Renesmee was the antichrist. Every detail about her from conception onward was creepy and dissonant and full of explicit body horror. Every single trope involving her was pulled straight out of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen and stories in that vein. Even in-universe, there was textual evidence that creatures like her were apocalyptic events unto themselves.
And after all of that setup, the narrative pulls back and insists that all that horror and dissonance was a big fake-out, or else entirely unintentional. The baby isn’t the antichrist, she’s practically the messiah!
…which is, literally, exactly what the antichrist would say.
Neko Atsume, but with fish/reptiles/dinosaurs/pigeons/chickens instead? Where are these games? Am I going to have to learn to make games now?
(&:) Tiny Bird Garden is like Neko Atsume but with assorted birds, and Gecko Garden is basically the same but with leopard geckos.
(I would love things like dinosaurs, more reptile varieties, chickens, and especially small friendly cryptids. 😀 But I’m too lasy to make them myself. :/)
I’m going to check those two out ASAP. Thank you a million times for helping to feed my unending hunger to collect small good digital animals.
I’ve heard good things about Tap Tap Fish!
Tap Tap Fish is indeed pretty dang awesome. They came out with a little freshwater section too, so you can tap for guppies and goldfish and bettas and turtles and stuff now as well as various saltwater critters.
Hadelmach, The Twisted. It is in her nature to labour unceasingly, to reap what she has sown, and to dwell in pristine darkness. She is the patron deity of the Sunless Isles, a society of Gaunts that, despite their worship of an evil god, threw off the rule of their God-Emperors (distantly descended from Hadelmach herself) in revolution, and now are far friendlier to outsiders than they used to be. Hadelmach’s more ‘positive’ influences and rituals have become preeminent among the cold, rain-soaked cities of the Isles, and what effect that will have upon the goddess over the centuries remains to be seen.
The Sunless Isles are a very interesting and friendly place.
…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.
I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.
Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.
…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.
This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”
Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….
Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.
In all seriousness I took a death and dying course in college for fun and that’s when I fell in love with, and began to seriously study, spontaneous or “street shrines”. These are the organic, unplanned placements of items when someone is killed, generally, and the community almost descends on a spot. I am fascinated by that interfaith, inter-spirit moment of connection fostered. What drives someone to leave the first item? Who guides them there? What do we, as humans, seek from the leaving of a memorial on a place that now hallowed? And we know it is, to some extent, even if we’re not spirit-workers. We have this human need to bear witness, no matter who we are, and over and over again it manifests as this need to build some space, some monument that says “they were here, and now they aren’t here, and we, collectively, of all faiths and walks of life, strangers to each other, will remember them”
We take comfort in, and protect to some measure, that space we create with tea-light candles and stuffed bears and flowers and it just feels like the Right Thing to Do. We rebuild these spaces when they are torn down by authority and we keep building them up and that’s beautiful
Street shrines are TRULY universal, too. They are largely non-verbal but it’s like we just KNOW what to do, like something moves inside all of us and it doesn’t fucking matter if we can’t understand anyone else standing at the site, it’s just a Knowing. It’s phenomenal
I started and re-started my answer to this ask half a dozen times. Because it’s a really, really important question, but it’s also a hard question to answer in a useful way. I’m going to do my best.
Nothing is as important as what you believe is true. If I can control what you think, I can control every decision you make. I can control what products you buy, who you vote for, which of your friends you trust—and which of them you distrust; I can choose which social causes you apply yourself to, and how effectively you champion them; to a very great extent I can even decide what you’ll major in in college, who you’ll marry, IF you’ll marry, if you’ll STAY married if the marriage goes bad, what job you’ll go for, how well you’ll do in that job, how you spend your leisure hours, how you treat your children, how you feel about yourself when you look in the mirror, what you’ll eat for dinner, and if you’ll respect yourself in the morning.
EVERY DECISION YOU MAKE is based on what information you’ve accepted. So if I can make you believe what I want you to believe, I own you.
And make no mistake: my best interests are NEVER the same as your best interests. The most you can hope for from ANY source is that their interests and your interests align. If I’m a company, then it’s in my best interest if you buy my product. I am only interested in the quality and safety of my product to the extent that you will not buy it if it’s garbage, or too dangerous. If I’m a newspaper, believe me, my goal is not to make you a more informed citizen of the world. My goal is to sell newspapers.
However, it may be that my reputation is an important part of reaching my goals: and if I feed you misinformation, my reputation may be damaged. And so a degree of trust may be invested in sufficiently reputable sources, since their goal (“to maintain a high reputation”) and your goal (“to learn something”) are aligned. Be VERY CAREFUL when bestowing this kind of trust on a source, and NEVER let them act as your ONLY source. You can never know for sure how important that reputation really is to them, or for what ends they may be willing to compromise it.
“But this information is from a random Tumblr post, not a news corporation, or a professional blog. Nobody’s making money, here. So why would they lie to me?” Attention? Attention’s a big one. Those posts you see going around, full of SHOCKING CLAIMS, usually have tens of thousands of notes. Tens of thousands of people shocked – shocked! – to learn that feeding bread to ducks makes them sick, or that Charlie Chaplin was a Nazi, or that bleach mixed with baking soda can eat through concrete. It doesn’t matter that none of those things are true. It doesn’t even matter if the OP, or all of the people reblogging it, BELIEVE that they’re true. What matters is that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE had in their own interest something that was more important to them than “make sure the things I’m reblogging are accurate.”
Maybe they wanted the prestige of being the first to bring interesting new information to their social group. Maybe they were alarmed by what they read, and they wanted to keep their friends and loved ones safe. Maybe what they read reinforced some bias that they had, and so they disseminated it because they wanted it to be true. Maybe having this surprising intel on their blog made them feel more intelligent, or more socially conscious. There are lots of reasons, because there are lots of people, and every single one of those people had their own best interests.
And none of those interests are yours.
So because what you believe is SO important, and because you are the sole guardian of your own best interests, I think it’s downright reckless to accept any piece of information as fact without asking two questions first:
– Who is telling me this? Do I have reason to trust them? Should I trust them SO MUCH as to let them be the sole arbiter of what I believe on this subject?
– Who benefits if I accept it as the truth? THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. A lot of information masquerades as being in the interests of one thing when really it’s in the interests of something else. Really think about it.
When you choose to believe someone – anyone – about anything, you are giving them power over you. And skepticism is the only thing that protects you from giving that power to people who don’t deserve it.
When you choose to believe someone – anyone – about anything, you are giving them power over you. And skepticism is the only thing that protects you from giving that power to people who don’t deserve it.
And this is why we research outside of tumblr before reblogging posts that claim something as fact, and why we research by looking at more than one source.
20+ years ago, a friend of mine was doing research on “collaborative filtering”, the technology that underlies things like Netflix showing you movies you’ll probably-like. There was discussion of a project applying this technology to Usenet (a discussion medium) or internet forums or things like that, and one of the people, I think a faculty adviser, rejected it completely and said “no, this would be evil”. Because if you filter out all the posts you don’t like, you live in a bubble of people who agree with you.
Facebook proved him right.
I think this is a key thing to understand about all this “do we talk politely to people who disagree with us” discourse: 90% of the people supporting any given evil thing are not strongly committed to it. They’re just going along with what the people around them believe and say. If any people around them believe and say differently, that will have a significant impact on them.
Convincing people on things like this isn’t some kind of incredible one-in-a-million chance. If you just talk to them on a regular basis and go about your business, just existing, but occasionally mentioning conflicting views, that will convince a lot of them that the extremist things they are picking up are possibly-bullshit. Just being queer near people who are default-homophobic can, and does, get many of them to gradually change their minds.
There’s plenty of research on the polarizing impact of things like facebook’s default sorting of things so you see people who agree with you more and people who disagree with you less.
Failure to distinguish between genuine militants and people who are supporting crazy bullshit because no one they know personally is suggesting there’s a problem means further radicalizing the latter.
I know this is anecdotal, but in my 31 years of life, I have never convinced anyone to let go of some toxic or cruel attitude or practice. No amount of calling attention to it or explaining why it’s bad ever made a difference. No amount of just “being there” made any positive influence whatsoever.
People don’t change their minds, and they don’t consider anything beyond what they heard when they were five years old.
Convincing people on things is not a “one-in-a-million chance” like you say, but that’s only because you think it would actually work one time.
It doesn’t.
Even me saying this isn’t going to change anyone’s minds. No one is going to read what either of these posts say and reconsider their stance on anything.
Talking to other human beings is a pointless, frustrating waste of time and energy that could be better spent jerking off.
@despicableplankton I think this is a valuable perspective, and I have some questions, because if you’ve covered all the bases I can think of to cover in your efforts to convince people and still saw no success, it would warrant a significant update on my perspective on the matter.
As a starting point for what my perspective is, I can summarize it as follows: We don’t convince people by explaining how wrong they are. We convince people by trying to understand how right they are, and if they feel that we’re genuinely engaging with their ideas they’ll realize their errors themselves along the way as they try to explain them to you.
So what I normally do – unless I see a good reason for doing otherwise – is any time my mind raises a disagreement, I try to find some way to formulate it as a “I want to understand what I’m missing” sort of question. Incidentally, for me this aligns perfectly with me actual desire to learn anything that I might be missing.
So with that said, I’d actually like to know, if you don’t mind taking the time: have you tried the above, if so, could you go into details as to how those interactions went, and in what ways has it failed you?
TL;DR: I don’t think it matters what mental strategy you have, or how you present an argument, or even what you use to back up your beliefs. People decide ahead of time they don’t want to change, so they don’t. People have learned to throw out whatever information they don’t want to believe. Your pitch and your presentation is pointless if they’re not buying what you’re selling.
VERY LONG, RAMBLING, DEPRESSED RESPONSE BELOW THE BREAK:
One thing to remember is that you won’t always know if you’ve changed someone else’s mind.
I have had vehement arguments with people where I dug in and didn’t give an inch, didn’t even show the slightest appreciation for their viewpoint – only to change my mind later, long after the conversation was over, based in part on things they told me.
I have also had times where I’ve watched two other people argue, in one of those arguments that goes absolutely nowhere, and shifted from agreeing with person A to agreeing with person B without ever actually involving myself in their conversation.
If you regularly argue about things you’re passionate about, and use good argument strategies, it’s quite likely that you have changed some minds without even knowing that you have. Especially if those conversations were in a public forum, and therefore likely to involve many silent bystanders who choose to observe without contributing.
I agree with the one above me. I’ve been in lots of arguments, and I’ve never once changed my mind during the argument. But I have charged my mind, sometimes months or years later, due to things that people argued at me.
I’ve persuaded literally dozens of people to change their minds on contentious issues, that I know of, and sometimes I find out later about people I didn’t realize I’d convinced.
If you don’t think people can be persuaded, git gud.
Most people change their minds many many times in life. Even fanatics. What you don’t get, as merely one single outside participant in another human being’s life, is awareness and control over the timing or results of the change process, or credit for the results. this is not a bad thing.
i would encourage skeptics to consult exmormon.org and observe large groups of “hopeless” fundies undergoing massive ideological healing in real-time. Look at their stories. Count the people who were saved from lifelong mental prisons by the words of strangers.
Just because you can’t tell you’re winning doesn’t mean the other guy is a lost cause. That kind of surrender just indicates you got some stuff to work on yourself.
god im reading a text about romance fiction (especially targeted at young adults) for class and one sentence in it literally made my brain explode because ive been thinking about this kind of stuff too, how “Many people wouldn’t fall in love if they’ve never heard about it before.” and like…imagine there was no ideal/overaccentuated image of love and romance painted in postmodern mass media….how would we love? would it be purer? more authentic? what would we do differently? would we fall in love at all if we werent constantly being fed an ideal concept of love as the norm in mass media? like what is a natural process of human feelings and what is just a projection of how we want to love and want to be loved based on what we’ve seen on tv and read in books etc? in this essay i will
w … wh … where’s the rest of the essay, op?
if it worked like this, queers wouldn’t fall in love, because we grew up being told it was only a filthy lust that could never compare with the clean true love of A Man And A Woman having a church wedding. we love anyway, and we married even when the state didn’t recognize it as marriage.
i’m not pointing this out to scold you. you had an interesting hypothesis, but it turns out there actually was a control group, so the experiment’s been done.
I was talking to someone today about writing, and I was surprised by how amazed they were by writers’ ability to create a story. They couldn’t understand how JKR was able to create the world of Harry Potter–how she came up a world so far removed from our reality.
It made me realize something; not everyone can come up with worlds on a whimsy. Not everyone can create characters that they grow so fond of that they’re like real people in their eyes. Not everyone has gone through the experience of a character derailing their story and swearing it wasn’t them typing those words in that document. Not everyone can just envision a story and then just write it.
I’ve been making stories since I was a small child–it’s something so ingrained in me that to imagine not being able to write (no matter how much I agonize over writing woes) is such a foreign concept to me. Writers, cherish your ability to create stories. Because not everyone can create stories. Because there isn’t anyone in the world who can write the stories you are writing. Because you don’t know when or where there might be a person in the world who needs to hear your story.
Out of all my posts to hit 5k, I’m glad it was this one. All my fellow writers out there are amazing, and don’t ever be afraid to express yourself through writing! I support every single of you guys ❤
This made me emotional. Sometimes I don’t feel like a good enough writer, but things like this really help put it into perspective. To all my fellow writers, we are amazing!
As someone who is so utterly convinced that everything they write is bad, I needed this so much… yeah. Yeah, we’re awesome.
just moving along like everyone else 