Is Zombieland Saga episode 10 making a point about different teaching methods not working for everyone, and that clearer communication would actually make things easier?
I feel I’m not picking up some subtleties here.
edit:Thinking about it, I think it is. I think its lovingly poking fun at how a lot of filler episodes in shows work. Pointing out that while they could be avoided if the characters communicated, they can also lead to lots of fun moments.
I think what’s kind of a cute touch is that Lily tends to avoid using first person pronouns which comes off as just being cutesy at first, but once she comes out as trans it makes sense from a character standpoint too.
Since she was living with a father who wasn’t sure how to deal with his “masao” insisting she was “lily,” referring to herself in 3rd person becomes an objection to being misgendered. It also says that she’s not sure whether to call herself “watashi” (typically feminine) or “boku/ore” (typically masculine). She would probably feel uncomfortable using masculine first person pronouns but, as a child under the care of someone who didn’t quite get the whole trans thing, she might be more comfortable referring to herself with her “stage name” than with a feminine pronoun.
…the writers probably also wanted to dodge addressing whether or not the character considers herself a girl for as long as possible since respecting personal identity, insecurities, and gender performance could be slightly less contentious than getting into the nitty gritty aspects of gender identity. Like, there’s a slight difference between saying “lily hoshikawa is lily hoshikawa not masao go” and saying “lily hoshikawa is a girl.”
This isn’t me being critical, the implication is very very very clear that lily hoshikawa is a girl, or at least should unarguably be treated as such, and there’s no reason to raise the issue if the writers didn’t want to make a statement about trans issues in the first place. it’s just a thing i noticed that they were careful to avoid stating outright.
these butterflies are actually drinking the turtle’s tears! it’s a wonderful symbiotic relationship, the butterflies get food and the turtle can see better!! 🙂
The saddest thing about Cringe Culture bloggers and people who go around bullying autistic kids is how many of them are victims of that same bullying and their attitude is basically “if I had to be abused into acting more normal, everyone else does too”
Behind the scenes of “Silent Running.” Universal actually sued George Lucas because they said the “cute robots” of Star Wars were based on the “Huey, Dewey, and Louis” robots from “Silent Running.”
Dr Malcolm perfectly captured the problem with too much moralizing sci-fi when he whined “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”Because of course they should! “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs*?” The answer is obviously yes, utterly yes, that’s the positive control case to test absolute YESness. You don’t ask people that question to find the answer, you already know the answer, you ask people that question to find out if they’re worth talking to.
*a scaled pseudospecies distinct from feathered “actual dinosaurs”.
The real problem is the wrong people asking the wrong questions, then blaming science for delivering overwhelming experimental evidence of their mistakes. Jurassic Park’s key question wasn’t “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs?”, it was “Should we unleash those awesome dinosaurs on a safari with worse security and fewer staff than the average Apple store?” No, you shouldn’t have done that. The science spectacularly succeeded in delivering a dinosaur miracle, and then specifically didn’t knock them out of the Park because that tourism screw-up’s entirely on capitalism. No scientist was collecting data for “Quantifying how much money we can make from tourism” or “Material testing the flimsiest fences imaginable with a goddamn Tyrannosaurus Rex”.
That’s the Malcolm Fallacy: blaming science for everyone else’s mistakes. You’ll see it in almost every techno-horror.
Should we invent AI? Yes! Should we connect it to military mainframes with nuclear launch authority? No!
Should we research viruses? Yes! Should we override the security computer and physically crack open sealed airtight doors when viral labs go into lockdown? No!
Should we research teleportation? Yes! Should we experiment on ourselves, alone, without even the most elementary laboratory (or even pizza parlor) standards of cleanliness? No!
Almost every sci-fi horror plot is driven by money-grubbing corporations but it’s the researchers who can’t even afford a change of clothes from their “I’m a scientist!” lab coats who take the blame. And now we have hordes of idiots destroying cropfields and resurrecting defeated diseases while CEOs gold-plate profit reports on basic medicine.
You’d think Microsoft’s learning AI becoming a nazi because of nazis on the internet getting access to it would have taught us that the AI isn’t the problem
AHHHHHHHHHHH This is one of the problems I have in the movie vs the book; in the book, Hammond is the main bad guy, and it’s because he took this cool awesome science thing and said, ‘Man, how can I sell this to people for incredible amounts of money?’. The whole book is about bioengineering companies that exploit other third-world countries to test possibly dangerous new genetic strains of animal without having to follow laws. The problem in the books is that Hammond didn’t *listen* to his scientists! In fact, he even picks out a young scientist to lead his company who didn’t know any better and was awed by him so he could try and shape him the way he wanted, and ended up ignoring his advice when he grew up more and started having serious protests. (Poor Wu, he deserved better) 😦 This is why, although I like the movies for their beautiful effects and because part of me is always gonna be an excited six-year-old who loves watching dinosaurs eat people who richly deserve it, I’m still always gonna prefer the book.
The novel was (probably inadvertently and unintentionally) about how a billionaire’s greed and cutting corners on essentials to save costs ended up causing a major disaster that killed and maimed people.
Not unintentional; Micheal Crichton’s science fiction novels often criticize the super rich. It’s his theme (alongside his other theme of suspenseful horror).
A lot of the time his work champions science as something really cool (like letting a gorilla communicate with humans, or bringing dead animals back to life, nanobots to help with medicine, etc.) but used in seriously uncool ways (trying to get at expensive diamonds, theme parks or animal testing loopholes, not testing nanobots safely and causing injuries, mind control etc.) usually for the profit and benefit of a businessman.
My favorite part about 1931 Dracula is that there are armadillos running around Dracula’s castle.
Look at this it’s like they couldn’t find any rats so they just were like “eh close enough no one will notice”. But I noticed. I noticed.
“WE NAILED IT BOYS”
Apparently in the 20s and 30s, armadillos weren’t very commonly known, so moviemakers would use them wherever they needed some creepy, ‘demonic’ animal running around. So there were a lot of armadillos in early filmmaking, and it was often people’s only source of reference for armadillos.
Fast forward twenty years to when the father of the biology professor who told me this is driving out from the east coast to see his son in California. Crossing the southwest at night.
An armadillo runs across the road.
He comes to a screeching halt and the Thing Of Evil, which he never knew was actually a real animal, trots the rest of the way across the road and vanishes into the desert.
A single, solitary bee with his own tiny custom-built coffin.
Nobody ever talks about Dracula’s pet bee.
GIVE ATTENTION TO THE BEE
SOMEONE WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT THE BEE PLEASE
Holy shit
Fun fact: Whenever I run a spooky D&D campaign, I always drop in an armadillo somewhere incongruous specifically because of how they show up in Dracula ‘31.
In one campaign the party got so fixated on why I’d included an armadillo that they wound up capturing it and bringing it along, naming it after a player who had recently left the group (Armadylan).
In retrospect, I feel like that entire campaign was an object lesson about the perils of throwing things in for flavor.
Worst Party Ever, Forever. ❤
The really hilarious thing is that armadillos are native to the Americas exclusively. They aren’t found in Europe at all and are extremely unlikely to be crawling about in a castle in Romania. So the question is, how did they get there? The only real explanation, in universe, is that Dracula must have had them imported to his castle personally. Which is so many different kinds of hilarious. Forget bats, Dracula’s true favorite animals? Armadillos. In all seriousness, my interpretation of Dracula is going to be a crazy nerd for weird and exotic wildlife, and has, in recent years, utilized the internet to add all kinds of strange creatures to his castle’s menagerie. He’s collected kinkajous, tegus, blue-tongues, lemurs, Brazilian porcupines, capybaras, all manner of bats (of course), and many others. Including chinchillas. One does not simply fuck with the Prince of Darkness’s chinchillas.
>Industrial waste pollutes water >Filter feeders process waste and store toxins in their bodies >People harvest shells for art >Artist suffers from exposure to toxic materials, suffers for years with debilitating mental and physical symptoms.
She will NEVER recover.
People act like environmental pollution is always something happening “somewhere else” but we’re all breathing and eating and drinking it and it should really put some shit into perspective that just having a hobby around seashells turned this woman’s household dust into a death trap.
“Hobby” ?????
oh wow i didn’t even catch that (wasn’t reading the reblogs as carefully as i should have been).
Gillian Genser’s art is incredibly intricate, time consuming (she spent 15 years on these sculptures, often working on them up to 12 hours a day) and evocative. She gave years of her life and sacrificed her health to make these sculptures, working on them even after she became ill. It’s not a hobby around seashells, and characterizing it that way is a disservice to the incredible work this artist has put into her craft.
She writes, I’ve experienced the suffering of so many creatures trapped in their polluted habitats. I now hope their voices can be heard—that my art might create a sense of awe, a sense of connectivity and reverence for the natural world.
I often think of Beethoven, who suffered from lead poisoning; he lost his hearing and producing his work became an angry struggle. In the end, he had to create his music from the memory of sound. I was creating my art from the memory of joy. When I look at Adam, I feel grief—both for myself and our planet. But I also feel satisfaction because he is magnificent. That’s how I find my hope. I call him my beautiful death.
This is a really good clarification and I’m glad you wrote it!
I’d also like to add that the dust produced by grinding down shells is not “household dust”. There are many artistic practices/fields that involve working with hazardous dust (for example, ceramicists need to take precautions against silicosis, an incurable, potentially fatal condition caused by inhaling ceramic dust which contains tiny tiny glass shards). Artists like Genser are aware of this; this woman is someone who went to work aware of these risks, took the workplace precautions she believed were necessary according to the accepted standards of her field, and is dying because those standard precautions (which countless artists in numerous fields rely on! Seashells are just one material artists use that comes from the earth!) are no longer adequate due to environmental degradation. Framing this as a “hobby around seashells” that produced toxic “household dust” not only is a condescending, minimizing, and frankly misogynistic way of talking about an extremely accomplished creative professional, it undersells the nature of this problem on a larger scale; this is a workplace hazard for many, many people, and it is directly tied to workers rights and safety.
Okay I genuinely NEVER thought of the word “hobby” that way. I’ve always associated “hobby” with hardcore dedication to something you love, like people who spend thousands of hours gardening or whittling, whether or not it’s also your money-making career.
I’ll avoid it from now on and I’m sorry for using it, but I genuinely didn’t think the term was like that, I’ve just been accepting people calling me a “hobbyist” for how I make my living and would’ve never guessed if it was a backhanded insult 😦
“Imagine a woman in the long skirts and high collar of the early 20th century standing in front of the painting she created. It is a massive piece—about 10 feet tall by 8 feet wide—and it is not a landscape, a portrait, a still life, nor a scene from myth or history. Dominating the composition is a bold yellow form reminiscent of a plant or sea creature, glowing amid colorful, biomorphic shapes and vigorous lines. This is just one of 10 such works that she has created almost entirely alone—sometimes walking on her work as she lays down the paint—and one of 193 radically abstract paintings that she has made in a few short years, between 1906 and 1915. None of these details fit with the story told in museums and art history courses. We know the first abstract painters so well that we often refer to them by last names alone: Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. We know who is celebrated for doing “action painting” on giant canvases laid on the floor—Pollock. Each of these men has been lauded for opening a way into new territory. As it turns out, that territory had already been explored by another artist. Her name was Hilma af Klint.”
Monsters and Stuff 