Totally been Bea this whole time

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

a. She’s 5′ 11″ and can never find pants long enough for her legs or shirts long enough for her arms.

b. She hates synthetic fibers as much as I do and it’s difficult to find natural fiber clothes that aren’t made of cotton

c. She’s a biologist and would physically fistfight microplastics if given half a chance

So her gift from mom and dad for her birthday was a sewing machine. Not a super expensive one but a good solid serviceable one.

And recently she asked “So where do I GET wool or linen and thread that isn’t polyester” and mom was like ‘go ask your sister’

“Bets, u know I’m a 15th degree blackbelt of buying shit on the internet”

cotton and Silk thread; https://redrockthreads.com/

Linen thread and wool fabric; https://burnleyandtrowbridge.com/ (they’ve got wool stuffs and worsted wool fabric for $15 a yard! I just got three yards of navy worsted wool I’m making a constellation winter skirt from)

More linen thread and wool; https://wmboothdraper.com/ (just ordered wool broadcloth to make a coat)

Silk fabric (THE best place to get silk lining fabrics and raw silk fabric):https://www.dharmatrading.com/

A varying assortment of wool and silk and cotton and even some leather, use coupon code  spring2020 for 50% off your full order, worked yesterday when I bought some stuff there; https://metrotextilesnyc.com/

The Linen Lab has a variety of weaves, weights, and colors available

And this store is in Canada if you need to avoid the insane markup from the US right now-

what do they even think a fortification is for???

what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????

if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it's just you punching people that's one thing. or even if it's you and five guys who've decided they like how you roll!

but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don't know what you're doing. that's not okay.

it's not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.

when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn't have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn't want and weren't competent to handle, without support.

or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.

even if they win! i don't want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there's triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!

For example, in the American Civil War, the tactics used of soldiers, marching into open fueled, and exchanging musket fire was not all that different than the tactics of the American revolution a little under 100 years prior. However, the rifles that infantry men were armed with were significantly more accurate. As a result, casualties, both in terms of lives lost, and soldiers, injured were horrific.

The concept of trench warfare in World War I was not all that different from wars, fought all over the continent in the century prior, and were designed to try and curb advantages of cavalry. But again, of mortars, more accurate, rifles, and chemical warfare meant that charging trenches resulted in truly grotesque numbers of casualties.

There is certainly evidence that World War I era generals were fairly callous when it came to casualty figures. They were more interested in territory gained. And it mattered very little how many lives that cost since soldiers were replaceable.

I agree that there should be some narrative coherence when protagonist squander advantages due to bad tactics, but when you look at actual history, it’s very clear that even if there are “good guys“ and “bad guys“ in war, there’s also just a lot of waste. That doesn’t make for a very sexy narrative, but it’s the nature of the beast. Militaries in particular are conservative institutions slow to change. you do things a certain way because that is the way they are done. That will always get people killed. But that’s also excepted as the way things are done.

At the end of the day, I’m just not sure there is a good way to organize two groups of people trying to kill each other.

thereby creating major ruptures in the narrative logic and characterization for anyone who knows (for example) what the point of a wall is.

this is a writing complaint, about failure to adequately situate motive within character and maintain internal consistency.

i'm not going to ask every piece of fiction that wants to have swords in it to engage in a meditation on the nature of conflict. that sounds boring, and also like it's asking too much of people. i'm aiming way lower here.

Changes in this part of the brain were previously used to previously used to argue that women are the ideal primary caretakers of children in all cases. And apparently, it’s false. The reason they found these changes in women was that women were already the primary caretaker in almost all cases, not because there’s something inherent to women that makes them better parents.

There he is

In undergrad, especially at BYU, my depression was like…BAD bad. Like not showering or eating or getting out of bed or talking to people or turning on the lights bad. It’s partially because I had PTSD that was untreated, partially because I was getting overstimulated a lot and didn’t know it, and partially because I was burned out. My normally mild depression was SEVERE and my mom saw it one summer and took me to a dog shelter and got me a dog.

Her name was Madi, she was half-Malinois and half-Chow Chow. Curly tail, purple tongue, looked like a coyote had the night of his life with a German Shepherd, LOTS of sass, and about 7 teeth.

She was a grumpy old lady when I got her, but she was MY grumpy old lady and I was HER confused lazy mama and she LOVED me. I was the only person she loved - even my mom, who even on a bad day can be described as an animal whisperer, couldn’t get her to so much as eat treats from her. She was a weird, silly dog: she had arthritis, so she needed gabapentin, so she slept a lot during the day. She had basically no teeth but wouldn’t eat wet food, so we had to get her the only kibble she’d eat (it was blessedly cheap) and get it wet, and then MAYBE! JUST MAYBE! She’d eat some.

She was high strung and had some issues with appetite on-top of that because her arthritis diminished her appetite, so sometimes she’d go a whole day or two without eating. When she got like that, she’d only eat if I gave her treats or mixed her kibblemush with cottage cheese or unsalted butter, and then fed it to her by hand. There was also a trick I had where I would take her for a walk and sprinkle treats and kibbles into a bush she was smelling and she’d be like “HAHA! See, mama, it is a kibblebush! I have no need for your stinky kibbles, nature provides!”

Despite being sleepy during the day, and not always having much of an appetite, she ALWAYS wanted to walk. I’d take her for a minimum of two miles a day. That was actually a huge boon to me. Every morning at about 6:30 she’d wake me up and I’d have to look her in her big wet brown eyes and decide if I wanted the depression to win (she poops on my rug) or if I wanted us to win (I get out of bed and take her for a walk) and no matter how much I hated myself I couldn’t bring myself to do that to her, so I’d get outta bed and we’d go for a walk and she’d poop somewhere cool and unique, like grass, or a leaf, or someone’s flowers, and not on my rug.

So our symbiotic relationship - she gets me out of bed, I trick her into eating enough food to live, was working. Then I moved from Provo, UT, with forests and greenery, to Arizona, where the pavement gets to 175°F at times, and she was severely annoyed with me. She wouldn’t wear the little doggy booties so I’d have to take her for walks in the early morning or late night most of the year, but around October it would be chilly enough for an afternoon walky and she LOVED those. Sometimes during the summer I’d take her on an afternoon walky to an irrigated field or a dog park with lots of shade trees so she could walk, and during the school year and the peaks of the summer we explored so many of the little alleyways and secret areas of ASU campus since they almost always had shady sidewalks and sprinklers running somewhere.

But her absolute FAVORITE place was this little alleyway behind the Howie’s Pizza just off ASU Campus. She loved it because there were always lots of smells, because it was extremely well-shaded so even in the peak of summer we could take a short walk over that way without risking her little peets, and because the dumpsters behind the pizza place, the shawarma place, the Chinese place, and the Mexican place, were all greasy as hell. That by itself wasn’t much to interest her tbh - she couldn’t reach the garbage and wasn’t super food motivated besides that, but she had two joys in life besides walkies and me and that was chasing animals and biting them. And those dumpsters were full of food trash, which drew in pigeons, and then those pigeons got so greasy from the food trash that they’d get too slow to fly away from her, so even when her arthritis was bad she could catch a pigeon.

Because she had no teeth, she could not KILL the pigeons, but she could kinda suck on them a little before I’d take it out of her mouth and she loved the thrill of the hunt.

But one day - one fucking crazy-ass day, it’s October so we’re walking at like 11 AM and she’s not burning her little peets so she’s thriving already AND on our way home we walk past the alleyway AND she catches a pigeon AND she was sucking on it but this pigeon had looked kinda fucked up before she caught it and I was worried. So I take it from her mouth and sure enough - she caught it so damn easy because its wing was totally busted. It couldn’t fly.

If this were anyone else, they probably would have thought to take the bird to a vet, but I was sleep-deprived (depression kept me up and made my sleep less satisfying), bedraggled (uncombed tgirl egg hair, wearing flip flops, in my jammy pants), and raised by cowboys, so I was like: I know what to do! Big Papa and Grandpapa Yeehaw taught me! End the animal’s suffering by wringing it’s neck! (I know, I know, so gross and violent, I’m sorry, I know better now). So I drop Madi’s leash for a sec, check the opening to the alleyway, see there’s nobody about to be traumatized by this, so I look back down, apologize to the pigeon and tell him he’s gonna be somewhere happier soon, and then wring his neck.

Important to this is that the only other time I had done this was when I was 12 and had teeny fucking noodle arms and was hunting and I had to put my whole soul into the act. But now I was a depressed 23-year-old with like three times as much strength. So when I put the entirety of my strength into this I just popped the pigeon’s head off (ew ew ew ew ew I know I know I know I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry) and in the time I took to prepare myself some grad student had walked into the line of sight of all of this.

So I look up and make immediate eye contact with this complete stranger - he’s on a phone call, or he was, but now he’s making direct eye contact with a disheveled human mess and her equally disheveled insane toothless hound and he just throws his hands up in surrender, says something about not telling anyone what he saw, and then breaks out at a full sprint, leaving me holding a pigeon’s head and my dog looking at me like “good job mama we did it!” and me feeling so dirty I had to wash my hands like four times and then take a shower and then take another shower and then cry.

Anyways - Madi lived to the ripe old age of about 11-12 before she died almost exactly a month before I started grad school. I miss her still - a lot tbh, she was such a funny beast. She was old and had lots of little lipomas so I called her my grumpy pickle because she was often grumpy and had the texture of a pickle. She would holler at me any time she couldn’t see me, which included like…if she walked out of the room herself, sometimes.

She didn’t like swimming, but loved what we called our “wet belly time” where I’d take her to irrigated fields or orange groves and she’d just kinda crawl around in the shallow water on her belly because she loved having a wet belly. She also preferred drinking from puddles, so sometimes I’d take her along the canals and she’d drink so much water she’d pee like 8 times on the walk back home.

Sometimes in the winter she’d act all haughty and huffy when I’d invite her to snuggle me in bed - like “No, mama, I have my own bed and am a big brave wolf” and then she’d lay down and be like “Oh heck no mama the ground is cold I snuggle you” and then worm her way under my blankets. Also, Every morning when she woke up her tongue was flopping out of her mouth because her teeth were mostly gone and she couldn’t keep it in.

She liked laying on her back but couldn’t balance super good so she’d lay on her back and bite her foot to hold the position. She loved car rides and stuff with me and she was always happy to spent time with me. My mom had a kind of thick ivy called “wedelia” that she LOVED because we grew up on a street built over an old orange grove, and orange groves attract giant rats, and she could smell those rats in the wedelia, and she loved feeling like a hunter. She also liked it because it was thick enough and soft enough that she could lay down in it without having to bend her sore joints by just kinda toppling over into it, which allowed her to then squirm and wriggle as much as she wanted without having to bend her knees too much. Plus one time she actually killed a rat in the wedelia and my mom was so proud of her she gave her a greenie after I’d already given her a greenie to wash the smell out of her mouth so she got TWO greenies even if she didn’t eat the one my mom gave her until my mom handed it to me.

She stayed by my side until the very end, and she died two days before I got FFS which made the whole experience really wild for me emotionally. She was such a good dog and I miss her all the time.

She was such a sweet, weird beast, and the way she loved me and the way I loved her really helped make my depression more manageable. I’m gonna include a bunch of pictures of her for y’all and because I love her. FWIW the pigeon she’s got in her mouth was totally unharmed - she ended up letting him fly away about 8 seconds after I took the picture, she just wanted to suck on his greasy feathers a little.

My sister took more photos of my dress. I am very happy with how this turned out :)))))

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

SIKE

THEY'RE GAY

And they're not some rare exception to the rule, either!!!

About 25% of black swan couples consist of two swans of the same sex (typically, two males).

These couples will court each other, build a nest, and raise their young together in a more-or-less committed monogamous relationship.

In fact, these same-sex couples have a high success rate of 80% when raising their young to adulthood, as opposed to the 30% of their heterosexual counterparts! Two big buff papa swans are better than one when it comes to stomping on invaders of nesting territory.

"But," I hear you say, "where do their baby floofballs come from? Does mpreg exist among black swans?"

Alas, no, but there is a very elegant solution to this. The swan couple may simply temporarily associate themselves with a female swan.

Afterwards, the female swan deposits their eggs and swims off free to live her single girlie life if she wishes (or, find a boyfriend. Preferably one who isn't already committed to another boyfriend.)

So whenever someone commits the naturalistic fallacy "homosexuality bad because unnatural >:(" I like to point out not only their glaring illogicality, but also, respectfully, there is homosexuality happening in the local lake right now.

paramedic: hi, I'm Allan

me: you told me. and your colleague is Jim, and the man who found me is Peter. guess my short-term memory is okay

me: well my feet are still freezing but it's okay, I know you need to focus on getting my core temperature up first