Reminder That The All Star Battle Localization Team Did This.

I think the obsession with having been “born this way” largely stems from the idea that you need to be “innocent” to be guiltless. 

If something is weird then you need to have no control over it, otherwise it would be mandatory to fix it. If I said that I had control over my stimming and could stop it at any time, people would request I do so. Not for my comfort but for theirs. If I said that I had control over my gender and could be something binary or maybe even cis, people would request I do so. If I said that I have control over my sexuality and could make myself heterosexual, people would request I do so. If I said I could control my attraction and could make myself monogamous, people would request I do so. If I said that I could control my disability and could choose to stop a flair up in its tracks, people would request I do so. They would never ask out of the goodness of their hearts, they would always be asking because I was annoying, concerning, distracting, or inconveniencing them. 

Diversity is sometimes only tolerated if you have no control. If you have control, rules will be made to stop it. Hair will be straightened, clothes will be standardized, languages will be shushed, interests will be squashed, weight will be lost, and so on and so on and so on. Proving that we were born this way replaces the more obvious, that we’re okay this way. I don’t need to be a helpless victim of my differences to be forgiven for them. My differences aren’t crimes. 

OK SO PEARL’S NAME

ok so you probably know that pearl’s outfit in octo expansion is based on the notorious b.i.g. aka biggie smalls

what you probably dont know is that pearl’s full name in japanese is “houzuki hime”. houzuki comes from “daio houzuki ika”, which is the colossal squid. hime comes from “hime ika”, the northern pygmy squid. 

basically what im saying here is. pearl’s japanese name is “colossal pygmy” which is literally the squid version of “biggie smalls”

Like to charge reblog to cast

Hmmmmmm

I can't believe home depot literally produced a wildly successful science fiction musical and we all just pretend it didn't happen. on one hand yes it had a boring white guy main character but like.... home depot just... Made it? And it had shit ton of box office sales? and no one even talks about this. this is like avatar (2009) all over again

Someone pls tell me what anime this is

It's that time of year again where Mari Lwyd starts to be talked about and shared around and an INCREDIBLY misleading post gets shared a lot. As someone who grew up with Mari Lwyd I wanted to clear some things up.

Also hello, if you are unaware who Mari Lwyd is. This is about the Welsh tradition of the horse skull who visits houses during the Christmas to New Years period in Wales asking for alcohol.

First off and probably the most important one:

Mari Lwyd is not a cryptid!

I can not emphasise this enough. She. Is. Not. A. Cryptid. There is no story or mystery about a ghost or zombie horse roaming the Welsh valleys. She's not even supposed to be a ghost or a zombie. It's just a horse skull on a stick with a guy under a sheet. She's a hobbyhorse and a folk character used to tell Welsh stories and keep songs alive. When people spread the misinformation that she's a cryptid, it's the equivalent of saying Kermit the Frog is a cryptid.

She is actually only one character in a wider cast of characters who go door to door or, in more modern times, pub to pub. The cast of characters can change town to town and village to village but there are some common ones I see time and time again. The Leader, the Merryman, The Jester and The Lady are just some I see regularly. Punch and Judy used to be more popular a few years ago but I haven't seen them in a while as their tradition has mostly fallen out of popularity. In most cases, almost the whole cast will be played by men. Even the characters are considered and referred to as female. Though this again depends and varies by which group is partaking in the Mari Lwyd tradition.

This point also goes onto my second point,

Mari Lwyd does not rap.

I think this comes from a very common misunderstanding of what rap is vs spoken word. Rap is a very specific style of music originating from the African American communities of the USA and has it's own structure and motifs unique to it. It's a lot more complex than people give it credit for as a style of music and just flippantly assign anything similar to it as being rap. If someone is talking fast or reciting poetry, it is not rap. Or anything that is an exchange of words between two people is not a rap battle. Mari Lwyd does not do rap, actually something that gets left out of these posts is the fact Mari Lwyd does not even speak. It's actually the Leader, who does all the speaking and song based banter between the house/pub owner for entry. Mari Lwyd just clicks her mouth, bites people and bobs her head around.

I think Mari Lwyd is a really beautiful and unique part of Welsh culture. She's not actually as wildly celebrated as a lot of the posts make her out to be. Actually, I think most Welsh people themselves learn about Mari Lwyd through the internet as well. Her popularity is increasing thanks to the drive of local groups wanting to keep the traditions alive and a renewed desire to document Welsh traditions before they're gone. Which is why it's such a shame that she's turned into something she's not to earn horror points on the internet. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see the misunderstandings of the culture and the folk tradition. Mari Lwyd's origin is very hot debated as well as how long it's been going on for. But I think it's thanks to a lot of traditions like this that the Welsh language and our stories weren't lost forever. Welsh culture is recovering as is the language. But it's still in a very fragile place. I think it's why it's important to document and correct information when it's spread.

Anyway, if you want to see the tradition in action, here's a lovely video from the Cwmafan RFC going to one of the pubs for charity. It includes the song exchange with the pub owner for entry and the whole pub singing and joining in once Mari Lwyd and the rest are inside.

As well with another video from St Fagan's showcasing the more traditional and door to door form with the larger cast.

I think a lot about manufacturing processes because they’re the most impressive things humanity has ever done and injection moulding wacks me out the most. I was looking at the toy keyboard I bought a while back and it got me thinking about how much of what we consider to be the look of The Modern Era is down to injection moulding.

I hold that injection moulding is one of the pillars of modern society and technology. Can you imagine a world where you couldn’t use injection moulding. It’d look completely foreign. Like looking into an alien world. When you consider it you have to conclude that injection moulding has shaped our culture as much as the development of the camera or the invention of the piano or the creation of glassblowing. If archaeologists had to name our culture in the style of the Corded Ware culture or the Funnel Beaker culture, we’d be the Injection Moulded Plastic culture.

Injection moulding is how we get, oh, almost every plastic thing you’ve ever seen. The keys on your keyboard are injection moulded. Your phone case is injection moulded. Unless you’ve got a fancy milled metal laptop like a macbook then your laptop’s chassis is mostly injection moulded plastic. Your lightswitches are injection moulded. Plastic water bottles are injection moulded. Injection moulding is how we can produce extremely similar objects at breakneck pace for almost no money.

Now it’s important to rememeber that injection moulding isn’t cheap, or, well, injection moulding is only cheap for mass production. Every single unique piece of plastic needs a mould, and each mould will cost somewhere around thousands to tens of thousands of dollars EACH, depending on how tight the tolerances are and how complex the geometry is. Look at how many unique plastic pieces there are on that keyboard. Each one represents an investment of like $7000 into making this toy that gets sold for about $20, so there’s no way this would get made unless the company had plans to sell literally hundreds of thousands of these things.

(This mould can spit out one chair every 30 seconds and it probably cost twenty thousand dollars to make)

Once you learn to see injection moulding you can’t unsee it. It’s like learning about kerning, or musical intervals, or disability compliant designs, or the pantone colours, or about how many insulator disks are needed on different voltage power lines. You start to see it everywhere, you realise that everything in your life relies upon our ability to jam plastic through a heated screw and into a mould reliably, hundreds of times per day, all day, every day.

Unless you’re wandering alone in the wilderness (and even then, maybe: check your clothing), look around and see if there’s something injection moulded near you. I can tell you the answer, there definitely is. It’s inescapable.

What would a world without injection moulded parts look like? It’d be weird. Everything we think of as cheap and easy to make is suddenly expensive. Complex curves and slopes like you’d find on a one dollar potato peeler now require hours of work to form. Every budget consumer item would be like those cheap sheet metal PC cases that have drawn blood from everyone who build a PC in them. Everything now has the aesthetics of a Sun 3/280 system:

Heck, even this sheet steel cube has a dozen injection moulded parts visible.

All the chunky plastic housing of the 90′s and 2000′s, all the sleek curves of the 2010′s, all the cheap plastic knick-knacks, the plastic toy horses, the snugly-fitting appliance chassis, the stacking plastic chairs. All these things now cost ten times as much and have to be formed from heavy steel, or milled out of chunks of cast plastic, or replaced with formed sheet metal.

Our culture, artistic sensibilities, and sense of value has been irrevocably shaped by our ability to squeeze liquid plastic into a metal die.

@DavidProduction 

This is a simple introduction to how Israel rules Palestine 🇵🇸