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[cescalr]

What is the funniest pokemon move

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[cescalr]

the assisted dying debate is so crazy

because i do fundamentally believe everyone should have the right to die when they want.

BUT if they legalise assisted suicide in the UK right now i don't trust our ableist fucking government to not just start coercing disabled people into suicide to save money. they already won't give them enough money to live.

[cescalr]

no one can be normal about this ever but anakin does objectify padme & act possessive towards her, he does idolize her, he does put her in the place of his mother, he does exhibit all these behaviors and also form a deep connection with her that is incredibly personally fulfilling for both of them. it’s not either/or and in fact it’s a key part of their dynamic. his first line to her is “are you an angel?” and then he spends ten years meditating on her, dreaming of her—that is deification, that is putting her on a pedastal. she in turn sees him as this token from an old era of her life, she keeps his good luck charm for all of those ten years and carries that memory of his innocence. there’s always this tension between the real world and their own special secret world, the adult duties they have and the arrested development of their childhood traumas, whether they can run away together, whether these visions anakin has of the people he’s not supposed to love are real, all this fog. & to combat this, they carve out a little hole in the galaxy that’s only theirs. it’s idealism. they both represent to the other something real and freeing and scary and transgressive. and that does play into the violence, the mega stakes of what it means for anakin to think padme has sold him out. that’s not an excuse and that’s not me saying they’re a straightforwardly abusive relationship, but they are a deep bond formed amidst serious turmoil. and palpatine preys on that. he ferments that shit. & it’s unfortunate because 9 times out of 10 you can’t get past the “well are they abusive/toxic or not” thing & people expressing general performative disgust at a fictional dynamic being less than a platonic ideal . when this is melodrama

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forever grateful i was simply too lazy to let the makeup industrial complex get its hooks in me. I was just like im not doing all of that. in fact. im doing none of that

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The thing is though if Sjin gets fluxed at magic police Duncan will have no idea what he’s doing, and probably take him to kim to see if she can undo it because shes fluxed up, she must know about the flux.

When he gets there he’ll finds himself and Kim next to a fluxed sjin voodoo poppet.

It’ll just be one big steaming pile of “What the hell?!” with a side dish of, “Why are there two of me?!”

[cescalr]

stop letting miserable people on the internet convince you that you must have a concrete, well-constructed opinion on everything that has ever existed.

[cescalr]

(opening the author’s works page after finishing a fic) and if im lucky they’ll have written this exact same fic but different a bunch more times

[cescalr]

Is it poor taste to drink milk directly out of the carton?

Yes

No

I grew up with my parents always telling me this, but never telling me why. Wanna hear if this is a common belief and why it's looked down upon

I grew up with my parents always telling me this, but never telling me why. Wanna hear if this is a common belief and why it's looked down upon

[cescalr]

For those of you who are in/have gone to college/university, did you ever take the maximum units that were available?

In other words: For those who have ever went to college/uni for any type of degree, if the maximum amount of units you could take was 18 or something like that, did you ever take 18 units?

-> No

-> No, but I plan to

-> Yes, I was fine

-> Yes, I was not fine

-> I don't remember/I'm bald

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to everyone who's ask has sat unanswered in my inbox i am wishing you a very I Am Sorry But I Am Understaffed. Also I'm An Idiot

[cescalr]

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

[cescalr]

Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012)

[cescalr]

The thing about Jason Todd is I like to call him cathartic and he *is* but he's also...a sort of fantasy fulfillment, but not the one I think people assume.

Jason cannot be a Punisher type fantasy because his own victimization undercuts it. This isn't a tale about a hero avenging his family. This is the singing bones.

Because fundamentally, the fantasy in utrh is this: the victimized dead can rise again, screaming. Can cut a bloody path through the world and make the powerful listen. It doesn't matter if what he does is just or right, anymore, just that it exposes the wound.

In real life the dead stay dead and their abusers write their obituaries and get sympathy cards from their families and you bite your tongue and let the wounds rot and -

And then there's Jason, who comes back wrong because the world is wrong. Who comes back sharp and cruel, who makes himself a knife where there was once only grave dirt. Who tells Bruce, and by extension the audience itself, that *yes* you were grieving wrong. Yes you did allow this. You preserved peace over justice. You offered platitudes to a silent headstone while you ignored the screams of the living victims.

The fantasy of Jason Todd is this:

You have to look the corpse in the eyes, this time.

[cescalr]

No one seems to grasp the concept of the mask. Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) dir. Marc Webb

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Maybe this is just me being old, but I genuinely think that, in general, a well-written dialogue scene between two interesting characters is about ten thousand times more entertaining than an action scene.

[cescalr]

Your first pride story was touching and all but you still married a man.

Yeah, bisexuals do that sometimes.