Machine

There's a tech company called "Shinkei Systems" that created an "AI powered fish killing machine" (they're using an automated machine to do ike jime, a traditional Japanese slaughter technique where a fish is killed instantly via a knife to the brain). Here's a picture of their machine:

Isn't that metal box such a great way for a living creature to die? Shinkei systems claims this automated death machine is "more humane" than error prone humans, who of course, sometimes miss the mark when severing a fish's brain from its spinal cord.

If the idea of automated animal slaughter doesn't freak you out enough, take a look at their promotional material where they promise to "eliminate 85% of the workforce" wherever their machine is used.

And just to wrap this story up in a bow, the founder is a guy named Saif Khawaja who retweets a lot about "DNA based IQ testing" and other race-science nonsense:

So yeah....a tech company run by a race obsessed skull-measurer decided the most pressing issue facing the world was not enough cheap sushi-grade salmon. The solution, of course, isn't to allow the ocean's depleted fisheries to regain their natural levels by reducing commercial fishing, it's to make a robot that can kill fish in a fancy Japanese way so people who eat industrialy farmed animals can feel less bad about it. And why not put a bunch of fishermen out of work while you're at it? The solution to our ever alienated world is clearly removing any human contact in the food supply and ceding that role to a machine. Clearly, the faster we can kill animals the better; perhaps we can kill them quickly before any concerns about the rapid destruction of the earth's aquatic ecosystems arise out of our collective haunted consciousness.

more like mommy Morrowind

mother morrowind

Yeah so some of these couples are jokes and only "ships" in the fandom way. But you're wrong if you believe there wasn't any kind of special relationship between Robespierre and Saint-Just, Carnot and Prieur, Barère and... a lot of men. Yes, Carnot and Barère were married. Carnot loved his wife. Barère had several female lovers. Prieur had a long-term relationship with an older woman (who was married to someone else). But um... Did you forget bisexuality exists? Or homoromanticism? Or are you just de facto implying those aren't "real"? Have you internalized that they aren't real maybe? Because trust me some men love other men as much as women, as much as their wife, maybe more than their wife. David loved Drouais more than his wife - and no it wasn't "fatherly love". It was a teacher's/mentor's love with all of the ambiguity this involves when you remember they were artists and what the subjects they preferred to paint were. This culture offered a convenient pretext where you could blur the lines. And no, you'll likely never know the truth. You'll never know if they fucked other men, or how, or what positions they preferred, or if David actually fathered his own children. And honestly it's kinda creepy to take it beyond mere speculation and actually really want to know that far as if it was a fact you were owed to? You don't need to know those details. You can just know when there's obviously a loving relationship going on. That's just as true for living breathing beings you know btw. You'll never really know what kind of loving relationship they have unless they choose to tell you... or someone forcibly outs them, which is gross.

Maybe we should be happy they had the chance to live in a brief period where all loving relationships between men weren't automatically seen as "scandalous" and "depraved", that men were allowed to love each other without it being always perceived as "suspicious" and "illicit".

Barère's thoughts about Saint-Just aren't creepy because they're about another man - they're creepy because he clearly sounds jealous of Robespierre and, you know, the whole Thermidor thing and all the nasty things he said about both. But it's actually quite special that we get to read his obviously non-straight non-normative thoughts so openly. It's not "subtext" or our "fevered deranged imagination". It's just there. Your denial isn't my problem to deal with.

this is adorable I love her :)

When I was 3 years old I went to a preschool that had this little green crocheted crocodile finger puppet that was my absolute favorite toy to play with of all time. I named her Chelsea, because Chelsea starts with C and crocodile starts with C and more often than not wild animals in fiction aimed at kids have names that start with the same first letter as their species. I played with Chelsea every day, because she was my favorite toy, and because the other kids weren't really interested in her, and also because I eventually started to hide her in a special secret spot in the room so no one else would find her before I did. She was so beloved by me that when I graduated from preschool, my teachers gave Chelsea to me permanently, because it was clear no one else would ever love that little crochet crocodile as much as me anyway (in part because I hid her). They waited a few weeks after I graduated before doing it, too, and sent Chelsea with some post cards as if the crocodile had been on a whirlwind "travel the world" vacation before deciding to come live with me.

And Chelsea remained my favorite toy all through my childhood. There were others I loved nearly as much, like my Imperial Godzilla and the big red T.rex from the first Jurassic Park toy line and my tiny knockoff plush Charmander, but Chelsea always held the place of honor in my heart. She was my absolute favorite toy.

I kept a lot of my favorite toys through adolescence, even if social pressure eventually got me to give away a lot of them (and some, y'know, broke). That's obviously not surprising to you if you've followed my blog, since I still collect toys into my adulthood. But it's important to note because while I know I made a conscious effort to never throw out Chelsea every time I pared down my collection... at some point, she went missing.

I became aware of it when I graduated from high school. I was feeling really emotional about leaving that stage of my life and, y'know, becoming an adult and shit, and in that state I decided to find Chelsea to reassure myself that I hadn't entirely left childhood behind. But Chelsea wasn't there. No matter how hard I looked, I could not find Chelsea anyway.

And that was, like, devastating, because the only explanation was that somehow, at some point, I had accidentally tossed her out with some other "childhood junk" while trying to grow up and be responsible in my teen years. I had literally thrown away my childhood in a careless attempt to be more grown up.

Of course I knew she was just a toy - nothing more than some yarn twisted together in the loose shape of a crocodile, lifeless and soul-less and more or less worthless in the objective light of day. But she was also Chelsea, my best friend since i was three, my stalwart little pal, a source of comfort for most of my life at that point, and I had just... tossed her out! Like garbage! What kind of person was I becoming if I could do that to my best friend?

I was very visibly distraught, and my mom noticed. Being very crafty, she tried to find the pattern for Chelsea so she could crochet me a new one. The problem is, she had no idea where to find said pattern. She checked all her books of crochet patterns, and when that failed she tried the internet, but no matter how hard she looked, she found nothing.

So my mom found the next best thing.

The original Chelsea was a tiny finger puppet, and I had "met" her when I was three. Well, I was eighteen now - shouldn't Chelsea have grown too? And as has been established, this crocodile was fond of whirlwind vacations. My mom found a pattern that looked as much like Chelsea as possible while also being a much bigger crocodile, and gifted her to me before I left for college - to show that while we can't stop the flow of time or how it changes us, that doesn't mean we have to leave it behind.

And yeah, I decided to believe it. That's Chelsea now. Yeah, I know that in reality it's a completely different set of yarn made by my mom rather than... whoever it was that crocheted the original Chelsea, but then, Chelsea was never really the yarn. She was the feelings I put into the yarn, you know? So that's Chelsea, all grown up, and still my most prized toy.

...

Flash forward... Jesus, eighteen years, holy shit. A few weeks ago I saw a post trying to identify a different crochet crocodile pattern, and thinking it was cute, I decided to try and look for it on ebay and etsy, just to see if maybe I could find it. I didn't, but do you know what I found instead?

A very familiar crochet crocodile finger puppet. An intensely familiar one, you might say. Of course I bought it. And of course I asked the seller if, perhaps, they might have the pattern for it or know where it came from (they did not, alas). And after a few days, she showed up at my house.

She's not Chelsea, obviously. For one thing, she's far too clean and fresh looking - Chelsea was very well loved, and looked the part, while this crocodile finger puppet has definitely not endured years upon years of a child's affection. And, more importantly, she's not Chelsea because we've already established that Chelsea grew up into a bigger crochet crocodile. This has to be Chelsea's younger sister, Cici.

And if I could find another of Chelsea's kind after all these years, then maybe, with a bit of luck, I might find the pattern for her, and be able to make more of them. Fill the world with Chelseas.

did I prove OP’s point? I don’t think so

I offered that anecdote to draw a parallel between two people who I thought were similar.

Horner disliked tyrannosaurs because he preferred hadrosaurs, and thus tried to prove that tyrannosaurs were Objectively Bad.

Op dislikes lottienat because they prefer mistynat, and thus in this post attempted to prove that lottienat is Objectively Bad. *Are you picking up what I’m putting down?*

My point was that it’s fine to dislike something but going this far is just… kind of pointless. Let people enjoy things. I don’t go around posting about how mistynat is evil and bad and no one should ship it ever, even though I prefer lottienat.

can we talk about how lottienats disregard travnat/ mistynat/travis/misty as characters for their ship? they're insanely important to nat. and disregarding them means disregarding nat's development, drives, and ideals. they literally changed nat's perspective and character. like do you even care about lottienat as characters? and the whole 'i hate men so i'll ignore him and misty's a freak so i'll ignore her' like way to strip natalie of possibly the narratively two most important people to her

and i fear lottienats have a super surface level understanding be another thing is like. whether you like travnat/travis or not he's important for her characters development and drive for her entire life. there's a reason why travis haunts her story, whether you like him or not you gotta understand why he's fundamental for her character

modern artists are really out here going “what if I made something that was boring and pointless?”

Plastic Chair in Wood by Maarten Baas (2008)

i was watching the yes minster episode “The Skeleton in the Closet” today and had a random thought.

at about 10 minutes in, Sir Humphrey and Jim are walking through, like, a foyer? there’s big double doors behind them. and as they walk past, a woman comes through the doors and walks offstage the way they entered. they don’t interact with or even acknowledge her, and almost no viewer will even notice her presence. believe me when I say that her presence adds NOTHING to the episode.

but for some reason I started fixating on her (probably because she was kind of pretty and I’m very gay). who was she? why was she there? how did she get on the show? her cameo was so inconsequential that I can’t imagine she even got paid. did she just happen to walk through the shot and they left it in? or was she actually hired to be on screen for four seconds?

this post isn’t leading to any spectacular conclusion, it’s just a random thought. maybe I’ll write a fic about her character.

The difference is that, yknow, the bbc isn’t funded by an autocratic fascist government. England is not a police state with a vested interest in keeping its citizens misinformed. Russia… is.

rt is propaganda because it funded by russian government but bbc, australian broadcasting corporation, npr, korean broadcasting system, svt, television new zealand, radio canada, npo and france 24 totally objective source of informative news despite also being state funded. great work today everyone hit the showers