#it's just. this isn't some new concept to me. this is Super Basic American History.

[nero-neptune]

not to be black on main, but i don't think racism and/or right-wing 'leanings' are minor inconsequential things worth ignoring in the name of Working Class Solidarity™. like this isn't so much about luigi and whatever he (allegedly) did as it is about the response from (alleged) leftists. unlike many of you making posts like that, i live in the real world (while black). and in the real world, the politics of SO many americans start and stop with hating non-white (or specifically black) people, wherever they personally fall on the class ladder. this is why millions of poor and working class white americans will happily cut off their nose to spite their face if it means millions of nonwhite americans (of Any social class or income) are kept in 'their place'. this is a Big reason why reconstruction failed and the southern strategy succeeded. so, no, it's not something i can afford to look past for the Greater Good, actually. whole time, y'all are talking around it like it's a mild inconvenience, a teeny-tiny bump on the road towards some utopic class unity or whatever, as if racism isn't Fully Baked into politics isn't Fully Baked into classism in the U S of A. once y'all figure that out, something (like fixing this bullshit healthcare system) might actually get done lol

sorry if this complicates your easy 'this is how working class solidarity can still win' narrative, but life is complicated!

[ruleofbirds]

𝚍𝚎𝚟𝚕𝚘𝚐_𝟶𝟸.𝟷

Moa's Ark & Zealandia

https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/moas-ark-1990/series

Moa's Ark (1990s TV series) opening animation. It was during the 90's that scientists formulated the "Zealandia" protocontinent theory and complexity of how species migrated over time, putting the last nail in the coffin of the idea that everyone got a free ride over on a piece of Australia. Going through Aotearoa's natural history doco archives has been a lot of fun.

Hello again! I took a bit of a break in posting long- form updates, but I think there's enough on my mind for a second batch of posts this week. After that there will again just be small updates on the Instagram until May - when I may have some sort of concept media for the sim to show off. For now I'll aim for a focused peek into a couple of aspects of it as usual.

This post is going to be all about the Moa, the species that got me hooked on this project. It's also going to be about species variation, and the tension between scientific accuracy and visual accessibility.

Moa skeletal reconstitutions at Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand.

A couple of interesting facts about the moa;

-We currently classify them as nine species. Here is a full catalog of every time someone thought they'd found a new one:

-Within many species, female moa can be more than twice the size of males (yes, this is one reason so many moa "species" were identified)

-Moa are unique in that they had no wings (not even the kiwi's tiny t-rex stubs) and, thank goodness because so many NZ species can be traced back to evolving from Australian fauna, their closest past relatives are South American tinamous rather than the emu.

-They also got a bad wrap for their past perception as tall, emu- like, big dumb grass grazers. Actually, while they're nowhere near as smart as multi-sense-foraging kiwi, they could identify and feast on a whole variety of twigs, herbs, leaves and berries - most of which were found in the more common forest than grassland.

This is why they have a bulky build and head-forward posture (until kinda recently, museum curators tended to give them that tall, emu/giraffe like posture, even adding extra vertebrae for show.)

Whanganui Regional Museum (This isn't close to the worst examples)

So; how do I even begin to approach the scope, as well as potential uncertainty, of data we have on the Moa?

Here's one way: Oversimplification!

Screenshots from Godot editor & runtime previews for compatibility (web) mode and forward+ (basically more shaders) renderer. The camera is RTS- style; getting the runtime shots was a bit finnicky.

I've started to build low-poly models in Blender for the fauna, which in the future I'd love to rig for animation and get super technical with appearance variation. For now I'll focus on the system for placing them in the right biome and basic pathing behaviour, and the Moa will be a North Island giant moa based vaguely off this model for an AR national park exhibit: https://moaparkotorohanga.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/a-collection-of-moa-feedback-from-trevor-worthy-and-lizzy-perrett/

While I'm not working directly on the simulator for the next while, I am building this 2D tool to represent the moa's species variation; it is *incredibly* helpful to have just set up a system where I can add and edit instances of a broader Moa "class", and I'm looking forward to giving each species its visual character (the main creative liberty I'll be taking is colour coding from grey to brown to communicate which of New Zealand's islands each species populated, as well as their preferred biome (there's 3 main ones: subalpine mountain, wet podocarp forest, dry forest/ lowland)

Moa "collection" project at time of writing.

If this exercise has highlighted anything though, it's just how difficult it is to reduce life's complexities to a single shape that represents a single numeric value. Those who read my last posts may remember that any given moa species' size may have varied over time and with temperature, (generally bigger during ice ages and smaller out of them) along altitude, (generally bigger and bulkier higher up) and just within species based on how they adapted to any given place. Not to mention the relatively massive lady moa.

And since we're only working with what's left of them all - the only intact gizzard samples proving that whole diet theory, and most of the remains we have to work with, are those found in Pyramid Valley in Canterbury (a swamp with surrounding mosaic of vegetation and forest) - who knows how to truly depict what life was like tens of thousands of years ago.

From the Moa book by Quinn Berentson

A very cursed JavaScript "spreadsheet".

So, very long-winded post. I hope you found something interesting within! Something that made you think about nature's craziness maybe. I meant to get across just how much there is to scientific communication, and I barely touched on how I aim to keep the overall narrative in focus (or basically be aware of it.)

I can't wait to work on this more collaboratively, with folks who really know their stuff about ecology and the cultural aspects of Aotearoa - I think the potential for collaboration and education is what's keeping me going with this project.

Until next time ! - here's some of my highlights from a trip to the Zealandia ecosanctuary.

Kia hora te marino

Kia whakapapa pounamu te moana

Hei huarahi mā tātou i te rangi nei

Aroha atu, aroha mai

Tātou i a tātou katoa

Hui e! Tāiki e!

May peace be widespread

May the sea be like greenstone

A pathway for us all this day

Let us show respect for each other

For one another

Bind us all together!

[olderthannetfic]

I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?

--

Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.

Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.

The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.

There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.

We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.

That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)

Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.

Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.

A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.

--

The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.

New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.

Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.

But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.

In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.

--

There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.

Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.

In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.

A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.

(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)

--

Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.

A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.

--

Now... fandom...

I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.

As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.

People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.

A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.

--

Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.

But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.