my step mom was asking me more questions about the nonbinary thing and after talking to me for a bit, she said "oh, so youre a rosé! not a chardonnay transitioning to a merlot, just your own unique type" which was such a middle aged white woman way to frame it, but i cannot lie gang. it did make me want to cry
Bog, what's the creepiest sea animal you can think of? Besides dolphins, of course.
That absolutely goes to Stygiomedusa gigantea (most photos by mbari:)
It doesn’t sting but the thought of this flowing, blind, black gelatinous being slowly flying through the vastness of the deep sea abyss is awe-inspiringly haunting
Especially because it gets thirty feet long
Misdreavus
FINALLY 👏 SOMEONE 👏 SAID 👏 IT. 👏 ALL OF IT. 👏ALL AT ONCE. 👏
(Thank you @fallingawkwardly for bringing this to my attention.)
Brandon Taylor is great.
while brandon taylor is p cool, actually stopping to address like half of these would bog your story down in some of the most fantastically pointless, reader unfriendly, and unnecessary detailing ever written since the silmarillion was slapped down on the intake desk at george allen & unwin, and amounts to little more than pedantic nerd-flexing, “how did they agree on a systematised measure of time”? are you KIDDING ME?? more like how the fuck could you possible convince your read that yes, it matters, please don’t go, just another 500 words on my in-universe ‘mathematics in the context of social sciences’ textbook that my illiterate character happened to be thumbing through. it’s important to work on your world building, obviously, but there is a pretty hard limit to what you need to show your reader, and when you cross that line, unless you happen to be the reincarnated soul of terry pratchett, it becomes flabby, boring, and distracting from the actual story. YES to getting rid of senseless misogynistic tropes and putting more effort into crafting your story, NO to including the fucking ancestral migrations of horses.
THANK YOU I was literally going to reblog this just to say that.
Yes, put this in your worldbuilding. Some day down the road, you might be able to share all the facts about what laws are applied where, what the penal code looks like, antique glaciation, the development of agriculture, the consolidation of power in one family instead of many, the succession laws in individual fiefs (if applicable), etc. But they’re not important to the fucking story. Don’t put them in your goddamn story unless it becomes relevant. I’m not going to talk about the intricacies of how one family has managed to hold power for nearly ten thousand unbroken years (or at least claimed to), unless it somehow becomes relevant (it does). Or who maintains the road systems. Or how the currency system developed. Or who founded the magical orders when. Or any one of another thousand things in my novel-length ethnography that is my worldbuilding bible.
This is stuff that is important for you to know, in case it becomes relevant.
Get rid of your old misogynistic tropes; have practical geology, soil types, climates, etc; put less white people in; more LGBTQA+. Think about the practical concerns of daily life that your characters need to address, or the needs of whatever shitty life they get thrown into via the plot, and only put those in, and the background details needed to anchor those. Don’t fucking give us a scientifically valid ethnographic report for 500 pages on said fantasy world without a plot because not many modern readers really want that shit. Hell, I’m an anthropologist and I don’t want that shit.
A lot of people don’t think properly about worldbuilding, because this is so fucking common in the genre. But if you can’t work these details in as part of the plot, they do not belong in your book. Period.
reach into your local bog and you just might find yourself a pair of good ol’ fashioned frunkles (frog grunkles)
a ford and stan to go with the twins i frogified!!
The thing that gets me about most arguments against accessibility features in video games is that they’re not just grossly ableist, they’re also hypocritical as hell. Video games have always had accessibility features: we just documented them poorly and called them “cheat codes”. Indeed, having a robust library of difficulty-modifying cheats was considered a mark in a game’s favour! The only difference is that a cheat code is theoretically a secret, which allows it to be framed as elite knowledge, even though it’s functionally identical to having an “infinite lives” switch on the options screen.
Here’s a thesis for you: the Konami Code was the first well-publicised accessibility feature.
being bad at video games is a disability now?
I’m going to assume you’re not being disingenuous here and take this as a serious question. In brief, very few people are generically “bad at video games”; in most cases, difficulty engaging with interactive media stems from one or more of a wide range of physiological conditions, including:
This is, of course, only a partial list. Many of these issues are individually rare, but taken together, we’re looking a huge chunk of the population - up to 40%, by some estimates - who have at least one condition that would impact their ability to play the shooters and action-platformers that are held up as the gold standard for hardcore gaming.
hot tip: if your disability makes you bad at a thing, maybe either put in the extra effort to get good at it or just don’t do it instead of demanding people make the thing easier?????
Here’s the a better question: why is it an issue for you? Accessibility features in video games are entirely transparent to those who choose not to use them. Your experience of play isn’t affected by their existence in any way whatsoever unless you deliberately turn them on. Complaining about the mere existence of such features is like claiming that your viewing experience of a movie is being ruined by the fact that the disc has a subtitle feature on it, even though you haven’t actually turned subtitles on.
(And no, don’t try to frame this as video game developers somehow being victimised by unreasonable demands. The vast majority of developers are more than happy to include accessibility features in their games - and quite sensibly, because, you know, they’re businesspeople, and they want to sell things to as wide an audience as possible. The popular backlash against accessibility features is entirely on the player side.)
i just want to appreciate the genius in this thread who unironically typed what amounts to “if your disability makes you bad at a thing, try being good at the thing instead”
That’s pretty much the common American attitude toward disability. Or poverty. Or most social ills.
A scrimblo and her bimbinis,,,
While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.
Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Clickhole, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.
Oh. So you can just like. Tell them to stop, huh. If you're president. You can just ask I guess. A phone call away I guess.
my observation from 2 months of kittens
calvin vs his parents
a rivalry for the ages…..
Man, it always sucks when I’m listening to a fic and the screen reader goes “doubleyou ach ay tee eye ess why oh you are eff ay vee oh are eye tee ee see oh ell oh are doubleyou ach ee are ee dee-”
And I pause it like what the fuck, then find my phone to look at the screen and I see “whatisyourfavoritecolorwhered-”
Like, bro, please, why would you do this?
Or when it starts going “EXEXEXEXEXEXEEEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEXEX!!” Because somebody didn’t use the code for a line break. At least just make it one dash, please.
Like, it’s your fic and your writing it for free and that’s cool, so if you see this and you’re like, “mmmm, nah, still gonna do it my way” then that’s chill.
Just know that it’s really difficult for people with screen readers to read some of these fics. Me personally, when I find a fic that does this, I don’t give it a chance no matter how good it is.
I second this! Zalgo text can be really frustrating too. You'll get whole blocks of text that don't make any sense. And often, I can't pause the phone and look at the actual words; I'm trying to work, have latex gloves on, etc. I have the ability to go back and look at the text but I imagine it's even more frustrating for someone who can't because of vision issues.
Abstract The frozen mummy of the large felid cub was found in the Upper Pleistocene permafrost on the Badyarikha River (Indigirka River basin) in the northeast of Yakutia, Russia. The study of the specimen appearance showed its significant differences from a modern lion cub of similar age (three weeks) in the unusual shape of the muzzle with a large mouth opening and small ears, the very massive neck region, the elongated forelimbs, and the dark coat color. Tomographic analysis of the mummy skull revealed the features characteristic of Machairodontinae and of the genus Homotherium. For the first time in the history of paleontology, the appearance of an extinct mammal that has no analogues in the modern fauna has been studied. For more read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-79546-1
I always knew it was possible, but I never dared to hope.
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