Lulav // 31 // she // America (MN)
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@spacetrucksix on Twitter
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Originally I was just going to browse homoerotic Homestuck watercolors, but then I decided to talk about feminism.
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Reblogs are turned off for this post but the OP and the user w the embarrassing Wicked/Dr Who url were both right despite the additional veracity of the responses…like fine okay the actual opinion piece contained nuance and the scientific paper it’s based on was a poll of all-Han college students BUT the opinion editor chose to write (((some cultures))) and pair it with That Image and that tendency in the NYT opinion editor has if anything gotten WORSE in the 8.5 years since the article — which shows up first in this particular person’s particular Google search in the year of someone else’s lord 2023 — was released.
The title, short summary, and image are all the ultimate responsibility of the opinion editor, and are the only things that show up when you search for related terms or see an article linked on social media. There’s also some responsibility of the author to consider the reach and ideology of the platform they’re being given: be careful about submitting your article that could be decontextualized into race science (despite not being that) to The Department of Editorial Phrenology, or your article about complex feelings about bottom surgery to a readership of MILLIONS OF CIS PEOPLE LOOKING FOR ANY EXCUSE TO INVALIDATE YOURSELF AND OTHER TRANS WOMEN, ANDREA.
Anyway the main thing is, we can hold multiple truths at once as derived from multiple perspectives and I feel like “yes, and” is a phrase we could stand to learn as a people outside of improv comedy
my favorite romance trope is like. you dont want to hurt me but i am asking you to hurt me. i need you to stab me. i need you to carve this out of me. i need you to cut something off of me. this will hurt both of us in incredible ways. yours are the only hands i trust enough to weild this knife. you do not want to hurt me. i am asking you to hurt me.
i think especially with relatively near future sci-fi and alternate present/just off reality sci-fi and fantasy, it’s a lot more effective to play off of “this word is the same, but the thing it refers to is in fact different than what you’ll initially picture or assume” than to invent a bunch of cutesy fake slang (again, ESPECIALLY for things we already have good words for)
like, for a real life example of what im talking about– we had “phones” in 1977, and we still have “phones” in 2017, but MAN would a time traveler from the 70s be confused by the things we call “phones” now, and the ways we use and relate to them– “im typing this text post on my phone, and autocorrect keeps cramping my style” is a straightforward and easily understandable sentence to me in 2017. it would sound like word salad to someone from 1977. (how can you TYPE something on a PHONE?? what does “post” mean in this context, or “text”? the fuck is “autocorrect”??)
but we still call them “phones”, you know, and not, idk, “cyberrectangles”
interplanetary shuttle system makes use of automated, pre-scheduled wormholes to get you to your day job on mars every morning – still called taking the bus.
super high-tech window protectors that keep out the deadly light of the ultra-bright sun? “close the curtains, tom, it’s almost dawn.”
your zero-g space station’s air filtration system is malfunctioning, threatening to cause a fiery explosion as all the waste co2 builds up in the engine room rather than the greenhouse? time to call the plumber.
Every other day you have to go out and squeegee the space dust accumulating on your solar panels… it’s still called “dusting.”
Light cargo shuttles used for transporting a few passengers at a time, or maybe small packages, they still call them cars.
Every six months, you have to replace the layer of ablative panels on your car, designed to absorb micrometeor impacts, they still call it an undercoating, and garages still overcharge you for it, but it’s definitely worth the reduced maintenance costs in the long run.
Consider how the terms we use now could change depending on context, tho:
“Stellar” as short for “interstellar,” meaning “vast nothingness, really boring.” so: “How was the concert?” “Meh… pretty stellar, I guess.” “Oh, sorry.” “So, how was your weekend?” “Family gathering, it was toootally stellar.”
Suns radiate tremendous quantities of lethal radiation, so when you say your day was “sunny,” it means you nearly died five times just getting out of bed… which, depending on the space station, isn’t much of a stretch (picture: reaching over to hit the snooze alarm, and hitting the airlock instead). Having a “sunny” disposition means “your expression conveys murderous rage.”
“Chill” in reference to the cold hard vacuum of space, so when someone says “chill out,” it’s equivalent to saying “go jump out the airlock and die.”
Even just a small adjustment to how we use contemporary words can signal to the audience that we’re using them differently – in the first example, compare “close the curtains” with “drop the curtain.”
I really appreciated(?) how We Know the Devil did this with “radios” — they are clearly still a device that you tune to certain numbered frequencies to receive messages, but the shape and materials were unclear beyond being Rather Different and there is a certain divine immanence to them because the narration never stops to look straight at & describe a radio for a time traveler from our present
Monster fucker this, monster fucker that. What if I want a monster RELATIONSHIP huh?! Monster HAND HOLDING, monster INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS, monster COMFORTABLE SILENCE??
Yoooooooo time for my favorite yuri trope (girl that the romantic interest is more physically comfortable with lays her claim, EITHER bc she will then have pining girl’s explicit (begrudging) blessing OR so that pining girl shits & thereby gets off the pot)
Did you know that peafowl are born with a full set of flight feathers? It only takes them 3-4 days to remove the sheaths and put a little length on them, and then they are capable of flight!
Just finished reading a book where anarchocommunists figured out how to get people talking to each other and fixing the world’s ecological problems, and even the oligarchs got less shitty, and uh
Came back to a post about Shit Musk Is Trying To Pull, which is a little jarring of a reality transition
