the sun is as theoretical as clouds

messed up that you can literally be better and nicer in every way and the adventuring party will still be like "waaa its a shapeshifter waaaa the real whatstheirface would never say that" like ok maybe i am a picture perfect copy of your friend that i imprisoned beneath the earth and replaced when you werent looking. so what. maybe they were a cunt. maybe i thought youd appreciate an improved version of your friend. with awesome eldritch tendrils.

The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.

I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widder’s work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals can’t perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And that’s how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!

unless its egregious, i'm not embarrassed to be fooled by ai. "oh i got lied to via something made by the Lying Machine the machine we made to Lie really well" like it's gonna happen it's no egg on your face. just be chill about it

don't get me wrong. it's always devastating always humbling. no one wants to fall for the lying machine it just sounds bad. but you can't dwell

the idea that a sex scene in fiction is fundamentally useless/simply for audience titillation UNLESS they’re fucking infodumping exposition while they bone or something is so funny and myopic to me. like, you really genuinely believe for real that there is NOTHING to be gained about your understanding of a story or characters simply from how they approach and engage in sex? really for real?

have you reopened the wound? will you reopen the wound? when will you reopen the wound?

the siren call of the itchy scab

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

often you will see things online where you just have to be like "what a strange thing to say" or "i don't think that's true :)" to yourself and try to move on or you will lose your mind

commenting under art of a thin character "oh they look like they give the most dogshit hugs. like being embraced by a wet skeleton"

there's this weird thing people fall into online a lot, where people assume that if the [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged then people will, naturally, do [perceived-to-be-superior] version of [activity] instead. When really it's just as (or more) likely that if [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged people just won't do it at all.

audiobook listeners are not necessarily people who would otherwise do a lot of traditional reading if audiobooks did not exist, many are people who simply would experience zero books. Booktok romance readers would not necessarily be reading the classics if booktok did not exist, many of them would simply not read. Fanfiction writers would not necessarily be novelists if fanfic wasn't an option, many would just be people who didn't write. You know?

passing in public makes me feel like white shrek