how dare you (X) to accuse Jinshi of being a pdf

The audacy

Rank And Responsibility. Or: The Hairpin Scene from Jinshi's POV.

Be warned now about the consequences of choosing to do an English Lit degree - you end up doing lit crit for fun. With that in mind, let's break down the hairpin scene at the end of Covert Operations (Episode 5). Mild spoilers for Jinshi's arc are below.

been watching livestreams of US news channels lately and

1) they have a LOT of commercial breaks

2) i didn’t realize that ads for medicine were actually like this

ppl keep reblogging this and asking “well what are the medicine ads like in your country” and like…there aren’t any? It’s literally illegal to advertise prescription medicine here?

All of America: God I wish that were me

btw watching movies you loved when you were younger will fix literally anything wrong with you

we as a fandom forget Jinshi is an annoying 19 year old

The United States government is literally disappearing people to a gulag with no due process and yet it's the stock market crash that has finally pissed conservatives off.

the other 25% shouldn't be in mega-prison either, btw

the "dire wolves are no longer extinct" stuff is gonna be the most annoyingly persistent science misinformation for the next decade at least

All right. I'll take a crack at weighing in.

Is Jurassic Park a movie about frogs? Are frogs the reason millions of people spent hours of time and billions of dollars watching those movies?

Based upon the "facts" of the story, you'd have to admit that this is technically correct, but is it true?

The argument being presented here is that these aren't really Direwolves, because they have a basis as Gray Wolves and they have subsequently been modified. I'd argue that adding the essence of what a Direwolf is to what was the essence of a Gray Wolf changes and destroys the necessary defining properties (essence) of Gray Wolf, making the creature's new necessary defining properties Direwolf.

In other words. If the essential properties of Direwolf are added to Gray Wolf, isn't it now Direwolf and not Gray Wolf?

I'd go even further and say that since direwolf and gray wolf DNA is virtually identical, they have actually de-extincted the direwolf simply by making a gray wolf the size of a direwolf

The argument being presented is not that these aren't direwolves because they have a basis in gray wolf DNA. It is that these aren't really direwolves because they have no direwolf DNA. None. Not any at all.

These are gray wolves that have been GMO'd to look like direwolves.

The premise in Jurassic Park is that the dinosaurs used actual DNA of the dinosaurs that were revived. Frog DNA was used to fill in the gaps, yes, but even in the films, Ian Malcom and Alan Grant--who never agree on anything--agreed that the parks dinosaurs were only kinda-sorta revived dinosaurs specifically because DNA from other animals was spliced in. If direwolf DNA had been used in the creation of these animals, we would be having the Jurassic Park debate. It wasn't.

They aren't direwolves just because they've been modified to look like them. In order for direwolves to be revived from extinction, they would've needed to use actual direwolf DNA and they didn't.

This effort is distinct from efforts to revive the woolly mammoth, which do in fact use mammoth DNA. Or to revive the Pyrenean Ibex, which also use DNA from the extinct species. Or to revive the thylacine, which also use DNA from the extinct species. That wasn't done in this case. They didn't pull a Jurassic Park because they didn't do the same thing as what was done in that franchise.

almost every comment I've gotten on this post, both arguing for and against these being dire wolves, is making the same mistake that i alluded to several times, which is assuming that a dire wolf is the fantasy creature that looks like a normal grey wolf, as portrayed on game of thrones. Dire wolves, the real animal, are not wolves. "wolf" is just the common name of the animal, akin to "mountain goat". The dire wolf was a species of wild canid that wasn't particularly closely related to grey wolves; no more than a wolf is related to this:

at the very least the animal's head shape was much different to grey wolves, and even if it looked anything like them at all (ex. both having similar coat patterns), they would still be recognizably distinct animals, ala mountain lions and african lions or ostriches and cassowaries. No, "sharing most of their DNA" does not mean two different species look like the same animal (unless you think humans and gorillas are the same thing), and that certainly wasn't true of dire wolves and grey wolves, given the former, again, have massive disproportionate heads among other anatomical differences:

The animal they've bred here has not been "GMO'd to look like a direwolf" or "given the essential properties of Direwolf", it's just a normal looking wolf, allegedly going to grow bigger because people think dire wolves are bigger than grey wolves (they aren't) and only white because the wolf on game of thrones is white (what are the chances a large mammal from a temperate climate would have pure white fur?) The equivalent here isn't "a literal jurassic park dinosaur that technically has frog dna"; the equivalent would be if someone edited a infinitesimally tiny amount of a frog's dna to match the "hypothetical dna" of a dinosaur and claimed the completely average looking frog they hatched was a resurrected t rex. The argument here - "it's a dire wolf because it looks like one" vs "it's not a dire wolf, it just looks like one" is completely ignoring that the jurassic park t rex of the situation looks exactly like a normal frog.

yuri beams ur labru

friends, if I can give you one piece of advice for those of you who are new to work, or are about to enter the workforce, especially if you have any sort of office job:

Do not work on your days off.

"But--"

DO NOT WORK ON YOUR DAYS OFF.

Do not work on your breaks

Do not “answer a few emails” on your vacation

Do not work off the clock

Doing this doesn’t reward you with more money or whatever. It rewards you with more work.

Additionally: TAKE YOUR BREAKS P L E A S E

Do not do extra work unless you are being paid/compensated.

The only rewards you get going above and beyond is more work being handed to you from the slowest workers.

My shaylas my world. they’re everything

inspired by this recent art of them (specifically the 3rd pic) https://x.com/7o_1ki/status/1909699903821087104?s=61

maomao’s dedication to ignoring jinshi’s real identity is truly inspiring. the woman who has solved multiple murders based on minor clues in the environment keeps looking at every sign pointing to jinshi being royalty and going “damn, this could add up to something. good thing I can’t do math!”

Finally caught up with Apothecary Diaries. I can't believe they gave Maomao a gun.

lishu is so. she's 17 widowed and divorced. her family sent her to a pedophile. her family does not claim her. people have tried to assassinate her at least three times, including her family. she's scared of men and clings to her surrogate mother who's dressed as a man. she falls in love with a man who can't stop saving her. he's worried his strength scares women, and she, known to be fearful of men, loves him for it. she gets fucking drugged. she has no home or family, but people still look out for her and love her. she raises ducks and knows she has growing up to do. she's soooo

sketch ^^

they could have said, like, "we made a new wolf morph, which shows how far genetic science has advanced". they could have said, "we're calling them direwolves out of a love for the extinct species." maybe too much to ask for but would have loved it if they'd pointed out some kind of ecological niche they were theoretically intent on resolving - like, "wolves are having trouble adapting to human sprawl and we are hoping that our research into the past will help us save wolves in the present."

but alas they did not do this. and see this sucks because i want to be hype about new bigass fantasy wolves. there is a 7th grade version of me that would be ecstatic about this. she would be obsessive.

unfortunately, due to capitalism, now i gotta have beef with puppies. can you imagine.

And now the Trump administration is saying that we don't have to worry about species becoming extinct because we can just make them again, which is... so great.

Source

Custas is awesome and cool and awesome and cool