its not a coincidence the language zosia uses when telling carol about the eggs and the joining !! it is *textbook* unsupportive family retoric. the ‘were doing this because we love you’ shtick that every queer person understands. its INSANELY well done im not going to shut up about this show for months. i have so much to say help
The first thing I thought when I saw that scene was “I bet you Carol had this exact same conversation with her mother before she sent her off to conversion camp”
It’s so strange that - at least in North America - the style of living in which you have your own room but only a partial kitchen, but the building has a large communal eating area in which a paid professional makes food at scale on a fixed schedule every day (with a few options, but nothing made to order) is only available to a) college students, b) prisoners, and c) people in long-term care homes.
Not everyone would want to live like that, of course, but I’ll bet you that a lot of people would. It’s a great living situation for single people, young people just starting out, and people who are in a city on a temporary basis. Cooking at scale is significantly more time- and cost-efficient than each individual cooking or getting takeout. Cleaning kitchen facilities scales similarly well. Employ a few people who know what they’re doing and are paid well to do it, and they’ll keep that kitchen running safely, efficiently, and cleanly in a way that a few hundred pressed-for-time 20-somethings never could. And a lot of people simply do not care enough about what they eat to want anything else.
Moreover, not putting a full kitchen in each unit means that the units can be smaller without cutting into living space, cheaper to build, and safer. Lots of people who live alone don’t cook a lot, since cooking for one is not very time-efficient, which means that for all those people the kitchen is practically just dead space. You could replace its function with a microwave and a minifridge, and if you do, you’ve given that person a whole extra room.
And the thing is, this style of living does exist in North America. You just can’t voluntarily get it unless you go to college. Why? Because we have - for some reason - decided that this globally-not-uncommon way of living is somehow beneath the dignity of an adult. We should change that.
This was literally me one time at a doctor’s appointment with a new specialist, and they asked me “what do you do?” and THEY meant like what do I do for a living, or whatever, but my disabled ass was on such a different track that I thought they were asking about my level of activity throughout a typical day, so I tearfully answered “what I can” and looked probably exactly like this watery eyed cat while doing it
When I said I was going to watch Megamind last night, my roommate told me about how the surround sound in the theater where they saw it was so good, they thought the random citizen was in the audience behind them
one of my favorite elements of pluribus is how the series highlights the parts of human relationships and connection that the hivemind cannot experience, because of how it highlights the things that the hivemind eliminates, and everything that willingly submitting to the hivemind would erase from the world.
mr. diabate makes a very sad and hungover carol breakfast in his penthouse suite. he watches her miserably mash her avocado into her toast and pile her bacon and scrambled eggs on top of it to shove into her mouth. he looks down at his own plate to do the same, and discovers that he also enjoys eating his breakfast all together as a sandwich. he wouldn’t have thought to try it that way if he hadn’t seen carol do it first. he has surrounded himself in a bubble of hivemind make believe, with a harem of dubiously willing supermodels to attend to his ever whim, but he is ultimately alone, just like carol is. he cannot experience human connection because there are no humans around him to connect with, only the hivemind playing pretend with a bunch of meat puppets at his direction. this is the first time since the hivemind descended onto earth that he has experienced something as simple as imitating another person. the hivemind cannot offer this to him, because the hivemind does not have its own experiences to draw from. it “has” everyone’s experiences at its disposal, but it cannot make individual decisions based on its own preferences.
the most chilling example of this, to me, was zosia telling carol that she is so excited that she will be writing another winds of wycaro book (pause. it is so funny that they named the series that. thank you plurb writer’s room.) because we will finally have something to read!!
of course, the hivemind knows everything about the wycaro series. they know the full text of the novels. they know every fan theory and debate. they know everything that carol and helen workshopped together but didn’t include in the published series. they know every interaction carol has ever had with a fan or an agent. they know every twitter, tumblr, and reddit post ever penned about or in response to the series.
but even knowing all of this, the hivemind cannot create a new entry for wycaro. even if the hivemind absorbed carol and had access to every unpublished idea she’d ever had for the series, it still couldn’t create a new book. because one of the most basic building blocks of the creative drive is the desire to share your work. even just with one friend. even just in one small community. the desire to create something is the desire to communicate to another person. the hivemind cannot have this desire, because the hivemind does not communicate. knowing everything about everyone does not facilitate communication, it ends it. there is no need, within the hivemind, even to speak out loud. every colonized individual can experience the thoughts of all their fellow hive members in real time. eliminating all barriers to communication also eliminates the need for it.
the hivemind absorbing carol and knowing everything that she would have included in the next seven wycaro novels is not the same as an unjoined carol creating a new novel and giving the hivemind something new to read. this is something the hivemind would not even know it was hungry for if it did not have a few individual stragglers to remind it of what it lacks.
and in the ways i’ve described above, the hivemind is generative ai. the whole mass of all human knowledge sitting at its fingertips, and no ability nor desire to do anything with it.
“Tattoos are becoming unpopular”, “piercings are unpopular again”, “keep your hair natural never dye it again, it’s the trend now” literally fuck off I know what y'all are doing
Hipster voice: I did it before it was cool… and after it was cool.
im legit embarrassed but i really do wonder if i’ve spent 5figures on furry commissions this year bc i have a lot and i really did not buy or save this year at all outside of those
honey…….i……think i may have lowballed it…
I added it all up and im not saying the amount. it’s less than 5 digits but it’s. so embarrassing.
back in ye olden days times, they would have called you a patron of the arts. sooo… yeah. give that a little think.
know what you’re right
when we say ‘king shit’ this is as close to the real deal as you can get
when we say ‘king shit’
this is as close to the real
deal as you can get
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
More than “here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)” thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that “much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons”
so i live in boorloo (perth) which is on noongar country and 1. i fucking love the noongar seasons it’s so much more accurate to here 2. should be noted that other season stereotypes are completely different! there’s ONE native deciduous tree here (common coral tree) and it blooms in the middle of july, which to a greater point! different native plants are always blooming all year round! the traditional “spring” period doesn’t really that many more (native) flowers than any other time of the year!
anyways i fucking hate how northern hemisphere coded the western holidays are girl why are you putting up snowflakes and reindeer it’s 40°c outside i am going to melt into a puddle
While colonial genocide means that the weather calendar for my region is no longer known for south-east Queensland (if I am wrong and there’s one out there please tell me!), I have found the Banbai calendar pretty accurate for Brisbane (less the snow. We don’t snow).
It has 6 “seasons”, mostly determined by wildfire risk. One of those seasons: Wildfire Time is 5 months, from November to March.
The 4 seasons model really really doesn’t work here.
