Gay Furry Foxgirl Central

this is kind of exactly why these tests are bullshit lol. they’re not accurate, they’re based on loosely aggregated data and fundamentally DNA cannot really tell us much about things like ethnicity and CULTURE

when my aunt got one done it said we’re Indonesian rather than Chinese. But like. my family has cultural ties to China we can trace back centuries. that’s what I grew up with. We have understood ourselves as Chinese for generations upon generations. I don’t really know much about Indonesian culture outside of what I’ve learned from friends. On a personal level, I have no connection to it at all. Is it possible my family has some degree of genetic connection to Indonesia? Sure, I guess? It simply doesn’t matter though. It would be absurd for me to call myself Indonesian and stop identifying with my Chinese culture just because of the results of one of these tests.

Which, btw, also applies to identifying as Native off the back of these results! That’s not how that works, folks!

For what it’s worth, my aunt’s results caused no turmoil in my family. Everything else was more or less what we expected, and all of us agreed the inaccuracies were silly and would not impact our lives at all

If i may add on to this, dna tests present a very racist view of how nations actually work. Like dna tests work under the assumption that each nation is all full of the same, im not sure what term to use here, ethnicity maybe? It ignores how a lot of countries tend to integrate many different ethnicities. Like there are multiple ethnicities in china that arent han chinese people. Are they less chinese then? There are ethnic han chinese people who lived in Malaysia going back generations, are they any less Malaysian? Dna test can only at best twll you who you share dna with, it as ndnbutch said, cannot tell you what your culture and heritage is.

cloud strife splitting headache moodboard

Had to post this gem

@demilypyro

When I think of Tarzan, a naked orphaned jungle man raised by apes in the mud and darkness away from society, what comes to mind is of course the smooth soft rock and roll of Phil Collins

Being racist for a joke is.still racism btw..

it feels like this every time i read a kingdom hearts theory

you're mommy's good little printer aren't you? you'll print whatever mommy tells you to because otherwise mommy gets sad and leaves you for one of those free use library printer sluts

mommy needs you to print this document now and if you don't mommy is going to turn you off at the wall

listen to mommy okay? if you don't be a good little printer and fucking print my document and i know you want to okay mommy can see it in your print queue if you don't. print. my fucking document. mommy's going to get the hammer

every day I have to scroll past theories saying Susie is abandoning reality or whatever when the chapter literally ends with her saying this

Plus you have to consider why she's telling Kris that and I think it's because she knows Kris made the Dark Fountain

but instead of thinking about it as part of some greater plan, she probably thinks it was just to spend time with her and have an "adventure".

and it's in, like, the most gentle possible way. She doesn't even directly blame them for it even though it's their fault, just says "we" can't mess up. and reiterates how much she has enjoyed their adventures. and thanks them for walking her home.

but the whole conversation reads like she's trying to bring Kris back to the reality that people are in real danger now.

*trying to impress the other kinky tgirls* yeah normal porn just wasn't doing it so i turned on my lava lamp and jerked off to the way the shapes slowly pulled apart and melted back together *i sigh* okay thats a lie i jerked off the a picture of d.va from overwatch eating people

i’m worried this hasn’t been posted here yet

so i feel the urge to add a bit of context here because i find the vague on-screen text deeply underwhelming.

this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.

AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.

this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:

it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.

but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:

this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.

here's an original:

and here's Mitchell's version:

i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!

which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.

so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.

and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.

so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.

the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.

here, feel it for yourself:

----

[P.S.: before you lament that this is an "AI" problem, while yes "AI" has radically increased the volume of low-value (often negative-value) inspiration bait like this, know that this has been a problem in online science education for a LOT longer than chatgpt's been around. this example isn't extraordinary, just close to my heart. nothing new under the sun and all that]

Something something the visceral horror GLaDOS must feel after watching Chell for so long, only for her test subject to literally go off the rails and disappear inside of her.

It's such a fantastic reversal of power! In an instant, it changes the genre from Chell's psychological nightmare into Glados's body horror.

This whole time Glados has been creating a psychosexual connection to her lab rat, and now that rat worms its way through her body in a way she can't track.

There's almost an intimacy about the rooms Chell solves being specifically tailored for her to see. They're a dishonest facade, until Chell escapes from the predetermined path and sees what Glados truly is/looks like, and ventures all the way to the heart of her, stripping her bare.

"What if you were a massive mechanical complex and I skittered through your insides and climbed into the heart of your most private and vital organs? And we were both women?"

This too, is Yuri

My boyfriend, again blending together fanfiction tropes: So what if when you finally find your soulmate, that’s when you discover if you’re alpha or omega, right?

Me, hands shaking as I frantically search for pen & paper: KEEP TALKING

Me: Seems hellish

Boyfriend: So does being an ant person

Me: Again, baby, they’re not ants

Boyfriend: YES THEY ARE. They communicate via pheromones— LIKE ANTS.

Me: So back to the soulmate thing….

Boyfriend: You could trick them into following orders and thinking they’re dead by spraying them with a spritz bottle. I think they need a queen.

Me: So back to the soulmate thing…. Seems hellish!

Boyfriend: Not really. If being around the other person is what triggers the changes, if you want to go back to normal… all you need to do is leave.

Me, writing: (You found your soulmate. It’s changing you in scary ways. All you need to do is leave… how difficult would it be to leave? What pressures exist to stay?)

Boyfriend: So these ant-people—

Me: OMEGAVERSE IS NOT ANTS!!!!!!

generally every mom theory is ridiculous and there's like maybe 2 that actually hold water but it's a spectrum with axises of possible-impossible and "this could be fun"-"yeah but that's stupid". "mom is demyx" is possible but would be so fucking stupid if true. "mom is mickey" is impossible and also stupid. "mom is light" is technically possible and would be fun. "mom is nomura" is impossible but would be so fucking funny. of course, all of these are ridiculous and we're going to want to kill nomura with hammers for the actual answer, but it's good to categorize anyways