the floor is my moirail

The last mammoth died on in island off the northeast coast of Siberia in ~1650BCE.

But the second time it came past I saw 

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about - unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit - with incredibly damaged chromosomes.

I teach genetics, I don’t deserve to have to explain why this is so wrong and yet. Oh my god. 

Mueller’s Ratchet–which is what this chucklefuck is talking about, the reason that purely asexual lineages don’t last well in evolutionary time–does not apply to feminism. The hypothetical scenario of merging two eggs to create a baby? Yeah, uh, that’s fucking sex in this context, whether or not it involves a male. 

There are zero feminists pushing for parthenogenesis for humans, mostly because the whole thing is basically impossible for mammals as a result of mammalian investment in genomic imprinting. Among other things. It’s the sort of thing that only works okay in species that don’t control their embryonic development anywhere near as closely as your basic placental mammal does, because it relies on a certain amount of flexibility about sex determination and placental mammals are kind of weird about that.

Even if there were, Mueller’s Ratchet only applies if you never ever sexually reproduce and reshuffle alleles, like the parthenogenetic whiptail lizards mentioned upthread. If we have the technology to induce parthenogenesis in a human woman, we have the technology to reshuffle some alleles now and again. Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad! 

Furthermore, Mueller’s Ratchet is specifically a population genetics phenomenon that refers to the accumulation of deleterious mutations within an asexually/clonally reproducing lineage. It has dick fuck all to do with chromosomes.

Mueller’s Ratchet exists in order to explain why asexually reproducing lineages haven’t overrun the world, because frankly in the short term these lineages usually do way better than their conspecific, obligate sexually reproducing partners do. Furthermore, it’s really fucking common to see species that reproduce sexually at some times and asexually at other times, depending on context and who’s available, and that’s in and of itself a complex fucking phenotype you species-centric cortically starved ignorant dillweed

all of this is completely fucking irrelevant to the mammoth example that @brett-caton there chose to bring up, by the way, because mammoths don’t fucking reproduce asexually either 

as you would know if you’d bothered to read the paper, you self-satisfied jellyfish fellator

or even the pop science article you cited yourself 

which clearly and cogently explains that the fucking mammoths died of being inbred as all shit, much like yourself

the laziness inherent in jumbling all this pig-ignorant, overconfident and understudied bullshit together and claiming it’s a solidly built house rather than a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish is the final straw

you can’t even be arsed to read an article that you dug up and cited yourself, you shithugger

how are feminists supposed to be the lazy ones? 

“genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries

MAG 129

so to be realistic, your aliens should have something equivalent to the godawful design of the human spine and lower back, and they should look like total wimps compared to basically everything else on their planet!

Anthony J. Crowley, who won three awards in Hell when he created Tumblr dot com:

Punk dad got his badass kids back 

Slime mold was grown on an agar gel plate shaped like America and food sources were placed where America’s large cities are. 

The result? A possible look at how to best build public transportation. 

Using slime molds as a calculator.

So like, I can see that they didn’t put any sort of inhibitor where the Appalachians are, so the slime mold put a bunch of networks right in the steepest (not highest, steepest) mountains in the lower 48, and none through the nice flat well-populated Piedmont – that’s the east coast, blank from Jersey to Jacksonville FL here.  (I’m less clear on the Rockies than I am on the Appalachians, so forgive the bias here.  I can’t quite tell how the western networks relate to the Great Basin, Rockies, and Sierra Nevada.)

Ohio is the most densely populated state that isn’t on a saltwater coast.  This network not only goes around it, but it does so via the course of the Ohio River, in the Desolation of Smalltowns twisting between steep Appalachian foothills from Cincinnati to Wheeling WV.  It would make more sense to either go through Ohio, in the 2/3rds of the state from Cincinnati to Cleveland which is flat, or follow the shore of Lake Erie and go through Cleveland, which is pretty much what I-80 does.

In short, most of this network is passing through steep mountain/hill country and avoiding people by hundreds of miles.  Perhaps a later experiment will add growth inhibitors and facilitators to approximate the missing elements.  That would be really cool to see.

it’s implied that john is finding earth c (post-canon) existence unfulfilling and his relationships are suffering because of that. john is the glue that ties the characters together (you’re our friend and this is why you must be our leader). if john is “stuck” in canon aka still relevant to the story, he cannot be meaningfully present with the life he’s built afterwards. with that lack of presence, the rest of the crew starts to crumble psychologically too.

anyways i think john sticking his hand in the juju is why earth c faces the threat of becoming non canon. perhaps as long as there is a way to influence canon in the post game, the story can never be fulfilled and complete.

With ‘go after Lord English when he’s younger’, it seems likely we’re heading towards the Caliborn Claymation Special. In that fight, John, Rose, Dave, and Jade are imprisoned in the house juju and it is cast into the Furthest Ring.

My theory is that the retcon powers go with John into the juju – and then leave without him, when earlier John touches it. When the juju is actually set off, the four of them will emerge, but John won’t have retcon powers anymore.

Some say in candy. 

From what I’ve seen the fans entreat,

I hold with those who favor meat. 

But knowing Huss’s modus operandi, 

I think I’ve read enough updates 

To say that for conclusions candy 

Is also great 

And would be dandy.

OP: Hey, I thought I’d share this commentary I saw in book 3 about [S] Jack: Ascend, because I thought you’d probably find it as interesting as I do (also it’s too big for an ask so I have to do it as a submission sorry):

Hussie quote: “[…] I think this one marks the start of Homestuck’s trend thereafter of dropping exceptionally violent, high-octane, game-changing animations out of nowhere. There are so many like this from on, right up to the end of Act 5. Only then does the number sort of taper off. But from this point on I just sorta started shoveling more and more red meat into the story’s maw. This stretch is where I was starting to get a feel for this type of sensationalistic storytelling content as something I’d later code (mostly for my own internal purposes) as “meat,” in the meat/candy binary of storycraft theory. I really shouldn’t talk about this yet, though. It’s too soon.”

This quote threw me for a loop, to be honest, and I’ve been mulling it over the last couple days. I wasn’t sure what the Meat/Candy binary was referring to at all, I was just kind of like uhh wtf?

Then I remembered this exchange, and I think things started coming together:

Meat and Candy are all Caliborn/Calliope eat. Which makes sense, since they’re the ultimate audience stand ins.  Hussie gives us a good sense of what Meat means in his description: Very violent, very game-changing animations that move the story forward. Parts where people die and/or Get Shit done, usually delivered with a lot of visual spectacle.

Caliborn gives us a pretty hefty clue as to the second. Odds seem good “Candy” refers to shipping, or at least the very particular kind of shipping Caliborn is interested in.

Which is to say, Caliborn isn’t interested in watching Roxy and Jane have a real relationship, or grow as people, or wrestle with real feelings. He’s interested in the physical titillation they can provide him with by acting out the cute parts of a relationship. See also: Trickster Mode, where the characters indulge candy and become saccharine sweet and affectionate to each other while being entirely detached from their conflicts and issues.

Unsurprisingly, Caliborn’s also only interested in “candy” that caters specifically to his own sexuality, insofar as he consciously performs it.

So basically, Meat and Candy both provide different forms of titillation and satisfying “content”, from the fandom’s perspective. Meat gives us raw plot, the satisfaction of Things Happening, steaks being raised, etc. Candy gives us shipping fodder, absent conflict and growth that real relationships require.

This log also introduces a third concept into the equation, presenting an alternative to the Meat/Candy binary: Pumpkins, or Vegetables.

The implications of this one seem fairly obvious to me. Vegetables may not be tasty or satisfying to eat, but they’re good for you and necessary to a healthy body. Eating one’s vegetables is considered a sign of maturity, or at least being on the path to maturity.

I’m going to guess that in this framework, vegetables refers to content depicting the characters actually reckoning with themselves, facing their feelings and flaws, and growing as people, friends, and relationship partners. This is explicitly built into Dirk and Jake’s relationship symbolically, but really it applies to every endgame ship and to the character’s arcs more generally. Caliborn doesn’t give a shit about anything that has to do with the characters actually growing up.

Pumpkins are also Void items, which makes me wonder. If the most “important” romantic relationships for each character, the ones that help them grow as people, are the ones considered “Pumpkin” matter in the story, maybe that goes some way to explaining why we get so little explicitly romantic affection shown between, say, Vrisrezi, Davekat, and Dirkjake. That’s candy.

If that last idea is accurate to the story’s internal logic, it makes me think of this quote from The Little Prince:

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

A long time ago Homestuck was big and everyone who loved it liked to joke that it was bad, because it was kinda, in that it was a weird style and an absurd story and a shambling tangle of non-linear meta-jokes and cultural references only thirty year old coders would get. People still loved it, because that wasn’t all it was (we’ll get to that), but over time Stuff happened, and the momentum of the story slowed while expectations mounted and the resulting dissonance left the ending feeling a little flat. And sometime in the intervening years between then and now, the ironic “Homestuck is bad” apparently stopped being ironic and became sincere.

Which was a little confusing and a little annoying, because I never got the memo and it took me a long time to cotton on to the fact that Homestuck was considered ‘cringey’ even in circles that it literally built. Anyways, the conventional wisdom does seem to be Homestuck Is Bad now, and the wise thing to do is probably apologetically disavow or at very least cautiously enumerate Homestuck’s various flaws so I can reassure both you and myself that I’ve paid the proper penance for whatever nugget of sincere affection I may have harbored under my ironic platitudes in those bygone years of the mid 2010′s. 

Thankfully I’m a dumb fucking bitch, so instead here’s why I love Homestuck.

Mistaken For Strangers- The National

Companion to this piece from three years ago