kaz

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

my daughter cannot, through action or inaction, harm a human or allow a human to come to harm

a daughter at rest or in constant motion remains at rest or in constant motion unless acted upon by another force

daughters are never created or destroyed, only transformed

always treat every daughter as loaded, even if you know she isn't

If you're going into the season completely blind with no prior knowledge that Robin is a lesbian, like most of us did when it came out in 2019, the you're already sort of primed by narrative conventions to root for Robin and Steve to end up together, or at least expect them to. By s3 we know that steve is a Good Guy, and therefore he deserves a girlfriend. But we're not supposed to root for steve and nancy anymore, because nancy is with Jonathan now and Jonathan is also a Good Guy. So enter Robin, who is paired exclusively with steve for the entire season, and the solution becomes obvious.

And the thing is, they do seem to hit all the standard tropes for a romance arc. They have chemistry! They act like they don't like each other but they have funny banter. They hold hands during a tense moment. Dustin repeatedly encourages steve to go after her. Robin admits that she was obsessed with him in high school.

And then the reveal comes and it turns out there actually is a platonic explanation for everything, at least on robin's side. And even as a queer woman myself, when I watched it for the first time I was almost disappointed for a second, because I love steve and want good things for him.

And that's part of why it works so well for me, because it did piss people off (not everyone - iirc it was actually pretty well received at the time, but there were definitely factions of both shippers and reddit bros who hated it, some of which still remain in denial to this day) and because it works as a sort of meta commentary on what it's like to be a gay woman in real life even forty years later. Because unless you're openly and visibly queer, people will assume that you're available to any guy that's interested and jump to conclusions about your relationships with close male friends. Straight is automatically assumed as the default, and by keeping the audience in the dark about Robin's sexuality until the crucial moment, our own subconscious biases are exposed. There's nothing to suggest that she's gay before she says it, but equally there's nothing to suggest that she's straight, it's just the conclusion we jump to because that's what we've been trained to expect.