I approve of powerscaling discourse only in utterly senseless contexts. I don’t give a shit about which shōnen protagonists could beat up which other shōnen protagonists, but I will 100% read your five thousand word essay exploring the subtle nuances of establishing a tiered ranking of the Smurfs.
“Could Batman beat Captain America” trite, tedious, bullshit. “Could Deadpool beat Roger Rabbit” now you have my attention.
i think the scariest exam i ever took was in my Fisheries Management 400 course, the final semester of my degree. our final exam was an essay response to a management prompt. each of us pulled a slip of paper out of a jar at the start of the exam, for a unique fisheries management situation. like a recovery project in a salmon habitat, etc. then we wrote a response as if we were the project manager, detailing how we would manage, execute, and accomplish the project.
so i got my prompt and my heart sank because as i read it, i could only think that what i was assigned to manage was impossible. the prompt explained that a farmer asked me to stock a fishing pond with a specific species & create a self-sustaining population. based on the location and the ecological parameters of this imaginary pond, i knew it would be impossible to accomplish his goal to maintain a self-sustaining population of his target species.
basically, the answer was, “The client’s request is not possible [short explanation as to why]” and “I would recommend alternative species, or repeated manual stocking.”
In the end, my essay response was 3 sentences long. It took me 5 minutes to think over and write. By the time I wrote down my answer, most of my classmates hadn’t even picked up their pencils. They were still thinking over their no doubt far more involved management prompts. We had 2 hours to take the exam.
I sat there having a crisis for 15 minutes until I finally walked to the front and put my notebook down on the professor’s desk.
I said, quietly, unsure if he’d give me ANY hints, “surely…..this should be longer?” He raised his eyebrows and said, “Do you trust yourself and what you’ve learned in this class?” I said, “Uh. I think so?” He said, “Then you’ll have to trust it’s as long as it’s supposed to be.”
I decided to think those were encouraging words so I left the class, 15 minutes into a final exam that allowed 2 hours for my response.
Went home and took a Xanax. Got an 100%.
Nobody better ever do that to me EVER again.
This is a completely unethical way to run an exam. Congratulations to you though I’m glad you succeeded.
oh I disagree! this is a real-world fisheries management scenarios. people make unrealistic requests of wildlife & fisheries managers all the time. much of a fisheries & wildlife manager’s career is explaining the why and how of a habitat and its populations. in my four years (and 7 fisheries management courses) at the school, I learned how to create, restore, and generally manage habitats for a variety of target fish species. i absolutely should be equipped to identify when a project isn’t possible, communicate it to a client in terms they understand, and recommend alternatives. i absolutely should have known the answer to this question, and i did! it only threw me off because it was so simple. but it was only simple because i knew my stuff! this prompt tested me on my knowledge of game fish species, and their chemical, geographical, reproductive, temperature, and food source requirements. all things everyone else needed to know to answer their own prompts.
The reality is, “that won’t work” is not an unusual answer in ecological management.
I’m pretty sure if you’re trying to pick up Hardware Store Guys being covered in sawdust and smelling like WD-40 is WHY they started talking to you. It’s like catnip.
i haven’t watched a single episode of severance and while it does pique my curiosity at this point i think it’s way more interesting and funny to learn everything i know about it via tumblr osmosis
my beloved tumblr mutuals with great taste: oh my god… the innies… the outies
me, oblivious: wow what are they doing to those guyses bellybuttons
I’ve been asked this question a few times in the past year – why I spend so much time thinking, reading, and reflecting on antisemitism, especially because I am not Jewish myself. There are a few reasons, really. One of them is that I think antisemitism is a hatred that spawns other hatreds, but even if it did not, it would still be worth studying, because the fact that it is a hatred at all is enough. The fact that antisemitism impacts Jewish people is enough of a reason to oppose it.
It’s also because it’s important to oppose because of the way it damages the thinking habits of people who believe it. I saw somebody say, “Jew-Hate makes you dumb,” once. And though I think it was probably an off the cuff statement for them, it stuck with me, and I think they’re right. In my religion, we say hatred is one of the three poisons – it can seriously harm your mental well-being in a way that deepens your suffering in all aspects of life. Often, hatred can also be spread like a contagion. It’s something that destroys social harmony and causes severe social dysfunction. And right now, I think antisemitism is the most contagious of hatreds – I’ve seen people in my life fall off the cliff, I’ve been able to talk some back from it, and I’ve seen how so many people wander towards it without any idea that that’s what they’re doing.
Part of the problem is that antisemites consider themselves righteous in a way I think most racists don’t. Often, you’ll see “I’m not racist but” I almost never see that with antisemitism. They don’t add that qualifier. They just say it. Most racists I know will make a tacit acknowledgment of the racist implications of what they’re about to say – antisemitic people don’t. They often even engage in anti-Jewish racism while invoking anti-racism.
I don’t really know any Jewish people in real life, perhaps only two. But I don’t need to know them to know that hating them is wrong. I think I also have a debt of gratitude to many people in the Jewish community because of the advances in Buddhist Studies made by Jewish people, which sounds strange – but it’s true that many leading voices and researchers, both in academia and within Buddhism itself happen to be Jewish. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s absolutely true. The most prolific translator of Pali into English that I can think of is Jewish. The most impactful Vipassana instructor in America I can think of is Jewish. The most impactful voice in Deity Yoga, for Tibetan Buddhism, is Jewish. People who are Jewish, for some reason, contributed probably more than ex-Christian Americans or atheists combined to the proliferation of Buddhism in the United States.
Buddhists and Jewish people are known to have a close relationship. There are a lot of different reasons for this that I would suggest, but none that add up to explain the amazing contributions to Buddhism made by American Jews.
I think another reason I have for being so interested in antisemitism as a non-Jew is the kind of… political disillusionment I’ve been experiencing? It’s been a disturbing few years, and I haven’t seen many people elaborate very well on this feeling of abandonment and horror, witnessing people who you thought shared your values become hateful and deeply violent in their beliefs. The only people I’ve seen consistently speak about it happen to be Jewish.
I think all of this has helped contribute to a feeling of closeness to Jewish people as a group, despite that I don’t really know Jewish people in my real life, and only have one or two Jewish friends online. This year has been a horror show of watching people’s minds become twisted – it’s so scary in a way I can’t quite capture with words right now.
I also sometimes have a back and forth with myself about when and if to mention I’m not Jewish when I talk about antisemitism, because I do think it’s totally necessary to explain the perspective from which I speak, but to be honest it feels kind of icky to be like “I’m not Jewish, but antisemitism is bad”, because antisemitism is bad whether or not the person saying so isn’t Jewish, and I think it might be a negative for people to think “not being Jewish” is something which makes it any less valuable to be against antisemitism, and talk about how against it you are. It’s very real that people who talk about antisemitism are perceived to be Jewish, and obviously, it’s important not to lead people into thinking you’re Jewish when you’re not, but adding an “I’m not Jewish” qualifier to statements about antisemitism I worry might contribute to the perception that those against antisemitism are Jewish.
Antisemitism is such an insidious ideology. And it’s everywhere. I see it daily in so many different spaces. It has the largest impact on Jewish people, but it also impacts non-Jewish people at times. I distinctly remember being mocked throughout school for “looking Jewish.” I think about that Greek restaurant which was attacked because they were thought to be Jewish. Or that man in the Amsterdam violence who tried to help and was then accused of being Jewish himself. It’s so deluded, violent, and manages to consume people’s thoughts like a parasitic worm in their brain.
Anyways, I planned for this post to be more organized. Oops.
Video captions: And stop trying to show your ex what they missed out on! Stop trying to teach your family a lesson for not believing in you! Stop trying to shit on your haters! Do it for you! Do it because you deserve it! Do it for YOU! Water your dreams with love! Don’t put no hate and resentment, and try to — “oh Imma fucking show them, Imma show” — FUCK THEM! Fuck them, do it for you! They don’t matter! They NEVER mattered.
The William Morris acanthus pattern key block, just for fun.
Now, I have a bad habit of never being honest about how long something takes me to carve: this postcard-sized block took me exactly four Lord Peter Wimsey radio dramatisations, or to use a more prosaic unit of measurement, well over eleven hours.
ALT
amhrancas 