Gah, Skittens EVERYWHERE

The only other thing is that not all USB-C cables are created equally. The form factor is standardized, the insides are not, some shitty, cheap, cables are only rated for data not power, or for low power needs. You can search for charging cable to make sure you get one intended for power transfer.

So it's the last day of Men's Mental Health Awareness Month (& Pride, but I already posted regarding that!) and I wanted to write a post concerning it somewhat. I'm not gonna rampage about looksmaxxing or the manosphere or the male loneliness epidemic or any number of other concerns that affect men these days. Instead, I'm going to talk about a diamond in the rough from cartoon history. As the title suggests, the incredibly wholesome and enjoyable male friendship between Tygra & Panthro from the original 1985 ThunderCats!

Now, to those not particularly well-versed in 80s cartoons, Panthro & Tygra's relationship could be hand-waved off as the ever underwritten "everyone is friends and never disagrees because we're all on the same team! If anybody disagrees or argues they're the butt of the joke, mind controlled, or we're spoon feeding some kind of moral." thing that was very common in 80s cartoons. However, like many many other things about the original ThunderCats, it's (perhaps sneakily) very well-written and interesting to the keen observer.

Obviously there's the surface level stuff. They both love science, they've got plenty of overlap in their interests and expertise in science (Tygra) and engineering (Panthro). It is both work and play for them, and there's more than one occasion where there's entire scenes devoted to the two them enjoying one another's company while putting together something cool and useful. They both also have the unspoken shared duty of being positive male role models and parents to Lion-O, Wilykat & Wilykit, and by extension the show's primary audience.

A hallmark of some of the most common gripes I have with a lot of male relationships in media for all ages is that it always feels as though the male characters are always (often unnecessarily) competing for something. Jealous of what the other has that they lack because this underlying desire to get the gold star sticker for being The Man In Charge in the context of an ensemble, undervaluing what traits the other male characters have that aren't something they share with them, however virtuous.

Especially when badly written, all these male characters come off as insecure and emotionally stunted. It is a particular kind of sexism especially hurts men and their friendships with other men. There's this constant need to win, to "win" conversations, win debates, win being the most useful/skilled at a task or mission, and most irritating of all winning the attention of a woman. ThunderCats in general seldom was written where male characters expressed these types of behaviors completely unexamined.

In Tygra & Panthro's dynamic lacks this pervasive issue. They appreciate one another's differences, in their expertise, their combat styles, and their approaches to solving problems. There's no bad faith competition in their friendship. Neither of them are trying to win Best At Science or Kill Most Bad Guys or force each other or Lion-O to only ever do things their way. Most pleasing of all, neither of them are competing for Cheetara or her affection, she's her own person and they both have good relationships with her without any possessiveness. Which was extremely feminist for the time and still is today.

Their relationship goes much deeper than merely being "science bros" too. They genuinely deeply care about one another, which is true for all the other ThunderCats too but it's easier to make the assumption that they might only express vulnerability and tenderness regarding the only female character or the kids. This however is not so! Neither of them have any qualms about genuinely expressing concern for each other's well-being without it being seen as mushy or embarrassing. Even beyond immediate physical injury or peril.

Some of the best and most endearing examples of this are in the first season of the show. For specifics I'm going to talk about The Trouble With Time and Spitting Image. In The Trouble With Time, Panthro is extra cautious in looking out for Tygra while he's vulnerable if not actively dying. He prevents Cheetara & Lion-O from drawing out a fight unnecessarily and physically helps Tygra get to the Geyser of Life. When Panthro goes missing, Tygra is the first one to reach Lion-O after being unable to find him anywhere, not Cheetara the known speedster, Tygra! When they learn that its Mumm-Ra whose abducted him, he insist they search everywhere "inch by inch" when they don't know where Mumm-Ra has taken him.

Beyond the obvious care for one another and their shared hobbies, they also ground and balance one another out. Panthro grounds Tygra by checking on him when he suffers in silence and avoids letting other people help him in episodes like The Garden of Delights. While Tygra on the flip side is able to redirect Panthro's anger and confrontational nature with pragmatism and focus in episodes like The Mountain.

In fact, they are so good at balancing one another out, that the biggest blunders that emerge from their individual shortcomings tend to occur when the two of them are separated. Tygra never asking for help and putting himself in self-imposed isolation that exacerbates the problem in episodes like The Crystal Canyon. While Panthro allows his temper and desire for a direct & simple end to a complicated threat rule him in episodes like The Mask of Gorgon. Which even in a series that isn't heavily serialized like the original ThunderCats, character relationships do genuinely matter that aren't just mentor & student, siblings, or lovers.

This is really awesome actually. I wasn't familiar with these before at all.

Here's some that I found in reasonably good (photo) quality:

It's honestly quite incredible how accurate these are to real life (although I guess it's not that surprising since I assume most/all of these were made based on someone that the sculptor knew). One of the facial paralysis ones lowkey looks like me right to the head tilt. This guy from ~1700 years ago was just like me fr...

A lot of artists and companies could learn a thing or two from the Moche on how to portray disabled people. Not even joking.

And look, even if that wasn’t deeply racist, it would still be stupid. And wrong. But the fact is…

it is deeply racist.

The ukulele is a Hawai'ian instrument, descended from the machete de braga, a small Portuguese guitar brought to Hawai‘i in the late 1800s by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira. Hawaiian luthiers adapted and reimagined it into what became the ukulele. It’s a cultural symbol with a history of colonization, cultural appropriation, and resilience, born from the blending of immigrant traditions with Native Hawaiian artistry.

When you reduce it to some internet stereotype, you’re not just making a dumb music take, although you are also doing that, more importantly you’re participating in the long tradition of white mainland culture flattening and mocking Indigenous Hawai'ian traditions for sport.

It’s also worth noting that the ukulele’s popularity didn’t explode because it’s “quirky” or “internet twee”, it’s because it’s approachable. The instrument is physically small, light, and low-tension compared to guitars or violins. You don’t need huge hand strength to fret it, the (usually) nylon strings are soft, and it can be tuned in a way that’s forgiving for beginners. That makes it accessible to disabled musicians, kids, elders, and anyone without the privilege of formal music education. You can teach yourself entirely off the internet or even practice alone if you're dedicated.

I say this as someone who used to play violin and piano but now plays ukulele and ocarina because those are instruments my bad back and hand tremor will actually allow me to enjoy.

My own ukulele was an investment, imported from Hawai‘i, made of mango wood, rosewood, and bull bone. It’s a gorgeous instrument, it’s one of the most expensive things I own (a very spicy $500), and I cherish it deeply.

But here’s the thing: you don’t need a $500 ukulele to make beautiful music. You can get a perfectly playable one for cheap, especially secondhand.

That means this is an instrument that’s accessible to poor and working-class people, including those from marginalized communities who often don’t get the same access to “prestigious” music education or expensive instruments or expensive equipment and programs to make music digitally.

So when I hear someone mocking “cringe transmasc ukulele music,” here’s what I know immediately:

They’re definitely not an artist making art with any real value

They’re transphobic toward trans men and likely nonbinary people too

They’re ableist

They’re racist

They’re classist

And if someone is happy being a mediocre artist who’s also multiple kinds of bigoted, that’s their prerogative, but I’m not going to respect their opinion on art, or trans people, or disabled people, or Indigenous people, or poor people.

I genuinely don’t have much more to say. That’s it.

You make fun of ukuleles like it’s an aesthetic crime instead of a living piece of Hawai'ian culture and a vitally accessible instrument for marginalized folks, you’ve told me exactly who you are.

Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?

My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.

Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!

Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).

Keeping yourself as cool as possible isn't being weak or wimpy. It's protecting your capacity to think and move well if you need to.

Women also had vocations and forms of income unrelated to their husband. The nature of these jobs changed over time but many women did things like weaving, embroidery, crafting, beer brewing, chicken tending and laundress work to bring income. Women with skills were seen as better marriage candidates because they’d make money for their husband.

My great-great-great-great grandmother told fortunes and did farm labor, my great-great-great grandmother was a midwife, my great-great grandmother worked in a textile factory for most of her adult life and my great grandmother was a school lunch lady.

What I think needs a little more spelling out as well is the way that historically, what we grammatically speak of as being the man's occupation was often in fact the entire family's occupation, with which parts of the necessary work each person did conventionally divided up along gender lines.

Just some random examples (the gender splits here are pretty typical but I can't say they're true of all cultures; I'm primarily familiar with western European history and especially the British Isles):

men fishing, women preparing the fish for sale and selling them at a market ("fishwives")

wives as salespeople and managers of the financial side of the business was also common for many male-coded artisan crafts; the man who is the 'silversmith' is actually smithing the silver (possibly with the aid of sons, apprentices and/or hired labourers), while his wife is taking care of everything else that is necessary for this to translate into a money-making business

husbands underground mining coal with a focus on speed over purity of product, children transporting it to the surface so he doesn't have to leave, and wives sorting the coal from the worthless rock on the surface. The entire family contributes to the pay check, which is based on the amount of sorted coal delivered.

wives as writers, editors, secretaries and research partners to male academics, scholars and politicians - also frequently doing much of the work associated with the networking that was neccessary for success in these careers. (It was not uncommon in some periods for wives to handle a lot of their husbands' correspondence, and of course a lot more socialising used to involve being hosted at peoples' homes. Wives of the relevant social classes for these careers were unlikely to be handling e.g. the cooking themselves - their job here is more like event manager and line manager of the staff doing the work.)

servants who were married were typically married to servants in the same household (and servant occupations were highly gendered)

"farmer's wife" and "baker's wife" and so on are properly understood as occupations, traditionally taking on parts of the work that a modern baker would need to hire someone for

besides the fact that most of the time its full grown adults making fun of middle school aged kids drawing their favorite characters because it makes them happy, i just dont get the appeal. like the whole punchline is "this person posted something vulnerable so lets make them suffer for it". we're supposed to laugh because that a person tried hard, wanted to share that with other people, but we think it turned out bad and that they should feel ashamed instead of happy. and i mean this no exceptions- that'll never be funny to me.

i'm thinking extra hard about how we've ended up where we are, with trans kids at the center of so much hatred, because children are not seen as people with interiority or an ability to narrate their own experiences. we've decided it's alright to lock children up for horrible diagnoses that psychs throw around like they're nothing, to strip their autonomy completely and force them through humiliation, invasions of privacy, and endless torment by "professionals" whose power over every waking moment of their lives has no end. these things cannot be separated.