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Cake day: November 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s also possible to be a person who genuinely cares about classic art and the environment already. And it’s also possible to be a poor person with little to no power to influence the fossil fuel industry. Chiding people for not having the privilege of free time and minimal obligations to protest isn’t very productive. Again, change needs to happen at the top and it’s not going to be achieved through appeals to emotion or coercion via symbolic or actual threats to famous art or sites.


  • I will not be fair, the publication isn’t. Why should I?

    Because arguing dishonestly makes you look irrational and does their propaganda work for them.

    but you are more likely to try to distance yourself from fossil fuel reform movements, and that’s all they need you to do to be successful.

    Not really. This isn’t an effective form of protest or reform. Stunts like this allow articles like this to be written in the first place, but the stunts, even if written of with the highest of praise, are useless. Effective action would involve changing the minds of those who profit from fossil fuels the most and making it unprofitable for them to continue. You don’t need to convince people who care about world heritage sites or famous artwork. You need to convince the profiteers of industry and that won’t come from an appeal to emotion but from a threat to their financial well-being.




  • This is a decent one, but a ton of the HFY stories are just so problematic. Many just feel like they’re congratulating humanity on being vicious and creatively violent, like they think the Terran Empire in the Star Trek Mirror Universe were good guys.

    Otherwise, a bunch just feel lazily formulaic and repetitive with others. Take a random human trait or convention from a human culture like say…fried foods. Use an alien narrator to describe how weird they think it is to fry foods. Find an angle to portray humans as plucky and great for their fierce devotion to frying foods and involve it in a narrative about humanity winning against greater odds. “And the human just dumped the entire chargizoid corpse into a vat of boiling oil! And then he took it out with something called tongs and ate it, skin and all! And that’s when I knew I needed humans on my side in the coming galactic war…”

    I guess I feel like the subgenre plays on the optimism of Star Trek utopianism, but ditches any real criticism of humanity’s past (or our present). I think the message from Orville’s Season 3 Episode 10 about what made humanity better in their past is a better heir to Star Trek utopianism than most of the HFY stories I’ve read.




  • It’s still not stealing. It’s plagiarism or fraud or any number of other terms, but stealing necessarily requires the deprivation of a limited, rivalrous thing, like money or property. You can’t steal fame or exposure or credit, except poetically. And by that point, the word becomes so watered down that it’s meaningless. You might as well say I’m stealing your life seconds at a time by writing this extra sentence.

    The purpose of using the term stealing here is only to borrow the negative moral connotations of the term, but it doesn’t communicate clearly what exactly is happening.

    It’s perfectly valid to say you consider it morally equivalent with theft, but it’s not stealing.