...why can elephant seals dive that deep wtf

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

The real reason that sex scenes in traditional fantasy erotica tend to involve bathing in improbably convenient crystal-clear pools is that fantasy writers and readers on the whole are the sort of people who won't bat an eye at wizards and dragon, but would be terribly bothered if the text didn't explicitly address the obvious consequences of whipping one's unmentionables out after spending weeks on end traipsing across trackless wilderness in full amour.

I literally just realised that Vitas' "The 7th Element" is blatantly name-checking the motif from the second movement of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

Like, okay:

The motif comes in around the forty-five second mark, and repeats prominently throughout. You don’t need to listen to the whole thing if you don’t want to – the first couple of minutes will give you the idea.

Now, compare:

I swear media aimed at a specific brand of Straight Dude feels like it was written by space aliens. Like, okay, let's write a story about a bunch of attractive ladies, because who wants to look at dudes, right? All of them are 100% heterosexual, because we have to preserve the possibility of them wanting to fuck the viewer, and also they all hate each other because they view each other as competition for male sexual attention, which is the most valuable thing in the world. However, the narrative cannot at any point acknowledge that it's actually possible for a man to be sexually attractive, because that's Gay™. So basically, this story takes place in a milieu populated by women who hate each other and are constantly in vicious competition for male sexual attention in spite of the fact that to all appearances they unanimously find men sexually repulsive. Hot.

Maybe I’ve just managed to avoid the worst but I feel like even most harem anime don’t quite match this description. I suppose the idea of a man being, physically, sexually attractive is pretty rare in both anime and western live action TV I’ve seen though.

Harem anime usually hinge on the idea that the protagonist is a naturally caring and morally-upright person. (That's an understandable reason to date somebody: feeling safe around them.) American movies of this type are afraid to show a man who isn't an asshole, because not being an asshole is too close to being gay.

So there's American live-action harem anime that's even worse and I've just been lucky enough to not see any; got it.

To favour cultural reform (say less racism) is to imply that one culture can be better than another: namely, our culture with less racism is better than our culture with current levels of racism. Thus, there is some tension between hating your culture war enemies and not hating say the foreigners from Arkansas.

I’m going to mostly bite the bullet and say some cultures are better than others, but also in many pairs of cultures one will be worse in some ways but better than others. The point of cultural reform is partly to change features that were necessary trade-offs at lower technology levels but are now suboptimal (eg. women doing nothing but spin thread, raise children and cook food when those combined were 50% of the labor needed to maintain society), and partly to copy the best aspects of other cultures and combine them to make a better culture than any component, Voltron-style.

arguably the pornography industry is less sexually exploitative than normal Hollywood since "I will have to have sex with people for the advancement of my career" is something porn stars are presumably expecting.

Been eating a lot of strawberries lately and noticed you can separate them into two categories: -the real ones -the fake evil ones the government wants you to eat

The real ones are: darker in color, softer, usually a bit bruised and the taste is good The fake ones are: brighter in color (look fake like a cartoon), firmer (like artificial plastic), not bruised at all (as if they were staged)and the taste is barely there very watery (as if they mixed chemical flavoring with water and injected it with syringes)

Stay safe you guys

you just described ripe vs unripe strawberries I think

i described good crystal skull strawberries and evil shadow skull strawberries stop arguing with experts

As a fan of fake evil food, I am happy if you leave those strawberries to me, as firm and bruise free sounds lovely. What is ripe fruit but fruit suspiciously similar to spoiled fruit?

I like that despite describing it this way OP was actually right about which ones you should vs. shouldn’t eat.

so I guess nobody else has read the Arthur C. Clarke book The Ghost from the Grand Banks about an effort to raise the Titanic which culminates with a submarine imploding at that exact location?

Love that book. There is a short scene that describes people trying to remember a song lyric and then everyone racing to google it. This was 1990, years before google (and maybe the web actually) existed and when my only experience with a computer was the old Macs at school. I still remember thinking how cool and futuristic it sounded and now it’s the most banal thing in the world.

Today's aesthetic: people who are like "this anime could have been good if it weren't for one specific detail that totally ruins it", and then that one specific detail is, like, the thematic foundation of the show's core premise.

Independence Daily Reporter, Kansas, June 10, 1914

Strange New Worlds is pretty good but I refuse to believe you can just punch out a Klingon with one strike even if you’re on space meth.

Pike took out a Klingon by fucking boxing his ears. Girl at worst that’s a flirtatious caress… come on.

[start id: a black and white drawing cropped from p.29 of the Usborne Guide to Computer and Video Games (1982). The image shows a chessboard with lights and mechanical arm built in.

Image caption reads: "The robot arm on this chess-board makes all the computer's moves, and removes your pieces when the computer captures them. If the computer loses the game, it flings its arm about, flashes its lights and shrieks." end id.]

I assumed this emotionally dysregulated chess robot was just a 1980s fever dream, but apparently it exists, and glories in the name of "The Novag Robot Adversary":

Quoth the gorgeously Web 1.0 (but still updating in 2023?!) Chess Computer UK:

That page also has videos of the machine in action, including this heart-rending footage of it losing its shit:

I am inordinately happy to learn about this.

@zamboni-whisperer​

Everyone will just

Everyone will just, but the problems that could be solved that way already were. Everyone will just stop gobbling up the sidewalk cement.

the one consistent conclusion from this week’s SCOTUS opinions: the US college paradigm is fucked up

Republicans and Democrats both agree that Harvard should be selecting America’s ruling class when they’re 18, that it should be based on criteria where the children of rich parents have huge advantages, they only have a slight disagreement on the ethnic makeup that ruling class should have. They both agree that Harvard should get hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing this whether or not their graduates get any actual benefit, but disagree whether if someone tries and fails to get into the ruling class the money should be paid by that person or by taxpayers.

The drafters of the Constitution were fluent in Greek and Latin. George Washington's speeches read like they're in fucking Latin, translated into English.

But you know what else feels like a Latin construction?

I wonder if this was entirely unambiguous to Madison because of how his brain parsed Latin grammar?

This had never occurred to me, but now that you mention it I can’t unsee it.  The grammar looks so incredibly Latin.

The first half is an ablative absolute.  The second half is a fucking gerundive.  The sentence looks like it was translated from Latin, but as an exercise where you’re trying to prove you can read the Latin and so you’re not even trying to render it into idiomatic English.  No wonder it’s confusing!

(This article makes the same observation, and argues that this implies the second amendment is only protecting militias; I don’t think the piece is quite right, though.  It says the ablative absolute gives the “reason” for the following clause, but I think the Dickinson College link I gave, which is not trying to discuss politics, gives a better account: it’s the cause or circumstances of the following clause, which is much less specific.  You can see this article arguing for the opposite conclusion and also name-checking the ablative absolute, but I think it’s a less persuasive case—even though I’m not really persuaded by the first one either.)

But yeah, no wonder the amendment seems weird.  It is!  It’s not really written in English.

---

But then I look at the rest of the Bill of Rights and I get basically the same vibes from all of it.  It’s all super weird.

One thing I notice is how much of it is in the passive voice.  The First Amendment is active (and not coincidentally probably the easiest to read and parse); the Sixth is formally active but has a lot of passive voice in it; and all the others are straight up passive voice.  “No soldier shall...be quartered in any house”; “The right of the people to be secure in their persons...shall not be violated”; “Excessive bail shall not be required”; etc.  You also get the sort of baroque nested clauses and running series of conjunctions that comes up a lot in Latin.  

And something like the Fourth Amendment:

reads like a passage from Cicero, where he stacks up ten clauses in one sentence and you don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about until you get to the end.  

I learned in high school that Cicero was great with crowds, because of his comparatively straightforward and easy to follow style.

Okay, so: in early drafts of Jules Verne's 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo is a Polish guy bent on revenge against the Russian Empire for the murder of his family in the January Uprising. Verne's editor objected on the grounds that Russia was a French ally at the time of the book's writing, and in the actual, published version of the story, Nemo's national origin and precisely which empire he's pissed off at are left unspecified.

Later, in the 1875 quasi-sequel The Mysterious Island, Nemo is retconned as an Indian noble out for revenge against the British for the murder of his family in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 – basically the same as the original plan, simply substituting a different uprising and a different empire. Verne's editor raised no objections this time around, because fuck the British, right? Though Twenty Thousand Leagues and The Mysterious Island aren't 100% compatible in their respective timelines, this version of Nemo has customarily been back-ported into adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues ever since.

Now here's the funny part: perhaps as a jab at his editor, Verne made a specific plot point in Twenty Thousand Leagues of Professor Aronnax repeatedly trying and failing to figure out where the fuck Nemo is from. At one point his attempt to pin down Nemo's accent is frustrated by Nemo's vast multilingualism. At another point, he tries and fails to trick Nemo by quizzing him about latitude and longitude.

(To contextualise that last bit, at the time the book was written, there was no international agreement on which line of longitude should be zero degrees, and many nations had their own prime meridians; Aronnax hoped to identify Nemo's national origin by calculating which meridian he was giving his longitudes relative to. Nemo, however, immediately spots the ploy, and announces that he'll use the Paris meridian in deference to the fact that Aronnax is a Frenchman.)

The upshot is that at no point in the course of any of this Sherlock Holmes bullshit does Aronnax ever bring up the colour of Nemo's skin as a potential clue. In light of the book's publication history, this is almost certainly simply because Verne hadn't decided that Nemo was Indian yet. However, taking into account The Mysterious Island's retcon, it retroactively makes Aronnax the least racist Frenchman ever.

20k was like, one of the first pieces of media that I got all special interested in (points at my avatar, can't say I don't still have a fondness), so I read a bunch of like, JSTOR essays on it back in the early 2000s. I vividly recall reading a paper that argued that Nemo was... Scottish.

Gender roles in a nutshell: the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang entrances in The Goblet of Fire.

also, to my knowledge neither of those schools were sex-segregated in the books

That bothered me more than the Dumbledore yelling, actually.

Nicolas Flamel was an alum of Beauxbatons.

The first headteacher of Durmstrang was a witch.

Bam.

In the books, it even says that there were boys and girls from each school. Thanks Hollywood for making Durmstrang buff and all athletic men and Beauxbatons all feminine and dainty.

Just imagine what it would have meant for every kid watching, seeing girls walking beside the guys in Durmstrang being “manly” and boys walking with Beuxbaton being flirty and feminine.

It would have shown that girls and boys can be however they want.

It also suggested that the only way a female could have be selected to participate was if she was not up against any male competition. In the books Fleur is chosen as the best candidate for her school from a selection of female AND male students. And she was the best PERSON. Not the best GIRL.

all men are Russian and all Women are French.

Buffy breast feeds Cody on Sesame Street (x)

This was 1976. Big Bird understood and was wholly accepting and empathetic toward Buffy breastfeeding in public, and Big Bird is meant to be the equivalent of a preschool aged child, but every single day on social media, adults exclaim disgust toward breastfeeding in public and misogyny at the parents who do so. People, you’re less evolved than

Big Bird was 38 years ago. Grow the hell up.

holy shit.  I had NO idea Sesame Street covered this topic.

And Buffy was Native American. And she breastfed. In front of muppets and children. No one died.