#science is not really represented in media

[mysecretboringlife]

I AM NOT A HERO,

I AM A SCIENTIST.

Carlos the scientist, my idol

[mwagneto]

HAAANK DON'T GET MAD AT SCIFI FOR NOT MAKING SENSE HAAAAANK !!! IT'S A METAPHOR FOR REAL LIFE THAT'S MEANT TO MAKE YOU ASK QUESTIONS HANK YOU DON'T NECESSARILY HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THE EXACT MECHANICS!!!! HAAAANK

[sirfrogsworth]

This was some of the most high effort bullshitting I've ever seen someone go through just to keep disabled people out of their D&D campaign.

It's so incredibly simple. And as someone who is chronically verbose, even I could boil it down to a single sentence.

PEOPLE LIKE TO SEE THEMSELF REPRESENTED IN THE MEDIA THEY CONSUME.

There should be a name for that.

Like... representative analogs.

Representism.

Representology.

I'm sure someone will think of something to call it. And then let everyone know how much it matters.

But seriously, It really does not need to be any more complicated. And it isn't even that complicated to come up with reasons disability exists in a magical realm.

Perhaps magic caused the disability in the first place. Or it is a curse not easily undone. Or perhaps magic gets better over time like science. 100 years ago, an infection was a death sentence. Now we have antibiotics. And the magic to "cure" disabilities just isn't advanced enough yet.

I could literally do this all night.

Fantasy is probably one of the easiest genres to include disabilities and it is really gross how many people want to deny us this opportunity for... representation.

[emo-batboy]

Battinson Guest Starring on TV Shows

SO

For someone who holds the title of Richest Man in the World, Bruce doesn’t do a lot of traveling.

Which is to say he does a LOT of traveling, but he always tries to find a way out of it.

(Are there bat-related reasons for this? Are there people-related reasons for this? Are there anxiety-related reasons for this? Who knows?)

But partners and sponsors aren’t always going to tolerate his hermit-like tendencies. So once every month or so, Alfred wrangles Bruce into a private jet and sends him off to who knows where so he can represent the company.

Usually, it’s somewhere close on the East Coast, maybe it’s across the pond, even Asia isn’t off the table, but the rarest place to spot Bruce Wayne is actually the West Coast of the US.

One day, it is announced that Bruce Wayne will be spending two (count ‘em, 2) consecutive weeks in California with his kids for some grand business convention.

The West Coast media goes feral with the news, ESPECIALLY interviewers. And because Bruce kicks up such a fuss this time, Alfred has the gall to sign him up for FOUR TV appearances.

Here are these appearances :)

RuPaul’s Drag Race

Drag Queens, especially Drag Race all-stars, contribute to a wide variety of charities

So on a new episode, the queens are challenged to design and shoot a promotional ad for their own charity

And who better to act as a guest judge for this episode than the show’s largest benefactor, CEO of the Wayne Foundation, Bruce Wayne?!

Physically? He’s older than half of the contestants. But spiritually? He screams Baby Gay.

Fifteen minutes into the episode, Bruce is welcomed into the werkroom where he gives them pointers on their campaign. He’s in his cute little three-piece suit (Alfred’s idea) with the intention of looking put-together and knowledgeable. But that’s not the only outcome.

They all flirt with him. Everyone, single or taken. The confessionals are so thirsty.

“He’s lucky the cameras are on. Otherwise, I’d eat him up faster than a bachelorette party in a buffet line.”

“My celebrity crush is talking to me, and all I can focus on are his gorgeous eyes. How am I supposed to know what he's saying?”

Of course, they shoot their shot, but most of it is joking since they don't know he's bi yet.

“Are you single, honey?” Bruce blushes. “It’s complicated.” “Well, I’ll make it simple for you.”

We all know this man can't handle being flirted with. We saw how he froze when Selina did it. It’s like he mentally bluescreens when someone calls him a pet name.

Only THEN do they learn he's bi

One of the queens jokingly asks him, “Ever been with a man before?” thinking it would be a firm no, but Bruce says, “Actually, yes.” “Oh shit, really?” And to Bruce’s embarrassment, the whole room hears him.

The flirting is thus taken up a notch.

On the main stage, Bruce has a lot of great constructive criticism. He talks about how to find the right audience, the importance of a good slogan, and even goes on a little rant about logo design.

(You cannot convince me that Bruce hasn’t hyperfixated on the business of charity work before. Or the science of marketing. They’re his favorite business topics.)

After about three minutes of him complimenting one contestant for their Drag Library pitch, he stops himself mid-sentence and says, “Oh sorry, am I talking too much?” “No, please! Keep talking, sweetheart.” Bruce covers his face to hide his blush. “Why is everyone flirting with me?” “Baby, have you seen yourself?”

While the judges deliberate, RuPaul mentions Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent. Bruce nods along for a while then suddenly just blurts out, “Wait, does it spell ****?”

The judges pause then burst out laughing. “Oh no, we’ve traumatized him!" Bruce is blushing up a storm. “I just never thought about it like that!” “Sweet, innocent Bruce. We’re so sorry.”

It’s later revealed that Bruce offered to help some of the queens launch their charity projects through the Wayne Foundation.

It’s v cute 🥰

Nailed It!

I love Nicole Byer.

She is Mother.

In all seriousness, she’s so fucking funny and she’s personable enough to pull Bruce out of his shell a bit.

The theme for this episode is Found Family. Three pairs of family members compete together—a gay father and his adopted son, an aunt who adopted her niece, and a stepfather and stepdaughter.

Because Bruce Wayne famously adopted two children, he is invited to guest judge.

So Nicole opens the episode with a zinger, the contestants are introduced, and Bruce is welcomed onto the judge’s panel beside Nicole and Jacques.

(Yes, Bruce does speak French. Yes, Nicole makes a joke about it being hot.)

Nicole: “We were surprised you accepted our invitation, Mr. Wayne. You’re notorious for staying on the East Coast. What brought you to the Nailed It! Studio?” Bruce: “My children love this show. They always tell me I should be on it since I’m so bad at baking.” Nicole: “Really? Maybe we should do a celebrity season of Nailed It! and have you compete.” Bruce: “No, you should not.”

Nicole: “So, Bruce, I know you have a butler at home who bakes for you. But what’s the grossest thing you’ve eaten? Escargot? Bad caviar?” Bruce: “I drank olive oil straight from the bottle once.” Nicole: “…What?”

The problem for Bruce is he can’t say anything bad. It just feels mean :(

(And he would rather jump into oncoming traffic than gamble with a social interaction)

For the first challenge, the contestants make cake pops. But when Bruce tries the first one, there is a sickening crunch. Bruce’s eyes widen for a second and he slowly chews.

Nicole: “What was that? Bruce, are you okay?” Bruce, clearly struggling: “It’s…good.”

“Bruce, you can spit it out. It’s okay.” “I already swallowed it.” “Oh, you poor thing.” Bruce chokes for a second, and Nicole pats his back. “Please don’t die. We can’t afford it.”

For the big challenge, production has a surprise in store for Bruce.

Dick (9) and Jason (7) run onto the set and smother Bruce with a hug.

It’s adorable. Bruce no longer cares about paying attention, okay? His kids are here :D

The two boys read from cue cards to announce the second challenge: a three-tiered Gotcha Day cake. And as per tradition, the winner of the first challenge gets a leg-up.

This time, it’s a Helping Hands Button. When they hit the button, Dick and Jason will run over and help them for three minutes. (While being supervised, of course.)

As the contestants bake, Nicole says hello to Dick and Jason, who are clambering all over Bruce like a jungle gym. They both shake her hand and talk about how they love the show.

Nicole looks pointedly at the two empty chairs beside Bruce. “You know, we brought these chairs for you two to sit in.” Dick, on Bruce’s shoulders: “We’re fine, Ms. Byer!” Nicole: “Ms. Byer? Oh, you’re a cutie, aren’t you?”

Just ten minutes before the challenge is over, the Helping Hands button is pressed, and Dick and Jason are given stools so they can help the aunt and niece stack their cake tiers.

Two minutes in, the aunt instructs them to let go of the cake. But the moment Jason pulls his hands away, the cake topples over and covers him in frosting. Jason, whispering: “Oh f*ck.” Bruce: “Jason!” Jason: “I didn’t say that! Dick did!” Nicole: *cackling as Bruce buried his face in his hands*

Jason gets cleaned up, and Dick helps them stack what can still be salvaged.

When Wes brings out the trophy, he’s dressed as Batman. Dick and Jason gets a kick out of that.

Celebrity Family Feud

Bruce was invited to the show after his SNL skit went viral a few months ago

This episode, the teams are split up by cities they grew up in. Gotham v. Star City. Naturally, his team is playing for the Wayne Foundation.

It’s a pretty odd cast of people, most of them having moved to LA or Hollywood. Bruce is the only one to still live in Gotham.

They have fun, though, despite their limited common ground. The audience has a few good laughs.

(Some at Bruce's expense)

Harvey: You're a very wealthy man, Mr. Wayne. What do you really do in that tower all day? Bruce: I, uh…business? Harvey: …You business. Bruce: ……Wait-

All in good fun. Bruce just vibes in his little corner until he needs to answer a question. It's pretty chill.

For exactly half of the episode.

Then it happens.

Steve Harvey takes two people from each team up to the buzzer and says, “We asked 100 people: Name something your parents always told you as a kid.”

What the production failed to consider is how this particular question might be a sensitive topic for some contestants.

Bruce’s team gets the question, and Steve saunters up to Bruce, completely oblivious.

“Alright, Bruce Wayne!” Bruce nods awkwardly. “Hi, Steve.” “Bruce, what’s wrong? You’re looking a bit uncomfortable.” “…I don’t like this question, Steve.” “Why not?” Bruce just gives him a desperate look, and it clicks. “Oh! Oh my gosh!”

Let’s be real. Bruce is awkward enough, but Steve Harvey cannot save an awkward moment for his life either.

But he tries his best anyway and asks, “Are you okay with answering this question, or would you like to pass?” Bruce nods frantically. “I can answer. ‘I love you.’” “I love you too, Mr. Wayne.” “No, uh, my answer is ‘I love you.’” “Oh! That’s a good one.”

Thankfully, the audience erupts in laughter. That little interaction cuts the tension, and Bruce’s answer ends up on the board.

And by god, the memes

“I love you too, Mr. Wayne” is the new “Enjoy your meal.” “You too.”

The audio clip of “I don’t like this question, Steve” goes viral on TikTok

Someone gets a pic of Bruce and Steve looking at each other with palpable fear in their eyes, and it makes its rounds all over Twitter

10/10 never again

Running Wild with Bear Grylls

Now this is the most challenging. Not because it’s difficult, of course. But because Bruce has to look stupid enough to maintain his Brucie Wayne persona but smart enough to keep himself safe.

For this episode, Bear takes Bruce to the California desert.

“How much do you know about survival, Bruce?” Bear asks. Bruce nods carefully. “I did some survival training once with a friend from boarding school.” “Oh really, how did you do?” “Fine, I think.”

This is, of course, his way of saying I trained with a league of assassins for years, but Bear can’t know that! And that’s how most of the episode goes.

Thank god Bruce's fear of being caught is mistaken for being scared of the physical challenge because every time Bear points out how well he’s doing, he breaks into a sweat.

Bear: For a businessman, you’re surprisingly fit. Bruce, sweating bullets: Oh, this is all just for show.

Bear: Wow, you’re a natural. Are you sure you’ve never set up a zip-line before? Bruce, gripping his equipment so tight he gets rope burn: I think it’s just the survival instincts.

Of course, he pretends to be out of breath a few times. The Drama.

Bruce, pretending to slip and fall: Ouch! Who knew the outdoors were so dangerous? Bear, you are crazy. Bruce, internally: How much longer are we doing this?

Bruce being a vegetarian is actually a point of contention. You see, Bear always makes their celebrity guests do something crazy for food like skin a snake or eat a mouse. Scavenging for berries just doesn’t grab the audience’s attention.

But do you know what is vegetarian?

Bear: Now, in extreme cases of survival, it’s not rare for humans to resort to drinking their own pee. That’s what we’ll be doing in a moment. Are you up for it? Bruce, visibly repulsed: I’ve had Gotham tap water. I’ll be fine.

How on God’s Green Earth did Alfred convince him to do this?

To get to the extraction point, Bear takes Bruce down a cliffside.

Bear shows Bruce the meticulous process of properly belaying from the top of a cliff, and Bruce, who has done this over 100 times is like, “Wow that’s so dangerous :( Will we be okay?”

He really tries to ramp up his acting skills this time.

(Little does he know that’s not necessary.)

Bruce goes down first as Bear belays with a cameraman filming from the top. Halfway down, Bruce hears a scuffle, and the cameraman yells, “F*ck!”

Bruce looks up, arms already out for protection, and he sees a small disk falling towards him. It’s the lens cap. He catches it on instinct.

For a second, he thinks, “Shit, was that too skilled? That’s not enough to make people think I’m Batman, right? I just caught it in midair while dangling from a cliff. That’s totally not weird and suspicious. Normal people do that—“

Then Bear yells, “Bruce, drop it!” Bruce looks up at Bear, confused. “Why?” “There's a scorpion!” That’s when Bruce looks at the lens cap and sees a black scorpion perched on top with its tail ready to strike.

They don’t have those in Gotham.

Bruce jumps in his harness and flings the cap at the rocky cliffside. He hears a crunch, and the scorpion and cap tumble to the ground. Bruce frowns. Can a scorpion survive that drop?

“You just killed a scorpion, mate!” Bear cries. Bruce looks up in horror. “I killed it?!” “Hell yeah!” Bruce’s face falls. “No!”

Because oh. shit.

Bruce just killed something. The sad, orphaned vegetarian just killed a scorpion.

Bruce has a meltdown.

He didn’t mean to kill it!!!! Oh no, he just killed an innocent little creature. Yeah, he punches people for fun sometimes, and he definitely put a few violent criminals in the hospital, but he’s never committed MURDER!!

This poor little scorpion died due to his own negligence, and he feels so so so bad about it.

Bruce is a mess as he climbs the rest of the way down.

Bruce, cradling the scorpion’s body: I don’t know how to perform CPR on a scorpion! Bear: Bruce, you took its head clean off. Bruce: *sad noises*

Legit inconsolable. To him, it’s like he just murdered a puppy

Once they're out, Bear is trying to cheer him up. Bless him.

Bear: We’ve conquered the wild! Haven’t we, Bruce? Bruce, head between his legs, still mourning the scorpion: I’m never going outside again.

Yeah, no one’s going to think he’s Batman after that.

And that's all four of Bruce's TV appearances from the West Coast :) Dick and Jason never let him live any of it down. Alfred is almost sorry. (He is not sorry.)

Let me know your thoughts! What other TV shows do you think Battinson would appear on as a guest?

Okie dokie :D Love y'all! Have a good day <3

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.

The real AI harms come from the actual things that AI companies sell AI to do. There's the AI gun-detector gadgets that the credulous Mayor Eric Adams put in NYC subways, which led to 2,749 invasive searches and turned up zero guns:

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nycs-subway-weapons-detector-pilot-program-ends/

Any time AI is used to predict crime – predictive policing, bail determinations, Child Protective Services red flags – they magnify the biases already present in these systems, and, even worse, they give this bias the veneer of scientific neutrality. This process is called "empiricism-washing," and you know you're experiencing it when you hear some variation on "it's just math, math can't be racist":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#phrenology

When AI is used to replace customer service representatives, it systematically defrauds customers, while providing an "accountability sink" that allows the company to disclaim responsibility for the thefts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

When AI is used to perform high-velocity "decision support" that is supposed to inform a "human in the loop," it quickly overwhelms its human overseer, who takes on the role of "moral crumple zone," pressing the "OK" button as fast as they can. This is bad enough when the sacrificial victim is a human overseeing, say, proctoring software that accuses remote students of cheating on their tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#cheating-anticheat

But it's potentially lethal when the AI is a transcription engine that doctors have to use to feed notes to a data-hungry electronic health record system that is optimized to commit health insurance fraud by seeking out pretenses to "upcode" a patient's treatment. Those AIs are prone to inventing things the doctor never said, inserting them into the record that the doctor is supposed to review, but remember, the only reason the AI is there at all is that the doctor is being asked to do so much paperwork that they don't have time to treat their patients:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14

My point is that "worrying about AI" is a zero-sum game. When we train our fire on the stuff that isn't important to the AI stock swindlers' business-plans (like creating AI slop), we should remember that the AI companies could halt all of that activity and not lose a dime in revenue. By contrast, when we focus on AI applications that do the most direct harm – policing, health, security, customer service – we also focus on the AI applications that make the most money and drive the most investment.

AI hasn't attracted hundreds of billions in investment capital because investors love AI slop. All the money pouring into the system – from investors, from customers, from easily gulled big-city mayors – is chasing things that AI is objectively very bad at and those things also cause much more harm than AI slop. If you want to be a good AI critic, you should devote the majority of your focus to these applications. Sure, they're not as visually arresting, but discrediting them is financially arresting, and that's what really matters.

All that said: AI slop is real, there is a lot of it, and just because it doesn't warrant priority over the stuff AI companies actually sell, it still has cultural significance and is worth considering.

AI slop has turned Facebook into an anaerobic lagoon of botshit, just the laziest, grossest engagement bait, much of it the product of rise-and-grind spammers who avidly consume get rich quick "courses" and then churn out a torrent of "shrimp Jesus" and fake chainsaw sculptures:

https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/

For poor engagement farmers in the global south chasing the fractional pennies that Facebook shells out for successful clickbait, the actual content of the slop is beside the point. These spammers aren't necessarily tuned into the psyche of the wealthy-world Facebook users who represent Meta's top monetization subjects. They're just trying everything and doubling down on anything that moves the needle, A/B splitting their way into weird, hyper-optimized, grotesque crap:

https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-being-overrun-with-stolen-ai-generated-images-that-people-think-are-real/

In other words, Facebook's AI spammers are laying out a banquet of arbitrary possibilities, like the letters on a Ouija board, and the Facebook users' clicks and engagement are a collective ideomotor response, moving the algorithm's planchette to the options that tug hardest at our collective delights (or, more often, disgusts).

So, rather than thinking of AI spammers as creating the ideological and aesthetic trends that drive millions of confused Facebook users into condemning, praising, and arguing about surreal botshit, it's more true to say that spammers are discovering these trends within their subjects' collective yearnings and terrors, and then refining them by exploring endlessly ramified variations in search of unsuspected niches.

(If you know anything about AI, this may remind you of something: a Generative Adversarial Network, in which one bot creates variations on a theme, and another bot ranks how closely the variations approach some ideal. In this case, the spammers are the generators and the Facebook users they evince reactions from are the discriminators)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

I got to thinking about this today while reading User Mag, Taylor Lorenz's superb newsletter, and her reporting on a new AI slop trend, "My neighbor’s ridiculous reason for egging my car":

https://www.usermag.co/p/my-neighbors-ridiculous-reason-for

The "egging my car" slop consists of endless variations on a story in which the poster (generally a figure of sympathy, canonically a single mother of newborn twins) complains that her awful neighbor threw dozens of eggs at her car to punish her for parking in a way that blocked his elaborate Hallowe'en display. The text is accompanied by an AI-generated image showing a modest family car that has been absolutely plastered with broken eggs, dozens upon dozens of them.

According to Lorenz, variations on this slop are topping very large Facebook discussion forums totalling millions of users, like "Movie Character…,USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and God Bless." These posts link to SEO sites laden with programmatic advertising.

The funnel goes:

i. Create outrage and hence broad reach;

ii, A small percentage of those who see the post will click through to the SEO site;

iii. A small fraction of those users will click a low-quality ad;

iv. The ad will pay homeopathic sub-pennies to the spammer.

The revenue per user on this kind of scam is next to nothing, so it only works if it can get very broad reach, which is why the spam is so designed for engagement maximization. The more discussion a post generates, the more users Facebook recommends it to.

These are very effective engagement bait. Almost all AI slop gets some free engagement in the form of arguments between users who don't know they're commenting an AI scam and people hectoring them for falling for the scam. This is like the free square in the middle of a bingo card.

Beyond that, there's multivalent outrage: some users are furious about food wastage; others about the poor, victimized "mother" (some users are furious about both). Not only do users get to voice their fury at both of these imaginary sins, they can also argue with one another about whether, say, food wastage even matters when compared to the petty-minded aggression of the "perpetrator." These discussions also offer lots of opportunity for violent fantasies about the bad guy getting a comeuppance, offers to travel to the imaginary AI-generated suburb to dole out a beating, etc. All in all, the spammers behind this tedious fiction have really figured out how to rope in all kinds of users' attention.

Of course, the spammers don't get much from this. There isn't such a thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a unit of account, a medium of exchange or a store of value. Attention – like everything else that you can't build an economy upon, such as cryptocurrency – must be converted to money before it has economic significance. Hence that tooth-achingly trite high-tech neologism, "monetization."

The monetization of attention is very poor, but AI is heavily subsidized or even free (for now), so the largest venture capital and private equity funds in the world are spending billions in public pension money and rich peoples' savings into CO2 plumes, GPUs, and botshit so that a bunch of hustle-culture weirdos in the Pacific Rim can make a few dollars by tricking people into clicking through engagement bait slop – twice.

The slop isn't the point of this, but the slop does have the useful function of making the collective ideomotor response visible and thus providing a peek into our hopes and fears. What does the "egging my car" slop say about the things that we're thinking about?

Lorenz cites Jamie Cohen, a media scholar at CUNY Queens, who points out that subtext of this slop is "fear and distrust in people about their neighbors." Cohen predicts that "the next trend, is going to be stranger and more violent.”

This feels right to me. The corollary of mistrusting your neighbors, of course, is trusting only yourself and your family. Or, as Margaret Thatcher liked to say, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."

We are living in the tail end of a 40 year experiment in structuring our world as though "there is no such thing as society." We've gutted our welfare net, shut down or privatized public services, all but abolished solidaristic institutions like unions.

This isn't mere aesthetics: an atomized society is far more hospitable to extreme wealth inequality than one in which we are all in it together. When your power comes from being a "wise consumer" who "votes with your wallet," then all you can do about the climate emergency is buy a different kind of car – you can't build the public transit system that will make cars obsolete.

When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about animal cruelty and habitat loss is eat less meat. When you "vote with your wallet" all you can do about high drug prices is "shop around for a bargain." When you vote with your wallet, all you can do when your bank forecloses on your home is "choose your next lender more carefully."

Most importantly, when you vote with your wallet, you cast a ballot in an election that the people with the thickest wallets always win. No wonder those people have spent so long teaching us that we can't trust our neighbors, that there is no such thing as society, that we can't have nice things. That there is no alternative.

The commercial surveillance industry really wants you to believe that they're good at convincing people of things, because that's a good way to sell advertising. But claims of mind-control are pretty goddamned improbable – everyone who ever claimed to have managed the trick was lying, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Rather than seeing these platforms as convincing people of things, we should understand them as discovering and reinforcing the ideology that people have been driven to by material conditions. Platforms like Facebook show us to one another, let us form groups that can imperfectly fill in for the solidarity we're desperate for after 40 years of "no such thing as society."

The most interesting thing about "egging my car" slop is that it reveals that so many of us are convinced of two contradictory things: first, that everyone else is a monster who will turn on you for the pettiest of reasons; and second, that we're all the kind of people who would stick up for the victims of those monsters.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/29/hobbesian-slop/#cui-bono

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[markscherz]

Can I ask how you feel about your Tumblr fame?

I get the impression you just made this account for normal casual funsies reasons, but it kinda blew up by happenstance. If that's right, I'm curious if now you feel like it's kind of a more serious thing, where you have an opportunity to sorta act as a science communicator with a reach you otherwise might not?

Or maybe something else? You gonna see if you can somehow leverage your Tumblr fame to get research funding? Deputize us to harass polluters and developers destroying habitats? Crowdsource name ideas for new species?

It's a bit bizarre, in that it has very little real-world-ness to it. I showed my mother the ongoing tumblr celebrity poll, and she was like 'how many people could possibly be interested in frogs?', to which I replied 'well as of today about 46,000 and counting'.

I have always had an unhealthy relationship with fame. I spent most of my teen and young adult life fawning after it, as is I suppose very often the case.

More after the cut…

I always really wanted to be famous, but I was never really interested in changing who I was or what I represented in that pursuit. That is to say, I wanted to be known for what I was already doing, or for things that were already interesting for me, rather than things that might have much higher chances of success but require more effort or be less in line with the things that I am interested in.

I had my first brush with virality in 2012, when a poem I wrote went a little viral (largely thanks to StumbleUpon). I remember the rush of seeing how much attention it was getting, and staying up late to keep refreshing the page as the visitor numbers went up and up and up.

But not long after that, I had some closer encounters with fame and people becoming famous. That was extremely eye-opening. I witnessed first hand how strongly that can affect someone's life, for good and for bad. That experience also made me realise, quite jarringly, that famous people are still just people; that celebrity is something extrinsic to them; that they also wipe their own butts (if they are able); and that in many cases, it is a substantial inconvenience if not downright pain in the ass for them. I think this is why we see so many of the big celebrities having mental health crises or trying to live as much of their lives out of the public eye as possible.

That experience pretty much stifled my desire to achieve fame, and really changed my relationship with it. I should add that I could say much more on this topic, but nothing so coherent or insightful as John and Hank Green, who have given me so much clarity on this topic over the years through their thoughtful commentary on youtube and their podcasts.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that fame itself doesn't really appeal to me anymore, I do still have a problem wherein I quickly became addicted to the microdosing of euphoria associated with every reblog and like and follow. So I put huge efforts into social media in order to try to gain traction in the space that I felt I could really compete in—Very Niche SciComm™—and build up a following.

Tumblr was the first platform where I felt that really succeed; I managed to fight my way to a few thousand followers with a thick queue of regular posts about herpetology and other science. At that time, there was a great community building up in the rudimentary private messaging system—I am still friends with several other tumblr bloggers from that era (none of whom I have ever met in person). From that early time (2013), I think my most successful post was probably this one about germination of 32,000 year old seeds—a post that, as of today, has 836 notes, but at the time felt huge and exhilarating.

As I went through gradschool, I got more and more active on twitter, and less and less active on tumblr (by the time I wound down, I had about 8,000 followers on tumblr). This was partly because of the pornbot takeover on tumblr, which meant I basically could not go on the platform in public or at work, but also because the audience and interactions are just fundamentally different. Twitter had a different kind of vibe and energy than tumblr, and there were real SciComm experts there, who were doing it just completely differently. More importantly, I became more focussed on doing outreach aimed at colleagues, rather than non-experts.

Then, in 2017, I hit headlines for the first time. The description of Geckolepis megalepis made it big on social and traditional media, and I had my first experience with real media attention. I had a flurry of late-night phone-calls with journalists in the US. This was a different animal altogether than the few viral posts I had had until that point. It was extremely stressful, but exhilarating. Then in 2018, our chameleon fluorescence story made similar headlines, and in 2019 the Mini frogs, and in 2021 with gecko fluorescence and the smallest chameleon.

Seeing my name on the BBC News website and in the New York Times and National Geographic—those things have been the most surreal moments of near-fame I have experienced so far. The number of followers on social media is quite difficult to conceptualise, but seeing your own name in a media outlet that you consume regularly, or have grown up with, is more palpable.

In any case, I continued to run with twitter as my main platform for years, because I found the interaction with colleagues and other academics highly stimulating. In 2021, I even posted a twitter thread about a different species of frog from Madagascar every day for the full year. All this work was ultimately greeted with mediocre success; I just crested over 10,000 followers a few months before the Musth takeover. But then the platform became basically unusable. And in the fallout, I came back to tumblr, where, just by chance, I happened to find a post about the Mini frogs and reply to it and it went properly viral and now here we are. In the space of a year, I went from having 8000 followers to having >46,000.

How do I feel about that? It's bonkers. I think it is great that so many people are interested in hearing the Good News about frogs and other creatures. But I also feel like I am not really on the same playing field as most of the others in that poll mentioned above, in that I do not have any of the celebrity that several others have. And I know for a fact that there are fanblogs with far, far larger followings than I have. But perhaps that is the great thing about tumblr; that the playing field is somehow levelled…

What's the point of this ramble? Well, first I guess it is to outline that I have given fame a lot of thought over the years, and I have a long-standing and complicated relationship with it, and take it quite seriously. Second, to illustrate that I have been working on as a science communicator or person in outreach for many years—it has kind of been my social media brand since I started gradschool in 2013. And third, to kind of outline how we got here, because I often feel like you have to know where an arrow has come from in order to figure out which direction it will continue to fly.

You asked if I would somehow try to leverage my tumblr fame to get research funding—I already do that. In fact, my social media activity had a signfiicant role in landing me my current job, and will continue to help me achieve tenure. Outreach is an important part of my job, and funders like it too.

I would love to have the community-building power and tenacity of the brothers Green; Nerdfighteria has achieved some incredible things over the years, and the power of that community is now being seen at an unprecedented scale in their battle for equitable access for tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment. But I do not have that in me; this platform is the wrong one for community activation, and my community is still too small for that. Moreover, it is not organised or structured, in the way that I think effective deputisation would require.

As for the crowdsourcing of name ideas, that is currently off the table. I like to try to name things on my own or with my colleauges; it is a very good part of the process. And I have yet to hear a suggestion for a Mini species epithet that I had not already come up with myself, so I am not convinced that this would really augment the experience.

So for now, I hope that the main way I use the platform, and the power that comes with a few thousand followers, will be to spread the Good News about frogs and other wonderful animals, and the other kinds of science happening around us (and occasional other off-topic content). I hope that you are encouraged to explore the world around you, and to do your own reading to find out more about the subjects that interest you. And also I will continue to try to make meme-worthy content, because it does nice, if addictive, things in my brain when I get the clicks.

Thanks for asking, anon, and sorry for the Wall of Text.

[max1461]

I stand by my claim that tumblr users are on average more curious and intellectually playful than users on pretty much any other major website. I've thought this a lot with regards to how many of the popular memes on here are history, science, or philosophy themed, in a way that doesn't just strike me as surface level repetition of a factoid (cf. reddit), but actually represents more thoughtful engagement with an idea. Thinking about all the really clever ways that "this is not a place of honor" has been used and reworked, or the Ea-nasir jokes, or even something as simple as those "juice reward" memes. And the boyfriend memes! Those have mass appeal here, and they're all shit like "yeah we shifted your boyfriend down an octave", "yeah we mythologized your boyfriend", "yeah we compressed your boyfriend into a .zip file". You know, like... for all that's been made of the tumblr userbase's susceptibility to convincingly-worded falsehoods, people here really do seem willing to contemplate things a little harder than people on reddit or twitter do. As someone who spends time on a number of different social media sites, the difference is pretty stark.

And I'm just thinking about this in light of the fact that, as soon as polls are introduced, everyone immediately starts using them to do game theory. Like, not even the usual suspects here, just random tumblr users! And I don't think this is because they know game theory and are doing it intentionally, I think it's because a lot of people here just have that sort of playful, tricksterly intellectual impulse. It's wonderful.

[alexanderwales]

Castle Solutions was the only time travel company in the world. They had a giant corporate headquarters in downtown Chicago, which was the only place in the entire world with a time machine, at least as far as anyone knew. They were worth hundreds of billions, and the only reason they weren't worth more seemed to be that they didn't care all that much about money. The time machines were used for everything: reporting, media, market corrections, the surveillance state, and industry. Castle Solutions was the lynchpin of the modern world.

Daniel had thought the waiting room would be nicer.

He sat in a blue-gray chair that would have been at home in any waiting room anywhere else in Chicago. Slightly tinny music played over speakers from the ceiling. A fake potted plant sat in one corner, failing to look lively. There were no windows, because the waiting room was deep in the heart of the building, close to the machine itself.

Daniel was the only one in the waiting room. He'd come half an hour early, lugging all his gear, and now the only thing left was for the clock to run down. A bored-looking woman had come in to tell him that it might be awhile, that they were running behind schedule — the time travel company, running behind schedule. So there had been more waiting than expected.

A man in a charcoal gray suit with a simple blue backpack came in. He slung the backpack down onto the ground with a sigh and rubbed his face. He had stubble there, but an artful amount of it, like he'd spent some time in the mirror making sure that it was the right amount of scruff to offset his expensive suit.

Daniel looked straight ahead, trying not to look, keeping his face blank, like he was passing by a homeless person who might ask him for money he didn't have.

"Wow, you've got a lot of stuff," said the man. "Is that a sword?"

"It's a katana," said Daniel. He didn't match the eye contact the man was giving him.

"Oh, cool," said the man. "You're going to ... katana times?"

"Edo Japan, yeah," said Daniel.

Daniel was trying his best not to engage, to get this conversation over as quickly as possible. He wasn't making eye contact.

The man picked up his backpack and moved across the waiting room to be closer to Daniel.

"You speak Japanese?" the man asked.

"Hai, watashi wa nihongo o hanashimasu," replied Daniel. He wished that he were more fluent, that the words had come out less rote.

"Cool," said the man. He had apparently also come closer to get a look at all of Daniel's stuff. His eyes moved over the duffel bags. There wasn't much to see, everything had been carefully packed away. "Wow, you sure are prepared, huh?"

"It's a different time and place," said Daniel with a shrug. It represented five years of planning, five years of training, learning, honing himself.

"Personally, I'm going to 1946," said the man, though Daniel hadn't asked. He held out his hand. "Archie Vedder."

Daniel reluctantly took the hand. "Daniel Strom." He had never really gotten the hang of shaking hands. He worried that his hands were too clammy, a worry that proved founded when Archie wiped his hand on that expensive charcoal suit.

"I went with the kit," said Archie, pointing to his backpack. "I've got papers, I've got a computer with a backup, I've got a projector, a media library, a science library, the whole works, plus some forged bonds and a stack of cash. I got a sweet deal on it, they're overstocked now."

Retreating into the past had seen its heyday. Now most of the people who had been most enthusiastic were gone, and there were only the dissenters left. Everyone agreed with using the machine for the mundane stuff, but simply leaving, never to return, rubbed people the wrong way.

"I guess they don't sell kits for Edo," Archie ventured.

"They do," said Daniel. "They're trash."

"Ah," said Archie.

"This is all custom," said Daniel. "Higher quality, field tested, everything I'll need to set myself up there." Only some of it was stock. He had two computers, three smartphones, chargers and plugs, solar panels, replacement batteries, and redundant media libraries and science libraries.

Archie raised an eyebrow. "What does that mean, field tested? Because people don't come back. You're there for good, right?"

What it actually meant was that Daniel had gone out into a field and tested it, made sure that it worked under various conditions, set himself up like he might be explaining all this to a carefully chosen daimyo. There was only so much that camping in the woods and taking dry run vacations could tell him though.

"Some of it is theory," said Daniel. "Research."

"Yeah, see, that's why I went with 1946," said Archie. "It's really well-trod. You know, I was reading an article the other day that maybe the Baby Boom was a little overstated? Like, we're obviously living in the wake of time travelers, but that's the prime time to come back, anywhere from 1946 to 1960. The economy is doing well, tech is advancing, it's familiar enough. The culture is so close you can sell some stuff from a media library, it's brilliant. You're five steps away from becoming a multimillionaire in a time when that meant something."

"Sure," said Daniel.

"Any reason you're doing hard mode?" asked Archie. "I mean, samurai and ninjas are cool, sure, but —"

"It's not about that," said Daniel.

"Alright, sure," shrugged Archie.

Daniel looked over at the waiting room's lone clock. You would think that a waiting room for a time travel company would have better clocks, but it was a cheap utilitarian design, thin plastic and wobbly hands.

"What's it about then?" asked Archie.

"I was going to go with a friend," said Daniel. "We had practiced together, trained together. Then he got cancer."

"Ah, shit," said Archie.

"He lived," said Daniel. "He's fine. But he's on medications now, and will be for the rest of his life, and he can't go anymore."

"Huh," said Archie. "So there's a friend who you're leaving behind?"

"No," said Daniel. "I mean ... this was what we did together. We talked about it a lot. We read history books and practiced crafts and skills. At the start, I didn't really take it that seriously, it was just a hobby, but I got invested, and I guess I kept seeing it as — I don't know."

"I mean for me, it's a way out," said Archie. "Most people feel that way, yeah? My wife filed for divorce, I got fired from my job, so hey, time to start over in 1946, pretend I'm part of the Greatest Generation, ride the waves I know are coming. Exploit it."

Daniel grimaced. The Vietnam War, segregation, the Red Scare? People had a rosy view of that time. He'd never felt particularly aligned with people like Archie who were just looking to make a quick buck.

"Oh come on," said Archie. "You think you're better than me? You're a, you know, what's the word. Colonizer."

Daniel rolled his eyes. "No."

"What, just 'no', it's not, you know, what we did to the Native Americans?" asked Archie. "The whole 'conquer the past' thing?"

"I'm a single person," said Daniel. "I'm bringing back things that will change their culture forever, but I'm not an agent of my country, and even if I were, I think those people who want to be a god king are morons. And sorry, I'm not spending my last minutes in the present on badly rehashing a debate I've had a thousand times already."

"Why not?" asked Archie. "See, I think having arguments right before you go is great. You can leave on a high note. I've spent the last few days saying whatever the hell I wanted to people. It's great. I went to my dad and said 'hey, you were a terrible father, I never liked you, and it's sad that you thought I needed your approval'. And then you know what's hilarious? I get to just walk away and never be seen again. How's that for a power move? How's that for a mic drop?"

"Seems immature," said Daniel.

"Well, see, I'm actually fine being immature," said Archie with a little laugh. "And when this conversation is done, one or both of us is going into the past, never to be seen nor heard from again, and isn't that great? You don't like me, I don't like you, and then we're strangers again."

Daniel had been looking straight ahead, but he turned to Archie after that. "You don't like me?" he asked. "You don't know me."

"I know your type," said Archie. He leaned back. "You spent what, three years cooking up a plan, making this trip back in time your entire personality, and now you think you're better than me, better than everyone, like you've got it all figured out. You talked yourself into throwing away everything you've got going on here. You got dreams of a future in the past. It's quitter talk, is what it is."

"Fuck off," said Daniel. In his normal life he'd have never said it, but he was on the precipice.

"You think going into the past is going to transform you?" asked Archie. "That another world, a second chance, you'll somehow become the man you think you were supposed to be? Well let me tell you, if you were a loser here, you'll be a loser there."

Daniel stood up and drew his sword. He'd practiced the draw a thousand times. The sword gleamed, even under the ugly fluorescent lighting of the waiting room. "Fuck off, or you'll be going back to the 50s missing a hand."

"Bah," said Archie. "Fine." He stood up and took a seat further away, the same one he'd taken when he first came in. He was bouncing his leg and reading something on his phone.

Daniel was putting his sword back in its sheath when the receptionist came into the room.

"Daniel?" she asked, glancing only briefly at the sword. "They're ready for you."

"Finally," Daniel thought but didn't say, because even though he wasn't going to be around anymore, he believed in basic politeness.

He gathered his things and left the waiting room, ready to leave.

~~~~

Archie sat outside Castle Solutions, in their little courtyard, vaping.

It wasn't long before the receptionist, Lydia, came to sit next to him.

"It didn't really seem like you wanted to convince that one," she said.

"Yeah," he said. "Sorry."

She shrugged and pulled out a vape pen of her own. "Sometimes you just want to yell at someone. I get that. But you're risking us getting caught. And if we get caught in the future, we probably get caught in the present."

"Yup," he said. "Won't happen again."

"Give it a few days before you come back," she said. "Three, let's say. He didn't file a complaint, so there's nothing in the system."

"Mmm," said Archie. He made a long, slow drag of the pen. They sat there vaping together for a while. It had often occurred to him that vaping was impossibly lame, but it felt less lame when done with someone else. He watched as the vapor left her mouth in a thin, concentrated stream. "You wanna go out sometime?"

"On a date?" she asked. She gave the tip of her vape pen a casual look. "No, not really."

"Alright," said Archie.

"I don't really know what your deal is," she said. "Why this is important to you. Why you want to talk people back from the brink, or yell at them."

"Mmm," said Archie. "You want to tragic backstory?"

"Meh," Lydia replied. "I'm not going on a date with someone who has a tragic backstory. That's all. Sorry. I've got my own tragic backstory, thanks very much."

"Fair," said Archie. "It was my kid brother, that's the short version. He up and left one day, left us a note that read like ... well, you know." He drew a finger across his neck.

"Where'd he go?" asked Lydia.

"England, 16th century," said Archie. "He thought he was going to take Shakespeare's place." He shook his head. "Only eighteen, you know? Unconscionable that they let kids that young through. He had his whole life ahead of him and he just ... disappeared."

Lydia sighed. "Yeah."

She turned off her vape pen, then mimed stubbing it out on the bench like a cigarette before slipping it into her purse. He felt a surge of attraction for her.

"Alright, I'll go on the date," said Lydia. "But if we're going to be dating, you've gotta stop this."

"Vaping?" asked Archie.

"You know what I mean," said Lydia. "You going in there trying to convince them to back out, that's one thing. It's noble, almost. But if it's going to be fighting, if it's you trying to work through some shit, then I'm not sticking my neck out for you. Doubly so if you want to get together. You process your trauma some other way, or repress it like the rest of us, alright?"

Archie thought about that for a moment. "Alright. Sure."

"I've got to get back to work," said Lydia as she rose from the bench. "You have my number."

Archie nodded, and after she had left, he stayed, looking out at the courtyard.

He wondered how Daniel was doing out there, in that other timeline, but he supposed that he would never know.

[covid-safer-hotties]

New COVID Variant XEC May Outpace Others This Fall - Published Sept 18, 2024

"The virus is always going to be mutating away from what it was in order to get more efficient at infecting individuals," Adalja said. "So I think this really highlights the fact that a universal COVID vaccine, or some vaccine with different technologies, perhaps a nasal vaccine and using mucosal immunity, all of those things are important."

What if, get this, we prevented covid cases by improving ventilation, mandating air filtration, and wearing masks in public? Wouldn't that accomplish the same goal right now? Every mutation takes us further away from the current scientific fantasy of a universal covid vaccine. We have to stop cases to make this dream a reality.

by Sophie Putka

The new COVID-19 variant XEC may overtake others in circulation to become dominant in the coming months, experts said, but will not prompt a meaningful change in symptoms or vaccine response.

So far, the CDC's variant proportions tracker has not registered enough cases of XEC in the U.S. to report it. (The agency's projected estimates for the 2 weeks ending in September 14 currently show KP.3.1.1 and KP.2.3 as the leading variants, with 52.7% and 12.2% of national cases, respectively.) Another estimate using data from the variant tracker GISAID has XEC at 1.11% of U.S. cases as of September 15, with around 48 sequences reported.

First detected in Germany in June, it's been found mostly in Central Europe, representing 10% of cases, according to the U.K.'s Science Media Centre.

"XEC represents a fairly minor evolution relative to the SARS-CoV-2 diversity currently in circulation, and is not a highly derived novel variant such as those that were granted Greek letters," like Alpha, Delta, and Omicron, Francois Balloux, PhD, a computational biologist at University College London and director of the UCL Genetics Institute, said in a Science Media Centre statement.

Experts noted that while XEC may have a small advantage in transmission, available vaccines are still likely to provide protection from serious illness.

XEC is a "recombinant variant of some of the other Omicron lineages that have been around for a while, and it does appear to be more immune evasive, giving it a transmissibility advantage in the population with the immunity that it has," Amesh Adalja, MD, of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, told MedPage Today. "But it doesn't really change anything, just like the last variant didn't change anything, or the one before that, one before that, or the one before that."

Currently available COVID vaccines target slightly different subvariants. The updated mRNA shots aimed at KP.2 from Pfizer-BioNTech (Comirnaty) and Moderna (Spikevax), as well as Novavax's vaccine targeting the JN.1 variant lineage, are still protective against the most serious consequences of COVID infections, experts said.

"If this becomes a dominant variant, it will decrease the efficacy against infection of the updated vaccines, but the updated vaccines will still be durable against severe disease [and] hospitalization, and that's what is really the primary function of our current, first-generation COVID vaccines," Adalja said.

Still, he emphasized, the rapid mutation of the virus underscores a need for a different kind of vaccine than those currently available if the goal is to protect against infection rather than just severe disease.

"The virus is always going to be mutating away from what it was in order to get more efficient at infecting individuals," Adalja said. "So I think this really highlights the fact that a universal COVID vaccine, or some vaccine with different technologies, perhaps a nasal vaccine and using mucosal immunity, all of those things are important."

[genderqueerdykes]

this is prob silly but i appreciate you being so candid about not interacting with much media (like film/tv/pop culture stuff). it's kind of hard to be on tumblr or really even exist if you're not able to interact with media but it's a big trigger for me so i just... can't. like, i've never had anyone understand that it's not a choice i'm making to be special/different/lazy i just have extreme and unhealthly reactions to most media, except some books and comics. which idk if that's how it is for you (its not my business or anything) but i've never felt seen/represented about it before so im thankful, yk?

i appreciate you for sending this! i don't find it silly at all

i think it's very good for you to acknowledge that you have an unhealthy relationship with most forms of media. i'm sorry that you're going through this, but consuming media is not a requirement nor is it something that you genuinely need for your mental health, so it's okay that that's how you feel. i appreciate this because it gives me a chance to talk about something that is important to me, but people struggle to understand why that is

my parents used to make fun of whatever i was watching or playing as a kid over my shoulder. i used to get relentlessly mocked every time i put on a show i liked or played a game in front of either of them. it caused me to have severe trauma for years where i couldn't watch or play anything around other people at all. i still don't like when people ask me to put on things that i do like for a big group. the stress i feel when other people don't enjoy it is not worth it. i'm still very uncomfortable doing this to this day

i've felt pretty alienated all my life due to this. it seems like now more than ever, media, especially fictional media, is so important to general modern culture that it creates a barrier between people who do and don't engage. and it's not like it's a passive thing, i have people get offended at me when i say i haven't seen a movie or TV show. not talking about anyone on here, or any anons i've answered about media! people have been kind and respectful here. but in my real life and in conversations with other people, i have genuinely been mocked or insulted because i don't engage with most television, movies, books and comics.

i've had people question my autism over this. when i've told people in the past that i do not engage with pop culture, fictional media and so on, i've had people actually say "but i thought you were autistic????" like it's genuinely frustrating that it seems like people have shifted to thinking that autistic people's special interests are always cartoons, games and TV shows. it worries me because at times it feels like people are turning the common definition of autism into Media Consumption Disorder. my special interests are queer history & culture, animals & nature, and medicine & psychology. i genuinely enjoy research, it's something i happily do for hours because it stimulates my brain and motivates me. it excites me just as much as i think fiction excites people who can enjoy it. it's more than okay for autistic people to have a piece of media as their special interest, i'm not saying that its not! but it frightens me that people seem to conflate "autistic" with "loves fictional media".

due to my DID, i can't remember plots. like at all. plots confuse the ever loving hell out of me because i can't keep track of what's going on. real life doesn't have a plot. science doesn't have a plot. i don't know if fully understand the point of a plot, honestly. expecting people to be able to remember such an absurd amount of information in order to figure out something that happens down the road or at the very end feels like a herculean task to me. i can't remember what happened to me 10 minutes ago, there's no way i'm remembering a tiny event that happened hours and hours and hours ago. scripted interactions feel so stiff and unnatural to me

people tell me i'm saying i don't know what they're talking about to "be an asshole". i used to have a best friend who got really into dungeons&dragons and it traumatized me for years because i got into at first, then quickly lost interest once i realized how boring actually playing the game is for me. my friend did NOT take it well. he continued to force me to play. if i would ask him to please change the conversation topic he would start insulting and berating me and telling me that i was pretending to not be interested anymore to be mean to him. he couldn't understand that i grew out of it. he never got any better with this, as he was obsessed with marvel films and would get super pissed off if i told him i had no interest or didn't know what to say to him. it was frustrating because i didn't have a choice whether or not i could like something. it was "if you don't like this, you're an asshole."

and it's not just him that's treated me that way. it's been most of my friends. for whatever reason, when you tell the average person that you haven't seen, or god forbid don't like a piece of media, they take it personally for... some reason. as if i said "no i don't watch that because that's bad" as opposed to what i actually say is "i don't know what that is" or "i haven't seen that". you would not believe how insecure people get when you tell them you don't like a piece of media they like. i'm not sure why people feel like their favorite media is an extension of themselves, but it's an unhealthy relationship. it's not healthy to get offended if your friend tells you they haven't seen a piece of media that you have.

i have aphantasia, which is the inability to picture things in my head. i don't get "sucked into" media like people with clearer mind's eyes do. i don't picture anything cool or epic or fun happening in my head because i can't. as a result, i don't get pulled into shows, i don't get invested in tabletop games, i don't really get that affected by the media that i watch because i am painfully aware that i'm staring at a pre-recorded and scripted show the entire time. i'm painfully aware that i'm staring at an actor in a costume i just cannot get immersed in most forms of media save for very rare video games but even then, i immediately stop thinking about it the second i'm done interacting with it

i just don't listen to music and that one baffles people as i'm punk. most music is just straight up overstimulating to me due to my autism. i'm not saying that music is bad, it just overstimulates the everloving hell out of me. most of the time it just hurts my ears or gives me a headache or triggers my misophonia, which results in me getting irrationally pissed off. it's not something i can control. i prefer to listen to nature sounds, very simple meditation music that is a few simple tones, or nothing at all. i actually enjoy silence. i enjoy not overloading my ears. i enjoy being alone with my own thoughts. i can't think when there's too much noise happening

video games are more enjoyable than anything else due to the interactive element, but that does not mean i am paying attention to the characters or the story. it's very rare that a game can actually make me get interested in the characters themselves. i'm just there for the gameplay. generally i prefer games like rollercoaster tycoon, tower unite and other games that don't have a plot at all and are strictly focused on gameplay. i have no idea how people memorize all the different characters and interactions and story beats in games that have an overarching plot.

it's a personal choice. you're allowed to choose what your hobbies and interests are. if pop culture stresses you out, you do not have to engage. i just straight up do not get pop culture references at all and i've had people laugh at me for it but i just really don't care, it's not what i'm interested in as a person. i feel like a lot of people aren't quite realizing that most popular media is made for profit, not to be something genuinely well written or entertaining. i'm not saying those things are bad but what i am saying is that it's a product meant to be consumed in order for you to help a generally huge company profit. there's very little soul and whimsy when it comes to most AAA games and big box office films. the artistic integrity is severely lacking

anyway, thank you for giving me a chance to talk about this more at length! it's why i'm just very honest about it because i'm not going to force myself to change my interests because some people find how i approach life strange, or take it personally. you're allowed to choose what you interact with and don't. you're allowed to define your own interests and hobbies. and i think you're doing a great thing by acknowledging that you have an unhealthy relationship with pop culture. a LOT of people do right now. it's manufactured to be addicting on purpose. binge watching things is encouraged and is becoming seen as a new norm. i don't think people like you or i deserve to be mocked for approaching life in ways that make sense to us. take care of yourself, i appreciate you!

[holy-obsession-batman]

DC x MHA lore

I'll be using the very convenient fact that we know absolutely nothing about any country other than Japan in MHA, beside it be vaguely implied that there's also an hero system. All we know about America is that 1) the crime rate is super high, 2) Star and Stripe is supposedly the n°1 hero, and 3) All Might was there as an hero for some time.

So I raise you this: mha is the same earth as DC, but 150~200 years later, in the 23th century.

The MHA worldview is actually as partial and potentially biased as the Harry Potter canon what with it using at 95% the point of view of teenagers in a school eagerly teaching pro-system propaganda, in a country that is KNOWN for its, huh, racism nationalist enthusiasm. (We see like three foreign characters, whose characterization are like 1) connexion to Japanese character (All Might), 2) foreigner.) MHA!Japan could be actually a closed-border country, with heavy social media control, what do you really know!

So we can make use of the HP fandom big specialty: twisting the world building to show the canon viewpoint is actually super warped.

hero ranking

Star and Stripe is allegedly the US "n°1" hero: that would be only among the heroes part of the official, government-sanctioned hero system, which the JL isn't a part of, because independent and international.

Plus (a bit like the gun policy) there are still a ton of vigilantes in America, cuz people like Batman refuse absolutely to surrender their independence (with valid reasons, when people like Waller are part of said government). Especially since the 'official' heroes don't have a secret identity--at least, not to the government.

So the "heroes" in the popularity board are, yeah, just a tiny, non-representative group.

(I'm partaged whether Luthor is one or not. On one hand, he dreams himself a hero, and preach about democratic control yada yada. On the other, I don't think he would like the control.

US quirk population

If I remember correctly, mha's big statistic makes 20% of the population quirkless, so one out of five people. Which is... definitely not the balance you find among the characters. There is a grand total of four named quirkless characters, and one isn't even Japanese. (I know that the show is about the hero industry and that whole thing is that there are no quirkless in the hero industry. But even then.

=> If 80/20% is worldwide stat number, some countries, like Japan, having a higher quirked concentration, means that other have a bigger quirkless percentage. even more so the case if the world stat of 80/20 isn't calculated directly from the world's quirked/quirkless total population, but as an average from countries' percentage... You can make statistics say anything.

All that to say, there's a bit more quirkless people in the States. But at the same time, there are also other types of meta people, like aliens, wizards, robot and shit.

Either Quirk factor equals metagene (=linguistic difference) or the metagene is an ancestor of the Quirk factor. In any case the term 'metahuman' is broader than just quirked, it also means all people who got power through science or magic, and aliens.

As for the quirk regulations, I think they would be much looser than in Japan (again, like the US gun policy). In Japan, using a quirk in public is forbidden if you don't have a permit. I think there would be more of a FREEDOM *eagle cries* mentality in the States, with the use of a quirk only being penalized if used to do a crime or sth.

American hero landscape

the government sanctioned heroes, on the official popularity board (with Star and Stripes as a number one): a somewhat little number.

vigilantes protecting each their city, like Batman Gotham, Flash Central City, Superman Metropolis, Green Arrow Star City, Nightwing Blüdhaven...

Justice League business: the JL is independent and international (or more accurately: planetary), but has several bases and institutions in the States, like the Hall of Justice (tho the Watchtower is in space).

Also for some reason most of the extra-planetary JL & Green Lantern Corps business also happens to take place in America, be it the space refugees, the planetary diplomacy or the monthly alien invasion.

the Titans are also an independent international organization, with more than ten Towers across the world, but the first Tower was founded in New York, and the main hq is San Francisco's TT.

What parts of DC survive two hundred years in the future:

All the practical immortals, like the Amazons, demigods, mercenary with a healing factor, aliens with elongated lifespan and super-villains bathing in green spa are still running around doing same old same old

Lex Luthor is super decrepit but held alive by money, preservatives and spite. Supers are at various states of aging: Clark is grey, Jon is a youthful adult, and Kon is eternally bound to teen age. (YES, I'm using Young Justice Comics Kon). Lois, tho ;-;

Is there a Flash? Trick question. There is, well, one Flash born in this era, but also Flashes from various timelines casually come and go, as Flashes do.

the Batfam is still around, for the same reason Dick hasn't hit 30 anymore than Bruce has hit 50 in 70 years : their ages keep getting post-dated ten years at a time Crisis after Crisis without anybody (the Bats themselves or the cape community) even realizing, nor questioning that yes, this is the same Batman who co-founded the Justice League, yes, Bats is older than Supes, yes, Bats is 100% human and probably around 50, and yes, Supes is 200-something, what's the connexion between all those questions?

Civilians (read: Gothamites) are in fact aware that Batman have been around for more than two centuries. Theories are 50/50 between immortal cryptid and mantle passed down. On the other hand, they aren't aware of the recurring editing of local billionaire Bruce Wayne and his whole family (and friends)'s ages, and don't make any connexion between the two. (same with the fact that Dick Grayson and friends founded the Titans...)

I haven't read much (or anything, really) about the Arrowfam, so either they are dead or they got the same treatment as the Bats, along with some other key characters like Waller, the Gotham Rogues and any of your fav, really.

Okay so this was a bit of world building, I got half a scenario for the Titans meeting class A that I will add later

(Masterpost)

[thereadingchallengechallenge]

Review: Metal From Heaven by August Clarke Rating: 5/5

I received an ARC of this title through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

Marney Honeycutt works in the Yann I Chauncey Ichorite Factory but when their sister leads a workers' strike that turns into a massacre, they are suddenly all alone. Touched in the head by the metal they worked from birth, Marney has to get out of the city. They fall in with a gang of thieves who whisk them away to a mansion high in the hills by the sea. But Marney will come back. Because they are going to kill Chauncey and they're going to marry his daughter to do it.

August Clarke has done it again. I was captivated from the very first page by Clarke's signature dizzying, dazzling prose. I was utterly immersed in this rich world that blends fantasy and science fiction absolutely perfectly. I loved the different cultures, I especially loved the way Clarke emulated butch/femme lesbian culture, I loved that trans-ness was just part of the world and Marney never had to fight to be who they were.

The queerness really was my favourite part. It was so nice to finally read a book about a trans stone butch that feels like the trans stone butches I know. Marney felt and talked and behaved like so many of my friends do and that representation is so sorely needed. I have a list of friends a mile long to recommend this book because I know they ache to see themselves and their lives represented in media. I'm very grateful that August Clarke is able to do that with their books.

And the prose! Clarke has such a specific way of writing that just latches into your brain and doesn't let go. It flows so beautifully but has a staccato edge that I can't get enough of. I especially enjoyed how Clarke intermittently used second person to elevate how Marney was telling the story and the reason why they were doing that became so satisfying as the story went on. It was utterly brilliant.

If you are looking for a truly unique speculative fiction story that centres queerness and working class people in a story of revenge, I implore you to pick up Metal From Heaven and allow yourself to be swept away in this enthralling book. It's an absolute masterpiece.

Metal From Heaven releases October 22nd, 2024!

[river-taxbird]

The Four Horsemen of the Digital Apocalypse

Blockchain. Artificial Intelligence. Internet of Things. Big Data.

Do these terms sound familiar? You have probably been hearing some or all of them non stop for years. "They are the future. You don't want to be left behind, do you?"

While these topics, particularly crypto and AI, have been the subject of tech hype bubbles and inescapable on social media, there is actually something deeper and weirder going on if you scratch below the surface.

I am getting ready to apply for my PhD in financial technology, and in the academic business studies literature (Which is barely a science, but sometimes in academia you need to wade into the trash can.) any discussion of digital transformation or the process by which companies adopt IT seem to have a very specific idea about the future of technology, and it's always the same list, that list being, blockchain, AI, IoT, and Big Data. Sometimes the list changes with additions and substitutions, like the metaverse, advanced robotics, or gene editing, but there is this pervasive idea that the future of technology is fixed, and the list includes tech that goes from questionable to outright fraudulent, so where is this pervasive idea in the academic literature that has been bleeding into the wider culture coming from? What the hell is going on?

The answer is, it all comes from one guy. That guy is Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum. Now there are a lot of conspiracies about the WEF and I don't really care about them, but the basic facts are it is a think tank that lobbies for sustainable capitalist agendas, and they famously hold a meeting every year where billionaires get together and talk about how bad they feel that they are destroying the planet and promise to do better. I am not here to pass judgement on the WEF. I don't buy into any of the conspiracies, there are plenty of real reasons to criticize them, and I am not going into that.

Basically, Schwab wrote a book titled the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In his model, the first three so-called industrial revolutions are:

1. The industrial revolution we all know about. Factories and mass production basically didn't exist before this. Using steam and water power allowed the transition from hand production to mass production, and accelerated the shift towards capitalism.

2. Electrification, allowing for light and machines for more efficient production lines. Phones for instant long distance communication. It allowed for much faster transfer of information and speed of production in factories.

3. Computing. The Space Age. Computing was introduced for industrial applications in the 50s, meaning previously problems that needed a specific machine engineered to solve them could now be solved in software by writing code, and certain problems would have been too big to solve without computing. Legend has it, Turing convinced the UK government to fund the building of the first computer by promising it could run chemical simulations to improve plastic production. Later, the introduction of home computing and the internet drastically affecting people's lives and their ability to access information.

That's fine, I will give him that. To me, they all represent changes in the means of production and the flow of information, but the Fourth Industrial revolution, Schwab argues, is how the technology of the 21st century is going to revolutionize business and capitalism, the way the first three did before. The technology in question being AI, Blockchain, IoT, and Big Data analytics. Buzzword, Buzzword, Buzzword.

The kicker though? Schwab based the Fourth Industrial revolution on a series of meetings he had, and did not construct it with any academic rigor or evidence. The meetings were with "numerous conversations I have had with business, government and civil society leaders, as well as technology pioneers and young people." (P.10 of the book) Despite apparently having two phds so presumably being capable of research, it seems like he just had a bunch of meetings where the techbros of the mid 2010s fed him a bunch of buzzwords, and got overly excited and wrote a book about it. And now, a generation of academics and researchers have uncritically taken that book as read, filled the business studies academic literature with the idea that these technologies are inevitably the future, and now that is permeating into the wider business ecosystem.

There are plenty of criticisms out there about the fourth industrial revolution as an idea, but I will just give the simplest one that I thought immediately as soon as I heard about the idea. How are any of the technologies listed in the fourth industrial revolution categorically different from computing? Are they actually changing the means of production and flow of information to a comparable degree to the previous revolutions, to such an extent as to be considered a new revolution entirely? The previous so called industrial revolutions were all huge paradigm shifts, and I do not see how a few new weird, questionable, and unreliable applications of computing count as a new paradigm shift.

What benefits will these new technologies actually bring? Who will they benefit? Do the researchers know? Does Schwab know? Does anyone know? I certainly don't, and despite reading a bunch of papers that are treating it as the inevitable future, I have not seen them offering any explanation.

There are plenty of other criticisms, and I found a nice summary from ICT Works here, it is a revolutionary view of history, an elite view of history, is based in great man theory, and most importantly, the fourth industrial revolution is a self fulfilling prophecy. One rich asshole wrote a book about some tech he got excited about, and now a generation are trying to build the world around it. The future is not fixed, we do not need to accept these technologies, and I have to believe a better technological world is possible instead of this capitalist infinite growth tech economy as big tech reckons with its midlife crisis, and how to make the internet sustainable as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, the most monopolistic and despotic tech companies in the world, are running out of new innovations and new markets to monopolize. The reason the big five are jumping on the fourth industrial revolution buzzwords as hard as they are is because they have run out of real, tangible innovations, and therefore run out of potential to grow.

[onlycosmere]

Cosmere/Magic the Gathering

'What IP do you most want to see in Magic the Gathering?' Thunderwoodd: Stormlight Archive!

thyfoolish1: Brandon said they reached out to him and he was excited and ready to go but they haven't gotten back to him. I think this was Dragonsteel last year. So there is hope.

Egi_: Even after the shitshow with the free book he gave them on the condition it wouldn't be commercialized and then WotC commercialized it?

Brandon Sanderson: I knew what I was getting into working with a big corporation. Like the proverbial frog giving a ride to a scorpion, I don't see justification for complaint regarding the eventual sting. I love the game, and the designers, so that's really my metric. As a note, everyone I worked with on the narrative team was wonderful.

I don't want a passing secret lair of five cards; I am interested in a full-blown set, so with that constraint, I wouldn't foresee a Stormlight or Mistborn crossover until one of several things happens:

1) They burn through the bigger properties that match MTG's vibe like LOTR did. Fantasy, or science fantasy, properties that feel legit as a big expansions. As mentioned in this thread alone, there is a pretty deep mine there. Dune, Witcher, Elder Scrolls, Arcane/LoL, Westeros (if they're feeling spicy.) A hobbit set is all but inevitable as well.

Considering they'd be unwise to put these sorts of things out too quickly, and should really give them time to breathe, we're looking at ten years easily before they're out of larger fish to fry. Stormlight is big for a book series, but without any shows/films/games, I'd suspect it doesn't have the casual word-of-mouth reach their marketing team looks for to justify the extra expense of licensing fees.

2) Said bigger properties decide they aren't interested, leaving things popular but without media representation. If they ever decided to experiment with a book-only series, I suspect I'd be very high on the list to approach.

3) Cosmere gets one of said media properties, something I'm actively trying to accomplish--but it is slow going, as I'm in the fortunate position of being able to be very picky about partners, and prefer to take my time.

I've made it clear to them that if a large-scale set were in the, ahem, cards, I'd be willing to make frequent trips to Seattle to be part of the design team on said set.

awakenedjunkofigure: If any author deserves the pick of the litter for production companies, it's absolutely you. Can't wait to see what your books would look like on-screen!!

Brandon Sanderson: Well, the answer to what they'd look like on screen is "Expensive," which a part of the problem...

schloopers: Any large consideration in your mind for spoilers versus fully representing a world or story?

Stormlight you’d of course want all 10 Orders, so spoilers are far as those are concerned are a given.

But maybe a legendary creature “Iron Eyes” instead of any spoiler specific proper names?

I ask because I have so far gotten one friend in the playgroup to start reading, and a couple full sets would for sure help in garnering interest, but I would worry for the story beats getting too greatly revealed out of context.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just unavoidable. I’ve had several Dr. Who episodes “spoiled” for me through that set.

Brandon Sanderson:  This is something I haven't given a lot of thought toward, but I perhaps should be mulling it over. You make a good point.

Thunderwoodd: Woah! Can’t believe you responded. Huge fan! And I loved your commander cube! Saw it on Game Knights right after I finished Rhythm of War.

Curious, do you think the Radiant orders could correspond to guilds or color wedges?

Brandon Sanderson: Yes, I've done thought experiments on that, and think guilds could actively work for them without too much trouble. Problem is, would we want a Stormlight set or just a Knights Radiant set, because ten guilds for ten orders is already a high demand. It might be better to make a wedge set, but the problem there is that the Radiants are actively all colors, so it would be hard to cut out any save black. (Willshaper individuality and artistic expression could be green red instead of red black, for example.) So maybe five four-color wedges? I think the lore could support this, and be something that MTG has had trouble conveying without the expansive worldbuilding an entire book series could provide.

Radiants and sapient spren (all but black, to indicate the inherent selfless Radiant cause)

Human Nations (all but green, to indicate triumph over nature, which is an antagonist on Roshar.)

Singers (All but blue, to indicate the lack of ability to plan for the future, dearth of scholars, and onset of madness in the fused.)

Non-sapient Spren and wildlife (All but white, to indicate lack of overriding societal structures.)

Secret Societies (All but red, indicting the deliberate and conscious planning of these groups.)

Four color signpost uncommons would be WILD, even with hybrid mana. So I can see the design team balking. This (four color guild set) is almost certainly something they've explored and specifically decided not to do.

mediocreattbest: It’s crazy coming onto this post to say “any cosmere set!” And then see you actually replying. Out of curiosity, would you prefer just a stormlight set or a cosmere-wide set? I’d love to see characters through their stories (like we had with the LotR set)

Brandon Sanderson: I'd prefer Stormlight or Mistborn alone, as the planets themselves are so much a part of the stories.

[mistressoftherant-blog]

Hypocrisy in the TMNT Fandom

I may come back to this topic at a later date, but I feel like I need to address the hypocrisy in the TMNT fandom when it comes to how 12 Donnie is treated for his crush on April, compared to other characters such as Bayverse Mikey and Mutant Mayhem Leo, or I might explode. Do I condone everything that 12 Donnie does in the name of his crush on April? No. Do I sometimes find the cringiness of his actions unbearable (keeping in mind that he is my favourite character in 12)? Absolutely. But is there context behind his actions that often gets ignored? Yes. Do the fandom vilify or make fun of behaviour from him that they let slide in other characters? 100% yes.

People love to bash 12 Donnie for his actions, without even considering the reasons behind them (poor choices from the show writers aside). April is the first human his age that Donnie really sees and gets to interact with. He's a deeply insecure character, who feels out of place even amongst his family and, as people have pointed out before me, April represents a wider level of acceptance to Donnie. If a pretty human girl can love him, maybe there is hope for him gaining wider acceptance from humanity. I do think he has genuine feelings for her, but I also believe that part of his obsessiveness is a desire to be more human, or at least be accepted by humans, and he subconsciously views gaining the love of a human to be a part of this. 12 Donnie (like most Donatellos), is keenly aware that he will never get what he wants, or deserves.

He is a genius, and that will never be acknowledged by the world. He will never get everything a human genius would get. He doesn't get go to school, or go shopping for new resources, or make friends who share his interests. He risks his life saving the world over and over again, only to be seen as a villain for the way he looks.

That's part of why he sees 12 Casey as such a threat, Casey is human and doesn't need the same level of acceptance that Donatello does. He already has everything that Donnie wants (he can go to school, make other friends etc), but yet he still wants to be with April. The first human to show Donnie any acceptance. One of the only people to even tentatively seem interested in Donnie's science. If April chooses Casey over Donnie, then that truly does mean that Donnie, as a mutant, and a nerdy outcast mutant to boot, can never find love or acceptance, (again, this would be Donnie's perspective, and it is not April's duty to validate Donnie's self worth by getting in a relationship with him - that being said, the mixed signals she sent definitely didn't help matters).

Also, his stalking is creepy, but this is a kid who grew up with no social interaction besides his brothers, watching shows that provably had dubious ideas of romance. All of his ideas of romance are influenced by media, which isn't exactly a healthy way to gain an understanding of how to express those feelings. And when he knows the exact distance to her apartment, I always thought that he was just insanely good at estimating distances? He's shown to be able to make advanced calculations around distances and things in seconds on the show, so this never really seemed that bad to me, even if the show itself deemed it creepy?

Moreover, for the most part, he does genuinely follow April when he believes she is in danger, or when she is distancing herself from them (again, absolutely not a healthy thought process, but he misses her and wants her safe, and thinks is the best way to handle it). Is it still wrong? Yes. But should Donnie as a character be completely dragged for this for eternity? Not really. Also, can we please move past reducing Donnie's character to nothing more than his failures at flirting?

There is also the fact that April definitely did flirt back with him on numerous occasions. Whether or not this was done consciously, or to manipulate him, or whatever, is a rant for another day, but 12 Donnie definitely does have reasons to believe that April could want a relationship with him. She kisses him, on the mouth, right after he had told her that he was going to stop with his behaviour.

People also genuinely forgive 12 Leo flirting with his sister more than they do Donnie calling April his sweet chinchilla (and yes, Leo and Karai are still flirty even after the reveal that they are siblings, though it is thankfully toned down later on, and though I've seen people jumping through hoops trying to deny it). And Leo's flirting with Karai (even before the reveal), is equally as cringy as Donnie's. He's the poster boy for the 'I can fix them' mentality, even when the person he was trying to fix was actively trying to destroy everyone he cared about. 12 Leo also puts his brothers in danger due to his obsession with Karai, hurting them both physically and mentally, but a lot of people sweep this under the rug and only focus on times that 12 Donnie puts the others in danger due to his crush on April, or see this as a positive thing, showing how Leo never gives up on the people he cares about.

Moving on, 12 Donnie can be possessive of April (again, not great behaviour, and not something I particularly enjoy or condone), but 12 Mikey is the same way about Renet, and no one mentions it? Donnie hugs her (or says he could hug her, I can't quite remember the exact context), and Mikey gets all pissy about it? He's known Renet for barely any length of time, and they have no relationship at this point, but he gets annoyed at Donnie having a friendly interaction with her, as if it hasnt been well established that Donnie is only interested in April? Why is this more acceptable than when Donnie gets annoyed at Casey (a confirmed love rival), shows off about being close to April?

Additionally, why are Bayverse Mikey and Mayhem Leo hardly ever given the same treatment as 12 Donnie? I see countless crossovers where 12 Donnie is given endless shit for his bad flirting, especially as it's towards someone who the other counterparts see as a sister figure, with hardly any of them ignoring how unfair it is to criticise 12 Dee for seeing April differently to the others when their circumstances are different, or bringing up anyone else's behaviour.

Bayverse Mikey is just as bad! In fact, some of the things that he says are far worse than anything 12 Donnie has said, and it just gets brushed over? Even in crossover fics where 12 Dee gets slaughtered for his crush, no one brings up the downright crude things Bay Mikey says?

He constantly calls her a babe (I think 90s Mikey also makes similar comments), and even says 'she's so hot I can feel my shell tightening' which is hella gross tbh. Sure, 'sweet chinchilla' is weird, but it's far less demeaning than babe? And Mikey keeps this attitude up throughout both films? Why is this treated as being more acceptable than 12 Donnie's behaviour? This is even worse as Bay April is clearly an adult compared to the teenage turtles, and is clearly depicted as an older sister figure. At least in 12 there is only a year age gap, and neither April nor her father had anything to do with them when they were babies.

Hell, a few chaarcters (I think 03 Mikey and either 90s Raph or Mikey) make a joke about getting to 'keep her' when they bring an unconscious April back to the lair, and no one bats an eye?? It's played off as a joke, but even so, it's still freaky, and I've never seen anyone mention it before. They don't even get admonished for it!

Also, Mayhem Leo is absolutely just as much of a cringefail flirt as 12 Don, but everyone is acting like he comes across as so much better?! We've only had one movie with him so far, but his behaviour so far isn't all that different to 12 Don's?

They basically act the same way upon their first meeting. The rooftop scene when he first sees her is almost exactly the same as the scene in 12. And the comment about her beautiful, perfect mouth? If 12 Donnie said that he'd be slaughtered, but because it was Mayhem Leo, it's considered cute? When 12 Donnie gets super excited about getting April's number even though they already have it on the fridge it's embarrassing, but when Mayhem Leo tries to get Mayhem Donnie's phone to swipe her number it's endearing? Both ramble and get nervous around her, but people think this is sweet from Mayhem Leo but annoying from 12 Don.

Plus, Mayhem Leo has far more experience with humans than 12 Donnie. He has been going outside of the lair for a while, he has definitely seen other girls before. In 12, Donnie had never left the lair before the night he saw April, she's genuinely the first girl he's ever seen in person.

This point may also be a little unfair as we only have the Mayhem movie at the moment, compared to entire seasons of the 12 TV show, but it's also irritating me a bit how many people are acting like Mayhem Leo has far more of a chance with April than 12 Donnie did, purely because she agreed to go to prom with him, ignoring her line about how it was just as friends, and the many instances in 12 where April reciprocated Donnie's flirtation (again, April kissed him on the lips in the cartoon. It is canon that she did so).

Why are there so many double standards around the turtles having crushes? Either address all of their behaviour, or stop throwing 12 Donnie's flirting in our faces. It's exhausting seeing people openly bashing 12 Donnie, ignoring all of his great characteristics due to his crush, and then turning around and glorifying 12 Leo, Bay Mikey, or Mayhem Leo, or just ignoring their behaviour. It's grating to see almost every chat fic (even ones I thoroughly enjoy!!), have a seemingly obligatory bash 12 Donnie's crush and flirting chapter, yet hardly ever address the way any of the others behave.

[hers-underwraps]

AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK ADVENTURE!!

Octoreview time + talk about Koshi!

Watching this episode was awesome, got to see my favourite sisters in action in AUSTRALIA (YEAH)

Like first of all genuinely love the way Octonauts represent the creatures in the countries they visit. I honestly loved seeing all the Australian outback creatures and it wasn't giving the "down under" parody vibe that media usually presents Australia with. So um slay meomi?

I genuinely loved the way these two interacted with each other. They're so expressive and silly throughout the episode.

Dashi getting so excited over the Kangaroo was so funny and a core memory moment. It's such an Australian thing to get overly excited when seeing a kangaroo even though we see them in out backyard like every day. We're always "OMG GUYS LOOK IT'S A KANGAROO" and the Joey excitement is so real.

(Lowkey reminds me of the time our science teacher had a Joey he was fostering and it came into our science class and just chilled the entire time)

ANYWAYS GETTING A LITTLE SIDETRACKED BUT JUST HAD TO GUSH A LITTLE BIT.

I just love to see my girls winning ya'know?

They were pretty independent throughout the episode (apart from when the guys back at the Octopod were checking in) and it's nice to see them being able to use their own skills and knowledge without outside support

*literally, me watching Koshi and Dashi in this episode*

ALSO -> Not Koshi stealing Barncles thunder. Bro was probably like girl, you stole my most iconic line you can't just do that. Like he was so taken aback I just giggled. (Koshi being a little smartass is always so amusing to see though)

Since there was a heavy Koshi focus in this episode I just want to say I adore her as a character (no not just because she's Dashis sister).

I love how overly excited she gets, I love her insights and I love the sibling relationship she has with Dashi.

(Just look at how excited she gets with the octo-watch. The gasp and shaking with excitement oh my gosh it was so cute)

She genuinely admires her sister so much and she constantly shows her admiration and support throughout the whole series. The mystery sisters series she writes is just so adorable, she constantly gushes about how cool her sister's job is and how she aspires to be an Octonaut is so heartwarming. Especially since there are some unhealthy sibling relationships on the show (*coughs* pinto) and since I love the relationship I have with my sisters I really enjoy seeing it in these two!

Also, I appreciate how this Octo-watch was well deserved. Unlike some of the other jnr octoagents Koshi genuinely makes positive and helpful contributions to the team. She's still and child and sometimes gets distracted yapping but she can be a vital part of the team instead of a liability.

(Like just look at how happy everyone is for her!)

Also, the fact the she wanted to make her sister round like *tears in my eyes* gosh I love her.

Gotta love my dawgs <3

Anyways thanks for reading!