What is even this

whetstonefires:

chimaerakitten:

whetstonefires:

whetstonefires:

whetstonefires:

the problem with knowing things about battle tactics is that an ever-increasing subset of popular media becomes impossible to enjoy properly because you have to sit there like ‘wow Captain Protagonist good to know all those dead people on your own side are a direct result of your total lack of anything resembling brains’

seriously i’m not talking about anything elaborate, just basic common sense, but common sense is so much harder to ignore once you’ve got systematized data to back it up, like

what do they even think a fortification is for???

what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????

make the other sonuvabitch have a hard time killing you without getting killed first! most basic goal of combat! why are movies so bad at writing characters who actually attempt this on even a very small 'army’ scale?

and like i said in the first post, it’s not just that it’s Dumb, the thing is that once you put the character in a command role, their ability to think their way through a combat situation with some degree of optimization becomes a reflection on their character on like. a moral level.

if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it’s just you punching people that’s one thing. or even if it’s you and five guys who’ve decided they like how you roll!

but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don’t know what you’re doing. that’s not okay.

it’s not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.

when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn’t have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn’t want and weren’t competent to handle, without support.

or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.

even if they win! i don’t want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there’s triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!

no! they fucked it up is what they did! this is some Light Brigade gaslighting shit! shut up. our boy just massacred people who trusted him.

This is reminding me of the extremely weird experience I had watching, of all things, The Kid Who Would Be King a couple months ago, because it was one of very few fantasy movies I’ve seen recently wherein actual tactical thinking is evidenced.

And like, granted, it wasn’t especially brilliant tactics, but it was weird as hell to be watching a bunch of middle schoolers fighting hell zombies display a better understanding of concepts like fortifications and ambushes and traps and bottlenecking an invading force than most purported “good leaders” in fantasy with far more adult target audiences

#it is possible that the kids were good at tactics #because being a movie for kids meant NOT letting their Allies (other children) get massacred #for later dramatic payoff #so instead they’re allowed to make good choices and not die

rip that could very well be

(via roach-works)

vaspider:

gwydionmisha:

National Anti-Trans Bans Loom: Will Democrats Surrender Trans Rights?

Republicans have introduced a new amendment banning any federal funds from gender affirming care in several must-pass bills, with very littl

erininthemorning.com

Now is an excellent time to tell your Democratic Congress Critters trans Healthcare is important

If you can’t safely contact them in person, here are some other options:

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

This is extremely important, y'all. They’re trying to Hyde Amendment trans care for people of all ages.

Medicaid and Medicare coverage would go away, no matter what state you are in. ACA plan coverage would go away. Hospitals would fully just have to stop offering trans care, full stop, or lose their federal funding.

I know we hate the phone but we absolutely can’t sleep on this. If you have a Democrat rep, you absolutely have to tell them to hold the line against this.

(via hazel2468)

androgynuisance:

eviltransnecoarc:

We have GOT to stop being assholes to people with receding and balding hairlines. There’s not a single person that it can’t affect. It affects trans men, particularly on hormones, it affects trans women, particularly those not on hormones, it affects people with endocrine issues, something that’s becoming more prevalent and common, and it can affect people without a particular cause, including cis women. It’s a normal part of being human and we NEED to stop dehumanizing and humiliating ppl for it

My bf started losing his hair in his early 20s and the effect it’s had on him is devastating.

He’s an actor and he was dropped by his agent after he stopped hiding his hair loss. The roles he was cast in narrowed and shifted from more heroic characters to villains, and eventually he became so miserable about it that he stopped going to auditions altogether.

He used to enjoy dyeing his hair bright colours, and he lost that means of self expression. It alienated him from his own appearance, which knocked him back in coming out and exploring his queerness. The way he talks about it often feels dysmorphic. He says shaving makes him feel like he’s “rotting” - like he’s “scraping the mold off [his] head”.

I’ve seen drunk people and teenagers yell at him in the street and mock his baldness. I’ve seen people come up to him and slap his head or touch it without asking for permission. I’ve witnessed this behaviour from other trans people and women who I know would absolutely kick off if he took such a degrading or entitled attitude towards a part of their body, but seem to think it’s OK to do it to him.

Since going bald people perceive him as more masculine. He feels people are more suspicious of him. Women are less likely to approach him. Folks are quicker to put him in a box or misread his behaviour as aggressive or threatening, when the reality is that he’s neurodivergent and can’t conform to rigid social norms.

Baldness is a heavily gendered characteristic. If someone is conventionally masculine enough and/or is protected by other intersecting powers and privileges (eg wealth) then baldness can reinforce their maleness and the harm to their social standing is minimised. But if their performance of maleness is complicated by something like queerness or disability, it creates a dissonance. They have what is perceived as a hypermasculine trait standing in sharp contrast with their refusal/failure to perform normative, idealised masculinity.

And that’s how baldness is typically read - as failure. Especially when it exists outside of wealthy, successful, heterosexual masculinity but tbh even there too - just look at all the jokes about Jeff Bezos’ baldness or Elon Musk getting hair plugs. It’s similar to insulting Trump over his weight. Like yeah fuck those guys but all you’re really doing is revealing to the fat and bald people in your life that you think their bodies are deserving of mockery.

And God help you if you’re a bald woman. All women with receding hairlines are at a huge risk from transmisogyny.

Sorry for the essay. Baldness is absolutely a body neutrality issue. It’s an ageism issue, and a trans issue, and I WISH there was a broader recognition of this.

(via roach-works)

turing-tested:

turing-tested:

turing-tested:

doing research on people’s preferred formats for how restaurants have their menus displayed online and i’m including responses to the post to send to my boss but um. i don’t think i can include this specific response

I regret to inform you but my Google drive name at my job is Dirk Strider because that is also my real life legal name in my life

(via voidnerd)

weaver-z:

weaver-z:

I love folklore so much because depending on the location and era it comes from it’s either the most terrifying concept or the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard

Mexican Folklore: You think this place is a Normal Location? Tch. You fool. Everyone knows this place is the SCARY Location.

British Folklore: There’s a little Beast in your house… make sure you give it the necessary porridge……. otherwise it might turn to mischief…….

German Folklore: For the love of God, do NOT trust hot people and do NOT trust babies and do NOT trust short men and do NOT trust Christmas and do NOT trust sausage and do NOT trust the elderly and

US Folklore: This Giant Boy From Texas Is God’s Favorite

(via roach-works)

derinthescarletpescatarian:

adventures-in-poor-planning:

raiasintended:

adventures-in-poor-planning:

adventures-in-poor-planning:

Today I saw a pic of a baby cowbird next 2 its nest “parent” and it was so much bigger!!!!! Which is the sort of thing that gets normal people upset about the injustice of nest parasitism but makes *me* worry if baby cowbirds get bird dysmorphia

This (from Cornell Labs via Merlin) is the pic I was looking at. It’s just a little baby but it’s so much bigger than its “parent”!!!! Do baby cowbirds feel isolated? Do they understand they’re a different bird, or are they just a really bad sparrow?

hey, good news! ecologists have been studying this very thing! it seems young cowbirds have some kind of innate sense that leads them to sneak out of their foster nest at night to hang out in grasslands where they—more often than not—meet other cowbirds and learn more about what they really are.

Thanks I am going to cry so hard I throw up ;-;

(via roach-works)

lordoftherazzles:

For those of you who want to lock all of your works with all the silly AI scraping of AO3 (which AO3 is recommending you lock your works, as stated in this post)

Here is a quick and easy guide of how to edit ALL of your works at once.

From your Dashboard click on “edit works” on the far right. This will bring up all of your works that you can select.

Select all the works you want to edit, then hit “Edit” at the bottom right.

Scroll to nearly the bottom of the page where you find “Visibility” and select “only show to registered users” and then update at the bottom.

That’s it, all of your works have now been locked without having to go in and edit each fic individually.

I hope this helps!

(via monkeymindscream)

sixstringxoxo:

fantasticsublimepeanut:

relaxxattack:

for a while there i was sympathetic to tumblr because of how much they’re in debt; i was kind of like “well of course they’re absolutely desperate for new users, they literally need the money or else tumblr goes down forever”. and then suddenly today it hit me that there’s actually no fucking reason for that debt to be causing these ui changes? the userbase has been INCREDIBLY clear about what they want from tumblr over the years, not to mention clear about the fact that even twitter people don’t need this place to look like twitter. it actually would be very… EASY? for them to just make changes in a direction people would actually be HAPPY with?

for fuck’s sake there were people trying to organize a “crab day” for tumblr despite tumblr doing nothing but telling us to go fuck ourselves for months on end. there were people spending hundreds of dollars on check marks just for the glee of MAKING FUN of twitter. can you IMAGINE how much money this userbase would donate to tumblr if they actually made ui updates geared toward what people have been asking for?

if tumblr actually crowdsourced ideas or even just LISTENED to their userbase it may have been possible for them to make way more money than they’re begging for now, they just insist on trying to drive their actual demographic and loyal userbase out for literally no reason

They are doing surveys that are really hard to find because their survey blog has reblogs disabled for some reason.

Log survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2V3MQTP

Short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HS5LP3W

Blog: https://www.tumblr.com/benevolenthellsite

clickable links:

long survey

short survey

blog

(via voidnerd)

dramono:

bruciemilf:

bruciemilf:

Did I daydream this, or was there a website for writers with like. A ridiculous quantity of descriptive aid. Like I remember clicking on “ inside a cinema ” or something like that. Then, BAM. Here’s a list of smell and sounds. I can’t remember it for the life of me, but if someone else can, help a bitch out <3

I FOUND IT BITCHES

This is going to save me so much trouble in the future.

(via classychassiss)

thequeenofsastiel:

palominocorn:

lady-writes:

liberalsarecool:

#LateStageCapitalism

(sigh)

It wasn’t boomers who made it impossible to survive on a librarian or gardener’s salary - it was rich people. 

Plenty of boomers work as librarians, teachers, gardeners, and so forth, and are finding that as the cost of living skyrockets and corporations take over more and more of the world, that their salary is no longer able to support them.

And thus you have boomers - who understand how much you want to be a librarian because they also work as librarians - going bankrupt, losing their homes, drowning in debt, and dying because of unaffordable healthcare. And they get why you’re becoming an IT specialist instead of a librarian - because they! Know! That you can’t survive! On a librarian’s salary anymore!

On the flip side, the rich people sucking money out of every service and person they can! Aren’t! Always! Boomers! Tons of them are Gen X! And an increasing number are millennials! I haven’t seen a Gen Z billionaire yet but I’m willing to bet there’s a couple by now!

Oh, and it’s not like they “don’t know” how much people want to do these sorts of jobs - they do! That’s how they justify underpaying people, because it’s your passion, you don’t ~need~ to be paid a living wage for your passion.

You have more in common with poor boomers than you do with Kylie Jenner (born 1997). Go and talk to them. Organize with them. You’ll find they have a lot to offer once you stop dismissing them as rich old folks who ruined the economy.

As someone with a super leftist boomer father I feel this

(via voidnerd)