im Magnus or mags for short(and friends) ~he/him/his~ twenty something yrs old
labels are getting overrated so lets just say im very queer 🌈🌂✨
i like math and things that make sense not wibbly wobbly emotional things yikes, also sleeping, rainbows, and everything that sparkles as well as doing nails, sometimes make up, jewelry things and cATS😍🐈✨
personal posts are tagged #mags speaks, *sometimes* i do art and craftsy stuff then its #mags art or #mags crafts (sometimes both)
so today was kind of… had a rough start, lets put it like that, so i took a sick day and spent the morning taking it slow day
and looking after myself which apparently included walking around the garden and taking pictures of whatevers left of the flowers
Just started saving craft and art and direct action and activism tutorials I want to be able to find again to The Wayback Machine* so that I know I’ll always be able to find them again if they get moved or deleted
*The Internet Archive has a browser extension that lets you automatically archive a page with literally two clicks
And immediately. 10/10. 14/10. Would absolutely recommend
It also lets you see any archived versions of a page with just a few clicks, so it’s great for getting around paywalls, as well as for keeping data and news stories from being deleted or moved
You can get the extension (or app for phones?) here:
Got stuck trying to find an article explaining how awesome this extension is but I did find out this is actually even more important activism and archival work than I had realized:
For the past 20 years, the Internet Archive has recorded and preserved web pages, and hundreds of billions of them are available via the Wayback Machine. This is good because we are learning the web is fragile and ephemeral. For example a 2013 Harvard study found that 49% of the URLs referenced in U.S. Supreme Court decisions are now dead. Those decisions affect everyone in the U.S., and the evidence the opinions are based on is disappearing.
And that was before the US government started deleting unbelievably important and massive resources, databases, and datasets!!
Next time you see a page and mentally go “ooh people need to see this,” I recommend you hit a button and help a future you and millions of other people out!!!
Imagine: Never having to go back and find a recipe you wanted or loved was deleted ever again. Because you go to the link/website/page and it’s already there, saved for you, with the touch of a button
you have to go outside or you will forget what women look like and before you go “this is about nerds and anime women I don’t need this information” you do okay because this is about filters, AI, algorithms, Instagram, tiktoks, shorts, etc you are being given a barrage of the most statistically pleasing facial structures through a machine built to learn and return the optimal image to keep you engaged longer some women do in fact look like the goddess Aphrodite but the machine is giving you 10,000 of them in short order you were not meant to see that many you were meant to go to the walmart to get a 10 pack of hanes underwear and see a slightly tired mom with an absolute shelf for a butt and thank the heavens you were born in just the right time to live to witness her
The possible issues that could be caused by poor people abusing the system, whether through human error or deliberate fraud, in order to get what they need to survive is statistically infinitesimal when compared to the harm that has already been, and continues to be, caused by the abuse of the system by the super-wealthy, who have never needed survival-level financial help and never will.
Tired, scared, depressed people are easier to control and less likely to fight back. It is quicker to temporarily feed anxiety with trinkets than to create structures to dismantle and prevent anxiety.
It is not your fault if you are exploited in these ways. You are not weak, or bad, or “not trying hard enough” if you feel the weight of the world upon you, if it takes all you have just to survive. It’s okay if you have ups and downs, if one day you’re able to do many things and the next barely get out of bed. You did not create the system we are all trying to function within, one that punishes what it cannot exploit.
But your ongoing survival is a message that you are not defeated. Every single moment you are here offers the opportunity to try again, to be better, to grow and change and learn. Missed the last opportunity? That’s okay, another one will come along any moment now, and the next, and the next. You just choose which one is the best for stepping aboard a new pathway, when you’re ready. If it takes a while because you are, in fact, tired, scared, depressed, that’s okay. There are many, many moments before you and who knows what could go right?
Self-care is rebellion. Joy is a radical act. Love–given to others, and above all to yourself–is a key part of the antidote to what ails us. Even if your embodiments of these are not big and momentous, they are no less important a part of your ongoing story, and the weaving of a better world.
Something so disgusting about how the original Haitian zombie folklore is “the zombies are victims of a sorcerer who exploits them as slaves” and then modern zombie media is “the zombies just appear from an infection that turns Real People into a rampaging horde serving no other purpose than to threaten Civilization” like.
The Haitian zombie is very clearly metaphorical for the very real horrors of slavery, while the viral zombie is fundamentally about “what if there was a type of guy it was completely okay to kill and you got to exist in a survivalist fantasy as a Badass, also when infrastructure collapses it’s every man for himself and altruism goes away”
And isn’t it super interesting to think about that in the context of historical US-Haiti relations?
Also there’s many of them and they spread and become innumerable hordes who invade your town but also you can kill hundreds of them because they’re individually weak and stupid
A completely disorganized horde of weak, uncoordinated, literally feral humans that a Real Badass can take out by the thousands, but they somehow overwhelm all the regular people and cause the collapse of society. It’s up to the Great Men to fix the problem. This totally isn’t a fascist fever dream.
And this is what we get instead of stories that go something along the lines of an evil, powerful individual or group of individuals turning people into zombies, while a resistance movement fights back. Which would be rad as hell actually.
ⓘ Tip If you feel unfulfilled by how you spent your time today, you can stay up late to try to combat the sense of dissatisfaction. This will ensure that you feel even worse tomorrow.
kinda feel bad for millennials who don’t know that Harry Potter is almost a hate symbol now. Imagine that happening to any other beloved childhood media
How do people not know?
a lot of millennials know only the bare surface level of it (jkr = transphobe = bad) but dont really know much further than that so theyre like Okay so its fine if you just pirate the books and dont buy merch! Its fine! Im still a ravenclaw though!
This is already over and I’m not Directly involved* but I also think it’s prob important to mention that the full extend of JK Rowling’s transphobia is really often EXTREMELY downplayed. Transphobia is a form of bigotry not treated with a lot of seriousness and very flagrant and often violent displays of transphobia are seen as “acceptable” or “normal” by enough people (moreso than a lot of other forms of bigotry I would argue; I seriously think “famous children’s book author thinks homosexuality is a mental illness on par with pedophilia” would be treated WAY more seriously than “famous children’s book author thinks transgenderism is a mental illness on par with pedophilia” because most people literally do think being trans is a mental illness) for JKR’s transphobia to be reported on mostly as “the trans community Disagrees with some of JK Rowling’s statements” in its most neutral state and “can you believe the crazy pronoun mob is trying to CANCEL Harry Potter just because of a GENERATIONAL DIVIDE?” in its most nefarious. The idea that JK Rowling “just said a few things wrong and didn’t use totally up-to-date language” is STILL how most cis gays especially above a certain age think about “the JK Rowling drama”. The actual reality, which is that JK Rowling has spent years and years of her life not only donating to anti-trans orgs, not only publishing thinkpieces about irreversible damage and tomboy extinction and rapists in women’s bathrooms, but spending basically every day on Twitter arguing with pro-trans tweets with literally three views (not likes, views), just is not reported on by mainstream media outlets. Cis people continue to treat “the JK Rowling discourse” as crazy triggered snowflakes blowing a few out-of-context comments made years ago out of proportion because they hate Harry Potter/women/family values/etc., and not more akin to the “Kanye West said he loves Hitler and somehow basically nothing has happened to his career” type situation it actually is. I just don’t know how “canceled” someone really is if they still own a fucking theme park. I feel confident in saying that there is not a single trans person on this Earth who is as influential and successful as JK Rowling continues to be.
TL;DR millennials and older still manage to “not know” about JK Rowling (and by extension Harry Potter, because unlike most other “canceled authors” JK Rowling has outright said that she considers any and all mildly positive engagement with her work to be a signal of support of her ideas about trans people; I need to emphasize that this is Not Common and also not the actions of someone who got taken out of context by the crazy woke mob) because transphobia is so undervalued as an actual serious force of bigotry that mainstream media does not report on JK Rowling as a very serious and devoted bigot, in perhaps the most extreme example of “only trans people are expected to care about and notice that this is happening”
If you were ever wondering why someone would put up with a cat that’s as much trouble as Mayhem (you weren’t, she’s stunningly cute) just know that most nights she climbs onto my chest and sleeps the whole night like this. Ultimate baby technique
“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”
I KNOW that playing God is morally wrong, but holy HELL, it looks fun.
Why is it playing God? We aren’t violating any natural laws. God set the parameters of the universe to allow these things. There’s nothing wrong with it, there’s no hubris in learning more about how to manipulate the universe around us.
We made a whole-ass fish.
The reason this was accidental BTW is because they used paddlefish eggs as a negative control group for a breeding experiment on sturgeons because the scientists, quite naturally, assumed that they were SO unrelated it would be genetically impossible for them to mate. Like. I cannot stress enough to you how these creatures last related ancestors were
140 MILLION YEARS BACK.
If you don’t know how far that is, that’s basically the start of the cretaceous. Let me simplify that for you even further. Chimpanzees and humans seperated, what, 5 or 6 million years ago?
This is basically like if humans could hybridise with THESE THINGS.
This is the sort of thing that should be impossible. They used those eggs to be ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN.
And then THEY GOT FISH OUT OF IT.
Like. You can quite clearly understand why they didn’t think anything would happen. WE ARE MORE RELATED TO BLUE WHALES THAN THESE THINGS.
THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH AND THE STURGEON ARE SO COMPLETELY UNRELATED THAT THIS IS NOT PLAYING GOD. IF ANYTHING THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD.
THE SCIENTISTS HAD NO BLAME IN THIS BECAUSE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE
It sort of goes against the rules of genetics a bit.
Oh i forgot to add
THESE THINGS, FOR HYBRIDS, HAD A REALLY HIGH SURVIVAL RATING. LIKE 70% OF THEM SURVIVED.
To put that into perspective, getting a blue whale and a squirrel and trying to hybridise them is more sensible, and that wouldn’t produce anything but getting you banned from science. Most animals that aren’t plants can barely hybridise two degrees away from each other.
BUT THESE TWO ENTIRELY UNRELATED FISH create PERFECTLY HEALTHY HYBRIDS.
the scientists literally had to do the tests AGAIN just to be like “okay this is real right. This is actually like, not a fluke, this works right” and it worked again. They just Can!
So for those who don’t know what the original fishes look like, this is an American Paddlefish:
And this is a Russian Sturgeon:
So honestly, saying the hybrid is “weird looking” is a bit fort de café when you see its parents. I think the sturddlefish looks cute.
“these creatures last related ancestors were 140 million years back”
(glances at fish)
Yeah that’s exactly what I thought you’d look like, you Mesozoic fuck
#Holding a red squirrel in my left hand and a blue whale in my right desperately hoping to make a purple squale (via @dykepuffs)
