WHAT IS GOING ON

In space no one can hear you genocide.

137 Hours on Stellaris

(via qualitysteamreviews)

When you laugh at a dumb meme and someone who’s not an internet person asks whats so funny, but it’s like a tier 3 meme and you’ve gotta explain about seven years of internet for them to understand the nuances

fanart for foreigner by cj cherryh

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

INTRODUCING: THE PRISONER’S TROLLEY PROBLEMMA

A trolley full of your loved ones is heading down the tracks and will hit another loved one. If you redirect it, it will hit three strangers, but all of your loved ones will be fine. However, there is another person on the other side of the tracks facing the same problem. If you both choose to redirect the trolleys, they will crash in the middle, killing almost everyone. 

The least amount of people will die if you do nothing and allow a loved one to die, the best-case scenario for you will occur if you pull your lever and the other person does not pull theirs, and the worst-case scenario will occur if you both pull your levers.

What do you do???

“Appeasing them would only make it worse.” I crush the blessing doll. Its stitched smile bloats up. “It has only ever made things worse. My mother and grandmother have been appeasing my father and grandfather for a lifetime. They haven’t changed one bit. You cannot appease someone into loving or respecting you.”

Iron Widow (Iron Widow #1) by Xiran Jay Zhao

Pronation and form changes by Anatomy Next

The wildest thing about the reactions on that dinosaur post is that I never said it's wrong to point out inaccuracies, but made fun of people who point them out in an overtly rude way. Are these particular dinonerds taking offense to that because they feel that rudeness is justified, or something? It's important to them to be mean about it? Or did they just imagine I said "never educate people" because their defensiveness is that hair-trigger? I didn't have a negative view of them before at all. It was supposed to be more of a friendly ribbing of a post. Now in only hours I've come to feel that the internet dinosaur community may have some uhhhhhhhhhhhh mighty peculiar characters to say the least

I mean what is this. WHAT is this. Who is out here insinuating that inaccurate movie dinosaurs are a slippery slope to an ecological apocalypse. Good lord, calm the heckarooni down, that is not remotely how anything works, society's collective understanding of the environment is indeed dismal but I'd actually bet good money that it is not significantly impacted by the number of people who have an obsolete mental image of a Spinosaurus, and frankly I don't care for the implication that "lack of education" or "scientific ignorance" is what's destroying our world rather than, you know, the corporate greed of people who absolutely do know better. This kind of outlook is more or less blaming the poorer, lower class majority for issues they have no power over at all. "The Properly Educated are the heroes who hold back the teeming throngs of mindless zombie idiots from annihilating society" is to put it gently not a terribly realistic or fair perspective. It's really in fact more of an anime villain monologue.

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

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A year has passed 💔

Are you saying that a year has passed and only that? It was a year of bitter loss and suffering. It was a year of suffering, displacement, homelessness, and loss of home, house, and work 😭💔

It was a year full of tears, despair, oppression, and disappointment 💔😭

Please don't be like them. Don't let me down too. I am here calling for your help to save what is left of my family 💔😭

Death is approaching us at every moment. Don't be a helping hand to them and let us down. You can help me save what is left of my family 💔😭

Any simple donation contributes to you saving a family from the danger of death 💔😭

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