Elle

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

"When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers."

So, this scene is specifically a fuck off to famously anti-union Disney. But it goes beyond the dialogue. Look at Puss on Shrek's shoulders. Puss's movement is counter balancing Shrek's so that he stays up there. It's a lot of movement, a lot of animation, for a character who isn't talking. Every time they have to animate that feather in his hat, that's extra work, extra care, extra money, and that's just one element of the work, there. The animators could have chosen to put Puss on Donkey- look at Donkey's relatively small amount of movement compared to Shrek or Puss. But they didn't, they put him on Shrek's shoulders and they animated him. Why might they do this as a fuck-you to Disney? Well. Disney is not only anti-union, they are cheap as fuck. There's a lot of recycled rotoscoping in Disney movies in the 1970s because they were cheaping out on the process so they didn't have to pay rotoscopers. There are probably other examples, but, they recycle their own work a lot, and I assume most Tumblrinas have probably seen that video of the scenes from Robin Hood and Jungle Book and 101 Dalmations directly compared with scenes from Snow White and several animated cartoons that the rotoscoping was taken from. The reason that Don Bluth left Disney to start his own company (not Dreamworks, but, this is the example that I have) was because on The Rescuers, there were a lot of examples of the whites of eyes not being painted in- you can see it a LOT with Bernard, especially in action sequences. Don was told that the reason for this was that it was too expensive. He thought it looked like what it is, unprofessional and unfinished for a company that's allegedly got Disney money and Disney quality, so he went off and did the math and was like, "It doesn't cost shit." And Disney told him to shut up and stop colouring in the whites of the eyes. So he left. And you can see the kind of "needless" art he did in movies like The Land Before Time and The Secret of NIMH where there's a LOT of attention to detail in the art and in the animation.

Thought this section was particularly interesting:

Finding out AI companies are chewing through - literally, they’re pulping and burning them as they go - millions of books often including 1/1s and old texts that cannot be reprinted

i wrote a paper in my masculinity studies class in college about this exact phenomenon, specifically about how high heeled shoes started as a practical way for Persian cavalry to keep their feet on their stirrups, then likely due to that association, became a popular fashion item and status symbol among the upper classes of Europe, before the Great Male Renunciation of the 18th-19th centuries, when men started shunning opulence in favor of utility, leaving them as a fashion item for women instead.

#lol this post is stupid spup kitchens were created by the gov after they literally destroyed black radical organizers lives#and since when does going to a town hall meeting and working within the system help anybody in any significant way

My spouse goes to every single school meeting they host, and often is the only person to show up. When the school was debating putting The Ten Commandments in every school room, they held a meeting about it. Guess who was the only parent to be at that meeting? Guess who voted “no”? Guess what the school released as a memo after the meeting? (“Due to popular vote we will not be hanging religious writings in our school rooms.”) And this is just the only time I can prove his vote was the deciding factor in policy change, I know he’s probably swayed more changes (or prevented changes), like taking books from the library or imposing collective punishments on students or letting cops run around inside the building. Because he always shows up.

While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.

PSA - Do not buy an LG smart TV. They just added a line to their terms of use that it's the user's responsibility to inform any guests in their house that by entering they consent to be recorded, in order to comply with wiretapping laws. That thing is literally recording you.

I just need a good pot, a good wok, TWO paring knives, TWO steak knives, and one Santoku style choppitychoppity.

Very helpfully, there is someone keeping track of which high-quality kitchenware has been enshittified and which hasn’t.