Been Experimenting

23 and 30 for the fic ask game? :3

:3

23. What’s a story you’d love to write but haven’t even started yet? This is an arc and not a story, but everything to do with pjo!Fyroah. There is nothing more I can write about him without majorly spoiling half the PJO au, and I'm not ready to do that yet. Insane. Cruel. Evil. I want to write about Fyroah.

30. Have you noticed your style change over time? A little! I like to think I've gotten better at cutting the fat from my prose, especially in the past year. There's also a phenomenon that used to happen a lot more, where I'd get so excited about a concept I would cram it in without regard for how well it actually fit in the work. I still do that when I draft, but I'm much better about killing my darlings now.

Ask game

You're right, and I'm not saying this to disparage your point at all, but if someone cannot draw an Asian man as Asian because they value accuracy to his Minecraft skin more, that is racism. I don't care if he's a snowman, basic respect should take precedence. Even if he had a pure white skin, even if we'd never seen a hint of him in real life, this would still be true. Like I said in my tags, a Minecraft skin is not an excuse for whitewashing and it never will be.

You know what, I feel like being mean today. Can we stop whitewashing Hax?

I've been seeing a startling amount of it come up in artworks in the recent months, and honestly, that isn't cool at all. That guy is Asian. He is from Hong Kong. It is whitewashing to depict him with a skin tone as pale as or paler than your designs for white runners. It is whitewashing if you choose to depict him with pale eyes. It is especially whitewashing to draw him like that without any other ethnically accurate traits.

Learn to draw people of color. I'm begging you. Or at least don't draw an openly Asian man with a skintone three shades off pure white.

really enjoying all the videos Muslims have been posting of their cats looking like this

when the humans are up at 4 am for suhoor

The most frustrating part of being trans is that you can't win.

My uni has quite a few all-gender washrooms. (Specifically all-gender, cis people are absolutely encouraged to use them). And despite the fact that there are womens washrooms everywhere on campus as well, I've had cis women treat me with borderline disgust when I use the all-gender bathroom. I've had people tell me that "sure, its all genders, but when a cis man uses it its just weird".

And like. Thats the point! Even IF a cishet man using a washroom he is specifically allowed in was weird. Even then. You have to understand that no trans or nonbinary person can safely use an all-genders washroom if using it means they are either trans or female.

Like to be very clear- I am a cis-passing trans man. There are so many reasons I feel more comfortable in a non-gendered washroom. Even if I was cis I woild likely want to, because I am gnc and don't always feel safe in purely male spaces. And even if I was the cissest, hetesst, most gender conforming man on the planet, I might still want to use it because its closer to my classes.

And really, this all comes back to this deeply transmisoginistic idea that Men Are A Threat to Women in Womens Washrooms,, which. If I have to explain to you why this is purely a propagandistic falsehood I really think you need to do a gender 101 course.

Gender neutral washrooms cannot be "women Lite washrooms". In order to protect trans people, at all stages of coming out and transition and of all presentations, for the love of god stop dictating who can use all-gender washrooms.

Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

Do not obey in advance.

A Crash Course to Kendrick's Super Bowl Performance, from a Black Woman

Note: this does NOT go in depth into all of the song's lyrics. I don't have time to recount two decades of his discography. This is just a summary of the performance itself.

Let's start with the first visual we get:

UNCLE SAM - most notably recognized from WWII American wartime propaganda, Uncle Sam is the personification of American patriotism and freedom. The term "uncle" is also evocative of Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist book that aided in inciting the Civil War. Uncle is also a very common term (both endearment and derogatory) towards Black men (eg. "unc"). Samuel L Jackson was fantastic.

Uncle Sam also resembles a circus ringleader, notable for my next point:

THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME - no, not Super Bowl. The GAG is us the people being pitted against each other: through late-stage capitalism, through the culture war, through class warfare, through being built of the backs of slaves. We are all players in the GAG because none of us on this site were the oligarchs seated at the inauguration.

This is also seen as Kendrick's stage was a Play Station controller. Not only did it remind of circus rings visually, but it was a game battle stage. The Great American Game is a battle royale of the commoners for the amusement of the rich whites.

Remember the foods / Them color was tin and brown / But now they 100 and blue - For this I'll just say, look what the last election said about lowering the price of eggs... and look at the prices now.

The revolution about to be televised / You picked the right time / But the wrong guy - Election 2024 once more.

THE FLAG DANCERS - yes, the dancers formed the US flag... off of the backs of Black people. Not a single white person in sight, and that's true of the cotton pickers in the fields. Plantations are part of how the US came to economic prominence after being a "backwater" colony. Remember tobacco? Cotton? Our bloodlines do.

The red and blue dancers are also notable for representing the Crips and Bloods, two infamous street gangs. The dance in Not Like Us is the Crip Walk. I recommend researching more on your own time about them, but just know they are a large part of the stereotype of Black people being "ghetto."

TOO LOUD, TOO RECKLESS, TOO GHETTO. Do you really know how to play the game? - This is exactly what Black people, especially Black men, get told all the time. It's why we change our names on resumes if they sound "too Black." It's why we codeswitch in non-Black company. This is especially rich considering how non-Black people love our culture and love to make money off of us, as the latter part of the quote points to. And it's even more profound during the Super Bowl-- the NFL is majority Black players.

STREET LIGHT A CAPELLA -- "thug" stereotype dancers to counteract the a capella connotations, with Uncle Sam then saying that Kendrick figured out "bringing other street guys around being a culture cheat code." Yes, this is a direct hit at Drake (listen to "Not Like Us") but also politically. Look up "model minority". Notably I would point to Candace Owens, or the Miami Venezuelan political group that's been in the news recently, especially as this directly led to Kendrick being surrounded by...

DANCERS IN WHITE -- it's white America. That's... that's the allegory.

NOT LIKE US TEASER -- Kendrick says "Not Like Us" is "their favorite song." -> he means white people specifically here. It comes after he's surrounded by all white dancers, the women around him who are his call and response are also in white (my opinion, they represent the industry). He's saying "Not Like Us" is the favorite of yts because it is about BLACK MEN FIGHTING. This again is reflected in the video game stage and ringleader Uncle Sam.

SZA -- instead of giving what they want, we see SZA. She's one of Drake's exes and Kendrick has always supported her.

ALL THE STARS -- This was in the first Black Panther movie, which I recommend you watch. Rest in Power Chadwick. Notably, this movie was incredibly mainstream as a major Marvel movie, and then we have Uncle Sam say...

"THAT'S WHAT AMERICA WANTS: NICE AND CALM. DON'T MESS THIS UP" -- translation: Marvel (the industry, America, etc.) wanted a safe, semi-pop song because white American likes safe pop songs, not Kendrick's usual heavy rap style about his life as a Black man! Don't mess up what you've got going mainstream for having this "Black rap feud" with Drake, who is an R&B model minority to white people because he's safe.

So what does Kendrick say?

IT'S A CULTURAL DIVIDE / IMMA GET IT ON THE FLOOR -- He was warned not to be political or apologetically Black for this Super Bowl performance, but he is using this big stage opportunity to speak out.

40 ACRES AND A MULE / THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE MUSIC -- 40 acres and a mule are what the freed slaves were promised. Instead, this land went to white sharecroppers. Research Jim Crow laws.

THEY TRIED TO RIG THE GAME / BUT YOU CAN'T FAKE INFLUENCE -- rig the election, rig the industry like with model minority Drake, rig the Great American Game with culture war to distract from active class warfare.

NOT LIKE US -- the only thing I'll mention because it made me holler is Serena Williams crip walking on Drake's metaphorical grave. She's another one of his exes.

TURN THE TV OFF -- exactly like he said! The TV is a distraction, the Super Bowl is a distraction, the mainstream news is often a distraction. Turn it off and get with your people!

GAME OVER — could not see this on my stream but at the end of the performance, the lights in the stadium spelled this out. The world is watching, America…

In conclusion, Kendrick Lamar is a visionary and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

theater panoptica

I would love to see a fantasy novel where the lore that the reader / protagonist learns at first is not true

Unusual but sympathetic paper:

Language Matters: What Not to Say to Patients with Long COVID, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Other Complex Chronic Disorders

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/2/275