#GREENLIGHTVOLUME10

Fascinated by the implication that it is the cars themselves who are having a fun time at the waterpark.

Idk guys, maybe people are blaming leftists who refused to vote because of genocide because I literally saw them holding political rallies last weekend in a swing state telling people not to vote

Like it wasn't just tumblr leftists saying not to vote for Kamala, or at all, because of Palestine. Those were real people I walked past last Saturday in Pennsylvania, a key swing state. They had megaphones in front of Philadelphia city hall and a sizeable crowd. I feel like we can, in fact, say they are partly culpable here.

Observe the difference in the popular vote. Trump actually got fewer votes this year than he did in 2020. So what changed? Maybe it’s the 15 million fewer democrat votes. Where did they go? They didn’t vote for Trump, they didn’t vote 3rd party. They just didn’t vote at all.

Republicans didn’t elect Trump. Democrats did, by refusing to vote.

I hate you, words that aren't spelled the way they sound. I hate you words with silent letters. You are the worst and I hope you cease to exist when society inevitably falls.

The soundtrack ripping my soul right out of my body didn’t help either

And the animation! The fur and foliage in this movie looks downright impressionistic at times! See it on the big screen if you can.

just got fired from my government job… apparently they can control the weather with space lasers now so they don’t need me to stand on a dark tower and chant in a big bellowing voice to summon clouds and winds of fear and frost

sorry to hear that, but it's happening all over. i recently got replaced at my job of luring sailors to their death on the rocks by an iphone and a loudspeaker

That’s a bummer to hear everyone is getting hit :/ I got replaced as the ghoul shaking your pipes and creaking your floorboards at 3am by shoddy new construction that does it on its own

That’s a shame. I just got replaced at my job of whispering vague and ominous portents of doom by rising rates of anxiety and existential dread.

Comet C/2023 A3 image by @xipteras

Finally saw this in person! First clear night in a month, because of the fires, so I’m glad I got to see it before it’s gone.

The second you start talking about some mysterious "they" that are controlling society in some fashion, you are engaging in dangerous conspiratorial thinking even if you're being woke about it. "They" did not institute the 40 hour work week specifically so you would be too tired to revolt. "They" did not invent the sleek minimalist aesthetic in order to crush the spirit of art in the common people. "They" are not pushing mediocre media into the mainstream in order to poison people's critical thinking skills.

Your best case scenario after that is you talk to someone who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about and you get embarrassed because you can't answer basic questions about your own ideology because you never learned anything past "the ruling class/capitalists/politicians are making things bad and if we got rid of them the bad things would all go away!"

Your worst case scenario is obviously the woo-to-fascist pipeline and you end up believing Jews are poisoning American food supplies with GMOs in order to turn us all into beta cucks, so like . . . maybe just stop blaming "them" before you fall down that route.

Obligatory round of disclaimers: Yes, sometimes people do bad things. Be specific about exactly who is doing what instead of ascribing it to some vague group of shadowy elites. Yes, sometimes things in society are bad. Learn to identify the root causes of complex social issues instead of assuming that they're actually extremely simple to fix and we're just not doing it because of some vague group of shadowy elites. Yes, minimalism isn't for everyone. Learn that some people don't share your tastes and get the fuck over it for the love of god.

Also, before you blame a vague "they" for a contemporary social norm or law or policy you think is bad, look up what the norm was before it. What did it replace?

"They created the 40-hour workweek to --" QUERY: What was the average working-class person's weekly workload before the 40-hour workweek was standardized?

"They created credit scores to --" QUERY: How did banks determine who was and wasn't worthy of a loan before credit scores?

"They promote bad media to --" QUERY: What was the average working-class person's entertainment before this era of "bad" media?

"They invented schools to crush children's creativity and --" QUERY: What was the average working-class child's daily life like before universal public schooling?

To be clear. Before someone accuses me of pissing on the poor.

I AM NOT SAYING "Stop opposing current social practices because Things Used To Be Worse, stop complaining about a 40 hour workweek because great-grandpa worked 90 hours a week uphill both ways in the snow --"

We should advocate a shorter workweek, actually! We should advocate abolishing credit scores, actually! We should advocate non-authoritarian schooling, actually!

But we should do it from a place of informed historical perspective that doesn't quickly become romanticizing the past and perpetuating the idea that Things Were Great Until They Took Over.

“If the Evil Capitalists hadn’t invented jobs, I could be frolicking in a grassy meadow and eating sun-ripened grapes off the vine instead of making spreadsheets!”

Stop.

Google subsistence farming and the starvation rate in hunter-gatherer societies, and then be grateful for your climate-controlled office and cushy swivel chair.

Sincerely, your friendly neighborhood farmers’ daughter.

It’s always been odd to me that there are not any ocean scavengers equipped to take optimal advantage of large carcasses. Like…. in prehistoric times, the oceans were full of huge animals… was this a problem back then too?

That was a twist I was not expecting.

So I have worked on whale breakdown teams before and it is dirty exhausting work. Even a small dolphin takes multiple people working the entire day just to do one.

So I would assume that if a team of mermaids were to break down a whale, this would be a dedicated team maybe working on rotation for for a couple of months. And maybe even up to 5 to 6 months for a large sperm whale. So most likely from they would be contracted for a certain period of time. Maybe they’re only paid a lump sum after the whole contract is complete. Don’t know anything about mermaid economy or employment practices. But it seems efficient from a employment perspective.

I’ve only broken down whales on land, so you are either on a beach or in a lab setting. But I would assume that mermaids would be stationed on the drifting whale and working on it until the job is done. Maybe attaching some platforms are scaffolding to rest after work or take breaks.

Whale break down is also mostly manual labor. It is dirty exhausting work and I can see maybe young mermaids being conscripted for something like this, especially if they are poor and lack employment options or as part of punishment as a form of community service or terms of parole. The drifting carcass essentially functioning as a labor camp and the workers stigmatized by their role. Is there a such a thing as mermaid labor law? Perhaps the shifts are long, rations are tiny and working conditions poor. Got a typhoon heading in with rough seas? Suck it up. Gotta keep cutting. Blubber ain’t going to harvest itself.

Like I can easily see this as a premise for a young mermaid to try to join up with a passing human ship in search of something better. Maybe a young mermaid from poor family and a minor criminal record with nothing to look forward to other than whale salvage, joins up with a questionable human operation such as a drugs smuggling ship or some pirates or a slave ship or Royal Caribbean cruise line, you get the gist. Adventures ensue….etc

Quick clarification.

That first picture is in fact a picture of dead, rotting whale.

If you ever find yourself in control of a boat, and you see THAT, you should not go near it. Because sometimes they don’t sink. Sometimes they explode.

So what you’re saying is we need a mermaid bomb squad.

so they can explode on their own? i thought that only happened on one specific day in oregon

The bacteria that decompose carrion produce methane gas as a byproduct, so anything that’s been dead for a while and is intact enough that there aren’t any openings for the gas to escape from will start to swell up. It’s not as much of a problem on land as at sea because usually something eats it before the pressure gets high enough to explode. But with something as huge and hard to eat as a whale, the pressure just keeps building and building until

i'm actually very okay with "there was no other way this could end" endings. if they gotta die, let them die. if they gotta break up or go the wrong way or lose something important, let'em. so long as it completes the story. only thing i dislike more than a forced happy ending is a forced bad ending

how dare you hide these absolute facts in the tags prev

I think having the ending of Asimov’s Nightfall spoiled for me actually enhanced the experience. It provided dramatic irony that wasn’t there originally, and made the book a really interesting foregone-conclusion type of thing where I watched the characters slowly piece together their inevitable fate that I already knew.

thinking about that TNG episode where Riker says he never feels rested after sleeping and Dr Crusher tells him to just drink warm milk about it and then later it turns out he's been abducted by aliens 6 times and had his arm cut off. most accurate portrayal of dealing with the medical profession ever seen on screen

Which is kind of weird because you’d think Star Trek doctors would be more accepting of Weird Diseases than regular doctors. Effects of alien abduction should have its own page in the Space DSM. Bones, for example, would have gone, “Ugh, it’s always something with you people,” and his proposed cure would have toed the line between recklessness and mutiny, but he would have taken it seriously.

My mom thinks one of the writers for that episode must have experienced this and decided to take out their frustration on the script.

Btw I rewatched Black Widow with my sister last night and I don't care what anyone says, that movie had the most terrifying villain in the MCU. "Taskmaster--", she wasn't the actual villain, she was a victim. You may complain over how it wasn't even Tony Masters, I get it, but that's not the point of the post. The villain was Dreykov. "But he's weak" oh yeah physically. He's not a purple alien or a crazy robot yeah. He's still terrifying. He was a human trafficker. He kidnapped little girls. He brainwashed them, he forcibly sterilized them, taking their choice of whether they wanted to be mothers or not —Natasha wanted kids, Yelena didn't but the point is the choice. He groomed them and turned them into killers, also had them trained into using seduction and sex as a weapon (you know what that probably means), literally chemically subjugated them so they couldn't even refuse. The ones who weren't useful enough for him or rebelled against him? He had them killed. He ruined thousands and thousands of lives.

He was a wealthy guy with huge political influence who viewed women as expendable resources to do his bidding and nothing else. Even his own daughter. So yeah, that's why I found him more terrifying than other villains. Because no purple alien with a gauntlet is going to come to kill people. But there are a lot of motherfuckers like Dreykov in real life. He's a realistic villain. That's why.

I really wanted to like that movie. As you say, the villain and the themes are great, I just really wish they’d done more with them. Dreykov himself is played completely seriously, but he only really shows up in the climax. So for most of the movie, whenever Nat and Yelena try to really reckon with the horror of what was done to them, it’s usually undercut with some stupid joke.

Now I know the MCU has always been quippy, but it was nowhere near this bad pre-Endgame. Compare the scene in Age of Ultron where Nat tells Banner about the Red Room. Now whatever people think of the actual content of that conversation (a lot of people like to miss the point on it but that’s a tangent for later) you can’t deny it’s played dead straight. Not a single cringe joke in sight. In Black Widow, a potentially interesting idea about the cycle of abuse inherent in Nat’s parent being victims even as they offer their “daughters” up to the same system is buried under sitcom-family jokes and Red Guardian being a buffoon. When the Guardians of the Galaxy can treat a similar plotline with more gravitas you know you’ve done something wrong.

I also think the fact the Red Room uses chemicals rather than the complex conditioning alluded to elsewhere in the franchise kind of pulls the movie’s teeth. Instead of exploring how these little girls can be so thoroughly warped as to be convinced that mass murder is right, and how difficult it would be to undo that, now they’re just straight up mind controlled, complete with magic off switch.

TL;DR, you’re right, but I wish the filmmakers realized that.

that experience when there's a show/movie/singer/band that you feel is pretty average, decent but not mind-blowing, but tons of people are getting hyped up about it and being weirdly hostile to anyone who doesn't like it, and you're just sitting there like "it's not THAT great" and getting flack for it, and then the backlash against it starts and everyone's dunking on it and mocking people for being fans of it and you're sitting there going "it's not THAT bad" and getting flack for that, great experience 10/10

What’s up? I had to close my laptop and walk around a bit while watching a recap of the latest Rings of Power episode, actually starting to say to myself, “this isn’t the worst,” and then getting shot in the temple when Elrond kissed his mother-in-law. I still need a few moments to recover I think. I don’t know if it was a ruse, or if it was real, but either way it’s messed up.

When WHAT now? Ew. Just ew.

Y’know, for a supposedly feminist series they sure can’t seem to think of a whole lot to define their heroine besides her romantic entanglements.

one of my favorite this american life segments of late is about the people who played orchestra pit for phantom of the opera on broadway and how, like, a sizeable majority of them had literally been playing the show since it opened in 1988 (on broadway. I know it opened in 86 on the west end, you random pedants, but I am specifically talking about broadway musicians) because their contracts stipulated that they'd have jobs throughout the show's entire run... but nobody anticipated that phantom would become the longest-running broadway show of all time.

and none of these people wanted to walk away from a guaranteed job, so very few of them ever quit. they just kept doing the same show eight nights a week... for twenty or thirty years... and by the time it finally closed last year most of these musicians (who had been working together for DECADES) hated each other and really really fucking loathed phantom. I can't stop thinking about it. it's indescribably hellish to imagine but also the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.

can you imagine.

[ID: excerpt from an article reading: One of my favorite stories, which should drive anyone who has every played in a band crazy-- there’s this bassoon player who has sat next to the same clarinet player since 1988. She’s convinced he plays half a note4 flat on every note he’s every played. He denies this. /]

That’s crazy. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the players went nuts and started killing people. Come to think of it, maybe someone should write a play about that. Oh wait-

the undoing of Boromir

YOU WANNA LEARN ELVISH?! HERE YA GO!

is this legit?

This is legit. My husband, sitting across the room, looks over and says, “IS THAT SOMEONE SHOWING HOW TO CONVERT ENGLISH TO TENGWAR?  BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY!”

Believe this man.  He owns atlases of Middle Earth, the complete history of Midle Earth (leatherbound), and has read the books at least 150 times.  Also: speaks elvish.

Yes.

For future reference. :)

REBLOGREBLOGREBLOGREBLOG

I once taught myself how to read and write Elvish and Dwarvish from the appendices. There are months’ worth of journal entries from when I was 11 that I have no idea what they say. I should relearn it sometime.

King Lune told Corin not to pick fights with people weaker than him cause that makes him a bully but if he wants to pick fights with someone bigger and get beat up that's his perogative and Corin really said "okay" then went off to pick a fight with a bear, huh.