kat-all-d

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Grasshopper's Dream Cafe Located: Jeongseon, South Korea

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Bothering the beast

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there is an insane amount of antisemitism floating around right now.

i just want to say:

this blog loves and supports jewish people.

this blog does NOT conflate the israeli government, or the atrocities it commits, with jewish people.

this blog is disgusted with those who use or express antisemitism.

this blog knows that if someone needs to invoke antisemitism, they do not actually care about helping palestine or the palestinian people.

this blog will do its best to insure that it remains a safe space for all.

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“your rent should be a third of your income” well wouldn’t that be nice. wouldn’t it. lower the rent pussy

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blue whales are the largest animal ever recorded, like you literally need to be in a helicopter to actually see one in from a perspective with zero distortion. idk i just feel pretty lucky to be alive on earth at the same time as them and they don’t even want to kill me. they just wanna use their toothbrush mouthes to filter the ocean of smol ocean bugs. they have communities and they sing to each other to communicate. work is slow im sorry happy friday whales r so cool

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The madden gif maker has banned the use of the word “capitalism”.

“Too many people were using our videogame football gif maker to make communist propaganda. We need to put a stop to that.”

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Broke: Barbie's many different careers are a way to sell dolls and accessories to little kids.

Woke: Barbie had every single one of those careers and is an immortal timeless being.

Bespoke: Barbie's different careers are different versions of Barbie from across the multiverse who occasionally swap place with each other or combine into one Barbie.

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sex isn't sexy unless it's a little bit gross. have you forgotten that you are a divine ape? plastic smooth skin, plucked hair, painted faces, scripted reactions, scrubbed til only the smell of perfumed soap remains, proportions that are conflictingly cookiecutter yet unattainable, none of this is even a little bit interesting.

you can laugh at napoleon's "home in three days, don't bathe" letter to his wife, but there's more sexuality in that one line then there is in the entirety of the hypersexualized but painfully unsexy internet.

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LEGALLY BLONDE (2001) BARBIE (2023)

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miriam adeney

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky // Alanis Morissette

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please not another wave of sex bots

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“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.  

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I want to share something for those of you who are teaching and want your conservative students to be more open-minded to liberal ideas that you’re presenting.

I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative town, and like most conservative kids, had been told that colleges were hotbeds of liberalism, so I was already defensive politically when I started college. My first semester or two I was really skeptical of everything political that my professors presented me with.

And then I took a women’s studies course (required at my college). And on the first day, the professor said, 

“You don’t have to be a feminist. There are days when I’m not a feminist. But we’re going to discuss feminist ideas in this class, and you might find that you agree with some of them and disagree with others, and that’s fine.”

And that took the pressure off. By telling me that I didn’t HAVE to be a feminist, that I didn’t HAVE to agree, that professor started me on the road to becoming a feminist. I particularly remember her giving us information about what a huge percentage of the housework was still done by women, even in [hetero] couples where both the man and woman worked outside the home. And after that I remember saying, “I’m not a feminist, but I can see where they’re coming from.” 

Within 5 years, I was claiming the term and coming out to my mom as a feminist.

So when I taught college writing, I assigned politically liberal essays to my students, many of whom came from conservative backgrounds. And before they read the first one, I would say,

“The reading for the next class–I want you to know that you don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to agree with anything that your professors teach you in college. But the point of a college education is to have your mind opened to other points of view. So you’re not required to agree, but you are required to approach the reading with an open mind. You might find that you agree with some things the author says and disagree with others. And that’s cool! We WANT you to use your critical thinking and decide for yourself what you think about things! But to do that, you need to give people the benefit of the doubt and be open-minded to what they have to say.”

And I have to say, it worked really well for me! I remember in particular that after I assigned the essay “Black Men and Public Space”, one of my students wrote in her reading reflection,

“I was taught in school that racism in America ended with Martin Luther King. I am appalled to discover that this is not true.”

Priming your students to be open-minded, while also encouraging them to use critical thinking, can help to break down some of the automatic defenses against new ideas that students are often taught. Approaching your students’ comments during discussion with an open-minded view yourself, validating their experiences while also making gentle counterarguments, can do a lot as well.

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🌳🌲🌳🌳🌲🌳🌳🌳🌲

Tiny forest for your dash