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Nothing's the motto

@pig-suck

with me

i think one of my fave shark facts is this thing that some species of sharks do where they sorta peek their heads out of the water to see whats above the surface…..its called spyhopping and great white sharks do it all the time

This gave me so much serotonin for some reason.

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They look like they forgot they can breathe underwater and think they’re drowning

#dont they reckon they learned this from whales?#bc whales have been doing this for as long as weve been observing them but sharks have only started doing it in the last decade or so#OH HEY THAT REMINDS ME#ON THE TOPIC OF SHARKS LEARNING THINGS FROM OTHER SPECIES#theres a pod of orcas that have recently started hunting sharks off the coast of south africa#started with one orca with a collapsed dorsal who reportedly HATES sharks and was the only orca on record to hunt them routinely#WELL#he taught his buddies and now theres a whole pod that hunt them#and the sharks (who arent used to being predated by anything) USED THE SAME EVASION TECHNIQUES THAT THEIR OWN PREY USE WITH THEM#so seals and turtles and etc will try to evade a GWS by swimming in a tight circle and keeping the shark in their line of sight#the GW has a larger turning circle than the prey so if the turtle/seal/whatever is able to got into the right position then they can evade#the shark. well the orcas started hunting the sharks and the sharks TRIED EMPLOYING THE SAME TACTIC THAT THEIR PREY USES#this is huge in terms of lateral learning bc its not as though the sharks have an instinctive orca evasion technique bc if they did it#would be something different. given that sharks are solitary hunters but orcas are pack hunters and the smaller turning circle method#will only work with a solitary hunter and definitely HAS NOT worked when applied to pack hunters. BUT THIS MEANS!! that the sharks are#intelligent enough to recall the behaviour of their own prey’s successful evasion techniques AND TO THEN MIMIC IT THEMSELVES.#incredible!!!!!!! but yeah as stated it very much only works against solitary animals so the sharks that employed it did not get away and#the orcas have killed a handful of GWs and literally all the other sharks have fled the area entirely - like - there’s not a single#one to be found and the ones with tracking devices show them getting the fuck out of dodge and of course this is having a big negative#impact on the local economy which runs largely on shark tourism. but yeah like the facinating thing here is that an adult orca has taught#fellow adult orcas how to hunt sharks AND the sharks have tried to employ evasion techniques that they have known to work in the past#its two instances of lateral learning and ONE OF THEM IS CROSS SPECIES LATERAL LEARNING#its amazing!??!? (via @bundibird)

ok you can not just leave all of this in the tags this is fascinating

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pikmin: ok so you are a little guy

pikmin 2: there are Two little guys because it's pikmin Two :)

pikmin 3: there are Three little guys because it's pikmin Three :)

pikmin 4: there's like 30 of them now. fuck you

In the Sunshine Airport track in Mario Kart 8/Deluxe, three different messages can be heard faintly over the intercom. These are difficult to hear in-game due to being drowned out by the music and the sounds of the race. Here they are extracted from the game's files. In order, the lines are:

"Paging Galaxy Airlines, Flight 2218, passenger Ms. Birdo, please proceed to the information counter on Floor 2."

"Passengers departing on Galaxy Airlines, Flight 2580, bound for Dolphin Shoals, should proceed to customs and immigration at this time."

"This is the final boarding call for Boomerang Bros. International Airline, Flight 117a to Sweet Sweet Canyon, departing from Gate 3."

Fun facts of the day!

- State charges cannot be pardoned by the President of the United States. They have to be pardoned by the governor of the state in which the crime was committed

- the governor of Georgia does not have pardon power, that power was stripped in 1943 by the Georgia state legislature

- TV cameras are forbidden in federal court. TV cameras are permitted in state court. It’s already been stated that Donald Trump’s Georgia trial will be televised

- Donald Trump will be booked, processed, fingerprinted, and have his mug shot taken just like any other person who enters the Fulton country jail. They don’t believe in special treatment down there

- the Georgia RICO statue carries a 5 year mandatory minimum sentence which cannot be revoked by a judge

Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

It’s called: antisemitic caricature.

I don’t understand what’s Jewish about mother gothel… she has a typical Disney face doesn’t she? Is it the curly hair..? I mean her nose and everything else seem normal?

I’m sorry, I’m just trying to figure it out, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.

dark curly hair - long hooked nose - darker complexion than the blond blue eyed heroine 9and really the rest of the cast - portrayed as greedy and evil.

Lisa Edelstein is Jewish.  As are Idina Menzel and Amy Winehouse, both of whom I have seen compared in looks to Gothel.  Gothel’s design is a pretty clear caricature of ethnically Jewish women.  

This is a pretty good contrast between Rapunzel and Gothel.  Rapunzel has the “typical Disney face”:

Here’s a more close up look at her features.

The hooked nose becomes even more pronounced as she becomes “eviler.”

If you wanted to claim that there was noting out of the ordinary for Disney animation when it came to Gothel’s features, you would have to find at least one Disney princess or heroine with similar characteristics (long hooked nose and dark curly hair, etc).

But here is what we have is -

small noses that turn up at the end:

wide, flatter noses (though cheers to Disney for not putting button noses on their characters of color, although Esmerelda’s clothing design deserves another essay on Rromani stereotypes and there are some major issues with Pocahontas as well)

And then a few misc noses (again, props for Jasmine’s nose not being a button):

Apart from just the design of Gothel, there’s also the whole: “obviously ‘other’ (read Jewish) woman kidnaps the pretty blonde (read: gentile) kid to use her for ritualistic/magical purposes”

Like that right there on top of the aesthetic Jewish-coding is what pushed the antisemitic caricature over the top for me.  It harkens back to antisemitic blood libel that claimed that Jews stole gentile children for all manner of nefarious reasons. Even when Gothel is in “mother” role to Rapunzel, she’s is shown as nagging and passive aggressive, both antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish women.

There is no one thing that makes her an antisemitic caricature, but the design, plus the storyline she plays out, plus her characterization cement the overall character as antisemitic.  

Jew-coding a villain is not in itself always antisemitic when there are also Jewish coded heroes. Rapunzel does not have that.

Having a villain steal a baby for magical/ritualistic reasons is not always antisemitic as long as the villain is not Jew-coded.  Rapunzel fails this as well.

Having a nagging and passive aggressive mother character is not antisemitic provided that she is not, again, coded as Jewish.  Rapunzel fails once again.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: @ariminak pointed out that some of my wording made it sound like Gothel’s features only stereotypically caricatured Ashkenazi women when in fact that is not the case.  I changed the language to remove that phrasing and make it clear that any ethnically Jewish women can be affected by this type of aesthetic trope. If you reblogged the old version, could you please delete it and reblog this one instead.

Spread this version so people recognize that this stuff harms all Jewish women.

omfg can y’all chill the fuck out, any race can be portrayed as hero or villain, it’s a fucking kids movie not a political statement

So I’m guessing you’re white and a gentile. As such, you’ve more than likely grown up looking at tv and movies and fairytales and seeing your face in those of the heroes.

Jewish people don’t get that.  When we are portrayed in live action, our characters are more often than not whitewashed and in other media, our features are used and caricaturized to create “evil looking” villains.

You don’t see it because you’ve been ingrained with the idea that “ethnic” features are just “how you make a character look evil.”  You don’t look at Gothel and see your mother.  You don’t see yourself and your people.  You don’t see decades of propaganda aimed at fostering hate against you and ultimately seeking to destroy you.  

So really, you need to chill the fuck out and stop telling marginalized people to stop talking about the tools of our own marginalization.

Let’s play a game I like to call: Movie Villain or Antisemitic Propaganda:

Many “evil witch” tropes were built on European antisemitic stereotypes, not just in appearance but in the storylines they play out as well. Greediness, stealing children, killing children, hunger for power, etc.  Every time a movie villain design uses stereotyped Jewish features to communicate “evilness” to an audience, they perpetuate the marginalization of the people they are using. 

One big issue I have is that Gothel’s didn’t start out as the antisemitic caricature that made it to screen.  Much of the early concept art has a more dark romanticism feel.  

They changed the original design. Presumably to make Gothel more “other” from the good characters in the movie.  At some point, a decision was made that dark curly hair and a hooked nose wound better convey their villain.

It really doesn’t matter if any of this was intentional, I’d actually bet that it wasn’t.  However, antisemitic tropes are so engrained in our societies that people like you, even when confronted with a step by step break down of what it is, feel comfortable thinking that there’s nothing wrong with it and mocking those calling it out as if we are overreacting.

You seem to have completely ignored the majority of my post.  It is the character design, plus the characterization, plus the story line that mirrors blood libel that makes Gothel an antisemitic character.  It’s not just about someone of a certain race or ethnicity being a villain.  It’s about how stereotypes of a certain ethnic group are understood as “villainous” due to villains being repeatedly coded as Jewish over decades of film and tv.

And contrary to your naive belief, all media is political to some extent. Every time a historically present minority is not included in film (ex: lily-white Harlem in Fantastical Beasts) or when a minority character is whitewashed, or when the “ethnic” features of a minority are used almost universally to portray bad guys, it is a political and social issue.  When you never see yourselves as the people who play the hero or even see your people existing in a portrayal of a place where they should be, it is not benign.

Reblogging again for these additions.

To add another topical example of “Villain or Antisemitic Propaganda” we have Trader Johann from the How To Train Your Dragon television series.

image

In the first seasons, he’s introduced as a merchant that works as a neutral trading party, sailing around from port to port carrying mail and selling plot items (sometimes very hazardous items), with his general loyalty being to highest bidder.

But a twist at the ending of season 5 revealed him to have been in the villain’s camp the entire time–which is a group organizing for the purposes of conquering the world–and he’s one of the main antagonists for the sixth and final season.  This earned him the fandom nickname of “Traitor Johann”, and his demeanor shifts from the cheerful and gregarious fellow to, well, this:

Now, this character twist has been argued to death in the fandom already on the merits of plotting, with the general consensus being (from what I’ve seen) that it was unnecessary, the result of the series being suddenly extended and needing material, and a general character derailment.  

However, it certainly says something about how deeply embedded these antisemitic tropes are.  Look at Johann’s character design and compare it to that antisemitic image posted above.  Hooked nose, beady eyes, bushy beard, and an untrustworthy demeanor… oh, and did I mention that the voice actor for Johann is Jewish?  

So, not only did they give a barely trustworthy hook-nosed merchant to a Jewish man to voice–which I would already argue is an act of antisemitic stereotyping in line with what’s discussed above–they then took that character and made him a backstabbing traitor who belongs to a conspiracy for world domination.

Was it intentional?  I doubt it.  But it speaks volumes about just how deeply these stereotypes run.

Oh, and to back it up just a bit more, here’s the concept art sheet for Johann:

The majority of these concepts are not in line with the near-caricature of his final design–although those two at the top left make me incredibly uncomfortable, because it’s like looking into a mirror, especially the second one from the left.  So they had other options.  But what design did they settle on?

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The fascinating thing about this particular patch note is that it implies the game engine is fully rendering your character's penis at all times, not just when you take your pants off.

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I'd say it was because they were accurately rendering the bulge, but if they're clipping through, that clearly can't be the case either.

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Even if they wanted the bulges to be meticulously accurate, the sensible approach would have been to include a hidden penis size slider in the mesh for the trousers. That way, you could render the trousers with a bulge of appropriate dimensions baked into the mesh and simply switch the penis off whenever it's fully covered; it'd be hugely computationally cheaper than doing fabric simulation to determine the bulge dimensions dynamically, you'd save on running needless penis physics calculations whose results will never be seen by the player, and there'd be no risk of penis clipping. The way they currently seem to be doing it is just sloppy penis optimisation.