So I wanted to discuss a topic in social justice, because I genuinely believe it’s something we all need to be better at, myself included. Long post warning, sorry.
The above anon message was sent to me after I contributed to a Tumblr post here. The discussion was about the decision by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to support a controversial right-wing blogger’s right to speak. (If you prefer to get your news from sources, you can read NPR coverage from February 2017 here.) Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said things like “What’s amazing about the First Amendment is it protects us, regardless of our viewpoints, regardless of the causes we hold dear.” (1)
As you can see from the first few comments on the Tumblr post, some people in the social justice community found this stance abhorrent. They explained that the ACLU is tainted by this decision, and that everyone who supports the ACLU (and all of the ACLU’s work) should feel bad. In the notes and discussion, people express their disappointment with the ACLU, adding that they have defended icky people in the past, as well. The message is clear: the ACLU has fucked up in their eyes by defending icky people and is now a Bad Organization, forever.
These people belong to the slash-and-burn school of social justice and online activism – where if an entity fucks up, that entity is tainted forever and can never be forgiven. Anything that the entity does for good is erased, forever, by That Time They Fucked Up. Under this school of thought, the massive amount of work that the ACLU does in defense of American civil rights – that important, life-saving, world-shaking work – is undermined because they have also defended the civil rights of icky people. This is the school of thought that recommends you discard all attachment to something if it has a problematic aspect. This line of thinking is interesting, and I believe it has good intentions somewhere, but I don’t subscribe to it.
My post addition, and those of others before me, pointed out that a nation’s civil rights must necessarily extend to everyone in the nation. My post addition specifically said that in order for a justice system to work, it must provide equal representation and protection for the accused. The entities that defend the accused are not evil for doing so, even if the accused is literally Satan. They are part of the necessary machinery for ensuring justice. “Everyone deserves equal representation,” was my point. “Try to design a better system [than equal representation].”
Anon, as you can see above, did not like me doing that. Fair enough.
They wrote “Also “try to design a better system”? We are. Look up prison abolition or even criminal rehabilitation.”
They meant to disarm me with these buzzwords, indicating that “they” – the Truest and Purest Social Justice Clerics – are more knowledgeable about criminals than conservative Elodie, who lives in a cave and supports rights for icky people.
Here’s the thing that I want to point out.
If you belong to the slash-and-burn school of social justice thought, in which you believe that one problematic thing (defending icky people) destroys the entity (ACLU) beyond redemption, so that the entity should no longer receive any good things (our support) ever, and anyone who questions that is an enemy (me), who must be punished (with anon complaints)…
YOU ARE NOT DESIGNING A BETTER SYSTEM,,
YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON TO BE INVOLVED WITH CRIMINAL REHABILITATION.
YOU HAVE LITERALLY THE OPPOSITE MINDSET FOR THAT.
Because if you want to get involved with criminal rehabilitation, you stand a higher-than-ordinary chance of interacting with rightfully-convicted criminals who have done icky things – such as literal and genuine rapists.
And you are supposed to take those icky people, who have done incredibly problematic things, and you are supposed to direct them towards redemption, and give them good things, and assure them that they can still be a positive member of society who deserves support. And you have to believe in this.
Even if the criminals hate you, and are constantly lashing out in pain and fear and disgust for you, insulting you and abusing you and berating you. If you want to rehabilitate a criminal and abolish prisons, and build a society where equal representation is not needed because everything is PERFECT AND FAIR, here is what you have to do: if you want to take the people whose actions have placed them outside of society, and bring them back into society – you have to believe that One Bad Act does not define people. That people can learn from past mistakes. You have to stake your life and soul on the fact that people can make incredibly bad decisions, and hurt others irreversibly, and behave in incredibly icky ways – and that they can THEN do enough Good to erase that, or at least balance it.
If you want to rehabilitate criminals, you have to take people who fuck up and fuck up and fuck up, and say “Well, you still have plenty of value as a human being, and you can absolutely move past this.”
If you want to rehabilitate criminals, you have to offer them the reward: “If you stop fucking up, and put some positive things into society, then you will earn support. You will no longer be an icky person who fucks up. You will be a better person who will deserve every good thing. You have this capacity, and I will help you get there.”
If you want to rehabilitate criminals, then you will be tired sometimes, because some of the people are horrible criminals, and some of them really aren’t, and some are wrongfully accused people, but others are deeply awful people who never had a chance to be anything else. People who abused because they were abused, and people who killed their abuser (a cool motive, but still murder).
Believe me, criminal rehabilitation will be harder work than simply disliking someone on Tumblr. Things will be so complicated and so hard, and you will feel sympathy for the strangest people, in the most unexpected ways. You’ll be one of the people with dirty hands. And then people will accuse you of being icky because you defend rapists.
So I think even at the bottom of it, we still need equal representation. And we haven’t escaped that truth, despite the Clever Use of Buzzwords.
But I think that in the social justice community, we could stand to reflect upon this. Does the slash-and-burn principle of eliminating problematic things… actually work? Can we reconcile that ideology with beautiful liberal ideas like criminal rehabilitation and prison reform? Can people be icky, and still deserve every good thing? Or should icky people only have limited access to good things? How should we limit that access, and why?
Can we be redeemed?
Because I am a sinner, I have to believe we can.
===
(1) It’s worth noting that this is an American cause. Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. There are no exclusions in the First Amendment for hate speech.
In the United Kingdom, hate speech is not protected speech, and it is defined more rigorously. Certain expressions of hate are indeed illegal and can be punished. The right-wing blogger’s speech and actions would not receive equal protection in the UK.
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).
Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.
(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
ding ding ding ding.
Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content. Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it. Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.
If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency, then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.
The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is – so who gets to decide?
You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?
Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?
The world is complex and there are no easy answers.
The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.
Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.
Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.
The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers.
Preach it loud and hard!
I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”
The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic – victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.
And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.
The mentality is one and the same – “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.
And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.
This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.
Okay, so I find the history behind this discussion really interesting, because there are two things that stand out to me. One is the thought AO3′s culture is equivalent to LJ circa 2010. This is almost true, except you actually have to go back further. Ao3 and Dreamwidth are both specifically trying to recreate the fan culture of Livejournal from 1999-2007, and I can say that with some authority because A) I was there (olllld) and B) both were founded in 2008/09 as a direct response to the shit happening on LiveJournal and Fanlib.
The other thing is the idea that anon-harassment culture started with Tumblr. Because, kiddos, did it ever not. Tumblr is very much Fanfiction.net circa 1998-forward. (That’s right, FF.N was basically always awful.) But how we got from there to here is actually really interesting And tangly. And long.
Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.
Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced.
This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.
At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest.
But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues that we won’t get into here will discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ.
LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.”
Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it.
And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there!
FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS.
Yeah, this system had no room for abuse.
So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter.
It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS.
Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work.
So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities.
In a quest to rid LJ of “pedophilia,” 6A wiped out a large swath of ethically questionable fanfic, and woke a beast. Again: We like our porn. 6A took a step back and restored some of the deleted journals, but the damage had been done. AO3 was already being discussed as a response to Fanlib, a hosting site that wanted to charge for access to fanfiction. (Yes, if you’ve been following along, that was a terrible idea. But that’s a post for another day.) But as AO3 began to change and grow, creators specifically wrote provisions into the TOS that guaranteed a strikethrough-esque event could never happen on the site. A specific kink or pairing would never be considered a violation of the TOS. The onus was on the reader, not the author, to protect themselves with the information given. Basically, AO3 took the early fandom nugget “Don’t like, don’t read” and made it policy. When peole say AO3 grew out of Livejournal, they’re specifically referencing this. One event that proved ALL OF OUR LONGSEATED FEARS WERE TRUUUUUUUUUE.
Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.
It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.
That’s it, folks. Fandom mom wrote almost 2k words on early fandom and now she needs a nap.
authorial intent & Google Translate aren’t exactly NEW problems
i love how this feels like ive just accidentally walked in on you in the middle of a long rant
I was having a lot of thoughts & feelings about oral traditions vs written traditions & how the modern world tends to treat oral traditions/documentation dismissively & as inherently less accurate than written traditions/documentation when in fact for basically all of human history written language has had the same contextual issues that are the reason modern internet communication relies heavily on the use of emoticons & non standard punctuation & spelling to clarify meaning.
FOR EXAMPLE, let’s talk holy texts, and because it’s what I’m most familiar with, let’s talk the Bible. Now, as everyone knows, there wasn’t really a standard version of the Bible until comparatively recently, and older versions of the Bible can be wildly different from what we’re familiar with today. And this ultimately comes down to three main issues: authorial intent, translation, and transcription errors. The last is the most straightforward, so let’s go in reverse order. IF you’re a scribe in a dimly lit monastery in the 1200s who spends literally all day copying things by hand…well. Transcription errors happen, and it’s not like they had spellcheck. It’s pretty common to see things like someone having skipped down to the next line halfway across the page, replacing one word with another similar word (either in what it sounds/is spelled like or similar in meaning), or just basic spelling & punctuation errors. Not a huge deal usually, but it causes drift over time, because of course the next copy will be being made from this copy. There was some cross-checking of work but not on the scale we think of such things happening today, so it was easy for things to slip through the cracks, especially as reading/writing wasn’t a common skill so the population that could cross-check was limited AND parchment/vellum was expensive & they would have been reluctant to replace something that had already been finished.
Translation is a particularly interesting problem in the case of the Bible, because much like Google Translate it’s going through multiple layers of languages and sometimes the translations weren’t the most reliable. Additionally, it’s not even working from contemporary languages (or their contemporary variants, ie Church Latin vs Classical Latin), it’s relying on relatively recent translations of old versions of languages that are sometimes themselves translations of ancient versions of languages. (Think about how much English has changed since Shakespeare wrote, and imagine how much Hebrew must have changed between when the various books of the Old Testament was written and when it was translated into Greek in the 200s & 100s BC.) Although by about 400 AD pretty much everyone was working from a set group of texts (kind of), that didn’t mean that they were all working from the same copy, and there were definitely differences between the exact copies that everyone had access to. And translation is hard! Sometimes there are problems! You have to take this word that has this meaning now but had that meaning then and decide which one is right and find an appropriate way to convey that in a different language and then someone 30 years later has to figure out if what that means has changed at all since the time you wrote it down. (One of the reasons the Church continues to use Latin is because it’s a dead language and so theoretically the meaning doesn’t change, which is handy.)****
Which brings us pretty neatly to the question of intent. One of the most common reasons for drift in texts like the Bible is the correction of perceived mistakes–someone thinks a word is incorrect, or something is phrased poorly, or even changes/inserts/removes entire passages. Their understanding of this thing is based on a different version, and so they “fix” it as they copy it. (Other genuine mistakes were sometimes preserved, which can end up being pretty funny actually.) More broadly, meanings of words change over time, and what was once a fairly accurate translation takes on a different meaning and maybe gets replaced by a different word that’s a synonym of the new meaning or a colloquialism gets thrown into the mix and starts to be taken literally once the copiers no longer have a frame of reference for it. Copiers knew & understood that human error played a role in texts not being accurately recorded & passed down, and there are clear signs that at times they actively strove to interpret and convey intent. But without the safeguards of an oral tradition–tone, facial expression, being actively taught the exact thing you’re memorizing by someone who has memorized not just the words but also their intent and impact–each person was making decisions about intent on their own, influenced by doctrine but not guided in each precise word.
And so oral traditions, more than textual traditions, have a toolset available to them that allows them to address the problems of intent and translation. For important texts where meaning isn’t up for debate and needs to be kept intact, humanity has ALREADY, ON MULTIPLE DIFFERENT OCCASIONS devised a pretty effective solution–but for some reason Western cultures don’t want to use it.
****Some translations are A++ spot on, but that doesn’t mean that the people doing these particular translations were very good at it. My intent here isn’t to disrespect the awesome work that modern translators do, it’s to point out that bad translations were & are common and can cause miscommunication.
While we’re on the topic of Climate Change, this post and article is worth reading (from my science blog above).
That’s 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it should be at this time of year. I’m especially troubled because my Actual News-Reading Friends are reacting to this with “wait but is that normal, or is it actually global warming?”
Which means that sources like the Washington Post are doing a terrible job of explaining what this actually means. Which is probably a huge part of why people are generally not very concerned about climate change, especially not compared to how bad the situation actually is.
The graph above shows that every single year on record, the amount of ice in the sea has grown and melted at about the same times and in the same amounts. Except this year, when suddenly, instead of a bunch of ice forming in fucking winter, it’s… Not. It’s remaining at summer levels, basically.
This is not just part of global warming, it IS global warming. This is the core of the whole thing. The amazing amounts of carbon dioxide that we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere at an increasing rate for the past 100 years have been trapping more and more heat inside the atmosphere.
This has finally reached the point of Horrible Vicious Cycle. Because when it gets too warm, the polar ice caps melt.
When they melt, the oceans become much warmer and more acidic and can’t sustain life well.
When the oceans get warmer, they stop helping cool the atmosphere. Having large bodies of cold water lying around is GOOD if you want an area to be cooler. Having large bodies of warm water lying around does fuck all for cooling anybody down.
The less the oceans help cool things, the more our carbon emissions affect the atmosphere. Because they’re no longer partly being counteracted by the oceans.
Which means global warming accelerates.
Which means ice melting accelerates.
Which means the oceans get even more fucked up.
Which means global warming accelerates even more.
The reaction to this should not be “wait but is this just a thing that happens, the newspaper didn’t really say,” it should be a massive, front page, global headline of “OH FUCKING SHIT.”
Adding, because skepticism is important.
The temperature value is real. The danger is real. That chart is wrong.
Here’s the real chart, from NASA:
And the Antarctic sea ice:
And here’s the same data from the National Snow & Ice Data Center’s interactive graph here:
As you can see, it’s bad, but it’s not as imminently apocalyptically bad as the upper chart, which was made by a single poster on the Arctic Sea Ice Forums and doesn’t line up with the graphs displayed by the site as the most accurate.
Is this bad? Yes, undoubtedly. It’s very, very alarming, and you can see by the actual graphs that this year is very unusual. But is the ice loss as sudden and apocalyptic as the top image seems to indicate? Not so. The ice hasn’t just gotten stuck at summer levels. There has not been a sudden, catastrophic change in the ice this year, it’s still shrinking at the same alarmingly bad rate as usual. Climage change is still a huge, huge, existentially bad issue right now, but it’s important not to fly into a blind panic over an inaccurate graph and a vague headline. Should you be worried? Yeah, definitely. But try to keep a level head. You don’t need to move inland and stock up on bottled oxygen just yet. That’ll come later.
GATHER ‘ROUND CHILDREN AND LET ME TELL YOU A THING OR TWO ABOUT THIS GLORIOUS BOOK.
I HAVE OWNED THIS BOOK FOR A WHILE BUT NOW I’M SHARING IT WITH TUMBLR BECAUSE WE’RE ALL DRAGON-LOVING-FUCKS.
IN THIS BOOK
IN THIS MOTHERFUCKIN MASTER PIECE OF A BOOK
THE GIRL SEEKS OUT THE DRAGON BECAUSE SHE WANTS TO ESCAPE HER BORING LIFE AS A PRINCESS.
I DON’T THINK YOU GUYS HEARD ME.
THE GIRL WANTS TO BE WITH THE DRAGON.
AND THIS AINT EVEN IN A ROMANTIC WAY. SHE JUST RESPECTS THE DRAGON SO FUCKING MUCH.
THERE IS EVEN A PART WHERE SHE REPEATEDLY TELLS A PRINCE TO STOP TRYING TO SAVE HER BECAUSE SHE WANTS TO BE THERE AND THE PRINCE JUST ISN’T GETTING IT BECAUSE HE’S NEVER HEARD OF A PRINCESS WANTING TO BE AMONG DRAGONS BEFORE.
LIKE I CAN’T EVEN RIGHT NOW JUST READ THE DAMN THING.
THIS IS THE MOST READ BOOK I OWN AND I READ A LOT OF BOOKS AND HAVE MANY FAVORITES SO Y’ALL KNOW THIS BOOK MUST BE GOOD.
i have read it a total of 39749823792837493 times.
Every once in a while a post comes around that reminds me of how important these books were to wee me, and I have to reblog it so that other people can find this very important series.
Bonus: the dragon she goes to live with, Kazul, is also female. Through various events in the book, Kazul eventually becomes King of the Dragons (yes, you read that right–in dragon culture, the titles of King and Queen are not tied to gender.
I cannot TELL YOU how much little Stele wanted to run away and become a dragon’s princess.
I LOVED this series growing up. now I want to re read it…
I was wondering when someone was going to say it. D:
THESE BOOKS ARE THE FUCKING BEST OKAY
also the books are just fucking hilarious in general like the entire series is an exercise in dry humor and litotes
OMFG THESE FUCKING BOOKS OKAY.
I was about ten when I first picked this up, so I didn’t know much about
all the nastiness that happens to fantasy ladies, but I DID know there
were way too many princes and shepherd boys and woodcutters and sailors
and such having all the fun. By the time I was done, I was like, “Mom, pack my bags, I’m going to live with a dragon and be friends with a witch.” (The spit-take was epic.)
Cimorene was the fucking REASON I got into reading fantasy novels. It was so refreshing to see a strong female lead who didn’t get dumbed down or “humbled” (we all know what it means, fuck you GRRM) somewhere along the way. Cimorene was strong, she was sassy, she was smart, she was independent, and she was still GIRLY. And she didn’t need to fiddle-fart around with special powers or magical ancestral relics to kick wizard ass, oh no. CLEANING SUPPLIES.
And don’t even get me started on Morwen and how much that influenced my interest in magic.
Dealing With Dragons led to The Ruins of Ambrai, which led to The Dragonstar books, which led to The Abhorsen Chronicles, which led to The Black Jewels series…
STRONG FEMALE FANTASY LEADS ARE IMPORTANT.
*gasp* no one has posted the absolutely AMAZING Trina Schart Hyman cover for this book, though!
look at her amazing eyebrows, her sword, her attitude! I checked this book and its sequels out of the library so many times I might have set a record.
Ah, god, these books are the best. And they were something of a bonding experience for myself and my mom when I was 16; I read through the entire series out loud to her over the course of a couple months. (We didn’t intend to start; I was rereading the series yet again and wanted to share the great opening lines, and just didn’t stop!)
These books are the fantasy series both of us wanted when we were kids, with characters that felt infinitely more real and relatable than yet another farmer’s son inevitably thrown into a hero role. It turns all the princess tropes on their ear and laughs at them for being so shallow (it does not laugh at shallow PRINCESSES however, and that distinction is SO important). The female characters support and help each other in their own way – even the ones the tropes suggest would be a hinderance or antagonistic – and this is the one series I recommend to all my friends who have kids.
It’s so nice to see these pristine cover images, because all of mine look like this:
OH MAAAN. I loved these books. I got them out of the library. I think I actually accidentally read the last one (about Cimorene’s son) first and then went back and read her books. The last one is actually still my favorite but they’re all so great.
THESE BOOKS ARE AMAZING and also hilariously your reading order was actually the order they were written in – Talking To Dragons was published first in like 1980 something and then the other three were written later in the 90s. I absolutely loved them too; Cimorene always struck me as the kind of hero that you’d actually want to be, rather than the hero that the book tells you is good or admirable. She’s smart and she likes cooking and she finds satisfaction in organizing things and she loves to learn and she’s brave and she fights against cruelty and cares for people and ugh, Cimorene is just great.
And where the FUCK is my $100 million blockbuster adaptation of this btw???
What I Say: I’m fine.
What I’m Thinking: Stargate was such a beautifully rich and complex world, and I feel like they really screwed themselves over with Universe, but that is no reason to shut down that mythology all together. I mean SG-1 was so good, it was about exploring and it wasn’t all sexed up, and really Universe went wrong the moment they opened their pilot with the Marine and the soldier banging in an actual literal supply closet. And has it been almost ten years since it went of the air? Yeah but I still miss my star children. And let’s not forget Stargate Atlantis. Hello: Space Vampires! And like they were really terrifying, and Elizabeth Weir deserved so much more in the end. They all did. And not to mention we got 4 seasons of Jason Mamoa being a hottie badass. Suck it GOT. I honestly miss the G’ould. I mean they were pests, lets be real. They were dick shaped parasites, BUT Ba’al was fun. He was a nuisance, but he was fun to mock. He and Jack O’Neil were always funny to watch, I mean when Jack wasn’t being tortured. I’m kind of afraid the new film reboots will fuck everything up, like why. Don’t do that, just bring back my literal star children as a tv show that doesn’t fuck up like Universe did. I was so angry as a little ten year old when Universe got too dark for me to watch. To this day I still haven’t watched all of it because I’m angry at it. I will eventually, but at the moment I’m too pissed at Eli for being a fuck boi to Rush, who let’s be honest was based on Geddy Lee. I just really really miss my Stargate. Give me G’ould, Wraith, fuck even the Ori, I just want my spinny ring portal back.
mostly the thing i find baffling about dd’s catholicism is he only ever seems to talk to the priest. where are the grandmas? the pianist? the youth groups? the really earnest youth *educators* still trying to get you to come to a meeting at 23 years old????
Right? There’s no sense of community, or place, both of which are SUPER DUPER IMPORTANT in Catholicism-as-practice. The only people who aren’t theoretically part of a community in the Catholic Church are people who choose to isolate themselves for religious reasons, and while an interpretation of Matt Murdock as someone who’s doing that would be cool, it’s not what it’s happening? There isn’t even a clear rejection of community; it’s just…missing.
THE PLACE THING TOO THOUGH, that’s something that bothers me A LOT! Like, okay, my religious studies professor in college was talking about how while churches are important in Christianity, they aren’t sacred/holy in the same way the spaces of other religions can sometimes be, in the sense of God being more present inside of the building/space, because in Christianity God is everywhere. And that’s true, but a girl in my class brilliantly made the case for it not being true of Catholicism (she had a lot of supporting evidence including the incorporation of relics into churches, though she did not center the tabernacle nearly as much as I would have because hello, we literally think Jesus is physically actually in the church and look, we even have a house for him), and that’s…really missing from Daredevil?
Also just like, casual ritual in general is lacking. Why does Matt Murdock not have a pocket rosary sewn into his costume, or why does Foggy not give him grief about some holy card or saint medallion or something on a regular basis? Why do we rarely see him doing the Sign Of The Cross? Why does Matt only behave like a Catholic when it moves some other plot forward–that is to say, when he goes to confession?
I mean, the legalistic aspect of Catholicism can show up in shows/movies in cool ways too (see: Dogma), and that is less focused on practice for obvious reasons. But Matt Murdock’s Catholicism isn’t about legalism, it’s about character, and I just find it really disappointing that it’s kind of MIA from the show.
The more I think about it the more I realise that no ancient civilization would be at all interested in taming dragons.
Dragons are carnivores, so they’re really inefficient and costly to feed. They’re solitary, so its really frigging hard to form any kind of relationship with them. They’re darn right dangerous, so why risk your life taming one when there’s loads of llamas in the world. And worst of all their life spans are insanely long; if you had an opportunity to breed one, you wouldn’t live long enough to see the fruit of your labour mature, so you wouldn’t even bother.
‘BABY BOOMER TAMES DRAGON. REFUSES TO BREED IT. SAYS “MILLENIALS SHOULD BE SATISFIED WITH LLAMAS” DOES A SICK LOOP-DE-LOOP ON BACK OF DRAGON’
Not sure I’d agree with that, since cats are obligate carnivores and became domesticated. Seems like it would depend more on the size of the dragon in question.
Also, being reptiles, I think they’d actually be less expensive to feed than a carnivorous mammals since reptilian metabolisms tend to be slower, which is why snakes and lizards can go a very long time between meals if the food happens to be big enough.
Oh cats and dogs are most certainly carnivores, but they happen to also be pack animals, relatively safe to interact with, and have an ideal maturation rate and brood size for breading. They manage to tick some boxes which make them legitimate for domesticating.
Elephants come to mind as something less than ideal to tame that humans just, decided to tame anyway. Their maturation rate is crazy long and elephants can kill. But they are herbivores, making them deceptively cheep to feed for their size (Well, relatively, big herbivores are expensive to feed, but at least you’re paying to only feed it, not every big herbivore it ever eats) and Elephants are SUPER sociable. But even so, Elephants aren’t the most popular in terms of domestication.
Dragons meanwhile have so very little qualities which would make them good for domestication. (Being really freaking cool, terrifying in battle, and useful for travel are good incentives to try to domesticate a dragon, but it doesn’t mean an industry of domesticating them is going to be plausible.)
You’ve got me on the reptile metabolism thing. I don’t know enough about that topic to discuss it.
cats only became more sociable through domestication. so if u could domesticate a dragon having a giant animal to fly u and things long distance would be very valuable, and even though they take a long time to grow if they are passed down thru families they could be valuable
They could be bred to be more sociable through rapid selective breeding. Which is why if dragons had to be domesticated I’d choose the game of thrones ones because holy flip that dragon is an adult and only five years old. But cats were sociable to begin with, they live in prides; it’s in their nature to socialise, so humans could get all up in that.
A dragon pet being valuable doesn’t overcome a dragon being plausible. I’m sure some dragon fanatics who have the wealth, land, and disposable people to domesticate one dragon would occasionally manage to, but not civilisations.
I’m sure one guy who really loves the abstract idea of heritage would put the effort into breeding their dragon so that their great great grand daughter could have a dragon too, but there’s nothing to say that grand daughter will feel the same way about a load of descendents she’s never going to meet.
Dragons will be for the super rich fanatics, civisiations would have to make do with drawings of their kings riding them.
I’d like to point out that the “low metabolism” thing is bunk.
Dragons (as described here) would be flying animals. Giant flying animals. Giant flying animals that breathe fire. Flight is the single most costly mode of transportation ever evolved by a huge margin; birds on the wing use about 7 times the energy that they use while at rest. By comparison, we humans only use less than twice our “resting energy” while walking. As is expected, these ratios increase with an animal’s size. A dragon large enough to carry a human is gonna need a FRICKEN LOT of energy to be able to fly at all, which requires a fast metabolism to provide (yes, even if it doesn’t fly very much).
Secondly, fire. How would they produce it? They sure wouldn’t breathe fire just by thinking “burny” thoughts, and the flames most dragons are depicted as producing are strong and persistent which isn’t consistent with the common “gas bladder” explanation given by many. This suggests the production of liquid fuel, a method of ignition, and more importantly a way to throw that fuel far enough for the dragon to hit things without burning itself alive. I don’t know how it’s gonna accomplish those things, but I guarantee you that it ain’t gonna be cheap. The fuel alone would require so many kilocalories, like you wouldn’t believe how many KCs are in a napalm-like fuel, like holy crap. It’s gonna need a TON of food to produce that.
So, yeah, reptile or not, a dragon would definitely need way more food to stay alive and do dragony things than a non-dragon critter of similar size. Unless you’re a monarch who doesn’t particularly care how starving your subjects are, dragon domestication is a no-no.
^ I was thinking that while reading this post
get these dragon taming elitists of my dash
I’m glad dragons aren’t real; the dragon fandom would suck all the fun out of them.
consider this. they’re magical animals that work by magic. its the only explanation for why any thing about them makes sense. for one thing, for anything at that size to get airborn under normal circumstances, the size its wings would need to be is absurd and impractical. they work by magic becuase they’re inherently magical creatures. no one asks how a unicorn has healing powers becuase they’re understood to be magical
Screw magic. Also screw carnivore dragons.
Omnivore dragons.
A dragon marauds into an area and eats all the livestock, sure, but there’s also crops, trees, plants, houses, etc. Why should dragons just eat all the sheep in an area when they can break the grain silo open and go to town? Devastate a year’s worth of harvests then try to waddle away because they’re too fat to fly (like a gorged vulture).
Even “carnivores” like bears and wolves will eat fruit, nuts, grass, things, etc because it’s easier than chasing down prey. Why restrict dragons? Why insist dragons are too discerning?
Omnivore dragons ftw.
That’s a point. What’s the benefit of being strictly a carnivore anyway? Digesting things becomes a lot easier, but dragons are BIG, they should have room for enough stomachs to eat just, all the trees.
Simply put, the benefit of being a hypercarnivore (having a diet comprised 70% or greater of animals) is indeed that digesting things becomes a lot easier.
Foraging is a very expensive activity. To make the investment of food-collection worthwhile, an animal needs returns on whatever it eats that outweigh that investment. Cows eat grass, need to spend pretty much all of their time grazing just to turn an energetic profit, and their lifestyle is hardly a fast-paced one. Cheetahs, on the other hand, eat tasty tasty dead things only every once in a while, and theirs is the most fast-paced life of any terrestrial vertebrate. The tradeoff is that they can’t afford to do anything but rest while they’re not foraging.
Back to the issue at hand, why should a dragon be strictly carnivorous? Let’s look at the numbers: A pound of grain (in this case wheat) has about 1,500 kilocalories of available energy, while a pound of classic Dragon Food (sheepies!) only has about 1300. From just this, the argument for the “omnivorous harvestfucker” dragon is pretty convincing! However, lean meat is not the only component of sheep. They’re also full of tasty fat (3500 KCal/lb) and bone marrow (3500 KCal/lb).
Assuming your average sheep weighs ~150 pounds and has a median bodyfat content of ~15%, a hungry dragon can expect to net a whopping 275000 kilocalories from a single animal. Compare that to the 225000 kilocalories from a similar mass of grain. It may not seem like much, but when you’re a massive hypercarnivore that 50 million calorie difference is a huge motivator.
So while I’m not completely opposed to the idea of omnivorous dragons, I’d wager that if they existed they’d be eyeing the waddling balls of penned mutton more often than fortified grain silos.
Dragons taming humans makes much more sense.
Yes, but all this feeding talk is completely redundant if you can’t catch and pen one to begin with.
Like, look at buffaloes. They’re grazing animals that produce meat and fur that can, and historically has, been used for food and shelter. And yet, they have only very recently been domesticated. Not because ancient people didn’t want to domesticate them, but because they couldn’t. Buffaloes are huge and they will attack you if you mess. It’d be like being attacked by a steamroller.
That’s the same reason why we’ve never domesticated lions or tigers or bears (oh my). As cool as it would be to ride a friggin’ war bear into battle, they’re just not good for domestication to get your war bear in the first place. When you just have a stick with a pointy rock on one end, maybe a sheet of metal covering your torso, and more gumption than is good for you and your going up against something at least twice your size with daggers attached to each of its toes and no problem attacking you to defend itself, your not gonna win.
Dragons, in most depictions, are big as houses with diamond hard scales, have claws the size of people, and, in many stories, have human like intelligence (which brings up a moral aspect to domestication). Oh yeah, and they can fly.
Maybe the odds of achieving a capture of one would be plausible now in modern times where we have the technology to match their power, but in medieval times, you can get a group of fifty of the strongest warriors to try and catch one, but the only thing you can be guaranteed is that most of them will die in the process, assuming that the dragon doesn’t just fly off to begin with, in which the warriors would have no way of following. And then, assuming by some miracle they do manage to catch one, they still have to catch a second one for breeding. And after the lose of life capturing the first one, you’ll be hard pressed to find people willing to go after a second one.
The only way around that is if your dragons are no bigger than horses
with little natural protection
to begin with and then you breed them into the large powerhouses you see in stories (that’s what they did in the Pern novels by Anne Mccaffrey).
And then you’ve got the dragons with human like intelligence. There’s no domesticating them, because then it’s slavery. But, alliances can be brokered with them, which means awesome dragon societies.
But wait, there is a third option here. Dragons (of the non-human like intelligence variety) do like cats did and domesticate themselves.
Because why bother stealing food from the humans when you can just get the humans to willingly give the food to you. You might have to do a bit of guard work for them or let them ride on your back or go attack other humans for them, but in return you get fed choice meals, get better places to sleep in beside a cave (that will increasingly improve with human technology), have a safe place away from predators to have your eggs, have that hard to reach spot scratched for you whenever it gets itchy, and just over all have a more secure life than you would’ve trying to survive on your own in the wild.
In short, if you watch over the sheepies and protect them from predators and thieves for a few hours, you will get to eat some of the sheepies in reward, which takes a lot less effort than trying to steal them yourself.
Because quite frankly, one of the best survival techniques for non-humans is to be useful to humans. Because we are super clingy that way.
Dragon taming discourse
I’m now thinking about dragons domesticating themselves because humans produce things like olive oil and similar plant-based fats that make being omnivorous much less of a pain (they avoid having to eat a fuck-ton of olives or whatever and dealing with all the fiber, sugars, and other things that are not fats), and things like butter that collect several animals’ output of milk and concentrate all the fats into one tasty and longer-keeping solid.
Dragons domesticating themselves because humans have hearth-fires and buildings that keep out the cold, vastly diminishing the energy they have to consume to regulate their body temperature and making winters much more comfortable (some castles and manors have giant fireplaces, perfect for a dragon to sleep in, curled around the fire).
Dragons domesticating themselves because humans don’t eat the bones or viscera of animals they butcher, and depending on prosperity level may consider some of the cuts of meat undesirable, so the remnants of a hard day’s work for a butcher might be a very easy-to-get source of calories (especially if dragons are like lammergeyers and have the ability to digest bone).
Dragons domesticating themselves because humans like the horns, antlers, and hides of prey animals, and giving a human these parts that aren’t good to eat can earn gratitude in the form of a nice warm fire in the winter, or a place to shelter from the storms; dragons learning that humans place high value on certain things, like the winter pelts of a fox; dragons using the power of flight to go where humans can’t easily access, like taking ibex and chamois from the high mountaintops, bringing the carcasses to the human towns and presently getting a pile of bones, organs, fats, meat scraps, and a jar of olive oil as well, and the warm embers of a fire to sleep in.
Ooh. Ooooh.
‘Cause I’m thinking, you know, the thing about domestication is that animals tend to domesticate us right back. People who could tolerate and bond with the first dogs were more successful than the ones who couldn’t – I’m thinking guarding and caretaking behavior as much as hunting. Early Europeans (speaking VERY roughly, there) lost their lactose intolerance after/during the domestication of cattle. Cats, as mentioned above, chose us, not the other way around, and five minutes on the Internet could tell you what an impact that choice had on us. 😉 There’s this symbiotic sort of co-evolution that happens when humans and animals develop that relationship that I think is really cool.
Apply that to self-domesticated dragons. Magical creatures with humanlike intelligence who can fly and breathe fire. What impact would that have on our bodies and our societies?
We’d become more resistant to heat, for one thing – imagine a dragon getting up from its fire bed in the morning and trotting out for breakfast still dripping embers. (No more rushes on the floor for us!) We’d come to depend on fewmets for fuel and shed scales for fine etching tools. We’d gain resistance to certain cross-species diseases from exposure alone. Depending on how magic works in this world, we could gain resistance from magical ailments the same way, maybe even become harder to curse. Little ones with a talent for spells would go to Madam Dragon for instruction. Dragons with a more crafty bent would unite their talents with that of smiths, potentially accelerating our metalworking technological development. Dragon-based travel methods would interconnect the world the same way the invention of the train or airplane did.
…this has the potential for some serious nerdery, people. 😀
Better resistance to certain air pollutants, for cultures that work with dragon-smiths. Humans that ride dragons would have a lot more people who are unafraid of heights. Artistic stylings would change, with both larger, more dragon-sized designs, as well as possibly a premium paid for things that are incredibly, finely intricate and difficult for dragons to produce themselves. We’d need a lot more space to live, for any given number of people (and their dragons). Our houses would be WAY bigger. TV shows starring dragons and with dragon-centric plotlines. Cross-species love scandals (you know it would happen, come on you KNOW it would HAPPEN.)
And if permanent magic effects works by affecting your epigenetics, well. How did you think that dragon blessings and curses on entire lineages WORKED, after all?
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms – they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.
Ok get this though. In the books humans wind up *wiping out the borg completely*. Pretty much because they had a human president of the federation, and humans yoloing all across the galaxy to find out how the borg were made and found out how to stop them one and for all by getting the nigh all powerful aliens that created them on accident to undo their mistake, these aliens by the way were xenophobic to the extreme but peaceful. We did it by annoying the shit out of them until they did what we wanted. Oh yeah time travel was involved, twice.
I… have… SO MANY FEELINGS ABOUT THE ACCENTS OF VARIOUS HARRY POTTER CHARACTERS!!!!!!!!!!
and by ‘the accents of various Harry Potter characters’ I mean the LACK THEREOF and the Overwhelming amount of Posh Wankers in this series. I MEAN. it winds me up MASSIVELY, and it also opens a can of wooorrrmmmss re: the wizarding population around the British Isles. like… We Need To Talk About Wales. caveat: this is all coming from a Northerner, so as far as I’m concerned the Midlands are in the South, but I’m going to try to be geographical instead of Northern about this.
SO, for those who can’t tell the difference between various UK accents/didn’t realise there were accents in England other than The Benedict Cumberbatch (which, if you’re going from these movies, is understandable), let me break down the film accents for you: McGonagall, Cho Chang and Oliver Wood are Scottish, Seamus Finnegan, Mad-Eye Moody and Luna Lovegood are Irish (Evanna Lynch is from the border region so her accent sounds slightly Northern Irish), Neville Longbottom has a Yorkshire accent (Yorkshire is a county in the North of England), Hagrid is from the West Country (which, despite how it sounds, is The South), and literally every other character sounds like they grew up below the Watford Gap. discounting the ones I’ve just mentioned, everyone else is Generic Southern or straight up Good Old Boy RP (Received Pronunciation, which is like standard BBC English that you hear on the telly/out of the gob of pretty much every HP character).
(I mean, in fairness, this wasn’t really a Movie decision. in the books the Midlands and the North are just places the Hogwarts Express has to pass through to get to Scotland. Harry is from Surrey, the Weasleys are from Devon, it never really says where Hermione’s from but judging by how her dialogue reads I’m guessing it’s The South, Sirius grew up walking distance from King’s Cross, Godric’s Hollow is in the West Country somewhere, Malfoy Manor is in Wiltshire, and even though the footy team you support doesn’t always indicate where you’re from we’ll ignore that in this case and say that Dean Thomas is from Stratford, East London. and those are just the characters I can remember off the top of my head. that’s a lot of southerners. like, Pureblood wizards seem to be mostly very old aristocracy (I remember reading that the Malfoys came over from France with William the Conquerer in 1066), so you could argue that, like, they all had wizard babies in/around the capital and they’re slowly but surely spreading outwards hence the CLUMP of southern wizards (not to mention they tend to stick together in communities like Ottery St Catchpole and Godric’s Hollow) but a) that is a stupid, reaching theory and I seriously doubt it, and b) even if it WAS true, MUGGLEBORNS EXIST! why aren’t there wizards popping up in, like, Liverpool or Salford or Birmingham? why is EVERYONE so goddamn WELL-SPOKEN???)
I do think about the accents thing a lot. and I get mad about the movies a lot. I mean, Hagrid’s accent reads as Yorkshire. he says ‘summat’! he’s the most Yorkshire thing ever!! and Dean has a Generic Nice Southern accent, not an East London accent! he should sound like Alfie bloody Moon!!! also, considering Godric’s Hollow is in the West Country, DUMBLEDORE SHOULD HAVE HAGRID’S ACCENT!!!!! I JUST DIE OVER THE TERRIBLE ACCENT CHOICES FOR THESE FILMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY WOULD YOU LET MICHAEL ‘I DON’T NEED TO READ THE BOOKS’ GAMBON DO A WEIRD DRUNKEN IRISH LILT WHEN HE COULD HAVE BEEN HAGRIDDING EVERYWHERE!!!!!! (also if Voldemort hadn’t ruined everything and Harry had been raised in Godric’s Hollow he would also have a Hagrid-ish accent. amazing.) AND, according to the HP wiki, Little Hangleton is in the North somewhere, which means Gaunt cottage is in the North somewhere, which means VOLDEMORT IS NORTHERN. LOL. take a moment for that one. let it sink in. Voldemort is my past, present and fookin’ future, innit.
BUT YEAH. ANYWAY.
so if we’re going by the books there’s literally one Scottish person and one Irish person that we know of at Hogwarts (AND one of them is a teacher, AND I don’t think either of them were ever SPECIFICALLY said to have a Scottish/Irish accent). which begs the question: where the fuck is everyone who isn’t middle class English going to school??? what the hell is going on here???? as far as we know there is one (1) Irish student and this school and no (0) Scottish students. which… is wild. especially because the entire Irish quidditch team must have passed through the hallowed halls of Hogwarts in the preceding 10 years, but suddenly: a dearth. AND THERE’S NO WELSH STUDENTS! WHERE ARE THE WELSH? obviously the Holyhead Harpies are a Welsh team, and the common Welsh Green is a Welsh dragon, and Dai Llewellyn who had a ward in St Mungo’s named after him sounds Welsh, and I’m pretty sure Helga Hufflepuff was from Wales*, SO WHERE ARE THEIR SPROGS AT?
*IIRC aren’t the four founders all from different countries? I’m sure it’s at least implied by the Sorting Hat at one point. like ‘Gryffindor from wild moor’** = Dartmoor, I assume, as Godric’s Hollow is in the West Country = England, Ravenclaw’s from ‘glen’ = Scotland, I’m sure there are glens in other places but SCOTLAND, Hufflepuff is something something valley? again, valleys are everywhere, but whenever someone says ‘valley’ my brain immediately puts on a Daffyd Thomas voice and goes ‘IN THE VALLEEEEYYYSS’ which it certainly doesn’t do for any other country, so = Wales, and SLYTHERIN = FEN = Ireland has a shitload of bogs and fens and stuff. plus Slytherin is green, Ireland is the Emerald Isle, I’m just REALLY GLAD SLYTHERIN’S IRISH HAHA ÉIRE GO BRÁCH LOSERS
**FOR THE RECORD the HP wiki told me Godric’s Hollow is in the West Country, and that seems very likely as the North of England doesn’t seem to exist in the HP canon, HOWEVER I PERSONALLY choose to believe that the ‘wild moor’ is in fact THE YORKSHIRE MOORS and that Godric Gryffindor, like Tom Marvolo Riddle, is a top lad innit mate.
but back to The Absent Welsh: I like to think that maybe they’ve set up their own school. it’s a weekly boarding. everyone speaks Cymraeg. all the Irish and Scottish students go there too because they fucking hate the English. it would certainly explain the lack of Scottish, Irish and Welsh students at Hogwarts. they’re all just getting on with it in Wales somewhere. probably Anglesey. or maybe there are actually wizarding schools that are just normal day schools and Hogwarts is just the famous one because it’s a big, old, prestigious boarding school. considering Harry apparently had his name down since birth… MAYBE HOGWARTS IS THE ETON COLLEGE OF MAGIC! THIS IS MAKING SO MUCH SENSE!!! all the middle class English lot are like ‘oh darling, you simply must go to the Eton College of magic!!’ meanwhile muggleborn Gary ‘Gazza’ Bloggs from the Wirral is like ‘nah mate I’ll just go t’ t’ local like.’
(SPEAKING OF ETON COLLEGE, Justin Finch-Fletchley had his name down for it, which is aaaaabsolutely hilarious. Eton is an independent all-boys boarding school which costs roughly £37,000 ($48,000) per academic year. if Justin hadn’t been a surprise wizard he probably would have gone to Eton, gone to Oxford, joined an elite drinking club, burned money in front of homeless people, rattled a dead pig and then become Prime Minister. but instead of doing all of that he has to go to a PUBLIC SCHOOL with negligible rules, very little uniform, girls, AND he can’t even tell any of his posh little mates about it when he goes home to MUMMY for the VAC. to top it all off he’s gone from being a Good Old Boy Top Shelf Jolly Hockey Sticks Young Chap on the path to upper class glory and the Houses of Parliament to being a MUGGLEBORN HUFFLEPUFF i.e. the bottom of the Wizarding world/Hogwarts food chain. but never mind, eh, he seems pleased enough. bet he has a CORKING accent, what!)
even though my Average Joe Wizard High School idea is definitely not true, I definitely 100% feel like Ireland should have its own wizarding school. the Republic of Ireland’s relationship with The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is so long and arduous that even I, who has an Irish mother, can’t keep it all straight in my head, but basically Ireland is not part of ~the UK~ or ~Great Britain~ even though it is part of the British Isles, so they really need their own school. (tbh I’m low key offending myself by talking about this like they Should have their own school rather than They Have Their Own School, Obviously, but… whatever.) THEY ALSO SHOULD HAVE THEIR OWN MINISTRY OF MAGIC! they might have! we just don’t know! why didn’t Harry make better friends with Seamus!!! UNLESS, of course, wizards don’t trifle themselves with Muggle Affairs and didn’t get involved with the Irish revolution and the Troubles etc. (although considering how the Order of the Phoenix being founded/the war really kicking into high gear coincided with the Winter of Discontent/widespread right wing sympathy across the UK… I doubt it), and so Irish wizards are still being governed from ~Westminster. but again, if that’s the case, WHY ARE NONE OF ‘EM GOIN’ HOGWARTS??????? WHY IS SEAMUS FINNEGAN THE LONE IRISH DIASPORA AT WIZARD SCHOOL????
I… literally cannot believe how Away from me this has Gotten.
accents. okay.
yes, Sirius Black accidentally being EXTREMELY POSH is something I am very passionate about also. he tries to mask it by being all rebellious and Landaaaannn about everything but fails miserably because every so often he’ll say ‘one’, and when he’s tired or excited he’s just like… the Queen on steds. arrived at Hogwarts fluent in French and passable in Latin. knows how to use so many forks. a prank goes right and he’s like ‘YESSSS TOP SHELF, BOYS! ABSOLUTELY BANG ON!’ James is also posh but posh in the rich, big old farmhouse, Barbour jackets and Hunter wellies way, so he gets away with it because he’s never been to a cotillion and doesn’t sometimes slip and say ‘spiffing’. meanwhile Remus is from the Midlands in my heart (maybe Shropshire)*** and is just very normal and not at all impressed by these posh knobs he has to share a bedroom with. Peter is probably from somewhere with an accent that grates on you after a while, like Birmingham. (no offence @Brummies.) according to the HP wiki (it’s teaching me SO MUCH but literally where tf are they getting this info) Snape is from the Midlands, which means that surely Lily is from the Midlands, because they met when they were playing out as kids!!! this Excites Me! also imagining Snape with a Wolverhampton accent is just… exquisite.
***I know a lot of people are All About Scottish Remus and while that is second in my heart to Midlands Remus it is certainly In My Heart.
I love and support Neville Longbottom having a Yorkshire accent because I, too, have a Yorkshire accent, and his in the films means SO MUCH TO ME!! he’s OUR BOY!!! GO ON, LADDDD!!!!!! etc. I really want Lee Jordan to have a Limmy-esque Glaswegian accent, because IMAGINE him doing the quidditch commentary and just getting more and more incomprehensibly Scottish, and McGonagall keeps yelling at him because she can actually understand what he’s saying whereas everyone else can just manage to catch ‘Slytherin’ and ‘cheating’ and ‘10 points’ so they’re just like ‘???!!!!! ! !! ? !!’ also I’m a big fan of Bristolian Lavender Brown, for no other reason than I just thought of her greeting Ron by saying ALRIGHT MY LUVVER and nearly died.
in conclusion, you could say that I do indeed have feelings about the accents of various Harry Potter characters and I hope you weren’t lying when you said you’d love to hear about it.
missionlameturtle 