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for one, percy yielding is such an integral part of pjo. all of pjo. but even if u somehow missed it in the first four books, tlo explicitly spells it out. "sometimes the hardest power to master is the power of yielding" hestia says to percy. "i yield when necessary. can you do this?" and then this is the climax of the story. "you are not the hero...it will affect what you do." percy has spent the last five books being told that he's the super powerful chosen one able to save or destroy the world, and he still chooses to yield to someone that has done nothing but betray him. "the line from the great prophecy echoed in my head...my whole world tipped upside down, and i gave the knife to luke." hoo acting like this is a lesson percy needs to learn is an affront to reading comprehension. percy lives bc he yields. and then he does it (yielding) again when he surrenders godhood, and power, to choose other demigods instead. this is not subtle writing.

for two, percy has rejected power, and his title, for the entirety of his story. percy doesn't even fully recognize how powerful he is until the volcano in botl. and he had to be told directly that it wasn't a fluke. then in son, percy immediately rejects the power and status offered to him. repeatedly. reyna offers him praetorship, he turns it down. frank is abt to let percy climb the wall first in the war games, percy says it was frank's claim. percy doesn't even want to go on the son quest but relents bc frank asked him. in moa, percy never demands that he lead. instead, he includes frank where he probably wasn't necessary, supports hazel, encourages annabeth, follows leo and piper's lead, and strategizes w jason. he isn't acting as a leader, but rather as part of a team. percy didn't need to "step back," the writing for the other characters needed to step up.

for three, percy had to be kidnapped and manipulated to be on this entire quest. he's not there bc he has a hero complex. acting like he has to learn to step back when he was quite literally shoved into place is wild.

for four, an integral part of percy's character is freedom, autonomy, and he extends this to the ppl he's loyal to. this is pretty explicitly established in tlt: "you're enough like me to understand," sally says. "if my life is going to mean anything, i have to live it myself." percy respects ppl's decisions. this is one of the first lessons he learns when he becomes a hero and an integral part of pjo: percy has to let sally save herself. percy has to let tyson go to the boiler. percy has to let bianca defeat talos. percy has to let nico walk away. percy has to let annabeth fight. if he loves them, he's going to let their lives mean something. even in hoo, percy still lets annabeth go on her quest alone, despite hating it, despite disagreeing w it, bc it's not his place to tell her what she can and can't do. this is her life. she has to live it. so this plotline doesn't even work it we ignore all of pjo and focus solely on hoo.

As a fellow animorphs enthusiast, do you have any thoughts? Do you think it would have changed much?

Not really. I don't think Tobias cares much about the sex of his hawk body, and I don't think the other kids would talk about him as a girl if he was in a girl hawk, if that's what you mean -- they morph across sexes all the time and never have much to say about it except for that one time really early on that Marco complained about being a "girl wolf". Being a hawk is a radically different experience than being a human already, and I don't think that female hawkitude is any closer physiologically or socially to female humanity than male hawkitude is. I think the main difference, if Tobias had a female hawk body, would be slightly different teasing from Marco.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.

"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?

“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.

"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.

"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.

It was often miserable to be a woman in early nineteenth century britain and ireland: true ✅

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

So like, with the stars dying, I'm thinking Eridian media might have gone on a whole "aliens are bad bad bad out there killing stars and wanting to eat Erid" and etc trend for their sci-fi. Long ballads about what are essentially evil Eridians with the equivalent of prosthetics doing terrible things to the galaxy and brave heroes like Rocky going off to stop them. Because y'know that's probably how you'd conceptualize a huge scary conflict like total cosmic annihilation in a way that makes it seem beatable: designate a bad guy you can just defeat in order to stop it.

But then Grace and Rocky get to Erid and that trend gets immediately flipped. Turns out that there were kind of bad aliens, the astrophage and all, but that's more like a natural disaster, and hero Rocky has returned with the weirdest, nicest alien ever. Erid media suddenly rockets back to a prior era of optimistic sci-fi previously considered intolerably twee and cringe after the solar disaster kicked off, where the aliens are always nice nice nice, incredibly weird and sometimes goofy as fuck but friendly and not the bad guys.

Of course you never get full consensus on these things, so there are also creative Eridians who are like. But what if evil humans question? Evil humans posing as saviors infiltrate Erid and replace Eridians with pods that hatch into creepy non-Erid rock monsters question? Evil human comes to Erid under guise of niceness and KILLS Eridians question???

Which is broadly considered like. Holy shit dude stop being gauche the nice alien saved the planet stop fucking writing stories where his skeleton cracks open like a nest of evil eggs and turns into a bunch of monsters! Rude, statement! Aliens very nice statement!

And like at first all the Eridian scientists are very sure to keep this sort of stuff away from Grace, they don't want to insult him or imply that he's being slandered in their media or anything. And again overall the popular trend turns a lot more to aliens-as-friendly, especially if they're expressly humans, and the sci-fi writers of Erid are having a total BLAST speculating about Earth and writing stories about it and etc, Grace seems to very much enjoy answering questions for the ones who want to keep things accurate and chuckling and enthusing over the creativity of the ones who don't. He's like, oh yeah they are definitely also doing this back on Earth, don't worry.

Researchers laughing and nervously just being like, yes of course, this is the full extent of it, not to worry! Normal thing which humans are also doing!

Until one day Rocky just brings Grace a recording of a full-blown Eridian horror sci-fi where Grace HIMSELF is EXPLICITLY a horrible monster that goes on a killing spree and tries to destroy Erid.

The other researchers are losing their shit. RoCKY?!?! WHY QUESTION??? Oh fuck Grace is going to be so upset! He's such a sensitive soul he doesn't even like it when one of his students gets distressed!

Desalination is the process of generating freshwater from brackish or saltwater, usually through the process of reverse osmosis. While this can be a very useful tool in water shortages, it also has some pretty huge drawbacks--reverse osmosis requires a lot of energy, requires chemical treatment of the water, and produces concentrated brine as a waste product which can be harmful to aquatic ecosystems.

And well beyond organic life, modern society's great human invention is the Electronic Magic. Our greatest minds invented the Electronic Magic and it sends information around the world instantly. Our infrastructure our economy our modern life, minute by minute by minute, hinges on utilizing the great Lighting Technology.

That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".

A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!

In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.

The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.

A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.

In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).

It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.

Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?

The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!

Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?

"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"

Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?

Ganymede, the biggest moon in the solar system, is 0.008% the mass of Jupiter. The Moon is a bit over 1.2% of Earth's mass and a solid 27% of its radius. There's no other planet* in the solar system with a satellite anywhere close to the kind of similarity in size that the Earth-Moon system has.

You might also say "Fine but it's literally called 'The Moon' so that's a bit silly". To which I say that I've been calling it that to be more easily understood but it would be extremely easy to switch to calling it "Luna" which is what most people do when they encounter situations where saying "The Moon" creates ambiguity - like when writing sci-fi or a nontrivial amount of astronomical research.

In conclusion, lumping Luna in with the satellites of other bodies is unhelpful because it is geophysically distinct from most of them, and orbitally distinct from all of them. Luna is a planet and it's rad that we can see one so clearly in the night sky.

Hi, I'm an astrophysicist, I am well aware of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) definition of a planet. It is a definition that is relatively controversial and doesn't really make a lot of sense - it was mostly written to prevent the list of planets from getting too long as we discovered more dwarfs. This definition does not include anything to do with barycentres - I'll get back to that.

The IAU definition of a planet has 3 parts:

1. Object in orbit around our Sun

2. Object has reached hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. it's a sphere, not a potato)

3. Object has cleared its neighborhood around its orbit

Both Earth and Luna satisfy 2. I will accept that 1 is debatable, but the crux of my argument is that Luna is the size of a terrestrial planet (yes, ~1% of Earth's mass, but still huge and of roughly the same order of magnitude as Mercury, which is a mere ~5% of Earth's mass) and exceptionally large relative to its orbital partner compared to any other "satellite", a factor the IAU does not account for.

It's important to note that 1 literally does not permit binary planets - even if both bodies are identical, one must be the "moon". This is major criticism of the IAU definition. It also doesn't account for exoplanets or rogue planets, but that's another story.

3 is where this definition falls apart. You could easily argue that most of the planets in our solar system fail depending on how you interpret it, because it's so fuzzy. The Earth fails, because there's a planet-sized body chilling out in its orbit (Luna), Jupiter fails because it has huge quantities of asteroids trapped in its Lagrange points, etc.

In the latter case, we say that because Jupiter is determining the motion of these bodies, it still counts. For the Earth we simply ignore Luna and say that the rule is more about stray bodies than orbital partners. But by the same logic we can say that for Luna we ignore the Earth, and Luna passes.

So I would argue that the IAU definition is bad, but if you fixed it so that it allowed binary systems to exist, it would readily define Luna as a planet in my view (if you deleted the Earth from the solar system and left Luna, it would unambiguously meet the criteria).

Now let's talk about barycentres.

The barycentre of two bodies in orbit is just their overall centre of mass. People often point to the external barycentre of the Pluto-Charon system to indicate that they are binary dwarfs. However, this is a poor metric in my view, because it's highly dependent on orbital distance.

The centre of mass of the Earth-Luna system is inside the Earth at present, but if Luna simply orbited further away, the barycentre would be in the empty space between them, with nothing about the two bodies individually, or the qualitative nature of their orbits, having changed. In fact, given enough time and pretending the Sun won't consume both bodies in a few billion years, Luna would actually drift far enough away due to tidal interactions for this to happen - it would be silly for it to suddenly be a planet one day when it wasn't the day before.

It's really frustrating to me when people lash out and say "You're wrong because there's a definition, for the love of god look up the definition" about a topic where I think it's clear my point is that I KNOW the definition and I disagree with it. And that's allowed! Definitions are made up! "Planets" are made up, and I think we should make them up differently!

All the things in our solar system are just different kinds of rocks dancing to each other's gravity- they're all affected by each one's gravity, even in tiny ways. They do not fall neatly into subcategories "planet" and "not a planet" - we made this distinction up because we wanted it. We noticed that some of the bodies in our solar system seemed much more important and dominant than others and we wanted a name for that. But the planets don't know that- they don't have an inherent major distinction between them, nor are they obligated to. When we wanted to come up with a way to clearly decide which bodies were planets, we had to make something up.

What we made up is a little bit vague, and even if it were extremely clear cut, we could still debate whether it was a reasonable or intuitive or useful definition.

We run into this same issue in anthropology constantly, so I've been coming to the conclusion that if you get far enough into studying any subject you will eventually run into a situation where it's nearly impossible to agree on a definition of a fundamental term. People make definitions and humans are inherently constrained by the knowledge at their disposal, the limits of the language they're speaking, and their ability to get others to agree with them.

My personal favorite examples from anthropology are the definitions of human biological sexes and gender. We talk about how it's impossible to define "woman" in a way that excludes all trans women while including all cis women, but we rarely talk about how it's actually equally (if not more) difficult to define "female" in a way that is biologically meaningful.

Partly because human biological sexes occur on such a gradual spectrum and are controlled by so many factors (there is no single characteristic that can be used to draw a distinct line between males and females in humans. Not chromosomes, not hormones, not a single phenotype, nothing. They're not biologically discrete types, so any line we draw is inherently arbitrary), and partly because we are unable to separate our cultural background from how we study sex.

Cultural beliefs influence what questions we even think to ask about bio sex, the language and models we use (there's a reason sperm are anthropomorphized with active or violent terms typically associated with masculinity, while egg cells are described with more passive adjectives and metaphors—which may have actively hindered research since it seems the egg plays a more active role in "choosing" which sperm is accepted during fertilization), and the conclusions we draw from the data we observe.

And that's all before we consider how cultural factors influence our physical biology. Nurture can change nature. If we go with a phenotypic or hormonal definition of bio sex, this is pretty obvious. Under these definitions, we can literally and intentionally change our biological sex through cultural practices like hrt, cosmetic surgery, or do so even incidentally or accidentally, such as a side effect of medical interventions. We also know behaviors like breastfeeding affect the different hormones related to biological sex (not just estrogen and testosterone btw). And there's a documented association between childhood sexual abuse and early pubertal onset, and while I'm not well-read enough on that specifically to say if this is a causal association, if so, that would be another way our biological sex is influenced by our cultural environment.

Yes, yes, YES! Starting a new post, because this sums up so many of my frustrations with fan crit. Like, Animorphs clumsily attempts to tackle AIDS and slavery reparations and environmentalism and disability justice, and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. But at least it tries. AniTV strips all of that out in favor of a far blander "yeerks bad, humans good, we ignore race here" story.

There's this fallacy, where it's easier to criticize a failed attempt than it is a total lack of trying. In the Heights (2021) got smacked up, down, and sideways by critics and fans for its failure to include more dark-skinned characters; meanwhile A Quiet Place II (2021), Venom II (2021), Free Guy (2021), and Black Widow (2021) get no such critiques because they each include Exactly One Black Actor. Scholomance gets review-bombed for "fake" "forced" "diversity" (X) for featuring kids from all over the world, while Mortal Instruments gets a total lack of criticism for its cast having Exactly One Asian Guy (who is half-white).

I vividly recall a media professor ca. 2013 mansplaining to me that, actually, Orange is the New Black is sexist because it shows male characters having power over female ones, and there's no onscreen sex between the Black lesbians. Somehow he didn't feel the need to say this about Breaking Bad, Supernatural, Peaky Blinders, or any other series that went entire YEARS without passing the Bechdel test. No wonder TV shows have again embraced colorblind racism.