so my apparently my entire blog is now flagged for mature content because of two completely sfw posts from literal years ago getting a flag that it will not let me appeal haha @staff i am coming for your life

like i wouldnt care except now when i look up my blog it comes with a big This Blog Contains Mature Content warning and its like. i started this blog in part because i wanted a monster blog that wasnt explicit and that would be more easily accessible to folks who love monsters but dont necessarily want to or arent comfortable with regularly seeing porn on their dash. id almost understand the label more if it was about the occasional artistic nudity, and if the flagged pieces were reviewed by an actual person so i could contest this, but the two posts seem totally arbitrary and that just feels like. kind of unfair.

anyways fuck tumblrs policies in general but also like if youre going to have them it feels kind of shit to make blogs that go out of their way to label themselves as sfw less accessible as well. like who is this for?

sidenote my actual nsfw blog doesnt give me this warning so like what is the truth

On a night in January 2022, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin stepped on stage in a former airbase in Houma, La.

With American flags draped from the stage, the topic of the night was democracy.

The state's chief voting official joked that he was competing with a former LSU Tiger great playing in the NFL playoffs the same night.

"I want to thank you all for coming out, competing with Joe Burrow is pretty tough!" Ardoin laughed.

But these were election die-hards.

The group hosting the event — We The People, Bayou Chapter — is one of hundreds of so-called election integrity groups that have popped up across the country since 2020, motivated by former President Donald Trump's lies about voting.

During the Q&A portion of the event, people asked about how to stop dead people from voting "to support the Democrats" and voiced a number of other popular election conspiracy theories.

More evidence that all the Republican talk about stopping voter “fraud” is performative. And in fact they are doing the opposite of what they claim to want to do. They are rigging elections so that fewer Democrats or those who lean Democrat can vote. 

Given that a lot of the voter fraud that has been caught has been done by Republicans, it makes me wonder if the movement to pull out of ERIC is an attempt to allow more Republicans to vote in more than one state election. 

Politics for the past 8 years.

I love the shade the writer cast on Fears. Like

"yeah, those things are why people judge you"

Understanding the Ethnic Geography of China

First, understand the provinces of China:

When people think of China, they all assume that everyone in China is Chinese, speaks Chinese, looks and live like this:

Now let’s look at the Ethnic Make-Up of China!

Look how many Han Chinese there are? But first things first! All the Han Chinese do not speak the same language! Chinese is probably as useful as saying the “Europeans”.

Let’s pretend that Europe is combined into a single country! But with London as the Capital City, and everyone is officially, “European” and they all speak “European”, with European English as the official language of Europe! The French, German, Spanish and Russians? They are their own entire language, culture and ethnicity.

Same goes with China. China is much larger than Europe, speaking different languages, eating different foods, practicing different religions, wearing different clothing. Beijing is the capital, with Mandarin Chinese as the official language of the entire country. However, Chinese languages are considered “Dialects”, but not their own distinct language, culture or ethnicity.

Now let’s look at the Han Chinese languages:

Mandarin Chinese not only has it’s “Northern, Eastern, Southwestern” dialects, but they even break up into more different dialects and accents from different region, city and province. There’s a difference between London accent, Welsh accent, Scottish and Irish accents. To simplify it, the government simply grouped everyone together.

Southern Chinese languages cannot mutually understand with any other Chinese. That’s like an Englishman trying to communicate with a German, a Dutch, or a Danish. They all belong from the same language group, but they cannot understand one another mutually.

But what about the other Non-Han Chinese?

See where Han is at? (Look where Beijing would be!) That is the original homeland of all Han Chinese people.

There are officially 56 Ethnic Groups in China, but there are hundreds and even more that are unofficial and undocumented. It’s the Chinese government way of saying, “Meh. Saffron, Violet and Pink are the same thing. Let’s just call it “Red”.

But how did Han Chinese became the major language and ethnic group of China?

Through conquest! Very much like how the Romans of today Italy killed, pillaged, raped and took over the Gauls of France, the Germania of Central Europe and the Britannia’s of the British Isles, and turned them “Roman citizens” through colonization and expansion!

But what makes China a unique case, is that the surviving natives of the Northern Han conquest, is that they still retain much of their native cultures. They survived, because most of the ethnic groups lived up in the mountains, where the ancient Han Chinese were too lazy to bring their armies up mountains:

Those who were colonized and assimilated into Chinese culture?

The Vietnamese were colonized by the Chinese more than three times.

Korea was colonized/tributing state for the longest time ever.

And Southern China! They would be influenced and assimilated strongest to Northern Chinese culture and language!

But why is everyone considered Chinese?

Same bullshit as your government saying that you’re an American, Canadian, British, Australian, etc. etc. citizen. It’s like a rich White straight male, taking control of the government and dictating how you live, under his life style. The Han Chinese says that everyone in China is all Chinese.

And mostly the blatent ignorance and education on the diversity of China. 

Chinese Dialects?

It’s another bullshit ideology.

Is French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese a dialect of Europe? No. They are their own distinct languages. They may come from the same Roman history, the same Romance language family, but they are their own language. Teochow, Hakka, Minnan, Cantonese, Mandarin, etc. etc. are their own distinct language and ethnicity.

Unified China?

To unify Germany, Hitler said that the German Race was the greatest race! Germans from all over Europe, the German Swiss, the Austrian Germans, etc. etc. united as a single “Race” and rose to power.

To unify China, Northern Chinese Emperors said that they were the greatest race! And attempted to conquer everyone else, killing anyone who wasn’t “Chinese”. This was done for more than 3,000 years, resulting in many extinct native cultures and ethnicities in China, and resulting many cultures (like Korea, Vietnam and even Taiwan) to assimilate into Northern Han Chinese culture.

Conclusion:

Not everyone in China are Mandarin Han Chinese, the major ethnic and language speaking group of China. Three different dialects of Mandarin and 6 different languages of Southern Chinese (Hakka, Min, Wu, etc.).

There is an official recognized 56 ethnic groups, but hundreds that are unrecognized. Such as Tibetans, Miao, Manchu and even Koreans and Mongolians!

China is very diverse in language, culture, religion and ethnicity. Not everyone is ethnically Chinese, nor speak Mandarin Chinese.

Adding these comments regarding written and spoken Chinese, because the original post is wrong about the different Chinese *dialects* – they’re dialects rather than separate languages because the written language is the same, whereas French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are all written and spoken completely different (and even the grammar is not the same across those languages – Chinese grammar is mostly the same across the different Chinese dialects): 

I don’t know anything about this at all, but saying “they’re dialects because they use the same written language” feels like it’s the same thing as saying “English and Spanish are just different dialects of the same language because they both use the same alphabet”

The difference is that the dialects of Chinese are all using the exact same hanzi (although there are region specific hanzi). Written Chinese doesn’t work like the Latin alphabet does, for example: I study, yo estudio, ich studiere, učím sa; all 4 examples mean the same thing but are spelled differently whereas in Chinese they would all be spelled identically but pronounced differently

Oh, right on, that makes sense. It also helps simultaneously helpful and unhelpful

this 50′s hungarian comic strip I’d never heard of until now is so damn cute for something that also gets so horny

It helps that the writer was trying to create something he hoped would appeal to women as much as men.

Yeah and I think where it really succeeds vs. modern anime wifey fantasy shit is that Jucika really is just a character super comfortable with being sexual, likes looking sexy and even has no shame in using it to get her way:

….But at the same time, she doesn’t tolerate being objectified against her wishes:

….And the comic takes her side in both cases, whereas I’ve seen countless modern narratives in which this same character would have only been framed as like a Slutty ™ Bitch ™ or full blown villain.

One of the things I also really like about this comic, besides what’s already been stated, is that the humor isn’t always about her being sexy. Sometimes it’s just about other goofy things in her life!

oh yes many of them are experienes just anybody can relate to

but then there’s also the time she just….built a functional AI?

she just didn’t predict how the robot rebellion would really manifest

I love how there isn’t a single dialogue bubble, yet you can fully understand what’s happening.

Always reblog Jucika.

Me in my house welcoming you with excitement

1.mood

2.fun fact this bat isnt being eaten; like, its roosting there for the night. this is Nepenthes hemsleyana, a pitcher plant species in a mutualistic relationship with the local tiny bat friends Kerivoula hardwickii (Hardwicke’s woolly bat)!! it works like this:

- the pitchers are shaped to make a special distinctive reflection of the bat’s echolocation. so like, the bats can hear where the pitchers are and go to them for roosting. 

-the bats enter the pitchers and sit on this special rim inside that holds them above the water line so they dont get eaten on accident. 

-up to two teeny bat friends can fit in an average pitcher at a time lmao

-the bat friends poop when they sleep and the plant eats the poop when it falls into the digestive fluid

-bat friends get a safe place to sleep, pitcher plants get food! 

IM SORRY FOR REBLOGGING THIS TWICE IN ONE DAY BUT I WAS READING THE STUDY AND IT GOT BETTER

Fun tags on this post

I was reading something about Whitestown, Indiana and my eyes nearly popped out of my head thinking it was one of THOSE comically racist towns. Nice to know, at least the name, wasn’t that.

Racisttown, named after the abolitionist Stopbeing Racist,

That's nothing. Check THIS shit out

WHAT THE HELL

That town has been pretty consistently resistant to changing any of their names, saying “fuck off, our Hitlers were here first”.

do you even realize that Dr Gay Hitler exerced his profession during WW2? like there were people who were going to get their teeth done by Dr Gay Hitler. While the other one was in Europe doing politics and war and stuff.

History is amazing

Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’

Why don’t more animated movies look this good? According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable.

Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion.

While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments. Across the Spider-Verse was meant to debut in theaters in April of 2022, before it was postponed to October of that year and then June 2023 owing to what Entertainment Weekly reported as “pandemic-related delays.” However, the four crew members say animators who were hired in the spring of 2021 sat idle for anywhere from three to six months that year while Phil Lord tinkered with the movie in the layout stage, when the first 3-D representation of storyboards are created.

As a result, these individuals say, they were pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year to make up for time lost and were forced back to the drawing board as many as five times to revise work during the final rendering stage.

"For animated movies, the majority of the trial-and-error process happens during writing and storyboarding. Not with fully completed animation. Phil’s mentality was, This change makes for a better movie, so why aren’t we doing it? It’s obviously been very expensive having to redo the same shot several times over and have every department touch it so many times. The changes in the writing would go through storyboarding. Then it gets to layout, then animation, then final layout, which is adjusting cameras and placements of things in the environment. Then there’s cloth and hair effects, which have to repeatedly be redone anytime there’s an animation change. The effects department also passes over the characters with ink lines and does all the crazy stuff like explosions, smoke, and water. And they work closely with lighting and compositing on all the color and visual treatments in this movie. Every pass is plugged into editing. Smaller changes tend to start with animation, and big story changes can involve more departments like visual development, modeling, rigging, and texture painting. These are a lot of artists affected by one change. Imagine an endless stream of them."

"Over 100 people left the project because they couldn’t take it anymore. But a lot stayed on just so they could make sure their work survived until the end — because if it gets changed, it’s no longer yours. I know people who were on the project for over a year who left, and now they have little to show for it because everything was changed. They went through the hell of the production and then got none of their work coming out the other side."

Don't be this kind of boss

i cannot stress this enough: if your reasoning for clowning on the mcu is "they overwork their cg artists and animators" i 1000% guarantee that a show or movie you have been stanning for years also abused their artists and you just haven't heard about it because the production companies aren't in the spotlight like mcu productions are. that cartoon for kids? that incredibly animated movie? that non-marvel superhero movie? i've seen people declare their hatred for the way the mcu treats their workers and then turn around and gush about a show that i know for a fact was hell for the artists attached

and no this is NOT me saying "this means you should stop hating on the mcu uwu" it's me saying you gotta be aware that this shit is an INDUSTRY WIDE PROBLEM. you CANNOT "fix" it by refusing to watch mcu movies and feeling good about it. you have to be aware that it's EVERYWHERE. why do you think so many animation and vfx productions are sourced in canada? in india and the phillipines? we are not unionized.

i know it's hard to face the idea that your favourite show might have been made unethically especially when you've spent so much time hating the mcu for doing the same thing. you don't have to start hating your favourite show. just like...be aware. don't be smarmy about it. don't claim without research that a beautifully animated movie Must mean the animators were not working 16 hour days and weekends. i do think we can fix this 👍 but we can't fix it if 90% of us don't even realize what the problem really is

now that it's come out that the spiderverse animators were working unsustainable hours yall need to be aware of this more than ever. even good movies aren't innocent of this. we often see the narrative of "see what happens if you pay animators well and give them time to work?" when it comes to good movies but. that is almost never the case. the artists are still being worked to the bone. the movie being good does not negate this.

literally every anime is made by underpaying and crunching animators. there are only a handful of studios (KyoAni and PA Works, maybe others) who treat their workers right, as in giving animators benefits and proper pay and training. the majority of the industry is perfectly willing to grind animators into dust to make anime happening, and the rate at which animators are leaving the industry is faster than new animators coming in, which is why you see companies turning to net animators from outside Japan. it certainly helps that those net animators are typically impassioned fans easily manipulated into even worse contracts than most animators get, on worse schedules. this has been a problem for a long time, but over the last decade or so, it's gotten so much worse that the anime industry is on the verge of collapse. sooner than later, something's going to give, and the entire industry will fall apart. it's more and more common for anime to be released as split cour productions, or to have their last few episodes delayed because they could not be released on the production schedule they were given. it's entirely untenable, and what was a one-in-a-generation disaster only six or seven years ago (think about how notable Flip Flappers was for being such a disaster) has become something we see multiple times a year

if you're a fan of anime, as i am, you need to recognize the exploitation that goes into producing it. celebrate the few studios that are trying to improve worker conditions, and don't let it go unrecognized

what's up with KyoAni and PA Works? im not really sure what to look up to read about their labor conditions but it sounds interesting

KyoAni keeps their labor in-house as much as possible, as opposed to other studios, which mostly work by outsourcing to other studios or internationally. the benefits from this are what i mentioned, that they provide living wages, actual benefits, and training to junior animators. this ensures that KyoAni has an actual studio culture unlike so many others, but it also ensures that animators are working better hours for more money and are being treated better while doing so. i don't know specifics about PA Works, but i mentioned them here because i've heard a lot of comparisons between them and KyoAni in terms of business practices, although KyoAni has been doing this for longer that PA Works, so it's more established

as for where you can read about this, i recommend checking out sakugablog, which is where i've picked up a lot of my information about the industry

Support artists

same as it ever was

more than anything i want this zucc vs musk cage match to go through and for zucc to pick elon up like a disobedient chihuahua and drop him directly on his head and walk out of the ring without saying anything as the commentators start freaking out because musk isn't moving and the ref can't find a pulse

Mark Zuckerberg has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do the funniest thing possible.

okay i was joking initially but like. think about it. brutally murdering the richest man on earth with your bare hands on live TV in front of dozens of cameras and a live audience is about the most impossible thing to get away with, and if it was anyone other than Zucc, they'd be shot dead immediately and that would be that. but which security guard is going to shoot Mark fucking Zuckerberg? you can't just shoot him, you have to, like, bring him to justice with a trial, because we're better than that or whatever. and because Zucc has more money and lawyers than God he could probably draw it out for years. decades, even. jury members mysteriously disappear and have to keep being replaced. the judge recuses themselves after receiving an email during the trial with an attached video of themselves sleeping the previous night, filmed from their laptop's webcam (which they have a sticker over). the prosecutor's car drives off a bridge on the way to trial and when it's finally dredged up weeks later the brake lines were cut and there's no sign of a body.

also hyperpop musicians would sample the head bonk

taking off my big thick bulky powered mechsuit to reveal a horrifying, twisted mass of bio-engineered muscles and flesh underneath. and then shedding that back to reveal a super light skintight set of futuristic armor, then taking that off to reveal my very normal and feminine human-skinned body, which then actually comes apart in pieces to reveal the mechanical ball joints and pistons underneath, but then those actually turn out to be made of a colony of extremophile shapeshifting metal worms. but really those worms are little machines piloted by 3 teeny tiny anime girls each.

And the girls are all dating each other

such a beautiful take. allies take note. 

apparently europeans have the impression that US Americans never learn the metric system.

like our science curriculum from day one is entirely done in the metric system. we just don't use metric in our day to day lives.

yeah actually we kinda just do it for the bit :)

I have had people try to gently and kindly explain to me the workings of the metric system, as if Americans are having trouble with the concept of a base ten system. like no. we get it. we were taught this when we were like eight. it's just that like. we don't really wanna do it that way. for the bit.

no no it's for the bit it's for the bit !!! it's for the bit!!!!!

[ ID: Five successive tweets by C.W. Howell @ cwhowell123 that read as follows: So I followed @/GaryMarcus's suggestion and had my undergrad class use ChatGPT for a critical assignment. I had them all generate an essay using a prompt I gave them, and then their job was to "grade" it--look for hallucinated info and critique its analysis. *All 63* essays had / hallucinated information. Fake quotes, fake sources, or real sources misunderstood and mischaracterized. Every single assignment. I was stunned--I figured the rate would be high, but not that high. / The biggest takeaway from this was that the students all learned that it isn't fully reliable. Before doing it, many of them were under the impression it was always right. Their feedback largely focused on how shocked they were that it could mislead them. Probably 50% of them / were unaware it could do this. All of them expressed fears and concerns about mental atrophy and the possibility for misinformation/fake news. One student was worried that their neural pathways formed from critical thinking would start to degrade or weaken. One other student / opined that AI both knew more than us but is dumber than we are since it cannot think critically. She wrote, "I'm not worried about AI getting to where we are now. I'm much more worried about the possibility of us reverting to where AI is." /end ID. ]

butch fatale

She walked into my office with the swagger of a racecar pit crew boss. From her steel toed boots to her safety glasses, this dame was giving me forklift certified vibes strong enough to shake me loose from my classic depression laced with alcoholism.

her carabiner jingled with keys to four speakeasies, two u-hauls, and a thousand broken hearts.