Ah, this is the puzzle piece I was missing in Ben Dreyfuss's rant that was about how much students suck and also how professors should be allowed to befriend them socially: he thinks professors should be more free to "get something out of" putting up with undergrads.
I commented elsethread about this, but Dreyfuss's rant is basically, "Sucks that professors aren't allowed to be friends with the sweaty, miserable dunces they're forced to put up with."
Which on the surface doesn't make sense. Why would the professors want to?
But if your view of a friend is just someone you can get something out of, then denying professors the right to "befriend" students is denying professors the right to take advantage of students.
And so Ben's lament becomes clear: professors are "paying in" in that they have to put up with the loathsome undergrads, but aren't being "paid out" in being allowed to exploit them.
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First birthday after my vaccination feels less real or like a birthday or milestone than my birthday during Quarantimes, I think because last year I was way more consciously doing things to mark "Yes, this is happening and it's my birthday."
On the plus side it not feeling like my birthday means it also doesn't feel like the anniversary of my last day with a living mother. Though maybe that's why I've been so blah/down lately, anniversary effect creeping up on me unnoticed.
....the Twitter profile balloons have never felt sadder.
Is it actually only one year since Jack made the Fireball cake? Is that possible? Did that happen in 2020? Time is fake, and out of joint, and an illusion. It's a fake, out of joint illusion.
One of the many things I like about Dishonored 2's level designs is the way it begins and ends in the same place, though drastically changed, and how this highlights how the protagonist has changed as well.
In the first level, you're escaping from a room high atop Dunwall Tower and you have no supernatural abilities so you are limited to one survivable path down across the rooftops to the ground.
In the last level, you have the opportunity to scale those same roofs using your accumulated magical/superhuman abilities (and whatever game proficiency you've gained in real life) and it's completely different.
Every once in a while I think about how Lois & Clark, a show that had almost no characters with superpowers outside of Superman, had two different unrelated ones played by the incredibly distinctive character actor Leslie Jordan.
I don't know how that happened but I think it was to the benefit of the show and the stories that he was cast in the part, as it was crucial in both cases that the character not actually be read as villainous despite being thrust into a supervillainous role.
His Invisible Man was Mr. Cellophane meets Henry Bemis, an overlooked man who made himself invisible and decided the best use of his power was to redistribute as many resources as a single pair of invisible hands could.
So there's a thing where TERFs and their defenders love to define "woman" in very reductive ways that obviously exclude large numbers of cis women, like "Woman can get pregnant." or "Female means they have large gametes."
And when you point out exceptions, they get indignant.
They say, "OBVIOUSLY we're not talking about that, OBVIOUSLY we don't think infertile women aren't women, OBVIOUSLY you're just playing word games..."
Obviously, their definitions for "women" and "female" are as fuzzy and circular as anybody else's.
But as TMBG observed years ago: you can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding. The rhetoric you push, whether you believe it or not, will gain traction.
And so we'll see more things like this as time goes on.
LRT: Please, please don't embarrass me by replying to those tweets to explain what you think the definition of those words is or should be, or what problems you have with them.
Here's the thing: a lot of people have a chosen/accepted version of bisexual that does a very specific dance to wank the working definition around to the point that there's a reference to "two" in it.
But I don't care. It doesn't need "two" in it. Why does it need "two" in it?
"Bisexual doesn't need to mean 'two'. Etymology isn't destiny or definition."
"I was told that it does, it's 'genders like mine and genders different from mine'."
I abhor people like Benjamin Lyon, whatever account name he's using now. People like him treat child sexual abuse and exploitation as an absolute joke, an accusation they can throw around as a weapon to hurt people they don't like for whatever reason. It's disgusting.
He 100% knows the picture he reported Hillary for was not sexual, pornographic, abusive, or exploitative, but he plays his schtick to the hilt in comments, talking about protecting children from predators.