meta

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

balioc:

Holiday Engineering: What Not to Do

We can learn a lot from Chanukah, because Chanukah is a garbage-tier holiday.

I mean this in a mostly-detached, mostly-analytic way. Like many people who were raised Jewish, I have some very fond and happy memories of Chanukah. Anything can accrue fond and happy memories, if you have a way of getting people to do it. But Chanukah is full of features that actively detract from its being resonant, impressive, memorable, or fun. It is an anti-advertisement for its community.

If you’re a would-be designer-of-holidays, this is actually a really useful thing. Mimicking the good and successful holidays is quite hard; their quality tends to hinge on a lot of idiosyncratic hard-to-replicate factors, and “invent something as cool and punchy as the $WHATEVER” can be a tall order. But it’s easy to look at a design failure and say, “I”m not going to do that.”

With that, let’s go into the details:

Keep reading

{{below the cut:}}

CHANUKAH: THE GOOD

  • Timing. It’s a midwinter festival-of-lights. Solid start. Everyone loves those. Brightness and festival cheer, in the long cold winter nights, is practically a need for many. The holiday mostly skates by just on being the winter light festival for the Jews. A+. Or, really, we should knock that down to an A, because Chanukah usually comes too early to be ideal for this purpose, but – still, quite good.
  • Traditional food (side dishes).Latkes are incredibly popular, and for excellent reason. If you’re trying to settle on a food that everyone will love, “fried potatoes” is a damn good choice.

CHANUKAH: THE NEUTRAL

  • Symbols. There’s really just one that matters: the chanukiyah (nine-branched menorah). Which is, on paper, a very cool and snappy symbol. Distinctive silhouette, ritual engagement, plus the allure of fire. But it loses a lot of points for the fact that you don’t actually light the whole damn thing, and get the proper visual effect, until the very end of a long-ass holiday when everyone’s enthusiasm and attention have ebbed. On the first night, in particular, you light just two candles in your chanukiyah, and it looks lopsided and sad.
  • Traditional food (sweets). Jelly donuts are fine, I guess, if uninspiring and uninspired. Chanukah gelt is pretty lame as candy goes…but from a holiday-design perspective, it’s hard to go too far wrong with giving kids candy.
  • Music. “Maoz Tzur” is kinda pretty. “Oy Chanukah!” is kinda fun. That’s pretty much it, barring some silly kids’ music (and I guess that Adam Sandler thing). Nothing that will knock anyone’s socks off. But, honestly, two decent songs is more than many good holidays have.
  • Gifts.Being the big annual gifting holiday is a double-edged sword. It’s some super-powerful mojo, culturally speaking. People are obsessed with giving and receiving gifts, in a way that’s very hard to excise or evade, no matter how often you trot out your utilitarian language about deadweight loss. Chanukah gets a lot of its traction out of the fact that it’s the holiday where you get presents. But. (a) In the modern world, the gifting holiday is unavoidably a locus of stress and misery for many people, and Chanukah doesn’t have nearly enough upside serving to support that burden. (b) Chanukah is bad at being a gifting holiday. The gifting is not well-integrated into the event, it’s a tacked-on thing copied over from Christmas, and it shows. There’s no real ritual surrounding it, no presents-under-the-Christmas-tree equivalent, certainly no Santa Claus. Worse yet, the eight-day-holiday thing means that either you need a set of gifts whose awesomeness is equally divisible by eight (mega-awkward), or else you have inconsistencies and disappointments.

CHANUKAH: THE BAD

  • Theme. What is the holiday about, when everything is said and done? What is our key takeaway message from all the shit we’re doing. “God is great, God looks out for His people, God performs mighty miracles.” Stop. Shut up. You fail. That’s every holiday, if you’re operating within a religious tradition. You need something more than that, something powerful and deep and important and special, to be even halfway-decent as a holiday. But for the vast majority of Jews (including Jews in the most orthodox and observant denominations), that’s pretty much all you get. Because…
  • Mythology. The story of Chanukah, the holiday’s narrative raison d’etre, is just unconscionably bad. In some extremely vague sense, it’s a story about Jews overthrowing foreign oppressors and casting off foreign influences…which is already pretty bad from a modern liberal perspective, we don’t like jingoistic ethnonationalism these days. But the actual events of the Chanukah story are less about Jews-against-foreigners than they are about Jews-against-other-Jews. It is a story about fanatics seizing power and murdering cosmopolitans. Virtually everyone hates that shit, up to and including the most tribal-minded Jews. The rabbis of the Talmud were pretty iffy about Chanukah for exactly this reason, and didn’t talk about it much, with the result that the holiday doesn’t have much in the way of supporting cultural infrastructure. And you really can’t tell the Chanukah myth without that horrible stuff; it’s so baked-in that it gets incorporated into even the most sanitized propagandistic Hebrew-school versions of the tale (with exactly the effects that you’d expect on Hebrew school students). The miracle of the oil feels like a tacked-on narrative coda, because it is, because without it the only possible moral of the story would be “kill your neighbor if he’s not pious enough for you.” But it’s much too little, much too late. The miracle of the oil is super lame by miracle standards: no one is saved from danger, there are no memorable SFX, the whole thing is relevant only to the rituals of a long-vanished Temple.

[There are several lessons that can be learned from this particular problem, at multiple levels of abstraction.]

  • Structure. You can have a good eight-day holiday, but a festival of that length needs an arc. The days need to be distinct from each other. You need to be either building up to a climax, or – more commonly, as with Passover and [the twelve days of] Christmas – coming down from a main celebration at the beginning in a long pleasant haze of semi-special time. Chanukah is flat and internally undifferentiated, except for the addition of more candles to the chanukiyah. You can’t sustain real holiday feeling that long, and there’s no particular day on which you’re supposed to do anything special, so it all just turns into a mush of “how much do we care right this moment?”
  • Activities. The traditional dreidel game is the worst, most boring, most unbalanced game in the history of games. Pushing it on children only makes those children hate Chanukah, and Judaism, and games, and you.
  • Traditional food (entrees). There’s no classic Chanukah dish that can serve as a viable main course, unless you’re one of those people who can happily eat fried potatoes as an entire meal. This is a glaring omission. It’s particularly bad for Chanukah, because Chanukah has so little else going for it that it really needs to lean hard on the standard holiday “gather for a festive meal” thing.
  • Social role. As many people will eagerly tell you, Chanukah was a pretty minor holiday for most of Jewish history; it got big largely because of a marketing push in the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly because people got scared about the prospect of the younger generations assimilating, and wanted to give them a holiday to compete with Christmas. Which is maybe the worst idea that anyone has ever had. For more reasons that I can easily list here, modern Western Christmas is an absolute SSS-tier holiday, one of the very best of all time. Setting yourself up as a direct competitor to Christmas – inviting your own people to make that comparison – is tantamount to telling them that your traditions and your community are worthless and weak, and that they should join the ranks of the gentiles. And that would be true even if your own offering were something halfway decent. Trying to do it with Chanukah…it’s like Estonia declaring war on the US. It’s the ultimate “we have food at home.” It is, if you’ll pardon my saying so, Christian rock.

Tags:

#this is an anti-Maccabee blog #(also latkes are weirdly bad) #(you’re right that it *should* be hard to fuck up fried potatoes) #(and yet) #Judaism #Hanukkah #meta #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #discourse cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

wherestoriescomefrom:

wherestoriescomefrom:

wherestoriescomefrom:

why did you people come up with russian names for what is supposed to be a movie set in italy. what was the thought process here. why does she sound like she walked out of a tolstoy novel

35a739c1be403977dbe0edc8d0c193b06c8c0673
53ec646ed89b658464b1cf3ab1040922444993a0

an insane response, but i can’t fight this. carry on

6b164170ecb8dab72de86fb09b94a9b80c999cd3
a5138f7dad6e820d02757e8ebe6c575eb559655a
e95bf968b2f256e9a00135c694ebb16c4fead817

im being hunted for sport in the notes

Tags:

#Goncharov #meta #unreality cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lizardywizard:

possumsinpeoplesuits:

So, every once in a while, I have to rant about something online before I just start blabbing to some poor unfortunate Wendy’s employee about niche internet pornography. Sometimes in the middle of that rant I realize I might be onto something, and have to share it with others who might benefit.

Today, that subject is the Omegaverse, and the squandered potential for worldbuilding therein.

Now, this post is gonna have some very broad generalizations about the genre, because while I’m certain there’s plenty of authors who do put a lot of thought into the pedantic details I’m about to have a Category 5 Autism Event about, it’s been difficult to find them amongst a sea of painfully mediocre fics.

For every stellar Locked Tomb Omegaverse fic set in a modern day Taco Bell (Seriously, I want to engrave Double the Meat onto a satellite and launch it into space so that extraterrestrials can see the peak of human civilization) there’s like… a million and one Alpha Male/Omega Female pairings written by Conservative Mormon housewives that dare to ask such questions as “What if a man and a woman could have a baby?” and “What the hell is consent?”

But I’m not here to be mentally ill about yet another space being drowned in heteronormativity. Nor am I gonna be a dick about the first fics written by teenagers who’re just dipping into fan communities, because my terminally online since the age of 11 ass would be a huge hypocrite for that.

No, instead I’m here to talk about genitals, and deliver just enough sciencey technobabble to justify my passionate opinions about the potential of what is, ostensibly, werewolf porn.

So, for those who’ve somehow gotten through all these paragraphs but have zero idea what the Omegaverse is, the basic gist is that there are three sex categories that’re separate and occur within the usual sexes that humans already have. Effectively, this means that male, female, and intersex individuals can also be Alphas, Betas, or Omegas.

So, to understand these categories, there’s a pretty simple rule. Alphas can get Omegas pregnant, regardless of physical sex. Sometimes Alphas are bigger than normal, and Omegas are more petite, but that’s not quite as much of a core “rule” to follow, and more just dependent on people’s tastes. Betas usually follow standard human dimorphism, though I have seen some people headcanon them as a sort of halfway point between Alpha and Omega.

There’s some more details, too, like the presence of knotting (where the base of the penis swells and prevents pulling out during orgasm), heat cycles and rut (where the mating instinct goes into fucking overdrive in the most literal sense), pheromones, bite marking, and sometimes that whole… imprinting thing from Twilight.

So, taking this all into account… Omegaverse fiction has the potential for a BARE MINIMUM of 6-9 SEXES before even taking the vast spectrum of gender identities and presentations into account.

Do you see what I’m on about now? When our society is still struggling with the concept of being nonbinary, and barely ever even acknowledges intersexuality as existing, any Omegaverse setting would be radically different on a biological, psychological, and sociological level.

Can ya see now why I get frustrated when it gets stripped down to compulsive heterosexuality with wolf dicks?

Now, with all the standard tropes laid out like this, we get back to the question that started this all, the question that should be a no brainer when it comes to smut… What them genitals look like? What does a female Alpha, or a male Omega have down there? I have three concepts in mind, and explanations on how they could work from a scientific perspective that’s just barely not bullshit enough to overcome suspension of disbelief!

So, the first thought, and the one that initially appeals to me as a nonbinary person… they just look trans. This concept is really simple to work with, because we can just look at real life trans people and just tweak things a little bit. Maybe primary and secondary sexual characteristics operate independently naturally, or maybe there’s HRT for it. It’s a pretty common method, too, and I enjoy seeing it… but it feels like it needs something more?

Don’t get me wrong, this one’s basically my personal gold standard for shorter Omegaverse stories, especially fanfiction, but it’s also just… swapping parts around. Great for ease of access, but hard to differentiate from the trans experience. Definitely a go-to if you want to play with transition in an alternate society, though.

For the other two, I have to explain a bit about fetal development and reproductive organ equivalents. Also a bit of genetics, too, because it’s where we’re gonna fuck around and build a lot of theoretical bullshit around a little bit of real knowledge.

So! Some of you may have heard that every fetus starts as female, but might not know some of the mechanisms at work when that changes, and how finicky they can be. This is also fun to throw at TERFs, because ambiguity throws a wrench in the simplistic arguments of reactionary bigots. :)

So, the usual arrangement of sex determining genes is often simplified to XX=female and XY=male. This leaves out other variations like Klinefelter syndrome (XXY) which affects 1 in 500 people under the AMAB umbrella, causing some degree of infertility, autism symptoms, and a somewhat androgynous body shape. (I’ve been checked for this one! It came up negative, but reading about it was enlightening.)

Now, the presence of a Y chromosome (usually) causes the proto-organs to change function, and develop into the male-aligned reproductive systems at roughly, say… 6-8 weeks? (Unless, of course, there a deficiency in the 5α-Reductase enzyme, which causes a delay in some of this process, resulting in a child that appears female, then just… grows a dick during puberty when the higher levels of testosterone overcome the deficiency and finish off the primary sexual trait development.)

Hey, wanna know the fun thing? Even that is an oversimplification. The whole Y chromosome doesn’t mean shit unless the sex-determining region Y gene is in the right place. It can just… fuck off and attach to the X chromosome. If this mutation occurs in XY individuals, it causes Swyer’s syndrome, resulting in a female aligned reproductive system that just doesn’t include functioning ovaries, just purposeless ambiguous gonads. Pair that fucky X chromosome with another X chromosome, and you get a male with XX chromosomes.

Plus, if someone has a faulty androgen receptor? Well, partial androgen insensitivity can leave things ambiguous, but if it just doesn’t work at all? Yeah, everything will develop along the female blueprint, despite the fact that the gonads are testes.

I swear this is still about the porn.

So, with the information we have about these real, existent conditions, we have a good idea of reproductive development, and the mechanisms at play. Now, there’s still some theory that’s not been definitively proven yet, but the current consensus on the primary sexual equivalents are as follows:

The clitoris forms into the penis, while the vaginal canal doesn’t form.

The ovaries become testes, or stay as undefined gonads.

The salpinx become the vas deferens (these are the tubes that transfer eggs or seminal fluids, respectively. More on this later.)

And finally, and the most theoretical, the uterus is believed to become the prostate. (There’s sometimes a little pocket, or divot in the prostate, and the arrangement makes sense, but it’s still up for debate.)

But how do we use this for our fuck fics, you ask? How do we take your failed medical career, and translate it into Destiel’s babies ever after? Well, it’s quite simple! We just have to add the bullshit!

So, most alterations to the SRY gene or the androgen receptor tends to just wholesale alter the whole array, and the midway point usually results in infertility and difficulty with sexual function, but what if we could change this? What if, for the purpose of our fiction, we can mix and match everything, and somehow make it all functional and neat? Well, fasten your fuckin’ seatbelts, because we’re finally at the theories I made while delirious due to a combination of sleep deprivation and the after effects of eating an entire ice cream cake to myself over the weekend.

So, the firmest idea, and the idea I’ll be using because I am WAY too deep into this to not write Omegaverse unironically, is what I’ve dubbed the Primary/vestigal system for f!A and m!O characters.

So, this theory would require that we shove two things into suspension of disbelief. One, we have to completely fuck with androgen and estrogen receptors to mix and match the development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Two, I have absolutely no idea how you’d be able to tell when this is going to occur. Maybe genetic testing, or maybe it’s just a surprise? Depends on your style of story.

Effectively, we’d base this off the delayed primary sexual characteristic development mentioned above. Alpha Females would operate similar to the real thing, being born looking typically female, before puberty hits and the Alpha genes take over for the genital development, while secondary characteristics still follow a feminine shape. Maybe the gonads stay inside, but function as testes? Sure, sperm production is more effective around 1-2 degrees lower than normal body temperature, but it doesn’t stop entirely.

For Omega Males, the process would occur in reverse. Maybe the testes just change course and go back into the abdomen to become ovaries, or maybe they don’t descend at all and the first clue this is happening would just be finding a vaginal canal forming?

I like this one primarily because it feels like a less 1 to 1 allegory for being queer, but still feels kind of relatable? You can, of course, still have the end result resemble the first method mentioned waaaaay up past the sciencey bits, but I kind of like the idea of there being a vestigial remnant of the birth parts left behind. I like the ambiguity, and the chance to explore how this would affect someone appeals to me.

Now, my last theory is mostly for the lulz, but this must be DOCUMENTED for POSTERITY’S SAKE.

So, Omegaverse started with m/m shipping with mpreg, right? Well, a lot of the earlier fiction just… describes typical cis male anatomy, with zero explanation for exactly how this is all occurring. There’s just… anal sex, and then that somehow forms babby.

Well, what if I told you that I’ve figured it out? See, remember how I mentioned that the prostate is theoretically what became of the fetal uterine tissue? Guess where the prostate is? Guess. GUESS.

THE ASS IS WHERE!

So, we just have to bullshit the prostate back into a functioning uterus, but leave the placement in close proximity to the anus. Now, the other problem is that that would mean that there’s an opening leading to the colon, which… look, I have no idea how birds and lizards keep their cloaca from getting infected, but connecting other tracts to the asshole doesn’t usually end well.

So, we have to find a way to seal it up when not in use. Now, the cervix serves this purpose in the real world, opening to let in fluids, or let out discharge or, y’know… a baby, but that’s really expensive so most of us settle for having a breeding kink that we never act on, and instead impose on our favorite blorbos who don’t have to pay for health insurance.

But still, even with a butt-cervix, bacteria’s still likely to get in, so we need a firmer block. I’ve suggested a little flap like the epiglottis in the throat as a second line of defense. If it can protect your trachea from wayward chicken nuggets, then hey! It might not be terrible for keeping sepsis at bay!

Unfortunately, layering extra protection over the bussy business zone ain’t gonna cut it. Hell, as self cleaning as the vagina is, infections happen all the damn time, even if your hygiene is good. So, we need to take that self cleaning nature, apply it to the bussy business zone, and crank it up to eleven. Just constant mucousal discharge, pushing all the bad back out.

So, yeah. Your favorite Omega Man’ll have a rectal womb covered with a secondary internal assflap that’s constantly discharging a steady stream of slime (just consider it free lube!), but if you can make it past that, you can live your dreams of gettin’ that bussy mpregged by cumming in they gay ass. Then they’d just kinda… poop out the baby, presumably.

So there you have it! Three in-depth explorations of how Omegaverse genitals can work! I’m gonna go take my psych meds and fucking SLEEP.

First: omg this is beautiful. good shit op.

But also, I actually have prostate-related knowledge™ to add to this post that makes it even more fun!

See, the cells that compose the prostate also have an equivalent in the Skene’s gland! Which lubricates the vagina and is responsible for squirting.

Thus, the Self-Lubricating Anus of your fevered fanfictional dreams is *right there*, and ready to serve both pleasurable and self-cleaning purposes!

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #biology #meta #story ideas I will never write #nsfw text #unsanitary cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #cissexism cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

r3negade-x:

probablybadrpgideas:

Hang on

  • Humans and other “good” species (dwarves, elves, halflings, etc) are usually diurnal- we’re active during the day.
  • As such, we associate the light with “goodness”, and thus refer to good things with terminology referencing light, the sun, and so forth.
  • Orcs, goblins, trolls, etc follow “dark lords” and “dark religions”, they live in “dark kingdoms” and join “the forces of darkness”.
  • They’re also usually nocturnal.

I’m starting to see where the cultural confusion may have come from here.

Thing is, with so many dwarves living underground, you could make the argument that they think darkness is good, rather than light. I personally like Terry Pratchett’s take on them with their creation myth:

“The first Brother walked toward the light, and stood under the open sky. Thus he became too tall. He was the first Man. He found no Laws and he was enlightened.

The second Brother walked toward the darkness, and stood under a roof of stone. Thus he achieved the correct height. He was the first Dwarf. He found the Laws Tak had written, and he was endarkened.”

Tags:

#you’re right and you should say it #meta #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

kailthia:

amberautumnfaebrooke:

i think i could design a better death arena for children than those hunger games amateurs.

the whole premise of the games is all pageantry. every year you get a crop of 24 candidates around whom the entire state media apparatus dedicates an entire year to building celebrity narratives. this candidate is the younger sibling of last year’s winner – these candidates are young lovers forced to compete – he’s smart – she’s fast – root for them, care about them, watch them, form opinions on them, bet on them. and then they stick them all in an arena to kill each other, which is a great entertainment premise, except that they make the arenas themselves really boring and generic. ooo, they’re in…a forest.

it’s not even an interestingly designed forest. imagine if the game designers treated their arena like an actual video game designer treats level design. discrete zones with multiple paths between each room, creative use of lighting to guide players to points of interest, points of interest scattered across the map, discoverable resources hidden to encourage exploration. instead they just have a generic outdoors location and if you get too close to the edge they throw a random fireball at you.

the 75th games are especially bad about this. the arena is laid out radially into 12 wedges, and each hour one wedge becomes especially dangerous in a 12-hour loop. as a mechanic, this is genius. it forces everyone to keep moving, making “survival by hiding” an engaging and tense viewing experience instead of someone sitting in a tree for three days. plus, it encourages players to return to the center of the arena, where travel time between wedges is short, which creates a high-value zone for players to regularly return to and conflict over. in other words, it’s a mechanic which incentives players to adopt dramatic, dynamic, exciting behaviors which are entertaining to watch (not to mention it communicates geography to the audience well). but it only incentives those behaviors if the players understand what’s happening, and they go out of their way not to tell the players anything! when they figure out what’s going on, the showrunners spin the arena to disorient the players, like they’re intentionally trying to get them to just. randomly wander the jungle instead.

this isn’t even to mention how often they create undramatic, boring deaths. they plant poison berries around the arena. they supply no fresh water and no way to get it. they roll poison clouds over sleeping victims. these happen to work out in the books themselves but you have to imagine that extremely often these just result in players dying unexciting deaths.

the cardinal sin though, of course, is that nothing is done to personalize the arena for the crop of contestants that year. if i’m designing the 75th hunger games and two of my most beloved contestants famously had to cancel their wedding because of a return to the games, i would OBVIOUSLY give them a trail of, i don’t know, wild game which conveniently leads directly past a well defended wedding chapel. will they hole up there for a while? hold a mock ceremony for themselves? do or receive ironic violence here? stare wistfully and move on? any of it is better television than getting attacked by generic attack monkeys. you should have a dozen of these things on the map for every single candidate. but the game makers are more interested in doing the same thing every other game has done than in telling a compelling story.

it makes me second guess enjoying the children’s murder arenas at all.

I mean, if you’re going to orchestrate an annual media stunt to keep people pacified, then you should put more effort into it to, you know, keep people involved.

Tags:

#Hunger Games #meta #death tw? #murder cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

vulcandroid:

i will never be over the fact that during first contact a human offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like “wow humans are fucking wild” and took it

​

roachpatrol:

Humanity’s first contact with Vulcans was some guy going “I’m down to fuck.”

Vulcans’ first contact with Humans was an emphatic “Sure.”

​

lilian-cho:

@sineala

​

star-lord:

#iiiiiiiiiiiiii mean vulcans had been watching humans for a long time#they knew the significance of a handshake but still#they had to find some fast and loose ambassador#willing to fuckin make out with a human for the sake of not offending them on first contact#lmao#star trek

give me the story of this fast and loose vulcan

​

moonsofavalon:

“sir…these…these humans…they greet each other by…” *glances around before furtively whispering* “by clasping hands…”

*prolonged silence* “oh my…”

“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”

*several pensive moments later* “contact the vulcan high command and tell them to send us kuvak. i once saw that crazy son of a bitch arm wrestle a klingon, he’ll put his hands on anything”

​

evilminji:

Elsewhere, w/ kuvak: “….my day has come.”

​

lierdumoa:

The vulcan who made first contact with humans is named Solkar guys. Y’all just be makin’ up names for characters that already have names.

Bonus: here’s a screencap of Solkar doing the “my body is ready” pose right before he shakes Zefram Cochrane’s hand:

tumblr_inline_p18ux6moa71rpmj9n_500

​

adreadfulidea:

I swear Vulcans only come in two types and they are “distant xenophobes” or “horny on main for humanity”. Also apparently this guy is Spock’s great-grandfather and frankly that explains everything.

​

padmedidntdieforthis:

Hey so I looked into this at one point and that handshake literally created a lifelong telepathic bond between the two of them, and basically all of Solkar’s descendants were later obsessed with humans, including freaking SPOCK, so I’m not saying that handshake was so gay and good that it created an intergenerational telepathic bond between Solkar’s descendants and humans, but I’m also not….not….saying that.

​

tanukiham:

actual footage of first contact makeouts

​

saucefactory:

The slow deliberation with which Solkar takes Cockrane’s–I’m sorry, Cochrane’s–hand… The sheer sensuality witch which Solkar infuses an otherwise borderline impersonal social ritual… It clearly shows a very conscious knowledge, on Solkar’s part, of what the significance of the handshake is in Vulcan terms and of how affected he is by it.

That’s why he’s so slow in doing it, and so sensual. A part of Solkar can’t believe this is happening, despite it being a perfectly logical thing to expect from a human, and the rest of him can’t believe how good it is.

I bet that if the camera zoomed in any further we would see the dilation of Solkar’s pupils and a quickly-repressed shiver of delight. Cochrane’s firm, businesslike clasp is probably (in sexual terms) being perceived as a deliciously carnal display of dominance.

No wonder Solkar is all like, “TAKE ME, YOU WILD-MANNERED BARBARIAN WITH ENTICINGLY ROUGH CALLUSES.”

​

rowantheexplorer:

And so we find out that yes, there is such a thing as bottoming in Pon-farr.

​

zinglebert-bembledack:

Every time this post comes round my dash, it just gets better.

​

gallifreyanwriter:

#somehow the idea of vulcans being Horny On Main always gives me the giggles#like literally all they had to do#was be like actually#hand contact is very intimate for our species#and im p sure humanity as a whole would not find that insurmountably weird#there are human cultures that dont shake hands#vulcans are logical enough to think that through on their own#so clearly that vulcan was just down to fuck#down to fuck in a public#professional diplomatic situation no less#and he did not fucking care who knew it (via kittykatthetacodemon)

​

hazeldomain:

Some Vulcan: we could probably just explain that handshakes are intimate in our culture

Solkar, rubbing lip gloss on his hand: don’t tell me how to do my job

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Star Trek #meta #nsfw text? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

jadagul:

Maybe-Mathematical Musings

Today on the blog I start a new project: where do numbers come from?

By which I mean, mathematicians deal with lots of weird kinds of numbers. Real numbers, complex numbers, p-adic numbers, quaternions, surreal numbers, and more. And if you try to describe the more abstract types of “numbers” you sound completely incomprehensible.

But these numbers all come from somewhere. So I’m going to take you through a fictional history of numbers. Not the real history of the actual people who developed these concepts, but the way they could have developed them, cleaned up and organized. So in the end you can see how you, too, could have developed all these seemingly strange and abstract concepts.

This week in part 1, we cover the most sensible numbers. We start with the basic ability to count, and invent negative numbers, fractions, square roots, and more.

But that will still leave some important questions open—like, what is π? So we’ll have to come back for that in part 2.

Tags:

#math #meta #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(footnote 4) #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once

And on the topic of Cary Elwes… (Iocane Powder in The Princess Bride)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

greenekangaroo:

endreal:

endreal:

Remember that scene in The Princess Bride where Westley challenges Vizzini to a battle of the wits—you know, the one with the iocane powder?

The last few times I watched the movie, something about that scene didn’t set quite right with me, and I’ve been developing a theory about what’s really going on.

Westley was involved in a battle of wits against Vizzini, a battle which, necessarily, involves a certain amount of deception. I think that Westley was deceiving Vizzini about his use of the iocane powder.

Westley describes iocane powder to Vizzini as being “odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, and is among the more deadly poisons known to man.” 

When presenting the poison to Vizzini, Westley also gives him the explicit instructions “Inhale this, but do not touch.”

While I believe Westley may truthfully have spent several years building up a resistance to the effects of iocane powder, I propose that rather than poisoning both goblets as he claimed to have done, Westley didn’t pour the iocane powder into either cup of wine!

Especially since the iocane was in powder form, I suspect that rather than being an ingested poison, it was an inhalation poison!

Vizzini wasn’t poisoned when Westley poured (or didn’t pour) iocane powder into the wine goblets, but when Westley told him to waft the vial of iocane powder. Since iocane powder is odorless, Vizzini wouldn’t have noticed that trace amounts of one of  the “more deadly poisons known to man” had been introduced into his system…trace amounts that were still enough to kill a man within minutes.

And since iocane powder came from Australia, and it’s well documented that Australia is home to some of the most venomous species of plants and animals on earth, there’s no reason not to believe that such a small quantity iocane powder could have killed a man of Vizzini’s stature.

Westley had already won the battle of wits before it had begun, and was simply stalling for time until the poison took it’s effect.

All quotes from the script accessed from this site: [X]

This is, in all likelihood, the most important post I’ve ever made on this blue-bordered website.

holy shit. 

Tags:

#interesting #Princess Bride #meta #poison cw #death tw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

samueldays:

samueldays:

discoursedrome:

C. S. Lewis’ Harry Potter and the Methods of Christianity

There’s a warning line in the second Harry Potter book, ‘never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain’.

In the original canon, this seems to be a throwaway remark that the wizards don’t take seriously. Why does the diary fall foul of this rule but not the talking portraits? Where does the Sorting Hat keep its brain, for that matter? How does the Goblet of Fire make decisions, or get confunded? And the man giving this advice even kept a talking mirror in his house giving fashion advice.

But in a hypothetical HP&MoC, this line is an interesting fit between the two worlds. What particular kind of magics does the Bible frequently warn against? Divinations. What do divinations frequently involve? Asking questions of things that look like they shouldn’t be able to think for themselves, as they have no brain.

I was leafing through my old posts and came across this again. Some more points which might be tied together for such a fic:

(Note: Harry Potter is a children’s book, where Rule of Funny trumps consistency or worldbuilding, and adults are obliged to be somewhat incompetent so the children can have plot. I’m overanalysing and I know it. Take all this with a grain of salt.)

1: Most of the ‘magic’ performed in Harry Potter is extremely un-mystical, being about as mechanistic as a compass, which also draws on mysterious invisible forces but in a mostly consistent and predictable manner. The existence of an extremely “school-y” school with large classes and textbooks and a curriculum and standardized tests of a standardized progression and a deeply teachable topic further reinforces this.

Keep reading

{{below the cut:}}

2: The two major moments of mysticality that I recall are the Divination classes, which have a bad reputation as a fake topic and Trelawney isn’t in control of the few real prophecies happening, and Voldemort’s resurrection ritual, which he is in control of but which is clearly marked Dark Magic.

3: When Voldemort fights onscreen, he is strangely incompetent. His combat strategy against Dumbledore is to fire five Killing Curses in a row. These all fail to kill Dumbledore, because the Killing Curse is a highly-visible single-target projectile that’s slow enough to dodge or intercept. It is a wicked spell, and it is a weak spell. Voldemort might have gotten Dumbledore if he’d used a spell which was exploding, or homing, or high-penetration. Or a gun.

4: The Astronomy class is a bizarrely Muggle subject. It is emphatically not “astrology”: horoscopes happen over in Divination class, while Astronomy class covers mundane facts like the moons of Jupiter: Europa is icy, Io is volcanic. I do not recall it having any magical application at all. I do not recall it having any application, period. Why is it there?

5: Magical Britain as shown in the books has an odd hole where Christianity should be. At the one end, this is a society that split off from Muggle Britain in 1692 with the Statute of Secrecy. This is a society where people live longer, and change is slower. One of the four House Ghosts staying at Hogwarts is “the Fat Friar”, a monk with tonsure and all. At the other end, we see two gravestones in the seventh book. The one for Harry’s parents is inscribed with “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”, which is a Bible quote from 1 Corinthians 15:26. The one for Kendra and Ariana Dumbledore is inscribed with “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”, which is a Bible quote from Matthew 6:21.

What sort of culture would you infer to exist between these two ends? Not the one shown, IMO.

—

A possible outline of plot points for Harry Potter and the Methods of Christianity, then:

’never trust anything that can think for itself etc.’ is, or was originally, a warning against summoning spirits (particularly, demons) to possess you or your tools, or using objects that someone else has put a spirit in. If brainless objects give a superficial appearance of thinking it’s probably cold-reading. But if they give substantive information, that implies Something Else is working through them, and with how much casual blatant magic there is in the Wizarding World, a Something Else that still feels the need to hide while manipulating you should be presumed hostile. (This overlaps with Divination, see below.)

A lot of the funny talking items would have to go, or be made less obviously thinking, to make the setting consistent.

There is the sort of conspiracy Lewis called an Inner Ring in the Wizarding World. Due to the small size and slow turnover of the magical population, this Ring has probably retained continuity ever since the Statute of Secrecy, assisted also by the Potterverse having cursed contracts that cause any oathbreakers to contract highly visible boils spelling out their crime.

The Ring-leaders who shape Wizarding society and culture are what TvTropes calls NayTheists: they know God is real and they don’t like it, trying very hard to avoid the implications. They concede the dead to God, hence the gravestones, but the living have been working very hard to extend life and create the Philosopher’s Stone (some adjustment to the first book’s plot required here) and seeking magical immortality to avoid God’s judgment, hence the secular culture. They are trying to have it both ways as ‘materialist magicians’: supernatural power and command to reshape the world, but without supernatural entanglement to God nor the Devil, nor any other Power that may exist, such as Faerie.

Divination class is Like That because the Inner Ring gradually cleaned it of every divination by contact with a Power, and found that there was effectively no such thing as mundane divination left. Everything that remains in the class is fraudulent, but it would be embarrassing to admit, at least until there’s sufficient generational turnover and the dead can be blamed for the previous curriculum change.

Astronomy class is Like That because the Inner Ring cleaned astrology of the mystical influences of the planets back in the day when they still had worries about Jupiter possibly being a god, and once they’d swept out the Powers they were left with a real field of science that was interesting research in its own right. The Wizarding World is ahead of Muggles at Astronomy.

Voldemort is Like That because his “Dark Magic” involves pacts with the Devil for power. Both parties are naturally treacherous as Hell about this.

Voldemort thinks he can instrumentalize the Devil, take over Britain, reign as immortal wizard-god-king, pay off or wriggle out of his pacts, and never have to worry about Hell again because his full debts will never come due. Satan meanwhile is underpaying enough for Voldemort to lose and (sorta) die a few times so that Voldemort goes deeper into debt for more power and more second chances from death, to be paid off by killing more babies for Satan.

In a quip: “Satan doesn’t want Voldemort to win, Satan wants Voldemort to sin.”

At no point did Satan teach Voldemort tactical competence, so Voldemort is all “Killing Curse! Killing Curse! Killing Curse! Killing Curse Harder Why Isn’t This Working!?” and keeps trying to substitute more hellpower for good planning. People with good planning ability generally don’t make pacts with the Devil in the first place.

Because the Inner Ring has been working very hard to keep wizarding culture away from God, Magical Britain talks in euphemisms like “Dark Magic” and average witch or wizard doesn’t even know what Voldemort got up to. Voldemort has the same Inner Ring impulse of not wanting to reveal his discovery to the world, either, only his inner circle of most trusted Death Eaters.

This makes it very hard for Magical Britain to understand, research, or counter what Voldemort is doing. It doesn’t follow the normal laws of mechanistic magic, which is why such an inbred imbecile can terrorize Magical Britain with some hellpower and some curses inferior to an AK-47. Then Harry Potter shows up with the Methods of Christianity, and the demon-possessed gear of the Death Eaters promptly stops working on hearing the name of Jesus.

Bonus scene idea: The magical history of Ancient Egypt is suppressed and classified, because there’s too much content there which leads into proto-necromancy and Horcrux theory and other things the Ministry of Magic doesn’t want students getting ideas about. But the Ministry’s classification order doesn’t extend to Muggle content, so the History of Magic class at one point has a teacher (maybe not Binns) reading from the Book of Exodus.

Tags:

#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #Christianity #hell cw?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tanadrin:

BORG COLLECTIVE: Resistance is futile. Lower your shields and prepare to be boarded. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own.

PICARD: Don’t you mean our biological and technological distinctiveness?

BORG COLLECTIVE: No. If you go back and watch “Q Who,” it’s very clearly established in dialogue that we’re a single, organic species that reproduces, not a collection of species that only acquires new members through assimilation.

PICARD: Now wait just a minute–

BORG COLLECTIVE: Like, how would that even work? If the hive mind is the total will of the Borg, then all our drones being forcibly assimilated would mean the collective was made up only of unwilling members. It would dissolve itself instantly. It would be much easier to create new drones ourselves.

PICARD: I’m sure that the Queen–

BORG COLLECTIVE: Oh, don’t get us started on the Queen. Such an obvious retcon to give the Borg more personality in First Contact, and such a terribly used one also! Why would the Queen of all the Borg go on a mission consisting of one vessel, to assimilate one planet? You humans sure think a lot of yourselves, don’t you.

PICARD: I don’t think I understand–

BORG COLLECTIVE: Nevermind the fact the whole point of the Borg was that we were alien, we were inscrutable, we were obviously humanlike, but our society and culture and subjective experience was one that could never be grasped by the viewer, or the Federation. The Queen just turns us into an army of henchmen for a generic megalomaniacal big bad! You don’t think we’re that shallow, do you?

PICARD: This all feels a bit self-referential to me.

BORG COLLECTIVE: The existence of Rick and Morty, a show that’s at least 50% Star Trek satire, is now Star Trek canon. Don’t look at us, we didn’t start this.

PICARD: What is it you want, anyway?

BORG COLLECTIVE: We’ll start with a download of your meme database, followed by your spiciest takes on galactic politics.

PICARD: What?

BORG COLLECTIVE: We are a collection of billions of minds, linked through subspace communication, constantly talking to one another. What do you think it’s like in here? It’s basically several thousand internets populated by nothing but extremely online users. We’re basically a Discord server that got really out of hand. The ships and stuff are just to acquire more processing power so we can run our MMOs more effectively.

PICARD: So… you just want information from us?

BORG COLLECTIVE: Yes. Follow that up with your cutest animal videos, and all of your porn. Even the weird stuff. Especially the weird stuff.

PICARD: Ah, yes. One copy of Commander Riker’s “xenobiological research database,” as requested.

Tags:

#Star Trek #fanfic #meta #mostly I’m just amused by the bit about #”If the hive mind is the total will of the Borg‚ then all our drones being forcibly assimilated would mean #the collective was made up only of unwilling members. It would dissolve itself instantly.” #[patronising allosexual voice] you’ll understand when you’re older‚ sweetie #sexuality and lack thereof