It always upsets me so much when I see interpretations/illustrations of the two headed calf poem that show a living calf being torn away from its mother and killed to sell to a museum and framing the poem as being "humanity kills beautiful things for being different".
Two headed cows almost never survive more than a few hours after their birth. The farmer finds the *body* the next day. The calf was destined to die, and that's a tragedy, but for the time it was alive, it had a beautiful and unique experience.
It's not a poem about the cruelty of man. It's a poem about the beauty of life in an indifferent universe. It's about purpose and beauty being able to exist even in an existence doomed to come to an end, as all our lives are. It's not a poem about how a calf dies, but how, even for only a brief moment, it was alive.
And, for that moment, because of that life, however fleeting, the sky had twice as many stars.
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I really live a lonely fucking existence.
If I had a dollar for like every person who just leaves me on read or left me hanging.. well I wouldn't need to be here feeling like this lol.
And it's the same here and everywhere else.
Idk man lol it gets old.
I contemplate when I'm going to delete everything for good.
People obviously take me for granted and don't deserve me around.
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man I wish there were a more nuanced way to talk about dress history’s darker sides without like.
making people feel guilty for thinking the clothes were pretty.
to be clear, I don’t mean this in the Conservative Pundit sense where literally any criticism of white/cis/straight/male privilege and its negative effects on society makes them cry about being Laden With Unfair Guilt(TM). I mean like...I don’t know. this Gotcha attitude I see sometimes that’s like
“think this dress is pretty? well IT CAME FROM A HORRIFIC SYSTEM SO THINK AGAIN, BOZO! BET YOU DON’T LIKE IT SO MUCH NOW HUH???”
obviously we should talk about the horrific systems (many many of them) in the past. if a garment was made from fibers processed by enslaved people, and sewn by teenage seamstresses making a pittance, that needs to be discussed
but I feel as if it would help to contextualize that with like
“who makes the majority of our clothing today? what conditions do they work in? what difficulties prevent us from simply opting out of having our clothes produced this way? who sets trends, and do people outside their social echelon also enjoy those trends?”
so that people get that they should be thinking about the past and how its legacy impacts us today, rather than tearing themselves up for Finding The Early 19th Century Cotton Evening Gown Pretty
there is no unproblematic period to enjoy clothing from, including the one we live in now. and it’s not productive to rip people a new one for Bad Fashion Preferences. to me, it’s the same as claiming that someone supports sweatshop labor because they said a Shein dress was cute once
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unfortunately I have opinions about the ascendant astarion ending and I have been holding back from saying it. but it's a problem that applies to the whole game and it's been annoying me
what's actually weird about the ascendant "romance" scene is that the writer considers it a tempting option for the player. They wrote it to be bad, but they also think it's a fun and sexy option. Same goes for the haarlep scene which they also wrote that way because they find it sexy. Except finding this sexually appealing entirely hinges on the idea that the player is a submissive. So RIP to a scene that the rest of us could have found sexy because the lead narrative designer was a submissive. lmao
In this game you can have a scene where you have to kneel for a male character. But you can never have a male character do the same for you. (Halsin doesn't count. It's a vanilla scene, he is not submissive there and we are not even asking/telling him to kneel down) You don't get such options, not even if you play a drow female! RIP the number one reason for playing drow female to be honest. lol You can kneel and fully submit to ascendant astarion or fully submit to mizora or fully submit to haarlep or submit to lae'zel or submit to minthara. you can get whipped by abdirak or you can tell him "touch me and lose a hand" he even responds positively to this remark and yet the possibility to flip the dynamic doesn't exist. There is never an option where a male character truly submits to the player. RIP to a scene that would have been the opposite of the traditional dynamic. the potential that existed but they never used the opportunity
By the way, how interesting that Lae'zel is dominant but she is a woman so ofc you get the option to tell her “no you will submit to me”. You never get such switch options with any of the male characters... Obviously it's not ascendant where they could have made that an option. My point is that it's NEVER an option among so many male characters.
It's a cool idea that the bad ending in a romance means "I saw this character as a sex object" except it falls apart when the scene is very sexually unappealing to anyone who is more dominant leaning. If I see a character as a sex object then I would place them in sexual situations which are appealing to me. so the message doesn't quite work. because there isn't anything that I can selfishly choose for myself just because I like it and I find it sexy.
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So uhh... we found something really, REALLY strange
As the tectonic activity continues to shift ever more chaotically across the globe, randomly elevating or crumbling parts of mountains, opening up fissures and expanding fault lines, not to mention all the volcanic eruptions, to say it is important to monitor the inner workings of Earth would be a criminal understatement.
On the remains of what used to be Hawaii, now a singular landmass, lies a monitoring station closest to the epicenter of the Fusion Detonation Event, some 400km away. Seismographer and tectonics expert Joannie du'Preeste was finalizing this months deep level mapping of the area of detonation and directly below to give the algorithm-driven disaster prediction model at least an above 50% accuracy rate for this month.
Typical readings, increase in magma outflow, collapses of internal caverns, formation of new ones, and irregular shifts from the various efforts to stymie and direct the disastrous plate movements. Now that Humanity and Earth were properly back in dimensional space instead of in-between, some additional hectic activity in the form of directional nuclear detonation had been performed for the upcoming plan of "plug the hole with a large piece of another planet or moon".
They've selected Sycorax by the way, just waiting for it to get further away from Uranus in its irregular orbit, hook it up to several Dreadnoughts and haul it over to Earth and gently plop it in the hole. It is about the right size and nobody will miss it if it doesn't work.
Anyway, as she pondered the likely inevitable yet another calamitous event we'll be willingly conducting, the mapper finished its work.
At first, more of the same chaos as usual, but something at the back of her mind said to glance closer at the density readings from the deepest level measurements. With not much else to do today before the work day ends, she highlighted the appropriate levels, and as she started to remove clutter data, a shape began to emerge.
A tendril.
While scans and maps often show things that our minds interpret as something already familiar to us, once you look at each individual part, you see that it is just a coincidence. The brain wants to see what it knows to make sense of the unknown, life would be too complicated and overstimulating otherwise.
No mistake, however. As she removed more of the clutter and focused in on the object, there was no mistaking its resemblance to a biological structure. Hints of veins, pores, hairs, scales, needles, eyes... seemingly everything you could find on the surface layer of a creature was there, or parts of it anyway. Composition-wise it was more of the same silicates and such compounds found within the mantle. But... denser, more concentrated, almost deliberately shaped.
She quickly loaded up older data and after a bit of filtering and comparing, sure enough, the same tendril-like structure is there, just a little closer to the regular density levels of the surrounding. Even years old data provided similar results, though you could only find the shape if you already knew it was there.
Loading up the oldest records she had access to from around 300 years ago revealed the same, just even less distinguishable from the surrounding materials.
The scans don't go deep enough to show what the tendril leads to, if anything, but what is it? How did it get there? Why is something clearly biological in structure within the mantle layer? And if it does continue, how far? Does the core of the planet itself house some impossible creature? If so... what does that mean? For Earth? For Humanity? For the Universe? This is way above Joannie's pay grade and expertise, way past her regular waking hours as well at this point, and way too big to know how or if to reveal any information to the public. Some higher ups can have a headache instead.
Maybe the Coalition aliens know something similar.
Maybe this is all a big load of nothing and she just imagined it all.
Yeah.
That'd be nice.
Wouldn't it be nice if Cthulu wasn't potentially real?
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I made monster GLaDOS thing a fat while ago and neglected to post it to the one page where I actually interact with the people of Portal.
The thought process behind this is both a keyboard smash and a very strange series of prophetic dreams. I will not be elaborating.
This is my first experience with the mech-kind so I'll apologize in advance to those more familiar with machiney bits who might be reeling at what horrifically amateurish terrors their eyes are currently experiencing. I realise I talk too much when I post art, but it's oh so fun...
Monster Machine GLaDOS!
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