#essay post

The treatment of the skaa vs the nobility by the narrative.

For me, this problem begins when Vin confronts Elend about how ruthlessly the nobility abuse the skaa, including the sanctioned rape and subsequent murder of skaa women. Part of Elend's response is that only about a third of nobility actually treat the skaa so terribly... And this is taken at face value and I guess is supposed to be fact, despite Elend not actually being in a position to know if this is true or not. Even if this was true, every member of the nobility who allows the slavery to continue is still complicit. There do seem to be some nobles who try to make their plantations better, but they are rare and only one is actually mentioned in the beginning. Almost every noble grabbing power after the god-emperor is killed tries to continue the skaa slavery.

The second part is when Elend tries to claim a class solidarity between the skaa and the nobility and how they need to stand together against the emperor... It's a... Nice platitude, but the nobility being manipulated with access to power and the skaa being made a slave race to both the emperor and the nobility and violently put back into place by both and being given horrific abuse with constant beatings... Aren't exactly equitable. Plus the whole "the nobility keeps shoving the skaa back into slavery" thing after the emperor was killed.

Now, there is a nuanced discussion to be had about what it would be like for your people to be enslaved longer than written memory only to be throw into chaos and extreme hardship immediately after escaping slavery, but that's not my problem.

The Hero of Ages book has an excellent example of my problem as there are two stable cities that Elend needs to either amicably ally with or lean on into an alliance. One is ruled by the nobleman turned priest Yomen and the other is ruled by the skaa named Quellion.

Yomen is a priest of the dead emperor who believes his priesthood gives him a divine right to rule the city after he ousted the previous nobleman ruler (who was also irresponsible as a leader). After attaining leadership, he immediately reinstated the exact power structure of the fallen empire with the nobles in charge and the skaa once again enslaved (and, as is directly addressed, still being violently abused). He allows the nobility to throw lavish balls as the world falls apart and makes sure to attend each one, not dissimilar in vibe to the Masque of the Red Death by Poe. He refuses to enter an alliance with Elend because Elend is somewhat hypocritical and wasn't chosen by the dead emperor.

Quellion took over the city after Elend's father left to conquer Elend's city (Elend's father is confirmed to be part of the third who horrifically abused the skaa, taking Elend to a skaa sex worker as a young teenager and killing her immediately after she did her job). He and the other skaa killed every noble within the city. Quellion continues on to then target anyone who had a noble parent and has a dedicated team to find anyone with recent noble ancestry. He proclaims the special nobleman magic (allomancy) to have been a tool of oppression. Secretly, he is an allomancer himself and employs other allomancers. However, the skaa seem to be generally free otherwise and the city is currently stable.

Yomen and Quellion are both oppressive leaders... However, one is called a good and reasonable man while the other is called a maniac and constantly compared negatively to the dead emperor. Guess which one is the maniac! No, it's not the religious zealot of the dead god-emperor who violently enforces slavery and encourages balls as the world falls into ruin, silly billy! It's the slave risen to prominence who hates the nobility that abused them for literally 1000 years!

Elend is one of the two only nobleman who's actually established as sympathetic at all (the other being Breeze whose family fell and he ended up working together with skaa), talking about the skaa like actual people and actively aiming for a better world with things like democracy. Pretty much every other nobleman is complacent and don't really care to change the status quo or either actively enforces the status quo. Again, the status quo is that the nobility are the only ones who are actually people with the skaa and the Terris their slaves. Some of the other noble characters are enjoyable or amusing to read, but, again, are still broadly fine with the whole slavery thing the first book's plot revolved around ending and so aren't really sympathetic characters.

This sentiment comes up in drafting as well, where it might feel like you should 'rush' through the sketch to get to the 'good part' of rendering (the part that the viewer will actually see) a weak foundation can lead to a shoddy end result. Instead you should measure twice and cut once - spend more time in the sketch stage, and you'll have to spend less time interpreting rushed sketches or undoing mistakes in the rendering stage.

I wish I could say I follow this advice, but alas, I am a chronic rusher. It's a work in progress :')

But the immediate thing that came to mind upon re-reading that passage was our current climate surrounding AI art. The pervasive philosophy underlining the growing prevalence of generative AI and ChatGPT is that it 'saves time'. That it removes all the "busy work" and creates finished products within seconds that would take a human being days or weeks or months or even years to complete.

And yet, despite so many companies and AI tech bros jumping at the chance to believe this theory, committing to gutting their human teams in favor of robots, we're now seeing those same companies losing valuable assets - data, money, time - and scrambling to hire humans who can fix the problems caused by what they assumed would save them time and money.

It didn't, and if anything, it had the opposite effect - their lack of planning and foresight cost them more time and money than if they had just invested it properly in the first place into the more reliable systems that had been proven to work for decades. Or, at the very least, it just didn't save them as much time and money as they anticipated, because as it turns out, AI isn't a magic wand, and it does frequently require supervision and moderating to ensure it doesn't spit out the wrong information.

I think this all goes to show that the 'long short cut' method is one that's still relevant and yet has been largely forgotten in favor of our modern fast-paced world that's chasing the dragon of instant gratification.

The value of art has always hinged on the consumer, but now it's to such a degree that we've decided to cut out the artist entirely, instead giving generative AI and ChatGPT to the consumer so they can get what they want immediately, regardless of whether it's even usable or high-quality.

But the Disney renaissance films that we look back on so fondly as consumers would not have existed without the time and effort put into them.

The Mona Lisa was not painted in seconds, but rather several years of painstaking process.

The process is the result.

If you don't want to do lots of work, what are you doing in art?

When the show ended I came to a conclusion that with this show it portrays people having trauma, dealing with trauma, and how trauma can lead to mental troubles.

Kinger- memory suppression from the traumatic experience of dealing with friends abstracting.

Ragatha- trouble with expressing emotions from dealing with an abusive parent who probably didn't let her express her opions or emotions without getting backlash from it.

Gangle- anxiety in some form, possibly social as they tend to have had a hard time connecting with people. Could be due to social isolation growing up.

Zooble- body dismorphia and possibly having some sort of identity crisis, since they don't feel correct in their body.

Jax- manipulation and abuse from parent.

(which could lead to some sort of personality disorder, now this is mostly a hunch of some sort for how in some flashbacks I could sense that maybe Jax has a personality disorder (PD) of some sort, for how he acted towards his friends. It mostly has to do with him putting on a face and acting as fake type version of himself. Also the scene with the different Jaxs could hint a PD, but it's a hunch and I'm not to sure, so if anyone has any input or has some sort PD I would like to know if Jax has traits of someone with a PD)

Now with pomni she is the one who probably doesn't have any issues, but more as someone to help the rest of the cast.

Kinger- figuring out a way to get memories back in some way. As someone who deals with memory suppression from trauma for me it was pictures, for kinger it was darkness and with that darkness it helped with him dealing with over stimulation in some way. Which lead to him regaining memories.

Ragatha- helped with becoming more as her true self as in the one episode where pomni could see how ragatha was not showing her true self and pommi gave her a wake up call.

Gangle- I would say it was more zooble, but pomni still helped. Now with zooble it was more of how gangle could find the one person they can feel comfortable with, which then leads them to be more open with the rest of the gang.

Zooble- with the help of pomnis influence on the others, zooble relised that they could help gangle be more open as those two are very close to each other. Also with pomni in the gun episode zooble embraced their parts more for how pomni and Jax were chasing them. Which made it seem like pomni was more of indirect help instead of direct help.

Now with Jax it leads into how the characters dealt with their trauma. While the rest of the cast were being helped by pomni to deal with trauma, Jax is an accurate portrayal of how some people don't want to admit they have trauma or issues. Which can happen to some people and I think it's a way for them to not remember the terrible things in their past, but that is the way of handling trauma in a toxic way.

To put a difference in dealing with trauma in a toxic vs non toxic way im gonna use Jax and ragatha as examples:

Ragatha (non-toxic):

- talks to someone about what is going on with them

- being more open with other about what they have been through

- admit what has happened to them and tries to become a better person

- does not hold onto past traumas to the point it affects their life. Ie having a past experience and tries not to remind themself of what happened, but instead admit what happened and move on to improve themself

- allows themself to do things or act in a way that their abuser would have punish them for. Becoming their own person.

- when someone points out some of their behavior they try to improve on what they did wrong.

Jax (toxic):

- keeps their trauma a secret

- doesn't talk it out with someone

- when asked what's wrong they don't express what they are feeling

- reminds themself and sort of blames themself for their trauma (victum blaming)

- does not try to improve with themself to become better and holds onto their trauma closely

- when given help they deny the help or acts like they don't need help which leads to defensiveness

- when they allow themself to be or do something that they want they revert to becoming what their abuser wanted them to be. Not allowing themself to be their own person.

A language of two speakers, untranslatable by design, before which the most faithful act left to the rest of us is to mistranslate knowingly and tenderly, with the distance confessed.

Word count — 442 words

What the fuck is this, Nell ? — Another autotheory and lyric essay. Addressed to you and everyone else. basically about minding your own business, by someone constitutionally incapable of it.

Note — I love lyric essays because of the syntaxes, the constitutive metaphor(s). That I may proceed by accumulation and image-logic as much as by inference. Meanings. Love-imbued in creation through deliberation. It begins in lived relation and theorizes outward from the situated experience.

Human cannibalism can cause neurological disorders in the consumer when they eat human flesh (muscle and organs) for a prolonged period of time, which is one of the MANY reasons cannibalism is outlawed, not to mention the obvious taboo of eating another human being.

Of course, there are a few exceptions, as with any taboo action, such as murder. And, of course, not all of these exceptions are universally accepted as exceptions, especially in the consumers' own conscious making them feel guilty.

The more obvious exception is in a life or death situation. Of course, this has many sub-exceptions of sub-exceptions, such as if the consumed gave permission to the consumer to eat them and/or the consumer killed the consumed to stay alive, but that would take too long to list out.

Although this is a common, much more common than the average person may think, occurrence, there is still much debate on whether or not human cannibalism for survival is understandable and an exception to the mass cannibalism taboo.

A good, for the lack of better words, example of survival cannibalism is the Andes Plane Crash of 1972. In this case, the few surviving passengers resorted to survival cannibalism only on their dead peers and were even remorseful about it.

In their minds, the only way to truly be free of the guilt of cannibalism, despite being on the brink of starvation, was to ask for consent. Without their dead peers to ask for consent, they turned to their God, asking for the consent to partake in survival cannibalism.

Whether or not survival cannibalism is morally aloud differs from person to person, but, at the end of the day, only one question could truly determine what a person's real, unbiased opinion on survival cannibalism is.

HOW TO IDENTIFY RELATIONSHIPS

Because ya’ll apparently need a refresher and I am happy to help 😙

All definitions in this post are courtesy of our lord and savior, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

First, let’s start with a few key words and their definitions.

Platonic (adjective) - of, relating to, or being a relationship marked by the absence of romance or sex.

Romantic (adjective) - of, relating to, or involving love between two people.

Sexual (adjective) - of, relating to, or associated with sex [or the sexes].

The three words above are not synonyms (they are not interchangeable—you cannot use one in substitution of another).

It is important to note that while the word ‘romantic’ itself is not defined as ‘a relationship marked by the inclusion of sex’, it is, like the word ‘sexual’, still an antonym (opposite) of the word ‘platonic’.

Based off these definitions, we know the following facts respectively to be true:

Fact 1 - Relationships that include sexual activities cannot be classified as platonic.

Fact 2 - Romantic relationships can include sex but do not have to in order to be defined as a romantic relationship.

Fact 3 - A sexual relationship cannot be platonic; it can be further described as romantic but is not automatically romantic by itself.

Now, lets take a look at the definition for the word ‘friend’.

Friend (noun) - person who has a strong liking for and trust in another.

Please note that nowhere in the definition above does it specify the type of relationship.

The word ‘friend’ is a noun, which is a person, place, or thing. You will notice that the definitions of ‘platonic’, ‘romantic’ and ‘sexual’ all state that they are adjectives, which are words that can be attached to a noun to further describe it.

According to these rules, each of the different scenarios listed below are all correct.

Person A and person B are friends. They are not dating and they do not have sex with each other. They are not in a sexual or romantic relationship. They are in a platonic relationship.

Person C and person D are acquaintances. They are not dating and they do not have sex with each other. They are not in a romantic or sexual relationship. Their relationship with each other is platonic.

Person E and person F are friends. They are dating and they do not have sex with each other. They are not in a platonic or sexual relationship. They are in a romantic relationship.

Person G and person H are friends. They are dating have sex with each other. They are not in a platonic relationship. They are in a sexual and romantic relationship.

Person I and person J are friends. They are not dating and they have sex with each other. They are not in a platonic or romantic relationship. They are in a sexual relationship.

Person K and person L are acquaintances. They are not dating and they have sex with each other. They are not in a platonic or romantic relationship. They are in a sexual relationship.

Next, let’s take a look at the definition for the word ‘family’.

Family (noun) - 1: a group of persons of common ancestry; 2: a group of individuals living under one roof; 3: a group of people united by certain convictions or a common affiliation

As seen above, the word ‘family’ has a few different definitions: one refers to blood relations, while the second refers to a household. The third refers to the fellowship and choice of the people involved in the relationship.

It is important to note here that these definitions do not contradict each other. They can be taken in harmony or as individual definitions.

Like the word ‘friend’, the word ‘family’ is a noun, meaning that it can be modified or further defined by an adjective.

Platonic, romantic, and sexual are all adjectives we learned earlier. However, there is another adjective we can add to this list:

Familial (adjective) - of, relating to, or suggestive of a family.

So, we actually have another type of relationship to add to our repertoire here: familial relationships.

It’s important to note here that the word ‘familial’ is not considered an antonym to any of our other three adjectives. In fact, based on context, it can be used synonymously with any of them.

Let’s take a closer look at some contextual examples, then.

Per the definition of the word ‘family’, the different scenarios listed below are all correct.

(In Harmony)

Person M and person N are roommates and cousins that share the same grandparents. They are family (relation) because they are related by common ancestry (grandparents) and they are family (household) because they live under the same roof.

(Individual)

Person O and person P are siblings. One of them lives in the east and the other lives in the north. They are family (relation) because they are related by common ancestry (parents).

Person Q and person R are roommates who are not related. They are dating each other. They are family (household) because they live together.

Person S and person T are roommates who are not related. They see each other as siblings. They are family (household) because they live together.*

Person U and person V are roommates who are not related. They are not dating each other and don’t see each other as siblings. They are family (household) because they live together.*

Person W and person X are adopted siblings. While they are not related by blood, they are family(relation) because they share parents.

*The validity of the scenario involving persons U & V is based on the context of their relationship with each other. It is equally true that two people sharing the same roof may not consider each other as family in the emotional sense, but are still considered as a ‘family’ (which, in this specific case, is being used as a synonym of ‘household’).

Below are some other scenarios that fall under the 3rd definition of the word ‘family’— ‘a group of people united by certain convictions or a common affiliation.’

Person Y and person Z are not related and they do not live together. They see each other as siblings. They are family(fellowship) based off their platonic relationship and choice.

^Alternatively: Person 1 and Person 2 are not related, are not dating, do not live together, and do not see each other as siblings. They are still family(fellowship) due to their platonic relationship and choice.

Having examined the different definitions of the word ‘family,’ we know the following facts respectively to be true:

Fact 1 - two people who are considered siblings, parent and child, or other familial relationship (by blood, by law, or by emotional attachment) can be defined as being family.

Fact 2 - two people who have a romantic relationship can be defined as being family.

Fact 3 - two people who have a platonic relationship but not a familial relationship can be defined as being family.

In conclusion: stop mislabeling relationships as ‘sibling coded”/“parent-child coded” and making up fake rules about what relationships are ‘allowed’ between the fictional characters in the fictional media about fictional events that are not real and didn’t actually happen.

She is not the ‘mom’ of the found family, she’s a member of the group who just cares about her friends.

He is not her brother, he is her non-familial friend and their relationship is platonic.

That’s not ‘basically his dad’, they’re in the same friend group and one is slightly older/taller than the other.

It’s a found family but that JUST means that it’s a group of friends who care about each other. Thats it!

They aren’t siblings, they are not parent and child, they are not related, they’re friends. Maybe in the same found ‘family’ (aka FRIEND GROUP), sure. But they can date each other and it isn’t illegal or immoral or wrong or bad or a sin or what have you. Please touch grass.

One comment on her video about Dalmatians was "not everyone wants a Lab!" Sure! Not everyone wants a Lab. I don't want a Lab myself! But it's the question "why don't you want a Lab?" A lot of people new to dog ownership/unfamiliar with dogs expects every breed to be a Lab but in a different font. Not every breed acts like a Lab though. I would say most breeds don't. If you know someone looking for their very first dog and expects a cheery and playful dog that listens to commands and is eager to please, it would be incredibly irresponsible to suggest a Dachshund, Husky, English Mastiff, or Chow Chow. You'd point them to Labs or Goldens or maybe some toy breeds bred specifically for companionship like the Shih Tzu. The Dalmatian is not a Lab but in a different font, rather a dog historically bred for guardian work (and, from what I hear, incredibly velcro).

I am not unfamiliar with dogs, having grown up with them. Mostly Dachshunds. Also, I was close friends to someone with Great Danes and a family friend with Rottweilers (really good service dogs). I also am pretty realistic about my energy, so, when looking for my own dog as an adult, I knew the general idea of different breeds, what I wanted in a dog, and where some of my big lines were. I wanted a more independent and calm dog that was decently active rather than a more excitable dog (and shelter availability)... Of course, the dog I got crossed one of those lines because she's a hard-core undercover Husky mix, but I am very lucky in being able to step up my activity and there are some good trails near me. Turns out you can house a husky in an apartment if you spend most of the morning outdoors with them as it's actually less about what kind of domicile you house a husky in and more how much activities your husky gets (a lot of people underestimate how boring yards can be when you've been bred for hundreds or thousands of years to run with weights over long distances for multiple hours).

I absolutely would not recommend my dog to first time dog owners. Both halves of her mix, Shar Pei and Siberian Husky, are known for being very independent dogs and I've seen more than one trainer on social media say they don't enjoy working with these breeds. Put these two together and that's a dog that requires a lot of patience. The Husky is obviously better for someone with a little more experience and can handle a really active dog. The Shar Pei, on the other hand, requires a more knowledgeable eye for health issues (or, if buying, knowing how to find an actually good breeder to help avoid a lot of these health issues) along with this breed being more geared to guarding behavior, suspicious of strangers, not always dog friendly, and not a very cuddly dog (granted, with the horse coat, how much do you actually want to cuddle?). I've never had a dog so communicative about wanting space (which kinda teaches you to look for signs in other dogs). Should she have been my first dog as an adult? Eeeehhhh, probably not. If she hadn't been decently raised with good human socialization and okay-ish dog socialization, living with her would have been much more difficult. However, she was and life with her has turned out pretty great, if more time outside then I expected.