It's A Probably A Distortion Based On Whoever Stopped Sending Zheng He

Kubinashi ouryou to shikyou amanojaku

Kubi-oke kaese, hai, hai, hai, HAI!　

首無しおうりょうと死凶天邪鬼、くびおけかえせ！はい、はい、はい、ハイ！

theyre letting me crawl out of the grave tomorrow

Thinking about how a lot of the cultural-political worldbuilding in His Dark Materials might not even be true because it's filtered through the perspectives of biased characters. Things like, do the Northern Tartars actually form a distinct group, or is it just an abstract term the European characters use for a collection of peoples they don't fully understand? It doesn't seem like the Yenisei Pakhtars are connected at all to the Tartars attacking Muscovy. I feel the same way about the description of the insect automata as "Afric." The worldbuilding is full of ironic exoticism and we are never given a 100% objective look at how things work

im so glad ZUN is cool and not a reactionary! Massive festival should be thrown

alright. people on bluesky are getting upset that ZUN apparently AI-generated a Background for the latest Touhou game. I'm officially on the "Oh my god who cares" side of the "AI" debate

It's really hard to understand what is and isn't bodily autonomy when it comes to social pressures. Do people want to alter their bodies or are they being pressured into it... but really, there is no such thing as an authentic individual self that can make these decisions free of pressure. We are social pressure, it's part of us just like our bodies

You can trace an ideological lineage from Tezuka to Miyazaki, where both promote a kind of 'pacifism' which is at its core conservative and hostile to the idea of fighting against real evil. Thinking specifically of Tezuka's "Buddha" series here

My hot take is that I feel like “ghibli films are pro Japanese imperialism” is a lazy jab that grabs at a few soft spots in the oeuvre to make the cheapest most rhetorically damaging shot it can, and that an honest analysis would generally struggle to say even the most problematic of the movies like The Wind Rises come out of the wash with a positive opinion of imperial Japan. My hotter take is that if you rigorously pull at the threads where the nominally anti-war films thematically collapse, you’ll find the issue isn’t a support of Japanese Imperialism but a lack of a rigorous critique of industrial civilization.

the best argument for space travel is Bataille's The Accursed Share

waste is inevitable and it must only be spent in a way we choose...

In terms of science communication and space exploration advocacy, Elon Musk has sent us back into the fucking Stone Age.

Drini, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Coyolxāuhqui

I don't believe that cultures can be better than each other, but I think it can be good to have a past culture for modern ones to organize themselves around and to inspire them

only 70s era Tadanori Yokoo can hit the same feel as Gustave Moreau

venetian miku ! by marshoworld

This is weird, but "Tong Nao" is actually a pretty accurate Chinese pronunciation of the name. The game is called "Tonnou" in Japanese, and the characters would be read as "Dongnao" in Mandarin. It seems like the publishers of this game picked a strange hybrid romanization meant to look as exotic as possible, that mixes aspects of Japanese and Chinese. I don't blame this person for trying to pronounce it as if it was Chinese.

obviously a lot of ink has been spilled on how prefacing statements with "I'm not even gonna TRY to pronounce that!" is way worse than just. trying and getting it wrong

but what really bothers me is when people mispronounce something very badly even though it's written using a phonetic alphabet