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Aliens reacting to our wildlife.

Because, god, if they think we're Space Orcs, wait until they see the shit that could scare or amaze us.

Like:

Alien: "Human, I was looking over my notes..."

Human: "I have a name-"

Alien: "Your closest living ancestors are of the genus Pan, yes? These "Chimpanzee" and "Bonobo" creatures."

Human: "Uh, yeah. Funny story, they wouldn't be living nowadays if it wasn't for NATO signing the ENCR Preservation Act-"

Alien: "In 2031, yes, I know, that's not what gets me. What gets me is, uh...I was unaware your empathy and barbarism was genetic. Chimpanzees enter into societies and build tools, yet also cannibalize weaker factions and have "hair-trigger" tempers."

Human: "Yeah, Chimps are fucking terrifying."

Alien: "...They're what?"

Human: "They're...fucking terrifying?"

Alien: "They scare you?!"

Human: "Why wouldn't they? They have super-strength and sharp teeth, not to mention the grey matter. Piss off a Chimp and you could, literally, lose your face."

Alien: "YOUR KIND ROUTINELY BUILDS SUPERWEAPONS AND INGESTS POISON FOR FUN, AND YOU'RE SCARED OF YOUR PRE-SAPIENT RELATIVES?!"

Human: "Wait 'til you find out how we feel about bears!"

The 2000s were the golden age of French fantasy/fairytale animated films (think Prince of Egypt on a lower budget) and people are sitting on it and lamenting that Disney and Amazon can’t do diversity well. (No shit). Spoilers in the links.

Kirikou et la Sorcière (Kirikou and the Sorceress), 1998 + its two sequels: inspired by West African storytelling and folktales, Kirikou is a young boy who can walk and talk since the womb and helps his people defeat the evil witch who has taken away all the men of the village. The sequels are more episodic tales focused on smaller issues Kirikou helps resolve with his ingenuity. It’s got some banging songs by Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour, an almost exclusively pan-African voice cast (in the original French dub at least), and it explores some pretty dark issues without pulling any punches while managing to stay light-hearted. (It also has a lot of non-sexual nudity, which might be disconcerting if you’re not expecting it.)

La Reine Soleil (The Sun Queen), 2007: essentially a Prince of Egypt rip-off but focused on Egyptian history and religion instead. It follows Ahkenaten and Nefertiti’s daughter Ahkesa and her betrothed Prince Tuthankaten. The animation’s not the greatest but it has some pretty impressive visuals here and there (although for the life of me I can’t figure out why the royals have got otherworldly blue eyes). It’s not as great as the others on the list but it’s got the right vibes.

Azur et Asmar (Azur and Asmar: The Princes’ Quest), 2006: by the same director as Kirikou. Azur is a rich young boy raised by an Arab nursemaid together with her young son Asmar. The three of them are separated, but an adult Azur eventually crosses the sea on a quest to find the Djinn fairy, and the two not-quite-brothers find themselves at odds. The early 3D animation is pretty funky but the backgrounds and the Morrocan architecture especially can be incredibly beautiful and detailed, and a lot of the movie is in classical Arabic (spoken by native speakers).

Les Enfants de la Pluie (The Rain Children), 2003: some very beautifully animated heroic fantasy with very nice worldbuilding and lore. It’s not directly inspired by any one culture or fairytale but it’s pretty far from the standard European fantasy worldbuilding that’s been done to death. All the characters are non-human, with some big Atlantis vibes for the Hydross and a cool desert aesthetic for the Pyross. Sweet and short.

Princes et Princesses (Princes and Princesses), 1989, compiled in 2000: also by the guy who made Kirikou and Azur and Asmar. It’s six short tales in handcrafted paper silhouette animation (inspired by Chinese-shadow puppetry), with three European-style fairy tales with some pretty imaginative visuals, and other tales from Japan, Egypt and even a sci-fi story ‘from the year 3000’. As many female characters as male ones, and the female characters are all pretty awesome. The music can get hauntingly beautiful.

Delete Yourself From Web Services With JustDelete.me

JustDelete.me is a directory that allows you to permanently remove yourself from different web services such as Facebook, PayPal, Amazon, etc. 

Why can’t you just go to the listed sites on your own and delete yourself that way, you ask? It’s not that easy. 

A lot of sites have dark patterns — interfaces created to trick users into agreeing to terms they otherwise wouldn’t — and JustDelete.me is designed to work around those patterns.

For example, Facebook’s Account Settings menu only offers people the option to deactivate their accounts, so many think that it’s not possible to completely delete themselves from the site; the “Delete Account” button can only be found if you hunt it down. With JustDelete.me, you can click the Facebook link and be taken directly to the “Delete Account” page without all the hassle.

JustDelete.me even color codes web services by how difficult it is to delete yourself from each site, with green being the easiest, and black being impossible. (Good luck deleting yourself from Craigslist.) 

Cinderella: Young Ella is orphaned at a young age when her mother dies and her father perishes soon after. Now under the thumb of her cruel stepmother, Ella’s life is a living hell. But, unknown to Ella, her mother was a powerful Druid who served under a mighty Fae Queen. One day, Ella finds her mother’s staff hidden away and she meets the Fae Queen face to face. The Fae grants Ella great power over the beasts of the land to do her will, but her power only comes forth under the light of the Full Moon. Using this power, Ella meets the Prince of the Kingdom, an accomplished monster hunter, and the two bond and fall in love while fighting the Demons and Witches that plague the land.

Red Riding Hood: Young Rebeca, known as Red by the people of her village, befriends a girl in the forest on the way to her Grandmother’s home. Unknown to Red, the girl is a werewolf, and Red soon finds herself embroiled in an ancient war between Werewolves and the Huntsmen who prey upon them. To make things even more complicated, Red discovers that her father and grandmother are masters of this order of Hunters. Caught between the young werewolf girl she is coming to love and the legacy of her family, Red must find a way to bring balance to her land and people.

All Loving Hero - Many people in the fandoms and IRL think someone who believes in kindness and love is “weak”. I call BS on that statement. It’s easy to believe being cruel and/or edgy is “mature” but it’s not. Willingly choosing to be good in a world where others tell you to stop is the pinnacle of strength and resilience.

Amazon Chaser - Seeing a (usually male) character be smitten with a female’s character battle prowess and/or fiery attitude is *chef’s kiss*.

Babies Ever After - What can I say? I love seeing my favorite OTPs having a child and/or children together. It makes me think back to the beginning and progress of their love.

Badass Family - The family that kicks ass together is the family that will ALWAYS worm their way into my heart.

Beware The Nice Ones - Seeing a normally nice and gentle character go APESHIT when pushed too far will never get old.

Big Brother (Big Sister) Instinct - Protective siblings for the win.

Bittersweet Ending - Sometimes you want a straight up happy ending but life doesn’t happen like that. In reality, the best you can get is half happy and half sad. It’s bittersweet for a reason.

Childhood Friend Romance - It’s just a sweet concept. Two people who have known each other all their lives, falling for each other, and then forming a romance is absolutely wonderful. Marrying your best friend and true love at the same time? PEAK ROMANCE.

Cool Big Sis (Bro) - Having caring, loving, encouraging older sibling figures is PEAK SEROTONIN.

Dark And Troubled Past - Hearing a person’s troubled life can better humanize them to the audience. Me included.

Feminist Fantasy - In short, this trope is about a fantasy and/or scifi story featuring a female protagonist and/or large female cast. And many of people’s favorite shows/movies fall into this category.

Handicapped Badass - I believe I was introduced to this trope when I was graced with ultimate presence of THE best earthbender of ATLA/Tlok, one of THE well-written characters in history (animated or live-action), and one my ultimate fav characters: Toph Bei Fong. She was a blind girl but she was able to use what people perceived as a weakness to be her greatest strength.

Hard Truth Aesop - Something needed in a lot of media. Sometimes the moral of a story isn’t as straightforward as meany would like it to be. It makes life more complicated and nuanced.

Interspecies Romance - I think my liking of this trope aka “Monster Boyfriend/Girlfriend/Romance” started with one of my favorite disney movies: The Beauty and The Beast (the OG one). Seeing a huge, monstrous being (who is ironically still quite good looking) having a tender and loving romance with their human lover is peak romance. Like Guillermo del Toro, I am all for monster romances.

Mama Bear - The woman who birthed you for roughly 9 months, is ready to go through all hell to protect you. Good parenting.

Papa Wolf - Similar to the Mama Bear trope, a dad going beast mode to protect his child/children is good parenting at its’ finest.

Platonic Life Partners - Despite popular belied, it IS possible for male and females friends to be and stay just like that: FRIENDS. And it’s not “lesser” than

The Reason You Suck Speech - Whether they’re the hero or villain, a rant meant to call them out on their shortcoming and how said shortcoming keep hurting the goal and/or other people is great. It makes either the hero grow or makes the villain get their final comeuppance.

Took A Level In Badass - Watching the progress of how a wimpy, unskilled character transform into a badass is freakin’ awesome. Either they become badass in skill, personality, and/or both are all equally awesome.

Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found. Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence. The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context. Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all. These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.  Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board. Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content. The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely. 

Bookshop.org is offering free shipping July 8-11 as part of their Anti-Prime day, so now is an excellent time to pick up a copy of Hunger's Bite!

My favorites:

73% of people globally feel safe walking alone at night, the highest ever recorded

UN high seas treaty ratified, allowing for nations to extend major protections to marine environments

Extreme poverty falling

China, once one of the major emitters, is investing heavily in green and renewable energy

India's tiger populations has doubled in the last decade

Amazon deforestation in Brazil is at its lowest level in 11 years

When was your last Pap smear?

Because I am tired of seeing young people (think 40 year olds!) die horribly of an almost completely preventable disease, and I haven't seen the obligatory Tumblr PSA about it, so I'm making my own.

1. CERVICAL CANCER IS REALLY BAD

Cancers that have a good prognosis are usually cancers that can be caught early--like skin cancer, which is easily seen, and therefore usually treated very early. Cervical cancer does not give you symptoms until you have very advanced disease, which means unless someone is regularly testing your cervix, you will likely not be diagnosed early. More than half of people diagnosed with cervical cancer present with advanced disease. 75% of them will be dead within 5 years. For comparison, when caught in the earliest stage, there is a 90% 5 year survival rate. Treatment for those diagnosed is chemo and radiation, and believe me, those are not fun. If you do happen to be in the lucky 25% of survivors, if your cancer comes back, you have an 85% chance of dying within a year. Also! We think of cancer as something that happens to old people, but the average age of diagnosis for cervical cancer is 50.

2. WHO GETS CERVICAL CANCER?

Cervical cancer used to be the most common cause of cancer-related death in women in America, but at this point it's basically a disease of People Without Pap Smears--developing countries, immigrants, low socioeconomic status, BIPOC, rural communities, LGBTQ, etc.

3. HOW DO PAP SMEARS SAVE YOUR LIFE?

A Pap smear is a screening test for two things: HPV, and your cervical cells. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the world. Literally half of the people in America have some strain of HPV on their body. Most HPV infections go away on their own (in people with healthy immune systems), but some strains are Very Bad, and some people are just Very Unlucky, and the HPV starts causing your cervical cells to turn cancerous. 91% of all cervical cancers are caused by HPV. So a Pap smear looks to see if your have HPV, and if so, is it one of the bad ones? And also, do you have any cancerous cells hanging about in your cervix? And! It takes 10-30 years for HPV to turn those cells into cancer, which means you have a really really long time to catch it before it becomes cancer and cut those pre-cancer cells out!

4. WHAT ABOUT THAT VACCINE?

The thing my dad said I shouldn't get because it might make me a slut. Yes! There is an HPV vaccine! You should get it! It protects you against the nine most common cancer-causing types of HPV. It's recommended starting at age 11, and you can get it up to age 45 now! (It used to be 26, but as of 2020, it's now extended.)You can get it from most primary care doctors, or from Planned Parenthood, CVS, Walgreens, etc. If you get the vaccine you still need Pap smears.

5. I HEARD YOU CAN ONLY GET THE VACCINE IF YOU'RE A VIRGIN

Fake news. While the vaccine does not treat old infections of HPV, it does prevent new ones, so while the benefits are theoretically decreased in those who have already been sexually active, it does not mean you will not benefit from having it!

6. WHO GETS PAP SMEARS?

Everyone with a cervix starting at age 21, until you lose your cervix or until you're 65. You should get them every 3-5 years (depending on your exact age and what test your doctor does).

7. BUT I GOT THE VACCINE

Nice! You still need Pap smears.

8. I HAD ONE AND IT WAS HORRIBLE/I'M SCARED OF THE EXAM

Talk to your doctor about this in advance! Good gynecologists (and other providers) will work with you to minimize discomfort as much as possible. They can use a small speculum and lots of gel, prescribe anti-anxiety medications to take in advance, and some people will even use numbing creams and/or laughing gas.

9. BUT I DON'T HAVE/CAN'T SEE A GYN

Most primary care physicians can do them! So do a lot of urgent care centers!

10. BUT I'M A LESBIAN

HPV can be transmitted through oral/genital contact, hand/genital, and even hand-to-hand-then-genital, so you still need Pap smears.

11. BUT I'M A VIRGIN/ASEXUAL

You still need Pap smears. HPV can be transmitted not just through penetrative sex, but also through oral/genital, hand/genital, and hand-to-hand-then-genital, and also 9% of cervical cancers are not caused by HPV.

12. BUT I'M A TRANSGENDER MAN

If your cervix was removed, then congrats! You do not need Pap smears. Otherwise, unfortunately, you are still at risk for cervical cancer and need to be screened.

13. BUT I'M A TRANSGENDER WOMAN

Neovaginas do not need Pap smears! Congrats! Consider getting the vaccine, though, to prevent spreading HPV to others.

14. BUT I'M A CIS-GENDERED MAN

Congrats! You do not need Pap smears! You should still consider the vaccine though, not only to prevent the spread of HPV to others, but also because HPV causes 50% of all penile cancers as well.

In summary: please please please go get your pap smear. Go get vaccinated. The spread of HPV can be prevented, and cervical cancer can be caught and treated before it even becomes cancer.

Anyone hear who is vehemently opposed to this and disappointed with him, should speak out to both his Twitter/Insta account(s) and the official social media accounts of Amazon MGM Studios. When doing so, do NOT make violent threats to either one; I HATE what they are doing but threats of violence is NEVER okay. Now, if you want to make a statement to either one or both, I can give list of reasons to express your opposition. But when you go to do so, make it in YOUR OWN WORDS, do not copy and paste, make it original.

Here are some things you can say in opposition:

Explain that they will be fine because they are positioned to make money but all the other workers who are not big named and NEED this type of work to stay afloat. And no matter what excuse or 'reassurance' they try to give, they are STILL hurting workers

How this action is basically them not appreciating the work these people have done for them in the past. Those workers did all the work with little pay and having to change their near final work with little notice because executives wanted to add/remove something. It's an unfair relationship that ALWAYS put the workers at the bottom, always on edge and always struggling because execs simply don't care

For Gutierrez specifically - The hypocrisy from him. In 2024, he was against AI and now has changed mind. And his whole Twitter announcement was him trying to save face before it. Also, many fans would've gladly flocked to any impressive looking new story he was doing but this stunt will hurt in the future because now people will associate with him being an ai sellout

State the obvious - AI is NOT perfect. It can exploited in numerous ways, even in animation. And recent research has even shown that despite the intention, AI actually COSTS MORE. Since PR and money is all execs and money chasing 'creators' care about, explain that.

A recent example on how an all AI movie is - a recent Chinese movie was made entirely out of AI and it had a VERY weak box office performance.

Many polls shows that Americans do NOT like the idea of using AI or replacing humans workers with AI. Imagine the reaction from avid moviegoers and animation lovers and even just people who are neither but respect the hard work of usually screwed over people.