Seleni @ Seleni @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

They’ve done studies, and have found that guard rails actually make the problem worse. Gives people a sense of security and a false sense of bravado.

Nooo they kill pest bugs!

Wish we could convince them to expand their repertoire and go after MAGA pests too…

They kill pest insects. They’re voracious hunters. And they are the only insect that pollinates figs.

How’s that?

Amazing how even asshole wasps manage to be more useful than MAGA creeps. There’s not a single useful thing they do for anyone or anything. Hell, they even shoot dogs!

Hmmm

Even the Far Side got in on the act

I did like Spiderman the best, I will admit. It felt a lot more relatable and real.

But then the Gwen-Stacy-as-a-plot-device-and-not-a-person nonsense started, and I was just like… oh, here we go. Again.

At least the manga I read never treated women as fridge stuffing, even if they were regulated to background characters.

I think the thing that grinds my gears the most about Rob Liefeld isn’t that he’s a terrible artist; it was that he’s a terrible artist who was kept on the payroll and allowed to keep making terrible comics. They could have fired him and hired someone else, anyone else.

Hell, at the time there were lots of successful women doing manga in Japan, and I doubt they had the only women in the world who could draw comics. It really feels like he was mostly keeping his job because he was white and male.

Even today Marvel and DC all but body-check women comic artists out the door. Thank goodness for the internet, so they can put their art out anyways, and on their own terms.

Edit to add: I recommend reading Magic Knight Rayearth if you have the time. (Maybe don’t watch the anime. Trying to simplify Clamp’s highly detailed art… didn’t work that well. Although the OAV wasn’t too bad.)

It’s an oldie, but it’s one of the comics that first got me into manga back in high school. It’s by an all-woman team, it’s beautiful (really, pretty much all of CLAMP’s art is, and I recommend checking it out), and not only did it have teenage women as the protagonists, but it was the first story I read where there was no actual villain or hero, and the story was actually compelling!

This This is a funny one. It looks like it was drawn by someone who carves wood with a chainsaw for a living. It even has the dark areas where you’d use a blowtorch lol.

Plus bonus parade balloon muscles.

With the source material, at least for me as compared to western stuff like X-men, Superman, etc, is that one, it crosses all genres and appeals to all genders. Comic books for much of their existence were largely geared to a specific, very male audience, and it was made quite clear by their writing and the actions of people into comics at the time that other genders (and, to a certain extent, skin colors) need not apply to join the club.

Since I’m a girl, when I was a kid I got teased a lot for liking ‘guy stuff’ like Batman and GI Joe. The problem was, well, I liked action stuff for one, but back then there just wasn’t anything for girls. Hell, I remember them even taking Wonder Woman’s power away, because apparently women empowerment reasons?

Those comics were all written by largely out-of-touch white guys who had, shall we say, definite opinions of what a woman could look like and should act like. And as a woman, I was never impressed. Especially by the time I got to the hundredth drawing of a woman’s ass and legs framing a supposedly ‘serious’ scene.

Then I found manga, with all-women writing teams, and artists who wrote well-rounded characters of all genders and orientations (Sailor Moon had many adorable scenes between a lesbian couple, just to name one example). They drew women who were people. They were sweet, they were brash, they were rude and crass, they were funny. And who weren’t afraid to fireball their way out of trouble. Hell, they drew varied guys who were weak, strong, silly, spacey… they felt real, in a way that I’d never seen in western comics.

Another thing is that mangaka tell the story, their characters get a satisfying actual ending, and then the artist moves on to another story. None of this ‘Oh, the X-men found happiness and solved their problems! In our next comic, watch as everything goes back to the shitty status quo because we have no idea how to write different stories!’ or ‘Welcome to the 2,171st reboot of Superman, now with Extra Edge^TM (because we hear that’s all the rage with kids these days). And remember that this iteration specifically references that one part of reboot #1,023, so read that too (if you can find it lol).’

And the third thing for me is it was quite a bit more beautiful and fluid and varied than western animation. Especially in the case of the days of Too-Many-Pockets Rob and his wooden doll faces, or the small beady eyes of, well, every comic character ever. Anime and manga faces were much more expressive, the worlds more varied and creative, and they weren’t afraid to draw regular people as protagonists, without muscles bulky enough to make you think you were looking at a Macy’s parade balloon.

You know, you’re always welcome to post your own, not-reposted content.

Conservativism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there is a group that the law should protect but not bind, and a group that the law should bind but not protect.

And the thing is, while there are some people who just go along with this for the benefit of their own grift, the vast majority of these people actually believe that an order like this is absolutely necessary, and if we don’t have it civilization itself will collapse. In their view there must be a strict hierarchy and everyone must ‘know their place’ in it, or we are all doomed.

Because of this, they spend their time primarily in two pursuits:

1. Trying to force everyone to live this way, because it is the One Right Way To Live
2. Proving to themselves and others that they deserve to be in the In Group and at a certain level in that hierarchy, usually by trying to assign people to the Out Group and then put them in a lower position.

You’re just someone they’re trying to stuff in the Out Group, is all.

It’s also why they don’t like the idea of minorities in power; one, in their eyes minorities belong in the lower tiers of the Out Group and therefore their presence will destroy the fabric of society, and two, they think that if minorities are let into the In Group, then they will be forced into the Out Group.

Thin of those white kids screaming at the little black girls coming into their school (under military escort for safety) back in 1957, those white teens spitting on black teens doing soda fountain sit-ins in the 60s… and remember they’re adults now, with kids and even grandkids of their own.

Do you really think they taught their families to be open-hearted and to respect people of color?

This issue is getting better, but it’s got a long way to go yet. Things like this echo through time.

It is, though—women having children later in life are at higher risk for complications for both themselves and the baby. It also has a higher risk of birth defects.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice. -Martin Luther King Jr

It seems that sort is equally bad when it comes to letting Nazis in the door.

A depressing amount of people have a combination of ‘don’t rock the boat’ mentality and a belief that since something doesn’t/won’t affect them, then it doesn’t matter.

This is a bit of a silver lining, though:

Anxiety that resolved within the first five years was so unassociated with greater risk that the odds were similar to those without anxiety — a finding that Dr. Glen R. Finney, an American Academy of Neurology fellow, called “a welcome addition to our knowledge about anxiety and dementia.” Finney, director of the Geisinger Memory and Cognition Program in Pennsylvania, wasn’t involved in the study. The results were also largely driven by participants under 70. ”We have known for a long time that stress increases risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who wasn’t involved in the study, via email. “This study agrees with earlier studies that therapy aimed at alleviating anxiety can help reduce risk for (Alzheimer’s disease). But, it’s the size of this study that is particularly compelling.”

Don’t worry; if he sees jail time (and given how other similar cases have gone, he won’t) he’ll have a nice cushy job waiting for him at the Sheriff’s office the next county over when he gets out.

ACAB.

Probably because it used to be that being ostracized from our towns/clans/whathaveyou was basically a death sentence.

Getting criticized for something could potentially lead to the town/your family driving you out. Either through the people listening to the complaints deciding you weren’t ‘good’ for the town, or others dogpiling on with their own complaints, real or imagined.

You have to remember, there were bandits, wild animals, and deadly weather outside the protection of our small groups. And that’s assuming you got to survive the ostracizing in the first place.

The Bible gives a rather chilling example: if your kid is disobedient or troublesome, drag them to the front of the town and loudly criticize their behavior. Then, it is the moral imperative of the town to assist you in stoning your kid to death.

With things like that being a social norm, is it any wonder we developed a fear of criticism?

My aunt lives in an HOA that was formed because the city wanted to cut down a big forested area to make a cookie-cutter neighborhood. The forest protected a watershed and was home to many native animals.

So the few people who lived there formed an HOA to gain all rights to the area; sold a few more properties to developers with strict rules so the houses built didn’t impact the wildlife or water, and set a large chunk aside as a ‘community park’ that really is a forest with a few walking trails and a nice pond.

The HOA fees mostly go towards maintaining the forest; planting natives, paying top-grade arborists to care for the trees, setting up bird boxes, stuff like that.

That being said, I’m well aware that hers is an outlier, and most HOAs are just excuses for bratty busybodies to harass their neighbors.

Went to Five Guys and made the mistake of ordering the Grilled Cheese.

It was a burger bun, turned inside out, with a sad slab of half-melted American cheese between the pieces.

Never going back.

It was originally used by creationists to mock Darwin, and from there slowly entered the lexicon as an expression of disbelief.

The last time they tried going it alone they couldn’t either lol.

I love him rocking four hats at once!