Hi there! You can call me Wulfie/Wolfie/Eco, but I go mainly by Saphira. Iâm a young adult, ND, bisexual and dragonkin/paleotherian(V. mongoliensis). She/It pronouns. Not safe for work content is present on my blog and may be Untagged. My âBacchanal Saturnaliaâ , âdragonhoardâ and âSeekersalvageâ tags in particular contain extreme content, and Iâd advise blocking them. Due to personal belief I donât and wonât trigger tag any animal. Asks off for mental health reasons.
Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism arenât marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.
Praying for a safe journey back to the spirit world, Uncle â¤ď¸âđŠšđŚ
Today is the anniversary of the death of Jonathan Joss (King of the Hill, Parks and Rec). Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who died protecting his transgender husband, on the first day of Pride month. Today we remember him and how he protected his family.
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Listen, marketing-as-exploitation discussions aside, Rainbow Capitalism is, has been, and continues to be the canary in the coal mine of social acceptance for the queer community.
If youâll all pardon my Americentrism for a moment, the amount, visibility, and flamboyance of Pride merch available in clothing, home goods, and comestibles stores is a DIRECT reflection of how safe it is to be queer in public in the United States.
How? Simple. Out groups arenât profitable. If youâre not âacceptableâ in the current social climate, big franchise businesses will not market to you. (Prime example - Look how quickly Target dropped all their Pride merch after having been wall-to-wall rainbows every June for almost a decade prior.)
Sure, capitalism sucks and being viewed as an exploitable marketing demographic isnât a fun concept.
HOWEVER.
The grim truth is that being normalized enough to be considered profitable by corporations IS A GOOD THING in terms of the barometer of social acceptance.
Same thing goes for smaller businesses that throw kitschy Pride events or even just put a token rainbow flag in the window or somewhere inside the shop. Thatâs a level of acceptance that DID NOT EXIST thirty years ago, and I can tell you because I was there.
The fact that we can scoff and bitch about being an exploitable marketing demographic nowadays means we have made GIGANTIC strides since the 1990s. It also speaks to the fact that the drive and the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are continuing. And getting louder.
You can be cynical about it if you want. But I will take a store that puts out lip-service rainbow merch over a world that pretends we donât exist any day of the week. Because that will always mean something.
In the UK so many pride events are going bust because corporate sponsorship has stopped after Trump took office in America. And with the rise of things like Reform itâs getting much harder to be ort and open in public. JKRowling is actively paying people to be anti-Trans and lobbying government and corporationâs alike.
I donât expect to see anything in my local supermarket this summer. My council will not be flying the pride flag this year. Neither will my library, which a few years ago had six different pride flags outside its building including trans, ace, and intersex.
Thankfully for my own safety Iâm not clockable. Not everyone is so lucky.
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âBecause the truth is, tech doesnât have an image problem. It doesnât have a message problem. It has an intention problem. Whatâs wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasnât successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. Whatâs wrong is that heâs trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product thatâs designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isnât that you havenât told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.â
my 100% failproof way to handle reactionaries asking why i donât shave at all is going âbecause i donât want toâ it works because what they really want is an argument about the merits of feminism, and theyâll draw it out and try to convince you itâs a cult or whatever, but you can avoid it all by sticking to âi just donât wanna. donât feel like itâ and if they argue with you about it you can use your ultimate ability, which is âiâm sorry i thought it was a free country?â which, believe me, they cannot come back from. theyâll either drop it or start harping on something you didnât say, and itâs important you donât take the bait at that point. when they canât argue with what you say, they assume your beliefs and attack those. and you crucially must be visibly baffled at their change of direction because it will make them seem and possibly feel crazy (which they are). âi donât want to shaveâ is a perfect response because truly it all comes down to autonomy and the ability to do what you want. theyâll try to say âfeminism makes you think you have to do thatâ and itâs important to not take that bait. to reiterate that you donât know what they mean and you just donât like shaving and that itâs really weird to look into it that deep. this works i promise
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, butâgiven the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild foodâcould there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think thatâs only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602â608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
Also like do go ahead and ask an archaeologist/anthropologist. Ask them about the healed broken bones they've seen that is evidence of humans caring for one another since we became human. Ask them about the hearths they've found for humans to gather around, and the cookware they've seen crafted by human hands. Ask them about the small circle of bricks in front of hearths that confounded them until someone realized it was to keep chicken chicks in the house where children could play with them. Ask them about the tools of creation they've seen. Ask them about the musical instruments, and the artwork spanning back to when we lived in caves. Ask them about the children's footsteps, their play preserved in mud. Ask them about the clothing they've seen and the hands that stitched them or wove them.
Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.
Ask them why they put their hands on the earth searching for history and spend hours digging through archives and talking to other humans about the past. Archaeologists and Anthropologists are like the #1 people to love humans so much they want to know everything about all of the humans across history, and IMO the questions you ask them are a bigger reflection of the person asking them than anything else.
Several times on here I've seen the take "I know local theater is bad and cringey, but you have to support it anyway!" And while I understand what they're getting at, I'm always like, why do you assume it's going to be "bad" just because the artists are members of your own community? I just saw a local production of The Importance of Being Earnest and it was HILARIOUS. Everyone was DELIGHTFULLY funny and we thoroughly enjoyed it! There have been so many times I've been greatly moved by "amateur" or student art, and if you can't allow yourself to appreciate anything but "the Best" (and who decides what "the Best" is anyway? This production of "Earnest" was way funnier than the version that Judy Dench and Rupert Everett were in, as deservedly "famous" as they might be) then you are just being a joyless snob. There's beauty and talent all around you. And if that makes me "easy to please," then well... That means I'm pleased more often! And why should I want to apologize for that?
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âWhy is all the best art from this ship artist?â
Because theyâre creating what they love.
âWhy is all the best art created by this porn artist?â
Because they donât apologize or censor themselves.
âWhy is all the best art created by this artist who likes dark content?â
Because they arenât tying their hands behind their back. If you worry about morality and âtasteâ in art, youâll only make whatâs acceptable, rather than whatâs interesting.
i dont think shipping is antithetical to good media analysis but even in situations when the romantic reading absolutely makes a story worse sometimes you have to go well. we're playing with toys. yes i know this character would not get into a conventional romantic relationship and if they did itd ruin a lot of the themes of the story but fortunately the original story still exists and i have no control over it. im playing in the space and nobody can stop me.
I would rather shove a handful of live fire ants up my ass than be around grown adults who get worried about âproshippersâ and âproblematic mediaâ you gotta go outside and find a real problem to worry about instead of this dumb bullshit
I canât escape from these types of people either. Theyâre everywhere in the internet art scene. Every week thereâs a controversy because Blungus123 ships Scrongo. There are people who get genuinely angry if youâre âneutralâ about this dumb shit and treat it like real world politics.
Gonna piss some folks off by saying that some of y'all have GOT to make peace with religion. Not convert, not suddenly erase all the damage a variety of religions have done, but make peace with it. A lot of religious institutions CAN and DO good things, and they can be vital in the process of helping deradicalize people.
Stop assuming all religions are just like white evangelical Americans, start cooperating with religions in community care.
And this is going to make a lot of people very angry to hear.
But a lot of y'all on this website are truly deeply genuinely never going to be capable of any kind of real narrative analysis--and I don't mean 'being right all the time' I mean 'meaningfully engaging with the text in any way'--
Because you are, fundamentally, incapable of comprehending that writers usually do things on purpose.
The match cuts were meticulously designed and put there to communicate something.
The VA's delivery of a line was being directed. Inflection and tone change the meaning of dialogue. This is intentional. There are entire teams of people shaping those choices and deciding which take to use based on what works best for the story.
Information is being revealed in a specific order, on purpose, to craft an emotional arc and guide the audience's understanding.
A character's romantic preferences are only, and SHOULD only be, their primary motivation if the genre is romance. That is why there is a genre called that. Most stories are other genres.
Creators who dislike a character generally give them LESS attention, MORE boring storylines, and LESS screentime.
Sometimes curtains are just blue. But if the shot composition or written narration takes time to HIGHLIGHT, especially more than once, that the curtains are blue, then the blueness of the curtains is by definition narratively important.
"Cite your sources" is not a witch's curse that banishes People With Different Opinions to the shadowrealm of Being Wrong. Someone making points that challenge your perceptions, while including screenshots and explicit examples, cannot be dismissed with "cite your sources" because they are literally doing that. Don't @ me on this one I've seen shit in the wars, y'all.
Failing to understand these things WILL bar you from ever really engaging with or understanding any narrative more complicated than Paw Patrol for the rest of your life.
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i feel like some of us on here are treating "sometimes disorders can cause harmful behaviors" and "you are responsible for your actions" as mutually exclusive concepts
like, many disorders & disabilities notably affect behavior, communication, and relationships, as does stress, discomfort, and hardship in general, and we should give people a little grace when theyre going through a tough time. but also, if you repeatedly hurt the people who care about you and make no effort to apologize, or improve, or make up for it, or even just own up to it, those people are under no obligation to endure being treated badly
There is definitely a phenomena where people try SO hard to avoid anthropomorphism they end up looping around into this quasi-religious stance that humans have some essential non-biological quality that sets us apart from other animals. Like being so cautious about how you describe emotion experienced by a nonhuman animal that you go "that animal is not 'happy' it's just demonstrating a response to positive stimuli and receiving chemical reward signals" as if that's not also what human emotion is at the fundamental level.
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