vengefulandfruity

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A story about a sex robot escaping an abusive owner and finding help in a woman's shelter? Learning from and with the others to set boundarys? Like a found family?

FUCK THE 'human teaches computer how to love/what love is' TROPE. I NEED 'human teaches computer it's okay not to love or have all the full range of 'human' feeling' NOW.

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this blog hates donald trump

Look how many people hate him. I’m pretty damn happy about that 😁😁😁😁😁😁

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glimpse into my beautiful imaginary world where arthropods are really big and we domesticated them

edit: people are starting to say some "my worst nightmare" or "eeeww no that one is yucky and scary" comments on this like they do on any bug post and id like to say. it's fine if you don't like bugs it's fine if you're scared of bugs but don't put that on MY post clearly talking about how much i like them and how cute i think they are. you can make your own damn post about how much you hate wasps or spiders or whatever. i'm blocking people who make these kinds of comments.

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there's an old old lady sitting at the top of a tall tall house and she stares out the window and points her long gnarled finger at me

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Based on this!

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god invented brown eyes so that everyone would quit killing themselves over not being able to see the most beautiful thing in yhe world. amen

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A mountain in New Zealand considered an ancestor by Indigenous people was recognized as a legal person on Thursday [January 30, 2025] after a new law granted it all the rights and responsibilities of a human being.

Mount Taranaki — now known as Taranaki Maunga, its Māori name — is the latest natural feature to be granted personhood in New Zealand, which has ruled that a river and a stretch of sacred land are people before. The pristine, snow-capped dormant volcano is the second highest on New Zealand's North Island at 2,518 meters (8,261 feet) and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.

The legal recognition acknowledges the mountain's theft from the Māori of the Taranaki region after New Zealand was colonized. It fulfills an agreement of redress from the country's government to Indigenous people for harms perpetrated against the land since.

How can a mountain be a person?

The law passed Thursday gives Taranaki Maunga all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person. Its legal personality has a name: Te Kāhui Tupua, which the law views as "a living and indivisible whole." It includes Taranaki and its surrounding peaks and land, "incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements."

A newly created entity will be "the face and voice" of the mountain, the law says, with four members from local Māori iwi, or tribes, and four members appointed by the country's Conservation Minister.

Why is this mountain special?

"The mountain has long been an honored ancestor, a source of physical, cultural and spiritual sustenance and a final resting place," Paul Goldsmith, the lawmaker responsible for the settlements between the government and Māori tribes, told Parliament in a speech on Thursday.

But colonizers of New Zealand in the 18th and 19th centuries took first the name of Taranaki and then the mountain itself. In 1770, the British explorer Captain James Cook spotted the peak from his ship and named it Mount Egmont.

In 1840, Māori tribes and representatives of the British crown signed the Treaty of Waitangi — New Zealand's founding document — in which the Crown promised Māori would retain rights to their land and resources. But the Māori and English versions of the treaty differed — and Crown breaches of both began immediately.

In 1865, a vast swathe of Taranaki land, including the mountain, was confiscated to punish Māori for rebeling against the Crown. Over the next century hunting and sports groups had a say in the mountain's management — but Māori did not.

"Traditional Māori practices associated with the mountain were banned while tourism was promoted," Goldsmith said. But a Māori protest movement of the 1970s and '80s has led to a surge of recognition for the Māori language, culture and rights in New Zealand law.

Redress has included billions of dollars in Treaty of Waitangi settlements — such as the agreement with the eight tribes of Taranaki, signed in 2023.

How will the mountain use its rights?

"Today, Taranaki, our maunga, our maunga tupuna, is released from the shackles, the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate," said Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, a co-leader of the political party Te Pāti Māori and a descendant of the Taranaki tribes, using a phrase that means ancestral mountain.

"We grew up knowing there was nothing anyone could do to make us any less connected," she added.

The mountain's legal rights are intended to uphold its health and wellbeing. They will be employed to stop forced sales, restore its traditional uses and allow conservation work to protect the native wildlife that flourishes there. Public access will remain.

Do other parts of New Zealand have personhood?

New Zealand was the first country in the world to recognize natural features as people when a law passed in 2014 granted personhood to Te Urewera, a vast native forest on the North Island. Government ownership ceased and the tribe Tūhoe became its guardian.

"Te Urewera is ancient and enduring, a fortress of nature, alive with history; its scenery is abundant with mystery, adventure, and remote beauty," the law begins, before describing its spiritual significance to Māori. In 2017, New Zealand recognized the Whanganui River as human, as part of a settlement with its local iwi.

How much support did the law receive?

The bill recognizing the mountain's personhood was affirmed unanimously by Parliament's 123 lawmakers. The vote was greeted by a ringing waiata — a Māori song — from the public gallery, packed with dozens who had traveled to the capital, Wellington, from Taranaki.

The unity provided brief respite in a tense period for race relations in New Zealand. In November, tens of thousands of people marched to Parliament to protest a law that would reshape the Treaty of Waitangi by setting rigid legal definitions for each clause. Detractors say the law — which is not expected to pass — would strip Māori of legal rights and dramatically reverse progress from the past five decades.

-via NPR, January 31, 2025

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Note: The article doesn't get fully into the implications of the broader, global "rights of nature" movement (of which this is part), which is powerful tool for not only recognizing Indigenous ways of relating to the world, but also preventing ecological damage.

Examples of rights of nature include rivers having the right to not be polluted, etc. Powerful tool for leveraging the courts and legal frameworks against environmental destruction.

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open a new window somewhere in the world. 

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kinder than man, athea davis

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this image came to me in a dream

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One of my favourite things about What We Do In The Shadows is their continual commitment to the framing device no matter how silly it is. They could've downplayed the cameras in sticky situations but instead they keep having secret organisations just inexplicably let the cameramen in and it's funny every time.

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Even if its just like tarantula sized, just tie a helium balloon to the fucker and youre good to go

i love seeing posts made by arachnophobes that are like this bc it's just. there are literally 0 downsides to this situation. i get to live in my dream house AND have a big fluffy beast as a pet. this is fucking awesome.

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Hey what if the ghosts of some haunted places with no record of anything horrible happening there are just scarecrows?

What if there are entities utterly beyond human comprehension, who have decided to take this specific area for their own use, and want to keep humans out. By now they've figured out that the most efficient way to keep out vertebrates is set out sufficiently convincing effigies representing their natural predators, with a focus on senses that this specific beast uses most to perceive threats. Apex predators are best kept out by a copy of its own kind - a bear will not wander through an area where another bear appears to hold territory.

This method didn't seem like something that would deter humans, who are, despite of everything, also social animals that do not necessarily avoid other humans unfamiliar to them. But somehow, it does seem to work reliably. Humans, who mainly rely on sight and sound, are far more likely to avoid an effigy that appears, moves and sounds like another human being, than they would avoid other real humans.

While creating sensory illusions of any sort is easy to these entities, they have no reason to fixate on particularly small details. A thing that looks, sounds and smells enough like a bear will frighten anything that naturally avoids bears. They do not bother to stop and investigate whether this potential threat is really a bear or not. But humans are very, very keen on details, particularly in the appearances of their own, and they can tell, on the spot, that something that looks almost human, walks almost like a human being, and makes sounds that almost sound like a human voice forming garbled mimicry of words in no recognisable human language, is decidedly not human.

So they get the fuck out of there. Fast.

The entities don't know what uncanny valley is. It doesn't matter to them why their fake human approximations deter humans more efficiently than actual humans would. They just know that it works as it should.

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One of the coolest creatures I've ever held

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How come semi trucks in Europe look like “toot toot :)” and in North America they look like “HONK HOOOOOOOONK >:|”

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If I were a fantasy tall boy elf I’d still sneak into peoples houses at night to fix their shoes