Superheroes Are Dorks

Until my brain remembered a very specific, famous rose in space:

[IMG ID: Art from the story 'Le Petit Prince' featuring the little prince on his asteroid, staring at his rose. There is some French text included that I do not know the translation of. /end ID]

And oh guess what else appears in this story?

A fox that the little prince befriends! In fact they have a very lovely chat about becoming friends and being 'tamed.' There's one quote in particular that comes to mind from that whole conversation, which is very long but all very lovely and useful to this topic but to save time and space I'm just going to C/P this one bit:

"“My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…”"

Which, surely the references to hair and wheat fields means nothing about a man named Ryland (cough land of rye cough) Grace. Surely the man with his rose buds on his ship and drowning in fox symbolism in his outfits should have nothing to do with a book about a little boy who searching across all the worlds for meaning and understanding and relationships, only to find that it is with the one that he has already left and that he will do anything for--even die to go back to. Surely this has no connection to Ryland Grace turning his ship around to go back to Rock even if he thought it would kill him. Surely.

There's a lot more here but its too early (late) and I'm so emotional I can't put all the connections together right this second. Like I'd need to sit down and re-read the whole book to put it all together because there's a LOT going on like there are a LOT of connections to be made here. Other people have made this connection between the two stories before, even! But now its getting pushed even further because there's ROSES of all friggin plants on this ship.

If something has a big fandom, publishers and studios know they can make money off it. This is why we see publishers openly acquiring and selling things that were originally posted as fanfic, like Alchemised, Heated Rivalry, etc. It’s why the horrid wizard woman considers people participating in her fandom to be supporting her political causes.

Polytrix pillow fort

Instagram is full of first-person videos of men harassing women in public. They follow a similar script: A man walks up to a woman or group of women in a store, sitting outside a cafe, or walking home from a bar, and delivers a pickup line. The women almost always nervously laugh, react with barely-veiled disgust, or say "fuck off" while he stalks her or refuses to walk away. The men recording these videos capture them with Meta's smart glasses, which are designed to discreetly capture interactions like these and upload the videos to Meta's platforms where the women in the videos are turned into content for "pickup artist" accounts.

New research reveals this ecosystem works, and how pickup artists (PUA) influencers are using Meta's products, including its smart glasses and social media platforms, to perpetuate a culture of harassment against women.

[...]

The assumer will see a social media post about someone's mushroom harvest, which clearly only contains exactly two distinct kinds of mushrooms, which the poster has identified and correctly named in the post itself, and the assumer will feel compelled to warn the forager to be careful out there! Some mushrooms are poisonous and they should be very careful to only pick ones they can identify! The assumer, who has ignored the fact that the poster did identify both of the mushroom species they had picked, and can most likely be trusted to do so in the future as well, has naturally assumed that the person showing off the results of their latest mushroom haul must have been obliviously picking them at random like an unsupervised toddler who is lucky to be alive.

If someone makes a post talking about how they just got a new job as a bus driver, the assumer might swoop in to warn them that driving a bus is extremely dangerous! It's so dangerous that it's literally illegal to do that unless you have a specific special training for doing that! Even a normal driver's license isn't good enough, you need a special license for it! And when the person who just got hired as a bus driver verifies that yes, they know that, they do have the license to drive a bus, and that they wouldn't have even hired someone who doesn't. The first question of the job interview was about making sure that they have a valid license for driving this type of vehicle.

You see this a lot in tech support. Everybody hates those basic questions like "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It feels ridiculous and condescending both to the person being asked and the person asking, and you honestly just want to skip it because surely nobody would bother calling tech support waiting without checking something so basic?

...and then you get that call. The one where you spend twenty minutes troubleshooting only to figure out that not only haven't they tried turning it on and off again, the device isn't even plugged in. After that, you always ask.

Somebody posts about picking mushrooms. Did they correctly identify the species? Or did they just get very, very lucky? Emergency rooms (and funeral homes) have seen a lot of people come through who were very confident in their mushroom identification skills.

I'm sure your bus driver example was intended to be an exaggerated strawman, because obviously nobody would hire someone to drive a bus without making sure they're qualified, right? You can totally just assume that from context clues.

The fact that someone, somewhere, has found a way to do things that make literally no sense, is not an argument for treating everybody like they're about to make the stupidest possible decision at all times.

The examples given were also very specifically about the explainers very clearly knowing less than the person they're talking to/at.

Not being able to discuss literally anything without being talked down to, leading to feeling the need to include giant paragraphs of asides that will get get ignored and/or picked apart, is *not fun*.

Sharing an experience in a social space is not a request for basic guidance on a topic you have in no way demonstrated any need for.

I think most people understand that if they responded that way irl chatting with someone they are vaguely friendly with, it would not go down well.

If you’re excited to share knowledge, then you can politely reach out your hand to share, rather than instantly assuming the other person is in need of correction or lecturing.

@free-and-to-none-accountable

@anarchistmemedistro

As a former music teacher, I can also say that "learn the fundamentals first" is the death knell for a vast percentage of beginners, especially adult learners.

I've run into this with drawing several times, where some well-meaning artist has lectured me on needing to study anatomy properly or not use shortcuts like CSP brushes. And oh, believe me, I know. I know exactly how to learn an artistic discipline in a structured way. I just...don't want to!

The thing is, I'm not aiming to be a professional artist. I want to draw my gay little anime guys. I would undoubtedly improve at art much faster if I approached every gay little anime guy drawing as a study exercise. But I would also have quit drawing a decade ago if I couldn't just let myself enjoy drawing imperfect fucked-up little guys with whatever shortcuts I needed to body myself across the finish line.

With my adult piano students, my approach was always "What's your goal?" If their goal was to learn exactly one Elton John songbook to play at parties, then...that's what we did. We'd put tape on the keys to label the notes, and just fuckin go for it. Learning exactly one Elton John songbook is a good and noble musical goal, full stop.

Some of my students needed and enjoyed a more structured approach to learning; if they wanted to be able to play classical music, then yes, scales were going to have to enter the equation at some point. And yet others would learn the Elton John songbook, catch their white whale, and realize they wanted to explore more of the ocean. The scales were still there for them to learn!

Often the choice isn't between "learn art well" and "learn art imperfectly" - the choice is between "learn art imperfectly" and "don't do art at all." To which I say, learn imperfectly! Or, what the hell, don't 'learn' art. Just do, and enjoy the doing of it.

My best friend:

Eridian Doctor: We went through the human genome and found a bunch of places with old broken DNA repair mechanisms so we came up with a gene editing therapy that fixes them in order to extend your lifespan.

Grace: *flashbacks to when Rocky found out that humans can experience long term effects from lower doses of radiation exposure and Grace wasn't being as careful as he should have been back when they first met because he still thought this was gonna be a suicide mission*

Grace (internally): Oh, so cancer prevention! Got it!

Grace: Sounds good!

*like 100 years later*

Grace: Hey Rocky, how am I not dead yet?

-hallucinate

-cry over what seems to be small things

-become furiously angry over what seems to be small things

-hit a self destruct button over and over again

-lose all sense of reality

-becoming straight up unable to communicate

-view every situation as life or death

-experience delusions/become vulnerable to irrational worldviews

-perceive hostility where none exists

-become extremely nauseous and/or throw up

-stop engaging in sleeping/eating/basic hygiene

-stop processing sensory input

-process way too much sensory input all at once

-lash out at others/themselves

-and more!