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My fictional crush is any woman in her late 30s/early 40s who knows she's too good for her husband

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Btw, that idea that privilege makes you morally evil and suffering makes you morally good is just repackaged versions of the Christian concepts of the evils of luxury and the holiness of martyrdom. Hope this helps!

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I can’t decide between Toshiro Mifune and Omar Sharif, the tiebreaker is whether or not we can get Peter O’Toole to play Elizabeth opposite Sharif

this is a poll for a movie that doesn't exist.

it is vintage times. the old hollywood studios, captivated by the electorate's previous casting of cinema classic dracula, have decided to celebrate jane austen's 250th by releasing an all-new vintage motion picture extravaganza based on her celebrated romance pride and prejudice. whoever is cast will impact the picture's tone and genre, so they are counting on you, the electorate, to deliver cinema magic.

you are the casting director for this star-studded epic. choose your players wisely.

This is one of many polls under the tag #pride and prejudice casting. If you need a reminder on who's who, here's the Wikipedia page listing the cast of characters. Thank you to everyone who suggested actresses for this poll!

previously cast:

Georgiana Darcy—Mary Pickford

Colonel Fitzwilliam—Albert Finney

Caroline Bingley—Joan Crawford

Charlotte Lucas—Mary Wickes

Aunt Gardiner—Beah Richards

Uncle Gardiner—Juano Hernandez

Mary Bennet—Dorothy Malone

Kitty Bennet—Hitomi Nazoe

Lydia Bennet—Dorothy Dandridge

Mr. Collins—Gene Wilder

Lady Catherine de Bourgh—Martita Hunt

Wickham—Errol Flynn

Mr. Bennet—vote here

Mrs. Bennet—vote here

Bingley—vote here

Jane Bennet—vote here

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What if the localisers of Dandadan changed Okarun’s name to one that Westerners would recognise

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fuck it. here's suselle textposts i've been meaning to make for weeks

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really glad i didn't grow up with AI essay writing scandals because i just saw a teacher say that "em dashes give away who's using AI. high schoolers don't know em dashes." lady i knew em dashes carnally in high school. if your student came in wearing a tardis hoodie then that em dash came straight from the heart. the only artificial intelligence there is the worldliness she believes she gained from watching perks of being a wallflower.

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Me when the ocean

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Congratulations once again to the writers of Severance for creating the first piece of media to make me too scared to fall asleep since I accidentally watched the first half of AI (2001) when I was 9 years old

Congratulations to the writers of Severance for writing a dinner party in the first episode that manages to be even more existentially dreadful than the show’s actual premise

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Congratulations to the writers of Severance for writing a dinner party in the first episode that manages to be even more existentially dreadful than the show’s actual premise

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Here's your VERY SPECIFIC comic about a VERY SPECIFIC thing for this friday.

Follow our tumblr blog for @skulltenders, a new DnD Horror Comedy Podcast I'm on, so you can scream-at and scare-us directly! Or subscribe to us on your favorite pod feeder and listen to our teaser.

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Speedrun commentator reacts to traffic violations.

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Japanese child actress Mana Ashida (little Mako) was embarrassed that she couldn’t pronounce Guillermo Del Toro’s name so he gave her special permission to call him “Totoro-san” instead.

My Neighbor Guillermo Del Toro.

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There's a lot of conversations to be had around the current influx of Americans to Xiaohongshu (RedNote/Little Red Book) ahead of the TikTok ban, many of which are better articulated by more knowledgeable people than me. And for all the fun various parties of both nationalities seem to having with memes and wholesome interactions, it's undoubtedly true that there's also some American entitlement and exoticization going on, which sucks. But a sentiment I've seen repeatedly online is that, if it's taken actually speaking to Chinese people and viewing Chinese content for Americans to understand that they've been propagandized to about China and its people, then that just proves how racist they are, and I want to push back on that, because it strikes me as being a singularly reductive and unhelpful framing of something far more complex.

Firstly: while there's frequently overlap between racism and xenophobia, the distinction between them matters in this instance, because the primary point of American propaganda about China is that Communism Is Fundamentally Evil And Unamerican And Never Ever Works, and thinking a country's government sucks is not the same as thinking the population is racially inferior. The way most Republicans in particular talk about China, you'd think it was functionally indistinguishable from North Korea, which it really isn't. Does this mean there's no critique to be made of either communism in general or the CCP? Absolutely not! But if you've been told your whole life that communist countries are impoverished, corrupt and dangerous because Communism Never Works, and you've only really encountered members of the Chinese diaspora - i.e., people whose families left China, often under traumatic circumstances, because they thought America would be better or safer - rather than Chinese nationals, then no: it's not automatically racist to be surprised that their daily lives and standard of living don't match up with what you'd assumed. Secondly: TikTok's userbase skews young. While there's certainly Americans in their 30s and older investigating Xiaohongshu, it seems very reasonable to assume that the vast majority are in their teens or twenties - young enough that, barring a gateway interest in something like C-dramas, danmei or other Chinese cultural products, and assuming they're not of Chinese descent themselves, there's no reason why they'd know anything about China beyond what they've heard in the news, or from politicians, or from their parents, which is likely not much, and very little firsthand. But even with an interest in China, there's a difference between reading about or watching movies from a place, and engaging firsthand, in real time, with people from that place, not just through text exchanges, but in a visual medium that lets you see what their houses, markets, shopping centers, public transport, schools, businesses, infrastructure and landmarks look like. Does this mean that what's being observed isn't a curated perspective on China as determined both by Xiaohongshu's TOU and the demographic skewing of its userbase? Of course not! But that doesn't mean it isn't still a representative glimpse of a part of China, which is certainly more than most young Americans have ever had before.

Thirdly: I really need people to stop framing propaganda as something that only stupid bigots fall for, as though it's possible to natively resist all the implicit cultural biases you're raised with and exist as a perfect moral being without ever having to actively challenge yourself. To cite the sacred texts:

Like. Would the world be a better place if everyone could just Tell when they're being lied to and act accordingly? Obviously! But that is extremely not how anything actually works, and as much as it clearly discomforts some to witness, the most common way of realizing you've been propagandized to about a particular group of people is to interact with them. Can this be cringe and awkward and embarrassing at times? Yes! Will some people inevitably say something shitty or rude during this process? Also yes! But the reality is that cultural exchange is pretty much always bumpy to some extent; the difficulties are a feature, not a bug, because the process is inherently one of learning and conversation, and as individual people both learn at different rates and have different opinions on that learning, there's really no way to iron all that out such that nobody ever feels weird or annoyed or offput. Even interactions between career diplomats aren't guaranteed smooth sailing, and you're mad that random teenagers interacting through a language barrier in their first flush of enthusiasm for something new aren't doing it perfectly? Come on now.

Fourthly: Back before AO3 was banned in China, there was a period where the site was hit with an influx of Chinese users who, IIRC, were hopping over when one of their own fansites got shut down, which sparked a similar conversation around differences in site etiquette and how to engage respectfully. Which is also one of the many things that makes the current moment so deeply ironic: the US has historically criticized China for exactly the sort of censorship and redaction of free speech that led to AO3 being banned, and yet is now doing the very same thing with TikTok. Which is why what's happening on Xiaohongshu is, IMO, such an incredible cultural moment: because while there are, as mentioned, absolutely relevant things to be said about (say) Chinese censorship, US-centrism, orientalism and so on, what's ultimately happening is that, despite - or in some sense because of - the recent surge in anti-Chinese rhetoric from US politicians, a significant number of Americans who might otherwise never have done so are interacting directly with Chinese citizens in a way that, whatever else can be said of it, is actively undermining government propaganda, and that matters.

What it all most puts me in mind of, in fact, is a quote from French-Iranian novelist and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi, namely:

“The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

And at this particular moment in history, this strikes me as being a singularly powerful realization for Americans in particular to have.

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everyone younger than me is having a baby and everyone older than me has 3+ roommates and everyone the same age as me fell down a biiiiiiiiiiig flight of stairs

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art by Dermot Ryan