#[ there's a billion other examples but yeah ]

[spookymulti]

Listen, if Bowser isn't actually just a Cool Dad™ that likes hanging out with his friends, then explain THIS

[simptasia]

the best reminder that LOST is a masterpiece is to watch any other drama series

[arolesbianism]

Guess who's thinking abt eg au again

[ha-youwish]

coming from someone who’s gen z i gotta be honest that as much as i do understand what op is getting at here, no one types like those two examples…like if someone wanted to put /gen into normal words they’d just say “genuinely” or whatever

or if someone wanted to make the joke about blocking a friend, they could put “blocking you (joke)” or. i dunno clarify in the next message. and tone indicators aren’t just slang, its not just for twitter characters limits, its an accessibility tool. and for something thats supposed to be accessible, it’s really not intuitive at all.

tone indicators came about because a lot of platforms have strict character limits (twitter, tiktok, tumblr tags, etc) and because any text communication done primarily via phone keyboard will trend towards abbreviations, so a lot of the time adding a quick "/gen" to a sentence might make more sense than a whole "asking genuinely here" clause. it's also appealing to many people because it's a way of clarifying jokes and quips without having to reconfigure the entire joke so it loses it's punch, ex. "blocking you rn /lh" reads differently than "don't take this seriously but I'm blocking you over this." if they don't appeal to you or you can't remember all the abbreviations or you find them otherwise confusing, that's all fine, you can simply not use them, but they aren't pointless nonsense words. I don't know if you know this but sometimes teens invent slang that makes sense to them but not older generations and this is what is regarded as "fine."

[txttletale]

Saw a tweet that said something around:

"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"

I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.

i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.

'depleting the global power and water supply'

something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)

a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)

i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.

most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.

but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.

but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!

so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."

it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.

nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!

plagiarizing human artists

nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.

AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).

to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?

then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!

this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.

(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)

today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools

i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).

jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!

there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.

so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.

if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.

[alpaca-clouds]

Why the media CEOs will always learn the wrong lessons

Yesterday a friend and I talked about how the entire (AAA) game industrie looked at BG3 being as popular as it is and going: "Oh, we need to produce 100+ hour games, I guess! Those sell!" Which... obviously is not why it is popular. The game is not popular because it has 100+ hours of gameplay, but because it has engaging characters, that are well-acted and that work as good hooks for the players. Like, let's face it: The reason why I so far have sunken 160 hours into this game is, because I wanna spend time with these characters - and because I wanna give them their happy endings.

But the same has happened too, just a bit earlier this year, right? When Barbie broke the 1 billion and every Hollywood CEO went: "Oh, so the people want movies based on toy franchises! Got it!" To which the internet at large replied: "... How is that the lesson you learned from this?"

Well, let me explain to you, why this is the lesson they learn: It is because the CEOs and the boards of directors at large are not artists or even engaged with the medium they produce. They mostly are economists. And their dry little hearts do not understand stuff more complex than numbers and spread sheets.

That sounds evil, I know, but... It is sadly the truth. When they look at a successful movie/series/game/book/comic, they look at it as a product, not a piece of art or narrative. It is just a product that has very clear metrics.

To them Barbie is not a movie with interesting stylistic choices that stand out from the majority of high budget action blockbusters. It is a toy movie with mildly feminist themes.

Or Oppenheimer is not a movie to them with a strong visual language and good acting direction. No, it is a historical blockbuster.

And this is true for basically every form of media. I mean, books are actually a fairly good example. In my life I do remember the big book fads that happened. When Harry Potter was a success, there was at least a dozen other "magical school" book series being released. When Twilight was a big success there was suddenly an endless number of "teen girl falls in love with bad boy, who is [magical creature]" YA. When the Hunger Games was a success, there were hundreds of "YA dystopia" books. Meanwhile in adult reading, we had the big "next Game of Throne" fad.

Of course, the irony is, that within each of those fads there might have been one or two somewhat successful series - but never even one that came even close to whatever started the fad.

Or with movies, we have seen it, too. When Avengers broke the 1 billion (which up to this point only few movies did) the studios went: "Ooooooh, so we need shared universe film series" - and then all went to try and fail to create their own cinematic universe.

Because the people, who call the shots, are just immensely desinterested in the thing they are selling. They do not really care about the content. All they care about is having a supposedly easy avenue of selling it. Just as they do not care about the consumer. All they care about is that the consumer buys it. Why he buys it... Well, they do not care. They could not care less, in fact.

So, yeah, get ready for a 20 overproduced games with a bloated 100+ hours of empty gameplay, but without the engaging characters. And for like at least 15 more moves based on some toy franchise, that nobody actually cares about.

And then get ready for all the CEOs to do the surprised Pikachu face, when all of that ends up not financially successful.

Really, I read some interviews yesterday from some AAA-studio CEOs and their blatant shock and missing understanding on why BG3 works for so many people.

Because, yeah... capitalism does not appreciate art. Capitalism does not understand art. It only understands spread sheets.

[cripplecharacters]

Hi! I’m working on an original character project that I want to include a lot of casual representation in (“casual” meaning that the characters don’t need a justification for being disabled/fat/POC/etc, they just are because people can and do exist that way in reality!)

I was wondering if you had any suggestions for finding resources for drawing facial differences(and maybe other visible disabilities), especially in a cartoony style. I’ve looked through the Facial Equality Week tag but would like to see more examples, and since my art is so… goofy, for lack of a better word, I would love any help I can get in integrating differences without being offensive or upsetting.

Sorry if this is a bother, and thank you for all that you do!

Hi!

I'm not aware of any guides for drawing facial differences specifically (or at least, good ones. There's 1 billion tutorials telling you that scars are just a Singular Line, always, but that's not... correct), but perhaps someone in the notes could help out?

For my own advice, you could check out this old post I made. Because you mentioned your art being cartoony, I would specifically urge you to not overexaggerate facial differences the way they often are. Prime example would be how a lot of cartoons portray strabismus;

It's just a funny gag to them rather than, IDK, how some of us look like. Not to mention that one of these is also a mockery of intellectually/developmentally disabled people with "Derp" in the name, but that's beside the point here.

It's the whole "the character is crazy/stupid/wild/whatever and that's why they have it" that's the problem with how it's often shown. You can also see it in how characters who don't even normally have it will be shown with it for a scene where they're saying something nonsensical, etc.

Another example that's nowhere near as rampant is the like... split-face thing with various facial differences being used. Mostly vitiligo but sometimes also facial palsy. I'm talking about this weirdly perfectly halved face that looks extremely different on each side, often used to signal that a character is two-faced or that the author doesn't know how vitiligo looks like.

[note: vitiligo also shows up on lighter skin. I wanted to make sure it's visible here for tutorial clarity purposes.]

This one is just weird because it straight up doesn't look like that? I have no idea where it came from, but it should go back there. Facial palsy doesn't make someone look like the antique comedy/tragedy theater mask.

Unless I'm forgetting some other annoying cartoon trope, these would be the big ones that you should stay away from.

Outside of that, it's really on a case by case basis on how a specific FD should be drawn because they're so different! A birthmark can just be a differently colored patch of skin, but a craniofacial difference would require some more changes to be included. Alopecia is well, lack of hair, and can be done very easily but ectrodactyly can be more complicated to show properly because of the limitations of a cartoony artstyle when it comes to hands. And while I do think it would be great to see more of those facial differences that tend to not be included in art at all, there's nothing wrong with deciding to go for the things you can represent more faithfully, especially if you're just starting.

I will say that if you're making an honest attempt at being respectful and trying to get it right, most of us will still be excited to see your work. Even if it's not perfect or has some inaccuracies. I will take a "'yeah more or less' correct with a happy, human character" over a "Very Technically correct but tagged as #tw burns and with blood splattered on them" any day.

Lastly, I wanted to share some art featuring characters with facial differences (and other visible disabilities) that are done in a cartoony, or at least somewhat simplistic artstyles (I'm using both terms very widely here, but like. Not Realism) - maybe it will give you some ideas!

Man with Treacher Collins syndrome (also one of the first pieces online where I saw a character with an FD portrayed in such a lovely way! A fav of mine) Girl with Pfeiffer syndrome Too many characters to count! Woman with burns Woman with a limb difference Multiple characters again Animation featuring people with Down syndrome [youtube] Multiple characters, including a girl with neurofibromatosis, a burn survivor, a girl with a cleft lip and another with TCS! [twitter]

If you have a more specific art question ("how do I draw a person with XYZ facial difference?") you can send me an ask on @saszor! I prefer to stick to the writing theme on this blog but would still like to help if you need it:-)

Hope this helps!

mod Sasza

Edit: apologies for the lack of alt text on one of the images, it has been fixed!

[centrally-unplanned]

The trick on the whole "Israel banning UNRWA" thing is that most militaries - like say the US in Afghanistan for example - directly provision aid. American soldiers would often be handing out food packages themselves, and even if they weren't the aid organizations would be directly contracting with the US government and the Department of Defense. You have a group in the military and the government that is like, okay, how do we feed people, let's hit those targets.

So if Congress decided to ban the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan in 2006 from operating in the country or whatever, that bill would say like "we hand over its mission to USAID, which has been allocated $2.1 billion dollars in FY-2005 to do X Y Z". It would probably be a dumb move that would create unnecessary friction and cost lives for political bullshit, but that is also life, people dying for political bullshit is a universal constant. It would probably be pretty small bore in the scale of things, like switching over contractors.

That isn't how Israel does things. I might be wrong about this, Israel is deliberately opaque about these things and I just gave this the ol' half hour of googling, I am open to being contradicted here. But my current understanding of net spending by the government of Israel itself on aid to Gaza is...$0. They do not provide aid. They permit aid from other organizations, funded by other countries, to be provided! But they don't take responsibility for the provision; meeting targets, outcomes, etc, none of that is their job. (I am sure it isn't literally zero btw, but I think you get my point)

It is really telling that when you look up pro-Israel statements by say AIPAC on aid, their headlines are:

Israel Facilitates Humanitarian Aid to Gaza as Hamas Continues to Attack

And they criticize the UN because the UN trucks aren't being delivered:

The United Nations and other international agencies are largely responsible for the existing delays in aid deliveries into Gaza. The U.N. has not been able to distribute aid at the rate that Israel is processing it, causing back-ups at the border crossings after Israeli inspections are completed. On March 3, the U.N. received 234 trucks in Gaza but only distributed 131 trucks of aid to civilians in the enclave.

If this was the US military, and the UN was getting aid trucks and failing to send them, we would send more of our own trucks? That we have? Because aid is part of the military operation. But Israel doesn't do that - because it doesn't have any trucks. Because aid isn't part of the military operation.

Which is why the bill banning UNRWA that is being passed does not mention aid provision to Gaza:

The international community has raised alarm over the legislation, which was passed without a plan in place for a humanitarian agency to replace UNRWA.

Again going off news sources here, link for the actual bill is currently down, if I am wrong will correct here, but I think it all tracks. So in the article above, you get statements from the government when people ask about aid, they reply, oh yeah these other aid organizations will fill the gap.

Then you ask the aid organizations themselves and they go, no, we won't fill the gap! We don't have the resources to do that! Which is logical when you realize Israel isn't funding those orgs. They don't know or care about their funding status. Hopefully someone else will figure that out - aid is someone else's problem. Those government remarks are just off the cuff, they aren't a plan.

Which I want to loop back around to the casus belli for the ban - UNRWA having ties to Hamas. That, to me, is one of those "uh duh, and?" things - Hamas is the government of Gaza. UNRWA runs schools there? And medical clinics? You think they do that...without contact with the government? This is just silly, the UN Mission in Afghanistan obviously had connections to the US Government! Government officials, working in both, par for the course.

But, and this is far more important, it is irrelevant. I completely agree that UNRWA has many people who are sympathetic to Hamas in it, because obviously they do. You want to ban it, dumb but okay. You propose a bill outlining the $2 billion dollars and the 5 partnered aid organizations and the 400 IDF trucks that will deliver aid to replace their work, sure. Whatever man, do your small bore politics bullshit.

That is not what they are doing.

Now, Israel has in fact allowed a bunch of aid in Gaza, I don't doubt that like USAID and the non-profit community and the governments of the UK and Japan and so on are gonna pivot funding to a bunch of organizations that will do herculean work stepping up operations and interfacing with the IDF checkpoint system and get aid in. Maybe they will do such a bang-up job that the cost in suffering won't be that high. Israel did give 3 months after all, they aren't the literal worst they could be.

But I do think at a certain point, the line between indifference and malice just ceases to matter. The UNRWA bill isn't some breaking point or big policy shift - it is just a highly revealing moment in the Israeli approach, why the war there has gone the way that it has. And it is, as the kids say, not a good look.

(h/t @loving-n0t-heyting as this was initially a reblog of their post, but they mentioned getting drama in the notes so I split it off; sorry to deny you the precious +1 internet point)

[transmutationisms]

I have always been wary of the psychiatric industry, but its only very recently that i started to read anti-psychiatric works. Your blog is the first time i saw that the "chemical imbalances causing mental illness" is a myth, and honestly its something im having a hard time wrapping my head around.

Is it that mood regulation struggles, labelled as a mental illnesses, has more to do with outside factors instead of the person "just being that way"? Is it therefore unlikely for someone to have struggles with mood regulation if they cant identify any external causes that would cause them to be, for example, extremely agoraphobic or to have anger management issues? Im asking this for myself mainly, cause i always had intense agoraphobia no matter how i often go outside my home (in fact it was worse when i was a teen and i was outside the house in even more back then). I cant think of any reason for me to be like this than chemical imbalances in my brain.

the specific 'chemical imbalance' myth i was talking about in this post is the idea that depression is caused by low serotonin, and that therefore SSRIs—serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, ie drugs that cause a higher level of serotonin in the brain—ought to cure or at least ameliorate depression. this conjecture is belied by the fact that SSRIs don't, at a population level, reliably perform better than placebo.

although a neurobiological cause of 'mental illness' has long been the holy grail of psychiatry, the serotonin imbalance myth is far from the only hypothesis that psychiatrists and neuroscientists have proposed. so, a critique of the serotonin myth is not synonymous with, or generalisable to, a critique of every neurobiological mechanism purported to explain psychiatric diagnoses. you may be interested to know, though, that genomics and neuroscience have not identified a biological cause of any psychiatric diagnosis (p. 851).

all human experiences are biologically instantiated, including in the brain and wider nervous system. we are embodied beings. however, it is a leap to assume that such instantiation is automatically equivalent to a causal explanation or disease etiology. in other words, to deny that psychiatric diagnoses are known to be biologically caused does not mean we deny that thoughts and thought patterns express in the physical matter of neuroanatomy. this is a major philosophical sticking point to keep in mind whenever you're looking at something like, eg, a study that purports to show 'brain differences' in those assigned a certain psychiatric diagnosis. another thing to consider is whether these papers are plagued with methodological issues or financial conflicts of interest.

i can't possibly tell you why you exhibit agoraphobia. however, when i talk about social, economic, and environmental factors that may contribute to the patterns of behaviour labelled as 'mental illness', i'm talking about much more than the individual choice to leave your house. since phobias are 'anxiety disorders', i might start by probing into questions like: is the world you live in safe? do you perceive it as safe? do you or your community face existential threats that may confront you more obviously when you go outside? are you nervous around other people, and if so, might that be connected to fears (well-founded or not) about interpersonal violence and harm? do you think any of these anxieties may be connected to the hostility and inaccessible design of the social environment and economic conditions?

human behaviour and thought varies. some of those variations may be totally benign; others may be helpful or harmful to the person living with them. it would be weird if every single one of the 8 billion people on earth experienced precisely the same amount of anxiety about any situation, no? all of this is to say: yeah, it's entirely possible you have been, for one reason or another (genetic, neuroanatomical, social, &c) predisposed to experience high, even debilitating levels of anxiety when leaving your home. most human characteristics develop from a tangle of social, environmental, material causes—ie, from a combination of 'nature' and 'nurture'. what doesn't follow, though, is the claim that there is therefore a discrete, 'diseased' element of your brain or brain functioning that can simply be cured or eliminated through psychiatric intervention.

it is a critical point of anti-psychiatry to challenge psychiatric and neuroscientific claims to neurobiological determinism where psychiatric diagnoses are concerned. this is for many reasons, including: a) that these claims have not been demonstrated to actually be true [see above]; b) that they rob pathologised people of agency and self-determination [see: you're too sick to know you're sick, and the doctor will fix you now]; c) that they are often pushed by pharmaceutical companies with financial interests, or grant-funded researchers with... financial interests; d) that they are politically seductive in various eugenic, hereditarian discourses that seek to eliminate the biologically 'unfit' element from society.

[astrowarr]

love your connection on how last life has affected double life scar's behavior, so i've decided to rewatch limited life to continue being insane about him in general and once you get past the first 8 minutes filled with. whatever the hell is happening to him there. you actually get insane lore implications. especially one moment when scar and grian cross paths (ofc they do) and scar tries to swindle grian out of his diamond sword in exchange for a diamond hoe and says "the diamond hoe can build you a future and a sword just brings you destruction" which is like. ok. whatever. not insane about that at all. but moving past that, grian leaves and scar doesn't move and keeps talking "audience just said it was a great deal, it's more of a like [grian is completely gone by this point] being a bigger person and becoming-" and there is a harsh cut in scar's pov. and then he's speaking with bdubs in the same spot and in bdubs pov you can see that he literally cut just one line "it didn't work". and bdubs says "he's gone" and scar in his pov literally DUBS OVER and adds a "yeah! correct. and He will Regret that" line. i hate that i need to crosswatch his pov with others to get the truth on what happened. i have finals. and grian is also not normal in that interaction. he makes a point of "y'know, i just thought if i ask you a question straight [about whether he's a boogeyman or not], you can be honest with me". and then says "scar's not the best liar". ok buddy. ok sorry astro i'll just follow your example and make a google doc and stop yapping in your asks. explodes.

never apologize for yapping in my asks I'M GOING CRAZY OVER THIS. what do you MEAN he cuts out "it didn't work" and dubs over. like, cutting out your admission of failure and then manually inventing this threatening bit. he's so abnormal. every time one of them cuts out a singular line, especially in the middle of the interaction, it says so much about them dude. that's why these analysis docs are so hard but so worth it; cross-watching takes a billion years but then you get gems like this and it's so rewarding both satisfactorily and analytically. that said YEAHH MAKE A DOC!! i would read the SHIT out of it! this is lovely work

also dude... augh... grian... wanting scar to be honest with him. and then being disappointed but unsurprised when scar Isnt, and is immediately able to clock it... both of them should die

[qoldenskies]

Yeah people pleaser Leo takes me out of fics so fast. Way faster than unbothered Donnie Or a Leo that crumbles under trauma if I'm honest

I've seen a lot of fics where his internal dialogue is so dependant heavy? And anxious about everything

That Leo would never tease Raph about his "chasm." The mere idea would make him want to vomit

Maybe they should try writing for mutant mayhem instead? Now there's an anxious, people pleasing Leo

"he would not say that" is one thing and its usually leveraged wrong. you can stomp on characters in all sorts of ways to Make Them Say That. i struggle with judging over the much deeper "he would not have that stress response" AND IN LEO'S CASE I DONT LIKE IT WHEN PEOPLE MAKE HIM FAWN LOL its pretty much the thing he does the LEAST, sucking up to people to manipulate them or going "ermmmmm why are you angry? lol" are both things that are not fawn responses at all LMFAO

actually that argument with raph in the movie is pretty much the BEST example of leo going to fight mode when he's upset about something. brushing it off and riling up raph INTENTIONALLY to derail the situation, he likes to go the long way around to make raph look unreasonable sometimes lmao. he likes to poke at them to embarrass them in order to express his disapproval, and he ESPECIALLY does it to those he's directly already antagonistic with. hell, he can even open his big mouth around the kraang in the middle of a dire situation lmao

donnie is so focused on attaining the approval of others, he is a BILLION times more likely to fawn and suck up when he feels threatened, as well as harbor a lot of anxiety about how others perceive him. leo wants to be liked, and he doesn't want to be alone, of course, but he turns a lot of inward. its about the persona he puts up, and when he's upset he'll crack down on it and put those walls up higher, usually via. lashing out in that exact way

it's literally the "im just a little guy im just a little birthday boy" response, but i think if you fucked him up enough you could make him more surprisingly focused cornered animal tbhhh and i think that's a ton more interesting interpretation of his issues. they cant psychological warefare him the same way he does them and it shows

tdlr in my opinion its like. he would not turn to desperate people pleasing when he feels his sense of self shaken or destroyed, he would double down and shut people out and potentially even refuse to accept help instead

hell, it took EVERYTHING with the kraang and all of the near death experiences in order to get him to actually reflect on himself and change in the movie. leo DOES CARE. very much, and a big reason he was so upset with raph and reacted like that is because raph used the lives of their little brothers as a point of argument, and implied he was apathetic to something like that. he HATES being seen that way!! so him actually facing how this behavior IS bad and seeing how much danger its gotten them into (especially with CJ's words in mind) is the thing that really makes him re-evaluate himself and grow.

leo pretends to have a fawn response but its very apparent that its just masquerading a deeply-rooted fight response. donnie pretends to have a fight response but its very apparent he's just masquerading a deeply-rooted fawn response. you understand.

[newsfromstolenland]

I was reading apparently focused labour of South Asians is real bad in Hong Kong. Also racism against them. And they get treated like criminals, heard stories of brown people Hong Kong being spat at, being denied service of taxi cabs and being neglected at hospitals. And other stuff.

Is racism against South Asian people widespread, in East Asian communities? Like beyond Hong Kong. Is it mostly colorism?

I mean yeah, colourism is a big issue in Asia, including in the majority brown countries

like for example, within India darker skinned Indians are looked down on. there's a few factors, one of which being that it implies your caste. people who live on the streets or work in the fields end up spending their days out in the sun so they end up with darker skin, so in India dark skin carries an association with poverty, and lighter skin is seen as more beautiful. most Bollywood stars that are known for being considered attractive are very light-skinned, especially the women

I've heard Chinese people call Indonesian people monkeys, I know Japan historically had it's own version of nazi race science, and those are just a few examples

in Asia overall, partially though not entirely because of european colonialism and beauty standards, there is a general belief that paleness = beauty and class. which kinda happens everywhere, but one thing that is especially prevalent in Asia is the skin whitening industry.

you don't want to get me started on skin lightening because I can rant about it for hours, but in short it's a massively profitable multi-billion dollar industry that involves products and procedures to lighten people's skin in the name of beauty. the beauty industry overall is predatory and harmful, but this part of it is especially insidious. it's people getting rich off of the insecurity that white supremacy has created in the minds of people of colour- specifically women of colour. and these products and procedures are often dangerous! at the very least it's bad for your skin, but it can also contain mercury or cause blood poisoning and cancer

ANYWAY, all this is to say that colourism exists everywhere, including all over Asia. and I think each region of the world and each culture has its own manifestations of colourism

[terapsina]

Now that the writers and actors strike is about to begin being felt (and as we wait for those greedy billion dollar companies who are refusing to negotiate fair pay and conditions to give up) here's 10 of my favorite (all around best) fully finished older series you should definitely check out if you haven't watched.

I mean it, these are the shows with continuously great writing and a satisfying endings that manage to actually deliver on their promises.

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1. Leverage - (containing 5 seasons, or 77 episodes) - trailer here.

Hitter, Hacker, Grifter, Thief and Mastermind. Heists and cons. Stealing from the rich and giving to their victims. They provide... leverage.

Meant for anyone who enjoys bad guys being the best good guys, who will burn down the lives of evil CEOs and then gloat in the background. Very satisfying.

Hands down the best example of a found family trope I've ever seen on screen. Barring none.

2. Killjoys - (containing 5 seasons, or 50 episodes) - trailer here.

Space Bounty Hunters. Another case of found family trope. Bisexual space princess assassin. Quippy sentient ship. Green alien goo. Evil lesbians (but like... in a good way). The warrant is all.

More seriously though, it's a story about three killjoys and the bounties they go after. Initially. And then they have to save the entire Quad from some very terrifying... stuff.

Contains one of the best friendships I've ever seen on television.

3. Orphan Black - (containing 5 seasons, or 50 episodes) - trailer here.

Found family trope but with clones.

Low level grifter sees a woman who looks exactly like her kill herself and plans to take over her identity long enough to cash out. Except then there's two other women who also look exactly like her. And apparently they're all clones and someone's killing them.

Enter a global conspiracy. Human experimentation. Lots of clone shenanigans. Some serial killings. And a few murders 💖.

4. Person of Interest - (containing 5 seasons, or 103 episodes) - trailer here.

Okay I'm beginning to see how I might have a found family trope issue.

Former CIA agent gets recruited by a reclusive billionaire computer programmer who developed a... machine that can predict acts of terror before they happen. But it also predicts 'irrelevant' acts of violence that will result in someone's death.

Unless someone interferes.

I'd really like to spoil some stuff to get you all to watch this one. But I'm going to maintain self control and just mention that early on they get a dog named Bear. Bear is a very good boy. Watch it for Bear.

Also for excellent commentary on rights of privacy, government surveillance and what does 'greater good' even mean? But mostly Bear.

5. 12 Monkeys - (containing 4 seasons, or 47 episodes) - trailer here.

The very best time travel show out there. What starts out as a confusing mess of causality basically exploding, by the end of the series all makes complete and total sense.

(when that final timey-whimey loop slid into place and revealed the entire pattern it was like a choir of angels started singing in the back of my head. It was freaking glorious).

Anyway, a man from a post apocalyptic future travels into the past to stop a plague from decimating nearly the entire world population.

He has the name of the man who released the virus and it's supposed to be a single trip. One trip. One bullet. Simple. Done.

Except then things keep escalating, and escalating until time begins eating its own tail and it might start looking like the end of the world might be a better ending than erasing all of time and space from reality.

Because when our guys screw it up, they screw it up GOOD.

And oh yeah... found family.

6. The Good Place - (containing 4 seasons, or 53 episodes) - trailer here.

A self-proclaimed Arizona dirtbag opens her eyes and finds out that she's dead and got accepted in the Good Place. Except that as soon as she arrives the Good Place starts glitching, and she really, REALLY needs to become a better person before she can be found out and kicked out to the Bad Place.

Luckily her assigned soulmate was a professor of ethics and moral philosophy.

One of the funniest, most thoughtful and clever comedies I've ever watched. Ever. The characters are delightful and by the time the final minute rolled around I had sobbed my heart out multiple times (which, as we all know, is a sign of the very best comedies out there).

As for the question of whether or not this too contains Found Fami- Yes! Obviously, yes.

7. Avatar: the Last Airbender - (containing 3 seasons, or 61 episodes) - intro here (couldn't locate the trailer but it's basically the same thing in this case).

The four nations lived in harmony. Until the Fire Nation attacked.

It's been a hundred years since the beginning of the war when two kids from the Southern Water Tribe find a boy frozen in ice and wake him up. A boy who's able to bend all four elements... though not very well.

Enter multi-nation flying road trip (thank you Appa, we love you most of all) as they try to find teachers for the Avatar and save the world.

Includes found family (shut up), amazing fight scenes, the most heartfelt and vivid characters ever, and the best example of a redemption arc actually done well.

8. Love Between Fairy and Devil - (containing 1 season, or 36 episodes) - trailer here.

This one gutted me. I'm saying this as a compliment. But it had to be said. Completely destroyed me. I just haven't been the same.

A love story between an Orchid Fairy and the leader of the Moon Tribe that starts out with her accidentally releasing him from millennia long imprisonment and then takes you through the caleidoscope of all possible human emotions (it's a body-swap comedy through the first part, then a romcom, then a dramatic romantic tale, and finally a tragic love story).

But it's such a satisfying slow burn.

And it carries this... humanity through the whole thing that makes it so visceral.

If you're a romantic who's very tired of instalove and characters dropping all their morals because 'ooh, attractive person' then you've got to watch this. Because this story does NOT take the easy road there.

(my more extensive rec for this series can be found here)

9. Star Wars: The Clone Wars - (containing 7 seasons, or 133 episodes) - fanmade trailer here (it was better than any of the official ones).

This series did so much. Introduced Ahsoka Tano, and made us love her. Gave names and faces and souls to the Clone Troopers (okay, it's the same face but you know what I mean), to a point where their endings during Order 66 destroyed me just as much as the ending of the Jedi Order. And somehow made me both love Anakin AND be a million times more angry with him.

There are some arcs in this series that might be a bit weaker. But there were some... god, there's a reason I love Clone Wars more than any other series or trilogy in this universe. And I'm not even a little ashamed to say it.

Must watch for Disaster Lineage shenanigans; for the vod'e; AND for the Jedi (who did their best okay? They always did their best 😭💔).

(and on the subject of found family... do I even need to comment)

10. Nikita - (containing 4 seasons, or 73 episodes) - trailer here.

A rogue assassin that escaped Division - covert government agency that takes recruits out of prison, fakes their deaths and then forces them to become spies and assassins - has come back to take it down. Brick by brick if she has to. With guns and explosives too when that works better.

Contains soooo many cool fight scenes. Is full of incredible characters you'll fall in love with (and hate with) very quickly. And most of all has an incredibly complex relationship of mentorship and friendship between two women that holds both great admiration and betrayal, real care and love as well as rage and hatred, forgiveness, mutual respect and an unbreakable kind of bond that so very rarely involves even one female character on TV, let alone two.

(as usual, found family tropes up the wazzoo).

-----

In conclusion. We all know there's going to be a large space between seasons of our favorite shows now (and some shows that aren't going to survive it). Let's fill that space with some excellent TV we haven't had a chance to see yet.

And direct the blame for the wait towards the right place (i.e. the studios).

[qqueenofhades]

I also think leftists view liberals and centrists as worse than right wingers because liberals and centrists maintain the status quo, thus prolonging capitalism. In the case of accelerationists, they think a revolution is only possible if people are desperate enough to want one and so they often align themselves with right wingers who they know will make things worse (see MAGA communism as one example). To them it doesn't matter if the fascists will take power because they believe fascism always fails and communism will naturally follow. All the deaths will be worth it in the end.

I hit ask before I finished. I meant to add in parentheses that all of that is of course an oversimplification, but those are pretty much the arguments I saw in multiple leftists subreddit, on tumblr and twitter in the past few months. I know leftists irl are more normal.

See, this is what I mean when I point out that Online Leftists have become just as much of a zero-sum radicalized death cult as the MAGA Trumpists. They're willing to embrace any atrocity, global disaster, terrible people, and massive death toll as long as they think it'll bring their Shining Ideology (TM) to fruition, and then of course this will last a thousand years and never be changed and humans will bow down as a group to this Shining Ideology and destroying everything will be Worth It In The End. Apparently. This is complete ahistorical genocidal nihilistic gibberish, where any progress to fix the world and make a better future for the billions of people alive right now is actually Bad because What About the Glorious Revolution?!?! It is Totally Real! It Will Work! O Bow To Us Great Keyboard Warrior Dipshits! If You Don't Want to Violently Die With Everyone You Love, You Are Part of the Problem!!!!!

Now, I don't know about you, but I sure as fuck don't feel like sacrificing everyone and everything is a great tradeoff for whatever Communist Utopia these cosplaying pissbabies think would be the ultimate fruition of their labors. It's lazy, it's dangerous, it's stupid, it excuses them from ever having to do any effort to make the world better right now, and it feeds into the worst impulses and movements of humanity and the same mistakes that have been repeated in history over and over. This is basically what the late 19th-century and early 20th-century Communists thought: people would rise up in a Great Socialist Revolution, overthrow capitalism and fascism and every other bad thing in the world (which would somehow never ever come back, I guess) and then the future would be bright and shining forever. In practice, it resulted in tons of bloody and pointless deaths, a lot of failure, and some communist regimes that were absolutely zero improvement whatsoever on the oppressive systems they had replaced (and often were in fact MORE oppressive, but online leftists don't listen to people who actually grew up in these regimes and are not eager to see them come back). And guess what? Capitalism and fascism were not actually defeated Once and For All Time! Because yet again, you cannot just Violently Revolute your way to Ultimate Morally Pure Power once and for all, kill the Right People (aka everyone) and then everything is fixed forever. If it was ever going to work, it would have already done so. It has not. This fallacy is the cause of pretty much all the evil in human history. So. Yeah.

[frenchkanna1808]

So after being in school alone with my thought, i wondered the question no one dared to ask, what is my friends daily account activity? Do they really hold up as dailies? How much dailies account even in there? Did brody cause 9/11? All those questions went trough my brain like wildfire, and after a very long 15 seconds of thinking i too the harduous task of finding every single daily accounts and using the power of MATH to see their overall activity.

so follow me on my little rambling as i see the RISE and FALL of the yttd daily community

So lets say some ground rule, when i mean activity i mean that the blog has posted adn actual daily blog post and not just talked or respounded to asks, so for example brocoli respounds to asks but he didn't post a daily since a certain time. Rule understood, okay okay.

First part of this task was to fin every single daily blogs and look their last posts, and this was the longest part for sure.

forget my very bad typos this was written in a moment of euphoria. What we can see from this is that there is 1 billion blogs actually but also that a ton of those blogs are in fact desactivated. THose which are classified as today are actually yesterday post i just was very lazy to change it.

Second phase was to put them all in different categories on a exel sheet to see the overal proportions and see the average of month since a last daily was posted.

as we can see there is no joke 53 FUCKING DAILY ACCOUNTS. But more importrantly about 16 of those accounts are either gone and dissapeared out of the face of the earth or they are simply stated as inactive by the daily in question. The second largest numbers are didn't post in 8 months and 4 months.

third part was to make a graphical illustration of my point, so i made a camembert.

so yeah i'm not gonna do a big study but its pretty clear that if we only consider daily accounts who posted today or this month as actual dailies then we can consider all the others as inactive dailies.

What was the point of this you might say? Well i wanted to prove my theories, first off most of those daily accounts were in fact born from the brody genesis, so when brody created his daily keiji account. It became a popular idea and everyone impulsively created accounts. The thing is that having a daily account is not some funny bussiness its extremely tiring and extremly difficult, and since most of the yttd community on tumblr are teens to young adults, we mostly have school to deal with. So keeping up with pace is pretty much impossible. Second my guess was that honestly all daily accounts would burn out in two months, and i was kinda right. Yes the graph seems to show that they lasted longuer, but actually, this doesnt count the time of inactivity in betwens or the long breaks. Most account burned out after 1 or 2 months which is pretty logical. LIke dailyshinai/rune burned out in two month for example.

I think the overral if we did a competion winners would be @rekofan101 who posted for a year straight and just terminated being a daily on their own account and janice/ @daily-dose-of-bucket who despite longs breaks are still posting. The dailies had an immense rise at one point but the fall was even harder slowly has the accounts and trend started to burn out. As someone who is on a dailies account i will say out of the maybe 30 blogs on it only lik 8 are actually active and only 1 post regularly.

This is isnt' at all a judgement or anything but its an interresting depictions of how waves of trends affect certains populations.

Tho if i had to give advices to make a daily account it would be:

-make it a weekly, more time better results last longuer

-don't do it alone perhaps do it with a friend and alternate betwen one another

-if you have adhd, a job, memory issues or overall issues that will make it evn more difficult for you to make an account a daily, i would consider not doing it, instead perhaps just do a regular fan account like me

But anyway thank for reading my useless unemployed friend rambling and keep doing what you love!