Robin :)

if you happen to know what common greek and latin roots mean you can spot someone mistranslating them, which comes in handy very often

normal sounding words are almost never coined as acronyms. if someone claims something is an acronym you should literally always fact check it

sometimes the story presented by a proposed etymology falls apart if you like. think about it. why would a hypothetical continent be named after an animal speculated to not live there? why would an idiom's original form be something that very obviously sounds like something you'd say as a comeback to the version everyone already knows?

https://www.tumblr.com/betweenlands/824227915400200192/im-not-trying-to-be-offensive-but-what-part-of

^ this post breaks down why they think the design is racist and they said they studied the field too iirc? I’m very tired, got a headache and my mind fuzzy. I think they’ve also made other posts too about the subject. Read to ur hearts content and come to ur own conclusions. Genuinely sorry people are being so rude to you instead of linking a post explaining things.

okay thank you! sorry i decided to take a break from this website because i was incredibly stressed out from all the fire i took up yesterday

finally someone has. actually sent me a post breaking down why they think it's racist and orientalist. this is a well-thought out post with lots of sources and i agree now that it's definitely poor-taste and inspired by orientalist trains of thought, and the design does need to be changed. i don't think it was intentional, i think he was just combining a lot of high-fantasy type tropes and it blended together into a poor design... thankfully it is the next day and it appears scott has already apologized and is changing/re-touching the design.

everyone if you haven't read it i would suggest reading this post, it includes sources and does a really good break down on the outfits roots in orientalism that i had been asking for yesterday and it does genuinely make a lot of sense

i still have a problem, though, in that i think people assumed it was immediately deliberate and malevolent. everyone has biases and everyone has internalized racism they need to unpack, it's not always "i'm going to wake up and be racist." the amount of people i saw who wrote scott off as a raging racist and that he'd never take the criticism well and change his design, and people who i Know don't like scott taking the opportunity to dog on him (all i saw of people calling it racist was people that when i went through their blogs they had no reasoning attached and had evidence of not liking scott already, which is why i assumed it was manufactured), as well as people using the opportunity to spread hate and harassment to people who disagreed politely

(i.e. me. and i have changed my mind! that design IS orientalist! if someone had explained it to me earlier instead of just sending me nasty stuff....)

i also have a problem that while i saw a lot of incendiary and angry people everywhere, i didn't really see any reasoning or explanations despite going looking for them. i think when discussing racism, there's a fine line between productive discussions meant to inform or change the circumstances of people, and between anger. of course, people are allowed to be angry about racism, but a lot of the people i saw that were angry seemed to not be affected by orientalism themselves (i.e. not asian or arabic or what have you). plus i think someone probably should have made a larger effort to let content creators know instead of just being angry on tumblr and writing the whole smp off as doomed i'm going to be real

it's a new day though! and i am excited scott seems to have actually listened to people calling it racist and is re-vamping the design from what i've heard. i'm sad that people were using the discussion of orientalism to make dissertations on why scott is a horrible person because i feel like it really took away from the point of orientalism and i still feel like Certain people diluted the word and discussion away from what it should have been as an excuse to be racist (i.e. that person that called his outfit asianified and said his hair looked like an anime boy)

There is no reason you could give to explain why there are no BIPOC creators on that server—especially when that is a demographic which has a disproportionately smaller following—which is not racist. There is no excuse. If you have an SMP that is meant to uplift small creators, but nearly every single player is white, you have done something incredibly wrong and legitimately racist.

Black and Brown content creators are, on average, much smaller than white content creators. People like to cite that as the reason that their SMP doesn't have any representation: they just didn't know of any creators to invite, or creators who were large enough to be on their SMP, or creators who would fit the vibe of their server. That is an already incredibly flimsy and racist excuse, but Lunar Phase? An SMP with a cast of entirely small creators? An SMP with the purpose of uplifting and highlighting small creators in the MCYT community? An SMP with an absolutely massive cast? There is not a single excuse for the sickening lack of racial representation on the server.

I don't care if it was on accident. That's a mistake that should never have had the chance to be made, and the fact that it was? The fact that nobody looked at the cast list and thought "Hey, there aren't any non-white people here, we should fix that"? The fact that an SMP of SIXTY FOUR WHITE-LISTED PEOPLE has TWO non-white creators, and nobody batted an eye? That is racist. Not noticing the lack of Brown and Black people, viewing white as the "default" state of people (subconsciously or not), being anything but actively anti-racist? That is racist.

The only two non-white creators on Lunar Phase are, to my knowledge, TheM1G and LeonSBU. There are no Black creators. There are no dark-skinned or tan-skinned Minecraft skins being used by any of the cast. That is genuinely pathetic.

The belated continuation of the fanciful brooms collection. Instead of more flora brooms, I chose to explore fauna brooms~

I actually drew this months back but completely forgot about it ahaha

I still have dozens of broom ideas thanks to everyone's suggestions and I'll be working on those as inspiration strikes!