Link To Bypass Paywall If Necessary

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

the fundamental problem on this website is that if a homeless person tried to talk to most of y’all you’d be scared out of your minds

(divorcesteal) are you angry? if so, why are you?

I GAVE YOU A CHANCE! IN FEAR, ALL YOU DO IS FREEZE

it’s kind of crazy how here on the so-called feminism website you literally can’t say something as simple as “dude is an inherently gendered term” without literally dozens upon dozens of people who consider themselves feminists showing up to say “idk i use it in a gender neutral way”. like idk how to tell you this but the fact that masculine words are considered default/neutral and feminine words are not is, in fact a reflection, of a patriarchal society.

no sentence fills me with utter loathing so much as "i asked chatgpt"

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

another x-men panel redraw… predictably I’m obsessed with this visual from Inferno #3

theater panoptica

Self-made tragedies have got to be one of my favorite genders. What if you woke up every morning and chose to keep marching towards the only outcome that would destroy you. What if you burned down your whole life and everyone around you to stay on that road, even if every one of its twists and turns try to shake you off. What if saving yourself could be the easiest thing in the world, but only in retrospect. What if you could have prevented this all along. What if you didn't until it was too late. What if this only happened because you were you.