I know I might be about to ruffle some feathers, but The Orville is how you do representation right imo. The whole story arc with Topa was beautiful.
Like, something that turned me off of nu-trek was how the representation was handled. It felt pandery to an almost gross extent. Like, Jesus Christ man, it’s the year 24-something-something, why are you still acting like being gay is a big deal? OoOoOoOoo oh nooooo, there’s gay people WoooOoOooo. And while I don’t remember there being spoken pandering in the few episodes I watched, there was something about how the scenes were constructed, the shots were lined up, etc, that felt like they were trying to draw attention to the LGBT members doing LGBT things. Again, it’s 24XX, I’m supposed to believe humanity has achieved near-utopia, why am I getting the feeling that you’re trying to show me how gay these dudes are purely because they’re gay. You don’t need to do that. It’s 24XX, who the hell is still getting bent out of shape about homosexuality 400 years from now?
The Orville, on the other hand, just kinda… treated it like it was normal. Some characters are gay, some characters are straight, but the show didn’t really focus on it; some guys just liked other guys more than gals and vice versa. They treated it like it was normal.
Okay, okay, but I brought up Topa, and Topa’s story arc is literally all about Topa’s gender problems. How does that not go against my previous complaints? Well, Topa isn’t human. Topa is from a male-dominated culture that believes femininity is weakness and should be eradicated via gender reassignment. It’s not a human culture, and so it doesn’t clash with the idea of humanity having a near-utopia. A human utopia involves everyone being treated equally, so when you imply different treatment, whether through dialog choices or cinematography, it clashes with that idea. But the Moclans don’t have a utopia, and so putting emphasis on Topa being female makes sense, especially when it comes to the human crew struggling with the clashing ideas of Moclan forced gender reassignment and the human take on sapient rights. Unlike nu-trek, there’s no dissonance there.
SoulSeek. Seriously, don’t bother with anything else unless you can’t find it on SoulSeek, which is very unlikely. Seriously, I’ve found weather channel music compilations on SoulSeek. If it exists, it’s probably on there in some format.
The square root of negative 1 is “i”. The “i” referrs to an imaginary number. When you square a number (e.g. 2^2 ) the result will always be positive. This is because you are multiplying the number with itself, and a negative number multiplied by another negative number will be positive. So -2 * -2 = 4, -3 * -3 = 9, and so on.
A square root is the inverse of this. It attempts to find what the original number was that was squared, so sqrt(4) = 2, sqrt(9) = 3, and so on. However, what do you do if you have sqrt(-4)? There’s no way for a square to result in a negative number, so the result must be imaginary. So sqrt(-4) = 2i, sqrt(-9) = 3i, and so on. As such, sqrt(-1) = i.
For the next part, when you divide one number by another, it is sometimes referred to as [first number] over [second number].
Finally, 8, well, sounds like “ate”.
So sqrt(-1)/8 = i/8 = i over eight= I over ate.
(Sorry if this came off as condescending near the end, I’m trying to be thorough in case you aren’t a native English speaker)
King Gizzard. They love weird-ass time signatures (look up the ridiculousness that is Crumbling Castle for an example), polyrhythms, unconventional tuning, and such. They hop from one genre to another, they probably have one of the highest album-to-year ratios in music (not including live and demo albums), sometimes they’re serious, sometimes they’re silly, sometimes they’re silly-serious. The biggest blow to them however, is that nothing they make is truly a “masterpiece”. It all ranges from “good” to “great” but nothing they’ve made is really a “masterpiece”. Maybe in time they’ll make a true masterpiece, but nothing yet quite qualifies imo.
The other nomination I’d make is Devin Townsend. Where King Gizzard is extremely prolific but doesn’t make masterpieces, Devin Townsend takes his time and makes masterpieces. Despite its silliness, Ziltoid the Omniscient is one of the best, if not the best, metal albums, period. It’s an album so good that even my parents, who don’t like metal, have songs they enjoy from the album. Empath is a stunning blend of metal, electronic, prog, praise & worship/gospel,^1 and god knows what else. The man just does things and they come out amazing.
^1 Afaik Devin Townsend’s not a Christian, sorry to any Christian peeps hoping for good Christian music. He just incorporated that sound into the album.
Yeah, for real. Pitbulls are the common target because they’re the “vicious dog”. It’s a self-fullfilling prophecy. Talk about how pitbulls are vicious man-killers, people who want vicious man-killers buy them and train them to be vicious man-killers, pitbulls become vicious man-killers. Meanwhile, the people who want a family dog don’t get pitbulls because, well, they’re “vicious man-killers”. The result is that statistics get skewed in favor of the “vicious man-killer” status, leading to people seeing the breed as nothing more than vicious man-killers.
Math is literally made up. There is no physical basis for math. Math is just another language used to describe things. The universe doesn’t care whether there’s “2 particles” or “1 particle and another particle” or “1 particle + 1 particle”. It doesn’t make these distinctions. Math only exists as long as there is an intelligent species which uses it. If there are no intelligent brains capable of using math and with a knowledge that it exists, math stops existing.