#i'm true neutral

[amazonmishima]

Inspired by recent changes to the YTTD wiki

[mumble-muse]

Choosing Merlin’s full name for your modern au fic alignment chart

(insp)

[cinthgarden]

don't worry they're fine (sort of)

[arabella-strange]

not to "AND ANOTHER THING!!!" forever about the Wildmother here but — nature hates hubris. nature punishes hubris.

Oh you'd like to cross the ocean in an enormous steamliner and cut corners with the manufacturing to make money? Enjoy that iceberg

You're an imperiled masculine millionaire who thinks he can avoid safety regulations and go deep-sea crawling? At least your death from an insane pressure implosion will be quick

You're here to colonize an entire island and import a new species of cheap crop to harvest (via slave labor)? Lol, when your new crop collapses the ecosystem and becomes impossible to uproot in a span of ten years (as the indigenous population tried to tell you), it's your funeral buddy

Climbing the highest mountain and refusing to turn back at bad weather? Ignoring the evacuation orders simply because you think they're silly? Wanna pet that bison? Well I'll be sad but I won't be surprised

Nature is terrifying. Nature punishes hubris. And nature will win—unless there is nothing left.

[ozonecologne]

.

[suddencolds]

.~

[fayeandknight]

I don't think agility class is a good option for dogs struggling heavily with reactivity - particularly if they are constantly lunging at other dogs.

That is not to say that I think dogs struggling with that level of reactivity are bad dogs. Nor do I think they should be sequestered away in their homes and never allowed to be out in the world.

Heck I'm not even of the opinion that they shouldn't learn agility. Just that private lessons would benefit the dog more than a class setting while they are working through reactivity.

Because the thing is, agility is super stimulating for most dogs, whether participating or watching. Even more so if it's an intro class where the team is learning to navigate the equipment and handling. Additionally keeping the dog from going after others is stressful for everyone involved. And I just don't see it as a kind or fair setting to be introducing something as complex, and let's be honest - potentially dangerous - as agility.

I also don't think there's any shame in realizing that an agility class may be too much for where the dog currently is in working through reactivity and taking a step back. Dog training in all its flavors isn't always linear. But I do think it's important, for the people both handler and instructor, to ensure the dog is being set up for success even if it doesn't look the way we'd hoped it would.

Much love and compassion for folks working through reactivity with their dogs. Your dog is not a bad dog. You are not a bad handler. Y'all are working through something difficult and I wish you kindness and patience in your journey.

[tagswoman]

You are being autobalanced to evil team

‌

[girderednerve]

so i've been watching the olympics!

i ideologically reject the olympics & they should not be held. however, it is fun to watch sports on television, especially if you, like me, are a fan of weird sports that aren't televised often (equestrian sports!).

there are a lot of problems with equestrian sports, mostly that they're capital-intensive, which is to say that they're inaccessible & elitist. the big controversy this olympics relates to animal welfare, though. there have been scandals in the past, but this year, right before the olympic games, charlotte dujardin, a very famous & celebrated dressage rider, withdrew from competition pending an investigation for animal welfare by the FEI & british dressage federation after the release of a video that is at least two years old (age contested) of her repeatedly striking at the legs of a client's horse with a long whip during a training session. i will note that she has previously had to withdraw from an international competition after blood was found on her horse (they check bits & spurs every round). charlotte dujardin is famous & celebrated because she has had incredibly good, record-breaking results in international competition, despite her relatively young age (gold medalist in her 20s, when people remain competitive in this sport into their 60s). she also competed in international dressage wearing a riding helmet, which was not at all conventional in the 2010s, although it is now in part because of her influence. when she won her gold medals at the 2012 olympics, she was riding at home & was met with a massive swelling of national pride by british viewers.

international dressage competition was dominated by german riders (isabell werth is like, the queen mother of dressage basically), and there had just been a huge controversy about animal welfare centering on the practice of rollkur, a training method in which the horse's head is pulled in very close to their chest, which is a very unnatural way for a horse to move & involves a lot of force exerted on the bit(s) in the horse's mouth. i strongly agree that rollkur is bad and should not be done, but the public discussion about it immediately became extremely messy, because a) some fans were looking for a reason to discount german records & decry german horsemanship and b) we couldn't agree what rollkur actually is! the FEI said that you can't do rollkur, but that it's fine to use a "deep & round" training frame, which is, um, different, because it's not mean? which is nonsense, or at least very difficult to enforce by eye, but sort of understandable; i myself have spent plenty of time on a horse (my beloved friend, strudel the pony) who habitually ducks behind the bit & carries his head low & behind the vertical. while it's straightforward to identify & sanction extreme cases (e.g., patrik kittel's blue-tongued horse), it can be much harder to agree on other instances, keeping in mind that you only see a very small piece of a rider's general practice in competition. judges are supposed to penalize movements in which the horse's head is behind the vertical, but in practice they spent years penalizing carriage in front of the vertical more sharply & consistently (this has begun to shift in the last couple years, but the rollkur stuff was happening in like, 2010). this sport is an old, strange, slow-moving patchwork of styles, full of people who are deeply particular, territorial, & aesthetically conservative. there's also a huge variation in how horses themselves behave; they have character, personality, & preferences. none of which lessens the burden of responsibility on riders & people who work with horses to make sure that they are cared for well, but does make adjudicating an individual case complicated. of course, it's also intensely emotionally charged, because we are, & ought to be, outraged by animal abuse.

anyway the thing i'm trying to get at is that we don't have a cultural consensus on what animal welfare in equestrian sports ought to look like. i realize that sounds like rank apologia, which i am not trying to do; i have not watched the video of charlotte dujardin in the training session, because i don't have the stomach for it & am not interested in trying to argue about this one case. the bigger & more interesting issue to me is that i think there's a general cultural shift, in the sport & beyond it, around what we think is appropriate to ask from a horse. like i said, people have long careers in this sport, & it's culturally conservative on its own; i rode a couple times with a celebrated british rider whose father was responsible for determining which horses to care for & which to put down during world war ii (!!!), which obviously accompanied an extremely different attitude towards horses & the labor we expect from them than anything you might find in a modern barn. many of these determinations about equine welfare are being conducted on the public stage, by people who have never spent significant time around horses; the video of dujardin hitting a horse aired on good morning britain. there's also a vibrant, very opinionated amateur community, who have spent time with horses but aren't professionals. i do think there's a meaningful difference between having a horse who is your buddy & spending all day working with horses, having sort of done both; i don't think it's particularly edgy to say that you treat an activity differently when it's your job than when it's a thing you're doing for fun & stress relief.

when i was taught to ride, i was told (& of course believed!) that it's fine & appropriate to punch a horse with my stupid seven-year-old fists if they knocked me around with their big horse faces, which made me feel weird when kim raisner was banned from the german pentathlon team for same, but then she obviously was not seven. i'm not quite sure what i think about it; the argument in favor of smacking a horse is that they're big & dangerous if they don't have manners, & in my experience they didn't really care. i feel some shame & conflict about this now that i am years away from working with horses, but i also recall trying to make sure that the horses i was around knew me & weren't afraid of me. we had solid working relationships from my perspective, but of course i can't go back & ask the horses. increasingly, i think excellent animal welfare is probably just not compatible with large-scale competitive sport, or, perhaps, with a capitalist environment. hot take, i guess!

one thing i think about a lot is that while there obviously is money in dressage, there's not nearly as much money in it as there is in horse racing, which is, from my perspective, a hugely destructive & cruel industry for horses & for people. horses die racing. people die caring for them, almost all of them undocumented barn workers. dressage defines itself in opposition to this approach—many amateurs pride themselves upon the differences—but i'm not convinced that the kinder ideas we have now of how to coexist with animals scale with revenue-generating industry, even outside of racing.

anyway, it makes people uncomfortable, and it makes me uncomfortable too. i think we'll see some comparatively rapid change in the next five years or so. the future of equestrian sports in the olympics is in question, as the olympics desperately try to stay relevant & interesting to younger generations (do kids like, uh, breakdancing? skateboarding? metal bands???). there's also an image crisis more broadly. the olympic ideal has shifted over the years, but a lot of the people involved in planning the games have self-aggrandizing ideas about what they're doing & the utopian potential of sports. equestrian sports have a martial history, which commentary generally elides, but is revealing in its way about the historical purpose of the olympiad. if the public conversation is focused on how this sport, which is expensive to put on & pulls low viewership numbers, is a harm to horses (&, in the popular mind, is not so much a sport as an exercise in expensive sitting, cf. the comedy around the romney-owned dressage horse), then the whole facade is crumbling. i guess it's better for the IOC for us all to worry about charlotte dujardin's heavy whip hand than it is for us to ask why israel is competing, or how well the unhoused people of paris are faring during these expensive spectacles, but surely they'd rather we set aside those conversations to talk about how inspiring the whole games are.

[averlym]

@remylong :

[witchmd13]

made using this chart

[anders-hawke]

only mystra would go "yes i am the source of all of your problems and am the reason you couldn't reach your full potential <3 but now you're free of me so you can do that now <3 i'm so smart and nice and am definitely a good-aligned goddess!!"

[i-am-trans-gwender]

"Google is free"

True but I'd rather get an answer from a person with emotions then a website that turns a 30 word answer into an entire article while trying to stay as neutral as possible.

[lilunebriumplays]

i have been living inside of the character creator My Tavs and their Daisies

[brinnanza]

you guys know stuff can just be neutral right. like it doesn't have to be good or bad it can just Be ykwim like sometimes an experience is Weird but that doesn't necessarily imply that it was good or bad sometimes things are just so unfamiliar that the sheer novelty overrides having an opinion about it. sometimes you hear someone's died, but it's no one you knew or would ever know and it's so many degrees of separation from the source that they have no emotional investment in it either and that's not automatically a tragedy OR a relief it's just a statement of fact.

sometimes stuff just Is. and it's okay that it is.

[klanced]

I see where you're coming from, but also blorbo is different to everyone and we all had different experiences. I was in voltron but pidge was my blorbo, not lance, so I rarely saw him. And then I saw Yuuri everywhere whether I wanted to or not. Also, polls are not about accuracy, as much as we might think they should be. Life is a popularity contest. 🩵💙🩵💙🩵

my blorbo rankings contain multitudes. however, i am cognizant enough to recognize two things:

while lance is not my specific blorboest blorbo, i still rank him to be a more iconic blorbo than yuri. and so my vote for lance is still valid.

this poll is about most iconic blorbo. i like keith and allura more than i like lance, but i firmly believe that lance is voltron's most iconic character. i define "iconic" based on the following criteria: a) canon material; b) fandom experience and reaction; and c) impact on outsiders (the "did i see this character everywhere" standard). i heavily value points in the (b) category over points for (a) and (c).

lance's canon material sucks ass. however, the fandom's ability to 1) go crazy over lance anyway, and then 2) ability to extrapolate so heavily, insist on digging so deeply, and create so genuinely is impressive to me. and also incredibly hilarious. this is why i made the toxic iconity argument: i deeply respect the daily battles lance stans fought, both between themselves/the wider voltron fandom, and the constant enduring sisyphus-level uphill battle against the quality of the canon material. lance stans were able to create everything out of veritable nothingness, and i believe that deserves to be commemorated.