stray

joined 6 months ago
[–] stray@pawb.social 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Something I pretty much never see pointed out is that we don't need billions of humans. Our governments keep encouraging us to have children, but they should be working to end the culture of pressuring people (especially women) into having children because they're somehow incomplete without them. There should be more programs offering access to birth control and family counseling services. This endless and meaningless growth is as harmful to us as it is to the rest of our planet.

[–] stray@pawb.social 7 points 1 day ago

I believe pets are counted as livestock, but it's not specifically referenced as far as I have the interest to read.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115

[–] stray@pawb.social 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

As an animated work, Steven Universe is kind of garbage. There are YouTube essays out there detailing its problems, but it's most glaring when a guest animator takes over a small portion of the series and blows the entire thing out of the water.

The OP is disingenuous, but animation is having a problem these days with restricted budgets, homogenized designs, and poor use of digital tools. Quality animation was always expensive and therefore in the minority, but the everyday budget stuff is worse than in the past. There are recent series that I can't even watch due to awful framerates and bad CGI.

[–] stray@pawb.social 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But what if she had four wheels?

[–] stray@pawb.social 3 points 3 days ago

No. What is or isn't a vegetable is determined entirely by whether we collectively consider any given plant or plant part a food item.

[–] stray@pawb.social 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't love the honor translation partially because it's been used in racist caricature, but also because it's often inaccurate. Like you might say ohana because you're in an extremely formal interaction, or because you want to sound poetic or whatever, but you're not actually saying "honorable flowers" usually. You can mean that though. I feel like it's too context-sensitive and culturally nuanced for simple translation.

[–] stray@pawb.social 13 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

In Swedish the prefix for bad stuff is the same as the prefix for not or un-. So a monster is a not-animal and a weed is ungrass. Which is especially interesting to me because that same prefix (o) is for better versions of things in Japanese.

e: This got me thinking about "plant," and I realized it's literally the verb to plant. In Swedish it's a growth, or thing that grew. Japanese and Chinese: planted thing. Spanish is also the same as the verb. I feel kinda bad we mostly talk about them in terms of farming them rather than giving them a proper name. Like if they get sentient someday, plant will probably be considered a slur.

[–] stray@pawb.social 9 points 3 days ago

It definitely counts as invasive if we put it there though. I don't see rabbits swimming to Australia.

[–] stray@pawb.social 6 points 6 days ago

Spraying someone with pepper spray is a violent assault. It's banned in a number of counties due to the possibility of permanent injury or even death, and the risk to bystanders.

[–] stray@pawb.social 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I don't think whether an attack is physically violent should play a role in whether someone is allowed to use violence to defend themselves. Plenty of forms of sexual assault are non-violent in the sense that they don't cause bodily harm to the victim, but I still think you should be allowed to resort to violent methods of stopping/preventing them. Things like gropings, upskirt photography, etc are a form of psychological violence in my opinion.

This is different from break-ins which are a more serious crime as they violate the private living spaces of people on top of violating their property rights.

What is the reasoning behind this distinction? Are you suggesting it's okay to defend your home with violence?

To come at this from another angle, do you think theft should be legal? If not, why is it okay for the state to enact violence on perpetrators, but not victims?

[–] stray@pawb.social 1 points 6 days ago

Everything being said on both sides in those screenshots doesn't really mean much to me without data to show it's actually the case.

My personal feeling is that I don't care to own most games in the first place and would be happy getting them all from the library the same way I do with books. Without Gamepass I wouldn't have played things like Payday 3 or Grounded in the first place because I won't purchase them. The alternative for me is piracy.

[–] stray@pawb.social 24 points 6 days ago (21 children)

I don't agree with characterizing being robbed from as not a big deal, especially when it's as physically intimate as pickpocketing.

Maybe it's no big deal to lose a bit of money if you're rich, but I would be truly fucked to lose my phone or wallet, and more than inconvenienced to lose money or objects which would need to be replaced with money.

But more than that is the sense of violation. What gives someone the right to come into my home or put hands on my body and take my personal things? It's dehumanizing. It feels disgusting to be treated that way. Of course I'm going to defend myself.

 

Transmogrify! 14 Fantastical Tales of Trans Magic is a collection of short stories focused on including trans characters in magical worlds. Some stories have very inclusive settings, while others involve characters rebelling against rigid systems and/or abusers. While the cover reads very femme, there are plenty of male characters, and quite a few of the authors have made a point to focus their stories on nonbinary validity.

Some highlights:

Verity was interesting due to its inclusion of fluid pronouns, which I'd not seen before.

The POV character of Dragons Name Themselves is a magical school, the building itself.

In Genderella, Ella's wicked step-mother won't let her go to prom in a dress. I'd really love to see a film like this.

Espejismos is similar to some Latine horror films I've enjoyed, and that made it my favorite. It has a mysterious apocalyptic setting, dream-like events, and a bittersweet tone.

 

Self-Made Boys is a reimagining of the Great Gatsby by queer and mixed-raced author Anna-Marie McLemore. It has mystery, love geometry, good humor, and great pacing.

It touched on some pretty heavy topics, but always managed to make me feel really good about myself rather than depressed or triggered. The author made me feel connected to a wider community through the characters' connections with each other, and the supportive ways injustices and traumas were addressed.

Five stars.

 
 

This is going to contain spoilers through season 1 episode 10.

My tastes in media have become somewhat more demanding as I've gotten older. I used to enjoy pretty much anything with a fun adventure, but now I need my entertainment to also be educational or growth-provoking in some way.

I mostly enjoyed episodes 1-7 because even though it was a cute slice of life, it was coming at it from a more unique angle of how we form and value relationships and I felt that it was emotionally meaningful.

But then by episodes 9 and 10 suddenly all these villains have really specific quirks, and the combat is drawn-out as characters over-exposit every detail of what's going on. They even tell you what's going to happen with the fight well before it ever occurs, and then they still drag out the result for some reason. It was very disappointing and I'm concerned this is just going to be the state of things from now on.

I got kind of excited about the way Frieren was talking about demons because her beef with them sounds a lot like what a pig or chicken would think of humans, and I got almost a racist vibe, but my partner's reaction made it seem like we're not going to get introspective about our biases and hipocrisy, and he suggested we move on to something else. (He's read the comic and wanted to watch the show together.)

Thoughts? I'd like to think the story is going somewhere, but it won't be good for our relationship if it just ends up with me complaining the whole time.

 

One time on IRC the topic of what Boxing Day even is came up, and this guy said in seriousness that it's to memorialize the Boxer Rebellion, and we had a big fight about it. He backed up his claim by pointing out that the horse from Animal Farm was an allegory for said uprising, so he wasn't just making things up.

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