YaelaTheWordsmith

A list of free to read shorts 👀 Comments are always very welcome!

“Robot Story” del artista: Vaskange.

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

Small farmers have basically been obliterated by corporations. Over the last 50 years, 97% of pig farmers went under and their farms were bought out by corporations.

The textbook acted like the meat chicken industry was a great example of what other industries could do in the future and it was nightmare stuff. Like. In poultry, one corporation will own all the hatcheries, breeding farms, finishing facilities, slaughterhouses, that process millions and millions of chickens. One corporation.

There are literally less than 100 people in the United States that make all the decisions for how 99.9% of chickens are bred. The way the chicken breeds are, is controlled entirely by the corporations. And the chickens are all super inbred. They've inbred them intensely to make them grow as fast as possible with basically no other consideration, so they can get as big as possible to be slaughtered as young as possible, and they are basically fed nothing but corn and soybeans, despite chickens being omnivores.

That's the POINT of chickens being in your agricultural system, actually. They eat bugs, they eat plants, basically everything in their path, so you can have free pest control and fertilizer and get eggs and occasionally meat, but this system can't be exploited to squeeze out profit.

So it's like??? Their diet is just monocropped bullshit, and the meat is lower nutritional quality for us because they're basically just corn and soybeans with extra steps. I mean not really, they do convert it to different nutrients more useful for us, but it isn't the same benefit as eating chicken that actually has a normal varied diet.

And obviously the animals are getting treated like shit in these corporate owned warehouses and their genetics are so shit they can barely like, be a living creature properly. Like with the Cornish cross meat breeds, once they're like 3 months old, watching them move around (even in more ethical facilities that let them do so) is so sad because you can tell that they are really struggling to walk and hold themselves up because they're an inbred genetic nightmare made to grow so fast they can barely function. Because a few corporations are solely responsible for breeding them basically.

With pigs it's just as bad sustainability wise because the point of a pig is that they're basically a garbage disposal. They eat all your food waste, as well as foraging for themselves and for centuries they were bred to store it all as fat. The most important part of the pig was the lard, it was basically used like butter in baking and all sorts of stuff. The meat itself was packed in salt and cured and it would last for literal years without refrigeration or any fancy modern thing

Then there comes a notion that lard is Bad For You and you should eat Margarine Instead to be Healthy (which i think turned out to be...not even true???) and a bunch of pig breeds literally went extinct because there was a major anti-lard shift in the way they were eaten, and now we use pigs generically for meat and feed them a shit ton of corn and soybean to accomplish this, which totally contradicts all the actual reasons pigs were traditionally used in agricultural systems (eat food waste, store it as fat, produce lard that can be used to pad out the nutrition of everything you cook and cured meat that can last forever)

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

I’ll raise all of you: there has never actually been a point in human history where we all lived in magical healthy harmony of perfection and fulfillment. This is not something humans have ever had.

Atomized individualism is absolutely potentially isolating, creating loneliness, mental health problems based in isolation, alone in the burdens of homemaking, etc, etc etc! 

and! at the same time!

Large extended families living in integrated groups have always been potentially toxic, coercive, and deeply unhappy, and always contained at least one subclass of people (if not multiple) who ended up doing unrecognized and unescapable emotional, psychological and physical labour. 

These things are both true at the same time. Neither one of them cancels the other out. 

The flat bench-line of human history is not happiness. It’s not fulfillment. It’s not widespread mental health and actualization. 

It’s just survival. So people don’t need to have been happy and fulfilled and deeply healthy in their groups in the past - it just has to have balanced out on the side of survival, more or less, most of the time. 

Humans are absolutely social creatures: we need other people, and there’s absolutely nothing about us intended to be Alone and Solitary. In fact overwhelmingly through history, “all alone” was more or less synonymous with “you’re gonna die horribly soon.” 

That does not mean that the networks of other humans we lived in were naturally harmonious, healthy, supportive, emotionally functional, etc, etc, etc. In fact if you take five seconds to look at most history and folklore and stories and life-experiences, we almost always weren’t! Globally! 

It was just better than being all alone, where you died and your life fell apart. 

Were SOME communities more or less supportive and healthy for more or less the majority of the people? Sure. That still leaves times when they weren’t, and people for whom they were poison, because “more or less” and “the majority” still leaves people who just didn’t fit, or weren’t like the rest of the community, or had wildly competing needs. And that’s WITHOUT getting into anything one might actually recognize as “right” or “wrong” - that’s just about stuff where there’s no moral value attached. 

Like loud people in groups of quiet people, or vice versa. 

There is a fundamental challenge to being human that involves trying to create, maintain and nurture networks of support and connectedness and help that are at the same time strong enough to be supportive - to offer adequate hands to all the burdens of human life - while at the same time aren’t restrictive, rigid and mismatched enough to be absolutely toxic. 

In order to rise to that challenge one of the things I think it is absolutely critically important to realize is: 

Yes! Atomized isolation/individualism can be a pretty crappy way to live!

So can integrated “traditional” societies based around extended obligate networks! 

Both options often suck and have huge potential downfalls and failure modes. Neither one is inherently and automatically going to produce Correctly Adjusted Humans because absolutely nothing about how humans came to exist is predicated on us ever being Correctly Socially Optimized and Emotionally Adjusted Humans. All it had to be was good enough for there to be another generation of humans who a) survived and b) perpetuated the cultural norms into the future and the generation after that. 

Whether leaning more on the individual or collective side is going to be better for any one given person is gonna depend hardcore on their context: 

- is the collective context they have available a good fit for them?

- is the collective context safe for them?

- are they in a position and life situation where they NEED continual contributions from other humans in their lives, or no? 

- what’s their personality like? what do they find easier or harder? 

And that’s gonna end up with a whole lot of cost-benefit analysis going on. 

But there was never a time when Everyone Was Totally Happy With The Big Integrated Families And Things Were Perfect (but then we BROKE IT!!!). There absolutely have been MANY times when your choices were “figure out how to fit into a big integrated network OR DIE” so people sucked it up and figured out how to live. But that’s not the same as “we were all ~*perfectly happy and adjusted*~”. 

On the other hand there’s DEFINITELY been historical contexts where being able to Get The Fuck Away From That Toxic Hellpit You Were Born Into was way, way better!  … that at the same time doesn’t mean that humans aren’t massively wired as social animals and that there aren’t huge detriments to being isolated. 

[Now ideally, right: we figure out how to both skillfully interact and create support networks that ALSO AREN’T harmful to the people involved, and reflect the needs of those in them for both company and autonomy. This is gonna take a hell of a lot of careful behaviour, careful thought, and flat out work, though, cuz humans are fucking messes at the best of times. *palms up shrug*] 

If we want to live in small tight-knit communities or big extended families, the best way to make those groups serve the needs of everyone in them is to make them optional for survival and for thriving.

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Climb aboard, then!” But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown. “Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.” 

“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”

___

…But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the frog felt a subtle motion on its back, and in a panic dived deep beneath the rushing waters, leaving the scorpion to drown.

“It was going to sting me anyway,” muttered the frog, emerging on the other side of the river. “It was inevitable. You all knew it. Everyone knows what those scorpions are like. It was self-defense.”

___

…But no sooner had they cast off from the bank, the frog felt the tip of a stinger pressed lightly against the back of its neck. “What do you think you’re doing?” said the frog.

“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

They swam in silence to the other end of the river, where the scorpion climbed off, leaving the frog fuming.

“After the kindness I showed you!” said the frog. “And you threatened to kill me in return?”

“Kindness?” said the scorpion. “To only invite me on your back after you knew I was defenseless, unable to use my tail without killing myself? My dear frog, I only treated you as I was treated. Your kindness was as poisoned as a scorpion’s sting.”

___

…“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

“You have a point,” the frog acknowledged. “But once we get to dry land, couldn’t you sting me then without repercussion?”

“All I want is to cross the river safely,” said the scorpion. “Once I’m on the other side I would gladly let you be.”

“But I would have to trust you on that,” said the frog. “While you’re pressing a stinger to my neck. By ferrying you to land I’d be be giving up the one deterrent I hold over you.”

“But by the same logic, I can’t possibly withdraw my stinger while we’re still over water,” the scorpion protested.

The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.”

The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Absolutely not!” said the frog, and dived beneath the waters, and so none of them learned anything.

___

A scorpion, being unable to swim, asked a turtle (as in the original Persian version of the fable) to carry it across the river. The turtle readily agreed, and allowed the scorpion aboard its shell. Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell. The turtle, swimming placidly, failed to notice.

They reached the other side of the river, and parted ways as friends.

___

…Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell.

The turtle, hearing the tap of the scorpion’s sting, was offended at the scorpion’s ungratefulness. Thankfully, having been granted the powers to both defend itself and to punish evil, the turtle sank beneath the waters and drowned the scorpion out of principle.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” sneered the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back.”

The scorpion pleaded earnestly. “Do you think so little of me? Please, I must cross the river. What would I gain from stinging you? I would only end up drowning myself!”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Even a scorpion knows to look out for its own skin. Climb aboard, then!”

But as they forged through the rushing waters, the scorpion grew worried. This frog thinks me a ruthless killer, it thought. Would it not be justified in throwing me off now and ridding the world of me? Why else would it agree to this? Every jostle made the scorpion more and more anxious, until the frog surged forward with a particularly large splash, and in panic the scorpion lashed out with its stinger.

“I knew it,” snarled the frog, as they both thrashed and drowned. “A scorpion cannot change its nature.”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. The frog agreed, but no sooner than they were halfway across the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown.

“I’ve only myself to blame,” sighed the frog, as they both sank beneath the waters. “You, you’re a scorpion, I couldn’t have expected anything better. But I knew better, and yet I went against my judgement! And now I’ve doomed us both!”

“You couldn’t help it,” said the scorpion mildly. “It’s your nature.” 

___

…“Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”

“Alas, I was of two natures,” said the scorpion. “One said to gratefully ride your back across the river, and the other said to sting you where you stood. And so both fought, and neither won.” It smiled wistfully. “Ah, it would be nice to be just one thing, wouldn’t it? Unadulterated in nature. Without the capacity for conflict or regret.”

___

“By the way,” said the frog, as they swam, “I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s on the other side of the river?”

“It’s the journey,” said the scorpion. “Not the destination.”

___

…“What’s on the other side of anything?” said the scorpion. “A new beginning.”

___

…”Another scorpion to mate with,” said the scorpion. “And more prey to kill, and more living bodies to poison, and a forthcoming lineage of cruelties that you will be culpable in.”

___

…”Nothing we will live to see, I fear,” said the scorpion. “Already the currents are growing stronger, and the river seems like it shall swallow us both. We surge forward, and the shoreline recedes. But does that mean our striving was in vain?”

___

“I love you,” said the scorpion.

The frog glanced upward. “Do you?”

“Absolutely. Can you imagine the fear of drowning? Of course not. You’re a frog. Might as well be scared of breathing air. And yet here I am, clinging to your back, as the waters rage around us. Isn’t that love? Isn’t that trust? Isn’t that necessity? I could not kill you without killing myself. Are we not inseparable in this?”

The frog swam on, the both of them silent.

___

“I’m so tired,” murmured the frog eventually. “How much further to the other side? I don’t know how long we’ve been swimming. I’ve been treading water. And it’s getting so very dark.”

“Shh,” the scorpion said. “Don’t be afraid.”

The frog’s legs kicked out weakly. “How long has it been? We’re lost. We’re lost! We’re doomed to be cast about the waters forever. There is no land. There’s nothing on the other side, don’t you see!”

“Shh, shh,” said the scorpion. “My venom is a hallucinogenic. Beneath its surface, the river is endlessly deep, its currents carrying many things.” 

“You - You’ve killed us both,” said the frog, and began to laugh deliriously. “Is this - is this what it’s like to drown?” 

“We’ve killed each other,” said the scorpion soothingly. “My venom in my glands now pulsing through your veins, the waters of your birthing pool suffusing my lungs. We are engulfing each other now, drowning in each other. I am breathless. Do you feel it? Do you feel my sting pierced through your heart?”

“What a foolish thing to do,” murmured the frog. “No logic. No logic to it at all.”

“We couldn’t help it,” whispered the scorpion. “It’s our natures. Why else does anything in the world happen? Because we were made for this from birth, darling, every moment inexplicable and inevitable. What a crazy thing it is to fall in love, and yet - It’s all our fault! We are both blameless. We’re together now, darling. It couldn’t have happened any other way.”

___

“It’s funny,” said the frog. “I can’t say that I trust you, really. Or that I even think very much of you and that nasty little stinger of yours to begin with. But I’m doing this for you regardless. It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s strange. Why would I do this? I want to help you, want to go out of my way to help you. I let you climb right onto my back! Now, whyever would I go and do a foolish thing like that?”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”  

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Come aboard, then!” But no sooner had the scorpion mounted the frog’s back than it began to sting, repeatedly, while still safely on the river’s bank.

The frog groaned, thrashing weakly as the venom coursed through its veins, beginning to liquefy its flesh. “Ah,” it muttered. “For some reason I never considered this possibility.”

Pro: Thing

Backstory from KTO's interviews

Jun-ho is from a well-to-do family and his parents are both attorneys. He especially admired his mother, and tried to be a lawyer but didn't make it. Even though it was his dream, Jun-ho doesn't have any sense of inferiority or complex watching all the attorneys around him while working as a law firm employee.

That's why KTO thought Jun-ho is a really nice person and would fall for a girl whom he can admire and respect, and then Young-woo came into his life. She did what he could not, and this newbie attorney comes up with a brilliant idea that no one could. And the wedding dress scene was a spark.

In EP3, Jun-ho counts with Young-woo when she goes into Atty Jung's office. That was KTO's improvisation. He thought because Young-woo has a routine or a habit like that, Jun-ho would also be used to that.

In EP2, Jun-ho clinks his glass with Young-woo's when she can't do it with the others. That was also a scene made by KTO. He said it's easy to notice things like that when you're interested in someone, so he did it, then the director decided to do a close-up at his hands.

KTO's favorite scene is the sunset scene in EP4. He likes how Jun-ho says "I want an attorney like you to be on my side." not "I'll be on your side."

Jun-ho always carrying a backpack = also KTO's idea. Jun-ho is a litigation staff who supports attorneys, so he thought it would be necessary for Jun-ho to carry all the materials.

It's a very common mistake for people to see their fictional blorbos engaging in calm, rational discussion about their feelings and say things like "aww, such healthy communication!" without recognizing the telltale signs of authorial mouthpiecing, which is a very stressful and unhealthy situation for blorbos to be in.

Blorbos thrive on melodrama, and require lots of space in their stories to scream and cry and break things and talk past one another while their voices crack and they make horrible gurgling noises from the weight of all their emotions in order to get the enrichment they need. While they do engage in catharsis naturally from time to time, it's a very sparing occurence and should not be forced.

Recent trends in blorbo breeding have authors and fans alike selecting for increased catharsis output and "behavior modeling", with little consideration for the effect this has on their ability to perform their vital functions. For example, in the above video, Alice explains to Bob that she feels hurt by his actions at the softball tournament in a measured and even tone, without even throwing so much as a lamp in his direction. Bob, rather than getting defensive and doubling down, responds by considering Alice's feelings and offering to make up for the transgression. Throughout the conversation they both use terminology ripped either directly from the DSM-V or the most recent thinkpiece the author had read. These blorbos are suffering from severe drama malnutrition.

While videos like this might seem cute and heartwarming at first glance, it's important to stay aware of the ongoing trend of blorbo abuse behind the scenes. Misinformation about proper blorbo care is rampant online and many authors arent even aware they're doing anything wrong.