#you're better off ignoring

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

And they can paralyze the sci-fi writer, if you think too much about them. Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next.  “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,” the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty.  “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.”  Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’ gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would implode in its own gravity field.  And now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers.  Self-satisfied, smug in superiority.  As if we did the work to find out ourselves, instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.

[kaisollisto]

based off of this

Today is frigid and windy, she feels it unforgivingly on her cheeks. Clouds part around her, clinging to her jagged features. They are wet and stifling, a brushing reminder of what she cannot have. It is the only thing claimed from the earth she can touch.

She passes above skylines and craggy mountains and watches. The earth is still cold and unyielding and she yearns for it in a reckless way. A silly wish to feel all that it has to offer in her mouth. She wants to touch, to feel the grainy sands between her fingers and find sand in horrible unbefitting places. The encapsulating experience of teetering the fine line of tasting the sun and burning herself. She wants to be down there.  

She’s heard many names weaved in between her. There are many she’s been called but one that has truly stuck with her, Ava. 

A soft sound pressed between lips, a gentle thing for a large entity like her. She likes to believe that’s who she was before this, a force too big to contain that she had to become this. A mangled thing of roots and chunks of dirt. 

It’s better this way, someone tells her in a foggy haze, she’s fighting them, a sloppy sluggish battle of desperation. Ava doesn’t know why but the memory lingers like a prolonged goodbye. A sort of awkward suspension holding her rooted to the spot like there’s more to it, a truth sitting in plain sight. 

[mikesbasementbeets]

are you arguing that bi mike believers, unlabeled mike believers, and those who are undecided are homophobic?

no. i’m not arguing that any person or sets of people are homophobic. i do think that there are certain avenues of thought that come up often in arguments against a definitive gay mike reading which stem from homophobic biases that, given the benefit of the doubt, the people arguing them may not realize are homophobic or even realize that they hold those biases.

believing that mike is bi or being undecided about it doesn’t mean you’re homophobic. obviously. however, plainly acknowledging that mike canonically does not exhibit attraction to women and then insisting that he could still be attracted to women in spite of that, to me, indicates a (possibly subconscious) bias against men who are not attracted to women. if your instinct when confronted with a character who presents a categorical lack of opposite-gender attraction, concurrent with active displays of same-gender attraction, is to round up every possible alternative explanation, all equally hypothetical and unsupported by canon, to avoid coming to the logical conclusion of that specific narrative dichotomy (homosexuality), then all i’m asking is that you examine what biases you might be holding onto that lead you to that reaction.

[ardri-na-bpiteog]

I love reading comments on cooking videos because some people have really bizarre and unscientific ideas about food safety and hygiene

[smolandweirdwriter]

Tell me about I'm not incompetent (but damn, you make me feel that way) BECAUSE I UNDERSTAND THAT REFERENCE

oooh yay! I'm not incompetent (but damn, you make me feel that way) is a fantasy high fic centering adaine and kristen junior year as they struggle with adhd. it's mostly a (VERY) self-indulgent fic about how neurodivergence is such a, well, diverse experience, even for people with the same neurological disorder/difference, and coming to terms with the fact that everyone's brains work differently, and that that should be a source of pride and joy rather than shame.

I'm pretty sure part of this also entails I provide an excerpt? so here you go-

"Yeah, but -- I mean, Aelwyn did it!" Adaine exclaimed.

Ah, Kristen thought. There it is. "I don't think those are exactly the same set of circumstances," she said, wishing she could find the right thing to say because so far it seemed she hadn't said it.

"You're right!" Adaine burst out. "Hers were harder! My sister managed to keep her grades absolutely perfect while helping an evil being rise to power while running a lucrative drug-dealing business while going to parties where she did said dealing to her classmates, and I never knew she was stressed, and neither did our parents. She managed it! And you're all managing it! And I'm…" Adaine slumped on the edge of the bed and buried her face in her hands as though doing so would make her shame go away. "Why am I not managing it?" she asked quietly, her voice cracking. "I have it easier than most of you, and I'm not managing it at all."

"Adaine…" Kristen said down on the bed next to her. "I'm not managing it. And I don't think Aelwyn was either."

[wyldfell]

one last thought before i go meemees

i feel like i have to twist my mind into a pretzel to figure out wtf is going on with aemond and aegon. obviously aemond is out for revenge and, with luke dead and the brothel fiasco of the last ep, aegon placed himself firmly in the position of new enemy no. 1 (which i don't necessarily have a huuuuuge problem with because i, too, have an older sibling whom i love but could also dracarys).

ewan says that - as of now, at least - whether or not aemond meant to kill aegon is open to interpretation and the editing of the scene backs it up (i suppose). which opens several avenues of thought for me, namely:

aemond meant to kill aegon so he could take the crown. tracks after the brothel scene of 2x03 but hinges heavily on 2x05 dealing with the fact that criston is a witness to this attempted regicide and that, by tgc's admission, aegon knows (or is at least convinced) that aemond's actions were deliberate..... do i trust c&h to follow up on all the beats necessary to make this a compelling route? absofuckinglutely not but we live in hope. just wondering how they're gonna explain aegon pulling a "my brother literally tried to roast me like a marshmallow but it's fine, i still want to commemorate him with this statue in his honor because love prevails." unless condal wants to say that was green propaganda too, everyone in king's landing just hallucinated these statues, they never existed, what do you mean.

aemond didn't mean to kill aegon, his real target was meleys and this was just another storm's end-like accident, in which case he seems like a really incompetent dragonrider. how many workplace accidents can this man have without it being ridiculous?

so my money's on "this was opportunistic attempted regicide/fratricide/kinslaying take two." either way, i hope they actually address it. i know aemond lives in the grey and ambiguity is his thing, but at some point they've got to start letting him make actual decisions with material and emotional consequences... or at least you'd think so, what do i know, i am just a pleb who thinks that if i caused the maiming of my older brother in the heat of anger, i would feel kinda shitty about it afterwards.

[queenlucythevaliant]

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although "they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, emphasis mine

[silusvesuius]

n*loth is literally a demon i mean iHold on YAAASSSSS!

i mean it 😒😒😒

[snickerdoodlles]

there's a point at which someone's fear of being a dick wraps back around to them just being a dick anyways

[backonmybullship]

I am literally asking people if when I try to get a new job should I tell them I am a union member in Hollywood that is being starved out by the studios once again, and everyone responding to the post is not answering about whether or not I should disclose my union status but trying to tell me other ways I can make money.

It's all a bunch of middle-aged white men who haven't been out of work since the '90s and are telling me to go into landscaping and carpentry.

One of them even told me to take my hobbies and try to make money off of it. Yes sure let me start my own plant nursery at my apartment. Yes you know what That's a great idea BRB tying a fuck ton of string into plant hangers so I can compete with the 83 million other macrame plant hanger makers on Etsy. Oh I know carpentry but do I have money or a garage for an entire garage carpentry shop no I do not. I literally sold All of my tools from the garage in my parents house to move out to Los Angeles to do this stupid Hollywood job

I can do both easily and physically able and I know a lot about landscaping and carpentry. I don't speak Spanish though. It's not a stereotypical or racist thing I just know that I will be working amongst majority Spanish speakers here in Los Angeles.

[leoninekelter]

cannot BELIEVE people who tell me Wings of Fire is worse than Warrior cats. did you READ the pro-colonizer heavily Christian propaganda. Did you ever ONCE think about how the tribe of rushing water is a racist caricature of native American tribes. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you never read any of that right now. I dare you

[honeysunchild]

Libraries are just about the punkest places in existence and ppl wanna be transphobic in them? Not on my watch fuck you very much

[basically-fabulous]

u "don't vote" motherfuckers r stupid as shit

[rovermcfly]

the damage this post has done to media recommendation on tumblr is honestly insane

when ALOTO came out I made a couple of posts recommending it, and one post was about how regardless of whether they enjoy the genre/story, people should support the show because sapphic-centered shows are disproportionately cancelled and need three times the support to not be axed (which ALOTO was). I got so much hate for saying that with people basically just quoting this post at me over and over, even though my point wasn't a recommendation but a plea for support. The fact that I made other posts, describing exactly what kind of show it is was irrelevant bc ppl only sought out these posts to hate on them. And the fact is, if a show is exclusively about queer people like ALOTO, that is going to be what I bring up when recommending it. ALOTO is about queer women's history, but this post has poisoned people's minds so hard that all I got back was "okay but what is it about 🙄🙄🙄" even if it simply is about queer women.

everytime people say "please support this show about queer women and/or queer poc" people go out of their way to say "well I won't now bc tumblr users only say shows have gay people and never what they're about or if they're good" and it really can be tracked back to this specific post that half this userbase inexplicably internalised to a vile degree and applies not only to recommendations, but always also to calls for support of shows that are already struggling exactly because of who they're representing.

It's valid to want to watch a thing only because you'll be represented in it, so it's valid to recommend something only based on who's represented. the idea that a recommendation is bad because it focuses on that is absolutely insane, and this post's energy has also somehow made people feel empowered to be their most smug and mean selves in response to those recs.

I just wanted to get that out. I havent seen the post in a while but knew exactly this is the reason I've been getting hate bc I vividly remembered it. I've been paying a lot of attention to how shows get recommended and what the responses are and you can always tell how deeply this post has been internalised bc people either attack recommendations or people stumble over their words to go "but I'm not just saying it bc the charcater is gay! I promise! pls no hate!" like what the fuck are we doing to each other out here in a media landscape where queer experiences are still rarely represented authentically and it's worth celebrating when they are.

[forcebookish]

discarded a longer post about this but something about when ppl speculate about a bl actor's sexuality with "i don't want to assume anyone's sexuality" always about them being possibly gay annoys me. it's never like, "oh he might have a girlfriend, but i don't want to assume he's straight."

idk, it gets under my skin

because when i read it i read, "i'm not going to acCUSE anyone of BEING GAY," ya know?

[strangefable]

Finally got my queue cleared to only ~80 posts in it (wahooooo!) so. I have added everything i've been tagged in this month to come back around to haunt all y'all with my commentary tags <3