High Quality but Morally Dubious

do you ever find something that is so funny and you want to share it with everyone but it also requires 18 layers of context spanning things like. 90s anime. aviation history. europop. canada. in order to even remotely understand why it is so funny

tuesday status?

yup. its tuesday 👍

copy. tuesday confirmed ✅ engaging tuesday protocol

duuuuuude you have GOT to come out tonight we're enacting cruelty upon those who have transgressed so badly that we can justify any act against them... and you KNOW we're interpreting our delight as moral righteousness... Yeah it's fucking crazyyyyyyy get an Uber

Warhammer 40,000 is of course, uh, not unproblematic. But patterning orks specifically and incredibly blatantly off English football hooligan culture was probably simultaneously the least bigoted and most creative thing literally anyone did with the concept of 'the orc' at any point in the 1980s

My tits: OUT

My teeth SOMEONE ELSE'S

well maybe you should blearily wake up at 5:08 in the pre-dawn light and find the sleeping soft tiny mammal body of your cat just inches from your head like a miracle too beautiful for speech, and you should rustle one hand out from your blankets to rub fingertip circles across the warm eggshell dome of her little velvet-wrapped skull and on the bristly patches just where the cups of her ears begin, and as she inclines her head into your fingers and purrs without ever opening her little eyes you should feel a love so tender that you understand how that love could have reached out from the fireside into the inky spangled nights long gone to reach her, and then you'll feel better

[Image ID: Tumblr tag from hotTubSharts reading: and then maybe she'll wake you again at 6 to the sound of her puking on the floor. maybe /End ID]

shoutout to the words "overmorrow" and "ereyesterday". english losing these words was stupid. "the day after tomorrow" "the day before yesterday" clunky-ass constructions. revolting. i'm bringing overmorrow and ereyesterday back in my idiolect and there is nothing you can do about it

Sort of 'In the Pale Moonlight'?

Thinking about the Ferengi economy and how they would presumably have the most advanced financial machinery in the quadrant but all of their money is based on actual physical specie. They don't have credit cards; they don't have paper money; they don't even have promissory notes, as far as I recall. They only deal in cold, hard gold-pressed latinum that must be really heavy and really expensive to cart around the galaxy.

That's how their economy survives and keeps values stable in the face of post-scarcity options and possibilities, where physical labor and physical value derive hard direct value from. By requring physical labor and physical transfers, this keeps the prices equal to value of effort to posess, conceal, and labor to keep control of. Additionally, by removing the concept of non-tangible credit they require physical relationships and communal wealth strategies. Their religion is capitalism and economic market expansion, to keep that dream alive they must have extremely reliable economic values. They do not appear to hold the concept of "imaginary" value, such as shareholder value, and by not letting imaginary value derive absolute value they can focus on physical rules of acquisition that has reasonable expectations of value, where economic value is only grown through dealmaking and tangible logistical economic dominion.

I wonder how this is tied up in the Ferengi ideals of Masculinity that we see in DS9. (I Could use a gender neutral term, like "Cultural Value", but with the Ferengi it is very much their version of Masculinity). The Ferengi Masculine Ideal, the "Lobes" as it were, is more specific than Being Wealthy, it is specifically being a Good Businessman. The same way the Klingon ideal of "The Warrior" is distinct from "Guy with a lot of dead enemies". A Good Ferengi is a skilled negotiator with a good eye for opportunity and a ruthless pursuit of profit. Simply owning something valuable does not count as a demonstrationg of ferengi masculine virtue until you have convinced somebody else to pay you for that thing, since until the latinum is exchanged, a BETTER Ferengi could always swindle you and convince you to sell it for cheap. Quark's whole character is built around attempting to perform Ferengi Masculinity in it's idealized form: a skillful businessman who uses personal charisma and a network of associates to profit by buying and selling physical goods. Running a bar with an import/export/smuggling business on the side isn't neccessarily the best way for somebody like Quark to acumulate wealth, but it IS the best way for him to perform Ferengi Masculinity, to demonstrate that he's a Good Businessman who can sell things to people for more than he paid for them. I'd say Ferengi probably DO have the concept of Credit, they certainly have the concept of Debt, but it's not real, it is distinct from any cultural definition of wealth. Somebody who hands you a note that says "I Owe You 100 Bars of Latinum" might be conning you, or they might be an idiot who is about to die in a tragic accident before they can pay you, in either case that note is worthless and you havn't proven that you're a Good Ferengi. Ferengi probably have really interesting slurs for Ferengi who talk up the imagined value of things they own but have not yet converted into Latinum.