I think people often underestimate the potential educational value of senseless memes. For example, thanks to Spiders Georg, literally every teenager on Tumblr has a reasonable grasp of what a statistical outlier is and the sorts of problems that outliers can introduce into a naïve
analysis. There are grown adults who don’t get that – I deal with them on a daily basis.
“Memes have educational value” actually statistical error. Average meme teaches 0 facts. Spiders Georg is an outlier adn should not be counted
In CoS when they try to sneak into Myrtle’s bathroom to ask her about her death, McGonagall catches them and Harry makes up the excuse that they wanted to see Hermione in the hospital wing and Minnie doesn’t give them detention and then comes this and since we all know Harry’s dumbest excuse, here’s the official suggestion to rate all of Harry’s excuses on a scale from
but all people have weird ideas about sex and how it’s done, it’s not a limited population category thing. women are copping the brunt of this dumb discourse because the discoursees are applying some really shallow readings to content on two sites, where the content is generated by women by a huge margin over any other gender, and making some hogwild logical leaps to end up endlessly circling the mlm discourse echochamber.
occasionally you’ll luck out by bedding some fuck shaman who opens your third eye through the power of labe grinding your armpit or whatever, but Regular Guy and Population Median Woman probably know diddly shit beyond PIV and anal on birthdays. sex ed sucks beyond ‘don’t do it/this is a condom on a banana/from the front the uterus-womb-ovary complex looks like a buffalo kinda’, live action porn is stuck in a one-upmanship overton window shift (except, y’know, for sex), and sex positive material online is like a infinite house of mirrors except every reflection shows you erica moen advising you to stick a lamp up your ass
and that’s just the cisgender hets bumbling their way around.
finding out info about what the hell to do and how to do it if you’re gay is hard, and damn near impossible if you’re not cis and probably juggling an extra course load of terminology, body perception, and having to do a 101 How Not To Talk About My Junk to every Brock and Chriss on Scruff.
when all the material out there is basically boiling down getting that dick into a hole as the ultimate goal, it’s a wonder that anyone is even writing anything other than ‘he shoved it in, he came’. 1-2-3-dick is formulaic but man, that it’s even around enough to become formulaic is new.
‘straight girls write anal wrong! they don’t know anything about anal!’ well i mean without getting into the whole thing of yes it’s possible to have comfortable anal penetration with spit, yes it’s possible to have comfortable anal penetration with nil or extremely fast minor fingering, no your o-ring will not blow out and prolapse if you take a pounding without 40 minutes of getting tenderly fingered with free trade lube handmade by monks in the peruvian alps, etc etc etc (i.e. every thing some sanctimonious chucklefuck will grandly declare as absolutes) but lmao women absolutely know about anal. a quick glimpse at cosmo magazine will tell you that. a quick glimpse at fuckin’ pornhub will tell you that. straight women do anal, lesbians do anal. every population microselection you can name has been getting pleasure from the asshole for as long as human beings have had assholes!!!
‘straight girls only write about penetration! real gay people frot and grind!’ again: PIV/PIA is everywhere. EVERYWHERE! gay porn is penetration focused! straight porn is penetration focused! romance stories with a regulation fade to black cut imply penetration! the popular concept of what constitutes sex itself is based on penetration! you can’t get furious at someone for doing a thing when everything around them is doing the same thing!
everyone is stupid about sex. sometimes people get less stupid. sometimes people get brave enough to actually ask for what they want. i really can’t fault anyone for not having every intricacy of boning nailed down straight out of the gate but if the alternate is going ‘women are harming me by not faithfully depicting ultimate best practice safe sex in their fiction written for the purpose of hopefully getting the reader off, and for that sin they’re all b*tches who will never understand what it’s like to be sexualised or objectified 😦 :(*’ then god, just end it.
anyway i got totally off track from your ask, but yes, 100% i am supportive of more sexual education that isn’t based solely around cis bodied reproduction and how to avoid it/recognise it, but amatuer erotica is not the venue to get educated and it’s unreasonable to demand that it should be en masse. that doesn’t mean people can’t strive for good practice and authenticity or whatever. if it works for you then shit yeah, make gloving up a feature, go nuts, the only way to normalise something is by including it, but the smarmy attitude of ‘if you don’t include items a through f, practices 1 through 4 and do my towers of hanoi puzzle to decode the Problematic Content Of The Day then you’re a homophobe who is actively hurting and fetishising smol mlm beans and you deserve to be hounded’ is just… nah. nah, nah. nah.
you know, this entire slashcourse could be cut off at the knees if every time someone said ‘but no REAL gay man writes x, y, z’ their browser was force directed to nifty.org with a posting ban until they do a book report on a randomly selected story.
*’women don’t understand sexual objectification’ is a phrase i read with my own gay eyes on a yaoicourse blog and i had to stare out of the window for a while to absorb the goddamn
audacity of it.
I feel like god personally came down from heaven and kissed me on the mouth with tongue when reading this, this is poetry, this is modern art, if no other document makes it past the burning of our libraries and the fall of society, I hope this is preserved somewhere for someone or something to find in the inevitable ruins
So the thing I find fascinating about this, is that I feel like I’ve been around fandom long enough to have seen this whole thing come full circle. Back when I first started reading slash the sex was often fairly unrealistic. And then there was a BIG BIG BIG push by people within fandom to mock any unrealistic sex tropes, ESPECIALLY in slash fics. I remember post after post about “Things I Never Want to Read in Slash Again” about how much preparation anal sex requires and the wonders of lube and how unrealistic simultaneous orgasms are, how sex can’t really last that long etc, etc.
And this really seemed to take hold. I would occasionally see people mention things like “well this fic has them come at the same time but otherwise, it’s pretty good.” It was very much a Thing.
And personally I became very self-conscious about writing sex to make sure I wasn’t breaking any of those rules. Even the ones I didn’t completely agree with I made sure to follow because I didn’t want anyone dismissing my fic on that basis.
But things started to feel very formulaic to the other extreme. Every slash fic had to be very careful not to make anal the be-all end-all, and make sure there’s endless preparation with gallons of lube and blah, blah, and yanno, it gets kinda boring.
And real, actual sex varies. A LOT. By person, by couple, by day, by taste. I mean, I’ve actually gone and researched some stuff for fics of like biological function of male orgasms and stuff and it’s way more weird and complicated than the “acceptable slash fic” rules would have you believe. And I know my own experiences don’t conform to a lot of that stuff either.
So, I think stereotypes are bad, whether it’s “real gay men do X” or “real gay men don’t do x” or whatever. I always think sex is best when it has a realistic grounding, but at the end of the day this isn’t a textbook. It’s supposed to be sexy and romantic and hot. (Except, I guess, for when it isn’t.)
And ultimately there are only so many ways for human beings to get off. I mean, yanno, props can add variety, but ultimately there aren’t that many sex acts. That’s almost never the point of the story. ‘Dude has an orgasm’ just isn’t very interesting unless we are made to care about that dude and how he FEELS about his orgasm. And that’s almost always the actual point.
i sometimes grump about things like “why is it always three fingers” but it’s not because it’s especially unrealistic or – god forbid – because i don’t want people who don’t hang out with penises to write smut. the more smut the better. it’s just that it kind of breaks my immersion when it’s the same every time in every fic. similarly, the phrase “come for me” has become an instant fourth wall breaker. and “to give him better access,” that one kicks me out of the story as well.
also i guess there’s some minor element of going, “most dicks just aren’t three grown-man fingers thick, y’all, the characters’ hands are bigger than yours,” but that’s not honestly a big deal, it’s just a bit funny.
If space travel doesn’t involve sea shanties then I think we’ll have missed an opportunity.
You see though, for sea travel you want big strong people who are capable of managing rigging. For space travel you want small low-mass people who are technically educated, as they are called, nerds. Your space shanties are going to be less booming and more squeaky.
in so far as there will be space shanties, they’ll be filk
I call shenanigans on the big strong people; sailors were young and malnourished by modern standards, and climbing around the rigging is easier if you’re small and light.
Like, I am 100% in favor of shanties in as many situations as possible, but I’m having trouble coming up with a mode of space travel that would require multiple humans to move in concert, thus necessitating songs with a strong beat to move to.
Sea chanties were for providing a strong beat to move to. Space chanties might very well arise just because we’re bored, out there between point A and point B for so long.
(Also yes, @gdanskcityofficial up there has the right of it.)
Space shanties are for warp piloting. Under warp drive, human time perception and time as measured by crystal or atomic oscillators don’t match. Starship pilots listen to a small unamplified chorus singing a careful rhythm while keeping their own eyes on a silent metronome that the chorus can’t see, linked to a highly-precise atomic clock. How the chorus and metronome fall in and out of sync tells the pilot how to keep the ship safely in the warp bubble and correctly on course.
Depending on route, a typical warp jump can last anywhere from one to ten minutes, and most courses consist of five to fifteen jumps before a necessary four to six hour break to check the engines, plot the next set of jumps, and give everyone a chance to recover. A good shanty team, with reliable rhythm, a broad, versatile, and extendible repertoire, and the stamina to do 3-4 sets a day over the course of a voyage, is just as vital to space travel as a pilot, navigator, or engineering team.
Other reasons Shanties will experience a revival in the space age:
We will sing for any freaking reason, or no reason at all, and Shanties are FUN to sing.
Deep Space is a lonely place and recruiting people suited to long periods of isolation might be a good idea. People from Newfoundland/Labrador, for instance.
SPACE WHALES
THEY’RE DEFINITELY REAL I FEEL IT IN MY SOUL
“What Do We Do With A Drunken Sailor” is basically a revenge fantasy against your most incompetent co-workers and if there’s something humans love doing, it’s being petty.
so you know this cool challenge dance maui does to get the lava demon’s attention? it’s called a haka, and it turns out new zealand sports teams do it before their matches.
There’s something extremely perverse about “luxury coffins”. Thousands and thousands of dollars for an impenetrable box to dump in a hole that you can’t even rot in because your corpse is so saturated with preservatives. It’s like a sick joke.
Or a future archeologist’s goldmine.
But a modern ecologist’s nightmare.
I mean I get it but also. The sheer amount of information we’ve been able to glean from these kinds of Extra burials (i.e., Pascal’s tomb, the pyramids, even the Valley of the Kinds) is staggering and SO valuable. Even just old cemeteries and mass graves. It isn’t a cut-n-dry issue.
I think we should also leave people alone to deal with something as personal as their own death. Especially as it’s so wrapped up in cultural, religious, and moral context that you can’t just tell people “hey we’re gonna burn you/turn you to liquid/whatever newfangled methods.”
Me @ modern ecologists and future archaeologists: FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
The future archeologists would win because they’re from the future and have advanced technology
Future archaeologists might not exist if modern ecologists fail to push sustainable reform.
I fall solidly on the side of the archaeologists here. And the historians who will be gloating over all the material. And the anthropologists who would have so much more information to work with when trying to understand our world and our cultural practices. Generally, I don’t think our burial practices are too disruptive to ecosystems, seeing as they’re contained within specific spaces set aside to house the dead, but obviously, I could be wrong.
You know that all people die, and that there are more being born every day, and that each one will die eventually, right? We are continuously getting new corpses in need of disposal, but we are not getting more land in which to bury them. We regularly unearth old graveyards to build new things, but only recently (post Civil War) have we been creating problem corpses pumped full of gallons of extremely toxic preservatives. These preservatives do not prevent decay – they merely slow it down for entirely aesthetic purposes, so that people can have prettier and more leisurely open-casket funerals. Formaldehyde and other chemicals may be washed out into the surrounding ecosystem during floods and pose health risks to embalmers and anyone hoping to repurpose modern cemeteries. Pesticides and lawnkeeping for expansive graveyards is wasteful, expensive, and toxic, creating dangerous chemical runoff that wrecks havoc on aquatic ecosystems in particular – golf courses pose a similar problem. Conventional burials involve large hardwood coffins treated with even more toxic chemicals, and most also require concrete vaults to be placed underneath for extra stability.
For the entirety of human history, nearly everyone has received a “green” burial. Even the mummification process in Ancient Egypt can be considered “green”, and huge tombs were reserved for a select few. Up until very recently, even in the west, grave sites were routinely reused, and corpses largely allowed to decompose and like other organic material without releasing strong poisons into the ground. Catacombs and charnel houses provided efficient storage space for large numbers of bodies at once.
Not only are modern embalmed burials not traditional, they are virtually barren of useful information to archaeologists. Again: your body will still rot, it’ll just do so will a side of pollution. We do not bury our dead with any signifiers of individuality or culture, beyond a nice suit and maybe some jewelry. If you’ve ever studied archaeology, you’ll know that ancient burial sites are valued because they contain thousands of cultural artifacts, not just corpses – artifacts such as jewelry, weapons, tools, offerings, and other indications of status, role, relationships, etc. We… don’t. Putting someone in a silk-lined wood casket wearing a nice dress and sensible earrings is not remotely comparable to burying them with the tools of their trade, the bones of their cat, protective talismans, chieftain’s jewelry, and/or a mural describing their cultural beliefs about the afterlife. Tombstones exposed to the elements are often worn down in barely a century and contain little information about the deceased. Lastly, there are millions and millions of corpses already in the ground. Our massive population means that we will have more bodies to dispose of than our ancestors. These hypothetical future archaeologists whose careers you prioritize over the planet’s health will likely find that our current burial standards, if not altered, will be a great nuisance by preventing productive land use.
Whatever terrifying scenario you’re imagining in which current civilization has collapsed and cultural information stored in books and technology is lost, and historians are forced to gloat over anonymous bones, I don’t want to know. I just want to avoid it by ensuring that, culturally, we recognize the importance of adopting sustainable practices in all corners of life as much as possible. Conservation of natural resources and reduction of ecological harm is the best way to ensure those archaeologists will actually be born in the first place. Burials are a relatively small example of the changes that need to be made for the sake of a desirable future, but an important one. Embalming is not necessary or healthful, and sustainable alternatives to hardwood luxury caskets exist – it’s all about moving away from the norms of excess.
just moving along like everyone else 