Thursday hater corner:
lol @ 'adapting' One Piece into a movie. Would you adapt In Search of Lost Time into a sonnet? Would you adapt Swan Lake into a tweet? No. Also, Luffy's deal is that he's a stylistic throwback to early 20th century 'rubber hose' animation, like Popeye; having Luffy exist in live action is grotesque. (There's a live action Popeye from the 80s; it's grotesque.)
stupid annoying bright-ass moon. calm down.
WANE, FUCKER
I saw a good post go by that featured this image:
...and it gave me a flashback to elementary school. My school was papered wall to wall with these fucking things, all with the same horrible face.
Heroic researchers have since identified this as the signature style of Patti Carson and Janet Dellosa, founders of Carson Dellosa Education, a school supply company based in North Carolina. While they used this one face for at least fifteen years (from 1979 until the approximate year my school would have purchased the materials), their reign of terror did come to an end, and CDE updated their house style to a less stomach-turning alternative. Rather than being upsettingly close together, the eyes are now too far apart, as you can see from the modern posters for sale on their website. For instance, this one-- wait. hold on. what is this
Hauntology is a concept coined and descriped by Jacques Derrida, also known as the Nostalgia Critic
This is an Australian sponge crab. I can’t
i can. coward
the problem with a hybrid workweek is that you spend just enough time alone at home to develop completely deranged rituals like “sometimes when you’re stuck on a problem the best solution is drink a shot of soy sauce mixed with 3 tablespoons of creole seasoning”
but then next time you’re in the office you instinctively reach for your trusty soy sauce bottle, and. fuck! it’s not there!! and also wait wtf when did i develop such bizarre snack habits, can i do this in public, i’m p sure no human should be doing this right
John Scalzi is too happy and it's ruining his work. His success made him boring and unfunny. I want something really bad to happen to him so he can write well again.
This is the third and final part in my (Re)introducing Series, and the one that I've been looking forward the most to writing, because I've thus far held details about Galaxy Federal very close to my vest. Here's a look at my big sprawling sci-fi world.
This kicks ass!!
That generation of Metroid games also sparked my imagination as a kid, and I spent a lot of time dreaming up details and backstory for Samus, disconnected from anything Nintendo had to say about it. There was something deeply evocative about those games. Or maybe kid imagination just latches on to weird things and doesn't let go.
And now, as an adult, my favorite kind of science fiction is the kind that tries to reinterpret the old humanist ideals of classic SF into something modern and new, so this is a lot of shit I love in one place.
I'm gonna follow this project for sure!
Visiting Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo this weekend to figure out which one of them is going to turn into Night City
My friend’s sturdy dog who is “difficult to tip over”
Oh god
on the phone with the hydraulic press channel guys, trying to bequeath my cadaver to them in my will
they eventually agreed, but only under the condition that I eat 500 marbles right before I die
"But how will you know when you're about to die?"
Well I'm not gonna eat 500 marbles and live
Yeah, I love X
"Rotating it in my mind" started on Tumblr as a COGIATI joke and took off hard with everyteenager4free using it, which gave cis people this beautiful phrase that they don't know how to use
The COGIATI was an "are you trans or not" test that achieved enough clinical legitimacy to do overall good for the world, although basically every tran old enough to remember it has beef with it. It infamously had a section which asked you to rotate a series of cubes in your mind as a way of determining how male-brained you were, which is hilarious to begin with and is funnier because it's 100% sincere and actual cis psychiatrists had trans people do this test to validate themselves
Ok, assuming this is the same test, here's the question (from this site):
Visualize the following entirely in your head. Do not draw or write anything, just use your mind. Picture a pair of cubes. The two cubes are connected by a bar through their middle, like a dumbbell. Imagine that the dumbbell object is floating in front of you, one cube close to you, the other directly away from you. Now, imagine that the cube nearest you is red, and the cube furthest from you is blue. Picture the dumbbell built of two cube and a rod begins to rotate, the near, red cube, dropping down and away, and the blue, far cube, rotating up and nearer. The dumbbell continues so that it now stands vertical, in front of you, the red cube on the bottom, the blue cube on the top. Continue this direction of rotation, end over end, three times exactly, starting with that state where the red cube was on the bottom, and the blue cube was on the top. What is the position of either cube, red or blue?
What on EARTH does this have to do with gender, trans or otherwise
It relies on then-common speculation that spatial geometry was a faculty of the brain that "male brains" had a natural advantage in, which is actually still a pretty commonplace assertion or belief among people who have read like 1 psych textbook ever. In JDR's defense, I don't think she expected anyone to be talking about her silly little web 1.0 test 25 years later, was more interested in providing a vague scientific veneer to people wanting to transition than actually keeping current on sexed neuroscience, etc. It should go without saying that "men better at math than women" is a ridiculous stereotype that got grandfathered into the way people study brains without a lot of critical thinking, and that the author of the COGIATI (JDR) was far from alone in believing in that nonsense
Also fun fact, if you are a cis woman or man, imagine having a geometry test as a load-bearing part of how medical and government professionals gender you. I hope that helps explain why some trans people have wound up with beef with the COGIATI
That question is worded so badly I thought I was going insane.
Like, in terms of what it wants you to do, it's the same as asking:
Imagine a coin that's on a table, heads up. Flip it over three times. Is it still heads up?
...except that it takes place in the MATH DIMENSION and has ten times as many words. I got mad reading this.
I can see that there's a context in which this could have been useful. "Providing a vague scientific veneer to people wanting to transition" is a useful function. Since only boys can enter the MATH DIMENSION, anyone who gets the question wrong must not be a boy. Taken in the spirit of using the tools of clinical psychiatry to get people the treatment they need, it's even admirable. But the instant this idea gets deployed in any other context at all it becomes a nightmare. Sorting all of humanity into the boy and girl toy aisles. Assigned Math At Birth.
SAME. I mean I’m pretty sure the extra wording has the purpose in trying to get you to visualize this 3-D object and its movements (I would expect your familiarity with 3D modeling or video games graphics affects this a lot more than your gender), but then the final question it asks is pure logic that requires NONE of that. Instead, it depends on whether “end over end” means 180-degree or 360-degree rotation -- I would *guess* the former but in casual speech I could totally see people meaning the latter.
(In fact, the visulaitzation part really feels like a distraction from the actual question. This isn’t a geometry test, it’s a test of how good you are at wading through useless verbiage to find the actual question.)
I hope trans people who needed to take this test for medical access were sharing answer keys with each other.
I got really tripped up on language too – I would assume that the rotation is 180 degrees, but the original rotation was only 90 degrees. And is that original rotation included in the three times? Which, language is supposed to be "girl brain", right? So am I girlbrained for being confused by the question, or boybrained for being confused with specifically the language part of it? It's really creepy that this stuff has been used to determine someone's transition.
Possible answers:
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Last song: What else could it be but the haunting strains of bulgarian choir music
Currently watching: Sumo wrestling rebroadcasts on twitch. Did you know sumo is the greatest and most horrible sport of all time?
Currently reading: Book of the New Sun, along with the currently airing Ranged Touch podcast. It seems cool so far. Twig, by Wildbow. Addiction by Design, a nonfiction book about slot machines and people who use them. It's one of those books that makes you look at everything differently.
Current obsession: Kinda between obsessions atm. It was the most recent Gundam show but that fell into production hell and turned into a mess. They girlbossed too close to the sun. Not sure what I'll get into next. Contenders: Orion's Arm? Rally racing? PS1-era 3d modeling a la Lilith Walter? John le Carre? Sumo? Sumo is so fucked up you guys. You have no idea
You asked for off-topic content, so we're gonna talk about one of my obsessions from the past year: BATTLE DOME.
I know there's a lot of Y2K-era nostalgia now, but if you lived through the Bush years, you probably remember that the early 2000s were a cultural wasteland of amped-up, testosterone-addled, hyper-sexualized garbage.
At the top of that pile was BATTLE DOME, a short-lived TV game show that aired for two years in syndication, presumably to low viewership. BATTLE DOME attempted to blend the over-the-top athletic competition of American Gladiators with the hypermasculine, character-driven soap opera of professional wrestling.
The result was maybe the stupidest show ever to air on television: an extraordinarily dangerous game show where competitors regularly walked away with serious injuries, interrupted by scripted melodrama that played like it was written by and for horny middle schoolers. It is spectacular, and it's almost too unintelligible to be offensive.
Cool set though
This was my barbenheimer
