In four billion years, there have been many continents that died.
You’ve heard of the famous ones–Pangaea, proud monolith; Laurasia, home of dinosaurs–but there were others, so many, many others. The grand march of time swallowed islands whole, scraped them up like residue from the baking pan of the world.
Everything has a soul. Everything remembers.
Gondwana floats gently over London now, remembering when the world was hot and green. She loves the lights. There were no lights, when she was alive. There were no lights when the world was so hot and green.
Rodinia settles onto the dry Atacama, bringing moisture from the sea. She moves much faster now, unhindered by gravity and friction, slipping through the walls of this new house. The walls are always moving, yet she stays, floating in and out, bringing moisture.
Vaalbara, eldest and most fire-born, sneaks in tendrils and wisps over her old haunting grounds. Her bones are buried in the outback, ancient cratons resting unrotted through all the fearsome gnawing of time. She likes the summers here. The heat reminds her, so faintly, of what it was like to be born. In the wildfires, she sees the magma oceans of her youth.
I recall being in a conversation with a gatekeeper once (the sort of “monosexual is a homophobic term!” “MOGWAI means kinky people count as queer!” “asexuals don’t belong in the queer community!” type of asshole) and they said of a fictional character: “He’s definitely gay. Totally gay. Maybe bisexual. Queer at the very least.”
That’s when it clicked for me: Gatekeepers honestly think that any sexuality beyond straight and gay is just Gay Lite. Bisexual is half-gay, asexuality is, like, 0.05 percent gay, and just identifying as “queer” is a quarter-gay, maybe.
This is why they lose their shit so badly whenever someone thinks a character is bisexual and not gay, why they accuse others of erasing their representation. A bisexual is just half a lesbian, so how dare you try and water down our portrayal in the media! Asexuals are such Lite Gays that they might as well be straight, so don’t you dare take away my representation with your ace headcanons!
Never mind if the source material itself is ambiguous. If it’s not gay or lesbian, it’s not real representation. If you don’t want real representation, you’re siding with the straights.
It’s such a pathetic and limited way of looking at the world. I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t such jerks.
Some do this in relation to trans headcanons as well. They’ll go into one hell of a performative outrage against TERFs and other assorted bigoted shits… and then have a fucking meltdown when a young trans man on this site says ‘I headcanon this character as a demisexual trans boy’. This person got dogpiled by dozens of the usual suspects involved in the most virulent anti a-spec discourse, all of them shouting ‘she’s a lesbian!’, ‘lesbian-only!!!!’ The fact that all of this was over headcanons about the goddamn moon in the sky just made me cross myself and go ‘these people are the future of the community? I fucking weep for it, then.’ Honestly, someone can post all they want about how ‘TERFs are Bad’. it becomes mere performative drivel when one engages in pretty damned TERFy bullshit in turn.
Also, he’re as example of this particular dogpiling in action re: a bisexual headcanon. Notice, again, the usual suspects involved and the rejection of any headcanon other than gay. But sure, sure, m-spec people and a-spec people and trans and nonbinary and agender people are ~*~totally valid~*~ and other meaningless buzz-words tossed round like candy for placation. Valid until any of the aforementioned groups want to work at seeing themselves represented by identifying with a character and having personal headcanons for a character whose sexuality and gender are never black-on-white stated in a give canon.
I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:
Why are dogs dogs?
I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.
Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense
Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.
The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”
The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”
The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”
These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive. So why is dog-sorting intuitive?
Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.
To process Things – whether animals, words, situations or experiences – our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before – whether first-hand or through a story – then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.
If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.
This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)
In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!
On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as
* pointy * Specific!! Squawking noise!! * The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye * Patriotism?!? * CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD
Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)
So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as
* four legs * Meat Eater * Soft friend * Doggo-ness???? * Walkies * An Snout, * BORK BORK
Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.
And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.
Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.
So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,
* Mop?? (Unlikely – seems to be self-propelled.) * Alien? (Unlikely – no real alien ever experienced.) * Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.) * Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!) * Very fluffy cat? (Maybe – but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!) * Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type) * Robotic toy? (Unlikely – too complex and convincing.) * alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a … * DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space! * Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game. * Best doggo. * PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.
And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!
I feel like this explains why Very Young Kids call every unknown foru-legged creature a Dog
Adding different characteristics together into an idea of what something is is called a schema. That’s exactly why young kids do it: they’re so young that they haven’t had a lot of experience with building schemas for things. For example their schema of a dog may = four legs and soft but not not include bark. So when they see an animal that has for legs and is tiny, like a cat or a rabbit, they may end up calling it a dog because it fits into their schema of what a dog *is*. Once they know that dogs bark or that cats are fairly different animals that ALSO are four legged and soft, they can redefine the schema accordingly so that now dog = soft, four legs, and bark, while cat might = soft, four legs, and purr.
her eyes convey that she has just witnessed an incredible traumatizing horror but her body language conveys that it is a normal but still somewhat disorienting occurrence for her
anyone else still sometimes catch themselves thinking about how after all those years of idolizing dave strider and after all that time in the void session wondering and anticipating and nervously awaiting this theoretical possibility that he might get the chance to meet him, dirk finally fucking sits down with dave one on one hours from the final battle and like wow fucking surprise motherfucker
he gets to find out his literal worst fears were ACTUALLY true! the version of him that dave knew actually did, in fact, do his level best to ruin dave’s life and was an abusive, toxic influence from day one and throughout to the point where dave can’t even look at him without flinching!
this coming at a time when dirk is already horrendously low on himself, his relationship with Jake literally just blew up like 3 hours ago and if the AR thing went down even remotely the same way there was also that and holy hell dude what a time to be informed about the existence of Bro Strider. Dirk is sitting there thinking he was a toxic influence to Jake from moment one and probably all of his friends the whole time and here Dave is confirming everything from a parallel perspective?
you can just see this horrible gut clenching moment when this utterly defeated Dirk just meekly accepts that this other version of himself is reflective of his true innermost self and has justifiably ruined any chance he ever had of impressing or even knowing Dave
– and then you see Dave just immediately lift it off him, even get kinda angry at him for having the audacity to even try accepting it that way, you can FEEL Dave’s fucking confusion because he went in guns blazing expecting a confrontation with someone as impossible and inscrutable as Bro was. Dave went in expecting to punch a brick wall and get nowhere, and instead he got Dirk “you’re absolutely right and I’m so fucking sorry I ruined your life” Strider
and from Dirk’s pov, listening to this, watching this, having this realization that this dave isn’t an untouchable, aloof, mysterious and mythical heroic figure of legend at all, but that only makes him MORE worthy of idolization in all the ways that genuinely matter – and simultaneously thinking that he’s already sabotaged himself out of the chance to know him at all.
It’s like, god, you know those hyperrealistic nightmares people have sometimes that are so fucking scary because they’re indistinguishable from real life, the ones where after you wake up it takes a long time for the understanding that it was actually just a dream to hit you and then you want to cry with relief?
For Dirk this had to have been so much like that, the whiplash between being 100% sure that Dave was just going to say what he needed to say and then never speak to him again (and knowing Dirk would have considered it completely justified and never questioned his right to do so jesus christ) followed IMMEDIATELY by Dave just being like no you don’t get it, THIS you, this version of you, what I am looking for deep down in my fucking SOUL is for this you that you are right now to be a person that I can have in my life to tell me that I’m okay, that you’re okay, that WE’RE okay – and after fifteen minutes talking to you I can already immediately tell that you ARE that person.
Dirk’s friends were always only interested in denying the possibility that Dirk could ever truly become a monster, they could never have possibly understood just how DARK Dirk is at his most self destructive, and that’s part of why their reassurances were always hollow for him – they didn’t GET IT, right, they never could have followed the rabbit hole all the way down, so what did they know? But this guy, Dave Strider, has literally seen Dirk at his worst, has lived through the actual reality of the worst things living inside the full-picture potential of Dirk Strider, has dealt with that to great personal detriment and is fucking STILL sitting here telling him “I can tell that you are different, I can tell that you are better, and I am willing to trust you and help you to become a better person than the guy I knew because at the end of the fucking day, you are too important to me to give up on”
like yeah confronting dirk with all of that was what dave needed absolutely but BEING confronted and ultimately forgiven by dave was what dirk needed too, just as much
in conclusion homestuck is good
both of them grew up looking for a brother and they found each other at last
Game Concept: You the player are some terrible god-like force and you pick an NPC at random to possess as the Player Character. All NPCs in-game react accordingly to the sudden possession depending on who you pick. You can pick any character with each fresh play through.
Example: You possess the mayor’s son and his family is grateful and humbled to have one of their bloodline chosen as Hero of the Land. If you pick the farmer’s daughter as the PC, her dad will be a game-long companion and come with you trying futilely to help/save his possessed daughter. You pick the town new comer and literally no one will try to help you at all except the farmer’s daughter who, in the play through, is not possessed and is very kind to you.
You still go on and fight the big bad as normal, but 99% of the drama is based around the interpersonal fall out of this small town tolerating you as a a weird spirit thing possessing someone they know in order to save the kingdom.
See then the dialogue wheel would be you, as the spirit/force choosing how to play it: benevolent deity, neutral force, or demonic avatar. Or other weirdo dialogue choices to confuse ppl fallout style. Depending on how u wanna do it, your get everyone as your ally and try to save your host or just burn everyone.
Bonus game+ you can break the fourth wall and admit you’re a person playing a video game and try to get someone to believe you. Various trophies for giving every npc an existential crisis.
just moving along like everyone else 