interested in worldbuilding? stuck trying to figure out conlangs, place names, etymologies, and so on? need to communicate moral absolutes about your characters with your linguistic choices? good news! i have just the chart for you:
ALTi love pitting classically trained magic users against self-taught magic users in sci-fi/fantasy but it shouldn’t be snobbish disdain for them it should be terror
“WHO TAUGHT YOU LIGHTNING BEFORE BASIC TELEKINESIS. LOSING MY MIND WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU JUST DID IT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAST WITH YOUR BARE HANDS”
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT YOU’VE ‘HACKED’ MANA DRAIN
WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘DRINK SOME JUICE’
WHAT IS ‘LOW BLOOD SUGAR’
WHY IS THIS WORKING
I HATE YOU SO MUCH
Okay but other direction can ALSO be a lot of fun
“What do you mean I don’t have to burn half my blood to create a fireball?”
“Why can you teleport more than once without vomiting? WTF is ‘quantum displacement awareness’???”
“You know HOW many spells? HOW? ... What do you mean ‘my spell book’?”
“Ooooh, you’re just summoning water portions from the Plane of Water... Lol I thought I HAD to combine hydrogen and oxygen molecules to generate water in small amounts. That’s so much easier then what I was doing!”
Tags via @mia7437
Available now for pre-order: Haze Cave by Pigao! We are so excited to be publishing this stunning book, which beautifully captures the dislocation of modern China.
Image description: Pages of the comic showing a couple driving along one of Beijing's massive highways. Gazing out the window at the office buildings, one character wonders at how little of the city she is able to understand.
anyway ai discourse is kicking off on my dash again and i just want to reiterate that i fully and 100% believe that "cutting up and remixing pre-existing intellectual property without prior permission" should never be made illegal and it would be utterly horrifying if the united states attempted to criminalize it.
ai is a flawed and shitty tool that presents a fuckton of labor rights abuses and industry problems that need to be addressed promptly. this can and does coexist with the fact that it is currently legal to make art using other people's intellectual property and criminalizing that is a fucking batshit idea that will open pandora's box of corporate litigation and artist abuse.
they spend like half of watching and dreaming establishing how the collector doesn’t understand the concept of death and injury for mortals because he is so powerful that he doesnt need to worry about that for himself. and also they have never connected with mortals enough to understand that via extrapolation. so they set that up entirely for the collector to finally understand the gravity of death when he befriends luz and she dies right in front of him. but then like one anime battle later they meet up with luz again and luz is like “ya ik i died lol but the titan who was also dead fixed me back up and im fine dw about it”
I think this is super important to remember.
No kill shelters result in animals dumped on the highway and tossed in the river because the rescues wont take them. That’s the part they never tell you.
Meanwhile the spca will take every animal, and if they have to euthanize them at least it will be done kindly and not via neglect or cruelty.
Because people in the notes are not getting this, let me explain:
No-kill shelters TURN AWAY animals. When they’re full - and they often are because most of these no-kill shelters are small - they stop taking them in. While they are “taking their time to find the right homes for every single animal”, many other animals never get in the door. Somehow they don’t count those animals, or track what happens to them. A success for them doesn’t include the ones they turned away. They’re taking their time because they can.
The No-Kills who brag about 100% adoption rates are the worst, because they tend to reject the most. The animals who will be difficult to adopt out? They just don’t take those. Special needs? Too old? If they’re going to be hard to adopt out, they can claim to be full, even if they’re not.
They are telling owners they absolutely cannot take their fifteen year old cat because they are full of litters of kittens. Adorable kittens that will turn over quickly, and boost their adoption numbers. So what happens to the fifteen year old cat? After days of being rejected at the shelters they get dumped on the side of the road somewhere, or worse.
You cannot imagine the VOLUME of animals that a city shelter deals with. The kill shelters are not allowed to turn anyone away. The difficult cases, the special needs, the elderly, the feral. The dog that bites, the cat that pees everywhere. Every animal is going to be taken in and treated with kindness. They are going to be assessed and treated for their fleas and conditions and behavioral problems. They will get their time on the adoption floor. They will get the best chance possible to find a new home. And if it’s not possible, they will be humanely euthanized, and that cage space will go to the next animal who is already waiting for it. It never stops. While you were working on the paperwork to adopt out 1 cat, three people brought in 4 more. It’s a numbers game that you cannot win if you aren’t turning people away.
A lot of times kill shelters get the animals that the no-kill shelters refused to take. Maybe their owners bring them. Or maybe they got literally thrown in the garbage, abandoned, or put in a bag and tossed in the river, when the no-kill shelter said they were full. The police and rescuers will bring these poor injured animals to the city shelter where they will be cared for. The volunteers will spend days and weeks trying to wash the tar out of their fur, or treat their broken bones, or whatever other horrible thing has happened to them. They will feed and house them. They will put most of them in new homes. They will save many many more animals, by orders of magnitude, than a no-kill shelter ever will. A no-kill shelter will brag about dozens or maybe hundreds of adoptions. Kill shelters are dealing in thousands of successful adoptions, and they still have to euthanize because it just isn’t enough. There are just so many animals to take in.
And then, after all this, the No-Kill Shelters get to claim the moral high ground somehow, and self-righteous types will refuse to adopt from the only shelter that takes absolutely everyone. It’s infuriating.
I understand why people think Manfred would be bigoted but honestly I think it would be significantly funnier if he just. Wasn’t. Someone calls him homophobic in court and he’s immediately like “I?? The great prosecutor Von Karma, blinded by the biases of lesser men? I fight only for justice and the holy fire of retribution, how dare you insinuate that I am beholden to the fallacies of the wretched” and everyone immediately tunes out his self-aggrandizement bc they’re just flabbergasted by von karma supporting gay rights
Adding to this that Von karma gets super pressed whenever someone misgenders anyone in the courtroom because he sees it as a cheap tactic. Some defense attorney purposefully misgenders a witness during a cross-examination to rattle them and Von karma loses his shit
“Pathetic tactics for PATHETIC attorneys. What happened to the days of commanding the witnesses through the fear of your gaze— have you no shame? Are you so daft and sniveling and inexperienced that you don’t know how to manipulate the evidence to serve you? Are you weak enough that you resort to such base methods? You can’t even intimidate the witness into doing what you want without such vile trickery? You are like a roach beneath my heel, unworthy of even being crushed. Coward.”
It’s such a powerful and resonant statement that no one notices that von karma admitted to like seven crimes in the span of thirty seconds
how are all of you funnier than me
mostly I haven't been swayed by any "they would have been able to explore [x topic] better if it were a show made for adults" arguments I've yet heard about steven universe, but god could I feel how desperate the writers were to directly characterize pink/rose as horny. psychoanalytically speaking, she's the libido of the diamond authority. she's the bodily sensation of the cbt diamond. her symbol was a blooming flower viewed from above. she was known to take human lovers for pure novelty. she read greg's sexy alien lady erotica. her spaceship was a hot pink pair of legs that we first see with the camera pointing directly up at the pussy. rose quartz voted horniest character to ever not be canonically horny.
Literally the only difference between a Walmart employee reciting a corporate speech to a screaming customer and a Tumblr employee reciting a corporate speech to someone suicide baiting them in their inbox is that you can actually see how dead inside the Walmart employee is. The fact that we can't see the emptiness in the eyes of staff members or the ways their smiles look ready to crack right open means that people on here have convinced themselves that the corporate speak is sincere and the actual opinions of these paid employees. Get a fucking grip.
