Trix, she/her, ace, Australian, totally blind. I'm Christian but mind my own f**king business, and would rather live out my beliefs in ways that are kind and respectful. This blog is safe for anyone in the LGBTQ+ community who is not actively a dick to anyone else in the LGBTQ+ community. Yes, that means transphobes and aphobes and other such exclusionist types can fuck right off. Fandoms include, but are not limited to: Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh! DM/GX/5D's, Pokémon, TMNT 2003, Steven Universe, the Roddaverse (Rowan of Rin/Deltora Quest/related series), the Sevenwaters series/everything by Juliet Marillier, Star Trek: TNG/DS9/Voyager especially, fairy tales (yes that counts), and other random miscellaneous stuff! I am also a writer of both original fantasy and fanfiction. Currently the fanfic front has been overtaken by DS9 and I honestly do not know when it will simmer down, because I have had a lot of fun so far!
Hi, I'm Trix! I write stuff! And sing stuff sometimes! And am looking into branching out into podfic territory!
I'm also totally blind, Ace and Australian! And a Christian who knows when to mind her business and is determined to not be a bigoted arsehole (I may not always know if I'm failing at this, but I was raised with the understanding we never stop learning and growing unless we're arrogant enough to believe we don't need to anymore). Vehemently anti-Capitalist, hate bigotry in all its forms, think progressives need to stop with the bullying because abuse and harassment have no correct target, and am working hard at being kind and open-minded.
List of important sideblogs:
Main writing sideblog, for discussions about writing, including fanfiction, though it's mostly full of reblogged writing advice as of now (this will change): @imaginatrixproductions
My sideblog specifically for my biggest ficverse, including reblogs I feel are relevant to it: @themaginitechronicles
My political blog, where I have somewhat sporadically been reblogging political posts I agree with: @politicallytrix
Tumblr changed how you select blogs to post to recently so I've had a bit of a tough time adjusting and haven't reblogged/posted to my sideblogs much lately, but I'll get back into it, promise!
The great big list of fandoms!
Dragon Ball
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, and its first two spinoffs
Pokémon
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the 2003 version)
Winx Club
Avatar: The Last Airbender/LoK to a lesser degree
The Sevenwaters series, Blackthorn and Grim trilogy, and Warrior Bards trilogy, all by Juliet Marillier
The Deltora Quest and Rowan of Rin series by Emily Rodda
Steven Universe
Star Trek, though notably not Star Trek: Picard. I may give Discovery and Prodigy a go but I am of the opinion that ST:PIC was unnecessary nostalgia bait and they should've let those characters (and actors) rest. And not doing so led to some things being technically canon that I have firmly rejected.
To be more specific, though, my main Treks are TNG, Voyager, and most important of all, Deep Space Nine.
Fairy tales! (Yes, this counts as a fandom. And it has bled into a lot of things I write, even the fics that aren't specifically fairy tale retellings).
Aaaand I think that's everything that needs covering for now! Enjoy yourselves, and don't be mean or I shall block you.
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I love predictions of the future that oscillate between "eerily prescient" and "what the hell are you talking about?" Like that description of the year 2,000 written in 1933 where the author predicts flatscreen television, the glass wall trend in the homes of the wealthy, and the obsolescence of stuffed mattresses, but is also convinced that normal showers will be replaced by a device called the VAPOR LANCE that VAPORIZES the DIRT on you
this made me think “Hephaestus would also love us” and then I saw Hephaestus going on a forbidden journey to sunder Prometheus’s chains because without the gift of fire humans would never have learned the art of the forge. and he was already cast out of Olympus for being born with a disability, without fire in human hands he would have been so lonely, god of nothing and no one.
now they watch humans do these things together just beaming like two proud dads and occasionally calling Asclepius when shit goes sideways (“we love you, children! always wear your PPE!”)
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Firstly, what is warm-bloodedness? This is a term not widely used in scientific literature anymore, since it's kind of nebulous and encompasses three different thermoregulatory phenomena:
Endothermy - ability to create and internally control one's own heat
Homeothermy - ability to maintain a consistent internal body temperature
Tachymetabolism - maintaining a high metabolism rate
It's possible to show a variety of combinations of these three phenomena, and it's also possible for the same organism to change between different states. Some cold-blooded animals show commonly warm-blooded features, or have found other ways to achieve thermoregulation [1, 2]. So, 'warm-bloodedness' is a pretty complex thing. In addition to that, a lot of these things are hard to assess in fossils, since we see only static snapshots, mostly of bone rather than the organs which would give better indications. But there are some things the fossil record and evolutionary biology can potentially tell us.
First, growth rates. Generally, it takes a lot of energy to grow, and especially to grow fast. Dinosaurs generally seem to have grown rapidly during their youth to reach adult size quickly (comparatively to reptilian growth rates), which can be seen through analysis of bones [3, 4]. This can be taken as evidence of tachymetabolism and endothermy, as the ability to generate massive energy for growth would imply an ability to generate massive energy for thermoregulation, too. However, this is not consistent across all dinosaurian groups, and analysis shows a variety of intermediate comparative rates, similar to mesothermic animals, so it's probably complicated [5].
Secondly, posture. Dinosaurs famously walk upright, with legs directly under the body, unlike the sprawled posture of most modern reptiles. In modern animals, only endotherms show upright posture and gait - no modern ectotherm has an upright posture [6, pg 23 onward]. Additionally, many dinosaurs had limb ratios which suggest adaptations to running and high-speed movement. This suggests an active lifestyle, which would have demanded higher metabolic rates and higher energy needs, which could enable endothermy [7].
Third, habitat. We have evidence for dinosaurs that lived in the cold polar regions of the planet - for this, they would have had to be capable of endothermy, otherwise they would not have survived the low ambient temperatures [8]. This implies that at least some dinosaurs were endothermic.
One of the most well known common features of warm-bloodedness is the four chambered heart. Fun fact, crocodiles also have four-chambered hearts!! This makes them an anomaly in the world of cold-bloodedness. It could therefore be possible that endothermy evolved early in the archosaur line (the larger family group dinosaurs evolved from) [9, 10] - this would imply that endothermy was in fact basal to Dinosauria. There is evidence for very active early crocodilians, and it is suggested that modern crocodilians have 'reverted' to ectothermy due to selection pressures of their hunting methods [11]. If this is true, perhaps dinosaurs were basally endothermic, but some later reverted to ectothermy for various reasons.
Incidentally, it's not necessarily accepted when exactly endothermy evolved in terms of mammalian lines, either. There seems to be some evidence for endothermy in early synapsids in the late Permian [12], some theories suggest a late-Triassic origin [13], and some suggest true endothermy didn't evolve until crown-group mammals in the mid Jurassic [14]. Conversely, some people think it may in fact be basal to all amniotes [15], with current ectothermy being a secondarily evolved characteristic! So who got there first? We don't know!!
So, to conclude an hour's worth of poking around at various sources - there is a lot of evidence to support that at least some groups of dinosaur were endothermic, particularly the coelurosaurs from which birds evolved. Certain groups meet various criteria for assessing 'warm-bloodedness', although not all do. There is some evidence to suggest that archosaurs evolved endothermy early in their lineage, and therefore that endothermy could in fact be basal to Dinosauria as a group.
i do wish the response to the ai water usage concern debate (umm actually the water and mineral usage is roughly equivalent to all of our other constantly growing massive distributed information systems that require enormous amounts of resource extraction etc etc etc) was less of a "haha checkmate luddites" and more of a "hmm maybe we should reevaluate our usage of constantly growing massive distributed information systems that require enormous amounts of resource extraction" but idk
I wish depression were an emergency. I wish someone could take one look at how sick I am and go “oh my god, we need to get you to a hospital!” and then when we get there I get rushed into surgery and the surgeons say “it’s a good thing you brought her here when you did, this is a seriously advanced case” and then they put me under and spend the next ten hours pulling metres of long, sticky black strands of gunk out of my body, throwing it immediately into an incinerator so that it can’t infect anyone else. And then they could stitch me back up and I could rest a few days, and when I leave the hospital everyone can see how much better I am and they congratulate me saying “well done, you’ve been so brave, I’m so glad you’re ok. I love you.”
you’re not hopeless you’re just really really tired and in desperate need of a break and im shaking you by the shoulders and telling you that all is not hopeless but you do need to rest
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hey, if you live in so-called australia and want to watch a whacky heartwarming mini-series about a trans man who returns home to find his mother is being haunted by the ghost of his pre-transition self - created by trans masc director AP Pobjoy - check out Homebodies for free on SBS On Demand 🥰🏳️⚧️
one of the things about cities that regulate the growth in someone's yard is that often when someone is kind of letting shit get overgrown it's partly because they have other shit going on
so this person is dealing with shit and here comes the city to hand them more shit to deal with
like yes actually I'm aware the fucking rose bush I've been trying to kill for ten years now has gotten out of hand this year, I have had other problems
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Carcinization" is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.
For a long time, it seemed to me that you could make sense of the tech platforms by placing them into one of four quadrants on a 2×2 grid, in which one axis denoted "control freakishness" and the other, "surveillance."
Each quadrant had its own canonical company. The most surveillant/least controlling company (top left) was Google. They would let you roam the whole wide internet and exert no control over your conduct, but would spy on you wherever you went. The least surveillant/most controlling company was Apple, who imprisoned you in its manicured walled garden, but promised never to spy on you. The non-spying/non-controlling option is free/open source tech (of course), which doesn't care what you do, and doesn't watch you do it. And the most spying, most controlling company was Facebook, a company whose products did everything they could to imprison you within their virtual walls, from which vantage they could effect maximal surveillance.
I've used this comparison many times over the years. I included in my 2023 book The Internet Con, along with the joke that Tiktok's position on the grid was so far up and to the right (maximum surveillance and control) that we'd had to put its logo on the back cover. Enough people took this joke seriously and wrote in to complain that they'd gotten a misprint without the logo that we added it to the paperback:
The grid was useful, until technocarcinization started to push all the tech companies into that top right quadrant. Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance – they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you:
Apple can't even claim to protect you from third-party surveillance. Sure, they block Facebook from spying on you, but they have barred ICE Block, an app that tells you if there are ICE chuds hunting in your neighborhood, looking to kidnap you and send you to a concentration camp. Apple declared ICE mercenaries to be a "protected class":
And thanks to Apple's control-freakery – which prevents you from overriding Apple's decisions about your own devices – once Apple decides to spy on you or sell you out to fascist goons, there's nothing you can do about it:
Then there's Google, the company that ran a free-range livestock operation in which you could roam wherever you liked, because they could always find you when it was time for the slaughter. For years now, Google has been moving inexorably to the kind of control-freak nonsense that you used to only find in one of Apple's crystal prisons.
For example, every year or two, Google floats a proposal to use secure hardware in your device to rat you out if you've got an ad-blocker, privacy blocker, or other aftermarket add-on that lets you choose how you experience the digital world:
Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden:
Google also took the idea of a free/open browser and ran with it, rehabilitating some discarded Apple code and turning it into Chrome, the internet's most dominant browser – by far. Now, Google is nerfing that browser's plug-in architecture in a way that blocks all kids of user-tunable options, including and especially ad-blocking:
And Google has also announced that they're going to turn Android into an iPhone, making it both technically challenging and radioactively illegal for you to install software of your choosing on your own property:
Google is adopting every one of Apple's worst practices, and Apple is adopting all of Google's worst practices, and so they're both turning into Facebook: technocarcinization!
What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression:
Control lets platforms block competing products, extract massive junk fees to the businesses they connect you to, and control repair and end-of-life, forcing you to replace hardware by blocking parts and independent service:
It turns out that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is only half-right. The other half is, "even if you pay for the product, you're the product." Pay, don't pay: companies will productize anyone they can. And thanks to our enshittogenic policy environment – where the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money – you can always be productized:
This is independent of the kind of person running the company. Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.
By contrast, Google and Apple are no longer run by their flamboyant founders, who were every bit as prone to folly as Zuck. They were constrained by their shareholders, which meant that the blast-radius of Steve Jobs's worst ideas (like treating his otherwise curable cancer with green juice) were confined to his own person.
Today, Apple and Google are run by bloodless business sociopaths who go to enormous lengths to project an air of sober adulthood. And yet, these people – who would never be caught dead bow-hunting their own livestock or climbing into an MMA cage – have steered their companies into Facebook's quadrant on our enshittification 2×2.
I think this shows just how much the enshittification of tech is a matter of the policy environment, not the personalities of the people involved. Sure, the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab:
And in the meantime, there is one inhabitant of the 2×2 that hasn't drifted up and to the right: free and open source software. It's still snugly nestled in the low-surveillance/low-control box, and if you live in that box, your life will be much, much better for it.
There's no better time to make the switch: with RAM and storage prices through the ceiling and OSes growing ever-more bloated with AI and spyware (but I repeat myself), this is the moment to rehabilitate that old computer with Linux:
Stop telling me the only way to escape this hell is to fucking relearn how to use a computer on a less accessible operating system!
I will not switch to Linux because:
I don't fucking know how to set it up without sighted help and my only sighted helper has less experience with this sort of thing than I do!
I am blind and from what I've heard from blind youtubers who use Linux, the screen-reading options on that OS are *shit.* Not to speak of everything else I'd be unable to use as easily as I can on Windows!
Seriously, if I could have switched Operating Systems, I'd have fucking done it by now, and no amount of telling me it's the only way to escape is going to make it easier or more tenable to do so!
Tbh i dont rly know why that guy said that theyre technically mammals. Theyre not technically anything. Cardassians are not real. The boobs can be full of cotton candy if you want. Theyre aliens. They have boobs because Mary Crosby happened to have some. Be free
Freak that I am, I've actually given Cardassian boobs some thought before (no, not like that lol). I like to think they're not mammals (trek needs more truly alien species), so why would Cardassians have breasts? They wouldn't. That wouldn't make sense.
BUT!!!! What if they they just have basically the same thing that camels have going on and that's just storage for excess nutrients (camel humps don't actually hold water, sorry -- but maybe Cardassian front-humps do 🤷). After all, we know Cardassia is a very harsh planet to live on, so maybe the Cardassian people evolved to store as much extra fat/protein as possible, which means humps, but if those things were on the backs of a biped, that would lead to balance issues.
Cardassian soldiers only appear to have big barrel chests because other species have Opinions(tm) about manboobs, so they've designed their armor to conceal the fact that they have them. Garak looks so tit-tastic because he doesn't bother trying to hide what nature gave all Cardassians. Pseudo-breasts are more prominent on females because they've evolved as a sign of reproductive fitness, but one that has nothing to do with milk production. It's just much easier to carry a child to term (or produce a large clutch of eggs) if your body has nutrients to spare. So maybe a busty Cardassian hits the same way the Venus of Willendorf does -- a strong indicator of fertility, in men AND women.
Yes, this implies that Dukat has tits that would put Seven of Nine's to shame. You're welcome!
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one of my biggest gripes with trek is how both the show and the fandom will refer to characters who are mixed alien/human exclusively by their alien side except for when it’s time to give them trauma. ex. referring to spock as exclusively vulcan or b’elanna as exclusively klingon. it reeks of the one drop rule and tragic mulatto type thinking
voyager’s lineage has a lot of problems but the way tom talks about his and b’elanna’s 3/4 human child as though they’ll be fully klingon is especially indicative of how the writers conceptualize race. plus with how heavily racially-coded klingons are, the way they decide to have klingon physical features persist even with distant ancestry ties back to a lot of racist tropes about “race-mixing”. obviously i’m not saying that people can’t relate to/claim a grandparent’s culture, it’s that star trek treats all mixed alien/human people as aliens no matter how small a percentage their alien ancestry is. which is, y’know, the one drop rule
Guys PLEASE remember that if you're set to "this author has indicated this blog may contain content not suitable for all audiences" then unless you want people who are already affected by these stupid age verification laws to give up their IDs, you should... probably fix that.
Because the number of times lately that I've had people reblog from me and I can't see anything from them unless it's right there on my dash is insane. I have a notif saying someone has added something to a post I shared. I can't even tell which one it is! Because Tumblr won't show me!
I can't even tell which one they added to, let alone what they added, because "there might be content unsuitable for all audiences."
I am an adult. But I refuse to do, uh, this:
Yeah, no. I don't trust that at all.
So.
This is what i see if you have your blog marked as "mature":
And it literally just sends you back to the home page if you're on the dash last I tried, so good fucking luck trying to get back to where you were.
Just... at this point. Blogs marked as "mature" are basically "on private" to anyone who's in a country that's already rolled out these laws. If you follow me, if we're mutuals, it doesn't matter. I can no longer interact with you, because of that setting.
Okay update- I got one major thing wrong, because I was still going based off my memories of how things were when things were... sane.
@menacinglyenlargedlarvae asked and I went looking, and the setting, I'm sure, used to be in one's blog settings. However, it is no longer there - you can only filter to not see things marked as mature. You cannot, however, mark yourself as mature.
You also can't un-mark yourself. Therein lies the problem.
If you've been sharing anything labelled as "mature content" without using "content labels" then your entire blog gets neutered like this. You can appeal, but... yeah.
So that's what's happening.
All I can suggest then is to attempt to appeal, and try to use the content labels, but at the same time, we know appealing may not always work, and Tumblr's own labelling system is incredibly shit.
Still. I guess if those who've had this applied do what they can, that'd help.
What really is crazy is that I've had this blog for over 10 years, my birthday appears in my account settings, but it still wants me to "verify my age" - I mean, sell my data to god only knows who.
