smmojen
Phonemes and Stat Blocks
I’ve given up on writing my dissertation. Instead, I overthink my dnd characters and stare at pictures of space.
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Back in 2014, I did a panel at CON.TXT on dubious consent tropes: sex pollen, fuck or die, omegaverse, and so on. And we talked about how the same tropes can carry different kinds of narrative weight, and how the ways they're used have evolved over time--how tropes that started out as a way to get around the rape culture assumption that Nice Girls Don't were repurposed to interrogate rape culture. By making the coercion external to all parties to the sex act--by removing culpability--they allow for rape and rape culture stories without rapists.
And I proposed that a lot of these tropes were also coming to be used in ways that read as allegories for the impossibility of resisting the conditions of late capitalism. A character is placed under complete social or biological constraint, with no power to escape or fight or do anything but submit, and their only choice is whether to submit gracefully or make a token and futile resistance. And that their decision to make the experience something they want--to claim whatever good they can in it--is an act of power. That to consent, even internally, and make it meaningful, even when they have no way to enforce a refusal, is an act of power.
Because it was a panel on dubcon, and saying Yes is what differentiates dubcon from noncon, in fiction, we talked mostly about stories where the protagonist says Yes; we talked about these consent tropes as allegories for the ways that people do, in fact, find good in conditions they cannot opt out of. People do build good relationships under rape culture. They build communities under late capitalism. These things do happen, outside of fiction, and a story about someone reconciling to life as an omega can have a lot to say about the complicated internal struggles people go through to make them happen.
We didn't talk so much about the flip side of these tropes--that by making that internal Yes meaningful, even in circumstances where No has no power, they also imply that there is meaning in No, even where it has no effect. They validate the worth of an internal resistance, even where it achieves nothing. Maybe we mentioned it? I don't even remember--it was a panel on dubcon, not noncon, and that internal No has the power to change the genre, if nothing else.
I am thinking now, though, about the rise within fandom of a purity culture that strenuously rejects these tropes--while also granting them remarkable power. That claims that, because real life does not have the distinction possible in fiction between dubious consent and nonconsent, that not only is fictional dubcon no different from fictional rape, it's no different from real rape. That returns culpability to these stories and places it firmly with the author. That says that a fictional character cannot consent, to anything--and that the real author, being the only person involved with actual moral agency, owes it to the character to keep them safe.
To exercise moral choice on their behalf.
To say No, in the fictional world where that No is meaningful, and to imbue that No with an irresistible moral weight in the real world.
At any rate I'm not saying the crowd that thinks not voting to withhold their consent from things done in their name is somehow a meaningful form of protest just needs to read some sex pollen about it. But I'm not not saying that.
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“she should be at the club” “but not everybody can handle loud music / likes going out / enjoys drinking / wants to—“ YOURE MISSING THE POINT. “she should be at the club” is not about the literal club!! it’s about the whimsy of youth!! it’s about the things you can get away with, body and mind!! it’s about having fun and ignoring the horrors for as long as you can!! it’s about the fact that you do not deserve to feel this pain and have these responsibilities, you do not deserve to be locked in your room with your sadness, you deserve to enjoy the music and the pretty lights and the ass shaking of life!!! it’s about how i wish joy for you, even if you do not wish it for yourself!!! you should be at the club!!!!
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Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:
[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?
A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.
Q: Why did you need to be the victim?
A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]
From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites
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“Why should rich people pay more” because fuck ‘em
“So you are okay for paying more when you have money” I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘em’ when relevant
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whats the deal with proven winners?
okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this.
proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses.
like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like…flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region.
it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like….tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild.
now….this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale:
-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing™.
-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like…..bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?
-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects.
-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab:
FUN INDUSTRY SIDE STORY: looks like they have some new orange petunias this year, which reminds me fondly of the 2017 purge ordered by the USDA of a ton of illegally GMO orange petunias….
you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just….not telling the government and just kind of…pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like….kind of Suspicious™, and started doing some tests….and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias.
small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like…Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol
AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase™, they have a bunch of……weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but…idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.
youtube
see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company.
you get inspected by the plant police.
im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous.
proven winners wants to ensure that there’s no Illegal Plant Downloads taking place, so they literally like….send people out to these small retailers and ask to see their stock to make sure that all the plants are going in the Patented Proven Winners White Pots™ with the Patented Proven Winners Information Tags™. you MUST plant proven winners stuff in the pots they send you, with the instructions they send you, and they will check you for this. the first time my internship mentor ordered from them, they accidentally planted the plugs in generic brown pots instead of the white ones, and the weird proven winners police rolled in unannounced for an inspection and told them that the next time it happened they wouldn’t sell to them anymore. what they’re worried about happening is that the growers will order a small amount and then just make a bunch of cuttings without paying them, and it’s just……weird. like i get why they do it but that’s always struck me as really, really shady lmao
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say what you will about jack rackham but the man knew how to serve cunt. I don’t just mean his dandy little outfits, either. or the fact that he remained best friends with his gay ex. or the fact that he imprinted on a het beefcafe like a duckling and spent much of his life navigating the messy waters of “do i want to be him or do i want to be with him?”. I mean that Jack Rackham got arrested by a homicidal colonist, was facing imprisonment (if not outright execution), and literally his first instinct was to read woodes rogers for filth over his memoir. my guy really sat down in his office, took a gulp of his wine, and said: “you’re shit, you look like shit, your self-importance is shit, and your book was a snore. your memoir is literally in my dnf pile. it sucked ass.” every time i watch black sails i mourn the fact that jack rackham didn’t live to see the invention of poppers.
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nobuddy feels like they have a sharp attention span these days, right? and we all just click “agree on terms of service” because its hard to love yourself sometimes, well
enter Terms of Service, Didn’t Read: a website and a browser addon that streamlines the terms of service of many popular web services to be read by the tech sunday drivers.
It’s graded from A (great) to E (awful) and if you have the addon you have access to the info about the website on your bar
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Day 25 Favorite Monster Girl.
Nagas. Who knew they’d be so fun to draw? Especially with their colors. Also I really like doing the henna designs.
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just having some fun with interesting fantasy imagery! Give it a reblog, if you play, please? And tell me WHY you picked what you picked if you want?
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what’s your ‘thing’ as a friend. i don’t mean like ‘oh im the mom friend’ i mean like what’s the Thing where if one of your friends was looking for a specific interaction they’d message you first. personally i can always be relied upon to get hyped about bugs, literature, and cursed internet images.
#dnd 5e in particular as opposed to the many ttrpg generalists#corvids#linguistics#fast and the furious
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We've apparently invented an artificial stone that, when cut, functions as a kind of Super Asbestos.
So, you know, watch out for that.
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Concept: in a setting where vampires exist and can only be harmed by symbols of faith (crucifixes, etc.), a James Randi-style skeptic/supernatural debunker witnesses his family murdered by vampires, and dedicated his life to hunting down what he believes are a cabal of ordinary serial killers with a blood fetish and some cheap plastic fangs. They die when he shoots them with an ordinary gun, granted holy status by the sheer force of his belief that they are actually just ordinary humans who will die when shot.
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“You know, for a monarchy, the King doesn’t seem to play much of a role in your affairs.”
“Well, It’s embarrassing to admit, but we’ve rather lost track of them.”
“Lost track of them?”
“Quite so. We know we have a monarch, but we don’t know who they are or where they reside.”
“… okay, you’re going to have to run that by me again.“
“To be blunt, the last King had something of a roving eye. While we’re reasonably certain one of his numerous illegitimate offspring has inherited the divine mantle, we’re not sure which one – if, indeed, it’s even one we know about.”
“Can’t you just, you know, pick one?“
“Heavens, no. Our monarch rules by divine right. The land is bound to them. Its prosperity and weather reflect their health and moods. The sacred bond is clearly responding to something, so we can rest assured that a living monarch exists, but none of the candidates we’ve tested have panned out.”
“So, the rain of opera-singing fish last Tuesday…?“
“Wherever our current King or Queen is, they’re evidently having a fantastic time.”
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"i'm suck at it" 🤝 "help it's again" 🤝 "life needs things to live"
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