There is magic in the mundane

everybody here's my tiny crochet coelacanth <3

I mean full-on khaki-shorts-wearing, traversing-wilderness-with-nothin'-but-a-machete Adrian who yoinks snakes outta trees and pets swamp puppies and will unflinchingly dig around in elephant faeces for signs of a rare parasitic tapeworm if needed.

Oh, humans eat socially? No problem, Adrian has observed many many animals eat. Did you know that an obscure species of small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid also eats socially? Adrian can give you a not-so-short presentation on them.

Oh, the human has no external carapace and so its internal sounds are absurdly loud, wet and off-putting? No problem, Adrian was just conducting an expedition last month researching the incredible eridian animal, the Wet Loud Worm from the south-east region of Wet Loud Wormland. They're desensitised, it's fine.

Oh, Grace leaks often from many orifices and it can be a bit of a learning curve to get used to? No problem for Adrian, see Wet Loud Worm paragraph again!

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

chances are I can't. my body is that of a disabled Asian woman.

the facial markers of childhood on a white person- prominent monolid eyes, round faces without prominent cheekbones, clear, smooth skin devoid of wrinkles, lack of facial hair- are traits that many adults of Asian descent, many in their fifties and sixties even, have to an extent that several of my (adult, mind you) relatives and friends have been declared to be in their teens, or even to be preteens or 8-year-olds, by an algorithm that associated those features with childhood rather than ethnicity and lineage.

I can usually figure out how to look directly at a camera, if I try hard enough. but from what I've seen of Roblox's face verification process, it also needs you to move your eyes slowly from left to right so it can determine you're using live footage of a real person.

simple, right? wrong. I can't do that. I can kind of move my eyes a short distance(and it always hurts like hell, especially when I do it consciously), and I can change what part of my vision I'm paying attention to, but otherwise my only way to change what I'm looking at is to turn my entire head. and it clearly doesn't accept head-turning as "looking from left to right".

I don't have any other facial differences that might mess with the algorithm recognizing my face as a face- and that's a related problem that's already been documented by numerous people and organizations like Face Equality International.

Trans men's accounts of their struggles with poverty, from "Pathyways into Poverty: Lived Experiences Among LGBTQ People" by UCLA's Williams Institute

>no idea what a tumblr accent even is

i’m fat, intersex, and disabled. so many times if i hung out with someone, their outfit gets complimented but not mine (even if i that person literally picked out my outfit so its not a matter of me just not having a good fashion taste). so many times have people treated other people around me kind but their attitude changes immediately if they have the misfortune to interact with me. i don’t do anything to warant this besides looking different. i get treated like i’m not there or not human. it sucks.