"Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world."

Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always

bert and ernie go to ikea

“FMA is bad because it portrays war criminals as sympathetic, likable people” bro that’s the point. That’s the whole point. That is THE point. Did you think Ethnic Cleanser is some kind of special category of person that gets separated away from all the Good People at birth? Did you think there’s some kind of barn full of Genocide Doers that only gets deployed into the general public during world wars? Did you think assholes who do terrible shit in real life are never charming or likable or capable of doing good things and helping people? One of the best parts of FMA is how we the audience realize that some of our core protags have made irredeemable choices, and we have to reckon with the fact that they’re still people, with the unalienable rights and qualities thereof. Sorry if the Problematics aren’t constantly wearing a dunce cap and a list of all their crimes and this makes the media incomprehensible to you  

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The point of making sympathetic, likeable characters war criminals isn’t to make war crimes seem good. It’s to show that people who appear good can still be war criminals

Art by Camille Andre

seeing as we’ve moved on from “this would kill a Victorian child (the same ones that snorted cocaine for a head cold)” to “this would kill a medieval peasant” I just have to say. you can’t eat a meal without your phone or tv blasting shit directly into your brain and you get all of your social interaction and conflict resolution skills from moral posturing on the internet leading to massive arguments inside of discord servers. you think that medieval peasant whose been toiling fields since age 2 unwashed covered in smallpox scars just witnessed a man get dragged through town until his skin got roadrashed off because he stole an apple is gonna melt because they heard your garbage lemon demon playlist? you have to make your mutuals trigger tag naruto because it reminds you of your ex who kinned sasuke mothefucker YOU would melt instantly if you were in the pit at a Shakespeare play

I have been having great fun with your patterns! Some have become gifts, others grace my home, and some have been turned loose in the wild of thrift stores to make someone's day a little better and/or more surreal.

yknow it's a real shame that romans didn't have access to australia specifically for augury reasons. i really wish i could have seen a roman augur have to deal with australian birds. like imagine trying to properly interpret an omen from a fuckin. cassowary

loving that the general consensus here is that "the omen when you see a cassowary is that you are about to die of cassowary"

The cassowary performs an aurgry on you. With your guts

I have so many feelings about this, but they boil down to the same frustrated rage I've had for a year or more.

you need to read this article

This is a long read, and I really suggest going into it if you have the time, but here are the main points:

Throughout the early pandemic, the CDC and WHO insisted that COVID was spread through droplets, not through aerosols, insisting that to be considered 'airborne' it had to travel on particles 5 microns or smaller. Anything larger was a 'droplet', which would fall quickly and stick to surfaces, explaining the emphasis on social distancing and surface sanitation.

Aerosol scientist and infectious disease researcher Lindsey Marr, along with others such as atmospheric physicist Lidia Morawska, argued that made no sense. Depending on temperature, humidity, ventilation, etc much larger could easily travel large distances through the air. They presented evidence like choir practice superspreader events, which droplets couldn't explain. The WHO shut them down, insisting on the 5-micron fulcrum.

Marr wanted to find out where everyone was getting the 5 micron number, because everything quoted it like fact. She communicated with Hong Kong indoor-air researcher Yuguo Li who had come to similar conclusions. With the help of grad student Katie Randall's forensic approach to research, they eventually tracked down where the number came from:

Tuberculosis.

In experiments from the 40's and 50's, only guinea pigs who had been exposed to aerosolized TB particles 5 microns or smaller contracted the disease. The problem is, tuberculosis is SUPER PICKY. If It doesn't get all the way through your respiratory system into your lungs, it doesn't cause an infection.

The 5-micron limit has been applied to every disease since, but no other respiratory infection is that picky. If enough viral particles of COVID, or the flu, or the common cold lands anywhere in your respiratory system it can get a foothold.

Very slowly and quietly, the CDC and WHO has changed its stance on aerosolization, and the importance of ventilation and mask-wearing indoors. This article argues it was too little too late, and caused too many unnecessary deaths.

I read about this way back in July, when the group of scientists and physicians first sent a huge petition to WHO to change their guidelines, and I’ve been trying to tell people about it ever since. Because what you need to do to protect from aerosols is very different from what you need to do to protect from droplets and this is killing people by the hundreds of thousands.

So here’s what we know about what ACTUALLY protects people from COVID. Basic definition of terms: an aerosol is a gas/vapor. It’s the air from your lungs. Physically it acts like steam or smoke.

Not significantly helpful:

I’m not telling you this to say, like, “don’t do these things”, but so you know that doing these things does not make you safe. You need to do the things in the second list.

1) 6 feet. I’m sorry. I know this has been your guiding life principle for the last year. The WHO and CDC lied to you. This is not a conspiracy anti-mask dumbass thing. They actually did. That’s the biggest thing about aerosols vs droplets: droplets stop at six feet. Aerosols DO NOT. You can be all the way on the other side of a church service or a wedding or a whatever and get COVID. That’s how superspreader events happen. (You know how everyone’s het up about the CDC saying vaccinated people don’t have to be six feet apart? It’s... not actually about the vaccination. They just know now that 6 feet didn’t help significantly in the first place.)

2) Sanitizing objects. It’s not very specifically mentioned in this particular article, but was part of what they said back in July: “fomites” - contaminated objects - are just... not a factor in COVID at all. All that Lysoling of chairs and shit is pointless. Probably don’t watch someone cough on a counter and then immediately lick it, but we’ve known for more than a year that tables, chairs, railings, etc cannot pass COVID.

3) Handwashing. Please... please do wash your hands, there are many other things you transmit/get from your hands. COVID is however not one of them. Hands fall under the category of “fomites”. Again, don’t put your hand right into your mouth seconds after someone coughs on it, but since COVID is actually passing through air there’s like... not much air that sticks on your hand??? The amount of virus that sticks to your hand is not enough to give you COVID. Also COVID infects you through your lungs not your skin.

4) Bad masks. While wearing a mask is good, many (most!) sorts of masks actually make the problem worse. Your goal isn’t to block droplets from shooting forward, it’s to stop aerosol - gas - from getting, well, anywhere. An ill-fitting mask that has a gap between the mask and your cheeks will cause aerosol to blow backwards at people behind you. A mask that doesn’t have wire at the top will blow the aerosol upwards where it can settle back down all over the room. A bandana, or a mask not covering your nose, or a face shield, or a mask with a valve or a hole, will do absolutely fuck-all.

Things that do help:

In summary, the NUMBER ONE THING - the factor that controls like 95% of risk - that we now know matters (as of a year ago, fuck you, WHO) is air flow/ventilation.

1) Being outdoors. This the single best way to avoid COVID. Being in an outdoor area with free airflow is the best thing you can do by miles, I cannot emphasize this enough. This is why protests weren’t superspreader events. An outdoor area with restricted airflow (like between buildings) is not as good but is still infinitely safer than being six feet away from someone with masks indoors.

2) Proper air circulation. If you have to be inside and have any control over the building, open the doors and windows. Put fans blowing air outside. Turn on the bathroom and stove exhaust fans. If nothing else stand near the door.

3) Air filtration. Get. a. HEPA. cleaner. These filter virus out of the air. A properly used HEPA cleaner cuts indoor virus risk to almost as low as being outdoors.

4) Air filtration part 2. If you have full control over a building, revamp the HVAC system. You need a system that recirculates large amounts of air continuously and filters it to medical standards. If it’s just your home, make sure your HVAC system has a good filter on it. Pressure businesses and airlines to update their air filtration.

5) Good masks. Remember: the mask has to stop air. Not droplets. If air can get in or out anywhere around your mask, the mask is NOT HELPING. Your mask needs to have a wire at the top to stop gaps around your nose and to fit smoothly against your cheeks. If the mask isn’t layered enough to filter air it is also not helping.

6) Get. Fucking. Vaccinated. We didn’t know at first but we do know now that the COVID vaccine is incredibly effective. Like, way more than most vaccines. (Get all your vaccines. But they all do leave some risk of both getting and transmitting the disease, which is one of the reasons we need herd immunity. The COVID vaccine has a way lower lingering risk.) It keeps you safe and it keeps everyone else safe.

In case it got lost in all that: the best thing you can do by a huge margin is to STAY OUTDOORS.

A/B/O is just xeno for cowards so in this essay i will propose some fun updates to the genre inspired by actual reproductive strategies found in nature. ; )

The Snake Model (Snodel): - Omegas are female. They have a single opening for the digestive and reproductive tracts called a cloaca. - Alphas have hemipenes aka two dicks. In nature this evolved to get sperm into both the pink and the stink (not that scientists will admit it). Pros: two (2) dicks Cons: realization that it’s been cloaca porn the whole time

The Seahorse Model: - Alphas are actually female. Their big throbbing knotty cocks can stay exactly the same but they’re actually ovipositors. - Omegas have a brood pouch. The eggs deposited can even be microscopic/semen-like if you’re squeamish. Pros: no substantive changes to popular “biology” needed; includes the phrase “brood pouch” Cons: forces confrontation with inherent misogyny of the genre

The Bluegill Sunfish Model: - Aggressive, hyper-masculine Alpha males pair off with female-mimicking omega males. - Alpha-omega pairs stake out a territory, build an inviting nest and put on sexy displays together to impress the local females. - Females who approve of a male pair deposit eggs in their nest then go back to their wives and careers. - The males fertilize and care for any eggs left in their nest. Pros: fascinating, sexy, domestic and original; female characters exist and are all lesbians Cons: none

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The war on drugs is rooted in racist policies . The failure of the war and drugs is obvious. We need to find a better solution, because people of color should never be the victims of racist policies. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely to go to prison for marijuana, which is not a hard drug. Moreover , even when white people get caught , they get less time in prison. 

…is that Rachael Leigh Cook, the same actress who did the original anti-drug ad when she was a teenager?

It is indeed.

She grew up, realized she’d been exploited to further a racist government agenda, and turned around to bite the hand that feeds. Awesome.

I’m so proud of her

Good for her!

— Vivek Shraya, I’m Afraid of Men     (via makingqueerhistory)

Gordon Tootoosis, Aboriginal Canadian actor, activist, and band chief of Cree and Iyarhe Nakoda descent, as Cecil Delaronde in Canadian TV series Blackstone.

[image description: two stills of Gordon Tootoosis, captioned, “Leadership is about submission to duty, not elevation to power.” end description.]

This is one of the most profound statements on leadership I’ve encountered in a long time, and it really landed a hit on me. It’s difficult to discuss without getting a little weird about it, but for a long time I’ve been of the mind that the privilege of having a large readership implies the duty of giving back in specific ways – I just never thought of it in terms of leadership as submission to duty. 

why you should build a treehouse in minecraft

This seems like some pro-elf life bullshit

Allow me, your local dwarf advocate, a moment of your time to consider Caves

Thanks for attending my TED talk (Totally Epic Dwarf)

Ok, BUT cliff houses are where it’s at.

Just don’t fall.

You’re all forgetting the true ultimate in minecraft architecture, the humble Dirt House, whose benefits include

•Dirt

•Grass sometimes

•Use dirt to block up the door and keep shit out

And here we have in order:

you’re all making me want to play Minecraft again

But consider - ships.

The more I talk about recycling with people the more I realise just how many people recycle backwards.

Hey OP what the fuck are you talking about?

What I mean is, when a lot of people plan to recycle, they look at stopping products from ending up in landfill. This is a completely pointless thing to worry about. Some materials do require special handling to dispose of safely (batteries, fragile plastics, etc.), but if your goal is a general ‘how do I repurpose this so it doesn’t end up in landfill?’, that solves absolutely nothing.

We aren’t lacking in landfill space. The shirt in the back of your closet that you never ever wear is exactly as bad for the environment in the back of your closet as it is in landfill; storing it is just delaying the point in time at which it’ll start to break down. If I buy something in a plastic bottle, and then repurpose that plastic bottle into a garden pot or something… that garden pot is still gonna go to landfill eventually. I haven’t saved anything. The plastic was landfill as soon as it was manufactured. That shirt was landfill (unless you choose to burn it, which isn’t environmentally any better) the moment the fabric was produced.

The critical point when it comes to making a difference with recycling isn’t before stuff hits landfill; it’s before the stuff is produced in the first place. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” only works because ‘reuse’ and ‘recycle’ are strategies to feed into ‘reduce’. Recycling glass bottles or aluminium cans is useful only because it reduces the amount of new glass and aluminium being produced (note: most of the plastic bottles you recycle go straight to landfill in other countries). Recycling fabric is useful only if it prevents the purchase of new fabric, and thus on a large scale, the production of new fabric.

For example, let’s say my pants are threadbare beyond repair, and I cut them up for dusters. Important question: do I use dusters? Do I need this many dusters? Is this, in short, an act that is stopping me from buying dusters made from newly manufactured material? If it’s not, then it’s not doing anything at all to help the environment. That same amount of fabric is still going to landfill. (That’s not a reason not to do it, it just doesn’t help the environment at all.)

Another example: I tend to cut up old clothes and pick up fabric that’s going to be thrown out a lot, to make bags and wall hangings and rugs and things. I recycle a LOT of fabric. Is this helping the environment? For some people doing this, it probably is, because they’re making stuff they’d otherwise buy. But for me, it’s doing nothing whatsoever for the environment. If I wasn’t making cushions and wall hangings, I wouldn’t be buying any. I just wouldn’t own any cushions or wall hangings. They’re fun to make, they brighten the place up, but they don’t affect my consumption (and therefore the incentive for cushions and wall hanging to be produced) at all; I’m buying zero of those things either way. Is this recycling? Yes. Does it have any effect whatsoever on helping the environment? No. It’s just delaying the amount of time before that exact same fabric ends becomes rubbish.

Same is true of the aformentioned plastic bottles into garden pots. That plastic is going into landfill whether you recycle it first or not. The question is, did repurposing it stop you from having to buy plastic garden pots? Will the cumulative effect of people doing this lower the amount of plastic garden pots being produced? Will that lower the amount of plastic being produced?

Stopping things from reaching landfill is largely an irrelevant and pointless practice. Recycling is only environmentally useful when it affects the future production of materials. Repurposing materials is often fun and practical regardless (I love repurposing materials), but it’s not automatically environmentally useful just because you’re reusing something.

#This is one of the reasons I am OBSESSED with green building materials#because so many of them are actually not that green at all#and the concept of recycled building materials is so over used while being under examined#and BOY DO THEY HATE IT WHEN YOU POINT OUT THAT THEIR GREEN PRODUCT IS NOT REALLY THAT GREEN#omg it makes them so mad#them being architects or company reps etc 

Still fuming over that “vegan leather made from cacti!” thing that turned out to be almost entirely plastic with like, a bit of cactus in there.

This is mostly true except the assertion that “We aren’t lacking in landfill space”, which I must disagree with, because we are. Every landfill means another habitat dug up, more hydrology altered, and unless they’re properly constructed, a LOT of extremely harmful compounds entering the surrounding ecosystems via leachate. And it’s a particular problem if you live somewhere with a smaller landmass (e.g. UK, Iceland, Aotearoa, the Philippines, etc) - we are absolutely running out of landfill space, and anything that slows their filling IS a good thing.

But yes, it’s absolutely true that the behemoth in the room is our consumption patterns, and a lot of the green movement is just capitalism in a new colour. If we don’t stop making all the stuff we’re making, the planet dies. It really is that simple.

That’s a good point. For context I am Australian.

Friendly reminder that capitalism mangled “reduce reuse recycle” into just “recycle” for a reason. Corporations don’t want to reduce consumption at all so they’ll gladly sell you the lie that if you recycle hard enough you’ll save the environment. No amount of recycling will save shit if we do not reduce and reuse (and obliterate the capitalist system forcing us all into perpetual overconsumption)

Maldha Mohamed.

Astounding paintings that combine realism and texture by artist Maldha Mohamed, who lives and works in Maldives.

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Be sure to follow Supersonic Art on Instagram!

WOW

fictional character discourse would be more fun if we all internalized the fact that characters are narrative tools, not people. once we have that basic fact down, we can start talking about what story the author is trying to tell using these characters, whether they’re successful, whether the story itself is successful and by what means we are measuring success—which are all really fun and interesting things to discuss! but we simply cannot get to that point unless we first accept that fictional characters simply do not have thoughts, feelings, opinions, or any agency on their own. a fictional character has more in common with the fictional chair theyre sitting on than with a real person

Some one explain this to me like I’m five

I’ll try:

The way we talk about characters in stories would be better if we really understood that characters are just tools that writers use to tell a story.

Once we understand that, we can start talking about how the character is used to tell the story, about whether we think it’s an interested story, and about what makes something an interesting story to us.

Which are all really fun and interesting things to talk about.

But we can not do that unless we accept that characters are not people. They do not have thoughts. They do not have opinions. They do not make decisions. They only exist as tools to tell the story.

Other tools in a story are things like a chair in a story where people sit, or a palace in a fairy tale, or the sun in a story about a hot dessert. A character is like that chair, that palace and that sun: only a tool to tell the story.

A character is not like a real person. A real person can be ‘good’ or bad’ (or both) because they do good or bad things (or both), a character can only be a useful tool or a not useful tool to tell a story.

So when we hear something like “I like this character”, what we should hear is “I like this tool because it is an interesting tool to tell an interesting story”, we should not hear “I like this person and approve of their actions and would do similar actions”.

Hidden inside statements like "you can do everything you put your mind to", "you have no limits" and "you can achieve everything you work for" is the message that it must be your own fault if you don't/can't. That's why it's important to challenge toxic positivity. That's why it's important to swallow the fact that not everything is within our control.

Those of you who liked the knife cleaning video will also like this!

Cleaning old tools: now, with no terrible sounds!