#and they're extremely ubiquitous

[prolibytherium]

There's a LOT of things people do wrong when constructing fantasy beliefs in pantheons of gods, but one of the more specific is having only one god related to fertility and it kind of being just a horny sex thing.

Like you'll have one in the entire bunch whose sphere is listed as fertility and it's basically like Yeah this is the sex one. She's always depicted naked (but not TOO naked because censorship and/or the writer's own skittishness). She's going to have the exact body type epitomized in contemporary western beauty standards and there's usually no chance in hell that she's gonna be fat (unless MAYBE they're referencing 'venus' figurines). Her thing is fertility, which means having sex and making babies. Might be a goddess of beauty or love or marriage too, because these are kinda sex things, but that's probably it. And yeah that sort of thing is virtually nonexistent in real life.

Like the concept of fertility is so fundamentally important to the function of most societies in human history in ways that it is just Not in industrialized imperial core countries. Most people are getting food from stores, and not having to worry about harvesting crops or breeding livestock or foraging for food or having enough animals to hunt, so fertility only really comes up as a concern if you're trying to have kids (and there is certainly societal pressure to have children, but your wellbeing and survival is rarely going to Depend on it). And I think writing only from that perspective and not even trying to learn about WHY fertility is so conceptually important is why you see this trend.

There's no absolute universal statement about how people believe in gods but it's broadly accurate that systems with many deities will Usually have more than one deity associated with fertility, and these associations will certainly include human reproduction but also the fertility of livestock/hunted animals, plants, the land itself.

Some fertility deities may also be heavily associated with seasonal changes or environmental factors that agriculture or foraging is dependent on (spring/summer/fall, seasonal rains, seasonal flooding, rain itself, sunlight, good soil, rivers, wetlands, etc). Some certainly might be related to love, marriage, sex, and beauty, but that's VERY RARELY going to be the sole way the concept of fertility is embodied. And they'll often will have other associations not directly about fertility, or related to fertility in culturally specific ways.

[ms-demeanor]

Friends, I think we need to talk about Covid.

I want to get a few caveats out there before I start:

I am aware that there are people who need to exercise extreme caution about Covid; I live with someone who has two solid organ transplants and who is at the most immune compromised level of immune compromised. *I* have to be extremely cautious about covid.

Masking does prevent a certain level of transmission, and people who think they may have covid should mask and people who are concerned that they may be at high risk for covid should mask.

You should be vaccinated and boosted with the most recent vaccines that are available to you; covid is highly transmissible and very serious, you do not want to get covid and if you do get covid you don't want it to be severe and if you do get covid you don't want to give someone else covid and up-to-date vaccinations are the best way to reduce transmission and help to prevent severe cases of Covid.

We should be testing before going to any gatherings, and informing people if we test positive after gatherings, and testing if we suspect we have been exposed.

It is bullshit that there aren't good protections for workers who have covid; you should not be expected to go to work when you are testing positive

It is bullshit that people who are testing positive are not isolating for other reasons; if you have Covid you should not be going out and exposing other people to it even if you are experiencing mild symptoms or no symptoms.

We do need better ventilation systems for many kinds of spaces. Schools need better ventilation, restaurants need better ventilation, doctor's offices and hospitals and office buildings need better ventilation and better ventilation can reduce covid transmission.

I want to make it clear that Covid is real and there are real steps that individuals and systems can take to prevent transmission, and that there are systems that are exerting pressures that needlessly expose people to covid (the fact that you can lose your job if you don't come in when you're testing positive, mainly; also the fact that covid rapid tests should be ubiquitous and cheap/free and are not).

All of that being said: I'm seeing some posts circulating about how we're at an extremely high level of transmission and the REAL pandemic is being hidden from us and, friends, I'm pretty sure that is just incorrect and we're spreading misinformation.

I'm thinking of this video in particular, in which the claim is made that "your mystery illness is covid" in spite of negative tests. The guy in the video says that there's nothing else that millions of people could be getting a day, and that he predicted this because a wastewater spike in December meant that there was a huge spike in cases.

I've also seen people saying that deaths are where they were in 2021-2022, and that we're still at "a 9/11 a week" of excess deaths and friends, I'm not seeing great evidence for any of these claims.

I know that we (in the US, which is where the numbers I'm going to be citing are from) feel abandoned by the CDC and the fact that tracking cut off in May of 2023. But that only cut off for the federal tracking.

I live in LA county and LA county sure as shit is still tracking Covid.

If you want a clearer picture, you can see the daily case count over time compared to the daily death count:

Okay, you might say, but that's just LA.

Alright, so here's Detroit:

Right, but maybe that's CDC data and you don't trust the CDC at this point.

Okay, here's fatalities in New York tracked through New York's state data collection:

It's harder to toggle around the site for South Dakota, but you can compare their cases and hospitalizations and deaths for early 2022

To cases and hospitalizations and deaths from early 2024

And see that there's really no comparison.

Okay, you might say, but people are testing less. If they're testing less of course we're not seeing spikes, and they're testing less because fewer tests are available.

Alright, people are definitely testing less than they were in 2021 and 2022. Hospitalization for Covid is probably the most clear metric because you know those people have covid for sure, the couldn't not test for it.

Here are hospitalizations over time for LA:

Here are hospitalizations over time for New York:

As vaccination rates have gone up, cases, deaths, and hospitalizations have gone down. It IS clear that there are case spikes in the winter, when it is cold and people are indoors in poorly ventilated spaces and people are more susceptible to respiratory infections as a result of cold air weakening the protection offered by our mucous membranes, and that is something that we will have to take precautions about for the forseeable future, just as we should have always been taking similar precautions during flu season.

So I want to go point-by-point through some of the arguments made in that video because I'm seeing a bunch of people talking about how "THEY" don't want you to know about the virus surge and buds that is just straight up conspiracism.

So okay, first off, most of what that video is based on is spikes in wastewater data, not spikes in cases. This is because people don't trust CDC data on cases, but I'd say to maybe check out your regional data on cases. I don't actually trust the CDC that much, but I know people who do tracking of hospitalizations in LA county, I trust them a lot more. Wastewater data does correlate with increases in cases, but this "second largest spike of the entire pandemic" thing is misleading; wastewater reporting is pretty highly variable and you can't just accept that a large spike in covid in wastewater means that we're in just as bad a place in the pandemic as we were in 2022. We simply have not seen the surge of hospitalizations and deaths that we would expect to see in the weeks following that spike in wastewater data if wastewater data was reflective of community transmission.

The next claim is that "there is nothing else that is infecting millions of people a day" and covid isn't doing that either. The highest daily case rates were in January of 2021 and they were in the 865k a day range, which is ridiculously high but isn't millions of cases a day.

But what we can see is that when people are tested by their doctors for Covid, RSV, and the Flu, more tests are coming back positive for the Flu. Covid causes more hospitalizations than the other two illnesses, but to be honest what the people in the video are describing - lightheadedness, dizziness, exhaustion - just sound like pretty standard symptoms of everything from covid to the cold to allergies. There are lots of things your mystery illness could be.

The video goes on to talk about the fact that people aren't testing, and why their tests may be coming back negative and I'd like to point out that the same things are all true of Flu or RSV tests. People might be getting tested too early or too late; getting a negative test for the flu isn't a good reason to assume you've got covid, getting a negative test for covid isn't a good reason to assume you've got the flu, and testing for viruses as a whole is imperfect. There are hundreds of viruses that could be the common cold; there are multiple viruses that can cause bronchitis; there are multiple viruses that can cause pneumonia, and you're not going to test for all of these things the moment you start feeling sick.

He then recommends testing for multiple days if you have symptoms and haven't had a positive test (fine) and talks about the location of the tests (less fine). Don't use your rapid tests to swab your throat or cheek unless it specifically says that they are designed to do so. Test based on the instructions in the packet.

He points out that the tests probably still pick up on the virus because they're not testing for the spike protein, they're testing for the RNA (good info!)

The video then discusses something that I think is really key to this paranoia about the "mystery illnesses" - he talks about how covid changes and weakens your immune system (a statement that should come with many caveats about severity and vulnerability and that we are still researching that) and then says that it makes you more susceptible to strep or mono and that "things that used to clear in a day or two now hit you really hard."

And that's where I think this anxiety is coming from.

Strep throat lasts anywhere from three days to a week. A cold takes about a week to clear. The flu lasts about a week and can knock you on your ass with exhaustion for weeks depending on how bad you get it. Did you get a cough with your cold? Expect that to take anywhere from three to eight weeks to clear up.

I think that people are thinking "i got a bad virus and felt really sick for a week and haven't gotten my energy back" but that just sounds like a bad cold. That sounds like a potent allergy attack. That doesn't even sound like a bad flu (I got a bad flu in 2009 and thought i was going to straight-up die I had a fever of 103+ for three days and felt like shit for three days on either side of that and took six weeks to feel more like myself again).

Getting sick sucks. It really, really sucks. But if you're getting sick and you're testing for covid and it's coming back negative after you tested a few times, it's almost certainly not covid.

The video then says "until someone provides evidence that it's not covid, it should be assumed to be covid because we have record levels of covid it's that simple" but that's not simple. We don't have record levels of covid and he hasn't proved it. We have record high levels of wastewater reports of covid, which correlates with covid cases but the spike in wastewater noted in december didn't see a spike with a corresponding magnitude of cases in terms of either hospitalizations or deaths, which is what we'd have seen if we had actual record numbers of covid.

He says that if you want to ignore this, you'll get sick with covid, and that about 30-40% of the US just got sick with covid in the last four months (which is a RIDICULOUSLY unevidenced claim).

He says that we need to create a new normal that takes covid into account, which means masking more often and testing more often and making choices about risk-avoidant behaviors.

Now, I don't disagree with that last statement, but he prefaces the statement with "it doesn't necessarily mean lockdown" and that's where I think the alarmism and paranoia is really visible here. We are so, so far away from "lockdown" type levels that it's absurd to discuss lockdown here.

What I'm seeing right now is people who are chronically ill, people who are immune compromised, and people who are experiencing long covid (which may not be distinct from other post-viral syndromes from severe cases of flu, etc, but which may be more severe or more notable because of the prevalence of covid) are talking about feeling abandoned and attacked and left behind by society because covid is still out there, and still at extremely high levels.

I am seeing people who feel abandoned and attacked because the lgbtq+ events they are attending don't require masking. I am seeing people who are claiming that it is eugenicist that their schools don't have a negative test policy anymore.

And this comes together into two really disconcerting trends that I've been observing online for a while.

The claim that the pandemic is still as bad as it's ever been and in fact may be worse but we can't know that because "they" (the CDC, the government, capitalist institutions that want you back in the office, the university industrial complex that wants your dorm room dollars) are covering up the numbers and

Significant grievance at the fact that people are acting like number one is not true and are putting you at risk either out of thoughtlessness (because they don't realize they're putting you at risk) or malice (because they don't care if the sick die).

And those things are a recipe for disaster.

I think I've pretty robustly addressed point one; I don't think that there's good evidence that there's a secretly awful surge of covid that nobody is talking about. I think that there are some people who are being alarmist about covid who are basing all of their concern on wastewater numbers that have not held up as the harbinger of a massive wave of infections.

So let's talk about point number two and JK Rowling.

Barnes and Noble is not attacking you when it puts up a Hogwarts Castle display in the lobby. Your favorite youtuber isn't trying to hurt you when they offhandedly mention Harry Potter.

If you let every mention of Harry Potter or every person who enjoys that media franchise wound you, you are going to spend a lot of your time wounded.

People are not liking Harry Potter at you.

Okay.

People are also not not wearing masks at you.

You may be part of a minority group that experiences the potential for outsized harm as a result of majority groups engaging in perfectly reasonable behaviors.

There are kind, well-meaning, sensible people who go out every day and do something that may cause you harm and it's not because they want to hurt you or they don't care about whether you live or die, it is because they are making their own risk assessments based on their own lives and making the very reasonable assumption that people who are more concerned about covid than they are will take precautions to keep themselves safe.

We are not at a place in the pandemic where it is sensible to expect people with no symptoms of illness to mask in public as a matter of course or to present evidence of a recent negative test when entering a public building in their day-to-day life.

I think now is a really good time to sit down and ask yourself how you expect things to be with covid as an endemic part of our viral ecosystem. I think now is a good time to ask yourself what risk realistically looks like for you and for people who are unlike you. I think now is a good time to consider what would feel "safe" for you and how you could accomplish feeling safe as you navigate the world.

I'm probably going to continue masking in most indoor spaces for years. Maybe forever. There are accommodations that SHOULD be afforded to people who have to take more precautions than others (remote learning, remote visits, remote work, etc.), and we should demand those kinds of accommodations.

But it is going to poison you from the inside out if you are perpetually angry that people who don't have the same medical limitations as you are happy that they get to go shopping with their faces uncovered.

So now I want to talk to you about my father in law.

My father in law had a bone marrow transplant in 2015. That's the most immune compromised you can get without having your organs swapped out.

The care sheet for him after the transplant was a little overwhelming. The list of foods he couldn't eat was intimidating and the limitations on where he could go was depressing. It cautioned against going to large events, it recommended outdoor gatherings where possible but only if he could avoid sunlight and was somewhere with no history of valley fever. It said that he should wear masks indoors any time he was someplace with poor ventilation and that he should avoid contact with anyone who had an illness of any kind, taking special note to avoid children and anyone recently vaccinated for measles.

It was, in short, pretty much what someone immune compromised would need to do to try to avoid a viral infection. Sensible. Reasonable. Wash your hands and social distance; wear masks in sensitive contexts and don't spend time in enclosed places with people who have a communicable illness.

This is what life was always going to be like for people who are severely immune compromised, and it was always going to be incumbent upon the person with the illness to figure out how to operate in a society that is not built with them in mind.

It is not the job of every parent I encounter to tell me whether their child has been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months. That isn't something that people need to do as part of their everyday life. However it IS my responsibility to check with the parents I'm hanging out with whether their children have been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months so I know if it's safe for my immune compromised spouse to be around them.

If you want an environment in which you feel safe from covid, at this point in the pandemic (when the virus is endemic and not spreading rapidly as far as we can see from case counts) it is your responsibility to take the steps necessary to make you feel safe. Some of those steps will involve advocating for safety improvements in public spaces (again, indoor ventilation needs to be better and I'm personally pretty extreme about vaccination requirements; these are things we should be discussing in our school board meetings and at our workplaces), some of those steps will involve advocating for worker protections, guaranteed sick time, and the right to healthcare. But some of the things you're going to need to do to feel safe are going to come down to you.

If you are concerned about communicable diseases you have to be realistic about the fact that our society doesn't go out of its way to prevent communicable diseases - norovirus among food service workers pre-pandemic is pretty clear evidence of that. You are going to have to be proactive about your safety rather than expecting the world to act like Covid is at 2021-2022 levels when it is measurably not.

[problemnyatic]

Once again I am apocalyptically gobsmacked at just how ubiquitous gacha games seem to be these days, especially among young queer folks. I thought we all agreed that they're extremely predatory cash grabby rigged gambling skinner boxes with nothing to provide that something plucked from the indie scene can't do with galaxies more heart and less profit motive???? Literally why are all of you prancing around in the manipulative gambling addiction engine when there is an even bigger sea of unique and interesting character designs, settings, narratives, and gameplay experiences right there (even for free in many cases!!!!!!!!!!) on itch.io

[rorschachisgay]

i wish there was some nuance between "everyone has to love the word queer" and "if you don't like it you are a terf automatically". because the reality is i don't identify with the word queer and i never have. as a kid i was aware of it as a slur and as a teenager i started to understand it in an academic concept first (as in Queer Theory) but i didn't identify with it because in my mind it was like, a clinical, academic word. and then later as i got older it became an increasingly prevalent point of conflict around me.

im not arguing that terfs dont dislike queer as a group term, though speaking from a british perspective the majority of them here are very focused on removing the T from LGBT over arguing about queer as a term at all, so it doesnt really feel like a particularly important form of conflict over what is a very targeted erasure of trans identity Specifically.

and thats kind of partially why i struggle to identify with the term Queer. it is not specific. it does not describe or capture my identity. lately i have found much more identity in words like fag, faggot, transexual, which do relate directly to my specific identities and have a very long history in the community. and additionally, won't get fuckin sold back to me by coke.

like that's really all Queer feels like to me now, something that has now been packaged up as an easily marketable buzzword to be printed on t-shirts at Primark or used meaninglessly by Disney to pretend they care. it does not refer to the aspects of my identity that matter to me, it's not something that i ever claimed for myself, and now i am continually getting told that if i don't identify with it im bigoted against myself and my siblings.

"queer was reclaimed by everyone, it was reclaimed in the 80s". i actually don't feel like someone else gets to decide this for me? im not going to lie and pretend it was never used as part of the campaign for equality for decades and decades, it obviously has a crucial place in history, but now in popular culture it has become like. ubiquitous.

like ive said before i think words like fag and dyke can be used in a way that reflects our communal family and is a sign of camaraderie and that's also true of queer, but with those words it's extremely understandable when someone isn't comfortable with them and when someone doesn't want to identify with queer it's treated as a sign they're in the wrong.

idk this is so far from being a crucial issue it's barely worth talking about but i just really struggle with being told that i am in the wrong because i have my own complicated feelings about a word with a complicated history. in the grand scheme of things it's NOT that important but it does grate on my nerves to be told that theres zero room for any kind of debate or alternate opinion in this. like i just wish we didn't have to be so black and white as if the issue has no grey area or room for personal expression at all.

[theminecraftbee]

some smallishsona social links i've thought up:

XIII (DEATH): zombiecleo. i know this is the obvious choice but also i'm not immune to obvious choices. cleo is a "florist" that joe knows. florist is in the world's biggest scare quotes; between the fact they're the one who's willing to give the team weapons and fence stuff they got from the other world, and also the conspicuous full-body burn scars, joel is VERY willing to bet that cleo is not, in fact, a florist. he's not stupid though. he's not about to like, ask if she's in the yakuza or something. because then they would kill him. he is ALREADY unwillingly at constant risk of death by shadow monster, he doesn't need yakuza coming after him, thanks.

cleo's social link starts out about their begrudging willingness to do joe a favor by handing high-schoolers various weaponry, but also their continued attempts to explain that they're making a mistake. (joel KNOWS okay it's not HIS fault there's a demon in his head and his life is full of tarot cards now, give him a break.) however, as the social link continues, it reveals details of cleo's life, the story of how they ended up with those burn scars, and how they can move past the tragedies of their past.

V (HIEROPHANT) xisuma. this one feels a little obvious, went back and forth on whether this should be tfc instead but landed on xisuma. a man joel meets in a tea shop who is very concerned about joel's mental state, considering how joel came to town in the first place. joel thinks this is extremely rude, thanks, especially since if it hadn't been for the fact it was tea, not alcohol, joel would be half-convinced xisuma had been trying to drink his problems away.

the social link focuses on xisuma trying to mentor joel very badly, and also the reveal that part of why xisuma is so concerned for joel is that he wants to make up for his failures to take care of his younger brother. at the end of the social link, xisuma starts to reconcile with his brother and family, and joel maybe reluctantly admits it's nice to have an adult with nothing supernatural going on with them that's somewhat concerned for him. not that he needs supervision or anything, but...

XVI (TOWER): doc. was going through the suggestions people gave me and was surprised to realize just how UBIQUITOUS this was as a suggestion. however, yeah, this fits his character archetype to a t. doc is a disgraced scientist who is willing to give joel his inventions to test; joel's courage social stat needs to be like a 4 before he can even initiate this social link, and joel first finds out about doc from rumors in town about a madman scientist who got someone killed in a lab accident. the inventions provide various perks in battle, though, and frankly by the point in the story joel has high enough courage to start this one his attitude is starting to become "fuck it we ball", so.

doc's social link starts with doc leaning into his terrifying reputation. however, as the social link continues, it becomes clear doc is actually trying to make a working version of his clean fuel generator that couldn't possibly ever cause an explosion like the one he faced again. in the end, it's revealed the original design was sabotaged, and there was nothing doc could have done to prevent the tragedy--except, maybe, be willing to share his plans with others to catch the sabotage, because joel helps doc figure that out.

this social link MAYBE has some thematic relevance. don't worry about it.

I (MAGICIAN): scar. one of joel's earliest social links and teammates, i'm debating if he was one of the people who was teamed with grian before joel arrived. scar himself has a largely magic-based garu persona. he's also the party's early healer, although he later gets supplanted in this role when impulse joins as the actual party healer, and his build is actually more focused on heavy-hitting magic and status effects. (think ann, or reload mitsuru). i think if i go with my current theme for the team's personas (mythological lovers/mythological figures related to love or bonds), i might make his persona majnun?

anyway, he's very VERY scar, a fast-talking, smooth-playing, optimistic kind of guy, who DEFINITELY won't end up having a mid-story breakdown about whether or not he's wanted or needed on the team, absolutely not, no way, it's not like that's the magician's role in a persona game or anything. as a social link i think scar's social link is about him dragging joel into his school black market schemes and the two of them hitting it off during this, but also, a bit, about scar confiding his loneliness and feelings of inadequacy as something more than the comic relief. he's one of the earliest available social links, second only to skizz, and ends up being one of joel's closest links, magical tarot powers be damned.

VII (CHARIOT): skizzleman. joel's earliest social link, who develops a persona thanks to joel having to rescue him from the other world. a cheerful, friendly guy with a slight sense of distance under the surface, skizz works to keep himself strong and the people around him happy, sometimes to the point of excluding his own emotions. he's an agi user, although his persona is largely focused on physical skills rather than magic (he's the team's physical heavy-hitter), and i might make his persona patrolcus? (all of these personas are things you can argue with me, btw.)

skizz's social link is about him trying to find ways to lighten the moods of the other people in joel and skizz's apartment building who were moved in there because they didn't have elsewhere to stay, and his ability to remain cheerful despite often being rejected in this. it's also a social link about digging more into the history that lead to skizz feeling alone enough to be Vanished and in need of rescue. because he's so plot-central in that way, though, his actual SOCIAL LINK is more lighthearted shenanigans about the various schemes skizz comes up with to try to get other people to cheer up, and eventually ends with joel and the others turning it around to give skizz that same cheerful stuff.

anyway these are the guys i've definitively assigned to what social link now i am having SO MUCH FUN with this au,

[transmascutena]

Okay a bit related the awful discourse happening right now I would like to say that interpreting Anthy as thousands of years old is just... okay I wouldn't say it's impossible but it feels like such a strange thing to be so ubiquitous in the fandom as opposed to a niche interpretation. Anthy is Utena's age when Utena first meets her. I've never seen a reason for why she's Utena's age in one flashback but is somehow eternally 14. Anthy and Dios's flashback is probably the main reason this reading exists at all, but I think it's safe to say this scene doesn't tie itself to any specific time period and is also not completely literal? I think timeline of the series is actually extremely condensed compared to most peoples interpretations when you consider that Tokiko (who got to age and is still alive at the time of the main plot) and Mikage worked on the perpetual motion machine which plays a huge part in the duels.

Am I making sense?? Does this cohere?? I just hate how gross Anthy is able treated by some fans while they defend it with an incomplete headcanon that doesnt even suit the series very well. My main problem with the reading isnt even the timeline, its that it does Anthy a wild disservice! Shes a child! Shes not an immortal being whos existed for centuries, shes 14! Akio isnt either, for that matter. Propping him up as an all powerful god of patriarchy actively works against the series' conclusions about him as a pathetic manchild who can only have power when its as a figurehead chairman. Thanks for listening to me ramble a bit!!

thank you! just saw this take too and it's one of my most hated interpretations of the show. "anthy is a 1000 year old in the body of a child" as a literal take (as opposed to like. she feels that way because of the nature of her abuse) is so . bad. always used to justify hating her for some shit that is very easily explained by the fact that she is a child. or to say that her and akio's age gap doesn't mean anything. or to say that there is a weird age gap between her and utena when, like you said, they've been the same age in every scene they're in together, including back when they're children. taking the flashback with dios and anthy completely literally as taking place hundreds of years ago, while simultaneously arguing that all of akio's current abuse is strictly metaphorical is just. an incredibly stupid way to read the show.

[lakesbian]

“Even my most loyal. Bitch of a thing to do. Not the actual procedure of sticking the things inside their heads. After the first twenty, I could do the surgeries with my eyes closed. Literally. I actually did a few that way.”

i'm sure there's at least some of it out there that i'm not aware of, but worm is genuinely the only superpowered media i can think of off the top of my head where technology-based superpowers feel this meaningful. tinkers in worm aren't just people toting around sci-fi weapons that feel ubiquitous in the setting, they're the only people who have those weapons, and they have them because they're breaking the rules for how technology should work on a very fundamental and unnerving level. i would like to hear someone with more complete knowledge of the genre at large talk about this (@artbyblastweave ?) because something about how tinkers are written in worm feels special to me. like, from my not-very-into-cape-media PoV it feels like in most other works people w/ the tech-based powers aren't explicitly doing anything special--it's typically presented as if what they're doing is fully plausible within the normal bounds of the universe in question, and their reliance on it might even make them less interesting or more vulnerable than people with "real" superpowers. batman, iron man, etc. and worm sidesteps this entirely by not only giving tinkers extremely inventive, iconic, and powerful toolkits, but by constantly casually reinforcing that what they're able to do is just as unnatural as someone shapeshifting or shooting lasers. bakuda doing brain surgery with her eyes closed! riley making functioning blood replacement out of shit she scrounged up in her kitchen! it doesn't matter if you take the tech away, because their schtick as a cape isn't having the money to put together a purportedly-regular power suit or bag of gadgets, it's having the ability to build a bomb with a couple of nails and the lint in their pocket in the 5 minutes someones back was turned. i simply cannot go back to media where people with gadget-based cape identities don't textually have inhuman capabilities with technology after reading worm, because worm just Does It Better

[calebwittebane]

this is a random observation but i looooooove it when a very pretentious person with actually very little of value to say is going on an inane rant and they start doing the Repetition For Emphasis thing. you know, like "THIS is why we have to [x]. THIS is why we have to [y]. THIS, is why we have to [z]", that sort of thing. like they're giving an impassioned world-changing speech. when in reality theyre either talking about absolutely nothing and getting waaaay too self-important about it, or just don't know how to compile the thoughts into something coherent without having to restart the sentence over and over for no good reason. because, surprise, extreme emphasis of the sort only works if what you're saying actually warrants it, otherwise it's impossible to take seriously. anyway yeah the other day i saw (not for the first time, i'd seen the whole thing ages ago) a clip of lily orchard's original "steven universe is garbage" video where she goes off about The Evils Of Rebecca Sugar in that manner. its crazy. but that's just an example i'm giving you, as the stylistic choice is quite ubiquitous amongst members of the "ridiculous fool with an inexplicably large platform" community. and it cracks me up every time. like fuuuuuuck you really told them!!! you really told us! i'm getting fus ro dah'd by the sheer POWER of your statements about whatever this bullshit is. shouldve been adding those boom sound effects from the my name is skyler white yo edit. it's like the youtuber's "no. fuck this. fuck you."

[delta-orionis]

i'm on pc for a change and i just looked at your askblog AND OMG THAT IS SO PRETTY?????

it looks so good and the little interactive details? so cool so cool i don't know how hard it was to make it look like this but it definately paid off

pc users are eating so much better than mobile

I'm glad you like it!! It was a lot of fun to put together. I know most people use tumblr on mobile these days and won't ever get to see desktop themes, but I've always really liked custom tumblr themes and I try to use them on all of my blogs.

This theme was pretty easy to set up, I used the theme "Glitch" by glenthemes. They have a ton of other pretty themes in their portfolio as well.

(Full disclosure, I was inspired to use this theme after I saw it used on the blog ask-jewels-against-the-sea, I thought their setup was really pretty. Hopefully they don't think I'm copying them, I just thought their theme was very nice.)

Also, it's worth mentioning for people who are newer to tumblr/only ever use it on mobile, but setting up custom desktop themes is extremely easy. While on desktop, go to your blog's settings page, scroll down to "Custom Theme", toggle the "Enable Custom Theme" button ON, and then click "Edit theme".

It will open your blog's theme customization page, which looks like this:

Settings are on the left, and a live preview of your theme is on the right. (Any changes you make to your theme aren't reflected on your actual blog until you hit the blue "Save" button.)

Tumblr has a few first-party themes in the "Browse themes" tab you can use, but most of them are pretty limited, and a bunch cost real money (ew). There are literally HUNDREDS of custom themes that people have made that are completely FREE. They're not that hard to find if you know where to look; you can literally just type "Custom Tumblr Theme" into the Tumblr search bar or Google. A lot of people have portfolios with live previews of all of the themes they've created, with links to the HTML code. Also if there's a specific theme from someone's blog that you want to use, almost all themes have a "Theme" button you can click that leads to the artist's portfolio:

Installing the theme is literally as easy as copying and pasting. Portfolios and live theme previews usually have a "code" button you can click that will take you to the raw HTML of the theme.

Select the entire code by hitting CTRL+A, and copy it.

Then go back to your theme customization page and click on the grey "Edit HTML" button under "Custom Theme".

It will open up the HTML editor tab, which looks like this.

All you need to do is hit CTRL+A again to select the code that's currently there, delete it, and paste the code from your clipboard into the editor. Then hit the green "Update Preview" button to update the live theme preview on the right so you can see how it looks.

Most themes require zero knowledge of HTML to use. If you click on the back arrow, it will take you out of the HTML editor, and back to the theme customization tab. Scroll down to the "Theme Options" header.

Here you can change the colors, fonts, toggle settings on and off, upload background or sidebar images, etc etc. The settings of some themes allow you to get very granular with the customization, with custom fonts/image sizes/colors for different elements of the theme, so you can make your theme unique.

Once you're satisfied, hit the blue "Save" button and the theme will be reflected on your blog.

I highly recommend looking around for a custom theme you like and adding it to your blog, it's a lot of fun!!! I've been on tumblr for over a decade and custom themes used to be completely ubiquitous; everyone wanted to have a unique theme that reflected their personality and interests. Themes are a very fun form of self-expression. Even if most people these days won't see your desktop theme, it's a nice little treat for yourself when browsing your own blog, so make it something that you enjoy.

[fakecrfan]

Hey so, weird thought about trans healthcare but stick with me. Right now gender affirming surgeries have an extremely high satisfaction rate. I think as they become more accepted and ubiquitous, the satisfaction rate is going to go down.

No, this isn't me being anti-trans. Hear me out: I think someone who is asked "what is your level of satisfaction with your knee surgery?" and someone who is asked "what is your level of satisfaction with your bottom surgery?" are likely hearing two fundamentally different questions.

The person who has a knee surgery feels no need to defend the right of knee surgeries to be performed. Why? Because knee surgery is a standard, ubiquitous, and socially accepted treatment. So someone being polled about their satisfaction levels after that surgery is going to give their satisfaction level for that particular surgery as opposed to feeling like they need to make a statement on all knee surgeries ever. Was anything botched? Was there a longer recovery time than the patient was told? Did the patient get an infection or other complication? Were the results even after full recovery not up to standard? Did they have to go in for a second surgery after complications with the first one? These are all common scenarios, so a lot of people can be dissatisfied or angry after a surgery that they wanted and still generally approve of.

Now, let's think about a trans person who has a gender affirming surgery. If they are asked "How satisfied are you with the procedure?" there is a serious chance that, due to the political climate, what they will interpret it as is "Do you feel like transitioning was a good choice? Do you feel like this surgery should exist?" Because after all, there is a significant chunk of the population that seriously thinks that trans healthcare should not be performed at all. As a result, I think patients who have these surgeries are motivated to report high satisfaction rates even if they had the same level of complications that a dissatisfied patient of knee surgery had. What does it matter if they got an infection, if they suffered way more pain than they thought, or if their expected recovery time was doubled? They're satisfied with the fact that they got to transition. Perhaps in the light of the possibility that these treatment options may not be available for others in the future, they rate the existence of gender affirming surgeries as a whole as opposed to rating their particular experience with a particular surgery.

Now of course, even if you've read everything I wrote just now, don't go internalizing it into your worldview or anything. Right now this is all speculation. I'd need to read more medical literature and figure out how satisfaction surveys are being conducted to see if this idea holds water, which I may do in the future.

Still, I'm putting this out there right now so if anyone sees a headline that says "TRANS REGRET 10 TIMES HIGHER THAN PREVIOUS SURVEYS SHOWED, ACCORDING TO NEW POLL" some time down the road, they can think about this and do a little digging to see what exactly the surveys are measuring.

[theboombutton]

I remain unreasonably annoyed that the word "flannel" has drifted to include pretty much anything plaid.

Proper flannel is woven wool with a distinct fluffiness created either by loosely-spun thread, or by intentionally scratching up the cloth after it's woven so that it's covered in little broken fibers. It's traditionally dyed plaid, but it doesn't have to be. It's strong, soft, and will hold warmth even when it's wet. It's the perfect fabric to wear while shoveling your driveway.

"Cotton flannel" shirts are not flannel - they're imitation flannel. They're the clothing equivalent of imitation crab, except if imitation crab became so ubiquitous that a lot of people just called it "crab", and didn't even realize that there was a real live animal called a crab that their version of "crab" was imitating. If imitation crab was regularly marketed as just crab, and everyone looked at you weird if you even brought up that imitation crab wasn't actually crab. If an entire region of the country had a stereotype for eating crab, but it wasn't even real crab, it was imitation crab, but oh it's their big Thing now, and you'd look like an extremely rude lunatic if you tried to explain to them that their cultural icon, their defining cuisine, wasn't actually real crab.

So instead you leave their posts without interacting, and rant on your own tumblr where no one will see you. And if they do, at least you're just chewing on your own walls instead of being confrontational in other people's notes.

[compacflt]

When it comes to historical research, do you research for things that DON'T exist? For example, foods that are common now but didn't exist in the average American restaurant or grocery in the '80s or '90's? Words, phrases, and entire concepts that are commonly accepted today but unheard of to the average American when Mav and Ice were at Top Gun?

Your writing is so unbelievably good.

not really because I don't care about food, I care about the literary device that is "taking communion." i.e. it doesn't matter what they eat, it only matters that they're eating together, for the plot.

And, okay, showing my little-kid bias, but was there actually stuff in grocery stores in the 80s/90s that wouldn't be there today/vice versa? brands might change, like okay Pringles might not exist but you still have potato chips; and obviously specialty stuff like what you find in your average Asian market might not be commonplace, but, like, were the 90s all that different from today, American-food-wise? its my assumption that they weren't, but I also wasn't alive in the 90s, so. Um, ectocooler Hi-C, maybe? that's the one 90s food I know.

attitudes of course are what change. today's concept of being so QUICK to publicly label sexual identities would be extremely foreign, for instance. obviously people did label their sexualities in the 80s & 90s, people were definitely calling themselves bisexual and such, but probably not the people ice & mav would be hanging out with, in the Reagan-era navy. which is what my fics are about. that's the whole point.

and, also, COMMUNICATION changes. I have never used a payphone in my whole life so I actually have no idea how they work. but they were ubiquitous "back then," and lend themselves to amazingly interesting conflict (omg I don't have enough change to call my boyfriend maverick who's mad at me!!!) which is why I lean on payphones so much in my writing. honestly, im gonna be real, the invention of the cell phone makes telling stories about miscommunication so much harder. instant-speed communication would make certain stories less interesting, which is why a lot of horror movies default to the "no cell service" trope to isolate their characters, or why some teen dramas have the characters reject cell phones on principle (Alyssa or James having a phone in 2017's "The End of the F***ing World" would solve most of their problems, which is why Alyssa smashes hers in the first five minutes and James basically says he views them as a cancer to society--if they had phones the story would be boring, so the writers took away their phones).

I also feel like people used to treat society differently "back then," i.e. Going Out was much more of a thing when there were 10 channels on TV and no one had cell phones, so you Went Out and had drinks & met strangers & interacted with general society to an extent im not sure we do anymore. So that experience is way more fun to write about in the 80s than today. (u can't see me but im seething with jealousy over ppl who were born in ~1965)

idk. im not sure I did a great job reproducing the zeitgeist of the 80s/90s in my fics, bc I wasn't there to have knowledge of what they were like. I got most of my presupposed knowledge about that time period from reading Calvin & Hobbes anthologies as a kid. oh well.

[mistswalker]

Genuine question!! You'd mentioned hating scholar runes and I keep looking for alternatives because they're so UNGODLY expensive (because of how recommended they are for builds). What recommendation would you have for a DPS build instead of Scholars? (@ratasum)

I'm trying to get more into endgame content so I really would love the advice!!

Hey there! I'm happy to help how I can. Unfortunately this is going to be one of those questions that has a longer and more beneficial answer as well as a shorter, more direct but less beneficial answer, so I apologize in advance and thank you for bearing with me lol. The short and direct answer is that there are many instances in which runes of the Eagle, the Pack, Strength, and Rage can perform just as well as Scholar for a fraction of the cost. And even when they don't meet the exact output, whichever one works best for your build will get you pretty darn close. Berserker and Ogre are other very solid DPS runes for condi/power hybrids and power DPS respectively, but they've become frequently recommended alternatives to Scholar and their price has risen nearly as high now.

That said, my longer answer is that there is no general direct substitute rune that will work better for all DPS builds all the time, but this is also part of what is wrong with the way that Scholar runes are ubiquitously recommended on meta build sites.

Every rune in gw2 has a fairly unique set of circumstances in which they function best, just as the different classes and specializations all have different benefits and limitations, and the key to a well optimized (or min-maxed) build is to play into a particular niche of combat as hard as you possibly can. Scholar runes provide a total of 175 power and (now) 225 ferocity in pure stat points, but their main claim to fame is their 6th slot bonus: "Increase strike damage by 5% while your health is above 90%".

For clarity, "strike damage" in gw2 refers specifically to power-based damage or "direct damage". Damage that can critically hit. It does not apply to condition damage. Strike damage is also mitigated by the target's armor and Toughness stat. Condition damage, on the other hand, is not.

Scholar runes became so recommended because of two misguided notions:

That "strike damage" amplifiers increase all outgoing damage dealt by the player, making them the most important "stat" to stack. And,

That the best defense is always killing something dead faster than it can hit you, and that if you ever take damage the answer is always "git gud". (People treating defensive stats as "training wheels" for gaming is certainly not unique to scholar-runes enthusiasts, but nothing displays it quite as potently as tying your stats to how often you can keep your HP at 10k/11k.)

The truth of the matter is that there is no shortcut stat to a solid build in this particular game, and it takes balancing a number of stats and fine-tuning traits and skills to optimize your build.

As an example, I'm going to use this Power Deadeye build copied from a popular raid build website. Full details can be seen at the link, but notably it uses full Berserker armor, Scholar runes, and sigils of Force and Impact. These are the final stats on the Power Deadeye build as given:

This build is noted by its creators as not being beginner friendly, and having a rotation which requires "extreme precision and pristine conditions". I cite this only to better illustrate that this build is intended to be the most optimal thief build for endgame content.

The rotation's main loop is as follows, and the skill screenshots' numbers are based on the attributes of the equipment given assuming the player is above 90% health. It is stated that Malicious Backstab must be used from behind.

This loop provides a maximum total of 15,464 direct damage, plus an additional maximum 5,288 condition damage from one loop. Accounting for the build's perpetual fury bringing critical chance to 99.33%, and the fury-increased critical damage of 270.47%, this increases the total direct damage of this loop to 41,545, and leaves us with a grand total of 46,833 damage per loop. Now, how close can we get to those numbers on that exact rotation without Scholar runes?

For this comparison, I swapped the Scholar runes for Runes of Strength. Also, noting that the Impact sigils were only giving their base 3% strike damage bonus since this build has no stuns or knockbacks to make use of its secondary feature, I exchanged the Sigil of Impact for Sigils of Strength to synergize with the new rune choice. [Rebuild Link] The sigil choice plays on the build's near-100% crit chance by giving a stack of might on each critical hit, and with the runes' increased Might duration, this means you will passively accumulate and maintain 15 stacks of might while in combat. So what do the numbers look like now?

In this version of the loop, we get 16,565 direct damage, and 10,418 bonus condition damage. When we account for critical hit the same way we did before, this amounts to 42,035, giving us a grand total of 52,453 damage dealt per loop. So in this instance, replacing Scholar Runes and Impact Sigils with Strength Runes and Strength Sigils gave this build a DPS increase from the recommended build.

Now, this doesn't mean that every build could be improved by those same changes, but there are often very few changes that would need to be made to adjust a build for the removal of Scholar runes. If nothing else, I hope this helps to illustrate how there is no one-size-fits all answer to runes, let alone to builds as a whole, no matter how popular a specific item is with metagamers.

The key to all builds, DPS or not, is synergy between elements. When equipment, traits, and skills build on each other rather than acting alone, you're going to find way better performance, and usually, have way more fun with your build.

[sleepymccoy]

I think the American who wrote saying 'we only have sweet pies' had a bit of a mental hiccup? Because savory pies are very much a thing here in the states. We call them pot pies, they're cheap frozen food, and they're like stew in a pastry crust. Not as good as pasty but still a popular option. Also the ubiquitous Hot Pocket is very much a savory hand pie, in this usamerican's opinion.

Look that makes more sense to me. I can appreciate culture weighting one way or the other but to the extent of ignoring all savoury pie? Seems extreme

Go on tho

[nereidprinc3ss]

babe I know it happens in a lot of languages. I just hope I'm not being too unnecessarily sensitive about this but, it kinda irks me because I feel like it's discriminative between genders because they're literally doing the same thing! What, is it like, "yeah, they're both confidants but she's a 'confidante', so beware, like she's less trustworthy."? I don't really know if it makes sense but it doesn't make sense to me that it is specifically stated in numerous languages when they're doing the same thing. With love and hugs 💙

Oh well idk, I’m not an authority on English let alone all the other languages it happens in! I was just saying it’s not exclusive to English because you specified that it was something that bothered you about the English language and it’s kind of a ubiquitous thing. But it is objectively discriminative, you’re right. Society is obsessed with gender, we always have been, so while I don’t think gendered language became the norm to denote some sort of overt female inferiority, I guess people thought it was important enough to know the gender of the subject of a sentence when speaking to differentiate words by gender. That’s probably because it was implied that women were less competent and less important so you wanted to know if someone was talking about a man or a woman. Male is seen as the default due to millennia of misogyny so if you didn’t specify that you were talking about a woman it would be assumed that you were talking about a man and I could see how confusion would arise if everyone assumed that and then were wrong. I think it’s unnecessary as you said an actor and an actress are doing the same thing in function, but it’s just become a rule of proper grammar unfortunately as misogyny is extremely deeply rooted in society, even our languages! But I completely agree it’s dumb and unnecessarily specific

[princeescaluswords]

Public vs. Private

There's an interesting discussion going on over on @elandrialore's blog that I think everyone should read, but I didn't want to derail the conversation any more than I already have, so I'm starting another post.

I think that a lot of the trouble we're having about fanfiction and other creative works and the criticism of said works comes from overreaching capitalism and the way it has contaminated all social interaction with the controlling concept of ownership. People believe that if they put the effort towards the creation of something it becomes theirs in perpetuity, which gives them the right to control how it is perceived, how it is reacted to, and how it is discussed. It is as if copyright -- which solely governs profit from intellectual work -- has metastasized into some universal and (hilariously) moral right to constrain how an audience experiences art.

As an old fogey, I partially blame the internet and technology. There used to be a pretty bright line between the Private -- actions which exist for which an individual is answerable only to themselves and the people they choose to involve -- and the Public -- actions which exist for anyone in the general mass of humanity who makes an effort to involve themselves. The rights of an audience member depend on the nature of the actions. To give a concrete example, if I am walking by a house where a person is playing the piano in the living room, and they are not doing it well, I should recognize it as a private action and keep my reaction to myself. If I walked up to the house, knocked on the door, and told the performer they sucked, it would be rude and crass. But if I am attending a concert, I am supposed to react, and I am free to react in a certain number of ways. I am able to clap or not clap, even boo if it is extreme, or write a report or comment evaluating the skill of the performer.

But on the internet now, we have people taking pictures of what they ate for dinner and sharing it with millions of people. We have parents sharing fights with their children on Facebook. In other words, we have people walking about the house, hearing the bad piano playing, recording it and sharing it with their ten thousand followers. The line between Public and Private has become blurred into near nonexistence.

Many of the arguments we're having about fanfiction today seem to me to arise out of people trying to apply mores about Private behavior to Public actions. (Make no mistake, by any definition, publishing a story on AO3 is a public act.) This is the basis of "don't like; don't read" or "I do this for free." Through the application of ownership to something it has never been before, they're trying to exert control.

It just doesn't work, and, more importantly, it's vital that it doesn't work. Public art serves a definite purpose in civilization beyond immediate pleasure, and for that service to be healthy, the audience has to be able to engage with it freely. You know how I know this? Minstrel shows.

In my profession, I work with a lot of music from the first half of the twentieth century, and minstrel music was very popular. Al Jolson is only the most well-known example. But it wasn't just done for profit. There were public performances of minstrel shows across the United States done by churches, by fraternal organizations, by schools. They propagated racists stereotypes absolutely, and they peddled a nostalgia for a United States that never existed so hard that it affected political elections. Yet, you won't see them today because eventually criticism of both the racism and the pseudo-nostalgia. Would it matter if the creators and performers of these shows -- not Al Jolson, but the ubiquitous local, said "don't like, don't read" or "we're doing this for free." No, and it shouldn't.

The idea that the creator has the expectation that they can perform a public act and control the reaction to that act is unbelievable and damaging in many ways. It leads not as they argue to the freedom of creators to create but to disconnection of the audience and the tyranny of the mob. No one, no one, posts a story on AO3 and doesn't want other people to read it, and so they will follow the trends that are popular, and without counterbalancing criticism, art becomes a tool of conformity rather than something that opens up experiences for an entire community. Again, because this ridiculous disclaimer remains necessary, no one is saying that an author can't create what they want and distribute it, but the audience, to be fully included, has to have the freedom to react to it, which the people who run AO3 recognize by having a comments section. How much effort the author put into it is irrelevant.