Tijopi

At the same time whenever Zim is working with anyone other than Dib, he’s the one doing this.

They’re just really alike I guess? Neither of them exactly know how to play well with others, or trust other people at all for that matter. With one another that at least prevents either of them from getting too hurt, most of the time.

I love that even though Zim is the alien he at times expresses more humanness in his emotions than Dib and I definitely think it’s intentional because not only does it keep their dynamic like I said, it also helps balance them with an equal back and forth when you have an alien that’s literally attempting to conquer Earth so would be unbalanced if he was pit against any Normal Kid. Zim is horrible to others but Dib is horrible to Zim right back moreso than Zim is to him.

As I’ve said before, I find the Planet Jackers super interesting. Much like the Irkens, they are a space-faring civilization of conquerors who deliberately steal planets to hurl into their dying sun to keep it alive.

Unlike the Irkens, their motivation behind conquering planets is an act of self-preservation. While Irk just wants to have more things for themselves and power, the Planet Jackers are trying to save their home world from destruction.

However, the Planet Jackers are still a merciless group, revealing that they often pick planets with lots of living beings on them because it makes their sun burn better.

Planet Jackers are way bigger than Irkens and physically stronger too. They also have the ability to literally grab entire planets and drag them all the way to their sun.

They are a force to be reckoned with and that’s exactly why when Irkens began their conquests, they sought diplomacy with the Planet Jackers.

It’s objectively the safest option Irk could take. 

The Planet Jackers are huge, strong, have technology powerful enough to move planets, and have likely been conquering planets before Operation Impending Doom I and II even began.  

So, at some point, whoever was the current Tallest at the time made a treaty with the Planet Jackers so they could both continue their conquering in their own corners and away from conflict. 

This isn’t to say Irk wouldn’t eventually betray the Planet Jackers as they did to Vort, but clearly they aren’t in a powerful enough position to do so yet. 

As far as we can see in the series, Vortians are not interested in conquering.

Conquering is a core part of a Planet Jacker’s life and is probably how they got their name as the Planet Jackers. As I said before, it’s likely that the Planet Jackers have been stealing planets long before Irk started their conquest.

One on One? The average Irken doesn’t stand a chance in a fight against a Planet Jacker. 

The size and strength difference is staggering. Zim couldn’t even leave a dent on Oog-Ah, it was his durability and Oog-Ah’s general lack of caring that Zim even survived the encounter. 

The Planet Jackers aren’t threatened by Irkens at all. If Oog-Ah was more pissed off than he already was, he probably could have decided to kill Zim right there. 

Irk would have to really have their power secured to even consider betraying the Planet Jackers. Taking one of the planets the Planet Jackers have their sights set on could land them in huge trouble. Irkens would have to rely on their wits to get them out of that mess.

The relationship between the two seems to be decent. The Planet Jackers seem to respect the deal they made with Irkens, but one can only imagine their reaction if Irk went back on their word.

Who knows! Zim violating the agreement through this insistence on his fake mission being real could’ve landed Irk in some trouble. 

Zim isn’t defenseless or a non-threat just because he’s incompetent. It’s his incompetence that is the most dangerous aspect about him. Remember, Earth (outside of Dib, Gaz, and arguably Membrane) are exaggeratedly dumb and easy to conquest. Dib HAS thwarted Zim from taking over Earth on a number of occasions. If Dib wasn’t a factor, Zim would have likely taken over Earth by now. Dib isn’t bullied every episode either. As noted, he often instigates attacks, and his primary goal isn’t to save Earth, but to prove himself right among the people who’ve made fun of him. But even that bullying from classmates is sometimes justified- Dib has been harassing students for a long time prior to Zim’s arrival. 

I do stay the fuck inside actually, most of the time, even before the pandemic. I have severe sound sensitivity, and going somewhere is pretty scary because meltdowns in public are dangerous. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but baby screams are incredibly loud. Like, pierce through noise-cancelling headphones loud.

I used to think there were safe spaces, one of these being libraries. All of a sudden, this changed, because oooo society is now “vibrant” and “dynamic” and we “welcome everyone” and now people bring their babies who clearly aren’t having a great time.

I’m glad you don’t have to know what it’s like to be in a position where hearing a baby scream it’s head off is more “annoying” (literally painful) than “hearing [people] bitch and complain about babies. But it’s completely bizarre to me that seeing a tumblr post about something could be somehow worse than sensory overload.

Also you are an adult with the ability to leave and go somewhere else if a baby is annoying/causing sensory overload. I work at a supermarket that plays loud music, always has some fan running, and is frequented by plenty of very annoyed children. I too have sensitivities to sound as does my girlfriend (it feels like being stabbed in the ear and that’s before the inevitable headache sets in), but when a baby starts screaming cuz they’ve had enough stimulation, I don’t get mad at the fucking baby. I go to another part of the store, -usually the back room- or I step outside. I do that, on the clock and usually don’t even have to tell a manager. This happens multiple times during a shift and of it gets busy I don’t even have noise cancelling headphones OR an escape to use because I have to hop on register.

The post isn’t just about people saying a baby being loud is annoying and you missed the actual point by a fucking mile. It’s about people complaining that babies (and by extension the caregiver/s) are outside at all and not holed up with the baby until the baby learns noise control. It’s the way people get mad at parents for wanting some time with other fucking people (adults) but need to bring their child because they can’t afford not to. The post is about how babies/children are expected to be silent or not present at all lest they annoy/inconvenience the adults around them.

Someone: Are you SURE? Older adoptees present UNIQUE CHALLENGES

I’m real over it. If I become a foster mom to a 17 year old kid and I get the privilege of the option to adopt them? You better believe I am legally making that kid mine.

“They’ll be a legal adult in no time, why spend the money to adopt? They’ll be aged out of the system.”

There’s no aging out of family, Marvin.

“They might be rebellious or smoke or do drugs or steal things! What if they won’t listen to you?”

Then I guess I’ll have to step up and do some fruxking parenting, Stanley.

“You want to adopt problem children then?”

Horror movie premise: there's something weird in the woods

Turns out sometimes the most evolutionary useful thing you can do is chill and not wear yourself to shreds, whether mammal or insect. It helps you deal with emergencies and adapt to change. Plus, you can act as living food storage!

Yeah, they spend 16-20 hours of the day laying around, socializing, raising Cubs and napping.

The last 4-8 hours are spent hunting.

Wait wait, they’re not a primate so they don’t count.

How about Orangutans?

Well, they spend 90% of their time awake just hanging out in food-rich areas, eating fruit and leaves, socializing, raising children, and chilling.

Well, they’re not people so it doesn’t-

How about Stone Age people in Europe?

They probably worked 3-5 hours per day, every day. (Though seasonal changes in food scarcity could change that)

Laborers in ancient Egypt worked 8 hours, with an hour break at lunch. They did this for 8 days, then rested 2 days. That sounds familiar. Except… they also had regular time off for festivals and holidays, and only worked for about 18 out of every 50 days.

Artisans in imperial Rome generally worked from 6am to Noon, and then had the rest of the day off… and only worked for half the year, due to all the holidays and festivals they got off.

But that’s too easy, what about a Peasant in medieval England?

6-8 hours per day, with Sundays off, Farm workers put in longer hours at harvest time but worked shorter days in winter when there are fewer hours of daylight. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in the period following the Plague they worked no more than 150 days a year, due to the long holidays and many festivals.

Ugh, let’s go poorer. 17th century France. Starvation was afoot for the working poor!

During the reign of King Louis XIV, the workers of France had it tough, and hunger for the poorest was a fact of life. The typical working day was as much as 12 hours long, but two hours were set aside midday for lunch and perhaps an afternoon nap. Nevertheless, the Ancient Régime is said to have also guaranteed peasants, labourers and other workers a total of 52 Sundays, 90 rest days and 38 religious holidays off per year, meaning they worked just 185 out of 365 days.

So what changed?

The industrial revolution, baybe~~

New factory owners could work their employees to the bone due to a lack of regulation and abundance of cheap labour.

The typical factory worker in mid 19th-century England toiled away for a soul-destroying 16 hours a day, six days a week, 311 days per year!

THAT nightmare became the standard by which western society began to judge “work-life balance” and anything gentler than the industrial factory’s unfettered brutality is considered “softness”

(So many people died being mangled in those machines. Hair handkerchiefs went into style during American industrialization because working women would otherwise get their hair caught in the machines, and be either scalped or be bodily pulled inside to die…. But that’s a horror for another time)

Americans in 2020 worked an average of 8.5 hours per day on weekdays, plus another 5 hours on weekends.

Taking out federal holidays and weekends, we work 262 days per year. Most of us get 5-9 sick days to take per year. (Yes, a fixed number, no matter how sick you really are), and usually either no paid vacation, or 7-15 days paid vacation, depending on seniority and the company. Unpaid vacation doesn’t have a max, but taking it often risks you getting fired.

Even comparing against the poorest laborers in ancient history the current working structure for humans is, frankly, inhumane.

We are mammals. Let us rest. Let us celebrate holidays and attend festivals. Let us attend to our homes and families.

Even the ultra wealthy folks who got their heads chopped off gave us more time off than this!!!

Someone in the comments said something like “humans are instinctively industrious and productive, as social creatures!”

Buddy, that’s a lie fed to you by capitalism.

In our default state, we attend to our families yes, but we also party like hell, lounge around, and make fantastic works of art just to be proud of ourselves. We made beautiful things for the joy of creating them.

Stone Age humans may have spent a couple hours hunting and gathering, but DEFINITELY spent loads of time painting every available surface. Time and weather washed most of it away, but some places like Arizona and Colorado still preserve a few of the endless murals made by ancient hands.

Evidence shows that the ancient world was COVERED in paintings and etchings - just saturated with images of birds and beasts and humans, sunsets and cool weather. We invented mythologies and painted about them. We did something impressive, and painted about it. We taught our children how to paint and lifted them into our shoulders so they could mark the ceiling.

In our most base state, humans will work enough to survive, but our instincts demand we use all other time to create art. We want to communicate. To make connections.

“Working” or “being productive” is not on that list.

»swofehuper« by richard tipping (+)

She: This word evolved naturally from Old English from seo/heo which were just words to refer to feminine-female people evolving from Proto-Germanic words meaning ‘that/there’. He as a word evolved from the same ideas but Proto-Germanic words for ‘this/here’. Your idea of “patriarchal language” further falls apart when you compare this part of English to other Germanic languages, of which English is related, the words in German for he and she are “er” and “sie”, completely unrelated. So it is by clear happenstance, not some patriarchal conspiracy that the words “he” and “she” in English have similar form. 

Woman: Oh god this one always gets my goat when people go for this one. Man did not used to mean “male”, man used to mean “humanity/human being”, the old words in Old English for male adult person and female adult person were “werman” and “wifman” respectively, we can see this relation in words like werewolf and wife as being the remnants of the base “wer-” and the base “wif-”. Woman evolved phonologically from the word “wifman” by natural processes where the ‘f’ sound dropped and the ‘i’ became lax. Man dropped its “wer” stem for reasons mostly unknown but I can guarantee have nothing to do with “patriarchy” because phonological change has no basis in that.

Female: Male and Female actually come etymologically from two completely different words. Male comes from Old French “masle” which meant masculine, while Female came from Old French as well “femella” which meant young woman. This is another case, just like he and she, where the words coincidentally ended up looking similar without having any direct correlation in historical linguistic processes to make them as such.

Human: This word etymologically derives from Proto-Indo-European “ghomon” which means earthly being as opposed to heavenly being which would refer to gods. You have some small glimmer of hope here in that the word does eventually branch off into the word for “man” in some languages but this is still too small of a precedent to base any conspiratorial thinking like you are doing off of.

Person: This one offends me the most, simply because I love the fuck out of Etruscan language and your continued ignorance just irks me at this point. Person derives from “persona” from Latin which meant the same meaning, which ultimately derived from “phersu” Etruscan for ‘mask’ as Etruscans would often have theatre performers use masks to give identity to the performers. So never once did “person” have any meaning to do with “son”. So yes, this IS the “natural order” or language.

The idea that language change (@/rhysiare said phonological change specifically) has nothing to do with patriarchy is something I’d push back against. Language is a social system, intimately connected with the society in which it’s used. The idea that language change is somehow neutral or immune to forces such as patriarchy is…questionable at best.

I don’t happen to have any gender-related examples off hand, but a class-related example of social influence on language change would be the word villain. Villain comes from Latin villanus meaning a peasant/serf (someone from a villa, a country estate). This word, associated with the working poor, came to mean in the modern day something entirely negative.

I’d also like to emphasize that diachronic and synchronic linguistic analyses are different (though both important). The modern speaker of a language doesn’t have ready access to these etymologies (without consulting a dictionary). Their previous meanings and developments become obscured, so all they have to analyze are the present words.

This leads to things like the above image, called folk etymologies or reanalysis, where speakers break apart words to reanalyze their pieces in ways that they didn’t originally mean. This is super common. The word hamburger originally came from Hamburg (the city in Germany) plus -er (meaning “person from”). The word has since been reanalyzed as ham + burger, and we now see burger used as a productive stem (cheeseburger, veggie burger, chicken burger).

Heck, you know what I’d actually like to read? Fears during sex, and there’s plenty of them in the real world. Fears of pleasing your partner, fear of not being good enough, frustration if you’re unable to get the effect you want, etc. If you’re going to write a sexual scene as an asexual individual, I’d ask to look at it from a lens that most don’t. 

Birth to 17.99999999 years: Child. Doesn’t matter where you fall in that range. You are a helpless, innocent child.

18-approximately 21 years: Adult. Full internet privileges!

21-25 years: Sketchy adult. You can stay, but you’re on thin fucking ice.