Ohohoho it's fun ti have to think of silly titles for posts sometimes. I'm glad tumblr doesn't require titles, but I do enjoy them.

Anyway, I'm crossposting this one. I think it's worth storing, and maybe that this platform will be more conducive to the type of conversation I'd like to have with this regards.

So.

Tumblr OP, with Mino's tags here.

US Americans are, by and large, disconnected from food production in a way that I honestly was not equipped to understand based on where I grew up. Due to a combination of location and poverty, my family and community during childhood were heavily built around hunting for meat, farming for vegetables, and managing food waste through small animals (chickens, dogs, maybe a pig if you're rich/clever/weird enough to pen it, etc).

I didn't realize until the pandemic when "backyard chickens" became a "trend" just how separate my experience was from the norm.

I always perceived grocery stores as something for.... well. People with money to travel to them, growing up. We bought food there monthly in the winter, and saved our money on vegetable farming and hunting in the summer to afford it.

And I think what I've just described sounds like an unfathomable, impossible dreamscape from one of my solarpunk fantasies or whatever.

Or else sounds like a hellish monstrosity, if you're more familiar with rural poverty and food deserts.

But like... it's neither of those really. It's just... a food system that isn't as tied to the industrial complex as most in the US.

And that modest disconnect still sounds like a made up imagination world to most people in this country. That's how bad the disconnect between food, ALL food, and the average US American is.

And that's without even touching on the way foods native to various parts of the US are considered broadly inferior/filthy compared to colonial imports, including and especially with regards to meats.

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I'm still just thinking about this subject a lot. I've talked before, especially on this blog, about food based racism I experienced growing up. But as I entered adulthood and left rural living behind, I experienced a peculiar sort of food classism (?) instead. The idea that I know how to manage a small scale farmstead because... because why would't I? Who DOESN'T???

It's still strange to me.

But then, I still have to remind myself that just because I have paranoid delusions about mass persecution that are exacerbated by real world politics, and thus literally spend a lot of time preparing for the apocalypse, I am not a "prepper"either.

After all, my preparations include making sure I'm up to date on current food processing safety standards, that I have adequate sewing supplies, that I know how to treat common poultry injuries and infections, that stuff.

you know.

actually useful skills.

Anyway, the disconnect is real and it confuses me to no ends.

Do you know most Americans not only have never killed a fish or game animal, but haven't even seen one be killed? That's so weird to me. How do you live like that??

Anyway, IDK, what are your thoughts??

 I was screenshot and inserted into her latest video, the one where she makes fun of a cult with a death toll because she thinks they use childish language.

I'm so tired.

Why the fuck did none of you ever tell me how the "anime" that the Matrix movies are based on were fucking magical girl anime?

You fuckers know I love me some magical girl shit, right? If you did know that, then you were derelict in your duties for not recommending these movies.

Also did they lift the sex scene from Utena? That's like. There's a lot to unpack there.

This post has been heavily editted for cross platform posting. The original draft is located at the end but the primary difference is that I was having a psychological meltdown at the time of notation.

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Please join me on this liveblog/review/commentary track for the recently released Space Jam Legacy, a blatant attempt to suction money out of the pockets of the exhausted and broken masses instead of actually doing anything useful with these properties, or better yet, releasing them into the public domain for the rest of us to enjoy why you use your big budgets and extreme technical skills to create new things, boundary pushing things.

 

Except for the part where actually the movie is a love song to the days of being 6 years old and hype as FUCK to watch a GODDAMN CARTOON.

( Anyroad ) End of final draft. Original draft begins below.
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( Read more... )

It's like srspost or whatever but like

Is it piss post, or is it food post?

So, my elecom thumb trackball has given up the ghost. The switch under the left click is becoming less and less responsive.

As trackballs fall further and further out of favour with the general public and become increasingly niche hardware, the cost of replacement goes up, and the quality of contruction goes down. I'm pretty tired of having to replace mine every year or so. But I can't use a mouse: it irritates my shoulder to the point of paralysis.

As such, I decided to get a Ploopy. It's a very silly name, but for an excellent product. Some dude who really loves trackballs just straight up made it. The whole thing is opensource: if you have access to a 3D printer, a bit of pi-style circuit board, some screws, 3 ball bearings, and a USB cable you can make one entirely using the software provided on github.

I thought about going around it the long way, but our libraries are still only on reduced hours so 3D printing isn't really feasible right now. The dude sells assemble-yourself kits, which I also considered, but TBH I hate soldering and if I'm already paying for the hardware, I'd rather just pay someone else to solder it too.

So I ordered a fully assembled one, and now it's here, and I'm at a loss.

You'd think, having exclusively used trackballs for like a decade, this would be fine. But it's just like... woo, it is a Lot.

On one hand, the construction is amazing. I could kill a man with this trackball and it wouldn't even notice. The movement of the ball is so smooth and swift, it just goes and goes and goes. The ball bearings make a soft, pleasant sussurus similar to a high end fidget spinner, which is extremely satisfying.

On the other hand, every one of the shitty plasticky lightweight trackballs I've paid far too much for in the last decade has been thumb driven.

You move the ball (and thus the cursor) with your thumb, and you click the buttons or scroll the wheel with your fingers.

The Ploopy is finger driven. You use your index (and/or middle finger) to roll the ball, and your thumb to click the buttons. This lets you maintain a healthier wrist posture, in theory offers more precise movement of the ball, faster response time on clicking, etc.

I'm having war flashbacks to the time I tried learning Colemak typing, which was a similar feeling. Like, sure, I could gain a lot of benefits such as faster, more accurate typing and healthier hand placement/movement, but the unlearning of QWERTY makes me hurty.

Finger driven trackballing will definitely be easier than a whole new keyboard layout, but I also gave up on Colemak like 3 weeks in, and I am modesty concerned that my future in finger driven trackballs will be similarly short.

I made a comment last night talking about how spurious claims of purity policing led to me getting shut down when discussions racism in media, specifically as regards to popular cop comedy Brooklyn 99. That all happened about 6 months ago.

And, as if summoned from the depths of hell by the mere mention of it, lo and be fucking hold, it's happening again as of this evening.

I don't understand why this is considered such a contentious subject. Brooklyn 99 is a fantastic show, and I love it. It's got superlative writing, exceptional acting, and a real sense of conscience about race dynamics.

But it's also a show where cops are sometimes the villains, but always the heroes. And that comes with baggage in a society that already considers the heroism of cops to be so ubiquitous and inherent that even when cops murder children in cold blood, most of them receive paid leave, and get hired by neighboring police precincts.

It's not that B99 doesn't try to talk about the nastiness of police and race. It's that it's a sitcom where police are the heroes. The genre restraints prevent a serious discussion from happening, save in the occasional Very Special Episode. And, often enough, that ommitment to acknowledging the complexity of race and policing is back-seated in favour of a good joke at the expect of an arrested person, of a defence lawyer, of internal affairs.

It's a good show.

It's also a flawed show.

I don't think that's really in question here... And yet, so many people insist that by pointing out and discussing these flaws, I am a monster calling for the end of QPOC on primetime TV.

I am absolutely gagging on rage, completely rabid, over frankly a really stupid and not at all worth the energy or emotions essay circulating on tumblr.

The thesis of the essay is that modern casual communication relies too heavily on slang and allusion, and that people should speak to eachother at a more intellectual and less referential level, like they used to do in the unspecified but way better past.

The author basically doesn't understand certain common references made in casual conversation, and rather than considering what those references could me or doing research on them, the author is screaming about how other people aren't doing the research or considering the implications. Because if other people did the research and considered the implications, then the author wouldn't have to, and things would be so much better. Therefore, the entirety of modern society should shift to better cater to the author. And to justify that catering, the author keeps making vague allusions to a time when people actually did speak with well researched and absolute clarity free of allusion or dated slang. Only, of course, there's no such time. That time literally does not exist because people have been alluding and slanging since we invented language.

It's really a frustratingly bad concept, and it absolutely reeks of neo-con palingenesis given the thinnest coast of paint to make it sound progressive.

And I shouldn't care that much, because peopel are wrong all the time.

But that particular brand of rhetoric is usually just some Stormfront nazi shit. And to see literally hundreds of supposedly progressive people on tumblr saying that it's the most brilliant, insightful thing they've read all month is really alarming. And enraging.

And I'm just so absolutely fucking livid.

There's a topic of conversation that has been rolling around my social media feeds, and which is extremely frustrating to me in ways that I have trouble articulating.

There's this persistent notion that you "shouldn't" write about characters with identities you don't share, because you "can't" understand the nuances of their lives. Sometimes, people will say you should only write about such characters if you've done extremely detailed amounts of research, and others will say it is utterly forbidden.

This is endlessly frustrating to me.

From the perspective of almost any of my myriad marginalizations, it puts people like me in a situation where no one will write for or about us except for ourselves. From the perspective of the marginalizations I don't share it, it leaves me without the ability to use my art as a way of expressing alliance and furthering equality. From the perspective of a writer, it just rings of the same censorship people are always trying to put on fiction, this time with a slightly different set of vocabulary.

I want to be able to read about, say, mixed race intersex people, without having to be the one who writes those stories for myself.

Basically, white/cis/hetero/men/whatever get the opportunity to be the audience. The rest of us are expected to be the creators. And we are expected to create only in extremely restrictive, and even separatist fashions.

I have a hard time expressing why, exactly, this line of argument is so frustrating to me. It seems more like a conflux of little things than any one major flaw.

But it's gettign more prominent again, and it's making me absolutely livid.

Basically, let straight white men write about queer poc so that queer poc like myself can take a goddamn break.

That's not mutually exclusive to "celebrate the art of marginalized people" either. But this expectation that marginalized people do all the hard parts...

Well.

It smacks of, "if you don't like white men being the protagonists of games, go make your own game," in progressive paint.