i see a post talking doom and gloom about how we’ll never escape toxic masculinity. i think about back in 2017 when american girl released their first boy doll, and a review for him went viral in the collecting community. the review was written by a mom, who said they went into the store to get their daughter a doll, only to see their son’s eyes light up like fire when he saw a doll that looked like him, and now every night he puts his doll in pajamas and rocks him to sleep. i think about the toddler in my daycare room a few years back who was obsessed with baby dolls, carrying them everywhere, and his mom proudly told us he uses his sisters’ old baby dolls and wants to be just like them. that toddler saw another toddler crying one day and gave her the doll he had to cheer her up. i think about the eight-year-old boy i saw a few years back, excitedly waving around raya’s sword in a target checkout line like all his dreams were coming true. there was a video on my instagram the other day of a little boy at disneyworld crying with joy upon meeting his hero, mulan. i think about the voice actor for bow in the she-ra reboot saying his nephews only wanted adora action figures. celebrity men are wearing dresses on tv now. last halloween i saw a little boy dressed as elsa. i went to go see spiderverse over the summer, and in the line ahead of me was a boy who couldn’t be older than twelve or thirteen, bouncing and beaming, giddy with excitement over getting to see the female-led romance movie elemental. i think about the five-year-old boy at my library who breathlessly asked me where the pinkalicious books were, eyes widening when i had more on my cart, his mom explaining that he is all about pinkalicious and fancy nancy. i saw so many pictures online of boys and men dressed in pink to see barbie. teenage boys are gonna open their phones and see the man who wrote fucking game of thrones dressed in pink to see barbie. when i was a kid, a boy dressing in pink was practically a social death sentence. there are boys running around in pink on my street right now.
many sharks are at least moderately social, and if a specific species of shark has the ability to breathe without actually swimming and tends to have a lot of sharks in a fairly small area, well.
they are just going to Pile. and there is simply nothing you can do about it.
also, fun fact! whitetip reef sharks in particular are SO damn cuddly with each other that theyâll actively seek out a buddy or ten when they get sleepy!
itâs pretty much slumber party or nothing for these guys. you wonât find a whitetip sleeping alone except in the most dire and tragic of shark circumstances.
I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.
To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.
I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while.
Its parts were obscenely limited in their movement. Each hinge could open or close only a small amount before reaching its limit, yet by working in concert they demonstrated unexpected dexterity, moving and manipulating the objects before it with cunning equal to my own. It was more torso than limb, as though a seal had been stretched and warped, given long grasping tentacles filled with bones like bars of coral. Itâs head was most horrid of all, flat and ovoid, jutting out too small from the trunk as though it belonged to a beast half its size.
The thing rose upon its lowermost appendages, two long trunks that ended in flat, protruding flippers that branched into stubby, grasping mockeries of a sucker. Itâs triple-hinged uppermost limbs were similar, but the ends branched into five smaller tentacles, each with three hinges of their own.
I froze, as the thingâs gaze fell upon me and it opened its hideous fish-jaw, filled with thick, many-shaped teeth like white shards of stone, and spoke in a shrill, discordant babble. I felt its horrid dry grip on my flesh, as those hinged appendages closed on me like the legs of a crab.
I felt the heat of its body, tasted its noxious, oily flesh through my touch, and prepared for the end, and all went black as a swoon overtook me.
I awoke, some time later, the cold and comforting water, banished back to the comfort of the sea and the dark. I should be grateful I am alive. I should cast aside the experience like a half-remembered dream.
I shall never again go swimming in search of lights above. The last thing I recall before the darkness took me was my right eye popping free of the thingâs grasp enough to see into the distance for one brief moment.
I saw thousands of lights.
ok so it turns out âhorror but itâs about something mundane from the perspective of a non-human animalâ fucks severely
If everyone receives Minimum Basic Income, what happens to all the relationships where one of the individuals no longer has to depend on the other(s) to survive?
Just let that marinate for a moment.
Not just the economic landscape but the social landscape could be transformed.
Not for nothing, but this is literally part of the entire point of Universal Basic Income.
When abused people can just literally walk away, knowing they can still have enough money to live, the world will be a lot less sheltering of abusers and that is a massive fucking benefit.
It gets better than that, if we go with my ideal UBI scenario, in which we peg UBI to âenough to live in any major metropolitan city in the countryâ and do NOT adjust it for cost of living.
Suddenly, the poverty and scrabbling for survival of rural areas? Gone. That UBI will go a whole long fucking way out there. Suddenly, people who had to move to the cities to get jobs that paid enough? Can afford to move back. Heck, they can afford to get decent fucking broadband out there and continue working, just, not in the city. Suddenly, people who live in rural areas but want to move to the cities with like-minded people? Thatâs affordable, too. Suddenly, people who want to have a bigger house, but are stuck in a tiny apartment in a city? They can afford to move out to where there are bigger houses.
Universal Basic Income would realign our whole damn society, and I think it would long-term be for the better.
[ ID: tweet by athelind: âBasic Income is not a âsolutionâ to the 'problemâ of automation. It is the FULLFILLMENT of the PROMISE of automation.â /ID ]
UBI would not only give abused people the freedom to leave bad situations and end hunger and homelessness, it would force corporations to pay reasonable wages to attract people to work crap jobs, which the corpos could then deduct from their (higher, to pay for UBI) taxes, creating a positive feedback loop that encourages better pay
many would use UBI to quit abusive jobs and find better jobs even if they pay less, because their costs of living are paid for
many would start small businesses, do crafts and handiwork, create art and media, increase their education and health (physical and mental), dive into science and research, and so forth. weâd see a boom in innovation and invention, and the world would become a better place for most folks
so, to appease conservatives: the economic argument is that the economy would grow a great deal. some tests that show it works in the real world:
the only argument against UBI comes from those whoâd pay greater taxes - big corporations and the ultra-rich - but theyâd do fine, because now thereâd be more consumers of their products and services. and if theyâre not providing anything to society that would benefit from others doing better, well, they donât deserve to benefit from society
thereâs literally no reason to not implement UBI
I think ive said it before but you really gotta feel bad for oedipus that wanting to fuck your mother got named after him. He really did not want to do that . It is central to oedipus rex how badly he didnt want to do that. Dick move by freud
I’m arachnophobic, but I recognize that spiders are an important part of the ecosystem. I just want them to go be an important part of the ecosystem somewhere where I am not.
ALT
