{Untitled Opinion}

commission for @cianur0!

based off this post

So I’ll say it again: it is okay if you come to tumblr to escape upsetting news. It is okay if you’re just here for fun and fandom. It is okay if you do not want to use your tumblr as a place to read about or spread the current events that are circulating. It is okay if you need a place to decompress and just relax. There are other ways to be involved in/support causes and you are allowed to set boundaries on social media platforms without it being indicative of your belief systems. 

>Tariffs being hit and coming to effect monday

March 14th, 2023: Fixed several remote code execution and crash exploits against co-op partners.

March 25th, 2023: Fixed two remote player crash exploits.

April 26th, 2023: Fixed several crash and remote code execution exploits.

January 5th, 2024: Fixed several remote code execution and crash exploits against co-op partners.

February 2nd, 2024: Fixed several exploits that could crash a coop partner's game.

June 3rd, 2024: Fixed some exploits that could lead to crashes or remote code execution against a co-op partner.

June 24th, 2024: Fixed a remote code execution exploit and out-of-memory exploit in cooperative mode.

January 20th, 2025: Fixed exploits used to crash remote players.

TL;DR:

Valve has evidently spent the last two solid years trying to fix a bug or series of bugs which permit hostile remote code execution against one's co-op partner in Portal 2, seemingly without success.

1. they know how to shut up. the animals know how and when to shut up. yes, even the comic relief one. do you have any idea how important this is? yes, they play it for laughs when diego first confronts manny and they fight and then diego stops, clears his throat, and asks manny politely for the child (which was brilliant, by the way, i laughed aloud), but aside from that, when there’s a serious moment, they let it be serious. when manny accepts the baby from the mother, when he sees the paintings of the mammoths on the cave wall, when he returns the baby to its father, these are moments where everyone is dead silent, even sid, and the music is soft and heartwrenching and the next line is rarely, if ever, a joke that undercuts the prior moment. they let these scenes linger and it really makes this feel like an emotional, somber, serious movie with fun character interactions rather than a comedy that makes cheap appeals to emotion.

2. the way they characterize manny at the beginning is SUPER interesting to me. by the end of this movie, we know manny is a big softie who was deeply wounded by the loss of his family. we as the audience don’t know this yet, though, and the first time we catch a hint that there’s something deeper going on here, it’s when manny firmly, sharply insists to sid that partners should be loyal to each other. it’s not an obnoxiously blatant “hey i have trauma” flag, since it could be interpreted as the writers playing with the monogamy of mammoths and promiscuity of sloths, which i’m fairly certain they bring up in this movie, if not one of the others. still, though, it strikes that perfect balance of not making the Oh Frick Manny Had A Family reveal later on completely blindside us while also not telegraphing it too obviously. at the beginning, manny is clearly a loner who wants nothing to do with sid, but to avoid making him come off as a straight-up jerk, they make it abundantly clear in the introductory sequence that he has a strong moral code that he holds himself to (”I don’t like animals that kill for pleasure”). i just thought this was really well done, opening the movie with a scene that demonstrates both that manny is a complex character who comes off as cold but cares deeply (which sid basically sees straight through and i love it) and that sid is incredibly unlikable and as such nobody likes him. i didn’t realize it at first, but that’s such an interesting move. we open the movie with sid getting abandoned by his family, but then we find out how annoying he is and go “oh, well that explains it.” but then he tells manny all about how they regularly do their best to ditch him and it’s so clear that he’s just too pure and innocent to hold any malice towards them. under it all, though, it’s clear that he’s lonely, too, and has been for a while. these characters have depth, and feel like people, and every quiet moment just drives it home even more that they really don’t have anyone except each other.

3. DIEGO! we stan. i think it’s really interesting how instead of just throwing these characters into the world together, the writers make it clear that they had other people, before, but those people either were toxic and ditched them (sid’s family), were toxic and needed to be ditched (diego’s pack), or were loving but torn away by circumstance (manny’s family). i dunno, it just adds a really interesting layer of depth here. but anyway, diego’s arc was just really well done. he’s only there to get the kid, and though he does start to enjoy himself, he still has his mission. but when manny risks his life to save diego’s and sid makes that comment pointing it out, you can SEE how he starts to linger, starts to dread, the guilt builds up until he TELLS THEM. that’s so important! he tells them!!! there’s no stupid, “liar revealed” plotline where they figure out that he’s been tricking them because he comes clean himself, without provocation or pressure, and they do eventually forgive him and that’s SO important. diego wasn’t being honest with them, was living a lie and planning to betray them, and he made the incredibly difficult decision to stop in his tracks and come clean on his own terms because he knew it was the right thing to do. there were So Many Ways the writers could have handled that reveal, but to have diego just stop, think, change his mind, and confess was SO GOOD. also the dynamic between the three of them was just really, really great. i’m so emotionally attached to these early-2000′s CGI creatures okay.

4. speaking of which, this movie is surprisingly good-looking. like it came out in 2002. that is IMPRESSIVE. manny’s fur holds up shockingly well and my suspension of disbelief was never fricked up by poorly rendered CGI graphics. props to blue sky, man.

5. okay point five is lowkey the whole reason for this rant because it’s a really really cool point i only noticed on my second watch through: the parallelism. why does diego have to kidnap this baby? because his pack’s leader (soto, apparently) wants to eat it alive as revenge for the humans killing half of his own. why does manny want to rescue this baby? because he, too, is a parent who lost a child and doesn’t want the humans to go through that. but, wait, hang on a minute, how did he lose his child? oh, yeah, the humans killed it and his wife right in front of him. both soto and manny lost most of the people they care about to the humans—these humans, specifically, since they seem to be the only community in the area—but where soto swears revenge, manny doesn’t want them to go through what he went through, even though this very act could be what perpetuates that. and they acknowledge it in the movie. diego mentions how this baby is gonna grow up to hunt them and sid counters that maybe the fact that they saved it means it will remember their kindness and things will change. but the whole movie carries the somber atmosphere of a tragedy because, as someone else mentioned above, the humans are steadily encroaching and all of these creatures are going to go extinct, and this one act of kindness may not have the intended effect and may soon be lost to the uncaring tides of history, but that doesn’t make it any less worth it. manny isn’t doing this to try and make a statement or change the humans’ behavior, he just wants to prevent them from going through what he did. calling this story one of “breaking the cycle of violence” cheapens it, i feel, because the humans are hunting the mammoths, not out of malice, but out of necessity for furs and meat and bone and tusk. it’s nothing personal—they’re predators. but still, manny seeks them out to return their baby to them. and when the baby’s father is raising his spear at manny when he’s trying to return it, you can just see that look in manny’s eyes, that he’s begging this human to understand, but he’s prepared to get speared if it means this kid gets to be with his father and MY HEART, YOU GUYS.

6. FOUND FAMILY FOUND FAMILY like i know found family isn’t really all that hard to come by, but this movie is REALLY explicit about it in a good way! they make the distinction between a pack—a group who wants you for what you can do for them—and a herd—a group who regularly looks out to see what they can do for you. and a saber-tooth tiger leaves his PACK to join this HERD! and they joke that this is the weirdest herd they’ve ever seen, but a carnivore has just joined a herd and that makes me feel SO MANY FEELINGS

ultimately, ice age is a movie about choices. manny’s choice to return this kid to its parents, even though he lost his own kid to those very parents, diego’s choice to come clean about his betrayal and his choice to join a herd even though he’s a carnivore, manny making the choice to risk his life to save diego, diego making the choice to return the favor, and all three of them making the choice to not give up hope that they can find a new family again after losing what they had before. this is a movie in which characters are more than the way they were born, are more than the circumstances of their lives, are more than what happens to them. they make choices and their choices matter and they choose to be kind, even when they have absolutely nothing to gain from it and everything to lose from it.

i guess you could say this movie aged nicely.

Oh and guess what else you can't say you can't say? **** [Nipples]. had to type that myself. penis is ok but **** [clitoris] isn't, and all my attempts to say "clit" were Misunderstood, which may just be my speech but at this point I am not willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Vagina is OK too but every time I say it there is a moment when an * shows up on screen first before the full word does. this doesn't happen when I say the word penis.

It is completely heinous. Anybody who needs speech to text is immediately forced to comply with the rules set out by people in a position of power and then enforced by a machine — a machine that is a very powerful accessibility tool. Imagine trying to dictate a letter to a doctor or fill in an E consult with speech to text, only to have words of your anatomy censored as if they are taboo. there is already far too much stigma around genital physical health — and note that I could say genital but can't say **** [clitoris] — for it to be okay for these words to be censored.

And even if somebody just wants to swear In a message to their friends or write smut/**** [pornography], they should be able to. There is no justification for this feature. No reason for it to be default.

[ID: REDDIT POST:

Title: "Speech to text alternative for Windows that DOES NOT censor curse words?"

Flair: "General Question"

Post main text:

"I hate how Windows speech To text censors my words, things like offensive words and curse words. I'm an adult and if I want to say those words, I should be able to say them and not have to deal with a bunch of asterisks. Speech to text alternatives?

answer: I was using a different, simpler windows voice to text functionality. Windows has a more extensive voice control functionality that actually allows you to navigate windows with voice as well but you can use it for diction only like i do:

You can turn off the profanity filter.

Use profanity filtering

If voice access captures a profane word, it is masked in the speech feedback. If a profanity is detected while you're dictating text, the masked version is typed out. By default, this option is turned on. You can turn the profanity filtering off or on from the voice access bar.

You all will do anything to not give us our land back huh