HONG KONG UPDATE 4 SEP 2019: Withdrawal of Bill? Beware.

I implore all to please kindly read the entire thing, do not be deceived.

HK gov has infringed on morals and principles of good governance and freedom of expression and violently suppress basic human rights.

This is Carrie Lam, Chinese gov & HK gov's plan to split the "courage" and "peace" factions by giving crumbs so that some naive ppl will instead be upset that citizens continue pressing gov to accept all 5 demands.

This is also their plan to deceive the international community and make them turn attention away from HK.

"Withdraw" same as "Death of the Bill" she used to deceive international community in July. No change. Cry of a wolf.

Also excuse to pave way for Emergency Regulations Ordinances to put HK under martial law "since I already made concessions why are y'all still unhappy, you leave me with no choicee." 🙃

Or as one of the gov officials suggested this morning, a chance to recruit Special Constables (i.e. set up secret police) to "maintain law and order" by giving rights to pro-gov supporters to act as Special Constables and attack everyone.

5 demands, not 1 less.

Lam: No independent investigation

Lam: "We gonna have dialogue", proceeds to Mainland China next day

Seems like priorities lie with One Country and not Two Systems.

General consensus in HK is that no one believes in Lam and a poll shows that more than 92% are behind "5 demands, not 1 less".

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This is a ploy by Lam, HK gov, HK police and Chinese gov to attempt to pull the flames from under the pot. Withdrawal of extradition bill is now not the most impt of the demands. Too little too late.

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Carrie Lam added only 2 members to IPCC. Authorised for only complaints against police, no authority to investigate e.g. call witnesses. What happens if ppl refuse to cooperate & submit evidence? IPCC is NOT independent commission. Police cannot investigate police.

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Just a few hours ago, HK police called HK protests a "disease" (and last night they called HK citizens "cockroaches").

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Exact same sort of discourse by Chinese gov on extermination of Uyghurs.

And then few hours later you expect HK citizens to believe that Lam and HK gov are sincere?

!!!! Stay Strong

Ok but like why

Because he is powerful

the wrong amazon is burning and the wrong ice is melting

IT DIDNT CATCH FIRE IT IS BEING DELIBERATELY CLEARCUT AND BURNED BECAUSE LARGE AGROBUSINESS CONGLOMERATES PAID THEIR FASCIST GOVERNMENT TO IGNORE THIS COURT RULING

It’d explain why it isn’t getting coverage for sure.

You can give *directly* to Indigenous forest protectors in Brazil by supporting @ApibOficial (Brazilian Articulation of Indigenous Peoples). Indigenous groups are the only reason there is any rainforest left in Brazil at all at this point.

Here’s the link. 

Link

Zuko in Sifu-mode

I can’t tell you how much life it gives me that Zuko’s redemption is less about fighting and more about TEACHING. Because you stop wars with fighting, but you build peace with teaching.

Just like he learned from Iroh. Ozai never taught him even if he thought he was giving Zuko a lesson. Instead he punished Zuko for the only thing he did wrong; to not follow others blindly. With this Zuko is mirroring Iroh’s way of parenting, and it really shows that at least subconsciously, Iroh has become his true father.

It’s a really good point. And it’s so amazing, because both times it happens when he’s away from Iroh. When they are together, Zuko is stuck in the indulgent parent - petulant child dynamic with his uncle, but whenever he strikes out on his own and has some distance, he starts to emulate Iroh subconsciously and do exactly like Iroh would expect him do. It shows how much Zuko internalized Iroh’s entire value system, but also that he needs the space to be able to appreciate everything Iroh stands for and has given him.

Even healthy parent-child relations need the eventual distance to allow the child to grow.

Oh yes that is very true! I feel like this is a behaviour teens tend to do, where they act their age (or maybe younger) around parental figures because they are the Adults in the situation. There is no need to be above your age when the people around you will handle that. But once the teen is alone, certainly in extreme situations where Zuko is literally all on his own without Iroh near. They will go into adult mode, to protect themselves and handle the situation. If you go into child-mode while you’re all alone, it could literally kill you. So Zuko emulates the adult that taught him to become one. Which is Iroh. But we do notice that after the banishment, Zuko never reverts to that child-mode again with Ozai (at least as far as I can remember), he remains this too-mature-for-his age teen, because he subconsciously knows that he is still alone here. He is not safe. His father is not an adult that will protect him, he has to do that himself. Compared the moment he reunited with Iroh in the white lotus camp, he went to his knees crying and begged for forgiveness. His emotional outburst made him vulnerable, (child-like, not adult-like), but with Iroh, he finally felt safe to do so again.

Yeah, I agree that it’s a typical teenage behaviour - and there are similarities with Sokka being alone and being around Hakoda.

I’ve always thought that Zuko was very much in (frightened) child-mode at his reunion in Ozai. The animation made him look very young (I think on purpose in those scenes) and vulnerable. He’s trying to be the dutiful son for one last time.

I think after that last meeting, he really has no choice but to accept that he’s been lying to himself for 3 years, and Ozai would never be the father he needs. Then comes the teenage emo-phase, and the angry rebellion and the mature confrontation. And we see a very differently animated Zuko - he grows into an adult in front of our eyes during the season.

But then - you are right - we see that child-like animation again when he’s reunited with Iroh, because that’s the one space he’s allowed to be a child again.

HAUHGUHAUHSUHGUDISHGGHUDHSG

When you need to use royalty free music but can’t find any you like so you make your own but then you remember you don’t know how to compose music but you spent all this time making it and you’re not turning back now

i was getting ready for bed and this gave me a heart attack holy shit

which Ocarina of Time boss is this

Thousands of protestors singing “Do You Hear The People Sing” in a Hong Kong international airport. This is part of a 3-day sit-in and is only one example of the many marches, rallies, and sit-ins that are occurring daily.

The people of Hong Kong are fighting. Please do not let their voices go unheard around the world.

Hong Kong’s huge protests, explained by Vox.

Just in case someone wonders what they’re protesting against.

This is happening RIGHT NOW in Hong Kong. It is August, 2019, and they are fighting for their freedom being taken away from the totalitarian government of China.

willy wonka and the inventor mindset

roald dahl’s books, as fondly as i feel about them, have a habit of conflating good and evil with being good or bad at appreciating aesthetic things—just a bit too much.* what i like about charlie and the chocolate factory, but even more so about willy wonka and the chocolate factory (the 1971 movie adaptation) is that it gets much more specific about what exactly it thinks aesthetic appreciation does and doesn’t look like. so you have wonka, who is a kind of “perfect” creator. and you have charlie, who is a “perfect” consumer. and then you have this whole cast of characters that get taxonomized by their ability to appreciate wonka’s inventions.

*(matilda in matilda and charlie in charlie and the chocolate factory are both good-hearted children, mistreated and deprived by a world of tv-watching, cake-gorging philistines. the foxes in the fantastic mr. fox are starved by evil farmers, so they steal chicken and ham to have an enormous banquet. the big friendly giant in the bfg is tragically forced to subsist on the awful snozzcumber, but gets triumphantly served a delicious breakfast at the end. hell, james lives in a giant peach. we know the witches in the witches are evil because they do perverse things to food, eating pea soup and plotting to lace the candies in sweet shops with poison. the villains in his stories are, without fail, the greedy, small-minded and gluttonous. sensitive appreciators versus abusive authority.)

the “bad” young people, for example, consume unthinkingly, with the entitlement of never having been denied anything. the “bad” middle generation is too preoccupied with image and success to care about appreciation (the overworked parents). and the oldest generation is complacent and isolated (the bedbound grandparents). by contrast, the “good” young person (charlie) savors his chocolate. the “good” middle person, wonka, is a workaholic in the service of something beautiful. and the “good” older person, joe, has a flexible mind still capable of childlike wonder. (all present-day jokes about what a jackass joe actually is aside)

in willy wonka the people who are bad at art constantly attempt to prove their expertise, except their boasting only reveals how much they care about the wrong or trivial things. their motivations are egoistic. so on the surface, someone like violet “loves” gum, is always talking about the properties of gum—flavor, how long it lasts—but what she really wants is to be the authority of gum. when wonka tries to warn violet away from his experimental gum, she declares: “so long as it’s gum, then that’s for me.” and proceeds to authoritatively narrate her own transformation into a human blueberry.

some more ways that ego interferes with appreciation:

1. confident wrongness

2. irrelevant boasting

3. cruelty or evasion in order to preserve authority

4. treating the unknown as “weird” or “disgusting” or trivial

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what’s peculiar about willy wonka is that superficially, wonka himself is quite egoistic. he’s obscure, and glib, and his teasing would be nearly cruel if the people were capable of detecting that he was teasing. this is a very different quality for a “good” authority figure in a dahl story to have. wonka does not have the motherly kindness of miss honey or the grandmother in the witches. i would call the book wonka impish, but the movie one is downright trollish. i’m not even sure if dahl would endorse him.

compare this wonka exchange with the one charlie had with his chemistry teacher:

wonka is being undeniably evasive. he doesn’t expect the people to understand his process, and so he doesn’t share it. he doesn’t even bother to have patience. but unlike the chemistry teacher’s evasion, which is a wall that you can breach with flattery or obedience (ego things), wonka’s acts as a kind of filter. the right person will notice that wonka’s flippancy is the real explanation of his invention process. he is saying: the specifics of this experiment do probably matter, but actually telling you the specifics would just lead you to cargo cult the wrong things (imagine: people writing in moleskines because hemingway did), but here is the attitude that helps me discover the right process. he is saying: if you can think in this magical, imaginative, irreverent way that values beautiful things, you can probably make beautiful things too. people who are good at art, who are good at inventing, are often characterized by this kind of disguised dismissal. that quality that says, simultaneously: “you don’t deserve my seriousness yet” and “but i am giving you an invitation to play.” people that are cargo-culting the impatience of the competent do not leave these sorts of openings. they have no desire to be actually understood because if they were understood it would be clear that their motivations had to do with ego and not making something good.

the utter disappointingness of most of the golden ticket winners makes wonka’s impatience sympathetic. it’s understandable. but i wouldn’t say that the movie advocates it, exactly, and i wouldn’t say that i do either. it’s a side-effect of the good thing, but meanness is not itself the good thing. i say this because the end of the movie strikes an interestingly upsetting emotional tone. wonka yells at charlie, and it hurts because we know that charlie is good, and wonka is supposed to recognize that. his impatience was only supposed to be for people who don’t get it, not charlie. what good is wonka’s filter if even charlie wouldn’t make it through? and if wonka values joy and whimsy so much, why would he be bothered by charlie playing with the fizzy lifting drinks? but wonka is surrounded by half objects during this scene—half a clock, half a cup, half a hat—and we understand that wonka is just half-done person himself. imperfect, not magic, and lashing out because a boy he was hopeful about disappointed him (about the gobstopper, to be clear, not the fizzy lifting drinks). it complicates the bichromatic morality of dahl’s books, in other words, while still nakedly valuing the sincere appreciation of beautiful things. 

(EDIT: i was talking to my brother and he/we had the additional insight that wonka being disappointing to charlie and/or the audience conveys the idea that being disappointed in your idols–the way wonka is disappointed in everyone else–is a key, painful process of developing your own artistic attitude. maybe you don’t even feel disappointed, but simply aware that the idol cares about something you don’t, or in a way that you think is wrong. and you feel motivated to improve on them.)

I was absolutely gutted by this scene as a child! Until the end we’ve been gleefully watching the Bad Children getting dispatched by troll Wonka, then when Charlie should get his reward everything goes… wrong, Wonka drops the charade and we are slapped with his genuine anger at Charlie and in a way at us, rage which seems to come out of nowhere but is humiliatingly justified by the fizzy lifting drinks incident, a terrifying scene in itself that we thought was over and done with, forgotten. Being accused of something you didn’t do must be terrible, but sometimes being accused of something you did do is even worse, getting yelled at by a man you idolised in a room of broken objects and broken dreams. Wonka is mad and disappointed, and we feel that he’s being unfair even if we did let him down. Grandpa Joe calls him a fraud, but Charlie gives the gobstopper back anyway. In a normal movie this would feel like passing a test imposed by a stern but kindly guardian, but here Wonka is left a slightly broken man, surpassed by his chosen successor, making the ending bittersweet – chocolate got too dark, perhaps?

There must be dozens of movies where wacky guardians shepherd innocent children through fantastical adventures – although I’m blanking on anything beyond Baron Munchausen – but this is one of the few that shows what it can feel like to grow up and realise the wise adults are winging it just like you.

HONG KONG UPDATE 11 AUG 2019 Part 2

1500 - past 1800: North Point

A lot of Fujianese men and other pro-Beijing supporters congregated in North Point, a rare neighbourhood known for stout support of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They laid in wait for protesting citizens so that they could attack them like how they did on 7.21 Yuen Long, 5.8 Tsuen Wan and 5.8 North Point, but none came cos' all were at Sham Shui Po and Island East. Only the press were there, so the men in red decided to attack the press and random passersby instead.

As with all 3 previous cases of pro-Beijing attacks, the attackers were escorted away by the HK police and not arrested.

Police also conducted aggressive frequent stop and searches and violently arrested random passersby - Jocelyn Chau, the community officer of the large residential complex City Garden, came out to remind residents to stay safe and was accused of "assaulting officers" and arrested. She was pushed forcefully to the ground and her hands were tied.

so many gifs of ostriches doing their mating dance for humans but did u know

they actually did a study on this

and ostriches repeatedly found humans more attractive than other ostriches

yes

ostrich farmers have trouble setting up their ostriches with each other because they’re just not interested, they want their farmers instead

it’s incredible

also, ostriches show notable sexual preference

some male ostriches will only display for male humans, some will display for anybody, some will display for female humans only

I can’t believe ostriches are reverse furries

great we gotta kinkshame the fuckin birds now

I’m so mad because this worked

help me roger

Reblogging myself because

Originally posted by gifs-for-the-masses

Reblogging myself because… what was that? Five minutes?

O_O

………my friend has made me curious

help me roger

Update: after I reblogged this someone messaged me offering me tickets to the sold out Hausu screening with a Q&A and autograph session with the director

let’s do it, roger

Roger helppppp

I need you Roger!

ROGER PLEASE

I accidentally paid my mortgage twice and need to pay utilities. cmon roger, do me a solid

Last time I reblogged this magic fish I sold a book. 

a meme so hot it’s measured by scovilles

Peak Cat Behavior

Work harder, not smarter! 

Hot take: people who argue that saying “mood,” “same,” “F,” “oh worm?” etc. add nothing to a conversation don’t realize that they function the same way as aizuchi, i.e. signalling that you’re still paying attention to what the speaker is saying, which is harder to do when you can’t see the other person.  In this essay, I will

No go on, I’m listening

Hell, they don’t, I will. In this essay I will discuss how the textual and meme-based forms of aizuchi are not only a sign of our changing methods of communication with the advent of technology, but a particular advantage to those who have problems deriving shades of meaning from vocal tone or facial expression, and arguments made against textual and meme-based forms of aizuchi are speaking from a platform of ableism.

Technology has made a lot of changes in the way we communicate. When it’s face-to-face, we can get away with nods, that little ‘yeah, good point’ purse of the lips, raised eyebrows, that face-scrunch that just says ‘doubt’ … facial expressions, in short; really complex ones, often with an aural component. We read more from those than we realise, but at their base level, they show that we’re not only hearing the noises and nodding in the right places, but listening.

Enter the telephone. Suddenly a speaker can’t see where their conversational companion’s eyes are pointing, what they’re doing with their hands, what their posture’s like, or even if there’s someone on the other end of this bit of plastic they’re talking into. I imagine that aural aizuchi became common to the point of being considered a conversational necessity with the telephone, because when telecommunications technology was in its infancy, back in the days of party lines, it was shaky and unreliable (think Comcast) and there was every chance that your call could be disconnected without realising it. So interjecting with aural cues helped when it came to building trust in the communications medium that was the telephone.

When the internet turned up, it took away even the aural component, and the problem that arose with the telephone repeated itself on a grander scale. Not only could someone not necessarily be sure that someone was paying attention (yes, they might be online, but are they looking at the chat box or did they alt-tab out?), but any exchange was stripped of emotional content. The conversational cue words used to denote attention being paid can come across as sarcastic, dismissive or overly abrupt when stripped down to words on a screen, without the nuance lent to it by vocal tone and facial expression.

The solution? Create a whole new dialect, combining pictures and text to capitalise on a shared cultural foundation. If you’ve ever seen the ST:TNG episode “Darmok”, it’s a bit like that. There are a lot of different cultural cue points (thus “There’s a horse loose in a hospital!” instead of “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”), and we abbreviate a lot, but in principle, it’s the same. We communicate in metaphor, allowing our shared cultural background carry the emotional nuance that’s lacking in text alone.

What seldom gets brought up is how this has helped those who have issues parsing facial expressions. For some people, parsing all but the most basic facial expressions is a hit-and-miss exercise requiring a lot of work, and vocal tone hits them the same way. When we started communicating online in what I can only call a memetic dialect, we started conveying concrete, text-proven emotional context in our conversations. This must have been a relief for anyone who has difficulties reading facial expressions and vocal tones, since people can lie about what’s going on behind their face but an established cultural foundation at least pins down what their conversational partner or partners meant to convey. Also consider: when this memetic dialect came into use in face-to-face conversation, it gave a solid emotional context to certain words that can be referenced outside of the forum-and-text-chat medium. In short - words and phrases mean things and, once that meaning has been established, it carries over into whatever mode of conversation is in use.

The fact that we as a culture created a memetic dialect to effectively communicate emotional context via a medium entirely stripped of the standard emotional cues is incredible, and I honestly believe that anyone who takes issue with “same” or “mood” used in text conversation (or even verbally, since the thing about memetic anything is that it spreads; that’s the point of a meme) should probably be obliged to analyse their own speech for useless words. At least that might help make the point that everyone uses filler words or aizuchi, but modern forms of it actually make sense not only in terms of adapting to suit a medium, but also adapting to be equitable to those who may have issues with emotional context in other sources.

tbh i dont get why most people assume that robots are always cold

like have u felt a laptop while its working? its kinda not exactly cold yo

tbh any piece of machinery thats working hard to function is usually not cold, the only time its ever cold is when its turned off

so id like to think while a robot is awake and functioning they could have the potential to be as warm as a human being :0

never thought about this before but now it’s obvious

although like i hope they’ve actually improved cooling tech by the time they’re building androids bc my laptop can actually get so hot it makes THE ROOM hot and it’s only the size of a laptop so potentially an android who was thinking very hard would be a veritable furnace 

think too hard, overheat, faint

fainting couches for androids omg

Fainting couches for androids is the best possible thing

file under things i didn’t know i needed in my life

humans who carry around those chemical freeze-packs in case they need something to drape across their friend’s fevered brow

humans who insist on holding a parasol for their robot friend on sunny days

a robot draping herself over a fainting couch in distress and a bunch of worried humans mobbing up to fuss and fan her and bring her some cool water and pat her hand and gallantly offer to beat up whatever alarmed her

too cute

Okay guys and gals I like where ur going but I think we’ve glossed over something with real potential.

Androids blushing

A human calls their android friend cute and then they look flustered and you hear their cooling fans kick into high gear

A human plants a little kiss on their cheek and they turn red hot (literally) from embarrassment

“Brr, it’s friggin cold in here.”

“Hold on I got this. Hey TX-10 did I tell you you look very pretty today?”

The room temp rises a couple degrees as TX-10 tries to hide their blushing.

yES THANK U FOR ADDING THIS TO MY POST

YES YES YES YES this is the content I want from my Tumblr

okay but also consider this

robots attracting cats like catnip every time they stop moving for more than a few minutes

robot sits down for ten minutes, is immediately a cat pillow

halfheartedly protesting to their human friends that they have tasks to do and being informed that no, their priority one override task is now to be a cat pillow, sorry friend that’s just how this works

the other day seebs told me a thing about robots whose idea of humor is saying facts that aren’t true, like they’ll go “bananas are a type of bird” and laugh uproariously. combined that with the above in my head and achieved cutest android. will def write story about.

cute android: human friend! human friend! i have— haha— very important information!

human friend: yes what is it cute android i am desperate to learn a thing

cute android: eeheehee it’s that— and you should commit this to memory! popsicles were invented by ralph nader!

human friend: is that so

cute android: on the moon!!

human friend: that’s completely astounding i will make sure to remember this fact always

cute android: hahaha IT WAS A JOKE I JOKED YOU, YOU WERE JOKED!!!

human friend: you dastardly robot! how could you!

cute android: *glee*

slfg;hjkadlfgkjhsdfglkjsdfgh yes good

cute android telling ‘jokes’ to its cat groupies which are all purring because android gets so warm when it’s having emotions

android learns to purr back

Do u ever think about how dogs, who have 2 colour receptors, see an apple as grayish yellow, while humans have 3 and see it as red, and mantis shrimp have 12, and see it another monstrous colour altogether?

How none of us are necessarily correct, and the apple itself, is not really any colour, it’s just a fruit minding its own goddamn business??

Fucking fascinating

We don’t know how ANYTHING TASTES, SOUNDS, LOOKS, FEELS, OR SMELLS

okay, since no one’s talking about this, i will.

i also apologize for my bad english. i’m ukrainian and writing this in a rush.

anyway.

TW: murder, death threats, homophobia, transphobia.

the russian LGBT community is in deep shit right now.

a russian LGBT rights activist elena grigoryevna was recently found dead with 8 stab wounds near her home.

the police didn’t do anything about it, despite how many people called out for help.

there’s also a russian anti LGBT group called “pila” (“chainsaw”). a couple of months prior they published a hit list of LGBT activists from russia. elena was on the list. and so are other people who are related to the community in some ways.

they stated that they prepared some “cruel gifts” to the people on the list. the beauty blogger andrew petrov (whose name is also on it) recently made a post for his followers that shed more light on the situation.

another activist, andrew shituhin is a victim of this organization. the addresses of his family, along with other personal information got published on the website. earlier he got kicked out of his university. he immigrated to netherlands, although recently he came to a town near moskow to live for a bit. his friend, zhenia svetski, is aimed at by this organization. in a threatening email “pila” stated that he will be killed before august if andrew doesn’t help him to immigrate to netherlands.

all i’m asking for is to spread this post so that more people from other countries are aware of the situation.

also, i’m encouraging russian folks to add more information to this post in case if i missed anything. thank you.

Thank you, @hasturlavista​ 

I’m gonna add a personal note here if you don’t mind.

This shit carousel is widespread as fuck. 

The “Pila” already have members in Chechnya, Dagestan, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Udmurtia, Samara Oblast, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Saratov Oblast, Orenburg Oblast, Perm Krai and Stavropol Krai. Saint Petersburg also seems to have become their “hunting ground”. They’re planning to expand their activity even further and launch the persecution of the lgbt community in many more areas of Russia including Moscow itself.

They’ve basically admitted to nursing a wet dream of tracking down and murdering gay and trans people over the entire country. They may as well emerge in Ukraine and Belarus, according to their own statements. They’re talking about stuffing people with tranquilizers, kidnapping and taking them to Chechnya. They’re claiming that they’re protected by law.

The police won’t help us. They’ve been doing their best to ignore us for years at this point. The state has been doing its best to pretend that we don’t exist. 

Get it, guys: the state has passed the propaganda law to silence the lgbt, yet does nothing to silence the homophobes. The state has told us to do whatever we want “behind closed doors”, yet just recently the police have stormed the apartment of a same-sex couple (and their two adopted children) without any sensible reason. The state has basically made us go into hiding so that we “won’t disrupt the traditional values”. And when we did that, they immediately started searching for us. Lmfao.

Apparently, the traditional russian values are so delicate that they are disrupted by the sole fact that gays exist.

Now, the number of actual active “gayhunters” equals about a couple of hundred people. But the number of those who in one way or another support “Pila” is immense. According to the most recent surveys, more than half of Russian population is hostile or disdainful towards the lgbt community. Twitter users have launched a respective hashtag #ЗащититеЛюдейОтПилы (#ProtectPeopleFromPila), and replies under the most popular posts are already being filled with homophobic slurs and death threats. Those who send such messages do not bother to give any reasoning behind their point of view. That’s because they have no reasoning. There can’t be any reasoning. We’re simply surrounded by stupid, nonsensical, stubborn and evil people who are well aware of their impunity.

And that’s while gay activists who defend the simplest right for the lgbt to be valid members of society get brutally murdered.

Russia – our holy nation, am I right?

I rarely post on tumblr these days, but I just can’t stay silent during this nation-wide fuck-up. I ask those few followers that I have to spread this information further. The world should know.

If you want to help, you can donate to the Russian LGBT network. 

(full link: https://lgbtnet.org/en/help-us-so-we-can-help-others)

Honestly I have no words anymore.