#2020 has been wild

[noodles-and-tea]

Redrew an old piece :)

[stardestroyer81]

In the tags of my previous post, I mentioned that the prime reason behind Hydro Man's redesign was so that I could have a portrait drawn of him for the finalized version of Mega Man Ultimate's stage select, and seeing as I haven't shown its updated version since 2020... here are the eight robot masters of the Synth Legion in all their glory! 💙🏳️‍⚧️✨

(Psssst! You can find individual pins of every Synth Legion Number's portrait as well as a full stage select shirt over on my RedBubble store!)

[my-secret-sketchpad]

I decided to share a bit about my Divine Comedy retelling/reimagination I am not sure how to label it. It has Beatrice midway though her mortal life going on a field trip to hell (with Dante included, the boy sure likes revisiting that place I wonder why 🤔).

[to-be-a-dreamer]

Sometimes I just randomly remember the frankly exhausting story of the 2020 West Side Story revival and I have to go through the wiki page just to make sure I haven't forgotten anything because it is SO MUCH that poor production just couldn't stop taking Ls

Production made some WILD changes including, but not limited to: cutting "I Feel Pretty" and overall making the show so short it didn't even have an intermission, changing the ballet choreography to hip-hop (no snapping), casting POC actors to play the Jets, giving the characters iPhones, and using giant screens with pictures of the actors as the majority of the set design

Two of the five main actors got injured before previews even ended, one of which delayed their opening night by two weeks and the other just had to leave the show permanently (the latter then went on to be in the Steven Spielberg remake in 2021)

One of the other three main actors had been fired from their dance company and a previous show due to SA allegations, which led to extreme backlash and protests outside of the theatre (idk any details about this, just an added layer of insanity to this show)

They found out like six months after closing that they weren't eligible for the Tony Awards because they opened on February 20 and the cutoff date had been moved back to February 19th due to COVID

SEE NUMBER TWO AGAIN IF IT WASN'T FOR THAT ONE INJURY THEY WOULD HAVE QUALIFIED FOR A TONY AWARD

If they had opened on their original date, they would have won Best Revival of a Musical because they would have been the only show that was eligible (assuming they got nominated, I'm still mad about The Lightning Thief)

The lead producer later "stepped down from his active roles in Broadway production" because a bunch of his employees came forward and exposed him for being such a toxic boss he got bullied out of the industry

Like, imagine being just Some Guy in the ensemble or the crew just trying to do your job and all this nonsense happens

[doggerell]

new tricks for the old dog??

[theheadlessgroom]

@beatingheart-bride

"...so I go looking for the little scamp, and I find him under the bed, looking extremely guilty, and with plenty of whipped cream still smeared on his cheeks," Wilhelm was recounting sometime later, having fallen into family stories, chiefly ones from Randall's childhood (the more endearing, the more embarrassing it was-all the more reason to tell them!), grinning to Emily as he continued, "Of course, he tries to tell me that he didn't eat all the whipped cream his ma just baked-told me it was the Whipped Cream Fairy who came in and ate it all."

"Pa..." Randall groaned, burying his reddened face in his hands at his father's storytelling, at which Wilhelm grinned, "It was cute, lad! Yes, your mother was a little irked in the moment, but she was able to laugh about it pretty quickly!"

"I was," June commented to Emily, resting her head in her chin as Randall continued to hide his face (though she caught a glimpse of a smile between his fingers), leaning back comfortably in her chair, enjoying the relaxed nature of the conversation as she recalled, "I spent all day baking up a banana cream pie, and I'd been so proud of my piping work with the whipped cream...I leave the room for all the more of five seconds, and when I come back, it's like I'd never decorated it at all! He could be very sneaky when he wanted to be, very soft on his feet when he was little, don't ask me how he pulled it off."

[notsoattractivearenti]

i’m still wondering how my blog turned into a football blog

[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

Guess who applied for college??

[princelancey]

duuuude (gn), same about Max' radio. No clue how anyone could think that's hot jfc. I kno it's a rly unpopular opinion in the fandom and yeah, probably in bad taste to speculate but about that theory with the apple and the tree...it just sounded like something he learnt, and learnt well.

It's very much the opposite of hot to me, big ol red flag running for the hills type stuff. Yeah that would definitely be an unpopular opinion 😬 I would say I think it's more a case of max has been allowed to have his own way for years in red bull, no questions asked it's all been about him as the no. 1, clearly something has happened behind the scenes and unless someone is very brave or very stupid we're never going to know for sure. But something happened that has aggrieved max and now his arrogant, entitled personality is on full show. I mean it's been clear for like the past few years but damn did the mask completely disappear yesterday

[magentagalaxies]

overdid it at my improv show last night and now all i can do is lay in bed having blorbo thoughts

[cleolinda]

AITA for banning my husband and father in law from the delivery room due to their intensely stressful/creepy behavior during my pregnancy?

There’s a famous Reddit post from 2020 where a pregnant woman wrote that her husband and father-in-law were a little too comfortable with their certainty that she was absolutely going to die in childbirth just like her husband’s late mother. It was to the point where her FIL was insisting that she go ahead and put all her clothes into storage, because she was obviously going to die in the hospital and it would save them the grief of packing up her things afterwards. Like. It was WILD.

When I tell my husband [that she feels suspicious of her FIL], he calls me paranoid, but I feel like my FIL WANTS me to die; his whole life identity for the past 35 years has been “amazing single dad” (never dated or had close friends or even hobbies really), and it seems like he’s looking forward to being able to guide my husband through what he went through. At this point, I’d honestly be happy to never see my FIL again, and I certainly don’t want him in the delivery room, especially since he told me he was “putting [his] foot down” about me not being “allowed” to have an epidural…. My husband, in addition to backing his dad on everything, acts like my due date is my death date, and has completely pulled away from me.

The commenters (and me, honestly) were convinced that the husband and FIL were either going to kill her outright to fulfill this expectation, or just make decisions about her care that might conveniently let her die.

And then she never posted again.

Over the last four years, people have frequently mentioned that post, always leading to a thread of people saying, “Oh god, I still worry about that woman.” I did too. It became one of those famous unresolved posts that people always wondered about.

Until yesterday, when someone on r/BestOfRedditorUpdates dug up a 2022 update she had posted on a different account:

TLDR; I had a beautiful and healthy baby girl, and I divorced my ex-husband. I lived, obviously.

She writes that she put her foot down about having her own mother in the delivery room rather than her FIL (!), and she WOULD be getting an epidural. Her husband lost his shit. And in his outburst, he let slip--

I admittedly lost my temper, and told him that I wasn’t going to die- it wasn’t my fault his father’s trauma wormed it’s way into his head, and that he needed to fix it without taking it out on me. He yelled at me that he didn’t need therapy. That caught me a little off guard; I asked him why he went to his therapist and was given advice about my death if he felt he didn’t need it. His expression gave it away, and he caved not long after. It turns out there was no therapist. It was just his dad. During the times he was supposed to be at therapy, he was with his dad. I’m still fuming.

And that was when she got the fuck out.

I’ll wrap this up- I’ve got an adorable little toddler tugging at my leg atm. I’m alive, I’m happy, and I’ve got my baby in my arms. Life is good.

I truly never thought we'd see a resolution to this, and I feel like there's probably a good number of people who remember it, so I thought you might want to know.

ETA: Brilliantly, I put the link in at the top; here it is again for convenience.

[postmanlinksbootyshorts]

mmmm need to write body horror expeditiously

[electroniccollectiondonut]

you know the hyperfixation is good when it makes you want to do ten thousand jumping jacks

[renthony]

In Defense of Shitty Queer Art

Queer art has a long history of being censored and sidelined. In 1895, Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was used as evidence in the author’s sodomy trials. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the American Hays Code prohibited depictions of queerness in film, defining it as “sex perversion.” In 2020, the book Steven Universe: End of an Era by Chris McDonnell confirmed that Rebecca Sugar’s insistence on including a sapphic wedding in the show is what triggered its cancellation by Cartoon Network. According to the American Library Association, of the top ten most challenged books in 2023, seven were targeted for their queer content. Across time, place, and medium, queer art has been ruthlessly targeted by censors and protesters, and at times it seems there might be no end in sight.

So why, then, are queer spaces so viciously critical of queer art?

Name any piece of moderately-well-known queer media, and you can find immense, vitriolic discourse surrounding it. Audiences debate whether queer media is good representation, bad representation, or whether it’s otherwise too problematic to engage with. Artists are picked apart under a microscope to make sure their morals are pure enough and their identities queer enough. Every minor fault—real or perceived—is compiled in discourse dossiers and spread around online. Lines are drawn, and callout posts are made against those who get too close to “problematic art.”

Modern examples abound, such as the TV show Steven Universe, the video game Dream Daddy, or the webcomic Boyfriends, but it’s far from a new phenomenon. In his book Hi Honey, I’m Homo!, queer pop culture analyst Matt Baume writes about an example from the 1970s, where the ABC sitcom titled Soap was protested by homophobes and queer audiences alike—before a single episode of the show ever aired. Audiences didn’t wait to actually watch the show before passing judgment and writing protest letters.

After so many years starved for positive representation, it’s understandable for queer audiences to crave depictions where we’re treated well. It’s exhausting to only ever see the same tired gay tropes and subtext, and queer audiences deserve more. Yet the way to more, better, varied representation is not to insist on perfection. The pursuit of perfection is poison in art, and it’s no different when that art happens to be queer.

When the pool of queer art is so limited, it feels horrible when a piece of queer art doesn’t live up to expectations. Even if the representation is technically good, it’s disappointing to get excited for a queer story only for that story to underwhelm and frustrate you.

But the world needs that disappointing art. It needs mediocre art. It even needs the bad art. The world needs to reach a point where queer artists can fearlessly make a mess, because if queer artists can only strive for perfection, the less art they can make. They may eventually produce a masterpiece, but a single masterpiece is still a drop in the bucket compared to the oceans of censorship. The only way to drown out bigotry and offensive stereotypes created by bigots is to allow queer artists the ability to experiment, learn through making mistakes, and represent their queer truth even if it clashes with someone else’s.

If queer artists aren’t allowed to make garbage, we can never make those masterpieces everyone craves. If queer artists are terrified at all times that their art will be targeted both by bigots and their own queer communities, queer art cannot thrive.

Let queer artists make shitty art. Let allies to queer people try their hand at representation, even if they miss the mark. Let queer art be messy, and let the artists screw up without fear of overblown retribution.

It’s the only way we’ll ever get more queer art.

_

Like this essay? Tip me on Ko-Fi, pledge to my Patreon, or commission an essay on the topic of your choice!

[opencommunion]

recommended resources on Lebanese resistance and its context

this has been in my drafts for a long time bc I wanted to find more audio resources but in light of recent events I'm posting as is, and will add more later. pdfs for texts without links can be found on libgen ⭐ = start with these 📺 = video resource 🎧 = audio resource Hizballah ⭐ Lara Deeb, "Hizballah and Its Civilian Constituencies," in The War on Lebanon: A Reader, eds. Nubar Hovsepian and Rashid Khalidi (2007)

⭐🎧 Electronic Intifada Podcast with Rania Khalek, "Why Hizballah would deal Israel a deadly blow" (2024)

⭐🎧 Electronic Intifada Podcast with Amal Saad, "How Hizballah Aims to Deter Israel" (2024)

📺 Rania Khalek, Interview with Hezbollah's Second-in-Command Sheikh Naim Qassem (2023)

🎧 Rania Khalek and Julia Kassem, "The Hybrid War on Lebanon is All About Weakening Hezbollah" (2022)

Hassan Nasrallah, "Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah," ed. Nicholas Noe (2007)

Judith Harik, "Hizballah's Public and Social Services and Iran," in Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the last 500 years (2006) Sarah Marusek, Faith and Resistance: The Politics of Love and War in Lebanon (2018)

Abed T. Kanaaneh, Understanding Hezbollah: The Hegemony of Resistance (2021)

Karim Makdisi, "The Oct. 8 War: Lebanon's Southern Front" (2024) Political theory ⭐ Ussama Makdisi, "Understanding Sectarianism," in The War on Lebanon: A Reader, eds. Nubar Hovsepian and Rashid Khalidi (2007)

⭐ Rula Juri Abisaab and Malek Abisaab, The Shi'ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism, and Hizbullah's Islamists (2014)

Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (2010) Tareq Y. Ismael and Jacqueline S. Ismael, The Communist Movement in Syria and Lebanon (1998) 2006 war ⭐ Gilbert Achcar and Michel Warschawski, The 33-Day War: Israel's War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Its Consequences (2007)

The Electronic Intifada with Dahr Jamail, "The world just sat by" (2006)

The Electronic Intifada with Bilal El-Amine, "Lebanon in Context" (2006) The War on Lebanon: A Reader, eds. Nubar Hovsepian and Rashid Khalidi (2007)

Civil war and 1982 invasion ⭐📺 Up to the South, dir. Jayce Salloum and Walid Ra'ad (1993)

⭐📺 Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon, dir. Mai Masri and Jean Khalil Chamoun (1987)

⭐ Souha Bechara, Resistance: My Life for Lebanon (2003)

Jean Said Makdisi, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (1990)

Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, Sabra and Shatila, September 1982 (2004) Ottoman era Charles Al-Hayek, "How, then, did you try to rebel?"

Lebanon Unsettled, "Lebanon's Popular Uprisings"

Axel Havemann, "The Impact of Peasant Resistance on Nineteenth Century Mount Lebanon," in Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East (1991) Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (2000)

Peter Hill, "How Global was the Age of Revolutions? The Case of Mount Lebanon, 1821" (2020) Mark Farha, "From Anti-imperial Dissent to National Consent: the First World War and the Formation of a Trans-sectarian National Consciousness in Lebanon" (2015) French mandate era ⭐ Kais Firro, Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State Under the Mandate (2002) Sana Tannoury-Karam, "Founding the Lebanese Left: From Colonial Rule to Independence" (2021) Idir Ouahes, Syria and Lebanon Under the French Mandate: Cultural Imperialism and the Workings of Empire (2018)

Malek Abisaab, Militant Women of a Fragile Nation (2009) Misc ⭐📺 Leila and the Wolves, dir. Heiny Srour and Sabah Jabbour (1984)

⭐ Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (2007)

Karim Makdisi, "Lebanon's October 2019 Uprising" (2021)

[somekh]

yea its... idk but pengo is doing the fv updates and according to the stopscammingartists blog hes also doing the weird cult attack therapy things on ppl and its like, really scary bc hes supposed to be studying to be a therapist? like man has lost the plot real bad and im scared someones gonna get hurt

this prompted me to post some shit to that blog actually that ive been hanging on to for ages. idk what to feel about it really and i sure as hell wont tell anyone else how to feel, but... might be relevant?

tbh i used to read the glip thread but i stopped in .... god, probably mid-2020? it's been almost 3 years since ive kept up with anything they've done. partly bc i just dont have the energy, and i kinda drifted away from pengo too (we were in brief contact bc my abuser claimed falsely that they were close with him, and he helped me with a lot of that)

i trust him to be reasonable-ish but also fear for his wellbeing. but then again ive seen him go in hard on glip. man i dont fuckin know...