romance-of-three-memes

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you will live to witness manmade horrors that are completely within your comprehension if you've paid any attention to a single piece of human history but are nevertheless still huge bummers

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good morning age of sail tumblr and happy

APRIL 1805

NAPOLEON IS MASTER OF EUROPE

ONLY THE BRITISH FLEET STANDS BEFORE HIM

OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS

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Man I wish I could find that graph that compares the top military spenders in the world that tries desperately to make the USA's spending look less utterly insane, it's the worst designed graph I've ever seen. Hilariously terrible, the mental gymnastics required for it sure must've been something.

Fascinating how the reputation of the French military has morphed over the centuries. For a long time they easily had one of the most successful militaries in Europe, between that and French being considered a prestige language among European nobility, tons of military terms in a lot of European languages (including English) are either lifted straight from French or are direct translations from French. They had a huge empire which they often used military force to expand and maintain. A lot of people erroneously narrow it down to Napoleon for like 20 years in the 19th century, but he got there partially because France already had the infrastructure for him to take advantage of and kick into overdrive (fun fact, he was from Corsica, which had become a French territory just before he was born, during his youth he straight up hated France and wanted Corsica to be independent).

Honestly it was the 20th century when things really started going to shit for them, there were those two funny little world wars that gutted and quite frankly embarrassed them, they lost a ton of their empire either through further conflict or because they just gave it up at least in an official capacity (I say 'official' because of things like the fact that 14 African countries who were French colonies have to keep 50% of their financial assets in the French treasury so France will act as their guarantor and print their currency), so ultimately they went 'ughhh FINE if everyone isn't going to know us for being a military power then I GUESS we'll start talking up our culture even more, and especially target America and Japan since they're clearly on the upshoot' and it worked pretty damn well all things considered, since everything from French cuisine to art is lauded as fancy and high-class. At least here in America there's basically a French tax that lets people get away with selling French things for more money because oooooh it's French so that must mean it's fancy and high quality, and it's most often applied to those little pastries I like so much and had to shell out quite a bit for even before inflation became a near constant occurrence.

... But nowadays France also has a very well stocked military, and quite a few nuclear warheads, about 300 at least before Russia launched its full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In terms of military spending they're dwarfed by the US, China, and Russia, but that's really not saying a lot since absolutely everyone is dwarfed by the US, including its runners-up China and Russia, and those two dwarf everyone else. But after you take the fact that those three are the Military Georgs of the world (especially the US, and yet we still don't have universal healthcare, utterly fascinating isn't it) France consistently ranks among the biggest spenders after them. I guess what I'm saying is France has a weird relationship with how it projects itself to the rest of the world nowadays and how it feels like it still wishes it was one of the top military powers of the world.

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Fascinating how the reputation of the French military has morphed over the centuries. For a long time they easily had one of the most successful militaries in Europe, between that and French being considered a prestige language among European nobility, tons of military terms in a lot of European languages (including English) are either lifted straight from French or are direct translations from French. They had a huge empire which they often used military force to expand and maintain. A lot of people erroneously narrow it down to Napoleon for like 20 years in the 19th century, but he got there partially because France already had the infrastructure for him to take advantage of and kick into overdrive (fun fact, he was from Corsica, which had become a French territory just before he was born, during his youth he straight up hated France and wanted Corsica to be independent).

Honestly it was the 20th century when things really started going to shit for them, there were those two funny little world wars that gutted and quite frankly embarrassed them, they lost a ton of their empire either through further conflict or because they just gave it up at least in an official capacity (I say 'official' because of things like the fact that 14 African countries who were French colonies have to keep 50% of their financial assets in the French treasury so France will act as their guarantor and print their currency), so ultimately they went 'ughhh FINE if everyone isn't going to know us for being a military power then I GUESS we'll start talking up our culture even more, and especially target America and Japan since they're clearly on the upshoot' and it worked pretty damn well all things considered, since everything from French cuisine to art is lauded as fancy and high-class. At least here in America there's basically a French tax that lets people get away with selling French things for more money because oooooh it's French so that must mean it's fancy and high quality, and it's most often applied to those little pastries I like so much and had to shell out quite a bit for even before inflation became a near constant occurrence.

... But nowadays France also has a very well stocked military, and quite a few nuclear warheads, about 300 at least before Russia launched its full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In terms of military spending they're dwarfed by the US, China, and Russia, but that's really not saying a lot since absolutely everyone is dwarfed by the US, including its runners-up China and Russia, and those two dwarf everyone else. But after you take the fact that those three are the Military Georgs of the world (especially the US, and yet we still don't have universal healthcare, utterly fascinating isn't it) France consistently ranks among the biggest spenders after them. I guess what I'm saying is France has a weird relationship with how it projects itself to the rest of the world nowadays and how it feels like it still wishes it was one of the top military powers of the world.

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okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

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godddd im back on my bullshit thinking about whalefalls again

specifically the whole speciation/evolutionary stepping stone thing where they allow certain species to move, adapt, and disperse in new environments through the resources that they create simply by dying. Literally hundreds of species take advantage of one when it happens. So many species are fundamentally altered by a resource oasis hundreds of times more effective than marine snow.

fuckkk all im thinking about is shit like. one body. one death. yet a body that, depending on certain conditions, could take up to a CENTURY to be fully returned to the entropy it came from.

That shit can be considered an actual fuckin. Biome. a whole biome in a single creature.

Imagine you, a single cell or near single cell microorganism being the latest in a generational line that spans back so far that your line has evolved and speciated from its origin point before the whale fell.

Imagine you, with a lifespan of days or weeks living in rotting flesh that will presumably take up to a full century to fully consume

Imagine you, your entire bloodline, your whole world living off one body. Alive off of corpse-fat and marrow, consuming your god as it transforms you into something unrecognizable

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Your Mission: Play video games made by strange transsexuals.

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I SHOULD be getting ready for work soon but here, have this instead because I've been in a shitty low-effort edits mood again.

I could also have made this about how the game tries to twist your arm into making your character a typical neutral-good hero archetype, which would be fine if I could choose that myself (ngl I think it's really weird how some people insist that type of character is inherently boring), but gets tiresome when it's forced on me in a game that's supposed to be about making your character whoever you want them to be.

People kept telling me how thoughtful and well written the dialogue regarding the player character in Dragon Age The Veilguard being trans is if you choose to make them so, and so I finally get to a part actually mentioning that some 25 hours into my second playthrough and my character is automatically shoehorned into talking about how he hated himself and was deeply unhappy beforehand and still hates ''''parts of himself''' (ah yes, absolutely astounding subtlety) instead of letting me have any input in what he says about that particular topic. Despite how having input in what your character says is supposed to be a big part of Dragon Age's mechanics. Veilguard has a bad habit of not letting you do that to the extent of the previous games, it often tries to twist your arm so that you can only cast your character into a certain mold.

I dunno I just don't like the assumption that everything is about pain and self-hatred, you know, it gets tiresome. It's extremely unhelpful at best. In this case I even think it's rather lazy to make it the only option since again, having diverse dialogue options is supposed to be one of the main draws of the series and a single dialogue tree with like three options that don't get further expanded on could've fixed this. Hell, just two probably could've worked if you really want to be Spartan about it.

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'...Nezha's Wikipedia page is at it again, huh? (Still waiting for the day when they stop saying the "Ao Guang asking for human sacrifice" thing is from FSYY)'

I'm curious, can you elaborate on this human sacrifice part? Also if it's incorrect why not change it? The Wikipedia editors won't magically know it's wrong (Though I get that it's not yours or anyone's responsibility, and wiki editing can be a hassle, but they *are* a community effort and if it's bothered you for such a long time wouldn't it be better to just... fix it?)

Welp, good news: I've already gone and changed the page after making that reblog.

In the edited Wikipedia page, I've also made a brief explanation about where the "Ao Guang asks for human sacrifice" thing comes from.

In short, it's mostly popularized by the 1979 Nezha Conquers the Dragon King movie, where Ao Guang demands young girls and boys as food in exchange for answering the people's prayers for rain.

I have no problem if the original page says it's from the movie, but it, well, doesn't. Prior to my edit, it attributes the human sacrifice story to FSYY novel, as seen in this screenshot:

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People kept telling me how thoughtful and well written the dialogue regarding the player character in Dragon Age The Veilguard being trans is if you choose to make them so, and so I finally get to a part actually mentioning that some 25 hours into my second playthrough and my character is automatically shoehorned into talking about how he hated himself and was deeply unhappy beforehand and still hates ''''parts of himself''' (ah yes, absolutely astounding subtlety) instead of letting me have any input in what he says about that particular topic. Despite how having input in what your character says is supposed to be a big part of Dragon Age's mechanics. Veilguard has a bad habit of not letting you do that to the extent of the previous games, it often tries to twist your arm so that you can only cast your character into a certain mold.

I dunno I just don't like the assumption that everything is about pain and self-hatred, you know, it gets tiresome. It's extremely unhelpful at best. In this case I even think it's rather lazy to make it the only option since again, having diverse dialogue options is supposed to be one of the main draws of the series and a single dialogue tree with like three options that don't get further expanded on could've fixed this. Hell, just two probably could've worked if you really want to be Spartan about it.

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Ohhhh, parasites... I dunno, I thought you meant they had some particularly crunchy structure inside their bodies. Not an endoskeleton but... Something??? I didn't make the connection that it was an actual crab or some individual organism inside the mussel.

Favourite part of eating mussels is the tiny crunchy bonus crab.

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apparently there's been another 'this site is gonna die' scare so here's a reminder that when this site dies you can find me in an alley in a trench coat peddling shitposts

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Exactly, I really do just want some variety... Variety is the spice of life and sexiness is highly contextual.

So you know those really skimpy costumes for animated female characters that were clearly designed to just show a lot of skin without really putting any effort into making it interesting and were very clearly designed by cishet men, and people criticize them for being sexist? Yeah that's a given, obviously, but let's set that aside for a minute and criticize something else.

They're boring and unsexy partially because they're so... Plain, I guess? Unimaginative? Like oh let's do the easiest most basic thing possible so everyone will know we want them to think this female character is sexy. I don't get when other lesbians say stuff like 'as a feminist I'm against this but as a lesbian I'm delighted' when they see a photo of a woman in a regular bikini taken in a context and at an angle clearly meant to appeal to the cishet male gaze.

Like speak for yourself pal, my taste is different. It's not that outfits that show a lot of skin can't be sexy, just... The way that they do it affects it a lot? This would be easier with visual examples but I have work soon and can't go hunting for them now.

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Ok sure I'll use Skullgirls as an example since I've been on a Skullgirls kick.

Anyway, in my opinion these are interesting sexy designs:

And this is not:

The first two have interesting outfits that I think are fitting for them, a good bit of thought clearly went into their designs. The third is just 'hey what if we had a sexy nurse, she doesn't wear pants or a skirt and her top is buttoned down to a degree that it's kind of amazing that her nipples don't spill out. Okay that's good let's call it a day.

So you know those really skimpy costumes for animated female characters that were clearly designed to just show a lot of skin without really putting any effort into making it interesting and were very clearly designed by cishet men, and people criticize them for being sexist? Yeah that's a given, obviously, but let's set that aside for a minute and criticize something else.

They're boring and unsexy partially because they're so... Plain, I guess? Unimaginative? Like oh let's do the easiest most basic thing possible so everyone will know we want them to think this female character is sexy. I don't get when other lesbians say stuff like 'as a feminist I'm against this but as a lesbian I'm delighted' when they see a photo of a woman in a regular bikini taken in a context and at an angle clearly meant to appeal to the cishet male gaze.

Like speak for yourself pal, my taste is different. It's not that outfits that show a lot of skin can't be sexy, just... The way that they do it affects it a lot? This would be easier with visual examples but I have work soon and can't go hunting for them now.

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So you know those really skimpy costumes for animated female characters that were clearly designed to just show a lot of skin without really putting any effort into making it interesting and were very clearly designed by cishet men, and people criticize them for being sexist? Yeah that's a given, obviously, but let's set that aside for a minute and criticize something else.

They're boring and unsexy partially because they're so... Plain, I guess? Unimaginative? Like oh let's do the easiest most basic thing possible so everyone will know we want them to think this female character is sexy. I don't get when other lesbians say stuff like 'as a feminist I'm against this but as a lesbian I'm delighted' when they see a photo of a woman in a regular bikini taken in a context and at an angle clearly meant to appeal to the cishet male gaze.

Like speak for yourself pal, my taste is different. It's not that outfits that show a lot of skin can't be sexy, just... The way that they do it affects it a lot? This would be easier with visual examples but I have work soon and can't go hunting for them now.

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