jalopyrustbucket

[jalopyrustbucket]

This sounds like a fantastic idea.

pandemic episode of malcolm in the middle: malcolm struggles to reconcile his commitment to quarantine safety measures with the fact that all the girls his age are so lonely and isolated that they're suddenly willing to go on dates with HIM, of all people. reese discovers that egging neighbors' houses still counts as a "socially-distanced" activity and has the time of his life. dewey does some mental calculus and realizes that he gets fewer wedgies per day from his brothers than he does from the school bully and decides he'll keep these lockdowns in effect at all costs, so he starts calling in fake pandemic data to local health districts to bump the numbers up. lois gets in a physical altercation with a non-masker at the lucky aide and starts duct taping people's mouths shut, which craig finds both alarming and oddly alluring. (craig then immediately gets infected from licking his hand to slick back his hair in a bid to impress her.) hal works from home but, after slacking off on the family computer all day, is driven to obsession by the thought of becoming the digital solitaire world champion.

[jalopyrustbucket]

Oh, and don’t forget about the genocide happening over in South Africa right now.

The Irish Potato Famine was a genocide

The Armenian genocide was a genocide

The Holodomor was a genocide

The Holocaust was a genocide

What’s happening right now in Wuhan is a genocide

It’s mind-boggling that I know people who would attempt to debate me on this

[jalopyrustbucket]

This footage of Elmo after messing up a take on Sesame Street is peak relatable

[jalopyrustbucket]

How to know you’re talking to a Nazi

[jalopyrustbucket]

communicate and be willing to apologize if you did something wrong.

date men who communicate and apologize

[jalopyrustbucket]

you have a problem with minor making boundaries on who they want to interact with? like seriously the purpose of carrds is to establish boundaries, like cranky that you couldnt interact with someone?

i have a problem with minors willingly placing so much incredibly personal information in a single place on the internet where literally anyone can see it and especially with the culture that has normalized this to the point where it is expected and anyone who doesn’t want to share that information is automatically viewed as suspicious.

you have 13/14-year-old kids listing all sorts of information that makes them vulnerable to predators (including the fact that they are 13/14!!! that makes them vulnerable!!) and that can make it easier to narrow down their real life identity. that specific tweet didn’t talk about location but i have seen children list their location and what school they go to, and that genuinely terrifies me. i’ve seen lgbt teenagers making public tweets about how they’ve been kicked out by their homophobic parents and need a place to stay in a specific city—you are literally broadcasting the fact that you are young and vulnerable and your family isn’t looking for you!! ANYONE can see that! that’s fucking dangerous!!!

and the idea that you should list your triggers all in one place is also incredibly dangerous, like i know the point is to let people know what to avoid but what you’re actually doing is giving potential bullies or predators a ready-made list of things they can use to hurt and harrass you. all of the things that that person listed as “basic info” is stuff that can be used to target you. it lets other people know you’re part of an in-group, yes, but it also puts a target on your back. i’ve gotten racist hate messages, homophobic hate messages, rape and death threats, and i’m fine because i’m an adult and i’m not online that much, but it still takes its toll and i cannot IMAGINE being 13 and opening yourself up to those things online because everyone is now expected to list their race and sexuality and fucking trauma and medical diagnoses for everyone to see as soon as they click their profile.

the problem with saying “xyz people dni” is that only the polite and respectful people will actually listen and not interact with you. the people who you should actually be worried about, the people who actually actively want to hurt you, will use the information that you have willingly provided them to target you. do you think putting “terfs and fascists dni” on your carrd is actually going to stop terfs and fascists from interacting with you? if they want to hurt you they will hurt you, expecting them to respect boundaries just because you have publicly stated them is leaving yourself extremely vulnerable.

make boundaries by using the block button liberally, or like i don’t know setting your fucking profile to private. protect yourself by valuing your own privacy and not actively providing people who might harm you with the exact tools and ammunition they can use to do so.

the idea that i could only be upset by this trend because i ??? want to disrespect people’s boundaries???? is so fucking bizarre. i made that post because i am legitimately terrified for these children’s safety. not to be all kids these days, but LITERALLY kids these days are sharing their face, their identities, their entire lives, with the entire internet on a public platform without a second thought, and expecting their peers to do that as well, and it has real repercussions.

[jalopyrustbucket]

I try to stay away from a lot of fandom discourse, but since I’ve been seeing this on my dash again and in tags, I feel the need to make a statement on this, particularly for any young fans who follow me that might get drawn into this mindset.

Stay away from purity culture. Warn your friends away from it too, if you see them starting to fall for it. It’s very easy to get drawn into it

Almost always, it starts with one of three roots, pedophilia, incest and/or abuse. Usually it’s pedophilia. Funnily enough, that’s also what congress usually uses to try to justify passing bills that undermine online privacy & security. Because it’s an easy, extreme target, and when people attempt to argue against it, it’s nice and easy to say “Oh so you like pedophilia” rather then actually engaging with their argument.

The logic goes like this, although there’s many forms of it.

“Pedophilia is bad.” -> Obviously, you agree with this. You’re a reasonable person, and the idea that anyone would do something like that to a child is horrible. This is a normal human reaction.

“Because pedophilia is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.” -> Here you might hesitate, but it adds up, doesn’t it? The thought of pedophilia in any context probably gives you a bad feeling, that makes you inclined to go along with this logic. 

“Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia is also bad.” -> Maybe you pause here, or maybe you don’t. But still, it adds up, it’s a very easy flow. After all, we’ve decided that that is Bad, so why would anyone Good want to create something like that?

“Since people who create content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia are just as bad as people who engage in pedophilia in real life, it’s okay to harm them.” -> Here’s where you might pause again. The argument might not win you over entirely, you might not be willing to do harm yourself, but you may be a lot more willing to turn a blind eye to harm being done to someone. Or to consider it ‘justified’.

The pattern now repeats for anything else that’s considered “morally impure”, and “pedophilia” is expanded and expanded, often to ridiculous points, such as merely shipping two underage characters. “Abuse” becomes any ship that the person pushing doesn’t like, for any reason. And so on and so forth.

This is the foundation of “anti” culture, and it’s important to be aware of it so you can catch this false equivocation. Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity. It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions. 

A very handy trick for when you encounter this sort of argument, is to replace whatever the selected purity term is with murder. After all, we can all agree that murder is bad, but at the same time, we understand that a murder in a book =/= a murder in real life.

Let’s see that argument again, shall we?

“Murder is bad”

“Because murder is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.”

“Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of murder is also bad.”

“Since people who create fictional explorations of murder are just as bad as the people who commit murder in real life, it’s okay to harm them.”

Hopefully, it’s now easy to see why the above argument is fundamentally flawed.

Keep your eye out for purity culture in your fandom spaces, and when you see it, refuse to engage with it. Warn your friends if you see them falling into the same traps, although try to be kind about it; this is a very easy thought pattern to fall into. I don’t recommend trying to argue/debate anti’s. The attention only feeds them. Block them instead. Don’t let people control or shame you for what you create or consume, and don’t control or shame others for what they create or consume.

Also, as a note, let me be clear about something. If you are uncomfortable with any of the above discussed things, or anything in general in fiction (ie, underage ships, murder, incest, abuse, penguins, needles, etc), that’s perfectly fine (it’s also called a squick, for those that haven’t heard that term before). Absolutely control your fandom experience by blocking people, filtering tags, unfollowing, etc. However, just because you are uncomfortable with something, does not give you the right to control other people. Other people have no right to control what content you create or consume, and you have no right to do that to them either. 

Okay?

[jalopyrustbucket]

[jalopyrustbucket]

[jalopyrustbucket]

I’ve figured out why the entire idea of a “cruella devil as the rebellious antihero” movie rubs me the wrong way in comparison to stuff like joker and maleficent

It’s because you can’t reinterpret “steals literally 99 puppies to kill and skin them for a coat” which is her entire character motivation.

With malelificent and joker there was a lot of wiggle room to work with because there was no motivation already set as a core for the character besides “I’m evil because I’m evil”

With joker you can play around with him being some form of a nihilistic anarchist revolutionary or as someone who was driven too far by society’s failures or whatever and it works because it makes what he does understandable outside of an overly simple “good vs evil” story and may even create sympathy until he pushes back too hard. Same with maleificent. I have my issues with that movie but it does a good job of creating a setting where we can understand, relate to and even sympathize with her.

Meanwhile cruella’s motivation leaves zero wiggle room. She wants to murder puppies for a coat because she’s vain and greedy and has no regard for life when it gets in the way of what she wants. It’s incredibly hard to misinterpret that. It’s like making a rags to riches story about a BP executive.

[jalopyrustbucket]

[jalopyrustbucket]

Remember finding a story, getting a little bit into it, realizing it was crap, but reading it anyway? If it was spelled correctly and had decent formatting, it’s still interesting to read a story and really start to understand why it was bad. Or maybe it wasn’t bad, it just had a really, really simple plot structure.

full offense but none of you would have ever survived fanfiction.net in 2009

[jalopyrustbucket]

Some queer people prefer the term queer and are offended at any other term being used, and some have a different preferred term, and are offended at the word queer. 

If that’s where the discussion is, then I think it’s unimportant enough to ignore it and just roll the dice randomly every time I need to go search for an “alphabet soup category” kind of word. 

Queer has the advantage of being a real word that just means “strange”, or “different”, or “doesn’t follow the norm”. This is literally accurate. It’s also only a single syllable long, so it’s fast to say.

Any proposed alternative will have to contend with these variables. If the only consistent factor in “preferred terminology” is constant change, then you’ll never, ever be happy with it, so people will just stop caring entirely.

Don’t call me queer.

[jalopyrustbucket]

Fun fact: There was a tape recorder running when the kool-aid drinking was happening. The recording is available online. I think I found it on one of the various Internet Archive sites. There were comments and discussions of people who narrowly escaped Jonestown who went to find the recording to hear the event that they could easily have ended up in.

The tape was also recorded over top of a previous recording of music, and some of the imprints of the old music stuck around in the tape, if you listen closely.

Jonestown was a very progressive commune, and preached racial integration, which was very progressive for the time.

I learned about the Jonestown massacre today.....

[jalopyrustbucket]

Cloud is back! Kinda… ‘Ehrgeiz’ PlayStation

[jalopyrustbucket]

Growing up with your starters

Artist:  esasi8794 / Twitter