#sometimes you have to rant

[megpie71]

Appropriate Surnames, and Aggravating People

I'll be honest enough to admit this article got me good and riled up, mainly because of a lot of what it doesn't say. I will also say their surname is very appropriate (as someone who has recently finished re-reading "Pride and Prejudice" for the nth time). So, rant incoming...

The first thing to note is when well-to-do upper-middle-class Americans start talking about "population", they're generally talking about race. Overpopulation means "there are too many brown people"; underpopulation means "there are not enough white people". This is definitely the case with the Collinses, and the various people who are involved in their "cause". They are proudly conservative right-wing Americans, which means their response to the whole issue of "underpopulation" (as stated previously, "not enough white people") is to urge people like them to breed more and replace the population. Great Replacement thesis, anyone?

I can see why the Collinses put themselves forward as mouthpieces for their movement. To put it bluntly, they're fools and cranks, and they're that particular variety of well-off fool and crank who believes all they have to do is get the rockets off the ground, rather than worry about where they land ('"That's not my department" says Werner von Braun'). They have set off boldly down the road - fixing the potholes they cause is someone else's job. They're also of that particular brand of data-driven fool from the US Tech sector who believes very strongly in the inevitable logic of "the right thing" making its own case. It is notable the one area of data this particular type of data-driven fool never pays attention to is historical data - they borrow from the solipsistic logic of the objectivists and the libertarians there, essentially deciding "history starts today" and refusing to look at what the problems with their solutions (often of the sub-type "simple, cheap and wrong") have been the last few hundred times people have tried them.

What they're describing is the classic upper-middle-class breeding program - people who are wealthy enough to afford children should be having as many of them as possible, people who are too poor to afford children should be breeding so their children can be adopted / fostered by the wealthy upper-middle-classes as an act of charity, and well-to-do white autistic people should definitely be trying to out-breed the neurotypical masses because autism is its own superpower (just look at Elon Musk!).

Sidebar: I am particularly annoyed about the highly-autistic side of this, because quite frankly it is very much a case of "if you have enough money to throw at it, nothing is a disability" - the people who are busy proclaiming autism as a superpower are usually people who were diagnosed young, didn't have particularly severe autism to start with, had all the therapy in the world thrown at them from a very young age, and who have enough money, status, and familial support to be able to set up their lives to work around the constraints their autism places on them. They are able to arrange their worlds to suit them. Nice for them. If you aren't able to arrange the world to work around the constraints of your autism (for example, if you're working class, where you're basically given the options of conform or die) then yes, the same level of autism does become a disability. I'm saying this as a "high-functioning" person who has what's called "category 2" autism here in Australia - even with a good strong social safety net, at least fifty percent of the reason I went to the trouble of getting a diagnosis is so I could get the supports I need, rather than having to struggle all the time and argue uphill against disinterested systems in order to even get my needs recognised.

Anyway, reading about the Collinses is an exercise in the peculiar type of frustration which comes from having to deal with the sort of conservative thinker who doesn't want to see beyond the end of their own arms, and who works very hard to avoid doing so. Mr Collins doesn't believe in funding maternity leave - "The “number one pronatalist policy position,” he tells me, is for governments to make it easier for women to work from home and have flexible hours. The Collinses believe in childcare, but not maternity leave" - which would be fine, except that a lot of the jobs women do (outside Silicon Valley, where they are mentally still resident, even if they're physically living in Pennsylvania) aren't ones which could be done from home. For example: care work - childcare, disability care, elder care, nursing care; teaching; most service jobs - all of these aren't things you can do from home. (Effectively, they're willing to pay for a woman who works in childcare to go to work and care for someone else's children after they've given birth, but they aren't willing to pay for her to have time off to care for her own. It takes a very special type of data-driven thinking to come up with that one).

“Within and between countries, the less money somebody has, the more kids they have. This is a very well-studied phenomenon,”

Yes, it is. The main reason a lot of people in poorer families in poorer countries have lots of kids is because they also have high childhood mortality - you have seven kids in the hope that two will survive to breeding age, and you hope for sons (and expose the daughters) because sons can bring in wealth, while daughters cost money in dowry. In places like the USA, where the social safety net is atrocious, where pregnancy care and post-pregnancy care are expensive, and where sex education consists of "abstinence only", poorer families have larger families for one very straightforward reason: they don't have any options for how not to do so within the income they have.

"Eugenics is state-sponsored selective breeding to influence the dominance of certain genes, he argues. What he and Simone are doing is polygenics, using technology to give parents the choice over which traits they value most."

'It's not eugenics when we're the ones doing it', in other words. It's not eugenics when the government isn't involved.

Mr Collins is, in fact, wrong here. Eugenics, as a philosophy about human breeding, came out of the interpretations of Darwin's work on natural selection done by Darwin's half-cousin, Francis Galton, however it was predated by countless societies where a crude version of population control and santization of the breeding pool was performed by exposing disabled infants (or excess infants from families too poor to support them) to the elements, drowning them in a nearby river, burning them alive in the fire and all the various other means by which infanticide was enacted. Galton, who was a proper Victorian gentleman complete with country estate and so on, was aware of the work being done with selective breeding during the era in order to increase the size of cattle, sheep, pigs etc in order to feed a growing population and felt that this work could also be beneficially applied to humans, to weed out things like hereditary diseases, weakness, and "feeble-mindedness" from the human gene pool. He communicated these ideas to a large number of his like-minded colleagues, via articles such as "Hereditary Talent and Character" and books like "Hereditary Genius" and they gave these ideas the label of "eugenics" (from the Greek term for "good breeding stock") rather than the more blunt Anglo-Saxon of "selective breeding" because snob value (and also good advertising). One of the core ideas behind eugenic thinking can be boiled down to: "the wealthier you are, the better your genes must be".

There is a wealth of social science research out there which proves it's not just the genes, it's all the other little advantages wealth brings with it which work as a cosmic thumb on the scales in favour of the "inevitable" success of the scions of the wealthy. But again, this data and this science isn't of interest to the sort of "data driven" person that Mr and Mrs Collins embody. Funny that.

To be honest, I'm looking forward to the "fifteen years later" follow-up article to this one - because I suspect at least one of the Collins children is going to come right out and say "I was raised in a cult".

[arcanegifs]

Here are some Season 2 Arcane GIF comparisons before and after I color and sharpen them! | Season 1 Comparison GIFs

[lygma-nygma]

Being a batfam fan is funny because people will make a post like “here’s my headcanon-“ and it’s just something that’s directly canon to the story then post about major canon events and get everything wrong.

[sweetieviktor]

jealous! viktor x reader (headcanons + tiny scenarios)

summary: viktor sees you talking with a friend and get jealous.

content warning: idk if it counts as a cw but jealousy?? also, i made with s1 viktor in mind!

author notes: heyyy, so sorry this one is little, im still trying to find motivation after the end of the series but i think it turned out cute! thank u for the request and hope u like it!! :)

» it was a common sight to see you walking up and down piltover’s academy, working or just chilling on lunch breaks, but every time viktor would approach you, you were already with someone. sometimes an unknown person, other times with a friend, laughing and joking, touching them in such a sweet way, side by side in the aisles.

» he looked at you both, blood boiling and shaky hands. if you looked at him, it was possible to see his lips forming a thin line, brows furrowing, his left eye almost twitching. oh, he was jealous.

» he felt angry at himself to feel like this, he didn't mean to be jealous at all, but he wanted to steal you away, just for a second, and be the one by your side, be the one you smiled to, the one you’ve been touching so sweetly.

» he wanted to reach for you, to interrupt your silly conversation about whatever you two have been talking about, he wanted to share his new discoveries with you, he wanted to be in their place so bad.

» but he couldn't complain, not when you waved a goodbye at your friend, and turned your body, recognizing viktor, eyes lighting up immediately, smiling from ear to ear.

“viktor!”, you shouted, voice echoing in the aisle while you walked to him, “i’ve been looking for you all day. you wouldn't believe what happened!”

he looked at you, expression softening, eyes shining, mimicking yours, his thin lips now turning into a little smile, “yeah? tell me."

» soon all the jealousy melted away, now, he is the one walking by your side.

[ultravioletbrit]

“share” - Jegulus microfic - @into-the-jeggyverse - 376 words

James is just about to leave Regulus’ flat, but Regulus stops him just as he reaches the front door. “Wait. What’s in that bag?” Regulus asks when James picks up a duffle bag that Regulus hadn’t noticed sitting by the door.   

“Nothing.” James answers awkwardly as he tries, and fails, to hide the large duffel bag behind his back.

“James...?” Regulus says slowly as he walks over to him. Regulus takes the bag from James and gasps when he opens it. “My sweatshirts!” He yelps. “Why are you stealing all my sweatshirts?”

“Your sweatshirts?”

“Fine, our sweatshirts.” Regulus corrects himself and James raises an eyebrow. “They’re not our sweatshirts?” Regulus asks with a little pout. “We share them so doesn’t that make them ours?”  

James takes the bag from Regulus and puts it on the floor so he can wrap his arms around Regulus’ waist. “Sharing implies that we both get to wear them, love. You steal them, and I don’t see them again until I run out and I have to sneak in here and take them all back. Then we start the whole process over again.”

Regulus blinks at James a few times. “You…? But I…?” Regulus fumble the huffs. “How long have you been doing that?”  

“How long have we been dating?” James smiles sweetly.

Regulus gives James another small huff with a little pout but after a moment something flashes across Regulus’ eyes and he narrows them at James.

“Do you wear them when you take them back?” Regulus asks.

“Yeah…?”

“So, we both wear them. Doesn’t that imply that we share them?” Regulus asks with a little smirk.

“I… But you…” James fumbles his words then huffs. “I guess we share the sweatshirts.” He says with a resigned sigh.

“Our sweatshirts.” Regulus corrects him.

“Our sweatshirts.” James agrees with a fond eye roll. He leans in to give Regulus a quick kiss before he picks up the bag.     

“Wait.” Regulus puts his hand on James’ to stop him. “Can I just keep one of them?” He asks in a shy voice as his cheeks turn a lovely shade of pink. “I like to umm… sometimes I…”

James smiles and leans in for another kiss. “I always leave you the one you keep under your pillow.” James whispers.

[stiffyck]

I WISH ARO HEADCANONS WERE MORE POPULAR IN FANDOMS

[randomalistic]

Wait you guys are actually buying Disney products I thought it was a joke

(READ TAGS FOR FULL CONTEXT Sorry it’s long dies

[dani-fox]

DAYILY REMINDER TO THE TF2 FANDOM

Pyro is a grown ass adult.

Pyro is not cannonly a child.

Pyro is a grown adult. who cannonly ran his own business, who suffers from a mental illnesses, and shouldn't be infantlised just because Pyro acts silly.

Pyro can be in a romantic relationship if you want them to be

Pyro can be aroace and not interested in romance and gender if you want them to be

Pyro can be a elderish Abomination if you want it to be

Pyro can be a cis man if you want him to be

Pyro can be a butch lesbian it you want her to be

Pyro can be in a father child relationship with engineer if you want

Just DONT push your ideologies onto others

I've seen so many posts about peaple getting mad at Texas Toast shippers for 'proshipping'

Pyro and Engineer are not cannonly in a father son relationship. Those two are grown consenting non-related adults!

So if you see Pyro and Engineer as family, that's fine just don't go into every goddam Texas Toast comment section and go "Erm actually they are father n son" because no one like you if you do that. That is why you don't get invited to partys Steve! Because you are the fun cops!

Seriously: Just don't do that bullcrap you weirdos. Not everyone thinks like you so just respect their opinion(unless its proshipping. Then don't respect the proshippers)

Thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

[azems-familiar]

you know what? like, no, actually, i don't want to see endless reblogs of gifs of people punching nazis with trite comments underneath like "likes charge reblogs cast" or "here's some positive cleansing energy for your blog". actually i want to know what concrete steps you're going to take to support the vulnerable people in your life, because personally, just a hot take here, but i actually believe that it's more important to care for people and act out of love and compassion than it is to act out of hatred and idolize violence. not that anyone would care about this. i swear it's all just some fantasy where people are so excited they finally get to be violent because they actually only care about getting to be the oppressors and have their turn as the boot on someone's neck.

they've been doing this to jews for over a year now, after all.

[gentlexmadman]

Okay I have some thoughts about the community’s reaction to the Secret of the Mimic trailer that I need to get out or else I’ll explode. Everybody is so upset for no good reason and it’s kind of exhausting that we can’t have a single FNaF release without people getting mad that it’s “not like the OG games”. Which is fair, but also, FNaF has undergone ten years of development, both technologically and financially and Scott now has ten years of retrospect with this series, and obviously everything is going to change. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about though SO I’m just going to ramble about a few things I’ve seen people say and spout some thoughts my friends and I have been having about it.

“Who even is the Mimic???” Okay. It’s completely fair to not know who the Mimic is (even though most people do at this point, as it’s not exactly information that’s hard to access), which is WHY this game is being made, and it’s why I’m so glad this game is being made. Important game lore being exclusively in the books is dumb, and I’m glad we’re finally getting the Mimic backstory in an actual game. This is a good thing!! They’re giving us information in the format they should’ve been giving it to us in all this time!! (Though, it being in the books first felt like a test run of these concepts they’re exploring in the games, as if they were trying to get us used to it? I guess it kind of worked? Still a weird move though.)

“It’s just Poppy Playtime /neg” Have we all forgotten that Poppy Playtime was made to feed off of the Security Breach hype? Have we forgotten that FNaF essentially created the mascot horror genre? SotM is the style it is because of SB, not because of the mascot horror games that copied the modern FNaF style. SotM would’ve existed in its current form with or without PPT, as PPT has nothing to do with the natural progression of FNaF games. PPT started with people calling it a FNaF ripoff and now I guess people are saying FNaF is a PPT ripoff?? Do you guys hear yourselves??

“Tales from the Pizzaplex isn’t canon because of [insert minor detail]” How on earth do you still think this even after the games have followed Tales’ Mimic lore time and time again?? Tales is how we know what we know about the Mimic, which lines up with what we have in the games. It’s all one story, just being told across different forms of media for some reason. And if SotM directly mentioning concepts from Tales isn’t enough, I do not know what you think they’re trying to do here. You guys are coping so hard. As for little details that are different: OBVIOUSLY the games are going to be different from the books, they’re entirely different medias with different requirements for storytelling and audience engagement.

TL;DR Your reasons to be mad about modern FNaF are stupid and don’t make sense. If you don’t like the way FNaF is going, simply do not follow it or interact. It’s that easy. Alternatively, accept you can’t do anything about it and just go along for the ride and at least try to enjoy yourself! Stop being angry about everything, it’s not helpful to you or anybody else.

[frownyalfred]

“if readers take the time to leave comments on fics, then authors should at least take the time to reply.”

gently pats you on head. Babe. They already wrote the fic. For free. They gave you thousands of words to be judged and criticized. They don’t owe you anything on top of that.

[star-lights-up]

you're gonna be popular ♡

[arcanegifs]

This is the last time I'm going to be annoying about this, I swear.

A few examples of that I, a gifmaker, personally love seeing under the tags:

Analysis of said scene, show, or character, especially the long ones going in depth that span like 1000 words

People saying how crisp the GIFs look and how nice the coloring is THANK YOU. ILY GUYS. That's always huge praise for me.

Reacting with how emotional you got with the scene. How painful and emotional or how touching a scene is.

People making funny jokes, memes, comments, etc.

Literally ppl horny posting LMAO. It's super funny to read and I love seeing all the unhinged comments.

Seeing how much you loved the show and its characters

Things I don't like seeing under the tags. And these are just two very specific things:

How much you hate the show, how much you think a scene is bad, how much you hate a character, the ship, the creators, etc. or how much you dont like this ship anymore, calling a ship horrible because ____ reasons. OKAY! I get it! But I don't want to see that. Make your own hate post on your own blog! You're free to have an opinion on how much you hate something. Just do it on your own blog.

Asking why I leave out certain scenes out, why I decided to gif this scene, or not gif more of these characters. Sometimes, I'm just exhausted. I can overlook things. You guys don't know how draining making gifs can get to me, especially the scenes that are really long. But I do it because I LOVE Arcane, the story, and the characters, and the particular scenes that I make gifs of. I have my own biases too. Of course I’m making them first. Please, just make them yourself instead of complaining under the tags of my edits. Yes, I can see them.

Don’t get me wrong, I wholeheartedly appreciate everyone who supports and follows the blog. I want to make a million more HQ gifs of this amazing show, but sometimes, the very rare negativity can still get overwhelming, to the point where it demotivates you.

Arcane is extremely special to me because it's such a fantastic show, and that alone motivates me in trying to create more GIFs. Honestly, if it was any other fandom or show? I would've probably left already. Arcane is THAT great.

I know the block button is there. I use it too, but sometimes, the amount of effort and time you exert to create FOR FREE just isn’t worth it. And that’s why gifmakers and creators stop making things for fandom. It’s not fun anymore. It’s not worth it.

Some people think that making my style of GIFs is easy. Then great! Since you think so, then do it yourself and help create for the fandom too! I wholeheartedly encourage you to do it!

TLDR: Don't be rude on people's fanwork, especially when they are created FOR FREE. If you don’t like their fanwork, you can make them yourself.

[lobotomy-lady]

I don't care how many times the rich & famous talk about how being rich & famous is the worst fate humanly possible I will never ever ever believe them for one milisecond lol

[marzipanandminutiae]

I miss people using non-medicalized terms for other people's passions

like. well and good to talk about "hyperfixations," "special interests [in the context of an autistic person's favorite subject]," or "infodumping" if you have ADD/ADHD or autism, or are talking about someone who is, but...that's not everyone who feels strongly about something, obsesses, or loves talking about their interests. those words mean specific things, associated with specific forms of neurodivergence

don't assume everyone is comfortable with that language

"rambling" is a word; so is "ranting." "obsession" is a word. "passion" is a word. learn them and use them

[goldenstorm0]

thinking about a Yuri/Yor identity reveal, and how kinda heartbreaking it would be. Like i know everyone is invested in a Yor/Twilight id reveal, and ngl i am too, but my god. just think. you learn the little baby brother that you love and cherish. Is actually working as a fucking monster for the government. And my heart breaks a little. Especially if yuri finds out his sister, who he desperately wants to protect, has been murdering hundreds of people. And he learns that it started because his sister desperately wanted to protect him. And their motivations all beautifully reflect, and I want to see what happens when they are both confronted with that, and what they will do, cause it's going to be fucking messy.