Risha ✨she/her ✨ queer ✨ Illustrator & Cosplayer ✨ Critical Role, McElroys, Marvel, fashion, memes✨ You can see my art @slightlyviciousart here on tumblr or
@slightlyvicious on twitter!
If you use Zoom, be aware that they’ve decided they’re going to use your input (from both free and paid accounts) to train their new AI tools. And there’s apparently no way to opt out of this. :/
I think that 2023 is a good time for many of us, and allies in particular, to practice again the dying art of minding our own fucking business when it comes to the identities and lives of other people.
You see someone from one of your classes in a public place with a different gender presentation/expression than they typically have? Mind your own business.
You discover that one of your coworkers is in a same gender relationship, but they aren’t out at work? Not your place to share that information in the workplace.
You notice that your neighbor in a red state takes a road trip across state lines with their transgender child every 3-6 months? No you fucking didn’t.
You overhear students in your classroom using a different name and different pronouns for one student than you are used to using? If you live in a state hostile to trans rights, pretend that you don’t know anything about this and report nothing.
You suspect that an acquaintance of yours might be gay, but they deny it when asked directly? Leave them the fuck alone.
One of your friends refuses to publicly label their sexuality? Good for them, you aren’t entitled to that information anyway.
Your sibling comes out to you as questioning, but isn’t comfortable sharing that with your parents yet? Keep your fucking mouth shut.
Don’t out people; coming out is a personal choice not a moral obligation. Don’t demand personal information about other people’s sexuality or sex lives. You aren’t entitled to information about anyone’s gender identity, assigned gender at birth, or transition.
Bring back privacy, allow people to have control over the information that is shared about them publicly; it might save their job, their housing, their parental rights and their child’s safety, or even save lives.
Ok, I NEED you to understand just how insane even ATTEMPTING this was for them.
1. Playing an instrument is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Don’t think I’m stepping on any toes saying that.
2. Dancing is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Still not controversial.
3. YOU AVOID, AT ALL COSTS, MOVING YOUR BODY WHILE PLAYING A WIND INSTRUMENT. To make the correct, pleasant sounds, you need to be in the correct form. And that form involves your ENTIRE body, even your legs when sitting down.
4. “oh, but I’ve seen marching bands before and-” MARCHING BANDS HAVE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC FIELDS DEDICATED TO FIGURING OUT HOW TO MARCH WITH MINIMUM BREAKING OF PROPER FORM. A marching band tries to be as smooth as possible while moving, so as not to jar their instrument, mouth, neck, arms, torso, or anything else.These ladies and gentlemen are BOUNCING and still playing properly, what the FU-!
5. AND ANOTHER THING! Wind instruments and dancing BOTH make demands on your breathing, so the fact that they are dancing (making you breath faster for extra oxygen) AND playing wind instruments (making you effectively hold your breath) AT THE SAME TIME is HUGE. Their lungs must be MASSIVE.
All of that also; the song is Sing, sing, sing (with a swing). If you wanna listen to some of THE SPICIEST big band ever recorded. Its a big hard song and this band does it expertly.
I will. I will say ONE thing. As a wind instrument player, and very drunk atm for unrelated reason.
Most of the point above are correct, save for the first.
Playing in syncs with other is actually easier (Imhe, ymmv) due to a stronger base beat/rhythm/placement to follow and the ability to drop out when you need a breath knowing that there is plenty of volume to cover you and and that when you pop back in, you’ll know where you are thanks to following the players around you (and which point you then provide th same opportunity to your band mates)
i’m a taylor swift centrist. she makes perfectly tolerable pop music that i can’t imagine really getting into. dunno what it is about her that makes so many people go insane
i listen to one of these relatively bland and inoffensive but nonetheless well-crafted pop songs and everyone around me demands that i proclaim it a masterpiece or artistically bankrupt or whatever. i just want to grill for god’s sake
The Very Hungry Rust Monster is a mini-comic I made a few years back. I’ve seen it floating around Tumblr without attribution recently, so I’ve uploaded a higher-resolution version, properly credited.
They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
So its that easy huh
Of course it is
Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.
Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)
Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).
What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….
