Was out driving and I passed one of those church signs all “don’t put a period where God has placed a comma”.
And I know that’s a liberal prot thing, all “okay we know the Bible specifically says X but that doesn’t count anymore”.
But then I remember that line about an early-stage embryo being the size of a comma and actually that would work really well as an anti-abortion slogan.
So the other thing to happen on that drive… remember when I said that the things in movies that made me cry were spacecraft in operation and heroic sacrifice?
Out of nowhere I remembered that scene from Deep Impact where the astronauts realized their last chance is to fly up to the asteroid and place the nuke directly, and then one of them points out they won’t have the time and fuel to clear the blast radius, and then there’s a beat or two of silence and one of them says “You know, they’re going to name elementary schools after us.”
Which was kind of a problem, since I was going down 82nd at rush hour and needed to see.
On the Belgian euthanasia thing… dude, people have forever been killing themselves because they were depressed, or permanently disabled in ways they didn’t like, or just tired of living. The Belgians just figured out a way to harvest that as a source of institutional legitimacy. And good for them.
On a related note, in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, the narrator at several points angrily goes off at length at how unfair it was to dispossess the heirs of Olde Tyme peasant suicides, all “WTF, you’re going to hold them in bondage and oppress them and etc. etc. and even go so far as to deny them the option to fuck off out of life completely?!?”
And the thing is this has nothing whatsoever to do with ANY of the plot or characters or other themes, and I’ve always wondered what was up with that.
So the reason white-collar criminals get sent to cushy “camp Fed” minimum security prisons - yeah some of it’s that they have strings to pull and favors to call in (and better lawyers, hoo boy). And some of it’s that they can be trusted not to spend 20 hours sharpening a toothbrush handle to stab the guy who looked at them wrong.
But a lot of it isn’t the system corruptly looking out for their interests but protecting its own. The kind of guys who end up in, uh, “Thug Jail” may be violent but they often lack the discipline or cooperation to accomplish anything large-scale or long-term. Their only weapon is brutality and that can be countered by prison guards armed with brutality AND teamwork. (And guns.)
Though, you take those guys and add an executive type who’s used to exercising leadership in a world of big dick/egos, or a lawyer type who actually knows how to format and file a motion, or what the appealable flaws are in a prosecutor’s case, or where the *actual* power in the prison grievance system resides…
It’s like how judges will dismiss tickets and charges for cops and lawyers, or prioritize their cases so they can finish and leave - if the legal system tries to fuck with them, they know how to fuck right back.
And yes, holding them to the same expectations as everyone else DOES count as fucking with them - that’s what the legal system is, a mechanism for fucking with people that’s been mythologized as legitimate.
In contrast, in a lot of ways celebrities have a rougher time with the legal system - people pay a lot of attention to their doings, so to maintain legitimacy it’s under pressure to not break kayfabe and pretend things actually work according to the mythology.
Anonymous asked: Pray that post doesn't go viral, we don't need tumblr going tumblr and further excusing dysfunction as justice.
Fuck you talking about? You’re reading the moral backwards, point is lot of what goes under the name of “justice” is actually *functionality*. And sometimes names need rectifying.
Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled
Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.
This is so fucked up.
To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.
In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.
This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.
Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.
The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.
This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.
(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)
Someone needs to build a self-piloting drone with a good EMR sensor, program it to fly around looking for unprotected outdoor electrical outlets and give it a probe tool dextrous enough to plug itself in to recharge. Call it a Mosquito.
Someone needs to build a self-piloting drone with a good EMR sensor, program it to fly around looking for unprotected outdoor electrical outlets and give it a probe tool dextrous enough to plug itself in to recharge. Call it a Mosquito.
I mean not that this would be terribly useful by itself, but it’d be a good proof of concept and evolutionary platform for…. Skynet, I guess. Basically Skynet.
Someone needs to build a self-piloting drone with a good EMR sensor, program it to fly around looking for unprotected outdoor electrical outlets and give it a probe tool dextrous enough to plug itself in to recharge. Call it a Mosquito.
I mean not that this would be terribly useful by itself, but it’d be a good proof of concept and evolutionary platform for…. Skynet, I guess. Basically Skynet.
Public service campaigns all “Stop the Bot: Plug that Spot!”, vector control all driving around in vans with their own EMR sensors, nighttime construction sites hiring duck hunters to stand around with shotguns guarding the generators…
Man, sometime I need to learn to save my good ideas for SF stories rather than burning them on posts.
Ugh, tricycle “motorcycles”. Dude, if you want to take your ladyfriend riding in the open air but you don’t like the whole two-wheel thing, get a goddamn Miata.
