#DICHOTOMIES

[shisasan]

A romantic, tender soul intoxicatingly drawn to the depth of shadows with a hidden taste for wicked and perversion. Who else feels this to their bones?

[alternatefandom]

That bit in Kaveh's demo where Alhaitham and Kaveh are walking side by side into the akademiya

[ofscribesandmen]

[extantformoflife]

the inherent homoeroticism of recognizing yourself in your enemy

[qwertystop]

teaching both theater and STEM together gets you Heinz Doofenshmirtz.

[anteroom-of-death]

The UK has 3 days to make the correct decision politically or I'm fucking becoming a dictator of the planet via one-woman coup.

[theblackknightofworcestershire]

nice dichotomy, idiot. what lies outside it????

[jamnsketch]

venus // pluto

[ofswordsandpens]

Luke being given a quest at 17, feeling like there's no glory in it because it's a quest someone's already succeeded before, but then failing that very quest he considered to be beneath him, getting a permanent scar, "ruining it" for the rest of the campers because now no one else can go on quests and earn glory in the eyes of the gods, so he turns to Kronos, and years later here comes a possible candidate for the great prophecy, 12 years old, gets the first quest the camp has done since Luke's fucked it up, and Luke is actively ensuring this quest is an impossible quest!! he's literally rigged it so Percy's gonna fail (the shoes, the bolt appearing in his bag) and then this kid somehow succeeds still??? and not only that, Percy got the unique quest Luke wanted in the first place and achieved feats no one else had and earned glory in the eyes of his father, all because Luke created the circumstances for that to happen??

oh my god yeah I don't think I'd ever recover from that either

[processes]

honestly wow

the preferred bureaucracies

Welcome to the first bracket of US Government Agencies! This is being run by the mod of @centers-for-disease-control.

Below we have the set up for round one:

Round One:

Nasa vs ICE

USPS vs MSHS

DEA vs NARA

DHS vs FDA

USGS vs DOC

Air Force vs USDA

NPS vs Navy

AMTRAK vs DOJ

DOL vs DOT

VA vs Coast Guard

OSHA vs DOI

FBI vs CIA

Army vs ED

NIH vs IRS

DOE vs BIA

DOS vs CDC

[wickedzeevyln]

Perfect

“Look at that family, they are so happy.” “You don’t know what’s happening in the background. They have problems too.” Of course they do. Everybody does. Why not focus on the positive? Frame the moment as an inspiration to feel better and do better. Why is it human nature to come and seek out flaws of others to make them feel good about themselves? It’s the fear of changing that people dare not…

[connabeth]

the liberty annabeth has been given to be deeply unserious and true to her character in the new “pjo” books while being deprived of that aspect of her character elsewhere is so personal to me because what do you mean she wants to duet with percy on shallow, cheerfully bon voyages her boyfriend off a cliff, carries around a backpack of mystery mouskatools including herbal tea and snake treats just in case, instructs percy “don’t stop skipping, skippy” when he has the rainbow staff for absolutely no other reason aside from shits and giggles, breaks into his bedroom for no reason besides the fact that she simply likes the challenge, apparently regularly signs autographs and is fawned over up on olympus, and keeps suggesting cute and dumb shit to get magically scribed into percy’s diy college rec letter. and now she’s giggling with her architecture friends about glass and marshmallows and wants to throw a haunted house party in a scary goddess’s mansion (a goddess scary enough to make her boyfriend literally piss his boxers) because she’s too self-assured to believe they can’t evade the consequences and too excited to experience something she’s never gotten to throughout her childhood and adolescence. not to mention the callback to her love of animals, no matter how demonic, and how she misses playing fetch with cerberus…oh annabeth chase, the woman that you are. like yes let her be impulsive and unserious and excited and batshit and a troll because she’s just a girl trying to have fun in a miserable fucking world godammit!! rick riordan, they could never make me like you, but i’ll give you this one thing—the whimsy has been restored and its name is annabeth chase

[prettypunkpurple]

fma: human transmutation is bad!! There is no equivalent exchange for human life >:(

dungeon meshi: how much meat ya got?

[dragongirlbunny]

one of the fun things my friends and i do is called 'boat or cage' where we try to categorize anything and everything as either a boat or a cage.

[iicaaruus]

saw this dragon on the front page and decided to check out the lair

I must say I am absolutely fascinated by this... PsuedoNym52 if you’re reading this I need to dissect your brain

[cerebraldischarge]

Plato's dead hand and the -isms of our day

The Greeks wrote stuff on wax tablets. I wonder if there were marital misunderstandings due to the malleable material being left out in the summer glare. Despite all the lies we have heard in the past twenty years or so, hot summers have existed back then. They rocked the cradle of our civilization, sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently.

It’s also a myth that the Greeks could not perceive blue. Their skies were not burgundy or gray, they saw the same wavelengths we do. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omPGq_cu58Y

Paradox, perhaps, but the human tendency to divide (both things and people) into categories is one of the most universal. Greeks and Barbarians, Hebrew and Goyim - that’s the most primal distinction: Our Kind and Everyone Else. Then, as our vocabularies, libraries, and some people’s access to too much free time grew, more categories were established. Incidentally, this is akin to the process of generating more and more color words. At first, cultures differentiate between light and dark; then red enters the picture; then the dividing lines between blue, green, yellow, brown, pink, and so on are drawn - all the while looking at the exact same visible spectrum, except for a few unfortunate males (or perhaps fortunate, as they are the ones who see through man-made camouflage the most - which goes to show that “survival of the fittest” depends to the utmost extent on the environment into which the fitting occurs).

Perhaps we are at the beginning of such a proliferation of definitions. The basic distinction starts with Healthy (people you agree with; the majority breed) and Unhealthy (people who are different - perhaps with more or less limited perceptions than average, perhaps with skills adapted for different environments, perhaps a diminished or elevated capacity for empathy, or any other “weirdness” that is externally perceivable). Then the latter category starts being divided along the gradient of how useful they are to the Healthy ruling class, or how well they blend in, or how exotic but harmless they seem, or how compliant they are in their own exploitation. (Excuse me for using somewhat left-bent language here, but when it comes to people who have been stripped of their agency through chemical means, often from childhood and not merely learned to victimize themselves for temporary gain, the word “exploitation” seems very much appropriate to me.) There is now a whole damn book detailing the minutiae and shades of being Unhealthy (which, obviously, doesn’t mean they are actually unhealthy, just as non-Greeks or non-Jews aren’t inherently inferior either - it’s just a cultural framework).

Following the proliferation of definitions, the recognition of the spectrum nature of the categorized phenomena occurs, as historically observed: we still talk about distinct hues to children, but everyone implicitly knows that electromagnetic radiation is a spectrum, and these “colors”, as well as a bunch of other things (radio waves, gamma rays, and so on) differ only in their wavelength, but fundamentally are the same thing. With races, it’s a bit more complicated because they are more culturally than biologically constructed (and whoever tries to argue with this fact only does so because he is trying to prove the superiority of his own group, which is a laughable idea - if you really are superior, prove it via your own actions, don’t piggyback on the deeds of your ancestors). With some of the categories of neurodivergence, this gradient-spectrum nature is becoming recognized (the autism spectrum comes to mind), but the overarching notion (that even ChatGPT espouses, referring to it as the “current consensus in the field”, by the way) still seems to be that there is a “standard”, there is a “normal”, a “superior race” to which everyone else should conform either through changing one’s mindset with the help of a trusted authority figure (therapist - indoctrinator), or through chemical alteration (mandatory addiction), or a combination of both methods. Within the spectrum of human sexuality, similar trends can be observed - a gradual recognition of a spectrum-like nature combined with ironclad resistance from certain groups who feel threatened as their hegemony gradually erodes or loses meaning.

We are born Platonists. The human mind, at its most unrefined, likes to think in distinct, concrete categories. Nouns are the first thing every young human learns. This is a cow, that is a cat. This is a circle, that is a triangle. This is big, that is small. We grow out of it to some extent - “hot” and “cold” are replaced with a numerical scale, the color wheel becomes familiar, and so on. But there is something primordially comforting in things like man/woman, sane/insane, rich/poor, positive/negative. (Incidentally, I have a notoriously hard time categorizing emotions as either positive or negative, because when I show someone an erotic piece I wrote, which to me is full of good vibes and pleasant feelings, I often get the response that it’s “dark” or “depressing” - and when I express raw pain, people sometimes think I’m joking or trolling; and these incongruities have been a part of my life since the beginning. I used to be frustrated by this - now I just try to understand it.)

Some people get so damn close to realizing that the people they were told to categorize as Unhealthy (thus, not fully human, at least until “recovery” is completed, if that’s deemed to be possible) are actually people too. They parrot the fact that we all experience states labeled Unhealthy throughout life. But somehow the dots don’t get connected. Bodily autonomy doesn’t get recognized. All I wanna know is: why?