#it's such a tragedy because they're so good

[im-da-bronx]

This absolutely.

But I just want to say, as someone whos family currently gets the majority of their groceries from a food pantry:

Grocery stores work with local food banks and pantries. A good percentage of our food isn’t donated by people, but by grocery stores. If the grocery store throws out food, it’s because it wasn’t safe to give to the food pantry. Trust me. We get so many foods with “Sell by” dates on the day we get it.

Grocery stores aren’t throwing out food that could be given away. They are throwing out food that has the possibility of making someone sick. Sure, a lot of the food is probably ok to eat, but when it comes to food poisoning, it’s better to be extra safe than sorry, especially when food poisoning can cause lifelong chronic illnesses and death.

Some supermarkets work with local farmers in an effort to minimize food waste. Anything designated “unfit for human consumption” but not completely inedible will be used as food for livestock, and any completely inedible food that can will be composted. (This is the part where I remind you that consumers are the largest single contributor to food waste at 43%, and while businesses do contribute to 40% of food waste, this includes restaurants and food service companies alongside grocery stores).

The biggest reasons grocery stores limit what they donate are liability and logistics. Stores think that they can be sued if someone gets sick from food they donate, which means they tend to be overly cautious when throwing food away (as I stated earlier). However, the US has the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which legally protects donors (such as major chain grocery stores) so long as they meet certain criteria when donating food.

The second issue is logistics, meaning that grocery stores and food pantries might lack the ability to safely transport or store donable food, which leads to food being discarded when it would have been donated. This can mean they don't have enough refrigerated trucks, they don't have enough drivers, they have a limited amount of cold storage at the food pantry, or even that they simply don't have enough volunteers to help load or unload food.

It is important to keep in mind that there are a lot of people who recognize a problem, that just don't talk about the problem. Sometimes its because they don't care or don't know what to do, but a lot of the time the reason they're not talking about the problem is because they're actively working to fix or circumvent the problem. If you are concerned about how much food grocery stores throw away, volunteer with a food pantry to help transport food safely. And if you're wondering why you don't hear about this on the news, its because 1) most news agencies have some kind of agenda, and 2) there is a sense of shame at being unable to provide for your family, even if you're working full time. It's not something that people really talk about, which is a tragedy, because if you don't talk about it, how will you know where to go for help?

Anyway, TL;DR: while there are many things that our country meets with unnecessary violence, grocery stores donating to food pantries is not one of them.

I think it's stupid when people say political violence has no place in this country when our government uses violence against poor people every day. Why does a person sleep outside in the cold when the car dealership is heated all night? Why do people go hungry when grocery stores pack dumpsters with perfectly edible food? Because of the threat of violence. Because someone with a gun will show up if you even try it.

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/766688842914938880/wait-soif-the-only-things-making-companies-censor?source=share

So I've been keeping half an eye on the NSFW AI chatbot and image generation scene (because it's funny watching how fast they flare up and burn out), and the app store and payment processor thing is really evident here

Horny AI image generators can't go in app stores. Full stop. It generates pornography, there's no really getting around the artistic merit stuff, and anything that generates believable photographic styles can actually spit out literally illegal images (digital content which is indistinguishable from a real life photograph recording of a living child) if it's good enough. Users only have minimal control over if what they generate will comply with the ToS; if you ask a bot to give you an image of a "cute boy" it might give you a heartthrob pop star, a generic smiling toddler, or a shota with a huge dick. If the shota is against the ToS, you are now breaking a rule that you have no control over.

And becaues it's AI, it can't actually be filtered. The robot doesn't know what it's looking at, it can't generate an image and then make a judgement call about how that image applies with the ToS because it doesn't know what a ToS is and all it knows is that the image it generated from the "cute boy" prompt is the kind of image that is associated with the caption "cute boy".

App stores and the big payment processors don't want to deal with that mess, so these platforms will have apps that can be downloaded from their website or from discord, and weird sketchy ways to pay, like crypto or some small payment processor that you've never heard of and that sounds like a phishing scam.

Horny image gen platforms tend to be very short lived, and either rebrand as SFW platforms or completely shutter after only a few months. It's funny, but the tragedy is that this happens because of poorly moderated NSFW images, not because the images it generates suck.

****

Text does a little better, since it's copyright laws, not "we can't let people pass off recordings of child abuse as digitally generated art" laws that AI text tends to violate, and "horny is bad" as a social more is applied more strongly to visual material than to plaintext.

The bigger text platforms, like Google's Bard, have filters in place that will refuse to show NSFW text, and they're more or less accurate. The smaller platforms, which most of the "talk with your anime waifu" chat platforms are, have stupid insane garbage filters on what text users can enter, but not on what the chatbot generates. So you can prompt "describe her sexy vagina" and get "I'm sorry, I want to keep people safe so I can't talk about that", but if you type "describe her petals" you get a graphic description of a vagina from a bot that obviously has a mountain of het erotica in its database.

There are some text-only NSFW chatbot platforms that seem to be chugging along just fine with paypal, but they have strict rules about what images can be uploaded as avatars. Some will allow users to make sexually explicit loli bots, but won't allow any images of young characters, sexual or otherwise, anywhere on the site. Many text-only platforms don't seem to be in app stores, though. Paypal is fine with them but Apple isn't.

It's a weird, weird, little microcosm of the internet, and an interesting insight into what's going on with payment processors and app stores in re the pressures placed on websites.

****

The takeaway from all this (aside from the fact AI is amusingly ridiculous) is that text-only sites like AO3 and or Literotica are probably just fine, while sites that host images, like Tumblr, are under more scrutiny.

--

[journalofimprobablethings]

I think the thing about your first response that is provoking knee-jerk reactions (at least, it did for me) is that it implies that character death's only purpose in fiction is to "maximize pain" for the readers, and that any other purpose it might serve can be found through other means. And I don't think that's true at all.

To a certain extent I agree with the OP commenter that it's not necessary to kill a character simply for 'emotional impact' or 'realism'. If an author's main goal with a character death is just to "inflict maximum pain" on the reader, then that's probably not very good writing, and not "necessary". The death needs to do more than just hurt the reader; it should affect the story in some way, either in how other characters react to the death, or how events change because of it.

But I also agree with friskdaferret's argument that some character deaths are necessary for the story that the author is trying to tell. That's the key. Could they choose to write it a different way? Sure. They're the author, it's their story, it's all made up. But then it would be a different story.

I know that you consider the Holes argument to be a bit of a tangent, but for the sake of using an example that's already been brought up, Sam's death in Holes serves a particular purpose in the story. It reflects real-world racism in a very direct way: black men being lynched for having a relationship with a white woman (or after being accused of assaulting/touching a white woman, whether they did or not) is a real fact of American history. It's an ugly fact, and it's something that Louis Sacher decided was important to include in the story. For some kids reading that book, it may even have been their first exposure to that sort of racism. Having Sam leave Kate for other reasons, as you suggest, would change the story, and would make a different point. It's not the story Louis Sacher was trying to tell.

Your argument, if I understand correctly, is that sometimes, the potential pain inflicted on a reader who is very attached to the character might outweigh an author wanting to make a particular point or tell a particular story. How then, do we handle telling stories that are inherently about painful topics? What is the "utilitarian calculus" as it relates to a story like Orpheus and Eurydice which is about grief; or tragedies like Hamlet?

I also think that if you're going to make that argument, you have to consider the other side - that is, what benefit do those deaths, as written, bring to readers? Why has the author included it in the story? What do people get out of it? That answer is going to be different for different readers and stories, but there is a reason that death has been such a prominent trope in human storytelling since forever. Death and grief are inherent, immutable facts of life, and so storytellers are going to find ways to engage with and examine it.

Two examples that came to mind while I was thinking about this post were The Fault in Our Stars by John Green and Babel by R.F. Kuang. Both of those books contain absolutely devastating moments of loss in connection with characters we have become very close to as readers. I don't think I've ever cried as hard at a story as I cried at those two books in particular.

Both of those stories would not be what they are, or say what they wanted to say, if those deaths didn't happen. They are a book about cancer and a book about imperialism and the violence it engenders, respectively. Both those topics are impossible to handle without at least talking about death.

Now, would I give people a warning before I recommend those books to them? Absolutely, because it's the sort of thing you probably want to be in the right headspace for. But do I think that those books should have been written differently, just because the stories were painful? Absolutely not.

I don't know that I agree with any sort of utilitarian argument about the potential effect of a character death on readers vs its function in the story, in part because that sort of thing is impossible to quantify. How would you ever possibly judge what was "too much"? It's entirely subjective, and in the end, authors do not have control over what a reader's reactions to their story will be.

I also think that to a certain extent, readers are responsible for their own reading experience. If a person does not want to encounter painful moments in their reading, that is their responsibility to tailor their reading accordingly. If they as a reader know they are prone to making deep connections with characters such that it might genuinely hurt them if that character then dies, they can take steps to avoid those sorts of stories, or to use sites like doesthedogdie.com to check whether a story has something that they don't want to/can't engage with. But it's not an author's responsibility to tailor their story so that it doesn't make anyone sad. That's not the point of fiction.

Fiction is a reflection of life, and a way for us as humans to examine and process all aspects of it, including the aspects that hurt, that are awful, the parts that don't make sense. It's perfectly valid for someone to not want to engage with challenging fiction, but to say that authors shouldn't be writing it at all because it might somewhere cause someone grief? I can't agree with that.

im starting to think you guys dont like it when stories make you feel things

[5ummit]

HTP Fic Recs: Hidden Gems

Have you, like me, devoured everything in the Hydra Trash Party AO3 tag and are desperate for more? Well you may be in luck.

In honor of CATWS's 10th anniversary I’ve decided, yet again, to make a new rec list so that these gems don't get buried in my overwhelmingly extensive original rec list. This list features HTP and HTP-adjacent fics that are NOT tagged as HTP (either because the author didn't know the label existed or didn't believe it applied to their fic), making them particularly hard to find, and I think, deserving of more attention.

Many of these fics don’t have much, if any, explicit noncon, but noncon is often implied or referenced and they’re all rife with other types of dehumanization and abuse so the usual HTP warnings still apply. Read tags carefully etc.

The Making of the Winter Soldier [series] by CluckU & Mumble_Bee Relationship: Hydra Agents/WS, Zola/WS Words: 13,700

There are a small, precious collection of things he knows for certain each time he wakes in his chair: He is a weapon. A soldier. An asset. He is being molded into the Fist of Hydra. He must prove himself. Failure is not an option.

Muscle Memory by sparklingbinjuice Relationship: Rumlow & Bucky Words: 4500

It had taken five minutes of fumbling but he had eventually picked the lock. The soldier wouldn’t be back for hours. Coordinates provided by the remaining, somewhat rudimentary, tracking device installed in the titanium arm indicated that he wandered the streets on weekends – watching people, visiting libraries and museums, feeding the birds. It was all so horribly human.

Reconquer, regain, recover by werebird Relationship: Hydra Agents/WS (past) Words: 2300

Hydra had known his body better than he himself ever could. They had taken it, reshaped it, reprogrammed it. They had birthed the Winter Soldier although they had never given him life.

Taming Winter by Runlights Relationship: Rumlow & WS, Steve & Bucky Words: 91,000 Notes: terrifying bloodthirsty WS

Regardless of the intravenous set pumping warming fluids into those veins, regardless of the fact that a moment ago, the guy looked on the verge of death, the Winter Soldier was out of the chair and in front of him with two steps that happened so quickly he didn’t even have time to do more than inhale. He froze as he felt the press of his own combat knife against his throat, the bite of the blade causing blood to well and slip down his throat. This was the point where he suspected people felt fear, especially staring into those unfocused cold eyes. He only felt a twisted fascination.

The Soldier’s Kittens by exclamation Relationship: Sam & Bucky, Steve & Bucky Words: 11,300 Notes: animal abuse/death

"Sam's a really good guy," Steve said. "I think you'd like him if you spent more time with him." Bucky said nothing. He would not show any interest in Sam, just as he had not shown any interest when Steve had taken him to the animal shelter to try and get him to interact with the dogs there. He knew this trap and he wouldn't fall into it twice.

Flinching by Exorin Relationship: Steve/Bucky Words: 570

It might finally break what's left of him if Steve knew the way he's had to dig his nails into his palms hard enough to draw blood just to shape his breath into the sound of a moan.

I'm comin' up only to hold you under by anonymous Relationship: Hydra Agents/Bucky, Steve/Bucky (past) Words: 2100

They drag him out of his cell by his hair and toss him into a room full of identical guards. He lands hard on his knees, the force of the impact stuttering up his weak, tired body, and he glares up and them with all the hatred he can gather. He feels off-balance, like he does whenever he tries to carry himself now—the stump of his missing arm has a phantom weight he can't get used to, won't get used to.

Context is Everything by thedevilchicken Relationship: Hannibal/Bucky Words: 2600

"I don't understand," Bucky replied. "Recontextualize?" "Your memories of HYDRA seem…distant," Hannibal said. "The way you speak about them is as if they happened to someone else. In order to process your trauma, you must understand that they happened to you."

Never Letting the Blood Dry by BarrenPines Relationship: Rumlow & WS, Steve & Bucky Words: 2500 Notes: whipping

After the mission, there were pats on the back, expressions of congratulations and thanks, and a dozen other little niceties that made his skin crawl. He’d gotten lucky, that’s all. And he’d also defied orders, departed from his assigned task. Praise wasn’t what he deserved.

[babtest]

At least 50% of the fun of seeing the mountain goats live is watching John Darnielle have the most fun a person could possibly have. He really is where he's ment to be. Bouncing around on stage

[horreurscopes]

watching death note and house of the dragon simultaneously earlier this year did something permanent to my galaxy brain

[marta-bee]

I'm fascinated by this.

First, thank you thank you THANK YOU for talking seriously but generously about book!Denethor and book!Faramir's relationship in a way that doesn't treat him like an outright villain. I'm a huge Denethor fan (in a way that hopefully revels in his moral complexity/complicity rather than whitewashing it, because where's the fun otherwise?), and we really need more of that in fandom.

I'm not sure I'd call Faramir cruel, but he's definitely living in an imperfect world where he probably understands he can't save everyone, even as he's probably better able to do that than Boromir just because he's working with a much smaller group. But he's harsh when he's questioning Gollum. He's not even overly quick to reassure Frodo and Sam that they're safe and he believes them, after the drumhead trial-type interrogation before they all decamp to Henneth Annun. And he takes part in several really bloody battles and he's still prepared to lead men into almost certain defeat to defend the various outposts around Minas Tirith. I see him making lots of hard decisions in the books.

(It's been years since I've actually reread the books, and it's also late so if I'm misremember or misrepresenting anything, please take it as a good-faith misremembering.)

But I do think --fascinatingly-- he sees an even bigger picture than Denethor does. That's the tragedy of Denethor, that he sees the whole struggle in terms of Gondor vs. Mordor. I was going to say book!Faramir isn't this overly moralistic person, it's more that he's concerned with the fate of everyone, coupled with having the wisdom to see what his father would prefer he'd do wouldn't actually work. I'm thinking of the temptation to bring the Ring back to Minas Tirith here especially. If he thought it would actually bring the goal he's working for, I'm not sure he wouldn't have done it.

But he's wise enough to know it would destroy the Gondor he loves, and broad-thinking enough to know saving Gondor isn't enough. And maybe that is goodness in the Arda-verse or close to it: not some idealistic clinging to principle totally divorced from the practical consequences of how you act, but thinking more universally and seeing more clearly.

Or put another way:

I don't know. It's a fascinating thought, and one I'll probably be turning over in my mind for the next few days.

book!denethor and faramir are like

"i need you to make the hard decisions now that your brother is gone, because you are the one that will be my heir. i need you to weigh the good of many and the good of few. and i need you to do it independently for when i am gone as well."

and

"i refuse to be anything but gentle. i refuse to let the concept of a greater good justify cruelty. i love you. and im sorry to be a disappointment."

[macbethisms]

underrated thing about wang baoxiang is how utterly pathetic he is. intentionally provokes his brother every time they interact because having esen be mad at him for something he did on purpose is easier than being vulnerable and then is like how could esen think i hate him :(( goes around rolling his eyes at all these Idiots who don't consider the Needs of the Common Folk and then gets grossed out whenever a servant dares to speak to him. constantly thinking about Hot Men Exercising and how much they all want to fuck each other probably. hasn't emotionally matured past the age of fifteen (he is twenty-three). thinks of himself as a Character instead of a person so much that he gets surprised whenever the things he did for their narrative significance have actual real consequences. while being quite literally haunted by a specter of his own guilt is like hm what could this mean. well time to not sleep for another 36 hours. kills people and then throws up about it and then goes off to kill more people because surely this is the one that will fix everything right. wants to be punished for what he's done because it's the closest he can get to admitting he feels remorse. looks for his brother everywhere but only ever finds himself.

which of course culminates with him stalking miserably through the hallways looking for someone to be mad at because there needs to be someone else responsible for making his life suck but there isn't anymore because no one has power over him anymore. and he can't go back but tries to convince himself that he doesn't want to because he also needs to see himself as being In Control of Everything That's Ever Happened to Him. he wanted it all along and he likes it here actually. and he won fratricide chicken and got himself tortured and tried to show mercy and did every evil dishonorable thing and now he just has to live with it all forever. loser!!!!

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

Role swap AU in which Sasha ends up in Wartwood, Marcy in Toad Tower and Anne in Newtopia, but Sasha is still a manipulative little shit and Marcy a total sweetheart despite Sasha being with the "good guys" and Marcy with the "bad guys".

It's not like she enjoys tormenting Marcy for sport. It's not like using all her insecurities against her and destroying her confidence brings her joy, but she and her toad friends are threatening her Wartwood and her frog family and oh boy, she should have kept her head down among her books where it belongs because Sasha is not going to let this offense slide.

[sapphireswimming]

I just!! Am Screaming!!!! Sean said they were just going to keep sending him back into the field one more time just one more job you gotta do until he was dead but he never said no! he could have left Candela Obscura at any point, after any job, but he chose to stay there! even after he'd reached the end of his rope! and everyone else continued to stay with him! for him!! Marion told Sean he was only there because of him. Auntie Bee admitted she was only there to stay near him. if he ever said he wanted out they would have not only let him but left with him! and if Sean and Marion were both out, Jean would have been to! Nathaniel would have followed as soon as he paid his debt to Allison! they didn't want him to keep going until he broke! they were trying to be there with him for him by him beside him because that was literally all they could do for him! they all could have been happier outside of Candela Obscura but Sean was there so they weren't going to leave! they loved him!! the love was there!! the love was there the whole time and it mattered of course it mattered but it didn't do anything!!!! it didn't do anything except keep them all together until it was too late! and I! ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[pensivespacepirate]

it feels like the whole purpose of venom 3 is to kill off venom what the fuck

[bayofwolves]

i was on the most random nostalgia kick and rewatched the prince of egypt yesterday and let me just say... that movie is truly one of the greatest animated films of all time.

[gurorori]

haha oh no im definitely not at all disturbed by the prevalence of leftists on all platforms who are loudly 'anti-genocide' when it comes to the palestinian cause (and a couple others at best :3c) yet the only time ukraine [ʊkrɐˈjinɐ] leaves their mouths is in critique, in stark comparison to the former or in complaint about their (american) government sending aid.

at first what i saw often was pointing out the differences in western media framing [ukraine vs palestine], and that's fair (until the words and the agenda of western journalists are used to paint, as a whole, ukrainians who have been actively going through genocide as some kind of white supremacists hogging the blanket of global attention when they kinda just want to live and have the rights to their own land, culture, names and families)

but no one is even caring to do that anymore, today bitches just invent metaphorical scenarios and people to get mad at and to throw an entire ethnos away because wahhhh i decided that you care for X but not for Y!!!.... all while doing the exact thing they are condemning. the exact absolute same and they don't even hide it but do lack the self-awareness to realise

[viillette]

it's so crazy how few historical fiction novels are like sharon kay penman's. the way that they're built out of the skeleton of the historical record seems so obvious, but there's so few people who are actually willing to commit to it in the way that she did. it seems like so often that's just a starting point which gets reformed to fit a coherent narrative, but she makes no real attempt to do that. there's themes and foils and patterns, but first and foremost it is a reconstruction. you can't really know what someone who lived that long ago was like, only what they did, and you can feel how she takes these isolated, dramatic events and builds a whole life around them. the books are nothing more than an answer to the question 'what might someone have been like, what could the history between these people have been, to possibly explain something like this?' the ability to string together a handful of facts and events from medieval chronicles to create people that feel so real, and psychology and relationships that develop so naturally that these distant, seemingly impenetrable choices suddenly feel so immediate and clear is just beyond belief. you know this probably wasn't actually how things happened, but it doesn't matter because it was something like this. the particulars are less important the crushing awareness that at one point all of this made sense. there was a time when all of this was right now. the world is unrecognizable and exactly the same. that's something which sounds very simple but is incredibly difficult to accomplish.

you come to know these people so well, their loves and hatreds and ambitions and failures, and those things are rarely resolved in the end. you know them from the time that they're children, you watch each one of them die, and none of it means anything in particular except that they were a human being. things which seem like they must be building to some tragic fallout end in anticlimax. things which seem utterly inconsequential in the moment manifest again decades later in cataclysmic disaster. and then you see it all play out again from the beginning with their children, and their children's children. all these uncanny echoes, this endlessly unfolding palimpsest of lives, each laid over the triumphs and mistakes of those who came before. i've never read anything so epic with so much mastery over the micro and macro levels of history. it's the minute, seemingly inconsequential everyday details, which build into a lifetime, which builds into generation of lives, which builds into the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires. it's the merciless endlessly turning wheel of fortune that replays the same songs in different keys again and again for all time. a person is both an individual with free will, and the prisoner of their blood and circumstances. somehow everything has infinite weight, is tied to everything that has come before and will come after, is the culmination of someone's entire existence—their pains and joys and fears and hopes—and yet is simultaneously completely meaningless, just one more victim of fate in an endless procession of lives and choices. the whole impotent tragedy of humanity is laid out in front of you and it's so repulsive and beautiful. it's deep love and unfathomable, senseless horror briefly and miraculously reverberating in a vacuum, an absurd aberration fading into silence.

if it's not obvious these books have made me cry like 10 different times

[rotzaprachim]

something something i have many thoughts on the deliciousness of jyn and cassian’s relationship being specifically about the... ambiguity, or if not the ambiguity, the places where it shirks and twists away from the modern hollywood play-by-numbers Movie Romance into something... earthier, messier, more human and intimate. like i don’t personally feel like we needed the kiss, or the infamous deleted wedding ending, as much as i would love to see it in the cut scenes, because i feel like what the movie provided us felt so much more true to character. because there is no kiss, no hollywood declaration of love, the audience has to look at the text as is and the body language and acting decisions and those are simply more insane than almost any other live action star wars couple 

[red-revival]

I got multiple saves planned to romance the doc under various circumstances with various traits entirely because thats the most efficient way to learn abt a character in this game and the closest I can get to studying her under a microscope