Sometimes, good ideas need a bastard. Alchemist, doctor, lay-theologian, and grandfather of toxicology, Phillipus Aruelious Theophrastus Bombastus von Hoenhiem –better known as Paracelsus– was a preeminent shit-talker in a Europe that already contained Martin Luther. He was the five-foot-nothing, always-armed-with-a-sword bastard who would draw from alchemy and magic to lay the groundwork for modern medicine.
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[Let us say you're a doctor] Someone comes to you with a huge infected wound on their leg. It needs to be amputated. You are insulted that they came to you. You’re not some lowly surgeon! Surgeons are glorified butchers, people who saw off limbs on battlefields. Maybe some surgeons have the good sense to learn anatomy at a university, but even then, they don’t garner anywhere near the respect that you do as a physician.
Paracelsus thinks you’re an idiot. He hates your guts, and he tells you to your face every time he sees you. Instead of Theophrastus, you and your other physician friends call him Cacophrastus, literally “shit-fence.”
kafkaesque? no, kefkaesque. I'm a clown and i'm gonna be the most relevant mother fucker in the entire world forever!!! get fucked!!!
If I did a star trek it would contain a shockingly self-indulgent magical girl themed episode and I think that would be in the general spirit of things
Anonymous asked:
*multiplies you by 1*
Ach im the exact same but a process has occurred
I'm thinking about this post and i have decided that it is one of those things that is a poem in some undefinable way
there’s a genre of fantasy books I need a name for with no homophobia, no racism, no ableism, no colonialism, with happy benevolent monarchs and potatoes and tomatoes with every meal, because I want a more efficient way to describe how sick it makes me feel.
it's called propaganda
#before somebody is like 'just let people have escapism'#when your fantasy lit looks like an advertisement for how rad everything is under monarchy#its propaganda#and yes im accounting for 'fairy tale kingdoms'#if the only conflicts can come from an Outsider Interloping Force but there's also No Colonialism you've got a Halcyon Prelapsarian Society
idk if it’s the decline of humanities education or just because this is the pissing on the poor website but god i’m tired of reading “analyses” that are just literally the text of what happened. congratulations you understand the absolute basics of this piece of media!! maybe don’t read any actual analysis in case it makes your poisoned brain explode!!!
One factor that contributes to it may be IP exploitation on monetized web platforms.
Now, I don't like the idea of Intellectual Property as it exists today. It favors the wealthy and exists as a means to secure profits, and doesn't successfully protect ordinary people's creative work. So I do like the idea of things like fanfiction where corporations that own media don't get to control ideas in public consciousness completely.
But the purpose of IP is usually to prevent a non-owning entity from profiting from the sale of another's owned property. The thing is though, BECAUSE IP is owned, access to it is gated. and any time something is gated or scarce in even the mildest way, there is a market for it.
So that means tons of youtube videos with ad revenue that dodge IP law by doing things like describing what happened in tv show episodes, movie trailers, video games, without selling the actual product itself. Some 'summaries' are actually stretched out longer than the original under the blanket of 'analysis' to get maximum return for minimum content available to use: content that actually isn't theirs except for maybe a voiceover.
It's like tapping a pipeline: because a thing exists, somebody can be paid if they describe it and people click on this video. and this format is successful for whatever reasons it is. so people who won't make money copy the approach in other mediums like text posts, tiktoks, etc.
I don't remember this type of post being so frequent a few years ago, and reading comprehension has always been iffy online so it hasn't gotten worse in that time. But the ways people can extract money from the internet have changed in that time and because money-making behavior is presumably successful if it persists, it will be influential on people who aren't grifting, too.
“your rent should be a third of your income” well wouldn’t that be nice. wouldn’t it. lower the rent pussy
Casual observation from someone old enough to remember: in the year 2000 financial advice was that rent should be no more than 1/4 of your income.
Until the mid 80s, the advice was that if you must rent instead of owning, then that 20% of your monthly income (oh yes, only 20%) should include all your utilities too.
After all, rent costs more than a mortgage, so it should offer more too.
The housing market is a fucking travesty.
Hmm what happened in the mid eighties....
The idea of the barbie movie makes me feel some way that is hard to describe for the same reason a lot of my agender experiences are hard to describe. There's a lot of concrete language, projected expectations, shared understanding of binary gender experiences... but not very much for 'null' experiences.
Nonbinary experiences are muted in general, but often do get described-- in contrast to the binary. Even 'gender-neutral' is usually conceptualized as androgynous, could-be-male-or-female. 'Neither gender' is usually thought of like, 'a secret third thing' rather than 'nothing.'
I grew up disliking barbies because they were a toy my parents didn't prefer. My parents are older, so they saw a lot of cultural shifts: the '60s as kids, the '70s as young adults, the '80s happened as they began to gain stability and had me in the '90s. So the journey from 'baby dolls' to 'fashion dolls' really didn't hit any feminist women-can-be-adults statement to either of them. They were fully awake for Reaganism and how it turbo-boosted femininity as a consumer product. I know that's the opposite of the typical 'my boomer parents' narrative but it's the truth.
So I didn't play with dolls, dress-up or otherwise, much as a child. I found other outlets for that type of play that satisfied me. I played a lot of pretend, I dressed up in my own costumes, I designed characters, I wrote and drew them, and I 'dressed up' avatars in video games. I really didn't feel like I missed anything.
I began questioning my gender more when I had to present more feminine for things like job interviews and for work. I realized that I was playing a role that was not 'me', but dressing up like a doll. You know, not just 'costume time' but 'costume time, with accessories that come in the box.'
It disturbed me for a little while, but eventually I found the idea freeing. For the first time, I was not just 'bad at doing 'girl' but 'someone who can assume the form of a girl' even if the way I acted and felt was just 'me.' It occurred to me that ordinary girls probably didn't feel like they were collecting 'garb' like for a SCA event or a ren faire to go into the city every day. I am going to the party in disguise, I am a shapeshifter, I can Assume The Form You're Comfortable With, impostor syndrome who?
For a lot of people, this would be 'being in the closet.' Or it would be 'girlmoding' or 'boymoding' or whatever. And others might be like, 'it's not trans representation to present as the gender you're assigned at birth!' But it's actually impossible to 'present as' the null. We don't look at the people around us and think 'are they all in costume, pretending? What if they're nothing?'
In fact, conservative power despises this idea and projects it on the most vulnerable people in the queer community. If somebody passes an anti-cross-dressing law, they think they are safe from doubt. But if they went to a wedding and everyone in their gowns and suits told them, we're not men or women, it's dress-up, it would be a nightmare for them.
To me, the idea of 'a doll' is that whatever the plastic looks like, that is not a girl. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, you know?
modern gaming culture is so uniquely exhausting
you can't google anything about a game without being flooded with hundreds of copypasted ad-bloated articles like "How to navigate the menus in Gun Fart 25 SECRET TIPS". every comment section on every game that dares to feature anything beyond straight white dudes is filled to the brim with nazi 4chan chuds whining about how gay people are ruining their hobby. video guides have 2 minute long intros with fake bubbly annoying youtube personalities gushing about a task that takes than 30 seconds to explain. spoilers everywhere. battle passes. having to fear nft/crypto integration. the worst instances of FOMO in human history. every single piece of useful info being locked behind yet another discord server you have to join. i'm tired.
Star Trek struggles telling stories (not that it doesn't, it struggles) for all sorts of reasons but one of them I think is individualism.
Star Trek's internal logic is non-individualist. Every show is about multiple people working together as some kind of team to resolve conflicts, explore concepts, and all of that. While characters have their personalities, inner challenges, quirks, whatever ship or environment the show focuses on is more like 'the main character' than any of the core cast. How the core cast contributes to that environment is where the ensemble drama comes in.
But, maybe from its beginning, it's struggled with individualist tropes, or framing that shapes the world FOR an individual perspective. Like, with how Roddenberry projected on the Captain Kirk character so much, you could interpret the universe to be set up to facilitate hello-sailor low-commitment low-judgement encounters. Or it could be a way to showcase the beneficiary of a military, police structure of command without formal military, police responsibilities: conflicts that Roddenberry personally experienced.
So now we have like, two natures at war with each other inside the same creative work. The premise is that conflicts are solved by a community of some kind, but the world the premise navigates is set up to serve individual desires for freedom, pleasure, heroism, excellence, etc.
So that seems to me to be why so many problems get solved by technobabble-- it's a way for an individual to prevail though simply being smarter or knowing more. It may be why some conflicts collapse down to one character in some of the movies or more serialized arcs, like to just about Kirk or to Spock or Picard, or to Season 2 of Star Trek Discovery framing Michael Burnham as so important the whole of sentient life in the galaxy depends on her (lampshaded as a martyr complex sometimes?) And it's why some of the humor in Lower Decks works so well (I think!), because the bridge crew behaves like they are going to get these individualistic stress tests and sometimes they do, but not only are the low-ranking officers the actual main characters, at the end of the day you're the hero of a... really big utility van.
botw 2 trailer except the creepy hand that’s holding Ganondorf down is one of these
I can't believe I was sort of right, it literally is a sticky hand, you use it to glue things
Do I actually want to write this fanfic or do I just want to wallow in the delicious daydream like a pig in the mud?
Unfortunately I wish for others to wallow in my magnificent mud pit
sorry but im afraid im going to talk abt loz and gender... Again !
well i was planning to do that but this paper ended up being so good and touched on nearly everything i had wanted to comment on extremely well so it looks like i dont have to! FUCK YES!!!! so nice to see this topic explored in like. an actual reasonable way
anyways my favorite parts/most notable to me:
and the entire NINTENDO'S CONSERVATISM section which is too long for me to post but soooo true. has an entire paragraph dunking on that aonuma quote i was just making fun of earlier. i also like the section that highlights how tetra completely loses her agency when she is made to fill out a traditional zelda role. also how botw zelda is completely disconnected from the main narrative and therefore reduced to existing solely as motivation for link rather than like, as an actual character (and not in a slay 'doomed by the narrative' way but just like. regular sexism <- my words not the paper's)
anyways this paper is mainly just an examination on link as a character and a little bit of zelda, so there are some bits on the franchise's overall portrayal of gender that it hadnt touched on that i would like to just briefly point out..
- the racialized portrayal of genders and gender roles in gerudo society and how its so incredibly racist and offensive. the villainized/racialized hypermasculinity of ganondorf and what that represents.. also the botw gerudo quest in particular. hey let me throw in the racialized + sexualized depiction of midna's true form into here for good measure as well
- other non traditionally gendered characters and how the franchise portrays them (usually as strange people, the village weirdo, or sometimes as respectable people, etc). examples of such characters are the recurring carpenters originating from oot, bolson from botw, tetra's pirates, etc
- and the paper briefly comments on it but i wish it examined a bit more on how link's androgyny is related to his youth, relating itself to the japanese definition of bishounen tht is only applicable to men under 20
also one more thing. link having the ability to change into various costumes, several of which that alters his gender presentation, is a modern addition and is definitely a point for nintendo for being not so ramrod conservative (when it isnt lending itself to oriental tropes... like totk's frostbite costume is very nice in this regard)
however i just wanna set the record straight and point out this did not originate from botw, but from our underdog entry TRIFORCE HEROES!!!!
also technically it occurred even earlier in zelda 2 that lets you become this hot pink bitch. nice!
why did they give give cars a central nervous system
So they can feel Pain.
