why-animals-do-the-thing
octofly asked:
No dumb questions. It drives me absolutely up the wall when educators make fun of things they’ve been asked or stuff people didn’t know - especially when it’s their job to be a friendly, approachable resource on a topic. I’d say one in five asks that WADTT gets starts with ‘sorry if this is a dumb question’ and I saw another thread full of people making fun of dumb questions this morning, so, I figured it was time for a reminder that I don’t operate like that.
You probably want to train a ‘trade’ cue with your dog - here’s a good resource on how to do that. The goal is pretty much to have your dog be willing to drop whatever thing they’ve got willingly in exchange for something else high value, rather than try to hold onto it and make you pry it away from them. It’s a more positive and more reliable method of getting things back, and it will help circumvent the tendency of a dog to chomp down on a fragile crayon when they don’t want to give it up.
noxfoxarts
autisticburnham
@autisticandroids @soft-galaxies you both raise a good point here, which is that I may have used the words ‘redeeming qualities’ in this post a bit incorrectly. I don’t think that Odo’s willingness to change is enough to redeem him, not really.
I have a really contentious relationship with the character of Odo: he starts out as the typical Star Trek alien who is alone in the galaxy and has yet to find his own place in it, then the show complicates this by introducing the Dominion and the issues of his behavior during the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor. But instead of like, trying to seriously confront these issues for more than one episode, Odo continues to be painted as the Nice Guy™ who pines for the Cool Girl™ who is out of his league. And oh boy do I hate that trope! I think it’s especially tone-deaf because, well, Odo is far from being an innocent teenager, and even during the course of the show he makes some really fucked up choices (the Dominion occupation of Deep Space 9 comes to mind) which are not really talked about again either!
I especially don’t like when the show implies that Odo and Kira’s actions during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor were ‘equally bad’ morally. They just weren’t: Odo was motivated by a very misguided need to bring ‘order’ that did nothing but further the Cardassians’ agenda and brought more meaningless death upon the Bajoran people. I can’t in all honesty compare this to Kira’s experiences in the Resistance, where the violence was a necessity of survival.
I choose to interpret Kira and Odo’s relationship as two people bonding over their experiences in the same war, but it’s not lost on me that Kira is asked by the narrative, over and over, to forgive the people who brought so much grief to her planet. From a characterization perspective I can believe that that happens because of who Kira is as a person, someone who is shaped by her past but not bound to it indefinitely; but as a viewer I don’t like the message it implies.
I think I tend to ‘forgive’ all of this because by the end of Season 7 Odo has also been used as vehicle for genocide, plus his choice to leave the alpha quadrant to try and change his own people seemed right to me (even if he was Yet Another Person Leaving Kira). But still, I have a hard time liking Odo.
autisticandroids replied to your post
imo theres a world in which odo is redeemable, but it’s a world in which 1) he followed a very different plot thread, specifically interrogating what happened in the occupation, why he did it, what exactly he did, and what about that he regrets and must atone for, and 2) the ds9 writers have better politics re, like, colonialism
I totally agree with you on this. I wish the show had been more… consistently aware that Odo’s need to belong somewhere (and with someone) does not really justify anything he did. I think his character loses a lot of complexity too when the plot conveniently forgets about (or refuses to engage with – god I’m still so angry about the closet scene in “You’re cordially invited…”) his past and present choices. And the fact that his needs end up almost completely projected on Kira… idk. I think I’d be more sympathetic towards him if, again, there wasn’t all that largely untouched issue of Odo having collaborated with the Cardassians.
Like, I love “Things Past” but it’s literally just one episode and it’s not nearly enough!
So glad to see this @romulan-commander :)
The only way I can fly with the closet scene in “You’re cordially invited” is with the idea that Odo so wanted to be friends again with Kira that he forcefully linked with her and sort of brainwashed her so she would ignore his atrocities. And that’s why she then reacts so violently when Rusot asks her how it feels to be in a relationship with a collaborator.
I think Odo was a great character in the beginning but the writers Fucked Up Big Time in how they completely overlooked the darker parts of him. Let’s not forget either that the alternate Odo in Children of Time did commit genocide on his “best friend’s” descendants just so he could change his own fate, and spare himself having to lose Kira. He sacrificed thousands of people so he wouldn’t have to deal with that. That and the Dominion occupation of Terok Nor makes me consider that when Odo leaves to join the Great Link, it’s not necessarily a good thing, because he is capable of greater fuckery…
cosmictuesdays
cyanwrites
seccasaurus asked:
notbecauseofvictories answered:
As a preface: I love vampires.
They’re not my favorite horror trope, but they’re an obvious second place. Vampires are about grief, like ghosts, but they’re also about transgression. (Ghosts aren’t about transgression unless you make them—ghosts are mostly about grief, which is why they’re my first favorite.) Vampires are mostly about eroticism and virulence and what you can’t control; vampires are the corpses that won’t stay dead. They existed before the language of pandemic, but not plague, and that’s what vampires are. If you go back into the historical record? They’re about disease.
What Stephanie Meyer failed to realize and what Bram Stoker knew, is that—in order to be into vampires, you’ve got to already be on a weird page. Vampires aren’t ghosts, horrific but distant, untouchable; vampires are embodied. Sickness of the body and a disease of the flesh; outside your self and still somehow in the physical world. Vampires are about a curse. In that way, vampires about the horror of cannibalism and the body, decay and resurrection and defiance of both. And maybe part of the reason I like them so much is they’re a dark mirror to the backbone of Catholic belief. After all, we’re the only religion that says, this is my body, given up for you, every week, before eating our 2000 year old dead god.
……………and then we turn around and ask our god to subsume us, make us his instrument, and fill us up entirely.
Say what you want about religion, it tends to get to the point.
(I mean, vampires drink the blood and eat the body, which is what my people do, but—vampires do it transgressively. They’re unsanctified, after all, and their ceremonies darker. Sacrilegious. Where’s that post about how only Italians could have come up with vampires—Catholics without a crucifix, without the sanctified communion, and cursed to exist with no garlic at all.)
All this to say you’ve got to be….kind of into being eaten, with vampires. Even if it’s all metaphorical. Even if you draw the distinction between being eaten and being eaten out….the concept of vampires doesn’t. It wants to eat you. It is not picky about what grammatical proposition exists after that. Vampires are the embodied concept of a confusing nexus of language where “wanting to fuck and be fucked,” “wanting to eat and be eaten,” and “wanting not to die” coalesce.
There’s a lot of romantic and spiritual poetry about the hunter and the hunted, various gods of various pantheons arrowing in (literally) on their beloveds, and that’s very much what’s going on here.
It’s great.
kaelio
“i think that Garak had a moment of sympathy and compassion that broke through his obsidian order conditioning–and in that one precious and profound moment he was given the opportunity to empathize as a full person again, and he seized that, and for that he was exiled”
me: “counterpoint: it was this.
(english subtitles)
cosmictuesdays
mystery-ink
i have 15 years’ worth of outstanding library fines in three separate cities and it’s my hope that eventually a bounty hunter librarian will come to collect and we’ll get in a bar fight and fall in love
I also can’t rent movies in two different towns so there’s that.
I’m newly terrified by the implication that librarians aren’t people and I’ve misjudged what exactly I’m up against
terrypratchettappreciation
july-19th-club
“…Goodie Whemper -”
“ - maysherestinpeace -”
“ - maysherestinpeace, she used to take me over to Razorback or into Lancre whenever the strolling players were in town. She was very keen on the theater. They’ve got more crowns than you can shake a stick at although, mind -” she paused - “Goodie did say they’re made of tin and paper and stuff. And just glass for the jewels. But they look more realler than this one. Do you think that’s strange?”
“Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact,” said Granny.
- Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
cleowho
chubbycattumbling
thegmscreen
t00thpasteface
