Selenesparis - Selene's Paris

“you should be at the club” i should be by the sea. i should be in the mountains. i should be awestruck and rendered speechless by the majesty of the natural world. if you even care

Hilarious Reasons Why Every Cat Owner Should Get A Glass Table

Caves are weirder and more varied than you think

When the Oscar Wilde character drops, is his ability going to be called “The Picture of Oscar Wilde” by the same logic of “The Great Fitzgerald”?

love when creatures sniff your hand and are like. ah understood

if a sword is like an extension of the wielder. and a sword can be said to have its own identity. then can a sword not feel grief and sorrow at being forced to clash with its opponent forged in the same crucible but forced to turn against it. can a sword not cry out in the screech of metal on metal from the pain of betrayal.

I don’t think anime vs western animation are as different as people claim due to the fact they have inspired and fed off each other for decades (they’re friends!!), however I do think our environmental messages to kids are… significantly and interestingly different

whereas, say Ghibli films express a deep Shinto-based respect and reverence for nature:

fighting for it as a means of both self-preservation and expression of heroism revolving around justice

and a matter of other groups of humans (the government often) going up against the stalwart youth

This is contrasted to western animation which tends to be like…. hey! look at this funny bat! And pollution is an evil spirit you can fight like physically 

that isn’t to say the west doesn’t depict environmentalism as heroic and even involving collective action, Captain Planet is a good example of this

but individualism is still very present, the struggle is stalwart youths versus an individual or individual corporation, hell, sometimes you even get a sympathetic backstory for the corporation and weirdly cool rock song

to be clear, antagonists like Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke are sympathetic too, but it is… different, Lady Eboshi is trying to survive due to circumstances but it is all of Irontown that represents a system of corruption

In comparison, there is this western idea of corruption coming from individuals rather than systems as well as the fact they aren’t trying to save nature because we are part of it, but because nature itself is a person and thus worthy of respect

In Fern Gully the fairy’s represent nature, the Lorax represents nature, Captain Planet is literally just nature, all things we can talk to and relate to, where in Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa the ultimate nature spirits are something you can’t talk to and are frankly terrifying, awe-inspiring, and mighty

Western epistemology is heavily rooted in Christianity which says that man has dominion over fish of the sea, fowl of the air, and creatures of the land, ect, which leads to a utilitarian and separate view of nature– what can it do for us as separate (higher) beings, and the only way to combat this view is to say “actually nature is a person and thus worthy of protection”

Whereas Japanese Shintoism has much more emphasis on the idea that we are all part of a whole with nature, nature is the ultimate divine with nothing more important than the other, and something worthy of protection not because we can understand it, but because we can’t

“It’s a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential to human beings”– Hayao Miyazaki

this is not to completely bash western animation, it does have other strengths such as emphasizing children’s relationship to empathy, empathy toward others in “Toy Story” and empathy toward themselves in “Inside Out” 

However, our methods of conveying environmentalism could use some updating and steering away from “goofy” and “relatable” and maybe a little more terror and awe involved with fighting the good fight

My favorite jokes are about mispronouncing philosophers' names but I'm afraid it's a nietzsche subgenre

i literally can’t listen to tik tok by kesha without thinking about that goddamn star trek tos fanvid…you know the one

Turning a Powerful Black Hole Collision into a Beautiful Symphony

(phys.org)

Jōichi Hoshi, The Milky Way Rhapsody (1970)

Sonification of the Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina Nebula, captured by NASA’s Webb Telescope (sound on).

Laura Gilpin, "A Toast to the Alchemists", The Hocus Pocus of the Universe